The NBCNews.com headline over Jonathan Allen’s story kvetched about the lack of “drama” on the first day of the impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, but the person in charge of the Twitter account chose a more, well, pizzazz-y synonym for “drama.”
Analysis: The first two witnesses called Wednesday testified to President Trump's scheme, but lacked the pizzazz necessary to capture public attention. https://t.co/1UfkaeZ3I4
— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 14, 2019
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Halloween is over, but echoes of boo are still reverberating throughout the land, most notably when the current occupant of the White House ventures out of his safe spaces and into the unfiltered public domain. He was greeted with loud boos and chants of “lock him up” at Nationals Park in Washington during Game 5 of the World Series on October 27.
Meanwhile chants of “boos” & “lock him up” rang out when Trump was shown on the Jumbotron at tonight’s World Series game. Signs that read “Veterans for Impeachment” and “Impeach Trump” were also hung around the stadium by fans pic.twitter.com/Pzjjs4AI4t
— HOT 97 (@HOT97) October 28, 2019
And there were more boos at what would seem to have been an even friendlier milieu: an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Madison Square Garden on November 2.
Trump was loudly booed during his arrival to this UFC fight — the second sports arena to boo him this week pic.twitter.com/Num0v1kiOP
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 3, 2019
As historian Kevin Kruse pointed out on Twitter, there is robust precedent for president-booing at sporting events.
And other presidents have been booed at baseball games, in case everyone suddenly forgot.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) October 28, 2019
If I'm remembering correctly, Obama was booed at the All-Star Game in 2009, GWBush was booed at a Nationals game in 2008, and GHWBush was famously booed at the 1992 All-Star Game: pic.twitter.com/spZjEj1vqh
But enough celebration of our right to free and loud expression. What about that word boo? How did it come to signify disapproval (verb), surprise (interjection), and affection (noun) – and much more?
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October 2019 marks the centenary of the Volstead Act, the federal legislation that led to the passage of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution—and to the misguided 13-year social experiment known as Prohibition. From January 1, 1920, until Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933, the manufacture, sale, and importation of “intoxicating liquors” were officially outlawed. As everyone knows, all of those activities flourished illicitly.
And so did new vocabulary items.
I’m celebrating the anniversary—and the vocabulary—in my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Sidecars and Scofflaws: Prohibition’s Linguistic Hangover.” Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt.
Continue reading "On the Visual Thesaurus: Prohibition's linguistic hangover" »
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“Texting is not destroying the language” and five other things you may not understand about English. (John McIntyre for the Baltimore Sun)
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A study of 597 logos found that “descriptive logos more favorably impact consumers’ brand perceptions than nondescriptive ones, and are more likely to improve brand performance.” (Harvard Business Review)
Old descriptive logos (left) vs. new nondescriptive logos (right).
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Last week’s headlines were full of bovine references. I’m not talking about the usual bull: This was all about a fake cow with hundreds of thousands of (presumably) real Twitter followers—a cowfluencer, you might say—that’s being sued by a sitting U.S. congressman.
The cow in question (1,200 followers on March 18, 634,000 followers on March 24):
The congressman (404,000 followers):
Yes, Devin Nunes of California’s Central Valley, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, is suing Twitter over a parody account that tweets hashtags like #TheMooovement and #ProtectTheHerd and mocks the “udderly worthless” congressman, who owns a dairy farm not in his home county, as he often boasts, but in far-off Iowa. Nunes is also suing a parody account called Devin Nunes’ Mom and a couple of non-anonymous accounts, all of which he claims “repeatedly tweeted and retweeted abusive and hateful content” about him. He’s asking for $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages. Because Nunes is a public figure, the suits have little chance of succeeding, but they’ll keep a herd of lawyers busy for a while.
Headline writers had a field day—or was it a pasture day?—with cow-related headlines: “How Now, Defamatory Cow?”, “Jimmy Kimmel Milks Devin Nunes’ Cow for Late-Night Comedy,” “Devin Nunes Is Having a Cow.” (More about “how now” and “have a cow” in a bit.) At a “release the Trump-Russia report” demonstration in Washington Saturday evening, some people in the crowd wore cow costumes.
