Fritinancy

You Don't Have to Be Jewish...

...to take this fascinating survey of "American Jewish language." Its authors, a pair of social scientists from Hebrew Union College, say it's "the first of its kind to ask North Americans about the words from Yiddish and Hebrew (and other languages) that they may use or recognize."

Part of the survey is a vocabulary quiz that includes words such as the well-assimilated chutzpah, shmooze, maven, and mensch. There's also a section on Jewish-flavored English idioms, some of which were completely alien to me: Sure, I've heard (and used) "Enough already," but not "Are you coming to us for dinner?" or "What do we learn out from this?"

Because trends in baby naming are a demi-obsession of mine, I particularly enjoyed the questions about names you'd consider for your hypothetical children. Options include what I'd consider über-goyish (Christopher and Christine, absolutely; but John strikes me as more culturally neutral than the other choices) to modern Hebrew (Matan for a boy, Noa for a girl) and old-school Yiddish (Moishe, Mende, Basya, Freydie).

And yes, they're curious about non-Jews' linguistic scope, too. (You'll get a shorter survey than the one I took.)

But I wasn't able to discern which "other languages" were in the survey besides Hebrew, Yiddish, and English. Anyone? *

Via Polyglot Conspiracy.

* Update: I figured it out. There's a least one Ladino term in the survey. (Ladino: Judeo-Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews.)

___

P.S. About the post title: "You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy's Real Jewish Rye" was a famous ad campaign created by advertising genius Bill Bernbach (he also dreamed up Volkswagen's "Think Small" slogan). Beginning around 1970, the posters--featuring models from all ethnic groups-- appeared all over the New York subway system. Here's one poster; here's another.

June Linkfest

It actually feels like summer around here for a change, as opposed to the customary June Gloom, so these solstice links are even more solsticious:

1. I've submitted captions to the New Yorker cartoon-caption contest but have never come close to winning. Obviously, what I needed was a system like the one used by recent winner Patrick House, who reveals his secrets in "How to Win the New Yorker Caption Contest," in Slate. His mantra: "You are not trying to write the funniest caption; you are trying to win The New Yorker's caption contest."

2. Q. Pheevr's swell "What Mama Don't Allow, Linguistically Speaking" is a treat for blues-loving linguistics geeks. Here's a verse to give you a taste; be sure to read all the comments, too:

Mama don't allow no back-formation round here.
No, Mama don't allow no back-formation round here.
Well, we don't care what Mama don't allow;
Gonna back-formate anyhow.
Mama don't allow no back-formation round here.

(I have a few verses of my own I'd like to add, but I'm confounded by Q. Pheevr's comment format, which seems to be in Swedish. If you're reading this, Q, please send help!)

3. I'm still having fun with Twitter, the microblogging service that limits posts, called "tweets," to 140 characters. (Try it yourself: sign up--it's free--and then follow my tweets by typing Fritinancy in the search field.) Twitter has a serious side, too, as Craig Stoltz explains in How Twitter Finally Taught Me to Be an Editor. Craig writes: "I find that every time I sit down to write a meaningful Tweet I hone my craft a bit more."

4. Twitter has also spawned a subgenre: Twaiku, or haiku posted on Twitter. Take a look at this fan wiki for definitions and inspiration.

5. Discover the meanings of balatronic, croodle, pinquescence, and more at Obsolete Word of the Day.

6. More fully researched, and thus more conducive to frittering, is Worthless Word for the Day (or WWFTD, pronounced "wifted"), which recently posted guerdon ("reward"), the winning word in the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Use the drop-down menu in the upper-right-hand corner to search the WWFTD dictionary, read the "worthless disclaimer," and pleasantly waste more time. (Update: link has been fixed, per comment.)

7. Lifehacker's "Best Online Tools for Word Nerds" includes some resources previously acknowledged in this blog as well as some that were new to me, including What Does That Mean? and Definr. (Hat tip: Kirinqueen.)

