Linguistics...constantly evolving

"The Word For…"

by

Ian Crouch

October 24th, 2013

The New Yorker

There ought to be a word for “the limbo-like precincts of an airport baggage claim, where groggy travellers gather around the motionless treads of empty conveyor belts.” It is a singularly desolate scene, and there should be a succinct way for a forlorn luggage-seeker to text a quick apology to the friend who is idly circling the airport roads. Now, there is: “baggatory.”

That clever turn is just one of a couple hundred neologisms coined by Liesl Schillinger in her new book, “Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century.” Other gems include “social crawler” (a party-goer who accidently mingles with losers); “Facebook-happy” (a miserable person who fakes bliss in carefully managed Facebook posts); “polterguy” (an ex-boyfriend who haunts future relationships); “factose intolerant” (a person who claims a false allergy or irrational antipathy to certain foods); and “rotter” (the bottom drawer in the refrigerator where produce goes to putrefy). Most of the words and phrases in the collection are accompanied, in a bit of whimsy, by an illustration of birds acting out the scenes described: the “social crawler” is a peacock mixing with pigeons.

The word “neologism” dates to the seventeen-seventies, taken from Greek via French, meaning “new speech.” But the practice of coining new words goes back to the beginning of language itself. It accelerated as culture accelerated, and by the nineteenth century conservative types were worried that industry and science were flooding the linguistic marketplace with all kinds of shoddy fad words, and that the language had to be protected from interlopers. Others embraced the dynamism. In a letter to John Adams, in 1820, Thomas Jefferson, a man of business and science as well as politics, wrote, “I am a friend to neology. It is the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony.”

Of-the-moment words still have their skeptics: every time a major dictionary announces that they’ve added a trendy word, like “twerking,” a chorus of worried head-shakers turns up online to complain that the whole country is going to pot. This is nothing new, but the occasional vehemence of the response may be due to the sense that novel words are coming at us faster than ever. Schillinger, in her introduction, writes that “over the last two decades new technologies, new means of communication, and sweeping social changes have crashed down on society like an avalanche.” Stodgy lexicographers, she writes, just need to keep up.

The Internet, for better and worse, has produced a pile of jargon that’s now been absorbed into the wider language. And its various associated social tools function as a vast and productive word farm—combining the longstanding instinct to match language to the modern condition with the very recent ability to share one’s experiments with a wide audience. The Internet Age has produced more writers per capita than ever before. Has it made us better writers or worse? Smarter or more distracted, callow, and stupid? Clive Thompson, in his new book on the ways that technology has improved cognition, writes that one of the unexpected developments of innovation is that “status-update tools like Twitter have produced a renaissance in witty, aphoristic, haikuesque expression.” With all the bad (“wut r u doooooing?”) comes plenty of good—an explosion of short and smart bits of humor, insight, and commentary. The lines between amateur and professional have eroded; it is as if the world is writing together to try to sort out the large and small questions of the day. Twitter, especially, is an ideal incubator for neologisms. Space is limited, so running words together becomes a stylistic necessity—function drives form, and portmanteaus reign.

One of Schillinger’s better creations is “fratois,” meaning “a hearty slang or patois used by bonhomous men that makes them sound like back-slapping fraternity brothers.” This is a mocking term, evoking locker-room towel snapping or George W. Bush’s Oval Office. It also brings to mind another strain of neologism currently enjoying popularity, what Katherine Connor Martin, of the Oxford University Press, identifies as the “portmanbro.” She cites such examples as “bromance,” which is now in general use, and other terms like “brahphet” (“the guy who thinks he knows everything”) and “brobituary” (“a short description of an ex bro who went off and got married”). Most of these terms make fun of the male subspecies known as bros, but Martin cheekily warns of the dangers of metonymy: What if, by “being the sort of person who says ‘bro,’ a person becomes a bro”? This might go further: Are the people who trade in contemporary neologisms astute critics of the moment, or are they somehow defiled by their use of this moment’s language?

