Fritinancy

Name of the Year: Follow-Up

“My money’s on Sandy,” wrote Ben Zimmer in a comment on my Names of the Year for 2012 post, published earlier this week.

That’s probably smart money, and I’m regretting my oversight.

“Sandy” is linked to two separate 2012 disasters, both of which occurred in the last quarter of the year. The first was Hurricane Sandy (aka Superstorm Sandy, Frankenstorm Sandy, or Bride of Frankenstorm), which smashed into the East Coast in late October. “Sandy” came from a storm-name list created by the World Meteorological Organization. Since 1979, the WMO’s lists have included male and female names in alternating alphabetical order, omitting the letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z. (See the name lists for the next five years at the National Hurricane Center’s website.)

As a personal name, “Sandy” may have sounded old-fashioned to a lot of Americans. Its popularity peaked in the 1960s, when, according to the Baby Name Voyager, it ranked #167 among girls’ names. When you search “Sandra,” from which Sandy is often derived, the trend is even starker: Sandra was hugely popular in the 1940s, peaking at #6, and remained in the top 100 through the 1980s before falling steeply. The best-known “Sandy” today, other than the hurricane, may be the female lead in the Fifties-nostalgia musical Grease, played in the film version (1978) by Olivia Newton-John. Sandy can be a male nickname (Sandy Koufax, Little Orphan Annie’s dog), but it’s more often associated with a certain pert, wholesome, mid-20th-century female archetype: think of perennial Peter Pan Sandy Duncan, born in 1946.

(I found it interesting that many of the other girls’ names on the 2012 hurricane list were similarly Forties- and Fifties-ish: Betty, Patty, Debby, Joyce, Leslie. I suppose you have to reach back that far to find unambiguously girly names: today’s baby girls are likely to have androgynous or traditionally male names like Taylor, Sawyer, MacKenzie, and Maxwell. Compare anachronistically named Susie in the “lemonade-stand” Verizon Wireless commercials, played by a young actress with the trendily androgynous name Lennon.)

The other 2012 Sandy is, of course, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were massacred on December 14. This Sandy is a descriptive word modifying “hook,” a geographical term for a curved spit of land.

Two devastating Sandys in two months: That’s a lot of attention on a familiar-sounding yet out-of-the-mainstream name. It could be the deciding factor in January’s Name of the Year vote in Boston.

Word of the Week: Hunker

Hunker: To crouch or squat; to sit on one’s heels; to take shelter; to take a defensive posture. Usually in combination with down: “hunker down to avoid the icy wind.” Possibly from Old Norse hokra, to crouch; may be related to haunch (upper hip and thigh). The OED traces hunker to a 1720 Scottish usage; Etymology Online says hunker down is American Southern dialect popularized circa 1965.

There was a lot of hunkering down in the headlines during the days preceding Hurricane Irene’s landfall on the East Coast of the United States. “Quinnipiac University is preparing to hunker down for Hurricane Irene and the aftermath of the storm” read the lede of an August 26 story in The Quad News, the Connecticut college’s student newspaper.  “Find a safe place to hunker down,” Delaware Governor Jack Markell advised residents of his state on August 27.

Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, tweeted this on August 28:

And this headline appeared in the Washington Post on August 26:

 

Hunker also has a history as a noun. “Originally, a nickname for a member of the conservative section of the Democratic party in New York; hence, one opposed to progress in general; a fogy” is one definition at Wordnik. The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia goes into greater detail:

In American politics, a conservative; one who opposes innovation or change; a fogy: first applied in the State of New York as a name to the conservative section of the Democratic party who opposed the Barnburners or radical section, about 1845. Also used adjectively.

Although hunker is no longer used as a nominative political epithet, the sense of “opposes innovation or change” still lingers in some usages. “Holds stubbornly to a position” is another Wordnik definition, with this sentence example: “As the White House hunkered down, G.O.P. congressional unity started crumbling” (Time).

April Linkfest

I’ve added Ruth Wajnryb’s blog, Words Woman, to my blogroll, and I recommend that you bookmark it, too. Ms. Wajnryb is an Australian linguist who writes in an approachable and open-minded manner about new words, new meanings for old words, word play, and, yes, the addition of heart (v., tr.) to the OED. I first cited Ms. Wajnryb several years ago in a post about the migrating meaning of “erstwhile.”

