Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 13
November 13, 2019
Thatcherism on steroids, nonsense on stilts, ego on wheels et alia
The Right Honourable Member for Islington North recently made a highly emotive campaign speech (4 November) in which, after mentioning the by now clichéd chlorinated chicken and the novel rat hairs, he claimed the Conservatives want ‘to unleash Thatcherism on steroids on our society’. He continued: ‘The Thatcher government’s attack on the working people of our country left scars that have never healed and communities all over this country that have never recovered.’
There are too many rhetorical sleights of hand in this speech to analyse. To focus on one, he was invoking a hate figure for many on the Left and then upping the ante. Using the word ‘Thatcherism’ is an efficient, if cheap, populist rhetorical dog-whistle device because it contains the hated name but is also suggestively and usefully vague. Do you know what ‘Thatcherism’ is? Do I? Does anyone other than the economists? But it brings in the political termagant to end all termagants – in some people’s imagination.
That ‘on steroids’ in Mr Corbyn’s speech is a potentially powerful image: if you’re visual, you might in your mind’s eye, for example, see King Kong-size muscle-bound Amazons attacking NHS hospitals with supersonic flamethrowers – or not.
Whatever
What interests me here is the meaning of the phrase and particularly its structure, because that specific structure is systematically exploited to create similar hyperboles, and not just in political speeches.
Steroids are a double-edged weapon,
if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor. Actually, what we’re talking about here are anabolic steroids. Steroids without the ‘anabolic’ have a range of uses in medicine, but anabolic steroids are widely used by athletes and bodybuilders to increase muscle mass and enhance performance. They may thus help some to achieve monstrous or enviable, according to taste, Schwarzeneggerish proportions. The downside is that they can cause aggression and anger.
Whether it is disaster movie-tinted or not, ‘Thatcherism on steroids’ certainly seeks to exploit that negative side of steroids, playing to the idea of ungovernable aggression and anger encapsulated in the punning ’roid rage.
[image error] Terminator in his younger days.
New or just rehashed?
The phrase has not just been dreamt up for the occasion by Labour’s spin doctors. For instance, Labour MP for Stockton South, Dr Paul Williams, used it in a BBC broadcast on 20 February 2019 and then in a newspaper article published on 2 August 2019. As he’s a medical doctor, the steroids part might have had a special resonance for him.
And perhaps it was from him that magic grandpa or his speechwriter picked it up. However, the phrase itself wasn’t, as it were, plucked from thin air by Paul Williams, though it is in the ether.
For instance, ‘X on steroids’ to refer to something being a pumped-up, overinflated, overhyped yet substandard version of something else seems to be quite widely used to criticize films, musicals, TV series and the like.
…a mashup of ‘La Cage Aux Folles’ and ‘Mamma Mia!’ on steroids’. (referring to a musical)
Eurovision is ‘American Idol’ on steroids.
In the Oxford Monitor Corpora for February and April 2018, X on steroids pops up 14,863 times out of a total for the structure N SINGULAR on N PLURAL of 1,216,496, so about 1.2 % of occurrences of that structure. (The three most common collocations are war on drugs, war on women (?) and pressure on prices.)
The question that immediately arises is, how many are literal, e.g. I’m on steroids for a chest infection? And the next question in my mind was, how many of those non-literal ones refer to an abstract noun and how many to a concrete one?
Removing the lemma BE within three places to the left still leaves roughly 11,000 examples. A random sample of those suggests that less than 10 per cent of them are literal. In other words, the vast majority are metaphorical.
Contexts where the first noun is concrete seem more frequent, which makes sense because in general language we probably talk more about concrete nouns than abstract ones. Often the comparison is made explicit through the use of like, resembling, and so forth, turning it into a simile.
Concrete examples:
It’s your data transfer app on steroids reserved for use by Samsung’s customers.
Large fluffy, white flowers [sic] plumes resembling the blooms of astilbes on steroids begin blooming in June.
So she decided to write a book about weight loss to boost her credibility as a weight loss consultant. (Having her own book would be like a business card on steroids.)
…though Dubai strikes me like you say a weird almost fantasy city like Las Vegas on steroids.
A blizzard is a snowstorm on steroids.
Abstract examples:
Welcome to consumerism on steroids.
…and Obama is looking at the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or NAFTA on steroids.
It’s a Wall Street CEO mentality on steroids.
Well, Yelp reviews are word of mouth on steroids.
Silliness on steroids, WWE on wheels, little boys and their toys. One reason Americans are so DUMB.
X on Y
I claimed earlier that there was a pattern. First, as regards on steroids, it can be used with almost anything that doesn’t defy reason or common sense. There are lots of one-offs. However, when it comes to abstracts, the collocations which are not one-offs tend to be political philosophies. Thus, in the February corpus we have (numbers in brackets):
capitalism (23)
political correctness (10)
socialism (8)
neoliberalism (5)
Keynesianism (4)
privatization (4)
Most frequent of all is NAFTA at 64. Not a philosophy, perhaps, but certainly the result of one.
It seems, therefore, that Thatcherism on steroids draws on a well-established pattern for political discourse, rather than being a striking creative novelty. The metaphor is conventional to the extent that the first slot in the frame is mostly drawn from a single lexical field, but creative in that it also allows for a degree of choice outside that field.
Second, the structure lends itself to three other stereotyped forms of hyperbole: X on stilts, X on legs and X on wheels.
Nonsense on stilts
Let’s look at X on stilts first as the putative granddaddy of them all.
It goes back at least to the eighteenth century (1735). The idea behind the metaphor is that if someone is on stilts or does something on stilts, they affect detachment from the hoi polloi, attempt to be lofty in person or in style, are pompously elevated in tone (hence the adjective stilted).
In the OED examples below, it is interesting that Horace Walpole described Dr Johnson, lover of the long word, in that way. Only with the Landor quotation does the pattern of N on N PLURAL emerge in the OED examples.
1781 H. Walpole Let. to W. Mason 14 Apr. Hurlothrumbo talked plain English in comparison of this wight on stilts [Dr. Johnson].
1818 W. Hazlitt Lect. Eng. Poets i. 20 When artists or connoisseurs talk on stilts about the poetry of painting.
1826 W. S. Landor Imaginary Conversat. (ed. 2) I. ii. 26 [Ld. Brooke] Ambition is but Avarice on stilts and masked.
It might seem improbable that this structure used in this way could generate a series of set phrases, yet I believe it has. Not cited in the unrevised OED entry is Nonsense upon Stilts, a title used by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham1 and still going strong in the form nonsense on stilts. His words were: ‘Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts.’ This was written in late summer/autumn 1795 but not published in English until much later.
Unlike on steroids, on stilts is mostly literal (houses, huts, buildings, etc.) When used metaphorically, however, nonsense on stilts – Bentham’s phrase, modified – is far and away the single most frequent metaphor with on stilts, which suggests the persistence of his phrase.
The February 2018 corpus has 69 examples of nonsense on stilts; no other instance of the metaphorical structure has anywhere near that number. Next is stupidity on stilts (9), which is paradigmatically related to nonsense on stilts, as are silliness on stilts (3) and madness on stilts (1).
There is also austerity on stilts (2), ego on stilts (4), gas guzzler on stilts (Qashqai SUV) (1), where the literal and metaphorical merge, as they do in hatch(back) on stilts (8); and a few other one-offs.
Labour accused the SNP Government of creating ‘austerity on stilts’ by passing Westminster cuts onto councils…
Whether he’s interviewing an ego on stilts from The Apprentice…
A leading Labour MP criticised the figures, saying they showed that immigration policy was ‘madness on stilts’.
The claim that there are just as many young people as old supporting this law is nonsense on stilts.
I’ve got to say this argument is just silliness on stilts.
Austerity on stilts could perhaps equally have been austerity on steroids; ego on stilts is paralleled by ego on legs, as we shall see in a minute.
