By Ben Zimmer

Greetings, OUPblog readers! It’s been about six months since I had my “Last Word” around these parts, and it’s good to be back, reporting in from my new vantage point as executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus. When I was writing the column “From A to Zimmer” here, I often talked about how the OUP dictionary program uses the latest computational tools to shed new light on the inner workings of the English language. The development of the Oxford English Corpus has been particularly useful in tracking English usage, illuminating everything from spelling errors to shifting idioms to innovative combining forms like -licious. In my new job, I still get the chance to fuse lexicography with state-of-the-art technology. One fun example of this fusion is a new online spelling bee that adapts to players’ skill levels. It tells us a lot about how people grapple with the confusing rules of English spelling.

American schoolchildren have been competing in spelling bees for about two centuries now, originally sparked by the spelling textbooks of Noah Webster, whose 250th birthday was celebrated by American lexiphiles two weeks ago. Since Webster’s time, the spelling bee has become a distinctly American tradition, with its lasting appeal showcased in movies like Akeelah and the Bee and Spellbound, and the widely watched national broadcast of the Scripps National Spelling Bee on ABC and ESPN. Even Great Britain is belatedly joining in the fun, with the (UK) Times currently sponsoring the first-ever national Spelling Bee.

When we launched the Visual Thesaurus Spelling Bee this past summer, we knew there was a built-in interest, but the response was still surprising. So far there have been 15,000 players who have tried their hand at spelling a grand total of 500,000 words. It’s clearly habit-forming, with many repeat visitors. The reason why it’s so addictive is that it’s been designed to be adaptive, so the more words that are spelled correctly, the more difficult the words become. And conversely, if you’re not a great speller, the words will get easier and easier. That way a player will always be quizzed at the appropriate skill level — from the orthographically challenged to the most expert spellers.

As more and more players try the Bee, the game has steadily improved based on data collected on how words are spelled. Words are being continuously reanalyzed for difficulty based on how spellers fare. Every five minutes, words are rescored for difficulty taking into account the latest data from the Bee spellers. That means there’s an increasingly better fit to different skill levels. As the player continues to spell, the quiz narrows in on his or her score, on a scale from 200 to 800. A 200-level speller will get quizzed on the easiest words, but 800-level spellers are in for a fiendish challenge — matching their wits against such oddities as puerperal (relating to childbirth), faineant (disinclined to work or exertion), and palilalia (a pathological condition in which a word is rapidly and involuntarily repeated — something you might get from trying to spell too many words!).

There’s some sophisticated data analysis going on behind the scenes to score both players and words. Using intricate algorithms and curve-fitting models, the Bee is able to determine not just how difficult a word is to spell, but how well a word is at discriminating good spellers from bad spellers. That way the Bee can quickly zero in on a player’s skill level, in much the same way that computer-adaptive tests like the GRE and GMAT tailor themselves to test-takers’ abilities.

For each word, a graph is generated to plot the distribution of right and wrong answers across different skill levels. Then a curve is drawn to fit the data. If that curve rises very steeply, then the word is a good “discriminator”: it’s an accurate way to separate the good spellers from the bad spellers. Take two relatively easy words: harried and horrendous. Both of them are about the same difficulty level: 350 on the scale of 200 to 800. Here are their graphs, with player’s skill levels on the x-axis and the frequency of correct answers on the y-axis:

harried

horrendous

As the graphs illustrate, the curve for horrendous rises much more steeply than the one for harried. So if you spell horrendous incorrectly, it’s a very good bet that your skill level is below 350. And if you spell it right, then you probably can handle words at a level above 350. Each time a player spells a word right or wrong in the Bee, that gets added to the growing pool of data about each word’s difficulty and ability to discriminate good spellers from bad spellers.

We’ve come a long way from Noah Webster’s “Blue-Backed Speller,” but the impulse to test one’s spelling prowess is still running strong — both in the American spelling-bee tradition and now, increasingly, among the international audience of Anglophones. Everybody loves a challenge, even if they accidentally learn something in the process! And as the creators of the challenge, we’re constantly learning too, finding the patterns of how people succeed and fail when confronting the odd and outrageous rules of English spelling.

This is, I’m sad to say, the final installment of “From A to Zimmer” on OUPblog. As of next week I’m departing Oxford University Press for a new position as executive producer of Visual Thesaurus. I’ve greatly enjoyed the platform afforded me by OUPblog, but I’ve always had a niggling concern over the rubric “From A to Zimmer.” Doesn’t that give short shrift to all the words appearing alphabetically after “Zimmer”? So, since this week’s theme is finality, I thought I’d take a look at candidates for the real last word in English.

For the New Oxford American Dictionary, the last word is zymurgy — namely, “the study or practice of fermentation in brewing, winemaking, or distilling.” The zym- prefix is from the Greek word zumē meaning “leaven” (such as yeast), and the -urgy is from a Greek root for “working,” just as metallurgy means “metal-working.” If you’re not a brewer or a winemaker, you probably haven’t come across zymurgy, except in discussions like this one about the last words in dictionaries.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is bigger than NOAD, so naturally it moves the goalposts back a little further. The Shorter ends with zythum, “a drink made in ancient times from fermented malt, esp. in Egypt.” Once more we’re in the realm of fermented beverages, and again we have the Greeks to thank, with zythum deriving from Greek zuthos by way of Latin. The complete Oxford English Dictionary, like its Shorter distillation, currently stops at zythum in its main headword list, though you can find zyxt tucked away in the entry for the verb see as an obsolete Kentish variant (second-person singular past tense only, if you please!).

