The Lexicographer's Rules

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.

In the latest episode of the radio program we talked about "Like a duck on a june bug," bird names, overuse of "like," "Good night, nurse!", Luddites, chicken bog, keeping your eyes peeled, getting someone's goat, an old children's rhyme, and more.

In the Malaysia Star you'll find my latest in a series of columns in which I try to bring to light interesting slang for a non-Western audience whose English skills range from nascent to fluent.

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From my desk—at which sits someone who has been on the Internet since 1992 and was a patron of dial-up computer bulletin board systems for years before that—language change on the Internet is a beautiful thing.

You probably know LOL (“laugh or laughing out loud”), which is now included in several mainstream dictionaries. It is used as a bit of interjected paralinguistic restitution, a way of saying “this strikes me as humorous” in text where, if you were speaking, you might chuckle, giggle, or laugh.

Not included in any mainstream dictionary, however, is the five-year-old word (a word that is five years old, not a word used by five-year-olds) lulz, which derives from LOL (also written in lowercase: lol).

LOL, when spoken aloud—and it is spoken aloud outside of cellular (mobile) telephone commercials, usually sarcastically or ironically—is usually rendered something like “lall” or “loll” or “lull”.

As a result, the online variant lulz (invariably plural) has appeared, undergoing not only an orthographic shift (the spelling has changed) but a semantic shift (the meaning has changed). It means, more or less, “cheap laughs” or, better, laffs.

Laffs (also usually plural) itself is a shift away from “laughs” in spelling and meaning. It is almost the same as yuks.

Both words, despite the dictionary definition of yuks as “loud, hearty laughs”, in show business usually mean “false or forced laughter” or “cheap laughter”. These are the kind of laughs you get when everyone has heard a joke before, when the humour is broad and obvious, and when the audience can see the punchlines coming from a mile a way (when they knew what the funny part of the joke would be).

“Laffs” also seems to be unaccounted for in mainstream dictionaries, even though it is at least 50 years old. Neither laffs nor yuks are from the online lexicon, but I thought the tangent worth making. Back to online language.

LOL has gone another way, too: lollerskates. It’s used in place of LOL, usually satirically or ironically. That is, the person will write something, and then where others might earnestly and unthinkingly put LOL to indicate that the preceding text is supposed to be funny, the writer will put lollerskates instead. It’s a mix of LOL plus the word rollerskates and it means, more or less, “laughing out loud a lot”.

In Singapore and other nearby English-speaking parts of Asia, one might write lolx to indicate lots of laughs. The ‘x’ serves as a multiplier: lolxxxx means more laughs than lolx.

Another part of the older Internet lexicon, OMG, too, has undergone a transformation. It originally meant “Oh, my God!” and was used as an exclamation of surprise or delight.

Now its ironic and sarcastic uses far outweigh the earnest and unironic ones. It’s also given rise to ZOMG.

ZOMG is probably spelled that way because users reaching for the shift key on the left side of the keyboard miss and type Z, though one wonders if it wouldn’t be more appropriately rendered as zomg – if you miss the shift key, then nothing would be capitalised, right?

In any case, ZOMG is now a word in its own right. It expresses emphasis and excitement, in a knowing, intentionally overboard fashion.

Another word that has been transformed is “the”. It’s been mistyped so often as “teh” that teh has taken on a life of its own. It’s used for emphasis and it’s used in an intentionally different way than “the”.

For example, if something is very cool (meaning great, good), you might write, “It’s teh cool!” Teh suck, as another example, is a way of saying, “That’s really bad.”

“Teh” serves as an emphatic, a word which, like very, increases the strength of whatever other words it modifies. Teh can be pronounced as “tay”, but among the few people I know who pronounce it, it’s always said as “tuh”.

Note my comments about “knowing”, “irony,” and “sarcasm” above. Those who use such language are aware of how it might look to others. Of course they are.

They know that their writing might seem childish, or that they might seem to be clueless (out of touch with common rules of good conduct or with what is really happening), or that they may appear pretentious or as if they are trying too hard to be cool.

As a result, they tend to be very careful with such language, and a lot of times, they’ll use it in such a way as to indicate to the reader that they know very well that such language is loaded (meaning, it has the potential to cause problems). They want to be understood. They also don’t want to be seen as trying to artificially force a new word to become popular, which is, contradictorily, almost surely a perfect way to make it unpopular.

At the same time, they know that these words have uses. Paralinguistic restitution is one part of it. They restore to the written language a flavour that is easier to indicate in the spoken language. They also allow for meta-commentary, in which you can not only literally mean “that is funny” but you can also kind of poke fun at yourself for it, all in a single word: lulz.

When you see such slang online, just assume that the writer knows everything you know about the word and assume they intended the funniest, kindest meanings possible. You’ll find it all the more enjoyable.

Feeling fankled? It’s a Scots English word that means “messed up” or “confused.” In this week’s episode of the radio show, my co-host Martha and I discuss a whole litter of synonyms for dust bunny, a slew of different terms for the piece of playground equipment you slide on, and the proper way to refer to a baby platypus.

Joining in the fun, here's my list of financial terms related to the economic crisis to go along with those made by Ben Zimmer and Mark Peters. You can also find a lot more in my word-of-the-year nominations for 2007 and 2008.

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What We're Talking About Is Money

bad bank: A government-run bank that intentionally takes on the bad debts and deals of another bank that is in financial jeopardy.

Chimerica: The symbiotic Chinese-American financial relationship, in which there is a great trade imbalance as Americans save little and buy lots, and there is a great investment in American Treasury bills and the dollar by the Chinese.

depressionary: Related to a depression or a recession that looks like it could become a depression.

diworsification: Diversifying one's investments too much.

dry powder: Capital readily available for investment.

econolypse: The current economic crisis.

financial incest: Telling one's children about family financial affairs in such a way or to such a degree that they learn too much and become overly concerned.

HENRY: A person who is a High Earner But Not Rich Yet.

kitchen sink-it: To report the worst financial performance possible, as in the case of AIG.

lifecycle fund: An investment arrangement in which money is invested in safer securities and investments as a person grows older.

malus: A penalty for poor performance, the opposite of a bonus.

narrow bank: A bank that handles only basic banking and does not get involved in complex investment programs.

nuclear winter: A period in which investment capital is very hard to come by.

Obamanomics: The economic policies of Barack Obama and his administration. Carries on the tradition of presidential -nomics, like Nixonomics and Clintonomics.

peanut butter approach: Spreading tax breaks or government stimulus money thinly across a lot of beneficiaries instead of targeting those areas in need of the most help.

silent second: Someone who loans money to someone else in order to buy a home, usually to make them look like a good risk, without notifying the mortgage lender.

spendulus: The Obama administration's economic stimulus package.

stimovation: Innovation plus economic stimulus, two ways that together could improve the economy.

whisper number: A rumor about a company's financial performance, plans, deals, etc.