Category Archives: Etymology

Mew or mews?

When we hear British folk talk about a mews (and yes, it is a singular noun, even though it sounds very plural), we think of a quaint cobble-stoned street lined with stable-like town houses, usually forming a quiet cul-de-sac off — and hidden away from — a larger residential street.

A recent article on Narrative.ly described an American mews that few have heard of, let alone seen, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “The Walk, as locals call it,” Narrative.ly exlains, “is a small English-style mew modeled after the streets of London and named for a romantic comedy by British playwright Louis N. Parker, set on a similar mew” [my italics]. Mew? According to all my dictionaries, singular mew means a gull, the cry of a cat, or a house for hawks. But considering it’s hard to find a real mews outside Great Britain, Americans can easily be forgiven for getting confused about the word and its usage …

OED defines mews as a British noun meaning “1. a set of stabling round an open yard or along a lane. 2) such a set of buildings converted into dwellings; a row of houses in the style of a mews [pl. (now used as sing.) of mew(2), originally referring to the royal stables on the site of hawks’ mews at Charing Cross, London].”

The OED’s second definition of mew, as referred to above and from which the modern word mews derives, is “a cage for hawks, esp. while moulting”; this dwelling for birds used for falconry was often the size of a small building — especially when it housed the king’s hawks as it did in 14th-century London. When the hawks’ mews became the royal stables in the 1530s, the name remained; today the Queen’s stables, which were moved in the early 19th century to their current site in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, are still called the “Royal Mews”.

At the end of the Industrial Revolution, before the motorcar replaced the horse-drawn carriage on England’s streets, prosperous Victorians needed dwellings for their horses and grooms that were near enough to their own homes for convenience, but sequestered enough to hide the sounds, sights and smells of the 19th-century stable from the master and his family. So wealthy urban dwellers lived in large terraced houses (or “row houses”, in American English) with stables at the rear that opened onto a small service street — or mews — on which the horses and stable-hands lived and worked.

With the advent of the motorcar, the mews lost its raison d’etre and fell into disuse; those carriage houses that weren’t demolished became commercial properties or were converted into private dwellings, which are now some of today’s most fashionable and sought-after residences on London’s property market. The previously unnamed stable-lanes took on the names of the main streets they had served, with the tag “Mews” added to distinguish between them. Look at a map of Central London today, and in the small, picturesque section of Westminster between Marylebone High Street and Portland Street you can count no fewer than ten mews named after neighboring streets: Marylebone Mews, Wimpole Mews, Beaumont Mews, Browning Mews, Mansfield Mews, Weymouth Mews, Devonshire Mews, Bentinck Mews, Queen Anne Mews, and Dean’s Mews. See if you can spot any more …

There are very few mews outside London (a Washington Mews can be found in New York’s West Village). Some fancy apartment buildings, gated housing developments and cul-de-sacs in Canada, Australia and the U.S. include “Mews” in their names to lend an air of elegance and exclusivity, but few if any of their residents can claim horses and hay-bales as their predecessors.

Spraint and fewmets

Warning: don’t read this over lunch, or any other meal. Save it for the next time you’re playing Balderdash, the Dictionary Game, or any of those parlor games involving obscure words and unlikely definitions.

An earlier post (https://glossophilia.org/?p=1375) examined terms of venery, ie. nouns of multitude used to name groups of particular animals. Now let’s take a look at words used to name the ‘output’ of particular animals. Yes, there are a few, and understandably most of the names describe certain types or categories of animal waste that have been put to good use by humans, ie. as fertilizers or sources of fuel; it stands to reason that anything that man has to use, handle, distribute, clean up or step in on a regular basis is going to get its own name eventually. (There is a claim — now widely disputed — that the Inuit have multiple words for snow, because of the Eskimos’ extensive knowledge and use of this natural product.) But a few of these animal dropping monikers are peculiar. Why would anyone ever need a word to describe the excrement of an otter, or of a leaf beetle?

Here are the names I’ve found so far; please contribute to the comments section below if you know of any others.

General, especially in wild carnivorous animals: scat
Cattle: (bulk material) dung, ordure, (as fertilizer) manure, (of grazing animals, esp. for fertilizers) tath; (individual droppings) cow pats, cowpies, meadow muffins, buffalo chips, (esp. when burned as fuel) bodewash*
Deer (and formerly other quarry animals), or hunted prey: fewmets (an old English word that describes the feces of a hunted animal by which the hunter can identify it; fewmets are the only evidence of an animal’s existence, before it has been seen itself); see also below
Otter: spraint
Seabirds or bats (in large quantity): guano
Herbivorous insects, such as caterpillars and leaf beetles: frass
Earthworms, lugworms: castings
Horses: manure, road apple
Fossils: coprolite
Dragons and other mythical creatures: fewmets

I’ve deliberately avoided the vast and sometimes colorful vocabulary devoted to human waste, since it seems a little crass for this forum. But there’s no shortage of words both formal/medical and colloquial/vulgar to describe it, and if you really feel the need to indulge your curiosity, there’s a whole web site devoted to slang names for both the product and the process: the “Poop Thesaurus” can be found at http://www.heptune.com/poopword.html.