Sex on legs
Turning now to look at the February data for on legs, apart from the hundreds of literal uses, we get the standard, not to say clichéd, sex on legs 56 times. (Do not, on any account, look for images, as I innocently did.)
But we also get the anatomically surreal ego on legs, which somehow makes me think of Alice’s Humpty Dumpty, three times. In addition, there is death on legs (3) and several creative one-offs, such as chaos on legs, class on legs, those in the examples that follow, and several others besides:
…then the likely short-term successor is Vince Cable, the Lib Dem conscience on legs…
I lost my hair by the handful, I lost my appetite, my skin colour, my zest for life. I was death on legs.
This was the original Mr Perma-tan, an ego on legs who cruised around town in his Rolls-Royce…
She’s an encyclopedia on legs, and very witty and articulate.
(That one plays on ‘a walking encyclopaedia’.)
…there will be queues, with a running commentary from mouth almighty, a relative of gob on legs giving voice loud and long on how disgusting it is to be kept waiting, …
Bitch on wheels
The final prepositional phrase in the group is on wheels. Most of the collocations NOUN SINGULAR on NOUN PLURAL are, of course, literal, such as bags on wheels, billboards on wheels, homes on wheels, meals on wheels, etc., etc.
In the April Monitor Corpus, fewer than 5% are metaphorical. Among them, the most common is hell on wheels (102), followed by sex on wheels (26), followed by bitch on wheels (9) and then disaster on wheels (2). However, all but one of the sex on wheels quotations refer to cars.
Whereas Cole might be sex on wheels, Evan Black was the slow burn of sin and seduction – and tonight he was in rare form.
The 2014 Audi R8 V10 Plus is pure sex on wheels.
With hell on wheels, excluding the film title, the great majority are metaphorical:
Nicole is hell on wheels – charismatic, insistent, dramatic, angry.
He described Rahm Emanuel as ‘hell on wheels,’ and then suggested that the former White House chief of staff had attention deficit disorder.
Christmas can be hell on wheels!
I think a Cruz and Huckabee campaigns would be hell on wheels!
Next, bitch on wheels:
Alicia herself admitted that the client was probably ‘a bitch on wheels’.
From her skepticism of Donald Trump’s credentials to her White House dream-team pick ( Elizabeth Warren = bitch on wheels)…
Then:
That’s probably not much of a surprise given what a disaster on wheels the last CNBC debate turned out to be.
Apart from those, there a few one-offs, such as:
From actor, director writer and the guy who taught Tom Cruise in Top Gun, Tom Skerritt, comes what Skerritt has described as ‘Sex in the City’ on wheels.
Some, as we have seen earlier, mix the literal and the metaphorical, the wheels being literal, real wheels, the metaphor residing in the singular noun:
…bus companies, union officials say, are little more than ‘sweatshops on wheels’.
As the miles churned on, the highway became a metaphor on wheels for what America has become: fat, rude, stupid and self-centered.
I would rather be in the studio making music than driving around in a surogate [sic] penis on wheels.
The part metaphor is used particularly as a way of slagging off cars, e.g. box on wheels, brick on wheels, coffin on wheels, breadbin on wheels, etc., etc.
1 Jeremy Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution, ed. P. Schofield, C. Pease-Watkin, and C. Blamires, Oxford, 2002 (The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham), pp. 317-401. The work was first published in French translation as ‘Sophismes anarchiques. Examen critique de diverses Declarations des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen’, in Tactique des assemblées législatives, suivi d’un traité des sophismes politiques, ed. Etienne Dumont, 2 vols., Geneva and Paris, 1816, ii. 269-392, and then in English as ‘Anarchical Fallacies; being an examination of the Declarations of Rights issued during the French Revolution’, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, 11 vols., Edinburgh, 1838-43, ii. 489-534.
Footnote information taken from Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Nonsense upon Stilts’ Philip Schofield University College London, Utilitas Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2003; IP address: 86.184.195.70, on 10 Nov 2019 at 19:37:31.
October 22, 2019
As fit as a flea and a trout and a butcher’s dog
7-minute read
I’ve got a bee in my bonnet at the moment about animal imagery, so when I read someone being described as fit as a whippet, it set me thinking about which animals or other things you can be as fit as.
Which other beasts in the animal kingdom do people invoke to beef up the idea of being physically fit?
The two similes that immediately sprang to mind were (as) fit as a fiddle (of course)* and the one the BH often uses, as fit as a butcher’s dog. ‘Fit’ in these well-known set phrases (‘idiomatic similes’) is used in its older meaning of physically fit rather than sexually attractive.
I started sniffing through corpus to see how large the menagerie is and came across a few surprises.
What animals can we be as fit as?
In the two data sets I dug into (2014 and 2018), there were the usual suspects.
(Use of as is optional; for some similes use without it is almost as frequent as use with.)
(as) fit as a fiddle is the most popular by a long chalk. (But we’re not interested here in Strads or Amatis! Editor). Okay, okay! I’ll try to stick to the point.
In order of popularity, and jostling to be first into the Ark, we have (as) fit as a flea, and (as) fit as a butcher’s dog. So far, so obvious.
Trailing behind them sprints, charges, crawls, springs or swims – yes, swims – a mottled menagerie of buck rats, greyhounds, whippets, bull moose, horses, trout, ferrets, fleas, Mallee bulls, mountain goats and pandas.
Pandas? Read on.
[image error] Oh, dear. When I saw this image I didn’t see the lead. Were I to anthropomorphize, I’d say those eyes are imploring ‘set me free’.
How ‘set in stone’ is the idiom?
It’s one of those that allow a certain amount of wiggle room in the noun group.
It’s stating the obvious to say that the animals invoked have to display certain characteristics attributed to them, in fact or by convention. And what are they?
brute strength in horses, bull moose, and Mallee bulls;
litheness, agility, gracefulness (and speed) in greyhounds, whippets, ferrets, trout (?) and mountain goats;
simple speed in buck rats, I presume (try shooing rats away, as I have, and you’ll see what I mean)
As for fleas, well, they do jump around a lot on, from and onto their hosts – so I’m told.
[image error]
And as for the butcher’s dog, presumably it’s all the meaty titbits/tidbits said hound gets fed with, or snaffles, that keep it fit – at least according to the old idea that meat = health.
Alternatively, historically a butcher’s dog is a large mastiff or possible even a Rottweiler:
Gret bucher dogges, þe whiche bochers holdeth forto helpe hem to brynge her beestes þat þei bieth in þe contre. (Great butcher dogs which butchers keep to help them lead their animals that they buy in the country.)
a1425 Edward, Duke of York Master of Game (Digby) xv. 72
(You’re drifting off the main point! Editor.) So I am. Either way, we’re talking muscled mutts.
Why do we use these similes?
(Before going on, I should point out that these ‘idiomatic similes’ involving animals are a mere tiny subset of the (as) ADJECTIVE + NOUN GROUP type – think safe as houses, snug as a bug [in a rug], etc. –, which is itself a minuscule part of our lexicon of what can broadly be called metaphors. There’s a list of several as similes here.) In one way, they have an obvious expressive function. Our language would be very dull indeed if we only ever used neutrally descriptive words:
‘He’s very fit’
‘And? Your point is?’
They thus intensify the adjective more vigorously than a simple intensifier like very can achieve: he’s very fit vs he’s as fit as a butcher’s dog.
And they have an obvious social function: when you use them, you are selecting a morsel of language that you share with your interlocutor or reader and you thereby strengthen your connectedness. It has also been claimed (Carter, 2004) that ‘Simile is more designed for the recipient than metaphor, which often required more interpretation.’
On another level, they are part of the metaphorical compass we often use to navigate our way through the world using English. At its simplest, think of the omnipresent ‘journey’ that people use to describe an experience that has changed or developed them in some way. It has been suggested that similes in general are part of a convention of story-telling (Mary had a little lamb, her fleece was white as snow).
