Inspired by reel life

There are so many interesting words, uses and etymologies that often go unnoticed until brought into the limelight by their use in journalism, politics, finance, literature, music, advertising, television or film. Events of last week were no exception, for where popular culture goes, old words, new words, and linguistic trends may be unearthed.

Arnold Schwarzenegger may be a little too busy being governor of California to work on any Terminator films at the moment, but the humans vs. Skynet battle continues regardless in the post-apocalyptic Terminator Salvation, released in cinemas last week. The word terminator is a fairly obvious extension of terminate, and its application as the name of the robots sent to kill influential (if fictional) humans such as John Connor is both catchy and logical. Yet it also has an alternative sense, defined in The Chambers Dictionary as “the boundary between the illuminated and dark portions of the moon or of a planet”. The terminator divides night and day on the moon, casting shadows from craters and mountains along its line. Due to the light scattering effect of all the air in our atmosphere, Earth’s terminator is not so clear, and night becomes day much more slowly. So Earth does have a terminator – it just isn’t out to eliminate the human race.

Last Saturday’s MTV Awards across the Atlantic were dominated by blockbuster vampire film Twilight, and its two stars Robert Pattinson and Kirsten Stewart. Although their romance seems to be restricted to the big screen and feigned moments in award ceremonies, the co-stars have nonetheless been assigned the combination nickname ‘Robsten’, following in the footsteps of celebrity supercouples such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (Brangelina), Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes (TomKat) and the now separated Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez (Bennifer). Although these combined names have become increasingly prevalent in popular culture, they certainly aren’t a new invention. Bill and Hilary Clinton reportedly went by ‘Billary’ during their first few years in the White House, while Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, stars of American sitcom I Love Lucy, referred to themselves as ‘Desilu’. This portmanteau technique of word formation can be seen in many common compound words, such as chocoholic, blog, cyborg, brunch, sitcom and Spanglish. Even television itself was originally a portmanteau, fusing the Greek tēle- meaning ‘far’ and the Latin –visiō meaning ‘to see’, concisely describing the function of the television through the combination of ancient languages.

Talking of television, love it or hate it, most people will be aware that Channel 4’s reality show Big Brother returned to our screens on Thursday. Only time will tell what new catchphrases this year’s contestants will popularize, but the show itself certainly remains faithful to the notion of a sparse society controlled by an unseen superior as depicted in George Orwell’s novel 1984, from which the title ‘Big Brother’ derives. Indeed, Orwell’s novel coined a surprising number of terms that have taken on extended meanings in modern language. As well as the powerful dictator figure of Big Brother, Orwell introduced the idea of doublethink, the power to believe two conflicting notions at once, and Newspeak, a simplified language system including such words as ‘blackwhite’, the habit or ability to claim or even believe that black is white, and ‘unperson’, one who has been erased from existence entirely. Such was the power of 1984 that the adjective Orwellian now describes the characteristics of the society Orwell so vividly portrayed in it, one embodying a climate of dehumanization and authoritarianism. Of course, whether this year’s Big Brother will demonstrate those concepts remains to be seen.

Deborah Smith

Bookmark this post

A garden of delights

Summertime is finally here, and while others fire up their lawnmowers or head down to the local garden centre, a lexicographer is prompted to think about the names of flowering plants.

The Chambers Dictionary sheds some interesting light on this subject. It reveals, for example, that dahlia is spelt like that because it is named after a Swedish botanist called Anders Dahl. Similarly, fuchsia takes its name from a German botanist called Leonard Fuchs, and buddleia from an Englishman Adam Buddle.

Knowing this sort of thing can be very useful if you want to remember how to spell these tricky words, but it seems to me that calling flowers after botanists to create hard-to-spell Latin-sounding names is a disappointingly prosaic thing to do. For the dictionary preserves another strand of plant names – ones that originated in country lore – which I find much more evocative. Wouldn’t it be nicer if we still called the pimpernel the poor man’s weather glass (a name earned from its habit of closing up its flowers before a fall of rain), and if we still gave flowers names like enchanter’s nightshade, gold dust and Spanish dagger?

