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Saturday, May 10, 2008 12:13 PM
golden eye - someone who can notice very slight differences in picture quality
A quick search brings up this cite from an article on Comcast's switch to 3-to-1 HD compression:
"The testers are our engineers who we call 'golden eyes,' who have a proven track record of picking up subtle differences in picture quality," he said.
The reference is probably to the animal kingdom or the monetary value of good eyesight, and not to Perrin from the interminable Wheel of Time series.
I like golden eye — it has a narrower sense than eagle eye and it pushes back against the conflation of enthusiasm and perceptual ability that you sometimes get with videophile. And this is pretty cool:
golden eye : sight :: super taster : taste.
Now I just wish we had a similar term for people who can hear all the beeps.
Internet famous is the best famous
Tuesday, April 29, 2008 7:28 AM
The business first became Internet famous a decade ago, but has proved remarkably durable, with sales climbing to around $4.5 million last year.
It's new to the NYT, but Internet famous has been around for a while now. Last year Time had an article on an "Internet Famous" course offered through the Parsons New School for Design.
Years ago I coined (or re-coined; it's so hard to tell) the phrase Internet true, but it didn't go anywhere. I blame truthiness.
Domeball fever: can you catch it?
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 3:48 PM
This seems to have at least two relevant senses. First and foremost: "baseball as played at the Metrodome." Example:
If you're a baseball purist and just can't endure domeball, parlorball, studioball, or whatever you want to call that strange game played indoors on a carpet, then head outdoors to Saint Paul's Midway Stadium. [cite]
(I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that this sense is applied to baseball games at other domed stadiums.)
The second sense is the one I intially encountered: "a fly ball that is hard to see because the ceiling and the baseball look too similar." This sense seems to be less common in print, but here's an example:
Inside-the-park homer, my ass. Anyone who knows a thing about the game knows it was a single and three base error. This was not a domeball like that over Milton Bradley's head Tuesday; it was a fielding error, plain and simple. [cite]
I also found a Star Tribune article with some interesting Twins factoids. I remember hearing before about the Baggie, our version of the Green Monster, but I hadn't realized that nowadays the Twins play on FieldTurf, not AstroTurf.
(Or Astroturf, as that Trib article would have it. Maybe some stubborn copy editor is still fighting the good fight against internal caps?)
I plan to watch a lot of baseball this season, so here's hoping that I run into some other interesting lingo. Double-Tongued Word Wrestler has already assembled a nice collection of somewhat obscure baseball terms.
I'd have figured "domeball" for the sport and "dome ball" for the hit/fielding opportunity.
Or is that too obscure a mechanism for readers to get?
Rob Dyrdek's etymological quandry
Sunday, February 17, 2008 3:45 PM
Rob: "I found out that a person who studies turtles is a herpetologist... so maybe we go talk to the herpy...."
[general laughter]
Rob: "Why would you call yourself that? What does a turtle have to do with itches on your wee-wee?"
The superficial resemblance between the two words is hard to miss, and — if you'll allow me to play Bradshaw of the Future for a moment — it turns out that herpetology and herpes really are related: they're both offshoots from the Greek herpein, "to creep."
The Online Etymology Dictionary can flesh it out for us:
herpetology
"study of reptiles," 1824, from Fr. herpétologie, coined from Gk. herpeton "reptile," lit. "creeping thing," from herpein "to creep" (see serpent) + logia "a speaking in a certain manner, study of."
herpes
1398, from L. herpes "a spreading skin eruption," from Gk. herpes, the name for the disease shingles, lit. "creeping," from herpein "to creep" (cognate with L. serpere "to creep").
I was a little surprised that I couldn't find any evidence of a rebranding attempt. At the aptly named Buy Zovirax website, a blogger explains my confusion:
I have felt burning for some days. A doctor has addressed me to the herpetologist.
That's right, both senses of herpe- can appear behind the same signifier. The descriptivist in me is inclined to accept this very low-frequency usage of the word herpetologist for someone who specializes herpetic diseases. The copy editor in me might balk, depending on the audience.
