writation

Super Bowls, Balls, Boles, and Bulls

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 23:45:00 +0000

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl, so of course I've been wondering not primarily about which team will win, but about the origin of the term itself. (See also my post on Super Tuesday from 2012). Why is the Super Bowl called the Super Bowl? It hearkens back to College Bowl games, and first and foremost the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The Rose Bowl's name and shape were inspired, in turn, by the very first bowl-shaped college stadium, the Yale Bowl in New Haven, CT.

But the association between bowls and balls comes not only from the shape of football stadiums in which oddly-shaped balls are tossed around. In fact, "bowl" and "ball" come from the same root.

Take bowling, for example. Bowling got its name from bowls, a 15th century game played with wooden balls; bowl was another word for ball and the verb "to bowl" was derived from the noun. Incidentally, this is the origin of the phrase "to bowl over," originally, to physically knock someone over with a ball. The word "bowl" for "ball" derives from the Old French "bole," (boule in modern French; even English speakers might enjoy buying bread whose shape is described using that word).

The french bole (or boule) derives in turn from the latin "bulla," "a round swelling or knob." Because the seals used to seal documents were (I suppose) round and knob like, a sealed document began to be called a "bulla" as well, whence the papal bull, an official communication by the pope.

Whether bull, bowl, bole, or ball, these words, all describing various kind of round, rounded, or swollen things, derive from a Proto Indo-European root meaning "to blow, inflate, or swell." This very productive root also spawned a whole slew of other words, including belly, billow, bellow, pillow, and, of course, phallus.

Passive Voice Day 2012

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:59:00 +0000

This guy Shaun declared April 27th Passive Voice Day, and wrote a post about it using entirely the passive voice. Language Log praised him for actually using the passive voice correctly throughout. In fact, lots of people (T.A.s, profs) angrily correct instances of what they think is the passive voice--considering all passives to be wrong and evil--that are actually participles and adjectival complements and not passives at all (see a great piece on this here).

Titanic

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 01:40:00 +0000

The 19th century into the early 20th was a period when things titanic were in vogue.

Titan was the name, in Greek mythology, of the elder brother of Kronos and the ancestor of the Titans. In poetry it was also used to refer to his grandson, the Sun-god, Helios. The adjective titanic came to mean gigantic, colossal, thus in all ways resembling the nature or character of the Titans. This sense became progressively widened, coming into particularly wide usage in the 19th century, denoting a person, mountain, tree, etc. of gigantic stature or strength, physical or intellectual, a ‘giant." In 1796 titanium, one of the particularly strong rare metals, was given its name. Titanic, towards the end of the century, was applied descriptively to machines of great size and power, for example a dredger or a crane.

Thus when the famous British liner of 1912 received its name, it was drawing on nearly a century of fascination with the large, the powerful, the mechanical, and drew from a legacy of Greek mythology that had for decades been applied to modern technological power.

Tacks Day

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 02:46:00 +0000

It's tax time, and having reflected on taxes a bit, I found myself drawn to tacks, tack, and tackiness.

As my fourth grade teacher was fond of saying (and this was when Ross Perot was going around doing his shtick), flat tacks don't work. It's true, tacks need a point. A tack is something that fastens one thing to another thing using its sharp point. All sorts of small fasteners have been called tacks. Nowadays, we tend to think of the little ones we use on cork boards.

Because my postings tend often to have something to do with ships, it is important to note that one particularly important kind of tack was used on a ship: one kind of "tack" was a rope, wire, or chain and hook used to secure to the ship's side the windward side of the lower square sails of the sailing ship in certain circumstances. "Tack" thus came to refer to the "lower windward corner of the sail" where such an attachment was fixed.

From this we get the verb "to tack" which I remember learning at summer camp when we had sailing lessons. (I wasn't exactly a sailing master). It means to move in a zigzag way, keeping the boat in a 90 degree relationship to the wind, alternately on the port and starboard sides of the vessel. From this maneuver comes the more figurative sense of the verb: "To change one's attitude, opinion, or conduct; also, to proceed by indirect methods."

Tack is also something that sailors might eat on a ship. Hard tack, that is. This sense derives from a more metaphorical or abstract use of tack to mean "strength" or "sustenance," and thus came to be used to refer to foodstuff in general. Hard tack, or ships biscuit, was used from 1836 in opposition to "soft tack" which meant bread.

Tacky in one sense means "sticky," that is, having the quality of sticking onto something. This usage is mainly attested in the 20th century. But the more common sense of this adjective now is different: "Dowdy, shabby; in poor taste, cheap, vulgar." The origin of this word, which is older, is obscure, and seems to relate to a 19th century usage of the word to refer to "A poor white of the Southern States from Virginia to Georgia," which in turn came from a use of the word to mean a "degenerate broken down horse." Its relationship to the sticky or fastener sense of tack is unclear, and there may not be a connection.

How should we celebrate Tacks Day this year?

BAGGAGE

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 23:56:00 +0000

I'm on the road (i.e. air), so another travel-related post. Baggage, from bag, of course, is the collection of stuff that one packs up to take with him or her on a journey. It also has been used to refer to the portable equipment of an army that has to be packed up and moved around.

In the sense that people generally don't like to carry stuff around, baggage has taken on some rather negative connotations beyond the usual "encumbrances" (many of them becoming obsolete): rubbish, dirt, corrupt matter, trashy stuff, dregs, riff-raff, the rites of Catholic worship (after the reformation), worthless people, and, my favorite, "A worthless good-for nothing woman; a woman of disreputable or immoral life, a strumpet." This last one is illustrated by the OED with a quote from 1601: "Every common soldior carrying with him his she-baggage." And another from 1712: "That Wife dying, I took another, but both proved to be idle Baggages."