Some dictionaries, such as American Heritage and the Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary, take things all the way to zyzzyva, a genus of tropical American beetles. The biologist Thomas Lincoln Casey bestowed this genus name in 1922. Casey was probably inspired by another Z-heavy taxonomic name, Zyzza, which in older classifications referred to a genus of leafhoppers so named for their buzzzzzing noise. Zyzza is also responsible for the last word in Webster’s New International Dictionary, in both its second and third editions: Zyzzogeton, an extended form referring to yet another genus of buzzy leafhoppers. And some biological references will tell you that Zyzzyx names a genus of sand wasps that (you guessed it) make a buzzing sound.

To break the barrier into zz- words, we have to be a little more lenient. In 1903, Rupert Hughes published The Musical Guide (entitled The Music Lovers’ Encyclopedia in subsequent editions), which has as its last entry zzxjoanw. According to Hughes this is a Maori word pronounced “shaw” that can mean “drum,” “fife,” or “conclusion.” Sound far-fetched? Well, that’s because it’s a hoax entry. It was debunked in 1976 in the journal Word Ways by Philip M. Cohen, who noted (among other warning signs) that the Maori written language doesn’t even use the letters z, x, or j. Fake entries like this are called Mountweazels after a famous fabrication in the New Columbia Encyclopedia. (For more on Mountweazels and other examples of “lexicographical belligerence,” see this recent article by Rutgers professor Jack Lynch.)

If we accept place names, then the award most likely goes to Zzyzx in San Bernardino County, California. Zzyzx is a far-flung settlement in the Mojave Desert that used to be called Zzyzx Springs, originally named by Curtis Howe Springer, who founded a resort there. Whether Springer was inspired by the buzzy Zyzzyx sand wasps, I cannot say. But we can safely conjecture that he wanted to secure the last place name in American atlases, much as the Yellow Pages feature “AAAAA Auto Parts” and other companies trying to get the jump on the competition, alphabetically speaking. If you’re ever traveling on Interstate 15 between Southern California and Las Vegas, keep an eye peeled for the exit sign to Zzyzx Rd, leading to Springer’s old settlement.

To beat Zzyzx requires a word with at least three Z’s. If we can accept onomatopoetic representations of snoring, then we can pile up as many Z’s as we want. The OED entry for Z includes this lovely citation from a 1983 issue of the British satirical magazine Private Eye:

“Once you have hit on a commercial product you just go on producing more of the same, over and … zzzz … over and … zzzz … over and … zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

That’s 43 Z’s in a row at the end. There is of course no upper limit, as a Web search readily shows. But before all this snoring puts readers to sleep, I’ll end things here. Though this brings “From A To Zimmer” to a close, it’s not my final word. You can still find me writing at Visual Thesaurus and Language Log, and I expect I’ll be making guest appearances here on OUPblog every now and then. Thanks for reading.

Mark Peters, the genius behind the blog Wordlustitude in addition to being a Contributing Editor for Verbatim: The Language Quarterly, a language columnist for Babble, and a blogger for Psychology Today, is our guest blogger this week. Below Peters encourages us to make old words hip again.

Did you hear about the nude pictures of Lindsay Lohan and Roger Clemens drinking a human growth hormone/grain alcohol smoothie?

You have? Then let me tell you what my brother’s nanny has been up to with your father’s mechanic in the gazebo.

Not interested? Please. Much as we’d all like to believe we’re a little too well-placed on the evolutionary ladder to gossip and gab, studies show nine out of ten gossip-deniers are filthy liars—or so I’ve heard.

And just being part of that evolutionary ladder may predispose us to gossip: Robin Dunbar’s fantastic book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language suggests that verbal nit-picking may have the same social-bonding function as literal nit-picking for our non-human brothers and sisters of the primate persuasion.

So don’t feel bad about your loose lips: gossip is your genetic destiny and should never be questioned.

What could be questioned is our language for talking about gossip (and the closely related field of chatter). Sure, words like babbler, bad-mouth, blather, buzz, chit-chat, he-said-she-said, scuttle-butt, and tattler are perfectly serviceable, and new lingo is being created moment-by-moment on the celebublogs. But there are many forgotten, underused, colorful terms just dying to be rescued from obscurity in the Oxford English Dictionary.

So whether you’re a blogger, a journalist, a scholar, or a snitch, here are some old words to freshen up your vocabulary. And you didn’t hear them from me.

clacket
One of the many joys of romping through the OED is noticing that our familiar repertoire of words had so many similar cousins, and that today’s common word—much like today’s common salamander—had to undergo a Darwinian struggle for survival, metaphorically killing off the competition. For example, we all know the word grrr refers to a dog’s growl, but at various times and places, yar, hurr, harr, girn, narr, gnar, and the piratical-sounding arr have meant the same. Similarly, racket seems to have outlasted clacket, which is type of racket defined as “Clacking, vigorous, and incessant chatter.”

prattle-basket
This is an exact synonym for chatterbox; prattle-box has been used too. Contemporary word-maker-uppers with less maturity than your humble guest blogger might conjure additional insults such as prattle-breath, prattle-wad, prattle-face, and prattle-butt.

