The Lexicographer's Rules

My latest column in the Malaysia Star has been posted. The column is based on a radio essay that I wrote in June 2007 but never aired. In short, I’m endorsing the use of quotation marks for emphasis. John McWhorter more or less agrees in a column he published in the New York Sun in August 2007.

...

There’s a chain of restaurants in the United States called White Castle that sells greasy, yummy, little, oniony hamburgers in paper boxes.

On those boxes is printed the slogan Buy ‘em by the “sack.” The double quote marks around “sack” are theirs, not mine. They are what is called “scare quotes.”

Scare quotes are usually found around very short phrases or around single words in order to call attention to those words in a negative way. They aren’t used to quote someone, they’re used to call into question whatever words are found within them. They instil doubt.

For example, in the movie Citizen Kane, scare quotes appear on the screen in a screaming newspaper headline, Candidate Kane Caught in Love Nest with “Singer.” Singer is in scare quotes as a way of suggesting that Kane’s sweetie, Susan Alexander, was little more than a floozy (a woman of loose morals) and not much of a singer.

White Castle, it turns out, has been using quotes around “sack” since at least the ’50s and probably longer. Because of the way the company uses them, I prefer to call them something other than scare quotes.

For one thing, they’re not really calling the word “sack” into question. There’s no scaring to be done, no fear to be instilled, no doubt to be sown. I suppose there are cheap laughs to be had by reading Buy ‘em by the “sack” as if the “sack” were only pretending to be a sack but is instead something else, like a tugboat or a banana. That’s the kind of intentional misunderstanding you have to make in order to think that those quotes around “sack” shouldn’t be there.

They belong there because the company is calling attention to the word. “Sack”, perhaps, wasn’t a word that everyone would use. Some might prefer “bag”, since “sack” historically has been much less used in some parts of the United States to refer to the folded paper container your purchases are packed into at the grocery store.

So if they’re not scare quotes around “sack”, what are they?

I suggest the term shout quotes. And I suggest that the use of quotations for emphasis be condoned for casual use by all language authorities: hired, self-appointed, or otherwise.

There’s a weblog called the “Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks” and on the photo-sharing website Flickr, there’s a fantastic picture pool called “quote abuse.” Both mock the use of quotes used to emphasise or draw attention to a word.

But as examples on both sites show, there are proper, natural, widely understood rules behind using shout quotes, even if they’re taught in no grammar or style book that I can find.

They’re appropriate when you have no other easy way to indicate emphasis. They’re appropriate when used, for example, in casual sign-making. They’re appropriate when bolding or underlining is not possible. They’re appropriate when used by people who don’t do typesetting for a living.

One picture shows a handwritten sign that says, “Sorry”, but there will be no pumpkin soup served today!

Well, for lame laughs, we could assume those are scare quotes and that the writer meant they weren’t really sorry. But that’s an uncharitable reading. The only way you could truthfully assume that the sorry was insincere would be to also assume that the sign-writer was incapable of even the simplest lie about being sorry. Clearly, with the shout quotes, the sign-writer meant that “sorry” was to be emphasised. Perhaps the pumpkin soup is extraordinary and they really were sorry it was not being served.

The intentional misreading of the shout quotes as scare quotes does grow rather thin. The sign that says We Love “Sushi” makes one commenter on Flickr wonder whether the sign-maker meant “cat” in place of “sushi.” See, if “sushi” is in quotes it must mean that the word is dubious, right? Maybe they’re selling cat-meat instead of fish?

No! They just wanted to emphasise the word “sushi.” Very simple. You have to go out of your way to get it wrong.

A truck door that says our drivers are “safe” drivers could make you wonder whether that company does indeed define “safe” differently from everyone else—besides leaving you wondering who they are trying to convince, when safe-driving behaviour alone should do the trick.

But of course, all they meant to do was to emphasise the word “safe”, in much the same way that in sign after sign, “do not” or “please” are put inside shout quotes that emphasise the strongest sentiments of their authors.

