From the bard to your mouth

(American Digest)

Go ahead and aggravate me

I was taught that if you are pestering me you are irritating me, that if you admitted to aggravating me you were using the term incorrectly.

Oops.

The linguist Robert Beard has irritated me on this. Or aggravated me. Whatever.

aggravate /  æ-grê-vayt / verb

1. To make heavy or heavier, to load, burden, as to be aggravated with the responsibilities of someone else's office.
2. To increase the gravity of, to make worse, exacerbate.
3. To annoy.

Here's where Beard gets annoying: I recall being told in grammar school (as we called it then) that aggravate can only mean "make worse" and not simply "annoy," as in "This zipper aggravates me when it sticks like this." My teachers didn't know, however, that the word had borne both meanings since the 17th century and, moreover, the original Latin verb, aggravare, could be used in both senses as well. So feel as free to say that the sticking zipper aggravates you to no end as you would to say, "Jerking it like that when it sticks only aggravates (makes worse) the problem."

History: Aggravate is taken from the past participle (aggravatus) of the Latin verb aggravare "to make heavier or worse." This verb is made up of ad "to" + gravare "to burden", based on the root gravis "heavy". We see this stem in many English words borrowed from Latin, such as grave "serious" and gravity. This word also devolved into Old French grever "to harm", which English borrowed as grieve which also gave us grief. The Proto-Indo-European root that gave rise to gravis also went on to become guru "heavy, serious, venerable" in Sanskrit, the ancestor language of Hindi, whence English borrowed the word when India was a colony.

Good grief, you can see why this guru is irritated.

But what do you really think?

"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered.It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of dogs barking through endless nights.It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.It drags itself out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is flap and doodle.It is balder and dash."

-- H.L. Mencken, on Warren G.Harding

Are you p'd off?

Jay Nordlinger writes, "Many years ago, I became aware that “pissed” meant one thing in America, another thing in Britain. One night in London, I asked a man for directions. He said, “Sir, I’m pissed.” He didn’t look angry, though. What he was, was drunk."

His readers chimed in.

My Irish relatives said: "Come on in and we'll have a wee nip and some good crack". Crack meaning conversation over there. 

The Japanese equivalent which is used to express anger, that I used below is kind of odd to us westerners.　腹(hara) belly　立つ(tatsu) to stand up, roughly it a literal translation of ちょー腹立つ！ would be "My belly is really standing up!" but it means I'm really angry (or really p***ed off!).

Another reader:

As an admiral’s aide back in 1993 — the admiral was deputy chief of staff at SACLANT [a component of NATO] — I was exposed to many language differences between the Brits and us. My favorite one: 

British Admiral to Boss’s Wife: “So, what did you like best about living in Charleston, South Carolina?” 

Admiral’s Wife: “I absolutely loved shagging on the beach. My husband is quite the shagger, if you didn’t already know!” 

The British admiral gave no response, and he managed to keep from spitting out his drink. [There’s the British stoicism we know and love so well!] Now, my admiral’s wife was a great lady with a sense of humor. When I explained to her the difference in meanings, she almost passed out, she laughed so hard.

In Britain, Nordlinger explains, for the uninitiated (if that’s the word), shagging means copulating. I wrote back to the reader, “Just to be clear: Did you mean to say that the admiral and his wife hit golf balls on the beach?” (To shag is to practice golf shots, as on a range.) He said, “No — the shag is a dance they do in the Carolinas.” I had no idea.

Obama is a rail-splitter, buffoon and boor

Nutmeg dealer.

No wait, he's a cross between sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass.

A few days ago, Obama lamented that, “Lincoln -- they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”

John Miller looked it up and reports:

After securing the Republican nomination in 1860, he was branded the “Black Republican.” Southern newspapers obsessed over his physical appearance. He was “the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a human frame” and “a horrid looking wretch . . . sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper and the night man.”

Following Lincoln’s inauguration, the Charleston Mercury dubbed the new president “the Ourang-Outang at the White House.” Others called him “the Illinois Ape,” a “Baboon,” and “the original gorilla.” A Virginia congressman called him “a cross between sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass.”

Of course it all calmed down eventually.

Many of Lincoln’s critics were in the North. As the 1864 election approached, the New York World condemned the GOP ticket of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson: “The age of statesmen is gone; the age of rail-splitters and tailors, of buffoons, boors and fanatics, has succeeded,” it wrote. “In a crisis of the most appalling magnitude, requiring statesmanship of the highest order, the country is asked to consider the claims of two ignorant, boorish, third-rate backwoods lawyers, for the highest stations in government."

If you don't like this post, then you're a “border ruffian” and “a vulgar mobocrat.” Bite me.

What's the opposite of opposite?

From National Review Online:

A reader writes:

Mr. Derbyshire,

In your July Diary on NRO you mentioned your annoyance with words that have no opposite. Earlier today I was discussing languages with a friend and I recalled that in the past I have used the word “shallow” as a sort of vague, inexact opposite to “steep”, but it never seemed right. What is the actual opposite of “steep”? What word can you put in place of “steep” in “this mountain is very steep” to make it mean the opposite? I don’t think there is one.

Just so. We need an adjective to describe words like this — words with no opposite. “Anantonymous”?

But then … what would be the opposite?

William Butler Yeats: language of the people

"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."

-- William Butler Yeats