Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label words. Show all posts
Oct 26, 2014
May 9, 2014
5 Words That Trace Back to the Word "Mother"
Make Mom proud this Mother's Day—incorporate her in your vocabulary.
1. Alma Mater
From the Latin for “nourishing mother.” Now refers to the school where one has presumably received some mental nourishment.
2. Metropolis
From the Greek combination of meter (mother) and polis (city). A metropolis is a “mother city.”
3. Matter
Materia, from Latin mater, originally referred to a tree’s trunk, the mother of all its branches. It came to stand for wood in general, then extended to building materials, then more generally to stuff out of which something is made, then even more generally to a subject under consideration.
4. Matrix
From Latin mater plus the feminine suffix -trix, this first meant womb but later came to mean any kind of protective, supportive structure.
5. Matrimony
From mater + abstract noun for state. State of motherness.
Apr 6, 2014
Rich Talk
Some favorite words of Stockholm University linguist Mikael Parkvall, from his Limits of Language (2006):
Gunwinggu, spoken in northwestern Australia, uses different verbs to describe the hopping of a black wallaroo:
- klunen (Dutch): “to walk or run overland with skates on (usually from one body of frozen water to another)”
- aÉ£one (Kuot): “to drink from a bottle in such a fashion that drool trickles from the mouth back into the bottle”
- fringsen (German): “to steal coal from railway wagons or potatoes from fields in order to survive”
- knedlikový (Czech): “rather partial to dumplings”
- qamigartuk (Yup’ik): “he goes seal-hunting with a small sled and kayak in the spring”
- baleÅ‹ga (Chavacano): “excessive swinging of arms while walking”
- kallsup (Swedish): “a gulp of water that a bather accidentally inhales”
- googly (English): “(of an off-breaking cricket ball) disguised by the bowler with an apparent leg-break action”
(Macropus bernardus) (kamurlbardme), the hopping of an agile wallaby (Macropus agilis) (kalurlhlurme), the hopping of a male antilopine wallaroo (Macropus antilopinus) (kamawudme),
and the hopping of a female antilopine wallaroo (kadjalwahme).
Apr 5, 2014
51 Delightfully Geeky Language Facts
Words, man. Words.
Ailbhe Malone
1. In Germany, Rice Crispies don’t go ‘snap, crackle and pop’ - they go ‘Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!’2. In France, they go ‘Cric! Crac! Croc!’
3. In Spain, they go ‘Cris! Cras! Cros!’
4. There are 108 words for describing ‘sweet potato’ in Hawaiian, and 47 for ‘banana’, including ‘palaku’ - a thoroughly ripe banana.
5. The Finnish language has three of the world’s longest palindromic words :
‘saippuakivikauppias’ - a soapstone seller, ‘saippuakuppinippukauppias’ - a soapstone trader and ‘solutomaattimittaamotulos’ - the result from a measurement laboratory for tomatoes.
6. The Danish for jeans is ‘cowboybukser’.
7. The little dot above lower case ‘i’s and ‘j’s is called a tittle.
8. ‘Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo’ is a grammatically correct sentence - as ‘buffalo’ can mean the large animal, the city in New York and also a verb - ‘to bully’.9. The concept of ‘Tingo’ (Pascuense language of Easter Island) means to borrow things from a friend’s house one by one until there is nothing left.
10. The Tashlhiyt dialect of Berber (North Africa) contains vowelless words like tzgr (she crossed) and tftktstt (you sprained it).
11. ‘Bel hevi’ (Tok Pisin, Papua New Guinea) describes the sinking feeling that accompanies sadness, literally translating as ‘belly heavy’.
12. ‘Mamihlapinatapei’ (Fuegian language from Chile) describes the shared look of longing between two lovers, where both know the score but neither is willing to make the first move.
13. ‘Drachenfutter’ (German) translates as ‘dragon fodder’ - meaning the peace offerings brought by guilty husbands to placate their wives.
