Language Log

Swearing is risky behavior. Many of its implications are out of the speaker's control. Thus, it is advisable to know your audience well before, say, dropping the F-bomb. I think this is basically true in any setting, and I expect it to be even more powerfully felt in situations where swearing is highly transgressive.

The Enron email dataset provides a nice chance to test out these claims. It is large (about 250,000 distinct messages, sent and received by over 11,000 distinct email addresses), and it contains a moderate amount of bad language. Not everyone swears, but a fair number of people do. The topics range widely: fantasy football, faith, energy markets, vacation time (and of course bankruptcy and the FERC). So, with some qualifications that I'll get to, it is a useful testing ground for claims about swearing and risky verbal behavior. The following email network graph is my first stab at conducting such a test:

This morning's serendipity is the history of gas, which turns out to come from chaos, and to have been coined almost 400 years ago by J. B. Van Helmont in association with another word, blas, that never caught on.

I was curious about a slang use of gas in Edith Nesbit's The Magic City, to mean something like "boastful talk". So I looked it up in the OED, where I was waylaid by the etymology:

[A word invented by the Dutch chemist, J. B. Van Helmont (1577-1644), but avowedly based upon the Gr. χάος (‘halitum illum Gas vocavi, non longe a Chao veterum secretum.’ Ortus Medicinæ, ed. 1652, p. 59a); the Dutch pronunciation of g as a spirant accounts for its being employed to represent Gr. χ; perh. suggested by Paracelsus's use of chaos for the proper element of spirits such as gnomes: see GNOME².

Van Helmont's statement having been overlooked, it has been very commonly supposed that he modelled his word on Du. geest spirit, an idea found at least as early as 1775 (Priestley On Air Introd. 3). Van H. also invented the term BLAS, which has not survived, while gas has been adopted (usually in the same form) in most European languages; the spelling in F. and Pg. is gaz, which was also employed by English writers for a time.]

On 30 Rock's "Christmas Special" episode this past Thursday, Tracy Morgan's character (Tracy Jordan) says to Tina Fey's character (Liz Lemon): "What's the past tense for scam? Is it scrumped? Liz Lemon, I think you just got scrumped!" See it at the end of this clip here (or better yet, watch the whole episode):

The intended joke here is that scrump (or skrump; the alternative spelling is irrelevant) is a slang term for sex, with more precise popular definitions ranging from the relatively benign "to have convenient sex; usually brief and decidedly unromantic" to the more disturbing "[t]o physically violate". (Some believe the word to be a blend of "screw" and "hump"; others assume a biblical link to the story of Adam & Eve, euphemistically speaking of stealing fruit/apples.) So, Tracy Jordan is informing Liz Lemon that she just got fucked.

The latest episode of Comedy Central's "Sarah Silverman Program" (first aired Dec. 4, check your local listings for repeats) is sure to warm the hearts of neologophiles. Here's the blurb:

In this week's episode, "Kangamangus," Sarah strives to leave a legacy by creating a popular slang word, "Ozay." While she struggles to get others interested, Brian effortlessly succeeds in the same pursuit with his word, "Dot-nose." Also, British actor, Matt Berry, ("The IT Crowd") makes a guest appearance.

Matt Berry, awesomely enough, plays the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who arrives to tell Brian that dot-nose is entering the dictionary, complete with a Word Induction Ceremony. Video clips after the jump.

Yesterday afternoon, Josh Marshall titled a post "Neo-Hooverite Republicans". About an hour later, Matt Yglesias posted a sort of snide blogospheric RIAA letter:

A clever coinage from Josh Marshall. Why didn’t I think of that sooner (or this)?

Matt's point, apparently, was that he used the words neo-Hooverite and neo-Hooverism back in October, and so Josh should have credited him for the invention.

It all started with an entry in the "Sic!" section of Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter #614, on 11/22/08 (boldface added):

Rachael Weiss found an item on a menu in Turkey: "Aubergine Kebap. Ground veal patties with aborigine arranged on a layer of sauteed pita bread, topped with tomatoes and spices." She observed, "We white Australians haven't treated the original owners of our land very well, but this seems to go too far."

This is not just a simple substitution of aborigine (in the sense 'aboriginal inhabitant of Australia') for aubergine (a mostly British variant referring to the egg-shaped fruit of a plant in the genus Solanum, eaten as a vegetable, and otherwise known in English as eggplant), since the two versions occur together in this very short text. The menu writer seems to be treating the two as alternative versions of "the same word", referring to a foodstuff, perhaps along the lines of aluminium and aluminum; aboriginal inhabitants of Australia probably don't come into it at all.

The variant aborigine 'eggplant' is widespread in food writing (especially in menu items and recipes). Literally widespread, in writing about food from places from Greece and Turkey through China and Japan (these from the first hundred Google webhits on {aborigine aubergine} on 11/25/08; no doubt I've missed some cuisines in this search).  I'll give a sampling of these occurrences, and then talk about what we might make of them.

