Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from this week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog.
Last week’s favorites:
Thanks to everyone for playing! This week you’ll have another chance to perfect your word of the day perfect tweets. To get the word of the day, just 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.
Monday was Halloween, and while we at Wordnik treated it like any other day, Slate explained why ghosts say “Boo!” while Flavorwire gave us a lesson in American cryptozoology.
It’s November now, which means it’s National Novel Writing Month. Electric Literature made this NaNoWriMo mixed tape, while for Movember, the Telegraph offered this guide to terrific taches.
This month also marks the anniversary of Ms., “the delightful, one-size-fits-all female honorific that was invented 110 years ago this month.” Alex Beam of The Boston Globe wrote that the title was ignored for 70 years till Gloria Steinem launched Ms. Magazine in 1971.
In other important news, Kim Kardashian got divorced after 72 days of marriage. Salman Rushdie wrote a limerick about it, while Weird Al Yankovic made up a funny new word (“72 Days is now an official unit of time known as a Kardash”).
Rick Perry made up a word, too, but it was already a word. Then he got drunk (apparently), and Robert Lane Greene at Johnson questioned the claim that Perry is a “doer not a talker,” saying that “the American presidency is a talky one,” and the president must “use the bully pulpit effectively to rouse political support for his plans” and “handle the sceptical media in press conferences.”
Meanwhile Ralph “Voldemort” Fiennes blamed Twitter for the dumbing down of the English language. Alex Knapp at Forbes assured us that Twitter isn’t ruining English at all, and in fact “the 140 character restraint not only forces efficiency,” but “also lends itself to some really, really fun wordplay.” (Mark Liberman at Language Log gets a shout-out in Knapp’s piece too.) Ben Zimmer went as far as to say that “Twitterology” is a new science, and that Twitter is “a gold mine for scholars in fields like linguistics, sociology and psychology who are looking for real-time language data to analyze.” Take that, Noam Chomsky!
Mr. Zimmer also wrote about the changing meaning of ridiculous; interviewed playwright David Henry Hwang about his new play, Chinglish; and at Language Log, took a look at a crash blossom; another milestone in eggcorn history; and censorship of the word occupy in China. Meanwhile, Victor Mair explored Chinese characters in the iPhone dictionary app.
The Economist blog Johnson discussed the often welcome British invasion into American English, and some differences between British and American English. In last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Erin McKean spotted unidoor, craveability, hopium, and moneybomb. She also did some owling, planking, and catbearding.
The New York Times rounded up some typos, while Jan Freeman said that some misspellings are not that big of a deal (though this one probably is). Fritinancy considered the lucky number eight in Chinese culture; what artisan actually means (Grub Street NY charted the word’s downfall); and Yiddish-accented reduplication (reduplication, re-schmuplication!). Her words of the week were kettling, “the corralling of demonstrators by police into a limited area, where they are contained as if in a kettle,” and claque, “a group of people hired to applaud at a performance.”
It’s Subcultural English Month at Macmillan Dictionary blog, and they celebrated with posts on theatre speak; the language of rap; musical subcultures; and a roundup of the weirdest subcultural English words. Meanwhile, Stan Carey was caught in a webinar, and was impacted by the word impact.
The Virtual Linguist wondered if language influences one’s financial behavior; explored the language of girl gangs; discussed Samhain, “a less common word for the Feast of All Hallows”; and spotted gazelle, a small company that is “exceptionally fast-growing over a number of years.”
Dialect Blog examined accents of the Pacific northwest; the Mississippi accent of 1893; the Irish “strut”; and questioned if Southerners really do speak more slowly. K International let us know about a Braille keyboard for touchscreens; a sanitation worker who won a grant to study Gaelic in Ireland; that a second language may delay Alzheimer’s disease; and that if you’re a Siri-user with a Scottish accent, you’re shite out of luck.
In punctuation land, Henry Hitchings wrote about the future of punctuation, and Buzzfeed listed 13 punctuation marks you never knew existed. Meanwhile, Mighty Red Pen gave us some lesser-known editing and proofreading marks.
Like Shakespeare? Learn to insult like him. While you’re at it, clear up 12 misunderstood and misquoted Shakespearean expressions.
In book news, The Phantom Tollbooth turned 50; St. Mark’s bookshop in New York City was saved by a rent reduction; and language expert Mark Forsyth gave us The Dictionary of Odd Phrases. The Guardian presented The Hobbit as JRR Tolkien imagined it, and wondered if reading on the loo is unhealthy. Slate revealed how gruesome the original Pinocchio was, while Full Stop sorted the American presidents into Hogwarts houses. In non-book news, Flavorwire rounded up the most ridiculous Ikea product names and what they mean.
