The Lexicographer's Rules

Read my latest column in the Malaysia Star, bitches.

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One of the measures of whether or not a word is considered safe, at least by Americans, is whether or not it’s OK to say it on television during prime time, when the whole family might be watching.

“Bitch” is one of those words.

In its simplest, literal use, a bitch is a female dog. That’s only the smallest part of the story.

In slang use, “bitch” is a derogatory word for a woman, and, occasionally, for a man who acts like a woman, especially when it’s not considered the proper way to behave. To be a bitch is to be ball-busting (verbally aggressive towards men), to be disagreeable, to be difficult to get along with.

Calling someone a bitch is still considered impolite enough to make them smack you, yet it’s not anything that would cause fines to be imposed by government agencies on the television shows that use the word in their scripts.

Indeed, women will sometimes call themselves a bitch, without anger or self-hatred. In those cases, they simply mean that a bitch is a tough, uncompromising woman, usually one who knows what she wants and intends to get it.

Even more facetiously (humorously or flippantly), a woman could refer to all of her female friends as “my bitches”. It’s slangy, it’s very informal, but it’s unlikely to offend because it’s the kind of thing you can say about your inner circle that you simply cannot say about outsiders.

It simply means that, for better or worse, with flaws and all, these women are her friends.

Among men, a bitch is a man who is believed to be weak, fragile, whiny, or complaining. For example, if one man calls another his bitch, he means that the other man is under his control and is being dominated physically, emotionally, or socially. “I’m not your bitch, dude. You can’t make me do that.”

It’s also the negative, undesirably feminine aspect of “bitch” that gives the word its place in the slang terms “bitch tits” and “bitch slap”.

“Bitch tits” are fatty breasts on a man, usually the result of being overweight. It’s a curious combination of words, since “tits”, a crass slang term for “breasts”, usually only means a female body part. “Bitch tits” seems redundant; that is, it kind of says that they’re feminine twice.

A “bitch slap” is a hard smack with an open-handed palm on someone’s face. A bitch slap usually results in a satisfying “smack!” sound; at least, it does if you’re the one doing the smacking.

I suppose this is called a “bitch slap” because it’s the kind of hit perceived as more typical of a woman. A man is expected to punch with a closed fist, not smack someone with an open hand.

The noun, as they tend to do, eventually became a verb. To bitch means to complain or gripe in a constant, annoying way. To bitch out someone means to lecture, chastise, or criticise someone.

A son of a bitch is a bad man, or a man who is tough, stubborn, and unkind. It’s a universal term of abuse that you might call someone simply because you don’t agree with them or they don’t agree with you.

“Son of a bitch” is often abbreviated as SOB, which is not pronounced as a word, but as letters: ESS oh bee, with the emphasis on the first letter. It has the same uses as the longer form.

A milder version of “son of a bitch” is son of a gun, although it’s so tame that it doesn’t carry anywhere near the same force as “son of a bitch”.

Both can be used as exclamations of surprise. “Son of a bitch! They stole a billion dollars?” Or “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun! They even stole my toothbrush!”

Similarly, you might say “What a bitch!” when someone has bad luck like losing a mobile phone or having a small automobile accident, the kind of thing that is annoying and costly but not life-threatening.

A bitch, in this case and others like it, is simply a difficult situation or thing. “That nut is a bitch to get off that bolt” means that it’s hard to get off.

One of the few positive forms of “bitch” is bitching, used as an adjective to mean “good” or “great”. It’s usually spelled and pronounced as without the final ‘g’, as “bitchin’ ”.

It’s a bit dated now, but still heard in music and movies occasionally, especially since it never really seems to have become passé (outdated) in California. “He’s got a bitchin’ new car, man.”

To flip a bitch isn’t really negative or positive. It simply means to make a sudden left turn in a car, especially in a place where such a turn is not usually done.

Why the “bitch” here? I’m not completely sure. A much bandied about stereotype is that women are worse drivers than men. I suppose a sudden, incautious left turn could be seen as a sign of bad driving.

