Author Archives: Angela Tung

by

This Week’s Language Blog Roundup: 30 Rock, gaslighting, dictionary news

30 Rock

30 Rock

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.

For Super Bowl XLVII, OxfordWords Blog tackled some football language. In honor of the end of 30 Rock, Slate gave us their favorite catchphrases from the show while Visual Thesaurus reminded us of Mark Peters’ post on 30 Rock euphemisms.

The New York Times delved into the origin of big data, and Vanity Fair recounted an oral history of YOLO, “the word that lived too long.” Ben Zimmer explored the history of bounding asterisks and when life imitates movies, from gaslighting to catfishing, while The Week told us even more about what gaslighting is.

Johnson examined foreign language films at the Oscars, Indian retroflexes, and immigration and learning English. At Lingua Franca, Ben Yagoda discussed dog-whistle politics, Geoff Pullum wrote about being a preposition, and Allan Metcalf told us about a publication of the American Dialect Society, American Speech.

At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Michael Rundell picked on adverbs and Stan Carey praised serendipity. On his own blog, Stan traced the diffusion and variety of folk tales. John McIntyre considered the relationship between writer and editor and the persistence of grammar ignorance.

In the week in words, Erin McKean noted funambulist, a tightrope walker; tongqi, Chinese for a straight woman married to a gay man; mot-diese, France’s substitution for the banned hashtag; and windowing, charging a fee to viewers who want to get early access to videos. Erin also gave us the Week in Words’ also-rans for January, words that “while interesting, were not Week-worthy.”

Fritinancy’s weekly word choices were tannoy, “a loudspeaker or public-address system,” and Godwin’s Law which says, “As an online discussion becomes longer, the probability of a comparison invoking Hitler or Nazis approaches one.”

Word Spy spotted hedge rage, “extreme anger or aggression exhibited by a homeowner in response to a neighbor’s massive or overgrown hedge”; social swearing, “casual swearing that helps to define and bind a social group”; and cinemagraph, “a still image where an element or small area of the image has been animated.”

Sesquiotica compared if and when, and in his Word Taster’s Companion series, offered the consonant line and the fricative. The Virtual Linguist examined stalking horse; chaturanga and the number four; and the origins of hunch and hunch-backed. The Dialect Blog explored different kinds of ahs as well as the impact of military service on one’s dialect.

In dictionary news, Kory Stamper examined morality and dictionaries, Merriam-Webster gave us a preview of their electronic unabridged dictionary, and DARE, the Dictionary of American Regional English, was awarded RUSA’s Dartmouth Medal for excellence. Meanwhile, we enjoyed this dictionary of Victorian slang.

This week we learned that grammar badness makes cracking passwords more difficult; most of what we think about grammar is wrong; and some early theories about the origin of language. We also found out about 11 words we’re mispronouncing; 20 words we owe to Shakespeare; and from Ben Yagoda, nine writing mistakes we might be making.

We sang along with these ABCs from eight different languages and practiced our letters via superheroes. We couldn’t help but laugh at Scott Brown’s Twitter troubles (“Bqhatevwr”). We love these hotels inspired by literature, these bizarre fairy tale adaptations, and the idea of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in Chinese (or it gives us a headache, we’re not sure).

That’s it for this week! Until next time, bqhatevwr!

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by nathaniel.scribbleton]

by - 1 Comment

Dickensian Soup: 11 Words from Charles Dickens

London_1 62_edited

Charles Dickens

Two hundred and one years ago today, English writer Charles Dickens was born. The prolific author’s inventive character names have given rise to many words now common in the English language, and he has been credited with the coining of dozens of words.

While some of these words have been antedated – for example, an earlier citation of boredom, long credited to Dickens, has been found – there’s no denying the author’s role popularizing words that may have disappeared into obscurity. Today we round up 11 of our favorites.

abuzz

“The court was all astir and a-buzz, when the black sheep—whom many fell away from in dread—pressed him into an obscure corner among the crowd.”

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

Dickens was one of the first authors to use abuzz, “characterized by excessive gossip or activity.” Another “early adopter” of the word was George Eliot, who used it in her 1859 novel, Adam Bede: “I hate the sound of women’s voices; they’re always either a-buzz or a-squeak.”

creeps, the

“She was constantly complaining of the cold, and of its occasioning a visitation in her back which she called ‘the creeps‘.”