That’s it for this week! Don’t forget, next Wednesday will be the bi-weekly installment of our new series, Word Soup, in which we bring you the strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words from TV. If you see a word you think is Word Soup worthy, let us know on Twitter with the tag #wordsoup.
“Remember, remember, the fifth of November, Gunpowder Treason and Plot.”
Tomorrow is Guy Fawkes Day, “observed in England to commemorate the foiling of the attempt led by Guy Fawkes in 1605 to blow up the king and members of Parliament in retaliation for increasing repression of Roman Catholics in England.”
In her post on autumnal holidays, Lynneguist says “the main autumn ritual in the UK is Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night.” In Lewes, “a site of Protestant martyrdom,” Guy Fawkes Night is “huge,” often involving bonfires, fireworks, and parades (or “Mardi Gras with fire,” as Lynneguist puts it).
lewes bonfire night 2010 by http://heatherbuckley.co.uk, on Flickr
[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by heather buckley]
Guy Fawkes’ foiled attempt is also known as the Gunpowder Plot. The word plot originally referred to “a piece of ground; specifically, a small piece of ground of well-defined shape,” and comes from the Old English plot, “small piece of ground.” The meaning, “a stratagem or secret plan; a secret project; an intrigue; a conspiracy,” is from the 1580s, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, “probably by accidental similarity to complot,” meaning “a plotting together; a joint plot; a confederacy in some design; a conspiracy,” and may be a “back-formation from [the Old French] compeloter, ‘to roll into a ball.’”
A plot is also known as a conspiracy, “an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.” The word conspiracy comes from the Latin conspirare, “to agree, unite, plot,” and which literally means “to breathe together.” Conspiracy theory, “a theory seeking to explain a disputed case or matter as a plot by a secret group or alliance rather than an individual or isolated act,” is attested to 1909.
A stratagem is “any artifice; a trick by which some advantage is intended to be obtained,” and comes from the Greek strategein, “to be a general, command,” which also gives us strategy and stratocracy, “a military government; government by force of arms.”
A subterfuge is “that to which a person resorts for escape or concealment; a shift; an evasion; artifice employed to escape censure or the force of an argument.” Subterfuge comes from the Latin subterfugere, “to evade, escape, flee by stealth,” with subter meaning “beneath, secretly” and fugere meaning “flee.” Fugere also gives us fugitive.
Intrigue is “secret or underhand plotting or scheming; the exertion of secret influence for the accomplishment of a purpose,” and comes from the Latin intrīcāre, “to entangle.” An intrigante is a female intriguer. Machination is the act of “contriving a scheme for executing some purpose, particularly a forbidden or an evil purpose; underhand plotting or contrivance.” The word ultimately comes from the Latin machina, “machine, engine, fabric, frame, device, trick,” which also gives us machine and the phrase deus ex machina, “an unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot,” literally “the god from the machina,” with machina referring to “the device by which ‘gods’ were suspended over the stage in [Greek] theater.”
Treason is “violation of allegiance toward one’s country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one’s country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies,” and comes from the Latin traditionem, “a handing over, delivery, surrender,” which also gives us tradition. High treason is “criminal disloyalty to one’s country,” while petit treason (petit is French for “small”) is “the crime of killing a person to whom the offender owed duty or subjection, as one’s husband, master, mistress, etc.,” and “is now not distinguished from murder.”
Perfidy is “deliberate breach of faith; calculated violation of trust; treachery.” The word perfidy comes from the Latin perfidus, “faithless,” which comes from the phrase per fidem decipere, “to deceive through trustingness,” where per means “through” and fidem means “faith.” Treachery comes from the Old French trichier, “to trick.”
A traitor is one who is guilty of treason, and comes from the Latin trādere, “to betray.” Some eponymous synonyms for traitor include Benedict Arnold, a general during the American Revolutionary War who later defected to the British; quisling (named for Vidkun Quisling, “head of Norway’s government during the Nazi occupation”); and Judas, “one of the twelve original Apostles of Jesus, known for his role in Jesus’ betrayal into the hands of Roman authorities.”
But Guy Fawkes Day gives us more than words about plot and treason. The word guy, an informal term for a “man or fellow” or “persons of either sex,” comes from Guy Fawkes himself. Guy earlier referred to “a person grotesque in dress, looks, or manners; a dowdy; a ‘fright,’” which came from the meaning of “a grotesque effigy intended to represent Guy Fawkes.” Around 1847, guy came to mean “a fellow.” The name Guy is French in origin and related to the Italian Guido, “leader.”
How about that mask? It was first made famous by the comic book series and film, V for Vendetta, and then taken up by the hacktivist group Anonymous. It can now also seen at Occupy protests all over the country.
