Neology

Bob Harris blogs his "Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing." By which he means words that appear too often in book reviews.

Aside: I immediately assumed that the title was a reference to George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" monologue, also known as "Seven Dirty Words," and sometimes misquoted as "Seven Deadly Words." Turns out I'm not the only one who associates the phrase "seven deadly words" with Carlin; as of this writing, if you Google the phrase (in quotation marks), a Carlin monologue is the first result. At any rate, whether or not Harris meant to refer to the Carlin monologue, his "seven deadly words" are kind of the opposite: they're words that he sees as overused.

And I'm puzzled by almost all of the ones that he and his readers list, because they pretty much all seem perfectly reasonable to me. Perhaps it's just that I don't read very many book reviews?

I may be a little defensive about this, too, 'cause several of the words (such as "compelling" and "intriguing") are words I use all the time.

Anyway, mixed in with the distaste for certain words being used too often, I detect what I think is a certain attitude toward writing in general. Harris starts it off by quoting Wilson Follett (author of Modern American Usage: A Guide and other books) as saying "The best critics [...] are those who use the plainest words[....]" A commenter refers to a word as being "a product of laziness and lack of imagination"; another refers to "great deal of sloppy, lazy writing going on"; another quotes The Elements of Style as referring to critics using words "whose only virtue is that they are exceptionally nimble and can escape from the garden of meaning"; another says reviewers should use more "language every person can relate to."

All of which makes we think that perhaps what's really going on is a complaint about use of words that the objectors see as hifalutin. Reviews, the argument would appear to go, should be written in plain language so that plain-speakin' plain ol' folks can understand 'em.

Which I totally disagree with. I'm not saying book reviews should be hard to understand, but to me, nearly all of the words these folks are complaining about are pretty ordinary words that have pretty ordinary meanings. Is "readable" really meaningless? Are metaphorical descriptions, like "luminous," really so awful? Is the use of the word "smart" to describe a book really so cryptic? They don't seem so to me.

(The one criticism in the list (of those I read) that does seem useful and interesting to me is the idea that male reviewers often refer to a particular feminist poet's work as "engaging"; that sounds to me like potentially the same kind of politically problematic attempted praise as referring to an African-American as "articulate." On the other hand, there are plenty of other contexts where "engaging" is perfectly good praise.)

I suppose part of my reaction is that I have a poor ear for cliches. There are several phrases that I use regularly and see nothing wrong with but that critique groups have told me are cliches to be (yes) eschewed. So maybe overuse just doesn't bother me; maybe I'm deaf to that (um) nuance of language and usage.

And, of course, lists of pet peeves don't have to be rational.

Speaking of rational, I have to object to the other part of the quote from Follett: "[...] and who make their taste rational by describing actions rather than by reporting or imputing feelings." Really? Reviewers are supposed to have rational tastes, having nothing to do with their feelings? I apparently don't live in the same world of reviewers as Follett and Harris; I often rather like learning about a reviewer's feelings about a work.

Posted by Jed at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Two lesbian friends of mine alerted me tonight to a new word: "gayelle."

It's a fascinating attempt to coin a new word. The people over at gayelle.org (a.k.a. sapphicchic.com) are claiming, apparently seriously, that because the word "lesbian" is now old-fashioned and has negative connotations, it's time to replace that word with a new, hip, sophisticated, 21st-century word. And the one they came up with is "gayelle"--"the feminine form of gay meaning homosexual."

Also, the word "bisexual" contains the word "sex" and used to be sometimes used to mean "hermaphrodite," so the gayelles have decided (with the help of a little intersex-phobic phrasing like "freak of nature") that bisexual women should have a new term as well. They somehow came up with "sapphysapphia" (although their explanation fails to explain why they think that term should have anything to do with being interested in men too), which word they note is composed of only six different letters; if you put those letters in alphabetical order, you get "ahipsy," which they've altered to "hipshe." So, all you bi-dykes, better get used to calling yourselves hipshes from now on. (And presumably non-bi women aren't hip.)

On the one hand, I'm tempted to mock them. To me (and to the lesbian friends who mentioned "gayelle" to me), the terms sound silly and goofy and not even remotely hip. (One of my friends suggested that "Gay-El" sounded like a resident of Krypton; the other noted that "gayelle" is only one letter off from "gazelle.") Also, the gayelle folks say that "The word lesbian is antiquated" as evidence that we should stop using it, while they say (in a positive tone) that "Sappho" is "A well known name from antiquity" as a reason to use that; really, none of their arguments in favor of their new coinages make much sense to me.

On the other hand, language does change, and new coinages and new uses sometimes do catch on. After all, it wasn't all that long ago that people were still lamenting the loss of the perfectly good word "gay" to those awful homosexuals who'd appropriated it.

