11.30.08
Posted in eponyms, myths and misconceptions, word history at 10:22 pm by Bill Brohaugh
I continue with my recent name dalliance today, and in doing so, I present an “old” joke. The joke itself is not old (I wrote the damn thing and it appears in my Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
—name sound familiar?), but the misconceptions involved in the joke indeed have a bit of dust on them. Actually, I’m pretending to make a point about word histories while hoping that one of the major media companies will see the following as a charming conglomeration of historical characters providing the stuff of an animated movie or at the very least a graphic novel). With such intent in mind, I gather a cast of characters into the promised joke:
An inventor, a Philadelphia entrepreneur, a doctor, and a Civil War general walk into a bar.
The barkeep says, “What can I get you gentlemen?”
“I’d like some of me,” says the Philadelphia entrepreneur.
The general nods. “One of me, as well. Two if you know where I might find me.”
“Good idea,” agrees the doctor. “And since I’ll be accompanying the good general, I’d like to purchase a couple of me, as well.”
The bartender says, “What the hell are you guys talking about?”
“Oh, never mind,” huffs the entrepreneur. “Just give me some rotgut whiskey.”
The general says, “Know where I can find a prostitute?”
“And do you sell prophylactics here?” says the doctor.
The bartender is appalled. “We don’t have any of those things here, gentlemen!”
“None at all?” the inventor says finally. He angrily spits out, “Me!”
The bartender is agitated by now. “Just who do you guys think you are, anyway?”
Says the entrepreneur: “I’m Philadelphia distiller E.C. Booz.”
The military man stiffly says, “I am Union General Joseph Hooker.”
Says the doctor, “Dr. Condom here.”
When the bartender insists that no me’s are available at his establishment, the inventor snaps again, “Oh me!”
The bartender looks at the inventor. “’Me!’? Don’t tell me . . . you’re the inventor of the Valveless Water Waste Preventer.”
“Thomas Crapper at your service!”
That little tale is as fictional as the etymologies involving the characters’ names. Supposedly, these mostly real persons lent their names to the items they were seeking in the bar. However, we knew of booze long before the coincidentally (and perhaps fortuitously intentionally) named whiskey distiller E.C. Booz sold hooch in the cabin-shaped bottles of the early and mid 1800s. There’s no evidence of a Dr. Condom, though the device is often said to be named after said 17th- or 18th-Century physician. Prostitutes were called hookers before the army of loose-moraled General Hooker was accompanied by concubine camp followers, and the word crap was in use before Mr. Crapper developed a patent for a toilet flushing device in 1882.
Now, my first draft of this story was quite a bit bawdier, but I bowdlerized it to make it more suitable for a family audience, employing the process that was indeed named after a real person, Thomas Bowdler, famous for his editing Shakespeare into G-rated productions in The Family Shakespeare in 1818 (“To G or to PG—that is the question”). Yes, a number of words result from surnames of persons both real and otherwise.
Keep this rule in mind: If the person’s name makes you snicker, it’s unlikely that the name was the source of our present word. If the supposed source person’s name is boring, the etymology is more likely to be correct: Mr. Bowdler (bowdlerize); the Speverend Rooner—er, the Reverend William Spooner (spoonerism, from around the turn of the 20th Century); the fictional Mrs. Malaprop (malapropism from an 1830 play); Union General Ambrose Everett Burnside (burnsides, and later sideburns in a delightful syllable swap, from the 1800s); Nicolas Chauvin (chauvinism, from the mid 1800s); Thomas Derrick (derrick, because his name became associated with his tool, the gallows); Capt. Charles Cunningham Boycott (self-explanatory, from around 1880); Capt. Charles Lynch (self-explanatory, from the early 1800s)*; Louis Pasteur (pasteurize, late 1800s); Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry (gerrymander, early 1800s); James Thomas Brudenell (the Earl of Cardigan, who likely was not wearing a sweater while he led the legendary Charge of the Light Brigade, but still got one named after his stomping grounds).
