By: Lizzie Furey,
on 10/5/2016
As usual, let me offer my non-formulaic, sincere thanks for the comments, additions, questions, and corrections. I have a theory that misspellings are the product of sorcery, as happened in my post on the idiom catch a crab (in rowing). According to the routine of many years, I proofread my texts with utmost care.
The post Etymology gleanings for September 2016 appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Lizzie Furey,
on 9/28/2016
Caution is a virtue, but, like every other virtue, it can be practiced with excessive zeal and become a vice (like parsimony turning into stinginess). The negative extreme of caution is cowardice.
The post The origin of the word SLANG is known! appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 12/16/2015
In their search for the origin of blunt, etymologists roamed long and ineffectually among similar-sounding words and occasionally came close to the sought-for source, though more often look-alikes led them astray. One of such decoys was Old Engl. blinn. Blinn and blinnan meant “cessation” and “to cease” respectively, but how can “cease” and “devoid of sharpness; obtuse” be related?
The post Blunted purpose: The origin of BLUNT, Part 2 appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Connie Ngo,
on 7/2/2015
Jonathan Green, an expert lexicographer and contributor to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, gives us the rundown of the sweet terms and phrases that have been re-imagined and incorporated into slang.
The post Going sour: sweet words in slang appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 12/17/2014
One of the dialogues in Jonathan Swift’s work titled A complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1738) runs as follows:
Neverout: Why, Miss, you are in a brown study, what’s the matter? Methinks you look like mumchance, that was hanged for saying nothing.
Miss: I’d have you know, I scorn your words.
Neverout: Well, but scornful dogs will eat dirty puddings.
Miss: My comfort is, your tongue is no slander. What! you would not have one be always on the high grin?
Neverout: Cry, Mapsticks, Madam; no Offence, I hope.
This is a delightfully polite conversation and a treasure house of idioms. To be in a brown study occupies a place of honor in my database of proverbial sayings (see a recent post on it). I am also familiar with scornful dogs will eat dirty puddings, but high grin made me think only of the high beam (and just for the record: mumchance is an old game of dice or “a dull silent person”). But what was Neverout trying to say at the end of the genteel exchange (see the italicized phrase)?
The first correspondent to Notes and Queries who wrote on the subject—and the problem was being thrashed out in the pages of Notes and Queries—suggested that it means “I ask pardon, I apologize for what I have said” (4 October 1856). Two weeks later, it was pointed out that mapsticks is a variant of mop-sticks, but no explanation followed this gloss. When fourteen years, rather than fourteen days, passed, someone sent another query to the same journal (8 May 1880), which ran as follows: “Like death on a mop-stick. How did this saying originate? I have heard it used by an old lady to describe her appearance on recovery from a long illness.” Joseph Wright did not miss the phrase and included it in his English Dialect Dictionary. His gloss was “to look very miserable.” Although the letter writer who used the pseudonym Mervarid and asked the question did not indicate where she lived, Wright located the saying in Warwickshire (the West Midlands). We will try to decipher the idiom and find out whether there is any connection between it and Swift’s mapsticks ~ mopsticks.
As could be expected, the OED has an entry on mopstick. The first citation is dated 1710 (from Swift!). In it the hyphenated mop-sticks means exactly what it should (a stick for a mop). The next one is from Genteel Conversation. Swift’s use of the word in 1738 received this comment: “Prob[ably] a humorous alteration of ‘I cry your mercy’.” This repeats the 1856 suggestion. After the Second World War, a four-volume supplement to the OED was published. The updated version of the entry contains references to the dialectal use of mopstick, a synonym for “leap-frog,” and includes such words pertaining to the game as Jack upon the mopstick and Johnny on the mopstick (the mopstick is evidently the player over whose back the other player is jumping), along with a single 1886 example of mopstick “idiot” (slang). The supplement did not discuss the derivation of the words included in the first edition. By contrast, the OED online pays great attention to etymology; yet mopstick has not been revised. I assume that no new information on its origin has come to light. In 1915 mopstick was used for “one who loafs around a cheap or barrel house and cleans the place for drinks” (US). This is a rather transparent metaphor. Mop would have been easier to understand than mopstick, but mopstick “idiot” makes it clear that despised people could always be called this. Johnny on the mopstick also refers to the inferior status of the player bending down. The numerous annotated editions of Swift’s works contain no new hypotheses; at most, they quote the OED.
I cannot explain the sentence in Genteel Conversation, but a few ideas occurred to me while I was reading the entries in the dictionaries. To begin with, I agree that Swift’s mapsticks is a variant of mopsticks, though it would be good to understand why Swift, who had acquired such a strong liking for mopsticks and first used the form with an o, chose a less obvious dialectal variant with an a. Second, I notice that the 1738 text has a comma between cry and mapsticks (Cry, Map-sticks, Madam…). Nearly all later editions probably take this comma for a misprint and therefore expunge it. Once the strange punctuation disappears, we begin to worry about the idiom cry mopsticks. However, there is no certainty that it ever existed, the more so because the sentence in the text does not end with an exclamation mark. Third, mopstick, for which we have no written evidence before 1710, is current in children’s regional names of leapfrog, and this is a sure sign of its antiquity (games tend to preserve local and archaic words for centuries). A mopstick is not a particularly interesting object, yet in 1886 it turned up with the sense “idiot” in a dictionary of dialectal slang. Finally, to return to the question asked above, to look like death on a mopstick means “to look miserable,” and we have to decide whether it sheds light on Swift’s usage or whether Swift’s usage tells us something about the idiom.
I think Swift’s bizarre predilection for mopsticks goes back to the early years of the eighteenth century. In 1701 he wrote a parody called A Meditation upon a Broomstick (the manuscript was stolen, and an authorized edition could be brought out only in 1711). It seems that after Swift embarked on his “meditation” and the restitution of the manuscript broomsticks never stopped troubling him. At some time, he may have learned either the word mopstick “idiot” (perhaps in its dialectal form mapstick) and substituted mopstick ~ mapstick for broomstick; a broomstick became to him a symbol of human stupidity. To be sure, mopstick “idiot” surfaced only in 1886, but such words are often recorded late and more or less by chance, in glossaries and in “low literature.”
Swift hated contemporary slang. The last sentence in the quotation given above (Cry, mapsticks, Madam; no offence, I hope) seems to mean “I cry—d–n my foolishness!—Madam…”). The form mapsticks is reminiscent of fiddlesticks, another plural and also an exclamation. The dialectal (rustic) variant with a different vowel (map for mop) could have been meant as an additional insult. If I am right, the comma after cry remains, while the idiom cry mapsticks, along with its reference to cry mercy, joins many other ingenious but unprovable conjectures.
The phrase to look like death on a mopstick has, I believe, nothing to do with Swift’s usage. In some areas, mopstick probably served as a synonym of broomstick, and broomsticks are indelibly connected in our mind with witches and all kinds of horrors. Here a passage from still another letter to Notes and Queries deserves our attention.
“Fifty years ago [that is, in 1830] I recollect an amusement of our boyish days was scooping out a turnip, cutting three holes for eyes and mouth, and putting a lighted candle-end inside from behind. A stake or old mop-stick was then pointed with a knife and stuck into the bottom of the turnip, and a death’s head [hear! hear!] with eyes of fire was complete. Sometimes a stick was tied across it, to make it ghostly and ghastly….”
Those who have observed decorations at Halloween will feel quite at home. The recovering lady looked like death on a mopstick, and we now understand exactly what she meant. In 1880 the letter writer (Mr. Gibbes Rigaud) resided in Oxford. Oxfordshire is next door to Warwickshire, and of course we do not know where our “heroes” spent their childhood.
