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By: Lauren,
on 6/27/2011
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By Dennis Baron
The Supreme Court is using dictionaries to interpret the Constitution. Both conservative justices, who believe the Constitution means today exactly what the Framers meant in the 18th century, and liberal ones, who see the Constitution as a living, breathing document changing with the times, are turning to dictionaries more than ever to interpret our laws: a new report shows that the justices have looked up almost 300 words or phrases in the past decade. Earlier this month, according to the New York Times, Chief Justice Roberts consulted five dictionaries for a single case.
Even though judicial dictionary look-ups are on the rise, the Court has never commented on how or why dictionary definitions play a role in Constitutional decisions. That’s further complicated by the fact that dictionaries aren’t designed to be legal authorities, or even authorities on language, though many people, including the justices of the Supreme Court, think of them that way. What dictionaries are, instead, are records of how some speakers and writers have used words. Dictionaries don’t include all the words there are, and except for an occasional usage note, they don’t tell us what to do with the words they do record. Although we often say, “The dictionary says…,” there are many dictionaries, and they don’t always agree.
As for the justices, they aren’t just looking up technical terms like battery, lien, and prima facie, words which any lawyer should know by heart. They’re also checking ordinary words like also, if, now, and even ambiguous. One of the words Chief Justice Roberts looked up last week in a patent case was of. These are words whose meanings even the average person might consider beyond dispute.
Sometimes dictionary definitions inform landmark decisions. In Washington, DC, v. Heller (2008), the case in which the high Court decided the meaning of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, both Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens checked the dictionary definition of arms. Along with the dictionaries of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, Justice Scalia cited Timothy Cunningham’s New and Complete Law Dictionary (1771), where arms is defined as “any thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another” (variations on this definition occur in English legal texts going back to the 16th century). And Justice Stevens cited both Samuel Johnson’s definition of arms as “weapons of offence, or armour of defence” (1755) and John Trusler’s “by arms, we understand those instruments of offence generally made use of in war; such as firearms, swords, &c.” (1794).
The much less publicized case of Barnhart v. Peabody Coal Co. (2003) turned in part on the meaning of a single word, shall. In this case the justices all agreed that the word shall in one particular section of the federal Coal Act functions as a command. What they disagreed about was just how much latitude the use of shall permits.
In Peabody Coal the Court’s majority decided that s
By: Lauren,
on 6/23/2011
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By Mark Peters
I love bullshit.
Perhaps I should clarify. It’s not pure, unadulterated bullshit I enjoy (or even the hard-to-find alternative, adulterated bullshit). I agree with the great George Carlin, who said, “It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.” Hard to argue with that.
What I love is the enormous lexicon of words for bullshit and nonsense. Studies show they are all wonderful words. Piffle! Tommyrot! Poppycock! Truthiness! Balderdash! Rot! Crapola! Hogwash! Intellectual black holes! Using a vivid, meaty word like gobbledygook almost makes it worth dealing with gobbledygook itself. A few years ago in this very blog, I looked at some of these words.
Three years later, I’m older, wiser, and no less enamored of BS and all BS-like terms. This time, instead of looking at the origin stories of terms you already know, I’m going to share some terms I bet you don’t know: bullshit obscurities, some of which I’d never have found without the help of newly published sources, like Green’s Dictionary of Slang, the magnificent work of Mr. Slang, Jonathon Green. I implore you: give these words a home in your doomsday prophesies and cupcake recipes. They should be useful. You can never, ever have enough words for bullshit.
flummadiddle
Here’s a spin on flummery that would make Ned Flanders proud. Like flummery, flummadiddle (also spelled flummerdiddle and flummydiddle) has been used to mean either horsefeathers or something that would taste just as awful, as in this 1872 OED example: “Flummadiddle consists of stale bread, pork-fat, molasses, cinnamon, allspice, [etc.]; by the aid of these materials a kind of mush is made, which is baked in the oven and brought to the table hot and brown.” Mmm, mush. No wonder this diddly-fied version of flummery works so well when describing mushy thoughts and words, as in this 1854 use: “What does she want of any more flummerdiddle notions?” Bonus BS: this word is related to fadoodle and fairydiddle.
arkymalarky
One of my top five favorite BS words has always been malarkey, so I had at least two wordgasms when I found this variation in Green’s. Green spots two uses from the 1930’s and 40’s, both by Carl Sandberg, so this term might be an invention of his. Surely it deserves broader use, partly because it has the reduplication that makes jibber-jabber, mumbo-jumbo, and pishery-pashery such fitting words for fiddle-faddle. Yet another BS-y reduplicative term has a Shakespearian résumé: skimble-skamble appeared in Henry IV: “Such a deale of skimble scamble stuffe, As puts me from my faith.”
ackamarackus
Green notes that arkymalarky may be related to ackamarackus, which the OED defines as “Something regarded as pretentious nonsense; something intended to deceive; humbug.” Apparently, giving someone the old ackamarackus is like giving them the old okey-doke: a maneuver perfected by politicians and other flim-flammers.
donkey dust
This Massachusetts term—recorded in t
By: Lauren,
on 5/25/2011
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By Anatoly Liberman
Because of the frequency of the words the, this, that, these, those, them, their, there, then, and with, the letter h probably occurs in our texts more often than any other (for Shakespeare’s epoch thee and thou should have been added). But then of course we have think, three, though, through, thousand, and words with ch, sh, ph, and gh. Despite the prominence of h in written English its status is entirely undeserved, because it performs its most important historical task, namely to designate the sound in words like have, hire, home, and so forth only in word and morpheme initial position (the latter as in rehire, dehydrated, and the like).
