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.
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 don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoon of himself with his stockings. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”
He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now standing there: perfectly winded.
“There’s the saucepan that the gruel was in!” cried Scrooge, starting off again, and frisking round the fireplace. “There’s the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered. There’s the corner where the Ghost of Christmas Present, sat. There’s the window where I saw the wandering Spirits. It’s all right, it’s all true, it all happened. Ha ha ha!”
Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs.
“I don’t know what day of the month it is,” said Scrooge. “I don’t know how long I’ve been among the Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop! Hallo here!”
He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer; ding, dong, bell! Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!
Celebrate the season, and celebrate the joy of Dickens’s wording in A Christmas Carol: Laocoon, a legendary Trojan priest famously depicted (unclad) in a Vatican statue; frisk in a largely abandoned verb use; sentences jamming onomatopoeia against nouns, and boisterous boisterous boisterous repetition.
“A merry Christmas to you.” And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.
Whoop! Hallo! Whoop! May blithe sounds ring in your ears this day, and all days.
I continue with my recent name dalliance today, and in doing so, I present an “old” joke. The joke itself is not old (I wrote the damn thing and it appears in my Everything You Know About English Is Wrong—name sound familiar?), but the misconceptions involved in the joke indeed have a bit of dust on them. Actually, I’m pretending to make a point about word histories while hoping that one of the major media companies will see the following as a charming conglomeration of historical characters providing the stuff of an animated movie or at the very least a graphic novel). With such intent in mind, I gather a cast of characters into the promised joke:
An inventor, a Philadelphia entrepreneur, a doctor, and a Civil War general walk into a bar.
The barkeep says, “What can I get you gentlemen?”
“I’d like some of me,” says the Philadelphia entrepreneur.
The general nods. “One of me, as well. Two if you know where I might find me.”
“Good idea,” agrees the doctor. “And since I’ll be accompanying the good general, I’d like to purchase a couple of me, as well.”
The bartender says, “What the hell are you guys talking about?”
“Oh, never mind,” huffs the entrepreneur. “Just give me some rotgut whiskey.”
The general says, “Know where I can find a prostitute?”
“And do you sell prophylactics here?” says the doctor.
The bartender is appalled. “We don’t have any of those things here, gentlemen!”
“None at all?” the inventor says finally. He angrily spits out, “Me!”
The bartender is agitated by now. “Just who do you guys think you are, anyway?”
Says the entrepreneur: “I’m Philadelphia distiller E.C. Booz.”
The military man stiffly says, “I am Union General Joseph Hooker.”
Says the doctor, “Dr. Condom here.”
When the bartender insists that no me’s are available at his establishment, the inventor snaps again, “Oh me!”
The bartender looks at the inventor. “’Me!’? Don’t tell me . . . you’re the inventor of the Valveless Water Waste Preventer.”
“Thomas Crapper at your service!”
That little tale is as fictional as the etymologies involving the characters’ names. Supposedly, these mostly real persons lent their names to the items they were seeking in the bar. However, we knew of booze long before the coincidentally (and perhaps fortuitously intentionally) named whiskey distiller E.C. Booz sold hooch in the cabin-shaped bottles of the early and mid 1800s. There’s no evidence of a Dr. Condom, though the device is often said to be named after said 17th- or 18th-Century physician. Prostitutes were called hookers before the army of loose-moraled General Hooker was accompanied by concubine camp followers, and the word crap was in use before Mr. Crapper developed a patent for a toilet flushing device in 1882.
Now, my first draft of this story was quite a bit bawdier, but I bowdlerized it to make it more suitable for a family audience, employing the process that was indeed named after a real person, Thomas Bowdler, famous for his editing Shakespeare into G-rated productions in The Family Shakespeare in 1818 (“To G or to PG—that is the question”). Yes, a number of words result from surnames of persons both real and otherwise.
Keep this rule in mind: If the person’s name makes you snicker, it’s unlikely that the name was the source of our present word. If the supposed source person’s name is boring, the etymology is more likely to be correct: Mr. Bowdler (bowdlerize); the Speverend Rooner—er, the Reverend William Spooner (spoonerism, from around the turn of the 20th Century); the fictional Mrs. Malaprop (malapropism from an 1830 play); Union General Ambrose Everett Burnside (burnsides, and later sideburns in a delightful syllable swap, from the 1800s); Nicolas Chauvin (chauvinism, from the mid 1800s); Thomas Derrick (derrick, because his name became associated with his tool, the gallows); Capt. Charles Cunningham Boycott (self-explanatory, from around 1880); Capt. Charles Lynch (self-explanatory, from the early 1800s)*; Louis Pasteur (pasteurize, late 1800s); Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry (gerrymander, early 1800s); James Thomas Brudenell (the Earl of Cardigan, who likely was not wearing a sweater while he led the legendary Charge of the Light Brigade, but still got one named after his stomping grounds).
Two challenges to the “boring” rule, however, are the shepherd hero of a 16th-Century poem who gave us the name of something the Civil War general sought to prevent with the device of the good doctor (the poem being “Syphilis, sive morbus Gallicus”), and the real-life Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, who advocated use of one of the garments the Civil War general would seek to invade—the bloomer dress, or bloomers.
* If you want your name to become an active word in the English Language, it apparently helps if you change your first name to “Capt. Charles.”
