By Charles Layton

Happy new year, word wonks.

I’m thinking that our linguistic new year’s resolution should be about clichés. I hate clichés like sin. So in 2013 I resolve to avoid them like the plague. Avoiding clichés is going to be Job One. It’s going to be a game changer. A no-brainer. That’s what I’m talkin’ about!

Seriously, was this past year more cliché-packed than most? Especially in politics? It seemed so.

What if, in the coming year, our politicos and their enablers and hirelings and flacks made a real effort not to talk about (to pick one example) “kicking the can down the road.” That used to be an extremely apt image – much better than the older expression, “punt.” But after you’ve heard it three or four times a day it loses its magic.

Many clichés got to be clichés because they were magical — originally. When I first heard someone talk about “throwing out the baby with the bath water,” I was in wonderment at the pure genius of that. Now, through repetition, the image has lost impact. So it goes. (I’m always reminded of the man who read Shakespeare’s Hamlet for the first time and complained that it was full of clichés.)

Anyway, I’m for a bipartisan agreement that we stop referring to roads with cans in them. And that we forego the use of the word “spin” in its political sense; it’s making people dizzy. Also, no more references to a “fiscal cliff.” And no more accusing people of “politics as usual.” That trite little phrase that has come to mean both anything and nothing. In fact, accusing someone of politics as usual has itself become politics as usual.

I’d also ask Christian conservatives to stop accusing secular liberals of waging a “war on Christmas” – a phrase as seasonally predictable as an Andy Williams song — and that liberals, in return, stop calling out conservatives over “the war on women.” Discarding the “war on” shorthand might allow both groups to frame their complaints more precisely.

The “war on” motif began in the 60s, to my recollection, when Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. It sounded pretty cool back then – until the war on poverty got displaced by a real war in Vietnam. But in the 70s Nixon tried to have a war on cancer. And then came the war on drugs, which has had a longer run than Cats. Bush launched a war on terror. More recently, according to the New York newspapers, Mayor Bloomberg has had both a “war on guns” and a “war on soda.” In between, we’ve had various “culture wars” along with wars on crime, inflation, obesity, germs – everything except a war on wars. I read a headline the other day that said: “Putin Declares War on Orphans.” Thus does a once-vigorous metaphor become shriveled and exhausted, and thus do its users betray their linguistic laziness. “War on” has become a headline writer’s cute little joke.

Sports produces even more clichés than government and politics. It’s amazing how long baseball announcers have been yelling, “It’s outta here!”

But basic sports terms have a way of transmogrifying into political clichés. Horse race terms predominate during election campaigns, when candidates try to “break out of the pack” and become “front runners.” Sometimes they run “neck and neck” or even have a “photo finish.”

Just to shock us out of our cataleptic boredom, I would challenge the commentators to take up another sport. How about cricket? Wouldn’t it be great if they started announcing that Obama had served up a zooter to Congress, or that the New Jersey Democrats had denounced Christie for bowling grubbers and beamers. I’d buy tickets to that.

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The Grammarian befriending a pachyderm. Photo by Mary Walton

By Charles Layton

Today’s word is “ramify,” meaning to divide into branches, from the Latin ramus (branch). That’s what it says on one of my favorite websites, wordsmith.org.

This website is run by Anu Garg, a writer and computer consultant who lives beside a lake somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Each day he features a different word, for which he provides its definition and some interesting commentary.

Also, he throws in a daily random quote, which he calls “A thought for today.” This morning’s thought, for instance, was from James Baldwin: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

This little website claims nearly a million linguaphile (i.e., word nerd) subscribers in at least 200 countries. It’s been up and running since 1994. It’s been written up in the New York Times and elsewhere.

Mr. Garg has become an established authority. People write in with questions, such as the following:

From Mary at worldbank.org:

I  was wondering if you might be able to help me. I have recently started to date a special man. The problem is that I am uncomfortable calling him my “boyfriend” because he isn’t a boy (and I’ve always hated that word anyway; it’s sophomoric). I looked up “boyfriend” in Microsoft Word’s thesaurus but the alternatives are equally unacceptable. Please, please, please, is there a word out there that indicates a close, romantic relationship without being too sappy (or too explicit)? If you can suggest one, I would be forever grateful!

