Cimorene

One of the books I was reading lately was old enough to include an example of when "guy" was still an insult, specifically (in that context) meaning "fool". Love that little slice of word history.

I think it must've been the Mapp & Lucia series (1930s). But it could've been from the Irish RM books (1890s).

*I have been reading some much older than that - medieval romances; but they're all in translation from old French, so no vocabulary history is demonstrated.

I was surprised to find only these definitions of "twerp" at wiktionary:

Noun

twerp (plural twerps)

(UK, colloquial) A fool, a twit.

Now you've broken it, you twerp!

1940, Fred Godfrey (lyrics and music), “Bless 'Em All”‎[1], performed by George Formby:

There's many an airman just finishin' his time. There's many a twerp signing on.

(US, colloquial, childish) A small or puny person; one regarded as insignificant, contemptible.

Get out of my way, you little twerp!

(US, colloquial, childish) A person who can be bullied playfully, or easily teased. Sometimes used as a pet-name (often for a younger sibling).

I would have said that it also carries an implication that the puny character is a pest, like... a terrier, or Brad Marchand. But this definition definitely doesn't allow for that implication.

Glancing through a page of search results, only Britannica and Urban Dictionary seem to have that nuance ("annoying" and "obnoxious").

What about everyone else?

Snookums had a vet checkup for his diabetes today, the first one in about a year (I've consulted on the phone with the vet and over email on the basis of blood glucose values from home tests though). We took him to the nearest vet for the first time and provided some papers from his previous vet tests and the values from the most recent blood curve a few weeks ago. (A blood curve is when you test blood sugar over a 12-hour period every 2 hours or so & graph the rising and falling blood sugar levels.)

Snookums, as a purebred cat, has the breeder-assigned silly name, you may remember, "Russel [sic] Crowe". However, he earned the name Snookums shortly after we acquired him because of his incredible snuggliness.

snookums (n.) | Online Etymology Dictionary

trivial term of endearment, by 1910, from the name of the baby added in 1907 to the popular "New York World" comic strip "The Newlyweds" by U.S. cartoonist George McManus. The name is perhaps from Snooks, proper name used in Britain for "a hypothetical person" (1860; compare Joe Blow in U.S.). As an actual proper name, Snooks dates back to the Domesday Book and may be from Old English *snoc "a projecting point of land" (perhaps here with sense of "a big nose").

Snookums is pronounced with ... [INSERT 20-MINUTE DETOUR THROUGH THE IPA VOWEL WITH AUDIO CHART] ɵ, the close mid-central rounded vowel at the beginning and the well-known ə, schwa at the end, i.e. Snɵ'kəms, and these are two sounds that are not in Finnish and quite difficult for Finns to say (plus the emphasis on the first syllable is confusingly light for them, according to Wax).

When I say it, Finnish people usually ask me to repeat it slow, and the receptionist instantly handed me a piece of paper to write it down. Upon receiving it she looked down through her reading glasses and said deliberately "Snow-oh-kUms" (because a double vowel is always a longer duration in Finnish, so she was spelling it in her head) (last syllable a bit like rhyming with zooms). The vet said "Snow-kooms, Snew-kooms?" I said "More like ÖÖÖÖÖ," which is a vowel in Finnish but it isn't really quite that vowel. Swedish speakers don't have trouble repeating it because it is quite close to, sort of in between, common Swedish vowels and occurs in dialects of Norwegian, and a very similar sound in standard Danish, so it's more like a sound from a comedically accented dialect of their language than a truly unknown sound to them. Schwa is also a complete cypher to Finns, but just making the end rhyme with "zooms" gets close enough to sound okay; that's what Swedish speakers tend to do.

Anyway, that was an unanticipated and cute tour through Finnish pronunciation, thanks to the fact that over time, keeping a straight face while vets refer to him as "Russel [sic] Crowe" (but without saying sic) has become more and more challenging, and this vet asks for their nickname (use name or preferred name, rather) first, and puts their legal or formal name on the chart as an addendum. I was excited for this opportunity just because I knew it would be more natural. For me. LOL. (Wax and I subsequently concluded the best spelling to clarify things to Finns would probably be Snukums... which... hahahahhahah.)

Anyway, his blood sugar was fine today at the visit but his fructosamine indicates over the past two weeks it's been worryingly high, as did the last blood curve I did. The vet found signs of a healing inflammation on his gums (he hasn't shown any discomfort about eating but his food doesn't really require much chewing: it's served to them like a warm sort of... coarse stew) and said he should have his teeth cleaned soon and this could explain the blood sugar levels, but has prescribed a higher dose of insulin for the time being, with blood tests before each dose to make sure he doesn't get hypoglycemic, and then a blood curve in a week's time after which I will consult with her via email.