The history of h is dramatic. Germanic experienced a change known as the First Consonant Shift (a big shock, as the capitalization above shows). When we compare Latin quod “what” (pronounced kwod) and its Old English cognate hwæt (the same meaning; pronounced with the vowel of Modern Engl. at), we see that Engl. h corresponds to Latin k. A series of such regular correspondences separates Germanic from its non-Germanic Indo-European “relatives,” and this is what the shift is all about. The k ~ h pair is only one of nearly a dozen. When the shifted k arose more than two thousand year ago, it had the sound value of ch in Scots loch, but then the weakening of Germanic consonants set in (linguists call this process lenition), and the guttural sound was one of its casualties: it stopped being guttural and became “mere breath,” as we now have in home and hell. Degraded to breath, or aspiration, h began to disappear. In no other Germanic language has the habit of dropping one’s h’s advanced as far as in English, but it can be observed in all its modern and medieval neighbors, especially in popular speech. For example, in the delightful Middle Dutch narrative poem about the arch-scoundrel Reineke Fox (the French call the beast Reynard) h is dropped on a scale unthinkable in Modern Dutch. Standard English frowns upon h-less words, but in a few cases they managed to assert themselves. For instance, the form preceding modern them was hem, and that is why we say tell’em: it is not th that has been shed, but h. However, what the sound h has lost in pronunciation, the letter h has more than regained on paper.
Each case—the introduction of ch, sh, and gh—deserves a special essay, but I will devote this post only to th. Today th designates a voiceless consonant (as in cloth) and a voiced one (as in clothe). Both sounds existed in Old English, though their occurrence and distribution were partly different from what we find in the modern language, and there were special letters for them—þ (voiceless) and ð (voiced). They go back to the form of two ancient runes. But from early on the Romance tradition became dominant in Germanic scriptoriums: in German, Dutch, and English we find the digraphs (that is, two-letter groups) dh and th. Dh did not stay anywhere, but th did and is ambiguous, for, at least theoretically, it could be used f
By: Lauren,
on 5/23/2011
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According to some, today is ‘Lucky Penny Day’. The OED describes a ‘lucky penny’ as usually one that is bent or perforated, or sometimes an old or foreign coin. In the early nineteenth century, a ‘luck-penny’ was defined as ‘the cash which the seller gives back to the buyer after the latter has paid him; it is given back with the hope that it may prove a lucky’. It’s also recorded that the participants would usually also spit on their palms to seal the deal.1
The origin of the word ‘penny’
The word penny comes from Old English penig, penning which is of Germanic origin and is related to Dutch penning and German Pfennig, perhaps also to pawn and (with reference to the shape) pan.
Pennies or pence?
Both pence and pennies have existed as plural forms of penny since at least the 16th century. The two forms now tend to be used for different purposes: pence refers to sums of money (five pounds and sixty-nine pence) while pennies refers to the coins themselves (I left two pennies on the table). The use of pence rather than penny as a singular (the chancellor will put one pence on income tax) is not regarded as correct in standard English.
Pennies from heaven …
The humble penny has given us many idiomatic expressions and proverbs:
a bad penny always turns up – proverb someone or something unwelcome will always reappear or return.
be two (or ten) a penny – be plentiful and consequently of little value (chiefly British).
counting / watching the pennies (in the US, also ‘pinching’) – being careful about how much you spend.
in for a penny, in for a pound – used to express someone’s intention to see an undertaking through, however much time, effort, or money this entails.
look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves – if you concentrate on saving small amounts of money, you’ll soon amass a large amount.
pennies from heaven – unexpected benefits, especially financial ones.
the penny dropped – used to indicate that someone has finally realized something (chiefly British).
a penny for your thoughts – used to ask someone what they are thinking about.
Whether you pick up a lucky penny today, or seal a deal in ceremonial fashion by spitting in your hand, here’s hoping that it brings you luck!
1. “LUCK-PENNY“ A Dictionary of Superstitions. Ed. Iona Opie and Moira Tatem. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Oxford University Press – Main Accnt. 23 May 20
By: Michelle,
on 5/23/2011
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Want more of The Oxford Comment? Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes.
You can also look back at past episodes on the archive page.
Featured in this Episode:
Michelle goes on-site with former Oxford intern Caleb Madison, the youngest person to publish a crossword puzzle in the New York Times (at the age of 15). A puzzle by his class at Sundays at JASA: A Program of Sunday Activities for Older Adults was recently published in the New York Times and featured on the Wordplay blog.
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By: Lauren,
on 5/18/2011
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(The first word was larrup.)
By Anatoly Liberman
Lunker seems to be well-known in the United States and very little in British English. Mark Twain used lunkhead “blockhead.” Lunker surfaced in books later, but lunkhead must have been preceded by lunk, whatever it meant. In today’s American English, lunker has several unappetizing and gross connotations, and we will let them be: one cannot constantly deal with turd and genitals. Only two senses bear upon etymological discussion: “a very big object” and “big game fish.” From the meager facts at my disposal I am apt to conclude that “big fish” is secondary, so that the word hardly arose in the lingo of fishermen. Also, lunkhead probably alluded to someone with a big head “typical of an idiot,” as they used to say.
