Category Archives: Words, phrases & expressions

Homely: plain ugly, or just plain?

In a recent review — written by an English critic — of a production of La boheme, the soprano in the leading role was described as “well suited to the role of Mimi in her homely, demure appearance.”  Is the use of the word homely here a compliment or an insult — or neither? Well, it depends on who’s reading it…  To British-English readers, and especially to those familiar with the character in question, the meaning is fairly clear: she was presumably simply dressed and not striking in looks, as befits the character of Puccini’s ailing and unassuming seamstress.  But North American readers might have been surprised by the reviewer’s assertion that a “homely” appearance was well-suited to the doomed heroine, since we don’t generally think of Mimi as being ugly.

The OED explains the word’s different meanings on either side of the Atlantic:  1. Brit. a. simple, plain.  b. unpretentious.  c  primitive.   2. N. Amer. (of people or their features) not attractive in appearance, ugly.  3. comfortable in the manner of a home, cosy.  4. skilled at housekeeping.

Curiously, the word plain — one of homely‘s synonyms — is understood by both Brits and Yanks when describing the fairer sex (and the adjective is rarely if ever used to qualify the looks of a man or boy) as not just ordinary or undistinguished in countenance, but as positively unattractive. “She’s no oil painting” could be said of all the plain women of the New World and the old.

When William Wordsworth wrote his poem To the Daisy, the English poet was surely finding a certain beauty in “that homely face” that populates the lawns of English gardens, rather than dismissing the white-petaled weed as unbecoming.

With little here to do or see
Of things that in the great world be,
Sweet Daisy!  oft I talk to thee,
For thou art worthy,
Thou unassuming Common-place
Of Nature, with that homely face,
And yet with something of a grace
Which love makes for thee…

When Benjamin Franklin mused “Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely“, he was presumably playing on the word’s different meanings — namely, skilled in housekeeping, and safely unattractive.

 

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!


 

Face to face, one on one

            

One on one ……….                                or     One to one?

PBS Newshour is reporting this evening that “President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner have agreed to negotiate one-on-one in an effort to broker a deal to prevent the country from going over the so-called fiscal cliff at year’s end.”

Don’t worry: this isn’t a post about the fiscal cliff — even though we are all wondering what exactly this econo-geographical phenomenon actually is, and we’ve all probably imagined what it might look like …

 

No, let’s get back to this interesting meeting. Other US news media outlets are also reporting on and speculating about this imminent one-on-one encounter,  focusing more on the issue of the steep drop ahead than on the manner in which the President and the Speaker will go head-to-head, face-to-face, man-to-man…

I expect most British-English speakers who have read this far are trying to rid their minds of more — let’s say — “intimate” images conjured up by the advertised one-on-one meeting.

 

Yes, in Br.Eng. we keep these meetings — these face-to-face, head-to-head, man-to-man, toe-to-toe, nose-to-nose, eye-to-eye tete-a-tetes — strictly one to another, never allowing the use of one of those highly suggestive conjunctions such as “on” that imply or even hint at the possibility of any undesirable physical contact.

A teacher offering her student a one-on-one tutoring session, or a vicar counseling a lost soul in his flock one on one*, would raise more than a few eyebrows (and probably a few temperatures) in that green and pleasant land called England.

We know exactly what our American counterparts mean, but we’re going to keep it strictly business: mind to mind, sword to sword, face to face. Save the ons for wrestlers and dolphins.

 

* the question of whether the expression should be hyphenated or not, as probably determined by whether it’s used as an adjective or an adverb, is for separate discussion

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.
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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?

A flock of nouns of multitude

The answer to my previous post, “A singular quiz”, is that they’re all collective nouns, or nouns of multitude, and specifically terms of venery.

