In the etymological world, prospecting for earlier instances of a word is like prospecting for gold in the geological world. You look in the online Oxford English Dictionary for the earliest known date of a word and then go data mining in the archives of old publications for something earlier.

One of the leading prospectors is Fred Shapiro of the Yale University Library. He announced his findings in the first instance earlier this year on the American Dialect Society’s discussion list, ADS-L. That got the attention of the assay office, a.k.a. Comments on Etymology, a paper and ink journal I’ve written about before. It’s published by Gerald Cohen at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and it’s the first draft of etymological history. The news about hot dog came in the recently arrived Vol. 42, Issue 6 for March 2013.

Shapiro, Cohen, the independent scholar Barry Popik and others  have spent decades searching back in time for the ur-hot dog. They started by refuting the legend that hot dog was the invention of the cartoonist Tad Dorgan in the early 1900s, finding it in Yale student publications as far back as 1894, in a Nashville newspaper of 1893, and in New Jersey in 1892.

Both new examples are from newspapers in Nashville, suggesting that it might have been the hotbed of hot dog. Shapiro moves the earliest known sighting of that name for a sausage in a bun back seven years to 1886.

Shapiro’s first example was a short item in the Nashville Daily American of February 9, 1891:

BOTH ARRESTED

Two Men Who Mistreated the ‘Hot Dog’ Vendor.

Pat King and W.T. Brooks were arrested last night by Officers Russell and Howington for disorderly and offensive conduct. They were, it is claimed, worrying and cursing one of the little negro ‘weiner-wurst’ boys and became so boisterous that their arrest became necessary.

More impressive, though, is what Shapiro subsequently found in the Nashville Tennessean for November 14, 1886:

“’Hot stuff,’ ‘hot pup,’ ‘hot dog,’ sings out the fiend who carries in one hand a tin cooking arrangement, and on the other arm a basket. He is the wiener wurst fiend. It is his cries that greet you as you enter the theater and regreet you as you come out. He is the creature whose rolls make the night hideous, and whose wares make dreams that poison sleep.

“The luxury came originally from Austria. Wiener means little and generally speaking, the purchase gets a little the wurst of it. Wurst means, in English, sausage; so that when one of these peddlers says wiener wurst to you he means do you want a little sausage.

“The tin vessel which he carries is divided into two compartments. The upper is filled with water, in which are about a thousand, more or less, skin sausages. In the lower apartment is the alcohol stove that keeps the sausages hot. In the basket he keeps his rye bread and horse-radish. The sausage, sandwiched by two slices of bread which have been smeared with the horse-radish, make up the wiener wurst, which costs you a nickel.

“Since Shakespeare asserted that nectar was the food the gods lived on, it has been discovered that wiener wurst is the stuff that fattens dudes. The young men who sell the article are, as a rule, not modest.”

But why call it a hot dog in the first place? Simple enough: It’s a joke. It goes back to a 19th-century rumor that the sausages were made of dog meat.

• Once and awhile
• Set and stone
• Try and get
• Spit and image
• All and all
• Hand and hand
• Tongue and cheek

I’ve run into all of these recently, mostly in student papers, but also in published work. So many of our habitual expressions have lost their connection to the original meaning that students—and sometimes professional writers—set them down as they sound without regard to whatever sense they might make. Given the aural similarity of and, in, and -ing, it’s no surprise that malapropisms like in this day in age crop up—for how often do we actually think about something being common in this day and also in this age, or era? And why would we?

If we think carefully or have background knowledge, of course, we can and do make some sense of these expressions. Once in a while means “at some point during a moderate length of time.” Substitute and for in and combine the last two words, and you get “at some point and for a short time,” which is not usually what the writer means. Tongue and cheek, referring to something said jokingly, makes no sense whatever; tongue in cheek does make sense, but only if we have the 18^th-century social context of signifying contempt by thrusting one’s tongue into one’s cheek (which, it might be noted, is hard to do while talking).

On the other hand, we could imagine set and stone to mean something that is both fixed and enduring, as opposed to something that has been engraved in stone and therefore not erasable. In a case like this, although the nonstandard use lacks the historical reference of set in stone, it’s neither meaningless nor inapropos.

