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:
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).
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.
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?
I spent a good number of my growing-up years on a farm. My uncle raised chickens, milked cows, and grew corn, oats and wheat. I grew intransitively; my uncle grew transitively.
This subject came to mind when I was writing my post about gift as a verb. I had found a list of “Words you don’t need to use,” and gift (presumably as a verb) was among them*, which was what had led me there. Not in the list but in the comments was this: “I hate it profoundly when ‘grow’ is used as a transitive verb!”
My first thought was of my uncles and my cousins and my grandfather out in the fields not growing corn, oats and wheat. But I quickly realized that the profound hatred was likely directed at a more modern transitive use of grow. The growing my farm-employed family was synonymous with raise, cultivate, nurture. (The OED’s first record of this use is from 1774.) The profound hatred was likely reserved for the transitive use synonymous with expand, as now often heard in corporate jargon-friendly situations, such as “We must grow the business.” (Oh so modern. The OED’s first record the sense of “To cause to increase, to enlarge” is from 1481, though interestingly the OED labels this use as obsolete. So it’s not modern after all. It’s archaic.)
In some word-watching quarters, the transitizing of verbs (as in this case, grow intransitive being grown into grow transitive) seems to attract as much ire as the verbing nouns (hmm—is verb as a verb transitive, intransitive, or both?). But here again, conventions and preferences and everyday usage shift over time.
It is a matter of, shall we say, growing the language.
*Other words not included in “Words you don’t need to use” are utilize (which I defend as the right word in the right usage), and impact as a verb, which I cheer. Words appropriately not included in “Words you don’t need to use” are flange, carburetor, chartreuse, Brobdingnagian and plotz—and just about every other word anyone has spoken, because, as with utilize, it’s a matter of using the right word at the right time. The only words you truly need to use, as both your mom and mine told us, are please and thank you.
I knew Rachel Maddow reminded me of someone. It finally clicked last night while watching. She’s my 8th-grade English teacher. Her lesson:
Just because I said it’s ironic does not mean that it’s funny. But it is irony.
This was her conclusion of the unfortunate tale of American kidnapping consultant Felix Batista himself being kidnapped (and, of course, we wish him a happy fate). Maddow’s introduction:
Irony alert. Code red. Threat of disturbing irony imminent in an unfunny story.
The story is indeed ironic in the Greek tragedy sense: character action in contrast to audience knowledge of the true situation. And Maddow is right. “Ironic does not mean that it’s funny.” Irony can, I grant you, produce a certain level of amusement, in an “I have mocked thee” or a “You got your comeuppance, buddy” sort of way. Yet, irony in its most powerful sense is rather somber.
As Maddow and her writers acknowledge by way of disclaimer, irony has also come to imply ha-ha-titter-titter kinds of jokes. Pratfalls instead of tragedy, spit-in-the-wind yuk-em-ups instead of pointed sarcasm.
And the write tight guy in me wonders if she could have saved a lot of words just by introducing the story as a possibly redundant but definitely clear “tragic irony.”
It’s sad for the world that she has this story to report in the first place. And in my little part of the world, it’s also sad for the word lovers that she is forced to go to such extents to steer her audience from a softened meaning of a powerful word.
With Barack Obama speaking eloquently of a promise of change, we’ll quickly hear a group of reactionaries fretting about one thing Obama said in his election night speech: enormity.
Those reactionaries are the folks I call the persnickitors, the ones whose blood pressure approaches geyser strength when they spot language use they consider wrong. Their certain target:
I know you didn’t do this just to win an election and I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime—two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.
“It’s not enormity!” they will spout. “It’s enormousness! What an egregious language error!” And indeed, enormity is regularly misused to indicate massive size when its actual meaning is “gross or monstrous offense or crime.”
But it is, after all, a time of change. I prefer that we use enormity in its most powerful meaning, yet I concede that the word’s meaning might very well be changing. Because it already has changed.
Enormous and enormity of course result from the same roots, meaning “outside the norm,” a figurative use of norm, meaning “a mason’s pattern.” The original meaning of enormity was, on the order of enormous, a less-harsh “something outside the norm.” And, by the way, one meaning of enormous in its original use was “outrageously outside the norm, monstrous, or shocking.”
So is using enormity to mean enormousness an egregious error? To many, it is. But to that many, I’ll also point out that egregious (in an ancient instance of e- prefixes having nothing to do with internet commerce or mail) comes from Latin roots meaning “outside the herd”—and it originally meant “remarkably good.”
The Republicans’ attempt to make the case that Barack Obama is hoity-toity and they’re hoi polloi has fallen under the sheer weight of the stunning numbers
That’s Maureen Dowd. Hoi polloi from the Greek literally means “the many.” Hoity-toity, a duplicative (think flimflam, dillydally, etc.) means, to put it informally, “all uppity and stuff.” And Dowd gets them both right.
Hoi polloi is often misused to mean the phrase’s very opposite—”the elite”—likely because of comparison or confusion with the similar-sounding hoity-toity. In an odd way, hoity-toity has experienced a similar reversal, though in the opposite direction. Hoity-toity, meaning “putting on airs” in a mocking sense, results from the verb hoit, which means, roughly, “to act the hoyden”—to be rude and boorish. Which is an accusation that the hoity-toity might be prone to assign to the hoi polloi.
