Author Archives: Angela Tung

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This Week’s Language Blog Roundup: Inauguration Day, gun control, biblio-cats

Bookstore cat

Bookstore cat, by Sarah Stierch

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.

We were saddened by the passing of Aaron Swartz, “computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist.” Ben Zimmer wrote about Infogami, a startup Swartz founded, while Geoffrey Pullum discussed “vague and lazy talk” about hacking.

For Inauguration Day, the Smithsonian offered visualizations of the meaningful words behind famous inaugural speeches; Ben Zimmer discussed words coined by U.S. presidents; and The New Yorker gave us a brief history of inaugural poems.

The New York Times reported that in the debate on gun control, even the language can be loaded, while at Johnson, Robert Lane Greene wondered if changing one word could change American opinions.

Johnson also discussed the language of gender and sexual orientation, a short history of you, and the singular they, about which folks had a lot to say, including Jen Doll (against), John McIntyre (for), and the Oxford Dictionaries blog (neutral).

At Lingua Franca, William Germano examined Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s signature and the paraph, “that flourish-y bit below a signature,” as well as catfishing and imaginary online friends. Geoff Pullum considered being an adjective, Lucy Ferriss peeked under the lid, and Ben Yagoda went po-faced.

At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Stan Carey mansplained the new-word-pocalypse, and on his own blog, played usage peeve bingo. In the week in words, Erin McKean noted jukochodai, old-school manufacturers; slow steaming, a technique for slowing down ships; laolaiqiao, “old people doing young things that even young people wouldn’t do.”

Fritinancy looked at drusy, “a crust of small crystals lining the sides of a cavity (or vug) in a rock”; snollygoster, “a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician”; and some moist slacks (ew). She also discussed how to name anything.

Sesquiotica gave us a taste of phonemes, long and short vowel pairs, finicky, and frisky. The Dialect Blog dialogued on the Jamaican rounded schwa, and the Virtual Linguist told us about Silbo Gomero, “an old whistling language used on the Canary island of Gomera.”

Ben Yagoda discussed the Britishism have (someone) on. Allan Metcalf told us about a new crowdsourced Jewish English lexicon, Slate’s Lexicon Alley explained the origins behind the New York accent, and Chicago Magazine mapped the geography of Chicago’s second languages.

IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, is learning some slang; OxfordWords blog taught us slang of the prohibition era; and Jonathan Green gave us 50 (we think!) slang words that come from snow. The Economist discussed how the press in China is getting around censorship, while O Canada told us about a campaign to save old words, with quotes from Jesse Sheidlower, Mark Liberman, and our own Erin McKean.

This week we also learned a brief history of the dictionary, that Emily Dickinson scrawled her poems on tiny scraps of paper, how to insult in Lutheran, and how to speak Ned Flanders. We found out why the blues is called the blues, the science behind beatboxing, and why people roll their eyes when they’re annoyed.

We’re glad to see Ben Schmidt is still collecting anachronisms from Downton Abbey. We agree that editors are important and that cheesemongers do indeed pen some clever descriptions. We loved these best shots fired in the Oxford comma wars, these 16 great library scenes, and this amazing library (although the idea of robot librarians scares us a little). And then our heads exploded imagining all 11 Doctor Whos in one anniversary special.

We’d like to order all of these coffee drinks, then stay up all night playing these literary board games. We chuckled over these light bulb jokes for the publishing industry and are currently memorizing these 17 vowel free words that are acceptable in Words with Friends. We liked these lolcats of the Middle Ages and awww’d over this catalog of bookstore cats.

That’s it for this week! Until next time, have a dandy-diddly day-di-iddlyo!

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Sarah Stierch]

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Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Words We Found There

[ T ] John Tenniel - Alice Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

Alice Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

This Sunday is the birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the English mathematician and writer whose most famous works include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark.

Such works featured Carroll’s specialty: coining blends and nonce words. We take a look at 10 of our favorites here.

boojum

“But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,
If your Snark be a Boojum!  For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
And never be met with again!”

Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 1876

The boojum is “a particularly dangerous variety of ‘snark,’” an imaginary creature of Carroll’s invention. The word boojum has inspired the naming of everything from “a species of tree. . .native to Baja California, Mexico” (found in 1922 by plant explorer Godfrey Sykes, who proclaimed, “It must be a boojum!”); to a supersonic cruise missile that “was determined to be too ambitious a project. . .and was canceled in 1951”; to “a geometric pattern sometimes observed on the surface of superfluid helium-3,” as named by physicist David Mermin in 1976.

chortle

“He chortled in his joy.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871

To chortle means “to exclaim exultingly, with a noisy chuckle.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Carroll coined the word as a blend of chuckle and snort.

frabjous

“‘O frabjous day!’ rejoiced Emma Dean, using her bath towel as a scarf and performing a weird dance about the room.”

Jessie Graham Flower, Grace Harlowe’s Return to Overton Campus, 1915

Frabjous means “great, wonderful, fabulous,” and is a blend of either fabulous and joyous, or fair and joyous. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” cries the narrator of The Jabberwocky upon learning that the Jabberwock has been slain.

galumph

“I struggle to keep up on an particularly cold winter evening as I galumph my way across rough downland in pursuit of a tour guide.”

Ian Vince, “Stonehenge Landscape Can Still Surprise with Its Stunning Vistas,” The Telegraph, January 14, 2010

Galumph means “to move heavily and clumsily,” and is a blend of gallop and triumph.

jabberwocky

“In theory, the pledge could do most of the same work if we had children say it in Anglo-Saxon or Arapaho, or if we replaced it with the lyrics to ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’ They’re going to turn the words into jabberwocky anyway.”

Geoff Nunberg, “I Pledge Allegiance to Linguistic Obfuscation,” NPR, March 30, 2010

The Jabberwocky is “a nonsensical poem that appears in Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll,” while the Jabberwock is “a fantastical dreaded monster with flaming eyes who is depicted” in the poem. Regarding the word itself, according to Carroll:

The Anglo-Saxon word ‘wocer’ or ‘wocor’ signifies ‘offspring’ or ‘fruit’. Taking ‘jabber’ in its ordinary acceptation of ‘excited and voluble discussion.’

Jabberwocky came to mean “nonsensical speech or writing” around 1908, says the OED.

mimsy

“I mean, their hair looks like it was designed on a Spirograph in the dark, then carelessly flopped on to them from atop a rickety step ladder, while their fans are all exactly the kind of mimsy mugginses who ‘Instagram’ pictures of wheelie bins to stick on their Tumblr, because, you know, it’s properly, like, photography, yeah?”

Gareth Aveyard, “This Week’s New Singles,” The Guardian, January 6, 2012

Mimsy was coined by Lewis Carroll in 1855 as a blend of miserable and flimsy. According to the OED, by 1880 mimsy also came to mean, in British English, “prim; careful; affected; feeble, weak, lightweight.” Mim is a much older word meaning “primly silent,” either imitative of the pursing up of the mouth, or coming from the Scottish Gaelic min, “delicate, meek.”

portmanteau word

“Portmanteau words are now a staple of the magazine competition, and amid the waste of failed invention, every so often one meets a need: smog, stagflation, chocoholic. I don’t know how we ever did without ‘metrosexual’, coined by my friend Mark Simpson.”

Philip Hensher, “Sarah Palin’s Struggle with the English Language,” The Telegraph, July 21, 2010

A portmanteau word is “a word formed by merging the sounds and meanings of two different words.” A portmanteau is “a case used in journeying for containing clothing,” and comes from the French porter, “to carry,” plus manteau, “cloak.”

Carroll coined portmanteau word in 1882 based on the idea of “two meanings packed up into one word,” says the Online Etymology Dictionary.

slithy

“Hearing these slithy and suggestive movements, I declined to remain any longer ignorant of their meaning.”

Ernest Raymond, Tell England: A Study in Generation, 1922

In 1855, Carroll combined slimy and lithe to form this nonce word. However, slithy as a variation of sleathy, “slovenly, careless,” has been around since 1622, says the OED.

snark

“The Snark was one of that strange man’s imaginary animals, but when novelist Heidi Julavitz used the word to describe unpleasantly critical book reviewers in her indifferently researched 2005 McSweeney’s magazine article, the word gained, as they say, ‘traction.’”

