On the heels of my little note on “Manly Deeds, Womanly Words” (a comment from John Baker notes that this is “the motto of the Calvert family “Fatti maschii parole femine” loosely translated [from Italian] as “Manly deeds, womanly words” ”) came two more items on male/female differences: a piece in the NYT Sunday Review on the 21st (“The Tangle of the Sexes” by Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis); and an Alex cartoon in the London Telegraph on men as rational, women as emotional.
Archive for the ‘Innovations’ Category
On the sex / gender watch
April 24, 2013Today’s useless portmanteau
January 9, 2013Every so often I post on dubious, regrettable, and even pointless portmanteaus; as I said in “More dubious portmanteaus” (here),
The world of portmanteaus is crowded with playful formations that are unlikely to survive for long (Higgsteria), including many that are just for ostentatious display (Piranhaconda and Sharktopus). Then there are those that appear to be meant to be useful, but are awkward and unlikely to succeed: for instance the dubious portmanteaus Innovatrium, womance (and femily), and twunk. Two more have recently been logged on ADS-L: mediot(s) and preglimony.
(And since then, Ab-vengers.) Now, in today’s Scenes From a Multiverse: (archive copy here):
Lawsages: useless in any context.
Generalized word rage
June 1, 2012A new comment on “Dubious portmanteaus” (from last July):
I know this is an older article but I was just thinking today how much I hate portmanteaus. I hate ‘fandom’ and ‘cosplay’. I also hate the word ‘kidlet’, although I’m not entirely certain that it is a genuine portmanteau. I asked some friends who are parents and they seemed to think it is a combination of kid and piglet.
Two things here: the rage at a whole class of words (in this case, at portmanteaus in general), and the three specific examples that set off the commenter’s rage: fandom, cosplay, and kidlet.
Lexical gap filled!
May 30, 2012Question: Given that an event that is depicted in a movie (or television show) is said to have happened on-screen, how do you refer to an event that is depicted in a comic strip?
Lexicosexual note: throuple
May 4, 2012Noted yesterday: the innovation throuple (based on couple), to describe a romantic or sexual threesome, triple, or triad.
Anniversaries
April 20, 2012Chris Ambidge wrote to report a mailing from the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, celebrating its ten-year anniversary; on-line story here. Chris would have said tenth anniversary, and found ten-year anniversary redundant (like PIN number, he said), because ‘year’ is already contained in anniversary. This is one of two complaints about the usage of anniversary: the perceived pleonasm of n-year anniversary. The other complaint is about the perceived contradiction in n-span anniversary for spans other than year, especially month (one-month anniversary, six-month anniversary, six-week anniversary) — again, because ‘year’ is contained in anniversary. The second complaint seems to be the older one; it’s the only one reported in MWDEU (in 1989).
The second innovation presumably arose from a weakening appreciation of the etymology of anniversary, so that the word can be extended to recurring spans of time other than a year (though the default span of time was still a year). Then people began supplying year, for clarity, giving us things like ten-year anniversary, as distinct from ten-month anniversary and ten-week anniversary.
And the complaints piled up.
Grammandos and more
March 5, 2012From yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, in the “One-Page Magazine”, Lizzie Skurnick’s regular “That Should Be a Word” feature, appropriate for National Grammar Day:
GRAMMANDO
(Gruh-MAN-doh), n., adj.
1. One who constantly corrects others’ linguistic mistakes. “Cowed by his grammando wife, Arthur finally ceased saying ‘irregardless.’ ” See also: Dictaplinarian (enforces correct pronunciation); Spellot (takes a red pen to all documents).
Fiction rule of thumb
January 23, 2012One more cartoon, and then I have to get on with the rest of my life. This xkcd is from a comment by Army1987 on the Language Log posting “Create a language, go to jail” (here):
A lot of invented vocabulary is certainly a barrier to literary appreciation — and so is a lot of foreign-language vocabulary. Conlang or natural language, lots of unfamiliar vocabulary puts readers off.
(I’m not sure about Randall Munroe’s attitude towards the inflected comparative awesomer; it’s easy to find examples, but many of them are jocular and Munroe might be treating them as non-standard innovations.)
non3
October 10, 2011From the October 8th Economist, the piece “From prison to jail”, which begins:
MIRED in fiscal crisis and usually deemed dysfunctional, California under Governor Jerry Brown has nonetheless surprised itself this year with one big reform. Starting this month, it has begun to send people newly convicted of crimes that are non-violent, non-sexual and non-serious, or “non3” in the jargon, to jails, which are run by county sheriffs (and are normally used as pre-sentencing holding pens), instead of prisons, run by the state.
The innovation here is the abbreviation non3 (non3 in the print version).
The velocitized Toad
September 30, 2011Today’s Zippy, with a speeded-up Mr. (the) Toad:
Velocitize isn’t a Bill Griffith innovation, but it hasn’t been around for a very long time.