Disobey by mediafury, on Flickr
[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by mediafury]
We’re happy to announce the addition of Will Fitzgerald to Wordnik!
Will is leading the effort to build Wordnik’s analytics platform. Before coming to Wordnik, Will was a senior research development engineer for Microsoft’s Bing search engine. He joined Microsoft as part of their acquisition Powerset and their semantic search engine, where he was in the first round of employees. While at Powerset, Will led the development of their lexical server (a kind of Wordnik light) and spent a lot of time tuning models to find references to people, places, and organizations.
Prior to Bing and Powerset, Will helped build an autonomous helicopter for NASA, led some translation projects at Canada’s National Research Council, taught computer science, built dialog systems for NASA and others. He got his PhD from Northwestern University at the Institute for the Learning Sciences, where he built semantic dialog systems for embedding in educational tools.
Will proudly evidences the Northern Cities Shift, likes to sing loudly, and is an editor of The Trumpet, a thrice-annual periodical for singers and writers of dispersed harmony and fasola music. Based on a statistical analysis of his writings, his favorite word is the. He blogs at Will.Whim, and can be reached at will@wordnik.com.
Happy All Saints Day!
All Saints Day is a Christian festival “that commemorates all the saints (especially, in many churches, those who have died in the preceding year).” While the word saint comes from the Latin sanctus, “holy, consecrated,” the study of saints is hagiography, which is made up of Greek parts, hagios, “holy” and graphy, “process of writing or recording.”
May You Have the Feast of All Feasts! - St. Anthony by kevin dooley, on Flickr
[Image by Kevin Dooley under Creative Commons license]
Hagio gives us a slew of saint-words. A hagiographer or hagiologist is “a writer of sacred books; a writer of lives of the saints.” Hagiology is “that branch of literature which treats of the lives and legends of the saints; the list and legends of the saints, and, by extension, of popular heroes.” Hagiolatry is “the worship of saints,” while a hagioscope is “an opening in a wall, screen, or barrier of a church, to afford a view of the chief altar to worshipers in the chapels or side aisles,” and is also known as a squint.
There are also several types of saints. A martyr is “one who willingly suffers death rather than surrender his religious faith.” The word comes from the Greek martus, “witness.” A hieromartyr is “a martyr who was a priest or bishop” (hiero is Greek for “sacred’ and also gives us hieroglyphics), while a protomartyr is “the first martyr; the first of any series of martyrs; the first who suffers or is sacrificed in any cause; specifically, Stephen, the earliest Christian martyr” (proto is Greek for “first”). A “list or calendar of martyrs” is a menology or Menologium.
A thaumaturge is “a worker of miracles; a wonder-worker,” and is also a magician. The word comes from the Greek thauma, “wonder, wonderous thing.” A cephalophore is “a saint who is generally depicted carrying his or her own head; in art, this was usually meant to signify that the subject in question had been martyred by beheading.” The word cephalophore is made up of the Greek kephale, “head,” and phoresis, “being carried.”
Sint Nicasius by GeS, on Flickr
Dulia is “an inferior kind of worship paid to saints and angels in the Roman Catholic Church,” while hyperdulia is “the worship offered by Roman Catholics to the Virgin Mary: so called because it is higher than that given to other saints.” The word dulia comes from the Greek doulos, “slave.” Opposed to dulia is latria, “a technical term for that supreme worship which is allowed to be offered to God only,” and comes from the Greek latreia, “worship, service paid to the gods, hired labor.”
Saints are often depicted with halos. The word halo comes from the Greek halos, “disk of the sun or moon, ring of light around the sun or moon.” A halo is also known as a nimbus, which also refers to “a cloud or system of clouds from which rain is falling,” and comes from the Latin nimbus, “cloud.” Other synonyms for halo include aureole, glory, and corona.
St. Rita by kevin dooley, on Flickr
[Image by Kevin Dooley under Creative Commons license]
Heiligenschein is “an optical phenomenon which creates a bright spot around the shadow of the viewer’s head, when the surface on which the shadow falls has special optical characteristics (as with dewy grass).” According to World Wide Words, the word is German and literally means “holy light,” and is “caused by internal reflection within the drops of water on the blades of grass (a related process in other circumstances makes a rainbow).”
For even more halo types and phenomena, check out this list.
Did you know the word tawdry, meaning “gaudy; showy and tasteless,” actually has saintly origins? It comes from tawdry lace, an alteration of Saint Audrey’s lace, which was “sold at the annual Saint Audrey’s fair, Ely, England.” According to the Virtual Linguist:
Legend has it that Audrey, a religious woman, died of a tumour in her throat. She believed the tumour grew because she was being divinely punished for her love of fine silk and lace neck ornaments. In the 16th century the women of East Anglia would buy tawdry lace adornments and jewellery at annual fairs held in honour of their patron saint. In time cheap and tacky versions of the necklaces were produced and sold at a lower price, hence today’s meaning of the word tawdry.
