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.

“Fortune is bald behind”

The Chicago Tribune had a brief article in January on baby naming trends, specifically the practice of naming children after places. It mentions the importance of timing:

“Fashionable names risk a kairos problem,” says speech consultant Jay Heinrichs . . . . “Kairos is the rhetorical art of timing. The Romans called it Occasio and made it a god with a beautiful youthful body who was bald on the back of his head,” Heinrichs says. “The occasion, such as a moment of fashion, ages quickly – hence the wonderful expression, ‘Fortune is bald behind.’”

That’s twice lately I’ve seen the same striking phrase. For a fuller exposition of its meaning I defer to Dr Stephen Maturin, in colourful conversation with Captain Jack Aubrey in Patrick O’Brian’s historical novel The Mauritius Command:

‘Far be it from me to decry patient laborious staff-work,’ said the Governor. ‘We have seen its gratifying results on this island: but, gentlemen, time and tide wait for no man; and I must remind you that Fortune is bald behind.’

Walking away from the Residence through streets placarded with the Governor’s proclamation, Jack said to Stephen, ‘What is this that Farquhar tells us about Fortune? Is she supposed to have the mange?’

‘I conceive he was referring to the old tag – his meaning was, that she must be seized by the forelock, since once she is passed there is no clapping on to her hair, at all. In the figure she ships none abaft the ears, if you follow me.’

‘Oh, I see. Rather well put: though I doubt those heavy-sided lobsters will smoke the simile.’ He paused, considering, and said, ‘It doesn’t sound very eligible, bald behind; but, however, it is all figurative, all figurative . . .’

Does Jack say it “doesn’t sound very eligible” because bald behind could be interpreted as a reference to a bottom instead of the back of a head? Or is it on account of its obscurity?

In any case, it’s a memorable expression, and a search online shows a popular variation: “Seize opportunity by the beard, for it is bald behind.”

Book review: Sick English, by Janet Byron Anderson

Specialist language sometimes spreads beyond its initial domain and becomes part of common currency. From baseball we get home run; from jousting, full tilt. And from medical science we get syndrome, viral, clinical, [X] on steroids, and others – not exactly an epidemic (that’s another one), but a significant set all the same.

For example: a detective novel I read lately (Angels Flight by Michael Connelly) contained the phrase: “the senseless and often random violence that was the city’s cancer”. Intuitively we understand the cancer metaphor, but we might never have thought about it analytically. You’ll be glad to know that someone has.

Janet Byron Anderson, a linguist and medical editor, has written a book about these words. Sick English: Medicalization in the English Language looks at how medical terminology has “migrated from hospital floors and doctors’ offices and taken up dual citizenship on the pages of newspapers, in news reports and quoted speech”.

All the words went down the wires

I recently read Deirdre Madden’s novel Remembering Light and Stone (1992), which some of you may remember seeing in a bookmash here a couple of years ago.

Narrated by an troubled, introverted Irishwoman in Italy, the story weaves a strange and intimate spell, though some readers may find it quite gloomy. I hadn’t read Madden’s work before, but I’ll definitely read more of it. Take this short passage:

When I was a child, I couldn’t understand how telegraph poles worked. I thought all the words went down the wires, and if you cut a wire, language would drip out of it like water from a broken pipe.

I remember having similar thoughts myself as a child, struggling to grasp how telephony worked and assuming that with the right equipment you could listen to the jumbled flow of words as they sped along the wires from mouth to distant ear.

Irregular verbs, dialects, and sockpuppets

I have a few new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. First up, Irregular ours considers irregular verbs, whose familiarity obscures their peculiarity – most pronounced in everyday words like be and go:

Irregular verbs can be awkward items for students, requiring to be learned (or learnt) by heart rather than by a simple rule. But they are also historical artefacts that have stubbornly withstood (not withstanded) the pressure to conform, and they shed light on the shapes and structure of English morphology – word formation – as it has unfolded over the centuries.

The post also looks at how new irregulars (snuck, knelt) sometimes appear; how old ones (holp, brung) survive in regional dialects; and how irregular forms, far from being chaotic, tend to follow patterns and sub-rules of their own.

Dialects in dialogue continues the theme, briefly discussing regional variation, how conformity squeezed it out of the emerging standard variety of English, and how authors continued to convey it through the technique of ‘eye dialect’:

Variation in language goes beyond inflection and vocabulary, of course. In everyday encounters it is most noticeable in our accents. As children we learn sounds from the people around us, typically our families, neighbours and peers, and we imbue our accent with qualities all our own. The signature sound of our voice is the result of a unique anatomy, personality, and social environment. . . .

Spelling became largely standardised as Middle English developed gradually into Early Modern English. But authors continued to exploit the features of regional speech, which retained – and still retains – old grammatical and phonetic variants. [read more]

Finally, On the metaphor of sock puppets addresses the term sock puppet in its new online incarnation. Describing it as “the use of a fake identity online for the purposes of talking about oneself, typically in a self-promoting way”, I examine the term’s connotations and appropriateness, especially in light of the etymology of puppet and the other metaphorical uses to which it is put:

The fun and friendly feel of sock puppets, perhaps helped by puppet‘s similarity to poppet and indeed puppy, seems awkwardly at odds with the sneaky behaviour it has come to mean. At first glance the term doesn’t fit well with the usual metaphors of deception, which evoke things that are dark, down, dirty and hidden – not playful and brightly coloured. But when we look at puppet’s other metaphorical uses, we see it’s not such a leap. [read more]

Older posts are available in my archive at Macmillan Dictionary Blog.

