The Origins of Some Technology Terms

• Google. The word in this exact form was originated by Google, the company that makes the search engine Google; but I presume that the name is an alteration of the word googol, which is used for the very large number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The origin of the word googol is, according to the story, that it was uttered by Edward Sirotta, the nephew of the mathematician Edward Kasner.
• Yahoo. In Johnathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver's fourth voyage takes him to a land where there is a "race of filthy, loathsome brutes" [Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia], called the Yahoos, who resemble human beings. The intelligent and admirable race in that land are the Houyhnhnms, who resemble horses. The Houyhnhnms have tamed the Yahoos, who Swift intended to represent his rather cynical view of the human race.
• Bluetooth. This was an epithet of several Scandinavian or Viking kings or chieftains, and especially Harald Bluetooth, who was a 10th-century king of Norway and Denmark. Some of the high-ranking Vikings did indeed have blue teeth, due to the painful custom of putting colored inserts into the teeth, for decoration, to look formidable, and to show bravery in the face of this painful procedure. According to Wikipedia, "the Bluetooth logo consists of the Nordic runes for his initials. . . ."

Copyright © 2014.

Pare a Pair of Pears

I noticed a linguistic curiosity today. No, it doesn't have to do with pears or paring them; it has to do with pairs.

We speak of a pair of gloves, a pair of socks, a pair of shoes, even a pair of dice; and those are all clearly sets, or pairs, of two things.

But we also speak of a pair of pants, a pair of scissors, a pair of glasses—eyeglasses, that is. In these cases it's much less clear that we're dealing with two things. I do have a pair of kitchen scissors that separates into two parts--sometimes too readily—presumably for ease of cleaning. But these pairs are normally not two separable things. So why do we treat them, linguistically, as two? Maybe it is because they are sort of bifurcated. You could say that about a pair of pants, pretty clearly. And maybe scissors. But it might be stretching things a little bit to apply this theory of mine to glasses.

Well, people who study language (and I include myself here) come to recognize that you often can't apply "logic" to language. Any language is its own system, and it has very little regard for any external system such as what we call "logic."

Copyright © 2013

Funny Things We Do with (English) Words

There has been a tendency in English to drop the noun from a phrase consisting of a noun-plus adjective, and then the adjective becomes a noun.

Some examples: a transistor radio came to be called a transistor. (We don't hear that term anymore because any radio is going to be transistorized, or solid-state; plus, not many people carry radios in this age of the iPod.)

A microwave oven is now universally called a microwave, and we don't even think anything about it—although a microwave ought to be a kind of wave and not a kind of oven.

A pickup truck is a pickup. Laminate flooring becomes laminate—particularly if you're a flooring dealer. I've even heard Venetian blinds called venetians and I think I've seen real-estate listings in which the kitchens are described as having stainless steel and granite.

On the other hand, there's what seems to me a directly opposite trend, to add a word which is in some sense redundant. Examples: pita bread (pita is a kind of bread so you could just say pita); similarly challah bread. Garbanzo beans; bouillabaise stew; London broil steak. I have even heard salsa sauce, but that could only come from someone unaware that salsa is Spanish for 'sauce'. I have even seen, on a restaurant menu, "with au jus gravy"—never mind that au jus is French for 'with juice' (or gravy). So both with and gravy are redundant.

Not just foods: you hear panda bear and koala bear. Now, there's been argument among zoologists as to whether pandas really are or are not bears, but koalas are definitely not bears.

Here in Chicago, you often hear the word Chicagoland. Supposedly this word was coined to designate the Chicago area--the city and its suburbs. Yet I hear "the Chicagoland area," "Chicagoland and suburbs," and even "the greater Chicagoland area"!

I recently heard the US Attorney for Northern Illinois talk about a "sting" operation used to entrap suspected corrupt politicians, and he talked about "an undercover." Well, it's a strength of English that words can change their part of speech and thus an adjective becomes a noun.

Updates, May 26, 2012, June 22, 2012, June 29, 2012, July 29, 2012. More examples added.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Linguistic Stupidity

I just read, in an online article about the space shuttle Atlantis docking with the International Space Station for its final time:

Every landmark, or rather spacemark, of this final two-week shuttle mission is being savored.