I endorse the use of quotation marks for emphasis, even in extreme cases. One example I collected is of a sign in a bar advertising half-off bottles of beer during happy hours. There are four shout quotes, one in each corner, decorating the page as much as they are enclosing the text, but all of them emphasising the discount.

That perfect example of using quotes for emphasis is something I can drink to.

It’s what you might call service journalism, but it’s something I’ve been seeing a need to write for a while: How to buy a dictionary, my latest column in the Malaysia Star.

...

A popular question from English language-learners and native speakers alike is, “What dictionary should I use or buy?”

There are many bad dictionaries. It’s difficult to tell what’s worth your money and time and what isn’t. So, let me offer you some ways that you can help distinguish the good dictionaries from the bad ones.

Use or buy two dictionaries.

The editorial guidelines of dictionaries can vary greatly. They control what words are included, how thorough the definitions are, what kind of special features are added, and for what reading level the text is written.

Just as two parents contribute something to the creation of every child, each dictionary will contribute different things to your understanding of English words.

Make sure they’re from two different publishers.

It’s not uncommon for publishers to repackage the same dictionary material into many different forms.

To be sure you are getting two truly different viewpoints on a word and its meaning, you need to use dictionaries that have different content. The best way to ensure that is to make sure they’re published by different companies.

Use a learner’s dictionary and a general-use dictionary.

Even further, you might do best to use one dictionary that is for learners and another that is intended for general use at home or the workplace. They have different goals and different content.

The learners’ dictionaries tend to have simpler definitions, more information about collocations (words that tend to appear together), more extra material like synonyms and antonyms, and fewer overall words.

General-use dictionaries tend to define more words, to include more etymological information, to include more encyclopaedic information (such as biographies of famous people), and they tend to be physically larger.

Make sure the book was recently published.

You need a dictionary that is current. Make sure it was published in the last five years.

Look for recent words.

Publishers will often republish dictionaries over decades without updating the material with new entries, or at the most with only the barest few new entries.

In the United States, it’s common to find cheap dictionaries for just a few dollars that claim to contain tens of thousand of words. They’re perfectly good dictionaries—except they don’t include words like Internet or computer or anything else that’s modern. They’re simply reselling old material.

Make sure the dictionaries you choose have other modern words that wouldn’t have been used more than two decades ago like weblog, blogosphere, hybrid car, text messaging, SMS, LOL, and other technical or recent words. Finding these will help ensure that the dictionary has been updated relatively recently.

Look for dirty words.

All parts of English are important, even those trouble-making words that are coarse, derogatory, or sexual. A good lexicographer will include the most common words of all kinds, including ones that can be troublesome.

If a dictionary’s editors have chosen to leave out words they consider offensive, we must also wonder what other words they have left out. What are their criteria for judging words to be offensive? Are they leaving out words that concern any religion but their own? Are they leaving out words that deal with political viewpoints they don’t support? Are they leaving out words simply because they think they’re ugly? Are they including words simply because they like them? Are they deleting insulting words for their own ethnic group and leaving in insulting words for other groups?

This may surprise you, but I usually recommend that parents give adult dictionaries to their children. It is important for children to get frank, matter-of-fact meanings for words rather than getting the wrong idea from other children, yet many children’s dictionaries don’t include these troublesome words.

Naughty words lose a lot of their power when they are explained in dry, ordinary dictionary definitions instead of accompanied by the giggle and wink of the playground. Children are also usually relieved that the words really are more boring and ordinary than they first sound.

Of course, by not listing the words here, I am assuming that you are an adult who already knows them. If you are a child, I encourage you to seek out a parent or other adult you respect. Ask them to explain these words in plain language, or better, ask them to show you a good dictionary in which you can look up the words for yourself.

Make sure there are sample sentences.

Lots of them. It is easier to learn the meaning of a word from sample sentences than it is from definitions. This is why learners’ dictionaries—those designed for students who are learning English—have so many of them.

Don’t be persuaded by superficial features.

Etymologies, for example, are interesting, but they are largely irrelevant when it comes to using a dictionary for schoolwork (unless you are specifically writing about word origins) or for preparing business reports.

Coloured text, too, is often not worth the extra money and colour photographs are a luxury unless the dictionary is primarily a picture dictionary.

My latest column in the Malaysia Star is about the words that go with the games we play when something unexpected happens. Not games of chance, but games of whimsy.

...

Rituals and superstitions and the words that go with them are a favourite topic on the radio show I co-host. Our listeners can’t get enough and the e-mail keeps coming in long after we discuss them on the air.

For example, if two children are talking and they accidentally say the same thing at the same time, then the first to say “jinx!” scores a point over the other person. The jinx-shouter has the right to demand a punishment of the other person, especially their silence. That person is not permitted to say anything until they are unjinxed.

The rituals for getting unjinxed – being permitted to speak again—are complicated and can vary even within a single school. They usually involve the recitation of a lot of nonsense words like “jinkle pink pickle jinx, I love you.”

This exposes the jinxed to further embarrassment because “I love you” must be said to another child—usually someone agreed to be loathsome. To get unjinxed, you have to suffer a little.

In parts of the United States, they say “Jinx! You owe me a coke!” when two people speak as one. Coke is a short name for the Coca-Cola brand soda, though in parts of the American south it means any brand of soda pop or fizzy drink. The penalty here is, of course, having to buy the other person a soda.

Another thing that can be done when two children accidentally say the same thing at once, especially between close friends, is pinky-swearing. They each hook the little finger of one hand to the other person’s pinky, they recite some rhyme known to them both, and they perform other gestures, such as clapping or complicated handshakes.

The rituals surrounding jinx are a form of childhood superstition. It is, for some reason, bad luck to say something at the same time as someone else. So the charms and chants are a way of deflecting that bad luck.

Another superstitious practice is bread and butter.

If you’re walking down the street with a friend and you encounter an obstruction—a telephone pole, a mailbox, an open manhole—and each of you walks around a different side of the obstruction, then one of you says “bread and butter” and other says “come to supper.”

In another version, the first person says “peanut butter” and the second says “jelly.” There are many more versions, each with the idea that the vague threat of bad luck is avoided by saying something.

This isn’t so much a superstition as it is a ritual or road game: padiddle, variously called bediddle, padoodle, padungle, perdiddle and perdiddo. In this game, when you’re riding in a car and you see another car with only one working headlight, you shout “perdiddle!” If you shout it first, you get the right to punch another passenger on the arm. Not very sporting, really, but those are the games of children (and some adults).

An older version of padiddle was a kissing game. If a couple (meaning a man and a woman who are romantically involved) are out for spin (for a drive in the car) and the man is the first to spy a car with one working headlight, then he shouts “padiddle!” which gives him the right to kiss his gal. If the woman spies the car first, then she shouts it out and gets to slap her guy. Seems like an even trade.

There’s also a variation of the padiddle that involves the tail-lights of a car, rather than the headlights, and it has many variations, too: padunkle, padonkle, perdunkle, pasquaddle, paduchi, Popeye and dinklepink.

The many rules for jinx and the many variant names for padiddle are a good indication that these customs are passed by word of mouth or by observation and not through education or from reading books.

Strange things can happen to words that are passed mainly in spoken form. For example, the variants “perdiddle” and “perdiddo” result from what is called R intrusion, in which a speaker adds an R sound even though there is no letter R in the word. Thus, padiddle becomes perdiddle.

R-intrusion is common in some dialects of American English. You can, for example, often hear it in the word “wash” which is made to sound like warsh. Washington, too, sometimes sounds like Warshington.

Given that these intrusive Rs are consistent and follow set patterns, we know that they are a feature of dialect—kind of a minority sub-language—and not simply a lot of people making the same mistake.

My latest column in the Malaysia Star is about words we say wrong on purpose. Update: There’s a lively conversation on this topic now underway at Jason Kottke’s blog.

...

