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This Week’s Language Blog Roundup: royal baby language, JK Rowling revealed, calf’s head hash

 

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 royal baby news, Lynne Murphy, aka Lynneguist, spoke with NBC about the difference between British and American baby talk. The OUP Blog explained the little prince’s full name. In less appealing news, Electric Lit offered 10 literary characters and their Carlos Danger pseudonyms.

In language news, The New York Times told us about a language invented by children in a remote Australian village. NPR reported on young people making innovations in language by creating gender neutral pronouns.

BBC delved into how many hours it takes to become fluent in English; The Economist discussed the impact of technology on the culture of the hearing impaired; and Robert Lane Greene compared the language of Democrats and Republicans.

This week we also learned about the secret language of Scottish travelers; familects, the secret language of families; a stolen cockatoo identified by its fowl foul mouth; and why Twitter inspires so many new words.

In author news, Jane Austen will replace Charles Darwin on the British 10 pound note. JK Rowling was revealed to be the author of “debut” detective novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling. The Vulture rounded up 10 Harry Potter hallmarks in the novel and The Guardian gave us a history of pen names. Meanwhile, literary legend Harper Lee is suing her agent for allegedly stealing the copyright and royalties of her classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Wall Street Journal explained why startup names are getting quirkier; professional namer Nancy Friedman (aka Fritinancy) spoke with The Atlantic about the pitfalls of cleverly named startups; and ValleyWag got on the startup name bandwagon by giving us a visual of Silicon Valley’s stupid names, inspired by Fritnancy’s Pinterest board.

Ben Zimmer looked at the origins of upset and the term whistleblower. At Language Log, Ben examined the phrase no justice, no peace; Victor Mair considered Japanese loanwords in English; Geoff Pullum poked holes in the dolphin name study; Mark Liberman wondered how some ethnically offensive fake names made it onto the air and set straight a doctor suffering from “no word for X”-itis.

James Harbeck entertained and enlightened us about 10 annoying sounds we need to stop making. Arika Okrent revealed 16 words that are much older than we thought. Lucas Reilly gave us 24 words that used to mean something negative.

Ben Yagoda wondered if we should write what we know, and admitted he doesn’t like the microphone abbreviation mic. Also at Lingua Franca, Anne Curzan personally doesn’t like impactful but won’t tell anyone to stop saying it; Geoff Pullum is glad that The Great Gatsby doesn’t comply with Strunk and White; and Allan Metcalf was amused by Sharknado and other SyF franken-titles.

At the Macmillan Dictionary blog, Michael Rundell had nothing against like, and Stan Carey opined on the “the” abbreviation. At Merriam-Webster, Stan examined those thingamajigs, placeholder terms, and on his own blog reported on the journalistic cliche, than previously thought.

Fritinancy’s words of the week were cronut-rival frissant, a fritter-croissant hybrid “invented and named by Swiss Bakery (“artisan bread specialist”) in Vancouver, British Columbia,” and chap hop, a “genre of comedic British rap music with lyrics in Edwardian English about quintessentially British topics.”

The Word Spy spotted microlife, “a unit of measure equal to approximately 30 minutes of life expectancy,” and obtainium, “an object found or obtained for free, particularly material for an art, craft, or construction project.”

We loved these alternative dictionaries, these gorgeous libraries, and these incredible miniature books. We were happy to learn that a Calvin & Hobbes documentary is coming soon and that we’re not the only ones who couldn’t get through Moby-Dick.

We enjoyed these moments in musical punctuation, are glad that Jay Z took a cue from email and dropped the hyphen from his name, and want to wish said hyphen best of luck in its job search. Finally, we won’t be trying any of the recipes in the 300-year old The Cookbook of Unknown Ladies (calf’s head hash, anyone?), but we love the name.

That’s it for this week!

[Photo from Hollywood Reporter]

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Ode.La: Making Writing Fun Again

Memories.

A great thing about a place like Reverb is that it’s bursting with talent. Besides the terrific work done for the company, people show their chops through their passions outside of work, whether it’s music, photography, building bicycles, racing motorcycles, or writing books.

Ayush Gupta is a freelance developer who has been consulting with Wordnik and Reverb for almost three years. He’s a full stack engineer who works on everything from data and deployment to building user interfaces. In his spare time, he enjoys creating consumer-centric Internet apps.

Today we spoke with Ayush about one of his projects, ode.la, a site dedicated to writing and having fun with words, something right up Wordnik’s alley.

