The emergence of Gambit

Not too long ago I wrote about some of the imaginative and not so imaginative superhero names to have appeared in comic books, graphic novels and blockbuster movies recently. Not to get obsessive, but this subject is yet again relevant, with the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine this week.

While a number of the X-Men heroes were discussed in my previous blog, one of the better-known characters had yet to be depicted on the big screen. Remy LeBeau, aka Gambit, is a comic-fan favourite and will be debuting in Wolverine this week. Gambit has the ability to manipulate the kinetic energy of objects, exhibits a hypnotic charm, possesses superhuman agility and dexterity, and carries a pack of playing cards as his weapon of choice. He also has a great name.

The word gambit can be used generally to refer to trickery or stratagem (another fantastic word), and is clearly fitting to describe a superhero who carries playing cards wherever he goes. Specifically, the word is applied to chess to describe a move in which a player sacrifices one piece early in their game in order to gain an overall advantage. Such a risky move may seem to be quite a gamble, and it would be logical to imagine that with this semantic similarity and initial 'gamb' in common, gambit and gamble may be etymologically related. Yet while gamble is a form of game, deriving from the Danish gammen, gambit can be traced back to Italian gambetto, meaning a tripping up, from gamba, leg. Of course, exactly who is tripping who depends on the strength and cunning of the gambit itself.

A similar etymology to gambit can be found in the rather jolly gambol, meaning to jump around playfully, which also derived from the Italian gamba, and suggests exactly how I will be frolicking to the cinema this weekend.

Deborah Smith

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Filth

Lexicography is one of the few professions in which it is not merely permissible to use obscene words, but it is actually compulsory. Words that you would not use in conversation with your bank manager or your mother-in-law turn up as part of the work: they are found in the language and there is no avoiding them. Of course, whether this state of affairs is a penance or a privilege really depends on the individual.

Few people of working age are seriously embarrassed or offended by many of the words to which the dictionary attaches its cautionary labels of ‘taboo’ or ‘offensive’. Indeed there is often a certain relish attached to such words, especially when they are used in a way which is neither gratuitous nor offensive. When Michael Caine snorts ‘You’re only supposed in the blow the bloody doors off!’ in The Italian Job, or Audrey Hepburn urges ‘Come on, Dover, move your blooming arse!’ in My Fair Lady, the swearing is integral to the situation and appropriate to the characters, and we are naturally amused.

For most people there is a dividing line between tolerable obscenity and unacceptably foul and abusive language. Yet it can be difficult to judge which words fall on which side of the divide. In a recent conversation I was censured for using the word pee. I had thought I was choosing a harmless euphemism, but something about the word made it quite unpalatable to my interlocutor.

So it appears that each individual may respond differently to a word. Some words may develop unpleasant associations for us from the contexts in which we have heard them. Others may contain sound combinations which are somehow objectionable to our ears. Much also depends on the culture in which the person grew up. Americans, for example, appear to be quite unabashed about using the word crap (although it is not one I would use in front of my local vicar, rabbi, imam or guru), and yet they react with horror when Brits use the word toilet.

On the whole, however, words relating to religion, sex and bodily functions have lost much of their power to shock in recent decades – probably because their subjects are no longer taboo. I can type words such as crap, bloody and arse without experiencing any serious concern that I might be offending anybody. And yet these words have not entirely lost their vestigial power as obscenities - I still wouldn’t use them in front of my bank manager.

Ian Brookes

Those who are not easily shocked will have fun browsing Smut, a collection of the most down-and-dirty of slang words.

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A forgotten oubliette

Discovering useful words for useful things is always an intriguing aspect of lexicography, as Ian Brookes recently mused on in this blog. Yet sometimes it's even nicer to rediscover obscure words that will rarely serve any use at all. This was the case recently when I flicked through Foyle's Philavery and stumbled across the word oubliette, the name for a secret dungeon beneath a trap door.

Oubliette is hardly a word that a person needs to use everyday, unless perhaps you're trapped in a dungeon or live in a castle. But as a child obsessed with Labyrinth - in which David Bowie in tight lycra was almost as scary as the magical creatures and mythical monsters - an oubliette seemed a logical thing to be aware of. Where else would you trap hapless wanderers within the sprawling maze, never to return again?