Jingle bells…
At the level of sound, it also seems clear why some are used more than others. After fit as a fiddle, fit as a flea is the commonest. Alliteration rules, OK! (how long is it since that formula was popular?) in both, as it does in fit as a ferret, which also has the repetition of the short /ɪ/ sound.
That double /ɪ/ jingle might partially account for fit as a fiddle’s pre-eminence, that and its antiquity (before 1605 in the OED). Fit as a whippet trumps them both by having the sound thrice. Compare it for pzazz with fit as a greyhound and the winner seems clear. Ramped-up alliteration combined with emphasis accounts for fit as a f****** fiddle. (As fit as a thistle, which also turns up once, can be explained by the almost-alliteration + vowel matching).
Another sound feature perhaps worth mentioning is number of syllables. Other than butcher’s dog, none has more than two syllables, and even it has 2 + 1.
How much variation?
Is it an ‘open set’ as linguists would call it: can you just add to it ad infinitum, provided the animal invoked fulfils the criteria? The safest approach seems to be that there is a small established set of animal similes generally recognized by English speakers (‘institutionalized’, to use the jargon) and beyond them a rather larger, fuzzy set where wordplay sometimes has a role. Some of these outliers are discussed under Examples later on.
With the caveat that corpora cannot provide the full picture, on the basis of what I looked at and some further searches, the core, institutionalized group would be, in alpha order:
fit as a butcher’s dog
fit as a ferret
fit as a flea
fit as a greyhound
fit as a horse
fit as a mountain goat
fit as a trout
The boundary between ‘idiomatic similes’ which are fixed, institutionalized on the one hand and lexical creativity on the other is hard to set. In an earlier draft, I had surmised that antelope was an unlikely candidate because of its three syllables, despite fulfilling the criteria of speed and gracefulness. A Google search (17 October 2019) throws up just four examples (for frequency compare that with 2,200 for mountain goat), making it an almost-hapax (which is a contradiction in terms, but for my money 4 hits on Google is hapaxish in old money).
My late aunt once described my athletic cousin as ‘like a gazelle’ (she runs up mountains! Eek!) and, sure enough, as fit as a gazelle shows up 2,760 times on Google (same date as previously). Apart from being more prototypical for the qualities speed and grace, it also, crucially, has one syllable less than antelope.
Are there regional variations?
Fit as a Mallee bull is definitely Australian in origin. The mallee is scrub vegetation ‘consisting of dense scrub dominated by low-growing bushy eucalypts, characteristic of semi-desert areas of Victoria and some other parts of southern Australia’ (OED). For a bull to survive there, it would need to be fighting fit.
Fit as a buck rat seems to be a New Zealand speciality. (Are their rats different?)
Examples
A. First, about that panda…it’s an ironically humorous way of saying how unfit the speaker was: Gilbert has just completed a trek up the 19,340ft Mount Kilimanjaro with Wales rugby legend Martyn Williams in aid of Velindre Cancer Centre. He raised more than £ 4,000 in the six-day trek, despite saying he was about as fit as a panda.
chortle.co.uk, 2013
The possibly surprising fit as a trout is, according to the Macquarie Dictionary, a creation of Conan Doyle’s. In my corpus we had, The All Blacks had a light training in sunny Swansea on Monday morning and the big news is captain Richie McCaw is as fit as a trout. The sore hip that ruled him out…
stuff.co.nz, 2015
While not confined to NZ, other searches suggest it is more popular there than elsewhere.
Occasional examples are metalinguistic, that is, they are making a comment on the phrase or referring to its use in some way: Thankfully William, who seems as fit as a proverbial mountain goat as he mentions his recent hike from Cape Reinga to Wellington, is happy to set a leisurely pace…
NZ Herald, 2015
Even the men in the crowd freely admitted that Tony was looking as fit as a you-know-what.
Irish Examiner, 2004
The use of ‘proverbial’ indicates clearly that a simile is standard, as in I think it’s genetic. I don’t drink, I exercise three or four times a week (in the gym – hard training) take vitamins, manuka honey (how expensive is that stuff!), drink green tea endlessly, eat fruit, veg, chicken, brown rice. etc. and I ‘m still always flaming poorly. Other people abuse themselves constantly and are fit as the proverbial butcher’s dog.
Daily Mail, 2013 (Brit.)
B. Apart from the previous metalinguistic examples, there are minor variations that intensify the image, such as fit as a racing greyhound and‘Chico will take me out and do a bit of jogging along the waterfront,’ says Bobby, who adds worriedly: ‘Have you seen him? He’s fit as a butcher’s whippet’.
thisisplymouth.co.uk, 2014 (Brit.)
The second intensifies the image by specifying the meat-monger’s hound.**
C. Occurring once only in the corpora consulted:
She confirmed that while Torro originated from the Uralla site, the pup had left her shop as ‘fit as a bull’.
feeds.sma.com.au., 2015
This is a variant of the much commoner phrase (as) strong as a bull. Fit as a bull moose references Theodore Roosevelt: It was popularly known as the ‘Bull Moose Party’, after Roosevelt told reporters, ‘I’m as fit as a bull moose.’
thefreedictionary.com, 2017
I’ve been hitting the running pretty hard this week, and so far, I’m pleased with the results. My pants are loose, my arms are firmer and those HGH tablets I bought have made me as fit as a horse!
feedburner.com, 2013
This one riffs on the more frequent (and alliterative) healthy as a horse as well as on strong as a horse.
D. First occurrence according to the OED.
This is excellent ynfayth, as fit as a Fiddle.
a1605 W. Haughton English-men for my Money (1616) sig. Gv
1889 As fit as a flea, as ready and eager as a flea for blood.
J. Nicholson Folk Speech E. Yorkshire iii. 19
1960 ‘All right. How’s Bubby?’ ‘Fit as a Mallee bull! Got another tooth.’
Overland (Melbourne) Apr. 7
*The original meaning of fit in fit as a fiddle is ‘appropriate, apt’. It was only in the nineteenth century that it acquired its current meaning.
**In the frame as ADJ as a whippet, ADJ varies a lot, and fit is far less common than fast/lean/skinny/thin.
October 11, 2019
Of mental health and the word ‘mental’
When was the phrase mental health first used?
In the OED meaning ‘mental health n. health of the mind as distinct from physical health; the condition of a person or group in respect of the functioning of the mind; the branch of medicine that deals with this; frequently attributive.’
It goes back rather further than you might expect…
Virtue is a Virgins Wealth, The Magazine of mental Health.
?1650 T. Jordan Claraphil & Clarinda in a forrest of fancies, sig. B8
Thomas Jordan was a seventeenth-century poet(aster), actor and dramatist.
Curiously enough, the next citation is also poetic:
I’ll be thy guest, and give thee mental health.
1795 C. Lloyd Poems on Var. Subj. 104
A modern definition of ‘mental health’ is ‘A person’s condition with regard to their psychological and emotional well-being’ (Pedants: please note the use of ‘singular’ their there.)
Does the ?1650 quote have that meaning?
‘Magazine’ there means ‘storehouse, repository’. The meaning seems to be that by remaining virtuous (i.e. a virgin) a woman retains a healthy mind. The second quotation seems similarly to be saying that the writer will restore the addressee’s mind to a healthy state.
It is not, however, until 1946 that mental health in its modern meaning (covering both the state of mind and the branch of medicine dealing with it) appears, this time as a book title:
Neurosis and the mental health services.
1946 C. P. Blacker (title)
The compound noun phrase mental health was first enshrined in law in the UK in the 1959 Mental Health Act. Its very title was distinctly more humane than those of the acts it abolished, the Lunacy and mental Treatment Acts 1890 to 1930, and the Mental Deficiency Acts 1913 to 1938.
Google Ngrams (for ‘British English’, many of which are not in fact British) shows a vertiginous rise in its frequency from the 1990s, following a slower upward curve from 1940 or thereabouts.
Where does the word ‘mental’ come from?
The OED lexicographers say that it is not clear whether English ‘borrowed’ it directly from Latin or from French. If from Latin, it’s amusing to note that Saint Augustine condemned it as a new word in the fifth century: dislike of new words is very old.
