Monthly Archives: March 2010

Usually when I come up with a new word to write about, I just start cracking open my dictionaries. Even if the word is obscure, the OED will usually have something if none of my other dictionaries does.

But when my friend Rick at work asked me to write about the slang work merk, I figured it was going to take more work than that. Slang, especially new slang, is largely absent from dictionaries.

Rick said something about “getting merked” at work on Sunday. I looked at him funny and asked what it meant. He said it was slang that meant “to kill.”  As in, “If that Crip goes into the Bloods’ territory, he’s gonna get merked.”

I began digging into it. The Urban Dictionary, which contains user-submitted definitions of slang, had several definitions for both merk and merc, mostly centering on the idea of killing, although the entry for merc also says that it can mean “to leave,” as in the line from the Mos Def song Miss Fat Booty: “I’m about to merc, I say peace to the family.”

There were also references in Urban Dictionary and elsewhere on the Web that say merk and merc, in the sense of killing, come from the word mercenary.

I kept looking, since I wanted something more definitive than the Urban Dictionary. Like Wikipedia, it’s a great reference. But it doesn’t carry as much authority.

Then I found the Double-Tongued Dictionary, which “records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English, with a focus on slang, jargon, and new words. This site strives to record terms and expressions that are absent from, or are poorly covered in, mainstream dictionaries.”

The site is run by lexicographers and other experts, and was created by Grant Barrett, “an American lexicographer and editorial director of the online dictionary Wordnik. He is also editor of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (May 2006, McGraw-Hill) and co-host of the language-related public radio show A Way With Words, broadcast nationwide via radio, streaming, and podcast.”

That’s more than enough authority for me. Here’s their entry on merk:

• 1. to kill (someone); to verbally or physically attack someone; to defeat, to overcome someone or something, to do well
• 2. to depart; to travel (to a place).
• Also murk, mirk.

What I really like  is that they give a long list of citations for the word, both from media sources and from blogs and other places people write online.

(Note, these citations contain language.)

Here are two about killing:

• 1999 GoldenChild Usenet: rec.music.hip-hop (Feb. 17) “This Big-L thing”: The sad thing is, if Big-L wasn’t a rapper then niggas wouldn’t even care that he got merked. Theres hundreds of kids everyday that get slain just like that in ghettos across the country.
• 2001 David Weiss Wilkes-Barre Times Leader (Penn.) (Sept. 14) “Wilkes-Barre Man Charged In Killing” p. 21A: “That’s when I did him,” Yenglee told a witness, according to arrest papers. “I merked (murdered) him.”

And one about leaving:

• 2005 LiveJournal for Matt (Newport News, Va.) (Jan. 30) “People are crazy”: But the girl who had invited me was the one screaming, and telling everyone to get the fuck out. At that point, I’d had enough bullshit for one night. So..Me, Daniel and Perm merked. I went to Chenellos to help Chris close.

There are a bunch more on there if you want to dig into it.

As for merk (or merc) coming from mercenary, we can go back to the regular dictionaries. Merc is also a colloquialism for mercenary, according to the OED, which has these citations:

• 1967 “Time 11 Aug. 28/2 Zambesi Club ‘mercs’ are white Rhodesians and South Africans from Colonel ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare’s Fifth Commando.”
• 1988 B. Sterling, Islands in Net ix. 284 Any dumbass merc will fight for pay for Grenada or Singapore, or some jungle-jabber African regime.
• 1999 W. Gibson. All Tomorrow’s Parties xlviii. 199 He had a feeling the scarf was the one he’d really have to watch for; he couldn’t say why. ‘What if those mercs scope us leaving?’

The American Heritage Dictionary gives this etymology for mercenary: “From the Middle English mercenarie, from the Old French mercenaire, from the Latin mercēnnārius, from mercēs, meaning wages, price.”

UPDATE: As Rick points out in a comment below: “So then, Merk is a not-so-distant cousin to the more whitebread words merchandise, mercantile and market? Think about that the next time you merk the market. Or, god forbid, get merked in a Mercedes in the market parking lot.”

Exactly.

From a Denver Post story about deep cuts in public services in Colorado Springs:

Colorado Springs’ woes are more visceral versions of local and state cuts across the nation. Denver has cut salaries and human services workers, trimmed library hours and raised fees; Aurora shuttered four libraries; the state budget has seen round after round of wholesale cuts in education and personnel.

So what is visceral? To the American Heritage Dictionary:

• 1. Relating to, situated in, or affecting the viscera.
• 2. Perceived in or as if in the viscera; profound.
• 3. Instinctive.

And the definition of viscera:

• 1. The soft internal organs of the body, especially those contained within the abdominal and thoracic cavities.
• 2. The intestines.

Definition 2 of visceral seems about right here. The Colorado Springs cuts include reductions in police, fire, watering public parks, and other deep losses that will probably feel like a kick in the gut when the effect is noticed.