Most dictionaries give herpetic as the adjectival form of herpes, and it's in that sense that it has the broadest currency — but here too, we can get mildly unfortunate stuff like this line from the book Columbia National Parks:
The herpetic fauna in Selva de Florencia is one of the most abundant and varied in Columbia and the world.
(Note the the author's exemplary use of the singular fauna. News to me.)
Once again this sentence is perfectly understandable, even if the identical spellings are troubling on a conceptual level. And it turns out that this low-frequency sense of herpetic is just one of the lovely lexicographic innovations we owe to the herpetologists. (The scientists, not the doctors.)
Where to begin? First of all, herpetologists really do study herps, a.k.a. reptiles and amphibians. It turns out that this is a very common term within the field.
(Reactive grammar aside: how many schoolchildren have given the easy, "wrong" answer to "what is herpetology?" Hey kids, you were right after all! Sorry, but we wanted to make sure you were sufficiently baffled by science terms in particular, and the English language in general.)
From herps we get herping, which has its own Wikipedia entry so you know it's Made It Big. It's interesting how herping seems to differ — at least connotatively — from both birding and fishing.
Another word formation line-dance gives us herptile. Huzzah for innovation!
Much less common, but nevertheless amusing, is the inevitable herptacular.
Beer geeks tweak promospeak
Tuesday, February 5, 2008 4:47 PM
With a little investigation I was able to find the promotional copy they were commenting on:
Cross Drinking Without Social Stigma
What's hot in wine? Beer! Cross-drinking wine experts dare to declare that America's craft beers change the way wine drinkers think about malt beverages. Join this panel of talented tasters as they chuck their corks for brown-bottle fare and tell all about this latest beverage trend. Along the way, you'll get a first-hand glimpse into the palates and preferences of three of the food worlds' most savvy cross drinkers.
Cross drinking, cross drinker... after you filter out all the bad search results, these terms hardly appear at all on the Internet. I was able to find only one other cite for this sense, in a September 2002 user review at beeradvocate.com.
Just as rare is another, slightly older sense of cross-drinking: "to drink a certain variety of wine with a food traditionally paired with a different variety."
Both senses seem fairly transparent in context, and somewhat useful as jargon, so I'm a bit surprised that neither has caught on.
Perhaps the signified in both cases is too uncommon to warrant a signifier? Alternately — if not for the guffaws of those beer cognesceti — I could even believe that one or both of these terms was in common usage but had somehow eluded Google's myriad tentacles.
Outdoor words
Sunday, January 13, 2008 7:52 PM
Labels: vocab
The Distracting Word Meme
Sunday, December 30, 2007 2:11 AM
Words that always look misspelled to me
adviser (clearly a pet peeve of mine)
separate
dilemma
whisky
Words that look nicer in italics
far
murderous
Words I enjoy saying
h.c. (for hardcore)
introvert
roger
hence
solid (instead of favor)
Words I enjoy hearing
"abzurd"
jerkin' (Josie and the Pussycats)
yonder
killjoy (Halo 3)
Abbreviations I dislike
MILF (and its lexical offspring are even worse)
micro (for microwave)
s/f or SF (instead of sci-fi)
Proper nouns I enjoy
Londonderry
Harvey Wallbanger
McKean's Law
Words I associate with happiness
breeze
malt
twilight
Words I always misspell
periphescence
misspelling
Words I enjoy spelling correctly, every time
complimentary
stationery
Albuquerque
Words that, though I love their meaning, I'm too embarrassed to say out loud
bailiwick
f*ckbuddy
bloviate
whence
seigniorage
Words I can never remember the meaning of no matter how many times I look them up
cacozelia
crepuscular
lacuna
The word whose meaning I can never remember is "jejune."
As for MILF, have you heard about Spirit Airlines' MILF promotion? They claim they had NO IDEA it stood for anything but "Many Islands Low Fares." Right-o. More info here: http://commercial-archive.com/node/141850
Fantastic words! Breeze is a happy word isn't it? Hence does feel good in the mouth. And you are right, murderous looks great in italics :)
The thing about "sci-fi" is that it's something of a shibboleth. There are communities where it's got a history as a patronizing and derogatory term, generally aimed exclusively at bad film and television science fiction, and so if you use it around members of those groups, you will mark yourself as an outsider, and ignorant of their mores. 'SF' has no such connotations to navigate.
