Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 5
June 6, 2022
Teslas and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
Has this ever happened to you?
I’d be surprised if it hasn’t.
You notice something for the very first time and then you read it or hear it mentioned all the time everywhere. Therefore you think what you have just noticed is particularly common and frequent when in fact it isn’t. Its apparent frequency is just a product of your biased – or rather, pre-primed – perception.
An example could be people with multi-dyed hair or men wearing quilted anoraks that are two sizes too small [insert your own example here].
There’s a name for this well-known phenomenon: ‘the frequency illusion’.1 It’s a cognitive bias that, in my estimation, particularly afflicts people with an unhealthy interest in how people use language – ‘language peevers’ as the uncharitable label them/us.
For I number myself among such peevers.
This perceptual phenomenon also goes under the name of the ‘Baader-Meinhof phenomenon’.2
I mention all this because I was forcefully reminded of it the other day while driving up from Cornwall to Yorkshire, a distance of about 360 miles.
There seemed to be masses of Teslas on the road. ‘Oh, there’s another one’, thought I when yet one more overtook us as we dawdled in the slow lane to save fuel and, more importantly, to save our nerves. ‘That’s great: people are really making the transition to electric cars’, I wittered inwardly. Then I realled up and started counting how many non-Teslas went past us: perhaps 100 to 1, if not 200 to 1.
And then I started thinking, ‘This is probably not even “typical” traffic. This is drivers in the fast lane of a given motorway.’
It turns out that my estimate of a ratio of 1:200 Tesla:non-Tesla was insanely inaccurate. This site, which claims to list the makes of the most frequent cars in the UK, puts Tesla in 46th place, behind the luxury brand Aston Martin, and assigns it a piffling 12,249 cars out of the total of 32.5 million in the UK. So, all things being equal, or ceteris paribus, you might expect to see ONE Tesla every 2,653 cars.
My Tesla spotting on the motorway was truly an example of the frequency illusion.
When you are next tempted to peeve linguistically, bear that in mind.
1 It was Arnold Zwicky who first coined the term ‘frequency illusion’ in 2006, as described here. It relies on two mental or cognitive tics: first, ‘selective attention’, to register something strongly in the first place, and then ‘confirmation bias’. The term is now in the OED, as per one of the screenshots.
2 The Baader-Meinhoff effect. This designation from the way that, in 1994, someone in an online discussion group, having never previously known of that group of psychopathic Red German nutters the Baader-Meinhof gang, who by that date had ceased to be newsworthy, heard them mentioned by a friend and then came across two written references to them in the next 24 hours.
As the coiner of the term put it: ‘The phenomenon goes like this: The first time you learn a new word, phrase or idea, you will see that word, phrase or idea again in print within 24 hours.’
June 3, 2022
The Platinum Jubilee: Celebrating Her Majesty the Queen’s 70-year reign – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
Here’s one I made earlier. The rubric below is obviusly not by me: I would rather saw off my legs than use ‘around’ in that way.
Collins Dictionary celebrates Her Majesty the Queen’s 70-year reign by looking into the etymology around the Platinum Jubilee.
May 3, 2022
National Gardening Week – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
With National Gardening Week starting on Monday 2 May, Collins Dictionary discusses words to do with horticulture and gardening.
Source: National Gardening Week – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
April 28, 2022
National Tea Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
I should have posted this on the day, but here it is anyway.
Thursday 21 April is National Tea Day, so Collins Dictionary discusses all things tea, from cups, to teapots, to types of tea.
April 22, 2022
Macron, he-vage, Donne and merkins
Recently, President Macron was photographed in a pose that in more innocent times would have embarrassed even a cash-strapped gigolo. But such is the deadly grind of modern media, when the presidency is in your sights, it seems anything is allowed – short of displaying your masculine appendage. (For copyright reasons, I can’t reproduce the picture, but I gift you a hyperlink here.)
On display was Monsieur le Président’s thicket, scrub or savannah of chest hair in what seemed like a throwback to the gold-medallioned hirsuteness of the 1980s. Naff, cheesy or subtly erotic? Who can say? One way or the other, it is a Marmite pose. In fact, such was the lavishness of the fur on show some might suspect a chest wig.
