Fritinancy

Homo Sapient

I got into a little usage discussion with a commenter on Tracey Taylor's fine blog about East Bay real estate. (Tracey was riffing on a post I wrote about the meaning of Main Street, so yeah, this is what you might call logrolling.)

I knew I was right, but I wasn't sure why. So I did some research.

Commenter David used the word homogenous in his assertion that Berkeley and San Francisco lacked true demographic diversity. I responded that, regardless of whether the assertion is true, the correct word here is homogeneous. David apparently thought I was critiquing his spelling; he came back with a dictionary definition for homogenous and a boast that he was the Wisconsin State spelling bee runner-up.

Yes, homogenous is a dictionary word. David spelled it correctly. It just isn't the right word in this context.

Homogenous (emphasis on the second syllable) means "similar in makeup because similar in descent." The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) gives this example: "These animals are homogenous, as their similar physiology makes clear." Words @Random, from dictionary publisher Random House, explains that homogenous is a technical term in biology ("The forelimbs of mammals and fishes are homogenous"). Or: homogenized milk, in which the fat globules are thoroughly emulsified throughout the liquid.

Homogeneous (emphasis on the third syllable, with a long e vowel) means "of the same kind or structure; of like composition." CGSAE's example: "It was a homogeneous community, its members holding remarkably similar values." That's what David meant, and why his word choice should have been homogeneous.

Both homogenous and homogeneous are composed of Greek word parts that mean "of the same kind." But, notes Words @ Random, "Homogenous is properly limited only to this biological use, so if you're not writing about this, the word you want is homogeneous."

The opposite of homogeneous is heterogeneous. The opposite of homogenous, rarely seen outside scientific literature, is heterogenous.

Hope I've cleared that up.

The Word Haters

The October 13 New Yorker—the politics issue—just arrived, and it's full of articles I can't wait to read. (Plus: two cartoons by the magnificent Roz Chast. I could find only one online, though.)

I'm saving the longer articles for later. But a two-page essay by James Wood, who teaches at Harvard and is the author of How Fiction Works, wouldn't let me go. Its title is "Verbage"; the subtitle is "The Republican war on words." I urge you to read it, because it goes a long way toward explaining many of the bizarre campaign tactics we've been witnessing.

Wood suggests that the McCain campaign's attacks on Barack Obama as "just a person of words" reflect "a deep suspicion of language itself ... as if Republican practitioners saw words the way Captain Ahab saw 'all visible objects'—as 'pasteboard masks,' concealing acts and deeds and things—and, like Ahab, were bent on striking through those masks."

To those of us who "just work with words" in the service of commerce, this paragraph has special resonance:

Or take McCain’s slogan “The Original Maverick,” now attached to many of the campaign’s ads. It cynically stipulates that politics is just merchandise, by sounding as close to a logo or a brand name as possible. But it also understands that consumers trust brands that sound like “quality.” Thus “Original,” which has the reassuring solidity of something like “Serving Americans of discernment since 1851,” or, indeed, “Levi’s 501: Original Jeans.” In such formulations, “Original” means eccentric, strange, unusual, and also first, best, belatedly copied by others. Better still, the phrase sounds like the tagline from a movie poster; not for nothing has McCain taken to announcing that “change is coming soon, to a district near you.”

Read the entire essay, which takes its title from Sarah Palin's (deliberate?) mispronunciation of verbiage. Wood writes: "It would be hard to find a better example of the Republican disdain for words than that remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language."

While you're on the site, check out the magazine's endorsement of Barack Obama. It hardly comes as a surprise, but that doesn't make it any less eloquent and compelling. 

What Does "Main Street" Mean?

There's been a lot of talk about "Main Street" in political speeches and news articles lately. It's a metonym—a word that represents an associated concept, as "White House" represents "the presidency"— that's usually used in opposition to another metonym, Wall Street.

Used this way, I suppose "Main Street" stands in for "just plain folks" or "mom-and-pop stores," or that creepily voguish concept, "small-town values." But I can't do any local research, because there's no Main Street in Oakland, where I live. (We do have a Broadway and, naturally, a Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.) Berkeley's main street is Telegraph Avenue. San Francisco's Main Street is on the far fringe of the Financial District and much less representative of that city than, say, Market Street or Castro Street. Los Angeles, where I grew up, has a Main Street that for years has pretty much been synonomous with Skid Row. (Digression: The first Skid Row was Seattle's Skid Road, a dirt path along which logs were skidded to the sawmill.) But Los Angeles's symbolic main street is Hollywood Boulevard, and many of its actual main thoroughfares—as well as its historic main street—have Spanish names: La Brea, La Cienega, Ventura, Sepulveda, Olvera.

