Why did Hector, Troy's mightiest, bravest defender in Homer's Iliad, become a blustering, domineering bully? His name, symbolic for a gallant warrior in early English literature, today mean not only a bully, but to bully, torment, or treat insolently. The change seems to have taken place toward the end of the 17th century when a gang of young bullies, who considered themselves paragons of valiant courage, adopted the honorable name "Hectors." This ruffian band insulted passersby, broke windows, and became notorious for their bullying, terrorizing the streets of London. It is probably from their name that hector and to hector derive, rather than from that of the exalted magnanimous Hector, noble in victory and in defeat. Some scholars point out however, that Hector was represented in medieval drama as boastful and domineering, possibly from the notion that any hero is swashbuckling and blustering.From the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
Monday, July 27, 2009
hector
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Say it ain't so, Joe
Recently, someone asked me about the origin of this phrase after I said it during our conversation. I told her my familiarity with it came from the Palin/Biden debate when she said it in response to one of Biden's answers. Flipping through my handy Word and Phrase Origins book, I found the phrase and now know the history behind it:
The said "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, a poor boy from South Carolina, played ball without shoes down home, but he put on spikes when he made the majors and became a great star, his lifetime average of .356 the third highest in the history of baseball. Shoeless Joe never made Cooperstown's Hall of Fame, though, and never will. Jackson was one of the eight Chicago White Sox players who conspired with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series, after which he was banished from baseball for life. After confessing his role in the affair on September 28, 1920, Jackson walked down the steps of the Cook County Courthouse through a crowd of reporters and a ragged little boy grabbed his sleeve and said "Say it ain't so, Joe." The phrase is still used in reference to any hero has betrayed his trust, though Jackson denied the boy said it.I suppose I should have known the origins of this phrase after reading the entry. Wasn't this made into a movie or something? I recall seeing a scene like the one mentioned at the end acted out in black and white.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Returned
So, it looks like I've nearly wrapped things up with graduate school in Florida. I am now your humble blog contributor typing away in cool and windy Illinois. And here is the word for this Saturday night: potboiler.
'"All men who have to live by their labour have their pot-boilers," Hazlitt wrote, and an obscure English poet lamented: ' far'vring patrons have I got,/But just enough to boil the pot.' A potboiler is of course a literary work written to make a living, a task performed to keep the pot boiling, or to eat. Financial gain is the only object in writing one, but sometimes genius transcends the immediate object and the result is a work of art. Dr. Johnson's "philosophical romance" Rasselas (1759), for example, was written over the nights of one week to meet the cost of his mother's funeral and pay off her debts. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner has been called "the most sublime of pot-boilers to be found in all literature," but I suspect there are even greater ones. In telling of the birth of Sanctuary (1931), William Faulkner observed that he was hungry. '[I began] to think of books in terms of possible money," he recollected. 'I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks.'" (From The Fact on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins)
Also, a photo. This is from a few days ago, as seen from my backyard.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Political Slogans
Hello from chilly Illinois! I'm sitting in my office, working on my thesis, gazing out the window, and coveting the birds swarming my neighbor's bird feeder (I've bought a feeder too, but only one cardinal has used it so far). I thought I'd take a moment to post about political slogans (information from the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins )
Even before "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" swept William Henry Harrison and John Tyler into office, slogans played an important part in politics. Like all slogans, good political slogans are usually short and simple, with rhyme or rhythm, and say what the electorate feels but is unable to express. Yet some great slogans have had few or none of these qualities. For example, Herbert Hoover's backers used the negative scare slogan "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" to defeat Al Smith in 1928. The Democrats' slogan against Grover Cleveland's opponent in 1884 was: "James G. Blaine, James G. Blaine / Continental liar from the State of Maine!" Humorous slogans have also been effective, such as the Democrats' gem: "In Hoover we trusted, now we are busted." There is no space here for a complete accounting of political slogans, but below are some famous ones that may or may not have succeeded:
"We Polked You in '44; We Shall Pierce You in '52!"--Franklin Pierce (1852)
"A Square Deal"--Theodore Roosevelt (1912)
"He Kept Us Out Of War"--Woodrow Wilson (1916)
"A Chicken in Every Pot"--Herbert Hoover (1928)
"A New Deal"--Franklin Roosevelt (1932)
"A Fair Deal"--Harry Truman (1948)
"I Like Ike"--Dwight Eisenhower (1956)
"The New Frontier"--John F. Kennedy (1960)
"All the Way with L.B.J"--Lyndon Johnson (1964)
"In Your Heart You Know He's Right--Barry Goldwater (1964)
"Nixon's the One"--Richard Nixon (1968)
"We Can't Stand Pat"--Pat Paulsen (1972)
Cross-posted at Incertus
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Where does the time go?
