Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week.
Thanks to everyone for playing! As always, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.
Here at Wordnik we’re all about lists and favorites, so when we review books, we do what we love best: list our favorites.
Today we’re looking at a terrific new book from Ben Yagoda, one of our favorite language bloggers: HOW TO NOT WRITE BAD: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them. As the title suggests, Yagoda focuses on not how to write well but how to write less badly. After all, “you have to crawl before you walk, and walk before you run.” You have to write “good-enough” before you can even attempt to write like David Foster Wallace.
We liked a lot of things about this book. Here are some of our “five favorites.”
Five favorite terms
bromide
“I imagine the write-what-you-know bromide is mocked because it implies, or seems to imply, that you’re required to write about what you’ve already learned or experienced at the time you sit down at the keyboard.”
A bromide is “a commonplace remark or notion; a platitude,” or “a tiresome person; a bore.” This comes from the chemical sense of the word, “a binary compound of bromine with another element, such as silver,” which was used as a sedative, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.
Dickens Fallacy
“You could call it the Dickens Fallacy: somehow, we all seem to have an ingrained sense that we’re being paid by the word.”
British writer Charles Dickens was actually paid in installments, not by the word, but the idea of a Dickens Fallacy vividly illustrates some people’s penchant for wordiness. Yagoda’s examples – a verbose sentence followed by his more pared-down version – are helpful in demonstrating not only why concise is better, but how to get there.
frisson
“If I happen to be writing about unfortunate digestive conditions, I can put down diarrea and then diarhea and finally diarrhea – getting a frisson of pleasure from seeing the last one absent of a squiggly red line.”
Frisson is one of our favorite words. It means “a moment of intense excitement; a shudder,” and comes from the Old French fricon, “a trembling.” We also loved Yagoda’s advice about not relying too heavily on spell-check, that it’s “anything but a cure-all and actually can make things worse.” In other words, sometimes spell-check simply won’t help.
gueulade, la
“Gustave Flaubert, renowned as one of the great all-time stylists, used what he called la gueulade: that is, ‘the shouting test.’ He would go out to an avenue of lime trees near his house and, yes, shout what he had written.”
Yagoda suggests reading aloud what you’ve written to catch wordiness, repetition, and “sentences that peter out with a whimper, not a bang.” We’ve tried it, and it works.
skunked words
“The trouble is, like the language itself, the corpus of skunked words is always changing.”
Skunked words are those that were once considered “ignorant, illiterate, unacceptable, etc.,” but have become, by frequent usage, generally accepted. For instance, chomp at the bit was once champ at the bit, stomping ground was stamping ground, and pompom was pompon.
Five questions we had answered by this book
Five words we’d use to describe this book
Useful. How to Not Write Bad is as useful for beginners as for seasoned pros.
Entertaining. One of our favorite lines from the book:
As for sound, students tend to insert commas at places where they would pause in speaking the sentence. This has about the same reliability as the rhythm method for birth control.
Another:
Sitting in class or dancing at a bar, the bra performed well. . .Though slightly pricey, your breasts will thank you.
We’ll never think of dangling modifiers the same way again.
Clear. Yagoda takes his own advice and writes in a clear, concise, and conversational way.
Example-ful. We at Wordnik love examples, and How to Not Write Bad has plenty of them, which do a great job of illuminating Yagoda’s points.
Memorable. Yagoda’s advice for not just correct but strong writing will stay with us for a long time, and we’ll be sure to return to the book for a periodic refresher.
Welcome to this week’s Language Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news and culture.
President Abraham Lincoln
Earlier in the week, the Oxford Dictionaries blog celebrated Presidents’ Day by comparing the language of President Obama’s inaugural address to that of Abraham Lincoln’s time. Slate showed us the President’s handwritten edits of his speech, and The Atlantic discussed dialect and when presidents say “y’all.”
