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.

Touchous about “whom”

I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. The first, Touchous, honeyfuggle, and whoopensocker, celebrates a few regional terms in US English, and suggests some good sources for learning more about them:

A curious recent example is unthoughted, meaning thoughtless, with the related adverb unthoughtedly and noun unthoughtedness (heard mainly in the South and South Midlands, according to DARE). Given another spin of the language-change wheel, it’s easy to imagine this being the normal morphology and thoughtless the obscure one.

More exotically, consider the BFG-esque honeyfuggle, an old-fashioned term meaning (among other things) “to flatter, sweet-talk; to wheedle; to ballyhoo”. There’s a related noun, equally fun to say: honeyfoogler, meaning a flatterer. [Read the rest.]

While I’m on the subject: DARE – the Dictionary of American Regional English – has hit financial trouble and is seeking help. It appears, as far as I can tell from samples and reviews, to be a masterwork of modern lexicography, and deserves rescuing.

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Next I revisit the fuss over whom, in To whom it deeply concerns. This was triggered by an article at the Atlantic that quotes me and other usage specialists on the word’s declining status. Some of the comments there were, shall we say, on the alarmist side.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that language is somehow not supposed to change, when in fact change is one of its central qualities. English has survived the loss of umpteen inflections, with no significant effects on its expressiveness. People who lament whom’s decline, and protest that they like the word, may continue using it – they needn’t stop just because it’s becoming less popular.

Nor is whom sure to disappear: there’s every chance it will persist in set phrases (for whom the bell tolls) and, more generally, right after prepositions, especially in formal settings (The applicants, all of whom live locally, will be notified today). Tellingly, COCA (1990–2012) has 17 examples of all of who versus 1429 of all of whom.

I also discuss why whom has fallen from favour, among other things.

Comments, as always, are welcome at either location, and my archived articles are here.

Centring around phonetic alphabets

Over at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, I’ve been writing about idioms and alphabets, specifically centre around and “SaypU”.

In Centring around a usage disagreement, I discuss the phrase centre around and the regular complaints that it’s somehow wrong or illogical:

Centre around has been in use for about a century and a half, and no one seemed to mind it until the 1920s. Then someone cried foul, or rather illogic, and since then many have found fault with its apparent contravention of mathematical propriety. Nowadays it’s a regular source of annoyance, some of it extreme: one reader said seeing it in an article sent her “screaming to Strunk and White”. I worry for her blood pressure.

Critics object that a centre is “technically a single point” (Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage) and you can’t physically centre around something. But if centres were single points, city centres would be impossibly crowded.

The problem lies with the tension between mathematical logic and idiomatic usage. (You can guess which side I’m on.) I’m also interested in what motivates people to say centre around, and I touch on that later in the post.

Do you use the phrase, avoid it, like it, hate it, or have no strong feelings either way?

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Next: Can shared alphabets foster peace? follows up on a recent BBC report about a new phonetic alphabet, SaypU, whose creator hopes it can make the world more peaceful and harmonious. Historically this is nothing unusual:

Moral and political aspirations have motivated inventors of languages and other communication systems for centuries. Esperanto is perhaps the most famous. Its creator, Ludwik Zamenhof, was an idealist who felt the “heavy sadness” of linguistic diversity and believed it was “the only, or at least the primary force which divides the human family into enemy parts”. So he created Esperanto to foster communication and understanding between people of different languages.

But would speaking the same language really make people more inclined to get on? . . . [T]here’s no reason to assume greater communicative overlap would engender significantly more kindness and mutual consideration among people.

The post looks briefly at whether the project measures up in practical terms, and throws the IPA and Douglas Adams into the mix.

For older articles, see my Macmillan Dictionary Blog archive.

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.

Fiscal metaphors and everyday idioms

Happy new year, all. I hope you enjoyed the break, or at any rate survived it in one piece.

I have three new posts at Macmillan Dictionary Blog to round off 2012. First up, An everyday usage anymore looks at the different ways anymore (and any more) is used:

Macmillan’s page on anymore notes that it is usually used in negatives (We don’t use the car anymore) or questions (Do you knit anymore?). It also appears in conditional contexts (If you fight anymore, I’ll stop the game). And sometimes the negative is not explicit but implied: It’s too busy to visit anymore. So for most people the word is what linguists call a negative polarity item.

But there is a variant construction, generally called positive anymore, that means “nowadays” or “from now on”: I cycle to work anymore. Macmillan Dictionary will be digital-only anymore. This usage dates to the 1850s at least, and seems to be spreading. [read more]

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It’s the time of year for words of the year, and still making headlines beyond this niche – even in Ireland now – is fiscal cliff. So in The steep rise of ‘fiscal cliff’ I assess the term’s effectiveness as a metaphor. Some critics have said it’s unsuitable,

mainly because the economy would more likely drop gradually than with the irreversible abruptness of falling off a cliff edge. The word invites images like the Washington Post’s “going over the cliff” and “fall over the fiscal cliff” – dramatic events compared to what would happen on a fiscal curve or fiscal hill, which have been proposed as alternatives.

