Excuse me while I crawl into Jonathan Swiftian “infusion of Enthusiastick jargon” depression mode. Here’s a brief quote from an online chat I was privvy to recently. Among the noncapitalization, the elipses longer than the Panama Canal, the fact that someone thinks Deep Space Nine is entertaining, and the misspelling, note the irony of the quickly following self-correction (which was apparently the subject of some thought) contrasted with the beginning of the original post.
DisguisedName: lol im watching the funniest episode of deep space 9 ever lol…………..ferengi thinking they are commandoes DisguisedName: commando’s
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.
I grew up in a town whose most famous native son is Frank King, creator of the Gasoline Alley comic strip (premiered 1918) once common in the Sunday comic pages. Growing up, I knew the comics section of the Sunday newspaper as the “Sunday funnies.” Certainly people in other regions called it that, too. Not that I cared, back when. As a youngster in moderately rural Wisconsin (Tomah, specifically, population 5,460 at the time), I didn’t know and therefore didn’t care that terminology might differ in other regions—I was then oblivious to such concepts as terminology and regions.
Until just recently, I had no idea that—oof-dah!—such colloquialisms as “Sunday funnies” might represent linguistics on the cusp (and maybe even at the lip of the eave trough, what some of you might know as a “rain gutter”) of language change.
Wisconsin lies at the edge of many of the most significant changes currently underway in American English. Learn more about what makes Wisconsin English remarkably distinctive and worth studying!
What? Drinking fountains the world over are now being called “bubblers“!? Maybe. Maybe not. The quote is from the Wisconsin Englishes website, where some serious stuff is going on, what-hey?:
Two major vowel changes in the US meet in Wisconsin. The eastward change is where the words caught and cot are pronounced essentially the same. The westward change is where vowels rotate in what is called the Northern Cities Shift ( bit > bet > butt > bought > baht > bat; six > sex > sucks > Saux’s > socks > sax ).
Doncha know! Allow me a juvenile giggle over the “six > sex > sucks > Saux’s > socks > sax” progression. As a native Wisconsinite, this progression makes me wonder about what really goes on in Sauk City. Methinks that sax/socksophones are not involved.
I love this site, because it takes a marvelous Everything You Know About English Is Wrong “I’m-serious-but-I-don’t-take-it-with-funereal-solemnity” attitude.
Bottom line, because it’s Sunday and we all need an injection of funnies, I’ll leave you with something I rarely promulgate (a word seldom used in the comics/funnies/funny papers)—an internet list. In the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy (with some of the verbal things prioritized), “You might be from rural Wisconsin if . . .”
You know that “combine” is a noun.
You can make sense of “upnort” and “batree”.
Pop is the only name for soda.
You know that “creek” rhymes with “pick”.
You hear someone use the word “oof-dah” and you don’t break into uncontrollable laughter.
You know what knee-high by the Fourth of July means.
You know how to polka, but never tried it sober…
You know it is traditional for the bride and groom to go bar hopping between the reception and wedding dance.
You know the difference between “Green” and “Red” farm machinery, and would fight with your friends on the playground over which was better! [Brohaugh notes: I grew up with Red, but much prefer Green.]
You buy Christmas presents at Fleet Farm.
You spent more on beer & liquor than you did on food at your wedding.
Every wedding dance you have ever been to has the hokey pokey and the chicken dance.
Your definition of a small town is one that only has one bar.
The local gas station sells live bait.
You or someone you know was a “Dairy Princess” at the county fair. [Brohaugh notes: Wasn't me. Honest.]
You let your older siblings talk you into putting your tongue on a steel post in the middle of winter.
You think Lutheran and Catholic are THE major religions. [Brohaugh notes: Add Packer fandom—see next entry.]
Football schedules, hunting season and harvest are all taken into consideration before wedding dates are set.
Saturday you go to your local bowling alley. [Brohaugh notes: Vlasek's Bowling Alley, to be specific. Alas, it's no longer there.]
There was at least one kid in your class who had to help milk cows in the morning… phew!
You have driven your car on the lake.
(Side note: David Benjamin has written a superb memoir of growing up in my home town of Tomah, Wisconsin, just a few years ahead of me in the categories of school grades and age. I recommend The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked primarily for its grace and style, then for its sharp observations on growing up in the ’50s. It’s a much better read than, say, an aged comic strip, an internet list or a snarky language blog . . .)
I’m confused. Perplexed. Flummoxed. Bemused. Discombobulated. Kerfluffled. Well, those aren’t quite the words I want. Let me turn to my thesaurus . . .
Stop!
PLEASE don’t use a thesaurus. It does terrible things to your writing. Yes, that’s right. Do yourself a favour and forget about thesauruses. They’re harmful unless used correctly.
