Your editor has a word for you

illeism / il-lee-iz-êm / noun


1. The use of a third person pronoun (he or she) referring to oneself or someone expected to be addressed as you.  
2. The use of third person expressions in referring to yourself as, "Stop asking me the same thing. Your dad has (= I have) said 'no' and that is the end of it."

Dr. Goodword:

My favorite illeist remains Rumpole of the Bailey in the BBC series of the same name. Horace Rumpole, played admirably for several seasons by Leo McKern, refers to his wife as "She who must be obeyed": "Yes, She who must be obeyed has spoken and I can but submit to her will," is a paraphrase of many of his responses to her requests. We also hear illeisms, though, in children who haven't quite mastered the shift of the pronouns I and you. Children cannot make out early on why they are sometimes I, sometimes you, so they are likely to say things like, "Mikey want to play outside" rather than, "I want to play outside." 

History: It is a little odd to create an English word out of a pronoun (nouns, verbs, and adjectives are usually objects of our borrowing) but illeism is based on the Latin third person singular pronoun ille "he" (illa "she", illud "it"). We see the remnants of ille and illa today in words like French il "he" and elle "she" and Spanish él and ella. The word originally meant "that" and, just as unaccented that became the in English, Latin ille and illa became "the" in French (le, la) and Spanish el, la.

Mark my solecisms

solecism / SOL-uh-siz-uhm / noun:

1. A nonstandard usage or grammatical construction; also, a minor blunder in speech.
2. A breach of good manners or etiquette.
3. Any inconsistency, mistake, or impropriety.

Her English is good, apart from a few stubborn idiosyncrasies of preposition and tense, but these are music to me, sung solecisms -- how else to describe "I am already loving you," her first declaration of feeling for me, now two years old?
-- Ronan Bennett, The Catastrophist

History: Solecism comes from Latin soloecismus, from Greek soloikizein, "to speak incorrectly," from soloikos, "speaking incorrectly," literally, "an inhabitant of Soli," a city in ancient Cilicia where a dialect regarded as substandard was spoken.

Is your writing pellucid?

pellucid / puh-LOO-sid / adjective

1. Transparent; clear; not opaque.
2. Easily understandable

In her scrupulous and pellucid prose, she appears to distance herself from the optimistic Californian light.
-- Cynthia Ozick, "What Writer's Writers Write.", New York Times Magazine, January 2, 2000

History: "transparent, translucent," 1619, from L. pellucidus "transparent," from pellucere "shine through," from per- "through" + lucere "to shine"

Frankly, we should thank the Germans

for this simple word, which does so much work.

frank / frængk / Noun, Adjective, Verb

1. [Noun, proper: Franks] A member of the Germanic people who conquered Gaul about 500 AD.
2. [Noun, common] A small, smooth, bland-tasting sausage commonly served in an elongated bun.  
3. [Adjective] Brutally honest, straightforward, without sugar coating in speech or writing.  
4. [Verb] To stamp a postmark cancelling it, or to stamp an envelope in some way permitting it to be delivered free of charge.

Dr. Goodword is at the lectern:

With frank we get a bargain: at least four distinct words for the price of one. However, as the Word History will show, if we explore their backgrounds, we find that they all come from the same source.

All of the meanings of frank, believe it or not, originate in the same Old Germanic word which probably meant "free". It was first recorded in Medieval Latin in reference to the Franks but also as an adjective francus meaning "free".

The land of the Gauls conquered by the Franks kept the latter's name, France today, and in all probability the Franks were called "the free ones" because they were the conquerors. For whatever reason, they were associated with freedom and, in particular, speaking freely, hence the sense of the English adjective.

The postal application originally referred to stamping an envelop for delivery free of cost. A little Frenchman was known as a Franciscus in Late Latin and this word went on to be Francis and Frances in French. Francis was reduced back to Frank in English.

Frank the hotdog? This frank is a clipping of Frankfurter, referring to a sausage originally made in Frankfurt, Germany. This city is located by an ancient ford used by the Franks and hence picked up the name Frankfurt am Main "the Franks' ford on the Main". 

