Author Archives: Angela Tung

by - 1 Comment

Summer Watching

Last month we brought you some summer reading recommendations. Today we have some movies and videos that might be word-nerd-worthy.

“A group of ivory-tower lexicographers realize they need to hear how real people talk, and end up helping a beautiful singer escape from the Mob.”  Did you know such a movie existed?  Is it too good to be true?  It’s not. Ball of Fire stars Gary Cooper as that ivory-tower lexicographer, Professor Bertram Potts, and Barbara Stanwyck, in an Oscar-nominated role, as Sourpuss O’Shea, that saucy nightclub singer. They meet while the professor is researching an article on slang, and as expected, end up falling for each other.

Love the Scripps National Spelling Bee? Chances are you already love Spellbound, a documentary which follows eight competitors in the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee. You may also want to check out The Girl Who Spelled Freedom, a 1986 made-for-TV movie based on the true story of Linn Yann, a Cambodian refugee who survived the Khmer Rouge labor camps and immigrated with her family to Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Four years later, “she won the countywide 1983 Chattanooga Times Spelling Bee,” before making it to the 1985 national finals of the Scripps Bee in Washington, DC.

Also available for your spelling-viewing pleasure are Akeelah and the Bee, about “a young girl from South Los Angeles [who] tries to make it to the National Spelling Bee,” and Bee Season, based on Myla Goldberg’s novel about “a wife and mother [who] begins a downward emotional spiral, as her husband avoids their collapsing marriage by immersing himself in his 11 year-old daughter’s quest to become a spelling bee champion.”

For you crossword-puzzle addicts, there’s Wordplay which focuses on four crossword puzzle solvers competing in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, features Will Shortz, the editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle, and includes celebrity crossword-geek “confessions” from the likes of Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and documentarian Ken Burns. If Scrabble is more to your taste, try Word Wars which explores the world of competitive Scrabble playing, following “four players in the nine months leading up to the 2002 National Scrabble Championship.”

For you history buffs, there’s The Story of English, a nine-part series that appeared on PBS in the mid-1980s, and that includes such episodes as An English Speaking World, The Guid Scots Tongue, and Muvver Tongue.  Also be sure check out the perfectly delightful History of English in 10 Minutes from Open University.

Want a walk down memory lane? Sing along with Schoolhouse Rock’s Grammar Rock, in particular Conjunction Junction (“What’s your function?”) and Lolly Lolly Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here.

Know of more word-nerd-friendly movies and videos?  Share them in the comments!  Till then, here’s to happy (air-conditioned) summer watching.

by

This Week’s Language Blog Roundup

Happy Friday before Fourth of July! It’s time again for another Language Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news.

There was much hubbub in the Twitterverse this week over the loss of the Oxford comma, as stated in the University of Oxford’s style guide. However, it was soon determined that the Oxford comma wasn’t dead after all, and that the “only explicit permission to dispense with the Oxford comma. . .was in a guide for university staff on writing press releases and internal communications.” Whew! We’re calm, cool, and collected now.

In Shakespeare news, a group of scientists got the green light from the Church of England to exhume “the Bard of Avon’s remains to determine the cause of his death and, among other things, if the playwright had traces of pot pumping through his system.”  Meanwhile in politics, Vanity Fair desconstructed Michele Bachmann’s favorite metaphor, the three-legged stool.

Erin Gloria Ryan over at Jezebel wrote about her love affair with peppering her speech with “like” while Mark Liberman at Language Log questioned Ryan’s proposal that women may use “like” more often than men, and jokingly devised a possible solution, the iPeeve, an imaginary app that is “a speech recognizer with a style checker [that] will make [your smartphone] vibrate (or beep, or flash) whenever you indulge in any of the verbal tics that you’ve asked it to watch out for.”

In neologism news, The Economist’s language blog, Johnson, noticed incent, the verb form of incentive, while Stan Carey mused over preloved euphemisms.  Word Spy spotted omega male, “the man who is least likely to take on a dominant role in a social or professional situation”; teacup, “a college student with a fragile, easily shattered psyche”; and filter bubble, “search results, recommendations, and other online data that have been filtered to match your interests, thus preventing you from seeing data outside of those interests.”

But the unmapped word of the week, in our humble opinion, was humblebrag (brought to our attention by @mcintyrekm), a “type of bragging which masks the brag in a faux-humble guise.”

