Finding your feet

One of the exercises within the CD-ROM for the recently released Chambers Student Learners’ Dictionary involves inserting the name of a part of the body into the correct idiomatic expression. The exercise, designed for learners of English, may sound easy, but when you consider the plethora of expressions in English that involve various bodily appendages, you can understand how it might be a little more difficult for a learner.

The thinking behind body-related expressions is often quite clear. To do something behind someone’s back or to stab someone in the back is to be treacherous in a such a way that the victim cannot be aware of it or anticipate it. Similarly, sticking your neck out portrays the vulnerability that would be associated with that action, especially if performed around sharp instruments or fast moving traffic. Seeing eye to eye demonstrates a shared viewpoint, while something that falls on deaf ears may as well have not been said.

You can do more things with your feet than anyone would have thought possible, whether relaxing by putting your feet up, or putting your foot down in determination, or sometimes awkwardly putting your foot in it. All of these are only possible if you’ve got a leg to stand on of course, so you have to avoid paying an arm and a leg for anything. If you do end up making an expensive purchase you might pay through the nose, a process that sounds particularly painful.

One would also assume that losing limbs would represent injury, or at least discomfort, unless of course you’re laughing your head off, a surprisingly enjoyable experience, or someone’s been pulling your leg. Giving someone a hand can’t be too excruciating either, and is definitely more morally rewarding than a severed limb. And of course, while some may argue of the potential emotional stress, falling head over heels isn’t always as bad as it sounds.

There are so many expressions like this that it’s no wonder some English learners try to learn them all by heart, but with so many different variations they would really have their hands full, and even with the right phrase on the tip of their tongue, might never quite put their finger on it.


Deborah Smith

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The Rory Bremner of neologisms

As a newcomer to the dictionary business, I still have a wide-eyed fascination with where words come from and how their inclusion in the lexicon comes about. An avid basketball fan, I was reading an article on the NBA website, where an up-and-coming player was praised as being ‘telegenic’. I was pretty sure I knew what this meant, but I thought I’d better look it up just to be certain. Sure enough, the definition is ‘having a presence, appearance and manner suitable for television’. The etymology reveals that this is modelled on ‘photogenic’, which was fairly obvious, but I was interested by the wording ‘modelled on’. It struck me that this was quite a different approach from just using common affixes to alter the meaning of words. By that method, with the traditional meaning of the prefix tele- being ‘far, distant, over a distance’, one might come to the somewhat different conclusion that this young basketball player only looked good from afar.

I wondered if this was a common technique for producing new words and thankfully, Chambers Reference Online came to the rescue, by allowing me to search for all cases where ‘modelled on’ appears in the etymology field. Perhaps this could help solve a few ‘chicken and egg’ scenarios about the order in which words appeared. For example, when asked ‘Which came first, the gremlin or the goblin?’, I can now emphatically answer ‘the goblin’. Unsurprisingly, developments in technology have produced a few notable examples, with viaduct building on aqueduct, video echoing audio, escalator leading to travolator and hi-fi producing both ‘lo-fi’ and ‘wi-fi’. Technophiles and early adopters have even been nicknamed the ‘digerati’, using this technique to bring literati into the 21st century.

It’s likely that the main perpetrators of such economical coinages are journalists. Who else could have formed Glaswegian from Norwegian, precycle from recycle and pescatarian from vegetarian? I was recently introduced to the concept of ‘snowclones’, defined by Language Log’s Geoff Pullman as ‘some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists’ – a veritable swiss-army knife of neologistic shortcuts. The most famous example is probably X is the new Y which was first popularised in the fashion industry with phrases like ‘gray is the new black’ but has now been used ad nauseum for a variety of purposes, for example ‘30 is the new 20’, ‘quiet is the new loud’, ‘knitting is the new yoga’ and so on. But my favourite snowclone has to be X is the Y of Z, a good example of which is the saying ‘Edinburgh is the Athens of the north’ (although a quick search reveals it’s not the only city to deem itself so). Language columnist Mark Peters extensively documents the latest and most creative occurrences of this phenomenon at his site The Rosa Parks of blogs, which provides many happy hours of distraction. Find out what’s been described as ‘the Tom Hanks of vegetables’, ‘the batman of feminism’ or ‘the Sean Connery of payment systems’!

It strikes me that these new words and phrases are somewhat like impressionists, inventive yet always paying homage to what’s gone before. In fact, to use a snowclone, you might say they’re like the Rory Bremner of neologisms.



David Wark

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A cluster of collective nouns

A few days ago, I received a text message from my brother lamenting a poster he had seen outside a bar, which read ‘Be Part of the Pack for the Lions Tour’. I replied that I might let its creators off as they were referring to rugby, but they should have run with something like ‘Lions Tour 2009: Feel the Pride’.

