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.
Fullerton Patrolman Ernest E. Garner with bank robbers, Fullerton, 1927
A recent New Yorker piece, A Pickpocket’s Tale, gives a fascinating portrait of Apollo Robbins, an expert in “theatrical pickpocketing.” The article is also chock-full of equaling fascinating pickpocket lingo, such as skinning the poke (“removing the cash from a stolen wallet and wiping it off before tossing it”), kissing the dog (“the mistake of letting a victim see your face”), and working single o (working without a pickpocket crew).
After reading the article, we were so obsessed inspired, we decided to take a closer look at even more thief words. Here are our favorites.
Adam Tiler
“Why, an autem diver is a pickpocket who practises in a church, and an Adam tiler his associate, who receives his booty, and runs off with it.”
Tales of My Father, and My Friends, 1823
An Adam Tiler is “a pickpocket’s accomplice, who takes the stolen goods and leaves with them.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term originated in the 1660s and comes from Adam, “the name of the first man,” and tiler, slang for “pickpocket.”
busk
“We would all have 36 hours to blag, beg and busk our way around the globe.”
“Taking liberties: a jailbreak to San Diego,” The Guardian, April 15, 2011
Busk meaning “to earn a livelihood by going about singing, playing, and selling ballads” may come from another meaning of the word, “to cruise as a pirate.” The word itself may come from the obsolete French busquer, “to prowl.”
ferret
“McCain employs a staffer known as the ‘ferret’ to find and expose pork-barrel provisions tucked away in major legislation.”
Evan Thomas, “Senator Hothead,” Newsweek, February 20, 2000
The word ferret has multiple meanings, the earliest of which is “a weasellike, usually albino mammal (Mustela putorius furo) related to the polecat and often trained to hunt rats or rabbits.” The word comes from the Vulgar Latin fūrittus, diminutive of Latin fūr, “thief.”
Ferret took on a figurative meaning around 1600, according to the OED, “to hunt after; to worry,” with the earliest recorded usage in Shakespeare’s Henry V: ” Ile Fer him, and ferit him, and ferke him.“ Ferret also means “to drive out, as from a hiding place”; “to uncover and bring to light by searching”; or “to search intensively.”
furuncle
“The word carbuncle, in Latin means live coal, and in Greek, anthrax signifies the same thing. While furuncle in Latin stands for thief or knave, pathologically it is synonymous with the term boil, which is too well known to require a definition.”
The Medical Summary, March 1915
Furuncle, “a circumscribed inflammation of the skin, forming a necrotic central core, and suppurating and discharging the core; a boil,” comes from the Latin fūrunculus, “knob on a vine that ‘steals’ the sap. Fūrunculus is diminutive of fūr, “thief.”
grift
“Like junkies, they’re hooked on the grift–it gives them an almost sexual rush–but they keep telling themselves they can pull out whenever they want and go straight.”
David Ansen, “Con-Artist Classic,” Newsweek, February 3, 1997
Grift refers to “money made dishonestly, as in a swindle”; “a swindle or confidence game”; or “to engage in swindling or cheating.” The word originated around 1906, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, and may be a corruption of graft, “dishonest gain acquired by private or secret practices or corrupt agreement or connivance,” or “a business, process, place of concourse, or office, in or at which dishonest gain, by corruption or direct thieving, may be acquired.”
gun moll
“‘A dip—pickpocket—and his girl, or gun-moll, as they call them,’ translated Kennedy. ‘One of their number has evidently been picked up by a detective and he looks to them for a good lawyer, or mouth-piece.’”
Arthur B. Reever, The Dream Doctor, 1914
A gun moll is “the girlfriend of a gangster.” Gun here doesn’t refer to the weapon but is from gonif, slang for “thief.” Gonif is Yiddish in origin, coming from the Hebrew gannabh, “thief.” Moll comes from the “nickname of Mary, used of disreputable females since early 1600s.”
keister
“President Reagan has apologized to a freshman congressman for using the word ‘keister‘ to describe the human posterior.”
“President apologizes for ‘keister,'” The Pittsburgh Press, September 13, 1983
Keister became slang for “buttocks” in the 1930s, says the OED. The earliest meaning of the word is “suitcase, satchel” (1882), and in 1913 came to mean “a strong-box in a safe.” The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word may come from the “British dialect kist (northern form of chest) or its German cognate Kiste ‘chest, box,” and the connection to “buttocks” may be via the “pickpocket slang sense of ‘rear trouser pocket’ (1930s).”
prat
“Topping a poke: If the wallet is hidden in a rear pocket, the pickpocket pushes it up from the bottom of the prat until it is visible, then either ‘pinches,’ ‘forks,’ or ‘spears’ it.”
