The virtual linguist

Rock and roll

I heard a snippet of the BBC Radio 4 programme Payola, the Pluggers and the Father of Rock and Roll (the full programme is available for a few more days here) on this evening's Pick of the Week. The programme was mainly about the payola scandal, namely the practice of disc jockeys accepting bribes to give certain records air time, but the DJ mentioned, Alan Freed, was responsible for the term rock and roll as applied to music.

In the 1940s Freed was a disc jockey at a white-owned US radio station. He found the usual output of the station boring so began to play some records of his own, which were numbers by African-American artistes. He called the music rock and roll to avoid telling his bosses and the white listeners that the bands were African-American. Freed did not invent the term rock and roll; in African-American slang it meant sex (or, as the BBC presenter called it rumpy-pumpy, which, coincidentally I blogged about a couple of days ago), but he is credited with popularising the term. 

In-laws

There was an interesting post this week over at Language Log on the meaning of 'brother-in-law' and whether it can be used to describe the relationship between the husbands of two sisters, even though they themselves are not actually related at all. Several commentators felt that the term brother-in-law was fine to use this way. 

I was going to comment that Russian has different words for the English brother-in-law, sister-in-law, mother-in-law etc depending on whether the relative was related to the man or the woman, but someone had already said the same thing (Karen, whose comment is 12.21am on November 20). I say "was related" as some of these words are dropping out of the Russian language, and many Russians don't know them these days.

Words survive in a language for as long as we need them, but when society or cultural practices change, the need for the words disappears. In a patriarchal society (as tsarist Russia was) the side of the family you were on -- the husband's or the wife's -- was significant and made a difference to your status within the family, hence the need for separate words.

When I was teaching English in Libya in the early 1980s, a student asked me one day for the name of his mother's brother in English (the relationship, he meant). I answered "He's your uncle". "No, he isn't", he replied, "my uncle is my father's brother". "Yes, it's the same thing", I continued, which he found absolutely impossible to comprehend because, of course, in that society, your father's brother and your mother's brother are not the same thing and do not have the same position in the family.

As I said, the different Russian words are dropping out of the language because the significance of being a paternal or maternal relative no longer has any relevance today. One of the first relationship terms to disappear -- you sometimes read it in 19th-century novels, but it's not even in dictionaries these days -- is yatrov' or yatrovka which is the wife of your husband's brother. That is clearly an important relationship in a patriarchal society -- two women who have married brothers and are therefore two outsiders, who perhaps feel a common bond with each other for this reason.

Words of the decade

A private company, Global Language Monitor, which monitors language use on the internet, including in blogs and social networking sites, has published a list of the most-used 'words' in the past decade. Global warming tops the list, followed by 9/11, Obama, bailout, evacuee, derivative, Google, surge, Chinglish and tsunami.

The company has also produced a list of most-used phrases and 'climate change' tops this group. I cannot understand why 'global warming' belongs to the word list and 'climate change' to the phrase group, since both expressions consist of two words. Some people might argue that 9/11 isn't a word, either.

The list is skewed by the fact that most of the words were heavily used during one particular year in the past decade; evacuee relates to Hurricane Katrina, Chinglish is there because of last year's Beijing Olympics and tsunami because of the devastating tsunami of 2004.

Spartan and laconic

This morning's In Our Time on Radio 4 was devoted to the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta (you can listen to the programme for another week here). Most people know that it is from this place that we get the current meaning of spartan, namely 'indifferent to comfort or luxury'. The Spartans were warriors, and boys were removed from their families to be brought up in male communities. Their training involved having to forage for food, kill as many of the enemy Helots as possible and undergo various privations.

What I didn't know, but discovered from the programme, was that the word laconic, meaning 'of few words', has the same origin. Another name for Sparta was Lacedaemon and the wider region around the city was called Laconia. Since the Spartans were a self-disciplined lot, they didn't waste time on idle chatter. One of the OED's definitions of laconic is 'Spartan-like'.

Rumpy-pumpy

One of the front-runners for the post of president of the EU is Belgian prime minister Herman van Rompuy. Predictably, the poor man has been the butt of many jokes in the British media and the word rumpy-pumpy often creeps into reports about him -- even John Humphrys said it on the Today programme this morning. 

