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.

From humblebrag to underbrag

We are, it seems, mired in a culture of bragging. The traditional form took a twist with the humblebrag, a boast veiled in fake humility (and showcased to hilarious effect on Twitter). Now we have the underbrag, a far subtler way for us to show off. Sort of.

Jen Doll believes that the humblebrag’s moment has passed. Introducing the underbrag in the Atlantic Wire as the brag that “doesn’t care what The Man thinks”, she says it’s:

when you brag your own disaster or situation that one would not normally brag about. Skilled underbraggers can get away with doing so because the underbrag is not fake like the brag brag; it reveals intimate life details that are interesting and probably even embarrassing . . . . Part of the twofold power punch of the underbrag is what it demonstrates about the person who can get away with it. It is a sign of both authenticity and enthusiasm. And power. If you can underbrag and not get fired, grounded, or shamed into brag-bragging, you are a force to contend with indeed.

For example: Wow, my bedsit is a real pigsty. Or: I’m totally reheating yesterday’s toast for my dinner. The underbrag is a lousy brag, a brag that shouldn’t be a brag. It is, Doll contends, “not really a brag at all—except for the fact that the underbragger is bragging about it and therefore changing the rules of bragging as we know them.”

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On a side note, you might have noticed two examples of contrastive reduplication in the quoted excerpt above: “not fake like the brag brag”; “shamed into brag-bragging” – brag-bragging being normal bragging, in contrast to these modish spin-offs.

Emily Brewster also used contrastive reduplication in the tweet that tipped me off: ‘All this talk about new words, but my fave new NEW word is “underbrag.”’

What other forms of bragging are there? Bumperbrag could be a brag on a bumper sticker. Mumblebrag, mumbling a brag so you seem coy about something but really you want someone to ask you to repeat it, louder, or to brag on your behalf. Examplebrag, using examples to show off. Umm. I’d better stop there.

Update: On Twitter, Angela Tung tipped me off about a new kind of brag via Anil Dash: disclosurebrag.

‘Scary quotes’

You’ve probably heard of scare quotes, well here’s scary quotes.

This is an image from the BBC news website today. Note the scary phrases in quotation marks, aka inverted commas:

Scary quotes commonly appear in headlines and subheadings. Some indicate reported speech or text, a common function of quotation marks; others paraphrase. They are a subset of claim quotes, an unofficial journalistic term for what Martyn Cornell describes as

a shorthand way of saying “someone is making this claim and we neither give it authority nor dismiss it, we’re just reporting it”. Frequently what is inside these sorts of claim quotes is a paraphrase of what was actually said, to make it fit inside the headline space

Bombers, memory holes, vomiting and screaming: the defining feature of scary quotes is that their contents are scary. Visit BBC news any day, at any hour, and you might take fright. [Edit: On a visit an hour later, I saw 'rape', 'recession', and 'rhino gang' in scary quotes – and that's just the Rs, on the front page.]

Yes, I’m plagiarising my Twitter self again. It’s a busy week.

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Previously in novel punctuation: apostrophantoms.

Slang ‘helmer’ and the fun of new words

I have a couple of new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. First, The fun of new words considers the pleasure we get from playing with words, letters and language, with special focus on neologisms:

Wordplay, in a word, is fun. It can break ice and break conventions, exercise the mind and stretch the imagination. Language, like physical play, is a medium through which we can indulge our creative instincts. Some people channel this into inventing entire languages; more commonly it manifests in our love of coining and using new words. . . .

Portmanteaus are an especially popular type of new word. Here, much of the groundwork has already been laid in the form of two or more existing words. There is a surreal kind of entertainment in seeing words joined improbably together, and when newspaper headlines join in the game, these blends spread all the faster. [more]

Next, Helmer at the helm sketches the development of helm from its origin as a nautical term to later senses that have nothing directly to do with steering a ship:

Inevitably, the word has developed metaphorical uses. At the helm means in charge, and you can be at the helm of a government, business, sports team, film production, and so on. Words such as steer, saddle, and pilot have broadened similarly, from navigation and transport to more figurative senses: a steering group could be in the saddle guiding the direction of a pilot project. . . .