Image credits: Witch, CC0 via Pixabay. Kittens, public domain via Project Gutenberg.
The post Moping on a broomstick appeared first on OUPblog.
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By: Diana Hurwitz,
on 12/11/2014
By: Alice,
on 10/8/2014
Continued from “Bimonthly etymology gleanings for August and September 2014. Part 1″…
A correspondent cited a few tentative etymologies of English words.
I am sorry to disappoint our correspondent, but such haphazard comparisons should be abandoned. To discover the origin of old words, one has to compare their most ancient attested forms. For example, kauen always had a diphthong, while cow has its late diphthong from a long monophthong that once sounded like Modern Engl. oo (compare German Kuh). And so it goes. On the more intuitive level, one should realize that, if a word has baffled professional scholars for centuries, the most tempting solutions have probably been offered and rejected. By the way, the Dutch compound for “bride and bridegroom” is bruidspaar, not brudespaar; the word has nothing to do with brooding.
Another correspondent wrote that the Russian word for “kiss” also means “to aim.” Whoever suggested this connection seems to have confused the Russian words tsel “whole” (discussed in the post on kissing) and tsel’ “aim.” The sign l’ stands for palatalized (or “soft”) l; where the transliteration has an apostrophe Russian has a special letter (the so-called miagkii znak). Tsel is an old word, while tsel’ is a borrowing of German Ziel “aim” (more precisely, Middle High German), via Polish.
Still another correspondent wonders whether the noun chapbook and the verb tucker (out) “to tire, to weary” can be of Hindi origin. I think chapbook has such a transparent English derivation that it does not merit further discussion. Tucker is probably a frequentative of tuck, like very many verbs of this structure. There is no denying the fact that our correspondent cited Hindi words that have both the form and the meaning closely corresponding to chapbook and tucker. But, as I have written many times while answering similar questions, the fact of borrowing can be ascertained only if we succeed in showing how a foreign word reached English (compare the history of thug, which is indeed from Hindi, or other examples cited in the great book Hobson-Jobson). Was tucker used mainly by Hindi speakers? Do we have any proof that this verb spread from their community? Only a detailed investigation along such lines can sound convincing. Otherwise, we will stay with kauen ~ cow and their likes.
Wise restraint. An old colleague of mine wrote in connection with my post on roil.
“Honoré de Balzac published in 1842 a novel called La Rabouilleuse. The title name is explained as being a word local to the Berry region of France where a young girl is employed to stir up the mud in a stream, thus clouding the water and permitting a fisherman to more readily catch crayfish (crawfish?). One can easily see the way the word is formed: the verb bouillir “boil” plus a reduplicating prefix ra- and a feminine agent suffix. Now the verb rabouillir or some variant of it might fit in with roil both with some phonemes and the meaning.”
The author of the letter did not suggest any solution, and I think he was right to do so. The coincidence looks like being due to chance.
Every now and then I run into publications that would have come in most useful in my earlier posts and comments. But it is never too late to pick up even the oldest chestnuts. For instance, I have challenged the supporters of they ~ them in sentences like when a student comes, I never make them wait to give examples that are really old. Almost nothing has turned up. But here are two more phenomena that have aroused some interest among our readers.
Split infinitive. It would seem that passionate, as opposed to rational, splitting set in several decades ago, and the construction I called to be or to not be conquered the ugly day. Roswitha Fischer’s article on the split infinitive appeared in 2007; however, I read it only this summer. Among many other examples, she quoted Wycliffe: “It is good for to not ete fleisch and for to not drynke wyn” (ca. 1382). I do not follow Wycliffe’s recommendation but in defense of his grammar should say that with for to he had nowhere else to put the negation. I am sure everybody will remember: “Simple Simon went a-fishing, / For to catch a whale.” Nowadays, for to, an analog of German um zu, is dead, except in some dialects.
One… his. We have been taught to say one…one’s. But people keep correlating one with his (now probably their; see above). In The Nation for 1921 I found a letter to the editor from Steven T. Byington (Ballard Vale, Massachusetts) with the funny title Four Centuries of Onehese. The writer quoted five sentences with one—his. I’ll reproduce only the relevant part of them:
Among other things, the letter discusses the utterance: “One oughtn’t never take nothing that ain’t theirn.” I suspect that in the great books on English grammar by Jespersen, Poutsma, and Curme many more examples of the one… his type will be found. A certain Markman, a friend of James Steerforth’s, “always spoke of himself indefinitely as a ‘man’, and seldom or never in the first person singular” (David Copperfield, Chapter 24 “My First Dissipation”). This way of speaking may help those who have trouble with one.
Also in The Nation, this time for 1922, I found a more than enthusiastic review by Clement Wood of Carl Sandburg’s fourth book of poetry Slabs of the Sunburnt West. In the opening paragraph, Wood expressed his delight about Sandburg’s use of slang. I ran the list by my undergraduate students. Here it is: humdinger, flooey, *phizzogs, fixers, frame-up, *four-flushers, rakeoff, getaway, junk, *fliv, fake, come clean, gabby mouth, *hoosegow, *teameo, *work plug, lovey, slew him in, bull, jazz, scab, booze, stiffs, hanky-pank, hokum, bum, and buddy.
The words that no one recognized are given above with an asterisk. I knew more. However, some of them I knew by chance. For instance, long ago, a bookstore near our main campus closed its doors. It began to sell its stock at a small discount, but every two days the prices went down. The only books that no one wanted to take even when they were free were those by American poets. I grabbed the entire batch and read everything. In this rather dubious treasure trove, I discovered Sandburg, read his poem called Phizzogs, and looked up the word. It has never occurred in my reading since that day. In my work, I have dealt with synonyms for “prison,” so that hoosegow was quite familiar to me. I also knew fliv, but the word is forgotten. This is what I expected, for once I tried the same experiment with jitney and drew blank, while people of my age recognized it immediately. If I had run into a poker player, such a person would have had no trouble identifying four-flushers. Fixers, bull, work plug, slew him in, and stiffs look transparent, but without the context it is impossible to decide their exact meaning. We of course guessed that hanky-pank is a back formation on hanky-panky.
My students say that, when they watch movies of the fifties, they do not understand the slang used there, while their parents are in the dark when it comes to the slang of their children. On the other hand, the words given in bold in my list are today so familiar that no one would have referred to them as particularly striking. One should take into consideration that, to know one’s language, one has to read the literature written in it. It is curious to follow the modern annotations of Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair. Both Dickens and Thackeray used slang quite generously, and the commentators assume that no one understands it today. Perhaps they are right.
I still have some questions unanswered and will take care of them at the end of October.
Image credits: (1) Photograph of Carl Sandburg, 1947. Library of Congress. (2) Sandburg book cover via Booklikes.
The post Bimonthly etymology gleanings for August and September 2014. Part 2 appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 10/2/2014
Slang is in a constant state of reinvention. The evolution of language is a testament to our world’s vast and complex history; words and their meanings undergo transformations that reflect a changing environment such as urbanization. In The Vulgar Tongue: Green’s History of Slang, Jonathon Green extensively explores the history of English language slang from the early British beggar books and traces it through to modernity. He defends the importance of a versatile vocabulary and convinces us that there is dose of history in every syllable of slang and that it is a necessary part of contemporary English, no matter how explicit or offensive the content may be. Test your knowledge…how well do you know your history of slang?
Headline image credit: Explosion. CC0 via Pixabay.
