Fritinancy

New Words

It's a good-news day when the hometown paper has a headline about new dictionary words. Actually, the hundred or so words Merriam-Webster is adding to the 2008 update of its Collegiate Dictionary aren't new--just newly added. And some of them are surprisingly old.

Who knew, for example, that fanboy ("boy who is an enthusiastic devotee, such as of comics or movies") dates back to 1909? Or that wingnut ("Slang: one who advocates extreme measures or changes; radical")  first appeared in print circa 1900?

It's nice to see mondegreen ("word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung. From the mishearing in a Scottish ballad of 'laid him on the green' as 'Lady Mondegreen'") finally getting its due. Its first print appearance was in 1954; I learned the word about four decades later, through Jon Carroll's many columns devoted to the topic. Merriam-Webster is asking readers to submit their favorite mondegreens; read more here.

And yes, a mondegreen is a subgenre of eggcorn. Perhaps eggcorn will make the Collegiate's twelfth edition?

Word of the Week: Mountweazel

Mountweazel: Any made-up word included in a dictionary or other reference book as a copyright trap.

"Mountweazel" got its name from a fake entry in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. According to a 2005 New Yorker article on copyright traps, Lillian Virginia Mountweazel was purported to be:

a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”

In the second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary, the mountweazel is esquivalience, whose fake definition is "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities." Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of that dictionary,

said that Oxford had included it in NOAD’s first edition, in 2001, to protect the copyright of the electronic version of the text that accompanied most copies of the book. “The editors figured, We’re all working really hard, so let’s put in a word that means ‘working really hard.’ Nothing materialized, so they thought, Let’s do the opposite.” An editor named Christine Lindberg came up with “esquivalience.” The word has since been spotted on Dictionary.com, which cites Webster’s New Millennium as its source. “It’s interesting for us that we can see their methodology,” McKean said. “Or lack thereof. It’s like tagging and releasing giant turtles.”

A similar tradition of deliberate falsifying exists, for the same reason, in mapmaking. "Map traps" are sometimes called "bunnies" (after the find-the-hidden-bunny drawings popular in the 1930s) or simply "hooks." Read more about map traps here (and be sure to read the comments).

Hat tip to Karen at Verbatim for remembering the New Yorker article and mentioning it in a comment here last week.

Declaration of Independence

Here's what I've come to expect from Online Etymology Dictionary, which calls itself "a map of the wheel- ruts of modern English" and which counts among its sources the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition) and Holthauzen's Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache:

• An authoritative analysis of word origins
• An objective, academic, rather staid writing style
• An even-handed approach to the many varieties of English used throughout the world. 

Which is to say, I was startled to come across this partisan entry:

gaol

 see jail, you tea-sodden football hooligan.

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! 

How to Buy a Dictionary

Buy two dictionaries (from different publishers). And look for dirty words.

More tips from Grant Barrett at The Lexicographer's Rules.

The Mind Behind the Thesaurus

From a New York Times review of The Man Who Made Lists, a new biography of Peter Mark Roget (1779-1860), the creator of Roget's Thesaurus, by Joshua Kendall:

Never quite intended as a book of synonyms (Roget thought there “really was no such thing,” given the unique meaning of every word), the Thesaurus was constructed as a crystal palace of abstraction, each of whose 1,000 lists pushes a reader, often antonymically, to the next, “certainty” leading to “uncertainty” leading to “reasoning” leading to “sophistry.” The truth is that most users of the Thesaurus have never made head nor tail of the system and have just availed themselves of the index — added by Roget almost as an afterthought — to find what they are looking for.

If he were living today, Roget might be diagnosed as an obsessive-compulsive. Reviewer Thomas Mallon writes: "Madness did not just run in his family; it galloped, sped, sprinted, dashed and made haste."

Since its first publication in 1852, writes biographer Kendall, the Thesaurus has “lost 10 concepts — it’s down to 990 — but it has gained a couple hundred thousand new words.”