The one that surprised me, as I started making a casual list focused on and, in,  and –ing confusions, was spit and image. Spitting image was what I had always known, and a Google Ngram shows me why—the year of my birth, that version of the expression began to outpace the original spit and image as well as its offshoot, spitten image, which has now fallen almost totally into disuse. The original, it seems, referred to an offspring’s being both made of the stuff of his parents (the spit) and looking much like them (the image). If that image is created from the spit—if the likeness, that is, is genetically based—it is a spitten image. But somewhere in the 20^th century, it seems we were hearing, not spitten, but spittin’, and so we corrected ourselves—and started saying spitting image. Another explanation is that we conflated the term spit and image with the less common colloqualism splittin’ image, meaning things that are as alike as the two halves of a split log. And so splittin’ + spit and = spitting.

Etymologically, this sort of stuff is interesting for us word addicts. But what’s more interesting to me is to note how, as and replaces in or –ing replaces –en, we see language evolving from the point where it conveys some literal meaning to the point where we simply understand the set of words without pausing to consider their exact reference. That is, She’s the spitting image of her mom is really a sort of nonsense—she’s not spitting, her image isn’t spitting. But it’s what we say now—it’s what I will doubtless continue to say, even now that I understand how the expression went astray from its original, and rather interesting, construction—and no one misunderstands.

Will the same happen to hand and hand? To all and all? Let’s try and see as the years roll on.

I was disappointed to find, however, that “Backblogged: Our Five Favorite Sentences of the Week” consists of sentences from a rather small subset of published work, The New Yorker itself. No one admires The New Yorker more than I do. However, I judge a magazine, even The New Yorker, to be too small a sample to yield each week five sentences worthy of collecting: that is to say, sentences which you cannot think of a way to improve and which might have a chance of living on when the immediate circumstances of their publication are long forgotten. Here, for example, is Backblogged’s latest crop:

1. “Henry Miller was one of those rare writers who actively and energetically hated New York, calling it late in life ‘that old shithole, New York, where I was born.’ ” From “Henry Miller, Brooklyn Hater,” by Alexander Nazaryan.
2. “It used to be the case that L.A. seemed utterly different from Eastern cities in one crucial way: It was already hauntingly apocalyptic, a place of steep hills, deep predator-filled canyons, terrible earthquakes, and winds bearing plutonium from Japan.” From “Leaving Los Angeles,” by Meghan O’Rourke.
3. “Cicadas have no natural predators, in the sense of an animal that depends on them as a primary food source—it would be problematic to wait nearly two decades between meals.” From “The Song of the Cicada,” by Michael Lemonick.
4. “For Berry and the others to be rescued, in other words, two things had to happen: she had to never forget who she was, and that who she was mattered; and Ramsey needed to not care who she might be at all—to think that all that mattered was that a woman was trapped behind a door that wouldn’t open, and to walk onto the porch.” From “What Charles Ramsey and Amanda Berry Knew,” by Amy Davidson.
5. “I never told anyone—not the people I worked with every day, or the victims I convinced to go on camera to share their stories—how my own life was changed by a gun.” From “Guns and My Mother,” by Arkadi Gerney.

They’re all fine sentences, don’t get me wrong. But collectable? One and 5 are gimmicky at the core, their impact dependent on a single surprising word. In 4, a cascade of prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, and abstract verbs pile on top of an interesting thought and pretty much bury it. Three is witty and nicely uses litotes in the essential word problematic; but the phrase in the sense of was clearly chosen for rhythm rather than meaning. (A species’ natural predator is an animal dependent on it as a primary food source, right?) O’Rourke’s sentence is the closest thing to a keeper; the list after the colon is vivid and beautifully paced. But the initial clause is marred by the overstated utterly and crucial and the wordy “It used to be the case that … ”

Of course, there are lots of other places where you can find personally curated sentence collections. A good one is a Tumblr called The Beautiful Sentence, which has been in business for exactly one year, as of today, and whose “About” reads: “Sentences with sound and sense. Emily Gordon, lepidopterist.” Gordon ranges widely, like a good shortstop: she’s got old and new, print and Web, demotic and mandarin. A few of her recent selections:

