The virtual linguist

Hurtful

A word I seem to be seeing more and more these days is 'hurtful'. No-one seems to get angry at a spouse's unreasonable behaviour or an insult any more; instead they describe remarks and behaviour as 'hurtful' - the supermodel Naomi Campbell, for instance, who found an advert comparing her to a chocolate bar 'insulting and hurtful' (see here).

 

I checked on Google NGram, which is a facility which looks for words and phrases in a huge historical corpus of digitised books. You can see how usage of a word has changed over a time period. The data for 'hurtful' show that use of the word 'hurtful' had been steadily declining since the year 1800 (in books, anyway), bottoming out between 1940 and 1980. Since then, however, hurtful has been getting steadily more popular and the graph is going up again.

Philogynist

One of the recent words in the Oxford Dictionaries Online 'word of the day' mailings was philogynist. It's a rare word, but it's opposite, misogynist, a woman hater, isn't so rare. What does that say about us, I wonder?

 

A philogynist is someone who admires or is fond of women. The OED's definition includes the information that it usually refers to a man. There are only four words in the massive OED ending in -gynist; apart from philogynist (described as rare by the OED) and misogynist, there is also monogynist, defined as 'one who practises monogyny', monogyny being the practice of having only one wife at a time, and polygynist, a man who has several wives.

 

You can sign up for 'Word of the Day' from Oxford Dictionaries Online's home page.

Humble address

MPs paid a 'humble address' to the Duke of Edinburgh in honour of his 90th birthday (see this BBC article). The term 'humble address' is put in speech marks in the aforementioned article, as it is an official term, not just a couple of words that the BBC have put together. A humble address is a formal communication from the House of Commons or the House of Lords to the sovereign. It is also a formal reply to the sovereign's speech at the opening of Parliament.

 

The expression 'humble address' and definition above is in the Oxford Dictionary of English, and the Dictionary tells us that it is also known as Address to the Throne (capital A and T) or loyal address.

 

Humble means modest, unpretentious, insignificant or lowly and its deferential, old-fashioned tone is retained in some expressions in common use today (some of them, admittedly, ironic), such as 'my humble abode', and 'your humble servant'. The word came into English from the French word, which came from the Latin humilis, meaning low (related to the Latin humus, ground). The h of humble was once silent in English, as it always was in French and, indeed, this 'umble' pronunciation was preserved until the 19th century (cf Dickens' character Uriah Heep who goes on constantly about being 'umble'). 

 

I am going on holiday for about twelve days today. I have programmed a few blog posts to appear throughout this time, but apologies in advance for not being able to reply to any comments. Please come back to a more regular output after 22 June.

Cabal

An article on the BBC website looks at secretive cabals. A cabal is a small group of people or organisations who are involved in intrigue or secretive machinations. It has had that meaning since the mid-17th century. The word is first recorded in written English a few decades earlier to refer to the mystical Jewish oral tradition sometimes spelt Cabala, Cabbala, Kabballah or another variation. It comes from the Hebrew for 'tradition' or 'that which has been received'.

 

It is a common erroneous belief that the word 'cabal' is made up of the initials of five ministers of Charles II who were members of the Committee of Foreign Affairs or Council: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale. Certainly, this committee was referred to as the Cabal at the time, but it had more members than just these five, and the word was in use before this period.

 

The BBC article on the subject of cabals is here.

Bridewell

I visited a friend in Odiham, Hampshire at the weekend, and saw that the term Bridewell was still in use in the village. The Bridewell is now a building housing the library and the police station, but it was once a prison.

 

Bridewell is a lovely-sounding word, but bridewells were not lovely places. They were houses of correction. The name comes from an old area of London near modern-day Fleet Street, where there was a well dedicated to St Bride. Cardinal Wolsey built a palace here and put it at the disposal of King Henry VIII, who lodged there for a while until he fell out with Wolsey (a Catholic) over his decision to divorce Catherine of Aragon. The 'St' part of the name St Bride's Well eventually disappeared, and the full name became just one word. In 1553 Edward VI handed over the palace to the City of London and it became a place of detention. Later other such buildings throughout the country were also called bridewells.

 

The term Bridewell is still used by some police forces in the UK, usually as the name of a police station, or of a custody suite.

Grockle

I met someone from Devon at a party earlier today, and he talked about 'grockles'. A grockle is a West-Country word for 'tourist' or 'summer visitor', and the OED says it is 'mildly disparaging'. The OED has nothing on the origin of the word, but the Oxford Dictionaries Online site looks at some possible origins for the word.