14. In Afrikaans bees don’t buzz, they go ‘zoem-zoem’.15. In Malay cats don’t miaow, they go ‘ngiau’.
16. In Bengali cows don’t moo, they say ‘hamba’.
17. In Thai owls don’t hoot, they go ‘hook hook’.
18. In Albanian pigs don’t oink, they go ‘hunk hunk’.
19. In Vietnamese sheep don’t baa, they go ‘be-hehehe’.
20. Nine languages don’t have words for colour - they only differentiate between black and white. For example in Dan (New Guinea) things can be ‘mili’ (darkish) or ‘mola’ (lightish).21. In Hindi, the word for ‘yesterday’ (‘kal’) is the same as for tomorrow. The tense of the attached verb tells you of the meaning.
22. In Amharic (Ethiopia), ‘aye’ means ‘no’.
23. In Yiddish, ‘finger’ means ‘toe’.
24. In Georgian, ‘mama’ means ‘father’.
25. In Indonesian ‘air’ means ‘water’.
26. ‘I’m a dot in a place’ is an anagram of ‘a decimal point’.27. In Albanian there are 27 words for ‘moustache’ including ‘dirs ur’ - meaning the newly sprouted moustache of an adolescent.
28. In Hawaiian, the verb ‘pana po’o’ means to scratch your head in order to remember something you’ve forgotten.
29. In Sinhala (Sri Lanka) the word ‘ayubowan’ means ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’, ‘good evening’, ‘good night’ and ‘goodbye’.
30. In Masai, the name of a dead child, woman or warrior is not spoken again. If their name is also a word that is used every day, then it is no longer used by the bereaved family.
31. In Japan, four (shi) and nine (ku) are considered unlucky numbers, because the words sound the same as those for ‘death’ and ‘pain or worry’.
32. Because of this, some hospitals don’t have room numbers 4, 9, 14, 19 or 42. Forty-two (‘shi-ni’) means ‘to die’, 420 (‘shi-ni-rei’) means ‘a dead spirit’ and 24 (‘ni-shi’) is double death.
33. The Russian word for a railway station is ‘vokzal’. This is because when a Russian convoy visited Vauxhall in South London in 1840, they confused the name of the railway station there for the general name of the building. From then on, railway stations in Russia were called ‘vokzal’. Although this story has been contested.34. ‘Achaplinarse’ is a Spanish (Central American Spanish) word which means to hesitate and then run away in the style of Charlie Chaplin.
35. “Asà te tragues un pavo y todas las plumas se conviertan en cuchillas de afeitar” is a Spanish curse, meaning ‘may all your turkey’s feathers turn into razor blades’.
36. The Romanian proverb ‘dacă doi îți spun că eÈ™ti beat, du-te È™i te culcă’ translates as ‘if two people say you’re drunk, go to sleep’. Which is just good advice.
37. When a word spelled backward (such as ‘pots’), creates another word (‘stop’) it’s called a semordnilap, which is ‘palindromes’ backward.
38. A pangram is a sentence which contains every letter of the alphabet only once. For example: ‘Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz’ which means ‘carved symbols in a mountain hollow on the bank of an inlet irritated an eccentric person’.
NBC / Via wordpress.com39. ‘Sgriob’ (Scottish Gaelic) denotes the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey.40. ‘Lampadato’ (Italian) describes a person who gets tanned using a sun lamp.
41. ‘Katahara itai’ (Japanese) means laughing so much that one of your sides hurts.
42. ‘Backpfeifengesicht’ (German) means a face that cries out for a fist in it.
43. ‘Zastrich’ (Russian) means to cut one’s nails too short.
44. ‘Vogget’ (Cornish) means to hop on one leg.
45. ‘Guuguu’ (Japanese) describes the sound of someone in a deep sleep, snoring.
46. ‘Viajou na maionese’ is a Portuguese phrase meaning ‘to live in a dream world’ (literally to travel in the mayonnaise).
Submarine47. ‘U’ (Samoan) means an enlarged land snail.48. ‘U’ (Xeta, Brazil) to eat animal meat.
49. ‘U’ (Burmese) means a male over 45 (literally an uncle).