• “The dad was too irritated to see how his outburst made the child a thousand times less likely to stop complaining, bizarrely laying responsibility for how fun the entire vacation was, possibly the vast Grand Canyon itself, on the kid’s grouchy little blond head.”—Amy Shearn, Huffington Post
• “To condemn a woman simply for mentioning what she’s wearing is to miss the point that she has no choice but to wear something, and that the world we live in is such that people will derive meaning from her clothes in a way they do not from the spaghetti-sauce stains and baggy khakis of the male-poet set.”—Michelle Dean, Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.”—Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
• “Ashley Tisdale parades her slim pins in animal print jeans as she picks up a calorific meal at In-N-Out Burger with pup Maui”—Daily Mail  headline

From these and other examples, I take it that some of the elements of a great sentence are shapeliness, pacing, conviction, surprise in both diction and idea, precision, wit, the evidence of the intelligence and personality behind it, and a strong sense that, having come up with it, the writer celebrated by utilizing some whiskey he or she had been saving at the back of the cabinet.

My own collection is a hodgepodge. One particular sentence from The New Yorker, by Ian Frazier, made me do a virtual spit-take when I first read it the week of April 19, 1982, and has been a favorite ever since. You actually need to read the previous sentence (which is also a good one) to get the full effect. Frazier is talking about a fishing-store owner. “Garen has a style of garment which he loves and which he wears almost every single day of his life. This garment is the jumpsuit.”

Another New Yorker one-two punch was penned in 1937 by A.J. Liebling, in a profile of the boxing cornerman Whitey Bimstein. Liebling says Bimstein’s assistant is “a Mr. Emmet.” Then: “Mr. Emmet, a Bostonian, is so called because, as he explains, ‘I always hanged in Emmet Street.’ He forgets his former name, which was polysyllabic.”

Here are a few more selections on my current playlist:

• “He do the police in different voices.”—Dickens
• “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”—Shakespeare
• “Raid Kills Bugs Dead”—Lew Welch
• “Without supposing that the man in the street has any penetrating instincts denied the expert, or is immune from demagoguery, we may nevertheless think it reassuring that political power is shared between experts and nonexperts rather than being a monopoly of the former.”—Richard Posner
• “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”—Ring Lardner
• “If you feel like loving me—if you’ve got the notion—I second that emotion.”—William (Smokey) Robinson

The collection is always changing. A recent addition is from a Washington Post article by Michael S. Rosenwald about gun shows. Rosenwald encounters a man at the show who says his name is Tom. Rosenwald writes:

“Asked his last name, Tom said, ‘Why?’”

Currently my favorite sentence is from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Horace de Vere Cole, a “practical joker” (that is the DNB‘s summary phrase) who died in 1936. My friend Wes Davis alerted me to the sentence several years ago, and I return to it whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth. Actually, there are several contenders in the Cole entry, which was written by Richard Davenport-Hynes. The final line is a classic of over-the-top understatement: “His widow married Mortimer Wheeler (1939) and shot Lord Vivian (1954).” Still, nothing can top the one Wes told me about, which describes the aging practical joker in the winter of his years:

“His advanced deafness prevented him from realizing that his carefully timed coughing was inadequate to cover his explosive breaking of wind.”

I would be delighted to hear of the favorite sentences of Lingua Franca readers.

“The Scream” (1893), by Edvard Munch; mug from Yizzam.com

Last summer I had the chance to see two versions of a work by Norway’s greatest artist, Edvard Munch. If you go to Oslo you can see it in one version at the National Gallery (no photos, please) and another in the lovely Munch Museum (cameras welcome). In recent years each of them has been stolen and recovered. A third version of the work has been on view this year at MoMA.

Of course, you know the picture—it’s an icon of modernity’s anxiety. The figure has been thought to depict a psychiatric patient, or even a mummy.

Munch himself spoke of his synesthetic response to the world, where ideas and words presented themselves in chromatic terms. His recollection of a particular urban moment inspired him to create the various versions of a visual arrangement that would become synesthesia’s poster child and one of the masterworks of Scandinavian art.

English speakers know this image in reproduction—on T-shirts, key rings, and inflatable pillows—as “The Scream.” For German speakers it’s “Der Schrei.” Munch himself allowed the world to know the work as “Der Schrei der Natur”—the cry (or scream) of nature.

I must have looked at commercialized versions of Munch’s painting thousands of times, but only last summer did I stop to think about the wavy color bands that oppress the composition’s central figure and their relation to the work’s title.

Does it matter what a picture—this one, any one—is called?