Yeah, I don't mean to open a can of worms there — I did that already with a "videogame vs. video game" post — but I'm aware of the arguments for "speculative fiction" and "sf" as opposed to "sci-fi." I just think that, as a label for straight-up science fiction, "sf" is overused within the community of people that has no narrow-minded prejudices against "sci-fi."
If you don't want to open a can of worms, maybe hanging up loaded phrases like "narrow-minded prejudices" before you start may be helpful.
Hah! Fair enough. I guess I didn't think it would be controversial to say that people who don't like sci-fi because it's called "sci-fi" are being narrow-minded.
I suspect that the people who don't like the term "sci-fi" are primarily the really big sf fans...?
There should be a category for words that you always seem to misread, no matter how common they are.
My two worst offenders are "misled," which I always want to read as [mai.zld] and "uniformed," which I usually see as "uninformed."
Where did you get the idea that I was talking about people who don't like science fiction in discussing people who don't care for the term "sci-fi"?
I took you at your word when you said, "I'm aware of the arguments for 'speculative fiction' and 'sf' as opposed to 'sci-fi'," but if in fact you're supposing that the likeliest opponents of the term "sci-fi" are people who are not fans of the genre, then I'll have to conclude you were talking through your hat.
It's precisely among fans of science fiction as a literary genre that the term "sci-fi" may be objected to most strongly. And to call that objection narrow-minded might be likened to calling a person of color narrow-minded for objecting to the term "coon".
Is that a bit clearer?
I think "coon" is a poor comparison, since it's incredibly perjorated, whereas I highly doubt that I'm the only sci-fi fan who still finds the term "sci-fi" innocuous. A sometimes-contentious, increasingly unfashionable label like "hipster" might be a more apt — albeit less dramatic — comparison.
But obviously it's I who's been having trouble being clear. Since my first comment we've been talking about two different groups: I mentioned that I was aware of "the arguments for 'speculative fiction' and 'sf' as opposed to 'sci-fi'," saying that I didn't mean to open a can of worms. I added, however, that I thought those terms were overused within the community of people with no narrow-minded objections to the term "sci-fi," i.e. the community of science fiction fans. I think it's here that I lost you.
I have no bones against the people who use the term "s/f" so that certain works can gain a broader acceptability, or refer to "speculative fiction" because it's a useful umbrella term. I disagree with them and continue to dislike these terms, but however strong their opinions about the word "sci-fi", these fans can presumably still look beyond the label. In short: I wasn't trying to call a subset of science fiction fans narrowminded; I was referring to a different group of people, as I made explicit in my second comment.
I do think that the likeliest, if not the most vociferous, pejoraters of the term "sci-fi" would be the general public (i.e. non-fans and some of the casual fans). As far as I can tell, it's largely their perception of sci-fi that has given it a connotation as a "patronizing and derogatory term, generally aimed exclusively at bad film and television science fiction."
I see "speculative fiction" as a rebranding, an escape from a genre pigeonhole necessitated by the pejoration of "sci-fi" within the general public. And so you get people like Margaret Atwood saying stuff like "No, it certainly isn't Science Fiction. Science Fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that."
Compare "progressive" with "liberal," a label which was until quite recently still in use here in Minnesota, but which was abandoned mostly because "liberal" had become a dirty word. This very blog is premised on a similar rebranding: the abandonment of "descriptivist grammar" (in favor of "reactive grammar") because the prescriptivists have made "descriptivist" out to be something crazy.
So now that we're using a different label some people who used to be called "descriptivists" can call descriptivism "utterly insane." Likewise, having abandoned the label "sci-fi" for serious works, it seems like a certain subset of science fiction fans have begun using it in the pejorated sense. Your point in your first comment was, and still is, well-taken: among that group of science fiction fans, "sci-fi" has become a shibboleth.
