Fritinancy

November linkfest

It’s Word of the Year season, and two British dictionaries are leading the pack. Collins picked lockdown – a word we threw around here in the US but never experienced the way they did in the UK and elsewhere. (A friend of mine is literally confined to her London apartment after spending a month in France: she can’t go outdoors at all.) And Oxford Languages, publisher of the Oxford dictionaries, chose a phenomenon instead of a single word: the impact of the COVID-19 on language. “What struck the team as most distinctive in 2020 was the sheer scale and scope of change,” Katherine Connor Martin, the company’s head of product, told the New York Times’s Jennifer Schuessler. “This event was experienced globally and by its nature changed the way we express every other thing that happened this year.”

“Social distance”: sign in an Oakland produce-store window, May 2020.

On the Visual Thesaurus: How we talk about the past

For my November Visual Thesaurus column I look at our language of nostalgia and retrospect: at the words, old and new, we use when we talk about the past. Words like Before Times[s], retro, oldie, newstalgia, fauxstalgia, and reboot.

Full access to “Into the Past” is restricted to subscribers. Here’s a preview:

October linkfest

Cleo Levin wrote for Slate about “ridiculously surreal” made-for-Amazon brand names: “Here were a series of names that were not only unknown to me, but also quite perplexing: Artfish, Wishpig, Sweatyrocks, Demonlick, and Pukemark.” 

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Ben Zimmer wrote for Beyond Wordplay about Washington’s new Planet Word Museum, which opened via virtual ribbon-cutting—with President Obama as a surprise guest—on October 22.

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On the Visual Thesaurus: Poll stars

In my latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, I take a look at a certain four-letter word that’s dominating the news lately. No, not that one. Not that one, either. I’m talking about poll.

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers. Here’s a sample:

Time magazine, known in its early years for its inventive language, is responsible for an enduring poll coinage first seen in print in 1939: pollster, a person who conducts opinion polls—another term first recorded in 1939, although the practice of opinion polling in the US goes back to 1824. The -ster suffix “is slightly jazzy (jokester, trickster, hipster),” [William] Safire wrote in his Political Dictionary, “and not at all scientific; many people in the survey business resisted it at first but now put up with it.” What Safire didn’t note: many modern -ster compounds have unsavory overtones: mobster, gangster, tipster, bankster. (Not to mention the much older monster, which goes back to Chaucer’s era.)

In the 70-plus years since pollster was coined, polling has become more widespread and more scientific. Exit polls (first usage: 1976) catch voters as they leave a polling place to take the pulse of an election. Flash polls, which “quickly reach a target audience with a time-sensitive goal”—often just a matter of hours—were made possible by online survey methods and statistical-inference techniques. There are polls of polls that compile the results of multiple polls from different sources; poll trackers, which obsessively analyze those results; and websites such as FiveThirtyEight devoted to poll aggregation and election forecasting. 

 

Read the rest of “Poll Stars.”

Blog bonus! Grammar Table—an actual traveling table staffed by Ellen Jovin—runs frequent Twitter polls on English-usage topics. Here’s a recent one.

You and a birder friend are about to jump out of an airplane, and your friend is nervous. To relax your friend, you say, "Imagine you __________ (are, were) able to fly like a bar-tailed godwit."

— Grammar Table (@grammartable) October 17, 2020

Jush and zhuzh and tszuj

A TikTok video by QueenBV59, about her preparations for casting a ballot during early voting, was shared all over Twitter on Thursday. I’ve watched it half a dozen times myself.

SHE READY pic.twitter.com/zLWQbSMljH

— Meena Harris (@meenaharris) October 15, 2020

One repeated word—jush—was new to me and, apparently, to some other viewers as well.

OK, folks, I’m gonna go over here and get my jush

Y’all need to get y’all jush and get y’all vote on

I’m gonna get my damn jush

Jush—rhymes with push—turns out to be a rare slang term that can be traced to a single person. But it isn’t quite as simple as that.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Political campaign slogans then and now

My September column for the Visual Thesaurus, “A Slogan in Every Pot!”, looks at the history of political slogans—from “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” (1840) to “Build Back Better” (2020).

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt.

Campaign slogans are “miniature narratives,” says Philip Seargeant, a British linguist and author of The Art of Political Storytelling: Why Stories Win Votes in Post-truth Politics (2020). Successful slogans, he told me in an email, “place the desire for change at their heart, and foreground the need for action to accomplish that change.” Change through action is at the heart of slogans like "Make America Great Again” — Donald Trump's 2016 campaign motto, often compressed into a hashtagged acronym, #MAGA — and “Take Back Control,” a Brexit slogan. “Both use imperatives — ‘make’ ‘take’ — which urge a form of participation from the electorate, and suggest that together some sort of change can be effected in society,” Seargeant says.

“Make America Great Again” was an abbreviated version of the slogan originally used by Ronald Reagan. In 1984, Reagan ran for reelection with the hazy, sunny slogan “It's Morning in America.”

Context matters too, says Seargeant: “A successful slogan will be a mix of the words on the page themselves, plus outside factors which mean these words resonate with a particular mood in society, with the character of the candidate, and with the larger branding of the campaign or movement.”

Read the rest of “A Slogan in Every Pot!”

Popcorn

How bad is it out here? On Wednesday, smoke from wildfires throughout the American West turned Bay Area skies an otherworldly shade of dark orange. The COVID pandemic is still very much with us, and most businesses and schools are at least partially closed. Bob Woodward’s new book about the Trump presidency, Rage, is predictably enraging. (Read Jennifer Szalai’s sharply written review in the New York Times.)

Things may be even worse in Florida.

So let’s take a moment for distraction. Pass the popcorn.

Pass the Popcorn, a movie-guessing game

August linkfest

I’ve been reading some excellent books—more about them soon—but right now I want to tell you about a couple of interesting podcasts for language lovers.

• Word Matters is “a show for readers, writers, and anyone who ever loved their English class”; it’s hosted by four Merriam-Webster lexicographers: Emily Brewster, Neil Serven, Ammon Shea, and Peter Sokolowski. Episodes have tackled singular kudo, the pronunciation of antennae, and everyone’s favorite bugaboo, irregardless (which is definitely “a word” even though my editing software red-squigglies it. Yes, “red-squigglies” is also a word. Because I said so, that’s why.)
• Science Diction is “a bite-sized podcast about words—and the science stories behind them,” brought to you by the folks at NPR’s “Science Friday” and hosted by Johanna Meyer. Did you know that restaurant originally meant “a medicinal soup”? Do you know “the linguistic reason why ‘Rocky Road’ sounds so dang delicious”? How about the connection between cobalt and German folklore? Lots more like that, too.

The kobold. (Source)

Coronacoinages IV

The COVID pandemic is still with us—remember when it was going to “go away in April with the heat”?—and so are the new words it’s inspiring. This is my fourth installment of novel coronacoinages; scroll to the bottom for links to related posts.

On the Visual Thesaurus: "Bound" for glory

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus was inspired by an email from reader Dan Freiberg, who sent me this photo of a bottle of Windex glass cleaner.

“100% Ocean Bound Plastic”

 

Dan wrote: “To me, this doesn’t mean what I think SC Johnson” — parent company of Windex—“wants it to mean.”

Investigating exactly what ocean bound means led me down some twisty paths. According to a Danish organization called Ocean Bound Plastic, ocean bound plastic—yes, there should be a hyphen in there—is land based, whereas ocean-waste plastic is retrieved from waterways and then recycled. But that was just the beginning, because bound has multiple meanings and at least four unrelated etymologies. 

Access to the full column is paywalled. Here’s an excerpt: