Surrounded by newspeak

Roger Kimball writes:

When I wrote about what Obama’s minions are calling our “kinetic military activity” in Libya, I noted that the folks presiding over Orwell’s Newspeak would have liked the phrase “kinetic military activity.” As a mendacious and evasive euphemism for “war” it is hard to beat. But Orwell is not the only important thinker the Obama administration’s assault on the English language brings to mind. There is also Confucius. 

Asked by a disciple how to rule a state properly, Confucius replies that it begins with rectifying the names: 

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be conducted successfully. When affairs cannot be conducted successfully, propriety will not flourish. When propriety does not flourish, punishments will not be properly meted out. When punishments are not properly meted out, the people will not know how to conduct themselves.”

That was written about 475 B.C. When will we catch up with its wisdom?

Uh, when the teleprompter breaks?

GE, OC

If you think texting and tweeting are bringing the language to its knees, you will be ROFL over these abbreviations used in the era of the telegram -- you do remember those, right?

ABT About

BTR Better

B4 Before

C Yes; correct

CUL See you later

FB Fine business (Analogous to "OK")

GA Good afternoon or Go ahead (depending on context)

GE Good evening

GL Good luck

GM Good morning

GN Good night

HI Humour intended

OB Old boy

OC Old chap

OM Old man

OT Old timer

SED Said

SEZ Says

TNX Thanks

TXT Text

CUL!

What is your weltanschauung?

Robert Beard, a PhD, Linguistics who runs the alphaDictionary.com site and sends at a "good word" each day by email (sign up here), offers a doozy today.

weltanschauung / velt-ahn-shæw-ung / noun.

This word stands pretty much as it did in German when English traced a copy for its vocabulary, Dr. Goodword says. "This means that we do not expect to find English derivations from it. However, there are spelling and pronunciation pitfalls. (1) Remember that the W is pronounced [v], (2) that the [sh] sound is spelled SCH, and (3) that two Us precede the NG.

Weltanschauung expresses our conception of the world as it should be: "My weltanschauung cannot accommodate preteen dating or senior citizens living out of wedlock." Of course, the German word sounds so peculiar in English that it begs for facetious applications: "Ferdie decided to open a little Philosophy Shop on Market Street to treat those who are out of step with the current zeitgeist or who are struggling with their weltanschauung."

History: It's a German word made up of Welt "world" + Anschauung "outlook". The German word Welt "world" goes back to Old High German weralt from an older compound wer-ald- "life or age of man", from wer- "man" + ald "age, old". The same compound came down to English as world. The word wer- "man" shares the same origin as Latin vir "man", which we see in borrowed words like virile, virtue (aren't all men virile and virtuous?), and triumvirate. While the Old English word did not survive to Modern English, we find remnants of it in words like the name of the wolf man, werewolf.

A lot more here.

Toss those cookbooks

I've been going through the business throwing stuff away. Seems I've saved every telephone I've ever owned. There are three computer printers down there. And more books than the Library of Congress. What to keep?

An article in the New York Times has some advice, including this on books.

Keep them (with one exception). Yes, e-readers are amazing, and yes, they will probably become a more dominant reading platform over time, but consider this about a book: It has a terrific, high-resolution display. It is pretty durable; you could get it a little wet and all would not be lost. It has tremendous battery life. It is often inexpensive enough that, if you misplaced it, you would not be too upset. You can even borrow them free at sites called libraries. 

But there is one area where printed matter is going to give way to digital content: cookbooks. Martha Stewart Makes Cookies a $5 app for the iPad, is the wave of the future. Every recipe has a photo of the dish (something far too expensive for many printed cookbooks). 

Complicated procedures can be explained by an embedded video. When something needs to be timed, there’s a digital timer built right into the recipe. You can e-mail yourself the ingredients list to take to the grocery store. The app does what cookbooks cannot, providing a better version of everything that came before it.
Now all Martha has to do is make a decorative splashguard for a tablet and you will be all set.

You shoont opened this blog

Realizing she shoont.

