Fritinancy

Talking Politics

In my latest column for Visual Thesaurus, published today, I take a look as some of the lingo that's been coined during the current presidential campaign, such as Bittergate, under the bus, and this:

Shoulder-pad feminists: "Some women in their 30s, 40s and early-50s who favor Barack Obama have a phrase to describe what they don't like about Hillary Clinton: Shoulder-pad feminism." So wrote Maureen Dowd in a March 5 New York Times op-ed column that went on to define the phrase as symbolizing the "men-are-pigs, woe-is-me, sisters-must-stick-together, pantsuits-are-powerful era that Hillary's campaign has lately revived with a vengeance." The phrase—and the rest of Dowd's column about racism and sexism—struck a tender nerve among many readers. Shoulder pads make an interesting metaphor: out of fashion in women's clothing for more than a decade, they suggest both historic achievement and sartorial not-with-it-ness. The image of broadened shoulders also evokes football-like aggression and unwelcome pushiness. Feminist has also become a highly charged word: for many young women, it seems to carry no positive implications at all (such as equal pay for equal work), but only stridency, man-hating, and—those shoulder pads again—bad fashion choices.

Full access is restricted to subscribers, but a year's subscription is only $19.95 and well worth it, if you ask this biased observer. The new "executive producer" of VT--that's apparently what they call an editor nowadays-- is Ben Zimmer, formerly of Oxford University Press, and he's got some great ideas about VT's future. Read here about how VT enlisted the help of opera singers to record the pronunications of 150,000 words and phrases in VT's lexical database. Ben is also writing a new column, Word Routes, available to nonsubscribers (although you have to subscribe to leave a comment). And his two-part interview with New York Times columnist William Safire, whose revised Safire's Political Dictionary was just published, is full of insights from a long career in words and writing. 

Oh, and don't forget the main attraction: the visual thesaurus itself. Type in a word and watch a constellation of synonyms bloom around your entry, then click on any word in the constellation to generate still more synonyms. Available in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish! 

New -kini on the Block

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the bikini and its offspring: monokini, tankini, skirtini, etc. (Commenter John reminded me of Borat's mankini.) I've just discovered an Italian variation: the trikini. 

It's clearly three pieces, thus the tri- prefix. However, unlike the cartoon girl (who is saying, "No trikini, no ocean!"), real women are apparently supposed to wear only two pieces at a time. Unless you fancy a belly band with your beachwear. Or you're from a galaxy far, far away where the women have two sets of breasts.

Spotted at Sartoria Vico, which I discovered via SwissMiss. Many other interesting and adaptable items of clothing at Sartoria Vico, if you have a few minutes to browse. I'm completely smitten with the Sciarpone scarf-sweater-thingy.

We'll Always Have Scranton

Very satisfying third-season finale to "The Office" last night, with fireworks, a surprise marriage proposal, and this line of dialogue, spoken by Michael (Steve  Carrell) to scary-loony ex-girlfriend Jan (Melora Hardin):

You cheated on me? After I specifically asked you not to?

And Amy Ryan joins the cast as the replacement for departing HR guy Toby.

Check out the episode's deleted scenes.

Penultimate (Revisited) and Erstwhile

Mike left a comment on yesterday's post with a link to one of his own posts about how -sicle, as in Popsicle, became a productive morpheme--in layman's terms, attached itself to other words to form combinations that mean "X on a stick." (Dreamsicle, Creamsicle, etc. Oh, and corpsicle: a body frozen in the hope of revivification.) This despite the fact that -sicle was originally shortened from icicle, and icicles in the wild do not necessarily contain sticks.

The title of Mike's post is "Erstwhile Trademarks¹," which started me thinking about how frequently "erstwhile" is misused.

Erstwhile means former (adjective) or formerly (adverb); it's a blend of erst, an Old English word meaning "once" or "long ago" that's familiar to crossword solvers; and while, meaning "during" or "at that time." But that's not how many people use it.

I used to have a very nice client who, while we were sitting in the same room, would refer to me admiringly as "our erstwhile copywriter." He actually did this more than once, apparently ignoring my stricken look. (Had I been fired?) Eventually I figured it out: he thought erstwhile meant esteemed.

And he's far from alone. A cursory (hasty, hurried, superficial) search revealed quite a few complaints about the misuse. Here's what the Australian linguist Ruth Wajnryb, who says she's often invited to settle usage disputes, has to say:

The latest contretemps is between a pair of elderly, well-educated gentlemen disputing the meaning of "erstwhile". I'll call them Elderly Gentleman 1 (EG1) and Elderly Gentleman 2 (EG2). EG1 is upset that EG2 insists on using erstwhile to mean "esteemed", "stalwart", "dependable", "worthy", even "wise". For EG2, it's a laudatory adjective: he'll comfortably refer to a staff member as "erstwhile", intending the word to be taken as public praise.

EG1 protests furiously. Erstwhile means "prior" or "former", and there's no shortage of authoritative sources to support him. As an adverb, erstwhile has been part of English since the 16th century, formed from two much older words. The adjective joined about 1900. EG1 argues, rightly, that referring to an employee as "erstwhile" would suggest that the employment is over.

