The virtual linguist

Cougar

A cougar is a woman of a certain age who dates much younger men. The term is more common in the USA (think Demi Moore) than here in the UK - the term, mind you, not the phenomenon. I first came across the word in this sense in today's Daily Mail in one of the reader's comments to this article about Wendy Salisbury, author of The Toyboy Diaries (see Barbara's comment at 08.11 for the word 'cougar'). The Daily Mail had another article about cougars a couple of weeks ago.

The word has been around for a few years. Wikipedia says it was coined in Western Canada. There was a 2007 film called The Cougar Club; Faye Dunaway and Carrie Fisher played two of the cougars. There are also dating agencies with names like Go Cougar, Cougar Dating, Cougar Fling. I'm not posting links - I'll leave it to your imagination!

Select Committee hearing on politicians' language

The Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) is holding a public hearing today on the language used by politicians (details here) in response to the increasing number of complaints from members of the public regarding the 'impenetrable' jargon used by MPs. Some people claim that the politicians have been influenced by the business sector, which has plenty of jargon of its own, while those who are more cynical say it is a deliberate policy of obfuscation on the part of politicians.

In a discussion on this subject on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, Evan Davis interviewed Matthew Parris and Professor David Crystal, both of whom will be giving evidence at today's hearing (you can listen again for another week if you go to the Today home page for 9 July - it's here at the moment, but this page is always the latest edition, so will have been updated by tomorrow; scroll down to 08.42). As an example of impenetrable gobbledegook, they replayed a recent interview with government minister Liam Byrne, who said this:

"[...] and if power is pointing up for the decade ahead, power has to point out, which is why we need a change of gear and a power-shift."

Top ten 'bad-boy' names

Adolescent boys with unpopular, uncommon or 'girlish' first names are more likely to be delinquents, according to a study carried out by an American economist (see here). This study bears out previous studies, which have found, for instance, that people judge boys' masculinity and trustworthiness from their names, and that parents with fewer years of education are more likely to give their children unpopular names. Another study showed that boys with unpopular names are more likely to be living in a single-parent household. All of these studies are American, by the way.

It's not the name per se that causes the criminal behaviour. In some cases, a negative reaction from others causes the young man to have lower self-esteem. If a young man has a name that makes his ethnic group clear, this can sometimes lower his job prospects, which might be related to a drift into criminal activity.

The top ten bad-boy names (listed in alphabetical order), according to the latest study are Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell and Walter.

An unusual name did not harm Barack Obama, it must be said.

David Crystal on Radio 4's Midweek

In case you missed it, Professor David Crystal was one of Libby Purves' guests on Radio 4's Midweek this morning. He spoke about linguistics as both an art and a science, about his fondness for puns and related an amusing anecdote from his newly published memoir-cum-autobiography Just a Phrase I'm Going Through.

You can listen again for another week here. Professor Crystal enters the conversation about 25 minutes in. 

Blow-dried

Collins Dictionary gives blow-dried as the past tense of the verb 'to blow-dry'. That's fine; I can accept sentences such as 'He blow-dried my hair' or 'She looks as if her hair has been blow-dried'. I have a problem when 'hair' is replaced by 'it'. With phrasal verbs (yes, I know 'blow-dry' isn't a phrasal verb, but it strikes me as being similar), 'it' usually comes between the two parts of the verb:

I put up my hair in a bun, but ... I put it up in a bun

I picked up my dry cleaning, but ... I picked it up

I put on my hat, but ... I put it on

I was talking to my daughter about blow-drying my hair (frivolous creatures that we are!) and had to think for a moment; 'I blow-dried it' didn't sound right; I felt 'I blew it dry' sounded better. That, however, contradicts Collins' and the OED's version of the past tense. It also means that I had converted a hyphenated word into two distinct words to form the past tense. I stand by my version however (funnily enough, I'd never say "I stand it by"; in this instance "I stand by it" sounds perfectly ok to me). 'I froze them dry' sounds odd, too, as a replacement for 'I freeze-dried the vegetables'.

On the subject of the verb 'blow', whose past tense is 'blew' ... the unusual past tense form 'blowed' is used in certain expressions eg Well, I'll be blowed!, which is an expression of suprise, and 'I'm blowed if ...(I can find ...)', which means 'I just can't (find)'.

Historical thesaurus to be published

The world's largest thesaurus - and first historical thesaurus - will be unveiled to academics tomorrow, and will be published in the autumn. It has taken over 40 years to compile, and contains over 600,000 words organised into over 230,000 categories and sub-categories. The words span 1300 years.

The historical nature of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary means that we will know what words were available at what time to talk about what particular concept. So, we will be able to discover what people called 'trousers' in various centuries, or what the synonyms of 'nice' were at different times.

