Category Archives: Words, phrases & expressions

Thank you. You might be welcome …

Do we say thanks too much? “Thank you” (or the appropriate equivalent — eg. thanks, tah, cheers, merci, etc.) tends to be said more frequently in some cultures — especially in English-speaking countries — than in others; many would argue that utterances of thanks and gratitude are dished out so habitually and gratuitously in England and the U.S. that the sincerity of the sentiment is often diminished.

The Chinese rarely say thank you to their family and close friends. And because they value humility, saying “thank you” after being paid a compliment can be perceived as arrogant. In Thailand, gratitude is generally conveyed using the “wai”, a gesture of hands clasped together as in prayer, which varies according to the social status of the person being thanked, and sometimes simply a smile will suffice; a verbal “thank you” is reserved for important actions that warrant sincere and special gratitude. The Nepalese have no words that translate directly to thank you or please; they adjust or conjugate their pronouns and verbs (much like the way the French use vous or tu) to reflect the level of respect they wish to convey, but don’t have dedicated “polite” words. (Similarly, most Scandinavian countries — certainly Danish, Finnish and Icelandic — don’t have an actual word for please.)

As for acknowledging thanks, the nature of the verbal response also varies from culture to culture and language to language, and seems to fall into three general categories. The first amounts to dismissing the act that inspired the thanks as unimportant or non-existent. The French say de rien, the Portuguese de nada, in Catalan, it’s de res — all translating roughly to “it’s nothing”. Then there’s almost the opposite: an expression of pleasure on the part of the person being thanked. The Dutch phrase graag gedaan translates literally as “gladly done”; when the Icelandic say gerdu svo vel, they mean “my pleasure”. And finally there’s a fairly common tradition of echoing back the word for please when you’re acknowledging an expression of gratitude. In Hebrew, Russian and a number of Eastern European languages, the way you say “you’re welcome” is by using the word for please. In Russia, it’s пожалуйста” (“pah-zhal-stah”); the Polish dual-purpose word is prosze; in Hebrew, it’s bevakasha.

In British and American English, we tend to use variations on the first two types of expression. An Englishman, if he does verbalize a response, is more likely to offer “of course”, “don’t mention it”, “it was nothing”, “by all means”, “no problem”, “no worries” (very common in Australian English), “that’s OK”, “that’s all right”, “my pleasure”, or “not at all”. The traditional “you’re welcome” is more of an American phenomenon. In fact, since the British have a habit of thanking everyone for the smallest and most trivial actions (they give thanks almost as much as they apologize), they’re less inclined to acknowledge all the gratitude being doled out — and therefore a nod or a smile, with deliberate eye-contact (which in itself is enough to make most English folk blush), will usually do the trick. The Americans are more conscientious (they will usually offer a verbal reply), less self-conscious and more effusive with their “you’re welcomes”, and common alternatives are “sure”, “sure thing”, or, even more informally, “you bet” — or “you betcha!”. That’s something you won’t hear an Englishman say.

Last year, Lynneguist on her blog Separated by a Common Language wrote a detailed and nuanced post comparing American and English usage of please, thank you and other general terms and expressions of politeness (a video of her TEDx talk on the subject at Sussex University accompanies the piece). It’s well worth a read to understand some of the more subtle differences in manners — both linguistic and social — between the Yanks and the Brits.

Here are a few international versions of “you’re welcome”, with their literal translations where I’ve managed to track them down:

Brazilian/Portuguese: de nada, “of nothing”

Catalan: de res, “it’s nothing”

Cantonese: M̀h’sái haak-hei, “not necessary”

Danish: selv tak, “thanks yourself”

Dutch: graag gedaan, “gladly done”

Finnish: ole hyvä

French: de rien, “it’s nothing”

German: Bitte schoen, “please pretty”

Hebrew: bevakasha, “please”

Hungarian: nincs mit, “nothing”

Icelandic: gerdu svo vel, “my pleasure” or “there you go”

Italian: prego, “I beg”

Japanese: dou itashimashite

Norwegian: bare hyggelig, “my pleasure”

Polish: prosze, “please”

Russian: pohzhalstah, “please”

Slovenian: prosim, “please”

Spanish: de nada, “it’s nothing”, or mi gusto, “my pleasure”

Swedish: varsagod, “be so good”