The Virtual Linguist took a look at “once every preston guild,” a Lancashire expression meaning “very rarely”; down, meaning “an area of high land”; a now-troubling word that once simply meant a “bundle of sticks”; and The Daily Mail’s taking Kate Middleton to task for using ‘till instead of ‘til in her wedding thank you cards.  The Dialect Blog discussed the ever elusive English schwa; David Marsh at The Guardian demanded the termination of “railspeak”; and LeVar Burton is apparently “actively plotting” a “Rainbow Reading flashmob.”  Empirical Zeal blogged about dissecting the language of songbirds, while Buzzfeed cited a very British headline that is positively for the birds.

In library news, the Internet Archive announced that their eBook lending program has expanded to 1,000 libraries in six countries. Congrats! Meanwhile, George Mason University is busy archiving the world’s English accents.

The Book Haven at Stanford University profiled the exiled Chinese poet, Bei Dao, who stated that “each language keeps the secret code of a culture,” which may be just another reason to preserve endangered and disappearing languages such as Calo, “spoken by Romani people, sometimes referred to as Gypsies, in Spain”; Ayapanec, “which is thought to have descended from a language spoken by the Olmecs, a pre-Columbian civilization”; Eyak, “once spoken by a native tribe in Alaska”; and Kapampangan, a regional language in the Philippines, which may be preserved by “teenagers [who] think it’s ‘cool’ to send mobile phone text messages” in that language.

In videos of the week, check out this one from the Getty Museum about the structure of a medieval manuscript, and this thoroughly entertaining 10-minute history of the English language from Open University, brought to our attention by @MisterVerb via @Fritinancy.  Don’t have 10 minutes? Then at least check out chapter 7, the Age of the Dictionary.

Finally, happy Canada Day to our friends north of the border!  One Canadian living in Wales grieved the loss of her Canadian English, while our list of the day celebrates Canadianisms, and this one and this one honor Canadian places.

Till (or til?) next week, stay wordy my friends!

by - 1 Comment

This Week’s Language Blog Roundup

It’s Friday again, folks, which means it’s time for our Language Blog Roundup, in which we give you the highlights of our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news.

The ignoramus of the week award goes to the narrator of Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman’s biography video. Huntsman, the former Ambassador to China and Utah governor, speaks Mandarin Chinese and Hokkien, “whatever that is,” quips the folksly narrator. As the article helpfully notes, it’s “a Chinese dialect based in Taiwan, and spoken throughout Southeast Asia by about 47 million people.”

Ben Zimmer at Language Log commented that we “now face the fascinating prospect of having two major presidential candidates who can speak Asian languages with some degree of proficiency” (President Obama knows Indonesian, from his time in Jakarta), and Huntsman has talked about “the importance of learning foreign languages as a bridge to cross-cultural understanding.”  Robert Lane Greene at The Economist wrote about presidential language abilities, while the prolific Ben Zimmer noted some new words from this early stage of the election campaign.

The New York Times pondered Sarah Palin’s undeniable influence on the English language (“How’s that hopey-changey stuff working out for ya?”), while K International discussed how Twitter is changing language, and Stan Carey reviewed Guy Deutscher’s book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

Hopefully after you’ve read Through the Language Glass, or any book, you won’t have biblio-amnesia and forget what you’ve read, though chances are you will (here’s a whole list of book recommendations for you to forget).  In “Whatpocalypse Now?” Mark Liberman at Language Log talks about libfixes, in this case sportspocalypse.  Arnold Zwicky, coiner of the libfix term, has an extensive list.

Meanwhile, a pub brawl broke out in Penrhyndeudraeth, a Welsh village, when bar patrons in the predominantly Welsh-speaking area were forced by management to make their orders in English. We’re happy to report that the pub is now “back under Welsh-language friendly management“. In the Twitterverse a less violent, though no less passionate, disagreement occurred over accent marks.

The Virtual Linguist engaged in a taming of the various meanings of shrew, which originally referred to a “wicked, evil-disposed or malignant man,” and in “the 14th and 15th centuries. . .was applied to the Devil.”  The Wrdnrd enjoyed some sake terms, while Mark Peters over at Oxford University Press blog informed us he likes bullshit and other slang.

Stan Carey also wrote about Silbo Gomero and other whistled languages, while The Dialect Blog posted about Quebec English and California English and the “gay accent,” if there’s a such a thing.  Separated By a Common Language explored the American and British expressions, respectively, “it’s up to you” and “it’s down to you.”

