The virtual linguist

British accents in Game of Thrones

The television series Game of Thrones is far more popular in the US than in Britain (it is shown on a pay-tv channel in the UK). The series is based on the books of an American, George RR Martin. The accents, though, are all British - and regional British at that, which I found out when I read this BBC article today.

 

In the BBC piece, American TV critic Matt Zoller says that the British accent is the usual accent used in sci-fi and fantasy films, as well as films set in ancient Greece and Rome. "A British accent is sufficiently exotic to transport the viewer to a different reality," claims Zoller. The only American actor to play a leading part, Peter Dinklage, puts on a British accent in the role. The series is based on north/south conflict and the characters in the series from the north of the realm use northern English accents (Sean Bean and Mark Addy speak with a Yorkshire accent, for example).

 

For the full BBC article, click here.

Piece of cake

I was writing an article about Ogden Nash for a magazine, and went to the OED for some inspiration. I discovered that the first recorded instance in writing of the phrase "piece of cake" is attributed to Ogden Nash. In one of his poems in the collection Primrose Path there are the lines "her picture's in the papers now, and life's a piece of cake". The phrase is defined in the OED as "something easy or pleasant". The earlier word "cakewalk" also has the meaning "something easy". And, of course, something can be "as easy as pie". I don't know why cakes and pies came to be associated with something easy - they're easy to eat, I suppose, if not necessarily to make.

Commuter in Russian

There is no word for "commute" or "commuter" in Russian (as I mentioned in this recent post), although there are words for commuter train, commuter bus and commuter parking lot. Michele Berdy is an American who writes for The Moscow Times and she wrote a piece last week on words that are lacking in Russian (here).

 

Just as it is difficult in English to know what word to use to refer to your romantic partner (boyfriend/girlfriend sounds young, partner could be business partner, and so on), so does Russian have the same problem.

 

Here's the full article from The Moscow Times.

Cross Bones Graveyard and single women

I went to a fascinating ceremony on Friday evening (23rd), held at the gates of the old Cross Bones Graveyard near London Bridge station in Southwark. In the 1990s London Underground were doing some digging in the area and came across 148 skeletons, many of which were those of women and children (they estimated that this represented only about 1% of the number of bodies buried there, ie there were around 15,000 in total). This plot of land, it turns out, was the site of an old paupers' graveyard, described in a 1598 Survey of London as a burial ground for "single women", a euphemism for prostitutes (and, indeed, 'single woman' is in the OED as a sub-heading of the 'single' entry, with the definition 'a prostitute' (and citations dating from the 16th and 17th centuries)).

 

The short ceremony I attended was organised by a community group, led by local writer John Constable (also known as John Crow), and takes place at 7pm on the 23rd of every month. The purpose is to honour and remember the forgotten or outcast dead - and not only those buried in Cross Bones. Here is an audio slideshow from the BBC website and here is a very interesting 10-minute video on YouTube.

 

You'll notice that 'Winchester geese' appears on the plaque and in the video. Winchester geese is another old euphemism for prostitutes. I wrote about this term last year here.

 

Here is the website of the Cross Bones Graveyard group.

New words in the OED March 2012

The OED has just added another batch of words, as it does every quarter. There are around a thousand new entries (which are words which have their own internet page, or are headwords) and many more sub-entries. Among the new headwords are:

arachnodactyly: the condition of having unusually long and slender fingers and hands.
arborio: variety of rice
astroturfing: the practice of falsely suggesting mass support for a policy or product by means of an organised campaign
blood and guts: violence and bloodshed
boofy: blokeish (Australian slang)
businesspeople [first recorded 1821, but with a slightly different meaning then - a people or nation engaged in business]
busy-busy: very busy [first recorded 1900]
date rape (as verb and noun)
designy: characterised by strong or unusual design (frequently depreciative)
East German (and also West German)
femcee: female master of ceremonies
femmy: feminine, effeminate
gasp (as an interjection): used parenthetically to express mock horror etc
geohistory: geological history of the Earth or a region
George Sandism: a lack of regard for conventional female behaviour
historyless: lacking history, or not having a noteworthy past
histrionics: melodramatic or hysterical behaviour, typically intended to attract attention [1931]; showy vocal or instrumental virtuosity [1940]
ludology: the study of games (now especially video games) and game playing.
pussyclaat: a contemptible person (chiefly Jamaican slang)
scratchiti: words or images engraved or etched (illegally) into surfaces in a public place.
soz: slang for 'sorry'
youing: action of addressing a person as 'you' (cf thouing) [first recorded in 1659]

 

There's a new meaning of 'cabbage' -- it's a familiar way of saying and spelling CABG, coronary artery bypass graft.

Time

Time is the most frequently occurring noun in English, according to the Oxford Dictionaries site, and the 55th commonest word in the language. And it keeps growing. The Oxford English Dictionary has been editing the entry for ‘time’ over the last quarter and it has added around forty new ‘time’ phrases. Several of them are a reflection on our busy lives these days; new sub-entries at the main 'time' entry include: time constraint, time management, time pressure (and time pressured), time-sensitive and time-starved. Time-filler has only just gone in to the Dictionary, but time-waster and time-wasting have always been there as entries in their own right. Time-wasting and time-waster date back to the 17th century, although the OED says that the former was “rare before the mid-19th century”.

