http://www.grantbarrett.com/ The personal web site of lexicographer, writer, and editor Grant Barrett. en editor@doubletongued.org Copyright 2009 2009-07-02T01:53:45+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/call_of_nature/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/call_of_nature/ Personal, Language and Languages, The Words 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.]]> 2009-07-02T00:53:45+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/feedburner_urls_that_have_huge_accidental_traffic/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/feedburner_urls_that_have_huge_accidental_traffic/ My Commentary, Quibbling
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
]]> 2009-06-17T00:41:29+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/i_held_samuel_johnsons_1755_dictionary_in_my_hands/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/i_held_samuel_johnsons_1755_dictionary_in_my_hands/ Language and Languages, Dictionaries and Lexicography






]]> 2009-06-09T12:18:02+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/new_doors_are_open_for_wordnikcom_a_dictionary_that_aims_to_show_all_the_wo/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/new_doors_are_open_for_wordnikcom_a_dictionary_that_aims_to_show_all_the_wo/ Personal, Language and Languages, Dictionaries and Lexicography 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!]]> 2009-06-08T10:24:29+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/boohoo_wah_diddums_words_of_fake_sympathy/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/boohoo_wah_diddums_words_of_fake_sympathy/ Personal, Language and Languages, My Commentary 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.]]> 2009-06-03T12:14:34+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/my_book_is_now_available_at_no_cost_as_an_e_book_download/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/my_book_is_now_available_at_no_cost_as_an_e_book_download/ Books and Literature, Personal, Language and Languages, My Commentary, Dictionaries and Lexicography The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English is now available on the bootleg e-book sites ("pirate" is the wrong term, I think), I've decided to make it available for download at no cost. This is not a big deal. The book never sold more than a few thousand copies, the copyright is mine (even though the publisher, McGraw-Hill, incorrectly printed the copyright as theirs), the book is being remaindered, and all the rights are now reverting to me.

But the main point here is that I'd like to draw people to my site for the free download, not to some shady place on the Internet. So:

Download the The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English at no charge. (PDF 2.7MB)

No fees, registrations, logins, passwords, ad-clicking, or hoop-jumping required.

By the way, the way these books get out there is usually simple. Sometimes the files leak from publishers, sometimes from authors, sometimes they're scanned from paper to pixels, etc., etc., Sometimes people pretend to be blind and contact the publisher to ask for a digital copy of a book so they can use it with their screen readers that translate the digital pages into something they can understand. The publisher sends a digital copy and in a few days it's all over the Internet.

Make no mistake: I'm not angry. Just resigned. I knew it would happen.]]> 2009-05-25T11:18:09+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/jitterbug_thug_and_dance/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/jitterbug_thug_and_dance/ Language and Languages, My Commentary, Dictionaries and Lexicography 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.”]]> 2009-05-20T12:02:18+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/the_fantods_and_the_cold_robbies/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/the_fantods_and_the_cold_robbies/ Language and Languages, My Commentary 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.
]]> 2009-05-06T00:19:39+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/a_conversation_with_roy_blount_jr/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/a_conversation_with_roy_blount_jr/ Personal, Language and Languages, My Commentary 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.]]> 2009-04-29T12:59:39+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/putting_in_a_good_word_rating_words_chances_for_success/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/putting_in_a_good_word_rating_words_chances_for_success/ Language and Languages, Dictionaries and Lexicography 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.

...

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.
]]> 2009-04-27T13:41:37+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/pickle_is_automatically_a_funny_word/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/pickle_is_automatically_a_funny_word/ Language and Languages, My Commentary latest column in the Malaysia Star, written for a foreign audience seeking to improve its English.

...

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.]]> 2009-04-22T16:56:56+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/like_a_duck_on_a_june_bug/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/like_a_duck_on_a_june_bug/ Language and Languages 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.]]> 2009-04-13T13:50:15+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/from_lol_to_lulz_to_lolxxx/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/from_lol_to_lulz_to_lolxxx/ Personal, Language and Languages, My Commentary 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.

...

