Author Archives: Angela Tung

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This Week’s Language Blog Roundup

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.

In The New York Times, Philip Corbett noted words The Times’ writers love too much; Constance Hale remembered loving the sound of a sentence; and Erin McKean wrote about “madeupical” words. The New Yorker invited readers to make up their own words, while at The New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith expounded on the essentialness of a local library and bookshop.

In American politics, a third spelling error arose in Mitt Romney’s campaign (if you’re keeping count, that’s Amercia, sneak-peak, and offical). Ben Zimmer discussed the new, overly friendly political speech and the controversy over the definition of marriage. Geoff Pullum and the Virtual Linguist both wrote about the death of the Queen’s English Society. Meanwhile, the language wars continued with a post from Arrant Pedantry on what descriptivism is and isn’t and from Mark “Descriptive Destroyer” Liberman.

At the Language Log, Mark discussed pronounceable snack ingredients, the case of “vinyls,” and e-publishing string replacement gone wrong. Ben Zimmer also posted on unfortunate search and replace results, namely Nookd for kindled and deDeputys for devices. Barbara Partee considered the negative event, and Victor Mair had some cheese bacon mushroom face.

At Lingua Franca, Allan Metcalf considered not; Geoff Pullum explored the however myth; and Ben Yagoda rounded up some comma comments, broke down the anatomy of a catchphrase, and examined the phrase, yeah, no. At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Orin Hargraves got granular, Robert Lane Greene talked go, and Stan Carey considered commas and at Sentence First taught us how to stop confusing pore and pour. Meanwhile, Motivated Grammar compared “than I” and than me” and the Grammar Monkeys told us about style and grammar, and why lots of things aren’t “wrong.”

In the week in words, Erin McKean spotted desquamation, a condition in which “all your skin falls off”; chinoise, a type of sieve for cooking; gaokao, China’s “grueling college entrance exam”; and miche, a type of bread. Fritinancy noted blazerati, “officials of amateur sports associations who are identified by their colored blazers”; and prochronism, “a chronological error in which an event or usage is dated earlier than its actual occurrence.”

Fritinancy also described how General Tso’s chicken got its name, while we learned that in Paris “there is currently no greater praise for cuisine than ‘très Brooklyn,’ a term that signifies a particularly cool combination of informality, creativity and quality.”

Sesquiotica was entertained by gecko, get-go, and get; got into some frenzy words; and corroborated on a corroboree. Lynneguist compared the American and British ways of introducing oneself. The Virtual Linguist traced the origins of jubilee and nemesia and nemesis, and rounded up some bun phrases. The Dialect Blog dropped some Hs, measured –ness, and discussed the profane conversion of dick.

We loved these Star Wars alphabet prints and these of London in the 1850s, and were terrified by these French children’s books. And we still can’t get enough of anachronisms in Mad Men and Downton Abbey.

That’s it for this week! Yeah, no, really.

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Word Soup: James Joyce

This Saturday, June 16 is Bloomsday, an annual celebration of Irish writer James Joyce and his novel, Ulysses.

Want to join the festivities? Follow in Leopold Bloom’s footsteps and take a walking tour of Dublin. Learn about the Irish capital through an app that “maps the locations of James Joyce’s modernist novel.” Attend a readathon with “more than one hundred Irish writers [reading] consecutively over 28 hours,” or listen to BBC Radio 4’s “five-and-a-half-hour adaptation of the novel.” Read Ulysses in its entirety (finally) at the Irish National Library. Or just enjoy this roundup of ten of our favorite Ulyssesean and Joycean words.

honorificabilitudinitatibus

“Like John o’Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

Honorificabilitudinitatibus means “the state of being able to achieve honors.” According to World Wide Words, Joyce borrowed it from Shakespeare, “who in turn borrowed it from Latin”:

I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
for thou art not so long by the head as
honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
swallowed than a flap-dragon.

