Evolving English II

Create + Update = ?

2011-11-14T16:05:00.000-08:00

In the world of databases, you can perform what are generally (and amusingly) referred to as CRUD operations -- create, read, update, and delete. Every editor I personally know who's encountered the term CRUD has been moved to ask "Seriously, can we even use this term?" Indeed, we can and, since our audience uses it, we should.

Fun as that is, I'm actually interested today in a term I have run across a few times recently that pertains to just two of these, namely create and update. The standard database command for creating a new database entry is Insert. If you need to update an existing entry, you use (logically) the Update command. Sometimes, tho, you have a situation where you want to update-or-insert — that is, update the item if it exists, or create (insert) it if it doesn't.

Turns out there's actually a term for this: Upsert. Like, a legitimate, definitely-in-use term that gets over 100,000 search hits and that has its own Wikipedia entry.

Like CRUD, this isn't apt to warm the hearts of editors. (It's also not yet in general dictionaries, which is more editorial reason to frown about it.) It's handy, tho, at least for the crowd that deals with CRUD-y stuff all day long. The term has been formalized in at least a few programming frameworks as an actual command (salesforce.com, Oracle). It's hard to imagine that the terms would escape into general usage from its current confines in the world of database folks. But you never know.

I can C you now

2011-10-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

Had one of those moments. Yesterday evening my wife was looking at the cover of one of her nursing magazines, which had an article titled "Nurses in the C-Suite." "What does that mean?", she asked me. My articulate reply: "Huh?"

Then today I was glancing at someone's resume, which said this: "Highly effective external and internal communication from C-level to consumer." Same term, basically, twice within 24 hours. What the heck?

Apparently I've been out of touch with the terms C-suite and C-level. It's all over Google (> 1 million) hits, as if the evidence of seeing it on the cover of a magazine weren't enough evidence that it's widely known. Wikipedia has a nice explanation in its entry for Corporate title:

The highest level executives are usually called "C-level" or part of the "C-suite", referring to the 3-letter initials starting with "C" and ending with "O" (for "Chief __________ Officer"); the traditional offices are Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Operations Officer (COO), and Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Chief administrative officer and Chief risk officer positions are often found in banking, insurance, and other financial services companies. Technology companies (including telecom and semi-conductor) tend to have a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), while companies with a strong Information Technology (IT) presence have a Chief Information Officer (CIO). In creative/design companies (such as film studios, a comics company or a web design company), there is sometimes a Chief Creative Officer (CCO), responsible for keeping the overall look and feel of different products, otherwise headed by different teams, constant throughout a brand.

I take a very small comfort that the terms C-level and C-office don't appear (yet) in general-purpose dictionaries (including the OED, as far as I can tell). The Investopedia site has a definition that refers to C-suite as "widely used slang." That seems right.

I'm curious how long the terms have been around; they seem widespread enough to seem pretty established. Paul McFedries finds a citation from 1997 for CxO (Chief [Whatever] Officer), and his entry (tho not the citation) talks about C-suite and C-level.

I tried a Google n-gram search, but the hyphen is treated as a token by itself and I don't know how to get around that just yet.

Anyway, there you go: one of those moments. A term (two terms) that I've apparently been surrounded by for a decade or more and would have sworn I'd never heard before. I suppose it's evidence that I my own self will not soon be achieving any sort of C-level.

Why a Duck?

2011-10-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

Back in July, a section of [the] 405 in Los Angeles was closed for repair. The anticipation of the traffic mess that this was going to make spawned the term carmageddon. (In the end, that whole project went pretty smoothly, possibly due to the extreme publicity and people's efforts to "use alternate routes.")

In Seattle, the venerable Alaskan Way Viaduct that runs along the downtown waterfront — a stretch of State Route 99 — has been shut down. This is the first phase of a project in which the old viaduct will be replaced with a tunnel. The viaduct is old (1953) and was damaged during a 2001 earthquake. Everyone feared a repeat of the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct in San Francisco, and the state DOT (cleverly?) posted a video that showed a simulation of what might happen to the viaduct in an earthquake.

All this led to a, um, Seattle-style debate about how to replace it, and here we are, a decade later, finally getting around to actually doing something. As of Friday October 21, the viaduct will be shut for 10 days while they do some preliminary work.

The problem is that the viaduct carries about 100,000 cars a day and that the only other major north-south route in Seattle is I-5. Closing off this route is, as with the L.A. closure of I-405, many people's worst traffic nightmare.

Ok! So what to call it? Carmageddon is sort of already claimed.

An early term that the MSM seems to favor is Viaduct Crunch. Adequate, but lacking that certain something.

Let's see what's shaking on Twitter! One hashtag on Twitter that has some traction is #viacondios. Cute, but to my mind a bit of a stretch.

It's looking like people are converging around #viadoom. It's all over Twitter, of course, and the term has gotten enough traction that it's showing up (albeit in quotation marks) in media reports — for example, in a Reuters article.

I do suspect that cute names for this little diversion are going to wear thin very quickly. L.A.'s carmageddon lasted one weekend. Viadoom is going to last 10 days, and there's years' worth of construction still to come. Perhaps when the tunnel boring starts in earnest, we'll get another term for that particular mess.

PS Should you not recognize the title of this entry, have a gander at this video.

Just throw some text at it

2011-10-17T15:51:00.001-07:00

We've mused here before about the interesting "up" particle that can be added to so many verbs (man up, whip up, bulk up, eat it up, new up).* In Dilbert today, another appearance of the interesting "up":

This usage is not, I believe, the "up of completeness" -- eat up, drink it up. Rather, it's the "up" of "conjure [up]" -- whip (something) up, maybe even draw (a contract) up and make (something) up (?). There are subtle gradations of meaning here that might or might not all be the same.

Anyway, I like this a lot. Perhaps because there's been more than one time when I was indeed called upon to "word something up."

* And not just here; see also Fritinancy.

"Hello, World"

2011-10-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

Over on my main blog, I have a piece on how Dennis Ritchie's influential book The C Programming Language introduced the phrase "Hello, World" to represent the starting point for pretty much any learning experience. Check it out:

Dennis Ritchie, Technical Writer

Let's (cohort) party down

2011-10-12T21:50:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine recently sent me email in which he said he'd been standing in an elevator with some young people who were talking about a "cohort party" and did I know what that was? Not me. To my surprise, searching around revealed many uses of cohort in casual ways that suggested people were familiar with the term:

If anyone is interested in having a cohort party, feel free to suggest some possible ideas. […] On friday, Melanie was saying something about a get together on December 15th, which is the day after we finish our practicum [#]
Some girls from my Elementary Education cohort decided to have a couples party. [#]
Each intake is split into cohorts. Each cohort divides into clusters. And each cluster… well, it’s just a cluster. So a lot of socialising happens at the cohort level. Like last night at the Irish pub in Rittenhouse Square, where the INSEAD group crashed a two-cohort party. We were told to ask the cohort of whomever we spoke to before they had a chance to ask ours. If they said “cohort E”, we were to pretend to be from “cohort I”. If they said “cohort I”, we were naturally from “cohort E” [#]
We have had the chance to meet many members of Cohort 10 as they’ve joined us for classes and speaker series over the past few months […] Now we are all anxiously awaiting the Baltimore Study Group-sponsored cohort party in January. [#]

And so on. But no actual definitions, as in "a cohort party is ...," really sprang out. My kids are college age and not un-hip; when I queried them, my son did note that he understood the term cohort in its, what, sociological sense: "a group of people having approximately the same age." But the term cohort party rang no bells with him.

I have to conclude two things. Thing one: I'm an old guy and the term cohort seems sort of quasi-technical to me (when I hear it, I think "academic paper"), but for younger people, it's a normal word that they're used to hearing in descriptions of their class/group/work unit. I asked Ben Zimmer about this whole thing, and he noted that he only started hearing cohort when he got to grad school, where it was used to describe what I might have termed his "graduating class." An n-gram for cohort provides a bit of evidence that use of the term has been rising since about 1970 or so:

Thing two is that a cohort party is nothing more than a party that your cohort -- your school class, whatever -- is throwing. And the reason that this seems strange to us oldsters is that cohort is just not a term we were brought up with.

If anyone knows something more specific than this, I'd sure love to hear it.

A smarter way to app

2011-09-28T07:38:00.000-07:00

The Windows Phone people are rolling out a new version of the operating system, known officially as Windows Phone 7.5, known unofficially by its code name "Mango." The tagline (or one of them, anyway) seems to be "A smarter way to app":

(Click here to see a 30-second video.)

The meaning they intend seems to be "a smarter way to use apps" as opposed to, say, "a smarter way to create apps." (Which would be a meaning that might have some traction in the group I work in.) Or I suppose you could interpret it as "a smarter way for us (Phone) to present apps to you (user)."

Certainly app has been established as a noun, and there was the interesting tussle earlier in 2011 when Apple sued Amazon over the trademark "App Store."

But I haven't till now seen app being used as a verb. Of course, this is marketing, and those folks are nothing if not playful with grammar.

One Nissan Leaf, two Nissan ...

2011-09-12T12:23:00.001-07:00

Now it's not just the Prius and its tricky plural. Nissan's electric car is the Leaf. Suppose you had two of them. They'd be ... Leaves? Leafs? June Casagrande thinks Leafs. So do I, and for the reason she mentions. (See my thots about the Prius.) You?

The honey badgers of web development

2011-09-01T07:03:00.000-07:00

First there was the honey badger, a badger-like creature that's apparently known for its "ferocious defensive abilities." Then there was a nature program (video) that explored the honey badger's appetite for such delicacies as bee larvae and cobras and its apparent indifference to bees and snakebite and venom and pain. And then there
was Randall's alternate narration (video) for that nature documentary, from which all the world learned that "Honey badger don't care. Honey badger don't give a shit."

Like it? Get the t-shirt or the poster.

Right, this isn't news; the Know Your Meme site has a nice piece that recounts the brief history. (It also came up in the TV show "Glee," which is nothing if not culturally au courant.)

What's fun is watching the term honey badger go generic. Earlier this year, Mignon Fogarty (aka Grammar Girl) tweeted this:

Honey badger don't care about "i.e." and "e.g." (http://youtu.be/4r7wHMg5Yjg), but you should: http://j.mp/m3apUD

That was in May; note that she uses the full phrase and includes a link for the as-then-still uninitiated. But yesterday I found this in a technical article:

Then there are the honey badgers of web development, the notorious Content Management Systems, designed to kill all your hopes and dreams.

No "don't care" here; no link. You either get it or don't.[1]

This is what really interests me; is it possible for the term honey badger to become decoupled from any explicit reference to Randall's video and enter the lexicon as a synonym for, dunno, "indifference" ("aggressive indifference"?). That would be pretty awesome for Randall, and awesome to have seen it happen.

1 As an aside, from an editorial perspective, the article is filled with cultural references and is too clever by half, as people say. Woe onto the non-English-as-first-language speaker (non-American?) who reads this. Entertaining, tho. :-)

Organize and humorize

2011-08-31T15:45:00.001-07:00

A little tongue-in-cheek (mostly) humorization from The New Yorker:

I say "mostly" because although they used a hyphen in the body of the ad, they don't in the subject line of the email where I saw this.

Update: This is an ad for a desk calendar, in case that isn't clear, oops.

I personally have no problem with -izing nouns, but some folks do ("seemingly lazy application of this custom").

True only if you don't say it about yourself

2011-08-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

It's always bugged me, too, this thing where a person or a company takes pains to tell you what they think their virtues are:

I'm a classy person.
I'm an educated person.
I'm a modest person.
(Most any reference to "elegant" in a product description.)
etc.

Now John Scalzi has coined a term for this: McKean's inversion. He describes it this way:

The adjective a person says they are is frequently the thing they are not.

The name McKean's inversion originates via an indirect route. Erin McKean is a lexicographer (among her other talents) who once stated what's come to be known as McKean's Law: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error." Scalzi knows McKean and says he remembers how she once observed that ...

... if someone used the word to describe themselves, it was often quite obvious that they were in fact the opposite.

Thus the inversion. And as noted, McKean's Law was already taken.

It's a little early to tell, but my sense is that this is intended to be used for instances where the person is being a bit clueless. It would therefore not work when they're simply being disingenuous, e.g., "I'm just a humble technical writer." But who knows?

One media to rule them all

2011-08-05T11:56:00.001-07:00

Not a surprising neologism in retrospect, but then again, good ones always seem obvious after the fact:

... etc., about 23K hits in all on teh Google. The term seems to be a particular favorite of John Pilger.

Definition? Well, dunno, something like this:

Murdoch's immense political power , which has had successive Prime Ministers dancing attendance on him, and rushing to confer lucrative favors on his News Corporation.

(Thanks to James Galasyn for finding this one.)

Legitimate illegitimists?

2011-07-27T19:22:00.001-07:00

It's not often you get to watch a new word being launched, but we might have one here. On Slate yesterday, Anne Applebaum gave it a shot:

In contemporary America, we also have people who are — and I am inventing this word here — illegitimists: They believe that the president of the United States is illegitimately elected, or that the country is ruled by a cabal that is in turn controlled by some other sinister force or forces.

(She is careful to note that her intent is to be agnostic with respect to political persuasion, by noting that this also described Marxists in an earlier era. Not everyone buys this attempt.)

Just as a word, illegitimist is not unknown. It has no dictionary entry in standard dictionaries (at least, as per Dictionary.com and Vocabulary.com). Even the mighty OED does not have a specific entry for this term. However, there is a precedent or two:

In Treitschke's History of Germany in the Nineteeth Century, we find "... must play the magnanimous protector of the illegitimist Isabella."
J. E. P. Boulden has a play named Medicine; or, the legitimists and the illegitimists.

But these are slightly different meanings, I deduce; these refer to people who are illegitimate, as opposed to people who question the legitimacy of something.

This seems like a handy term to me. It covers more ground than various specific manifestations of illegitimism (birthers are her poster child). It gets at a kind of core belief system that's independent of the specifics of why the illegitimist thinks the government is illegitimate, and even which government (or other authority) is being thusly considered.

One could imagine the term being used outside a political context, I suppose. You might use some term and point at the American Heritage Dictionary as your authority, and I could be an illegitimist about that authority. Or we could use the term to debate someone's religious beliefs and the sources thereof; or, if the term really dug in, we could use it to refer to anyone who questions any claim made by an appeal to authority. That seems unlikely, but you never know. Still, the term has to start somewhere. Let's see how it goes.

PepsiCo and the future of snack terms

2011-07-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

The May 16, 2011 edition of The New Yorker has a fascinating article ("Snacks for a Fat Planet," paywall) about the PepsiCo's efforts to try to divine their future markets. It's also fascinating for an unusual number of neological-type terms and for the not-entirely-clear formula they're using to determine whether to put presumably unfamiliar terms inside quotation marks.

The two terms that struck me first were drinkified (for foods) and snackified (for drinks). Here's a cite that sums it up:

Let's say you give a kid a carrot," Nooyi [CEO] explained. "And he says, 'I don't want to eat a carrot.' But you say, 'I tell you what, I'll give it to you in a wonderful drinkable form that's still as close to the carrot as possible.' All of a sudden, what have I done? I've drinkified the snack! Or I take a fruit juice and give it to you in a wonderful squeezable form, which is Tropolis. What have I done now? I've snackified the drink.

There are ~9000 hits on Google for drinkified; many of them reference this same thing (either the article or similar stories about PepsiCo).

I'm just going to go out on a limb here and muse that these two terms are going to irritate a lot of people.

As I say, there were some other terms in the article as well. One is, I think, of Pepsi origin, others are from other fields, but relatively unfamiliar. Let's say that there are a lot of quotation marks in the article around terms. Here's my list:

reward sensitivity -- a term from psychology (?) referring to how easily people are satisfied. (Something that people who design snacks take into account.) No quotation marks in the article. (34K Google hits.)
bliss point -- the point at which you achieve satisfaction, same context. In quotation marks. (48K Google hits.)
sip and spit, e.g. sip and spit rooms -- the technique used for tasting. In quotation marks. (Familiar from wine and coffee tasting, I suppose -- 160K Google hits.)
blue-can Pepsi -- the traditional/original version of Pepsi. No quotation marks. (8K Google hits.)

Not all new terms, but new enough, I guess, that John Seabrook (or some editor) decided that some -- but not all -- needed to be marked.

From Greek battles to all-day presentations

2011-05-31T09:54:00.000-07:00

One of the VPs where I work is a guy named Scott Guthrie, who's one of those people who seems to be able to pack about 48 hours into a day. In addition to VP-ing, whatever that exactly consists of, he flies around the world giving presentations -- often keynote speeches -- to large and enthusiastic audiences of programmers.

A diversion. At Microsoft (and, I imagine, many other places), the basic algorithm that they use to assign you an email name is first name + last initial. For example, an email alias that's well know at Microsoft is billg. However, if you've got a common name (like Mike, for example), they have to do something else. One possibility is to start adding letters to the last name. As a result, Scott Guthrie's email address is scottgu. Partly because we seem to have so many Scotts in our division, this has led to VP Guthrie being referred to as "Gu" or even "the Gu" (pronounced "goo," of course). Example: "We're meeting tomorrow with the Gu about this."*

And now to wrench the discussion to a new track. Once upon a time there was a battle near the Greek city named Marathon, and a dude named Pheidippides started a trend by supposedly running some insane distance to announce an Athenian victory. (And this before Gatorade.) Now a marathon is a really long race, or by extension, "any contest, event, or the like, of great, or greater than normal, length or duration or requiring exceptional endurance." Example: dance marathon, sales marathon.

But why use a full name like dance marathon when you can use, so to speak, first name + last bit? The -athon suffix is very productive. Here's just a few of the many, many examples I found:

Walkathon (alt. walk-a-thon)
Bike-a-thon
Science-athon
Organize-athon
Stay-awake-a-thon
Butt-numb-a-thon (my personal favorite), described as "a celebration of film fandom," 12 movies in a row.

Almost all the usages I've found use a hyphen to mark either -athon or -a-thon. (The latter spelling suggests that -thon could by itself be the suffix, but I haven't found an example.) The exception is walkathon, which might have become sufficiently established to be thought of as a single word rather than a conscious construction, dunno.

Back to the Gu. I'm not sure how many people use "Gu" as a vocative in Scott's presence, but he's well aware of it. So much so, in fact, that Scott decided to refer to the occasional all-day presentation that he gives as a Guathon. We hope, of course, that this refers only to the "greater than normal length or duration" of the event and not to it "requiring exceptional endurance." :-)

* There is, I'm sure, a study somewhere that examines the phenomenon of referring to people in the third person by their email aliases -- at Microsoft, the once-feared "BillG review" has, AFAIK, no other name.

It's useless, but somehow not

2011-04-04T09:50:00.000-07:00

Twitter. Even ardent supporters admit that if you describe Twitter in simple terms ("you post whatever pops into your head, many times a day!"), it does seem lame. Someone once called it "the stupidest application you’re ever going to see."

Yet this was someone who thought it was great. Fans have a hard time describing to the unconvinced why Twitter is so great. Scott Hanselman -- prolific blogger, early adopter, and unabashed supporter -- came up with a term that seems to capture this combination of banality and utility in his blog post Twitter: The Uselessfulness of Micro-blogging. In fact, Hanselman goes one better in a subsequent post -- he calls Twitter a river of uselessfulness, and a river (indeed, torrent) it is.

It's an amusing neologism, what with its oxymoronic melding and clever way of both anticipating and retorting to the common criticism of Twitter.

Perhaps surprisingly, this is not the only citation. I found one instance from a time before Scott's blog post, and meaning roughly the same thing (I think), but in a very different context. This is from a forum post that pertains to pickup trucks:

Nothing fancy and of debatable uselessfullness (probably should never be in 4Hi with lockers ON). Maybe some cases in sand dunes or snow, but not much else.