Guess we should thank the French

for these words.

soi-disant / swah-dee-ZAHNG (the NG is not pronounced, but the vowel is nasalized) / adjective

self-proclaimed, so-called

"It's one of the few soi-disant walking boots we've seen this month that you might be able to, you know, walk in." (The Times [London], March 3, 2010)

"Soi-disant," which in French means literally "saying oneself," is one of hundreds of French terms that entered English in the 17th and 18th centuries, during the period known as the Enlightenment. Even as political antipathies between France and England were being played out on battlefields in Europe and America, English speakers were peppering their speech and writing with French. "Soi-disant" first began appearing in English texts in 1752 as a disparaging term for someone who styles or fancies him- or herself in some role. "Crepe," "vis-a-vis," "etiquette," and "sang-froid" are a few of the other French terms that became naturalized in English at that time.

-- Merriam-Webster

The infinite pathos of life's realities

The Rev. Dr. Henry Van Dyke of Princeton participated in the funeral of Mark Twain, making note of the great writer's use of humor:

"Those who know his work as a whole know that under the lambent and irrepressible humor which was his gift there was a foundation of serious thoughts and noble affections and desires.
 
"Nothing could be more false than to suppose that the presence of humor means the absence of depth and earnestness. There are elements of the unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange, incongruous world which must seem humorous even tot he highest Mind. Of these the Bible says, 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Almighty shall hold them in derision.' But the mark of this higher humor is that it does not laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent; only at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the hypocritical.

"Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile at the claim that his humor was infallible. But we may say without doubt that he used his gift, not for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work is clean and wholesome. He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world's false claimants out of court, and entangled many of the world's false witnesses in the net of ridicule. In his best books and stories, colored with his own experience, he touched the absurdities of life with penetrating but not unkindly mockery, and made us feel somehow the infinite pathos of life's realities."

(Creativity Central)

Ralph Waldo Emerson: listening

"There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening, we shall hear the right word."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reading or listening

John McWhorter writing for TNR.com:

"Why does Sarah Palin talk the way she does? . . . [She] is given to meandering phraseology of a kind suggesting someone more commenting on impressions as they enter and leave her head rather than constructing insights about them. . . .

The easy score is to flag this speech style as a sign of moronism. But we have to be careful—there is a glass houses issue here. Before parsing Palinspeak we have to understand the worldwide difference between spoken and written language—and the fact that in highly literate societies, we tend to have idealized visions of how close our speech supposedly is to the written ideal.

"Namely, linguists have shown that spoken utterances—even by educated people (that is, even you)—average seven to ten words. We speak in little packets. And the result is much baggier than we think of language as being, because we live under the artificial circumstance of engaging language so much on the page, artificially enshrined, embellished, and planned out."

A new chapter for books

Wade Roush at Technology Review:

For serious readers, products like Amazon's Kindle 2, Barnes and Noble's Nook, and Sony's Daily Edition are a godsend. It's not just that these electronic reading devices are handy portals to hundreds of thousands of trade books, textbooks, public-domain works, and best-sellers, all of which can be wirelessly downloaded at a moment's notice, and to scores of magazines and newspapers, which show up on subscribers' devices automatically.

They're also giving adventurous authors and publishers new ways to organize and market their creations. A California startup called Vook, for example, has begun to package cookbooks, workout manuals, and even novels with illustrative video clips, and it's selling these hybrids of video and text to iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch owners through Apple's iTunes Store.

Unfortunately, you can't get away with charging hardcover prices for an e-book, which makes it hard to see how traditional publishers will profit in a future that's largely digital. As a result, book publishers are facing a painful and tumultuous time as they attempt to adapt to the emerging e-book technologies. The Kindle, the iPad, and their ilk will force upon print-centric publishers what the Internet, file sharing, and the iPod forced upon the CD-centric music conglomerates starting around 1999--namely, waves of cost cutting and a search for new business models.

Last words

"A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur."

-- Mark Twain

Tomorrow, April 21, we celebrate the centennial of Samuel Clemens' death. Our greatest humorist died at his home in Redding, Connecticut.

He was watched constantly by the press and at one point earlier in his life had to deny that he had died. He wrote his statement.

Have you ever been gruntled?

Ben Schott runs a blog at The New York Times dedicated to new words. Here's his weekend competition:

This weekend, co-vocabularists are invited to create necessary neologisms by monkeying with prefixes and suffixes.

For example:

Why, when one can be overwhelmed and underwhelmed, cannot one be whelmed?

Surely, unsubtle innuendo is outuendo, and innuendo that goes too far is innuendon’t.

Is one who hates all married women a mrsanthrope?

And, how many of us have ever been gruntled?

I was gruntled once. I bought an ointment and it went away.

Was Obama care a Pyrrhic victory?

pyrrhic / pĭr'ĭk / noun

A victory that is accompanied by enormous losses and leaves the winners in as desperate shape as if they had lost.

In use: Technically it was a victory for the British, who attacked the patriot fortifications -- but a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was: out of 2,200 British soldiers 1,034 were killed or wounded, including one in nine of all the officers the British lost in the whole war.
-- Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "A Revolutionary Itinerary", The Atlantic, April 2001

History: This expression alludes to Kind Pyrrhus of Epirus, who defeated the Romans at Asculum in a.d. 279, but lost his best officers and many of his troops. Pyrrhus then said: "Another such victory and we are lost." In English the term was first recorded (used figuratively) in 1879.

There is also a Cadmean victory.

A victory attained at as great a loss to the victor as to the vanquished.

History: c.1600, from Gk. Kadmeia nike  "victory involving one's own ruin" [Liddell & Scott], from Cadmus  (Gk. Kadmos ), legendary founder of Thebes in Boeotia and bringer of the alphabet to Greece. Probably a reference to the story of Cadmus and the "Sown-Men," who fought each other till only a handful were left alive. 

Dare you to say it

A blog I've recently discovered, Word O' Day, presents this interesting specimen:

mamihlapinatapai / noun

It is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It describes "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start."

If you want to work it into conversation today, here are some tips:

The word consists of the reflexive/passive prefix ma- (mam- before a vowel), the root ihlapi (pronounced [iɬapi]), which means to be at a loss as what to do next, the stative suffix -n, an achievement suffix -ata, and the dual suffix -apai, which in composition with the reflexive mam- has a reciprocal sense.

Hope that helps.

A new chapter in the book business

Is it hyperbole to say that the impact of the Internet is as profound, if not more so, than Gutenberg's?

From The Economist:

In 2009 Amazon sold 19% of printed books in North America, reckons Credit Suisse, compared with Barnes & Noble’s 17% and Borders’ 10%. By 2015, the bank estimates, Amazon will sell 28%.

Booksellers are labouring to raise their profile online and win back the customers they have lost. Barnes & Noble’s online sales rose by 32% to $210m in the quarter ending in January, compared with a year earlier. It has started selling its own e-reader, called the “Nook”, and digital books to go with it.

Will bookshops disappear completely, as music shops seem to be doing? Most are pinning their hopes on giving people more reasons to come inside. Many shops have started to offer free internet access to keep customers there longer and to enable them to download e-books.

How words cost us money

It is estimated that there are at least one million tax preparers in the United States; and that this year 60% of all taxpayers will use a professional and another 20% will use tax preparation software (another industry). In essence, the government has created a process for citizens that most citizens can't navigate.

Ron Ashkenas, a management consultant, blames it on words.

What's going on? Here's one possibility: Over the years, the government turned the tax code over to technical experts, who wrote the regulations, forms, and processes in their own language without regard for the end-user, the citizen, who would be required to use them. As the language and process became more and more arcane, fewer end-users could actually do their own taxes, so an industry of "tax preparers" formed to provide an interface between the tax payer and the taxing authorities.

There is nothing to stop the IRS, if it has the will and courage, to simplify the language and process of paying taxes. And in the past year, under the leadership of Commissioner Shulman, positive steps have indeed been taken in that direction. For example, more than half of all 2009 returns will be filed electronically, a process that the IRS has finally embraced. The IRS has also set up a permanent "Office of Taxpayer Correspondence," which identifies and acts on ideas for simplifying communication and has already streamlined various tax collection "notice letters" and inserts. 

I don't try to read that stuff. I let my accountant, Slick Louie, do it. I don't even bother to open the envelopes anymore, and Slick is always amazed when he opens them for me that I've stayed out of prison.

Spelling, anyone?

In 2006, the New York City Department of Education made a mistake in their bookkeeping.  Apparently, there was a misspelling that had a word with one extra letter.  This word was not readable by their accounting system and, somehow, that system decided to therefore spend twice as much on transportation.  That year, $2.8 million was spent instead of the budgeted $1.4 million. The city had to come up with the money to replace it.

