The virtual linguist

Merry Christmas

This will be my last post before Christmas, as I am going to Munich tomorrow to visit my daughter for the holiday. I thought I'd do a quick post on the origin and history of the word merry, but wow! what an interesting story! I've been following up references for the past couple of hours.

Merry is one of the oldest words in English, and at various times has meant 'causing pleasure', 'pleasing', 'pleasant', 'producing a sweet sound', 'pleasing to behold', 'fragrant', 'amusing', 'brightly coloured', 'festive', 'jolly','tipsy' and 'witty'. It's an unusual word because there aren't any similar words in other Germanic languages; the nearest is the Middle Dutch mergelijc, which also means 'pleasant'. It is ultimately related to the Old High German murg, which means 'short' and this in turn comes from an original Proto Indo-European (ie the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages) root *meghru or *mrghu, which also means 'short'.

So what have 'short' and 'jolly' or 'pleasing' got to to with one another? Maybe, it's that doing something pleasant makes the time pass more quickly, or seem shorter. There is an obsolete German word Kurzweile (literally 'short time') which refers to a pleasant pastime. The opposite Langeweile (literally 'long time') is in modern German dictionaries and means 'boredom'. Indeed, the word pastime in English has a similar sense ie the time passes quickly because it is enjoyable.

So, Merry Christmas everyone. I'll be back at the beginning of next week.

New entries in the OED December 2009

The Oxford English Dictionary adds a new batch of words, and new meanings for existing words, every quarter. It has added over 200 words this quarter. Most begin re- as the editors were working on the range between refund and reputeless. Here are a few (the rest can be reached via the OED's homepage):

regender: i) to recreate, to make again and ii) to assign a new gender to. Although this word has only just entered the OED for the first time, the first sense dates back to the early 15th century

rehairing: the fitting of new hairs to the bow of a stringed instrument

several German words beginning Reichs: -fuhrer (with umlaut), -chancellor, -kanzler, -minister

religioso: synonym for religious

remembery: a written commemoration (now obsolete); a person's memory, or the thing remembered

remote control: control exercised at a distance

repmobile: a type of car supposedly favoured by sales reps

The OED also includes dialect words and non-British English, eg:

rego: official registration of a vehicle (Australian)

rent: colloquial word for a parent (US)

rep by pop: representation by population (Canada)

rejumble: (of partially digested food) to rise up from the stomach (Lincolnshire dialect)

New entries that don't begin with re- include:

adultescent: an adult who has retained the interests, behaviour and lifestyle of an adolescent

backstabbing: a treacherous or underhand attack on a person

Beatlesque: characteristic or reminiscent of the Beatles

blogosphere: blogs, their writers and readers collectively

bum rap: unjust criticism

can-do: positive, willing

Various subordinate entries were added at existing entries and these include career break, Celtic Tiger and change management.

Jamie's Slang Dictionary published for US viewers

The US Food Network, a TV channel, has published a glossary of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's slang (here) so that American viewers can understand him. They are also considering subtitling his programmes. The glossary includes whack it and chuck it (both mean 'put it'), pukka (excellent), over the moon (happy), hen party (bachelorette party in US) and lovely jubbly (really nice). 

I mentioned Jamie Oliver's accent and dialect in this post. Jamie Oliver speaks 'mockney' (sometimes written Mockney with a capital M), which is an affected (ie mock) Cockney, or London, accent. Oliver had a middle-class upbringing in the Home Counties but affects a working class London accent to endear himself to TV viewers.

Jumping the shark

There's obviously not much news around at the moment because there was a report on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning about TV shows which have 'jumped the shark' (you can listen for a few more days here - scroll down to 08:21). 'Jumping the shark' refers tothe point in a television programme when it stops being a good programme and becomes silly and no longer watchable. The expression was coined thanks to an incident in the Happy Days show in 1977 when Fonzie jumped over a shark while waterskiing. 

The radio discussion was prompted by the last-ever episode of Wife Swap, which will be shown on Channel 4 tonight (described as starting off ok but then, after jumping the shark, becoming full of 'shouty freaks'). Another programme which has passed its sell-by date, according to the media people on Today, is Big Brother (also described as having turned into a freak show).

I would say that most soap operas 'jumped the shark' long ago. Since they are on television almost every night of the week, it must be getting harder and harder to find story lines. The things that go on in the sleepy Yorkshire village of Emmerdale are incredible -- murders, arson, shootings, kidnappings, hostage crises and a plane crashing on the village! 

Triple witching

It's triple witching day today. Sounds very exotic and exciting, doesn't it? As if three times the usual number of fairies and elves are around and about! The reality is rather more banal. Triple witching, or the triple witching hour, is a financial term and happens four times a year. It refers to a trading session on the Stock Market when the contracts for stock index futures, index options and equity options all expire on the same day. The result is increased, sometimes extremely volatile, activity and price changes on the Stock Market.

