Here’s the situation: you have a man who made something of a career of helping others, especially kids (president of the father’s club at his son’s elementary school, pack master for a scout troop), but also counseling women who are victims of abuse. How do you refer to this role?
Archive for the ‘Innovations’ Category
How to say this?
October 21, 2010Brevity plus
February 15, 2010That’s the title of an abstract of mine that was just accepted for delivery at the Stanford SemFest (#11) on March 12. And here’s the abstract. Remember that it’s just an abstract; it’s also missing references to discussions of the phenomena (though readers of this blog will recognize some of them).
Brevity plus
The innovation and spread of lexical items very often is favored by considerations of brevity: items are invented by some people and adopted by others because they are more compact than earlier expressions. (And for some reasons not having to do with formal considerations: they have the virtue of novelty, suggesting fashion, ostentatious cleverness, or playfulness; and they usually have the virtue of contextual or social specificity, via ties to specific contexts, like sports, journalism, business, radio/television, the tech world, gaming, etc., or to specific social groups, like young people, Australians, women, etc.)
But these innovations also frequently (perhaps almost always) have the virtue of semantic/pragmatic specificity. The innovations usually allow for shadings of meaning that are fuzzed over in the older expressions (which, typically, have radiated and generalized in their meanings over the years). This point is scarcely a new one, but it tends to be buried by usage writers and language peevers who are hostile to innovations and treat them as “unnecessary”.
Here I look mostly at category conversions in English, in particular zero conversions and subtractive conversions (back-formations), concentrating on plain nounings (a disconnect vs. a disconnection), plain verbings (to extinct vs. to make extinct, drive to extinction), simple back-formations of verbs (to incent vs. to provide an incentive), and two-part back-formations of verbs (to cheerlead vs. to serve as a cheerleader). The larger point is that people have good (if unconscious) reasons for creating and adopting such innovations.
I look at several case studies, including that of the simple nouning an ask, which has been innovated several times in several very different senses over the years.
-ground-
January 17, 2010Susan Dominus, “A Teenager’s Protest March, Mighty but Strictly Virtual” (NYT, January 16), reports on 15-year-old Tess Chapin’s campaign to be released from parental grounding (for five weeks, for “drinking at a party and missing her 11:30 curfew by an hour”). The campaign is entirely electronic — carried on in a Facebook group she created for the purpose. Dominus’s story quotes two bits of morphological inventiveness, the verb unground and the noun groundation.
The Facebook group is called “1000 to get tess ungrounded”. On it, she pleads, “please join so I can convince them [her parents] to unground me. please please please.” Here we have reversative un- creatively deployed, not a great surprise in a world that already has the verb unfriend (built on the verb friend).
And she refers to her grounding as her “groundation”, attaching the complex abstract-noun-forming suffix -ation to the verb ground. There are many models for this: ferment-ation, present-ation, quot-ation ‘act of quoting’, permut-ation, detest-ation, etc. What makes ground-ation stand out is that the verb ground is so clearly from the “Anglo-Saxon” stratum of the vocabulary rather than the “Latinate” stratum (including words that came to English via French). One result of this is that groundation is noticeable as an innovation, and also somewhat playful in character.
(Note that there are often subtle differences in meaning and use between the nominal gerund V-ing and the derived noun V-ation. These might carry over to grounding vs. groundation.)
A note on the verb ground as used in the NYT story. The noun ground has been verbed many times since Middle English. A relatively recent verbing is in the sense ‘keep on the ground, prevent an aircraft, pilot, etc. from flying’, attested in OED2 from 1931 on, with a metaphorical extension (originally U.S.) to the sense ‘confine (a child) to his or her home outside school hours, as a punishment’ (OED draft addition of May 2003, with cites from 1953 on).
As for Tess, her impassioned plea argues against her groundation in terms that should be familiar to anyone who’s dealt with teenagers or watched episodes of the television series 7th Heaven:
how much genuine remorse she had already expressed, her inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, other parents’ more lax standards, the injustice of so heavy a punishment for a first-time offense.
Hasta la vista, -ista!
January 4, 2010The end of one year and the beginning of the next provides an occasion for people to write about their faves and their hates. It’s an odd custom, but there it is. Mixed in with reviews of movies, books, and music, you can find a lot of peeving about language.