Love’s Labor Lost

But Shakespeare didn’t coin the word. Its first appearance, “in the form honōrificābilitūdo” was “in a charter of 1187 and as honōrificābilitūdinitās in a work by the Italian Albertinus Mussatus about 1300.” The word was also used “by Dante and Rabelais and turns up in an anonymous Scots work of 1548, The Complaynt of Scotland.”

inwit

“Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit. Conscience. Yet here’s a spot.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

Inwit, meaning “inward knowledge; understanding; conscience,” was coined in the 13th century, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, and comes from in plus wit. World Wide Words goes on to say that the word “had gone out of the language around the middle of the fifteenth century” and “would have remained a historical curiosity had not Joyce and a few other writers of his time found something in it that was worth the risk of puzzling his readers.”

The phrase agenbite of inwit echoes Ayenbite of Inwyt, a Middle English “confessional prose work.” Ayenbite or agenbite is “literally ‘again-bite’, a literal translation of the Latin word meaning ‘remorse’,” says World Wide Words.

monomyth

“At the carryfour with awlus plawshus, their happy-ass cloudious! And then and too the trivials! And their bivouac! And his monomyth! Ah ho! Say no more about it! I’m sorry! I saw. I’m sorry! I’m sorry to say I saw!”

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Monomyth, a word that Joyce coined, is “a cyclical journey or quest undertaken by a mythical hero,” and today is most famously applied to Joseph Campbell’s concept in his writings about heroes, stories, and myth.

Mr. Right

“Be sure now and write to me. And I’ll write to you. Now won’t you? Molly and Josie Powell. Till Mr Right comes along, then meet once in a blue moon.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

Mr. Right refers to “a perfect, ideal or suitable mate or husband,” and, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, first appeared in Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. However, we found Mr. Right in this context (not as someone’s name) in what appears to be a song from around 1826:

Mr. Right! Mr. Right!
Oh, sweet Mr. Right!
The girls find they’re wrong when they find Mr. Right
There’s some love the young, and the young love the old,
There’s some love for love, and some love for gold.
Many Pretty young girls get hold of a fright,
And all their excuse is – I’ve found Mr. Right.

If anyone has any additional information on the origin of Mr. Right, let us know!

poppysmic

“Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

Poppysmic refers to the sound “produced by smacking the lips.” The word comes from the Latin poppysma, says World Wide Words. The Romans used the word to refer to “a kind of lip-smacking, clucking noise that signified satisfaction and approval, especially during lovemaking,” and that “in French, it referred to the tongue-clicking tsk-tsk sound that riders use to encourage their mounts.”

pud

“For your own good, you understand, for the man who lifts his pud to a woman is saving the way for kindness.”

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

A pud is a “a paw; fist; hand,” but is also apparently meant as slang for penis, says the Online Etymology Dictionary. Pud is short for pudding, which originally referred to “minced meat, or blood, properly seasoned, stuffed into an intestine, and cooked by boiling,” also known as sausage. Pudding gained the slang sense of penis in 1719.

quark

“— Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.”

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Quark is a nonsense word that Joyce coined in his novel, Finnegans Wake. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, applied quark to “any of a group of six elementary particles having electric charges of a magnitude one-third or two-thirds that of the electron, regarded as constituents of all hadrons.”

schlep

“Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun’s flaming sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

While Joyce didn’t coin the word schlep, which comes from Yiddish shlepn, “to drag, pull,” its first known appearance in English seems to have been in Ulysses.

Ulysses

“In ‘Ulysses,’ Joyce follows Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman, around Dublin through the course of one day in 1904 – June 16, a date that is now annually celebrated by Joyce scholars and admirers as ‘Bloomsday.’”

Herbert Mitgang, “Joyce Typescript Moves to Texas,” The New York Times, June 16, 1990

Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus, in Greek mythology, “the king of Ithaca, a leader of the Greeks in the Trojan War, who reached home after ten years of wandering.” The Odyssey and Odysseus gave us odyssey, “an extended adventurous voyage or trip”, or “an intellectual or spiritual quest.”

Ulysses contract

“The new paper takes precommitment strategies much further, advocating, for example, a ‘Ulysses contract’ — or a ‘commitment memorandum’ that spells out what to do when the markets move 25 percent up or down.”

Jeff Sommer, “The Benefits of Telling the Ugly Truth,” The New York Times, April 30, 2011

A Ulysses contract, says The Wall Street Journal, is a promise

not to act hastily in volatile markets. Just as Ulysses had his crew tie him down so he could resist the Sirens’ deadly song, Prof. Benartzi…would have investors promise not to overreact to sharp market moves in either direction.

