Did you know this?

prescience / PRESH-ee-unss / noun

foreknowledge of events: 

a : divine omniscience

b : human anticipation of the course of events : foresight

If you know the origin of "science," you already know half the story of "prescience." "Science" comes from the Latin verb "scire," which means "to know" and which is the source of many English words ("conscience," "conscious," and "omniscience," just to name a few). "Prescience" comes from the Latin verb "praescire," which means "to know beforehand." "Praescire" joins the verb "scire" with the prefix "prae-," a predecessor of "pre-." A lesser-known "scire"-derived word is "nescience." "Nescience" means "ignorance" and comes from "scire" plus "ne-," which means "not" in Latin.

-- Merriam-Webster.com

Three words that are fun to say

frangible \FRAN-juh-buhl\, adjective:

Capable of being broken; brittle; fragile; easily broken.

Frangible ultimately derives from Latin frangere, "to break."

tarradiddle \tair-uh-DID-uhl\, noun;
also taradiddle:

1. A petty falsehood; a fib.
2. Pretentious nonsense.

Tarradiddle is of unknown origin.

effulgence \ ih-FULL-junss\ noun

radiant splendor : brilliance

Effulgence derives from the Latin verb "fulgēre," which means "to shine."

Squad helps dog bite victim

Classic newspaper headlines:

“Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,”

“MacArthur Flies Back to Front”

“Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans” 

“Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim"

“Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge”

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines, Ben Zimmer writes in The New York Times. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.

Zimmer has more:

“McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers”

“British Left Waffles on Falklands”

“Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts”

How do we explain crash blossoms?

Zimmer: Nouns that can be misconstrued as verbs and vice versa are, in fact, the hallmarks of the crash blossom. English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, “-s.” In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of “to be” — robbing the reader of crucial context. If that A.P. headline had read “McDonald’s Fries Are the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers,” there would have been no crash blossom for our enjoyment.

Grammar police: it's important

its and it’s

 
The secret here is that pronouns don’t take “apostrophe plus S” to make them possessive. Decide whether you can change the “apostrophe plus S” to “is.” (Example – It’s going to be a long time before the tech comes, so the copy machine is going to keep spitting out its paper regularly.) Since you could say “It is going to be a long time...” you know the apostrophe form is correct. But you wouldn’t want to say “...spitting out it is paper regularly.” Pronouns don’t take “apostrophe plus S” to form the possessive: That is [my, your, her, his, its, their, our] book. Even when shifting a sentence to a little different form, NONE of them use the apostrophe: The book is [mine, yours, hers, his, its, theirs, ours].

-- MoneyInstructor.com

How Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain

Rob Velella at The American Literary Blog provides more details of the birth of the pen name "Mark Twain:"

A man named Samuel L. Clemens traveled west with his brother, across the Great Plains, over the Rocky Mountains, and stopping in the territory of Nevada, where he got a job as a miner. That role didn't work out for him and, instead, he turned to the local newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.

He achieved some notoriety there, later writing to his mother somewhat tongue-in-cheek as having "the widest reputation" possible on the frontier. He noted, "If I were not naturally a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing vagabond," he might even make money off it. "And I am proud to say I am the most conceited ass in the Territory." Such was Clemens's humor.

In fact, some of his writing for the Enterprise was humor rather than pure journalism. Such was the case for its February 3, 1863 issue, when one of those articles by Clemens was signed, inexplicably, with a pseudonym. Though Samuel Clemens was 28 years old, some call this the birthday of "Mark Twain."

The name comes from the call made by leadsmen aboard riverboats (a role Clemens held at one point), and most scholars agree this was the intended reference. However, in 1874, Clemens wrote a letter offering his own explanation. He claims that he borrowed the name from a senior boat pilot named Isaiah Sellers, who himself used the name when he wrote for the Picayune, a newspaper in New Orleans. He stopped using the name when Clemens made fun of him for it. Sellers died in 1863 and, perhaps to make amends, Clemens took it over, noting that Sellers didn't need it anymore. In fact, the story doesn't check out; Sellers was still very much alive when Clemens adopted the name "Mark Twain," and no articles under that name existed in the New Orleans paper.

Another story claims that Clemens used to order two drinks at once while at the taverns out west. He would ask that both ("twain") be "marked" on his bar tab. In theory, then, he would go to the bar, hold up two fingers, and ask the bartender to "mark twain." 

