01.23.09
Posted in English origins, Latin sources, neology, word history at 8:05 am by Bill Brohaugh
I maintain a small file of “perfect words,” ones that elegantly match form and content. One such word is sesquipedalian, which from its Latin roots roughly translates to “a foot and a half long.” It means “using or characteristic of long words.” Words a foot and a half long.
Sesquipedalian represents perfection for everyone. I recently unearthed a perfect word for me. Consider:
- I once harbored a deep fascination with archeology.
- I think aardvark is a funny word.
- I love puns, wordplay, and neologisms.
Thus:
Aardvarchaeology is a science blog I stumbled across and that I frankly know nothing about. Yeah, I could read the “About” section, but I’m still reveling in the word creation. I appreciate several things about this word concoction, in addition to the opportunity it affords me to use another bulleted list:
- Perfect word for me personally, as described.
- This perfect word was constructed by a Swede—I only dream of being able to concoct wordplay in a second language.
- The neologism was created with an archaic (reference intended) spelling of archeology, at least to American eyes—because, after all, shouldn’t old subjects use olde spellings?
Now, I also once harbored a deep fascination with the American Civil War, and I think carburetor is a funny word . . . I wonder what I might stumble upon next.
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01.17.09
Posted in write tight, writing craft at 12:11 pm by Bill Brohaugh
In a news story titled “Dell to offer refunds to customers” comes this sentence:
Some never got promised rebates, while others applied for zero-percent financing but were charged higher interest rates.
Everything I know about math is wrong, too, but am I incorrect in assuming that charging interest of any sort would constitute a figure higher than zero? Therefore, “but were charged interest rates” without the higher is clear. For that matter, the word rates is superfluous, as well. ” . . . others applied for zero-percent financing but were charged interest.” (I’ll leave the discussion of the difference between applying for something and being guaranteed something to another day, when I talk about how I’m suing the government because I applied for negative taxation but taxes were levied nonetheless.)
Sometimes extra words hinder prose not necessarily by adding tiny physical length, but by lading considerable “mental length” onto the reading experience, as readers disconnect from the story to mentally note the wording. If the goal is lower interest, then in my case the sentence quoted above has accomplished that goal, by reducing my interest in the story it tells as I (in my occasional role as general reader) focus on how it is told.
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01.16.09
Posted in euphemisms, word misuse at 12:12 am by Bill Brohaugh
In one of those “Why didn’t you just ask me and pay me the research grant?” studies, McMaster University has discovered that suffering from seborrheic dermatitis is more severe than suffering from dandruff. Or so the patient perceives—same condition, different names. Give a condition a name worthy of a TV commercial “doctor,” and people get scared. Got it—people don’t understand jargon. Give me the grant money, please. And the newer the concocted medicalese, the greater the likelihood that people will perceive the jargon as more serious. Got it—people fear medical conditions they haven’t heard of more than they fear ones they’ve heard about for years. Give me the grant money, please.
Says the abstract of “The Role of Medical Language in Changing Public Perceptions of Illness”:
This study demonstrates that the use of medical language in communication can induce bias in perception; a simple switch in terminology results in a disease being perceived as more serious, more likely to be a disease, and more likely to be a rare condition. These findings regarding the conceptualization of disease have implications for many areas, including medical communication with the public, advertising, and public policy.
Among the technical/lay pairs studied:
- hypertension/high blood pressure
- erectile dysfunction disorder/impotence
- seborrheic dermatitis/dandruff
- myocardial infarction/heart attack
- hypertrichosis/excessive hair growth
- pharyngitis/sore throat
- myalgic
encepalomyelitisencephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome
- psoriasis/the heartbreak of (just kidding)
One technical phrase used in the study seems to operate in the opposite direction: “cerebrovascular accident.” On the surface, that doesn’t sound all that bad. It was an accident. Stubbed my cerebellum. Give me a Band-Aid. Just a little boo-boo. The phrase seems to inappropriately disguise the severity of the event: a stroke.
But a figurative cerebrovascular accident is just what you might experience if your doctor were to announce that you have been diagnosed with androgenic alopecia. Don’t panic. Just throw away the comb. It’s male pattern baldness. Don’t allow the doctor to infect you with verbomedicyclical terrhor—the fear of big medical words.
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01.14.09
Posted in punctuation at 7:25 am by Bill Brohaugh
Kind readers and fellow word lovers, you gotta love a good phrase:
heretical anapostrophism
No comment, because I can’t top such wonderful deconstructionist constructionism, except to point to the source of the phrase (and to some delightful commentary from Motivated Grammar, which alerted me to the phrase).
All I can say is, fercri’s’sake’s.
