Category Archives: Etymology

Whistle while you work it

1937, SNOW WHITE & THE SEVEN DWARFS

“All the world is perpetually at work, only that our poor mortal lives should pass the happier for that little time we possess them.” — Temple

Most of us work. It’s what we do for much of our waking lives. In fact, the notion of work is so embedded in our psyche that the very word pervades all aspects of our lives — even when we’re at play. The word with so many definitions (it takes up several pages of the OED) has never been confined to just its core meanings of toil, labor and employment; more than representing simply the opposite of play, it embraces countless notions of intention and activity in as many different guises. Work takes a proud place in the Oxford Dictionaries’ list of the 1,000 most frequently used words. And recently it has begun to work its way idiomatically even further and more pervasively into the lingo. But let’s start with our more traditional understanding and use of the word.

“Fodder, a wand, and burdens, are for the ass; and bread, correction, and work, for a servant.” — Ecclesiasticus 33:24

Even in its core context — that of employment — work can refer to so many of aspects of its own self, showing off its versatility before it’s even left the workplace. Continue reading →

You say soda, I say pop; you say soda water, I say club soda; what the fizz?

soda

If an Englishman asks you for a soda, he most probably means, specifically, soda water, or what his friend across the ocean might refer to as a club soda. But an American asking for a soda likely has another idea in mind: on these shores it usually indicates any sort of carbonated soft drink, whether it be a Pepsi, ginger ale, 7-Up, or — as the Brits might generalize — a “fizzy drink”.

But what’s the difference between British soda water and “fizzy water” (as the Brits would say when I was younger — now more often and elegantly referred to as “sparkling water”) or “seltzer”, as the Americans usually name their fizzy H2O?

In the UK, soda water contains bicarbonate of soda, which gives it a specific flavor and differentiates it from plain carbonated or sparkling water (or seltzer), making it popular as a mixer in drinks like whisky and soda or Campari soda.

In the U.S., carbonated water was known as soda water until the Second World War because of the sodium salts added as flavoring and acidity regulators to mimic the taste of natural mineral water. In the ’30s, during the Depression, it was sometimes called “two cents plain”, being the cheapest drink offered at soda fountains. The names sparkling water and seltzer water flourished during the ’50s, with the latter being a classic “genericized brand name”, much like the modern generic kleenex, hoover and biro, which all originated as trademarked names. Seltzer derives from the German town Selters, renowned for its mineral springs from which naturally carbonated water has been commercially bottled and shipped since the 18th century. Seltzer water doesn’t usually have added salts, whereas the American club soda (another brand-name-turned-generic) still often retains sodium salts, making it more akin to the British soda water. However, seltzer  or seltzer water isn’t used — or even really known — in Britain and most Commonwealth countries.

Nowadays in the U.S., soda has come to mean any type of sweetened, carbonated soft drink (with soft drinks so called — across standard English — to contrast them with “hard” or alcoholic drinks). The Online Etymology Dictionary gives this potted history of the word. “Soda meaning “carbonated water” is first recorded 1834, a shortening of soda water (1802) ‘water into which carbonic acid has been forced under pressure.’ ‘It rarely contains soda in any form; but the name originally applied when sodium carbonate was contained in it has been retained’ [Century Dictionary, 1902]. Since 19c. typically flavored and sweetened with syrups. First record of soda pop is from 1863, and the most frequent modern use of the word is as a shortening of this or other terms for ‘flavored, sweetened soda water’.”

However, just to confuse matters even further: the name for fizzy soft drinks in the States varies by region. Soda and pop are the two most common American names for this broad category of beverage, but there are others, including soda pop, the British fizzy drink, and even coke, which is used generically in the South. And the word Americans choose to name their fizzies is most associated with their geographic origin or location, rather than their age, race or socio-economic status. Go fizz.

Soda is most common on the East and West Coasts, as well as in St. Louis and Hawaii. Pop tends to be the name of choice in the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest and Mountain West. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, pop meaning “flavored carbonated beverage” dates back to 1812, and was onomatopoeic in its origin. Robert Southey in a letter of that year described his “new manufactory of a nectar, between soda-water and ginger-beer, and called pop, because ‘pop goes the cork’ when it is drawn.” In the South, coke (or cola) is used generically to name any type of soft drink—not just colas (for which coke is a common nickname) or their most famous brand representatives, Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The reason for this is quite possibly that Coca-Cola’s headquarters are located in Atlanta, Georgia, a southern state. Coke is also heard generically in neighbors of the southern states, such as New Mexico and Southern Indiana, as well as in specific areas like Trinity County, California and White Pine County in Nevada.