Many of these old names suggest resemblances to parts of animals, as in hare’s ear, pheasant’s eye and storksbill, while the shapes and colours of others suggested sad images to the old country-dwellers: love-lies-bleeding, baby’s tears, mourning bride.

Of course, familiarity breeds a certain amount of contempt. There are plenty of poetic-sounding names that have survived – forget-me-not, honeysuckle, foxglove, snapdragon, speedwell – but we are somewhat immunized against their charms because we know them so well.

Nevertheless, I still like the idea of a garden filled with the likes of dusty-miller, snow-in-summer and witches’ thimble. I wonder whether any of these will be available at the garden centre.

Ian Brookes

Bookmark this post

Bada bing!

Microsoft have just launched a new search engine, Bing™, which they hope will be a serious pretender to Google's web search crown. While the beta is slick with a particularly impressive image search module, functionality won't be the only front on which the battle for search dominance will be won. Microsoft will also have to sell us brand Bing.

According to the Microsoft marketing folk, Bing has an onomatopoeic quality, evocative of that moment of enlightenment or discovery - the 'sound of found'. Steven Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, also expressed his happiness with its potential to 'verb up'. This comment is interesting because, in general, companies are fiercely protective of their treasured trademarks and do their utmost to prevent their verbification or use as a generic noun.

Becoming the generic term for a class of product is certainly confirmation of a brand's dominance. However, if a trademark becomes genericized, the owners’ intellectual property rights to the word are threatened. Syntactic or morphological shifts such as verbification and pluralization can often signal a trademark’s demise and so are actively discouraged by the likes of Google™, Hoover™ and Xerox™ wishing to avoid the fate of escalator, kerosene, trampoline and yo-yo.

The situation gets pretty tricky when it comes to dictionaries. It is the job of a lexicographer to use corpus evidence to identify and record language change accurately. If there is evidence of change in the form, frequency or function of a word - trademark or otherwise - then a good dictionary should reflect this. As can be seen here though, trademark owners will always defend their brand, even at the expense of lexicographical completeness. Consequently, we have to be very careful when dealing with trademarks in our dictionaries - always using the registered trademark symbol where required with the disclaimer that a trademark's inclusion by us has no bearing on its legal status.

Only time will tell if Steve Ballmer gets his wish but he'll surely be pleased to know that the word ‘bing’ has got form when it comes to 'verbing up'. According to The Chambers Dictionary (never one to leave you short of an obscure definition) it is an obsolete slang term evidenced in the works of Walter Scott and means 'to go'.

Incidentally, 'google' as a verb also has an existence independent of search engines. It describes the action of a cricket ball and means 'spin like a googly' - a 'googly' being 'an off break bowled with an apparent leg-break action by a right-arm bowler to a right-handed batsman, or conversely for a left-arm bowler'. Unsurprisingly, neither of these terms is in any way related to the origin of Google™. The name is a play on the word googol and a reference to the ambition rather than the cricketing nous of Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Ruth O'Donovan

A different kettle of ghoti

"The only stupid thing about words is the spelling of them."
- Laura Ingalls Wilder

Incorrect spelling annoys people. So does bad grammar and strange punctuation. There are websites, blogs and forums devoted entirely to finding cases of peculiar or humorous cases of these mistakes. But while grammar and punctuation seem (on the whole) to follow logical rules, there are so many shortcomings in our current spelling system that it’s a wonder we still use it to communicate.

