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The Oxford English Dictionary is the work of people: many thousands of them. In my work on the history of the Dictionary I have found the stories of many of those people endlessly fascinating. Very often an individual will enter the story who cries out to be made the subject of a biography in his or her own right; others, while not quite fascinating enough for that, are still sufficiently interesting that they could be a dangerous distraction to me when I was trying to concentrate on the main task of telling the story of the project itself.
You just lost your job. Your partner broke up with you. You’re late on rent. Then, you dropped your iPhone in the toilet. “My life’s in shambles!” you shout. Had you so exclaimed, say, in an Anglo-Saxon village over 1,000 years ago, your fellow Old English speakers may have given you a puzzled look. “Your life’s in footstools?” they’d ask. “And what’s an iPhone?”
The decision by Oxford Dictionaries to select an emoji as the 2015 Word of the Year has led to incredulity in some quarters. Hannah Jane Parkinson, writing in The Guardian, and doubtless speaking for many, brands the decision ‘ridiculous’ — after all, an emoji is, self-evidently, not a word; so the wagging fingers seem to say.
Do you know when laugh entered the English language? What about cricket or fair-weather friend? Take the OED Timeline Challenge and find out if you are a lexical brainiac (1975). To play, simply drag the word to the date at which you think it entered the English language.
In a speech made after the November terrorist attacks in Paris, President Obama criticized the media’s use of the word mastermind to describe Abdelhamid Abaaoud. “He’s not a mastermind,” he stated. “He found a few other vicious people, got hands on some fairly conventional weapons, and sadly, it turns out that if you’re willing to die you can kill a lot of people.”
The newest knockout competition on British television is The Great Pottery Throw Down (GPTD), in which an initial ten potters produce a variety of ceramic work each week, the most successful being declared Top Potter, and the least successful being ‘asked to leave’. The last four then compete in a final [...]
In the United States, thoughts are turning to the start of the primary season, when votes are cast to choose each party’s presidential nominee. It’s a complicated and sometimes very long process, beginning in Iowa and winding all the way to the conventions in the summer, and every time it gets going, there are certain buzzwords that seem to find their way into the American popular consciousness.
When an armed group occupied a federal building in Oregon to protest against the US government’s land management, the media quickly seized on the word ‘militia’ to describe them. The Guardian reported the incident with the headline ‘Oregon militia threatens showdown with US agents at wildlife refuge.
Tea was first imported into Britain early in the seventeenth century, becoming very popular by the 1650s. The London diarist Samuel Pepys drank his first cup in 1660, as recorded in his famous diary: "I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I had never drunk before."
New York City, home of Oxford Dictionaries’ New York offices, has made numerous contributions to the English lexicon through the years, as disparate as knickerbocker and hip hop.
Humans are very good at reading from start to finish and collecting lots of information to understand the aggregated story a text tells, but they are very bad at keeping track of the details of language in use across many texts.
Anglo-Saxon literature is full of advice on how to live a good life. Many Anglo-Saxon poems and proverbs describe the characteristics a wise person should strive to possess, offering counsel on how to treat others and how to obtain and use wisdom in life. Here are some words in Old English that describe what a wise person should aspire to be—and some qualities it’s better to avoid.
Amnesia, disguises, and mistaken identities? No, these are not the plot twists of a blockbuster thriller or bestselling page-turner. They are the story of the word culprit. At first glance, the origin of culprit looks simple enough. Mea culpa, culpable,exculpate, and the more obscure inculpate: these words come from the Latin culpa, “fault” or “blame.”
Why should we commemorate Samuel Taylor Coleridge? The obvious reason is his high status as a poet, but a better one might be his exuberance as a wordsmith. As a poet, after all, he is widely known for only two relatively short works: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and 'Kubla Khan.’ While the academy would no doubt add four or five others prized by specialists, the total number is still small.