Or perhaps this is just a bit of a mistake. Note that the author here includes "debatable," which I think is unnecessary if you stick to your guns with the new term.

I did find another instance, more recent, but this one is clearly intended with a different meaning.

Uselessfulness. Yes that is now a word. A term we are coining for Tuscon artist Nick Georgiou who takes useless trash (pretty much anything print) and creates amazing useful works of art.

And one more, which came up in the context of a programming blog, a post titled Shuffle: an extension method of random uselessfulness. In this case, the author simply uses the word with no real additional context. I believe the implication is that he's presenting a programming technique that is of perhaps no real use, but it's actually not that clear to me why he's using the term or what he means by it.

I know Scott a little bit, enough to ask him about this term. He confirms that he invented the term for his original blog post. I'm guessing that these other instances are probably independent inventions, or in the last case (the programming blog), maybe it's one of Scott's readers taking up the term and propagating it.

A fun exercise would be to think of new places to wield this term. The concept certainly isn't strange, so there should be lots of candidates. :-)

Truthiness and falsiness

2011-04-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

Stephen Colbert put the term truthiness on the map (pdf), but there is a context where the terms truthy and falsy have another, quite precise meaning. This is among people who use the programming language known as JavaScript, which runs in web browsers. The following explanation, by Mike Davies, appears on the isolani blog:

JavaScript has keywords for true and false, but like many C-style derivative languages, it has concepts of truthy and falsy. These are non-boolean expressions that can be treated as a boolean value. The number zero is falsy, and any other number is truthy. Equally for strings, an empty string is falsy, and a non-empty string is truthy.

A slight variation from another blog:

When javascript is expecting a boolean and it’s given something else, it decides whether the something else is "truthy" or "falsy". An empty string (''), the number 0, null, NaN, a boolean FALSE, and undefined variables are all "falsy". Everything else is “truthy”.

(NaN here refers to a value known as "not a number", which JavaScript returns when it needs a number but gets something else, like if you try to add 12 + "a". A discussion for another time: does boolean get a cap?)

I'm not finding a lot of references to these terms outside JavaScript. One blogger uses the terms when referring to the Clojure programming language, and I found a couple of references to falsy in some text about the language Python. Contrary to what the first cite suggests, truthy and falsy are not, at least as far as I can tell, used in descriptions of the C language or its close cousins C++ or Java.

Truthy does have a dictionary definition, which is listed as "Truthful; likely; probable." It seems to me that the JavaScript definition does not match this; in JavaScript we're not talking about likelihood or probability, just a collection of values that all are treated the same (i.e., as true).

I don't have a smartphone, I have ...

2011-03-22T12:51:00.000-07:00

Those of us who haven't quite gotten with the smartphone wave are stuck using, you know, older cellphones. While everyone we know goes on at tedious length about their iPhone or Android or Windows 7 phone and all the many apps that they play with, we have ... that other kind of cellphone. What kind is that, exactly? Not a dumbphone, except in jest. (Or exasperation.) Do you know?

There is a formal term, actually: it's a feature phone. (2.6 MM hits on Google.)

There are some interesting things here. One is that this is a kind of retronym; the term feature phone is defined primarily by what it's not. What it's not, however, has changed a bit. If Wikipedia is to be believed, a feature phone was originally a phone that had more features than the original set of monochrome, just-talk cellphones. (Cite.) However, these days, since those old-skool phones are pretty much gone, a feature phone is a phone that has fewer features than its successor, namely a smartphone. Or both at once -- this article describes it this way:

Feature phones, [which] are dumb phones that have elements (but not the full connectivity) of smartphones.

And here's another wrinkle: the term smartphone itself has had something of a movable definition. Or even a circular one. Here's Wikipedia:

A smartphone is a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone.

The article goes on to describe the first smartphone (1992) as having many of the features that people would probably consider smartphone-ish:

[...] it also contained a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, notepad, e-mail, send and receive fax, and games. It had no physical buttons to dial with. Instead customers used a touchscreen to select telephone numbers with a finger or create facsimiles and memos with an optional stylus. Text was entered with a unique on-screen "predictive" keyboard. By today's standards, the Simon would be a fairly low-end product, lacking for example the camera now considered usual.

1992? Impressive.

Note that this implicitly says that smartphones today include cameras, i.e., part of the definition (necessary but not sufficient) is that there's a camera. It don't do the trick if it ain't got that click.

But the term smartphone itself is even older than that. Paul McFedries finds a cite that goes back to 1984, where of course it meant something a bit different:

Part of the transparent keyboard facility is the ability to deal with the telephone through the "smartphone" option, which makes it possible to answer the phone (using a headset) with the computer.

Not today's definition, I think we can agree. It's tempting to say that smartphone simply means "whatever the newest state of phone technology is," but that isn't supported by actual usage citations. Still, it does lead a body to speculate what we'll call the next generation of phones, which will have the ability to ... golly, what? I can't even imagine. But it's a sure thing that the current generation of iPhones et al. will someday seem quaintly primitive. At that point, it's hard to imagine that we'll still be calling them smartphones. Or what we'll call the new ones.

Under the table and DRMing

2011-02-21T07:18:00.000-08:00

I was in a meeting at work the other day when someone emitted a sentence that started this way:

I got some information DRM'd to me that …

It took me a second to parse this. (In fact, I think I got so interested in DRM'd that might have missed what it was that had in fact been DRM'd.)

DRM stands for digital rights management, which is a blanket term for protecting (or "protecting," if you want to be more cynical) digital media like, say, music files or movies. Let's say for convenience that it means something like "restrict." It's a pretty easy leap to turn this into a verb, and indeed, Mr. Google tells us that there are several hundred thousand instances of the term DRM'd . (Exercise for the student: calculate the percentage of these mentions in which the term is used in a positive way, haha.)

What threw me in the particular usage I heard, tho, was that DRM was being used as a verb that meant more than just "restricted": the information had been DRM'd to the recipient. This, I think, requires a particular context to make sense, a context that happens to obtain where I work, but probably is not all that widespread. (Maybe it is; y'all can tell me.)

Our email system at work is based on Microsoft Exchange and uses Microsoft Outlook as its client. This combination of technologies supports a feature named Information Rights Management whereby the author of an email can set restrictions/permissions on an email message for who can see it, and which restricts things like whether you can forward the message or even copy from it.

By saying I got information DRM'd to me, our interlocutor had managed to compress into this one verb that a) she had received an email via Outlook that b) had been tagged with IRM permissions because c) it had "eyes only" information, and that d) she could not forward us this information.

If was pretty good information density for an off-the-cuff remark. I have not (that I know of) heard DRM used as a verb in exactly this way before. It might be a one-off that occurred to her in the moment. Even if it is more widespread than that, this exact usage seems like it would be restricted to a limited context in which all of the conditions (permissions + Outlook) apply.

Gasmic consciousness, Part II

2011-01-24T17:38:00.000-08:00

I while back we visited -gasm as a productive suffix. It's still going strong, as evidenced by some nice examples I've run across recently. For example, I found this in a comment about a political ad that featured a lot of (intended-to-be) stirring images of America:

The patriotgasm certainly seems Michael Bay-like.

This sent me searching, which yielded the following without much effort:

Twitter-gasm
Super Bowl stat-gasm
Moore-gasm (as in, Michael Moore)
snow gasm (a puerile bit from a comedy site)
sports-gasm
geekgasm
gun-gasm
Obama-gasm
higher ed-gasm

These came up, by the way, because they are either political sites (hence "patriot") or sports sites (hence "New England Patriots").

Update 20 March 2011: "Apple starts this frenzy or what I call an iGasm." (#)

Something of note here is that the meaning of -gasm as used in these examples seems to still primarily be "intense or unrestrained excitement", but that it seems also to have a negative connotation in almost all of these examples. It's used derogatorily to refer to people who have unrestrained enthusiasm for something the author is not enthusiastic about (guns, Obama, people's use of Twitter) -- a kind of after-the-fact "Don't have a cow" wish. That was not the case last time we visited -gasm. Perhaps it has to do with the narrow search I did. (?)

Lost in the search-result woods

2011-01-20T04:54:00.000-08:00

The proto-conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey used to use the phrase "Page 2" to segue from the news portion to the advertisement portion of his show. This became a beloved catchphrase, and in his case, the transition proved to be a goldmine for his sponsors.

For a Google search, tho, it's all about page 1; according to one study, "sites surveyed received more than 95% of all their non-branded natural search traffic from page-one results." There's a lively industry around getting a site onto Google's first page. Because if you're not on page 1, you are ... what? "In the wilderness"? "At the back of the pack"?

Tom Krazit, for one, has a term for it:

Links to prominent services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Flickr carry a lot of weight with Google, and can push unwanted content to the Google Ghetto, otherwise known as page two.

It's not a very PC term. Even among objective definitions, there aren't any that suggest that a ghetto has positive connotations, not to mention the complex associations between ghetto and touchy socio-economic issues.

But you have to admit that the phrase does evoke the idea of a place you probably don't want to live. And there's the catchy alliteration.

I can't at the moment find any other use of this term to mean the same thing. Or let's say that if there are other mentions, they're not on page ... haha, too easy.

Making your web presence go dark

2010-11-11T19:07:00.000-08:00

When you log out of your computer or out of a website, you're terminating your current interaction with it. And pretty much that's that, because these intermittent conversations you have with the thing are pretty much the extent of your interaction.

But social media brings a new wrinkle to the game. You might log out of (say) Facebook, but your cyberpresence remains out there for other people to interact with. For most people, that's perfectly fine, and they are happy to come back later, log back in, and see what all their friends (er, Friends) have had to say to them.

For various reasons, however, there are those who want to treat a social-media network like Facebook only as an interactive/synchronous medium. They log on and interact with their friends. But when they're done, they don't just log out. They deactivate their Facebook account entirely, so that others cannot see it at all until it's reactivated.

Turns out there's a name for this: super logout, or variously super logoff.

I first heard about this in a blog post by the social researcher danah boyd:

Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account. She knows that this doesn’t delete the account – that’s the point. She knows that when she logs back in, she’ll be able to reactivate the account and have all of her friend connections back. But when she’s not logged in, no one can post messages on her wall or send her messages privately or browse her content. But when she’s logged in, they can do all of that. And she can delete anything that she doesn’t like. Michael Ducker calls this practice “super-logoff” when he noticed a group of gay male adults doing the exact same thing.

In a related tweet linked to the blog post, user zephoria says "My students talk abt this call it 'whitewashing' or 'whitewalling.'"

The term has gotten a lot of attention right away:

New York Magazine: Lessons From Teenagers: The Art of the Facebook Super Log-Off
Lifehacker: Use the "Super-Logoff" Technique to Exercise Tighter Control Over Your Facebook Profile (11/9/10)
wikiHow: How to Super Logout on Facebook (11/11/10)
urlesque*: New Facebook Trend - The 'Super-Logoff' (11/11/10)

In pedantic technical ways, the term is not accurate, but it feels like it's sticky, for two reasons that I can think of. One is that no better term really suggests itself. The obvious one -- deactivate -- while possibly more accurate, sounds kind of technical. And -- second reason -- deactivate does not get at the intent of this new practice, which of course is, not just to log yourself off Facebook, but log your Facebook presence off.

And now, of course, I must post about this on Facebook so that I can see what people think of it tomorrow. :-)

* Clever name, that.

Or alternatively, to Ging

2010-10-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

We're not sure if this really is an emergent term, but let's just say it seems like one that's inevitable (obvious?), tho its stickiness is not guaranteed. Correspondent Seth today spotted this in an email that was internal to Microsoft:

... [blah-blah] the number hasn't been zero since early 2006 in my quick boogle.

Seth comments: "Given that it was an MSFT employee, I think he was trying to hint that he's used both major search engines." (One would have to understand that there is a certain informal peer pressure inside Microsoft to a) not use google as a verb and b) use Bing as search engine.)

The reason I say that the term seems obvious is that it's a natural formation that moreover has been claimed already: there is the site booglesearch.com, which searches both engines and presents results side by side.

Beyond that, tho, things get murkier. (To me.) The site boogle.com does a Google search but presents you with a page that displays a quotation and a picture in lieu of the standard Google home page. (Oh.) No tie to Bing that I can deduce. There's Boogle the game, which looks (to me) like a trademark-skirting variant on the game I know as Boggle.

The exceptionally unreliable Urban Dictionary lists one definition of boogle as:

A negative result to having Googled a person; to be shocked or repulsed by what you find out about a person you have just Googled; to Google someone with the intention of finding out something negative about them.

But really, that's as much as I've found in my few moments of poking around. We'll have to keep an ear out.

Stars of a different type

2010-10-17T01:33:00.000-07:00

Wow, when did this become a productive suffix?

Rhee is a Grade-A edu-lebrity [#]
[Y]ou're far more likely to be picking through the sausage-makings as they just sort of spray willy-nilly out of the meat grinder of news-lebrity that has replaced the news. [#]
Ever want to know what it's like to log into Twitter as your favorite Twitter-lebrity? [#]
And there are perks to being a bona fide Z-lebrity [#]
Bornstein refers to herself as a "sub-lebrity" [#]

Update 9 April 2011: Here's a nice one: "'Glee' piano player happy as a 'sub-lebrity'. (Brad Ellis in the background of "Glee" as the club's accompanist.)

There's also C-lebrity, which appears in a number of guises, but most popularly as the name of a song by Queen, which of course dates it considerably. But it's unclear to me whether this is really intended to mean anything other than celebrity.

Anyway, this is another cran-morphy rejiggering of the morphological elements of the original, in which celebr is the nominal root, but in which -lebrity becomes instead the productive bit. (See also cheese-burger etc.)

These all strike me as pretty clever, but my sense is that they work better in written language than said out loud. A number of them are a bit awkward to say, possibly because they end up with sound sequences that don't entirely work -- news-lebrity, Twitter-lebrity. In the examples that are easier to pronounce (Z-lebrity, sub-lebrity), the aural resemblance to the original would require very careful enunciation to get across the point of the new formation. Still, it's always handy to have some new materials for making words.

We will now focus obsessively on something dumb

2010-09-14T13:21:00.000-07:00

I've actually been inchoately wondering whether there's a term for this. This could be one:

Every time he publishes a new mess, it gets the full Pastor Jones treatment in the respectable press.

(Source: an article in Slate.) This seemed sort of Whorfian to me, inasmuch as we could crystalize the concept by coming up with a word for it. It sure does seem like we need a handy way to refer to these periodic episodes of press insanity, where 30 people in some state somewhere all of a sudden are headline news around the world. It would be best, of course, if the term were apolitical -- think of Balloon Boy.

Or is there already such a term?

One millennium, two ...

2010-07-31T23:24:00.000-07:00

I have this notion, which is admittedly somewhat idiosyncratic, that when foreign words join the ranks of English, they don't get to bring along all their foreign-word baggage -- their plurals, their conjugations, or anything else that would require an English speaker to somehow have to intuit the rules for that word in its original tongue. No, because the word has joined English, which already has rules for these sorts of things, and in the fine print of the contract that the word signed upon joining the language, it explicitly says that it must abide by house rules.

Nonetheless, people get theyselves worked up these things. Not terribly long ago, I essentially laid all this out when someone asked what the plural should be of the car known as the Prius. Easy, sez me: in English, the default way to make plurals is to add -(e)s, so, hey, Priuses. All this fancy talk about what the plural would be if this were a Latin word is just piffle, because we're not talking about Latin, we're talking about English.

Ask folks what the plural is of octopus, and yer more edumacated types will tell you it's octopi, because something-something-Greek-something-something. Or cactus, or focus, or schema, or -- heh-heh -- opus.

Now, I would not say that it's wrong to say that the plurals are octopi or cacti or foci or schemata or opera. But I will also staunchly defend octopuses and cactuses and focuses and schemas and opuses. Because these latter words all follow normal rules, and because if I were a native speaker of English, I would find those to be perfectly reasonable ways to make the plural forms. (Hey, wait, I am, and I do!)

Ok. Surely among the more conservative publications in terms of these things is the New York Times, yes? Yet behold this thing that they have printed:

(I make you a picture in case some editor at the Times get a gander at this, haha.)

Surely this is unusual for a publication, is it not? Google reports a mere 425,000 hits for this term, versus around 6 million for the term millennia (where the plural ends in -a because something-something-Latin-something-something).[1]

Having read this far, tho, you will not be surprised to hear me say that I cheer the NYT for this. I'm sure they'll get letters from folks who want us all to know Latin declensions, but fie on those people. And I say to the word millennium, welcome to English, after all these years!

[1] This is not to be confused with the Mazda Millenia (sic), a singular car with a plural name, which we forgive because marketing has yet another set of rules, among them being "let's not let grammar get in the way of a good brand."

Update 1 Aug: Apparently I had a thought about millenniums in an earlier post. I guess this obsesses me, I just keep forgettting that it does.

Update 1 Aug: Per Ben, fixed all the spellings, oops. :-) This actually upped the count for the non-native plural (millennia) to more like 10 million.

Update 5 Oct: Mark Liberman posts on the Language Log about the plural of syllabus. Interesting comment in the thread from Henning Makholm speculating a bit about the use of -i as a productive plural marker in English, not just a fossil on foreign borrowings.

Scaling the digital walls

2010-04-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

Another term that's new to me (maybe I should stop saying this, I'm perpetually behind these days): jailbreak as a verb. Of course, we all know that guys in stripy pajamas tunnel out of prison all the time (hey, I watch movies), but this would be a somewhat new usage. Also, it's invariably spelled as oneword.

Jailbreak-the-verb as I recently found it is specific to computers. Here's a definition from YourDictionary.com:

To get out of a restricted mode of operation. For example, jailbreaking may enable content with digital rights to be used on any computer, or it may allow enhanced third-party operating systems or applications to be used on a device.

It's therefore a subspecies of hacking (or cracking, for the more precise). Something interesting to me is that for the moment, and although this term is theoretically generic to computers, it seems to turn up almost exclusively in discussions around the iPhone and his cousins and his sisters and his aunts. Even relatively deep searching into Google still turns up iPhone and iPad references.

It's certainly not an unknown term -- Google get 1.6 million hits. Although I did specify "+computer" as part of the search, I suspect that this includes the traditional use of the term as a noun.

Morphologically, the verb follows normal rules for to break. Thus, the past is jailbroken. It's a transitive verb -- you jailbreak your iPhone, and the iPad was jailbroken.

One reason I am probably not so up on this term is that I don't own any of the devices in the i-Family. It certainly sounds like there's a, um, thriving ecosystem for getting around restrictions in that computer family's design. I expect there's a lesson in there for vendors, but that would not be a topic for this blog. :-)

Party flavors

2010-04-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

On the tiniest chance that you missed it, surely the word of the week is -- tada! -- Teabonics: creative spellings (as they say) on political signs during rallies. There's a collection on Flickr.

Here's an example:

I just find the neologism irresistible. :-)

Handy handible

2010-03-24T09:33:00.000-07:00

A comment thread on the CodeProject.com site raises an interesting question about word formation. (Well, spelling, maybe.) The original question is this:

So, Google gives a whopping 722 hits for "handible", Googling for "define: handible" shoots beside the target and reference.com has never heard of it in any form.

You English speakers out there - is "handible" a real word? If not, would you understand me anyway if I said that "Oh, you know, this is really handible!" ?

Most of the Google hits in question are bogus -- either the term is dynamically inserted into a search result to drive traffic (no links, thank you), or is clearly being used by non-native speakers. (And bless them for trying to write in English).

Most instances seem to be attempts to spell handleable (a word that the spell checker in Firefox does not like), like this example about a phone:

Its is smat, handible and easy to use. it as long durability and an outstanding design which gives it that cute look. i would recomend the phone for basic mobile phone users.

