Something I hadn’t counted on when I plunged into blogging and then Twitter was how online connections could turn into real-life acquaintanceships—even friendships. By now, 16-plus years after I started blogging, I’ve met a number of internet pals: writers, name developers, linguists, and editors. When one of them accomplishes something special, I’m among the first to cheer.
Today I bring you news of new books by two internet friends. Huzzah!
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Attactics: Aggressive tactics. A portmanteau of attack and tactics; in some cases a probable eggcorn.
In a November 13, 2015, post on ADS-L, the listserv of the American Dialect Society, slang expert Jonathan E. Lighter noted that “CNN speaks of Donald Trump’s ‘attactics’ against Ben Carson” in the Republican presidential campaign. I hadn’t heard the usage, so I emailed Lighter for specifics. The source, he told me, was Christopher Cuomo, co-achor of the “New Day” morning show. Cuomo, it turns out, has been staging a one-man campaign to make attactics happen on the air and on Twitter.
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Hollanderizing: A proprietary process for cleaning fur garments, named for its inventors, A. Hollander and Sons Fur Care (originally of Newark, New Jersey, and later of Toronto and Montreal).
“Hollanderizing: Canada’s leading garment care professionals since 1930.” (Hollanderizing.com.)
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Grist: Grain for grinding; ground grain. Unchanged in form and meaning since Old English; “perhaps related to grindan ‘to grind’ (see grind), though OED calls the connection ‘difficult’.” (Source: Online Etymology Dictionary.)* As Michael Qunion explains in World Wide Words, public grist mills were once common in Britain and the United States.**
In the 21st century we’re most likely to encounter grist, if we encounter it at all, in the idiom “grist for the mill,” which means “something that can be used to advantage,” as in grain that can be readied for flour. However, I recently saw the idiom rendered as “gist for the mill.” I dismissed it as a typo until I did a Google search and discovered more than 50,000 hits for gist for the mill.
There’s a podcast called Gist for the Mill, for example, whose title may be spelled that way for comic effect. (There’s a lot of humor on the site, and the forum section is called Gist Forum the Mill.) But I also found “some gist for the mill” in a Democratic Underground forum, “more gist for the mill” in a post on a Canadian political blog, and “provide gist for the mill” in a set of flashcards for the study of abnormal psychology.
One of George W. Bush’s Bushisms, first reported by Newsweek in 2000, was “I thought how proud I am to be standing up beside my dad. Never did it occur to me that he would become the gist for cartoonists.”
So it seems that a lot of people are substituting gist (the real point, the crux) for grist (grain) because they think it’s logical. In other words, they’re using a type of malapropism known as an eggcorn.
Gist is certainly more familiar than grist to modern-day, non-grain-grinding speakers of English. When gist and grist are pitted against each other in GoogleFight, the results are decisive.
Of course, the two words have different consonant sounds: the G in gist is /j/, while the G in grist is /g/. So I’m guessing that this particular eggcorn is based on mis-reading rather than mis-hearing. That is, if it’s an eggcorn at all: I couldn’t find it in the Eggcorn Database, which contains many examples of eggcorns based on mis-hearing: for all intensive purposes and minus well are among the most common.
Grist survives intact as the name of a nonprofit online magazine about environmental issues, founded in 1999. Grist’s news section is called Gristmill (“fresh, whole-brain news”); its pop-culture section is called GristList. Grist’s taglines are “A Beacon in the Smog” and “Gloom and Doom with a Sense of Humor.”
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* Grist is not related, etymologically, to gristle, which has meant “cartilage” since Old English and which is related to West Germanic words such as crostila and gruschel.
** This entry also contains useful and entertaining information about millstone, keep one’s nose to the grindstone, and run of the mill.
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Spotted at a bus stop on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco:
The “worldwider” coinage is, as we say in my narrow world, the brandable element. It seems to me to be built not from “worldwide” but from “wider”: you wouldn’t say “We’re getting worldwide,” but you might say “We’re getting wider.”
Naturally, I couldn’t help remembering this exchange from “24 Minutes,” the 399th episode of The Simpsons:
Principal Skinner: Just how wide is the Web?
