If you haven’t already heard, unfriend is the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year. In honor of this announcement, I surveyed Facebook users across the country about why they would choose to unfriend someone.

1. They’ve turned into a robot.
“People send me Green Patches all the time,” said Jane Kim, a television research assistant in NYC. “It’s annoying. And that’s all I ever get from them. Clearly, they’re not interested in actually being friends.”

That’s because your friends are robots, Jane. Marketing robots. These are the friends you never hear from except when they want you to join a cause, sign a petition, donate money, become a fan of a product, or otherwise promote something. Farmville robots are increasingly becoming problems as well, but are not yet grounds for unfriending.

2. You don’t know who they are.
“A few days ago, Facebook suggested I reconnect with a friend whose name I didn’t recognize,” said Jessica Kay, a lawyer in Kansas City. “She’d recently gotten married, but I hadn’t even known she was engaged. I’ll probably unfriend her later. Along with some random people I met at parties in college.”

“You’re tired of seeing [that mystery name] your newsfeed,” said Jonathan Evans, a contract specialist in Seattle. “You haven’t talked to that person since the random class you took together, and you’ll probably never talk to them again.”

3. They broke your heart.
Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City, shared that his number one reason to unfriend someone is “because they just broke up with you on Facebook.”

So, maybe they didn’t break your heart. But if the only reason you were friends on Facebook is because you two were somehow involved, it might be time to play some Beyoncé, crack open the Haagen-Dazs and click “Remove from Friends”.

4. You don’t like them anymore.
In the early years of Facebook, users would  friend everyone their dorm, everyone from high school, and every person they had ever shared a sandbox with. But now, many people are finding they no longer like a number of their friends, and spend time creating limited profiles, customizing the newsfeed, and avoiding Facebook chat.

Teresa Hynes, a student at St. John’s University, pointed out that it’s silly to be concerned one of these people might find out you’ve unfriended them and get angry. “You are never going to see them again,” she said. “You don’t want to see them ever again. You hated them in high school. Your mass communications group project is over.”

5. Annoying status updates.
“I don’t want to see ‘So-and-so wishes it was over,’” said Andrew Varhol, a marketing manager in NYC. “Or the cheers of bandwagon sports fans—when suddenly someone’s, ‘Go Yankees! Go Jeter!’ Where were you before October?”

Excessive status updates are one example of Facebook abuse. Amy Labagh of powerHouse Books admits she is irritated by frequent updates. “It’s like they want you to think they’re cool,” she said, “but they’re not.”

A professor at NYU, agreed, and said he finds a number of these frequent updates to be “too bourgie.” “It’ll say something like, ‘So-and-so is drinking whatever in the beautiful scenery of some field.’ I mean, really?!”

The style and type of each update is also important. A number of users agree that song lyrics, poetry, and literary quotations can be extremely annoying. Updates with misspellings or lacking punctuation were also noted. “I once unfriended someone because they updated their statuses in all caps,” said Erin Meehan, a marketing associate in NYC.

6. Obnoxious photo uploads.
Everyone has a different idea about what photos are appropriate to post , but a popular complaint from Facebook users in their 20s concerned wedding and baby photos. “It’s just weird,” said a bartender in Manhattan. “I know that older people are joining now, but if you’re at the stage in your life when most the photos are of your kids, I mean, what are you doing on Facebook?”

“I think makeout photos are worse,” said his coworker. “My sister always posts photos of her and her boyfriend kissing. Sometimes I want to unfriend and unfamily her.”

Across the board, a number of users found partially nude photos, or images of someone flexing their muscles as grounds for unfriending. Another reason, as cited specifically by Margitte Kristjansson, graduate student at UC San Diego, could be if “they upload inappropriate pictures of their stab wounds.”

7. Clashing religious or political views.
“I can’t handle it when someone’s updates are always about Jesus,” said Robert Wilder, a writer in New York.

In the same vein, Phil Lee, lead singer of The Muskies, said he’s extremely irritated by “religious proselytizing and over-enthusiastic praise and Bible quoting. Often in all caps.”

An anonymous Brooklynite shared that he purged his Facebook account after the last Presidential election. “It was a big deal to me,” he said. “I found it hard to be friends with people who didn’t vote for Obama.” After which his friend added, “I voted for McKinney.”

8. “I wanted a free Whopper.”
In January, Burger King launched the Whopper Sacrifice application, which promised each Facebook user a free Whopper if they unfriended 10 people. It sounded simple enough, but if you chose to unfriend someone via the application, it sent a notification to that person, announcing they had been sacrificed for the burger. Burger King disabled the application within the month when the Whopper “proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.”

Since Facebook has made the home page much more customizable than it used to be, you might wonder, “Why unfriend when I can hide?” More and more, Facebook users are choosing to use limited profiles and editing their newsfeed so undesirable friends disappear from view. “I find lately I’m friending more people, then blocking them,” said Gary Ferrar, a magician in New York. “That way no one gets mad, no one’s feelings get hurt.”

Do you have another reason? Tell us about it!

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A midwife is called a midwife not because the midwife is in the middle of anything, nor because during the birth of children the midwife is helping the wife as opposed to the husband.

It is pretty uncommon to find men who are midwives but I guess they do exist. The etymology of the word midwife reflects the fact that assisting in bringing a new little person into this world has long been a gender role and almost completely dominated by women.

The wife part of midwife has nothing to do with the marital state of the parents of the baby being delivered, nor that of the midwife herself.

The word wife predates an association with being married or unmarried and in our earliest records just meant “woman.”

If we paste that meaning on midwife we get midwoman.

Unfortunately this doesn’t get us much further along the way toward understanding why these deliverers of babies might be called midwives.

We have to take another step and examine the mid part of midwife.

In this case mid does not mean middle.

There don’t seem to be too many examples of words other than midwife that retain an old meaning of mid but what it is believed to have mean was “with.”

Thus midwife literally means “with woman” and refers to the fact that this woman called a midwife has the job of being with the mother during her labor and delivery.

Our Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary expert, Professor Christian Kay, blogs about the numerous press enquiries and interviews in the wake of the HTOED’s publication.

To read more about the HTOED click here.

An unexpected outcome of the publication of HTOED was the interest it generated in both UK and overseas media. On the whole, encounters with the press have been an enjoyable experience, and they’ve done us proud with articles, reviews, and interviews, but sometimes I find myself conning over the less flattering words for members of the journalistic profession (hack, penciller, tripe-hound, ink-slinger, creeper, thumb-sucker, press gang), and plotting my revenge.

So what interests the media? I learned to carry with me at all times a list of ‘favourite words’ to distribute on request. During the final stages of the project, I had asked the proofreaders to keep an eye open for anything suitable – unfortunately what they considered entertaining was often not what one would want to spell out over the phone or see in a family newspaper. However, I managed to offload such rare gems as spanghew ‘to cause a frog or toad to rise in the air’ (unfortunately mis-spelled as it whizzed round the world), purfle ‘to decorate with a purfle’, and ostrobogulous ‘indecent, somewhat bizarre’. I’m still waiting for a victim for Old English paddanieg ‘an island with frogs on it’ or weirding peas, a Scottish term for peas employed in divination.

Anecdotes were much in demand. Fortunately, we had one anecdote to cap them all, the Great Fire of 1978, when the building housing the project went on fire (as Glaswegians disingenuously say). At that time, all our research was contained in a single set of paper slips, which luckily were housed in metal cabinets and escaped unscathed. Recounting this for the twentieth time, it was tempting to embellish the narrative, rescuing screaming infants, or at least professors, from the flames rather than smouldering volumes of the OED.

Human interest questions varied in subtlety: “how many years have you worked on the project”, “how old were you when you started”, or simply, “how old are you?” Colleagues threatened to get me a badge like the ones children have on their birthdays, emblazoned with ‘I am 69’ to forestall such questions. Many reporters seemed to find it incredible that anyone would work on a project for 44 years, as several of us did. Some hinted that this was at the expense of a more fulfilling life, but I was nevertheless startled that in 2009 a newspaper would produce a headline describing me as a “lingo-loving spinster”, and one, moreover, who “coyly confessed” to celebrating publication with a glass of champagne.

I am not really a morning person, so the number of breakfast radio programmes requesting live (or fairly live) interviews was something of a trial (unless they were in Australia, which was fine, as the interviews took place in the evening). On publication day, I set off at 6.30 a.m. for the BBC headquarters in Glasgow, and by 7.45 had chatted brightly to four radio stations. At that point a colleague and I were handed a news story about an Australian golf course and asked to ‘translate’ it using HTOED synonyms, thus providing an uplifting finale to the programme at 8.55. HTOED does not abound in synonyms for the creatures which apparently haunt Australian golf courses, such as kangaroos, camels, dingos, and hairy-nosed wombats. We felt that we had done pretty well to produce boomers, ships of the desert, warrigals, and hirsute-nebbed badgers. Then we returned to campus to deal with three television crews.