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.]]> 2009-04-08T11:52:25+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/latest_radio_episode_dust_bunnies_and_ghost_turds/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/latest_radio_episode_dust_bunnies_and_ghost_turds/ Personal, Language and Languages 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.]]> 2009-04-07T10:55:21+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/a_few_recessionary_depressionary_econolyptic_terms/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/a_few_recessionary_depressionary_econolyptic_terms/ Language and Languages, Dictionaries and Lexicography Ben Zimmer and Mark Peters. You can also find a lot more in my word-of-the-year nominations for 2007 and 2008.

...

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.
]]> 2009-03-26T13:15:29+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/the_lore_and_rhymes_of_children/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/the_lore_and_rhymes_of_children/ Language and Languages, My Commentary latest column in the Malaysia Star. Thanks to cousin Kirk Gadberry, whose query about "chinny chin chin" gave me the idea of talking about the lore of children. We'll be talking more about counting rhymes and such on an upcoming episode of the radio show, now carried in many more markets across the country and available by podcast, too.

...

My son is two and we are well beyond the “peek-a-boo” stage (also called “peep-eye”, “peepo” or “beebo” in some places), so I spend a good deal of time telling him stories.

Books we have by the dozens, but every once in a while I like to tell him a story off the top of my head – from my own imagination – such as how the monkey family gave him to us because he didn’t have tail or fur (not true; the monkey part, I mean – he indeed does not have a tail or fur).

Harder to recall are the fairy tales, those stories passed from ear to mouth over the generations. I can recollect only bits and pieces of rhymes, songs, and stories I knew as a child.

I do recall most of ‘The Three Little Pigs’. There are three pigs, and a wolf who is trying to get inside their houses, and in response to his demands, the pigs say the memorable phrase, “Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin.”

This is partly a nonsense phrase, of course. That jutting feature of the face just below the mouth doesn’t need the “chinny chin”. So why do we add the extra words?

Well, in a version of the story that predates the version we usually tell today, the pigs were goats. Although pigs do have whiskers of a sort, goats have beards, which makes more sense.

The wolf would say something like “Let me in!” and the goats would reply, “Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!”

The extra syllables were added to “chin” to make “chinny chin chin” in order to rhyme with the right rhythm and meter.

Other mysterious language of childhood includes what are called “counting rhymes”. When it comes time to play a game, somebody has to go first. Children try to keep each other fair, so you must “count off” (point at each person in turn until you reach the end).

One counting rhyme we used when I was a boy was:

One potato, two potato, three potato, four.
Five potato, six potato, seven potato, ore.

The potatoes are there to give it the proper counting rhythm. Every time you say a number and a potato, you point to a person.

The “ore” is probably from an old-fashioned pronunciation of “over”, which means that if the count lands on you when it’s said, then you are counted out. Then the rhyme is done again and the last person left is “it”.

Being “it” is a prime honour. It means you are the one who controls the game play and, probably, has the most fun. “It” is the person who chases everyone else when playing tag, “it” is the person who covers their eyes while everyone else hides in the game ‘hide and seek’, and “it” is the person who gives the orders in the game ‘Mother May I’ which is all about following instructions.

There are also a variety of counting rhymes that begin “eeny, meany, miney, moe” and are followed by any number of verses, some of them off-colour (meaning, racist or prejudiced), so I won’t repeat them here. Given that these are generally transmitted between children, the values and mores (the basic customs of a community; pronounced “MORE-ayze”) of parents don’t necessarily come into play.

There are also rhymes for teaching the numbers and their order. The one that most people know is “One, two, buckle my shoe; three, four, open the door” and so on. Then there’s this one – no longer in use, as far as I can tell – recorded in 1798 which is part of a set of rhymes meant to teach multiplication tables:

So 5 times 8 were 40 Scots,
Who came from Aberdeen,
And 5 times 9 were 45,
Which gave them all the spleen.

“To give someone the spleen” is an archaic expression which means “to make someone angry”.

There are also childhood superstitions that my son won’t learn from me. He’ll probably learn them from his friends.

