December 2009

We owe you an Etymology

So, here it is: Merry Christmas. Everybody's having fun. Especially etymologists. Many of the words omnipresent at this time of year have intriguing histories. Some of these are widely known. For example, it wouldn’t take much sleuthing to work out the origins of the word Christmas (it’s from the Old English Crīstes mæsse, i.e. the Mass of Christ). Similarly, it’s no seasonal secret that Santa Claus is a contraction of ‘Saint Nicholas’, as Mr Claus is commonly identified with the aforementioned Saint (the legendary patron of children, who brings presents on Christmas Eve or, in some European countries, on Saint Nicholas’ Day).

But what about the origins of the word Yule, for example? This comes from another Old English word geōla, which was originally the name of a pagan feast that lasted 12 days (Ring any bells? Or put a partridge in your pear tree?). It has equivalents in the Old Norse jōl, the Swedish jul, and the Gothic jiuleis. And how about the ever-popular festive accessories holly, ivy, and mistletoe? Holly has its roots in the Old English holegn, which is related to the Old Norse hulfr, the Old High German hulis, and the Old Slavonic kolja (meaning ‘prick’). Ivy comes from the Old English īfig, is related to Old High German ebah, and possibly to the Greek iphuon (meaning ‘a plant’). And mistletoe stems from the Old English misteltān (comprised from mistel, the Old English word for this plant, and tān, meaning ‘twig’).

The traditional Christmas dinner and its trimmings also have their own rich history. Turkey is a shortened form of turkey cock, which was used at first to designate the African guinea fowl (apparently because the bird was brought through Turkish territory), and was later mistakenly applied to the North American bird. Pudding has its base in not only the Low German puddek (meaning ‘sausage’) but also the unappetizing Old English puduc (meaning ‘a wart’). Sprouts come from the Old English sprūtan, which is related to the Middle High German sprūzen (meaning ‘to sprout’) and the Lettish sprausties (meaning ‘to jostle’). And the nog part of egg-nog is from an East Anglian dialect word meaning ‘a strong beer’.

As for the tradition of giving gifts, this is popularly believed to hearken back to the gifts from the Nativity of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In case you were wondering, frankincense is an aromatic gum resin obtained from trees of the genus Boswellia, which grow in Asia and Africa. It gets its name from the Old French franc (meaning ‘free’ or ‘pure’) and encens (meaning ‘incense’). And, for the avoidance of doubt, myrrh is also an aromatic resin, obtained from any of several trees and shrubs of the African and S Asian genus Commiphora, especially C. myrrha. It is used in perfume, incense, and medicine, and its baffling-to-some name is from the Old English myrre, via Latin from the Greek murrha, with its ultimate origins in the Akkadian murrū (which bears comparison with the Hebrew mōr, and the Arabic murr). Gold does not need quite so much of an introduction, but the word itself is from the Old English gold, related to the Old Norse gull, and the Gothic gulth.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Collins!

October 2009

Samhain: the seeds of fear
Hallowe'en has been and gone. Afraid? You should be. I'm standing right behind you. Not really (I'm under your bed).

These days (in the UK, at least), the main fear response triggered by Hallowe'en is parental anxiety over excessive snacking contributing to childhood obesity. However, to be fair, Hallowe'en's historical roots were not as a festival of fear, but as a celebration of the end of the year and the beginning of the new. In the Old Celtic calendar the new year began in November, and the end of October was a night of celebration incorporating some traditions to honour the dead. There were good spirits to be wished safe passage to the afterlife, and evil spirits to be dodged, discouraged, or downright confused by disguising oneself as them. If the last point seems like an odd strategy, try to put yourself in the evil spirits' shoes: can you predict how would you react if you went to a party only to find everyone else had come dressed as you?

The Celtic festival most chronologically aligned with Hallowe'en is Samhain (pronounced sow-inn) which means 'summer's end'. Historically, pagan and Christian festivals have often blended, and as November 1st was designated All Saints' Day or All Hallows' Day, so October 31st became All Hallows' Eve, or All-Hallow-Even (hallow is derived from the Old English hālgian, which is related to hālig, meaning holy, and even is a short form of evening). Thus the word Hallowe'en came to exist in the 1800s as a contracted form. Somewhere along the way its apostrophe was lost, and the generally accepted current form is Halloween.

