RE: https://mstdn.social/@ThatWordChat/116642149349539153

That Word Chat is live TODAY at 4:30 PM EDT!

We're excited to chat with Michael Adams, curator of the Madeline Kripke collection — 20,000+ dictionaries and language books, now on exhibition at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

Last chance to register: ThatWordChat.com

#Lexicography #Linguistics #Dictionaries #ThatWordChat

That Word Chat is excited to welcome Michael Adams on June 2.

Adams is a linguist, lexicographer, and curator of “The Whole World in a Book,” the Lilly Library exhibition centered on the extraordinary dictionary collection of Madeline Kripke.

Grab your virtual seat: ThatWordChat.com

#Lexicography #Language #Linguistics #ThatWordChat

English words of the year 2024

It’s something of a tradition here on the Grammaticus blog to start the New Year with a lexicographical recap of the previous year. If you’ve missed it in the news, here’s an overview of the words that marked the year 2024, chosen by the leading dictionary publishers from the English-speaking world.

The Collins Word of the Year 2024 was “brat.” Its standard meaning – a badly behaving child – has been recently updated to reflect its current usage as an adjective: “characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude.” The publisher has referred to the album titled Brat by Charli XCX as a major influence: “More than a hugely successful album, ‘brat’ is a cultural phenomenon that has resonated with people globally, and ‘brat summer’ established itself as an aesthetic and a way of life.”

Other words shortlisted by Collins were: 

• brainrot (noun): “an inability to think clearly caused by excessive consumption of low-quality online content”
• era (noun): “a period of one’s life or career that is of a distinctive character”
• looksmaxxing (noun): “attempting to maximize the attractiveness of one’s physical appearance”
• rawdogging (noun): “the act of undertaking an activity without preparation, support, or equipment”
• anti-tourism (noun): “opposition to or action against large-scale tourism”
• delulu (adjective): “utterly mistaken or unrealistic in one’s ideas or expectations”
• romantasy (noun): “a literary genre that combines romantic fiction with fantasy”
• supermajority (noun): “a large majority in a legislative assembly that enables a government to pass laws without effective scrutiny”
• yapping (noun): “talking at length, especially about inconsequential matters”

Dictionary.com had some of the same words on their shortlist, as you’ll see below, but their final choice was the adjective “demure.” This word saw an explosive, overnight rise in usage in 2024, largely thanks to a series of TikTok posts by Jools Lebron (you know the ones – “very demure, very mindful”). Similar to “brat”, this word has also somewhat changed its meaning thanks to the social media: originally meaning “reserved, quiet and modest”, it has comes to refer to “refined and sophisticated appearance or behavior in various contexts.”

Here are the other words Dictionary.com had on their radar:

• brainrot (noun): “the effects of spending too much time consuming low-quality content on social media”
• brat (noun): “confidently rebellious, unapologetically bold, and playfully defiant”
• extreme weather (noun): “a period of weather or a weather event that is severe and unexpected or abnormal for the location or season in which it occurs”
• Midwest nice (adjective): “a courteous and agreeable manner, often involving self-deprecation, politeness, and avoidance of conflict”
• weird (adjective): “strange, odd, bizarre”

Based on the number of lookups, the Merriam-Webster lexicographers chose the word “polarization,” and it isn’t difficult to see why. The year 2024 was the election year in the U.S., and the word got to be used in the media and the general public even more than usual. Polarization is defined as “division into two sharply distinct opposites; especially, a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.”

“Weird” and “demure” were also shortlisted by Merriam-Webster, along with the following words:

• totality (noun), in reference to the Moon: “the phase of an eclipse during which it is total; the state of total eclipse”
• fortnight(noun): “a period of 14 days; two weeks” – Taylor Swift fans will know why the word was so popular in 2024
• pander(verb): “to say, do, or provide what someone wants or demands even though it is not proper, good, or reasonable)
• resonate (verb): “to affect or appeal to someone in a personal or emotional way”
• allision (noun): “the act or an instance of a ship striking a stationary object”
• cognitive (adjective): “of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering)”
• democracy (noun): “government by the people : rule of the majority”

Saving the Oxford English Dictionary for last, because their word of the year matches my personal choice. It’s “brain rot”, defined as follows: “Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.” I don’t know about you, but I strongly feel there’s no word that describes the previous year better than that one.