8. Wordcraft claims to have the largest list of eponyms on the web, but that's just the beginning. Wander around and discover lists of Christmas-carol words (gladsome, roundelay, swathe, etc.), "German lingo of mental states" (Anschauung, sprachgefühl, gemütlich, etc.) and "words concerning anti-black discrimination" (redlining, Beulah land, DWB, etc.) Excellent discussion board, too. (Hat tip: Goofy, via the Wordcraft discussion board.)

Word of the Week: Kadigan

Kadigan: A placeholder word such as whatchamacallit, thingamajig, yada-yada, oh-dark-thirty, or foo.

Kadigan (sometimes spelled cadigan) seems to have originated in the 20th century, possibly with the American writer, poet, and editor Willard R. Espy, who wrote An Almanac of Words at Play. The term is included in Dictionary of American Slang (first published in 1960 and now in its third edition), whose original editors connected it to gin, as in cotton gin.

Kadigans are used in virtually every language. For some fascinating word lists, see this Wikipedia article, which also includes this helpful clarification:

Even among the world of otherwise nameless things referred to by placeholder names, there is a hierarchy of specificity. "Thing", as its name implies, is universally applicable. It is likely, however, that a "gizmo" involves some minor degree of technological sophistication, connoting as it does some mechanical or electronic aspect.

(Hat tip: Kottke.)

The Prefix Perplex

I was standing in a long, stationary line at the San Francisco Film Festival, indulging in my favorite waiting-in-line activity: eavesdropping. Directly behind me were a 50-something man and his 20-something daughter, good-naturedly arguing about the correct use of the word infamous. Dad maintained that infamous could mean extremely famous, while Daughter insisted that infamous really meant something more like heinous. The example they were using was footwear designer Christian Louboutin, whose shoes always have red soles. Dad called them "the infamous red soles," while Daughter claimed they were merely "famous."

Well, score one for Gen Y. Louboutin's soles would be infamous only if they were implicated in a triple homicide, or if toxic red dye seeped upward and caused horrific foot burns, or in some other equally dire scenario. Infamous means "notorious, ill-famed, having an exceedingly bad reputation." It even has legal definitions:

a. Punishable by severe measures, such as death, long imprisonment, or loss of civil rights.

b. Convicted of a crime, such as treason or felony, that carries such a punishment.

The overheard conversation got me thinking more generally about the way people use prefixes in English. As children, we were told never to use irregardless to mean regardless: the former, we learn,"isn't a word." (Of course, it is a word, probably blended from irrespective and regardless, but it's considered substandard and illogical, not to mention redundant: both the ir- prefix and the -less suffix have the same negative meaning.) Regardless, people still carry on saying irregardless. As with infamous, the extra syllable must make the word sound ... I don't know. Smarter? Stronger? Fancier?

Then there's penultimate, which means "next to last," as in, "Y is the penultimate letter in the alphabet." Yet penultimate is often used to mean "really, really ultimate--absolutely the very last word!"

I'm wondering whether some people think that adding any prefix to a word intensifies its meaning. Do some of us yearn to agglutinate words, to pile on the parts and make our language more Germanesque?

Maybe the prefixizers are following the example of invaluable, in which the prefix does act as an intensifier. Invaluable means not simply "of value"--for that, we could use valuable--but "beyond calculation," "incapable of being valued," "priceless."

Can anyone suggest other such words? Or additional examples of prefix abuse?

March Linkfest

London-based cartoonist Tom Fishburne explains, in comic-strip format, How to Come Up with a Product Name. How about "Cosmic Crunchios"? (Hat tip: Cultural Branding.)

City juice, Adam's ale, eighty-one, and dog soup: four ways to say "tap water" in diner slang, according to this lingo guide in Diners Roadhouses Drive-Ins Joints & Dives, a blog devoted to classic American eateries. I especially like Bronx vanilla. It means "garlic."

"Victorian words dance with African grammar" in Nigerian English, according to this International Herald Tribune article. English has been the official language of instruction and administration since 1960--and it's also the "language of national unity" in a country where hundreds of languages are spoken--but that doesn't mean a visiting North American will necessarily understand a conversation that includes terms like "gripe water," "vulcanizer," or "felicitate." Pronunication tends toward the strictly phonetic: "Fuel is FOO-el. A receipt is a "re-seeped," and yacht frequently rhymes with hatched. Wednesday is pronounced exactly as written — Wed-nes-day — and a leopard rhymes with leotard."