Tagalog: walang anuman, “no problems”

Italian: Prego

If you will

Commenting in a recent Washington Post article — about whether earthworms whose heads are severed from their tails really can and do grow back their missing halves — Mark Zoran, who studies nervous system regeneration at Texas A&M, made the following statement: “[Severed red wiggler tails especially] have trouble mounting productive head regeneration and thus die of starvation and brainlessness, if you will.” As I see it, his use of the expression “if you will” is slightly ironic or mildly facetious: he’s clearly playing on the word brainlessness, which is usually meant figuratively but in this case can be taken more literally; he’s drawing our attention to his hesitant choice of word, and asking the reader to accept it in this context, perhaps with a touch of humor.

“If you will” is an expression that you won’t hear in England, but it is common on the other side of the Atlantic (and is thought by many to be pretentious or fuddy-duddy, especially if it’s used habitually). The British phrase “if you want” is probably the nearest equivalent (but used less often), and is more or less a translation of “if you will”, since will is used here in the archaic sense of “want” or “wish”, rather than the future form of a verb (as in “if you will do something”). Probably more common in British-English are the phrases “as it were” or “so to speak”, which convey a similar sense of word-choice hesitancy, and can also be perceived as pompous, pretentious or old-fashioned.

Geoffrey Pullum on Language Log claims that the expression serves the same purpose as the now ubiquitous discourse particle like: as “a way to signal hedging about vocabulary choice — a momentary uncertainty about whether the adjacent expression is exactly the right form of words or not.” (Although I would argue that this is giving like too much credit; I think of it more as a sentence filler such as er or um, with no discernible intention of meaning.)

The OED explains “if you will” as being “sometimes used parenthetically to qualify a word or phrase: = ‘if you wish it to be so called’, ‘if you choose or prefer to call it so.’” It claims that there are citations of the exact phrase going back to the 16th century, and similar elliptical uses date back to Old English.

According to UsingEnglish.com, “if you will” is used to make a concession in a sentence, allowing the writer or speaker not to commit to a particular argument or assertion, but letting the reader or listener draw that conclusion if he so wishes. It gives the following example: “He wasn’t a very honest person, a liar if you will,” whereby the writer, while not accusing the subject of the sentence of being a liar, allows her reader to draw that conclusion nevertheless.

Laines and twittens

Me in a twitten

During my weekend in Brighton, I’ve discovered two words from the old Sussex dialect that are still alive and well and being used in Brighton, Lewes and Cuckfield: laine and twitten. One of these has a similar meaning to lane, and you’ve probably guessed that it’s not the one you might think.

A visit to Brighton wouldn’t seem complete without a visit to the North Laine — a trendy bohemian shopping and eating area that isn’t actually part of the city’s famous Lanes (apart from anything, they’re spelled differently). Laine is an old Sussex word describing an open tract of land; it derives from an Anglo-Saxon legal term for a landholding — nothing to do with lanes or streets. The area now known as North Laine once represented five open farming plots that had probably existed as such since the Middle Ages. In fact, the original farmhouse is where Brighton’s famous Royal Pavilion, the palace built for the Prince Regent who would become King George IV, now stands.

Twitten is also from old Sussex dialect, dating back to the early 19th century, and it means a narrow path, passage or alleyway between two walls or hedges, usually leading into a courtyard, street or open area. There are a few very picturesque twittens dotted around Brighton and throughout East and West Sussex, some with quaint little houses on at least one side of the narrow alleyway. It has been suggested that the word derives from the Low German twiete, meaning “alley” or “lane”; Wiktionary proposes that it’s a corruption of betwixt and between. The word is included in William Douglas Parish’s A dictionary of the Sussex dialect and collection of provincialisms in use in the county of Sussex, published in 1875.

Other regional/quirky names for alleyways around England and Great Britain are twitchells (probably related to twittens) in north-west Essex, east Hertfordshire and Nottingham; chares in north-east England; jennels, gennels or ginnels in northern England — the latter sometimes roofed or covered; opes in Plymouth; jiggers or snickets in Liverpool; gitties (or jitties) in Derbyshire and Leicestershire; shuts in Shropshire; and vennels in Scotland. As recently as 1983, a Yorkshire writer named Mark W. Jones invented a new word, snickelway, by making a portmanteau of three words already mentioned: snicket, ginnel and alleyway: this neologism is now in regular local use.

