Talk Wordy to Me

I recently finished The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, a book by James D. Hornfischer about the World War II naval battle off the Philippine island of Samar on October 25, 1944, in which a tiny US task group took heavy losses while holding off a much larger — both in number and size of ships — Japanese force. I’d never read anything about this battle, and it was a really great story.

Late in the battle, the book talks about the American escort carrier St. Lo:

• “By some impossible concatenation of independent miracles, the carrier had not taken a single hit during the battle.”

I thought concatenation was an interesting word and wanted to know if it had a specific meaning that justified using a ten-dollar word.

The OED defines concatenate as “to connect like the links of a chain, to link together.” So no real justification for the word, but at least it is clear from the context.

The OED etymology: From the Latin concatēnāt-, participial stem of concatēnāre, meaning to link together, from con- + catēnāre, meaning to chain, from catēna, meaning chain.

When I was writing about wizard earlier this month, I made my way to the dictionaries’ entries on warlock, which is a male witch or sorcerer. I found the etymology interesting.

The AHD says warlock is from the Middle English warloghe, from the Old English wǣrloga, meaning oath-breaker, from wǣr, meaning pledge + -loga, meaning liar (from lēogan, meaning to lie). The AHD also says the word warlock can refer to a demon.

The idea of a warlock originally being a traitor (and later a demon) was interesting, but I needed to go to the  OED to get  a deeper history. The OED gives three early, obsolete definitions for warlock:

• 1a. An oath-breaker, traitor.
• 1b. A wicked person; a scoundrel, reprobate; a general term of reproach or abuse.
• 1c. A damned soul in hell.
• 2a. The Devil; Satan.
• 2b. A devil, demon, spirit of hell.
• 3. A savage or monstrous creature (hostile to men). The word is applied to giants, cannibals, mythic beasts, etc.

The OED says oath-breaker is the original sense of warlock, dating to the 11th century and farther back to undated usages in Old English. But the “application to the Devil (either as a rebel, or a deceiver)” was also already in Old English, with undated references. The sense of a monstrous creature also dates into the obscurity of Old English.

The OED’s fourth definition is the modern sense, with a first usage dating to circa 1400:

• One in league with the Devil and so possessing occult and evil powers; a sorcerer, wizard (sometimes partly imagined as inhuman or demonic, and so approaching sense 2 or 3); the male counterpart of witch.

In the etymology, the OED says, “The applications to sorcerers, with especial reference to the power of assuming inhuman shapes, and to monsters (especially serpents), appear to be developments, partly due to Scriptural language, of the sense ‘devil.’ “

I’ve written before about about my best friend in high school, Chris Jones, who was killed in  a car accident in 2003 when he was 19. Today is his birthday; he would have been 27.

I’ve heard, and appreciated, a lot of songs about losing friends since then. But the best is by The Gaslight Anthem, The ’59 Sound. I just found a quiet, acoustic version on YouTube that’s appropriate for today. The lyrics and the original video are below that.

Well, I wonder which song they’re gonna play when we go.
I hope it’s something quiet and minor and peaceful and slow.
When we float out into the ether, into the Everlasting Arms,
I hope we don’t hear Marley’s chains we forged in life.

‘Cause the chains I been hearing now for most of my life,
The chains I been hearing now for most of my life.

Did you hear the ’59 Sound coming through on grandmother’s radio?
Did you hear the rattling chains in the hospital walls?
Did you hear the old gospel choir when they came to carry you over?
Did you hear your favorite song one last time?

And I wonder, were you scared, when the metal hit the glass?
See, I was playing a show down the road
When your spirit left your body.
And they told me on the front lawn, I’m sorry I couldn’t go,
But I still know the song and the words and her name and the reasons.

And I know ’cause we were kids and we used to hang
I know ’cause we were kids and we used to hang

Did you hear the ’59 Sound coming through on grandmother’s radio?
Did you hear the rattling chains in the hospital walls?
Did you hear the old gospel choir when they came to carry you over?
Did you hear your favorite song one last time?

Young boys, young girls,
Young boys, young girls,
Young boys, young girls,
Young boys, young girls,
Ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night,
Ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night,
Ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night,
Ain’t supposed to die on a Saturday night.

Did you hear the ’59 Sound coming through on grandfather’s radio?
Did you hear the rattling chains in the hospital walls?
Did you hear the old gospel choir when they came to carry you over?
Did you hear your favorite song one last time?

Young boys, young girls,Young boys, young girls.

If you  need more lexicographic rationality, and of course you do, John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun has also written on why the additions to the OED are not something to get all worked up about over at his blog, You Don’t Say.

I’ve been trying to ignore all the nonsense of people being outraged about some of the latest additions to the Oxford English Dictionary, but between seeing that it has reached the point that newspapers are running newsbriefs about it and reading this wrongheaded column on the Washington Post’s website, I couldn’t stay silent.

Haven’t heard about the issue? The OED announced its latest revisions this week, and it included the acronyms OMG (netspeak for Oh My God), and LOL (laughing out loud), and FYI (which isn’t even netspeak), as well as two other web-driven words: dot bomb, and ego-surfing.

This has resulted in all sorts of ZOMG THE OED IS TRYING TOO HARD TO BE “COOL” AND “HIP” AND …

Well, and this, from the aforementioned Post column:

• “It’s like a grandmother who insists on using slang, but worse. It’s like a grandmother wearing glittery makeup and jeggings. It’s like Yoda trying to sext you. It’s like your great-uncle Pete going to see “Never Say Never 3D,” twice. If the OED weren’t a dictionary, I would be worried that it was a pedophile, given that it spends all its time hanging around people hundreds of years younger trying to seem cool.”

