World Wide Words -- 05 Feb 05

Fri Feb 4 19:58:13 UTC 2005

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 426         Saturday 5 February 2005
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Sent each Saturday to 22,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org       US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Twixter.
3. Weird Words: Digamy.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Grass roots.
6. Sic!
7. Q&A: Chillaxing.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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YOUR RETURNING EDITOR WRITES  Our holiday in Egypt was a pleasant
and sunny winter break. However, several hundred e-mail messages
were waiting for me upon our return; it will be some time before I
can answer them all, though everybody who e-mailed should have had
an acknowledgement. Thanks to you all for your forbearance during
the long break between issues: much of this issue plays catch-up
with the word-related happenings of the past month.

LINKS  As this issue has a large number of links to other pages, a
note on their format may be useful. Each sends you to a page on my
parent site, quinion.com, where it is translated into the actual
link to the relevant page and sends you to it. It's done this way
because the direct links are often long and easy to mistype.

2. Turns of Phrase: Twixter
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The cover story in Time Magazine of 24 January argued that a shift
has taken place in the culture of young people between the ages of
about 20 and 28, usually college graduates who are often unmarried
and living at home, often with no settled employment. The article
wasn't kind to them, calling them "permanent adolescents" and
"twenty-something Peter Pans", stuck between childhood and the
adult world; it also coined "twixters" for them because they were
"betwixt and between", perhaps modelled on the established term
"tweenies" for those a little younger than teenagers. As the
article implied, there's nothing particularly new in identifying
this age group as one with special problems: psychologists have in
the past coined terms such as "kidult", "youthhood", "adultescent",
"emerging adulthood", and "boomerang kid" when writing about it,
none of which have been especially successful in linguistic terms.
The piece got a lot of attention, including criticism from members
of the group, who argued that it was economics, not arrested
development, that has led to their situation. It's too early to say
whether "twixter" stands any greater chance of catching the public
imagination than previous creations. Early indications, mainly that
few other writers have borrowed it, suggest it isn't likely to
become part of the permanent lexicon.

* St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 31 Jan. 2005: And what might a twixter
be? Those in their middle-to-late-20s experiencing a period of
limbo between the college years and the permanence of adulthood
(career, marriage, children).

* Time, 24 Jan. 2005: In his view, what looks like incessant,
hedonistic play is the twixters' way of trying on jobs and partners
and personalities and making sure that when they do settle down,
they do it the right way, their way. It's not that they don't take
adulthood seriously; they take it so seriously, they're spending
years carefully choosing the right path into it.

3. Weird Words: Digamy
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A second marriage after the death or divorce of a previous spouse.

World Wide Words subscriber Tim Russell wrote to me back in 2001 (I
do eventually follow up messages) to wonder why this word was not
more often used, since many of us are digamists without realising
it, and pointing out that it describes a very common and entirely
acceptable relationship. Perhaps those few people who have come
across it believe it is just another term for bigamy (a sense the
word could indeed once have had) or perhaps the ease with which the
two words can be confused led to the less common one dropping out
of casual use. It does appear on rare occasions in academic works.
The word comes directly from Latin "digamia", with the same sense,
which in turn derives from Greek; its first recorded appearance was
in 1635.

4. Recently noted
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LANGUAGE MAP  British subscribers may be interested in the online
project by the BBC to create an updated language map of the UK. See
http://quinion.com?L28P for details. The results will be announced
in June and it will be fascinating to see how those for England
differ from the ones in the survey of English dialects carried out
between 1948 and 1961. What seems certain is that it will show a
continuing decline in rural dialects and a corresponding rise of
urban ones, including some - such as Estuary English - not even in
existence at the time of the earlier survey. The site also has a
game in which you can test your knowledge of English dialects.

POLARI  An article in the Guardian (see http://quinion.com?P93K) on
17 January reported on a revival taking place in this slang
vocabulary of English showmen, circus people and thespians. The
article makes some interesting points but contains a serious error:
Polari has never been used solely by gay men; however, this is
widely believed in the gay community because in the first half of
last century it did become associated especially with homosexuals.
But it is at least 200 years older than that. See also my article
on Polari at http://quinion.com?P23J.

DISAPPEARING LANGUAGES  It's good to hear that any form of speech
is reviving, since languages are vanishing at a great rate. A radio
programme, The Connection, from WBUR Boston, broadcast on 21
January, which you can hear online (http://quinion.com?D86L),
discussed the issue. BBC News online (http://quinion.com?D77L)
reported on the same subject on 19 January, based on an interview
with Mark Abley, whose book, Spoken Here: Travel Among Threatened
Languages, came out in paperback on 5 January. You may recall I
reviewed this on first publication (see http://quinion.com?S35H).