Here are a bunch of what I might refer to as twitten: participants in Brighton’s annual Naked Bike Ride, which we stumbled upon in fairly frigid temperatures earlier today:

American -ates and -ations

The Americans usually shorten their words and phrases, given any opportunity. Take “three hundred fifty dollars” (cf. “three hundred and fifty pounds”), “it starts June 2” (cf. “it starts on June 2nd”), or “let’s go find him” (cf. “let’s go and find him”). They even take letters and syllables out of words – eg. “color” cf. “colour”, “aluminum” vs. “aluminium”. So isn’t it interesting that there are a few words that have longer alternative versions — and it’s the longer rather than the shorter words that have been adopted into standard American English? An Englishman orients himself in a new city; his American spouse probably orientates herself with a map. The tourist from London would inquire (well, she would actually enquire) about what transport she can take to Boston; the American would ask about transportation. The sleazy limey is planning to burgle the house on the corner; the Yank was caught burglarizing his neighbor. Administrate is an uncommon version of the verb administer, and although it’s more widely heard in the U.S. (and it is acknowledged by dictionary consensus to be a real word), it’s generally considered disagreeable and best avoided.

There is one further pair of related words that some might argue have a subtle difference in meaning; however, I believe they are synonymous. Whereas the English feel obliged to say sorry at any given opportunity, even to inanimate objects, the Americans generally feel obligated to give up their seats to the elderly. According to the Oxford Dictionaries, oblige means “to make (someone) legally or morally bound to do something”, and obligate means “to require or compel (someone) to undertake a legal or moral duty”. As far as I’m concerned (and I’m British-born), they’re the same, and oblige suffices without the added ‘-ate’.

There are words for which the addition of an ‘-ate’ or ‘-ation’ does in fact change the sense of the root word. To comment is to make a single remark, whereas to commentate is to provide a steady flow of comments and observations, usually about a sports event. A protest is an expression of disapproval or objection to something said or done, but a protestation is an emphatic declaration that something either is or isn’t the case.

Can you think of other words with longer alternative incarnations that are favored by the Americans?

Meet the raisins

We had Chelsea buns for tea yesterday. While discussing its ingredients (and its curious name), my American-raised daughter asked slightly suspiciously, “What’s a sultana?” Good question. Even though I know what it looks and tastes like, I realized I had no idea what it actually is, or what makes it different from a raisin. (And if you’re wondering what a Chelsea bun is, keep reading …)

The sultana is a “white” (pale green) variety of seedless grape, also called a sultanina, a Thompson Seedless (in the U.S.), a Lady de Coverly (in England), and a Kishmish (in Turkey and Palestine). The sultana grape is nicknamed the “three-way grape” since it’s used for table grapes, raisins and wine. Because of its multi-functionality, it’s the most planted grape in California. It’s thought to have originated from either Constantinople or from the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire, from where the sultana raisin was originally and traditionally exported to the English-speaking world, some time in the 17th and 18th centuries. In some countries, namely Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, sultana is also the name of that particular type of raisin; in fact, in the UK, sultana usually refers to the dried fruit — which is basically a golden, plumper, rounder, more juicy version of the raisin (it’s treated with sulfur dioxide to maintain its color) — rather than to the variety of grape from which it’s made. However, in the U.S., raisin is a catch-all word for all dried grapes, making the word sultana unfamiliar to speakers of American English.

Another variety of raisin is the currant, made from the small, dried Black Corinth seedless grape, which is produced mainly in California and the Levant.* Currants — not to be confused with the berries called redcurrants or blackcurrants — are miniature raisins that are firm, dark in color and have a tart, tangy flavor; they are more often found in cooking and baking than their sweeter raisin cousins, which enjoy strutting their stuff as healthy snacks these days. The currant gets its name from Corinth, the port in Greece from which it originated.

For a comprehensive history of the raisin — and other dried fruits — check out the second chapter of Sun-maid’s rather delightful 100th anniversary book.

And back to the Chelsea bun: This classy-sounding treat is a type of currant bun — made of a rich yeast dough sweetened with brown sugar, cinnamon and spice mixtures, spread with butter, and rolled up with currants, lemon peel and dried fruits before being baked. (Americans: think cinnamon roll or cinnamon swirl, with less sugar and lots of raisins.) It was so named after the Bun House in Chelsea, a fashionable area of London, where the bun was first created in the 18th century. Favored and frequented by the British royalty of the time, the Bun House was demolished in 1839.

