The virtual linguist

Hebrew slang

The Forward is a Jewish-American newspaper that began in 1897 as a Yiddish paper. Even now it has pages in Yiddish as well as English. Last week guest editor Judith Shulevitz devoted part of the publication to articles on Hebrew slang (link sent to me by Scott - thanks, Scott).

 

I found this article interesting because it was about a word I recognised -- large. Large has been absorbed into Hebrew, but it doesn't mean big in size. It is a measure of character and means generous or expansive.

 

Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet, but it is a Germanic language, therefore I could guess the meaning of the word freier (from German frei, free) in this piece. It once meant a non-observant Jew, literally one who was 'free' of religious commandments, but these days the meaning has changed to mean a gullible person or sucker.

Russian goes global

The majority of users of Russian-language sites on the internet are thought to be outside Russia, according to this piece on a Russian website. The author regards Russian these days as a global language, spoken by a large Russian diaspora, as opposed to a regional language, not particularly widely spoken across the world, as was the case during Soviet times. People from a range of countries, particularly Russia's neighbours, are now learning Russian, not to study Pushkin or Tolstoy, as was often the case before, but to get a job in Russia. According to one American soldier encountered by the author of the piece, Russian often goes down better than English in some regions of Afghanistan.

 

Here's the full article. Thanks, Elizabeth, for sending it to me.

Breeding

Former Conservative MP Howard Flight was forced to apologise after making this statement: "We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive, but for those on benefit there is every incentive."

 

It was the word 'breeding' that caused the furore. Some commentators saw in it an allusion to eugenics and 'selective breeding'. Broadly speaking, if you use the verb 'breed' as opposed to 'have children', you are probably being negative, because 'breed' is associated with animals. The verb 'breed' was often used when talking about female slaves in the 19th-century USA, and the OED has a couple of citations of this ilk.

 

Another reason for the word 'breeding' being regarded as a negative word is that these days it often crops up in the phrase 'breeding grounds for terrorists' (mostly but not always - a quick look at Google News also brings up the phrases "a breeding ground for student success", "a breeding ground for new talent" and more neutral phrases referring to animals eg "a breeding ground for nightingales").

 

Ironically, breeding used as a noun is also used in a positive sense, eg good breeding means having a good background and being well brought-up.

Step up to the plate

"Labour warns Ed he must step up to the plate" is the headline in an article in today's Telegraph. (The Ed in question is Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party.) There are several hundred instances of the idiom 'step up to the plate' in today's Google News pages. Many of them are from British newspapers, which is interesting as the phrase is a reference to baseball, not a popular sport in Britain. The plate in baseball is the piece of rubber marking the spot where the batter stands, so 'stepping up to the plate' literally means getting ready to hit the ball.

 

Step up to the plate means to take on a challenge, or take the initiative. In the aforementioned article, I guess that the author is saying that Ed Miliband needs to do something and show leadership.

 

Lawyers' corporate jargon

The author of a piece in today's Guardian, once counted eleven 'going forwards' in the space of five minutes in the speech of a senior lawyer, and counted even more instances of the expression 'added value' at a law conference.

 

The article was prompted by a law firm who, instead of announcing 'redundancies', had called the job losses 'right-sizing'. Other examples of jargon in the column include 'a solution-focused approach' (which means 'cutting corners') and the use of 'spend' as a noun and 'team' as a verb.

 

Why the Ashes?

The Ashes, a series of cricket matches between England and Australia, has just started. But why is it called the Ashes?

 

We have to go back to 1882 to discover the origins of the name. England and Australia had played each other at cricket before 1882, but that was the first year that Australia beat England in a match played in England. The defeat shocked fans in Britain and the Sporting Times published a mock obituary "in affectionate remembrance of English cricket, which died at the Oval on 29th August, 1882". The report continued "The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia."

 

When the next cricket international came round a year or so later, this time played in Australia, the British media joked that hopefully England would regain the Ashes. When England did, in fact, win, a group of Australian women presented the England cricket captain Ivo Bligh with a small terracotta urn containing some ashes - supposedly those of a cricket bail (which is one of the wooden sticks that makes up the wicket).

 

Even if Australia win the competition, they never get to take the Ashes back with them. The original urn never leaves the Marylebone Cricket Club museum at Lord's, and instead the winning team gets to keep a Waterford glass replica until the next Ashes series.

Big society

Big society is OUP's 2010 word of the year (see Susie Dent's article on the Oxford Dictionaries website). A big society (the expression was popularised by David Cameron) is a society run by local communities and the voluntary sector, with state intervention and control kept to a minimum. Those are my words and my understanding of the term but, it has to be said, there are plenty of other definitions on other websites, and there are plenty of people, even David Cameron at times, who are not exactly sure what the expression 'big society' means.