The post Do you have a vulgar tongue? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Maud Newton,
on 8/9/2014
In the past couple years my mom has taught me and reminded me of a few more of my Texan granny’s favorite expressions. Some highlights:
By: Diana Hurwitz,
on 7/11/2014
By: Sara Pinotti,
on 6/12/2014
Britain’s soldiers were singing about “hot stuff” more than 200 years before Donna Summer released her hit song of the same name in 1979. The true origins of martial ballads are often difficult to ascertain, but a song entitled “Hot Stuff” can be found in print by 1774. The 5 May edition of Rivington’s New York Gazetteer attributes the lyrics to sergeant Edward Bothwood of the 47th Regiment during the Seven Years War (1756-1763).
This text leaves little doubt that “hot stuff” held similar sexual connotations to its eighteenth-century crooners that it does today. Alluding to the famous generals on the battlefields of Quebec, the final verse describes the soldiers invading a French convent (or possibly a bawdy house, since the terms were synonymous among soldiers). The sexual element in “hot stuff” is abundantly clear:
With Monkton and Townshend, those brave Brigadiers,
I think we shall soon knock the town ‘bout their ears;
And when we have done with the mortars and guns,
If you please, madam Abbess, — a word with your Nuns:
Each soldier shall enter the Convent in buff,
And then, never fear, we will give them Hot Stuff.
The Oxford English Dictionary has not previously recognized the use of “hot stuff” as a term to denote sexual attractiveness in the mid eighteenth century; the earliest such usage claimed by the current edition only dates back to 1884 and I have alerted the editors of this earlier example.
William Hogarth, The March of the Guards to Finchley. (1749-1750); Oil on canvas. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Folklore anthologist Roy Palmer uncovered a reference to a pensioner’s wife who swore compulsively, yet was considered a good soul whose coarse language was simply an indelible imprint of army life. One of the most famous of these military wives, Christian Davies — who followed her husband disguised as a soldier and later traveled with the troops as a sutler — commented on an officers’ ability to “curse,” noting one particular lieutenant who “swore a round hand.”
Martial language went beyond swearing, however. Francis Grose proudly named “soldiers on the long march” as one of the “most classical authorities” in the preface of his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (first published in 1785). Having served in the army himself, Grose had first-hand knowledge of military slang. His dictionary referred to terms such as “hug brown bess” meaning “to carry a firelock, or serve as a private soldier;” “fogey” for “an invalid soldier;” and “Roman” for “a soldier in the foot guards, who gives up his pay to his captain for leave to work.”
Though Grose arguably provides the best evidence of military slang in the eighteenth century, other records offer hints. One soldier testified at the Old Bailey in 1756 that it was common for military men to use the term “uncle” to mean “pawnbroker,” for example. The contemporary resonance of terms like “hot stuff” and “fogey” are evidence that some, though not all, eighteenth-century soldiers’ patter eventually found its way into the civilian lexicon.
Francis Grose By D. O. Hill (Prof Wilson. Land of Burns. 1840) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Tim Cook’s exploration of the colourful idioms of the Canadian troops in the First World War suggests that they served simultaneously to distinguish the Canadians from the other British forces and to help a disparate body of recruits develop a unified identity that separated them from their civilian counterparts. Although many of his insights could be applied to other armies in other wars, Cook limits his observations of language to its role in helping soldiers “endure and make sense of the Great War.”
I would suggest, instead, that linguistic liberties are a common characteristic to all Anglo armies from the eighteenth century onward. More needs to be done to determine whether the phenomenon is broader in geographic and temporal scope, and to understand precisely why military culture tends to take this particular shape.
At the very least, the British soldiers singing bawdily about “hot stuff” in the mid-eighteenth century probably found their shared slang helped to bond them to one another. Language operated similar to the uniform in separating military men from civilians and transforming them into objects of fascination (both positive and negative). Set beside Donna Summer, these raucous soldiers take their proper place at the forefront of popular culture.
Jennine Hurl-Eamon is associate professor of History at Trent University, Canada. She has published several articles and book chapters on aspects of plebeian marriage and the interactions between the poorer classes and the lower courts. She is the author of three books, Gender and Petty Violence in London, 1680-1720 (2005), and Women’s Roles in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2010) and Marriage and the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century (OUP, 2014).
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Image credit: William Hogarth, The March of the Guards to Finchley. (1749-1750); Oil on canvas. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Francis Grose By D. O. Hill (Prof Wilson. Land of Burns. 1840). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The post Eighteenth-century soldiers’ slang: “Hot Stuff” and the British Army appeared first on OUPblog.
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By: Jodi Webb,
on 8/12/2012
(C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com
Visit WOW! Women On Writing for lively interviews and how-tos. Check out WOW!'s Classroom and learn something new. Find jobs on the Freelance Job Board. Enter the Quarterly Flash Fiction Contest. Open Now!
By: Kirsty,
on 11/17/2011
With the arrival of the new Muppet movie, Kermit, Miss Piggy, Beaker, and our other felt friends are everywhere. There’s no escaping Jim Henson’s creations, and few of us would want to (unless the movie happens to suck, which is doubtful, given the stewardship of Jason Segel, who showed major Muppet mojo in the heartbreaking and spit-taking Forgetting Sarah Marshall). It’s a good time to look at the history of the word Muppet, which has some meanings that would make the Swedish Chef bork with outrage.
Thanks to interviews with Muppet creator Jim Henson, we know Muppet is not a blend of marionette and puppet, though that theory has been appearing since 1959, just four years after Henson invented the crew, who appeared in pre-Sesame Street and Muppet Show fare such as commercials for Wilkins coffee. I love this part of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of Muppet: “Any of a number of humorously grotesque glove puppets.” That phrasing seems humorously grotesque itself, but if it helps a Martian understand a Muppet, I guess it’s worthwhile.
In the eighties, the word took on several meanings. Since 1983, a muppet has been “A lure made to resemble a young squid.” I don’t want to give my enemies (arch or mortal) any ideas, but since calamari is squid, I’m pretty sure this kind of muppet could lure me anywhere. In British prison slang, a muppet is “A prisoner with psychiatric problems; a vulnerable inmate liable to be bullied or harassed by others.” As this 1998 use shows, Muppets aren’t the only Henson creation to carry this meaning: “Their favourite targets are the fraggles, the nonces and the muppets. But anyone showing tell-tale signs of fear is a target for Britain’s jail bullies.”
A muppet can also be an idiot, though I have no idea why, since the Muppets are among the least idiotic members of the puppet community (Elmo excluded). However, this part of the OED’s definition sort of rings true: “someone enthusiastic but inept; a person prone to mishaps through naivety.” With the exception of curmudgeons (RIP Andy Rooney) such as Oscar, Statler, and Waldorf, the Muppets are brimming with optimism from their pieholes to their puppetholes. Green’s Dictionary of Slang also has examples of muppet meaning a child or a cop.
These Muppet meanderings are similar to the meanings smurf has taken on over the years. While most know Smurfs as blue elves with a disturbingly low female population, other smurfs or smurfers make smurf dope: blue crystal meth. A smurf is also “an inexperienced or short prison officer,” as Green’s puts it, and a gay man who’s youngish and blonde. Plus, smurf is one of the most awesome euphemisms for the f-word in the known universe, as seen in words like clustersmurf, mothersmurfer, ratsmurf, and fan-smurfing-tastic. If I didn’t know better, I’d think smurf has an acronymic origin, like fubar and milf. Despite the PG origin, something about smurf feels blue in the naughty sense.