The well cited argument for spelling reform, commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw, is that with current spelling ‘fish’ could be spelt ‘ghoti’. It wasn’t Shaw who actually made this particular statement, but it’s still a valid point. ‘Ghoti’ takes the sound made by ‘gh’ in rough, the ‘o’ in women, and the ‘ti’ in nation, which phonetically combined could be pronounced as ‘fish’. It’s no wonder that this is possible when you consider that there are nine pronunciations of ‹ough›:

• Borough/thorough ə
• Cough ɒf
• Enough/rough ʌf
• Bough/plough aʊ
• Nought/thought ɔː
• Through uː
• Dough/though əʊ
• Hiccough (hiccup) ʌp
• Lough (Irish loch) ɒχ

Mark Twain satirically devised an ingenious plan to improve spelling by gradually dropping the ‘unnecessary’ letters of the alphabet c, x and y, removing double consonants, ‘fixing’ the use of g/j and w/o and completely adjusting the way we use vowels. Yet what was satirical then was not so ridiculous once. Before the printing press standardized written English, spelling was much more flexible. William Caxton introduced not only the printing press but also Dutch spelling habits, and began to homogenize English spelling. Language was further normalized by Samuel Johnson with his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and since then dictionaries have usually been considered the most authoritative guide to correct spelling.

But here’s the catch: dictionaries are on the whole descriptive, describing the language that people do use, rather than prescriptive, prescribing how people should use language. So rather than set the standard form of a word, most dictionaries merely reflect the one that is most commonly considered acceptable. If the nation decided to start spelling ‘fish’ as ‘ghoti’, you would soon find this updated in The Chambers Dictionary.

Because of this, readers occasionally question why we list the two alternatives of words such as recognize/recognise or organize/organise with the –ize suffix as the headword. The reason is that while both spelling forms are acceptable in British English, only the spelling –ize is regarded as correct in American English, making it more internationally appropriate. In fact, while some British speakers prefer the –ise forms, –ize is actually more etymologically accurate. The suffix was found in many Ancient Greek verbs as –izein, for example baptizein, to immerse, from which our modern baptize is derived. The –ise spelling was a later adoption from the French, and can be seen fixed in forms such as revise and advise.

Of course, as language isn’t a fixed phenomenon, we might just have to revise this all one day anyway. In which case, we’ll keep you posted.

Deborah Smith

Bookmark this post

What shall we do with the icebound sailor?

Working in the Marketing Department at Chambers, I find myself in a strange lexicographical position – I know exactly how words get into the dictionary but I have no say in whether they do (it’s certainly not a case of slipping the editors a tenner with my personal ‘missing word’ bugbear written on it). I know too that we get a lot – a lot – of mail asking for words to be added to the dictionary. The editors meet regularly to discuss new words. Our commissioned readers constantly trawl the media and we have a computer program zapping tirelessly through the internet in search of cutting-edge vocabulary. Dictionaries thrive on the addition of new words.

With all this pressure to put words in, I particularly enjoyed this piece by Robin Bloor on ‘words you don’t know that shouldn’t exist’ – it’s very rare that we get people demanding that we take words out.

One of the words in the list is ‘mallemeroking’. In my opinion, mallemaroking is a brilliant word. It’s a rare word meaning ‘carousing of seamen in icebound ships’, from the obsolete Dutch mallemerok, ‘a romping woman’, with the Dutch mal meaning ‘foolish’. There are few words to be found in English with this mal in their derivation, although there is mallemuck, ‘the fulmar or a similar bird’, literally translated from Dutch as ‘foolish gull’.

While admitting the word ‘mallemaroking’ is obscure – Michael Quinion over at World Wide Words points out that it is ‘the preserve almost solely of those wordsmiths who write about Weird Words’ – I have my own suggestion for easing this word into more everyday usage. Let’s make it into a simile: carousing like seamen in icebound ships. Think of the raucous behaviour of children on the bus home from a school trip that gets caught in traffic or snow or flooding – the holiday from school and parents nearly over, excited and tired, they snatch their extra moments of freedom by playing games, singing, shouting across the seats, smearing lipstick and ink on the faces of their sleeping peers. They are mallemaroking.

For the time being, mallemaroking will stay in The Chambers Dictionary. We take great pride in our range of historical and obscure words. After all, they’re the ones that you’re going to have to look up if you come across them. What’s more, we love words. We love them for their oddness or aptness, their meaning or euphony. It is no surprise that mallemaroking makes an appearance in Foyle’s Further Philavery by Christopher Foyle, a collection of words that are just wonderful for whatever reason.