Early this week the spacecraft New Horizons began its flyby of Pluto, sending a wealth of information to back to Earth about Pluto and its moons. It’s an exciting time for astronomers and those intrigued by the dark dwarf planet. Pluto has special significance not only because it is the only planet in our solar system to have its status as a planet stripped and downgraded to a dwarf planet, but also because along with its largest satellite Charon, it is our solar system’s only binary planet system
Have you ever noticed that many of our swear words sound very much like German ones and not at all like French ones? From vulgar words for body parts (a German Arsch is easy to identify, but not so much the French cul), to scatological and sexual verbs (doubtless you can spot what scheissen and ficken mean, English and German clearly draw their swear words from a shared stock in a way that English and French do not.
As the television show Mad Men recently reached its conclusion, we thought it might be fun to reflect on the contributions to language during the turbulent decade of the 1960s. This legacy is not surprising, given the huge shifts in culture that took place during this point in time, including the Civil Rights movement, the apex of the space race, the environmental movement, the sexual revolution, and—obviously—the rise of advertising and media. With this in mind, we picked 16 words from the 1960s that illuminate this historical moment.
It’s graduation time at many of the nation’s schools and colleges. The commencement ceremony is a great exhalation for all involved and an annual rite of passage celebrating academic achievements. Commencement ceremonies typically feature a visiting dignitary who offers a few thousand inspirational words. Over the years, I’ve heard more of these speeches than I care to admit and have made my own checklist of suggestions for speakers. For those of you giving commencement speeches or listening to them, here’s my advice.
It is curious that, although the modern theory of evolution has its source in Charles Darwin’s great book On the Origin of Species (1859), the word evolution does not appear in the original text at all. In fact, Darwin seems deliberately to have avoided using the word evolution, preferring to refer to the process of biological change as ‘transmutation’. Some of the reasons for this, and for continuing confusion about the word evolution in the succeeding century and a half, can be unpacked from the word’s entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
False friends (‘faux amis’) are words in one language which look the same as words in another. We therefore think that their meanings are the same and get a shock when we find they are not. Generations of French students have believed that demander means ‘demand’ (whereas it means ‘ask’) or librairie means ‘library’ (instead of ‘bookshop’). It is a sign of a mature understanding of a language when you can cope with the false friends, which can be some of its most frequently used words. Having a good grasp of the false friends is a crucial part of ‘learning to speak French.’
As somebody who loves words and English literature, I have often been assumed to be a natural enemy of the mathematical mind. If we’re being honest, my days of calculus and the hypotenuse are behind me, but with those qualifications under my belt, I did learn that the worlds of words and numbers are not necessarily as separate as they seem. Quite a few expressions use numbers (sixes and sevens, six of one and half a dozen of the other, one of a kind, etc.) but a few are more closely related to mathematics than you’d expect.
Sometimes, we say what we don’t really mean. ‘You look really tired’, for example, when we mean to be caring rather than disparaging of appearance. ‘I thought you were older than that!’ when we mean to applaud maturity rather than further disparage appearance. And so it is with the gay thing. The accidental difference between what people are saying or writing, and their intended meaning, is becoming perplexingly polarized.
Fresh Off the Boat, the newest addition to ABC’s primetime lineup, has garnered more than its share of attention in the lead-up to its February debut: based on restaurateur Eddie Huang’s critically-acclaimed memoir, it’s the first sitcom in 20 years since Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl to feature an Asian-American family at its epicenter, rightfully assuming its place among the network’s recent crop of 21st-century family comedies, including Modern Family, Blackish, and Cristela.
This fanfare comes at a time when Asian-American identity politics is, for all intents and purposes, increasingly front and center in our national dialogue; in the wake of Wesley Yang’s seminal “Paper Tigers” essay in New York Magazine, Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise to athletic fame, and the ascendance of YouTube personality KevJumba, Fresh Off the Boat makes strides in shattering what is known as the ‘bamboo ceiling’, a term frequently employed to describe the range of obstacles Asian-Americans encounter in collision with mainstream society.
