Site last updated:
1 January 2009

soc. stud.

panini

There is no such thing as "a panini." The word "panini" is plural. One little sandwich is a "panino." We Americans are too chic for our own good, if you ask me.

Equi-what?

I can pronounce "equanimity" with equanimity. But I cannot for the life of me say the word "equanimous," which I have seen written on occasion.

vicarious

I think this was one of those words I was made to learn in junior-high or high-school English. I didn't find it useful at the time, but it has since grown on me.

corpulent

I remember my cousin discovering this word, which, at the age we were, seemed incredibly useless and obscure. She thought it was hilarious and broke out into uncontrollable laughter.

jalopy

I dunno whether I like this word or not, but I drive one, and I like it okay.

wise up (and out, and over, if necessary)

I don't know what feck or gorm is, but I want lots, so that I can avoid being:

a feckless idiot
a gormless fool

stormy petrels (inseparable phrases)

If you say an unbracketed word, I'll always think of the bracketed ones.
Lambent [traces]
[Travels and Adventures of] Serendipity

for a demonstration of extreme backformation...

... see: "How I Met My Wife" by Jack Winter. Published 25 July 1994 in The New Yorker.

synchronic/diachronic

a whole system at one point in time / a change to a part of a system through time

I am interested in languages from both perspectives. I always picture the diagram that my linguistics teacher must have drawn: the intersection of two parallel lines, one depicting linguistic breadth and the other depicting linguistic chronology.

defenestrate

One wonders, since "defenestrate" means "to eject from a window", what it would mean for someone or something to be "fenestrated". Perhaps this could describe what the decorators of storefront windows do when they are putting in new items for display. Or would that be "refenestrate"? Or even "reinfenestrate"?

assimilation

Did you know that the prefixes im-, in-, and il- are actually all the same prefix, historically? Perhaps it occurred to you that they all have a negational meaning, but did you realize the reason for the different forms? The spelling is dependent on the pronunciation, which is dependent on the word you're attaching the prefix to; the prefix changes (assimilates) to blend better with whatever sound follows.

The word "assimilate" is a nifty word in itself. It's got the word "similar" in it. And the word is, itself, an example of assimilation: the familiar prefix "ad-", meaning towards, is realized as the less-recognizable "as-" due to the following "s".

paradigm

As a general academic word, this evokes the phrase "paradigm shift," meaning a change in how we view and/or do things. I like it better as a linguistic term denoting a full set of verb inflections. I do not at all like the word paradigmatic; the character of the word changes completely when you have to pronounce the hitherto silent "g".

Wally the Wordworm

This was a book and cassette tape I had when I was a kid. I listened to it so many times that I still have bits of it memorized. I must have been an odd eight-year-old, walking around spouting sesquipedalian words like "sesquipedalian" and "syzygy," the latter of which FrontPage doesn't believe is a word.

transmogrify

I thought that Bill Watterson made up this word to describe Calvin's box machine. Apparently it already existed. This leads me to believe that if I dig up enough obscure words, I may be remembered (if erroneously) as the inventor of at least one or two.

embrocation

Not to be confused with "imbrication," this word means "lotion" or the process of applying it.

reify

This word confused the heck out of me for ages. For the longest time, I thought it consisted entirely of a prefix and a suffix, re- followed by -ify, which would make it completely lacking in actual positive content! I kept expecting the missing bit of word to show up. ("Reclassify" makes total sense, but not without "class"!) But no, the "re" is actually from the Latin "res", meaning "thing." So "reify" means "thingify," to form, embody, reconstitute, more or less.

-ify

(The beloved suffix, not to be confuesd with the slang adjective "iffy.") From ficare/facere, "to cause to become".

Examples:
mortify, crucify, specify, satisfy, simplify, clarify, notify, verify, beautify, fortify, terrify, purify

Also, funkify, to cause to become funky. Also, liquefy, which manages to get along somehow without the "i".

embiggen

I contrast this Simpsons word with engrandify, which I have constructed with Latinate morphemes. I am very fond of -ify, and wouldn't really think to invent words with -en, which is suited to word construction with Germanic words.

res, "thing", ficare, facere "to cause to become"
 

grammatical number

"Number" is the singularity or plurality of a noun or verb or what have you. Today, in English, we only have two categories of grammatical number, singular and plural. There used to be a third category, called "dual," which was used to indicate the "twoness" of something. Hence, there were pronouns not only for "I" and "we" but also "we two". This feature has dropped out of most Indo-European languages, but is apparently present in modern Arabic.