Here is Garg’s answer:

Dear Mary,

I suggest “priya” (pronounced PRI-ya). This unisex word comes from Sanskrit, isn’t sappy, and conveys that unique sense of affection which forms the essense of a relationship.

You can see the level this guy is operating on.

I usually just read the word of the day and then move on, but this morning, having time to kill, I started following some of the comment strings in this website’s extensively rich archives.

I stumbled on a great conversation about the difference between a rug and a carpet. It began with this, from a reader: I tend to think of a carpet as covering more space than a rug. But the dictionaries give them as synonyms.

Then Fiberbabe posted this response: Yeah, I think of carpet as having that wall-to-wall quality, whereas a rug just covers a portion of the floor … throw rug, area rug, mug rug 🙂 … no one I know would ever say “throw carpet.”

But then Jheem filed this dissenting opinion: If a carpet goes from wall to wall, why would anybody talk about wall-to-wall carpeting? Or an area rug? Also, there used to be talk about a flying carpet, not a flying rug. You get called onto the carpet, but have the rug pulled out from under yourself. Carpet is from Latin/Italian and rug is from Scandinavian.

See how educational? Here are a few other things Wordsmith.org taught me today:

• The expression “ring true” comes from the old practice of judging a coin to be genuine or fake by the sound it gives when tapped. That practice became obsolete when coins stopped being made of precious metals, but the idiom lives on.
• All elephants are pachyderms, but not all pachyderms are elephants; the rhinoceros and hippopotamus have also been classified as such. The word means thick-skinned, and you may apply it as well to a thick-skinned, insensitive, stolid person. (Which seems unfair to something as fundamentally inoffensive as an elephant.)
• The disease we call cancer comes from the Greek word for “crab” because the ancient physician Galen thought the spreading lesions of a malignant tumor looked like crab’s claws.
• The word apocalypse, meaning revelation, comes from the Greek word meaning to uncover. But — surprise! — so does the word eucalyptus. It literally means “well-covered.” (Wondering whether the word calypso might also be related, I looked it up elsewhere online. Alas, no connection whatsoever.)

I also ran across a quotation in which one of O. Henry’s characters misunderstands the term solar plexus. “‘His arm,’ said Chad, ‘is harder’n a diamond. He interduced me to what he called a shore-perpluxus punch and ’twas like being kicked twice by a mustang.”

And, finally, let’s conclude with this down-to-earth observation on language by Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who ‘ligate’ arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.”

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By Charles Layton, Blogfinger staff.  Re-posted from 2012.  Still relevant.

I eastwooded today. It was totes cray FOMO. But, really, YOLO, right?

Oh, I forgot, I’m writing for Blogfinger. Gotta switch to the king’s English here.

Today we’re going to travel into the turbulent world of in-crowd slang. Please stow your baggage securely in the overhead compartment and make sure your tray is in the upright position.

For our purposes, an “in-crowd” is any group of people that wishes to distinguish itself from the likes of you. To do this, an in-crowd will develop its own language. If you’ve ever been in the armed services, you know what I’m talking about. The sergeants used to tell us recruits there were three ways to do a thing: the right way, the wrong way and the Army way. And God knows the Army has its own way of speaking. Ten hut!

African Americans developed a way of speaking that was intended to be private from whites. This dates from slavery. It obviously served a needed purpose. And the black community has been a fertile source of language engineering ever since.

Jazz musicians have always had a special way of speaking. Back in the day, one of my favorite jazz-musician/hipster turns of phrase was the playful attachment of the suffix “ville” to almost any word. Instead of being weird, something would be weirdsville. Instead of being cool, it would be coolsville.

In my wandering youth – in the very early 60s — I once found myself riding on a train with a young musician who was just full of jazzy slang. He was almost a caricature of the type; he actually said “Daddy-oh.” When our train passed through the village of Hicksville, on Long Island, he asked me, “Hey, man, where are we?”