But there are a couple of interesting hiccups. One is that this term (or just this spelling) is more prevalent (relatively) among people who are writing about animals. Here's one example where the guy is talking about a snake:

Hey guys my names Joe and im a proud snake lover i used to have a gorgeous sunglow male corn until my goddaughter fell in love with it and i gave it to here. looking to get another as he was very timid and handible.

You can ascribe this simply to poor spelling, but if so, it's a poor spelling that's spreading, at least a bit. I've found handible used in a similar way when people are writing about a gecko, bunny, spider, and water dragon. (What's a precise definition for how these folks are using handible?)

And there's a curious instance of the term in a patent application:

Currently available braided suture products are acceptable in terms of their knot-tying and knot-holding properties. However, as removed from the package, they tend to be stiff and wiry and retain a "set" or "memory" such that at the time of use, it is usually necessary for the surgeon or assistant personnel to flex and stretch the suture to make it more readily handible. Furthermore, the surfaces of known sutures are perceptibly rough. Thus, if one passes one's hand or fingers along the braid, surface irregularities will be readily detected.

I say "curious" because I would have thought that patent applications, at least as posted on the Web, would have cleaned-up spelling, and if so, this is the intended spelling. (Perhaps I'm wrong about that.) And if so, this might be a technical term. Whatever it is, the intended meaning seems different to me than what the pet owners are talking about.

The examples form the various animal forums are the most interesting to me. I like to think that one possible outcome here is that in the context of ... what would you call it? ... pet husbandry? the word handible becomes (first) informally established as an offshoot from handleable, that it becomes a bona-fide field-specific word (breeders talk about breeding handible animals), and it eventually achieves legitimate status as a standalone term.

Your thots?

Try out our new giant comment threads

2010-02-27T10:12:00.000-08:00

A couple terms only recently noted by me, tho not brandly new by any means.

Freemium. A word whose origins, unusually, are known very precisely (if one trusts Wikipedia, I mean). This refers to a business model in which you give away a basic version of your product and charge for a more-capable version. The term and the business model were both supposedly coined in 2006.

The term has caught on -- about 365K hits on Google -- but I still kind of scratch my head. One is that I am not getting how this exactly differs from the idea of a "demo version" or just a free sample that has been around since the birth of the first salesman.

A second thing about the the term is that it conveys a slightly wrong idea to me. When I think of free + premium I don't think of "there's a free version, and there's a premium version." My initial impression is that it's a "free, premium" version. Obviously, I'm not getting the "correct" definition, since the term refers to a business model and not to a thing per se. Still.

Threadnaught. A long and active thread (e.g. blog-post comment thread). For example, in a comment thread about IQ and political views, one of the earlier comments in the thread (out of 454 at last count) predicted: "It's gonna be a threadnaught." This is a clever hack on dreadnaught, which is a term that I sense is not in everyday use in the U.S. (got no specific stats to back this, tho), and which I for one know primarily in the military context of a large class of battleship. (Read a lot of military history in my younger days.)

Update 5 April 2010: Oh, hello, I realized where else I know the term dreadnought from: guitars. A dreadnought guitar is basically what you think of when you think of an acoustic guitar. I note that the word was in fact derived from the same term used for a battleship: i.e., a big 'un.

All right, back to reading comments ...

Sticky with me

2010-01-19T08:21:00.000-08:00

Any interest group with a Web presence generally coalesces around a forum, which is where people can ask questions and others can post answers. Forums are generally divided into topics, and the Q&As are displayed in reverse-chronological order. Here's one I'm familiar with:

As with blogs, older posts fall off the front page. Now and then, the site administrators will decide that a post should not scroll off into history (for example, an FAQ or an announcement post), so they will configure it to be permanently visible at the top:

What's the verb for doing this? Had you asked me, I would have said that you were pinning the post to the top of the forum. To pin a post is a common enough term, which derives, obviously, from the idea of pinning something to a bulletin board.

A post thusly pinned is also said to be sticky. This is another fairly obvious derivation. The dictionaries I have immediately to hand don't list a definition for sticky that refers to a persistent idea or thought, but that usage is all over the Web, and certainly got a big boost from the book Made to Stick.[1]

So. Using the Magic of Language, you can combine the verbiness of pinning and the adjectiveness of sticky to come up with a new term. Yes you can, as evidenced in a quote from an article on Arstechnica:

I suggest reading our FAQs stickied at the top of the indexing forum to get some ideas of what to do.

There are a surprising number of hits for this term. I get around 370K on Bing, 450K on Google. Here's a great example:

Stickied threads are being unstickied!

What's notable, of course, is that the new verb was invented in a roundabout fashion (to stick -> sticky -> to sticky), instead of the plausible usage evolving from simply saying that a post was stuck in a forum. But the new usage has advantages; saying that a post is stuck in a forum is ambiguous, whereas saying that the post is stickied is quite clear.

It's hard to tell whether to sticky is actually used in any form but the participle; it's tricky to search for to sticky as a verb, because of the prevalence of phrases like [lead] to sticky [situations]. If you run across an example of the infinitive or present participle, I'd love to hear about it.

[1] I must say, the cover of that book, which illustrates a piece of duct tape, was brilliant.

App-rehension

2009-11-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

In my world (computers), the term app has been short for application since approximately forever. That's what the industry has always done -- created apps like Lotus 1-2-3, or Quicken, or that thing they use at the dentist to to schedule your next appointment.

But in my corner of my world -- editing -- any mention in draft documentation of an app has always been expanded into the more formal term application. The idea is that app is programmer slang.

But is it any more, I wonder? I'm thinking here of the Apple iPhone, which has done a lot in latter days for, um, mainstreaming the term app. It's not an entirely given thing just yet; here's a bit from their Web site (web site, website):

Applications for iPhone are like nothing you’ve ever seen on a mobile phone. Explore some of our favorite apps here and see how they allow iPhone to do even more.

I interpret "Applications for iPhone ... some of our favorite apps" as a vestigial acknowledgment that there might be 4 people left who use an iPhone and who have not yet made the connection between application and app. But that's about the only place I can find that still does this -- it's otherwise the App Store, Apps for iPhone¹, etc.

So my question is whether app is now firmly entrenched as a general term for applications or whether non-programmer types now think of it as something specifically for the iPhone. Has Apple succeeded in co-opting some programmer slang into not just general use, but in something that reinforces their own brand name? Pretend you're not a programmer. If you hear the word app, do you think application, or do you think iPhone application?

¹ Note that Apple's own branding is Apple iPhone, no the. Common usage is the iPhone, but those of us who have to think about trademarks have to be careful when referencing this device in, for example, our official documentation.

Thank goodness it's abou-tober

2009-10-28T01:15:00.000-07:00

There's something about the name October that seems to inspire the urge to play. There's a certain mellifluous quality to the name that we don't have with other months (heck, people can barely pronounce February). And that -tober on the end makes a satisfying particle onto which you can join practically anything, it seems. We've all heard a local radio station advertise its Rocktober lineup (a term also in use by Guitar Center and, it seems, about 300,000 other folks, if Google is to be believed).

Just how productive an ending is -tober, do you suppose? A few minutes of seaching has turned up the following:

Crocktober -- promotion by the Crock-Pot(tm) company of their slow-cooker line.
Motor-Tober -- from the MINI (car) people.
Biketober -- There's Biketoberfest for motorcycles in Daytona Beach, and Biketober for bicycles at various locations.
Slot-tober at a casino.
Mr. A-Rod-tober -- A designation for the Yankees slugger, formerly known as Mr. Flop-Tober.
Sports'tober -- An appreciation for the many varieties of sports played in this month.
Bock-tober -- Seasonal beer for a seasonal fest.
Scotchtober -- Oktoberfest for malt lovers.
Hot-tober -- whining about the heat in Florida.
Dogtober -- various ways to help our furry friends.

Good, if predictable, fun. Are there rules? Interestingly, almost all the examples here have a vowel that's in the same vowel neighborhood as Oct-. (The most common variant -- Rocktober -- is of course a perfect rhyme.) The word to be joined to -tober seems, from these examples, at least, to require a closing consonant. I would initially have guessed that any new prefix would have to be monosyllablic, but A-Rod-tober and Motor-tober appear to be counter-evidence.

What else can we come up with for examples, rules, or idle speculation?

Approvaled

2009-02-05T12:11:00.000-08:00

Another instance of a past tense that makes you go "huh?"

ABC has officially greenlit a pilot for its reworking of "V," the 1980s miniseries about alien lizards coming down to Earth.

(I got this from a Twitter post, but it seems to be a cite from elsewhere.)

I think my instinct would be to use greeenlighted. Probably (again) because we (well, I) like "regular" patterns for verbs and nouns, e.g., whacking -ed onto a verb for a past tense.

I briefly wondered about to light as a transitive verb; historically, I believe, this would have made it regular. But lit sounds right(er): He lit the way with a flashlight. Even so, greenlit sounds odd to me.

Obligatory Google search results:

greenlit: 256,000
greenlighted: 116,000

Superizory role

2009-01-18T21:52:00.000-08:00

Another one I've apparently missed. This is from an article about using Plurk:

On to some extras to uberfy your plurking!

So ... uber is the new super. (I actually blogged about this several hundred years ago.) Therefore, to uberfy is to make super-duper, yes? One might say that it's akin to pimping: On to some extras to pimp your plurking!

I do like it, tho as a former student of the Germanics, I still have a hard time letting go of ~~Mr.~~ Herr Umlaut. (And for that matter, front rounded vowels.)

Incidentally, the article from which this comes includes a link to Plurk that is labeled as obviated for invites. I understand about invitations/invites to join certain Web-based communities, but I can't say that I can figure out exactly what the author means by obviated in this context. (Obviously, I'm not going to be getting any invites to Plurk anytime soon.)

Social studies

2009-01-14T17:59:00.000-08:00

I heard a usage today, twice, that sent me scurrying to the dictionary. (Well, to Google, but that led to the dictionary.) Considering that I work in high-tech, you'd think I'd be au courant with late-breaking linguistic developments. Perhaps I don't go to enough meetings.

Anyway, the term in question is socialize. Obviously, we all know it in the context of chatting at cocktail parties and the like. And after peeking at the dictionary I allow as how you can transitively socialize, say, a feral dog. (You can do so grammatically, if not always in reality.)

Yon dictionary also uncovered a couple of transitive usages that I am not very familiar with:

2 a: to constitute on a socialistic basis <socialize industry> b: to adapt to social needs or uses

3: to organize group participation in <socialize a recitation>

Can't say that I've ever consciously heard either of these usages.

But the usage I heard today was subtly different yet. At a meeting today, we were discussing a particular technique that we'd like people to use, and the boss said We need to socialize that.

A few editorial eyebrows twitched at that. I attributed it to a slip of the tongue and that what was meant was We need to evangelize that, which is a pretty common thing in our corporate lingo. Sell it. Talk it up.

But then later today, by golly, I attended a panel discussion about blogging, and one of the participants said this: I socialized the term "blog smart."

Hearing the second instance within mere hours made it clear that I just had totally missed this one. So, a bit of Web-based research revealed that the phrase socialize the idea (as but one possible phrase for this usage) has a couple thousand hits.

Web searching also turned up a couple of attempted definitions. This one is from Terrence Seamon:

The concept of "socializing" refers to the interpersonal communication process of building support for an idea or course of action by visiting with key stakeholders one at a time.

From the page 7 Buzzwords Every Content Provider Should Know*:

[T]his word means "to spread an idea with the hope that familiarity will gain it acceptance or build a consensus." Sentence: "After I write an article I like, I socialize the idea with social bookmarks."

In this blog post, they're simply taking it as a synonym for "familiarize," but in the comments people suggest slightly different definitions, for example:

[S]ocializing to me often means convincing a group – frequently by leading the members of that group to believe they helped to develop the idea.

And:

Familiarization is a passive activity (I expect the team to learn it) whereas socialization is an active activity (I am responsible to teach it). It is in that teaching that the idea may undergo some changes and or modifications that may aid in its adoption or rejection.

It's mildly interesting to encounter a new (to me) word like this, but somewhat more interesting to discover that although the core idea is something like "sell personally," the exact definition is a little elusive. Of course, this is hardly the only example.

* I think they're not counting the buzzword content provider in the title.

As I lied dying

2008-11-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

What's generally termed "confusion"* between lie and lay is widespread and has been for a long time. It's more accurate to say that the semantic space occupied by lie is encroached upon to a large degree by lay, so that one hears things like:

I'm going to lay down.
The girls like to lay out in the sun.
etc.

Part of the problem is surely that the past-tense forms add to the, um, confusion. The verb lay is transitive (to put something into a prone position), and like good transitive verbs in Germanic languages, it follows a regular ("weak") pattern for forming its constituent parts:

present: lay. I'm going to lay the book on the table.
past: laid. Yesterday I laid the book on the table.
participle: laid. All of us have laid books on the table.

(Compare, say, talk.) The verb lie, on the other hand, in the sense of being in a prone position, is intransitive and in the manner of some Germanic verbs, is thus irregular ("strong"):

present: lie. The book lies on the table.
past: lay. Yesterday, the book lay on the table.
participle: lain. The book has lain on the table all day.

(This last sounds odd even to me, so rarely does one hear this conversationally.) It's easy to see that a present-tense lay is easy to confuse with a past-tense lay, for example. And in the world of Germanic weak and strong verbs, if you're going to bet on which form will prevail, the weak form is your better bet by a long shot.

So. Blah-blah. Why am I telling you this? Because Michael B has found such a nice example where this gets really confuddled:

That's when Perkins missed for the second time in the game. He was wide left from 28 yards with 3:24 left in regulation, then missed wide right from 37 in the second overtime. Perkins lied on his back as Martin Stadium erupted at the possibility of a shocking upset.

(Hopefully they haven't fixed this by the time you read it.)

As I say, if you're going to bet on verbs, bet on weak verbs; given half a chance, people will whack a -d onto the end of anything that looks like a verb.

* I adamantly refuse to say that this is "wrong." But then, I would.

texts and selections

2008-11-10T11:54:00.001-08:00

Seth forwards a link to a blog post that includes this cite:

This morning I got an email from a prospective [...] student who wanted to see my syllabus prior to registering. Because [the course] deals with literature of many genres, I use the word 'texts' in my syllabus (rather than the specific terms story, play, poem, essay). The student wrote back asking whether she would need to buy a new cell phone, seeing that we were reading so many texts. I assumed she was kidding and replied with a smiley face. Immediately, I received a furious tirade about how unfair I was to expect students to purchase phones and to pay for text messages, which are expensive. I replied that I hadn't realized she wasn't joking and defined what a 'text' means in English class. She wrote back that I had no right to use that word in a way that 'no one could possibly understand' and that she had already looked into buying phones which had worsened 'an already bad day' (guess she didn't vote for Obama?). I didn't have the heart (or stomach) to tell her that I'd switched to 'text' from my previous term 'selection' because former students had found 'selection' confusing (they thought it meant they only had to read part of an assignment--a selection of it. Usually, they just read the first page, especially if I neglected to include the entire page range of a selection on the syllabus).

I have to suspend disbelief a bit to buy this, but that's probably just because I don't deal much with the demographic in question. I can easily imagine that as a college student (I'm assuming), your first definition for text is what you create on a, you know, device. Where this goes wrong for me is that this anecdote suggests that the student in question does not have a second (or subsequent) definition for text that would make more sense in the context here (an English Lit class).

Is it possible that for this language community, the definition of text has become so strongly associated with texting that it has crowded out, so to speak, more traditional definitions?

The confusion over selection here isn't as problematic for me here, again assuming that we're talking about students who are young and/or new to a literature class. Couple this with the natural tendency of most students to want to do the least possible to fulfill an assignment, and with a bit of squinting, I can see this.

All this said, I have no suggestion as to what term here would be completely unambiguous to both teacher and students. What could one use here. Readings?

Anyway, for an amusing take on cross-generational vocabulary confusion that I can relate to, have a look at Matthew Baldwin's You Say Tomato post.

peak-a-boo

2008-09-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

Peak: pinnacle, highest point, acme, summit, apex, etc. We know the term well from many contexts, including:

"in peak health" (#). This expression is so well known that a surprising number of medical facilities play on it (#)
"at peak [commuter] hours" (#)

Then along came peak oil, which introduced (? -- or at least popularized) a subtle difference in how the work peak is used, as suggested by the definition in the article:

Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached ...

Peak in this sense seems to gobble up a bit more meaning than just "apex"; as used here, it seems to mean "upper limit of the (easy) availability of [commodity]." And sure enough, this usage can be generalized:

Where else do we see this usage?

Update 10/14/08: John Cole uses the term Peak Wingnut in a political blog, which is then deconstructed somewhat (mostly the "wingnut" part) by Mark Liberman on the Language Log under the title "Peak X."

... and for chagiggles

2008-09-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

I heard something today during a presentation that got my attention (well, the presentation was interesting also), but which struck me at the time as just as slip of the tongue. But when I got back to the office, I searched for it. Man, was I ever surprised:

just for chagrins, lets just suppose that everything in this film is embellished (#)

That might be neat to find out just for chagrins. (#)

Will probably resurrect the F body and try the filter with it (just for chagrins..) (#)

etc. These from the single page of Google hits for this phrase. Not so many cites, but I was surprised that there were any at all.

I believe that per the technical definition, these aren't eggcorns; they're just plain ol' malapropisms. I suppose these cites essentially mean that some people don't know what chagrin means. That's not so surprising, I suppose; it's not a term that comes up in everyday speech.

So: probably not an evolutionary development. Just a little mutation.

Starting over

2008-09-08T20:18:00.000-07:00

I've been around the term reboot since, dunno, 30 years ago? (He said, using uptalk intonation.) It's, like, a computer thing, right? On the conservative extreme (language, not politics) among the people I work with (editors), booting is already a bit casual; the proper term is bootstrapping.

Or was. It's safe to say that more people know to boot than know to bootstrap in the context of computers, and I've never heard anyone even suggest to rebootstrap. Although I might try that, see what kind of reaction I get.

It seems that to reboot has been wending its way into territory beyond computer science. This came to me forcefully today when I heard Teri Gross talking about the director J. J. Adams:

Next year Abrams's new "Star Trek" movie will be released, with the hope that it will reboot that franchise the way "The Dark Knight" rebooted Batman.

Repeating reboots, cool. This is an interesting usage to me; it's clear enough what it means, since it has the same semantics as in computer land, namely to restart. Turns out that this usage is established in the comic-book industry, where writers find themselves faced with a ticklish problem, namely how to wipe the slate clean on an established story line. As the highly authoritative Wikipedia explains nicely:

A reboot gives the chance for new fans to experience the core story by reintroducing it in smaller and easier-to-understand installments and/or by refocusing the story on its most important elements and abandoning many subplots and an overgrowth of minor details. Reboots may also serve changing audience expectations as to storytelling style, genre evolution, and sophistication of material.

I went a-searching for more examples of reboot being used outside computers. Huh, once you pay attention, you see it everywhere, imagine.

There's a book of essays named Rebooting America. (A bonus there is a tantalizing link to something called smartocracy -- ain't that neat? -- but the link doesn't seem to go anywhere.)

There's a TV show I've never heard of (that covers most of them, actually) named ReBoot. By computer dudes, it looks like.

reboot now: a conference about technological change: "A convergence to celebrate the emergence of new paradigms,where you can become a catalyst for change by the unlearning of old patterns… ."Another nice find: the Latest News section starts off with "Dear Fellow Rebootians," heh.

Reboot Music: "A music label founded by technology and entertainment industry veterans to reinvent the business of music. Utilizing an innovative approach, Reboot Music embraces new consumer behaviors and new technologies to create a company without boundaries." Gotcha.

A Lifehacker.com blog piece: Reboot Your Workflow This Fall.

A piece in Wired magazine: "The Critics Need a Reboot. The Internet Hasn't Led Us Into a New Dark Age."

Reboot Stereophonic is a music company that ... well, I don't quite get it, but it has something to do with old recordings.