Here’s the rest of the OED shortlist:

• demure (adjective): “of a person: reserved or restrained in appearance or behaviour. Of clothing: not showy, ostentatious, or overly revealing”
• dynamic pricing (noun): “the practice of varying the price for a product or service to reflect changing market conditions; in particular, the charge of a higher price at a time of greater demand”
• lore(noun): “a body of (supposed) facts, background information, and anecdotes relating to someone or something, regarded as knowledge required for full understanding or informed discussion of the subject in question”
• romantasy(noun): a genre of fiction combining elements of romantic fiction and fantasy, typically featuring themes of magic, the supernatural, or adventure, alongside a central romantic storyline”
• slop(noun): “art, writing, or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic or inaccurate”

You can visit the OED Word of the Year 2024 web page, and read very interesting summaries on the origin of each of these words, along with short explanations as to how and why these particular words were shortlisted.

What’s your personal Word of the Year 2024? Tell us about it in the comments section below!

NOTES

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COVER IMAGE CREDIT

Felicia Montenegro via Unsplash

The strange absence of ‘ambiguate’

If I asked you to name or invent a word that means ‘make ambiguous’, what would it be – ambiguify? ambiguate? I’ve felt an occasional need for such a term, to say that a word or piece of syntax ambiguates the meaning in text or speech.

I mean, sure, I can say ‘makes the sense ambiguous’. But there’s no reason not to have a one-word verb. After all, we have its antonym, disambiguate: to make something unambiguous. More on that later.

Take this use of since: Since I’ve been injured, I haven’t gone running. Does it mean ‘because’ or ‘since the time that’? Is its meaning causal or temporal? Without further information, there’s no way to be sure. The choice of conjunction ambiguates the sense.

The same issue arises with other common words, like as and while. She made the sauce, while he chopped the vegetables. Does while have a temporal sense, indicating concurrent activities, or a contrastive or additive sense, like whereas or and? The comma and other factors might guide our interpretation, but ultimately we can’t be certain.

Usages like this are ambiguating. As a copy-editor I come across them fairly often, and I’ve begun using ambiguate judiciously in referring to them. Disambiguate is also useful, being more specific than synonyms like clarify and resolve. Disambiguate is a relatively new and specialized term, but it’s established enough to appear in major dictionaries:

to make (an ambiguous expression) unambiguous [Collins]

remove uncertainty of meaning from (an ambiguous sentence, phrase, or other linguistic unit) [Oxford]

to establish a single grammatical or semantic interpretation for [American Heritage]

to establish a single semantic or grammatical interpretation for [Merriam-Webster]

to make a sentence or phrase perfectly clear by removing all uncertainty [Vocabulary.com]

to make clear the meaning of a word, phrase, etc. that has more than one meaning [Macmillan]

(Note the tantalisingly near-identical definitions from AHD and M-W.) The OED has citations for disambiguate from 1960, generally in linguistic and philosophical contexts, and the word’s usage has risen steadily since then:

The noun disambiguation has been in use since at least 1827; it has become more familiar this century from its common appearance at the top of Wikipedia pages:

*

As it turns out, ambiguate exists in the lexicon, but only barely – not enough for lexicographers to include it. Dictionary aggregator OneLook shows it only in the crowd-sourced Wiktionary, whose entry defines it as ‘to make more ambiguous’ (which implies, oddly, that the thing was already ambiguous).

A sense of the two verbs’ relative frequency may be seen in this corpus comparison:

Ambiguate is not even in the OED, that great historical cabinet whose vast shelves swell with obscure Latinate vocabulary. Instead of the verb you’d expect – even if labelled archaic or obsolete ­– nestled in among ambigual, ambigue (n.), ambigue (adj.), ambiguity, ambiguous, ambiguously, and ambiguousness, there is a lacuna where ambiguate might go.

Its rival, ambiguify, appears in none of the corpora above but shows up a couple of times in Google Books (e.g., ‘Her words seemed to ambiguify their meanings’ —Norman Spinrad, The Void Captain’s Tale). Its chances of happening, fetch-style, are even smaller than those of ambiguate, yet it has its champions.

I’m not the first to point out the utility or validity of ambiguate, and a search on Twitter Bluesky shows it in casual use. But even here its appearances are sporadic, and in printed or edited texts it remains marginal.

My recommendation is that if you ever need to use the word, do. Its meaning should be transparent enough in context, and with more usage it will gain in familiarity and acceptability. Whether it will gain enough to ever show up in major dictionaries, or even in language corpora, is an open question.