Erin McKean says that Ulysses’s wife, Penelope, “also lends her name to a number of objects, including Penelope canvas (used for needlework), and to the verb penelopize, ‘to pull work apart to do it over again, in order to gain time.’”

Still jonesing for more Ulysses words? Check out this list and this one, and for more nonsense words like quark, check out this one.

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WotD Perfect Tweet Challenge Roundup

Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog.

Here are our favorites from last week:

Thanks to everyone for playing! Remember, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.

Finally, we wanted to announce that starting this month we’ll be giving away Wordnik T-shirts to two randomly chosen players once a month. For June, the winners will be announced on the last Monday, June 25.

In the meantime, we wanted to give shirts to amicatonic and peacefulldawn as thanks for giving us the idea in the first place! So if you ladies wouldn’t mind emailing us your address and T-shirt size, that would be great.

Looking forward to more of everyone’s word of the day perfect tweets!

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Word Soup: Mad Men

From ricmeyers.com

Say it isn’t so! The season finale of Mad Men is right around the corner. While some have been on anachronism watch, we’ve been keeping our ears open for words that we like. From slang to advertising lingo to words of the time, we’ve gathered our favorites here, even managing to notice one out-of-place term (see sicko). Ben Zimmer would be so proud.

UPDATE: Sicko may not be an anachronism after all. Thanks to Ben Zimmer for the detective work!

bitchin’

Peggy [holding up Michael’s work]: “Have I lost my sense of smell or is this good?”

Stan [laughs]: “That’s bitchin’.”

“Tea Leaves,” April 1, 2012

Bitchin’ is slang for “excellent; first-rate,” and originated as “teen/surfer slang” in the 1950s. The word apparently plays on the verb sense of bitch, to complain, “in some inverted sense.”

calice

Megan [upon realizing Don’s surprise party has been spoiled]: “Calice.”

“A Little Kiss,” March 25, 2012

Calice is a Québécois French swear word which, according to Slate, “has its origins in Roman Catholic ritual—it’s the communion chalice.” Other French-Canadian swear words, says Slate, include “Calvaire! (Calvary), Ciboire! (ciborium—the container in which communion wafers are stored), Ostie! (communion wafer), or Tabarnak!” Tabarnak is the Québécois equivalent of fuck and comes from tabernacle.

consumerism

Megan [to Don]: “I didn’t think [the play] was such a strong stand against advertising as much as the emptiness of consumerism.”

“Christmas Waltz,” May 20, 2012

The word consumerism, which was coined in 1944, originally meant “the movement seeking to protect and inform consumers by requiring such practices as honest packaging and advertising, product guarantees, and improved safety standards.” Around 1960, it came to refer to “the theory that a progressively greater consumption of goods is economically beneficial,” and by extension an “attachment to materialistic values or possessions.” Here Megan is referring to this last meaning of consumerism.

fresh

Betty [to Don]: “I wanted to know if you’d have any problem with me strangling Sally. I’m not joking. She’s fresh. And I prefer to not have her sourpuss ruining our trip.”

“Commissions and Fees,” June 3, 2012

Fresh in this context means “verdant and conceited; presuming through ignorance and conceit; forward; officious.” This sense originated in 1848 as U.S. slang, probably from the German frech, “insolent, cheeky,” which ultimately comes from the Old English frec, “greedy, bold.”

go ape

Hanson/Handsome: “Billy Josephs and I were supposed to join up, but my dad went ape.”

“Signal 30,” April 15, 2012

To go ape means “to become wildly excited or enthusiastic,” and is attested from 1955. “I Go Ape” is a 1959 hit song from Neil Sedaka. To join up means “to enlist or enroll,” and originated around 1916.

grabass

Don: “Now knock off the grabass and give me some lines.”

“The Other Woman,” May 27, 2012

Grabass means “horseplay; play fighting, wrestling.” We couldn’t find an exact date of origin but the term has been in use at least since the mid-1940s, perhaps beginning as military slang. Also playing grabass.

half-assed

Peggy [to Don]: “You didn’t want to rehearse. You ran through it one time half-assed.”

“Lady Lazarus,” May 6, 2012

Half-assed is slang for “not well planned or executed” or “incompetent.” The word originated around 1932 and may be “a humorous mispronunciation of haphazard.”