One is “step on a crack, break your mother’s back”. This is something you say as you walk on the pavement and it causes a great deal of hopping and skipping as you try to avoid the cracks.

And when my son gets older, there will no doubt be punching games. These are, basically, excuses for young boys to hit each other. One common one was called “the eye” when we were growing up, but that’s just one of many names.

A boy will make the “okay” sign with his hand – the thumb and index finger forming a circle – and he’ll rest it on his leg. The first person to see it gets punched in the arm or leg. Juvenile and childish, but that’s boys for you.]]> 2009-03-25T09:42:32+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/a_sense_of_snow/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/a_sense_of_snow/ Language and Languages, My Commentary published in the Malaysia Star.

...

Folks from those parts of the world—or even the parts of the United States—that have only known warm climates have a hard time getting a handle on snow, even after a few winters where snow is common.

So it occurs to me—as I stare out my window here in New York City at 11 inches of the white stuff, as the weathercasters (those people paid to predict the weather) sometimes like to call it—that a glossary of some of the more interesting snow language would not go amiss.

A big snowstorm that dumps a lot of snow fast can be called a thump snow, because it seems so sudden that you can imagine you might hear a sound like a dropped box of books.

A monstrously large snowstorm deserves its own name, like those given to hurricanes. One that swept across Canada earlier this winter was called Snowmageddon and the Snowpocalypse.

Snowmageddon is the word “snow” plus part of the word “Armageddon”, a battle scene marked in Christian theology as a precursor to the Day of Judgment, in which the sins of all people are counted.

Snowpocalypse, similarly, is the word “snow” plus the word “apocalypse”, predicted in the Christian Bible as the final destruction of the world.

Both words, “Armageddon” and “apocalypse”, are often used trivially to refer to something serious or dangerous and both often lend part of themselves to other words to indicate something disastrous.

That’s not to say that thundersnow (a snowstorm accompanied by thunder) and blizzards (severe snowstorms that make it impossible to see very far or to survive very long out of doors) aren’t scary. They are. Either one can whisk your courage right away.

But we handle large snowfalls all the same, with snow shovels and snow plows, vehicles—sometimes garbage trucks with large, long blades affixed to their fronts—that push snow off the roads, mittens and gloves, hats and scarves, and lots of hot drinks.

Sometimes, snow plows perform echelon plowing, in which several line up like geese in a flying-V formation, each pushing the snow a little further off the roadway than the ones in front of it.

Drivers of vehicles that have to travel in the snow might hang iron or chain up. That is, they put specially made metal chains on their tyres so that they can have added traction on the slippery roads.

Of course, snow isn’t all a chore. A day off from school or work is sometimes given because snow makes it difficult to travel. This is simply called a snow day.

If you have a snow day, you might hit the slopes, meaning you might go skiing, for which all you need are two boards strapped to your feet and a death wish (usually meaning a desire to die, but here a joking way of referring to someone’s desire to do fun but dangerous things).

But there’s also snowboarding, which is like skateboarding (or surfing) and skiing combined; snowski, which is basically skiing with just one board strapped to your foot; and snowboardcross, a mix between snowboarding and competitive off-road bicycling.

Of course, for some people, a day on the slopes isn’t a day off from work but a day at work. Professional or competitive skiers look for hero snow, snow so perfect that it makes the skiing look magical (especially if they are professional skiers in competitions).

They might also seek out hero bumps, small moguls (bumps created by lots of previous skiers) that make it easy for them to perform high-scoring moves. They might also look for windlips, snow that has been built-up into an inviting wave-like shape by the wind. You can ski right off of these straight into the air.

If you’re not a professional—or you are but your abilities aren’t up to snuff (good enough)—you might end up in what is jokingly called a snow sale or a yard sale. You will fall and everything—boots, skis, ski poles, clothes, body, etc—will be spread across the snowy slopes.

It’s called that because it looks kind of like a yard sale, when people sell their belongings from the lawn or yard in front of their homes.

