Monthly Archives: January 2010

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.

Pathos means:

• 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.”

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.

My wife came across an interesting word in a novel she was reading last month: orotund. I made a note of it, but the book was so bad she quickly traded it in at a local used book store, so I don’t have a quote.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines orotund as:

• 1. Pompous and bombastic: orotund talk
• 2. Full in sound; sonorous: orotund tones

And the etymology: “From alteration of the Latin ōre rotundō, meaning with a round mouth; from ōre, ablative of ōs, meaning mouth + rotundō, ablative of rotundus, meaning round.”

Hah. What a great word. Might make a handy obscure insult to use so the insultee doesn’t realize they are being mocked.

I’m reading Fragile Things, a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman. The first story, “A Study in Emerald,” is a Sherlock Holmes tale. In it, Holmes, who is in disguise as a theatrical promoter, and an actor are discussing grand plans for a tour of America. They are smoking tobacco pipes and have this exchange:

“This is most exciting,” said Vernet (the actor). “I hope it will not turn out to have been a pipe-dream!”

“No sir, it shall not!” said my firend (Holmes), puffing on his own pipe, chuckling at the man’s joke.

I’d wondered before why an unlikely-to-happen plan is called a pipe dream, and it never occurred to me that it was a reference to smoking pipes and not plumbing pipes. As soon as I read that, I realized it was probably a reference to opium, which a check of the American Heritage Dictionary confirmed. It defined pipe dream as “a fantastic notion or vain hope” and gave the etymology as “from the fantasies induced by smoking a pipe of opium.”

I’d bet the OED has more information about this, but of course, I CAN’T CHECK. Argh. (UPDATE: A friend checked the OED for me on this, and I was wrong, there is no further etymology.) Merriam-Webster Online does give a date of 1896 for the coining of pipe dream, squarely in the days of Sherlock Holmes. (UPDATE: The OED dates it to 1890.)

I had a weird morning. After my wife left for work at 8:30, I never really got back to sleep. I just kept slipping into dreams for a minute or two before jerking awake.

(Not surprisingly, the dreams mostly featured Adam and Jamie from the Mythbusters. As I wrote yesterday, we watched a ton of that show in the past week during my furlough.)

In my confused state, I first wondered if I was lucid dreaming. But I wasn’t, since that requires an awareness that you are dreaming and an ability to control the dream, which I didn’t have. I was just asleep and awake again so fast that it felt like that. Later, I wondered if I was just hallucinating. Some part of my brain that was still functioning wondered if lucid and hallucinate have a common origin.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, lucid means:

• 1. Easily understood; intelligible.
• 2. Mentally sound; sane or rational.
• 3. Translucent or transparent.

And the definition for hallucination:

• 1a. Perception of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory experiences without an external stimulus and with a compelling sense of their reality, usually resulting from a mental disorder or as a response to a drug.
• 1b. The objects or events so perceived.
• 2. A false or mistaken idea; a delusion.

However, I was surprised to find that they do not have a common origin. Both come from Latin, but the AHD says lucid comes from “lūcidus, from lūcēre, meaning to shine,” while hallucinate comes from “hallūcinārī, hallūcināt-, meaning to dream, be deceived; variant of ālūcinārī.” The Online Etymology Dictionary goes further for hallucinate, saying the Latin is “probably from the Greek alyein, from the Attic halyein, meaning be distraught; probably related to alasthai, meaning wander about.”