If neologisms seem suddenly ubiquitous, perhaps this proliferation is the result of our current pace of life. If we are expected to multitask, then shouldn’t our language have to, too? Searching for innovation, we might seek out something that predates the Internet by a few years: the German language. German has a fine architecture, in which appositive phrases are joined into compounds, leading to long and goofy-sounding words that express often complicated factual and emotional information. One popular Web convention of late is the phrase “There should be a German word for ….” Take a situation that I often face: the struggle after receiving an e-mail to find a response time that is long enough that you don’t appear creepy or desperate but short enough that you don’t forget to respond altogether. To such linguistic questions come answers, in Ben Schott’s hugely inventive new book, “Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition.” There are a hundred and twenty new and evocative words; here are four:

    Leertretung
    Stepping down heavily on a stair that isn’t there.
    Void-Stepping

    Tageslichtspielschock
    Being startled when exiting a movie theater into broad daylight.
    Day-Light-Show-Shock

    Rollsschleppe
    The exhausting trudge up a stationary escalator.
    Escalator-Schlep

    Gaststättenneueröffnungsuntergangsgewissheit
    Total confidence that a newly opened restaurant is doomed to fail.
    Inn-New-Opening-Downfall-Certitude

That last one may be the longest in the book (thankfully, there are pronunciation guides). Each word has an accompanying anecdote, fact from history, or literary citation provided on the facing page. They are cross-referenced and indexed. Several of Schott’s creations answer needs generated by the hyper-connected present, but it is, in its tone and organization, pleasantly pre-Web—a self-enclosed thing that rewards another, older kind of multitasking: reading, laughing, and learning. 

Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century

by

Liesl Schillinger

ISBN-10: 1476713480
ISBN-13: 978-1476713489

Deceased?--Diagramming Sentences

Remember high school and those English classes when time was spent diagramming sentences? I'm not sure if such an exercise was successful and I am not even sure such exercises are being done anymore, but they could certainly be interesting.

A sentence from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter...

"In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf--but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass--here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick."

For more information see Eugene R. Moutoux's web site.

Foenetic Speler...Edward Rondthaler

Edward Rondthaler
June 9th, 1905 to August 19th, 2009

If this were universally adopted what a revolution in linguistics--might make Wittgenstein smile.

"Edward Rondthaler, Foenetic Speler, Dies at 104"

by

Margalit Fox

August 30th, 2009

The New York Times

Edward Rondthaler was one of the 20th century’s foremost men of letters — actual, physical, audible letters. As an outspoken advocate of spelling reform, he spent decades trying to impose order on his 26 lawless charges. As a noted typographer who first plied his trade 99 years ago, he helped bring the art of typesetting from the age of hot metal into the modern era.

From the early 1960s on, Mr. Rondthaler was known publicly for his energetic campaign to respell English, a cause that over the centuries has been the quixotic mission of an impassioned few. To spell the language as it sounds, he argued, would vanquish orthographic hobgoblins, promote literacy and make accessible to foreign readers English classics like Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” — or, more properly, “Oed to a Nietingael” — whose opening lines appear on this page.

Long before that, Mr. Rondthaler had already established a national reputation by helping usher in the age of photographic typesetting. Phototypesetting was for decades a vital bridge between the hot-metal days of old and the digital typography of today.

A man of strong constitution and ardent enthusiasms, Mr. Rondthaler died on Aug. 19. He was 104 and attributed his longevity to having taken cold showers daily since 1918.

His death, at his home in Cedar City, Utah, was confirmed by his son, Tim. Mr. Rondthaler previously lived for many years in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Mr. Rondthaler first became known more than 70 years ago for his seminal work in photographic typesetting. In the mid-1930s, he and a colleague, Harold Horman, perfected a phototypesetting device that helped streamline the traditional art of setting type. Known as the Rutherford photo-lettering machine, it was one of the first such devices in wide commercial use.

Armed with their new machine, the two men founded Photo-Lettering Inc., a highly respected New York typographic house whose clients included many of the country’s best-known magazines and advertising agencies.

But over time, Mr. Rondthaler came to feel his beloved letters were traducing him with their unruly behavior on the printed page. So he took up the standard for spelling reform. For decades afterward, he championed SoundSpel, a simplified English spelling system he had refined from an earlier model.

“Foenetic speling wil maek reeding and rieting neerly automatic for evrybody,” Mr. Rondthaler wrote in SoundSpel, in a passage quoted by The New York Times in a 1977 profile.