Bob Hoover, “Hunting Snarks with a Pop Gun,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 18, 2009

Snark referring to “an imaginary animal” was coined by Carroll in 1876 in his poem, The Hunting of the Snark, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. In the 1950s, snark was the “name of a type of U.S. cruise missile and in 1980s of a type of sailboat.”

The word snark also has the meaning of “to snore; to snort,” which originated about 10 years before Carroll’s imaginary animal, according to the OED. This gave rise to snarky, “rudely sarcastic or disrespectful; snide,” or “irritable or short-tempered; irascible,” around 1906, which gives us snark‘s modern meaning of “snide remarks.”

vorpal

“Because, really, there’s nothing more grandiose and theatrical than the vorpal blade. It’s the weapon of dueling gentlemen and swashbuckling adventurers, of knights in armor and the horse lords of Rohan.”

Daniel Engber, “Nerd Violence,” Slate, January 3, 2011

Vorpal meaning “sharp or deadly” was coined by Carroll in 1871. In the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, the vorpal sword is a sword “capable of decapitation, specifically through magical means,” which aligns with the plot of The Jabberwocky:

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Cea.]

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To Catch Some Thief Words

Fullerton Patrolman Ernest E. Garner with bank robbers, Fullerton, 1927

Fullerton Patrolman Ernest E. Garner with bank robbers, Fullerton, 1927

A recent New Yorker piece, A Pickpocket’s Tale, gives a fascinating portrait of Apollo Robbins, an expert in “theatrical pickpocketing.” The article is also chock-full of equaling fascinating pickpocket lingo, such as skinning the poke (“removing the cash from a stolen wallet and wiping it off before tossing it”), kissing the dog (“the mistake of letting a victim see your face”), and working single o (working without a pickpocket crew).

After reading the article, we were so obsessed inspired, we decided to take a closer look at even more thief words. Here are our favorites.

Adam Tiler

“Why, an autem diver is a pickpocket who practises in a church, and an Adam tiler his associate, who receives his booty, and runs off with it.”

Tales of My Father, and My Friends, 1823

An Adam Tiler is “a pickpocket’s accomplice, who takes the stolen goods and leaves with them.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term originated in the 1660s and comes from Adam, “the name of the first man,” and tiler, slang for “pickpocket.”

busk

“We would all have 36 hours to blag, beg and busk our way around the globe.”

“Taking liberties: a jailbreak to San Diego,” The Guardian, April 15, 2011

Busk meaning “to earn a livelihood by going about singing, playing, and selling ballads” may come from another meaning of the word, “to cruise as a pirate.” The word itself may come from the obsolete French busquer, “to prowl.”

ferret

“McCain employs a staffer known as the ‘ferret’ to find and expose pork-barrel provisions tucked away in major legislation.”

Evan Thomas, “Senator Hothead,” Newsweek, February 20, 2000

The word ferret has multiple meanings, the earliest of which is “a weasellike, usually albino mammal (Mustela putorius furo) related to the polecat and often trained to hunt rats or rabbits.” The word comes from the Vulgar Latin fūrittus, diminutive of Latin fūr, “thief.”

Ferret took on a figurative meaning around 1600, according to the OED, “to hunt after; to worry,” with the earliest recorded usage in Shakespeare’s Henry V: ” Ile Fer him, and ferit him, and ferke him.“ Ferret also means “to drive out, as from a hiding place”; “to uncover and bring to light by searching”; or “to search intensively.”

furuncle

“The word carbuncle, in Latin means live coal, and in Greek, anthrax signifies the same thing. While furuncle in Latin stands for thief or knave, pathologically it is synonymous with the term boil, which is too well known to require a definition.”

The Medical Summary, March 1915

Furuncle, “a circumscribed inflammation of the skin, forming a necrotic central core, and suppurating and discharging the core; a boil,” comes from the Latin fūrunculus, “knob on a vine that ‘steals’ the sap. Fūrunculus is diminutive of fūr, “thief.”

grift

“Like junkies, they’re hooked on the grift–it gives them an almost sexual rush–but they keep telling themselves they can pull out whenever they want and go straight.”