Are you now craving a Chelsea bun? Well, don’t fret: Fitzbillies, Cambridge’s oldest craft bakery and a veritable institution, is famous for its Chelsea buns and traditional cakes. And it ships all over the world. As it boasts on its website: “Our extra sticky Chelsea buns travel well – Sir Edmund Hillary took a box with him to Base Camp when he conquered Everest. They are packed in an airtight cellophane envelope and then into a stout corrugated mailing box. They should reach you in perfect condition for the final assault on the summit… or indeed your tea.”

Go scoff a Chelsea bun today.

* The Levant is “the crossroads of western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean, and northeast Africa”.

You say highway, I say freeway; you say crawfish, I say crayfish: Highway, freeway, crawfish, crayfish, let’s map the whole thing out …

Do you drive on a highway or a freeway? Do you wear sneakers or tennis shoes? What do you call a sweet fizzy beverage? Can you distinguish – purely by ear – the words merry, Mary, and marry? And if your spouse announces that she’s got a job in “the city”, where do you think you’re going to end up living? Your answers will be determined mainly by where you live (in America, by the way), or where you grew up, and now you can see these regional dialect differences — in pronunciation and word usage — represented clearly and colorfully on maps of the U.S. thanks to Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at North Carolina State University, and to Dr. Bert Vaux of Cambridge University.

Let’s go back to the beginning of this century, when Dr. Vaux, then of Harvard University, spent five years collecting data on regional dialects throughout the U.S. using a survey he and his colleagues devised to distinguish differences in usage and pronunciation. Questions ranged from how you would pronounce “aunt”, “caught” and “caramel” to what you would call a long sandwich containing cold cuts. Do you say “y’all” or just “you”? “Soda” or “pop”? Vaux then mapped the data, using single color-coded points like pins on a map to show the geographical distribution of responses to the 122 questions he asked of more than 5300 participants.

Enter Joshua Katz, who decided for his end-of-the-year project to take Vaux’s data and create a series of interactive maps that gave a more complete and complex picture of these national dialect differences. Using a statistical algorithm that weighted the responses around a particular location, Katz was able to create mapped visualizations of Vaux’s survey; there’s even a drop-down menu that will show you the cities most and least similar in dialect to any point on the map you choose. Read Business Insider‘s report on Katz’s project. And the next time you’re offered a “car-ml” with only two syllables, you’ll know roughly what part of the country they come from …

Boys will be guys

About half of my 20-year-old daughter’s many friends are of the male persuasion. Does she refer to them as men or boys when talking about them in the third person (ie. behind their backs)? The trouble is, they’re no longer boys, and to refer to them as such would be as demeaning as it would be inaccurate. But these youngsters with their lanky gaits and fresh-faced grins can’t really be called men either: they’re not yet blessed with the gravitas or the sheer male experience that would earn them that moniker. So where does that leave these young chaps, in terms of what we should call them? Curiously, it isn’t quite the same for girls teetering on the edge of womanhood: girl is generally acceptable — and can even be regarded as quite flattering — for a maiden long past her official passage into adulthood.

Boy officially means “a male child or youth”, according to the Oxford Dictionaries. In plural form it can refer informally to men who mix socially or who belong to a particular group, team, or profession: eg. “he wants to go out with the boys”. “Boy bands” are often just that: ensembles of pre-pubescents with more than just wet dreams who rarely make music together as men. And in days now fairly long gone, boy was sometimes used as an affectionate address for or to a man: “Let me advise you, my dear boy”, or “The old boy has seen better days”. But essentially, the word is reserved for those of pronounced youth or immaturity, before dropped voices and facial hair turn them into their official adult incarnations, ie. men.

In the US, we’ve found a solution for this ambiguous linguistic interregnum between boy and man: we call these youngsters guys. In fact, guy serves as a suitably vague catch-all to describe not just a male of indeterminate maturity or unspecified age, but also — especially in its plural form — a group of mixed genders and even ages; it’s not unusual to have girls or young women included in a group of guys (think the equivalent of the French pronoun for they — ils, which covers either men or men and women), although it is predominantly a male thing. A guy thing. Dude is also gaining ground — and not just in comic screenplays by Judd Apatow or in jocular boy-bonding-speak; that dude with the green hair can apply appropriately if informally to any guy of any age or persuasion.

