The virtual linguist

Swivel-eyed loons

A close associate of David Cameron apparently called Tory party activists "swivel-eyed loons". Swivel-eyed originally referred to squinting, but modern references are always related to people who are wacky or bonkers, particularly right-wingers. One of the citations in the OED for the entry 'barmy army' is "During the 1995 Tory leadership contest it was Collins who described John Redwood's campaign team as a ‘swivel-eyed barmy army’". That citation is from 2002 (Collins was a spokesman for John Major, and the quotation continued with ".. from Ward 8 at Broadmoor"). Another example, the phrase "“swivel eyed Daily Mail reading loon” appeared on this BBC forum last year.

 

Loon has several different senses. Actually, the sense meant in the phrase "swivel-eyed loons" is not mentioned on the loon page, but is closer to loony, which is short for lunatic. Loony is defined as "extremist, fanatical" and, ironically, became frequently used to refer to the "loony left" in the 1970s and 80s. One of the definitions of loon itself is "A boor, lout, clown; an untaught, ill-bred person", and is described by the OED as Scottish or northern English.

 

Loon is also an aquatic bird. The OED says that here loon developed from the word loom, a word from the Shetland dialect, and ultimately from Old Norse.

 

If you were around in the 1970s you may remember wearing loons ie flared cotton trousers. The noun loons developed from the 1960s verb 'to loon', meaning to lounge around or spend one's time pleasurably. The origin of this sense is unknown.

Womb man

There is a piece on the Quiverfull movement on the BBC website today. The term Quiverfull is a reference to Psalm 127, and the lines "As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them".

 

Quiverfulls believe in having lots of children. One of the gurus of the movement is Nancy Campbell, whose organisation is called Above Rubies. As mentioned in the BBC article, Campbell likes to cite the 1928 edition of Webster's dictionary, which states that the word woman is a combination of womb plus man, therefore a woman is 'a man with a womb' or 'a womb man' (she says it on this page of Above Rubies website).

 

This is not the current understanding of the derivation of woman. The word woman developed from the Old English wifman (which had various spellings), where the i was pronounced /iː/, like the ea sound in the modern weave. Wifman was made up of the words wif + man, where wif was a woman (as in Chaucer's Wife of Bath, or a fishwife, housewife etc) and man was a person of either sex. Over the centuries the long /iː/ (ea) vowel sound, said with open, spread lips, was affected by the w sound in front of it, said with the lips rounded and forward, and by the f sound after it, articulated at the front of the mouth, and so the vowel also came to be pronounced with rounder lips. The f of wifman gradually disappeared, in a process similar to what happens when people say 'give me' quickly ie the v disappears and it becomes gimme.

 

Womb is another word that has been around since Old English times, but it is unrelated to wifman. Womb has cognates in other Germanic languages eg Old Frisian wamme, Old Danish vom, Old Swedish vamb, Gothic wamba and means belly or uterus. Today it means uterus, but over the centuries the term womb has also been used to refer to the abdomen, chest, stomach, chamber of the heart, and bowel.

 

Quack

Oxford Dictionaries Online's Word of the Day yesterday was quack. I discovered that quack meaning fake doctor was originally an abbreviation of the earlier quacksalver, whose first recorded use was in 1579. The OED tells us that this longer word was very common in the 17th century, and only later was largely superseded by the shorter quack.

 

The word comes from the Dutch kwakzalver. It possibly came from the Dutch kwak, meaning scrap or rubbish (zalver is related to the English salve, and means one who uses ointments). Kwak here is from the Dutch verb kwakken, to fling down. Or, another suggestion has been put forward for the etymology, namely that it is from another Dutch verb kwaken, to croak, squawk or quack. The link is that medical quacks aggressively touted their cures.

 

There was also once in common use a corresponding verb to quack, which meant, in the words of the OED: "to advertise, palm off, or sell like a quack cure; to promote or boost (a person or thing) with fraudulent or exaggerated claims".

 

The verb to quack, with reference to ducks, first appeared in the 16th century. There are very similar words for the sound ducks make in all Germanic languages. There was an earlier (14th century) word, to queck, meaning the same. In the 19th century quackle and quake were used of ducks, too.

 

All in all, there are six separate entries for quack in the OED. The earliest meaning is "a state of hoarseness or croakiness in the throat". Chaucer used the phrase 'on the quack' (he wrote 'quake') in the 1390s in The Reeve's Tale. Quack is also short for quackgrass, which is couchgrass.

 

 

Texas German

Texas German is spoken by the fifth and sixth generations of early German immigrants to Texas. In interviews with some of these people in a BBC piece (here), we discover that future generations of these families are unlikely to continue to speak German. The people interviewed (probably in their sixties) said that they had spoken nothing but German in the family when they were children, but after the War many Texan Germans preferred to speak English to their children.

 

Professor Hans Boas of the Linguistics Department of the University of Texas has been recording the speech of Texan Germans, and has established that a) there are many variations within the language - the German of no two speakers is identical, and b) it is different from the German spoken in Germany. Mouth movements have been affected by the speakers' knowledge of English, and English vocabulary has crept into the language, as in the sentence "Die Kuh ist über die fence gejumpt" (the cow jumped over the fence).

 

Here's the short description and video.

Power verbs

Regular reader Alan emailed me details of a book he'd found in his local library - Power Verbs for Job Seekers. I'm grateful to Alan - especially as this blog post is mostly the result of cutting and pasting from his email.

