From the story “Feeders and Eaters” in Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things:
I was beginning to wonder whether he had a right arm. Maybe the sleeve was empty. Not that it was any of my business. Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.
In Monday’s Words of Others, I quoted from chapter of the book “An Artist in Treason” in which our villain, James Wilkinson, has moved to the frontier in Kentucky. One of Wilkinson’s talents was in giving good first impressions to everyone he met (only to borrow, betray, and disappoint later). A description of one such impression gave me a word to explore:
In staccato style, a fellow settler, Humphrey Marshall, noted the impact of Wilkinson’s physical presence, energy, and wit: “A person not quite tall enough to be perfectly elegant, compensated by symmetry and appearance of health and strength; a countenance open, mild, capacious and beaming with intelligence; a gait firm, manly and facile; manners bland, accommodating and popular; and address easy polite and gracious, invited approach, gave access, assured attention, cordiality and ease. By these fair terms, he conciliated; by these he captivated.”
Whoa. I thought I was reading a history book, not a romance novel.
Steamy or not, that description was indeed staccato. The definitions from Webster’s New World:
- 1. In musical direction: With distinct breaks between successive tones: usually indicated by a dot (staccato mark) placed over or under each note to be so produced.
- 2. Made up of abrupt, distinct elements or sounds, as in a staccato outburst of gunfire.
The American Heritage Dictionary had the best etymology I could find. It led back twice to related words and etymologies:
- Staccato: From the Italian past participle of staccare, meaning to detach, short for distaccare, from the obsolete French destacher, from the Old French destachier. See detach.
- Detach: From the French détacher, from the Old French destachier : des-, de- + attachier, meaning to attach. See attach.
- Attach: From the Middle English attachen, from the Old French attachier, an alteration of estachier, from estache, meaning stake, of Germanic origin.
Ah, Super Bowl week. Wall-to-wall media coverage that results in both reporters and athletes looking a little ridiculous. (Evidence: We had a picture in today’s paper of a player bench-pressing a reporter.)
In yesterday’s paper, we had a story about rain forcing “media day activities” inside. It included this:
It led Saints running back Reggie Bush to provide the day’s first pun.
“Well, it put a damper on things,” he said.
This could have been an actual pun. But a lot of people seem to think damper actually means “to get wet”; I almost never see it used in anything but a story about rain ruining something. Since it doesn’t mean that, I don’t think it even really works as a pun, because it wouldn’t be understood as one.
Damper actually means to depress or deaden, with its roots going back to choking or smothering fumes.
Here are damper’s definitions, from Webster’s New World. The first is the relevant one here, with the second being related:
- 1. Anything that deadens or depresses.
- 2. A movable plate or valve in the flue of a stove or furnace, for controlling the draft.
- 3. A device to check vibration in the strings of a stringed keyboard instrument.
- 4. A device for lessening the oscillation of a magnetic needle, a moving coil, etc.
I needed the OED to get deeper into the etymology, so a friend checked it out for me. Damper comes from the verb damp. The relevant defintions:
- 1a. Transitive. To affect with ‘damp’, to stifle, choke, extinguish; to dull, deaden (fire, sound, etc.). Also figurative.
- 1b. To damp down (a fire or furnace): to cover or fill it with small coal, ashes, or coke, so as to check combustion and prevent its going out, when not required for some time. Also figurative.
1a refers to damp as a noun, and in the etymology for damp as a verb, the OED points back to a meaning of damp as a noun that is obsolete except when used in a coal-mining context:
- 1a. An exhalation, a vapour or gas, of a noxious kind. Obsolete.
- 1b. Specifically in coal mines: (a) = CHOKE-DAMP; also called black damp, and suffocating damp. (b) = FIRE-DAMP, formerly fulminating damp.
The OED gives this etymology for damp: “Corresponds with the Middle Low German and the modern Dutch and Danish damp, meaning vapour, steam, smoke; the modern Icelandic dampr, meaning steam; the Middle High German dampf, tampf and modern German dampf, meaning vapour, steam; compares also to the Swedish damb, meaning dust.”