I will hope that on the trip on which I am about to embark my baggage (none of it she-baggage) arrives without incident.

(Perhaps I will investigate "luggage" in another post).

Book-Free Booking, Book-Free Books

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:59:00 +0000

Books didn't used to be an anachronism (and, for now, are still not), but the verb formed from that noun was: to book a ticket, since tickets have for some time been booked through electronic means. But now many books are electronic too, so both the book and the booking involve no book at all.

Of course, keeping the books, in the financial sense, also often involve no books, nor does cooking them.

Flotsam and Jetsam

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:09:00 +0000

I've always liked the words FLOTSAM and JETSAM. But can I use them in a sentence?

Constance Hale thinks she can.

In a recent New York Times piece, Hale compared different kinds of sentences to different kinds of boats:

There are as many kinds of sentences as there are seaworthy vessels: canoes and sloops, barges and battleships, Mississippi riverboats and dinghies all-too-prone to leaks.

But some sentences aren't really sentences at all. They don't have a subject (which she calls the 'what') and a predicate (the 'so what') so they are the "impostors, flotsam and jetsam — a log heading downstream, say, or a coconut bobbing in the waves without a particular destination."

The boat metaphor falls apart a bit partway through the article when, after comparing the subject to the hull of the boat and the predicate to "the forward momentum, the twists and turns, the abrupt stops" she intermittently drops the boat metaphor and offers a new model: "I like to think of the whole sentence as a mini-narrative." In general, though I think the article is a lot of fun and offers some fun literary sentences to mull over, it may not be the best piece for teaching people how to write.

It did remind me, though, that I liked the words 'flotsam' and 'jetsam.'

Flotsam and jetsam are two categories of goods that have been cast off or otherwise detached from their ships. They are two types of what is technically called "wreck."

Flotsam (from "flotation" through "flotsen," possible influenced by the suffix -some)= goods lost from a ship which has sunk or otherwise perished, which are recoverable because they have floated.

Jetsam (from "jettison", from Latin iactionem, act of throwing, probably on the model of flotsam) = goods cast overboard in order to lighten a vessel which is in danger of sinking, even if they ultimately perish.

There are two further categories of abandoned goods:

Derelict = property which has been abandoned and deserted at sea by those who were in charge without any hope of recovering it. This includes vessels and cargo.

Lagan = goods cast overboard from a ship, which afterwards perish, buoyed so that they can be recovered later.

There are all kinds of legal issues connected with wreck, like assessing its value, ascertaining its origin and ownership, reconnecting it with its owner, etc. There is now a post in the British government (as of 1995) held by a person responsible for processing reports of recovered wreck. This post is called, yes, the Receiver of Wreck, which may be the best job title I have ever heard.

Everyone loves the words flotsam and jetsam. There are some fun cultural references I should call attention to. Flotsam and Jetsam are the names of Ursula's evil eels who are tasked with following Ariel around.

"Flotsam and Jetsam" is also the name of chapter nine of Book Three of J.R.R. Tolkien's Book The Two Towers. I haven't read the book, but apparently it is not totally clear why the chapter is called this, and whole Tolkien forums online are devoted to trying to figure it out.

"Flotsam and Jetsam" is, moreover, the name of a metal band (founded 1982) whose albums include "Doomsday for the Deceiver." They were inspired by the name of the chapter from Tolkien.

Flotsam can be a real nuisance. I once noticed a book on a friend's shelf with the following title: Flotsametics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science. The authors are Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano. Ebbesmeyer is a follower of flotsam. By following flotsam, that is, floating random stuff that has been cast off boats, he is able to understand quite a bit about ocean currents and how they work.

Flotsam and jetsam are awesam. How's that for a sentence?

The Beloved Reference Shelf--On 'Relevance'

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 23:55:00 +0000

In this digital age, all one really needs is an empty room, a comfortable chair, and an internet-enabled device. What one doesn't need, strictly speaking, are shelves and shelves full of books. The first shelf to go, often, is the reference shelf, as those books are heavy and expensive and the internet is particularly excellent at providing immediate access to reference material.

Those of us who love reference books have to adjust.

Like most people, I most often treated reference volumes as books for quick consultation, taking them down off of my reference shelf as needed. But I treasured the shelves I stocked with English dictionaries and thesauri, language dictionaries in several languages, a dictionary of quotations, a rhyming dictionary, concordance, several atlases, and my much beloved New York Public Library Desk Reference, which I affectionately called the NYPLDR. (Part of an Amazon review of the book summarizes as follows):

Sections of the desk reference include music, literature, and the visual arts, religions, philosophy, and museums around the world, alphabets, grammar, and daily etiquette. Life-saving first-aid procedures are described, as are cooking tips, stain-removal advice, personal-finance details, and legal information, plus useful addresses and phone numbers relating to adoption, disabilities, and domestic violence, alcoholism, family planning, and television networks. With sections on travel, sports and games, as well as the United States and the political world, this is an irreplaceable reference of great scope and value.

I was, shall we say, something more than a casual user of reference books. I admit that I sometimes read reference books quite a lot like regular books, picking a volume of my parents' World Book Encyclopedia off the shelf and simply reading through it. My reader probably won't find it surprising that when I received an etymology dictionary as a gift, sometime in my early teens, I read it from cover to cover. The NYPLDR was similarly entertaining.