Looking at Munch got me thinking about fluid vowels and hard consonants. You can hear how the English word scream ends with an m-sound. Close your lips and you can sustain that sound for a long time (recall those pre-Warhol Campbell Soup Kids who thought chicken and vegetable was “mmm-mmm good!”).

In German the word  Schrei  ends with an open vowel and an open mouth. You can extend the word Schrei  with something close to either the ah sound or the ee  sound. (All lieder singers know the ins and outs of extendable vowels.) Scream  and Schrei  are words, or names for things, that don’t shut down acoustically—their shapes permit sound to continue. In Munch’s painting—a work of art that’s in some sense about signals and vibrations—this seems a not insignificant detail.

If you visit Oslo, though, you’ll see Munch’s work identified by its Norwegian name: Skrik. The closest English word to Norwegian skrik  is the cognate shriek, in turn related to German Schreck, or horror (sorry, Dreamworks fans). For English speakers, skrik—which names the same idea as scream—sounds pretty much the way it looks: the Norwegian skrik  ends with an abrupt k-sound, as if it’s been caught up short.

What does this have to do with Munch’s painting? Maybe nothing. But skrik  is a word that suggests  the shuddering force of vibration—just saying it feels as if the brakes have been slammed down, your body thrown forward and bouncing back. That seems to correspond to Munch’s bands of color—discrete visual zones surrounding the painting’s figure—in a different way than the English word scream.

To my ears, the word scream  suggests alarm but also a continuous emanation, maybe an emanation of sound-color-feeling. Skrik,  by contrast, offers a short, sharp shock; it’s the sound of fingernails on the existential blackboard.

Would we see Munch’s work differently if we knew it as Skrik? 

last week

The hunch that the founders of Google bet on was that simple keyword search could be made vastly more useful by taking the entire set of pages containing all of the list of search words and not just returning it as the result but rather ranking its members by influentiality and showing the most influential first. What a page contains is not the only relevant thing about it: As with any academic publication, who values it and refers to it is also important. And that is (at least to some extent) revealed in the link structure of the Web.

This idea led to the development of an astonishingly powerful technique for finding information and answering questions. Page ranking tends to melt away many of the problems that might have led one to think Natural Language Processing would sooner or later be a necessity.

You hardly need a system that can understand the sentence “What problems make breeding pandas in captivity difficult?” when the search string breeding captivity panda calls up a list of sites in which the top-ranking ones (those most referred to by others) contain exactly what you’re looking for.

There is scant need for a system that can parse “Are there lizards that do not have legs but are not snakes?” given that putting legless lizard in the Google search box gets you to various Web pages that answer the question immediately.

It is possible to find questions that are close to unanswerable using nothing but Google’s keyword search (and it is fun to try; I gave a simple example here), but it is difficult.

Google relies on at least four facts, all of them crucial, but especially the fourth one.

1. Computer memory chips have become so cheap and so tiny that in an office-sized space you can pack enough random-access-memory units to store an utterly gigantic automatically maintained concordance to the whole Web, augmented with copies of huge portions of what is on those sites.
2. Networks and processors have become so fast that your search command can be delivered to a server far away and checked against the gigantic index in just hundredths of a second.
3. The number of sites containing all of the words on a list (rather than just some of them) goes down rapidly with the length of the list, and much more rapidly when the words have low probabilities of occurrence.
4. Humans looking for a certain piece of information can on the whole be trusted to be smart enough to supply a list of words with the crucial property of having low probability in most texts but being guaranteed to occur in texts containing the desired information.

The combination is like magic. You can get very close to finding just the site you want by simply selecting a few words that won’t appear in most Web pages but will be in the ones you want to see. A nontrivial accomplishment (as pointed out to me by the linguist and founding staff member at Powerset Ron Kaplan, it is akin to translating English into a very basic structureless language), and one that not everyone will excel at. But it works.

Where is that giant tokamak machine being built to harness nuclear fusion in confined plasma for power generation, by some huge international collaborative project whose name you can’t remember? Forget build, generation, giant, harness, in, machine, power, project. … Those words are much too common; they’re almost useless to you. But try tokamak international: The top hit is the home page of ITER, which is the project name, and with a click or two you can find the location (near Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, France).

