The virtual linguist

More films to be dubbed into Catalan

A recent headline in a Barcelona-based newspaper said that the regional government was considering a law that 50% of films shown in the region should be in Catalan. Currently only 2% of Hollywood films shown in Catalonia are dubbed into Catalan - the rest are dubbed into Spanish. There is also talk of taxing dubbed films, the aim being to encourage the use of subtitles - presumably both Spanish and Catalan translations would be given at the bottom of the screen.

The Catalan government has tried once before, in 1998, to introduce these measures, but it backed down then after threats from the film industry to withdraw distribution. For more on this story see this Guardian article. 

Couch and couched

Where the bee sucks, there suck I;

In a cowslip's bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

Those lines are from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Couch is no longer used as a verb in the active voice, except perhaps for technical uses, and the OED has no citations later than the 1890s. It comes from the French, where coucher is still a common verb, especially in the reflexive form se coucher, to go to bed. It's quite common in English in the passive voice, though - as the past participle, couched. It means 'expressed' and usually appears in phrases such as: couched in ... terms or couched in terms of ... or couched in the language (or vocabulary) of ... Interestingly, the OED doesn't reflect these usages; again there are no citations beyond the 19th century. The latest citation is "The couched resentment of the Church" from 1835.

Ephebiphobia

The word ephebiphobia, meaning fear of young people, has appeared in several newspaper articles recently (this Guardian feature, for instance). The word does not appear (yet) in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is believed to have been coined in 1994 by Kirk A Astroph in an article in the professional education journal Phi Delta Kappan (abstract here).

Ephebos is Greek for 'youth or adolescent', and phobia is Greek for 'fear'. The OED has a handful of related entries, including the nouns:

ephebe, ephebus - in ancient Greece, a young citizen aged between 18 and 20

ephebeum - a court in the palaestra for young men to exercise themselves

ephebiatrics - the branch of medicine dealing with the study of adolescence and the diseases of young adults

ephebophilia - sexual attraction in adults to adolescents especially homosexual attraction to adolescent males

The words ephebriatics and ephebophilia were coined in the mid-20th century.

Hebe- is another prefix related to puberty (perhaps a bit younger than epheb-); the citations for hebephrenia tell us that it is the insanity of puberty, characterised by silliness, incongruity and mannerisms. In theory, people who fear or dislike young people could be accused of ageism (defined in the OED as "prejudice or discrimination against people on the grounds of age"), but ageism is usually directed against the older members of society (as the OED goes on to say).

Chic

Chic sounds like a French word, doesn't it? Why then is it an invariable adjective in French, unable to take the usual masculine, feminine and plural endings (des chaussures chic, stylish shoes, not chiques ie the feminine plural ending, like public/publiques)? That question occurred to me earlier so I looked up the origin of the word chic. The OED says it is of uncertain origin. Some etymologists say it comes from the German schick, which means the same as chic. Others say it might be an abbreviation of chicane meaning trickery.

Chic was first used in English in the 1850s according to the OED. Ironically, in English we can add prefixes and suffixes to the word - also in the OED are chicness, chicly and unchic. It has spawned lots of related expressions: eco-chic, geek chic, heroin chic, porno chic, punk chic, radical chic and retro-chic are all in the OED and Wikipedia lists many more, including Camilla chic, chav chic, checkout chic, hick chic and vampire chic.

Revisions to the Oxford English Dictionary

The OED is constantly adding to the Dictionary or editing its definitions, and this month (March 2009) it published its latest batch. The revisions to definitions and citations occur across all letters of the alphabet. Often an entry has been revised because the word was used earlier than previously thought. Sometimes the definition has been expanded, as in the case of sociopath. The 1989 definition (2nd edition of the print version of the OED) was "Someone with a personality disorder manifesting itself chiefly in anti-social attitudes and behaviour"; the newly edited definition (March 2009) is "Originally: a person who performs criminal or antisocial acts as a result of a moderate degree of mental deficiency (disused). In later use (also hyperbolically): a person affected with sociopathy; a psychopath". Notice how 'antisocial' has lost the hyphen since 1989.

The word 'absentee' had two definitions in the 1989 edition: "One who is absent, or away, on any occasion" and "One who systematically stays away from his country or home; a landlord who lives abroad". There are now five different meanings for the noun absentee and another three for the adjective, including the more modern absentee father and absentee mother. The outdated and annoying 'his country or home' now reads 'his or her home, country, property, or place of employment'.

There are completely new entries, too eg live wire now is a headword in its own right and alkali has entered the Dictionary as a verb for the first time, even though the earliest citation is 1849.

See the OED site for more information.