When a word is as fun to say as Smurf or Muppet, there’s no stopping how people will use it. Now that the Muppets are back, who knows what this mega-appealing word will soon describe? I have no idea, but let me suggest a meaning, Urban Dictionary-style, that I’ve used and suspect others use: “A harmless, lovable person.” I used this sense when I called my friend Neil a Muppet a few years ago, as Neil was stuck giving a presentation that typically made students reach for pitchforks and torches. This pernicious presentation made presenters long for a force field, or at least student-proof chicken wire. In calling Neil a Muppet, I
By: Lauren,
on 8/5/2011
By Dennis Baron Matthew Engel is a British journalist who doesn't like Americanisms. The Financial Times columnist told BBC listeners that American English is an unstoppable force whose vile, ugly, and pointless new usages are invading England "in battalions." He warned readers of his regular FT column that American imports like truck, apartment, and movies are well on their way to ousting native lorries, flats, and films. Engel’s tirade against the American “faze, hospitalise, heads-up, rookie, listen up” and “park up” got several million page views
By: Lauren,
on 6/23/2011
I love bullshit.
Perhaps I should clarify. It’s not pure, unadulterated bullshit I enjoy (or even the hard-to-find alternative, adulterated bullshit). I agree with the great George Carlin, who said, “It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.” Hard to argue with that.
What I love is the enormous lexicon of words for bullshit and nonsense. Studies show they are all wonderful words. Piffle! Tommyrot! Poppycock! Truthiness! Balderdash! Rot! Crapola! Hogwash! Intellectual black holes! Using a vivid, meaty word like gobbledygook almost makes it worth dealing with gobbledygook itself. A few years ago in this very blog, I looked at some of these words.
Three years later, I’m older, wiser, and no less enamored of BS and all BS-like terms. This time, instead of looking at the origin stories of terms you already know, I’m going to share some terms I bet you don’t know: bullshit obscurities, some of which I’d never have found without the help of newly published sources, like Green’s Dictionary of Slang, the magnificent work of Mr. Slang, Jonathon Green. I implore you: give these words a home in your doomsday prophesies and cupcake recipes. They should be useful. You can never, ever have enough words for bullshit.
flummadiddle
Here’s a spin on flummery that would make Ned Flanders proud. Like flummery, flummadiddle (also spelled flummerdiddle and flummydiddle) has been used to mean either horsefeathers or something that would taste just as awful, as in this 1872 OED example: “Flummadiddle consists of stale bread, pork-fat, molasses, cinnamon, allspice, [etc.]; by the aid of these materials a kind of mush is made, which is baked in the oven and brought to the table hot and brown.” Mmm, mush. No wonder this diddly-fied version of flummery works so well when describing mushy thoughts and words, as in this 1854 use: “What does she want of any more flummerdiddle notions?” Bonus BS: this word is related to fadoodle and fairydiddle.
arkymalarky
One of my top five favorite BS words has always been malarkey, so I had at least two wordgasms when I found this variation in Green’s. Green spots two uses from the 1930’s and 40’s, both by Carl Sandberg, so this term might be an invention of his. Surely it deserves broader use, partly because it has the reduplication that makes jibber-jabber, mumbo-jumbo, and pishery-pashery such fitting words for fiddle-faddle. Yet another BS-y reduplicative term has a Shakespearian résumé: skimble-skamble appeared in Henry IV: “Such a deale of skimble scamble stuffe, As puts me from my faith.”
ackamarackus
Green notes that arkymalarky may be related to ackamarackus, which the OED defines as “Something regarded as pretentious nonsense; something intended to deceive; humbug.” Apparently, giving someone the old ackamarackus is like giving them the old okey-doke: a maneuver perfected by politicians and other flim-flammers.
donkey dust
This Massachusetts term—recorded in t
By: Maud Newton,
on 3/31/2011
Thanks to Jonathon Green’s magnificent three-volume Dictionary of Slang, which arrived yesterday compliments of Oxford University Press, I’ve already learned that the first recorded use of “bad shag” dates to 1788, that to “beat skin”* (1944) doesn’t mean what you think, you pervert, and that the term “dude” was once (1883) considered so offensive that “a vigorous Bloomington woman cowhided a clerical editor for calling her a dudess.” (Eternal disclosure.)
“Courage pills” (1933) are heroin in tablet form. “Coño,” a hometown favorite, gets an entry, as it should; you might want to look it up before you run out into the streets and start shouting it at people. As for “douchebag”: raise your hand if you’d like to see a usage shout-out to Alex Balk, circa TMFTML; has any single man in history worked as tirelessly, and as effectively, to restore an epithet to the lexicon, with so little recognition?
More to come — I’m still making my way through Volume 1 — but for now do read Colin MacCabe’s review for the New Statesman. An excerpt:
In these three volumes, Green has dared to put slang on the level of The Oxford English Dictionary, offering illustrative citations, arranged in historical order, for all of his headings and subheadings.
Such a venture runs into the problem that slang has a particular affinity with the spoken rather than the written language. And, indeed, with the exception of certain 17th-century dramas, the early sources are mainly specialised “canting” dictionaries that promised to furnish the innocent countryman with a guide to the evils of the city. It seems to be impossible to imagine slang without cities, without worlds in which anonymous figures can speak to you in words you cannot understand.
The rise of the novel led to an ever-increasing representation of forms of speech both low and high – and slang is always refreshingly low. The significant burst of written sources comes with universal literacy and pulp fiction at the turn of the 20th century. But then there is also cinema, as well as popular music, television and now the internet. Green, with an industry to match Dr Johnson’s, has ploughed through his sources, and offers, in his Dictionary of Slang, both an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the history of the language and one hell of a good read. If we take our three underground phrases and consult Green, we find that the use of “pig” as a word for the forces of authority dates back to the end of the 18th century and the struggles that pitted the corresponding societies against Pitt’s repressive state. One further discovers that “get one’s act together” comes from United States black English, probably the single most fertile source of slang in the 20th-century anglophone world and the source of such other staples of the countercultural vocabulary as “heavy” and “groovy”. “Front”, in the sense of to advance money, is first quoted as late as 1961, but “bread” in the sense of money dates back to 1938 – though all the quotations place it in that creative linguistic circle that surrounded black music.
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By: Rebecca,
on 5/12/2010
Slang words are so hard to etymologize because they are usually isolated, while language historians prefer to work with sound correspondences, cognates, and protoforms. Most modern “thick” dictionaries tell us that rogue, the subject of this post, is of unknown origin. This conclusion could be expected, for rogue, a 16th-century creation, meant “a wandering mendicant.” (Skeat attributes the original sense “a surly fellow” to it but does not adduce sufficient evidence in support of his statement.) Words for “beggar,” “vagabond,” and “scoundrel” often originate among beggars, vagabonds, and scoundrels. Not improbably, the first “rogues” called themselves rogues, but even if this is true, it in no way clarifies matters. We do not know where hobo, a much more recent coinage, came from; consequently, it should surprise no one that rogue, which appeared in a text in 1561, remains an unsolved etymological puzzle.
The first English etymological dictionaries were published in 1617 (John Minsheu) and 1671 (Stephen Skinner). Neither author had a clue to the origin of rogue, though for Minsheu it was contemporary slang. But he looked for the answer in a wrong direction and cited a Hebrew and a Greek look-alike as a possible etymon. Skinner thought of an Old English source and (predictably) found nothing of interest. The same holds for Franciscus Junius, the third most erudite English etymologist of the “prescientific” epoch. Other researchers made no progress either, for fanciful references to Dutch and to various English verbs beginning with an r took them nowhere (sterile guesswork can hardly be called an achievement). We seem to be in the same position as our distant predecessors, except that we can now say with a clear conscience: “Origin unknown.” However, something is known, and this “something” is not unimportant.
