Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

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?

Throughout most of my life people around me have been saying that we would have a black president when pigs fly. Well, we have one now and guess what? Swine flu. (Thank you Paul Ogden for passing it along.)

It is pretty easy to make jokes from the sound of Russian names in English.  Putin is a joke itself in English. Jackendoff is a rare but real Russian name. (But we don’t go there on this website.) In Russian, Tolstoi means “fat”, so the great author’s name (as I may have mentioned before) can be translated into “Leo Fats”.

The media are having a field day noticing that Bernie Madoff made off with 60 or so billion dollars. Didn’t anyone wonder about the guy’s name for 25 years? You don’t get clues like that very often. What do we need, “Bernie Smakingoff”? Smakingoffwidjadoe? I know. It isn’t funny. That’s his mug shot up there.

And what about Vikram Pandit, the mook who was paid $38.2 million in 2008 alone to destroy CitiGroup, costing its stock to lose 77% of its value. No one thought of flipping the P in his name for the hint?

Donnella dropped a note yesterday, writing: “I’m hearing “guaranteed bonus” in the news a lot, referring to the AIG situation. It seems to me an oxymoron. I understand there are legal concerns but the word bonus must have a different meaning in a contract. I’d like to see your take on this.”

It would seem that money-addicts have invaded and taken control of most large US corporations. The compensation packages they have been giving themselves became more and more obscene as the years lumbered by.

Typical large corporation heads started with outlandish salaries plus stock warranties or options but no amount could satisfy the money addicts, so “(guaranteed) bonuses” were added outside salaries, probably to becloud the issue of total compensation. The term “guaranteed bonus” is not an oxymoron like “jumbo shrimp” or “pretty ugly”, but simply a contradiction of terms.

We all know what a bonus is: it is additional compensation given for outstanding performance, finishing a project ahead of schedule or overfulfilling a contract. So we can’t know ahead of time that a bonus will be due. However, people whose sole measure of worth and accomplishment is income, need money beyond what stock holders might be willing to endure if their compensation were reported as a lump-sum salary. So, “bonuses” were built into contracts, that is, guaranteed.

The current euphemism for them is retention bonuses, under the assumption that without them, an executive would move on to another company. A retention bonus actually sounds more like a bribe. Now, the absurdity of bribing the total failures at AIG to stay and continue undoing the company seems to escape those who tender this argument.

The argument goes on: only those who led AIG into its mess have the skills and knowledge to lead it out of its mess. It strikes me that these people are far more likely to make mistakes of the same magnitude leading the company back toward solvency that they made leading it flatly into insolvency. Maybe logic has changed since I was an undergraduate.

In all probability, if bonuses returned to what the word means, stock options were curtailed, and salaries were reasonable, large corporations would fare much better. Why? Because fewer money addicts and more people with a long-term commitment to the company would apply for executive positions. People who are as smart and experienced as the current executives of AIG are not hard to find—many are sitting right there in the company now.

Building a net worth of $100 million would still be possible, but only as a result of continuing excellence in management over a significant period. A $50 million per year compensation package and $150 severance payment regardless of performance discourages any commitment to a company beyond the first year.

The newly defined bonuses in the obscenely high compensation packages for corporate executives are therefore bad capitalism. They play to only the basest motivation toward excellence, the one that attracts money addicts. Moreover, without complex compensation packages, we would need far fewer absurd euphemisms like “retention bonus” to becloud the discussion of corporate leadership.

The Republican presidential campaign seems to be attempting to raise fears of an Obama presidency by references to his names. His middle name, Hussein, is an easy key to associate with Sadam Hussein, so long as no one remembers King Hussein of Jordan, long one of our strongest supporters.

Senator Obama’s first name, however, is far more interesting if wholly and totally unrelated to his character and presidential campaign. My friend Paul Ogden did a little basic research on this name. The results were so fascinating that I couldn’t resist doing a bit on my own and reporting the results here.

The basic Semitic (Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew) meaning of barak is “blessing”. It is a word that appears in the Old Testament more than 300 times. But did you know about the ancient Semitic tradition of sealing a successful business deal or other negotiation with an exchange of gifts, called al-baraka “the blessing” in Arabic.

The Spaniards adopted the practice during the Moorish Period of their history, referring to the gift with the Arabic word, which became albaroque in Spanish. This word then appeared in Ango-Norman (French spoken in England) as abrocour and brocour which, by folk etymology, eventually became broker, something we would hope any US president would be good at. Diamond brokers around the world today seal their deals with a handshake and proclaiming mazel and brocha “luck and a blessing”, brocha being a variant of barak(a).