So when Farhad Manjoo callously suggested that we should celebrate the end of the Encyclopedia Britannica's print edition, I was a bit peeved. And I breathed a sigh of relief when the NYPL (of NYPLDR fame) deemed print encyclopedias 'relevant' even in the digital age. I was a little saddened that they saw the target users mainly as the old, recent immigrants, and those who couldn't snag one of the limited number of computer terminals in the library. Will there never again be a 13-year-old who says, "Hm, today seems like a good day for a read through the "D" volume"?

Etymological aside: Since it's hard for me to encounter a word without looking it up, I also serendipitously discovered an interesting irony: relevant is from the Latin 'levis' meaning 'light,' i.e. 'not heavy.' The connection becomes somewhat clear if we understand 'relevant' as 'legally sufficient,' as in a defense, which was its initial meaning. A legally sufficient defense had the ability to 'relieve' an accused of the burden of the accusation, i.e. to "lift" it or lighten his or her load. It brings a bit of levity, doesn't it, to note that 'light' is not exactly an apt description of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Fluke, Mutterperl, and the Politics of Jewish Male Sexuality

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 19:52:00 +0000

The revelation this week: the boyfriend of Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who testified before congress about contraception and then was viciously attacked by Rush Limbaugh on radio, is Jewish. Sarah Seltzer offers an excellent post in the Forward this week about an interesting new right-wing uproar stemming from a blog post by Brooks Bayne, who suggests that the boyfriend, Adam Mutterperl, isn't only Jewish, but ultra-liberal, from a bona fide socialist family. Bayne really shouldn't get any more links to his blog, but, ok. Marc Tracy initially broke the story in Tablet, looking at Bayne's screed-like attempt to connect Jewishness ipso facto to socialism and spinning an image of a conspiracy-like web of rich socialist Jews up and down the East Coast.

Seltzer and Tracy point out some of the obvious hogwash in Bayne's argument, while noting very much correctly that the conservative concern to link Fluke to a vast lefty conspiracy has some deep-seated anti-Semitic threads at its core (or at least, that it takes very little to connect those anti-leftist sentiments to latent antisemitic sentiments when the opportunity arises). As Tracy writes, "What makes it, in the final analysis, anti-Semitic, is that Jewishness proves certain things." To tie Jewishness to modes of economic thinking that one is seeking to discredit is one of the oldest tricks in the political playbook.

But it's not just the Jews-as-socialists theme we should be calling attention to here, however, though indeed that is a long and rich trope. There is also the implicit relation to a longstanding trope of male Jews compromising the sexuality of Christian women by being at once hypersexual (i.e. having sex with unmarried women, as in this case) and insufficiently or deficiently sexual, a charge that historically has been connected to charges of Jewish male homosexuality.

It is only too fitting that the culprit in this case has among the more effeminate names that have graced members of the Jewish people: Mutterperl.

Mutterperl, a less common variant of the far more common Perlmutter, is a typical Jewish last name, meaning "mother-of-pearl." Though several Jewish last names are constructed from the first names of mothers (many names ending with -kis, -kin are matronymics: Mirkin, belonging to Mirka; Malkin, belonging to Malka), this is one of the few that actually has the word 'mother' in it. It's very feminine-ness led at least one major Hebrew writer to change it. Yehiel Perlmutter was the original name of the Hebrew poet better known as Avot Yeshurun, a name that means "Fathers of Jerusalem" (Yeshurun being one name for Jerusalem) or "Fathers are Watching us" (Yeshurun being also a form of a verb meaning "watching"). In changing his name, Avot Yeshurun changed a feminine reference to a clearly male one, as Naomi Seidman points out in her book A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish.

Seidman quotes an interview from the mid-1970s with Avot Yeshurun about his choice to change his name, in which he reveals that he made this change just before entering the Israeli army in a symbol of new masculinity, erasing both a feminine, Yiddish-sounding name that refers to the Diaspora past and evocations of mothers in general and his mother in particular. Her analysis, including of his memories of his own mother's lullabies, goes into further detail about this substitution.

But Adam Mutterperl, name unchanged, presumably, is marked as the archetypal diaspora Jew, with his archetypical feminized name. Of course, to point out the obvious twist, it isn't the Christian right that would pick up on this irony, it is the American Jewish readership, grown up on the dysfunctional Jewish sexuality captured in Portnoy's Complaint as well as Philip Roth's continued obsession with impotence, and generally sensitive to stereotypes of effeminate Jewish maleness (especially in cases where Jewish men are dating non-Jewish women). Brooks Bayne is totally fixated on the Mutterperl family's socialism (and their wealth) in his post (rather than the son's sexuality). But the picture he posts of the guy, in a flamboyant-looking green spandex outfit, certainly suggests otherwise. In the title of the post, Bayne refers to Mutterperl as "Cutie Pants." And he implies towards the end of his rant that having liberal politics on red-blooded heterosexual sex, the kind a woman can get pregnant from and therefore needs contraception during, is really ultimately about sexual deviance. "[Fluke] ultimately has her sights set on requiring insurance to pay for gender-reassignment surgery," he claims, implying that her appeals on behalf of contraception coverage are only the beginning of a much vaster and far more deviant sexual agenda. This sort of male-bashing has been picked up by some of those who have re-posted Bayne's observations. On a right-wing forum called gold-silver.us ("a forum for gold, silver, and liberty") a poster called "General of Darkness" comments, "Maybe Adam could produce a biopic titled, “Beta Males and the Progressive Chicks Who Dig Them." Case in point: underneath the critique about leftist politics is, indeed, a critique about an imagined deviant leftist sexuality.