It's not just the Nigerians. Here's Kottke.org on four words that prove how difficult the English language is. Only four? Actually, more.

Speaking of difficult words, the dandy blog German Joys, which is written in English, analyzes an interesting German word every week. Recent words of the week: Aufgebrezelt (literally, "pretzeled-up"; figuratively, "all dolled up for an evening on the town"), Muttermundschleim (literally, "mother-mouth slime"; figuratively, "cervical mucus"), and Angstlust ("the enjoyment of fear"). Blog author Andrew Hammel also puts a German twist on the findings in a new book about bad baby names.

Brad Shorr of Word Sell has posted what he's calling the world's hardest vocabulary quiz--57 stumpers, including grampus, haruspice, and crenel.

I've fallen down innumerable interesting rabbit holes dug by Omniglot, who says about himself: "The foreign language I speak the best is Mandarin Chinese, followed by Welsh, Irish, French, German, Spanish and Japanese (more or less in that order), and I’m currently studying Czech." Here, for instance, is a post about "emperors, antiquarians, and elephants"--all names of different sizes of paper in the English imperial system. (There are also double elephants, grand eagles, and potts.)

Simpsons Linguistic Roundup IV

Linguist Heidi Harley has compiled her fourth annual Simpsons linguistic joke collection, "Beyond Beyond Beyond 'Beyond Embiggens and Cromulent.'" To borrow a phrase, it's a treasure-trove of culture and multi-culture!

Naturally, I love this citation:

Category: Haplology¹

Homer has drunk Moe's 'forget-me-not' drink, and has 24-hour amnesia. He's visiting the Memory Recovery Institute ("We do not do MRIs"), where Professor Frink is welcoming him.

Professor Frink: Mr. Simpson, I have built a device that will enable you to explore your memories. The science was easy, but now I've got the hard part -- coming up with the name!
Homer: How about the "Dejà-ViewMaster"?
Frink: Ahh…
Homer: "Remembrance of Things Fast"?
Frink: Umm..
Homer: "The Rememberererer"?
Frink: We don't need to come up with the name now.

And also this one:

Category: Novel derivational morphology

Homer builds a rollercoaster and names it the "Zoominator".

The post includes links to Heidi's three previous roundups. And here's a link to my own June 2007 post about fictitious brand names in The Simpsons. I'm working on a sequel!

___

¹Haplology (the loss of one of two identical or similar syllables in a word). IANAL (I Am Not A Linguist--and also "I Anal"), but I thought "Remembererer" was an example of reduplication.

Word of the Week: Vigesimal

Vigesimal: Pertaining to a base-20 numeral system. Pronunciation: vī-ˈje-sə-məl. From Latin vicesimus or vigesimus: "twentieth."

In Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, a delightful (and delightfully illustrated) little tour of the world of languages, author Elizabeth Little observes:

Vigesimal systems (base-20) are not at all uncommon--a fact that isn't remotely surprising if you've ever bothered to add your fingers to your toes. The Maya, accomplished mathematicians and astronomers, are one of many people to rely on a vigesimal system: in Mayan, the number thirty-one is buluc tu-kal--literally, "eleven after the twentieth."

Little also writes about a traditional vigesimal counting jargon once used throughout West Britain, primarily for counting sheep:

The words themselves are utterly charming, sounding like nothing so much as the names a young Will Shakespeare might have conjured up for a litter of adorable kittens: yan, tan, tether, mether, pip, azer, sezar, akker, conter, dick, yanadick, tanadick, tetheradick, metheradick, bumfit, yanabum, tanabum, tetherabum, metherabum, jigger.

The title of Little's book comes from the story that the original Chinese transliteration of "Coca-Cola," back in 1928, was ke-kou ke-la--literally, "Bite the Wax Tadpole." According to Snopes.com, fearless debunkers of urban legends, that's not quite right. The final agreed-upon transliteration translates to something like "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice."

