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.
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?
I recently stumbled on a blog called The Frisky (”a daily romp on the sexy side”) and its list of “15 Most Unfortunately Named Fashion Items.” Wendy Atterberry takes jabs at garment names including skort and skong, mukluk and spat, and a few R-rated designations, as well (R is for romp, after all).
I love the shot at cummerbund (which, by the way, is Persian for “loin-band”):
A broad waist sash worn with dinner jackets and tuxedos, a cummerbund sounds more like a grammatical error you might learn to avoid in 8th grade English class. “Molly, your sentence had a incorrect gerund, a dangling preposition and an awkward cummerbund. Please re-write.”
In language land, The Frisky might be interested to note the linguistic terms that sound a bit rompish. For instance, take the title of the blog itself: The Frisky. You see the (wink-wink) tittle there, right? Yes, I spelled it right. Tittle. That’s the dot above the letter i. Cross your T’s, and tittle your I’s. Sounds positively ribald.
It’s a food day today, what with me cooking my entry in the finals of a local Cook Like a Wokstar contest (I admit that my interest in entering may have been influenced by the pun). So the theme today is food; and because this immediately follows yesterday’s debunking of a false etymology of a place name, we’ll throw more place-name chat in, as well, in this excerpt from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong:
Chili peppers hot,
Chile peppers cold,
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old.
This, of course, is a recast of the old “pease porridge” nursery rhyme, infused with a different set of concepts to make a point about the verbal porridge representing the relationship between chili peppers, the country of Chile, and the chilly reception you’ll get from etymologists if you suggest that any of these words are connected.
Chili peppers hot: Chili (the pepper and ultimately the stew made with the pepper) traces back through Spanish to the native South American Nahuatl word for the pepper plant. It is not, as Dutch physician and botanist Jacobus Bontius wrote in 1631, a “quasi dicas Piper e Chile” (“named as if a pepper from Chile,” if my Latin translation is anywhere in the same hemisphere as the actual meaning, but then again, remember that I tried to translate “E Pluribus Unum” by myself as a kid, and could only come up with “made of lead”).
Chile peppers cold: One might say that the etymological trail to Chile has grown cold. Though we’re not sure how the country name originated, no possibilities connect it with the hot pepper plant, and one possibility even suggests that it comes from native tchili, meaning “snow,” from the native South American language Aymara, or a word from the native South American language Quecha: chili meaning “cold” or “snow” or, yes, “chilly.” But even so:
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old: Our adjective chilly and its source noun chill, meaning “cold,” traces all the way back to Old English. And just to confuse matters, one early spelling of chill was chile.
Why do I spend so much time disassociating chili and Chile and chilly? Well, I hail from the Cincinnati area, where a favorite local dish is a bed of spaghetti, topped with a spiced meat sauce (cinnamon and chocolate or cocoa among the spices), chopped onions, beans and grated cheese [recipe from Cincinnati chef Paul Sturkey here]. This dish is “Cincinnati chili,” and it, too, has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned chilis.
Yes, you Texans and Mexicans and Chileans, we know this concoction is not “real” chili, and, by gosh, we don’t care.
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.
In a previous post I promised (I knew you were holding your breath) for more on word origins from commedia dell’ arte, an Italian theatre form (beginning in the 1500s) combining improvisation and standard bits actors could weave in at appropriate moments. Yesterday’s theatre/etymology lesson showed how this improv style gave us the word zany. I talked about zany in the midst of a running theme about names, and the word pants has double origins in names.
One of the stock characters in commedia dell’ arte was Pantalone, generally a miserly, leering patrician codger. Apparently, Pantalone was Venetian; the patron saint of Venice was St. Pantaleone, and Venetians were known as Pantalonis by association with their saint. On stage, the Pantalone stereotype generally wore tight-fitting legwear that came to be known as pantaloons. (I sometimes wonder if that’s why pantaloons and eventually pants are in the plural—ultimately a misinterpretation of the possessive Pantalone’s, perhaps?—but I suspect that on the evidence of breeches and trousers, the plural comes from the fact that humans generally have more than one leg.)
The specific type of tight-fitting trousers were called pantaloons in the 1600s, and by the 1700s the word was applied to trousers (as opposed to knee breeches) in general. By the mid 1830s, the word had been shortened to pants (unrelated to the pants Pantalone did when leering at the female characters).
So wear your pants knowing that they have their origins in making light of old folk (and in fact the word pantaloon by the 1600s meant “old codger”). And men, keep your pants on lest you be accused of being a dirty old man like the commedia dell’ arte dirty old man who kept his pants on. (Particularly good advice for men in England, where pants are underwear.)
Finally, if you’re like me, facing more gray hair than I like in places I like even less, growing old should not scare the pants off you. It should scare the pants onto you.
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.)
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.)
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Chile peppers cold: One might say that the etymological trail to Chile has grown cold. Though we’re not sure how the country name originated, no possibilities connect it with the hot pepper plant, and one possibility even suggests that it comes from native tchili, meaning “snow,” from the native South American language Aymara, or a word from the native South American language Quecha: chili meaning “cold” or “snow” or, yes, “chilly.” But even so:
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