In dictionaries I was able to find only one conjecture on the origin of lunker. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (RHD) suggested that it might be a blend of lump and hunk. Unless we know for certain that a word is a blend (cf. smog, brunch, motel, blog, gliberal, Eurasia, Tolstoevsky, and the like), it is impossible to prove that some lexical unit is the product of merger: for instance, squirm is perhaps a blend of squirt and worm but perhaps not. I suspect that RHD’s idea was suggested by The Century Dictionary, which, although it offers no derivation of lunkhead and does not list lunker, refers under lummox “an unwieldy, clumsy, stupid fellow” (“probably ultimately connected with lump”) to British dialectal lummakin “heavy; awkward.” Lump turned up first only in Middle English. It has numerous cognates in Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages and seems to have developed from the basic meaning “a shapeless mass.” No impassable barrier separates lunk- from lump-, for n and m constantly alternate in roots, and final -p and -k are also good partners (see the previous post). German Lumpen means “rag,” and a rag may be understood as a shapeless mass or something hanging loose. It is the semantics that complicates our search for the etymology of lunker: we need cognates that mean “a big thing,” and they refuse to appear. Lump does provide a clue to the history of lunker; by contrast, hump may be left out of the picture: we have enough trouble without it.
Joseph Wright included lunkered (not lunker!) in The English Dialect Dictionary, but without specifying his sources or saying, as he often did: “Not known to our informants.” His definition is curt: “(of hair) tangled; Lincolnshire.” He also cited several other similar northern (English and Scots) words, of which especially instructive are lunk “heave up and down (as a ship); walk with a quick uneven, rolling motion; limp” and lunkie “a hole left for the admission of animals.” Unlike larrup, discussed in the previous post, lunker did find its way into my database. A single citation occurs in The Essex Review for 1936. The Reverend W. J. Pressey quotes a 1622 entry in a diary: “Absent from Church, and for ‘lunkering’ a poor woman’s house in great Sampford, to the great fear and terror of the said poor woman.” He comments:
“This word is derived from the Scandinavian. ‘Lunkere
By: Lauren,
on 5/11/2011
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By Anatoly Liberman
For this essay I have to thank Walter Turner, who asked me about the origin of larrup. The verb means “beat, thrash, whip, flog.” Long before my database became available in printed form as A Bibliography of English Etymology, I described in a special post what kind of lexical fish my small-meshed net had caught. (Sorry for the florid style. I remember a dean saying in irritation to one of the speakers at the Assembly: “Can you stop speaking in metaphors?” I mean that our team read a lot of articles and marked the places where anything pertaining to etymology turned up, without missing even the most trivial remarks.) After some of the words had been gathered in a mini-thesaurus, I observed with surprise the number of synonyms for “beat, strike.” Baist, bansel, clat, dozz, keb, lase, polch, starn, and what not. Needless to say, my knowledge of the language and of the ways of the world did not go beyond bang, buffet, lick, trounce, whack, and the like. And let me repeat: the database includes only such words about whose origin something has been said in the articles I have read, so, by definition, a small fraction of the existing literature. Later in Notes and Queries an exchange titled “Provincialisms for ‘To Thrash’” came my way, with mump, clool, wheang, and more of the same enriching my passive vocabulary. Among other things, in elementary school “‘thimble-pie’ was a serious letting down. It was administered with the dame’s thimble finger,” and (the author adds), “as I remember, was very much past a joke.” All the northern correspondents knew skelp, but no one mentioned larrup, though, according to Joseph Wright’s The English Dialect Dictionary, it is recognized in every part of England. It is also widespread in the United States, even if less so (see Dictionary of American Regional English). What then is its etymology? Larrup does not occur in my database, which means that I have not run into a single article or note in which its history is mentioned. And yet, as happens so often in etymological studies, its origin was, if not explained, at least elucidated, almost a century ago; only no one has paid attention.
The OED lists larrup (the earliest citation there goes back to 1823) but offers no etymology. It only quotes an 1825 publication, in which lirrop (not larrup) “to beat” is followed by a short remark: “This is said to be a corruption of the sea term, lee-rope.” Larrop and lirrop, as pointed out in the OED, are, naturally, variants of larrup. As to lee-rope, we need not bother about this exercise in folk etymology. The Century Dictionary also has an entry on larrup and says: “Prob. [from] D[utch] larpen, thresh with the flails; cf. larp, a lash. The E[nglish] form larrup (for *larp) may represent the strongly rolled r of the D[utch]: so larum, alarum, for alarm” (in linguistic works, an asterisk before a form means that it has not been attested). This statement can be found verbatim in several later dictionaries. From time to time I write about “unsung heroes of etymology.” Charles P. G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary, is one of them. He can always be relied upon; yet I do not know where he found the words larp and larpen. The Great
By: Lauren,
on 5/4/2011
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By Anatoly Liberman
In lieu of an introduction
The best way of finding out whether “the world” is watching you is to err. The moment I deviate from the path of etymological virtue I am rebuffed, and this keeps me on my toes. Even an innocent typo “causes disappointment” (as it should). Walter W. Skeat: “But the dictionary-maker must expect, on the one hand, to be snubbed when he makes a mistake, and on the other, to be neglected when he is right” (1890). Apparently, this blog does not exist in a vacuum, though I would welcome more questions and comments in addition to rebuttals and neglect. Among other things, I noticed that my angriest opponents are those who have no facts (just opinions) at their disposal. For example, I once stated that contrary to the loss of endings or changes in the word order in the history of English, sentences like if a tenant is evicted, it does not mean they were a bad tenant were promulgated and enforced by overzealous social engineering, rather than being a product of natural development. I was immediately told that such constructions had flourished since the days of Chaucer, if not since the reign of King Alfred. I am still waiting for evidence from Old and Middle English. (Peter Maher has recently sent me the sentence: “Officials believe that it were Dissident Republicans opposed to the peace process who carried out the bombing.” This is another example of enthusiasm running away with common sense. They so say in German (es waren…), where the link verb (copula) agrees with the predicate, but English is not German, is it?)
