4/2/10  Sloop Scoop

      Sometimes you can infer where a bit of old-fashioned slang came from if you know what the word originally meant before it became slang. Often the original meaning is long lost as nobody uses it any more, though the slang lives on. Here's one example...

scuttlebutt (SKUT-el but) noun. 1. A drinking fountain on a ship. 2. Formerly, a cask on a ship holding the day's supply of drinking water. 3. Slang. Gossip; rumor. [scuttle, hatch + butt, cask]

      So you ask yourself, where do co-workers gather to exchange the latest juicy bits of gossip or rehash the latest episode of some popular TV show. At the water cooler. Then you ask, what's the old-time version of the water cooler for a sailor. A scuttlebutt. Put two and two together and you can easily speculate how scuttlebutt came to mean gossip.

3/15/10  Fauxcabulary Word #2

      Fauxcabulary: words and terms coined to be amusing or satirical and not found in a dictionary. Following is just such a word formed by combining blur and word...

blurd (blurd) noun. A word which means one thing to the English and another to Americans.

      The word 'pissed' is a blurd. To a Brit it means drunk and to a Yank it means mad. Then again, mad to an American often means angry and to the English means insane. Which is how you can be mad with rage while being angry with rage is redundant. Now I suppose 'raving mad' would work in both senses of mad, though usually it means wildly insane on both sides of the pond. People rarely call you raving angry, though they might speak of angry raving.

      Then there's 'jumper.' Stateside that'd be some suicidal sort on a building ledge. In merry old England it's a knitted top, called a sweater in the US. What I don't know is what an Englishman might bring an American who asked for jumper cables.

      The Briton's biscuit is the American's cookie. I think what Yanks call a biscuit is called a scone on the right side of the Atlantic. Then again, U.S. corn is maize in the UK where wheat is corn. Though if the main grain of the land were rye or millet, then they would be corn. So a corn biscuit... I give up.

      As Winston Churchill famously said, England and America are "two nations divided by a common language."

      No more true than this story where an Englishwoman craving a cigarette shocked her American host by saying, "I could murder a fag." If you find that amusing, you might try this quiz.

2/25/10  Beware of Poofs

genie (JEE nee) noun, A supernatural being who does one's bidding. [From Latin genius, guardian spirit.]

      Can I use it in a sentence? I'll do better than that, I'll use it writing an original joke in parable form. Or maybe it's a fable. Or a fairy tale, even though there is no fairy in the tale. There is a genie, so close enough.

      A genie grants a politician three wishes. "I wish I were the smartest person in the world. I wish I were the most popular person in the world. I wish everyone agreed with my policies."

      Poof! The politician disappeared.

      The moral of the story: Be careful what you wish for. And be very careful what politicians wish for.

      Since the word "genie" comes from genius, a second moral of the story is: be careful of solutions from geniuses.

2/5/10  Fauxcabulary Word #1

fauxcabulary (foe KAB you lair-ree) noun. Words and terms coined to be amusing or satirical and not found in a dictionary.

      Word play is a favorite pastime of wags and gagsters, pundits and punsters, and boys and girls of all ages. One word playtime activity is making up new words. When such neologisms are just for fun, they're fauxcabulary words. Or at least they are here since I made up the word.

      One method of coining fauxcabulary words is adding prefixes and suffixes. You'll see this sprinkled liberally around terrycolon.com: internetonaut, scroll-o-rama, index-o-matic, feature-ola, ColonoramaVision. There'd be more except I haven't come up with uses for -tastic or mega- yet. Maybe mega-tastic could work. Sounds pretty Terryfic, if I say so myself.

      A similar strategy takes the form of combining two words creating a portmanteau word taking on the meaning of both. Like Fauxcabulary, a combination of faux and vocabulary. A fauxcabulary word can also be created by changing a syllable in the middle of the word...

      claustrofauxbia, the fear of getting trapped in an imaginary box, or maybe the fear of mimes.

      Sometimes only the spelling changes and not the pronunciation...

      bimbeau, a male bimbo.

      This type only works in print, in conversation you have to spell it out which rather dulls the point.

      I admit these are rather concocted examples. I've never come across claustrofauxbia or bimbeau that I recall. Which perhaps makes me a lexicon-artist. Once the word play starts it's hard to stop. Sorry.

      On the web a favorite trick is using proper names in such combinations for satirical purposes. It shouldn't be hard finding any number of combinations containing Obama and Limbaugh around the political part of the blogosphere. Obamanation and Lamebaugh are only the beginning.

      Fauxcabulary words turn up in headlines and blog names where word play seems particularly popular. I think Instapolipundiwonkblog.net is available. A blog that would be blahgrrrrific!

1/18/10  Sea-lubbers?

      "Avast, ye maties!"