You might also (inexplicably) want to read poetry about it: here’s a short anthology of works on this unseemly subject:
“Ode on the Commode” by Jack Butler
“Excrement” by Alan Ginsberg
“On the Rectum of Peacocks” by Gabriel Gudding
“****: An Essay on Rimbaud” by Thom Gunn
“The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers”
– Ernest Hemingway
“An Epiphany” – X.J. Kennedy
“Holy Shit” – Galway Kinnell
“The Excrement Poem” – Maxine Kumin
“Feces” – J.D. McClatchy
“Yam” – James Merrill
“I Get a Feeling” – Liam Rector
“The Dung Pile” – Peter Streckfus
“The Beautiful Bowel Movement” – John Updike

* Here is an explanation of the origins of the word bodewash on a web site about Canadian words:

http://www.billcasselman.com/canadian_food_words/manitoba_words.htm

“Bodewash” warmed many an early Manitoba settler. This term for dried buffalo dung used as a fuel was borrowed from the Canadian French of fur trappers where it appeared-at first humorously-as bois de vache ‘cow wood’ and also in the more refined phrase bois des prairies ‘prairie wood.’ Buffalo chips or cow chips were both called bodewash, which is a direct Englishing of bois de vache that shows up in the rural Manitoba folk saying “squished flatter ‘n a bodewash chip.” Anyone who could find the chips of buffalo dung used them, since there was little wood available. Dried cattle burns with a heavy odour, while buffalo chips are relatively odourless and were in plentiful supply before the vast herds were slaughtered.”

Are you 21st-century awesome, or 17th-century awful?

“Are you awesome?” That’s the question that Crunch, the gym chain, is using in its New Year campaign to attract new customers. Presumably we’re in slang-land here, and Crunch is asking if you’re fabulous or fantastic — not whether you’re inspiring awe or terror. (The idea seems to be to invite everyone to join the “club of awesomeness” …)

What if Crunch were asking “are you awful?” That might seem awfully odd to 21st-century English-speakers, for whom awesome is super, outstanding or excellent, whereas awful means just the opposite: nasty, bad or monstrous. But these virtual antonyms didn’t start out that way, and if Crunch had been around at the end of the 16th century it could have used the adjectives interchangeably in its advertising campaign — and would probably have ended up filling its gyms with Gods rather than mortals. At the root of both words is the old English word awe, a noun defined by the OED as “reverential fear or wonder”, and the adjectives in question were formed by adding a suffix — “-some” and “-ful” respectively. These suffixes serve to form adjectives that are full of, characterized by, or able or tending to the noun that they follow: hence beautiful means full of beauty; helpful, tending to help; burdensome, characterized by burden. And so, as logic dictated, both awesome and awful started out meaning the same thing: inspiring awe ….

So how, when and why did these synonyms part company and go their separate ways? The answer lies largely in the evolution of their core word, awe, which in its old English infancy was anchored in the context of God and man’s perception of deity, ie. a feeling of reverence and respect mixed with fear and even terror. Awful emerged at the beginning of the 14th century as the first adjective born of this worshipful state. It wasn’t until the very end of the 16th century that its younger sibling, awesome, made its first appearance, entering the vernacular at around the time that awe was just beginning to move into more secular contexts, inspired by what the OED describes as “what is terribly sublime and majestic in nature, e.g. thunder, a storm at sea”. So awful and awesome were synonymous for a couple of centuries, both describing phenomena — religious, natural or man-made — that inspired a sense of wonder, amazement, or reverence. When Queen Anne visited St. Paul’s Cathedral after it had been destroyed by the great fire of London and rebuilt by its original architect, Sir Christopher Wren, she famously told him that she found the new cathedral “awful, artificial and amusing”. Wren was suitably flattered by the compliment … (Back then, like awful, artificial and amusing also had different meanings.)

As the 18th century wore on, the meanings of awful and awesome began to shift in their emphasis, coming to represent the “ying and yang” respectively of awe in all its nuance and historical complexity. Awful tended increasingly to emphasize the element of fear and dread that religious awe inspired, rather than the wonder more associated with human and natural forces, feats and accomplishments. Awesome began to hijack the good, positive, wondrous qualities that awful eventually shed from its meaning. The OED still defines awesome as “inspiring awe; dreaded”, and gives “marvellous” and “excellent” as its slang definition. The definition of “unpleasant”, “horrible”, or “of poor quality” now assigned to awful is deemed colloquial, and only when the adjective is used poetically does it revert to its original sense of “inspiring awe”.

‘Vite, ‘trude and ‘herit: when ‘in’ is not not

Inhospitable, involuntary, invisible, incoherent, intolerable … It seems intuitive and it’s often inferred that “in-” words mean the inherent opposite — or inverse — of the word that “in-” precedes. Or maybe not. “In-” does not invariably indicate “not”; decapitate the “in-“, and you’re left with an invalid, incomprehensible word (see all the bold “in” words in this sentence). Inherit, incense, incumbent, invite and intrude are just a few further examples of the innumerable in-words that are unviable (yes, that is a word, but inviable is not) without their first two letters. And in a very few instances, when you take away the “in-“, you have a synonym — or something that comes in-terestingly close in meaning to the original intact word. Go figure.

Famous and infamous: mean almost the same thing. F = celebrated; well-known. I = notoriously bad (and notorious means well-known, especially unfavorably).

Habitable and inhabitable: mean the same thing. Both mean that can be inhabited.

Valuable and invaluable: mean very similar things. V = of great value, price or worth; I = valuable beyond estimation, priceless.

Fix and infix: can mean the same thing. F = mend, repair, make firm or stable; I = fix (a thing in another).