Of course, you can always go snowmobiling, too. (Not in New York City, mind you.) In Alaska and parts of Canada, they call them snow machines, but they’re the same vehicle, a small, motorised transport with tracks in the back—like those on a military tank—rather than wheels. You sit astride them like a child riding on his papa’s back.

One way to stay entertained with a snowmobile is to do what is called highmarking. It’s a dangerous pastime of driving the machine straight up a steep incline to see how far you can go.

Unfortunately, if a snowmachiner (someone who rides a snow machine) goes too far, the machine will overturn and it can fall on them and kill them. Not recommended.

Sliding around on a cardboard box can be fun, too. And safer.
]]> 2009-03-11T10:06:43+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/zombies/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/zombies/ Language and Languages, My Commentary latest column in the Malaysia Star is about the language of zombies. Aarrgurrggghhhhhh!

...

The word “zombie” means a person who has come back from the dead and is now walking the Earth. Arising out of the religions brought by African slaves to the New World, the word traces it roots back to the religions of that continent more than 200 years ago.

In the earliest French writings, the zombi, as it was usually spelled, is simply called a spirit or a powerful being.

Travelling along with the word in English, however, has long been the idea that a zombie is mindless and not altogether itself.

For example, someone can be said to behave like a zombie if they don’t show emotion, if they seem uninterested or unengaged in life, or if they seem to be very tired.

A zombie can also be anybody who is loyal to someone or something in an unthinking way, such as someone who follows a sports team slavishly (meaning they think everything their favourite team does is interesting). If you buy every book written by a favourite author, you might be said to be zombie-like in your devotion.

A zombie is also someone who does the same task repetitively, such as eat one pastry after another without really enjoying it or thinking much about it. A zombie could also be someone who spends too much time playing computer games.

Someone who does a lot of illegal drugs, especially to the point of addiction, is often called a zombie, or at least zombie-like, because there is often something crude and primitive about their behaviour and because their minds are adversely affected. They cannot, in short, think straight.

In Canada, during World War II, a zombie was someone who was conscripted into the military but only to serve inside Canada and not overseas. Of course, every country needs a force to protect its borders, but this duty was seen as somehow less honourable than overseas service. The idea was that they weren’t real men – they only appeared to be the same as other men. This was intended to be insulting.

As you can see, being called a zombie isn’t very flattering. There are some more or less neutral uses, though.

A zombie process, for example, is a background computer program that appears to still be running but isn’t really. That is, it shows up in a list of currently operating software, but it’s not really active. This plays off the idea of a zombie as something that looks alive but isn’t.

A zombie is also a computer that is controlled by illicit or illegal software or by a secret, remote administrator. It is made to do things like send the computer’s information to a distant thief or to send lots of illegal e-mail. It’s like a zombie because it is controlled by an evil outside force.

In the finance world, zombie debt is money that was once owed to a company which, for whatever reason, it stopped trying to collect. Years later, however, that debt resurfaces, usually when the company is bought over and the new owner intends to collect on the debt anew. So, it starts badgering (bothering) the original debtor to make payments. A zombie debt, then, is one that has come back from the dead.

Elsewhere in business, a zombie is a company that is able to pay its bills and service its debt (meaning, make regular payments on money it has borrowed), but it is not able to borrow sufficiently to make improvements and grow, nor does it seem like a good prospect for a takeover. Its debts are too high.

A variant of this zombie company is one that is basically bankrupt but is kept alive by banks which are unwilling to acknowledge that they will never get back the money they loaned the business.

None of these zombies, of course, are as exciting as the ones in the movies.
]]> 2009-02-11T00:45:52+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/book_fraud/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/book_fraud/ Books and Literature, Dictionaries and Lexicography Here's someone repackaging and selling a book which can be had for at no cost from the Internet Archive, which is undoubtedly where they got it. ]]> 2009-02-08T00:21:36+00:00 http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/drinking_your_words/ http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/drinking_your_words/ Language and Languages, My Commentary column in the Malaysia Star.

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A recent New York Times article about Pu’er teas reminded me that I’ve been meaning to talk a bit about the names of food.