In this sense oubliette acts in the truest sense of the word, for not only is the dungeon designed to trap its victims, but to remove them from memory entirely, revealed by the word's origins in the French oublier, to forget. With no way out but the trapdoor through which they fell, prisoners relied on their captors' mercy, or some other outside assistance, to get out. And those that didn't were simply forgotten. Which is quite ironic, since the word itself is likely to be one I'll forget again and again, only to be reminded of it by the occasional nostalgic film viewing. And while oubliettes are still occasionally discovered in this country, I'll just keep hoping I never find myself trapped in one.


Deborah Smith

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Words fail me

There are few things more satisfying for a dictionary editor than a definition that neatly explains a difficult word in simple terms. That, after all, is the apparent function of a dictionary.

Yet common words can sometimes defy lucid explanation in this way. What if a concept is so fundamental that it cannot be simplified but can only be explained by increasing the level of complexity? On such occasions a dictionary is apt to struggle. For example, The Chambers Dictionary defines the verb laugh as ‘to express, by explosive inarticulate sounds of the voice, amusement, joy, scorn, etc, or a reaction to tickling, etc’. And the definition of north is even more convoluted: ‘the point of the horizon or that pole of the earth or sky which at equinox is opposite the sun at noon in Europe or elsewhere on the same side of the equator, or towards the sun in the other hemisphere’. These definitions may be accurate, but one wonders if any user will come away thinking, ‘Ah, so now I know what that word means.’

You might even argue that everybody knows what words such as laugh and north mean, and so there is really no need to define them in a dictionary. However, there are good reasons for hesitating before deciding that a dictionary should deal only in hard words.

For it is possible and even necessary to give useful information about common terms: the entry for north explains the difference between true north and magnetic north; the entry for monkey explains the technical distinction between monkey and ape, and so on.

Furthermore, especially when viewed in its electronic form, a dictionary can be used as a resource from which to view the entire language. It is possible to use Chambers Reference Online to find all of the dictionary’s New Zealand words, all of the Shakespearean words, all of the words ending in -thon, and much more besides. The results of such searches would be compromised if editors started to discard words that they felt people would never need to look up.

So the definition of north stays in – although suggestions for a simpler and neater version would still be welcome.

Ian Brookes

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Monkey business

The English names of many monkeys are often taken directly from the local names in whatever part of the world the animals are found. When the names are more consciously awarded, however, some themes start to emerge. The names baboon and marmoset both come from French words that mean ‘grotesque figure’. When the people who named monkeys were in a more charitable mood, however, they drew analogies with monks.

The best known example of the latter practice can be found in the capuchin monkey of South America. This creature’s name comes from the supposed resemblance between its thick pelt and the cowl of the Capuchin monks, a branch of the Franciscan order noted for the hooded cloaks worn by its members (capuchon being the French word for a cowl).

A very similar process can be seen in the less familiar word talapoin. This comes from an ancient form of the Mon language of south-east Asia, and originally referred to a Buddhist monk. But it was later applied to a small West African monkey on account of a perceived similarity between the two.

It is curious that the entries for monk and monkey are adjacent in The Chambers Dictionary. On some levels the two represent quite contradictory ideas: monks are solitary, sober and serious, while we think of monkeys as being gregarious and fun-loving creatures. Moreover, although both words start with the same four letters, they have their origins in different languages: monk comes (via Old English and Latin) from the Greek word monachos meaning literally ‘a person who lives alone’; monkey appears to have come from the Middle Low German word moneke.

Is it just a coincidence that two different species of monkey should be named after two different types of holy man? Or is it perhaps that people have looked at these creatures and seen something spiritual going on behind all of their monkeying around?

Ian Brookes

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Words on the chopping block

At the end of February, researchers at The University of Reading claimed to have identified – with a little help from computer technology – the oldest words in English. Among these were the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘who’, and the numerals ‘two’ and ‘three’. More controversially, the researchers proposed words that could disappear relatively quickly, including verbs such as ‘turn’ and ‘wipe’.

