Inspiring etymology, and ‘stakeholder’

I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. Inspiring etymology is a brief survey of breath-related words and phrases, anatomical and metaphorical, including the familiar constellation of terms arising from spirare:

Both inspiration and expiration originate in Latin spirare “breathe”, with the prefixes in- and ex- specifying the particular action. Both are related to spirit, from Latin spiritus “breath”: this too came from spirare, as did perspiration, respirator and conspiracy. . . .

In these related terms there is great variety along the literal–figurative continuum. Sometimes we see it even in the same word: aspiration can refer either to wishes or, more concretely, to audible breath. If you’re aiming for a certain linguistic register, you might aspire to aspirate your (h)aitches.

In the comments there’s an interesting discussion about related words in other languages and contexts.

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‘Stakeholder’ stakes a claim looks at a word made recently popular:

Many of the words that commonly modify stakeholders – such as various, different, multiple, diverse, and a range of – convey the breadth of views that have to be taken into account with regard to some organisation or development. Other collocating adjectives, such as key, relevant and major, indicate a hierarchy of involvement . . . .

A Google Ngram graph of the word in singular and plural forms shows how recent is its growth in popularity: hardly ever used until the late 1970s, at which point it rose steadily for a decade and then climbed even more rapidly. The Corpus of Historical American English shows a similar curve: no tokens at all from 1800 to 1980, then a sudden surge.

Words that develop sudden widespread usage tend to attract critics, and stakeholder is no exception, as the post shows. But based on texts I’ve read or edited over the years, I think it’s a useful addition to the general vocabulary and is certain to consolidate its niche(s).

You can also read older articles in my Macmillan Dictionary Blog archive.

A kempt back-formation

The word unkempt (untidy, dishevelled, slovenly, uncombed) is common enough, but kempt (tidy, neatly kept, combed) is much less so. I’m not sure why: it is itself a neat word, expressive and economical. Here’s an example from Denis Johnson’s great war novel Tree of Smoke:

At this point Jimmy Storm took notice of a patron sitting down to another table, a rather tall young Asian woman, prepossessing, strikingly kempt, sheathed in a glamour of silk . . .

Most sources say kempt is a back-formation from unkempt, which has been around for centuries. In Middle English unkempt took the form unkemd – from un- + kembed (or kempt), past participle of kemb “to comb”. Comb gradually replaced kemb except in isolated dialectal use.

We find kemb in Chaucer: “His longe hair was kembed behind his back.” In Old English it was cemban; the American Heritage Dictionary says this is derived from the Germanic form *kambaz, originating in the Indo-European root gembh- “tooth, nail”.

Jack Winter’s comical essay How I Met My Wife is full of unusual and improbable words created by removing negative prefixes, and sure enough he makes use of kempt: “Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.” Various poems exploit the same terrain.

But kempt, as we’ve seen, can also be used with a straight face; contemporary examples may be browsed at Wordnik, many of them in the compound adjective well-kempt:

On the whole, she was not much cleaner or any better kempt than the ragamuffin boy. (Margaret Peterson Haddix, Uprising)

With his thick gray hair, salt-and-pepper beard, and aviator glasses, he looked like a well-kempt Jerry Garcia. (Paul Elie, ‘The Velvet Reformation’)

[Image shows a Scythian comb, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I think its handle is a metaphor for knotty hair.]

Timber, temples, and “ligging” a hedge

A few short passages from The Shining Levels: The Story of a Man Who Went Back to Nature, John Wyatt’s classic memoir of his time working in England’s Lake District. First, on how to “lig” a hedge, which the OED says is an old – and now dialectal – word for lie. (See etymology of lie.)

It was a pleasure to watch Joe ‘lig’ a hedge; for the work was his pride and joy. Hedges around where we were are a wild mixture of hawthorn, hazel, ash and holly. Laying a hedge is necessary when it grows too tall and shows gaps. Bough undergrowth is cut away, leaving the bare upright stems which are then cut only part-way through near the butt, then pulled over and layed [sic] in neat lines, occasionally being pinned firm with hazel stakes. The tools for the job are a pair of leather hedging mitts, one very sharp bill-hook, and a stone to whet it with at regular intervals.

