Collins Language

November 2010

2010-11-17T10:32:00.010Z

Boom Shellack-a-lack-a!

Earlier this month, the United States held their ‘mid-term’ elections (so called because they occur in the middle of a sitting president’s term of office). The media on both sides of the
Atlantic promised it would be a referendum on the Obama administration so far, and indeed, the
morning after significant Republican gains, President Obama characterized the election as a ‘shellacking’. His use of this word received nearly as much press coverage as the defeat itself, with major news outlets filing pieces on the origin and history of shellacking, and how it came to mean ‘a severe beating’.

For those who missed the news coverage, shellac was originally a noun referring to the yellow resin secreted by the ‘lac’ insect, used in varnishes and polishes, etc. The word entered English in the 18th Century and is in part a translation of the French phrase laque en écailles or 'lac in scales (thin plates)'. In the 20th Century the noun also came to mean a gramophone record made of shellac.

Interestingly, all the verb senses of this word are originally US or North American. From the 19th Century onward, to shellac meant 'to coat or treat something with shellac varnish'. The sense in which President Obama used the word, i.e. 'to defeat utterly', goes back to the 1930s. Its original meaning was 'to beat or thrash', i.e. to give someone a physical beating, and some early citations come from organized crime or gangster slang. Our Collins corpus has 104 citations of shellacking, almost all of which mean 'a beating’ or ‘a defeat', and quite a few of these come from American sports, such as:

The Texans haven't forgotten a 38-3 shellacking last year.

In terms of why a word that originally meant 'to varnish' would come to mean 'beat up or utterly defeat', no one really knows. Slang, unfortunately, isn't always logical, and because it is inherently non-standard, slang usages often go unstudied until they break into mainstream language (like, say, when a prominent world leader uses them), at which point their origins are often lost.

However, we can compare shellacking with two other words which have overlapping slang senses. Plaster and paste can both mean 'to beat or thrash' or 'to defeat utterly and completely'.

Of the two, plaster is originally US, while paste is more widely used throughout the English-speaking world. Again, their origins are uncertain, but there is evidence for plaster to mean 'to shell or bombard excessively'. This sense originated in World War I.

In US English, plaster the noun refers to 'plaster of Paris'. Presumably the idea behind the WWI sense of plastering was that the thoroughness of them bombardment spread damage across enemy ranks the way a builder would spread plaster of Paris all over a flat surface. Eventually, plaster came to mean 'pommel someone with your fists', probably echoing the World War I usage (likening the repeated punches to the bombs falling). This sense originated in boxing, and spread from there.

Because plaster of Paris is a kind of paste, it is easy to see how this meaning became transferred to paste the verb, especially in countries like the UK, where plaster usually means ‘bandage’. Varnishing an object with shellac, presumably, also involves spreading the substance over the surface. This may be the link between shellacking, plastering, and pasting. Hypothetically speaking, plastering could have come first, and as it took hold, other nouns indicating a spread of some viscous material over a hard surface also developed ‘beating’ senses by analogy.

But there is a footnote to this story.

The most common form of plaster in US English is the past participle, plastered, which means 'excessively drunk'. Interestingly, there is corpus evidence of shellacked meaning 'drunk' as well. The relationship between being drunk and being beaten up is not entirely clear; however, in both cases the ‘victim’ is liable to stumble about in semi-consciousness. It is interesting to note that the phrase punch-drunk dates from the same period as plastered (early 20^th century).

Robert Groves

Editor

October 2010

2010-10-08T12:55:00.004+01:00

He's all 'She's like, "Oh my God', and she goes 'Don't talk like that'

On a recent visit to her former school, actress Emma Thompson was apparently offended by use of the word like as a speech filler; at least, that is the usage that attracted the most comments from language experts. However, there is another peculiarly modern use of like that is, ahem, likely to aggravate more conservative speakers: an introduction to speech (always in combination with the verb be). For example:

He's like, 'I don't know'.

As with other slang or informal uses of like, this phrase has a peculiar bouquet of Southern California. Funnily enough, one of the earliest recorded citations of the phrase is a line from Frank Zappa's song 'Valley Girl':

She's like 'Oh my God'.

This is not to say that Frank Zappa invented the phrase; it was certainly in use before 1982 (when the song was released). It is not even guaranteed that the phrase originated in California's San Fernando Valley, though Zappa's use of it would indicate it had indeed become associated with Valspeak.

Is it possible, then to tell where be like as a direct speech introduction did come from? Perhaps not, but it may be related to other informal introductions for direct speech, some of which are logical developments of pre-existing phrases.

One of the oldest of these is the use of go, often in the simple past tense (went). This usage goes back to Dickens, and derives from the earlier sense of go meaning 'to make a noise as specified' (e.g. The gun went bang). This sense of go dates back to the 16^th Century. It is interesting that applying it to reported speech took another 300 years to develop; however, as early citations seem to favour non-verbal sounds such as 'yo-yo-yo' or 'chirp'. Go followed by full sentences of reported speech don't become common until the late 20^th Century, and are usually considered non-standard.

By contrast, one of the newest of these is be all, as in She's all, 'Ooh, let it out. You can tell me'. This usage was common in US English from at least the late 20^th Century, and has been creeping into British English, probably via the usual suspects (imported US films and television programmes). In 2009 we added it to the 30^th Anniversary Edition of Collins English Dictionary. One wonders what Ms Thompson would make of that.

The Virus Has Spread

The word viral used to mean 'of, relating to, or caused by a virus'. Of course, it still means that; but it has acquired another meaning in the past 10 to 15 years. The adjective viral, when used with something other than a disease, refers to the spread of something, usually publicity, via word-of-mouth, electronic discussion (emails, blogs, internet chatter, etc), which is metaphorically like the spread of a virus from person to person.

Lexicographers first noticed this sense of viral in the phrase viral marketing, which is an advertising campaign which disseminates its message 'virally'. In some ways this was a great marketing innovation, as it made use of burgeoning technology (the internet and email) and its adherents, and was cheaper than a traditional campaign, as most of the leg-work was done by the targeted consumers.

Word-of-mouth advertising campaigns go back to way before the internet, but the adjective viral doesn't seem to have been applied to them until they started using internet technology. Possibly this is because they emerged at the same time that increased internet access brought computer viruses to mass public awareness. Early viral marketing was spread by email (one of the earliest and simplest examples being Hotmail's tagline automatically added to the end of every email sent by the service, effectively making each email a mini-advert), as were most computer viruses of the time. Also, the irrelevance of spatial and national boundaries in cyberspace allowed viral campaigns to spread more quickly and more widely than previous word-of-mouth or stealth campaigns, creating something that resembled a global epidemic.

The earliest citation of viral marketing in the Bank of English comes from a 1999 newspaper article describing the phenomenon and explicitly likening it to computer viruses. Three years later, in 2002, we get our first citations of viral email. Some citations of this phrase use it as a synonym of viral marketing (much of which was still disseminated through email); others, however, point to a different phenomenon: the circulation of jokes via email, for entertainment, rather than marketing purposes. One person forwards the joke to her or his mates, who then forward it to their mates, and soon the joke ends up in nearly everyone's inbox.

Many of these jokes were long-winded, off-colour stories or rude pictures composed of non-alphanumeric keyboard characters, both of which were, frankly, a pain to read. However, some were brief, downloadable video clips, the famous 'dancing baby' of the late 1990s being an early notable example.

Before the advent of video-sharing website such as YouTube, these videos had to be contained within the email as an attachment. Nowadays, all you need is a link, which can even be contained in the subject field of the message, eliminating the need for superfluous LOLs in the body of the email. Also, the size of the email is smaller, making it less likely to clog recipients' inboxes. Finally, because the video itself is stored on a free website, potential viewers have other ways to search for and find it than just a randomly circulated email message.

The net result of this development is that the focus of these wide-spreading jokes is now on the video rather than the email, and people now speak of viral videos rather than viral emails.

There are no citations of viral video in the Bank of English before 2006 (YouTube was launched in 2005). From 2006 to 2009, there are 100 citations of the phrase (and only 23 of viral email). In fact, in corpus citations from 2005 to 2009, video is the second most likely noun to follow viral (infection being the first and marketing being the third). Email is way down at number 20.

All this is also leading to the emergence of viral as a noun, meaning 'a viral video', as evidenced by the increase in citations of the inflected form virals in the Bank of English. Before 2005 there were 3 citations of virals all misspellings of 'antiretrovirals'. From 2005 to 2009 there are 174 citations, all referring to viral videos. To be fair, most of these citations comes from issues of one men's magazine which seems to have taken the term and run with it. However, virals also generates more than 2 million Google hits, the majority of which link to viral videos. Worryingly, a lot of these are borderline pornographic, which suggest viral as noun may have less-than-savoury connotations.

Robert Groves – Editor

www.collinsdictionary.com

September 2010

2010-09-22T15:53:00.010+01:00

Thanks A Latte

Last month in New York City, English professor Lynne Rosenthal was forcibly ejected from a Starbucks after refusing to place her order using the established terminology. What makes this altercation surprising is that it did not involve coffee. I suspect most of us quietly avoid ordering a 'venti latte', but Professor Rosenthal's 'faux pas' was to refuse to specify that she didn't want butter or cheese on her multi-grain bagel.

One thing this admittedly fatuous story brings to light is the notable absence of more linguistic disputes in coffee bars, not only because of the silly terminology the chain stores have adopted, but because the history of coffee is replete with misnomers and misconceptions.