Rumpy-pumpy means sexual intercourse. It is a humorous word and is not disrespectful. There are lots of words in British English meaning the same thing and in the same register: hanky-panky, slap and tickle, nookie, how's your father, for instance. The use of such humorous euphemisms no doubt says a lot about British attitudes towards sex!

Rumpy-pumpy comes from the word rump ie bottom or hind-quarters. The word arse, or, as said in the US, ass, means exactly the same thing as rump, but this is vulgar and disrespectful.

The words rumpy-pumpy and hanky-panky are examples of a linguistic phenomenon called reduplication, where a word or syllable is repeated. Such words in English are usually informal eg hocus-pocus, razzle-dazzle.

Arugula or rocket

When I was on holiday in California recently I kept seeing arugula mentioned on menus. I had to order a dish to discover that it was what we in the UK call rocket, a salad leaf with a long history. According to the OED it is also known as hedge mustard.

Although the words arugula and rocket look completely different, they are both ultimately from the Latin word eruca, a type of downy-stemmed cabbage.

The other type of rocket ie a projectile, comes from another Italian word, rocca, which means a distaff or spindle used for spinning, a device which was shaped like modern rockets.

Unfriend named word of the year

The New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen 'unfriend' as its word of the year. Unfriend is a verb and means to remove someone from your list of 'friends' on Facebook and other social networking sites.

This is the first time in several years that the winning word has not been environment-related. 2008's word of the year was hypermiling, 2007's was locavore and in 2006 the number one place was taken by carbon neutral.

Here are some other finalists for the accolade:

intexticated: when people are distracted by texting when driving

sexting: sending sexually explicit messages and pictures over your mobile phone

deleb: a dead celebrity

netbook: a very small laptop computer with limited memory

More words and more on the story here.

Endangered language projects

The latest newsletter from the Endangered Language Fund dropped into my Inbox this morning (it can be read here). It contains details of the projects which have recently been awarded grants by the Fund. Several of the projects concern North American Indian languages, including Karuk, spoken in California, Potawatomi, spoken in Wisconsin, Kansas and Oklahoma and Anishinabemowin, spoken as a native language now by fewer than five people in Michigan.

Grants have also been awarded to two South American languages, Shiwilu, spoken by a handful of elderly people in Peru and Akuntsu, spoken by a handful of monolinguals in Brazil. Apart from those, projects concerning a minority language in China, Samadu and a language in Papua New Guinea, Aruamu, with about 10,000 speakers, will receive grants, in the case of Aruamu, to teach children to read the language and provide materials (an alphabet has only recently been developed).

Language of texting to feature in English GCSE

The etiquette and grammar of text messaging is to be included in the English Language GCSE exam, taken by pupils at the age of 16. Students will apparently be tested on common abbreviations (more on the story here).

I must say that I find that text messages I receive don't have many abbreviations these days -- certainly not as many as when texting first became popular. In fact, I find that I use more abbreviated words eg c u l8er and thx, than the people I correspond with, because I do not use predictive texting. I turned off that facility on my mobile phone as it drove me mad -- it never predicted the words I wanted to write, but always came up with a suggestion that I would never want to say (as I mentioned in this post). Even so, if I type wed, the phone will finish off the word for me and write wednesday, if I type lon it will fill in london.

Predictive texting sometimes makes texts I receive difficult to understand as people tend not to reread what their mobile has written automatically. 'He' keeps coming up instead of 'if', I find, and 'of' instead of 'me'.

Pope as a verb

On Radio 4's Broadcasting House this morning in a trailer for a later news programme, Edward Stourton referred to 'Anglicans who pope' (at just over 31 minutes into the programme which you can hear for another week here). Broadcasting House's presenter Paddy O'Connell asked whether pope can be a verb, which was a question I was wondering when I heard it, too.

Indeed there is a verb to pope. It has a modern meaning (since 20th century) of 'to convert to Roman Catholicism', according to the OED. The dictionary says this is a colloquial use and all instances of pope in the three citations given are in inverted commas. Before the 20th century the verb to pope meant 'to act as a pope or the Pope' (and still does); it was also possible to say 'pope it' to mean the same thing.