The writer goes on to say the OED ” is supposed to have dignity. It is supposed to enshrine the words that actually mean things. Just because people are using these words doesn’t mean that they deserve to be in the dictionary.”

Actually, that’s exactly what it means. Sorry. Dictionaries describe the language as it is being used. And language evolves, all the time. OMG and LOL do “actually mean things,” because if they didn’t no one could use them because no one would understand them.

A dictionary is just a reference book, not the Code of Hammurabi. (Even the OED.)  A word’s inclusion or exclusion from  the dictionary doesn’t make it “real” or not. It’s just there so people can look words up and learn their meaning. What’s wrong with that?

Seriously, what’s wrong with providing useful information to people? If you don’t like these words, just don’t use them.

A month or two ago, I was editing a story when I came across a reference to an image being pixilated. I looked that up, thinking it was a misspelling, since it is a reference to the image’s pixels, with an e. I was right, but what I didn’t know was that pixilated is a real word with a very different meaning from pixelated.

Pixelated, of course, menas “Of an image: captured, reproduced, or displayed as pixels, usually with a grainy or low-resolution result, specifically of parts of a televisual or photographic image deliberately blurred in this way, for purposes of censorship or to maintain the anonymity of the subject,” as the OED puts it.

Pixilated , however, means, “Slightly crazed; bewildered, confused; fey, whimsical; (also) intoxicated,” the OED says.

Pixilated has its origin in the word pixie, and compares with the earlier pixie-led, which means, “Led astray by pixies; lost; bewildered, confused,” according to the OED. It is interesting that the word evolved from meaning bewitched by spirits, to being confused or bewildered, to being drunk.

I did think of one instance where pixelated and pixilated intersect. If you’ve ever watched a show like Cops, the suspect’s face is usually blurred. And the same suspect is often intoxicated. So you have a pixilated assailant whose face is pixelated.

So I had an op-ed about my parents in the Philadelphia Inquirer for St. Patrick’s Day last week. I’ve gotten a lot of nice notes, for which I thank everyone. But I wanted to share two songs that were sent to me via YouTube in response to the op-ed.

The first is from my mom, an instrumental piece called Brian Boru’s march. (Brian Boru is the Irish king I am named after.)

The second video was sent to me by a man named Mickey, along with a very nice note. I’ve never met Mickey, but I thank him for sharing Black 47′s Bobby Sands, MP. Bobby Sands was the first Irish hunger striker to die in 1981 and was another central part of my op-ed. Here is the song and the lyrics:

My name is bobby sands, mp
Born in the city of belfast
Divided by religion
I grew up fast

I was stabbed and i was spat upon
My family run out of its home
There was only one solution
Turn the whole system upside down

But the system had other ideas
I got lifted for carryin’ a gun
In a trial without a jury
I got fourteen years from the judge

Screws beat me regularly
But they couldn’t break me because
I had the love of my comrades
And a burnin’ faith in my cause

Still i left a girl outside pregnant
Married her while on remand
Now i got a son and a pain in my heart
When he doesn’t recognize his old man

Your soul’s on ice oh oh oh oh
But they can’t stop the desire
To break on out oh oh oh oh
When your heart is on fire

We wouldn’t wear their convict clothes
So they stripped us to the bone
Threw in some threadbare blankets…..

And when they jeered us about our nakedness
As we slopped out down the halls
We wouldn’t come out of their prison cells
We smeared shit on their prison walls

Stuck in an eight foot concrete box
With a bible, a mattress
And the threat of violence every day….

Can i make it through these fourteen years
Will my son remember my face
I don’t blame her for the separation
But for christ’s sake let him keep his name

Your soul’s on ice oh oh oh oh
But they can’t stop the desire
To break on out oh oh oh oh
When your heart is on fire

Five simple things we ask of them
Five simple things denied
But thatcher will not compromise….

I ask my mother’s permission
To finally break her heart
We have come to a decision
……hunger strike

Three comrades starve behind me
I pray to god that my
Death will lead to compromise….

I can no longer see your face
My bones break through my skin
I’m goin’ back to belfast city
You can’t cage my spirit in

Your soul’s on ice
But they can’t stop the desire
To break on out
When your heart is on fire

With the recent earthquake in Japan, an error that comes with every quake  popped up in various newspapers. Another word for earthquake is temblor, which newspapers often reach for in headlines and to avoid repeating earthquake and quake over and over. (A concern that is often a bit overworried about, I think.) The mistake comes as temblor is often misspelled as tremblor. But as it turns out, tremblor is a an error that has gone on long enough to establish it as a real word, albeit an inferior one.

It’s easy to see where the extra r in tremblor comes from, because of the closeness to the word tremble. And in fact, temblor is the Spanish word for earthquake, but it also translates as “a trembling,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary.  It comes from the word temblar, which means to to shake, which itself comes from the Vulgar Latin tremulāre, from the Latin tremulus, meaning shaking.

As Garner’s Modern American Usage describes it, the OED’s first citation for using temblor in English is in 1876. Less than 40 years later, in 1913, tremblor appears, with the same meaning, an earthquake. The OED doesn’t call this an error, but rather an “alteration of Spanish temblor, influenced by the English trembler,” a trembler being “one who trembles, especially with fear.” Garner describes this as a “historical double bobble”:

• “A double bobble occurs when somebody reaches for a word — in fact, the wrong word — and then mistakes another word for that wrong word. It’s a word twice removed from its correct use.”

Though tremblor has appeared often enough that is has become an established word, Garner’s points out that temblor “is by far the dominant form, appearing in print 100 times as often as temblor.”