logophilius

Christmas Card Sonnet 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Fri, 25 Dec 2020 19:10:00 +0000

I sent a few holiday cards this year — first time in, I don't know, forty-six years or so — to friends that I hadn't been able to see in person in at least the last three months. Along with a personal message, I included this sonnet. Hope you enjoy it:

Just like that moment two breaths become one
Expands to fill a sweet eternity,
Yet when you part, the intimate kiss done,
Discover just how fleeting time can be,
So has the time from when a friend departs
To when that friend returns with smiling cheeks
Been counted both this year in beating hearts
And neverending, silent, lonely weeks.
This year — this scourge — has stolen way too much,
In time, in health, in possibilities.
But what we value most it must not touch:
That thing that binds our chosen families.
And so we must, before December ends,
Carve out some time to send our love to friends.

A Word in the Hand Is Worth Two in the Book

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 20:23:00 +0000

The words people have been writing about other words.

For a number of reasons (some of them actually good), I took a couple weekends off from this wordy round-up, but I'm back! And because of that time off, I'll be going back a bit farther in language links than I normally might. So here is my latest collection of word nerdery:

A Bumper Crop of Etymologies

etymology, word history

A number of people have been delving into etymological explorations in fun ways recently:

Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman at Grammarphobia take on the important question, "Why are old men called coots?" Their answer is both word-brained and bird-brained.
A person who studies geology is called a geologist. A person who practices dentistry is called a dentist. Why, then, do we call a person who practices medicine either a physician or a doctor? The editors at Merriam-Webster elucidate.
Jeremy Butterfield explains why a common story about the etymology of round robin is probably wrong, and offers a cogent argument for where it really came from.
James Harbeck of Sesquiotica takes a brief look at the flatulent history of the word petard, as in "hoist with his own petard," and does it without once making a "Jean-Luc Petard" joke. He's a better bloke than I.
At the OUPblog, Anatoly Liberman responds to some of the comments sparked by his etymological posts during the month of May. Even without going back to his earlier posts, you can glean some interesting info about the history of sword, grammatical gender, the F-word (which isn't really the F-word), and more.
These two are mine: On Wednesday, I wrote about the history of migraine, and last week I wrote about the word curfew, which has nothing to do with a small number of dogs and everything to do with a bell.

A Shitload of Swearing

profanity, slang

"Once upon a time . . . we made a promise to keep you regularly updated with interesting sweary tidbits from the Wide World of Web," writes Nancy Friedman at Strong Language. "It has been, we note with embarrassment, more than 30 months since we posted Sweary Links #25." "Sweary Links #26" doesn't try to include everything relevant from the last 2 1/2 years, but it is a nice collection of both thought-provoking and laugh-inducing stories from the bad word news, including Dominic Cummings' problems with Twitter's profanity filter, creative swearing on the BBC, and a warning not to touch other people's balls.

A Crap-Ton of Political Ads

onomastics, politics

In addition to her work at Strong Language, Nancy Friedman has also been keeping an eye on the language used in political ads (and there will be no shortage of data to analyze until November). Her post from June 4 focuses less on the content of a specific ad as on the name of the production company: MeidasTouch. Why the extra E? You'll have to read it to find out.

Just One Podcast

language podcasts

I mentioned back at the end of February that my favorite podcast, Talk the Talk, was going off the air for a while. It's back! It has a new name, Because Language, but it's still the same great folks — Daniel Midgley, Hedvig Skirgård, and Ben Ainslie — talking all about language. In the first new episode, they ask a bunch of their linguistic-minded friends (many of whom you'll recognize) to talk about their favorite part of language and linguistic study.

A Shameful Amount of Self-Promotion

self-promotion, good news

As far as words go, I've been having a great summer:

First of all, go buy my book The Body Politic. If you don't like the link in that first sentence, you can find another one at the top of the right column of this blog.
A couple months ago, I entered a story in a flash fiction contest hosted by the podcast Semi-Sages of the Pages. Each of the four semi-sages chose one winner of their own, which were read during a live recording of the podcast. I wasn't one of those four. BUT, I did receive an honorable mention, which I don't think they had planned to do when they started the contest. Apparently, they all really liked my story, but there was a problem: It involved and named a living person who apparently is quite litigious. They didn't want to run the risk of legal hassle. (In my defense, in the podcast where they talk about the contest, one of the women specifically said she would love a story about this person. I only delivered what was asked.)

After I leaned of the problem, I went back and did a little switcherooing in the story so as to keep all the characters fictional. You can read the story (and the story about the story) in a post called "My (Dis)Honorable Mention," or you can just wait a bit and have someone read it to you, because the semi-sages have decided that they will read this new expurgated version on the air in an upcoming episode.
You know that I write a weekly word history column at the website for The Saturday Evening Post, right? It's called "In a Word," and if you enjoy all this word nerdery and you aren't keeping tabs on my stuff there, well, you oughta, because I'm still going strong with it.
I can now announce that, out of more than 50 entries, my sonnet "The Bolted Door" won third place in Indianapolis Shakespeare Company's "Spring Sonnet-Off." In a small-world-ain't-it coincidence, the second-place sonnet was written by Robert Springer, who was my first supervisor at John Wiley & Sons back when I was proofreading. First place went to Tony Armstrong; I don't know Tony.

For those of you keeping score at home (and why would you?), this is the second poetry contest I've placed in this year. I won the annual Grammar Day Poetry Contest back in March with a quatrain about a semicolon. I never really thought of myself as a poet; writing poems is just something I do for fun. Perhaps I've missed my calling.

At any rate, the Indianapolis Shakespeare Company plans to publish the winners soon and a collection of the sonnet entries at some point later in the year, but here is mine now:

Within this house there stands a bolted door,
Substantial, still, and solid as a wall.
Beyond it I hear voices that implore
To open up, to let them in the hall.
No fool am I; I know what I would find!
Pandora's worst: Disease and grief and hate
And all the selfish evils of mankind.
I would be mad to choose that awful fate!
But also there is creativity
Beyond the door, and kindness, friendship, cheer,
Adventure -- nay, a whole vast world to see,
Commingled with the things that I most fear.
For now the door stays fast, and here I hide.
One day I'll twist its knob -- and go outside.

Featured image attributed to Christian van Donck.

My (Dis)Honorable Mention

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 00:52:00 +0000

[If you’re coming to this post from Discord, just skip down to the story. This intro is old news to you.]

I was delighted on Sunday to open my email and discover that a flash fiction story I had entered in a contest hosted by Semi-Sages of the Pages (a podcast I would recommend to anyone who is seriously interested in writing better fiction) was chosen as a runner-up. What’s more, the ladies of SSotP actually read the winning stories aloud on Sunday afternoon.

Alas, I was unavailable to listen to the live broadcast. (Also, I haven’t really taken the time to figure out how Discord works yet.)

But I finally got around to listening to that podcast Thursday night, and I was buzzing with the anticipation of hearing my story read. So I’m listening along through the first story, then the second, then the third (saving the best for last, tee-hee tee-hee!), and then a fourth one (wait, weren’t they only picking four winners?), and then . . .

MORRIGAN: We got a story that I absolutely love. It made me laugh hysterically . . . but I, um, can’t read it.
MOLLY: This story did involve a real person who is really alive and really likes to sue people.

I hadn’t even considered the possibility that one of the people mentioned in the story might get litigious. I mean, it’s obviously satire (as you’ll see, it’s conspiracies all the way down). And I certainly wouldn’t want to put the semi-sages in any legal peril. So I understand why they were reluctant to read it.

But I ain’t afraid of no lawsuit.

Okay, I’m a little afraid of a lawsuit. So here’s an altered version of the story that got an honorable mention but not the honor of being read on the Semi-Sages of the Pages podcast. I’ve changed two names and one title, but I think you’ll get the joke.

And please don’t sue.

An Unexpected Package

Expurgated Version (The One Without the Gannet)

“Are you sure you can’t think of anyone who would send you a severed hand?” Detective Griff asked.

“No,” I repeated.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go over the sequence of events one more time.”

I had read about this interrogation tactic. She was hoping to catch me in a lie. But I was telling the truth.

“Ellen saw the package on the front porch about an hour ago,” I told her, glancing at my wife sitting silently in the La-Z-Boy, as pale as she had been after she opened the package. “She carried it into the kitchen. I was in the living room grading papers. She screamed, and I ran into the kitchen, where the box was open on top of the stove. I looked in and saw the hand.” I still couldn’t get the image out of my mind. “It was just sitting there on top of some bubble wrap.”

“And that’s when you called 911?” Griff asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you touch the hand?”

“Well, yeah. I thought maybe it was fake, so I touched it. Once. On the knuckle.” I touched the spot on my own hand and Griff scribbled it in her notebook.

“Did you touch it?” she asked Ellen.

Ellen shook her head, unable to make eye contact.

After a moment’s pause, Detective Griff said, “The fact that there was no postal stamp or anything on the box means it must have been dropped off in person. Which means it was left by someone local.”

I hadn’t thought of that. From the look on her face, Ellen hadn’t either.

Griff’s phone vibrated then. She tapped it and put it to her ear. “Detective Griff.”

“...”

She whispered to us, “They found a match on the fingerprints.” And then, into the phone, “Sorry. Say that name again.”

“...”

“Why does that sound familiar?” she said, and then to us, “Do you know a Joshua Penningbird?”

Then I clearly heard the voice on the phone say, “It’s Josh Bizarre, from Leopard King.”

Ellen and I stared at each other, nonplussed.

“It can’t be,” Griff was saying into the phone. “He’s in prison, isn’t he?” She took the call into the foyer then, her back to us.

“But, but that’s...” Ellen stammered.

I could only shake my head.

***

The detective’s questions petered out quickly. Ten minutes later, I was watching her car disappear up the road. When I turned back into the foyer, I was alone. “Ellen?”

“In the basement!”

I descended the steps to the dark underneath. “We got a problem,” Ellen said, her face lit up eerily blue by the light from the open freezer.

As I approached, I could see him in there. His frozen skin was gray-blue, but his mullet still shone golden. Ellen held up Josh’s arm in her blue-gloved fingers. It was a stump.

“Someone’s been down here,” she said. “Someone knows. What should we do?”

“Let’s move up Phase Two. Get Cheryl in the phone.”

If you enjoyed this story — and especially if you loved the part about the hand being detached from the body — you should check out my new book The Body Politic, available on Amazon for cheap. Just scroll back to the top, and you’ll find a handy link in the right column.

And if you want to read the stories that did make it to the podcast, you can find them here — or simply find the podcast and listen to them.

Into the Words

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 23 May 2020 21:55:00 +0000

The smoking skeleton is metaphorical, somehow.

Your Kerb Enthusiasm

British English, homophones

Lynne Murphy at Separated by a Common Language — a blog devoted to highlighting and explaining (when possible) the differences between American and British English — realized this week that she’s never done a post about one of my favorite differences, kerb and curb. Now she has. The short version: Both languages have the verb to curb, but the American English noun curb (as in the edge of the roadway) is spelled kerb in British English.

The Opposite of Anti-Unpositive

antonyms, coinages

Separated by a Common Language isn’t Lynne Murphy’s only blog. She also keeps “a diary of antonyms, opposites, and contrasts” at Who Shall Remain Antonymous. This week, she dissected a word that, thanks to Stephen Colbert, appeared in The New York Times for the very first time: unnegative. Does it just mean positive? Maybe not.

Devil-headed

idioms, word history

“It is amazing how often the Devil is invoked in English idioms,” writes Anatoly Liberman at the Oxford University Press blog. And then, of course, he takes us on a lexical tour of some of those expressions, including “the devil and his dam,” “pull devil, pull baker,” and “the devil overlooks Lincoln.”