 

The word 'grockle' became well known thanks to a 1962 film, The System, which was set in the Devon resort of Torquay during the summer season. The scriptwriter appears to have picked up the word from local people while filming in Devon. However, the word may not have originated in that part of the country. One suggestion is that it comes from a famous early-20th-century clown called Grock. Another is that it was first used in the comic, The Dandy, in a story about 'Danny and his Grockle', the grockle being a magical dragon-like figure.

 

A citation from the 1980s in the OED entry for 'grockle' shows how the word took hold in the language and then spread. So, the terms grockle fodder (fish and chips), grockle bait (souvenirs) and grockle nests (campsites).

 

Grockle is used in Devon. In Cornwall, tourists are 'emmets', which are 'ants' literally.

Here's more on the origin of the word 'grockle'.

Euphemisms in business

This week's Johnson blog of the Economist magazine is devoted to euphemistic understatement, which is a feature of British offices. The writer begins with an anecdote about a friend who was prompted to look for a new job after his boss told him his position was 'unassailable'. The key point here is that British workers recognise that the boss meant the opposite of what he or she said.

 

Euphemistic understatement is a feature of speech in other areas, not just business. In the 1980s Mrs Thatcher described the position of her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, as 'unassailable'. He resigned a few days later.

 

The Johnson blog considers several phrases with hidden meanings. If a British manager says 'With the greatest respect', what he or she actually means is 'I think you are wrong (or a fool)'; 'Very interesting' means 'I don't agree'; and 'I hear what you say' also means 'I disagree'.

 

More examples here. There are plenty more suggestions from commentators.

Sulky

I was flicking through a book earlier and came across a sentence about Dr Erasmus Darwin, who was a friend of Samuel Johnson in his home town of Lichfield. The sentence mentioned Dr Darwin going about the town to visit his patients in a sulky.

 

I couldn't resist looking up 'sulky' in the OED. It's obviously a carriage, but why a sulky? As usual, the OED had the answer. The adjective 'sulky' meaning 'silent and ill-humoured' is first attested in 1744. The carriage 'sulky' is first recorded in print a decade later. A sulky is a carriage for one person, and it is so-called because a sulky person is aloof and uncommunicative.

 

A quote from 1862 from a book entitled Our Last Years in India has the word 'sulky' meaning a spherical container pierced with holes "for brewing a single cup of tea for the morosely inclined".

 

There is a link in the Dictionary to the word 'desobligeant' which is also a carriage for one, although this time it's a carriage in France. This is from the French word désobligeant, meaning 'disobliging', which also has the same sense of sullenness and unwillingness to communicate as 'sulky'.

Commute

Seeing this article about the daily commute in today's Telegraph reminded me that the English word 'commute' often doesn't have a direct one-word equivalent in other languages. The online wordreference.com multi-language dictionary needs a full sentence to explain it in French: to ~ between Oxford and London faire le trajet entre Oxford et Londres tous les jours (lit, to make the journey between Oxford and London every day); she ~s to Glasgow elle se rend à Glasgow tous les jours; there is a similar rendering in Italian: ~ between Oxford and London fare il pendolare tra Oxford e Londra; she ~s to Glasgow va a lavorare a Glasgow (tutti i giorni). There is also a long explanation in Spanish: commute - (verbo intransitivo) viajar todos los días (entre el lugar de residencia y el de trabajo) and Russian: commute v.i. (to work) ездить (indet.) каждый день на значительное расстояние на работу (lit: to travel a considerable distance every day to work). German, however, has the one-word verb pendeln.

 

Commute meaning 'to exchange' or 'to substitute' dates back to the 17th century. By the late 18th century it meant "To change (one kind of payment) into or for another; esp. to substitute a single payment for a number of payments" (OED). It became associated with travelling to work a century later. A commuter was originally someone who bought a 'commutation ticket'. That was originally a season ticket sold on US trains (several daily fares being 'commuted' to a single payment).

Ecosystem

I was watching an interesting programme, one of a series, on BBC iPlayer recently (here, but only for UK residents, I think), entitled All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. The series is about the influence of computers, and this episode was about the myth of the self-regulating ecosystem.

 

The word ecosystem was coined by British botanist and pioneer in the field of ecology Sir Arthur Tansley. The first citation the OED has for the word is from a Tansley article of 1935. The OED definition of ecosystem is "A biological system composed of all the organisms found in a particular physical environment, interacting with it and with each other". 

 

The origin of other words from the field of ecology was discussed in the aforementioned programme. One was 'holism'. This word was coined by former South African leader Jan Smuts, who defined it as "the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution".

 

The TV programme's title All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is the title of an influential 1960s book of poetry by Richard Brautigan.