Thanks for saving me from myself. That’s from an article by Grant Barrett in the Malaysia Star. Barrett contends that a thesaurus leads you to selecting haughty or imprecise words, or flashy words you haven’t used before and have that new-car smell. These are all dangers, I agree. All tools have dangers. But using a razor doesn’t force you to shave off your eyebrows; using a thesaurus doesn’t force you to select the wrong word.
Barrett’s cautions aren’t (what’s the word I’m looking for? oh—here’s a good one) hidebound. And in fact he makes a superb point that individual words do not substitute for clear, precise writing. The right reasons to use a thesaurus are many:
Discover nuance. The parenthetical above wasn’t me being a smartass. I indeed went to a thesaurus to find hidebound to communicate inflexibility. I liked the tight-skinned implications of the word I found in my search.
Enrich your vocabulary. Perhaps you’ll find a word or two you’d not encountered before. Barrett dismisses the thesaurus in part because “no thesaurus that I know—I own more than a dozen—has definitions in the thesaurus entries.” Granted. But a tome that included a definition for each word would be monstrous and unpublishable. So turn to the tool dedicated to that purpose. Look up new words in the dictionary. (And the smartass in me wants to ask why someone who finds thesauruses potentially harmful owns more than a dozen of them—wants to, but I’ll resist. Sort of.)
Enrich your understanding of the range of the language. Perhaps you’ll encounter words you know, but hadn’t realized were related to the word you’re looking up. As a hypothetical, imagine someone looking up atrocity and discovering the expected abomination and the unexpected enormity. “That means ‘real big,’ doesn’t it?” our hypothetical writer might think. No, it doesn’t.
Increase your humility. Sometimes the word you know is perfect is not perfect at all. Return to our hypothetical thesaurus consultation, and this time picture the writer looking up enormity to begin with.
Become practiced with writing tools. Use a razor but once in a while, and you’re apt to cut yourself. Use it daily, and shaving becomes efficient; the results cleaner, more acceptable. The thesaurus, the dictionary, the rhyming dictionary, the grammar guide, the etymological dictionary—use all regularly (and not just one of each—a dozen or more sometimes suffices) to learn their strengths, deficiencies, goals and assistances, and you can use each tool like a fine razor to pare down to the most precise words and wordings—a hallmark goal of concise writing.
In fact, a danger far greater than using a thesaurus is not using it enough.
Those of you who deliberate on why words like conversate and orientate seem to permeate sloppy speech and writing, do you abominate deliberate? If we converse and orient, why don’t we deliber instead of deliberate? In fact, we once did; the first recorded use of the verb deliber, from Chaucer, preceded the verb deliberate by about 150 years. Deliber on that for a while.
I tuned out the chat-drama-chat-ohhh!-chat-chat-drama-drama-draaammmma Olympic commentary last night shortly after one of the U.S. women gymnasts flubbed a floor landing, and one commentator declared, “That is a disaster of immense proportions.” Or some such blather.
Tune-out. Not remote-control-sound-down tune-out. “Oh, just shut up,” tune-out.
The Chicago Fire was a disaster of immense proportions. Hurricane Katrina. Vesuvius. A moment of gymnastic imbalance is, well, a darn shame. But, oh well—there’s no molten lava surging across my kitchen floor.
Said commentator (I would mention him by name if he’d said anything to warrant me spending the energy looking it up) was perhaps trying to marry form and content in his commentary. China about to wrest Olympic Gold from our golden girls! Dreams about to be dashed! Oh the up-close-and-personal-agony-of-defeat-draaaammmmaaa! Had he wanted to marry form and content, he would have taken my instruction and just shut up every once in a while. The content before us was the incredible physical grace and artistry of the gymnastic routines. The form of the commentary should have aligned itself and assumed some quiet, graceful moments. But as it was, the commentator’s verbal gymnastics were themselves a disaster of immense proportions.
I’m fascinated when persnickitors peer into certain English locution voids and see purgatory and hell and not simply a vacuum that both nature and language abhore. I regularly refer to ain’t as a word villified persnickitorially on grammatical grounds (and not, more appropriately, on contextual grounds) depite the word’s perfectly grammatical foundations. Ain’t, as my defense goes, fills a void because we have no “am not” contraction. So, occasionally in conversation, I go, “Ain’t doesn’t deserve such disrespect.”
I sense the cringing. Eww! “Goes”, goes the persnickitors’ lament.
Allow me to agitate the lamenters. Though using go to identify the beginning of a direct quote is relatively and slangishly new, not to mention (I’ll readily admit) annoying, it fills a void. Say is a synonym, but is less precise because say can signal paraphrase, or even non-speech. (”That suit says ‘professional.’” Indeed? In what sort of accent?) Go generally signals a precise quote. (”I’m sure you’re familiar with our national anthem. This is how it goes . . .”). And using go is less pretentious than “occasionally in conversation, I say, and I quote . . .”