I’m still reading Neil Gaiman’s short-story collection Fragile Things, and found a word that was new to me in the story “The Problem of Susan”:
The Grimms’ stories were collected for adults and, when the Grimms realized the books were being read in the nursery, were bowdlerized to make them more appropriate.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines bowdlerize as ” To remove material that is considered offensive or objectionable from (a book, for example).” A friend checked the OED for me, and it had a more colorful definition: “To expurgate (a book or writing), by omitting or modifying words or passages considered indelicate or offensive; to castrate.”
The OED also had the best etymology: “From the name of Dr. T. Bowdler, who in 1818 published an edition of Shakespeare, ‘in which those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family’.”
Wow, this reminds me of the story that was circulating last week about the California school district that is taking dictionaries out of classrooms because they have a definition of oral sex. I guess they are just bowdlerizing the entire book.
My wife gave me a book for Christmas that is turning out to be really interesting: An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson — Commander in Chief of the U.S. Army and Agent 13 in the Spanish Secret Service. (I though the long subtitle explains the book pretty well.)
Wilkinson started out in the army during the American Revolution, when he was in his late teens and early twenties. He ended up betraying too many of his mentors and left before the war was over. He then moved his young family to Kentucky, where so many of us intrepid Easterners have gone to find our fortunes. (Wilkinson was from Maryland; his wife from the great city of Philadelphia.)
Others saw Kentucky as a promising land as well, including “The Dutch-born, South Carolina-based explorer John William de Brahm.” He is quoted in the book, describing Kentucky in 1756:
“The vallies are of the richest soil, equal to manure itself, impossible in appearance ever to wear out. This country seems longing for the hands of industry to receive its hidden treasures, which nature has been collecting and toiling since the beginning ready to deliver them up.”
Well, the hands of industry certainly did receive those hidden treasures. I always think it is interesting how much the world has changed, that what once seemed like the limitless bounty of Providence has given way to resources so depleted that strip mining, mountaintop removal mining, deforestation, and worn-out soil are the result. This is true everywhere, not just in Kentucky, but Kentucky is where I live for now, so this struck a chord.
A New York Times review of last Friday’s Hope for Haiti telethon focused on how little the star power at the event was played up. Except:
The most showbiz-y of all was the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, who chimed in live from Haiti, describing the misery there framed by images of desperation, sometimes with a little too much bathos for a newsman.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines bathos as:
- 1a. An abrupt, unintended transition in style from the exalted to the commonplace, producing a ludicrous effect.
- 1b. An anticlimax.
- 2a. Insincere or grossly sentimental pathos
- 2b. Banality; triteness.
Of those, I think 2a best fits what the reviewer was saying.
- 1. A quality, as of an experience or a work of art, that arouses feelings of pity, sympathy, tenderness, or sorrow.
- 2. The feeling, as of sympathy or pity, so aroused.
This isn’t really a revelation though. Whether or not it is sincere, isn’t that kind of display of emotion Anderson Cooper’s coin in trade? It’s what he built his career on after Katrina.
Bathos is “Greek, meaning depth, from bathus, meaing deep.” Pathos is also Greek, meaning suffering.
I watched an episode of MythBusters last week that tested myths that had to do with farting. But they never used the word fart. In what I think was a (successful) effort to be both funny and inoffensive, they referred to the passed gas as flatus throughout the entire show, even when they were collecting Adam’s flatus as he sat in a bathtub of cold water wearing Speedo-style swimtrunks.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines a flatus as: “Gas generated in or expelled from the digestive tract, especially the stomach or intestines.” It gives the etymology: “Latin flātus, meaning wind, fart, from flāre, meaning to blow.”
Via the folks at Quite Interesting (specifically their Twitter, @qikipedia), a word game, and a revival of Beat the Word Nerd:
Word Bubbles gives you three letters, and you have to come up with as many words that start with those letters as you can in one minute. You go three rounds to get a final score. There’s a bit more to it, but it’s easy to pick up.
I went seven rounds, all in the name of research, of course. Also, addiction.
The game is under the site’s “flexibility” category, and it’s a good description. Once you get locked into a certain root, it is hard to get your mind to chase other words. For instance, I got sac- as a starter, and flamed out after running down all the sacr- words like scared and sacrifice.
