Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

A good deal has been written and is being written on the topic of language death. Linguists and anthropologists don’t like the idea though they are hard pressed to present any reasons for their dislike. I suppose it emerges from the dislike of death itself and the implication that a culture is dying if not the peope speaking the language themselves.

Another way of looking at language death, however, is the way the commercial world looks at the death of companies: language consolidation. The native languages around the world are being consolidated, not in the usual sense of that word, but in the financial sense that they are being replaced by larger entities that must grow larger and larger.

In North American, for example, the hundreds of Native American languages are being consolidated into English and Spanish with a bit of French tossed into the mix. In France, the Celtic languages to the south are being replaced by French. The result of language death is the same as consolidation in the world of business where small businesses die out so that large businesses can grow larger.

The great difference between commercial and linguistic consolodation is that in the commercial world, small businesses reappear. Once a corporation reaches a certain size, it loses interest in small niche markets and new, small businesses appear to service them.

The beer industry is a prime example. As the breweries of the last century grew and put smaller breweries out of business, they were forced to produce beers of universal appeal, which is to say bland, inoffensive tasting beers. Drinkers with a taste for beer were ignored because the larger breweries thought them too small a minority to cater to. So, microbreweries began to appear to cater to that minority on a local level.

This does not happen in the linguistic world. Once a language is gone, it is gone forever and no other language will ever arise to take its place. Language consolidation is permanent. This means that the number of languages in the world will continue to dwindle but the number of people speaking the surviving languages will continue to increase. Attempts to preserve the smaller languages, like attempts to preserve small businesses in competition with large corporations, are doomed at the outset to failure.

About mid-career, I realized one day that I was passing my friends in the hall without making eye contact. If I did, I would stop and chat and that would take 2-3 minutes (or more) out of preparing lecture plans or research. If I did that 15-20 times a day, we would be talking about major time loss for an academic. Academics have two jobs, after all: teaching and research. Add a family and house-repair on top of that and the time squeeze becomes a major one.

Upon retirement, I found myself not only talking more with friends but adding to that crucial and interesting group. My circle of friends began to expand. As I built the alphaDictionary Agora, Dr. Goodword’s blog, joined Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, and Twitter, and added these contacts to my circle of friends here in Lewisburg and around the world and my alphaDictionary e-mail friends, I began finding myself having more and more difficulty keeping up with everyone. Will all the various types of social networking made possible by the Web lead to acquaintaince overload?

Friendship should be close, between people who know each other and enjoy company and conversations with them. But the brain has limitations. It is stuck in the skull so there is only so much it can retain. Don’t get me wrong. There are millions of interesting people in the world and I would love to be acquainted with them all. Now that we actually have the tools to do that, do we have the time and mind space required?

I write this because I have grown quite close to people I’ve never met and I really don’t understand what that means. Of course, when we communicate via websites and e-mail we present ourselves at our very best. Friends generally know our shortcomings and love us despite them. Perhaps this is the attraction of the Internet: we can protray ourselves at our best, shuck off our warts and create a new and shining self. We connect by our common points and delight to discover how many of them there are.

The question then follows, will these new and shiny selves that we create on line actually become us? Will we arise in a new decency that we never realized was in us as a result of the Web? That isn’t clear in light of the many genually evil websites out there, websites that protray the worst human beings can be.

I suspect as time grinds on, we will discover that most of us share most of our most important features. We will discover that we are all in this together. Together. That is not a bad thing that should make us angry, but a very good one. But then on a halcyon and idyllic autumn day like today I can’t help being a cock-eyed optimist.

I received this note from Rebecca Casper today:

“The word that came up in the debate tonight was idyll or idyl. Some believe it is related to ideal. Others said, “No.” In any event, its full meaning is not altogether clear from a simple dictionary. Have you ever featured this word so that you could share your research? It is of Greek derivation, but I thought it was also an allusion to some Greek myth or legend. (But I can’t find anything.) Tennyson wrote ‘Idylls of the King,’ but that doesn’t give us a good etymology. Can you?”

First of all, how do we spell this word: Idyll or idyl? The US dictionaries don’t seem to care how many Ls we use but idyll is the original spelling. Idyl is a later misspelling that has become acceptable.

This word is unrelated to ideal though the latter may have informed the meaning of the former. Ideal is the adjective for idea under the assumption that the idea of an object is always a perfect representation of that object.

