01.13.09

No-no bots

Posted in acronyms, jargon, ugly words at 7:18 am by Bill Brohaugh

I already have a nomination for the American Dialect Society (ADS) 2009 Word of the Year, in the “Most Useless Word” category. This past year, ADS awarded that category to moofing (Mobile Out of OFfice-ing). My nomination is very much in line: nanobot.

Interesting word, and it’s been around for a time. It denotes microscopic robots—”wannabe proteins,” as Urbandictionary.com puts it—the stuff of science fiction. Nanobots injected in your body, for instance, could give you x-ray vision by deploying microlenses in your eyes, or recomb your hair without you having to reach all the way up there, or somesuch.

But that’s not the word I’m blasting. Nanobot is a well-constructed contraction of the prefix nano- (indicating something very small, a generalized use of its technical meaning of 10 to the minus ninth power, or one billionth, or at least I think, but then again, everything I know about math is wrong, too), and robot (a word itself introduced in science fiction: Karel Capek’s 1920 play, R.U.R.). I’m referring to the clumsy, difficult-to-remember, huh?-inducing acronym for Nearly Autonomous, Not in the Office, doing Business in their Own Time Staff. People who set their own hours while working at home. (Or PWSTOHWWAH, if you will.)

Empowered by their mobile devices and remote access to the corporate network, nanobots put in long hours, sometimes seven days a week—just not at their desks.

So write David Pauleen and Brian Harmer in Away From the Desk . . . Always,” in MIT Sloan Review

A Wall Street Journal Report podcast discusses (a bit drily, I must advise) how to evaluate and motivate this breed of out-of-office employee. I have one motivational tip: don’t refer to such employees with a word meaning “ultra-tiny, invisible robot.” Doesn’t look good on a business card.

Besides, wouldn’t Nearly Autonomous, Not in the Office, doing Business in their Own Time Staff lead to nanitodbitot? And, now that I think about it, wouldn’t Mobile Out of Office lead to mooo?

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01.12.09

Bailstorming

Posted in acronyms, euphemisms, future of the language, ugly words at 7:33 am by Bill Brohaugh

When the American Dialect Society (ADS) announced bailout as the organization’s Word of the Year (WOTY) 2008 last Friday, did a conference-roomful of corporate execs race up to the stage to accept the honor the way teams of producers sometimes scramble en masse to the presenter at the Oscars or the Tonys? Or were they tired from doing so when they accepted bailout’s word-of-the-year nod from Merriam-Webster?

It’s a pretty lackluster word of the year, this bailout. And even the American Dialect Society recognizes it. When announcing the results of ADS voting, Grant Barrett, chair of the ADS New Words Committee and co-host of public radio’s A Way with Words, said: “You’d think a room full of pointy-headed intellectuals could come up with something more exciting.”

Though it’s not a glitzy word, it was indeed important in its use, and in the frequency of its use, in 2008. And bailout beat out a number of interesting nominees (phrases are considered, as well). Some that particularly caught my eye (and the definition listed in the recent ADS WOTY press release):

• recombobulation area: An area at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee in which passengers that have just passed through security screening can get their clothes and belongings back in order.
• long photo: A video of 90 seconds or less. Used by the photo-sharing web site Flickr.
• thought showers: Coined by a British city council because the synonym “brainstorming” was said to be offensive to epileptics.

Just who thought-showered that latter gem?

Recombobulation area took first place in the ADS “Most Creative” category. Other category winners (again, with notes from the ADS release, and snarks in parentheses from yours truly):