In the first place, most coffee drinkers in the West think of coffee as a drink brewed from ground beans, but coffee beans are in fact the seeds of a cherry-like fruit indigenous to Ethiopia. Both the drink and the word were introduced to Europe via the Middle East. The word coffee ultimately derives from Arabic qahwah, though most European languages borrowed it from its Turkish cognate kahveh, which became caffè (Italian), café (French, Spanish, and Portuguese), Kaffee (German), koffie (Dutch), and coffee (English).

Citations of the word coffee in English technically go back to 1598, in descriptions of Turkish and, later, Italian culture. These early citations, however, usually spell the word chaoua (presumably pronounced 'cowva') or cahve. The earliest citation of the spelling coffee comes from 1636. Spellings such as kauhi, cahu, and kauhi persist until the end of the 17^th Century.

In the English-speaking world, coffee came into its own during the 18^th Century, when Britain expanded its sea power and, through trade, laid down the foundations of what would eventually become the British Empire. It was at this point that things like coffee, tea, and sugar became available in the British Isles – if you had the money. Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock depicts wealthy Brits drinking both tea and coffee, implying the drinks had relatively equal status, though as we all know, tea eventually replaced coffee as the drink of choice in the UK among all social classes.

In North America, however, coffee was king. In the United States especially, this may have resulted from a desire to distance itself culturally from Britain, but may also have been influenced by the number of immigrants from Continental Europe, who would have drunk coffee instead of tea.

The first European coffee houses appeared in the 17^th Century, naturally in places where there was contact, through trade, with the Middle East: Hungary, Austria, and Italy. The last of these is still renowned for its coffee, and continues to influence our relationship with the beverage.

In English, coffee used to mean a bitter, black liquid produced in a percolator or a drip-machine. Nowadays it means a shot or two of espresso, some frothy steamed milk, possibly chocolate or a flavoured syrup, perhaps topped with chocolate power or cinnamon, or whipped cream.

Modern coffee tends to fall into one of three variations: the Cappuccino, the Latte, and the Mocha. All three of these drinks start with espresso coffee, which is 'strong coffee made by forcing steam or boiling water through ground coffee beans'. Both the word and the coffee are Italian; espresso means 'pressed', because the boiling water is 'pressed' through the coffee grounds. The Italians developed this technique of making coffee in the early 20^th Century, though the earliest citation of espresso in English dates from 1945. Citations of espresso in the Bank of English, our database of over 4 billion words of actual written and spoken English, begin in the 1980s. Many of the earliest citations are from catalogues and refer to the machines that make espresso coffee, suggesting it was a newly popular gadget for the upwardly-mobile to purchase with their disposable income. Interestingly, the word ciao shows a similar date spread, indicating a mid-Eighties trend of affecting Continental manors. Espresso is also a word many English-speakers get completely wrong; Bank of English has 52 citations of 'expresso' (which would presumably mean a rapidly prepared cup of coffee).

A similar history and date spread is found with cappuccino, which is espresso coffee served with steamed milk (in the UK, it is often topped with whipped cream or chocolate powder, though this is rarely done in the US and never in Italy). The cappuccino was developed around the same time as the espresso, using much the same technology to force steam into milk, creating a velvety froth. The name cappuccino comes from the Italian for the capuchin monks, who wear a brown habit with a hood (Italian cappuccio literally means 'hood'). When the steamed milk combines with the espresso, a medium brown colour, similar to the capuchin habit, results; also the froth cap sits above the brown milky coffee like a hood.

Of the three main espresso coffee drinks popular in English-speaking countries the latte has been with us the longest. While citations of latte (as a coffee drink, rather than plain milk) on its own don't begin until 1989, citations of the full phrase caffè latte appear in English from the middle of the 19^th Century. It is likely, however, that these early citation refer simply to coffee and with milk, rather than the espresso drink we know today, for espresso coffee would not be developed for another 50 years or so. Latte is Italian for milk, and as a former barista I can testify that a latte differs from a cappuccino in that it has more steamed milk and less froth (usually just a tiny cap of frothed milk on the top).

The interesting thing about latte, though, is that we often misspell the first part. Italian for 'coffee' is caffè. Our 2005 version of Bank of English has 46 citations of caffè latte. There are 55 citations, however, of café latte, incorrectly combining the French name for the coffee with the Italian name for the milk (in France, this drink would be a café au lait). The trend continues in our 2009 corpus, with 67 citations of caffè latte compared with 122 of café latte. The spread is even more telling if you break it down by time period. In the 1990s, there are 40 citations of caffè latte compared with 30 of café latte (i.e. the 'correct' version in the lead). In the first half of the Noughties, though, we get 15 citations of caffè latte versus 45 of café latte; the 'incorrect' version pulls far ahead. And it stays there: from 2005-2009 we have 14 citations of caffè latte compared with 44 of café latte. This indicates that when we first starting talking about caffè lattes, we got it right, but quickly slipped into the 'incorrect' mixed form (probably because café is much more common in English than caffè). In any case, the most frequent way to refer to this drink now is simply to drop the caffè part. In the period from 2005-2009, Bank of English has 59 citations of latte preceded by some form of caffè, as opposed to 757 citations of just latte on its own.

Another modern-day coffee misconception is the meaning of mocha. In most espresso bars, a mocha is basically a latte flavoured with chocolate, often topped with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles instead of plain milk froth. But this is the second definition in Collins English Dictionary. The first is 'a strongly flavoured dark brown coffee originally imported from Arabia'.

Mocha was originally the name of a port in Yemen, famous for exporting Arabian coffee. The 'Mocha' variety of coffee tended to be rich and dark. Some people suggest its flavour is chocolatey, leading to the association with chocolate. Just as likely, however, is that the name Mocha, being associated with coffee, was used to indicate a coffee flavouring in chocolate dishes such as 'chocolate mocha walnut cake' (cited in the Bank of English), which is a chocolate cake flavoured with coffee. Whatever the explanation, a caf(f)è mocha is now so strongly perceived as a chocolate-flavoured coffee drink, that when the coffee house I used to work at tried serving the original mocha variety as a standard filter coffee, customers complained about the lack of chocolate.

Robert Groves - Editor

19 August 2010

2010-08-19T10:13:00.009+01:00

Writing under sexist rules

After spending days or even weeks in a foreign land, switching back into your mother tongue does not always happen easily and could leave you thinking differently. You might even find yourself hyper-sensitive to points of language you never noticed before like gender in language and grammar.

Consider the French language. In conversation, a female must remember to add an extra -e to certain adjectives. For example, when using the adjective content to mean happy or pleased, the -e must be added so as to produce the female form of the word.

Similarly, for nouns, the correct article le or la must be used to denote the grammatical gender of the word. In French, grammatical gender usually corresponds to natural gender, so nouns that have female referents use the feminine articles une and la; nouns that have male referents use the masculine articles un and le. Nouns that have referents without gender distinctions have to be learned on a case-by-case basis, e.g. la table, le bureau.

For non-native speakers who are trying to speak as fluently as possible, concentration levels are already high so the extra onus of remembering to distinguish yourself as female can be difficult and cumbersome.

Gender specification through language does not pose problems to learners alone. The French authorities are struggling to find accepted, non-sexist forms of nouns to denote certain professions. Following a plan laid down by the French government to combat sexism in the late 1980s, disagreements have arisen with the body governing the use of the French language, l'Académie française.

For professions such as writers and company bosses, the accepted form is a masculine noun, écrivain and chef respectively. The new initiative proposes that the female forms of these nouns should be écrivaine and chefesse. Here enters rhyming embarrassment. Feminizing the word chef with the suffix -esse has created a word which rhymes with the French word for buttocks, fesses. The added -e on to écrivain has created a word which means vain or empty, vaine.

Feminists are protesting at these proposed changes because they actually reinforce sexism. They say these new words promote connotations of weak, vain women or focus attention on physical attributes of the female body – altogether making a joke out of a proposal which is supposed to make everyone happy and equal.

So, what about the English equivalents? Slowly and subtly we have been doing the opposite of the French, and replacing our gender-specific nouns. For example, television and newspapers seem to have phased out the word actress to replace it with actor regardless of the sex of the person in question.

Indeed, Collins English Dictionary includes the following note:

'Use of the word actress to refer to a female who acts is old-fashioned. The gender-neutral form is actor.'

Whereas France wishes to separate men and women in language as in other areas – arguably keeping the sexism debate alive – English opts to ignore this and puts everyone in the same category.

With the centenary of International Women's Day approaching in March next year, the organization is asking women writers to come forward to contribute towards a special global arts initiative for 2011. The question is, however, will they be able to write in their own languages without sexist language flowing through their pens onto paper?

Rachel Hanretty

www.collinsdictionary.com

2 August 2010

2010-08-02T17:06:00.008+01:00

Indian English

With David Cameron's visit to India in the news, our attention at Collins Language is drawn to the linguistic variety of the subcontinent. By a conservative count, India has 415 languages. English is one of them. After the United States, India has more English speakers than any other country – more than 90 million of them – who generally use it as a second or even third language. To them may be added many millions in Bangladesh and Pakistan, as well as millions more in other countries. The British were on the subcontinent from the seventeenth century onward as traders, colonizers, missionaries, soldiers, and administrators, culminating in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Imperial Raj (reign). Even after independence in 1947, the use of English did not decline. In fact, it grew with the rise of the internet, satellite communications, and India-based call centres for foreign companies' telemarketing and technical support.

Statistics are always in flux, and generalizations always hazardous, in the second most populous country on earth. Twenty-two Indian languages have more than a million native speakers. That fact alone guarantees that the Indian English spoken by a bilingual or multilingual person will reflect a native language, whether it be Hindi, the official, most widely spoken one or, in order of population, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, and Gujarati. Though spelling usually follows British English, which also may confer social prestige on its users, Indian English differs in many ways. Its syntax, usages, and pronunciations are rich pickings for comedians though Indians also make fun of themselves, helped by the habit of using seemingly pompous formulations such as beginning a business letter with 'Respected Sir' and ending it with 'Please do the needful', or asking, 'What is your good name, sir?'