Video of the Week

video, portmanteaux

This week I discovered Trevor Neal’s YouTube series AwkWords. Each episode is basically just a silly little minute-long video about a coined portmanteau, like friendurance (“a lasting ability to put up with annoying friends”), animassassination (“the contract killing of a popular cartoon character,” shown below), and speedoze (“a brief nap taken while wearing tight-fitting swim trunks”). You’ll also get some cute wordplay on company names and meet Professor Edward Wordward.

Not Ssssssmokin'!

idioms, advertising

Chantix is a pharmaceutical designed to help you quit smoking gradually, or as one of their ad campaigns explains, it helps you quit slow turkey, as opposed to cold turkey. Is slow turkey really a thing? No, writes Nancy Friedman at Fritinancy; Chantix’s ad writers made it up. But cold turkey has a long history, as she explains in her latest Word of the Week post.

Honey-baked Hamlet

word history, literary analysis

“To be or not to be, that is the question.” So begins what is perhaps the most famous of Will Shakespeare’s soliloquies. What makes these simple words so powerful, so meaningful, and maybe so wrong? Find out as James Harbeck takes these ten words apart one at a time at Sesquiotica. (It’s a long read, but worth it for both logophiles and Bardheads.)

Speller Door

etymology, word history, spelling, self-promotion

My In a Word post at The Saturday Evening Post this week "The French Lieutenant's Spelling," tackles a word that's easy to misspell: lieutenant. Not only do I give you an etymological breakdown, but I also give you the tools to never misspell it again.

The Body Politic: Order It Now!

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Mon, 18 May 2020 12:44:00 +0000

It's here! The Body Politic: A Parable for the Twenty-first Century is now available to order on Amazon for only $8.99.

The 120-page book contains three stories:

“All the girls at Ellen’s eleventh birthday party were having a great time until her pinkie finger fell off.” Like any pandemic, it started with just a few isolated cases that couldn’t be easily explained. But even after it took hold around the world, scientists could find no cause, no common source, no traceable vector. Could that eleven-year-old girl, one of the plague’s earliest victims, discover the cause and the cure that even science could not fathom in “The Body Politic”?

In “The Perfect Gift,” Matthew has found the most amazing birthday present for Joan. But a gift this personal might reveal once and for all his secret feelings for her. What if she finally understands that he loves her? Or worse, what if she doesn’t?

What would you do if you won the world’s first trillion-dollar lotto? You can guess what Eldridge does with his winnings in the story titled “The Man Who Bought the Moon,” but he soon learns that owning all that lunar real estate isn’t as satisfying as he had hoped, as each new day begins with the same question: What next?

My thanks again to Rue Sparks for the great cover image, and to my writers critique group, Indy Pen to Paper, for helping me mold these stories into something I can be proud of. I hope you enjoy them.

A Word to the Whys

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 16 May 2020 14:11:00 +0000

Can I have a word with you? How about a few dozen?

Falling Behind

etymology, word history

At The Grammarphobia Blog this week, Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman answer the question that has been dogging many of us for ages: Is butt short for buttock? The answer, as they say, may surprise you.

AIF: YMMV

writing, abbreviations

If you haven’t learned it by now, this may come as a shock to you: English isn’t a single thing, with a single grammar and a single set of rules that governs all writing. I’m not talking just dialects, either: Fiction writers don’t have the same set of rules as nonfiction writers. The editors of The Chicago Manual of Style recognize this, as evidenced by Carol Saller’s post this week about using abbreviations in fiction.

The standard rule for using abbreviations is to spell out what they mean on first reference — but that doesn’t necessarily apply to fiction. Read her post to explore other approaches.

From the Mountains to the Prairies to the Oceans White with Fomites

vocabulary, etymology

Nancy Friedman of Fritinancy this week discovered a pertinent word she hadn’t seen before, and neither had I. The word is fomite, “an inanimate object that may be contaminated with infectious agents and serve in their transmission.” She gives a little more history and etymology of it as her latest Word of the Week.

Yes Stir, No Stir

podcast, word history

If you have any interest in etymology or word history, you should know about the That’s What They Say podcast from Michigan Radio. Each Sunday, in a five-minute segment (perfect for a snack break), University of Michigan English professor Anne Curzan digs into the history of one word or phrase.

This week, in “Stir-crazy? Join the Club,” she explores the stir in stir crazy, which links to another quirk of the English language: If jail and prison are (practically) synonyms, why are jailer and prisoner opposites?

Dukes of Hazard Pay

etymology, euphemism

If you can hoist yourself over The New York Times’ paywall, Ben Zimmer takes a closer look this week at the history and etymology of the word hazard, as we find people in government this week euphemizing hazard pay with phrases like Patriot Pay and Heroes Fund.

The Air o’ Parent

sexism in language

There’s no denying that an indecent amount of sexism is baked into our language, and often in ways we don’t normally notice but that seem so obvious once they’re pointed out. A post at Language: A Feminist Guide this week brought one to light for me. Consider the completely separate meanings of mothering and fathering and what that says about the inherent expectations on the individual parents of a child. Recognition of this gender specificity is surely a contributing factor to the rise in popularity of the word parenting since the 1980s.

Mirror or Rim?

palindromes, wordplay

And we'll end with a little fun wordplay. Yes, the title of the Language Nerds post “28 Palindrome Words and Phrases You’ve Probably Never Thought Of” is a bit ambitious. (I mean, come on: racecar? A word that only ever shows up in lists of palindromes?) Still, there are a few in here that I hadn’t seen before, and considering how scientists think the coronavirus came from bats, the palindrome “Eva, can I stab bats in a cave?” ought to be finding new popularity.

Featured image by Dirck van Baburen (PD).

The Body Politic: Cover Reveal

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Fri, 08 May 2020 12:30:00 +0000

I am giddy to announce that Rue Sparks has put the finishing touches on the cover of my forthcoming book The Body Politic, and I couldn't be happier. Here it is!

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but feel free to make an exception in this case.

Working with an illustrator to craft the concept and then fine-tune the details was a new experience for me. Although the book contains three stories, “The Body Politic” is the centerpiece and the one I wanted the cover image to focus on.

I talked Rue briefly through the story when I first raised the possibility of commissioning them to create this cover. I didn't commit to anything right away, but Rue immediately came up with some rough sketches that got me thinking. I sent the email to actually commit to the commission the day my coronavirus stimulus check dropped into my bank account.

Then, over the next two weeks or so, Rue emailed sketches of ideas, possible color schemes, and reference pieces. I gave some feedback and suggestions and asked some questions, and, at the end, we landed on a rough sketch that I was excited about:

Then Rue made a transfer image, with new lettering, that would be used for the final image. It was my last chance to make any changes! (I didn't have any.)

From this sketch, Rue completed the image in pencil, putting in all the wonderful shading and details. What’s more, they did it in a livestream on Twitch; you can watch the previous image turn into the next one on Rue’s Twitch channel.

Finally, Rue took the image into Photoshop for the finishing touches — color! — and voilà!

I hope to have The Body Politic available to order very soon (it depends in part on Amazon). Follow me on Twitter and/or Facebook for the latest, and, of course, watch this space!

Words with Fiends

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 02 May 2020 17:54:00 +0000

Is there a word in English for something we don't have a word for in English?

Bookin’ It

self-promotion, books

As I announced on Tuesday, I have decided to publish a book containing three of my stories. It’ll be self-published through Amazon, and you likely have opinions about self-published vs. traditionally published books. That’s fine; I’ve had my own inner squabble about that subject, but in the end I decided that I didn’t need to wait for permission, that I shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and about seventeen other bromides. In part, I was inspired by other people in my life who have happily gone the self-publishing route, people like Randy Clark, Tony Noland, James Harbeck, and Rue Sparks.

That last name is a special one, because the first thing I did with my federal stimulus check was commission Rue to create the cover image. And here’s the exciting part: You can watch Rue actually create the cover image LIVE on their Twitch channel tomorrow (Sunday, May 3) starting at 1 p.m. If I’m remembering correctly, you don’t have to create a Twitch account to watch the livestream, but you do have to have an account to post to the live chat, for what I hope is an obvious reason. (Because human beings are horrible.) I’ll post the direct link on Facebook and Twitter as soon as I get it.

As far as the book is concerned, I’m hoping to have it available on May 13, depending on how soon I can pull together all the pieces and how quickly Amazon can get me a proof copy. Look for it in the right sidebar →.

A Way To-Go

podcast, word people

You listen to A Way with Words, right? Either over the radio, or as a podcast? If not — or even if you do — you should read what Mary “Comma Queen” Norris wrote this week about the show and its hosts, Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, for The New Yorker. (She calls the show “Car Talk for lexiphiles,” which is both spot-on and a great compliment.)

I miss Car Talk.

Warren Piece

etymology, genealogy

James Harbeck this morning published a post on Sesquiotica that is ostensibly a deep dive down the rabbit hole that is the history and etymological extended family of the word warren (and the name Warren) but is in the end a nice little tribute to his father for his 80th birthday.

Hold My Beer, Adolf

onomastics, weirdness

Some names fall out of favor because of the associations they create, like the aforementioned Adolf. Some names start to sound old-fashioned, go out of style, and then, inexplicably, erupt into popular again. And some names, well, some names most people just never thought of as being names; those are the ones that end up on the Name of the Year bracket.

Vulture is hosting the semifinals for the 2020 Name of the Year contest. The remaining "competitors" are Mathdaniel Squirrel, Kokain Mothershed, Courvoisier Dingle, and Beanbag Amerika.

And let me be clear: These aren’t names that were foisted on newborns in the last year; each of these semifinalists is a living, grown-ass adult who could, at any time, legally change their name to Bill or Sue or Jean. Or even Adolf.

Video of the Week

video, idioms

An oldie but a goody: Finnish comedian Ismo thinks that ass is probably the most complicated word in the English language. He thought it simply meant “butt,” but that was only the tip of the assberg.

Big Dictionary Energy

dictionaries, history, resource

This year’s annual conference of ACES: The Society for Editing was, like so many other conferences, canceled. A large stet of editors should have been gathered in Salt Lake City this week for three days of education, networking, and camaraderie, but, well, you know.

But the Society rallied; yesterday, they took four of the conference presentations to Zoom. Participation in each was limited to the first thousand people — and yes, most of them sold out.

If you weren’t there, you’ve missed it. But, as I understand it, these sessions are going to be posted and available for free to all next week. Wordies will likely be interested in Merriam-Webster lexicographer Peter Sokolowski’s (@PeterSokolowski) “The Invention of the Modern American Dictionary.” Or, if you’re more interested in shining some light in the darkest corners of English grammar, check out Lisa McClendon’s (@MadamGrammar) “Grammar Arcana” (which might have actually gotten ablaut reduplication trending on Twitter). If editing is more on your mind, the other two are “Developing a Quality Editorial Process End-to-End” and “What’s New in the AP Style Guide,” the latter presented by actual editors of the AP Stylebook.

Keep your eye on the ACES website next week for more information and links.

Meta Short Story

etymology, word history, self-promotion

For this week’s In a Word column, “An Anecdotal Word History,” I tell the brief story of the source of our word anecdote. It goes back to a 6th-century Byzantine political tell-all that was so scandalous the author kept it under wraps until after his death.

If Loose Lips Sink Ships, What Do Loose Ends Sink?

British English, idioms

I’ve been stuck at home by myself for more than a month now — you probably have, too — and more and more I’m finding myself at loose ends. Or am I at loose end? Turns out, as Lynne Murphy explains at Separated by a Common Language — I’m a bit of both, regardless of whether I’m speaking British or American.

