What The Digamma!

21 March 2016

Jay Dillon found what may possibly be the earliest known use of what the fuck, which he has posted to Facebook. Dillon discovered the following poem, which was written by Joseph Dunn Lester and appeared in the 1881 Prize Translations, Poems, and Parodies. Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word, the go-to resource for all fucking things, has the earliest use of what the fuck in Henry Miller’s 1942 Roofs of Paris. Who the fuck and where the fuck appear in the 1930s. And there is a 1903 citation of what the puck. The abbreviation WTF is recorded in 1985. So this poem, if it is indeed a use of the phrase, would be a significant antedating.

But the phrase is not clearly spelled out. Like many early uses of fuck, it’s encoded. The poem reads:

Διος Ομηρος (The God Homer)

Polyphloisboisteros Homer of old
Threw all his augments into the sea,
Though he’d been firmly but courteously told,
Perfect imperfects begin with an E.

“What the digamma, does any one care!”
The Poet replied with a haughty stare,
And he sat him down by the wine-dark sea,
To write a fresh book of the Odyssey.

A digamma is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet that resembles the modern Latin letter F. (It had a sound value of /w/.) So the relevant the line could be read as “What the F, does any one care!” It seems likely the poem is a bit of an inside joke. Lester slipped a vulgar expression past the editors knowing that only those who knew Homeric Greek would get the joke. But this would mean that the phrase what the fuck was in use in 1881. That stretches credulity a bit, but not to the breaking point. Fuck was such a taboo word that there are very few printed uses of it in the nineteenth century, so its absence from the printed record is not evidence of its absence in spoken language.

If it is indeed an instance of what the fuck, it was hiding in plain sight. The poem was once well known, at least in certain rarefied circles. The word polyphloisboisteros even has an entry in the OED, with a first citation being from this poem. (It means noisy, boisterous.)

Ben Zimmer has a longer explanation, including a juicy tidbit about Charles Dodgson’s (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) reaction to the poem, in the Strong Language blog.

English Time Machine

16 March 2016

This video isn’t terrible, but it’s really too simplistic to be useful:

It’s got some problems. It conflates poetic language and everyday speech. It’s focused on the London dialect, as if all English speakers spoke the same way. Some of the “unknown” words are hardly unknown today (abbess, anyone?) The discussion of the Great Vowel Shift is wrong in the timeline; it was pretty much over well before Shakespeare’s day. They don’t attempt to replicate pronunciation until they hit Chaucer; I’m pretty sure that Defoe didn’t sound like the actor who is reading from Robinson Crusoe.

And, while this really isn’t a mistake, you don’t have to go back in time to find hard-to-understand English. There’s a wealth of diversity in English spoken around the world today.

It’s a shame really. The video is very well produced, so why didn’t they take the time to get the subtleties right? It wouldn’t have been difficult.

Origin Unknown: Profile of Anatoly Liberman

2 February 2016

Lapham’s Quarterly has a nice profile of etymologist Anatoly Liberman.

I don’t have much to say about the piece, except to highlight a couple of quotes. On why he pursues etymologies:

“Love is the wrong word,” he says. “Etymology is not a child or a woman. So there is nothing to love it for. It’s the excitement of discovery. Whether you discover a new particle in physics or the origin of a word, it’s really the same thing. It’s the excitement of the chase, the hunter’s feeling that you had your prey, and that you succeeded!”

And on the utility of Google:

“Can you do any searching with computers?” Liberman repeats the question in a resigned tone. “That’s what everybody asks. And, unfortunately, this answer is no. If you want to know the origin of a word, you will open the computer and Google the world heifer. Google will give you the titles of twenty etymological dictionaries, which is a waste to me. I have them all on my shelf. I know much more than a Google search, because I have every edition of every dictionary. I don’t need that. Sometimes Google Books will highlight a page, including Notes and Queries, that will show me something I may not know. But this is not even for dessert. These are crumbs.”

ADS Word of the Year for 2015

9 January 2016

Meeting in Austin, Texas this week, the American Dialect Society gave the nod to the singular they as its Word of the Year for 2015. The group, which has its members those who study how English is used in North America, also dubbed the singular they as the Most Useful word for the past year.

The singular they is the use of that pronoun, which is usually plural, to represent a single person when that person’s gender is unknown or ambiguous, as in, “Not having met him or her, John didn’t know whether they would make a good copy editor.” As seen in this example, the singular they is a substitute for the clunky he or she construction. This use of they, traditionally viewed as incorrect by strict grammarians, can be found as far back as the works of Chaucer in the fourteenth century, but has increasingly become more acceptable since the 1980s, with many style guides now accepting it. That new-found acceptance, plus news stories about Caitlyn Jenner and the success of television shows like Orange is the New Black and Transparent, which feature transgender characters, brought this use of they to the fore in the past year.

Other solutions to the problem of representing ambiguous or unknown gender, such as proposed pronouns zhe and thon, have failed to come into general use. Pronouns are a closed class in the English lexicon, that is they don’t readily admit new members. Nouns and verbs, on the other hand, are an open class, readily adopting new words into those parts of speech. They, in fact, is the most recent pronoun to be added to standard English (not counting ones like zhe or thon that haven’t gained traction). They is a borrowing from Old Norse, appearing in English by 1200. She is another pronoun that was adopted at about the same time, being attested to sometime prior to 1160. (She was voted the ADS World of the Millennium in 2001.) All the other standard English pronouns date back to Old English.

The ADS choice of WOTY is primarily undertaken for fun and public relations purposes. While the choices are informed by the scholarly work of its members, it’s not a rigorous academic exercise. The proceedings are often raucous and entertaining.