whitter-watter
Reduplication is a popular way of making words for excessive yakking, probably because yada yada, blah blah, gibble-gabble, bribble-babble, and tittle-tattle sound slightly less sensible than prelapsarian or neurosurgery. Among the other 7,834 words with a special place in my heart is whitter-whatter, which an 1825 quotation explains, “A woman who is very garrulous is said to be ‘a perfect whitter-whatter’.”

gabble, chelp, chirm
Blab-blabbing people and cheep-cheeping birds are linked by many words: gabble is one, referring to unshushable people and geese. Chelp is another, defined as “To chirp or squeak; to chatter”, and it does have a cheepy, yak-yak-y flavor to it. An even chirpier old word and synonym is chirm. I’d say the noble birds have more reason to be insulted than the hairless apes: Idiots who can’t shut up during movies rarely have feathers.

snatter
This rare 1700s word sounds like chatter, and means chatter, and in 2008 looks like a blend of chatter and snark—that bile-y word that’s omnipresent (and omni-annoying) on the web. This is much snattering in the world; it’s time we said so again.

psilology
This serious-sounding word—which means “Vacuous chatter, mere talk”—is a nonce word. In related news, my name is Mark Peters, and I am a nonce-word-aholic. Words like nonce-word-aholic make me happy as a chocolate puppy on a spring day, and I collect nonces in my humorous, not-for-kids, dictionary-blog Wordlustitude, where you can enrich your Christmas cards with words like unbiggify, two-donut-dejellification, enthrallitude, bunnycapades, cat-nookiepalooza, and man-strumpet. The OED also has a metric truckload of nonce words, including transfisticate, cakate, and podicate—which mean to dish out punches, cake, and spankings respectively. As for psilology, this OED noncer never caught on, but has a famous user, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Schools of psilology (the love of empty noise) and misosophy”(1834). Misosophy is a slightly less rare word meaning “hatred of wisdom”.

clat-fart
In 1913, D.H. Lawrence used and defined this short, sharp word: “The Guild was called by some hostile husbands..the ‘clat-fart’ shop—that is, the gossip-shop.” These two little syllables, representing two of the body’s less-renowned musical instruments, make for a punchy, vivid, slap-in-the-face of a word.

bavardage
All those A’s make this rare, nineteenth century word for “Idle talk, prattle, chattering” feel substantial and meaty; there’s also a strong hint of bastard and garbage here. It’s a word that makes me want to use it. Cease your bavardage! I can’t take this bavardage! I will give a shiny nickel to the first blogger who works bastard and bavardage into a sentence. Hey, I win.

tonguester
It’s as old as 1871, but this 1877 quote voices a common opinion: “The simple, silent, selfless man Is worth a world of tonguesters.”

And that’s as good a cue as any to end my bavardage.

Unless you want to hear what I just heard about Paris Hilton, Barry Bonds, and a Presidential candidate who I couldn’t possibly reveal…

Jeff Prucher, editor of Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, has kindly guest blogged for us this week. Below, learn how science fiction has conceived of a crime, which has never been committed.

There have been a number of news reports in recent months that reveal a dark underside to the word of organ transplants. In one case, corpses were illegally purchased from funeral directors, and usable tissues were resold to be used in transplants. In another, poor people were paid or coerced into having one of their kidneys removed; the kidneys were then used as transplants. These stories are disturbingly reminiscent of events in a series of stories by science fiction writer Larry Niven that began in the late 1960s. In the universe in which these stories are set, organ transplantation is an effective method of prolonging life. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that fewer people die, which in turn means that there are fewer organs available for transplant. Extreme measures are taken to deal with this issue, both by the government (which harvests organs from criminals who have been executed for committing one of an increasingly absurd array of capital offenses, including excessive traffic violations) and by organized gangs who traffic in illegal organs – usually either taken from unwilling (living) donors or from people in cryogenic sleep. Unlike the real-world kidney donors, the victims of the illegal organ harvesting in Niven’s stories don’t tend to survive. In his story “The Jigsaw Man” (1967), Niven describes the fate of a man who was executed for the crime of stealing people’s organs

The doctor took him apart with exquisite care, like disassembling a flexible, fragile, tremendously complex jigsaw puzzle. The brain was flashburned and the ashes saved for urn burial; but all the rest of the body, in slabs and small blobs and parchment-thin layers and lengths of tubing, went into storage in the hospital’s organ banks…. If the odds broke right, if the right people came down with the right diseases at the right time, the organlegger might save more lives than he had taken.

There’s an unusual word in the last sentence, and it’s why I’ve brought up all these gory details. Organlegger is a word that Niven coined to describe the criminals who traffic in human organs; he called their crime organlegging. These are portmanteau words, which take the “-leg” from bootlegger – a trafficker in illegal liquor – and its derivatives, and combine it with organ. (Bootleggers were originally so called because they carried their liquor in the legs of their boots, a practice which, we can presume, has not been perpetuated by organleggers.)

These words have been familiar to readers of science fiction for over forty years now, and have been moderately successful, as far as neologisms go, in that some other science fiction writers have started using the terms in their own writing. Its first appearance outside of Niven’s work may well have been as the title of a science fiction fanzine that began publication in 1973. The first non-Niven use in fiction that I’ve been able to find is from Rudy Rucker’s 1987 novel Wetware:

The organleggers took some of their organs right out of newly murdered people; others they purchased from the Moon.

