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! You’ll have another chance this week to perfect your word of the day perfect tweets. To get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.
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.
Johnson took a look at the faux-pology of the week, Rush Limbaugh’s “I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices,” while Ben Zimmer mused on the meh generation, and some meh occurrences over the years. At Language Log, Mark Liberman explored the phrase, no less X, and Geoff Pullum told us the difference between passive and passive-aggressive, and about something Sofa King stupid.
At Lingua Franca, Allan Metcalf discussed the birth of the teenager, and Lucy Ferriss offered some quaint train language and decoding of train toots. At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Stan Carey culled a hotchpotch of reduplication, and on his own blog, posted about the normality of conversation in Twitter. Jan Freeman unraveled a mind-buggering mystery; Arnold Zwicky was on the garmmra (not grammar) watch; Arrant Pedantry rolled the dice; and Grammarphobia flushed out some bathroom language.
For Leap Day, Fritinancy’s word of the week was intercalary, “inserted into the calendar to make the calendar year correspond to the solar year,” while Word Spy spotted leapling, “a person born on February 29.” Leap Day also marked Wordnik’s first birthday. Here’s our cake!
Fritinancy also discussed cicerone, “an expert beer server, the equivalent of a wine sommelier,” and the origin of dibs. Word Spy noticed Marchuary, “a January or February with March-like weather,” and 100-foot diet, “a diet that consists mostly or exclusively of food grown in one’s garden.”
In the week in words, Erin McKean caught Fasching, a “colorful folk festival in Germany”; noodlers, “hand fisherman”; the czech, a type of bad liquor; and kangas, “rectangles of cloth often printed with proverbs, slogans or riddles.” Erin also discussed fleeting fashions and long-lived words (hopefully mantyhose will be fleeting), and Peter Elbow’s new book, Vernacular Eloquence.
The Dialect Blog expounded on the American off-glide and dictionaries and pronunciation. The Virtual Linguist considered the verb, to welch; the origin of daffodil; and the phrase, tickety-boo, “in good or satisfactory order.” Sesquiotica examined quirt; bannock, “a griddle-baked soda bread”; and mulligatawny, a kind of soup.
This week we learned about the QWERTY effect, which gradually attaches “more positive meanings to words with more letters located on the right side of the layout” of a keyboard; sound effects in comic books (KRONCH!); and why Robert Sherman wrote the song, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
We cracked up over this joke about the Oxford English Dictionary and amazeballs, and the hot new meme, legbombing. We loved this list of eight kinds of drunkenness; Mark Twain’s enormous list of all the foods he missed while in Europe (“Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way”); J. R. R. Tolkien’s response to a German publisher asking for proof of his Aryan descent; and George Orwell’s six rules for writers (number five: “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent”). However, as Cracked reminded us, there are some foreign words for which there is no English equivalent (grief bacon, anyone?).
Finally, we were saddened by the passing of Jan Berenstein, the co-creator of the Berenstein Bears.
That’s it for this week. It’s been amazeballs.
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! You’ll have another chance this week to perfect your word of the day perfect tweets. To get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.
While the television show The Soup brings you “the strange, obscure and totally unbelievable moments in pop culture, celebrity news and reality TV,” Word Soup brings you those strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words from talk shows, sitcoms, dramas, and just about anything else on TV.
Captain Obvious
Nolan: “Forgive me for being Captain Obvious, but you do realize you’re putting your own sister into the crosshairs again.”
“Perception,” Revenge, February 8, 2012
Captain Obvious refers to a speaker who is being obvious. While the phrase is commonly used on the internet, it seems to predate it. Variations include master of the obvious and obvious troll is obvious.
Eisbiber
Nick: “Two Eisbiber kids egged my house last night.”
“Tarantella,” Grimm, February 10, 2012
The Eisbiber is a beaver-like creature that can take on human form. The word is German in origin and translates as “ice (eis) beaver (biber).”
glitter bomb
Jon Stewart: “The glitter bomb has emerged as a weapon of choice for gay rights activists looking for a form of protest that’s more clever than a pie in the face but less clever than something actually clever.”
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, February 16, 2012
Glitter bombing is “an act of protest in the United States in which activists throw glitter on people at public events.” The act was first launched, according to NPR, in May 2011 when “Newt Gingrich and his wife were signing books at an event sponsored by a group that opposes same-sex marriage,” and a protester “hit Gingrich with glitter” as he yelled, “”Feel the rainbow, Newt! Stop the hate! Stop anti-gay politics! It’s dividing our country and it’s not fixing our economy.”
ground
Suren: “Mother, please don’t ground me!”
