May 21, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Adam Naming the Creatures, 1847 Currier & Ives print
It has been vulgarly claimed that prostitution is the oldest profession. Wrong! It’s lexicography.
Here’s proof:
As we have learned, perhaps in elementary school, a word isn’t a word unless it’s in the dictionary.
If it’s not a word, you can’t use it.
Therefore, you need the dictionary before you can utter a word. So dictionary making has to be among the oldest of professions, if not the oldest.
This logic, incidentally, solves the question of the origin of human language, a question that has vexed linguists ever since Darwin proposed his theory of evolution.
Linguists know that languages change drastically over the course of a few thousand years, so drastically that there’s no telling what the original human language was…
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May 17, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Alas!
No, that’s not the four-letter word in decline. It’s “ain’t.”
Unlike other proscribed four-letter words, “ain’t” isn’t obscene, blasphemous, or insulting. And yet in its heyday, not too long ago, in some circles it could provoke a reaction even stronger than the f-word.
What reaction? Well, according to one version of the jump-rope rhyme:
Don’t say ain’t or your mother will faint,
your father will fall in a bucket of paint,
your sister will cry, your brother will die,
your dog will call the FBI.
Why? Well, according to another version of the rhyme,
Don’t say ain’t, your mother will faint,
your father will step in a bucket of paint,
because there ain’t no word such as ain’t.
So proscribed was “ain’t” that like other four-letter words having to do with certain intimate activities, supposedly it wasn’t in the dictionary….
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May 8, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Unless you have several hundred dollars to spare, and a foot of shelf space for five 8¾-by-11¼-inch volumes of a close to a thousand pages each, you aren’t likely to own a copy of the Dictionary of American Regional English. But you might find it worth your while to visit your local public or university library to take a look at the 60,000 rare and unusual words inside.
DARE reached a milestone this spring: publication of Volume V, completing the alphabet A through Z of words used differently in different parts of the country.
Last week, in celebration of that milestone—nearly 50 years after work on the dictionary began, more than 25 years after publication of the first volume—the dictionary staff at the University of Wisconsin staged a “symposium” (learned academic gabfest) and a “shindy”: a party or gathering, especially a noisy one with dancing. You will grasp…
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May 4, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Illustration by Nan Lawson
Many words belong to all speakers of a language. But some are differentiated by region, ethnic group, social class, gender, age group, occupation—or by generation.
In their book Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069, published more than 20 years ago but still largely on target with its observations, William Strauss and Neil Howe proposed that each generation has distinctive attitudes, different from the generations before and after. Here are Strauss and Howe’s names and dates of recent generations:
Lost Generation, born between 1883 and 1900
GI Generation, born 1901-24
Silent Generation, born 1925-42
Boom Generation, born 1943-60
Thirteenth Generation, born 1961-81
Millennial Generation, born 1982-2004
Homeland Generation, born 2005-
In 500 …
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April 25, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
What is it with people who, because they know a language, presume that they know exactly how the language works?
They are like those who, because they can drive a car, presume that they know how the engine works. Except in that case, we all know better. You can be an expert driver without knowing the parts and connections that make the car go.
Similarly, you can be an expert user of a language without knowing the parts and connections—at least, not knowing how to explain them. But in the case of language, that doesn’t stop expert users from making the logical fallacy of assuming If X, then Y, X being knowledge of a language and Y being how that language works. It’s like someone who knows how to build a campfire telling a chemist that phlogiston accounts for the phenomenon of fire.
This is nothing new. In fact, it’s the subject of a famous article by a famous America…
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April 16, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Maybe you bought a ticket for the Mega Millions lottery a week or two ago and dreamed about what you’d do with the grand prize of $656-million. Or maybe you heard last week’s news about Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for a cool $1-billion and wondered how you’d spend all that money if you invented something like it.
Well, forget about it. A billion dollars would be chump change compared to what you would make if you had invented OK and held the patent on it. Or the copyright.
The 1935 copyright on the song “Happy Birthday to You” still brings in $2-million a year. Think of how much you could make with OK.
If you had a penny for each time 308 million Americans said OK in just one day—well, make it 250 million, some are too young or infirm—and suppose each of us (by a conservative estimate) says OK 50 times a day, then at the end of the day you’d have…
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April 12, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Blizzard Entertainment
As Lucy Ferriss, Ben Yagoda, and Carol Saller have recently remarked here, writers sometimes strain too hard for variety in their vocabulary.
But there is a realm where variety is not just apt but necessary: epic poetry.
The elevated style proper to a proper epic includes elegant variation, especially in reference to the actors. The epic poet gives them nicknames—not slangy versions of their names like “Oddy” for Odysseus, but characterizing alternatives, “eke-names,” or “also-names,” to use the etymology of that word. In the Odyssey, for example, Odysseus is introduced as “that ingenious hero”; in the Aeneid, Aeneas is addressed as “goddess-born.”
But we need look no further than our own English language for epic variety in vocabulary. If we go back a thousand years…
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April 3, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
In a response to my post of last week, Robert Lane Greene provided a link to an editorial in The Economist consisting entirely of one-syllable words. It’s an impressive feat, but after a bit, with no relief from polysyllables, it’s like a hammer pounding relentlessly on your head.
Nevertheless, there is much to be said for words of one syllable when set against a background of polys. They are like gemstones set in a bracelet, rather than a heap of gems.
So today I’m offering a few of the gems I have collected over the years. Some of the greatest moments in literature use words of one syllable to slow down and emphasize a poetic line, in deliberate contrast with its surroundings.
Nobody does this better than Shakespeare. Quite a few of his sonnets end with monosyllabic couplets contrasting in their plainness with the previous 12 lines. You could write a dissertation (a…
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March 30, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
If you go online to The New Yorker’s Cartoon Bank and enter the keyword “woof,” you’ll be taken to a page with a cartoon by Charles Barsotti showing a bird, a pig, a fish, a cat, and a duck all seated at a round table looking at a dog. The bird, the pig, the fish, the cat, and the duck all say “Woof.”
To which the dog replies, “Everybody gets a raise.”
In other words, to get along with the boss, you have to speak the boss’s language.
And that’s why the English language does not have an Academy for Preservation of the Purity of Our Language, as others do. We lost our purity beyond recovery nearly a thousand years ago, when for several centuries the rulers of England spoke French. (Norman French, to be sure, not the dialect of Paris, but French all the same.)
Our native English might have been a chirp or an oink or a quack, but those who wanted to get along …
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March 21, 2012, 12:01 am
By Allan Metcalf
Something odd has happened to Webster’s New World Dictionary, the dictionary of choice for journalists. It’s still there, like the grin on the Cheshire cat, but its body—the editor and editorial office—seems to have vanished.
The dictionary is still listed by its adopted publisher, John Wiley & Sons. From Wiley, or from Amazon or your friendly local bookseller, you can still get a copy of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, fourth edition, in print or on CD-ROM. There’s even an iPhone and iPad app that came out in version 3.1 last September. Despite all that, there’s no evidence that anyone has worked to keep the dictionary up to date in the past couple of years.
As recently as 2009, Webster’s New World seemed in good health. From the dictionary’s office, in Cleveland, at the end of that year, the editor, Mike Agnes, announced that the word of that year should…
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