After that, things started to pick up a bit. And the meaning of the terms started to shift, as well – it started to be used in ways that weren’t limited to human organs. The role-playing game Shadowrun, first released in 1989, is set in a world where both magic and high technology co-exist, and in which cybernetic implants or wholesale limb replacements are common. Its organleggers traffic not only in organs, but in cybernetics as well. The titular creatures in F. Paul Wilson’s 2003 novel Sims are chimpanzees that have been genetically modified with human DNA. At one point, organleggers are suspected of harvesting sim organs to be used for transplants into humans.

This borrowing of neologisms is a comparatively rare occurrence in the world of science fiction, if you pause to consider that there is a good chance that any given science fiction story will contain either a neologism or a novel use of an existing word. And while few of these are ever used by another author, fewer still slip out into broader usage. But what’s interesting to me, as a lexicographer of science fiction, is that some people have indeed started using the words organlegger and organlegging to describe these current events. (Naturally, at least some of them are science fiction readers.) Time will tell whether these words ever truly become ensconced in the language, or whether other terms will be invented instead. But if they do, Niven will have pulled off a rare feat – conceiving of a crime before committing it is remotely possible, and giving it a name that sticks.

John McGrath built and maintains Wordie.org, a collaborative dictionary and social network for logophiles. By day he’s a software developer at Curbed.com. McGrath has kindly agreed to be the first in our series of guest language bloggers.

Through what must have been a series of clerical errors akin to Major Major Major Major’s promotion by an “IBM machine with a sense of humor,” OUPblog has asked me to write a guest post.

I’m manifestly unqualified to do so–I’m a programmer, and am closer to being that IBM machine than a lexicographer. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I am no Ben Zimmer.

But my housekeeping duties at Wordie.org offer a ringside view of the lexisphere, which is how I discovered “Depraved and Insulting English,” by Peter Novobatsky and Ammon Shea. While posting about that delightful book I came across another gem: Ammon has spent the past year reading all 20 volumes of the OED and writing a book about it, “Reading the OED,” to be released by Perigree this summer. I was enchanted by the project, and emailed Ammon to ask him what it’s like to read 300,000 dictionary entries.

Q: Can you give me a quick bio? I know you as the author of “Depraved and Insulting English.” Are you a lexicographer?

Ammon Shea: “Depraved and Insulting English” (which I co-wrote with Peter Novobatzky) was initially published as two separate books ["Depraved English" and "Insulting English" -JM]. In addition to writing these books my occupation has been furniture mover in New York, gondolier in San Diego, street musician in Paris, and similar things. My preoccupation, for the past decade, has been reading dictionaries.

I am not myself a lexicographer, but my girlfriend was, and she’s rubbed off on me.

Q: Does San Diego have canals? And what do you play?

AS: San Diego does not have any canals. But it does have a good number of docks, especially on the bay side. There was man there who had just retired from running a prop studio in Hollywood, and he decided that what he wanted to do was build gondolas. So he and I built a couple of them and we’d row people about the docks by the yacht clubs.

I used to be a jazz saxophonist, which is a great way to make a living and a terrible way to pay the rent – one of the reasons I gave it up was that the only time I ever made a decent living at it was playing on the streets and the subways in Paris.

Q: Where did the idea of reading the OED come from?

AS: When I first began reading dictionaries it was quickly apparent that reading a lexicon is considerably more fun than one might imagine. Once I’d established that it was enjoyable rather than onerous the natural next step was to read longer and longer dictionaries. I find few things in life more depressing than coming to the end of a good book; the OED was attractive in part because I knew that would take quite some time.

Also, whenever I looked up a word in the OED I would think of something else to look for, and then I would get caught up in the pages, a hour has gone by and although I’ve found some wonderful things I’m still haunted by the thought that the rest of this dictionary has other wonderful things in it that I haven’t yet read. So I decided that I would read the whole thing to sate my curiosity about all those unread pages.

Q: How long did it take?

AS: I haven’t worked out the hours, but it was a full-time project for about a year. Most weeks I was reading 9 or 10 hours a day, five days a week.

Q: Did this hold your interest all the way through, or did you have to slog you way through parts?

AS: It was remarkably constant in keeping my interest. I would sometimes wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning and begin reading, just because I almost always had a feeling that I was about to get to something terribly interesting.

That being said, the letter Q was boring as hell. And I didn’t much care for X either.

Q: Were you intending to write the book at the outset of your reading? How and when did the relationship with Perigree come about?

AS: I was planning on writing a book about it from the start. I have a much easier time working at something if I have a definite goal in mind, and signing a book contract will provide that.

The relationship with Perigee came from the fact that Marian Lizzi, who had been my editor for a previous book, was recently named editor-in-chief, and so I thought they might be sympathetic to the idea of this book.

Q: Can you tell us some favorite words or citations you found?

AS: Here is a small list of some of my favorite words that were buried in the dictionary.

Apricity – The warmth of the sun in winter
Bouffage – An enjoyable or satisfying meal
Father-waur – Being worse than one’s father
Ignotism – A mistake that is made from ignorance
Introuvable – Not capable of being found, said specifically of books.
Obmutescence – The state or condition of obstinately or willfully refusing to speak.
Onomatomania – Vexation with being unable to find the right word.
Peracme – The point at which one’s prime has passed
Postvide – To make plans for an event only after it has happened
Psithurism – The sound of leaves moved by the wind.
Sialoquent -Someone who spits when they speak.
Velleity – A mere wish or desire for something, unaccompanied by any action of effort.

