Ah, the wearin’ of the green. I lay claim to one-quarter Irish blood, which yields the in-group privilege of getting my Irish up when I want to and also provokes delight in Joe Biden’s recent use of the term “malarkey.” Biden has greater rights to Irishisms, being half-Irish; Ryan, who grew up “lace-curtain Irish” according to Irish Central, may have an even greater claim.

But moments after Biden used “malarkey” to describe Paul Ryan’s criticisms of the administration’s handling of the embassy attack in Benghazi, etymologists were weighing in about the origin of the word. Both The Economist and Ben Zimmer at Visual Thesaurus pointed out that malarkey is not so much of Irish as of Irish-American origin, its first cite from 1922. The OED gives the word’s origin as “unknown,” and conjectures have ranged from the Greek word malakia (denoting a particular sort of …

Read More

I’ve just finished grading my first set of persuasive essays this term. True to form, about two-thirds of them ran into trouble, or exposed the trouble into which they’d run, with an unreferenced demonstrative pronoun, usually “this.” A quick sampling, with identifying markers removed:

1. Because Character A, who loves him, is not aware of her own potential, she is more desirable to Character B who is able to use this to his own benefit.
2. Critic X’s ideas are particularly applicable when examining how B participates in indirect narration. This is most clearly seen by comparing the description of Character C from the narrator’s perspective to moment when we are taken inside B’s thoughts.
3. Character Y’s interactions serve as a red flag to us as readers, warning us that he is not a voice that can be trusted. The most significant moment that demonstrates this is just after…

Read More

I sometimes start my fiction-writing class off with an icebreaking exercise stolen from NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me. I call it “Bluff the Class” (cf. “Bluff the Listener”), and its purpose is to demonstrate to students that we all have a certain storytelling talent at our fingertips—we can make up a fake outrageous news story in 10 minutes or less. The exercise is similar to the parlor game Dictionary, in which players often discover their other talent, for creating fake dictionary definitions.

I’m not sure why I like these forays so much, except that they reveal the creative force of mundane categories. Which brings me to my current favorite: the Avery Durable View Binder With 2-Inch Durable Turn Ring, currently rated 4 stars on Amazon, with almost 1,200 reviews. The first hundred or so, from 2010-11, tout the advantages of the binder in what now seem like…

Read More

“What verb,” asks Helen Sword in the latest “Draft” column in The New York Times, “describes the act of creating a new verb from another part of speech? Verbify, of course—or, simply, verb.” She’s right—to an extent. She goes on to give examples that add the usual suffixes to nouns and adjectives to create verbs—prettify from pretty, Mondayize from Monday, Californicate from … well, let’s not go there. She then proceeds to produce the more academic terms zero derivation, functional shifting, and my favorite, anthimeria, to describe the morphing of a noun into a verb.

My sense, though, is that (at least) two different shiftings are taking place. The sort that Sword refers to, wherein a prefix or suffix supplies the shift, receives little notice except when a double shift has taken place, as in solution, being the noun form of solve, morphs into the ugly solution…

Read More

I told myself I was going to take a break from posts about language and politics after the election, but Robert Lehrman’s recent “Draft” column in The New York Times changed my mind. Mr. Lehrman wrote of President Obama’s policies going forward,

Naturally, whether President Obama can bring people together will be determined by more than a speech. Like tennis, it depends on players across the net. For the last four years, Republicans thought they could win with another game. Will Republicans, chastened by defeat, now change?

Though I gather that Michelle Obama plays tennis, Lehrman’s is the first reference I’ve heard to that game in talking about this year’s presidential contest. But we’ve exhausted practically all the others:

• This year’s contest between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama is best explained as the biggest football game ever. … The fourth quarter began…

Read More

In an earlier century, I taught at an exclusive four-year college whose English department had a bang-up reputation for producing fine writers. Elders in the department had produced a style manual that all instructors were to follow. The rule of thumb was to mark papers with the style-manual codes and not to accept final versions until all errors had been taken care of. Such error codes included “wc” for “word choice” (using “like” for “as”); “cg” for “incongruity” (“an example of this is when”); “da” for “dangling”; and so on. I found the practice tiresome and relatively ineffective, particularly when I turned in my first annual report, where I had noted that my research “centered around” a particular topic, and one of my elders had written “cg!” in the margin. We were missing the forest for the trees, I thought then and think now; we were…

Read More

I broke my right wrist over the Thanksgiving holiday and am clad in a cream-colored cast up to the elbow. Being right-handed, I’m finding it dodgy to correct student papers, grade exams, etc., at the very end of the term. I also find myself in numerous conversations about handedness and brain dominance. Invariably I mention that I was born lefthanded—a “soft lefty,” in some parlance—and my parents tried switching me until research came out suggesting that such persuasion was not good for the brain. I blame all my mental failures, needless to say, on having been left in the middle. On the other hand, by the time I get this cast off, I may be able to sign my name or swing a tennis racquet from the other side.