One learned to be tolerant of minor inaccuracies (OED is a dictionary, OUP is a publisher; HTOED contains 800,000 different meanings, not 800,000 different words). Often I longed to launch into my first-year lectures on the history of the English language, while refusing even to attempt to answer such questions as “What is the oldest word in English?”

The closing question was often on the lines of “What are you going to do now?” as if life had come to a stop when the last slip was entered in the database (by coincidence, or careful planning, the last slip was the word thesaurus itself). One interviewer had thought this through, however, taking due account of age and gender, and asked: “And now you’ve finished, have you got something else you’d like to get back to, like your garden, or a big piece of knitting?” I’d like to put it on record that I do not have, and never have had, “a big piece of knitting”.

Ammon Shea is a vocabularian, lexicographer, the author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages and a frequent OUPblog contributor.  In light of our Word of the Year 2009 announcement (WOTY) Ammon has taken a closer look at how WOTY is chosen.  In the post below he reveals the process that led to unfriend being chosen as WOTY 2009.

Every year, at about this time, the New Oxford American Dictionary releases its Word of the Year (WOTY), a combination of solid lexicographic practice and a light-hearted look at the changing face of English today. Since there are quite possibly thousands (or at least dozens) of people out there who wonder “where does the Word of the Year come from?” the following is a brief explanation of what this momentous process entails, and what it does not.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Word of the Year is chosen by a group of unruly lexicographers, drunk on whimsy and an inflated sense of their own power, who are hell-bent on introducing silly words into English. So let’s see what actually happens.

The candidates for WOTY are drawn from three main sources, each of which reflects a particular strength of Oxford University Press and its unrivaled language research program. The first of these is the Oxford English Corpus, a database of over two and a half billion words drawn from current English the world over. The corpus is fully searchable, allowing the editors to find words that have either entered the language or changed meaning significantly enough to warrant attention. The use of the corpus allows tracking of words, and the examination of the shifts that occur in geography, register, and frequency of use.

The second body of candidates to merit consideration for the WOTY is composed of those that have been “catchworded” (catchworded words are those that have been identified as new or unusual usages by one of the vast number of readers who provide citations of word use for the OED and other Oxford Dictionaries). An editor who is responsible for new words in English combines the catchworded items into a digital database, a sort of mini-corpus, in which individual words can be analyzed by frequency, register, and region.

The third source for potential Words of the Year comes from the various editors at OUP, who are continually keeping tabs on the varieties of English and the ways in which these varieties are changing. These words come from the editor’s own reading, or from conversations they’ve had, and from lists of new words that are taken from one of the numerous dictionaries published by OUP.

Once the preliminary list of words has been collected it is sent to a group of perhaps 7 or 8 editors, who commence poking at the words with a sharp stick, weeding out those that aren’t in fact new, or which may new, but not yet widespread enough to be more than a regionalism. The words are all checked to make sure that they do not exist in any current dictionary, and that there is sufficient evidence in the Oxford English Corpus, in various forms of print, and on internet search engines to warrant each one’s inclusion.

This list of words is sent around and winnowed to a short list, which is then itself winnowed to a final list, and from the final list a single word is chosen which has been accorded the honor of being the Word of the Year.

Although the process of picking the WOTY is quite similar to that of introducing a word into a dictionary, this status does not guarantee that the word will be included in any future reference works. The word in question may be quite widespread today and have fallen entirely from use within a few years. The WOTY is not a popularity contest, nor is it simply the word that has been used more than any other over the past year. It is a forward-looking examination of one small aspect of our language, one in which the Oxford lexicographers take a chance on picking the word that they think represents the use of language today, and that will continue to have an influence.

It can be a tricky business, trying to figure out which words will stick ahead of time, and there is no shame in making an educated guess that turns out to not be as accurate several years hence as it seems now. James Murray famously decided to leave the word appendicitis out of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary after receiving advice from William Osler (a famous doctor at Oxford) that it was likely not a word that would ever be in widespread use. A short time later the coronation of Edward VII was delayed after he had to undergo an emergency operation for his appendicitis. Although many people wondered why the word was not in the OED, there was no way that Murray could have made the necessary guess to include it.

The WOTY is an attempt to capture some of the breathtaking fluidity of our language, and to look at its semantic change and inventiveness in real time, through the use of solid research, editorial skill, and intuitive guesswork.