Before I grabbed the definitions online, I looked up visceral in my new print copy of the American Heritage Dictionary, which I got for my birthday on Sunday. It’s a gorgeous, illustrated volume. One of the reasons I like print dictionaries is there is always the opportunity to notice other entries that you wouldn’t see when using the online version.

In this case, I saw viscid:

• adj. 1. Thick and adhesive. Used of a fluid.
• 2. Covered with a sticky or clammy coating.

And viscous:

• adj. 1. Having relatively high resistance to flow.
• 2. Viscid; sticky.

And then I saw viscus:

• Singular of viscera.

So I wondered if viscera and viscid had the same messy origin. But no. Viscus and its plural viscera both come straight from Latin. Viscid and viscous also have a Latin origin, but it’s not quite as direct: Middle English viscous, from the Old French, from Late Latin viscōsus, from the Latin viscum, meaning mistletoe and  birdlime made from mistletoe berries.

So viscus is a soft internal organ, but viscum is mistletoe. Not something you’d want to confuse when hanging it over the doorway at Christmas.

I love my new dictionary. Thanks Mom and Dad.

Ars Technica had a story yesterday that said that copyright holders (mainly the music and movie industries) are reconsidering their preference for using the word “pirate” to describe people who steal music, movies, and other content:

Copyright holders have long preferred the term, with its suggestions of theft, destruction, and violence. The “pirates” have now co-opted the term, adopting it with gusto and hoisting the Jolly Roger across the Internet (The file-sharing site The Pirate Bay being the most famous example).

Now, in the post-Pirates of the Caribbean world, though:

Some of those concerned about online copyright infringement now realize that they may have created a monster by using the term “piracy.” This week, at the unveiling of a new study for the International Chamber of Commerce which argued that 1.2 million jobs could be lost in Europe as a result of copyright infringement by 2015, the head of the International Actors’ Federation lamented the term.

“We should change the word piracy,” she said at a press conference. “To me, piracy is something adventurous, it makes you think about Johnny Depp. We all want to be a bit like Johnny Depp. But we’re talking about a criminal act. We’re talking about making it impossible to make a living from what you do.”

Seriously? This is very silly. I don’t think anyone sits down to illegally download Avatar or the new Gorillaz album because they are thinking, “Arrr! I be a pirate of the cyber-seas and I be plundering the entertainment industry! Where’s me rum? Where’s me wenches? I am a little bit like Johnny Depp! Arrrrrr!”

Nor would more widespread use of the word thief to describe people who do this be a wake-up call. People aren’t stupid. No one in 2010 who is downloading copyrighted content thinks it is legal, whether it is called piracy or theft.

Way to blame your problems on words rather than your slow adaptation to emerging technology, entertainment industry.

On to the word nerdery. Here’s the etymology for pirate, culled from a few dictionaries and mashed together: Middle English, from Old French, from Latin pīrāta, from the Greek peirātēs, from peirān, meaning to attempt, to attack, assault, from peira, meaning trial, from the Indo-European base per-, meaning to bring through, penetrate.

My parents are half Irish, and that gives me and my brothers the same half-green blood. But for both generations, our cultural upbringing has been almost all Irish. Every March 17, my mom cooks a pot of corned beef, potatoes, and cabbage. Sometimes we’d have soda bread, sometimes rye. It was always something I looked forward to. I miss it now that I live in Kentucky.

It’s because of that Irish heritage that I am here to write this blog. My parents met while organizing Philadelphia’s boycott of British goods in reaction to the 1981 hunger strike by political prisoners at the Maze prison in Northern Ireland.

I don’t know as much about the strike as I’d like, so I decided to watch the 2008 movie Hunger today. It’s a dramatization of the strike.

The prisoners wanted to be recognized as prisoners of war, not as criminals. The British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, wouldn’t allow it.

The prisoners included men who were violent and members of the IRA, but they also included those had marched and organized and spoken out against the British presence in Northern Ireland. I was talking to my dad about it today, and he described it like this:

“It would be like if they took everyone who was against the war in Vietnam and had ever marched and put them in a cage. (In Northern Ireland) it didn’t matter if you were a sniper or a librarian.”

The prisoners refused to wear uniforms, because that would be accepting criminal status, so they wore only blankets.

The prisoners were beaten when they left their cells, even to empty their chamber pots or bathe, so they refused to do so and smeared their excrement on the walls.

And on March 1, 1981, Bobby Sands led the fatal hunger strike. There had been hunger strikes before, but no one died. This time, they fully committed. Sands died after 66 days, and nine more died over seven months before the hunger strike was called off.

The hunger strike renewed worldwide attention on The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which began in 1969. In Philadelphia, my parents, who had yet to meet, began working separately on boycotts in 1981.