Reading the OED for Fun and Profit

John McGrath, who maintains the collaborative dictionary Wordie and blogs at Errata, pinch-hit for lexicographer Ben Zimmer a couple of weeks ago at the Oxford University Press USA blog. McGrath interviewed Ammon Shea, who read all 300,000 dictionary entries in the Oxford English Dictionary and lived to tell the tale in the forthcoming Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. (Shea is also the co-author of Depraved and Insulting English.)

Asked whether the project had yielded any insights, Shea replied:

[O]ne insight that I’ve had about lexicography is that it is fun. Dictionaries are fun. They really are amazing creatures, and I think that they are underused. A number of highly educated and dedicated people have worked terribly hard at filling these books with all sorts of fascinating information about the language we use, and most of us just use them to see if we’re spelling a word correctly; it’s like using a great novel as a paperweight.

Shea estimates he devoted nine or ten hours a day, five days a week, for the better part of a year to his project. "I would sometimes wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning and begin reading," he says, "just because I almost always had a feeling that I was about to get to something terribly interesting."

Still, he admits: "The letter Q was boring as hell. And I didn’t much care for X either."

The other 24 letters proved much more entertaining. Some of Shea's favorite discoveries:

Apricity – The warmth of the sun in winter
Bouffage – An enjoyable or satisfying meal
Ignotism – A mistake that is made from ignorance
Onomatomania – Vexation with being unable to find the right word
Peracme – The point at which one’s prime has passed
Psithurism – The sound of leaves moved by the wind
Sialoquent -Someone who spits when they speak
Velleity – A mere wish or desire for something, unaccompanied by any action of effort

I'm especially partial to onomatomania, a condition with which I'm all too familiar.

February Linkfest

In honor of leap year, an extra helping of links:

Real people are dreaming about presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And they're sharing their dreams on a couple of blogs known as I Dream of Hillary / I Dream of Barack. "A Christian Clinton-Hater" writes: We were in a car going somewhere. As we talked and things unfolded, I found myself liking her. By the end of the dream, I actually found her desirable. (Via Murketing.) (P.S. Does anyone else remember all the sexual dreams people--OK, women--reported having about Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign? They were collected in a book, Dreams of Bill, now available online for as little as 20 cents.)

The Dictionary of Newfoundland English presents "the regional lexicon of one of the oldest overseas communities of the English-speaking world." As you might expect, it includes plenty of seafaring terms as well as holdovers from earlier British dialectical items such as droke, dwy, fadge, frore, keecorn, linny, nish, and suant. (Via Errata.)

"Sure as eggs," "get the chop, "up the gum tree": the British expatriate and Florida resident who blogs at A Gentleman's Domain explains those expressions and ten others in "13 British Idioms That I Have Never Heard in North America."

You too can possess a richer, more colorful vocabulary for insulting your enemies! Simply transport yourself to Wikipedia's Pejorative Terms for People, a compilation that includes macacawitz, jíbaro, and shoobie (a New Jersey insult applied to people from Philadelphia). (Hat tip: qwghlm.)

Jay Garmon at TechRepublic has compiled a list of 75 words every sci-fi fan should know. I recognized, um, about seven of them.

Here's how The Ad Generator explains itself: "Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed to generate invented slogans, which are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby creating fake advertisements on the fly." Provocative, beautiful, unsettling. (Via Verbatim.)

The Dictionary of American Regional English--known to fans as DARE--is nearing completion; the final volume will be published next year. In the meantime, you can visit the DARE website and take some quizzes on DARE terms. (Use the left-hand navigation.) Crimmy? Feest? Kiss-me-quick? Good luck! (Via Mike Pope.)

December Linkfest

Long pre-solstice nights call for many illuminating links. Happy Festivus!

Feeling nostalgic for Lustre-Creme shampoo, Dr. Denton's pajamas, the Ford Taurus, or the BankAmericard? BrandLand USA, a project of historic preservation activist Garland Pollard, reports on dead, moribund, and resuscitated brands with great gusto. (By the way, BankAmericard is back.) (Via The Trademark Blog.)

Read/Write Web recommends seven places to watch commercials on purpose, including TBS's Very Funny Ads, where I caught a droll South African commercial for DSTV: enter "arranged marriage" in the search field.