By Anatoly Liberman

Specialists seldom agree about anything (that is why they are specialists), and in the field of word history few etymologies are final. But today heated controversies regarding the origin of words seldom spill over into the pages of the popular press. At best, concerned individuals write to editors or Dear X and ask questions. Most of them begin with the statement: “My husband and I (variant: my colleagues in the office) cannot decide whether….” The editor of the word column or Dear X gives a cautious reply (sounding judgmental? God forbid!), intimating that opinions differ but that effect and affect should rather not be confused, that careful speakers distinguish lie and lay (though if you are a Midwesterner, go ahead and say: “I laid for a few minutes”—never mind what), and that the origin of boondoggle is uncertain, but according to — (fill in the blank), it comes from…. Unfortunately, in the English speaking world hardly any outlets for such questions and answers exist, whereas in Germany, for example, any respectable library subscribes to at least one of three language journals aimed at teachers, editors, and everybody trying to speak and write well. The Internet bears witness to the need for an authoritative English magazine specializing in such matters. Countless blogs invite comments on word origins, and people offer them. Etymology has gone underground and rots there.

There was a time in both England and the United States when lances were broken in open etymological tournaments. My database, with its more that 20,000 titles, shows that the history of some words, especially slang, was discussed mainly in Notes and Queries (including this great periodical’s local offspring), The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Athenaeum, The Academy, The Saturday Review, and so forth. The vehemence of those jousts cannot but fill one with wonder. The derivation of English words and phrases also took a good deal of space in books like John Timbs’s Notabilia; Curious and Amusing Facts about Many Things Explained and Illustrated (1872; printers occasionally put a semicolon in titles where we have a colon) and the much more reliable Nuggets of Knowledge by George W. Stimpson, first published in 1925 (it had a sequel and was reprinted as late as 1970). One of the bones of etymological contention was Whitsunday. A look at that old mini-tournament may perhaps be worth a minute. Whitsunday, it will be remembered, means the same as Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter, celebrating the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples. In Old English, Pentecost, the name of the Feast, appeared in the form pentecosten. Whitsunday (also in its archaic form) emerged about a century later. Pentecost is of Greek origin and means “fiftieth” (day after the numeral has been left out; with respect to the root, compare pentagon). The only serious question is: “What is Whit-”?

Several nonsensical etymologies of Whitsunday competed for recognition, of which two were especially hard to eradicate. The first denied any connection between Whit- and white and associated Whit- with wisdom, so that Whitsunday turned out to be a day on which wisdom was acquired or on which wise (“witty”) people were selected by some assembly. But wit never had an h preceding w, while the oldest forms of Whitsunday (hwit-) always did. Norman scribes could not pronounce the consonantal group hw and tended to omit the first letter. This fact is of no importance for the derivation of a native English word. The vowel of Old Engl. hwit- was long (it had the value of Modern Engl. ee). In words of more than two syllables, the first vowel regularly underwent shortening; hence the difference in the pronunciation of south and southern (despite the traditional spelling of both with ou), holy and holiday, homonymous with whole-ly and holly-day, and many others.

Supporters of the other etymology (a sizable crowd) traced Whitsunday to Pfingsten, which is a German modification of the Greek word. I am sorry to report that some reviewers of Hensleigh Wedgwood’s English etymological dictionary (Skeat’s once influential predecessor) and Timbs, the author of Notabilia, held the same view. In their writings, they never asked why in the 12th century the Old English name of a religious holiday should have been borrowed from German and what phonetic tricks transformed Pfingsten into Whitsunday. If I am not mistaken, cows are colorblind, so that a red rag cannot irritate a bull more than any other, but it is a pity to give up the idiom. The derivation of Whitsunday from Pfingsten (occurring in Old High German only in the dative plural as phingstenen) was to Walter W. Skeat like that proverbial red rag to a bull. An irascible man and a hard working scholar, he despised amateurs and had no patience for unprofitable guesswork or smug ignorance. Between 1877 and 1904 he wrote five letters to journals, four of them to Notes and Queries, on Whitsunday, and discussed it at length not only in his great dictionary but also in its concise version. And indeed, before 1400 no High German word was known to English speakers, who already had pentecosten. To boost his argument, Skeat cited the Old Icelandic analog of Whitsunday, unambiguously meaning “White Sunday.” However, the Scandinavian form may have been an adaptation of the Old English one. It tells us how the English word was understood in the North but may have no independent value (this is how we should interpret the remarks in the OED). And Skeat was right when he said as early as 1877: “It is, perhaps, as well to note that Whitsunday is a wretched popular corruption of Whitsunday-week.”