Original featured image from The Public Domain Review.

The Body Politic: The Big Book Announcement

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 13:01:00 +0000

Coming soon to an online retail giant named after a big ol’ river near you!

via GIPHY

Coming in early May, my new novelette, The Body Politic: A Parable for the Twenty-first Century.

It begins like this: “All the girls at Ellen’s eleventh birthday party were having a great time until her pinkie finger fell off.”

Like any pandemic, the disease that social media has named dropsy started with just a few isolated cases that couldn’t be easily explained. But even as it was taking hold around the world, scientists could find no cause, no common source, no traceable vector. Could that eleven-year-old girl, one of the plague’s earliest victims, discover the cause and the cure that even science could not fathom? And what does it mean for the future of the human race?

All will be answered. (Okay, most will be answered. That last one’s up to your own optimistic, cynical, or realistic view of humanity.)

Also included in this book are two short stories:

In “The Perfect Gift,” Matthew has found the most amazing birthday present for Joan. But a gift this personal might reveal once and for all his secret feelings for her. What if she finally understands that he loves her? Or worse, what if she doesn’t?

(You might have read this one before. It was the first story I ever sold and is still online at SaturdayEveningPost.com.)

What would you do if you won the world’s first trillion-dollar lotto? You can guess what Eldridge does with his winnings in the story titled “The Man Who Bought the Moon.” But he soon learns that owning all that lunar real estate isn’t as satisfying as he had hoped, as each new day begins with the same question: What next?

Just as exciting (but much less nerve-wracking) as this forthcoming publication is the book’s cover. I’ve enlisted the talents of Rue Sparks (who also writes) to illustrate it. We finally decided on the design this week, and I’m giddy with anticipation of the final product.

No firm decision yet on the price (it won’t be expensive), or even exactly when it will be available to order on ~~Mekong.net~~ Amazon.com. But I hope some of you feel some sense of anticipation for it. Get giddy with it.

More info coming soon.

Wordiness Is Next to Godliness

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 16:03:00 +0000

Like the flu and the coronavirus, language is constantly evolving.

This week’s word-link list is a bit brief. We had a bit of an emergency in the Hollandbeck household this week — involving my 72-year-old father, an unstable ladder, and four or five broken ribs — that left me relocated and rather busy. Thankfully, the injured party should recover fully, eventually.

The Village Idiom

idioms, word history

That Anatoly Liberman, at the Oxford University Press blog, was tracking down the named people in some English idioms caught my interest. What I found when I read was a collection of idioms I had never heard before — as coy as Croker’s mare, as wise as Waltham’s calf, as learned as Dr. Doddipol — from the right (as opposed to left, not wrong) side of the Atlantic. So not only do you get a fun little trip through these phrases’ history, you get a slew of new idioms to play with in “Who Is Dr. Doddipol?”

Bacon It Till You're Makin' It

word history, etymology

Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman of Grammarphobia this week do their best to answer the question Why is a strip of bacon called a rasher? (They also delve into the history of the adjective rash.) If you can read their article without craving the wonderful taste of warm bacon, you’ve more self-control than I.

Zump Truck

neologisms, quarantine

This week’s video comes from We Love Hip Hop — not one of my usual sources for lexical goodness. They’re talking about a new word on the rise: zumped, getting dumped over Zoom.

All's Dwell That Ends Dwell

word history, etymology

It’s long been espoused that words that contain a K sound are inherently funny. But for my comedic tastes, nothing can hold a candle to words that start with dw-. (I’m a dweeb, I know.) James Harbeck of Sesquiotica wanders through the nuances and history of another dw- word, dwell, with stops at poems from Tennyson and Dickinson.

Pay It Backward

etymology, self-promotion

I wrote briefly about the etymology of the word pay this week at The Saturday Evening Post in “Pay It Backward.” Its origins have less to do with receiving what one has earned and more to do with getting one’s creditors to calm down.

Featured image by Kim Carter, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Lex Machine

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sun, 19 Apr 2020 16:51:00 +0000

Daze of the week.

She Blinded Me with Sciencing

usage, language change, verbs

“Am I just an old fogy or can any noun be turned into a verb these days?” a reader asks Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman of Grammarphobia. The verbed nouns in question here are internet and science.

If you’ve read Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet (and if you haven’t, you should), this is a small glimpse into one of the vectors of language change she discusses.

Fruit of the Zoom

onomastics, brand names

With so many people working from home, videoconferencing companies are on the rise. And the undisputed king right now is Zoom. Zoom has become so ubiquitous these days that the brand name is well on its way to genericization. Nancy Friedman took a closer look at the word zoom this week — from online meetings to Mazda commercials to 1970s kids TV — over at Fritinancy this week in "Corona Brands: Zoom."

All Tied Up in a So

grammar

You probably recognize the word so as the last element in FANBOYS, the mnemonic to remember the coordinating conjunctions. But like so many small words, so can be a number of different parts of speech. June Casagrande (The Joy of Syntax) takes a closer look at how the word appeared in one particularly awkward CNN headline for the L.A. Times in "The Word 'So' Is So Confusing." (Paywall)

Podcasting a Wide Net

podcast, etymology

For John McWhorter’s 100th episode of Lexicon Valley, "The Many Meanings of Too," he takes listeners on a short etymological exploration of practically every word in a few lines if a 1940 recording of the song “Rubber Doll,” which I had never heard of until this episode. I won’t be adding “Rubber Doll” to my playlist anytime soon, but the podcast is worth a listen if you’re a logophile.

My Up Runneth Over

British English, idioms

I learned this week from Separated by a Common Language’s Lynne Murphy that the idiom “on the up and up” has a slightly different meaning in American and British English. “It looks like it’s probably a case of an American phrase coming to Britain and being re-interpreted,” Murphy writes.

Just Another Manic, Um, Thursday?

self-promotion, etymology

With all my time being spent at home in isolation, and not a lot of variety to mark the passage of time, I find I’m having to think harder to remember what day of the week it is. And that’s the moderately true way I segued into an article about the etymology of the days’ names in this week’s In a Word column, “My Gods! What Day Is It?”

Sittin' on Top of the Word

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 11 Apr 2020 18:34:00 +0000

All my books are so excited that I'm spending more time at home with them.

Blather, Mince, Repeat

swearing, word history

James Harbeck set out to give us a historical background on the words gadzooks and zounds, and in the process gave us a nice disquisition on why we swear, what makes a word taboo, and some of the odd minced oaths that have bubbled up through the English language.

The short version: Gadzooks and zounds are shortenings of God’s hooks and God’s wounds, and there have been plenty of other swears along this line, like God’s eyes, God’s fish (?), and even God’s lids. (I didn’t know Jesus even wore a hat.) Harbeck lists more, but absent from this list is God’s abs. I’ve never seen or heard God’s abs used as an oath before, but it seems like I should have. If you look at any artistic rendering of the crucifixion of Christ (including the one below, which I saw at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore in March), you can come to no other conclusion than that artists are obsessed with Christ’s six-pack. How are we not all wandering around today shouting "Zabs!" at every amazing thing?

Verb Appeal

verbs, language change

There’s a common language myth about how the Civil War brought the United States together so completely that it even changed what verbs we use with it. No more “The United States are…,” but now “The United States is…”

But that’s just bunk, writes Ben Yagoda (I’m paraphrasing) at Not One-Off Britishisms.

Poxy Lady

swearing, word history

When you’re stuck at home, daily routines can get, well, routine. Even the little things, like cursing. Expand your collection of historical and international malady-related vulgarities with Nancy Friedman’s “Swearing in the Time of Coronavirus,” for Strong Language.

Virtual Unreality

etymology, self-promotion

As so many of us work from home during the coronavirus pandemic, businesses are discovering the virtues of virtual meetings — or more likely learning that, as they say, “This meeting could have been an email.” Nonetheless, I consciously noticed for the first time this week how similar those words virtue and virtual are. So, naturally, I wrote about it, in “In a Word: Virtue in the Virtual.”

Clown Collage

bullying, presidential vocabulary

If you’ve had enough with the constant juvenile bullying by the president of anyone who challenges his anything, skip this article. But if you’re interested in how his name-calling stacks up with previous presidential japes (short version: not well, but it’s effective with the right people), then check out Edwin Battistella’s “Donald Trump’s Insult Politics” at the Oxford University Press blog.

Word and a Prayer

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 20:14:00 +0000

Words words words words words words words.

Diacritical Thinking

diacritics, history

Umlauts are not diaereses, explains Jonathon Owen this week at Arrant Pedantry. What are we talking about here? Twö lïttle döts thät äppear äböve a lëtter, a diacritic mark that we don’t see in English often outside of The New Yorker. Though an umlaut and a diaeresis look exactly the same on the page, they serve two different purposes and developed along two completely different routes.

Epicenter Fielder

vocabulary, word history

There sure seem to be a lot of epicenters of this pandemic — Wuhan, China; Bergamo, Italy; New York City; New Orleans. It’s as if maybe epicenter — the spot on the Earth’s surface directly above the source of an earthquake — isn’t the best word to use to describe a viral hotspot. “[U]sing a word created for another kind of disaster might actually hurt our response to this one,” writes Ben Zimmer for Politico in “Is ‘Epicenter’ the Wrong Word for New York?”

Video of the Week

languages, video

Not Your Granddad’s Grand Adz

etymology, word history

Under regular circumstances, adz is just a convenient word for getting rid of the Z tile in a game of Scrabble, but this week, it is the subject of an etymological exploration by Anatoly Liberman at the Oxford University Press Blog. Turns out, the ultimate source of the words is a mystery, but Liberman has a theory.

Tell-Tale Cocktail

word history, spirits

Somehow I missed that last Tuesday was National Cocktail Day, so I’ve been celebrating it every day since. To mark the day, Angela Tung at Wordnik took a closer look at a number of cocktail terms, including jigger, nip, sling, and cocktail itself.

Original featured image by Eduard von Grützner.

Languishing and Languaging

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 16:31:00 +0000

Reading words about other words, because what else can you do?

A Coronacopia of Neologisms

neologisms, portmanteaux, wordplay

I think it’s fair to say that the coronavirus pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives — including our language. New word coinages are popping up all over, from quarantini and coronarita to coronacation and iso bro. Nancy Friedman of Fritinancy posted a collection of them this week, what she calls coronacoinages.

Decimated Driver

etymology, etymological fallacy, snoots

Let Stan Carey’s “Literal Decimation,” at Sentence First, serve as your latest regular reminder that the argument “Decimate can only mean 'eliminating one in ten'” does not hold water, and that the etymological fallacy, “the belief that a word’s older or original meaning is the only correct one or is automatically more correct than newer, conventionally accepted ones,” is, well, a fallacy.

Video of the Week

language history, Scots

This week, Fire of Learning explored the question “Is Scots an English dialect or a language all its own?” The answer to the question, if one exists, has implications for how we categorize other languages and dialects.

The video includes a brief overview of some of the migrations and invasions that contributed to the evolution of language on the island of Great Britain, as well as a deconstruction of the words of “Auld Lang Syne.”

There are more resources out there like this; help me find them! Schools all over the world are closing down in-person classes and shifting to elearning, and many of these new online resources are available to anyone with an internet connection. While we’re all holed up in our homes, this may be a prime opportunity to learn about, well, anything — and from actual experts and teachers.

So if you find a great new resource to learn about any aspects of the English language, please do share. We’ve all rolled our eyes at people who are famous just for being famous; we might have a chance here to make more people famous for being great teachers and innovators.

A Man of Few Birds

etymology, word history

If a group of twenty crows is called a murder, what are they called if one of them dies?
A Corvid-19.

