Linguistic Pet Peeves

Everyone has words, phrases, or expressions that can be called pet peeves. I have two of them. The first pet peeve is one you often see printed in newspaper obituaries: "So-and-so died surrounded by family and friends." It irks me because, one, it probably isn't true, and two, it makes those who knew the person sound like a bunch of vultures eagerly waiting for death to come so they can begin the reading of the will or to grab as many family heirlooms as they can. Plus, how would they know the exact moment of death? Was a doctor or undertaker present at the bedside beforehand?

The second pet peeve is "So-and-so is 95 years young." If you're 95, you're not young. Saying someone is 95 years young, instead of 95 years old, stigmatizes old age and is another example of ageism.

I'm Finna Discuss "Finna"

The first time I saw the word "finna" was in a Facebook post by one of my great-nieces (she's 36 years old). It was a strange looking word to me, a baby boomer. My first thought was that it was something she made up.

But one evening, to my surprise, as I was leaving the public library on 115th Street in Harlem, at closing time, I saw a book on a book cart with the title Finna: Poems. The book is by Nate Marshall and was published by One World in 2020.

On its back is a definition of "finna." It's described as being from African-American vernacular English and means "going to; intending to."

No doubt the word is used a lot by those involved in hip-hop culture.

Well, folks, I'm finna sign off, bringing this blog post to a close.

Give "Queer" The Boot

When I was on an elevator in an office building here in New York, it was either in the late seventies or early eighties, I rode with three other men. The one standing in front of me kept turning around to look at the two men standing in a corner. As soon as he got off on his floor, one of the men said to the other, "He must be a queer." Needless to say, he didn't use the word "queer" as a term of endearment. From then on the word "queer" has become cringeworthy.

I refrain from using it whenever possible because it's such an ugly word. Even dictionaries still describe it as offensive, as a pejorative. If the gay and lesbian community continue to embrace that word, they should also be willing to embrace "faggot," "bulldagger," "fairy," and "pansy." Like "nigger" and "kike," they are equally ugly, hateful, evil, and disparaging.

There are many highly educated gay men and lesbians. You would think someone within that segment of the gay and lesbian community could come up with terms that are more edifying and life-affirming. Trying to "reclaim" hurtful terms does not erase or sanitize their negative histories.

Note: This blog post originally appeared on my Facebook page on April 19, 2023. I've made a few minor changes.

Obscure Languages Are Important, Too

The National Enquirer published an article called "Unspeakable Tax Waste" (August 6, 1985) that complained that the Department of Education was wasting U. S. tax dollars providing colleges and universities with funding to teach students "obscure foreign languages" such as "Dinka, which is spoken in the Sudan" and "Telugu, a language of southern India."

To me, this attitude is shortsighted as well as downright ignorant. It might even be called racist.

Language is the gateway to understanding and appreciating other cultures. And since the United States has diplomatic as well as other ties to countries around the world, it makes sense to train people to speak a variety of languages, no matter how obscure. Certainly the people who speak these "obscure languages" don't think of them as unimportant.

The newspaper amNew York (now called amMetro New York) cited in a  November 24, 2014 article the work of Ellen Bialystok, a neuroscientist, on the benefits of bilingual education. She "found that people who are bilingual tend to maintain better cognitive functioning with age and, " continued the newspaper, "are even believed to have delayed onset in Alzheimer's symptoms after diagnosis."

Also the "obscure languages" that the National Enquirer writer disparaged could very well be the source of new words, useful words in English, a language that has adopted many words from other languages.

The Man Who Coined The Word "Gig"

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people nationwide were laid off their jobs and had to apply for unemployment benefits from the state and federal governments, there was talk of including people who were part of the gig economy. These individuals, called gig workers, ordinarily didn't qualify for unemployment, because they were not on anyone's payroll. They were freelancers, independent contractors. Due to the unusual circumstances brought on by the pandemic, they got to collect unemployment checks.

That brings me to the origin of the word "gig." While reading a book called Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way by Caseen Gaines (Sourcebooks, 2021), I learned where the word came from. It's "a term," writes Gaines, an award-winning New Jersey-based author and journalist, "[African-American band leader James Reese] Europe coined [in the late nineteen-teens] to describe a one-night performance, which quickly caught on in the jazz community."

Now we know who should receive credit for creating "gig," a word that has become applicable to people both inside and outside of show business.

A Briticism Used In An American Op-Ed Article

 "Argle-bargle" is a term I've never encountered until I read Jennifer Senior's op-ed piece in The New York Times (September 23, 2020), called "The Ginsburg-Scalia Act Was Not a Farce." The article is about the friendship between Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, who were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Ms. Senior described Justice Scalia as a "hero of the Federalist Society, defender of originalism, dreaded foe of progressive argle-bargle." [Italics mine.]