There's a bathroom on the right

When she was a child, the American writer Sylvia Wright recalled, her mother read aloud to her from "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," and one of her favorite poems began, as she remembered:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl O'Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

The actual fourth line is, "And laid him on the green."

In an essay in 1954, "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," Wright  explained the need for a new term. "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original."

Among the more well-known mondegreens:

• Surely Good Mrs. Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life ("Surely goodness and mercy…" from Psalm 23)
• Gladly, the cross-eyed bear(from the line in the hymn, "Keep Thou My Way" ("Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I'll bear")
• 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy (from a lyric in the song "Purple Haze", by Jimi Hendrix: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky").

And, of course ...

There's a bathroom on the right (the line at the end of each verse of "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival: "There's a bad moon on the rise") 

And a few more:

• "The girl with colitis goes by." (Real lyric: "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes," Beatles)
• "Olive, the other reindeer." (Real lyric: "All of the other reindeer.")
• "The ants are my friends, they're blowing in the wind." (Real lyric: "The answer is blowing in the wind," Bob Dylan.)
• "There's a wino down the road." (Real lyric: "And as we wind on down the road," Led Zeppelin.)
• "In a glob of Velveeta, honey." (Real lyric: "In-A-Gadda Da Vida," a.k.a., "In the garden of Eden," Iron Butterfly.)

The rubric of this blog is The Writer

And it is of the rubric of blogs. But it is not red. (I hope, however, that it is read.)

rubric / ru-brik / noun

1. A title or heading, the name of something, especially the name of a category.  
2. A direction for the conduct of services in a liturgical text, often distinguished from the text by red print.  
3. Any red-letter entry in a diary, on a calendar, etc.

From Dr. Goodword:

Rubric comes with a natural adjective, rubrical, but all its other relatives mean "red" in some sense: ruby, rubescent, rubeola. It comes in handy when talking about categories of things: "Carlton, I would say that charging me 30 percent on a personal loan until payday would fall under the rubric of usury." Introduce it whenever you are talking about the name of something: "Marian Kine has been married so many times it almost falls under the rubric of polygamy."

History: Rubric is another snipped from Latin, this time rubrica "red chalk". Rubrica was derived from ruber "red", and went on to become rubrica in Spanish and Portuguese, rubrik in German, Danish, and Swedish, and rubriek in Dutch. Its meaning shifted to "heading" because the headings of the liturgical texts in the Catholic Church have traditionally been printed in red. Those headings came to be referred to as "the reds" in Latin and French. Latin inherited it from Proto-Indo-European reudh- "red", for some reason changing the DH to B in rubrica. We would have expected DH to become F in Latin, and so it does in rufus "red-haired", a word that also became a common name in Rome. The Proto-Indo-European root for "red" also came to English via its Germanic roots as ruddy, converting the DH to D, just as we would expect.

On the tip of my tongue

Are these familiar words part of your vocabulary?

rapacious \ruh-PAY-shuhs\, adjective:

1. Given to plunder; seizing by force.
2. Subsisting on prey.
3. Grasping; greedy.

Rapacious comes from Latin rapax, rapac-, "seizing, grasping, greedy," from rapere, "to seize, to snatch."

verboten \ver-BOHT-n\, adjective:

Forbidden, as by law; prohibited.

Verboten is from German, past participle of verbieten, to forbid, from Middle High German, which derives from Old High German farbiotan.

machination \mack-uh-NAY-shuhn; mash-\, noun:

1. The act of plotting.
2. A crafty scheme; a cunning design or plot intended to accomplish some usually evil end.

Machination derives from Latin machinatio, "a contrivance, a cunning device, a machination," from machinari, "to contrive, to devise, especially to plot evil." It is related to machine, from Latin machina, "any artificial contrivance for performing work." To machinate is to devise a plot, or engage in plotting. One who machinates is a machinator.