The bar staff obviously thought they were being clever by punning on the rugby pack (the forwards; you know, the ones who do all the scrummaging and stuff) and a pack of lions. But we all know that the collective noun for lions is a pride – so my pun is far superior. Pack is the collective noun for hounds.

A collective noun is defined as ‘a singular noun referring to a group of people or things’, although people seem most fascinated by those referring to groups of animals, and it’s not surprising given the wonderful images they create. Author Ali Smith was kind enough to write to us with some of her favourite words, one of which was a shrewdness of apes, which instantly makes me think of their strangely human faces and wrinkly foreheads.

Some collective nouns are so common that we barely realise that they’re collective nouns – a swarm of bees, for example. Others are familiar but have lost none of their power: think of that pride of lions, holding their heads high, kings of the jungle, or a gaggle of geese cackling away to themselves. And did you know that geese are only a gaggle when on the ground or in water? In flight, they’re a skein of geese: flying in a loose formation, tied together by the thermals we cannot see.

I particularly enjoy obscure collective nouns: a kindle of kittens, warm and soft but sparky as they learn to use their claws; an ambush of tigers, stalking their prey; a skulk of foxes, scavenging in the twilight; a tribe of goats, nomads on the hills.

The collective nouns for birds are my favourites, conveying a cacophony of colours, sounds and moods. Compare a parliament of owls, serious and studious, to a pandemonium of parrots where all hell breaks loose. A watch of nightingales, sentinels of darkness, give way to an exaltation of larks celebrating the new day. A murmuration of starlings go about their business, talking under their breath, and a rafter of turkeys line the barn. In folklore, birds are often regarded as omens, and sinister connotations can be found in a murder of crows and an unkindness of ravens.

Such is our interest in the collective nouns for animals that we’ve listed them in two of our most recent editions: they can be found in The Chambers Thesaurus and in the Language Lovers’ Miscellany included in Chambers Concise Dictionary. Now my aim is find a suitable collective noun for ‘lexicographers’ – I’ve had a lexicon suggested to me and I’m quite partial to a drudge in homage to Samuel Johnson’s irreverent definition of a lexicographer as ‘a harmless drudge’. Answers on a postcard [or suggestions in the comments section], please…

Naomi Farmer

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Lexicography 2.0

The Global Language Monitor recently announced that, according to its calculations, the millionth word in the English language is Web 2.0 (web two point oh), a term popularized several years ago by Tim O'Reilly and friends as a way of describing the maturation of the World Wide Web from its humble text-on-screen beginnings to the interactive, community-driven, multimedia, all-encompassing behemoth that it has now become. This announcement is likely to provoke a lukewarm response from the general public, for whom the term is probably unfamiliar, and amongst web pioneers, who are getting excited about the semantic web (which enables computers to understand the meaning behind web content) and hoping to usher in the era of Web 3.0. And it provides yet another example (along with the language of search engines and mobile phones) of the challenge presented to lexicographers by the rapidly advancing world of technology. The transient nature of such words makes dictionary inclusion a difficult decision. In fact, Web 2.0 didn't make the cut for the recent edition of The Chambers Dictionary.

The term Web 2.0 pays homage to a popular method for naming different versions of software. Traditionally, developers use this numbering scheme to differentiate between minor and significant updates - a version ending in .0 is a completely new version, whereas other numbers represent more subtle improvements. Hence the choice of Web 2.0 rather than Web 1.1 to emphasize that this was a radically new way of thinking about the web. And so the 2.0 suffix joined the family of "e-"s, "i-"s and "-.com"s in creating artefacts of the information age, as it became a somewhat popular way to describe any organization or entity that hopes to re-invent itself with a new, tech savvy identity. Reference has been made to Business 2.0, Government 2.0, Terror 2.0, Church 2.0 and Novel 2.0. But it’s often hard to pin down exactly what these terms mean. How does a book become eligible for the Novel 2.0 label? Could a film adaptation be considered a multimedia novel? Or if interactivity is key, what about "choose your own adventure" style books? At Chambers our concern is with Dictionary 2.0, as online dictionaries, open dictionaries and visual dictionaries provide new opportunities for people to engage with and contribute to the lexicon.

Adopting technical conventions for more conversational purposes is not a new practice. James Harkin's book Cyburbia, published by our friends at Little, Brown, drew my attention to how words like "feedback", "in the loop" and "switched on" were drafted into everyday language from the world of engineering in the middle of the 20th century. More recently, "offline" has been co-opted by businessmen where "taking something offline" means discussing it outside or after a meeting. I'm sure the reader will be able to think of many more examples from other sciences and disciplines, and the list will no doubt expand in years to come as dictionaries try to keep pace.