And here’s a hybrid, with peeving about fashion trends mixed in with peeving about language: a photo feature in the Image section of the L.A. Times on “Fashion terms and trends to retire with 2009”, among them formations in -ista:
While we’re tackling tired terminology, how about a permanent moratorium on any more cute “-istas”? The suffix that refuses to die lumbers on like a zombie in the zeitgeist. Once there were only baristas, Sandanistas and fashionistas, but the ranks have since swelled to include recessionistas, frugalistas, bargainistas and even a “foodinista.” (OK, we actually like the last one, it’s the title of a blog that muses on food and fashion. It’s a perfect fit there, but that’s as far as we’ll go.) Instead, going forward (and let’s retire “going forward” while we’re at, shall we?), we’d like to suggest appending the more professional-sounding: “ist.” Fashionists, frugalists and bargainists sound like folks we’d want on our team in 2010.
The peeve is illustrated with a photo of Sacha Baron Cohen as “supposed fashionista Brüno”:
(Hat tip to Victor Steinbok.)
(I doubt that many people who use fashionista and the like would accept the -ist versions as replacements.)
Michael Quinion did a World Wide Words item on the word in 2000 (March 4), beginning:
This is a gently sarcastic term for a person who is an enthusiast for fashion. It covers not only the dedicated followers of fashion who wear the clothes, but also those who write about them. And it can refer to those who design, make, model and publicise clothes, and the fashion buyers whose decisions determine the success of a collection.
I’m told by researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary that it goes back to 1993, to a book by Stephen Fried entitled Thing of Beauty: the Tragedy of Supermodel Gia. The word began to become more widely popular from about 1998 onwards, has just started to appear in dictionaries, and looks set to become a permanent part of the language.
The OED then composed a draft entry (of September 2002) for the word, marking it as colloquial (and oiginally North American) and noting that it is “sometimes depreciative“. The definition there:
A person employed in the creation or promotion of high fashion, as a designer, photographer, model, fashion writer, etc. Also: a devotee of the fashion industry; a wearer of high-fashion clothing.
(with cites beginning with the 1993 Fried quote).
OED2 (1989) does have a fashionist entry, with the definition:
A follower of the fashions; one who conforms to the prevailing style of dress; a fashion-monger.
and cites from 1616 through 1850 (but nothing more recent than that).
Short shot #32: walking on water
December 25, 2009In the holiday issue of New Scientist, a piece by Paul Collins on the history of water-walking (“Take a walk on the wet side”, pp. 36-7), beginning with the story of Charles W. Oldrieve, who was in 1907 (when he walked down the Mississippi) the “world’s pre-eminent aquatic pedestrian”. At one point in his career, he vanished. Collins writes:
Some assumed he had drowned: after all, humans are poorly designed for aquatic pedestrianism.
I was tickled by “aquatic pedestrian” ‘water walker’ and “aquatic pedestrianism” ‘water walking’, with the non-predicating adjective aquatic.
(Water-walking has a long and complex history, continuing to the present day. People are still designing devices for walking on water. And in 1988 Remy Bricka took 40 days to walk from the Canary Islands to Trinidad.)
The hiney virus
November 14, 2009A few days ago, a friend mentioned the /hájni/ virus, referring to the H1N1 flu virus, but treating “H1N1” as if it were a piece of leetspeak, with the numeral 1 standing for the letter I, the whole thing pronounced like the North American slang word for ‘buttocks’ (a shortened variant of behind, in combination with the suffix -y). There’s even a t-shirt (and a sweatshirt), on sale here:
The t-shirt uses one of the variant spellings of the buttocks word. The OED entry (draft of December 2006) for the word (which notes that it’s frequently a euphemistic substitute for ass and has cites from 1922 on) gives four spellings: heinie, heiny, hiney, and hinie. Though the OED treats heinie as the main spelling, when the buttocks word appears in combination with virus and flu, the hiney spelling (as on the t-shirt) is by far the most frequent in Google hits. The ordering of the OED‘s spelling variants is the same for X virus and X flu: hiney first, then (well behind it) heinie, then hinie, then heiny. In addition, there are some occurrences of the spellings heiney and hiny.
housemade
October 29, 2009On the menu at my local Gordon Biersch restaurant: housemade pretzels.
Housemade for older home-made (or homemade) seems to be sweeping U.S. restaurant menus, though it doesn’t seem to have made it into any of the standard dictionaries yet; and if you search for it, Google suggests you meant homemade; and the English-Test.net site flatly labels it as an error in English grammar.
Literalists have long complained about home-made on menus, on the grounds that it means ‘made at home, made in someone’s home’ and so shouldn’t be used for food that is prepared in a restaurant’s kitchens (much less for something brought in from elsewhere, made it a factory, or bought in a store); this is the meaning given in most dictionaries. Nonetheless, an extended use for ‘made in-house’ has been around for some time.
