The virtual linguist

Mrs Thatcher in the dictionary

There are certain words associated with the late Mrs Thatcher and, not surprisingly, this connection is reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary. Iron Lady went into the Dictionary in 1993, with the first citation dating from 1976. Under the entry for Society, Mrs Thatcher’s oft-quoted belief that “There is no such thing as society” is there. It is not attributed to her, however, but to Tony Blair in a 1988 Times article. One of the definitions of wet is “a politician with liberal or middle-of-the-road views on controversial issues (often applied to members of the Conservative Party opposed to the monetarist policies of Margaret Thatcher)”, but the word had been used with this sense since the beginning of the 20th century.

 

Mrs Thatcher was responsible for the change in verb form – from a noun to a verb – of the word handbag, and of the introduction into the Dictionary of handbagging. It is described by the OED as ‘jocular’ and is defined: “to subject to a forthright verbal assault or to strident criticism; to coerce in this way”. She is also directly responsible for the coining (by others) of the word leaderene.

 

There are more than twenty other words in the OED where Margaret Thatcher is mentioned in a citation. Some don’t come as a surprise, for instance, at the Schoolmarm entry, she is described as having “the bearing of a school ma'am, an inability to suffer fools”, and she is also given as an example of an agelast (someone without a sense of humour). At Abominator she is mentioned in a Guardian Weekly quotation as someone who is “a sincere abominator of the Soviet system of government”. Thatcher’s Britain, Thatcher’s child, Thatcheresque, Thatcherism and Thatcherite are also in the OED.

 

Unrelated to her political career she appears in the entry for Chemical (referring to her original career, when she supposedly invented ‘whippy’ ice cream) and also in the entry for Scotophobia. No, she was not afraid of the Scots – scotophobia is a fear or dislike of the dark, and Mrs Thatcher apparently suffered from it.

Neologisms

There was an interesting piece on the BBC website the other day about neologisms (newly coined words) in the field of technology, and how annoying many people find them. It was written by Tom Chatfield, author of Netymology.

 

Chatfield makes the point that there is nothing new about people objecting to new words. In the 16th and 17th centuries people criticised the use of inkhorn terms, words derived from Latin. These days we might wonder what they were complaining about, since we are quite happy with dismiss, celebrate, ingenious, capacity, antiques, prodigious and other words once termed inkhorn.

 

In the 19th century the poet William Barnes (about whom, coincidentally, I wrote recently - here) also railed against the use of words formed from foreign prefixes, suffixes and whole words, again without much success, since we still use words he disapproved of such as preface and photograph.

 

One of Tom Chatfield's favourite neologisms is the Cupertino effect, which refers to the word your computer or phone automatically changes something you've written into, because it thinks you mistyped. Cupertino is the Californian city where Apple is based, and an early spellchecking program once converted cooperation into Cupertino, when someone typed it. Other examples are of computers and phones changing Freud into fraud, and soonish into Zionism. I can identify with this, since I discovered only recently, to my horror, that, although I had been signing off text messages with Sx (S for Susan, my name, plus a kiss) my phone converted this abbreviation to the word Sex. I now know why I received such interesting replies!

 

Objection to new words, and a belief that there are sufficient existing ones, goes back to well before the 16th century mentioned in the BBC piece. I've been reading a book lately about the 8th-century English monk Bede, and it mentions Hisperic Latin, which referred to writings comprising learned Latin words created by Irish monks of the time. Wikipedia refers to these words as 'curiously learned', whilst the book I was reading described them as 'bizarre' and part of a 'cult of the grotesque'.

Scallion and rapscallion

Oxford Dictionaries Online's word of the day today is rapscallion, an archaic word, although sometimes used humorously today, for rascal. It is unconnected to the word scallion, which is more commonly called a spring onion in British English. It was first attested in the late 17th century, and is a variant of the earlier rascallion which, according to the OED, derives from rascal plus an "apparently fanciful ending".

 

In the late 16th century there was a similar word with similar meaning -- rampallion. This may derive from the verb to ramp, which, in heraldry, means 'to rise on the hind legs', and when applied to people used to mean 'to gesticulate or behave in a furious or threatening manner'. Another suggested link is a connection to Ram Alley, the name of various old streets in London. Lording Barry, a 17th-century dramatist, wrote a play called Ram Alley, populated by various disreputable characters and set in a seamy area.

 

There is an even later word with similar spelling and meaning - ramscallion. Here, the OED suggests that the ram may be a Scottish intensifying prefix (and directs the reader to the Scottish ramfeezled, exhausted and ramsgunhoch, surly or boorish).

 

As for scallion, this word has an interesting origin. It comes from the popular Latin escalonia, onion. The classical Latin equivalent is ascalonia, and this is from the Latin name (Ascalon) for the old Palestinian port of Ashkelon on the Mediterranean, which was a thriving trading town at the time. The word shallot derived from scallion, so has a similar history.

Frimponged

My football-mad son introduced me to the verb 'to frimpong', which means, as far as I can gather, 'to tackle very aggressively'. Emmanuel Frimpong plays for Fulham on loan from Arsenal, and he seems to be the person responsible for the new verb coining, having written tweets such as 'I need to start frimponging people instead of me being frimponged' (see here). Coincidentally, Emmanuel Frimpong was also instrumental in coining the word dench, which I blogged on very recently (here).

 

Another well-known verb derived from the name of a footballer (well-known among football fans, that is) is 'to kerzhakov', from Aleksandr Kerzhakov, a striker with Zenit St Petersburg. The verb was coined by a journalist on The Guardian, after Kerzhakov failed to score, despite having several chances, in a match during last year's Euro Championships. It therefore means 'to fail to score when shooting from a perfect position'. Kerzhakoved has been used to refer to other players, for example in this report about the England-Italy match in the Euros:

It should have been dealt with without any fuss whatsoever, but the England defence was dozing and it dropped to De Rossi, who turned and Kerzhakoved a volley wide from six yards out!