Don’t get this (horrible, horrible) joke? Here's what you're missing: Corvid is the name for a large family of birds that includes ravens, jackdaws, magpies, and others, including crows. On Sunday, James Harbeck of Sesquiotica wrote about corvid, the bird and the word, which resembles COVID but isn’t etymologically related at all, though in the twisty twiny way languages evolve, there are some interesting connections between the birds and pandemics.

COVID-19 itself isn’t some technical, esoteric word that’s impenetrable outside of scientific circles: It’s an abbreviation for COronaVIrus Disease of 2019.

Logomachy!

book review, dictionaries

Here’s one I missed from earlier in the month: Kory Stamper, Our Favorite Lexicographer, wrote a review of Peter Martin’s book The Dictionary Wars for TLS, (the Times Literary Supplement). When I started reading it, I was excited that there was a new book about the lexicographical and marketing battles between dictionary-makers Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester — another book for my (practically infinite) to-be-read list. Then I kept reading: After a brief, basic explanation of what Martin’s book is all about, Stamper skewers the author, calling out an obvious bias toward Worcester, questionable editing of quotations, factual errors, and important threads of research that were snipped too short. Maybe it wouldn’t be worth reading after all.

Who am I kidding. Of course I’m going to read it. A book like this as practically custom-made just for a guy like me. (Now if only I could find a good, non-academic book about the Great Vowel Shift.)

Warning: TLS is a British outlet, so expect British-style formatting and spelling, including periods outside of quotation marks, towards, and the occasional -our.

Just for Pun

puns, images

From The Language Nerds this week, “27 Brilliant and Funny Puns That Will Make You Giggle.” Though brilliant is perhaps a step too far, there are some cute ones in here, including this great visual pun of Bill Clinton hiding in the bushes:

Featured image from The Public Domain Review.

Out of This Word

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 17:19:00 +0000

Learn about your language while you're stuck in quarantine.

Going Viral

onomastics, xenophobia

There’s a reason the WHO took six weeks to come up with COVID-19 as the name of the disease caused by the unique strain of coronavirus. And there is another reason — and some deeper implications — why some anti-immigration types have been calling it the Wuhan virus, the Chinese coronavirus, or the foreign virus. And this week, we got two points of view (though they’re largely the same perspective) about what people are calling the cause of the current pandemic: For Medium, Nancy Friedman wrote “Does It Matter What we Call a Disease?” and for The Atlantic, Ben Zimmer offers “Why Trump Intentionally Misnames the Coronavirus.”

Englishing Good

zombie rules, grammar

Can or may? Well or good? Who or whom? You might not really know, writes Michelle Sheehan in “Five Things People Think They Know about English Grammar That Make Absolutely No Sense” for The Conversation. Most copy editors — myself included — could probably triple this list if lexical foibles. What weird, stupid grammatical rule did you learn in school and then have to unlearn as an adult?

E, C, and Me

podcast, self-promotion, spelling, pronunciation

This week’s Grammar Girl podcast, “Whisky or Whiskey,” posted on St. Patrick’s Day, comes with an Irish theme. Apart from the mystery of the errant E, Mignon Fogarty talks about the pronunciation of Celtic, which is pronounced exactly like you think, and also not. But most importantly (at least from one blogger’s point of view), she reads my winning quatrain from this year’s National Grammar Day poetry contest.

Lex and the City

onomastics, maps

Ever dream of taking a vacation in Black Pool, Smoky Bay, or Meadow of the Gods? I bet you have! According to a new post from The Language Nerds, “Extraordinary Map Shows the Literal Meanings of City Names,” these are the “true” meanings of Dublin, Reykjavik, and Oslo. And there are lots more city names to explore the world over.

Top-Shelf Herb

word history, cooking

In a post on Thursday, James Harbeck of Sesquiotica explored the pronunciation, etymology, religiosity, culinary uses, and practically everything else about basil — the word, the herb, and the name.

Featured image from Public Domain Review.

Grammarama Ding-Dong

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 07 Mar 2020 14:00:00 +0000

A week of words, words of a week.

Gravy Quatrain

grammar, poetry, self-promotion

March 4 (“March forth!”) was National Grammar Day, which means time for ACES: The Society for Editors' annual Twitter poetry contest! In the past, they’ve asked for haiku and for limericks, but this year it was quatrains. After all the entries were judged, the one that came out on top was…

MINE! And here’s my winning quatrain:

Learn about the semicolon;
'Tis a good thing to invest in.
It splits up independent clauses,
Not half your large intestine.

I was, to say the least, surprised and honored to have won. Read Mark Allen’s write-up of the whole contest, the runners-up, and one of the creepiest photos ever taken of me in “Copy Editor’s Command of the Semicolon Earns First Place.”

Cutting the [G/J]eez

British English, spelling

You’re writing a comic strip. In it, a tween tells himself that he’s going to take only one of the chocolates his mother forbade him from touching. In the next frame, he realizes that he’s eaten all of the chocolates. What appears in the speech bubble, JEEZ! or GEEZ!? Lynne Murphy of Separated by a Common Language shows how the answer might depend on where you live.

Eyeing Colors

colors, onomastics

Yeah, this image is cute and kind of funny, but there’s also an interesting exploration at Language: A Feminist Guide of how men and women look (or may look) differently at colors and their names to go with it.

Cock-Blocked by the USPTO

trademarks, onomastics

The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office cannot deny the registration of a trademark simply on the basis of being “scandalous.” But as Anne Gilson LaLonde at Strong Language reports in “Some Sweary Trademarks Still Off Limits,” the USPTO is still “relying on a shaky rationale to justify rejecting a variety of” trademarks that include some choice four-letter words. I'm sure some of your favorites are represented.

God's Gift to the Word

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 29 Feb 2020 17:35:00 +0000

Your weekly round-up of logophilia, logodaedaly, and idiocy.

The Graphics Format that Sticks to the Roof of Your Mouth

pronunciation, acronyms

File this under “funny marketing ideas we thought no one would ever do”: The company that makes Jif peanut butter is releasing a special edition jar of the stuff with Gif on the label instead. The similarities are cute, sure, but the company also using the opportunity to weigh in on the neverending GIF pronunciation debate. GIF, they say, is pronounced with a hard G, just like graphic.

If your argument for pronouncing GIF with a soft G — like Jif — is “the man who invented GIFs says we should pronounce it that way!,” I will not entertain your argument until you can adequately explain why we pronounce gerrymander with a soft G even though it’s named after Elbridge “Hard G” Gerry. (Hat tip to Madeleine Vasaly for coming up with the gerrymander connection.)

Virginia Is for @*%&#ers

swearing, law

You can now legally curse in public in the State of Virginia.

To be fair, public swearing has been protected speech at a federal level — through a U.S. Supreme Court ruling — since 1971, but Virginia has had a law against profane swearing on the books since 1792. The state legislature voted to repeal that law this month.

While this seems like just a silly story about a pointless law taking up space in a state’s rulebook finally being eliminated, there is more to it than that. An anti-profanity law means that a police officer has cause to arrest someone who calls them a dirty name, and even though the charge might not stand, just think of how disruptive fighting such a charge would be to your life. Though it’s unclear (at least to CNN) how many people have been charged under this law, you can probably guess what type of people were most often targeted. (Hint: It’s not middle- or upper-class white folks.)

Starting Over with a Green Slate

podcast

Helen Zaltzman will be taking a break from The Allusionist podcast for a bit, so you should check out the last episode she’ll be putting out for a while. In “Alarm Bells,” she talks with people in the business of talking about saving the planet about the words we use to talk about it (wow, is that too many prepositions?) — and how the words themselves have been used to manipulate how we feel about the arguments. One of the words she defines is one I had forgotten about: greenwash, which refers to disinformation by organizations hoping to present an image of being environmentally responsible. The phrase clean coal comes to mind.

Speaking of podcast hiatuses, Talk the Talk will be off the air soon, but not for good. They’re leaving the RTRFM family but will be coming back in a new form in the future. Host Daniel Midgley doesn’t offer a lot of specifics about their future, but I hope they won't be gone too long. The final RTRFM broadcast, “Outed or Misgendered,” focuses on personal pronouns and the complex nature of even asking someone what their pronouns are.

Euphemistic Boogaloo

euphemism, word history, gun rights

Nancy Friedman of Fritinancy this week explored and explained how we got from 1984’s Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo to ammosexuals wearing floral Hawaiian shirts under their tactical gear at a Virginia gun rights protest. Inasmuch as mid-’80s breakdancing movies could be ruined, these gun nuts have ruined mid-’80s breakdancing movies for me.

The Round-up Round-up

etymology, word history

Anatoly Liberman of the OUPblog this week published his “Etymological Gleanings for January and February 2020,” a number of quick-shot etymological explications based on comments and letters he’s received over the last two months. There, you’ll find theories and explanations about the history of squirrel, hunt, silk, belong, and more.

Battle of the Bissextus

etymology, self-promotion

Today is Leap Day, and over at The Saturday Evening Post, I wrote “Bissextus: A Short History of Leap Years,” which explains how we got the word bissextus, or bissextile day — another name for Leap Day.

Of course, I’m not the only one promoting his bissextile coverage — after all, the word only becomes relevant every four years. Merriam-Webster has a nice little post about it, Collins Dictionary is tweeting out its definition page, Word Genius gives a brief gloss, and there are others.

What most of these posts don’t point out, but that mine does, is the idea that, to purists, bissextile day isn’t February 29; it's February 24.

Unaltered featured image by Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0.

My Intellectual Ancestor?

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 17:56:00 +0000

While reading Dennis Baron's new book What's Your Pronoun? during lunch today, I was surprised and delighted to find a reference to someone I can only conclude is my intellectual ancestor. The Ladies' Repository in July of 1864 printed a piece called "An Epicene Personal Pronoun Needed" that was attributed to someone called Philologus.

This pseudonym is built from the same Greek roots as my blogging nom de plume, only in the opposite order: philos "loving" and logos "words, speech."

For writers and editors, the conspicuous absence of a nongendered third person singular pronoun has long been recognized. This Philologus proposed ve, vis, and vim — as in "Someone left vis smartphone in the locker room. Ve'll want it back, so I'm trying to find out who owns it so I can get it back to vim."

Obviously, it didn't catch on, like nearly all of the more than 200 proposed pronouns that Dennis Baron chronicles in What's Your Pronoun? I'm nearing the halfway point of this book, but I can already recommend it to anyone interested in nongendered language, grammatical arguments, the intersection of grammar and politics, language history, or gender equity.

War of Wordcraft

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 18:51:00 +0000

Words can be dangerous, but so can silence. It's up to you to choose which is the better weapon.

They Are Still in the News

pronouns, gender

You may recall that Merriam-Webster’s 2019 Word of the Year was nonbinary they, and that the American Dialect Society chose (my) pronouns as their Word of the Year and singular they as Word of the Decade. These choices were more than just brief, meaningless, year-end exercises. The whole topic of personal pronouns isn’t going away anytime soon, nor should it.

If you haven’t given the topic much thought, or if you are just looking for other takes or even some history on pronoun use, new resources are appearing all the time: On a smaller side, the Grammarphobia Blog yesterday responded to one reader’s momentary confusion from looking for a plural antecedent for a singular they in “A ‘They’ by Any Other Name.” At the larger end, Dennis Baron’s new book What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He & She was recently published. It takes readers through English-speakers’ search for gender-free and nonbinary third-person pronouns, including a long list of proposed pronouns (like idn, ip, hir, and hiser) that goes back to 1770.

That's not a typo: 1770.

You can also listen to an interview with Dennis Baron in this week’s Talk the Talk podcast.