Whatever your view of this word, it’s great to see people blogging about it and talking about it again. I predict a resurgence in its use, and mallemaroking may be here to stay.

Naomi Farmer

Bookmark this post

Cornering the meerkat

I have been noticing a lot of meerkats recently. It’s not that I have taken up residence in the Kalahari Desert, but it has been hard to escape an advertising campaign playing on the similarity between the words meerkat and market that has brought these creatures to Britain’s television screens.

Readers who are acquainted with Dutch will know that the word meerkat literally means ‘lake cat’ (although meer originally referred to the sea, and so the word meant ‘sea cat’). Quite why a meerkat should be called a ‘sea cat’ is a bit of a puzzle – the animal isn’t a cat at all but a member of the mongoose family. And it lives in deserts, not by water.

Some experts think that this is an example of a folk etymology – an unscientific attempt to make sense of an unfamiliar word by associating it with words that are familiar. According to this theory, Dutch travellers may have adopted the Hindi word markat (or a similar word from another Asian language) to mean ‘monkey’, and this word was later assumed incorrectly to be associated with ‘sea’ and ‘cat’. The early occurrence of the word – it had already moved from Dutch into English in the 15th century – makes this theory difficult to substantiate, but not impossible to believe.

So meerkat became a Dutch and also an English word for a monkey, but at this date it still had nothing to do with the desert-dwelling member of the mongoose family. It was not until the start of the 19th century that the word was applied to these curious animals – presumably by someone who hadn’t studied a lot of zoology and thought that any creature with a cute face that stood up on two legs must be some kind of monkey.

So it's only by a chapter of accidents that the word meerkat comes to exist at all, never mind become attached to its current owners. Not that the advertisers who are using meerkats to sell car insurance will be too worried about the word’s strange journey.

Ian Brookes


Bookmark this post

Let's talk about text

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about textonyms. I never expected it to be as popular as it turned out, but I've since learned how a little bit of hype can behave like a gyre (4973). It happened so quickly - one day I posted the blog, the next I was being goaded to incede ("advance majestically") (462333) upon the BBC studios to be interviewed for Radio 4's cultural magazine programme Front Row. I felt quite terrified as I versified (837743433) about textonyms, and although it's always easy to judge one's own performance with harshness, hearing myself on the airwaves ultimately brought a sense of happiness (427746377). You can still listen to the end result at the BBC site (I appear about 23 minutes in to the programme, but the whole show is worth a listen!).

Before my five minutes of fame, I had to make sure I had enough ammo to cause a boom (2444). Thankfully, my friends and family were there to provide some tales of predictive text gone wrong. Even my "nun" diligently compiled a list of possible textonyms that she'd encountered during the course of a day's texting, my favourite of which was the bizarre mapping from "cards of hope" to "acres of gore". To aid me on my quest, I also made some improvements to the program I'd written initially to research the phenomenon. This has been packaged into a little "textonym solver" which is available on our website. It's still in no way a complete resource, so I apologize if it seems to be both effective and defective (333328483) at the same time. Be sure to let us know if you find any interesting new examples!

In the world of technology, innovation inevitably leads to obsolescence - just look at how the internet threatens to make paper rarer (72737). Mark Lawson, the presenter of Front Row, agreed that the popularity of smart phones with touch screens and small keyboards would likely relegate "textonyms" and indeed predictive text to the annals of time. Our grandchildren will laugh as we try to explain why we used to have to type words using numbers. The fact that you can now get The Chambers Dictionary on your iPhone is certainly proof that mobiles are getting smarter, but I fear the loss of predictive text may well make them seem less wise. Gone is the relationship advice – knowing that we can be damaged by those we once fancied (3262433). Gone are the lessons for our children about the effects of disobedience – a prank is always closely followed by a spank (77265). We might miss it more than we expect.


David Wark

Bookmark this post