Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

Lenn Zonder sent such profound comments on my recent treatment of the Good Word shenanigans that I just have to share them with everyone. Here is his response:

“I was so glad to read your definition of shenanigans and noting that it has nothing to do with the female gender as there is no henanigans.”

“Historectomy used to scare the daylights out of me until I found out it actually should be called a herstorectomy.”

“Seriously, though, you let the Germans off the hook in charting the etymology of shenanigan. I would point out that the second through the sixth letters of this word, H-E-N-A-N, names a large Chinese province on the south bank of the Yellow River. and remember, San Francisco has one of the finest Chinatowns in America.” [A great lead to follow were the word henanigans—REB]

“Also, if you take those same five letters and add a second ‘E’, it spells Heenan, a fine old Irish name. And lord knows the Irish have produced some of the finest practical jokers to have ever walked this earth.”

“Just blowing some smoke up Smoketown Road in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. ”

‘Nuff said.

We seldom utter a sentence that does not contain an idiom, yet much less than they deserve is written about them. I was reminded by a recent article in the Lewiston, Maine Sun-Journal, “Idioms add color to our language“.

So, what is an idiom? An idiom is a phrase that cannot be analyzed into separate words but makes sense only as a whole. For example, “Jill flew off the handle when she saw lipstick on Jack’s collar.” Jill, of course, must be a woman here and not the family canary, so she cannot fly. However, taken as a whole, “flew off the handle” simply means “got mad”.

Because they are treated as wholes and cannot be semanticallly analyzed into parts, idioms are stored in the right side of the brains of 98% of us, the side of holistic thinking. (Our knowledge of grammar and vocabulary is located on the left side, the side that analyzes sentences into their parts and relationships.)

At the end of dictionary entries, the major idioms in which the word occurs are listed. At the end of the entry for jump, we find the idiom jump the gun listed as meaning “start too soon”. Under shirt we find give the shirt off one’s back, meaning simply “be generous”.

Idioms should not be confused with metaphorical usage. Idioms are phrases of two or more words. We might think that window of opportunity is an idiom. In fact, though, window may be used in this sense with other nouns, such as a window in a tight schedule or a window in the development of an organism. Here, window is simply being used metaphorically to mean “opening” because, well, windows open. The meaning of window in these cases is not totally removed from the literal meaning of the word.

One of the greatest tricks of the comedian is to find situations where an idiom may, in fact, be analyzed, leaving the listener in a quandary—does the comic intend the idiom or the literal meaning? In an episode of the TV series Mash, hearing that a soldier has been dishonrably discharged, Hawk-eye asked, “Why? Was he rotten to the corps?” Now, when you hear this, it sounds identical to the idiom “rotten to the core”, which means simply to be extermely bad. Which did Hawk-eye mean, corps or core?

On our Punny Pages, we have many examples like this: She criticized my apartment, so I knocked her flat. The humor in this rides on the interpretation of knock as well as the ambiguity of flat. Flat may be an adjective meaning, well, “flat” or it can be noun meaning “apartment”. Knock means, literally, “to hit, strike” but it has an idiomatic sense, totally removed from the literal sense, of “to criticize”. To literally knock someone flat is to knock them down, hit them hard enough that they fall to the floor. However, in the idiomatic sense, to knock a flat means “to criticize an apartment”. (Great joke if you just laugh and don’t analyze it.)

The last example is based on the idiomatic meaning of a verb. As you can see, words with idiomatic meanings may also be slang. In fact, many consider idiomatic phrases slang and slang dictionaries usually contain idioms as well as slang. I remain unconvinced that the two are one and the same, however. Knock in the sense of “criticize” may be both slang and idiomatic, but many if not most idiomatic phrases may be used where slang would be avoided. Fly off the handle, go overboard, jump the gun are all OK in situations where we would not want to use gussied up, gum shoe, the pokey. However, there is overlap and the issue is not a settled one.

The important point is simply that a string of words may be a logical sentence or an illogical one which is still meaningful if the string is memorized along with a single meaning as a whole. When we are aware of this distinction and listen carefully to each other, life can be much funnier.

We heard a lot about flip-flopping during the last presidential campaign. I had hoped it had run its course but I’ve heard it a few times recently in the current pre-pre-preliminary campaign for the presidency of the United States so I feel I have to vent a little on the subject before I do ‘flip out’.

First, it is a child’s word, a rhyme compound like roly-poly, piggly-wiggly, willy-nilly, in a rhyme class with clip-clop and hip-hop. It isn’t a serious word; you don’t read it in scholarly journals.