This doesn’t rely on artificial intelligence, it relies on your intelligence. It works so well that it has largely obviated question-answering by means of NLP. Devising computer programs that can understand the grammar and meaning of sentences remains an academic research challenge, and could still be very useful, but the pressure to provide it in a hurry has receded because of Google’s innovation.

In my next post I’ll describe a second development that has had a similar effect on the need for NLP.

I myself have taken part in the effort to defend singular generic they  on numerous occasions. I happily climb on my soapbox about this construction because (a) they  is singular in common usage, so it doesn’t make sense to call it “ungrammatical” in the descriptive sense (it is completely meaningful to both speakers and listeners in their everyday speech); (b) singular they  is a very useful, efficient solution to the “generic pronoun problem”; and (c) writers have been using singular they  effectively and often unnoticeably for centuries, so I would like to see the current prohibition on its use in formal writing lifted. But I’m not going to rehash those arguments here, given how well they have been articulated already in other places. Instead, I want to address the teachers who have read all of these various justifications yet still find themselves reluctant to let students use singular generic they.

I had the opportunity to talk with one of these teachers in person about 10 days ago, in the Q&A after a talk I gave in Ann Arbor in honor of a former colleague, during which I had climbed on the singular they  soapbox. The woman identified herself as a high-school teacher and said that she heard all my justifications based on historical use and common spoken use, but that as a teacher, she did not feel comfortable letting students use singular they  in their writing. She then added: “Please take your best shot at persuading me. I’m deeply skeptical, but I’m open to being persuaded.”

How could I turn down this invitation?

As I said at the time, I appreciated her openness and truly understood her concern. As English teachers, one of our responsibilities is to ensure that students master the conventions of standard edited English, so that they will not be judged in negative ways based on their formal writing. Whether it is fair or not, others (including other teachers and future employers) may judge a construction like singular they as “wrong”—as evidence that a writer is not well trained and “does not know better.”

I then offered my pedagogical solution: I tell students that they are welcome to use singular they  in writing for my class, but they should footnote it the first time they use it and in the footnote explain their rationale for using singular they. And students do, both in my class and in other classes (for other classes, I tell them they’re allowed to end the footnote with an invitation for the instructor to contact me with any questions). This footnote accomplishes at least three things: It shows readers that the author is consciously making a choice to use singular they; it informs readers about legitimate reasons for using singular they, even if they disagree with its use in this context; and most importantly, it asks students to be careful, self-conscious writers, reflecting on and explaining their choices in their writing.

A fundamental goal of writing instruction, including instruction in grammar and style, is to encourage students to be highly aware of the decisions they are making as writers, from the level of the word, phrase, and sentence to the terrain of the paragraph and essay as a whole. The usage footnote demonstrates just this kind of awareness, and it offers instructors and students a way to acknowledge prescriptive rules about usage while adhering to their own sense of effective writing, especially when it does not correspond with still-accepted prescriptivism on the issue.

Your results (and you could get identical ones by typing the same words in the reverse order) will contain an estimated two million or more pages about Rupert Murdoch and the newspapers owned by his News Corporation. Exactly what you did not ask for.

Putting quotes round the search string freezes the word order, but makes things worse: It calls not for the answer (which would be a list including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, etc.) but for pages where the exact wording of the question can be found, and there probably aren’t any (except this post).

Machine answering of such a question calls for not just a database of information about newspapers but also natural language processing (NLP). I’ve been waiting for NLP to arrive for 30 years. Whatever happened?

In the 1980s I was convinced that computers would soon be able to simulate the basics of what (I hope) you are doing right now: processing sentences and determining their meanings.

To do this, computers would have to master three things. First, enough syntax to uniquely identify the sentence; second, enough semantics to extract its literal meaning; and third, enough pragmatics to infer the intent behind the utterance, and thus discerning what should be done or assumed given that it was uttered.

Take Flying planes is dangerous as an example. The syntactic step includes identifying it as having a singular subject (a gerund-participial clause), accounting for the singular agreement form is. (The distinct sentence Flying planes are dangerous has a plural noun phrase as subject, hence plural agreement on are.)

The semantic step involves (at the very least) noting that Flying planes is dangerous talks about a risky activity. (Again, contrast this with Flying planes are dangerous, which is about aircraft being a danger.)