All of which has me thinking about the soft bigotry of our anti-lefty language. My break being the result of a fall, I can be accused of having two left feet. If I do…

Read More

I’m finally following up on a suggestion made some months back by Frank Williams at Eastern Kentucky University, to investigate the proliferation of the first-person plural in what appear to be dubious circumstances. He writes, “Decades ago I was taught not to use the first-person pronoun in serious writing, but instead to use the editorial ‘we,’ meaning ‘me’ (or maybe ‘I’), and I’ve seen the variety of ‘we’s’ that are explained on the Web. However in recent years I’ve seen what appears to be a different usage: ‘we’ meaning a small proportion of the general population (tho’ perhaps numerically large) but probably not including the author.” As an example, Williams cites David Ropeik, author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts,” writing in The New York Times that “we have excessive fear of vaccines”—a fear that the author himself may not…

Read More

Here we are again, in the wake of a horrific mass murder 45 minutes from my home, discussing whether or not we can discuss the question of guns. Writing in The New York Times on Saturday, Nate Silver pointed out a shift in our language to which any who wish, finally, to engineer this public discourse should pay attention. Gun rights and Second Amendment, as he demonstrates, are on the rise, whereas gun control and gun violence are on the decline.

As George Lakoff has so convincingly demonstrated in his articles and books (Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think), language controls political debate: “Any political message about policy can be understood only in terms of moral values,” he writes in The Little Blue Book; moreover, “Traditional liberal discourse strategies are not consistent with the science of how reason really works.”

Nate Silver’s analysis back…

Read More

A recent post in The Stone, a New York Times blog, has been sitting on my browser for a couple of weeks now, bugging me. I refer to “Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination” by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone, which uses a poeticized version of a Craigslist personal ad to advocate for what the authors dub “the poetic imagination”—an imagination they locate in the minds of readers, not poets. Lepore and Stone describe a number of features they find especially salient in the “lineated” version of the ad—though they miss a few, in my view—to argue that “a poem—and artistic language more generally—is open to whatever we find in it.”

Sigh.

Let us set aside, for the moment, the possibility that the authors are so steeped in William Carlos Williams that they fail to recognize the way in which the found poem on which they focus is indebted to one particular type of…

Read More

The origin of a cliché is a bottomless pit on a dark and stormy night, but I was tickled by The New York Times’s recent addition to the trove of lore concerning the whole nine yards. This one is apparently the deepest of all secrets, the windingest of all labyrinths. Yards, after all, can refer to two-dimensional measure (yards of cloth); three-dimensional measure (yards of concrete); playing fields (baseball yards); a spar on a sailing mast; and degree of achievement (gaining yards in football). The origin of the phrase, thought to have been coined in 1970, has now been traced back to the 1910s—but surprise! It was only six yards then.

To follow the theory behind this discovery and the ways in which amateur etymologists are reconciling it with their nine-yard theories, I refer you to the Times article. Of most interest to me is the possibility of inflation. However “the whole …

Read More

My recent column on the language of gun-related legislation seems to have tapped into the zeitgeist. The talking heads now refer mostly to gun violence, and Peter Baker’s recent New York Times column points out that “Gun control advocates these days generally do not use the term gun control; instead, they talk about curbing gun violence, recognizing that ‘control’ stirs opposition among legal gun owners who fear their rights being trampled.”

That same column, meanwhile, observes that the language of guns permeates our discourse. Certainly, some of the phrases Baker cites—no silver bullet, gun at the head, shooting for Tuesday—refer directly to guns. But others are not specific to firearms, and I find it intriguing that we now think so regularly of guns as our central projectile launcher that we lump all such phrases with “gun vocabulary.”

Take point blank, central…

Read More

My one serious attempt at memoir takes the reader back, as memoirs often do, to my adolescence and coming of age, in the late 60s and early 70s. When the manuscript went through copy-editing, a long query appeared at the point where I had written, “The next time, he brought a lid over to my dorm room.” What was this lid? the copy editor wanted to know. She had checked dictionaries and manuals of usage; she had thought of Tupperware lids, garbage-can lids, baseball caps. None of them made any sense to her.

I began buttonholing friends and acquaintances. “Picture,” I told them, “a friend who is generally stoned. I say that he’s brought a lid over to my dorm room. What has he brought?”

Men and women born between 1950 and 1958, I found in this completely anecdotal survey, knew immediately that I was talking about four fingers’ worth of marijuana in a plastic bag. Those …

Read More

This is not a rant.

