Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Hustings

Hustings: A place where political speeches are made; more generally, the campaign trail. plural and singular. From Old English husting, “meeting, court”; adapted from Old Norse hus-thing, “house assembly.” A related word, Althing, is the name of Iceland’s general assembly. (This thing is analogous to the Latin legal term res: an issue or matter.)

“Hustings” is a word that appears only during political seasons in the US, and then infrequently: the synonym “stump,” which can also be a verb, often replaces it. The late language maven William Safire, in Safire’s Political Dictionary, said “hustings” was “archaic” and “often used semihumorously.”

One place “hustings” is taken seriously is the Wall Street Journal, where the word has appeared five times in the last two months. “Obama Hits Hustings on His Own” was the headline on an August 31 story.

 

In a September 18 blog post about the Romney campaign, “Time for an Intervention,” WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan addressed the candidate directly:

Wake this election up. Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city—don’t they count anymore? A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings.

“Hustings” is used differently in the UK and Commonwealth countries (and ex-Commonwealth nations such as India), where it means the proceedings at a parliamentary election. It often appears as a modifier: “a hustings event.” The word has been used in many contexts since it first appeared in print in 1030; the modern British sense, according to the OED, comes from the term for the temporary platform from which Parliamentary candidates were nominated.

Word of the Week: Feckless

Feckless: Ineffectual, lacking purpose or vitality; irresponsible. Originally a Scottish dialect word (along with its antonym, feckful) in which feck is a shortened form of effect. Entered English in the late 16th century; popularized by Thomas Carlyle in the early 19th century. (Carlyle, 1823: “I am so feckless at present that I have never yet had the heart to commence it.”)

Feckless was in the news last week when Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, used it to castigate President Obama’s Mideast policy in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show.

Source: Today on the Trail, September 13, 2012.

 

The feck in feckless is unrelated to the Irish feck, which, as Stan Carey explains, is a minced oath, “occupying ground between the ultra-mild expletive flip and the often taboo (but also popular) fuck.” This Irish feck is the one appropriated by FECKiN Irish Whiskey, a brand I wrote about last year. Used as recommended, 80-proof FECKiN Irish whiskey is very feckful indeed.

Word of the Week: Arithmetic

Arithmetic: The science of numbers; the art of computation by figures. From Latin arithmetica, originally Greek arithmetike (“the counting art”). In English since early the 14th century, originally as “arsmetrike” because of the false Latin etymology ars metrica, “the art of measuring.” Standardized to arithmetic by mid-17th century. Arithmetic replaced Middle English tælcræft, literally “tell-craft,” in which “tell” meant “to reckon” or “to calculate,” a sense we retain today in “bank teller” and “to tell time.”

Arithmetic was in the news last week after former President Bill Clinton used the word six times in his fact-filled and rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

 

MinnPost.com, Sept. 6, 2012

Here’s the first usage (from the transcript of the speech as delivered):

Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic. (Sustained cheers, applause.)

Arithmetic suited Clinton’s rhetorical purposes because—in contrast to, say, math—it suggests “elementary” and “basic.” Arithmetic is what we learn in grade school: it’s times tables, not quadratic equations; long division, not differential calculus. Clinton drove home that point in a later line about his differences with Republican opponents over the national debt:

It was a highly inconvenient thing for them in our debates that I was just a country boy from Arkansas, and I came from a place where people still thought two and two was four. (Laughter, applause.) It’s arithmetic.

(Emphasis added.)

If you missed the speech. here’s video with annotation from New York Times reporters.

Also of interest:

Clinton made so many changes to his written text—ad-libs and deliberate revisions—that the speech ran almost twice as long as scheduled. To see exactly how he altered the text, take a look at The Atlantic’s marked-up version. BuzzFeed offers a slightly different version, which contains a couple of changes sure to please print editors: Clinton’s correct lower-casing of “president” when it doesn’t precede a proper name (“the next president of the United States”) and of “bless” (“God bless America”).

“Fixin’ to Get Folksy,” an analysis of the speech’s homespun rhetorical devices. (Ben Zimmer at Word Routes.)

