Fritinancy

Word of the week: No-platform

 

If you’ve followed college controversies over the last couple of years, you’ve heard about microagressions and safe spaces, both of which were on my 2015 Words of the Year list (and the lists of many other people). Both of those terms arose out of 1970s New Left movements in the U.S. Now comes no-platform, a British import that’s the latest vogue word among politically aware college students.

The verb no-platform, according to the Oxford Dictionaries entry, means to prevent someone whose views are regarded as unacceptable or offensive “from contributing to a public debate or meeting, especially one at which they had originally been invited to speak.” The entry’s example sentences: “Dozens of other speakers have been no-platformed because they hold non-leftist opinions”; “If we want to debate the limits of free speech within the law we can't really do that consistently by no-platforming extremists.”

 

Via The Rebel (Canada), February 21, 2016: “‘No-platforming’ is the new college campus craze!”

Word of the week: Deplorables

Deplorables: Nounified, pluralized form of deplorable, an adjective meaning “lamentable, very sad, grievous, miserable, wretched” and usually used in reference to events, conditions, or circumstances. The adjective is derived from the Latin verb plorare, to weep or bewail.

The adjective deplorable first appeared in print in the early 1600s. The OED provides one citation for the plural noun deplorables: the journal of Sir Walter Scott, published in 1828: “An old fellow, mauld with rheumatism and other deplorables.” (Mauld is an alternate spelling of a regional usage of mauled that means “fatigued.”)

The OED and other dictionaries now have another noteworthy citation: the remarks of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on September 9 at the LGBT for Hillary Gala in New York City. Here’s the relevant section:

 

We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."

(Generalistic is not in standard dictionaries, but once again, Clinton“s is far from its first use.)

Clinton went on to describe “the other basket … of people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change.”

Cadillac’s Mixed Message

Is Cadillac a whipped underdog? That’s what I infer from the automaker’s new “Dare Greatly” campaign, from Publicis, which will kick off during Sunday’s Academy Awards broadcast. I caught the teaser ad at a Berkeley movie theater before a screening of the Best Foreign Film nominee Timbuktu, which is about the violent clash between cattle herders and religious extremists in Mali. (The dissonance between ad and movie was so thick it would have taken a cleaver to slice it. But I digress.)

Here’s the spot:

  

  

The script isn’t credited, but it’s lifted from “Citizenship in a Republic,” a 1910 speech given at the Sorbonne in Paris by Theodore Roosevelt, then one year out of the White House. The youthful-sounding female voiceover, the moody music, the slow-mo near-black-and-white imagery: they’re intended to make you think—no, not think, feel—that Something Important Is About to Happen. Something moving and portentous and great. But is that really what we’re being told?

Inauguration Recap: Rhetoric and Poetics

Commentary on the language of Inauguration Day:

At The Atlantic, James Fallows identifies “the two most powerful allusions” in President Obama’s speech: “lash and sword” and “Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall.” I’d add that the lucky alliteration in the second allusion gives it additional force.

Ben Zimmer, of the Visual Thesaurus, looks at the repeated rhetorical flourish of “We, the People.” He also addresses the nitpickers who cried foul over Obama’s placement of “only” in one phrase and his use of singular “they” in another. (Both usages, by the way, are acceptable.)

For a snarky take on the speech, see the Whatever It Is, I’m Against It blog. The title of the post: “We Are Made for This Moment (Although If You Check the Label, It Says ‘Made in China’).”

UPDATE: Jay Heinrichs analyzes the rhetorical tropes of the speech: antithesis, metaphor, and anaphora (with a little syncrisis—“a kind of antithesis that piles on the contrasts in multiple clauses”—for good measure). 

The inaugural poem, “One Today,” was written and delivered by Richard Blanco, who was born in Spain to a Cuban-exile family and grew up in Miami; he was only the fifth poet to read at a presidential inauguration, and the first immigrant, first Latino, first openly gay person, and youngest person (at 44) to hold that honor. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly provides the full text of the poem and an analysis (“a humble, modest poem, one presented to a national audience as a gift of comradeship”). Andrew Sullivan heard “strong echoes of Whitman, America's national poet.”

I had one tiny cavil: A professional writer, especially one whose first language is Spanish, ought to know that it’s Sierra—singular—and not Sierras.

My posts about the January 2009 presidential inauguration are here and here.

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: Arithmetic

Arithmetic: The science of numbers; the art of computation by figures. From Latin arithmetica, originally Greek arithmetike (“the counting art”). In English since early the 14th century, originally as “arsmetrike” because of the false Latin etymology ars metrica, “the art of measuring.” Standardized to arithmetic by mid-17th century. Arithmetic replaced Middle English tælcræft, literally “tell-craft,” in which “tell” meant “to reckon” or “to calculate,” a sense we retain today in “bank teller” and “to tell time.”