But fiscal cliff is unlikely to be displaced. It comprises several constituent metaphors that our minds integrate into a powerful combination. In his anatomy of fiscal cliff at the Huffington Post, George Lakoff mentions conceptual metaphors such as TheFutureIsAhead, which is how we commonly conceptualise time; along with MoreIsUp, SuccessIsUp, ActivityIsMotion and others, all bundled in the fiscal cliff complex. [read more]

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Finally, Try to get over ‘try and’ looks at the synonymity and subtle differences between try to and try and. Although both phrases are standard, try and is sometimes rejected as illogical or just plain wrong, which I think is unfounded:

A recurring objection, as Cathy Relf discovered, is that try and [verb] implies two successive actions, trying and [verb]ing, and that the phrase is therefore ambiguous or misleading. When I asked on Twitter, I received several responses along these lines (as well as insights into how people use them differently).

But this is an overly literal interpretation of an idiom. I’ve never seen anyone raise the same objection to constructions like Go and (find out), Come and (visit), or Be sure and (say hello). The parallels between these and try and are not precise, but the key word is idiom. Trying to impose strict, literal logic on them is misguided. [read more]

The honourable peacay sent me a great survey (PDF) of the semantic and pragmatic differences between try to and try and, but the link seems to be down at the moment. Back at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, don’t miss Michael Rundell’s summary of the highlights of the year, or Kati Sule’s collection of the blog’s 10 most popular posts of 2012.

Google’s Ngram Viewer and wild treacle

I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. If you subscribe to it, or follow me on Twitter, you may already’ve seen them, in which case please indulge or disregard.

The first is a report on the new features of a recently relaunched linguistic corpus tool: Google’s Ngram Viewer 2.0:

It has improved the datasets and publisher metadata and added many more books to the corpus, so the results are more accurate and comprehensive than before. The interface remains much the same – you can modify searches by timeframe, degree of detail, and corpus type, including several different languages – but it comes with a whole new bag of tricks.

A significant innovation is the ability to search by part of speech. Say you want to look for a word as a verb, but it also functions as a noun. Just append “_VERB” to your search term – the capital letters are essential – and the Ngram Viewer filters accordingly.

You can also now compare BrE and AmE in the same graph. Here’s one I did of color vs. colour on both side of the Atlantic (click to enlarge):

See colour’s conspicuous double-dip in early-19th-century U.S.? Read on for my interpretation of this shift.

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My latest piece, Getting ‘treacle’ from wild animals, traces the strange origins of treacle, beginning with the Proto-Indo-European root *ghwer- “wild”, from which we get Latin ferus (→ fierce, feral) and ferox (→ ferocious).

*Ghwer- also gave rise to the Greek word thēr, meaning “beast” or “wild animal”, whence the diminutive thērion – a word Aristotle used to refer to vipers. We see the same root in Therapoda (“beast feet”), a category of dinosaurs . . . . From thērion came thēriakos (adj.) “of a wild animal”, which led to thēriakē “antidote for poisonous wild animals”.

Latin borrowed this as theriaca, which became *triacula in Vulgar Latin. From this we get Old French triacle “antidote”, subsequently imported into Middle English and later to become treacle. Treacle was used especially against venomous bites such as snakes’ – the remedy often included snake flesh – then gradually the word’s meaning shifted from antidote to general cure or prophylactic. Sir Thomas More mentions “a most strong treacle against those venomous heresies”. Eventually the medicinal connotations faded.

You can read the rest of this peculiar etymology at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, and older posts are available here.

Edit: Something else I meant to mention. A couple of weeks ago Macmillan announced it would be phasing out its printed dictionaries. Editor-in-Chief Michael Rundell writes about the decision here. “[E]xiting print is a moment of liberation,” he says, “because at last our dictionaries have found their ideal medium.”

Crowd-sourced dictionaries and rare portmanteaus

I have a couple of new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. Links and excerpts now follow.

Dictionary signals vs. noise looks at the business of crowd-sourcing in dictionary-making. (Crowd-sourcing means outsourcing a task to the general public or another unspecified group.) Some recent discussion about this might give the impression that the field of lexicography is destined for an Urban Dictionary–style makeover. This won’t happen.

It seems to me more a matter of dictionaries finding different ways to integrate public input, and this is something they’ve always done to varying degrees.

Urban Dictionary is an extreme case in that its entries are entirely user-generated; it is therefore best consulted with a certain scepticism. This is not to say UD is unhelpful: it’s sometimes the best or even the only place to find a plausible explanation for contemporary slang, especially the more faddish or explicit sort. But unless several definitions converge on a sense, a pinch of salt or a confirming source tends to be necessary.

For more of my thoughts on Urban Dictionary, and why professionally curated dictionaries are in no danger of displacement, you can read the rest here.

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Lesser spotted portmanteau words briefly introduces the history and structure of portmanteau words, aka blends, before coining a few fanciful examples (which turned out to be unoriginal, but anyway):

Blending is a common source of new words because it’s fun – a kind of language play – and relatively straightforward. So when people neologise, whether whimsically or with more serious intent, they often coin portmanteau words. It’s an easy way to combine two ideas: just think of a word and blend it with another. From dictionary, for example, we might conjure a contradictionary: a dictionary of paradoxes; and a benedictionary: a dictionary of blessings.

Many such coinages are destined to be short-lived or remain limited to certain sublanguages. Others, as we’ve seen, eventually enter our everyday vocabulary.

The post was prompted by a unusual sense of portmanteau word which I encountered in an old book on Beethoven. You can find out about that – and ponder whether banoffee pie has peaked – at the original post.

Comments here or there are welcome, and if you’re new to this and inclined to read more, there’s always my Macmillan Dictionary Blog archive.