Lisa: World.
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The title of this post is meant to be a pun on “Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder,” the US Air Force Song (lyrics and music here). Nevertheless, when I searched for “wide blue yonder” I got more than 180,000 hits, including the title of a movie, the title of a novel, the title of an Oysterband album, and the name of a web-design company. In fact, it isn’t clear which is the eggcorn: “wide” or “wild.”
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Back in June I wrote about a couple of nearly identically named companies with nearly identical services. (“Vendr, Meet Vendder.”) Both companies have developed applications that add retail capabilities to any website.
Now the confusion, at least in the names, has been resolved. Last week I received an email from Tiago Duarte Matos, a principal at Vendder, telling me that his rival has changed its name to Wazala! That’s Wazala’s exclamation point, not mine.
The Wazala blog announced the news with a quotation from Voltaire (“What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous”) and reassurance that “We’re still the same people, offering the same great product, we just now have a new moniker and logo.”
As for what “Wazala” means, the renamed company is mum. A couple of guesses:
Wazala is a project of Boxador, a software incubator based in West Hollywood, California. Judging from the home page, Boxador takes its name from a Boxer-Labrador cross.
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I thought I knew a lot about tampon ads, but I'd never considered their similarity to cigarette ads. Allow former "Colbert Report" producer Allison Silverman to enlighten you as well, via this hilarious slide show. (Slate)
A roundup of recent bank and credit-union name changes. Yep, we won't shed many tears over CUMCO. (The Financial Brand)
Who's afraid of the trademark police? Recently, a surprising number of big companies. (CatchThis)
We've had staycations, mancations, and furcations. Now there's nakation (or nacation), the "clothing-optional" getaway. Not to be confused with naycation, the just-say-no variation. (Mr. Verb)
Feel like a schmendrick because you don't know bupkes about the mamaloshen? Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch and How to Be a Mentsh and Not a Shmuck, patiently answers readers' questions about Yiddish. (Schott's Vocab, Part 1 and Part 2)
From another corner of the linguasphere, behold the chola makeup tutorial by Baby Smiley, included here because of its repeated use of "eyebrowns" (as in "You gotta make sure that your eyebrowns scream bitch!").* "Eyebrowns" is a well-documented eggcorn with about 43,000 Google hits and an entry in the Eggcorn Forum.
Viewer advisory: Extreme cosmetics, casual profanity, and mock mayhem.
Many thanks to style (and swearing) maven Wendy Brandes, who posted the video on her blog.
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* OK, OK. I included it because it's hilarious.
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Happy Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us! The aluminum pole has been lofted, the Feats of Strength admired. Now it's time for the Airing of Grievances, my favorite ritual of all. I've been saving up grievous examples for more than a month in anticipation of this special day. Too negative for you? Go watch It's a Wonderful Life.
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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about philandering South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's "world wind" travels. But it turns out that Sanford is not the only Republican politician with a proclivity for malapropisms. A couple of days ago I spotted this eggcorn from Alaska's almost-ex-governor, the vociferously beleaguered Sarah Palin, tweeting from her BlackBerry:
Are these constant, wasteful thumped-up ethics charges result of not caving when the filer begged for job? More frivolous chrgs filed today:
Leaving aside the insinuations in that question and the statement that follows it (not to mention the mysterious dangling colon), let's look at thumped-up.
The traditional expression, at whose meaning Ms. Palin was evidently aiming, is trumped-up, which means "fraudulently devised." A related noun, trumpery, means "deceit"—or it did in the mid-15th century, when its use was first recorded. Both words derive from the Old French verb tromper, "to deceive."
Thump, on the other hand, means "to strike hard"; Online Etymology Dictionary says the word is "probably imitative of the sound made by hitting with a heavy object." Related words come not from French but from Germanic languages.
A pro-Palin blog, Conservatives4Palin, provided a wishful translation of their heroine's misuse, asserting without evidence that "thumped-up" is a reference to The Thumpin'—the title of a book about Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's chief of staff. Conservatives4Palin doesn't mention that it was a sheepish George W. Bush who famously said that the 2006 election, in which his party lost the House and almost lost the Senate, "was a thumpin'"—that is, a sound beating.
