The virtual linguist

The emirate has no clothes

In an article on Dubai's financial crisis in Saturday's Financial Times (I can't find it online, but it's on page 6 of the paper) a hedge fund manager was quoted as saying "This is a case of people realising that the emirate has no clothes".

This phrase is understandable to most people because they are familiar with the fairy-tale The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen, from where it comes. As Wikipedia says:

"Scholars have noted that the phrase 'Emperor's new clothes' has become a standard metaphor for anything that smacks of pretentiousness, pomposity, social hypocrisy, collective denial, or hollow ostentatiousness".

The hedge fund manager was particularly creative, given that the words emperor and emirate are vaguely similar -- they begin with the same two letters, anyway. Emperor and emir both originally meant 'commander', but emperor comes from Latin and emir from Arabic.

I've been trying to think of other phrases from fairy-tales that are common in everyday English. There's "Open Sesame" from Aladdin, (Ali Baba, sorry) and various permutations of the phrase 'genie in a bottle', which is from Aladdin. Here are some sentences I found on Google's news pages:

"Key to keeping violence genie in the bottle is ..." (Scotsman)

"... two genies in different bottles waiting to be rubbed the right way" (Guardian)

"... the genie was well and truly out of the bottle" (Irish Times)

"Kiss that frog" is another phrase that turns up in unlikely places (like in this article about Michelle Obama). That is from The Frog Prince by the Brothers Grimm. "The big bad wolf" is also common in news reports -- usually with reference to the government. The phrase comes from the story The Three Little Pigs. Again, we are all so familiar with this story from our childhood that we understand a headline like "Who's afraid of the big bad net?" (Scottish Herald).

Gone ghetto

Tiger Woods is reported to have described his wife as having "gone ghetto" after she allegedly got angry and scratched his face in an argument over his supposed relationship with another woman (see story here).

I had never heard the phrase "gone ghetto" before but I found the term used way back in 2005 on this forum. Moreover, the forum was discussing Channel 4 and the forum users were based in Britain. I understand the term to mean downmarket and what might be called in Britain 'chavvy' (or, as my mother used to say, 'common').

The word ghetto has an uncertain origin, but it probably comes from Italian, as it originally related mostly to a district in Italian cities where Jews lived. It then came to mean any rundown area of a city where minorities lived.

Woods supposedly told a friend he would need to buy his wife a "Kobe special", according to the celebrity website TMZ. This is a reference to the expensive ring basketball star Kobe Bryant gave his wife several years ago after a well-publicised extramarital fling. 

One of the only ...

I picked up today's Times in the hairdresser's today and read the Feedback to readers' letters section. It doesn't seem to be online yet -- last week's page is still up -- but it will probably be there in a few days' time; you can read it for yourself by clicking on Comment, then Letters, then finding Sally Baker's photo and clicking on that.

A reader had objected to the sentence "The M1 is one of the only places where classes mix", believing it should be "one of the few places". The reader presumably felt that 'only' refers to a solitary thing. Sally Baker, the Feedback page editor felt the phrase was ok and was a sort of extrapolation and rephrasing of the perfectly acceptable sentence "the only places where the classes mix are the M1, the cinema and the Derby".

I've just googled the phrase, but most of the hits on the first page are blogs and copy-editors' discussions about whether the phrase is acceptable, so it's hard to draw any conclusions from that. One of the hits reads "Urban Outfitters is one of the only clothing retailers still turning a handy profit ...", and that does sound a bit clumsy to me. 'Few' would be better here, I feel, although maybe there are more than a few retailers who are still turning a handy profit, so 'only' is vaguer and may suit the writer's purposes for that reason.

There are several instances of "one of the only" on the British National Corpus, but this phrase appears in only 0.47 instances per million words compared to 1510.37 instances per million words of the word only considered on its own.

Folie à deux

When I was on holiday in California last month I visited the Folie à Deux winery in the Napa Valley. The winery's website says that it is named for the French expression meaning 'shared fantasies'. Well, that's a nice way of translating the French. Folie à deux is in many English dictionaries as it is used by the medical profession. It is a rare psychotic disorder where two people who are closely related share the same delusions (for a fuller explanation see here). It is sometimes called by other names including contagious insanity, infectious insanity, double insanity, and communicated insanity. The delusions can appear in more than two people simultaneously, in which case the number deux in the phrase changes. There is a recorded case of a folie à douze (12). As the French Wikipedia page says, it is a form of mass hysteria.

Thanks Chris for prompting me to look up this expression ... and for remembering the name of the winery we visited -- I obviously sampled more wines than you did, because I couldn't remember any of the names of the places we visited!

Curry

This article on the BBC website is about curry, to celebrate National Curry Week. Curry has been a popular food in Britain for more than 200 years. Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery, first published in 1747, has recipes for curries and pilaus.

There is an older cookbook, from the 1390s, called The Forme of Cury, but at this time the word 'cury' referred to all hot food and was from the French verb cuire, to cook. The OED's origin of the modern word curry is the Tamil kari or Canarese (another Indian language usually called Kannada nowadays) karil.

The first curry house in England opened in 1810. Its owner was Sake Dene Mahomed who later became shampooing surgeon to King George IV. I blogged on him and on the then meaning of the word shampooing here.

Pants

Tennis player Andy Murray described his serve in a recent match as 'pants' (see article here). Pants is British English slang and means 'rubbish' or 'terrible'. The campaign Pants to Poverty uses pants in the sense "goodbye to something unwanted". As the OED says, although pants is, strictly speaking, a noun, it is often used like an adjective. In the 1990s, when the exclamation became popular, it was common to say "that's a pile of pants" or "that's a load of pants", but 'pants' on its own is more widespread now. It's also much more common in speech than in writing.