If Lewks Could Kill

vocabulary, trends

How do I know I’m out of touch with young people? Merriam-Webster wrote up this whole post about lewk — a variant spelling of look with a more specific meaning — and I had never seen the word before. Apparently it’s used in fashion to designate someone’s individual look, and I need to watch more Queer Eye.

If, like me, this word is entirely new to you, before you click over to read more, you’ll also need to consult this Merriam-Webster post about the word zhuzh.

Try Not to Imagine Albert Einstein Cursing Like a Sailor

swearing, confirmation bias

I'll admit it: I included this story mostly because I want it to be true, in spite of any shortcomings of the study itself. That would be the 2015 study that concluded that, as brought to light by The Language Nerds, people who curse a lot are smarter and have a better vocabulary than those who don’t.

Interesting if true. And also fun. And it actually makes a certain amount of sense that people with more language proficiency and a larger vocabulary generally would also be more proficient at creative cursing. It also gives us all a reason — backed up by scientific research! — to shoot for Margo Hanson-level swearility in our daily lives.

Don’t know that reference? It’s to the SyFy show The Magicians. of which I just finished watching the fourth season. In spite of this show's plot holes, inconsistencies, and sometimes needless complexity, it’s still worth the time to watch it just for Margo’s creative cursing. Here’s a short compilation video of some of them, but I have no idea how whoever pulled this together could have left out “Jesus' tits.”

Guess That Body Part

swearing, literature

In other vulgarity news from the week, Stan Carey at Sentence First took a look at swearing as it is depicted in Antonio White’s 1933 novel Frost in May. In that story, the matrons at the convent where Nanda (the protagonist) is progressing have a rather severe idea of what constitutes cursing, including an apparently prolix list of verboten verbiage. Nanda talks about “a word so dreadful that she only whispered it in her very worst, most defiant moments. She blushed and passionately begged Our Lady’s pardon for even having thought of such a word in her presence.”

What’s the word? It's a body part, but it isn't the body part you think. And it's not your second guess, either. You’ll have to go read “A Word So Dreadful and Rotten” to find out.

My Name Is Mud

etymology, word history

In his latest offering at the Oxford University Press blog, “Muddy Waters,” Anatoly Liberman wades into mud — that is, the origin of the word. The etymological history of mud is, well, muddy, and as he takes us into the word’s past, we find ourselves knee-deep in morass, moor, and marsh. And there’s also some smut in there, too.

Chili con Carnival

self-promotion, etymology, word history

What do you call next Tuesday? If you aren’t a Christian, the answer is probably “next Tuesday,” but the rest of you have other choices: Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Pancake Day, and Shrove Tuesday. My latest word history column, “A Carnival of Names for Mardi Gras,” is all about where all these names for the last hurrah before Lent come from. I also touch on what for some is the meat of this season: carnival.

Featured image sourced from The Public Domain Review.

As the Word Turns

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 15 Feb 2020 19:07:00 +0000

The week's best word news, for the casual logophile.

Don't Make Me Hurl

language change, pronunciation

It’s amazing (sometimes even in a good way) which innocent little statements can send people wandering en masse on tangents, or jumping down rabbit holes, or, in this case, tumbling into the sky. Editor Jaime Sperling started a little wordwind on Twitter this week by pointing out,

Omg, I have been pronouncing trebuchet as "treh-boo-shay" (in my head), when apparently it's pronounced pretty much how it's spelled, with the final t sound. This week is blowing my mind. #amediting
— Jaime Sperling (@DiedofEnnui) February 13, 2020

She wasn’t the only one who was surprised to discover they had been “mispronouncing” the word their entire lives. Or had they? If so many people are pronouncing trebuchet to rhyme with Chevrolet, wouldn’t that make it a legitimate pronunciation? Isn’t that how a democratic language is supposed to work?

James Harbeck of Sesquiotica offers up this explanation of the word trebuchet — both its history and its pronunciation — and now there’s a small contingent urging Merriam-Webster to add the maybe-it-shouldn't-be-considered-incorrect pronunciation to the word's dictionary entry.

The App’s Tale

app, literature

I had never really considered using a great work of literature as the basis for an app that wasn’t a video game. (BTW, programmers: I’m still waiting for Jane Eyre to show up to kick some ass in Mortal Kombat.) But as I read up about how an international team of academics (headed by folks at the University of Saskatchewan) has created a Canterbury Tales app, with audio recordings, a digital manuscript, notes, and commentary, it makes perfect sense. “We want the public, not just academics, to see the manuscript as Chaucer would have likely thought of it — as a performance that mixed drama and humor," says project leader Peter Robinson. Academic apps — who knew?

Currently, only the General Prologue is ready, but that’ll be enough to keep you busy for a while, no? And in a surprise turn, the late Terry Jones of Monty Python had a hand in making it all happen, and the app was deliberately released on what would have been his 78th birthday.

This is levels above, say, CliffsNotes, and what’s more, it’s free. And I’m downloading it to my phone while I type this. Look for “General Prologue” from Scholarly Digital Editions on Google Play or the App store.

Relevance of Style

editing, usage, style guides

On paper, a copy editor’s job seems pretty straightforward: Fix the grammar and usage, smooth the prose down, and keep the author from looking like a fool. Beyond that, copy editors make sure manuscripts conform to house style, which includes the treatment of numbers, capitalization, punctuation, preferred spellings, and other little niggling details.

Though I think most writers understand that, even though I can gloss over the job description in just two sentences, copy editors have a lot to consider. But few really understand how just how many "little niggling details" a copy editor contends with.

But here’s your chance to find out: Mother Jones published its style guide online this week. It is a book’s worth of editorial guidance — and this is in addition to the AP Stylebook and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Mother Jones decided to share this guide, writes Daniel King, “to encourage readers, and ourselves, to learn out loud about words’ consequences and constraints.” I encourage you to dip into this, whether you’re familiar with style guides or not. I guarantee you’ll find some aspect of getting writing, editing, or journalism “right” that you hadn’t considered before. It could make your writing better, but what's more, it'll make you appreciate a good copy editor.

Cartoon of the Week

style guides, cartoon

Speaking of style guides...

DON’T LET ME STEAL IVA CHEUNG’S CLICKS! Go to her website and check out some of her other editing-related cartoons. (And learn more about editing while you’re there.)

One Off the Airwaves

podcast, word history

In this week’s That’s What They Say podcast, Anne Curzan talks about one-off, a possible replacement for the weakening unique that some Americans are hearing more often. A folk etymology claims that one-off came from a shortening (and parheps mishearing?) of one-of-a-kind. Not so, says Curzan; the word comes from British manufacturing, where you might also find two-off or sixty-off. Take four minutes to listen to the whole episode, "A Manufactured 'One-Off.'"

Rank and Phile

self-promotion, vocabulary

My short language quiz (which originally appeared in the January/February issue of The Saturday Evening Post) is up online. The idea is simple: Match the “-phile” on the left (e.g., chionophile, selenophile) with the object of that “lover’s” affection. Can you get nine out of nine? (Also check out my new post about eponyms, “9 Things You Didn’t Know Were Named After People.”)

The Fine Print

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 15 Feb 2020 01:12:00 +0000

“What can I do to get you inside one of these beautiful cars?"

It was such a cliched thing for a car salesman to say, and that’s why Jeremiah Tork smiled when he heard it. He had already decided to go through with leasing the super-expensive, cutting-edge supercar before he'd arrived at the dealership, and he looked forward to making this salesman’s day, if not his month, from the commission.

Psychopomp Motors kept the details of its DaemonForce 6000 top secret. Parts lists, user’s manuals, and repair manuals weren’t publicly available, not even on the Dark Web, and not even to someone like Jeremiah, who had the money to pay for them. The DaemonForce 6000 was the only vehicle that required signing a nondisclosure agreement, an inexplicable hassle to some, but an irresistible lure to Jeremiah. If it wasn’t worth the price for the power, which was substantial, or the fuel efficiency, which was unbelievable, it was worth it for the prestige of being able to drive such an exclusive sports car around the city.

Jeremiah had memorized ten questions to ask the salesperson about the car, to let them think they were convincing him to buy, but in the end he asked only two and found himself in the leasing office before noon.

"Allow me to be the first to congratulate you on your lease of a brand new DaemonForce 6000 hybrid sports car,” Anthony the salesman said, smiling at Jeremiah’s signature at the bottom of the lease form, “the most powerful, most fuel-efficient sports car ever made.”

“Thank you,” Jeremiah said. “I still would much rather buy one outright.”

“I’m afraid it’s not possible,” the salesman said.

“I’ve got the money.”

“It’s not a matter of money, I’m afraid,” Anthony said. He slid the lease paperwork through a slot on the wall beside his desk. “Now, to the nondisclosure agreement. As I mentioned before, there are a lot of trade secrets under the hood of the DaemonForce 6000, secrets our competitors would love to get their hands on. Obviously a two-thousand-horsepower automobile that gets nearly a hundred miles per gallon is light years ahead of everyone else. All other car manufacturers, as we like to say, are trying to catch up with us, both literally and figuratively.” Anthony smiled widely, showing, Jeremiah thought, slightly more than the usual number of teeth.

With a flourish, the salesman produced a fresh stack of papers from a desk drawer, a stack even thicker than the lease agreement.

“So before we can even start your orientation,” Anthony continued, “we need you to agree to keep our secrets, well, secret. In a legally binding way.”

“Orientation?”

“Yes. There are certain, shall we say, maintenance issues with the DaemonForce that are quite different from your average car.”

“Okay.”

“Now, here on the first page…” Anthony quickly took Jeremiah through each part of the NDA. The entire first page was nothing but a defining of terms — Jeremiah as lessor, Psychopomp Motors as lessee, the difference between intellectual property and trade secrets, and so on. The second page was a section in all-capital letters about indemnification and arbitration and the legal limits of Psychopomp’s responsibility.

The more interesting information began on the fourth page, where, Anthony explained, one section was an acknowledgment that Jeremiah understood that, in the case of a sudden collision that compromised the integrity of the engine area, the entire engine block would automatically self-destruct in a way that would not put the driver in any danger, provided he had survived the accident itself.

Faster and faster, Anthony sped through the text of the NDA, pointing to relevant blocks of thick legalese: All but the most basic maintenance tasks — changing a headlamp or the windshield wipers — were to be performed at the dealership and only at the dealership, he warned. The hood was not to be opened outdoors, where someone might see, and the engine was equipped with sensors that, in the presence of natural sunlight, would cause the engine to become unusable. The hood was not even to be opened outside the dealership except in very special, controlled circumstances.

In the beginning, Jeremiah took the time to scan each line of the contract, even if he didn’t always understand the jargon. He signed on long lines and initialed on short ones. Twelve pages in, the words the letters formed had ceased to hold any meaning, and he felt a headache coming on. Relying on Anthony’s descriptions, he penned in his name or initials where indicated.

Finally, there were only two blank lines left for his full name and the date.

He held the tip of Anthony’s fountain pen above that final line. “I’ll get a copy of this agreement, right?” he asked.

“Of course!” Anthony said. “You can take it home and review it to your heart’s content!”

Jeremiah noticed Anthony’s wide smile falter ever so slightly when he set the pen down and massaged the cramp out of it. “Considering all the money and now time I’m sinking into this car,” Jeremiah said, “it better be worth it.”

“Oh, it will be. Believe me, it will be. You will be driving around town in the single greatest vehicle ever built.”

There was a quiet knock at the office door.

“Yes?” Anthony called out.

The door opened just enough for a mechanic to stick his head in. “His car is ready.”

“Thank you, Michael,” Anthony said.

Michael’s head disappeared, and the door closed silently.