The trick or treat tradition of children demanding sweets (sorry, candy) was popularized in the US in the 1940s, where Hallowe'en is a national institution. Householders may decorate their front porches with carved pumpkin jack-o'-lanterns, but woe betide those who don't stump up with the treats. This practice was originally known as guising in Scotland and Ireland, where it is still popular, and still involves going from door to door in costume asking for candy (sorry, sweets) but without the added threat of retribution as an incentive. Turnips tend to be used rather than pumpkins (as they were in Celtic tradition) and eager participants go dooking rather than bobbing for apples.

The festival of Hallowe'en would be a good deal less colourful without its associated assortment of gruesome creatures of myth, such as ghosts, goblins, and ghouls. The constituent parts of this alliterative triple threat have their etymological origins in a variety of languages. For example, ghost comes from the Old English gāst, which is related to Old Frisian jēst, the Old High German geist meaning 'spirit', and the Sanskrit hēda, meaning 'fury' or 'anger'. Goblin comes from Old French and from the Middle High German kobolt, whereas ghouls (evil demons thought to eat human bodies, either stolen corpses or children) come from the Arabic ghūl (from ghāla, meaning 'he seized'). And the much-maligned word witch is derived from the Old English wicca, which is related to the Middle Low German wicken (meaning 'to conjure') and the Swedish vicka (to move to and fro).

Hope you had a happy Hallowe'en, whether you chose to apostrophize or otherwise. And don’t have nightmares.

Duncan Black - Editor

September 2009

It's only Rock and Roll
Summer is pretty much over, and so is the music festival season. While some critics bemoaned the encroachment of “pop” groups into this arena, the outdoor music festival is still the traditional territory of Rock music and its myriad progeny.

Rock music is less a single genre and more a blanket term which includes several distinct kinds of music, all of which are directly or indirectly descended from Rock and Roll, a form of popular music that emerged in America in the 1950s, combining elements of the Blues, Jazz, and Country and Western music (among others). There are copious and complicated “family trees” showing how the various genres and sub-genres are related to each other; less is written about where the names come from.

According to one folk theory, the name Rock and Roll, is actually a euphemism for sexual intercourse. While this sounds racy for a genre so popular among teenagers, we must remember that teenagers are for their interest in sex and, more importantly, that this was not the first time sex had yielded the name of a musical genre. Jazz, which predates Rock and Roll, is thought to be a variant of jizz or jism; its application to the musical style presumably evokes the intense emotional release resulting from the improvisation of the musicians.

The “rock” in the full form Rock and Roll is clearly a verb; however, as the genre became established, the name was shortened to Rock, which is grammatically ambiguous: it could be taken as a noun or a verb. Rock and Roll was always characterized by a heavy beat and a fast tempo. As the genre developed, the guitars got louder, even distorted, and the subject matter of the songs became more serious. Whether by accident or design (or a little of both), the noun became the more appropriate: Rock music was indeed “hard” like a rock. It is perhaps this association of “hard” music with a hard substance that eventually yielded Metal.

This genre of “extreme rock music” was originally called Heavy Metal. No one is exactly sure when Heavy Metal was first applied to music, though one legend has it that a journalist described a Jimi Hendrix’ as “heavy metal falling from the sky.” (The Steppenwolf lyric “heavy metal thunder” clearly refers to the motorcycles, not the music.) This sense of heavy metal originated in chemistry: it refers to metals on the periodic table with a high atomic weight, such as uranium and plutonium. These elements are used in nuclear and atomic weaponry, and cold-war nuclear hysteria made them household terms. Thus “heavy metal” was an effective description of loud, explosive rock guitar.

Other bands and artists that lay claim to originating Heavy Metal include Iggy and the Stooges, Alice Cooper, and (somewhat more likely) Led Zeppelin, though most fans regard Black Sabbath as the first Heavy Metal band. Even so, the band made it through most of their career without ever hearing this term. It wasn’t until the late seventies/early eighties that the name became established, probably in order to distinguish its territory from its main extreme-music rival: punk.

