The virtual linguist

Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang

I have a hefty tome on my bookshelf - Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, by Jonathon Green. It was published in 1998 and runs to over 1300 pages. However, I was just reading a review in the FT about Green's latest dictionary of slang, and this runs to three volumes and over 6000 pages. Around 110,000 words or phrases are defined.

 

The FT reviewer includes the phrases 'give someone the mitten' (reject their marriage proposal) and a 'ham sandwich' (meaning 'nothing'). A fogle-hunter was a pickpocket who specialised in stealing silk handkerchiefs. Much of the slang lexicon deals with taboo subjects and in this dictionary there are more words from the fields of drugs, sex and crime than from other areas (although food and money spawn plenty of slang expressions too).

 

Green provides etymologies where he can, but because so much of slang developed from underground and/or secretive groups or subcultures, sometimes the origins are impossible to trace.

 

The full review is here and it is an interesting read.

 

Happy New Year everyone!

Chinese buzzwords of 2010

A list of 'words of the year' often tell us a lot about a country -- what its citizens or the press are preoccupied with, for instance. The same probably goes for China, eight of whose 2010 buzzwords are given in this article, together with their translations.

 

At number one is an expression which best translates as 'awesome'. This expression is proving so popular with the young, and in internet forums and the like, that it has already begun appearing in state newspapers, and advertisers are incorporating it into their ads.

 

At number two, 'fake divorce' gives us an insight into Chinese society. New laws make it difficult for families to buy more than one property, so some couples have been going through a 'fake divorce' in order to be able to invest in the property market.

 

Ant tribe is the picturesque idiom at number three. It refers to the hordes of young people commuting to cities to attend university.

 

Number four is very interesting. It's 'My dad is Li Gang'. Li Gang is a real person -- a police official -- and when his son was arrested for drunk driving, he (the son) was alleged to have said 'Go ahead and sue me -- my dad is Li Gang'. The phrase now is used to express resentment at the privileges enjoyed by the elite. I had heard this phrase before reading the article about 2010 buzzwords, and it seems to have really hit home with many Chinese people.

 

By number five the Chinese buzzword list is looking more like Western 'word of the year' lists -- it's low-carbon lifestyle.

 

Number six contains many clues as to changing mores in China today. It's "I'd rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle" and was uttered by a female contestant on a reality television dating show. It shows, according to commentators, how materialistic Chinese youth has become.

 

Number seven is 'swinger professor' and relates to a news story where a maths professor was sentenced to a period in prison for his sexual activities. The case gave rise to much discussion about how far the government should intervene in people's private lives.

 

Number eight is something of a linguistic dilemma. It hinges on the word bei, be in phrases such as 'be represented' or 'be donated'. The word epitomises the feelings of powerlessness or passivity of young Chinese people, who have no control over their lives.

 

Read the full article here.

Bougie

Bougie is the French word for candle (it's in the OED, too). I learnt the derivation of the word earlier when I was writing an article on numbers, and had cause to look up Fibonacci, who was responsible for popularising the Arabic system of numbering in Europe in the 13th century.

 

At that time the best mathematicians were from Arab countries, and Fibonacci, a Pisan, studied maths in Algeria at a place called Bijiyah (spelt many different ways across the internet including Béjaïa and Bejaia). This Algerian town was also known as Bugia, or Bougie, and, since the town was well known for trading in wax, the name was given to wax candles.

Political words of 2010

The BBC has an A-Z piece on its website today looking at some of the words that were frequently used over the year in political stories. Many of them, of course, are to do with the Coalition government. There's 'agree' as in the phrase uttered lots of times during the pre-election televised debates between the three party leaders, "I agree with Nick". There's also Cleggmania, although that was more in evident before the election, than in recent weeks.

 

There were the insults hurled at various opponents: ginger rodent, dwarf, geeks and nutters. Plus words that are not insults in themselves, but were used in a way that upset people - twine, for instance, which is what some "pretty primitive" people in his constituency use to hold up their trousers, according to Cumbria Tory MP Rory Stewart.

 

I blogged on a couple of words on the list -- breeding and Bigotgate.

 

Here's the full A-Z BBC list.

Turkey

On Saturday, Christmas Day, I shall be sitting down to turkey, like a lot of other people. But why is the bird called a turkey?

 

The original full name of the bird was turkey-cock, but this applied to a different bird -- the guinea-fowl, a native of Africa. The bird was, according to the OED, imported "through the Turkish dominions", hence the name. Guinea in the name guinea-fowl refers to the West African country, from where the Portuguese got the birds and traded in them.

 

The American bird, the turkey, was so-named because it was believed to be a species of what was then called turkey-cock.

 

Michael Quinion of World Wide Words thinks that the American expression 'talk turkey' probably came about because of the banter that went on around the Thanksgiving Dinner table, although he also concedes that it could relate to the turkey trading that went on between Native Americans and settlers.

 

Some believe that the phrase 'cold turkey' (ie suddenly stopping taking drugs, or giving up another addiction without winding down) comes from the food, since cold turkey is a dish that needs no preparation. Others believe it is related to the aforementioned phrase 'talk turkey' since this means straight talking, getting right down to business without preliminaries.