My latest column in the Malaysia Star.

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In all the talk in this space about slang, it’s easy to forget about dialect.

Dialect is that language of a specific group of people from a particular ethnic or geographic background. It’s the kind of English – a word, a turn of phrase, a special pronunciation – that is passed from parents to children, unlike slang which is passed between members of a generation and tends to become outdated rather quickly.

We get a lot of questions about dialect on the radio show. Often, they are about something an elder used to say.

My go-to resource (the place I trust the most) for answering dialect questions is the Dictionary of American Regional English. The editors are now finishing the fifth and final volume of the work, which will complete what I believe to be one of the great feats of English-language dictionary-making. DARE, as it is abbreviated, tends always to have the answers I need.

For example, one caller wanted to know about the word “dauncy”. She told us it was what her grandmother used to say when she was not feeling well but didn’t have anything obviously wrong with her.

In other words, she was “poorly”, a word that looks like an adverb because it ends in “-ly” but is an adjective meaning “unwell”.

The older spelling of “dauncy” is “donsie”. Among all the reference works I checked, there are at least 10 spellings. Widely varying spelling is characteristic of dialect, which tends to be mostly oral, and, therefore, more susceptible to an author’s imagination when written down.

About 20 years ago, Vic Weals wrote about “dauncy” in the Knoxville (Tennessee) Journal. I thought he described it very well.

He said that the word “appears to have meanings that differ when it is applied to self and when it applies to another person. ‘I feel donsie’ might mean I feel dizzy, or slightly ill, or nauseated. When put on somebody else, ‘donsie’ can mean, at least in some localities, that the person is intoxicated, addled, silly, stupid, or, according to some local interpretations, quick-tempered, and even saucy or pert.”

Under the spelling of “donsie”, DARE shows that the word has been used to mean “vaguely unwell” as far back as 1874. A map shows that usage of the word is clustered roughly around the Ohio River valley. DARE also suggests “dauncy” comes to American English from Scots Gaelic.

Checking the online Dictionary of the Scots Language, I find additional coverage of the word, as well as in the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, edited in part by Michael B. Montgomery, and in Montgomery’s book From Ulster to America, which covers the influence of the Scot-Irish on American English.

Montgomery believes the dialect word comes from the Irish word “donas”, meaning “bad luck or misery”, and its Scots Gaelic equivalent “donas” or “donais”, meaning “mischief, harm, or bad luck”.

DARE shows another, older meaning of “donsie”, dating back to 1805 that means “fastidious” or “squeamish”, which is likely from the Scots word “daunch” which means fastidious.

“Dauncy” is just common enough that it was used in the 1950s in an episode of the old television sitcom I Love Lucy where the main character is pregnant. Instead of saying that she has morning sickness, she says she’s “dauncy”.

As you can see, it’s easy to get lost in dictionaries when researching dialect.

Another word a listener recently asked about was “faunch”. DARE has it as far back as 1970 and defines it as “to fret; to show irritation or impatience”.

An older meaning by some decades is “to rant and rave”, which goes back to at least 1911. That use is particularly associated with horses, who might be said to be “faunching at the bit” or “faunching around” when they’re restless or unsettled.

Finally, one last dialect term: “jockey box”. That’s another name for the glovebox or glove compartment in a car. It dates to as early as 1881 and is common in Idaho.

However, when in 1961, Roberta Hanley wrote about truck drivers’ language in the journal American Speech, she suggested that “jockey box” was used throughout the country.

My latest column in the Malaysia Star.

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A lot of well-publicised new words are fake.

Take the word wilf as an example. It stands for “what was I looking for?” and describes the tendency of people on the Internet to get distracted.

Web users intend to find information about, say, horses but instead end up reading about tortoises, somehow forgetting as they clicked from page to page to read about horses much at all.

In 2006, wilf was widely discussed in the international English press. You’d have thought it was the best, shiniest, coolest new word ever. But now the word that was once much-heralded in the newspapers is still only talked about in the press as a curiosity, as a new word, as something to remark upon. It seems practically nobody really uses the word at all.