Much of the conservative bashing of deviant sexualities in this rendering of the Fluke story is below the surface, and I don't want to claim that even the writers themselves are aware of it. It is precisely the mix of sex and economic ideology that has made the Sandra Fluke story and the politics of contraception so compelling in the first place. To discover a Jewish man in the middle of it invites reflections—including sordid, historically loaded ones—not only about the economic deviance of Jewish men, but also about the presumption of their sexual abnormality.

(The picture of Adam Mutterperl posted on Brooks Bayne's blog)

The Thames, A River in Connecticut

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:51:00 +0000

Just reposting a discussion I found on Language Hat about the proper pronunciation of the Thames (and why the Thames River in CT--all 15 miles of its glorious length--is pronounced θeɪmz (that's a theta, like in "third", and the word rhymes with "James") and not like the Thames in England (rhymes with hems).

Query, Posted by Annabelle Morison at June 22, 2005 11:22 PM: One of the most interesting place names that comes to my mind when it comes to confusion of pronunciation is that of the Thames River in London, England. So far, I've heard it pronounced in three ways. Half the time, I've heard it pronounced "Tems", while other times, it was pronounced more like "Tames". But most recently I read that the original pronunciation of the name of this river is "Thaymes". Many people have told me that "Tems" is the only way that it is correctly pronounced, but I can tell you, that's definitely debatable. If "Thaymes" was the original, and thus was the correct pronunciation, how in this world did it change from "Thaymes" to "Tems"? It seems this is an unsolved mystery. Was it a British thing? Was it an American Thing? What is the story behind this confusion of pronunciation?

Reply, Posted by language hat at June 23, 2005 07:29 AM: I read that the original pronunciation of the name of this river is "Thaymes".

Your source was wrong. There was never a /th/ sound in the word; the Roman name was Tamesis, from a Celtic name also preserved in the rivers Tame and Tamar. The h was added in a fit of Renaissance pseudo-etymologizing. In England it's always /temz/.

I believe the Thames River in Connecticut is pronounced /theymz/, but that of course is simple spelling pronunciation, like /menziyz/ for Menzies and /keytlin/ for Caitlin.

So basically, just another American mispronunciation based on spelling. And there are so many.

I have to admit, sometimes I have fits of Renaissance pseudo-etymologizing. Those are really fun, but can be unpleasant for the people around me.

(The Thames River, seen from the waterfront in New London, CT--from Wikipedia)

On Cockneys and their English, Ahead of the 2012 Olympics

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 02:16:00 +0000

It should be easy for American visitors to London for the 2012 Olympics to get around, right? They speak English, after all. Not so fast, warns NPR's London-based correspondent, Philip Reeves.

The games themselves will be held in East London where, according to Reeves, "people speak in code." This is the land of Cockney rhyming slang, a curious linguistic contrivance developed in Victorian times by those who wanted to evade the police. Though East London is ethnically diverse nowadays, and many Cockney speakers have left (and some claims have been made that Cockney English is on its way out) the slang persists. For a compilation of examples, you can go to cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk. Some London bloggers are putting together special rhyming slang just for the games.

Now here's an interesting origin, while I've been focusing so much on birds in this blog (see my magpie post). Cockney sounds like "cock" and it is in fact related. Cockney as a noun very early on (14th, 15th centuries) meant an egg laid by a hen or "cock's egg" (I don't try to understand the problem here that cocks don't lay eggs). The "-ey" part at the end is related to the German word for egg, "Ei." A derivative meaning soon after was a child who remained too close to his mother, one who couldn't wean himself away, a mother's darling and, hence, an overly effeminate man or an effeminate townsman.

When Cockney started to be used as a term for one born within the city of London, a 17th century usage, this seemed to be because such a person was deemed inferior to other English people. 1617: "Londiners, and all within the sound of Bow-bell, are in reproch called Cocknies, and eaters of buttered tostes."

And just as so often groups get associated with their language patterns, Cockney came to refer just as much to the accent of these particular Londoners as to the population itself, though this transition didn't seem to occur until around 1900. In 1890, the English publisher Andrew White Tuer wrote of "Back-slang, or Costers' Cockney, in which the letters forming leading words are turned hindside before." Cockney speech was the supposedly inferior language that Henry Higgins tried to correct in Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady.

So there we have the Cockney, a strange bird of its own, to be handled carefully by American visitors who might assume they know what to expect. Separated by a common language, indeed. (I highly recommend, by the way, the blog "separated by a common language," which focuses on all kinds of discrepancies between British and American English usage).

Logs, Blogs, and Chunks of Wood

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:34:00 +0000

A log is something you chop from a felled tree and maybe stick in a fireplace or use for construction. It is also anything shaped like said wooden object: a piece of goat cheese, for instance. A log is also a place where people record important information, for example on a ship and, nowadays, in the form of a weblog, aka. blog. What's the connection between these?

(An aside for the Talmud scholars among you: a log is also a Hebrew liquid measurement equal to about three quarters of a pint, but sometimes compared to the volume of various numbers of eggs. Rabbis in the Talmud debate just how many logs of wine one needs to drink to fulfill various ritual obligations, e.g. on Passover).