The article explained that the tea was thought to reduce cholesterol and cure hangovers, so the Pu’er name had become immensely powerful in selling teas.

This is something like a brand, which means the mark, name, or identifying characteristics of a product that help people identify it.

Usually, though, a brand belongs to a single company. The whole category of curative teas is called a vertical, meaning a single group of products which all compete for the same customers and the Pu’er teas are a smaller vertical still inside the larger one.

You’ll find a similar brand-like behaviour with prosecco, an Italian sparkling wine. According to another story in the New York Times, in 1984, Fabio Zardetto shipped 50 cases to the US. In 2007, he shipped 100,000 cases.

Now, he’s not quite yet in a position to compete against champagne, the French regional designation for the most famous of the sparkling wines. But he’s doing quite well.

He and the other Italian prosecco winemakers did it, of course, by turning their product into a brand and then marketing it. They create an atmosphere of desirability around their product so that distributors would carry it, wine experts would write about it, and customers would buy it. That is largely how names like “prosecco.”come to our attention these days.

Zardetto’s problem, and that of all the Italian prosecco-makers, however, is that “prosecco.”is the name of a grape. Therefore, anyone can call their sparkling wine a “prosecco.” even an Austrian company that sells the wine in cans at gas stations and features a nude, gold-painted Paris Hilton in its ads.

It’s hard to protect a brand name. In Europe, there are cultural, historical, and geographic ties to the names. Wines, beers, breads, balsamic vinegar, olives, and other things are all controlled in varying degrees in this way.

So a group of prosecco-wine makers are looking for protection for the name from the European Union.

The EU government make rules about what products can take what name. Prosecco, as similar as it is to champagne, is forbidden by law from taking the name “champagne.” The prosecco-makers, in turn, hope to forbid other growers and bottlers under the EU’s jurisdiction from using the name “prosecco.”

It’s the same with cheeses. “Parmesan.”and “parmigiano-reggiano.”are strictly controlled in Europe. You can’t sell a cheese by those names in Europe without meeting strict requirements as to where and how the cheese is made.

In the US, of course, we can and do call any cheese “parmesan.”or “parmigiano-reggiano.”

Of course, the US is the country where cheese product – a food-like substance that looks kind of like cheese and tastes kind of like cheese but might not contain any cheese whatsoever – can still be called “cheese.”

Outside Europe, of course, EU laws hold little sway unless there are international agreements. What work is done to control the naming is vaguely performed by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which is part of the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Basically, they try to ensure that when something is labelled, for example, “soy sauce.” you’re getting what you think you’re getting.

If you’re Japanese, you want to make sure that “soy sauce.”means a condiment brewed and fermented from soybeans, whereas if you’re an American manufacturer, you want to make sure that the meaning of “soy sauce.”is broad enough to include a condiment that contains an extract of soybean or some other protein, flavour enhancers, and artificial colouring. Again, something that is called “soy sauce.”but is sometimes very far from being soy sauce at all.

A decade or two ago, the Meritage Association of Napa valley created the “Meritage.”name so that they could label what are blended table wines as something other than, well, “table wine.”

The conventional wisdom about wines says that blended wines — those made from more than one kind of grape, like table wines — tend to be inferior, or at the very least too variable to be counted on from bottle to bottle, from case to case, or from year to year.

Nobody with any class or sophistication ever bought a table wine to go with an expensive meal. So the vintners of table wines wanted to class up (improve the image of) the category a bit.

To be a meritage wine, there are specifications as to the types of grapes that must be included (at least two of the grapes used in red wine from Bordeaux), and a vintner must be admitted officially as a member to use the name, which is jealously guarded.

Many controls on the names of other wines specify explicitly that a certain percentage of the wine must be a certain grape in order to take a certain name. Not that violations aren’t found but we have to take their word for it at every pour, don’t we?

Probably the most outrageous example of a product straying far from what its name originally meant is ketchup (or catsup), but I’m not even going to go there. Pass the fish sauce.
]]> 2009-01-28T12:20:48+00:00