David Ansen, “Con-Artist Classic,” Newsweek, February 3, 1997

Grift refers to “money made dishonestly, as in a swindle”; “a swindle or confidence game”; or “to engage in swindling or cheating.” The word originated around 1906, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, and may be a corruption of graft, “dishonest gain acquired by private or secret practices or corrupt agreement or connivance,” or “a business, process, place of concourse, or office, in or at which dishonest gain, by corruption or direct thieving, may be acquired.”

gun moll

“‘A dip—pickpocket—and his girl, or gun-moll, as they call them,’ translated Kennedy. ‘One of their number has evidently been picked up by a detective and he looks to them for a good lawyer, or mouth-piece.’”

Arthur B. Reever, The Dream Doctor, 1914

A gun moll is “the girlfriend of a gangster.” Gun here doesn’t refer to the weapon but is from gonif, slang for “thief.” Gonif is Yiddish in origin, coming from the Hebrew gannabh, “thief.” Moll comes from the “nickname of Mary, used of disreputable females since early 1600s.”

keister

“President Reagan has apologized to a freshman congressman for using the word ‘keister‘ to describe the human posterior.”

“President apologizes for ‘keister,'” The Pittsburgh Press, September 13, 1983

Keister became slang for “buttocks” in the 1930s, says the OED. The earliest meaning of the word is “suitcase, satchel” (1882), and in 1913 came to mean “a strong-box in a safe.” The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word may come from the “British dialect kist (northern form of chest) or its German cognate Kiste ‘chest, box,” and the connection to “buttocks” may be via the “pickpocket slang sense of ‘rear trouser pocket’ (1930s).”

prat

“Topping a poke: If the wallet is hidden in a rear pocket, the pickpocket pushes it up from the bottom of the prat until it is visible, then either ‘pinches,’ ‘forks,’ or ‘spears’ it.”

“Know How They Do It So You’re Not ‘Dipped,‘” The News and Courier, September 7, 1987

Prat is another word for “buttocks,” originating in the 1560s as criminal slang. Around 1914 the word entered U.S. criminal slang as “hip pocket,” and around 1968, in British slang as “contemptible person.”

Prat-digging is “the action of stealing for a hip pocket,” says the OED.

smart aleck

“This reminds us of the time a smart-aleck friend told us the word ‘gullible’ wasn’t in the dictionary.”

James Taranto, “Blago-What? Never Heard of Him,” The Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2008

Smart aleck (which is sometimes hyphenated) refers to “a person regarded as obnoxiously self-assertive,” or “an impudent person.” The word may come from Aleck Hoag, a “19th-century American confidence man and thief.”

According to Wordorigins, “Hoag and his wife Melinda operated several confidence games where Melinda would pose as a prostitute and Aleck would rob the johns of their valuables.” Hoag would then pay off police to escape arrest.

velociraptor

“At about this time last year I wrote a column on Mike Novacek, whom I believed was the American Museum of Natural History’s chief dinosaur hunter, expert, velociraptor whisperer—whatever the term of art is for the big buana, the institution’s primo paleontologist.”

Ralph Gardner Jr., “The Coolest Dude Alive,” The Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2011

A velociraptor is “a small active carnivore that probably fed on protoceratops; possibly related more closely to birds than to other dinosaurs.” The word originated around 1924, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, and comes from the Latin velox, “swift,” plus raptor, “robber.”

The oviraptor, another type of dinosaur, comes from the Latin for “egg thief,” due to “the fact that the first fossil specimen was discovered atop a pile of what were thought to be Protoceratops eggs.” However, it was found that “the eggs in question probably belonged to Oviraptor itself, and that the specimen was actually brooding its eggs.”

Can’t get enough? Check out our post on Breaking Bad words, Drugs, Thieves, and Special Sauce, and these lists: A Swell Mob, A Whiz Mob, and The Grifters.

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Orange County Archives]

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Word Soup Wednesday: BOGO, green fairy, lion’s head

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.

BOGO

Virginia: “I’ll also be using this 20% off store coupon, which I will then combine with a BOGO.”

“The Last Christmas,” Raising Hope, December 11, 2012

BOGO is an acronym that stands for “buy one get one (free).” A synonym is twofer, “a coupon offering two items, especially tickets for a play, for the price of one.”

cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust

Jon Stewart: “Ladies and gentlemen, the fiscal cliff! It’s the subject of tonight’s cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust, our nation’s totally solvable budget problem.”