• Most Useful Barack Obama: Both names as combining forms. (Barack Obama has found that phrase useful for many years now.)
• Most Unnecessary: moofing: From “mobile out of office,” meaning working on the go with a laptop and cell phone. Created by a PR firm. (In fact, most such acronums are proving themselves increasingly unnecessary and unused, waning from the heyday of yuppie and nimby. More on that tomorrow.)
• Most Outrageous: terrorist fist jab: A knuckle-to-knuckle fist bump, or “dap,” traditionally performed between two black people as a sign of friendship, celebration or agreement. It was called the “terrorist fist jab” by the newscaster E. D. Hill, formerly of Fox News.
• Most Euphemistic: scooping technician: A person whose job it is to pick up dog poop. (Seems a pretty lame selection after we’ve endured sanitation engineer for garbageman lo these many decades.)
• Most Likely to Succeed: shovel-ready: Used to describe infrastructure projects that can be started quickly when funds become available. (I disagree. You won’t hear it used more than three times in 2010, if that. Speaking of shovels, the phrase will be grave-ready once projects are underway.)
• Least Likely to Succeed: PUMA: An acronym for Party Unity My Ass, used by Democrats who were disaffected after Hillary Clinton failed to secure a sufficient number of delegates. It was later said to stand for Party Unity Means Action. (And soon to stand for Pretty Ugly Manipulative Acronym.)
• New Category: Election-related Words: maverick: A person who is beholden to no one. Widely used by the Republican Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates, John McCain and Sarah Palin. Also in the adjectival form mavericky, used by Tina Fey portraying Palin on Saturday Night Live. (I put it in a different “new category”: Most Abused Word, and select it as the winner.)

Overall, I stick with my previous choice for 2008 word of the year: susurration, because nobody used it this year past year, and they should have. It’s a beautiful word, one to be spoken quietly in the middle of thought showers.

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01.10.09

Plumb and Dumber

Posted in assorted weird crap, verbal stupidity at 6:45 pm by Bill Brohaugh

Radio air personality Gary Burbank often referred to himself as a pronounsker—of course the reference was tongue-in-cheek (as an aside, “tongue-in-cheek” is good attitudinal form but bad physical form for a radio comedian).

Gary used the word so often that when I wrote comedy bits for him, I typed “Pronounsker:” to introduce the lines to be spoken by an announcer in, say, a fake commercial or in a wildly concocted routine about a blue-collar worker most familiar with clogged drain traps suddenly tapped as a journalist to report on the sadly enduring Mideast conflict. After a time, I embellished the word pronounsker, whimsically ballooning it to Pronounskiator at one point, and then taking it even ridiculously further to Pronounskiationist.

Oh, wait, I didn’t concoct the above-mentioned routine about drain-trap man, wildly or otherwise. History concocted it.

Drain-trap man is the McCain-campaign-annointed Joe the Plumber, who was recently hired by some website or another to cover the recent turmoil in the Gaza Strip. When asked by Fox Gnus about how he had prepared for the assignment, Joe said that one of his biggest challenges was to learn how to pronounciate the names related to the conflict.

Pronounciate? Maybe Gary and I wildly concocted Joe the Plumber after all. And if we didn’t, at least we created Joe the Plumbinatiationizerist Enunskiationizingmeistererer.

We want royalties.

And check out Jon Stewart’s coverage.

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01.02.09

WOTYwoot

Posted in jargon, language change, neology, wordplay at 7:37 am by Bill Brohaugh

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:

12.30.08

Democrecy

Posted in English origins, Latin sources, persnickitors, spelling at 9:25 am by Bill Brohaugh

Language is one of the ultimate manifestations of democratic action. I can declare that the word blibbelfrigdibble means “the tendency to stop a word in the middl,” and the word takes meaning if others agree with that definition. I could spell that word as ieou7aer, and pronounce it blibbelfrigdibble, and if those I communicate with agree, then that’s how it’s spelled. Sure, arguments will ensue. “My English teacher taught me that it’s O before 7, except after a dipthong!—you descriptivist, you!” But in the history of the language, democracy wins out.

Now comes an interesting exercise both in language and in democracy, which reader Jeff Rasmussen kindly alerted me to. You see, in the formal democratic world, one places a proposed change before the public by circulating a petition. If enough people sign, then onto the ballot the proposal goes, and we vote. If people want to change the spelling of stationery (the writing paraphernalia) to stationary, they sign a petition and we vote. Well, we don’t vote, other than by our usage. But now we can sign a petition.

