words wholly unrelated

cushy & cushion

on account of modern technology (u.s. robotics sportster 14400 fax modem) i’m typing this post from the comfort of a bed. the bed is not my own bed, indeed it’s not a bed in which i’m accustomed to waking up in. i know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking “there goes raynor being the international playboy that i know he is. he probably spent all night playing naked twister with the butt double of a famous movie star. again.” the truth of the matter is that naked twister is not nearly as fun to play as it sounds. plus, butt doubles are so 2004, in november 2011, it is the belly button models that get all the attention.

anywho, the point of opening with the bed thing is not to flaunt my latest escapades, but to let you know how cushy it is to access the internet from under silky sheets and how my laptop is currently resting on a down-filled cushion (what the cushion itself is resting upon is not something i should be noting in a morning post). anywho again, the point of all of this is that cushy and cushion, despite having to do with comfort, are not etymologically related to each other. cushy is from the hindi khush “pleasant, healthy, happy,” while cushion comes from the old french coissin, “seat cushion” and probably ultimately the latin word culcita “mattress.”

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my gratitude to my grandmother’s cabana boy, rich cheng for bringing this unrelationship to my attention.

today in intriguing german loanwords:

kassiber • a letter smuggled out of jail, a secret coded message.

the word originally comes from the practice of red army faction prisoners using their attorneys to smuggle letters out of the stammheim prison but now refers to any type of secret coded message. it’s derived from the yiddish word kessaw meaning “written.”

my infatuation with prison culture is well documented and so is my obsession with secret codes. so it only stands to reason that i will one day marry this word and have many beautiful babies with it and all of the babies will be named kassiber junior.

miscellaneous portmanteaux trois

every 400 days for the rest of my life, i plan to release a new batch of coined portmanteau words into the wild and see if any of them stick. 400 days ago, i told you about bar-b-coup and nonline which have since risen to #451 and #1,033 on the mla’s list of hot new words to watch out for™. 800 days ago, i told you about farticle and gratuitesque and now these two words alone comprise 40% of every word on wikipedia. i wonder what the future will hold for this year’s batch?

• mockward (mock + awkward) a seemingly uncomfortable social interaction where all parties are actually feigning embarrassment. “atticus and hugo drunkenly hooked up again last night. they pretended to be embarrassed about it, but the interaction was decidedly mockward.”
• dreadline (dread + deadline) a date on or before which an undesirable project must be completed. “april 15th marks the national dreadline of tax day.”
• squeemail (squee + email) an overly-excited email. “she sent me a squeemail after hearing the good news that my dandruff problem is now a thing of the past.”
• affluential (affluent + influential) using one’s wealth to control or manipulate. “the koch brothers are affluential a-holes.”
• adorifice (adore + orifice) a preferred orifice. “i always enjoy that particular aperture baby-cakes, but it’s my birthday and i’d love a shot at my adorifice.”

the next post in this series will be published on november 27, 2012 by which time iowa city will have elected its first minotaur to the office of mayor.

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previous to this: miscellaneous portmanteaux un et deux

today in intriguing german loanwords:

geisterfahrer • a driver who mysteriously appears on the wrong side of the road.

urban dictionary clears up the mystery on why german speakers need a word for this seemingly rare phenomenon:

[Its literal translation is] “Ghost Driver;” a driver who drives on the wrong direction on an autobahn, often with headlights turned off at night. Usually a drunk driver but can also be a thrill seeker, suicide attempt, or horrendous driver error.

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finally: i collected german loanword posts together into one tag. it is this one

update: luke (a real person) clears up the mystery, here.

know your car____ movement verbs

• to careen is fall to one side
• to career is to rush at full speed
• to carom is to glance and rebound

this is also a secret words wholly unrelated post because none of the car____ verbs are related etymologically and each comes from different sports.