Popvssoda.com has published a map of the U.S. showing the generic names for soft drinks by county.

softdrinks

If you want further facts on this fabulously fizzy phenomenon, here’s Wikipedia‘s list of brand names of soft drinks listed by their country of origin. Aren’t you dying to know what exactly Pritty, Juizee Pop, Pschitt, Battery and Semtex (sic) are — and where they are drunk?

Catching zeds, and the language of slumber

zzz

 

When and why did we start using zzz to refer to sleep? How long have we been catching zeds (or what Yanks call zees), and since when have we been getting our 40 winks?

The OED lists one definition of z (“usually repeated”) as “used to represent the sound of buzzing or snoring”, and it was indeed a case of onomatopoeia that first linked the letter z — or multiple zzzzzzs —  to sleeping by approximating the sound of snoring. The American Dialect Society’s Dialect Notes, published in 1918, lists “z-z-z” as “the sound of whispering or snoring, and 1919’s Boy’s Life, the Boy Scouts’ yearbook, gives “Z-z-z-z-z-z-z” as the title of a joke about that most supersonic of sleep sounds. This onomatopoeic use of z’s — which later came to signify, more generally, the state of slumber — was popularized by its use in early comic strips and comic books, for example in Schulz’s “Peanuts” cartoon series. In fact, a single Z in a speech bubble is enough nowadays to indicate that a character is asleep, and this is no longer confined to just the English language: as Wikipedia explains, “Originally, the resemblance between the ‘z’ sound and that of a snore seemed exclusive to the English language, but the spread of American comics has made it a frequent feature in other countries. An exception to this is in Japanese manga, where the usual symbol for sleep is a large bubble coming out of the character’s nose.”

And why “40 winks”, meaning a short sleep or nap? It’s not clear where or when the actual expression originated, but the number 40 is known to have been used historically to signify a great or indefinite number — hence the Biblical “40 days and 40 nights” and other numerous references; as argued in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia,” edited by James Orr in 1915, “it may have originated, partly at any rate, in the idea that 40 years constituted a generation or the period at the end of which a man attains maturity, an idea common, it would seem, to the Greeks, the Israelites, and the Arabs.” Add the informal meaning of wink as a very short period of time, especially in the context of lack of sleep (as in, not being able to “sleep a wink”), and suddenly “40 winks” makes perfect sense. The Online Etymology Dictionary attests the expression “40 winks” from 1821, and speculates that its early use might have been associated with, and perhaps coined by, the eccentric English lifestyle reformer William Kitchiner M.D. (1775-1827).

Other colloquial words and expressions for slumber are cat nap (noun), to doze or doze off (verb), to nod off (v), shut-eye (n), snooze (v & n), and going bo-bos. Cockney Rhyming Slang gives us soot (Sooty and Sweep = sleep) and Bo Peep — the latter possibly giving rise to the suggestion, cooed persuasively and desperately to British babies, of “going bo-bos”…

“Goodnight, sleep tight, and don’t let the bed-bugs bite.” Tight in this context refers not, as some contend, to ropes tied tautly across early bedsteads, but instead to the adverb tightly, defined by the OED as “soundly, properly, well; effectively”; indeed, that dictionary’s first definition of tight itself is “soundly, roundly; = TIGHTLY 1. Now chiefly in colloq. phr. (good night) sleep tight, a conventional (rhyming) formula used when parting for the night or at bedtime.” The bed-bugs can probably speak for themselves.

To Sleep
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the “Amen,” ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,
Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.
— by John Keats

TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (Dec 27)

selfie

As 2013 draws to a close, we’ve got lots to celebrate about it — like the use of the word selfie, and other words of the year.  The Russians haven’t just banned discussions about homosexuality: they also won’t let anyone mention obscene terms for genitals or women of easy virtue. The Church gave a nod to Mexican languages; the Finns don’t like the way iPhone is spelled. And we learned some important new facts: like the words for horse-eating, 3-letter extensions to words in Scrabble, and French kissing in France …