Some time ago I read a vitriolic comment on my post titled “Death of the Adverb” (the writer from Australia was quite “incensed” by it). While discussing the phrase do it real quick, I maintained that hardly any speaker of American English would use either really or quickly for real and quick in it. First of all, it was pointed out that having Oxford University Press in New York (where this blog was founded) is an oxymoron (no need to fear the American conquest like the Viking raids or the Norman Conquest of 1066: branches of OUP are situated in many places, while Oxford is still in England, and may it stay there for another million years). Second, Americans were advised to leave English alone. This is familiar advice. Thus, at the end of the 19th century bitter complaints were voiced about (over?) “…the unlicensed liberty of speech by which some American public men are wont to recklessly debase our common English tongue”; the tongue is common, but don’t you dare paw it over. (Here I cannot refrain from the remark that in British English wont is homophonous with won’t, whereas in American English it is indistinguishable from want, but this is by the way.) Now what about real quick? Here my opponent, who reveals his age (“fifty odd years”) suggested that adjectives and adverbs simply merged in those words and yielded identical forms. I am afraid that during (over?) the last half-century the writer has not had a chance to study the history of English. Mergers are common. For instance, fast (adjective) and fast (adverb) were different in Old English (the adverb had -e at the end), but when unstressed vowels were shed in Middle English, the two words became homonyms. Occasionally tangles are produced, and then we observe division of labor, as between hard and hardly. Nothing simi
By: Lauren,
on 4/27/2011
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By Anatoly Liberman
Habit, in additions to the meaning that is universally known (“settled disposition of mind and body”), can also designate “apparel,” even though in restricted contexts, such as monk’s habit or riding habit. At first sight, these senses do not belong together, and yet they do. The word is, of course, a “loan” from French. (I have mentioned more than once that linguistic loans are permanent, for they are never returned, except when, for example, an ancient Germanic, that is, Franconian word traveled to Old French—note the similarity of Franconian and French—and then returned to English or more rarely to German so changed that even philologists sometimes have trouble recognizing the prodigal son.) Both Latin habitus and its continuation Old French habit already combined the two meanings retained in English; English only borrowed both.
Since habitus was the past participle of habere “to have,” it could refer to almost anything that was “had,” including dress and mental makeup. Less predictable is the meaning of Latin habitare “to have in permanent possession, keep,” whence “to stay put; dwell,” from which English has, again via French, inhabit and habitat. Habitare is the frequentative form of habere. A frequentative verb describes a regularly occurring action: for example, we can wrest an object from an opponent’s grip and wrestle continually with a problem: wrestle is frequentative, as opposed to wrest. Habitat is a curious bookish word that surfaced in English only in the 18th century. Those who know some Latin will immediately see that habitat is the 3rd person singular of habitare, that is, “he dwells.” Here I cannot do better that quote The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology: “…derived from its use in [Latin descriptions of] floras and faunas to introduce the natural place of growth or occurrence of a species (e.g. ‘Common Primrose. Habitat in sylvis’ [grows in woods].” Thus, a Latin verb was transformed into an English noun. Inhabit goes back to Latin inhabitare, literally “indwell.”
Some other derivatives and borrowings with the same root, such as the legal term habendum, the phrase habeas corpus (both pure Latin), habitual, habituate, and habitué, hardly deserve our attention. But it is worthy of mention that French, like Spanish and Italian, lost initial h quite early in its history. When we see Spanish hay or Italian ho, we know that h is a graphic symbol devoid of phonetic value. French borrowings have taught us to treat h- with caution. Engl. hour, ultimately from Latin hora, is a homonym of our (the Spanish cognate is still spelled hora, like French heure, but the Italian for hour is ora!). Engl. habit is the product of medieval and Renaissance scholarship: the learned, who took themselves too seriously, loved to spell English words etymologically and sometimes suggested such silly variants as abhominable because they derived the adjective from ab and hominem, while in fact it is related to omen. Later the written image of habit, humble, and so forth affected the way they were pronounced. Fluctuations are still possible. Herb is herb in England but ‘erb in American English, in which Herb is only a name,
By: Lauren,
on 4/20/2011
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THE HAPPY END: FROM BOOZE TO MILK
(THE WORD BEESTINGS)
By Anatoly Liberman
The word beestings once had its day in court. About half a century ago, American linguists were busy discussing whether there is something they called juncture, a boundary signal that supposedly helps people to distinguish ice cream from I scream when they hear such combinations. A special sign (#) was introduced in transcription: /ais#krim/ as opposed to /ai#skrim/. The two crown examples for the existence of juncture in Modern English were nitrate versus night rate and beestings versus bee stings. I remember asking myself: “What exactly is beestings?” Well, it is “first milk from a cow after calving,” considered a delicacy in some quarters, for example, in Iceland, as an old dictionary informs us, and perhaps elsewhere; colostrum is its Latin synonym and gloss. More or less along the same lines the nonexistent difference between wholly and holy in oral speech bothered phoneticians. If I am not mistaken, unprejudiced informants treated the members of such pairs as homophones, and the term juncture disappeared from linguistic articles and books, the more so as around that time about everybody agreed that most of pre-Chomskyan linguistics had been a sad aberration, and the terminology that dominated the previous period lost its relevance. In this drinking bout, bee stings and beestings are connected in a rather unpredictable way: mead played an important role in my discussion (and mead is inseparable from honey and, consequently, from stinging bees), while beestings may share the root with booze and, according to a bold hypothesis, also with beer.