Rachel Maddow on Friday night (11/21/08) gave some unintended linguistic truth to her regular “Ms. Information” segment title with coverage of a project called The Atlas of True Names. Said atlas labels countries, regions and cities not with their current names but with what the names supposedly mean. Much of the atlas’s labelings are true; many of them are misinformed. For instance, Maddow swallowed whole the atlas’s claim about the origin of Yucatan:
Apparently Spanish explorers asked, “What’s the name of this region?” And the local Mayans responded by saying, “Yuk ak atan,” which means, “I don’t understand.” And so the Spanish named the place Yucatan. They named the place “I Don’t Understand”! If ever there were a more perfect summary of colonialism, I do not know of it.
Well, Rachel still does not know of it. On hearing this claim, my etymological Spidey-sense began tingling, because the tale has bullshitternet notymology written (and mapped) all over it. It sounded like a number of nonsense derivations I mock in Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. Everything you know about cartography is wrong, too.
There are a number of theories of how Yucatan took its name, and Language Log, quick to the fore, discusses them and other fallacies and misinterpretations perpetrated by The Atlas of True Names. The Yuca-yarn is very much in the spirit of other canards as the kangaroo taking its name from, again, natives responding “I don’t understand” to a naming question. The logical fallacy is that such explanations imply that the one and only time explorers heard “I don’t understand” as a response was when asking one specific question. How were all the other questions answered?
I’m fascinated by one “I don’t know” etymological response that likely is kinda-sorta true, however. At Language Log, Benjamin Zimmer writes:
Similarly, the story that the name of the Alaskan town of Nome comes from a phrase meaning “I don’t know” (ki-no-me) goes back to 1905 at least. A 1901 letter by George Davidson (recently noted here by Jon Weinberg) provides another popular theory, that the map notation ? Name was misread as C. Nome (for Cape Nome). (The Nome Convention and Visitor Bureau accepts this derivation.)
Some native Alaskan likely did not say “I don’t know,” but some cartographer likely did admit he/she didn’t know by writing “? Name.” Either way, all dunnos lead to Nome.
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.
Today’s instruction: Always use fail as a verb! A thing that fails is a failure!
Always use it as a verb, Mr. Brohaugh?
Yes. Without fail! . . . oops.
I bring this up because of Christopher Beam’s recent Slate coverage of the increasing use of fail as a noun (which I discovered by way of Editrix alert). I suggest that Slate’s shot at the noun was not a complete succeed. For one, modern use of the noun is slangish and a bit distracting, but I’m not sure it’s precisely the “Internet meme” that Slate would have it. Fail as a noun was first recorded near the turn of the 13th century. Chaucer used it, as did Shakespeare and Swift. It has been dubbed “obsolete” by the Oxford English Dictionary, with the exception of the fossil phrase, “without fail.”
Is the modern use a revival, or a new formation? Here’s an excerpt from Slate:
Most Internet memes have the lifespan of fruit flies. But there’s evidence to suggest fail is here to stay. For one thing, it’s easier to say than failure. (Need for brevity might explain why, in Webspeak, the opposite of fail is not success but win.) And there’s a proud tradition in English of chopping off the endings of words for convenience.
Yes, but there are other proud neological traditions, as well, such as verb-to-noun conversion? Both the original noun and the original verb use appear about the same time, both brought in from Old French; one was not—in English, at least—a conversion of the other. In the case of the modern use, I suspect it’s conversion and not shortening, just as the noun convert was converted from the verb convert. Particularly in the light that first recorded use of failure comes just under 350 years after fail the noun.
By the way, Slate points to a good blog recording fails: FAILblog, but fails to note its kin, the English FAIL Blog.
And the title of this piece? Just another excuse to honor Paul Newman:
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.)
As an editor and a writing instructor, I’m very much a fan of wordplay—dancing with words, cavorting with them, making them jump, allowing them to commingle, nestle in on one another, breed neologically. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine!
Sounds a bit racy, doesn’t it? I’ll arch my eyebrows a bit, and then say that I’m speaking of my long-time advice to writers to take every opportunity become intimate with words. If you spot a word you don’t know, look it up in the dictionary. But do not stop at reading the meaning; immerse yourself in the etymology, the construction, the core syllables. Then get promiscuous. Covet thy verbal neighbor’s spouses. Dally with the surrounding words—common meanings? Common ancestry? A little incestuous?
It is with such attitude that I encourage you to visit a blog I recently discovered because the blogger was kind enough to stop by here and post: Word Porn: Your Home for Language Lust. This is one of the most energetic, interesting and challenging vocabulary sites I’ve encountered. With regularity, your gracious wordpornster host Amy introduces you to an unusual but fascinating word, pokes at it, mocks it gently, defines it, then uses it in a complete sentence, with artistry and a wink. And then challenges you to perform with the word as well, big guy.
I’ve long been a proponent of wordplay to develop vocabulary, language and writing skills. Now I can point you to something perhaps even better: word foreplay.
—name sound familiar?), but the misconceptions involved in the joke indeed have a bit of dust on them. Actually, I’m pretending to make a point about word histories while hoping that one of the major media companies will see the following as a charming conglomeration of historical characters providing the stuff of an animated movie or at the very least a graphic novel). With such intent in mind, I gather a cast of characters into the promised joke: 
and 
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