The Lexicographer's Rules

My latest fortnightly column, written for an audience of English learners, has been published in the Malaysia Star.

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When a circuit judge in Florida was reported to have told a man who took up the habit of crack cocaine at age 47 that he would be joining the “jitterbugs”, she didn’t mean he’d be on the dance floor swinging and jerking to the sounds of Tommy Dorsey. She meant he would be joining the juvenile delinquents and the thugs on the street.

Slang language is filled with telescoping synonyms for otherwise normal everyday words, but it also has many identically spelled words with very different meanings. Sometimes they come from the same origins. Sometimes they arise separately, live different lives, and pass for different kinds of currency in completely different social groups. The dance jitterbug and the thug jitterbug are good examples.

Just what is a jitterbug? It’s all of these: a jittery person, a person who dances the jitterbug, a foolish or ignorant young person, or a juvenile delinquent.

The verb jitterbug has a few more meanings: to dance the jitterbug, to hop about rapidly or fool around, to saunter or swagger, or to engage in gang fighting.

Who can say which came first? Did the different jitterbugs arrive in American English together, like contestants at a dance marathon trying to see which one could last the longest?

Since slang is self-reinforcing, meaning that it tends to feed on itself, breed its own descendants, and abandon its own offspring when necessary, we can claim with some confidence that all the jitterbugs worked together. There are a few other reasons, too.

For one, it’s a fun, funny word, just the kind that catches the fancy, engages the ear. Those of the kinds of words that travel well, and words that travel well tend to fork into other meanings.

For two, all the recorded evidence shows that many of the different jitterbug meanings appeared at about the same time.

For three, there’s also a lot of overlap in the meanings. Most are youth-oriented. There’s also a rebel component: gang fighting, sauntering, swagger, delinquency, foolishness, and ignorance, are all behaviours outside of the norm, and perhaps in a “these kids today!” way, we can include the jitterbug dance and its dancers, which were mocked even when the fad was in its heyday.

Famed bandleader Artie Shaw is said to have suggested in 1939 of the dance faddists that, in one newspaper columnist’s version, “if you scratched the head of a jitterbug you’ll find the brain of a moron”.

All of these factors indicate there’s a pretty good chance all the different kinds of jitterbug spring from the same source. But what source was that?

A 1934 song by Cab Calloway and others, called ‘Jitter Bug’, seems to have launched the word into American English, although Calloway probably did not invent the word:

If you’d like to be a jitter bug,
First thing you must do is get a jug,
Put whiskey, wine and gin within,
And shake it all up and then begin.
Grab a cup and start to toss,
You’re now drinking jitter sauce!
Don’t you worry, you just mug,
And then you’ll be a jitter bug!

Though it is less well known than the kicking-it-up-at-the-heels jitterbug, the delinquent jitterbug as meant by the Florida judge is alive and well in modern American slang. Hip-hop outfit The Coup, in a cut called ‘The Liberation of Lonzo Williams’ off the 1999 Kill My Landlord album, brought the divergent meanings back together: “He was a jitterbug thug, at the dance, cuttin’ a rug.”

My latest column in the Malaysia Star.

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In a recent newsletter from Anu Garg, who runs the excellent “A Word a Day” e-mail list, a reader used an expression I hadn’t heard before. In talking about ritual mourners – people who are hired to wail and moan at funerals – she wrote:

“He explained that the women did not actually faint, but were probably demonstrating the ‘cold robbies’, or the ‘fantods’, in their performance of what appeared to be fainting spells.”

Cold robbies and fantods both require explanation.

To get the fantods is to feel uneasy, queasy, or nervous. It’s often used in the phrase the howling fantods, which, as you might guess, is a particularly bad case of being nervous.

Both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Collins-brand dictionaries define “fantod” as something like “crotchety or faddish behaviour”, which, to this American’s eyes, seems wrong.

For one thing, I hardly think crotchety, which means “irritable or cranky”, covers it. “Faddish”, too, is a queer choice for the definition. If behaviour is faddish, that means that a person has a craze or a great deal of enthusiasm for something.

Here’s what the fantods are, as far as I know: If you’re in an old building after dark and the lights suddenly go out and you hear mysterious noises in the other room and you begin to feel like something supernatural is breathing on your neck, that’s a case of the howling fantods.

It’s not that the fantods are different in the United Kingdom, but in looking at the citations in the Oxford English Dictionary, and in the many uses I find over the past couple of centuries, I see that the fantods to some people have meant “fidgety, fussy, or frustrated behaviour” and to others they have meant “nervous behaviour, as if afflicted with some uncontrollable fit or emotion, even to the point of resembling a medical condition requiring treatment”.