It's Word of the Year season again, and a dark-horse candidate is surging on the inside turn to the home stretch: malus.  (OK, well, it appeals to me at least — my poor past record in predicting WOTY choices suggests that my lexical tastes are in the minority.) A press release from the Union Bank of Switzerland, dated 11/17/2008,  explained that "[b]eginning in 2009, UBS will adopt a new compensation model for the Board of Directors and the Group Executive Board", according to which

Variable cash compensation for the Group Executive Board is based on a bonus / malus system.

Last week a truce was brokered in the great Philadelphia Alt-Weekly Battle over Meh. But fresh fighting has broken out on the webcomic front. Here's today's Overcompensating strip from Jeffrey Rowland (click to expand):

Meh has its supporters, particularly among fans of "The Simpsons" (see this piece by Mark Peters for more Simpsoniana). But in his comment on the Overcompensating strip, Rowland has a retort to the pro-Simpsons crowd:

I know it started with a Simpsons episode. So did "don't have a cow man." People had the good sense to knock that crap off though.

(Hat tip, Dan Holbrook of Language is the People's, who notes that Rowland is no stranger to word rage.)

The announcement that the next edition of Collins English Dictionary will be including the indifferent interjection meh (having beaten out other submissions from the public) has set off a bit of a squabble between Philadelphia's two alt-weeklies. Molly Eichel of Philadelphia City Paper blogged that "meh isn't a word — it's a sound effect." Joel Mathis of Philadelphia Weekly responded that meh is "not only a word, but a great word." Eichel emailed me to try to settle the dispute, and I was only too happy to oblige, given my interest in meh ever since my June 2006 post here, "Meh-ness to society." You can read all about it in my latest Word Routes column over on the Visual Thesaurus (where I hang my hat these days).

While I'm in self-promotion mode, why not try the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee? It's an addictive spelling challenge that adapts to your skill level, and it comes with the seal of approval from such Friends of the Log as Languagehat, Mr. Verb, and Jan Freeman. If you're interested in some background on how we made it adaptive, check out my recent post on OUPblog, "Building the Ultimate Spelling Bee." I hope you find the results anything but meh.

[Update: There's a truce in the meh wars. Mathis responds here and Eichel here.]

WAG is a very unusual initialism that has evolved in the last decade or so in the language of British newspapers. It is a back-formation from an acronym. Its origin lies in the the initials of the phrase Wives And Girlfriends, the phrase used to refer to the often newsmaking entourage of female companions surrounding (in particular) British soccer-playing celebrities. But once the acronym was established, and said females (often glamorous models or wannabes much sought after by celebrity photographers) could be referred to collectively as the team's WAGs, a singular noun was created as a kind of back-formation, and today an individual woman in a relationship with a soccer player can be referred to as a WAG.

In this earlier post, I was critical of the FCC's claim that the F-word "inherently has a sexual connotation" no matter what the context. (The Supreme Court took up this question yesterday.) However, my post doesn't offer any suggestions for how to get a clear look at what the F-word does contribute to a discourse. Though I don't have results for the F-word in particular, I do have results for more mildly-taboo items, including English damn and the Chinese intensive tama(de). (I'm hoping that this follow-up post allays any fears Geoff Pullum might have that I now see language as a big bag of words…)

Robert James Hargrave has pointed out to Language Log that several regional councils in England are prohibiting their employees from using "elitist" Latinate phrases like "bona fide" or "vice versa" The Daily Telegraph has an article about it. I quote:

Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas, meaning beauty and health, has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use.

This includes bona fide, eg (exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib or ad libitum, etc or et cetera, ie or id est, inter alia, NB or nota bene, per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis, vice versa and even via.

Its list of more verbose alternatives, includes "for this special purpose", in place of ad hoc and "existing condition" or "state of things", instead of status quo.

In instructions to staff, the council said: "Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult."

The Supreme Court hears oral arguments today in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, the case of the fleeting expletive. Bono got things going when exclaimed "really, really fucking brilliant" at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards.[*] The FCC first judged such usage non-offensive, then back-tracked in the face of pressure from the Parents Television Council. In this note, the FCC declares that

given the core meaning of the "F-Word," any use of that word or a variation, in any context, inherently has a sexual connotation

Language Loggers have commented on this and related topics before, and Arnold recently went meta on the Times coverage of the case. I recently spoke with Jess Bravin at the Wall Street Journal about the FCC's statement and the coming Supreme Court hearings. (His article with Amy Schatz appeared today, along with a cool wordle-like graphic on the results below.) During out conversation, Jess asked how a linguist might test the FCC's claim about the connotations of the F-word. Does it in fact have sexual connotations even when used as an intensive, as in Bono's "really, really fucking brilliant"?