I'm starting to wonder if "sci-fi" might be what's sometimes called a "skunked term" — "a disputed word that has undergone a semantic shift, thus making it difficult to use it in either the older or the newer sense. Sticking to the older sense confuses those unfamiliar with it, while using the newer sense annoys traditionalists who feel that it is wrong." Although I suppose in this case both sides seem to end up annoyed.
The King is Wack
Friday, November 23, 2007 12:05 PM
(That's my reality show night: has anyone else noticed the growing prevalence of Tyra Banks' pet adjective, fierce? I heard it on Project Runway.)
As you'd expect given Corporate America's current infatuation with language play, this B.K. had some very odd signs.
First, breaking news: our nation's top engineers have finally invented the Frypod.
(Photo by Hawaii)
Other bloggers have wondered if Apple can sue Burger King for leeching off its cred — I'm guessing the answer is no. For my part, I'm just amazed at what seems like an excessive amount of promotion for a new shape of fry carton.
(Also, in 2007 the iPod is no longer the hip new thing: it's an institution. There's nothing fresh about the word frypod.)
As a Minnesotan, I found another ad far more irritating. The first sign in this set says "This burger is stocked full of good stuff." The second says "Just like our 10,000 lakes."
Our 10,000 lakes, Burger King? You are a corporation from Florida, worldwide maybe but not Minnesotan. Multinational fast food chains aren't local just because they're found locally. I feel like the King is sidling up to me in a bar, asking for a favor, all calling me buddy and pal.
Fierce is one of my fave Tyra words! She uses it on America's Next Top Model all the time -- I have no idea what it means but the models all seem to know exactly what to do. Secret language?
They must be working on some level we can't understand... that would also explain Tyra's ability to demonstrate what to do and what not to do with what sometimes look like identical gestures.
[snort] I think it has to do with the number of times she blinks.
ps: we got a nice mention on Mr. Verb today if you didn't see it yet.
Never mind the lakes, I'm not sure I'd want a burger that was 'stocked full' of anything. Just doesn't sound very appetising (like eating something that was 'assembled', or 'manufactured').
Oh, and the Mr Verb mention was a result of me pimping myself out for publicity...
And you're both welcome...
Thank you, JD, for our submentions to your mention :-)
Well-pimped J.D. — and we're complementary goods! I feel like one of those fancy condoms from Pretty Woman.
I like your point about "stocked full" — it is oddly artificial. I wonder if the other state-specific advertisements are as strained.
Redneck radar love
Monday, November 5, 2007 11:43 PM
My brother claims that the other speeders are supposed to be the rednecks here. If that's true, his formulation would be atypical of redneck terms, which usually refer to the crass or low-tech improvisations of purported rednecks.
I'd thought that the redneck limo was the most famous example of this formulation, but it seems that the beach along Florida's panhandle is well known as the Redneck Riviera.
I could google any number of redneck words and probably come up with results, but I can't think of any other terms off the top of my head — most Minnesotans would probably file our local "rednecks" under white trash, so it's not a word I hear very often.
Gnarly
Wednesday, October 17, 2007 10:57 AM
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word gnarled initially appeared only in Shakespeare ("Merciful heaven! / Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt / Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak / Than the soft myrtle"), likely as a variant spelling of the earlier knarled.
Which is not quite obsolete nowadays. Editors could conceivably find themselves replacing an intentional use of the original spelling with what was once a non-standard spelling variant. Following common usage here is the obvious choice — too many people would think knarled was an error, not that language is a democracy oh-no — but if you care about "correctness" you should feel a bit conflicted. Along similar lines, I used to wonder what I would do if someone wrote curry Fauvel instead of curry favor.
(Obviously: remove the reference to an obscure poem from 1310. I'm here to represent the readers, after all.)
Both gnarled and knarled meant something like "knotty or misshapen."
So Shakespeare's gnarled goes unnoticed until the 19th century, when the poets of the day bring it back into currency. It's around that same time that people start using the backformation gnarl, meaning either "a protruding knot on a tree" or "to contort, twist."
