Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week.
Thanks to everyone for playing! As always, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.
Slash
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.
Ben Zimmer took a look at a surreal week in Boston; Lucy Ferriss examined the phrase, first responder; and Jen Doll discussed the words we use when we talk about terrorists. Republicans are watching their language in debates about undocumented immigrants, and teens in Baltimore have created their own gender neutral pronoun.
In language news, the National Digital Public Library was launched; the holy grail of rare books could fetch $30 million; and a Charlotte Bronte poem manuscript went for 90,000 pounds. John Simpson, the retiring chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, spoke with Time about his career.
In Rwanda, roadside typists fear losing their jobs to the increasing accessibility of computers, and in Vietnam, schools experiment with teaching children of ethnic minorities in their mother tongues.
Earlier this week was Talk Like Shakespeare Day, and Mental Floss celebrated with 20 words we owe to Bard while we rounded up a short dictionary of Shakespearean insults.
At Johnson, Robert Lane Greene, inspired by Ben Yagoda’s post on the historical present, discussed tenses in jokes of different languages. At Lingua Franca, Allan Metcalf time traveled through the English language, and Anne Curzan considered the slash (not Slash) as slang.
At Language Log, Ben Zimmer dissected the anatomy of the spambot, and Mark Liberman explained the difference between Chechnya and the Czech Republic. At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Michael Rundell delved into DNA as metaphor; Miles Craven and Karen Richardson told the stories of the words stroke and dandelion; and Stan Carey gave us some inspiring etymology.
James Harbeck looked into where English got all those words other languages borrowed, and analyzed nine famous quotes that are technically grammatically incorrect. Arika Okrent rounded up the pig Latins of 11 other languages as well as nine pretentious Latin and Greek plurals.
Some BuzzFeed bunnies helped us remember 10 word mix-ups to avoid; Tom Chatfield listed the 10 best words the internet has given us; and Brain Pickings gave us some astronaut lingo. The Dialect Blog dialogued on race and “voice quality” and the Cork accent.
Fritinancy’s words of the week were swatting, “calling 9-1-1 and faking an emergency that draws a response from law enforcement,” and Zajonc effect, “the tendency of people, after repeated exposure to an unfamiliar thing, to reverse their initial feelings of dislike or distaste and like the thing more over time.”
Erin McKean’s verbacious choices included white money, “money that is legitimately earned, and fully reported for tax purposes”; lob, a long bob; and smart pig, a robotic device which detects flaws in oil pipelines. Word Spy noted nanofacture, “to manufacture something at the molecular level using nanotechnology,” and organ recital, “a long-winded recitation of one’s ailments.”
This week we also learned that illuminated manuscripts had no shortage of fart jokes and how difficult it can be to name a band. We loved this roundup of Great Gatsby covers, and are excited about the movie version of Judy Blume’s Tiger Eyes. We would like an adult-sized version of this TARDIS tent please. Finally, we forgive Stephen Fried for inventing the word fashionista 20 years ago, but just barely.
That’s it for this week!
[Picture: “Slash,” CC BY 2.0 by Rodrigo Amorim]
Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week.
Thanks to everyone for playing! As always, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.
William Shakespeare
While Shakespeare’s actual date of birth remains unknown, April 23, the date of his death, is celebrated as his birthday. Bardolators pay homage by learning to talk like him and his characters – what better way to start than with insults?
Here we round up ten of our favorite Shakespearean jabs, what they mean exactly, and where they came from.
assinego
Thersites: “Ay, do, do; thou sodden-witted lord! thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows; an assinego may tutor thee.”
Act 2. Scene I, Troiles and Cressida
Assinego, also spelled asinego, is “a little ass” or “foolish fellow.” The word comes from the Spanish asnico, diminutive of asno, “ass.”
bed-presser
Prince Henry: “I’ll be no longer guilty of this sin; this sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh,—”
Act 2. Scene IV, Henry IV, Part 1
A bed-presser is someone who’s lazy and loves their bed. Other old-timey synonyms for sluggard include idlesby, loll-poop, curry-favel, and, our favorite, loitersack.
bull’s pizzle
Falstaff: “’Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish!”