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What do selfies, Suarez and Seamus Heaney have in common? The same as Bieber, bitcoins and Breaking Bad . . . They all appeared in “top words of 2013” lists. “PRIVACY. Selfie. Geek. Science. Four dictionary publishers each selected one of those words as its word of the year for 2013. But it’s tough to catalog the preoccupations of the year in a single word. There were many flying around that seemed to capture a moment, an emotion, a thought, a new way of doing or describing things, or the larger zeitgeist. Some were new, some not so new, but they all seemed to say something about the times. Here are a few …”, the New York Times reported …

Time magazine looked more closely into Oxford’s actual word of the year, which is captured — literally — in James Franco’s pic above …

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The Russian media has been given four categories of swear words that must never appear either in articles or in readers’ comments, in print or online. Newspapers and websites that fail to comply could lose their licenses. The list of unprintable words was compiled by Roskomnadzor (Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications) and among the categories of banned words are “obscene terms for a woman of easy virtue”. RT has the story.

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Mexico’s indigenous languages get a nod from the Church. The BBC has the story …

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According to Cult of Mac, Finland’s linguistic authorities — the Institute for the Languages of Finland, which rules on correct spellings, loan words and usages as the Finnish, Swedish, Romani and Sami languages develop — has decreed that the correct Finnish usage of iPhone is not iPhone, but rather Iphone or I-phone. You tell ’em, Finland.

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Finally, thanks to the BBC’s list of “100 things we didn’t know last year”, we now know 22 fun facts about words and language that we didn’t know in 2012:

Horse-eating is called Hippophagy.

“Russian flu” got its name because of the Cold War rather than because it originated in Russia.

William is the surname that has decreased the most since 1901.

Haribos are so-named because of founder Hans Riegel and his hometown Bonn.

South Africa was included in the BRICS as it made for a better acronym than Nigeria.

“Lucifer” and “.” (full stop) are banned baby names in New Zealand.

Birmingham City Council blocks the word “commie” from incoming email.

Using “don’t” and “won’t” correctly in online dating messages boosts response rates by more than a third.

The French call a walkie-talkie a talkie-walkie.

Until recently the US Navy had a requirement that all official messages be sent in capital letters.

“God’s bones” was the sweariest expression in medieval times.

The French had no official word for French kissing… until now. It’s “galocher”.

Ampersand was once an actual letter which followed the letter Z in the Latin alphabet.

The first recorded incorrect use of the word “literally” was in 1769.

Polyamorous people have invented a word to indicate the opposite feeling of jealousy – compersion.

Glaswegians are starting to sound like Cockneys because of EastEnders.

In Scrabble, a Benjamin is a three-letter extension to the front of a five-letter word.

The word “get” went out of fashion in books between 1940 and the 1960s.

Amazon’s original name was to be Relentless – and the URL relentless.com still redirects to the company website.

John Wayne coined the phrase “the Big C” to avoid naming cancer.

Americans pronounce gifs as “jifs”.

A long-term lover is known as a “small house” in Zimbabwe.

Snowclones are the (not so) new cliches

downisnewup

Got snowclones? You might not have heard of a snowclone, but chances are you’ve used one recently, perhaps without even knowing it. “50 is the new 30” or “sitting is the new smoking” you might have suggested, feeling a little bit clever. “Discretion is my middle name”, you could have said reassuringly. “Thanks be to Godot” was how a friend signed off wittily in the 48 hours before Thanksgiving…

A snowclone, according to the person who first identified and named it, is “a type of cliché or formulaic expression (such as ‘Much ado about X,’ ‘X is the new Y,’ or ‘X leads the league in Y’) that ‘can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers’.” About a decade ago, linguists began collecting these formulaic or pattern-based clichés on Language Log, a popular linguistics blog. In January 2004, soon after linguist Geoffrey Pullum identified this particular type of phraseology and invited a discussion about it on the blog, economist Glen Whitman coined the term snowclone, it was endorsed by Pullum, and it’s been used ever since by linguists, language commentators,  journalists and authors, all happy to have a name for this quirky practice. Yes, Virginia, there is a name for such clichés. In a piece on The Economist‘s Johnson blog, “G.L.” described his (or her) “Eureka” moment on discovering the concept of the snowclone: “It is a phenomenon so pervasive and mundane that it never occurs to you to give it a name, but once you discover that there is one, you wonder how you managed without it.”

But even with its spanking new name and identity, the snowclone has had a pretty bad rap. Just a few days after it was christened, the linguist Mark Liberman — using a snowclone to make his point — pronounced on the same blog that “snowclones are the dark matter of journalism”. Granted, they can be hard worn and hackneyed, but give them a break: they have been in use for a very long time — more than a hundred years, in fact.

