A muffit of tea

‘Do you want a muffit of tea?’ This expression – if you’re unfamiliar with it – can be heard in a short sketch by the Scottish comedian Brian Limond, aka Limmy, in series 2 of his brilliant Limmy’s Show:

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Numbnuts, hashtags, and refutations

I normally report on my posts for Macmillan Dictionary Blog about once a month. But because I took a short break from blogging here, I have three to share instead of the usual two.

The first reflects on the American Dialect Society’s words of the year (columbusing, even, manspreading, bae, #Blacklivesmatter). These category winners, considered collectively,

testify to the creativity and imagination inherent in language use, each in a different way. #Blacklivesmatter is not lexically innovative, but its selection as word of the year underscores the irresistible rise of hashtags and how they continue to spread into mainstream culture and domains beyond their early use as a way of organising discussions on social media.

It also indicates the broader significance of the hashtags shortlisted: #icantbreathe, #notallmen, #yesallwomen, #whyistayed and #blacklivesmatter all point to conversations taking place, on a global scale and in real time, about violence or abuse between different groups of people. Hashtags have facilitated such communication, providing a forum for voices to be heard and opening people’s eyes to others’ experiences.

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My next post picks up on a new entry to Macmillan’s crowd-sourced Open Dictionary, numbnuts, and looks at words with a similar sound and meaning, such as ninny and numbskull:

Slang lexicographer Jonathon Green dates numbnuts to the late 1960s, and has also recorded numbhead, numbwit and nimwit (by analogy with dimwit) numbass, and other more colourful variants that cluster around similar sounds. There’s also numps, numpty, nimrod and nincompoop, and a little further off we find dumbo, dumb-ass, dunce, dunderhead, chump, schmuck, and Monty Python’s Gumbys. I have a soft spot for numbskull because of the comic strip The Numskulls, which I loved as a child. And I recently dreamt I called someone an ‘ignorant ninny’, which belongs in the same general set (though it doesn’t appear to be an abbreviation of nincompoop, as I originally imagined).

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Finally, and topically, I defend the ‘loose’ use of refute by refuting allegations of its incorrectness:

For the first few hundred years of its existence in English [refute] had various related senses having to do with disproving theories, arguments, people, and so on. But its use as a word meaning reject or deny the accuracy or truth of something is no upstart either – it dates to the 19th century, so it’s had time to become established in the common tongue.

This ‘weakened’ usage has been criticised for almost as long as it has been around . . . . Yet the original sense of refute, according to the OED, is ‘To refuse or reject (a thing or person)’.

It’s topical because the UK Telegraph responded to the HSBC scandal this week by ‘utterly refuting’ allegations (from its newly resigned chief political commentator Peter Oborne) that its editorial operations were not distinct from advertising-based income. The BBC went so far as to paraphrase the Telegraph’s statement:

I’ve seen a lot of criticism of the Telegraph’s use of refute in its statement. It could be described as unclear, or careless because it contradicts the paper’s own style guide. But it’s not incorrect, and anyone insisting that refute can only mean ‘disprove’ has fallen foul of the etymological fallacy.

Older posts can be read in my Macmillan Dictionary Blog archive.

Use ‘said’ and ‘wrote’, the editor highlighted

Fiction writers are rightly advised to use said in dialogue and avoid redundancies or conspicuous synonyms: ‘You must,’ he insisted. ‘The hell I will!’ she shouted loudly. This sort of thing is likely to annoy readers and distract them from the story. It’s one of Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing:

Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

Yet writers continue to riddle their stories with showy or gratuitous synonyms. It can give the impression that they’re trying too hard to enliven their text, without knowing the right and wrong ways to translate their passion for the material into something readers will appreciate, not wince at. If you’re going to thesaurify said, you’ll need a damn good reason.

Horror writer Ramsey Campbell had one for his short story ‘Next Time You’ll Know Me’ (1988), which plays around with the ownership of ideas and the challenge of being original. Its narrator deliberately overwrites his account, studiously avoiding said in almost every report of speech in favour of overblown alternatives:

Australian clippings in Peter Temple’s ‘Truth’

Australian English has a famous tendency to abbreviate words, doing so frequently and in a variety of ways. Clipping comes first, then the stump may be suffixed with an -er, -o, -s, -ie or -y, etc. This can and does occur in any form of English, but Australians seem to have taken diminutives furthest: it’s an unmistakable feature of the dialect.