Word order may appear wrenched to non-Indian ears. Some short words like also, but, and only may be tagged for emphasis at the end of sentences, or repeated: 'We talked about books only only.' Like only, itself can emphasize time and place: 'Can we discuss the topic next week itself?' A question may end, 'yes?' 'no?' or 'isn't it?' To distinguish between male and female, a cousin may be a cousin brother or a cousin sister: 'He is your cousin brother, isn't it?' Compounding words often occurs: a time-pass is time spent purposelessly or unexcitingly: 'That course was a real time-pass.' Likewise, word-shortening: enthusiasm is enthu, fundamentals are fundas. Though Indians are no more profane than other English-speakers, damn is used much more frequently.

The progressive tense is much used, as in 'Chanda is wearing sari' and 'You have seen?' The definite or indefinite article is often dropped: 'She was often guest.' Rhyming phrases abound, as in the title of a famous Anglo-Indian dictionary, whose shortened form was Hobson-Jobson. A person older than oneself may be respectfully addressed as aunty or uncle, or the suffix –ji or the Urdu-derived sahib tacked on to a name or title: 'Swami-ji', 'Begum Sahib'.

Hindi often intervenes, as in wallah, to denote an occupation or activity, as in tiffin-wallah, a person who delivers snacks or lunches. Indians are expert at mixing or switching from one language or social context to another. Since since and for is the same in Hindi, since is often used for the latter: 'I have been ill since two weeks.' Hindi in fact has fused with English to form the hybrid language Hinglish, one common word of which is yaar, a buddy or companion.

Pronunciation varies much from the north to the south but Indians, like most Canadians, generally pronounce the r before consonants or at the end of words. V and w often sound the same. They often pronounce weak vowels as full ones, and stress the syllable rather than longer rhythmic units, lending speech a sing-song quality.

Outside the country, India has loaned many words to standard English. From Hindi: shampoo. From Malayalam: ginger. From Sanskrit: guru, yoga, pariah. From Tamil: curry. So it goes: bamboo, mango, bungalow, chintz, juggernaut, pundit … Culturally, international enthusiasm for Indian food has made terms for breads and snacks (chapatti, samosas, pakoras), spice mixtures (masala), and tandoori chicken familiar to restaurant-goers and home cooks alike. The fame of the Indian movie industry has also grown mightily, as witness Bollywood, which blends Bombay and Hollywood. Bombay has officially been renamed Mumbai, taken from Sanskrit and Marathi words. The new name may take a while to catch on.

Fraser Sutherland

www.collinsdictionary.com

July 2010

2010-07-12T09:38:00.005+01:00

What's in a Name?

Every four years the attention of the world is focused on one summer sporting event: the Summer Olympics. But there is another summer sporting event, also held every four years, which draws the attention of every nation on earth but one: the FIFA World Cup.

Football, in its modern form, was invented in England; or at least, the formal rules which distinguish it from other forms of football were first codified in England in the mid-nineteenth century. Early types of ball-game played primarily with the feet are traceable to the Middle Ages and not necessarily confined to England.

Football has long been one of the most popular sports in the world, uniting Europe (its traditional home), Asia, the Americas, and Africa. In the English-speaking world, the one or two countries that don't really care for it are identifiable by their tendency to call the sport 'soccer'. However, football is significantly less popular than other sports in Australia, where it falls behind cricket and 'Australian Rules Football', and New Zealand, where rugby is the more popular sport; both of these countries, however, avoid the term 'soccer'.

The name 'soccer' is particularly associated with the United States of America, where they refer to complacent middle-class housewives as 'soccer moms' and where the sport is regarded as the province of children and women. Europeans often chastise Americans for choosing to excel in sports which no one else plays, such as baseball, basketball, and American football (though, to be fair, baseball is popular in Canada and Central and South America, and the World Series does involve more than one nation, unlike the Superbowl). Ironically, the name 'soccer', like the sport it refers to, originated in England.

The Football Association was founded in England in 1863 in order to codify a standard set of rules for the game, enabling the various city clubs to compete against each other (they had previously had their own variations of the rules) and to distinguish the sport from other forms of football, especially Rugby. As this sport was officially known as 'Association Football', it was naturally shortened to 'soccer' – just as 'Rugby Football' was and still is shortened to 'rugger' – with the first citation being recorded in 1889.

As the popularity of Association Football grew around the world, it came to be shortened to just football, being the version of the football most commonly referred to, and the name soccer began to die out. Most other languages call the sport football or some derivation of it, such as Fussball in Germany or futbol in Spain. In North America, however, the American and Canadian versions of football reigned, and both of these games were derived from Rugby in the nineteenth century. Therefore, in North American varieties of English, the name soccer is retained, to avoid confusion with the game where two teams try to score points by moving an oval-shaped ball toward the opponents' side of the field. This form of football is sometimes called 'gridiron', especially in Australia and New Zealand, referring to the layout of the playing field (the yard lines create a grid-like impression, especially if you're used to a traditional soccer field).

Incidentally, one of the earliest citations of the word football comes from 1424, when the Parliament of Scotland forbade playing the game and imposing a fine of four pence.

That Vuvu That You Do

If there is one word – and sound – that has come to represent the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it is vuvuzela.

We added this word to the Collins English Dictionary in 2005, for the 7th Edition. There are only 11 corpus citations of vuvuzela in the 2005 version of the Bank of English, however, and chances are most people didn't know what this word meant back then, unless they had happened to attend a football match in Cape Town. There are now 197 corpus citations of this word, and we not only know what it is, we are all (unfortunately) intimately acquainted with its monotonous bellowing. Collins English Dictionary likens the sound to "the trumpeting of an elephant"; personally, I found the horns en masse gave the impression that the poor footballers were playing a match inside a giant beehive. Maybe they sound different in person.

In case you have been lucky enough to escape the thing, a vuvuzela is a long plastic horn, popular among stadium crowds in South Africa. When blown, it emits one loud note, which some people say is B-flat, but in reality has only a casual relationship to music of any description. The word vuvuzela comes from Zulu, but the origin of the actual horn is more controversial. Several people and institutions claim to have invented it, including a plastics company and a Baptist Church…though it probably doesn't take much of a genius to come up with the idea of a plastic horn.

The vuvuzela first began appearing in South African football matches around 2002. Our earliest corpus citation of vuvuzela is from 1998, but it is in reference to the South African Kwaito musician Arthur Mafokate, and there is no mention of football or any other sport. Football-linked citations pick up in in 2003-2004, becoming especially prolific in 2009 (when 2009 FIFA Confederations Cup, also held in South Africa, first brought the 'instrument' to the attention international football's audience).

The horn is now so popular and ubiquitous (someone even brought one to the Times UK National Spelling Bee Grand Final), that it has developed a 'nickname': vuvu. This word has yet to appear in our corpus, but it does get 679,000 Google hits. If citations continue now that the competition is over, this short form could find its way into the Collins English Dictionary; however, it is equally likely that the word will turn out to be as ephemeral as the cheap plastic from which it is made.

June 8th 2010

2010-06-08T11:55:00.007+01:00

Agnostic: our diagnosis

Google recently announced that its online e-book store Google Editions will allow customers to download e-books to a range of devices. Unlike the e-books sold through Amazon and Apple, which are designed for the Kindle and Apple devices respectively, e-books purchased through Google Editions will be readable on any web-enabled device including mobile phones, netbooks, tablets, and desktops.

"It is a different approach to what most readers today have and the vision is to be able to access books in a device agnostic way," said Google spokesperson Gabriel Sticker.

The word agnostic has changed. From its original meaning ('a person who holds that knowledge of a Supreme Being, ultimate cause, etc, is impossible'), it has evolved to mean 'undecided' or 'uncommitted' and also 'unbiased' or 'independent'.

Agnostic comes from the Greek agnostikos meaning 'unknowing, unknown, unknowable'. Professor Thomas Henry Huxley is credited with coining the term in the 1860s to describe his own philosophy to members of the Metaphysical Society. Huxley was an English biologist and disciple of Darwin so it is hardly surprising that he was unwilling to believe in something which was unproven and unprovable.

In matters of the intellect follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration... and do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. (Reflection #142, Aphorisms and Reflections, selected by Henrietta A. Huxley)

The second sense of agnostic, meaning 'independent' or 'uncommitted' has become particularly prevalent in the field of technology, as in the Google example. Our corpus attests many similar collocations: platform-agnostic; product-agnostic; browser-agnostic; network-agnostic; broadband-agnostic; system -agnostic; vendor-agnostic; access agnostic; technology agnostic; agnostic about operating systems; agnostic to technology.

When technology is described as agnostic, it means 'functional across different types of hardware, software, etc'. It has been suggested that marketing departments may be to blame for this, as this corpus example shows:

I now think it's the marketing departments and the sales people who are the worst sinners. They're all trying to glamorize technologies with sexy language. Talk to engineers about a computer, and they call it a "box"; the marketing department will elevate it to a "productivity system." Ask engineers about a program that runs on any operating system and they say, "It doesn't matter what you're running"; ask marketers, and they will say it's a "agnostic application."

There may be some interference with the word 'diagnostic' which sometimes collocates with 'technology' and 'application'. There would appear to be obvious benefits to customers if companies are unfettered by allegiance to specific types of software or hardware. In this meaning, 'agnostic' probably has a positive connotation overall.