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01.13.09
Posted in acronyms, jargon, ugly words at 7:18 am by Bill Brohaugh
I already have a nomination for the American Dialect Society (ADS) 2009 Word of the Year, in the “Most Useless Word” category. This past year, ADS awarded that category to moofing (Mobile Out of OFfice-ing). My nomination is very much in line: nanobot.
Interesting word, and it’s been around for a time. It denotes microscopic robots—”wannabe proteins,” as Urbandictionary.com puts it—the stuff of science fiction. Nanobots injected in your body, for instance, could give you x-ray vision by deploying microlenses in your eyes, or recomb your hair without you having to reach all the way up there, or somesuch.
But that’s not the word I’m blasting. Nanobot is a well-constructed contraction of the prefix nano- (indicating something very small, a generalized use of its technical meaning of 10 to the minus ninth power, or one billionth, or at least I think, but then again, everything I know about math is wrong, too), and robot (a word itself introduced in science fiction: Karel Capek’s 1920 play, R.U.R.). I’m referring to the clumsy, difficult-to-remember, huh?-inducing acronym for Nearly Autonomous, Not in the Office, doing Business in their Own Time Staff. People who set their own hours while working at home. (Or PWSTOHWWAH, if you will.)
Empowered by their mobile devices and remote access to the corporate network, nanobots put in long hours, sometimes seven days a week—just not at their desks.
So write David Pauleen and Brian Harmer in Away From the Desk . . . Always,” in MIT Sloan Review
A Wall Street Journal Report podcast discusses (a bit drily, I must advise) how to evaluate and motivate this breed of out-of-office employee. I have one motivational tip: don’t refer to such employees with a word meaning “ultra-tiny, invisible robot.” Doesn’t look good on a business card.
Besides, wouldn’t Nearly Autonomous, Not in the Office, doing Business in their Own Time Staff lead to nanitodbitot? And, now that I think about it, wouldn’t Mobile Out of Office lead to mooo?
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01.12.09
Posted in acronyms, euphemisms, future of the language, ugly words at 7:33 am by Bill Brohaugh
When the American Dialect Society (ADS) announced bailout as the organization’s Word of the Year (WOTY) 2008 last Friday, did a conference-roomful of corporate execs race up to the stage to accept the honor the way teams of producers sometimes scramble en masse to the presenter at the Oscars or the Tonys? Or were they tired from doing so when they accepted bailout’s word-of-the-year nod from Merriam-Webster?
It’s a pretty lackluster word of the year, this bailout. And even the American Dialect Society recognizes it. When announcing the results of ADS voting, Grant Barrett, chair of the ADS New Words Committee and co-host of public radio’s A Way with Words, said: “You’d think a room full of pointy-headed intellectuals could come up with something more exciting.”
Though it’s not a glitzy word, it was indeed important in its use, and in the frequency of its use, in 2008. And bailout beat out a number of interesting nominees (phrases are considered, as well). Some that particularly caught my eye (and the definition listed in the recent ADS WOTY press release):
- recombobulation area: An area at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee in which passengers that have just passed through security screening can get their clothes and belongings back in order.
- long photo: A video of 90 seconds or less. Used by the photo-sharing web site Flickr.
- thought showers: Coined by a British city council because the synonym “brainstorming” was said to be offensive to epileptics.
Just who thought-showered that latter gem?
Recombobulation area took first place in the ADS “Most Creative” category. Other category winners (again, with notes from the ADS release, and snarks in parentheses from yours truly):
- Most Useful Barack Obama: Both names as combining forms. (Barack Obama has found that phrase useful for many years now.)
- Most Unnecessary: moofing: From “mobile out of office,” meaning working on the go with a laptop and cell phone. Created by a PR firm. (In fact, most such acronums are proving themselves increasingly unnecessary and unused, waning from the heyday of yuppie and nimby. More on that tomorrow.)
- Most Outrageous: terrorist fist jab: A knuckle-to-knuckle fist bump, or “dap,” traditionally performed between two black people as a sign of friendship, celebration or agreement. It was called the “terrorist fist jab” by the newscaster E. D. Hill, formerly of Fox News.
- Most Euphemistic: scooping technician: A person whose job it is to pick up dog poop. (Seems a pretty lame selection after we’ve endured sanitation engineer for garbageman lo these many decades.)
- Most Likely to Succeed: shovel-ready: Used to describe infrastructure projects that can be started quickly when funds become available. (I disagree. You won’t hear it used more than three times in 2010, if that. Speaking of shovels, the phrase will be grave-ready once projects are underway.)
- Least Likely to Succeed: PUMA: An acronym for Party Unity My Ass, used by Democrats who were disaffected after Hillary Clinton failed to secure a sufficient number of delegates. It was later said to stand for Party Unity Means Action. (And soon to stand for Pretty Ugly Manipulative Acronym.)