Two challenges to the “boring” rule, however, are the shepherd hero of a 16th-Century poem who gave us the name of something the Civil War general sought to prevent with the device of the good doctor (the poem being “Syphilis, sive morbus Gallicus”), and the real-life Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, who advocated use of one of the garments the Civil War general would seek to invade—the bloomer dress, or bloomers.
* If you want your name to become an active word in the English Language, it apparently helps if you change your first name to “Capt. Charles.”
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11.29.08
Posted in redundancy, wordiness, write tight at 10:46 am by Bill Brohaugh
Quoted from England’s Daily Express, which I know is the world’s greatest newspaper because the paper itself prints that precise slogan under its logo, and you must believe everything you read, particularly everything you read in the world’s greatest newspaper:
“It seems to me that you need to remind people every now and then that you can’t communicate to people in a language unless you know the grammar and the syntax and, indeed, the punctuation,” the prince told a Georgian Group awards ceremony at The Ritz in London.
The prince quoted above is England’s Prince Charles. Bless his royal-blue heart, his intentions are good, but his attempt to “communicate to people in a language” needs a bit of precision. This flabby sentence should feature all the precision of the Buckingham Palace guard, yet exhibits the wasted motion of fans in an artist-formerly-known-as-Prince (the other one) mosh pit. Let me pick royal nits:
- The statement is imprecise and, in a sense, not true. You can communicate with grammar, syntax and punctuation lapses. We do it all the time. “I ain’t got none of them cookies no more, they’s gone.” Are you confused about my cookie inventory? Prince Charles meant that you can’t communicate precisely, without distraction, and with authority if you haven’t mastered the big three.
- The good prince’s declaration not only fails to address but also itself employs another obstacle to communicating to people in a language: squishy and indirect word use. To wit:
- “It seems to me.” If it didn’t seem to you, why would you even say it? Unnecessary. Besides, the phrasing has a subtle sense that he is at odds with general thinking (”they say one thing, but it seems to me that . . . ”)
- “you need to.” you must is shorter and more powerful.
- “remind people every now and then.” remind people occasionally would have been more direct, and more in tune with an audience sitting in the Ritz.
- “to people.” Who else would you be using grammar, syntax and punctuation to communicate to? The dog? Rover doesn’t care if the command “Rover sit” should feature a comma. And not many inanimate objects can hear you at all, not even the chair in Neil Diamond’s “I Am, I Said.” Delete “to people.”
- “in a language.” The phrase’s construction and placement weakens its connection to the language elements about to be listed. See my edit below.
- “the.” Instead of “the grammar and the syntax,” how about “its grammar and its syntax”? Despite the being a definite article, “the grammar” gives the noun a general, unconnected air. Its clearly ties grammar to language.
My suggested revision isn’t poetry, but it would likely carry far more of the authority and confidence we expect of the man who will be king: “You can’t communicate precisely and credibly without command of the language’s grammar, its syntax and, indeed, its punctuation.”
And then I’ll take it even further: “You can’t communicate precisely without command of grammar, syntax and, indeed, punctuation,” as grammar, syntax and punctuation are components of language and few other things (name one), and, combined with the word communicate, these three words clearly imply language.
In other words, to fight the good fight, write tight.
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11.27.08
Posted in humor, myths and misconceptions at 7:33 am by Bill Brohaugh
The 11/23/08 installment of the Frazz comic strip begins with this exchange (at least in some papers it does; it is a Sunday intro panel that papers can eliminate for space):
Young female student (looking at open books): “There’s only one word that rhymes with ‘rhyme,’ that’s spelled like ‘rhyme.’”
Frazz: “A sage observation, Rosemary.”
I admire the delicate touch employed by cartoonist Jeff Mallett. Here he didn’t need to flap the word thyme at us like a semaphore flag; in fact, he didn’t use the word at all. But we know it anyway.
And everything we know about English is wrong. Have I established that yet?
Let me allow you to digest the fact that another word spelled like rhyme also rhymes with rhyme. And once digested, that fact will be chyme. In two literal senses. Chyme, you see, is the intermediate substance that results when your stomach’s gastric juices partially digests food, including herbs, leading to partial sage, rosemary and . . . thyme.