Dent and indent: can mean the same thing. D = mark with a dent. One definition of I = make a dent in.

Flammable and inflammable: mean exactly the same thing. As the OED notes: “Flammable is used because inflammable can be mistaken for a negative (the true negative being non-flammable). Inflammable, the original word that was in standard English usage from the 16th century, derives from the Latin inflammare meaning to kindle or set alight. Flammable was deliberately introduced and its use encouraged in the 1920s by the National Fire Protection Association, which was understandably concerned that the word inflammable was commonly being misunderstood to mean non-flammable or fire-proof.

*****

Below are a few further examples of words that look as though they might or should have different meanings:

Disassociate and dissociate: mean the same thing: Both mean disconnect or become disconnected; separate.

Iterate and reiterate: mean the same thing. I = repeat; state repeatedly. R = say or do again or repeatedly.

Cogitate and excogitate: mean almost the same thing. C = ponder; meditate. E = think out; contrive.

Appertain and pertain: mean the same thing. Both mean to relate or be appropriate (to).

The Name Game, Part I: What’s in a (brand) name?

From amazon to Ziploc, Google to Yahoo!, there’s a host of memorable and marketable brand names that both color our daily language and lord over our common nouns like rock-stars with snappy stage-names. Designed specifically to be ‘sticky’, alluring, unique, easily pronounced and remembered, and especially suited to the product or brand they represent, the names themselves tend ironically to be fairly homogenous in their etymologies, usually falling into one of five basic brand-naming-formula categories: 1) the name (usually surname) of the brand founder(s), 2) an acronym, 3) a portmanteau, 4) one or more meaningful existing proper names (or even common nouns) symbolic of the product in question, and 5) a nickname or invented word symbolic of or peculiar to the brand or those that created it. (To read more about portmanteaux, see an earlier Glossophilia post: https://glossophilia.org/?p=1355; and here is Glossophilia’s exploration of acronyms: https://glossophilia.org/?p=1342.)

Setting aside those brand names — such as McDonald’s, Levi’s, and FAO Schwarz — whose namesakes are simply founders’ names and therefore which need no further explanation, let’s look at some famous examples of brands with crafty or creative monikers whose origins aren’t so obvious. Once the codes are cracked, it’s easy to see in which of the categories above the brand names evolved — and succeeded. Thanks to Wikipedia for many of these entries — some verbatim and some parsed.

Aflac (insurance company):

Acronym: the initial letters of the company’s original (and long-winded) name: American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus

Aldi (grocery store):

Portmanteau: Albrecht (name of the founders) and discount

amazon.com (online general retailer):

Named after the South American river, which is the world’s second-longest and the largest in terms of waterflow

Amoco (oil company):

Portmanteau: American Oil Company

Amstrad (audio equipment):

Portmanteau: its founder’s name: Alan Michael Sugar Trading

AOL (online service provider):

Quasi-acronym: America OnLine

Apple (computers):

Named after the fruit: because it was the favorite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs, and/or because he had worked at an apple orchard

Coca-Cola (carbonated drink):

Named in 1885 for its two supposedly medicinal ingredients: extract of coca leaves (from which was derived the cocaine in the original recipe) and caffeine, from the kola nut. (The “k” of kola was replaced by a “c” to make the name more memorable and marketable). See also Pepsi-Cola below.

Duane Reade (pharmacy – and more recently grocery – retail chain):

Named after Duane and Reade Streets in lower Manhattan, where the chain’s first warehouse was located

eBay (online auction house):

Invented word. Ebay started life as AuctionWeb. Its founder, Pierre Omidyar, had already formed a web consulting firm called Echo Bay Technology Group. “It just sounded cool”, according to Omidyar. However, a gold-mining company called Echo Bay Mines Ltd had already taken the URL EchoBay.com, so Omidyar registered his second choice for a name, eBay.com: thus AuctionWeb became eBay.

Esso (oil company):

Quasi-acronym: The pronunciation of the initials of Standard Oil of New Jersey (SO = Esso)

FedEx (express courier):

Portmanteau: Federal Express Corporation, the company’s original name

Fiat (automobiles):

Acronym: Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Italian Automobile Factory of Turin)

Finnair (airline):

Portmanteau: Finland and air

Google (search engine):

Invented word: An accidental misspelling of the word googol (the name of the number that has a one followed by 100 zeros); chosen to signify the vast quantity of results/information to be provided by the search engine

IKEA (home and furniture retailer):

Acronym: the first letters of the Swedish founder Ingvar Kamprad’s name plus the first letters of the names of the property and village in which he grew up: Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd

Kinko’s (print and reproduction service):

From a nickname. At college, the company’s founder, Paul Orfalea, was called Kinko because of his curly red hair

Kleenex (facial tissues):

An invented word. In the early 1920s, Kimberly-Clark, a paper manufacturer, developed its first consumer product, Kotex, a feminine hygiene product made of creped wadding; unfortunately it didn’t fare well in the marketplace when first introduced. Seeking to find other ways to use its large supply of creped wadding, the company’s scientists developed a softer crepe and from this the idea of Kleenex facial tissue was born. The Kleenex tissue was envisioned as a disposable cleansing tissue to clean away cosmetics, and was marketed by the same team that developed the Kotex pad. The name Kleenex was probably a combination of the word “cleansing” (or “clean”) with the capital “K” and the “ex” taken from Kotex.

