Category Archives: Etymology

The chance of a link between casual and casualty

casualty

A scene from the popular British TV soap “Casualty”

Bloomberg View reported earlier this week that “U.S. Exaggerates Islamic State Casualties”, and a headline in the Detroit News read: “Marine casualties from Fla. helicopter crash identified”. The context of the statements leaves us in no doubt about what is meant by the word casualty here: it’s being used in its most extreme and tragic sense — to signify death. (In its plural form it’s commonly used to denote the death-count from a war or accident.)

We also meet the word casualty in a slightly different incarnation. “The unseen casualties of Japan’s lost decades suffer in silence”, reported Sahoko Kaji recently in the Financial Times, and “The Journalistic Casualties of The Guardian’s Erroneous Whisper Story” was a headline in New York magazine a few days ago. Again there’s no ambiguity here in the sense of the word, which can also refer to someone injured (in a war or accident) or a person or thing lost in or badly affected by an event or phenomenon. (In the UK there’s an additional meaning: you go to “casualty” — just as an American might head to the ER — for treatment after an accident or emergency.)

Now let’s turn to the adjective casual, so close in spelling to the ominous noun, and suddenly the mood is lifted. Whether it describes something happening by chance (i.e. not planned or expected), informal (i.e. calling for ordinary dress or behavior), or done without much thought, effort or concern, the word seems very far away in meaning or nuance from the mortal or grave sense of casualty, which is invariably associated with disaster. Can the words possibly be related? Continue reading →

Naming that app (applr, app.ly …)

 directr   trrigr  mixlr      foodler   yummly

At the time of writing, there are just over 915,400,000 live websites online — and counting, according to InternetLiveStats.com. New apps and sites are being added to our cyber-world by the second — and as fast as the new hopefuls pop up on our screens with their snappy vowel-less monikers, so do hundreds of Zuckerberg-wannabes surrender their lowercase domain names back to GoDaddy, hanging their bearded chins in their youthful hands and wondering what went wrong. Well, one thing that helps make a good site is a good name. But what gives a cyber-name its magic? Continue reading →

A doozy of a Daisy

doozy         daisy

A daisy isn’t just a flower — or a girl’s name. It’s a traditional long drink — a spirit base with lemon juice and sometimes soda, sweetened with grenadine, sugar or a fruit syrup –and it’s been enjoyed in its various brandy and gin incarnations since the mid-19th century. According to WebTender Wiki (yes, there is one), a recipe for Brandy Daisy was listed in Scientific Bar-Keeping by Joseph W. Gibson in 1884, and Esquire professes to have another such recipe from “Professor” Jerry Thomas dating back to 1862, calling for curaçao and fragrant Jamaican rum.

Why is the cocktail called a daisy? Continue reading →

Two tattoos, one taboo …

scottishtattoo

When you hear the word tattoo, do you think of skin pictures or of marching band extravaganzas? Maybe both, if you’re a British drumming soldier with a body-load of tats … Curiously, the two meanings of this unusual word have completely different origins in both time and place — and quite interesting stories behind their respective definitions. It’s not too surprising that they have nothing to do with each other (except perhaps that they’re both, loosely, forms of artistic expression, and soldiers often have lots of tattoos), but it is odd that they evolved eventually into the same word. And did you know that tattoo and taboo have more in common with each other than the fact that they rhyme? Here’s the scoop on tattoo, tattoo and taboo.  Continue reading →

Slang: the most esoteric and quintessentially human form of language?

fagin

Why do we talk slang? Is it like an inside joke, which makes us feel more connected with others in the know? Is it useful for covert communication, to hide wrong or bad stuff from prying ears? Are slang words and expressions the equivalent of linguistic toys, injecting some fun and humor into our normally drab verbal discourse? Can it fulfill a need for verbal economy, providing one word or phrase to capture a paragraph’s worth of meaning and suggestion?  Can slang be a proverbial ice-breaker, offering a sense of informality or even affection to an otherwise frosty exchange?

The answer is yes: any one of these factors can come into play when slang is on the linguistic menu, and some of these factors are at the heart of a particular slang’s very existence. Slang in its many forms can represent the most nuanced, potentially ambiguous, socially delicate and subtle of human utterances, depending as much as it does on the social context and culture in which it lives and thrives.

