The virtual linguist

Stocks vs pillory

I saw Alan Ayckbourn's latest play Neighbourhood Watch last night, which is about a neighbourhood watch group that gets out of hand. At one point there is talk about whether they are to install stocks or a pillory on their estate, and one of the characters explains the difference.

 

Stock was one of the earliest words in English; it first meant a tree trunk and a few centuries later, a post or stake. Stocks are old instruments of punishment consisting of one plank of wood on top of another with holes cut out for the wrongdoer's ankles. The person would have to sit there unable to free his or her legs. These old stocks can often be seen in old English villages today. This meaning of stocks was first attested in the 14th century.

 

The word pillory also dates back to the 14th century. A pillory is similar to stocks; the difference is, though, that the victim stands up and the pillory holds fast his or her arms and head, not legs. The pillory as a form of punishment was outlawed in Britain in 1815, except in cases of perjury, and was abolished completely in 1837. Pillories are often seen, however, at school fêtes, garden parties and the like - often a hapless teacher or prefect (a volunteer, I think!) is fastened in the pillory while visitors throw wet sponges at him/her to raise funds.

 

The verb 'to pillory', meaning 'to expose to public abuse or ridicule', is quite common these days. Its original meaning was literally 'to put in the pillory'. There was once the verb, 'to stock', which meant 'to put in the stocks', but that is obsolete now.

Burns Night 2012

It’s Burns Night this evening, so I have looked around for a Scottish theme for today’s post (here are two past posts I have written on this day – on neeps and Sassenachs and on haggis and pluck).

The Scottish government has recently decided that from 2014/15 Scottish school pupils taking Higher English will be obliged to answer questions on a Scottish text, be that one written in English, Scots, or a mixture. Currently there is usually a Scottish text in the exam, but it is just one of the options, and pupils do not have to answer questions on it.

Here’s the story.

'Barrow boy' stock market slang disappearing

Cockney rhyming slang has dominated the speech of foreign exchange traders in the City of London until recently, according to a Reuters piece. But with the growth in computer trading, as opposed to face-to-face interaction, and with dealers being increasingly sought among graduates from top universities, as opposed to local lads, who probably in the past worked on the family market stall in their free time, the language on the trading floors is changing.

 

Some expressions are still very common, eg half a yard of cable: the 'yard' in the expression is a billion, and rhymes with milliard, the French word for a billion (well it rhymes when milliard is said with an English pronunciation, where the final consonant is pronounced), while 'cable' refers to pound/dollar transactions and refers to the transatlantic telegraph cable. Even non-bankers know the expression the Old Lady (of Threadneedle Street); that is the Bank of England. The epithet 'the Old Lady' was coined by Richard Sheridan (who wrote The School for Scandal, but who was also an MP) in a speech to Parliament. He referred to the Bank as 'an elderly lady in the City of great credit and long standing'. Bill and Ben is rhyming slang for 'yen'.

 

Numbers and currencies have their own slang words. Here are some, copied from the aforementioned Reuters article:

A Spaniard: 1 (from the Spanish name Juan)

A prickly: 2 A prickly pear

A carpet: 3 (UK prisoners used to be allowed carpet in their cells after 3 years)

Lady Godiva: 5 (Rhymes with fiver)

Ayrton: 10 (Tenner rhymes with Ayrton Senna, the late racing car driver)

A bully: 50 (From the 50-point bullseye on a dartboard)

A monkey: 500 (The 500-Indian rupee note used to have a picture of a monkey on it)

Currencies:

The loonie: Canadian dollar (A waterfowl named the loon is depicted on Canada's one-dollar coin)

The kiwi: NZ dollar (National bird of New Zealand)

The Aussie: Australian dollar

The stokkie: Swedish crown

The nokkie: Norwegian crown

 

Here's the full article.

Vastly

Many studies have posited that women use more intensifying adverbs (such as 'really', 'so', 'ever so' etc) than men in their speech. The 18th-century statesman, Lord Chesterfield, railed against these tendencies of his 'fair countrywomen'' in an article in The World (read it here). Here's a paragraph from the article about his bête noire, the word 'vastly':

Not content with enriching our language by words absolutely new, my fair countrywomen have gone still farther, and improved it by the application and extension of old ones to various and very different significations. They take a word and change it, like a guinea into shillings for pocket money, to be employed in the several occasional purposes of the day. For instance, the adjective vast and it’s adverb vastly mean any thing, and are the fashionable words of the most fashionable people. A fine woman (under this head I comprehend all fine gentlemen too, not knowing in truth where else to place them properly) is vastly obliged, or vastly offended, vastly glad, or vastly sorry. Large objects are vastly great, small ones are vastly little; and I had lately the pleasure to hear a fine woman pronounce, by a happy metonymy, a very small gold snuff-box that was produced in company, to be vastly pretty, because it was so vastly little. Mr. Johnson will do well to consider seriously, to what degree he will retain the various and extensive significations of this great word.