It’s a new era which, alongside ushering in new attitudes about race, has also pioneered a new vocabulary, one illustrative of multiculturalism as modern American ideal. From the inventive terms ABC to nisei, there is revived interest in the language of the immigrant experience: its tensions, complexities, and — above all else — its vibrancies. Language, in this case, becomes less an heirloom than a living thing, evolving to represent a changing landscape for generations of immigrants, all of whom have strained under the weight of racial discrimination.
There is revived interest in the language of the immigrant experience: its tensions, complexities, and — above all else — its vibrancies.
Give me your tired, your poor
Parsing this “new vocabulary,” of course, involves unraveling the historic origins of the ‘immigrant experience.’ Many invoke textbook narratives, recalling Emma Lazarus’ most memorable lines from the poem ‘The New Colossus’, inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’
But Lazarus’s words, poetic as they were, mostly belied the actual immigrant experience: the phrase ‘fresh off the boat’, first employed against European immigrants, swiftly developed derogatory connotations—alongside other racial slurs like mick, wog, and wop — to deride those who hadn’t fully assimilated into mainstream culture.
No different in their fervid pursuit of ‘the American dream’, hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants arrived on the heels of the California Gold Rush in the mid-19th century. And no different than their European counterparts, they too were ostracized by the ‘native’ population, as terms like Chink, coolie, and Chinaman enjoyed widespread use by politicians, including Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). This fear of racial othernessmanifested itself in the all-encompassing term “Yellow peril,” owing much of its prevalence to use in newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst.
Language became law when, in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act suspended all Chinese immigration to the United States until 1943. Even so, this wasn’t the first occasion where Chinese immigrants endured scrutiny: an earlier piece of legislation, colloquially known as the ‘Anti-Coolie’ Act of 1862, imposed special taxes on Chinese businesses in California. Eventually, the phrase ‘Chinaman’s chance’—meaning very poor or negligible prospects—came to appropriately symbolize the unequal treatment Chinese immigrants experienced in their new country of residence.
From San Francisco to New York, the immigration waves of mid-19th century arguably marked the beginning of America as it is contemporaneously known: a heterogeneous country that, in theory, would house democratic multitudes. But for many, there was a chasm between the American ‘dream’ and the actual immigrant experience. From private beliefs to public action, xenophobia spread unchecked, even leading to massacres of Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, and—most famously—in Rock Springs, Wyoming.
Reclaiming identity
During the mid-20th century, following the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese immigration to America resurged, as did use of the phrase ‘fresh off the boat’, revived in 1968 partly thanks to the acronym FOB. Coinciding with the rise of FOB, however, was the spread of the acronym ABC (American-Born Chinese), similar in meaning to the derisive terms ‘banana’ and ‘Twinkie’, denoting a person of Asian descent who is ‘yellow on the outside and white on the inside.’
This dichotomy, above all else, speaks to the duality of the immigrant experience: an external struggle against mainstream perceptions, as well as an internal struggle to tread a middle ground between Americanization and ethnic preservation. For instance, where first-generation immigrants are more likely to resist cultural integration, their children — and grandchildren — more often than not embrace assimilation. These differences are reflected in linguistic distinctions like issei, nisei, and sansei, now used to identify first, second, and third-generation Japanese-Americans.
Indeed, a new generation of Asian-Americans—of which Eddie Huang is a part—grapples with the language of belonging. For many, identity formation becomes a balancing act, ranging from sensitive negotiation to violent oscillation between opposing cultural forces: family and country. Not to mention lingering tensions with racism; while, in recent years, ethnic slurs have declined in mainstream use, familiar stereotypes of Asians have been slower to improve.
In recent years, there has been a renewed effort to reclaim derogatory slurs like ‘fresh off the boat’, as the title of Huang’s memoir and subsequent TV adaptation suggest. ‘Fresh off the boat’ has evolved from slanderous term to unabashed badge of honor, re-appropriated by immigrants themselves as a product of changing times. Eddie Huang’s sitcom, in this sense, could very well transcend itself as the expression of a painful history: it has the potential to shed old hatreds and breathe life into a new vocabulary.