Obviously, -ings is a suffix in beestings, a word that has been attested in numerous similar-looking shapes. Old English already had the forms with the suffix (bysting) and without it (beost), and beest has wide currency in modern British dialects. The German, Frisian, and Dutch cognates of beest are unmistakable: they sound alike and mean the same. A probable Norwegian (dialectal) cognate has also been discovered. The most authoritative dictionaries call beestings and the related forms words of unknown origin, but, as always, everything depends on how we define “unknown.” Some words are so impenetrable that nothing at all can be said about their past, while others are obscure to varying degrees. As a rule, numerous conjectures have been put forward about the derivation of hard words, and, even if the problem remains unsolved (the most common case), some contain the proverbial grain of truth. “Origin unknown” is a loose concept. This also holds for beestings.
Early attempts to connect beest with an Old Romance word for “curdled” (such as Provençal betada “clotted” and 17th-century French caillebotes “curds”) have been abandoned, and indeed, Old Engl. beost and betada resemble each other by chance; nor is the resemblance impressive. A more serious riddle is whether Old Engl. beost has anything to do with Gothic beist “leaven, yeast” (Gothic is a dead Germanic language, recorded in the 4th century). Many lexicographers combined them (some even us
By: Lauren,
on 4/13/2011
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(GRAND FINALE BEFORE THE NEXT LIBATION)
By Anatoly Liberman
Toasting, a noble art, deserves the attention of all those (etymologists included) who drink for joy, rather than for getting drunk. The origin of the verb to toast “parch,” which has been with us since the end of the 14th century, poses no problems. Old French had toster “roast, grill,” and Italian tostare seems to be an unaltered continuation of the Romance protoform. Tost- is the root of the past participle of Latin torrere (the second conjugation) “parch.” English has the same root in torrid and less obviously in torrent, from torrens “scorching, said of streams; roaring, rushing”). A cognate of the root tor- can be seen in Engl. thirst, a most appropriate word in the present context. Kemp Malone (1889-1971), an eminent American scholar, equally proficient in modern linguistics and medieval literature, once reclassified the senses of the verb toast “parch,” as given in the Oxford English Dictionary, and came to the following conclusion:
“…throughout, the verb means the same thing: ‘to heat thoroughly’. This has always been the basic meaning of the word, but in modern times the process of toasting has come to be restricted to a beneficial application of heat. The source of this heat in early times was either the sun or an open fire, but later uses of the word indicate that toasting may be effected by any source of heat found suitable for the purpose, as an electric current or blasts of hot air.”
This is probably true, but it tells us nothing about toasting occurring at banquets, and yet, from an etymological point of view, it must be the same word.
As usual, popular books and the Internet give lots of anecdotal information about the origin of toast “drinking a guest’s health,” without disclosing their sources, but etymologies unsupported by exact references should never be trusted, for authors tend to copy from one another and thus produce an illusion of consensus and solid knowledge, where a critic easily discerns a Ponzi scheme in historical linguistics. One thing seems to be certain, however: from early on, people put a piece of charred bread at the bottom of a wine glass. Whether this ingredient added flavor, removed flavor, or disguised the presence of poison in the container is less clear. I will quote part of a statement by a professor of chemistry, as given in the periodical Comments on Etymology (January 19, 1990):
“My understanding of the origin of toast is that the French had a custom of floating spiced bits of toast on various drinks (including coffee and tea) on festive occasions. It is certainly possible that some spoiled wines were served this way, so that the spoilage could be hidden by the spices, and also so that the toast could absorb some of the odors…. While charcoal and probably toast can remove ethyl acetate, this is a short-term solution because they are not very effective at removing acetic acid. The primary use of charcoal in the wine industry is the removal of unwanted color and some off-odors.”
It is thus safer to forget for the time being the antiquity and the Middle Ages and start with the 18th century. The main revision of Samuel Johnson’s famous 1755 dictionary was made by H. J. Todd, who expanded Johnson’s etymologies and added a good deal of new material to the great work. He pointed to the now well-known passage from Tatler (June 4, 1709). It has been repr
By: Lauren,
on 4/6/2011
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By Anatoly Liberman
Booze is an enigmatic word, but not the way ale, beer and mead are. Those emerged centuries ago, and it does not come as a surprise that we have doubts about their ultimate origin. The noun booze is different: it does not seem to predate the beginning or the 18th century, with the verb booze “to tipple, guzzle” making its way into a written text as early as 1300 (which means that it turned up in everyday speech some time earlier). The riddles connected with booze are two.