Quite early, rogue acquired the senses “knave” and “villain” and became a facetious term of endearment. Today we mainly apply it to scamps and mischievous persons, especially to the rogues prone to displaying a roguish smile. The main stumbling block (though it should have been a stepping stone) in reconstructing the history of rogue is French rogue “arrogant, haughty,” which, odd as it may seem, is evidently unrelated to arrogance. Arrogance and arrogant go back to the root of Latin arrogare “claim for oneself,” from the prefix ad- and rogare “ask” (compare interrogate and prerogative). If French rogue is not akin to arrogant, what is its origin? Friedrich Diez, the founder of Romance comparative linguistics, suggested that the French had borrowed rogue from Old Norse (Scandinavian) and cited Old Icelandic hrókr “rook; long-winded talker.” This rather improbable etymology has been questioned a few times, but it still appears, though not without some hedging, in the most authoritative dictionaries of French. Our greater concern is that, according to an opinion that has long since become dogma, French rogue is neither the source nor a cognate of Engl. rogue. Only the great German etymologist Friedrich Kluge thought otherwise (but he devoted a single line to the English word), and Skeat believed that the meaning of roguish had been influenced by French.
Similar Celtic words, such as Scottish Gaelic rag “villain; a thief who uses violence,” with a cognate in Breton, were noticed long ago. Judging by their geographical distribution, they are not loans from French. Nor does the French word look like a borrowing from Celtic. The OED offered no etymology of rogue and did not mention the oldest hypothesis on its origin. William Lambarde, a famous 16th-century author on legal matters, traced rogue to Latin
By: Joanna,
on 11/11/2009
Dandy first made its appearance on the Scottish border and in the 1780’s became current in British slang. Its origin (most probably, dialectal) remains a mystery—a common thing with such words. Etymologists have grudgingly resigned themselves to the idea that dandy goes back to the pet name of Andrew. How Andrew became Dandy is also unclear (by attracting d from the middle?). But this is not our problem. Pet names behave erratically. Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Beth make sense, but Bill (= Will) for William? Peggy for Margaret? In any case, Dandy is a recorded short name for Andrew (and incidentally, for Alexander). Trying to discover why Andrew was chosen to represent London overdressed young men (assuming that such a thing happened several hundred years ago) would be a waste of time. This mythic character is a member of the club to which Sam Hill, Smart Aleck, and Jack Sprat (a.k.a. Jack Prat) belong; its whereabouts are lost.
Then there are merry-andrew “buffoon” and jack-a-dandy “a merry foppish fellow” (the latter predates dandy by about a century). The OED is noncommittal with regard to the etymology of dandy but admits a possible connection between it and jack-a-dandy. Here are two quotations in addition to what the OED gives (the second obviously echoes the first or rather is part of a formulaic pattern): “Smart she is and handy, O, /Sweet as sugar candy, O, / Fresh and gay/ As flow’rs in May, / And I’m her Jack-a-dandy, O” (no date given); “My love is blithe and bucksome [sic] / And sweet and fine as can be; / fresh and gay as the flowers in May, / And looks like Jack-a-dandy” (1671). In the 1780s many songs having almost the same refrain were in vogue, with Dandy, O substituting for Jack-o-dandy, O.
We will ignore a few fanciful suggestions (such as the attempt to trace dandy to the name of an ancient tribe, and a few others), for two reasonable derivations have been proposed. One centers around dandiprat “dwarf; urchin; a small coin” (an early 16th-century word). Since its origin is also unknown, no help can be expected from these quarters. But it may be observed that the time gap is significant: if dandy had been “abstracted” from dandiprat, it would probably have surfaced much earlier. Also, dandy does not seem to have been used to mock the ostentatious (and indeed often ridiculously dressed) “swells”: when dandies attracted public notice, they became the object of good-humored, even if vulgar, curiosity and were more often gaped at than vilified. Later, whatever opprobrium might have been associated with them disappeared. Byron was a “dandy.” Around 1830 people spoke about “Winchester gentlemen, Harrow dandies, and Eton bucks” (bucks must have had more than one meaning). Pushkin’s aristocratic Evgeny Onegin was “dressed like a London dandy” (those interested in details should consult Nabokov’s commentary to chapter I of the novel). By contrast, dandiprat never had positive connotations. The second “school of thought” looks for the homeland of dandy in France, even though French lexicographers unanimously state that dandy is an import from England. French dandin means “ninny”; hence the immortal cuckold George Dandin. The verb dandiner has been glossed variously as “to twist one’s body about; have a rolling gait, waddle; occupy oneself with trifles.” Even the earliest dandies were not ninnies, though they did comport themselves in a way that aroused amusement. Apparently, dandy cannot be traced to French dandin.
At this juncture, we could have left our word in its etymological wilderness, but for a certain complication. Dandy “fop” is not an isolated word in English. We find a dandy of punch (that is, a small glass; predominantly Irish), dandy “a vessel rigged as a sloop and having also a jigger mast,” and dandy, a term used as the first element in the names of various contrivances. Whether the boat, the glass, and the contrivances are “neat” is open to doubt. In a local book, the devil’s hounds were called dandy dogs (!). A regional dictionary gives dandy “hand.” And then, whatever the origin of dandiprat, its “prat” must have been dandy. Looking at the words close to dandy in a dictionary, we come across dander “an outburst of anger,” as in get one’s dander up; dander “stroll, saunter,” dander “the ferment (of molasses)” and one more dander “a piece of slag”; dandruff, and dandle “to rock a child” (with which we may, if we wish, compare dangle). In our texts, none of those words predates 1500 (while some were attested much later), and surprisingly, the origin of all of them is unknown (in dandruff only -ruff admits of a convincing explanation). French dandin is also obscure.
While working on the history of English words, I ran into a few instances of what may perhaps be called common old European slang. One example is the family of mooch. The early cognates of this Germanic verb made their way into Italian and almost certainly into French (I will refrain from citing them, for they can be found in my etymological dictionary). Their protoform has a cognate in Old Irish. The puzzling look-alike is Latin muger “a cheat at dice,” which can hardly be related to Germanic-Celtic muk- ~ myk-. It seems that words with the root muk- and mug-, denoting darkness and clandestine dealings, have been current in Europe for at least two millennia. I suspect that a similar, though shorter, story can be told about the dand- words. Middle High German lyric poetry made tandaradei, an exclamation of joy, famous. It has been explained as a shout imitating a bird’s song. Do birds sing tandaradei? Engl. dandle resembles Italian dandolare “swing; toss; dally; loiter.” The OED observes about a possible cognate of a similar sounding German verb that “no word of this family is known in Old or Mid. Eng., and the sense is not so close to the English as in the Italian word.” Yet German tändeln means’ “dawdle, play, etc.”
We will probably never know the origin of dandy for sure, but if we venture into the prehistory of slang, we may risk the conjecture that when dand- words first invaded some West-European languages around 1500, they meant “active, mobile” or “quick, nimble” (is this where dandy “hand” came from? are dandy dogs quick dogs?). “Swing, shake” would be a natural extension of quickness, and the exclamation tandaredei would emerge as a natural expression of animal spirits. Fine and dandy is a tautological binomial like safe and sound; all that is quick and nimble is fine by definition. Jack-a-dandy certainly knew how to win a girl’s heart. At some time dandy “fop” may have had amorous overtones. French dandiner “to twist one’s body” fits the picture well (compare “swing, toss”). Twisting in coils found no favor with the French: it must have struck them as idiotic. Hence dandin, a back formation from the verb? If this is how dandy acquired its meaning, it has nothing to do with Andrew, so that the association between them is late. The origin of dander, in all its manifestations, deserves a special look.
