The virtual linguist

Nonage and dotage

We still talk quite frequently of someone being in their dotage, albeit often humorously, but the word nonage has fallen out of fashion. I came across it when I was reading Shakespeare's Richard III - when Edward dies and the citizens worry who will become king, one of them refers to the king's son, still a minor:

In him there is a hope of government:
That in his nonage council under him,
And in his full and ripened years himself,
No doubt shall then, and till then, govern well.

 

Nonage is made up of the negative word non (= lack of) + age and meant 'the state of being under full legal age'. Dotage is from dote + age, dote meaning folly or weakness of mind.

 

Now obsolete, the words boyage, child-age, adultage, infantage and barnage (from bairn, a Scottish or northern English word for 'child') are in the OED. As for what comes between nonage and dotage, well it's the also now-obsolete man-age, defined in the OED as "the age at which a boy becomes a man; the adult period of a man's life". (Needless to say, women don't get a look in in the dictionary.)

Shamefaced

I'm just off out to the Globe Theatre in London to see Richard III performed in Mandarin, part of the Globe's international season (here's a short BBC news video about it).

 

I don't know Mandarin, so I have been swotting up on the play and reading an annotated edition. I discovered that the word shamefaced, first recorded in the mid-16th century, was actually an etymological misinterpretation of the much older (it goes back to the earliest days of Old English) shamefast, last used, according to the OED, in the 19th century. The definition is 'bashful or modest', and was originally intended to be a positive word. Unshamefast is also in the Dictionary, meaning 'immodest'. The original meaning of fast was 'restrained', but the OED says it was a common adjectival suffix in Old English (e.g. the word handfast once meant 'espoused or betrothed', soothfast meant 'truthful' and the word steadfast dates back to OE times).

Slacks banished from New Yorker magazine

Readers of the New Yorker have voted 'slacks' as the word which most needs to be banished from the English language. I am surprised at that, as I didn't realise anyone still said 'slacks' - I thought it was an old-fashioned word when my mother and her generation said it in the 1960s.

 

Other words nominated were epic, irregardless, actually, awesome and literally. Some people suggested eliminating the New Yorker's own favourite words, such as focussing and spectre. The word moist was cited by about 10% of respondents.

 

Here's the story.

Mass Observation

There was a piece on the Radio 4 Today programme last week (listen again for a couple more days here - scroll down to 07:38) about the Mass Observation project, that was begun in the 1930s, and that set out to observe the conversation of ordinary people in Britain in order to understand them better. Volunteer correspondents were asked to report on all sorts of things - people's behaviour at war memorials, gestures made by motorists, bathroom behaviour and such like.

 

The questions asked by the correspondents are as revealing about the 1930s as the answers. One fascinating area was people's attitudes to different words, and how these were regarded as class markers. For instance one question asked whether people used certain words, and if not, what did they think when others used them. The words included cheerio, okey-dokey, toodle-oo, not half, old boy, chum, pal, ta and mate. A 47-year-old male park-keeper replied that he felt uneasy if addressed as pal, chum or old boy as he felt the other person was talking down to him.

 

The interview is at 07:38 on this page, and here is the website of the Mass Observation archive.

Banned words during the Olympics

Pub landlords won't be able to put up signs saying "Watch the London Games (or Olympic Games) here" and organisations won't be able to put on exhibitions with the words "summer 2012" or "London 2012" in the name during this summer's Olympics. Restrictions on mentioning any brands that are not official Games sponsors will be in force, and athletes have been told not to be seen with, or mention, Pepsi Cola or Nike, for instance, which are not official sponsors.

 

Using the words Games, Twenty-Twelve, 2012, or Two Thousand and Twelve, in conjunction with one of these words - London, medals, sponsors, summer, gold, silver or bronze - is also banned.

 

Games organisers are keen to avoid 'ambush marketing', which is where companies associate themselves with a particular event, without paying any of the fees associated with sponsorship.

Omnishambles

The latest political buzzword is omnishambles, used by Ed Miliband to describe the government. The word omnishambles was coined in the sitcom The Thick of It (video clip here, but NB there is a lot of swearing).

 

Shambles is an interesting word as it is regarded as singular, despite ending in -s. The modern meaning - a scene of devastation and disorder - dates back only to the 20th century. The word shamble dates back over a thousand years, however. In Anglo-Saxon England a shamble was a table or shop counter. A few centuries later it referred to a meat shop and rows of meat stalls in streets soon became known as shambles. Many towns, eg York, Guildford, have streets called The Shambles. This usually indicates that meat markets were once held there. The very earliest meaning of shamble (in around the year 825, according to the OED) was stool or footstool. It was spelt sc(e)amel in those days. Interestingly, the modern German word for stool is der Schemel.

 

Will Self on obscure words

The writer Will Self defends his use of difficult and obscure works in his books in a BBC piece today, bemoaning the fact that anything difficult these days is considered undesirable. He says that if Shakespeare was trying to get his works published today he would be branded as 'too difficult'. Self says that people respond to his advice to "look up words you don't know in a dictionary", after they've complained about not understanding his writing, as if using a dictionary was torture.

 

Not surprisingly, he uses plenty of difficult words in the article - sesquipedalian, desiderata, recondite and others - which the BBC has listed with links to their meaning, so you can check whether you know them.

 

Here's the article.

Luddite

People opposed to technology are often called Luddites (usually written with a capital L), a reference to a late 18th-/early 19th-century band of workers who destroyed manufacturing machinery in the north and midlands of England, afraid that the machines would replace workers. A piece on the BBC's website looks at the original Luddites and considers whether the term is used correctly these days.

 

The Luddites were so called possibly after one Ned Lud, who lived in a Leicestershire village in about 1779. In a fit of rage he rushed into a ‘stockinger's’ house, and destroyed two frames so completely that the saying ‘Lud must have been here’ came to be used throughout the hosiery districts when a stocking-frame had undergone extraordinary damage (this story is taken from the OED). Rioting and destruction spread to the cotton and woollen mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The state put down the revolts brutally and a number of rioters and wreckers were hanged, while others were sent to Australia.

 

The 19th-century Luddites were afraid that technology would cut workers' wages, they were not opposed to technology per se, but since the 1970s the word Luddite has been used to refer to anyone who either can't use technology or doesn't want to.

 

Some historians bridle at the 'wrong' use of the term Luddite, but we use a lot of historical terms in English that are far removed from their original meaning: cavalier, puritan, bolshie, nazi, philistine, for example.

 

Here's the BBC piece.

Haywire

Skimming down a dictionary on the 'hay' page earlier - past haycock, hayloft and hayrick, I wondered how haywire got its modern meaning (wild, erratic). The original meaning of haywire was wire that was used for binding bales of hay. The OED says that in the early 20th century the definition " Poorly equipped, roughly contrived, inefficient" came about as a result of haywire being used for makeshift repairs. A haywire outfit was originally "a contemptuous term for loggers with poor logging equipment" (OED), but then the meaning broadened to mean any inefficient workplace. Go haywire, meaning go wrong, was first attested in the late 1920s. The OED says it originated in the US.

Behemoth

I heard the supermarket chain Tesco being described as a behemoth on the radio this morning (and it is in this article too). Behemoth is mentioned in the Book of Job in the Old Testament (the OED says hippopotamus is probably meant). It is the plural of the Hebrew word for 'beast'. But the OED says also that ancient Hebrew speakers adopted an old Egyptian word p-ehe-mau, meaning water-ox, and made it b'hēmōth, which was easier for Hebrew speakers to say.