It is not absolutely clear what “white” has to do with Whitsunday. Modern dictionaries explain: “From a tradition of clothing the newly baptized in white baptismal robes on Whitsunday” (sometimes with probably inserted for safety) and refer, as Wedgwood and Skeat did, to Dominica in albis “Sunday in Whites,” which, however, was the name of the First Sunday after Easter but called this for exactly the same reason. Another suggestion about the color white has been offered by T. Oswald Cokayne, a reputable scholar, even if not a luminary in the area of etymology. Originally, he said, Whitsunday was a pagan festival celebrating the coming of summer, and young women appeared on that day in white clothes, “asking for a white clear summer sun.” Pagan and Christian rites merged in post-conversion Europe, and disentangling their roots is not always easy. The reference to Dominica in albis remains the strongest argument in favor of the view we find in our dictionaries, but even Skeat admitted that, although the origin of the word Whitsunday is non-controversial, we are allowed to argue over the reasons for the name.

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most “un-” prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar “un-” verbs (uncap, unpack), but “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

Wondering what other new words were considered for the New Oxford American Dictionary 2009 Word of the Year?  Check out the list below.

Technology

hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

Economy

freemium – a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content

funemployed – taking advantage of one’s newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests

zombie bank – a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support

Politics and Current Affairs

Ardi – (Ardipithecus ramidus) oldest known hominid, discovered in Ethiopia during the 1990s and announced to the public in 2009

birther – a conspiracy theorist who challenges President Obama’s birth certificate

choice mom – a person who chooses to be a single mother

death panel – a theoretical body that determines which patients deserve to live, when care is rationed

teabagger -a person, who protests President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)

Environment

brown state – a US state that does not have strict environmental regulations

green state – a US state that has strict environmental regulations

ecotown - a town built and run on eco-friendly principles

Novelty Words

deleb – a dead celebrity

tramp stamp – a tattoo on the lower back, usually on a woman

Notable Word Clusters for 2009:

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Once upon a time my mother was knitting a style of sweater that had many open holes in the weave. My father looked at it and said “no wonder it’s going so fast, it’s mostly air.”

That’s the thing about nets too, they’re mostly air; but it’s what’s around the air that does the job.

I was looking at the web based dictionary wordnik and one of the features they have is a little graphic representing frequency of a word’s appearance over time. It’s interesting that their plot for the word net falls off during the 1920s to 1950s and then pops back up again in the 1990s.

It seems obvious to me that the frequency of the word net over the past decade would have increased as an abbreviation for the word internet.

I wonder what made the word less frequent after 1950; perhaps more grocery store shopping and less small-scale fishing? I don’t picture small-scale fishermen as being terribly prolific writers who’d have bulked up the word-stock before that.

If you have any ideas let me know.

Of course it could be that the wordnik stats feature has a kink in it.

Clearly the internet is so called because it is full of links between nodes, just like other networks; streets, train tracks, groups of friends.

All of these networks are so called because a real net is strands linking knots.

But it turns out that a real net is called a net not because of the strands but because of the knots.

I mentioned knitting and nodes as well as net and knot and all of these words go back to a knotty origin. They have a granular kind of Old English taste to them don’t they?

Today, Professor Christian Kay from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary team talks about categorization in the HTOED.

Click here for more posts about the Historical Thesaurus.

When I first came to Glasgow, I was puzzled by children ringing my doorbell and asking, “Goat ony ginger boatles, Missus?” (which loosely translates as, “Do you have any ginger bottles which you might give us, Madam?”) I understood that they wanted to take the bottles back to the shop and claim a refund on them, but I could not understand why their trade was so specialized. To me, a ginger bottle must be a bottle containing a ginger-flavoured liquid. Only later did I learn that for Glaswegian children, and many adults, “ginger” was a generic term for any fizzy drink – what I, equally illogically, call lemonade.

What was happening here was a clash of categorization systems. The Glaswegians and I were surveying the world of drinks and organizing it in different ways. As an incomer, I had to learn the categories of their society if I was to operate successfully within it. A similar situation faces anyone moving to a new place, or learning a new language; children learning their first language may initially identify different categories from those employed by adults.