When I tweeted about Palin's misstatement, calling it an "interesting substitution," I got this reply from journalist John McQuaid (author of a thoughtful blog on science, media, globalization, and politics):
Actually, I like "thumped-up" - vivid. Poss source of confusion: "trumped up" employs an obsolete meaning
He included a link to Answers.com, which notes that the use of trump to mean "devise fraudulently" is "otherwise obsolete." (Trump's other meanings include "surpass" and "a playing card that outranks others.")
It may be otherwise obsolete, but as a modifier for "charges," trumped-up is well known and generally understood, at least in the Lower 48. Thumped-up is colorful but unsupported by etymology or meaning.
"Thumped-up charges" has all the hallmarks of an eggcorn, although it hasn't yet been logged in the Eggcorn Database or Forum. I found 410 Google matches for "thumped-up charges"; the most recent and highest-ranked involve Palin's tweet, but others come from places as far flung as Nepal, Zimbabwe, and the Caribbean.
On The Mudflats, a progressive Alaskan blog, commenters had fun with thumped-up:
I understood “thumped-up” immediately. A common expression here is “Bible thumping” or “Bible thumpers,” used to describe those who enthusiastically, and loudly, rap a Bible held in one hand with four fingertips of the other to reinforce a religious conviction. It’s like saying, “See here? Here? It’s in The Book! It is true!” The longer and louder one thumps, the more the true believers truly believe. Likely this term is in Palin’s vocabulary, and she uses it here to describe the relentless drumming of complainants and bloggers as they tap (thump) their keyboards of false witness to communicate with others of like mind, who pick up the beat and pass it on to persecute the pious. -- Jane in NC
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Thumped up!
Isn’t that what happened to Bristol?! -- Drew from Lil Ol Texas
I don’t understand what is the big deal about her Tweet. What did she say wrong? Yes, they are thumped up charges. The big mogul is New York is Donald Thump. And when playing cards, your highest card is the thump card. -- Bucfan
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Besides being a very naughty governor, South Carolina's Mark Sanford turns out to have a penchant for purple prose, as evidenced by his email correspondence with his Argentine inamorata. Here, from July 10, 2008, is one of the juicy bits:
I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light — but hey, that would be going into the sexual details we spoke of at the steakhouse at dinner — and unlike you I would never do that!
I could ... but I won't. Such a coy lover, that Marco!
However, I was drawn to a more banal sentence in the same email. See if you can figure out why:
Tomorrow night back to Philadelphia for the start of the National Governor’s Conference through the weekend. Back to Columbia for Tuesday and then on Wednesday, as I think I had told you, taking the family to China, Tibet, Nepal, India, Thailand and then back through Hong Kong on world wind tour.
It was the last three words that blew me away: "world wind tour." This apparent conflation of "world tour" and "whirlwind tour" turns out to be not a Sanford original but a fairly common eggcorn: a mis-heard term that's assigned a creative spelling (and definition too, usually). The Eggcorn Database lists six citations of world wind for whirlwind, and they're probably just the tip of the cyclone.
For the record, a whirlwind is "a small rotating windstorm" or, metaphorically, "a confused rush." Adjectivally, as in a whirlwind romance, it means "fast-moving" or "tempestuous." One of the most famous whirlwinds appears in Hosea 8:7: "For they sow the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind."*
Eggcorns are usually created when words are learned by ear rather than by reading. But amazingly, some people are capable of getting it wrong even when they know (and see!) the source of the phrase. Here's reader SilverHawk confidently and erroneously answering a question submitted to The Phrase Finder in which whirlwind is spelled correctly ("I was just hoping to find out the origin and meaning of the saying which goes something like 'sow the wind; reap the whirlwind'"). SilverHawk's spelling and punctuation sic:
NASA, by the way, has created a downloadable open-source tool called World Wind that "lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth." Perhaps Gov. Sanford should use this World Wind, from the comfort of his den, the next time he gets a whim to hike the Patagonian Trail.
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* Source: Masoretic text of the Old Testament— i.e., translated directly from Hebrew.
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