50. In Somali there are 43 words relating to camels (for example, ‘cayuun’ meaning ‘camel spit’.)
51. ‘Ben’ (Turkish), ‘Ami’ (Bengali), ‘Fi’ (Welsh), ‘Jo’ (Catalan), ‘Mama’ (Sinhala), ‘Mimi’ (Swahili) and ‘Man’ (Wolof) all mean ‘I’.
Sources: The Meaning of Tingo by Adam Jacot de Boinod.Tyrannosaurus Lex by Rod L. Evans, Ph.D.Correction: #40 has been changed to ‘lampadato’, instead of slampadato. #51 has been changed to ‘Swahili’ from ‘Swedish’.
Mar 31, 2014
56 Delightful Victorian Slang Terms You Should Be Using
Image credit: ThinkStock/Erin McCarthy
In 1909, writing under the pseudonym James Redding Ware, British writer Andrew Forrester published Passing English of the Victorian era, a dictionary of heterodox English, slang and phrase. "Thousands of words and phrases in existence in 1870 have drifted away, or changed their forms, or been absorbed, while as many have been added or are being added," he writes in the book's introduction. "‘Passing English’ ripples from countless sources, forming a river of new language which has its tide and its ebb, while its current brings down new ideas and carries away those that have dribbled out of fashion." Forrester chronicles many hilarious and delightful words in Passing English; we don't know how these phrases ever fell out of fashion, but we propose bringing them back.
1. Afternoonified
A society word meaning “smart.” Forrester demonstrates the usage: "The goods are not 'afternoonified' enough for me.”
2. Arfarfan'arf
A figure of speech used to describe drunken men. “He’s very arf’arf’an’arf," Forrester writes, "meaning he has had many ‘arfs,’” or half-pints of booze.
3. Back slang it
Thieves used this term to indicate that they wanted “to go out the back way.”
4. Bags o’ Mystery
An 1850 term for sausages, “because no man but the maker knows what is in them. ... The 'bag' refers to the gut which contained the chopped meat.”
5. Bang up to the elephant
This phrase originated in London in 1882, and means “perfect, complete, unapproachable.”
6. Batty-fang
Low London phrase meaning “to thrash thoroughly,” possibly from the French battre a fin.
7. Benjo
Nineteenth century sailor slang for “A riotous holiday, a noisy day in the streets.”
8. Bow wow mutton
A naval term referring to meat so bad “it might be dog flesh.”
9. Bricky
Brave or fearless. “Adroit after the manner of a brick," Forrester writes, "said even of the other sex, 'What a bricky girl she is.'”
10. Bubble Around
A verbal attack, generally made via the press. Forrester cites The Golden Butterfly: "I will back a first-class British subject for bubbling around against all humanity."
11. Butter Upon Bacon
Extravagance. Too much extravagance. “Are you going to put lace over the feather, isn't that rather butter upon bacon?”
12. Cat-lap
A London society term for tea and coffee “used scornfully by drinkers of beer and strong waters ... in club-life is one of the more ignominious names given to champagne by men who prefer stronger liquors.”
13. Church-bell
A talkative woman.
14. Chuckaboo
A nickname given to a close friend.
15. Collie shangles
Quarrels. A term from Queen Victoria’s journal, More Leaves, published in 1884: “At five minutes to eleven rode off with Beatrice, good Sharp going with us, and having occasional collie shangles (a Scottish word for quarrels or rows, but taken from fights between dogs) with collies when we came near cottages.”
16. Cop a Mouse
To get a black eye. “Cop in this sense is to catch or suffer," Forrester writers, "while the colour of the obligation at its worst suggests the colour and size of the innocent animal named.”
17. Daddles
A delightful way to refer to your rather boring hands.
18. Damfino
This creative cuss is a contraction of “damned if I know.”
19. Dizzy Age
A phrase meaning "elderly," because it "makes the spectator giddy to think of the victim's years." The term is usually refers to "a maiden or other woman canvassed by other maiden ladies or others.”
