I recently learned that @#$%&! actually has a name. It’s a grawlix. I figured since Mort Walker (of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois fame) took time to come up with that name, he had probably named other aspects of the craft.

Turns out he has. He authored a book entitled The Lexicon of Comicana in 1980 and named damn near everything. The non-grawlix censored language in the strip above is composed of jarns, nittles and quimps.

What do you call the clouds of dust that hang in the spot where a swiftly departing character or object was previously standing?

I get a twitter message from Susan Wu saying she doesn’t get “cosplay.” I think, “Hmmm… I don’t either. What’s cosplay?” I open the browser and ask Wikipedia. Well, it’s a portmanteau of the English words “costume” and “role play” Got it, cool. Well, not really, but portmanteau is much more interesting. I can tell what it means from the usage, but what an interesting word! I wonder what the etymology is? I ask Wikipedia again, but before I can get to the etymology I am clicking links trying to figure out the difference between “nonce words” and “neologisms” (as a side note, basically a nonce-word is made up for one-time usage, but if the cat who made it up is popular and it catches on, then the word becomes a neologism… I guess that’s before the neologism gets a spouse and a mortgage and becomes a… word).

Luckily, I wasn’t totally side tracked by the nonce-word / neologism debate and was able to make my way back to the portmanteau article on Wikipedia, because if I didn’t - I wouldn’t have been able to share this little gem with you.

Portemanteau, from Middle French porter (to carry) and manteau (a coat or cover), formerly referred to a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments, hence the linguistic idea of fusing two words and their meanings into one.

The modern usage of portmanteau was actually coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying,

“Well, slithy means lithe and slimy … You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”

A beautiful image isn’t it? Packing words.

Bummer: When the beautiful woman you made eye contact with gets off the train before you can figure out how to begin a conversation.

Damn shame: When you realize - a station later - that she got off at your stop….

I am loving Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Book Project:

The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves

Vanity Fair has published an excerpt from Cullen Murphy’s upcoming book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America

The excerpt traces the ways that America, much like Rome centuries ago, is privitizing government functions and what outcomes we can expect if we continue on course.

But I was really intrigued by the following two passages. Murphy notes that Geoffrey de Ste. Croix decided to trace the change in connotation over five centuries of the Latin word Suffragium which orginally meant “voting tablet” or “ballot”:

The original meaning went back to the days of the Roman Republic, which had possessed modest elements of democracy. The citizens of Rome, by means of the suffragium, could exercise their influence in electing people to certain offices. In practice, the great men of Rome controlled large blocs of votes, corresponding to their patronage networks. Over time Rome’s republican forms of government calcified into empty ritual or withered away entirely. Suffragium meaning “ballot” no longer served any real political function. But the web of patrons and clients was still the Roman system’s substructure, and in this context suffragium came to mean the pressure that could be exerted on one’s behalf by a powerful man, whether to obtain a job or to influence a court case or to secure a contract. To ask a patron for this form of intervention and to exert suffragium on behalf of a client would have been a routine social interaction.

Now stir large amounts of money into this system. It is not a great conceptual distance, Ste. Croix observes, to move from the idea of exercising suffragium because of an age-old sense of reciprocal duty to that of exercising it because doing so could be lucrative. And this, indeed, is where the future lies, the idea of quid pro quo eventually becoming so accepted and ingrained that emperors stop trying to halt the practice and instead seek to contain it by codifying it. Thus, in the fourth century, decrees are promulgated to ensure that the person seeking the quid actually delivers the quo. Before long, suffragium has changed its meaning once again. Now it refers not to the influence brought to bear but to the money being paid for it: “a gift, payment or bribe.” By empire’s end, all public transactions require the payment of money, and the pursuit of money and personal advancement has become the purpose of all public jobs.

Looking back at the change, from ballot box to cash box, Ste. Croix composes this epitaph: “Here, in miniature, is the political history of Rome.”