Q: Did you find many errors? Any more dords?

AS: I did find some errors, although no ghost words such as dord. At first I was very excited when I found mistakes, and felt pretty pleased with myself. That was short-lived. When I checked the online version – in which they’ve started releasing OED 3 (they’ve done M-P so far) – I found that the editors had already corrected all the errors that I had found.

Given the size and the complexity of the work, there are remarkably few errors. But I do have a sneaking suspicion that they may be mistaken in defining jive-ass as ‘a person who loves fun or excitement’.

Q: Has this exposure to dictionaries given you any thoughts or insights into the state or nature of lexicography? Are there changes you’d like to make in the OED or in dictionaries in general, either specific or structural?

AS: I’m fairly certain that if I answer these questions I will say something that I will later regret. To answer the first question as briefly as possible, I would say that one insight that I’ve had about lexicography is that it is fun. Dictionaries are fun. They really are amazing creatures, and I think that they are underused. A number of highly educated and dedicated people have worked terribly hard at filling these books with all sorts of fascinating information about the language we use, and most of us just use them to see if we’re spelling a word correctly; it’s like using a great novel as a paperweight.

In response to the second question, I don’t think that I would change anything. Dictionaries are already constantly changing, and they don’t need any advice from me.

Q: Thoughts on how the OED could improve its web presence?

AS: What I would love is if they would go back and re-insert all the material that the OUP delegates made James Murray leave out of the dictionary, when they were trying to keep its size down, in the 19th century.

Q: Have you read other dictionaries? Are you a serial reader of reference books?

AS: I’m afraid that I could be called a serial reader of reference books. The first dictionary I read was Webster’s Second New International. This proved to be so entertaining that I then read the sequel, Webster’s Third New International. Then I plowed through some of the older dictionaries, such as Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, and a few of the hard word dictionaries of the 17th century.

If you add up all of the regular dictionaries, medical dictionaries, glossaries, and assorted word lists, I would say that I’ve read several dozen over the past ten years.

One might imagine that if you’ve read one dictionary, you’ve read them all, but this really isn’t the case. Each dictionary has its own character and its own quirks, and the more of them I read the more apparent this becomes.

Q: Do you have any other projects that will derive from this, other than the book? It would make for good radio.

AS: It’s not obvious what exactly comes from spending a full year of my life reading the dictionary, other than this book. Presumably, fame and fortune. I’m herewith soliciting ideas for means to such fame/fortune on my website, ammonshea.com .

Q: Do you know of anyone else who has done this? Maybe you’re part of a book club?

AS: There must be people as obsessed with this dictionary as I am, but I’ve never made their acquaintance. Maybe we’re all part of the club, but we’re also all socially maladjusted enough that it is unlikely that we’ll ever meet.

Q: Is your reading always so directed? What other sorts of literary interests do you have? By the time you finished, were you dying for a narrative arc? Or something a bit less… highbrow? South Park?

AS: Usually, when I’m not reading a dictionary I’m reading books about dictionaries. Other than that, my interests are far-ranging, so long as the story or the telling of it is interesting. Recently I’ve been reading the diaries of one of the brothers that ran Merriam-Webster in the 19th century, and several children’s books by William Steig.

Actually, I thought there was a strong narrative arc in the OED itself: not a particularly linear one, but clear stories, or tales, therein. Most letters were edited by a single editor, so as you read through the volumes subtle stylistic differences arise. Different letters are populated by different prefixes, and this lends the worlds of each individual letter distinct tones.

And the OED is so full of literature that it’s impossible to not feel as though you’re ingesting dozens of books in reading it. A huge amount of what Shakespeare wrote is included in the citations in the OED. It may be chopped up and sprinkled about, but it’s still there. I’ve probably read The Tempest and Macbeth backwards, sideways, and upside down. So although there is no real plot in the OED, there are arcs. Of course, it’s possible that it was simply my own reading that formed the arc – getting more excited about finishing, experiencing highs and lulls – and I attributed it to the dictionary.

Take a look at Mark Peters’s language guide for parents or his Wordlustitude blog.

Swing by Jeff Prucher’s blog for an interesting meditation on horror as a genre.

Then click over to Grant Barrett’s Double-Tongued Dictionary which can keep you busy for hours on end.

Don’t miss Erin McKean’s Dictionary Evangelist blog which proves just how much fun you can have with language.

In the closing sentences of last week’s column about Super Bowl and Super Tuesday, I unwittingly set off some readers’ usage alarms. Talking about terms like Tsunami Tuesday and Super-Duper Tuesday, I wrote: “But none of these amplified epithets have managed to displace good old Super Tuesday.” That’s right — I used none with the plural verb have instead of singular has. I then continued: “A Google News search currently finds nearly 20,000 articles referencing Super Tuesday in the past month, compared to less than 1,000 for Super-Duper Tuesday and less than 500 for Tsunami Tuesday.” Less than 1,000, less than 500? Not fewer? Eagle-eyed commenters were to quick to pick up on both of these usage points. I’d like to say I hid these in the column as a test for readers, but I wasn’t that clever. It does provide a good opportunity, however, to take a look at two of the more contentious debates over English usage in modern times.

