The Lexicographer's Rules

The American Dialect Society is now accepting nominations for the “word of the year” of 2008.

What is the word or phrase which best characterizes the year 2008? What expression most reflects the ideas, events, and themes which have occupied the United States and its residents?

Nominations should be sent to woty@americandialect.org.

They will be considered for the American Dialect Society’s 19th annual word-of-the-year vote, the longest-running vote of its kind in the world and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It will be held in San Francisco on Friday, January 9, 2009.

The best “word of the year” candidates will be:

—new or newly popular in 2008
—widely or prominently used in 2008
—indicative or reflective of the national discourse

Multi-word compounds or phrases that act as single lexical items are welcomed, as well.

Sub-categories for “word of the year” include most useful, most creative, most unnecessary, most outrageous, most euphemistic, most likely to succeed, and least likely to succeed.

The vote is informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion. Members in the 119-year-old academic organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, authors, editors, professors, university students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead, they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.

Past winners can be found here.

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In its most common form, “ass” means one’s buttocks, rear end, behind, etc. The slangy use of it, though, means fool or stupid person.

You can probably see how that came about: an ass is a taboo place on the body because that’s where we excrete our waste. Nobody wants to be associated with excrement. So “ass” is used in all sorts of ways that are negative. The British equivalent and the older form, “arse”, is understood by Americans and Canadians, but they only tend to use it themselves self-consciously when making reference to the United Kingdom or English spoken on other continents.

“Ass” is informal enough that you’re unlikely to hear politicians use it in interviews, yet a parent might publicly say “Move your ass!” to a poky (slow-moving) child. It would be understood by onlookers that the parent was upset or frustrated because it’s a bit of an impolite way to say “hurry up!”

“Move your butt!” would be a politer, milder way to say the same thing.

“Get your ass in gear!” would be a ruder way of saying it. As you can guess, “to get your ass in gear” comes from putting the engine of a car in gear.

“Get the lead out of your ass!” would be an even ruder way of putting it. Lead is a heavy metal, so if one is said to have lead in one’s ass, they act as if they’re slowed down by a heavy load.

In all three of those phrases, “ass” and “butt” are used to mean an entire person. They are “meronyms”, which means part of something is used to mean the entire thing.

“Haul ass!” also means “move faster!” Interestingly, in this case “ass” is working as a mass noun, as opposed to a count noun as it usually does. A mass noun is one, like “sheep” or “fish”, in which the plural word is the same as the singular.

In very recent slang, you’ll find “ass” as a mass noun in expressions like “That smells like ass!”, meaning that it doesn’t smell very good.

Back to nicer “asses”. A parent might also say “Don’t be a pain in the ass” to a child who is being difficult or annoying. In that case, a “pain in the ass” is an informal, not very polite expression that means “something bothersome or annoying”. It refers only figuratively to an actual ass.

Another way in which “ass” is used is as an intensifier. By tacking it on after an adjective or noun, you can emphasise its meaning. This is what linguist Diana Elgersma’s humorously calls an “anal emphatic”.

For example, “That is a big-ass piece of cake” means “That’s a very big piece of cake”.

“That’s a crap-ass computer” means the computer is really bad. “Crap”, as I’ve mentioned here before, is an informal way of saying something is poorly made, poorly operated, or overall just a sorry-assed thing.

“That’s one sad-assed cake” means the cake is poorly made, small, or in some other way not a very good cake at all. It’s kind of sad-looking.

“The cop was a real hard-ass” means that the police officer was firm, obstinate, or harsh in his treatment. To be “hard” in this context means to be stern and uncompromising.

“That was a crazy-ass party” means the party was chaotic in a good way. Crazy here means disorganised, confusing, crowded, or loud, which, in this case, are all good things.

“He’s a bad-ass” is a bit more complicated. “Bad” in this sense is positive, taking on the idea of “good or excellent in a tough or strong way”. So someone who is a bad-ass is a very tough or strong person.

These anal emphatics come in two forms. Sometimes “-ass” is added, and sometimes “-assed” is added. In general, they mean the same things and work in the sentences the same way, though you should be alert to subtle differences, such as whether the word that is created works as a noun (as in the case of “hard-ass” and “bad-ass”) or an adjective (as in the case of “crap-ass,” “crazy-ass,” and “sad-assed”).

There are probably enough things happening with “ass” to write a book, but I’ll give you a few more that you’re likely to hear.

If someone says, “I busted ass to get the garden planted this year”, they mean that they worked very hard to sow seeds and plant seedlings.

“That’s a kick-ass computer” means the computer is great or excellent. “To kick ass” means to be good at something. It’s a variation of “to kick someone’s ass”, which means to beat them in a fight or contest.

“Raggedy-ass” means shabby, beat-up, overused, or pathetic. “She trotted out that raggedy-ass story about her trip to Greece again” means that she has told the same story too many times.

“Don’t be bringing those raggedy-assed animals into my house” means that the animals are soiled or generally unclean-looking.

A guy who has been sending tip-offs on new words and slang for years, Joe Clark of Toronto, did some independent research into Canadian English spellings, looking at everything from blogs to literature to yogurt (not “yogourt”) containers.

Canadian spelling really exists, he found, but it’s under threat from spellcheckers, which let American and British spellings sail through even if you’ve told the software to use Canadian. (Joe’s also an activist, advocate, and expert on closed-captioning.)

The book is Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English.

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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.

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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.