The Lexicographer's Rules

My latest column in the Malaysia Star. It is written for English learners.

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Bodily functions are a rich source of English slang, so naturally, we have a lot of ways of saying “urinate,” “defecate” and “go somewhere to urinate and/or defecate.” Here’s a quick rundown of appropriate usage.

Freshen up. This can mean anything from “wash one’s face and hands,” to “fix one’s make-up,” to “straighten, retuck, refasten, or smooth one’s clothing.” It covers all the things one is likely to do in a bathroom or WC. Safe to use by anyone anywhere, though perhaps it’s a bit more likely to be used by or to a woman.

Visit the facilities. Same story: vague enough to cover anything that happens in a room where there is a toilet and a sink. Safe for all people and places. You might say, “I need to visit the facilities. Where would I find them?”

Powder one’s nose. Strictly for women, this one explicitly refers to make-up, yet it is widely used even by women who don’t use makeup. It’s a cover-up! Can be used anywhere to cover any purpose in the little room with the porcelain fixtures.

Go to the bathroom covers both visiting the little room as well as the acts of urination and defecation themselves. Though it is less polite and less vague than the expressions above, it is safe to use in front of almost anyone, though it’s far more likely to be heard in North America. In the UK, go to the WC is similarly used. (Americans understand “WC” but they don’t use it much.)

Use the toilet has pretty much the same usage, though for many Americans, toilet refers specifically to the white, water-filled porcelain seat that you sit upon in a bathroom and not to the room itself. If you say, “I need to go to the toilet,” they think of you doing certain bodily acts and not just of you going to a specific room.

Make water. Sufficiently euphemistic that it can be used in a non-giggly way by patients and doctors when discussing the body. No one will be embarrassed by too much detail, and yet it’s less formal and less clinical than a word like “urinate” or, worse, micturate, a synonym. It’s not much used elsewhere in everyday colloquial English.

Go to the little girls’ or little boys’ room. Used by adults talking to children but also used by adults talking among themselves and not often in a joking way. Adults probably remember it being used by their elementary school teachers, who are masters at finding ways to talk about the bathroom so that mobs of children don’t giggle.

Go number 1 or number 2, to urinate or defecate. This is also part of the language of teachers, parents, and children. Children might say to a teacher, “I need to go number 2.” Then the teacher knows how long the child should be out of the classroom and whether or not to come along.

Use the potty or go potty means to visit the bathroom or to urinate or defecate. This is language used when talking to children or in the presence of children. Similar terms are take a pee-pee or poo-poo, go pee-pee or poo-poo, or, for urination only, go wee-wee (British and American), to tinkle (British and American), to widdle (British), and to piddle (British).

Plain old go pee and go poop (without the second syllable repeated) are fine to use around children and are used among family members or close friends of any age.

See a man about a horse is an adult way of saying, “go to the bathroom,” as in, “I need to see a man about a horse and then we can hit the road” (I need to urinate and then we can leave). The expression is so widely used that there’s not much strength left in its euphemism.

Evacuate one’s bowels. An inoffensive but not altogether euphemistic term typical of the sort used by medical professionals and police when making formal descriptions. There’s usually a notion that the bowel evacuation was not intentional, as might happen during a car accident or in the case of diarrhoea. It is rather crude and not to be used to excuse yourself during a meal, when traveling with family, or even when partying with friends. If you said, “Excuse me, this is a fine meal, but I need to go evacuate my bowels,” it would bring unpleasant associations to mind.

Take a piss. To urinate. This is crude and mainly used by and among men. Not a good one for polite company, nor is take a dump, which means to defecate. The British take or take a slash (urinate) has the same kind of usage: it’s used mainly among men and boys.

Similarly, take a leak and drain the lizard aren’t really all that polite and not likely to be used by or among women except in a joking way. Only slightly more polite is take or go for a wizz, also spelled wiz, whiz, and wazz.

When I tried last month to consolidate my feeds into one, things did not go as planned. I lost about 3000 subscribers, for one thing, mainly due to RSS readers that don't know how to handle the very standard and ordinary htaccess redirect. I did this through Feedburner, which hosts my feeds. Feedburner also put a human-readable "this feed has moved" message in the feed and gave everyone 30 days to switch before closing the feed altogether.

But even more oddly, once the 30 days were up, Facebook, which was automatically importing my old feed and which did not automatically pick up the htaccess redirect to the new feed, redirected to http://feeds.feedburner.com/index.rdf which is an all-Chinese news feed. My Facebook friends noticed long before I did and I've only just gotten around to resolving the issue.

That feed URL is extraordinary and is the purpose of this post (because, really, technical snafus on the Internet? Also ordinary). That feed likely picks up a HUGE amount of extra feed traffic because anyone who has moved their feed over from another server to Feedburner is highly likely to have that "index.rdf" at the end of their URL. If they don't change their entire feed URL on their pages to the new Feedburner URL they have picked out; that is, if they change only the host name and not the path after it, then, ta-da! a lot of people will accidentally be reading a lot of Chinese news.

