The virtual linguist

Oddest book title of the year award

The shortlist for the oddest book title of 2009 was announced earlier this week. The candidates are:

Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter by David Crompton
The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease by Ellen Scherl and Marla Dubinsky
Collectible Spoons of the 3rd Reich by James A Yannes
Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes by Daina Taimina
Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots by Ronald C Arkin
What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua? by Tara Jansen-Meyer

The industry magazine, The Bookseller, runs the contest, which was first held in 1978. The first winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop of Nude Mice. Other past winners include People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification and Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers.

Titles that didn't make the shortlist this year, for some reason, include The Great Dog Bottom Swap and The Wild World of Girly Men and Masculine Women - And Why Americans Suffer from So Many Other Idiotic Syndromes. The full longlist can be viewed here.

Employers value foreign language skills

A survey conducted by CILT, the National Centre for Languages, discovered that employers rank language skills among potential employees second only to IT skills. About 300 top companies, including Boots, HSBC and Royal Mail have signed up to a campaign to encourage young people to learn a language. (More here.)

CILT has recently added a new area to its website dealing with careers using languages (here).

Swingeing

The panel on this week's The News Quiz, a comedy panel game on BBC Radio 4, were talking about 'swingeing cuts'. Someone asked whether anything else other than cuts could be swingeing, and the host Sandi Toksvig asked whether it was possible to swinge.

The answers are 'yes' and 'yes'. I put 'swingeing' into the search box on the Google news page and certainly it is true that 'swingeing' nearly always accompanies the words 'cuts', but I also saw the phrases 'swingeing rates applied to credit cards', 'swingeing council job losses' and 'swingeing tax rises'. Swingeing is from the verb 'to swinge', which is now virtually obsolete and means, or meant, 'to whip or flog'. The present participle swingeing, used as an adjective, is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as colloquial or slang and has the definition: "Very forcible, great, or large; huge, immense." The verb 'swinge' dates back to Old English and is related to the word 'swing'.

Who or what was Humpty Dumpty?

You probably know the nursery rhyme:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

I was in Colchester yesterday and learnt that Humpty Dumpty supposedly came from that old city. Humpty Dumpty was a cannon. During the English Civil War (1642-49) Colchester (a town held by the Royalists) was under siege by the Roundheads (Parliamentarians). The city was protected by a wall and the cannon was placed on this wall. In July 1648 the Roundheads managed to blow up the part of the wall on which Humpty Dumpty, or the cannon, sat, and it came tumbling down to the ground. The Royalists (all the king's men) tried to repair it but couldn't and they surrendered to the Roundheads shortly afterwards.

Not everyone believes this story. Some say that Humpty Dumpty refers to Richard III who was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Another suggestion is that Humpty Dumpty was a 'testudo' or army machine or vehicle, a precursor to the modern tank, that was designed to climb the walls of the city of Gloucester, also during the Civil War, but it fell off into the moat. 

Pantywaist

I read this clause in Libby Purves' column in the Times yesterday: "Leaving aside the question of what sort of cringing pantywaist coppers we hire these days ...". I had to look up 'pantywaist', and found that it is in the OED. The definition (of pantywaist as an adjective) is: "Weak, ineffectual; cowardly; unmanly". The OED says it is a North American derogatory term, and originally comes from the noun pantywaist, a child's romper suit.

Libby Purves has another good word in her piece, although she has made this one up -- Gordonzilla, based on the film monster Godzilla.

The Guardian and the actor versus actress debate

There was an article in yesterday's Guardian, in which the newspaper's style editor said how he had had several complaints, mainly from men, about the use of the word 'actor' to describe women as well as men. It is also the Guardian's policy, he told us, to avoid the use of stewardess, waitress and other feminine forms. I have blogged on this subject before.

Some specifically feminine forms are pejorative and are not merely the female equivalent of the masculine word: a governess is not a female governor (although she used to be - Elizabeth I was described as a governess), a majorette is not a female major and an old mistress is in no way similar in meaning to an old master. I would say that rare -ess words eg poetess and ambassadress should be avoided in speech and newspaper reports but actress is still fairly common, so I don't really have a problem with that. However, it depends on the context and sentence. As one of the article's commentators points out, to say 'Whoopi Goldberg is a better actress than Mel Gibson' sounds odd. Another commentator refers to the unlikely collocation 'pretty actor', which gives away the sex of the person concerned just as clearly as if the word actress had been used.