Bite The Wax Tadpole is also the name of an Irish web development company; an amusing explanation of the name choice appears here.

The 27th Letter

Interior Design magazine reports on a contest to create the "undiscovered" 27th letter for the English alphabet. But before you start spending your prize money (of which there apparently is none, anyway;  participants get free notebooks in which to record their ideas), read the rules:

Sponsored by the Art Directors Club and Moleskine, the competition is open exclusively to the Young Guns, a group of the visual communication club's members under the age of 30. The deadline for the contest is March 3. Finalists will be announced April 1, just as the club begins accepting entries for the sixth Young Guns class.

Participants can create the letter through any media, from type design and websites to video and photography. The results will be evaluated by a jury that will select 27 finalists to feature in a virtual exhibition on the ADC website, and in a limited edition Moleskin publication which will be available for sale to benefit Lettera 27, a non-profit literacy advocate.

I hereby make this an open-source contest. If you'd like to nominate a new letter, leave a comment. I'll forward all the submissions to the Art Directors Club.

Hat tip to reader Marjanne Pearson, who didn't want a link but who commented, "I always thought the 27th letter was the ampersand." So did I.

Pictured: Eth (also spelled edh), a letter in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet and in modern Icelandic, where it represents a voiced dental fricative like the th sound in them.

Word of the Week: Ideophone

Ideophone (ID-ee-oh-phone): A word, often onomatopoeic and sometimes involving reduplication, that vividly represents a sensation or sensory perception. English-language examples include bling-bling (glitter, sparkle) and gobble. This Wikipedia article gives examples in other languages, such as Navajo k'az k'az (the sound of shearing sheep).

"The Ideophone" is the name of a blog written by Mark Dingemanse, a PhD student in language and cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in The Netherlands. Here is Mark's post on the history of the term "ideophone," which concludes with an example from Siwu, a Niger-Congo language spoken in eastern Ghana:

It may not be the most tasteful one, but I’m sure it will give you a good idea of what expressives are about. The expressive is sàsàsàsàsà, and in my database it is glossed as ‘spontaneous outcoming of urine’:

gɔ yukukpe ɔpia mɛ̀ ɔ̀tu i kanya, kùru lotsɛ mɛ̀ ìbɔrɛ sàsàsàsàsàsà
when thief he-put me gun in mouth, urine it-give me outcoming EXPR
‘When the robber put a gun into my mouth, I started urinating sàsàsàsàsàsà‘ (lit. urine gave me outcoming ~)

Shatner in Esperanto

John McGrath posts at Errata:

Have you ever wondered what spoken Esperanto sounds like? Have you ever wondered what it sounds like spoken by Bill Shatner, in an expressionistic black and white fantasia of an arthouse horror movie?

Of course you have, so you need to see Incubus, made in 1965 by Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens and written entirely in Esperanto.

I've been fascinated by Esperanto, the international language that was supposed to bring about world peace and harmony, since I first learned about it as a child. Isn't it lovely that "Esperanto" means "one who hopes"? And isn't it poignant that the language, invented in 1887 by a Polish-Lithuanian-Russian-Jewish opthalmologist named Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, still has, according to Wikipedia anyway, "between 100,000 and 2 million speakers," including "approximately a thousand native speakers"? (Forget Shatner: don't you wonder what Esperanto baby talk sounds like?)

I used to have an insurance-company client in Emeryville, a tiny enclave between Oakland and Berkeley, whose offices shared building space with Esperanto-USA (formerly the Esperanto League of North America, which had a ring of quaint subversion that the new name sadly lacks). I kept meaning to drop by and say Salut! but never did. I have, however, slipped Esperanto words into naming lists on more than one occasion. So far, no client has accepted the challenge.

More about Esperanto--"the international language that works!"--here, here, and here. Sonja's English-Esperanto Dictionary--a highly arbitrary compilation that includes translations of "wapiti" and "sainfoin" (what-what?) but not of "sharp," "bright," or "happy"-- has a nifty "ten random words" feature, including--just now--"squint (partly close eyes) duone fermi la okulojn."