Let’s start with the less versus fewer distinction. The general rule of thumb, as outlined by usage guides like Garner’s Modern American Usage, is that fewer is used for things you can count and less for things you can’t — in other words, one is for count nouns (like books or children) and the other is for mass nouns (like butter or money). But that rule of thumb has never corresponded very well to actual usage, since less has been used with countable things since the early days of English. The prescription limiting less to mass nouns apparently arose in the eighteenth century and eventually became enshrined in the grammar books. Even though it might seem like a minor point of usage, it’s one that people often feel very passionately about. New York Times columnist William Safire prides himself on the fact that one of his “On Language” columns convinced the Safeway supermarket chain to change its express-lane signs from “10 items or less” to “10 items or fewer.”

Even those who favor restricting less to mass nouns recognize that it can be appropriate for certain kinds of countable things, such as units of time or money. It makes sense to say “less than five hours” or “less than ten dollars” because hours and dollars aren’t really thought of as individual units in those contexts. Large numbers also tend to be understood as amounts rather than collections of discrete units. Hence, I felt perfectly comfortable saying “less than 1,000″ and “less than 500,” even though I was enumerating items that are technically countable (articles on Google News). Others will obviously disagree, since this has become such a disputed point of usage, but it’s best not to be too doctrinaire in such matters.

The same can be said for the use of none with plurally marked verbs. In many cases none is best construed as singular, as if it were a shortened form of “not one.” But some insist that none should always be singular, in the belief that it can only be understood as “not one.” Historically, there’s a grain of truth to this, as the word’s Old English predecessor, nān, was formed from ne ‘not’ and ān ‘one.’ But the Old English word could be inflected as singular or plural, so the etymological argument ends there. Still, the idea of none as equivalent to “not one” took hold among some grammarians by the turn of the twentieth century. A hundred years ago, in The Standard of Usage in English, Yale professor Thomas R. Lounsbury pointed out that none had long been used as the subject of plural verbs without anyone complaining about it (much like the use of less for countables). Lounsbury gives numerous literary examples of plural none, from Bacon to Shakespeare to Browning, before concluding, “There is no harm in a man’s limiting his employment of none to the singular in his own individual usage, if he derives any pleasure from this particular form of linguistic martyrdom. But why should he go about seeking to inflict upon others the misery which owes its origin to his own ignorance?”

Lounsbury made his case convincingly. As recounted in an article from the May 31, 1908 New York Times, the professor pulled a reference off of his shelf to show the reporter that his view of none had become accepted, in opposition to the notion that it must always be singular. That reference? The latest volume of the New English Dictionary, later to be known as the Oxford English Dictionary. “In later use commonly with plural verb,” the NED noted of none, nonjudgmentally. And yet even today, as Garner’s observes, “some stylists and publications insist that none is always singular, even in the most awkward constructions.” Most style guides disagree: the New York Times stylebook, for instance, says for none, “construe as a plural unless it is desired to emphasize the idea of not one or no one — and then it is often better to use not one or no one instead of none.” Will that persuade any of the remaining singular-none acolytes out there? I suspect if this argument doesn’t do the trick, then none are going to.

Ben Zimmer is an editor at Oxford University Press and a true word junkie. Once a week he surfaces from his dictionaries to write this column. Check out his “words of the week” on our main page (center column) or by clicking here

Americans have two “super” events coming up on the national agenda: Super Bowl XLII on Sunday between the Giants and Patriots, followed two days later by Super Tuesday, when about half the country will vote in Democratic and Republican presidential primaries. Fox, the network that is broadcasting the Super Bowl, is even creating a Super mashup before the game begins, with two hours of coverage on Sunday morning mixing politics and football. It’s all quite super, some might say super-duper. So how did we get to this level of superheated superabundancy?

English super-words all owe their roots to the Latin adverb and preposition super, meaning ‘above, on top of, beyond.’ As a prefix, super- can attach to verbs like superimpose, adjectives like supernatural, and nouns like superstructure. In the twentieth century, super- got supercharged by one of the most enduring figures of modern popular culture: Superman. The term superman to refer to an idealized superior being goes back to Nietzsche’s übermensch, which has also been translated into English as overman or beyond-man. George Bernard Shaw helped popularize the super-version with his 1903 play Man and Superman, and the term would eventually be picked up by the creators of the Superman comic strip, first appearing in 1938. By the 1950s, thanks to radio, film, and television serials, the image of Superman had become firmly entrenched in the public consciousness — and by extension a variety of other superheroes with superpowers.

In the wake of Superman, a person or thing prefixed with super- is generally understood to be surpassing all others, the best or most imposing of its class. In the latter half of the twentieth century the lexicon was flooded with all manner of superlatives, from superhighways to supercomputers, from superstores to supermoms. This proliferation was helped along by the earlier development of super as a free-standing adjective, meaning ‘excellent, first-rate,’ sometimes reduplicated as super-duper.

So when the National Football League merged with the American Football League in 1966 and a name for the new championship game was required, it’s not surprising that the game was called Super. It was called a Bowl in the tradition of college football’s post-season “bowl games,” which ultimately can be traced back to the first such game played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. One story has it that AFL founder Lamar Hunt came up with Super Bowl after watching his children play with a new-fangled bouncy toy known as the SuperBall. Hunt might have initially meant it as a joke, but needless to say another term never came along to supersede it.