• careening, a nautical term, is from the latin carina meaning the keel of a ship (or “nutshell”).
• careering, a horse racing term, comes from the latin carrus “a wheeled device” —car and carriage are its first cousins. when career first infiltrated english it meant something like “racetrack” though it didn’t take long for this definition to expand metaphorically to something like “the course of one’s profession.”
• caroming, a billiards term, is from the italian carambola “the red billiard ball,” which itself may be from the indian karambal, a fruit said to resemble such a ball.

today in intriguing german loanwords:

schlimmbesserung • a so-called improvement that makes things worse

off the top of my head: scrolling on osx lion, how my dad now puts a bar of bitter chocolate into his famous bunkhouse chili, 3d movies, my new van dyke beard, the effects of botox, the new budweiser identity, et cetry, et cetry.

what falls on your schlimmbesserung list?

some peculiar adjectival forms of country names

on my flight back from wyoming, i was seated next to a woman who claimed to be a resident of the principality of monaco. obviously, this led to a conversation about the only (and perhaps stereotypical) items that i know about that particular micro-state: gambling, f1 racing, and grace kelly. at some point, i fumbled when trying to use the adjectival form of the country by muttering something like, “MO-knockin” or “monna-KANDER,” and was informed that the proper word was, quite unexpectedly, “monégasque.”

that got me thinking about irregular demonyms and which other countries had peculiar forms. here are a few »

• Azerbaijan → Azeri
• Barbados → Bajan
• Botswana → Motswana
• Côte d’Ivoire → Ivorian
• Cyprus → Cypriot
• Greenland → Greenlandic
• Hungary → Magyar
• Isle of Man → Manx
• Lesotho → Basotho
• Luxembourg → Luxembourgish
• Madagascar → Malagasy
• The Netherlands → Dutch
• Philippines → Filipino
• Switzerland → Swiss

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incidentally, the wikipedia article contains this delightful shoutout:

In some of the latter cases the noun is formed by adding -man or -woman, for example English/Englishman/Englishwoman; Irish/Irishman/Irishwoman; Chinese/Chinese man/Chinese woman (versus the archaic or derogatory terms Chinaman/Chinawoman, which are not the preferred nomenclature).

tokyo language drift

the word place comes from the latin word platea and originally meant “broad street.” over the ages, its meaning has drifted to “any particular position or point in space.” this natural process of language is called generalization and is slowly happening all the time.

as stewards of our language, is it our duty to stamp out generalization and other language shifting whenever we encounter it? the answer is a personal decision and not one that i will be making for you. HOWEVER when the word is snarf or twerp, i am willing to admit that generalization can be a bad thing. let’s listen in as kurt vonnegut, jr. is interviewed (by himself) in the paris review.

VONNEGUT: Yeah. And one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly. Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny—and ever after that I was given the name “Snarf.” …Technically, I wasn’t really a snarf. A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls’ bicycle saddles. I didn’t do that. “Twerp” also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now. Through careless usage, “twerp” is a pretty formless insult now.

INTERVIEWER: What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?

VONNEGUT: It’s a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.

INTERVIEWER: I see.

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source: kurt vonnegut, the art of fiction no. 64 in the paris review (spring 1977)

words wholly unrelated

villain & vilify

i’m commuting to work on my ducati superbike 1198 (bloodbath red) and between weaving in and out of minivans and doing endos for kids riding the school bus, it will probably get pretty difficult to say everything that i want to say about villain (“an evil dude”) and villify (“to deprecate or disparage”) and why neither word is related to the other. BUT i will give it my best shot.

it should be no real surprise that vilify is closely related to vile (from the latin villis). what is more surprising than the sweet air that i got from ramping off a deer carcass just now, is that villain is not likewise related to vile. ultimately villain comes from the latin word villa and meant “low-born rustic.”

dr. ernest klein (an authority) says:

The most important phases of the sense development of this word may be summed up as follows: ‘inhabitant of a farm; peasant; churl, boor; clown; miser; knave, scoundrel.’

the path from “farm hand” to “scoundrel”, like my 320 kph dash through 6 lanes of opposing traffic has been hazardous and unlikely, but all the more amusing when you consider the end result: a word whose meaning evolved in unexpected ways, and yours truly dismounting his ducati superbike wearing nothing but jodhpurs and fist-bumping any bro within fist-bumping range.