(And happy Thanksgiving!)
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11.26.08
Posted in assorted weird crap, myths and misconceptions, unfortunate English, write tight, writing craft at 8:54 am by Bill Brohaugh
With Black Friday looming, I today offer unhumble suggestions for your holiday shopping list. (It’s a commercial, dammit! I admit it! And I’m not kidding about the headline.)
I’ve just received the good news that Writer’s Digest Books will publish my Unfortunate English in paperback in Fall of 2009. The hardcover remains available, and I humbly suggest it for the word lovers on your Christmas list. And other lists, as well. The subtitle of the book is “The Gloomy Truth Behind the Words You Use,” which is so appropriate for the upcoming festive season, don’t you agree? Classy cloth binding, nicely creepy illustrations, and the same snarky sense of humor you’ve come to expect in this blog (for better or worse).
Other vaguely humble suggestions for my books that are possibly enjoyable by people other than my mom (see the headline):
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Write Tight: Say Exactly What You Mean With Precision and Power
> ”These days, most creative-writing courses teach self-indulgence. Write Tight counsels discipline. It is worth more than a university education. Its advice is gold.”
— Dean Koontz, #1 New York Times bestselling author
> ”If you read Write Tight, and if you apply its lessons, you will be a better writer.” — Lawrence Block, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master
> ”Write Tight is a supremely valuable ‘must-have’ for aspiring writers in all fields.” — Midwest Book Review
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Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
> ”If you love language and the unvarnished truth, you’ll love Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. You’ll have fun because his lively, comedic, skeptical voice will speak to you from the pages of his word-bethumped book.” — Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English and other popular word books
> ”The book provides a good counterpoint to Lynne Truss’s anxiety-inducing Eats, Shoots & Leaves and will be enjoyed by everyone who can’t quite admit to being amused by William Safire because they can’t get past his politics. In other words, Brohaugh is funner.” — FeatureBook.com
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The Grill of Victory: Hot Competition on the Barbecue Circuit
> ”It’s not about words, but it uses them.” — Bill Brohaugh, author of The Grill of Victory”
> ”Thank you, William Brohaugh. Thank you for writing this book. Barbecue is the better for it.” — Doug Mosley in The National Barbecue News
> ”A must read for aspiring pit masters and great for armchair cooks, too.” — Steven Raichlen, author of The Barbecue Bible
> ”The blend of travel, social and culinary history is exceptional and fun in this highly recommended pick.” — Midwest Book Review
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11.25.08
Posted in Chaucer, Middle English, Shakespeare, assorted weird crap, humor, style at 6:34 am by Bill Brohaugh
I get bedazzled by online gadgets for their industry, their creativity, their fun, and their potential for wisecrackery. Mostly for the first three items but also for the fourth is my interest in ofaust.com (with a nod to one of the commenters at Language Log for the alert). Submit a bit of writing through the site’s interface, and O’Faust reports whose classic writing the text most closely resembles.
Fearing for the mockery such evaluations would send my way, I first tested O’Faust on the “Late for the Sky” blog perpetrated by my friend and fellow radio comedy writer JohnnyB (his song parodies are superb). JohnnyB’s “Come Fly With Me” installment was gauged to be most like Frank Baum, with 24% similarity. His “I Love LA” entry was gauged, with less confidence at 14%, to be most like Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Note to JohnnyB: my evaluation that you exist in your own fantasy world has been independently confirmed.) Oh, and a song parody. JohnnyB’s “Country (First) Rogue”—political parody of John Wasilla’s . . . um, John Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads”—gets a nicely complimentary 65% similarity to Oscar Wilde.
Feeling then safe to apply the test to my own writing in this blog, I submitted “Chile is not chilly, chili is not chilly, and never the twain shall meet,” and was given a 23% nod to Edgar Allen Poe. Chills indeed. (As an aside, for the radio show JohnnyB and I wrote for, I composed an ode to an NFL game in which the Baltimore Ravens dominated the Cincinnati Bengals: “Quoth the Ravens, never score”). My “Slurry up and wait” nudged up to 25%, and pointed to Mark Twain. My “Rerenaming names” slipped again to 23% and named—oh, shit—Frank Baum.
