The Tin Lizard

Wrongney and Lyin'

It's inevitable in the heat of a political campaign that some memes will develop to describe candidates one side or the other doesn't like.  Over four years of the Obama administration, of course, there has been plenty of time for pro-Republicans to develop a plenitude of them, but pro-Democrats will need something to refer derogatorily to the new Republican team of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

I'm going with "Wrongney and Lyin'." 

New Names, Old Ideas

Recently I lamented the invention of new meanings for terms that are already "in use" for a very different concept.   ("Tailgating" is an example.)  There's an opposite and equal trend, mostly marketing-related, by which something that may be out of style is given new life by giving it a new name.

Recently I got a chuckle out of reading or hearing something like this:  "whether you call them cropped pants or capris they're here to stay as an essential in any woman's wardrobe."   Well, OK, but what if you call them "pedal pushers," as they were called when they first burst on the fashion scene?  Not a term anybody wants to hear these days.  (Incidentally when I hear hucksters saying something is "here to stay," I usually figure whatever it is is on its last legs as a trend.) 

Another effort in stealth appellations is the now-ubiquitous sport utility vehicle, or SUV.  They represent another trend that's come and gone several times.  We had "station wagons," then "minivans" or just vans; and now SUVs.  They're the same, except that I like to think of SUVs as station wagons that they can market to guys as being cool.

Sometimes new names are technology-driven.  A "tablet" does a lot more than a transistor radio.  It's not the same thing, exactly, but as the hot new incarnation of must-have portable entertainment, it fills the same role.

And sometimes we perversely ignore technological change.  In conversational English these days, I'm constantly hearing references to a "ticking time bomb."  When bombs were set off by analog clocks, the term would have been redundant -- all time bombs would tick!  How odd that now, with advances in technology having brought us bombs set off by digital clocks and cell phones, which do not tick, the term "ticking time bomb" is on everyone's lips.

Do you have any examples of your own?  Let me hear them.   

What's A Michigoose?

Since my youth I've heard the term "Michigander," referring to a resident of the U.S. state of Michigan, and wondered how that term came about.  "Michiganian" would be expected, maybe even "Michiganer," but how did that "d" get in there?  The term conjured up images of a large male bird; were there also, I wondered, "Michigeese?" 

So, I wondered for quite a while, but with so much political talk these days about the upcoming Michigan primary, and specifically when I was reading an excellent post on that topic by my fellow blogger GabbyGeezer and was faced once again with the term, I decided to stop wondering and find out.

My Merriam-Webster online unabridged offered the information that the term arose from a reference to a politician named Lewis Cass.  OK, but insufficient. Then my quest led me to Wikipedia, where I found that the coinage of "Michigander" is attributed to none other than Abraham Lincoln, well before he was President.  He intended the term to be a little pejorative - because he wanted to disparage Cass's views on the extension of slavery to new states - so the reference to a noisy bird was intentional.  Not earth-shattering, but I learned an interesting factoid today.

Along the way, I learned another term:  "demonym."  Nothing to do with demons!  It's a recent coinage, a term applied to a word that denotes the people of a geographic place.  Like "Michigander," for example; or like another odd one I picked up during my travels in Scotland:  "Glaswegian" for a resident of Glasgow.  Wikipedia has a great little article on demonyms, by the way.

Wikipedia is a great resource (and hey, they take donations, if you find yourself using it a lot) but even there, some things aren't covered.  Cuing on an old adage, I assumed that what's source for the gander is source for the goose, so I checked in Wikipedia for "Michigoose" but found nary a word.

Adverbs - Now You Hear 'em, Soon You Won't

Drive safe.  Eat healthy.  Treat him gentle.

What's wrong with these short sentences?  In many people's eyes, nothing at all.   But if you're an oldster or a purist, you might say they should use adverbial forms rather than adjectival ones:

Drive safely.  Eat healthily.  Treat him gently.

There is an increasing trend, especially of course in speech, to just use the adjective.  It's happening, I would guess, for a couple of reasons.  First, there are some annoyingly confusing but frequently used adjective-adverb teams.  Do you feel bad, or badly?  One says you're upset, mentally or physically; the other announces your defective tactile sense.  If someone asks how you are, you can say "I'm well" - again a reference to your health - or you can say, as many do these days, "I'm good" which some listeners might think is a boastful reference to your moral character.