If you agree that stationary should become the proper spelling of both the paper goods and the adjective communicating motionlessness, then hop on over to iPetitions and support it with your John Hancock and your JohnHancock@JohnHancock.opining address. The petitioners explain:

The word “stationery” however was originally spelled with an “a” in English. It derived from the fact that such products were sold in “stationary” shops and not from travelling peddlers. Both spelling derive from the Latin stationarius defined as a place where something is located.

I know that the same folks who complain that it’s O before 7 except after a dipthong will shout that the difference in spelling communicates the difference in meaning, which is often a valid reason to discreetly retain discrete spellings. On the other hand, in this case one word is an adjective and the other a noun, so context will always clarify more quickly than spelling. And the truly technical folk will argue that stationery perhaps didn’t evolve directly from stationarious (as in the wares of a stationary store), but with lineage once removed—in that the person operating from a stationary location known as a station was a stationer, and therefore the adjective “stationery wares,” which know is known as stationery.

Doesn’t matter. One is a noun even though it was once an adjective, and the other remains an adjective. We could spell either or both as ieou7aer and still know what they mean.

Even so, on this particular ballot, I believe I shall take the reactionary stance and side with those who want to maintain the current spelling. Or would that be the reactionery stance?

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12.29.08

Borderline redundancy

Posted in assorted weird crap, redundancy, verbal indiscretions, wordiness, writing craft at 7:46 am by Bill Brohaugh

Today’s visit to the land of Redundanstan:

Pakistan told India on Saturday [12/27/2008] it [Pakistan] did not want war and was committed to fighting terrorism — a move apparently aimed at reducing tensions after Pakistan moved troops toward their shared border.

I’m thankful for the specificity of the last two words there, because so many countries have unshared borders. Maybe the writer thought that the Pakistanis were playing “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon Geography.” Pakistan has a border with Afghanistan, which has a border with HardyOliverandLaurelStan, who starred in Sons of the Desert, which is often misspelled as dessert, which is often served at Thanksgiving, a celebration at which families usually serve turkey, a country that has a city named Isparta, which is the place that first grew organic iPods, which were subsequently made in China, which has a border (likely shared) with India.

Glad we cleared that up.

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12.28.08

I don’t want to know how people bookmark these things

Posted in Shakespeare, assorted weird crap at 11:05 am by Bill Brohaugh

Another year down, and another year without getting a tattoo. I’m aiming for a perfect record in this regard—an unblemished record, if you will. No body art, no body instructions, no body sight gags. No body mottos. No body quips. No body short stories.

I’m not kidding about the last one. A few years back, writer Shelley Jackson set out to inscribe a 2,095-word short story not on the head of a pin but on a head. A few heads. Human heads. 2,095 heads, by tattooing one word of the story on each one. I’ve been staring at this paragraph for about 20 minutes now, trying to resist the “writer’s blockhead” pun, but now that I’ve succumbed to it, let’s move on.

I ran across this project when I recently spotted a web photo slideshow displaying celebrity tattoos, and feeling overwhelmed by popular culture deprivation, I paged through idly. And stopped when I spotted Megan Fox. Not for the reason you suspect (well, not only for the reason you suspect), but because of the Shakespeare misquote she showed off: “We will all laugh at gilded butterflies” (actual quote from King Lear: “we’ll live,/ And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh/ At gilded butterflies”).