“Addicted to Love,” Being Human, February 13, 2012
Ground in this context means to punish a vampire by burying her alive (well, “alive”), presumably forever, taking the ground meaning of “to restrict (someone) especially to a certain place as a punishment” literally into the ground.
Keyser Söze
Steve: “Squirt Cinnabon?”
Roger: “Yeah, I Keyser Sözed you off the top of that file cabinet.” [cut to file cabinet with bottle of Squirt soda and box of Cinnabon pastries]
Keyser Söze refers to the mysterious and menacing character in the film The Usual Suspects. At the end (SPOILER ALERT) it’s revealed that the seemingly timid police informant has made up his entire statement based on what he’s seen on a bulletin board, and that he himself is the powerful Keyser Söze. Thus, to Keyser Söze someone is to create a name or story based on objects within view.
le retour d’age
Charlotte: “Her age would be between 28 and 32, depending on when she went through le retour d’age.”
“Tarantella,” Grimm, February 10, 2012
Le retour d’age translates from the French as “change of life.” Change of life usually refers to menopause. Here it seems to refer to a time when the creature (see spinnetod) reaches a stage when she begins to age rapidly and must feed on other creatures to retain her youthful appearance.
gladiator Löwen
Eddie: “Oh, you’re talking about gladiator Lowen. They’re fierce. They’re fueled by generations of bitterness. Just imagine, one day you’re king of your own jungle, minding your own business. Then suddenly you’re in a net being dragged off to Rome and thrown in a gladiator pit.”
“Last Grimm Standing,” Grimm, February 24, 2012
The Löwen are lion-like creatures that can take on human form. The word Löwen translates from the German as “lion.” Gladiator Löwen “were hunted and used as fighters in the gladiatorial arena by the Romans,” and now “catch other Wesen and force them to fight in secret cage death matches.” The word gladiator comes from the Latin gladius, “sword.”
meet cute
Mary-Louise: “I think we need a good meet cute. A sweet story of the cute way we met.”
“Jimmy’s Fake Girlfriend,” Raising Hope, February 14, 2012
A meet cute is “a staple of romantic comedies,” and may have originated in the late 1930s. The earliest citation we could find was from 1945.
morning star
Nick: “Part of a morning star.”
Hank: “A medieval weapon?”
“Last Grimm Standing,” Grimm, February 24, 2012
A morning star is “a weapon consisting of a ball of metal, usually set with spikes, either mounted upon a long handle or staff, usually of wood and used with both hands, or slung to the staff by a thong or chain.” The weapon is named presumably for its resemblance to another morning star, “the planet Venus as seen in the eastern sky around dawn.”
normalling
Jenna and Paul: “It’s a whole new fetish called normalling!”
“The Tuxedo Begins,” 30 Rock, February 16, 2012
Normalling means to behave like “normal” couple rather than one that is depraved. To Jenna and Paul, the epitome of depravity, behaving normally is like a fetish, “an abnormally obsessive preoccupation or attachment; a fixation.”
oedipussy
Stewie: “Looks like he’s getting a little oedipussy.”
Brian: “Can we say that?”
Stewie: “We just did.”
“Tom Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” Family Guy, February 20, 2012
Oedipussy is a blend of Oedipal, “of or relating to the Oedipus complex,” a complex of males “to possess the mother sexually and to exclude the father,” and pussy, slang for female genitalia. In this situation, Chris is dating a girl who resembles his mother. The word Oedipussy may also be a play on Octopussy, a James Bond film.
perfektenschlage
Dwight: “The Schrutes have a word for when everything in a man’s life comes together perfectly. Perfektenschlage. Right now I’m in it. . . .I am so deep inside of perfektenschlage. And just to be clear, there is a second definition – ‘perfect pork anus’ – which I don’t mean.”
“Special Project,” The Office, February 9, 2012
Perfektenschlag translates from the German as “perfect (perfekt) bang or blow (schlage).” It’s most likely a nonsense word.
sexual walkabout
Jenna and Paul: “Sexual walkabout. We spend the next three months alone doing every depraved thing we can think of with as many people as we can.”
“The Tuxedo Begins,” 30 Rock, February 16, 2012
Walkabout is an Australian term meaning “a temporary return to traditional Aboriginal life, taken especially between periods of work or residence in white society and usually involving a period of travel through the bush.” A walkabout is also a walking trip.
spinnetod
Eddie: “I’d say that looks like a spinnetod, a death spider. . . .They’re like the black widows of their world.”