That's all well and good, but a second, and more important reason for adverbs to vanish, is that people are beginning to recognize that adverbs - or more precisely, adverbial forms of adjectives - are absolutely unnecessary in most cases.  Is "drive safe" confusing as to its meaning?  Not at all.  We can do without the "ly."  If you don't believe me, check in with German, which lost its adverbs ages ago.   Here I think we can see language changing right before our eyes.  I wouldn't be at all surprised if, in a couple of generations, adverbs had complete (sic) dropped out of usage.

Of course for adverbophiles, there will always be the stand-alone adverbs - those that are words in themselves, like "always" and "almost."   Those have a place, and undoubted (sic) will remain around in the language, as they also do in German.

 

 

How Do I Love Thee

A self-identified "English teacher" has written to the Washington Post with a curious complaint about a recent column by George Will, as follows below.  I quote in full, but without the writer's name, because I think the writer ought to be embarrassed:

In George F. Will’s June 23 column, “McCain, caped crusader,” he quoted Sen. Lindsey Graham as saying “Congress should sort of shut up” on Libya. Will’s reference to Graham’s statement was “This ukase might make more sense. . .” This word exemplifies the pedantic prose of George Will. I doubt many of The Post’s readers understood this word. I didn’t. As a former English teacher, I have a fairly good vocabulary, having studied Latin for four years in high school. I looked up “ukase.” Synonyms are bull, as in Papal bull, decree, diktat (Russian), fiat, ruling and edict, among others. Later in the same piece, but not as laughable, Will used the word “risible.”  I noticed in Will’s June 25 column, “A Texan’s ‘exceptionalism,’ ” there was not a pedantic word to be found. I hope he realized, without being told, how ridiculous his stilted language can be.

This letter amazed me on two counts.   First, the writer doesn't say at what grade level she taught English, but I can't imagine an English teacher would not know these two words ("ukase" and "risible"), both of which I'm fairly sure have been familiar to me since somewhere along about high school, or university freshman at the latest.    

Second, I'm bowled over that any English teacher would suggest writers purposely restrict (limit?) the vocabulary they deploy (use?).  Isn't it good for people to be exposed to something that may challenge them a bit, or expose them to a new word?  Should every word printed in a newspaper strive for the reading level of (say) a high school freshman?  If not, what level would be appropriate as a lowest common denominator? 

Now, perhaps the writer wanted only to say that good expository writing should be simple, clear, and declarative.  That's a good point.  It certainly applies to the instruction manual for your refrigerator, to the instructions for your taxes (good luck with that!), and perhaps even to basic reportage in the newspaper.  But there's a level where we get beyond that.  Reading for opinion (like Will's op-ed), reading for nuance (such as an analysis of a complex social issue), and reading for fun (an essay or a work or literature) are very much in this second category.  So, contrary to the English teacher's assertion, I'm sure that many, if not most, of the Post's readers who read Will at all did understand his language.  A good writer knows his audience. 

The title phrase of this post is so famous that almost all of us with a modicum (little bit?) of liberal-arts education would automatically follow it with, "Let me count the ways."  Most of us might also identify it as the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but fewer might know it as "Sonnets from the Portuguese No. 43."   No matter.  The poem is all about love, of course, but its form depends on stating the same things in different words.  To do that, we need synonyms. 

Our letter-writer above offered a number of synonyms for "ukase" (some of which I think are likely to be just as unintelligible to some readers), but that hardly rules out the use of ukase.  A grammarian-instigated edict against "ukase" would be a "bull" in more ways than one.

Selling Stuff

There are always annoying trends in advertising.  After all, what is advertising but an attempt to annoy you, or (same thing, different words) to break in on whatever else you're doing and distract you from it?

Lately I've noticed a few irritating trends in marketing messages.  Here are a handful:

EVENT!  Is anyone but me tired of having everything labeled an "event?"  Car dealers are having events right and left; the release of a new movie is an event; soon even 5% off on a box of cereal at your local grocery will be an "event."  Maybe the word "event" gives people a thrill but let's just call it a sale ... or wait, is it possible the reason they don't do that is that there IS no sale, no discount, no savings, maybe the EVENT is that they get you into the store (terminology again: let's call it a "selling field").   Speaking of car dealers, I love those ads when they have their "event" and they depict the showroom crammed with people running back and forth picking out cars.  Did you ever see a car dealership that busy?  I don't like crowds so if I did, I'd probably go elsewhere.  I guess these are the ones who are excited by events.