Deciding to conduct the ultimate test, I then submitted:
11.24.08
Posted in assorted weird crap at 9:15 am by Bill Brohaugh
I have Regret the Error on my blogroll; it’s a fascinating log of journalist mistakes—the ones they admit to. Regret the Error placed on Time.com’s First Annual Blog Index. Nicely done.
SoupAddict’s Blog is over there in Blogroll Land, too (not to mention Eggroll Land). Karen, a long-time friend, is a great cook. Yesterday she beat me into a cooking contest pâté with her second place (and my somewhere-past-third place) in the Cook Like a Wokstar contest. My compliments. Details of her winning entry here.
Short blog today. I have to regret my cooking contest errors and start cooking up Karen’s recipe.
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11.23.08
Posted in English origins, Old English, foreign sources (general) at 9:55 am by Bill Brohaugh
It’s a food day today, what with me cooking my entry in the finals of a local Cook Like a Wokstar contest (I admit that my interest in entering may have been influenced by the pun). So the theme today is food; and because this immediately follows yesterday’s debunking of a false etymology of a place name, we’ll throw more place-name chat in, as well, in this excerpt from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong:
Chili peppers hot,
Chile peppers cold,
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old.
This, of course, is a recast of the old “pease porridge” nursery rhyme, infused with a different set of concepts to make a point about the verbal porridge representing the relationship between chili peppers, the country of Chile, and the chilly reception you’ll get from etymologists if you suggest that any of these words are connected.
Chili peppers hot: Chili (the pepper and ultimately the stew made with the pepper) traces back through Spanish to the native South American Nahuatl word for the pepper plant. It is not, as Dutch physician and botanist Jacobus Bontius wrote in 1631, a “quasi dicas Piper e Chile” (“named as if a pepper from Chile,” if my Latin translation is anywhere in the same hemisphere as the actual meaning, but then again, remember that I tried to translate “E Pluribus Unum” by myself as a kid, and could only come up with “made of lead”).
Chile peppers cold: One might say that the etymological trail to Chile has grown cold. Though we’re not sure how the country name originated, no possibilities connect it with the hot pepper plant, and one possibility even suggests that it comes from native tchili, meaning “snow,” from the native South American language Aymara, or a word from the native South American language Quecha: chili meaning “cold” or “snow” or, yes, “chilly.” But even so:
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old: Our adjective chilly and its source noun chill, meaning “cold,” traces all the way back to Old English. And just to confuse matters, one early spelling of chill was chile.
Why do I spend so much time disassociating chili and Chile and chilly? Well, I hail from the Cincinnati area, where a favorite local dish is a bed of spaghetti, topped with a spiced meat sauce (cinnamon and chocolate or cocoa among the spices), chopped onions, beans and grated cheese [recipe from Cincinnati chef Paul Sturkey here]. This dish is “Cincinnati chili,” and it, too, has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned chilis.
Yes, you Texans and Mexicans and Chileans, we know this concoction is not “real” chili, and, by gosh, we don’t care.
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11.22.08
Posted in English origins, eponyms, foreign sources (general), myths and misconceptions, word history at 10:06 am by Bill Brohaugh
Rachel Maddow on Friday night (11/21/08) gave some unintended linguistic truth to her regular “Ms. Information” segment title with coverage of a project called The Atlas of True Names. Said atlas labels countries, regions and cities not with their current names but with what the names supposedly mean. Much of the atlas’s labelings are true; many of them are misinformed. For instance, Maddow swallowed whole the atlas’s claim about the origin of Yucatan:
Apparently Spanish explorers asked, “What’s the name of this region?” And the local Mayans responded by saying, “Yuk ak atan,” which means, “I don’t understand.” And so the Spanish named the place Yucatan. They named the place “I Don’t Understand”! If ever there were a more perfect summary of colonialism, I do not know of it.
Well, Rachel still does not know of it. On hearing this claim, my etymological Spidey-sense began tingling, because the tale has bullshitternet notymology written (and mapped) all over it. It sounded like a number of nonsense derivations I mock in Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. Everything you know about cartography is wrong, too.
There are a number of theories of how Yucatan took its name, and Language Log, quick to the fore, discusses them and other fallacies and misinterpretations perpetrated by The Atlas of True Names. The Yuca-yarn is very much in the spirit of other canards as the kangaroo taking its name from, again, natives responding “I don’t understand” to a naming question. The logical fallacy is that such explanations imply that the one and only time explorers heard “I don’t understand” as a response was when asking one specific question. How were all the other questions answered?
I’m fascinated by one “I don’t know” etymological response that likely is kinda-sorta true, however. At Language Log, Benjamin Zimmer writes:
Similarly, the story that the name of the Alaskan town of Nome comes from a phrase meaning “I don’t know” (ki-no-me) goes back to 1905 at least. A 1901 letter by George Davidson (recently noted here by Jon Weinberg) provides another popular theory, that the map notation ? Name was misread as C. Nome (for Cape Nome). (The Nome Convention and Visitor Bureau accepts this derivation.)
Some native Alaskan likely did not say “I don’t know,” but some cartographer likely did admit he/she didn’t know by writing “? Name.” Either way, all dunnos lead to Nome.
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11.21.08
Posted in unfortunate English, word history at 7:45 am by Bill Brohaugh
As both a wordie and a foodie, I’m completely embarrassed that I’ve never before encountered the word slurry. I discovered this word after entering a recipe contest sponsored by The Oriental Wok, a restaurant in the Cincinnati area (Northern Kentucky to be precise).
(As an aside and an admission, I will point out that everything else I say here is to give me an excuse to point out the fact that my recipe made the important first cut and will be judged in the finals this coming Sunday. My friend Karen over at SoupAddict’s Blog also made the finals. I believe Karen will place above me because of a secret signal communicated by the misspelling of my first name as “Wiiliam” on the Wok’s website. Perhaps someone believed that my recipe was a virtual food, cooked properly with a Nintendo Wii.)
Anyway, I patrolled the recipes posted on the Wok’s web site. There, in a list of ingredients for orange chicken, was “cornstarch slurry for thickening.” Neither the concoction nor its intent surprised me. A little cornstarch in water thickens sauces and juices when heated, much like flour in a gravy, though with a thinner texture. I’ve used this, what I called a “thickening agent,” perhaps hundreds of times before. Even so, the word surprised me. In a nonfood context, slurry is a thin mud. The word derived from slur, also a thin mud. As well, the muddy physical slur gave us the verb slur—to figuratively stain with mud.
Now, my recipe for this particular contest entry calls for no slurry, neither with cornstarch nor with mud. And I’m hoping that after the judges taste it with a slurp (unrelated word), they won’t be tempted to bestow the figurative mud of slurs upon my entry in their evaluations.
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11.20.08
Posted in assorted weird crap, verbal stupidity, wordiness at 9:02 am by Bill Brohaugh
Some years ago, a local TV station fired a popular weathercaster because he was “just” an announcer. He held no meteorology degree . . . the faker!. This was at the forefront (and the coldfront) of general TV news departments deciding that weathercasters needed degrees so that they could entertain us with adiabatic lapse rates and slipstreams and other meteorological minutia, perhaps trying to imply to us that said weathercasters used El Niño prevailing breezes to scientifically and naturally blow-dry that hair. Put it in simple English! Leave the test tubes back at the lab and tell us if it’s gonna rain tomorrow.
At the time, I was writing for a Cincinnati radio personality, and I composed a comedy bit in which said TV station next demanded that its news anchor have a Ph.D in current events, the economics reporter be a former Secretary of the Treasury, and the sportscaster have a Masters in statistics and Euclidean geometry.
It seems that I have, after all these years, finally gotten my “put it in simple English” request. Driving home last night, listening to the weather report on the radio, I heard this (exact quote as best as I can remember):
Temperatures will hit the 40s tomorrow, but over the weekend, it’s back to the 30s. And that means colder temperatures.
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