What happened was that it was spread by a press release. A company that wanted to attract attention to itself and its business (we won’t name them here: why give them what they’re after?) created the word, put it in a press release, and then the media reported from that press release.

Words that are spread that way are called factitious words. They are created only so that they can be spread; that is, they are created by people who want to sell a product.

Lots of newspaper coverage must mean that a word is heavily used by other people, too, right? Somebody other than journalists?

Well, no. “Wilf” doesn’t appear to be used by anyone else at all. That’s a characteristic of such words: their existence depends upon a constant outflow of publicity and marketing. They are not spread like most other words, which is by natural use and word of mouth.

“Wilf” is a word, of course, but since it had an unnatural birth, it has an unnatural life. It’s just a stunt word, what they would call in the US military a self-licking ice cream cone. It exists only to help itself continue to exist. That, and helping the company that coined it to coin it, so to speak (helping the company that created the word to make lots of money).

Marketers and marketing companies create most of the stunt words that I come across. They want to demonstrate to their potential corporate customers that they know all about a certain kind of individual or family consumer, so they’ll create a name for that kind of consumer. That way, they can spread that new name and ride along with it wherever it goes and get second-hand publicity from it.

One British firm coined the term YAWN to stand for “young and wealthy, but normal”. It describes unostentatious, environment-loving young people who, of course, have money. Somehow all of the terms created by marketing companies always seem to focus on a group of people who have lots of money to spend or are said to control the family’s budget.

Another one of this same type is yuffer, a “young urban female” who overspends, is deep in debt, and likes to party. This term popped up in my word-hunting a couple of years ago. Where is it now? Nowhere. Nobody uses it. Guess who created it? Right: a company that did a consumer survey for a British car manufacturer.

Both words are patterned after yuppy, which stands for “young urban professional”. Like many successful new coinages, it spawned a slew of imitators.

An outstandingly bad example of such coinages is orchid, which stands for “one recent child, hideously in debt”. What possible purpose could identifying that kind of marketing niche serve?

One more example: stressette, which purports to define a market segment of young women who are worried about how they look and who aren’t sure what life has in store for them. In other words, nearly all young women. “Stressette” was coined, of course, by another marketing company.

Momfluential is a more recent one. It purports to describe a group of women who have influence on the way their friends, family, and strangers spend money. They are moms (mothers) who are influential.

Thing is, that pretty much describes every mother I know. They all have a great deal of influence on people who love or like them. Why not just call those consumers “mothers” instead of momfluentials?

My latest column in the Malaysia Star.

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Please don’t use a thesaurus. It does terrible things to your writing. Yes, that’s right. Do yourself a favour and forget about thesauruses. They’re harmful unless used correctly.

Usually, thesaurus-users are looking for a different word for an idea they have in mind. The word they already know for that idea seems tired or worn out. They want a fresh word.

Or they feel that the words they’re using don’t have gravity (that is, they don’t seem important or weighty). They want their writing to sound more sophisticated or more educated.

Or they just like using a lot of different words. New words are fun.

So they go to the thesaurus, look up the word they do know, and get an exciting array of other choices that, supposedly, mean the same thing.

Problem is, no thesaurus that I know—I own more than a dozen—has definitions in the thesaurus entries. Unless you already know all the words in question, there’s no way at all to determine which word is the right word.

And believe me, most of the synonyms given in a thesaurus are not the right words.

For example, if you look up frank, meaning “honest, direct (when speaking or writing), or straightforward”, you might find candid, open, free, round, blunt, naive, and guileless. (These come from three thesauruses.)

I’ll admit that a thesaurus can be useful if there’s a word on the tip of your tongue (meaning, you can’t quite remember it). A thesaurus is good at reminding you of words that you already know. If blunt was the word you were forgetting, then now you are reminded of it.

Really, though, if you can’t think of the word, then it probably isn’t the right word in the first place.

If you don’t know the synonyms that are suggested—or better, if you don’t know all the uses of a synonym—then there’s no guidance at all as to which one to choose. So people tend to choose a word willy-nilly (without care or scruple) as if they all serve the same purpose.

