How poetically satisfying to razz the misspelling of raspberry.
I spotted this concession item list on my recent BBQ travels (note the tea flavor at the top):
I’m not going to simply make fun of the misspelling. I’m going to razz it. Because razz is ultimately a shortening of raspberry, as in “giving misspellers the raspberry,” which is in turn a shortening of “raspberry tart,” rhyming slang for fart. A raspberry tart is a description of the mocking fart sound you create by sticking your tongue out between otherwise closed lips and blowing.
So, raspberries to rasberry tea . . . though as we consider the bodily sources of words, I wonder. Is a side benefit of drinking lots of rasberry tea avoiding the need to P?
Let’s pause in our verbal travels—let us sojourn—to examine a line from a David Brooks editorial:
They say we are products of our environments, but Obama, the sojourner, seems to go through various situations without being overly touched by them.
Despite their similarity (and common origin), sojourn and journey are not synonymous. A sojourn is a pause in a journey, a temporary stay. A sojourner is a visitor, a temporary lodger. Is Brooks using the word sojourner correctly here? I tend to think so, though I can’t say for certain, as the context could allow either interpretation of the word. Brooks likely means that Obama pauses to visit each situation, though “go through” tends to imply otherwise.
Either way, the word gave me pause and an excuse to linger over another interesting word, so to invite a brief stay by you, my fellow sojourner.
Over at the Editrix blog, I found some discussion about which is the better word choice: “The data is stored on a computer,” or “The data is stored in a computer.” Editrix sided with on, and posted a poll for readers—with a provocative third choice: “They’re both wrong. It should be ‘data ARE,’ damn it. ‘Data ARE!’”
I voted for on myself. The results? I was on the winning side in this poll, though now I’m being subjected to the election-year game of investigating voter registration fraud—because I registered surprise at the results:
Over 31 percent? Excuse me while I pry open my computer to try to count all data there. Oh, there’s a datum. And that particular datum tells me that, like such words as couple or trio, data can function as a group noun. “The couple is” emphasizes the group; “the couple are” emphasizes the individuals in the group. “The data is” emphasizes a body of information; “the data are” implies—to me at least—a collection of individual facts, perhaps not particularly connected.
I’ve babbled about this before, of course, but let’s now move on and get back to that group noun couple: datum sounds like an activity the couple is engaged in. “We’re not serious. We’re just datum.” (And I’m not serious, either.)
One of my persistent rants in Everything You Know About English Is Wrong is that “We don’t speak Latin” (with an implied dammit! at the end). This particular grumblus is directed at persnickitors who fume that data must take a plural verb, who imply that the debauched tendency to incorrectly split (oops) an infinitive will bring Zeusian wrath because Latin doesn’t split infinitives, or who demand that Latin baseball players must shout “Vos es caecus, ump!” after called strike 3, because they’re, well, Latin. OK, maybe not the last one.
On the other hand, maybe we are about to be speaking a bit more Latin, if for no other reason than to be able to carp whiningly about having no bread at the promised American bread and circuses. Columnist Maureen Dowd is sufficiently convinced that the U.S. is on one of the many roads that don’t lead to Rome but instead to Roman collapse that she has written a column half in English and half in Latin. (By the way, a translation appears here.) Bless her heart, Dowd doesn’t once misuse the word data.
I mention this because I find Dowd’s column to be a fascinating exercise in multi-lingualistic cross-connotation Latinesium vox yaddayaddus blahblahblattus . . .
Well, I really mention it because I love the column’s title: “Are We Rome? Tu Betchus!” (With, I suspect, an implied dammitus! at the end.)
I’ve recently encountered a bit of confusion about the word personality—a subject of jealous interest of mine since I myself have no personality.
One bit of confusion I found at wilderdom.com, a site about something, though I’m not sure what:
Personality comes from the Greek word “persona”, meaning “mask”
The word ‘personality’ derives from the Latin word ‘persona’ which means ‘mask’. The study of personality can be understood as the study of ‘masks’ that people wear. These are the personas that people project and display, but also includes the inner parts of psychological experience which we collectively call our ‘self’.
Greek, Latin, Babylonian—hell, just toss out any ancient language origin. How about “Etruscan,” while we’re at it?
Turns out that yes, the origin described in nonboldfaced type is correct. The word persona is Latin. But now there’s a seed of doubt. Just as it isn’t Greek, perhaps it also doesn’t mean “mask.” Could that be true? Let’s ask some language experts: Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks, who say—
The English word ‘personality’ comes from two Latin words, per and sona, “through sound.” The Romans knew that the personality comes through in the tone of voice and other vocal aspects.