“Tarantella,” Grimm, February 10, 2012
Spinnetod translates from the German as “spider (spinne) death (tod).” The word spider comes from the Proto-Germanic spenwanan, “to spin.”
STOCK Act
Jon Stewart: “Congress should obey the same laws as everyone else. I believe that was in the No Shit Sherlock Act of 2000 and always. That’s why last Thursday Congress passed something called the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK Act. It was designed to prevent congresspeople or their staff from benefiting financially from information they learn in the course of being in Congress.”
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, February 15, 2012
The STOCK Act plays on the word stock, “the capital raised by a company through the issue of shares.”
strafe
Virginia [as Burt flies a remote helicopter]: “Burt, stop strafing Mawmaw!”
“Jimmy’s Fake Girlfriend,” Raising Hope, February 14, 2012
To strafe means “to attack (ground troops, for example) with a machine gun or cannon from a low-flying aircraft.” The word strafe comes from the German saying, Gott strafe England, “May God punish England,” a slogan from World War I.
twirly
Jess: “We need to go out because I’m feeling pretty twirly.”
Schmidt: “Twirly? Is that like horny?”
Jess: “I got the dirty twirls, Schmidty!”
“Valentine’s Day,” New Girl, February 14, 2012
The original meaning of twirly is coiled or curly, or perhaps given to twirls or spins. While the origin of twirl is unknown, it may be a blend of twist and whirl. Twisty is 1970s slang for “attractively feminine.” Twirly may also be a play on squirrelly, “eccentric.”
upper decker
Detective: “You might want to be sure he didn’t leave you an upper decker.”
“Lo Scandalo,” Archer, February 16, 2012
An upper decker is “the act of defecating in the upper tank of the toilet.”
Wesen
Eddie: “I think some Wesen found out you’re a Grimm and they’re curious.”
Nick: “What’s a Wesen?”
Eddie: “You know. Blutbaden, Fuchsbau, Wildschwein, those of us the Grimms have been trying to eradicate for centuries.”
“Tarantella,” Grimm, February 10, 2012
Wesen translates from the German as entity or being.
whiz palace
Ben: “Excuse me, I need to use the bathroom.”
Dave: “You mean the whiz palace. Leslie calls it that sometimes.”
“Dave Returns,” Parks and Recreation, February 16, 2012
Synonyms and slang for bathroom are plentiful and varied.
yips
Jenna: “Fine, it’s mental! I have the yips!”
“Hey Baby, What’s Wrong?” 30 Rock, February 9, 2012
The yips refer to “nervousness or tension that causes an athlete to fail to perform effectively, especially in missing short putts in golf.” While the yips were originally thought to be completely psychological, the Mayo Clinic says “it now appears that some people have yips that are caused by a focal dystonia, which is a neurological dysfunction affecting specific muscles.”
The origin of the word yip is unknown. It may be imitative of jumpiness or anxiety, and perhaps plays on hiccup. Some sources cite the first known use as 1962, however, we found a citation from 1941, and several (behind paywalls) from the late 1930s. These sources seem to cite Tommy Armour, a Scottish-American professional golfer, as the coiner of the term.
Yoko
Roger: “You brought him in, you get him out, before [Stan] takes a big Yoko all over this place.”
“Wheels & the Legman and the Case of Grandpa’s Key,” American Dad, February 12, 2012
Yoko here refers to Yoko Ono, who has been blamed for breaking up the Beatles. Roger is implying that Stan threatens to break up his partnership with Steve.
zentai
Malory: “A zentai covers the head and face. A catsuit just stops here [points gun at base of neck].”
“Lo Scandalo,” Archer, February 16, 2012
A zentai is “a term for skin-tight garments that cover the entire body,” including the face and head. Zentai is a contraction of the Japanese zenshin taitsu, “full-body tights.”
That’s it for this week! Remember, if you see any Word Soup-worthy words, let us know on Twitter with the hashtag #wordsoup. Your word and Twitter handle might appear right here!
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! You’ll have another chance this week to perfect your word of the day perfect tweets. To get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.
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 don’t know about you, but we’ve gone into Downton Abbey-withdrawal since Sunday’s season finale. Luckily, to tide us over till next season, we have pieces from Ben Zimmer and Ben Schmidt on Downton Abbey anachronisms (which got a mention on SNL’s Weekend Update, congrats!), and our own Word Soup post on the words and phrases the show (mostly) got right.