I’m especially taken by a Hollywood slang usage:

Helmer in particular interests me. Most commonly it appears as a surname, but in US English it has become a synonym for film (or TV) director. I see this usage especially in film reviews and reporting, for example in the Hollywood Reporter (“the helmer’s 1978 horror classic”) and Variety (“the helmer switches to color”).

Helmer appears in Variety‘s slanguage dictionary, which contains what Julian Gough, in a comment, describes as “an internally consistent version of English that reads like the snappy, jazzy dialogue in a Howard Hawks script”.

You can read the rest here, or browse my archive of Macmillan articles.

Corpus fu, mismarriedly, and other neologisms

In a comment here last month I used the phrase corpus fu, which I subsequently defined as follows:

Corpus fu (n.) Skill or mastery in the use of text corpora.* By analogy with Google fu, from Kung fu.

Ian Preston said there was “all kinds of nerd-fu” out there, and he’s right. Given the productiveness of the X fu formula, I was surprised to find no older instances of corpus fu online. I expect the phrase has been used in unrecorded speech, but this post might give it a boost.

I like making up whimsical words and phrases. Often they appear as wordplay in conversation and are promptly forgotten, but a few I remember. Raiding my Twitter archives, I found bemused — not a new word but a new usage, which I’m voting Least Likely To Succeed:

Since "bemused" is now skunked and people are confused about what it means, I'm giving it another meaning: "attended to by one's muse".—
Stan Carey (@StanCarey) August 22, 2011

On Google+ last week, Kory Stamper shared the curious adverb marriedly (“in the manner of a married couple; as if married”). I took to adding prefixes and ended up with mismarriedly (“in the manner of a mismarried couple; as if mismarried”, where mismarried = unsuitably married).

I was just playing around, but it turned out that mismarriedly had only a handful of results on Google, each of which was a computer-generated inflection. So Kory suggested (“Quick!”) that I use it in a sentence, and this was it:

The couple mismarriedly struggled on, doomed to a life of intimate unhappiness.

Had I given it more thought, I might’ve written something a shade subtler, like “…resigned to a life of intimate dissatisfaction”. But it’ll do. Mismarriedly is unusual for me in that it’s not a silly or frivolous coinage. It isn’t very useful, either — the world has done fine without it for long enough — but who knows, maybe someone will put it to practical use.

Another coinage I’m adopting is urbigator (urban + alligator?), meaning “any large earth-moving or digging vehicle”. This is one of several new words in Erin McKean’s recent article on neologisms in the Boston Globe. I was also struck by thelcome, which blends thank you and you’re welcome. Would it be handy to have a word like this in common parlance?

Erin explains why some new words are more likely to take off than others. She says Allan Metcalf of the American Dialect Society

gives five factors by which to judge the success of a new word: what he calls the FUDGE scale. FUDGE stands for “frequency of use” (more use means a higher chance of success), “unobtrusiveness” (is it too jokey?), “diversity of users and situations” (is it used by a lot of different people?), “generation of other forms and meanings” (can you verb it?), and “endurance of the concept.”

All of which suggests that corpus fu, mismarriedly and my bemused are not destined for world domination. But who knows.

What do you think of thelcome and company? Do you invent words, or are there little-known words whose circulation you’d like to increase? I’d love to hear about them.

Update: Via a comment from Ben Zimmer on Language Hat: two excellent articles that trace the shifting meaning of bemused: “We are not bemused”, by Jan Freeman, and “Perplexed by ‘Nonplussed’ and ‘Bemused’”, by Ben himself.

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* By text corpora I mean structured linguistic data such as the sets created by Mark Davies (also under “Language links” in the blogroll).

Jumbling, tumbling

Between this blog and other active online haunts, I’ve been spreading my internet self a bit thin. But I’m a glutton for punishment, so I’ve started a Tumblr blog, provisionally titled Books & bits asthore.* So far it’s an erratic series of book excerpts, poems, and images from films.

Sentence first has been nominated in Macmillan Dictionary’s inaugural Love English Awards. You can vote for it, or for another language blog, on this page until 31 January. My expectations are non-existent, but I’m honoured to be in such great company, and I found a few new websites to explore. (Disclosure: I write for Macmillan Dictionary Blog.)

It’s a mild and sunny December day in the west of Ireland — Pseudocember, I’ve been calling it — and this is likely to be my last post before 2012. Thank you for your visits, comments, and innumerable kindnesses all year, and have a happy and peaceful Christmas.

moss on a wall in county Galway this morning

* I wrote about the Irish English word asthore here.

