Language Log

Regular LL readers know that we're not naive about the relationship between "news" and truth, especially when it comes to science reporting or the accuracy and context of MSM quotations and even video clips. In fact, we could fairly be accused of excessive cynicism. But this is breathtaking: "Science Reporting Gone Wild", Neuroworld, 1/18/2010; "The British media's 'Blonde Moment'", Neuroskeptic 1/28/2010.

Either Aaron Sell, a psychologist at UCSB, is lying about what he said to John Harlow, the West Coast Bureau Chief for the Sunday Times, or John Harlow seriously needs to be fired.

From reader JHG:

Is it just my perception, or is the phrase "on-point" in the midst of a meteoric rise in usage and a de facto expansion in meaning?  I have heard it used repeatedly as a general term of approval or commendation rather than to mean only "germane." We may not have the next "cool" on our hands, but I think there's a trend here. Any way to validate one listener's perceptions with some research?

The winner of the 2009 Dutch Word of the Year, as selected in an online poll conducted by the Van Dale dictionary group and Pers newspaper, was ontvrienden, a social networking verb equivalent to English unfriend or defriend. NRC Handelsblad recently reported that ontvrienden can be found in the Dutch historical dictionary Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal with citations back to 1626:

The entry quotes references dating from 1626 and 1658. One is a reference to the infamous courtesan of Lais, a woman so beautiful — and sexually available — that she drew pupils away from a famous philosopher, "defriending" him in the old-fashioned sense of the word. "Today you can defriend someone. In the past, you were defriended," said Wouter van Wingerden, a linguistic consultant with the Society for the Dutch Language.

The other reference is found in Psalm 88:8, translated in the King James Bible as "Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me." The Dutch version quoted in the Woordenboek might be close to 400 years old but it is definitely more concise. It reads 'Mijn vrienden hebt ghy my ont-vrindt,' which translates to "My friends thou hast defriended."

The word fell into disuse after the 17th century, perhaps because the Netherlands had few friends left. By 1672, the young Dutch republic found itself at war with France, England, and the dioceses of Cologne and Munster.

Similarly, unfriend, the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of 2009, is dated by the OED back to 1659. For further thoughts on the revival of unfriend and ontvrienden, see my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus, "'Sleeping Beauties' in English and Dutch."

"Egbert's, a custom car shop at this location since 1992, specializes in restoring and building unique cars to disconcerting customers", says the website for Egbert's, a company that designs and restores hotrods and collectible cars for street use. I am quite sure that by "to" they meant "for". And although perhaps some of the tattooed customers who bring in muscle cars to have skull motifs or gang insignia incorporated into the paintwork may be a bit disconcerting, surely they must have meant that they restore and build cars for discerning customers.

The results are in: the American Dialect Society has selected tweet as the Word of the Year for 2009, and google (the verb) as Word of the Decade for 2000-09. I've got a full report on the proceedings over on my Word Routes column for the Visual Thesaurus. An excerpt:

Reactions to the vote are already coming in. On the American Dialect Society mailing list, John Baker pointed out that both tweet and google are proprietary names. Google is obviously a trademark of the powers-that-be at the Googleplex (who are no doubt unhappy about the dilution of the brand name by having it treated as a generic verb). But tweet is also a service mark owned by Twitter, filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on April 16, 2009 and pending registration.

Read the rest here.

"Just because you collect them doesn't make them collectibles," says a wife to a dopey-looking husband in the cartoon that Bob Ladd peeled off his New Yorker calendar last December 23. And she's right. There's a difference in meaning between the -ible suffix, which attaches mainly to roots with a Latin origin, and the word possible: what is possible for you to X may not meet the standard for being Xible. As so often, the cartoonist (Barbara Smaller in this case) draws on not just a familiarity with life and relationships but also a pretty good implicit analytical knowledge of semantics and derivational morphology.

Last night, the American Dialect Society (meeting in Baltimore in conjunction with the Linguistics Society of America) selected the final nominees for Word of the Year (2009) and Word of the Decade (2000-09). Here are the WOTY finalists:

-er A suffix used in such words as birther, someone who questions whether Obama was born in the United States; deather, someone who believes the government has death panels in its healthcare reform plan; Tenther, someone who believes the Federal government is mostly illegal because it usurps rights which belong to the States, in violation of the 10th Amendment; and truther, someone who doubts the official account of the 9/11 attacks.
fail A noun or interjection describing something egregiously unsuccessful. Usually used as an interjection: “FAIL!”
H1N1 The virus that causes swine flu.
public option A government-run healthcare program, desired by some to be part of the country’s healthcare reform.

Charlie Clingen writes:

This year I have started to notice an ambiguous use of the terms Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. In the good old days, it seems to me that those terms commonly were used to mean the evening of the day before Christmas Day/New Year’s Day. Now, in addition to those meanings, I have been hearing them used to mean the entire day before Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, especially in weather forecasts and financial news. Are the terms Christmas Eve Day and New Year’s Eve Day becoming less popular? I admit it does save a few bits here and there; maybe the occasional ambiguity is worth it.

A piece of fluff on the op-ed page of the NYT on December 28: Philip Niemeyer, "Picturing the Past 10 Years", with an item a year for 2000 through 2009 in twelve categories. The last two categories are words: Nouns and Verbs.

There are no statistics here, just someone's judgments about what was hot in each year; others would no doubt have made other choices. For the last two categories:

Here in the Edinburgh office of Language Log we are snowed in this morning. Thick, thick snow. (Though our language has only one word for it, we find that is quite enough.) There have been repeated falls overnight. This is unusual weather for Edinburgh. Part of the major London-to-Edinburgh highway, the A1, is being closed. Travel advisories of the don't-even-think-about-it type are being broadcast on the radio. And yet below the windows of our New Town apartment, cars and trucks and taxis belonging to those unable to understand broadcast warnings are sliding around and getting stuck on the snow-coated cobblestones of our street. People are digging spasmodically and hopelessly with rusty shovels they found in their basements to try and free these cars from their wintry doom. I saw one neighbour come out with an ice axe to try and free a truck that was unable to get up the hill. It was in vain. Linguists are helping too. We have teams out across the city doing comprehension tests: asking the drivers of stuck cars, "Which part of ‘unless absolutely necessary’ did you find hard to understand?"

Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett have done another end-of-the-year buzzword catalog for the NYT Week in Review. There's a sampling on the front page: aporkalypse, Chimerica, octomom, car tone, ununbium. And then Grant's main list, from athey to wise Latina woman, on p. 3.

In doing the final work on the (first, not final, edition) of the Cheslatta Carrier dictionary, I came across a word that I have encountered only in this dialect that I just had to mention. Not only have I not encountered it in other dialects of Carrier, I'm not aware of any other language that has such a term.

The word is natsultook'ah [natsʌltuk'ah], a compound of "tears" and "tracks". It describes the portion of the face extending from the medial corner of the eye along the nose to the end of the nose. It's the route along which tears flow if not so copious that they spill out of the eye at other points. It doesn't refer only to the track left by tears, but to that portion of the face, even if no tears or traces thereof are present.

John McIntyre, "Meep me daddy, eight to the bar":

The principal of a high school in Massachusetts recently banned the word meep in his school, threatening any student who used it, spoken or written, with expulsion. His rationale is that the students were using the word in a disruptive manner.

Of course they were. That is what adolescents do. Few teen pleasures are keener than getting under the skin of officious adults. And the principal, one Thomas Murray, lost composure sufficiently to forward e-mails containing meep to the local police.