Act 2. Scene IV, Henry IV, Part 1
This quote from Henry IV is jam-packed with insults. A starveling is someone who is starving but probably means a weakling here. An elf-skin is “a man of shrivelled and shrunken form,” says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). A neat’s tongue is a tongue of cow or ox, where neat is an obsolete term for a “domestic bovine animal,” and a stock-fish is fish “cured by splitting and drying hard without salt,” perhaps with the idea of something dried up and shriveled.
Finally, a bull’s pizzle is a bull’s penis. The word pizzle comes from a Low German word meaning “tendon,” and is now mostly used in Australia and New Zealand, according to the OED. Penis, in case you were wondering, is Latin in origin.
cullion
Queen: “Away, base cullions!”
Act 1. Scene III, Henry VI, Part 2
A cullion is “a contemptible fellow; a rascal.” An earlier meaning is “testicle,” coming from the Latin culleus, “bag.” See also cully and cojones.
fustilarian
Falstaff: “Away, you scullion! you rampallion! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe.”
Act 2. Scene I, Henry IV, Part 2
Another quote that’s teeming with taunts! A scullion is “a servant who cleans pots and kettles, and does other menial service in the kitchen or scullery,” a rampallion is a villain or rascal, and a fustilarian is a scoundrel.
Fustilarian comes from fustilugs, “an unattractive, grossly overweight person.” Fustilugs comes from a combination of fusty, musty or lacking freshness, and lug, “anything that moves slowly or with difficulty.”
Catastrophe here refers to “the posteriors,” as the OED puts it. So I’ll tickle your catastrophe means something like “I’ll kick your ass.”
harebrained
Charles: “Let’s leave this town; for they are hare-brain’d slaves, / And hunger will enforce them to be more eager.”
Act 1. Scene II, Henry VI, Part 1
Harebrained means having “no more brain than a hare.” Shakespeare’s is the earliest recorded use of this word, which is now often associated with the phrase harebrained scheme.
The earliest mention of harebrained scheme we found was from an 1892 New York Times article: “Of course this is nonsensical, but it appears to have a certain excuse in the fact that the Queen did harbor some such harebrained scheme, and actually summoned Devonshire to Osborne House to discuss it.”
Know of an earlier mention of harebrained scheme? Let us know in the comments.
hobby-horse
Leontes: “My wife’s a hobby-horse, deserves a name / As rank as any flax-wench that puts to/ Before her troth-plight: say’t and justify’t.”
Act 1. Scene II, Winter’s Tale
In this context a hobby-horse is a loose woman or prostitute, according to Gordon H. Williams’s Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. The hobby-horse was “one of the principal performers in a morris-dance,” which says Williams, was “notorious for licentious behaviour under the mask of Maygaming.”
lily-livered
Macbeth: “Go prick thy face, and over-red thy fear, / Thou lily-liver’d boy.”
Act 5. Scene III, Macbeth
Lily-livered means cowardly or timid, and this use in Macbeth seems to be the earliest. Shakespeare seemed to also be the first to use lily to mean pale or bloodless. During Elizabethan times, the liver was believed to be the “seat of love and passion,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. As a “healthy liver is typically dark reddish-brown,” a pale liver is presumably unhealthy and weak.
puppy-headed
Trinculo: “I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed monster.”
Act 2. Scene II, The Tempest
Being puppy-headed means being stupid, like a puppy. While puppy at first meant “a small dog kept as a lady’s pet or plaything; a lapdog,” says the OED, by Shakespeare’s time it meant “a young dog.”
In the quote Trinculo is referring to Caliban, “a ‘savage and deformed’ slave of Prospero, represented as the offspring of the devil and the witch Sycorax,” and “figuratively, a person of a low, bestial nature.”
three-suited
Kent: “A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave.”
