Bowdlerizing Huckleberry Finn

17 January 2011

Update:

John McIntyre of the You Don’t Say blog has an excellent post on the topic:

One of the great moments in that novel is the point at which Huck recognizes, confronts, and rejects the casual racism in which he has been brought up. [...] The things that word stands for are central to the book, and if Huck can face them, so should we be able to. Besides, if a taboo word cannot appear even in a classroom, subject to analysis and study, then we have granted it a power beyond our control, and that cannot be a good thing.

Original (8 January 2011):

As many of you have probably heard, the publisher NewSouth Books is coming out with an edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that edits out the words nigger and Injun, in the former case substituting the word slave. The stated intentions of the publisher are noble; the edition is an attempt to get the classic, which is perhaps the greatest American novel of the nineteenth century, back into schools that decline to teach it because of the presence of those words in the text. But the actual effect will likely be negative, glossing over and making more palatable the most evil aspect of American history.

G. L. at the Economist’s Johnson blog has an excellent discussion of why this well-intentioned edition is not a good thing. You can’t address racism unless you can discuss it, and what is needed is not a bowdlerized edition, but rather one with accompanying teaching aids and lesson plans for how to appropriately and effectively deal with the word when reading and discussing the novel in a classroom. The right answer is education, not the deliberate fostering of ignorance.

ADS WOTY in Trademark Dispute

13 January 2011

It has been less than a week, but Microsoft has used the American Dialect Society’s designation of app as the Word of the Year for 2010 as evidence in a trademark dispute with Apple. The latter company has attempted to trademark the term app store. Microsoft want to call its online retail outlets app stores as well and cites the ADS vote as an acknowledgment that the word is generic and thus ineligible to be trademarked. In a legal brief, Microsoft says:

Indeed, the arrival of app stores by Apple’s competitors was cited by the American Dialect Society as of the reasons it chose “app” as its Word of the Year for 2010, even though it
was not a new word. Linguist and American Dialect Society representative Ben Zimmer noted:

App has been around for ages, but with millions of dollars of marketing muscle behind the slogan “There’s an app for that,” plus the arrival of “app stores” for a wide spectrum of operating systems for phones and computers, app really exploded in the last 12 months.

The full legal brief can be found here. The quote is from page 14 of the brief (page 18 of the pdf).

(Hat tip: Ben Zimmer)

Blood Libel

13 January 2011

I normally don’t “do politics” here at wordorigins.org, but it is important to have a place to discuss the facts behind the history of the term’s use.

The term blood libel is all over the news and is trending high on Twitter, Google and other up-to-the-minute indexes of what’s hot. Sparking the interest in the term is a comment by politician Sarah Palin in an internet video address. Critics have blamed Palin and other right-wing politicians and pundits for using rhetoric that, in the eyes of the critics, amounts to incitement to violence, and the critics say that Palin and others like her are to blame for the recent shooting in Arizona in which six people, including a federal judge, were killed and thirteen others injured, including a US representative. Palin responds to the criticism by saying:

Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.

Palin’s video can be seen here (the quote is at about the 3:25 mark).

What has caused the furor over Palin’s use of blood libel is that the term is traditionally used to refer to the belief, which dates to the medieval period, that Jews used the blood of Christian and Muslim children in preparation of the unleavened bread served at the Passover Seder. While the belief is no longer widely held in the Christian West, it is still commonly found in the Muslim world. Palin’s critics are outraged that she is apparently branding her political opponents with a term associated with a heinous and antisemitic belief.

Finding an accurate history of the term’s use is difficult. Unfortunately, the OED does not contain any references to the blood libel, and I am unable to accurately date its origin. (The earliest citation in Google Books that I can find is from 1967, which is much too late). But we can find how the term has been used recently in journalism and by those commenting on the internet.

Is the term used in non-Jewish contexts that would explain or excuse Palin’s use? In an interview with CBS News Radio in New York, the New York Time’s “On Language” columnist Ben Zimmer notes that the meanings of words change, and often specific references become more generalized over time. This is true in a general sense, but is there evidence that the sense of blood libel has been changing and being used in a wider, non-antisemitic context?