 

I noticed a bag of chips last week was labeled "Best if Purchased By...(date)"   I'm confused.  Doesn't that imply that if I purchase them by that date, take them home, and keep them on the shelf for a year, they'll be just as good?   I'm pretty sure they wouldn't.  No, this "purchase by" phrasing is just the manufacturer telling us, "buy them, get them out of the store, take them home, so we're less likely to have to take them back as expired food!"   Consumers have been through many permutations of the expiration date on packaged food: "sell by," "best if used by," etc.  That last one seems the best to me - it indicates what we need to know: No matter when you bought it, you should USE it before this date. 

 

 

Wow.  Everybody wants what he/she deserves.  (Actually most of us probably would prefer to get what we believe we deserve, because some of us might be surprised to receive what we really do deserve.)  But for marketing purposes, this indicates an interesting and fairly basic shift of concept.  It's no longer enough to need something, or even to want it.  We deserve it.  The use of this one little word has gravitated from major luxury purchases -- you know, like that new Mercedes, or a full length mink, or even a hot blonde wearing a full length mink and sitting in that Mercedes -- down to pretty everyday stuff like cell phones (the source of the photo above).  Again, maybe this works subliminally on some people.  For me, it's a code word that tells me I can't afford it, don't need it, or both.

 

Pronouncing Our Unspellable Language

He's b-a-a-a-c-k!  The Pronunciation Grump.  Didn't we promise he would be (or did you take that as more of a threat?)

Everybody knows English (even the more refined version known as American English) is difficult to spell, and that also makes it difficult to pronounce.  But one of my peeves is people who make it even more difficult by giving their kids oddly spelled names that they may be stuck with for life.  (Ever heard of the "Boy Named Sue?") 

Speaking of Sue, that's what got me thinking about this whole matter.  On television last week, a woman whose name has appeared on book covers:  Suze Orman.  It turns out that she wants to pronounce that first name like "Susie."  When I see it, I want to pronounce it "sooze" (rhymes with "ooze").  Was it Mom who confused the issue?  In English we can go with Soozie, Suzie, Susey, Souzee, and maybe other spellings that would give her the pronunciation she seemed to want.  But "Suze" is "Sooze."  

I think back to a skier named "Picabo," and pronounced (by her Mom at least) as "peek-a-boo."  Same deal:  Maybe, if you stretch, the first syllable could be "peek" but that last syllable can't be anything but "bo" in English.  It doesn't help that the name comes from a little town; towns aren't people.  If you happened to meet this woman and she told you her name, you might not worry about how it's spelled; but as most folks won't ever meet her, she was doomed from birth to have a lot of people mispronounce her.

The same problem sometimes extends to last names, too.  Let's take the writer Michael Crichton.  Clearly, "kritch-ton," yet people tell me he liked to pronounce it "cry-ton."  Wow.  English has a lot of weird spellings, and even consonant clusters that can be pronounced more than one way (tough/through).  But I really can't think of anyplace in English where "ch" is just silent.   Can we just spell things any old way?  If I said my name was spelled "Harjklixor" but pronounced "Jones" how would you react? 

The problem becomes even worse, of course, when names derive from those devilish foreign languages we don't know.  I am not constantly plugged into television or other audio media, so when I encounter a name like "Sinise"  (sinus? synice? sineezey?) or Proulx (I think that one is Basque so I'm going with "proo"), I just have to take a wild guess.   It would be a great help if book jackets could tell us how the author's name is pronounced (rather than giving us another of those idiotic blurbs); it would be heaven if television shows and movies had voiceovers to r-e-a-d aloud the names of the cast as they roll across the screen. 

The Pronunciation Grump

Diane Sawyer mangled the pronunciation of the relatively simple name of the Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladic the other night.  Maybe she thought that since he "allegedly" massacred many, it was OK to commit the same crime on his name.  More likely, I think, she just couldn't do it, and her trouble reminded me again how much trouble Americans have in pronouncing foreign words. 

For example, it's hard to think of a French word that IS pronounced correctly in the U.S.  -- Lingerie?  Déjâ vu?  Chaise longue?  Pierre L'Enfant?  Nope, none of those.  (On the subway in our area, the drivers have to announce "L'Enfant Plaza" and it usually comes out sounding like "Lawn Fawn," so you get off expecting to find a selection of concrete Bambis somewhere on the street above.  This is what they mean by "lenfant terrible," I guess.)  Other languages fare no better.   We do with them what we will and leave them broken and disheveled on the sidewalk behind us. 