In the Historical Thesaurus of the OED, categories shift in time rather than in space. In category 01.02.07 People, for example, we find increasing numbers of relatively recent words referring to people in terms of their age: teenager (first recorded in OED2 in 1941), bobby-soxer (1944), pre-schooler (1954), subteenager (1959). The need to make such fine distinctions perhaps reflects the importance of age in our society, as do terms at the other end of the scale, such as senior citizen (1938), third age (1972), and, less flatteringly, wrinkly (1972) and crumbly (1976) to refer to an old person. Comparable terms for many other members of the animal kingdom exist in 01.02.06 Animals, but here our world knowledge may not immediately supply the categories. How many modern urban dwellers know that the words teg, hoggerel and thrinter refer to sheep in their first, second and third years respectively, or indeed to sheep at all? Fortunately for the classifier, this information is readily available in the OED.

A further complication lies in the fact that people can happily operate with more than one system of classification. Ask someone what a tomato is, and they are quite likely to reply that it is a type of vegetable, even if they are aware that technically a tomato is a fruit. The clash here is between a folk category, based on the use of the object in our society (we eat it with other vegetables), and a scientific or expert category (fruits have seeds). Since much of English vocabulary came into use before serious classification of the natural world got underway in the eighteenth century, the two systems often have to be juggled in HTOED. Early words for plants, for example, fall more readily into categories such as ‘medicinal’, ‘poisonous’, or ‘yielding a dye’ than they do into a scientific taxonomy. Classifiers have to take account of such duality. In the case of tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers, and so on, the solution is a category called Fruits as vegetables.

Categorization is a basic human cognitive skill. We begin in childhood to organize things according to whether they are alike or unalike, and continue this process in adult life. Most of us will impose some sort of order on our material possessions, sorting books by author (or title, or subject, or size …), socks by colour, sweaters by season, and so on – the categories may vary from person to person, but the principle is there. Dictionary definitions often categorize words by reference to other words, as when OED defines sofa as “a form of lounge or couch” or rapier as “a long, thin, sharp-pointed sword”. Such relationships are revealed by proximity in HTOED, which thus constitutes a map of their development of in the history of the English language.

We use words and the categories they represent to impose order on our universe. If we hear the word tree, or hill, or green, very different images of these phenomena may spring to mind. Yet the multitude of trees that an individual may have seen have enough in common to form a category of Trees which is shared by other speakers of the language, and thus enables communication to proceed. (Except, of course, when the categories are fuzzy, as they mostly are, and we start arguing about whether a tree is actually a bush, or a hill qualifies as a mountain, or this particular green is closer to blue or yellow, but that’s a different problem.)

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at the dilemma of being old in the internet age.

Philip Greenspun, an MIT software engineer and hi-tech guru, argues in a recent blog post that “technology reduces the value of old people.” It’s not that old people don’t do technology. On the contrary, many of them are heavy users of computers and cell phones. It’s that the young won’t bother tapping the knowledge of their elders because they can get so much more, so much faster, from Wikipedia and Google.

It was adults, not the young, who invented computers, programmed them, and created the internet. OK, maybe not old adults, in some cases maybe not even old-enough-to-buy-beer adults, but adults nonetheless. Plus, the over-35 set is Facebook’s fastest growing demographic.

Even so, despite starting the computer revolution, and despite their presence on the World Wide Web today, the old are fast becoming irrelevant. According to Greenspun, “An old person will know more than a young person, but can any person, young or old, know as much as Google and Wikipedia? Why would a young person ask an elder the answer to a fact question that can be solved authoritatively in 10 seconds with a Web search?”

Why indeed? With knowledge located deep in Google’s server farms instead of in the collective memories of senior citizens, the old today are fast becoming useless. Might as well put them out on the ice floe and let them float off to whatever comes next.

According to the federal government, which is never wrong about these things, I myself became officially old, and therefore useless as a repository of wisdom and memory, last Spring. But I’m not worried about being put out to sea on an ice floe, because thanks to global warming, the ice is melting so fast that it poses no danger. There’s not even enough ice out there to sink another Titanic, though if someone built a new Titanic people wouldn’t sail on it because it probably wouldn’t have free wi-fi.

I found out all I know about global warming and the shrinking ice caps and even the Titanic not from that well-known American elder, Al Gore, but from Wikipedia. Wikipedia also told me that Al Gore, who is no spring chicken, invented the internet. I learned from Google that there was no free wi-fi before the internet, and no such thing as a free lunch.