I said, “We’re in Hicksville.”

He said, “I know, man, but what’s the name of the place.”

Hicksville

Criminals and gangsters have always constituted the quintessential in-crowd. In the 1930s, the movies acquainted the general public with such colorful gangster lingo as “stool pigeon” (or “stoolie”), referring to someone who was a “snitch” or a “rat” – someone who “squealed” or “sang” to the cops and therefore needed to be “rubbed out.” I seem to remember Edward G. Robinson uttering the wonderful phrase, “My rod will speak,” meaning he was going to shoot some people.

Drug users have given us a ton of slang terms, such as “horse” for heroin and “pot” and “grass” for marijuana. You know those terms. But do you know what an “Alice B. Toklas” is? It’s a marijuana brownie, named for the woman who was the partner of the writer Gertrude Stein. (It may not be a coincidence that a puff of marijuana is sometimes called a “toke.”)

And then, of course, we have teenagers and pre-teenagers who use slang to create a separate place for themselves in the world, a distinct culture, a wall between themselves and adults. That’s why a teenager says “It’s totes cray” instead of  “It’s totally crazy.”

A simple and common way to alter language is to cut off the ends off words. It’s why “radical” became “rad” some years ago, and why “reverend” got shortened to “rev.” Molly Ivins, the late columnist, used to call the Texas legislature “the Lege.” Now it’s the common term down there. In Washington these days, people call the Oval Office simply “the Oval.” It’s kind of fun to do this. The military raised word shortening to an art. Psychological operations became “psy ops.” Signals intelligence became “sigint.”

Connie Eble, an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been collecting college slang since 1972 and writing about it. College is a Petri dish for new slang. In the past, it has given us such expressions as “cut class,” “cram” and “rocks for jocks.” A “turkey dump” is when a college student returns home at Thanksgiving to dump his or her hometown sweetheart. “Dormcest” is hooking up with someone who lives in your dorm.

Eble’s list now includes two popular new terms that are acronyms: FOMO, which means “fear of missing out,” and YOLO, which means “you only live once.” These terms seem to have drifted downward into high school, junior high school and even lower. A kid who isn’t on Facebook can develop FOMO. Such a kid might say, “I’m having a FOMO attack,” converting the word into an adjective.

YOLO is even more interesting. It became popular this year after the rapper Drake included it in a song. “YOLO, and we ‘bout it every day, every day, every day.”

YOLO is what you say when a friend suggests parking in an illegal spot. People also speak of a boozy night on the town as YOLO-ing – “I went YOLO-ing last night.”

It’s not just a word, it’s a philosophy. This past spring a streaker – wearing nothing but a pair of sneakers – sprinted across the field at a Boston Red Sox game with YOLO written across his chest.

An example of eastwooding

By the way, we witnessed the birth of a brand new word just last week: “eastwooding,” named for the actor Clint Eastwood. To “eastwood” is to have a conversation with a chair, or to post a picture of yourself on the Internet in conversation with a chair. This has been happening on both left-wing and right-wing websites in recent days. It’s an activity all of America can enjoy, regardless of party affiliation.

Keep this thing out of your sister’s bedroom.

I think my favorite new slang word – phrase, actually – is “honey badger.” The honey badger is an animal native to Africa and Asia. It is known for its fearlessness and tenacity. According to Internet legend, honey badgers steal food from bigger animals, such as leopards; they attack and eat cobras, and they break into bee hives and eat the larvae even while getting stung thousands of times. Urban Dictionary states that “when they kill something they crack open their victim’s skull with their teeth and eat their brain and digest their thoughts.” It is even claimed that a honey badger will climb into bed with your sister and impregnate her while she sleeps.

Anyway, a guy named Randall made a YouTube video about the honey badger. It was crude, it was hilarious, and it went super-viral. Randall then, in 2011, published a book called Honey Badger Don’t Care. And now, voila!, “honey badger” has entered our language, and probably other languages, with several different meanings. A person might say, “I hate that girl; she’s such a honey badger.” The term also has a rather specific sexual definition, which Blogfinger propriety forbids me to reveal. But, actually, its meaning seems to be migrating in several directions, and if it should survive long-term, it’s unclear what it will finally come to mean.