Idyll comes, via Latin idyllium, from eidyllion, a diminutive of Greek eidos “form, that which is seen, a person’s beauty”, from the verb meaning “to see”, the one that also went into the making of English video. The diminutive of this word came to refer to a type of short idealized poem, usually a bucolic one, which is to say, a romantic poem about the countryside.

An idyll today still retains a bucolic aroma but today it means ”a simple, tranquil state of affairs”. It can also refer to a peaceful interlude that is absolutely perfect, a vacation or affair in a place we normally only dream about.

Look for this word as a Good Word toward the end of October.

Sorry I haven’t been updating this blog. I’m in the final throes of editing The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English on top of a very busy work schedule. Generally Lexiteria’s business drops in July and August but this year it actually increased over May and June, just as the book requires my full attention.

It goes to press Monday, so I will have more time to think about language more generally and return to trying to keep up with the US media’s assault on the language. In the meantime, I received a chain e-mail with a routine by George Carlin that all those interested in language and ageing should enjoy. Carlin’s eye for the humorous in language was uncanny. Here is what he noticed about the way we speak of getting older.

George Carlin on Aging

Do you realize that the only time in our lives when we like to get old is when we’re kids? If you’re less than 10 years old, you’re so excited about aging that you think in fractions.

‘How old are you?’
‘I’m fourand a half!’

You’re never thirty-six and a half. You’re four and a half, going on five! That’s the key.

You get into your teens, now they can’t hold you back. You jump to the next number, or even a few ahead.

‘How old are you?’
‘I’m gonna be 16!’

You could be 13, but hey, you’re GONNA BE 16! And then the greatest day of your life!

You BECOME 21. Even the words sound like a ceremony. You BECOME 21. YESSSS!!!

But then you turn 30. Oooohh, what happened there? Makes you sound like bad milk! He TURNED; we had to throw him out. There’s no fun now, you’re just a sour-dumpling.. What’s wrong? What’s changed?

You BECOME 21, you TURN 30, then you’re PUSHING 40. Whoa! Put on the brakes, it’s all slipping away. Before you know it, you REACH
50 and your dreams are gone…

But wait!!! You MAKE it to 60. Whew! As if you didn’t think you would!

So you BECOME 21, you TURN 30, you PUSH 40, REACH 50 and MAKE IT to 60.

You’ve built up so much speed that you HIT 70! After that it’s a day-by-day thing; you HIT Monday, you HIT Tuesday, you HIT Wednesday!

You GET INTO your 80’s and every day is a complete cycle; you HIT lunch; you TURN 4:30; you REACH bedtime. And it doesn’t end there. Into the 90s, you start going backwards; ‘I WAS JUST  92.’

Then a strange thing happens. If you make it over 100, you become a little kid again.

‘I’m 100 and a half!’

May you all make it to a healthy 100 and a half.

I was rather taken aback at the response to our recent Good Word nickname. A reader by the rather silky name of Monroe Thomas Clewis admitted, “I have always enjoyed silkier sobriquet as a synonym for the more leathery nickname.”

I must admit material sympathy for Mr. Clewis’s preference. I do think that we have room for both these terms, though. I wouldn’t want to stretch the patience of sobriquet to names like Knucklehead, Stinky, Pusslegut, or even Buck, for that matter. So, I would say that there are both nicknames and sobriquets in this world, and may never the twain collide.

A Canadian reader, Davi McGrew, after buttering me up with an ostensible confession of pleasure in the daily Good Word, tried to tauten my definition of nickname in this way: “It seems to me that Pat, etc. should more properly be acknowledged as diminutives rather than nicknames…of which I have had several myself. If the point was to ‘add something to, or enrich’ [Great approach: pinning me down with a direct quote–DG] then a bald shortening seems besides the point.”

I’m one of the few US-ers who give Canada credit for harboring several clever people, so I am not at all surprised at Davi’s comment—nor his sly argumentational tactics. I fully appreciate them, in fact, even though they leave me unconvinced. Pat as a nickname for Patrick or Patricia could be a “clipping”, i.e. a word the majority of which has been clipped, e.g. Doc for doctor, rep for representative.

I don’t think, though, that I could call it a diminutive, a word that indicates a smaller version, as a napkin was once though to be a smaller version of an apron. English doesn’t sport diminutives any more, just the vestiges of them in words on -kin and a few borrowings from French on -ette, as when the former cigarette was a smaller version of the still current cigar.