Well, that sounds good and all, but the word actually comes from one Latin word—persona—meaning, yes, “mask.” Think Dramatis Personae—the theatrical cast of characters. And, no, persona likely didn’t itself result from a “sounds-like” origin, as it probably came from Etruscan (gasp!)—the word phersu, also meaning “mask.”
Still, I’m very forgiving of language experts Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks, because they are actually body language experts, and they brought up the personality factor in analyzing the decipherable body language of one Sarah Palin. (At least her body language is decipherable, as her verbal language is hardly that.)
So I leave you with Kathlyn and Gay to analyze some bodyspeak from a current “personality” (read: mask-wearer) in this interesting article.
We’ve been hearing a lot of mavericks in this election. The word derives from Samuel Augustus Maverick, a 19th-century rancher and politician who did not mark his cattle with brands (nor, I would assume, did he mark his bulldogs or pigs with lipstick). In time, the name was generalized to denote any unbranded bovine, and then was swiftly given figurative use to denote independent people and less swiftly to self-denote political candidates who couldn’t manage to herd themselves.
That would be McCain and Palin, of course, who have raised the ire of Sam Maverick’s descendent (no, not James Garner). In the New York Times:
“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants. . . . “It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd.”
I find a couple of interesting connections between mavericks old and new in language terms:
Terrellita Maverick seems to believe that the purloined word maverick is in itself a maverick; one meaning of maverick, as recorded in 1890, was “A thing obtained dishonestly,” says the Oxford English Dictionary.
Sam Maverick’s grandson Fontaine Maury Maverick was himself in government, and is credited with creating a word to describe confusing language and bureaucraticspeak: gobbledygook, you betcha.
I like the goals, the coverage and the common sense over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, a blog devoted to setting folks straight regarding misconceptions and falsehoods related to history, economics, education and other topics. The name comes from the popular “fact” (promulgated by various means, but now certainly fueled by the bullshitternet) that Millard Fillmore was the first President to enjoy a bathtub in the White House, when in fact this nugget of noninformation was first mentioned in a humor piece by H.L. Mencken. Such delusions must be demystified, and if I ever get time, I’ll write a book about misconceptions about the English language and call it Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. Oh, wait.
. . . the American open road is, as always, very interesting.
For example, according to the billboards, somewhere in Wisconsin there is a restaurant named Brisco’s (after Brisco County, Texas?), which claims to feature cuisine (a French word) of a “southwestern” flavor. What does that mean?
This is a wry comment on a word often associated with the phrase “French cuisine” juxtaposed against American Southwestern fare. I’ve seen observations that took the topic of non-French cuisine to extremes, by declaring that, say, the phrase “Norwegian cuisine” was nonsensical because cuisine denoted French food and French food only.
There is no such limitation. A cuisine is “a style of cooking,” and Southwestern cooking is a particular style. (You could argue that Norwegian cooking is a certain style, too, though items like lutefisk argue to the contrary. I pick on Norwegian cooking because my heritage, my surname, and the area of Wisconsin I grew up in all have strong Norsk ties.) Granted, our borrowing cuisine from French as early as around the late 15th Century (and technically, we didn’t borrow it because we still have it), and the commonness of the phrase “French cuisine,” seem to limit the word’s use, but remember that many words over time have changed—broadening, narrowing, or even inversing themselves.
What does that Wisconsin restaurant sign mean? In this instance, as I commented on Ed Darrell’s post:
I believe it means that English is a very adaptable language. In addition to being a French word, cuisine is a centuries-old English word borrowed from French. If we were to apply words to concepts only in line with those words’ language origins, we wouldn’t be able to refer to English grammar (as the word grammar is of Old French and ultimately Latin origin) or even to the English language (again, from Latin and brought to us by the French). Nor, for that matter, would we have my favorite Muppet, the Swedish chef.
Meantime, enjoy your travels through Wisconsin, my native state. Yes, I’m a natural-born fromage-head.
And, Ed, if a culturally mixed-up restaurant sign is the oddest thing you’ve seen in Wisconsin, you haven’t run into any 30-foot plastic cows yet. They’re out there.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bork bork bork:
Already, the grog hangovers from celebrating International Talk Like a Pirate Day (TLAPD) a couple of days back are threatening to subside in the next week or two. Had we only eaten before such drinking—had we only partaken of the traditional buccaneer feast that I hinted at in yesterday’s post before imbibing, we might be less hung over, and a little pleasantly fatter, as well.
