The virtual linguist

Dialect words for 'donkey'

Donkey is one of those words, like scarecrow, for which there are, or were, many different words, depending on where you live. It's a cuddy in Scotland, a nirrup or ranterpike in Dorset, a pronkus in Lincolnshire, a dicky in East Anglia, a yawney box in Derbyshire, a mokus in Devon and a fussock in parts of Yorkshire. Then there are the colloquialisms and abbreviations, such as donk, moke and neddy.

 

A Jerusalem, or Jerusalem pony, is another term for a donkey. The OED says this came about because Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an ass. Eric Partridge in his slang dictionary says that it is from rhyming slang - Jerusalem artichoke rhymes with moke and, in the tradition of Cockney rhyming slang, the second word, or second part of the phrase is omitted (as, for instance, 'have a butcher's', meaning 'look', where the full rhyming phrase is 'butcher's hook').

 

Partridge also has Jerusalem nightingale as another slang term for a donkey. The OED doesn't have this as such, but under 'nightingale' it says that animals with completely unmelodious voices are sometimes ironically termed nightingales (and donkeys, as well as frogs, appear in the citations).

Smartphones' autocorrect errors

The Daily Mail has a piece today on unwitting, but amusing, errors made by smartphones' tendency to wrongly predict the word you are typing. Most of the examples given are obviously made up, and very contrived, but these errors do happen. Modern phones apparently take account of the words you use most often and tend to assume that that is what you mean when you type the first couple of letters of a word. So, if you use the word 'kill' more often than 'kiss', you might surprise a friend when you tell him about taking a girl out and kissing her. Examples offered by readers in the comments include a woman who was bemused to be addressed as 'big lips' in her nightly text from her boyfriend, until he told her that what he had meant to say was 'big kiss'.

 

On a traditional mobile phone where each number key represents three or four letters, you are unlikely to be offered kill for kiss, as they involve different number keys, but there are many textonyms around ie words which are produced using the same number keys. So, press 7663 and possible words are some, Rome, roof, pond, and others. 7378378 produces both request and pervert, and 2276243 could be barmaid or carnage.

 

The examples given in the article are humorous and harmless. However, there was a case earlier this year where someone killed a friend over a misspelt text message. He had meant to write 'mutter' but his friend read 'nutter'.

Sport of kings

I've just come home from Epsom racecourse, after an evening race meeting. Horse racing is known in Britain as 'the sport of kings', presumably because it has always been popular with royalty and the aristocracy. Certainly, the present Queen is a fan.

 

Sport of kings is in the OED, but the racing meaning is a 20th century meaning, and there were two other senses before 'racing'. The original 'sport of kings' was war (17th century), and after that it was hunting. Horse racing came to be considered the sport of kings in the 20th century.

Development co-operation replaces aid

The word 'aid' has fallen out of favour. These days rich countries are far more likely to engage in 'development co-operation'. Jonathan Glennie has examined the texts of declarations over the past six years and has found that, whereas in the Paris declaration of 2005 the word 'aid' was used 57 times and 'co-operation' used twice, in the draft Busan declaration of July 2011 'aid' is used only 6 times, whereas 'co-operation' is used 41 times.

 

The word 'aid' feels old-fashioned these days, says Glennie, since it suggests a 'rich donor- poor recipient' relationship. These days donors want to emphasise collaboration and working together.

 

Jonathan Glennie's piece is in The Guardian today. Read it here.

Grant Barrett on American English

American lexicographer Grant Barrett has written a riposte on the BBC website to a piece it published recently (and which I commented on) regarding Americanisms in British English. Barrett says that the 'mongrel bitch' that the British gave to the Americans is getting on very well in America. He turns the tables on journalists like Matthew Engel, who wrote the original article, and says that much of the comment about language that is published in the press is dominated by 'carpers, whiners and peevers'. Barrett knows what he is talking about; the radio show he hosts in the US gets about 10,000 phone calls from listeners, and "a small but keyboard-happy minority" ring to complain. He wishes that people would ask 'why?' and seek out explanations, rather than simply say 'I hate this word' and leave it at that.

 

Here is the piece by Grant Barrett.

As you do

I was reading the Oxford English Dictionary earlier – as you do – and I discovered that the expression ‘as you do’ entered the Dictionary for the first time last month. The first citation, from The Guardian in 1993 is “She stormed out of the cafe with her four children and returned with a 12-bore shotgun. As you do.”