“Know How They Do It So You’re Not ‘Dipped,‘” The News and Courier, September 7, 1987
Prat is another word for “buttocks,” originating in the 1560s as criminal slang. Around 1914 the word entered U.S. criminal slang as “hip pocket,” and around 1968, in British slang as “contemptible person.”
Prat-digging is “the action of stealing for a hip pocket,” says the OED.
smart aleck
“This reminds us of the time a smart-aleck friend told us the word ‘gullible’ wasn’t in the dictionary.”
James Taranto, “Blago-What? Never Heard of Him,” The Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2008
Smart aleck (which is sometimes hyphenated) refers to “a person regarded as obnoxiously self-assertive,” or “an impudent person.” The word may come from Aleck Hoag, a “19th-century American confidence man and thief.”
According to Wordorigins, “Hoag and his wife Melinda operated several confidence games where Melinda would pose as a prostitute and Aleck would rob the johns of their valuables.” Hoag would then pay off police to escape arrest.
velociraptor
“At about this time last year I wrote a column on Mike Novacek, whom I believed was the American Museum of Natural History’s chief dinosaur hunter, expert, velociraptor whisperer—whatever the term of art is for the big buana, the institution’s primo paleontologist.”
Ralph Gardner Jr., “The Coolest Dude Alive,” The Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2011
A velociraptor is “a small active carnivore that probably fed on protoceratops; possibly related more closely to birds than to other dinosaurs.” The word originated around 1924, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, and comes from the Latin velox, “swift,” plus raptor, “robber.”
The oviraptor, another type of dinosaur, comes from the Latin for “egg thief,” due to “the fact that the first fossil specimen was discovered atop a pile of what were thought to be Protoceratops eggs.” However, it was found that “the eggs in question probably belonged to Oviraptor itself, and that the specimen was actually brooding its eggs.”
Can’t get enough? Check out our post on Breaking Bad words, Drugs, Thieves, and Special Sauce, and these lists: A Swell Mob, A Whiz Mob, and The Grifters.
[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Orange County Archives]
Welcome to Word Soup Wednesday, in which we bring you our favorite strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words from sitcoms, dramas, news shows, and just about anything else on TV.
BOGO
Virginia: “I’ll also be using this 20% off store coupon, which I will then combine with a BOGO.”
“The Last Christmas,” Raising Hope, December 11, 2012
BOGO is an acronym that stands for “buy one get one (free).” A synonym is twofer, “a coupon offering two items, especially tickets for a play, for the price of one.”
cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust
Jon Stewart: “Ladies and gentlemen, the fiscal cliff! It’s the subject of tonight’s cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust, our nation’s totally solvable budget problem.”
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, November 29, 2012
Cliffpocalypsemageddonacaust is blend of cliff of fiscal cliff, apocalypse, armageddon, and holocaust. For more end-of-the-world words, check out Arnold Zwicky’s apocalypse posts.
An example of champlevé
[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by John Hritz]
champlevé
Appraiser: “And while I’m on that subject, I want to point out that this is not cloisonné, as a lot of people call it, this is champlevé.”
“Corpus Christi, Texas,” Antiques Roadshow, January 14, 2013
Champlevé refers to enamelware which has “the ground originally cast with depressions, or engraved or cut out, or lowered.” According to the Antiques Roadshow appraiser, to create champlevé, artisans “scooped the brass hollow and melted the enamel into the hollow,” as opposed to to cloisonné, “where they build up the channels and then melt the enamel down into that.”
This word is French in origin, coming from champ, “field,” and levé, “raised.”
Special thanks to @RoadshowPBS for their help with this word.
coddle
Anthony Bourdain: “What is coddle?”
Guide: “It’s like a peasant food, the leftovers, things like bacon and potato and sausage. It’s pretty much mixed it all together in a stew.”
“Dublin,” The Layover, January 7, 2013
Coddle is “an Irish dish consisting of layers of roughly sliced pork sausages and rashers (thinly sliced, somewhat fatty back bacon) with sliced potatoes and onions.” The name comes from the verb meaning of coddle, “to boil gently; seethe; stew, as fruit.”
disco nap
Gloria [who was falling asleep at dinner]: “Just a little disco nap.”