The recent release of The Imitation Game has revealed the important role crosswords played in the recruitment of code-breakers at Bletchley Park. In response to complaints that its crosswords were too easy, The Daily Telegraph organised a contest in which entrants attempted to solve a puzzle in less than 12 minutes. Successful competitors subsequently found themselves being approached by the War Office, and later working as cryptographers at Bletchley Park.
The birth of the crossword
The crossword was the invention of Liverpool émigré Arthur Wynne, whose first puzzle appeared in the New York World in 1913. This initial foray was christened a Word-Cross; the instruction in subsequent issues to ‘Find the missing cross words’ led to the birth of the cross-word. Although Wynne’s invention was initially greeted with scepticism, by the 1920s it had established itself as a popular pastime, entertaining and frustrating generations of solvers, solutionists, puzzle-heads, and cruciverbalists (Latin for ‘crossworders’).
“Bletchley Park.” Photo by Adam Foster. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.
Crosswords consist of a grid made up of black and white boxes, in which the answers, also known as lights, are to be written. The term light derives from the word’s wider use to refer to facts or suggestions which help to explain, or ‘cast light upon’, a problem. The puzzle consists of a series of clues, a word that derives from Old English cleowen ‘ball of thread’. Since a ball of thread could be used to help guide someone out of a maze – just as Ariadne’s thread came to Theseus’s aid in the Minotaur’s labyrinth – it developed the figurative sense of a piece of evidence leading to a solution, especially in the investigation of a crime. The spelling changed from clew to clue under the influence of French in the seventeenth century; the same shift affected words like blew, glew, rew, and trew.
Anagrams, homophones, and Spoonerisms: clues in crosswords
In the earliest crosswords the clue consisted of a straightforward synonym (Greek ‘with name’) – this type is still popular in concise or so-called quick crosswords. A later development saw the emergence of the cryptic clue (from a Greek word meaning ‘hidden’), where, in addition to a definition, another route to the answer is concealed within a form of wordplay. Wordplay devices include the anagram, from a Greek word meaning ‘transposition of letters’, and the charade, from a French word referring to a type of riddle in which each syllable of a word, or a complete word, is described, or acted out – as in the game charades. A well-known example, by prolific Guardian setter Rufus, is ‘Two girls, one on each knee’ (7). Combining two girls’ names, Pat and Ella, gives you a word for the kneecap: PATELLA.
Punning on similar-sounding words, or homophones (Greek ‘same sound’), is a common trick. A reference to Spooner requires a solver to transpose the initial sounds of two or more words; this derives from a supposed predisposition to such slips of the tongue in the speech of Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden of New College Oxford, whose alleged Spoonerisms include a toast to ‘our queer dean’ and upbraiding a student who ‘hissed all his mystery lectures’. Other devious devices of misdirection include reversals, double definitions, containers (where all or part of word must be placed within another), and words hidden inside others, or between two or more words. In the type known as &lit. (short for ‘& literally so’), the whole clue serves as both definition and wordplay, as in this clue by Rufus: ‘I’m a leader of Muslims”. Here the word play gives IMA+M (the leader, i.e. first letter, of Muslims), while the whole clue stands as the definition.
Crossword compilers and setters
Crossword compilers, or setters, traditionally remain anonymous (Greek ‘without name’), or assume pseudonyms (Greek ‘false name’). Famous exponents of the art include Torquemada and Ximenes, who assumed the names of Spanish inquisitors, Afrit, the name of a mythological Arabic demon hidden in that of the setter A.F.Ritchie, and Araucaria, the Latin name for the monkey puzzle tree. Some crosswords conceal a name or message within the grid, perhaps along the diagonal, or using the unchecked letters (or unches), which do not cross with other words in the grid. This is known as a nina, a term deriving from the practice of the American cartoonist Al Hirschfield of hiding the name of his daughter Nina in his illustrations.
If you’re a budding code-cracker and fancy pitting your wits against the cryptographers of Bletchley Park, you can find the original Telegraph puzzle here.
But remember, you only have 12 minutes to solve it.