Whatever your view of this sort of sub- or post-Putinesque display – mine was pretty ‘blech’ – it calls for discussion of a wonderful coinage that the more sober-suited dictionaries do not yet record: he-vage, the male equivalent of cleavage. As the Urban Dictionary puts it: ‘often seen when a button-down shirt is unbuttoned to an extreme. Generally viewed in nightclubs or on CSI’.1
That definition is dated 2007 so he-vage has been around at least that long. However, the word is a bit problematic from a formal point of view. If written without its hyphen, out of context how would anyone have any idea what hevage means and how to pronounce it? It’s a ‘knowing’ sort of word, in the sense that a knowing look involves a conspiracy between the deliverer and the receiver of the message.
He-vage and cleavageIt is of course a pun on cleavage. Which in turn is a euphemism, and a rather more recent one than I would have guessed. I was asking myself what people would have called cleavage before, and the answer is helpfully supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary definition: ‘The cleft between a woman’s breasts as revealed by a low-cut décolletage.’ I suppose in the past one would have talked less specifically of décolletage (pronounced day-coll-uh-tarzh). The OED labels cleavage ‘colloquial’, but I think that’s a rather old-fashioned caveat. Here’s the earliest example cited:
Low-cut Restoration costumes…display too much ‘cleavage’ (Johnston Office trade term for the shadowed depression dividing an actress’ bosom into two distinct sections).
1946 Time 5 Aug. 98
The next OED citation, from 1956, also put scare quotes round the word, indicating its then still slightly louche status.
What captivates me about the word is how English can almost willy-nilly borrow an element from one word that has no obvious meaning and then graft it on to other elements that thereby supercharge it with meaning.
A classic example is the –athon of marathon. On its own it is meaningless, and it is not a Classical Greek suffix. That hasn’t stopped it giving rise to walkathon, talkathon, swimathon and a host of others.
But –vage? That’s a harder one to graft on, especially as the suffix –age is well established, polysemous (the OED assigns it four meanings) and productive: think signage, roughage, appendage, and even cleavage itself, when it refers to the act of cleaving.
And do you pronounce it like wage, or like vague or just /ɪdʒ/ as in bondage?
And talking of cleaving, it is one of those rare words that is sometimes talked about as if it were a contronym, that is, a word having two opposing meanings. The first meaning is ‘to divide or split’ and the second is ‘to adhere or to stick to’ as in these examples from the Oxford Online Dictionary
They watched a coot cleave the smooth water.
And
Go and catch a falling starRose’s mouth was dry, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth.
The first has had a bewildering variety of forms down the ages. If one were to use it now, the past tense could be cleaved, clove or cleft and the participle can be cleft or cloven, as in finding oneself in a cleft stick or the devil’s cloven hoof. If I had to write the past tense, I would swither.
The past tense cleft, being such a rarely used inflection these days, put me in mind of the opening of Donne’s ‘Song’:
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil’s foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
And somehow the combination of Donne and chest hair led me to a word that caused no little puzzlement and much hilarity among our group when first encountered at university: merkin, a pubic wig. The OED provides it with several citations, including this jolly doggerel from 1962 by the American critic Edmund Wilson:
Said Philip Sydney, buttoning his jerkin ‘Allow me, darling: you have dropped your merkin.’
Night Thoughts
I hereby apologise if the title of my post clickbaited you.
1 CSI refers to an American crime series, Crime Scene Investigation.
March 3, 2022
World Hearing Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
My thoughts on World Hearing Day.
Thursday 3 March is World Hearing Day. This is an annual event to promote awareness of hearing loss and advocate for measures to avoid it.