Act 2. Scene II, King Lear
Three-suited means having “only three suits of clothes,” and therefore being “beggarly,” or so petty or paltry “as to deserve contempt.” Broken meat refers to “fragments of meat” left after a meal. Worsted stockings seem to be lower quality stockings.
Not insulting enough? Check out these, these, and finally these as told by, what else, cats. Also be sure to see these Wordnik-made lists, Slings and Arrows, 135 Offensive Shakespearean Terms, and today’s list of the day, Knaves, Rogues, and Stewed Prunes. For some now-common words and phrases that the Bard coined or popularized, revisit last year’s post.
[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by tonynetone]
When you've had a Horlicks of a day...
Welcome to Word Soup Wednesday, in which we bring you those weird, funny, and interesting words from recent TV.
baby boom
Jenny: “We’re in the middle of a baby boom.”
Episode 2, Season 2, Call the Midwife, April 7, 2013
A baby boom is “a sudden large increase in the birthrate,” especially referring to the one that occurred starting in the early 1940s through the early 1960s in the United States. The post WWII-baby boom in the United Kingdom was shorter, “peaking in 1946.” A baby boomer is someone born during these years.
The earliest use of baby boom is from 1880, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
beard
Reporter [to Angela]: “A question for the Senator’s beard.”
“Stairmageddon,” The Office, April 11, 2013
A beard, according to the OED, is someone who pretends to be “in a heterosexual relationship with a homosexual person in order to help to conceal that person’s homosexuality.”
This seems to come from an earlier meaning from the gambling world: someone “who performs a transaction or (in later use) other action on behalf of another in order to conceal the identity of the principal,” perhaps from the idea of wearing a beard as a disguise.
bread and circuses
Abed: “Placating students with a fun event. Classic bread and circuses. In ancient Rome the emperor would distract the populace from their problems by allocating money for free bread and circuses.”
“Herstory of Dance,” Community, April 4, 2013
Bread and circuses refers to “offerings, such as benefits or entertainments, intended to placate discontent or distract attention from a policy or situation,” and comes from a 1914 translation of the Roman poet Juvenal’s Latin phrase, panem et circenses.
Juvenal is referring to the “Roman practice of providing free wheat to Roman citizens as well as costly circus games and other forms of entertainment as a means of gaining political power.”
cabochon
Appraiser: “What you do have is a really nice example of a cabochon moonstone that’s really clean and really clear. And if you move it, you can actually see the light go through it.”
“Cincinnati,” Antiques Roadshow, April 8, 2013
Cabochon is “a polished but uncut precious stone,” as well as “a convex style of cutting gems.” This word comes from the French caboche, meaning “head,” which also gives us cabbage.
dead flight
Stephen Colbert: “What is the cause of death [of Detroit]?”
Charlie LeDuff: “It’s a lot of things. White flight, black flight, business flight, job flight. We even have dead flight.”
The Colbert Report, April 9, 2013
White flight, a term that originated in the late 1960s, is “the migration of white people from inner-city areas (esp. those with a large black population) to the suburbs,” says the OED.
Dead flight is, according to journalist and Detroit-native Charlie LeDuff, the exhumation of dead bodies from inner-city cemeteries to those in the suburbs. “People who grew up in Detroit and now live out in the suburbs and are afraid of it,” says LeDuff, “have gone and got Grandma, exhumed her, and brought her out to the suburbs to visit her.”
duppy
Trick: “Lisa is a duppy, a Fae spirit that lives in the earth.”
“Adventures in Fae-bysitting,” Lost Girl, April 1, 2013
The duppy is, in Caribbean folklore, a ghost or spirit, often said to be malicious in nature.
growler
Pierce: “I’m gonna go take a growler.”
“Intro to Felt Surrogacy,” Community, April 11, 2013
Growler is slang for a type of defecation. It also refers to a small iceberg, named for the sound the iceberg makes when it plunges deeper into the water, and a container used for carrying beer, again perhaps coming from the sound it makes, in this case being pushed across a bar.
guinea worm
Jimmy Carter: “If you drink a [guinea worm] out of a filthy water hole. . .you drink the Guinea worm eggs and in a year’s time it grows into a worm about 30 inches long.”