Nicknames do sometimes come with diminutives. Billy is more likely applied to a small Bill than a large one; Annie sounds more girlish to me than Anne. In fact, we have lots of these in English: Bobby, Jacky, Johnny. But this is not a consistency in the language. Molly is something quite different from a Moll and I wouldn’t take Leslie all the way down to Lessie.

Anyway, these words do show us how we can find some of the most uncommon behavior in the commonest of our speech habits.

Stephen Greenfield, a creative photographer in Cleveland, Tennesee yesterday came to the good Doctor with this problem:

“I’m trying to sort out what a male lover is called (not gigolo, boy toy, or pool boy) that corresponds to the feminine mistress, simply a female lover seen by a married man—not a kept woman, merely a woman a married man sees from time to time, sex just being a part of the equation.”

“What is the term when a married woman has an unmarried male lover? Geez, you would think that might have been settled long ago, but my research turns up nothing except debates about what is a mistress and long, dry dissertations written from a woman’s point-of-view of glass-ceilings, power, money, you name it, and they all claim it.”

The male lexical counterpart of mistress is master. Notice how this word has not developed in the same direction as mistress. Why not?

If I haven’t written on this topic before, I’ve discussed it for 30 years in my introductory linguistic courses. The fact of the matter is, English and most other Indo-European languages contains FAR more pejorative terms for women than for men. Notice that even two of the words for “lover” that Stephen cites, boy toy and pool boy, reflect pejoratively on the women who have them more so than on the toys and boys themselves. Gigolo is the exception because it refers to deceitful, unreliable men.

Let’s begin with a few relatively clean pejorative surrogates for woman: bimbo, cow, clothes-horse, crone, dog, fishwife, floozy, frump, hag, harlot, harpy, hussy, milf, moll, nag, prude, shrew, siren, skirt, spinster, tart, temptress, wench, witch, working girl. Prejudice against women is a flagrant characteristic of the English vocabulary.

There is no comparable list of pejorative words referring exclusively to men (i.e. not referring equally to men and women) that rivals this list. Of course, we can easily build a comparable list of pejoratives referring to homosexual men. However, they are accused precisely of being feminine by homosexophobes. This has long been an argument of the existence of a strongly male-dominated society.

Given this fact of English, why would we need a word referring to a male lover other than lover? Again, notice that a male lover is something to be admired unpejoratively while the pale penumbra of shame always hovers over the female lover.

Mark Conn is only the most recent reader of our “100 Most Beautiful Words in English” list to ask why so many seem to be French, not English. I guess it is time to put a reply up for everyone.

The reason is that well over 50% of the English vocabulary is borrowed from French. When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, he initiated the Norman Period of English history and the Middle English period of the language. Religious, legal, judicial, educational, and governmental institutions were conducted entirely in French and Old English became the language of the lower classes. Thousands of words were imported into English, a process that continued even after English reestablished itself as the strongly French-influenced national language again around 1300.

We can push the percentage of words borrowed from French and its mother, Latin, even higher if we include medical and legal terms, and higher still if we include the Greek language. The vast majority of current English vocabulary is borrowed, in fact. 

English doesn’t simply borrow words from other languages, it plunders other languages for their lexical treasures like a vocabulary pirate: Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, plus dozens if not hundreds more, have all seen their word stores scanned directly into the English lexicon.

Now, does that mean that English contains only a few thousand English words? That would be a hard case to make. Once we borrow a word like chatoyant (pronounced [shætoyã] then change its meaning and pronunciation (English [shætoyênt]), it is English. The fact that a French word is borrowed from a language associated with high culture, fashion, and epicurean sophistication does add to its beauty and allure, though.

The aspect of a native word like becoming, fetching, or comely that sets it off from the rest is a sense of being quaintly out of fashion, a warm, and cozy sense like that of a dowdy old aunt or grandmother. Here the distance is in time rather than place but it is still the sense of removal that adds elgance and grace to such such words.

That doesn’t mean that some current native words are not beautiful: love, lilt and offing certainly fill that bill. Certainly other aspects enter the lexical beauty equation. However, just as a sense of anachronism positively inclines us toward native words, the exoticity of distant cultures in words borrowed gains our vocabulary the same advantage.