Source: World Hearing Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
March 1, 2022
A kangaroo loose in the top paddock
Image by Lynda Hinton, courtesy of Unsplash. There’s a colourful Australian idiom to have (a few/a couple of) kangaroos/a kangaroo (loose) in the top paddock, meaning, to use another idiom, ‘to have a screw loose’, or ‘to be eccentric or unhinged’. I don’t know how long it’s been around and there’s no Oxford English Dictionary citation for it, but Jonathon Green’s earliest citation in his magisterial online Green’s Dictionary of Slang is from 1945: ‘to have kangaroos in one’s top paddock and to have the white ants, to be silly or mad’.
This is from a book of that year called The Australian Language, which suggests that the phrase itself must predate such a collection of Strineisms. There are several examples in the NOW (News on the Web) corpus of 14.6 billion words:
How do we work out what it means so easily?though he’d had to renounce his Australian citizenship to nominate, the opposition continued to make jibes about his provenance — even distributing a flyer with a picture of Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee saying the candidate had “kangaroos loose in the top paddock”.
It only takes an instant’s reflection to twig what it means, but how exactly can we do that so quickly? I suggest it’s because it’s a variation or an outlier of an underlying idea, of an underlying conceptual metaphor, if you will. That underlying conceptual metaphor is THE MIND IS THE TOP STOREY IN A BUILDING, which relies in turn on the conceptual metaphor THE BODY IS A BUILDING.
Far-fetched, I hear you mutter? Let me persuade you otherwise. First of all, the idea of the body as a building goes back in English at least as far as Old English, when the body might be referred to poetically by the kenning ‘a bone-house’ (banhus).
The body can be conceptualised in different ways. One standard one that we have no problem in using again and again is THE BODY IS A CONTAINER (and ANGER IS A HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER) as expressed in dozens of idioms such as ‘he blew a fuse’, ‘steam was coming out of his ears’, ‘he bottled up his anger’, ‘she flipped her lid’, and so forth. That conceptual metaphor is well attested in the academic literature. Similarly, we regularly draw on the metaphor RELATIONSHIPS ARE BUILDINGS through such metaphors as ‘our friendship has a firm foundation’, ‘we have a solid relationship’, ‘their friendship began to crumble’, etc.
THE BODY IS A BUILDING conceptual metaphorLess attested, or possibly not attested at all for all I know, is THE BODY IS A BUILDING.
Let’s look first at a couple of ‘creative’, that is, original metaphors harnessing this. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle drew on this mind metaphor when he wrote:
I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
George Bernard Shaw drew on the same conceptual metaphor:
When men and women pick one another up for just a bit of fun, they find they’ve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top story as well as a ground floor, and you can’t have the one without the other.
Those two are a creative simile and a metaphor, respectively, that instantiate the conceptual metaphor THE MIND IS THE TOP STOREY IN A BUILDING. That metaphor is also lexicalised in everyday language in to have bats in the belfry (OED, c.1901) meaning ‘to be mad or eccentric’ and to have a bee in one’s bonnet about something. Actually, that started out as to have bees in one’s head (OED, 1553) and it was not until 1845 that De Quincey is cited as writing the bonnet version.
What’s more, while those are the two idioms that standard dictionaries give, there are other slangier versions of the same idea (courtesy of Jonathon Green):
to have rats in the garret/attic (1842 [OED]/1899)
to have beetles in one’s attic/arcade (1902/1910)
to have bugs in the head (1897)
Fine, I hear you mumble. These are just English idiomatic phrases that riff off or clone each other.
In reply, I say that if it were purely a linguistic phenomenon within English, we mightn’t expect to find parallels in other languages. But we do find them:
French: avoir une arraignée au plafond (literally, to have a spider on the ceiling’, which Oxford translates aptly as ‘to have bats in the belfry’).
Danish: at have rotter på loftet ‘to have rats in the attic’ (now, where have I heard that before?)
German: a) schwach/nicht ganz richtig im Oberstübchen sein,‘to be weak/not all right in the little upper room’, in which the noun Oberstübchen seems to exist only in the idiom; and
b) einen Dachschaden haben, literally ‘to have roof damage’– and it is also used literally! Collins translates it as ‘to have a slate loose’ which fortuitously brings in another example of THE MIND IS THE TOP STOREY IN A BUILDING that I hadn’t thought about.