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Speaking of migrating meanings, Ben Yagoda, writing for Slate, considers the “nonplussed” problem, along with “momentarily,” “disinterested,” and “presently.”

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More multiple meanings: Take the Language Log polysemy quiz. And read the rest of the post, in which author Geoffrey K. Pullum asserts, using boldface for emphasis: “Languages love multiple meanings. They lust after them. They roll around in them like a dog in fresh grass.”

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What are blancmange, fish slice, pong, and skivers—all words from the British English lexicon—doing in So Much for That, a novel written by the American Lionel Shriver and set in the US? Jan Freeman explains. (P.S. So Much for That is one of the best novels I’ve read in the last five years.)

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“[W]hichever speechwriter came up with ‘win the future’ should be sent to count yurts in Outer Mongolia.” – Paul Krugman on President Obama’s budget speech.

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OK, we know that “Eskimos have a hundred words for snow” is a fallacy. But it turns out that English speakers have dozens of words for rain, from “ablaqueate” to “whisp.” Read them all in Ben Schott’s pluviovocabulary.

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Got 10 minutes? Watch an episode of “The Beauty of Maps,” a BBC documentary that originally aired last year. The series is a guided tour through the British Library’s collection of 4 million (!) maps. (Via Swiss Miss.)

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Speaking of maps, Muckety uses fascinating interactive maps to chart “the relationships of muckety-mucks”—i.e., people with power and influence, including Martha Stewart, LeBron James, and former Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. Register at the site to create your own Muckety. Vocabulary bonus: “muckety” derives from “high-muck-a-muck,” a corruption of Chinook jargon “hayo makamak” (literally “plenty to eat”—by extension an important person). Chinook jargon was a Pacific Northwest trade language that was used well into the twentieth century.

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“Can I legally get myself tattooed with a sports team’s logo?” Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope tackles the intellectual-property implications and concludes: it depends.

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How would a linguist translate “Dumber than a box of rocks” from the original Texan? Easy: “Dumber than a department of Sapir-Whorfians.” There’s a whole mess of useful conversions in “Texan for Linguists,” a possibly non-peer-reviewed article in Speculative Grammarian, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.”

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And speaking of flavorful Texas expressions, I’m partial to “Don’t just sit there looking like a tree full of owls,” from Maud Newton’s “Like We Say Back Home.” (Via Stan Carey.)

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Battle is for boys, love is for girls: the unsurprising-yet-still-discouraging sex-stereotyped vocabulary of toy ads, depicted in word clouds. (Via Arnold Zwicky.)

Word of the Week: Pogonip

Pogonip: A dense winter fog containing ice particles, found in mountain valleys of the western United States. From Shoshone pakenappeh or paγɨnappɨh, “thundercloud.” In Greek, pogo- or pogon- means “beard,” and English-Word Information speculates (possibly facetiously) about a relationship between pogo- and pogonip. It’s true that the ice crystals can make leaves and other structures appear bearded.

From English-Word Information.

Pogonip is not to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, The Handy Weather Answer Book, or my 1984 edition of The World Weather Guide. It is, however, in the Dictionary of American Regional English, which gives 1869 as the date of the first extended citation for the word. By that year the word had already attached itself to at least one western geographical feature:

Pogonip Flat offers no shelter whatever from the fury of the bleak, cutting blasts . . ; and here, too, it is that the dense piercing fog hangs from hour to hour in the dull dreary days of the winter. Hence “Pogonip” is now the conventional term for a roaring, piercing, cutting, bleak, merciless snow-storm, with all the furies of Boreas cut loose and filling the air with hideous noises.

The Wikipedia entry notes that pogonip forms only under specific conditions:

[T]he humidity has to be near 100% as the air temperature drops to well below 0°C (32°F), allowing ice crystals to form in the air. The ice crystals will then settle onto surfaces.

