Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

Here is the complete (edited) transcript of my interview with Linton Weeks, national correspondent of NPR news, cited in his article, “It No Longer Takes @#$%& To Use ‘Foul’ Language”, that you may now read by clicking here.

(Weeks) I am thinking about trying to write something this morning about Sarah Palin’s use of the word “cojones” yesterday when talking about President Obama and the immigration issue. On Fox News she said that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer “has the cojones that our president does not have to look out for all Americans, not just Arizonans, but all Americans, in this desire of ours to secure our borders and allow legal immigration to help build this country, as was the purpose of immigration laws.”

(Weeks) That coarse language spoken by coarse people has entered popular American parlance is an old story. But coarse language spoken by proper, line-toeing people may be a new thing. Sarah Palin may be known for many attributes, but a foul mouth is not one of them.

(Beard) Clearly, in using this word she is appealing to the literate rednecks in the ultra-rightwing base. She is using an off-color euphemism for a vulgar word that would not be readily accessible to Tea Partiers, but you are right in suggesting this word may be spreading in the general population. On the other hand, she may be extending a tentacle to the Spanish-speaking population, which would be rather apropos for the subject she was speaking on.

(Weeks) Are we living in a new era when the idea of coarse language no longer exists?

(Beard) The 60s changed the attitude of many middle-of-the-roaders when the left-wing of political thinking in this country began insisting that unless freedom of speech is absolute, it is of no value. Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, the YIP and even, to some degree, the leadership of the SDS of the time made a point of using profanity as a test of the First Amendment. This loosened constraints in some registers of speech and some places (HBO, movies in general, porn sites on the Web, etc.) and that loosening is growing every day. While profanity is becoming acceptable in the speech of others, most English speakers still avoid it and I hear it mostly from people or characters who have rejected mainstream society. In principle, this represents no change except that today that body of people is much larger and forms its own society.

(Weeks) When a formerly taboo word is used by respectable people, is that when it enters the general lexicon?

(Beard) Using the formula “mainstream society” = “respectable people”, yes, that is true. That is the purpose of euphemisms like ‘cojones’, ’screw’, ‘dump’, ‘pee’, ‘poop’. We even have a children’s book now called “Everybody Poops”, for which the film rights have been acquired. How mainstream can a word get?

(Weeks) Can you think of a few formerly edgy words that are now firmly in the mainstream?

(Beard) Actually, yes. When I was growing up ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ were as taboo are their off-color synonyms. One way to get around taboohood is to use a scientific term; science is good, right? We see this pushing of the envelope in TV ads, too: ads for “erectile dysfunction”, tampons, mini- and maxipads, medicines for vaginal conditions—even condoms for a while, were all prohibited when I was growing up in North Carolina. All of these ads imply things expressed by profanity in the general language yet, while the words are taboo, the subject matter is watched by “respectiable people”.

(Beard) I know respectable people (including my grandchildren) who use the medical terms as well as the “kiddy terms” (poop, tinkle). So we are inundated by the concepts in very respectable radio, newspaper, and TV ads, the words themselves occur in very respectable motion pictures about people on the other side of the respectability divide and, in fact, are used by our friends and acquaintances who occasionally step just just over that divide, today a rather wide gray area.

(Weeks) Does it help that Palin said that Brewer, a woman, has cojones? Does that lift the word out from the literal realm and place it in the metaphorical?

(Beard) Not usually. When we use the F-word metaphorically, it has the same effect as when we use it literally. People who would not talk about f…ing in the literal sense, also avoid that word in the metaphorical sense, e.g. Woody Allen’s famous line in (I think) “Everything you Always Wanted to Know about Sex.” In that film he claimed to be doing the same thing to a girl that the president was doing to the country, avoiding the F-word equally in either sense. Given all the other sources (mentioned above) for these words, I would expect Palin’s use of them to whiz past most ears unnoticed. Here is the reasoning:

• If the concepts are not taboo (TV ads, medical terms, kiddie terms),
• And the words themselves occur all around us, and in any realistic movie or TV show about those beyond the respectability divide,
• What could be wrong with the taboo words themselves, let alone the euphemisms like ‘cojones’?

(Beard) We are living in an era of tremendous upheaval, change on a scale and at a speed never experienced before. Everyone can now publish his or her ideas as fast as they can type them out and click “publish”. What is amazing to me is that there is anyone left who considers profanity profane at all.