The Main Street that evokes the most associations for me is the one in Sinclair Lewis's 1920 novel by that name. There, Main Street stands for everything parochial, ignorant, and self-satisfied about small-town America. But I'm guessing that's not what all those politicians and editorial writers are thinking about.

But what do they mean? Linguist Eric Baković has been thinking about Main Street as buzzword, and he's a little annoyed. "I don't live on Main Street," he writes in Language Log:

It's not that I don't understand the metonym (and why it might have once sounded like the perfect phrase to oppose "Wall Street" with), I just don't find it very effective — that, or the relative novelty of it (for me) wore off very, very quickly and now it just sounds cliché and, quite frankly, devoid of content.

Be sure to read the comments on the post, which broaden the discussion to street metonyms in general (Madison Avenue = advertising; London's Fleet Street  = newspaper publishing) and to nuances I, for one, hadn't considered. For example, John Baker observes:

In addition to its small town/retail implications, "Main Street" today is often used to refer to the real economy and operating companies, as opposed to Wall Street, which refers to the virtual economy and financial intermediaries. "Main Street" and "Wall Street" are probably more meaningful to most people than "real economy" and "virtual economy." "Main Street" does not mean "your street," so Bush was making a different (and smarter) reference with those words.

Update, Oct. 2: Language Log has published a couple of follow-ups to its original "Main Street" post. This one further explores what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi meant by "Main Street and everyday Americans." And this one, which includes a William Hamilton cartoon for the New Yorker, traces the history of the metonymic uses of "Wall Street" and "Main Street."

P.S. For another view of Main Street—and some distraction from the political and financial news— rent State and Main, about what happens to a small Vermont town when a movie crew decides to shoot there. (Hint: those townfolk are a whole lot more streetwise, Main- and other-, than the movie people counted on.) The movie, which appeared and disappeared too quickly in early 2001, was written and directed by David Mamet, master of cynical dialogue; the dream cast includes Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rebbeca Pidgeon (Mamet's wife), Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Ricky Jay, Julia Stiles, and Patti LuPone.

A Political Bestiary

My latest article for Visual Thesaurus, "Political Animals," is a little lexicon of zoological language used in politics, from earmarks and maverick to dog-whistle and bellwether. (And yes, I make a brief detour at lipstick on a pig.)

Full content is for subscribers only (just $2.95 a month or $19.95 a year!). Here's an excerpt:

Worried that your maverick candidate may not have what it takes to represent you? Then you'll want to vet him or her. A relatively recent arrival in American English—it was still unusual enough in 1980 that language columnist William Safire explained it to his New York Times readers—vet is nothing more than a shortening of the Latinate word for animal doctor, veterinarian. The verb form became popular in England in the late nineteenth century, when it meant "to check out an animal," in particular a racehorse; it got its more general meaning of "evaluate" in the early 1900s, and became very popular beginning in the 1930s. As recently as the 1980s it was used mostly in reference to documents: to "vet a manuscript" means to check its facts. It gradually came to apply to humans as well.

One of the very cool things about Visual Thesaurus is that each of the political-animal words in my story is a link to the thesaurus, which displays synonyms in a constellation pattern. You can try out the thesaurus free of charge here or on the home page: just type a word into the search field at the top of the page.

Banksters

An ad on the op-ed page of yesterday's New York Times caught my eye, and not only for its ransom-note design:

   

It was that word banksters along the right-hand margin that made me pause. Clever, I thought: a portmanteau of banker and gangster. Seems like the perfect coinage for the high-finance bailfest we're currently witnessing.

The ad was produced by the Institute for America's Future, a D.C. "center of non-partisan research and  education" (with a K Street address, I feel obliged to add) whose efforts "help shape a compelling progressive agenda primarily focusing on kitchen-table concerns such as affordable health care, accessible higher education, retirement security, living wages, healthy workplaces, strong infrastructures, safe food, fair trade and clean energy."

Sign me up for all of the above. But what about banksters? Was it invented by one of the institute's neologists?

The Google says ... not so fast. A search for bankster produces more than 27,000 results. Some are for people with the surname Bankster, but there also are many citations from earlier this year, when large cracks began appearing in the fiscal infrastructure. (See, for example, "Saving Bankster Bonuses," posted in March 2008 by a Ron Paul supporter, and "[Treasury Secretary] Paulson's Gift to His Bankster Buddies," also posted in March, on a "radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and justice.") The relevant entry at Urban Dictionary is likewise dated March 2008. (The other entry refers to graffiti artists who emulate British street artist Banksy.)

