The Lexicographer's Rules

Sorry the updates have been so intermittent. I’ll try to get back on track.

Recent interesting catchwords from the Double-Tongued Dictionary:

read-alike n. a (fiction) book whose contents are similar to another book’s.

violin hickey n. a mark left on the neck from playing the violin.

throw a Porsche at someone v. phr. in the British military, to fire an expensive missile at a target.

Q-tip cruise n. a pleasure trip aboard a ship, taken mainly by senior citizens. So named because the passengers have white hair that resembles the white cotton ends of Q-tips.

1-800 car n. a car that is outfitted with superficial and expensive after-market modifications that make it look good but do not improve its performance.

My latest column in the Malaysia Star.

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In Howard Marks’ rollicking memoir of a life of crime, Mr Nice, he describes living as a fugitive from justice: “I was fully aware that any one of them could turn me in to the authorities at any time. I just big-headedly assumed that anyone who knew me liked me and wouldn’t do such a thing. I was too nice to be grassed.”

Tattling (tale-telling) is the sort of thing that rascals like Marks have to worry about, so it’s no surprise that the underworld has an abundance of synonyms for it.

To grass someone or to grass someone up means to report them and their activities to the police. While the expression is almost completely unknown in North America, in Britain and Australia no explanation is needed in the press and on televised police dramas.

There’s also a noun, grass, a person who tattles, and supergrass, someone who tattles so much that criminal empires crumble.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, grass is a shortening of grasshopper, which a hundred years ago was current rhyming slang for copper, meaning police.

However, it could also be rhyming slang for shopper, meaning a person who trades information to the police in exchange for favours. To shop someone to the police means to offer up evidence of their wrongdoing.

These expressions, too, are decidedly British and see little use in North America, except for copper, which has been permanently shortened there to cop.

Snout is yet another one unknown to most North Americans. Both as a verb and a noun, it is more or less the same as grass. It probably comes from the idea of sticking one’s nose – or snout – into someone else’s business. These slang uses of snout and grass come from the early 1920s and 1930s.

Snout, in turn, recalls snitch, yet another synonym for betraying someone to the authorities. Snitch once meant nose or a flick of the nose. To snitch on someone means to squeal or sing like a canary – to tell all dirt to devastating effect – though those latter two terms were probably more popular in black-and-white gangster movies than they ever were among real criminals.

More typically used in North America is nark, which was originally a Briticism dating from the mid-1800s but which has been used in the United States for at least a hundred years. In criminal circles, it especially applies to people who get benefits like leniency, money, news about competitors, etc, from telling tales to the police.

In schools, nark is not just the derogatory term for the kid who tells the teacher about the misbehaviour of classmates but the one who blabs a classmate’s embarrassing secret to the whole school.

However, the verb nark is a little more complex. In the United States, it has been reinforced by the word narc, which is a policeman or detective who specialises in narcotics crimes. Narc is a shortened form of narcotics, which means any illegal drugs, not just ones that make you drowsy. Both the C and K spellings are used interchangeably.

Nark and narc have been tangled up with movie and television plots in which a perp (short for “perpetrator”, a person accused of a crime) trades information about someone else’s drug crime in exchange for a lighter sentence or even for getting off scot-free.

(Scot is an archaic name for a type of payment similar to a tax, so if you’re scot-free, you are free from “paying” by way of punishment or other obligation.)

A word similar to nark is stool pigeon. At its earliest, a stool was a type of decoy used by bird-hunters. A life-like (or dead) bird is perched and then manipulated by a hidden hunter so that the bird seems alive. The intention is to draw real birds into believing there is easy prey to be had.

In modern use, it means a police informer, but it has historically been used to mean a decoy or person used as a front for a criminal operation. The metaphorical uses of stool pigeon to mean a person who is controlled by another seem to have first been used in the 1830s. Such a person is fronting – pretending to the criminals to be something they’re not – so that they can lure the criminals into a false sense of safety. Pigeon, stool, and stoolo are all synonymous variants.

Louse, snake and weasel are still more ways to call someone a nasty name for an informer, though they are also perfectly good general terms of abuse. Rat, too, though it is now a bit dated but oh-so-evocative.

Rat shares a connection with another informer, a ratfink, which in turn can be shortened to fink. Ratfink contains within all the loathing we feel for dark, scurrying creatures that thrive on our filth and are loathed even by the loathsome.

Recent interesting catchwords from the Double-Tongued Dictionary:

fog line the bright lines painted near a road’s edge to guide drivers.

instant ancestor n. an old photograph of strangers used as decoration.

trashout when a tenant is forced out of a house due to foreclosure or eviction and leaves it in a squalid state.

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?