Outside the White House tonight: pic.twitter.com/h6i5oq1PIe
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) March 23, 2019
But enough about current events. My own interest is in the little word at the center of the beef: cow.
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Why are some companies, like publishers and fashion businesses, called “houses”? Includes a delightful explanation of how Random House got its name. (Grammar Girl)
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I’m a pushover for specialized slang dictionaries, and this is a good one: a guide to carnival lingo. Warning: many irresistible rabbit holes on that site. (Good Magic)
A razzle dazzle game (Stevens Magic Emporium)
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I never thought I’d say this, but: Mazel tov, Donald J. Trump! You have been officially inducted into the Wimp Hall of Fame.
Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 25, 2019
Immigrant-loathing scourge and recurring “Real Time with Bill Maher” guest Ann Coulter was referring, of course, to the president’s agreeing to end the 35-day government shutdown without receiving a single taxpayer dollar for a “beautiful,” “artistically designed” wall on the southern border of the U.S. (the wall that he promised, during his campaign, Mexico would pay for).
Although Trump insisted his cave-in was “in no way a concession,” many of his fellow Republicans begged to differ. A Tea Party founder, Mark Meckler, called Trump’s move “pathetic and disgusting.” Breitbart, the right-wing news outlet, called it a “short-term surrender to the Democrats.”
But the punchy, one-syllable wimp was the epithet that stung – and stuck. It was echoed by Senator Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, who called Trump “an amoral, lying person,” and added: “I guess if Ann Coulter yells at him he turns into a wimp.” Ouch!
Wimp even made it into headlines outside the U.S.
The Times (UK), January 27, 2019
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At the American Dialect Society’s annual Word of the Year vote, held Friday, January 4 in New York City, the overall winner was tender-age shelter. (Here’s my column about tender-age shelter for the Visual Thesaurus; subscription required for full access.) The runner-up word, yeet, was less topical and less transparent, especially if you’re older than, say, 19. I keep a running list of potential words of the year, and yeet — which was voted the Slang/Informal Word of the Year for 2018, and which won the first-round vote for overall WOTY — had completely escaped my attention. So I looked into it.
Via @frozenpandaman. According to the American Dialect Society’s live Twitter feed, “voting occurred to many shouts of ‘yeet!’ in the room.”
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This month we give thanks for WOTY, dictionaries, diet jargon, naming advice, and more.
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Word-of-the-year season kicks off in traditional fashion with the Oxford Dictionaries selection. This year it’s toxic, as in toxic masculinity and toxic chemical. Interestingly, toxic derives from the Greek term for word for “poisoned arrow,” but only the “arrow” part. Toxic won out over other words on the shortlist, including incel, gaslighting, big dick energy, and gammon, the last of which was a Fritinancy word of the week in May. Oxford’s word of the year is “a word of expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.” Read more.
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Big dict energy: The stupendously useful Green’s Dictionary of Slang – which was published in three volumes in the UK in 2010 and which moved online in 2016 – is now free to all users. Read more in Ben Yagoda’s post on Lingua Franca, and follow Jonathon Green on Twitter.
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This tweet is good, and the thread that follows (click on the date stamp) is even better.
Trump cereals:
— The Volatile Mermaid (@OhNoSheTwitnt) November 15, 2018
- Total Witch Hunt
- Golden Shower Grahams
- Leerios
- ICE Krispies
- Porn Flakes
- Racism Bran
- Special KKK
- Your Votes Don’t Count Chocula
- Honeycombover
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Have you ever noticed a certain word a couple of times within a short period of time, and then started seeing it everywhere? The Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky calls this the frequency illusion*, and I was afflicted by it last week. The word I kept seeing was stunt, the noun, and the more I looked into it the more it seemed to multiply. What was particularly striking was how it was implemented across the political spectrum to comment on recent events. I even discovered a new-to-me slang definition of the verb to stunt.
The Stunt Man (1980). Delightful movie. Its Spanish title, by the way, is El Especialista.
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