My dad came to it from a political background on Irish issues, my mom from a cultural one. But that was the thing about the hunger strikes and the boycott. There was a lot of division on the IRA and the violence during the Troubles, and a lot of Irish Americans stayed away from anything that had to do with the IRA.

But the hunger strike was different, and the boycott committee “kind of unified the spectrum” from conservative Catholics to those on the far left, my dad said. It also brought in people who hadn’t been very political before but were interested in Irish culture, “the dancing people and the people who were learning to speak Gaelic,” my mom said.

The boycott committee was added to the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Philadelphia. This was a big deal because the parade didn’t allow political groups to march, only cultural and religious. But the hunger strikes and the boycott seemed to transcend politics for the Irish community.

My parents worked together on the boycott for a few months before they began dating. They were married in 1982, and I was born in 1983. So my history, my genesis, is tied into that of Ireland. That’s why I feel such a strong connection to my Irish blood, and not so much with the German and Ukrainian that it is mingled with.

Hunger was hard to watch. There’s almost no dialogue, and though it is only 90 minutes long, it feels much longer because of the stark degradation and brutality. The hunger strike only takes up the last 20 minutes, but that was the most brutal of all. No dialogue, just what amounts to a time-elapse film of a man starving to death for what he believes in.

Just before the hunger strike in the movie, there’s a scene movie with Sands talking to a priest. They argue about the hunger strike, about whether it will do anything, about whether Sands is seeking martyrdom. The priest tells Sands:

“When your answer is to kill everything, you’ve blinded yourself, and you’re scared to stop it. Afraid of living, afraid of talk and peace.”

They argue more, and then Sands says:

“Putting my life on the line is not just the only thing I can do. It’s the right thing.”

I am still reading 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.

At one point, our villain, Wilkinson, is mounting a campaign to discredit a rival general, Anthony Wayne. The secretary of war, Henry Knox, chooses not to reply to Wilkinson’s requests for a court of inquiry because:

The complaint “appears to me … to be the effect of nice [sensitive] feelings than any palpable cause.”

I knew that the way we use nice today was not the original meaning. So I went to the OED to research, and I found 11 of its 14 main definitions as an adjective (and dozens of sub-definitions) are now considered obsolete or rare. Eleven! I’m going to share the whole list, but the Online Etymology Dictionary has a good summary (including a quote from an unspecified version of Fowler) if you don’t want to wade into that:

• late 13th century “foolish, stupid, senseless,” from the Old French nice “silly, foolish,” from the Latin nescius “ignorant,” literally “not-knowing,” from ne- “not” + stem of scire “to know.” “The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj.” [Weekley] — from “timid” (pre-1300); to “fussy, fastidious” (late 14c.); to “dainty, delicate” (c.1400); to “precise, careful” (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to “agreeable, delightful” (1769); to “kind, thoughtful” (1830). In 16c.-17c. it is often difficult to determine exactly what is meant when a writer uses this word. By 1926, it was pronounced “too great a favorite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality and converted it into a mere diffuser of vague and mild agreeableness.” [Fowler]

The OED says: “The semantic development of this word from ‘foolish, silly’ to ‘pleasing’ is unparalleled in Latin or in the Romance languages. The precise sense development in English is unclear.”

So as not to clog up the main page here, the full set of OED definitions is available after the break.

Read the rest of this entry →

I was talking with my friend Rick from work on Google chat, and I made an interesting typo. Instead of typing “publicly airing,” I wrote publiclairing.

We were discussing a desire to make a complaint known to the wider public. I think this is a great word for that or any other emphatic public statement, a portmanteau of public and declaring, especially if the second “i” is dropped.

Publiclaring.

Your move, OED.

Although I use online dictionaries to write Talk Wordy to Me because it is much easier to cut and paste than retype the entries, I still like using print dictionaries when I need to look something up at work or when I am reading at home. One reasons for that is because I often come across new and interesting words that I never would have seen if I’d just searched online for the word I wanted.

The other day at work, I found rathskeller.

This is a great word on its own, without knowing anything about it. It is interesting and has a creepy sound to it. Here’s the American Heritage Dictionary definition:

• A restaurant or tavern, usually below street level, that serves beer.

OK, so that’s not very creepy, beyond the underground bit. It’s still a great word.

Rathskeller is a German word. Here’s the AHD etymology:

• From the German ratskeller, rathskeller, a restaurant in the city hall basement. From the German rat, meaning council, counsel (from the Middle High German rāt, from the Old High German) + German keller, meaning cellar (from the Middle High German , from the Old High German kellāri, from Latin cellārium, meaning pantry, from the Latin cella, meaning storeroom.

My friend Lindsay at work sent me a link to an article on the mental_floss blog from last year on “The Nautical Roots of 9 Common Phrases.” I knew a few, including in the doldrums and filibuster, and there were a few really interesting new ones, including slush fund and by and large.