Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Wudu

Wudu: In Islam, the ritual washing of the face, hands, and other body parts in preparation for prayers. Wudu comes from Arabic al-wuḍūʼ; the closest English equivalent is ablution, although the latter word can also be used in non-religious contexts.

Wudu showed up in the news last week in obituaries for the Polish chemist and entrepreneur Wojciech Inglot, who died February 23 in Przemysl, Poland. He was 57.

Inglot had founded Inglot Cosmetics in 1983; in 2009, the company introduced O2M, a nail polish said to promote nail health by allowing oxygen (O2) and moisture (M) to pass through it. The polish – made from “a polymer similar to that in the newest generation of contact lenses,” according to a story in USA Today – sold poorly because of its high retail cost ($14 a bottle).

From the New York Times obituary:

Then last fall, a Muslim cleric and academic in Southern California who was working on a book about purification and prayer learned that some Muslim women were trying to determine whether O2M’s porous properties might make it acceptable for wearing during prayer. Muslim women who wear nail polish often remove it as part of a ritual, called wudu, that involves washing with water before daily prayers.

After the cleric published an article saying O2M was “good news” for devout Muslim women, “a craze” built up around the brand, USA Today reported:

Though the Muslim holy book, the Quran, does not specifically address the issue of nail polish, some Islamic scholars have said that water must touch the surface of the nail for the washing ritual to be done correctly.

Some Muslim women might put nail polish on after finishing the last prayer of the day before going out, and then take it off again before dawn prayers. They can also wear it during their periods, when they are excused from the prayers, but some find it embarrassing to do so because it could signal they are menstruating. Some simply don’t want to take the trouble of getting a manicure that won't last long.

The late success of O2M caught Inglot by surprise, USA Today reported:

“I don't think there is a single Muslim living here,” Inglot said in an interview with The Associated Press nine days before his death at his factory in Przemysl, near the border with Ukraine. “We didn't even think about this.”

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When I read the obituaries, I was struck by the similarity between Inglot’s surname and the French word for nail, ongle. A coincidence, to be sure, but an apt one.

Word of the Week: Behindativeness

Behindativeness: The exaggerated rear shape created by a large dress bustle: “That lady has got a deal of behindativeness.” – Passing English of the Victorian Era, a Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase, by J. Redding Ware, published in London in 1909.

Bustled ladies with a deal of behindativeness, 1885-1886. From Digital Changeling.

You could easily pass several delighted hours in the company of Passing English of the Victorian Era, which is reproduced in its entirety at the Public Domain Review, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. (Other worthy time-wasters on the site include a 1912 illuminated version of Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, a 1888 edition of Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature, and Dennison’s Bogie Book for Halloween, from 1920.) The dictionary’s introduction sets a lofty tone: “‘Passing English’ ripples from countless sources, forming a river of new language which has its tide and its ebb, while its current brings down new ideas and carries away those that have dribbled out of fashion.” (“Passing” here means “ephemeral,” I think.) But the contents are more anecdotal than scholarly; the entry for chortle, for example, neglects to mention that Lewis Carroll coined the word in Through the Looking-Glass (1872).

But that’s a tiny quibble. The offhandedness of the dictionary is one of its many pleasures. Here I learned, for example, that the following words and phrases were Americanisms still regarded in early 20th-century England as rustic novelties: bark up the wrong tree, have an axe to grind, filibuster, fuss (“a dispute without serious consequences”) cold snap, lobby (the political verb), guess (“think”), thusly (introduced by humorists in the 1860s), tickle to death (“to delight in the extreme”), and enthuse (“not yet accepted in England,” sniffs Mr. Ware; the OED still calls it “an ignorant back-formation”). Americans of the Victorian era were also fond of enthuzimizzy to mean “enthusiasm,” and they liked to affix ker- to many words to imply movement: kerwallop, kerslap, kerflummox, kerbang. (I can’t help wondering whether the more recent ka-ching! – the sound of a cash register – owes something to this tradition.)

Passing English is full of synonyms and euphemisms for drinking: play camels, wash one’s neck, colour the meerschaum, and tickle one’s innards all meant “to get drunk.” So did N.Y.D., short for the euphemistic “not yet diagnosed.” Going to see a man meant “going to get a drink,” while going to see a dawg meant going to see a woman “whose social position may be assumed by her association with ‘dawg’.” But going to see a man about a dog is sadly omitted, even though it dates back to the 1860s.