 

A very merry Christmas to everyone. I shall be back next Wednesday (29th) after the holiday.

All fur coat and no knickers

This was a headline in yesterday's Daily Mail referring to Pamela Anderson, who had been photographed wearing a fur coat: "All fur coat -- let's just hope she's wearing knickers".

 

Although the Daily Mail is frequently obsessed with celebrities' knickers, in this instance the reference is to an old idiom - she's all fur coat and no knickers. I can remember my aunts and neighbours saying it in the north-west of England in the 60s. They would be criticising a woman for her ostentatious vulgarity and showy facade, namely, she might look on the surface as if she is well-to-do, but she has lowly origins in reality.

 

This idiom varies around the country. You will (or would) also hear 'all red hat and no knickers' or 'all red hat/fur coat and no drawers'.

Other names for the dandelion

Every day on the BBC homepage there is a 'fact of the day' from the comedy programme QI. Yesterday the fact began "Dandelions are also known as pissy beds, jack-piss-the-bed, wet-the-bed, wet-a-bed, tiddlebeds and pissenlit ..." I'm afraid I can't complete the rest of it, as it's a different fact today and that one has disappeared. However, I did check the info when I read it yesterday.

 

The Oxford English Dictionary has even more synonyms - pish-the-bed, pee-the-bed, pissy-pee and pissabed are four. All of these names derive from the fact that dandelion was once well known as a diuretic - and you didn't need to eat it to get the effect; a citation in the OED says that it was believed that just picking a dandelion could cause you to wet the bed.

 

The standard name of the flower, dandelion, derives from the French dent de lion or 'lion's tooth', so-called because of the shape of the leaves.

Michael Rosen on how English evolved into a global language

The children's writer Michael Rosen gives a potted history of the English language on the BBC site to mark the major English language exhibition currently being held at the British Library.

 

He starts by saying that there has always been a need for an international language. Up to about 400 years ago that international language was Latin and it allowed intellectuals everywhere to communicate with each other. Plus, of course, it was the language of the Church. The rise of national cultures broke down Latin's hold, and people started wanting the Bible in their own language (note that the King James Bible will be celebrating its 400th anniversary in 2011, and Martin Luther's German Bible is several decades older).

 

The 20th century was the century of nation states - and of national languages, but some idealists tried to emphasise world unity by introducing a truly global language -- Esperanto was one invention. Now, however, another global language has emerged -- English, partly due to the former power of the British Empire but mainly because of the power and influence of the United States. As Rosen says, words and phrases from pop music and Hollywood films now pepper most languages of the world.

 

Full piece here.

16th-century spelling

English spelling was all over the place in the 16th century - there wasn't a standardised way to spell words. In the frontispiece of the first dictionary, the 1604 Table Alphabeticall, 'words' appears a few times, but is spelt two different ways - 'words' and 'wordes'.

 

I was reading A History of English Spelling by DG Scragg earlier. Discussing French spelling in the Middle Ages, Scragg notes that there were successive moments in France to adapt the spelling of words to reflect their etymology - povre became pauvre, for instance, to be closer to Latin pauper. These longer spellings were particularly approved of by lawyers' scribes, since these craftsmen were paid by the inch! By adding extra letters to words they made some handy extra income. Scragg notes that this practice went on in England, too. Richard Mulcaster, often considered the father of lexicography (although his list of 8000 words in The First Part of the Elementarie (1582) did not include definitions, so the work cannot be called a dictionary), wrote "If words be ouercharged with number of letters, that coms either by couetousnesse in such, as fell them by lines ..." (note the use of U for V -- V didn't become a fully fledged member of the alphabet till much later, as I wrote here).

 

Mulcaster's First Part of the Elementarie can be seen in full (as pdf) here.

Taghairm

At my office Christmas do last night talk turned at my table to everybody's favourite words. One person's favourite was taghairm, defined in Chambers Dictionary as "(in the Scottish Highlands) divination; esp inspiration sought by lying in a bullock's hide behind a waterfall".

 

What a great word, and how I wish I could find an opportunity to use it in ordinary conversation. The OED's definition isn't quite as picturesque as Chambers' ("A method of divination formerly practised in the Scottish Highlands"), but the Dictionary does tell readers to look at the citations for more information. This is the first one, from 1774: "A vast cataract, whose waters falling from a high rock, jet so far as to form a dry hollow beneath.‥ One of these imposters was sowed up in the hide of an ox, and‥was placed in this concavity: the trembling enquirer was brought to the place, where the shade, and the roaring of the waters, encreased the dread of the occasion. The question is put, and the person in the hide delivers his answer, and so ends this species of divination styled Taghairm." (from Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides)

 

Another citation is from Scott's The Lady of the Lake: "Brian an augury hath tried, Of that dread kind which must not be Unless in dread extremity, The Taghairm called; by which, afar, Our sires foresaw the events of war."

 

Thanks, John, for the word, and for giving me the idea for today's post.