Language

A drinking bout in several parts (Part 3: Mead)

By Anatoly Liberman

Tales that explain the origin of things are called etiological. All etymologies are etiological tales by definition. It seems that one of the main features of Homo sapiens has always been his unquenchable desire to get drunk. Sapiens indeed! The most ancient intoxicating drink of the Indo-Europeans was mead. Moreover, it seems that several neighboring tribes borrowed the name of this drink from them (and undoubtedly the drink itself: otherwise, what would have been the point of taking over the word?), for we have Finnish mesi, Proto-Chinese

A drinking bout in several parts (Part 2: Beer)

By Anatoly Liberman

At the beginning of the previous post, I promised to say more about some strange names of beverages. The time has come to make good on my promise. In a note dated December 1892, we can read the following: “Shandygaff is the name of a mixture of beer and ginger-beer…, and according to evidence given at the recent trial of the East Manchester election petition, a mixture of bitter beer and lemonade is in Manchester called a smiler.” Shandygaff and especially its shortened form shandy are still well-known words

Hamlet, and his secret names

By Lisa Collinson
In this new article, I conclude that Hamlet probably came ultimately from Gaelic Admlithi: a name attached to a player (or ‘mocker’) in a strange and violent medieval Irish tale known in English as ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’. If I’m right, this means that some version of the Hamlet-name was associated with players hundreds of years before Shakespeare lived or wrote.

Who cares about National Grammar Day? Or is it whom?

By Dennis Baron
March 4 is National Grammar Day. According to its sponsor, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG, they call themselves, though between you and me, it’s not the sort of acronym to roll trippingly off the tongue), National Grammar Day is “an imperative . . . . to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!”

The National Grammar Day website is full of imperatives about correct punctuation, pronoun use, and dangling participles. In the spirit of good sportsmanship, it points out

A Drinking Bout in Several Parts (Part 1.5: Ale continued)

By Anatoly Liberman

The surprising thing about the runic alu (on which see the last January post), the probable etymon of ale, is its shortness. The protoform was a bit longer and had t after u, but the missing part contributed nothing to the word’s meaning. To show how unpredictable the name of a drink may be (before we get back to ale), I’ll quote a passage from Ralph Thomas’s letter to Notes and Queries for 1897 (Series 8, volume XII, p. 506). It is about the word fives, as in a pint of fives, which means “…‘four ale’ and ‘six ale’ mixed, that is, ale at fourpence a quart and sixpence a quart.

Hollywood and The Dude

Last week we prepared for the Academy Awards by discussing words and phrases coined from film (twitterpated, bogart, party on) as well as linguistic choices in film this year (Winkelvii, ballerina lingo, The Kids are All Right, not Alright) . While watching the awards last night it occurred to me that we failed to address one of the most important cinematic words of all time: dude. Or in the parlance of our time: The Dude.

The government’s definition of writing is seriously out of date

By Dennis Baron

There’s a federal law that defines writing. Because the meaning of the words in our laws isn’t always clear, the very first of our federal laws, the Dictionary Act–the name for Title 1, Chapter 1, Section 1, of the U.S. Code–defines what some of the words in the rest of the Code mean, both to guide legal interpretation and to eliminate the need to explain those words each time they appear. Writing is one of the words it defines, but the definition needs an upgrade.

The Dictionary Act consists of a single sentence, an introduction and ten short clauses defining a minute subset of our legal vocabulary, words like person, officer, signature, oath, and last but not least, writing.

And the winners are…language lovers!

By Grace Labatt

The 2011 Academy Awards® take place this Sunday, February 27, the culmination of months of speculation about who will wear what, who will have the hardest time with the TelePrompTer, and, of course, who will win. But regardless of who goes home with an Oscar—whether it’s Natalie Portman for playing a tormented ballerina or Annette Bening for playing a tormented wife—language lovers already have plenty to celebrate with this year’s honorees. Films in 2010 had an array of unusual linguistic choices that highlighted their screenwriters’ unique skills.

Words, words, words

By Elizabeth Knowles
‘Is it in the dictionary?’ is a formulation suggesting that there is a single lexical authority: ‘The Dictionary’. As the British academic Rosamund Moon has commented, ‘The dictionary most cited in such cases is the UAD: the Unidentified Authorizing Dictionary, usually referred to as “the dictionary”, but very occasionally as “my dictionary”.’ The American scholar John Algeo has coined the term lexicographicolatry for a reverence for dictionary authority amounting to idolatry. As he explained:

Monthly Gleanings: February 2011

By Anatoly Liberman
As I said, when I first broached this subject, discussing the merits and demerits of the split infinitive is an unprofitable occupation: all the arguments have been repeated many times. But an ironic comment on my post made me return to splitting. The differences between me and a huge segment of the world (a look at British newspapers shows that the infection is not limited to American usage) can be formulated so: my principle is “split if you must,” while many others seem to stick to the principle “split at all costs.” Our correspondent asserted that nothing justifies keeping the particle to and the verbal form in close proximity. Not quite so.

Bada-Bing! – Episode 11 – The Oxford Comment

With the Academy Awards right around the corner, we thought it might be fun to look at the lexical impact of films and some words that were actually coined by movies.

100+ Eskimo words for snow? Not so.

By Dave Wilton

Having just moved to Toronto, Ontario from Berkeley, California, one thing that is on my mind, as well as on my front yard, is snow. Crunching through the drifts on my way to the subway, or when I walk my dog Dexter, gives me a lot of time to contemplate the unfamiliar white stuff. One of those thoughts is how familiarity with snow figures into one of the more persistent false beliefs about language—the one that says, “Eskimos have X number of words for snow,” with X being a number ranging from several dozen to as many as four hundred.

A Drinking Bout in Several Parts (Part 1: Ale)

By Anatoly Liberman

English lacks a convenient word for “ancestors of Germanic speaking people.” Teutons, an obsolete English gloss for German Germanen, is hardly ever used today. The adjective Germanic has wide currency, and, when pressed for the noun, some people translate Germanen as “Germans” (not a good solution). I needed this introduction as an apology for asking the question: “What did the ancient Teutons drink?” The “wine card” contained many items, for, as usual, not everybody drank the same, and different occasions called for different beverages and required

The Short and the Long of it

By Anatoly Liberman

There are two questions here. First, why does again rhyme with den, fen, ten rather than gain? Second, where did -t in against come from? I’ll begin with against.

Old English had a ramified system of endings. The most common ending of the genitive was -s, which also occurred as a suffix of adverbs, or in words that, by definition, had no case forms at all (adverbs are not declined!). It is easy to detect the traces of the adverbial -s in such modern words as

Happy Chinese New Year, Rabbit!

This year the Chinese New Year begin today, February 3^rd, and people all around the world will be ringing in the year of the Rabbit. Oxford Chinese Dictionary editor Julie Kleeman shares some insight into the traditions associated with the Chinese New Year celebrations.

Infidels and Etymologists

By Anatoly Liberman

Today hardly anyone would have remembered the meaning of the word giaour “infidel” (the spellchecker does not know it and, most helpfully, suggests glamour and Igor among four variants) but for the title of Byron’s once immensely popular 1813 poem: many editions; ten thousand copies sold on the first day, an unprecedented event in the history of 19^th-century publishing. Nowadays, at best a handful of specialists in English romanticism