06.10.08
Posted in French sources, myths and misconceptions, spelling, word history at 5:53 am by Bill Brohaugh
When Father’s Day approaches, the ads for grill equipment immediately spring up. Yes—cliches. Man like fire! Man burn stuff!
Which is fine, because I am myself fuel for those cliches. One of my passions is barbecue, and sometimes barbeque. In my book The Grill of Victory, I talk about such spelling variations:
The word barbecue itself is an orthographic challenge. On the back of the Gwatney Championship Barbecue team rig [the cooking gear of one of the competing teams] are painted the words “Bar be cue Made Simple.” The food may be made simple, but the spelling isn’t. There’s no way to misspell the word barbecue unless maybe you throw a Z or an ampersand into it. So many ways to spell the word that started out as barbacoa [from Spanish in the Caribbean]. There’s barbecue, barbeque, bar b q, bar b cue, bubbacue (actually a team name), BBQ, B B Q, barbicu (in pre-Revolutionary War writings), barbacue (same). Oftentimes today, the cooking is called Que for short, and Q for shorter. And the shortest version of the word, the letter Q, is visually appropriate. In your mind, rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise and see the fat little piggy and its tail.
I’m not the first to have visualized li’l perky-tail piggy. A few years ago, a famous word-watcher noted that, in fact, the letter Q derived its name from “tail” as a loan word:
Q..The name of the letter is cue, from queue, French, tail; its form being that of an O with a tail.
OK, it was a few centuries ago. That’s Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. Don’t believe it, even if you see it on the internet. Good guess, Doc Sam, but wrong. As wrong, by the way, as the false etymology of barbecue itself, which itself has some French misconceptions quite in line with the good Dr. Johnson’s. A little more self-serving self-quoting, this time from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong, dispelling the word’s supposed French origins:
Barbe means “beard,” and queue means “tail.” When one cooks a hog whole on a spit, you cook it from “beard to tail,” from barbe a queue. Barbequeue. Granted, there are dishes that are named according to how they’re prepared, such as pot roast, though to follow the pattern of barbe a queue, we’d have to call it something like compléterpourbaserdansunvraifourchaud (from the French meaning “top to bottom in a real hot oven”). But even if we would give such a word creation mechanism any credence, consider two things: 1) Wouldn’t mouseau-a-queue (“snout to tail”) have been a more logical way of expressing the cooking method? 2) Have you ever seen a pig with a beard? Even a French pig? Little goatee, curling handlebar mustache? Soo-oui-oui!?
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06.03.08
Posted in spelling, word history, word misuse at 4:34 pm by Bill Brohaugh
From Time, ferheavensake, posted June 1, ‘08:
With her win in Puerto Rico and a net gain of 24 delegates over the weekend in party rules meetings, Clinton is on the verge of eeking out a tiny moral victory
Is this a Time Inc. editorial comment? That Clinton’s tiny victory might be the equivalent of a squeak? Eek! Or is it simply sloppy spelling of the venerable verb eke? To that question, let me eek out a cringing response. And I do mean eek.
Everything You Know About English Is Wrong thematic alert: Eke is also a noun, which you use fairly regularly in a compound, though you’re probably not aware of it because of language evolution and a certain type of mistake we speakers tend to make. Let’s leave it in the political arena, and refer to Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Scooter is a nickname, though that latter word began as an “eke name”—an extra name. In a process named “metanalysis” (a wonderfully scholarly-apologetic way of describing “a mistake”), an N began wandering about, so that “an eke name” eventually became “a nickname.” Me, if my nickname were “Scooter,” I’d concede that it is indeed an eek name. End Everything You Know About English Is Wrong thematic alert.
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Posted in neology, persnickitors, spelling, word history, word misuse at 6:19 am by Bill Brohaugh
Until today, we’ve not been sure where the word quandary comes from. It might be related to conundrum, though that’s unlikely and, besides, we’re not sure where conundrum came from, either.
So, though we’ve been unsure about the origin of quandary, we have not been “in a quandary” about its origin. Until today. Quandary, it seems, comes from the political science department of the University of South Dakota.
As I write this on 6/3/2008, the primary polls in South Dakota and Montana are prepping to open, and the pundits can’t predict how Clinton will fare against Obama in the land of Great Stone Faces (the ones on the mountainside, not the ones covering the primary on CNN). As reported on Politico:
“Everybody is in the same quandary with how is this going to work,” said Elizabeth Smith, an associate political science professor at the University of South Dakota.
A quandary is a tough decision, a dilemma. It is not, oh ye political pundits and escapees from the USD English department, an uncertain situation, despite Merriam Webster’s flaccid definition of “a state of perplexity or doubt.” A superhero forced to decide to save the love of her life or the entire city of Topeka is in a quandary. Pundits awaiting to see who will be voted off the island in the most recent episode of political Survivor are not. I suspect that some individuals heading to the polls might be in a quandary; some superdelegates who have not yet committed their support are in a quandary. But of the observers, Professor Smith should have said, “Everybody is in the same state of uncertainty . . .” or, more succinctly, “We’re not certain . . .”, or, even better, “We dunno.”