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker says Clinton’s speech was “one of the greatest tours de force in convention history”:

In its intensity, in the palpable love between performer and audience, in its passion, in its earnestness, in its straightforwardness—in its politics, even!—this was the rhetorical equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen concert.

James Fallows at The Atlantic on why Clinton’s speeches succeed: “Because he treats listeners as if they are smart.” That’s a lesson for every speaker and speechwriter.

Update: Lucy Ferriss, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog, takes a close look at some of Clinton’s rhetorical devices:

This call to “listen” to what’s “important” is the chief emendation Clinton makes to a text that might otherwise, rhetorically, echo what not only the First Lady but also the other pundits had been saying from the platform. Even more brilliant is the addition of the “some brass” line, which will haunt our impressions of Paul Ryan henceforward.

Word of the Week: Hooliganism

Hooliganism: Rioting; bullying; rough horseplay; “the characteristic behavior of hooligans” (OED). (For an alternate meaning, keep reading.) Hooliganism first appeared in print in 1898, in a police report in the Daily Telegraph (UK); hooligan also first appeared in print in 1898 in the UK, in the Daily News. When Arthur Conan Doyle used “hooliganism” in his 1904 Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, he capitalized it.

Officially, the origins of hooligan and hooliganism are “uncertain.” There are theories, though, the most plausible being the one summarized in the Online Etymology Dictionary: “almost certainly from the variant form of the Irish surname Houlihan, which figured as a characteristic comic Irish name in music hall songs and newspapers of the 1880s and ’90s.”

In the English-speaking world, hooliganism is mostly seen in the UK and Commonwealth countries, where it’s frequently modified by football (i.e., soccer). “Football hooliganism” is associated with unruly, brawling, destructive behavior. But in the early 20th century hooligan and hooliganism found an adopted home—and a different interpretation—in czarist Russia and, later, the Soviet Union. The words had pointedly political meanings: In the Soviet justice system “khuliganism” was a catch-all description for offensive behavior. The words stayed in the Russian lexicon and penal code after the fall of the Soviet regime, and remain there today.

Which explains news reports like this one from CNN, published on Saturday:

Three members of Russian female punk rock band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison Friday after they were found guilty of hooliganism for performing a song critical of President Vladimir Putin in a church.

Malynne Stevenson, an associate professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Chicago, provided some context for this “hooliganism” in an interview published August 17 in Global Post:

In the Soviet Union and Russia today, hooliganism is legally defined this way: “In the Soviet Union ‘hooliganism’ (хулиганство, khuliganstvo) was made a criminal offence under the penal codes of the Soviet republics. In the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), article 216 of the penal code defined ‘hooliganism’ as ‘any deliberate behavior that violates public order and expresses explicit disrespect toward society.’ This article was used to cover a wide range of behaviors such as vagrancy, stalking, foul language, etc.” …

Lenin once declared that “hooligans” should be shot on the spot, along with murderers and tsarists.

“Hooliganism” is also used as a criminal charge in China and Iran, Stevenson said.

According to reporter Ben Johnson, who wrote about Pussy Riot earlier this month for Slate, most Russian antigovernment protestors aren’t charged with hooliganism but rather with “administrative violations.” The Pussy Riot case was different, Johnson says:

Members of Pussy Riot opened themselves up to the more severe accusation of hooliganism by choosing a church as their venue, and performing in front of the iconostasis (part of the church’s sanctuary, where women and other regular parishioners are not permitted), a choice that many members of the country’s largest religious group, Russian Orthodox Christians, have found offensive. Hooliganism charges can also be more serious if committed in a group, which in Russia’s court system is defined as two people or more.

“There’s only one punishment for hooliganism,” Johnson writes, “and that is ‘deprivation of freedom,’ which usually means imprisonment.”

Details about the Pussy Riot sentence, plus video and international reactions, here. For more about the Pussy Riot name and how it’s rendered in Russian, see Ben Zimmer’s post on Language Log. For more about the English-language media have handled Pussy—e.g., “a feminist punk group with a profane name”—see Arnold Zwicky’s “The Pussy Patrol.”

