World Wide Words -- 21 Nov 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 20 19:07:04 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 666 Saturday 21 November 2009
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Slipshod.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Review: Macquarie Dictionary.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BULL IN A CHINA SHOP The correspondence about last week's piece,
which was copious, divided neatly into two classes. One told me
about a 2007 edition of the US television program Mythbusters that
put bulls in a mocked-up china shop. The animals proved to be quite
nimble at avoiding bumping into shelves or breaking anything. The
other group told me that equivalent expressions exist in several
other languages - Russian, Latvian, Polish, Dutch, German, French,
Hebrew, Italian and Spanish - all of which feature the elephant
instead of the bull. The last two, however, prefer to place him in
a glassware store rather than a china shop. In Dutch you can also
say "like a horse in a china cabinet". English is the odd one out
in using the homely bull. There's probably a story in there, if one
could only tease it out. Daniel Szoke suggested that the idea may
have come from an Aesop fable, which is probably associated with a
Roman version of the simile, "like a donkey on a roof".
EMOTIONAL ANIMALS Last week, Christopher Joubert wrote that he had
added the fish we had been discussing, the Sarcastic Fringehead, to
his "list of animals with names suggestive of emotion", mentioning
the Depressed Mussel and the Blushing Snail. Mike Turniansky wrote,
"Mr Joubert can add the Melancholy Woodpecker of western Africa and
the Greedy Olalla Rat of Colombia and Venezuela." Several readers
noted the Pacific Black Duck, mentioned in the same issue, might be
added if we look beyond the immediate geographical reference. Linda
Doggett wrote, "I am not sure if bugs count on the list of animals
but I have always been fond of the Confused Flour Beetle."
2. Weird Words: Slipshod /'slIpSQd/
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In the beginning, around the middle of the sixteenth century, there
was the word "slip-shoe", about which there is nothing mysterious.
It was simply a shoe that one could easily slip on or off, one that
English speakers even then also called a slipper.
A little later in the same century, a person who wore a slip-shoe
began to be described - naturally enough - as "slip-shod". Within a
few decades, however, it began to take on the negative associations
that have remained with it down the generations. A person who was
described as slip-shod was wearing shoes that weren't suitable for
polite company because they were literally down at heel, shabby,
over-loose or untidy.
Our modern meaning of some activity that was lacking in care, badly
organised or slovenly came about in the nineteenth century. Writers
were the first to suffer its disopprobrium, with critics describing
what they felt was "slipshod English", and the wider sense grew out
of this.
We have completely forgotten the connection between "slip-shod" and
those comfortable sixteenth-century slip-on shoes, whose shabbiness
and unfashionableness has bequeathed the language a useful term.
3. What I've learned this week
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MORE VERBING NOUNS Courtesy of Neill Hicks: "I placed a telephone
order and told the clerk that if I was not at home the delivery
driver could just leave the item. 'Okay, we can PORCH it for you,
then?' the clerk asked. I agreed that the purchase could be PORCHED
and that any future orders could also be PORCHABLE." It's yet
another good example of the flexibility of English, whose lack of
inflections means that a word can readily switch between serving
several different roles in a sentence. Many people object to such
creations and decry them as a fault, but I think it's a feature, a
splendidly useful one.
Not all readers agree. Peter Duce reported, "It made me splutter
into my coffee when I heard an American parent refer to her child
as having been CONSEQUENCED for bad behavior." Bob Scala likewise
dislikes such forms: "Here in Tucson, Arizona, I regularly see a
sign outside an office building which reads, 'If you OFFICED here,
you'd be home now.' It almost causes me to drive off the road
whenever I see this language abomination."
WOTY TIME Language purists might feel similarly about a term that
has just been chosen as Word of the Year by the New Oxford American
Dictionary. It's UNFRIEND, a verb meaning to remove a person as a
"friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook. Christine
Lindberg, who is senior lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary
programme, was quoted as saying "Unfriend has real lex-appeal." She
wrote in the Dictionary's blog: "It has both currency and potential
longevity. In the online social networking context, its meaning is
understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an
interesting choice for Word of the Year." For more, and to discover
some other terms that were considered (including "hashtag" and
"intexticated"), go via http://wwwords.org?UNFR.
You will also find some forceful complaints about TEABAGGER, which
the editors define as "a person, who protests President Obama's tax
policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations
known as 'Tea Party' protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party
of 1773)." Complainants point to a sexual slang meaning of the term
and suggest that Oxford's inclusion is "insulting and demeaning to
members of the Tea Party movement", as one person wrote. It's very
silly, but good fun to observe from the sidelines. The term more
often used for members of the group is TEA PARTIERS.
Twitter has a similar form to "unfriend", which I also encountered
this week: UNFOLLOW. This is from the Twitter concept of members
who "follow" others by regularly reading their postings. If you
cease to do so, you "unfollow" them.
Oxford wasn't the first to announce its annual choice. First out of
the trap was the Webster New World College Dictionary, which has
chosen DISTRACTED DRIVING for its Word of the Year. It refers to a
consequence of using digital devices such as mobile phones while on
the move. The publisher's site said, "CrackBerry users beware, lest
a charge of DWD (driving while distracted) or DWT (driving while
texting) stain your record, not to mention endanger yourself and
others." It noted an interesting grammatical point: "As with drunk
driving, it is not the driving that is drunk or distracted, but
rather the driver. The target of the modifier 'distracted' has been
changed. Called _hypallage_, this twist is frequently seen in
poetry, but as terms like 'restless night', 'juvenile detention
center', and 'careless remark' attest, such semantic inversion is
not limited to the heights of language use."