What color dog are you?

yellow dog / adjective

1 : mean, contemptible

2 : of or relating to opposition to trade unionism or a labor union

Merriam-Webster informs:

In the 19th century, the noun "yellow dog" developed a derogatory sense, meaning a low, despicable person. This usage probably came about from the traditional association of the color yellow with cowardice. Just before the turn of the century, "yellow-dog" started to be used by writers who were derogatorily describing organizations that expressed opposition to trade unions. The popularized term "yellow-dog contract" referred to an agreement made by an employer and employee in which the employee agrees not to join a labor union during the time he or she is employed. While such contracts proliferated in the 1920s, they were later made unenforceable in U.S. federal courts under the Norris-LaGuardia Act (1932).

blue dog / adjective

The Democratic Blue Dog Coalition is a group of currently 54 conservative Democratic Party members of the U.S. House of Representatives, first formed in 1995. The Blue Dog Coalition describes itself as a group of moderate-to-conservative Democrats committed to financial and national security.

Wikipedia informs:

"Blue Dog Democrat" is derived from the term "Yellow Dog Democrat." Former Texas Democrat Rep. Pete Geren is credited for coining the term, explaining that the members had been "choked blue" by "extreme" Democrats from the left. The term is also a reference to the "Blue Dog" paintings of Cajun artist George Rodrigue of Lafayette, Louisiana; the original members of the coalition would regularly meet in the offices of Louisiana representatives Billy Tauzin and Jimmy Hayes, both of whom had Rodrigue's paintings on their walls. Tauzin and Hayes later switched to the Republican Party. An additional explanation for the term: "A blue dog is our mascot because when dogs are not let into the house, they stay outside in the cold and turn blue," a reference to moderate and conservative Democrats feeling left out of the Party which they believed had shifted to the political left.

Pan the panjandrums

Don't you just get tired of them all?

panjandrum / pan-JAN-druhm / noun

a self-important or pretentious official

History: Panjandrum was coined by Samuel Foote (1720-1777) in a piece of nonsense writing:

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. "What! No soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber: and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.

Dictionary.com says: It was composed on the spot to challenge actor Charles Macklin's claim that he could memorize anything. Macklin is said to have refused to repeat a word of it.

Not to be confused with a Grand Poobah.

Grand Poobah is a term derived from the name of the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885). In this comic opera, Pooh-Bah holds numerous exalted offices, including "First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral... Archbishop of Titipu, and Lord Mayor" and Lord High Everything Else. The name has come to be used as a mocking title for someone self-important or high-ranking and who either exhibits an inflated self-regard or who has limited authority while taking impressive titles.

And per se and

The ampersand -- & -- has an interesting history.

The ampersand can be traced back to the first century AD. It was originally a ligature of the letters E and T (”et” is Latin for and). If you look at the modern ampersand, you’ll likely still be able to see the E and T separately.

The first ampersands looked very much like the separate E and T combined, but as type developed over the next few centuries, it eventually became more stylized and less representative of its origins.

You can see the evolution of the ampersand below (1 is like the original Roman ligature, 2 and 3 are from the fourth century, and 4-6 are from the ninth century).

The modern ampersand has remained largely unchanged from the Carolignian ampersands developed in the ninth century.

And there's more:

The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase "and per se ("through itself") and", meaning "and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and".

Traditionally, in English-speaking schools when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A," "I," and, at one point, "O") was preceded by the Latin expression "per se" (Latin for "by itself"). Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign, pronounced "and". Thus, the recitation of the alphabet would end in: "X, Y, Z and per se and." This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837. 

And that's it.

Do you do the probity thing?

probity / pro-bê-tee / noun

Total honesty, integrity and virtue, uprightness, high moral character.

Dr. Goodword opines:

Probity pretty much stands alone as a lexical orphan though it has distant cousins in prove and its family. Probity has a meaning similar to honesty and uprightness but in a more pristine sense. Honesty and uprightness may be more or less but probity is both these in their purest form.

Another way of defining probity would be to say that it means "no messing around": "Sarah Soda's drabness and the advanced years of Jerry Attrick guaranteed the probity of their late night dinners together." It is not always easy to distinguish probity from the appearance of probity: "Looking for a needle in a haystack is like looking for probity on Wall Street."

History: English borrowed probity, like so many other words from French. French (Latin as spoken in France today) inherited the word from Latin probitas "uprightness, honesty", a noun based on the adjective probus "worthy, good". Probus went into the making of probare "to prove worthy, to test". This verb ended up in Old French as prover, which English also borrowed as prove. While raising its debt level to Latin and the Romance languages, English also borrowed probare directly from Latin as probe. Where did probus itself come from? It goes back to a pre-Latin Proto-Indo-European derived word pro-bhwo- "being up front", made up of pro "in front of" + bhwo- "to be", the source of English be.