Arithmetic was in the news last week after former President Bill Clinton used the word six times in his fact-filled and rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

 

MinnPost.com, Sept. 6, 2012

Here’s the first usage (from the transcript of the speech as delivered):

Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: Arithmetic. (Sustained cheers, applause.)

Arithmetic suited Clinton’s rhetorical purposes because—in contrast to, say, math—it suggests “elementary” and “basic.” Arithmetic is what we learn in grade school: it’s times tables, not quadratic equations; long division, not differential calculus. Clinton drove home that point in a later line about his differences with Republican opponents over the national debt:

It was a highly inconvenient thing for them in our debates that I was just a country boy from Arkansas, and I came from a place where people still thought two and two was four. (Laughter, applause.) It’s arithmetic.

(Emphasis added.)

If you missed the speech. here’s video with annotation from New York Times reporters.

Also of interest:

Clinton made so many changes to his written text—ad-libs and deliberate revisions—that the speech ran almost twice as long as scheduled. To see exactly how he altered the text, take a look at The Atlantic’s marked-up version. BuzzFeed offers a slightly different version, which contains a couple of changes sure to please print editors: Clinton’s correct lower-casing of “president” when it doesn’t precede a proper name (“the next president of the United States”) and of “bless” (“God bless America”).

“Fixin’ to Get Folksy,” an analysis of the speech’s homespun rhetorical devices. (Ben Zimmer at Word Routes.)

Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker says Clinton’s speech was “one of the greatest tours de force in convention history”:

In its intensity, in the palpable love between performer and audience, in its passion, in its earnestness, in its straightforwardness—in its politics, even!—this was the rhetorical equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen concert.

James Fallows at The Atlantic on why Clinton’s speeches succeed: “Because he treats listeners as if they are smart.” That’s a lesson for every speaker and speechwriter.

Update: Lucy Ferriss, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog, takes a close look at some of Clinton’s rhetorical devices:

This call to “listen” to what’s “important” is the chief emendation Clinton makes to a text that might otherwise, rhetorically, echo what not only the First Lady but also the other pundits had been saying from the platform. Even more brilliant is the addition of the “some brass” line, which will haunt our impressions of Paul Ryan henceforward.

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.)

Friday Miscellany

A little technology, a little politics, a lot of language:

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When I started receiving blog traffic from this MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) post about SQM, I got curious. SQM is internal code for the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program; it's pronounced "squim," which is how the Washington State town of Sequim is pronounced. (That qualifies Sequim as a shibboleth: a pronunciation that distinguishes locals from outsiders.) SQM used to stand for Service Quality Monitoring and now stands for Software Quality Metrics (yeah, yeah, whatever), but the more interesting thing about the acronym is its migration into verb-land. So: Is it more proper to write "We SQMmed this data," "We SQM'd this data," or "We SQM-ed" this data? Commenters naturally took sides, and one of them, Jolyon Smith, kindly linked to an old post of mine about apostrophe'd adjectives.

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More from the computer archives: Ironic Sans (real name David Friedman, yet we're not related; I'm related to another David Friedman) unearths the user manual for the Franklin Ace 100, circa 1983. One chapter was titled "The Ancestral Territorial Imperatives of the Trumpeter Swan." Explanation: "It's real title should be 'Let's Get Started,' but that's such a disgustingly cute phrase that it has no business adorning any page." Yep, they don't make computer manuals like they used to.

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In the National Review, linguist John McWhorter analyzes Sarah Palin's idiosyncratic speech habits, in particular her use of that and there ("distal demonstratives," in linguistics jargon):

What truly distinguishes Palin’s speech is its utter subjectivity: that is, she speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance.

Writing in Language Log, linguist Mark Liberman takes a differing view of Palinspeak:

[T]here's another set of reasons for using that and there — not to signal distance from the referent, but to establish fellowship with the audience.

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I've been thinking about New Orleans lately because I'm looking forward to Sunday's premiere of "Treme," the new HBO series from the creators of "The Wire," which was the best television I've ever watched. ("Treme," by the way, is another shibboleth: it's prounced "treh-MAY," even though it lacks an acute accent.) I've also been reading Zeitoun, Dave Eggers's nonfiction account of one family's experience during and after Hurricane Katrina. The title character, a Syrian-American married to a Louisiana native, remained in New Orleans after the levees broke. I followed the Katrina news voraciously as it unfolded four and a half years ago, but Eggers's book reveals horrors I'd never heard or imagined. I admit I found his authorial voice a little too ingenuous at first, as though he were writing for an audience of 12-year-olds—so many flat, declarative sentences; so many homely details—but halfway through I understood why he'd made those choices. I forgot my objections and surrendered to the story.