July Linkfest

If you’ve been following the big science news of the month/year/century/millennium, you know that the “Higgs” in “Higgs boson” is British physicist Peter Higgs. But you may not be aware that“boson” was named for an Indian scientist, Satyendranath Bose. (Note: The Higgs boson is not to be confused with the Higgs bos’n or the Herrgs berson.)

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Ten weird rules that control how planets are named.

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Five words with surprising etymologies. I knew the “California” story, but was indeed surprised by “partridge.”

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Guest-blogging at Midlife Mixtape, Alexandra Rosas of Good Day, Regular People teaches us some useful Colombian idioms. I’m partial to ¿Y quién pidió el pollo? which translates literally to “And who ordered the chicken?” but is infinitely more versatile.

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Moving north of the border now: Studio360Redesigns assigned Toronto-based Bruce Mau Design the job of rebranding the Canadian national identity. The Brand New blog reports on Mau’s “Know Canada” redesign.

I think “Know Canada” is a brilliant slogan. Inexplicably, though, Studio360Redesigns conducted a separate contest, open to nonprofessionals, and chose a different slogan. I can’t say I share the judges’ enthusiasm for “Canada: We’re Not Just Colder, We’re Cooler.” Meh.

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“I call them the Liquid Names: they flow smoothly, like water down a glass streambed with no rocks or branches to impede its path.” Baby Name Wizard reports on “a new class of girls’ names” that has “taken hold in the past generation.”

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What if language magazines were sold at supermarket checkouts? Two hypotheticals, one from Mignon (Grammar Girl) Fogarty (pictured below), the other from an opinion piece by John McWhorter in theNew York Times.

I especially like “What to do when he ‘begs the question’.”

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“On Newsroom, every word is expertly crafted by an genuine genius of dialogue. In a newsroom, people alternate between exhaustion and caffeinated hysteria.” And other differences between the HBO seriesThe Newsroom and an actual newsroom.

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Need a rhyme or a near-rhyme? RhymeBrain is one of the better online dictionaries I’ve seen. (Hat tip: John McChesney-Young.)

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Destination weddings, destination birthdays, destination funerals: How did “destination” become a modifier, anyway?

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The Project Twins’ illustrated dictionary of “unusual words,"     from acersecomic to zugzwang. (Via Culture Desk.)

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This is swellacious: The Oxford English Fictionary, “Defining words that aren’t real. Yet.” (Via this tweet from Our Bold Hero.)

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Spin magazine’s list of the 40 greatest band names of all time. (Via@VerbID.)

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How well do you know carny lingo? Trucker lingo? Show-biz lingo?

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Q: What’s the correct pronunciation of “Moleskine”? A: Whatever you like.

 

On the Visual Thesaurus: Bikini and Beyond

Hello, summer! And hello to what the ladymags like to call “bikini season.” My new column for the Visual Thesaurus investigates how the bikini got its name (in 1946 France) and why the word has been such a productive contributor to our vocabulary.

Access is restricted to subscribers. Here’s an itsy-bitsy excerpt:

Eventually, “-kini” acquired enough independent meaning that it became detached from the concept of skimpiness. In 1985, swimsuit designer Anne Cole introduced a suit that combined a bikini-style bottom with a relatively demure, hip-length tank top. The company called it the “tankini,” a descriptor that has endured. Or consider the full-coverage Burqini: a portmanteau of “burqa” and “bikini,” it’s the registered trademark for a full-body suit—only the face and hands are revealed—introduced in 2007 by a Lebanese-Australian swimsuit designer to meet the needs of active Muslim women. The Burqini (known generically as the burkini or the veilkini) was popularized by a non-Muslim, the British celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, who told reporters she wore the garment to prevent sunburn. Also innocent (and also a trademark): Babi-kini, a U.S. company that makes wee swimsuits for infants and toddlers.

Read the rest of “Bikini and Beyond.”

Bonus link #1: My 2008 blog post on bikinis and their -kini kin.

Bonus link #2: Why do men’s magazines love flag bikinis?