Life Reboot, a blog-y thing that's about people who are restarting their careers.

The meaning of "restarting" travels easily through these usages. My general impression, tho it's just that, is that this, what, more metaphoric? even more metaphoric? use of reboot is being driven by people who come out of the computer industry or its various cousins (e.g., "new media"). The exception might actually be comics, but then, there's quite a bit of overlap between comic fandom and computer folks, so maybe it's a natural migration of the term from the later to the former.

Anyway, if you hear your grandma talking about rebooting her garden or something, by all means, let me know. I'm curious just how far this term is going to go.

Auguring yesterday's events

2008-05-31T09:25:00.000-07:00

Just ran across a nice coinage that is a) made from parts you already have around the house, b) is semantically logical, and c) does not involve the youth of today ruining English.

This is from an article in Wired about solar eclipses in the distant past:

Using the same calculating methods that predict future eclipses, astronomers have been able to calculate when eclipses occurred in the past. You can run the planetary clock in reverse as well as forward. To coin a word, you can postdict as well as predict.

Nice, eh? A niggling point is that they did not, or were not the first, to coin the word. (Google: 3,740 hits). But the term has what appear to be multiple slightly different usages. The Double-Tongued Dictionary provides this cite:

Approximately one in five suspect identifications from sequential lineups may be wrong. As a result, no existing eyewitness identification procedure can relieve the courts of the burden of decide after the fact (or postdicting) which eyewitness identifications are accurate versus inaccurate.

This sense seems relatively established in the literature of psychology, where its sibling term postdictor is flung about with abandon.

Postdiction is also used in a dismissive sense to refer to "prediction after the fact" by people who are skeptical of, you know, prophecies. Think Nostradamus.

For the general idea of running the clock backward, as the Wired article puts it, there is also the term retrodiction. As defined in Wikiepdia, retrodiction is a way to test theories by comparing against past results in situations when comparing against future ones is impractical. You see this in economics, when economic models are tested by running them against data from the past to see if your model can, for example, accurately predict the mortgage crisis. Some might say that this constitutes that other, more dismissive sense of postdiction, but hey.

As an interesting aside, the very next paragaph in the Wired article has this bold usage:

The most likely candidate for Thales' eclipse took place on May 28, 585 B.C., though some authorities believe it may have been 25 years earlier in 610 B.C. Hundreds of scholars have debated this for nearly two millenniums.

This invites a discussion of forming plurals for terms that immigrated from non-English sources. I have an opinion on that, actually, which you can read here.

Let pre-dom ring

2008-05-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

The pre- prefix is good, clean fun, as many folks have noted. For example, in The Atlantic in November 1998, Corby Kummer had a cute essay[1] that was (ultimately) about pre-, which went along these lines:

I wear pre-washed jeans. I have outstanding loans for which I was pre-qualified and which I hope to pre-pay, and hold credit cards for which I was pre-selected and pre-approved. I make pre-retirement deductions from my pre-tax earnings. I pre-medicate before going to the dentist, because of a pre-existing condition. My children were pre-tested in advance of pre-school. They will clamor, I predict, to see the Star Wars prequel.

It's come up here before, where we noted pregaming and pre-buttal. Sort of along the lines of this last, today I found an entry on polyglot conspiracy in which Lauren makes this sad (but lingusitically amusing) comment:

... although I ought to feel invigorated and hopeful this time around by the impressiveness of many of the Democratic candidate options, as well as the real possibility that we could get a changemaker in office, I somehow still feel pre-defeated.

I know this feeling, don't you?

People occasionally complain about "illogical" uses of pre-, but I think we can agree that pre-boarding does mean something different than just plain ol' boarding, and that pre-announcing something is different than just announcing it. The beauty of the prefix is its flexibility in the terrain that it can occupy, ranging from the nominally logical "before" to the semantic areas of "anticipatory" or "preparatory" or just "early." And although the prefix can cover a lot of territory, I don't recall offhand any usages in which it was unclear what the intent was. Unless, of course, I'm post-remembering wrong.

[1] I am amazed, I must confess, that a link that I harvested nearly 10 years ago is still good.

Tag, you're innit

2008-04-21T15:02:00.000-07:00

From kottke.org I got a link to an interesting little articlette on the BBC Web site about the use of innit to finish sentences as what they identify as a tag question. The article specifically notes that innit, which is a contraction of the contraction isn't it, is becoming or has become an all-purpose tag question.

Examples from their text:

"We need to decide what to do about that now innit." (don't we?)
"I'll show young Miss Hanna round to all the shops, innit." (won't I?)

The piece says two things that I kind of wonder about, but don't have the wherewithal to go investigate, namely:

But kids in urban Britain are using 'innit' to cover a wider and wider range of situations.

My wonderings:

kids: I wonder whether this is in fact limited to kids and teens, or whether it's established among (some) adults as well when they're speaking non-standard English.
wider and wider. I heard innit used when I lived in the UK many moons ago. The article is suggesting that semantic range of innit is actively increasing. True, or is this just another instance of the recency illusion?

In my experience, this is strictly a British usage, but we have one or two equivalents in the U.S. as well. The one that springs to mind is you know?, which we can substitute in the examples above:

"We need to decide what to do about that now, you know?"
"I'll show young Miss Hanna round to all the shops, you know?"

Are there other constructs that we can plug in here?

I already know that you know? drives people to distraction in the US, and I imagine that innit does the same in the UK. The article is at least putatively in response to the question "Isn't innit ungrammatical?" I am delighted that their answer is "no" (coz it's just a tag question) and that the article specifically references similar tag-question particles in other languages, like ¿verdad? in Spanish. Which probably drives a lot of people to distraction in Spanish-speaking countries. I am reminded also that in German, gell is used in this considered-substandard way. Which probably drives a lot of Germans to distraction.

Anyway, yay for the BBC for not just whining about those damn kids and how they're ruining the language, innit?

Well-grounded verbs

2008-04-10T14:21:00.000-07:00

Michael B found something today in the MSN money blog entry that discusses the latest from Starbucks:

Starbucks needs to do everything it can to improve its image as a purveyor of premium coffee. The move towards pre-grinded coffee beans and automatic espresso makers left it vulnerable.

This is a little surprising. Historically, it's not unusual for irregular/strong verbs to move toward using the regular/weak pattern, which consists of whacking a -d/-ed ending onto the stem. (And no sound change.) We use this pattern in new verbs pretty much without exception. And we see it when a traditionally irregular verb is used in a new way that is sufficiently different to cause users to "forget" that it has an existing irregular past tense. (Examples frequently cited, including by me, are to fly out; to grandstand.) You can sense when verbs are teetering between irregular and regular, as I've noted before: what's the past of to troubleshoot? What about of to cheerlead?

What's surprising about grinded here is that the usual past tense -- ground -- is in constant use even in this context. People talk about fresh-ground coffee and about dumping the grounds. But perhaps that pre- threw off the writer; if we give him the benefit of the doubt here, he's analyzing to pre-grind as a new verb (to pregrind, let's say), and new verbs always take -d/-ed.

It's a mistake, from a purely editing perspective, but it's one that follows a rigid pattern, so to speak. If a body is going to get the past tense of to grind wrong, odds are that they'll get it wrong in exactly this way.

So, Google. The search grinded +coffee yields ~~about 6 cups~~ about 45,000 hits, including fresh grinded coffee and fine grinded and hand grinded and just plain grinded. (In fairness, a few of these are not native speakers, but a lot of them are.)

Grinded still sounds odd to me, but to quite a few people, apparently it does not. (Is it more prevalent in writing than in speech? That's a question that we here are not equipped to research, alas.) Let's check back in 20 years, see how things are developing.

Update (5 June 2008): Found this in a blog today: "While there was some discussion of how to fix the problems, it got overwhelmed by grinded axes swinging wildly against certain personalities in Microsoft India leadership."

noun rage

2008-04-07T13:51:00.000-07:00

I ran across a reference today to something that's apparently not particularly new, but it's set me off on another one of these blog posts, dang it. The term was wrap rage, which I found (still with quotation marks -- single ones, how odd) in a C|NET article. They define wrap rage as "... what some consumers suffer when struggling to remove a product from a sealed plastic shell resistant to poking, prying, and tearing."

Not that this has ever happened to me. Haha.

Paul McFedries noted this term in 2005, but his cites go to 2003, and he notes that package rage is at least as old as 1999. I can only imagine that in those long-ago days, package rage was all about CDs.

So, time for a rage hunt, specifically of the form noun + rage. The first one that sprung to mind was road rage, which is when those morons around you just do not know how to drive. :-) (George Carlin: "Have you ever noticed? Anybody going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac.")

Not so many rages as I thought, tho. McFedries had already found road rage, of course (first cite 1989), plus Web rage (mad coz your connection is so slow), air rage (bad-mouthing flight crews with extreme prejudice), and work rage, which might lead to going postal (1996).

Another one I remembered was roid rage, allegedly set off by overuse of steroids. An artificial example is Cage Rage, which involves guys fighting in a ring.

The pattern is clear enough -- rage set off by noun. (Cage Rage therefore doesn't follow the pattern, so we'll just dismiss him.) Given the examples, one might also conclude that the pattern calls for a single-syllable word preceding rage to get the appropriate spondee meter.

AFAIK, this pattern is not used when rage is used in the sense of popularity, e.g. all the rage.

What else can we find (or heck, invent) along these lines?

Obamapedia

2008-03-07T15:28:00.000-08:00

Slate magazine has a running feature called The Encyclopedia Baracktannica, in which people contribute found instances (I guess) of words coined around the name Barack Obama. A few samples:

Obasm
The sensation that occurs during or after a speech by Barack Obama, characterized by spasms of hope and a sensation that all will be well—Ed Bush

Baractogenarian
An Obama supporter who’s older than 21

Baracklamation
Anything that Barack Obama says

Obombre
A Latino who supports Obama—Jeffrey Barton

So, a couple of things here. First, the ink is hardly dry on my recent post about the proliferating usage of the -pedia suffix for all things encylopedic, when here comes Slate with some other new way to suggest, well, encyclopedianess. (Tho really what they're providing a dictionary, not an encyclopedia -- a glo-bama-ssary, we might say. (Or not.)

Which brings up the second point, which is that people are neologizing like mad, trying to think up words that can incorporate obama or barack. Question: what are the rules for this game?

I ask this because of something I read (via the Langauge Log) not long ago about the lolcats phenomenon. When lolcats was all the rage (that was back in, like, 2007), people were making up all sorts of "i can haz cheezburger" and "im in ur RSS feed, ritin mai blog" captions for cat pictures. It seemed like a free-for-all, but as Anil Dash said:

The rise of these new subspecies of lolcats are particularly interesting to me because "I can has cheezeburger?" has a fairly consistent grammar. I wasn't sure this was true until I realized that it's possible to get cat-speak wrong.

Thinking about the barackification of words, it seems like it likewise is a free-for-all, but of course, it's not. Some coinages work; others do not. As Anil Dash says, it's possible to get it wrong. So what are the rules?

Here's an initial stab at a list of constraints for Obama coinages. I don't think this list is necessarily correct nor exhaustive. Or insightful or interesting. I'm just musing, and invite you to, um, co-muse with me.

The new word has to be based on a word that already contains sounds that are at least a little like the sounds from the limited pallette in Obama's name. For example: Barackupied (cf occupied). This seems to be a feature of many uses of Barack: Baracktail (cf cocktail); Operation Baracki Freedom; Barackracy (fr bureaucracy); Baracklamation; Obamination (cf abomination - clever, it just reverses);
The new word follows a word-creation pattern that's already functional in English: Obameter; Obamasm (#); Baracturnal.
The word simply adds a recognizable part of Obama's name onto an otherwise stanadlone word (more often involving Oba-, it seems to me): Obamalaise; Obombre; Obalma mater; Barackolyte.

The test here would be to try to make up words on the -obama-, -barack- pattern that don't work. I haven't thought of any just yet, but I have a bus ride ahead of me, so ...

Nouny adjectiveness

2008-02-27T17:52:00.000-08:00

I occasionally spot words that are auditioning for a new part of speech. (#, #) I ran across a couple recently, one that was sort of self-consciously parading, and the other that snuck itself into a (kind of) conversation.

Number 1: MSN has ad campaign going at NoOneWantsToLookDumb.com, the point of which I have to confess is escaping me.^* When the site first comes up -- but you have to really be watching, because it's only for a few seconds -- the page says:

Wait just a moment for a quick dose of awesome.

Although it seems calculated (I can imagine the marketing discussions that went into developing the tag), I like it. Once you get past the part where an adjective is being all noun-y, it reads better than the nominally (haha) correct awesomeness.

Number 2: The second instance appeared in the comic strip "Sherman's Lagoon" last Sunday, to wit:

Double score here -- happy being used a noun ("your happy"), and a solution to the question of how you'd pluralize it ("conflicting happys"). For the latter, it's conceivable that you could use happies, but just whacking an -s onto happy-the-noun preserves its adjectival origin better.

I suppose we could also speculate that to stay on top of the cutting edge of language change, you need to read ads and comic strips. At least, that's my excuse.

* Also, guitar dude keeps moving his legs like maybe he has to go.

Momentum-us

2008-02-27T08:38:00.000-08:00

Sometimes your work is just done for you, what can I say? Over on Fritinancy, Nancy Friedman is inspired by Mark Peters of the Boston Globe to take the stem -memtum through many of its recent incarnations, which include (I steal these from him and her):

Joementum (Lieberman, whom Peters credits with, you know, unlocking the potential of the word).
Mittmentum, Obamamentum (current presidential race)
O-mentum (Oprah)
Met-mentum (New York baseball)

As an aside, I like one of the comments on her entry, in which a certain "Orange" notes that ...

Is he on crack? "O-mentum" doesn't evoke Oprah—it evokes the omentum , the great blob of peritoneal tissue that occupies some of the space around our abdominal organs.

Right, of course! That's everyone's first thought! But after they get past their medical degree, then it invokes Oprah. Sheesh.

Citing -source(s)

2008-01-31T13:37:00.000-08:00

Like it or not, to source is a verb that's been around a long time. The OED lists the verb, in its sense of "to obtain from a specified source," with a first cite of 1660.[1] In its direct, current usage, cites in the OED start at 1960.

From there we move along and develop to outsource, which per the OED and RHD emerged in the late 70s.[2]

Paul McFedries (aka Wordspy.com) reports the term intersource was coined probably in the late 90s, modeled on on outsourcing: "Intersource: To farm out work by creating a joint venture with an outside provider or manufacturer." (No OED reference.) Along a similar model, I guess, Webster's lists (without a date) to insource as "to keep within a corporation tasks and projects that were previously outsourced." To un-outsource, I guess.

More? You bet:

Downsourcing. Various meanings; most common is to pass work off to an entity that's smaller or less experienced:

"It's a new buzzword, but for a very old idea. Cutting out the middleman." (#)
"What these companies hope to do is engage in a constant process of what I call downsourcing, by sloughing off their older, my highly paid employees and replacing them with fresh-faced college grads eager to pay their dues -- at a much lower price." [#]
"Then there's the downsourcing of mainline customer service at many mid-size airports to some entities that are semi-incompetent. It is a cost saving that's likely one of the reasons that consumers want revenge." [#]

Upsourcing. Not sure I can make clear sense of the ways in which this term is being used. Have a look yourself using this search.

So, it's the -source hokey-pokey: in, out, all about. We keep finding new prepositions to whack onto the -source.

But that is not all. Steve Sampson wrote recently about crowdsourcing, where he quotes Wikipedia: "Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science)." Examples of crowdsourcing that Sampson mentions are Flickr.com, YouTube.com.

Where up to now we created directional (locational) locutions, crowdsourcing drops direction and going right to the source. (So to speak.)

More? Maybe. Another term built on this pattern is homesourcing (aka homeshoring), defined (Wikipedia again) as "The transfer of service industry employment from offices to home-based employees with appropriate telephone and Internet facilities". Here's an interesting note on how JetBlue uses homesourcing for its reservation system. I found one similar reference to housesourcing ("This term refers to a hot trend of hiring people who work from their home .for instance, independent contractors employs people to handle customer service calls from their home ,which saves time and money for both employers and employees.") Note that this definition is from a somewhat dubious source (haha), namely a Web site in Chinese (!).

In the world of computers, source is short for source code, which is the language in which programs are written, to then be compiled into object code. With the advent of community-supported software, we now have open-source (free, community supported) and closed-source (commerical) software.[3] Not surprisingly, we have verb forms, e.g. "Open sourcing of VMS".

So we've got -sources all over the place! Where else? What new terms can we come up with?

[1] Their example is: "Like a bankroute or shipe lost on the continent by the furie of sourcinge waves," which doesn't seem to me to have quite the same sense.

[2] The citations from the 1960s in the OED for to source actually anticipate the development of to outsource, check it out: "1960 Wall St. Jrnl. 15 Mar. 14/5 There is a growing tendency toward foreign ‘sourcing’, the purchase or production of finished goods or components abroad."

[3] These definitions for open- and closed-source are simplistic, I realize.

Mini-Me ... please

2008-01-29T16:16:00.000-08:00

Suppose that you are a programmer working with Web pages. Your job is to reduce the size of the Web page -- that is, of the HTML that defines the Web page -- to the absolute minimum. (Smaller Web pages are faster to download and thus display.) As part of this process, you get rid of all extraneous white space, extra line breaks (the browser doesn't care about those), etc.

What might you call this process? Well, here are some candidates:

Minimize. Possible; however, "minimizing a Web page" already means something else in the world of Windows and GUIs.
Compress. This term has a technical meaning (as in, compressing to a .zip file) that isn't exactly what you're doing here.
Condense. Ooh, nice … that's what you're doing, condensing the page to its essence, sort of.

All possible, but not what it's called. The word is … ta-da! … minify; the nounification is minification. This page provides a nice definition:

Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size thereby improving load times. When code is minified all comments are removed, as well as unneeded white space characters (space, newline, and tab). […] This improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced.

My first reaction, which might also have been yours, was to say "Huh, strange-sounding word." Perhaps you (but not me) further thought "Those darn programmers are always making up wacky new terms!" Ah, but it turns out that minify has been around longer than, say, anyone currently writing about how English is being ruined. RHD's etymology says it appeared in the 1670s. The etymology further suggests that the term was modeled on magnify. Well, that makes sense, I guess.

But wait, there's more. Another term that's used for minification is crunching. (One tool that can do this for you is named the Crunchinator.) In at least one usage I know of, crunching is a little more, um, intimate than minification … it isn't just crowding everyone together on the bus, it's giving some folks a haircut:"Crunching scripts happens when scripts are built, and removes whitespace and condenses local variable names to further reduce the size of the script files."

The Google search "minification html whitespace" yields about 2,230 hits; the search "crunching html whitespace" yields 7,340. Based on this and a few other not-very-rigorous search tests, I'd posit that the more popular term is in fact crunch.

Search-iti

2008-01-29T10:37:00.000-08:00

The Windows Live folks (more specifically, the lab portions thereof) are proto-releasing a tool that is described as "a search visualization site that brings a new user experience to researching -- "searching and storing results." Name: Tafiti. Per the site, the name "means 'do research' in Swahili."

Oh. I always find it a little lame when people have to explain where a brand(-ish) name comes from. For one thing, it means that the name itself isn't doing its fair share of denoting or connoting what it's supposed to represent.

So whence Tafiti? A kind-of homonym is Tahiti, a far-away exotic locale whose image would not seem (unless I'm missing something) to be suggestive of what's going on here. Another sound-alike is graffiti, which seems a little closer -- the search feature lets you save and amend search results for your research. So, evocative of scribble, perhaps.

Perhaps. Thots? Why would you turn to Swahili for branding? Not that it isn't a fine and useful language, but it's not widely known in the English-speaking world.