One thing that kinda bugs me politically about the "gayelle" thing is that it's kind of the opposite of reclaiming a word. The queer community has, to some degree and in some contexts, reclaimed a variety of words (including "queer") that used to be fairly universally derogatory; I'm a little sad to see people saying "that word is sometimes used derogatorily, so let's stop using it." (Interesting that the word "dyke" doesn't appear anywhere on their site.) Then again, this kind of language change happens all the time too, when once-polite words become derogatory. And for that matter, I myself have spent time agitating (mildly) for a new coinage; I invested a fair bit of energy into the gender-neutral pronoun "ta" in the '90s, before switching to gender-neutral "they."

I'm also mildly politically bothered by the gender politics I see in "gayelle." By creating a feminine form of "gay" (and why not "gayette," anyway?), they implicitly suggest that the word "gay" is exclusively male (which is, to be fair, how many people use it)--but they also suggest that the word for a homosexual woman should be a derivative of the word for a homosexual man. Wouldn't it be better to come up with a word that's not derived from an exclusively male label?

One more issue with "gayelle" is that the word's already in use. Googling for it, or looking in Urban Dictionary, reveals that the current most popular uses (at the time of my writing this entry) are:

• A community TV station in Trinidad & Tobago. (Which at first I thought was a queer station, given the slogan "At Last We Own Television" and the current top-of-page ads for "The Freedom Walk" and (in pink) "Gayelle The Channel presents ... Phagwa 2008.") (I'm thinkin' if women are going to start using "gayelle," then men should switch to "phagwa.") (Yes, I know that Phagwa is an ancient Hindu festival. I'm being culturally insensitive for the sake of a joke; sorry.)
• A Caribbean term for a cockfighting arena (I kid you not). Okay, cockfighting or stickfighting, but "cockfighting" is funnier in this context.

I'm left still uncertain whether this whole "gayelle" thing is in fact a joke, in which case my hat's off to the people who put it together. But the site is very straight-faced (as it were), and they're apparently even running radio ads on queer radio, which suggests to me that if it is a joke, it's a very elaborate one.

(Note: I'm pretty sure that some people who don't know me are going to encounter this entry, so I should note that (a) I'm a bi man, so I don't get to tell lesbians what they should call themselves, and (b) I use terms like "queer" and "dyke" casually and positively; no derogatory connotations should be inferred.)

Posted by Jed at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This morning, I read a couple of articles about a White House aide being caught plagiarizing.

Then I read a piece by Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, eulogizing William F. Buckley. It contains this sentence:

Buckley disdained the kind of partisan shoutfests that too often pass for political debate on our TVs today.

And then I turned to a New York Times article by Eric Konigsberg about Buckley's TV show Firing Line. It starts with this question:

The relationship of William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line” to the partisan shoutfests that pass for evening political exchange on television nowadays?

I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call plagiarism here. I can imagine two different people coming up with those sentences independently, and anyway it's only one sentence of similarity; the articles are otherwise entirely different.

But it still strikes me as odd. I thought for a moment that perhaps "partisan shoutfests" was a common/standard description of political TV shows, but a Google search for the phrase (in quotation marks) turns up only eight occurrences of it on the web, of which four are copies or quotes of the Konigsberg piece, and one is the vanden Heuvel piece. The remaining three don't have any other phrasing in common with the sentences in question.

Anyway. I probably wouldn't have even noticed this, much less commented on it, if plagiarism and copying hadn't already been on my mind. But given that it was on my mind, I thought this was an interesting enough item to post about.

Posted by Jed at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

According to a Detroit Free Press article, "Leap year babies hop through hoops of joy, pain of novelty birthday" (doesn't "Hoops of Joy" sound like it should be part of the same series as "Abs of Steel" and "Blades of Glory"?), a baby born on Leap Day is a "leapling," and an adult born on Leap Day (that is, a former leapling who's now grown up) is a "leaper."

Posted by Jed at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The other night, Mary Anne noted that the sheets for the air mattress were in the dryer, and that once they were dry, I would have to make my own bed. "And then I'll have to lie in it!" I said.

Which wouldn't have been noteworthy in itself; a weak joke made in passing. But not long after that, Kavi finished her bath (in her little plastic baby bathtub, which the baby bathes in while the mini-tub sits inside the otherwise dry full-size bathtub), and Mary Anne picked her up to put her to bed, and I found myself dumping out the bathwater but not, of course, the baby.

Fulfilling two proverbs in ten minutes! A new record for me, I think.

Btw, an article in De Proverbio, the electronic journal of international proverb studies, notes that the baby/bathwater proverb comes from German, and didn't come into common use in English until the 20th century. (Or at least the 19th.)

Posted by Jed at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Before I start in on today's entry, I have a little snippet of story for you to read:

I walked down the hospital corridor away from my room. One of the doctors I didn't know well--Dr. Karlson, I think--called out, "Jason, wait!"

I turned around, glaring.

The doctor took out a stethoscope. "Before you leave, I have to check your heart one more time."

I sighed. "Can't I just get out of here?"

"No, Jason. I'm sorry, but there are certain rules we have to follow."

Now: what gender is Dr. Karlson?

It should be obvious that the doctor's gender is unspecified in this little snippet. But something weird often happens when I read the word "doctor":

Not only do I assume that the doctor is male (which a lot of people, at least in the US, do), but I often think that the doctor was explicitly identified as male.

And then a paragraph or a page later, the author drops a pronoun and we discover that the doctor is female. And I say to myself, wait, the author explicitly said the doctor was male, this is not just me being sexist, it was right there in the story. And then I go back and look, and in fact it wasn't right there in the story; it was just me being sexist. Or gender-normative or something.

It's not that I don't believe in female doctors. I probably know more female medical doctors than male medical doctors; I've certainly gone to as many female doctors as male ones; it doesn't bother or upset or surprise me to encounter a woman who's a doctor. And if a story I'm reading clearly identifies a doctor as female upfront, that seems perfectly normal.

It's just that when I see the word "doctor" without any other markers, somehow my brain develops the idea that I've been explicitly told that the doctor is male. It's kind of bewildering, and remarkably (and unfortunately) consistent.

There are other professions that I have a strong gender assumptions for, of course. But I don't generally go so far in fabricating evidence about those.

Delany once referred to the assumptions we make about generic and otherwise undescribed people as the "unmarked state": in the absence of any markers giving us information to the contrary, we tend to assume certain things about people when they're mentioned to us. The unmarked state for a story's narrator (for a lot of us white American readers) tends to be white, heterosexual, upper-middle-class, etc. Probably male, too, although sometimes the unmarked gender for the narrator is the same as the gender of the author, or the assumed gender of the author if you can't tell from the author's name.

For me, the unmarked "nurse" is female; the unmarked "guard" is male. Certainly the unmarked "programmer" or "software engineer" or "computer scientist" is male. And there are plenty of others.

But I don't think my assumption is ever quite so strong with other words as with the word "doctor."

Posted by Jed at 9:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"Arb" is apparently a short form of "arbitrage trader." The Wall Street Journal had a blog entry recently that, a couple paragraphs after referring to arbitrage traders, included the phrase "an unhappy arb is a litigious one."

(The Perils of a Google-Yahoo Blocking Move, 8 February 2008)

Posted by Jed at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation of Villon's "The Ballad of Dead Ladies" (the poem whence comes the phrase "But where are the snows of yesteryear") includes this line:

(From Love he won such dule and teen!)

Turns out that "teen" is an archaic or obsolete word meaning things like "grief" or "injury" or "irritation." And a Dule Tree was a tree used in Britain for public hangings; "dule" in Scots and Middle English (according to Wikipedia) had to do with sorrow or grief.

There are a few other web pages that include the phrase dule and teen; most are other copies of the Rossetti translation, but a few are other verses, mostly copies of an Andrew Lang poem. One page defines the phrase as meaning "grief and pain."

The connection to teenagers is left as an exercise to the reader.

Posted by Jed at 8:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to Wikipedia, "presidential glass" is another term for a particular kind of mostly-transparent teleprompter commonly used by US Presidents.

Posted by Jed at 8:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On a video about an explosion, I heard an announcer use a term that sounded like "blevvies." I got curious and Googled it; turns out it's an acronym. According to Wikipedia:

BLEVE, pronounced [...] "blevvy"[...], is an acronym for "boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion". This is a type of explosion that can occur when a vessel containing a pressurized liquid is ruptured.

Posted by Jed at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Fossicking" is an Australian and Cornish (Cornwallish? Cornwallian?) term for prospecting. In Australia, it can apparently also mean "rummaging."

Encountered it in a cover letter for a story submitted to SH.

Posted by Jed at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Language Log last week, linguist Geoffrey Pullum posted an entry titled "Yale sluts and Princeton philosophers," about a threatened lawsuit over a Yale fraternity's writing a sign saying "WE LOVE YALE SLUTS."

Pullum's entry is primarily a fairly standard "damn those PC people who are trying to stop our precious freedom of speech!" post, thinly disguised as being of linguistic relevance through a couple of arguments about the use of language. And, y'know, I agree with him that our society has too many lawsuits. And he later retracted some of the political stuff that I found most annoying about his post, after he found out more about the situation; also, he linked to Jane Achson's subsequent guest entry that makes some compelling points about harassment. It's worth noting that there have always been legal limits on Americans' freedom of speech.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about; this is my language blog, not my political blog. So what I want to say here is that in that particular entry, Pullum (whom I normally have a fair bit of respect for) was so focused on making his political point that he fumbled a couple of language-related arguments. And the reason I want to talk about those arguments is that they're arguments that I see pretty often; so my point here is not primarily that Pullum shouldn't have made these arguments, but rather that nobody should be making them.

This got very long, so I'm continuing after the jump.

Continue reading "Two arguments about intended meaning" »

Posted by Jed at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)