Here are my scores in the order I got them, and here is the link to the game. Post your scores in the comments. If my Monday Quiz Challenges were any indicator, I am soon to be put to shame. Sweet!
- 930
- 1350
- 1260
- 1560
- 1680
- 1890 (High score!)
- 1860
I’m little late coming to this, but earlier this week, University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari called ESPN anchor John Buccigross a “jagoff” live on TV. There was a lot of chatter about it, including lots of people asking “what the hell is a jagoff, and is it too offensive for TV?”
Jagoff is Pittsburgh slang, which is why Calipari used it. (Video is embedded at the end of this post.) Here’s a transcript I grabbed from AOL Fanhouse:
Buccigross: “You talk about luck and bouncing the ball, and certainly had you had that against Kansas, certainly your Memphis team could have been a national champion.”
Calipari: “Now why would we bring that up? That was two years ago, John. What are you trying to bring up memories of a three that goes through a rafter? And ‘Why didn’t you call a timeout?’ And ‘You should have fouled earlier.’ I thought we were going to talk about Kentucky.
Buccigross: “Let’s take a 20-second timeout.”
Calipari: “You must be from Western PA, John. Where are you from?”
Buccigross: “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”
Calipari: “OK, so you’re a jagoff. Basically, you’re a jagoff.”
When that was called into question, Calipari tweeted:
John Buccigross & I go back 10 yrs. We’re both from Pitt. It’s a term of endearment & we went back n forth using that term b4 we went on-air
Although I grew up in Philly, which is a world and a mountain range away from Pittsbrugh, I’ve heard the word jagoff my whole life, so I guess it travels down the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
None of my regular dictionaries had anything on jagoff, but Carnegie Mellon University (which is in Pittsburgh) has a site on local slang that explains:
Jag (as in jag off or jagging around)
Definition: Various forms involving jag have to do with annoying, irritating, teasing, or playing tricks on. To jag someone or jag someone off means to irritate or tease. To jag around means to fool around, goof off. A jagoff is a person who is irritating because of being inept or stupid.
Text example: “I don’t know why she keeps jagging me all the time”
Origin: The exact origin of this word is unknown, but the source language is probably Scotch-Irish English. “To jag” means to turn sharply.
Source: The Dictionary of American Regional English
Of course, because of the way it sounds, jagoff is used as a synonym for jackoff, which is where the idea that it is offensive as well as insulting comes from, especially since a jackoff is often “a person who is irritating because of being inept or stupid.”
My favorite use of jagoff was in the song “College Avenue” on the solo album Life, Love And The Pursuit Of Justice by Justin Sane, frontman for Anti-Flag, a Pittsbrugh punk band. The song is about college students wasting their days away:
Some day, one of these thousands of jagoffs on this very campus
May become famous for something they’ll do
Maybe they will cure a disease,
or even bring about just a touch of world peace
But then again when i look around…
Then again when i look around…
Then again when i look around… I think to myself,
Maybe not!
You can watch Calipari’s exchange on YouTube, the action begins to unfold around the 1:30 mark:
I carry a notebook, which I mostly use to write down things that occur to me so I don’t forget them. I was scanning back through it the other day and came across a word I had meant to write a post on: upshot.
I don’t remember why it came up, but here’s the Webster’s New World definition: “the conclusion; result; outcome.”
And what I was really curious about, the etymology: “originally, the final shot in an archery match.”
Again, I’d bet the OED would give more information, but I CAN’T CHECK. Argh. (UPDATE: A friend checked the OED for me, there is no more etymology, but it does date the word to 1531.) I found a book on archery in Google Books — Hunting with the Bow and Arrow by Saxton Pope — that had a longer explanation. It’s the only thing I could find, so I can’t verify it, but I’ll share it with that caveat:
In ancient times when archery was practiced in open fields and shooting at butts or clouts, men walked between their distances much as golfers do today, and having completed their course, it was often customary to shoot a return round over the same field. This was called the upshot, and has descended into common parlance, just as many other phrases have which had their origin in the use of the bow and arrow.