(I'm not completely sure about that explanation, but it's all I have for now.)

What's most extraordinary to me is that that URL, http://feeds.feedburner.com/index.rdf, should even be made available to ANYONE. There are some other URLs that are also allotted that it seems to me should be reserved because of the high incidence of their use in standard web-site-building and blog-hosting software. (The suffix apparently doesn't matter: index.rdf, index.xml, index.php, etc., all point to the same place.)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/RSS
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RSS2
http://feeds.feedburner.com/feed
http://feeds.feedburner.com/atom
http://feeds.feedburner.com/rdf

Last night I got to see some rare first editions in a private library, including a copy of Samuel Johnson's first 1755 dictionary. I held it in my two hands and flipped through the pages. Very exciting! We also saw a copy of the wire service roll recording the teletypes sent out on the day Kennedy was assassinated, a copy of the Beatles biography signed by all four men, an original Monty Python movie script with handwritten annotations, and I don't know what all. Brilliant.

This is what I've been doing: Wordnik, an info-rich online dictionary that plans to show as much information as possible about all the words in English. The login requirement has been removed as of this morning, so the beta site is open!

Here's my latest column—written for learners of English—from the Malaysia Star.

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Sometimes, when you are explaining how someone done you wrong (a very informal and not altogether grammatical way of saying someone “treated you badly”), a listener will hold up a hand and slowly rub his index finger and thumb together.

If you’ve never seen this before, you’ll likely say, “What’s that?” Of course you will. They’re being rather obvious about it, almost begging you to ask.

Then they say with a smug look – smug means “self-satisfied” or “excessively proud” – “It’s the world’s tiniest violin. And it’s playing for you!”

In the movies, a violin is the kind of instrument used to play sentimental and weepy solos during scenes in which a hero meets his death or a mother loses a child.

By comparing your sob story – your tale of woe, your recounting of your misfortunes – to something very dramatic that might require the sorrowful sounds of strings, your listener is saying they do not agree with you. They think you are melodramatic or wrong. They have no sympathy for you.

(“Playing” the world’s tiniest violin is funny just once, at most. It’s often not funny at all. Play it too often and you’re a boor – a rude person.)

By the way, in another conversation that two-fingered gesture might mean money, although the thumb and the index finger rub together much faster in a way that resembles counting out banknotes.

There are a wide variety of terms used to treat sympathy, or lack of it.

Boohoo might be the most common one. Outside of books for the very young, boohoo is used mostly to pretend to be crying – it’s onomatopoeic, meaning that it sounds vaguely like weeping and is an imitative word – or, as in the case of the tiniest violin, to mock someone else.

If a family member complains about the way you pack their suitcase, you might say, “Well, boohoo. If you don’t like the way I do it, then do it yourself.”

Wah is the same: it sounds like a young baby crying, so much so that when my son was very young, my wife and I would joke that he had read the baby handbook. Many of his cries of frustration sound exactly like wah. But again, it’s mostly used for imitation or for making fun of someone else.

Decades later, I can just hear my brother and me taunting my little sister (little is sometimes used to mean “younger”) with a fake baby talk: “Wah, pwoor widdle baby gonna kwy?” (“Wah, poor little baby going to cry?”).

In British English there’s a similar word, diddums, which began more or less as a nonsense word for soothing a child but now is often used as a way of expressing fake sympathy, which is to say, no sympathy at all.

A: “Watch where you’re going!”
B: “Oh, diddums fall down?”

Too bad! is another one. It means, “You don’t like it? I don’t care.” If someone says, “You’re driving too fast!” you might respond, “Too bad! If you don’t like it, you can get out and walk.”

Be careful with too bad. Although it can be said if you intend to show genuine sympathy to someone, I believe it is more often used to show false sympathy.

If someone says, “I didn’t get that job I wanted,” you could say “Too bad!” but you had better punch (say) those words so that the “too” is louder and so there’s real emotion there. You need to look sorry for them. Otherwise, it might sound like you’re using “too bad” to be unsympathetic and dismissive.

The go-to source (meaning the one place where you’re sure to find answers) for this kind of language is the work of Iona and Peter Opie. These two folklorists and fieldworkers have a couple of fantastic books about children.

The best one of the bunch is The Lore And Language Of Schoolchildren. In a section called “Unpopular Children: Jeers And Torments,” the Opies offer long lists of taunting names, epithets, and scornful rhymes gathered from both sides of the Atlantic. A typical rhyme used to taunt a child who is being picked on (who is being made fun of):

Cry, baby, cry,
Put your finger in your eye,
And tell your mother
It wasn’t I.

Of course, the language changes, so the Opies did not collect evidence for tough cookies!, which is used the same as “too bad!”

One step up from the unsympathetic tough cookies is tough titty, which is mildly rude, and even further up is tough shit, which is thoroughly rude and not the sort of thing you’d say to anyone except very good friends.

The Opies also have nothing on sucks to be you, which, like the tiniest violin, shows no sympathy to someone who has told a terrible tale of woe.

You are now sufficiently linguistically equipped to be seven years old on an American playground.