One of the best brokers in US history was Bernard Baruch, who later became one of the most trusted advisors of President Franklin Roosevelt, the last president called upon to save the US from a financial crisis. Baruch means “blessed” and is the past passive participle of baraka “to bless”. (Baruch is famous for saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”)

The Semitic root of baraka is brk. (In the Semitic languages, the various forms of word are created by changing the vowels in the root.) We find the same the word in the last name of Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. Many linguists think that brk descended from krb. If so, Barak is also related to the source of the English word cherub, about as far away from a terrorist as we can get. 

One of the US newsy networks has recently discovered the verb to crater and its use is virusing from one network to another.  I understand what it means, but it makes me feel a bit lexically crapulent even though I’m not offended (as you can see) by the tendency in the US to verb nouns relentlessly.

Interesting point: the American Heritage Dictionary and the Free Dictionary give us identical definitions (isn’t that naughty?). Here it is from AHD:

“1. To form a crater or craters. 2. Slang a. To fall and crash violently from a great height. b. To fail utterly: “talked about how tough times were in Texas since the oil business cratered” (Stephen Coonts, Under Siege 1990, 1991 (pb)).”

Apparently Mr. Coonts introduced it and it has languished until recently. British dictionaries do not list this meaning, nor does Encarta, and Merriam-Webster lists the slang sense as “collapse, crash”, a sense I still feel is still too far from the image of a crater.

It is currently being used in referece to the precipitous fall of the stock market this month. The slang verb, therefore, is a metaphor for a fall from a great distance.

I think the reason it rubs me wrong is that it is based on the vision of a meteor falling to Earth or some other celestial body and causing a crater. But most craters are caused by explosions on Earth from geysers, bombs, or mines. 

The criticial visual crater gives us is the raised rim around a hole or other indentation. How that object is created is either not a part of the definition or too far removed to provide the connection with falling and crashing.

I don’t think this usage will survive but then I didn’t think google and bling-bling had much of a chance, either.

So what are earmarks, anyway? We hear more and more about them as the presidential election in the US rolls on. No, they are not how to tell if a politician is fooling around with another man or woman. Earmarks are projects funded by the state or federal government in a specific district, usually at the bequest of the congressman representing that district. An earmarked project may be a good or bad one; presumably most are good.

The word today is being used as a synonym for a pork-barrel project, a wasteful if not useless federally or state funded project. Male and female congressmen sometimes use their committee appointments to add “fat” to the federal budget via projects that benefit few people and cost much tax-payer money. These projects are referred to by the mass noun pork, known for its high fat content, or pork barrel.

Some national candidates are running on a ticket of reducing or ending earmarks. The latter means ending all state or federally funded projects for specific districts. Since the function of a member of the House of Representatives is to represent his or her district, ending or even unreasonably reducing legitimate earmarks to a district would be poor representation. Not a good idea. We need to remind ourselves of the distinction between earmarks and pork barrel projects.

Google alerted me this morning to a blog article entitled “Addiction: The Most Overused Word in our Language” by a Fox News commentator named Greg Gutfeld. Since word usage is one of my interests I looked it up to discover, well, not much. Gutfeld concludes that addictions are simply diseases easily cured by disposing of the focus of he addiction: throwing the offending computer out the window, throwing all the booze out the window, throwing all the drugs out the window, and so on.

The point should have been that the media has long used addiction as a pejorative metaphor for obsession. This leads to the more interesting question of why the US news media has developed its current passion emphasize the negative in all it reports, most of which are about as well thought through as Gutman’s blog.

An addiction is a physical dependency on some chemical: narcotics, alcohol, nicotine—all sinful within the Puritan code of ethic. The pejorativity of this term comes from this ethic, which has inevitably worked its way into the laws of the land. Alcohol and smoking is controlled, narcotics are mostly illegal. This is because addictions do measurable physical and psychological damage to the addict.

An obsession, on the other hand, is an emotional dependency at worst, a passionate focus on one particular thing at best. We may become obsessed with the Web, a person, a job, items in a collection. You must be obsessed with your work to become a star: actors who devote themselves body and soul to acting, baseball players who can do nothing but play baseball, singers who obsessively sing night after night. Their obsessions clear their focus and make them better at their obsession than others who divide their time over a variety of interests.

Now, I’m obsessed with the Internet myself. I spend most of each day working on my website, arranging translations via the Internet, and creating glossaries and word lists from materials gathered on the Web. Like professional baseball players, singers, actors, I do it because I love it, because I am totally in awe of it—not because I am physically dependent on it. It does no physical or psychological harm to me that I am aware of and I have learned immensely from the community of logophiles around the world it connects me with.