 

Unfortunately, despite criticising others for using 'vastly', Chesterfield also did so himself. For instance in a letter dated June 13, 1749, he wrote to a lady friend "Upon my word, madam, the chiding strain becomes you vastly ...".

 

The OED shows that vastly was used from the mid-17th century to mean 'immensely', but then goes on to say that it was a very fashionable word in the 18th century, when its meaning weakened to an intensive adverb meaning 'extremely' or 'very'. There are citations from Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, but otherwise the examples are those of male writers.

 

Demand for elocution lesson soars

According to a report written by The Tutor Pages, there was a large increase in requests for speech and elocution private tuition in 2011. Elocution was the subject with the highest number of enquiries per tutor (2nd highest was university level statistics). One of the elocution tutors cited in the report said she thought that the film The King's Speech was responsible for the growth in interest, with people thinking that if the king's serious speech impediment could be improved, then their lesser problems could be easily solved too.

 

All sorts of people want to change the way they speak - professionals, those in the media, even religious ministers. Some people want help with presentation skills and public speaking, but the commonest request is to help lose or soften a regional accent. The largest group of people with this request comes from Birmingham and the West Midlands. Many of these people feel they are being discriminated against in their quest for employment or promotion because of their accent. One enquirer said he'd been told he sounded 'thick' or 'like a thug'. However, most people don't want to lose their accent completely, just to tone it down and make themselves easier to understand.

 

Another large number of people approaching the tutorial agency are professionals from overseas who want to acquire a 'posh' accent. Joanna Lumley has been specifically mentioned as a role model (if you don't know what Joanna Lumley sounds like, click here).

 

Parents often approach The Tutor Pages with the aim of getting their teenage children to speak differently, and snobbism is often apparent in some of the quotes in the report. One Cheshire parent was horrified because his or her son had developed an 'irritating Scouse accent', another was horrified when his or her daughter moved from a private to a state school and the girl's accent changed.

 

Elocution lessons were quite common when I was a young child (I never had them, but at secondary school we had speech and drama classes, which were similar, I suppose). Elocution then fell out of favour for several decades, but seemingly it's in fashion again. Elocution was never considered a traditional academic subject, and even now I notice in the profiles of the tutors in The Tutor Pages report, that most have a singing or acting background, not one in phonetics and linguistics.

 

Here's the report from The Tutor Pages (in pdf format).

Masher

I caught a programme on BBC iPlayer about the old music-hall tradition (I think it's dropped off iPlayer now, I'm afraid, so I can't link to it). Not only has the tradition itself disappeared, but so have words that were inextricably linked with music hall.

 

One of the enthusiasts in the programme mentioned the word masher, a typical member of the music-hall audience. She said that mashers were 'toffs' ie well-to-do young men who came mainly to look at the women. The OED's definition of masher corroborates this: "A fashionable young man of the late Victorian or Edwardian era, esp. one fond of the company of women; a dandy". The OED describes the word as originally US slang. By the end of the Victorian era (1901) a masher had become "A womanizer; a man who makes indecent sexual advances towards women, esp. in public places". Judging by the TV programme on the music halls, plenty of such mashers could be found in the audience of the music hall.

 

There are a few synonyms of masher, or womanizer, in the dictionary: Lothario, philanderer, Romeo, stud, tom-cat, vieux marcher (specifically an elderly one). There are also the related words lady's man (or ladies' man) and poodle-faker. There isn't a word in English for a female equivalent, interestingly. I suppose coquette and flirt are the nearest. Flirt could once (18th and 19th centuries) also apply to men, while the verb 'to coquet' or 'to coquette' (defined as 'to act the lover' in Johnson's dictionary) was also once (18th century) used of both sexes.

Medveput

Merkozy is a name coined for the German and French leaders, Merkel and Sarkozy, acting together. The Russians have coined the word Medveput to describe the rule in tandem by President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin. The word has caught on in Russia, and has now become a common noun, spelled with a lower case m and declined like a regular masculine noun (medveputy, or медвепуты, in the plural), when it means a follower of the duo. It is intended to be either humorous, or scathing, from what I can tell, and it seems to have captured the imagination because of the similarities to the word Lilliput (remember that was a place inhabited by tiny people).

New words in the OED December 2011

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, over a thousand new entries went into the OED in December 2011. The overwhelming majority (but not all) begin with A. They can be viewed, even by people without a subscription to the OED I think, here. As usual, they represent a broad spectrum of register, meaning, and geographical variety of English. They include words fairly new to English, such as chemtrail and va-jay-jay (slang for 'vagina'), plus words that seem new but are older than you might think, such as academy school and 'stitch and bitch'. There are also words of historical interest, such as Adam Tiler (from the 17th century), which is, or was, a pickpocket's accomplice. There are some very old words indeed, such as abecedarium, another word for an alphabet, first used in Old English. There are African words, such as abakwetha (Xhosa traditional ritual) and abacost (man's suit in former Zaire) There are also new meanings of old words; Adam has a third sense now, as another name for the drug ecstasy. There are also old words that have become new parts of speech; accompanied and accomplishing have both been added as adjectives and accordion has gone in as a verb.

