Fonts are wonderfully creative and impactful, but many people haven’t bothered to notice. American English also uses or misuses the word bi-weekly and bi-monthly. Fortnightly can fix this problem.
I used to pay attention to sports. Prior to
living in Connecticut I loved baseball. Our street was quiet enough
that in the evenings we could play stick ball right out in the front
yard and on the street without too many interruptions from cars.
Just like the pros hitting a home run meant hitting it over the
fence. Of course in our case it was the fence of our neighbors
across the street. Stick ball was much more interesting that
baseball because there were some considerable technique changes when
your bat is uneven. This made the game much more fun.
My lawn mowing money in those days went to
baseball cards and even the kids’ club of the local team, the Los
Angeles Dodgers. Joining that club meant I’d get regular mail once
a month in the mailbox while the season was going just like an adult.
Getting something in the mail always feels good. Dodgers games
would come on the TV and dutifully plan our day to make sure we could
sit and watch. When they’d call a player to bat I’d look through
my humble stack of baseball cards to see what a player’s stats
were. I didn’t really understand how they were calculated, but I
knew some numbers were better than others.
Then there was a strike and the sport I love
wasn’t as important. If the pros didn’t see why they loved the
game, why should I? In addition we moved and were trapped between
Yankee and Red Sox territory. Scared that my nonexistent popularity
would decrease further if I picked the wrong camp to join, I didn’t
join any camp. To this day I don’t know sports players as well as
most of the people I’ve worked with. I don’t have a favorite
pitcher in base ball, quarter back in football, winger in hockey,
forward in soccer, or bowler in cricket. But I do have a favorite
lexicographer.
Yes, I have a favorite lexicographer.
In short a Lexicographer is someone who puts
the words in the dictionary.
One might think that before selecting my
favorite of anything I would come up with complex metrics like they
do in the sports area and develop stats for each potential candidate.
I did consider this as a method, but I didn’t know how to evaluate
the degree of difficutly in conjunction with numbers of words. For
example, a word like gongoozle only has one meaning. Adding that to
the dictionary is rather simple.
Gongoozle verb
1. to stare at the activity in a canal
Ah, but try being the lexicographer who
unluckily has to update the entry on the word keep which
already has approximately 60 entries in the dictionary. As a
lexicographer you’d have to verify each one of those existing
meanings to ensure they’re current and also look for any new uses
of the word. This significantly increases the level of difficulty,
and while I could have come up with complex formulas and put them in
a spreadsheet to narrow a pool of lexicographers down to only one it
just seemed like too much effort, besides I’m sure they’d prefer
not to be rushed in the process.
In order to become my favorite in this area one
doesn’t have to be on the road to the hall of fame among the
Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA). It’s not a contest,
it’s just what I get to choose. At the time of writing this
chapter my favorite lexicographer is Erin McKean. She’s a darling
lady who took the time to write a couple of books and record a few
TED talks on the subject of lexicography. She’s the one that
helped expose a fascinating field of interest that I was able to
bring into my life. She’s publicly stated that she wants to “help
make every word in the English language ‘lookupable’ – including
the 52% of unique English words that aren’t currently in any
dictionary.” Certainly a noble goal, because those obscure words
are simply delightful.
One of the most beautiful things about
selecting a favorite lexicographer over a favorite football player is
that there’s really no hall of fame or Heisman Trophy competition
with statistics for anyone to dispute your claim. You just pick a
favorite and that’s your favorite. As long as you can explain why,
you’re good to go. Although it’s still a bit of a shame that
there isn’t a Nobel Prize for lexicography. It might help more
people be aware of the vital part of our society these people play
and to appreciate them more.
One might imagine from my description of a
lexicographer above that these good people sit around all day
dreaming up words to force us to use. The reality is quite the
opposite. Language is much more federated and dynamic than it is
hierarchical. Most things are created when there’s a need. The
same is true with words. When there is a need a word is invented.
But a word invented for the use of one person doesn’t mean the word
gets added to the language. Others have to approve and adopt the
word as well. Lexicographers are the archaeologists searching out
the use of these words in context to communicate their meaning to a
broader audience.
You can imagine how with today’s technology
language is changing meaning faster than it ever has before. Let’s
take a look at a rather humble word, Priority. For the first 500
years of its existence it was a singular word.1
Think of it’s original meaning as first thing.
Then in the 1900’s it got pluralized. An s was added to
the end and now there were multiple first things.
We had multiple priorities. Once
you have multiple priorities there must be a verb to organize them.
Thus in 1972 during a televised presidential debate2
one of the candidate introduced the word prioritize to the audience.
Now we had a name for the
verb that means to organize a list based upon importance. Its
quick adoption by many who watched gave lexicographers plenty of
artifacts to enable them to understand its meaning and add it to the
dictionary.
How
interesting that for the first 500 years this word had only one entry
in the dictionary and no conjugation. This means that if you were to
use priority everyone understood its meaning. There
would be no discussion about the context of the word. In could
express a singular thought beautifully. Words with multiple
definitions can lead to some interesting discussions, especially in a
court of law were definitions of things matter significantly. There
was another time in the 1990s when a president responded to a
question one day with the reply “it depends on what the meaning of
the word is, is.3”
Interestingly
enough, there’s only one definition for is
in the dictionary, but there are 7 definitions for the verb to-be.
Governments, while well intentioned, aren’t
always run by the most ideal people. So, instead of functioning as
the society’s operating system they tend to operate with the
interests of the government in mind.