20. Doing the Bear
"Courting that involves hugging."
21. Don’t sell me a dog
Popular until 1870, this phrase meant “Don’t lie to me!” Apparently, people who sold dogs back in the day were prone to trying to pass off mutts as purebreds.
22. Door-knocker
A type of beard "formed by the cheeks and chin being shaved leaving a chain of hair under the chin, and upon each side of mouth forming with moustache something like a door-knocker."
23. Enthuzimuzzy
"Satirical reference to enthusiasm." Created by Braham the terror, whoever that is.
24. Fifteen puzzle
Not the game you might be familiar with, but a term meaning complete and absolute confusion.
25. Fly rink
An 1875 term for a polished bald head.
26. Gal-sneaker
An 1870 term for "a man devoted to seduction.”
27. Gas-Pipes
A term for especially tight pants.
28. Gigglemug
“An habitually smiling face.”
29. Got the morbs
Use of this 1880 phrase indicated temporary melancholy.
30. Half-rats
Partially intoxicated.
31. Jammiest bits of jam
“Absolutely perfect young females,” circa 1883.
32. Kruger-spoof
Lying, from 1896.
33. Mad as Hops
Excitable.
34. Mafficking
An excellent word that means getting rowdy in the streets.
35. Make a stuffed bird laugh
“Absolutely preposterous.”
36. Meater
A street term meaning coward.
37. Mind the Grease
When walking or otherwise getting around, you could ask people to let you pass, please. Or you could ask them to mind the grease, which meant the same thing to Victorians.
38. Mutton Shunter
This 1883 term for a policeman is so much better than "pig."
39. Nanty Narking
A tavern term, popular from 1800 to 1840, that meant great fun.
40. Nose bagger
Someone who takes a day trip to the beach. He brings his own provisions and doesn’t contribute at all to the resort he’s visiting.
41. Not up to Dick
Not well.
42. Orf chump
No appetite.
43. Parish Pick-Axe
A prominent nose.
44. Podsnappery
This term, Forrester writers, describes a person with a “wilful determination to ignore the objectionable or inconvenient, at the same time assuming airs of superior virtue and noble resignation.”
45. Poked Up
Embarrassed.
46. Powdering Hair
An 18th century tavern term that means “getting drunk.”
47. Rain Napper
An umbrella.
48. Sauce-box
The mouth.
49. Shake a flannin
Why say you're going to fight when you could say you're going to shake a flannin instead?
50. Shoot into the brown
To fail. According to Forrester, "The phrase takes its rise from rifle practice, where the queer shot misses the black and white target altogether, and shoots into the brown i.e., the earth butt."
51. Skilamalink
Secret, shady, doubtful.
52. Smothering a Parrot
Drinking a glass of absinthe neat; named for the green color of the booze.
53. Suggestionize
A legal term from 1889 meaning “to prompt.”
54. Take the Egg
To win.
55. Umble-cum-stumble
According to Forrester, this low class phrase means "thoroughly understood."
56. Whooperups
A term meaning "inferior, noisy singers" that could be used liberally today during karaoke sessions.
Mar 30, 2014
8 Pronunciation Errors that Changed Modern English
Someone I know tells a story about a very senior academic giving a speech. Students shouldn't worry too much, she says, if their plans "go oar-y" after graduation. Confused glances are exchanged across the hall. Slowly the penny drops: the professor has been pronouncing "awry" wrong all through her long, glittering career.
We've all been there. I still lapse into mis-CHEE-vous if I'm not concentrating. This week some PR whizzes working for a railway station with an unusual name unveiled the results of a survey into frequently garbled words. The station itself is routinely confused with an endocrine gland about the size of a carrot (you can see why they hired PRs). Researchers also found that 340 of the 1000 surveyed said ex-cetera instead of etcetera, while 260 ordered ex-pressos instead of espressos. Prescription came out as perscription or proscription 20 percent of the time.
The point is malapropisms and mispronunciations are fairly common. The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary lists 171,476 words as being in common use. But the average person's vocabulary is tens of thousands smaller, and the number of words they use every day smaller still. There are bound to be things we've read or are vaguely familiar with, but not able to pronounce as we are supposed to.