EG2 dismisses EG1's evidence. He disputes EG1's notion that people produce and receive words according to an unstated consensus about meaning. EG1 is outraged: an individual cannot simply take it upon himself, crusade-style, to make a word mean what he wants it to mean. But EG2 argues that word meanings aren't fixed in concrete. "Terrific" and "naughty" didn't always mean what they mean today.

If EG2 sounds familiar, it might be the echoes of Humpty Dumpty's exchange with Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

Humpty is wrong, of course, as is EG2. You cannot make a word mean whatever you want it to mean - that is, if you wish to be understood. Usage does not determine correctness. If a person starts swapping labels ("cats" for "dogs" and vice versa), all that will happen in the short term is confusion. The reductio ad absurdum is chaotic unintelligibility.

I'm on Ms. Wajnryb's side. In the short term, and as long as there's a likelihood of confusion--as there was when my client called me "erstwhile"--I want to stick to traditional definitions. And suggest three little words to my (yes!) erstwhile client and others like him: use a dictionary.

Is it possible that erstwhile for esteemed results from a contextual misunderstanding? That was the case for Jed Hartman:

I assumed that "my erstwhile colleague" (the phrase I usually heard the word in) meant "my esteemed colleague," but it really means "my former colleague." I wasn't alone in this misunderstanding; many people misuse this word.

(One of Jed's commenters says that he always thought erstwhile meant ersatz--a German loan word meaning fake. Again, a dictionary can be ever so helpful in sorting these things out. Try it yourself!)

Or maybe erstwhile just has that hifalutin tone that self-important people like to assume. Which brings me back to penultimate, one of the subjects of Monday's musings.

In a column mostly about the misuse of erstwhile, Barbara Frederickson wrote recently in TampaBay.com that penultimate is also frequently misued:

[I]t isn't the pinnacle of the ultimate; it's the next-to-last item, as in "she reached her pinnacle in the penultimate song."

I admit it hadn't occurred to me that misusers of penultimate were thinking about pinnacles. (Obviously that's because, being a native speaker of pure, wholly unaccented California English--oh, go ahead and scoff--I clearly distinguish between pen and pin, unlike some of my fellow citizens in Flyoverland.) But it does make sense in a way. It's wrong, but it's logical and rather creative.

___

¹By the way, Popsicle is the furthest thing from an erstwhile trademark: it is very much alive, and no doubt sturdily defended by its owner, Unilever.

News to Me

Jeep makes baby strollers? Well, Jeep licenses its name to baby strollers. And yes, there are Wrangler and Cherokee subbrands. I did a double-take when I saw my first li'l Jeepster this week, but my third take was: huh, makes sense. "Jeep" has always sounded like baby talk. Now, Jeep pet strollers are something else again.

Remember Alex, the African gray parrot who apparently was capable of learning referential speech? (He died last September at about age 30.) I did, but I hadn't known that Alex's name was an acronym for Avian Learning Experiment. I learned that and much more of interest in "Birdbrain," by Margaret Talbot, in the May 12 issue of The New Yorker. For example, Alex "sometimes played with the sounds he had learned, venturing new words. ... When Alex developed nonsense words--like 'cheenut'--[cognitive scientist Irene] Pepperberg and his other trainers did not respond, and he quickly stopped saying them." Elsewhere in the article, Talbot mentions Nim Chimpsky (1973-2000), a chimpanzee who was taught sign language. His name was a sly reference to the linguist Noam Chomsky, who has famously argued that only humans are capable of language.   

The trademarked treat known as the Popsicle was invented in 1905 by an 11-year-boy right here in the San Francisco Bay Area, an irony as close to "selling ice to the Eskimos" as you can get. (Mark Twain may or may not have said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco," but the truth of the assertion cannot be denied.) Indeed, the "Epsicle," as young Frank Epperson dubbed his invention--a blend of Epperson and icicle--was created when Frank left a mixture of powdered soda and water on his porch (with a stirrer in it) on a night of record low temperatures in either San Francisco or Oakland (accounts vary). It took him 17 years to introduce it to the public--at the Neptune Beach amusement park in Alameda--and another two years to apply for a patent for his "frozen confectionery." By then he'd renamed it the Popsicle, allegedly because his children called it "Pop's 'icle." Today the Popsicle trademark and brand are owned by Ice Cream USA, a division of Unilever. I learned some of this from a soon-to-be-published book by Krystina Castella, Pops!: Icy Treats for Everyone, which contains recipes for confections Frank Epperson probably never dreamed of, such as Sweet Martini Pops.

I just found out that Dan Piraro, creator of one of my favorite comics, Bizarro, has a blog. Sometimes he explains his jokes, miraculously without making them any less funny. Many of the jokes involve wordplay and semantic twists. Here's a Bizarro from last month:

Piraro says he rarely publishes captionless cartoons:

Call me wordy, verbose, circumlocutory, long-winded, loquacious, garrulous, periphrastic, prolix, or just a guy who can't shut up, but any way you slice it, it's a happy day in Cartoonland when I publish a captionless cartoon.