-- A Whole Lot of Nothing

Why we don't like some writers

The latest fad in university English departments is cognitive science. Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, is particularly interested in what cognitive scientists call the theory of mind, which involves one person’s ability to interpret another person’s mental state and to pinpoint the source of a particular piece of information in order to assess its validity.

Jane Austen’s novels are frequently constructed around mistaken interpretations. In “Emma” the eponymous heroine assumes Mr. Elton’s attentions signal a romantic interest in her friend Harriet, though he is actually intent on marrying Emma. She similarly misinterprets the behavior of Frank Churchill and Mr. Knightly, and misses the true objects of their affections. 

Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time, Ms. Zunshine said. For example, the proposition “Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate” is not too hard to follow. Add a fourth level, though, and it’s suddenly more difficult. And experiments have shown that at the fifth level understanding drops off by 60 percent, Ms. Zunshine said. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf are especially challenging because she asks readers to keep up with six different mental states, or what the scholars call levels of intentionality.

I'm going to slip into a Jane Austen page-turner right after my nap.

The things people put on a resume

Not going to make the final cut:

"Pig wrestling champion."

Candidate who had worked in a supermarket listed as one of his responsibilities: "Cut the cheese."

A man included his picture and the declaration that he was single and lived with his mother.

Under 'reason for leaving' an applicant stated, "Threat of death."

"It seems that my credentials would be a good fit for what you are looking to accomplish, however, I don't wish to make a career of it."

"Ecxellent attention to detail."

Hobbies: "Sleeping, etc., etc."

"I didn't like working at the strip club because I felt exposed."

Words you can use to describe Washington, D.C.

malversation \mal-vur-SAY-shun\, noun:

Misconduct, corruption, or extortion in public office.

languor \LANG-guhr; LANG-uhr\, noun:

1. Mental or physical weariness or fatigue.
2. Listless indolence, especially the indolence of one who is satiated by a life of luxury or pleasure.
3. A heaviness or oppressive stillness of the air.

pablum \PAB-luhm\, noun:

1. Something (as writing or speech) that is trite, insipid, or simplistic.
2. (capitalized) A trademark used for a bland soft cereal for infants.

quixotic \kwik-SOT-ik\, adjective:

1. Caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals.
2. Capricious; impulsive; unpredictable.

Going Globish

Robert McCrum on the phenomenon of English in use everywhere, which he terms "Globish":

"In September 2005, Jyllands Posten (the Jutland Post), a culturally influential Danish newspaper, published a sequence of satirical cartoons poking fun at the prophet Muhammad, which provoked riots in which 139 people died. Possibly the most bizarre response to the affair, which surfaced again in January 2010 with an assault on the home of the artist, Kurt Westergaard, was a protest by Muslim fundamentalists outside the Danish embassy in London. Chanting in English, the protesters carried placards with slogans such as "Vikings Beware!", "Butcher Those Who Mock Islam", "Freedom of Expression Go to Hell" and (my favourite) "Down with Free Speech".

"This collision of the Koran with Monty Python, or perhaps of the OED with the Islamic Jihad, was the moment at which I began to reflect on the dramatic shift in global self-expression (I didn't have a word for it then) that was now asserting itself in this crisis, through a world united by the internet. What more surreal – and telling – commentary on the anglicisation of the modern world could there be than a demonstration by devout Muslims, in London, exploiting an old English freedom, and expressing it in the English language, to demand the curbing of the libertarian tradition that actually legitimised their protest?"

The karma thing

karma / kah(r)-mê / noun

1. [Hinduism & Buddhism] The effects of our actions that determine our destiny in our next incarnation. 2. Vibes, aura, a distinct sense of or feeling for a place, person, or object.  
3. Fate, destiny.

We sit at the knee of Dr. Goodword:

You might try the adjective, karmic, though the mixing of a Sanskrit root with a Latin suffix is a little strange. Karma, of course, is not directly related to 'carma', our reward in this life for polite driving. Good 'carma' is built up by allowing other drivers into long traffic lines, giving up contested parking spaces, and the like. It results in finding more and better parking places, dodging road rage, and finding stations with lower gasoline prices.

Remember, your karma does not speak to your success in this life, but to your reincarnated form. In the English-speaking world, however, the word indicates the feel and invisible aura of something: "The karma in their house always sours when they bring out the slide shows."