Alternatively, English may have snaffled it from French. It appeared in the form mentel in Middle French in 1371 and as mental in 1457. In either case, the root word is the Latin mēns, meaning ‘mind’, a feminine noun which is still alive, if only barely, in the legal phrase mens rea, the intention of wrongdoing, or literally ‘guilty mind’.
The accusative of mēns is mentem, which is where the letter t comes in. Then you slap on the suffix –alis (as in fatal, global, etc.) to get the post-classical Latin mentālis.
What does it mean?
With so many other words, you could almost say in all seriousness, ‘how long is a piece of string?’
With mental, the situation seems simpler and clearer. Yes, the OED divides it into ten different senses – if you, dear reader, introspected about it, I’m sure you’d find it hard to think of ten different meanings – and that is without going into the compounds listed such as mental age, mental block, etc.
But don’t despair. Those ten meanings divide basically into two which the OED summarizes as a) ‘of or relating to the mind’ and b) ‘Senses relating to the mind in an unhealthy or abnormal state.’
Relating to the mind
Meaning a) above covers things such as mental events, mental arithmetic, mental image and mental science.
The first citation is from roughly 1422:
But now y see with myn yen mental Thestat of al an-othir world than this.
Hoccleve Ars Sciendi Moril. 666 in Minor Poems (1970) i. 203
An outlier of this broad meaning is defined as ‘Characterized by the possession of an active mind; thoughtful; intellectual’ which the OED tags as rare.
This young man is also very mental. His being is riddled with theory and hypothesis.
1983 J. Jones Dostoevsky ii. 202
Relating to the mind in an unhealthy or abnormal state
As with the previous meaning, this is mostly used before a noun (‘attributively’) as in mental breakdown, mental deficiency and the now discouraged use of the word as in mental hospital.*
It was first used in this meaning in 1768. There are some piquant OED examples by Poe, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Wyndham Lewis:
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend.
1839 E. A. Poe Fall House of Usher in Burton’s Gentleman’s Mag. Sept. 150
I resolved to be clean in my own sight—and to the last I repudiated the contamination of her crimes, and wrenched myself from connexion with her mental defects.
1847 C. Brontë Jane Eyre III. i. 21
I have such a horror of a mental breakdown.
1869 ‘G. Eliot’ Let. 21 Sept. (1956) V. 56
And my fave rave for baroque vituperation:
The goitrous torpid and squinting husks provided by Matisse in his sculpture are worthless except as tactful decorations for a mental home.
1926 W. Lewis Art of being Ruled xii. vii. 405
The first person known to use it colloquially in the sense of ‘mentally ill’ was Dorothy L. Sayers:
I gather she was a little queer towards the end—a bit mental, I think you people [sc. nurses] call it?
1927 D. L. Sayers Unnatural Death iv. 41
‘Queer’ above means ‘strange, odd’.
In the phrase to go mental, it generally means to lose self-control in anger, ‘fly off the handle’:
I don’t care if Mr. Dersingham goes mental, we’re going to be lucky.
1930 J. B. Priestley Angel Pavement ii. 68
But, as the OED says, it can be ‘more recently (as in quot. 1992) also in positive sense of ecstatic abandon).’
Take the express train and go mental to the sounds of DJ Steve McMahon.
1992 Village Voice (N.Y.) 28 Jan. 49/1 (advt.)
October 2, 2019
Of spelling bees and other bees.
A few weeks ago I went ape-ian and delved into the origins of four bee-related phrases. This week, like bees round honey, I can’t keep away and am looking into some more, namely spelling bee, bee-stung, and to put the bee on. And then I will truly bee able to say, bee-n there, drone that, bought the t-shirt. [That’s enough! Ed.]
Social bees: spelling, quilting and otherwise
Spelling bees being such a big thing in the States, everyone will have heard of them. Quilting bees, sewing bees and knitting bees are still very much a live tradition, too. But historically it seems there were other kinds, as noted in the OED definition quoted further down.
As that definition states, what links the insects and this use of the word is bees’ social character.* And as the OED notes, this use was originally U.S:
‘A meeting of neighbours to unite their labours for the benefit of one of their number; e.g. as is done still in some parts,** when the farmers unite to get in each other’s harvests in succession; usually preceded by a word defining the purpose of the meeting, as apple-bee, husking-bee, quilting-bee, raising-bee, etc. Hence, with extended sense: A gathering or meeting for some object; esp. spelling-bee, a party assembled to compete in the spelling of words.’
The first quotation, from the Boston Gazette for 16 October 1769 (i.e. pre-independence), illustrates the social and feminine aspects of such gatherings:
Last Thursday about twenty young Ladies met at the house of Mr. L. on purpose for a Spinning Match; (or what is called in the Country a Bee).
In the nineteenth century in particular, it seems, quilting bees frequently took place. They were a way for women to socialize with one another, often away from the confines of their homes, since sometimes the bees took place in communal spaces such as church vestries. (One can only imagine how the reputations of their menfolk fared on such occasions.) The charming painting below depicts what looks more like a family bee.
[image error] Morgan Weistling, The Quilting Bee
The next OED citation is from an 1830 novel set in North America by the Scottish writer John Galt (he had spent some time in Canada):
I made a bee; that is, I collected as many of the most expert and able-bodied of the settlers to assist at the raising.
The ‘raising’ mentioned is the communal building of a barn, which was, in contrast to quilting and sewing bees, a male activity. And in the next quotation, in addition to a quilting bee, Washington Irving mentions a husking bee: a gathering to husk the harvested corn.
Now were instituted quilting bees and husking bees and other rural assemblages.
1849, W. Irving Hist. N.Y. (rev. ed.) vii. ii. 390, 1849
The earliest OED citation for spelling bee dates to 1876:
He may be invincible at a spelling bee.
Lubbock Elem. Educ.in Contemp. Rev. June 91
Not all social gatherings, however, were well-intentioned:
They have sometimes had ‘lynching bees’,..they have sometimes lynched men for murder, for arson, for rape.
1900 Congress. Rec. 31 Jan. 1369/1
bee-stung
Yet another gift to English as a whole from U.S. English. As the OED notes: ‘colloquial (orig. and chiefly U.S.) (of a woman‘s lips) attractively full and red, naturally pouting.’
(Complain if you will that that is sexist, but it’s hard to think of a man’s lips being so described.)
I’m trying to remember what other adjectives characterize lips and the only one I can retrieve is rosebud, though there’s another one at the back of my mind which I can’t dredge up for the moment…
Oh, yes, it’s just come back to me: Cupid’s bow. Meanwhile, the first OED citation for bee-stung is by the nineteenth-century journalist George Augustus Sala, sent by Dickens to Russia as a special correspondent:
The Russian beauties are either of Circassian, Georgian, or Mingrelian origin—dark-eyed, dark skinned, full bee-stung lipped, and generally Houri-looking; or they are the rounded German-Frauleins.
1858 G. A. Sala Journey due North xvi. 351
A more modern quotation retrieved from the OED is rather less flowery and decidedly more practical:
Unfortunately, we’re not all..blessed with flawless skin, bee-stung lips and come-to-bed eyes, so cheat on the big day!
2000 You & your Wedding Mar. 64/1
to put the bee on
TBH, I’d never come across this before looking at the OED entry for bee (whose definition picturesquely begins ‘a well-known insect’).
Perhaps my ignorance is not surprising given that the phrase seems to be dated U.S. slang, with two meanings: (a) to quash, put an end to; to beat; (b) to ask for a loan from, to borrow money from.
It’s a nice example of everyday wordplay since the second meaning is a sort of pun on ‘to sting someone (for money)’, itself also a U.S. invention (1903).
The first OED citation seems to refer to this second meaning:
It’s always open season for Americans over here. They sure know how to put the bee on you too.
1918, H. C. Witwer From Baseball to Boches 131
P.G. Wodehouse used it in the first meaning (‘to put an end to’):
The old boy..got the idea that I was off my rocker, and put the bee on the proceedings.