5. Q&A
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Q. Can you tell me where the phrase "grass roots" comes from, as in
"This project needs some grass roots involvement if it is to
succeed"? [Lewis Lawrence]

A. In the sense of the rank-and-file membership of an organisation,
especially a political party, the Second Edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary records it first from McClure's Magazine of July
1912: "From the Roosevelt standpoint, especially, it was a campaign
from the 'grass roots up'. The voter was the thing." Searches of
electronic databases not available to the compilers of the entry in
the 1960s suggest that this is pretty much spot-on. The initial
sightings of the phrase all refer to the unsuccessful 1912
presidential campaign by former president Teddy Roosevelt against
Woodrow Wilson. I have found it from a little earlier that year in
the Evening News of Ada, Oklahoma, dated 26 January: "The Roosevelt
Sentiment, as cropping out at Coalgate, was but the forerunner, as
it was plain to him, he said, that the grass roots were for the ex-
president". It looks as though it was coined by Roosevelt or
somebody on his campaign team.

In its literal meaning the expression had by then been around for
two centuries at least. It had also begun to appear at the start of
the twentieth century in a related sense of the source or origin of
something or of its fundamentals. Rudyard Kipling is the first
writer recorded as using it, in his novel Kim of 1901: "Not till I
came to Shamlegh could I meditate upon the Course of Things, or
trace the running grass-roots of Evil."

It's interesting that the US political examples in the papers of
the time were paralleled by others referring to gold mining. A
proverbial saying to describe an especially rich strike had it that
the site was "gold from the grass roots down". As well as examples
in newspapers, it turns up also in Jack London's book Burning
Daylight of 1910: "She's a-coming, fellows, gold from the grass
roots down, a hundred dollars to the pan, and a stampede in from
the Outside fifty thousand strong", and in a poem by Robert W
Service called The Cow-Juice Cure.

It's impossible to say to what extent this influenced the creation
of the political sense. Some writers of the period talked about the
need to go "down to the grass roots" to gain support for policies,
which suggests that the "fundamentals" sense might also have been
in the minds of its coiners.

6. Sic!
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This one may need reading twice: "The ASG report said factoring in
inflation, which had been about 7.4 per cent a year for education
over the past two decades, a millennium baby who completes a three-
year university degree was likely to cost as much to educate as an
average-priced dwelling at the time they were born." Intelligent
buildings by 2020? This I hope to live to see. That appeared in the
Sydney Morning Herald on 29 January; thanks to Jeremy Ardley for
passing it on.

Rachel Hitchcock e-mails: "Being a student of linguistics, I'm
really amused by ambiguous sentences. I'm on AOL and they have news
headlines that appear on the welcome screen. One such heading today
(January 26th) read, 'Iran: U.S. threatens world peace' and the
corresponding news story had a headline that said, 'U.S. Tops List
for Threatening World Peace: Iran'." Your political standpoint will
determine whether you see ambiguity here ...

Bob Specker found an oddly-punctuated headline in the St Louis
Post-Dispatch of 14 January: "POLICE SEIZED, VALUABLES GO TO
AUCTION". He notes: "Add a hyphen, delete a comma, and pretty soon
it will make sense." But I wonder how much a seized policeman's
valuables would fetch?

Judith Baron found an article in The New York Times for 12 January
about a new bookstore in Brooklyn specializing in books about art.
"A description of the large crowd waiting to get in on opening day
includes 'bearded men wearing berets and children.' Although the
store is located in a very trend-conscious neighborhood, that's one
fashion statement I don't think will catch on. It must have been
the city editor's day off."

On 31 January, John Emory found this homophonic error on the Boston
Globe Web site, in a piece about single-six schools: "Students feel
free to take chances with their ideas and disregard stereotypes
that yolk sex to a particular subject or interest."

But my homophone of the week comes from Chris Smith, who lives in
Shetland. He was following up a previous item on "civil oranges":
"I guess they'd be nothing to do with the 'key wee fruit' I saw on
a market stall. Unrelated save for its creative ignorance, I got an
email this week saying that someone's internet access was down, and
that this was 'for scene to last all week.'!

7. Q&A
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Q. Could you explain the meaning of the word "chillaxing"? [Jerzy]

A. Many thanks for introducing me to this bit of American slang, as
I hadn't come across it before. It's a blend of "chilling" and
"relaxing" and is hip-hop slang ("chilling" being from Black
English "to chill out", meaning to take things easy, to stay cool).
According to Grant Barrett's Double-Tongued Word Wrester site
(http://quinion.com?DTWW) (he's a lexicographer for Oxford
University Press who - among other things - is the project editor
for the Historical Dictionary of American Slang), this has been
known online since 1994.

A rare example in print appeared in a reader's review in the issue
of Newsday for 8 December last year: "The album as a whole ...
actually sounds like a parody of a hip-hop record, and is, in fact,
too played out for servin', too wack for chillaxing, and much too
bunk to twurk to." This sounds like somebody piling on the rap
slang for supercharged ironic purposes and needs a translation for
people like me who aren't into this type of speech at all.

The online Rap Dictionary (http://quinion.com?RAPD) came to my aid
with the essential glossary. Something "wack" is crazy or weird,
something "bunk" is unpleasant, while "to twurk" means to dance (an
earlier example is in the title of the Ying Yang Twins' track
Whistle While You Twurk, which was a hit in the Spring of 2000). So
the writer was saying, roughly, that the album was too old-
fashioned to be worth listening to, too weird to relax to, and too
nasty to dance to.

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