Socrates once warned that our increased reliance on writing would weaken human memory — everything we’d need to remember would be stored in documents, not brain cells, so instead of remembering stuff, we could just look it up. Socrates knew all about brain cells, of course, because he looked that up in a Greek encyclopedia (he didn’t use the Encyclopaedia Britannica, because he couldn’t read English). And just as he predicted, Socrates, who was no spring chicken, had to look up brain cells again a week later, because he forgot what it said.

2,400 years have passed since Socrates drank hemlock — that was his fellow Athenians’ way of putting an irrelevant old man out to sea — but it looks like our current dependence on computers is rendering old people’s memories irrelevant once again. And that’s probably a good thing, because as Socrates learned the hard way, old people’s memories are notoriously unreliable, which is why Al Gore, who foresaw that this would happen, also invented sticky notes.

David’s “The Death of Socrates.” We remember the Greek philosopher’s critique of writing because his student Plato wrote it down on sticky notes.

Like old people, old elephants are also no longer necessary. Elephants became an endangered species not because hunters killed them for the ivory in their tusks but because now that we have computers, no one cared that an elephant never forgets. Technology reduced the value of elephants, and so the elephants just wandered off to the elephants’ burial ground to wait for whatever comes next. And also because the elephants’ burial ground has free wi-fi.

Unlike elephants and people, computers never forget, so we can rest assured that the value of computers will never be reduced. Unlike fallible life-form-based memory banks, computers preserve their information forever, regardless of disk crashes, magnetic fields, coffee spills on keyboards, or inept users who accidentally erase an important file.

And there’s no need to throw out your 5.25″ floppies, laser disks, minidisks, Betamax, 8-track, flash drives, or DVDs just because some new digital medium becomes popular, because unlike writing on clay, stone, silk, papyrus, vellum, parchment, newsprint, or 100% rag bond paper, all computerized information is always forward-compatible with any upgrades or innovations that come along.

Plus all the information stored in computer clouds is totally reliable and always available, except of course for those pesky T-Mobile Sidekick phones whose data somehow disappeared. Assuming the cable’s not down, Google invariably shows us exactly what we’re looking for, or something that’s at least close enough to it, and Wikipedia is never wrong, ever. That’s because the information on Google and Wikipedia is put there by robots, or maybe intelligent life forms from outer space, not by people of a certain age who have to write stuff down on stickies, just as Socrates did, so they don’t forget it.

And now that I don’t have to remember all that lore that elders were once responsible for, my brain cells have been freed up to do other important stuff, like spending lots more time online looking for the meaning of life and what comes next, assuming there’s free wi-fi at the coffee shop.

By Anatoly Liberman

Dandy first made its appearance on the Scottish border and in the 1780’s became current in British slang. Its origin (most probably, dialectal) remains a mystery—a common thing with such words. Etymologists have grudgingly resigned themselves to the idea that dandy goes back to the pet name of Andrew. How Andrew became Dandy is also unclear (by attracting d from the middle?). But this is not our problem. Pet names behave erratically. Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Beth make sense, but Bill (= Will) for William? Peggy for Margaret? In any case, Dandy is a recorded short name for Andrew (and incidentally, for Alexander). Trying to discover why Andrew was chosen to represent London overdressed young men (assuming that such a thing happened several hundred years ago) would be a waste of time. This mythic character is a member of the club to which Sam Hill, Smart Aleck, and Jack Sprat (a.k.a. Jack Prat) belong; its whereabouts are lost.

Then there are merry-andrew “buffoon” and jack-a-dandy “a merry foppish fellow” (the latter predates dandy by about a century). The OED is noncommittal with regard to the etymology of dandy but admits a possible connection between it and jack-a-dandy. Here are two quotations in addition to what the OED gives (the second obviously echoes the first or rather is part of a formulaic pattern): “Smart she is and handy, O, /Sweet as sugar candy, O, / Fresh and gay/ As flow’rs in May, / And I’m her Jack-a-dandy, O” (no date given); “My love is blithe and bucksome [sic] / And sweet and fine as can be; / fresh and gay as the flowers in May, / And looks like Jack-a-dandy” (1671). In the 1780s many songs having almost the same refrain were in vogue, with Dandy, O substituting for Jack-o-dandy, O.