Like Scots words? You can contribute them to an online dictionary.  Meanwhile the Squamish Nation published their first dictionary, “designed to help the Squamish learn their own language and bring it back from the brink of extinction.”

In our neck of the woods, medical students at the University of California, San Francisco are helping to bridge the language divide between doctors and patients through a “free mobile translation application” they invented, which “allows health care providers to play medical history questions and instructions out loud, so far in five languages.”

In fun stuff, the Oatmeal taught us the difference between “ie” and “eg”; the Phoenix New Times listed the best bands with punctuation or typographical marks in their names; and hey, did you know there’s a Language Museum? Flavorwire alerted us to the 30 harshest author on author insults in history. Our favorite? Some William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway – and vice versa – action.

Finally, we wanted to give a special shout-out to our librarian friends as they kick off ALA 2011 in the Big Easy. Nowadays, librarians and libraries are often heading the way in terms of increasing access to information online. For instance, the National Library of Medicine released its “Turning the Pages” iPad app, which  “is free and features selections from three rare books from the Library’s collection.”  The Biodiversity Heritage Library helped to digitize and hosts part of Charles Darwin’s huge personal scientific library.  It was announced that the British Library and Google would be working together to digitize “about 250,000 texts dating back to the 18th Century.”  (Of course “the project will take some years to complete,” so until then, have some fun with the British Library’s interactive timeline on the history of the English language.)

The Atlantic went as far as to suggest that big media could learn a lot from the New York Public Library and what it has been doing around “innovative online projects,” such as “smart e-publications, crowdsourcing projects, and an overall digital strategy that shows a far greater understanding of the power of the Internet than most traditional media companies show.”

Speaking of an innovative online project, this week JK Rowling revealed Pottermore.com, an interactive website that will exclusively host the e-book formats of the Harry Potter series, as well as include a social networking element and additional background for the original stories.  The site goes live July 31, Harry’s birthday, though you can sign up now.

That’s it from here!  Tune in next week, same Wordnik-time, same Wordnik-channel.

by - 2 Comments

Summer Reading

Happy summer solstice, everyone!  To celebrate this official first day of summer, we’re offering some reading recommendations, some new, some classic, all jam-packed with word goodness.

If you’ve ever wondered how the Oxford English Dictionary came to be, read Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, which focuses on one prolific contributor (the “madman” of the title), or for a whole history of the OED, Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.

If you’re interested in lexicographical founding fathers, you might like the classic The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, as well as the recently released The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture, by Joshua Kendall.

More keen on deciphering dictionaries? Then try How to Read a Word, in which historical lexicographer Elizabeth Knowles “offers clear guidance on how to explore the various aspects of words,” including “pronunciation, spelling, date of first use, etymology, regional distribution, and meaning, all spiced with intriguing examples.”  To hone your writing skills, check out How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, by Stanley Fish.  If presentation skills are your concern, then Jerry Weisman’s Presentations in Action: 80 Memorable Presentation Lessons from the Masters might help.

If you don’t like language “sticklers,” you might like You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, by Economist correspondent Robert Lane Greene. Greene asserts that “language is about communication rather than just rules and that debates about language and its rules are often really about politics.”

Slang your thang?  Check out The First Dictionary of Slang, 1699, first published in the 17th century and reissued this past October.  The dictionary was “the first work dedicated to slang words and their meanings,” and was “aimed to educate the more polite classes in the language and, consequently, the methods of thieves and vagabonds, protecting the innocent from cant speakers and their activities.” (If you really want to go all-out, try the three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang, by Jonathon Green.)

In the realm of language history, Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way examines the origins of English, English dialects, spelling reform, prescriptive grammar, and swearing.  In The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, available October 2011, Henry Hitchings “examines the present state of the conflict [of the English language], its history, and its future,” where the ideas of “proper usage” came from, and “grammar rules, regional accents, swearing, spelling, dictionaries, political correctness, and the role of electronic media in reshaping language.”

If you can’t wait till October, take a look at Hitchings’ 2008 book, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, which plays up the “acquisitiveness of English” and its propensity for collecting words from “more than 350 other languages.” The book “has a wide sweep, from pre-Roman Britain to online communities.”

