English Matters

When I saw this morning that EM was updated, my heart raced to check if Ansuya has returned. Alas! Don't take that as I was disappointed to see "you". But you know how we would jump with excitement, knock a champagne and barbecue king prawns if Ansuya was to return.

Back to you. Rihana, you meant headlines specifically here in this thread or generally in media. I am assuming latter because this thread has been dead for months.

"filmi geet" interests me because I'm leery how these native words are imported on global turf. Is that "t" in "geet" hard "t" as in /true/ or soft "t" as in /thin/. When Avatar was released, my colleagues pronounced "avatar" as /ava-tawr/ (with a hard "t"). During those conversations, at times, I was faithful to the native pronunciation. Later even I followed the suit to anglicize as /ava- tawr/. There are lot of native words that I've to modulate when I speak to an international team. Like "pundit", there's /pun-dith/ with my Indian friends and /pun- dit/ with my local friends. Once, during a conversation with my mate back in India, I pronounced wonky /ava-tawr/ and you should see how he teased me. Ouch!

Any time a native word is internationalised, I frown. Here comes two sets of pronunciations to stack in my ever flubbing phonetic drive.

 

I came across "crapshoot" few days ago and what would one infer, intuitively of course, on seeing this odious construct. What?! You closed the browser by now. Here is what the word means informally

crapshoot (informal): a risky or uncertain matter.
e.g, "skiing here can be a bit of a crapshoot at any time"

In a million years, I would not have guessed this usage. All words are deceitful. But few words are masters of trickery. This sleight of verbal form pulls a fast one on us. Few years ago Anu Garg from "A Word A Day" fame chose "terms that appear offensive but aren't" as theme for week starting 6-May-2013. On 10-May as part of that series he chose,

niggard: noun: A mean, stingy person; adjective: Stingy.

By the close of the week, Anu Garg publishes a follow-up here on the reception of these words. I am pasting 2 lines from the excerpt here.

While you may not be offended, this week's words did offend some enough to prompt them to cancel their subscriptions. Also, many readers missed this week's postings because email filters at their organizations were offended.

Though the follow up was on the words from entire week where people took offence to his invidious choice of words and cancelled their subscription I want to point out to only niggard that is controversies around niggard

The etymology helps to clear the air.

"Niggardly" (noun: "niggard") is an adjective meaning "stingy" or "miserly". It can be traced back at least to the Middle English word nigon, which has the same meaning, and is perhaps related to the Old Norse verb nigla, which means "to fuss about small matters".

"Nigger", a racist insult in English, derives from the Spanish/Portuguese word negro, meaning "black", and the French word nègre. Both negro and noir (and therefore also nègre and nigger) ultimately come from nigrum, the accusative case singular masculine and neuter form of the Latin masculine adjective niger, meaning "black" or "dark".

Appearances are deceptive, and words take that deception to untold levels.

 

Form the dice game Craps.
Not the scatological variety.

 

Er, isn't that the intended homework after the snoring class on etymology that "crapshoot" has its origin in

crap (a game in which two dice are thrown and in which a first throw of 7 or 11 wins, a first throw of 2, 3, or 12 loses, and a first throw of 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10 can be won only by throwing the same number again before throwing a 7)
+
shoot (to hit, wound, damage, kill, or destroy)

 

I came across this topic yesterday and sharing it here.
Who is a "bright"? I did say "a bright" not "bright" to distinguish the noun from adjective.

A bright is someone who indulges in scientific enquiry of the world using reason and logic as his tools of comprehension. A bright does not believe in a super-natural and mystical world beyond the scope of science or reason. Put in short and sweet summary, "bright" was coined by Paul Geisert in 2001 for want of a word that separates people studying natural history (who are called "naturalists") from people who believe in natural existence of the world (hurray! we are called "brights"). He didn't like the jarring ring of "godless" and instead preferred something that was more sanguine. That is how "bright" took up a new role, and of course, a new citation in non-standard English.

Though our vocabulary corpus is bursting around its seams by birthing neologisms at every tick of the clock — in this internet age, there's widespread recognition when established words are beefed up by adding a finger or two to its semantic body, rather than invent new words. And this is not the first or the only time where a noun was scooped out of an adjective to retain its positive connotation.