Cold robbies are even harder to get a handle on. It means more or less the same thing as “fantods” but it’s not very common as all.

It seems to come from the comic Pogo, written and drawn by Walt Kelly. In one strip, one of the characters confuses the word kohlrabi, a type of cabbage, for the name of a disease, and then they mispronounce it as “cold robbies”. So, to have a case of the “cold robbies” is to have an unknown and uncertain affliction.

Another similar term is yips. You could look up the yips in a medical textbook and perhaps find it under the term focal dystonia, but any pro golfer who has stood before a daunting putt could tell you all about them, too.

As a golfing term in the 1930s, the yips were a mental condition which threw off one’s game or destroyed the control required to make difficult precision putts.

Yips like these are strictly psychological. They make the hands do other than what the mind intends. Balls hook or slice, putts go wide. One golfer got such a case of the yips – or the mental yips, as they were often called – that he walked into closed doors.

The yips sometimes refer to an actual tremor of the hands or full-body flinches which prevent good play. Golfer Sam Snead had the yips – he called them the twitches, and said one of his best seasons (and he had many) was due to working hard to fight the yips.

The yips aren’t confined to the United States or golfers. Artists and musicians get the yips. Footballers in Australia get the yips. Basketball players who can’t make shots from the free-throw line, or even simple lay-ups, might have the yips. Baseball pitchers who can’t throw strikes might have the yips. More seriously, some doctors get the yips – shaky hands in the surgery having the potential to cause more damage than a wild pitch into the stands.

Those of us who are non-professionals, though, get different afflictions when we’re nervous: the willies, the heebie-jeebies, the screaming meemies, the screaming abdabs (largely British), the collywobbles, the jim-jams (which often include a notion of emotional depression). There are many other less common words, too.

The jim-jams are often used as a synonym for the DTs. These stand for delirium tremens, and refer to the shakes that alcoholics get when they’re suffering from withdrawal, that is, when they don’t have the alcohol that their bodies crave. Their entire bodies shake.

The full form, delerium tremens, is more or less a medical term, but the abbreviate form, the DTs, is more humorous.

"A Way with Words," the public radio show about language which I co-host and co-produce, just posted an audio interview I did with humorist and author Roy Blount Jr. in which we talked, among other things, about his books, the Authors Guild, authors' rights, the Amazon Kindle 2, catfish noodling, and whether the cancan dancers at George Plimpton’s memorial honored the late writer’s request and performed without panties.

I've got an article at Forbes this week, in which I identify some new words and gauge their chance of success. It's part of a larger package of articles about neologisms, with articles from Jon McWhorter, Ben Zimmer, Mark Peters, and others.

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New words are like grains of sand on a beach. They appear in uncountable numbers, last for just a brief time and soon wash away. But some--usually the utilitarian, the memorable and the simple--come into common use.

Grant Barrett, a dictionary editor and the co-host of public radio program "A Way with Words," rates the chances of a few recently coined words below.

AFPAK, Af-Pak. This two-year-old blend of Afghanistan and Pakistan is used to refer to both countries. It's convenient to use when situations straddle both country's borders, or affect the region as a whole. It's also easy to say, easy to spell and used by journalists and diplomats, so there's a high alert chance of the word's continued success.

Apatown. This is a Hollywood nickname for filmmaker Judd Apatow's pals and regular working partners, including Paul Rudd, Jason Segel and Seth Rogen. It's cutesy and already has the stink of a late night "where are they now?" retrospective. Chances of success? Bomb. What can rescue it? If Apatow puts out two great movies a year for the rest of his life.

fang-banging. Sex with a vampire. Lithe, luscious necks always seem to attract the peepers of readers and theater-goers alike, so we rate this one as potentially eternal.

frugalista. A woman committed to staying fashionable even though her means have become limited. As long as there is a recession, there will be somebody knocking 'em dead by wearing last decade's skirt with a different belt and her sister's shoes. Along with its synonym, recessionista, a thigh-high chance of success.

gay-marry. To marry someone of the same sex. With recent gay-marriage approvals across the country, this verb is poised to be greeted with toasts celebrating its noteworthy union with a dictionary in a few years.

Netflix divorce. When a couple decides that their tastes are too different to share a single Netflix account, they get two instead. While this term is at least two years old, recent use has brought it new life. Even odds on this one: It could be Gigli or Star Wars. We'll know for sure when brick-and-mortar video stores go the way of hand-cranked-phone factories.

reset button. This political argot du jour means starting over, a redo a second chance. As the metaphorical use of the term is at least seven years old, it's a cinch to say that its continued chance of success is very bright, but given its overuse, we also say don't push it.

retronovation. Returning to a former way of producing a product--such as making soft drinks with cane sugar instead of corn syrup and shipping them in glass bottles--in order to attract nostalgic customers. This term, coined in March by blogger Tim Carmody of Snarkmarket, has been used so rarely that we're calling its chances warm backwash.

schluff. Where bicycle-riding is forbidden or unwelcome, to schluff is to temporarily dismount and kind of half-straddle, half-push the bike. Though just a few months old, its odds of long-term success are failure to stop.

spendulus. A jokey name for the Obama administration's economic stimulus package, a blend of the words "spend" and "stimulus." Much-loved by conservatives who continue to pepper their word salads with it. We'll call it successful with a chance of being tired.