Later one evening Wyatt and a friend are smearing a homemade concoction on tree trunks in order to attract moths for study. The substance is “a mixture of demerara sugar, a drop of ale, treacle, and a good lacing of rum”; the dialogue is similarly rich:

When we reached the first tree, George pulled the lid off his jar, and said, ‘By gow, lad, this smells about ten ‘orse power!’ He dipped in his spatula and tasted it. ‘And it tastes better than t’best Cumberland rum-butter!’

I didn’t believe it, so had to try it myself.

‘Th’art reet!’ I agreed.

Wyatt sought to convey his sense of the everyday sublime while living and working in the woods, surrounded as he was by so much natural beauty. Here, he adds a short and unexpected etymological note:

The word ‘temple’ comes from the root ‘tem’, to cut – a forest clearing. The inspiration of those who made civilization’s first temples and churches all over the world, was the forest. You can see it in the pillars, the arched roofs, the decorated ceilings. For the gods walk in the forest.

The American Heritage Dictionary 5th edition, in its appendix of Proto-Indo-European roots, says *tem- had a suffixed form *tem-lo- from which we get “Latin templum, temple, shrine, open place for observation (augury term < ‘place reserved or cut out’), small piece of timber.” It’s a gratifying connection.

Peppercorn rent

I saw a curious phrase used in John Clay’s fine biography R. D. Laing: A Divided Self (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996). Laing and colleagues were looking for new premises for their experimental psychotherapy, and Kingsley Hall in London’s East End was a possibility. (It would become “a hallowed shrine of the counter-culture movement”.) Clay writes:

Sid Briskin visited and reported back favourably. Then he and Laing, both dressed soberly, went to visit the trustee of the building, Sidney Russell, Laing mentioning his working-class Glasgow background to provide credibility. Russell was convinced and offered them a five-year lease at a peppercorn rent.

Peppercorn refers to the dried berry of the pepper plant, and the word later became generalised, or semantically broadened, to also mean “a small or insignificant thing” (AHD4), “something trifling” (Collins), “anything very small or insignificant” (Random House), etc.

Peppercorn rent is a phrase in its own right, dating back several centuries, meaning a very low, nominal or token rent given as “a simple acknowledgement that the tenement virtually belongs to the person to whom the peppercorn is given”, as Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has it. But this negligible financial exchange was once quite literally pepper-based.

Oxford Dictionaries labels the phrase British and say it originates in a once-common practice of “stipulating the payment of a peppercorn as a nominal rent”. Merriam-Webster has similar information: (1) “a rent formerly often stipulated in deeds and consisting in supplying a certain amount (as a pound) of black peppercorns at stated intervals”; (2) “a merely nominal rent in kind operating to keep alive a title.”

There’s a little more history on peppercorn rent (and rose rent!) in Curious English Words and Phrases, and some legal notes at Wikipedia. Before reading the book on Laing, I don’t think I’d ever noticed it before. Are you familiar with the phrase, or have you ever paid a peppercorn rent?

[image source]

Words are tasty!

Image from Anarchy Comics #1, 1978, edited by Jay Kinney.

For readers unfamiliar with the idiom: eat one’s words means retract what one has said, take back a statement, admit an error. So it’s similar to eating humble pie (whose origins are surprisingly visceral), and worth comparing with laughing on the other side of your face.

“You gotta break an omelet to make an egg”, of course, reverses the natural entropic order, playing with a proverb (“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”) to make a political point. If you’re interested in the comic’s history, here’s a recent interview with Kinney at BoingBoing.

Zombie nouns, words of the year, and serendipity

Time to report on my postings at Macmillan Dictionary Blog since the year turned. I have three new posts up. The first, Nominalisation and zombification, looks at a grammatical process often cited as a hindrance to good prose:

Nominalisation, with or without adding an affix, is very common in English, and is a prolific source of new vocabulary. Yet it has a bad reputation in writing circles. As well as the traditional grumbling about words being used in novel ways or created unnecessarily, there is also a popular belief that nominalisation leads to weak and wordy prose. In the New York Times last year, Helen Sword warned writers about what she calls zombie nouns that “cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings”.