A fascinating article in The Guardian last year asked the question: Is slang the last frontier for artificial intelligence? Continue reading →

Did Benedict Cumberbatch (aka Alan Turing) coin the term “digital computer”?

digitalcomputer

Did Alan Turing coin the term “digital computer”? There’s a heady set of questions here: when was the modern-day computer invented, and was Turing its father — in its conception, its realization and/or its naming? The movie The Imitation Game, set in England during the Second World War, is all about the British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, mathematical biologist, pioneering computer scientist, and marathon and ultra-distance runner, and it does give us a clue. There’s a significant moment in the movie when Turing (played by the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch) explains to his friend and fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) his theory of computing and his new invention — a machine called Christopher. (Watch the movie to find out the reason for the name, and what exactly Christopher was built to do.) Here’s that moment, and it isn’t really a spoiler:

Continue reading →

Glosso’s advent: Baubles of Britishisms – Dec 12

sod

Day 12

Sod. 

An unpleasant or obnoxious person. Eric Partridge explains its origins in the Dictionary of  Slang and Unconventional English: “A sodomist: low coll.: mid-C. 19-20; ob.-2. Hence, a pejorative, orig. and gen. violent: late C. 19-20. Often used in ignorance of its origin.  

Also:

Sod off (f*** off): “The effect on Rita is shown through the breakdown of her marriage to her lummox husband Eddie, played by big-voiced everyman Adrian Der Gregorian, but his character is so irritatingly simple you want her to tell him to sod off.” — London24, 6 Nov 2014 (also see Dec 5’s advent post). Stack Exchange explores sod off in more depth.

Sod it (f*** it) “It’s a big challenge. I have had a few of those recently with charity things I have done and I thought ‘sod it’ this year! I feel tough and I don’t want to do it when I am too old! It is going to be an experience and I want to have fun.”” — Melanie Sykes in Daily Mirror, 11 Nov 2014

Sod all (nothing): “f you’re desperate to avoid anything remotely pumpkin-shaped, here are three great club nights that have absolutely sod-all to do with Halloween and everything to do with top tunes.” — Time Out London, 30 Oct 30 2014

Sod’s law (what Americans know as Murphy’s law): “Mossop had surgery on his troubled right shoulder when he arrived at Parramatta, having initially dislocated the joint in the 2011 Challenge Cup Final. Three games into his return, he suffered a fresh injury to his other shoulder. … “I had just been rehabbing it, rather than having surgery,” he explained. …“Parra wanted me to get it sorted, which ruled me out of the first eight weeks of the season. Then, sod’s law, I came back and I did the other shoulder, which I’d not had any troubles with.” — Wigan Today, 12 Nov 2014

Also you sod and sod you.

Glosso’s advent: Baubles of Britishisms – Dec 10

mick

Day 10

Take the mick (or Mickey)

“Rafe Turner, prosecuting for the RSPCA, said a fellow resident at the guest house had made the grim discovery after going to Rogers’ room to feed the rabbit. Rogers had earlier told the man he had killed it after microwaving it for three minutes but the man did not believe him and thought he was “taking the mickey”.” — The Independent, Nov 6 2014

“According to Mr Eagan, the witness added: “Brian was pretty drunk. He was taking the mickey out of his younger brother.” He said that Phillips initially pushed Brian off the stool. Mr Eagan said: “Then he [Brian] gets back up and continued to take the mickey out of his brother and then the incident took place. “There’s nothing worse than being taken the mickey out of by your own brother.” — Surrey Mirror, 13 Oct 2014

That’s what the Brits do when they’re making fun of you and laughing mercilessly at your expense.

It’s thought that the phrase is a shortened version of “take the Mickey Bliss”, which is Cockney rhyming slang for the slightly more vulgar “take the piss”. Who Mickey Bliss was and why the poor chap came to embody the Brits’ favorite past-time of taking the piss out of anyone and everyone we’ll probably never know. World Wide Words has the story.

Also:

Take the piss: “Men may fill them, but it takes a woman to take the piss out of a urinal. Or so Julian Spalding, the former director of Glasgow Museums, and the academic Glynn Thompson have claimed. The argument, which has been swooshing around the cistern of contemporary art criticism since the 1980s, is that Duchamp’s famous  artwork Fountain — a pissoir laid on its side — was actually the creation of the poet, artist and wearer of tin cans, Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven.” — The Guardian, 7 Nov 2014

According to World Wide Words, “it’s usually said that the phrase derives from an older one, piss-proud, which refers to having an erection when waking up in the morning … This developed into a figurative sense of somebody who had an exaggerated idea of his own importance. So to take the piss is to deflate somebody, to disabuse them of their mistaken belief that they are special.”