Pogonip is the name of a creek and a greenbelt district in Santa Cruz, California, and was once the name of a golf course, polo grounds, and clubhouse there. The Santa Cruz Public Library website includes this bit of folk etymology:

Many mistakenly believed “Pogonip” was an acronym for PO-lo, GO-lf and a NIP at the clubhouse bar. But the area was named for Pogonip Creek, after an Indian word meaning “river fog.”

Shuttered Pogonip clubhouse. Photo by Dan Coyro, Santa Cruz Sentinel.

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Weather-related words of the week in the archives: thundersnow, pyrocumulus, snizzle, petrichor, and orography.

June Linkfest

 The big news this month for us word folk has been the launch of The Economist’s language blog, “Johnson.” (That’s Johnson as in Samuel, the 18th-century lexicographer*, so stop the snickering, you dirty-minded American.) I immediately added Johnson to my RSS feed and have not been disappointed. A few highlights: The meaning of President Obama’s use of “ass” (skip the comments if you prefer to hold your fellow humans in high regard); words you can’t use in the New York Times (à propos the previous item, tuchus is on that list); and the wild pigs and cucumber troops of German politics.

By the way, you can follow Dr. Samuel Johnson—but not The Economist’s Johnson— on Twitter.

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Another excellent language blog, new to me: About English Idioms. Ever wonder where we get the expressions “the cat’s pajamas,” “takes the cake,” and “Potemkin Village”? Find answers here.

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I recently heard behavioral economist Dan Ariely speak about the research behind his books Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, so I was primed to discover You Are Not So Smart, “a blog devoted to self-delusion and irrational thinking.” Do you think it takes years of study and experience to appreciate wine? That makeup “is just a cultural norm”? That “music with mass appeal rises to the top of the charts”? You are not so smart.

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The ancient Greeks would have understood Homer Simpson when he said, “Fame was like a drug, but what was even more like a drug were the drugs.” That’s because Homer was employing the rhetorical device of metanoia, the self-correcting figure of speech. Figure of Speech, the blog that “rips the innards out of things people say and reveals the rhetorical tricks and pratfalls,” discloses the rhetoric behind a comprehensive list of Homerisms (and also Lisa-isms, Moe-isms, and Grandpa-isms).

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Finally, a couple of links for the beginning of hurricane season: A list of all the named hurricanes for 2010 through 2013 (via NameFlash) and a Wired article explaining the science and politics behind the naming of hurricanes (via Anthony Shore).

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Image of Samuel Johnson from Scholium.

Word of the Week: Pyrocumulus

Pyrocumulus: A cumulus-type cloud triggered by a heat source on the surface. From Greek pyro- (combining form, "fire") and Latin cumulus ("heap" or "pile"). Pyrocumulus clouds may be caused by wildfires, volcanos, or nuclear explosions; the nuclear "mushroom cloud" is a type of pyrocumulus. (Source: Skybrary.)

The recent wildfires in Southern California have caused some spectacular pyrocumulus clouds. Here's a photo of one such cloud created by the Station Fire* on Mt. Wilson:

 

From a Flickr set by EricF2000. Used under Creative Commons license.

Watch a time-lapse video of pyrocumulus clouds caused by one of last week's wildfires in the Los Angeles area (via The Cloud Appreciation Society).

More posts about fire names here. For current California fire information, see the incident page of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) website.

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* The Station Fire was named for the communications towers on Mt. Wilson that transmit feeds to every television station in the L.A. basin.

Word of the Week: Thundersnow

Thundersnow: An unusual winter thunderstorm accompanied by snow instead of rain. (Sometimes spelled thunder snow.)

Thundersnow is most likely to occur in a coastal area, because storms can form over the comparatively warm ocean or lake water and then move inland, where they encounter much colder weather. That's what happened earlier this month when a storm dropped six to nine inches of snow on the Puget Sound area. The Seattle Post Intelligencer reported on Dec. 18:

Thursday's storm started off with a bang as two bands of air barreled across the region from opposite directions and collided, producing a rare combination of thunder and lightning, with driving snow that quickly whited-out much of the city.

According to David Schultz, formerly a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, and now a professor in Helsinki, only 0.07 percent of recorded snowstorms are associated with thunder. Part of the problem lies in documentation:

Shultz points out that heavy snow has a way of obscuring sound and light — the telltale signs of a thundersnow.

