In the NYT Magazine on Sunday, a photo feature on noodling, specifically the Okie Noodling Tournament. I’d been aware of catfish noodling (that’s ‘noodling for catfish’, not ‘noodling by catfish’), but I don’t recall having seen pictures of noodlers before. Of course, my interest was piqued by the term noodling — where did it come from? — and by other non-obvious uses of a verb noodle, such as the one in “I wasn’t really playing the piano, I was just noodling around”. As I should have expected, these musings quickly took me into murky waters (of the sort where catfish live).
Archive for the ‘Innovations’ Category
noodling
September 9, 2011Reversed blame
August 27, 2011It started on the 18th with Barara Partee’s doing a double-take (in Facebook) on this headline she read in Yahoo! News:
Obama blames Congress Republicans on bus tour
She read it (as did I) as involving blame (A):
(A) blame RESULT on SOURCE
Eventually I came to see another possible argument structure for the headline (in addition to (A) and the intended reading).
Highway whateverism
August 17, 2011A recent Bizarro with an instance of “stand-alone whatever“, a.k.a. “free-standing whatever“, “discourse marker whatever“, and “dismissive whatever“:
This usage is relatively recent, and is stereotypically (but not entirely accurately) associated with young people — airheaded girls and slacker boys (earlier discussion on this blog in “Dudetalk in the Arctic”, with another Bizarro cartoon, here).
happenly
July 29, 2011Another report from Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook:
“If you happenly want to convert …”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “happenly” before, but it seems potentially quite useful.
Loinfruit
May 26, 2011Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky ranted in Facebook a while back, when Mothers Day loomed:
As a breeder, let me go on record as saying get over it already and stop turning my ability to produce loin fruit [she meant to type “loinfruit”] into an excuse to plaster the world with commercialized guilt and stereotyping.
First, there’s breeder, which has two salient senses here (both applicable to Elizabeth): ‘a heterosexual’ and ‘someone who has had a child’. But her posting was noticed mainly for its use of loinfruit ‘child, children’, which was new for some readers and struck them as inventive and entertaining.
Elizabeth was in fact using an expression she had learned some years ago on the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss. She and I picked it up from Gwendolyn Alden Dean, who referred to her son as “the loinfruit”. So I asked about the expression on the Facebook descendant of the newsgroup and got the local history of the expression.
On the innovation watch
May 21, 2011After more than a month, the major part of the response to my most recent plumbing diaster is over: the deconstruction (including the many dramatic hours of jack-hammering and concrete-sawing) came to an end, and this week the reconstruction succeeded (quite admirably, I must say), leaving only a day or so’s work of putting the furnishings back in place.
But I found reconstruction a pallid word for the process of undoing demolition. And then I remembered the occasion, back in 1999, when my friends Mike and Sim were faced with a bathroom renovation and Mike came up with a nice lexical innovation.
Two libfixes sharing a spelling
April 18, 2011On Nancy Friedman’s Fritinancy blog on April 13, a posting on the libfix -nomics, taking off from the headline “Flawed Tigernomics”, about Tiger Woods’s foundering golf-course business. Friedman remarks that
“-nomics” continues to be the go-to suffix for every trend in search of a pseudo-scientific reason for being.
and goes on to cite a slew of –nomics words (well, -((o)n)omics words) that have sprung from economics over 50-plus years, all having something to do with economics, money, business, or accounting. The publication of Freakonomics in 2005 triggered an avalanche of fresh coinings — Geckonomics, Socialnomics, Spousonomics, Emotionomics, newsonomics, and so on — using the ‘money’ libfix, which is pronounced with /a/ in the penultimate syllable. (Ben Zimmer has a collection of examples here.)
Meanwhile, a separate libfix developed from the model genomics, ‘ the study of organisms in terms of their full DNA sequences, or genomes‘ (from Ben Zimmer’s Word Routes column on the coinage culturomics; Language Log discussion here). There’s even a Wikipedia page on -omics coinages in biology. But culturomics ‘the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture’ takes the libfix — which is pronounced with /o/ in the penultimate syllable — in a new direction.
Spelling your neologisms
April 14, 2011Over on Facebook, Michael Thomas posted on my wall with two words he’d invented (claiming that his husband Aric said he had to tell me — I’m the go-to guy on language — about them):
Approxomathmatics: the study of close enough; see ‘government work’
Approxomattox — somewhere around Pennsylvania
I queried the spelling of the first, suggesting approxomathematics (since it preserves the spelling of one contributor to the portmanteau, mathematics), though on reflection I think approximathematics would be even better (since it preserves as much as possible of the other contributor, the adjective approximate).
Mike objected, asking if it was bad to misspell your own neologism, indeed if it was even possible.
as far as us is concerned
March 14, 2011Overheard at my local Gordon Biersch restaurant a few days ago:
as far as us is concerned, …
Strikingly ungrammatical for me. But I think I’ve figured out where it comes from.
What’s the word for this?
January 15, 2011What do you call a man who identifies himself as straight but nevertheless has sex with other men? Well, it turns out there are several different cases.