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1850

You may be surprised to know the modern-sound phrase, the creeps, “a feeling of fear and revulsion,” was coined by Dickens. He may have been influenced by the sense creepy, “chilled and crawling, as with horror or fear,” which originated around 1831.

devil-may-care

“Not that this would have worried him much, anyway—he was a mighty free and easy, roving, devil-may-care sort of person, was my uncle, gentlemen.”

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837

Devil-may-care, meaning “reckless; careless,” or “jovial and rakish in manner,” seems to come from the saying, “The devil may care but I don’t.”

flummox

“And my ‘pinion is, Sammy, that if your governor don’t prove a alleybi, he’ll be what the Italians call reg’larly flummoxed, and that’s all about it.”

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837

To flummox means “to confuse; perplex.” The origin is probably an English dialectal word which Dickens brought back into popularity. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the formation of the word “seems to be onomatopoeic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily; compare flump, hummock, dialect slommock sloven.”

gonoph

“He’s as obstinate a young gonoph as I know.”

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1853

Gonoph is slang for a pickpocket or thief. The word comes from gannabh, the Hebrew word for “thief.” Dickens’s seems to be the earliest recorded usage of the word in English.

gorm

“It appeared, in answer to my inquiries, that nobody had the least idea of the etymology of this terrible verb passive to be gormed; but that they all regarded it as constituting a most solemn imprecation.”

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1850

Gorm is “a vulgar substitute for (God) damn,” according to the OED. In the television show, Firefly, gorram is a common expletive,  presumably a corruption of goddamn. Whether or not the show’s creators were influenced by Dickens is unknown.

lummy

“To think of Jack Dawkins—lummy Jack—the Dodger—the Artful Dodger—going abroad for a common twopenny-halfpenny sneeze-box!”

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, 1839

Lummy is slang for “knowing; cute,” or “first-rate,” and probably comes from lumme, a corruption of “(Lord) love me,” according to the OED. Lummy is another Dickens-coined word that has fallen into obscurity, though we would like to see it make a comeback.

on the rampage

“When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my sister ‘went on the Rampage,’ in a more alarming degree than at any previous period.”

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860

The phrase on the rampage comes from the earlier verb form of rampage, “to act or move in a ramping manner; spring or rush violently; rage or storm about.” The word rampage may come from ramp, “to rise for a leap or in leaping, as a wild beast; rear or spring up; prepare for or make a spring; jump violently.”

red tapeworm

“If in any convenient part of the United Kingdom, (we suggest the capital as the centre of resort,) a similar museum could be established, for the destruction and exhibition of the Red-Tape-Worms with which the British Public are so sorely afflicted, there can be no doubt that it would be, at once, a vast national benefit, and a curious national spectacle.”

Charles Dickens, Household Words, 1851

A red tapeworm is, according to the OED, “a person who adheres excessively to official rules and formalities.” The phrase plays off red tape and tapeworm, and was coined by Dickens in Household Words, a weekly magazine he edited.

Red tape, slang for “the collection or sequence of forms and procedures required to gain bureaucratic approval for something, especially when oppressively complex and time-consuming,” comes from the English practice of using red or pink tape to tie official documents. The figurative sense arose around 1736, says the OED. A tapeworm is a ribbonlike parasite.

Some call a phrase like red tapeworm a sweet tooth fairy, “three words where the first and second form a known expression and the second and third form a known expression and all three together make a credible expression.”

sawbones

“‘What! Don’t you know what a sawbones is, sir?’ inquired Mr. Weller. ‘I thought everybody know’d as a sawbones was a surgeon.’”

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837

Sawbones is slang for a surgeon or doctor. Before the advent of anesthesia in 1846, speed was of the essence for surgeons. With a saw like the one pictured in this article, Victorian physicians could amputate a leg in half a minute.

whiz-bang

“‘Present! think I was; fired a musket—fired with an idea—rushed into wine shop—wrote it down—back again—whiz, bang—another idea—wine shop again—pen and ink—back again—cut and slash—noble time, Sir. Sportsman, sir?’ abruptly turning to Mr. Winkle.”

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1836

Whiz-bang in this example means something “very rapid and eventful; rushed,” and is imitative  of something that moves quickly, or whizzes, and perhaps lands with a bang.

During World War I, whiz-bang came to refer to “the shell of a small-calibre high-velocity German gun, so called from the noise it made,” according to the OED. By 1916, the term referred to “a resounding success,” and in 1960, a type of firecracker.