My latest column in the Malaysia Star, written for a foreign audience seeking to improve its English.

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In Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, a play about show business, one of the main characters tells another that certain words are funny all by themselves. “Words with ‘K’ in it are funny. You didn’t know that, did you? If it doesn’t have a ‘K’, it’s not funny.”

He adds, “Pickle is funny.”

Oh, yes, pickle is indeed automatically a funny word in English.

In North America, we almost always use pickle to mean a pickled cucumber. We use pickled as an adjective for anything else that’s been soaked in a flavourful seasoned brine, as in pickled tomatoes or pickled peppers.

North Americans also use pickle as a countable noun: There are three pickles left, meaning, “There are three pickled cucumbers left.” In Britain, pickle alone is an uncountable noun: Do you want some pickle on your fish? They are referring to what North Americans would call a pickle relish, a condiment of chopped vegetables soaked in vinegar and spices.

But there’s more to pickles than eating. As the playwright says, all sorts of unaccounted baggage travels along with a word, such as which words make us giggle and why. What kind of baggage makes pickle unserious?

Partly, when we think of the pickled cucumbers, perhaps we then think of other things similar to pickles and before we know it, we’re blushing. We snicker over pickle because its shape is suggestive of a certain male organ.

Hence, pickle is often used to mean “penis”, as it is in the Hollywood expression pickle shot, meaning a movie scene where a man’s genitals can be seen, and in pickle park, a public but secluded area (like a park) where men meet each other for secret sexual encounters.

Partly, too, we chuckle because as Simon wrote, “pickle” has funny sounds in it. A plosive P (a fast lip-popping noise) and a hard ck. Pickle! You almost want to shout it.

Pickles are common features in my son’s boardbooks (small, short children’s books with very thick pages that are hard to bend or tear) because authors know children know that pickle is fun to say.

Maybe we also giggle because we make odd faces when eating sour pickles, which is where we get pickle-puss, someone who has a sour expression. The lips purse (draw together like the opening of a bag fastened with string), the eyebrows scowl, the whole face scrunches up (squeezes together in an irregular way), just as if we have eaten a very sour pickle.

Because of the automatically funny notions about pickle — look, I’m serious, just ask anybody who speaks English for a living and they’ll tell you, pickle is a giggle-maker — the word pops up in all sorts of slangy language.

For example, pickle is used for things (besides male genitals) that are pickle-like. Bombs and torpedoes are long and smooth and round, so soldiers, airmen, and sailors call them pickles.

By extension, to drop bombs or to push the button to drop them is to pickle. Even getting a target in the crosshairs can be to pickle and the switch or lever which fires or drops the weapons (or controls other machinery) is sometimes called the pickle or pickle switch. The switch is sometimes shaped like a pickle.

To be in a pickle is a far more commonly known expression. It means to be in a difficult situation. If you’re locked out of your house at night with no way to get in, you’re in a pickle. If your wife is the person who locked you out of the house because you were having an affair with another woman, then you’re really in a pickle.

More obscurely, to hit a ball hard in baseball is to pickle it. The idea here, supposedly, is that the batter is salting away the ball. Ordinarily, when you salt something away, you store it away for a long time. This is often said of food, since salt has been used since the earliest days of civilisation to keep food from spoiling. Salting something is like pickling it. So, metaphorically speaking, the ball is hit so hard that it won’t be seen for a long, long time, as if it were a fruit that was salted, or pickled, and stored.

Pickle-stabbers is what you might call a woman’s high-heeled shoes, especially those with spindly, sharp heels. They look very much like the kind of utensil needed to successfully stab and retrieve pickles from a jar.

In aviation, to pickle an aircraft is to disassemble it, usually for storage or shipping, and packing all of its parts in oil or grease.

In fact, putting anything in any kind of liquid can be called pickling, including pickling your liver, which means drinking too much alcohol over a long period of time, although to be pickled can simply mean to be thoroughly drunk.

You can also pickle metal, which means immersing it in an acidic solution, usually as part of an industrial process.

In Britain, pickle can be a term of affection: “Come sit by your papa, my little pickle.”

So besides funny or sour, pickle is a little sweet, too.