As a genre-name, Punk is somewhat easier to define: a “punk” is a (usually young) delinquent person of low social standing, perceived to be engaged in devious, destructive, or underhanded activities. Punk Rock is simply rock music played by punks (though making music of any kind is an inherently constructive activity). Harder to determine is which was the first band to be called “punk”. Pete Townsend of The Who tried to claim that honour, citing his band’s tendency to smash their instruments during or after a performance. Iggy and The Stooges are also on the list (yes, they are both metal and punk), and Iggy claims to be the first musician called “punk” by the rock press. However, just as Black Sabbath are traditionally considered the founders of metal, most fans consider The Ramones as the originators of punk, and their song “Judy is a Punk” (track 3 on their first album) would seem to cement that reputation. The later genre “hardcore punk” is simply punk played even louder and faster (and angrier) than usual, while “horror punk” (pretty much invented by The Misfits) is punk with a horror theme.

This brings us to sub-genre names, some of which have interesting histories of their own. For example, a form of jazz that emerged during WWII, originated by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Kenny Clarke, among others, came to be known as bebop, thanks to a mishearing. One night in a noisy New York jazz club, a journalist asked Gillespie what he called his music (seeking a genre-name). Dizzy thought the journalist wanted to know the name of the song he had just played: “Old Man Rebop”. The journalist misheard and thought Gillepsie had said “Bebop”. And the name stuck.

As far as Rock music goes, creating sub-genre names is usually a case of adding an adjective or noun-modifier to “rock” to indicate how it differs from “typical” rock music, e.g. in intensity (hard rock, soft rock), audience (goth rock, jock rock) or by combining elements of another genre (folk rock, country rock).

With Metal, the story is slightly different. Heavy Metal remains the blanket term for the genre as a whole, though it is most likely to be applied to “classic” practitioners such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, and the host of British acts in the late 70s and early 80s like Iron Maiden, Diamond Head, and even Def Leppard (these bands are further grouped into their own sub-genre, the so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal or NWOBHM). Many NWOBHM bands were contemporaries of the original punk and hardcore punk bands. In the early 80s metal bands began combining the theatrics and occult subject matter of metal with the speed and aggression of punk to create a new sub-genre, variously known as speed metal (because of the fast tempo) and thrash metal (from the verb “thrash”, which evokes not only the music itself but also the act of enjoying it).

Thrash is often traced back to the NWOBHM band Venom; their first album Welcome to Hell was a major influence on Metallica and Slayer, who would go on to establish a template for thrash metal which is still relevant today. Venom created another sub-genre, however, with their second album Black Metal. The story goes that the band came up with this name when a journalist asked them what kind of music they play. The name “thrash” was not yet established, and in any case they wanted a darker, more distinctive name. Black Metal came to refer to any metal band with fast, aggressive music and overtly Satanic lyrics. This new genre once included the trash band Slayer and the death metal band Deicide.

The last major sub-genre of metal emerged in the mid-80s. San Francisco had become the spiritual home of Thrash Metal. Within this scene, a new band called Possessed (featuring future Primus-guitarist Larry Lalonde) emerged, seeking to push the music to new extremes. One day, during a test, the band’s vocalist and bass player started writing lyrics for a new song called “Death Metal”. He failed the test, but invented a genre. The song became the title track of their Death Metal EP and was also featured on their debut LP Seven Churches. Musically, Possessed still sound like thrash metal, but they were a major influence on, among others, the Florida metal band Death, who further pioneered the genre, and cemented its name.

Few, if any of these word histories will appear in major dictionaries. Interesting though they may be, these stories cannot really be proven and are thus resigned to the realm of “folk etymology”. This is because popular music is on the one hand constantly evolving and changing, and on the other hand often ignored as a subject of serious study. It is only after a genre or sub-genre has survived a few decades that people really begin to wonder where it began; but by then it is too late to gather real evidence.

Robert Groves - Editor

August 2009

A Hasty ReTweet
During a recent appearance on a radio show, the leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron stated that he did not have a Twitter account. His reasoning was that “Too many twits make a twat.” The subsequent press coverage made much of the use of the word “twat” on national radio*, but very little attention was paid to the use of “twits”. The more accepted usage (putting value judgments to one side) would have been “Too many tweets make a twat”.