OxfordWords also explored guest and host words, the genetic lexicon, and horse idioms and proverbs. In addition, they explained when wrong usages become right. Meanwhile, Mental Floss told us about seven words that came about from people getting them wrong.
Ben Zimmer talked about the Boston accent on The Today Show, and on the Visual Thesaurus discussed dating and grammar and sequester and sequestration. Jen Doll explored word lengthening and texting (yaaaaay!)
Stan Carey looked at peppercorn rent and the controversy that has arisen in the UK when “a Teesside school principal asked parents to ‘correct’ their children’s informal speech – phrases such as it’s nowt (it’s nothing), I seen (I saw, I have seen), and gizit ere (give us it here = give it to me).” The Dialect Blog had a thing or two to say about it too. In other dialect news, ATMs in East London now speak Cockney rhyming slang.
At the Macmillan Dictionary blog, Stan centered on centre around and Michael Rundell honored International Mother Tongue Day by writing about language, culture, and the dominance of English.
The Virtual Linguist explained the difference between cloud-cuckoo-land and the Land of Cockaigne, and meteor and meteorite. (And in case you missed the amazing videos of the meteor blast over Russia, here’s a roundup from Mashable.)
At Language Log, Mark Liberman was severely positive. At Lingua Franca, Ben Yagoda swang and missed, Allan Metcalf explained the grammar of newspaper headlines, and Geoffrey Pullum defended the “monstrous” adverb.
Fritinancy explored the recent proliferation of Xs and Os and the fictional drug brand name, Ablixa. In words of the week, her selections were dudeoir, male boudoir photography, and doxing, “the practice of investigating and revealing a target subject’s personally identifiable information, such as home address, workplace information and credit card numbers, without consent.”
Erin McKean noted jammer, a skater on a roller derby team who “tries to lap the other team’s skaters”; jughandle, a type of traffic-control feature; and decalcomania, in art, “two wet surfaces pressed together and then pulled apart.”
The Word Spy spotted second screening, “using a mobile device to monitor and post social media comments about what you are watching on TV or at the movies,” and sick-lit, “a literary genre that features individuals dealing with fatal or devastating diseases.”
Arnold Zwicky discussed his dislike for National Grammar Day. Photographer Ellen Susan proposed a new punctuation mark while College Humor suggested eight new and necessary punctuation marks.
In language news, a new Yiddish dictionary is being released, as well as a new look for Harry Potter trade paperbacks. Melville House told us about Whale Words, Flavorwire rounded up literary characters inspired by real famous people, and NPR interviewed Paula Byrne, the author of The Real Jane Austen.
This week we learned that plain and simple language doesn’t always equal the truth, men and women use uptalk differently, and why tongue twisters are hard to say. We groaned over these disastrous mistranslations. We loved this history of dog names, this etymology of the mother of all curse words, and this explanation of the two types of linguists (hint: at Wordnik we’re mostly type 2).
Finally, our favorite website of the week was Introverted Fairy Tales:
Once upon a time there was a young woman called Belle who fell in love with a library. Sure, there was a guy and a rose and a particularly talkative tea set, but mostly there were books. And they all lived happily ever after.
That’s it for this week!
Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week.
Thanks to everyone for playing! As always, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.
If you’re like us, you’ve been closely following the trials and tribulations of the Granthams and those who serve them. Like last season, Ben Zimmer and Ben Schmidt have been busy catching the anachronisms. Zimmer recently noticed a doozy – steep learning curve – while Schmidt found such out-of-place terms as ritual humiliation and shenanigans.
We’ve also been collecting words and phrases from the show, some perfectly ordinary, others more unusual, and all with interesting stories about how they came to be.
Spoilers may follow.
UPDATE: Two terms from the season finale have been included. See cock-a-hoop and chippy gippy tummy. Thanks to everyone who let us know it was gippy and not chippy!
blimey
Sybil: “Mary, you know what I said about the baby being Catholic. I’ve just realized the christening will have to be here, at Downton.”
Mary: “Blimey.”