The religious sense is still the most common sense, but the identity 'agnostic' may not be declared with pride. People are described as 'an avowed or confirmed agnostic', 'a self-confessed agnostic', and even 'a closet agnostic'. What is precisely understood by religious agnosticism is quite fuzzy. Some people consider it to be a decisive viewpoint; others read indecision into it. The definition in Collins English Dictionary reflects the former but it is also used in the latter way:

Once there, we discover a church that is hidden by a congregation of trees and surrounded by well-tended graves covered in fresh flowers. It is a peaceful place that could sway even the most uncertain agnostic.

Coming back to the second sense of agnostic, meaning 'uncommitted or undecided on an issue', it may even shade into 'ambivalent towards an issue'. People are agnostic towards many issues, it seems, but particular favourites seem to be the Euro, global warming, the death penalty, and films by Peter Greenaway:

I'm agnostic regarding the Greenaway films I've seen. They were beautifully photographed and designed, but it wasn't clear to me what they were about.

Almost no one feels detached about capital punishment. But when people asked me, I referred to myself as a death penalty agnostic. Every time I thought I was prepared to stake out a position, something would drive me back in the other direction.

It will be interesting to see if the second sense will develop further in time.

May 5th 2010

2010-05-05T12:41:00.006+01:00

A Transparent Choice?

On 6 April, 2010, Gordon Brown drove to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament. He then returned to Downing Street, announced the date of the next General Election, and delivered a brief address in which he promised, among other things, 'transparent, accountable, open and democratic politics being pursued in this country'.

We've heard this before, and not just from the Labour Party. In fact, Collins Bank of English 2005 (our current corpus of over a billion words of written and spoken English) has 73 citations of 'transparent and accountable' and 199 citations of 'transparency and accountability'. In the Bank of English 2009, which contains citations up to and including last year, the frequency of 'transparent and accountable' jumps to 185, while 'transparency and accountability' reaches a whopping 608. Clearly, these expressions are becoming popular political catch phrases. But when I was growing up, transparent meant 'see-through', and transparency referred to one of those clear plastic sheets teachers put on an overhead projector. So when did these words begin to change their meaning?

Transparent entered English in the early fifteenth century. It comes from Latin trans, meaning 'through' and parere, meaning 'to appear'; something that is 'transparent' allows what is behind it, especially light, to appear or be visible through it. It was almost two centuries before we saw a recorded figurative usage of the word, meaning 'clear' in the sense of 'obvious'. Interestingly, it was Shakespeare who first used transparent this way, for example in Romeo and Juliet: 'Transparent Heretiques be burnt for liers'.

Transparent and transparency, as applied to politics, business practices, and the like, do not connote either 'frankness' or 'obviousness' per se, but rather something more specific: visibility and accessibility to the general public. Transparent decision-making is not 'candid', nor is it 'obvious'; rather, it is 'out in the open', available for public scrutiny. It means we can see what they're doing and how they do it ('they' being invariably important people in the worlds of business, finance, and politics).

We can get a snapshot of how transparent and transparency are being used with the Collins corpus. For example, the nouns most likely to be transparent in Bank of English 2005 point to a mix of the 'see-through' and 'open to public scrutiny' senses: onion, motive, process, procedure, plastic, villain, raincoat, manner, reporting, accounting. The word most likely to be joined to transparent by 'and' is accountable (i.e. 'transparent and accountable'). If we limit the citations to only those before 1990, however, the situation changes. The noun motive is still on the list, but much farther down, while process, procedure, reporting, and accounting have completely dropped off, and there is only one citation for 'transparent and accountable'. The situation hardly changes for the early 1990s, but citations from 1995-1999 give us transparent cost-management (1999), pricing (1998-99), and bidding (1998), with 'transparent and accountable' showing a jump in frequency in 1999 (doubling its frequency from the previous year). Citations from 2000-2005 give us a picture much like that in Bank of English 2005 as a whole.

In Bank of English 2009, transparent is even more skewed toward the 'open to public scrutiny' sense: in addition to the 2005 words, transaction, fee, government, governance, disclosure, and decision-making are all 'transparent', and accountable still tops the list of words joined to transparent by 'and'. These days, when you hear someone in a suit say 'transparent', chances are they do not simply mean 'see-through'.

A Big Idea

The Tories, meanwhile, are trying to capture the public's hearts and minds with new catchphrases. This started way back in 2007, when David Cameron started pitching the idea of Britain as a 'broken society'. In the Bank of English 2005, there are only 4 citations for this phrase, one referring to Iraq in the aftermath of the second Gulf War, one referring to Iran during the revolution, one referring to South Africa's continuing problems with segregation, and one referring to Cambodia. Bank of English 2009, however, has 55 citations of this phrase, all referring to Britain – or Cameron's characterization of Britain, and nearly all appearing within quotation marks. The monitor corpus, which compiles citations of English on a monthly basis, has 139 citations of 'broken society'. However, this is a rather pessimistic catchphrase. So last month, Cameron debuted his solution to the 'broken society': namely the 'big society'.

'Big society' is Cameron's antidote to the (originally American) concept of 'big government'. Naturally, there are no citations for 'big society' in either the 2005 or 2009 versions of Bank of English. The handful of hits are phrases like 'a big society fundraiser'. The monitor corpus, however, has 27 citations of this phrase: still way behind 'broken society', but still quite a strong showing considering the phrase is only a month old.

The Agony and the Cleggstacy

Sometimes the most memorable political buzzwords, however, are not those the politicians foist upon us, but rather those which become attached to them from outside sources. Such is the case with Cleggmania and the more obscure but cleverer Cleggstacy. Both these terms refer to the brief but widely reported bump in popularity the Liberal Democrats enjoyed following leader Nick Clegg's performance during the first of the three televised debates. This bump put the LibDems ahead in the polls, probably for the first time since they were the Whigs. The bump was brief, however, which is reflected in the relatively poor showing in the Bank of English: the monitor corpus only has 5 citations of Cleggmania and none for Cleggstacy. Even Google cannot dredge up much more evidence that these words are still being widely used: 190,000 hits for Cleggmania, which is a drop in the ocean in Google terms, and a mere 1,310 for Cleggstacy, which is practically non-existent.

Lancastrians at the –gate

Sometimes these external buzzwords work against the politicians, as Gordon Brown has recently discovered. With just over a week to go before the General Election, Brown was heard calling a Labour supporter in Rochdale a 'bigoted woman'. The ensuing controversy has given English yet another '-gate': 'bigotgate'. Some particularly clever pundits have even created a 'backronym' out of bigot: Brown Is Gone On Thursday. As 'bigotgate' is just a week old, it's too new even for the monitor corpus. It does, however, have 280,000 Google hits, which, though still a small number, is more than Cleggmania.

May 1st 2010

2010-04-26T17:15:00.012+01:00

www.collinsdictionary.com

May Day – Mayday!!

Derived from the French venez m'aider, meaning "come (and) help me", the emergency code word mayday is used internationally as a distress signal. It is used and recognised globally during life-threatening emergencies by many groups including pilots, police forces, firefighters and transportation organisations. The call is always given three times in a row to prevent mistaking it for a similar-sounding phrase under noisy conditions and to distinguish an actual mayday call from a message about a mayday call.

The mayday call sign was originated in 1923 by Frederick Stanley Mockford (1897–1962), a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London. Mockford was asked to establish a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency. Since much of the traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the word mayday from its French origins.

At this time of year the term May Day is more associated with the coming of spring and celebrated with a holiday day on or around 1st May. May Day falls exactly half of a year from November 1 and marks the end of the uncomfortable winter half of the year in the Northern hemisphere. It has traditionally been an occasion for popular and often raucous celebrations, regardless of the locally prevalent political or religious establishment. In many countries, May Day is synonymous with International Workers' Day, or Labour Day, a day of political demonstrations and celebrations organised by the unions and socialist groups.

The first day of May is also the traditional day for pagan fertility rites, used for humans, cattle or crops and range from dancing round the maypole to blessing cattle as they go out into the field. Dancing around the maypole symbolises a ritual to welcome in the spring and bring good luck to farmers, the origins of which are probably Germanic. The UK parliament banned maypole dancing in 1664 but it was restored later by King Charles II. Long ribbons are attached to the pole and each person grabs hold of a ribbon and dances round the pole in different directions to create a pattern. In most countries, maypole dancing takes place on or around 1 May, but in Sweden it is also part of the nation's midsummer celebrations.

May Day is related to the Celtic festival of Beltane, Gaelic for the month of May, and the Germanic festival of Walpurgis Night on the eve of May 1st, believed in German folklore to be the night of a witches' Sabbath on the Brocken, in the Harz Mountains.

Other references to the term May Day include an early seventeenth-century stage play, written by George Chapman. This comedy was first published in 1611 and exploits the plot device of gender disguise and cross-dressing that was so common in English Renaissance drama. Continuing the acting theme, Grace Jones plays the character May Day in the 1985 James Bond film, A View to a Kill.

Whether you are Maypole dancing or simply looking forward to a well earned holiday in May, we hope that you enjoy it - without the requirement for a Mayday call!

www.collinsdictionary.com

April 2010

2010-03-29T10:25:00.011+01:00

www.collinsdictionary.com

Easter Egg-stravaganza

Easter is a festival of great significance for Christians, commemorating as it does the resurrection of Jesus Christ after the crucifixion. There are a host of Easter customs, traditions, and expressions with interesting origins. Shrove Tuesday (also known as 'Pancake Day') is so named because it was the last day of Shrovetide – the days on which confessions were made. Shrove is from the English verb shrive 'to confess and atone for one's sins'. The consumption of pancakes on this day is due to their luxury ingredients sugar, eggs, and milk – a final feast before such treats are given up for Lent. In many languages, this day is known as 'Fat Tuesday', e.g. French Mardi Gras, as it is the last day of feasting before the fast. The following day 'Ash Wednesday' is named after the ashes which some Christian denominations apply to their foreheads in the sign of the cross to signify repentance at the start of the fast. Lent is a 40-day period of fasting from Ash Wednesday until Easter Saturday, observed by Christians in honour of the time Jesus spent renouncing the devil in the wilderness. Its name is derived from Old English lencten 'spring', literally the lengthening of hours of daylight.