This literary skin game, ol’ untattooed me came to learn on further investigation (of literary tattoos, not of Megan Fox), is relatively popular and considerably well-chronicled. Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos brings examples of textual and illustrative body decoration based on books, poetry, songs, and other arts (ranging from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to To Kill a Mockingbird). Yuppie Punk has similar range, with a concentration on book illustrations (ranging from, yup, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to Curious George to a portrait of William Faulkner). U.K.’s Guardian reports on the practice, using Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man as a theme—made even more appropriate when you spot one of the tattoos at Yuppie Punk: The original cover art of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

The idea of a Bradbury tat is the closest I’ll come to actually considering permanent body alteration, as Bradbury is one of two writers whose work deeply motivated my love of writing (the other is Thornton Wilder, but in this context, the motivation has no connection to tattoos on The Skin of Our Teeth). But I’ll remain tattoo-free, especially in the light of Shirley Dent’s thoughts in the Guardian:

What we seek to do when we cut literature into our flesh is to make something metaphysical physical. We take tattooed literature into ourselves in the most superficial of ways, inscribing rather than imbibing its significance. Put another way, lit tats really are only skin deep, vainglorious and shallow all at once.

To paraphrase, you can’t judge a book by its cover, and neither can you judge a book by who it covers.

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12.27.08

Here we grow again

Posted in grammar, language change, myths and misconceptions, verbing, word history at 10:10 am by Bill Brohaugh

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.

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12.25.08

Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!

Posted in onomatopoeia, word history, writing craft at 8:49 am by Bill Brohaugh

“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.

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12.24.08

Ha! Bumhug!

Posted in myths and misconceptions, persnickitors, verbing, wordiness, writing craft at 8:07 am by Bill Brohaugh

On this glorious eve, I’m going to play the Ghost of Christmas Past to the Scrooges who would penuriously deny us the gift of gifting.

I’m talking about the the Scroogely denial of English’s gifted ability to bestow life to nouns, creating verbs in the process. Gift-noun begats gift-verb begats whining from the persnickitorial language Scrooges, who have real misgiftings about such conversion.

Do these people challenge the word gifted as applied, for instance, to prodigies? Should those endowed with special abilities instead be givended? Or something? Should the relay-baton present be regifted or regave? In each case, I believe I’ll stick with the former.

The American Heritage Book of English Usage notes:

Unfortunately, the use of gift as a verb in Modern English is tainted by its association with the language of advertising and publicity (as in Gift her with this copper warming plate).

Fair enough, particularly when commercialism has tainted the strings-attached noun gift so often that the phrase “free gift” is an almost required redundancy. But the real tragedy of the above example is the possibility of someone thinking a copper warming plate might be a romantic gift.

The language Scrooges are a bit more pointed than American Heritage. For example: “Using gift as a verb is a sign of stupidity, laziness, and verbal sloppiness.” And denying its use as a verb is a sign of not just persnickitorial intolerance but also of denying a basic writing principle: The right word is the right word. Certainly, using the lightning-rod gift when give is the right word is frown-upon-able. “Don’t gift in! I’ll gift you a call later!” But there are instances when gift, with its almost legal nuance, can be a more precise and powerful word than its suggested synonyms. Consider:

• Smith will gift the deed to the university. Formal, with implications of recorded transactions and tax benefits.
• Smith will give the deed to the university. “Here ya are. Don’t need it anymore.”
• Smith will bestow the deed to (upon?) the university. With puffed-up chest and “Pomp and Circumstance” playing in the background.
• Smith will bequeathe the deed to the university. Hinting of magnanimity, but without quite the formality of the first instance.
• Smith will donate the deed to the university. Comments similar to that of bequeathe.
• Smith will make a gift of the deed to the university. Only if Smith is trying to compensate for failing the writing course that instructed students to avoid passive, wordy and, yes, verbally sloppy phrasings.

And so this Ghost of Christmas Past turns back a page or two to quote not Dickens but Henry Fielding in Tom Jones, A Foundling (Book 1, Chapter 5): “As this is one of those deep observations which very few readers can be supposed capable of making themselves, I have thought proper to lend them my assistance; but this is a favour rarely to be expected in the course of my work. Indeed, I shall seldom or never so indulge him, unless in such instances as this, where nothing but the inspiration with which we writers are gifted, can possibly enable any one to make the discovery.”

Sure, there are plenty of ways to abuse gift. But sometimes, like the noun at Christmas, it’s best to accept it with grace and gratitude.

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