In this regard, I recommend this Polo & Higgins video on YouTube, which offers these lessons: First, it is a beautifully low-key illustration of a quandary. Second, it is a spelling lesson, in that it employs as its title the common misspelling quandry. Third, it is an admirable example of making English one’s one, a concept the persnickitors hate but that I champion in the right circumstances. Because, as one of the Polo & Higgins creators later admitted:
Oh, and it seems like I’ve accidentally spelled “quandary” wrong in the title sequence. I’m going to fix it by making “quandry” a new word.
I respect that. I’m a proponent of creative neology, and I’ve always advised budding neologists that if you’re going to make up a word, do it boldly, without apology (no rhyme intended).
But he got accidentally right, and another nod of respect for that, as it’s often misspelled accidently (but not on purpose). Spell it correctly? Spell it the way I like? Such a quandry!
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06.01.08
Posted in Arabic sources, Chaucer, French sources, Japanese sources, spelling at 8:02 am by Bill Brohaugh
Additional thoughts on spelling bees, prompted by the recent Scripps National Spelling Bee, won this past Friday by Lafayette Indiana’s Sameer Mishra:
The very existence of English spelling bees is often employed as ammunition for spelling reform proponents. English exhibits and accepts incredible variation, and I needn’t give any other examples than this very paragraph, in which, for instance, English and variation employ a two-consonant combination and a consonant-vowel combination to communicate the sh sound. And the spelling of vary can very (or vice versa . . .).
The negatives of spelling reform are:
1) First, first, first and first–it won’t happen. I attribute the impossibility of sweeping change to such factors as pure inertia (witness the success of the U.S. trying to dictate a change to the metric system in the last millennium). Add disagreement over the best reform system–do we accept Ben Franklin’s view that we actually eliminate C, J, Q, W, X and Y from the alphabet? Or do we keep C and adopt the list of 300 respellings dictated by Teddy Roosevelt (who couldn’t even spell his own name phonetically), including, within the context of this discussion, the deliciously appropriate accurst and clipt.
What’s more, even the most successful revamp of spelling–Noah Webster’s work to make the States as linguistically independent from from the Mother Isle as we were politically–gave us little more than fewer instances of U (of which I am in favour), jail instead of gaol (wow! momentous, that, or should I say momentos), and the somewhat less logickal departure of the letter k from words like musick and magick.
2) Successful total spelling reform would render English texts–perhaps even any written today–virtually unreadable within a few generations. The difficulty in reading Chaucer in the original, for instance, lies almost as much in spelling changes as it does in changed meanings and obsolete vocabulary. That’s re-formation, not reformation.
3) Spelling reform would wash the language’s inherent recognition of its linguistic diversity. Change technique to tekneek and the French influence fades from view, to be replaced by a some Nordic cast (or Nordik kast, if you must). To reinforce the point, consider the Scandinavian word skosh–which, because everything we know about English is wrong–is not Scandinavian at all. It’s Japanese. And we see other such fading. How many of us see the Arabic lineage in that pesky high school mathematical study, al-jabr, spelled algebra in English?
Factor 3 is one reason I’m intrigued that 2008 Bee winner Sameer Mishra is aspiring (at 13 years old, yet) to become a neurosurgeon. With his impressive mastery of English spelling, he is already performing a figurative surgery–dissecting and reconstructing the very DNA of this language, vastly rich in origin, nuance and texture.
And, oh yeah, a fourth reason sweeping spelling change won’t happen:
4) Spelling reform would eliminate the televised broadcast of the National Spelling Bee, with its low production costs and high ad revenue. Leave it to a network labeled ABC to continue to govern how we manage our A-B-C’s.
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05.31.08
Posted in Chaucer, Middle English, Shakespeare, spelling at 7:00 am by Bill Brohaugh
Lafayette Indiana’s Sameer Mishra, just 13 years old, won the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee in D.C. on Friday, May 30, by spelling guerdon. Which is mostly the correct spelling. The word–meaning “reward, compensation,” primarily in a poetic sense these days–for most of its lifetime has used guerdon as the accepted spelling. Chaucer used it thusly; Shakespeare, as well.
Here’s Chaucer from “The Sompnour’s Tale”:
We have this worlde’s lust all in despight
Lazar and Dives lived diversely,
And diverse guerdon hadde they thereby.
Note: lust means “pleasure” here, and despight–despite its spelling, young Mr. Mishra–means “contempt,” and isn’t it a cool word? (A sompnour, by the further way, is a summoner.)
Of course, guerdon isn’t the only “official” spelling, as official as spelling can be over the history of English. Other recorded forms, my trusty OED.com tells me, include (in alphabetical order) gardon, gardoun, gardwyne, gerdon, gerdonne, gerdoun, geurdone, guardon, guardone, guerdoun, gwerddoun, gwerdon, gwerdone, not to mention the comely Scottish variation, gwairdoun.
I think the time has come for Xtreme Spelling Bee. To win, you must orthograph not only the current spelling, but also every variant spelling over the history of the language.
Well, never mind. The contest is already Xtreme. Here are the other words Mishra spelled correctly on the orthopath to winning: demitasse, quadrat, diener, hyssop, macédoine, basenji, numnah, chorion, nacarat, sinicize, hyphaeresis, taleggio, esclandre.
And what was Sameer Mishra’s guerdon guerdon? $35,000 in cash, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond, and reference books galore, perhaps three of which actually containing the word guerdon.
Shameless Plug Alert: For some personal thoughts on spelling bees and why I suck at them, read this sample from my recently published book, in odd coincidence titled Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. End Shameless Plug Alert.
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