Flip-flop is a pejorative term for “change your mind” or “reconsider”, something intelligent people often do when new or fresh information about an issue comes to their attention. The worse thing a leader, political or otherwise, can do is to remain adamant on a point despite the fact that new evidence indicates that his or her position is wrong. At least it is bad if the objective is taking the right postion on issues.

If someone in known to change their position for political reasons, then that fact should be drawn out and presented in detail. Changing one’s mind in general, however, is not a bad thing.

So, using terms like flip-flop in a debate can be an admission that the target of the epithet is flexible in their thinking, that their thinking is based on best evidence and, as that evidence changes, so does the thinking of the flip-flopper. Flip-flop is a term of ridicule, to often used by debaters who have no argument or rebuttal. There is nothing wrong in flip-flopping if the evidence flip-flops—or if the flip-flopper’s thinking matures with experience.

So, let’s all keep in mind that flip-flopping is a pejorative term for mental flexibility, something those who used this word so extensively in the last presidential election do, in fact, seem to lack. Let’s hope that this word will be used in the future exclusively to refer to thongs of the feet such as those pictured above.

I am back from my foray into France, the land where everyone loves pain and a drink of water makes you say, “Oh!” It is a land where champs are flat and ordinary though everyone’s beau is good-looking. Hands are the main thing there. In France all pets are stinkers though the cats are rather chatty. You have to rue the streets even though everyone lives in chateaus for a personne is noone at all.

Happy National Punctuation Day all! Apparently we do not celebrate Punctuation Day the way we celebrate Labor Day—by avoiding any hint of it. I am not sure what one does on National Punctuation Day; I am at my usual labors.  You can read more about it here.

Punctuation is, of course, very important to language. The most famous proof is the sentence, “A woman without her man is nothing”, which some English teacher is purported to have written on an unsuspecting blackboard, asking that the class punctuate it correctly. The men all punctuated it thus: “A woman, without her man, is nothing”. The women wrote: “A woman: without her, man is nothing”.

A more interesting example was given years ago by my phonetics teacher at the University of Michigan, Kenneth Pike. He offered the simple sentence, “I love you,” pointing out that the intonation (and, by extention, the punctuation) can reverse the meaning: “I? Love you?”

So don’t stop at watching your Ps and Qs; watch your punctuation, too.

Yes, we had a wonderful cruise down the Rhône from Beaune (a wonderful discovery) to Arles, then spending 4 days in Aix (where all married women are ex-wives), sallying out from there to Le Baux and other monuments worth seeing. It is good to be back home, too.

I have a paper that I have read at several semi-professional venues called, “But There are no Such Things as Words”. It argues that words are intangible parts of a system that come and go, are created and disintegrate according to rules, in ways that make them uncountable. (I expressed a similar sentiment in “How Many Words are in English?“)

The recent surge (to use a military term) in lexical creations, like boomerangst, crackberry, politicide, and on and on and on would seem to test my position beyond its breaking point. I don’t think it does, though. I think that the Internet has made something new possible that leaves that impression but is misleading.

What has happened is that it is now possible for everyone with an Internet connection to not only talk with words but to talk about words. Words have become talking points, not just tools for talking. How many times have you ever discussed the words have or table or calm. It is a very rare occurrence. We use these words without thinking about them.

Now, another question: how many times have you used words like boomerangst (one of my favorites), crackberry, politicide, even truthiness without thinking about them while speaking to someone. Another rare occurrence. These are words we talk about; they are works of creative art, not the output of any rule of English.

English word formation rules produce words like googler from the new verb to google. They can (and have) produced truthiness from the regular word formation truthy generated from the noun truth in the sense of “containing or similar to truth”. All of these forms are automatically available when a new word enters the lexicon. If we picked up a new verb, blurk, blurking, blurker, blurkable, etc. are automatically “there”, available.

Another aspect of rule-generated words is that they are generated unconsciously. The blurk forms above come out of our mouths without thought, without losing our train of thought. The new generation of words, mostly sniglets are consciously created to amuse. This is why we talk about them more than we talk with them. If you know what blurk means, no one has to tell you what blurkability means. Someone has to tell what crackberry means and then it is funny.

The point I think I have arrived at is that words, which originally were communications tools, have become playthings. They have been that for a while among an elite group of intellectuals but now the entire cyberworld is infected. We are lucky to have Rich Hall’s term sniglets to separate these playthings from the real workhorses of language, words.