We come honestly by our tendency to commit mayhem on foreign languages.  It is inherited from the Brits, who do the same thing and have been doing so for centuries, perhaps because political-military imperialism fosters linguistic imperialism.  Otherwise, how did München become "Munich," Mumbai "Bombay," or Firenze "Florence?"  But whatever its origin, long experience with the practice has enabled the average Brit to mispronounce foreign words without a second's hesitation.  A London newscaster would have mispronounced "Mladic" the same way Diane Sawyer did but he wouldn't have stumbled a bit in doing so.

Having noted the phenomenon of twisting foreign words, however, I'm really not looking to wage a big campaign to correct things.  We can't expect everybody to know the pronunciation rules of dozens of languages, and some foreign sounds don't exist in English, so a degree of error is natural and predictable.  The same occurs among speakers of other languages when they try to pronounce English.   We can, however, expect at least those whose job is to present foreign news to try to get it right.

NOTE: When the Pronunciation Grump returns (soon!), he'll talk about some problems we have with pronunciation in our own language.

The Unwords

Decades ago, the soft drink known as Seven-Up, a clear carbonated drink with a flavor the company described as "lemon-lime," (somewhat dubiously in my opinion) devised a marketing campaign to set itself apart from the competition.  Since most if not all of the other most popular soda pops of the time were colas, Seven-Up became "The Uncola."   Does Seven-Up still exist?  I don't know; I don't drink much soda, never much liked Seven-Up anyway, and I don't see ads for it any more.   But at the time, the "uncola" campaign seemed to have some traction, helping the brand to establish its uniqueness.

If the brand does still exist, could there be a time in the distant future when colas have fallen so completely out of favor that only the Uncola survives, and we wonder what on earth a "cola" was?

Well, finally we're on my real subject:  I'm intrigued that there are so many words in English that are the negative of something for which no positive exists. 

One of my favorite examples is "disgruntled."  When I hear it used to describe a person (usually a group of people), I am concerned, because that's an unpleasant state most people don't want to be in, and I wonder to myself how we might make them gruntled again.

"Unkempt" is another.  Is English an unkempt language, that allows these unpaired words to hang around?  To paraphrase Prof Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady, why can't the English... be more kempt?  I suspect German is very kempt!

Even among informal slang words, we sometimes accentuate the negative.  The whole trend "discombobulates" me, and I'd far rather be combobulated.

There are plenty of other examples.  Indubitably you can think of a few yourself.  Like so many aspects of this quirky language we speak, I find them fascinating. It seems unlikely now that uncola would be one of them someday, but who knows? 

 

Talking Drugs

An entire new lexicon has come to light over the past ten years.   Do you recognize the following words?

Saxaglyptin
Desvenlafaxine
Bevacuzumab
Ibandronate
Tadalafil
Atorvastatin
Terbenafine
Esomeprazole

They may look like the list of words for the next National Spelling Bee (and perhaps they are) but in fact, they're all drug names, or more properly, chemical compounds.   Even in the 1950s we would occasionally hear a few such terms:  acetosalicylic acid, for example, or ibuprofen, which came along slightly later. 

But as drug manufacturers have introduced more and more new medicines, we've all seen the trend toward advertising them to the public, too -- "ask your doctor if [product name] is right for you!"  And those ads almost always specify the name of the actual drug, as well as the brand name. 

For the linguist, songwriter, or poet, these new words represent an untapped reservoir of material.  Certain ones spark odd associations, or conjure up wondrous images.  For example:

Fluoxetine.  It sounds as if it might describe a rheumy-eyed bovine with muscle pain and mild nausea.  Let's hope they don't use the fluox's tissues to grow the medicine in.

Onglyza.  That's a brand name, not a chemical name, but for me it raises the image of a big fat slug.  Or, if slugs have names and engage in races, maybe slug spectators on the sidelines shout out "On, Glyza!"  or "C'mon Slymeristin!"

Clopidogrel.  This is one of the earliest of these I noticed.  I believe it refers to bad poetry written by a horse. But the very best I have found is:

Rosiglitazone.  Wow.  Makes you think of shimmery pink things, or some hazy nirvana-like state.  Sixties druggie to his pal: "Whoa, man, why'd you go and wake me up?  I was just reachin' the rosiglitazone! Bummer!"  Or a wonderful pinkish, sparkly skyline, maybe with a unicorn standing in the foreground.

We should thank Big Pharma for making life so interesting.