Government education generally carries with it
certain traits. One, the history books they purchased by the
governement tend to focus on the government’s history instead of
the history of the people. Two they see everything as geography
based. Three they introduce jobs that tend to have heavy ties to the
government. Ask a group of students in elementary school what they
want to be when they grow up and you’ll get a bunch of firemen,
police men, teachers, lawyers, astronauts, and doctors. Every one of
those industries is heavily involved or subsidized through the
government. I’m probably a little more sensitive to this issue
than most parents, but there is a part of what my kids were being
exposed to at school that seemed nothing more than a marketing
campaign for public sector jobs.
So, I decided to do something about it.
Right around the same time that I learned about
lexicography and Erin McKean was precisely the same time my second
son was getting asked what he wanted to be when when he grew up, at
school. So I trained him that if he ever gets asked that question he
should respond with ‘I want to be a Lexicographer.’ Then explain
that it’s the person who puts words in the dictionary. I then went
the next layer knowing that my son would probably get asked what his
favorite word was, I proceeded to teach him the word absquatulate.
The word means, to leave quickly. And so, to avoid making this any more political than necessary we should quickly leave this post.
Our imperfect brains like to categorize things with broad brush strokes. This is how we create stereotypes. While not always true our broad brush strokes and stereotypes are a good starting point for learning.
Yes, it’s ok to have stereotypes as long as we recognize that they are very basic categorizations that need refinement.
We can see these stereotypes not just about people, but about the things around us.
My 9 year-old was talking about bad words the other day. I didn’t have the the opportunity for me to help her refine her impression at the time, but it’s on the list of things to do. How she categorizes her language will impact her future. For now, I’ll address it with this audience.
Yes, dear reader. I’m practicing on you.
There are no such thing as bad words!
Now, if you’re of the sensitive ear set the way to discover this might not be completely palatable. Helen Zaltzman’s work with language through her podcast The Allusionist revealed that it’s not the words themselves that are offensive. It’s that language has an aggressive aspect in both its content and delivery.
You see it’s not the list of words that we see as bad or good that’s really at play. That would simply be a checklist. It’s the words that our society only sees as aggressive.
This would be an aggressive — reverent scale. Not an aggressive — passive scale. Passive refers to tense, not tone.
The words used to create aggressive or irreverent language changes over time. The folks who screen movies might have a checklist of what can/can’t be said for certain movie ratings, but in our everyday life where we don’t have that checklist it’s not that we should check our words. We need to check our tone.
Are we communicating with an aggressive tone that will reduce our ability to collaborate?
If so, maybe that’s what we need to change. It’s not the list of words we’re using, but the choice of language we’re using in comparison to our desired outcome.
Privacy in the bathroom is something our Western society often takes for granted. What’s also pretty interesting is we extend that physical privacy into our language by referring to the activities our bodies naturally go through while in the bathroom. Thankfully sites like Wiktionary have consolidated a list of terms used for urination and defecation.
I’ve adjusted the list to be numbered so in addition to reading you can see how many items are on the list.
Pull a few cones (Think Mr Whippy soft serve ice cream, and the cones)
Punching a growler
Punishing the porcelain
Punishing the toilet
Put food in the dog’s water
Releasing a depth charge
Releasing a Dungbomb
Releasing Meatloaf’s Daughter
Releasing the chocolate hostages
Releasing the hostages
Releasing the Kraken
Releasing the hounds
Reset unload two
Restocking the pond with brown trout
Ride a pony and trap
Riding the Centaur
Ring of fire
Sacrificing to the Toilet/Porcelain god
Saturday morning special
Scatter bombing
SE (Sit and Emit)
Sending a Fax
Shed some ballast
Shitting bricks (Houses or apartments as substitutes for higher quantity.)
Showering the room with roses
Shtounga
Slopping gruel in Oliver’s bowl
Spray-painting the porcelain
Squirt juice
Stalling a brown sedan
Streaming Nixie (naval expression referring to an anti-submarine device towed behind a ship by a long, thick, possibly brown cable)
Studying one’s Process Design notes (refers to Environmental Engineering Process Design, a course taught to civil and environmental engineering undergraduates and that deals with, among other topics, the design of wastewater treatment facilities)
There’s a great post over at the Telegram about this phrase and other slang terms from the flapper era. Wiktionary gives us this background:
Attested since 1922, of unclear origin.[1] There are several suggested origins, but it may simply have been in imitation of the numerous animal related nonsense phrases popular in the 1920s such as the cat’s pyjamas, cat’s whiskers, cat’s meow, gnat’s elbow, monkey’s eyebrows etc.[2] A popular folk etymology has the phrase referring to World Champion Charleston dancer Bee Jackson.[3] Another suggestion is that the phrase is a corruption of business[2][4] but this may be a back-formation. The singular bee’s knee is attested from the late 18th century meaning something small or insignificant in the phrase big as a bee’s knee. Also as weak as a bee’s knee is attested in Ireland (1870). It is possible that the bee’s knees is a deliberate inversion of this meaning, but is not attested.[4]
Today the phrase seem’s pretty common. I’ve heard t used on the 2003 film School of Rock with Jack Black.
How common is it in 2018 is somewhat difficult to track. Five Thirty Eight‘s online tracker doesn’t have it as an option. Google’s Ngram Viewer only tracks until 2000, but is still a wonderful graph.
Maybe the more important thing to be aware of isn’t how popular a phrase is (cat’s pajama’s was slightly more popular in 2000), but how cool you look when you use the phrase is probably more important. Unfortunately there’s no graph I can show some one for how cool they look when they use the phrase. If I could find a graph for that I’d be sure to share.
When it comes down to it, though I really don’t know anyone who doesn’t like the phrase. This is probably because it’s predominantly used as a compliment. We could use a few more compliments in our daily discourse. So, have a go at it! Why not toss out “the bee’s knees” today in a conversation?