What is ode.la and who is it for?

ode.la is an online community for anyone who likes creative writing, the way SoundCloud is music lovers. Our focus is on keeping things playful, away from the stress of getting published. ode.la is like a playground or gym – a place to workout your creative writing muscle.

What inspired you to start ode.la?

In the writing world there exists a fixation on getting published which is unhealthy and a terrible killjoy to the love for creative writing. We wanted to create a stress-free environment where people can just enjoy the art of writing with others who respect and love it too.

At ode.la we won’t get you published, but we’ll sure help you have fun writing. Whether it’s about a train ride back home with your five-year old daughter, urban angst, mosquitoes, or a road trip. At ode.la there are a lot of fun things to do around writing. You can post challenges or writing prompts for others, or play writing games where you take turns adding to a story. There’s a writing app that helps you find your inner voices.

Did your work with Wordnik influence you?

Absolutely! I’ve always loved writing and words but it was at Wordnik that I got an opportunity to apply computing to language and words. Working with the awesome computational linguists at Wordnik and Reverb helped me learn so much about a field of work that I’d paid little attention to earlier. I started toying around with topic modeling and some other text algorithms. That eventually resulted the first version of ode.la.

How did you come up with the name?

I wanted something short which evokes writing and has a lyrical ring to it. After torturing myself contemplating some really terrible names (dottededge.com!), I bolted out of bed late one night, punched in ode.la, saw it was available, and bought it. The rest is history.

What are some challenges that you faced while creating your product?

We knew that online communities which focus on specific interests (SoundCloud, Flickr, Vimeo, Ravelry) do well. But we had no idea how such a community would look for writing. The biggest challenge was creating an experience around writing that was playful. While we’ve been successful with that, we’re organically funded at the moment, so the biggest challenge we’re facing right now is how to scale our community when we don’t have a lot of money to spend.

What have you learned?

The world of writing and writers was new to us and there have been some interesting lessons along the way. All artistic pursuit reveals something about its creator – this is perhaps truer of creative writing than other abstracts art forms. When pursuit of writing is treated seriously, it leads to a “stiff collar syndrome” and people are hesitant to share. Also, writing is often a solitary activity but once it’s done, people want to connect with others through that written piece.

We’ve applied those learnings at ode.la and through our online experience lowered the threshold to create, share, and engage with others around writing.

What’s the feedback been like? Anything surprising?

It has been amazing. We regularly hear things like, “Wow! Wordplays are great, they seem like a kind of literary chess.” People appreciate the little features like “the little scramble of words that shows up on your profile screen from the words you wrote.” In interviews we’ve heard repeatedly that writing is therapeutic and users feel drawn to ode.la when they feel like engaging with creative writing.

What advice would you give someone interested in creating their own product?

Find a need that people have and dig in deep. Explore the labyrinth of the need you’re addressing but don’t get lost. Keep a wider perspective but stay anchored to short term goals.

It helps to address a need you can relate to so you’re building a product you’d like to use yourself. Don’t risk burnout by doing too much; do less but do often. Don’t over-optimize or over-engineer.

Be ready to reinvent. Don’t get emotionally attached to specific things. If something stinks it’s probably rotting – don’t spray air freshener on it. Cut it out and throw it away.

Dream but don’t fool yourself. Never drink your own Kool-Aid. Focus on what’s interesting for your users, not what’s interesting for you to build.

Most of all have fun doing it. It takes a lot of effort to create something from scratch. If you’re not having fun, it won’t go anywhere.

[Photo: CC BY-ND 2.0 by Silvia Viñuales]

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A Brief History of Yippee-Ki-Yay

Twenty-five years ago this week, the action movie Die Hard opened and Bruce Willis uttered that famous line.

But where does the yippee-ki-yay part come from? (If you’re more interested in the origins of the second half of that saying, check out this article from Slate.) Let’s break it down.

The yip part of yippee is old. It originated in the 15th century and meant “to cheep, as a young bird,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The more well-known meaning, to emit a high-pitched bark, came about around 1907, as per the OED, and gained the figurative meaning “to shout; to complain.”

Yip is imitative in origin but probably also influenced by the 16th century yelp, which has an even older meaning of “boasting, vainglorious speaking.” Yawp is even older, coming about in the 14th century, but now is primarily associated with Walt Whitman’s late 19th century “barbaric yawp.”

The yips are “nervousness or tension that causes an athlete to fail to perform effectively, especially in missing short putts in golf.” As we mentioned in a Word Soup column back in November, some sources, including the OED, cite the first known use of the yips as 1962. However, we found a citation from 1941: “The match consumed three hours and thirty minutes, most of it because Cobb, the tingling-nerved old baseball Tiger, got the ‘yips‘ on many greens and would step back and line up his putts several times per putt.”