There might be others in other languages, and I’d love to hear them from you if you happen to know of any.
Meanwhile, back at to have a kangaroo loose in the top paddock and variants, rather than conceptualising the mind as the top storey of a building, it views it as the upper part of a physical space, a farm or similar. Why should it be the ‘top’ paddock unless it is calling on that top storey metaphor? At the same time, it seems to play to another metaphor, namely, MADNESS IS ANIMALS IN A BOUNDED SPACE. This provides another rationale for to have bats in the belfry, but also links to as mad as a box of frogs, not to mention to have kangaroos loose in the top paddock.
February 15, 2022
Scurrilous accusations
On 3 February this year, Munira Mirza, the UK Prime Minister’s policy chief, who had worked with him for fourteen years, resigned. She released a letter, parts of which are included at the end of this post. The straw that broke this camel’s back was that Boris Johnson had personally blamed the leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, for letting a (now) notorious multiple sexual abuser escape justice when Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions, aka the head honcho of the Crown Prosecution Service.
Many journalists picked up on a single word in her resignation letter: scurrilous. The reason seems fairly obvious: scurrilous accusation is a great soundbite. That said, I can’t help wondering, cynic that I am, about a couple of other things. Did the hacks relish it because it’s not a word you come across every day? And how many people googled it to find out what it means? It also has a very particular ‘mouthfeel’ as the oenophiles might say. The only other word containing the string of letters –rilous is perilous and its opposites. No other words contain the string –urrilous.
To what, then, does it owe its seemingly unique shape?
Where does the word come from?Scurrilous has been in English since the sixteenth century, according to the OED. Since 1576, to be precise. In A Winter’s Tale (1623; 1609-11) Perdita tells the servant to forewarn Autolycus that he ‘use no scurrilous words in’s tunes’. Given the bawdiness often underlying Shakespeare’s language, one sympathises with her request.
Scurrilous is the anglicised version of scurrile (1547; pronounced/ˈskʌrɪl/), which lingered on until the nineteenth century. And scurrile comes either from the same French form or from Latin scurrīlis, which in turn is a derivative of Latin scurra, a buffoon, according to Lewis and Short, ‘A city buffoon, droll, jester (usually in the suite of wealthy persons, and accordingly a kind of parasite; …)
What exactly does it mean?Collins Cobuild, based on corpus data, has an excellent definition:
Scurrilous accusations or stories are untrue and unfair, and are likely to damage the reputation of the person that they relate to.
That perfectly describes Boris Johnson’s jibe.
Cobuild then gives these two examples:
Scurrilous and untrue stories were being invented.
…scurrilous rumours.
The most common nouns it qualifies according to Collins Bank of English are rumours, slander, gossip, tittle–tattle and accusations. The adjectives it often appears together with are unfounded, contemptible, slanderous and untrue.
Doctor Johnson defined scurrilous multiply thus:
Grossly opprobrious ; using such language as only the licence of a buffoon can warrant ; loudly jocular ; vile ; low.
Some commentators might find that second definition particularly apposite for Boris Johnson. Perhaps as a classicist, he will have savoured the word.
Extracts from the Munira Mirza’s resignation letter“I believe it was wrong for you to imply this week that Keir Starmer was personally responsible for allowing Jimmy Savile to escape justice. There was no fair or reasonable basis for that assertion. This was not the usual cut and thrust of politics.”
[…]
You are a man of extraordinary abilities with a unique talent for connecting with people.
You are a better man than many of your detractors will ever understand which is why it is desperately sad that you let yourself down by making a scurrilous accusation against the Leader of the Opposition.”
January 29, 2022
National Puzzle Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
National Puzzle Day falls on 29 January. And what’s not to love about puzzles? We explore the origins of some of our favourite games and puzzles.
Source: National Puzzle Day – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
January 17, 2022
Last week was house plant week. I forgot to post this, but here it is anyway.
For Houseplant Week, we look at the definition: ‘a plant customarily grown indoors in a domestic environment for ornament’.