Brits have an equivalent term, bloke, that’s often used to describe those gangly man-boys — and indeed any male past puberty, young or old. But unlike guy, bloke is male-specific: girls aren’t ever included in a gathering of blokes, however many pints they can knock back. Other British-English words — now for the most part outdated — for a man of any age are fellow and chap. Lad was a word that covered both boys and youthful males, but unless used poetically (or by a Scotsman), it’s more or less gone from our vernacular today.

Juvenile suggests criminality, and youth now carries derogatory if not downright criminal overtones. So those fellows pictured above are probably happy that guys, blokes and dudes are firmly entrenched in our vocabulary, removing the need for us to choose between the men and the boys.

Dedicated to Jake, Flo’s favorite guy.

A kiss is just a kiss, but “galocher” is to French kiss …

Ils galochons. Yes, it’s official: a kiss is no longer just a kiss, at least not in the new French dictionary. The new edition of the Petit Robert — the French equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary — has a brand new verb with an age-old meaning: “galocher”, meaning “to kiss with tongues”. The French kiss finally has a French verb, marking the first time the French have a single word for one of their most famous verbal exports. It comes from the noun la galoche, the word for ice-skating boot — and yes, the new verb deliberately conjures the idea of sliding around on ice, a poetic evocation of the lovers’ kiss.

The term “French kiss” first entered the English language in the early 20s, reflecting the perception at the time of the French being more experienced and adventurous in the realm of sex and eroticism. The French words for the French kiss (as a noun rather than verb) are baiser amoureux (“lovers’ kiss”) or baiser avec la langue (“kiss with the tongue”), but baiser used as a verb has more vulgar connotations (think the French equivalent of the f word). Historically the French kiss itself was known as baiser florentin (“Florentine kiss”).

“Kiss” is from the Old English cyssan from the proto-Germanic kussijanan or kuss, which is probably onomatopoeic, based on the sound that kissing makes. The Four Vedic Sanskrit texts (1500 BC) contain the first mention of a kiss in writing.* The science of kissing is called philematology. Galochons involves the use of 34 muscles in the face.

Galochez someone today.

* Case, William. 1995. The Art of Kissing. 2^nd ed. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin

Back to Blighty

I’m going back to dear Old Blighty soon for my annual visit home. I always assumed (although I’m not sure why) that Blighty had something to do with the great Irish potato blight of the mid-19th century And being a British ex-pat, I’m someone who uses this affectionate term for my homeland frequently, without ever knowing where or how it originated. Then one of my American friends asked … Who knew that it actually comes from an Arabic word, by way of British India and the trenches of wartime France?

According to the OED, Blighty is British slang for Britain or England, or home. Used originally by soldiers during the First World War, it’s thought to have been uttered first on French battlefields some time in 1915. The word’s secondary meaning, which obviously developed out of the British soldiers’ yearning for their beloved Blighty, is “a wound securing return home” — ie. a wartime injury not mortal but sufficiently serious to merit being shipped back to Britain (and hence, sadly, often self-inflicted).

Blighty is a relic of British colonialism — specifically, British India: it derives from the Hindustani word vilayati (pronounced “bil-AH-ti” in many Indian dialects and languages) meaning “foreign”, which in turn comes from the Arabic/Urdu word wilayat, meaning “kingdom”, “state”, “ministry” or “province”.

In their 1886 dictionary, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C. Burnell explained how vilayati was adopted by the Anglo-Indians as a name for exotic foreign items, especially those brought to India by the British, such as the tomato (“vilayati baingan”, which translates as “foreign aubergine”) and soda-water (“vilayati pani”, or “foreign water”).

Fast forward about three decades, and Blighty was the British soldiers’ own corruption of the Anglo-Indian vilayati. Creeping into the vernacular of wartime England, it popped up regularly in songs — “There’s a ship that’s bound for Blighty”, “We wish we were in Blighty”, and “Take me back to dear old Blighty”, poetry, and other popular culture of the time. It endures today as an affectionate term used by British expats referring nostalgically to their homeland — now more commonly used with “Old” in front.