The monstrous indecency of hybrid etymology

The word hybrid (from Latin hybrida, “mongrel”) commonly refers to animals and plants of mixed lineage, and more recently to vehicles with two or more power sources. In linguistic morphology it refers to a word formed by combining elements that originated in two or more languages. The process is called hybridization.

Many new words arise through compounding and affixation, and a lot of roots and affixes in English derive from Latin or Greek — sometimes indirectly, such as through French. (Classical compounds are a related source of new vocabulary, but they are of a “purer” strain than hybrids and need not concern us here.)

There is a tendency for like to join with like, but because affixes from other languages are so well-established in English, and their origins are not widely known, etymological affinity is not routinely observed when words are formed. English has always added foreign bits to native bits, and both to other foreign bits. It does this in its sleep.

Hybrids are ubiquitous: they “luxuriate in the English word-garden”, as Simeon Potter put it. A familiar example is television, which (via French) yokes Greek tele- “far” to Latin visio “seeing”. Neuroscience joins Greek neuro- “nerve” to science, from Latin scientia “knowledge”. Other hybrids include automobile, hypercorrection, lovable, merriment, monolingual, sociology, and talkative.

Frankenstein’s monster reads a hybrid word and collapses in a daze; Dr F. flees in fright and disgust.

Purists used to complain about hybrids as if it were somehow unsavoury to fuse morphemes from different languages. Maybe this attitude owed something to a fastidious temperament and a bias for classical learning. Jan Freeman, writing about these Frankenwords, said that “usage gurus who could flaunt their Greek and Latin did, and those who couldn’t copied them.”

Eric Partridge, in Usage and Abusage, said neologisms should avoid “unseemly misalliance” and pay heed to “etymological decency”. Ralcy Husted Bell called jeopardize “a monster”, which seems a bit harsh. These phrases give the impression that hybrids are malformed abominations, hideous chimeras to be shunned and disowned.

In their influential King’s English, the Fowler brothers object to amoral on the grounds that a- is Greek, moral is Latin, and it is “desirable that in making new words the two languages should not be mixed”. H. W. Fowler later compiled the following “ill-favoured list, of which all readers will condemn some, & some all”:

amoral, amusive, backwardation, bi-daily, bureaucracy, cablegram, climactic, coastal, colouration, dandiacal, floatation, funniment, gullible, impedance, pacifist, racial, sendee, speedometer

Several are so commonplace that it’s hard to imagine them bothering anyone; others never caught on. Often it seems to be the newness wherein lies the main trouble: rarely is there a problem with well-established hybrids. On this point, Robert Burchfield found that “the arguments apply only to words formed in the 19C. and 20C.”

Fowler believed that word-making,

like other manufactures, should be done by those who know how to do it; others should neither attempt it for themselves, nor assist the deplorable activities of amateurs by giving currency to fresh coinages before there has been time to test them.

But even if we were to deny ourselves the natural, playful urge to neologise, who would do the testing to which Fowler refers? An elite cadre of grammarians and grammaticasters, or the general population whose language it equally is? Again I find myself siding with Burchfield, in his New Fowler’s Modern English Usage:

Homogeneity of language origin comes low in [language users’] ranking of priorities; euphony, analogy, a sense of appropriateness, an instinctive belief that a word will settle in if there is a need for it and will disappear if there is not — these are the factors that operate when hybrids (like any other new words) are brought into the language.

This to me is a more sane and tolerant stance, free of purist dogma and control-freakery. Rejecting hybrids in English just because their parts’ ancient origins don’t match is pointless peevery. Bryan Garner, in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage, writes that nowadays “only a few Classics professors” object to them. Let us be thankful for that.

My only regret is that hybrid is not a hybrid and so does not describe itself the way portmanteau does. But it’s probably too late to do anything about that.

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Updates: Ben Zimmer has drawn my attention to a T-shirt with the text: “Polyamory is wrong! It is either multiamory or polyphilia but mixing Greek and Latin roots? Wrong!”

Ben quotes a similar joke from Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love: “Homosexuality? What barbarity! It’s half Greek and half Latin!”

This post also appears on the Visual Thesaurus.

[Frankenstein image from Wikimedia Commons]