(Beard) Here is why I think the attitudes of folks like you and me persist. Words, as we all know, are associations of (linguistic) sound with meanings. However, the concepts (meanings) of vulgar words are not taboo, as the TV ads and medical terms I mention above point out. It is the sounds of these words alone that is profane or off-color. That is why they are taboo in either their literal or figurative senses.

(Beard) It is the sound itself of these words that connect them directly to our sense of shame, our moral sense, our sense of right and wrong. So all we have to do is substitute a different sound (cojones, screw, crap) and, in most cases, we distance ourselves enough from our sense of shame to get by. Those who use the originals have to lose or ignore that sense of shame—assuming they were raised to have one.

(Weeks) Thank you so much.

Brock Putnam made a comment on riparian that brought to light a guiding principle I use in writing both the glossaries that Lexiteria produces and the daily Good Words on alphaDictionary. He wrote:

“I’m most used to encountering it as part of a legal term: “riparian rights.” Several court cases (at least one of which went to the US Supreme Court some forty years ago) were concerned with riparian rights – the right of access to beachfront or waterfront land.“

“Usually, the issue is a contest between people who own waterfront (usually beachfront) property and the right of the public to have access to it. A significant case in New Jersey went all the way to the Supremes: the final decision of the court went back through American law, English common law, and finally resided in provision of the Magna Carta!“

One of my editors made this point, too. I decided that the second part of my definition, “related to the bank of a body of fresh water”, covered the legal sense of the word. One of my peeves with traditional dictionaries is that they multiply definitions to the point that they overlap up to 90%.

I try to find what meanings have in common and create definitions that are general enough to cover as many traditional definitions as possible. You may have noticed yourself what I’ve been observing for decades: outside techincal vocabularies, the meanings of words tend to be vague and fuzzy, especially around the edges.

My wife and I just drove past a house in our newest McMansion development and my wife noticed a tree with buckets hanging from its limbs. She asked my opinion as to why someone would want hang buckets from a tree. I didn’t know for sure but immediately set my imagination to the task of resolving the issue with relish on gusto.

• To symbolize how much money they have?
• To symbolize how much money the property cost them?
• In hopes someone would help pay the maintenance costs on the house?
• Too much chlorine in their tap water?
• They prefer acid to fluoride in their water?

My immediate association was with the phrase “buckets of money”. As I sat there waiting for her to stop laughing, I wondered why we keep saying “buckets of money” at a time when a bucket of money wouldn’t cover a car payment.

But that led to thinking about bucket in general. I floats almost effortlessly though the catalog of English idioms. “To kick the bucket” led to the “bucket list”, which I’ve heard two people use recently. This is after the Morgan Freeman-Jack Nicholson movie of the same name about two men working their way through a list of things they wish to do before they kick the bucket (die).

That led to sweet remembrances of the British comedy series “Keeping Up Appearances” with Patricia Routledge playing Hyacinth Bucket, who insisted her name be pronounced “bouquet”.

Of course, buckets is a fairly common synonym for lots: buckets of love, buckets of money, buckets of whatever we have lots of. It is a common word that does a yeoman’s work for English and makes us laugh doing it.

Two stalwart Good Word subscribers, Stan Davis and Jere Mitchum, wrote a day or two ago about my use of whomever in my writeup of kudos. Stan wrote, “In your e-mail featuring kudos, you wrote: “Kudos [ku-dahs] is due whomever repaired the faucet in the ladies restroom.”

“Shame, shame!! The correct form in this sentence would be whoever. The choice between whoever and whomever is governed by the use of the word IN ITS OWN CLAUSE, not by how the whole clause is used. Thus whoever is the subject of repaired and requires the nominative case, while the whole clause acts as the indirect object of due.”

I actually had written whoever in my original version of the Good Word but one of my editors chided my cowardice in giving up on whom forms and I couldn’t refuse the inherent dare in his comment. When I asked him about the rule Stan and Jere raised, his response was, “…I’ve just consulted the Oxford Fowler’s Modern English Usage Dictionary and after a quick scan of the five pages devoted to who, whom and their cousins, have concluded he [Fowler] agrees with your correspondent.”

The point, therefore, must be conceded with apologies and one brief note: this sort of confusion probably contributes to the loss of whom those of my generation are currently suffering: the simplest way to avoid breaking this rule is to simply use who everywhere.