Episode 4, January 27, 2013
Blimey is a British expression many of us are familiar with. It’s used to express anger, surprise, excitement, etc., and originated around 1889 as a corruption of “(God) blind me,” says the Online Etymology Dictionary. Gorblimey is another variant.
Chu Chin Chow
Mrs. Hughes: “Then your dinners would be grand enough for Chu Chin Chow.”
Episode 6, February 3, 2013
Chu Chin Chow is a musical comedy based on Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves in which “the wealthy merchant Kasim Baba (brother of Ali Baba) [gives] a lavish banquet for a wealthy Chinese merchant, Chu Chin Chow, who is on his way from China.” The show premiered in London in 1916 and ran for five years.
cock-a-hoop
Hugh: “Nield is cock-a-hoop.”
Episode 8, February 17, 2013
Cock-a-hoop means “exultant; jubilant; triumphant; on the high horse,” as well as “tipsy; slightly intoxicated.” The term comes from the phrase “to set cock on hoop,” which literally means “to turn on the tap and let the liquor flow,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and figuratively, “to drink festively.”
Cock in this context refers to “a faucet or valve by which the flow of a liquid or gas can be regulated,” while a hoop is “a certain quantity of drink, up to the first hoop on a quart pot.”
Debrett’s
Cora: “Not everyone chooses their religion to satisfy Debrett’s.”
Episode 5, February 3, 2013
Debrett’s is a British publisher of etiquette guides and Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage, a “genealogical guide to the British aristocracy,” or as Patsy Stone of the TV show Absolutely Fabulous calls it, the “Who’s Who in what’s left of the British aristocracy.”
gippy tummy
O’Brien: “Something different. I could fancy that.”
Wilkins: “Not me. All sweat and gippy tummy.”
Episode 8, February 17, 2013
A gippy tummy is, according to the OED, “diarrhœa suffered by visitors to hot countries,” where gippy is slang for Egyptian. Gippy tummy may also be an anachronism: the OED lists the earliest use of the term as 1943, 23 years after this episode takes place.
hobbledehoy
Carson: “Miss O’Brien, we are about to host a society wedding. I have no time for training young hobbledehoys.”
Episode 1, January 6, 2013
A hobbledehoy is “a raw, awkward youth.” The word is very old, originating in the 16th century. The first syllable hob probably refers to “a hobgoblin, sprite, or elf,” while –dehoy may come from the Middle French de haye, “worthless, untamed, wild.”
in someone’s bad books
Daisy [to Mosely about O’Brien]: “I wouldn’t be in her bad books for a gold clock.”
Episode 2, January 13, 2013
To be in someone’s bad books means to be in disgrace or out of favor. The phrase originated around 1861, says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
An earlier phrase (1771) is to be in someone’s black book. A black book was “a book kept for the purpose of registering the names of persons liable to censure or punishment, as in the English universities, or the English armies.” So to be in someone’s black book meant to be in bad favor with that person (or on their shitlist, as we Yanks say).
As you may have guessed, to be in someone’s good books means to be in favor. That phrase originated around 1839, says the OED, in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby: “If you want to keep in the good books in that quarter, you had better not call her the old lady.”
in the soup
Daisy [to Mosely]: “You’re in the soup.”
Episode 2, January 13, 2013
To in the soup means to be in in a difficult, according to the OED. The phrase was originally American slang, originating around 1889.
Johnny Foreigner
Robert: “But there always seems to be something of Johnny Foreigner about the Catholics.”
Episode 3, January 20, 2013
Johnny Foreigner is a derogatory term for “a person from a country other than those which make up the United Kingdom.” We couldn’t find an originating date or first use of the phrase. If anyone has information, let us know!
left-footer
Robert: “Did you hear Tom’s announcement at breakfast? He wants the child to be a left-footer.”
Episode 6, February 3, 2013
Anachronism alert! Left-footer, which is slang for a Roman Catholic, didn’t come about until 1944, according to the OED, 24 years after this episode takes place.