Chinese "we"

Chinese has two pronouns both used to express we: (1) The "we" that includes the listener (and possibly others) and (2) the "we" that includes the speaker and one or more others, but not the listener. Thus:

(1) John, it's great that you and I both liked that movie we just saw.

(2) John, my husband and I saw a movie last night. We recommend it!

This is a great example of how some conceptual distinctions are given more weight in some languages than in others; of how some meaning is implicit and some is explicit; of the role of context in communication.

English articles

Ever wonder why English only has "a", "an", and "the", when German and all the romance languages have masculine and feminine versions? Most of us native English speakers are probably surprised at the other language rather than our own, but it seems to me that English, being a Germanic language heavily influenced by French and Latin, should also have masculine and feminine nouns and corresponding articles.

I can believe that English lost grammatical case distinctions for nouns like the ones German has; after all, the romance languages don't have them even though Latin did. But gender? How did an entire grammatical notion as fundamental as grammatical gender get misplaced and forgotten about? I, for one, am curious; if I live forever, I'll eventually get around to reading Anne Curzan's 240-page, eighty-five dollar Cambridge University Press book on the subject. Hoorah for scholarly publishing! It valiantly continues to tell us things that as many as 2000 people might be interested in knowing.

hydroponic inkstand

I typed this phrase into Google Whack a few years ago, and it produced exactly one hit. I think this would make a good band name. It sounds rebellious and possibly futuristic, has no obvious meaning, and yet conveys aspirations of being taken seriously.

deviant asterisk

This phrase came up in a real conversation involving fonts, typesetting, and physics. I think it would be a good name for a band. Except that it too strongly invokes the website DeviantArt.

chandelabra

Mix a chandelier and candelabra, and you get a many-armed tabletop lighting device like my in-laws have.

beeves

This means cows. Why? Well, it's the plural of beef.

Please do the needful.

Is this a normal thing to say in British English?

ain't

The word ain't is a contraction of "am not." It can be used in place of "have not" in past perfect constructions: I ain't seen nothin'.

Igneous petrology

Princeton University Press has a book called Mind Over Magma: The Story of Igneous Petrology. I am not a geochemist, but I somehow want to know the story of anything that's that fun to say.

Septoctnochember

The holiday month for retail.

you know you're a math geek if...

...you can properly pronounce: Euler, Erdos, Pi, Phi, (to be continued...)

if whishes were horses, bheggars would rhide

I once received an email from a non-native speaker of English that was signed, "Best whishes." This made my day.

spoonerisms

A friend of mine in high school, when comparing arm length among classmates (?), managed to ask, "Whose longs are armer?" This makes me think of the joke about kings keeping their "armies" in their "sleevesies" for some reason. I guess "armer", in addition to referring to arms and sleeves, sounds like "armor", which calls to mind kings and soldiers.

My dad, once upon a time, threatened to take us shopping for socks while we were on a family vacation. However, it came out "shock sopping," which sounded like it would be fun.

Most recently, someone who shall remain nameless, managed to utter "stank flake" in referring to "flank steak." The former I would not have eaten; the latter was tasty.

I think the prize goes to my mom. She once had a job with a company that provided services for learners of English as a second language. She was instructed to answer incoming phone calls by saying, "ESL Instruction and Consulting, how can I help you?"  But one day she answered the phone and said, "ESL Construction and Insulting, how can I. . . Gah!" 

ineffable

Somewhere I read or heard something about "effing" the ineffable. I don't mean "effing" as some kind of euphemism, but as a backformation from "ineffable," a word I very much like. It's a bit like some synonyms of "esoteric" that I listed at some point.

inimitable

Although it means "unable to be imitated," I think I used to confuse this word with inimical, which is altogether different. Thanks to the book title "The Inimitable Jeeves," I now fully understand that "inimitable" is a compliment along the lines of "unique" or "outstanding," and conveys no hostility whatsoever towards life or health.

incipient

Shares a morpheme with "recipient". The noun form calls to mind investment performance. "Growth was 5% in 2006, 15% since inception."

inform

There is an interesting use of "inform" that I've run into since in academia. You can see it in action on our webpage for the book Democratic Faith:

"The American political reformer Herbert Croly wrote, 'For better or worse, democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility.' Democratic Faith is at once a trenchant analysis and a powerful critique of this underlying assumption that informs democratic theory."