In sports, we were driven to the brink of Linsanity – near-insane enthusiasm over Taiwanese-American basketball player, Jeremy Lin – an early contender, says American Dialect Society, for the 2012 word of the year. The Linsanity continued as Ben Zimmer discussed the linguistics of Linsanity; Victor Mair bemoaned the questionable Mandarin equivalent of the popular portmanteau; and Lin himself filed an application for the Linsanity trademark. Meanwhile, ESPN fired the writer who went with a poorly chosen headline regarding Lin. Pro-tip: don’t use “chink in the armor” in reference to someone of Asian descent. More tips if you need them.
In politics, Mr. Zimmer delved into the meh-ness and fail-ness of a recent GOP debate, while Johnson looked at what’s wrong with Democrat Party. At Language Log, Mark Liberman looked at Rick Santorum’s radical mis-speaking about President Obama; a Republican slogan that has Communist roots; and a grammar-based conspiracy. Geoffrey Pullum parsed sing, sang, and sung, and noted a novel illness, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, better known as a temper tantrum.
At Visual Thesaurus, Mark Peters explored the diversity of American English in his review of Richard Bailey’s Speaking American. At Macmillan Dictionary Blog, Michael Rundell told us more about how words get into the dictionary (with a nod to Wordnik, thanks!). John McIntyre suggested that more punctuation doesn’t improve your writing, and peeved about grammar peeves, while Stan Carey wondered where the grammar was in so-called “common grammar mistakes.”
At Lingua Franca, Ben Yagoda confessed that between you and I isn’t necessarily a grammar mistake, and Lucy Ferriss pondered illegitimacy. Meanwhile, the Angry Sub-Editor groused about crappy portmanteaus (or crapmanteaux), and Kory Stamper begged us to take her life, please. Sesquiotica told us about grackle; some plump words; the etymology of carnival; and all the hubbub (bub). The OUP Blog gave us the origin of the word dude, while the Virtual Linguist discussed the language of childbirth.
Fritinancy got her X on, and picked for words of the week, uppertendom, “the upper classes; the richest people in a city”; and nomophobia, “fear of being without a cellphone.” Erin McKean’s words of the week included echo boomers, “so-called because their parents were baby boomers”; devore, “a silk/rayon velvet on which a design is ‘printed’ using a heat-activated chemical”; and park and bark, “simply standing on stage and belting out the vocal line.”
Word Spy spotted altmetrics, “tools used to assess the impact of scholarly articles based on alternative online measures such as bookmarks, links, blog posts, and tweets”; peak people, “a time when the world’s population reaches a maximum”; engaged workaholic, “a person who works compulsively because he or she loves their job”; billion laughs, “an online attack that attempts to disable a website by sending a specially formatted sequence of characters such as ‘lol’ and ‘ha’.” Meanwhile, a group of German language experts voted shitstorm as the best Anglicism of 2011.
Superlinguo discussed flattery, respect, and kin terminology in Nepali and English. Dialect Blog examined inner city dialects, the c-word, hate speech, and ‘The Jersey Shore’ and Jersey accents (not necessarily the same thing). We learned that goats change their accents depending on social surroundings, and that inner speech during silent reading reflects the reader’s regional accent. Meanwhile, pupils at a school in Sheffield, England have been banned from using slang.
In dictionary news, Joan Houston Hall and Erin McKean spoke with KQED about The Dictionary of American Regional English, which was also profiled in the Wall Street Journal. In library news, we loved The Little Free Library, as well as these pop-up libraries a New Yorker created out of old pay phones, perhaps inspired by the “adopt a phone kiosk” library program in Somerset, England a few years ago. Finally, we loved this illustrated lesson in linguistics, and this list of titles in search of a script from Stanley Kubrick.
That’s it for this week!
With the Academy Awards just a few days away, we’ve had movies and movie words on the mind. What better way to celebrate than with this special Word Soup dedicated to film slang and lingo?
Abby Singer
“‘Abby Singer’ is director slang for the ‘next to the last shot,’ and takes its name from an assistant director, according to DGA Magazine.”
Joyce Wadler, “Where’s John Ford When You Need Him?” The New York Times, February 2, 2005
The Abby Singer was named for Abner E. “Abby” Singer, a production manager and assistant director. When asked how many shots were left at the end of the day, Singer would always answer, “This, and one more.”
Alan Smithee
“’Alan Smithee‘ is a phony name that turns up whenever a director is so embarrassed by what’s been done to his movie that he takes his name off it.”
John Hartl, “Credit Alan Smithee for ‘Hellraiser’ Fiasco,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 12, 1996
Alan Smithee – which some say is an anagram for “the alias men” – was first used for the 1969 film Death of a Gunfighter.
biopic
“A spot for Listerine, sold by Johnson & Johnson, urged viewers to ‘fight biofilm.’ That may have generated a lot of head-scratching in Hollywood, where a movie about a real person is called a ‘biopic.’”
Stuart Elliott, “Commercials at the Oscars Play It Safe and Play It Again,” The New York Times, February 28, 2011
A biopic, a blend of biography and picture, is a “a film or television biography, often with fictionalized episodes.” The word seems to have been coined by writers at Variety magazine.
blaxploitation
“For every heroine in the canon of blaxploitation movies — often filmed with her breasts popping out if her shirt at random intervals for no good reason at all — Pam Grier redeems every shirtless character she ever played in this film about a double-cross gone awry.”
Jim Izrael, “Girls, Guns and Grudges,” NPR: Tell Me More, August 28, 2011
Blaxploitation films are “a genre of American film of the 1970s featuring African-American actors in lead roles and often having antiestablishment plots, frequently criticized for stereotypical characterization and glorification of violence.” Blaxploitation is a blend of black and exploitation.
Bollywood
“The influence of Bollywood suffuses every scene of ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ as well as Hollywood-financed diversions as various as ‘Moulin Rouge’ and ‘You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.’”
Michael Phillips, “Bollywood hybrid fails to fly,” Chicago Tribune, January 16, 2009
Bollywood refers to “the Indian film industry located in Mumbai,” and is a blend Bombay, the former name of Mumbai, and Hollywood. The word Bollywood, which may have originated in the 1970s, was inspired by an earlier blend, Tollywood, “referring to the Bengali film industry based in Tollygunge,” and dating back to 1932.
box office poison
“Nation-wide attention was directed to a statement signed by the Independent Theater Owners’ Association, which came right out in print and characterized Mae West, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Kay Francis and Marlene Diectrich ‘as box office poison.’”
Paul Harrison, “‘Box Office Poison’ Blast Fails to Disturb Movie Moguls Trying to Cut Stars’ Salaries,” The Pittsburgh Press, May 10, 1938
The infamous “box office poison” letter was written by Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theater Owners’ Association. Brandt tempered his statement by saying that the actors’ “dramatic ability is unquestioned but [their] box-office draw is nil.”
chew the scenery
“Combs also has a ball as over-the-top Sergio, not so much chewing the scenery as swallowing it whole.”
Martin Morrow, “Review: Get Him to the Greek,” CBC News, June 4, 2010
To chew the scenery means to overact. According to World Wide Words, the phrase is sometimes meant as a compliment, “suggesting an actor who is energetic and spirited,” and may have originated around 1891, referring first to stage actors, “which is only reasonable. . .since scenery that is close enough to you that you can chew on it, even figuratively, is usually found only on the stage.”
chick flick
“At the very least, the film [The Devil Wears Prada] is laboriously designed as a chick flick in which the male species is clearly subordinated to the female.”
“The Devil Is a Dominatrix, But Streep’s No Real Surprise,” New York Observer, July 17, 2006
A chick flick is “usually about romances, which is popular with females and comparatively unpopular with males.” Chick is slang for a girl or young woman, and first recorded in 1927, while flick is slang for a movie, first attested from 1926 as a back formation of flicker, from the flickering appearance of film at the time.
The term chick flick seems to have originated in the early 1990s, referring to films such as Thelma & Louise and Sleepless in Seattle.
chopsocky
“In the 1970s and 1980s, a blizzard of ‘chopsocky’ TV shows and films, such as the 1982 Jet Li film ‘Shaolin Temple,’ helped to sear the Buddhist legends into the popular imagination, both in China and abroad.”
Geoffrey A. Fowlers and Juliet Ye, “Kung Fu Monks Don’t Get a Kick Out of Fighting,” The Wall Street Journal, December 14, 2007
Chopsocky refers to “a genre of exaggerated martial arts films made primarily in Hong Kong and Taiwan during the 1960s and 1970s.” The term was coined by writer David J. Fox at Variety magazine, and may be a blend of chop suey, “a mixed dish served in Chinese restaurants in New York and elsewhere, as a Chinese dish (but apparently not known in China),” and sock, “to hit hard.”
cowboy shot
“If a ‘D.P’ – that’s director of photography – calls for ‘a cowboy shot,’ he may not necessarily be working on a Western. ‘When cowboys duel on a Western street, where do they go for their guns? Their holsters. So you have to photograph down almost to their knees. That’s why we call it a cowboy shot,’ he says.”