In Sunday Express 23 Oct. 9, 1927
* An alternative etymology, first propounded in a dictionary in Webster’s Third International (1961), suggests that bee in this sense is a separate word ‘is ‘perh[aps an] alter[ation] of E[nglish] dial[ect] been, bean voluntary help given by neighbors toward the accomplishment of a particular task’ and suggests it is ultimately cognate with boon.
** The entry was part of the 1887 fascicle, so whether this applies now I cannot say.
September 3, 2019
Not the bee-all and end-all; busy bees; beeline
4-minute read
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
W.B. Yeats.
Nowadays we’re all relentlessly exhorted to keep or make our gardens bee-friendly.
Earlier in the summer it was a joy to see how many swarmed around the burgeoning thyme. Now, in our descent into autumn, a few drowsy hangers-on float about the giant hydrangea. Coincidentally, at the moment I’ve got a particular bee in my bonnet: metaphors derived from the animal kingdom.
A conversation with my partner set this train of thought chugging along, and then all of a sudden, we were going full steam and writing down dozens of animal-related words and idioms. (Yes, I know, we should ‘get out more’ as the jolly old Private Eye meme goes, but we quite like it at home.)
Anyway, among the words I’ve lighted on [Geddit!] in this connection comes bee. Whether that name is onomatopoeic I cannot say. It’s from Old English bēo, which is of Germanic origin and is related to Dutch bij and German dialect Beie (the modern German is Biene).
As with so many other entries in the OED, once you start to look, the miracle of polysemy hits you. Well, not really a miracle, more an example of the economy of language: just re-use the same configuration of sounds while attaching a new meaning to them as the years move along. This diminutive apian certainly has more than its fair share of meanings. Here we’ll look at just four (so as not to tax you too much with my verbosity), in strict historical order, as per the OED.
What intrigues me is how long it can take for a word to grow particular metaphorical wings. Or conversely, how quickly that can happen with certain other words & meanings.
Rather younger than I suspected is…
busy bee
Meaning 1 b. Often used as the type of busy workers.
First recorded in 1535, this metaphor was later taken up by that Alexander Pope of English hymnody, Isaac Watts:
c1720 I. Watts Divine & Moral Songs How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour!
[image error] Those pursed lips look a little censorious to me.
Anyone who has ever attended Anglican or related services will surely remember Watts’
‘When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.’
which I’m sure I must have sung several times in school assemblies.
The trope of bees as workers goes back at least as far as Virgil, but that’s another matter.
a bee in one’s bonnet
It’s meaning category 5 in the OED, defined as follows:
To have bees in the head or the brains, a bee in one’s bonnet: i.e. ‘a fantasy, an eccentric whim’, a craze on some point, a ‘screw loose.’ (Cf. maggot n.1 2a, and French grille.)
Bear (or, as too many write, bare) in mind that this 1887 entry has not yet been fully updated for OED3. Hence the seemingly eccentric (‘a craze on some point’) language.
Anyway, to my mind the way a bee lights on a flower, hovers, lifts off, then lands on another, then repeats that recursively ad infinitum strikes me as a perfect analogue to the way an obsessive thought settles, lifts off, hovers for a while, but then inevitably returns. (I should know: I’m obsessive.)
The first OED citation is from a Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid; or rather, from the prologue to Book VIII.
1553 G. Douglas in tr. Virgil Eneados viii. Prol. 120 Quhat berne be thou in bed, with hede full of beis?
(Quhat = What; berne = poetic word for ‘man’)
The next is from that Elizabethan proto-comedy that anyone studying Elizabethan drama was once forced to read:
a1556 N. Udall Ralph Roister Doister (?1566) i. iv. sig. C.ij Who so hath suche bees as your maister in hys head.
But we had to wait for De Quincey to equip the phrase with its now customary titfer:
1845 T. De Quincey Coleridge & Opium-eating in Blackwood’s Edinb. Mag. Jan. 124/2 John Hunter, notwithstanding he had a bee in his bonnet, was really a great man.
(Note the use of notwithstanding directly as a conjunction without that.)
[image error] Thomas De Quincey; photogravure after an 1855 chalk drawing by James Archer
beeline for
bee-line n. a straight line between two points on the earth’s surface, such as a bee was supposed instinctively to take in returning to its hive.
The OED notes this as first in print in an American source (1830). Thanks, America, for yet another crucial ingredient of our joint lexicon!
He of The Raven used it:
1845 E. A. Poe Gold-bug in Tales 35 A bee-line, or, in other words, a straight line, drawn..to a distance of fifty feet.
Nowadays it is generally not hyphenated and is almost invariably used in the set phrase ‘to make a beeline for’.
bees knees
What’s intriguing here is how it developed. Originally, as the OED puts it, it was ‘a type of something small or insignificant’:
1797 Mrs. Townley Ward Let. 27 June in Notes & Queries (1896) X. 260 It cannot be as big as a bee’s knee.
At this stage there is only one knee.
Gerard Manley Hopkins took the phrase to be Irish:
1870 G. M. Hopkins Jrnl. (1937) 133 Br. Yates gave me the following Irish expressions... As weak as a bee’s knee.
Yet this next quotation is from a book about the folk phrases of four West Midlands counties (Gloucs., Warks., Staffs. & Worcs.)
1894 G. F. Northall Folk-phrases 7 As big as a bee’s knee.
Sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century it started to be used as a teasing or nonsense phrase, in the same was as sky-blue pink for a non-existent colour.
Then, in 1920s US flapper lingo, its meaning was flipped, thus making it a sort of contronym of the original, meaning the ‘acme of excellence’. This meaning can be antedated to a year before the first OED citation, which follows:
1923 H. C. Witwer Fighting Blood iii. 101 You’re the bee’s knees, for a fact!
Apart from those phrases below mentioned by Mencken, bee’s knees belonged to a broad menagerie of fanciful animal phrases, including the kipper’s knickers and the cuckoo’s chin. Made endearing by its rhyme, it has survived along with the cat’s whiskers/pyjamas.
1936 H. L. Mencken Amer. Lang. (ed. 4) 561 The flea’s eyebrows, the bee’s knees and the canary’s tusks will be recalled.
(The dog’s bollocks, though, shows that the pattern is not entirely dead.)
As for ‘the bee-all and end-all’, as I was writing this, I bet myself there would be an eggcorn for ‘be-all and end-all’ and sure enough there is. Here’s an example:
In turn, that consensus is cultivated by the repeated slogan that prosperity is the bee all and end all of political achievement .
July 31, 2019
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s ‘style guide’. Some dispassionate thoughts.
[image error] This is he as Andy Warhol might have seen he.
Last week Jacob Rees-Mogg Esq., M.P. issued a style guide to his staff, proscribing certain words and phrases while enjoining a mixed bag of ‘rules’.
Nutty, or not so much?
The liberal media made hay with this linguistic opener to the ‘silly season’. Thanks to Twitter particularly, every season is now the ‘silly season’; nevertheless, this story gave many bien-pensants the conniptions and the perfect opportunity to spear a Conservative ur-stuffed shirt
There is nothing quirky, c/Conservative or anal about a style guide for staff. Incoming ministers often impose their linguistic tics (Gove, Pompeo). Any serious brand (and Iacobus Reesus-Moggus is decidedly a brand, albeit a retro one) has a style guide to help manipulate how the outside world ‘experiences’ it. Any major media outlet lays down the language law; some even publish their diktats (The Times Style Guide.) Microcosmically, individuals do the same when specifying which gender pronouns you can use to or about them.
If we can get beyond the fake news of JRM having a style guide, the question becomes just how quirky/conservative/Victorian is it? Looked at dispassionately, is it as ridiculous as some commentators have made out?
For economy, I group the points it covers under different headings. Though many are retrograde-cum-nostalgic – and one is plainly near bonkers – a couple are uncontroversial. Several, in contrast, are the kind of fake ‘rules’ (lot, got) that schoolmasters have passed down over the ages to get their charges to be more imaginative.