Pedia-tricks

2008-01-14T09:57:00.000-08:00

Etymologically, the term encyclopedia results from an imperfect understanding of classical languages. So it's come down to us as a single word that we older folks at least used to associate with a shelf-full of heavy books. An archaic but occasionally amusing feature of which was that they were arranged alphabetically and (at least in some editions) on whose spine were printed ranges (what are those called?) that indicated the letters incorporated into that volume: A-Com, Lit-Pat, Ped-Rel, like that.

Even tho there isn't a standalone word pedia in any obvious incarnation in English (unobvious ones, probably), it's been treated as combinatory form for a long time. As of 1985, the Britannica people had a Micropoedia, a Macropoedia, and a Propeodia. (Dig those funky spellings, which I will note do not pass the spelling checker I'm using.)

These days, -pedia is flung about with abandon. On the first page alone of a Google search, you can find pedia.com, cinema-pedia.com, mobile-pedia.com, e-pedia.com, info-pedia.com, tutorial-pedia.com, and design-pedia.com. "Compendium of knowledge" is yer core meaning here. (On the Web, no one knows that you're alphabetized, so that particular flourish in the original definition does not obtain.)

Probably the best-known online encyclopedia is Wikipedia, which combines the old term -pedia with the relatively new term wiki. For the 3 people left who don't know this, a wiki is a Web site that anyone can edit or contribute to. And for the 5 people left who don't know this, wiki is from the Hawaiian term wikiwiki, which means "quick."

The particles that go on the front of -pedia can address different components of the compendium. A common one is what, i.e. subject matter: cinema-pedia, design-pedia, mobile-pedia, info-pedia, the latter covering (one presumes) everything that constitutes information. Another possibility is where, i.e. where the pedia is found: e-pedia, referencing a no-longer-so-productive prefix for, basically, "online." The Wikipedia folks used a prefix for how, namely the manner in which the pedia is compiled.

All of this you know already, right? So. Not long ago I ran across a reference to Whiskypedia.org, a Web site that "has been set up to be the definitive online resource for all things Whisk(e)y." The "all things Whisk(e)y" part is pretty clear from the -pedia part of the name. What's interesting to me is that Whiskypedia is a wiki. I think the name therefore has two, two, two times the connotative value of [something]-pedia alone: I think they are, um, leveraging the similarity of the sounds of wiki and whisky to signal that it's both a pedia and a wiki. If that's true (speculate among yourselves), does it mean that as we progress, the term -pedia might start suggesting not just a compendium of knowledge, but specifically community-contributed knowledge?

Update 3/22/08: Nicholson Baker in The New York Review of Books: "Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue—a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren't libelous or otherwise illegal. Like other middens, it would have much to tell us over time. We could call it the Deletopedia." (source)

Update 4/14/08: The toonopedia.

The way that "cookie" crumbles

2008-01-10T12:53:00.001-08:00

Basic descriptions of the differences between American and British English will often feature a chart that lists words and their correspondents in the other dialect. You know, trunk=boot, panties=knickers, pants=trousers, like that. Among those it will often note what Americans call a cookie, the Brits call a biscuit. (Confusingly, and by no means uniquely, the British word has a different meaning yet in American English.)[1]

But it ain't that simple. It turns out that the word cookie has in fact come into British English, and even means something like what we Americans understand. But it hasn't replaced biscuit; instead, the two terms in BrEnglish now have a subtly different definition.

Lynne Murphy at separated by a common language explains:

In AmE, cookie refers to what BrE speakers would refer to as biscuits, but also to a range of baked goods that were not typically available in Britain until recently--what we can call an 'American-style cookie'--that is, one that is soft and (arguably) best eaten hot. Since in the UK these are almost always bought (at places like Ben's Cookies or Millie's Cookies), rather than home-baked, they also tend to be of a certain (largish) size. In BrE, biscuit retains its old meaning and applies to things like shortbread, rich tea biscuits, custard creams and other brittle things that can be dunked into one's tea, but cookie denotes only the bigger, softer American import. (In fact, twice this year I heard Englishpeople in shops debating the definition of cookie, and had noted this for further discussion on the blog...and here it is. For previous discussion of this and other baked good terminology, click here.)

The semantic range covered by a word is rarely fixed for all time, and the language adapts to address new circumstances, to accommodate new terms, and so on. In HistLing101, for example, they'll tell you that the English word deer, which refers to a particular type of ruminant, is etymologically related to the German word Tier, which simply means "animal." As the West Germanic languages split apart, what was once the same word claimed different semantic territory in the descendant languages. In the case of biscuit/cookie, in British English, a new thing was introduced that came with an existing name. One way to accommodate this would have been to also refer to American-style cookies as biscuits. But clearly British speakers have felt that it's useful to distinguish this new type of baked good from another type, enough so that British English now has two words for these different things. In the process, the definition of biscuit in BrEng has become a tiny bit narrower, inasmuch as it now does not cover all the territory that is covered by what Americans call a cookie. In those lists of American vs British terms, the line for cookie=biscuit should now at the least have an asterisk and a note that makes this point. (Not that any such note will likely be added.)

American speakers continue to use cookie to cover the whole range of baked goods here, so they don't yet feel that the difference requires a split in terminology. They sure as heck would get confused if BrEng speaker started talking about these subtle distinctions between biscuits and cookies.

I will note for the record that I'm aware that within the world of retailing (and baking), there are all sorts of different names for styles of cookies, even in (especially in?) AmEng -- ya got yer snickerdoodles and fig newtons and vanilla wafers and ginger snaps and animal crackers, all of which refer to specific recipes or styles of cookies. I think, however, that Americans would still consider all of these to be cookies. Yes?

[1] I worked in the UK a while back, and ran afoul of such a difference on my first day (!). My employer issued a card that could be used to pay for fuel for the company car. I was told to go to someone and get such a card; when I did, I asked for a "gas card." I got puzzled looks until one of us (probably not me) sorted out that what I wanted was a petrol card.

Sit on this, why doncha

2008-01-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

Seth points me to a term that was new to me, altho it's a variant on a term that I did know. He finds typosquatting, which is a specific instance of cybersquatting. Should these both be new to you, the terms refer to the practice of leasing a domain name (xxxx.com) that is either an actual brand name or similar to a brand name, in the hopes that the brand-name owner will then want to pay you to hand it over to them. For example, had you been clever and forward-looking in, say, 1995, you might have bought the rights to the domain name oed.com, and then have negotiated with the Oxford University Press for the rights to that domain name. (These days, you can be successfully sued for cybersquatting, so you might have a harder go of it today.) Typosquatting refers specifically to registering a misspelling of a trademarked name, as opposed to just a name or word that a company might find useful. If you managed to register, dunno, goggle.com and gooogle.com, you'd be typosquatting.

Squatting and squatters refer to the practice and practitioners of occupying something that doesn't belong to you (when of course it does not refer to sitting on your haunches). I did some small amount of poking to see if I could come up with more words that whack a prefixtual word onto -squat/-squatting, but came up dry. (I sorely, sorely miss not having wildcard searches in word stems.) Are there in fact other examples of such words?

(-er)-ed

2007-10-31T14:04:00.000-07:00

Just an observation, with the possibility for someone to tell me if there's a general rule at work here. If you have a new verb that ends in -er, how do you form the past tense?

Cases in point.

The noun (trademark, actually) Taser has begotten the verb to taser. (In fact, the derived verb is more frequently spelled to tazer, a trend; see below.) When Andrew Meyer was subdued at U Florida (#) recently, the cops used a Taser. Was Meyer tased or tasered? Google currently shows a combined 232,000 hits for tasered/tazered, a combined 494,000 for tased/tazed.

People use the web site Twitter.com to record their, um, quotidian activities. When you've done so, have you twittered or twitted? It's not possible (or not easy, there's the rub) to use Google to find instances specific to Twitter, because the verbs already exist with other meanings. However, you can find examples of both forms that refer specifically to Twitter.com ... here's a twittered (the writer also tentatively tried out tweeted); here's twitted.

On a more established front, we get 35,000 hits for lasered/lazed +eyes and 69,000 hits for lased/lazed +eyes.

Based on the two quantitative measures, more people seem to think that the inflectable stem does not include the trailing -er. Is this because -er is already understood as a particle, namely to make a comparative form for the adjective? Do we have verbs in English whose infinitive form ends in a removable -er suffix? I can't think of any after several concentrated moments of thought.

Anyway, something to contemplate.

Not on board with that

2007-08-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

Eruption today at work about the term to onboard. This is a term that seems to be jargon-y in the world of human resources (HR). It's used like this, courtesy of the About.com site:

In the talent management universe, the new employee orientation and mainstreaming process is known as "employee onboarding."

The discussion started off with a rather naive question about whether it's onboarding, on-boarding, or on boarding. (I can't think of any kind of valid case for that last one.) If you hang around with editors, you might be able to imagine what sort of reaction this engendered. Did people say "it might not be advisable to use this term, as it might not be generally understood"? Well, some did. But it also engendered a good selection of comments about how "grotesque" and "ungrammatical" it is.

For the record, Google gets ~275,000 hits right now for onboarding.

I suppose that the "grotesque" can be attributed to personal preference (like I care what you think about this word), but the tainting with "ungrammatical" did get a few timid queries about how that should be so. Reply:

It's a bit like saying "I've been Christmasing" -- it's turning a noun into a verb that isn't used as a verb.

This doesn't sound analogous to me. And I don't get the "verb that isn't used as a verb" part. Creating a new verb from a noun (or from anything) that "isn't used as a verb" is sort of how it gets to be a verb in the first place, no? Perhaps I'm missing something.

In any event, no one involved in the discussion has drawn the parallel yet between onboarding and offshoring (5.4 million hits) or downsizing (7.2 million hits).

I'm sure that for all the scorn heaped on poor ol' onboarding today, the term will have the last laugh. In 10 years' time, if that, no one will blink an eye, sez me.

Update My colleague David, who has a way with versification, has allowed me to post the following, which he wrote in response to the whole debate:

In my office sedate was I basking
When on mail came an innocent asking
E-mail streams I'm now fording
On the use of "onboarding"
And "grotesque!" neologists totasking*

*If bringing someone on board is "onboarding," then taking someone to task must be "totasking."

Gasmic Consciousness

2007-07-08T11:16:00.000-07:00

A secondary but, uh, obvious definition for orgasm is "intense or unrestrained excitement". Where does that meaning reside in the word? Looks like it's in -gasm, which true to form in English, has no etymological validity.[1] But we don't care. You can add -gasm/-gasmic to lots of things (anything?) and express your intense or unrestrained excitement about that thing.

I ran across this in a blog:

What is a foodgasm, you might ask? Well, as the name might indicate, that's when the food that you're eating is so good, it's practically orgasmic. Your toes curl up, your breath gets shallow. You may start to moan a little. Anyone who's ever had a foodgasm before knows what I'm talking about; anyone who hasn't, well, I'm sorry.

Google currently gets around 29,000 hits for foodgasm. Flikr has a Foodgasm photo pool, for the more visually inclined.

I looked for *gasm in Google Groups (need that stem search) and found a selection, although not so many that were being used as real words. But I did find some.

Some uses stay close to the idea of physical sensation:

toe-gasm (adults only for this link)
The aforementioned foodgasm.

Others are metaphorical:

war-gasm, a term that is somewhat disturbing, although I suspect many people know exactly what it means.
art-gasm.
joe-gasm, which I was amused at -- noted by a collector of old GI Joe dolls upon encountering a specimen.

Hmm, I guess foodgasm could fit into the second category.

Some people amuse themselves by inventing (tho not actually using) variations on this idea, which is referred to by some as the Gasm game:

Sex in a warehouse: store-gasm
Sex with a Norse god: Thor-gasm
Sex with Marines: corps-gasm
Mushroom sex: spore-gasm

... as examples from a very long list.

Anyway, that's the idea. What other terms are in real use that follow this pattern?

Updates

Nerdgasm.
Blogasm. Multiple blogs with this name. (This one says: "a blogasmic experience.")

[1] I actually got to wondering about the -asm suffix. From the two examples I can think of (orgasm, phantasm) I can't deduce a meaning. Need someone who knows Greek, I think. Any thots?

natty = naughty

2007-05-26T13:53:00.001-07:00

John McIntyre, assistant managing editor of the Baltimore Sun, ran slightly afoul of the evolving definition of a word that, as far as he knew, was just fine. He recounts:

An article came to the copy desk with a phrase about nattily
dressed people. And a couple of copy editors came to me wanting to change it to smartly dressed. Why? I asked. Natty is a perfectly innocuous word, usually applied, with some condescension, to people who wear bow ties.

No, they said; it means gross and dirty. Huh? I shrewdly asked.

And indeed, it seems that natty is a term that means different things to different generations. McIntyre was invited to visit urbandictionary.com, where among the many (different) defintinions, he found this:

Something gross, low-class or unclean. Originally meaning neat in apperance, the word natty ironically became its an antonym for itself over time, thanks in large part to its adoption by Rastafarian slang.

McIntyre is editing for a wide audience. Maybe a lot of people still recognize natty as having mostly positive connotations, but if the term is evolving and some people -- indeed, of some of the paper's younger editors -- react negatively to the term, then ok. He changed it.

You have the right to change roles

2007-05-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

Something from Seth: mirandize. (cite) In case it's not obvious, this is an eponymous verb form of Miranda warning (apparently; everyone says Miranda rights), whereby suspects under arrest are apprised that actions they take after the arrest (like, say, confess) can be used as evidence. (The Wikipedia article, in fact, mentions the term mirandize, although they cap it, editors that they are.[1])

It's hardly surprising that Miranda warning made an easy transition to the foreshortened noun mirandas (or Mirandas). Google turns up 34 hits for their mirandas, which are split up between references to Miranda rights, The Tempest, and Star Trek.

From there, heck, it's not a big leap to verbize the word -- Google currently has about 13,000 hits for mirandize. Anu Garg has a cite from 2004. All three big dictionaries list the word, although none of them (online, anyway) have a first cite date.

Miranda rights were established by the Supreme Court on the basis of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which grants, among other things, that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." This has led to the phrase take the Fifth or plead the Fifth, which is used in a technical sense (I believe) to mean that you refuse to answer a question on the grounds that it could be self-incriminatory. The law does not interpret this as a statement of guilt, but in common parlance that's just what it means:

Q: Did you take the last of the cookies?
A: I plead the Fifth.

ie, yes.

Here, the Fifth looks and acts like a noun. It requires some extra-syntactical knowledge to understand that this is, nominally at least, an elided form of the Fifth Amendment. Does everyone who utters the phrase understand that? The answer to that question might determine whether we can consider Fifth in the Fifth as a noun or adjective. We could experiment by applying various declensions and see what works. First, let's see if it can follow some noun rules:

"What did the witness do?"
"There were three Fifths."

I can see it. How about adjective? Many adjectives have comparative and superlative forms:

"And what about the last witness?"
"He was the Fifthest of all."

A stretch, but not impossible. So, Fifth here can, assuming you buy my analysis, be biPoSer.

As an aside, it's unlikely that most people know of these things from first-hand experience (probably a good thing). We can probably credit TV with bringing Miranda and the Fifth into common discourse. It can't be a bad thing for common phrases to remind us of some of the founding principles of US law, and indeed, English common law.[2]

[1] Eric Lippert wrote a musative blog entry that raised the question of when eponymous words are capped and when they are not. His conclusion: this is English, don't expect consistency.

[2] Another Fifth Amendment-ish right that's gotten some exposure recently is habeas corpus. It's somewhat interesting that a phrase that's in subjunctive in Latin can become a noun in English. Somewhat.

Do the French have a word for it?

2007-05-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

If you start companies not for profit or vision, but to "fulfill a desire to improve the world," what are you? A nontrepeneur. I can't quite get whether Nick Douglas actually coined the word or whether it's been around ... Google currently gets 376 hits, very many of which pertain to the article just linked.

This is another slice-n-dice job (aka cran-morph or "cranberry morpheme"). To belabor this a bit, the opening morpheme, as it were, of entrepreneur is entre- . (We actually know the word entrepreneur in English via the closely related enterprise.) A slightly facile etymology for entrepreneur is given as entre- "between" + prendre "to take".

Anyways. With some reanalysis, we can chop off entre- and be left with preneur, which means ... hmm ... "business-starting person." (Does that sound right?) In effect, the entire meaning of entrepreneur shifts to this new morpheme -preneur, which we can then prefixize al gusto to qualify the meaning.

Some other examples:

Intrapreneur, which appears to have been invented way back in the 1970s.
Technopreneur
Eco-preneur
Solo-preneur
Actor-preneur, "a theatrical performer who operates and assumes the risk of a business venture"
Mom-preneur, which I particularly like.

It's revealing, I think, that most of these have a hyphen in them, suggesting a self-consciousness in the coinage and perhaps thinking that readers won't get the word unless they make it obvious how they're stitching together the constituent parts.

Note also that, unusually, these formations break the original word into what are etymologically its original roots. (Contrast hamburger, which went from Hamburg+er to Ham+burger). People don't carry etymology around in their heads, and there isn't currently (well, wasn't) any such word or morpheme as preneur in contemporary English, so in a narrow sense this is still a cran-morph. I would guess that the word break falls on historically accurate lines because entre- is sufficiently close to something that sounds like an English prefix to feel like a detachable piece. Which then yields preneur, and here we are.

The example of nontrepreneur is interesting because it borrows -tre- from the original word, unlike the other examples I find. But I don't think there's any subtle semantics to the construction; nontrepreneur (to me) sounds better and is more obvious than nonpreneur, which in fact has a vaguely negative connotation, what do you think?

Riffing on nontrepreneur, James Britt writes a blog entry and, along with commenters, throws out some humorous variations, like the following:

Salontrepreneur: Operates out of some hip, literary hangout.
Gonetrepreneur: Ex-founder.
Don Juantrepreneur: No business plan, but still charms women into providing funding.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with some more of these. As always, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

Assessing calibration

2007-03-27T13:12:00.000-07:00

Finding neologistical goodness in corporate-speak is, admittedly, like taking candy from fish in a barrel of monkeys. But we don't hold ourselves to high standards in this blog.

Raymond Chen at A Well-known Software Company identifies a word that seems to be sliding around a bit in the semantic mud: calibration. He cites the following:

I would like to get calibration on that individual from those who know him.

There is, of course, a kind-of explanation for the emergence of this usage. A much-bemoaned twice-yearly* ritual at said company is The Review, in which employees go through a self- and manager assessment based on their previously declared goals. Although the process is secretive, it is generally known that managers get together for calibration meetings in which (it is rumored) employees are judged against their goals (and, most people believe, ranked against each other). You can see how the term calibration in this context derives roughly from (as Raymond notes) "adjusting a piece of measuring equipment against a known standard."

You can also see how the term calibration, as used here, can easily float over to take up the space occupied by assessment -- they calibrate, they assess, it's all sort of part of the same big thing. And from there it's an easy step to simply start using calibrate in ever-wider contexts where assessment would still be the more common term. Although in the cite that Raymond has, calibration does seem to still refer to assessing an individual; perhaps there's a connotation of providing a ranking, or at least a numerically scaled assessment.

There are comments on Raymond's entry. One person notes (yay!) that Google returns 10K hits for get calibration; this is not a singleton usage. (FWIW, my recommendation is that you ignore the ones in which people complain about the term. Of course.)

* Formerly known as semi-annual.

Adjectivy

2007-03-09T13:32:00.000-08:00

When people note (or complain about) words changing parts of speech, they tend to draw examples of nouns becoming verbs (verbizing) and verbs becoming nouns (nounification, double bonus). (The discussion of why some people feel that these role changes are bad is left to another day. Or not.)