- New Category: Election-related Words: maverick: A person who is beholden to no one. Widely used by the Republican Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates, John McCain and Sarah Palin. Also in the adjectival form mavericky, used by Tina Fey portraying Palin on Saturday Night Live. (I put it in a different “new category”: Most Abused Word, and select it as the winner.)
Overall, I stick with my previous choice for 2008 word of the year: susurration, because nobody used it this year past year, and they should have. It’s a beautiful word, one to be spoken quietly in the middle of thought showers.
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01.10.09
Posted in assorted weird crap, verbal stupidity at 6:45 pm by Bill Brohaugh
Radio air personality Gary Burbank often referred to himself as a pronounsker—of course the reference was tongue-in-cheek (as an aside, “tongue-in-cheek” is good attitudinal form but bad physical form for a radio comedian).
Gary used the word so often that when I wrote comedy bits for him, I typed “Pronounsker:” to introduce the lines to be spoken by an announcer in, say, a fake commercial or in a wildly concocted routine about a blue-collar worker most familiar with clogged drain traps suddenly tapped as a journalist to report on the sadly enduring Mideast conflict. After a time, I embellished the word pronounsker, whimsically ballooning it to Pronounskiator at one point, and then taking it even ridiculously further to Pronounskiationist.
Oh, wait, I didn’t concoct the above-mentioned routine about drain-trap man, wildly or otherwise. History concocted it.
Drain-trap man is the McCain-campaign-annointed Joe the Plumber, who was recently hired by some website or another to cover the recent turmoil in the Gaza Strip. When asked by Fox Gnus about how he had prepared for the assignment, Joe said that one of his biggest challenges was to learn how to pronounciate the names related to the conflict.
Pronounciate? Maybe Gary and I wildly concocted Joe the Plumber after all. And if we didn’t, at least we created Joe the Plumbinatiationizerist Enunskiationizingmeistererer.
We want royalties.
And check out Jon Stewart’s coverage.
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01.02.09
Posted in jargon, language change, neology, wordplay at 7:37 am by Bill Brohaugh
As a kid, I listened to Milwaukee top-40 station WOKY, though stating that might be oversharing. Today the radio is tuned to station WOTY, playing not the top pop songs but the top pop words. WOTY: an acronym for Word of the Year, and authorities of various stripes have recently announced a bunch of them for 2008. Here’s a not-so-comprehensive roundup (with a strong bow to eagle-eye Fritinancy for her great coverage of the topic); don’t touch that dial:
Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year: bailout, “a rescue from financial distress.”
Oxford University Press: hypermiling, the “attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques.”
Webster’s New World Dictionary: overshare, “to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval.”
William Safire: frugalista, “a person who lives a frugal lifestyle but stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes, buying secondhand, growing own produce, etc.”
UrbanDigs.com: Crecession, “a period of economic activity where available credit is contracting and the cost of credit is rising, leading to a disruption in the credit markets and difficulties for businesses that borrow short and lend long. The result will likely be a period of asset deflation leading to a lack of growth, rising unemployment, and rising commodity inflation due to pressure on the dollar” (OK, they made it up and declared it their own word of the year, but what the hell).
Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett’s Buzzwords of 2008: Lots of them. Click the link.
Separated by a Common Language:
- vet (British-English-to-American-English Word of the Year), a transitive verb meaning “To examine carefully and critically for deficiencies or errors; spec. to investigate the suitability of (a person) for a post that requires loyalty and trustworthiness.”
- meh (American-English-to-British-English Word of the Year), an interjection expressing indifference.
The Web of Language: Obama (you may have heard the word before)
Baby Name Wizard: Joe (Name of the Year).
Geoffrey Nunberg (in a “Fresh Air” commentary): Joe (not the name, but as an iconic reference to the common folk). And hey, it’s faux radio theme day, so you can listen to the commentary, too.
Fritinancy herself: (nomination for the American Dialect Society’s upcoming word of the year selection) monumentous
American Dialect Society: To be announced a week from today, 1/9/2009. So far the word change is leading the list of nominations, though that could change.
Me: susurration. Why? Nobody used it this year (not even in whispers), and they should have. It’s a beautiful word. Specific to the task at hand, I’m going to award a tie to plutoid, which Grant Barrett points out as “a new term designated by the International Astronomical Union to refer to Pluto and space objects like it,” because I like the astronomical justice given to to the space body that had been plutoed (The American Dialect Society’s 2006 Word of the Year) and now honored not with planetary status but with dictionetary status); and a phrase, “nuke the fridge,” which crystalizes why you don’t want to see the most recent Indiana Jones movie. On the other hand, why not award the now-frequently used acronym WOTY as word of the year?
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