In saying "spacemark," probably the writer of that was just being cute. We don't normally open up and look inside a compound word like landmark and don't even think about the meanings of its component elements, like land and mark in this case.

In fact, to do so is incorrect and fallacious. Landmark is one "lexical unit" (as one linguist called it) or one meme (in more modern terminology), and is not (or is no longer) the sum of its parts. (In fact, spelling reflects this: once a compound word becomes a single unit rather than the sum of its parts, then it comes to be spelled "solid"--that is, with no internal space.)

But I've seen this same mistaken and misguided practice of "looking inside" (as I put it) a compound word and saying, "Hey, we can't call it this. . . ."

My examples (collected over some years):

• We used to have a term butterfat, which meant the fat component in milk. Then the federal government (probably the FDA, I'd guess) said to its collective self, "Hey, it's not just found in butter, and it ultimately comes from milk, so we're going to decree that it should be called milkfat."
• The City of Chicago (or its parks, to be more exact) had a structure we all knew as a bandshell. Fine old word. Then someone said, "Hey, we have orchestral concerts there, not bands, so we can't call it a bandshell." Thus they started calling it by the nonexistent word "music shell." I am sure anybody encountering that word says to him/her self, "Oh, they mean bandshell," and quite possibly they figure out why the new word was felt to be necessary.
• The most recent—again with dubious thanks to a governmental agency in the Chicago area—is "rush period." That, to mere mortals, is rush hour, but presumably they said to their wise and collective selves, "Well, it lasts longer than an hour these days, so we can't call it rush hour anymore."

As I said, these changes are totally wrong-headed. You just don't "open up" these words and look inside--except that we might do so in humor, to make a joke. (People will realize that they don't usually look inside and consider the meaning of the phrase's constituents.)  They are understood as single units. Get your stupid, meddling, bureaucratic hands off the language.

Updates:
Another example of the what I call, above, misguided tampering with the language: My bank's web site uses a "passcode." Once I stopped to think about that term, I realized, it's a password but they didn't want to call it that because it doesn't have to be a word--so, a perfect example, just like the three above.

On the other hand--examples of how lexical units should work: Perhaps strangely, considering how the powers-that-be in Chicago have usually handled these things, Chicago's "Grant Park Concerts" are no longer held in Grant Park and yet they're still called the Grant Park Concerts.

And, today I heard on TV mention, in the narrative script, of "cutting-edge surgical techniques." Shows that the writer of that comment had no thought at all of the original or literal meaning of "cutting edge," and only used it in its "lexical unit" meaning of 'very new' or 'up-to-date'." Otherwise it might be redundant!

An example of this I've recently thought about: No one thinks it odd to talk about "old New York." I think that shows that we are definitely not thinking about the constituent elements of "New York," so we don't see any contradiction between old and new.

I was working for a publishing company where a guy who was in a supervisory capacity very often used the expression "to be on the same page." He never thought about the literal meaning of the individual words as opposed to the meaning of the lexical unit, and clearly was not thinking of any physical page of any of the books we were working on; he was treating it as a lexical unit, which is correct.

 


Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

A Little (English) Linguistic Oddity

Why is it that the smallest unit of pants (or jeans, shorts, etc.) is called a "pair"? Maybe, you might say, it's because a pair of pants has two legs. It might be like "a pair of scissors" and "a pair of pliers"; they both have two leg-like parts.

But, we speak of a pair of men's briefs—which has no legs at all.

Having come from people who were involved in the garment trade, I think I recall that in that business they might speak of "a pant."

Otherwise, it's just one of many, many little anomalies of English; and I'm pretty sure other languages have theirs, too.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Some New Words Needed in English

The English language certainly has lots of words. No one knows exactly how many—there are reasons you can't really count, such as uncertainty over what is to be counted as a word. But one estimate is one million words.

Still, new words enter the language continually. New words are coined, supposedly in response to a felt need--although often a perfectly good word for the meaning already exists.