For those joining us from the Steam Age, Twitter is an online microblogging service that allows users to send and receive messages up to 140 characters in length. These messages are posted in a similar fashion to online bulletin boards or status updates on social networking sites. Microblogging is still a nascent technology, and there are many similar sites (such as Posterous or Tumblr), but Twitter has garnered most of the media coverage and in doing so has popularised its own vocabulary. A posted message is known as a tweet, and a message using all of the maximum 140 characters as a twoosh. Tweet may also be used as a verb to describe the act of posting. Those permitted to view a user’s messages are followers, and one may follow another in order to view their updates, or unfollow them to cease doing so. And reposting a message to bring it to the attention of other followers is known as retweeting (abbreviated to RT). Trending topics are issues discussed by users, and are marked for discussion by the use of the hash symbol (thus are they hashtagged).

This technology-specific lexical subset is, of course, very similar to the wave of neologisms and usage changes that followed in the wake of social networking’s explosion in popularity, when friend began to be used as a transitive verb (as did Facebooking). As exclusive or even baffling as it may seem to newcomers, Twitter’s jargon has spread with wild popularity into the world at large, and Twitter-related words are being identified more and more by our corpus technology through their use in the media. Some portmanteau examples include Twitterverse and Twitterati (referring respectively to the world of Twitter and its users) and Twitterversy (coined in relation to a US Senator’s revealing his top-secret whereabouts in a tweet). More recently, especially since the service played a key role in providing the most up-to-date information on the political demonstrations in Iran as they happened, the use of Twibbons has become widespread. A Twibbon is a simple alteration to a user’s avatar in order to reflect support for a political or charitable cause (in the case of the Iranian demonstrations, supporters applied a green tinge). And the pastime known as twitchhiking means arranging to travel by prevailing upon one’s followers.

Microblogging is a boon for the English language. New forms of social media become successful because they make communication either more efficient or more fun. Plus they prove to be rich resources for new words and stimulate public debate. This particular medium is ideally suited for crowdsourcing (making mass appeals for ideas) and for raising awareness of political issues. And that’s not all: novels and operas are being composed using microblogging. Really.

*Is it a swear word? Yes. Yes, it is.

Duncan Black - Editor

July 2009

Wisteria Lame
As the Global Economic Meltdown drags on, we the taxpayers of once-prosperous nations have been called upon to “bail out” many failing institutions, but if the recent and still on-going Expense-Claim controversy is any indication, there is a limit to how many bills we care to foot. One questionable expense claim in particular, though, has sparked a spin-off tempest in a tea-cup: the Right Honourable David Cameron’s wisteria. While a certain broadsheet beginning with T still “owns” this story, the orthographic controversy rages on in a certain, somewhat more venerable paper, whose name also begins with T. This paper is known, among other things, for a style guide which is adhered to rather more strictly than the Bible. It seems that the chief writer and editor of this Style Guide and the chief editor the paper itself cannot agree how this climbing plant’s name should be spelled.

Without giving away too many details (which are, after all, available to anyone with an internet search engine), I can relate that Dr Style Guide favours the spelling wisteria because the plant was named for Caspar Wistar, its discoverer, who did not spell his name with an e. However, as Dr Style Guide himself points out, the man who actually named the plant, Thomas Nuttall, called it wisteria, and so it has been known ever since, the absence of an e in its discoverer’s name notwithstanding.

This fact is championed by the opposition (the wisteria-supporters) – if Nuttall chose to use an e, then that is de facto proof that we, too, should spell it with an e. They also point out that, if we use the a, we have to say wi-STAHR-ia or wi-STAIR-ia, whereas actual pronunciation of this word is something more like wi-STEER-ia.

Of course, the counterpoint to this argument is that we only say it that way because we write it that way; if we would just change the spelling to reflect Mr Wistar’s actual name, we could start pronouncing it “correctly” as well. We must also admit that, if the discoverer of the plant spelled his name Wistar, then the Thomas Nuttall seems to have misspelled it.

So where does Collins stand? Well, the Collins English Dictionary does not acknowledge the wistaria spelling, even as a variant spelling. So are we siding with Mr Newspaper-Editor against Dr Style Guide? So it would seem, but not simply because our House Style differs from his. In the first place, wisteria is the most commonly used form, outnumbering wistaria by 605 citations to 80 in the corpus, and 185 to 8 in the monitor corpus. Just as important is the fact that wisteria was simply the form chosen by Nuttall, and officially recognized by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.