As editor of The Chambers Dictionary, I was invited last week to take part in a discussion about the research on The Book Café on BBC Radio Scotland The overriding view among the guests was one of scepticism: surely language evolution is not so predictable that human or machine can say with any certainty which words will have the shortest life?

The extinction of words was a topic I had been pondering just before the research was published, having been prompted by a correspondent’s question about how we assign the label ‘obsolete’ to words in the dictionary. The answer is that we have no hard-and-fast rules, except that the label should be applied to words that we are certain have fallen out of use, usually because they refer to obsolete concepts. But then, it is very difficult to determine when a word is truly obsolete, and our awareness of it means there is always the potential to use it again. If I mention a word that has disappeared from the dictionary since 1901 – let’s say ‘wappet’ (a yelping dog) – can I claim to have resurrected the word by using it in this blog?

It was put to me by a producer on the programme that I must witness the death of words frequently, when we delete them from the dictionary and replace them with others. In truth, Chambers editors are not guilty of deleting very much. The editors of the 1972 edition of The Chambers Dictionary attempted to delete just one word – agene, a flour whitening agent. Not, you might imagine, a word of such inherent character and interest that it was bound to elicit love and loyalty. However, several correspondents remarked on its loss and the word was restored to the dictionary, where it resides contentedly to this day.

A report on the BBC news site on the Reading research described certain words as ‘heading for the lexicographer’s chopping block’. Because they can decide what is included in dictionaries, lexicographers are often perceived as having the final say in whether a word is dead or alive: they are the judge, jury and executioner in a word’s trial. However, lexicographers are well placed to appreciate how difficult it is, when language can be fluid and unpredictable, to say with confidence when a word is no longer in use. They also know how loath word lovers can be to think that any word could ever vanish completely.

Mary O'Neill

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Tackling the linguistics of rugby

In the first match of the Six Nations Rugby Championship this year Nick Mallet, Italy's coach, chose to play the talented flanker Mauro Bergamasco at scrum half. So appalling was his performance that a new phrase was immediately coined by journalists and rugby pundits: 'doing a Bergamasco'. Depending on who you listen to, the phrase refers either to one particularly shocking, ballooning pass by the hapless Mauro which gifted Italy's opponents England a try or to the poor decision by the selection committee to play a normally excellent player completely out of position with disastrous consequences.

Fortunately for Bergamasco and Italy such journalistic coinages are usually transient and tend to pass out of the language just as a badly thrown rugby ball can loop past its intended recipient (sorry, couldn't resist). However it won't be of comfort that there are cases of enduring performance-related coinages. These include the garryowen, defined by The Chambers Dictionary as 'a high kick forward together with a rush towards the landing-place of the ball'. The name comes from the Garryowen Club in County Limerick, Ireland, whose play was characterised by the frequent use of such 'up and under' kicking tactics.

As with many sports, the language of rugby is lively and rich: players forming a 'maul' could engage in some 'up the jumper' play, even a bit of 'truck and trailer' but they should be careful not to be 'pinged' by the referee or they might end up in the 'sin bin'. One of the most confusing things I found when I first started watching rugby was the multitude of names each position seemed to have. For example, the player in the number 10 position in rugby union can be referred to as a 'fly half', a 'fly', an 'outside half', an 'out half', a 'stand-off', a 'stand-off half', a 'five-eighth', a 'first five-eighth' or a 'first five', with apologies to the experts if I've missed out any. The diverse nomenclature is due to differences between rugby league and rugby union, historical rule changes and regional variation.

In addition to rugby-specific terminology, there are also more common words which have a particular rugby or sports sense such as 'mark', 'dummy', 'conversion', 'blind', 'open' and 'hooker'. Their use can lead to misunderstandings when rugby commentary is taken out of context, with often humorous or rude results. I spotted a nice example of potential ambiguity in the Observer's analysis of the Wales Italy game last weekend where Michael Aylwin writes:

'Tom Shanklin, one of a raft of replacements brought on to save a game that Wales were losing 12-7 as the final quarter approached, went over with eight minutes remaining after James Hook had gone blind from a ruck.'

For those of you with no interest in rugby, you'll be glad to know that James Hook is still fully-sighted. He just ran from the ruck on the side closer to the touch line.

Ruth O'Donovan

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