The virtual linguist

More Cockney cash machines to be installed before Olympics

There are plans to install more ATMs with Cockney instructions and prompts in East London regions around the Olympic venues, according to this BBC article. So now you can get your sausage and mash (cash), after putting in your Huckleberry Finn (PIN), in Lady Godivas (fivers or £5 notes), speckled hens (£10s), or in horns of plenty (£20).

Naysayer

Nick Clegg, the Deputy PM attacked ‘naysayers’ in a speech earlier this week (see this headline). A naysayer is “a person who opposes something or who is generally inclined to act in a negative manner”, according to the OED. That is a relatively recent meaning of the word (20^th century). In the 17^th century it was mainly a Scottish word and meant “a refuser, a person who declines a request”.

 

Nay is a regional variation of the word no. Originally nay had a slightly different sense. It was originally the standard negative response given to a question asked in the affirmative (the positive response would have been yea). If the question was posed in the negative, then the correct answer was no (or yes, in the affirmative), so no was more emphatic. There is a 1532 citation from Thomas More in the OED which explains this distinction:

1532 T. More Confutacyon Tyndales Answere iii. p. clxxxi, No answereth the questyon framede by the affyrmatyue‥yf a man sholde aske‥is an heretyke mete to translate holy scrypture into englyshe‥he muste answere nay and not no. But and yf the questyon be asked‥Is not an heretyque mete to translate holy scripture into englysh. To this questyon‥he muste answere no & not nay.

 

The word yea-sayer is also in the OED. It dates back to the 1930s, and was clearly coined in response to naysayer. It is defined as “one who agrees or is inclined by nature to assent, or act in a positive manner”.

Ukrainian police learning English ahead of Euro 2012

15,000 police officers in Ukraine are being given a crash course in basic English ahead of the Euro 2012 Championship in June, according to this article in the Kyiv Post. “We need to teach them to give directions to cathedrals and other places of interest around the city”, said one English teacher. I don’t know how useful that language will be, although it would be nice to think that football fans will be clamouring to see Kiev’s cathedrals. The main stumbling block is that many police officers don’t know themselves where the cathedrals or places of interest are, so they have to be given a crash course in learning about their own city.

The good news is that all of them passed their oral test. Just in case, police officers based in the city centre will be issued with phrase books and/or electronic translation gadgets so that they can cope with any request.

The full article is here.

Nutmeg

I was asked today the origin of the footballing term nutmeg (it's both a verb and a noun referring to a player kicking the ball between the legs of an opposing player then regaining possession of the ball). The OED cannot give a definitive answer. Theories that have been put forward are that i) it is derived from another dictionary definition of nutmegs (going back to the 17th century), namely testicles and ii) that it is old Cockney rhyming slang for 'leg'. The OED can find no evidence for either theory.

 

Other sources on the web (including this Guardian piece) refer to a book on footballing terms by Peter Seddon, in which he says the footballing term developed from duplicitous goings-on in the nutmeg trade in the 19th century. Nutmegs were very valuable and American exporters would put some wooden replicas in sacks being shipped over to England. So, being nutmegged meant being duped by a clever swindler. Indeed, the OED has a sub-entry for the Nutmeg State, which refers to Connecticut, with the reason for the nickname given as "to some of whose inhabitants was formerly imputed the practice of passing off nutmeg-shaped pieces of wood as the spice".

Advice on British English to Americans

Telly, adverts, bloke, chuffed and soft drink are all common words explained in an article in today's Washington Post (here), designed to prepare US visitors to the London Olympics in a few months' time. If you're coming for the first time you'll hear some words that you think you know, but that have a different meaning here eg a cracker (a great thing), chips (fries), subway (underpass), cheers (thank you), gutted (upset) and pants (underwear item or an adjective meaning 'bad').

 

Here's the article.

 

Buster

The suffix -buster is now ubiquitous, and there are thousands of words which end with it, according to a recent article published in the public area of the OED website (here).

 

The first -buster word was gall-buster in 1835. Buster in the early sense meant 'that which busts or destroys'. The OED says that the suffix has been particularly popular and productive (ie new words based on it have been coined) at three distinctive times in the 20th century. The first spike in popularity was in the 1930s, thanks to the popular US radio series Gang Busters. The prefix -buster came to be associated with law-enforcement agencies at this period.

 

The next period which saw a spate of new -buster words was WW2, with words such as dam-busters, bridge-busters and balloon-busters.

 

Then, in 1984 the popularity of the 'blockbuster' Ghostbusters resulted in manufacturers calling their products Dust-busters, Grime-busters and such like.

 

The word 'block-buster' was originally a type of powerful bomb; it then began to describe books, and is particularly used of films these days. It has given rise to another -buster word, chiefly in Britain - a bonkbuster, defined by the OED as "A type of popular novel characterized by frequent explicit sexual encounters between the characters". This word was popularised by the writer Sue Limb in a Guardian column in the 1980s.

Monstrous Regiment of Women

Terry Pratchett has written a book called Monstrous Regiment, and there used to be a feminist theatre company with the same name. The term Monstrous Regiment comes from the title of a John Knox pamphlet, written in 1558 – the full title is The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women. I discovered this when I was watching episode 3 of the BBC series She-Wolves: England’s Early Queens (click here to watch on iPlayer). John Knox was a Protestant reformer whose pamphlet rails against the rules of the Catholic queens around at the time – Mary of Guise (mother of Mary Queen of Scots) who ruled in her daughter’s name from 1554 to 1560, Mary Queen of Scots, and Queen Mary (Tudor) of England.

The two words monstrous and regiment have changed in meaning since those days. The original spelling of monstrous, used by Knox in the title of the pamphlet, was ‘monstruous’ and the original meaning was ‘unnatural’ (it is from the Latin monstrosus, meaning portentous or unnatural). The original meaning of regiment was ‘rule or government over a person, group or country, especially royal authority’. So, Knox was referring to the rule by female monarchs as unnatural. He got his come-uppance when Elizabeth I succeeded Mary to the throne. She was a Protestant but she banned Knox from setting foot in England.