Kodak (camera and photographic goods):

An invented word. Coined by founder George Eastman, who favored the letter ‘k’ (thinking it strong and incisive), he tried out various new words starting and ending with ‘k’. He saw three advantages in Kodak: It had the merits of a trademark word, it would not be mis-pronounced, and it did not resemble anything in the art. A common misconception that the name is onomatopoeic, sounding like the shutter of a camera.

Lego (toy bricks and construction tools):

Portmanteau (from Danish words): Ole Kirk Christiansen, a Danish carpenter, began making wooden toys in 1932. Two years later, his burgeoning company was named “Lego”, from the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning “play well”

Mattel (toy company):

Portmanteau: founders’ names Harold “Matt” Matson and Elliot Handler

Mitsubishi (automobiles):

Portmanteau: Japanese words mitsu, meaning three, and hishi (with the ‘h’ changed to a ‘b’) meaning diamond (as in the shape, not the gem). Hence the three-diamond logo.

Nabisco (biscuits/cookies):

Portmanteau: its original name, the National Biscuit Company

Nike (sports shoes and apparel):

Named after the Greek goddess of victory

Pepsi (carbonated drink):

(Originally Pepsi Cola): Named after two of its ingredients: the digestive enzyme pepsin and kola nuts.

PG Tips (tea):

Invented name. Originally Pre-Gest-Tee, the tea’s name implied that it could be drunk prior to eating food, as a digestive aid. Grocers and salesmen abbreviated it to PG. Once labeling tea as a digestive aid was outlawed in the ’40s, the PG name was officially adopted. The company later added “Tips”, referring to the fact that only the tips (the top two leaves and bud) of the tea plant are used in the blend

Pixar (animation studio):

Portmanteau: pixel and the co-founder’s name, Alvy Ray Smith

Qantas (airline):

Acronym: its original name, Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services

Reebok (sports shoes and apparel):

Named after an African antelope (an alternative spelling is “rehbok”)

Samsonite (luggage):

Named after the Biblical character Samson, who was renowned for his strength

Skype (online communication provider):

Quasi-portmanteau: the original idea for the name was Sky–Peer-to-Peer, which became Skyper, then Skype

Sony (record label and audio equipment):

From the Latin word ‘sonus’ meaning sound

Starbucks (coffee retailer/house chain):

Named after Starbuck, a character in Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick; also derived from Starbo, which was a mining camp north of Seattle when the coffee shop/chain was founded in that city

Tesco (retailer):

Acronym/portmanteau: founder Jack Cohen, a London market green-grocer, received a large shipment of tea from T. E. Stockwell. He named his new company using the first three letters of the supplier’s name and the first two letters of his surname

Verizon (phone provider):

Portmanteau: veritas (Latin for truth) and horizon

Virgin (record retailer/label, airline, travel company):

Named after the existing word. Founder Richard Branson, while still at school, started a magazine out of which grew an off-shoot business selling records by mail order; according to Branson, “one of the girls suggested: ‘What about Virgin? We’re complete virgins at business.'”

Twitter (social media channel):

Named after an existing word: twitter. Co-founder Jack Dorsey explained: “We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on … We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere. We wanted to capture that in the name — we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,” because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But “twitch” is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.”

Yahoo! (service provider):

Named after a made-up word, yahoo, invented by Jonathan Swift, which he used in his book Gulliver’s Travels; it describes someone who is repulsive in appearance and barely human, which Yahoo!’s founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang, jokingly considered themselves to be.

Ziploc (storage bags):

Presumably a form of portmanteau or compound word combining the first part of the word zipper and lock without the “k” (with the zippered bag locking in flavor and freshness)

Wassail!

Ever wish you could reach for a more colorful word or expression that captures the spirit of the season but doesn’t make any religious assumptions or references and isn’t the now ubiquitous generic, bland, very PC, multiple-choice “Happy Holidays” that has become our safety greeting of choice?

Lo, we have Wassail! It’s archaic, but this rambunctious, hearty word — almost onomatopoeic in its lift and frothiness (and curiously pronounced “WOSS-el”, rather than the expected “wah-SAIL”) — carries all the bells and whistles of festive winter cheer, both figuratively and etymologically.

Wassail derives from an old English word for a toast or greeting meaning “be of good health” (“wes hal” – old English for “whole”, now embodied in the hale of “hale and hearty”, meaning strong and healthy). In its more modern form it is a noun with two or three meanings: a festive occasion, or more specifically a drinking bout, and the drink — a spiced or mulled wine or ale — to be consumed on such an occasion (and originally sipped from a goblet in the wassail toast). Wassail is also an intransitive verb meaning to make merry, and to celebrate with drinking.

It’s a shame that this word — so evocative of the way so many of us celebrate the season around the world, regardless of our culture or creed — has slipped into relative obscurity and non-use, presumably falling out of fashion as its promotion of lowly, earthly, hedonistic behavior flew in the face of rising Christian values.

The English tradition of wassailing, which continues to this day and is a celebration of the New Year rather than a mark of any religious occasion, dates back probably to the 12th century, with its actual rituals and practices varying from region to region. Down in the west country of England (Hardy’s Wessex), one such example is pouring the remains of the cider kegs around trees in an orchard, dancing and singing the Wassailing song to ensure a good crop of apples for the following year. In the Midlands, wassailers go door-to-door wishing health and prosperity to householders with a wassail song, expecting in exchange a wee dram to be poured into the wassail bowl proffered. The Wassail Song, unlike other Christmas carols and true to its wassail tradition, doesn’t celebrate the nativity. Both the composer and writer of the lyrics are unknown.