Gay(adj) = Happy
Gay(n) = Homosexual

Gay(n) has a happy tone. Though it appears self-aggrandising, ranking it by popularity, "gay" is spirited and liberating than "homosexual".

Similarly bright(n) carved out of the bright(adj) is suave and intelligent. The word, now though, has been conferred a different meaning, it still retains the smuggled attractiveness of feel-good and smug conduct. Did the not-so-bright, ouch! the non-brights keep calm and keep going. No! They protested against such unorthodox impounding of a standard word into "speciality" word. How did the brights retort? They reminded that "super" was up for grabs and the non-brights, the believers in supernatural existence and theists, can seize it.

This post is not to rake up another God Vs Godless controversy but to bring forth amusing behind-the-scenes titbits on how language was ploughed to seed new verbal saplings. Bright in general usage is still "shining" [1] or "intelligent" [2] until this social inflection catches up with in the media to denote people who may or may not be [1] and [2] but are "believers of natural world in which there are no supernatural elements" [3]

You can read more about it at Brights Movement

NB: One day, our "neurite" will also be acclaimed in the same manner.

 

When you read this and this, does anything tooth-pique you?

There's this act that everyone understands which is to pocket toothpicks and sugar-coated fennel seeds. Can that be worded more accurately?

Here comes "spirited away" to your rescue.

Spirit away:
v. carry or transport or convey rapidly and secretly
v. to remove something secretly without anyone's notices.

e.g : stolen cows were spirited away some distance to prevent detection
or in our context,
toothpicks were spirited away from the restaurant.

The expression to "spirit away" means to remove without anyone's noticing.

Japanese and Germans capture the best nuances in the language. So when Miyazaki titled the international release of his 2001 anime as "Spirited away" , in Japan it was still "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi" and that translates to "Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away". Here Kamikakushi means "mysterious disappearance or death of a person that happens when an angered god takes a person away". In both the usages (popular phrase and the Japanese title), there is connotation of being taken, swept away and that of disappearance.

Next time you are in the restaurant, remember the dilemma is "To spirit away the napkins or not"

Language is discovered and explored closer to home. I hope anyone reading this post takes this observation in the right spirit and not twist it as offensive and picking.

 

I get thrilled when someone uses a word/phrase that melts me. Last week Gauri used "weasel word". I would have honoured that usage with "Finest Word" if only I had the authority. That "weasel word" encapsulates a concept which is smuggled in everyday ambiguous speech.

Definition: A weasel word, or anonymous authority, is an informal term for words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that a specific or meaningful statement has been made, when instead only a vague or ambiguous claim has actually been communicated. This can enable the speaker to then deny the specific meaning if the statement is challenged.

Wikipedia has few lively examples:

"A growing body of evidence..."(Where is the raw data for your review?)
"People say..." (Which people? How do they know?)
"It has been claimed that..." (By whom, where, when?)
"Critics claim..." (Which critics?)
"Clearly..." (As if the premise is undeniably true)
"It stands to reason that..." (Again, as if the premise is undeniably true—see "Clearly" above)
"Questions have been raised..." (Implies a fatal flaw has been discovered)
"I heard that..." (Who told you? Is the source reliable?)
"There is evidence that..." (What evidence? Is the source reliable?)
"Experience shows that..." (Whose experience? What was the experience? How does it demonstrate this?)
"It has been mentioned that..." (Who are these mentioners? Can they be trusted?)
"Popular wisdom has it that..." (Is popular wisdom a test of truth?)

Why use weasel words? Because weasel words transfer the credibility from the speaker to a humbug we just pulled. Rather than saying "I think", if you falsify the line as "A lot of people think" you made a weasel of your sentence by being ambiguous of your source.

I searched whether any other member used "weasel word" in entire IL corpus, and why am I not surprised. There is only one other instance from 2013.

Next time you identify these "weasel words" in a sentence construct, shriek,"Pop Goes the Weasel"
To the reader: You may wish to check out Glittering Generalities if Weasel interests you.