 

I can't think of any other footballers whose names have become verbs. I have found 'to be de Jonged' on the internet, after Nigel de Jong, a Dutch footballer, who kicked an opponent in the chest (see the action here), but my son tells me it's not a common phrase.

Birch tree

The literal meaning of the late Boris Berezovsky's surname is 'birch tree' (берёза, pronounced 'beryoza', is birch tree in Russian). Coincidentally, the name of the Icelandic singer Björk also means 'birch tree'.

 

Most words for the tree in Germanic and Slavonic languages are similar. It is believed that the words all stem from a common Proto-Indo-European root *bherəg’-, meaning something bright or shining. The English word bright originates from the same PIE root.

 

Interestingly, the Latin fraxinus, is also a cognate of *bherəg’-. It's hard to see the link, I know, but the PIE sound /bh/, an aspirated vocal stop, changed into other sounds down the centuries, depending on the language. This explains why blaze and flagrant (= burning) come from the same PIE root, and why bleat and the Latin verb flēre, to cry or weep, are related. However, the Latin fraxinus is not a birch tree; it's an ash. Scholars have speculated that the birch, a tree that grows in cool and temperate climates, may not have been familiar to the original inhabitants of warmer, southern European countries, so they applied the same stem meaning 'shining' to a familiar tree that also appeared to be bright and shining.

Not on your Nelly

The phrase 'not on your Nelly' was one of the rounds in last week's radio programme Just a Minute, which prompted me to look it up. Nelly is short for Nelly duff, which is Cockney rhyming slang for puff. Here, puff means 'life; span or length of life' (OED). The OED mentions the phrase in all one's (born) puff, meaning 'in all one's life', and tends to be used in negative contexts, or with a negative verb.

 

Nelly and puff share a definition. They can both refer, according to the OED, to 'an effeminate man'. Puff is the older word here, dating from the very early 20th century, whilst Nelly (also written nelly) goes back to the 1930s.

-stan

The suffix -stan on place names is usually associated with Asian countries or regions eg Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Baluchistan and many others. Today, however, when reading something on early English history, I came across the Battle of Degsastan, fought in AD603 between Aedan, king of Dál Riata, an old kingdom on the west coast of Scotland, and Æthelfrith, king of Northumbria. No-one these days knows where exactly Degsastan was, although it's certainly not in Central Asia. There are other Old English names (of people and places) ending or beginning stan, too, eg Æthelstan, Dunstan and various places (in Gloucestershire, and Suffolk, eg) called Stanton, plus the common first name and surname Stanley.

 

The two 'stans' have different etymologies. The stan prefix denoting an Asian country goes back to the Sanskrit sthāna, meaning 'dwelling place'. The Old English stan was rock, stone, or rocky place.

Dench

My daughter alerted me to last week's Graham Norton show when he discussed the slang word dench (Dame Judi Dench, the actor, was one of his guests). Here's the clip. Dench apparently means 'cool'. It was popularised after the rapper Lethal Bizzle used the name as the brand name for his range of clothing. I don't think he was thinking of Dame Judi at the time, although the fact that she wore one of his baseball caps helped sales of the range (see this article).

 

This meaning of dench has not yet made it into hard-copy dictionaries. Interestingly, dench is in the OED, but as a Middle English spelling variant of Danish.

Collectors

Oxford Dictionaries Online’s word of the day earlier this week was phillumenist, a collector of matchboxes. The phil part of the word is from the Greek prefix philo, denoting a liking for, and lumen is Latin for light.

 

Other interesting specialist terms for collectors include: deltiologist (postcards, from the Greek for ‘writing tablet’), tegestologist (beer mats, from the Latin teges, mat or covering), exonumist (badges, tokens and medals), scripophile (old bond and share certificates) and notaphilist (bank notes). Despite the Latin and Greek connections, these words were all coined only in the 20th century.

 

Other collectors, who are not in the OED, include: arctophile (teddy bears, from the ancient Greek for bear), meadophile (beer bottles) and fromologist (cheese labels).

 

By far the largest group of collectors in the OED are those who collect taxes (not as a hobby, presumably). Here are some old words with that meaning:

gabeller: gabelle was a salt-tax imposed in France before the Revolution. The equivalent English word was salt-master.
galer: gale was duty on fish in Gloucestershire
mise-gatherer: a mise was a tribute paid to secure a liberty or immunity, especially in Wales and Chester
penny-grave: formerly in the East Riding of Yorkshire
poll-groat bailiff: a poll-groat was an extortionate tax
publican: Ancient Roman times
remembrancer: a collector of the Crown’s debts
tithe-proctor: a collector of tithes
uplifter: a collector of rents, in Scotland

There are also words for this job in various parts of the old British empire: amildar and aumil (South Asia), zemindar and zilladar (India).

Conclave

A few dozen Roman Catholic cardinals are sequestered in the Sistine Chapel, as I write, taking part in the papal conclave. I'm not sure whether they are actually locked in, but that is the literal meaning of the word 'conclave'. Con is the combining form of the Latin word for 'with', cum, and clavis is Latin for 'key'.

 

The English music-related words claviature and clavichord are also derived from clavis, as is the word clavicle, or collar-bone. The OED tells us that the 19th-century French lexicographer Littré explained that some people said the collar-bone was compared to the key of a vault, while others said it resembled old bolts in form.

 

Here's a BBC piece giving ten facts about the conclave.