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, November 29, 2012

Cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust is blend of cliff of fiscal cliff, apocalypse, armageddon, and holocaust. For more end-of-the-world words, check out Arnold Zwicky’s apocalypse posts.

A memory of Philly

An example of champlevé

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by John Hritz]

champlevé

Appraiser: “And while I’m on that subject, I want to point out that this is not cloisonné, as a lot of people call it, this is champlevé.”

“Corpus Christi, Texas,” Antiques Roadshow, January 14, 2013

Champlevé refers to enamelware which has “the ground originally cast with depressions, or engraved or cut out, or lowered.” According to the Antiques Roadshow appraiser, to create champlevé, artisans “scooped the brass hollow and melted the enamel into the hollow,” as opposed to to cloisonné, “where they build up the channels and then melt the enamel down into that.”

This word is French in origin, coming from champ, “field,” and levé, “raised.”

Special thanks to @RoadshowPBS for their help with this word.

coddle

Anthony Bourdain: “What is coddle?”
Guide: “It’s like a peasant food, the leftovers, things like bacon and potato and sausage. It’s pretty much mixed it all together in a stew.”

“Dublin,” The Layover, January 7, 2013

Coddle is “an Irish dish consisting of layers of roughly sliced pork sausages and rashers (thinly sliced, somewhat fatty back bacon) with sliced potatoes and onions.” The name comes from the verb meaning of coddle, “to boil gently; seethe; stew, as fruit.”

disco nap

Gloria [who was falling asleep at dinner]: “Just a little disco nap.”

“New Year’s Eve,” Modern Family, January 9, 2012

A disco nap is “a nap you take before going to a party or going out dancing.” We couldn’t find the origin of disco nap. If anyone has any information, let us know!

ghillie suit

Stephen Colbert: “I’m getting ready for that dark tomorrow when jack-booted government thugs come for our guns. That’s where this ghillie suit comes in.”

The Colbert Report, January 15, 2013

A ghillie suit is “a type of overall covered in torn cloth sheds, used as camouflage by hunters and military snipers.” Ghillie comes from the Scottish gille, “servant” or a “lad.”

the green fairy

The Green Fairy

[Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 by James Vaughn]

green fairy

Nick: “That is not creme de menthe. That is the green fairy right there.”
Angie: “It’s absinthe.”

“Cabin,” New Girl, January 8, 2013

Absinthe is nicknamed the green fairy because of its “opaline-green color” and the hallucinations that result from excessive use. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, green fairy is a translation from the French fée verte.

lion’s head

Anthony Bourdain: “Or Mandarin lion’s head with brown sauce, which is not lion by the way. They’re giant pork meatballs.”

“Atlanta,” The Layover, January 14, 2013

Lion’s head is a direct translation from the Chinese, shi zi tou, and is named for the food’s resemblance to “the head of the lion and the cabbage (or other vegetables), which is supposed to resemble the lion’s mane.”

peameal bacon

Anthony Bourdain: “What is peameal [bacon]?”
Guide: “Basically pork loin that’s been rolled in cornmeal.”

“Toronto,” The Layover, December 17, 2012

Peameal bacon originated in Canada. The name comes from “the historic practice of rolling the cured and trimmed boneless loin in dried and ground yellow peas, originally for preservation reasons,” but now is “rolled in ground yellow cornmeal.”

souse

Anthony Bourdain: “And souse, something any chef would be proud to have on the menu, especially this good.”

“Atlanta,” The Layover, January 14, 2013

Souse refers to “something kept or steeped in pickle; especially, the head, ears, and feet of swine pickled.” The word comes from the Old French souz, sous, “pickled meat.”

stackable

Virginia: “I have half off from the manufacturer, which is stackable.”
Barney: “That means she can combine them with other coupons.”

“The Last Christmas,” Raising Hope, December 11, 2012

Stackable is coupon lingo, which also includes blinkie, a type of coupon distributed by a machine that blinks a light to catch shoppers’ attention; catalina, a coupon that’s printed with the shopper’s receipt, named for the company that makes the coupons; and peelie, a peel-off coupon.