“X is my middle name” is widely thought to be one of the oldest snowclones on record. As Glossographia pointed out, “the entry for middle name in the OED has been relatively recently updated, and includes numerous instances of this figurative use going back to 1905, where the New York Journal has “For retiring you’re—well, that’s your middle name” and other quotations going up to the present. I did a little further searching around and was able to find an earlier one going back to 1902, in the Manitoba Free Press, quoting a correspondent from Dawson, Yukon Territory …: ‘Fight is my middle name’.”

The 21st century has seen something of an explosion of snowclonology, as tropes and memes proliferate online, and our all-pervasive culture of sampling, imitating and riffing on retro or just pre-existing material becomes reflected in the snappy repartee, referential song lyrics and generally clever discourse of our time. When Radiohead sang “Down Is the New Up” in 2008, they were jumping on a bandwagon by using one of the more common modern examples of a snowclone cliché. The origins of “X is the new Y” are a little murky, although it’s understood that it started life as “X is the new black” (a twist on the original fashion motto “pink is the new black”), and then became more general as time went on. Language Log has explored this particular snowclone’s history, noting that its pink origin is commonly but mistakenly attributed to Gloria Vanderbilt in the ’60s. Barry Popik tracked down some early examples of “X is the new Y” published in newspapers of 1979: “colors are the new neutrals” (in the New York Times) and “pearl grey is the new neutral” (in the Chicago Tribune). Now broadened to way more than just a matter of color, X is the new Y is the new oldest cliché in the book.

The Snowclones Database presents a good read about particular phrases —  especially the ones with their origins in much earlier times — that are unambiguously legitimately snowclones. However, as the snowclone has invaded our colloquial lingo so aggressively, its definition has started to loosen and sag; new, sometimes iffy snowclones are creeping into our vernacular every day, making it more difficult for linguists and word-nerds to ‘officiate’ and decide what actually constitutes a snowclone. To be (a snowclone) or not to be (a snowclone)? That is the snowclone question…

Jack Schmidt’s wiki page of snowclones is another good resource, especially as it identifies the origins of some classic clichés through the ages. But the page fell victim to this snowballing increase in snowclonology and snowclonological debate, and it ended up having to go on hold — publishing this rather sad disclaimer in 2008: “This page is intended to develop an encyclopedic article on the historical development of pattern based cliches. It has sometimes been in a reasonable state, but due to the faddish nature of its popularity, the article quickly spiraled out of control. As the fad fades, more reputable and scholarly sources are emerging to sort out the noise from the culture.”

Let’s hope the snowclone can emerge unscathed from its overblown popularity and exploitation. It came, it saw, it snowcloned.

Meanwhile, here are some classic examples from Jack Schmidt’s page*, grouped chronologically according to when the originating phrase was first uttered in its virgin form.

Pre-16th century:

“I came, I saw, I Xed” — from Julius Caesar “Veni, vidicon, vici” (Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered”)

16th century:

“To X or not to X” — from “To be or not to be” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

* “A(n) X! A(n) X! My kingdom for a(n) X!” — from “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” from Shakespeare’s Richard III

17th century:

“I X, therefore I Y” — from Descartes “I think, therefore I am”

19th century:

“Yes, X (often Virginia), there is a Y” — from  “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Clause”, from an editorial by Francis Pharcellus Church in the New York Sun (1897)

1910s:

“The X to end all Xs” — from a popular saying that the first world war was “the war to end all wars”

1950s:

“Have X, will Y (often travel)” — from “Have Gun — Will Travel”, a late ’50s TV western

1990s:

“Got X?” — from the Got Milk? ads produced for the California Milk Processor Board

“You had me at X” — from “You had me at hello”, from the film Jerry Maguire

* all but one: I added “An X! An X! My kingdom for an X!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

The heart of an affair

affair

“An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.” — John Updike

It’s a scandalous affair that’s taking place at the Old Bailey right now: the high-profile phone-hacking trial of disgraced News of the World editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. And in a recent twist to the red-topped drama (red-topped not just because of the tabloid media giving it round-the-clock coverage but also with its flame-haired leading lady), there’s now another sort of affair that has come to light at the heart of this real-life soap opera: an extra-marital one that was apparently conducted between the defendants during the crucial period under investigation. But is “extra-marital affair” actually a tautology? Isn’t an affair — by definition — a romance between two people at least one of whom is married to another? What makes an affair an affair?