The answer is no. While Zimmer’s general point is quite correct, it doesn’t apply in this case. Palin’s use is one of the few that uses the term in an non-antisemitic context (actually the only one that I found, although I am sure there are some others that I’ve missed), and the only one by a person of prominence. The term has become somewhat generalized in that it does not necessarily refer to the use of children’s blood in the Passover ritual, but it always refers to a belief that Jews are murdering someone. For example, in November 2010 right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck accused Democratic supporter George Soros, who is Jewish, of assisting the Nazis in the Holocaust. Beck’s comment was labeled a blood libel by many. A search of Google News in the weeks leading up to the Arizona shooting turns up a handful of journalists using the term, always in reference to antisemitic beliefs. Similarly, a search of Usenet prior to this January turns up a few hundred uses since the 1980s, all in antisemitic contexts. The only use of blood libel that I found that was not in an antisemitic context was in a prayer posted to the Free Republic web site where the reference was ambiguous. (I’m not linking to it because I don’t want to encourage Freeper craziness.)

So it appears that by using the term Palin is using the term in a novel sense that is not justified by its history.

(Update: I have found some other uses of blood libel in non-antisemitic contexts in the days leading up to and just after the Arizona shooting by right-wing journalists. Palin may have gotten her sense of the term from these uses. I did not find them on my initial searches because I ended the date range of those searches a few days prior to the incident in Arizona. The fact remains that Palin’s use of the term is very new.)

(Note: be wary of web pages that purport to give the history of the use of blood libel over the years. Many have been updated in last few days and hours and are distorting the historical record by those with political agendas. One must rely on primary sources when dealing with hot-button issues like this one.)

ADS Word of the Year

10 January 2011

Update: a video is now available of the final discussion points and the vote for word of the year. The sound quality is pretty bad, but it gives a flavor of what the discussion is like at these meetings.

[Hat tip: Ben Zimmer]

8 January:

On 7 January, the American Dialect Society dubbed app, an abbreviation for application and a software program for a computer or phone, as the word of the year for 2010. App is not a new word, the OED has citations for the word dating back to 1985, but the explosion of usage of smartphones and tablet computers, like the iPhone and iPad, with the accompanying marketing force of companies that make and sell them propelled the word to the forefront in the past year. The ADS holds the annual word of the year vote at its annual meeting in January, which was held in Pittsburgh this year. 

Also at the meeting, which is held in conjunction with the annual Linguistic Society of America meeting, the American Name Society decided that Eyafjalljökul was its name of the year for 2010. Eyafjalljökul is the Icelandic volcano that erupted beginning in March of last year, and by April the resulting ash cloud grounded most European and transatlantic air traffic.

The 121-year-old ADS is a organization of academics, professional lexicographers, and lay people that is dedicated to the study of the English language in North America and of other languages and dialects. The word of the year vote is not a serious academic exercise, but rather intended as amusing, but informed, retrospective on the terms made popular over the past year.

Runners up for the ADS word of the year were:

• nom, onomatopoetic form connoting eating, esp. pleasurably.
• junk, a noun and adjective used in a variety of contexts, such as junk shot (nickname for one of the attempts to fix BP oil spill), junk status (Greece’s credit rating), and don’t touch my junk (a phrase uttered in protest against a newly instituted TSA pat-down procedure at airport security checkpoints).
• Wikileaks, as proper noun, common noun, and verb, from the name of the organization that published classified US diplomatic cables in 2010.
• trend, a verb meaning to exhibit a burst of online buzz.

The ADS also votes for words in subcategories. The word voted “most useful” for 2010 was the aforementioned nom. Runners up in the category were:
• fat-finger, a verb meaning to mistype, as by accidentally striking more than one key on a keyboard/pad.
• junk, as above.
• vuvuzela, a South African plastic trumpet used by fans during the FIFA World Cup matches.