 

English language had its humble beginnings as a scalar language where each word meant only one thing. Later we vectorized it by allowing directional semantics — a word can mean multiple things. Not complacent with such overwrought vocabulary, we made it dimensional by allowing it to rotate around its axis — are you in science, medicine or arts plane?

Words are unruly chameleons now. They shift and mutate depending on where they are used. "Cannibalism", "barn" , "doping" and several other words are repurposed by the scientific community and enriched to serve as scientific dialect.

Cannibalism:
Galactic cannibalism, for example, is what happens when a large galaxy merges with a companion galaxy through gravity, resulting in a larger galaxy.

Barn:
A barn is a unit of measurement used in nuclear and particle physics that indicates the target area (“cross section”) a particle represents.

Doping:
Most people associate doping with drug use and sports. But doping can be so much more! It’s a process to introduce additional materials (often considered impurities) into a metal to change its conducting properties

Here is the physics slang published in symmetry magazine.

Link: You keep using that physics word

While the gentle physicists rarely clash with the mainstream linguists and tip-toe back into their labs on purloining the low-hanging vocables, what can be said about the medical community.Storm is brewing in the medical community to remediate indiscretion in eponyms.

Link: These Medical Terms Still Bear the Mark of the Third Reich - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

Reiter’s syndrome is inflammation in the joints, eyes, and urethra. But who is this Reiter after whom the condition is named? Hans Conrad Julius Reiter is a notorious German physician with connections to the Nazi regime. Can we have diseases and disorders, or any medical term, named after discredited scientists? The medical fraternity of Israel Medical Association want this to be remediated and such honours revoked.

Here is a report with biographical names and associated medical eponyms that a sect of Israeli doctors want the global medical community to repudiate — eponyms and the nazi era

Language is no longer a mechanistic tool or boxy payload to exchange information. Language is the currency these days to valourize our identities and pride. That could either be in the form of physicists gussying up ordinary words as mighty actions or pathologists lobbying to dethrone the unsavoury eponyms.

 

Balaji's recent article titled "In the buff" caught my attention. "In the buff" means naked. I searched whether anyone used that phrase in IL before. Sí! Balaji used that phrase in one of his other threads.

Such a charming and quaint-sounding expression "in the buff". Something that John Cleese could swear upon in Fawlty Towers. I looked up the origin of the phrase

Origin:

A buff-coat was a light leather tunic which was worn by English soldiers up until the 17th century. The original meaning of 'in the buff' was simply to be wearing such a coat. Shakespeare makes reference to this in The Comedy of Errors, 1590 - employing a play on two meanings of the word suit, that is, a suit (of clothes) and suit (authorization):

ADRIANA: What, is he arrested? Tell me at whose suit.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: I know not at whose suit he is arrested well;
But he's in a suit of buff which 'rested him, that can I tell.

The later meaning of in the buff meaning naked is an allusion to the colour of the skin, which is somewhat like the colour buff (a light browny yellow)

In a conversation, "Naked" is abrasive but "in the buff" is inoffensive. Is that why we indulge in temperate words to gratify the prudery in us? What other words do we have.

Streaking = running naked

If you were raised before internet rampaged our lives, you will remember how Protima Bedi's streaking in Juhu beach to promote Cineblitz magazine caused furore in the media. There was a Femina article years later on this strip run.

Flashing = show one's genitals briefly in public.

So what is the difference between streaking and flashing if both depict nudity? Streaking is a rush act where the nudist whisks by or sprints with no elapsed engagement with the crowd. You are haggling for discount at a flea market when a nudist zooms past the crowd in public. Flashing calls for immobilised or sustained attention. Imagine that hippy, who till now was waving the foam finger, suddenly unzips his fly and flashes for the panning camera. Both these nude performances are deemed unsocial gimmicks. Is every style of nudity save the marginal nudists as trippy campers censured? When you want to get away with something, dub it as art. There's Spencer Tunick and his performance art. You may want to check out his creative art works.

So is it buff or nude? Hmm, these days I cannot find buff listed as a colour instead there is only nude in the apparel shopping catalogue. For all other intents and purposes, "in the buff" is pleasing to the ears.