Even the designation by Global Language Monitor of "Web 2.0" as a word is another cause of lexicographical debate, given that it contains numbers, a space and a full stop. Loosening restrictions on what makes a word is something that we have to deal with 24-7. From the panic of Y2K to the potential of the G20, viewing things in 3-D and listening to MP3s, lexicographers better hope this all doesn't lead to some kind of catch-22 situation.


David Wark

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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

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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

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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

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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 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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Too extreme for words

Some of us at Chambers have banded together to take part in a charity white-water rafting race on Saturday (yes, white-water rafting in Scotland in March – it’s going to be rather chilly). Forming the fundraising group on Facebook meant we had to decide what type of group it was. Sport, undoubtedly, but what category? We plumped for ‘extreme sports’.

Any sport forms a vocabulary of its own with words and meanings unique to it: think of the intense air of excitement a corner conjures up in football compared to the relative drabness of the corner of your living room, or the fundamental differences between a metal fencing piste and a snowy skiing piste. But extreme sports require a vocabulary that is rather more… extreme.

For a start, the language used by extreme sports fanatics tends to be exceedingly earthy. Swearing is often regarded as a sign of a poor vocabulary (even if the delectably filthy Chambers Slang Dictionary would beg to differ), but perhaps there is something about these sports that is too extreme for everyday words, something that transcends the boundaries of polite conversation.

However, it is not just swear words that are employed to try to convey the sheer intensity of the adrenaline rush involved. ‘Wicked’, ‘awesome’, ‘to the max’, ‘gnarly’, ‘sick’, the rather telling ‘mental’ and, of course, ‘extreme’ are just some of the examples that are familiar from modern mainstream usage. If the manoeuvre you had planned didn’t quite work out, you might describe it as ‘carnage’.

While carnage is a frequent occurrence, most people do emerge unscathed. With such dangerous sports, safety is paramount so the worst only happens very rarely. However, when it does, the euphemisms tend to be more polite, more gentle, and rarely found in any sporting glossaries. In skydiving, for example, ‘hooking in’ [a fast, downwards turn performed close to the ground before you land] is very dangerous, and, unlike football, being ‘in the corner’ [performing such a turn too close to the ground] can kill. The phrase no skydiver wants to hear is that one of their friends ‘went in’ at the weekend.

As long as extreme sports remain minority sports, the extreme meanings of these words will remain outside of the mainstream. But that’s probably how they’d like to be. A bit maverick, a bit ‘mental’, and slightly smug that they’re in on something amazing that the rest of us have no idea about.

P.S. The white-water rafting is taking place on Saturday 21st of March in aid of Chest, Heart and Stroke Scotland. If you’re interested in supporting us, the Facebook group is called ‘Chambers Rafting’ and our Justgiving page is justgiving.com/chambersrafting. Thank you!

Naomi Farmer

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The surprising journey of the paternoster

At the University of Sheffield there is a twenty-storey Arts Tower that dominates the skyline and has been said to sway in strong winds. In order to get students to the many floors in time for lectures the building uses a paternoster, a lift that consists of 38 cars moving on a continuous belt, so that passengers must ascend and alight with just the right timing at their chosen floor.

It is common knowledge at the university that paternoster comes from the Latin for 'Our Father'. Indeed, the Latin 'pater' can be seen as the stem of words such as paternal and paternity, and survives in the Italian and Spanish for father, 'padre'. Yet how such a strange contraption should have been given this name seems at first to be baffling.

However, the entry paternoster in The Chambers Dictionary revealing the word's many applications, structured chronologically to list the uses in the order that each came about, soon sheds light on its interesting derivation. As 'Our Father' are the first words of the Lord's Prayer, so Paternoster became used to refer to the prayer itself. In turn this became applied to the large beads of a rosary that would be clutched with the telling of the Lord's Prayer, and then the rosary itself. Parallels between the structure of the rosary and other items strung in this way led to paternoster being applied to anything constructed like this, such as a fishing-line with hooks at intervals. This, coupled with the continuous movement of the rosary between the fingers during prayer, led to its application to the continuously moving paternoster lift, with its intermittent cars reminiscent of the threaded rosary.

While the paternoster at the University of Sheffield is the tallest in the United Kingdom, others that remain functioning exist at the universities of Essex and Leicester and in a Rolls-Royce building in Derby, as well as in public and private buildings throughout Europe. Yet the perceived health and safety risks and associated accidents mean that the construction of new paternosters is no longer allowed in many countries, and many existing lifts are being taken out of service and covered over. One can simply hope that should use of paternosters decline, the fascinating etymology of their name will not be forgotten.

Deborah Smith

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Is it a bird...? Is it a plane...?

The film adaptation of the 1980s comic book series Watchmen is released in cinemas this Friday and highlights an increasing trend in the popularity of superhero blockbusters. After the seemingly unstoppable success of recent films starring such comic book characters as X-Men, Spiderman, Hulk and Superman, and the critical acclaim of 2008 Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight, it is unsurprising that films of this genre continue to be released and to draw huge audiences.