Some of the readers' comments are well worth reading, especially those that stray far from the original point.

Dint

Dint is a word that is only ever used in the phrase 'by dint of'. These days it has no independent meaning. I heard it mentioned on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning (scroll down to 08:56 on this page to read and listen again) in connection with wounds to the head of Amy Robsart, the wife of Queen Elizabeth I's favourite, Robert Dudley, who died after a fall down the stairs. Chris Skidmore, author of a new book, Death and the Virgin, said that on Amy's death certificate it was written that she had 'dyntes' in her head (the then spelling of 'dints'). Dint, or dynte, is one of the oldest words in the Oxford English Dictionary and meant 'stroke' or 'blow' in the 16th century, especially one caused by a weapon during a fight. 'By dint of' means 'by force of', and hence is a synonym of 'owing to'. 'Dent', which nowadays means a hollow or impression in a surface, is a later variant of 'dint' and in the 16th century also meant 'blow'. The OED has citations containing both 'by dint of sword' and 'by dent of sword' for this time.

There are a number of words in English which have survived only in set phrases and idioms, but are not used on their own any more. Here are some more examples:

amok (run amok)

cahoots (in cahoots with)

fettle (in fine fettle)

fro (to and fro)

kilter (out of kilter)

kith (kith and kin)

roughshod (ride roughshod over)

shrift (short shrift)

snook (cock a snook)

spick (spick and span)

Hypochondria

Hypochondria is a word that has changed in meaning over its history, as I discovered when I went to talk given by Dr Jane Darcy of King's College on melancholia in the 18th century.

Hypochondria comes from ancient Greek and literally refers to the soft part of the body below the ribs. In the 17th and 18th centuries hypochondria was considered an actual disease based around disorders of the stomach or digestive system. Boswell referred to Samuel Johnson as a 'hypochondriack' (sic), although Boswell was renowned for being one himself and even used the pseudonym 'The Hypochondriack' when writing articles. At the time the adjectives hyp, hypo, hypt and hypped were also in use to describe a hypochondriac, and the OED has a related entry 'hipped' which it describes as colloquial British English meaning "affected with hypochondria; morbidly depressed or low-spirited".

In the 18th and 19th centuries hypochondria was thought mainly to affect men, and it was a sort of male equivalent to hysteria (thought to affect only females, which is why the origin of the word is the Greek word for 'womb'). It was only in the late 19th century that hypochondria gained the more pejorative meaning it has today ie imagining oneself to be ill.

The sport of skeleton

I didn't know there was a winter sport called skeleton until I heard it on the news this morning. An Englishwoman had won a gold medal at the Winter Olympics, hence the news item. You very rarely hear the word English or British mentioned in the same sentence as Winter Olympic champion, but interestingly, the English were instrumental in the origins of the sport. According to the sport's governing body, in 1882, when skiing was still unknown in central Europe, a group of English soldiers built a difficult toboggan track leading from Davos to Klosters in Switzerland. Ten years later another Englishman called Child travelled down the track on a home-made toboggan made out of metal strips. It is thought that the sled became known as a skeleton because that is what it resembled. Another hypothesis is that the pronunciation skele was an anglicised version of the name of a traditional Norwegian sled, kjaelke.

Skeleton is in the Oxford English Dictionary with this meaning, although the entry and citation (below) are not very helpful in helping you picture the vehicle:

c. A skeleton toboggan.

1904 Field 6 Feb. 204/1 There were sixteen entries on skeletons... Eight skeletons (four gentlemen and four ladies) ran in the second heat.

Tickle Cock Bridge

Feisty residents of Castleford in West Yorkshire have forced their local council to reinstate the original name of a local underpass -- Tickle Cock Bridge -- after the council unveiled a plaque on the bridge with a new, sanitised, name -- Tittle Cott (story here). Older residents of the town felt that the local government officials were being prissy about the somewhat risqué name. Many elderly people had fond memories of using Tickle Cock Bridge when courting 40+ years ago.

In response to this story, that bastion of the Establishment, the Daily Telegraph published a list of the rudest place names in Britain (here). Some of the readers' comments are interesting, too.

Cock, meaning rooster or male fowl, is one of the oldest words in the Oxford English Dictionary. The risqué meaning ie penis, is most likely related to another meaning of cock, namely spout or short pipe. The word tickle is also slightly risqué in its own right, cf slap and tickle.