Such is the nature of language. It is adaptive, supple, inventive and thoroughly unpredictable. In other words, it’s totes cray.

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THE BLOGFINGER GRAMMARIAN

By Charles Layton

I just heard the news that some competitors in the Olympic Games got caught trying to “throw” their badminton matches. But you know what?, I don’t care. I just don’t have Olympics fever any more.

Maybe it’s because I’m a language maven. A word wrangler. A connoisseur des mot. And when folks like me feel a craving for competitive thrills, we don’t necessarily turn to archery or weightlifting or women’s Group C beach volleyball. We would just as soon turn to the American Dialect Society’s annual Word of the Year contest. Talk about an adrenaline rush!

For the past 22 years, the ADS has been choosing not only the major-category winner — the word of the year itself — but also the winners in several sub-categories: “most useful” word, “most creative” word, “most unnecessary” word, “most outrageous” word, “most euphemistic” word, and the twin categories  “most likely to succeed” and “least likely to succeed.”

They also choose, every 10 years, a “word of the decade.” For the decade of 2000-2009 that word was google as a verb. It’s a good choice, one of those brand names like Kleenex that has come to denote something generic, beyond itself.

The word of the decade for the 1990s was web, which certainly seems to have shown staying power. The word of the entire 20th century was jazz (I can’t think of a better one, can you?) and the word of the millennium was “she” (which I’m not sure I quite understand).

The word of the year for 2009 was tweet, which seems OK, but the word of the year for 2008 was better: bailout.

The top-word choices are often based on highly serious, even world-shaking events. The word for 2007 was subprime. Even more of a downer was the one for 2002, WMD or weapons of mass destruction. But occasionally something charming pops out on top. The best word winner for 2006 was the verb to pluto or to be plutoed, meaning to be demoted or devalued.

The best word of 1998 was not a word at all but a prefix — e — as in email or e-commerce. It’s the only time a single letter of the alphabet has won word of the year.

Reading over these lists affirms what an impact the Internet and its ancillary devices have had on our life and culture. The word of the year for 2010 was app. Of course!

One of the more interesting categories is “most likely to succeed.” Looking back over the years one finds some stellar names in this category. For 1999 the word most likely to succeed was dot-com. Good choice. For 2001 the word of the year and the word most likely to succeed were one and the same: 9-11. Most likely to succeed in 2002 was blog. In 1991 it was rollerblade.

But lest you think these people at the ADS are infallible genius-prophets, it pains me to report that they’ve produced the occasional clunker. The word most likely to succeed in 2000 was muggle, the Harry Potter term for a non-wizard, which came to mean a mundane, unimaginative person. I don’t hear that much on the streets of Ocean Grove, do you? Most likely to succeed in 2005 was “sudoku” — referring to a Japanese number puzzle.

The category that’s been the most fun over the years is “most creative” word. This list includes, in 2007, the word googlegänger, meaning a person with your name who shows up when you google yourself. In 2003, it was freegan, someone who eats only free food. In 1997 it was prairie dogging, which means popping one’s head above an office cubicle to see what’s going on.

The most creative in 2010 was judged to be “prehab,” meaning preemptive enrollment in a rehab facility to head off a potential relapse. But the one I would have voted for is the runner-up: the word sauce as an adjectival suffix, as in awesome-sauce meaning great or lame-sauce meaning stupid. I also like the term fat-finger, a verb that means to mistype, as by accidentally striking more than one key on a keyboard/pad.

Here’s the latest list — chosen for the year 2011. Play the Olympic theme in your head as you read these, and imagine the words standing on podiums with medals around their necks:

Word of the year — occupy.

Must useful — humblebrag, an expression of false humility, especially by celebrities on Twitter.