“New Year’s Eve,” Modern Family, January 9, 2012
A disco nap is “a nap you take before going to a party or going out dancing.” We couldn’t find the origin of disco nap. If anyone has any information, let us know!
ghillie suit
Stephen Colbert: “I’m getting ready for that dark tomorrow when jack-booted government thugs come for our guns. That’s where this ghillie suit comes in.”
The Colbert Report, January 15, 2013
A ghillie suit is “a type of overall covered in torn cloth sheds, used as camouflage by hunters and military snipers.” Ghillie comes from the Scottish gille, “servant” or a “lad.”
The Green Fairy
[Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 by James Vaughn]
green fairy
Nick: “That is not creme de menthe. That is the green fairy right there.”
Angie: “It’s absinthe.”
“Cabin,” New Girl, January 8, 2013
Absinthe is nicknamed the green fairy because of its “opaline-green color” and the hallucinations that result from excessive use. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, green fairy is a translation from the French fée verte.
lion’s head
Anthony Bourdain: “Or Mandarin lion’s head with brown sauce, which is not lion by the way. They’re giant pork meatballs.”
“Atlanta,” The Layover, January 14, 2013
Lion’s head is a direct translation from the Chinese, shi zi tou, and is named for the food’s resemblance to “the head of the lion and the cabbage (or other vegetables), which is supposed to resemble the lion’s mane.”
peameal bacon
Anthony Bourdain: “What is peameal [bacon]?”
Guide: “Basically pork loin that’s been rolled in cornmeal.”
“Toronto,” The Layover, December 17, 2012
Peameal bacon originated in Canada. The name comes from “the historic practice of rolling the cured and trimmed boneless loin in dried and ground yellow peas, originally for preservation reasons,” but now is “rolled in ground yellow cornmeal.”
souse
Anthony Bourdain: “And souse, something any chef would be proud to have on the menu, especially this good.”
“Atlanta,” The Layover, January 14, 2013
Souse refers to “something kept or steeped in pickle; especially, the head, ears, and feet of swine pickled.” The word comes from the Old French souz, sous, “pickled meat.”
stackable
Virginia: “I have half off from the manufacturer, which is stackable.”
Barney: “That means she can combine them with other coupons.”
“The Last Christmas,” Raising Hope, December 11, 2012
Stackable is coupon lingo, which also includes blinkie, a type of coupon distributed by a machine that blinks a light to catch shoppers’ attention; catalina, a coupon that’s printed with the shopper’s receipt, named for the company that makes the coupons; and peelie, a peel-off coupon.
Last week was National Letter Writing Week, and we celebrated by asking you to write, in one tweet, a letter from your future self. The message could be from the near future, the far future, serious, or funny. Here are our favorites:
Thanks to all the future-letter writers!
This week we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming – tweet any word of the day from this week in a sentence demonstrating the word’s meaning, and you may appear on our blog.
Happy twooshing!
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 were saddened by the recent passing of Michael Cronan, a graphic designer and marketing executive who was behind the naming of TiVo and the Kindle. We had the pleasure of interviewing Michael and his wife and business partner, Karin Hibma, back in November. We will miss him.
In words of the year news, Lynneguist’s US to UK word of the year was wonk, “one who studies an issue or a topic thoroughly or excessively,” while her UK to US choice was bollocks, “which has a good AmE equivalent in bullshit.”
Word Spy picked nomophobia, “the fear of being without your mobile phone or without a cellular signal,” and for neologism of the year, Grexit, “the exit of Greece from the eurozone.”
Meng, by Xin Mei
Arika Okrent rounded up eight words of the year from other countries, including meng, “dream,” the Chinese character of the year. Geoffrey Nunberg decoded the political buzzwords of 2012 while Erin McKean blogged about her Wall Street Journal also-ran words and we selected our favorite words from TV.
Jen Doll counted us down to the big moment: the American Dialect Society’s word of the year, which was (drumroll please) hashtag. Or #hashtag we should say. Color Robert Lane Greene #unimpressed. For a great roundup of words of 2012, check out Alice Northover’s post at the OUP blog.
In more “of the year” news, The Atlantic gave us the best and worst trend stories and the great book scandals of 2012. The Week told us the most hilarious New York Times’ corrections. Grammar Girl shared her favorite language stories, as did we.