Does Sword have a point? I look at the arguments and try to separate the sense from the scapegoating.

Next up is Mansplaining the new-word-pocalypse, in which I review the American Dialect Society’s recent Word of the Year poll, assess trends and likely keepers and offer some subjective thoughts on the winners and also-rans in the various categories:

Most readers will recognise some nominated terms and be less familiar with others. Gate lice (“airline passengers who crowd around a gate waiting to board”), voted Most Creative, was new to me but made immediate visual sense. Still, I’d have liked to see mansplaining win (“a man’s condescending explanation to a female audience”). It’s not especially creative – just another man-word, really – but it is very useful and has inspired several variations, such as whitesplaining, geeksplaining, and others based specifically on people’s names.

The comments include some fun discussion of various man- and -splaining words.

My latest article, just up today, is In praise of serendipity – the much-loved word and the equally treasured experience. It includes a note on etymology:

We have Horace Walpole to thank for this popular but peculiar word. In a letter he wrote in 1754, Walpole describes looking through an old book at random and finding some fact of significance to his studies – a discovery, he says, “almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.”

Walpole based the word on Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka, as in the fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip. The eponymous princes, while travelling, “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of”. Serendip comes from Arabic Sarandīb, ultimately from Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpaḥ, meaning island (dvīpaḥ) of the Sri Lankan people.

I also wonder whether serendipity is threatened by the pattern of bookstores and dictionaries going increasingly online-only.

Your comments here or at Macmillan Dictionary are very welcome. For older articles, visit the archive.

STRAC, a military acronym — and backronym

While reading Robert Crais’s detective novel L.A. Requiem, I came across an unfamiliar word (italics in the original):

First thing McConnell noticed was that this young officer was strac. His uniform spotless, the creases in his pants and shirt sharp, the black leather gear and shoes shined to a mirror finish. Pike was a tall man, as tall as Krantz, but where Krantz was thin and bony, Pike was filled out and hard, his shirt across his back and shoulders and upper arms pulled taut.

What followed the mention of strac implied its probable meaning, but to satisfy my curiosity I had to look it up. First port of call was Jonathon Green’s Chambers Slang Dictionary, which says it’s a US military acronym for Strategic Army Corps. I might have guessed this had the term been used in upper case.

Strac gave rise to stract – the headword in Green’s entry – a US prison usage from the 1990s meaning “neat and clean in appearance and dress”. Wiktionary’s glossary of military slang suggests an overlap, saying STRAC is US Army slang for:

“a well organized, well turned-out soldier, (pressed uniform, polished brass and shined boots).” A proud, competent trooper who can be depended on for good performance in any circumstance.

Chambers has a helpful note on the term’s history, quoting Dave Wilton on the American Dialect Society email list:

“STRAC.” Originally an [sic] 1950s acronym for Strategic Army Corps, a group of four elite divisions maintained at a high readiness for overseas deployment. It began to be used as an adjective, to be “STRAC” was to be prepared [...] After the demise of the Corps, the adjectival use hung on. A new, unofficial backronym was formed for it, “Skilled, Tough, Ready, Around the Clock.” It was very common in the US Army of the 1980s.

There’s no entry in the American Heritage Dictionary or Shorter OED, while offerings in the usual online spots are meagre. Urban Dictionary has two entries for “Skilled, Tough, Ready Around the Clock”, and one for “Strong, Tough, Ready Around the Clock”. For STRACT, Wikipedia offers “Strategically Ready And Combat Tough”, and says STRAC units

were those designated to be on high alert to move anywhere in 72 hours or less; as slang, means tight, together, by the book; when said with sarcasm by a combat unit about a REMF (rear echelon mother fuckers) unit it refers to stupid soldiers without combat experience.

There are even more alternatives listed at the Acronym Finder, some presumably backronyms, including “Standing Tall Right Around the Clock” and “Strategic, Tactical and Ready for Action in Combat”.

But the narrower, appearance-related meaning – phonetically suggestive of strict, sharp, straight, smart and strapping – is an interesting development. UD’s sole entry for stract has negative connotations: “overly concerned with standards and minute detail”, but these may not extend beyond one person’s impressions.

[image of U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduation from Wikimedia Commons]