Peter Temple’s Truth is an Australian crime novel with an abundance of such terms, and as I read it I decided to note some of them. The book, incidentally, is outstanding: the generic phrase crime novel utterly fails to capture this eloquent and ambitious morality tale. Anyway: to begin with -o forms. Truth offers several, usually in dialogue:

‘…get someone to take down every rego in the parking garage’ (registration, i.e., car number plate)

‘…years ago, you rings the cops, the ambos, they come.’ (ambulances ambulance paramedics)

‘If my old man had been a garbo, I’d be labouring on a building site.’ (garbage collector)

‘And have the Salvos take a walk around there,’ said Villani. (Salvation Army)

‘Told you at the servo then, you don’t fucken listen.’ (service station, i.e., gas station or petrol station)

Link love: language (61)

It’s a couple of months since I did a language linkfest, so before it gets out of hand again here’s a selection of linguistic and word-related items I’ve enjoyed over the last while.

A dictionary of hip-hop slang.

On the history and pragmatics of ping.

The future will see fewer, and simpler, languages. (Or will it?)

The global language network.

Spelling reformers get the wrong end of the stick.

Geniorum octopodes? A pedantic guide to borrowed inflections.

The Ling Space: videos introducing linguistic topics.

How old is the nickname Mike?

Using strikethrough for communication.

Celebrating the survival of aboriginal languages.

26 language writers on their favourite portmanteau words.

What are the best things to use as a bookmark?

Bae is an adjective and a verb now.

Did Celtic languages influence English grammar?

How the language of TV shows sheds light on their structure.

If you need another reason not to listen to Nevile Gwynne.

How and why does the English language change?

The language of convenience stores.

Not all likes are alike.

A short history of the pilcrow (¶).

A short history of the octothorpe (#).

Feminism and the language of football.

13 words of the year from other countries.

Research suggests bilingualism reduces essentialist beliefs.

Authors protest the omission of nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Signalling the intent to signal.

For crying in the sink, let’s euphemize!

Hawaiian pidgin word hapa (half-white, half-Asian) has ameliorated.

Why did people start peeving about “book entitled”?

Behind the scenes at Merriam-Webster.

Bringing Webster’s unabridged dictionary to market in 1864.

Wine words and their history in Australian English.

The case for dropping the term pathogen.

The hidden language of ~the tilde~.

Eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious.

Hashtagification.

Men, women, and language:

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Want more? See the language links archive for 60 prior installments.

Parky weather

Beryl Bainbridge’s 1996 novel Every Man for Himself, whose events take place on board the Titanic, uses (and mentions) an adjective I don’t remember seeing in print before, though I think I’ve heard it on British TV:

It was cold on deck and the few people about had sensibly put on coats and scarves. We walked to the dull roar of the ship as it waded the leaden sea. The night was moonless, windless; rags of dance music floated up from the deck below. ‘It’s parky,’ I exclaimed, the word rising from my subconscious like a fish from the deep.

‘A curious adjective,’ Scurry pondered. ‘It can mean both inclement weather and a sharpness of tongue. It’s intriguing, don’t you agree, the flotsam we allow to surface from the past?’

The OED has no entry for parky ‘sharp-tongued’, or even ‘inclement’. It defines the word as ‘cold, chilly’ – presumably the narrator’s intended sense – with citations from 1895. Its etymology is uncertain. Parky can also mean ‘resembling or relating to parks’ or ‘having lots of parks’, and is a variant of parkie ‘park-keeper’, but these are relatively run-of-the-mill usages.

Something else I liked about this passage from Bainbridge is the description of ‘rags of dance music’ floating up along the ship, rags not only evoking the threads of melody adrift in the north Atlantic night but also perhaps providing a clue to the type of music being played: ragtime, one of my first loves on piano.

Falconry terms in ‘H is for Hawk’

Revisiting T.H. White’s book The Goshawk last year brought back to me the peculiar lexicon of falconry: its austringer, keeper of goshawks; the creance used to leash hawks in training; and most indelibly the birds’ repeated bating, which is when they flap their wings and flutter away from their perch or trainer’s fist in an effort to fly off.

If training goes well, episodes of bating eventually diminish. (Just as well, since it can be hard to read descriptions of it – though nothing, I’m sure, compared to experiencing it as trainer, or as bird.) The word itself is many centuries old, and comes from Old French batre ‘to beat’, from late Latin batĕre. Here it is in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew:

These kites, That baite, and beate, and will not be obedient.

Because of its subject matter and positive reviews, I had been looking forward to Helen Macdonald’s multiple-award-winning H is for Hawk (Jonathan Cape, 2014). On a spin to the Burren last week, fittingly enough, my friend J gave me a copy, and I immediately put it on top of the pile, to be read once I finished the Olaf Stapledon I was immersed in.

H is for Hawk lived up to its word of mouth: it’s an engrossing memoir-slash-natural-history book, heartfelt, sad, and funny, full of arresting lines, memorable scenes, and vibrant descriptive passages that pull you up short. For Sentence first I’d like to return to the terminology of falconry; here Macdonald, a historian of science, outlines some of it: