Monthly Archives: August 2009
Words of Others | The Moon
From Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier:
“We must strive to be like the moon.” An old man in Kabati repeated this sentence often to people who walked past his house on their way to the river to fetch water, to hunt, to tap palm wine; and to their farms. I remember asking my grandmother what the old man meant. She explained that the adage served to remind people to always be on their best behavior and to be good to others. She said that people complain when there is too much sun and it gets unbearably hot, and also when it rains too much or when it is cold. But, she said, no one grumbles when the moon shines. Everyone becomes happy and appreciates the moon in their own special way. Children watch their shadows and play in its light, people gather at the squre to tell stories and dance through the night. A lot of happy things happen when the moon shines. These are some of the reasons why we should want to be like the moon.
A Long Way Gone is full of interesting little anecdotes like this, scattered among the heartbreaking stories from the time Beah spent fighting in Sierra Leone’s civil war as a child in the 1990s.
Pimp My Word | Episode Five
I’ll keep the requester of this one anonymous, for reasons that will become obvious (it’s not anyone I work with, so rest easy, Courier-Journalists).
The requester was looking for a word to describe someone as clueless without the clueless one realizing it.
My standard toolbox for Pimp My Word, Webster’s New World Roget’s A-Z Thesaurus, didn’t have an entry for clueless. So I checked ignorant, but most of the words there were too obvious. Ignorant led me to stupid, which had some good ones (cracked, addleheaded and damn-fool among them), but still nothing that might leave the target “groping in the dark” (another suggestion from stupid). But stupid suggested the second entry for shallow, and there I struck gold: piffling.
The American Heritage Dictionary explains what it means to piffle: “To talk or act feebly or futilely.” The OED’s definition is even more fun: “To talk or behave in an ineffectual way; to talk nonsense, to witter; to dither or fiddle.”
Sounds pretty clueless to me, and obscure enough that it could just slip past an empty head.
The dictionaries say piffle’s origin is unknown, though Merriam-Webster Online suggests: “perhaps blend of piddle and trifle.” M-W and the OED date it to the mid-19th century.
Requests for future episodes can be sent via Twitter, Facebook, e-mail or in the comments below.
Curb your dogma
I’m reading Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, which is a series of essays that uses cultural figures of the 20th century as jumping-off points. I’ve never heard of most of the people, but the book is very interesting.
In James’ piece on French sociologist Raymond Aron, a liberal who despised the French left’s embrace of the Soviet Union, there was this line (p. 38):
After the Liberation, (Aron) could be heard … reminding himself and his readership that, despite the immense prestige won by the Red Army for Stalin’s regime and the people of the Soviet Union, a system of belief that confused the desirable and the inevitable was still a dogma.
Dogma has a neutral meaning that can take on a negative tone (as in the above quote) when applied outside of religious belief, as the OED lays out in its first definition (italics added by me):
That which is held as an opinion; a belief, principle, tenet; especially a tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down by a particular church, sect, or school of thought; sometimes, depreciatingly, an imperious or arrogant declaration of opinion.
Dogma is fine in a religion, where the whole points is to take things on faith. In secular life though, dogma is dangerous, and it’s the reason why debates on important issues degenerate into idiocy (see the current one on health-care reform).
The American Heritage Dictionary gives this etymology: “Latin, from Greek, meaning opinion, belief, from dokein, to seem, think.”
Wordy strife? That’s my kind of fight
I’ve been misled by my own industry! I often have seen the word altercation used to describe a scuffle or fight in newspaper stories. So when I saw it used in a story last week to describe a noisy argument, I questioned it, only to be corrected by the wiser copy editors who surround me each night.
Three dictionaries’ definitions:
- OED: 1. The action of disputing in warmth or anger; wordy strife, wrangling. 2. A vehement or angry dispute, a noisy controversy, a wrangle.
- Merriam Webster Online: A noisy heated angry dispute; also : noisy controversy
- American Heritage Dictionary: A vehement quarrel.
The OED etymolgy: A French word with its origins in the Latin altercari, meaning to dispute with another, wrangle.
Unbraiding the meaning of boondoggle
An article in last week’s New York Times about supposed wastes of government stimulus money explained the origin of the word boondoggle:
Before it became a bad word, “boondoggle” was an innocent, humble craft. It was the Boy Scouts of America who claimed credit for coining the word, to refer to the plaited leather lanyards that they made and wore around their necks.
That all changed on April 3, 1935, at a hearing in New York City on how New Deal relief money was being spent. A Brooklyn crafts teacher reluctantly testified that he was paid to show the jobless how to make “boon doggles.” The outcry was swift. “$3,187,000 Relief is Spent to Teach Jobless to Play,” trumpeted a front-page headline the next day in The New York Times. “ ‘Boon Doggles’ Made.”
A new, more sinister meaning was born, and the word came to signify government make-work, later referring to wasteful government projects in general. Critics used it to criticize scores of projects, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt took a longer view. “If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this Depression,” Roosevelt said, “that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.”
In this, the New York Times trumps the OED, which gives this etymology:
Origin unknown.
I didn’t know such an admission existed in the OED. Brush up on your Americanisms, mates!
Merriam Webster Online and the American Heritage Dictionary add that the term was coined by scoutmaster Robert H. Link (died 1957).
Monday Quote Challenge | Introductory edition
OK, so there is no challenge. But I am discontinuing the Monday Quiz Challenge both because of a lack of new quizzes and a sharp decline in participation (from eight or so a week to none). Maybe the gimmick wore off.
Time for a new gimmick: Words of Others. I am going to post interesting quotes each Monday from something I have read in the previous week. I’ll kick it off with this, from the introduction of Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia (p. xxiii-xxiv):
The usual division is to treat our daily job as the adventure and our cultural diversions as a mere mechanism of renewal and repose. But the adventurous jobs are becoming more predictable all the time, even at the level of celebrity and conspicuous material success. Could there be anything less astonishing than to work day and night on Wall Street to make the millions that will buy the Picasso that will hang on the wall of our Upper East Side apartment to help convince us and our guests that we are lucky to know each other?
… The real adventure is no longer the job. … The real adventure is in what we do to entertain ourselves. … But even the entertainment can no longer be adventurous if it serves a purpose. It will be adventurous only if it serves itself.
I thought this was an interesting take on priorities. It also tracked with an article I read in the New York Times last week, about people who work hard in what are probably not very exciting seasonal jobs for part of the year, and then spent months traveling with the money they saved from those jobs:
“Make as much money as I can in the summer, and stay away as long as I can in the winter — until I’m dead broke” is how (Emerson) Breneman, 26, described his lifestyle, and in that he’s hardly alone.
It sounds marvelous. If only I could get health insurance with that.
New words get old fast these days
Yesterday’s Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day was on neologisms, and I found it interesting:
Neologisms (/nee-AHL-uh-jiz-emz/), or invented words, are to be used carefully and self-consciously. Usually they demand an explanation or justification, since the English language is already well stocked. New words must fill demonstrable voids to survive, and each year a few good ones get added to the language. Some become vogue words; others are slow to achieve acceptance; still others, denoting scientific innovations, might never become widely known.
It is sobering to record what the greatest of late-20th-century lexicographers said about the slow acceptance of new words: “It usually takes slightly more than a century for a word to reach such a state of maturity that it is not recognizably or instinctively felt to be a newcomer.” Robert W. Burchfield, Points of View 103 (1992).
Yet the explosion of electronic media in the second half of the 20th century has compressed time, and the standards for “maturity” are dropping. For whatever reason, we seem perfectly comfortable today with words such as “workaholic” (1971), “talk radio” (1972), “couch potato” (1973), “PC” (a personal computer in the 1980s, political correctness in the 1990s), “sound bite” (1980), and terms from the 1950s and 1960s such as “do-it-yourself,” “glitch,” “mall,” “meritocracy,” “middle management,” “nitty-gritty,” and “prime time.”
This is from the second edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage. The third edition was recently released, and I’d be surprised if it wasn’t updated to reflect the ever-faster pace of new words becoming accepted, largely out of Internet culture. Everyone knows what a blog is, and they didn’t even exist by that name 10 years ago.
You can subscribe to Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day here.
Telegraphing your tweets
Ben Schott, proprietor of the New York Times’ Schott’s Vocab blog, had a great column on the op-ed page of the New York Times on Monday. I probably would have missed it except I was flying and had bought a copy of the paper, which I rarely do anymore. (The print NYT is expensive, but I always find I get more out of it when I have it in my hands instead of scanning the Web site.)
Anyway, it was about codes that were used for telegraph because of character limits, much like those of Twitter:
The 140-character limit of Twitter posts was guided by the 160-character limit established by the developers of SMS. However, there is nothing new about new technology imposing restrictions on articulation. During the late 19th-century telegraphy boom, some carriers charged extra for words longer than 15 characters and for messages longer than 10 words. Thus, the cheapest telegram was often limited to 150 characters.
Concerns for economy, as well as a desire for secrecy, fueled a boom in telegraphic code books that reduced both common and complex phrases into single words.
It’s clear that secrecy was a big concern, because none of the single words have any bearing on what they stand for.
Here are my five favorites from his lengthy list of examples out of The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code, published in 1891. I picked them based on what they meant, not how interesting the words are. Almost every code word on the full list was strange and wonderful:
- Aloofness: Agent is dead.
- Andalusite: You seem to be annoyed.
- Babylonite: Please provide bail immediately.
- Crisp: Can you recommend to me a good female cook?
- Titmouse: I (we) accept with pleasure your invitation for the theater tomorrow evening.