First, why did the noun appear so much later than the verb? A parallel case will elucidate the problem. The verb meet is ancient, while the noun meet is recent, and we can immediately see the reason for the delay: sports journalists needed a word for a “meeting” of athletes and teams and coined a meet, whose popularity infuriated some lovers of English, but, once the purists died out, the word became commonplace (this is how language changes: if a novelty succeeds in surviving its critics, it stays and makes the impression of having been around forever). But the noun booze is not a technical term and should not have waited four hundred years before it joined the vocabulary. Second, the verb booze is a doublet of bouse (it rhymes with carouse, which is fair). Strangely, bouse has all but disappeared, and booze (sorry for a miserable pun) is on everybody’s lips. However, it is not so much the death of bouse that should bother us as the difference in vowels. The vowel we have in cow or round was once “long u” (as in today’s coo). Therefore, bouse has the pronunciation one expects, whereas booze looks Middle English. In the northern dialects of English “long u” did not become a diphthong, and this is probably why uncouth still rhymes with youth instead of south. Is booze a northern doublet of bouse? One can sense Murray’s frustration with this hypothesis. He wrote: “Perhaps really a dialectal form” (and cited a similar Scots word). It is the most uncharacteristic insertion of really that gives away Murray’s dismay. His style, while composing entries, was business-like and crisp; contrary to most people around us, he preferred not to strew his explanations with really, actually, definitely, certainly, and other fluffy adverbs: he was a scholar, not a preacher.
Whatever the causes of the modern pronunciation of booze, one etymology will cover both it and bouse. So what is the origin of bouse? This word is surrounded by numerous nouns and verbs, some of which must be and others may be related to it. First of all, its Dutch and German synonyms buizen and bausen spring to mind. Both are rare to the extent of not being known to most native speakers, but their use in the past has been recorded beyond any doubt. Most other words refer to swelling, violent or erratic movement, and noise: for instance, Dutch buisen “strike, knock” and, on the other hand, beuzelen “dawdle, trifle,” Norwegian baus “arrogant; irascible” and bause “put on airs” (which partly explains the sense of Dutch boos and Germa
By: Kirsty,
on 4/4/2011
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‘Politics feeds your vanity and starves your self-respect,’ according to the journalist Matthew Parris. In the video below, filmed by George Miller, Antony Jay discusses what makes a good political quotation.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Sir Antony Jay is the editor of Lend Me Your Ears: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations. He is most famously the co-creator of the classic British 1980s sitcoms Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.
View more about this book on the
By: Lauren,
on 4/1/2011
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By Mark Peters
Some people and characters are forever associated with a word. I dare you to say refudiate, malaise, nanu-nanu, despicable, winning, and meep without thinking of Sarah Palin, Jimmy Carter, Mork, Daffy Duck, Charlie Sheen, and the Road Runner (or Beaker).
Without a doubt, the poster boy for varmint is Yosemite Sam, the rootin’-tootin’, razzin’-frazzin’ cowboy who was so often outwitted by Bugs Bunny in immortal Looney Tunes cartoons. Sam started popping up in the 1940’s, but the OED reveals that varmint (or varment) goes back much further, referring to “An animal of a noxious or objectionable kind” since the mid-1500’s. It’s a variation of vermin, which I was surprised to learn originally applied to reptiles, not rodents, back in the 1400’s. Like beauty, obscenity, and fugliness, vermin-hood and varmint-itude have always been in the eye of the beholder.
Though Mr. Sam never seemed like the reading type—his intellectual rigor rivaled that of a box of rocks—I wonder what his personal book of quotations would look like. I suspect Yosemite would make predictable revisions to suit his personal mission, like so:
“Hell is other varmints.” –Jean-Paul Sartre
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the varmints.” –William Shakespeare
“Some of us are becoming the varmints we wanted to marry.” –Gloria Steinem
“To use a varmint to show that a varmint is not a varmint is not as good as using a non-varmint to show that a varmint is not a varmint.” –Chuang-Tzu
“My eleven-year-old daughter mopes around the house all day waiting for her varmints to grow.” –Bill Cosby
“Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.” –Gore Vidal
“When I need a little free advice about varmints, I turn to country music.” –George H.W. Bush
“For just one night, let not be co-workers. Let’s be co-varmints.” –Ron Burgundy
“Every woman adores a varmint.” –Sylvia Plath
“Imagine there’s no varmints. It isn’t hard to do.” –John Lennon
“We fought a war on varmints, and varmints won.” –Ronald Reagan
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘varmint’ is.” –Bill Clinton
“I’m going to take my varmints to South Beach.” –LeBron James
“Omit needless varmints.” –William Strunk Jr.
Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, language columnist for Visual Thesaurus, and the blogger behind The Rosa Parks of Blogs and The Pancake Proverbs.
By: Lauren,
on 3/30/2011
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By Anatoly Liberman
Question: How large is an average fluent speaker’s vocabulary?
Answer: I have often heard this question, including its variant: “Is it true that English contains more words than any other (European) language?” The problem is that “an average fluent speaker” does not exist. Also, it is important to distinguish between how many words we recognize (our so-called passive vocabulary) and how many we use in everyday communication (active vocabulary). The size of people’s active vocabulary depends on their needs, but it is rarely large. Thus, five-year olds can say everything they want, but if they are read to and if grownups speak to them all the time, they understand complicated tales and the content of their parents’ conversation amazingly well (oftentimes much better than one could wish for). Some people cultivate their conversational skills and make an effort to use “sophisticated” words in their dealings with the outside world; others are happy to remain at the level of first-graders. One of the most memorable events in my teaching career happened about thirty years ago when a student approached me after a lecture and, having complimented me (they always do in such cases), added: “But I don’t understand half of the words you use.” Ever since that day I have worked systematically on reducing my “public” vocabulary but sometimes still forget myself.