I can't believe I haven't posted here since July! And it's September now! My absence is due in large part to my frequent peregrinations. That is the word that has inspired this post! I love it!
Peregrination: (noun) A traveling from place to place; a wandering
Sunday, July 6, 2008
It worked; I am become death
Physicist Robert Oppenheimer recalled that after he and his brother watched the explosion of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos on July 16, 1945, he "remembered the line from the Hindu scripture. the Bhagavad Gita: 'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.'" However, according to Greg Herken's Brotherhood of the Bomb (2001), Oppenheimer's brother says these words came some time after the fact. What Oppenheimer really said at the moment was, "It worked!"
From the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Neglect
Okay. I've been neglecting the word blog. I'm going to make a concerted effort to provide more word/phrase tidbits on this blog. It's all about the words.
Hold one's tongue: To keep quiet, keep a secret. According to Matt. 26:23, in one version of the Bible, "Jesus held his tongue." There is a story about the tongue featuring 18th century Viennese writer and cleric Zacharias Werner. Werner gave a sermon on "that tiny piece of flesh, the most dangerous appurtenance of a man's body." On and on he graphically expounded to a blushed and blanched congregation--including several ladies who fainted in the aisles--about all the evils this tiny piece of flesh had caused. Finally, Werner concluded, his voice rising to a shout: "Shall I show you that tiny piece of flesh?" Not a breath could be heard until he cried: "Ladies and gentlemen, behold the source of our sins!" Smiling at last, he stuck out his tongue.
From the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Lexigraphical Longing
From the New York Times Magazine:
When I was 19, my father gave me an Oxford English Dictionary, the 1971 compact edition with the 1987 supplement. Citations for every English word since the eighth century were crammed into three bulky volumes of minuscule print. I hallucinated before the speckled onion-skin pages until I discovered that the dictionary came with a magnifying glass.
Read more here.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Sherbet
On Saturday, DS and I were buying food for a cookout. Always in the mood for some sort of dessert, but knowing I should restrain my impulse for my favorite ice cream (Dove brand vanilla with brownie chunks, and chocolate ganashe covering on top--yum!), I suggested sherbet. I initially pronounced it "sherbert," then moved on to pronouncing it "sherbit" because of the spelling. I also tried "sherbay." DS corrected me back to the "sherbert" pronunciation, but I declared that that could not be the right pronunciation because there was no "r" at the end. It didn't make any sense. Well, the Wordsmith has explained it in his new column on words at MSN.
So how did we get from sherbet to sherbert? When we borrow a word from another language, we often naturalize its spelling and sound (in Italian sherbet becomes sorbetto, in French sorbet). There are not many everyday words in English that follow the pattern of sherbet, but there's plenty of company for the -bert ending: Herbert, Robert, Albert, Dilbert, etc.
I think if the word is going to be pronounced "sherbert," the second "r" should be included in the (American) spelling because the disconnect between the spelling and the pronunciation makes me a little nuts. (I'm not usually bothered by word/pronunciation disconnects, but there is something about adding an "r" to the pronunciation of "sherbet" that seems a little ridiculous...kind of like when people jokingly pronounce "fajitas," "fagitas.")
Friday, April 11, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
Word of the Day
factory farming (FAK-tuh-ree FAHR-ming) noun
An industrialized system of producing meat, eggs, and milk in large-scale
facilities where the animal is treated as a machine.
[From the idea of operating a large-scale farm as an efficient factory.]
Some of the characteristics of a factory farm include intensive crowding
of animals, trimming of birds' beaks, cutting pigs' tails, force-feeding
of ducks, injecting artificial growth hormones, restricting mobility, etc.
A factory farm is also known as a CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation).
"'When you look at environmental problems in the U.S.,' says [geophysicist
Gidon] Eshel, 'nearly all of them have their source in food production and
in particular meat production. And factory farming is 'optimal' only as
long as degrading waterways is free."
Mark Bittman; The Meat of the Matter; The Dallas Morning News; Feb 10, 2008.
Courtesy of the Wordsmith
Friday, March 14, 2008
Swift!
Brobdingnagian (adj.): Of gigantic size. (After Brobdingnag, the fictional regional region where everything was enormous in Swift's satire, Gulliver's Travel.)
Friday, February 15, 2008
Paper Bleeds Little
Paper bleeds little: A rare but useful Spanish proverb that speaks of the difference between written plans, especially military plans, and the consequences of carrying them out in reality. Hemingway used it in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) "'Paper bleeds little,' Robert Jordan quoted the proverb."