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, April 9, 2013
The guinea worm is a long threadlike parasitic worm found in tropical Asia and Africa. “It stings the inside of your skin,” says Carter, “and creates a big sore and it emerges. It takes 30 days to come out and destroys muscle tissue and leaves you a cripple.”
Horlicks
Chummy: “With any luck, we’ll be back in time for Horlicks.”
Episode 1, Season 2, Call the Midwife, March 31, 2013
Horlicks is a hot malted milk drink, often taken before bedtime, and named for the drink’s manufacturer. In the mid 1970s, according to the OED, it gained the slang sense of “a mess; a disordered or spoiled state of affairs,” often used in the phrase to make a Horlicks of.
Nailsea glass
Appraiser: “That style of all this white glass like little dots in the green, that’s generally referred to as Nailsea glass.”
“Cincinnati,” Antiques Roadshow, April 8, 2013
Nailsea is a town near Bristol, England, once “an industrial centre based on coal mining and glass manufacture,” now “replaced by service industries.” The name may come from the Old English for Naegl’s island.
nigger-rig
County Commissioner Jim Gile: “I guarantee it would be the same if you go to nigger-rigging it.”
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, April 11, 2013
Jim Gile, County Commissioner of Saline County, Kansas, used the term nigger-rigging “in a study session with his fellow commissioners.” Nigger-rig is an offensive term meaning to create or repair in a makeshift or haphazard manner.
Gile went on to say that he is “not a prejudiced person” as he has built “Habitat [for Humanity] homes for colored people.” Describing African Americans as “colored” is also offensive.
Pachira tree
Manny: “It’s a Pachira, a Taiwanese symbol of good financial fortune. It’s also known as a money tree.”
Jay: “That makes two of us.”
“Flip Flop,” Modern Family, April 10, 2013
The Pachira, or Pachira aquatica, is a tropical tree that grows in swamps. The origin of how it came to be associated with good financial fortune is unclear. The “legend” is that “a poor man prayed for money, found this ‘odd’ plant, took it home as an omen, and made money selling plants grown from its seeds.”
Another story is that in the mid-1980s a Taiwanese truck driver was the first to cultivate the trees, which became popular as ornamentals first in Japan then the rest of East Asia.
A money tree also refers to a source of seemingly inexhaustible funds, as well as “a kind of holy tree believed to bring money and good fortune.”
shandy
Shivrang: “Who fancies a shandy?”
Winston: “What the hell is that?”
Shivrang: “It’s a drink.”
“Bachelorette Party,” New Girl, April 9, 2013
Shandy, short for shandygaff, is beer and lemonade mixed together. The origin of the word is unknown although an earlier meaning of shandy is “wild, boisterous,” and gaff can refer to a fair, “any public place of amusement,” and “humbug, nonsense,” says the OED.
Southern strategy
Jon Stewart: “For the last 50 years, the Republican Party has embraced a craven political calculation known as the Southern strategy.”
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, April 11, 2013
In a recent speech at Howard University, a historically black college, Republican Senator Rand Paul asked, “How did the party that elected the first black US Senator, the party that elected the first 20 African American Congressmen become a party that now loses 95% of the black vote?”
The answer, said Jon Stewart, is the Southern strategy, a Republican party tactic to get votes in the South by “appealing to racism against against African Americans.” The Southern strategy started in the late 1960s during the Presidential campaign of Richard Nixon, who said in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”
[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Duncan Verrall]
Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week.
Thanks to everyone for playing! As always, 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.
A Room With a View, from Drafthouse
We were saddened by the passing of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the screenwriter behind A Room With a View, Howard’s End, and and many others, as well as that of legendary film critic Roger Ebert. Check out Visual Thesaurus’s ode to Ebert’s lexicon and 10 movies he really hated.