Yippee came about after yip. The earliest record of this exclamation of delight is from 1920 in Sinclair Lewis’s novel, Main Street: “She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of slush, she gave a student ‘Yippee!’” Yippee beans, by the way, are amphetamines.

Yippie with an –ie refers to “a member of a group of politically radical hippies, active especially during the late 1960s.” The word, which originated in 1968, stands for Youth International Party and was modeled after hippie.

Now how about the whole phrase, yippee-ki-yay? It seems to be a play on “yippie yi yo kayah,” a refrain from a 1930s Bing Crosby song, I’m An Old Cowhand.

Do cowboys really say this? We’re guessing probably not, unless of course they’re single-handedly (and shoelessly) defeating a gang of bank robbers on Christmas Eve.

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This Week’s Language Blog Roundup: cracker, Ћ, giant Mr. Darcy

Cracker

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 words in the news, the British government overruled traditional definitions and are allowing “the words for the spouses to be used interchangeably for people of either gender in some contexts.” Kathleen Parker at The Washington Post gave a few reasons why cracker will never compare with the N-word, and Code Switch at NPR delved into the secret history of cracker.

The Smithsonian wondered if musicians can save the Welsh language. In Shanghai, ancient inscriptions, “believed to be 1,400 years older than the most ancient written Chinese language,” have been discovered. The New York Times explored a possible connection between baby babble and birdsong.

Slate claimed that profanity is changing for the better. Meanwhile, the word shitstorm entered Germany’s standard dictionary. The long-awaited new edition of Hobson-Jobson, a glossary of Anglo-Indian words, is now available.

Australian restaurateur Paul Mathis proposed the Ћ, a shortening of the. The Atlantic questioned if we really need it, and Tom Chivers of The Telegraph recounted other attempts at making the English language better. Meanwhile, we learned about the origin of a much-used symbol, the pilcrow.

Robert Lane Greene interviewed American teenage hyperpolyglot, Timothy Doner, who speaks 20 languages. Ben Zimmer kicked off his new column at the Wall Street Journal, Word on the Street, with a look at the prefix cyber.

At Lingua Franca, Anne Curzan gave a polite defense of no problem; William Germano examined the taxonomy of greeting cards; and Allan Metcalf pulled into reduplication station. He joined Arika Okrent who considered five meanings of argle-bargle and the phonetic pitfalls of the shm reduplication. Arika also qualified the old rule, “i before e except after c.”

At the Macmillan Dictionary blog, Laine Redpath Cole told the story behind South African, and Stan Carey told explained the minutiae of Latin plurals.

James Harbeck showed how foreign words have influenced political and military words in English. Neal Whitman uncovered the spatula’s linguistic origins. Kory Stamper shared some amusing editorial correspondence and parsed dictionary lookups.

In words of the week, Fritinancy picked soucriant, “a vampire witch who sheds her skin at night and turns into a fireball,” and mixonymics, “the creative naming of cocktails.” Word Spy spotted stealthwear, “clothing designed to prevent the wearer from being tracked, recognized, or photographed,” and hate-watch, “to watch a TV show, movie, or actor that one vigorously dislikes.”

Lynneguist told us what ordering a hot dog in the UK might get you, and spoke with the Chicago Manual of Style about why she started her blog, some surprising differences between American and British English, and words that are untranslatable.

The Dialect Blog explored the ever-shifting dialects of the television show, Orphan Black. The OxfordWords Blog had fun with Sein-language, or lexicon from Seinfeld, and The Week rounded up 10 SyFy movies just as ridiculous as the upcoming Sharknado.

Ted Scheinman of The Paris Review was lucky enough to attend the Jane Austen Summer Program. If you’re in London, check out the frightening cool giant statue of Mr. Darcy in Serpentine Lake of Hyde Park, and if you’re on Google Maps, go explore Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley.

The OxfordWords Blog toasted some whisky words. Jonathan Green, aka Mr. Slang, shared a wonderful timeline of slang terms for drunk. NPR explained how “boozy talk” can differ between men and women. And look out, cronut, here comes the frissant, part fritter, part croissant. Also keep your eye out for sonkers, grunts, slumps, and crumbles.

This we also learned some Yiddish words, 11 obscure regional phrases for “it’s really hot,” and 12 colorful American slang words that start with Z. We got a lesson in the international language of corruption and the art of ghosting, otherwise known as the French leave or the Irish goodbye.

And on that note. . . .

[Photo: “Cracker,” CC BY 2.0 by Tony Alter]