This is also true of people who use bilingual dictionaries, which also tend to be rather sparse in offering good contextual information on how best to use a word.

Let’s look at the synonyms for frank. For one thing, they cannot all be simply slotted into the same hole in the same sentence. Try it:

Let me be frank with you. The original sentence. It means, “Let me tell you the truth without hiding what I’m thinking.”

Let me be honest with you. This is almost synonymous with the sentence above, although many people would tell you that if someone says “let me be honest”, then they’re probably about to tell you a lie and if they say “let me be frank”, they’re probably about to say something hurtful.

Let me be free with you. This doesn’t work at all. The only way “free” really works as a synonym of “frank” is in a sentence like “He was free with his opinions,“ meaning “He gave his opinions frankly.“

Let me be blunt with you. This kind of works, but it’s better just as “Let me be blunt.“

Let me be naive with you. This doesn’t work at all. Naive is only vaguely related to uses of frank when it is used to describe someone as having a “frank visage” or “frank face”, meaning that all of their emotions and thoughts seem to be evident in their facial expressions.

Let me be guileless with you. This has the same problem as naive. Being frank is a wilful act. You do it on purpose. Being guileless is something that you are without trying and probably without realizing.

Let me be round with you. This doesn’t work, either. What, pray tell, is round doing in there? Well, it belongs to an old-fashioned meaning that is pretty close to the meaning of frank, but, unlike frank, you’d never use it to describe a person but only to describe the type of language they were using. You most often find it today in the adverb form, as in, “She cursed him roundly.“ It’s also related to to round on somebody, which means to suddenly attack someone, usually with harsh, angry language.

As you can see, each of these supposed synonyms for frank comes with its own connotations. Connotations are like little flags of useful information that tell you under what circumstances a word should be used.

You can only learn the connotations if you read or talk a lot in the language in question, or if you have high-quality reference works that provide them.

So if you insist on using a thesaurus, your best bet is to make sure that you look up the synonyms you find there in a dictionary.

I should also add that if you find yourself going to the thesaurus in order to make your writing seem better than it is, then you have a larger problem than deciding which word to use.

Maybe what you’re writing about is what is really in need of changing. Maybe your topic is stale, your subject matter weak, or your inspiration lacking. Finding a different word isn’t going to fix that.

If you’re looking for a new word to represent an old idea because you’ve already used the original word too many times, then maybe you’re putting lipstick on a pig. Maybe it’s time to start over.

License revoked: Can bad language punditry be stopped?. Jan Freeman writes in the Boston Globe about her ideal world, in which journalists, commentators, and other public figures would double-check their facts before they go spreading misinformation about language, especially about word origins.

Jan’s perspective is spot-on. There’s a laxness—an insufficient intellectual rigor—where it comes to language commentary, even by some of our media colleagues who should know better. Of course, everyone makes mistakes, but if you haven’t even checked the most basic resources and reference works before repeating some false etymology, that’s just laziness.

From where I sit, most of this laziness comes from people who learned a few things early in their careers and then haven’t bothered to keep up with the state of the art. In word origins in particular, my colleagues are debunking old stories by the page-fulls, so you can’t just keep quoting the same few books. You’ve got to participate in the community: read the language blogs, join the email lists, participate in the discussion forums, and, even listen to radio shows. When we do word origins, Martha and I often share first-hand primary research that we have done ourselves, stuff that cannot be found in any book. We don’t lord it around and shout “exclusive!” but it’s satisfying to know that hundreds of thousands of listeners are getting the straight dope as far as it can be known.

Directly on this subject is the column by Fred Shapiro in the New York Times Sunday Magazine today, in which, as he fills in for William Safire, he demonstrates how many of the people we believe said certain famous quotes did not, in fact, say them. It’s not just a few. There are *thousands* of them that even the most revered collections of quotations get wrong: they get the name wrong, the data wrong, and, sometimes, they even get the original quote wrong.