This week also saw the passing of independent publisher Peter Workman; actress and Mouseketeer, Annette Funicello; and Britain’s first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Read about Thatcher’s linguistic legacy.
In the business of language, last week Rosetta Stone bought online language learning community, Livemocha, for $8.5 million; Nook debuted Nook Press, a self-publishing platform; and Waterstones founder is planning on launching a “Spotify for books.”
In language news, the Associated Press dropped the term, illegal immigrant, from its lexicon, and what may be the largest proofreading project ever began with 100,000 volunteers proofreading the 25,000 books of Project Gutenberg.
The New York Times kicked off National Poetry Month with Times Haiku, “Serendipitous Poetry from The New York Times.” Also at The Times, Henry Hitchings complained those irritating verbs as nouns.
At Johnson, Robert Lane Greene wrote about NPR’s new blog on race, Code Switch, and code-switching itself, “the instant and frequent switching between two distinct languages.”
At Lingua Franca, William Germano looked at epistolary closes; Anne Curzan considered on the other hand; and Ben Yagoda wondered what does that even mean? Meanwhile, Geoff Pullum discussed his disdain for George Orwell’s famous essay, “Politics and the English Language.”
At Language Log, Mark Liberman’s crash blossom of the week was nozzle thought gun, while Ben Zimmer made a plea for DARE, the Dictionary of American Regional English, which “ is experiencing a serious financial crisis.” Consider making a donation.
Ben was also busy over at The Atlantic talking about his media (over)consumption habits and some bad driving lingo at The Boston Globe. At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Liz Potter told us the story behind the word Persian and Stan Carey rounded up some thoughts on whom.
On his own blog Stan admired “some superb entropy” in the language of spam. Megan Garber, inspired by Stan’s collection of synonyms for the exclamation point, added some of her own.
Fritinancy had fun with the stock phrase, not your close relative’s X, and in words of the week, picked cucoloris, “a screen with oddly shaped holes cut through it, placed before a light source to throw diverse shadows on an otherwise uniform surface,” and Poisson D’Avril, “a person who is taken in by an April Fools’ Day prank.”
Erin McKean’s words of the week included hippodrama, “plays in which horses took center stage)”; ogooglebar, Swedish for “ungoogleable”; mongo, “sanitation slang for treasure salvaged from trash”; and baranek, Easter lambs in the Polish tradition that are “hand-carved in butter or formed in brilliant white sugar wearing tiny bows.”
The Word Spy spotted de-extinction, “the artificial recreation of a previously extinct species”; work-life overload, “an excessive burden caused by the combined responsibilities of a person’s work and personal life”; and amygdala hijack, “an immediate, overwhelming, and usually inappropriate emotional response to a perceived threat or emergency.”
We learned about how the Philly accent is changing. The Dialect Blog explored northeastern Pennsylvania’s “un-northeastern” accent; dived versus dove in American dialects; and Downton Abbey and the death of drama school accent enforcement.
The Virtual Linguist told us about frimponged, “to tackle very aggressively,” and other football terms; Mr. Slang – aka Jonathan Green – explored synonyms and slang for death and dying; and James Harbeck explained how foreign languages mutate English words.
We learned why people hate certain words and why tech neologisms make people angry. We agree that these are business cliches that everyone should love to hate, but it might be fun to use biz speak instead of lorem ipsum. Plus did you know these nine things about swear words?
We found out why there are different names for the same country, why so many urban train stations are called Penn Station, and the art of naming a dog. We’ve always wondered why dogs rule literature and cats run the web, and now we know.
We loved this piece in McSweeney’s about commas and love, and this article in The New Yorker about words that shouldn’t last but do. We also loved this Game of Thrones bestiary and these fun facts about the Dothraki language. We laughed at these creative TV edits of naughty movie lines and enjoyed these weird and wonderful Shakespeare adaptations.
We want to participate in this Japanese Quidditching meme but not some of these international memes (please don’t put pantyhose on your dog).
That’s it for this week!
[Photo: “A Room With a View,” Drafthouse]