The term seems to come from the belief that “in the North of Ireland that Catholic farm workers use their left foot to push the spade when digging, and Protestants the right.” Kicks with the left foot is another slang term for Catholic, while kicking with the wrong foot “is used especially by Protestants of Catholics and vice versa.”
plain cook
Mrs. Bird: “She says there’s plenty of work for a plain cook these days.”
Episode 4, January 27, 2013
A plain cook, says the OED, is “a cook who specializes in, or most frequently prepares, plain dishes.” Plain dishes are “not rich or highly seasoned,” and have a few basic ingredients.
rich as Croesus
Mary: “He’s as rich as Croesus as it is.”
Episode 1, January 6, 2013
Croesus was, in ancient Greece, the last king of Lydia “whose kingdom, which had prospered during his reign, fell to the Persians under Cyrus.” Croesus came to refer to any rich man by the late 14th century.
squiffy
Robert: “I’m very much afraid to say he was a bit squiffy, weren’t you, Alfred?”
Episode 6, February 3, 2013
Squiffy means tipsy or drunk, and is of “fanciful formation,” according to the OED. Other ways to say drunk.
stick it up your jumper
Anna: “They’ll have to give Thomas his notice.”
Bates: “Mr. Barrow.”
Anna: “Mr. Stick It Up Your Jumper.”
Episode 6, February 10, 2013
The full phrase is oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper!, and is “an expression of contempt, defiance, rejection or dismissal.” It may have originally been “a meaningless jingle chanted jocularly or derisively” from the 1920s. The phrase makes a famous appearance in the Beatles’ song, I Am the Walrus.
tuppence
Isabel: “She couldn’t give a tuppence about Ethel.”
Episode 6, February 10, 2013
Tuppence is an alternation of twopence, two pennies or a very small amount. One who doesn’t give a tuppence doesn’t care at all.
Can’t get enough Downton Abbey? Check out our favorite words from the first two seasons.
[Photo: Carnival Films via The Chicago Maroon]
Every week we watch tons of TV for weird and interesting words so you don’t have to. Check out our latest selections.
cooler
Jess: “Nick, I’m gonna admit it. I might be your cooler. . . .But to be fair, you are your own cooler 70% of the time.”
“Cooler,” New Girl, January 29, 2013
A cooler here is someone who ruins another’s luck in romance, perhaps playing off another meaning of cooler: in gambling, someone who is supposedly bad luck and makes other players lose. The Cooler was a 2003 film with William H. Macy in the titular role.
NOLA Roast Beef Po-Boy with debris and au jus.
debris
Anthony Bourdain: “Now we’ve been talking about debris and po’boys. I do not see the word po’boy or debris on this menu.”
“New Orleans,” The Layover, January 28, 2013
Debris here refers to beef shredded into tiny pieces, resembling the original meaning of debris, “the scattered remains of something broken or destroyed; rubble or wreckage.” (A debris-cone, in case you were wondering, is “a mound or cone built up by the accumulation of erupted, fragmental products about the vent of a volcano.”)
The po’boy is a kind of sandwich native to the U.S. Gulf Coast. A shortening of poor boy, the phrase either comes from the French pourboire, drink money, or was coined by New Orleans restaurant workers in 1929 who called the railroad strikers they gave free sandwiches to “poor boys.”
despertainment
Stephen Colbert: “This pioneering form of despertainment is sure to be such a hit that other networks are gonna have their own spin-offs, like Meal or No Meal, Americans, Idle, and Are You More Employable Than a 5th Grader?”
The Colbert Report, February 5, 2013
Despertainment, a blend of desperate and entertainment, refers here to the reality show, The Job, in which unemployed contestants compete for the chance to win “a dream job at their dream company.”
dwell time
Anthony Bourdain: “Dwell time, that’s the period after you get through security [at the airport] and before you board.”