I looked up "argle-bargle" in my copy of  the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, Second Edition (2004), suspecting the term might be a British import. The closest term in the dictionary is "argy-bargy," identified as of British origin and meaning "a dispute or wrangle."

Consulting one of my two battered copies of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, I found the word "argufy," of no particular origin. It is defined as "to argue or wrangle, esp. over something insignificant." That's about as close to "argle-bargle" as I could get in an American dictionary.

"Argle-bargle" is one of those British expressions that have entered American speech, much like "gobsmacked," "shambolic," and "the full monty."

One clue to the origin of "argle-bargle" is Cockney rhyming slang. Lonely Planet's London guidebook (Lonely Planet Publications, 2012) says that Cockney rhyming slang "may have developed among London's costermongers (street traders) as a code to avoid police attention. This code replaced common nouns and verbs with rhyming phrases." For example, " 'going up the apples and pears' meant going up the stairs, the 'trouble and strife' was the wife, 'telling porky pies' was telling lies and 'would you Adam and Eve it?' was would you believe it?"

In the meantime, maybe I should send a copy of this blog post to Melissa Mohr, who writes the "In a Word" column for The Christian Science Monitor Weekly magazine. Ms. Mohr might be able to shed some light on "argle-bargle." 

Learning Another Word For Jet Lag

While reading Jeanne Mackin's riveting novel, The Last Collection (Berkley, 2019), about the rivalry between Paris couturiers Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel, I learned a new word--desynchronosis, the physical ailment one experiences traveling across time zones via airplane. It's better known as jet lag or jet fatigue.

Are You A Dogophile Or A Caninophile?

In his 2003 Time magazine essay, "Of Dogs and Men," later reprinted in Things That Matter (Crown Forum, 2013), his essay collection, the late syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer used the word "dogophilia" to describe the close relationship that humans have to their dogs.

A better, more elegant word would have been "caninophilia," the love of dogs. One website calls the word "a bastard mix of Latin and Greek," but it sounds much better than "dogophilia," a word that sounds ugly to my ears and robs such a passion for dogs of its beauty, mutuality, and elevated status. It would be like calling a person who has a deep passion for books a bookaholic or a bookophile instead of a bibliophile or, to use the name of this blog, a book maven.These latter terms are more elegant, celebratory, and respectful.

Some people might say that I'm nitpicking but to me words matter. How they are used conveys one's attitude and view of the world. To me, "dogophilia" trivializes a very important, deeply felt relationship.

As for me, although I've had many dogs in my life, I'm partial to cats. You can call me a felinophile or a cat lover, not a catophile.


Note: Merry Christmas, everyone!

Learning A New Word--"Shambolic"

While reading journalist Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt, 2018), I came across this sentence in the chapter about Donald Trump's former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon: "By default, everybody had to look to the voluble, aphoristic, shambolic, witty, off-the-cuff figure who was both ever present on the premises and who had, in an unlikely attribute, read a book or two." (See page 60.) [Italics mine.]

The word that caught my attention was "shambolic." I'd never seen it before. Being someone who enjoys learning new words, I consulted two of my American dictionaries and I could not find this word. I then went online and learned that "shambolic" is British slang for chaotic, disorganized, or mismanaged.

Looking further, I consulted the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd edition, a book I found, I think, on a street corner almost two years ago. It defines the word as "chaotic, unorganized." Now I have a new word to add to my vocabulary.

Searching For The Word "Upscuttle"

I recently flipped through an old, battered dictionary that I own with the express purpose of looking up the definition of  "gulag." My search was prompted by a radio interview I  had heard that detailed the brutalization of inmates by guards at an upstate New York prison.

That brought to mind the late "Grandpa" Al Lewis, a former cast member of the 1960s sitcom, The Munsters, and his comparing American prisons to gulags, or Soviet prison camps, on his weekly New York-based radio show on WBAI.

While looking up the word, I found a slip of paper tucked inside the dictionary on which I had written the word "upscuttle" and the name of the person I had heard use it, conservative talk show radio host Barry Farber. I probably heard him use the word sometime in the 1980s when he was on the air late nights on New York's WMCA. ("Upscuttle" is not a word you hear every day.) Unfortunately, I neglected to write down how he used the word in a sentence.

I searched for the word in the same battered dictionary, but I couldn't find it. Neither could I find it in five other dictionaries in my apartment, including the Canadian Oxford Dictionary and a huge dictionary that weighs almost as much as a ten-pound bag of sugar.

Here is urbandictionary.com 's definition of "upscuttle": "When everything in a given area seems to go topsy-turvy at once. A sudden capsizing of circumstances and conditions."