There are, technically speaking, two Internets. One—Internet2—is used privately by universities, scientists, corporations, and the US government agencies.

The other, which we might call the plain vanilla Internet (meaning the most basic kind), is the one nearly everyone else in the world uses. It’s what most of us mean when we say “the Internet.”

However, a lot of people are now calling the regular Internet the Internets, plural, with an ‘s’ at the end. It takes only a little research to see that they are mimicking President George W. Bush who is on record as misspeaking this way. He said “Internets” instead of “Internet” in 2000 and again in 2004.

As a result, “Internets” is now a heavily entrenched word, a plural used where a singular is usual.

But why do some people say it that way?

For one thing, it pokes fun at the president, who is known for his disfluency (his inability to speak well).

It’s also meant to be slightly ironic and a bit self-deprecating. You can make fun of yourself by saying it that way.

People incorrectly say words on purpose all the time. My wife says aminal instead of “animal” and maters instead of “tomatoes.”

I sometimes say “muscles” so that the ‘c’ has a ‘k’ sound (the same way the cartoon character Popeye says it), computor instead of “computer” (after Ned Beatty’s exaggerated pronunciation of “Mr Luthor” in the Superman movies), and I occasionally say benimber instead of “remember” because it was something my cousin Paul said more than 20 years ago.

My wife and I both sometimes say chimbly instead of “chimney,” fambly instead of “family,” and liberry instead of “library.” Like maters, these are common enough pronunciations that many Americans wouldn’t notice we were saying them any differently from anyone else.

It’s not that my wife and I, or anyone who says Internets, are maroons (a humorous way of intentionally misrendering “moron”).

My wife is a linguist, after all, and I am a lexicographer (that is, a dictionary compiler and editor), and we both know how to speak in very correct formal English or even just up-to-snuff (meaning acceptable and passable) day-to-day English. We both know how to pronounce “library”; it just amuses us, sometimes, to say it another way.

People speak that way because saying a word wrong on purpose is a form of wordplay. It adds variety, colour, and whimsy to our speech. It’s a common characteristic of slang, which is partly built upon fooling around.

Perzackly and prezactly, for example, are wildly ridiculous pronunciations of the adverb “exactly.” The Oxford English Dictionary rightly marks them as being largely American and further indicates that they are representations of rural or southern speech.

That’s dictionary-writer’s talk, which means people spell the word to imitate the stereotypes of uneducated or unsophisticated folks. They’re trying to be funny or to make fun of someone, but you’ll find that they’re often purposely making fun of themselves, too.

A more common intentional misspeaking is beeswax which is used in the expression “mind your own beeswax!” which means “mind your own business!” It’s what you say when someone is trying to find out your secrets.

In this case, “beeswax,” which is a real word meaning the stuff with which bees make their honeycombs, is a malapropism. A malapropism is when you substitute a word with a similar-sounding one, although it’s usually accidental.

Many Americans also say coinkydink instead of coincidence. It’s sometimes spelled kwinkydink or kawinkydink and is almost always used in a light-hearted or goofy way. It refers to when two or more things happen in the same way, at the same time, at the same place, or to the same people in a way that is surprising. Although you know they’re not related, they seem to be. Coinkydinks are interesting but unimportant.

There are still more: one fell swoop, an idiom that means “an action that happens fast and all at once,” is often rendered as in one swell foop. That’s a spoonerism, where the first sounds of several words are swapped around to create a nonsensical expression.

Mercy buckets is a rendering of the French merci beaucoup, meaning “thank you very much.” People who say this usually know perfectly well that the French is not pronounced that way. They’re just practising a fake and exaggerated ignorance.

Ossifer is a created by metathesis from “officer,” meaning a police officer. Metathesis is when letters inside a word are swapped around, in this case in the way that a drunk person might do.

This word often accompanies long joke sayings in which many of the words are jumbled, such as, “Ossifer, I swear to drunk I’m not God”—the kind of thing you might say to a cop if you were likkered up (inebriated) and couldn’t speak normally.