Jeremiah's heart raced as it had when he'd finally decided to lease the car. “Well all right then,” he said, picking up the pen. He signed his name, printed the date, set the pen down, and leaned back in the chair.

Anthony splayed his fingers out on top of the agreement and spun it around. “Beautiful,” he said, staring at the signature. Finally, he looked Jeremiah in the eyes. “Are you ready to see your new DaemonForce?”

The first thing Jeremiah noticed about the preparation area was how small it was. He was expecting an expansive, high-tech, multi-unit garage, but this room was just large enough to walk all the way around the single vehicle at its center. It was dark, too. A single bright light shone down from somewhere above them onto the sexy, bright red curves of his new DaemonForce 6000. Black acoustic tiles covered the walls, sucking sound from the air.

The overall result was impressive, Jeremiah thought, offering him almost no distractions from the car itself. Even the tall rolling toolbox, which Jeremiah's mind knew must have been just as bright as the car, faded into nonexistence in the corner.

Michael the mechanic — dressed in spotless navy-blue overalls that sported the winged Psychopomp logo on the left breast — stood like a sentry at the supercar's left front corner.

Anthony closed the door to the office behind them, and Jeremiah thought he heard a lock fall into place. "I present to you," Anthony said, extending his arm like a circus ringmaster, “your brand new, hybrid-powered, two-thousand-horsepower, American-made, panty-moistening DaemonForce 6000." He dropped a wireless key fob into Jeremiah’s open hand. The four-button fob was linked by a silver key ring to a shiny piece of solid silver in the shape of the Psychopomp logo.

Anthony walked to the side of the car and tugged on a nearly invisible release. The driver’s-side door rose up and folded back on itself like a bat’s wing. “Slide on in," he said.

The black leather bucket seat cradled Jeremiah's ass like the cupped hand of God, and his last lingering doubts about spending so much on the car disappeared.

As soon as he sat down, the dark display behind the steering wheel came to life — a minimalist, all-digital heads-up display showing only an odometer, dual trip odometers, and a clock in the same bright red as the car's exterior.

“No speedometer?” Jeremiah asked, confused.

“That is projected onto the lower-left corner of the windshield while you’re driving. You can move any of the other gauges up there, too, if you’d like.”

“Cool!” Jeremiah blushed for sounding like a grade-school kid with a new toy.

“It drives pretty much like any other car, with a few exceptions," Anthony said. "First, on the back side of the steering wheel, at ten and two, do you feel those two buttons? That's the overdrive. Keep the overdrive off for street driving. The bottom button is for highway driving, and the top button, well, we call that ‘Getaway Mode.’ Though you have touch access to the radio, the air conditioning and all that stuff on the center console, everything — and I mean everything — can also be voice-activated. The headlights, the windshield wipers, even the seat warmers can be controlled by the sound of your voice. All you have to do is say the car's name and then tell it what you want.”

“The car has a name?"

"Oh yes. And your car is..." he gestured to the mechanic, who handed him a square of blue paper. Anthony took the slip and glanced at it. “Really?” he asked.

The mechanic shrugged.

"Apparently," Anthony said to Jeremiah, "your car is named Edith."

"Edith?" Jeremiah said. That was his dead grandmother’s name. "Can I change that?"

"I'm afraid not. But don't worry; you'll get used to it.” Anthony pushed on before Jeremiah could object. "As I said, everything is voice-controlled, except the steering, the accelerator and brake, and, of course, the ignition, which is right there." He pointed to a big red button to the right of the steering column that had START printed on it in black block letters. “As long as your fob is within about ten feet of the engine, you just push that button and go."

Next to the START button was another, slightly smaller red button, labeled MOTIVATE.

"What does that button do?" Jeremiah asked.

"We'll get to that in good time," Anthony said. "But first, why don't you try out the voice activation."

"Doesn't the car have to be on?"

"Nope. It's always listening. Why don't you tell the car to turn on the headlights."

Jeremiah squared himself in the seat and said, tentatively, "Edith, turn on the headlights."

Nothing happened.

Anthony’s smile disappeared. He leaned into the cabin and said, in a voice like a parent chiding a recalcitrant child, "Edith! Put the headlights on."

A second passed in silence, but then, slowly, a pair of headlamps unfolded from the front corners of the car and lit up.

"They look a bit dim," Jeremiah said, noticing how the light barely illuminated the small room's back wall.

"They sure are," Anthony muttered. "And slow, too." But then his smile returned. "But I can show you how to take care of that on your own."

"Me?"

"Yes. And now we move to the more sensitive part of your orientation. Please press the last button on your fob."

When Jeremiah did so, an inch-long brass key popped out of the top of the fob.

"Now, may I direct your attention to the hood release," Anthony said.

Jeremiah found it just where expected, by his left knee.There was a small keyhole above it. "With one hand," Anthony explained, "you insert the key and give it a quarter-turn to the left, and with the other hand, you pull the release."

Jeremiah followed the instructions. There was a loud clunk, and simultaneously the front edge of the hood popped up several inches and he felt the key automatically retract into the fob.

While Michael the mechanic lifted and propped the hood, Jeremiah moved to get out, but Anthony was deliberately blocking his way. "Now let me remind you," he warned, "that you are never to open the hood outdoors, and that you are never to allow anyone else to look under the hood."

"I understand," Jeremiah replied, "but I really don’t understand why you need this level of secrecy."

"You will." Anthony stepped back to let him out of the car.

Jeremiah wasn't much of a car guy — he bought a new car every two years so he wouldn’t have to be — but he knew that what he saw under that hood was wrong. To call it an engine block wouldn’t be accurate. There was no battery, no fuse box, no tubes or wires. There was no spout to add coolant to the engine or water to the radiator. There was no radiator. What there was was a large, dark, metal sphere in the center, a silver box with a single red button beside it, and a place to put windshield wiper fluid.

"Now, to open the containment sphere,” Anthony explained, "just hold down that red button until you hear the click and the green lights come on. Go ahead." Anthony pointed at the red button on the silver box.

Jeremiah leaned under the hood and pushed the button down. He could feel a vibration under his thumb — some kind of power source that worked its way up his arm. It had reached his shoulder when it suddenly stopped, something in the silver box clicked, and a line of green LED lights lit up along the back of the compartment.

"At last, Mr. Tork," Anthony said, "May I introduce you to the power source and control mechanism of your new DaemonForce 6000. Now don’t be alarmed." The top of the sphere clam-shelled open, revealing, inside, a small metal cage. There was a lump at the center of the cage, a black lump — blacker somehow than the surrounding darkness — that looked simultaneously furry and scaly.

"You must be Edith," Anthony said to the lump.

It shifted as if alive, and Jeremiah, his heart suddenly pounding in his ears, saw what looked like (but couldn't possibly be) a tiny black paw raising an even tinier middle finger in Anthony’s direction.

"Edith," Anthony said. "This is Jeremiah. You're going to be serving him now." To Jeremiah he whispered, "Say hello."

"Uh, hello, Edith."

Jeremiah took an instinctive step backward when a second appendage appeared. It was definitely a tiny paw that was definitely flipping Jeremiah the bird.

"Don't be like that, Edith," Anthony cooed. "Ah, I suppose it’s just as well. I need to show Jeremiah here how the MOTIVATE button works.”

The furry-scaly black thing whirled around. In surprise, Jeremiah jumped backward and smashed his elbow against the large red toolbox. A drawer rolled partway open, revealing an array of tools, most of which Jeremiah recognized — a wrench, wire cutters, a screwdriver — but also a shiny hand tool that resembled a speculum.

“No, not the button!” rasped the thing in the cage, its lipless mouth grimacing, revealing at least three rows of small, sharp teeth. “Master Anthony, please. Not the button! I'll be good! I promise! See?” The headlamps lit up to full power.

"What is that?" Jeremiah at last found the voice to ask.

"That, sir, is a demon."

"A de— what?"

"A demon, Mr. Tork. Just like the name on the car says. Edith here was condemned to an eternity of torture in the hottest pits of hell, and we, er, negotiated her release to do a little work for us up here. Like a work-release program, but for infernal creatures."

In any other situation, Jeremiah would have dismissed the existence of demons, of hell even, as religious or occult fanaticism, but as he stared at the car’s miniature "power source" — with its bifurcated tail, four-nostriled nose, and single large eye with a rectangular black pupil — he couldn’t deny the truth behind the words. Still...

"Negotiated? You negotiated with hell for a demon to—"

"Demons, Mr. Tork. Demons in the plural."

"But how did you even … who did you even negotiate with?"

"Trade secrets, I'm afraid Mr. Tork. Trade secrets that are not included with your nondisclosure agreement."

"He's lying, Jeremiah!" the creature rasped. "Don't believe him! I was a person once, just like you. I had children. Do you have children? Well I had—"

"Ah-ah-ahhh," Anthony chided. "You know the penalty for lying, Edith."

"I'm not lying!" the creature grabbed a bar of her cage but yelped and pulled her paw back. Jeremiah thought he heard a sizzling sound.

"Rule number one with demons," Anthony said softly to Jeremiah, "is that they always lie. It’s what demons do. Don’t believe a word she says."

"But I'm not a demon." Edith was whimpering now, cradling her burnt paw.

"Of course, Edith," Anthony said facetiously. He walked back to the open driver’s-side door. "If she ever gives you any trouble again, Mr. Tork, just press the MOTIVATE button.” He slid into the driver’s seat. "Allow me to demonstrate."

Edith erupted: "No! Please! Not the button! I'm motivated! I'm motiv— AAAAAH!" A bolt like purple lightning encircled her, arcing not only around her body but through it, giving her dark furry-scaly coat an iridescent glow. It would have been an amazing sight were it not for the screaming. Edith's painful wails were louder than seemed possible from such a minuscule body. The sound of it filled the small room, and Jeremiah felt it vibrate within him, shaking loose terrors he hadn’t felt since childhood — the fear of spiders, of darkness, of clowns. Of death. He might have passed out from the shock if the sound had been allowed to reverberate and compound instead of being absorbed by the dark tiles that covered the walls.

The purple glow stopped abruptly, and so did the screaming, but the seconds of silence that followed were twice as loud. Edith curled into a tiny black lump once again.

"I never stop loving that sound," said Anthony. He stood beside the car and said, "Edith, close the car door."

Nothing happened.

"Edith," Anthony said sternly.

The sound was so small and so subtle that Jeremiah nearly missed it: Edith was crying, a sniffle that sounded so painful, and so human.

The car door unfolded and slid silently shut.

"Now, your demon doesn’t need much maintenance," Anthony explained, sauntering around to the front of the car as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened. "She can’t die, after all, because she’s already dead. But we find we get the best performance if, about once a month, you feed them about half a cup of fine gravel, which you can find at any pet store or place that sells aquariums."

Anthony doled out instructions on how to safely get the pebbles into the cage without being bitten or clawed, plus the various benefits of quartz gravel and river pebbles, but Jeremiah was only half-listening. We was watching Edith, certain that he could see her tiny shoulders shake as she wept.

She must have sensed his gaze, because she lifted her head to him. A quivering light reflected off the tears that welled up around her one great eye. She looked not so much like a demon as a frightened kitten.

A horribly deformed, frightened kitten.

Jeremiah’s heart broke.

"And that’s about it. Any questions, Mr. Tork?" Jeremiah finally looked away from Edith into the face of her captor.

"Uh, yeah. This, uh, demon seems like she's pretty powerful. How do you keep her caged up like that?"

"It’s simpler than it sounds. People like— I mean demons like her are horribly allergic to iron. Those thin bars on her cage are just your standard, run-of-the-mill iron bars. But because they’re iron, she can’t touch them. It’s ironic, isn't it?" He smiled at his little joke. "Anything else?"

