WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 614 Saturday 22 November 2008 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/atuw.htm The newsletter is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Spoken Web. 3. Recently noted. 4. Weird Words: Tripudiate. 5. Elsewhere. 6. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- BLACK SWANS A couple of readers pointed out that Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about black swans before his 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. He had previously introduced the idea in his work of 2001, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life. As a result, there are some references to the idea before 2007, among them Maggie Mahar's book of 2003, Bull!: A History of the Boom, 1982-1999. Jeremy Ardley e-mailed from the home of actual black swans: Perth, Western Australia. He says that they're are just as unpredictable as their figurative counterparts. "Their most significant feature is their desire to walk - slowly - to some other location. If this requires them to cross a four-lane highway they will do so. Usually this results in the entire highway stopping while the swan walks to its next dining stop. This happens at random during any day. Truly, to a commuter in Perth, a black swan is a Black Swan. It can strike at any time and cause untold disruption." NEW SUBSCRIBERS A special welcome to the many subscribers who have joined following a link from Randy Cassingham's newsletter This Is True. If you don't already subscribe to his weekly compilation of weird and wacky news stories, which show that collectively human beings have a long way to do before they achieve the pinnacle of evolution, you're missing a lot of fun. Follow this link to get to his site: http://www.thisistrue.com/. 2. Turns of Phrase: Spoken Web ------------------------------------------------------------------- Though the Web has evolved to provide audio, pictures and video, for most of us our primary interaction with the online world is via the written word, typed text in particular. This is a high barrier for many people, especially in developing countries. Imagine, for example, how an illiterate person could use it, or somebody with no access to a computer or any understanding of one. A new project from IBM India Research Laboratory called the Spoken Web is trying to resolve this problem. In essence, it creates Web sites based on the spoken word, VoiceSites, accessed by the spoken word using mobile phones. Computers are not widely available in India, but more than 200 million people have cellphones, albeit low-end ones without the sophisticated browsing or data-transfer facilities now common in developed countries. The key to adoption of the new system is the ease of creating the VoiceSites, which are then given telephone numbers equivalent to the URLs of Web sites. Callers navigate through the Spoken Web by voice responses using a simple audio browser. IBM's plans extend to other countries as well as India. It also proposes to introduce facilities such as an instant translation service, social networking and emergency mobile health care. * Business Standard, India, 13 Nov. 2008: The "Spoken Web" project aims to transform how people create, build and interact with e- commerce sites on the world wide web using the spoken word instead of the written word... Farmers need to look up commodity prices; Fishermen need weather info before heading out to sea; Plumbers can schedule appointments; and Grocery shops can display catalogues, offer order placement, display personalized targeted advertisements or reminders. * New Scientist, 24 Oct. 2008: A caller's experience of an individual VoiceSite is similar to the interactive voice response (IVR) systems that customers encounter when calling, say, an airline or their bank. However, where the spoken web differs from these systems is that different VoiceSites can be linked, just like in the internet. 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- NEOLOGISM ALERT We've had "staycation", a holiday spent at home to reduce expense during these financially straitened times. A related term appeared in the New York Times last weekend, "Americation", a vacation that's spent within the United States by Americans looking to reduce their carbon footprint. WOTY AGAIN Once again the Oxford American Dictionary is first past the post in the race to announce the Word of the Year. Last year, you may recall, it chose "locavore" (see http://wwwords.org?LOCA). This year, its word is another you've read about in these columns, "hypermiling" (http://wwwords.org?HPRM). The finalists included "frugalista", a person who leads a frugal lifestyle, but who stays fashionable and healthy by swapping clothes and buying second-hand; "moofer", a mobile out-of-office worker, who works away from base with the help of modern communications; and "topless meeting", one in which the participants are barred from using their laptops, Blackberries or mobile phones. THINK LOCAL Having mentioned "locavore", it may be worth saying something about a related term that has been appearing this past month, another aspect of what a writer in the Wall Street Journal on 5 November called The New Frugality. In the same way in which locavores are urged to shop locally to reduce the carbon cost of the long-distance transport of goods, locasexuals are encouraged to ditch that long-distance partner and find a significant other from nearer home. Barron YoungSmith used it in Slate on 22 October and suggested - with