The Lexicographer's Rules

Now accepting nominations for the 2009 “word of the year” and the 2000-9 “word of the decade”

2009-11-15T20:31:51+00:00

The American Dialect Society is now accepting nominations for the "word of the year" of 2009, as well as for the "word of the decade" for 2000-2009

What is the word or phrase which best characterizes the year or the decade? What expression most reflects the ideas, events, and themes which have occupied the English-speaking world, especially North America?

Nominations should be sent to woty@americandialect.org. They can also be made in Twitter by using the hashtag #woty09.

They will be considered for the American Dialect Society's 20th 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 Baltimore on Friday, January 8, 2010.

The best "word of the year" candidates will be:

—new or newly popular in 2009
—widely or prominently used in 2009
—indicative or reflective of the popular discourse

The best "word of the decade" candidates will be:

—especially prominent or important throughout the years 2000-2009
—indicative of trends, fads, upheavals, groundswells, or sea changes which affected history, culture, or society throughout the years 2000-2009.

Multi-word compounds or phrases that act as stand-alone 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 120-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 on the society's web site.

More information about the annual meeting.

How much underworld slang is still used from 80 years ago?

2009-10-28T03:46:39+00:00

My latest column in the Malaysia Star: Underworld lingo. The column, as always, is written for an audience that may not be perfectly fluent with English.

...

In 1931, the Los Angeles Times published a story headlined Underworld lingo. It was a lexicon of criminal cant and jargon written by Ben Kendall, a police reporter.

Kendall formerly was a police reporter in Chicago, too, where he uncovered bribes and corruption by making friends with pickpockets, safeblowers, and shoplifters. Some eight years later, Kendall would be indicted and convicted for his role in bribery related to illegal gambling in Los Angeles.

So, given his experience on both sides of the law, one can only assume that the lingo he recorded was genuine. But how much of it lasted? Seventy-eight years on, we find that some of the lingo is still in use, while some of it has vanished.

Alky is recorded by Kendall as “straight alcohol.” Most people today would use it to mean an acoholic drinker rather than the drink itself.

Angle he records as “a plan; a lead,” which is more or less how it’s used today. If someone says, “I don’t know what his angle is, but he’s up to no good,” they’d mean that the fellow seemed to be planning something suspicious.

Booster does indeed still mean a shoplifter. Boost in general means “to steal” and a booster bag is a specially designed bag that is meant to conceal stolen merchandise as it is taken out of a store.

Chiv is common still in prison lingo, though it’s usually spelled shiv. An even older form is chive, meaning a knife as far back as the 17th century. A shiv is a knife, too, but in prison slang it is especially a crude, improvised one, such as a toothbrush that has had a razor blade attached to it.

Grand still means a thousand dollars. Take still means “a share,” too, but it’s a fairly straight business term: “What’s my take on all this? If he gets 15% of the ticket money, I want 15%, too.” A pay-off is still a bribe or a payment made to someone to keep them from hurting you or your things.

Haywire, Kendall writes, is a “mental aberration.” Today we’d say that a machine went haywire more often than we would say a person went haywire. We mean the machine started malfunctioning.

Jam still means trouble or a sticky situation. “Can you help me out with the rent this month? I’m in a jam until payday.” Or, “I’m in a jam with the wife. She doesn’t know I was at the bar last night. Tell her I was at your house.”

Lug he defines as a “stupid fellow; a hanger-on,” which is close to the way we’d use it today, but not quite. We’d say a man (almost never a woman) is a big lug, which would mean that he was kind of stupid, but also clumsy or ungainly. It’s often used as an affectionate insult. “You big lug! You didn’t have to bring me flowers!” might be the kind of thing a woman would say in a fake tough voice.

Muscling in is still done pretty much as Kendall defined it: “to force one’s way in for a cut on the profits of a venture.” People still get nailed, too, meaning they get caught or arrested. And screwy still means “crazy.”

Kendall calls a wing-ding “a fit; berserk,” which is a meaning that other dictionaries show to have been more common in the past. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it more fully as “a fit or spasm, esp. as simulated by a drug addict” and in a “weakened sense, a furious outburst.”

However, only a later meaning is used today, which is “a party.” I daresay that no-one who today throws a wing-ding is faking a seizure so that they can get controlled drugs from a doctor.

Yentz hasn’t lasted. It meant “to outsmart” or “to defeat.” It was sometimes spelled yence or yince and had another crude, sexual meaning that meant “to have a non-romantic act of copulation.” Both meanings are synonymous with different meanings of screw.

Loogan (sometimes spelled loogin or lugan, according to the Historical Dictionary of American Slang) is also no longer used to mean “a minor hoodlum,” though hood, recorded by Kendall, is still used to mean “a petty gangster.”

For what it’s worth, I find loogan in Jamieson’s Scottish Dictionary of 1825 with a definition of “a rogue” and in a couple of modern amateur lists of prison slang online as meaning “mentally ill prisoner” in Ontario, Canada.

Perhaps one of the most interesting additions to Kendall’s slang list is his definition of quim as “anybody’s sweetheart.” Historically, and more often, this term has meant “the vagina.”

Even when used to mean “a woman” (a usage confined mainly to North America) it has usually been the crudest of terms meant to refer to the woman as chattel (a personal possession) or as nothing more than the target of sexual acts. It objectifies her as being no better than what her sexual organs are good for.

It’s possible that Kendall only knew the term in a purer, more innocent form. But I imagine, especially given his connection with the rougher corners of the underworld, that he knew very well about its less polite meaning. He would have had a laugh at getting such a coarse word printed in a daily newspaper in a time when even hell and damn might not have been allowed.

Remembering William Safire

2009-09-27T18:43:49+00:00

I want to take a moment to remember William Safire for his kindness.

He was unstinting with his help in matters that were important to me. He gave generous public praise to my radio show, A Way with Words. He supported the Historical Dictionary of American Slang when it applied for funding during my editorship, by writing letters of support that shone with erudition and respect. He gave my book, the Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang, a much kinder review than it deserved. He gave a cover blurb for my Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. He mentioned Wordnik, my latest project, in his column, generating interest from many thousands. He consented to a long interview about his political dictionary.

Perhaps most importantly, he gave me credit as often as possible in his column for helping him with his research, which allowed my own star to rise in the "language dodge," which is what he called this maven-rich, grammarizing, languagey niche we both inhabited. He did this for lots of people and he did it unbegrudgingly.

Thanks, Bill. You were kind.

The elephant in the language

2009-08-12T23:18:33+00:00

Today I want to talk about elephants.

One of the joys of my work as a dictionary editor is finding arbitrary but interesting connections among words, such as those colloquial expressions in English that have to do with elephants.

One elephant you might encounter in English is a white elephant. This is something like a building or a piece of furniture that is big, costly, and seemingly impossible to sell or give away. It can also be a programme or organisation that is a sinkhole for money, meaning that it is expensive and produces little of value. It continues to exist because it is in the favour of some person in power, or else because of inertia.

Related to this is a white elephant sale, which is the kind of event at which you are apt to find things for sale which are perfectly fine – working, clean, and otherwise OK – but yet which are unwanted. Eight-track tape players, maybe. Or a hand-cranked washing machine. Clothing that was fashionable 30 years ago and has yet to come back into style. Art made by the artless and given as gifts to the thankless – or once bought by the tasteless.

Pink elephants are a joking way to describe the hallucinations – strange, imaginary visions and thoughts – you might see if you are excessively drunk or under the influence of drugs. A pink elephant is also used to mean something extraordinary.

Pink elephant is also often used when talking about how hard it is to not think of something once it’s been mentioned. If I tell you: “Don’t think of pink elephants,” what are you going to do? You’re going to think about pink elephants.