Rob Nollan wrote today:

“First, let me tell you that I love your Dr. Goodword’s daily e-mail. Even when I’m too busy to read it, if I click on the mail and begin reading, I get sucked in and can’t escape. Your writing and wit make lexical discovery so much fun!”

“So…you state that noisome should not be confused with noise. But it isn’t too much of a stretch to recognize that noise comes from the Latin nausea which has nothing to do with sound, either.”

“Tracking the actual origin of words through historical usage is beyond my ability, but it seems to me that noise and noisome share identical meanings, other than the fact that one usually refers to sound and the other is an adjective.”

“Therefore, my question is this: how do you trace these words to know that noise and noisome really aren’t related? Just curious. Thanks for the great work!”

Here is, in a nutshell, how we do it. We follow the spelling of the word in historical documents as far as they go. Some languages have been preserved in many documents over long periods of time, some in few over only short periods, and yet others, in none. So that process is often limited.

Greek survives today, as does Latin (in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian). The same is true of the languages that developed from Sanskrit (Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, etc.) So, it is fairly easy to trace words back to these languages.

Doing that, we find that noisome unquestionably goes back to ‘in odium’ in Latin. Noise may come from nausea. Nausea is a Latin word based on the Greek word naus “ship” that we see in nautical and navigate. However, it may just as well originate in noxia “harm, damage”; we just aren’t sure. Either way, noise and noisome are probably two different words that are coincidentally  spelled similarly today.

Why aren’t we sure of the origin of noise? Even if there are written documents available, when talking about a span of 2000 years, there will be gaps of hundreds of years in which no written evidence has survived but the spoken language continued to change.

For those gaps etymologists apply rules learned from examining thousands of similar words without gaps over the same time period. That usually works, but not always. What we can’t predict are changes caused by the influence of other languages, people playing with their language, confusion of one word with another, and similar accidental phenomena.

It is fun, as you have discovered, but it is also revealing. I devote so much space in the daily Good Words to their histories  because words express us as surely as we express them. They express our ideas and attitudes. Their histories often provide insights into our cultures and especially the changes in our attitudes and thought over the centuries.

Dee Scrogin caught this line in an article about capping the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in the Wichita Eagle (May 27, 2010) and wondered if it were not an example of litotes, the Good Word for May 22, 2010:

“So far, ‘top kill” isn’t failing to plug oil leak”

Dee wrote, “I wonder if this is an example of litotes which you discussed recently? (5/22) I’d never heard the word but found it interesting about a double negative appealing to the positive. I enjoy your daily word; a friend, Ed Garvin, recommended you.”

Indeed, “isn’t failing” is a perfect example of litotes since “not” is built into the word “fail” = “not succeed”. You do not have to see the two negations as in “not uncommon” to make a litotes. So long as two words imply negation, they are litotic.The implication in this phrase is that top kill isn’t failing but isn’t succeeding, either. This is the expected effect of litotes.

A Facebook friend, Liza Kendall Christian, wrote Monday to express her curiosity about monetize:

“Bob, Do you knew the origin of the word monetize among all the other fun things you seem to dissect about language. Just a minor curiosity of when and in what venue/sphere it came into existence. Thank you, Bob!”

This word first began to appear in print in the second half of the 19th century in the sense of “to establish as the standard of currency”, a meaning which slowly evolved into “realize as or express in terms of money.”

In 1867 it was used several times in a book by J. A. Ferris called “The financial Economy of the United States”, e.g. “This would monetize gold again.” In 1903 it was being used widely throughout the English-speaking world. The British journal “The Speaker” was even using new words derived from it, e.g. “He demonetised silver in Germany and monetised gold.”

The word was borrowed from French monétiser, which emerged some time before 1818. The French didn’t inherit it from Latin but created it from Latin moneta “money” plus the Greek suffix -iz-. The British still spell this suffix the French way -ise (monetise) while we long ago changed the spelling to -ize. The US spelling is, however, in the process of being adopted in the UK.

BK Teo wrote yesterday: “I have come across this word “shoppe” and I undersand it has the same meaning as shop. I would like to suggest that you use the word Shoppe for “What’s the Good Word?” series from alphaDictionary.”