"Where you might hear a regular thunderstorm from four to five miles away, you may not hear or see a thundersnow from a mile away," he said.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in much of coastal California, thunderstorms are exceedingly rare at any time of year; our summers and autumns are dry. I'm always skeptical when I see movies set in San Francisco or Los Angeles in which thunder and lightning are added for dramatic effect.

Word of the Week: Orography

Orography: The nature of a region with respect to its elevated terrain. (Glossary of Meteorology.) Also, the study of hills and mountains.

The orography of a land mass affects winds and rainfall. Orographic clouds are created by the forced lifting of air by mountains; those clouds can produce orographic precipitation:

The extent to which winter precipitation is orographically enhanced within the Sierra Nevada of California varies from storm to storm, and season to season, from occasions when precipitation rates at low and high altitudes are almost the same to instances when precipitation rates at middle elevations ( considered here) can be as much as 30 times more than at the base of the range. (University of California, 2004.)

Watch a video depiction of orographic precipitation. (The YouTube title is misspelled, but it's correct within the video.)

Word of the Week: Petrichor

Petrichor: The smell of rain on dry earth.

Petrichor (pronounced PET-rih-core) was coined by two Australian geologists, I.J. Bear and R.G. Thomas, for an article they published in the journal Nature in 1964, "Nature of Agrilaceous Odour." They created the word from two Greek stems: petros (stone) and ichor (in Greek mythology, the substance that flowed through the veins of the gods). The scent, they proposed, comes from an oily essence released from rocks and soil. According to World Wide Words:

The oil is a complicated set of at least fifty different compounds, rather like a perfume. It turned out that the oils are given off by vegetation during dry spells and are adsorbed on to the surface of rocks and soil particles, to be released into the air again by the next rains.

I smelled petrichor Friday night, when it rained for the first time in six months, a teasing prelude to the real wet season that will get under way in November. The smell I detected was more petrol than petros: the aroma of half a year's worth of gasoline and motor oil being released from pavement. The first rain inevitably causes accident rates to rise as California drivers relearn how to negotiate suddenly slick roads.

I've never lived in a place where it rained year round; the very concept is alien. The first time I experienced summer rain I was 30 years old and passing through Pittsburgh, which appeared unseasonably (to my eyes) green for July. Although I was prepared for the weather, to the extent that I'd remembered to pack an umbrella, I couldn't quite believe it. I'm a California native: to me summer means dry, golden hills dampened only by fog; in my world, rain is always accompanied by cold temperatures and dark days.  And petrichor is as intoxicating and autumn-evocative as the scent of burning leaves must be to people in other parts of the country.

Candles in the Wind

In olden days they simply would have called it "The Big Blow" and been done with it. But now everyone wants to get in on the naming act, so the National Weather Service held a contest to name the storm that hit the Pacific Northwest last December 14.

The winning submission, chosen from 5,732 unique name suggestions: "The Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm." Thirty-nine people nominated this particular name; the lucky chosen-at-random winner is one Clyde Hill of Burien, Washington.

There are several peculiarities about the winning name. Michael Weissenfluh at Popwink (a) says "Sure, blame the Jews," and (b) finds it "ironic...that a storm that knocked out power to 1.5 million people is named after The Festival of Lights."

Then there's "wind storm," when the accepted spelling is "windstorm."

And I can't help wondering about Mr. Clyde Hill's familiarity with Jewish holidays. Just a wild guess, but I suspect Burien, WA, pop. 31,881, is not known for its rich Hebraic heritage. 

Because what really irks me is this: there is no "Hanukkah Eve." Hanukkah (or Chanukah) isn't Christmas. The holiday lasts eight days, and each of the eight "eves" is celebrated with candle lighting and, in the U.S. at least, the bestowing of gifts on children. And because the Jewish calendar is lunar, in 2007 the first night of Hanukkah will fall not on December 14 but on December 4. Which is really going to screw up the big Hanukkah Eve Wind Storm First Anniversary celebrations.

To read about firestorm naming, go here.