Can my reconstruction of the origin of dandy be taken seriously? Slang travels light from land to land. An expressive word can conquer half of Europe in a matter of a few years; consider our modern cool. In the past, the process was not so quick. Anyway, if we accept the etymology proposed here as a working hypothesis, we won’t be poorer than before, for at the outset we had nothing.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
By: LaurenA,
on 10/9/2009
Jesse Sheidlower is Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary and author of The F-Word. Recognized as one of the foremost authorities on obscenity in English, he has written about language for a great many publications, including a recent article on Slate. Here, Jesse discusses the criteria for including certain words or obscenities in dictionaries. Watch the video after the jump.
WARNING: This video contains explicit language. Click here to view the embedded video.
By: Carmela Martino and 5 other authors,
on 8/24/2009
Today's Reader Question is one that I address nearly every day in my writing.
In MG and YA novels, do you ever use diction from other cultures or parts of the country in your characterizations? Or do you focus more on a character's actions, behavior and gestures to define them?
Great question! And my answer is....it depends!
My novels (so far) have taken place in very specific places and times (Jackson, Mississippi, 1964-65 and Pittsburgh, 1943-44). Because the setting in these books (Yankee Girl and Jimmy's Stars) has the same weight and importance as my main characters, to ignore how characters sound style: is a lost opportunity to add another dimension not only to the characters, but to the entire story as well.
The way people talk has always been a big issue in my own life. I moved to the South from the Midwest when I was ten, and to this day, whenever I open my mouth, native Southerners say "You're not from around here, are you?" Most of my cousins are Pittsburgh-born and raised. When we talk, I note the difference in their sentence structure, and the local expressions that pepper their conversation. Pittsburghers are so proud of their unique vocabulary, it has been officially dubbed "Pittsburgh-ese", complete with dictionaries, websites and cultural studies.
In a mobile society that has been made ever smaller by TV and the Internet, Americans are losing their geographical and cultural speech patterns. We are beginning to all sound alike, with a homogenized "standard Broadcast American Speech" *sd they called in Speech Class) I think it's sad. We lose something of our roots in the disappearance of "local color" in our language.
So to answer the question, I often use speech as an component equal to action and gesture in developing a multi-dimensional character and to add depth to my fictional word. HOWEVER...
Pure dialect or dialog written entirely using regional expressions can be murder to read. Maybe it's just me, but looking at a page that thick with apostrophes substituting for all the dropped "g's" in an attempt to "sound Southern," makes my eyes hurt. (If you don't believe me, find an old edition of anything by Joel Chandler Harris.) If you don't have an issue with your vision, then try reading the page out loud. For me, anything that I can't read aloud smoothly, is not great writing. If I have to re-read a dialect-laden sentence over and over to puzzle out what the heck the writer is trying to say...well, that's a sign of dialect overkill. Using dialect correctly is a tightrope act. Too little of it, and it calls attention to itself, which of course, takes the reader of the fictional world you have worked so hard to create. Too much of it, and it's like someone dumped a bottle of Tabasco sauce on your meatloaf. A little brings out the flavor; too much, and your dinner is simply inedible.
The trick to using dialect and local speech is a light hand in places where the meaning can be understood in context. It's aeasy to fall into a trap of stereotypical speech. All Southerners don't sound alike, just as all Midwesterners or New Yorkers don't sound alike. Listen to your character. Let your character talk to you in his own voice. I find this easy, because I have never attempted a speech style that I haven't heard first hand. I never drop "g's" or the initial sounds of a word to "sound Southern." I prefer to use expressions like "we're fixing to go" or "what're you so ill about?"(Translation: We are about to leave, and why are you in a bad mood). I handled the Pittsburghese in Jimmy;s Starsby using my mother, who left Pittsburgh in 1943, as a model. If the terms "slippy," "lift supper" and "redd up" had remained in her speech after all these years, they must be central to Pittsburghese, and fairly easy for the outsider to comprehend in context. (Translation: slippery, put a meal on the table, and to clean up a room)
Sometimes speech has more to do with the age and social class of a character. I have a pet peeve of indicating the age of a young character by using the words "gonna," "gotta" and "wanna". (In fact, when I teach Young Writers classes, some of my students are surprised to find out that these are not actual words!) If I use each one of those words once in a book, I feel that I have taken a short cut by resorting to the stereotypical "mush-mouth" teenspeek There are other ways to accomplish the same effect. Kids don't talk in complete sentences. They use contractions. They sometimes use incorrect grammar. They run words together. They talk in Text Speak. Ok, I made up the term, but some of my fifteen-year-old's friends do say things like "You're my BFF" or "OMG, OMG" (and if you don't know what those mean, you need to eavesdrop on kids more often!) Again, all kids don't sound alike. Let your character be your guide.
My last point has to do with the use of historically accurate terms. Or, if you don't write historical fiction, allowing your contemporary characters use outdated or archaic expressions. Like from when we grew up. You know what I mean? Like groovy? Can you dig? (Hopefully your mental ears are hurting by now as I "laid my best 60's jive on you.") If you DO write historical fiction, you have to be aware that some commonly used words today had an entirely different meaning fifty, thirty, even ten years ago. Believe it or not, there was a time when there were no "nerds." When I was in junior high (oops middle school), ners were "goobs" or "social mistfits" and several less politically correct terms. Yes, sometimes I douse politically incorrect words, but only if absolutely essential to the story and character, and never, if there is an acceptable equivalent...like "goobs." In Jimmy's Stars"goobs" were "sad apples", "wet blankets" or "drips." Again, who says this, and in what context, should make the meaning apparent to the reader.
To sum up (finally!!), in using dialect and expressions, less is more. More is...too much of a good thing. Easy with the Tabasco.
THIS WEEK'S READING. I've been slacking a little since school has started here (always a trauma at my house.) But here is what I've managed to digest between High School Emergencies:
CHAPTER BOOK: For the Durationby Tomie DePaolaNi
MG/YA: Night Firesby George Edward Stanley
MG/YA CONTEMPORARY: Slobby Ellen Potter
YA FICTION: Afterby Amy Efaw, Jumping Off Swingsby Jo Knowles, Donut Daysby Lara Zielin
YA NON FICTION: Years of Dustby Albert Marrin
ADULT MEMOIR: The Slippery Yearby Melanie Gideon.
By: Megan,
on 6/9/2009
What do you think of when you think of slang? Maybe you think of a bunch of teenagers running around saying “OMG, like, LOL.” The truth is that everyone, not just young people, use slang –sometimes without even realizing it. In his new book, Slang: The People’s Poetry, Michael Adams suggests that our use of slang “outlines social space” and that “attitudes about slang partly construct group identity and identify individuals as members of groups”.
Adams, English language professor at Indiana University and author of several books on slang, writes that in addition to allowing slang users to be accepted into certain social groups, slang also acts as a barrier to keep those who aren’t “in the know” out. This is why someone over fifty may have trouble understanding the slang words of the under-twenty set. Below is a list , taken from Slang, of the top 10 slang words that are so hip they don’t even sound like slang.
1. Morning glory More than a flower, this slang term has existed since the early 1900s and has meant “something which or someone who fails to maintain an early promise” as well as, in the 1950s, “the first narcotic injection of the day.”
2. Gone Borneo This absurd-sounding phrase had a fairly short lifespan of about 10 years and was used in the 1980s to mean “intoxicated”.
3. Flash Still in use today, flash was used at least as far back as Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist to mean “hip”.
4. Suck Although many people want this word to originate somewhere far more off-color, suck is simply a shortening of the phrases “suck eggs,” “suck rope,” and “suck wind”—all of which can be used to mean “disappointing.”
5. Wig It sounds like a hairpiece, but wig is the clipped form of “wig out,” a less widely-used synonym for “freak out.”
6. Duck A pretty, but “snob[by], stuck-up young woman,” who often requires a lot of “lettuce ‘cash in bills’” to please.
7. Pegging Used at a dance, much to her embarrassment, by Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women.
“’I suppose you are going to college soon? I see you pegging away at your books—no, I mean studying hard,’ and Jo blushed at the dreadful ‘pegging’ which had escaped her.”
8. Bad Used “to mean its opposite, as well as ‘stylish, sexy, wonderful, formidably skilled’”.
9. Snack From a dictionary of terms “supposedly used by the criminal element” published in 1698 or 1699. After stealing your possessions, the thieves would snack ” ’share, go halves’ on them.”
10. Trouble & Strife A Cockney rhyming slang term that originated in London’s East End, trouble and strife is used to mean ‘the wife.’
By: AnneL,
on 6/3/2009
There is no way one can stop folk etymologies from spreading. Whatever dictionaries may say, people will repeat anecdotes like the one current about the origin of posh, for example (supposedly, an acronym: port out, starboard home). Nonsense is quick-paced, whereas true knowledge stays at home Cinderella-like and no good fairy comes to the rescue. Although I have nothing new to say about bistro, another rebuttal of a popular version may be of some use. But first some table talk.
I have heard a story that is a little too good to be true, but its witty message outweighs its questionable veracity. When the great physiologist Ivan Pavlov, so the story goes, received an honorary degree from Cambridge, he had a speech written for him in English, a language he did not know. After he delivered it, someone from the audience approached him and said: “I have read that Russian is related to English, but I did not realize they were so close.” As a matter of fact, English (a Germanic language with a strong infusion of French and Latin words) and Russian (a Slavic language that absorbed numerous words from its eastern neighbors) are not too close, and in oral communication a heavy Russian accent makes English nearly unintelligible. The number of common Russian words in English is negligible (for how often does one mention samovar, pogrom, or the short-lived sputnik and perestroika?), and those that have broken through tend to appear in garbled form. One such borrowing is babushka “a woman’s headscarf,” usually stressed on the second (instead of the first) syllable. Piroshki ~ pirozhki “small meat pies” is also stressed on the second syllable (instead of the last; audio-Webster recommends final stress but to no avail), and the often-heard names (Borodin, the composer; Gorbachev, and others) are invariably mispronounced in the media). I do not know who taught the West the Russian toast na zdorov’e. Perhaps it existed in the past, but today it is a formula used in response to “Thank you!” at table (the hostess answers: “Na zdorov’e,” that is, “You are welcome”). The toast should be (Za) Vashe zdorov’e “(To) your health!” Time and again have I been told that the word bistro came to French with the Russian Cossacks after the defeat of Napoleon. The thirsty customers, who were not allowed to consume alcoholic beverages, allegedly rushed the owners of small drinking establishments shouting: “Bystro, bystro!” (“Quick, Quick!”). The French heard it so often that they began to call small cheap cafés bistro. The date of the episode and the exact identification of the invaders change from version to version, but the core of the anecdote is stable.
The implausibility of this etymology should have become obvious even to non-specialists long ago. First, perhaps the uniformed Russians, while in Paris, really suffered from the effects of the dry law, but why did the story single out the Cossacks? At that time, most soldiers in the Russian army were serfs. Second, any sensible person staying in a foreign country tries to learn a few phrases needed for the most elementary communication and refrains from giving a waiter orders he won’t understand. Third, an offensive command used by the soldiers of an occupying army hardly has a chance of becoming popular. Who in Paris would have adopted a meaningless Russian word for the designation of a local café? Hated foreigners are mocked, not imitated. Finally, if the command “be quick!” had been pronounced surreptitiously, the thirsty “Cossacks” would have whispered rather than shouted it, for fear of being overheard by an officer.
The other arguments against this folk etymology are of a more special nature. The Russian for quick, quick! is not bystro, bystro (stress on the first syllable) but at best the comparative degree of this adverb “bystrei, bystrei!” (stress on ei). The French may perhaps have identified the “mixed” (central) Russian vowel transliterated as y with their front i, but stress, as noted, falls on the first syllable of bystro, and its unstressed o resembles a in Engl. tuna. Consequently, the result would have been something like bistra. In French printed sources, the word bistro surfaced only in 1789, too late for the Cossack theory, whereas in Russia the Western legend of the origin of bistro is unknown, and those who are conversant with French life (even if only from literature) never associate bistro with bystro.
The allure of folk etymology is irresistible: it explains the origin of words in a way anyone can understand: no exposure to linguistics, with its pedantic insistence on sound correspondents and semantic verisimilitude, is required. Paste shines like diamonds and costs almost nothing, but its price is commensurate with its value. The real story behind French bistro remains unknown. French words whose beginning sounds like bistro are rather many: bistouille “a mixture of cheap wine and alcohol” (was this swill served in the first bistros?), bistre “a brown pigment made from the mixture of wood soot and water” (the color of the walls in the earliest bistros?), bistraud (an Anjou or Poitou dialectal word for a boy guarding herds; from “a little shepherd” to “a wine merchant’s aide,” apparently, a recorded sense, and “a place where wine is served”?), and bistingo “a bad cabaret” or bistringue “cabaret.” None of these putative etymons inspires confidence. Bistro seems to have emerged from the depths of street slang (like Engl. slum, for example), and, as often in such cases, the word’s origin is lost. I would add only one comment to what has been said above. Most, if not all, correct etymologies are simple and, while looking at them, one has the feeling that yes, the truth has indeed been found. Devious ways (from dirty walls to the name of a filthy place, from “a wine merchant’s helper” to “saloon,” and so forth) need not be avoided, for incredible semantic bridges have been discovered, but it is better to choose straighter paths. In defiance of the meaning of Russian bystro, French bistro is slow to reveal its (cheap? dirty?) secret.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
By: Erica Olsen,
on 10/13/2008
My mother, the real librarian (not a digital muckety muck thingamajig like me), will be visiting me here in San Francisco next week. Since she will be hanging around with non-Midwesterners, I thought it would be good to provide her with an introduction to west coast language. I know, right?
Rumored origin: L.A.
Literal meaning: “Can you believe this thing we are talking about? It goes without saying, and yet we are saying it.”
Connotation: “We are all in agreement here. Also, I have never read Beowulf.”
Rumored origin: NoCal.
Literal meaning: Intensifier. “Their pie is hella good.”
Connotation: “I am twelve.”
Rumored origin: Coffee-fueled Berkeley undergraduates
Literal meaning: “I agree so strongly that it can be quickly dismissed with a rapid exclamation.”
Connotation: “We are getting things DONE in this conversation.”
Rumored origin: The 1960s.
Literal meaning: “Good. Calm. Without trouble. Easy.”
Connotation:”I have had lots of therapy and/or drugs.”
Got more? Send ‘em in!