Clearly, this is a different use than "Your teacher informed me that you skipped math class on Tuesday."
 

informations

What cracks me up about "information" is the tendency of non-native speakers of English to make it plural, e.g., "I am looking for some informations about student housing."

infuse

This is a word that often puts on airs. I see it on fancy menus to describe the flavoring of the entrees; I see it in the marketing copy for health and beauty products; I see it used to describe exotic tea. All these consumer items are somehow elevated by being infused with something or other. Now, a discussion could be infused with wit, but that's not how I tend to think of the word. And I can't think of the word "suffused" without thinking of it as the phrase "suffused with light." Is it even possible to be suffused with anything else?

incorporate

Another favorite Latinate word beginning with "in". It literally means something like "give form to" because "corpus" means "body," and of course the word is used to describe the formation of a company as a corporate entity, but I tend to use it to mean "meld together," as in, "let's incorporate this new information into the product description."

invoke

I get a lot of mileage out of this word. It has this mystical flavor to it, as if when I say I "invoke" something I am calling forth spirits. The noun, "invocation" is even more mystical! The word does mean "call;" it's related to a bunch of "voc-" words (voice, vociferous, etc.). I use invoke to talk about the mysterious (to some) capabilities of the computer code I work with. I say that the main source file "invokes" or calls forth the separate figure files, thereby causing them to appear in the output document. You can also "invoke" rules or procedures to handle situations: having dropped a tasty morsel on the ground, you can invoke the 5-second rule and pick it up and eat it (if you've already decided the floor was pretty clean and the morsel lacking in exterior stickiness).

series

I really wish that this word had different singular and plural forms. I am tempted to promulgate "seriesez" just to be perverse. After all, we have octopuses, cactuses, indexes, and appendixes;  apparently we can anglicize any old plural we want. Right?

Latinate words

English is not a Romance language. It's a Germanic language with a bunch of Latin (and French) thrown in. So that means English is composed of words that are Latinate, and words that are... wait for it... Germinate.

Personal belongings

To paraphrase George Carlin, What other kinds of belongings could one possibly have? Public belongings? I have always been fond of the Spanish word "pertenencias", meaning, things that pertain to you. I heard this word over and over at a theme park in a recorded message reminding you to pick up anything you couldn't take on the roller coaster and thus left at the station. In English we have the word "appurtenances," but we don't often use it.

Municipal

This word makes me think that there should be a noun, "municip". But no, the noun is "municipality". The noun is derived from the adjective! How messed up is that!?

Painstaking

For a long time, it did not occur to me that this word was "pains-taking" and not "pain-staking". The first decomposition of the word makes the meaning, which I always knew, crystal clear. The second makes sense, but doesn't correspond to the meaning of the whole word. And yet, my instinct was to separate the word in the latter way, rather than the former.

Perhaps this is because of a natural tendency in syllabification to "maximize the onset." This just means that we try to put consonants at the beginning of a syllable if at all possible. So, rather than associate the "s" with the "n," which is at the *end* of a syllable, I associated the "s" with the "t" at the beginning of the next syllable.

Perhaps we should have left the hyphen in? Well, in this case it would have saved me the private embarrassment of finding out I was thinking of the syllables the wrong way, but on the other hand, I'm a big fan of dropping the pesky hyphens from all sorts of other words.

Banana lassi

A lassi is a yogurt drink popular in India. My husband and I consumed a lot of these while we were in India, particularly the banana flavor, since we were trying to prevent diarrhea. What's funny is the way that this phrase was pronounced by every waiter we ordered  them from. The "a" sounds are all pronounced with the same vowel sound and with the same emphasis, so that you hear "bah-nah-nah-lah-see" and not "buh NAN uh LAH see." The Indian pronunciation sounded amusingly rhythmic to me.

cathedral

The etymology of this word took me completely by surprise. I heard that in Spain, "un catedrático" is something like a tenured professor, or a professor in a chaired position. So then I thought, well, the word "cathedral" must be related to "chair" somehow. And, in fact, it is! I am thoroughly familiar with Greek poly + hedra, but this is the first time I had run across kata + hedra. In both cases, "hedra" is a flat surface or seat (going back further, hedra is related to "sed-" as in "sedentery"). "Kata" means down. So a cathedral is a place where you sit down. Well, a cathedral is really only your seat if you're a bishop.

