The Lexicographer's Rules

My latest column in the Malaysia Star has been posted. The column is based on a radio essay that I wrote in June 2007 but never aired. In short, I’m endorsing the use of quotation marks for emphasis. John McWhorter more or less agrees in a column he published in the New York Sun in August 2007.

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There’s a chain of restaurants in the United States called White Castle that sells greasy, yummy, little, oniony hamburgers in paper boxes.

On those boxes is printed the slogan Buy ‘em by the “sack.” The double quote marks around “sack” are theirs, not mine. They are what is called “scare quotes.”

Scare quotes are usually found around very short phrases or around single words in order to call attention to those words in a negative way. They aren’t used to quote someone, they’re used to call into question whatever words are found within them. They instil doubt.

For example, in the movie Citizen Kane, scare quotes appear on the screen in a screaming newspaper headline, Candidate Kane Caught in Love Nest with “Singer.” Singer is in scare quotes as a way of suggesting that Kane’s sweetie, Susan Alexander, was little more than a floozy (a woman of loose morals) and not much of a singer.

White Castle, it turns out, has been using quotes around “sack” since at least the ’50s and probably longer. Because of the way the company uses them, I prefer to call them something other than scare quotes.

For one thing, they’re not really calling the word “sack” into question. There’s no scaring to be done, no fear to be instilled, no doubt to be sown. I suppose there are cheap laughs to be had by reading Buy ‘em by the “sack” as if the “sack” were only pretending to be a sack but is instead something else, like a tugboat or a banana. That’s the kind of intentional misunderstanding you have to make in order to think that those quotes around “sack” shouldn’t be there.

They belong there because the company is calling attention to the word. “Sack”, perhaps, wasn’t a word that everyone would use. Some might prefer “bag”, since “sack” historically has been much less used in some parts of the United States to refer to the folded paper container your purchases are packed into at the grocery store.

So if they’re not scare quotes around “sack”, what are they?

I suggest the term shout quotes. And I suggest that the use of quotations for emphasis be condoned for casual use by all language authorities: hired, self-appointed, or otherwise.

There’s a weblog called the “Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks” and on the photo-sharing website Flickr, there’s a fantastic picture pool called “quote abuse.” Both mock the use of quotes used to emphasise or draw attention to a word.

But as examples on both sites show, there are proper, natural, widely understood rules behind using shout quotes, even if they’re taught in no grammar or style book that I can find.

They’re appropriate when you have no other easy way to indicate emphasis. They’re appropriate when used, for example, in casual sign-making. They’re appropriate when bolding or underlining is not possible. They’re appropriate when used by people who don’t do typesetting for a living.

One picture shows a handwritten sign that says, “Sorry”, but there will be no pumpkin soup served today!

Well, for lame laughs, we could assume those are scare quotes and that the writer meant they weren’t really sorry. But that’s an uncharitable reading. The only way you could truthfully assume that the sorry was insincere would be to also assume that the sign-writer was incapable of even the simplest lie about being sorry. Clearly, with the shout quotes, the sign-writer meant that “sorry” was to be emphasised. Perhaps the pumpkin soup is extraordinary and they really were sorry it was not being served.

The intentional misreading of the shout quotes as scare quotes does grow rather thin. The sign that says We Love “Sushi” makes one commenter on Flickr wonder whether the sign-maker meant “cat” in place of “sushi.” See, if “sushi” is in quotes it must mean that the word is dubious, right? Maybe they’re selling cat-meat instead of fish?

No! They just wanted to emphasise the word “sushi.” Very simple. You have to go out of your way to get it wrong.

A truck door that says our drivers are “safe” drivers could make you wonder whether that company does indeed define “safe” differently from everyone else—besides leaving you wondering who they are trying to convince, when safe-driving behaviour alone should do the trick.

But of course, all they meant to do was to emphasise the word “safe”, in much the same way that in sign after sign, “do not” or “please” are put inside shout quotes that emphasise the strongest sentiments of their authors.

I endorse the use of quotation marks for emphasis, even in extreme cases. One example I collected is of a sign in a bar advertising half-off bottles of beer during happy hours. There are four shout quotes, one in each corner, decorating the page as much as they are enclosing the text, but all of them emphasising the discount.

That perfect example of using quotes for emphasis is something I can drink to.

My latest slang column in the Malaysia Star explores some new-found slang.

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Over the past few weeks in this space, I’ve shared old slang with you, but now it’s time to look at more recent slang, slang so new it has yet to prove that it will endure. 

From The Independent in London comes a bit of military slang that’s a head-scratcher (a puzzle) at first.  

In December, Jerome Starkey wrote, “Heat-seeking Javelin rockets designed to hit T72 tanks tearing across Europe are very good at finding insurgents cowering in compounds. Marines call it ‘throwing a Porsche at them’, because the missiles cost 65,000 a pop.” 

The expression throw a Porsche at someone has one of the hallmarks of slang: a bit of humour. Of course, the British soldiers are not actually tossing an expensive sports car at the enemy. They are, however, firing missiles that cost just about as much as a high-end sports car such as a Porsche. The slang comes about via metaphor. 

By the way, to say something costs a certain amount of money a pop, means it costs that much for every single one that you buy. You could also say, “Every time I ride the bus, it costs me two dollars a pop.” 

Another metaphor was used to invent the expression Q-tip cruise. This one takes a bit of unpacking (that is, explaining) in order to make it comprehensible.  

Q-tip is a brand name of a type of short stick that has very small tufts of white cotton on the end. They’re sold mainly in North America and are used for putting on make-up, daubing wounds with antiseptic, or cleaning out your ears (although the official advice is not to use them that way because you could do damage to your ear drums). 