Slightly sinister sock puppet image via Wikimedia Commons.

Lifting the sneck

Here’s a word I don’t recall noticing before: sneck. I came across it in John Gordon’s short story ‘Left in the Dark’, in a Ghost Stories anthology chosen by Robert Westall:

…the stairway became narrower until there was scarcely enough room for them and their luggage, and their free hands were holding a painted rail. They came to a landing of bare boards and one small window.

“Can’t be any farther, can it?” said Jack. “We must be practically under the roof with the birdies.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, hinny.” Pauline imitated his Newcastle accent. “There’s one more stage yet.” She went to a plain door that had a latch instead of a handle. “Lift the sneck,” she said as she raised the latch and pulled back the door, “and here we are. Almost.”

Sneck is a dialect word from Scotland, also used in the north of England, referring to the latch or lever of a gate, door, window, etc. (see photo, below).* It’s also a verb: to sneck the door is to close or fasten its latch; or you could “put the door on the sneck”. A door that’s “off the sneck” has the catch left off; if it’s sneckless, there’s no latch.

Sneck was around in Middle English as snekke. The OED says it’s obscurely related to snatch (n.); Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary makes the same connection. The Dictionary of the Scots Language has a wealth of dialectal examples from the last few centuries.

The word has produced several phrases. A sneck drawer or sneckdraw is a “latch lifter”, meaning a sly, crafty or stealthy person, or even a cheat. Similarly, to draw or lift a sneck can mean to act in a sneaky, surreptitious fashion, or to insinuate oneself thus into a situation.

A sneck-lifter can be a burglar, a ghost, or someone who goes door to door in the traditional “First Footing” ritual on Hogmanay. Most elaborately: according to Jennings Brewery, who make Sneck Lifter Ale, the phrase can mean

a man’s last sixpence which enabled him to lift the latch of a pub door and buy himself a pint, hoping to meet friends there who might treat him to one or two more.

A sneck-bend is a hook-shaped bend you’d find in a river or road, while a sneck-band is a latchstring, a piece of string tied to a sneck/latch and passed through a hole to the outside of the door or gate. A sneck-posset is a fastened latch, and give a sneck posset is an idiom equivalent to “give someone the cold shoulder” (i.e., give an unfriendly reception).

Sneck up is an imperative meaning “be silent” or “shut up”. Jonathon Green, in Chambers Slang Dictionary, dates Sneck up! (also Snick up!) to the late 16C–mid-17C, and describes it as an exclamation of dismissal, as in “The hell with you!”, taking its literal meaning as draw the latch and go to the other side of the door.

In a helpful article about the word for Caledonian Mercury, Betty Kirkpatrick says it even appears in head gear: a snecker-doun is “a man’s cloth cap, known in Scots as a bunnet, with a stud fastener on the peak”. Lifting this sneck has opened up a charming store of phrases previously unknown to me, both literal and metaphorical.

Edit: A fine example from Texas, 1909: “…and the Lord said unto Moses — ‘Sneck that door!’” via @TweetsofOld, who also found sneck off used as a typesetting term in Minnesota, 1899.

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* Sneck can also refer to a cut, a nose, or a type of small stone used to fill gaps in a wall, but I’m ignoring these senses here.

[cropped image from Wikimedia Commons]

On linguistic pruning and peeving

I have two new posts on language at Macmillan Dictionary Blog.

First, Linguistic botany looks at metaphors that draw parallels between language usage and gardening, beginning with Otto Jespersen’s famous comparison of English with a park “laid out seemingly without any definite plan”:

Jespersen was not the first to draw this analogy, and he won’t be the last, but it remains a fruitful comparison. We wander the park of language at will, speaking more or less like those around us. We can stick to the established paths, or we may forge new byways and see where they take us. But despite the great scope for variation in expression, we can take idiosyncrasy and experimentation only so far before communication begins to falter.

There is some discussion in the comments about why usage attracts such intense acrimony compared to gardening. Your thoughts on this would be welcome, in either location.

The title of my next post, Many right ways, is a reference to what Arnold Zwicky has called “One Right Way”, a prescriptivist principle used to object to language change and innovation. I find such a rigid approach

out of step with what language is and how people use it – it’s like trying to impose a uniform on public clothing habits. One of the great things about language is that it gives us so many options. We swim in expressive abundance, often being able to choose from several ways to say more or less the same thing. The luxury of alternatives allows us to deliver particular connotations or nuances with a given phrase, depending on our practical and pragmatic needs.

A familiar example of One Right Way is the etymological fallacy, which I discuss in the post. Gill Francis, in a comment, suggests another: what she calls the “word-class fallacy”, e.g., insisting that impact or contact is a noun only and shouldn’t be a verb. I think it’s a handy coinage.

Lots more in my Macmillan archive.