Yet while highly imaginative fictional creations, the classic heroes of these stories are often less than original when it comes to the linguistic inventiveness of their names. The animal characteristics that distinguish Spiderman, Catwoman and Wolverine provide their obvious inspiration, while the physical traits of Iron Man and Hulk, or abilities of Storm, Magneto, Iceman and Pyro are reflected in their superhero aliases. Captain America exhibits patriotism in the extreme, while Wonder Woman's pseudonym simply exudes magnificence and the Fantastic Four inspire marvel. The characters of Watchmen are more creative, for example the mysterious Rorschach is named after the psychological inkblot test, or the ingenious and enterprising Ozymandias takes an alternative name for Rameses II, often considered Egypt's most powerful pharaoh.

For many, the traditional, definitive superhero is the one with arguably the least inventive name of all, Superman. Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shushter in 1933, Superman first appeared as a comic book character in 1938, marking the beginning of the superhero comic book genre. Yet the etymology of the word reveals a surprisingly academic origin. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche first coined the term in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883. Nietzsche wrote of an Übermensch, which roughly translates to superman, as representing an ideal man and a goal for humanity to reach. Later adopted by George Bernard Shaw in the play Man and Superman, and of course developed by Siegel and Shushter to become the Superman we know today, Nietzsche's superman was an ambition, a theoretical possibility, and ultimately the meaning of life.

So perhaps the recent obsession with the superhero is indicative of a collective quest for higher meaning. Or maybe we all just wish we could fly. But please, let's not go jumping off any roofs trying to achieve Nietzsche's goal for humanity. That's probably not quite what he had in mind.

Deborah Smith

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'Tis the season to be joco

January 25^th was the birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland’s most renowned poet, and it was celebrated with the customary ‘Burns suppers’ of haggis, whisky, and lively conversation. This year there was unprecedented revelry, as the 250^th anniversary of the birth of the Bard of Alloway is being commemorated by a special ‘year of Homecoming’ in Scotland.

The legend of Burns’s personality and lifestyle – and the image that most readily springs to mind is that of a rather rakish ‘ladies’ man’ – sometimes detracts from the value of his poetry. It can’t be denied that through his poetry, Burns did much to preserve the idioms and vocabulary of Scots. Very many people in Scotland, whether or not they are particularly familiar with Scots language, will be well acquainted with words like sonsie and sleekit from Burns’s works ‘Address to a Haggis’ and ‘To a Mouse’.

Not all of the words that we can identify as Scottish are known to every Scot, given the different derivations and regional variation in usage of these words. Cailleach (an old woman) and clachan (a small village) are Gaelic in origin, while quine (a girl) comes from the Doric of North-east Scotland. But every Scot will know some distinctively Scottish words that express an idea succinctly and are very satisfying to say, for example fouter (pronounced ‘footer’, meaning to mess around aimlessly), wabbit (tired out), capernoity (irritable or giddy) and, of course, clishmaclaver.

Many of the words that Scots like best of all are those that have a unique meaning in the English spoken here in Scotland. If a Scot says he is ‘getting the messages’, he doesn’t mean that he is receiving communications from the afterlife, he just means he is going for his shopping. If you ‘uplift’ someone or something, you don’t have to elevate them, but you might collect them from somewhere. And one which bemuses many: if you ‘clap’ a dog, you are not abusing the poor animal or even giving it a round of applause, you are simply giving it a friendly pat. It is such differences in usage that make the English language so rich; all its subtleties would take more than one lifetime to learn.

Mary O'Neill

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Welcome to the Chambers Editors’ Blog!

Welcome to our very first Chambers blog, where you will be able to read the Chambers editorial team's musings on lexicographic and linguistic topics (and probably a few other things besides). Clishmaclaver struck us as an apt title, as the home of Chambers has always been in Edinburgh, Scotland, and clishmaclaver is what is known around these parts as 'a good Scottish word'.

When I tell people that I am a dictionary editor, it usually elicits an enthusiastic response, and not a little envy. To work so closely with words is clearly on many people's 'dream jobs' list, and so I am reminded that I am in a very privileged position. Some of the words we find ourselves working with in The Chambers Dictionary are, and I say this without overstatement, superb. No matter how familiar you become with the text, you still find some new delight every time you venture in. My own current favourites? Tosticated, meaning 'perplexed', and galimatias, a lovely synonym for 'nonsense'.

Making the dictionary available online has brought a whole new dimension to our work as lexicographers. The gap of years before we could add a collection of new material – or even a single new word – is no longer, and now we only have to hold off for a few months before we bring in the latest crop of good candidates. Like the profession of lexicography as a whole, this is a challenge as well as a pleasure, but we have the satisfaction of knowing that we are keeping our dictionary at the cutting edge of vocabulary coverage.

Mary O'Neill

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