Nouny adjectiveness

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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 ...

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.

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

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!