Our passive vocabulary depends on our reading habits. Since “great classics” are being frowned upon as elitist, the younger generation has trouble understanding even 19th-century English (Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and so on, through Henry James and the utterly forgotten Galsworthy), while publishers promote books written more or less in Basic English. Students get tired of following those authors’ synonyms, idioms, and convoluted syntax (their greatest compliments are matter of fact and down to earth, while all digressions are castigated as rambling). The same is true, to an even greater extent, of their attempts to read Defoe, Fielding, and Swift. For some Americans of college age even the vocabulary of Mark Twain poses difficulties. It is hard to believe that Mark Twain, like Jack London and Charles Dickens, was self-taught. Yet quite a few of our best and brilliantly educated writers did not make use of an extensive vocabulary. Oscar Wilde is a typical example. Others, like Dickens and Meredith, let alone James Joyce, made a heroic effort to use as many rare and learned words as possible.
Good dictionaries of English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, etc. seem to be equally thick. In a dictionary containing about 60,000 words one can find practically everything one needs. Webster’s Unabridged features seven or eight times more. Obviously, none of us needs to know so much. But perhaps two features distinguish English from its neighbors: an overabundance of synonyms (because of the partly unhealthy influx of Romance words) and the ubiquity of slang. French also overflows with argot, but English dictionaries of slang (British, American, Canadian, Australian) are almost unbelievably thick. This makes it harder to master current English than, for example, German, but each language has its difficulties. English resorts to all the usual international words (music, radio, antibiotic, and the like), while Icelandic prefers native coinages for such concepts. It appears that whether you want to learn a foreign language or your own you have to make a sustained effort. But then this is what the sweat of one’s brow is for. Only Adam had an easy life: none of the objects around him had a name, and he was instructed to call them something (presumably he remembered his own neologisms). His offspring ca
By: Lauren,
on 3/25/2011
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Dearest readers,
I think this might be the best collection of links I’ve ever gathered. So, you’re welcome. Have a wonderful weekend!
Next Stop Atlantic: a photo series documenting the hurling of MTA subway cars into the Atlantic Ocean to create artificial reefs for sea creatures. [My Modern Met]
“He doesn’t like George Michael! Boo!” This saxaphone player is committed. (I dare you not to laugh.) [Viddler]
There’s a reason you didn’t get an A+ on your creative writing homework. (Dare you not to laugh at this one, either.) [losteyeball]
Your head could look like a book. [Gizfactory]
Have you been reading The Morning News’s ‘Lunch Poems‘ series? [The Morning News]
The Word Guy gets PENsive. [Etyman]
Path of Protest: an interactive timeline of recent Middle East events [Guardian]
Nick Pitera does it again: a one-man Disney soundtrack. [YouTube]
Hilarious, ‘hardcore’, but fake Smithsonian ads [BostInnovation]
I know everyone has probably heard enough about ‘Friday’/Rebecca Black, but I have to offer up this if-you-laugh-you-lose challenge. [Johnny]
And finally, the award for Tweet of the Week goes to the Oxford Dictionaries team. [OxfordWords]
By: Lauren,
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By Lauren Appelwick, Blog Editor
Yesterday I was sitting at my desk, pondering…normal things that bloggers ponder…when my friend Cassie shared this link with me. If you haven’t seen the “Friday” music video, then perhaps the forecast just seems silly, but it inspired me to think about how fast the senses and connotations of words change. For most people, Friday is just the name of a day of the week, but for the moment it’s also the source of many inside jokes and references to Rebecca Black. She is, obviously, a big fan of Fridays because it marks the end of her school week and the beginning of the weekend. We have such acronyms to show our love for the day as TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday), and what seems to be a widespread distaste for Mondays. (*Ahem* Garfield. *Cough* Office Space.)
So the question is: did people always like Friday? Did we choose Friday as the end of the work week because it was already well-loved?
{ASIDE: I was just beginning my research when fellow blogger Levi Asher (Literary Kicks) teased me with this Wikipedia link, encouraging that I “meet [his] friend Frigg.” To this I replied, “How long have you been friends?” and he answered, “Since Thor’s Day.” Well played, Levi. Well played indeed.}
We begin with the OED.
Friday, n.
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈfrʌɪdeɪ/ , /ˈfrʌɪdi/ , U.S. /ˈfraɪˌdeɪ/ , /ˈfraɪdi/
1. The day following Thursday and preceding Saturday, traditionally regarded as the sixth day of the week, but now frequently considered as the fifth, and also as the last day of the working week and (especially in the evening) the start of the weekend. In the Catholic Church, Friday, along with Wednesday and Saturday, has traditionally been observed as one of the days for abstaining from eating meat, fish being the popular alternative. In Judaism, sunset on Friday marks the beginning of the Sabbath, which ends at sunset on Saturday.
So far, pretty simple. We see that Friday’s position in the week is appears to be most strongly connected to Judeo-Christian traditions. I didn’t really expect to discover anything spectacular, I was just satiating my own curiosity–and why bother the Oxford Etymologist with such small queries? But then I noticed a sense that was new to me.
Friday-look, n.
now rare (Eng. regional in later use). a serious or gloomy face or expression (cf.