Shoppe is an archaic variant of shop that is no longer in use. The spelling was probably influenced by French but who knows? Shoppe is used to for its sense of things dated, even old-fashioned, and quaint, as in “Ye Olde Antique Shoppe”. This phrase is simply a quaint variant of the modern “The Old Antique Shop”. These are curiosities but there isn’t much more than can be said about them that is interesting.

David Kelley of the Bucknell Electrical Engineering Department just dropped a note that I thought worth sharing with the world. Here is what he asked and how I answered.

“I enjoyed reading Sam Alcorn’s ‘Ask the Experts‘ profile of you that has just recently appeared on Bucknell’s web site. There is an aspect of language that has puzzled me for 25 years. I have never found a satisfyingly complete answer to my question, so I thought I would ‘ask the expert’.“

“Does anyone know why (or have a good theory for why) gender developed in most of the world’s (or at least Europe’s) major languages? I know French and Spanish have masculine and feminine nouns, and I know German adds “neuter” to the list. Even more intriguing to me is why English, which is derived from German and has borrowed heavily from French and Latin, has lost the classification of nouns by gender.“

David, thank you for your note. I’m happy that you enjoyed Sam’s interview with me; I was pleased with it myself.

We should keep in mind that we are not looking for logical reasons for gender, so the question “why?” begs the question. Gender exists for grammatical reasons alone and our mental grammar has its own rules. Grammar interacts with other mental processes but it should not be confused with them: it is an independent human mental faculty with rules of its own.

That said, gender is actually a category of the lexicon, out mental vocabulary, the dictionary of words we have in our heads. Grammar, the rules for organizing words in sentences, works together with lexicon to bridge our minds and the real world. Their job is to provide a speedy means of the expressing ideas about the real world to others out there. The first step in this process is to categorize everything.

Just as we have semantic (conceptual) categories like animal, vegetable, bodies of water, countries, we have lexical categories that group words so that they may be quickly grasped and understood in speech: gender, number, person. These categories are usually reflected in the dress of words, the suffixes, prefixes, endings, that they bear. Gender is one of those categories, a category with two or three members, usually masculine and feminine, but also neuter in some languages.

Now, remember that the lexical categories have to do with words, not semantic categories. The names “masculine” and “feminine” are therefore misleading for they also refer to the semantic categories of males and females. Masculine and feminine nouns are not limited to males and females. The word for table in Russian, stol, is masculine while la table in French is feminine. As I hope is obvious to all, tables have no semantic gender at all. Moreover, in Russian, the words for “uncle”, “judge”, “daddy”, and all male nicknames are feminine and the word for “girl” in German, Mädchen, is neuter.

Lexical gender, then, is an arbitrary set of classes and all nouns must belong to one of them. There is a tendency to associate semantic categories with lexical categories because of the confusion between the two that led to the names “masculine” and “feminine” for the lexical categories. Still, speakers have to memorize which class a noun belongs to just as they memorize each word’s meaning.

Languages that have gender also have agreement. This means that when a noun is used with an adjective or verb in those languages, that adjective and verb must bear an indicator (suffix or prefix) associated with the class of the noun. This helps the mind of the listener keep up with which adjective and which verb goes with which noun in complex sentences that have multiple adjectives and verbs. This is generally the purpose of lexical categories and, as you can see, it is purely grammatical, not semantic or logical.

The relation is not logical because languages like Chinese and Vietnamese have no prefixes or suffixes, no gender, no agreement yet speakers and listeners have no trouble processing these languages. English historically has been moving away from gender-agreement to the Chinese and Vietnamese model. We use only a handful of affixes now and there is evidence that they are losing their grip.

Why? No one knows. Clearly gender and agreement are not required of a functioning language; they just come and go for the arbitrary “reasons” of language alone, reasons linguists have not yet been able to establish.

An old acquaintance, Daniel Razumov, sent me an interesting Russian word with an unexpected story. Here is the story he tells:

“I have very nice example of Russian word “shmon” (шмон)  ’body search’ which is very similar to the Hebrew word “shmone” ( שמונה )  ’eight’.  My friends and I thought the similarity odd but coincidental.”

“Then we discovered that in the Soviet GuLags there was a body search at eight ‘clock each morning, and since many Jewish people were serving time in those prisons due to their ‘wrong’ political perspective in those days, the Hebrew word ‘eight’ was transferred from Yiddish or Hebrew to Russian slang as a body search.”

The semantic drift of words can be absolutely fascinating but also tell us so much about our history, where we are coming from and where we are going.