But what emerges for me is that lost among the dross there are some useful tips – please, let’s not call them rules – that even the style guides of major newspapers endorse, and also some fatwas on particular words and phrases that many of a conservative bent could well agree with. (Well, anyway, I do, so there.)
A maxed big
Retrograde/Nostalgic: 1. Esq. (My father taught me to put that on letters to gents. If I use it now, I do so only humorously to old friends); 2. double space after full stops. Mmm. Let’s call this legacy spacing from the typewriter age. I have a client of a certain age who uses it consistently.
Uncontroversial: No full stop after Miss or Ms, but this applies only to British English. (And our Jacob’s rules have ‘M.P.’ with stops, which is old-fashioned.)
Puzzling/pointless: 1. No comma after ‘and’. This cannot be a ‘rule’ because it would forbid this next subordinate clause and, if I may say so, is confusing. One interpretation is that the Oxford or serial comma is meant.
2. ‘Organisations are singular’: e.g. ‘The BBC has learned’. This is a pretty firm rule in US English; in British English it is normal to use singular or plural according to whether the focus is on the group or its members.
3. got: presumably as in I’ve got, which would have to be replaced by I have. If eliminated totally, somewhat prissy: I have no time for such niceties.
4. lot: if replaced by much, many, very much, etc., will make the tone more formal, fair enough.
5. speculate: which meaning? If you have to ‘speculate to accumulate’ financially, Rees-Mogg is quite an expert.
[image error]Useful: 1. CHECK your work.
Gentle reader, give yourself a pat on the back if you have never sent an email posted a tweet, etc. with a tyop in it.
2. Do not use too many ‘Is’. (It can sound childish or self-centred. Many scientific and learned journals eschew it.)
3. ascertain: quite rightly banned. ‘Find out’ and other synonyms do the job without the tang of pettifogging bureaucracy. The Plain English Campaign would surely applaud the ban.
4. I note/understand your concerns: similarly, quite rightly banned. This is the verbal equivalent of giving two-fingers to the complainant.
5. ongoing: often mere padding. If a problem, for example, is not solved, it is by definition ongoing.
Some points merit individual treatment.
Imperial measurements – Helpful for the aged and anyone who learnt about measurements before 1974, me included, but preposterous for anyone under about 50. And try doing scientific research with imperial measurements.
very – Nothing to see here, please move on.
Intensifiers like ‘very’ can be (very) overused. A well-known guide opines ‘Use this word sparingly. Where emphasis is necessary, use words strong in themselves.’
Ostracising the word entirely is impossible, but excising it rarely does any harm. As the Telegraph Style Guide notes: ‘very – usually redundant’.
meet with – A classic British prejudice against American usage that presupposes that ‘meet with’ is American in origin, which it isn’t. The OED (2001) notes it from around 1300 in the relevant meaning (‘To go to see, come together with (a person) intentionally; to have a meeting with’). However, the OED notes ‘Now chiefly North American.’ If used in British English it may well sound transatlantic to more conservative speakers, but IMHO it also carries a connotation that simple ‘meet’ does not, implying preparation, intention and even, heaven forbid, a measure of informality and friendliness. Moreover, since the revision of the OED entry nearly 20 years ago, things have moved on in British English. Even so, the Grauniad Style Guide thunders ‘You might meet with triumph and disaster, or meet with a bad end, but “meet” should normally suffice if you are just going to meet someone.’
unacceptable – Here I am wholeheartedly at one with the Sage of Somerset. He derides it as ‘New Labour’. Whatever its origin, it has long irked me because it is not only vague but fatally weakened through overuse. It is a disguised passive (‘that cannot be accepted’). Thus, if you say that something is ‘unacceptable’ you are stating that it cannot be accepted by unspecified people. If the person unspecified is you, to use it is cowardice; if other people, it is arrogance, for how can you know what other people accept? It dresses up personal distaste as moral absolute.
hopefully – Yawn. This usage bugbear schleps with it heavy baggage from the 1960s, when the sentence adverbial, for such it is, started to become widespread. It is useful and economical.
In conclusion, what are we to make of this so-called style guide? Principally, I suggest, that ‘style guide’ is a misnomer. ‘Style sheet’, at a pinch. A proper style guide, such as the Telegraph’s or The Chicago Manual of Style, is an extensive document covering a multitude of issues that go well beyond individual words and phrases. Style is the man, and here Rees-Mogg’s recommended writing style is in keeping with his persona of buttoned-up return-to-the-past pseudo-patrician.
July 10, 2019
A coruscating attack? Or an excoriating attack? Who’s right?
(1 & 2 of 30 commonly confused words) A revised & shortened version
[image error]
If person A makes a coruscating attack on person or thing B, what does it mean?
For instance:
The report is a coruscating attack on the Government’s welfare reforms and those of its coalition predecessor.
Sunday Express, 29 December 2015.
Three options might suggest themselves: a) search me, guv; b) oh, A is tearing into B like nobody’s business; c) A is an ignoramus, and what they actually meant was ‘an excoriating attack’.
A while back, The Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column plumped firmly for option c):
‘In the following article, Terry Eagleton’s “corruscating [sic] review” of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion may have been withering or possibly even acidulous.’
The Guardian style guide is categorical about the matter:
‘coruscating means sparkling, or emitting flashes of light; people seem to think, wrongly, that it means the same as excoriating’.
The Economist style guide concurs.
You won’t hear either word down the pub. (Unless it’s a pub frequented by lexicographers, journalists, usage pundits, writers or arty-farty types. Ah, most pubs in Stockbridge, then). Both are rare, and typical of arty or journalistic writing.
‘Takeaways’
A Twitter poll suggests that a minority would stet ‘coruscating attack.’
Most people would change it, either to excoriating (41%) or to a synonym of that (45%).
(See the end of the blog for possible synonyms.)
The Online Oxford Dictionary alone among dictionaries recognizes the meaning ‘savage, acidulous’.
For many, it will be a ‘skunked’ term.
Coruscating is occasionally used in a small number of phrases in what looks like confusion with excoriating.
The lemma to excoriate and its derivatives are about five times more frequent than coruscate.
Coruscating as an adjective is more frequent in British English than elsewhere, as are its collocations with attack and semantically similar words.
A Google search for ‘coruscating attack’ and ‘excoriating attack’ shows the second – the ‘correct’ one – in a ratio of 4.7:1 to the first.
So what do these words mean?
coruscating
[image error] Album cover for jazz giant John Surman. Copyright ECM or original graphic artist
Meaning and examples
Coruscating can be a bit of a journalistic trap. British hacks in particular sometimes light on it in order to embellish their prose, occasionally with scant regard for its meaning.
It derives from the Latin coruscāre in its meaning of ‘to flash, glitter, gleam’.
‘Glittering’ or ‘sparkling’, literally or metaphorically, is what it usually means in English. Merriam-Webster has a pithy definition for the metaphorical use: ‘to be brilliant or showy in technique or style’ and some nice examples.
Coruscating is the participial form, and the verb itself is rather rare. ( According to the OED, the word was first recorded in this –ing form, in 1705.)
The Oxford Online Dictionary labels the verb as literary, and includes the following example:
Finally, as the blazing star appeared high over the island, the glow coruscated into incredible brilliance and began the nightly display.
Nouns typically described as coruscating are wit, brilliance, a review, a performance, a display, and an attack.
The Oxford English Corpus data suggests that it occurs with less than expected frequency in U.S. English, and with higher than expected frequency in BrE.
She preserves the steely delicacy and coruscating wit of Wilde’s writing.
Sunday Times.
… a complete understanding of the resources of the instrument and an acute ear for contrast allowed Liszt to produce a quasi-orchestral palette of tone-colours, lending a coruscating brilliance and variety to both his original music and his transcriptions.
Oxford Companion to Music.
Oops, did I chose the wrong word?