History: Karma is the Sanskrit word for "deed" from the verb karoti "performs, does, acts", that is to say, an action that has consequences. Sanskrit is an Indo-European language related to English and most of the languages of Europe. So, it shouldn't be surprising to discover that this word is related to Latin creare "to create". In Russian we find chary "magic" and charovat' "to charm, enchant."

What you can call your friends

puerile / PYUR-ul / adjective

1 : juvenile
2 : childish, silly

"Puerile" may call to mind qualities of youth and immaturity, but the term itself is no spring chicken. On the contrary, it's been around for more than three centuries, and its predecessors in French and Latin, the adjectives "puéril" and "puerilis," respectively, are far older. Those two terms have the same basic meaning as the English word "puerile," and they both trace to the Latin noun "puer," meaning "boy" or "child." Nowadays, "puerile" can describe the acts or utterances of an actual child, but it more often refers (usually with marked disapproval) to occurrences of childishness where adult maturity would be expected or preferred.

reprobate / REP-ruh-bayt / noun

1 : a person foreordained to damnation

2 : a depraved person : scoundrel

These days, calling someone a "reprobate" is hardly a condemnation to hellfire and brimstone, but the original reprobates of the 16th century were hardened sinners who had fallen from God's grace. By the 19th century, "reprobate" had acquired the milder, but still utterly condemnatory, sense of "a depraved person." Gradually, though, the criticism implied by "reprobate" became touched with tolerance and even a bit of humor. It is now most likely to be used as it was in this August 1995 New Yorker magazine article about the death of musician Jerry Garcia: "It was suddenly obvious that Garcia had become, against all odds, an American icon: by Thursday morning, the avuncular old reprobate had smuggled his way onto the front pages of newspapers around the world."

inane / ih-NAYN / noun

: void or empty space

The adjective "inane" is now most commonly encountered as a synonym of "shallow" or "silly." But when this word first entered the English language in the early 17th century, it was used to mean "empty" or "insubstantial." It was this older sense that gave rise, in the latter half of the 17th century, to the noun "inane," which often serves as a poetic reference to the void of space ("the illimitable inane," "the limitless inane," "the incomprehensible inane"). This noun usage has not always been viewed in a favorable light. Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), says of "inane" that "it is used licentiously for a substantive," which in current English means that it is used as a noun without regard to the rules.

We will always have magazines

Our media landscape is constantly changing, and in response publishers are finding new uses for their magazines.




(Presurfer)

In your writing, don't be a popinjay

popinjay / pop-in-jey / noun

1. a person given to vain, pretentious displays and empty chatter; coxcomb; fop.

2. British Dialect. a woodpecker, esp. the green woodpecker.

3. Archaic. the figure of a parrot usually fixed on a pole and used as a target in archery and gun shooting.

4. Archaic. a parrot. 

A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. -- Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

History: 1270, "a parrot," from O.Fr. papegai (12c.), from Sp. papagayo, from Arabic babagha', from Pers. babgha "parrot," possibly imitative of its cry. Used of people in a complimentary sense (in allusion to beauty and rarity) from c.1310; meaning "vain, talkative person" is first recorded 1528. Obsolete fig. sense of "a target to shoot at" is explained by Cotgrave's 2nd sense definition: "also a woodden parrot (set up on the top of a steeple, high tree, or pole) whereat there is, in many parts of France, a generall shooting once euerie yeare; and an exemption, for all that yeare, from La Taille, obtained by him that strikes downe" all or part of the bird.

-- Dictionary.com

What's your forte?

forte / FORT / noun

something in which one excels : one's strong point

Forte derives from the sport of fencing -- when English speakers borrowed the word from French in the mid-17th century, it referred to the strongest part of a sword blade, between the middle and the hilt. It is therefore unsurprising that "forte" eventually developed an extended metaphorical sense for a person's strong point. (Incidentally, "forte" has its counterpoint in the word "foible," meaning both the weakest part of a sword blade and a person's weak point.)

There is some controversy over how to correctly pronounce "forte"; common choices in American English are "FOR-tay" and "for-TAY," but many usage commentators recommend rhyming it with "fort." None of these is technically true to the French, in which "forte" would sound more like "for." You can take your choice, knowing that someone somewhere will dislike whichever variant you choose. All, however, are standard.

-- Merriam-Webster