We’re familiar with the phrases “a flock of sheep” and “a pride of lions”, and similar collective nouns specific to certain groups or types of people, such as a “company of actors”, a “troupe of dancers”, a “class of students”, a “platoon of soldiers”, an “orchestra of musicians”, and even a “bevy of beauties”. The terms of venery — such words that refer to animals — can be especially poetic and descriptive, and below is Wikipedia’s explanation for their fascinating collective history and etymology (along with a list of my personal and most poetic favorites, which is by no means exhaustive). Also below is a list of my favorite flavory collective nouns used to describe certain professions or subsets of society, two of which need to be singled out for special attention: a “conjunction of grammarians” and a “shrivel of critics”. Whoever dreamed up those particular terms of venery must be the very epitome of style and wit. As a matter of fact, we do know the author of at least one of them, as explained in the next paragraph. It’s noted in Wiki’s explanation that these terms, even when they were first coined, never really had any practical application: they were “intended as a mark of erudition of the gentlemen able to use them correctly rather than for practical communication.” How lucky for all writers and poets (and even for us readers) that they persist in our lexicon today — some of them surprisingly so. The fact that a “gaggle” is still used to describe not just a flock of geese but also a collection of women (usually of the giggling or talkative kind) is interesting in these days of post-feminism and political correctness; this term was one of the many deliberately humorous words listed in the Book of Saint Albans, published in 1486.

James Lipton, best known to us as the creator and host of the American TV show Inside the Actors Studio, is — among many other things — a great lover of words. (Indeed, one of his favorite moments of his show — and definitely one of mine — is when he asks his actor subjects for mostly single-word answers to his questionnaire: favorite curse word? favorite and least favorite sounds? etc.) Lipton has a special interest in collective nouns, and he has published a definitive, best-selling book on the subject: An Exaltation of Larks (1968). Lipton has even invented some of his own nouns of multitude, including a “score of bachelors”, an “unction of undertakers”, a “shrivel of critics” (it had to come from an actor or some kind of performing artist), and a “queue of actors”.

Let’s not bore ourselves here (except to single out the lovely expression “a singular of boars”) with the questions and complexities of which verb forms (singular or plural) should be used with these collective nouns. Suffice to say the Brits and the Yanks diverge in their usage: in British English, collective nouns can take either singular or plural verb forms, depending on the context and something called the “implied metonymic shift”. It is perfectly acceptable in England to say “the class have finished their homework” (especially if all the students in the class had the same homework). However, in American English, collective nouns take singular verb forms: “the class has finished its homework”. This matter was discussed in an earlier Glossophilia blog post: https://glossophilia.org/?p=156

Some of my favorite nouns of assembly (for professions or groups of people):

– A tabernacle of bakers
– A shuffle of bureaucrats
– A hastiness of cooks
– A shrivel of critics
– A decanter of deans
– An obstruction of dons
– A galaxy of governesses
– A conjunction of grammarians
– A melody of harpists
– An observance of hermits
– A neverthriving of jugglers
– A superfluity of nuns
– A scolding of seamstresses
– A disguising of tailors
– A prudence of vicars
– An ambush of widows

Some of my favorite terms of venery:

– A shrewdness of apes
– A pace of asses
– A cete of badgers
– A sloth or sleuth of bears
– A singular of boars
– An obstinacy of buffalo
– A clowder or pounce of cats
– An intrusion of cockroaches
– A rag of colts
– A murder of crows
– A cowardice of curs
– A pitying of doves
– A business of ferrets
– A charm of finches
– A leash or skulk of fox
– A tower of giraffes
– An implausibility of gnus
– A trip of goats
– A down or husk of hares
– A bloat of hippopotamuses
– A cry or mute of hounds
– A cackle of hyenas
– An intrigue of kittens
– A deceit of lapwings
– An exaltation of larks
– A leap of leopards
– A pride of lions
– A labor of moles
– A span or barren of mules
– A richness of martens
– A romp of otters
– A parliament of owls
– An aurora of polar bears
– A prickle of porcupines
– An unkindness of ravens
– A crash of rhinoceroses
– A shiver of sharks
– A scurry of squirrels
– An affliction of starlings
– A streak of tigers
– A knot of toads
– A gam of whales
– A business of weasels

 

Wikipedia on the history of nouns of assembly:

The tradition of using “terms of venery” or “nouns of assembly” — collective nouns that are specific to certain kinds of animals — stems from an English hunting tradition of the late Middle Ages. The fashion of a consciously developed hunting language came to England from France. It is marked by an extensive proliferation of specialist vocabulary, applying different names to the same feature in different animals. These elements can be shown to have already been part of French and English hunting terminology by the beginning of the 14th century. In the course of the 14th century, it became a courtly fashion to extend the vocabulary, and by the 15th century, this tendency had reached exaggerated proportions. The Venerie of Twiti (early 14th century) distinguished three types of droppings of animals, and three different terms for herds of animals. Gaston Phoebus (14th c.) had five terms for droppings of animals, which were extended to seven in the Master of the Game (early 15th century). The focus on collective terms for groups of animals emerges in the later 15th century. Thus, a list of collective nouns in Egerton MS 1995, dated to ca. 1452 under the heading of termis of venery &c. extends to 70 items, and the list in the Book of Saint Albans (1486) runs to 165 items, many of which, even though introduced by the compaynys of beestys and fowlys, do not relate to venery but to human groups and professions and are clearly humorous. (a Doctryne of doctoris, a Sentence of Juges, a Fightyng of beggers, an uncredibilite of Cocoldis, a Melody of harpers, a Gagle of women, a Disworship of Scottis etc.)

The Book of Saint Albans became very popular during the 16th century and was reprinted frequently. Gervase Markham edited and commented on the list in his The Gentleman’s Academic in 1595. The book’s popularity had the effect of perpetuating many of these terms as part of the Standard English lexicon, even though they have long ceased to have any practical application. Even in their original context of medieval venery, the terms were of the nature of kennings, intended as a mark of erudition of the gentlemen able to use them correctly rather than for practical communication.The popularity of these terms in the early modern and modern period has resulted in the addition of numerous light-hearted, humorous or “facetious” collective nouns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun

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/

 

 

 

What’s in an A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.?

Which of the following words is an acronym? NATO, jpeg, Nabisco, radar, SAT, OMG, WTF? Most would agree that they’re all acronyms, with the possible exception of the latter two, but there are purists who would argue that only NATO fits the true definition.

There’s a whole lot of confusion out there about what actually constitutes an acronym, and there’s no elegant or eloquent way to define or explain what it is in its various incarnations (partly because of the very ambiguity of the word itself). According to Wikipedia, it’s “the name for a word from the first letters of each word in a series of words”; as Merriam-Webster explains it, acronym is “a word formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term”. Hmmm … We’ve hardly begun, and already we’re sensing some disagreement: is it just the first letter of each word, as explained by Wikipedia, or can it be made up of more than one letter from each constituent word, as Merriam-Webster suggests? The OED goes further by qualifying that it is a word “usually pronounced as such, formed from the initial letters of other words.” Indeed, some definitions prescribe that an acronym must be pronounceable as a word (eg. NATO) in order for it to qualify as such. The most common acronyms in use today are not pronounceable/pronounced as words but are simply strings of initials (FBI, SAT, BBC, CIA, PR etc.); this form of initial-letter abbreviation is also referred to as an initialism or an alphebiticism — especially by those unwilling to confer acronym status on it.

Deriving from the Greek acro-, acron (meaning extreme, tip or end) and onoma (name), the word acronym is relatively young. It was first coined in the 20th century, and many early examples were shorthand names for organizations created during or in the aftermath of the two world wars. Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service) were names for WWI units; as well as radar (radio detection and ranging), awol (absent without leave), and scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) coming out of the Second World War, a whole series of postal acronyms were developed by active servicemen conveying romantic messages to their sweethearts back home. SWALK (“sealed with a loving kiss”) is just one example of such a word scribbled on the back of many an envelope. I’m reading Erik Larson’s fabulous book about Germany in the early 1930s, In the Garden of Beasts, in which he reminds us of how the name Gestapo — the secret police of Hitler’s Nazi regime — came to be: from the first letters of its full German name “Geheime Staatspolizei”. So it wasn’t just the Americans looking to abbreviate the names of their organizations. NATO, NASA, and UNESCO are widely used true acronyms whose full multi-word original names are now almost forgotten. The machine that generates random numbers for the UK’s Premium Bond (or national lottery) drawing is called ERNIE, after the electronic random number indicator equipment.