Available this August is John McWhorter’s What Language Is: And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be. The linguist examines languages of all types, from “vanishing languages spoken by a few hundred people to major tongues like Chinese,” and “how languages across the globe. . .originate, evolve, multiply, and divide.”  Meanwhile, in On The Death and Life of Languages, Claude Hagège focuses on vanishing or dying languages, how they die, and how they can be revitalized.

In her recent Boston Globe column, Erin McKean talked about “nevers” and Mardy Grothe’s collection of quotations, Neverisms: A Quotation Lover’s Guide to Things You Should Never Do, Never Say, or Never Forget (as in, “Never let ’em see you sweat,” “Never let a crisis go to waste,” “Never ruin an apology with an excuse”).

Finally, if novels are more up your alley, you might like The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan, which tells the story of a broken heart through dictionary definitions (“I, n. Me without anyone else”); as well as Milorad Pavic’s The Dictionary of the Khazars. Originally written in Serbo-Croatian, the novel “purports to be the historical record of the Khazars, a fictional Indo-European tribe that vanished in the 10th century.”  The entries are alphabetical but “can be perused at random, read start to finish or back to front.”  As well, two different versions are available, “designated ‘male’ and ‘female,’ and differing by only 15 lines.”

For a list of these books, see below.  Happy summer reading!

Biographies

Dictionaries

History

How To

Quotations

Fiction

by - 1 Comment

Unmapped Words: Portmanteaus

Wordnik’s motto is “All the words, and everything about them, for everybody,” and when we say “all the words,” we mean all the words, especially the ones that aren’t included in traditional dictionaries — words that have been left off the previous maps of English.  Today we’re taking a look at portmanteaus.

Portmanteau originally meant “a case used in journeying for containing clothing: originally adapted to the saddle of a horseman, and therefore nearly cylindrical and of flexible make.” Now it’s also come to refer to a word “made by combining two words, stories, etc, in the manner of a linguistic portmanteau.” Portmanteau words are also known as blends.

Lewis Carroll was the first to use the word in this sense in Through the Looking Glass, in which “Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in Jabberwocky, where ‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’ and ‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’.”  Humpty Dumpty says, “You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

Some portmanteaus have become so common, one could argue that we’ve forgotten their origins entirely.  There’s bit, a blend of binary and digit.  There’s bodacious, a combination of bold and audacious.  Lewis Carroll coined chortle, part chuckle, part snort.  The pixel, which we all know is “one of the tiny dots that make up the representation of an image in a computer’s memory,” as well as the name of a very famous movie company, originated as a portmanteau of picture and element.

In addition to bit and pixel, there are innumerable technology-related blends.  Blogosphere, emoticon, malware, and netiquette are just a few.  On the more scandalous side, there’s sexting and, as spotted recently by Word Spy, twimmolation, a blend of Twitter and immolation, which means “the destruction of a person’s career or reputation caused by lewd or insensitive Twitter posts.”

Then there’s literal cross-breeding.  What do you get when you cross a labrador and a poodle?  A labradoodle of course.  How about a tangerine and a pumelo, or grapefruit?  A tangelo.  What happens when you smash together a turkey, duck, and chicken? You get a turducken (and perhaps a stomachache). Do we have lists for crossed animals and fruits? Of course we do. In fact we have two.

Let’s not forget celebrity portmanteaus, the manifestation of romantic, sometimes short-lived, unions.  There’s Bennifer (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, then Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner);TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes); and of course Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie).

Just recently, in the world of bromance, we learned of bronies, adult fanboys of My Little Pony, and brogramming (thanks @1lenore!), the art of programming with one’s “bros” (what, no girl programmers allowed?).  From Word Spy we learned about the nocturnist, a blend of nocturnal and internist, “a physician who cares for other doctors’ patients overnight,” and from linguistics expert (linguexpert?) Arnold Zwicky, we read about the mathemagician, a mathematician who also happens to be a magician; viewmongous, a blend of view and humungous, implying a humungous view of a television; muderabilia, memorabilia related to murders or murderers; and Newtiny, which refers to the recent mutiny of Newt Gringrich’s presidential campaign staff.

Come across any new blends yourself? Tweet it and tag it #unmappedwords or #unmapw.  Look up it on Wordnik and add your definition in the comments or “discuss” section.  Tag it portmanteau or blend. Make a list. Who knows?  Maybe eventually we can map the whole language, and no word will languish “off the map”.