Examples like the previous reflect the core meaning of the word, but what are we to make of these examples?
… the anthropologist and writer John Ryle wrote a coruscating review essay in the Times Literary Supplement , documenting numerous inaccuracies….
Guardian, Comment is Free.
Departing SNP leader John Swinney yesterday delivered a coruscating attack on the tormentors within his own party who…
Scotland on Sunday.
Here it is obviously intended to mean ‘scathing’, ‘ferocious’ and the like. It seems to be a mistake for the less rare but equally Latinate adjective excoriating.
(If you enjoy this blog, and find it useful, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Just sign up (in the right-hand column) and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, and writing tips. Enjoy!)
excoriate/excoriating
Origins, meanings, examples
While the verb has been used in English to mean ‘to strip the skin off someone’, i.e. flay them, it has a specific modern medical meaning, ‘to damage or remove part of the surface of the skin’ (images of which I’m too squeamish to show).
It comes from the Latin excoriāre ‘to strip off the hide’, < ex- out + corium hide>, and the OED dates its first occurrence to 1497, in a work published by Wynkyn de Worde.
[image error] The flaying of St. Bartholomew. Rome. 3rd quarter 16th century, cutting from a collectar. In the style of a Croatian artist – which may explain why the Romans look curiously oriental, with their splendid mustachios.
Clearly, if you can excoriate someone physically, that is, flay them, you can also do so metaphorically (lambast similarly developed from physical to figurative, and think of ‘to roast someone or something’ in a figurative sense, e.g. This is a movie whose brain belongs in its pants, and which deserves to be roasted for the turkey it truly is.)
The OED defines this non-physical meaning of to excoriate as ‘upbraid scathingly, decry, revile’ and dates its first occurrence to 1882. A current example follows:
Talk shows were excoriated in the media and featured in countless political cartoons of the period.
Art Journal, (U.S.).
Excoriating … is the participial adjective from the verb. It typically qualifies attack(s), a critique, a report, criticism, or an editorial.
Throughout the second world war, Aneurin Bevan subjected the line of the Churchill coalition government to excoriating criticism and withering examination …
A British English issue?
Of those collocations listed above for excoriating, over three-quarters are British English (78%). In other words, they are possibly better known in BrE than elsewhere. That might explain why the confused coruscating ?attack and ?review seem also to be peculiarly British: 80% of examples.
Is this a recent phenomenon?
It seems not. Good ol’ Ngrams throws up an example of coruscating attack from a 1961 Report to the Fellows, Pierpoint Morgan Library, p. 59. However, it also shows a vertiginous rise in frequency of that collocation between 1981 and 2000.
Why are the two confused?
I don’t know, but here are some thoughts. If one were to be uncharitable, ‘Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance’, as Dr Johnson is reported to have said. Viewed in that light, ‘coruscating‘ becomes a malapropism of the ‘allegory on the banks of the Nile’ kind.
But that won’t entirely do: the alternation simply cannot be arbitrary or random.
First, though clearly miles away from being homophones, they share both an -ating element and a Latinate sound – but, admittedly, not the same number of syllables.
Second, if someone has seen the phrase ‘coruscating review’, but not
read the review in question, how would they know what was meant? Reviews are often negative, so assigning a negative meaning to coruscating would not seem unreasonable. In any case, for many reviewers, the bitchier the review the more brilliant it is, at which point coruscating and excoriating easily begin to merge.
What word could I use instead?
The thesaurus is your oyster here: the Grauniad‘s acidulous and withering, and then blistering, devastating, scathing, savage, caustic, vitriolic, and whatever else your thesaurus and malevolence suggest.
A ‘skunked term’ is Bryan Garner’s phrase for a word or phrase whose alleged misuse will annoy purists. I suspect that for a certain number of people, ‘coruscating’ for ‘excoriating’ will indeed exude the rank, decaying smell of error.
July 4, 2019
Paparazzo, paparazzi and paparazzis. Not to mention spaghetto.
Of camera-snappers, clams, pasta and gaffes
The other day I was flummoxed by the apostrophe for the possessive of paparazzi (plural): paparazzi’s or paparazzis’?
Which reminded me that learning a language can be fraught with self-embarrassment. Visiting Italy many years back I was discussing the press with friends. Not having spoken la bella lingua for ages, and having only – at the time – recently encountered the word paparazzo, I voiced my doubts about this new, invasive species of photojournalist, the papagalli. Raucous laughter ensued: papagalli are parrots.
But while papagallo is a naturalized Italian word (from Byzantine Greek, from Arabic) paparazzo is an eponym: a word based on someone’s name, like biro or wellies. In Federico Fellini’s classic 1960 La Dolce Vita, Paparazzo is the surname of a photographer, the screen character being apparently based on a real-life Roman celeb-snapper of the era, Tazio Secchiaroli.
A unique musicality?
I remember our English master at school, in a lesson about Chaucer, rapturising over the perfect (if unprovable) balance in Italian of consonants and vowels. There is some truth in the idea. Take Pa-pa-raz-zo. Simple syllables, nearly all melodiously alternating consonants and vowels. None of the hideous consonant pile-ups of German. But where this invented surname came from is hotly disputed.
It seems that Fellini amused himself by telling contradictory versions of the name’s genesis. In one interview he noted that it suggested a ‘buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging’, which does not explain where it came from. He also said he found it in an opera libretto. In the dialect of one of the co-scriptwriters, Ennio Flaiano, the feminine noun paparazza is a clam and thus a way of describing a camera shutter. But Flaiano also claimed that either he or Fellini opened a translated travel book by Georg Gissing at random and lighted on a restaurant owner rejoicing in the name of Coriolano Paparazzo. Finally, Fellini’s wife claimed it was a portmanteau of pappatacio (sand fly) and ragazzo (boy). Whatever its origin, the ending –azzo is often pejorative (and cazzo for the membrum virile is a stand-alone oath.)
Violating incoming words
When English nabs a word from another language, it often does naughty things to it. After all, spaghetti is plural in Italian and takes plural verbs, but it’s a mass noun in English with a singular verb.* ‘These spaghetti are delicious’ could only be said by a lunatic. And ‘a panini’ seems pretty solidly established: to ask for a panino would be to indulge in pedantic one-upmanship.
With paparazzo, first filched in 1961, for example, English has taken what is technically the plural paparazzi and treated it as singular – since 1981:
1981 Washington Post (Nexis) 8 Oct. Jackie [sc. Kennedy/Onassis] wanted to sue that photographer, that paparazzi that was taking pictures of her.
Because paparazzi generally hunt in packs, the plural form paparazzi is much more frequent than the singular, which might reinforce the trend to treat it as singular. But if paparazzi is a singular, what is the plural? In 1995 the Grauniad proffered paparazzos, but that doesn’t really seem to have taken off.
17 June Even the scummiest paparazzos put their cameras away when I ask them not to take pictures of my kids.
If paparazzi is a singular, then logically the plural is paparazzis, and that does crop up:
I wouldn’t represent any clients that want me to tip paparazzis to tell them so that they can intrude on their personal lives
CNN transcripts.
But generally, the one form is rushed off its feet snapping singularly and plurally. Hence the query with which I started this.
As someone pointed out, the basic children/women rule must apply: to a plural noun which does not end in –s, add an apostrophe and then a letter s. Thus, ‘the paparazzi’s cameras’, which is, however, still ambiguous between singular and plural, hence my original cavil.
As we began with a mistake in Italian, so we’ll end with a hoary old one that I was reminded of recently. A tourist in Siena wants a room with a view over those evocative, terracotta (there’s another Italian word for you) red-tiled rooftops. The Italian for roof is il tetto, a masculine noun, plural tetti. But the tourist says Vorrei una camera con una bella vista sulle tette, ‘I’d like a room with a beautiful view of tits.’
*The singular spaghetto for a strand exists in English. But I bet most people would feel as berkish as I would to exclaim, for example, ‘You’ve just dropped a spaghetto on the floor.’ Surely it’s a bit or a strand or a string of spaghetti, or even a noodle?