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by USM MS photos]

by

The Name Game: Steve Rivkin

In the latest of our series of interviews with professional namers, today we speak with Steve Rivkin.

Steve is the founder of Rivkin & Associates LLC, a marketing and communications consultancy that specializes in naming. He is the co-author of The Making of a Name (Oxford University Press) – described by its publisher as “the definitive work on names and naming” – and has been called “America’s leading nameologist” by Asian Brand News.

How did you get started in the naming business?

It was an outgrowth of my consulting work in developing and then executing marketing strategies. The need for a new name was an integral part of the majority of these projects, and I was dissatisfied with the methods and narrow focus I saw.

Any new name, I believe, should embrace several disciplines. First and foremost, a new name must have a strong positioning orientation to help differentiate the brand. It also should have a strong consumer sensibility, and it should have a realistic basis in linguistics.

To do this requires seasoned professionals with hands-on business experience in marketing and communications. There are no rookies or academic linguists on our team, which is a common practice at the big naming factories.

What types of customers and clients do you work with?

All sorts. We have naming clients in the food, healthcare, communications, financial services, and technology sectors.

Please describe the naming process. Do you usually start with ideas, or do you find your customers often have their own ideas already?

We start with a clear briefing from the client on their objectives, likes and dislikes regarding a new name.

Next, we develop a specific vocabulary list about the client’s business, product or service. That list is then enlarged by adding roots, synonyms, analogues, idioms, collocations, and translations, to create the building blocks we need.

Then we employ a series of techniques that we know will generate large numbers of possible names: construction of new words (neologisms) from recognizable roots, by using word fusions, suffixes joined to building-block terms, and other methods; existing terms or words used in new ways, such as adapted metaphors; compressions or contractions of existing words and phrases; application of imagery and symbolism; and other techniques and inspirations.

What are some mistakes you’ve seen companies make in terms of naming?

Devouring their own. Alpo Cat Food, A-1 Poultry Sauce, V8 Fusion Plus Tea, Tanqueray Vodka. These marketers have stretched the original meaning of their names past recognition – or believability.

Yes, all brand names are elastic, to some extent. Consider the brand ESPN. It started out in 1997 as a single cable channel, but has since mushroomed into half a dozen other channels, two radio channels, Internet access, and a print magazine – all built around the concept of sports coverage and commentary. But note the core concept behind everything ESPN does. A name can only be stretched to a certain point before it “snaps” in the consumer’s mind and no longer stands for a clear concept.

Another common mistake: the impolite utterances that others have commented on, such as the shoe brands named Incubus (a demon) and Zyklon (a poison used by the Nazis). Ikea has a catalog offering for a workbench named Fartfull. (I’m guessing that moniker is attractive in Swedish.)

Foreign language stumbles are particularly embarrassing. Pajero, an SUV from Mitsubishi. (You can look it up in any Spanish dictionary:  “One who masturbates; a wanker.”)  Country Mist, a cosmetic product that Estee Lauder shipped to Germany. (In German, “mist” means “manure.”) Burrada, used to identify a frozen Mexican food entrée. (Burrada translates as “a stupid deed” or “ big mistake.”)

What are some names that you particularly like?

You know I’m going to embrace our creations for clients. Here are a few of them: Behold single-vision lens, Premio Italian sausages, Trueste perfume, Celsia Technologies, Global Impact for charitable assistance.

I’m also drawn to names that are unexpected combinations of language, because they engage the brain on several levels. They’re surprising, meaningful and playful – all at the same time. Examples: Geek Squad. DreamWorks, which combines the magic of movies with an old industrial term. Zany Brainy, the educational toy store. Sky Harbor, the name of the airport in Phoenix.

And I applaud companies which do not blur the distinctions among their brands. For instance, American Honda Motor Company applied its mid-range Honda brand name to a lineup of vehicles – Civic, Accord, CR-V. But as Honda climbed the ladder of performance, styling and luxury, it realized it could not “stretch” the Honda brand indefinitely – and the upmarket Acura brand was born, with a completely separate identity. (You have to search long and hard in Acura materials to find any references to Honda.)

What are some trends you’d sooner see die off?

One: The fascination with what I call techno-babble. Or we could call it geek-speak. Names such as (and I’m not making these up) @Climax, 1-4-@LL, 160 over 90, Design VoX, mmO2, and $Cashnet$.