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A Message from the Future!

Last week was National Letter Writing Week, and we celebrated by asking you to write, in one tweet, a letter from your future self. The message could be from the near future, the far future, serious, or funny. Here are our favorites:

Thanks to all the future-letter writers!

This week we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming – tweet any word of the day from this week in a sentence demonstrating the word’s meaning, and you may appear on our blog.

Happy twooshing!

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This Week’s Language Blog Roundup: Passings, words of the year, foreign words

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.

We were saddened by the recent passing of Michael Cronan, a graphic designer and marketing executive who was behind the naming of TiVo and the Kindle. We had the pleasure of interviewing Michael and his wife and business partner, Karin Hibma, back in November. We will miss him.

In words of the year news, Lynneguist’s US to UK word of the year was wonk, “one who studies an issue or a topic thoroughly or excessively,” while her UK to US choice was bollocks, “which has a good AmE equivalent in bullshit.”

Word Spy picked nomophobia, “the fear of being without your mobile phone or without a cellular signal,” and for neologism of the year, Grexit, “the exit of Greece from the eurozone.”

Meng

Meng, by Xin Mei

Arika Okrent rounded up eight words of the year from other countries, including meng, “dream,” the Chinese character of the year. Geoffrey Nunberg decoded the political buzzwords of 2012 while Erin McKean blogged about her Wall Street Journal also-ran words and we selected our favorite words from TV.

Jen Doll counted us down to the big moment: the American Dialect Society’s word of the year, which was (drumroll please) hashtag. Or #hashtag we should say. Color Robert Lane Greene #unimpressed. For a great roundup of words of 2012, check out Alice Northover’s post at the OUP blog.

In more “of the year” news, The Atlantic gave us the best and worst trend stories and the great book scandals of 2012. The Week told us the most hilarious New York Times’ corrections. Grammar Girl shared her favorite language stories, as did we.

We rang in the New Year with Fritinancy’s word of the week, pre-drinking, “chugging cheap alcoholic drinks before heading out to a bar, club, or sporting event,” and John McIntyre’s different words for drunk. Meanwhile, Jen Doll looked ahead with words to banish in 2013.

The New York Times talked about the Holy Grail of etymology, the whole nine yards, while Lucy Ferriss discussed some other inflation-prone cliches. Ben Zimmer celebrated 200 years of Uncle Sam and taught us how to talk like a doomsday prepper. Meanwhile, we had some fun with our own apocalypse words.

At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Stan Carey explained nominalisation and zombification and told us to try to (or is it and?) get over it. At Language Log, Victor Mair tackled iPhone ideography depicting the plot of Les Miserables, and Mark Liberman considered the malapropism, shunned their noses at us; the unclear shooting dead people; and grammar on Reddit.

In words of the week, Erin McKean noted never events, “the kind of mistake that should never happen in medicine”; missing fifth, “the continuing exodus of prime-age males from the labor force”; and flip, “a mixture of beer and spirit sweetened with sugar and heated with a hot iron.”

Word Spy spotted success theater, “posting images and stories designed to make others believe you are more successful than you really are”; AI-pocalypse, “a disaster caused by an advanced artificial intelligence”; and craftivism, “the use of crafts such as knitting to further political, social, or other activist causes.” Fritinancy looked at said-bookism, “a verb used in place of “said” – almost always a needless distraction.”

Jonathan Green walked us through some dog slang while Oz Worders swam with shark terminology. Sesquiotica introduced his Word Taster’s Companion. The Dialect Blog examined the spread of a slur; where “the South” begins; Piers Morgan’s “hoity toity” accent; and that’s what she said!

This week we learned the relationship between dialect and identity, and when Americans stopped sounding British. We learned how to create a fake author Twitter account; about the worst publisher of all time; how advertising agencies get their names; and some weird baby name laws. We got a foreign language lesson with these emotions for which there are no English words, and these 10 non-English faux pas. We also found out how to talk like Gollum.

We loved these definitions of love, this interview with Grammar Hulk, and these Batman words. We drooled over this diner’s dictionary and are currently obsessed with this list of 100 best lists of all time.

That’s it for this week!

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Xin Mei]