By: Cassie,
on 10/2/2008
I recently discovered why it is that Ammon Shea loves reading dictionaries so much. They’re really a lot of fun. Of course, it helps that the dictionary I’m reading is a dictionary of slang terms from the US, Australia, and Great Britain. Being new to this dictionary-reading business, I wanted to share some of my favorite words so far. The definitions are from Stone the Crows: Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, by John Ayto and John Simpson. The commentary is, of course, mine.
Stone the crows was the first term I looked up, since it’s the name of the dictionary and a term I’m not at all familiar with. I found it under stone, which has several definitions. The term “stone the crows” means an exclamation of surprise, originating in Australia. Some of the other definitions of stone are as follows:
Quite an interesting assortment, isn’t it? The first really fun word I found on my own (at least, the first one that’s fit to use in polite company) is banger: A kiss, esp. a violent one; a sausage; an old motor vehicle, esp. one which runs noisily. Banger is fascinating because of the range in its definition. How, exactly, can one word be used for a kiss, a sausage, and an old car? Yet that’s exactly what it means. The earliest meaning of the word is a violent kiss, but that’s hardly a pleasant thought, so I’ll probably stick with the sausage definition. Maybe the next time I go to a diner, I’ll order eggs and bangers. I’m looking forward to the waiter’s blank stare already.
Some of the more interesting words are the dated ones; dated meaning they’re no longer in common use. The original term for hipster (a person who is ‘hip’) is hepster, meaning hip-cat, or, in my own terms, a person who thinks he or she is really cool. Hipster might technically make more sense as a direct derivation of hip, but I just prefer the sound of hepster. Help me bring back hepster, people!
Another slang term no longer in use is prune-picker, meaning “someone from California.” The term was only used from 1918-1929. I thought this one deserved some additional scrutiny, so I looked it up in the OED. According to the OED Online, the term came into use because of the abundance of prunes grown in California. Still, I wonder why the term died out in 1929? Perhaps with the crash of the stock market and the onset of the Great Depression, people weren’t thinking about prunes anymore. Or maybe Californians stopped growing prunes.
A handy feature of Stone the Crows is that it tells you when a word is meant to be an insult. Noun derog, meaning derogatory, precedes the definition of ambulance-chaser (a lawyer who specializes in actions for personal injuries). This feature could particularly come in handy for politicians, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that term was offensive to [insert cultural or racial group here]!” I’m not including more of these terms because I don’t want to offend anyone. Though there are a number of interesting terms for blondes.
I’ve saved the best for last, of course. I’ll admit that I haven’t quite pulled off the trick of reading the dictionary straight through (I’ve done some jumping around), but my wandering through found this absolute gem of a word/term: noodge.
I think this is the Kevin Smith fan coming out in me, but I’m amazed to learn that this phrase (repeated quite often by Smith character Jay of Jay and Silent Bob) is a real word. Noodge means “to pester, nag” as well as “a person who complains or nags; pest.” The adjective form is noodgy. To cap it all off, it comes from the Yiddish term nudyen, meaning “to bore, pester.” How perfect is that? Jay is calling everyone around him a nag and a pest, and they all just think he’s a babbling stoner.
Posted on 6/19/2008
Ammon Shea
recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, will be published by Perigee in July. In the post below Ammon, an expert dictionary reader, wonders what makes a dictionary “hardcore”.
There was an accidentally interesting discussion on the subject of orthography last week on Fox News. Hosts Gretchen Carlson and Steve Doocy were giving their learned opinions on spelling reform, and whether it was necessary. When it seemed to me that they were just about to decisively put an end to several hundred years of debate, Carlson suddenly interjected a new question into the conversation: “do they even sell hardcore dictionaries anymore…?You are doubtless thinking right now ‘what is a hardcore dictionary, and where can I find one?’ There are a number of ways to interpret the meaning of this word, and so before answering Carlson’s question we should perhaps examine some of them.
Mark Liberman, in an excellent post at Language Log, recommended Allen Walker Read’s study on graffiti, Lexical Evidence from Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary. This is a good example of a hardcore dictionary since, as Liberman points out, the book was judged incendiary enough in the 1930s that it had to be privately printed.
If we are to assume that Carlson was using the word hardcore in the sense of ‘pornographic’ then she is in luck, as there are a great number of dictionaries that fall into this category. I think that the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang is pretty hardcore. So are Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word, and Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. In fact, the tradition of hardcore dictionaries in English lexicography goes back hundreds of years, with such gems as Sir Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (from 1785, but available in a modern reprint), and Henry Nathaniel Cary’s, The Slang of Venery and its Analogues, a two volume compilation of off-color words taken from 18th and 19th century dictionaries (privately printed in 1916 and unfortunately hard to find).
Although perhaps she meant hardcore as it is defined by the fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary (‘2. Stubbornly resistant to improvement or change’)? There are a number of prescriptivist dictionaries available that resist the inevitable change of language.
I suppose there is always a chance that Carlson already owns the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, and was referencing that work’s own definition of hardcore (‘hardened, tough, pitiless’). In that case I would recommend Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, which has all those qualities and more.
But maybe she meant hardcore as it is defined by the Harper Collins Dictionary of American Slang (‘essential and uncompromising’). There are a great number of dictionaries that I think are essential, and a few that are uncompromising as well. The 1916 version of The Century Dictionary comes to mind - this single volume work is over 8000 pages long (almost two feet tall when laid on its side), and so feels pretty uncompromising when you try to hold it in your lap. Plus, the publishers inexplicably chose to cover it in brown corduroy, which to me seems hardcore for a dictionary.
What if she had recently been reading The Cassell Dictionary of Slang, by Jonathon Green, and liked his definition of ‘…serious, committed, experienced, full-time…’? If this is what she meant then she can walk into almost any bookstore in the world and find that they most likely will sell a dictionary that meets these criteria. So no matter what meaning of the word was intended the answer is yes, Carlson, they do still sell hardcore dictionaries.
Hi, Jodi,
You're SO right that details can make or break great fiction. Just right details can also really bring a story to life.
Thanks or all the tips and reminders.
Happy writing!
Jodi--Your post was a great reminder. And those "experts" like taxicab drivers and dog-catchers and garbage collectors LOVE that they're being consulted. I recently had to to go to two different fire stations to ask some questions about details I was putting in a story. The fire fighters enjoyed being consultants. And I enjoyed the research...
Thanks for the well-written reminder, Jodi.
I agree that the little details are very important. What breaks suspension of disbelief is a funny thing. People will be cool with your hotshot FBI agent getting into all kinds of improbable situations, escaping from impossible traps, and taking the time to bed a few beautiful women along the way. But then they stop at a single line halfway through the book and say, "Wait. Did he just say the murder weapon was a .22 gauge shotgun?" (It would be "caliber"...and I've heard my SO go off many a time on writers who get the two confused!)
The difficulty is when you get so accurate about your regional or historical terminology that it might be confusing to the majority. Then you have to decide whether you'd prefer to receive complaints from the nitpickers who write to explain to you that the 19th-century "high school" would have been referred to as "college," as if you didn't know, or to receive negative reviews from everyone else who says, "This book was so full of inconsistencies! She said the hero had just come back from college, but then she said he was like seventeen and everyone's down on him for not going to university! I have no idea how this crap got published!" Both ends of the stick are unfortunately short.
I love details and exploring them, expanding my knowledge or the world in which I write.
BTW, I am from Philly and its definitely Jimmies. Most definitely.
But in the 90s a Jimmy-Hat or plain Jimmy singular was something totally different, lol.