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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11.21.08
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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11.17.08
Posted in English origins, French sources, Italian sources, eponyms, unfortunate English at 8:07 am by Bill Brohaugh
OK, we’ve been on a name kick the past few days. Let’s continue with that theme for a bit, with some unfortunate name origins that didn’t make it into my Unfortunate English: The Gloomy Truth Behind the Words You Use.
I’m going to first indirectly pick on my friend JohnnyB, who is a bit zany and has himself taken to the stage to perform comedy (all this will tie together—I promise). Johnny’s very name (without the B) is implicit in zaniness, because Johns of the world, you have further reason to take offense.
First there’s that slang for “one who partakes in prostitutes” slang. Then there’s that euphemism for toilet. And now, another offense, one not so obvious. A long time ago, John was portrayed as a clown. He was zany. Literally.
The word zany traces back (through Middle French) to an Italian theatre form called “Commedia dell’ arte,” a partially improvised farce using broad stock characters wearing masks. Among the form’s many stock characters (blowhard, geezer, girl-chaser, lovers, harlequin) is the wacky, clownish servant. Zanni. Clownish Zanni. Zany Zanni. And Zanni is a regional familiar version of Giovanni . . . or John.
By the early 1600s the word came to adjective use, first meaning “ridiculous” and then taking on the meaning of “crazy, outlandish.”
So when you call someone zany, you are invoking the insulting portrayal of that John Fool, though anyone named John would have to be really zany to actually worry about it.
(Commedia dell’ arte also gave us the name of piece of clothing generally worn by Johns, zany or otherwise, but that’s a musing for another day.)
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09.21.08
Posted in English origins, French sources, Spanish sources, foreign sources (general), unfortunate English at 9:12 am by Bill Brohaugh
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.
I propose that the traditional feast for TLAPD involves initials of a sort itself: BBQ. Here’s why, in the vein of my Unfortunate English: The Gloomy Truth Behind the Words You Use:
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.
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08.18.08
Posted in unfortunate English, word history, wordplay at 6:54 am by Bill Brohaugh
File under “A spoonful of sugar helps the etymology go down . . .”
Who would have thought that candy could be so educational? Our audiovisual aid today:
Tart in its various forms has various origins:
- The sweet: as in the dessert tart, coming to English in the 1200s from French.
- The tart: as in the adjective tart, meaning “sharp, piquant,” originating from an Old English word teart, with intense meanings of pain and suffering
- The sweet and tart: as in the pejorative tart applied to prostitutes, promiscuous women and occasionally men. This version of the word was sweet in that it was used in a positive sense when it appeared around the mid 1800s; it took pejorative connotations not long after.
So where does the candy come in? SweeTarts is a cleverly effective name in that it describes the confection’s sweet/sour flavors while recalling the positive word sweetheart. Significant to the word lovers among us is the fact that it almost certainly displays in its SweeTart/sweetheart pun the true origin of the once-nice now-pejorative noun tart. No, not the spicy nature of a type of woman. The heart of your sweetheart.
We’re not precisely sure how the word originated, but the two most likely explanations involve either a shortening of sweetheart or a shortening of jam-tart, a Cockney rhyming slang version of sweetheart.
Now class, your assignment includes reading four bags of M&Ms to prep for both spelling and math class next week.
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08.10.08
Posted in Latin sources, Norse sources, Old English, unfortunate English, word history at 3:32 pm by Bill Brohaugh
A few days back, I wrote about how dilettante word historians sometimes consciously or unconsciously dissect a word and “predict” its past based on the entrails revealed in the dissection. Hack apart greyhound (the word! the word!) with Sweeney-Todd-barber precision, and you might think you find lineage tracing back to fur color, though the DNA actually traces back to an Old Norse word, griey, with a completely different meaning. A greyhound is ultimately not a gray dog, but a female hound.
Technically, divination by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals (rarely greyhounds in the real world, I might add) is known as extispicy, a word I’d not encountered until recently. The discovery allowed me to delightedly add a definition to my English Delusionary: Extispic Etymology, or “predicting a word’s history by examining its clumsy vivisection.”
On the other hand, allow me to reveal a word history based on more-precise physical vivisection, in this an entry from my book Unfortunate English:
It’s a scene worthy of Hannibal Lechter or Jeffrey Daehmer or your favorite cannibal of choice. A human being is slashed open, revealing intestines and other entrails. It’s bloody, it’s gory, it’s . . . kind of like visiting the meat counter of the grocery store, with its tasty display of neatly packaged sausages.
At the time of this image and the verbal imagery that resulted, there weren’t any grocery stores as we know them, of course. The image may very well have occurred on a field of battle, where someone inclined to odd poetry viewed the insides of the eviscerated, and saw . . . sausages. (Perhaps the poetry wasn’t that odd, in that sausages are meats stuffed into casings—and the original casings were animal intestines.) In Latin, the word for small intestine was a diminutive of the word for sausage.
We use that diminutive word today, by the way, in a couple of forms. The Latin word was botulus, which was taken into Old French as boel, and into Middle English as bouel, what you and I now spell bowel. (The other form is botulism, the medical term adapted from German, describing not an affliction of the bowel as one might be prone to guess, but instead a type of food poisoning often associated with ill-prepared processed foods—originally and specifically, sausages.)
The new science of Extispic Etymology at its finest!
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08.06.08
Posted in Latin sources, myths and misconceptions, unfortunate English, word history at 6:55 am by Bill Brohaugh
When JohnnyB stuck his bloggish tongue in his cheek the other day and recommended that one of his readers check out “Brohaugh’s pedantic language stuff blog,” I commented, “Doesn’t pedantic mean ‘foot antics’?”
