The Lexicographer's Rules

Recent interesting catchwords on the Double-Tongued Dictionary are:

trade turkeys: v. phr. to swap bad teachers between schools. “Turkey” is a long-standing slang word for something or someone that performs poorly. A synonym for “trading turkeys” is dance of the lemons. A related term, also mentioned in the article cited here, is rubber room, where teachers who are lemons or turkeys spend their days while waiting disciplinary action.

camp leg: n. the condition of a player being unfit for regular American football season, especially in the legs. The name probably comes from being overweight, out of practice, or too used to the slower schedule of the off season when training camps are typically held. A camp leg is also a player brought in as a temporary kicker in order to keep a better kicker from being over-tired or over-exerted.

lasagna gardening: n. to make a garden using layers of mulch, dirt, and other materials.

Two days ago I spoke with Becky Boone of the Associated Press in Idaho about two terms that have come out of the bathroom sex scandal surrounding Senator Larry Craig. She managed to get out of me that they will be among my nominations for “word of the year” when the American Dialect Society holds its annual vote in January, this year in Chicago.

wide stance: n. the posture of a man who appears to be soliciting gay sex but, in fact, is not. There are connotations here of extreme manliness: if you’re well endowed, you have to stand a certain way. Saturday Night Live more or less defined “wide stance” as claiming one point of view in public but practicing another in private, also known as “hypocrisy.”

toe-tapper: n. a homosexual. This has already been used to some scandal by the New York Post.

Another word I’ll probably nominate is snus, a kind of sucking tobacco a bit more refined than chaw. It comes in little sachets that you put between your cheek and gum and then you try not to vomit. The product seems to be really picking up steam, but I italicize that word “seems” advisedly: it’s possible that it’s merely the result of a marketing push by Big Tobacco, in which case I will not nominate it.

The publication of Steven Pinker’s book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature means he’s been showing up all over the place as the author of popular articles on language. The latest one to come across my inbox (and I see them all, every one, as long as they’re online) is What the F***? from the New Republic. It’s a light overview of cursing, swearing, and obscenity. Most of its major points are familiar, many of is quotes are well-used, and the end result is a big “Huh. How about that?” Still, I recommend it as an introduction to the subjecct.

Then, if you really want to sink your teeth into something substantial, you’ll take a gander at Geoffrey Hughes’s Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, And Ethnic Slurs in the English-speaking World. I know it’s expensive, but I’ve been reading it in pieces over the last couple of weeks and find its synthesis of what we know about all facets of the darker side of language to be exceedingly thorough. I believe it would be very palatable to the layperson.

As an alternative, you could try Hughes’s Swearing, a paperback published in 1998. I have not read it but if the scholarship there is anything like that in his encyclopedia, then it’s sure to be a winner. I see it going for as little as $7.50 at Amazon.

Full disclosure: I am thanked in the front of Hughes’s encyclopedia and he gave me a copy for free.

Recent interesting catchwords in the Double-Tongued Dictionary are:

hose-dragger n. a nickname for a firefighter.

grunter-hunter n. a pig-hunter in Australia.

heritage callout n. a design that references a particular ethnic, racial, or national group, such as traditional Native American patterns on products targeted at Native Americans.

I’m not sure how I missed this, but Cambridge University Press and Linguist List have teamed up to create a new, free online publication called Cambridge Extra. You do have to register to read it.

The debut issue is visually quite ugly and seems to be merely a repackaging of linguistic content from various Cambridge publications, mostly in PDF form.

Still, the articles are interesting, not least because in this issue they deal with children’s language acquisition. That topic is of increasing interest to me as my son is almost seventh months old and seems to be on the cusp of speaking. I know, I know, it’s too early. But when you talk to him, his eyes dart between your eyes and your mouth, and, if you’re moving them, your hands. He also seems to already understand that conversation is when one person makes a sound and then another person makes a sound in return. And he regularly runs through his phonetic inventory as he tries out new syllables. He also likes to watch me whistle and then he sometimes seems to imitate me by blowing air through pursed lips and then making a high-pitched squealing sound. Very close. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear his first word before before January, at nine months of age, but maybe that’s just papa pride.

Some of the articles:

How children learn language—what every parent should know by William O’Grady, author of How Children Learn Language .

Do parents lead their children by the hand? by Seyda Özçaliskan and Susan Goldin-Meadow, who write about the role of gestures in language-learning.

Temporal markers of prosodic boundaries in children’s speech production by Jana Dankovicová, Kathryn Pigott, Bill Wells and Sue Peppé, writing about how children learn to use spacing and timing of language to inform their understanding of spoken language. “This paper investigates (i) whether, by the age of eight, children use temporal boundary features in their speech in a systematic way, and (ii) to what extent adult listeners are able to interpret their production accurately and unambiguously. The material consists of minimal pairs of utterances: one utterance includes a compound noun, in which there is no prosodic boundary after the first noun, e.g. ‘coffee-cake and tea’, while the other utterance includes simple nouns, separated by a prosodic boundary, e.g. ‘coffee, cake and tea.’”

Full disclosure: I currently undertake freelance lexicography projects for Cambridge University Press. I don’t know anybody connected with this particular project or any of the article authors.