Pantaloons, “tight-fitting garments for the thighs and legs, worn by men of fashion, generally buttoned around the lower part of the calf,” also has its origins in a saint. As per the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word is associated with Pantaloun, a “silly old man character” in a 16th century Italian comedy “who wore tight trousers over his skinny legs.” Pantaloun comes from San Pantaleone, “a popular saint in Venice,” and “in the comedies represents the Venetian.”
For even more saintliness, check out these lists: Patron Saints; We Have Saints for Your Complaints; and Good People.
Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from this week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog.
Last week’s theme – the Devil! Here are our favorites.
Thanks to everyone for playing! This week you’ll have another chance to perfect your word of the day perfect tweets. To get the word of the day, just follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.
If you’re like us, you like being scared this time of year, whether it’s from hearing spooky stories, watching the creepiest movies ever, or visiting “haunted” houses. However you like to get your jim-jams, there are many different ways to express your fear.
You might say you have the willies, “a feeling of nervousness or fear.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, willies may come from woollies, “a dialectal term for ‘nervous uneasiness,’ probably in reference to the itchiness of wool garments.” Or you might have the heebie-jeebies, which was coined by “William De Beck (1890-1942), American cartoonist, in his comic strip Barney Google.” Then again, you could have the creeps, the all-overs, or the collywobbles, which also refers to a stomachache. Collywobbles is attested to 1823 and is a “fanciful formation from colic and wobble.”
Or maybe your fears are of the screaming variety, whether abdabs or meemies. The origin of the term screaming abdabs is obscure. World Wide Words suggests, by way of slang-master Jonathon Green, that “the word could imitate the stuttering noise that somebody might produce when in a state of funk or incoherent frustration.” It could also be related to the term abba-dabba, which refers to “persons of such limited capacities that they are unable to properly form words.” Another origin may be “an old ragtime song called Abba Dabba Honeymoon.”
The origin of screaming meemies is a bit clearer. The Online Etymology Dictionary says it’s “World War I army slang, originally a soldiers’ name for a type of German artillery shell that made a loud noise in flight (from French woman’s name Mimi), extended to the battle fatigue caused by long exposure to enemy fire.” And in case you were wondering, the word scream may be related to the Old Norse skræma, “to terrify, scare.”
Scary stuff may give you gooseflesh, “a rough condition of the skin, resembling that of a plucked goose, caused by the contraction of the erector muscles of the superficial hairs (arrectores pilorum), and induced by cold, fear, and other exciting causes,” also know as goose pimples, goose bumps, and more formally, horripilation.
Horripilation comes from the Latin horripilāre, “to bristle with hairs.” Horripilāre is made up of horrēre, “to tremble,” plus pilāre, “to grow hair,” which comes from pilus, “hair.” Horrēre also gives as horror, which once also meant “a bristling or ruffling, as of the surface of water; a rippling,” and “a shivering or shuddering, as in the cold fit which precedes a fever,” in addition to its more common meaning, “a painful emotion of fear or abhorrence; a shuddering with terror or loathing; the feeling inspired by something frightful or shocking.”
Have nightmares? Then you’re hag-ridden, also an old term for sleep paralysis, with “the sensation of being held immobile in bed, often by a heavy weight, and accompanied by a sense of alien presence.” This is based on folklore that while you’re sleeping, you may be visited by a night-hag that will sit on your chest and immobilize you. The succubus is “a lascivious spirit supposed to have sexual intercourse with the men by night.” The incubus is the male version of the succubus, and also means “nightmare” and figuratively, “a heavy or oppressive burden; especially, a heavy weight on the mind.” While succubus comes from the Latin succubāre, “to lie under,” incubus comes from the Latin incubāre, “to lie down on.”
Ephialtes, a Greek god sometimes considered the “daimon of nightmares,” may come from the Greek ephallesthai, “to leap upon.” The mara is “a female demon who torments people in sleep by crouching on their chests or stomachs, or by causing terrifying visions,” and is related to the mare of nightmare. Nightmare originally meant “”an evil female spirit afflicting sleepers with a feeling of suffocation.” Mare comes from the Old English mare, “incubus.”
Still haven’t had enough? Check out this creepy crawly list, this scary one, and this one about sleeping – or not sleeping. The Virtual Linguist explains the origins behind the word Halloween and its traditions; Lynneguist discusses the American and British differences between some autumnal holidays; and Fritinancy rounds up some spooky foods and drinks. Finally, in case you missed any of our other Halloween posts, here they are.
From everyone at Wordnik, BOO!