One more from adworld: Mental Floss research editor Kara Kovalchik tracks down bygone ad mascots and finds out what became of them after their 30 seconds of fame. Included in the roundup: the Gerber Baby, Little Miss Coppertone (whose real last name, appropriately, is Brand), and the FedEx Fast Talker.

Word Wizard compiles many useful language resources in a single handy chart. Some of the less-familiar ones: a random neologism generator, a random insult generator, and a glossary of hard-boiled slang.

Merriam-Webster's Visual Dictionary went online last month: more than 20,000 terms, more than 6,000 illustrations. Beautiful and useful.

Human Brain Cloud is "a massively multiplayer word association 'game' (or experiment ... or something)." The cloud started with a single word, volcano, and has grown into a cloud of 531,316 unique words and phrases connected through 5,704,465 associations, according to Errata, which is where I discovered it.

May a moody baby doom a yam? Yes indeed, and more, in "Weird" Al Yankovic's palindromic tribute to Bob Dylan. (Hat tip: Jon C.)

Feed the URL of any website to Lingro and all the words on the site become clickable. You can choose English-to-English definitions or translate to and from Spanish, German, Italian, French, or Polish. Here, for example, is a Lingrofied version of this very blog. Cool, n'est-ce pas? I love Lingro's About page, too. (Via Verbatim.)

Lexicographer Erin McKean of Dictionary Evangelist has found a worthwhile use for Twitter: she posts interesting words of the day (WOTD). Spotted recently: "struthious" (ostrich-like) and "cropper" (a scrapbooking enthusiast).

Finally: Did you know the word dairy has no connection at all to words meaning milk or cow? Instead, it comes to us from an Old Teutonic word meaning to knead dough. Language Hat explains everything.

(Lustre-Creme ad from BrandLand USA blog.)

More Words of the Year

The votes have been tallied: Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word of the Year (WOTY) is w00t (spelled with zeros, not O's).  A contributor to Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary defines w00t as an an interjection expressing joy ("it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all"), as in "W00t! I won the contest!

A dissenting definition posted yesterday claims that it's actually an acronym for We Owned the Other Team--and thus spelled with letters rather than numbers.

I have absolutely no opinion. In fact, I'd never seen or heard "w00t" or "WOOT" until last week. OTOH, I don't text or Tweet. I am therefore grateful to Machinist for providing the complete lowdown on w00t.

(Update: In his blog The Lexicographer's Rules Grant Barrett posts a long and interesting history of W00t [and the related whoot]; Barrett calls "We Owned the Other Team" an "implausible" backronym. Be sure to read the comments, too.)

In another sector of the linguasphere, Global Language Monitor, a San Diego organization that "documents, analyzes, and tracks trends in language the world over, with a particular emphasis upon Global English" (upon?), also announced its annual word lists yesterday. GLM gets little respect from linguists because its president and "chief word analyst," Paul JJ Payack, is a non-linguist. Payack's chief claims to fame are that he's a high-tech executive who founded YourDictionary.com and invented an algorithm to count the number of words in the English language--a thankless and indeed probably pointless task.

I'm going to stay neutral in that dispute, too, and instead simply point out that GLM's "top word" of 2007 is hybrid ("chosen to represent all things green from biodiesel to wearing clothes made of soy, to global warming to living with a zero-carbon footprint"--and that's the sort of messy definition that makes lexicographers start chewing their fists). Also making the Top Ten are surge, bubble, Bluetooth, and amigoization (another term that's new to me; it refers to the "increasing Hispanic influence in California, the Southwest, and into the Heartland").

My favoriate GLM word, however, is smirting: "The new-found art of flirting while being banished outside a building for smoking." There isn't even half a chance that smirting will ever become widespread, but I'm enjoying it anyhow.

GLM also gives us the Emoticon of the Year: ?-) Supposedly, it signifies "pirate." It's cute, but I can't tell whether the question mark represents an eye patch or Captain Hook's curving appendage flung across his face in dismay.

Are you already weary of all these word contests? So is Seth Godin, the hairless marketing guru and much-cited blogger. "I think this trend won't last long," he opines, adding:

The best promotional gimmick will be the dictionary that finally has the guts to print an edition missing the word gullible. Practical jokers everywhere will need a copy.