The second-tier PoS get a bit less attention, it seems to me. But I noticed a couple of examples of adjectivization recently, one of which has gotten wide attention due to its source, namely the TV show "American Idol." The adjective is pitchy, which apparently the judge Randy Jackson uses to describe contestants' performances. Some Web sites (#) use the word without quotes or definition -- I guess if you're enough into the show to be reading Web sites about it, you should know the vocabulary of the show. However, in what I assume is a rare foray into things linguistic, People magazine got on the job and got a clarification from Jackson himself about what pitchy actually means:

"You're hitting the note that could be flat or sharp," Jackson explained. "So one note could be sharp, the next note is flat. Flat meaning that the note that is hit is lower than the actual note that you (should reach) to be on key."

Some people don't like this word. It's true that its definition is not clear from the word alone, other than you know that it must have something to do with (musical) pitch.

Can you just whack a -y onto the end of a word and conjure up an adjective? Maybe. One of the blogs I read recently posted the following:

[...] someone was stabbed on the orange line a few weeks ago. An isolated incident, I’m sure. Then another stabbing happened earlier this week.

My colleague regularly rides the orange line, so I asked her about it.

Me: Why is the Orange line so stabby?

To my mind, a clever adjectivilization. Now that I'm tuned in, I'll try to find more such examples. If you find any, do let me know.

Updates

20 Apr 2007: Dilbert, "Don't get all mathy on me."

1 Nov 2007: Blog post, "[W]hen an expert says "you have to believe me 'cause I'm all experty", maintain a healthy skepticism."

19 Jan 2007 Guitar Player magazine, "It doesn’t get much more guitar-y than this."

7 April 2008 I can't believe I didn't remember this earlier. A joke ... Q: What's brown and sticky? A: A stick.

Nordstrom, his store

2007-02-07T15:42:00.000-08:00

Many company names explicitly identify themselves as belonging to (in a grammatical sense) someone. Taking a walk down the street here, I can see:

McDonald's
Macy's
Papa John's
Trader Joe's
Wendy's
Schuck's
Chuck E. Cheese's
Fantastic Sam's

... and others too numerous to mention. The antecedent, as it were, of the possessive is sometimes explicit (Papa John's Pizza, Schuck's Auto Parts), but is often implicit: McDonald's ?restaurant, Macy's ?department store, Trader Joe's ?emporium, Fantastic Sam's ?tonsorium, Chuck E. Cheese's ?den of prepubescent dining.

The pattern of possessive name + (implicit) emporium is so strong that people follow it even when the name does not formally include the possessive. In my youth, we often shopped at Montgomery Ward's (or just Ward's), as everyone called it, even though the official name is just plain old Montgomery Ward. Likewise, you might have a hard time convincing some people that it does not say "Nordstrom's" on the side of the building. Although not everyone believes me, true old timers in Seattle -- aka Jet City -- will still refer to the aircraft company as Boeing's. If you listen with this in mind, you'll undoubtedly hear people whacking an extra -s onto the end of local establishments in your area. (Seattle: Pagliacci['s] Pizza, and the occasional and jaw-clench-inducing Pike's Market.)

To get a phantom possessive, it appears that the name must be clearly identified as the name of a person. In Seattle, people used to shop at Frederick and Nelson's. But people don't work at Microsoft's, or shop at Wal-Mart's or Target's, or buy their clothes at Old Navy's.

If the name includes an -s, then there is widespread confusion. Just for yucks, I googled for "Sear's +store" and got around 29,000 hits. Some of these refer to stores whose actual name is Sear's (e.g. Sear's Shoe Store), but from browsing the first few pages of results, it looks like most of the mentions refer to the erstwhile Sears Roebuck. You will also find the name Marshall Fields (now Macy's) written as Marshall Field's.

All of this, really, just to ask this question: why isn't there an apostrophe in Starbucks?

What goes up ...

2006-12-08T01:00:00.000-08:00

An open call. First: what exactly does the up in phrasal verbs like look up mean? Some examples:

work up [a solution]
rustle up [some chow]

and also:

toughen up [those raw recruits]
bulk up
eat it up[, yum]

... and plenty more that I can't think of at the moment. It seems clear that there's a difference in what up means in these two sets of examples.

Anyway, I found a couple of examples recently that suggest that the up particle is still going strong in producing new phrasal verbs.

The first case was at work, where we were having a little discussion about programmer jargon. (If you're not a programmer, just bear with me here a minute.) In one of our programming languages (C#), you create a new ... uh ... thing using the new keyword. (t = new Timer, for example). In another of our languages (VB), a similar function is accomlished with the keyword dim (which originally meant dimension).

Blah, blah. This is background for noting that it's pretty common programmer talk to say something like "Well, you new up an instance of the timer ..." or "You dim up a timer" or the like. My sharp-eared colleague David was recently at a lecture where the speaker was talking about some clever stuff that was going on behind the scenes when you program. The speaker's exact words were: "We essentially magic this class up for you."

Nice, eh? To magic as a transitive verb, and a new phrasal verb to boot. How flexible she is, the English! The up particle in these cases -- new up, dim up, magic up -- seems to be in the spirit of the first examples (work up, rustle up), adding a connotation (or even denotation) of creation. Interestingly, sometimes the up particle is optional (new, dim), other times not (work, rustle, magic).

Ok, so that's one. Onward. I was reading a column in the Seattle Times where the author was writing about a local pastor who is known for preaching that men's masculinity is threatened. This was the line that interested me:

The gist: Many men have become female appeasers who need to, well, man up.

To man up = to become more masculine. This use of up is related to the second examples (toughen up, bulk up, ?eat up). These verbs are intransitive (or can be). I'm not convinced that eat up belongs in the same category, unless the common thread is one of, dunno, completeness. To eat up means to finish eating something. Up is optional in toughen up; is it in to bulk up? Do they both suggest a kind of completeness, or perhaps a degree?

I confuse myself easily with these speculations. I could, of course, go look it up; I'm sure these are well-understood usages. My point, really, was just to note that I'd stumbled onto these novel usages of up, which I've now ... wait for it ... written up.

Update 14 Aug 2007: Here's one courtesy of our friends at the Language Log: "[y]ou can google up many other variants."

Is that a word? It is now.

2006-11-13T21:50:00.000-08:00

The perennial if wrongheaded question "Is that even a word?" implies that there is some sort of club with highly selective entrance criteria that certainly does not admit the lexical hoi polloi that like to pretend they have wordical membership. Erin McKean, who's an editor at the New American Oxford Dictionary, has, I think, the last word (haha) on that:

Lots of people (and by "lots" I mean roughly 99% of everyone I've ever spoken to) believe that the dictionary is a Who's Who of words. That it's like Ivy League college admissions. That only the really good words, the ones that have eaten all their spinach and who play the oboe and who get high scores on the SAT, make it into the dictionary. That the words that make it into the dictionary are somehow "realler" than the words that don't.

and

Some people have the idea that if a word isn't in the dictionary, they can't use it. This is not a rule any lexicographer ever came up with (think about it — if this were true, we'd all be out of jobs right quick) and luckily not a rule that most people follow. If a word you want to use isn't in the dictionary (and you're sure you haven't just misspelled it — hey, don't worry, it happens to everyone), go ahead and use it! That's the best way to get it in the next edition, and then everyone's happy.(1)

So. This thought forced onto you as a prelude to noting that the Oxford Univeristy Press people have recently announced their "Word of the Year," which this time goes to the term (as opposed to word) carbon neutral. Perhaps this term got a boost from its political timeliness, whatever. I found some of the runners-up more interesting:

funner as a comparative for fun. Now there's a term that earn endless opprobrium.

Islamofascism, another terribly timely term, which is partly interesting because it reflects the continuing widespread use of the term fascism among people who, I suspect, could not define it to save their lives.

pregaming, another lovely use of the flexible pre- suffix.

There you have it folks -- words in the dictionary, all legal-like. What could be funner?

PS Among the comments, one person suggests the term pre-mortem, used (possibly in a new metaphorical way -- see Webster's) by Glenn Reynolds for his gloomy predictions about the recent "thumping" the GOP got, to quote our president. (Which reminds me also the pre-buttal tactic that emerged a few years back, and which has made it to Webster's.)

(1) For those who've , ahem, seen this before, apologies for the double posting.

Noah's Mark

2006-11-04T14:59:00.000-08:00

The New Yorker has an article this week on Noah Webster's quest to create a dictionary of American English. A noteworthy aspect of the article is the description of the vitriol that Webster and other, similar champions of American English encountered in the teeth of snobbishness and conservatism. Small example:

"A disgusting collection" of idiotic words coined by "presumptuous ignorance," one critic wrote, referring to Americanisms like "wigwam," "rateability," "caucus," and "lengthy" (lengthy? what's next, "strenghty?"). "The Columbian Dictionary," as he saw it, was nothing more than "a record of our imbecility."

I wrote up some excerpts from the article on my other blog, and rather than repeat them here, I'll just link to that. But you can comment here if you want!

A niche of millions

2006-10-30T11:47:00.000-08:00

Clay Shirky, Web and computer industry pundit, flexes some neologistical chops:

I define a meganiche as a thin slice of the Web that nonetheless represents roughly a million users. The meganiche is something new, and it will have a lasting impact on online business and culture.

This would appear to be an oxymoronic concept, but I predict this one will stay, if perhaps not with as much currency as terms like the long tail. Shirky's example is a forum devoted to cell phones that gets 250 million page views a year for topics as obscure as modding the firmware in a cell phone, etc.

Irony and evolvery

2006-10-29T16:22:00.000-08:00

On polyglot conspiracy, Lauren observes:

I think the shift to talking about internets rather than The Internet might actually be happening. A couple years after Bush called it the internets, we all laughed, and it became a kind of joke to pluralize: the internets, internets, interwebs. But then just this week [...]
[...]
I’d be interested in hearing whether people notice usage of internets in a not-tongue-in-cheek way, or if this still seems to call attention to itself as an ironic formulation.

What do we think?

Elsewhere in the Ist-a-verse

2006-10-29T10:37:00.000-08:00

Here'a blog post (note their clever title, which I lift wholesale) that I can practically just to link to and say "Look, English on the march." The city blog Seattlest, which comments wryly on the goings-on-about-town[1] (town here being Seattle, I prolly should not need to add), does a nice roundup of similarly themed blogs from other metropolises, linking to the following:

Austinist, Torontoist, DCist, Parisist, Phillyist, Londonist, Chicagoist, LAist, Gothamist, Bostonist, SFist, and Sampaist.

Although I don't think it's really needed, I'll provide some thin value-add for y'all, to wit:

What's the exact semantic of -ist? Perusing the menu of meanings offered by AHD, we might select:
2. A specialist in a specified art, science, or skill: biologist.
The art, science, or skill here being "place where I reside," I guess. Or maybe:
4. One that is characterized by a specified trait or quality: romanticist.
Wherein the respective authors are characterized by their place of residence. Hmm.
Of the blogs in the ist-a-verse, only Seattle's ends in -est; the others all in -ist. What's the rule here? Is it phonological? (Doesn't seem like it.) An orthographical thing? (Maybe Seattlist looks too much like a site you could browse for used tools, jobs, and alternative mating options.)
Pronunciation would not appear to be the primary focus of at least one of these. How would you say SFist, anyway?
And hey, how about that ist-a-verse term, anyway? A bonus neologism that exercises the -verse morpheme for us.

Should I have named this blog EvolvingEnglishist?

[Update 7 Nov 2006 I emailed the folks at Seattlest.com to ask them whence their name. Turns out that the names Seattleist.com and Seattlist.com were already taken. Dan Gonsiorowski told me of Seattlest "Whatever, we love it. We're the est of the ists." There you go: mostly a commercial issue, only incidentally a linguistic one. Probably not the first time that's happened, eh?

[1] Or as your mother-in-laws and those attorney-generals might say, the going-on-about-towns, haha.

developing -ability

2006-10-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

Surely a very productive suffix we can slap willy-nilly onto things is -ability. In one of our older topics from work, we talked about (and I quote) availability, manageability, reliability, scalability, and secureability.[1] In its days as a draft, the topic was referred to as the "-abilities topic," as in "Hey, who's writing the -abilities topic?"

Our company style guide (elsewhere mentioned in this post) makes a point of saying that words with the -able suffix (hence the -ability suffix) "take their meaning from the passive sense of the stem verb from which they are formed." Their example is forgettable (forgettability), which they define as "susceptible to, capable of, or worthy of being forgotten," to which they carefully add "... not of forgetting."

Their counterexample is bootable (bootability), which is proscribed because it does not carry this passive sense. Thus a bootable disk is not a disk that's "suspectible to or capable of being booted"; nah, it's a disk that is "capable of booting." So, like, verboten. Welp, Google gets 196,000 hits for bootable disk, including (paging Alanis Morissette!) articles on the Microsoft Web site.

Nonetheless, the definition of -able/-ability is, I think, generally true (the -abilities topic confirms). At least, in my nearly minute of trolling for examples, I find none that obviously do not conform, except the damnable bootability of that disk. (Although: would you say that a particular brand of paint has great paintability or that the surface to which it is applied has that paintability? Hmmm, probably both, depending on what you mean.)

I am thinking about all of this today because I ran across a blog post discussing ... well, I'll just quote and you can see:

When you're designing for Users, you do a usability study. When you're designing for Developers, you need do a a developability study.

This conforms to the definition just fine. I was pretty sure this was a singleton, a one-off coined by the blog author, but nope, you can find several thousand uses already. Moreover, although Random House does not give the word its own entry, it lists it without comment at the bottom of the definition for develop. The OED has no cite for developability, but does have several for developable, starting in 1816.

I don't have the tools for this, but it would be interesting to see whether use of -ability has increased over time; my instincts say yes, but without the numbers, that remains a hunch. But I do opine with some confidence that -ability is a productive suffix that, as I noted at the beginning, we can probably add to many (transitive-ish?) verbs (a song with excellent singability, a program with promising podcastability). Which is to say, you are free to develop your own -abilities.

[1] A source of common discussion is whether to include or drop the -e- in words like manageability. Our company style guide says that you keep the -e- after -ce or -ge (manageability), drop it after -e (scalability). Obviously, this is purely orthography and has nothing to do with the ability to whack the suffix onto a word. Which would be the suffixability of the, um, suffix.

PS I created this entry with Windows Live Writer!

Didst troubleshoot

2006-10-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

One of our folks here sent around a query asking "What's the past of troubleshoot?" That's one of those "No, wait ..." questions. Whichever past you initially come up with -- troubleshot, troubleshooted -- you do a mental double take, because neither of them sounds right. AHD declares troubleshot, not surprisingly, but when's the last time you ever heard someone say that? Confusion seems to be common; a Googlefight reports about a 3:8 ration for troubleshooted:troubleshot. At least 37% of speakers are willing to actually write the former.

There's undoubtedly a name for this phenomenon, and if there isn't, the Language Log folks can come up with one in a jiffy. What's happening is that a word with an uncontroversial past tense (verbs) or plural (nouns) is used in a new context. The new context can be a new definition (e.g. a computer mouse) or with some sort of morphological twist (trouble+shoot). The new context is just sufficiently different to cause speakers to think of the word as new, or at least, to not intuitively connect it to its related form.

Some examples that I've noted here before (I think):

Plural of (computer) mouse: mice or mouses? Contemplated at leisure, it's easy to be confident that you know. But there is that "No, wait ..." factor, and Google lists nearly 2 million hits for mouses.
In baseball, today a hitter flies out; yesterday he flied out.
The past of cast is cast, but the past of podcast and broadcast is very often -casted.

There are many more, not that I can think of any.

Update 10/17/06: Saw the past of to cheerlead in the New Yorker recently: they cheerlead. Again, correct per the stem, but still a "No, wait ..." moment.

This phenomenon really only occurs when the original word has some sort of irregularity to it -- for example, the past of shoot is shot (irregular), not shooted (regular). But in the new context, folks apply the rules for formation of new words, which are overwhelmingly to use regular inflections and declensions and conjugations. New nouns are pluralized by adding -(e)s -- whatever your classics teacher might have told you, the common plural in English of octopus is octopuses. New verbs form the past tense with -d/-ed -- if we make up a new verb to bim, its past tense is going to be bimmed.[1] (A form of not particularly hilarious humor is to apply faux irregular rules to regular verbs, e.g., squeeze-squoze, think-thunk, bring-brang, status-stati, etc.)[2]

There is a certain, mmm, class of people who look down on this type of formation, but I don't see any particular reason why that should be. When little kids do it, we think it's cute, although the more appropriate sentiment might be astonishment at how quickly and thoroughly small children deduce morphological rules. And anyway, did you have a "No, wait ..." moment when you thought about troubleshoot? All right, then.

[1] A pattern that can throw people is a verb whose root contains -ing, like ring, sing, or fling. Make up a verb with -ing (e.g., fring), and a certain number of people will intuitvely use the irregular past. See Pinker in Rules and Words (or equivalent).

[2] A few times these forms have scrabbled their way into acceptance, the commonly cited example always being snuck in place of the (nominally) historically correct sneaked. Also: quit (vs. quitted), knelt (vs. kneeled), drug (vs. dragged).

Sucks rocks

2006-08-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

Seth Stevenson expounds in Slate on the de-vulgarization of suck (as also mentioned earlier here):

Sucks is here to stay. And what's more, it deserves its place in our lexicon, for a couple of reasons. First, it's impossible to intelligently maintain that sucks is still offensive. The word is now completely divorced from any past reference it may have made to a certain sex act. When I tell you that the new M. Night Shyamalan movie sucks (and man, does it suck), my mind in no way conjures up an image of a film reel somehow fellating an unnamed beneficiary.

And he makes this observation, which (who knows?) might end up applying to to pimp:

And take heart, sucks-haters. Soon enough, another bit of slang will come along and gain entrance into our common language, and it will be vastly more offensive than sucks ever was.

Via Nicole Stockdale.

Trying to suss this one out

2006-07-21T02:23:00.000-07:00

The NPR blog notes something I hadn't heard before, namely using the term effort as a verb. Their (possibly invented) cite: We're efforting to get an interview with the president of Kazakhstan.

I'm clearly out of the loop on this one, because it's been the topic of various discussions (or so Google tells me) for at least a little while. Predictably, the usual suspects are apoplectic about the word. I found a nice comment in a forum discussion, though: I love this kind of stuff, and i'm not even a native speaker . Lovely proof that English is not a dead language!!!

Not that anyone had recently suggested as such, as far as I know.

This Web page helpfully posits a definition: ... 'efforting.'; By this he meant the act of putting your attention on a goal or target result while you are in the act of doing something. (I didn't say it was a good definition.)

Anyway, the famous Google currently reports 23,300 hits for efforting, the clearest use of the term as a verb, imo.

I must admit that I'm a little puzzled by this one. Normally when you encounter a new term, whatever your opinion of it, you can at least get a sense of where it came from. This one, less so. In fact, even I (gasp!) find the term a little awkward, perhaps even forced. It seems more, haha, effortful to use the term than its more common analogs. And, like ... what's the past tense? We efforted mightly, but did not succeed -- ? Seems a little odd.

But we'll see. [Insert closing sentence here that uses the term in question.]

Look this one up on the Web

2006-07-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

In the news today: M-W has added google to its dictionary as a generic verb. Along with new terms like biodiesel, ringtone, spyware, text messaging, and others.

Lavishly decorate my workspace

2006-06-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

The general culture of our particular workplace is, mmm, perhaps more youth-oriented than some. (Boeing, say, or Safeco Insurance.) When we came into work the other morning, the place was festooned with posters for a new campaign designed to get internal people interested in Windows Live Messenger. The campaign is titled "Pimp your Office", and the idea is that you take a picture of your sorry office and upload it to a shared folder on WLM. Then people go have a gander and vote. Result: traffic. (I guess.) The winner has their^* office "pimped" with stuff like a couch and big plasma monitor

Well. It didn't take particularly long for HR to get sucked into a controversy about the term pimp. Official dictionary definitions were bandied about and various people professed to be mortally offended.