Bob Thomas, “Sound stage slang,” Sun Journal, October 31, 2005
In Europe, a cowboy shot is known as a plán americain or plano americano.
Dogme 95
“Almost a decade ago, Danish director Lars von Trier co-founded the Dogme 95 movement, which produced an ‘indisputable set of rules’ for filmmakers called ‘The Vow of Chastity.’ Among its ten commandments: ‘Shooting must be done on location’; ‘The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa’; ‘The camera must be hand-held’; ‘Special lighting is not acceptable.’”
Christopher Orr, “The Move Review: ‘Dogville,’” The Atlantic, August 24, 2004
Dogme 95 was founded in 1995. Dogme is the Danish word for dogma, “authoritative teaching or doctrine; a system of established principles or tenets.”
fake Shemp
“As well as having Campbell in the lead, this particular effort was written, directed and produced by one Josh Becker who had served as second unit lighting technician and sound man on The Evil Dead and who would go an to collaborate with Raimi and Tapert on a number of occasions. He was a ‘fake shemp’ in Evil Dead II, for example, whilst he has also directed one of the Hercules pilot movies and an episode of Xena.”
Anthony Nield, “The Evil Dead,” The Digital Fix, October 5, 2005
Fake Shemp is “the term for someone who appears in a film under heavy make-up, filmed from the back, or perhaps only showing an arm or a foot.” The term was named for The Three Stooges’ Shemp Howard, who died suddenly. Shemp’s stand-in was used “appearing only from behind or with an object obscuring his face.”
grindhouse
“Grindhouses, which got their name from the bump-and-grind stripteases they featured in their previous life as burlesque houses, were seedy, rundown movie theatres in the 1970s where low-budget exploitation films titillated undiscriminating audiences with sex and violence.”
Warren Clements, “Here’s to the grindhouse – in all its nasty, loopy glory,” The Globe and Mail, October 7, 2010
The advent in the 1980s of home video and cable TV threatened to make grindhouses obsolete.
it girl
“Clara Bow, still showing the flash of beauty she displayed as the ‘It Girl’ of Hollywood’s flaming past, emerged from self-imposed obscurity Monday to bury her husband of 30 years, Lieut. Gov. Rex Bell of Nevada.”
“Clara Bow, ‘It Girl’ of Movies, Beautiful at Husband’s Funeral,” St. Joseph Gazette, July 10, 1962
It girl is “a term for a young woman who possesses the quality ‘It’,” or an attractive quality difficult to describe or express. The term was coined either by Rudyard Kipling around 1904 or British novelist and scripwriter, Elinor Glyn, in her 1927 film It, which starred Clara Bow, who afterward became known as the It Girl.
J-horror
“Arguably the greatest film of the so-called J-horror wave of the late ’90s and early 2000s, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ‘Pulse’ brought the current of apocalyptic dread that runs through Japanese pop culture into the Internet age with a vengeance.”
Andrew O’Hehir, “Japan’s cinema of disaster, from Godzilla to J-horror,” Salon, March 15, 2011
J-horror refers to the genre of Japanese horror films that tend “to focus on psychological horror and tension building.” Although such films gained popularity in the 1990s, the term seems to have originated in the early 2000s. The earliest citation we found was from The New York Times: “[Director Hideo Nakata] is credited as one of the creators of a new, scarier, psychological horror genre known as J-horror, with less splatter and a lot more dread.”
J-horror may be a play on an earlier term, J-pop, coined in the 1990s and referring to popular, non-traditional, Japanese music.
Kubrick stare
“[The Shining] also has what Roger Ebert describes as The Kubrick Stare, with a character – in this case Torrance – staring into camera as he goes mad, with his head down and his eyes looking up.”
James White, “7 Respected Directors Who Did Horror,” Total Film, July 3, 2009
The Kubrick stare refers to director Stanley Kubrick. In Vincent LoBrutto’s 1999 biography of Kubrick, the stare is referred to as the Kubrick crazy stare. Kubrick’s cinematographer Douglas Milsome said that in Full Metal Jacket, Vincent D’Onofrio “flashes what people are now referring to as the ‘Kubrick crazy stare.’ Stanley has a stare like that which is very penetrating and frightens the hell out of you sometimes.”
MacGuffin
“But the microfilm that the bad guys are smuggling out of the country — that’s just what Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, the pretense for the movie, the silly excuse upon which he pinned his real story: a man is mistaken for another man and nearly murdered because of this mistake.”
“The Mother of All Horror Films,” Newsweek, January 6, 2010
World Wide Words says the first recorded usage of MacGuffin was by Alfred Hitchcock in 1939, who described it as “the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story.” However, the origin of the term is obscure.
magical Negro
“Perhaps it’s time for the ‘magical negro’ to retire. Just in recent years, this mythical figure has come to the aid of a number of cinema’s troubled whites: a golfer (The Legend of Bagger Vance), a shallow executive (The Family Man), an uptight attorney (Bringing Down the House), and The One (The Matrix-es).”
Tricia Olszewski, “Film Review: Black Snake Moan,” Washington City Paper, March 2, 2007
The term magical Negro was coined by director Spike Lee in a 2001 speech at Washington State University, in which he expressed disgust with “a recent trend toward characters he called ‘the super-duper, magical Negro,'” characters who “have amazing powers that benefit white people, but not blacks,” similar to “the age-old image of the slave who loves slavery.”
manic pixie dream girl
“Who’s just as cute as a button? Who’s the most deliciously delirious young woman, always up to her false eyelashes in madcap romps? It’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, of course.”
Neda Ulaby, “Manic Pixie Dream Girls: A Cinematic Scourge?” NPR, October 9, 2008
The term manic pixie dream girl was coined by film critic Nathan Rabin in 2007 regarding Kirsten Dunst’s character in the film Elizabethtown, “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
martini shot
“I stuck around after even after I wrapped to see the martini shot of the entire show. I could feel director Jack Bender’s resistance to call ‘print’ on that last take. In fact I’m pretty sure he asked for one more take to delay the inevitable.”
Eric Ditzian, “’Lost’ Star Jorge Garcia Pens Farewell To The Island,” MTV.com, March 21, 2010
A martini shot refers to the last shot of the day. According to Dave Knox, author of Strike the Baby and Kill the Blonde: An Insider’s Guide to Film Slang, “The last [shot] is a martini because the next shot is out of glass.”
mockbuster
“The ‘mockbuster’ is a film based on the story of a big blockbuster movie, which is cheaper, shorter and is usually released straight-to-DVD long before the original is anywhere close to coming out in the shops.”
Fiona Pryor, “Spoofing the big film blockbuster,” BBC News, May 17, 2010
Mockbuster is a blend of mock and blockbuster, a film “that sustains widespread popularity and achieves enormous sales.” It’s also known as a knockbuster, a blend of knockoff, an unauthorized imitation, often poorly-made, and blockbuster.
mockumentary
“What Reiner did not foresee was that in its 25-year existence, ‘Spinal Tap’ has influenced both the way we tell stories—Michael Schur, creator of ‘The Office,’ recently said the mockumentary is his preferred storytelling format—and the way we understand them.”
Jennie Yabroff, “The Real Spinal Tap,” Newsweek, April 10, 2009
Mockumentary is a blend of mock and documentary. As for first use, while the OED notes appearances of the word in 1965, the word may have gained popularity with the 1984 film, This is Spinal Tap.
nuke the fridge
“The story isn’t going to set the world on fire, but ‘Tintin’ is still a hell of a lot more entertaining than 2008′s ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,’ a movie so miscalculated it inspired a new variation on ‘jumping the shark.’ Now the moment when franchises officially run out of good ideas, they ‘nuke the fridge.’”
Matt Singer, “Indiana Jones and the razor-sharp criticism,” IFC.com, December 26, 2011
The term nuke the fridge was coined in 2008 “in the wake of ‘Indiana Jones the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,’ in which Indy survives an atomic bomb blast by hiding in a refrigerator.”
oater
“The craggy, mellowing Eastwood directs himself admirably in this scenic, first-class oater [The Unforgiven], which strikes an ideal balance between character piece and action film as it portrays a rapidly changing way of life.”
John Farr, “The Hard-Won Legacy of Gene Hackman,” The Huffington Post, March 21, 2010
An oater is “a movie about frontier or cowboy life; a western,” and is named for “the prominence of horses, known for their taste for oats, in such films.” The term originated in 1946. See also horse opera.