The origin of the tree log seems obscure. OED doesn't think it comes from Old Norse or Late Scandanavian though there are theories. It may have been more onomatopoeic, an attempt to express the notion of something heavy through sound, but this is inconclusive.

Here we move on to the ship connection. In the realm of seafaring, which I'm beginning to learn bits and pieces about as I blog (see my post on tenders), the LOG, between the 16th-18th centuries, was an apparatus made out of wood--basically a log--used for ascertaining the rate of a ship's motion. This contraption would consist of a thin quadrant of wood, loaded so as to float upright in the water, fastened to a line wound on a reel. 1574: "They hale in the logge or piece of wood again, and looke how many fadome the shippe hath gone in that time."

The pieces of information about distance and speed gleaned from repeated uses of the log would need to be recorded, usually on a LOG-SLATE or LOG-BOARD at first, and then later transcribed into the LOG-BOOK, which eventually got shortened into LOG.

Like so many other words, a term that had a very clear nautical context broadened in its meaning and came to mean any book in which key pieces of information were recorded. This broader sense seems not to have come into broad use until the 20th century, often as various kinds of manufacturers found themselves recording the details of their production. Thus, Printer's Ink Monthly, 1937: "Log, an account of every minute of broadcasting, all errors being considered. An accurate journal required by law." Or Fenelon, Economics of Road Transport, 1925: "A daily log prepared by the driver of each vehicle, showing the nature of the work performed, the tonnage carried, the time taken, etc."

Weblog seems to have premiered in the early 1990s to mean "A file storing a detailed record of requests handled (and sometimes also errors generated) by a web server." In 1997 the OED has the first instance of "weblog" meaning the more personal log of reflections that would eventually become the blog. J. Barger, in a Usenet newsgroup in 1997, posted the following: "I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis," to which he assigned the URL www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html.

OED has the first use of blog as both noun and verb in 1999.

By this point, it really wasn't about trees anymore, but let's not forget that this all comes from tying logs to the back of boats.

Happy Magpie Day

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:53:00 +0000

In honor of Pi Day, celebrated in our homophone-loving society as a holiday in celebration of pies, I thought it was appropriate to reflect on the lowly PIE.

Let's leave aside the pastry for a moment (but I'll come back to it), and note that the "pie," before it was a dessert, was a bird, the bird that we now call the MAGPIE (scientific name: pica pica). The name for this bird in classical Latin was "pica," which came into French and then English as PIE.

The word PIED was also an adjective describing the particular black and white coloring of the pie/magpie or, by extension, any multicolored plumage or clothing. Hence, the PIED PIPER of [the German town of] Hamelin who, according to folklore, led the children away from the town with his pipe after the townspeople were not willing to employ him as a ratcatcher. This story seems to date from as early as 1300.

MAGPIE was a later development of the word PIE to refer to the bird, though pie continues to be an alternative name for the bird. The magpie, it should be noted, it not exactly a much loved bird. Related to the crow, and marked by its noisy chattering call, it is also known to take an hoarde bright objects.

All together, the bird became an ill-omen. The association of women with many of these negative traits--especially its noise and its hoarding tendencies--led to the affixing of "mag" to the beginning, probably short for Maggie or Margaret, probably around 1600. The word Pica, the Latin term for pie/magpie and in reference to the magpie's feeding on miscellaneous foods, became a word used in medicine for a tendency or craving to eat substances other than normal foodstuffs, esp. non-nutritive substances, seen chiefly during childhood or pregnancy or as a symptom of dietary deficiency.

Nearly every feature of this bird became an epithet for people. The term "magpie" came to be used in reference to idle chatters in general, too. "He was so fond of talking," said one 1895 story, "that his comrades nicknamed him ‘magpie’." In the twentieth century, magpie was a nickname for hoarders, particularly collectors.

Lovers of printing and type will be interested to know that the PICA, original Latin for the pie/magpie, and now a typographical term, may also derive from the bird. The term refers to "size of type of about six lines to the inch" or about 12pt font. It may come from the fact that Pica was the nickname for a 13th century ecclesiastical book, the Sarum Ordinale which may have had a pied appearance because of the unevenly spaced blocks of text.

So what does this have to do with our ordinary pie, which are are celebrating (if obliquely) today?

Where PIE meaning "magpie" was used as early as the 1200s, PIE meaning yummy pastry seems not to have taken off until at least the 1400s. Initially, there was a link. If we recall, the magpie was known for its spotted appearance and tendency to collect lots of different things. The dish, which originally consisted of any variety of ingredients, may have been named by association with the bird, as it too was made by throwing together lots of different ingredients.

The phrase "Pie in the Sky" seems to have been coined in a 1911 poem, "The Preacher and the Slave," by labor leader Joe Hill, which was circulated in little red songbooks put together by the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.--the "Wobblies"). Scorning liberal and populist promises, including those by the Salvation Army, he wrote:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

Lexicon Valley Tackles Scrabble

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 22:37:00 +0000

Lexicon Valley, the new Slate podcast, speaks about Scrabble and its curious relationship to the English language. Ultimately does it celebrate language or not? Should language lovers love it or hate it?

If you don't want to listen to the full half-hour-plus episode, here is my synopsis:

Host Mike Vuolo interviews Stefan Fatsis, who wrote Wordfreak. In the interview, Fatsis comments on the nature of competitive Scrabble players, confirming that they are just not the same as us everyday Scrabble lovers. The difference: the rest of us love words and try to make high scoring ones. The competitive folks, in contrast, like math and probability. They know what letters are left in the bag; they make sacrifices in some turns to work towards 7-letter words later and make moves that eliminate the risk of opening up spaces for others. They try to memorize tons of words and stems of words that can be made into words when another letter is added: "an arsenal of language." It is ultimately a "limited use of language" oriented toward a very particular purpose.

Competitive Scrabble players build all sorts of skills. Of course the main one is rearranging letters and knowing whether there is likely to be a word contained in a particular group of letters. Some players like to learn definitions, but many don't. Fatsis himself says that he finds that it is too much for him--the goal is cramming words into one's brain and pulling them out when needed.

Lots of people hate Scrabble's reliance on super-obscure words that no one ever uses. What the game does--for the die-hards, anyway--is reduce language to a series of logical problems that can be solved by finding the optimal mathematical solution. To do so requires keeping track of what's been used already and what is yet to be played, what balance of vowels and consonants remains, and what one is likely to get on the next draw of letters.

Fatsis stresses, however, that a true word-lover can love Scrabble, too: Scrabble requires that we think of language in a way that is broader than daily usage, than active vocabulary. Perhaps it is cool that there are so many words in English that don't get used everyday. On another level, players can hope for something transcendent to happen. Something beautiful like placing whole words aligned with other words, using great or interesting words, building interesting shapes. Though technically Scrabble is all about utility, there is this beauty that can break through.

The conversation goes on to consider a great controversy about the Scrabble dictionary itself: there is a different American dictionary and international dictionary.

In 1978, the official American Scrabble dictionary 1st Ed. came out, but a different dictionary, with a broader lexicon, was being used abroad. This was in part because Hasbro owned the rights in North America, but Mattel owned them elsewhere. As Scrabble playing has grown abroad--for some reason South East Asia, and Thailand in particular, has become a hotbed for the game--the North American players who don't know the international dictionary or don't always play with it have fallen behind. Now there's pressure by some for North America to adopt the international lexicon, but others push back. Some say that it is flawed or too permissive, with too much archaism and an excess of words from Scottish and Welsh and even Maori. The controversy boils down to this: what is English? How broad is it? Does it include its full history and its full global spread? On the other hand, does an even further expanded lexicon make the game too easy? This was a critique when QI and ZA were added to the American Scrabble dictionary--now it is much less likely for one to be stuck with one of these two high-point letters. On the other hand, there have been some artificial limitations. Hasbro has also excised "offensive" terms from the dictionary, words including "jew," "jesuit," "fart," and "kike." After some protest, however, they now continue to allow those words in competition, on the basis of supplementary lists that include no definitions. For competitive players, after all, definitions are irrelevant: it's all about math and letter combinations.

Tender are my Muscles, Tender is the Truck

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:53:00 +0000

I got a massage today and the massage therapist said to tell her if my muscles were feeling tender.

Legal tender? I wondered, and with my face in that soft doughnut thing I started wondering about the word TENDER.

TENDER means soft, or easily broken. I found out that it comes from the Latin tener/ tenerum with cognates in all the Romance languages. This word was very popular in describing youth and femininity, both of which were long considered soft by nature. A 1382 translation of Deut. 28:56, renders its description of the terrible curses that will follow if the people do not follow God's laws, saying that even "A tendre womman and a delicate" will begin to begrudge the husband she loves. That word today ("rakh" in Hebrew) is today most often rendered in English as "gentle."

If "tender" is no longer so often used to describe women, however, it is still commonly used to refer to youth, often in the phrase "tender age." In fact, the Hebrew phrase "ha-gil ha-rakh" or "the tender age" using the same word "rakh" as in the verse from Deutoronomy cited above, is the common term used in modern Hebrew for preschool aged children.

John Keats famously used the phrase "Tender is the Night" in his 1819 poem "Ode to a Nightingale:

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

F. Scott Fitzgerald used the line as the title of his 1934 novel.

None of this, to my knowledge, has anything to do with legal tender, or, for that matter, to the use of TENDER, to refer to a truck. In modern Hebrew, I should point out, the word tender is the usual word for a pick-up truck. What's up with that? We'll get to that in a second.

But first: on back of our dollar bills there is the phrase, "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." Is it tender like my muscles? It turns out, no, it is from a different Latin root.

TENDER in this sense (and, interestingly, in the truck sense also) is from a very common Latin stem, tendere, meaning "stretch," the same one that gives us tend, extend, tendency, tendril, intend, and others. Interestingly, of all of these forms, tender is the only one that preserves the "er" ending of the Latin and the French through which the verb came into English. It is relatively rare for Latin-French verbs to preserve these -ar/-er/-ir endings in English.

to tender (v.) is to offer formally, i.e. to stretch out one's hand with something. Thus we have the phrases "to tender one's resignation" or "to tender an oath." In the sense of money, it means to present formally to satisfy a debt or liability. The noun, that which is offered in such an offer, comes from the verb and seems to date from as early as the 16th century, but the OED has "legal tender" only from 1740.

So what about the trucks?

Back to the root "tend": to tend to someone is to stretch out one's hand to help them. Thus, a "tender" is anyone who helps someone else (a nurse, attendant). By extension, the term came to be used for a vehicle that helps out another vehicle. By the late 17th or early 18th century, tender was being used to refer to a small ship that was employed to attend to a larger ship. London Gazette, 1675: "Here are arrived five Dutch Men of War, and four Tenders." The British Royal Navy then started using this term for a vessel commissioned to act (in any capacity) under the orders of another vessel.

By the 19th century, a tender was a small ship used to carry goods or passengers from a larger vessel, often when that larger vessel wasn't able to reach the shore. This usage was then extended to trains, where the tender became a carriage specially constructed to carry fuel and water for a locomotive engine. Tenders were also names for support vehicles used by the British during World War I--some of the better known were the one's produced by Crossley Motors: the Crossley Tenders.

We can start to see here how "tender" could be the name for a vehicle used to carry things around. But the use of "tender" for a pick-up truck seems to be present only in Hebrew. The British apparently used Crossley Tenders as part of their police force while they were in control of Palestine between World War I and 1948 and, after it was adopted into Hebrew, came to be used as the standard name for a pickup truck.

These kinds of tenders were important enough in the legacy of Jewish settlement in Palestine, specifically around Jewish attempts to protect Jewish settlements, that the tender entered the Hebrew cultural tradition in the form of a 1939 song, "Ha-tender nose'a" (The Tender Drives)," which had several versions. You can listen to several of them here.

Here's a translation of the chorus of one the versions, from 1939, by Yaakov Orland:

The tender drives, the tender runs along here.
From the shores of the Dead Sea to Ein Ha-Mifratz [in the North]
The night, the night is dark.
The tender--what is one night from another?

The tender--open your mouth in song
Our heart is wide and young.
With fire before us and fire behind.
The tender! Don't stop!

Let the G's Fall: Mitt's Southern Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 03:10:00 +0000

What does it take to win over southerners? Politico reports on Romney's efforts in the linguistic realm in advance of the Mississippi and Alabama primaries.

Meet the new Mitt Romney — the grit eatin’, critter stompin’, country music lovin’, y’all sayin’ presidential candidate.

Apparently it means dropping your final g's and saying "y'all" quite a bit.

There have been tons of posts on politicians dropping their g's to try to achieve down-home, authentic, southern, folksy appeal. Language Log has been at the forefront, chronicling this phenomenon in Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, and generally.

Obama has been cited for dropping his g's when talking to the black community. (See here). And there was some controversy when Obama called on the African American community to "stop complaining" in a September 2011 speech and the AP chose to transcribe the gerund in that sentence without its final G.

According to Politco, Romney has been traveling quite a bit with campaign aide and 2009 Ole Miss grad Garrett Jackson.

“He’s now turning me into an, I don’t know, an unofficial Southerner,” Romney said in front of several giant oil-drilling rig platforms sitting at the port. “I’m learning to say ‘y’all.’ I like grits. Things are, strange things, are happening to me.”

Romney's linguistic transformations seem not to come naturally to this northerner-to-the-bone. In fact, moving around the state of Mississippi and meeting with the governor, it seemed that Romney couldn't stop calling attention to how odd it felt:

“The governor said I had to say it right: Mornin’ y’all. Good to be with you,” Romney bantered.

Politico's unofficial polling of some individuals at Mitt's campaign stops yielded some mixed reactions to the newly acquired southernisms.

Jimmy Carlson, a Birmingham salesman said, “We know he’s not a Southerner. But at least he’s trying to seem that way.”http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

But Martin Perkins, a lawyer from Jackson, wasn't so convinced:

“That might be perceived as disingenuous,” Perkins said. “Maybe he should probably just be Mitt and let the chips fall where they may to some extent.

Let the chips fall, but not the g's.

Update: See Charles M. Blow's commentary on Mitt's southern strategy: "Dabbling in dialectic speech won’t quench people’s thirst for straight talk. Being called warm and comfortable doesn’t remove the gut feeling that you are cold and rigid. There is something missing from the core of the man, and people can see straight through him."

Poisonous Fish

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:15:00 +0000

POISON, from POTION, a drink, later, a potion/poisonous drink, from Latin potare, "to drink."

I always thought that the French word for fish, poisson, looked just a bit too much like "poison," and that this was unfortunate. But that's just a coincidence. It's actually cognate to fish/piscis, where we get the zodiac sign Pisces and the Spanish get their pez/pescado. And the pescatarians get their pescatarian diet.

There are of course quite a lot of poisonous fish out there. You must be careful.

The QWERTY non-effect

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:43:00 +0000

Wait, what? Because there are fewer letters on the right-hand side of the keyboard, we subconsciously prefer words that have more letters on the right-hand side and are thus easier to find and type, so says a new paper by linguists Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto.

But Language Log checked it out, and it seems like the effect is not statistically significant.

To Each People in Its Own Language

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:51:00 +0000

The Persian Empire in the Book of Esther was a multilingual one.

Esther 1:22 says:

He sent dispatches to all parts of the kingdom, to each province in its own script and to each people in its own language, proclaiming in each people's tongue that every man should be ruler over his own household.

This was the age of the multilingual empire, when power was exerted not through a Persian-only strategy but through the effective implementation of a multilingual policy.

English-only advocates, take note.

Let's not overlook, though, that egalitarianism in one realm (language) was used in service of anti-egalitarianism in another (gender). In the wake of a showing by an assertive queen (Vashti), the message (to the multilingual men) was clear: you should be rulers in your households.

The Original Mitt

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 02:46:00 +0000

So Mitt won the Ohio GOP primary by a nose or, shall we say, by a finger.

Time for a MITT post.

Mitt, the kind we'd heard of before we'd heard of Romney, is shortened from mitten. What is a mitten? If you know German, you know that Mitte means "middle" or "center." In this case, the sense is something that has been divided down the middle, specifically a glove that has been divided down the middle. A mitten (Old French "mitaine" was a half of a glove, i.e. a fingerless glove). Later it became the mitten we know today, with one section for the fingers and another for the thumb.