The story of Super Tuesday is a bit more complicated. The earliest known combination of presidential primary elections to be called Super Tuesday took place back on June 8, 1976, when California, New Jersey, and Ohio all held their primaries. That primary day paled in comparison to the Super Tuesday of 1988 and afterwards, when a large bloc of Southern states dominated on a Tuesday in early March. When states started jockeying to position themselves as early as possible in the 2008 primary process, a new Super Tuesday was created on February 5. Two of the original Super Tuesday states from 1976, California and New Jersey, have had their revenge now that they have moved up their old increasingly irrelevant June primary dates.

When it became clear that 22 states and American Samoa would all vote on one day, pundits quickly searched for an expression to out-super Super Tuesday. CNN political analyst Bill Schneider and others suggested the reduplicated Super-Duper Tuesday, but as Grant Barrett’s Double-Tongued Dictionary notes, this term was actually suggested by several observers to describe the Super Tuesday of 1988, which seemed super-duper at the time. As Erin McKean told the New York Times recently, the reduplication of Super-Duper Tuesday is a way of intensifying something that is already pretty intense, though the result “has an aura of jokiness.”

Other suggested names for February 5 are Tsunami Tuesday, Mega-Tuesday, and Giga-Tuesday. The National Journal’s Charlie Cook has called it the Powerball Primary (after the big multistate lottery drawing), while Donna Brazile and Michael Barone have both suggested the Mardi Gras Primary since that’s the day on which Mardi Gras falls this year. It has also somewhat unimaginatively (and inaccurately) been referred to by some as National Primary Day. Among this batch Tsunami Tuesday has proven to be relatively successful among the punditry since it first began circulating in March of last year, despite potentially unpleasant connotations of the 2004 Asian tsunami.

But none of these amplified epithets have managed to displace good old Super Tuesday. A Google News search currently finds nearly 20,000 articles referencing Super Tuesday in the past month, compared to less than 1,000 for Super-Duper Tuesday and less than 500 for Tsunami Tuesday. Sometimes super says it all.

Ben Zimmer is an editor at Oxford University Press and a true word junkie. Once a week he surfaces from his dictionaries to write this column. Check out his “words of the week” on our main page (center column) or by clicking here

As OUP lexicographers monitor the linguistic radar for new words and meanings, sometimes we find a usage that appears novel but has actually been kicking around for quite a while. Consider the verb big-up, meaning ‘to praise or promote; to raise the profile of.’ Three recent quotes from American media sources give you a sense of how it’s being used these days. Here’s the actress Jaime Pressly critiquing the show “Ugly Betty”: “They’re purposefully big-upping the ugly fat girl to make everybody feel great, but it also glamorizes the fact that people are getting plastic surgery because they can.” The music blog Idolator had this to say about an “American Idol” contestant: “This is actually the second time that Hennessy has been big-upped by the Idol powers that be,” adding, “is big-upping this girl really the best strategy to boost ratings?” And finally a profile of Staten Island’s Budos Band notes: “Legit blogs like Brooklyn Vegan and online publications like Pitchfork and RollingStone.com have also big-upped the band.” This might be the verb of the moment in hip, pop-culture-savvy varieties of American English, but it already has a long history in Caribbean and British English.

Big-up (with or without the hyphen) has a number of intertwining uses as a noun, adjective, verb, and interjection, all derived from English dialects spoken in Caribbean locales like Jamaica and the Bahamas. As early as 1982, lexicographers John Holm and Alison Shilling were documenting some of these uses for their Dictionary of Bahamian English. One early sense of the verb in Bahamian English is ‘to swell up, to become pregnant.’ Richard Allsopp’s Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage adds another usage, attested in Barbados: as an adjective meaning ‘highly placed, socially important’ (as in “a big-up soldier”), or as a related noun meaning ‘an important person, someone in authority’ — a bit like higher-up in American English.

But it was Jamaican usage of big-up that ultimately represented the most significant Caribbean contribution, first influencing English in the UK and then in the US. Among Jamaican musicians in the reggae and dancehall traditions, big up developed as a kind of greeting of respect, often made in a live performance: “Big up all massive and crew!” The interjection was also made into a noun to indicate an expression of respect or recognition made to another, much like shout-outs or props in American hiphop usage. And alongside the interjection and the noun, the verb big-up came to be used by the early 1990s to mean ‘give a big-up to.’

The verb big-up, along with the other forms, was quickly popularized by performers of Jamaican background, particularly in Britain. In Noises in the Blood, Carolyn Cooper writes of the British-based DJ Macka B dispensing big-ups at a 1991 reggae concert: “I’m big-up Jamaica, big-up Rastaman.” Similarly, in the 1992 song “Sweet Jamaica” (later appearing on the soundtrack of the movie Cool Runnings) the reggae singer Tony Rebel exhorted, “Help me big up Jamaica …We love the vibes, the food, and the culture.” In British usage the verb could be found in the mainstream media by the late ’90s, as in a Guardian article from 1999 describing how the owner of the Italian airline Debonair “does radio adverts bigging up his own airline.” Until recently, however, many Americans might have only been exposed to big-up through “Da Ali G Show” (first broadcast in the States on HBO in 2003), in which Sacha Baron Cohen’s persona of Ali G used the expression as part of his “Jafaican” patter.