Hare Krishna

Mother Lakshmi: “Hare Krishna, Harry.”

“Christmas Waltz,” May 20, 212

Hare Krishna refers to “a chant to the Hindu god Krishna”; a “member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), founded in the United States in 1966”; and “the society itself.” Hare translates from the Hindi as “O God!”

hep

Pete: “[The New York Times is] doing some literary profile on hip agencies.”

Bert: “Hep.”

“Dark Shadows,” May 13, 2012

Hep, first recorded in 1908, is slang for “aware, up-to-date.” However, with the rise of hip in the 1950s, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, “the use of hep ironically became a clue that the speaker was unaware and not up-to-date.” The speaker here is Bertram Cooper, and his use of hep is made even more ironic as he corrects Pete on his “hipper” language.

line

Don: “What’s the line?”

Peggy: “Doesn’t need one.”

“Dark Shadows,” May 13, 2012

Line is an advertising term that may be short for tagline or strapline.

mad money

Don: “Car fare, in case it doesn’t work out.”

Joan: “Mad money? Thank you.”

“Christmas Waltz,” May 20, 212

Mad money is “a sum of money, often relatively small in amount, kept in reserve to use for impulsive, frivolous purposes.” The term is attested from 1922, playing on the mad meaning of “wildly or recklessly frolicsome.” In this scene, the mad money is a from Don Draper, a “mad man,” with mad referring to Madison Avenue, slang for “the American advertising industry,” but also recklessness, derangement, or rage.

RFP

Roger [to Lane]: “A little bird told me you had an RFP from Jaguar.”

“Signal 30,” April 15, 2012

RFP stands for request for proposal, which “is issued at an early stage in a procurement process, where an invitation is presented for suppliers, often through a bidding process, to submit a proposal on a specific commodity or service.” Part of that proposal may be an SOW, or statement of work.

shakedown

Harry [to Mother Lakshmi]: “If this is some kind of shakedown, let me stop you right there. I know you’re trying to recruit me.”

“Christmas Waltz,” May 20, 212

Shakedown is slang for “extortion of money, as by blackmail,” and “a thorough search of a place or person.” When the word came about around 1730, it originally meant “a temporary bed made by shaking down or spreading hay, rushes, or the like, or also quilts or a mattress, with coverings, on the floor, on a table, etc.” The “extortion” meaning is attested from 1872, and “thorough search” from 1914, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, “both probably from the notion of measuring corn.”

sicko

Michael [to Peggy, Megan, and Stan gawking over gory pictures]: “You know what? You’re sickos.”

“Mystery Date,” April 8, 2012

A sicko is “a deranged, psychotic, or morbidly obsessed person.” The word plays off sick in the way weirdo plays off weird. But while weirdo originated in 1955, sicko didn’t come about until 1977, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. Therefore, sicko is a likely anachronism in this episode, which takes place in 1966. However, Ben Zimmer pointed out a Los Angeles Free Press movie advertisement dated April 16, 1965:

LARRY MOYER’S “THE MOVING FINGER”
Winner “Best Director” Award
San Francisco Film Festival
SEE…Freakos…wierdies (sic)…sickos…corrupt fuzz…faggots…wasted youth…smut…

The episode takes place in 1966 so sicko may not be an anachronism after all. Thanks, Ben!

square

Megan [to Don]: “You’re so square, you’ve got corners.”

“Tea Leaves,” April 1, 2012

Square is slang for “a person who is regarded as dull, rigidly conventional, and out of touch with current trends.” The word originated around 1300, says Online Etymology Dictionary, and came to mean “honest, fair,” in the 1560s; “straight, direct” around 1804; and “old-fashioned” in 1944 as “U.S. jazz slang, said to be from shape of a conductor’s hand gestures in a regular four-beat rhythm.” Squaresville originated around 1956.

A 1771 word, square-toes, has a similar meaning to square: “a precise, formal, old-fashioned personage,” from “a style of shoes then fallen from fashion.”

turn on

Sandy: “I say we postpone this conversation until after we turn on.”