When they won't answer your email

We've all experienced the frustration of not hearing from someone we've emailed or phoned. What to do? The reality is that some people are juggling hundreds of emails a day and they do what we do: they triage, answering only the most critical immediately and holding the rest for later.

Peter Bregman, CEO of a management consulting firm, suggests several courses of action:

I've made the mistake of sending multiple messages to the unresponsive person. But I realized something: not a single one of those multiple follow ups worked. Sure the people might have called me back eventually, but I never — not once — got the work.

What to do?

One, elevate the follow up to a crisis email. If, for example, you're pitching your services, you could suggest another client is waiting for your time. I would only suggest saying that if it's true. If it's not, it's a perilous gamble.

Two, recognize that it's not a crisis — at least not to the person you're trying to get a response from — and accept that they will respond in their own time or not at all.

Then, he says, manage your own emotions. How? Follow up once, after the meeting, and the moment you send that follow up — not a week later but as soon as you hit send or hang up the phone — assume they're not interested. They've said "no." Close the book. Take the follow up off your to do list. Move on to the next thing.

One other possibility, Bregman says, and I do this: You can always send other information unrelated to the open issue — articles, updates, referrals — that might be of interest and deepen the relationship. But don't follow up on the open issue.

This blog is filled with apercus

apercu / ah-per-su/ noun

1. A perceptive insight.
2. A brief summary.

Dr. Goodword asks:

What should we do with the French beard on the C (aperçu) in the English spelling of this word? This is a question, I'm sure, you have struggled with for a long time. The major dictionaries leave it on, but my spellchecker shaves it off. If you have difficulty finding it on your keyboard, just ignore it. On the other hand, the French spelling does make the word a bit cuter. The plural of today's word is, as we might expect, apercus (or aperçus).

How to use it:

Apercu, the good doctor informs, works when you tire of using summary or the French word with the cap on the E, précis: "Farley, the entire history of your life is unnecessary; a simple apercu will suffice." The other sense gives your speech or writing a little lift when you wish to express the sense of an insight: "Frank's report was comprehensive but lacked any pithy apercu into how we can solve the problem."

History: Apercu is the past participle of the French verb apercevoir "to perceive", freshly borrowed by English, beard and all. No attempt has been made to hide its point of origin. The French verb comes from Latin ad "(up) to" + percipere "to grasp, take possession of", comprising per- "through, thorough" + capere "to grasp, seize". The same root *kap-, became haben "have" in German and guess what in English. We see the effects of capere in capture, capacious, intercept, and many other English words snipped from the Latin lexicon.

Leader of the pact

Stanley Bing, the hilarious columnist who writes on life at work, answers a reader:

Dear Stanley,

I work for the largest bank in the world, and like all things it has its ups and downs. What strategies can I use to effectively “manage up”? I am hoping to differentiate myself from the pact, and my hard work seems to go unnoticed. Signed,

Ambitious

Dear Ambitious,

Well, you can start by learning to spell. I don’t mean to be unkind or rude, but there you have it. You won’t differentiate yourself from the “pact,” my friend, unless you are negotiating an international agreement of some sort. You will, however, differentiate yourself from the pack if you use language right and spell things correctly. Okay, there may be parts of the business world where spelling and grammar don’t count, and perhaps banking is one of them. But I don’t think so. I can’t tell you how many times, in spite of all my best intentions, I develop a slightly more negative opinion about somebody because they write me an e-mail that says, “Stan, your right.” I also have no particular affection for the dreaded “Him and me are going to call you about that.” What can I tell you? I’m a grammar and spelling police officer. I’m also a boss. If you want to manage me, you have to speak my language. Or any language. That’s a good beginning.

The most looked-up words in 2009

The 2009 Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year list is based on actual user lookups to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary and Online Thesaurus.

The word of the year that received the highest intensity of searches over the shortest period of time is admonish.