The Bush administration’s marketing department has been particulary weak at warspeak. It first came up with the term embed to express the military’s new control over the press (the first victim of war is truth). At normal conversational speed it is difficult to distinguish “reporter embedded with the 1st Division” from “reporter in bed with the 1st Division.” Intentional or not, the US media quickly absorbed the term and are now trying to understand  how Bush could have so misled us into believing Iraq possessed WMDs.

Now, troop buildup has been replaced by troop surge, no doubt because the political marketers think surge is more powerful and positive than buildup (or increase or expansion). The association is with a power surge that fries your electronic equipment if you use no surge protector. Tsunamis bring a surge of water that is even more destructive. Of course, any of us can experience a surge of energy that helps us get the job done. Maybe that is what the master marketeers have in mind.

What the marketeers have failed to do is come up with a terminology that demonizes the enemy. In World War II the Germans were the Jerries (we still use that term in the word jerrican) and the Japanese were the Japs. They were depicted as devils in all the war propaganda.

The clarity of that war did not carry over to the Vietnam war since the enemy and the “friendlies” looked alike (the enemy didn’t always wear uniforms). Some of our guys over there called them slopes but that slur didn’t take at home. 

Islamofascist is much too long and has no devilish image associated with it. We see Osama bin Laden but he is a Saudi and looks like too many other Middle Easterners. This makes it difficult to understand what we and our beds are surging toward and why.

Running a war without support let alone participation of the population at large has historically been a losing proposition in this country. But if we lose in Iraq, as we did in Vietnam, we may be able to chalk the loss up to marketing—or even reduce it to a matter of vocabulary.

Forgive me for not getting back to the blog any sooner. It isn’t for lack of interest; just conflict with the holiday rituals.

I promised a review of Will Shortz’ documentary film Wordplay upon my return and I am prepared to do that now. I think I can sidestep my jealousy at this point. Yes, Dr. Goodword is jealous of two people: Richard Lederer and Will Shortz. Both succeeded in making a living playing with words while I was laboring away in a Chomskyan framework trying just to understand them.

I really enjoyed meeting the people who write and work crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzles are an enjoyable intellectual challenge, which is why we carry several types of them on our website. (Our New Year’s resolution will be to update them more frequently.) However, this film is less about crossword puzzles than about the people who write them and the famous people who work them (Jon Stewart, President Clinton, Ken Burns, and the Indigo Girls among others).

The central figure in the film is Will himself, reading his mail, reading a puzzle to a participant on his PBS radio program, and emceeing the 28th Annual Crossword Competition in Stamford, Connecticut—nothing to produce a thrill a minute. As much as I love words and people who love words, I had to fast-forward several times to be able to say watching the film was time well spent. The problem is that the film is about the people who write and work crosswords with little said about the fascinating world of words itself.

The bulk of the film focuses on a competition for the fastest crossword puzzle solvers in the country. I’m not sure how anyone can enjoy words when their goal is to spit them out as fast as possible. I write Good Words to be savored; maybe that it my problem with the film. In the past 20 years of this competition, only 7 of the 400-500 people who compete each year have won. Are these people with rich vocabularies? Interesting lives? A better understanding of the world around them? As best I could judge, they just solve crossword puzzles faster than anyone else, a kind of lexical athlete.

Interesting documentaries about words can be made. American Tongues and the PBS series The Story of English are fascinating but, of course, they are not about puzzles. The spelling bee movies, Bee Season and Spellbound are fascinating. Granted they are not documentaries but they show how films based on words can capture your attention. Perhaps a history of crosswords from the Romans (Greeks?) onward would work. But the people who write them, talking about themselves and each other, is not the sort of excitement that even logophiles expect of the American film industry today.

My favorite crossword puzzle film is an unrated (so help me) four-part BBC series starring Alan Bates and Sinéad Cusack called Oliver’s Travels. The wordplay is the witty banter between the two main characters as they search for the legendary British crossword creator “Aristotle” from London to the Orkneys. Of course, the problem here is the fact that crosswords are in the background—but maybe that is where they should be. In order to make this film exciting, thriller plot was added in which an evil empire chases the heros, taking (real) potshots at them along the way.

OK. I’m not sure how to make an exciting crossword or word puzzle thriller and I am glad to have made a one-sided acquaintance with the foremost word puzzler and the fastest crossword puzzle workers in the country and I’ve already admitted that I am jealous of the star of this film. But whatever my motivation, I still think a golden opportunity was lost.