We rang in the New Year with Fritinancy’s word of the week, pre-drinking, “chugging cheap alcoholic drinks before heading out to a bar, club, or sporting event,” and John McIntyre’s different words for drunk. Meanwhile, Jen Doll looked ahead with words to banish in 2013.
The New York Times talked about the Holy Grail of etymology, the whole nine yards, while Lucy Ferriss discussed some other inflation-prone cliches. Ben Zimmer celebrated 200 years of Uncle Sam and taught us how to talk like a doomsday prepper. Meanwhile, we had some fun with our own apocalypse words.
At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Stan Carey explained nominalisation and zombification and told us to try to (or is it and?) get over it. At Language Log, Victor Mair tackled iPhone ideography depicting the plot of Les Miserables, and Mark Liberman considered the malapropism, shunned their noses at us; the unclear shooting dead people; and grammar on Reddit.
In words of the week, Erin McKean noted never events, “the kind of mistake that should never happen in medicine”; missing fifth, “the continuing exodus of prime-age males from the labor force”; and flip, “a mixture of beer and spirit sweetened with sugar and heated with a hot iron.”
Word Spy spotted success theater, “posting images and stories designed to make others believe you are more successful than you really are”; AI-pocalypse, “a disaster caused by an advanced artificial intelligence”; and craftivism, “the use of crafts such as knitting to further political, social, or other activist causes.” Fritinancy looked at said-bookism, “a verb used in place of “said” – almost always a needless distraction.”
Jonathan Green walked us through some dog slang while Oz Worders swam with shark terminology. Sesquiotica introduced his Word Taster’s Companion. The Dialect Blog examined the spread of a slur; where “the South” begins; Piers Morgan’s “hoity toity” accent; and that’s what she said!
This week we learned the relationship between dialect and identity, and when Americans stopped sounding British. We learned how to create a fake author Twitter account; about the worst publisher of all time; how advertising agencies get their names; and some weird baby name laws. We got a foreign language lesson with these emotions for which there are no English words, and these 10 non-English faux pas. We also found out how to talk like Gollum.
We loved these definitions of love, this interview with Grammar Hulk, and these Batman words. We drooled over this diner’s dictionary and are currently obsessed with this list of 100 best lists of all time.
That’s it for this week!
“Let me be clear; this is going to suck.”
Those are usually the first words out of the mouth of today’s interviewee, Tate Linden, the latest in our series on the art of naming, when he discusses what working with his firm is like. He’s been heading up Stokefire, a strategic branding and advertising firm in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, since 2005. All things considered, he seems to be doing pretty well.
In an industry where fun times, team building, and corporate retreats are the norm, Linden’s approach to developing names and brands tends to raise eyebrows and voices. With an education in philosophy and classical music performance from UCLA and a background in Fortune 500 product management, you might think he’d be mild mannered.
He is not.
He’s constantly poking, prodding, and provoking. A quick scan of his @Thingnamer twitter feed or Stokefire’s blog makes this abundantly clear. He’s not afraid to stir things up or to call into question the very foundation of the industry in which he makes his living.
His Twitter bio reads, “I brand stuff. With… My… MIND.” But we’re hoping he’s not quite so succinct in our interview.
How did you get started in the naming business?
The official version of the story has me figuring out how to brand stuff while employed for a decade by various Fortune 500 firms, and then parting ways to start up my own firm to specialize in it. Unofficially, the things that made me great at branding also made me intolerable as an employee of a conglomerate.
Around 2002 I left and began freelancing, then started up Stokefire in 2005 to focus almost exclusively on the verbal aspects of branding. Today we’re no longer a pure naming agency, but we do take on projects that have naming as one component of the larger brand.
What types of customers and clients do you work with?
Early on a pulse and a bank account were the only qualifiers, and the pulse was just a ‘nice-to-have.’ Now we have a bit more leeway to engage in projects that present the most interesting and unique challenges.
I look for great organizations that may be struggling to better connect with or have an impact on their audiences. We’ve worked with organizations like Google, Motorola, Charles Schwab, Heinz, and the largest caucus of the United States Congress. A couple of the most intriguing projects we’ve taken on have been the branding and advertising of concrete in North America, and a complete overhaul of the US Department of Defense’s DARPA brand.
