Monthly Archives: October 2008

We carved jack-o’-lanterns last night, and I was wondering where that name came from. That got me thinking about other names for Halloween things, so here’s a frightfully incomplete list:

• Jack-o’-lantern: Originally, a Jack-with-a-lantern was a  man with a lantern or a night watchman. It’s also the name for a phosphorescent light that hovers or flits over swampy ground at night, possibly caused by spontaneous combustion of gases emitted by rotting organic matter, which is also known as an ignis fatuus, a friar’s lantern or a will-o’-the-wisp. Ignis fatuus is Latin for foolish fire, and according to the OED, the marsh lights seem “to have been formerly a common phenomenon; but is now exceedingly rare. When approached, the ignis fatuus appeared to recede, and finally to vanish, sometimes reappearing in another direction. This led to the notion that it was the work of a mischievous sprite, intentionally leading benighted travelers astray. Hence the term is commonly used allusively or figuratively for any delusive guiding principle, hope, aim, etc.”
• Goblin: An ugly demon or sprite that is often mischievous or malicious. From the Middle English gobelin, from Anglo-French, from Medieval Latin gobelinus, ultimately from Greek kobalos for rogue (Merriam-Webster online).
• Ghoul: An evil spirit or demon in Muslim folklore believed to plunder graves and feed on corpses (American Heritage Dictionary). From the Arabic ghul, from a verbal root meaning “to seize” (OED).
• Ghost: We all know what this one means, but it comes from the Middle English gost, gast, from Old English gāst; akin to Old High German geist for spirit (M-W online).
• Witch: Another familiar word. It comes the Middle English wicche, from Old English wicca, masculine, wizard & wicce, feminine, witch; akin to Middle High German wicken to bewitch, Old English wigle divination, and perhaps to Old High German wīh holy (M-W online).
• Halloween: From All Hallow Even, meaning All Saints’ Eve. According to the OED: “In the Old Celtic calendar the year began on 1st November, so that the last evening of October was ‘old-year’s night’, the night of all the witches, which the Church transformed into the Eve of All Saints.”
• Candy: From Middle English candi, crystallized cane sugar, short for sugre-candi, translation of Old French sucre candi and Old Italian zucchero candi, both from Arabic sukkar qandi : sukkar, sugar + qandi candied (from qand, cane sugar) (American Heritage).

I’m working tonight, so eat some sukkar qandi for me!

Us can!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There was a funny mistake in a photo caption that came across the Associated Press wire last night after the miserable Phillies game was suspended:

The scoreboard at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia abbounces the suspension of Game 5 of the baseball World Series.

Abbounce is not a word (I checked), but I really like the way it sounds. So I tried to think up some things it could mean. Here’s what I came up with. Vote for your favorite below and add your own ideas in the comments.

1. Treat the ab- as the Latin prefix, which means “off, away, from,” so it could mean “bounce away” or “bounce off.” I lost my ball when I was playing with it near the cliff and it abbounced.
2. The obsolete and original meaning of bounce, according to the OED, was “to beat, thump, trounce, knock.” Combine that with the Latin prefix, and you have a word that means to beat or knock away. The soldiers charged up the hill, but the position was too strong and the enemy abbounced them.
3. My friend Nina said it reminded her of comeuppance. So, combining that with the old meaning, maybe it’s comeuppance that’s so sudden or shocking that it knocks you back. He not only got what he deserved, he got abbounced.
4. Maybe it’s similar to afire. He set the ball abbounce, and the dog happily chased it down the road.
5. Last thing I can think of is maybe it’s a snooty French food, pronounced ab-oonce. Duck with snails or something.

Every Monday, Talk Wordy to Me discusses newspapers’ uses of big or obscure words in Encomiums and Deprecations. An encomium is glowing and warmly enthusiastic praise. A deprecation is an expression of disapproval.

As promised last week, here’s my new feature. I have no deprecations this week and two encomiums, both in stories dealing with the fallout from the economic crisis.

Encomium:

To the Washington Post for the word pillory in a story about a House hearing that treated Alan Greenspan roughly:

Alan Greenspan, once viewed as the infallible architect of U.S. prosperity, was called on the carpet yesterday, pilloried by a congressional committee for decisions that contributed to the financial crisis devastating world markets.

To pillory someone is to expose them to public abuse and ridicule, derived from the noun pillory, which is the medieval device that locked a person’s head and hands in place for such displays of scorn.

That’s certainly what happened to Greenspan as the committee members unloaded on him. The words ridiculed or scorned could have been used here, but the whole purpose of the hearing was for the committee members to take Greenspan to task in public, which makes the use of pillory apt. I can’t remember, is there an election soon or something?

From caitlinburke's Flickr photostream.

Interestingly, pillories are more popularly known as stocks, but this is incorrect. The pillory, at left in the photo, holds the head and arms. The stocks, at right, hold the feet and sometimes the arms.