Wassail Song

Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green,
Here we come a-wand’ring
So fair to be seen.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail, too,
And God bless you, and send you
A Happy New Year,
And God send you a Happy New Year.

We are not daily beggers
That beg from door to door,
But we are neighbors’ children
Whom you have seen before
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail, too,
And God bless you, and send you
A Happy New Year,
And God send you a Happy New Year.

Good master and good mistress,
As you sit beside the fire,
Pray think of us poor children
Who wander in the mire.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail, too,
And God bless you, and send you
A Happy New Year,
And God send you a Happy New Year

We have a little purse
Made of ratching leather skin;
We want some of your small change
To line it well within.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail, too,
And God bless you, and send you
A Happy New Year,
And God send you a Happy New Year.

Bring us out a table
And spread it with a cloth;
Bring us out a cheese,
And of your Christmas loaf.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail, too,
And God bless you, and send you
A Happy New Year,
And God send you a Happy New Year.

God bless the master of this house,
Likewise the mistress too;
And all the little children
That round the table go.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail, too,
And God bless you, and send you
A Happy New Year,
And God send you a Happy New Year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1Ea-fIPj6k

From History.UK.com:

A Traditional Shropshire Wassail Recipe – for hardened Wassailers!

10 very small apples
1 large orange stuck with whole cloves
10 teaspoons brown sugar
2 bottles dry sherry or dry Madeira
1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground ginger
3 cloves
3 allspice berries
2 or 3 cinnamon sticks
2 cups castor sugar
12 to 20 pints of cider according to the number of guests
1 cup (or as much as you like) brandy

Core the apples and fill each with a teaspoon of brown sugar. Place in a baking pan and cover the bottom with 1/8-inch of water.

Insert cloves into the orange about 1/2″ apart.
Bake the orange with the apples in a 350° oven.
After about 30 minutes, remove the orange and puncture it in several places with a fork or an ice pick.

Combine the sherry or Madeira, cider, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, allspice berries, cinnamon, sugar, apple and orange juice and water in a large, heavy saucepan and heat slowly without letting the mixture come to a boil.
Leave on very low heat.
Strain the wine mixture and add the brandy.

Pour into a metal punch bowl, float the apples and orange on top and ladle hot into punch cups.

Makes enough for 15-20 people – but we always wish we had made more!

Sealed with an x

Thirty years ago, in September 1982, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh invented the smiley face. That is, the typed smiley face. Scott Fahlman was frustrated by the fact that on the university’s electronic bulletin board — an early version of the online newsgroup — irony was being lost on a number of the geeky scientists participating in these online discussions: they often just didn’t get the joke. Fahlman suggested using a colon, a hyphen and a closed parenthesis — roughly approximating a smile on its side — as a ‘joke-marker’, to denote those entries that shouldn’t necessarily be taken seriously. Little did Fahlman know at the time that his clever and very useful invention would soon spread beyond his newsgroup to the entire college faculty and student body, before ultimately landing on the World Wide Web, where it spawned a whole population and language of what we now call “emoticons”. Fahlman modestly gives credit to Vladimir Nabokov for coming up with the idea before he did; when the Russian novelist was asked by a New York Times writer in 1969, “How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?”, Nabokov replied with a virtual wink: “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”

Is the emoticon a symptom and symbol of our increasing verbal laziness? Are we no longer able to denote happiness or sadness, humor or irony using just our words? Or perhaps this goes beyond verbal competency and effort. In this age of communicating to the masses — with multiple CCs and BCCs on a single e-mail, hundreds of Facebook friends and thousands of Twitter followers around the world, and the risk of a simple mistake or misunderstanding ‘going viral’ — we can’t always depend on ourselves to get it right and on all our readers to even get it. We don’t even know many of the people who are reading our our e-mails, newsletters or posts nowadays, so we’re writing in the dark. Humor and especially irony vary enormously across languages and cultures; even between the Americans and the Brits, there’s a gaping difference in the use, expectation and understanding of irony, especially in everyday communications, so the opportunities for and likelihood of misreadings and misunderstandings are at an all-time high. When the stakes are high, an emoticon might just save the day, preventing lawsuits, tears, or just hurt feelings.

James Marshall has compiled one of the most comprehensive and entertaining lists of emoticons (of the pure keyboard – ie. non-Unicode – kind): with more than 2,000 entries, his Canonical Smiley List is a thing of beauty when you have some time to kill: http://marshall.freeshell.org/smileys.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Not exactly an emoticon but falling into the same category of emotional-keyboard-shortcuts is the ubiquitous digital kiss: “x”. This is surprisingly not a 20th-century phenomenon: The use of x to denote a kiss dates back to as early as 1763, as cited by the OED. The symbolic X itself is very old, starting with the Medieval practice of allowing illiterates to sign official documents with an X (according to Wikipedia). Kissing the X before witnesses was a sign of sincerity — much like kissing the Bible or a Christian cross, and so the letter X came to symbolize a kiss. The first literary citation of three or more x‘s at the bottom of a letter denoting multiple kisses was in 1901, also according to the OED.*

Is the x (and the xoxo of Gossip Girl fame) now spreading beyond friendly/romantic/personal correspondence and into the office environment? Not just into professional communications, but into the murky world of office politics? And is this just a girl thing? A fascinating article in this month’s Atlantic explores this very real and scary development.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-xo-factor/309174/

Kisses and Hugs in the Office

How a once-intimate sign-off is feminizing the workplace, for better or worse

By Jessica Bennett and Rachel Simmons

Cody Haltom

The phone call was friendly, the kind any two professional contacts might have. A colleague had put Amanda McCall, a comedy writer in New York, in touch with a producer in Los Angeles. The two women had admired each other’s work from afar. They chatted about whether they might want to collaborate on a project. They made plans to talk again.