Most creative — Mellencamp, a noun meaning a woman who has aged out of being a “cougar” (after John Cougar Mellencamp). That may be OK, but I’m more fond of the runner-up, which was “bunga bunga,” a name for the sex parties involving former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Most unnecessary — bi-winning, a term used by the TV star Charlie Sheen to describe himself, pridefully dismissing accusations that he was bipolar. (Runner-up was amazeballs, which is just a slangy variant of the word “amazing.”)

Most euphemistic — job creator, referring to a member of the top one-percent of money makers.

Most likely to succeed — cloud, referring to the online space for data processing and storage.

Least likely to succeed — brony, meaning an adult male fan of the “My Little Pony” cartoon franchise.

In conclusion, if you’re really into this stuff like I am, you can see all of the complete lists, going back to 1990, by clicking here.  It’s a walk down memory lane, and it affords a unique perspective on America’s recent history. It’s both entertaining and educational. Can you really say that about the Olympics?

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Y'all

All y'all

You

By Charles Layton

The plural form of I is we. The plural of he/she/it is they. But the plural form of you is just you.

Spanish changes usted to ustedes to make it plural. Most other European languages also have a separate plural form for “you.” But not English. We’re deprived.

When I joined the Army I’d never been north of the Texas-Oklahoma border, so I’d never heard anyone say youse before. When I got to basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, a sergeant got on the company squawk box and bellowed, “I want youse to listen up!” This sounded so ignorant to me that I burst out laughing.

But I shouldn’t have. The sergeant was from Yankeeland, where some people said youse for the very legitimate purpose of specifying the plural. I should have understood that, coming from a part of the country where people said y’all 60 or 80 times a day.

In spite of all formal teachings to the contrary, we-uns in the South have always had this perfectly good, time-tested second-person plural pronoun, and we’ve put it to good use. Regardless of what some people think, y’all is correctly used only as a plural. I agree with the Urban Dictionary when it says, “Only an absolute idiot would use y’all as a singular pronoun.” In the South, when an individual customer enters a hardware store or diner or tractor dealership or bail bond agency, the clerk or hostess or salesperson or bondsman says, “Can I help you?” Not “Can I help y’all.”

Some Yankees get mixed up about this because they’ve heard Southerners say “all of y’all” or “all y’all” or “all a’ y’all,” as if y’all were the singular and all y’all the plural. But that’s wrong. Let me explain.

In my high school, the cheerleaders would exhort us at pep rallies: “ALL Y’ALL YELL!” Which was correct usage. One would not say “all y’all” when addressing two or three people. In that situation, the proper term is “y’all,” the simple plural. “All y’all” is the all-inclusive plural. It comes into play when the group being addressed is so large that one would want to spread one’s arms as a gesture of inclusivity. However, say you’re addressing five people, two of whom are going to the rodeo and three of whom are staying home. You’d say, “Y’all are going” addressing the two “and y’all are staying” addressing the other three. Only if all five were going would you say, “All y’all are going.”

So, you see, Southerners have evolved the usage of this friendly little pronoun to a highly nuanced state of sophistication. The North has nothing to compete with it. Northerners might say “you guys” in one of the above situations — or “youse guys” — but then the masculine guys is forced to apply to people of both sexes. Y’all, being gender neutral, avoids that awkwardness. Plus, y’all has an elegant, easy-to-use possessive form: “That’s none of y’all’s business.” “Where is y’all’s ammunition?” (The possessive of youse is pretty clumsy by comparison.)

Up here in Yankeeland, I almost never use the word y’all (or its more dignified and stately variant, you all), because up here y’all are so confused about it. But last month, when I was in Florida, I found myself reverting to y’all a time or two. And I have to say, it felt comfortable, like meeting a very close friend after a period of separation.

English once had a solid distinction between singular and plural forms. Thou was singular and you plural. But, for some reason, thou dropped out of usage except in formal public prayer and in Amish country. So then you occupied the singular position, doing double duty. When y’all came along, you gave up its original plural spot (in the South, that is) and became just singular. E pluribus unum.

In Yankeeland, you still plays a double role, and an ambiguous one. It doesn’t seem quite right.

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