Google currently gets 2.6 million hits for the phrase pimp your, although that might be false, since I think they don't actually index your. Certainly the first several pages of search results contain the phrase pimp your ... or pimp my ...". This includes the lifehacker.com site ("Pimp your Mac Mini"), and there are pages that will help your "pimp your blog," "pimp your Web page," and "pimp your MySpace." There's a page with a post titled "Pimp Your Tech Writer." (FWIW, the way I read that post, they're not using the term as I understand it.)

When does a term that's current in youth culture become widely acceptable? Some older people cringe whenever they hear the term sucks, as in This music sucks. The word suck has become a mainstream, if very informal, term. (There once was an irreverant magazine, I guess you'd call it, at www.suck.com.) I wonder what reaction we'd get from people who are objecting to pimp your office if there were a poster that said something like Does your office suck? And what about that classic Johnny Paycheck song "Take this job and shove it"?

Update I am reminded of some other terms that are in common (informal) use but that have nominally vulgar origins: snafu; fubar; that blows (synonymous with that sucks); putz; schmuck; the various forms of WTF (discussed here before); ballsy. Prolly plenty more.

For anything we do on our team (technical documentation), pimp is still on the "forbidden terminology" list, along with a truly impressive variety of Anglo-Saxon terms. I don't know whether the marketing folks have to adhere to the same rules. In this case, it's quite likely the hipness overruled that list, assuming it even occurred to the poster's producers that they had a controversy on their hands.

^* Used deliberately. No grief, please; if you think that their cannot refer to singular antecedents, you are wrong, sorry.

Next: Opinionation

2006-06-12T16:58:00.000-07:00

I learn second (or some subsequent) hand that George Bush recently said "all the sharp elbows being thrown and the people opinionating and screaming and hollering." Pundits debate. Jan Freeman at the Boston Globe asks "Is it legit?" In response to her own question, she says:

And 400 years ago, opinionate was standard English, though writers in need of a verb meaning "believe, express an opinion about" could also choose opine or opinion. "Pythagoras opinionated [the soul] a Number moving of it selfe," says a 1643 tract cited in the Oxford English Dictionary. Opine has since pulled far ahead in the popularity contest, but that doesn't mean opinionate is dead.

Well, whew for that. I thought for a moment there that we might have an illegitimate verb, and that would mean that ... uh ... well ... Well, someone's going to have to tell the President.

This kind of thing has a tendency to annoy those in the "we already have a word for that" school, which would hold that ipso facto the new word is illegitimate. As Freeman notes, the already-have word is opine. However, she comes to the defense of the "new" word by noting that it has a subtle distinction from opine; she notes the analogy of the subtle distinction between comment (what you and I do) and commentate (what people do who are paid to comment).

But words don't need to be justified by the lexirati to be "legit." Whether opinionate means exactly the same thing as opine or not, it's out there. One thing that Freeman does not mention is that opine is a stuffy word and probably not used much by ordinary speakers. And why should it be? The relationship between opinion and opine is hardly obvious, certainly nowhere near as obvious as the relationship between opinion and opinionate. It's not inconceivable that opinionate could even replace opine someday, and the latter could come to be seen as an archaic term. (Current Google count for opine: 5.2 million; for opinionate, a paltry 48,000.)

Extending nouns to verb them is a common enough occurence; we recently saw executionalize. And although the -ate suffix seems to really bug some people, it's a, you know, legitimate way to form new verbs. (hyphenate, disambiguate, etc.) When I was in the U.K., I picked up to orientate as a pretty common variant on to orient. I use it now and then, mostly for my own amusement, seeing as how it often gets a rise out of people. I did that the other day, and sure enough someone cringed. I could not convince them that it was a common usage in Britain.

Paul Niquette devotes a page to the topic of orient and orientate and, as he says, "marked the beginning of a personal effort to identify every potential 'misguided back-formation' -- verbs that might have been derived from English nouns ending in '-ation'..." And boy howdy, he does come up with quite a list: adaptate, administrate, admirate, adorate, ...

For laffs, we could ponder -- that is, we could opine -- on what other new verbs we might see some day:

vacationate
regulationate
educationate
celebrationate
evaluationate (Heh, wouldn't that be hilarious?)

Nature calls

2006-05-08T13:52:00.000-07:00

JimP sent me an email today with the title "Microspeak?" and this content:

biobreak. In a long and ongoing meeting, an agreed upon break so people can, um, meet their biological needs in a timely manner.

This is a word I hadn't heard until recently, and now it seems ubiquitous. I wonder how far out of Redmond it has traveled.

Pretty far, it seems. The more common variant is bio break (two words, or bio-break with hyphen), for which Google lists 16,700 hits right now; another 925 for the biobreak variant. Examples:

The Everything2.com site has a definition and includes this note: "Although its use originated in the tech world, this bit of jargon is now used in business meetings in many industries and even appears on published conference schedules."
And indded, a Canadian site with a meeting agenda shows "There will be a Biobreak: [Depending on good behaviour and desperation]".
There's even a definition in French: "Terme employé par les netsurfers pour indiquer qu'ils doivent satisfaire des besoins naturels, et donc s'éloigner de leur clavier."

This is an example of a word that seems useful, if for no other reason that it's a very neutral term for something that we (in the U.S., anyway) are always a wee bit uncomfortable in saying. (What are the current terms? Bathroom break. Potty break. It's like we're little kids. :-) ) And anyway, as noted in the Everything2.com definition, biobreak covers a wider spectrum of, um, needs, including hydrating and fueling.

Gaming -gami

2006-04-07T07:42:00.000-07:00

I'm in a bit of rush today -- about to change continents -- but did want to throw down a "let it be known" post on yet another cran-morph bustin' out all over. (Warning: All views in this post subject to the Recency Illusion.)

Today's morpheme: -gami. As I say, hurry today, but two examples:

Microsoft's new ultra-mobile computer had the working name Origami, at least, until the marketing people got hold of it and christened it ... the Ultra-Mobile PC.¹
Aaron Swartz is in the process of starting a company named Infogami. The company aims to make setting up a Web site very, very simple.

MS's use is just recasting an ordinary noun as a name. Swartz actually takes the step of decomposing the term. So what's the common semantic, I wonder? Small? Folding? Make cool things out of simple materials? I can't quite pull the instances together.

Thots?

1 If my eyes do not deceive me -- but it's early -- the Microsoft page is the 2nd hit on Google for "origami," yet the word is not visible on the page itself. (Presumably in the page for the likes of Google to find.) A good example of making sure people can find your info using the term that they know.

I see also that MS is feeding its successful (?) viral marketing campaign with a faux-independent Web site, wherein the class of thing that Origami is is referred to as UMPC. Looks odd as yet.

Why Wi-Fi?

2006-03-25T20:59:00.000-08:00

This was news to me, and I am sad to say that I had not even thought much about it. The word Wi-Fi ... where did it come from?

Back in November, BoingBoing published a little piece by Cory Doctorow in which he in turn quotes one Phil Belanger:

Wi-Fi doesn't stand for anything.

It is not an acronym. There is no meaning.

Wi-Fi and the ying yang style logo were invented by Interbrand. We (the founding members of the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, now called the Wi-Fi Alliance) hired Interbrand to come up with the name and logo that we could use for our interoperability seal and marketing efforts. We needed something that was a little catchier than "IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence".

[...]

The only reason that you hear anything about "Wireless Fidelity" is some of my colleagues in the group were afraid. They didn't understand branding or marketing. hey could not imagine using the name "Wi-Fi" without having some sort of literal explanation. So we compromised and agreed to include the tag line "The Standard for Wireless Fidelity" along with the name. This was a mistake and only served to confuse people and dilute the brand.

This is a little weird, isn't it? A word that's in common use today was invented as a brand name. Of course, that's nothing new: (insert long list here of one-time name brands). FWIW, it's interesting how quickly Wi-Fi took off.

Quiz: what does the term Wi-Fi actually mean? Extra points for providing both a formal and informal definition. (Hint: try Wikipedia.)

Anyway, the kinda weird part is that it came complete with a kind of back-etymology that, if one is to believe the quotation, was entirely invented. Based on a pun.

Doctorow has an earlier post in which he first noted this story, and got, uh, many comments contesting his assertion. Glenn Fleishman, a guy with some authority in this field (I guess), makes the following observation. (I am not a lawyer; please do not take the following as legal advice. Haha.)

Wi-Fi is a trademark and thus can't mean anything that's not arbitrary in the realm in which the trademark is coined. Wi-Fi had to have no prior meaning, so it's de facto meaningless.

The phrase "wireless fidelity" comes in at about a million hits on Google at the moment, so clearly the pseudo-etymology took hold. The people who invented the term certainly can't complain that others mistakenly believe the etymology they invented, although they do seem to be doing just that. Someone notes in one of these posts that at least part of the reason for the pseudo-etymology was "when they started getting barraged by writers whose editors demanded that all acronyms must be spelled out." Heh. Been there. As regards that, I liked Doctorow's comment: even if Wi-Fi stood for wireless fidelity, what would it help you to know that? Excellent point. Been there, too.

We now return to our regular programming.

(All of this orginally via Raymond Chen.)

Mash up and out

2006-03-24T17:41:00.000-08:00

Another rising-with-a-star term these days is mash-up or mashup, which refers to combining media to create something new. The term is common in the world of music, where it seems to be an extension of sampling. Urban Dictionary sez:

1. mash-up

A remix made by taking two different songs, usually by 2 seperate artists, and combining them into one.

Closer in da club (Nine Inch Nails: Closer, combined with 50 cents Up in da club)

I've seen it in software to describe combining services from two sources to create a new thing. A typical software mash-up is to use Google maps with something else to produce maps that pinpoint something. For example, Housingmaps.com lets you click an icon on a Google map for information about the housing market in the area you click. Or this :

Mashing Up Google Maps with Wikipedia Articles

Google Maps, now integrated with Google Local, offers a lot of information about local merchants, but these detailed results typically don't include "overview" information about locations. Wikipedia, by contrast, has great general-information articles about thousands of places throughout the world.

A new service called Placeopedia maps geographic locations in Wikipedia articles onto Google Maps. It's a great feature that bolsters both services.

(Another time we'll tackle the -pedia suffix.)

So, nothing new here with mash-up per se. Paul McFedries finds a cite (in the musical sense) from 1999.

Today, though, I found an instance (new in my experience) of using mash up in a more generic, non-media sense:

Sundaresan was a student of Milos Konapasik (I might have the spelling wrong) who taught textiles at Georgia Tech and worked at Software Arts to create TK!Solver because of the need to solve complex equations. With all the attention focused on glitzy bio stuff it's good to remember that there are other cross-disciplinary opportunities such as mashing up textiles and computing.

I poked around a little to see if I could find other such uses, but the majority of uses (all I could find, anyway), were referring to either music or computer services. So maybe this is a term starting to break away from its original, somewhat specific meaning.

Real-izing

2006-03-10T15:41:00.000-08:00

I was in a meeting recently and heard this sentence, which I quickly wrote down:

How do we executionalize that?

I passed this around to my colleagues, one of whom made the comment "Dang, someone's been to Suffix Mart." (Someone else said "cruelly and unusually, of course.")

I suspect this was a slip of the tongue, although even there, it has the form of grammatical correctness, i.e., it's still following rules for verbing. I can kind of see how we get there. At work, a phrase that's popular is execute crisply, as in We need to execute crisply on that. To accomplish that task, you need crisp execution. If you want crisp execution, you need to executionalize crisply. See how that works?

I'm sure there are other examples of verbs (I can't think of any at the moment, but I'm just sure, ok?) that follow the development pattern of verb -> nouned verb -> re-verbed noun in new form. If you can think of any, by all means, drop a comment.

Update 3/24/06 I heard the same person use this term again today. So it's not just a slip of the tongue. Google: zero hits, except as noted on this blog.

More cast-ery

2006-03-08T13:48:00.000-08:00

Broadcast + iPod = podcast. (See also: podfade.)

Today (well, recently), buzzcast. What does it mean? How does it differ from podcast? Michael Lehman explains the term:

Part of my "day" job at Microsoft is to be a "professional" podcaster. I started the first podcast show on the Channel9 (http://channel9.msdn.com) website last June and now I'm about to start a new of new shows. The first new show is a rebirth of the podcast show I called the "buzzcast" which was a countdown to a Microsoft event. The original buzzcast was to talk about the Microsoft Professional Developer's conference. The new buzzcast is leading up to the Mix06 show (www.mix06.com) scheduled for March 20th in Las Vegas.

Google today: 18,300 hits.

ENOUGH ALREADY STOP

2006-02-12T11:46:00.000-08:00

A follow-up to the earlier post about anachronistic terms like telegraph. It occurred to me that another somewhat linguistically oriented fallout from the days of the telegraph, as suggested by the definition of telegraphic, is the style in which telegraphs came to be written. Telegraphs were charged by the word, so brevity became the goal, with some cleverness in reducing word count. A page on the history of the telegraph describes telegraphic language this way:

Most telegraph companies charged by the word, so customers had good reason to be as brief as possible. This gave telegram prose a snappy, brisk style, and the frequent omission of pronouns and articles often became almost poetically ambiguous. Telegrams were almost always brief, pointed, and momentous in a way unmatched by any other form of communication.

(For the curious, this page from the Irish Telegraph Office details the very exacting way in which chargeable words were calculated.[1])

This page has an improbable story that nonetheless illustrates telegraphic style:

I recently heard an account of a foreign correspondent for the BBC in the heyday of telegraphy. After long silence from the reporter, the BBC wired him to ask: NEWS? The reporter wired back: UNNEWS. The BBC, seeing no point in paying him if he wasn't working, retorted: UNNEWS, UNJOB. To which the reporter replied: UPSTICK JOB ASSWARD. (I've also heard that last line attributed to a telegram from Hemingway; I assume it's apocryphal. But it makes a good story.)

I found online a booklet from 1928 titled "How To Write Telegrams Properly" that provides the following guidelines for reducing word count. (As an aside, I find it amusing to contemplate the difference in style for how this same information would be presented today.)

Naturally, there is a right way and a wrong way of wording telegrams. The right way is economical, the wrong way, wasteful. If the telegram is packed full of unnecessary words, words which might be omitted without impairing the sense of the message, the sender has been guilty of economic waste. Not only has he failed to add anything to his message, but he has slowed it up by increasing the time necessary to transmit it. He added to the volume of traffic from a personal and financial point of view, he has been wasteful because he has spent more for his telegram than was necessary. In the other extreme, he may have omitted words necessary to the sense, thus sacrificing clearness in his eagerness to save a few cents.

A man high in American business life has been quoted as remarking that elimination of the word "please" from all telegrams would save the American public millions of dollars annually. Despite this apparent endorsement of such procedure, however, it is unlikely that the public will lightly relinquish the use of this really valuable word. "Please" is to the language of social and business intercourse what art and music are to everyday, humdrum existence. Fortunes might be saved by discounting the manufacture of musical instruments and by closing the art galleries, but no one thinks of suggesting such a procedure. By all means let us retain the word "please" in our telegraphic correspondence.

Another aspect of telegraphic language was that punctuation might be written out, leading to a style of message like SEND MONEY STOP . Older people who see that might immediately recognize it as telegraph-like, but I suppose younger generations would not know the genesis of this odd style. The booklet also addresses itself to the punctuation thing:

This word "stop" may have perplexed you the first time you encountered it in a message. Use of this word in telegraphic communications was greatly increased during the World War, when the Government employed it widely as a precaution against having messages garbled or misunderstood, as a result of the misplacement or emission of the tiny dot or period.

Officials felt that the vital orders of the Government must be definite and clear cut, and they therefore used not only the word "stop," to indicate a period, but also adopted the practice of spelling out "comma," "colon," and "semi-colon." The word "query" often was used to indicate a question mark. Of all these, however, "stop" has come into most widespread use, and vaudeville artists and columnists have employed it with humorous effect, certain that the public would understand the allusion in connection with telegrams. It is interesting to note, too, that although the word is obviously English it has come into general use In all languages that are used in telegraphing or cabling.

What does all of this remind us of? Texting of course, whose highly reduced orthography shares a couple of features with classic telegraphic style. One is the desire to keep things short (though not so much because of per-word charges as because of the limited UI). But the more important motivation is speed of entry, given -- hey, just like telegraphs! -- comparatively primitive means of creating text. (It's amusing to contemplate the picture of a telegraph operator keying out a message while driving down the freeway.)

And on a more thematically appropriate topic (for this blog), I am also very pleased to find a note that illustrates that the objections to evolving English have been with us always:

The word “telegram” was coined in 1852, when it first appeared in the Albany Evening Journal of April 6th. E. P. Smith, of Rochester, New York, wrote the following letter to the newspaper: “A friend desires us to give notice that he will ask leave … to introduce a new word…. It is telegram instead of telegraphic dispatch, or telegraphic communication.” Pedantic scholars opposed this horrible new word at first. To use proper Greek, the word should have been telegrapheme. But Americans preferred the catchier sound of telegram, and within a few years the new term had become standard.

[1]A (sort of non-PC, sorry) joke I found about word counts:

A young woman had a boy, and of course, there was great rejoicing. The husband wanted to send a telegram to his mother. So he took a piece of paper and wrote down, "Fanetshka happily delivered son."

He showed the telegram to the wife's father, who took a look and said, "Well, you aren't a businessman. Telegrams need to be short. Just take a look at all the unnecessary words you've got here.

First, Fanetshka. What do you mean, Fanetshka? Obviously, Fanetshka. Would you go and send telegrams about women you don't know?

Second, happily. How else? Not happily? If there had been (God forbid!) any danger, would you be running and sending a telegram?

And further, delivered? What else? The kid dropped out of the sky?

And again, why bother writing 'son'? Of course, if you're happy enough to send a telegram, it's a son. If it had been a daughter, you wouldn't be sending a telegram."

Super-exciting verbing!

2006-02-10T08:05:00.000-08:00

My colleague David sent around a comment on one of the many breathless announcements we get at work. I'll just quote the text and his comments.

Here's an excerpt:

Several beta programs for XXXX are already underway and we are making great progress, but we still need your help to customer-ready these services. [...] If you're already dogfooding some of our services – thank you. If not, we need your help [...] Below you’ll find more details on each of the betas you can trial [...]

Here's David:

Obviously, dogfooding is old hat. But I've never seen customer-ready as a verb! Though if it said "to ready these services for customers" or something like that, I wouldn't have noticed. A noun stack converted to verb! And then, the tour de force: trial as a transitive verb! Cool. I'm super excited to cutting-edge these locutions!

Update After our initial super-excitement! had died down a little, David and I chatted about this. As with most things linguistic, these locutions are not random and do not come out of thin air. (Right, they come out of thick air.) We noted, for example, that to ready is an established verb, so to customer-ready isn't perhaps as much of a stretch as it might seem on first hearing. And we poked a little bit at what possible subtle differences in coloration might obtain between to trial and (for example) to test. We agreed that testing is a somewhat generic verb, whereas trial has a slight connotation of to try out -- we do not, for instance, buy shampoo in "test-size" bottles. So there is some difference there, which the author(s) were apparently trying to capture.

We also noted that this type of unabashed repurposing of words is for the most part not done by those of us who think about every (well, many of the) words we write. "That can't be right!" is probably not a thought that the author of the announcement entertained when writing the verbs in question. David pointed out that the announcement was, unusually, correct in every other way -- grammar, punctuation, verb agreement, and many of the other niceties that are often considered secondary to the many! exciting! things! that the announcements have to say. So clearly the text had been reviewed, or at least, put together by someone who is not inexperienced in basic English writing skills.

Another Update (2/15/06) Saul forwarded an email from Comcast that announced "Comcast would like to invite you to trial a Beta version of one of our latest communication products, Comcast Video Instant Messenger." It's a trend!