The term "supposed" opens up a whole different debate, of course. Error is the engine of language change, and today's mistake could be tomorrow's vigorously defended norm. There are lots of wonderful examples of alternative pronunciations or missteps that have become standard usage. Here are some of my favourites, complete with fancy technical names
.
Words that used to begin with "n"
Adder, apron and umpire all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word. Linguists call this kind of thing reanalysis or rebracketing.
When sounds swap around
Wasp used to be waps; bird used to be brid and horse used to be hros. Remember this when the next time you hear someone complaining about aks for ask or nucular for nuclear, or even perscription. It's called metathesis, and it's a very common, perfectly natural process.
When sounds disappear
English spelling can be a pain, but it's also a repository of information about the history of pronunciation. Are we being lazy when we say the name of the third day of the working week? Our ancestors might have thought so. Given that it was once " Woden's day" (named after the Norse god), the "d" isn't just for decoration, and was pronounced up until relatively recently. Who now says the "t" in Christmas? It must have been there at one point, as the messiah wasn't actually called Chris. These are examples of syncope.
When sounds intrude
Our anatomy can make some changes more likely than others. The simple mechanics of moving from a nasal sound ("m" or "n") to a non-nasal one can make a consonant pop up in-between. Thunder used to be "thuner", and empty "emty". You can see the same process happening now with words like hamster, which often gets pronounced with an intruding "p". This is a type of epenthesis.
When "l" goes dark
A dark "l", in linguistic jargon, is one pronounced with the back of the tongue raised. In English, it is found after vowels, as in the words full or pole. This tongue raising can go so far that the "l" ends up sounding like a "w". People frown on this in non-standard dialects such as cockney (" the ol' bill"). But the "l" in folk, talk and walk used to be pronounced. Now almost everyone uses a "w" instead — we effectively say fowk, tawk and wawk. This process is called velarisation.
Mar 24, 2014
6 Widely Repeated Phrase Origins—Debunked!
Image credit: getty images
Recently we busted some myths about the popular email “Life in the 1500s.” Here are the rest of the tall tales, shrunk to fit reality.
1. Dead ringer
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The Tall Tale: England is old and small and they started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer."
The Facts: Snopes.com rounds up many accounts of live burial, feared and real, including only one instance of scratch marks purportedly discovered in a coffin lid. The idea of a signaling system inside a coffin didn’t occur until the late 19th century, when Count Michel de Karnice-Karnicki, a chamberlain to the Tsar, after hearing a horrifying account of girl nearly buried alive, patented a safety coffin. The slightest movement of the chest or arms of the body inside the coffin would trigger a complex mechanism to admit air into the coffin, ring a bell and wave a flag above.
But all that has nothing to do with the origin of the expression dead ringer. Ringer is slang for a look-alike horse, athlete, etc. fraudulently substituted for another in a competition or sporting event. It comes from an earlier slang verb to ring or to ring the changes, meaning to substitute one thing for another fraudulently and take the more valuable item. (Ring the changes harkens back to “change-ringing”: using a team of bell ringers to play tunes on church bells.) The ringer was originally the person arranging the fraudulent swap; later it came to mean the substituted competitor. Dead is used in the sense "absolute, exact, complete," as in “dead ahead” or “dead right.” So a dead ringer is an exact look-alike.
2. Saved by the bell
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The origin of saved by the bell is not in coffin contraptions or even the ardent prayers of students to be spared of answering a tough question by the clanging of the end-of-period bell. The classroom meaning is an extension of the original source of the phrase: boxing. It means to be saved from being counted out by the bell at the end of a round, and is first documented in the early 20th century.