Pants in British English are usually underpants or knickers, ie undergarments not trousers. Knickers is a rather dated expression of exasperation or contempt, so calling something 'pants' follows the same theme ie items of underwear are used in slang expressions.

Pants and knickers are both eponyms ie named after people. Pants comes from the commedia dell'arte character Pantaloon, and knickers from the surname Knickerbocker, the nom de plume of Washington Irving in History of New York.

Polari

I have mentioned Polari before (eg in this post). It is a slang 'language' (I put language in inverted commas because there is some dispute about whether Polari is a language, since it uses ordinary English grammar) that was used by homosexuals in Britain before homosexuality was legalised in the 1960s. The whole idea was to bamboozle the police and authorities in order not to get oneself arrested.

You might think that Polari has had its day, given that homosexuality is no longer a crime, and gay people can say whatever they like in public in standard English. In fact, Polari is enjoying something of a resurgence. I heard Paul Burston on today's Word of Mouth on BBC Radio 4 (you can listen for another week here). He has started a Polari literary salon (more here) and there has even been a Polari event at London's South Bank arts complex.

On the radio programme Paul gave a history of Polari. It has bits of Romany and Irish in it, and a lot of the vocabulary was acquired thanks to sailors, who visited various ports around the world and brought new words back with them.

This week's Word of Mouth was devoted to coded language. It also mentioned Leet (which I blogged on here). I learnt from today's programme that the word Leet is a phonetic representation of the word elite ie the implication is that only a select few use Leet or Leetspeak (or at least, used to use it -- it was first used in the 1980s). It was developed by hackers so that they could not be detected. By changing letters of words to other symbols, the new 'words' didn't show up when people put 'hacker' etc in search engines. Leet might change an E to a number 3, for instance, or convert an A to a /\ (forward slash followed by back slash).

German

In my post yesterday on in-laws I forgot to mention the word german. That's german with a small g, not the nationality or language. It doesn't exactly have anything to do with in-laws -- it means "having the same parents". A brother-german is a full brother ie you and your brother both share both parents, and a sister-german is similar.The word cousin-german also exists (although chiefly in legal or old texts) and means first cousin. 

German used in this sense is an old word (and more or less obsolete now). It dates back to the 14th century at least. If you're a keen genealogist you may come across the Latin word germanus meaning 'brother' in old documents, and it is from Latin that we get the word. It is related to the modern Spanish word for 'brother', hermano. These days we use the word germane (which shares the page with german in the OED), which once meant true or real, but now means pertinent or relevant.

German with a capital G, ie to describe a person from Germany, only entered English in the 16th century. It is also from the Latin germanus, because the word originally referred to several different groups in Europe, thought to be related since they spoke similar languages. These people themselves did not use the word German. The OED suggests that it may have been some Celtic Gauls who coined the word German, since it is possibly related to the Old Irish for 'neighbour' or 'battle-cry'.

Rock and roll

I heard a snippet of the BBC Radio 4 programme Payola, the Pluggers and the Father of Rock and Roll (the full programme is available for a few more days here) on this evening's Pick of the Week. The programme was mainly about the payola scandal, namely the practice of disc jockeys accepting bribes to give certain records air time, but the DJ mentioned, Alan Freed, was responsible for the term rock and roll as applied to music.

In the 1940s Freed was a disc jockey at a white-owned US radio station. He found the usual output of the station boring so began to play some records of his own, which were numbers by African-American artistes. He called the music rock and roll to avoid telling his bosses and the white listeners that the bands were African-American. Freed did not invent the term rock and roll; in African-American slang it meant sex (or, as the BBC presenter called it rumpy-pumpy, which, coincidentally I blogged about a couple of days ago), but he is credited with popularising the term. 

In-laws

There was an interesting post this week over at Language Log on the meaning of 'brother-in-law' and whether it can be used to describe the relationship between the husbands of two sisters, even though they themselves are not actually related at all. Several commentators felt that the term brother-in-law was fine to use this way. 

I was going to comment that Russian has different words for the English brother-in-law, sister-in-law, mother-in-law etc depending on whether the relative was related to the man or the woman, but someone had already said the same thing (Karen, whose comment is 12.21am on November 20). I say "was related" as some of these words are dropping out of the Russian language, and many Russians don't know them these days.

Words survive in a language for as long as we need them, but when society or cultural practices change, the need for the words disappears. In a patriarchal society (as tsarist Russia was) the side of the family you were on -- the husband's or the wife's -- was significant and made a difference to your status within the family, hence the need for separate words.

When I was teaching English in Libya in the early 1980s, a student asked me one day for the name of his mother's brother in English (the relationship, he meant). I answered "He's your uncle". "No, he isn't", he replied, "my uncle is my father's brother". "Yes, it's the same thing", I continued, which he found absolutely impossible to comprehend because, of course, in that society, your father's brother and your mother's brother are not the same thing and do not have the same position in the family.

As I said, the different Russian words are dropping out of the language because the significance of being a paternal or maternal relative no longer has any relevance today. One of the first relationship terms to disappear -- you sometimes read it in 19th-century novels, but it's not even in dictionaries these days -- is yatrov' or yatrovka which is the wife of your husband's brother. That is clearly an important relationship in a patriarchal society -- two women who have married brothers and are therefore two outsiders, who perhaps feel a common bond with each other for this reason.