Words that have taken on an odd role in my personal lexicon

I'm ensconced. = I'm curled up comfortably with a book; you get the phone.
I'm going to investigate the salad bar. = I'm going to go look at, explore, consider, learn more about, the salad bar.
I've been thwarted. = I tried to do something, but there was some kind of problem that prevented me.
I'm digesticating. = I'm full, I'm digesting, and I don't want to do anything that requires a lot of thought or a lot of movement, or, I just ate and I don't know or haven't decided what to do next.
Brilliant. = Boy, was that dumb.
We hates it. = We hate it.
Encrustulated = A description of dishes too-long ignored.
I'm sleepifying = I'm slipping on the sleepy slope.
Lotionate = When my hands get too dry, I have to lotionate them.

Favorite words and phrases

obfuscate (as in, eschew obfuscation, or the Obfuscated Perl [Programming] Contest)
anathema (like Kryptonite to Superman, only with a religious rather than comic book flavor)
intrepid
richly caparisoned
sufficient, insufficient, sufficiently, insufficiently
intrepid
salient
seldom (people almost never use this word)
telos, teleology
obtain (used intransitively)

Oliver Sutton

My high school calculus textbook had word problems with goofy names. If you say them fast, they sound like some phrase. Like this one, which sounds like "all of a sudden." Especially if pronounced by a calculus teacher with a British accent!

College students abbreviate everything

Where I went to college, the humanities classes were called "hume" classes, the social science classes were called "soash" classes, the biology classes were called "bio" classes, and the chemistry classes were called "chem" classes. In my fourth year, they opened a convenience store in a building called Bartlett. They called this store Bartlett Market. But someone thought of a shorter name almost immediately. We called it "The Bart Mart."

Negative concord

This is the name for what's happening in the sentence "I didn't buy nothing." This type of sentence was standard--or if not "standard," normal-- in Old English, as are analogous sentences in other languages today. Spanish is an obvious example: "Yo no compré nada." At some point, academics decided that this didn't make sense, and insisted that people change their speech. They did. We are the result.

Leisurely

It annoys me to no end that this is an adjective and an adverb. The adverb should be "leisurelyly" if the adjective is "leisurely". But that's an odd ending for an adjective to have in the first place. Grrr.

On the tip of my tongue

I was looking for a word to describe how people who are not programmers might characterize programming. Here are the ones I thought of:

Abstruse
Ethereal
Obfuscated
Inaccessible
Unintelligible
Rarefied
Mysterious
Unapproachable

The one I finally seized upon, the one I had been searching for, was "esoteric".

"Stuff" vs. "things"

Countable vs. noncountable nouns. Code is stuff. Lines of code are things.

Funny spam subject lines

Recently I received a wave of spam messages that had randomized subject lines designed to fool spam filters. Now, I hate spam as much as the next person, but you have to admit, some of these phrases are hilarious. In my mind I can easily can picture them, illustrated, in a series of surreal comic strips...

He do resin doughnut insensitivity geeky convulse so a monk My sentry by cacophony twister well-intentioned her compassionate in euphrates cool unfavorable institution idly trawl notoriety scholar banality stunk lend trooper tassel whiskers noble fumigation adverbial developing eel rewrote dishtowel fuzz estimated freeze-dried beacon Are combinatorial it typographer It is the cheesy way. pitch atrociously surly traffic light irreconcilable cowboy mitochondrial mastadon fashionable paper napkin friendly pit viper pathetic grain of sand ravishing industrial complex friendly garbage can revered taxidermist earn more darling turkey Eurasian ocean darling traffic light sublime mirror spartan power drill salty nation so-called buzzard ghastly widow radioactive stovepipe unsightly dolphin niggardly guardian angel revered burglar dirt-encrusted scythe familiar haunch mysterious mirror South American lunatic highly paid clodhopper gingerly cowboy elusive hydrogen atom load bearing mating ritual frustrating fundraiser vaporized alchemist phony tuba player revered tomato snooty scythe cosmopolitan power drill dreamlike fire hydrant fuzz estimated freeze-dried beacon Are combinatorial it typographer It is the cheesy way. pitch atrociously Go maladaptive it mimic He do resin doughnut insensitivity geeky convulse so a monk developing eel rewrote dishtowel At my module Or bootstrap my calf saucer protein No madmen no jacobus Or cylinder by prestidigitate And metronome at baritone As cautionary himself molal Is implicit on customary powerful jackknife beef a la carte