The innovation housemade serves to convey this meaning clearly. But it also provides a cachet lacking in the homely and amateur-sounding home-made. So, despite the fact that a fair number of people find it pretentious (to judge from comments on the web), housemade is steadily advancing.
Andrew Romano looked at the word for Newsweek this spring (“House Sweet House”, on-line on May 22, in the magazine on June 1) and reported:
Behold “housemade”: the artisanal adjective that has yet to appear in Merriam-Webster but is suddenly materializing on menus across the nation, often where a humble “home-made” used to be. In Brooklyn, restaurants such as the Michelin-starred Dressler rarely deign to serve dishes not described as housemade: housemade gnocchi with morel ragout ($15); cheddar burger with housemade pickles ($13.50); housemade pecan sticky buns ($4); and, lest the liquor feel left out, a cocktail with house-infused orange vodka ($11). According to Menupages.com, 244 New York restaurants now boast housemade (or “house-made”) fare, and the eateries of Los Angeles (118), Washington, D.C. (112), Chicago (79), South Florida (62), Boston (57) and Philadelphia (56) don’t lag by much. In San Francisco, the term has nearly outpaced homemade (192 to 176).
Home-made is of course still available for a contrast with store-bought, especially with reference to non-food items: homemade soap, laundry detergent, garden sprays, weed killer, solar power, wind generators, stun guns, and much more.
publicate
October 16, 2009Ian Frazier, in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece “Scratch and Sniff” (October 19, p. 30), about police dogs that sniff out cell phones:
Captain Matthew Kyle: “We don’t want to publicate what the cell-phone smell is exactly. It’s an organic substance that’s in all cell phones–leave it at that.”
What caught my eye was the verb publicate ‘make public, advertise’ (a verbing of the adjective public via suffixation with -ate), which I didn’t recall having seen before. Was it a recent innovation?
Well, you probably know where this story is going to go now.
Meme hybrid alert
August 25, 2009Although in my posting on portmanteaus I declared that I wasn’t collecting them — there are just too many, and new ones are invented every day — here’s what I think is an interesting new one, from Virginia Heffernan’s NYT Magazine piece (of August 23) “The Feminist Hawks”:
Like many conservatives, [David] Horowitz appears to have come to feminist-hawkism after 9/11. But in his hands, the ideology has fast became a tenacious memebrid — as Tim Hwang, a sociologist and the director of the Web Ecology Project, calls memes that unite two or more cultural phenomena.
“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere,” he wrote. Furthermore, to depict Islamic regimes less as terrorists than as repressors of civil liberties may appeal even to traditional isolationists, as it “plays off of the strong communities of libertarians that dominate some prominent spaces.”
Now memebrid is a portmanteau, a kind of hybrid, but the memebrid in question, feminist hawk ‘hawk who is a feminist’, is not. Instead, it’s an instance of a different scheme for combining two words to make a new word: compounding. (The OED entry for portmanteau makes the connection between the two phenomena explicit.) A compound has a dual nature: it is a word, but it also consists of two words in sequence; it has an internal structure.
In some portmanteaus, one of the contributing words appears intact (and the other appears only in abbreviated form); this is the case for memebrid, where meme appears intact, while hybrid is shortened to -brid. But many portmanteaus — brunch, spork — have both contributing words abbreviated (br- + -unch, sp- + -ork).
Still other portmanteaus have both contributors intact, but overlapping: bromance is bro + romance, with -ro- shared (in pronunciation and in spelling); the corresponding compound would be bro romance. In fact, there’s often overlapping in portmanteaus in general: Billary is Bill + Hillary, with shared -ill-; Scalito is Scalia + Alito, with shared -ali-. (Overlapping is a property these portmanteaus have in common with one large class of inadvertent blends, called “splice blends” in the literature: originary is original + ordinary, with shared -in-.)
No overlapping in memebrid, however.
A grow
August 23, 2009A New York Times story (“Deep in California Forests, An Illicit Business Thrives”, by Jesse McKinley, 8/22/09) tells us about Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department officers hunting for
… workers at one of the scores of remote, highly organized outdoor marijuana “grows” that dot the vast forests of California, largely on federal property.
Of course, I picked up on the nouning grow (a count noun meaning, roughly, ‘plot of land under cultivation for a crop’). And was shocked, shocked to realize that the English language had no word for this concept — no “word”, in the sense ‘ordinary-language fixed expression of some currency’ (see discussion here). Appalling! What simple creatures English speakers must be, able to make specific distinctions — fields, vineyards, (rice) paddies, orchards, gardens, (pot) grows, etc. — but hobbled by their inability to conceive of the overarching abstraction! But that’s the way of primitive peoples. (more…)