Which of the following is most notorious in the world of piracy: The pirate Blackbeard? Or the buccaneer Redmeat?
Redmeat is neither pirate nor buccaneer, of course. I’m referring to the artery-clogging red meat, the eating of which is in some circles both politically and gastronically incorrect. Before Blackbeard was spilling the blood of his victims from 1713 to 1718, the buccaneers were spilling the blood of wild red-meat oxen and wild the-other-white-meat boars in the Caribbean. And dining well. Caribbean natives used wood (and later metal) frameworks for various purposes, among them sleeping (to avoid snakes) and curing and roasting meat. Speakers of the native Carribbean language Tupi called such a framework a mukem. French explorers adapted the word as boucan, and people who used them to cook on were boucaniers. (Native Haitians used similar frameworks, which in the language Taino were called babricots. The Spanish adopted this word as barbacoa, which led to our word barbecue.)
The boucaniers moved from redmeatish pursuits to Blackbeardish pursuits, and were known by the late 1600s in English as buccaneers. Did they consult their food pyramids before all that pillaging?
For more information on the source of the word barbecue that will hurt your head even more than a grog hangover, consult my previous post on the topic, matey.
I’m a little embarrassed that I missed International Talk Like a Pirate Day yesterday, though I have a couple of excuses. After all, I’m still preparing for National Punctuation Day next Wednesday, the 24th—and I’m all ajitter (or should I say, “I’m all a;i!!e®”). Why do all the holidays come at once?!
Plus, despite the deep significance of celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day (TLAPD), I’d rather be celebrating Talk Like Keith Richards Day, which Johnny Depp celebrates year-round when a Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy marathon is broadcast (because in aggregate the three movies are about 365 days and 30 minutes long).
But avast! Mr. Brohaugh! Stop! Stay! You must hold fast, and beat your silly jokes to death with a cramp-iron!
Umm, a cramp-iron?
“Grappling hook,” matey. What better way to stop you than to grab you with a grappling hook?
Umm, just say “avast.”
I did, you scurvy bilge-lubber!
Our pirate-talker in the audience is helping me understand the possible origin of the word avast—a word I’d never thought about before getting in dutch with piratespeak lovers for forgetting TLAPD. In piratical penance, I visited the TLAPD website, which includes coverage of the three R’s of Pirate Prattle:
Arrreading
Arrriting
Arrrithmatic
(Well, no it doesn’t. I made them up.) So, you arrreaders, where does avast come from? The answer will keep you in dutch with the piratespeakers, as the origin is, very likely, Dutch. Notes the abbreviation-heavy OED.com (hey, OED guys, on the web, you can spell some things out, you know): “[prob. a worn-down form of Du. hou'vast, houd vast, hold fast: cf. Du. hou stop! stay! and houvast cramp-iron.]”
By the way, what’s the traditional buccaneer feast for International Talk Like a Pirate Day? Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post, and I’ll give you a word-origin entree for next year’s celebration. Why next year? Well, I’ve already missed this year, obviously. Plus, this will give you the opportunity to cook the dish low and slow.
This week, business takes me to a conference at the Key Biscayne Ritz-Carlton (accommodations far above my usual, believe me). In the shower this morning, I noticed that one of those little bath gel bottles was labeled:
Shampooing
Shampoo
This, of course, heartened me, because I was reassured that my hair would indeed be shampooed by this shampoo—so much more preferable than, say that “Depilating Shampoo,” which, if my shower drain is any indication, seems to be the purpose of my shampoo at home.
Turns out that I was being offered some lessons in the ways of a multi-lingual world. When I examined the other little bottles (there always seem to be about 40 of them, and they regenerate overnight), I also found:
Lotion pour le Corps
Body Lotion
Aha! French—one of sthe many languages I managed to avoid in high school and college. This one was appropriate because after a day of travel, I indeed felt like a Corpse in the English spelling. Then there’s:
Conditionneur pour Cheveax
Hair Conditioner
Which I loosely translate to “conditioner you pour on your head.” (Or perhaps not.)
is that “We don’t speak Latin” (with an implied dammit! at the end). This particular grumblus is directed at persnickitors who fume that data must take a plural verb, who imply that the debauched tendency to incorrectly split (oops) an infinitive will bring Zeusian wrath because Latin doesn’t split infinitives, or who demand that Latin baseball players must shout “Vos es caecus, ump!” after called strike 3, because they’re, well, Latin. OK, maybe not the last one.
:
. Feel free to 