 

A lot of sub-entries have gone in too (these are phrases that appear in existing entries), including abdication crisis, abstinence programme, abuse victim, acceptance speech, accident black spot, accident scene, account manager, ace of hearts, ace of spades, administration fee, adrenaline junkie, advertising campaign and very many others.

 

See all new words here. If you have a UK library card you can almost certainly get online access to the main part of the OED via your library's website - look for the Online Reference Shelf or some such wording. Virtually every UK local library authority subscribes on its readers' behalf.

Revisions to the OED December 2011

The revisions to the OED during the last quarter of 2011 mostly related to words beginning with A. Most of the entries had not been revised since the definitions were first written in the 1880s. When modern OED lexicographers set about the task of editing and amending the Dictionary, they decided to start at M, not A, believing that the second half of the Dictionary would be of a more even editorial standard than the first half. By the time they reached Z, they believed, they would be in the swing of the task of revising and so could tackle the more difficult letters.

 

In this A batch OED editors have sometimes changed the order in which the different definitions appear in order to portray the word's historical development more precisely. For the last 120 years, for instance, the first definition of the verb adhere was "To stick fast, to cleave, to become or remain firmly attached, to a substance, as by a glutinous surface, or by grasping, etc". That meaning is the meaning of adhere today. From December 2011 the first definition of adhere in the Dictionary is "To support a person (party, cause) steadfastly; to be an adherent or supporter of. Now rare and arch". This meaning had previously been listed as the second sense of the word. The OED editors have changed the order of definitions to put the first and original meaning of adhere (support a person) first.

 

In the case of the word accurate, the definitions after the revision are still fairly similar to the old definitions, and are in the same order, but definition 2, which in the previous edition was "Of things and persons: Exact, precise, correct, as the result of care", and definition 3, which was "Of things, without special reference to the evidence of care: Exact, precise, correct, nice; in exact conformity to a standard or to truth", have now become since last month "Of a person: careful, precise; tending not to make mistakes or errors; correct" (definition 2) and "Esp. of information, measurements, or predictions: exact, precise; conforming exactly with the truth or with a given standard; free from error" (definition 3). The word accurate derives from the Latin curare, to take care of, and the original editors of the OED, knowing this, felt that there thus had to be a reference to 'care' in all the definitions. Current OED editors feel that it was unnecessary and inaccurate to force a 'care' connection into each definition.

 

The other big task of the last quarter was to revisit all the Spenser citations in the Dictionary, of which there are 6266. When the original writers of the Dictionary in the 1880s wrote the Spenser citations they mostly used an 1869 edition of The Faerie Queene, which contained what were then modern spellings - hyphens were added, for instance, and u in words was replaced by v. Now the citations are taken from the first printings of Spenser's work in the 1590s. So, at the verb 'launch' the previous "A sharpe bore-speare, With which he wont to launch the salvage hart Of many a Lyon ", has been changed to "A sharpe borespeare, With which he wont to launch the saluage hart Of many a Lyon".

 

In addition to the above revisions, there are also well over 1000 new entries, new sub-entries and new senses of existing words that went into the Dictionary last month. I will look at those in tomorrow's post.

Illin'

One of the answers in a recent New York Times crossword, illin', has resulted in a great deal of comment on the internet. The New York Times crossword is a straight crossword, not cryptic, so that generally means that the clues should be straightforward. The clue for illin' was 'Wack, as in hip hop'.

 

Now, at this point in the story (which I read on the Guardian Crossword blog), I got lost, since I had never heard of the words 'slang' 'illin' (amended due to typo - thanks, John, for pointing it out) or 'wack' (except for wack used the Liverpudlian way). A reader had written in to the newspaper saying that wack and illin' were not the same thing. The paper's very eminent crossword editor, Will Shortz, replied that they were the same, illin' being hip-hop slang for 'bad' or 'uncool' and wack meaning 'worthless' (the full correspondence between the reader and Shortz can be read here). An article in the Gawker, which I linked to in the last sentence, too, says that the meaning of illin' is malleable -- it can mean wack, crazy or chilling.

 

The hip-hop slang adjective ill is in the OED -- it went in in 2006. It has two, completely opposite, definitions: a) "Aggressive, irrational, crazy; unpleasant, bad" and b) "Excellent, attractive; fashionable". Wack is in the OED, too; its original meaning (from the 1930s) was 'an eccentric or crazy person', then the meaning 'bad, harmful; unfashionable, boring' went in in the 1980s.

 

Here's the Guardian Crossword blog.