This is the time of year when the clocks go forward in most of the northern hemisphere, stemming from an odd collective desire to manipulate time and give workers a longer evening. Daylight Saving Time (in Britain 'British Summer Time') is thought to reduce the number of road accidents in the evening. It can disadvantage farmers, however, whose work depends on early morning daylight. DST always results in much confusion and head-scratching over whether we gain or lose an hour, and whether this means there will be more or less light at the beginning or end of the day. There is much comic potential in getting it the wrong way round, and a ready-made excuse if you happen to oversleep that day. The American English mnemonic 'Spring forward, fall back' helps us remember which way to reset the umpteen clocks in our houses, and fortunately our clever computer clocks keep us right anyway.

Easter can be described as a 'moveable feast' as its date is not fixed to the calendar, but to a complicated calculation going back to the middle ages: Easter day is always the first Sunday after the fourteenth day of the lunar month that falls on or after the day of the vernal equinox. The expression 'moveable feast' was the title of Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his bohemian days in Paris in the 1920s, and can now be applied to any enjoyable time, particularly one which is unfixed in duration or date. It has a very broad remit, almost applying to anything flexible and beneficial, as these corpus lines show:

Gold is a moveable feast. You can sell it for a price – set twice a day – anywhere in the world.

The nature of family has been something of a moveable feast throughout history: it has always been impressively flexible.

Don't keep to set times – your baby may be tired in the evening. Make bathtime a moveable feast.

'Moveable feast' seems a literally apt expression to describe Easter in modern times: workers making the Great Easter Getaway to join loved ones and eat Easter eggs together. Happy Easter from Collins!

Anne Robertson - Editor

www.collinsdictionary.com

March 2010

2010-03-12T08:56:00.006Z

www.collinsdictionary.com

(Tell Me Why) Ides Don't Like Mondays

Apart from "Et tu, Brute?", "Beware the Ides of March" is the most famous catch-phrase bequeathed to us by Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The Ides of March is the Ancient Roman name for 15 March, and the date had no intrinsically gloomy associations until Shakespeare immortalized it in 1599. Since then, beware the Ides of March has become a common way to indicate that some great misfortune, some tragic fall from grace, is about to occur (though it is less common now than it once was). In the US, the phrase was used facetiously to complain about taxes, back when Tax Day was 15 March (from 1918 until 1955 – ask your grandparents). Now Americans have to say "April is the cruellest month", quoting a more modern, though no less respected poet.

But why is the 15th called Ides of March in the first place? Well, in Roman times, they didn't number the days of the month, at least not the way we do. Instead, they had three special named days. The Kalends were the first day of the month (yes, it was plural). The Nones were usually the fifth day of the month (four months had the Nones on the seventh). Because the most famous Ides are those of March, many internet sources will tell you the Ides are the 15th day of a month. In fact, they were usually the 13th day, but four months (including March, of course) had their Ides two days later. Back when grammar school children were made to learn Latin, there was even a mnemonic rhyme to help them remember this:

In March, July, October, May
The Ides are on the fifteenth day

Sometimes the rhyme goes

In March, July, October, May
The Nones are on the seventh day

Both versions amount to the same hint, as whenever the Nones are the seventh, the Ides are the 15th.

To identify a day, the Romans counted how many days it was before the next named day. So 8 April was ante diem sextum Idus Apriles or "the sixth day before the Ides of April; 5 May was ante diem tertium nonas Maias or "the third day before the Nones of May", and 26 September was actually ante diem sextum kalendas Octobres or "the sixth day before the Kalends of October". No one can say the Romans weren't forward-thinking.

March, named after Mars, the god of War, was once the first month of the Roman year. The Ides of March was the day when one of the two Consuls began his term of office; the other began his on the Kalends of May. (The pronoun "his" in the preceding sentence is not meant to be sexist, by the way; it is simply a historical fact that all Roman Consuls were men.) If not for Caesar's death, the Ides not only of March, but of every month, would by now have fallen into obscurity. Caesar's famous assassination and Shakespeare's famous line have ensured they will live on in infamy, much like the anniversaries of other great disasters. This year, the Ides of March fall on a Monday, which is reason enough to fear them.

As for Shakespeare's other line, some contemporary sources claim Caesar's last were actually Greek: kai su teknon? ("And you, my son?"), showing off his education to the last (knowing Greek in Roman times was a bit like knowing Latin today). However, it's far more likely Caesar's dying word was "Aaaaah!"

www.collinsdictionary.com

February 2010

2010-02-08T10:39:00.007Z

www.collinsdictionary.com

I *heart* Valentine's Day

With Valentine's Day rapidly approaching, it is hard to avoid big red fluffy hearts. They are everywhere. From heart-shaped chocolates to balloons, Valentine's Day is a beautiful opportunity to show a loved one how much we care / a cynical ploy to make us feel guilty and obligated.*

In Ancient Greece, the heart was conceived as the seat of not only feelings and the imagination, but reason also. As medical knowledge advanced through the centuries, it was realized that the brain was the centre of the nervous system and the location of thought. In the 2nd century AD the Roman physician Galen of Pergamum considered feelings to be dictated by the balance in the body of the four humours – choler, phlegm, black bile, and blood. Emotions were bodily happenings, not mental states, and were influenced by the regulation of heat in the body. The heart was thought to heat the blood, and was therefore the focal point of health in the body. This view endured until the 17th century when the role of the heart as a pumping mechanism for blood in pulmonary circulation was discovered. Despite these advances in medical understanding, the notion of the heart as the seat of the emotions remains in popular culture and in the language of today: we feel heartbroken or heartsick; we wear our hearts on our sleeves and have our hearts in the right place.

Using a heart symbol to represent love dates back hundreds of years. The shape is likely to be a stylized version of a human heart, but it has also been suggested that it may have evolved from a heart-shaped plant symbol in ancient Greek and Roman art. This conventional shape is still ubiquitous today from playing cards to jewellery to tattoo designs. In today's technology-driven society, new ways of representing the heart symbol have emerged, such as the texter's <3 . 'I <3 u' thus means 'I love you', not 'I am three years younger than you' as I originally surmised. Another innovation is the use of the word heart as a verb. We are all familiar with the I Heart New York logo; its big red thumping heart took on a whole new significance in the light of the September 11th attacks. An echo of this logo is found in the existential cult comedy title I Heart Huckabees. More recently, I came across this in The Guardian Life and Style section:

"Alex: Kate is totally awesome. Following our date we started doing all sorts together and had only gone and become total BFFs... I am delighted to be able to consider her one of my best friends. That's right, AB hearts KD." (source: The Guardian 30th January 2010)

But be warned, with its slightly facetious tone, I heart you is no substitute for I love you. There are times when only those three little words will do, and Valentine's Day might be one of them.

* delete as appropriate

www.collinsdictionary.com

January 2010

2010-01-14T15:06:00.011Z

www.collinsdictionary.com

The New Year Has Two Faces

A certain copyrighted poet once named April the cruellest month, but I'd wager for most of us, it's January: the holidays are over, but the winter is just getting underway, and those annoying New Year's Resolutions probably only serve to remind us of the ones we failed to keep last year. If only we could just ditch the entire month, eh? Well, it may interest you to know that the month of January has not always existed; nor was it the first month of the year when it finally did show up.

Traditionally, January and February are said to have been added to the Roman calendar (the ancestor of the Gregorian calendar we use today) during the reign of King Numa, around 713 BCE. Before that, the Roman year was only ten months long. The name January comes from Latin Ianuarius, which ultimately derives from the proper name Ianus or Janus, the Roman god of doorways (yes, they had a god for doorways). Janus had two faces, one facing forwards and one facing backwards; he was an apt selection for the first month of the year, for he can simultaneously contemplate the year that has just passed and the year that has just begun.

But Janus has only been doorman of the New Year since about 450 BCE. Before that, the Roman calendar began with the month of March, whose Latin name was Martius. This month was named after Mars, the god of war, an important deity for the Romans (they owed their wealth and power to warfare).

Six of the months of the expanded Roman calendar year have names of special significance, but the remaining six were simply numbered: Quintilis (from quintus, meaning "fifth"); Sextilis (from sextus, meaning "sixth"); September (from septem, meaning "seven"); October (from octo, meaning "eight"); November (from novem, meaning "nine"); and December (from decem, meaning "ten"). Quintilis and Sextilis have been renamed, but September, October, November, and December are relatively unchanged, except that they are the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months, respectively, each having moved places when the months January and February were repositioned at the start of the year.

The name February comes from Februa, a purification ritual (februum means "purification") held on February 15 – which isn't the Ides of February, by the way: February's Ides are on the 13th. The root of April is Latin Aprilis. No one really knows what this word means, but one theory derives it from the verb aperire, to open, as this is the month when flowers "open".

There are two main theories of the origin of the names May and June. Their Latin names are Maius and Junius, and one etymology has the months named after the maiores (the "greater" or "older" people) and juniores (the "younger" people), respectively. The other theory, following the model of January and March, has them named after deities: Maia, the (originally Greek) goddess of fertility, and Juno, the wife of Jupiter.

Finally, the two months that have changed their names. Quintilis is the month in which Julius Caesar was born; small wonder, then, that this month's name was changed to Julius, the root of modern July. On this same model, Sextilis was renamed Augustus after Augustus Caesar, giving us modern-day August. (Augustus, though, was not born in August; rather, this month was chosen to commemorate him as it comes after his adopted father's month.)