The “most creative” term for 2010 was prehab, meaning preemptive enrollment in a rehab facility to prevent relapse of a drug or alcohol problem. Runners up were:
• -sauce, an intensive suffix, as in awesome-sauce “great” and lame-sauce “stupid.”
• spillion, an immense number, especially of gallons of oil in the Gulf spill. Also spillionaire, person made rich by money from BP’s spill cleanup fund.
• phoenix firm, a troubled company that reemerges under a new name.

The winner of the “most unnecessary” category was refudiate, a blend of refute and repudiate used by Sarah Palin on Twitter. Runners up were:
• ironic moustache, facial hair worn as a statement of retro hipsterdom.
• star whacker, an imagined celebrity killer (alleged by actor Randy Quaid and his wife Evi).
• hipsterdom, the state of being hip beyond all recognition. So hip you’re unhip.

The ADS voted gate rape as the “most outrageous” word of 2010. It’s a pejorative term for the new TSA pat-down procedure. Runners up were:
• terror baby, a alleged baby born to a terrorist family on U.S. soil in order to establish citizenship for the child so it can commit acts of terrorism decades hence.
• bed intruder, a perpetrator of a home invasion in Huntsville, Ala., made famous by a viral video.

The “most euphemistic” word of 2010 was kinetic event, a Pentagon term for a violent attack or explosion. Others in the running were:
• corn sugar, the Corn Refiners Association’s rebranding of high fructose corn syrup.
• enhanced pat-down, the TSA’s term for its controversial new frisking procedure.
• bed intruder, as above.

The ADS voted the aforementioned verb trend as the “most likely to succeed” word of 2010. Other vote-getters in the category were:
• hacktivism, using computer hacking skills to commit acts of political or social activism.
• -pad, a combining form used for the iPad and other tablet computers (ViewPad, WindPad, etc.).
• telework, US federal government term for work done by an employee away from the office.

The society considered words that, while popular for a time, were unlikely in their view to gain a lasting foothold in the language. Culturomics was voted the “least likely to succeed, the name of a research project using Google to analyze the history of language and culture. Others in the category were:
• fauxhemian, the winner of a Gawker poll to replace the term hipster.
• skyaking, jumping out of a plane in a kayak.
• top kill / top hat / junk shot, nicknames for various failed techniques to fix the BP oil spill.

When it spots a number of new terms in a particular category, the ADS sometimes creates a special category to acknowledge their presence in the language that year. Such a category for 2010 was “fan words.” The winner was gleek, a fan of the TV show Glee. Runners up were:
• belieber, a fan of pop singer Justin Bieber, a blend of Bieber + believer.
• little monster, a fan of pop singer Lady Gaga, so called by the singer herself.
• Twihard, a fan of the Twilight books and movies.
• Yat Dat, a native-born fan of the New Orleans Saints.

The group attempted to consider a category of election terms, but concluded that all the terms were “losers,” and abandoned the effort. The terms that were under consideration included:
• Aqua Buddha, deity in collegiate scandal involving candidate, now US senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul.
• mama grizzly, Sarah Palin’s term for a fiercely conservative female candidate.
• man up, exhortation to be responsible or “act like a man,” used by Sharron Angle against Harry Reid in Nevada Senate race.
• Obamacare, pejorative term for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

A Different 2010 Linguistic Retrospective

8 January 2011

Erin McKean has a delightful piece in the Boston Globe looking back at the linguistic news stories of the past year. It’s refreshingly different than the naming of the “words of the year,” which I enjoy but gets tiresome.

(And I’ve mentioned it before, but I just can’t over how the Globe dates its online news stories. This one is dated tomorrow, 9 January. Unless the Globe has invented time travel, this is not possible. Journalistic convention is that the dateline contains the date on which the story is filed, not the date it appears (which I’m guessing in this case is the date on which the column appears in the print version). This is even more vital in digital publishing, when stories are often written in the midst of rapidly changing information. Often readers can’t properly assess the quality of story if they don’t know when it was written.