3. Graveyard shift
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The graveyard shift has nothing to with literal graveyards, just the lonesome, uneasy feeling of working in the dark silence of the midnight hours. The expression first appears in the late 19th century. In 1895, the New Albany Evening Tribune for May 15 has a story about coal mining that begins, “It was dismal enough to be on the graveyard shift…” On August 17, 1906, Marshall, Michigan's The Marshall Expounder, in a piece entitled “Ghosts in Deep Mines,” says, “And of all superstitions there are none more weird than those of the ‘graveyard’ shift…usually between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.” Sailors similarly had a “graveyard watch,” usually from midnight to 4 a.m. According to Gershom Bradford in A Glossary of Sea Terms (1927), the watch was so called “because of the number of disasters that occur at this time,” but another source attributes the term to the silence throughout the ship.
4. Upper crust
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The Tall Tale: Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."
The Facts: An isolated source hints at such a custom. One of the first printed books on household management, John Russell’s Boke of Nurture, circa 1460, says (translated into modern English), “Take a loaf…and lay [a trencher] before your lord; lay four trenchers four-square, and another on the top. Take a loaf of light bread, pare the edges, cut the upper crust for your lord.” It’s not clear whether the upper crust was considered the tastiest nibble or the sturdiest substitute for a plate, but such instructions have cropped up nowhere else. Over the centuries, the phrase upper crust appears in reference to the earth’s surface, bread and pies. But it’s not until the 19th century that we find it used to mean upper class, so the connection with the apportioning of a loaf is dubious.
In the 19th century, upper crust appears as a slang term for the human head or a hat. In 1826, The Sporting Magazine reported, “Tom completely tinkered his antagonist’s upper-crust.” Most likely it’s simply the idea of the upper crust being the top that made it a metaphor for the aristocracy. Here’s how Thomas Chandler Haliburton put it in 1838's The Clockmaker; or the sayings and doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville: “It was none o' your skim-milk parties, but superfine uppercrust real jam.”
5. Trench mouth
Photo of ulcerative necrotizing gingivitis, public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The Tall Tale: Most people did not have pewter plates, but had trenchers, pieces of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Often trenchers were made from stale paysan bread which was so old and hard that they could use them for quite some time. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms and mold got into the wood and old bread. After eating off wormy moldy trenchers, one would get "trench mouth."
The Facts: Trencher, from Anglo-Norman, is related to modern French trancher, to cut or slice. It appears in English in the 1300s meaning either a knife; a flat piece of wood on which meat was sliced and served; a platter of wood, metal or earthenware; or a slice of bread used as a plate or platter.
Wooden carving boards can be breeding grounds for pathogens, but they have nothing to do with the origin of the phrase trench mouth. One of the earliest mentions of the term appears in the journal Progressive Medicine in 1917. If that date makes you think of World War I and trench warfare, you’re right. Trench mouth is ulcerative gingivitis caused not by worms or mold, but by bacteria, probably spread among troops in the trenches when they shared water bottles.
6. Wake
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The Tall Tale: Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock a person out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up—hence the custom of holding a "wake."
The Facts: The English could hold their ale in the 16th century. It was considered more healthful than water and was part of daily life, even for breakfast. Strong liquor (except for brandy, “a woman’s drink”) was not popular. Some people had pewter cups, which contained lead, but lead poisoning is generally a gradual, cumulative process. If anyone got knocked out from drinking mass quantities of ale from a pewter cup, don’t blame the lead. Nevertheless, the practice in many world societies of holding a wake for the dead arose at least partly from the fear of burying them prematurely. In the British Isles, the Christian wake, an all-night service of prayers for the dead, may have been influenced by the Celtic pagan wake in which the corpse was placed under a table on which liquor was provided for the watchers. Over the years, both types of wakes degenerated into scenes of drunken debauchery.
Sources: Access Newspaper Archive; Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear; "Food and Drink in Elizabethan England," Daily Life through History; Google Books Ngram Viewer; “Lead poisoning,” MedlinePlus; Oxford Dictionary of Music (6th ed.); "English Ale and Beer: 16th Century," Daily Life through History; Oxford English Dictionary Online; Of Nurture (in Early English Meals and Manners, Project Gutenberg); Snopes.com; “Wake,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (1958); Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning.
March 21, 2014 - 11:00am
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