I’m working on a longer, more detailed explanation of how beauty works in words for the book, The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English scheduled for August publication.

The Sunbury Daily Item this morning reported the arrest of an out-of-state visitor in the Susquehanna Mall for upskirting. (The online edition changed the headline so as not to unintentionally encourage its readership). Upskirting, according to the Deadly Item (as it is fondly called by those of us who adore it), is bending over to take a digital photograph up a lady’s skirt (or a naughty girl’s, for that matter). Given the length of skirts these days, I have difficulty visualizing this, since either the man is something of a contortionist or the skirts involved were very short.

The important point, however, is that the perp is from out of state, Missouri, to be exact. Readers in that state should be on guard! Another important point—aside from the one on this guy’s head—is that upskirting is not yet listed among the crimes in Pennsylvania, so the district attorney has to decide whether the actual crime is disorderly conduct or harrassment, neither of which carry stern penalties.

Here at alphaDictionary, of course, we are more interested in the fact that this new verb has reached the area. To upskirt, according to the Urban Dictionary, has been around since 2006, along with the misuse of photographic cell phones itself. Since the verb to skirt means “to go around, circumvent”, I would have expected to upskirt to mean “to circumvent by raising to a higher level”, as to upskirt an insult with a compliment to the insulter. Apparently, that is not the case.

Anyway, this brave new step into sexual perversion and the vocabulary it shleps with it has us all talking in appropriately hushed tones here in centrally isolated Lewisburg. Who knows where it will lead to next: peeking at girls in bikinis at the beach, no doubt. What’s the world coming to?

John Myes wanted to know if the hagia in Hagia Sophia is related to the hagios in our Good Word hagiography.  Hagia Sophia is the name of the museum in Istanbul that was once the seat of the patriarch (= pope) of Eastern Orthodoxy.  Indeed, Greek hagia “holy” is the feminine form of hagios, which is also the word for “saint”, so Hagia Sophia means “Saint Sophia”. (We find the same relation in saint, which was originally Latin sanctus “holy”.)

I always thought it interesting that the patron saint of the Roman Catholic Church was a man, St. Peter, the Rock, while the patron saint of the Eastern Orthodox Church (once a part of the Roman Church), was a woman, St. Sophia, also the Greek word for ”Wisdom”. 

The several historical attempts to (re)marry these two faiths have failed. They would seem to be incompatible despite all their common interests.

David Myer wrote the following from somewhere, I take it, out in Australia:

“So, what is a gammy leg? Usually used in Australia (and in UK as far as I can remember) to indicate a leg affliction that causes a limp.”

This one is easy for a while. Gammy is a mispronunciation of gamy, an extention of game, as in a game leg. Hobos in the 30s mispronounced it and expanded its meaning to include anything that is bad: gammy smell, gammy ride, gammy food. Notice that doubling the M in this word led to a different, though predictable, change in the pronunciation which provides the perfect segue to your next, more complex, question:

“Also interested in your US dropping of the double consonant when adding ing or ed. ‘focused’ or ‘targeted’ (assuming you actually deign to use such a word as a noun).”

“For me, the rule is simple. You select the spelling that is easiest to read. Focussed is likely to be instantly recognised and pronounced in only one way. The single s in focused can lead the quick reader to pronounce it as a z. The emphasis would then fall on the second syllable so you might read focused as in accused. Double s is infinitely preferable in my book.”

I totally agree with you on doubling the consonants—it and the ’silent’ E are the only consistent means of distinguishing long and short vowels in English. I’m not sure which editorial committee decided that we in the US should husband our consonants or for what reason but the single consonant in these words implies the removal of a silent E, e.g. bated vs. batted, coned vs. conned, pining vs. pinning, not to mention gamy vs. gammy, an excellent example of the mischief confusing the two can lead to. We actually aren’t even consistent in our spelling as these examples demonstrate, since the US rule applies only to multisyllabled words.

I do hope that you appreciate the fact that I use British punctuation when it comes to the placement of quotation marks. It irks many of our US readers but, again, the British system is logical and consistent: if the quotes logically belong inside the period or comma, you place them inside the period or comma. If the period or comma is a part of the quotations, they go inside the quotes.

Sometimes I marvel that we still speak to each other, two peoples, as Winston Churchill put it, “divided by a common language”.