The next morning, McCall received an e‑mail from the producer. “Absolutely LOVED talking,” the woman wrote, followed by a seemingly endless string of X’s and O’s. That afternoon, a follow-up to the follow-up arrived, subject line “xo.” The body read simply: “xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo.”

McCall was mystified. Should she e‑mail back? Should she ask her what it meant? Was she weird for thinking this was weird? “I’d never seen so many hugs or kisses in any kind of correspondence, even from my parents or boyfriends,” she says, laughing. “In which case: Was this person actually in love with me? And if I didn’t respond with equal love, was it going to hurt her feelings?”

This e‑mail was extreme, yes—yet it’s an example of a tic that’s come to plague professional correspondence, especially among women. The use of xo to denote hugs and kisses dates back to at least 1763, when The Oxford English Dictionary first defined X as “kiss,” but e‑mail and social media have provided a newly fertile habitat.

“I feel like xo has taken on its own kind of life,” says Karli Kasonik, a Washington-based consultant.

“I do it, most women I know do it,” says Asie Mohtarez, a writer and social-media editor, noting that she prefers a single x to the full xo.

“In my field, you almost have to use it,” says Kristin Esposito, a yoga instructor in New York.

And no, xo is not a habit unique to 20‑somethings reared on Gossip Girl. It has surfaced in the digital correspondence of everyone from Arianna Huffington to Nora Ephron. Wendy Williams, the talk-show host, says she wishes she could stop using it, but admits that she can’t. Anne-Marie Slaughter—foreign-policy wonk, Princeton professor, and she who still can’t have it all—doesn’t xo, but knows several professional women who do. In Diane Sawyer’s newsroom, staffers say, the anchor uses xo so frequently that its omission can spark panic.

As e‑mail has evolved further and further from its postal roots, our sign-offs have become increasingly glib. While Sincerely or With best wishes might have been the ending of choice for a letter or a business memo, these expressions feel oddly formal when pinged back and forth in immediate, high-volume e‑mail exchanges. And so Sincerely begat Best begat Cheers and so on, until, somewhere along the line, xo slipped in.

At first, its virtual identity was clear: a pithy farewell, sweeter than See you later, less personal than Love. Men could xo their wives. Girlfriends could xo girlfriends. It was a digital kiss—meant, of course, for somebody you’d actually kiss. But soon enough, nonstop e‑mails and IMs and tweets began to dilute its intimacy factor. “You could compare [it] to how the epistolary greeting Dear changed over time, originally just for addressing loved ones but eventually becoming neutral,” says Ben Zimmer, a linguist and lexicologist.

Today, xo is so common that researchers at Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford have studied its use in social media, and confirmed what most everyone on the Internet already knows: xo is a female phenomenon. Among Twitter users, 11 percent of women xo in tweets, compared with only 2.5 percent of men.

This gender divide has spawned a new breed of etiquette dilemmas, especially in the workplace. Can xo-ing colleagues shore up office alliances, or does the practice cross a line? Does one run the risk of being labeled a bitch for refusing to reciprocate? And what happens if a woman accidentally xo’s her male boss?

He almost certainly wouldn’t xo back, for fear of coming off as unauthoritative, unprofessional, or just plain creepy. Zimmer says he would never dare xo anyone but his wife (though the female editor of his Boston Globe column xx’s him frequently). Most men say xo has become so feminized, they wouldn’t even consider using it. “I’ve never signed an e‑mail, letter, text, stone tablet, smoke signal, or any other form of communication with xo,” says Brett Webster, a television producer in L.A. “Rightfully or wrongfully so, I would assume a guy who includes xo in correspondence is gay. Or a football coach.”

Why, then, has xo become such a fashionable accessory for women? Why, after all the strides we’ve made to be taken seriously at work, must we end our e‑mails with the digital equivalent of a pink Gelly Roll pen?

Certainly, the feminine utilities of xo are multifold. Insert it casually as a symbol of closeness, authentic or not, with a friend or colleague—or, as Slaughter sees it, as a small high-five of professional sisterhood. Use it à la Sawyer, to inspire loyalty (or fear) among staffers. Or simply resort to it as easy filler when you don’t want to put the effort into something longer. “It’s much faster to type the four-stroke xxoo than With warm wishes followed by a comma,” says Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, a writing expert and the founder of a company called Syntax Training. “If someone can type a smiley face in one second, why write a sentence like I appreciate your thoughtfulness?”

There’s also the matter of women’s tonal antennae, which pick up on even the smallest shifts. “In e‑mail, ending a command with a period can feel brusque,” says Anne Trubek, a professor of rhetoric at Oberlin College. So we use xo, along with other effusive indicators—exclamation points, ALL CAPS, repeating letters (Hiiii)—to signal emotional availability. According to Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown linguist who studies gender, these habits tend to parallel the way women speak as compared with men: with intonation patterns that go up and down more, with more emphasis on certain words, and about more-personal topics.