Double-Tongued Dictionary, Grant Barrett's excellent lexicon of slang and jargon, provides an even earlier--and non-U.S.--citation. A Nov. 10, 2005, article in the Miami Herald claimed the word had been coined by Ecuadoreans during their country's 1998-1999 banking crisis. But in a comment, Tad Cook pointed out that bankster has a much longer and uglier history. "This term has been used by the fringe of the far right in the USA for at least 70 years," Cook wrote, "in reference to some sort of conspiracy involving bankers and the Federal Reserve."

He's right. And not just "some sort of conspiracy." Take a look, if you have the stomach for it, at this venomous bit of propaganda about "Judeo-Masonic Banksters" and "Jewish Banksters, such as Rothschild and Warburg." Or this screed, sweetly titled "Time to Remove the Parasitic War-Loving Zionist Bankster Brain."

Coincidentally or not, Time magazine in the 1930s was fond of bankster as a descriptor for crooked lenders. "Bankster Jailed," reads the headline on a Sept. 5, 1932, story about "Scottish immigrant, onetime plumber, Bankster [John] Bain [who] had prospered in real estate, then branched into banking." And "Bankster's Moll" was the Runyonesque headline on a 1933 review of a novel that attacked "U. S. economic conditions in general, on small-town banksters in particular."

Will the Institute for America's Future reclaim bankster as a progressive epithet? Or will anti-Semitic hatemongers hear it as a dog whistle--a code word aimed at their ears? I wonder.

Update: I also wonder whether the old/scurrilous bankster usage was a portmanteau of banker and shyster.

Party Like It's 1066

Can you believe it's already been 942 years since the Battle of Hastings? Seems like only yesterday. Garrison Keillor is celebrating all week on his Writer's Almanac radio segment, with interesting bits about the influence of the French-speaking Normans on the English language. If you missed today's radio broadcast, you can read a transcript, listen, or download the podcast.

On today's segment, Keillor also reads "Windows Is Shutting Down," a  witty poem by Clive James, who's better known (to me) as a critic and essayist. I liked the poem so much that I'll be seeking out more of James's poetry. Here's the first stanza:

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Read the rest of the poem here.

And as long as we're waxing nostalgic--it's the first day of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, after all--here's the Billy Collins poem "Nostalgia." It's the one that begins:

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

New-Clear

From Leah Garchik's column in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

Listening to Sarah Palin pronounce the word "nucular" the other day, Paul Spiegel inquired, "What is it with that word? She's the daughter of schoolteachers and a former student of journalism. How can she and so many like her mispronounce it in a manner so clearly contrary to the way it's written?"

We turn to Stanford University Professor Seth Lerer, scholar of the English language: "I have come to believe that in fact, that is a regional or class dialect pronunciation, and that while educated people may believe that it's wrong, I believe that pronunciation - along with certain other regional or class-based pronunciations - is considered to be relatively standard in certain parts of the country. ... Because it has been used by somebody like (President) Bush and other people of prominence, it has become accepted as a standard."

A Democratic version: "When John F. Kennedy said things like 'Cuber' instead of 'Cuba,' I vividly remember hearing people accepting that pronunciation. Because 'Cuba' was a hot-button word, people affected that pronunciation. ... The umbrella question is this: What happens when people in power pronounce words in a particular way? ... People adopt that pronunciation, believing it to be maybe not correct, but influential, powerful. They want to affiliate themselves with people doing the speaking. ... I do believe strongly that this is a feature of the nature of political power."

You want to blame "nucular" on someone? Blame it on Dwight David Eisenhower, who as president was first to hurl the pronunciation at American ears.

(By the way, Lerer will speak Nov. 2 on "Where Our Words Come From" at the One Day University lecture series at San Francisco's Mission Bay Conference Center. I'm planning to attend. Anyone else?)

Criteria

In an editorial today, "Senator McCain's Choice," the print edition of the New York Times included this passage:

Governor Palin’s lack of experience, especially in national security and foreign affairs, raises immediate questions about how prepared she is to potentially succeed to the presidency. That really is the only criteria for judging a candidate for vice president.

It's criterion, the singular form of this Greek noun. Phenomenon is another singular noun that's often erroneously mixed up with its plural, phenomena.

The Times's error was corrected in the online edition.

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By the way, the "split infinitive" in the editorial--to potentially succeed--is perfectly acceptable. See this Language Log post for more about that hoary grammatical fallacy.

Palin in Comparison

Between Barack Obama's acceptance speech last night and John McCain's stupefying announcement of his running mate, former Miss Alaska runner-up Sarah Palin¹, today, I'm having a very hard time resisting the urge to turn Fritinancy into a political blog. But this isn't about me, right? It's about you. And us. And change. And hope. And staying the course. And so, my friends, I'll limit myself to a few choice, semi-relevant tidbits:

1. Sarah Palin pronounces "nuclear" the same way George W. Bush does: noo-kyoo-ler.

2. FOX News Channel co-host Steve Doocy suggested this morning, apparently in all seriousness, that Palin does so know about international relations "because she is right up there in Alaska right next door to Russia."

3. Palin's children are named Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and--as she took pains to enunciate in her speech in Dayton--"Trig Paxson Van Palin."  Jessica asks in an e-mail whether she ever confuses two of the girls and hollers, "Brillo!" And I ask: Do we want someone with such poor judgment in naming to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?

4. Palin is a mighty, mighty pro-lifer, at least when it comes to unborn fetuses. Wearing the skins of already-born animals, however, is another matter. (Hat tip: Ari Herzog.)

5. Back when marijuana was legal in Alaska, Palin tried it. She says she didn't like it. However, it was while stoned that she came up with her children's names. (I made that last sentence up. But still, you have to wonder.)

Update: Andrew Sullivan on the kids' names, via one of his readers in Alaska: "Willow is a town in Alaska and Piper is for an aircraft. Bristol is also for a place in Alaska and Trig is for a family member. Track is named for where he was conceived." Sullivan: "He was conceived on a track? Pray tell some more ..."

Update #2: We can be grateful that while the Palins were casting about for Alaska towns after which to name their offspring, they didn't choose Chicken. As some of you may be aware, the miners who settled the place wanted to name it Ptarmigan, after the state bird, but they couldn't spell it.

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¹ She was voted Miss Congeniality. Now you know who'll play her in the biopic.

Rise and Fall

Jan Freeman, a former Boston Globe copyeditor who also writes a blog, The Word, reported recently on a funny transformation of the fashion term "empire." She read about it in A Dress a Day, which is no ordinary fashion-and-sewing blog: its author is lexicographer Erin McKean, coiner of McKean's Law ("Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error").

Here's Jan:

McKean asks whether the empire waist -- that style that makes Jane Austen heroines look so fetching, and real people so pregnant -- is fostering the notion that the "empire" is a location on the body.

In case I've lost you, up to your left is an example of the empire silhouette, which was all the rage in the early 19th century--the age of Napoleon I's empire (which explains why fashion mavens insist on the French pronunciation, ahm-PEER).

Back to the 21st century. One of her readers had sent Erin a photo of a contemporary wrap dress that included this description: It cinches at the empire (the ideal spot for a wrap to fall).

Which suggests, says Erin, that the writer "posits there is a part of the body called 'the empire,' which is right under the bust, above the natural waist."

She continues:

It would be easy to write this off as an error (which I guess it technically is, at this point) but it's more interesting to look at it as an example of lexical change. (Perhaps this belongs on my other blog?) There are lots of different ways that words can change, but I think this is an example of a folk-etymological change.

If you had never made the connection that "empire" in this context refers to an actual empire, it would be completely logical to assume that "empire" is a more genteel way to say "high-waisted" or "under bust," right? Folk etymologies come up with explanations that seem logical and that fit the facts. Which is a simpler explanation: that a silhouette is named after some long-dead French people, or that the name is based on the part of the body it emphasizes?

Jan comments:

Actually, it might make sense to have a name for that under-the-bust circumference, since the bra people -- the ones who are always claiming that 7 or 8 or 9 out of 10 women wear the wrong size, though how the heck would they know? -- always instruct you to measure there first. They could say it more economically: "Your cup size depends on the difference between your empire and your bust."

But wait, there's more! In the comments to Erin's post, Sarah writes that she's noticed "People On The Internet writing about their 'umpire' waisted dresses, which confused me a great deal until I realised they'd been watching too much Stacy and Clinton."

Umpire waists? As in, belted under the generous belly overhang?

No, I didn't think so.

Nevertheless, a Google search turns up more than 1,000 hits for "umpire waist," some jesting, some serious, and a few hundred for "umpire dress," including this advice to a breastfeeding mother:

A umpire dress works wonders and still looks cute after you loose [sic] the weight. This style is fitted around the top and then flows away from the body.

As Heidi Klum might say on Project Runway, "In fashion, one day you're in, and the next ... yer OUT!!!"