A quick anecdotal survey among my friends suggests that different people have very different notions of what constitutes an affair. Some say it has to be extra-marital. But what if it’s an open marriage, or if the spouses are separated or otherwise feeling nonplussed about their partner’s roaming behavior? Does the cheating philanderer deserve to have his nth lousy blatant fling named so eloquently? Others say it has to be illicit or secret — but not necessarily because of marital guilt. Lovers hiding their assignations because of an inordinately large or indecent age-gap might be accused of conducting an affair, even if both are single. Must a dalliance be fleeting or doomed to be called an affair? The man long estranged from his wife with a permanent live-in lover and children is surely not to be accused of having one. Are affairs sexual by definition and only emotional when they’re qualified as a “love affair”? It does seem that the word’s defining criteria are questionable and more than a few: does a relationship need to be intense and passionate, short-lived or temporary, sexual rather than emotional, or simply adulterous, in order to qualify for this poetic label?

The OED goes for the marriage clause, as well as the element of transience, defining an affair as “a (usually temporary) sexual relationship outside marriage; a love affair”. Cambridge Dictionaries prefer to focus on its illicit nature, describing it as “a sexual relationship, usually a secret one”. Longman likes to have both in place, ie. “a secret sexual relationship between two people, when at least one of them is married to someone else”. Merriam-Webster (online) requires only concealment: “a secret sexual relationship between two people”, whereas Wiktionary focuses on the defying of vows: “an adulterous relationship (from affaire de cœur)”, as does American Heritage: “a sexual relationship between two people who are not married to each other”. All seem to agree that an affair is of the body, and not necessarily of the heart, mind or soul.

A look at the word’s etymology and early usage might help shed a little light on the heart of its meaning. As the Online Etymology Dictionary explains: “c.1300, “what one has to do,” from Anglo-French afere, Old French afaire (12c., Modern French affaire) “business, event; rank, estate,” from the infinitive phrase à faire “to do,” from Latin ad “to”+ facere “to do, make”. A Northern word originally, brought into general use and given a French spelling by Caxton (15c.). General sense of “vague proceedings” (in romance, war, etc.) first attested 1702. Meaning “an affair of the heart; a passionate episode” is from French affaire de coeur (itself attested in English from 1809); to have an affair with someone in this sense is by 1726, earlier have an affair of love: ‘Tis manifeſtly contrary to the Law of Nature, that one Woman ſhould cohabit or have an Affair of Love with more than one Man at the ſame time. [“Pufendorf’s Law of Nature and Nations,” transl. J. Spavan, London, 1716].”

So, in the early 18th century, having relations with more than one person at the same time seemed to constitute having affairs, and they were passionate affairs of the heart — at least when described, perhaps modestly, in print…

Reporting earlier this week on the tawdry Brooks-Coulson entanglement, the New York Times quoted Joan Bakewell, the former BBC presenter who famously had an affair with Harold Pinter in the swinging 60s, as she wondered how such illicit relationships can still be managed in our era of constant connectivity. She asked “how affairs work when you’re constantly pestered with cell calls and emails with “spouses and partners asking: ‘Where are you?” You know, it’s impossible. I don’t know how they manage it.'”

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TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (Nov 8)

dude

Words and language in the news during the week ending Nov 8. Scrabble, dudes and dementia are on the docket. Plus an epic and epically misunderstood poem.

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The Independent reported that one of the most famous sentences in the history of the English language has actually been misinterpreted for a couple of centuries. “The accepted definition of the opening line of the epic poem … has been subtly wide of the mark.”

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The etymology of dude: Slate finally puts this enduring mystery to rest, citing a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education that claims that “a massive, decade-long “dude” research project has finally yielded convincing results.”

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Want to know what words came up on the board of the final game of the British National Scrabble Championships? Swarf, enew and fy were some of the more obscure ones, and not all the weird words even have an entry in the OED. The BBC reported.

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If you’re nervous about getting dementia, learn a new language. As SmartBrief reported, a study in the journal Neurology found that the onset of many symptoms of dementia can be delayed by knowing more than one language. And this backs up the findings of an earlier Canadian study. Gehen und eine Sprache lernen!

 

TGIF: That Gerund Is Funky (Oct 25)

tgif

 

That Gerund Is Funky: Words and language in the news during the week ending Oct 25.

