Words are stupid, words are fun

As words fall in and out of fashion, new ones enter the language. But some, such as autonaut, chassimover and pupamotor, failed to reach the assembly line

English is a marvellous mashup of words. A few Celtic placenames. A stock of Old English words (day and night, black and white, food and drink, life and death, beer). More than twice as many words adopted from Norman French (marriage, parliament). Sometimes competing words from both: motherhood (Old English) and maternity (Norman French). Words of Greek derivation, like octopus. Words of Latin derivation, such as campus and ultimatum. Words from all over the place: Welsh (corgi), Irish (brogues), Arabic (algebra), German (hamster), Chinese (typhoon), Japanese (tycoon), American Indian (tobacco), Hawaian (ukulele), and many more.

Wherever they come from, words fall in and out of fashion. Within living memory gay has changed meaning completely, while bad and wicked changed, then changed back. Yesterday's slang is respectable today. In the 1950s and 60s, words that angered people who write to newspapers included job (the writer thought it vulgar, and preferred employment), breakdown ("horrible jargon"), and layby ("a combination of verb and preposition of rather obscure meaning"). The Manchester Guardian stylebook of 1950 banned such "slang" phrases as bank on, face up to, give away, sack (for "dismiss") and many others.

The expression "foregone conclusion" once meant an experience previously undergone, rather than making a decision without listening to the arguments. Many words we use today have a different meaning from 20, never mind 50, 100 or 200 years ago. Nice once meant silly (silly meant happy or blessed), then subtle, then pleasant. You could be sad with food and drink – it meant full to the brim, and was related to sated, satisfied and saturated. It then came to mean solid, so a reliable person could be called sad; in time, solid, heavy and dull came to mean sad in one of our modern uses. In recent years it subtly acquired an additional meaning, as in "how sad is that?"

Cicero invented the word qualitas because he felt Latin was inadequate to express a Greek philosophical concept. Now that's what I call nerdy. About 1,700 words are first recorded in Shakespeare (which does not necessarily mean he invented them), including barefaced, fancy-free, laughable and submerged. Milton is credited with beleaguered, impassive, jubilant and sensuous and the expressions "trip the light fantastic" and "all ears". Jung invented the word synchronicity as well as ambivalent, extrovert and introvert, while Freud came up with the word psychoanalysis, which is derived from the Greek for butterfly, psyche, who was also the Greek goddess of the soul.

Technology is a continual source of new words. The man who developed the wireless technology Bluetooth in 1996 was reading a historical novel about Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century King of Denmark, at the time and appropriated his name. Spam, in the sense of unwanted emails, was named after the 1970 Monty Python cafe sketch in which Spam, in the sense of unwanted canned meat, was compulsory in every dish. Sometimes new words catch on, sometimes they don't, but you can always bet that someone, somewhere will object to them. I recall readers complaining about the Guardian's use of the new word blog (an abbreviation of another new word, weblog) but within a very short time it had become established. In the early 1960s, the AA sought suggestions from the public for a new word to describe drivers: submissions included autocarist, autonaut, chassimover, motorman, wheelist, and the bizarre acronym pupamotor ("person using power-assisted means of travelling on roads"). The idea was dropped. Whoever came up with laser ("light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation") in 1960 was more successful.

The writer AP Herbert devised a scoring system for new words, which would be given marks out of 10 on each of four criteria: is it readily understood, is it to be admired, is it sound etymologically, and is it actually required? The pass mark was 50% and television, for example, just scraped through (scoring respectively 10, 0, 0, and 10). One of my favourite recent words is bouncebackability, a neat alternative to "the ability to bounce back" attributed to the former football manager Iain Dowie. I fear it would fail the test.

This is an edited extract from For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man's Quest for Grammatical Perfection, by David Marsh, published by Guardian Faber. To order a copy for £8.99 (RRP £12.99) visit theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
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References:

Marsh, David. 2013. “Words are stupid, words are fun”. The Guardian.. Posted: October 7, 2013. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2013/oct/07/mind-your-language-words

Linguistic Myths and Adventures in Etymology

The folk wisdom built up around common English expressions is often wrong, but it can be fun ferreting out the real origins.

The alarm went off. What does that mean? Recently, a friend who is learning English couldn’t quite figure it out. Isn’t the alarm going on, not off, he asked.