Now that I’m going the way of the cringe-making fool, let’s next discuss conversational “air quotes”—informal “sign language” (picture the air quotes as I write that) sympatico with using goes instead of says. Though, air quotes can be and are annoying, I accept them. And I accept them despite the fact that the air finger gesture used to communicate such quotes looks a lot like Tim the Enchanter warning King Arthur that “death awaits you all with nasty big pointy teeth” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Air quotes accomplish in gesture what the punctuational squigglies do in writing. Why do some folks get so annoyed over a relatively new gesture in conversation when we similarly employ so many other gestures? If body language is OK, why not body punctuation? Who hasn’t closed an emphatic statement with a sharp pointing gesture? Air period!
Ultimately: sometimes in informal speech, anything goes.
Herewith, some random-yet-numbered observations on using what’s without to express what’s within (with varying degrees of intent):
1. The Unintentional: File under “Well, they put the fish in my barrel and handed me the shotgun, so what am I supposed to do?”
I generally resist taking potshots at the stupid English exhibited in spam subject lines, but this buffoonish attempt simply taunted me too insistently:
do u want good pay job? World recognized University Dip1oma/Degree/Bacheloor for you
I’m sure lots good spelling on diplooma, two.
2. The Studiedly Intentional: File under “Comma sense”
Over at “On Commas, Again” in David Crystal’s blog, Crystal points out that he often employs commas in writing for form and not necessarily for grammar, in a great match of form and content:
Grammatically the commas are unnecessary, in these cases, but they represent the way I want the sentences to be internally heard. The issue becomes a matter of aesthetics, now, and so not everyone will like it. Indeed, a few weeks ago I got a ferocious email from someone complaining about the overuse of commas in my By Hook or By Crook. He found four in one short sentence, he said. Me, overuse commas, in a short sentence? Never, never, never, never, never.
3. The Concocted Intentional: File under “There’s a word I recently learned—just can’t think of it . . .”
Oh yeah. It’s lethologica. And it means “Forgetting the word you’re looking for.” The proverbial tip of your tongue is the land of Lethologia . . . only words you can’t think of reside there. Yes, I concocted the “I can’t think of the word lethologica” schtick as self-conscious form and content, but to swing back to #1 on the list above, here’s a fun bit of unintentional form and content: when lethologica is listed in the Dictionary of Difficult Words . . . because isn’t any lethological word at that moment a difficult word?
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!
Here’s my dilemma: Do I link to the specious advice I’m about to quote and therefore give it “just-spell-my-name-right” promotion, or do I refuse to even mention the source and rely on your trust that I’m not making it up? Or, a third undesirable choice: Do I disguise the source and dodge the issue entirely?
Oh, wait—a third less-than-optimal choice. I don’t have a dilemma; I have a quandary.
Or so the specious advice I’m about to quote would have it:
The words quandary and dilemma can be confused. A quandary is a difficult decision between many things. “She found herself in a quandary when all three of her boyfriends proposed marriage in the same week.” A dilemma is a difficult choice between two things. For example, “Caught in a major dilemma, she couldn’t decide if she should marry one of them or skip town.”
The only justifiable statement in that quote is “The words quandary and dilemma can be confused.” As demonstrated by how the author has confused them.
Yes, the di- in dilemma communicates “two.” From the Greek, a lemma is a proposition, and a dilemma two propositions. But because we don’t speak Greek and because language changes (it does! honest!) the word can now take broader meaning. In rhetoric, says the OED, a dilemma is “A form of argument involving an adversary in the choice of two (or, loosely, more) alternatives, either of which is (or appears) equally unfavourable to him.” If we’re going to insist that dilemma be used unchanged, then let’s apply the law of Xtreme Etymological Stasis (Xes) and insist that three difficult choices should be a trilemma. Try that one in everyday conversation sometime.
I wonder if the idea of the etymologically unrelated word quandary meaning “more than two” doesn’t come from extispic etymology (divination by examination of the entrails of a dissected word) and assuming that quan- means, um, “four.” Actually, no one’s sure how quandary originated, but none of the suggested etymologies involve numbers.
Such persnickitorial edicts—even when they are grounded in history or logic, which many persnickitorial edicts simply are not—elevate process over communication. Dilemma and quandary are simply synonyms with distinct implications. They impart subtle shifts in meaning and intensity; they speak with different sound. If dilemma properly evokes the level of severity of deciding among three options, then, simply, dilemma is the right word.
Also lost and/or confused in the example is that both these words suggest that the options are unpleasant. In the example, the three boyfriends must have been jerks if deciding which to marry induced quandary. (Then again, the woman was contemplating skipping town rather than marrying any of them, which would affirm that assumption).
So, back to my dilemma (yes, dilemma) about which of three choices to make: I’ve opted for the first. This is advice adapted from Vocabulary for Dummies. Make of it what you will.
primarily for its grace and style, then for its sharp observations on growing up in the ’50s. It’s a much better read than, say, an aged comic strip, an internet list or a snarky language blog . . .)
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