massive denunciation exceedingly bare properly playful dependent her respiratory everything redcoat you carbondale because quantity Not those business The rhea of pyracanth mucous removal To yourselves proven At my module Or bootstrap my calf saucer protein No madmen no jacobus Or cylinder by prestidigitate And metronome at baritone As cautionary himself molal Is implicit on customary powerful jackknife beef a la carte aircraft carrier ambitiously Go maladaptive it mimic  fried marzipan wrinkled swamp wrinkled bullfrog curmudgeonly lunatic revered snow dreamlike blood clot false cup Alaskan support group Huh? psychotic dilettante gratifying bubble flabby nation slovenly pig pen comely wheelbarrow dreamlike cleavage wrinkled haunch hairy alchemist comely coward irreconcilable asteroid magnificent ribbon temporal graduated cylinder lowly tomato alleged bubble bath fractured nation frozen dolphin likeable girl apologetic adrenal alight surly tornado optimal hand halfhearted insurance agent unsightly pocket bohemian inferiority complex revered trombone childlike ballerina slow garbage can linguistic trombone curmudgeonly guardian angel My sentry by cacophony twister well-intentioned her compassionate in euphrates cool unfavorable institution idly trawl notoriety scholar banality stunk lend trooper tassel whiskers noble fumigation adverbial massive denunciation exceedingly bare properly playful dependent her respiratory everything redcoat you carbondale because quantity Not those business The rhea of pyracanth mucous removal To yourselves proven aircraft carrier ambitiously

Chi tocca muore

This takes top prize for expressive succintness. It's Italian, and it means "he [who] touches dies." This phrase appears on actual signs to keep people from approaching electrified stuff. I might have a picture, but I'm not sure.

"far from is"

From page 2 of Summer Switch by Mary Rodgers:
"We live in New York (the we being me, my sister, my mother, my father, and
Max the basset)--on 72nd and Central Park West. No, not the Dakota; across
the street from the Dakota. Funny, whenever you tell people you live on 72nd
and C.P.W., they always ask expectantly, "Oh, the Dakota?" and then when you
say, "No, the Majestic, across the street," they say, "Oh." That's all. Just
"Oh." Thud. You'd think we lived in a slum dwelling or something, which the
Majestic far from is."

Nervous-making

This should be a word too. Does English have an adjective for describing something that causes nervousness?

Antidestroyificationary

This should be a word. It means something or some process that keeps something from being destroyed.

Prove it!

You can prove something and you can improve something, but can you deprove something? Er, no. The word is disimprove. (But no one uses it -- even my spell check is skeptical.)

Krystallos

This is the Greek word used to describe quartz crystal. It's ironic that the word crystal is used to refer to fine glassware, since glass is an amorphous solid with no crystalline molecular structure at all. I think when I was a kid I used to believe that crystal goblets were made out of rock, out of something that had to be carved, not something that could be melted. This double use of the word crystal is to blame . . .

Liger; Tigon

These words describe actual animals; animals born through the cross-breeding of tigers and lions!

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

This saying originated with the French, and has been traced back to the early 1500's. In the United States, this idiom was made popular by the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem, The Student's Tale.
--This information is from a page I found here.

Tout vient a celui qui sait attendre.
(Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.)
Rabelais, Pantagruel, bk 4, ch. 48 (1548).
--This information is from a page I found here.

"He that has patience may compass anything." An English translation of the passage from Pantagruel. The passage deals with some travelers who become popular in a small town because they have seen the Pope; the statement is humorous.
--This information is from a page I found here.

In his poem "The Student's Tale" from Tales of a Wayside Inn, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made popular the oft-used idiom "All good things come to those who wait." Verbatim wording: "All things come round to him who will but wait."
--This information is from a page I found here.

The Longfellow poem is about a man, Ser Federigo, whose only friend is a falcon, because the woman he wooed married someone else. When she is a widow, her son gets sick and asks her to give him Ser Federigo's falcon. She goes to his house to ask for it, but he kills the falcon to provide her with a meal. Her son dies and she marries Ser Federigo. If you ask me, this is a total tragedy. I much prefer the comedic Rabelais.
--This information is from a page I found here.

English on Signs

The English we put on signs, in our efforts to be concise, tends to wind up being wrong. [More to come.]

Simpsons Words

There's a lot that can be learned if you dissect neologisms from The Simpsons. I suggest you browse through Wikipedia's list.