Politics figures only obliquely in Zeitoun, but of course the whole Katrina catastrophe was largely political in nature. This week, in a stunning display of hubris or obliviousness (probably both), the Southern Republican Leadership Conference is meeting in New Orleans. "But do they have any idea where they are?" asks John McQuaid in True/Slant:

Just up the street from the GOP’s venue at the Hilton Riverside is the New Orleans Convention Center, where tens of thousands of people gathered in the days after Hurricane Katrina and waited in stifling heat without food or water for rescuers who didn’t know they were there. Even though they were on TV.

That was probably the low point in a catastrophic breakdown of government capacities at all levels – local, state, and federal. But the biggest single failure was at the top: George W. Bush was the one man who would have cut through it all. But he was oddly disengaged for the balance of that terrible week.

Nevertheless, former GOP congressman J.C. Watts received a standing ovation when he told the gathering on Wednesday that "history's going to be kind to George W. Bush."

I pass the microphone to my fellow blogger Mxrk, for whom being kind to George W. Bush has never been a priority. Read his latest Red Phone comic, "Strange Love."

Word of the Week: Telepalmter

Telepalmter: Humorous reference to notes written on Sarah Palin's palm and referred to by Palin during her Feb. 6 keynote speech at the Tea Party convention in Nashville. The word was coined in imitation of teleprompter, a genericized trademark for an auto-cue device. 

The words on Palin's palm appear to be "energy," "budget cuts" ("budget" is crossed out), "tax," and "Lift American spirits."

Palm notes are an ancient memory-jogging device familiar to anyone who has cheated on a school exam. The telepalmter coinage is an allusion to Palin's (and others') mockery of President Obama's use of a teleprompter during formal speeches.

Mr. Obama is not the only U.S. leader to have relied on auto-cues.

George W. Bush flanked by transparent teleprompter screens during his 2007 State of the Union address.

Ronald Reagan using a teleprompter during his 1988 State of the Union address.

Telepalmter began appearing on blogs and Twitter almost as soon as Palin finished her speech. Its first appearance may have been in a comment on a Daily Kos diary; it appears elsewhere as TelePalmTer and telepalmpter. Other waggish references have included "palm reader" and "Palin Palm Pilot." UPDATE: Or "Hillbilly Palm Pilot," as noted in The Times of London. (For an apolitical discussion of the persistence of "Palm Pilot," read my December 2009 post, "The Brand That Refused to Die.")

TelePrompTer, with internal capitals, was originally a trademark registered to the TelePrompTer company, which developed the technology in the 1950s. According to the USPTO database, the last owner of the mark was Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. Registration was canceled in 2003; there currently are no live trademark registrations for the name.

Palin palm photo from Andrew Sullivan's blog, Daily Dish, which also contains links to Sullivan's live-blog of Palin's speech.

Thanks to Sherry Noik for bringing telepalmter to my attention.

 

October Linkfest

First the bad news, courtesy of Ellis Weiner at The New Yorker: Your book publisher's promotion department has been replaced by an intern, and she has "some excellent ideas" about publicizing your book:

To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I’ll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I’ll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click “Endless,” and under “Contacts” just list everyone you’ve ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.

Now some good news: The Farmer's Almanac invites readers to rename the traditional moons-of-the-month (Harvest, Wolf , and so on). It's too late to submit names for the November contest (vote on finalists here), but there are ten other opportunities to play.

Meanwhile, in sports, compare your scorecard to these "distinctive" names in sports, including UFL receiver Craphonso Thorpe (named for his father, Craig Alphonso) and the NBA's God Shammgod (who only sounds like the love child of Richard Dawkins and Mother Teresa). But wait: no Merkin Valdez? (Via Nancy's Baby Names.)

Also in the sports department: The definitive Venn diagram of baseball team names. I especially like the "tautology" sector (Angels, Phillies). (Via Kottke.)

And in other news:

This list of the 50 most frequently looked-up words in the New York Times (Jan. 1 through May 26, 2009) would make a great SAT study aid. In first place: "sui generis." (Via JC Posner.)

If you're interested in speechwriting, check out the Barack Obama blog at Power Presentations, which analyzes the president's rhetoric. And at Language Log, Mark Liberman explores the cliché-by-president matrix: Is "defining moment" a defining phrase for Obama?