 

Because They Say So

The San Francisco magazine 7x7* brought to my attention a pop-up juice bar that opened in the city over Memorial Day weekend. It’s called Sow.

This is what I pictured:

Sow and juice-imbibing piglets. Image from JustMommies.

No, no, not /sau/, insists the Sow website.

 

See? It’s Sōw, with a macron over the O to tell you to pronounce it as a “long” vowel. Or to confuse you further.

And because most city folks won’t know a sow from a sōw from a hole in the ground, there’s a dictionary definition:

verb /sō/ plant (seed) by scattering it on or in the earth

That’s mildly interesting, but so what? A dictionary definition doesn’t make me want to patronize the shop. Besides, while the “planting” concept might make “Sow” an apt name for a nursery or a community garden, the connection between “scattering seed” and “drinking fresh juice” is fairly remote. (From what I’ve read—on the Kickstarter page, for example—Sow doesn’t grow its own fruits and vegetables.)

Another quibble: Nowadays, if a non-farming person is at all familiar with the verb form of “sow,” it’s probably as part of an idiom. And that idiom is a shady one: sow discord, sow rancor, sow rumors, sow one’s wild oats. 

As for the macron, here’s something I wrote in 2008 about Grāpple, a brand of grape-flavored apples:

Basic naming rule: If you have to rely on diacritical marks like the macron over the a to clarify pronunciation, your brand name isn't working. Additional hints (“Say Grape-L”) only make you seem more desperate.

That observation applies to Sōw, too.

We recently saw some fancy macronizing with Mondelēz, the new name of Kraft Food Inc.’s global snacks business. The macron over the second E is there to tell you—force you—to pronounce the name “moan-de-LEEZ.” But even the company’s original press release dropped the macron after the headline, and a more recent press release dispensed with it altogether. So go right ahead and say “MAHN-de-lezz” if you please. Or mahn-de-LAY. I won’t turn you in to the brand police.

(As Tate Linden of Stokefire, a branding agency, said in a tweet about Mondelez: “Any name that requires the Latin Extended character set gets a FAIL in my book. How many people can type an ē?”)

Let’s extract the juice from this critique:

What Does "Tribal" Mean?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, published today, looks at a word that I’ve been seeing a lot in fashion reporting and advertising: “tribal.” That’s “tribal” as in “tribal chic,” “tribal trend,” and “tribal style.” Or in this ad from Piperlime:

Beyond the bad pun, what does it mean? Here’s an excerpt from my column:

In past decades “tribal” styles might have been called “exotic,” “primitive,” “ethnic,” or “multicultural”—adjectives that now seem patronizing. “Tribe” and “tribal,” on the other hand, have gained status and hipness in the educated First World. Joel Kotkin’s 1994 book Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy paved the way by positing that “tribe” could be a modern, urban construct. (Kotkin’s thesis is that Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and British people are sophisticated “tribes” whose shared identity, rather than politics, contributes to their economic success.) In 2008 the influential marketing writer Seth Godin published Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, which told readers that thanks to the Internet, a tribe is any connected group of people.

The upshot: tribes are now cool. So cool that at least four marketing agencies in the US call themselves Tribe, and Tribal DDB is the name of “a digitally centric global advertising agency” that’s part of the huge DDB network.

Read the rest of “Fashion Tribes” (subscription required).

Word of the Week: Demise

Demise (verb): To grant or transfer by will or lease. From Middle French démettre, “to dismiss or put away.” Pronounced exactly like the noun: dɪˈmaɪz.

 

200 block of Sutter Street, San Francisco, March 2012.

 

Although it’s little used today outside of legal contexts, the verb demise is almost three centuries older than the noun. The OED’s earliest citation is dated 1480: “By oure chartre beryng the date of thees presentes have dimised, assigned, deliuered … to Henri Hardman clerk.” It wasn’t until the 1750s that demise took on the extended meaning of “death,” because that’s when the property transfer took place.

In real estate law, demised premises are leased or rented “for years or life, but not beyond that.”

For another example of a familiar word in an unfamiliar context, see my post on consist (noun).