There are no less than 84 definitions for the initialism “C.O.D.”, which is most commonly understood to mean cash on delivery. If it were a pure acronym it would be pronounced “cod”, and this brings us to another factor in the “what makes an acronym” argument: whether said abbreviation is spoken or written, and in what context. Especially now in our ADD world of SMSs, IMs, AIMs, texts, and tweets, where brevity is king, acronyms or initialisms are invading the language. BRB (be right back), LOL (laugh out loud), BTW (by the way), OMG, and WTF are just a few of the ubiquitous acronyms that populate the vast new vocabulary of internet slang. But these initialisms are rarely spoken aloud, since the number of syllables used to pronounce the full phrase is usually no greater than that of the acronym itself (and in the case of WTF, the initialism is actually longer and harder to pronounce than the words it represents), and therefore are used predominantly for keystroke- and character-saving purposes. So this particular form of acronym tends to be reserved for the pen or the keyboard — and many would argue that this confined usage and function strips the abbreviation of its acronym status. However, it’s worth noting that these written abbreviations existed long before keyboards became our predominant tool for writing: FYI (for your information), IMO (in my opinion) and P.S. (postscript) have been in the written vernacular for a long time, and some Latin acronyms even pre-date modern English: a.m. is from the Latin ante meridiem (“before noon”), and p.m. is post meridiem; A.D. (from the Latin Anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord”) was soon complemented by the English-sourced B.C. (“before Christ”).

OK is used and understood all over the world with its meaning of approval, assent, acceptance, agreement or acknowledgement. No-one really knows where OK originates, but the many theories of its etymology — a number of which have been dismissed as false — are acronym-based. Here are a few of them, all dating from the 19th century:

  • initials of “oll korrect”, coined  during a Boston fad for comical misspellings and abbreviations
  • initials of “Old Kinderhook”, the nickname for Martin Van Buren, used as a slogan in the 1840 presidential election
  • (German, c. 1900) initials of ohne Korrektur (“without correction”)
  • (Greek) initials of Ola Kala ( Ὅλα Καλά, “everything is fine”), used by teachers marking students’ work
  • initials of “Open Key”: a global telegraph signal meaning “ready to transmit”
  • (Latin) initials of Omnis Korrecta (“all correct”), used by early schoolmasters marking examination papersoch aye (“ah, yes”) used by Scottish immigrants

 

You say dressing, I say stuffing …

 

“Know your stuff, know what you are stuffing, then stuff it elegantly.“ — Lola May

 

Back in the middle ages in England, stuffing was known as farce, from the French farcir (derived from the Latin farcire), meaning “to stuff”. Farce also referred then to a brief and lighthearted dramatic interlude or play ‘stuffed’ for light relief between more serious religious presentations in order to hold an audience’s attention, and that meaning survives in a more comedic version today. As well as farce, forcemeat was another term used for the spiced meat mixture that was so called because of the way it was forced into the cavity of the bird for cooking.

Stuffing first began to be used in Tudor England during the reign of Henry VIII (the word was first seen in print in 1538). However, a few hundred years on, it was deemed too vulgar and descriptive a word for those in elegant Victorian high society, who began referring to stuffing as dressing — and this was the word that traveled across the Atlantic and is now used widely in North America, although it was subsequently dropped from the vernacular in England where its more hearty antecedent was preferred.

When the American company Stove Top introduced its own brand of dressing in a box in 1972 (after Ruth Siems, a home economist, invented the instant version of the product) and called it “stuffing”, the traditional English name found its way into Thanksgiving turkeys and households around the United States. Stuffing tends to be heard more in the South and East, while dressing is the accompaniment of choice in the Midwest.

Happy Thanksgiving!