A decade or so later they then make a new adjective, gnarly, out of that word. So gnarly goes back way back to 1829.
In the 1970s, surfers started using gnarly to describe dangerous waves (presumably they were quite twisty?), and by the 1980s it had been adopted into teen slang as a word for both "excellent" and "disgusting."
It's the "excellent" sense that seems to have won out. Although my guess is that, with the possible exception of some speakers on the West Coast, gnarly is used by most people today with at least a twist of irony.
(Bonus videogame tie-in: in Super Mario World, each level in the secret Special Zone took its name from surfer slang. In order: Gnarly, Tubular, Way Cool, Awesome, Groovy, Mondo, Outrageous, and Funky. It felt like I spent weeks trying to beat Tubular.)
Meat market lexicography
Saturday, October 13, 2007 2:38 PM
It surprises me that even while the list of English collective nouns for animals has expanded to include many, many dubious group names, our lexicon of meat words has hardly changed at all, not since the 11th century Norman occupation of England.
(Speaking of the Battle of Hastings, at what point in history did it become easier to become famous for what you did than for how you died? That he supposedly got shot in the eye is prettymuch the only thing I know about King Harold II. See also: the Catholic saints.)
During the Normans' extended visit, a number of high class Old French words (e.g. buef, Old French for cow) shimmied into our vocabulary, creating a lexical distinction between what was raised and what was eaten. Nearly a thousand years later, here's our active animal-meat lexicon:
calf: veal
cow: beef
deer, antelope, moose, caribou: venison
domesticated fowl: poultry
swine: pork
sheep: mutton
snail: escargot
squid: calamari
And occasionally:
kangaroo: astralus
shrimp: scampi
Besides astralus, only three of the terms on this list are recent additions. Escargot was (re)imported from French in the late 19th century, and while I don't have OED access, my guess is that the Italian calamari and scampi came along a bit later. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates scampi back to 1930.
In my experience calamari is almost always used instead of squid, while scampi only pops up in certain recipe names. I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention long pork, a culinary name for human flesh; it was supposedly coined by the cannibals of either Samoa or Fiji.
(The Wikipedia article on culinary names is fairly flabby, but it did point me towards two handy culinary euphemisms: Rocky mountain oysters for buffalo, boar, or bull testicles, and sweetbread for the thymus gland or pancreas of a young animal. And there's tripe, of course. Foie gras is used to describe duck and goose livers, but only when they've been artificially fattened by gavage.)
Perhaps this is because they weren't necessarily raised by anyone, but it strikes me as odd that English has no culinary names for squirrel and rabbit. We've been eating squirrel for a long time — my copy of The Joy of Cooking still has a squirrel recipe — but apparently the Anglo-Norman esquirel merely supplanted the Old English acweorna.
Stranger still, Old French gave us coney (and rabbit for young coney) to describe an animal similar to the one we called hare, and both names were able to exist side-by-side without either becoming a meat word — centuries later, early American colonists had a similar choice (rabbit vs. hare) and basically stopped using hare altogether.
(Somewhat related: Welsh rabbit, the world's tastiest ethnic slur. And rabbit fur is sometimes called by the euphemism lapin.)
More understandable is the lack of a culinary name for dog meat, which the Koreans call gaegogi.
(Not related: another fun meat-related word is jerky, an alteration — misspelling? — of charqui, itself apparently an English word borrowed from American Spanish.)
As any Good Eats fan knows, the word corn underwent a semantic narrowing. It used to refer to a number of kernels or seeds, or even just a bunch of coarse salt granules. So we call it corned beef in reference to the salt packed around the brisket.
The word meat is itself interesting for much the same reason: it once meant simply "food."
Hello folks,
FYI the dish is not called "Welsh rabbit" but "Welsh rarebit". Also, rabbit and hare are two distinct species (i.e. the rabbit is not a domesticated hare), the former being "Oryctolagus Cuniculus", the latter "Lepus" (Europaeus, Articus, Americanus, etc...).
Also, as synonym of "rabbit" in English, now out of use, is "coney" - compare with "conejo" (Spanish), "coniglio" (Italian), "coleho" (Portuguese).