“Far Away Places,” April 22, 2012

To turn on means to “get high, stoned, or drugged,” and seems to come from the phrase popularized by American psychologist Timothy Leary, turn on, tune in, drop out. Leary first used the phrase at a press conference in New York City on September 19, 1966, urging “people to embrace cultural changes through the use of psychedelics and by detaching themselves from the existing conventions and hierarchies in society.”

U-2

Pete: “I know. Because he hovers over your desk like a damned U-2. You think he’s looking at your breasts? He’s looking at my calendar!”

“A Little Kiss,” March 25, 2012

A U-2 is “a single-engine, very high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft operated by the United States Air Force (USAF) and previously flown by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).” It was nicknamed the Dragon Lady and first developed in the mid-1950s.

What are some of your favorite words from the series?

[Photo: Mad Men Season 5, from ricmeyers.com]

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WotD Perfect Tweet Challenge Roundup

Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog.

Here are our favorites from last week:

Thanks to everyone for playing! Remember, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.

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2012 National Spelling Bee Recap

Earlier this week, 278 spellers from around the world gathered together to compete in the 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee. Yesterday 14-year old Snigdha Nandipati of San Diego, California won with guetapens, which means “an ambush; an attack.”

We here at Wordnik had great fun yesterday live-tweeting the seminfinal and championship rounds. In between biting our nails for the young spellers, we tweeted defintions, etymologies, example sentences, and other fun facts about these difficult words. First up, the semifinal round:

Next, the final round:

Curious about all the words from the final round? We’ve put them in a handy list and have updated the list of all the winning words.

Congratulations once again to Snigdha and all the spellers!

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This Week’s Language Blog Roundup

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.

A language war ensued this month when two New Yorker writers, Joan Acocella and Ryan Bloom, took a stance again descriptivism. Never fear: Ben Zimmer, Nancy Friedman, Christopher Shea, the Dialect Blog, and Johnson, the Economist’s language blog, all weighed in on descriptivism’s side.

In politics, we learned that Mitt Romney wants a better “Amercia” (improved, apparently, by a name change) and were delighted by the subsequent snarky tumblr. Ben Zimmer noted the backronym of the week, the Ex-PATRIOT Act, while at Language Log, Mark Liberman discussed the speech levels in politics.

Also at Language Log, Liberman had a few things to say about the word hopefully, including the history of the word and hopefu(ly) grammar, while Geoff Nunberg gave his two cents as well. Victor Mair gave us some mistranslation “tips from the British royal breast” and analyzed this poetic piece of Chinglish, and Julie Sedivy explored some shocking shades of gray lingo.

The Macmillan Dictionary blog rounded up their bloggers’ favorite words that aren’t found in English. At Lingua Franca, Allan Metcalf discussed the importance of names and lexicography as the oldest profession, and Ben Yagoda took us to an article-less prom. At The New York Times, Yagoda identified the most comma mistakes, while at The Boston Globe, Zimmer opined on the golden age of proverbs.

Stan Carey explained the interstellar etymology of mazel tov, the word fell, and reflected on the reflexive, themself. Fritnancy’s words of the week were ganja-preneur, an entrepreneur dealing in ganja, or marjuana, and rampture, “the traffic congestion that’s expected to ensue after the closing of Wilshire Boulevard on- and offramps to (the) northbound I-405 on Los Angeles’s Westside.”

Erin McKean spotted over-sharenting, “the tendency for parents to share a lot of information and photos of their kids online”; social jet lag, “discrepancy between your natural body clock and your social clock”; Geuro, a “Greek parallel currency to the euro”; and green shoe, a reserve used by underwriters “in successful IPOs. . .to meet soaring demand.” Meanwhile, Word Spy caught unsourcing, “transferring company functions from paid employees to unpaid volunteers, particularly customers on social networks.”

The Dialect Blog explored place names, Sean Connery’s apical /s/, and the Brooklyn accent. Sesquiotica examined the word cicisbeo, “the recognized gallant of a married lady,” and delicious risotto. The Virtual Linguist served up the origin of the word tea, while Oz Words gave us the history of vegemite. We learned of a new fruit, the papple, which “looks and tastes like an apple but has the skin and texture of a pear,” and that America’s favorite condiment, ketchup, actually came from a Chinese word.

Finally, we had a huge laugh over these names that Donald Trump trademarked. Our favorite? Donald J. Trump, the Fragrance.

That’s it for this week!