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NPR took us on a linguistic journey through the word glitch … What is a glitch, anyway? Meaning everything from a catastrophe to a mere flaw, the word that began in the groovy 60s to describe uneventful snafus in space might now spell peril for Obama’s affordable healthcare act.

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“School Makes Parents Sign Contracts Promising Students Won’t Twerk or Grind at Homecoming Dance.” Yes, that’s a real headline in Time magazine. “It’s hard enough to explain twerking to parents. Now Maryland high schoolers have to explain twerking contracts.” The straight-faced magazine added this caption to the article’s accompanying photograph: “People who twerk or grind will get judgy looks.” Judgy?

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The Guardian‘s David Marsh called for the appointment of a Language Czar, to outlaw ugly business and political lingo, as reported in Prospect magazine. March also argued, in the New Statesman and the New Republic, that “the golden age of grammar is a myth. … Just think about the gay times we had in the old days, when spam was something that went into fritters and you kept your mouse in a cage. The belief that all change is for the worse is invariably accompanied by the conviction that standards of literacy are falling. Such fears date from at least the 18th century.”

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Huffington Post identified 9 words or phrases in everyday use that have racist or prejudiced origins (or murky historical pasts). Who knew that “uppity” once had more repugnant connotations?

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An appalled Daniel E. Jones wrote a letter to the editor of Baton Rouge’s The Advocate, complaining that the paper’s bad grammar (on the first two pages of its Metro section) seems to reflect a lack of education. Joan E. McDonald of Lethbridge up in Canada directed a similar complaint at her local paper, the Lethbridge Herald. But here’s a juicy one: the Washington Post must have hung its head in shame when it received this letter from one of its readers, complaining about an especially egregious ungrammatical utterance — by a penguin no less — in one of the paper’s recent editions. “’It’s me and my wife’s 20th anniversary.’ Listen, kids may be reading this stuff,” warned Jack Fretwell from Reston.

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It’s OK to retweet, but not to copy and paste on Twitter. CNBC Africa has been accused of Twitter plagiarism by its competitor, Business Day Television (BDTV), after it admittedly lifted messages posted by BDTV during South African finance minister Pravin Gordhan’s midterm budget speech. “As far as I know, publishing someone’s content as your own is plagiarism. Or does the Twittersphere have a different set of rules?,” BDTV boss Vernon Matzopolous wrote, according to TechCentral.

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When is it OK to use incorrect punctuation? When you’re listing something on eBay, explained Angus Kidman on LifeHacker. “When you’re listing items for sale on eBay and the product name includes punctuation, you should not include it in the headline. The reason? Most people find stuff to buy by searching rather than browsing, and most people are too bloody stupid to use correct punctuation. They will type the punctuation-free version. If you want to top those search results, you have to use the incorrect rendering.” Perhaps this is wise advice for anyone posting a searchable internet listing?

Nylon: the fabric of two cities, or an acronym?

nylon

Nylon was invented in the mid-1930s by Wallace Carothers, the director of DuPont’s research center. The synthetic fiber comprising three basic ingredients was called “Nylon 66” by the chemists who brought it into the world because two of its components — adipic acid and hexamethylene diamine — each contain 6 carbon atoms per molecule. However, Carothers named it simply “nylon”, and that was the name by which it was patented in 1935. The durable fabric was fantastically successful when it started being sold soon afterwards, in 1939, most usefully and famously as a replacement for silk in hosiery. Nylon stockings were introduced that year at New York’s World Fair, and by the following year the plural of the word, “nylons”, was synonymous with women’s stockings. The versatile fiber/fabric was used to make everything from toothbrush bristles, fishing lines and surgical sutures to parachutes during the second world war, and later seatbelts and tents. It’s now the second most used synthetic fiber in the U.S.

But why “nylon”? There are two spurious theories about how it got its name. First: it’s been suggested that New York’s initials (NY) and the first three letters of London were behind the famous fabric, representing the two cities where the product started its life. However, London wasn’t involved in any way with the launch of nylon: that all happened on the other side of the Atlantic …

The other more outlandish theory is that it was an acronym for “Now You’ve Lost, Old Nippon” (or, alternatively, “Now You Look Out, Nippon”), supposedly referring to Japan’s apparent loss of the U.S. market for its silk exports as a result of this new synthetic product.

