Bayeux Tapestry detail: Coronation of Harold, created by Myrabella, 2013, used under Creative Commons license
16 January 2012
I’ve done another podcast for 365 Days of Astronomy. This one is on the definition of “planet” and how the scientists at the IAU erred back in 2006 when they tried to come up with one. They should have consulted some lexicographers first.
The podcast is available for download and the transcript can be read at the 365 Days website.
[As I push the “publish” button, the podcast is not yet available for download, but it should be shortly. The transcript is available.]
14 January 2012
This Washington Post piece is a succinct illustration of how editors often do violence to quotations, and it shows that even something literally etched in stone can be changed.
7 January 2012
This year it’s occupy, a worthy, but unsurprising choice. You can read the press release here.
This year, instead of just regurgitating the press release, I’ll give my comments on the various nominees and winners. These are my idiosyncratic opinions.
Occupy. As I said a worthy, albeit obvious, choice. Had I been in Portland, it would have gotten my vote.
Other WOTY nominees: FOMO “fear of missing out”: Not a bad acronym, and it characterizes a social phenomenon. But I’d never heard of it before the ADS vote. (Not that that necessarily means anything; just because I haven’t heard of a word doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t popular.) 99%: A worthy contender, but too closely associated with occupy, which is the more characteristic term for the movement. Humblebrag: a great word, but I’m not sure it’s really caught on, although I hope it has. Job creator: sorry, this one just doesn’t cut it. If there were a category for “most propagandistic,” this would make the cut, although 99% would probably be a better choice in that category.
The four “most useful” nominees are good ones, humblebrag, occupy, FOMO, and tablet. A tough choice. Any of these would be worthy. Although the utility of occupy is somewhat limited as it identifies a particular political movement. I can see the other three still being used in a non-historical context a decade from now.
Mellencamp is the clear choice for “most creative.” I’m surprised the didn’t pop up in previous years. Kardash would be my choice for runner-up. I don’t see what’s so especially creative about bunga bunga. It’s just an odd term used by Berlusconi which others picked up on. Put a bird on it is a fun choice, but derivative from a TV comedy sketch. I’m not sure it qualifies as creative—the sketch does, but the linguistic usage does not.
Anything associated with Charlie Sheen qualifies as “most unnecessary,” so I have no issue with bi-winning. But planking would be my choice; I prefer populist words. I’ve never heard of amazeballs; it clearly didn’t achieve the popularity that the other two did. The Qwikster service may have been unnecessary, but the word isn’t. Trade names are by their nature necessary. Linguists should know better than to confuse the word with the thing it represents.
Most years the “most outrageous” category yields some really offensive terms, but these are tepid at best. Assholocracy isn’t outrageous, unless one considers asshole to be so; impolite, yes; outrageous, no. Deather: again, confusing the thing with the word. Plus, the underlying concept isn’t all that outrageous. The circumstances around Bin Laden’s death and burial at sea raise some reasonable questions. (Not that I’m one with the deathers. I firmly believe that Osama was indeed killed, but skepticism of government announcements isn’t unreasonable.) Botoxionist? Not only have I not heard of it, but I don’t see anything at all outrageous about the word. And since it only got one vote, it seems I’m in the mainstream on this one.
Job creator for “most euphemistic” is a good choice and would have had my vote. Although I would have made regime alteration the runner up, not artisan/artisanal, which just barely qualifies as a euphemism. Sugar-coated Satan sandwich is a nice one, but appears to be a one-off usage.
Cloud and Arab Spring are both good choices for “most likely to succeed.” I’d have voted for cloud, as Arab Spring is likely to only be used historically in a few years. Tiger Mother is already on its way out, so I’m not sure what its doing in this category.
Brony and Tebowing are two good choices for “least likely to succeed.” (My apologies to my friends who are “My Little Pony” fans. This isn’t a judgment of you, just my assessment of the word’s long-term viability.) 9-9-9 has already failed, so I’m not sure it’s fair to include that one.
”Occupy words” was a good choice for a special category. (In most years the ADS will create a special category to recognize words associated with a particular trend.) The Occupy movement has been especially linguistically inventive, and it’s nice to see these words on the list.
1 January 2012
The following is a list of books I read during the course of 2011. I’m not sure anyone else would be particularly interested, but I started keeping track of the books I read, so I figured I’d post the list.
Many are “classics” that were on the reading list for my PhD comprehensive exams. The asterisks indicate books I’ve read before, but re-read in 2011.
Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart
Atwood, Margaret, A Handmaid’s Tale
Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice
Bacon, Francis: various essays
Behn, Aphra, Oronooko
*Beowulf
Book of John Mandeville
Brand, Dionne, The Map to the Door of No Return
Cavendish, Margaret, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World
*Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales
*Conrad, Joseph, The Heart of Darkness
Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The
*Crystal, David, Stories of English
Defoe, Daniel, Moll Flanders
*Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol
*Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations
*Dickinson, Emily: various poems
*Donne, John: various poems
Eliot, George, Middlemarch
*Eliot, T. S.: various poems
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: various essays
Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews
Gay, John, Beggar’s Opera
Gray, Thomas: various poems
Herbert, George: various poems
*Hoccleve, Thomas, The Complaint
*Hoccleve, Thomas, The Dialogue
Johnson, Ben: various poems
Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas
Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
*Keats, John: various poems
Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior
Langland, William, Piers Plowman
Lanyer, Aemilia: various poems
Lyly, John, Gallathea
Macdonald, Ross, The Blue Hammer
Marlowe, Christopher, Dr. Faustus
Marlowe, Christopher, The Jew of Malta
Marvell, Andrew: various poems
*Melville, Herman, Moby Dick
Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl
Middleton, Thomas, The Chaste Maid of Cheapside
Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman
Milton, John, Areopagitica
Milton, John, Paradise Lost
More, Thomas, Utopia
Morrison, Toni, Beloved
*Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita
Pope, Alexander: various poems
Richardson, Samuel, Pamela
Shakespeare, William, 1 Henry IV
*Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
*Shakespeare, William, King Lear
*Shakespeare, William, Othello
Shakespeare, William, The Winter’s Tale
Shaw, Bernard, Major Barbara
Shaw, Bernard, Pygmalion
*Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein
*Sheridan, Richard, The School for Scandal
Sidney, Philip, The Defense of Poesy
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sterne, Laurence, A Sentimental Journey
*Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels
*Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn
*Whitman, Walt: various poems
Wilde, Oscar, Salome
Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire
Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts
Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway
*Wordsworth, William: various poems
Wycherley, William, The Country Wife
*Yeats, William Butler: various poems
York Cycle: various plays
1 January 2012
Languagehat has pointed me to an interesting blog on etymology, Odamaki. I’m adding it to my RSS feed. It looks like it will provide some good stuff, although it doesn’t appear to be updated all that often.
But someone is wrong on the internet, so I have to comment. Back in October Odamaki had a post on Nokia’s trade name Lumi, which in an obscure Spanish dialect means “prostitute.” Odamaki’s etymological commentary is accurate, but he makes the error that most such discussions make: failing to understand that the meanings of trade names simply don’t matter. It’s not a “mistake” to name a product that has a negative connotation. No one has ever shown that such a name has ever impacted sales of a product. I used to name products for a living, and I can tell you it doesn’t matter. (There are branding consultants that will tell you otherwise, but they are trying to peddle their services, so of course they will tell you that you need to hire them to spend many billable hours researching product names.)
Now, it is possible to name a product badly. No one would ever buy “Vomit” perfume, for example. But no marketing exec in their right mind would ever name a perfume “Vomit.” What we’re talking about here is subtle connotations that might slip past the normal brainstorming that occurs in a marketing department prior to a product launch.
Let’s look at some common cited examples of “badly” named products:
The infamous urban legend of Chevy Novas not selling well in Mexico
Coca-Cola allegedly meaning “bite the wax tadpole” in Chinese.
Reebok’s line of Incubus sneakers, which had a successful sales run, but after production was halted when Reebok streamlined its product line, a local news outlet twigged to the demonic implications that no one had commented on before.
The hugely successful Bimbo bakery. The giggling the name causes in its English-speaking markets doesn’t seem to have affected its sales.
And my favorite, because I used to work there, is the graphic-chip maker NVIDIA, whose “envious” and “spiteful” name did not prevent them from growing to a $5 billion company in just ten years.
People are really good at processing polysemy. They recognize that word in one context does not necessarily mean the same in another. So if a name has subtle negative connotations in one context, those connotations are not going to carry over to the trade name. People may recognize the negative connotation, but if they do, they quickly discard it in the new context. This is a sub-case of the etymological fallacy. The origin of the word does not determine its meaning; its use does. What matters in a trade name is the brand reputation you build, not where the name comes from.
[This post was edited for clarity on 5 January 2012.]
The text of Wordorigins.org by David Wilton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License