Encomium:

To the New York Times for the word gyre in a Paul Krugman column:

Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control.The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

A gyre is “a circular or spiral motion or form ; especially : a giant circular oceanic surface current,” according to Merriam-Webster. Man, that really does capture the feeling of what’s happening in the economy, doesn’t it?

Bonus points for quoting Yeats.

My Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day brought this interesting entry:

joust. The traditional view is that this word should be pronounced either /juhst/ or /joost/. See NBC Handbook of Pronunciation 264 (4th ed. 1984) (listing only /juhst/); William H.P. Phyfe, 20,000 Words Often Mispronounced 421 (1937) (listing only /juhst/ and /joost/). But almost all Americans say /jowst/; this pronunciation must be considered not just acceptable, but — because of its overwhelming prevalence, coupled with no good reason for opposing it — preferable. Let the orthoepic jousting cease.

I had no idea that joust was once pronounced any other way. The OED lists jowst as the current pronunciation.

And if you are wondering, orthoepic means “of or relating to orthoepy,” which is “That branch of linguistics which deals with pronunciation,” according to the OED.

The Boston Globe’s Jan Freeman discussed “feel bad” vs. “feel badly” and how people like to say feel badly is wrong by using a century-old joke:
“Feel badly is correct when the intention is to say that one’s power of touch is defective as through a mishap to the fingers.”

Says Freeman:

Har de har har. I would wager my rapidly dwindling net worth that no native speaker of English has ever misunderstood “I feel badly” as a statement about the sense of touch, but this witless joke won’t die.

She concludes:

After reviewing the online commentary, though, I’m beginning to suspect that people fuss about feel badly just so they can repeat that feeble joke about having numb fingers. I can see that it might appeal to the kind of person who goes about tediously insisting that “I can’t get no satisfaction” means “I can get satisfaction,” that “a hot cup of coffee” means the cup is hot, not the coffee, and that ain’t is “not a word.” Please don’t be that person.

I posted a link yesterday to Watch Yer Language about Craig Lancaster’s disdain for the word malternative, a marketing name for drinks like Zima. Two commenters over there, including Nathan of Polybloggimus, thought it actually was a good word, if it could be used to mean something else. As the first commenter said:

Before I read what a “malternative” was, I thought the word was a portmanteau of “mal-” and “alternative,” making the word refer to a bad alternative. In that case, it wouldn’t have been such a bad word.

Nathan adds this on Polybloggimous:

… it does end up providing us with a perfectly good word if we only seize the moment and utterly co-opt it. Just think of all the situations where it’ll come in handy.

I’m bored, so I’ve been clicking repeatedly on the online OED’s “Lost for Words” button, which gives you a random entry. Oddly, I got “self-tanning” twice in the span of five clicks. Anyway, I came across a slightly odd word, moisted, and adjective that means “made moist.”

But what really caught my eye was one of the quotations they cited, from Peter Gzowski’s Book About This Country in the Morning: “Moisted clay is nasty goop. I never put it in my soup.”

I have no idea what that means, but it made me laugh. Nice bit of writing.

Peter Gzowski, who died in 2002, was a Canadian Broadcasting Company radio host who had a show called This Country in the Morning in the 1970s and one called Morningside from 1982-1997, which was where he made a name for himself in Canada. The book cited above was “A medely of conversations, essays, songs, games, jokes, letters, limericks, recipes, advise, and a whole lot of other stuff by the host, the guests and especially the listeners of CBC Radio’s most popular program, This Country in the Morning,” according to this used-book listing.

A few interesting things I’ve read recently:

• The Editrix celebrates the rare instance of comprise being used correctly.
• Word Porn, which I recently discovered, explores chivy, chthonic, and malapert.
• Watch Yer Language denounces malternative.
• You Don’t Say discusses premiere vs. premier, then later adds some monkey business.

I’d heard about this bit of Phillies fandom last week:

On the XM RadioBaseball This Morning: Playoff Edition today, a caller from Delaware chimed in to share his joy for the Fightins. He may have just created the next great new catch phrase, saying, “Boston did it. The White Sox did it. Why can’t us? Why can’t us.” 2008 Philadelphia Phillies: WHY CAN’T US!

Awesome. No really, I mean it. But I didn’t realize that grammatically incorrect could unite a city until today, when Bill Brohaugh of Everything You Know About English Is Wrong pointed to this Yahoo story:

The slogan was taken from a grammatically-challenged sports radio caller — yes, I realize that is redundant — and it has already grown so large that Scott Van Pelt reportedly dropped it on Sports Center last night. Expect to be seeing a lot of these over the next week or so.

And now , Phillies Philadelphia sports blog The700Level, which broke the original snafu, is offering T-shirts. They also provide a roundup of the growing phenomenon.

Go Phillies!