Mr. Rondthaler was a past president and the chairman emeritus of the American Literacy Council, an organization dedicated to, among other things, simplifying English spelling. With Edward J. Lias, he edited the reference book “Dictionary of American Spelling: A Simplified Alternative Spelling for the English Language” (American Language Academy, 1986).

Edward Rondthaler III was born on June 9, 1905, in Bethlehem, Pa. His father was a bishop of the Moravian Church, as was his paternal grandfather. Edward III was reared in Winston-Salem, N.C., where his father was president of Salem College.

At 5, Edward received a toy printing press as a gift and began publishing his own newspaper. (It was a very small newspaper, about the size of a postcard, his son said.) Only a few years later, he and a friend opened a print shop in a nearby basement, doing jobs for paying customers; they ran the business through high school and for a year afterward, to earn college money.

After studying at Westminster Choir College — besides singing, he played the flute, oboe and bassoon — Mr. Rondthaler earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1929. He wrote his senior thesis on the effects of different typefaces on the reader’s perception of a text.

Mr. Rondthaler then moved to New York, where he was an art director for a commercial typesetter. In 1936, he and Mr. Horman founded Photo-Lettering, which specialized in headline and display type. The company was built around their new phototypesetting machine, which helped modernize a technology that had changed little in hundreds of years.

For centuries, type was cast in molten lead and set painstakingly by hand. In the mid-20th century, the advent of phototypesetting freed the alphabet from its leaden shackles, making it possible to manipulate letters as pure photographic images. The process let type be shrunk, enlarged, stretched and squeezed without casting a single drop of metal.

Mr. Rondthaler also helped found the International Typeface Corporation, which designed and licensed many commercial fonts, and the Type Directors Club.

Unleashed on the page, however, Mr. Rondthaler’s letters grew devious. “O,” a small sweet orb in the typographer’s hand, became a shape-shifting fiend, pronounced “owe” (as in so), “ah” (as in on) and “ih” (as in women). And so on.

Such anarchy, Mr. Rondthaler came to believe, helped cause illiteracy and with it, a web of social ills. Among them, as he wrote in the 1977 profile in The Times, were “jooveniel delinquensy, criem-in-th-streets, hard cor unemploiment and poverty.”

In promoting SoundSpel, Mr. Rondthaler cast his lot with some eminent spelling-reform advocates of the past. One was George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), who established a bequest for the design of a new English alphabet. Another was President Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1906 decreed that 300 English words be officially respelled. (After a vitriolic, highly literate national debate that raged in the newspapers for months, the House of Representatives rejected the plan.)

If Mr. Rondthaler’s campaign, like most efforts to reform English spelling, did not bear much fruit, he had a great deal else to occupy his time. He wrote several books, among them “Alphabet Thesaurus: A Treasury of Letter Designs” (Reinhold, 1960) and a memoir, “Life With Letters — As They Turned Photogenic” (Hastings House, 1981).

He was a prolific writer of letters to the editor, of this newspaper and others, on a variety of subjects. He wrote a song honoring the 100th anniversary of the Croton Dam. He invented things, including a slide rule that calculated currency-exchange rates and another slide rule that computed cooking times of foods based on weight.

After he turned 100, Mr. Rondthaler embarked on a new career in television commercials, appearing in campaigns for Pearle Vision and Genworth Financial.

Besides his son Tim, Mr. Rondthaler is survived by six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. Two other sons, Edward IV and David Lee, died before him; his wife of 72 years, the former Dorothy Reid, died in 2002.

In 1920, at 15, young Mr. Rondthaler bought a 2-cent card and addressed it to a classmate. Inside, he wrote, “The bluebirds are flying from my heart to you.” His message was written in standard orthography.

Reader, she married him.

Blue Moon

In all these years I cannot recall seeing a "blue moon". Of course the moon is not really blue, but it can adorn the appearance of blueness [and other colors]--all based on the particulate matter dispersed in the atmosphere such as volcanic eruptions or forest fires. Well, linguistics and science are at play here and from a linguistic perspective it is rare and thus the coined term "a blue moon"--generically, something [an event] happening rarely. But, it still could be a physical phenomena of a moon appearing "blue" in color.

Blue Moon

Blue Moon


Cool moon map...