If you need proof that initialisms weren’t born in the Age of Texting, look no further. To our Victorian forebears an N.N. was a “necessary nuisance” (that is, a husband), K.A.B.G.N.A.L.S. was reverse-spelled “back slang,” P.C. meant not “politically correct” but “poor classes,” R.M.D. was “ready money down,” and X.X. meant “double excellent.” I’m particularly fond of the abbreviation N.F., which stood for “no fool.”

As for the ladies’ bustle depicted above, it isn’t defined in Passing English, presumably because every reader would have understood it. The word’s origins are murky: it may come from German Buschel (a bunch or pad) or from another sense of bustle: a rustling motion.

Slightly related: this 2012 post about uppertendom.

(Hat tip for the Passing English link: The Hairpin.)

Word of the Week: Doxing

Doxing: “The practice of investigating and revealing a target subject’s personally identifiable information, such as home address, workplace information and credit card numbers, without consent.” (Source: Know Your Meme.) From docs (short for documents). Sometimes spelled doxxing.

From “Reddit’s Doxxing Paradox,” a February 4 post on the legal blog Popehat:

You might recall that popular social media site Reddit doesn’t like doxxing — that is, the public identification of online speakers and revelation of their personal information. Gawker’s public identification of vile Reddit creeper and troll Violentacrez was controversial to many Redditors, condemned by Reddit administrators, and has led to some Reddit mods engaging in a long-term ban of links to Gawker media sites.

So — Reddit’s culture is strongly against doxxing. Right?

Well — sort of.

Doxing was also in the news this month in connection with security breaches at the Federal Reserve and Department of Energy in which personal details about employees and contractors were grabbed. “Such an information leak, known as doxing, is a popular way among hacktivists to embarrass a target,” reported the information-technology publication EWeek.

According to the Know Your Meme entry, “doxing” was originally used in the early 2000s by computer hackers involved with the distribution of pirated software. (Urban Dictionary’s earliest entry is dated October 6, 2003.) In the late 2000s, “it grew into a harassment tactic used by members of Anonymous” – a loosely organized hacktivist group – during operations against the white nationalist Hal Turner, the Church of Scientology, and other targets.

Word of the Week: Patchwriting

Patchwriting: “A restatement of another writer’s text that uses too much of the original vocabulary and syntax.” (Word Spy)

Patchwriting has undergone a semantic shift since the term was coined, in 1993, by Rebecca Moore Howard, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University. In “A Plagiarism Pentimento,” published in the Journal of Teaching Writing, Howard contrasted patchwriting positively with plagiarism:

[O]ur adherence to the received definition of plagiarism blinds us to the positive value of a composing strategy which I call “patchwriting”: copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym substitutes. By failing to recognize patchwriting as a valuable composing strategy in which the writer engages in entry-level manipulation of new ideas and vocabulary, we fail to support our students in their efforts to assimilate the constructs of unfamiliar discourse.

(Emphasis in the original.)

Twenty years later, patchwriting has a more negative cast, possibly because the Web has made the practice easier and more pervasive, both on college campuses and in newsrooms. In a 2012 post on the journalism site Poynter.org, Kelly McBride criticized patchwriting as “problematic” writing—“the rearranged work of others”—that is “more common than plagiarism” and “just as dishonest.”

One writing teacher who doesn’t disparage patchwriting is Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet who teaches a course called “Uncreative Writing” at the University of Pennsylvania, in which students retype phone books and menus and plagiarize other writers’ work. (Uncreative Writing is also the title of a 2011 book by Goldsmith.) In a recent interview with The Awl, Goldsmith patchwrote most of his responses to the reporter’s questions and identified his self-poached sources. Here’s Goldsmith’s defense of Uncreative Writing:

The students that take my class know how to write. I can hone their skills further but instead I choose to challenge them to think in new and different ways. Many of them know how to plagiarize but they always do it on the sly, hoping not to get caught. In my class, they must plagiarize or they will be penalized. They are not allowed to be original or creative. So it becomes a very different game, one in which they're forced to defend choices that they are making about what they're plagiarizing and why. And when you start to dig down, you'll find that those choices are as original and as unique as when they express themselves in more traditional types of writing, but they've never been trained to think about it in this way.