"Admonish shot to the top of the list three days after Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during a speech made by President Obama, and it remained among our top lookups for weeks," said Peter A. Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's Editor at Large. "When the House announced plans to 'admonish' Rep. Wilson, the word was understood to be technical or official, and it has been repeated often in coverage of recent contentious political issues. While this particular story wasn't very important in the context of a year's worth of news, it triggered enormous interest in this word."

admonish (verb)

: to express warning or disapproval to especially in a gentle, earnest, or solicitous manner

The other words:

2. emaciated
3. empathy
4. furlough
5. inaugurate
6. nugatory
7. pandemic
8. philanderer
9. repose
10. rogue

Traffic to Merriam-Webster.com now exceeds 1.3 billion individual page views per year. On average, there are approximately ten lookup requests in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary or Thesaurus per second. During peak hours, this may increase to more than 100 requests per second.

How Mark Twain became a literary person

In his words:

"In my view, a person who published things in a mere newspaper could not properly claim recognition as a Literary Person: he must rise  away above that; he must appear in a magazine. He would then be a
Literary Person; also, he would be famous--right away. These two ambitions were strong upon me. This was in 1866. I prepared my contribution, and then looked around for the best magazine to go up toglory in. I selected the most important one in New York. The contribution was accepted. I signed it 'MARK TWAIN;' for that name had some currency on the Pacific coast, and it was my idea to spread it all
over the world, now, at this one jump. The article appeared in the December number, and I sat up a month waiting for the January number; for that one would contain the year's list of contributors, my name would be in it, and I should be famous and could give the banquet I was meditating.

"I did not give the banquet. I had not written the 'MARK TWAIN' distinctly; it was a fresh name to Eastern printers, and they put it 'Mike Swain' or 'MacSwain,' I do not remember which. At any rate, I was not celebrated and I did not give the banquet. I was a Literary Person, ut that was all--a buried one; buried alive."

Block that metaphor

From James Taranto and Best of The Web Today:

Metaphor Alert

"[Harry] Reid, 70, is fighting for his political survival. He has been a fixture in the state for 40 years, and he's worried that the last thing voters want is a Reid dynasty. . . . Instead of getting credit for putting down insurrections and wrangling his fellow Democrats into passing a health-care reform bill on Christmas Eve, Harry Reid is getting hosed for it. Republican leaders were licking their lips at the prospect of picking him off. And that was before Reid had to activate a one-man phone tree of apology this weekend for what he called 'improper comments' he made during the 2008 presidential campaign about Barack Obama's light skin and absence of 'Negro dialect.' "--Washington Post, Jan. 12

This avatar thing

There's a movie named "Avatar," which I have no intention of seeing but which prompted Dr. Goodword to look into the word.

avatar / æ-vê-tah(r)/ noun

1. The incarnation of a Hindu deity in human form.
2. An epitome, archetype, or embodiment of something, as the avatar of good or evil.
3. (Computers, Web) A character or image assumed by a player in a computer or online game.

Avatars are abstract ideas in real (human) form, the good doctor explains: "Barney Smith was an avatar of the modern investment broker until his investment in derivatives destroyed his company in the 2008 banking crash." The source of our principles can usually be portrayed as avatars: "I would not have survived to adulthood had my mother not been an avatar of kindness and the unflickering cynosure of my teen years." In the movie, the name wanders a bit off course, since the good guys are really clones of themselves rather than incarnations of abstract ideals.

History: Avatar comes from Sanskrit avatarah "descent" and the sense of this word has descended from the incarnation of a god to an image manipulated by someone in a computer game. The Sanskrit word comprises ava "down" + tarati "crosses over". The root of tarati also appears in tiram "brink" in Sanskrit (the oldest known Indo-European language), a sense that the Greek cast into its variation of the same word, terma "goal". Latin kept the sense of the original word in trans "across, over" but still used the newer sense in terminus "boundary, limit".

Image: Vishnu in the centre of his ten avatars. Hindus believe that sometimes a god will appear on the earth as a person or an animal. These are called avatars. The most important of the avatars are those of Vishnu who has appeared nine times, each time to save the earth.

This blog hasn't tipped the tuna

A couple of  terms for you trendy types.

Tipped the tuna

Started peaking in popularity.

Oddly, this phrase itself tipped the tuna when used in reference to the socal networking service Twitter. A commonly cited source is this blog post by Ross Mayfield "On Wednesday, Twitter tipped the tuna."

Jump the shark

A term to describe a moment when something that was once great has reached a point where it will now decline in quality and popularity.

Origin of this phrase comes from a Happy Days episode where the Fonz jumped a shark on water skis. Thus was labeled the lowest point of the show.

-- Urban Dictionary