 

Most people in Britain will have heard, however, of the phrase 'big society', which cannot be said about all the words on OUP's shortlist for the word of the year. Preloading is the practice of drinking alcohol before going out for a drink (rather like predrinking, which I have blogged on before); upcycling is recycling waste or old goods to make products of higher quality and value; tweeps are those who follow others on Twitter; and woot (or w00t) is a cry of triumph or elation on internet forums and message boards.

 

Tweeps and upcycling are blends ie formed from two existing words (Twitter and peeps, and upgrade and recycle), and blends are the most common way new words are coined. Other blends on OUP's top ten shortlist are clickjacking, a blend of click and hijacking, which means forcing internet users to click on hidden links, and showmance, a blend of show and romance, which is a romance between actors in a show (often a reality show) that rarely lasts longer than the filming of the show itself.

 

For the full shortlist, see here.

Shebeen

A letter from a reader in today's Financial Times complains about the use of colonial language in the paper to describe the Irish economy. This is the article in question, and the expressions the reader objects to are 'the last-chance shebeen' and 'the government has steered [...] into a bog'. The journalist also compares Irish banks to JM Synge's smooth-talking 'Playboy of the Western World'.

 

The Financial Times is not the only media source that has upset some Irish people with its stereotypes. A report on the BBC Newsnight programme about the same issue caused some viewers to complain on social networking sites about the stereotypical light in which Ireland was depicted -- there were mock-ups of picture postcards showing a hilly, boggy landscape and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne supposedly doing an Irish dance outside a traditional shebeen. (You can see the clip here).

 

A shebeen is a dive or a drinking den, traditionally a pub that sells alcohol without a licence -- similar to a US saloon, hence the pun on the well-known idiom 'last-chance saloon'. The Irish spelling is sibín. The OED says the word is of obscure origin, but other sources on the web (eg Wordsmith) say that it comes from the Irish word for mug or mugful. The word is used in Scotland and South Africa too. The word shebang is also defined in the OED as "a low drinking establishment" so it could be related to shebeen (OED says it is of obscure origin). However, the most common meaning of shebang in current usage is 'thing' or 'matter', as in the phrase 'the whole shebang'.

 

The word 'bog' meaning wet, spongy ground, has an Irish and/or Scottish Gaelic origin (from bog meaning 'soft').

French Radio London

If you're learning French, you might like to tune in to a new French-language, London-based radio station, French Radio London. Despite the English name, the station's announcers speak French and 80% of the tracks played are sung in French (that's a larger percentage than on most radio stations based in France). Apart from music, there is news, travel news and chat.

 

There are around 400,000 native French speakers in London, and the station is aimed at these, as well as francophiles. Those learning French will find it a bit easier to understand than stations broadcasting from France, as the news and adverts have an English flavour -- for instance, they were talking about Eddie Izzard when I tuned in.

 

Here's a taster and a brief report from the BBC website, and here's the French Radio London website.

Blinking

I went to a talk yesterday at the Johnson Society of London given by Jock Murray, Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at Dalhousie University, Canada. He was speaking about Samuel Johnson's well-documented eye problems and his talk was entitled Blinking Sam: What Caused Johnson's Poor Eyesight?

 

Johnson's friend Sir Joshua Reynolds painted four portraits of him and one of them is known as the Blinking Sam portrait, as it shows Johnson with a book very close to his face (see here). It was Johnson himself who came up with the epithet; on seeing the portrait he is said to have complained that he did not want to "be known by posterity for his defects only". When it was pointed out to him that Reynolds did not mean any harm, and that he had shown himself cupping his ear in his self-portrait, thus drawing attention to his deafness, Johnson is said to have remarked "He may paint himself as deaf if he chooses, but I will not be Blinking Sam".

 

In the 20th century 'blinking' began to be used as a mild expletive, and you will still hear some people (usually older people) saying things like "blinking idiot" or "blinking nuisance". Such phrases are usually said by people who would never dream of swearing, and 'blinking' replaces the stronger 'bloody'. There are other similar 'bloody' substitutes eg blooming, blasted and blankety.

 

In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Portia's second suitor, the Prince of Arragon, says on opening the silver casket "What's here? the portrait of a blinking idiot". Here, the word 'blinking' is probably literal -- it perhaps refers to the fact that the picture inside the casket shows the jester squinting. Johnson uses the above quotation to illustrate his definition of blink ("to see obscurely") in his famous dictionary. The headword 'blinkard' is also in Johnson's Dictionary with the meanings 1) One that has bad eyes and 2) Something twinkling. The OED has another sense for 'blinkard' and one that goes back to the 16th century, namely "one who lacks intellectual perception", which explains perhaps why Shakespeare attached the word 'blinking' to 'idiot'.

 

There's much more about Johnson's eyesight problems in this article.