“The new creativity is pointing, not making,” Goldsmith summed up.

Rebecca Moore Howard did not give an etymology for patchwriting; it appears to be formed in imitation of patchwork, the sewing technique. As far as I can tell, the name of the hyperlocal news network Patch (owned by AOL) has no relation to patchwriting. Rather, Patch’s sprouting-grass logo gives the impression of “a patch of earth.”

Also see copypasta.

Word of the Week: Godwin’s Law

Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion becomes longer, the probability of a comparison invoking Hitler or Nazis approaches one.” In other words, in any online discussion, regardless of topic or scope, someone will inevitably make a comparison to Hitler or Nazis. Also called Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies.

Godwin’s Law was formulated by Mike Godwin, an American lawyer with a long career in computer law; he was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, and has been a contributing editor at Reason magazine for nearly 20 years. In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Godwin told the origin story of Godwin’s Law:

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I’d decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as “similar to the Nazis” or “Hitler-like” was a recurrent and often predictable event. …

So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.

I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

I seeded Godwin's Law in any newsgroup or topic where I saw a gratuitous Nazi reference. Soon, to my surprise, other people were citing it - the counter-meme was reproducing on its own!

Since then, it has been a tradition in some online discussions that once the Hitler/Nazi comparison is invoked, the thread is finished and the invoker has automatically lost the debate.

Godwin’s Law manifests itself frequently in discussions of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (“the right to keep and bear arms”). See, for example, last Friday’s column by lexicographer Orin Hargraves for Visual Thesaurus, “Up in Arms”—paid subscriber content—in which Ben Zimmer, the executive producer, cited Godwin’s Law as justification for removing some uncivil comments.

Godwin’s Law is so familiar to some audiences that it can be reduced to shorthand and expanded beyond the original Hitler/Nazi meme, as in this headline last week on the Little Green Footballs blog:

“TeaParty.org Goes Godwin for Dough”

There’s no link to the quoted content, but you can find it by searching for the phrase “Someday, your children will thank you for saving their future from Obama’s Soviet-Style Socialist State.”

See also Cunningham’s Law and Dunning-Kruger Effect. For more Internet jargon, see The Jargon File.

Word of the Week: Tannoy

Tannoy: (UK) A loudspeaker or public-address system. From Tannoy, the trademark of a speaker manufacturer founded in London in 1926 and based in Scotland since the 1970s; genericized since the 1940s. Also used as a generic verb, “to call someone over a public-address system.”

Tannoy is a blend of tantalum alloy, the material used in an electrolytic rectifier developed by the company. The chemical element tantalum (symbol Ta) was discovered in 1802 and named for Tantalus, the character from Greek mythology who was forced to stand for eternity beneath a tree whose fruit was just out of his grasp. As you may have guessed, “Tantalus” is also the source of the English verb tantalize.

I knew about Tantalus and tantalize but had never encountered tannoy until I read a story by the actor John Lithgow published in the New York Times earlier this month. Lithgow is the only American in the cast of a current National Theatre production, The Magistrate; his essay is about the differences between US and UK theater customs. Here’s the lede:

The language of theater here is slightly different from ours in New York. The crackly speaker in a London dressing room is called the “tannoy.” The opening night of a London show is called its “Press Night.” When a stage manager announces the start of a performance, London actors don’t hear the word “places.” They hear “beginners.”

If you aren’t in London, you may be able to see Lithgow in The Magistrate in your own city through the magic of National Theatre Live, which broadcasts productions live (or almost live) to cinemas around the world. I caught The Magistrate in Berkeley last week and enjoyed it: it’s a late-Victorian farce, so expect plenty of groan-worthy plot contrivances along with well-earned laughs. The staging and acting—Lithgow’s included—are first rate. Check the site for broadcast dates.

Word of the Week: Snollygoster

Snollygoster: A shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician. American dialect and slang. First print appearance in 1846, in the Frankfort (Kentucky) Commonwealth: “Now here I am a rale propelling, double revolving locomotive Snolly Goster, ready to attack anything.” (Source: Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang. “Rale” is dialect for “real.”)

Snollygoster was popularized “almost singlehandedly” by a Georgia Democrat, H. J. W. Ham, writes Rosemarie Ostler in her 2011 book Slinging Mud: Rude Nicknames, Scurillous Slogans, and Insulting Slang from Two Centuries of American Politics.