Dr Style Guide is particularly unconvinced by Nuttall’s excuse for deliberately misspelling Wistar’s name: that wisteria is more euphonious. There is actually some value in this argument, however. English is, and probably has always been, a language which likes to harmonize it’s vowels; that is, it likes vowel sounds near each other in a word to be near each other in the mouth as well, if for no other reason than it makes things easier to say. In the case of wisteria, we are trying to harmonize the vowel which precedes the r (either a or e) with the vowel that follows it (undisputedly i). Of the two possible ways to pronounce the a in wistaria, /a/ (like AH) is pronounced much further back in the mouth than i, while /eɪ/ is a diphthong: two vowels run together, and therefore taking longer to pronounce than a single vowel (wiste/aria is already a four syllable word; it doesn’t need to get any longer). In modern English, the typical way to pronounce e is /i/ (like EE), which is as near to the i in wisteria as you are likely to get. In actual pronunciation, the e gets shortened a bit to /ɪ/, but this still harmonizes better than either of the possible a-pronunciations. You can try this yourself: say wistaria and wisteria and notice which one makes your mouth move more. This is a specific type of height harmony called umlaut or i-mutation. It is the reason the plural form feet evolved from earlier fotiz (pronounced “foat-eez”). An i-sound tends to pull other vowels up, and the controversial vowel in wisteria has an i on either side of it.

The thing about vowel harmony is that it’s not simply a linguistic process, it’s a physiological process. The human mouth isn’t easily able to leap from vowels in the back of the mouth to vowels in the front of the mouth in the space of one or two syllables. If the word wistaria had entered English before the introduction of writing, it is very likely that the vowel would have been raised to e by now anyway, simply through the physical demands of pronouncing it regularly. Perhaps, in choosing e for the plant name, Nuttall was intuitively imitating this important and wide-ranging phonological process.

Robert Groves - Editor

June 2009

Flip larking
As may be expected of a word associated with acrobatic movement, the word flip has not stood still over the past few centuries. This versatile word can be used as a simple noun, meaning a rapid jerk, a movement similar to a somersault, or a snap or tap (usually with the fingers). It can also be a transitive verb, meaning to throw or flick an object so that it turns or spins in the air (for example flipping a coin, flipping burgers), to propel by a sudden movement of the finger (flipping a switch), or to quickly read or look at a book, newspaper, etc. (flip through a magazine). In the US, the transitive verb sense has also extended from flipping a burger to include flipping a state. Disappointingly, this is only in the figurative sense, and indicates a switch in a state's primary political allegiance between Democrat and Republican parties.

Flip has also the capacity to be used as an intransitive verb, meaning for small objects to move or bounce jerkily. This intransitive sense provides in turn two slang senses describing an intensely emotional reaction: to fly into a rage or make an emotional outburst (in the phrases flip one’s lid or flip one's wig) or to become ecstatic or very excited (for example, flipping out — possibly over the flip side of a vinyl record). And that's not all: a person could perform a backflip, or use a flip chart while wearing flip-flops (in the sense of 'footwear'; see below for more on the sense of 'governmental indecision'). Flip can also be used as a profanity substitute in the UK, to stand in for the f-bomb when in polite company, and is occasionally heard absurdly dubbed onto TV or airline versions of films (taken to its logical extreme by the unforgettable "Flip you, melonfarmer!" from Repo Man, 1984). And, if profanity substitutes fail you, you can always flip [someone] the bird (by extending a middle finger skyward).

Flip's origins are most likely imitative (or a contraction) of fillip, a word dating back to the 16th century that means something that adds stimulation or enjoyment, or the action of holding a finger towards the palm with the thumb and suddenly releasing it outwards to produce a snapping sound. However, as an adjective, flip is used to describe something impertinent or glib. This use has a separate etymology from the verb sense and is derived from flippant.

Flip your Whig?
The most recent acrobatic feats performed by flip were in the political big top, using the hot topics of property and parliamentary expenses as springboards. Flipping can be used transitively to describe the buying and quick resale of property, to make a profit. This usage originated from US real estate parlance, but is now used widely in the UK. Politically speaking, flip was until recently most closely associated with the act of flip-flopping (that is, the reversal of a political stance). Yet in the wake of the furore over UK MPs and their expenses claims, an interesting new meaning has come into currency (no pun intended). MPs who changed the designation of a property, either in London or in their constituency, to take advantage of the now-infamous second homes allowance are already being described as having flipped their property. And there you have it: a rapid change in meaning over a very short time (performed without a net). Ta da!

So what next for flip? Personally, I hope one of its less well-known noun senses comes back into fashion, namely a warm 17th-century drink consisting of a mixture of beer and sugar (if only to see the advertising campaign: "You'll flip out for flip"? "There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the flip"...?).

Duncan Black - Editor

May 2009

Verbal Economic Meltdown
The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson famously referred to words as ‘fossil poetry’, meaning that the history of a word (its etymology) may preserve a record of long-vanished age. There is another way words can act as a timeline of historical development: charting their frequency of occurrence.

In the wonderful world of lexicography, each new edition of a dictionary is an opportunity to publicize newly added words, and the words which make the best stories are those that best sum up the current moment. In early 2008, while we were working on our Concise English Dictionary, we discussed the word subprime as a contender for the word of the previous year. It was certainly a word one heard often, particularly those of us with mortgages who woke up to Radio 4 every weekday morning; and though the ensuing economic downturn had not hit yet, this scary new addition to the mainstream vocabulary connoted a vague sense of impending doom, not unlike a distant police siren portending the end of the party.

If we search for the word subprime in our corpus of written and spoken English up to 2005, we get only 122 citations (the related word mortgage, by contrast, gets 46,014 citations). By late 2007, citations for subprime had almost doubled to 241. This makes perfect sense, of course: before the housing bubble burst, subprime lending was rarely discussed outside banking and finance. When house prices began to drop, subprime mortgages became a major and much-publicized economic weakness.

Subprime is now part of everyday English vocabulary; but do we still hear it every time we turn on the evening news? Probably not. Few, if any, banks are still practicing subprime lending. In fact, the more recent aspect of what has been dubbed the Global Economic Downturn is the lack of any lending, subprime or otherwise. This is called the ‘credit crunch’, and it spells disaster for the world’s already weakened economies, because those business which are not already on the brink of collapse now find it difficult to get the loans they need to continue operating.

In the 2005 version of our corpus, credit crunch gets 231 citations (perhaps demonstrating that people were aware of this potential problem long before it became an everyday reality). In our monitor corpus, which scans up-to-the-minute citations of written and spoken English, credit crunch gets 11,843 hits: quite a jump. Subprime, on the other hand, gets only 507 hits: more than in 2007, but not nearly as much as other economic vocabulary. In fact, citations for subprime have been going down again, as the economic crisis continues to evolve.

Using our various corpora, we can calculate a list of words which have increased in frequency of usage from 2002 to the present; topping the list are recession, crunch (of course), bailout, and downturn (the foremost euphemistic alternative to ‘recession’). Also high on the list are nationalise, recapitalisation, and liquidity. Subprime appears surprisingly far down the list, below such non-economic vocabulary as mayoral, contagion, and the abbreviation ITY, and only just managing to beat out deleveraging and mankini.

These regression statistics tell the story of the Economic Downturn in a nutshell: when house prices began to fall, subprime mortgages led to massive losses for lenders (and use of this word began to rise). Though government bailouts prevented certain banks and financial institutions from collapsing entirely (and led to increased usage of this word), these banks were still less willing and less able to lend, even to solvent customers. This created a lack of available credit, otherwise known as the credit crunch (another new addition to mainstream vocabulary). The negative effect this has had on previously profitable businesses leads to a recession, which the government initially preferred we call a downturn.

But what about that other economic elephant in the room: the word depression? In our 2002 corpus, citations for the business/economic sense of depression numbered only 409, and 241 of these referred specifically to The Great Depression. The 2005 corpus amazingly turns up even fewer citations (106), and the monitor corpus only 660, a fair number of which are either historical (the depression) or psychological senses of the word. Business senses of meltdown, on the other hand, generate a mere 8 citations in the 2002 corpus, 79 in the 2005 corpus (due largely to an economic crisis in Southeast Asia in 2004), and a whopping 2,020 hits in the monitor corpus, due to…well, what we’re all living through right now. But at least we’re still not using the D-word. Much.

Robert Groves - Editor