Another: The epidemic of me-tooism of “Ameri-something” names:  Americare, Americone, Amerideck, Ameridial, Amerihealth, Amerilink, Amerimark, Ameripride – enough!

And one more sin in naming: Thou shalt not prepare alphabet soup. “JCP&L, a GPU Company.” How that’s for dead-end communication? Or these recent adventures into anonymity from the Fortune 500: AES, BB&T, KBR, URS, SLM. That’s a total of $35 billion in corporate revenues, all cloaked in an invisible, all-initial shield.

by

Word Soup Wednesday: baller, Benghazi flu, Tuiasosopo

Welcome to Word Soup Wednesday, in which we bring you our favorite strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words from sitcoms, dramas, news shows, and just about anything else on TV.

Midnight Game

Midnight Game, by Jonathan Kos-Read

baller

Andy: “You are officially a baller.”
Tom: “I’ve been a baller since birth, son. Now I’m an athlete.”

“Women in Garbage,” Parks and Recreation, January 24, 2013

Baller has two meanings here: “one who plays basketball,” and “one who lives an extravagant, money-driven lifestyle.” The first meaning originated around 1867, says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and referred to a player of any ball game.

The second meaning is much newer, coming about around 1990, also according to the OED, perhaps “with reference to the perceived tendency of successful basketball players to spend ostentatiously.”

Benghazi flu

Jon Stewart: “Secretary Clinton was supposed to have testified back in December but kept postponing it for ‘health issues’ which came to be referred to by ‘medical professionals’ as [the Benghazi flu]. . . .The Benghazi flu turned out to be a cerebral blood clot.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 24, 2013

Benghazi flu was coined by Rep. Allen West, a Republican from Florida, who claimed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was faking illness in order to avoid testifying about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya in September. It was later revealed that Clinton had been suffering from a “blood clot near her brain.”

drone

Missy Cummings [Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT]: “The professionals in the field prefer to call [drones] unmanned aerial vehicles because the word drone connotates a kind of stupidness, and they’re definitely getting smarter.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 23, 2013

Drone meaning “a pilotless aircraft operated by remote control” is from 1946, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. The aircraft was perhaps named for its similarity in purpose and/or appearance to the male honeybee. The Ryan Firebee was an early drone model.

The meaning that Cummings is referring, “a kind of stupidness,” arose from the idea of the drone bee being stingless, preforming no work, and producing no honey, and whose “only function is to mate with the queen bee.” This gave rise to drone meaning “an idle person who lives off others; a loafer,” or “a person who does tedious or menial work; a drudge.”

gaslight

Jake: “I thought you and Marley were friends now.”
Kitty: “Duh, we are. I’m still gonna gaslight her every chance I get.”

“Sadie Hawkins,” Glee, January 24, 2013

To gaslight someone means “to manipulate [them] psychologically such that they question their own sanity.” This usage gained popularity in the 1960s, says the OED, and comes from Gaslight, a 1944 film “in which a man psychologically manipulates his wife into believing that she is going insane.”

narcoterrorism

Edward Berenson [Professor of History, NYU]: “Think of these groups as a kind of combination of Mexican drug organization and an Islamic terrorist group. . . .So what you’ve got is narcoterrorism in a way in Mali.”

The Colbert Report, January 24, 2013

Narcoterrorism is “terrorism carried out to prevent interference with or divert attention from illegal narcotics trafficking.” The term originated in the early 1980s, says the OED.

norovirus

News announcer: “British researchers have created a projectile vomiting robot that mimics that symptoms of norovirus. Researchers created the projectile robot to test how far the dangerous contagions spreads every time someone throws up.”

The Colbert Report, January 21, 2013

The norovirus is also known as the winter vomiting bug. The name norovirus is derived from Norwalk virus, originally named after Norwalk, Ohio, where “an outbreak of acute viral gastroenteritis occurred among children at Bronson Elementary School in November 1968.”

orange fog warning

News announcer: “In China, hazardous record-high pollution levels in Beijing have prompted what’s called an orange fog warning.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 24, 2013

An orange fog warning doesn’t have to do with the color of the fog but with its density. Blue is the least serious, followed by red, orange, and finally yellow as the most serious. Some have dubbed this recent bout with air pollution in Beijing as airpocalypse.

pogo

Schmidt: “A pogo is what your friends talk about when you leave the room.”
Cece: “Oh. Like your barnacle toenails?”