[Ham] traveled around the country during the 1890s with a stump speech titled “The Snollygoster in Politics.” Ham claimed to have first heard the word during an 1848 political debate. He defined a snollygoster as a “place-hunting demagogue” or a “political hypocrite.” The Columbus Dispatch for October 28, 1895, captures the spirit of the word with this more elaborate definition: “A snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy.”

The origin of snollygoster is unknown. It may come from German schnelle geister (“quick spirit”), writes Ostler, “but extravagant nonsense words such as lollapalooza and splendiferous were popular during the nineteenth century. Snollygoster may be part of this trend.” Snallygaster, which first appeared in 1940 as the name of a mythical dragonlike monster found only in Maryland, is probably unrelated to the political epithet unless both come from schnelle geister. In the 1960s the beverage brand Mountain Dew invented a drink called the snallygaster, made of vanilla ice cream and Mountain Dew.

Snollygoster faded into obscurity around World War I, then resurfaced during President Harry S. Truman’s 1952 reelection campaign. In a memoir, Ken Hechler. a White House assistant during Truman’s presidency, tells about a speech Truman gave at the Parkersburg, West Virginia, railroad station. The president asked Hechler for a Bible, then quickly found a passage about the “hypocrites” who “love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.” Hechler goes on:

Then he added that some Republican campaign orators like John Foster Dulles were posing as self-righteous defenders of the captive peoples of Eastern Europe. He read the Bible passage to his Parkersburg audience, adding that his grandfather used to tell him that when you heard someone praying loudly in public, “you had better go home and lock your smokehouse.” Then Truman sent reporters scurrying to their dictionaries when he denounced Republican “snollygosters.” He turned to the puzzled press corps, chewing their pencils at trainside, and quipped, “Better look that word up, it’s a good one.”

For more on presidential neologisms—including neologize, whose invention is attributed to Thomas Jefferson—see Paul Dickson’s recently published Words from the White House. Dickson was interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition yesterday; you can listen to the interview or read a summary here. 

Word of the Week: Drusy

Drusy: A crust of small crystals lining the sides of a cavity (or vug*) in a rock. Sometimes spelled druzy. Borrowed in the late 18th century from German druse, “weathered ore.”

According to an eHow entry on “drusy quartz”:

Drusy gems form naturally over millions of years. They are found on host materials such as agate or other minerals and are usually found when mining for other semiprecious gems, such as garnets and peridots. …

[Drusy] is recommended for pendants, brooches or earrings and does not hold up well to the wear and tear a ring or bracelet might receive.

Pendant with drusy and lapis lazuli from Bernadine Fine Art Jewelry.

Nevertheless, some jewelers do use drusy for bracelets:

Gold drusy bracelet from Etsy seller Frosted Willow.

And for rings:

Uvarovite drusy ring from Melissa Joy Manning. Uvarovite, a type of garnet, was named after Count Sergei Semenovitch Uvarov (1765-1855), a Russian statesman and amateur mineral collector.

Drusy jewelry has become popular only recently, according to the website of gemologist Barbara Smigel: “Until about 10 years ago, drusy minerals were little more than a curiosity, of interest to serious mineralogists, but unnoticed by jewelry designers, gem collectors, and the general public.” Drusy’s appeal, writes Spigel, “is easy to understand with its multitude of tiny crystals providing a reflective surface reminiscent of sugar or snow.”

Druse is also a botanical term referring to a rounded cluster of calcium oxalate crystals found in some plant cells. In ophthalmology, drusen (the German plural of druse) are tiny extracellular accumulations in the eye associated with aging and macular degeneration.

Thanks to Lisa of the Privilege blog, who introduced me to drusy with her link to the work of jeweler Rachel Pfeffer.

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* One of my favorite Scrabble words.

Word of the Week: Said-Bookism

Said-bookism: A verb used in place of “said” – almost always a needless distraction. From “said book,” a pamphlet of synonyms for “said.” Said-bookism is a subspecies of “the elegant variation,” the term coined by H.W. Fowler (1858–1933) to describe a substitution of one word for another for the sake of variety.¹

Although I was trained early in my editing career to purge manuscripts of fancy synonyms for “said,” I learned only recently that there was a name for the writing sin I’d been correcting. Stephen Dodson, in his Language Hat blog, educated me:

I don’t know if there ever was such a thing as a “said book” listing innumerable substitutes for the simple and useful verb “said,” but that concept is the basis of the term “said-bookism,” known to most professional writers as something to avoid as a sure sign of amateurism.