(And if you persnickitors are going to grouse that “the hoi polloi” is redundant, bring it on. I’m ready for you.)
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.)
In another bizarre confluence of the wordie and the foodie in me (and, as it turns out, the Blondie in me, as well), I’ll note that one of my prized possessions, hanging in my kitchen, is the original artwork of the May 27 1961 Blondie daily newspaper comic daily panel. This installment has early ’60s kitchen kitch splashed all over it, with Blondie wearing heels, and an apron over a flowing dress, and son Alexander coming home from school with a dress shirt whose sleeves are rolled up nearly to the point where he might tuck a cigarette pack in them. James Dean, he ain’t. Alexander is trotting a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of unsliced bread to one of those kitchen tables with a silverware drawer on one side.
The ’60s were so long ago. By that I mean the 1360s, the time of Chaucer (and no, the topic has not veered from Blondie). Wordie, meet Blondie . . . in the form of the Japes for Owre Tymes blog. That’s not modern misspelling; that’s Middle English. Japes for Owre Tymes is a delightfully arcane blog that each day translates a modern cartoon into Middle English. I wonder what the Middle English translation of “thought balloon” is?
Including Blondie in this Middle-English-a-Day endeavor is appropriate, because the strip has been around since 1930—and in comic strip terms, 1930 is the equivalent of Middle English.
Now, let’s take cartoons back to the origins of English: Old English. And we don’t even have to translate. Here’s an installment of The Captain and the Kids (more commonly known as The Katzenjammer Kids):
On the right, look at those words obviously derived from the Germanic speech of the violent, primitive tribes who spoke the very first versions of English—the Angles and the Saxons. On the left, look at those glyphs from some ancient predecessor of English’s great-grandpappy, Proto-Indo-European. Oh, a language lesson unto itself, all in the guise of Turn of That Century comic child intimidation.
Well, maybe not precisely. Anyway, back to Japes for Owre Tymes. Check out the most recent installment for an interesting lesson on the disconnect between language and reality in the form of The Family Circus (and check out Comics Curmudgeon for additional insight on the very same topic).
(By the way, in the early 1360s, Chaucer would have been in his late teens. I wonder if he rolled his sleeves up for his packs of death sticks?)
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:
Rollover Beethoven and tell Tchaikovski the news: Stop putting spaces in verb phrases. Such as demonstrated in this email I just received:
Now, many English-speakers would write that as “Roll over your 401(k),” but I fear that such speakers are becoming increasingly rare. The practice of compounding verb phrases is continuing to pick up. Or pickup.
Don’t get me wrong. I find nothing wrong with compounding. I tend to accept and generate compound words more quickly than others. I write website when others still prefer web site. And in my more lyrical fiction endeavors, I’ve written of, for example, “moonshards” to describe scattered light within a forest.
And there’s nothing wrong with language change—as long as it fills a void or brings additional communicative flexibility . . . and doesn’t confuse, introduce grammatical nonsense, or just plain ol’ sound stupid:
Confusion: To embellish my previous smartass example, consider “Pickup the truck.” Versus “Pick up the truck.”
Introducing grammatical nonsense: Consider an instruction you wouldn’t be shocked to see nowadays on a web page (and I believe lax website instruction-writing is at the root of much of this odd compounding): “To get started to rollover your 401(k), signup and login.” On the surface such construction seems clear. “Rollover your 401(k)” sounds nearly identical to “Roll over your 401(k)” (nearly, and more on that in a moment). But how do I express the fact that I am now acting on that instruction? “I am rolling over” or “I am rollovering”? Past tense: “I rolled over” or “I rollovered”?
Bonus item: Failing to mirror spoken sound. Say “The rollover is dead” aloud, and then say “Roll over and play dead.” Compare the compact (more concrete?) noun versus the flowing, more fluid verb phrase. Form and content.
Sounding stupid: Well, I always do that. But let’s return to our first example. “To get started to rollover your 401(k), signup and login.” Why not “To getstarted,” as long as we’re at it?
Or, for that matter, why not “whynot”?. And with that, I’ll stopit and shutup now.
(Musical side note: “Roll Over Beethoven” to me is like “On Broadway”—a fabulous, core rock and roll song of which there is no definitive version. That said, I deeply love the Electric Light Orchestra rendition. Check out the video below for that version, additionally delightful because Richard Pryor introduces the song, and YouTube—compound word and all—does indeed call it “Roll Over.”)
Heretofore, when encountering people who insist that data should take a plural verb, I have said “I presume, then, you feel the same about agenda“; I will now add stamina to my arsenal.
My own heretofore has rarely taken such a logical route. I like to confuse such insistent people, with a response more like “So, then, why don’t you insist on a plural verb for minutia, which is the plural of minutium?” I love the moment of quiet, the eyes darting back and forth. It’s a test of mettle—or mental stamins, maybe. The response is going to be a) silence; b) “I do use plural verbs with minutia“; c) “You’re full of shit.”
Answer a) speaks to the confusion caused by such Latin words as datum/data, stadium/stadia, graffito/graffiti, and balonum/baloney (well, maybe not the last pair). Answer b) speaks to the “depth” of their knowledge of Latin words, because . . . Answer c) is correct. Minutia is indeed singular, and minutium exists only in my mind as a contender for being the singular of baloney.
. Oh, wait.
and 
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