Open the pod word doors, please, Hal

2006-02-07T17:40:00.000-08:00

Briefest post yet, another cranalysis, tee-hee:

iPod -> podcast -> podfade (to stop podcasting)
-> ?
-> ?

(I now have it on good authority (Benjamin Zimmer, also Yaron) that Google doesn't do stem searches, so searching for pod* won't get me other such variants. Hence readers are invited to submit examples.)

Telegraphing the end (cc me on that)

2006-02-02T09:56:00.000-08:00

An article in news.com notes that Western Union has discontinued its telegram service. A fellow editor (JimP) and I were musing on vocabulary that is based in outmoded technologies. In this instance, there are at least a couple of words:

to telegraph (AHD: To make known (a feeling or an attitude, for example) by nonverbal means: telegraphed her derision with a smirk ). Also, as Jim added, "to reveal one's intentions without meaning to (a boxer who telegraphs his punches, f'rinstance). "
telegraphic (AHD: Brief or concise: a telegraphic style of writing. )

Jim had earlier sent me some terms he'd encountered while working with telephone-related software. He noted that the following phone-ish terms, while still in use, had essentially lost their literal sense:

On the hook, off the hook
Hang up
And as he said, "Really, even dial tone."

To which I add that to dial itself is a term that references obsolete technology.

Some time back, I'd been writing about software used to send emails (that is, "e-mail messages"). The two terms cc and bcc are still in wide use -- I can see them in Outlook 2003 right now. But how many people these days have ever held in their hands the "carbon" part of "carbon copy"? Only us old folks.

I would be surprised if there isn't a term for this kind of anachronism; the phenomenon happens all the time, and not just in high-tech. It's slightly odd, though, to watch it happen within one's adult life.

Dang. Oh.

2006-01-28T21:46:00.000-08:00

My friend Le'a spotted a billboard for a Web site called jobdango.com. She says: "Is this -palooza, part deux? Apparently."

We rely primarily on speculation rather than research here at (to borrow from Geoff Pullum) Evolving English Plaza, so we'll speculate, encouraged by our field agent, that the novel jobdango is "inspired by" (as they say about movies) the heavily adverstised Web site Fandango.com.

Teasing out the semantics of the morphological reparsing is kind of interesting. Assuming for the moment that our speculation is correct, they're breaking -dango out of Fandango. To spell it out maybe more than needed, there is no basis for this (AFAIK); fandango was imported as a unit from Spanish. (The etymology suggests that in Spanish it's a borrowing from Portuguese.) So our assumption is that there is no etymologically valid way in English in which the -dango portion has a meaning of its own.

So that's the fun part. They've broken off -dango and used it to mean, I am guessing, something like "place where you get something":

Fandango = place where you get movie tickets
Jobdango = place where you get jobs

The flaw in this theory is that Fan- doesn't map cleanly to "movie tickets." But who says that the -logy part of etymology has to mean "logic"? Not I.

I did some searching on Google, but did not find too many more examples. The closest I could come in about 12 pages of search results was an eBay auction for a product named "flame-dango," an airbrush template with a flame pattern on it.

There are some instances of a kind of missing-link spelling fan-dango, but most of those just seem to be variations on fandango. One possible exception is what looks like an effort to pry apart fan- and -dango -- in this case a review of tourist destinations that uses the phrase "Plan a FAN-dango", which is about visiting a shop that sells ... fans.

So it's possible that Le'a has spotted a very early -- perhaps the earliest? -- example of the attempt to generalize -dango. Let's see what happens.

Update 30 Jan 06 Benjamin Zimmer expands in a Language Log entry on both -dango and on "cran-morphing," a name for breaking off these word chunks for later reuse. (He also shows that he's got way better Googlechops than me, oops.)

Passed tenses

2006-01-05T19:52:00.000-08:00

Some short follow-up notes to a previous entry about simplified verbal structures in English. First, I was reading an article in the New Yorker ("Liquid Assets: The Social Life of Beverages," Aug 1, 2005) where the article's author quoted Pepys. The author was interested in Pepys's views on beverages (interesting enough), but I was struck also by the use of verbs. Here's one:

... with Sir W. Batten and [Sir] J. Minnes to St. James's, and stopt at Temple Bar for Sir J. Minnes to go into the Devil's Taverne to shit, he having drunk whey, and his belly wrought. [May 15, 1667]

And here's another:

To the office, where Sir W Batten, Collonel Slingsby, and I sat a while; ... And afterwards did send for a Cupp of Tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before) and went away. [September 25, 1660]

Two constructs requiring a past participle, and he uses two different forms. So clearly confusion about the "correct" participle for various verbs (I presume mostly irregular verbs -- i.e. "strong" verbs) goes back a long way.

Second, over on polyglot conspiracy today, he or she asks as an aside:

... past tense of shrink is shrank, right? Because I saw a NYT article two weeks ago where the headline used “shrank” (as in “Movie audiences shrank this year”), but the lead sentence said “shrunk” (as in “Audiences shrunk this year”). I’m not crazy to think that shrunk sounds bad, right? Despite Honey, I Shrunk the Kids…

Note: this from a linguistics student. I tell you, verb forms are confusing to everyone, which means they're not set by any means.

Finally, Mr. Pepys reminds me of a somewhat delicate, but nonetheless legitimate question, namely what are the simple past and participle of to shit? The question is whether you know this without looking it up somewhere. FWIW, in German, our cousin language, it's a strong verb, hence ablauts in the past: scheißen, schißen, geschissen.

Now, to quote Mr. Pepys, "And so to bed."

Socially speaking

2005-12-29T16:46:00.000-08:00

Every field has its jargon, and occasionally some of it leaks out from the audience of insiders into the world at large. I'm not sure when exactly I first noticed, but starting a couple of years ago, it seemed that everyone who had cause to ask for your social security number -- such as when you called your bank on the phone -- referred to it as your "social." "Can I have the last four digits of your social?" they'll ask.

The first time I heard it, I thought it was a small slip-up, that bank people use the term "social" among themselves and the rep had used it inadvertently when talking to me. But overnight, it seemed, everyone was using this foreshortened version with the public at large; I can't recall the last time someone asked me for my "social security number" by that name.

Obviously, it's not a term that's difficult to grasp. Still, I wonder how many times the customer service person is asked "My what?". And of course I wonder whether the public at large will use the term outside of the context of banks and credit card companies and those who traffic in "socials" every day.

Neologoness

2005-12-28T08:28:00.000-08:00

Here's a bit of self-conscious word invention, courtesy of a page on the so-clever-we're-almost-too-cute Flickr.com Web site:

Flickr labs have been hard at work creating a way to show you some of the most awesome photos on Flickr.

We like to call it interestingness.

Explore the gorgeousity by choosing a point in time...

Free extra bonus new word included at no charge to you.

(On an entirely extra-linguistic note, I personally find the use of we and especially we like to think or we call it in advertisements kinda oily. But that's just an opinion, not a usage observation.)

I will say that at this exact point in time -- it's early today, perhaps -- I can't think of an existing noun that would substitute for interestingness in place. One would have to recast using interest as an adjective, wouldn't one?

I'll also throw in that the word labs in this kind of context seems to me to be ambidextrous with respect to number. I think we could say either Flickr labs has been hard at work or Flickr labs have been hard at work. In British English, at least, the plural would be preferred always. We Americans often like to think of collective nouns as singularities. Is labs a collective noun? You decide.

think, thank, thunk

2005-12-27T01:13:00.000-08:00

It's well known that the tendency over the history of English has been to simplify its verbal conjugation system, specifically by reducing the number of verb forms. As illustration, I have here to hand the book 501 Spanish Verbs, and if I open a page at random -- let's say I am interested in necesitar, "to need", a perfectly normal verb -- I can count 43 distinct verb forms inflected for person, number, and tense. And that's not counting compounds like he necesitado, "I have needed."

In English, we have:

Present
need (I, you, we, they)
needs (he, she, it)

Progressive
needing

Past
needed (all persons), also functions as participle

I count four forms -- two present, one for past (including participle), one for progressive. Did I forget any?

Even gnarly verbs in English don't have that many forms. An irregular verb like eat has only one additional form: eat; eats; eating; ate; eaten. A wackier verb, still pretty simple: think; thinks; thinking; thought. Still only four. Another: ring; rings; ringing; rang; rung. The star irregular verb is, as usual, to be, which has these: be; am; are; is; being; was; were; been.[1]

For further comparison, I just totted up some German verbs, and unless I am missing some forms (I wouldn't be surprised), it looks like in German, most verbs have about 11 forms. Rather more than our four or five, but still way simpler than latinate languages.

(Incidentally, if you're wondering how we can get by with such greatly simplified verb forms in English, it's because we have effectively excised the semantic component represented by a verbal inflection and transferred it to another word, such as a pronoun. Thus Spanish amo is I love, amas is you love -- they like inflection, we like not-inflection and pronouns. Spanish has pronouns, of course, but they're often optional. Our habit of preferring to use separate words instead of inflecting verbs -- which is to say, the tendency of English toward being an analytic language -- applies also to verbal tenses and moods. As in German, many of our past and all of our future verbal forms involve auxiliary verbs. Ditto subjunctive -- If he would have come, ...)

And the point of this is? Well, I was talking to a 12-year-old the other day, and the topic of swimming came up, and when the phrase have swum was floated (haha), my interlocutor did not believe that swum was a word. "I have swam," she insisted was the correct form. This was all the more surprising to me because this is an extremely well-read girl who regularly tackles texts several grade levels above her age. Yet she has as yet not learned the "correct" participial form for a verb that is by no means obscure.

This seems like evidence to me that the drive in English to reduce verb forms continues, albeit somewhat checked among those who have formally studied the language. Non-standard English has all sorts of examples where, as with our swim example, the simple past has taken over the participle and further reduced the number of forms -- I have went, I have ate, etc.[2]

It is of course in the vulgate where continued change will manifest, and one therefore is not surprised that speakers of non-standard English are in the vanguard of evolution. But when people who for the most part speak standard English are confused about things like the form of a participle, further evolution in English is snoofling around at the door.[3]

Lest any of us get to feelin' too smug, though, consider that even us speakers of more perfect English can find ourselves unsure of forms, at least till we run to our beloved reference works for rulings. Which is it, dragged or drug? Sneaked or snuck? And as noted here before, there's that perplexing to dive -- I dive, I dove, I have ___________ ? It will be the rare folk among us who can confidently roll out every form of every verb in English, and especially, who can do it based on instinct alone. The fact is that we "know" the correct forms of such verbs only because various "authorities" have made a decision for us and we have studied their rulings.

[1] It doesn't take advanced linguistics study to guess that the forms of to be are probably not tortured inflections of a single base verb; instead, our current forms are the result of smooshing together several verbs into a single to be.

[2] Sometimes the participle wins: I seen him.

[3] At this point, even among educated people it's hard to find someone who can explain the difference -- or heck, even bothers to distinguish -- lie and lay.

Word-zilla

2005-12-14T00:49:00.000-08:00

In a recent article in the New Yorker ("Hogs Wild"), Ian Frazier writes about an urban-legendish monster boar that was shot, photographed, and shortly thereafter buried. The lack of concrete evidence inspired descriptions of an ever-bigger pig until it came to be known as ... tada! ... Hogzilla. (The boar did prove to exist, and did indeed prove to have been huge, though not quite up to the size of legend.)

The suffix -zilla is another one of those morphemes that falls out of reparsing an existing word. The meaning seems to be "monster." So Hogzilla is a monster hog. Something like truck-zilla would be a monster truck. Here are some examples I found using Our Friend Google:

ForumZilla a kind of meta-forum for finding forums. They use a lizard logo.
BroadbandZilla.
Blogzilla. Nice graphic.
Gozilla, "monster downloads."
Nanozilla, in the cleverly titled article "Nano-zilla strikes Tokyo."

Presumably there are more to be found.

Update 28 Jan 2006 I just thought of another: bridezilla, which per Paul McFedries is "a bride-to-be who, while planning her wedding, becomes exceptionally selfish, greedy, and obnoxious." That is, a bride-monster.

The suffix -zilla is handy, because as far as I know, we don't have a particle in English that we can add to a word to create "big version of." We have diminutives -- dog, doggy -- but no, uh, what? increasative. (Actually, it's called an augmentative.) In Spanish, there are a handful of augmentatives, such as -on and -ota, to name two. Una caja is a box; un cajón is a big box, etc. (For the curious, more on Spanish augmentatives to be found here.) Of course, -zilla isn't just "big version of"; it's "unprecedently enormous version of": the monster version.

And whence this term, anyway? I can't say definitively, but a very good bet is that it began with the movie Godzilla. That's in itself a slightly strange word, an Anglicization of the Japanese word Gojira, with an extra -d-. (One etymology posited here.) Given that Godzilla is an unprecedently enormous lizard, it's not a stretch to break the name on boundaries that make sense in English (god+zilla) and reuse the suffix-like part.

A note on Mozilla, the umbrella name for the browser foundation. The foundation uses a lizard as its mascot, but according to some purported diary entries from Jamie Zawinski, the name's originator, the name came first as a portmanteau of something like Mosaic+killer, Mosaic being the browser guts on which many a commercial browser was originally based. And in an interesting twist, some uses of -zilla do not directly mean "huge"; they instead echo the Mozilla name and suggest some affinity with that browser or its community, such as Bugzilla and podzilla.

I'm your Julie

2005-12-12T16:50:00.000-08:00

I've only noted recently something that's probably apparent to many people, namely the use of the term cruise director to mean, generically, organizer. I'm late to the game here because I was not a watcher of the TV series "Love Boat," which seems pretty clearly to be the source of this. Here are a couple of examples from recent emails in my Inbox:

I got an appointment on the schedule for a good-bye shindig on Friday, but I am not the greatest cruise director for these sorts of things, so I could use planning and implementation help from the more socially inclined among you.

and

I'll ask XXXX next week if I can make a brief announcement after class to see if we can sign up more people, but if you know of or have met other people you'd think would be good additions, let me know

XXXX,
aka Julie the Cruise Director

It's always interesting to see if a term that has a specific cultural context -- here, a TV show -- can make it out into the lexicon without its context. IOW, whether people who don't know the original context will pick the term up anyway. So far, people I know who use the term all explicitly understand that they're referring to a TV character. (At least, as far as I know.) Anyone have further info on this?

Whence weblog?

2005-12-10T21:34:00.000-08:00

Elmer Masters uses Google Groups to dig through old Usenet (?) postings to see if he can find the first appearance of the term weblog. Per his research, "web log" appeared for the first time on February 19, 1997^* on a page maintained by the Cyberspace Snow and Avalance Center. He links to other early examples as well.

Not known at this time is when the word blog evolved from web[ ]log.

^* My 40th birthday.

Via Dave Winer.

Competitive commenting

2005-12-09T21:20:00.000-08:00

We've had a go at pre- before, but it amuses me, so I keep a lookout for it. This was a comment left in a blog, which was aimed at the blog's author:

(By the way, you totally pre-commented me at DLB re Hercules' grammar.)

Hello! You've been greeted.

2005-12-08T22:18:00.000-08:00

A new way to use "to greet" as found in a catalog of greeting cards:

Are the holiday cards greeted?
Yes and No! The holiday cards come greeted with the words "Happy Holidays" or they can be ungreeted, please specify when ordering.

The un- prefix does not exist, AFAIK, in the transitive version (I greet you!, but no I ungreet you!).

It does represent economy -- the more traditional way would be something like "come with preprinted greetings" or the like; greeted surely is a lot shorter.

So, this usage is passive (the cards are greeted), which implies a differently transitive verb to greet meaning "to add a greeting to," right? I wonder if the folks at this company sit around at meetings and say things like Should we greet these cards? We should subpoena their emails.

Warriors and puppet masters

2005-12-06T12:26:00.000-08:00

File under "and why not use the existing term?" I found this today in a Wikipedia entry:

The Bogdanov Affair article has been plagued by vicious POV warrioring from a number of sides, including IPs belonging to Igor Bogdanov, the subject of the article.

Aside from being hard to pronounce, it seems that the term "fighting" would be appropriate. So why does the author use "warrioring"? Because it appears to derive from a noun "POV warrior," which (heh) Wikipedia helpfully defines as "someone whose writings consistently lack a Neutral point of view." Another Wikipedia entry uses the term in a similar way:

In short, I object to RoB's knee-jerk reverting of any change I make to the article, without any consideration for process (explaining his edits, responding to my explanations). Moreover, I object to his knee-jerk POV warrioring, refusing to accept views other than his own.

So within the Wikipedia community, this seems to be established. The verb is just a, uh, bonus.

As for turning "xxxx warrior" into a verb, we can find other examples:

An Amazon reviewer (of PlayStation) who signs himself "warrioring."
A clear example where "weekend warrior" (not completely defined) is converted to "warrioring."
A straightfoward example from a page that addresses machismo: "Macho posturing is a hangover from hand-to-hand combat times when tribal societies were in need of fierce warriors to survive. Now that women fly combat planes, warrioring no longer suffices as a sufficient proof of masculinity." [Note: site is perhaps not work-safe. -- M]
Ditto: "Warrioring is a necessary evil, like chemotherapy against cancer - not the kind of remedy I like to celebrate - we should use it sadly, only when necessary. Think of all the greatest atrocities in our history, like the holocaust - they were all committed by warriors. Warrioring is how we evolved as societies."

Etc. Google lists a paltry 486 cites for "warrioring" right now, which I take as weak support for making "warrior" into a verb.

BTW, the original Wikipedia entry also introduced me to a term I hadn't heard before: a "sock puppet," which they define as "an additional account created by an existing member of an Internet community. This account allows them to pose as a completely different user, sometimes to manufacture the illusion of support in a vote or argument." I generally suspect that overly enthusiastic reviews on Amazon and CitySearch.com are put there by sock puppets. But then, I'm a skeptic.

Your feeback[[']s] welcome

2005-12-05T14:46:00.000-08:00

This appeared in an email at work recently:

- One specific feedback we’ve received from our customers is that they would like to ...

I found this just a very tiny slightly small bit odd. Feedback is, in my experience, a collective noun. Granted, the standard means to indicate an individuum from the collective is the unsatisfactory "a piece of feedback," which is not only bland, but which doesn't even work -- you can have a piece of cake, but what the heck would a piece of feedback look like, anyway? Haha.

I sent this around for commentary, and one of my co-editors made this astute observation:

"Feedback" as a collective noun seems analogous to "e-mail": "One e-mail I received said..." I'm probably the only one on the planet who doesn't refer to individual e-mail messages as "e-mails." Let's see how long it is until you find "Many feedbacks we've received..." :^)

I had a fight once with someone (in email) about the use of email to mean "piece of email," and about the inevitableness of that usage and moreover its lack of ambiguity in everyday speech. (The counter-argument was that you would never refer to a letter as "a mail." FWIW, our in-house style guide insists on both the hy-phen ("e-mail") and on referring to "e-mail messages.")

The fact that people don't refer to feedbacks suggests that even if the analogy to "e-mail" has some merit, the word feedback has not yet fully made the leap to count noun. So keep your ears (and email eyes) open, folks.

Mysteriousing

2005-11-27T17:25:00.000-08:00

Normally when I encounter a new coinage, it's either explicitly defined or one can deduce the meaning from context or by analogy or what-not. Here's one I am still trying to completely suss out, though. It's the mission statement for the Web site Performancing.com:

Performancing.com is a group weblog written by professional bloggers, for professional bloggers. The emphasis at Performancing is commercial blogging.

The Performancing.com Mission

"To create a home for professional bloggers. A place where those that want to make money from their blogs can learn, and perfect the art of making a living from weblogging."

What exactly is "performancing" intended to mean? Working backward, we posit a verb "to performance." Is it transitive? I performance you. If so, what am I doing for you? Is it intransitive? I'm performancing = I'm working at a high-performance level?

I suppose I could just ask them, couldn't I?