Comprehending such phrases is often one of the more difficult steps in learning a language. These idiomatic expressions are collections of words that mean something different than each word’s dictionary definition. For example, “that barking dog next door is driving me up the wall,” if taken literally, could mean that the neighbor’s poodle has recently earned a driver’s license and is using a car to accelerate up the wall dividing our houses. “Woof, woof” could equal “Vroom, vroom.”

But how well do native speakers know their own language? Let’s have fun with our critical thinking skills and apply a little skepticism to some widely believed verbal urban legends.

David Wilton, author of Word Myths and webmaster at Wordorigins.org, coined the concept of “linguistic urban legends,” which tend to be false tales, yet which spring from some grain of truth. These expressions, Wilton claims, “arise mysteriously and spread widely.”

OK? Consider OK. Stories of its origin range all over the map: a Haitian rum port called Aux Cayes, a Choctaw word, okeh, meaning “indeed,” or President Martin van Buren’s nickname of Old Kinderhook. Writer (and noted skeptic) H.L. Mencken got into the act in 1921 when he debunked the popular belief floating around in 1828 that OK was short-hand for “all correct” because of Andrew Jackson’s abbreviations on documents and his misspelling as “oll korrect.”

That last one about Jackson is close but no cigar. It is now generally accepted that the original use of OK came about in 1839 as part of newspaper fads to humorously abbreviate phrases, including funny misspellings from supposedly illiterate characters. So some would use GTDHD for “give the devil his due” for a more literal acronym, and OK for a misspelled “oll korrect.” By now, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were LOL or ROTFL over this silly 19th-century fad! OMG, who’d do that these days?

Or maybe you’re too posh to play along this way. Another widely held linguistic urban legend claims “posh” was an abbreviation for “port out, starboard home” stamped on tickets to designate the shadier and more luxurious sides of the ship when traveling between England and India. Yet, no tickets have been uncovered with “POSH” stamped on them, and evidence exists from the late 19th century of the use of the word posh in a similar way as it is used today. While its exact source is unknown, posh may derive from a Romani or an Urdu word, referring variously to money, a dandy, well-dressed, affluent. Phrases like “port out, starboard home” to define the word posh are sometimes called “backronyms” as we work backwards from the letters to an invented phrase and end up creating what appears to be an original acronym.

Lacking historical perspective can lead us to overlook that there may be nothing new under the sun. Not only were humorous abbreviations used centuries before Twitter, but another computer-related word may not be as new as you think. Let’s hope that your choice of platform to read this article is not infected with a bug. While it is generally believed that an actual insect jammed some relay switches in an earlier version of the computer and the word spread throughout the industry, the Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to Thomas Edison in 1889 using it metaphorically to indicate a difficulty with his new phonograph invention and blaming the glitch on some imaginary bug.

Successfully finding the source of many of our idiomatic expressions sometimes has a snowball’s chance in hell. Many are passed along orally, and no written record exists. Yet, sometimes, good critical thinking and skeptical analysis can uncover the linguistic rumor.

One famous example is the alleged multiple words for snow that Eskimos use. Noted anthropologist and linguist Franz Boas, discussed the Inuit’s four — only four — words for snow in 1911.

However, by 1940, thanks to Benjamin Lee Whorf of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis fame, the original point of Boas’ linguistic observation got transformed into the idea that Eskimos actually see snow in multiple ways and categorize the world differently. Whorf, in one of his writings, increased Boas’ examples to at least seven, according to research in 1989 by linguist Geoffrey Pullum. Pullum argues that “the myth of the multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all. It is a kind of accidentally developed hoax….”

This seemingly provocative notion of many words and perceptions of the Eskimos’ world, well, snowballed. Anthropologist Laura Martin provided many examples in her 1986 published research about the Eskimo snow hoax, such as the Lanford Wilson play, The Fifth of July, which said there were 50 Eskimo words for snow, a New York Times editorial in 1984 that claimed there were 100 types of snow, and a Cleveland television station that reported the existence of 200 words while discussing the local snow storm.

Discovering the meanings behind our idiomatic expressions, linguistic hoaxes, and proverbs illustrates the fun side of skeptical thinking. So join in and when that alarm comes on (or goes off), wake up and smell the coffee.
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References:

Nardi, Peter M. 2012. "Linguistic Myths and Adventures in Etymology". Miller-McCune. Posted: March 22, 2012. Available online: http://www.miller-mccune.com/education/linguistic-myths-and-adventures-in-etymology-40524/