So, in response to some gaps in our vocabulary that I have noticed, I want to suggest some new words.

First, healthierize, meaning to make more healthy. Example: I healthierized this recipe by cutting the fat and salt.

Second, operate (in a new sense, namely to make an opera out of). Example: Mozart operated Beaumarchais' play The Marriage of Figaro.

Third: middle classify and middle classification. Example: Egg McMuffin is a middle classification of Eggs Benedict.

Fourth: cattlectomy, meaning to stop eating beef. Example: Since I underwent my cattlectomy, I have not been in McDonald's at all.

Fifth: Did you know that there is no word for a person who plays the horn (such as the French horn in a symphony orchestra)? A person who plays the violin is a violinist. Someone who plays the piano is a pianist. But there is no word hornist. I propose--again simply creating a new sense for an existing word, as I did with operate—that someone who plays the horn be called a horny.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

The French Have a Word for It

Have you ever had the experience of thinking, "I should have said such-and-such," or "I wish I had thought of saying such-and-such"? Of course you have; it's a very common experience.

Well, the French have a word for it, l'esprit de l'escalier, which literally means 'the spirit of the staircase'. The idea, presumably, is that you've just left someone's apartment and you've started down the stairs, and you think of what you should have said.

Well, today I thought of something I should have said--a couple of years ago! I know it sounds odd to be thinking of a situation that long ago. If I explained the association, or what triggered the memory, it might make more sense (trust me on this).

What I thought of as what I should have said would have been the perfect putdown to a person who was being obnoxious. It not only would have shut him up, I would have gotten a laugh, I'm sure, from the rest of the people at the table.

It's enough to make you wish you could travel back in time, so that you could have another chance to say what you should have said!

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Stein

The British Are Invading--Again!

It's generally recognized that British English and American English have significant differences--mainly in pronunciation and vocabulary. Winston Churchill famously called the U.S. and Britain "two countries separated by a common language."

Of course we live in an age of instantaneous global communication. The British have been viewing our movies for decades, and an enormous volume of such exchange should serve to "level" (in the jargon of linguists) the differences. And I think that the British now are acquainted with many terms which had been Americanisms.

However, the influence can work both ways. Americans have come to use a few terms that had been mainly British in their use.

First, fridge for refrigerator. This is now so common in America that we hear it and don't give it a thought but (trust me, I can remember!) there was a time when this was used only in Britain.

Another is to go missing. News broadcasts in America seem to be full of stories about a person or a pet who has "gone missing." Now, here's the interesting part: What did we say before we used that expression? I don't remember. It's funny how that works, once a term becomes well-established, we don't even remember how we got along without it.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Stein

Some Linguistic Musings

First, a couple of words of which the original meanings have been forgotten through maybe several "rounds" of meaning change:

First, jock originally meant 'penis'. Then jock became short for jockstrap, and then it came to mean an athlete through a natural association with jockstrap.

Joystick also originally meant 'penis'. The next meaning was for the control stick of an airplane, and then it came to be used for the similar controllers for video games and so forth.

Scumbag originally meant 'condom'. You can get the "bag" part of it, so guess what the scum part denoted.

Now, maybe what is another subject and not related at all.

Some diseases that people used to talk about (and which presumably doctors used to diagnose) are not heard of at all. The words have totally fallen into disuse.

Chilblains. Defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Ed. as "an inflammatory swelling or sore caused by exposure (as of the feet or hands) to cold."

Ague. Defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Ed. as "a fever (as malaria) marked by paroxysms of chills, fever, and sweating that recur at regular intervals."

La grippe or the grippe. Defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Ed. as "an acute febrile contagious virus disease; esp. influenza."

Now, these are all things that you would expect people would still get. People do in fact get malaria, although it is not common in the U.S. any longer; but it is in fact common in certain warmer parts of the world. Maybe there people still talk about having an ague.

As to the other two words, again you'd think you would still hear the words because people must still get those conditions; but you don't in fact hear the words--ever. I think it's a case of, if you have the word for it, you can get it. Without the word in current use, you won't get it. Sort of a mind-body issue.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Stein