Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

Kathleen of Norway asked the following poignant question via e-mail today:

“EveryONE paying THEIR own check???”

The question arose in connection with an example in yesterday’s Good Word, stickler: “Morris Bedda is a stickler about everyone paying their own check when dining out.”

Since this question has been raised before, I decided to write something definitive on the subject.  I just added it to the reference shelf in my office, which you can access by clicking here.

Doug Schulek-Miller wrote yesterday:

“I was recently confused by something. For all my literate life I’ve believed “Semitic” people to be those of the Middle East, inclusive of Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians—all the folks that used to be citizens of different countries in that area before WW I, and probably Persians [Iranians], too…. Therefore, anti-Semitic relates to being antagonistic to all of the above people, Semitic people.”

Well, first off, Iranians are not Semitic but belong to our family, the Indo-Europeans. Farsi, the language currently spoken in Iran, is written in Arabic script but it is clearly an I-E language related to English.

Doug’s point, though, is correct; many strange quirks lurk in language. Grammatically, anti-Semitic can only mean “against Semitic peoples” but that isn’t the way it is used and using it in this sense would lead to a breakdown in communications. Another example, homophobic grammatically can only mean “fearful of people” or “fearful of sameness”, depending on whether you intend the Latin or Greek homo, but that isn’t the way it is used and restricting the use of this word to its grammatically appropriate senses would lead to confusion.

Linguists make a distinction between what is “grammatical” and what is “acceptable” in speech. It is possible for ungrammatical usages to be accepted, as in these cases, and for grammatical uses to be unacceptable, as in the case of defenestrate meaning “removing windows”, as I recently reported and was criticized for. Errors are made because people don’t realize that they are errors and if everyone joins in agreeably, they become idiomatic forms or phrases.

In fact, most of the funny words in English are ungrammatical but accepted: gobbledygook, stick-to-it-iveness, panjandrum and hundred of other similar words were not generated by the rules of English grammar but by wags playing with those rules. The important point is this: humans make the rules of language so they can break them without going to jail or paying fines. So we do.

Several readers have written in response to our discussion of caboodle reminding us of the reanalysis of the phrase “kit and caboodle” as “kitten caboodle”.  ‘Reanalysis’ means that the words in a phrase are incorrectly separated (misanalyzed) and reanalyzed as a different phrase.  This results from mishearing or unfamiliarity with the spelling of the phrase.

Children are very likely to reanalyze phrases they have never heard before.  It was a child who reported learning a song about some cross-eyed bear named “Gladly” in Sunday School when the teacher thought she was teaching the hymn, “Gladly, the Cross I’d Bear”.  We have immortialized some of the best in our “In Church” section of the Out of the Mouths of Babes pages (click here).

Lew Jury reported “kitten caboodle” and Alan Janesh reminded me of “for all intensive purposes” instead of “all intents and purposes”.  Superman, of course, despised being “taken for granite”.  Better learn how to spell these phrases properly: it isn’t just a “doggy-dog world” out there (dog-eat-dog world) and spelling is mission critical if you wish to be taken seriously.

My favorite reanalysis of all time, however, turned up in a freshman composition collected by a colleague in the English Department at Bucknell, Mardy Mumford, when I was teaching there.  The author of this piece accused someone of having a “devil-make-hair” (devil-may-care) attitude.

Alyce Guinn today raised the following question about a new usage slipping into North American speech:

“There seems to be a new word, or a modification of an old word in use these days. It is occuring. I remember it used to be reoccurring. That meant that something that had happened was happening again. How can something occur and then when it happens again still be occuring?”

This is an interesting question. Of course, reoccurring is completely redundant given the existence of recur, so let’s rephrase the question to whether recurring is necessary.

Occur means “to happen once”; to recur is to happen again or happen many times. Obviously, we need these two words since their meanings are different.

Once you add -ing to them, however, the difference in meaning at least partially disappears. Why? The suffix -ing converts the verb into a present participle which designates an on-going action. Now, on-going action can be action in progress (a growing fear) or one that is repeated (pounding headache). So, when you add -ing to occur, the result is a form of the verb that refers to an action in progress or a repeated action, which is the same meaning as recurring, for example, a (currently) occurring pain or a (continually) occurring pain.

Even though occurring has both meanings, however, it is not a good idea to use this word in both because of possible confusion. Since we have recurring and since it has only one of the meanings occurring has, it is better to use occurring in reference to an action in progress and recurring for repeated actions.

The mysterious JBR wrote today: “My biggest fight with committee people that I am involved with is the use of the word ‘advocate.’ One advocates a position, not for or against it. Yet one can be an advocate for or against something.  I even hear lawyers, who should know better, misuse the word.”

An advocate for or against something? I don’t know what an ‘advocate against something’ would be. An advocate by definition is someone who publicly supports someone or something.  How can you support not supporting something? That would be opposing it.

I would say, ‘She is an advocate of clean air’. Neither ‘for’ nor ‘against’ goes with ‘advocate’ the noun or the verb. If you are against it, you oppose it.

Admittedly, we hear ‘advocate for’ and ‘advocate against’ enough that we are becoming comfortable with these phrases—too comfortable, in fact. Let’s get back in contact with the meaning of this word.

The line between regular phrases, phrases that we put together word by word, and idiomatic phrases, those we memorize whole (fly off the handle, climb the walls, straignt and narrow) can be fuzzy. When my dentist suggested I might need a root canal, I began wondering where this usage came from. (Which remainds me, I should call him and ask if he said anything important after making that announcement).

A root canal is an operation, not a thing as canal implies. It is an operation on the root canal(s) of a tooth but is not a canal itself. How do we understand this kind of misusage?

Well, we have to memorize an enormous amount of phrases that on their face make no sense. A red cap is not a cap, a quick study is not a study, nor is an egghead (just) a head. A root canal is an operation ON a root canal while a quick study is someone who studies (and learns) quickly.

These phrases and words are all idiomatic. Unlike grammar and the word lexicon which are processed in the left hemisphere of the brain, idiomatic expressions are processed in the right hemisphere. This makes sense given the left hemisphere specializes in analytic processing and the right hemisphere, wholistic processing. Idioms are processed as wholes with a single meaning.

The distinction between analytic speech constructs like “the mosquitor flew off the handle” and wholistic (synthetic) constructs like “my aunt flew off the handle” makes it clear that speech is something of a science and an art: a process of putting together atomic constituents (words) and whole preprocessed chunks.

I find mulling over the mysteries and complexities of speech and language much more rewarding than contemplating root canals or even counterfeit toothpaste, which can cause them.

If you are like me, the phrase counterfeit toothpaste looks a little odd in the headlines today. Money is usually counterfeit but paintings are forged, not counterfeit. That is probably because of the secret admiration we have for art forgers—they do have artistic talent. So we have different words for fakery depending on the degree of our dislike of a particular type of fake.

As I thought about it, synonyms for counterfeit began to accumulate in my mind; fake, bogus, forged, false, phony, fraudulent, sham, simulated, ersatz are probably just the ones on top.

We even have different words for many counterfeit, forged, and fake objects. Counterfeit hair, for example, is called a wig or a toupee and no one blinks an eye at it. Counterfeit teeth are less common than before but we admit that they are false.

Counterfeit, you might complain, implies deception. True. That is probably why counterfeit crab meat is now spelled krab—to make sure everyone knows that it is not crab meat but fish cleverly shaped and colored for people whose minds ignore their taste buds. However, wigs and false teeth involve deception—harmless deception but deception.

Does anyone remember ersatz coffee? Looks and tastes like coffee, again, if your taste buds are not on speaking terms with your brain. Counterfeit smoke, which can be added to any dish in liquid form, relies on the same disconnect.  

Still, counterfeit toothpaste sounds a little odd to me. Counterfeiting money requires more complexity, artistic skill, and inside information than producing bogus toothpaste. Fraudulent, mislabeled, phony strike me as more accurate epithets.

If you have little chance of doing something your chances are slim. Makes sense: slim things are smaller than fat ones. It follows, then, that if your chances are great, you have a fat chance, right?

It doesn’t seem to work that way. Slim chance and fat chance seem to be oxymora, for if I say “I have a slim chance of winning” my chances are probably greater than if I say, “Fat chance I have of winning!” This is tantamount to saying I have no chance at all!

There is a syntactic difference which may account for the semantic difference between these two sentences. But even if I make their syntactic structures identical, “I have a fat chance of winning,” I don’t get the impression that my chances are great.

Fat chance is used more often ironically, usually with sarcastic intonation for emphasis. Irony, of course, turns meanings upside-down. “I love you” is pretty straightforward but by simply changing the intonation to, “I, love you?” you turn the meaning around. The same irony converges fat chances with slim chances.

Don’t you wish we had an irony pill that worked the same way on our bodies?

Bud Hiller, who works in the Bucknell’s Bertrand Library, wrote today to ask: “What is the derivation of the word hotdog for the meaning as in this sentence:

‘Brian Gockley is a crazy skier. You should have seen him hot-dogging down the slopes, doing jumps, skiing backwards, skiing on one ski. Too bad he ran into a tree.’

One of our international students at the tech desk asked me and I couldn’t think of any reason for why hotdog means what it does.”

Althought the dates in my version have some tight tolerances, I am convinced the story goes something like this. Sometime well before the academic year 1894-95, students at Yale began to refer to the wagons that came to campus selling what were widely known then as “dachshund sausages” in buns, as “dog wagons”. What they sold were soon called “dogs”.

An article in the October 19, 1895 issue of the Yale Record, the campus newspaper, ended with, “They contentedly munched hot dogs during the whole service”. This is the first known recorded instance of hot dog in this sense and both words were probably accented at this time. (Hotdog today has only one accent which means it is one word.) In fact, by 1900 it was one word also used metaphorically (because of the implication of hot) to refer to someone who performed well or something that was really excellent, e.g. “He has made some hot-dog drawings for….”

The verbal sense comes from the exclamation “Hot dog!” and was first used in sports to refer to players who liked to show off. Someone who hotdogs is trying to get those watching him to exclaim their delight. This usage comes from the sense of someone who is excellent at something but this exclamation also serves as a euphemism of “Hot damn!” itself a euphemism for an even stronger interjection (G-D!)

At lunch I heard a news reader on TV answer the question, “What is your favorite place that you would like to return to on vacation” with “Machu Pichu, because the whole area is so unspoiled.”

Although I’ve heard the phrase “unspoiled area” many times before, this time it caught my attention for some reason. We all love to spend vacations in unspoiled areas. Why? Well, obviously to get away from spoiled areas, such as the places where we work and live.

This strikes me as an odd way to think of our homes and hometowns—spoiled. Spolied by what or whom? Well, since an unspoiled area is usually one with little or no population or pollution, the spoilers must be us. How could we even imply that this magnificant, technologically advanced society in which we live is spoiled?

What is lurking there in the backs of our minds? Does it tell us anything about ourselves?