Said-bookism comes from the Turkey City Lexicon, a collection of terms used in discussing science-fiction writing. The lexicon was developed by the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop, a workshop for professional science-fiction writers founded in Texas in 1973. The full lexicon – which includes wonderful entries like Phildickian, nowism, and ficelle character – has been published on the Science Fiction Writers of America website; it’s useful for writers of other genres (and nonfiction).

Television writers, for example. Here’s how the peerless TV Tropes website begins its entry on said-bookism:

“Said Bookism?” Alice interrogated. “What’s that?”

“Well,” Bob exposited, “it’s a variety of Purple Prose in which the writer goes out of their² way to avoid the word said.”

“Why would they do this?” ejaculated Alice.

“Because,” explicated Bob, “it was the fashion at one point. There were even ‘said books’ you could get mail order with lists of the words that can be used instead of said as saying said was discredited during that time. That's where the name of the trope comes from,” he further proclaimed.

Some Tom Swifties rely on said-bookisms for their humor – “‘I used to be a paratrooper,’ Tom explained” – although most use adverbs to drive home the pun. (“‘We have no oranges,’ Tom said fruitlessly.”) The Twilight books are flagrant perpetrators of self-bookisms, as the Reasoning with Vampires Tumblr makes painfully evident.

In a more serious vein (sorry, Twilight fans; this sort of thing is infectious), here’s the Letter Go blog on “What’s Wrong with Using a Said Bookism?”:

The very thing that editors love about the word ‘said’ is the thing that makes some writers shun it. ‘Said’ is unremarkable, unadorned, invisible. It blends into the background, allowing the dialogue to dominate the sentence and the reader’s eye to skip along unimpeded by the writer’s clever turn of phrase.

Remember that the writer’s job isn’t to wow the reader with beautiful prose and punchy word choice. The writer’s job is to tell a story so real that the reader lives it. The action, dialogue and internal dialogue are the stars of the show. The adverbs, adjectives and said bookisms are the special effects – too much and the reader either becomes jaded or pays more attention to them than to the story.

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¹ The most famous example of an elegant variation is “elongated yellow fruit” for “banana.” As Ben Yagoda observes – um, says – sportswriters are especially productive generators of elegant variations.

² Yes, singular “they” can be kosher. I refer skeptics to Baltimore Sun copyeditor John McIntyre.

Word of the Week: Pre-Drinking

Pre-drinking: “Chugging cheap alcoholic drinks before heading out to a bar, club, or sporting event.” – “ ‘Pre-drinking’ or ‘Pre-funking’ Common Among Young Alcohol Users,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2012. Also called pre-gaming, pre-partying, pre-loading, or frontloading.

Young drinkers’ reasons for pre-drinking include saving money, “getting in the mood,” and “facilitating contacts with potential sexual partners,” according to a new Swiss study to be published in the February 2013 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. It’s risky business, the L.A. Times reports:

Researchers found that when students drank prior to going to a bar or club, they drank more than they would otherwise. On average, pre-drinking students consumed seven drinks, and students who drank only at a bar or event consumed just over four drinks.

The researchers surveyed 183 Swiss adults, with a median age of 23, over five consecutive weeks. They used a recently developed cellphone assessment technique to collect reports. The legal drinking age in Switzerland is 16.

Florian Labhart, one of the study’s authors, was quoted by Science Daily as saying that “pre-drinking has been found in about one third of all on-premise drinking, which is a very high rate.” Pre-drinking rates in the United States may be even higher than that, according to Shannon R. Kenney, a sociology professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles who did not participate in the study. Kenney told Science Daily:

“In fact, due to U.S. legal drinking age requirements, pre-drinking may be most prevalent among underage drinkers in the U.S. … Research shows that underage drinkers may be motivated to pre-drink to achieve a ‘buzz’ or become intoxicated before going to a licensed premise where they cannot legally consume alcohol, such as a bar, club, concert, or sporting event.”

Happy new year! And if you pre-drink, please don’t pre-drive.