“Seattle,” The Layover, February 4, 2013
Dwell time is chiefly an engineering term that means “the period of time that a system or element of a system remains in a given state,” and seems to refer the amount of time a plane or train remains in station after arrival and before departure. The phrase also has the military sense of “the amount of time that service members spend in their home nation between deployments to war zones.”
The earliest citation we could find for dwell time meaning the amount of time a person waits at the airport after security and before boarding is from May 21, 2001: “From its airy and vaulted departure hall. . .to its four-block-long retail area that looks like any suburban mall. . .Terminal 4 seems intent on changing the airport phenomenon euphemistically called ‘dwell time’ into something more pleasant.”
fart patio
Waitress at vegan restaurant [to couple]: “We’ve been getting a lot of complaints. If you do need to flatulate, we have a designated area.”
[Cut to sign, FART PATIO, THIS WAY.]
Woman: “Ah! Now I’m all loosey-goosey!”
Episode 4, Season 3, Portlandia, January 18, 2013
A fart patio is, well, a patio where one goes to fart, and may be likened to a designated smoking area.
A common misconception is that a vomitorium was a designated area for ancient Greeks to vomit after feasting when it was actually “a passage located behind a tier of seats in an amphitheatre used as an exit for the crowds.” Vomit comes from the Latin vomere, “spew forth, discharge.”
Thanks to Nancy Friedman for showing us the fart patio.
gaffer
Appraiser: “Now, Martin Bach Sr. did not blow glass. He was a chemist. So he knew all the secret formulas and all of the different colors and chemicals used to create something that looked like this. But he didn’t have a gaffer.”
“Boston,” Antiques Roadshow, January 28, 2013
A gaffer is a glass blower in general, a master glass blower, or the head glassmaker. The word may be a contraction of grandfather, and also refers to an old man or the boss or foreman of a work crew, which may have given rise to gaffer meaning “an electrician in charge of lighting on a movie or television set.”
hogcock
Liz: “I just thought I’d check in on you because you’re the emotionally fragile one.”
Jack: “Hogcock, which is a combination of hogwash and poppycock.”
“Hogcock!/Last Lunch,” 30 Rock, January 31, 2013
Hogwash, slang for nonsense, first referred to “the refuse of a kitchen or brewery, etc., given to swine as food.” Poppycock, also slang for nonsense, probably comes from the Dutch pappekak, “soft dung,” where the last element, kak, comes from the Latin cacere, “to excrete” (which also gives us caca).
For even more slang words for nonsense, check out this list.
kotiate
Appraiser: “It’s a war club. . . .[f]rom the Maori.. . .called a kotiate. And a kotiate means ‘split liver’. . . . I think it probably comes from the shape of the item. It almost looks like the two lobes of the liver.”
“Boston,” Antiques Roadshow, January 28, 2013
The kotiate is a traditional hand weapon of the Maori of New Zealand. Other Maori weapons include the mere, the patu, and the taiaha.
lion rampant
Appraiser: “On the left we have ‘Arms of the lion rampant’ by the name ‘Phillips.’ And on the right side we have ‘Arms of the lion rampant’ by the name ‘Jackson.’”
“Boston,” Antiques Roadshow, February 4, 2013
Rawr
A lion rampant refers to, in heraldry, a lion “rearing on the left hind leg with the forelegs elevated, the right above the left, and usually with the head in profile.” A counter-rampant is “rampant in opposite directions: said of animals used as bearings.”
Plantagenet
Stephen Colbert: “He’s also an important historical figure because he was the last king of the Plantagenet line. For those not familiar, Plantagenet means he was descended from a plant.”
The Colbert Report, February 5, 2013
Plantagenet was the “family name of a line of English kings from Henry II to Richard III,” whose bones were recently found under a parking lot in Leicester, England.
[Photo: ” NOLA Roast Beef Po-Boy,” CC BY 2.0 by Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau]
[Photo: “Rawr,” CC BY 2.0 by Stuart Caie]
Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week.
Thanks to everyone for playing! As always, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.