The Lexicographer's Rules

Here’s something that peeves me like a six-wheeled peeling-and-peeving machine: newspapers reprinting email forwards without properly sourcing, dating, or citing them. It’s usually smaller newspapers that have no budgets and few staff, but still. How hard is it to properly find out where a chunk of text came from—a chunk of text that splatted in your inbox from the ether? Did not little green Martians bestow upon us Google for this very purpose?

A favorite to pass around in email and reprint in crappy newspapers everywhere are words taken from the Washington Post‘s Style Invitational in which readers invent new jokey words.

In some cases, the words are attributed to the Post, in some cases not. In this case, they claim “Here are this year’s winners.“ Well, no. They weren’t the winners this year, nor when the list first appeared on Usenet in 2003, when they also were labeled “this year’s winners.“ No, some of those words—like intaxication and reintarnation, appeared in the Washington Post in 1998. Others, like cashtration and beelzebug, seem to not be from the Washington Post at all. Sometime during their eight-year trip through the Internet, they were yanked from another list that has itself been travelling around since 1995, when it appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian newspaper. God and little green Martians only know where that list originated.

It’d all be different if they were, in fact, useful words, but they’re stunt words. They’re almost never used outside of these forwarded lists. They’re like pandas: good for a quick look, maybe an involuntary grin, and then you’re off to the monkey cages to speculate whether 43 bonobos could kill a silverback. Not useful.

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People claim to have coined words all the time that they clearly didn’t. Take this example. Peter Engel, the producer of the television show Saved by the Bell, says:

“You have to remember, our target audience was the 12- to 17-year-old age group…We invented the word ‘tween’…Parents trusted us with their children and we didn’t want to betray that trust.“

Maybe he meant “created the tween television market niche,“ but no, he and his people did not invent the word. Tween, “a preteen or a young teenager,“ dates provably to 1946 and perhaps as early as 1941. Tweenie, with the same meaning, dates to 1919 and Tweenager dates to 1949.

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There’s some yapping on the Internets about “cool” touch screens.

That cool factor is outweighed by history: touch screens failed as the primary interface for desktop computers and similar constant-use devices because of gorilla arm. This is the heavy, dragged-down feeling arms get when they are held forward or upward for extended periods of time. Short interactions with touch screens, such as those used in automatic teller machines, are not a problem. Nor are very small screens, like those on PDAs. Making the monitor angled backward in a more horizontal position, as shown in this video, can alleviate the problem somewhat.

Gorilla arm is also part of the reason why we have speed ratios on mice and trackpads, where the slightest movement of the hand moves the cursor a much larger distance across the computer screen. If it was a 1:1 ratio, repetitive stress injuries and the like would be far more prevalent.

Tip: you can ease the strain on your mouse hand by setting your mouse as fast as possible. For further tweaking, on OS X you used to be able to, and perhaps still can, install the Kensington MouseWorks software. Even when I haven’t had a Kensington pointer device, it let me set my mouse settings hyper-fast and hyper-sensitive. It takes a day or two to get used to, but after that you’ll need only to barely budge your finger to get the cursor to go exactly where you want it. Your tight tendons will eventually relax.

“In the early 1990s, when the mites first struck hives in the United States, Utah’s etymologist announced that after a single infected colony had been destroyed, the state was free of the infestation.“ (Source Link)

This article is so filled with rubbish I hardly know where to begin. I’ll just crush a bit of the low-hanging fruit:

Snoop Dogg…is credited with a form of rap-speak known as “shizzle.“ Credited only by people who don’t know better. He merely popularized it. The “izz” infix is recorded in its current incarnation as early as 1982, when Snoop Dogg was just ten years old. Older, probably independently derived, forms date to at least as early as the 1930s.

The one millionth word is likely to be formed this summer. Absolute twaddle. We’re long past the millionth word of English, no matter how you define “word.“ I believe there are millions of chemical names alone. Update: Ben Zimmer has gone into more detail at Language Log, basically saying: you can’t even count how many words there are in English. Like the national debt clock that used to be on Sixth Avenue in the New York City, any count given can only be an estimate. Ben calls the numbers in the Times article “exquisitely silly.“

Chinglish and up to 60 cousins such as Spanglish (Spanish-English), Japlish (Japanese-English) and Hinglish (Hindi-English) owe their rise largely to the internet. Ha! These glishes are all recorded in major language journals and elsewhere decades before the first web browser and before the pre-Web Internet left the labs and universities to become a household utiliity. Perhaps the phrase their rise might permit a begrudging acceptance of this “fact” but I think the many thousands of Puerto Ricans living in New York City before 1970 would disagree about whether, exactly, Spanglish became widely spoken because of the Internet.

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