“Pepperwood,” New Girl, January 23, 2013

Pogo in this context is a nonce word, “a word occurring, invented, or used just for a particular occasion.” Nonce comes from the Middle English phrase for the nones, “for the occasion.”

Randian

Stephen Colbert: “The Atlasphere.com is the best place for Randians to find the one they love other than their bathroom mirror.”

The Colbert Report, January 23, 2013

Randian means pertaining to the writer Ayn Rand, who created objectivism, a philosophy that asserted that “the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness (or rational self-interest),” among other tenets.

straw man

Paul Ryan: “. . .that rhetorical device [that] he uses over and over and over. . .a straw man.”
Jon Stewart: “I think a straw man is when you create or falsely characterize an opponent’s argument so that you can then easily dismantle the new fictional argument. . . .I think the President is throwing your own words back in your face without naming you. Passive-aggression, that’s what he’s using.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 23, 2013

A straw man is “an argument or opponent set up so as to be easily refuted or defeated.” The idea of a straw man as an “imaginary opponent” is recorded from the 1620s.

Tuiasosopo

Jon Stewart: “Al, I think you’ve been had by Hawaiian uber-prankster Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.”
Al Madrigal: “What? No. I got Tuiasosopoed? No!”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 21, 2013

Ronaiah Tuiasosopo is supposedly the man behind the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax. To be Tuiasosopoed means to be fooled by such a hoax. The word is both an eponym, a word derived from a person’s name, and anthimeria, using a word from one part of speech as another part, such as a noun as a verb.

[Photo: CC BY-ND 2.0 by Jonathan Kos-Read]

by - 1 Comment

A Short-Tempered History of the ‘Curmudgeon’

oscar the grouch

oscar the grouch, by whatleydude

It’s National Curmudgeon Day, which means you can embrace your inner grouch and grumble, complain, grouse, kvetch, and whine to your heart’s (dis)content. We’ll be taking a look at the history of curmudgeon words.

The word curmudgeon is an old one, originating in the 1570s, but where it comes from is unknown. The most famous suggestion, says World Wide Words, “is that of Dr Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of 1755 [in which] he quoted an unknown correspondent as suggesting that it came from the French coeur méchant (evil or malicious heart).” However, this is now considered unlikely.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says “the first syllable may be cur ‘dog,’” or that the word may “have been borrowed from Gaelic” – muigean means “disagreeable person” – “with variant spelling of intensive prefix ker-,” a slang term “echoic of the sound of the fall of some heavy body.”

An older grouchy word is crab, which comes not from the crustacean but the sour crab apple, which in turn may come from Swedish dialect word skrabba, “fruit of the wild apple-tree,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Crab came to refer to a sour person in the 1570s.

Malcontent, which now especially refers to “one who rebels against the established system,” also means “a chronically dissatisfied person,” and entered the English language from the French in the 1580s. Crosspatch came about around 1699, says the OED, and was formed by joining, you guessed it, cross and patch, where patch refers to “a ninny; a fool,” or “a harlequin.” This sense of patch may come from the Italian pazzo, “fool.”

Grump originated around 1727 and meant “ill-humor,” as part of the phrase, humps and grumps, or “surly remarks.” Then came the grumps, “a fit of ill-humor,” in 1844, and grump meaning “a person in ill humor” in 1900. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word may be “an extended sense of grum ‘morose, surly,'” which is probably related to the Danish grum, “cruel.”

The word codger, referring to an eccentric or grumpy old man, is attested to 1756, and may be an alteration of cadger, “a person who gets a living by begging.” Crank seems to be a back-formation of cranky, which originated around 1807. In addition to “a grouchy person,” crank can also refer to “an eccentric person, especially one who is unduly zealous.”

The word grouch was born in the early 1890s, first referring to the grouchy mood itself, then soon after the grumpy person. The word was U.S. college students’ slang, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, possibly coming from the Middle English grucchen, “to grumble, complain.” A grouch bag is a “purse for carrying hidden money” and possibly the source of the nickname of Groucho Marx, “who supposedly carried his money in one to poker games.”

Finally, sourpuss is a 20th century grouch word, originating around 1937 as U.S. slang. Puss had been slang for face or mouth since about 1890, coming from the Irish pus, “lip, mouth.”

Still in a bad mood? Check out our list of the day.

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by whatleydude]