From the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Mogigraphia
Mogigraphia: Writer's cramp
Tennis players have their elbows, athletes have their feet, so what do writers get? They get cramps. Mogigraphia is a fancy name for writer's cramp. Advanced writers go for a mental block. For the ultimate, we recommend carpal tunnel syndrome. A synonym of mogigraphia is graphospasm. The word owes its origin to Greek mogis (with difficulty) and graph (writing).
From The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two
Thursday, January 3, 2008
zenzizenzizenzic
The zenzizenzizenzic of a number is its eighth power. This term was suggested by Robert Recorde, a 16th century Welsh writer of popular mathematics textbooks, in his work The Whetstone of Witte, published in 1557, although his spelling was zenzizenzizenzike.
(inspired by Zimdog's study of z-words)
Friday, December 14, 2007
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Disappearing Languages
At a Loss for Words
The Native-American language Salish–Pend d’Oreille is on the brink of disappearing.
More than half the world’s 6,000 languages will be gone by the end of the century.
By Sarah Grey Thomason
John Peter Paul, a rugged, dignified man, was extremely ill during the summer of 2000. He was ninety-one years old and suffering from stomach cancer. Still, every week he insisted on wheeling himself into the (Longhouse) on the Flathead reservation in northwestern Montana. There, he and other elders of the Salish and Pend d’Oreille tribes would gather in meetings I had set up to expand and fine-tune the dictionary of their language and the collection of texts that we had been working on together for many years.
On one occasion in midsummer, when John’s illness reached a crisis point, he refused to go to the hospital because he didn’t want to miss our scheduled meeting the next day.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
James Joyce didn't use (didn't like?) hyphens
Compound Fractures
By Orin Hargraves
from the Visual Thesaurus
A press release accompanying the recent publication of the updated Oxford Shorter English Dictionary announced that 16,000 hyphens had disappeared. This announcement spawned a smattering of witty articles in the English language media and occupied the pundits slightly longer (perhaps four times longer?) than did the 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire of some time ago. In the Language Lounge, our reaction to the news of the banished hyphens was slightly more pronounced, but we did manage to absorb the information with only the help of a few doses of smelling salts.
It is an odd thing about English that it has never really made peace with the hyphen. Germans tend to eschew it altogether, smashing words up against each other without warning and giving rise to jumbo-sized hybrids like Weltanschauung and Gotterdammerung. The French, on the other hand, revere the hyphen and even have a high-sounding name for it: trait d'union. They would no more abandon a hyphen than they would prepare a croque-monsieur (that is to say, a toasted ham-and-swiss) in a bain-marie. English, however, struggles with compounds generally and flits about among three possible forms, sometimes never settling on a definitive one. In the trade, we call these three forms the open (e.g., day care), the hyphenated (e.g., brush-off), and the solid (e.g., lamppost). Compounding the compound problem is the fact that the two most influential dialects of English take markedly different approaches to the orthography of compound words.
Speakers of the two dialects that are the battling titans of English in the world today (that would be British English and American English) may be inclined to think that their own variety treats the spelling of compounds more consistently or sensibly than the other dialect, but this is probably not so, since they both tend to make a hash of it. The Oxford press release referred to above does say so, but it is likely that the 16,000 hyphens recently frogmarched into the valley of death got their just deserts mainly from the no-nonsense influence of American English, which has long abandoned the hyphen in places where it wasn't required. From an American point of view, the question would be, why were the hyphens allowed to persist for so long when they didn't have a job to do? Was it not H.W. Fowler himself, the English saint of English usage, who said
"There is, however, one general rule... and that is that the hyphen is not an ornament but an aid to being understood, and should be employed only when it is needed for that purpose."
Oxford dictionaries have of course always taken British English as their standard, but they are not blind to the fact that American English is the dominant dialect in the world today, as well as the dialect most likely to come to the attention of users of the Anglophone Internet; and Oxford does like to sell its dictionaries everywhere. It was thus a sensible step to make this adjustment toward international conformity.
This is not to say, however, that any dictionary makers should rest on their laurels with regard to compounds: compound orthography both within and across English dialects is a minefield; a dog's dinner; a can of worms. There is one general pattern: compounds that have long been spelled solid in American English are still mainly hyphenated or open in British usage, and for the most part in British dictionaries: take, for example, the in-between compass points (e.g., southwest); compounds formed with various affixes (e.g., those beginning with anti-, multi-, non-, and semi-, and those ending with -like); and verbal nouns formed from phrasal verbs (e.g., setup or layoff). This pattern, however, is but an archipelago of consistency floating near continents of chaos. To illustrate: recently we trolled experimentally through the letter M in a handful of dictionaries, both British and American, and found inconsistencies in the lemmatized forms (which we spell all solid here, though dictionaries don't) of masterstroke, milkshake, midair, mindset, mortarboard, motorcar, mousepad, mouthwatering, mudflap, mugshot, and muttonchops. The preferences of the dialects differ so greatly in this respect alone that localizing editors -- those who prepare written English in one dialect for consumption in the other -- could probably clean up nicely if they charged on the basis of compounds put right.