The approximate opposite of a pink elephant is the elephant in the room or elephant in the living room. “They ignored the elephant in the room: their daughter still would not speak to them until they agreed to let her go to the beach with her friends.”

This sort of elephant is so big you can’t miss it. Everyone knows it’s there, but nobody mentions it, usually because there seems to be no happy solution to whatever problem that elephant represents.

Elephants are often used metaphorically because of their size. In gold mining and the petroleum business, a piece of land with very large deposits might be called an elephant. Similarly, jumbo, meaning very big, is connected in history to a famous elephant who was considered to be a very large specimen. Since the 1860s, the term has been used for anything that is larger than ordinary.

Indirectly, dumbo, meaning a dumb person, is an elephant-ish term, as it was popularised by the elephant who flew with his ears in the 1941 Disney movie Dumbo. It is probably a play off of jumbo.

One outdated expression that is now little used except by writers who are looking for a bit of historical colour – meaning you’ll probably never hear this expression from the mouth of your average English speaker – is to see the elephant.

This means to become experienced, or to have passed through life or some event (or series of events) and come out on the other side wiser, or to just plain see, hear, feel, and experience everything that an occasion, or life itself, can provide. You might say of a soldier: “You could tell when a soldier had seen the elephant. He had a thousand-yard stare, he could fall asleep at a moment’s notice, and his commanding officer listened to his opinions.”

(A thousand-yard stare is a sharp, unblinking gaze that appears to see nothing at all but at the same time seems to look through you and into your soul.)

By the way, to see the light or to have a come-to-Jesus moment are similar to see the elephant. To see the light means to finally come around to someone else’s point of view. A come-to-Jesus moment is a revelation or sudden overturning of previous attitudes or beliefs. Both of these are still common.

A rare bit of old-fashioned jargon that I picked up from my research is the expression the elephant walks, meaning, “it’s payday”. I found it in a collection of jargon from elevator constructors in the 1930s. I like the expression and use it, but the elephant in my room is that when I do, nobody knows what I’m talking about.

Grant Barrett is editorial director of Wordnik, http://www.wordnik.com, a new online dictionary that aims to collect every word in English.

Updates will continue to be slow for Double-Tongued

2009-07-20T01:53:39+00:00

My family and I are in the process of moving ourselves and our belongings from New York City to the San Francisco Bay area—completely across North America—so updates will continue to be sporadic on this web site. Stay subscribed, though, because they will resume their previous vigor in just a couple of weeks.

Call of nature

2009-07-02T00:53:45+00:00

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.

Feedburner URLs that have huge accidental traffic

2009-06-17T00:41:29+00:00

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

I held Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary in my hands

2009-06-09T12:18:02+00:00

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.

New: doors are open for Wordnik.com, a dictionary that aims to show all the words

2009-06-08T10:24:29+00:00

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!

Boohoo, wah, & diddums: words of fake sympathy

2009-06-03T12:14:34+00:00

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.

My book is now available at no cost as an e-book download

2009-05-25T11:18:09+00:00

Since my book 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.

Jitterbug thug and dance

2009-05-20T12:02:18+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fantods and the Cold Robbies

2009-05-06T00:19:39+00:00

My latest column in the Malaysia Star.

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

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

Cold robbies and fantods both require explanation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Conversation with Roy Blount Jr.

2009-04-29T12:59:39+00:00

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

Putting In A Good Word: rating words’ chances for success

2009-04-27T13:41:37+00:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pickle is automatically a funny word

2009-04-22T16:56:56+00:00

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.

Like a Duck on a June Bug

2009-04-13T13:50:15+00:00

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.

From LOL to lulz to lolxxx

2009-04-08T11:52:25+00:00

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.

Latest radio episode: Dust Bunnies and Ghost Turds

2009-04-07T10:55:21+00:00

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.

A few recessionary, depressionary, econolyptic terms

2009-03-26T13:15:29+00:00

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.