Lady Day, the old New Year's Day

Today, 25 March, is Lady Day, another name for the Christian Feast of the Annunciation, which marks the day the Angel Gabriel revealed to the Virgin Mary that she would give birth to Jesus Christ. The Virgin Mary is the Lady in the name of the day. Lady Day was actually New Year's Day in England until 1752 when the Julian Calendar was superseded by the Gregorian Calendar. Eleven days were lost during the change-over of calendars and this explains why April 6 is still the start of the financial year. From 1753 until 1800 the financial year began on April 5 (11 days from Lady Day, the traditional start of the legal and financial year), and then in 1800 there was a skipped leap day, which meant that the start of the tax year moved to 6 April.

Lady Day is the first of the four traditional quarter days, when tenancies begin and rents become payable. You don't hear the term quarter day very much these days, but it was in the news today, as some businesses are finding it difficult to pay three months rent on one day, particularly so soon after the lean winter period (more here).

Dictionary of American Regional English

The Dictionary of American Regional English is nearing completion after more than 40 years of work. Researchers travelled the country in so-called 'word wagons' interviewing people about the words they used. The BBC 6 o'clock news this evening had a short report from where most of the information in this blog post comes. There's also an article in The Guardian. Researchers discovered that tomatoes are called poison apples in Wisconsin, and that seesaws are known as teeter-totters, tinter-boards and ridey-horses in different places. A slapper is a piece of cornmeal cake in Delaware and Pennsylvania, and long-johns and lazy-wives are also edible goodies. If you're confused in Georgia, Florida or Tennessee you're likely to say you're tazzled up. The writer John Steinbeck talked of having the mullygrubs - it means to be down in the dumps.

There is a case of a kidnapper who was tracked down by a regional word he used in his ransom note. He asked for the money to be left on the devil strip, meaning the grass verge between the pavement (sidewalk) and the roadway. Devil strip is a term used only in a certain location in Ohio, and that is where he was arrested.

Scottish rhyming slang

Rhyming slang is generally associated with Cockney, but it is becoming more and more a part of Scottish colloquial speech, particularly among the young. There is even a book called Jockney Rhyming Slang. It's different from English rhyming slang because it's based around Scottish pronunciation. Here are some examples:

corned beef - deaf

potted heid - dead

Hampden - score (from Hampden roar; Hampden is Scotland's national stadium in Glasgow)

single fish - piss

Mick Jagger - lager

chorus - arse (from 'chorus and verse', which rhymes with the Scottish 'erse')

There's even been an academic paper written on the subject - A Wee Keek at Scottish Rhyming Slang by Antonio Lillo (from Alicante!) in Scottish Language (2004), Vol 23.

Naked or nude?

By coincidence I read two articles today where the different nuances attached to the words naked and nude were mentioned. My friend Elizabeth saves clippings for me to give me ideas for this blog, and one of the articles was from a December 2008 column in the International Herald Tribune by William Safire. He was plugging the book The Artful Nuance by Rod Evans and cited this sentence illustrating the subtle difference between naked and nude: "A naked person is totally bare, wearing nothing; a nude person has become nude by removing clothes'. The other article was in today's Sunday Times and was written by the director of the play Calendar Girls, currently on stage in Chichester. There is a line in the play where one of the women tries to persuade her fellow WI members to pose for a nude calendar; "Naked involves detail", she says, "nude involves suggestion".

The Oxford English Dictionary (and most other dictionaries) includes the word nude in its definition of naked, and vice versa. It is often said, however, that there are no true synonyms in the English language, and the OED has a note at both entries regarding the slight difference in emphasis between the two words (both naked and nude entries have only just been updated - as of March 2009). Under the headword naked, the explanation is: "Naked and nude as applied to the human figure are partly synonymous, but have somewhat different connotations. Naked tends to connote vulnerability and absence of normal clothing; nude tends to be applied to nakedness regarded in positive or aesthetic terms, especially in artistic contexts." Under the headword nude is written: "Whereas the term naked is generally regarded as a neutral descriptive term, nude is now often used in contexts of suggestive or gratuitous display."

Nowruz

Today is Nowruz, or Iranian New Year. I can hear the Iranian family who live below me celebrating on this lovely spring day (Nowruz coincides with the vernal, or spring, equinox). It's clear from the word Nowruz, or the first part of it anyway, that Farsi, or the Iranian language, is related to English (Now is clearly related to the English new, German neu, Latin novus and Greek neo). Farsi is indeed an Indo-European language; it belongs to the Indo-Iranian group within it.

Although it is less obvious at first sight, ruz is related to the Indo-European root leuk, meaning 'light'. In Sanskrit 'light' is roka, which is a cognate of the Greek leukos and the Latin lux from which we get the English light. The sounds /l/ and /r/ are similar consonants - they are both liquids or approximants, to use the phonetic term. The information above is given in the entry for 'light' in the Oxford English Dictionary. Interestingly, the Latin word for 'moon', luna, is related to this group too.

Happy New Year to my Iranian friends and readers!