What Do You Call A Massachusetts Resident?

I knew that a person from New York State is called a New Yorker, a person from California is called a Californian, and a person from Texas is called a Texan. But what do you call someone who hails from Massachusetts or Connecticut? None of my dictionaries were helpful on this particular question.

So I finally consulted the ever trusty Internet to solve this mystery and learned a new word--demonym. 

What is a demonym?  It's a word used by geographers to describe where a person comes from. The website I consulted via my cell phone listed the demonyms for all fifty states alphabetically.

I learned that a resident of Connecticut is a Connecticuter and a person from Massachusetts is a Massachusettsan. Do the people in those states know this? The next time I talk to someone from either of those states I will ask them.

Here are some other demonyms: if you are from Iowa, you are either an Iowan or an Iowegian; if you call Illinois home, you are an Illinoisan (pronounced, I assume, Ill-leh-noy-an) or an Illinian (pronounced, again I assume, Ill-len-nee-an); a resident of Maine is called a Mainer or a Maineaker

(pronounced either Main-ah-ker or May-nee-ack-er). The last one sounds a little insulting. Maineite or Mainester might be better. And if you are firmly rooted in the state of Wyoming, you are a Wyomingite.

I now know --as well as lexicographers, I hope--what to call persons living in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

A Better Word For Suicide Due To Bullying Is Needed

Whenever I hear or see the word "bullycide," the image that comes to mind is someone killing his or her tormentor, not someone killing themselves because they were bullied. I wish someone would come up with a more precise term for suicides caused by bullying. "Bullycide" is not it.

How I Discovered Wiktionary

Browsing through the Village Voice (March 4-10, 2015 issue), I came upon an article about music journalist Robert Christgau and his memoir Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man (Dey Street Books). I remember proofreading his copy in the early 1980s when he was the music critic at the Village Voice.  (I think it was his sister, Georgia Christgau, who hired me.)

 Not seeing Christgau's age mentioned in the piece, I immediately went to Wikipedia to look up his birth date (It's April 18, 1942) and stumbled upon a link to the word "memoir." That led me to the Wiktionary page, which for me, a language buff, was a fascinating discovery. I learned that Wiktionary, the free dictionary, was "a multilingual, web-based project to create a free-content dictionary of all words in all languages."

 The project is currently available in 158 languages and is, like Wikipedia, its companion site, "written collaboratively by volunteers" called "wiktionarians." The English-language section, at the time that I checked the site, contained 3, 971,737 entries (and counting).

Although I had trouble using the site on my cell phone, I did click on the highlighted word "free" in the phrase "free dictionary." What popped up on the screen was a language lover's delight: there were
word origin and pronunciation guides, a list of synonyms and antonyms, definitions with literary examples, et cetera. For example, here are two definitions of "free" that appeared in a long list of definitions:

"without; not containing (what is specified);exempt;clean, liberated" as in "We had a wholesome, filling meal, free of meat" and "not currently in use; not taken; unoccupied" as in  "You can sit on that chair, it's free."

Once I figure out how to use Wiktionary, it will become a very useful reference tool and I will be consulting it often.

Go to www.wiktionary.org.

Cursing, Shakespeare Style

I found in one of my dictionaries a scrap of paper on which I wrote examples of Shakespearean cursing. Unfortunately, I neglected to indicate the source that I took them from. Here is what I wrote:

"You drone," "You drudge, you clog," "You unbaked and doughty youth," "You tyrant," "You carcass fit for hounds," "You base wretch, you unspeaking sot, you pigeon liver," "You devil incarnate, you child of hell," "A pox on your throats," "Oh, wretched fool. Consumption catch thee. Go shake your ears," "Were I like thee, I'd throw away myself."

Real Estate Code Words

Whenever you see a sign on a building that attaches the words "boutique" or "luxury" to a description of a condo, a co-op, or a rental apartment, it's safe to say that those are code words for expensive, unaffordable.

Dictionary Browsing

As a leisure time activity, I often browse the dictionary, finding, to my delight, words I've never seen before. Thumbing through my beat up copy of Merriam-Webster's, I discovered this term: "open dating." It sounded at first like there was a romance or "singles's night" connection. When I read the definition, I learned there was a marketing connection instead. The dictionary defined "open dating" (which came into usage in 1971)  as "the marking of perishable food products with a clearly readable date indicating when the food was packaged or the last date on which it should be sold or used."

So now whenever I go grocery shopping and look at the "Sell By" or "Packed On" date on a container of milk or on a deli item, I know those printed dates are called "open dating" and I can make reference to that term when talking to a store manager about an item that's been on the shelf past its expiration date.