Pragmatically, however, an utterance often conveys far more than its literal meaning. If Bob has just said “She gets so panicky when her husband is at work,” and Jane responds, “Well, flying planes is dangerous,” you will probably conclude that Bob and Jane know a nervous married woman whose spouse is a pilot, possibly a test pilot, and Jane sees that hazardous job as justifying some level of anxiety. Yet none of this was explicit in the two utterances. Such inferences rely on a complex process of common-sense pragmatic reasoning that we have no idea how to model computationally.

So ignore the pragmatic step; useful work could still be accomplished by a system limited to syntax and semantics. Why do we not find computer programs in general use that can analyze simple questions and provide answers in response? Imagine sending off queries like these, by text or e-mail, to an NLP server:

• “Can your site be accessed without using Internet Explorer?”
• “What is the validity period for multiple-entry business visas?”
• “Do you offer telephone support from the USA?”

Imagine that the machine—not some underpaid message-taker in a Mumbai call center whom you only reach after 10 minutes listening to “The Girl from Ipanema”—could process the questions, look up the answers, and return appropriate responses in a few hundredths of a second. Even if occasionally it replied “Sorry, I didn’t understand the question,” it could still be a boon in the average case.

One company was headed in that direction a few years ago, and had a nascent Wikipedia-based NLP question-answering service up and running in 2008: Powerset. But within a few weeks of its release, Microsoft made them an offer they did not refuse. Now, it seems, the science sleeps with the fishes: www.powerset.com simply redirects to Bing (a plain old keyword-based search engine with which Microsoft is trying to rival Google). Once again there is, to my knowledge, no available system for unaided machine answering of free-form questions via general syntactic and semantic analysis. (Clever ad hoc tweaks make some search engines answer selected simple question forms—try Google on “What is the square root of 1531?”—but don’t be fooled by imitations.)

How could we have drifted into the second decade of the 21st century with absolutely no commercial NLP products? I believe the answer lies in three initially unexpected developments having little to do with NLP. Each enabled a previously near-useless technology to become a useful substitute, reducing the need for the real thing.

Next Monday (May 13, 2013) I’ll discuss the first of those three breakthroughs.

Image from Aberdeen Bestiary, 12th-century collection, U. of Aberdeen

“In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” Adam was the guy whose first job, on direct orders from God, was to name all the animals. Not so easy, at the rate God created them! Thanks to his rush job, today we’re left with lots of animal misnomers.

(And don’t try to tell me that Adam didn’t speak English. What language do you think the Lord used when he inspired King James to write the Bible?)

Here’s the full story, as reported in the King James Bible, Genesis 2:19-20:

“And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.”

(Some help meet he got! But that’s another story. Back to the animals.)

Last week my post was negative. I gave examples of my pet peeves, words that should be banished from the English language, and asked for more, and you came through. That was great, but this time I want be more positive. Let’s redo Adam’s work, taking enough time to make sure we get those animal names right.

Admittedly, Adam did name some animals nicely. Hard to improve on bluebird, warbler, grasshopper, lion (it does lie around a lot), crow, dragonfly, hummingbird, stinkbug, and woodpecker.

But then there are all the others. As an example, I gave pigeon, misnamed because it’s not a pig and it doesn’t live for an eon. In the comments, johnbarnes nominated porcupine, clearly wrong because it has nothing to do with pork, or pine trees, or pining after something.

Here are some others that come to mind:

antelope—Give me a break! It’s not an ant, and whatever its personal life, it doesn’t elope. In fact, I don’t think antelopes can get legally married at all.

tiger—It doesn’t tie anything, and dogs say grr, tigers roar.

monkey—isn’t a monk, doesn’t carry a key.

robin—doesn’t rob anybody.

cardinal—Have you ever seen one playing cards?

bee—to be, or not to be? Come on, they aren’t buzzing philosophers!

dinosaur—didn’t dine on sour food, as far as we know.

flamingo—might be flame-colored, but certainly doesn’t go up in flames.

hamster—not a pig.

magpie—Where’s the pie?

penguin—ever seen one with a pen?

shrew—Is it shrewd? Really?

walrus—I don’t think you’d find one at Wal-Mart.

So readers, you’re invited to improve on these and other names of cattle, fowl of the air, and beasts of the field. For the benefit of generations to come, let’s have a logical bestiary.