The three quotations at the top of the column demonstrate how big-up is finally settling into the American lexicon, but they also indicate another way that usage is solidifying. Note that Jaime Pressly said that “Ugly Betty” was “big-upping the ugly fat girl,” not that the show was “bigging up the ugly fat girl” (or “bigging the ugly fat girl up“). So we find that big-up is being treated as a single entity that can be inflected with verb endings, rather than as the verb big plus the particle up. This also helps explain why the hyphenated form is appearing so commonly in print. It’s a bit unusual to find a so-called “phrasal verb” (also known as a “verb-particle construction”) undergoing this type of reanalysis, but one similar case is voice over meaning ‘to supply unseen narration to a broadcast.’ A film can be voiced over or it can be voice-overed, depending on whether voice over is treated as one entity or two. Of course, the existence of the noun voice-over helps with the single-entity reading, just as the noun big-up encourages inflected forms like big-upping.

And for anyone who finds the verb big-up to be objectionable, I would simply say, in the spirit of “The Simpsons,” it embiggens our language. In fact, it’s a perfectly cromulent word.

Ben Zimmer is an editor at Oxford University Press and a true word junkie. Once a week he surfaces from his dictionaries to write this column. Check out his “words of the week” on our main page (center column) or by clicking here

Now that U.S. voters are deeply enmeshed in the presidential primary season, I’ve been thinking a lot about the word primary. (Or maybe it was last week’s column on subprime that primed the pump.) Primary and its colleague caucus are distinctly American political terms for the processes by which a party’s candidates are selected, and tracing the usage of these words offers a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of the nation’s electoral process.

Before the advent of direct primaries for the election of presidents and lesser officeholders, candidates for the major political parties were nominated by local policymakers in small meetings known as caucuses. The origin of the word caucus is not certain, but the best guess is that it derives from the Algonquian word cau’-cau’-as’u meaning ‘adviser.’ Though there is no direct evidence of this etymology, it seems plausible given that the earliest known caucuses were clubs in New England, where the use of Native American names was quite popular. Along similar lines, the Narragansett words sachem ‘chief’ and powwow ‘meeting’ were extended into the early American political scene.

The first known use of caucus or caucas has generally been assumed to be a diary entry by John Adams in February 1763: “This day learned that the Caucas Clubb meets at certain Times in the Garret of Tom Daws.” But a slightly earlier variant appeared in the Boston Gazette of May 5, 1760, in an article about a political club known as “the New and Grand Corcas.” (Two researchers, Stephen Goranson and J.L. Bell, recently discovered this article independently of each other.) It’s helpful to know that by the mid-18th century, New England dialects had already become non-rhotic or “r-less,” so that the spelling corcas would be pronounced roughly the same as caucas or caucus. There are some claims that the caucuses of Boston actually date back to the 1720s, but for now 1760 is the date to beat for the term, regardless of its spelling.

Soon after caucus became popular as a noun, it also appeared as a verb, again from the pen of John Adams. In a letter to James Warren dated May 12, 1776, Adams wrote: “For God’s Sake Caucass it, before Hand, and agree unanimously to push for the same Man.” In that passage caucus is used as a transitive verb meaning ‘decide on (something) in a caucus.’ By 1788 the verbal noun caucusing was in use, and the intransitive verb caucus ‘to hold a caucus’ followed on its heels. Even now we read about voters in Iowa or Nevada going caucusing, since those states have inherited systems for selecting delegates for presidential candidates that can be traced back to those early New England caucuses.

Most states, however, now have direct primaries instead of caucuses, thanks in large part to the efforts of the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century. Primary is of course short for primary election, contrasted in the U.S. with the general election in November when candidates from different parties face off. But even before primaries as we know them took shape, the word was used as an adjective to describe primary assemblies or primary meetings that chose candidates or delegates in a caucus-like (caucusoid?) manner. The phrase primary election is first attested in 1835, and by 1859 it had been shortened to just plain primary: a New York Times article from that year said of a candidate for District Attorney in Brooklyn, “the primaries gave him the coveted nomination.”

When states began experimenting with the modern primary system about a century ago, the word primary followed the path of caucus and was transformed into a verb. In one early example from the populist leader Tom Watson in 1904, white primary was used as a verb to refer to the discriminatory practice of holding all-white primary elections in Southern states: “What can the negro do? He has been disfranchised in nearly every southern state, except Georgia, and in Georgia he has been ‘white primaried.’” In a 1908 newspaper article from Sandusky, Ohio, we find the nonce verb out-primary: “The senator was out-primaried, if we may use that term.” And in 1916 a paper from Fort Wayne, Indiana used primary as an intransitive verb to mean ‘hold a primary,’ much like caucus before it: “Texas Democrats today are primarying on everything from prohibition to dog warden.”

In more recent years primary has been used as a verb in a rather different political sense, referring to the candidates themselves and their campaigns against party opponents. Thus the Syracuse Herald Journal reported in March 1978 that Robert Byrne was “considering primarying against [Rep. William F.] Walsh for the Republican nomination.” Primary as a transitive verb meaning ‘to oppose (someone) in a primary’ begins showing up in 1982, as when a local candidate explained in the New York Times, “John primaried me and won — by about 95 votes.” Nowadays the verb typically shows up when an incumbent politician falls out of favor with a faction of his or her own party and runs the risk of “getting primaried.”

As we make our way to February 5th, a.k.a. Super Duper Tuesday or Tsunami Tuesday, when about half the country participates in presidential primaries, American voters should keep in mind the rich history encapsulated in our electoral terminology. Happy primarying, or caucusing, as the case may be!

Ben Zimmer is an editor at Oxford University Press and a true word junkie. Once a week he surfaces from his dictionaries to write this column. Check out his “words of the week” on our main page (center column) or by clicking here