Neither of these suggestions holds water, and nylon’s real etymology is disappointingly more prosaic. As Wikipedia explains succinctly, “in 1940, John W. Eckelberry of DuPont stated that the letters “nyl” were arbitrary and the “on” was copied from the suffixes of other fibers such as cotton and rayon. A later publication by DuPont (Context, vol. 7, no. 2, 1978) explained that the name was originally intended to be “No-Run” (“run” meaning “unravel”), but was modified to avoid making such an unjustified claim. Since the product was not really run-proof, the vowels were swapped to produce “nuron”, which was changed to “nilon” “to make it sound less like a nerve tonic”. For clarity in pronunciation, the “i” was changed to “y”.”

 

YOLO: from the sublimely stupid to the ridiculous

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“Should i work on my essay or watch Orange is the New Black? YOLO — Netflix!” Uh-huh: that’s, like, the new yolo. Not the “woah: this is crazy stupid, but hell I’m gonna do it anyway” yolo of yore.

YOLO [pronounced “YO-low”] is an acronym for “you only live once”. If you’re over 25, it’s probably so under your radar — and, well, beneath your interest too. If you’re young enough not to remember the dial phone, you might have spent some time arguing or thinking about what exactly YOLO means and where its subtle, nuanced evolution has taken it, and whether it’s totally uncool to use it any more, unless everyone gets exactly how and why you’re still punctuating your sentences with it.

According to Urban Dictionary, YOLO is (or at least started out as) “carpe diem for stupid people”. It gives as an example “Dude 1: i’m gonna go smoke poison ivy and see if my lungs get a rash. yolo!” Put another way, it’s “the dumbass’s excuse for something stupid that they did.”

Seize the day! was the sentiment of the acronym slogan that might have been conceived as far back as 2006 when The Strokes sang “You Only Live Once”, but first really infected the lingo of Generation Y with epidemic speed when Drake rapped “The Motto” in 2011. The new “don’t worry, be happy” of 21st-century teenage bravado, YOLO soared to Number 1 on the Twitter hashtag charts, usually accompanying tweets (as the Huffington Post wryly observed) “that should have made any responsible friend and/or Twitter follower call the cops and/or a medic.” The interjection — unlike other verbal ejaculations of its grammatical kind — tends to come at the end rather than the beginning of a sentence, or even as a stand-alone statement with its own punctuation (invariably an exclamation mark, at least in its early incarnation).

But it wasn’t always funny. Perhaps the most famous, tragic and bleakly ironic use of the word was when aspiring rapper Ervin McKinness, while driving drunk at 120 mph in September last year, tweeted “Drunk af going 120 drifting corners #FuckIt YOLO”. That was just before he crashing the car, killing himself and everyone else in it. YOLO…

By the end of 2011, teen idol Zak Efron had the reckless motto of his generation tattooed on his right hand. But less than six months later, YOLO was officially over — at least in the cool stakes.

When a prestigious New England college incorporated the once-trendy acronym into its application process earlier this year, YOLO’s street cred was already way beLOW-LOW. Making it one of six essay options on the writing section of its application form, Tufts University invited its student hopefuls to write on the topic: “What does #YOLO mean to you?” More specifically, the admissions faculty chirped earnestly: “The ancient Romans started it when they coined the phrase “Carpe diem.” Jonathan Larson proclaimed “No day but today!” and most recently, Drake explained You Only Live Once (YOLO). Have you ever seized the day? Lived like there was no tomorrow? Or perhaps you plan to shout YOLO while jumping into something in the future. What does #YOLO mean to you?”

What DOES yolo mean today? Probably not quite the same as what Drake meant when he unleashed the motto on the masses a couple of years ago — or what Tufts seemed to make of it (if only ironically): a kind of jaunty bravery. Nowadays, the gung-ho has faded to jaded. Where YOLO might once have stood in for “f**k it, let’s do it!”, it’s now grown up, and in the twilight of its short-lived existence it’s all about irony and self-mockery, with an “in the paddling pool, living dangerously, Yolo” kind of thing going on. Modern yolo-tagging pokes fun at its hip and reckless former self. Is this the symptom of a more sober generation, with the irrepressible, irresponsible folly of youth knocked out of it? Or is it more that it’s a cynical, worldly and self-referential generation who laugh willingly and easily at themselves and their own transient fads and fashions — linguistic and otherwise? They’re living as dangerously as they ever have done, but are commenting on the ride with more salty and savvy humor. Because they get it.  #YOLO.