We’re all back to the classroom now, and for me that means back to Moodle postings. I am a fan of Moodle postings. For those who don’t use the system—Moodle is an open-access classroom software that enables any number of communications and tasks, among them the establishment of “forums” for student discussion of readings. I use these forums as springboards for class discussion, so I tend to require one Moodle forum post per week, with the reassurance to students that I am looking for their spontaneous thoughts and questions about the readings, not for a finished argument or essay.

Recently, noting yet another yawning crevasse between my idea of literate orthography and my students’ spelling in their Moodle posts—and having eliminated an epidemic of dyslexia as the cause—I asked in class whether there was a spell-check function on Moodle. “Oh,…

Read More

People love words. We may not use them adroitly, spell them correctly, or like those who possess larger word-hoards than we, but The New York Times minifeature “That Should Be a Word” draws thousand of views for coinages like lostentatious (“overly proud of your downfall”). And there are more than a dozen Web sites devoted to the exhumation of obsolete words that should be made to stand and walk again. One of my favorites is Heather Carreiro’s 20 Obsolete English Words That Should Make a Comeback.” Her list includes such satisfying mouthfuls as ludibrious (“apt to be a subject of jest or mockery”) and perissology (“use of more words than are necessary”).

Some of Heather’s words, of course, are pure regional slang, like the Scots malagrugrous (“dismal”). Others, like yemeles (“careless, heedless, negligent”), seem to have been in mainstream use for several…

Read More

A reader recently suggested a blog post about what he called “creative abbrevs,” the acronym imo (“in my opinion”) being his example. Varieties of texting shorthand live and die as fast as mayflies, but the comment did get me thinking about anacronyms. For the uninitiated, an anacronym is an acronym whose provenance has been lost to the shifting sands of language. They are to be distinguished from acronyms per se, but also from backronyms and initializations—all of which distinctions were lost on me until I started thinking about “abbrevs,” and in particular about one of my favorites, snafu.

Snafu was one of my very proper mother’s favorite words, and I recall being shocked when I learned that she knew its acronymic origin (“situation normal, all f—ed up”) and used it anyway. So did countless American publications beginning not long after its coinage in WWII….

Read More

I love reading the New York Times editor Philip Corbett’s After Deadline blog, not so much for the gaffes he’s willing to expose in his weekly “newsroom critique” as for the glimpses he provides into the arbitrary nature of style manuals. His examples tend to send me squirreling into the OED or harrumphing over student usages that hadn’t bothered me until that moment. Three were of particular interest last week:

1. Almost one million of these $35 machines have shipped since last February, capturing the imaginations of educators, hobbyists and tinkerers around the world. This intransitive use of “shipped” has a flavor of jargon. Better to say “have been sold” or “have been ordered” or even “have been shipped to stores.”

I ran to the OED on this one. The intransitive definitions of the verb “to ship” actually preceded the transitive ones. More intriguing…

Read More

Hard-core discussions of gender have their own lexicon, as do hard-core discussions of anything. Like other vocabularies, this one has made its way into broader discourse as the relevant issue—gender—has entered public discussion. For most of us, terms like intersex, transgender, transsexual, heteronormative, and gender identity disorder have become clearly defined only in the last quarter-century. And it took a fair amount of what seemed, at the time, like ridiculous discussion before such terms were widely accepted in the LGBT community, not to mention among everyone else. So it behooves us to pay attention to a language controversy that some might be tempted to mock, namely the question of what to call a person who experiences a menstrual cycle.

According to Elizabeth Kissling at Ms., talking about “women who menstruate” is incorrect and even offensive. Not only do not all …

Read More

My mother talked to the birds. She’d stand under the Jonathan apple tree in our Missouri back yard and whistle up a cardinal or a yellow warbler or a black-capped chickadee, just by changing the melody and timbre of her whistle. “But what are you saying to them?” I’d ask as the birds tipped their heads quizzically from the perches in the tree.

“I’m just telling them hello,” she’d answer. “Letting them know they’re safe.”

Which they weren’t, always, given our cat, whose mouth she would sometimes force open to let an unwary and miraculously unhurt bird fly out.

Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are suggesting, not that Mom could really communicate with the birds, but that the language she used in her other verbal communications could have evolved from, or be related to, birdsong.

It’s a lovely idea, but less because of the…

Read More

You heard it here first. For years, now, language mavens have been discussing the creep of the nominative pronoun in constructions calling for the objective case. Although voices have been raised in favor of “hypercorrection” as an explanation for this deviance, they have been mostly overwhelmed by explanations that rely on coordinate constructions. But I’m here to tell you that we have passed through the wall.

Let’s back up. Initially the concern was focused on phrases like Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s “My father John and my mother Moira … migrated to this country with my sister and I.” The “rule of prestigious deviance,” according to some, allowed for the use of the nominative (“I”) for the second member of a coordinate construction. According to this theory, perfectly rational speakers of English would say “with my sister and I” or “with…

Read More