The Q is capitalised because “Q-tip” is a proper noun, although it is close to becoming generic in the United States, the same way that the brand name Kleenex is now widely used to mean any tissue paper on which you can blow your nose. The existing generic name of the Q-tip product is “cotton swab.”  

Cruise in Q-tip cruise refers to a pleasure trip aboard a large ship.  

Now, the metaphor comes into play because many of the passengers on Q-tip cruises are senior citizens or just seniors. That is, old people who have white hair that resembles the cotton on the ends of Q-tips. 

Here’s another bit of new slang: to swede. Sweding is a particularly interesting word from a new movie called Be Kind, Rewind. Created by French filmmaker Michael Gondry, the plot revolves around two men who work at a video rental store in which all of the videotapes of movies are accidentally erased.  

So the two men decide to swede the movies themselves, meaning to re-make all of the movies with a home video camera and the barest of props and plots. In use outside of the movie, Gondry and the website for Be Kind, Rewind say that to swede a movie is to insert yourself into it, to make yourself a part of the action. 

Another bit of new slang is to jock. It means to steal, or, in other slang, to bite. Bite and jock are especially used this way on the Internet, where they might be used in sentences like, “Don’t jock my pages!” or “He didn’t write that! He bit it from me.” 

In politics, a slang term that has caught my attention is hispandering. It, too, requires some unpacking before it’s easy to understand.  

First, it’s a blend of the words Hispanic and pandering. Hispanic is an adjective that refers to people from Latin America. In this case, because hispandering is a political term, it more specifically refers to illegal Spanish-speaking immigrants. 

Pandering isn’t slang, but instead is a long-standing English word meaning to give in to the wishes or desires of someone else, especially when those wishes or desires are vulgar or common. It comes from Chaucer’s play Troilus and Criseyde with help from Shakespeare’s version, Troilus and Cressida. 

Where these two words come together is in the middle of the debate over illegal immigration in the United States. Some Americans believe the country should grant amnesty—a period during which the immigration law will not be enforced—to illegal immigrants who have shown that they are hard workers and taxpayers, especially if they have children, since any child born in the United States has the right to be an American citizen, even if their parents are not. 

Those people who disagree with the idea of amnesty, therefore, believe politicians who do support it are pandering in order to get more votes from people who think the amnesty is a good idea. Voilà, Hispandering. 

Weee! I’m at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament this weekend, co-emceeing the finals and handing out awards. See me and my radio partner with Will Shortz here.

UPDATE: More photos here.

My latest column from the Malaysia Star.

Slang is the language of young people. It is a fast-moving river and although its bends and flows seem the same, they are, they must be, composed of different cascades and crests. We learn the slang of our generation and it is always the slang we know best, but our slang terms are usually new words for old ideas.

Look at the generational ways of saying “goodbye.” In the 1980s, “I’m out of here” became “outta here” which became the interjection “audi,” spelled after the car brand, and, therefore, sometimes rendered as “Audi 5000.” Although it’s a bit old-fashioned, some folks still use it where “so long!” might have been used in the 1940s.

In the 1960s, you might have said, “I’m gonna jet” meaning “I’m going to leave.”

In the 1980s, “to blaze” was another way of saying that you’re leaving. Like “audi” and “jet” you still hear it from time to time. It may never be very popular, though, because its space is blocked. A newer, more common meaning for “to blaze” has arisen: “to smoke marijuana.”

And that’s just as well. One of the key traits of slang—what distinguishes it from standard English, from jargon, and from simple humorous wordplay—is its synonymy.

Slang tends to have many words for the same ideas. A zillion words for sex acts or sex organs, bucketloads of admiring and rude terms for men and women, lots of ways to call people smart and stupid, an endless supply of adjectives meaning bad and good, and an astonishingly large list of terms for drugs and alcohol.

So, of course, slang doesn’t need “to blaze” to say “to leave.” It has, for example, “to bounce” with the same meaning. “Let’s bounce! Mikey’s got a band playing at his house.”

“Roll” is another one. “We’re done here. Let’s roll.” It calls on the American preoccupation with cars, suggests something of a caravan (in the sense of a parade of vehicles, not in the sense of a habitable vehicle used by British pensioners on holiday), and has an air of a police action or the military about it. It suggests a band embarking at once in an organised fashion to a specific destination to do something together.

Slang is alchemistic: it has many curious properties. On one hand, it can sound so extraordinarily old-fashioned or out-of-date that even the most dull-witted person can tell that a term is, as they say, radioactive, meaning that if you use it you will be marked as clueless—out of touch, out of fashion, and not even close to being cool. Slang carries with it invisible “best when used by” dates.

Think of “bling” or “bling bling” meaning “ostentatious jewelry or adornment.” It arose from a hip-hop song in 1999 and became overused in less than a year. It soon appeared in advertisements on the sides of buses. Once ad agencies or newsmagazines have picked up on a slang word, if it is not already uncool they are sure to kill it by overexposure.

Slang thrives from a sense of novelty and a sense of being privileged knowledge. You hardly get that if an airline is selling seats with it.

On the other hand, slang, if it does not catch the ears and eyes of the popular press and the writers of popular television and movies, can endure for generations, with each new younger set feeling that the “best when used by” date has not passed.

I’m thinking, for example, of a term for “drunk”—“tore up” or “torn up.” My colleague Connie Eble at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, collects slang from her students every semester. “Tore up” appears on her list from autumn 2006, defined as “extremely drunk,” and given with the synonyms “plastered,” “smashed,” “trashed,” and “wasted.”

Yet, that term was already in use in the 1950s.

“Bomb,” as in “to fail an examination,” is also on the 2006 list, yet dates to the early 1960s. “To bone someone” meaning to have sex with them, which dates to at least as early as the 1970s, is also on the minds of young people in 2006.

I wonder if those students know they’re using slang that is older than they are?