Oh. And there’s also a living online dictionary whose leader called us a few years ago and asked us to help her team figure out a name. The result of that project was something your readers may know: Wordnik.
How would you describe your naming process?
Pretty easily. “Painful” or “cathartic” both fit well. And I’m not stretching the truth. We put an immense amount of pressure on the name and the people and products that will be defined by it. We do this in order to ensure everything works effectively together and will stand up to the potential real world pressures to come. In my view a fun naming process is one that is likely to result in a name that serves a client well only until something goes wrong. As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” A client is better served by experiencing those blows in private and learning to respond to them than they are by the experience of being TKO’d in public.
Process? We’ve got all sorts of proprietary tools, worksheets, and tables, but so does every branding and naming pro out there. Our stages are roughly in line with what you’d see anywhere else. It’s the guiding philosophies and the way that we apply them to what we do that makes us different and potentially more effective.
As for those philosophies, the one I reference most frequently is based on a quote attributed to Gandhi. He said, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Ultimately Gandhi’s concept of happiness is the framework for all of the brands we craft. It’s not about slathering on a new coat of paint that will begin flake off the moment our team leaves. We strip organizations to the bare wood and help them display what makes them genuinely strong. When we leave there’s no questions from panicked leaders asking how to respond to something because what we’ve left them with is who they genuinely are rather than what Stokefire or their target audience wants them to be.
What are some resources that you use?
When naming, the books I pull down more than any others are my crossword dictionaries. They present words as answers to the questions a strategist might ask rather than as definitions we might not know to look for. Strangely, I’ve not migrated to the web for this resource, though I’m sure there’s something equivalent available.
When I do go online I have a few sites that draw me back time and again. There are some good reverse-lookup dictionaries, and there’s Wordnik’s ability to show how a term is currently being used, and to link to various kinds of related concepts. It’s a site I hit consistently with every project.
My best resource, though, is the network of creative professionals I’ve had the good fortune to work with over the years. Knowing that I can turn to someone like copywriter and naming pro Nancy Friedman when I need perspective or have a project that isn’t in my specialty area is invaluable. Back in the day I even relied on Wordnik’s own Erin McKean to share her lexicographical chops and entice a client to take the right path.
Living resources trump static resources almost every time, and you don’t get much more living than a person. Well, unless they’re dead.
What are some mistakes you’ve seen companies make in terms of naming?
Contrary to what I read in blog chatter and in the news, I think risk avoidance causes more problems than anything else. The number of brands that fail for lack of risk far exceeds the occasional Icarus-like ones that fail for too much of it.
The next time someone tells you that they can’t accept a name with risk, consider asking them if pouring money into a brand that no one notices and no one cares about is more or less risky than investing in one that just might have a shot.
What are some trends you’d sooner see die off?
All of them.
Back in early 2007 I spent about a week analyzing the impact of naming trends on the success of organizations. At that time the trends mostly involved prefixes like the e in eBusiness and the then revolutionary concept of personalization through the use of I, My, or You, as in iPod or YouTube.
My findings suggested that names that followed trends had only a 4% chance of being attached to a successful organization while those that avoided any identifiable trend had a success rate more than 250% higher. I knew copycat naming was a bad idea on principle, but I’d had no idea it was so strongly linked to organizational success.
I’m not suggesting that the trends themselves are causing companies to fail. I think that any organizational leadership that believes following a naming trend would be more effective than discovering a genuine way to express itself has larger problems. A copycat name is like a warning beacon to clients and investors that the organizational leadership views their product as a commodity, takes shortcuts, lacks strategic vision, and isn’t comfortable in their own skin.
Other than that, though, it’s no big deal.
Any last words?
Just that I’m honored to be included with the likes of Nancy Friedman, Anthony Shore, and the : : CRONAN : : crew; a talented group by any measure.
Also. It was mostly pain free. So, thanks Wordnik!
After our interview but before publication we learned that Michael Cronan passed away and reached out to Tate for comment.
I met Michael very briefly around 2006 and recall being awed by how his work and thinking consistently avoided trends, and even started them on more than one occasion. His passing this New Year’s Day was a blow to the identity industry, and indescribably difficult for the friends, family and peers that battled cancer alongside him for the past five years.
If Gandhi was right and happiness truly is “when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony,” then from my vantage point, even considering his more recent health battle, Michael looks to have led a wonderfully happy life.
To my way of thinking there’s no higher praise a man can earn.
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.