We will ignore a few fanciful suggestions (such as the attempt to trace dandy to the name of an ancient tribe, and a few others), for two reasonable derivations have been proposed. One centers around dandiprat “dwarf; urchin; a small coin” (an early 16th-century word). Since its origin is also unknown, no help can be expected from these quarters. But it may be observed that the time gap is significant: if dandy had been “abstracted” from dandiprat, it would probably have surfaced much earlier. Also, dandy does not seem to have been used to mock the ostentatious (and indeed often ridiculously dressed) “swells”: when dandies attracted public notice, they became the object of good-humored, even if vulgar, curiosity and were more often gaped at than vilified. Later, whatever opprobrium might have been associated with them disappeared. Byron was a “dandy.” Around 1830 people spoke about “Winchester gentlemen, Harrow dandies, and Eton bucks” (bucks must have had more than one meaning). Pushkin’s aristocratic Evgeny Onegin was “dressed like a London dandy” (those interested in details should consult Nabokov’s commentary to chapter I of the novel). By contrast, dandiprat never had positive connotations. The second “school of thought” looks for the homeland of dandy in France, even though French lexicographers unanimously state that dandy is an import from England. French dandin means “ninny”; hence the immortal cuckold George Dandin. The verb dandiner has been glossed variously as “to twist one’s body about; have a rolling gait, waddle; occupy oneself with trifles.” Even the earliest dandies were not ninnies, though they did comport themselves in a way that aroused amusement. Apparently, dandy cannot be traced to French dandin.

At this juncture, we could have left our word in its etymological wilderness, but for a certain complication. Dandy “fop” is not an isolated word in English. We find a dandy of punch (that is, a small glass; predominantly Irish), dandy “a vessel rigged as a sloop and having also a jigger mast,” and dandy, a term used as the first element in the names of various contrivances. Whether the boat, the glass, and the contrivances are “neat” is open to doubt. In a local book, the devil’s hounds were called dandy dogs (!). A regional dictionary gives dandy “hand.” And then, whatever the origin of dandiprat, its “prat” must have been dandy. Looking at the words close to dandy in a dictionary, we come across dander “an outburst of anger,” as in get one’s dander up; dander “stroll, saunter,” dander “the ferment (of molasses)” and one more dander “a piece of slag”; dandruff, and dandle “to rock a child” (with which we may, if we wish, compare dangle). In our texts, none of those words predates 1500 (while some were attested much later), and surprisingly, the origin of all of them is unknown (in dandruff only -ruff admits of a convincing explanation). French dandin is also obscure.

While working on the history of English words, I ran into a few instances of what may perhaps be called common old European slang. One example is the family of mooch. The early cognates of this Germanic verb made their way into Italian and almost certainly into French (I will refrain from citing them, for they can be found in my etymological dictionary). Their protoform has a cognate in Old Irish. The puzzling look-alike is Latin muger “a cheat at dice,” which can hardly be related to Germanic-Celtic muk- ~ myk-. It seems that words with the root muk- and mug-, denoting darkness and clandestine dealings, have been current in Europe for at least two millennia. I suspect that a similar, though shorter, story can be told about the dand- words. Middle High German lyric poetry made tandaradei, an exclamation of joy, famous. It has been explained as a shout imitating a bird’s song. Do birds sing tandaradei? Engl. dandle resembles Italian dandolare “swing; toss; dally; loiter.” The OED observes about a possible cognate of a similar sounding German verb that “no word of this family is known in Old or Mid. Eng., and the sense is not so close to the English as in the Italian word.” Yet German tändeln means’ “dawdle, play, etc.”

We will probably never know the origin of dandy for sure, but if we venture into the prehistory of slang, we may risk the conjecture that when dand- words first invaded some West-European languages around 1500, they meant “active, mobile” or “quick, nimble” (is this where dandy “hand” came from? are dandy dogs quick dogs?). “Swing, shake” would be a natural extension of quickness, and the exclamation tandaredei would emerge as a natural expression of animal spirits. Fine and dandy is a tautological binomial like safe and sound; all that is quick and nimble is fine by definition. Jack-a-dandy certainly knew how to win a girl’s heart. At some time dandy “fop” may have had amorous overtones. French dandiner “to twist one’s body” fits the picture well (compare “swing, toss”). Twisting in coils found no favor with the French: it must have struck them as idiotic. Hence dandin, a back formation from the verb? If this is how dandy acquired its meaning, it has nothing to do with Andrew, so that the association between them is late. The origin of dander, in all its manifestations, deserves a special look.

Can my reconstruction of the origin of dandy be taken seriously? Slang travels light from land to land. An expressive word can conquer half of Europe in a matter of a few years; consider our modern cool. In the past, the process was not so quick. Anyway, if we accept the etymology proposed here as a working hypothesis, we won’t be poorer than before, for at the outset we had nothing.