Murphy then looks at the simialr change in the word franchise:

The activities of government are, in effect, being franchised out. You can’t help lingering over the concept of “franchise,” wondering what a latter-day Geoffrey de Ste. Croix would make of it. Like suffragium, the word originally had to do with notions of political freedom and civic responsibility. Derived from the Old French word franc, meaning “free,” it later came to be associated with the most fundamental political freedom of all: to exercise your franchise meant to exercise your right to vote. Only much later, in the mid–20th century, did the idea of being granted “certain rights” acquire its commercial connotation: the right to market a company’s services or products, such as fried chicken or Tupperware. Today, to have a franchise on something is in effect to have control over it.

I love words or phrases that express feelings I have had or situations I have been in. I like that they can be reduced to something expressible. My latest discovery is the French saying, L’esprit de l’escalier which literally translated means “the wit of the staircase.”

According to World Wide Words:

It refers to that infuriating situation in which you leave a… room and are halfway down the stairs before you suddenly think of that devastatingly witty comment you could have made… More generally, it’s any sparkling remark you wish you had thought of at the time but were too slow-witted to produce.

I like that the French have a phrase for that feeling. Apparently the Germans do too, it’s called Treppenwitz

If you like this sort of thing, check out my earlier post on Lady Mondegreen and the Cupertino Effect.

I love the word fathom and imagine oceans and understanding whenever I hear the word. But this older definition is pure gold. As established by an Act of Parliament, a fathom was:

The length of a man’s arms around the object of his affections.

You’ll note that I got this definition and the quote below from a very authoritative source:

“Fathom originally was a land-based measuring term. It comes from the Anglo-Saxon word faetm, embracing arms or to embrace. Common measurements in the Middle Ages and earlier were based on the average size of parts of the body, such as the foot, the hand (still used for measuring horses) or the rod (the left foot, heel to toe, of forty pious men as they left church on a Sunday morning). A fathom was established by an act of Parliament, as “the length of a man’s arms around the object of his affections.” Fathom became a term used to describe the act of taking the measure of something. Thus, trying to fathom something is trying to figure it out.”

Youngna pointed out that she had recently come to understand the beauty of podcasts. I never really got into them before. I tried The Show, various NPR offerings, and Wallstrip. But I just don’t want to see these shows every day. I prefer to stop by the site on a whim and view/listen to a few episodes at a time.

But yesterday I realized that I could subscribe to spanish lessons via podcast. Now I am hooked and wondering what other useful material like this exists in pod cast form?

What podasts are you watching or listening to?

I love when I find out that words exist to express concepts or experiences that I have had.

I recently learned from an article on the OED in the New York Times that a misheard lyric is called a mondegreen. According to the New York Times:

It is named after Lady Mondegreen. There was no Lady Mondegreen. The lines of a ballad, ”They hae slain the Earl of Murray,/And laid him on the green” are misheard as ”They have slain the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.”

For the record, I have always been curious to know who this “Sweet Saranda” was in the song Bitter Sweet by Big Head Todd and the Monsters?

And today, I learned from Jason Kottke about the Cupertino Effect, or incorrect spellcheck suggestions that make it into finalized documents. The word comes from a spellchecking error in the various European Union Documents where the term cooperation was mistakenly replaced by Cupertino.

I wonder what other wonderful words exist for those experiences that I have had but never been able to explain without using several sentences? I wonder if, in fact, this very concept has a word to express it?

I realize that I am probably the only person on the face of the planet that attempts to use the synonym feature in the right click menu in Word. That said, can someone explain to me why when I attempted to find a synonym for “identifies” the only result was “identify”? I then (unintuitvely) had to select thesaurus from the context menu, confirm that I wanted synonyms for identify, select a suitable word from the results and then manually modify the new verb back to the proper tense.

Give me the damn synonyms in context so that I don’t make careless errors. The squiggly green grammar police program built into Word knows every time I make a grammar error (and even sometimes when I don’t). Why can’t the thesaurus figure the reverse?