Anyhoo (anyhow), there are many more of these, but I’ll save them for another time.

This is my latest column from the Malaysia Star.

...

The current political turmoil in Pakistan has turned up a curious bit of slang: Busharraf. It blends the names of Presidents Pervez Musharraf and George W. Bush. It shows that Musharraf is seen by his opponents to be a puppet for American political interests.

Nicknames like that are powerful. They describe who we have become, while given names reflect, perhaps, only what our parents wished us to be.

The current fad is blended nicknames, which mix two words together to make one. They work well because they are easy to understand. If you know the words they are made from, then you have a good chance at guessing their meanings.

For example, former US President Bill Clinton and his wife Senator Hillary Clinton, who is now campaigning for the presidency, are sometimes known as Billary or Hillbill.

Billary is a blend of their first names, Bill and Hillary. Hillbill is a blend of the same two names in a different order and with an added twist: add a y and it becomes hillbilly, which is a word used to describe backward and uncouth people from the Clintons’ home state of Arkansas.

Both Clinton nicknames reflect another fad of mixing the names of two people who are a power couple, especially two people who are rich, famous, and able to make things happen. The classic example (now several years and several relationships out of date) is Bennifer, which was used to describe the relationship of actor Ben Affleck and singer Jennifer Lopez.

Hillary Clinton, who is sometimes called unfeminine and overly businesslike, is occasionally called Chillary – a blend of chill and Hillary – by those who think she does not have a warm personality. Of course, if she were anything else, her critics would probably complain she was touchy-feely, which would be a criticism that she was soft and unable to withstand the rigours of the presidency.

Many cities and places take nicknames. My favourite is Sacratomato, which blends the name of the capital of California, Sacramento, with tomato, a plant which is grown near there in abundance.

Also in that state, sometimes known as Califunny (“funny” meaning weird or odd) and the land of fruit and nuts (fruit and nut being names for people who are weird or odd) is Eastlos or Easlos, a shortened form of East Los Angeles, long used by Spanish-speakers.

The movie business of Hollywood, California, has generated a slew of nicknames for other places. Bollywood everyone knows (the film industry of India, right?), but what about Nollywood, Wellywood, and Kollywood, referring to the film industries of Nigeria; Wellington, New Zealand; and Tamil-speakers?

One state away is Las Vegas (which in Spanish means “the fertile fields”), Nevada, that glitzy mecca of gambling and entertainment, known as Lost Wages for the many paycheques that have disappeared into its slot machines and roulette tables.

The city is also used to form other nicknames: Nash Vegas, for example, refers to Nashville, Tennessee, and Spoke Vegas refers to Spokane, Washington. The first because it has a lot of neon and cheesy (cheap and inauthentic) entertainment, like Las Vegas does; the latter for having casinos, also like Las Vegas does.

The -wood in Hollywood and the Vegas in Las Vegas are known as combining forms, meaning they can be used to make other words but don’t really have any meaning on their own.

Other nicknames use affixes: prefixes and suffixes, which go on the beginnings and ends of words.

London is sometimes called Londongrad by the new generation of rich Russians who have moved there. It uses the Russian -grad suffix, which means “town” in city names like Petrograd and Leningrad, two old names for St Petersburg.

Just outside of London, Heathrow Airport has long been called Thiefrow because of thefts of belongings from suitcases.

Dearborn, Michigan, where many Muslims and Middle Easterners have settled, is derogatorily called Dearbornistan. This uses the -stan suffix which means “place” or “land” and is found in place names like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In fact, all the countries ending in that suffix, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, are together nicknamed as the Stans.

Another nickname that uses that suffix is Trashcanistan, an unkind word which can refer to any poor Middle Eastern country or Central Asian republic.

But back to the blends. Nairobi, Kenya, is sometimes called Nairobbery, in reference to its high crime rate, while Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is called Killadelphia in reference to its murder rate.

That’s all from the Big Apple, Gotham, the Place So Nice They Named it Twice, New York, New York.