My insane and dear (which describes most of them) friend Rick asked me this morning, "Is shouldn't a contraction?"

"Yes."

"So is shouldn't've a double contraction?"

"Must be."

"Is a double contraction legal?"

"In some states."

"What is a double contraction?"

"That's when a woman is really, really about to have a baby."

"No, that's when a woman is about to have twins."

Rick had me there. So, as it developed, shouldn't've is a contraction of should not have.

"But," Rick says, "my wife contracts that to shoonta." As in, "You shoonta taken a nap."

Most important things in life revolve around naps.

"Maybe there's yet another contraction waiting," I said.

"Shoont," Rick said.

"You," I said, "shoont have started this conversation."

Stuttering and the writer

"The disorder teaches different things to writers, such as how a sentence can fly when it is freed from the requirements of speech. Writing as a vocation tends to attract control freaks, pathological introverts, and uneasy narcissists—the sort of people, basically, who don't mind spending hours alone at a desk, trying to make their own ideas sound good on a piece of paper—but for stutterers, the endless possibilities for voice control on the blank page carry especial appeal. Give a stutterer a pen and some practice and, suddenly, what seems imperfectible in speech is a few scribblings and crossings-out and rescribblings away. 

"This anxious guilty blockage in the throat," Updike wrote. "I managed to maneuver several millions of words around it." Even a partial list of stuttering writers points to certain correlations between the impediment and the development of literary voice: Updike, Drabble, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert A. Heinlein, W. Somerset Maugham, at various points Christopher Hitchens and the Dunne brothers (John Gregory and Dominick), Philip Larkin, John Bayley, Elizabeth Bowen—and so on, back to Henry James.

"In retrospect, James' impediment seems to gape back at us from every lavish, stylized page of his prose. Who but a speech-blocked writer would devote so much energy and ink to writing, rewriting, and overwriting such a body of work? Who else would dwell so hungrily on the rhythms and refracted meanings of the social sphere? As much as James is a literary paragon, he is the person many stutterers spend their whole lives trying not to be: the eagle-eyed wallflower, the brilliant nonparticipant, a man so disengaged from normal social congress that there's been scholarly debate on the extent to which he was straight or gay or, as one theory has it, neutered on a fence. This is the final and most insidious way stutterers fear being misunderstood: They worry that their speaking voice, and the behavior that accompanies it, will be taken as a window onto something like their personality."

-- Nathan Heller

Is it good if a vacuum really sucks?

You'll suck your bains out, kid!

And other oddities of our language ...

• Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?
• Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack?
• Why does "slow down" and "slow up" mean the same thing?
• Why does "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same thing?
• Why do "tug" boats push their barges?
• Why are they called " stands" when they are made for sitting?
• Why is it called "after dark" when it really is "after light"?
• Doesn't "expecting the unexpected" make the unexpected expected?
• Why are a "wise man" and a "wise guy" opposites?
• Why do "overlook" and "oversee" mean opposite things?
• Why is "phonics" not spelled the way it sounds?
• Why is bra singular and panties plural?
• Why do we put suits in garment bags and garments in a suitcase?
• How come abbreviated is such a long word?
• Why do they call it a TV set when you only have one?
• Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?

(Thanks, Lainey)

We should all be sprachgefuhl

It's a mouthful of a word, but palpable.

sprachgefuhl / shprahk-gê-ful / noun

feeling or sensitivity for language and the correct use of gramma

"Shakespeare's plays reflect not only a profound understanding of the human condition but a sprachgefuhl for phrasing and word selection."

Yeah, me too.

Dr. Goodword gives us the history: Sprachgefuhl was plucked by linguists part and parcel from Modern German, where Sprache means "language" and Gefühl, "feeling" from the verb fühlen "to feel". Sprache and English speech share the same origin, as do fühlen andfeel. Since the Germanic [f] comes from Proto-Indo-European [p], we find in Latin, as expected, a related verb, palpare "to feel, stroke gently", from which English palpable comes. Since we feel first and foremost with our fingers, the Russian used this stem for their word, palec "finger".