Of course, I am also the last person on Earth who would disparage the use of metaphors (figurative usage). However, the reason we have a separate scientific vocabulary for lawyers, doctors, and researchers, a vocabulary of superprecise terms that are never used metaphorically, is that metaphor undermines objectivity like nothing else. Calling pig a pig is as objective as we can get but  calling a friend a pig metaphorically is about as subjective as we can get. Metaphor is everywhere in general speech, where it often leads to misunderstanding.

Using addiction as a pejorative metaphor for obsession, then, is simply one of the more subtler methods the US Press (among others) uses to skew public opinion toward fear and hatred. It is easily overlooked among the sledge-hammer methods we are more familiar with.

The US press is dredging up a word from the early 80s and using it in a new, suggestive sense in an apparent attempt to tilt the US elections in the direction it prefers. Political leaders who attend the Democratic Convention with a single, uncommitted vote are now called superdelegates in the broadcast media. 

The implication of this term, raised first in the early 80s but seldom used since, is that these leaders have more power at a political convention than rank-and-file members of the party. Actually, a superdelegate is simply an elected official with one vote that is uncommitted prior to the convention—unless he or she has endorsed a candidate.

So why do we need this term this year (2008) and with a new, misleading sense?

The press has decided that it prefers Senator Obama for the Democratic Party nomination and, according to CMPA’s 2008 ElectionNewsWatch Project, has been giving him consistently more positive coverage than Senator Clinton. Recently, all the networks began announcing that Senator Obama had, in fact, won the primary race and have been openly appealing to Senator Clinton to resign from the race, making the job of the press easier.

The last hurdle the press must overcome is the Democratic Convention in Denver this summer. How can the press be sure that party leaders do exercise their prerogative to choose Ms. Clinton as the party candidate? After all, neither candidate has enough delegates to win the nomination; the primary is a virtual tie.

Well, one tack would be to attach a new epithet which might intimidate party leaders in case they decide to make such a move. That word is superdelegate, now used in the media in ways suggesting it refers to someone who has more votes than he or she deserves. Look out for an increase in the usage of this aspersive term as the Convention convenes this summer.

Why does the press prefer Mr. Obama so passionately as to flagrantly attempt to undermine Senator Clinton? Former President Clinton visited Lewisburg recently and suggested that it was because his wife is old news and the Press wants someone new to write about. My guess would be that the press is tired of looking for skeletons in Ms. Clinton’s closet and have greater hopes of digging up something that would embarrass Mr. Obama. He is the greater unknown.

Mr. Clinton also thinks that his wife represents a demographic that the press doesn’t understand: people who struggle to pay for their mortgage, send their kids to college, and pay their medical bills. “People at the networks don’t have to worry about these things,” he opined, “They are of no concern to network producers.”

Whatever the reason, we have another lexical toxin with which to tarnish those brave enough to enter the US political process.

Edited, updated May 26, 2008

I am surprised that this expression is not heard more in the news, aside from the rock group so named. It has become the sole basis of argument for the US news media this week in their attempt to create a scandal out of nothing and besmirch the character of Senator Barack Obama.

The lowest form of attack—as opposed to any form of argument or proof—is to accuse someone of a belief held by someone else they just happen to know. We should have learned this lesson from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s use of guilt by association in his attack on the First Amendment via the infamous House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the 50s. (Click here for comments on this practice by Edward R. Murrow.)

The purpose of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was to root out ”Communists” from the US society. It succeeded in destroying the lives of thousands of decent Americans in that pursuit and its primary tool was guilt by association.

People lost their jobs and reputations, not because they were members of the Communist Party or ever had been, but because they were seen in the company of a member of that party at one time or other. Often they didn’t even know at the time that the associate in question was a member of the Party.  But if you stand beside a Communist, you must be one, right? That is guilt by association.

How absurd. It is just as absurd to conclude that because Senator Barack Obama attends the church of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, that he must agree with everything the right Reverend utters. So why were Reverend Wright’s truthful if mildly provocative comments even repeated in the news? Why should Senator Obama feel compelled to respond to a scurrilous attack on his character from the US press, based solely on guilt by association?

To stoop to creating scandals using guilt by association lowers the press into the debilitating mire of Dark Ages. We can only hope that it will somehow retain the strength and light to eventually pull itself out of that mire.

Guilt by association is a phrase none of us should forget or misunderstand. The news this week was not the words of Reverend Wright, but the rearing of the ugly head of guilt by association, a news item no one heard about anywhere—save here.