‘As you do’ is a common colloquialism in British English. It’s used ironically to show that you are surprised at what has just been said, or think it’s odd, (it doesn’t matter whether it’s something you said yourself, or whether it was someone else who said it). However, it’s spoken in a deadpan voice, as if you are not surprised at all, and as if you think the action or activity is the most normal thing in the world. Here's another recent example from a celebrity story in The Daily Mail: "... she fell in love with an American special forces veteran, as you do."

 

The entry for ‘as’ in the OED has been updated in other ways recently too. Phrases like ‘as easy as pie’ have been in for ages, but previously it was necessary to include the object of comparison (pie, falling off a log etc). Now it has gone in as not needing the standard of comparison (just 'easy as', 'simple as', 'soft as' etc). Here are a couple of citations:
Even my mum had come up to me earlier in the day to tell me what a wonderful son I had finally become. Easy as. (from Bali Rai, (Un)Arranged Marriage, 2001)
No filth, simple as. No smut, no swearing, no racism, right? (from P. Kay et al. Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights: Scripts Ser. 1. Episode 5. 97/1, 2003)

Bathing and toilets

The word 'crap' does not come from the surname Crapper, as in Thomas Crapper the 19th-century plumber. I learnt that from a fascinating programme about the history of the bathroom, which I watched on BBC iPlayer earlier (available for another week here, although the series seems to be frequently repeated on BBC4). I learnt lots of new words, particularly old words for the toilet. These included 'great house of easement' (in Hampton Court), close stool (like a commode) and ajax (a pun on the old word jakes, meaning privy). The poor lads who had to clean the sewers underneath the Tudor royal court were known as gong scourers. Finally, the common modern word 'bumf' originally meant toilet paper as it was short for 'bum-fodder'.

 

Old public bath-houses were known originally as stews. There were many of these on the south bank of the Thames before Henry VIII's reign. Henry closed them down because the bagnios soon became bordellos, because they were popular with prostitutes. The physician John Floyer (who, coincidentally, treated Samuel Johnson as a baby) was a great advocate of cold baths and believed that they cured impotence, and what he called 'disorders of the codpiece economy'.

 

Finally I discovered that Sadlers Wells, the theatre, is so-called because the land underneath it was the source of medicinal springs.

Slang initiatives in Wales and Scotland

NHS chiefs in the Lothians (near Edinburgh) are considering texting patients, and using slang, in an attempt to get more of them to attend hospital appointments, and read healthy-lifestyle-related messages. Over 20% of the population of the area are functionally illiterate and may be missing out on important information and messages. Research has shown that some people have difficulty understanding the correspondence sent to them, and difficulty understanding what is on offer across the region's health services. There is a link between functional illiteracy and poor health.

 

Here is that story.

 

Meanwhile, in Newport, South Wales, the university is hoping to make students from outside the region feel more welcome and at home by issuing a mobile phone app translating Newport slang.

 

Here's a report on that story.

Journalists' language can predict a stock-market crash

When journalists start using the same nouns and verbs in their reports, you might want to consider selling your shares quickly. Researchers at University College, Dublin, discovered that in the lead-up to a bubble, journalists displayed a herd-like mentality and all used similar phrases -- "stocks rose again", "scaled new heights" and such like. When the market crashed, their language became more diverse. The verbs rise, fall, close and gain were popular throughout the whole of 2007, but their usage peaked in the week of the crash in October of that year.

 

Researchers found that the amount of agreement and disagreement in language parallels the major stock market indices. In addition, there was a surge in positive language used just before a bubble burst.

 

Here's one report; and here's another.

Showboating

I had never seen 'showboat' used as a verb until a story yesterday about a footballer 'showboating' when taking a penalty, but I am clearly behind the times, as it appears on this children's page (same story). Admittedly, it appears only in the report - none of the children uses the verb in their comments (which, incidentally, are a lot better spelled and more grammatical than most internet forum comments).

 

To showboat means to show off or behave or perform ostentatiously (OED definition). The OED describes it as US slang, and says it dates back to the 1950s. As a noun, a showboat is a show-off, as well as, of course, a river steamer with theatrical entertainment. That sense goes back to the mid 19th century.