0 Comments on A short (and incomplete) history of Friday as of 1/1/1900
By Dennis Baron
By rights, OK should not have become the world’s most popular word. It was first used as a joke in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, a shortening of the phrase “oll korrect,” itself an incorrect spelling of “all correct.” The joke should have run its course, and OK should have been forgotten, just like we forgot the other initialisms appearing in newspapers at the time, such as O.F.M, ‘Our First Men,’ A.R., ‘all right,’ O.W., ‘oll wright,’ K.G., ‘know good,’ and K.Y., ‘know yuse.’ Instead, here we are celebrating OK’s 172nd birthday, wondering why the word became a lexical universal instead of a one day wonder.
Most of the “abracadabraisms” popular among journalists in 1839 are long gone, but OK stuck around. It didn’t go viral right away, perhaps because the first virus wouldn’t be discovered for another 60 years, but unlike A.R. and K.Y., OK managed to spread beyond comic articles in newspapers, to become a word on almost everybody’s lips. For that to happen, we had to forget what OK originally meant, a jokey informal word indicating approval, and then we had to repurpose it to mean almost anything, or in some cases, almost nothing at all.
Here’s that first OK, discovered almost 50 years ago by the linguist Alan Walker Read:
he of the Journal . . . would have the “contribution box,” et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward. [“He” is the editor of the rival Providence paper, and the subject of the article, the shenanigans of rowdy journalists and their friends, is so trivial that explaining it in no way explains OK’s success.]
The fact that the writer, the Post’s editor Charles Gordon Greene, defines OK as “all correct” confirms its novelty—readers wouldn’t be expected to know what it meant. But because readers were already used to jokey initialisms, Greene expected them to connect “oll korrect” and “all correct” on their own. He didn’t have to ask, “OK, Get it?” or add a final “Haha” to the message.
But why did OK have more staying power than yesterday’s newspaper? One thing that kept OK going after its March 23, 1839 sell-by date was its adoption by the 1940 re-election campaign of Pres. Martin Van Buren. Van Buren, born in Kinderhook, New York, was known as Old Kinderhook, and his political machine operated out of New York’s O.K. (Old Kinderhook) Democratic Club. The coincidence between “Old Kinderhook” and “oll korrect” proved a sloganeer’s dream, as this notice for a political rally illustrates:
The Democratic O.K. Club are hereby ordered to meet at the House of Jacob Colvin. [1840, Oxford English Dictionary, known more commonly by the initialism OED]
That campaign may have helped OK more than it helped Van Buren, who was definitely not OK: he was blamed for the financial crisis of 1837 and roundly trounced in the election by William Henry Harrison. Harrison himself wasn’t so OK: he died from pneumonia a month after giving a 2-hour inaugural address in the rain, but OK got national exposure, and it was soon tapped as one of many shorthand expressions (like gmlet for ‘give my love to’) serving the new telegraph, the “Victorian internet” that began spre
By Dennis Baron
There’s a federal law that defines writing. Because the meaning of the words in our laws isn’t always clear, the very first of our federal laws, the Dictionary Act–the name for Title 1, Chapter 1, Section 1, of the U.S. Code–defines what some of the words in the rest of the Code mean, both to guide legal interpretation and to eliminate the need to explain those words each time they appear. Writing is one of the words it defines, but the definition needs an upgrade.
The Dictionary Act consists of a single sentence, an introduction and ten short clauses defining a minute subset of our legal vocabulary, words like person, officer, signature, oath, and last but not least, writing. This is necessary because sometimes a word’s legal meaning differs from its ordinary meaning. But changes in writing technology have rendered the Act’s definition of writing seriously out of date.
The Dictionary Act tells us that in the law, singular includes plural and plural, singular, unless context says otherwise; the present tense includes the future; and the masculine includes the feminine (but not the other way around–so much for equal protection).
The Act specifies that signature includes “a mark when the person making the same intended it as such,” and that oath includes affirmation. Apparently there’s a lot of insanity in the law, because the Dictionary Act finds it necessary to specify that “the words ‘insane’ and ‘insane person’ and ‘lunatic’ shall include every idiot, lunatic, insane person, and person non compos mentis.”
The Dictionary Act also tells us that “persons are corporations . . . as well as individuals,” which is why AT&T is currently trying to convince the Supreme Court that it is a person entitled to “personal privacy.” (The Act doesn’t specify whether “insane person” includes “insane corporation.”)
And then there’s the definition of writing. The final provision of the Act defines writing to include “printing and typewriting and reproductions of visual symbols by photographing, multigraphing, mimeographing, manifolding, or otherwise.” There’s no mention of Braille, for example, or of photocopying, or of computers and mobile phones, which seem now to be the primary means of transmitting text, though presumably they and Facebook and Twitter and all the writing technologies that have yet to appear are covered by the law’s blanket phrase “or otherwise.”
Federal law can’t be expected to keep up with every writing technology that comes along, but the newest of the six kinds of writing that the Dictionary Act does refer to–the multigraph–was invented around 1900 and has long since disappeared. No one has ever heard of multigraphing, or of manifolding, an even older and deader technology, and for most of us the mimeograph is at best a dim memory.
Congress considers writing important enough to the nation’s well-being to include it in the Dictionary Act, but not important enough to bring up to date, and now, with the 2012 election looming, no member of Congress is likely to support a revision to the current definition that is semantically accurate yet co