Fowler's dictum aside, we do in the Lounge occasionally derive enjoyment from ornamental hyphens -- those that appear in the novels of Dickens or Austen for example, where we find they can be just as picturesque as a gaslight or a cobblestone street -- but these hyphens are, in effect, set in stone, and the modern writer is well advised to avoid them (or, to illustrate a functional hyphen: the well-advised modern writer avoids them). It does not help that even up-to-the-minute spellcheckers (or is it a spell checkers? That depends on which dictionary you consult) may sometimes insist that we split a solid compound into its components, when our instincts tell us not to. The best approach is to adopt a sensible policy toward the spelling of compounds, which we suggest might incorporate the following points:
1. Do not obsess about how to spell compounds. Of all orthographic features of English, it is the most inconsistent and least rewarding for study.
2. For independent writing, follow the spellings in an authoritative, up-to-date dictionary in your English dialect. Why not benefit from the many hours that lexicographers have spent, using top-shelf tools, deciding which form (open, solid, or hyphenated) should receive headword status?
3. If you are writing for hire, blindly follow the style guide of the institution you are writing for regarding spelling; it will save you time and agony.
4. If you are writing text that someone else will edit, fret not: isn't that what the editor gets paid for?
5. If (3) proves completely unsupportable (because the policy is silly or hopelessly inconsistent), or if (4) backfires on you (because an editor respells a form you feel strongly about) rebel with dignity and be prepared to back up your preferred spelling with a welter of evidence, but first ask yourself: is it worth it? (Revisit principle (1), above.)
6. For words that do not appear in your up-to-date dictionary, the safe course is to choose either an open or hyphenated spelling. If a word is sufficiently established and frequent as a solid compound, dictionary editors would, in principle, have picked up on it and included it as a headword. On the other hand, the overall trend now in English spelling is toward solid compounds, and going that way might make you look way ahead of your time a few years down the road.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Darby and Joan
Darby and Joan (DAHR-bee and joan) noun
A devoted old couple leading a quiet, uneventful life.
[After a couple named in a 18th century poem in The Gentleman's Magazine
(London).]
In 1735 Henry Woodfall, a printer's apprentice, wrote a ballad titled
"The joys of love never forgot: a song" about a happily married elderly
couple. His inspiration for those characters was his own boss John Darby
and his wife Joan:
"Old Darby, with Joan by his side,
You've often regarded with wonder:
He's dropsical, she is sore-eyed,
Yet they're never happy asunder ..."
As you can imagine, he wrote this poem after Darby's death. This poem
in turn became an inspiration for follow-up poems and eventually Darby
and Joan became a metaphor. In the UK, clubs for old people are still
called Darby and Joan clubs.
-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)
Friday, October 19, 2007
Highbrow/Lowbrow/Middlebrow
On my way to look up the word heritage for Halloween (to get into the holiday spirit), I came across the background for the term "highbrow." I use this word often and had never thought about where it came from. This is what the book says:
highbrow; supercilious
Dr. Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), founder of the "science" of phrenology, gave support to the old folk notion that people with big foreheads have more brains. Gall's lifelong studies purportedly showed that the bigger a person's forehead was, the higher his brow, the smarter he would be. This theory was widely accepted though the 19th century, until phrenology was discredited by scientists, and the belief led to the expression highbrow for an intellectual, which is first recorded in 1875. The term is often used disparagingly and is the source of the similar terms lowbrow and middlebrow. Highbrowed people can be supercilious, meaning disdainful, and this word has a connection with brow, too. Supercilious is from the Latin supercilium, "eyebrow," and the Latin suffix-osus, "full of." Thus a supercilious person is literally one "full of eyebrow," an etymology that goes well with the image of someone lifting the eyebrow slightly in disdain. New York Sun reporter Will Irvin popularized highbrow, and its opposite lowbrow, in 1902, basing his creation on the wrongful notion that people with high foreheads have bigger brains and are more intelligent and intellectual than those with low foreheads. At first the term was complimentary, but highbrow came to be at best a neutral word used to describe such things as highbrow books, and at worst sank as low as lowbrow, being used by lowbrows and other anti-intellectuals to describe supercilious intellectuals or psuedo-intellectuals. Life magazine coined the term middlebrow in the mid-1940s.
From the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
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