Updates:

Languagehat joins me in ‘urging the use of this occasionally useful word’.

In episode 211 of the Weird Studies podcast, about 11 minutes in, J.F. Martel says of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that it “just ambiguates everything”. Great to hear it in the wild!

Peter Gilliver at the OED tells me they have evidence for ambiguate back to 1969. Watch this space.

Update to this update: After I posted about ambiguate on Bluesky, Peter Gilliver antedated the now-familiar transitive use significantly, to 1909, in the Caruthersville, Missouri, Twice-a-Week Democrat:

Ah, how you would like to ambiguate your phraseology to make an evil showing against me, but “technical” and “legal” truth is mighty and will prevail.

He also discovered a much older example of the word’s intransitive use, in the Melbourne Leader in 1868. He thinks it may be older still.

A Cabinet Minister with a larger share of natural ability than educational acquirement once said of a wavering supporter that he thought he (the supporter) was “ambiguating.” I have an immense respect for the man who can invent a new word and is bold enough to use it.

Note, too, the pleasingly disambiguating parenthetical.

*

[You’ll find more neologisms in the Sentence first archives.]

86 that slang etymology

Sometimes the universe hints strongly at what I should write about. Recently I read two books in close succession that featured the same curious slang word, used in different ways and worth a quick study. For one thing, it’s not just a word but a number: 86.

First there was Merritt Tierce’s fierce first novel, Love Me Back, whose narrator, a restaurant worker, says:

Later that day I am in the wine cellar updating the eighty-sixed list when the Bishop’s handler comes by.

Then I read Alison Bechdel’s brilliant comic memoir Fun Home, which shows another usage of 86 and a speculative origin story – but is it true? (Click images to embiggen.)

The etymology of 86 is uncertain, but it probably emerged as waiters’ and bartenders’ slang in the 1920s–1930s. Some authorities suggest that it’s rhyming slang for nix, a word of Germanic origin, but that doesn’t explain why it’s not, say, 36 or 96.

Still, this is the general route offered, with varying degrees of certainty, by GDoS, AHD, M-W, ODO, and the OED. Michael Quinion mentions a few other routes. The dictionary depicted in Bechdel’s comic, incidentally, is the 1951 first edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary, I think.

The OED’s first recorded use of slang eighty-six, in 1936, is as ‘an expression indicating that the supply of an item is exhausted, or that a customer is not to be served’. The first of these definitions is the one that applies to Tierce’s line above (‘in the wine cellar updating the eighty-sixed list’).

The verb came later, in the sense ‘eject or debar (a person) from premises’, then in broader senses, such as the media advisor quoted in the New Yorker telling Robert Redford to ‘eighty-six the sideburns’. Again that’s per the OED, which dates the verb from 1959.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang takes it back further: the original usage to 1933, in Walter Winchell’s On Broadway column: ‘A Hollywood soda-jerker forwards this glossary of soda-fountain lingo out there … “Eighty-six” means all out of it.’ And the verb to 1948, in the Washington Post: ‘The Alcoholic Beverage Control Board eighty-sixed two Ninth st. grog centers yesterday – cut off their taps.’

Though I don’t hear it in Ireland, 86 proved an appealing bit of slang, producing other usages in subsequent decades: an exclamation meaning Get out! or Go away! (1964); and No! (1981); a verb meaning kill, murder, or execute (1978); and be finished or ready to leave (1999).

Now I can eighty-six this from my to-blog file.

Updates:

Ben Zimmer discussed food-industry code on Lexicon Valley a few years ago and more recently at the Atlantic. He shares possible origins of 86 (including the Chumley’s-bar story) and other examples of food-industry code (81: a glass of water). His conclusion:

All of the speculation masks the likeliest origin, that it is simply a vestige of the arbitrary codes shouted out by soda clerks. And eighty-six has persisted thanks to the service industry’s continuing need to share signals—whether it has to do with removing menu items or removing customers.

Happy birthday to Webster's Dictionary!

Noah Webster registered the copyright for his 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘋𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘓𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦, containing 70,000 entries, on 4/14/1828.

#UnofficialDiaryDates #WebstersDictionary #lexicography

For those of you who like this sort of thing, here's a neat little BBC news story on the origins of the now ubiquitous phrase; 'not fit for purpose'.

It tracks its widening use & its (continuing) relevance to the Home Office. If politics is in part carried out in language then a bit of lexicographical history is always interesting. Enjoy

#politics #lexicography

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3dl18ndvydo