June 25, 2019
With regard to or with regards to? (2/2)
SUMMARY
21 per cent of a Twitter poll preferred ?with regards to over with regard to.
In a Twitter corpus the regards versions happen more often than the regard ones.
With regard to is three times more frequent in academic journals than in general language, whereas in regard to has a very similar frequency in both.
In a general corpus, with/in regard to occur with greater than expected frequency in formal and technical writing.
This blog is the continuation of an earlier one on the same topic. As mentioned in that previous blog, I look at language corpora to give me an objective basis for what I write. Below I show the results of searching in two Oxford University Press corpora initially, one of general language launched in February 2014 which I have often consulted and one of academic journals from June 2015.
What tweeps think
Before I get on to the figures it’s worth mentioning a couple of things. First, a poll on Twitter produced some interesting reactions. Here’s the question and the results.
Which reaction most closely describes yours to ‘with regards to’ for ‘with regard to’?
48% Totes unacceptable
22% Acceptable but worse
09% What’s the problem?
21% Better >with regard to
It was interesting that 21 per cent preferred ?with regards to. As for the 9% ‘What’s the problem’, I framed the question badly because it could mean either a) I don’t understand what the issue is, which is what I meant (Call yourself a lexicographer! Ed.) or b) the respondent doesn’t have a problem with either. I have just fired myself as a questionnaire writer.
Seriously, though, if nearly a quarter of respondents are happy with ?with regards to and, as Table 4 below suggests, nearly 15 per cent of examples are of it, it becomes problematic to talk about ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ versions, despite what editors (see previous blog) say. I have therefore adopted the terms ‘accepted’ and ‘stigmatized’, even though you could argue that this merely pushes the elephant of authority and correctness into the next room.
Now for the corpora
The two major ones are enormous:
Table 1: Corpora size
Numbers of:
Gen. Lang Corpus
Acad. Journals
Twitter corpus
‘Documents’
64,049
467, 954
1,689,217
Sentences
112,453,774
64,135,538
ditto
Words
2,145,689,388
1,367,119,159
17,764,948
My first research question, if you want to put it that way, was: how often are ‘in regard to’ and ‘with regard to’ used in academic writing compared to general writing?
And my second question was: how often do the stigmatized versions ‘?in/with regards to’ occur in academic writing compared to general writing?
However, once I started looking at those two sources, it struck me that I should also look at the Twitter corpus and add it to any comparisons. (See the table above for figures showing its much smaller size.)
And that led to the third question: what does the data show about the style or register of language in which the two phrases are used?
As regards or regarding question 1, then, as one might expect, with regard to occurs almost three times as often per million words*(PMW) in the academic journals corpus as in the general one while on Twitter it is negligible. In regard to is much less frequent than with regard to at 3.57 PMW in general corpus and 3.69 in academic journals. I have no convincing explanation for this very similar frequency across the two corpora but wonder if it suggests that it is less stylistically marked in people’s minds than with regard to. Any suggestions for an explanation are welcome.
Table 2: Relative frequency of standard phrases in three corpora
Gen. Lang Corpus
Acad. Journals
Twitter corpus
Total
PMW
Total
PMW
Total
PMW
with regard to
26,925
10.71
46,868
28.20
5
0.22
in regard to
8,969
3.57
6,138
3.69
2
0.09
*Frequency per million words is a useful way of putting words in rank order. For example, to put the figures for with/in regard to in context, happy, a common word, occurs 114.52 PMW in the general corpus but only 8.88 in the Academic Journals.
The next table shows data relating to question 2 (How often do the stigmatized versions ‘in/with regards to’ occur in academic writing compared to general writing.)
Table 3: Relative frequency of ‘regards’ phrases in three corpora
Gen. Lang Corpus
Acad. Journals
Twitter corpus
Total
PMW
Total
PMW
Total
PMW
?with regards to
3,772
1.50
3,621
2.18
11
0.49
?in regards to
3,810
1.52
1,088
0.65
15
0.66
This data shows, obviously, a much lower frequency PMW for the stigmatized versions in both the general language corpus and academic journals, but a higher one in the Twitter corpus, where there are in any case more stigmatized than accepted versions.
Another way of looking at the data is to calculate the relative percentage contribution of the accepted and the stigmatized versions in each corpus. The left column for each corpus shows the absolute numbers, the right the percentage contributed by each form to the combined totals.
Table 4: Percentages of accepted:stigmatized versions across three corpora
Gen. Lang Corpus
Acad. Journals
Twitter corpus
# of examples
%
Total
%
Total
%
with regard to
26,925
85.65
46,868
92.82
5
31.25
?with regards to
3,772
14.35
3,621
07.18
11
68.75
TOTAL BOTH
30,697
100
50,489
100
16
100
in regard to
8,969
70.18
6,138
84.94
2
11.77
?in regards to
3,810
29.82
1,088
15.06
15
88.23
TOTAL BOTH
12,779
100
7,226
100
17
100
The percentage of accepted version versus the stigmatized version is higher in the academic journals corpus than in the general corpus. In contrast, in the Twitter corpus, the accepted versions are a minority, and, for in regard to, a rather small one.
As regards question 3, the general corpus data is stratified according to register into five categories: standard, formal, technical, informal, non-standard. There is also a sizeable category ‘0’, meaning ‘unknown’.
Though one could perhaps predict this, it is still worth pointing out that both phrases occur with a much higher than predicted frequency in the formal and technical registers. Conversely, the altered or mistaken versions occur with somewhat greater than predicted frequency in the informal register, and with very much less than expected frequency in technical and formal registers. The next two tables show the absolute numbers per register and the actual vs expected percentage.
Table 5: Distribution of accepted forms by register
Register
Gen. Lang Corpus
with regard to
in regard to
Number
%
Number
%
standard
7,768
52.10
2,746
55.30
formal
7,652
163.90
2,200
141.40
technical
5,727
206.70
1,363
147.70
informal
1,521
40.80
576
46.40
non-standard
176
15.90
35
9.50
unknown
4,081
93.80
2,049
141.40
Table 6: Distribution of ‘regards’ versions by register
Register
Gen. Lang Corpus
with regards to
in regards to
Number
%
Number
%
standard
1,766
84.50
1,631
77.30
formal
494
75.50
385
58.30
technical
260
89.60
211
53.80
informal
608
116.50
828
157.00
non-standard
98
63.30
206
131.70
unknown
546
89.60
549
89.20
Regarding
Finally, in the earlier blog I suggested that in/with regard to could sometimes be replaced by about but that often that would not work. A reader kindly suggested that regarding could do the job, in addition to e.g. as regards, with respect to, in reference to, etc. I agree that it could, but think that while it is shorter than with/in regard to, it is still noticeably more formal and starchy than, say, a simple about, over and other single-word prepositions.
Rather more frequent than with/in regard in general corpus, it occurs with greater than expected frequency in the formal register and could often be replaced by something simpler, as in the following example:
When we disagreed with each other regarding whether to include a study, we discussed the inclusion criteria until we reached a decision.
about? over?
June 11, 2019
With regard to or with regards to? (1/2)
“Give my regards to Jean when you see her” I said to a friend the other day. (If I were considerably younger, I would no doubt have said “Say ‘hi’ to Jean…”)
“Giving your regards to someone” is a standard, if now old-fashioned, phrase that many people have used or will at some stage use.
Signing off an email with “Warmest regards” (my usual one) or some other formulation containing regards is also standard and uncontentious.
But a problem arises when that use of regards is unwittingly transferred to the set phrases “with regard to” and “in regard to.” Obviously, those phrases are used in rather different contexts: “Give my regards to” is mainly oral, while “in regard to” and “with regard to” are typical of writing – and not every kind of writing at that. Typically, they populate (some might say “infest”) formal, probably academic writing. (As it happens, this blog about the issue was sparked by spotting a professor, no less [or should that be “fewer”? 