If you're still looking for Christmas presents

A dictionary makes a great Christmas present - I think so, anyway. Most households have at least one dictionary, and they do get out of date quite quickly these days. Collins published a new, 30th anniversary, edition of their dictionary in 2009, and there was an updated Concise Oxford Dictionary published this year too. They're both excellent dictionaries.

I like Chambers dictionary, too, as it has lots more words in it than the two mentioned above, particularly Northern English and Scottish dialect words. It's rather quirky and is renowned for its humorous definitions eg Mullet: a hairstyle that is short at the front, long at the back and ridiculous all round. It has words in it which I could never imagine anyone ever needing or wanting to use eg paneity (the state of being bread) and shunamitism (rejuvenation of an old man by a young woman). Shunamitism the word might never be used, but of course the phenomenon still exists - the names Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart spring to mind! I blogged on the 2008 edition of Chambers here.

For anyone thinking of buying a dictionary as a present, here's a blog I wrote last December giving hints on how to choose the best one for your purposes.  

Sari- and bodice-rippers

I picked up a woman's magazine while waiting in the optician's and came across the term 'sari-ripper' ie a romantic story set in India in the past. Harlequin Enterprises, the owner of Mills & Boon, are already in India, and Random House have set up an imprint called Kama Kahani, which includes such titles as The Zamindar's Forbidden Love (a zamindar was a Moghul tax collector) by Jasmine Saigal. Random House's promotional material promises readers smouldering Rajput princesses and cruelly handsome zamindars.

The word sari-ripper is based on bodice-ripper, a word that was coined in the late 1970s. The one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English says this word is these days used in an informal, derogatory or humorous way and describes a sexually explicit romantic novel or film with a historical setting. In the 1970s another term for bodice-rippers was 'sweet and savages'.

A bodice is the upper part of a dress, a separate piece of material from the skirt part of the dress. The original meaning (17th century) was a whalebone-strengthened undergarment like a corset and it was worn by both men and women. It comes from 'bodies', the plural of body, and indeed, a bodice used to be considered plural (like trousers) because it was often called a 'pair of bodies' and later 'a pair of bodice'.

Writing this blog post has brought back a whole host of emotions to me as it reminds me of the endless arguments, tears and tantrums I had with my mother in the early to mid-60s when she insisted I wore a liberty bodice to keep me warm. For all these years I've never wondered why they were called liberty bodices, but I've just discovered why on Wikipedia. It's liberty in the sense of 'freedom' or 'emancipation' and the garment was designed as an alternative to the boned corset of the Victorian era to give freedom of movement to women. Here's a picture and I have to say that, although this one dates back to 1908, the ones I used to have to wear didn't look much different - I can still feel the rubbery buttons in my imagination now!

Most annoying office clichés

Most people hate their bosses using clichés, according to a recently published survey, although some bosses hate their employees' use of hackneyed phrases too. The most common cliché is 'at the end of the day', said about three times a day in most offices, according to a survey carried out by the equestrian charity the Brooke (I'm not sure why they wanted to know!). Here's the full list:

1 At the end of the day
2 What goes around, comes around
3 It's not rocket science
4 Thinking outside the box
5 Flogging a dead horse
6 Don't shoot the messenger
7 Going forward
8 By the close of play
9 Give you the heads up
10 Live and learn
11 C'est la vie
12 Don't put all your eggs in one basket
13 Hit the ground running
14 Always look on the bright side of life
15 Suck it and see
16 Don't look a gift horse in the mouth
17 Don't worry, be happy
18 I know it's a big ask
19 I'm out
20 There are no flies on me

And here's the story. 

20 words of the decade

The BBC asked readers of its website to come up with the words, people, objects, events and cultural highlights that they felt summed up the Noughties, or the years from 2000 to 2009. You can see all the lists here but the twenty "words" chosen, in alphabetical order, are:

9/11
24/7
Bling
Blog
Credit crunch
Chav
Facebooking
Fairtrade
Footprint
i-
lol
Meh
Obamamania
Pandemic
Slumdog
Sustainability
Truthiness
Tweet
WAG
War on terror

I am amazed that neither climate change nor global warming is on the list. I have noticed they creep into news reports about all sorts of things, such as two consecutive pieces on Radio 4's Today programme this morning (still available for another week here), the first on the increasing acidity of the world's oceans and the second on attacks by man-eating tigers. Interestingly, they did not feature in another piece on the same programme -- a report about councils having insufficient salt for the forthcoming snap of freezing weather forecast for later in the week!

Property terminology of the decade

Estate agents have always had a reputation for being very creative with language -- a bijou property (ie tiny), an up-and-coming area (ie unsafe), convenient for transport links (the M4 is at the bottom of the garden) and ideal for the DIY enthusiast (ie a wreck). The Daily Telegraph has just published a list of (tongue-in-cheek) modern terminology used by estate agents. The word 'flat' is no longer used apparently; everything is an 'apartment'. I must say I've noticed that agents don't use the words flat, apartment or house these days -- everything is a 'home'. Other words that have crept in are media room, sub-basement, Jack and Jill bathroom, gated communities and buying off-plan. The article is here.