Oscar
“The golden guy known to the world as the Oscar, the real star of Sunday’s Academy Awards, has become a Hollywood icon over the past 82 years, but the origin of his name has been lost in time.”
“Oscar: Hollywood’s golden mystery man,” The Independent, March 2, 2010
The Oscar is “a statuette awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” first awarded in 1929, and not named Oscar till the early 1930s. According to Andy Bowers, there are multiple claims to the origin, including actress Bette Davis remarking on the resemblance between the statue’s behind and her first husband’s, Harman Oscar Nelson; columnist Sidney Skolsky referring to an old vaudeville line, “Will you have a cigar, Oscar?”; and Academy librarian Maragret Herrick noting the small gold man bore a resemblance to her uncle Oscar.
quota quickies
“The standard histories maintain that there wasn’t much worth seeing [in prewar British cinema]: this was, after all, the era of the ‘quota quickie,’ cheap little movies made solely to fulfill the demands of the 1927 Cinematographic Film Act, which required that 5 percent of the movies on British screens actually be British.”
Dave Kehr, “New DVDs: Early British Cinema,” The New York Times, September 29, 2008
Quota quickies may be likened to B-movies, low budget movies with poor production values.
romcom
“Most romcoms attempting that delay tactic instead give us screaming matches, ridiculous misunderstandings and other exasperating nonsense that bring us to the brink of loathing.”
Jennie Punter, “Just Wright: The right mix for a slamdunk romcom,” The Globe and Mail, May 14, 2010
Romcom is a blend of romantic comedy, “films with light-hearted, humorous plotlines, centered on romantic ideals such as that true love is able to surmount most obstacles.” The term romcom seems to have originated in the late 1990s regarding films such as You’ve Got Mail and One Fine Day.
sexploitation
“The cinema’s biggest hits were underground classics such as Thundercrack and Cafe Flesh; John Waters’s 70s trash trilogy Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living; and the work of sexploitation king Russ Meyer.”
Tony Paley, “Cinema of sin: London’s old Scala picturehouse,” The Guardian, July 31, 2011
Sexploitation is a portmanteau of sex and exploitation, and refers to “exploitative use of explicit sexual material in movies.” It attests to 1942.
spaghetti western
“Sergio Leone, the Italian director who gave class to the term ‘spaghetti western,’ has made some weird movies in his day but nothing to match ‘Once Upon a Time in America,’ a lazily haullucinatory epic that means to encapsulate approximately 50 years of American social history into a single film.”
Vincent Canby, “Movie Review: Once Upon a Time in America,” The New York Times, June 1, 1984
A spaghetti western is a “a low-budget Western movie produced by a European (especially an Italian) film company.” The term originated in 1969.
Spielberg face, the
“‘Nowadays, it seems you can’t have a spectacular special effects action sequence without a Spielberg face to cue you to be in awe,’ Mr. Lee writes.”
Melena Ryzik, “Staring in Awe? It’s ‘the Spielberg Face,'” The New York Times, December 19, 2011
The Spielberg face, which refers to director Steven Spielberg, was coined last year by Kevin B. Lee who compiled a video essay of these close-up shots of actors with “eyes open, staring in wordless wonder in a moment where time stands still,” a look that “has come to be shorthand for a cinematic discovery on the part of the characters and the audience.”
Wilhelm scream
“A single scream, recorded for the 1951 film ‘Distant Drums,’ has made its way into dozens of films, games and TV shows. Afficianados call it the ‘Wilhelm Scream’ and have cataloged many of the films in which it appeared, from Hercules to Pirates of the Caribbean, The X-Files to the short ‘Golden Dreams’ film at Disney California Adventure.”
Cory Doctorow, “Wilhelm Scream – Hollywood’s favorite scream,” Boing Boing, November 29, 2006
The Wilhelm scream was created by sound designer Ben Burtt in 1977, “which he called ‘Wilhelm’ after the character that let out the scream in ‘Charge at Feather River.’”
wuxia
“Through martial arts practice the Wuxia hero becomes, in effect, superhuman. Lightning-fast reflexes allow for the ‘zhao’ fighting style, turning everyday objects into lethal weapons, whether thrown or wielded. Opponents can be paralysed with a single accurate blow or avoided by scaling walls or through the power of flight.”
“House of Flying Daggers,” Spiked, December 23, 2004
Wuxia, which is Chinese in origin, also refers to literature, Chinese opera, and video games. Wu translates as “martial, military, armed,” while xia translates as “honorable, chivalrous, hero.”
This list is far from complete! What are some of your favorite movie words?