The baseball sense of "mitt" is from 1892. But is it called a mitt or a glove? I think technically a glove, and I refer you a very cleverly titled book called Glove Affairs in which players fondly remember their first gloves. Baseball people can confirm, but my understanding is that glove is the general term, but the handwear of first basemen and catchers are called mitts because they lack individual fingers.

Let's not forget the mitten crab, an olive-green Asian crab with hairy pincers.

The real question is why a person named Willard gets nick named Mitt. Or why any person is nick named Mitt. Jon Stewart suggested Mitt was named for the shape of his home state.

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The name Mitt was apparently taken from the nickname of Romney's father's cousin, football player Milton "Mitt" Romney (1899-1975) who was a quarterback for the Chicago Bears from 1925-1928.

Superfine Tuesday

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:27:00 +0000

It's SUPER TUESDAY, and I'm wondering about our American obsession with SUPER stuff.

Back before I started this blog, I commented on my facebook page on the origins of the term SUPER BOWL, which seems to owe itself to some serendipity, connected to another instance of "super" in American lore, the SUPER BALL:

SUPER BOWL. The use of "bowl" to refer to a football game began when the Rose Bowl (stadium) opened in Pasadena in 1923. The stadium was modeled after the Yale Bowl in New Haven, CT, named for its shape. And "super"? Lamar Hunt, owner of the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs, first used the term during the 1966 AFL-NFL merger talks, saying it was likely in his head because his children had been playing with a Super Ball toy (i.e. a bouncy ball). In a July 25, 1966, letter, Hunt wrote, "I have kiddingly called it the 'Super Bowl,' which obviously can be improved upon."

Scholars of American history can comment on the history of Super Tuesday itself, which seems to date from 1984, an attempt to consolidate primaries into something that looks more like a national primary (as opposed to the limited state contests of Iowa and New Hampshire).

I'm wondering for now about why everything big or great is "super" in this country, from super-sized fast food (and Morgan Spurlock's documentary Supersize Me). It's every company's favorite adjective, too, from SuperShuttle to Supercuts to Super Nintendo.

The story is something as follows: Super is a pretty run-of-the-mill Latin adverb and preposition, meaning above, on top of, or beyond (and some other variations). It became common as a prefix, particularly in the sciences, and in many other words that made their way into English, like superintendent and superstructure (and lots and lots of others).

But it took until the 19th century before super started appearing on its own as an adjective in English. The Oxford English dictionary thinks that it came originally from SUPERFINE, a word used for manufactured goods meaning "extremely fine in quality," which then got extended to mean "Very good or pleasant, first-rathttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife, excellent."

This is still the sense that we observe in most colloquial uses, and most brandnames, but increasingly we're seeing it get used to refer to size or scope, which the OED doesn't pick up on but the American Dictionaries do (see Merriam-Webster's, e.g.)

Update: It may have been a SUPERMOON (when the moon is full during its closest approach to earth) that sunk the Titanic. It sounds like the conspiracy-est of conspiracy theories, but it was published in National Geographic.

Harvard is Cheaper than Cal State

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:42:00 +0000

It messes with our sense of what elitism is: Harvard and Yale (and other similar places), the elitist of the elite, are rich enough with their hefty endowments that they are able to generously fund up to comfortably middle class students with little if any loan burden.

Meanwhile, state universities (and California is particularly messed up in this regard) are slashing their state university systems and hiking their tuition rates.

So it's come to this, says the San Jose Mercury News:

Top private schools, with their generous aid, have been among the most affordable options for poor students for a few years, but rising tuition has only recently sent California State University and University of California prices shooting past the Harvards and Yales for middle-class students.

MLA: How to Cite a Tweet

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 03:07:00 +0000

The MLA Weighs In: How to Cite a Tweet (h/t DKM)

I find it interesting that the protocol is to cite the tweet in its entirety. A tweet cannot be subtweeted? Curiously, it also has nothing about hashtags.

How do I cite a tweet?

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

The date and time of a message on Twitter reflect the reader’s time zone. Readers in different time zones see different times and, possibly, dates on the same tweet. The date and time that were in effect for the writer of the tweet when it was transmitted are normally not known. Thus, the date and time displayed on Twitter are only approximate guides to the timing of a tweet. However, they allow a researcher to precisely compare the timing of tweets as long as the tweets are all read in a single time zone.

In the main text of the paper, a tweet is cited in its entirety (6.4.1):

Sohaib Athar noted that the presence of a helicopter at that hour was “a rare event.”

or

The presence of a helicopter at that hour was “a rare event” (Athar).

FLUKE -- it all seems a little fishy

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 02:07:00 +0000

Rush Limbaugh's recent target of opprobrium has a demonstrably unusual surname: FLUKE.

FLUKE can mean one of several things
1) a flat fish, similar to a flounder.

2) one of the triangular plates of iron inside the anchor which enter the ground and hold the ship in place--so named because the resemble in shape the fluke fish.
3) in billiards: a successful stroke made by accident or chance, more generally, any thing accomplished by luck or chance. (and the origin of this one is unknown).

BODICE

noreply@blogger.com (LH) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 23:11:00 +0000

BODICE, an oddly spelled plural of "body," because this contraption was originally made of two parts that fastened in the middle (formerly sometimes called "a pair of bodies").