Thanks for the tip about coney — I hadn't realized that was the probable origin of Coney Island. I'm still surprised that the Old English hare and Old French coney/rabbit didn't follow the standard meat/animal differentiation, but I've updated the entry to be less confusing, i.e. less wrong.
As the entry I linked to points out, and most modern sources will corroborate, Welsh rarebit (attested from 1785) is most likely a corruption of Welsh rabbit (1725). The former has gained currency today as the less offensive term.
Rachaelisms
Monday, October 8, 2007 1:25 PM
If you've never heard of Rachael Ray — a noteworthy achievement these days — she's the goofy, unabashedly unsophisticated host of several Food Network shows. As Slate notes, she's also quite possibly "the world's most reviled chef."
Since I myself have a mild case of Rachael Ray Derangement Syndrome (full disclosure: I heart A.B.), until yesterday I'd avoided her shows.
So I didn't know.
I'm here today to talk to you about Rachael Rayisms, or as they're more commonly known, Rachaelisms (alternate spelling: Rachael-isms). These are words and catchphrases either invented or frequently used by Rachael Ray.
The most famous Rachaelism is EVOO (an acronym for Extra Virgin Olive Oil, pronounced "e-voe"). As any professional linguist could tell you, this officially became a real word earlier this year, when it was included in the Oxford American College Dictionary.
Here's Ray accepting a certificate from Erin McKean, quite possibly the world's most beloved lexicographer.
It's actually pretty cool that such a well-known chef plays with language like Ray does, and I really have to respect her for not letting the haters ruin her fun. Coin on, Rachael Ray.
I just dislike the words she comes up with. In the episode we watched, she coined the word choup, a blend of chowder and soup. Then she proceeded to say "choup" about fifty times as she made what was (in my lexicon) clearly just soup. I'm sure that for some people, even chowder is just a kind of soup.
Your definitions, like Rachael's, may vary.
Some notable Rachaelisms
Choup - A blend of chowder and soup.
Delish - A clipping of "delicious."
Easy-peasy - Easy
EVOO - Extra Virgin Olive Oil
G.B. - Garbage Bowl
Igidator - Refrigerator
Motz - Mozzarella cheese
Sammie - Sandwich
Shimmy-shake - Toss (?)
Smashed potatoes - Potatoes that have been roughly mashed.
Spoonula - A blend of spoon and spatula.
Stoup - A blend of stew and soup.
Turn of the pan - A measurement used when drizzling a liquid, esp. EVOO, into the recipe. (Also, I swear I heard her use the measurement "a third of a palm." Apparently she's a big fan of eyeballing.)
Yum-O ! - Yummy, possibly very yummy.
Nunberg's "Punctuation"
Thursday, September 20, 2007 12:33 PM
Anyone who knows me shouldn't be too surprised to learn that it was the chapter's invention/use of a precise technical vocabulary to describe punctuation concepts that intrigued me the most. Below: some highlights.
Here's an early, crucial distinction between segmental and non-segmental punctuation.
The punctuation marks are all segmental units of writing — i.e. they fully occupy a position in the linear sequence of written symbols. There are, however, various non-segmental features which can serve the same kind of purpose as the punctuation marks. For example, titles of literary or other works may be italicised as an alternative to being enclosed in quotation marks.
Note that the Cambridge Grammar classes accents and umlauts as spelling, not punctuation — I don't have my own copy (yet), so I'm curious to see how they classify the New Yorker's use of diereses. That looks like non-segmental punctuation to me.
Before they get into the nitty-gritty of punctuation, the authors make a distinction between signifier and signified that would make Saussure proud:
In virtually all written material the apostrophe is physically — or, as we shall say, graphically — identical with a single quotation mark. We need, therefore, to distinguish between two kinds of concept which we will call indicators and characters. The characters are the graphical shapes, or symbols, that realise the indicators. Apostrophe and single quotation mark are then distinct indicators that may be realised by the same character.
In terms of specific punctuation, I enjoyed the lengthy discussion of How Commas Work, but it's much too long to quote here in any meaningful way.