"Dibs"

My 2012-2013 subscription package for Berkeley Rep arrived in the mail last week. (Highlights: An Iliad, currently at the New York Theater Workshop; and The White Snake, a new offering from the always-spellbinding Mary Zimmerman.) On the back of the subscription form, under the heading “Why You Subscribe,” a bullet point caught my eye:

• Dibs on special events like Robin Williams, John Leguizamo, and David Sedaris.

“Dibs”?

Of course I recognized the word—it’s playground slang for “a claim.” It seemed interestingly informal for a mainstream theater company’s subscription campaign. (But then again: playground, playful, plays!) It got me thinking: where does dibs come from?

The OED, surprisingly, is no help at all here. The only definition it gives for dibs is “a thick sweet syrup made from grape-juice in Eastern countries.” By “Eastern” the OED means “Middle Eastern”; this dibs comes from colloquial Arabic. I recognized it as a cognate of Hebrew dvash = honey. (UPDATE: See Q. Pheevr’s comment, below, for a correction on my OED research.)

I had to turn to American sources to learn more about the dibs I’d known since childhood. The American Heritage Dictionary says dibs is short for dibstones, “counters used in a game,” but doesn’t provide a history or explain dibs’s American-ness. The Online Etymology Dictionary is a little more helpful, giving 1932 as the first documentation of the word—but no indication of where it was published.

Onward to World Wide Words, Michael Quinion’s indispensable (and UK-inflected) online resource. In a 1999 entry, Quinion wrote that the 1932 citation for dibs appeared in American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society—which means only that some academic had finally gotten around to noticing it. “It comes into existence seemingly fully formed, with no obvious links to any previous meaning of the word,” Quinion observes acerbically, adding: “That’s hardly likely, of course.” As for the putative origin, dibstones, that word “is obscure to the point of terminal murkiness.”

Perhaps you’ve wondered whether dibs and divvy—as in “divvy it up”—were connected. That’s the theory Leo Rosten advances in The Joys of Yiddish, in his entry for pushke (a can kept in every home for charitable contributions). Rosten says dibs and divvies are not Yiddish but Chicagoese, used interchangeably “for anything to be divided up.”

I approached the Wikipedia entry for dibs with the necessary trepidation, but was pleased to discover that it is informative and well annotated. One of its sources is “No One Seems to Have Dibs on Word’s Origins,” a 2005 Chicago Tribune column by Eric Zorn with all sorts of fascinating lore about dibs and other slang terms for claims. Zorn writes that the Random House Dictionary says dibs probably came from dubs, “a shortened form of ‘double’ that's used in marbles ‘to claim two or more marbles knocked out of the ring by the same shot.’”

Also in the Wikipedia entry:

• A 1937 edition of Webster’s Dictionary connects dibs to the game of jacks (which is probably similar to dibstones).
• “In Boston, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, ‘dibs’ also refers to the practice of holding a shoveled-out parking space after a heavy snowfall by putting chairs, laundry baskets, or other items in the street to mark the claimed space.”
• “In the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, ‘bags’, ‘tax’ or ‘bagsie’ (or variants including ‘begsie’ and ‘bugsy’) is used to the same effect.”
• “The Scout movement has a similar phrase which is not linked to ‘dib’, but is actually ‘dyb’. DYB is an acronym for ‘Do Your Best’, and is used as a challenge which is responded to with DOB – Do Our Best.”
• In Spain, the equivalent to dibs is primer (“first”)—but next door in Portugal it’s dibs! Dibs is also used, untranslated, in Israel, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the New England variation on dibs that I learned from blogger/Internet friend Karen Wise: hi-hosey. Naturally, no one knows for sure where that term came from, either.

UPDATE #1: I neglected to mention a commercial use of dibs: 1stdibs.com, an online marketplace for antiques, semi-antiques, and other beautiful things “in the realm of the ludicrously expensive,” as Steven Kurutz put it in the New York Times last September.  

UPDATE #2: Separated by a Common Language published a wonderful post in 2010 about bags, dibs, and shotgun. Author Lynneguist says it’s one of her most-read entries by people outside the US and UK. (Thanks to @BabyNameWizard for reminding me!)