In some settings, xo-ing may be a way to indirectly apologize for being direct—think of all those studies concluding that women must be authoritative in the office, but also nice. One such study, by a psychologist at NYU, determined that the best way for a woman to be perceived as likeable at work is to temper strong demands with “a little bit of sugar.” In that context, xo can be seen as a savvy means of navigating a persistent double standard.

Or maybe, as Trubek suggests, xo‑ing is just like actual hugging: women do it more often than men, some women do it more often than other women, and that’s that.

“As someone who’s regularly ended letters to her accountant with xxx, I refuse to feel any shame for this widespread woman-trait,” says Caitlin Moran, the British feminist and author of How to Be a Woman. “Statistics show we’re slowly taking over the world, and I’m happy for us to do it one xxx e‑mail at a time.”

Jessica Bennett, formerly of Newsweek, is the executive editor of Tumblr. Rachel Simmons is the author of Odd Girl Out and The Curse of the Good Girl.

~~~~~~~~~~~

* Enwiktionary: OED: “X” 1763 Gilbert White Letter (1901) I. vii. 132, I am with many a xxxxxxx and many a Pater noster and Ave Maria, Gil. White.

The Duchess has a bun in the oven

After yesterday’s official announcement from St James’s Palace that the Duchess of Cambridge is carrying a future British monarch in her belly (and this is the first time in British history that one can say that about a right royal pregnancy), the news is spreading fast and furiously. Which words and expressions are the chattering and other classes using to describe our Kate’s ‘delicate’ condition?

She’s:

“knocked up”: The OED traces the American slang expression to 1813. It cites an 1836 reference to slave women who are “knocked down by the auctioneer and knocked up by the purchaser.” The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests it derives from the slang word knock, meaning “to copulate with” (1598; cf. slang knocking-shop “brothel” 1860)

“has a bun in the oven”: an expression that appears to date back to the early- or mid-20th century. Literary references go back to the 1950s. (Phrasefinder.com cites Nicholas Monsarrat’s Cruel Sea, 1951: “‘I bet you left a bun in the oven, both of you,’ said Bennett thickly… Lockhart explained … the reference to pregnancy.)

“in the club”, “in the pudding club”: pudding is an old slang word, probably dating back to the 18th century, for penis; by 1890, Barrère & Leland in their Dictionary of Slang defined the term “pudding club”:”A woman in the family way is said to be in the pudding club.”

“up the duff”: see above; dough is another word for pudding, and duff is an alternative form and pronunciation of dough

“she’s wearing the bustle wrong” (old Western slang)

“Keith Cheggars” (Cockney rhyming slang: Cheggars = preggars)

“up the pole” or “up the stick”: the most famous use of this phrase (“up the pole”) is James Joyce in his Ulysses of 1918:”That red Carlisle girl? Is she up the pole? Better ask Seymour that.” All early usages of “up the pole” in print (meaning pregnant) come from Dublin writers, so it’s probably an Irish expression

“tin roof rusted”: after condom failure from puncture (used in the song Love Shack by the B-52s, but its origin is unclear)

“up the spout”: British slang from the early 19th century meaning ruined, failed or lost; probably refers to pawnbrokers and their means of storing and retrieving items for pawning through a chute or early dumbwaiter: “spouting” meant pawning, and if an item was pawned, it was said to be “up the spout”

“sprogged up” (British slang; sprog is British slang for kid or baby)

“she killed the rabbit”, “the rabbit died“: Myth has it that an old and primitive form of pregnancy test involved injecting a rabbit with a woman’s urine, with the rabbit’s death indicating a positive (ie. pregnant) result. It is true that rabbits were injected with women’s urine to test for pregnancy, but not that the rabbit’s death in itself was an indicator; in the 1920s scientists discovered that if the injected urine contained HCG (a hormone present in pregnant women), the rabbit would display ovarian changes and it would therefore be killed to have its ovaries examined.

“on stork watch”

“in a fix”

“with child”

“expecting”

“in a/the family way”

“in the motherly way”

“eating for two”

“preggers”, “preggo”, “prego”

“caught short” or “caught out”

Can you think of any other words or expressions that I’ve missed? Please feel free to add them to the comments section below.

A random story about a random word

A story on yesterday’s All Things Considered, from NPR.

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/30/166240531/thats-so-random-the-evolution-of-an-odd-word

That’s So Random: The Evolution Of An Odd Word

by Neda Ulaby

The use of the word random as slang found its way into Amy Heckerling's 1995 hit film, Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone.

Paramount/The Kobal CollectionThe use of the word random as slang found its way into Amy Heckerling’s 1995 hit film, Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone.

text size A A A

November 30, 2012

Random is a fighting word for young Spencer Thompson. The comedian posted a video to a Facebook page entitled I Hate When People Misuse the Word Random.

“The word random is the most misused word of our generation — by far,” he proclaims to a tittering audience of 20-somethings. “Like, girls will say, ‘Oh, God, I met this random on the way home.’ First of all, it’s not a noun.”

Or, Thompson continues, warming up, [they’ll say,] ” ‘Oh, my God, we went to the most random party!’ What? No! It was people at a house who decided to have a party, like, in your friend group.”

But these uses of the word are not incorrect, according to Jesse Sheidlower. He’s the elegant, purple-haired editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary, which includes several definitions of the word random.

“It’s described as a colloquial term meaning peculiar, strange, nonsensical, unpredictable or inexplicable; unexpected,” he explains, before adding that random started as a noun in the 14th century, meaning “impetuosity, great speed, force or violence in riding, running, striking, et cetera, chiefly in the phrase ‘with great random.’ ”