Singular they received 187 votes for WOTY. Other nominees were:

• thanks, Obama. A sarcastic blaming of the president for a problem, (76 votes).

• ammosexual. A gun lover, (42).

• ghost (verb). To abruptly end a conversation, especially online, by cutting communication.

• on fleek. Impeccable, well-arrayed (4).

Nominees in the Most Useful category were:

• they (singular). (214).

• microaggression. A subtle form of racism or bias, (62).

• zero fucks given, ZFG. An indication of supreme indifference, (41).

• shade. A subtle or clever insult or criticism, (11).

• mic drop. A definitive end to a discussion after making an impressive point, (2).

Nominees in the Most Creative category were:

• ammosexual. (153).

• adult (verb). To behave like a grownup, (71)

• yass, yaass, yaaass, etc. An expression of excitement or strong approval, (43).

• lowkey (adverb). to a small extent, subtly, opposite of highkey, (38).

• squad. One’s posse or close circle of friends, (3).

Nominees in the Most Unnecessary category:

• manbun. A man’s hairstyle pulled into a bun, (207).

• or nah. A tag following a statement indicating it may not occur, (34).

• thanks, Obama. (34).

• dadbod. The flabby physique of a typical middle-aged man, (16).

• trigger warning. An alert for potentially distressing material, (10).

Nominees in the Most Outrageous category, the slash indicates a run-off vote:

• fuckboy, fuckboi. A man who behaves objectionably or promiscuously, (127/173)

• schlong (verb). To defeat soundly, (93/148).

• white student union. A campus organization formed in response to a black student union (27).

• sharewashing. A marketing campaign that treats services as “sharing,” (14).

• fish gape. Posed expression with cheeks sucked in and lips slightly apart, (3).

Nominees in the Most Euphemistic category:

• Netflix and chill. Sexual come-on, update to the come up and see my etchings of decades past, (315).

• af, asf. Abbreviation for as fuck used as an intensifier after an adjective, (1).

• Swipe right/left (verb). To accept or reject, based on gestures used on the Tinder dating app (24).

• lit. Amazing, excellent, fun, (2).

Nominees in the Most Likely to Succeed category:

• ghost (verb). (223).

• CRISPR. Name of a gene-editing technology, (51).

• on fleek. (23).

• mom. Admiring term of address for a mother-figure, (17).

Nominees in the Least Likely to Succeed category:

• sitbit. Device that rewards a sedentary lifestyle, a play on the Fitbit fitness tracker, (102/191).

• hoverboard. Self-balancing, motorized skateboard, (82/106).

• Berniementum. Momentum behind the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, (59).

• Uber for X. Pitch used by startups to compare themselves with Uber, (33).

Nominees for Most Notable Hashtag (new category):

• #SayHerName. Call to bring attention to violence against women of color, (178).

• #LoveWins. Celebration of the US Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, (60).

• #StayWoke. Call to remain vigilant and informed, used by the #BlackLivesMatter movement, (59).

• #StayMadAbby. Ridiculing the plaintiff in an affirmative action case, (17).

• #JeSuisParis. Expression of solidarity after the Paris terror attacks, (6).

Nominees for Most Notable Emoji (new category):

• eggplant, used as sexual innuendo, (138).

• 100, keep it 100, keep it real, (56).

• heart eyes, romantic, passionate, (31).

• information desk person, sassy, sarcastic, (31).

• winking face, humorous, flirtatious, (8).

English Composition 101

17 December 2015

This isn’t strictly on the topic of word and phrase origins, but it’s a topic I have recently gained considerable experience in. John Warner has penned an article for Inside Higher Ed titled “I Cannot Prepare Students to Write Their (History, Philosophy, Sociology, Poly Sci., etc...) Papers,” and I couldn’t agree with his conclusions more.

The one thing I would add to Warner’s article is that I take considerable time walking the students back from attempts to writing in an academic register. They become so focused on achieving the right tone and vocabulary that logic and clarity are crushed. They try to achieve the register they read in scholarly articles, but their mastery of basic argumentation and clarity is so shaky that they end up producing gibberish. When they abandon their attempts to write in a particular register, suddenly their ideas shine through. (And I am constantly pleasantly surprised by the inventiveness and quality of their ideas.) Which makes me muse that perhaps what is needed is a two-semester sequence in writing. The first semester, taken early in the undergraduate career, would be basic writing and argumentation. The second, taken midway through the undergraduate years, would be writing a research paper. Teach the fundamentals of clarity and argumentation first, and then after they’ve achieved a degree of mastery over that, teach them how to integrate source material into their own work. This second course would be discipline-specific. Yes, it’s more time spent on a non-substantive course, but writing is so very important, and most undergrads won’t end up working in the discipline they study anyway. What’s most important is they come away from university with the skills to think and express themselves clearly.

And there is one thing I would change about writing instruction and advice books—I would stop focusing on how to write a good sentence. My experience is that university students know how to write good, grammatical sentences. The one exception are foreign students who have a tenuous grasp of English. Native speakers and those for whom English is a second language but have come up through the US or Canadian secondary school system can write a decent sentence. (Maybe they have a bit of a problem with proper punctuation, especially comma usage, but that’s minor and easily fixed.) Again, when they commit aggravated assault on sentence structure, it is almost always because they’re attempting to write in an unfamiliar register. (I suspect that those who teach at community colleges or open enrollment schools might have a different experience, and those students may genuinely not understand how to write a good sentence. If that’s true, an approach appropriate to that audience is required.)