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!

A niche of millions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.