And it's not only the names of the months that are descended from Latin; the word calendar itself comes from Latin kalendae or the "calends", the Roman name for the first day of the month. Just another thing the Romans did for us.

Robert Groves - Editor

www.collinsdictionary.com

December 2009

2009-12-10T10:00:00.009Z

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!

Duncan Black - Editor

October 2009

2009-10-30T17:22:00.005Z

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

2009-09-21T11:16:00.012+01:00

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

2009-08-13T09:09:00.007+01:00

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

2009-07-06T17:50:00.033+01:00

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 wistaria 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 wistaria, 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 wistaria-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 wistaria, then the Thomas Nuttall seems to have misspelled it.

So where does Collins stand? Well, the Collins English Dictionary does not acknowledge the wistaria, 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, wistaria 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 wistaria was 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 wistaria 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 wistaria, 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 wistaria 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 wistaria 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

2009-06-01T14:38:00.011+01:00

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

2009-05-12T16:09:00.025+01:00

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

April 2009

2009-04-29T12:35:00.013+01:00

-ian ranking
Ballardian adj 1. of James Graham Ballard (1930-2009), the British novelist, or his works. 2. resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard's novels and stories, esp dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

Visionary writer JG Ballard was an uncanny predictor of humanity's social evolution, and his name joins a list of authors who have become adjectivized. Words changing their part of speech is very common in the English language. When nouns and verbs switch their identities, the process is known as nouning (e.g. This year's spend...) or verbing (e.g. computerize). Verbing can occur by simply adding the suffix -ize or -ise to a noun. In this case, proper nouns can become adjectives just as easily, by appending -ian or -esque. This illustrious group of author-adjectives includes Beckettian, Lovecraftian, and Tolkienesque, and is an unsurprising linguistic development considering the widespread recognition of the aforementioned writers and their bodies of work. Indeed, it is likely that more people are familiar with the literary themes of, say, Crime and Punishment (admittedly the clue is in the title) or Moby-Dick (less so) than have read the books themselves. (This is certainly the case with 1984, which was recently voted the book most people lie about having read.)

But at what stage do such descriptive words transcend their origins by taking on a greater meaning than the author's text, and thus start a life of their own? For example, the use of the word Dickensian summons up images of deprivation, dusty windows, cruelty, and gruel for tea, but is rarely used to describe being surprised by a series of phantoms in the wee small hours. The labelling of 'french fries' as 'freedom fries' in the wake of the invasion of Iraq is an Orwellian idea if ever there was one, alluding as it does to an attempt to control individual opinion, but not necessarily one specific to Mr Orwell's writings. And Kafkaesque can be applied readily to any situation involving confusing or unfeeling bureaucracy.

The obvious answer is that if an author becomes universally recognised, and their works represent an easily identifiable set of themes or circumstances (or a consistent worldview), then their name sometimes takes on a different significance and forms a more permanent part of the English language. Perhaps this is why this lexical evolution is more common among political figures and world leaders (in words such as Stalinist, Reaganomics, or Generation O[bama], for example), who by definition purport to stand for something greater than themselves.

Stranger than -fication
Any event that attracts media saturation provides a flurry of either completely new words or less-well-known words that become pushed to the forefront of the public consciousness. April had its fair share: the G20 summit brought attention to kettling (a method of policing that involves containment of large groups of people) and the G2 (political shorthand for the US and China, considered by many to have the most globally significant economies) while the press coverage of The First Lady's image prompted rampant adjectivization in the form of momification, Jackiefication, and Oprahfication. And the recent scandal over political emails vacillated between emailgate and smeargate as its designated title in the media, while also popularizing the phrase spad (an abbreviated form of special adviser).

New media coverage, blogging, and of course the Twitterverse mean these words are able to come into currency at a remarkable rate. Time will tell if these words become rooted in everyday English. We will be watching the corpus intently…

Duncan Black - Editor

March 2009

2009-03-16T15:34:00.010Z

Guilt-Free Snacking
When I was a kid, guilt-free, when applied to food, would most often mean 'diet'. I am a child of the 80s, when an emphasis on materialism and increased disposable income prompted many people to purchase 'diet', 'low-fat', 'non-fat', 'sugar-free', and 'light' versions of traditionally unhealthy products. Indeed, my house was so full of these products that I could only infer the 'unhealthy' versions existed by reverse-engineering the product name: if this was a tub of fat-free frozen yogurt, surely somewhere there must be some frozen yogurt that is not fat-free (it would be years before I could rustle up some real ice cream). The 'diet' products were all about trying to compromise a healthy lifestyle with pleasurable eating – or more accurately, reconciling our desire to look good with our desire for chocolate and/or beer: in other words, to have your cake and your figure too.

Twenty years later, a new class of specialized food has arisen to claim our disposable income (back when we had some, eighteen months ago): organic, free-range, fair-trade. In terms of corpus citations, organic has the lead, followed by diet and low-fat. Then come fair-trade and free-range neck-and-neck, both leaving fat-free, sugar-free and non-fat far, far behind.

While 'organic' foods have some overlap with the 'health-conscious' diet products of the 80s (organic foods are those produced without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, and thus perceived as being safer and healthier), free-range and fair-trade are different entities. Free-range refers exclusively to meat or animal products (like cheese and milk) and suggests the animals were allowed room to move around, not kept in high-density pens or batteries. 'Fair-trade' products are those which have been sourced from developing countries, especially coffee, tea, sugar, and chocolate – staples of the old Imperial Age – but which have been purchased directly from the growers at a guaranteed minimum price, instead of through 'middlemen' who keep the profit for themselves'.

These new trends, then, are not about health food, so much as 'ethical' food. Fair-trade products especially have no health benefits: the coffee and tea are still full of caffeine; the sugar is still sugar (not sugar 'light'); the chocolate is still chocolate (not carob or any 'healthy' chocolate substitute). The only thing fair-trade products will make lighter is your conscience.

Which brings back to guilt-free. A search of our corpus demonstrates that about 15% of citations for guilt-free refer to food. In all of these citations, guilt-free meant either a 'diet' version of a traditionally unhealthy product or an occasional wicked indulgence in a non-diet treat, with one exception: chocolate. Citations for guilt-free chocolate all seem to mean 'ethically sourced' or 'fair-trade' chocolate. I guess where this commodity is concerned, it's easier to cut the conscience than the calories.

Finger-Lickin' Good
Speaking of healthy food, who's up for something deep-fried and crispy? Fried foods may have been the biggest culinary casualty of the 1980s health craze, so much so that the popular fast-food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (one of the only high-profile business on course to increase jobs this year) unofficially changed its name to KFC just to avoid that poisonous word fried.

Deep-fried food is a staple of the cuisine of the Southern United States, especially the dish known as chicken-fried steak, which is a steak coated in seasoned flour and pan-fried. It resembles, but is not identical to the classic dish fried chicken. The difference in preparation led to the seemingly redundant chicken-fried chicken, which is chicken prepared like chicken-fried steak, rather than being breaded and deep-fried (the usual method for fried chicken). The breaded and deep-fried method can also be referred to as Southern-fried (because it is popular in the Southern U.S.) or country-fried (because the Southern U.S. tends to be a rural region).

The story doesn't end here, however. It seems fried food became so associated with the region that it can be a stand-in for any other aspect of U.S. Southern culture; thus all three of these hyphenated adjectives have a meaning beyond food, especially Southern-fried and country-fried. A search of the corpus shows that chicken-fried usually modifies steak or, less frequently, chicken, but there are also occurrences of non-culinary nouns, such as chicken-fried psyche and chicken-fried America.

Country-fried sometimes modifies steak or chicken, but occurs much more frequently in phrases like country-fried punks, country-fried kitsch, a country-fried White Stripes, or my personal favourite: country-fried neo-hippie acid-rock.

Citations for Southern-fried appear equally likely to describe either music (indicating a strong country/western influence) or the culture and politics of America's Deep South. It commonly modifies words like righteousness, conservatism, stereotype, and gentleman, but also rock, boogie, and jazz. Interestingly, Southern fried (without the hyphen) is more likely to describe food and less likely to describe music or culture than its hyphenated alternative.

Robert Groves - Editor

February 2009

2009-02-27T08:58:00.014Z

Lexploitation?
February's Friday the 13th has been and gone, but it coincided with a new arrival in the long-running series of Friday the 13th films, which are characterised by gory onscreen murders and crushingly predictable release dates. This latest instalment, however, flagged up a subtle shift in language (or, at least, marketing speak). No longer are cinematic series sustained by mere sequels; they are now dynamically re-energised by reboots, presumably in order to chime semantically with the marketeer-envisioned computing/gaming mindset of a younger audience. Perhaps this is not unreasonable, as they usually feature a younger cast. More dubiously, remakes are now reimaginings, implying that the auteur theory was considered when producing not only expensive blockbusters, but also less ambitious exploitation films.

The exploitation genre has intriguing etymological origins. Its main synonym is grindhouse, a term that dates as far back as the 1920s, and was so called after the more shabby cinemas dedicated to low-budget fare, featuring explicit content that the more upmarket venues could not offer. Exploitation cinema reached its peak in the 1970s, and while there may be little of interest to lexicography within, say, the 86 minutes of Shriek of the Mutilated (1974), the etymologies of the assorted subgenres (microgenres, even) covered by exploitation are worth investigating. Both splatter and slasher films have more guessable origins, but others are 'loan' words from foreign languages. These include mondo (meaning world, after the documentary Mondo Cane, which kickstarted a series of explicit documentaries — or shockumentaries, if you will — on tribal customs) and giallo (meaning yellow, from the yellow covers of the pulp crime novels providing inspiration, and often source material, for the films) from Italian. Meanwhile, Japanese provides chanbara (literally sword fighting, a less critically respected subset of jidaigeki, the period drama).