The fact that a word has only just gone in to the Dictionary does not mean necessarily that it is a new word. The first citation for time-filler is from 1893, and for time-starved from 1894. Time money has only just gone in to the Dictionary, but already it is described as “now rare”; it means “money loaned, or available for loan, for a set period”, and it was first recorded in 1873. Time-warped has gone into the Dictionary for the first time but, not as a sub-entry of the main 'time' entry as the words above, but as a headword in its own right. Its use in science fiction dates back to the 1930s but it was first recorded in print in 1841 (meaning "warped or distorted by the passing of time").

 

The verb 'times' has just been given its own entry in the OED. It has a technical meaning in the building and surveying industries, but another, colloquial, meaning is "to multiply" and many of us will have used the verb well before its entry into the Dictionary (eg "do I times these numbers together?"). The fact that there is a verb 'to times' means that there is also an -ing form, timesing, and this too is a sub-entry at 'times'.

Scruple

"Take an ounce of dried orange-peel finely powdered, divide it into scruples, and take one scruple at a time in any manner" is a remedy advised by Samuel Johnson for indigestion and 'lubricity of the bowels' (taken from the recently published Wits and Wives: Dr Johnson in the Company of Women, by Kate Chisholm, page 129). Clearly 'scruple' here has a different sense from the usual meaning today (moral qualm).

 

A scruple was originally (late 14th century) a small unit of weight, as used by apothecaries. It was also used as a term of measurement in other contexts, eg a scruple was a sixtieth part of an hour, or a minute, but was also, confusingly, a sixtieth part of a day, or 24 minutes. By the late 16th century 'scruple' had come to mean any small amount or quantity. Scruple is believed to have its origin in the Latin word for 'small pebble'.

 

The other meaning of 'scruple' has a separate entry in the OED, but this sense, too, is believed to be from the Latin for 'small pebble'; Cicero used the word scrupus to mean a cause of uneasiness. If 'scruple' or 'scruples' is in a sentence, it is usually accompanied by a negative word such as 'no scruples', or 'without scruples'. The adjective derived from it, 'scrupulous', too, is less common than 'unscrupulous', and although 'scrupulous' is common enough, again it often comes after words such as 'not', 'less' or 'less than'.

Shamrock

As it's St Patrick's Day today, I'll take a look at the word 'shamrock'. The word comes from the Irish Gaelic seamróg, which is a diminutive of the word seamar, the plant 'clover'. The first citation in the OED dates back to 1571. St Patrick supposedly used the shamrock to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity, which is why it was adopted as the emblem of Ireland.

 

The OED also has 'to drown the shamrock', which means 'to go drinking on St Patrick's day'. The first recorded mention of that was in 1888, although there is a citation from 1726 which mentions the people 'wetting' their Seamar-oge. The OED also has shamrockshire, described as now obsolete. It dates back to the 1680s and is defined as 'a jocular name for Ireland'.

 

As I said above, seamróg is a diminutive; -og(e) or -ag(e) are feminine diminutive suffixes in Celtic languages. For instance, the Scottish girl's name Morag is a diminutive of Mor, Sarah. The suffix -ock in English (and similar forms in other Germanic languages) also originally denoted the diminutive (cf hillock). It sounds similar to the Celtic -og, but that's probably just a coincidence.

Muppet

When banker Greg Smith resigned from Goldman Sachs, one of the things he said he objected to at the company was the fact that some of his colleagues referred to clients as 'muppets'. Muppet in the sense of 'daft or inept person' dates back to the 1980s (the first citation in the OED is 1989), but American puppeteer Jim Henson first coined the term in the 1950s. He refuted others' claims that the word was a blend of marionette and puppet, and said that he simply liked the sound of the word.

 

Literally

"My legs literally turned to jelly", "You are up against the Norwegians, who are literally born on skis" and "This album is literally flying off the shelves" were just three of the examples in a piece on Radio 4's Today earlier this week (listen again for a couple more days by scrolling down to 08:46 here). The subject was considered 'news' because Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, had talked of people who paid low rates of tax as being "literally in a different galaxy".

 

Mark Forsyth, author of The Etymologicon, reminded listeners that today's current sense of 'literally' (ie not literally at all) dates back to 1769. The word has its origin in the Latin for 'letter', so the original meaning of 'literally' was (literally) 'letter by letter'. Forsyth said that all words that start off as intensifiers gradually weaken in meaning; he gave the examples of 'probably' which is from the Latin word meaning 'prove' or 'test', and 'quite', which is used in two different senses in English today. 'Quite' can mean the same as 'fairly', but if you say 'quite right' or 'quite the opposite' it still has the sense of 'completely'.

 

I am rather tardy in following up this story, so the interview will be on the BBC website linked to above only for two or three more days. However, there is a written piece on the BBC website here.