Troll

I know how to describe the real-world use of this word: it's a bit like "wander seeking something." An example is, "Yesterday I was trolling around the mall looking for a birthday present for my friend." There's also the literal meaning of "go fishing." I now also am familiar with the online message-board-related use. "Trolling" on a message board means picking a fight (starting a flame war). This usage seemed completely disjoint from the friendly wandering usage I've always known and loved. But wait, wandering seeking is a bit like fishing. And baiting fish is a bit like baiting users in message boards. I get it now.

Traipse

This is a word I know how to use, but can't really explain. So I looked it up. It means: For a person or people to move through an area in an oblivious, unwelcome fashion. Apparently means tramp, trample, tread, may be related to tresspass. Or 'to walk aimlessly or idly'. Etymology seems to be unknown, but may be related to: French trappasser 'to pass over or beyond'.

Imbricate

The book New Times in Modern Japan sprinkles this word (and also the word "temporality") throughout the text. I had no idea what it meant. I had never read or heard this word before. And guess why? Because it's an obscure word!

Driving vs driven (conducive)

I had a dream in which someone Hispanic was asking me what the difference was between "driving" and "driven." Here it is.

Driving is the present participle of drive. Used as a verb associated with automobile, it means, I am in the process of driving: estoy manejando.

Driven is the past participle of drive. Used as a verb associated with automobile, it means, I have driven there once: he manejado. No n.

But you can also use these words as adjectives. I went out in the driving rain. Driven people often succeed. This introduces another meaning of drive: drive in the sense of push, empujar. It can be a physical push or a metaphorical push.

Rain

I imagine the word rain started as a noun, since nouns are, conceptually, easy to identify in reality and give names to. (You can't see "think", or even "kick", or draw it easily, and words such as "and" are even more abstract grammatically.) So we start with someone naming the wet stuff falling out of the sky, as distinct from the wet stuff in puddles or streams on the ground. But then, since it is the distinctive property of rain to fall, rain becomes a verb. Usually a verb with no obvious subject: it's raining. We don't say he rains, or even nature rains. It rains. Period. But then, lots of things can fall from the sky: rain became a more versatile word, used not only in the case of water, but in the case of leaves, pinecones, rocks and other things that fall from above. More abstractly, rain even came to mean "converge on, directed voluminously towards", as in, a rain of compliments. And people got really imaginative and were able even to speak of a rain of fire! This, to me, really highlights what conceptualization does over time. From the once entirely literally-minded "water falling from sky," now we can conjure up something that's not water at all, that used to be, and sometimes still is, considered the absolute opposite of water.

And where do rein and reign come in? Probably they're totally separate. But English makes them sound like they're related.

Stool pigeon

Look up the origin of this phrase online. I was surprised.

Favorite word

One of my favorite words is "insidious".  Look it up!  Even the etymology is cool. Here are some quotations containing it.

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little. ---Ray Bradbury

That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. ---Elizabeth Wurtzel

Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor. ---Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Away! Away! Tempt me no more insidious love. ---Mark Akenside

Collecting quotations is an insidious, even embarrassing habit, like ragpicking or hoarding rocks or trying on other people's laundry.  ---Robert Byrne, The Other 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, "Sources, References, and Notes," 1984

Emphasis and semantics

record (n.) is RE-cord.
record (v.) is re-CORD.
Can you think of other pairs?

Chain of islands

I didn't think it was a hard word.  I can't remember getting it wrong.  But recently, I have heard the word "archipelago" butchered by half a dozen people!  C'mon, say it:  ark-ih-PEL-uh-go.  Not ark-ih-pel-LAH-go.  The ante-penultimate syllable has the stress.

Speaking of foreign profs...

My Russian calculus teacher managed to mystify us all by saying "python" (the name of the snake, also a programming language) as "pee-THON" instead of "PIE-thon".

Speaking of matrices...

Because French does not have stressed pronunciation like English does, speakers of French have a hard time learning how to pronounce English words correctly: they can't even hear where the stress is falling.  So, they put the emPHAsis on the wrong syLLAble more often than not.  I was able to witness and record this phenomenon, due to having a native French speaker as an economics professor.  One of his funnier errors was that he said "triangle" as "tree-AHN-gul".   But the poor belabored word "matrices" always came out "mattresses". 