Jeremiah nodded thoughtfully; he was thinking fast. "What about tires?"

"Tires?"

"Yeah. What if I get a flat tire? Can I take it to a tire place?"

"We would prefer you didn’t. There's a spare tire under the back of the car. Just put that on and then speed on over here and we’ll get you a new one. You do know how to put on a spare tire, don’t you?"

"Sure. Can you show me?" Jeremiah asked.

"How to put on a spare?"

"No no. The spare tire. How is it, you know, attached to the car? And how do I get it off?"

"Oh, of course," Anthony said. "It's simple, really. Let me show you." He walked toward the back of the car.

Jeremiah feinted toward the back, but when Anthony came even with the back tire, Jeremiah grabbed the wire cutters from the half-open drawer and lunged for the engine compartment. He had them clamped around one of the thin bars before he heard the mechanic shout, "Tony!" The cutters clipped through the wire cage as a pair of thick arms wrapped around his waist, trying to pull him away. He slipped the fingers of his left hand between the bars of the cage and held on while he worked the wire cutters around a second bar.

He thought he heard Edith say "Thank you, Jeremiah" as the clippers sank through the soft iron with a solid click. Anthony had made it to the front of the car by then. He and the mechanic pulled at Jeremiah, but his fingers were too well secured in the cage, and the combined force of the three of them bent the iron back, opening a hole in the cage.

Jeremiah felt Edith’s coat like hot sand against his fingertips as she wriggled her way painfully through the gap. With a squeal, she hopped down to the concrete floor.

"Get the lights!" Anthony screamed.

Michael stumbled toward the light switch beside the door to the office.

Edith scurried toward a dark corner and shouted triumphantly, "Chomp my crank, motherfu—"

The lights came on, but Edith was gone.

Anthony let go of Jeremiah. He straightened up, sighed, and smoothed the wrinkles from his suit and tie.

The mechanic stood in front of the door to the main office like a bouncer, arms crossed.

It took Jeremiah a few moments to work his fingers out of the small cage. There was a pain in his index finger, and he feared it was broken.

"Why on earth would you do a thing like that, Mr. Tork?" Anthony said. "You’ve ruined my entire day."

"You were torturing that poor creature!" Jeremiah protested.

"Yes."

In the arrogance of that single-syllable response, Jeremiah found a reserve of defiance he didn’t know he had. "You can't do that. It's time people knew what was going on here. It's ... it's …" his voice was getting hoarse with rage. "It’s evil! It’s immoral. It’s —"

Something was wrong. Jeremiah remembered Anthony being a few inches shorter than he, but now he seemed a few inches taller. The mechanic, too, seemed slowly to be growing. The whole room was, in fact.

Jeremiah’s stomach felt weird, and his throat was scratchy. The knuckles in both hands popped all at once, and he stared down at them. The fingers were shrinking to stubs, while the fingernails were growing long and claw-like. Coarse red hair had sprouted from the back of his hands and was growing with supernatural speed.

In the spaces between what had been his fingers, he saw the floor rushing up toward him, and he realized: Anthony and Michael weren’t growing; he was shrinking.

He panicked.

"Wh-wh-what’s happening?!"

"Exactly what you agreed to, Mr. Tork." He gave a quick nod to the mechanic. "You freed Edith, so you have to take her place."

"What? I never agreed to that!"

"You most certainly did, Mr. Tork," Anthony said, producing the nondisclosure agreement from inside his suit coat. "It’s right here on page eight. Aren’t those your initials right there?" He held the document out for Jeremiah to see.

Behind Anthony, the mechanic pressed a button on the wall and a long panel slid open, revealing a row of small, identical cages, each holding a creature that was in its own way disfigured, disgusting, infernal. Each one sat quietly at the center of their cage, docile as a sloth.

The last cage was empty. The mechanic handed it to Anthony, who waved his hand in front of it, and the bottom irised open.

"But ...but ... but that’s not right!" Jeremiah pleaded, feeling hot tears welling in his three eyes. "I’m not a demon."

Anthony shrugged. "Neither was Edith, technically."

Jeremiah was shin-high now, his empty clothing heaped around him. He could feel the row of spikes down his spine, and the cold tips of his large, pointed ears, but he was afraid to look down at himself, frightened of what he would find.

"Look on the bright side, Jeremiah," Anthony said as he lowered the cage around him. "You are no longer responsible for the lease you signed." He waved his hand over the cage and it snapped shut, trapping Jeremiah inside. Anthony lifted the cage up to eye level and peered inside. "But more importantly," he continued, "I am going to get you inside one of these beautiful cars."

About this story

"The Fine Print" was a response to the biweekly #RueLouPrompts, which are writing prompts for flash fiction. Though it got me writing, I totally failed at the "flash fiction" part, which means it's supposed to be 500 words maximum. I missed that target a bit. By, like, 3,600 words. A bit. At least I got a story out of it.

The prompt was "There's a demon inside." Obviously, I took the super-literal route. Other writers didn't. You can find their takes on the prompt (in under 500 words), as well as the next prompt, at RueSparks.com.

Let's Talk about Lex

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 17:07:00 +0000

This week's contributions to the exploration of English are nothing to fneeze at.

Ms. Communication

feminism, titles

Kathy Pollitt wrote an interesting history of Ms. in “Excuse Me, Ms.!” for The Nation this week, and there are some surprises in there. Though Ms. didn’t really take off until the 1970s, did you know that it was first proposed in 1901? Or that Jacques Barzun argued that the -man in words like garbageman and mailman didn’t refer to “a male person”? Or that fact checkers at publications that rejected Ms. spent entirely too much time tracking down the marital status of women mentioned in their stories?

Looking back, it’s hard to believe there was much opposition to Ms. It just makes so much sense, and makes so many things so much easier.

A Historical Fnafu

etymology, printing

Texts from more than 200 years ago can sometimes be slow reading for modern readers because of the use of the long S — that S that looks an awful lot like a lowercase f. It turns out, though, that this isn’t entirely a modern problem. As Adam Aleksic, aka The Etymology Nerd, points out, the word sneeze might have come about from a misreading of fnesen, which really does begin with an F that was confused for a long S.

Lynneguist Gets Cracking

British English, breakfast foods

Lynne Murphy (@Lynneguist on Twitter and author of The Prodigal Tongue) is the purveyor of the blog Separated by a Common Language, wherein she dotes on the differences between American English and British English. She recently noticed that her blogging of late had been falling off, and she's now recommitting to posting at least once a week about the unexpected and sometimes weird differences in our shared language.

And she’s kicking off her new resolution with eggs. “AmE,” she writes, “has a vocabulary for fried-egg cooking that BrE doesn't, which starts from the assumption that if you want your eggs well-done, then you should flip them over. In UK, flipping is less common.” Unless you’ve lived in the U.K., you’ve probably never ordered a dippy egg at a caff, but you might have had the American equivalent.

Foiled Again

word history, etymology, British English

And speaking of the differences between American and British English, the editors at Merriam-Webster this week asked (and answered) the question, “‘Aluminum’ or ‘Aluminium’?”

I’ve been a word guy for a long time, and have long recognized and appreciated how variable this thing we call English is around the world. I view most differences between American and British English with understanding, amusement, or even glee. But for some reason, those British words that have just a few “extra” letters, and maybe an extra syllable, always bug me. Not in an intellectual sense, but as a knee-jerk reaction. Aluminium is one of those words. So is jewellery. And speciality.

At any rate, this pair’s history was surprising to me — which means I enjoyed it. Turns out, it started as alumium.

Crash Blossom of the Week

crash blossom, headline

From Andy Bechtel:

Today in crash blossoms. pic.twitter.com/YdzaSthIhH
— Andy Bechtel (@andybechtel) February 6, 2020

If you aren’t familiar with crash blossoms, read this post at Language Log for an explanation of the word’s coinage. You’ll also find a lot of other great crash blossom headlines over there, too.

A Primer on Premier and Premiere

confusables, vocabulary

Understanding the difference between premier and premiere is one of the things you hire a copy editor for, so I risk losing business by pointing you toward The Grammarphobia Blog’s post about the difference. It's not that great a risk, though, because, as Patricia O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman point out, the words are still in the midst of some change — though the only change left might be for the dictionaries to catch up with the rest of us.

Ya Winsome, Ya Fulsome

etymology, word history

Editor Jeremy Butterfield (the very same Butterfield who was hired to revise Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage) spent a little time writing about the trouble word fulsome. I call it a trouble word because, as he points out early in his explication, it’s a skunked term. To some people, fulsome praise is enthusiastic and sincere, but to others it’s sarcastic, mocking, or even two-faced.
Read “Fulsome Is As Fulsome Does” to get some history and perspective, but not so many definite answers.

Featured image from The Public Domain Review.

Laugh, and the Word Laughs With You...

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 16:53:00 +0000

...cry, and maybe you should've hired a copy editor after all.

The Glowers That Be

etymology, word history

Just because Rudolph’s nose glows doesn’t mean he glowers (though sometimes he does, I’m sure). If you give someone a glowing review, you aren’t glowering. But why the heck not? James Harbeck of Sesquiotica this week offers a brief, illuminating look at how the words glow and glower are related, even while they have such opposite meanings.

When Were Was Be

grammar, subjunctive

Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman of The Grammarphobia Blog were asked about a specific construction in the King James Bible: “if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law.” What’s up with that be? As they elucidate more comprehensively and authoritatively than I could, in “But If the Husband Be Dead...,” that be indicates the subjunctive mood in a construction that is less commonly used today than it was during the early 17th century, when the KJV was penned.

Warning: Here there be grammar. (Which is not in the subjunctive mood and is a different grammatical animal entirely.)

It’s Not a “Long Field Goal”

abbreviations, profanity

Initialisms and acronyms get coined, tossed, and lost down the sewer grate every day, so it takes a little something extra for one to become newsworthy. Like, maybe, being adopted for a presidential campaign.

Elizabeth Warren has adopted the unofficial slogan “You and Me LFG,” borrowing a TLA from soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe. You can get it on a campaign T-shirt, sticker, or button.

Don’t know what LFG means? Here's a hint: The middle word starts with F, and Nancy Friedman wrote about it at Strong Language.

Missed Aches

spelling, just for fun

We all make mistakes, especially as children just learning the quirky, inconsistent idiosyncrasies of English morphology. That leaves plenty of opportunities for comedy, like the “23 Children’s Hilariously Inappropriate Spelling Mistakes” collected by The Language Nerds.

Be warned: This is the least offensive of the twenty-three.

Return of the Pod Squad

podcasts

Many of my favorite word-focused podcasts took time off during “the holidays,” which apparently extend all the way through Thesaurus Day. But now they’re now coming back with new episodes!

A Way with Words came back with a new episode on January 20 called “Tiger Tail,” in which they touch on boondocks, yipka, potpie, bubbler, being so king wet, and more.
The Allusionist came back on January 24 with “Zaltzology.” Though it’s a pared-down version of an interview she did with Alie Ward for the Ologies podcast, it’s still fun.
And my favorite podcast, Talk the Talk, dropped a new episode January 28 that’s all about the various words of the year — but especially the American Dialect Society’s voting.
Aaaaaand I just discovered that Subtitle started reposting at the beginning of the month, but my podcast player apparently hasn’t been updating that one. (Technology: Can’t live with it, can’t guilt trip it into working the way it ought to.) So this weekend, I’ll be spending my time listening to “Why Mormons Are So Good at Language” and “Is a Polyglot’s Brain Different” — and probably downloading a new podcast player.

Get Your Irish Up

Irish English, word history

In “Are You Codding Me with All This Stravaging,” Stan Carey of Sentence First picked two interesting bits of Irish English from Brian Moore’s novel The Feast of Lupercal to explore more deeply. See if you can guess what they are just from the title of his post.

Codding (which also gives us to cod and codology, but not codswallop) means "joking" or "fooling." Stravaging, which doesn’t rhyme with ravaging, means "to wander about." That -vaging part is a relative of vagrancy and vagabond. Click over to learn more and add these two useful words to your vocabulary.

Avocational Equine

word history

Neil Steinberg, on his sacrilegiously named blog Every Goddamn Day, takes us on a quick trip through some of the trivia that caught his eye online recently. While homing in on the fact that the word hobby comes from hobby horse and not the other way around, he alights on the interesting history of canary and the relative widths of Australia and the moon.

With Puns Blazing

participation, puns

When I started this weekly newsletter-type thingy, I hadn’t landed on a name that I really liked for it. I thought I would try out a few in the wild — especially punny ones — and maybe I would eventually land on one that just clicked.

But what clicked was the constant punning. So I’ve decided not to settle on one name, but to put as many word-related puns as I can on this blog, week after week. The good ones are running out fast, though, which means that it won’t be long before I hit the groan-inducing puns, followed immediately by the long stretches to get there.

Wanna help? What other punny titles could I use for this weekly word round-up? Leave them in the comments below. (And if I use them, of course I’ll acknowledge your contribution and my gratitude.)

Featured image from The Public Domain Review.

On Words, Definition Soldiers — January 25, 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 25 Jan 2020 18:13:00 +0000

Do you like words? Are you exhausted by the impeachment trial? Here's a place for you to relax.

They’re Getting the Ban Back Together

slang, education, youth language

For as long as I live, I don’t think I will ever truly understand some grown-ups’ desire to rein in youth speech in favor of “correct” formal English. But here we are again (and by we I mean Paige Neal-Holder writing for BBC News) asking “Should schools be allowed to ban slang?” A number of schools in England have slang bans in place. They're aimed specifically at lessons in the classroom, but “grammar police” posters and “slang jail” stickers appearing around the school will certainly have a chilling effect in the hallways as well.

Language restrictions at school are nothing more than dress codes for your tongue, only with more opportunity of uneven, unfair distribution that could push already marginalized populations even further into the margins.

And another thing: I guarandamntee you that every single person who supported a slang ban was once a teenager who used the slang of their own cohort in the halls of academe. Only the most self-loathing or self-unaware could argue that their slang was just fine, but this generation’s slang is detrimental.

Like I said, I’ll never understand it.

Dutch Courage May Actually Help You Speak Dutch

foreign languages, liquor

The Language Nerds this week (or maybe not — read the end) reported on a study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology (they have the best centerfolds) that claims that consuming a moderate amount of alcohol can actually improve one’s ability to speak in a second language. Presumably, the alcohol lowers inhibitions and increases self-confidence, cutting through the nerves and social anxiety that lead to hesitation and self-doubt.

The researchers claim that the benefits disappear if “too much” alcohol is consumed, but I believe more research is needed to make that claim. And I would appreciate it if someone would give me a call when some young linguist decides to start a new study to find out where that “too much” line is.

So here’s my hedging: This article drifted through my feed last week, and I liked it, so I thought I would share it. After poking around a little more (and after I wrote it up), it appears this article might be older than I thought. Like maybe two years older. But the Language Nerds don’t put dates on their posts, which really annoys me.

If you have a website where you frequently post new content, please put the date it was posted in there.

A Proliferation of Diarrh— Dierhe— Deaiaerree— Let’s Say “Dots”

diacritics, fake news

It’s a proven fact* that copy editors who regularly read The New Yorker have stronger eye muscles than the general population. Why? It’s all the extra eye rolling. The New Yorker’s house style guide is famously stuck in the 1920s, and there is no more visible sign of that anachronistic outlook than the fact that they still put a diaeresis (a word no one can spell without help) over the second of two consecutive vowels when those vowels occur in separate syllables, as in coöperation, naïve, or, I don’t know, homoërotic?

This week, ClickHole — a website that strives “to make sure that all of our content panders to and misleads our readers just enough to make it go viral” — declared “‘The New Yorker’ Has Announced That They’re Going to Start Putting an Umlaut [sic] Over Every Letter ‘O’ and No One Can Stop Them.” Yes, this is a fake article, but I wouldn’t put it past them.

* Not at all a proven fact.

I'm Feeling Disorientated

British English, language differences, peeves

As a word lover and scholar, I went through a snooty, smarter-than-thou, grammar-judging stage; I think most professional copy editors can say the same thing. I also came through it and now have a more balanced approach to language, grammar, and “correctness”; again I think most successful professional copy editors can say the same.

But there are some peeves from those days that I have a hard time letting go of. For example, I still cringe a little when I remember showing up at Ball State University for freshman orientation, and having our guide — an English major, no less — introduce herself and say that she was there to help orientate us to the campus.

Shivers just now, typing that.

But this week, Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman of The Grammarphobia Blog took on a word that, from my point of view, is even more disturbing: disorientated. And they didn’t spend their time explaining why it was wrong.

Apparently, disorientated is accepted as standard in most dictionaries, though it’s more commonly used in the U.K. than the U.S. What’s more, British English speakers seem to prefer disorientate to disorient. Click over to their post "Disoriented or Disorientated?" to examine their evidence and arguments.

I will continue to never ever ever use disorientate in my own work (unless, like now, I’m writing about the word itself), but as a working copy editor, the door has now been opened — just a crack — for others whose work I edit to use it. It still makes me cringe, though.

Tweet Thread of the Week

typos, signage

Jon Danziger, who is (according to his Twitter profile) a researcher at the Oxford English Dictionary, posted an enjoyable thread of error-riddled grocery-store signs this week. (The "high biscuit" plant is my favorite.) Just click the image to go to Twitter and see the whole thread.

Memories light the corner of my mind pic.twitter.com/0I0R697AdH
— Jon Danziger (@jondanziger) January 22, 2020

I get a little uneasy about proliferating images like these because the act might be construed as poking fun at or belittling the people who made the mistakes. viewed in this light, it isn't fair to amplify a single mistake on a global scale like this. But I hope that isn't what you see here. I certainly don't intend it that way, and I don't think Danziger does either.

I am totally against shaming someone for making mistakes; after all, we all make mistakes because we're all human, and shaming someone for being human is ridiculous. So as you look through these images, there are really only two takeaways: 1) These are mistakes. 2) They're funny. Full stop.

But also remember: Some day, you'll make a mistake like this too. (You probably already have.)

Embiggened MacMillan

dictionaries, new words

In a new post at MacMillan Dictionaries, Liz Potter offers an overview of new additions to that esteemed reference work. A large chunk of the additions deal with how we talk about gender these days, including non-binary, cisgender, and Spivak pronouns. This last was new to me. It’s an eponym for “a set of gender-neutral pronouns developed . . . by a mathematician called Michael Spivak back in the 1990s.”

It isn’t all about gender words, though. It isn’t even all about words. MacMillan has also expanded the number of sound clips in its online dictionary as well as the collection of images paired with definitions. This explains the jarring juxtaposition at the top of the post. The headline reads “Reflecting on How We Talk about Gender: A New Update of MacMillan Dictionary,” which is immediately followed by a photograph of a bowl of noodles and mushrooms.

While the 14-year-old boy who lives inside me was gung-ho about reading about the connection between gender and noodles, the slightly-more-adult professional in me had his doubts.

Reprobate Court

etymology, self-promotion

Have you ever noticed that reprobate is just probate with re- tacked on? Now you have! Does that mean you're a reprobate if you have to go back to probate court a second time? Yeah, no. That's silly. Get a brief look at how these two wildly different words are related in my latest In a Word at The Saturday Evening Post, “From Probate to Reprobate.”

Hilarious Auto Cucumber Errors

autocorrect, typos

Lastly, and just for fun — because we could all use more satisfied fingers, horny Asians, and goat choking in our lives — here from The Language Nerds, in a more recent post, is the totally NSFW “30 of the Most Concerning Autocorrect Fails of All Time.” Remember these whenever you find yourself thinking that a grammar- and spell-checking algorithm could be just as good as a live copy editor.

Featured image courtesy of the Public Domain Review.

Word-Brained — January 18, 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Andy Hollandbeck) — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 14:02:00 +0000

What words are we talking about this week?

Ecstatic Onomasticon Diurnal Course!

holidays, synonyms

Happy Thesaurus Day, everyone! To mark this most auspicious (propitious, felicitous, fortunate) anniversary of the birth of Peter Mark Roget, I bring you . . .

I’ve got nothing . . . nothing new anyway. Thesaurus Day totally snuck up on me this year.

But if you’re really looking for some fun with synonyms and antonyms, I can direct you to my post from last year, “7 Surprising Synonyms for Thesaurus Day,” or to my 2013 post on this here blog called “A Bit about Roget and Thesauruses on Thesaurus Day,” which includes a brief etymology of the word thesaurus as well as an outdated reference to Fiona Apple. No doubt other word lovers will be publishing their Thesaurus Day thoughts at the same time I’m publishing this, though, so go out and see what else awaits you.

After you’ve finished reading this post, of course.

Bowled Over

etymology, football

Have you ever wondered why college football teams play in bowl games? Wonder no more! Dave Wilton at WordOrigins.com gives us the complete story, all the way back to Ælfric’s Life of St. George, written in the 10th century.

St. George, as we all know, is the patron saint of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Verbology

wordplay

I saw a tweet the other day that included an embedded video that some people say contains evidence of skulduggery in a major league baseball game. I don’t follow baseball; what caught my attention, though, was that the tweeter said that he had zapruder’d the video snippet for a long time before he formed a conclusion. I liked that verb zapruder’d, with all its implications of conspiracy and cover-up wrapped in a historical reference that I actually understand.

Some people can get annoyed when others turn nouns into verbs like this, but not me, and not Stan Carey, author of the Sentence First blog. “Verb All the Things” he says in the title to a recent post, in which he writes, "Novel verbing can lend oomph to mundane moments.” I tend to agree.

Normally, instead of just mentioning a tweet, I would actually find and embed it here. But I didn’t mark it when I first saw it, and when I went back and searched for zapruder’d on Twitter, it returned a lot more results that I expected. There’s also the apostropheless zaprudered, which I prefer, and presumably the present-tense zapruder is out there as well, though it’s more difficult to search for. I’ll take ’em all.

De Do Do Do, De Dot Dot Dot

pronunciation, opera

I realize that few people in this world have the type of personal relationship that I do with the Puccini opera Turandot. (It’s a whole high school marching band thing.) Fewer still have reason to ever say the name Turandot out loud. And it’s a good thing, too, because no matter how you pronounce it, somebody will tell you you're doing it wrong. A tuxedoed James Harbeck of Sesquiotic has more:

From the Trenches

etymology, history

The term no man’s land became common during World War I, and, from what I can infer, it holds particular import in the new movie 1917. (I'll probably never know for sure; I don't get to the theater much anymore, and I'm not a big fan of war movies unless there are space aliens involved.) Ben Zimmer, writing for The Wall Street Journal (which means there’s a paywall), did a deep dive into this phrase and discovered — as always happens — that it’s a lot older than we might expect. No-man's land stretches back almost a millennium to William the Conqueror and the Domesday Book.

Zed’s Dead, Baby

alphabet, history

And we end this post with the end of the alphabet. At Dictionary.com this week, in their Everything after Z section, we learn that Z was removed from the alphabet. What? You’re still using the old Zed-meister? Don’t worry: It happened more than two millennia ago, and we got it back a few centuries later.

Now — now — you can go google "Thesaurus Day" and see how other logophiles are marking the occasion.