On Thursday, a third Words of the Year set popped up from Merriam-
Webster (not to be confused with the other Webster). This was a
list of the words most often looked up during 2009 up by visitors
to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary and the Online Thesaurus.
At the top was "admonish". What provoked this was the outburst "You
lie!" by Representative Joe Wilson during President Obama's speech
on healthcare to a joint session of Congress on 9 September. For
this, he was formally admonished by the House. Peter A Sokolowski,
Merriam-Webster's Editor at Large, wrote, "While this particular
story wasn't very important in the context of a year's worth of
news, it triggered enormous interest in this word." The remainder
of the top ten are even more inconsequential: emaciated, empathy,
furlough, inaugurate, nugatory, repose, philanderer, pandemic
and rogue.
4. Review: Macquarie Dictionary
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Rooted in the colloquial English of transported convicts, modified
by contact with native languages and more recently by the creations
of other regional Englishes, Australian English has always been in
a class of its own.
Historically it wasn't well served by lexicographers, some of whom
seem to have shared a common nineteenth-century prejudice that such
uncouth colonial variations on the English language were corrupting
its purity. That began to change when James Murray worked hard to
include Australianisms in early fascicles of what was then known as
the New English Dictionary. The first local work, Austral English,
was compiled by Edward Morris and published in 1898.
After that, Australians had to wait until the 1970s before works
such as the Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary and the Heinemann
Australian Dictionary were addressed to them, though they were no
more than modified editions of British dictionaries. Even the
Macquarie Dictionary, first published in 1981, was a local version
of Hamlyn's Encyclopedic World Dictionary of 1971, itself based on
a Random House dictionary dated 1947. In the decades since, the
Macquarie Dictionary has evolved into a genuinely local dictionary
of Australian English and is now the standard authority.
A principal aspiration, of course, has been to record specifically
Australian words and phrases, such as the horseracing sense of
"blouse", an odd term that evolved in the 1980s to mean narrowly
win a race. It's most probably from the application of the noun to
a jockey's upper-body garment. What could be a narrower win than by
a neck or a nose? Why, a blouse. This new edition includes many
additional Australianisms, often regional: "nointer", a Tasmanian
term for a spoiled or difficult child; "schnitter", "black snow",
detritus from the burning of sugarcane fields carried on the wind;
a sandwich in South Australia; and names for animals and plants,
such as "bush banana", a vine of dry regions in inland Australia,
and "marron", a freshwater crayfish of Western Australia.
Like other regional Englishes, Australian English has been heavily
influenced by developments in American English and the creation of
terms that reflect international issues. The current editor, Susan
Butler (who, by the way, is another example of a lexicographer who
has been with a project for decades: she started with the precursor
of the dictionary in 1970) has been quoted as saying that in the
1980s you might expect US expressions to take 10 or 15 years to
reach Australia, but now with universal communications, they take
only a few months.
Such trends explain several classes among the 5,000 new words and
phrases added to this fifth edition. One records matters involving
the environment and climate change ("carbon capture", "cap-and-
trade", "ecological footprint", "global commons"). A second set are
terms relating to the global financial crisis ("moral hazard",
"ninja loan", "toxic debt"). A third group is of vocabulary from
fashion and popular culture and includes "junk sleep" (sleep which
is too short or too disturbed to be restorative), "pimp cup" (a
decorated glass goblet, which often has the owner's name picked out
in rhinestones, also called a crunk cup), "scene kid" (a young
person who likes offbeat musical styles and adopts unconventional
dress styles), "shwopping" (combined shopping and swapping through
the Internet), and "treggings" (tight-fitting women's jeans but
made from a fabric other than denim).
This edition has gone electronic, with a free Web-based version
accessible by a password presented in print copies, and an app for
the iPhone (an "app" is a computer application, and yes, it's in
the new edition).
[Susan Butler [ed], Macquarie Dictionary, Fifth Edition, published
by Macquarie Dictionary Publishers on 27 October 2009; hardback,
pp1940; ISBN-13: 978-1-8764-2966-9, ISBN-10; publisher's list price
A$129.95.]
5. Sic!
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Isthmus Magazine of 30 October discussed a public Halloween bash,
Marjorie Van Handel tells us. It wrote, "The desire to strut your
Sexy Noun outfit can be powerful stuff." She wrote, "Most people
prefer a Sexy Nun, except perhaps those wild and crazy English
majors."
We've been here before, I think, but Charles Patrick felt that the
London Free Press of Canada put it so pithily on 5 November: "All
pregnant women urged to get shot".
Shirley Thayer feels that, on the evidence of this line from the
Daily Beast of 15 November, the US Food and Drug Administration is
taking a short-term view: "The FDA is asking nearly 30 similar
manufacturers to offer scientific proof that their products are
safe within the next 30 days."
Child control, as practiced in Medford, Oregon: Seymour Collins
came across this reference in the Mail Tribune of 11 November: "If
you own guns and have children, it is important you store them in a
locked cabinet."
She must have been a busy seamstress, says Michael Grounds. The
Advertiser (Bendigo, Victoria) wrote on 13 November: "A Malaysian
woman concealed half a kilogram of heroin in hundreds of buttons on
dresses during a flight to Perth, the Australian Federal Police
claim. It is alleged about 500 grams of heroin was sewed into 574
buttons on 28 dresses."
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