Well, there’s a phrase that deserves resurrection. Sheidlower says that in the 17th century, random started to mean “lacking a definite purpose.”

“The specifically mathematical sense we have only from the late 19th century,” he observes. “But that’s with a highly technical definition — ‘governed by or involving equal chances for each of the actual or hypothetical members of a population; also, produced or obtained by such a process and therefore unpredictable in detail.’ ”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, nerds seized on random in the 1960s as slang. One early example dates from 1971, in a jokey article in the MIT student newspaper calling students “randomized tools.” Random as slang showed up in the Hacker’s Dictionary, then went mainstream.

“It was in the movie Clueless in 1995, for example,” Sheidlower points out. And he points out that Random House was established in 1925 specifically to publish books “at random,” in the words of founder Bennett Cerf.

No discussion of random could be complete without a reminder that randomness is vital to life as we know it. That’s according to Charlie McDonnell, the enthusiastic young Brit behind the Web series Fun Science.

The message: Life, like language, evolves.

“Every now and then — at random — you end up with something awesome,” he burbles. “And this could be anything — like longer feathers, sharper teeth, bigger muscles, a giant brain, anything that can help life survive. And that is why I think randomness is so cool, because it is what gives awesome things the chance to happen.”

How’s that for a random way to end the week?

Portmanteaux, neologisms, and malapropisms

Remember Bennifer? (And wonder why?)

Well, Bennifer — describing the then union between singer-actress Jennifer Lopez and actor Ben Affleck, and in effect creating a ‘composite identity’ of the two lovebirds — was one of the early examples of celebrity-name-meshing that’s now enjoying such a craze in Hollywood and beyond. (Other notable examples are Tomkat, Brangelina, and Billary. And this name-meshing can actually be traced back at least to the ’70s: there’s a scene in All the President’s Men in which the movie’s reporter-protagonists Woodward and Bernstein are referred to as “Woodstein”.)

Bennifer is a twist on the portmanteau: a linguistic blending of two or more words and their meanings into one new word with a composite definition. A good example of a portmanteau is brunch, which combines not just morphemes but also the meanings of its root words breakfast and lunch: ie. it describes a mid- to late-morning repast that combines in its menu typical fare of those respective meals. I have always thought that portmanteau was just a posh name for a suitcase (or a musical term — I guess that’s portamento), but my daughter’s boyfriend told me about its second and much more interesting definition during a discussion about acronyms (see previous post).

A marriage of French words meaning “carry” (porte) and “coat” (manteau), portmanteau had as its original and more prosaic definition a large traveling bag or suitcase, usually made of leather, that opens into two equal sections. The word was adopted by Lewis Carroll in the late 19th century to describe a new type of composite word that he invented especially for his poem Jabberwocky: slithy (combining “lithe and slimy”) and mimsy (“flimsy and miserable”) are two such words from his famous nonsense rhyme. Wikipedia describes how Carroll not only coined the new meaning for portmanteau but also explained his thinking in his most famous book and in another of his poems: “[In Through the Looking Glass] Humpty Dumpty explains the practice of combining words in various ways by telling Alice, ‘You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.’ … In his introduction to The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll uses “portmanteau” when discussing lexical selection: ‘Humpty Dumpty’s theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words “fuming” and “furious”. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious”.”

Examples of portmanteaus in common modern usage are smog (smoke + fog), infomercial (information + commercial), advertorial (advertisement + editorial), motel (motor + hotel), and simulcast (simultaneous + broadcast). Pakistan, as well as being an Urdu word, combines the names of its constituent regions: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan. When the African countries Tanganyika and Zanzibar united in 1964, the resulting new republic was named Tanzania. Wikipedia is a portmanteau, melding the words “wiki” and “encyclopedia”.

Many portmanteaus (or portmanteaux, if we want to feel swanky and French) start off as neologisms; a neologism (from the Greek néo-, meaning “new”, and lógos, meaning “speech” or “word”) is a word or phrase that is (or has a new meaning) new to common and accepted usage. An example of a neologism/portmanteau is metrosexual (which combines “metropolitan” and “heterosexual”), an adjective cooked up in the 90s to refer to straight men who display stereotypically homosexual traits such as fashion-consciousness and the investment of time and energy in careful grooming and clothes-shopping. Another example of a relatively recent neologism — in which an old word has a new use — is “friend” used as a verb, as in “to friend someone on Facebook”.

A bit of light word association takes us via the neologism “Bushism” (describing an utterance of our linguistically accident-prone former president George W. Bush) to another type of word or expression founded on the use — or in this case the often unintentional misuse or mixing up — of other words and phrases: the malapropism. Probably the most famous Bushism-malapropism, which also seemed to be a portmanteau but will hopefully never be a neologism, is misunderestimate. This non-word, presumably meaning (if it were a real word) to severely underestimate, and an apparent concoction of misunderstand and underestimate, was used on no less than three occasions by President Bush…

And finally, please enjoy this cartoon published on the webcomic xkcd.com. Here, comedian and xkcd founder Randall Munroe illustrates in a brilliant parody — of linguists, Wikipedia, and anyone who writes or reads grammar blogs — how the online encyclopedia might present and define his own invented stunt word* malamanteau.

* a deliberately attention-seeking neologism

http://xkcd.com/739/