Monthly Archives: April 2009

A column in today’s Guardian quotes a British Member of Parliament saying that it’s an issue of “legal vocabulary” that government-run jobcentres in the UK carry ads such as these:

The database has carried ads for escorts at £200 a shift – no experience necessary – masseurs, nude models, nude cleaners, pole and erotic dancers, sex chatline workers, and performers on topless TV.

The Department for Work and Pension, which runs the jobcentres, says it is not promoting the illegal sex industry:

It says primly that before it accepts ads involving physical contact, it demands a statement from employers confirming that no illegal activity is taking place, and that “the vacancy does not involve contact of a sexual nature.” Once a jobseeker has a post, the DWP will contact them again “to see if anything illegal was subsequently found to be part of the job requirements.”

Of course, as the columnist writes, everyone knows “what goes on in saunas and between escorts.” The problem, apparently, is that a UK high court ruled “that jobcentres must carry vacancies for legal work in the ‘sex and personal-services industries.’ ” The intent was to allow jobs to be posted for people to work in sex-toy shops, porn-movie warehouses, strip clubs, etc. Des Browne, a Labour Party MP said:

“It may be that the structure of law we have forces us not to discriminate between one sort of job and another, but it doesn’t seem right to me. There’s a big difference between being a warehouseman and working as a masseur in a massage parlour. We don’t have the legal vocabulary to make the distinction, and maybe we should.”

Blaming the problem on the “legal vocabulary” seems silly to me. The problem isn’t the words of the law.  Remember, the DWP asks that “the vacancy does not involve contact of a sexual nature.” So the words are there. The problem is one of enforcement. Since the courts say truly legal sex-industry work must be allowed to advertise, then someone (i.e., undercover cops)  has to be checking that the government isn’t in the business of acting as a middleman for the hiring of prostitutes.

Problem solved. You’re welcome, British government.

But I’d bet that no one wants to spend the money it would take to spot-check the ads by actually sending out police to take job interviews, as opposed to just calling up the job applicants and asking if they’ve signed on as a hooker.

Here’s a few interesting things I’ve read in the past day or two:

• A piece in yesterday’s Guardian that ruminates on acronyms.
• John McIntrye talks in his usual amusing way about the backward apostrophe in the Orioles’ logo and why he doesn’t really care.
• Schott’s Vocab is a New York Time blog that highlights interesting words and phrases in the news.
• And there’s Words Between Spaces, a copy editor’s blog whose proprietor scored a 13 out of 15 in my Monday Quiz Challenge yesterday.

From the New York Times’ story last night about the massacre at an immigration services center in Binghamton, N.Y.:

A gunman invaded an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton, N.Y., during citizenship classes on Friday and shot 13 people to death and critically wounded 4 others before killing himself in a paroxysm of violence that turned a quiet civic setting into scenes of carnage and chaos.

Using the Times’ handy double-click on a word to get a definition from the American Heritage Dictionary feature, I found that a paroxysm is:

• 1. A sudden outburst of emotion or action: a paroxysm of laughter.
• 2a.  A sudden attack, recurrence, or intensification of a disease.
• 2b. A spasm or fit; a convulsion.

And the etymology: Middle English paroxism, “periodic attack of a disease”; from Medieval Latin paroxysmus; from Greek paroxusmos; from paroxūnein, “to stimulate, irritate.”

The Guardian has an article about a village in Britain that ganged up and chased off a car that was taking pictures for Google Street View, the Google Maps feature that lets you look at neighborhoods in detail. Some people think it’s creepy; the concern at this particular village seemed to be that having the pictures on the Web would encourage burglary when people could see how fabulous their homes were.

But I’m writing about this because I liked the headline: “Coy village tells Google Street View ‘spy’ to beat a retreat.”

I usually think of coy as “affectedly and usually flirtatiously shy or modest” (American Heritage second definition) and as “marked by cute, coquettish, or artful playfulness” (Merriam-Webster Online definition 1b). But it’s the first definitions that the headline writer was using here:

• Shrinking from contact or familiarity (Merriam-Webster).
• Tending to avoid people and social situations; reserved (American Heritage).

In that sense, it’s the perfect word for the villagers’ attitude.

Coy is a Middle English word meaning quiet or shy, from the Anglo-French quoi, quei, koi meaning quiet, from Latin quietus meaning at rest, still, quiet, according to Merriam-Webster and the OED.

A Philadelphia judge kicked District Attorney candidate Seth Williams off the ballot last week for failing to disclose income. Williams says the money in question was for reimbursement of campaign expenses he paid himself , not income. Though most of the attention is focusing on whether this is standard practice, the debate really hinges on the word “or” in the law, according to an article from the Metro my dad sent me.

The law defines income as “any money or thing of value received or to be received as a claim on future services or in recognition of services rendered in the past, whether in the form of a payment fee, salary, expense.” In the Metro article, “Angry Grammarian” Jeffrey Barg writes:

The judge cited two (two!) different dictionaries on the definition of “or,” saying it disjoins “any money,” “anything of value received,” “to be received as a claim on future services,” etc. And because of  that, (Common Pleas Court Judge Allan L.) Tereshko said, the candidate’s definition of “income” is all wrong.

The judge is saying that income is any money, and that the rest of the phrase doesn’t matter. Each piece followed by an “or” stands independently, in the judge’s mind. So it doesn’t matter what Williams got the money for, even if it was a reimbursement for a campaign-related thing he paid for with his personal credit card. According to the judge, that’s income. That’s silly, both grammatically and logically.

Barg gives a more rational reading of the law:

Two problems here: First, “or” isn’t acid — it doesn’t forever sever relationships between alternatives. Parentheses would make the cumbersome legalese a little clearer: “any money (or thing of value) received (or to be received) as a claim on future services (or in recognition of services rendered in the past) … ” Remove what’s in parentheses and you get a better idea what the law is getting at.

That makes a lot more sense.

There’s a story in the New York Times today about how goat is now a trendy meat:

Goat is the most widely consumed meat in the world, a staple of, among others, Mexican, Indian, Greek and southern Italian cuisines. Moreover, it’s been edging its way into yuppier climes for a year or so now, click-clacking its cloven hooves up and down the coasts and to places like Houston and Des Moines.

I like the word yuppier. You instantly know what he’s talking about, it made me smile and it set the tone for the rest of the article.

I liked this less:

There’s even an adorable neologism (“chevon”) for those who want their meat to sound like a miniature Chevrolet or a member of a 1960’s girl group.

This is silly. If you’re eating goat, call it goat. Embrace the trendiness without fear.

Chevon comes from the French word for goat, chèvre. But I couldn’t find an entry for it in any of my usual dictionaries, including the OED. The only place I found it was in that link from dictionary.reference.com, which cites the Random House Dictionary as its source. So it does not seem to be a widely used word, as compared to say, mutton, another word of French origin (from Old French mouton, moton).

At any rate, I don’t think I’ll be eating goat any time soon.