However, there's a great part about the three types of hyphen.
At the first level we can distinguish three uses of the (ordinary) hyphen:i. To join grammatical components in complex words: the hard hyphen
ii. To mark a break within a word at the end of a line: the soft hyphen
iii. To represent in direct speech either stuttering ('When c-c-can I come?') or exaggeratedly slow and careful pronunciation ('Speak c-l-e-a-r-l-y!')
The terms 'hard' and 'soft' are taken from word-processing: a hard hyphen is introduced into a document by a keystroke, while a soft one is inserted by the word-processing program.
Why — why? — did they not name that third hyphen type? The English geekery gods can be so cruel.
There's also a section on the en dash, which they call the long hyphen. I keep promising myself that I'll start using this consistently, but it's clearly the forgotten punctuation mark:
This is used instead of an ordinary syntactic hyphen with adjuncts consisting of nouns or proper names where the semantic relation is "between X and Y" or "from X to Y":
[...]
It can be used with more than two components, as in the London–Paris–Bonn axis. It is also found with adjectives derived from proper names: French–German relations. There is potentially a semantic contrast between the two hyphens, as in the Llewelyn–Jones Company (a partnership) vs the Llewelyn-Jones Company (with a single compound proper name). This hyphen is also used in giving spans of page numbers, dates or the like: pages 23–64, Franz Schubert (1797–1828).
Finally, there's a brief hat-tip to the separation apostrophe. This indicator category presumably includes the common-but-nonstandard greengrocer's apostrophe, but their examples mention only the form I've taken to calling the special-assignment plural apostrophe-S, the style choice that launched a thousand incorrections:
iii. separation: A's PhD's if's 1960's
A minor use of the apostrophe is to separate the plural suffix from the base, as in [7iii]; this occurs when the base consists of a letter (She got three A's in philosophy), certain kinds of abbreviation, a word used metalinguistically, or a numeral.
This book would probably be the perfect accompaniment to the $13 Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage (also on my Amazon wish list) if it weren't so definitively out of my price range.
Labels: links, punctuation, vocab
fyi but you probly know this: the special-assignment plural apostrophe-S is called standard by the Oxford Companion to the English Language.
I'm woefully short of dead tree reference materials, but I'm not too surprised.
It seems like at least some version of this apostrophe should be standard for everyone, and that the people who get upset by it wouldn't if they would just stop and think about it...
Donkeys and ponies
Friday, September 7, 2007 10:25 AM
(I say either one-point-seven-five or handle — yes, yes, even when there's no handle. Some people apparently say jug.)
Does anyone else say donkey? The Double-Tongued Word Wrestler came up blank, and all I learned from the Urban Dictionary was how disgusting the Internet is. However, after much too much googling, I found a single (apparent) corroboration on a message board:
but remember, no party is the same without me. NEVAR!~~
new years party, Im bringing a donkey bottle of cuervo. [cite]
The other commenters seem to be from the Houston area, which only deepens the mystery.
I had more luck with pony, which my mom used this past weekend to describe those stubby little bottles of beer. (Not to be confused with pony keg, which was my initial interpretation. Now that would have been a much more interesting story.)
Foodgoat has a great roundup of the many alcohol-related meanings of pony.
This sense of the term apparently comes from the old 7 oz. Rolling Rock bottles, which had a picture of a pony on the label:
There are many imitators, and as far as I can tell no brewery, Rolling Rock included, is too keen to take the credit for inventing the pony bottle.
Incidentally, Rolling Rock is also somewhat famous for printing a mysterious 33 on the bottles. I'm reminded of the similarly mysterious journalistic 30.
Big Fish
Tuesday, September 4, 2007 12:48 PM
I don't fish very often at all, but my brother fishes constantly and is by all accounts an expert. His unselfconscious use of U.S. fisherman's slang is fascinating. Did you know that the American fishermen have over 500 words for lure?
Two words stood out. When my mom caught a large sunfish, my brother said, "Wow, that's a toad." An In-Fisherman search confirms that while this isn't too common in p