The Dead-Beat
He dropped, — – more sullenly than wearily,
Lay stupid like a cod, heavy like meat,
And none of us could kick him to his feet;
Just blinked at my revolver, blearily;
— Didn’t appear to know a war was on,
Or see the blasted trench at which he stared.
“I’ll do ’em in,” he whined,
“If this hand’s spared,
I’ll murder them, I will.”

A low voice said,
“It’s Blighty, p’raps, he sees;
his pluck’s all gone,
Dreaming of all the valiant, that aren’t dead:
Bold uncles, smiling ministerially;
Maybe his brave young wife, getting her fun
In some new home, improved materially.
It’s not these stiffs have crazed him;
nor the Hun.”

We sent him down at last, out of the way.
Unwounded; — – stout lad, too, before that strafe.
Malingering? Stretcher-bearers winked, “Not half!”

Next day I heard the Doc.’s well-whiskied laugh:
“That scum you sent last night soon died. Hooray!”

— Wilfred Owen

Reclaimed words

On the Facebook page of my younger daughter, who has just turned 20, one of her female friends has written her a birthday greeting that won’t raise any eyebrows in that particular FB friendship group: “Love you, beautiful betch!” (with betch being an alternative form or spelling of bitch). It’s a word young women are now using commonly as an affectionate term for each other — but I wouldn’t recommend that you adopt that particular term of endearment if you’re male or an older female: it’s probably just not going to fly. That’s because it’s a relatively recent “reclaimed (or re-appropriated) word”: one that was previously a slur or insult aimed at a particular target group (in this case, women) that has then been deliberately adopted and reappropriated by that very group and turned into an acceptable or even positive word. And sometimes — either for a period after its reappropriation or indefinitely — this new usage is permissible only to the target group in question. Hence only young women are allowed to call each other betch. A couple of other reclaimed words that fall into this category of restricted use are queer (to be discussed in a separate dedicated Glossophilia post), and more recently and still quite controversially, dyke and nigga.

It’s not hard to understand why reclaimed words abound in areas of life in which prejudice, bias, conflict and divergent points of view are rife. As the changing rules of political correctness (as well as fads and fashions) govern and police the constantly updated terminology of sexuality and gender, politics, and ideological and religious movements, so the lingo bends and adapts, sometimes producing these insults-turned-titles-of-honor as a means of deflating or exploiting the verbal bullying: as the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them. This is a linguistic phenomenon that dates back centuries; there are reclaimed words in modern usage that many might be surprised to learn started out as terms of mockery or insult.

Mormons, Shakers and Quakers were all derogatory terms for members of their respective religious movements before they became their standard colloquial names. The 18th-century British evangelist John Wesley was originally mocked by his fellow students at Oxford University for preaching a prescriptive “methodist” approach to his religious lifestyle, but he adopted the term as the name of his movement, which would eventually secure its place as a denomination in the Anglican Church.

In the sex and gender world, the waters can get very muddy. Both queer and gay have evolved through complicated mazes of meaning and innuendo, with queer still finding its way in the world of definition, identity and acceptability (as are many of those who identify themselves as such, although ironically the word’s most modern meaning is that of deliberately eluding identification or definition in terms of one’s sexual or gender orientation). Gay is now established as an acceptable synonym for homosexual, although it had pejorative overtones in its infancy (in the context of sexuality). However, it has recently developed an additional and quite separate meaning — used predominantly among young people — of general and unspecified disparagement (“oh, his outfit is just so gay”), which is thought by many to be homophobic, even though this new meaning is supposed to be unrelated to that of the reclaimed word. Like queer, gay is being reclaimed and then “dis”-claimed — batted back and forth across the net dividing PC from uncool. Dyke is another word in this area that might be in the process of being reclaimed, gaining ground in the gay community as a neutral word synonymous with lesbian, even though it is still considered insulting by most.

Tree-huggers, Tories and Yankees, all once terms of ridicule*, are now respectable nicknames used by self-respecting environmental activists, Conservative politicians and American citizens respectively — with barely a hint of irony. Nerds and geeks, who were social outcasts and the ultimate victims of bullying in their original incarnations, now wear their brains and smarts with fashionable pride, and often end up getting the girl. Even being a brat is something a few of us are happy to admit to, if we’re of the military or diplomatic variety.

* some would argue the third one still is, but that’s another (baseball) story …