The Lexicographer's Rules

Officers receive tips from Israelites. “As for the airports, Israelites have several security checkpoints, unlike America where there is one. Passports are checked anywhere from five to seven times. They don’t require people to take off shoes or belts because they are so used to profiling people.”

Quibbling point: The demonym for the inhabitants of Israel is Israelis. Israelites were a people of the pre-Christian era.

This is the stupidest folk etymology I’ve seen in a while:

The word “rune,” as far as I know, comes from the word “runner” where a runner would run with a rune stone four miles down the road, and then he’d give it to another runner, who’d run another four miles to another runner, who’d run another four miles to give it to the King, and the King would read the symbol on the stone and say, “Oh, there’s a wedding in three days.” So that’s how they communicated way back then.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a more reliable etymology:

In origin the same word as ROUN, mystery, etc., but in sense 1 adopted in the 17th cent. (through Danish writers on Northern antiquities) from Old Norse and Icelandic rún, pl. rúnar, later rúnir (Danish rune, pl. runer; Swedish runa, pl. runor). Hence also German and Dutch rune, pl. runen, French rune, pl. runes, etc. In sense 2 the immediate source is the Finnish runo, itself an adoption of the Old Norse word.

Roun, pointed to in the first line of the OED ety, is given this as its origins:

Common Teutonic: Old English rún str. fem., = Middle Dutch rune, ruun (ruen), whisper, secret counsel, etc., Old Swedish rûna (Middle Late German rûne, rûn), Old High German rûna (Middle High German rûne, German raun, dialect rûn), Old Norse rún, Gothic rûna.

There’s also a string of Greek that I don’t have the time to render here.

Any advocate of drastic spelling reform must have an insufficient understanding of just how differently English is spoken in the various groups that contribute to our various American English dialects. Which is why stories like this are such howlers: those paragraphs written in “simpler” spelling simply do not work in whole swaths of America. First, because they’re nightmares of craptastic phonetic transcription; second, because not everyone pronounces every word the same.

Slippery-slope logic suggests that after we have spelling reform, we’d have vocabulary reform, with one word for every thing, idea, or action, and only one thing, idea, or action per word. Imagine the naming committees getting together trying to figure out which bird species, exactly, is the robin, to the exclusion of all others.

But the first test of the self-appointed spelling reformers should be to decide whether cater-corner, catty cornered, or kitty corner is the preferred spelling. That’d keep them busy and out of further mischief for a few decades.

Thinking phonetic similarities between words prove origin or relation is a common mistake of amateur etymologists, as in this junk etymology, where the author, a known crank who favors simplistic and unverified Irish origins for a variety of English words—because he thinks American and English lexicographers have an anti-Irish bias—posits that bunkum comes from a buanchumadh, an Irish-Gaelic word he says means “perpetual invention, endless composition (of a story, poem, or song), a long made-up story, fig. a shaggy dog tale.” Of course, he provides no written citations of the word in English-language contexts. He’s got bupkus to prove his claim.

The author, Daniel Cassidy, used to post his rubbish to the email list of the American Dialect Society, but when his rickety logic and dubious scholarship couldn’t withstand the scrutiny of interested scholars and dilettantes, he took his quackery other places to people who don’t know any better.

Wake County school officials revised their book-use policy Tuesday which could lead to some popular and classic books being banned from their public schools.…Called2Action, a local Christian activist group, and some parents…[complained[ that the books contain “vulgar and sexually explicit language."…School officials said five books were formally challenged this school year, including…"Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang” by Jonathon Green.

Oh, Green’s dictionary definitely contains vulgar and sexually explicit language. But you don’t ban such books. You buy more copies and spread them around. Children are desperate for a resource they can go to for matter-of-fact answers about what words really mean. They may very well browse and learn some new terms, but where’s the harm in that? I learned all of mine on the school bus, reading my sisters’ torrid romance novels, and from my parents. A child only really has to hear his father say “motherfucker” once for it to take a permanent place in his brain. (It was 1983, Dad, and you were putting up the television aerial on the concrete steps out back of the house.)