What’s brought lol into prominence recently is its appearance in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s e-communications, in situations where the supposed meaning of the term renders the accused bomber eerily heartless: Lol those people are cooked and the like. As it turns out, Tsarnaev was most likely referring, not to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, but to members of Westboro Baptist Church who picket funerals; and the word cooked here most likely means “crazy” or “high from marijuana.” So the message, translated—“Laugh out loud, those WBC people are crazy”—isn’t quite as chilling as it first appears.

Still, no one is laughing, out loud or silently, and few have laughed alongside lol for years. Its chief use has becomes sarcasm—magnified, as Urban Dictionary points out, by spelling the initials phonetically (Ell oh ell real funny joke). My colleague Anne Curzan has pointed out this application of lol, and my students take her one further. “It can be difficult to see sarcasm in a text,” one student emailed me, “but the lol helps it come across.” Another wrote, “We understand that abbreviations are mainly for ditzy teenagers, so we think that using it now can be seen as a joke. Everything is done ironically in our generation.”

The term has become, in other words, an interjection, similar to well, yeah, really, and other terms and phrases that begin, end, or interrupt speech without meaning anything:

Well, it’s a long way to Tipperary.

Yeah, I don’t know if I want to go.

It’s a pretty day, really, but I’m not up for a picnic.

Let’s get together later lol.

It strikes me, though, that what my students call irony or sarcasm (and what another student named “the crutch of the verbally retarded”) has the same provenance as most of the lol uses listed in Buzzfeed. That is, whether it starts a sentence or ends a sentence, whether it expresses “This is not a joke” or “Did you get that?” or “I’m trying to flirt with you,” the use of lol boils down to Buzzfeed’s No. 8, “I am uncomfortable with my feelings and expressing them.” Isn’t sarcasm often a smokescreen for this very discomfort? Don’t other interjections often convey—albeit without a leftover reference to laughing—the speaker’s feelings of awkwardness or ambivalence? Such avoidance is understandable among young adults; one student described lol as “a comforting word between awkward teens who don’t understand emotion in text.” But even those of us who have never typed lol in social communications have been known to spring for irony as a mask.

Which brings me back to the pathetic spectacle of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. We don’t know much about him, and his texts and tweets are unlikely to paint a full picture of his psyche. But however “chilling,” “cold-blooded,” or “dark” that picture ends up being, one thing seems clear from the lols sprinkled through his social communications: he was distancing himself from emotions he might otherwise have felt or expressed. His last tweet, “I’m a stress free kind of guy,” takes such ironic distancing to its limit.

John McWhorter writes that lol “no longer ‘means’ anything. Rather, it ‘does something.’” I take his point in terms of grammar. But we shouldn’t be too quick to empty lol of its meaning. When a laugh becomes a smirk and “out loud” is reduced to cryptic silence, lol can mean SOS, the Good Ship Sincerity lost in a storm of sarcasm.

Obama at the Correspondents’ Dinner: “But I kid Mitch McConnell. … “

At 10:14 PM on April 27, Barack Obama took the podium at the Washington Hilton to the tune of “All I do Is Win,” by DJ Khaled. According to the official White House transcript (which includes indications of laughter and applause), the president began by telling the crowd at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

How do you like my new entrance music? (Applause.) Rush Limbaugh warned you about this — second term, baby. (Laughter and applause.) We’re changing things around here a little bit. (Laughter.) Actually, my advisers were a little worried about the new rap entrance music. (Laughter.) They are a little more traditional. They suggested that I should start with some jokes at my own expense, just take myself down a peg. I was like, “Guys, after four and a half years, how many pegs are there left?” (Laughter.)

I’ll say “Laughter.” As you can see from the video of his routine, POTUS killed it. (Note for a future Lingua Franca post: how and when did the traditional comedians’ term for success, to kill, take on that final pronoun?) Conan O’Brien had to follow him, and actually read his jokes off a piece of paper–I suspect Conan shrewdly decided to pretend that this wasn’t a real gig, so he wouldn’t suffer in comparison.

For years, the yardstick for presidential humor has been John F. Kennedy’s press conferences, the youthful Harvard man sparring and bobbing and weaving with the reporters wearing the same neckties and narrow lapels as he is (and that was just the girls…). When you look at video of JFK in action, he is indeed amusing, with his dry understatement and deft wordplay. Asked to comment on Vaughn Meader’s “First Family” comedy impersonations, he says, “I listened to Mr. Meader’s record and I thought it sounded more like Teddy than it did me.” Good one, old boy.