      A phrase often used to comically immitate a pirate. Such as you'd hear on International Talk-like-a-pirate Day. But have you ever wondered why pirates go about saying 'avast' and what the word actually means?

avast (eh VAST) interj. A nautical command to desist. [Shortened from the Dutch houd vast, "hold fast."]

      So our comic pirate is pretty much saying, "Hold it, you seamen." A translation which doesn't strike one as quintessentially pirate-like. You'd think you'd hear some rather more salty language from an old sea dog captain. Salty language is spoken by a salt, old slang for a sailor. No doubt you've heard the phrase 'curse like a sailor.' That explains salty language.

      What I can't explain is why pirates say, "Ar-r-r-r-r." Is that one of the symptoms of scurvy? Or is it simply a human growl? Another comic pirate habit is calling non-pirates 'landlubbers'. The 'land' part I get, but what is entailed in lubbering is beyond me.

      Perhaps the folks at the Official Talk-like-a-pirate Day site can tell you what all that pirate talk is all about.

12/24/09  The Longest Night

solstice (SOL stis, SOLE stis) noun, Either of two times a year when the sun has no apparent northward or southward motion, at the northern or southern point of the ecliptic.

      That's the dictionary definition. An astronomer might define it quite differently as the sun doesn't really go up and down, north and south. Though it would if you used the frame of reference notion of relativity. I think. Perhaps our astronomer would say it's when the Earth's rotation axis intersects the axis of orbital rotation. Easier to understand with a picture, and so...

      There are two solstices each year, one at the start of summer, the longest day of the year, and one beginning winter, the shortest day of the year. The winter solstice used to be the beginning of the year, which makes sense astronomically. Now we begin January first, which also makes sense, only calendar-wise. The two used to coincide but got out of whack because they didn't used to have leap years.

      This was corrected when they went from the Julian calendar minus leap years to the Gregorian Calendar with leap years. Well sort-of corrected because they didn't reset January first back to the solstice, but at least it stopped the season creep so that winter wasn't getting earlier and earlier any more.

      To do this they had to remove a couple weeks out of the calendar one year. A sort-of Great Leap Forward year. This upset some folks at the time because they thought they were having those days stolen from their lives by papal decree. After all, we only have so many years to live and if those years are shorter our lives are shorter. Which makes a sort-of accounting sense, but little common sense.

      All this calendar funny business is why winter starts, then Christmas is a few days later, and then New Years is a week after that even though at one time they were all marked by the solstice. Now we could adjust things again so they line up, but this would mess up everyone's end of year holiday break and the college bowl season, so let's not bother.

11/17/09  No Pain and no Gain

velleity (veh LEE eh-tee) noun, 1. The lowest level of volition. 2. A mere wish not accompanied by action or effort to obtain it.

      One might imagine this is basically laziness, but I don't think quite so. Laziness is not doing something you don't want to do. Valleity is not doing something you do want to do. Or at least that's my take on it.

      I don't suppose it much matters because when's the last time you ran into the word "velleity" in a sentence? How about any of these other approximations of laziness: dilatoriness; maudlinity; faineance; ergophobia; otiosity; or my favorite, torpitude.

      Then again, perhaps "velleity" applies to idle thoughts or daydreams. Such as I'd like to own a tropical island. Or I'd like to have superpowers like levitation. The likelihood of either of these happening is not very good. Though I don't know I'd ascribe the lack of effort to obtain them to laziness as much as to realism.

10/15/09  Good Humor, Man

      The picture above makes sense when you are familiar with the old-time idea of good health being a balance of the four humors. These ancient humors are bodily fluids, namely phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile. An imbalance of any of these was thought to cause a disposition and where we got the following words:

phlegmatic (fleh MA-tik) adj. Lazy. [phlegm]

sanguine (SAN gwin) adj. Happy. [blood]

bilious (BIL ee-us) adj. Irritable. [yellow bile]

melancholic (mel an KAW-lik) adj. Sad. [black bile]

      Another word for bile is choler, and so we get another word for bilious:

choleric (ko LER ik) adj. Irritable.

      To choler you add melan, which means black, and you get melancholic. The others don't make for good combinations. There is no phleguine, sangcholic, melanphlegmic, phlegmcholic or melansangmatic.

9/11/09  A Real Beute

cutieful (KYOO tee ful) adj. Characterized by being both cute and beautiful.

      OK, I might have made that up. Actually I heard it used on sports radio. At least I may have heard it. That's what is sounded like at any rate. Though I've not heard it again. Perhaps it was an unintentional spoonerism on the speaker's part. Still, I think the coinage might be useful.

      For instance, puppies are cute, not beautiful. Sophia Loren in her heyday was beautiful, but not what I'd characterize as cute. I would say Marylin Monroe was the quintessential example of cutieful. Now-a-days I might offer Cote DePablo as an example of cutieful.

      Of course, this is a subjective matter of taste or perception. Some folks think pugs are cute, I think they're pug-ugly. That's why they're called pugs after all.