tokelauan words that don’t have the letter f in them

there are many reasons to read this harrowing account of three teenage boys lost at sea for 51 days (their only provisions were moldy coconuts and a mason jar of vodka which they consumed almost immediately; they survived in the open ocean in a pontoon boat made for lake fishing; the location of their polynesian island is one of the most remote on the globe) but the biggest reason for reading the article is to soak up some unusual vocabulary from their exotic language (especially tagavaka):

lelea—a boat that has been blown off course.
palagi—a foreigner
tagavaka—a boat that has purposely sailed away—for love, adventure, or suicide.
tautai—a master fisherman, the highest honor a tokelauan man can receive.
ulu—the leader of all of tokelau. the position rotates every year among the heads of each individual atoll.

words wholly unrelated

mystic & mystic, (connecticut)

i’ve been at submarine school for the last week in mystic, connecticut. while i can’t disclose the confidential information that i’ve been learning, i did happen upon a rather unexpected bit of disinformation: the town of mystic has nothing to do with mysticism.

as towns go, the per capita mysteriousness of mystic lies somewhere between its rival new england seaport towns: newport, rhode island (not mysterious) and amity, massachusetts (somewhat mysterious). so why the misleading name? was it to attract tourists? was it to help launch a pizza empire and subsequently invite julia roberts to its town hall? was it to discourage soviet submarine spies? was it (like providence, rhode island) to lure the faithful?

the answer is none of the above. in this case, mystic comes from the pequot word “missi-tuk”, meaning “a large river whose waters are driven into waves by tides or wind.” early settlers stole it from the native americans? sounds a lot like the rest of american history.

victorian f-slang

did you know that there is a dictionary of slang dictionaries? and that it is not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4 volumes long and costs $500? i knew this and was withholding it from you because i have been secretly reading over each volume for the last 2 years on the prowl for the hawtest, newest (oldest) dictionaries in which to extract f-words.

in the third volume, i came across passing english of the victorian era. the dictionary is an attempt to preserve ephemeral victorian slang and is unique in that it catalogs phrases from all walks of life: from the histrionic jargon of theatre dweebs and the dusty argot of library nerds to the salty sea curses of sailors and the rhyming slang of filthy street urchins.

here is a little taste:

• F.C. (Theatre) False Calves (i.e. paddings used by actors in heroic parts to improve the shape of the legs).
• Face ticket (British Museum) The way that a recognizable reader enters the reading room without having to show a ticket the way less recognizable readers may.
• Faire Charlemagne (17C Court) To know when to walk away from a hand of cards.
• Fastidious cove (London, 1882) A fashionable swindler who pretends to be far more wealthy than he he actually is.
• Finger and thumb (Rhyming slang) Rum.
• Fiveoclocquer (Paris 1896) Afternoon tea.
• Flag unfurled (Rhyming slang) A man of the world.
• Flounce (Theatre) The thick line of black paint put on the edge of the lower eyelid.
• Foot-bath (European) Overflow from glass into saucer. Said of a full glass.
• Franc-fileur (French) A man who gets away quietly and won’t dance.
• Fright hair (Theatre) A wig which by a string can be made to stand on end and express fright.
• Frivoller (Society 1879) Person with no serious aim in life.
• Frosy (Devonshire) A delicacy eaten quietly after the children are in bed.

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source: passing english of the victorian era: a dictionary of heterodox english, slang, and phrase (1909) by james redding ware.

yesterday in intriguing greek words

tascodrugian • a nose-picker

according to epiphanius:

They are called Tascodrugians for the followin reason. Their word for “peg” is “tascus,” and “drungus” is their word for “nostril” or “snout.” And since they put their licking finger, as we call it, on their nostril when they pray…some people have given them the name of Tascodrugians, or “nose-pickers.”

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source: the panarion of epiphanius of salamis, vol. 2 by frank williams

today in intriguing german loanwords:

der lachende erbe • a relative distant enough to not feel grief upon your death but close enough to benefit from your will 

the literal translation, a “laughing heir,” (ie. an heir that laughs all the way to the bank upon learning of your gruesome death-journey through the gastrointestinal tract of the loch ness monster) has become a recognized term in the law of inheritance as well as a popular dickensian trope.