Organize and humorize

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

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

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

• Welcome to the first murdochracy
• This is What Murdochracy Looks Like
• The revolt against Murdochracy: a view from Oz
• End days for dead paper and "Murdochracy"?
• Is the Murdochracy tumbling down?

... 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?

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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?