While some believe (mistakenly) that the word exploitation refers to advantage being taken of cast members, it actually has more to do with financial returns than oppression. As legendary exploitation producer Roger Corman would tell you, such films are purely commercial exercises, exploiting both their explicit content and a specific target audience. The most obvious example is Blaxploitation, aimed at African American audiences of the 1970s. Variants of the genre are easily identified by the use of the suffix -ploitation, and the Corpus throws up such examples as sexploitation (no imaginative leap required) or Mexploitation (a regional variant from Mexico). Rhyme is not a requirement, however, as shown by Ozploitation (from Down Under) or carsploitation (involving cars – you get the idea). More pertinently, the suffix -ploitation has escaped the grindhouse ghetto and is now used to describe any entertainment subgenre with a readily identifiable target audience. So, teensploitation has become established enough to spawn the even-more-youthful tweensploitation. The -ploitation suffix is now as associated with material tailored to an obvious demographic as is the suffix -gate with political scandal.

Perhaps dictionaries have cornered the lexploitation market?

Duncan Black - Editor

January 2009

2009-02-04T11:24:00.011Z

Porn reborn
Porn is everywhere. Not the flesh-coloured, top-shelf variety, although there is certainly a fair bit of that around – I'm talking about something much more exciting: the word itself. Porn is popping up in all sorts of unusual places, but these days people are using it to describe things farther and farther removed from sex. This linguistic perversion first came to our attention with property porn, which appeared in 2002 as journalistic shorthand for all that drooling over imposing Victorian semis, exposed bricks, and so on, that was so prevalent in the Sunday supplements. And just the other day I stumbled across its latest mutation when a critic dismissed Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's Dickensian blockbuster, as 'poverty porn'.

So, in the interests of lexical analysis I took a deep breath, had a quick glance left and right, and typed the word 'porn' into the Collins Corpus to see what other terms are placed immediately before it in today's English. At first the results seemed a bit of an anticlimax. The vast majority of examples were, as any sane person might expect, concerned with old-fashioned, maiden-aunt-offending pornography; the word one place to the left either set out the content of the porn in question, or the method of delivery. I need not go into details about the full range here, except to report that the most intriguing was character-driven. But closer inspection did reveal some unusual collocates in the property porn mould. It seems that in a modern broadsheet article you might come across bike porn and car porn (magazines and features about expensive consumer items), torture porn and gore porn (films such as the Saw series and Hostel), docu-porn and doom-porn (documentaries that portray natural disasters, physical deformities, etc, with morbid relish), and, topically, climate porn and financial porn (sensationalist doomsaying about the planet and its finances respectively).

What's going on? Ten years ago food porn meant Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, and maybe even Marlon Brando. Now it's Nigella and those breathy Marks and Spencer adverts. These days you could interpret kitchen porn any of three ways - and only one of them would plausibly involve nudity. Like all language change it's a gradual evolution. It's a simple enough leap from, say, a girlie magazine to property porn, with its glossy pictures of unattainable fantasy. Climate and financial porn are just borrowing the word's unsavoury reputation to suggest a sense of unhealthy and indecent relish in the subject, while the more visual poverty and docu-porn perhaps fall somewhere in between.

At the moment the Collins English Dictionary definition of pornography is strictly literal, but there's more than enough evidence for us to reword it to cover this figurative use.

There now, have I used the magic word enough times to improve our search-engine rating?

Cormac McKeown - Head of Content

December 2008

2008-12-18T14:34:00.007Z

X-cited about Xmas?
There are two things I can count on every Christmas: one, it will start earlier every year (soon we'll see decorations up in late January); and two, someone will tell me that "'Xmas' is not a word in the English language."

Well, there's not much I can do about the first problem, but perhaps I can come to the aid of Xmas. This common abbreviation is no lazy, modern coinage, but actually more venerable than many Xmas carols we will happily sing while wearing tissue cracker-crowns over a mug of mulled wine this year.

The common misconception – one that I myself was told as a child, along with that nonsense about Port Out Starboard Home – is that the X in Xmas represents the 'criss' part of criss-cross, thus imitating the first syllable of Christmas (the t, of course, being silent). This, it turns out, is simply not true.

In the first place, Xmas is a fairly old word. Citations for it go back to the mid-1500s. By contrast, the Xmas carol 'Jingle Bells' was copyrighted in 1857, while 'Away in a Manger' was first published in 1885.

The –mas element, in both Xmas and the full form Christmas, comes from the noun Mass, which is a religious service in some Christian sects, especially Roman Catholicism. It comes from the Latin noun missa, itself derived from the verb mittere, 'to send', possibly referring to the dismissal at the end of the Mass: Ite, missa est ('Go, it [the service] is dismissed'). Christ, of course, refers to the founder of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth, called Jesus Christ and regarded as the son of God by his followers. It, too, comes immediately from Latin (Christus), though its ultimate origin is Ancient Greek. So Christmas is the day on which a religious service is offered in honour of Christ.

The 'criss' in criss-cross is also derived from the name Christ and refers to the crucifixion (unlike the word Christmas, it has dropped its t, disguising its origin). But the criss-cross was originally a t-shaped cross, resembling that enduring symbol of Christianity, and not and x-shaped cross (like the St Andrews Cross). Given that criss-cross appears more than a century earlier than Xmas, we might expect the abbreviation to be 'T-mas', if the abbreviation were truly derived from the symbol.

Furthermore, the letter 'x' is already used in other common abbreviations to mean 'cross' (e.g. the word Xing on road signs in certain countries or King's X for 'King's Cross'). And an 'x' can be referred to as a cross, a criss-cross, but never just a criss.

But the real clincher is that the 'X' in Xmas is not actually the English letter 'x'. It is the Greek letter 'chi' (Χ), which looks nearly identical to an English x, and is the first letter of the Greek word 'Christos', which is the Ancient Greek origin of the word Christ. The letter Chi has been used as an abbreviation of 'Christ' for about a millennium. So the form Xmas as a shortening of Christmas is venerable, logical, and religiously orthodox.

Now, playing that Band Aid song in October…that's a mortal sin.

Robert Groves - Editor

October 2008

2008-11-07T11:54:00.008Z

New words falling like leaves
Autumn is upon us, and nothing shakes the neologisms tree like a stiff breeze from the zeitgeist. The month of October has seen a particularly heavy fall, what with a US presidential election and an unprecedented economic meltdown in the headlines. And we at Collins must grab our rakes to sort through the pile...

From the political sphere, we have various soundbite-friendly buzzwords including Obamacons (formerly conservative voters backing Barack Obama), the axis of diesel (used in reference to oil-rich countries perceived as politically opposed to the US), and LIVs (low information voters, a nice way to describe less politically aware members of the electorate). Political candidates were also wary of an October surprise (a revelation or scandal close to the election that could derail a campaign).

The recent economic woes have turned up a baffling array of acronymic oddities such as CDSs (credit default swaps), TARP (the Troubled Assets Relief Programme, as introduced by the US government to stimulate the economy), and the TED spread (me neither). This sort of jargon was limited formerly to the financial world, but is now being pored over in the media, as people try to establish what went wrong. Good luck to them.

Other terrifyingly opaque terms entering the mainstream include stat arb (statistical arbitrage, an equity trading strategy that identifies relative mispricings between stocks) and rehypothecation (When money is lent to hedge funds, the funds must put up collateral. This collateral may in turn be used as security for the hedge fund's loans. Got it? Excellent.) And, if the downturn continues, we should hope for a V-shaped recession (i.e. a short-lived one, from the shape of a brief dip on a plotted graph) rather than one that is L-shaped (again from the shape of a graph, but this time a sharp fall followed by a flat line).

Brand awareness
Collins English Dictionary defines this as "the extent to which consumers are aware of a particular product or service". But what happens when a brand becomes so successful it enters everyday speech? One example is the controversy surrounding Google's objection to the use of their product's name as a verb in common speech. In essence, their preferred use was as a noun, i.e. performing a Google search rather than googling a person or a thing. The process by which a trademark is so successful it becomes synonymous with its associated product is known as genericide, and many have become victims of their own success in this manner. Not only have trademarks become verbs (Hoover, Xerox) but also generic nouns (Kleenex, Frisbee, Viagra). Other less well-known examples are Heroin (originally registered by pharmaceutical company Bayer, since lapsed, as has Aspirin), Swiss Army Knife (a trademark of Victorinox) and Vaseline (trademarked by Unilever).

Building up an established brand is no simple process. It takes time, effort, and expense, and any organisation going to these lengths would not wish to see the results fall into non-proprietary use by the man on the Clapham omnibus. Fair enough. On the other hand, it is an even more difficult task to control language itself, and organisations wishing to protect their intellectual property risk "doing a Canute" in their attempt to hold back the tide. There is some dispute over the intentions behind Canute's tale: was it a deliberate, dramatic demonstration of man's futility (and a King's humility) in the face of matters cosmic, or an exercise in hubris and crushing failure? If the late King's estate had wished to create a Canute brand, I suspect they would be keen to promote it as being associated more with the former (wisdom and knowledge: perhaps Canute life-coaching seminars?) than the latter (a red face and soggy chainmail socks).