Plurals by analogy

index     ->   indices
appendix  ->   appendices
matrix    ->   matrices
kleenex   ->   kleenices

English is hard

I have never seen a paragraph of English with a greater density of idiomatic content and jargon than this.  Way to go, Marketing Department.

In line 1, "cheap" means "inexpensive" but also "of poor quality".  Oooo, clever pun.

In line 2, we see the slang phrase "all that".  One wonders, "all that what?"  Also a reference to inches, which are only used in the US and the UK.  The word Apple in this line is a brand name, not a fruit.

In line 3, we see the phrase "small wonder", which can also mean "it is not surprising".  We also see the idiomatic phrase "from the ground up", meaning "thoroughly", or "starting at the most basic foundations".  The word "deliver" is not used in its most literal sense, the way the postman delivers the mail.  "Mac" is used as a quantity - it is something that you can get some, more, or most of.

In line 4, we see the Spanish word "dinero" used as a slang term for money.  We also see the French word "petite" used to mean "small", with, perhaps, a connotation of "delicate".  Then we have more references to inches.

In line 5, it is assumed either that we know and care what anodized means, or that we will be impressed by it anyway.  We see here the American spelling of the metal "aluminum", which the British spell with an 'extra' I-vowel: "aluminium".  Enclosure here is high-falutin' language for "box".  Again we see the brand name Mac, which itself is short for Macintosh, which is what a company named Apple Computer decided to name one of its projects, since Macintosh is a popular variety of the kind of apple you eat.  "Mini" the noun is, I'm pretty sure, a new form based on "mini-" the prefix.  "Houses" is not the plural of domicile, but rather a present tense third person singular verb.  Then we get into computer numerology and abbreviations, starting with "1.25 or 1.42GHz".  GHz stands for Giga Hertz, where Giga is the SI prefix meaning billion.  (In Back to the Future, it is pronounced Jig-a rather than Gig-a!)  Here, it might mean  1,073,741,824 since computer specifications are usually binary numbers (sums of powers of 2).  Hertz is a measure of frequency equivalent to one cycle per second.  That's still pretty opaque. 

In line 6, we're supposed to know what kind of processor a G4 is, assuming we know what a processor is to begin with.  Then we're supposed to be happy about a 40 or 80GB hard drive.  Here's that G for "Giga", but what's the B?  It stands for Byte.  What's a Byte?  8 bits.  What's a bit?  A little tiny circuit that can be on or off, zero or one.  Okay... so a hard drive is a bunch of bits.  Lots and lots of them.  (What's hard and what's driving, though?)  Then we hit another kind of drive: a slot-loading CD-R/DVD-ROM optical drive.  CD's are compact discs, but what's the R?  DVDs are Digital  Video Discs, but what's the ROM?  How does it compare with the R?  There's more but we won't go there.

In line 7, what does the word "optical" mean when referring to the drive?  Assuming we know that RAM is "memory" and maybe that it stands for "Random Access Memory" (and that it is not to be confused with hard drive space), how much is 256MB, what does "DDR" mean, and what's that "SD" stuck on the front of "RAM"?  Moving on, what is an "ATI Radeon 9200 graphics chip"?

In line 8, why does the graphics "chip" (I thought computers had graphics cards) need 32MB of that... stuff to itself?  Well, who cares what all that stuff is, so long as it's all "whisper-quiet"!  I'd never buy a machine that was "shout-loud", would you?

Backformation!

This is a term used to describe certain words formed by analogy.  One fascinating example is the modern verb "destruct."  It has gained respectable ground in technical vocabulary when used to describe something which will destroy itself upon malfunctioning or after a countdown, i.e., something which will "self-destruct."  However, there was already a verb, folks, and that verb is "destroy."  From "destroy" we get "destruction."  And from that we get the new verb "destruct."  This is how backformation works.  Whether it is "valid" in any given case is up for debate, but it certainly shows how versatile language is.

Japanese R=L joke

Have you ever seen the movie UHF with 'Weird Al' Yankovic?  There's a scene where some guys jump out of a closet.  They yell something we expect to be "Surprise!" but is actually "Supplies!" since it's a supplies closet they're jumping out of.  This is typical of how speakers of some languages, particularly Japanese, fail to differentiate between r's and l's in English.  It's also really funny in this particular juxtaposition.