Compared to the current president’s neo-Shecky presentation, Kennedy’s schtick was old-timey to the point of being Wodehousean. But I suppose that just as Sam Levenson led on some level to Louis C.K., JFK led to BHO. Also in the meantime, the presidency has been subject to the show-bizzification of our public life. With the advent of the Correspondents’ clambake, the Al Smith Dinner, and other such events, top politicians are now expected not only to acquire A-level material, but deliver it as if they’d put in their time trodding the boards at the Comedy Store and Carolines. (It is kind of weird that the convention is that they do standup, as opposed to, say, singing. Imagine if politicos habitually picked up a mike, loosened their bowtie, and launched into a rendition of “Livin’ la Vida Loca.”) These folks spend most of their working lives as public performers, and they usually acquit themselves fairly well. (Mitt Romney was a regrettable exception at last year’s Al Smith event, grinning so widely and uncomfortably that I wanted to put my arm around him and lead him to the nearest Dairy Queen for an extra-large Moolatte.)

But Obama has set a new standard. He’s got impressive comedy chops to start with: the poker face, the sense of the proper cadence of a line, the willingness to pause for a long beat while he looks off into the middle distance, in the manner of Hope or Benny. He has a trademark delivery, the way he barks out a huh! after setting down a premise. And nothing but God-given talent can explain his skill at milking or playing off a bit. The only wall this president wants to tear down is the fourth one, as he deftly riffs on the joke he’s just made:

I’m also hard at work on plans for the Obama Library. And some have suggested that we put it in my birthplace, but I’d rather keep it in the United States. (Laughter.) Did anybody not see that joke coming? (Laughter.) Show of hands. Only Gallup? Maybe Dick Morris? (Laughter and applause.)

Then, at another point:

Of course, everybody has got plenty of advice. Maureen Dowd said I could solve all my problems if I were just more like Michael Douglas in “The American President.” (Laughter.) And I know Michael is here tonight. Michael, what’s your secret, man? (Laughter.) Could it be that you were an actor in an Aaron Sorkin liberal fantasy? (Laughter.) Might that have something to do with it? (Applause.) I don’t know. Check in with me. Maybe it’s something else. (Laughter.)

Now, note the Dick-Vitalesque “second term, baby” in his opening bit, the “what’s your secret, man?” and “check in with me” in the one above. The truly remarkable thing about Obama as standup is that he really is the coolest guy in the room. This may be the nerd prom, but he is no nerd. Hearing him deliver jokes, you sense he’s actually listened to his teenage daughters talk (“I was like … “) and paid attention to what they’re interested in. (“Take the sequester. Republicans fell in love with this thing, and now they can’t stop talking about how much they hate it. It’s like we’re trapped in a Taylor Swift album. [Laughter.]“) He doesn’t quite code-switch all the way–that is, adopt an identifiably African-American cadence–but he nuzzles the line, and that adds a frisson to the package.

I don’t mean to shortchange the contribution of Obama’s writers, whoever they are, to his success. They gave him some great words, perfect for showing some self-deprecation (a comedy wonder drug) and some bristly attitude as well:

• “These days, I look in the mirror and I have to admit, I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist that I used to be. (Laughter.) Time passes. You get a little gray. (Laughter.)”

• “There are other new players in the media landscape as well, like super PACs. Did you know that Sheldon Adelson spent $100-million of his own money last year on negative ads? You’ve got to really dislike me — (laughter) — to spend that kind of money. I mean, that’s Oprah money. (Laughter.) You could buy an island and call it ‘Nobama’ for that kind of money. (Laughter.)”

• “Of course, even after I’ve done all this, some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. “Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?” they ask. Really? (Laughter.) Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell? (Laughter and applause.)”

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have done the humanitarian thing; George W. Bush has done … what exactly is it that he’s done? A sort of Monet at Giverny meets Ozzie and Harriet’s amiable next-door neighbor, I suppose. Anyway, when Obama is a strapping late-middle-aged Muslim socialist, I can see him with his own series on Comedy Central. As long as he keeps his writers, he would kill it.