 

The right verbs, according to the author (a business school professor):
• make you unforgettable
• powerfully demonstrate your value
• attract employers like moths to flame

 

Some of the verbs, eg abound, earmark, postulate could be described as useful to know - although whether they are 'power verbs' as such is a different matter. However, I cannot help imagining that the likeliest response to someone using some of the verbs or sentences in the book would be 'what a pretentious berk!' Here are some of the examples, kindly supplied by Alan:

One good quarterly report has not absterged the concern of investors
He lucubrated by dedicating himself to nearly constant learning
The external auditors oppunged our accounting records
The emergency data centre imbricated out in-house data centre during the blackout
Too many people have styleflexed their communications styles (a comment which, as Alan says, can be made of the author of this book!)
This ingenious marketing plan recrudesced this slumbering organisation
If she had not titivated she would not have felt as confident for the presentation

 

Alan kindly looked up some of these words in the dictionary, but couldn't find some, even in the OED (eg oppunge and lucubrate). The only one of the above group I had heard of - and probably used - is titivate, but when I think of someone titivating I think of them standing in front of a mirror fussily patting their hair or powdering their nose. This book claims 'titivate' means 'dress up smartly'.

Dothraki

The inventor of Dothraki, an invented language spoken by a group in the television series Game of Thrones, appeared on Radio 4's Today programme yesterday (listen for a few more days here).

 

David Peterson of the Language Creation Society said it took him between three and four months to devise the language, first organising the grammar, and then fleshing out the vocabulary. It has around 3,700 words. He said that the television producers initially had no intention of writing a whole new organised language, instead thinking that the actors could just utter gibberish. There are two problems with taking this approach. One is that, in this case, the producers and director did not like the end result, and the other is that many fans of cult series notice every little detail, such as someone saying the same words that are translated in the subtitles as meaning something different each time.

 

There is a little bit of spoken Dothraki on the BBC clip. There is more information about the make-up of the language - sounds, grammar etc - on its Wikipedia page.

Dog's letter

The Oxford English Dictionary's word of the day today was dog's letter, defined as "A name for the letter R (from its resemblance in sound to the snarl of a dog)".

 

It got me wondering which other letters of the alphabet had a nickname. There's the NATO phonetic alphabet, of course, plus the names of the letters linked to their sounds (bee, em etc), but nothing as picturesque as 'dog's letter'.

 

There is a term in the OED for the letter C with a cedilla, and that is ceceril. There's also the obsolete essefirme, a letter S. Upsilon is the Greek letter Υ, υ, representing the vowel u, and izzard is an old word for the letter Z.

 

Researching the topic in the Dictionary earlier, I came across these other letter-related words, which I shall try and squeeze into my conversations this week ...

 lambdacism: A too frequent repetition of the letter L in speaking or writing.

metacism: a definition from Ogilvie's Imperial Dictionary is given in one of the citations - "the too frequent use of the letter M".

 

And I also like the definition from another dictionary (the American Dictionary of the English Language by Joseph Emerson Worcester), given among the citations at the balbuties entry: "vicious pronunciation, in which b and l are substituted for other consonants".

Idler Academy Bad Grammar Awards

An open letter from a group of academics to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, won the inaugural Bad Grammar Award, sponsored by the Idler Academy, last week. The judges objected to a number of phrases in the letter, including "demands too much too young", on the grounds that 'young' can't be an adverb. I must say that the phrase doesn't sound too bad to me -- I am probably remembering the 1979 Specials song, Too Much Too Young. Perhaps that influenced the writers of the letter, too. It's a lot more catchy than the version suggested by Nevile Gwynne, one of the judges - 'demands too much when children are too young to be ready for so much'.

 

Runners-up were Tesco for "for using adjectives as nouns and failing to put hyphens in the right place", and London Transport for "mixing gerunds and infinitives on a safety sign".

 

I have looked in vain for the actual examples of these crimes on the Idler website (here - it's interesting and worth a look), so I can't repeat them. Nor, are they in the Guardian article, where I got the rest of my information from.

 

Actually, there are no set rules for hyphenation in English, and it is notoriously difficult to specify what part of speech some words are, so the judges' were merely expressing their opinion.

 

Here's the story.

Volcano

The OED published its latest additions at the end of last month, and Chief Editor John Simpson highlights a group of 'volcano-related' words in an article on the OED site (here).

 

The earliest word in English that described what we now call a volcano was vulcan, first used with this sense in the early 15th century, but the word was known much earlier as the name of the Roman god of fire and metalworking. By the 17th century the word vulcan had also gained the meaning of metalworker or blacksmith, and also of cuckold, particularly where the husband in question was a blacksmith. Volcan started to be used in the late 16th century to mean a volcano, and volcano, itself, which by the 18th century had become the established spelling, entered English a few years later in the early 17th century. The words have their origin in Latin (the volcan spelling came from Spanish). As Simpson says in his article, it is not surprising that such mountains were given foreign names, since they are not English phenomena.

 

Vulcan has always been in the OED, but a new sense has gone within the last few weeks, namely the fictional alien race from Star Trek.

Internet words

I blogged recently on the book Netymology. Its author Tom Chatfield had a piece in The Guardian about the history of some internet words that are included in the book. They are a mixed bag - from the Sanskrit origins of the word avatar to the word meme, coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976. The word spam became ubiquitous on the internet, thanks to an old Monty Python surreal sketch (see on YouTube here). Geeks were originally travelling circus performers who bit the heads off live chickens, and troll comes from the French verb troller, meaning to wander round while hunting.

 

Here's the Guardian piece, entitled The 10 best words the internet has given English.