tongue firmly in cheek - the creation of a Date Local movement that would seek to reduce one's "sex miles": "The group would be there to cushion the brokenhearted by imparting newly minted locasexuals with a sense of noble self-sacrifice — not to mention a pool of cute, like-minded enviros who happen to live in the neighborhood." EH? You may have read here recently of the fuss over the proposal by Collins to remove some old words from their dictionaries to make room for new ones. On Monday, one of the replacements, to appear in the 30th anniversary edition of the Collins English Dictionary, was made known to the world. It's "meh". It's a marker for the global reach of English that a word that began life in North America only recently is now an interjection among young people in Britain and Australia to mean boring, apathetic or unimpressive. A big step on its rise to acceptance was its appearance in the Simpsons. The head of content at Collins Dictionaries, Cormac McKeown, says that its popularity lies in part in the way that people who e-mail and text do so in "a register that's somewhere in between spoken and written English". For the possible Yiddish background to "meh", see Ben Zimmer's piece on the Language Log: http://wwwords.org?MEHH. 4. Weird Words: Tripudiate /traI'pju:dIeIt/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- To dance with excitement; to trample on an opponent in triumph. The Oxford English Dictionary marks this as "rare and affected", a reasonable conclusion. It had its period before the public, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but as writers came to eschew rhetoric and to prefer straightforward prose, it fell out of use and had pretty much vanished by the end of the nineteenth century. A typical instance of the type of high-flown language in which it flourished is Thomas Carlyle's History of Friedrich II of Prussia, in which he recounts the occasion in 1730 when the Emperor let slip some premature news about the marriage of his daughter Wilhelmina: "Upon which the whole Palace of Charlottenburg now bursts into tripudiation; the very valets cutting capers, making somersets, - and rushing off with the news to Berlin." ["Somerset" is an old form of "somersault", to turn head over heels.] The word is from Latin "tripudium", stamping on the ground, perhaps from words meaning "three" and "foot", indicating a measured dance, particularly during a religious ritual. The first sense in English referred to dancing, skipping or leaping for joy or excitement. The sense of trampling on an opponent came into the language only in the nineteenth century. An example is in Love's Meinie by John Ruskin: "And observe also, that of the three types of lout, whose combined chorus and tripudiation leads the present British Constitution its devil's dance, this last and smoothest type is also the dullest." 5. Elsewhere ------------------------------------------------------------------- PUNCTUATED Last week, the Daily Telegraph and other British papers noted the result of a survey showing that on average nearly half of the 2000 people tested couldn't use the apostrophe properly. You may feel that there's little surprising in that, but interestingly, older people used it wrongly more often than young ones. See the story: http://wwwords.org?APOS. My thanks to Janusz Lukasiak for the reference. AAARGH! If I ever thought of running a competition for the worse designed language Web site in the world, I would be dissuaded by the fact that it would take a lot of effort to beat the current front runner, the Australian Word Map (http://wwwords.org?ARGH). Take a look and tell me I'm wrong. But it might be worth donning your sunglasses to discover expressions like "pack of poo tickets". YES WE CAN! The US elections may be over but the language lingers on. The Associated Press has compiled a list of the Barackisms (or Obamanyms) that were produced during the campaign. They range from "Obamaphoria" to "Barackstar". Go via http://wwwords.org?OBAM for the full list. MOST ANNOYING CLICHES According to an online survey, the BBC says in a report on its Web site dated last Monday, the 20 most annoying clichés include among them "going forward", "actually" and "touch base". Go via http://wwords.org?TMOC to see the story. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Rachael Weiss found an item on a menu in Turkey: "Aubergine Kebap. Ground veal patties with aborigine arranged on a layer of sauteed pita bread, topped with tomatoes and spices." She observed, "We white Australians haven't treated the original owners of our land very well, but this seems to go too far." A recent report on the BBC News Web site about the actor Angelina Jolie was headlined "Jolie 'could give up acting for babies'". It was found by Len Blomstrand who commented, "Presumably they have difficulty following the plot, but don't we all sometimes." A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm . You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv@listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. For the details, visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor@worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers@worldwidewords.org . Submissions will not usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should be addressed to wordsquestions@worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs@worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me with simple subscription changes. C. 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