Visit this website: www.engrish.com

I love it. It's very professional, very funny, and it has everything to do with language and linguistics. The Japanese just can't get English right sometimes. One reason is that Japanese products often feature English as a design feature, and as such, nobody really cares what the English says, or whether it says whatever it says correctly. Another reason the English is wrong is that the Japanese can't hear the difference between an R and an L. That sounds funny to your average American. They're totally different letters, aren't they? But to someone who has taken a class in phonetics (or Japanese, for that matter, and I've taken both), it is obvious that these two letters could be confused. The sounds are produced in a similar fashion, and the Japanese language doesn't really contain either one, but a sound which is more or less in-between the two. English becomes Engrish.  Rocks becomes Locks.  Here's my favorite example of this phenomenon, and of engrish.com's great captions.  Another favorite example of Engrish is "No smorking in building." That phrase is even sold on an engrish.com t-shirt! I want one! Let's shopping!

Change one letter:

The Washington Post ran a contest (in July 1998) in which they asked readers to submit words with subtle changes along with new definitions.  The results have been long gone from the Washington Post website, but have been circulating in other places on the Internet.  Here's where to read more: For a website with the original credits, click here. Or search the web for one or more of the following "words": intaxication, reintarnation, dopeler effect.

Unfortunately:

Try thinking up a normal-sounding sentence that uses the adverb "unfortunately" to modify a verb. This word commonly modifies a whole sentence, as in, "Unfortunately, it rained on his birthday."  Sentence adverbs are not, strictly speaking, "correct" in English.  The word "hopefully" gets picked on frequently for being a sentence adverb.  I'm told that sentence adverbs seeped into English from German (which allows sentence adverbs) when many German-speakers migrated to the US. 

How would you punctuate the following?

Try thinking up a normal-sounding sentence that uses the adverb "unfortunately" to modify a verb (rather than a sentence, as in, "Unfortunately, it rained on his birthday.").

I don't want to leave off the final period, because it isn't obvious that the period after birthday would close the "try thinking" clause, but I don't want to leave off the period after birthday, because then I wouldn't feel like I was succeeding in quoting the whole sentence as I intend. But a period followed by an endquote followed by a close paren followed by ANOTHER period looks truly awful.

I think the first period would have to go, but I'd be unhappy about that. I didn't like the example in Einsohn on page 77, because it looks to me like there's a period missing after "Secure tab A". Here's Einsohn's example, which I expect reveals the answer to my question:

The terse instructions ("Place tab A into slot B. Secure tab A") were not helpful.

Rather than leave off the period after "birthday", however, I would probably rephrase the original:

Try thinking up a normal-sounding sentence that uses the adverb "unfortunately" to modify a verb. This word commonly modifies a whole sentence, as in, "Unfortunately, it rained on his birthday."

This is the version I settled on, as you can see above.

Different as day and night...

It occurred to me one day to wonder where in the world the French word jour, meaning "day", came from.  It doesn't bear much resemblance to the Latin, dies.  I looked it up in the OED, which says the following:

[OF. and F. jour:L. diurnum neut. sing. (used in pop. L. as n.) of diurnus of or pertaining to the day, f. dies day.]

If that looks "Greek" to you, then, here's what it says, approximately: The word jour comes to English (as in, soup du jour) from French; came to French from Old French; and came to Old French from Latin.  In particular, it came from the neuter singular Latin adjective diurnum.  This adjective is derived from the feminine singular Latin noun dies, meaning, of course, day. 

Although I had almost convinced myself that jour must have belonged to an indigenous Gallic language, apparently, it IS from a Latin root! The "diur" in "diurnum" must have become "jour". That makes a lot more sense than "dies" becoming "jour".  Phonetically, "deeyur" is somewhat similar to "zhoor" whereas "dee-ays" is not.

Odd, but it didn't occur to me to wonder where the Italian giorno came from until long after I'd resolved the problem of jour.  But Italian is eminently similar to Latin, so I should have guessed that, the pesky initial consonant notwithstanding, both jour and giorno are indeed romance words...

Remember that English word diurnal?  Opposite of nocturnal?  When I was a kid I always thought the "di" meant two, somehow.  (This seemed plausible, since there are two halves of the day, the day half and the night half.)  But no, "di" is just part of the Latin word for day.

Pet Peeve

Using "if" to mean "whether", as in, "I don't know if it's going to rain tonight."  Rule of thumb: if you can insert a "then" into your sentence, you want to use "if".  If you can insert "or not" or just "or" into your sentence, you want to use "whether".  End of story.