Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

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.

Actually, I’m not coming back to this funny little idiom, I just thought the title was catchy and, if you are reading this, it would seem to have worked.

Of course, idioms like “back to back” cannot be analyzed but must be taken at face value (so to speak). However, I did try to imagine how eight episodes of “Murder She Wrote” could be shown “back to back” as was announced sometimes in the not too awfully distant past on some television channel I occasionally peruse.

As I visualized these episodes, the first would have to be played forward, the second backward for them to be shown back-to-back. This means that episode two and three would be shown face to face–if anyone was still watching after number two was shown backward. Episodes three and four could then be shown back to back again.

Of course, I should be writing this idiom with hyphens, “back-to-back”, as do the dictionaries. “Back to back” without hyphens would mean literally “back to back”, as to stand back to back before stepping off ten paces in a duel.

We could avoid all this confusion with another phrase, face to back, but no one seems to be using this expression. We need it. That is the way bands march and people sit in auditoriums. Why isn’t it around? Let’s start using it. That’ll teach them.

Chris Stewart, a long-time e-friend from South Africa just pointed out that we have a new element that craves naming:

“See this New York Times article…. I propose to call this new element Superunobtanium, a name that speaks for itself and which I believe to be quite apposite considering only 6 atoms of the stuff have ever existed on this planet. However, there seems to be a committee of fuddy-duddies tasked with naming these things in commemoration of people who had nothing to do with their discovery and I imagine they would frown on such an eminently sensible appellation.”

Unobtanium, of course, is a fictitious element used by physicists and engineers in thought experiments pertaining to devices that cannot be produced because the material they require is “unobtainable”. It is also behind all the squabbles in the 3-D semi-cartoon movie Avatar. It has the unusual superproperty of having exactly the properties required by the use to which it is put.

Chris is one of those techies who would be in constant need of both these elements. I am one of those non-techies who can only pull my jaw back up and wonder at the discussion. I would much rather discuss the far more critical issue of whether unobtanium should be spelled with an I or not: unobtanium or unobtainium? I think the former looks much more impressive. The Grand Panjandrum of Fuddy-Duddidom has spoken.

Slow-lane officers in my hometown defused a dangerous situation which, no doubt and unfortunately, will be repeated elsewhere as the demand for more arms on our streets continues to rise. The Sunbury Daily Item reported Thursday that an armed gunman entered the Lewisburg courthouse insulting the local constabulary and threatening to rob a bank. (No doubt he intended to ask directions to one, too.)

Sheriff Ernie Ritter reported, “We made sure the area around the situation was safe, and then we began to move in,” Ritter said. “We assisted the man to the ground without incident and found a .45 Springfield Armory handgun with multiple magazines on him.”

Exactly why the man wanted to be on the ground was not made clear but then we in the slow lane can live with fuzzy details. Protection from himself, no doubt, was high on his mind. The important thing is that the man was neither thrown nor wrestled to the ground but merely assisted there. The reponse was the helpful, more Samaritanical and, hence, more appropriate to the simple and gentler life we are accustomed to here in the Slow Lane.

Tom Bivens just picked up a new nonce word that he thinks may make it into the language. The Web has, in fact, made it easier for (mis)created words to creep into common usage, so he may be right. Here is what Tom wrote:

“Smove is not a word yet but it’s about to be. I am hearing it and seeing it in writing more often. It means to smile and move on.”

Of course, it doesn’t mean that to you and me because it isn’t a word in the English vocabulary yet. It is a blend, two words simply smushed together. Blending is popular means of creating new words among reporters, publicists, and marketers, the source of such common blends that did stick as smog and motel. The rules of English create words with prefixes and suffixes, though, since English prefixes and suffixes have been vanishing for centuries, we have had to resort to more radical means of creating neologisms (new words).

I wrote Tom that I’m going to wait for this one. Oddities are like blog, phish, and frenemy) are flooding the language. Now, I’m not a grammar Nazi; I’m willing to accept them if they are forced down my throat. Like these other “words”, Smove is not formed by a rule of the English language but a logical rule that says that smushing two words together smushes their meanings together in understandable ways.

As I told my linguistics students for a couple of decades, we created English so we can do with it what we please. However, there should be some sort of democratic majority behind whatever changes we make and that is what grammatical rules are supposed to form. Nonce words make coagulating such majority support for a word difficult.

A nonce word is a word created for a specific occasion or situation that eventually evaporates leaving no use for the word. The problem with nonce words, aside from their evanescence, is that they have to be wholly memorized. Words like memory chip (actually one compound word), processor, and networks that we use in speaking about computers don’t require any explanation; we pick them up straightway. Someone has to tell us what words like phish, chad, blog, frenemy mean, so they interrupt the flow of conversation and actually hinder communication.

I am grateful to Tom for tipping me off, though. I do like to spot these new creatures before they bite me. My throat is so sore from swallowing so many already, what harm could one more do?

Andrea wrote a few days ago in reference to our Good Word squalid the following:

“In response to the squalid Good Word: the minute I read in your text that squalare meant meant ‘to be covered with a rough, scaly layer, be coated with dirt, be filthy,’ I thought of scales and wondered whether the concept “squalid” is related to fish scales. [This] would also make sense because of the identical word for a large fish in Latin squalus and filthy. So not that fish become stinky, but that being covered in scales when you are a fish and to be so dirty that you are scaly (when a person) are similar.”

In fact, I can mentally picture a squalid house falling apart like fish scales fall from a fish, so I am in sympathy with Andrea’s connection. In fact, I tried to suggest that without committing myself to a firm connection since I could find no etymologist who would agree with me.

The problem is that if this were the case (and I believe the similarities too close for it not to be), it was the case before Latin developed from other Italic languages and we have no record of words that are ambiguous between “scaly” and “squalid”. So we have to rest on “in all probability”. That is as far as even I have courage to wander.

Marnie Kaur recently raised a question I’ve heard many times before. This time I will share my thoughts on it with everyone within eyeshot of this blog.

“I have always been fascinated by words. Having never had the chance to study them I was wondering if you could give me some pointers on being able to converse with the best of them. Regards, Marnie.“

Conversation is an art, which means it requires practice. To become an excellent conversationalist, you must converse with excellent conversationalists. The best conversationalists tend to be people who read a lot, thereby developing a large vocabulary that they can use to make subtle distinctions that other well-read people pick up.

Repetition plays some role in learning. That is why we repeat our Good Words so many times in our essaylets. We always give two or three examples, play with the words creatively, and repeat them in discussing their derivational history—even in our acknowledgment to the people who suggest them.

However, human learning is more complex than repetition. Sometimes we can hear a word a hundred times and never remember it, as kids often exhibit a problem remembering “no” no matter how many times it is repeated. Other times we hear or read a word once and never forget it: once is usually enough for a kid to remember “candy” the rest of his or her life. 

Reading is the starting point for vocabulary building. My students often asked me what they could do to improve their spelling. I always told them that there is only one way: read more. Reading builds our word recognition or comprehension but does not bear directly on conversational skills.

We have a far larger vocabulary in our memory than we can actively use. This is another way of saying that we comprehend far more words than we can use in speech. However, the passive and active levels are connected, so the larger our passive vocabulary, the large our active vocabulary becomes. Our active or spoken vocabulary trickles down from our passive or comprehensional vocabulary. (For ages I thought this was the “trickle down” theory.)

Every language has four aspects familiar to every language teacher: (1) reading, (2) writing, (3) comprehension, and (4) speaking, ordered here from easiest to most difficult. That’s right: reading any language is far easier than speaking it. Actively using grammatical skills and vocabulary on the fly is by far more difficult that slowly reading the words on a printed page, where we may reread them and mulling them over as long as we wish. In conversation we don’t have time for all that.

Still, language written by clever writers contains a larger vocabulary more sensitively deployed than even the writer can use in speaking. If we read a lot, remembering the words that stick out, examining them closely as we do in our Good Words, that passive vocabulary eventuallly meanders into our speech. It is therefore the best way to improve spelling and the best if not only starting point for improved conversational skills.

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.