The source of that joke is what I call “microparsing”: dissecting a word and making assumptions about the entrails so discovered, in this case with humorous intent. This form of etymological analysis is often as reliable as extispicy (divination by examining entrails). Extispic etymology leads to assumptions and claims that the “man-” in manufacture is a male human (when it derives from a Latin root meaning “hand”) or that triage connotes “three” (when “tri-” comes from a root meaning “to cull”).
In contrast, some words post their origins right on their foreheads—no surgery needed—and those origins go unnoticed. I was surprised recently when a friend paused, then proclaimed “I didn’t know that” in something approaching wonderment after I mentioned that fabulous means “in the nature of a fable.” We see the miracle in miraculous, but apparently have lost the fable in fabulous.
Another example, in the spirit of foot-antical language stuff: It’s obvious, their youth, when you see pictures of soldiers who have died in action. It’s not so obvious, their youth, when you see the word infantry.
But it should be obvious. It’s staring you right in the face.
The word infantry arrived in English in its present meaning after a long journey (on foot, perhaps), through French, Spanish and Italian, and ultimately from Latin infant-—”youth.” The infant in the word infantry is not a literal baby, but a figurative babe. The infantry were the less trained, usually the younger. They were the ground forces, smaller than the cavalry. (They were the lads, marching off to war. And there, too, we see youth as cannon fodder: Lads, in the first use of the word before they were servant males of “low birth” and before they were young men, were footsoldiers. These lads could aspire to becoming cadets, one supposes, where they could go from being grunts to grunt-workers, toting the generals’ golf clubs on foot . . . and becoming the word we know today as caddies.)
And thus concludes today’s peripatetic pedantry.
(But before I go: Doesn’t extispicy sound like a way to order food at a road kill restaurant? “I’ll have my racoon brains spicy and my possum guts extispicy!”)
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07.18.08
Posted in Latin sources, unfortunate English, word history at 5:49 am by Bill Brohaugh
Today’s Unfortunate English moment, not captured in the original book: If employers are so concerned about people sleeping on the job, why do they put them in cubicles?
The first meaning of cubicle, from around the late 15th century, was . . . (yawwwn—excuse me) . . . (maybe I should get some coffee—just a second) . . . anyway, the first meaning of cubicle, from Latin, is “bedchamber,” and if I hadn’t seen that etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary, I’d wonder if the “bedchamber” origin weren’t perhaps concocted by the guy responsible for those Penthouse letters (you know there has to be only one).
So if you want your employees to stay focused, give them offices. But don’t expect them to be happy about it. I return to the the OED, and its definition of an early but now obsolete use of the word office: “The function or action of defecating or urinating; excretion; an instance of this.” At least such meanings might save you the bother of issuing keys to the executive washrooms.
And if I’ve bored you—well, your cubicle awaits.
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07.16.08
Posted in Greek sources, euphemisms, language change, unfortunate English, word history at 6:55 am by Bill Brohaugh
Too many people would agree that my posting this blog was a catastrophe.
Now, such catastrophic results could be could be good, and they could be bad, in that catastrophe began as a neutral word and now has negative meanings. This is quite the opposite of the words surveyed in Unfortunate English; those words were once pretty disgusting, but have risen to positive or neutral use. For instance, drat! sounds like such a soft interjection, until you discover that it is a contraction of “God rot you!”
A catastrophe in Greek theatre was the event that led to the conclusion. A loose theatrical/literary synonym for that usage is denouement. Now, much of Greek theatre isn’t exactly happy-go-lucky. Oedipus Rex, for example, is not a rollicking slapstick, and it has led to fewer Broadway musical comedies than, say, even the tale of Sweeney Todd. So you see how catastrophes got a bad name (“Daddy’s dead? And that’s Mommy naked under my sheets?! Where’s Sondheim when you need him?”).
The point is that my posting this blog entry was a catastrophe in that completion was the event that led to the result: the words now appearing on your screen and hopefully not straining your eyes too much. Now, if you’re reading this and agreeing with the modern sense of catastrophe, I thank you for your kind attention and note that the back button is likely on your upper left. If, however, I have convinced you of the innocence of catastrophe and the guilt of drat, maybe you’ll allow me to subject you to additional catastrophes another day.
And if you don’t return—well, then, Drat!
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07.08.08
Posted in grammar, language change, myths and misconceptions, persnickitors, unfortunate English, writing craft at 12:12 pm by Bill Brohaugh
Persnickitors would have it that you might incur a pox upon your lineage should you use the word and (or but or because or . . . yes, or) to begin a sentence. Rhythm be damned. Meaning be damned. Flow of ideas be damned. Rules are rules! And if you go swimming within an hour after beginning a sentence with a conjunction, or you’ll get cramps!
That’s why I’m pleased when I encounter reason regarding the language, and, in the case of today’s post, reason refuting the conjunction superstition. Michelle at the Write or Wrong blog provides insight into the intent of the conjunction guideline, and guideline it is, and no more.
Before adding a comment to Michelle’s post, I zipped over the the Oxford English Dictionary online to double-check the definition of conjunction. In the grammatical sense, quoth the OED, conjunction means “One of the Parts of Speech; an uninflected word used to connect clauses or sentences, or to co-ordinate words in the same clause.” (Emphasis added.)
But (oops) because (oops) I love words, I lingered on the OED’s other definitions of conjunction—to the delight of the Unfortunate English author in me. The earliest meaning of conjunction in English was generic “joining.” This led to a couple of obsolete figurative meanings of joining first recorded in the 1500s, including “marriage” and “copulation.”
So, let’s amend the “rule”: Don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction . . unless you’re writing porn.
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