The Oxford team used Roget's categories to start with, but eventually scrapped that idea, as they weren't detailed enough. Although Roget compiled a very influential thesaurus in 1852, if you buy a Roget's Thesaurus these days, it doesn't necessarily have any connection with that eminent lexicographer; the name Roget is in the public domain.

For more information on the new thesaurus, see here and here.

Slander of Women

The 1891 Slander of Women Act is still on the statute book in 2009, as I discovered when I was trawling through the UK Statute Law Database - a fascinating pursuit. It's a very short Act, which states:

Words spoken and published which impute unchastity or adultery to any woman or girl shall not require special damage to render them actionable.
Provided always, that in any action for words spoken and made actionable by this Act, a plaintiff shall not recover more costs than damages, unless the judge shall certify that there was reasonable ground for bringing the action. (see here)

I'm no lawyer, but I think this means that women do not have to have suffered financial loss as a result of the insults in order to sue the slanderer. However, any compensation (costs) the woman receives as a result of going to court, will not exceed any financial damage she has suffered.

If anybody would like to slander me or any other woman, I advise you to go to Scotland to do so - the Act does not apply there!

Nostalgie de la boue

"... there's no limit to the public's taste for nostalgie de la boue" are the last few words of Joan Smith's column in today's Independent on Sunday.

Nostalgie de la boue is French for 'nostalgia for the mud'. This is the Oxford English Dictionary's definition: "A longing for sexual or social degradation; a desire to regress to more primitive social conditions or behaviour than those to which a person is accustomed. Also in extended use." Joan Smith's article is about the 'great' train robber Ronnie Biggs, who is often portrayed in the media as a rather cuddly rogue, rather than a violent criminal. She mentions other gangsters who have been romanticised eg the Krays.

Other instances of nostalgie de la boue are the Lady Chatterley syndrome, where genteel women fall for 'a bit of rough'. When Constance confesses to her husband that she is pregnant with Mellors' child he rails at her about the 'beastly lowness of women' and then goes on to say:

'That proves that what I've always thought about you is correct: you're not normal, you're not in your right senses. You're one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue.'

The expression nostalgie de la boue was first used in the 1855 play Le Mariage d'Olympe by French playwright Emile Augier. A former courtesan marries a nobleman and tries to pass herself off as a lady, but she cannot escape her craving for her previous base tastes. Here are the relevant speeches from Act I:

LE MARQUIS: Mettez un canard sur un lac au milieu des cygnes, vous verrez qu'il regrettera sa mare et finira par y retourner. (Put a duck on a lake in the middle of swans, and you'll see that he will miss his pond and end up going back there)

MONTRICHARD: La nostalgie de la boue!

Misjudged full stop traps a murderer

The suicide note began "Dear Garry. I am typing this note, because I know that if I were to hand write it and leave it for you, then I know that you wouldn't read it". The use of the full stop after Garry, instead of a comma, which most people would write, convicted Garry of the murder of his wife. Garry was a police inspector and forged the suicide note, using wording he had seen on genuine notes throughout his career, but he failed to spot the misjudged full stop. He went on to kill himself when he was rumbled about 18 months ago, but this story was only in the Daily Mail yesterday.

The Mail article is about forensic linguistics, and expert John Olsson (this is his Forensic Linguistics Institute site). People have particular idiosyncrasies when writing or texting and forensic linguists can say whether a piece of text is likely to have been written by a certain person or not. Their evidence alone won't convict people, but it can support other evidence. In the case above, Garry's wife tended to use lots of commas, dashes and semi-colons in her writing, whereas her husband used short sentences and lots of full stops.

Olssen analysed texts sent from a young woman's mobile phone, purporting to be her own words saying she had run away from home willingly. The texts used the phrase 'ave 2 go', whereas Jenny, the young woman, always wrote 'ave2go' without spaces. Similar abbreviations were found in texts sent from Jenny's phone after her disappearance and her boyfriend's phone. He stood trial for her murder.

Forensic linguists tracked down an American kidnapper from a regional word he used in his ransom note. I blogged on that story here.

Shilling

An Americanism that I've noticed creeping into British English is the verb shill, often seen as shilling. It means to review a product positively as if you are an unbiased purchaser, when in fact the whole purpose of your review is to persuade people to buy, or to increase your star rating on internet sites.

This recent BBC article explains the phenomenon, which was in the news because the publisher Elsevier had offered academics $25 Amazon vouchers if they would review a certain textbook favourably on Amazon. 'Shill reviewing' was put in inverted commas in the article as the BBC recognised it was an unusual term - it was an American story they were commenting on. A quick search on Google UK shows that the expression shill bidding comes up a fair bit, in connection with eBay and other auction sites. It means making phoney bids to drive up the price or create a bidding war.

Shill is in British desk-size dictionaries. In the New Oxford Dictionary of English it is marked North American and informal and the definition of shill as a noun is "an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others". The origin of the word is unknown, but some sources say it is from Yiddish.

Thanks to Helen for drawing my attention to the BBC article.