Duncan Black - Editor

September 2008

2008-09-22T14:38:00.006+01:00

Double or quits
The spell-checker has become an integral part of modern life, but it still has its limitations. We have all had the experience of typing in a word we know to be spelled correctly (say, thematization) only to have it underlined in red by Microsoft. Less familiar is when the spell-checker recognizes and accepts two different spellings of the same word, leaving the writer to choose the 'correct' one. This, it was recently pointed out to me, is the case with the past tense of the verb focus. Microsoft (and, indeed, many dictionaries, including Collins titles) will permit you to write/type either focused or focussed. Can it be that both these spellings are actually correct? The short answer is, yes. In British English at least, either spelling is acceptable. The long answer is more complicated.

Most writing guides (including the Collins Good Writing Guide) will tell you that you should only double a consonant before a suffix like -ed or -ing if the word satisfies a series of complicated and easily forgettable conditions like:
a) ending in a single consonant
b) having a single vowel before the final consonant
c) either being a monosyllable or having a stressed final syllable
Thus tip becomes tipped and tipping, commit becomes committed and committing; but we have marketing and not marketting, revealed and not revealled. Focus does end in a single consonant preceded by a single vowel, but the first, not the last, syllable is stressed. By this logic, only focused and focusing should be acceptable. So why do spell-checkers approve both spellings?

Well, English is a language with nearly as many exceptions as rules and this is especially true of English spelling. Focussed and focussing are simply acceptable variants of focused and focusing. If, however, you demand a criterion to judge which spelling is more 'correct', it may interest you to know that focussed and focussing are the earlier spellings. The word was originally only a noun (with plural foci). The verb first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, when its present and past participles are both spelled with a double s. On the other hand, the single s spellings are the more modern, conforming as they do to three rules cited above. They are also the internationally accepted standard spelling (the double s is restricted to British English). For example, if you set your spell-checker to U.S. English, the focussed and focussing should both be marked as incorrect.

Still confused? We thought so.

Save a tree
Spell-checkers are just one of the many peculiarities of modern writing – or should I say 'word-processing'? What's the difference? Well, the verb write is a native English word, ultimately derived from Old English writan (both the w and the r are pronounced), and its original meaning was 'to scratch', specifically 'to scratch runes into the bark of a tree'. The original speakers of Old English were a continental Germanic tribe, and like all other German peoples of their time, they had only a runic alphabet. This alphabet was not used for writing down long passages of continuous prose or poetry. Rather it was used for things like marking boundaries and territories, say by carving initials into the bark of a tree or into a large, immovable rock. Writing in the (more) modern sense of setting pen to paper (or stylus to parchment) was introduced to Anglo-Saxon society by Christian missionaries, who also brought the Roman alphabet (Latin being the language of the Church). The Anglo-Saxons simply adapted the meaning of their verb writan to suit the new practice.

Nowadays we do most of our 'writing' on a computer, pressing keys on a keyboard to produce electronic reproductions of letters on a somewhat irritating, glowing white screen. We are also discouraged from producing hard copies of what we have 'written' unless absolutely necessary so that we might 'save a tree', thus pulling the modern act of writing even further away from the original sense of carving angular runic symbols in tree-bark.

Robert Groves - Editor

August 2008

2008-08-18T10:47:00.011+01:00

bespoke adj chiefly Brit 1 (esp of clothing or a website, computer program, etc) made to the customer's specifications 2 making such products: a bespoke tailor

As editors of the Collins English Dictionary, we try to be open-minded about the development of our mother tongue. We do our best to welcome change as the sign of a growing language in rude health. And while I've yet to hear anyone in the team talk about leveraging one thing or architecting the other, this sort of stuff is generally noted with interest rather than irritation. But we wouldn't be human if one or two words didn't rub us up the wrong way. Until recently, my personal bugbear was the ubiquitous use of the word bespoke outside the world of high-end tailoring. To tell the truth, there was even something annoying about it in its 'proper' sartorial context.

So I had to put my prejudice aside for a while when a journalist called to get a lexicographic slant on the word, for an article about a legal spat on Savile Row. A group of traditional 'bespoke' tailors had tried to stop a less well-established gentlemen's outfitter from describing their suits and their service as bespoke too. Their gripe was that, while the younger company did take customers' measurements in the normal way, they then used computerized machines – rather than scissors, needle, and thread – to cut and stitch the cloth. A bespoke suit, they argued, had to be made entirely by hand. The Advertising Standards Agency, however, didn't agree. They ruled that, at bottom, bespoke simply meant 'made to order', and that the Savile Row tailors (and, by extension, people like me) were clinging to their own outdated and too-narrow definition.

Nowadays, my new favourite word is used to describe anything that can be made to a customer's specifications, be it a cake, a holiday, or a huge industrial smelter. Indeed the Collins Bank of English, our huge database of real-life examples of modern English, shows that bespoke now has a stronger relationship, statistically speaking, with the words application, solution, and database than it does with suit, shirt, or shoe. 'The idiots are winning', I thought as the figures came on screen, but when I looked into the history of the term I was surprised to discover that in 1755, a good century before the denizens of Savile Row and Jermyn Street made it their own, bespoke was being applied to something as incorporeal as a play, written to order. And a play has as at least much in common with a website, a database, or even, God help us, a solution, as it does with a poplin shirt.

Greivous errers
Punctuation was all the rage a couple of years ago, but the hot linguistic topic of the moment seems to be spelling, and two stories in the papers last week illustrated polar views on it. The first concerned a professor of criminology appealing for a simplification of English spellings, so fed up was he with correcting the same errors again and again in his students' essays and exam scripts. His contention was that we should start to accept common misspellings as variants rather than mistakes – truely for truly, and so on – with the aim of establishing more easily followed conventions. An interesting idea, but not a popular one, at least if the letters pages of the broadsheets are to be believed.

In 1828 Noah Webster, the father of American lexicography, tried with some success to iron out some of the idiosyncrasies of English spelling with his American Dictionary of English Spelling, but even he only scratched the surface. There are still plenty of throughs, toughs and woulds in US English. My feeling is that, even if you'd want to risk losing some of the charm and precision of our great language, it's too late to try to impose any new rules on it – it's too big, too fluid for that. Spellings will change, as will grammar, but it will be down to evolution rather than engineering.

In the second of the week's orthographic stories, Judge David Paget came down firmly on the other side of the argument (or arguement?) in the Old Bailey. He angrily declared a court official who had repeatedly misspelled the word grievous to be an "illiterate idiot". A bit harsh, surely. In sympathy with the illiterate idiot, I've compiled a list of very common words that the Bank of English tells us are often misspelled, even in the broadsheets:

broccoli
camouflage
cinnamon
desiccate
diarrhoea
exaggerate
haemorrhage
impresario
inoculate
Mediterranean
millennium
reconnaissance
resuscitate
sacrilegious
silhouette

Cormac McKeown - Senior Editor

July 2008

2008-07-22T15:08:00.007+01:00

The -ize have it
One of the things I'll be doing in this blog is to discuss topics that I get asked about over and over again. One of these questions came up again this month – the perennial issue of whether words such as 'organize' and 'realize' should be spelt with '-ise' or '-ize'.

Most people in Britain are taught at school to use the '-ise' spelling, so it comes as a surprise to find that Collins (along with all other leading dictionaries) opts for '-ize' as the primary spelling form – although both are regarded as acceptable. One of the reasons for showing the '-ize' forms first is that this reflects the international consensus about the spelling. But it is not just a question of the creeping Americanization of English. This suffix has its origins in Greek, where the letter zeta (Z) was used instead of sigma (S). The Z form is also found in Latin, and it was only when the words moved into French that the S form took precedence. So there is also a good historical case for giving precedence to '-ize'.

Pot luck
One of the rewards of dictionary editing is that you frequently come across odd little facts and coincidences about language. Earlier this week I was looking at the word 'chytrid', which is a type of fungus that can be fatal to frogs, and which comes from a Greek word meaning 'little pot'. While working on this I was pleased to stumble across two completely unrelated words that also mean 'little pot' in their original languages: 'kettle', which comes from the Latin catillus, and 'poteen', which comes from the Irish poitín. It's little things like this that keep you going in this job.

Jargon-busting
Few months go by without some person railing against the creeping use of jargon in English. However, it might be worth reflecting that although everyone gets annoyed when they encounter difficult language that is difficult to understand, jargon (in its primary sense of 'specialized language concerned with a particular subject, culture, or profession') can actually be very useful. It allows extremely precise instructions to be issued and acted on in a short time – medical staff in an emergency room or soldiers about to storm a building would be in trouble if they had not developed specific shorthand to describe complex actions and equipment quickly. It can also be useful in certain situations to discover whether or not a person has the skills and experience he says he has. It also fosters a sense of unity within a team. I think jargon becomes undesirable only when it is used to communicate with people outside the group that developed it, as often happens when specialists are asked to explain their actions to a wider public.

So to round off this month's blog, here are a few examples of jargon that have escaped into everyday English and become widely embraced:

AWOL absent without leave (originally military jargon)

Bilge rubbish (originally naval jargon referring to foul water collecting at the bottom of a ship)

Blighty Britain (from a Hindi word for 'foreign', originally used in the phrase 'a blighty one' meaning a wound which necessitated a soldier's return home from India)

Blue-chip something considered a valuable asset (from stock-exchange jargon for the most reliable type of share, which in turn comes from the colour used to signify the highest value of chips in gambling)

Des res a desirable place to live (originally estate agents' jargon)

Grog alcoholic drink (originally naval slang, from Old Grog, the nickname of Edward Vernon, an 18th-century admiral who issued naval rum diluted with water)

Sticky wicket a difficult situation (originally cricketing jargon, referring to a pitch made difficult after rain)

Tweak to adjust slightly (originally journalistic jargon, referring to making slight changes to another writer's copy)

Ian Brookes - Managing Editor - English Dictionaries & Thesauruses

www.collinsdictionary.com