I've seen analytical comments on Twitter and Tumblr referring to the posting style of "Buckle Up Twitter", but I wonder what would be the appropriate term for the rhetorical style itself (that is to say, the rhythm/pacing and melody, the frequent borrowing of clickbait framing/listicle style, the didacticism, and the heightened sense of urgency combined with a self-consciously artificial, vague chumminess - an assumption of familiarity that also makes clear we all understand the audience is actually strangers).

I am not sure if my perception is accurate (because Recency Illusion), but I have a sense that I'm seeing this rhetorical style being used gradually further and further from Buckle Up Twitter-style subject matter (ie less arguably urgent or important).

When, as an individual person, you say stuff a certain weird way that nobody else does, that's called an "idiolect", right?

So what's it called when a family unit has some slang or jargon or whatever... terms that are unique to them?

When I was a kid my dad's eccentric fannish poet friend Geoff Huth wrote up a whole book of them from his family that he shared with their connections, and we were pretty impressed, having a fair number in our own (that is, my childhood nuclear family's) circle, but not nearly as many.

IMO my dad's best coinage is "pice", an endearment/form of address that he and my mom would both use to address each other, as "the singular of spouse". (I think it started as 'spice' and evolved into 'pice'?)

Since my wife tragically works a service job with randomly variable hours that are never predictable until she gets her schedule a couple of weeks in advance, she eventually coined the term "the flip-flop" (which then evolved into "the flippy floppy") for an evening when she's worked a late shift and has very little time before going to bed because she has to work an early morning shift the next day (the minimum difference is 9 pm-7 am).

Eventually, we realized that we needed a term for the inverse of this, a work night with extra free time because she's already worked an early shift and has a late shift the next day: "the floppy flippy".

The fact that these terms sound extremely undignified is either a bonus or a detriment, I guess, depending on how you look at it.

#language #idiolect #dad jokes #service industry

languagelog_feed just posted on The Communicative Properties of Footwear, linking two not-funny Cathy strips about the "language of shoes" to scholarly projects that actually are about the language of shoes. You'll find links to a website and a few individual scientific papers there:

• A small study using US graduate students tested perceptions of female physicians using transcripts of an outpatient interview either with or without a photograph of the female physician wearing conservative vs. trendy boots. (That study found no statistically significant effect of footwear on approachability, professional image, ability to empathize with the patient, or amount of specialist experience; but they did find a "near-significant" effect on approachability, with "trendy" boots being less approachable.)



• A British study found university students' "free response" to female airline attendants' footwear favored safer, practical styles - like aviation safety guidelines but unlike the styles prescribed by airline corporate policies (according to the abstract).

One of my favorite books to browse through when I was home alone and feeling nervous (I was home sick a fair amount, and the library is one of the sunniest rooms in my parents' house; I felt safe curled up in the bed there, since it doubled as a guest bedroom for much of my childhood) was The Language of Clothes, a nonfiction sociolinguistics book about fashion written in I guess the 80s or 90s. My mom had probably got it used somewhere since it isn't quite her usual cup of tea.

Tuareg or Tamasheq is the most common variety of Berber (or Tamazight, a term for the language group which is gaining ground over "Berber", which was borrowed from Arabic in the middle ages and bears no relation to the native terms). Tuareg is spoken by the Tuareg in approximately the middle third of the protruding Western part of northern Africa, between Algeria (N)/ Niger (S)/ Mali (SW)/ Libya (NE). Arabic script has been used to write Tuareg for a couple of thousand years now, but the consonantal alphabet of Ancient Berber - derived from Phoenician! - survived by some strange miracle, and a recognisable descendant of it is still used by the Tuareg colloquially (not for formal writing). Check out the awesome.

Via languagelog:



And in other news, I thought I wanted an Asus Eeepc this winter, but it turns out I was wrong. What I really want is an MSI Wind U100 (if they even make them with Nordic keyboards, since they apparently only launched in Europe this week).

Automatic spellcheckers, those functions that do more harm than good most of the time, are nonetheless a necessary evil for people whose grasp of spelling is shaky for some reason or other. But nothing more eloquently illustrates the need to use them with alertness than their effect on proper names (you'd think it would be possible for some sort of algorithm to guess when a capitalised word is probably a proper name, but then, you'd think whoever was using the computer in the first place would TURN IT OFF when they knew they were typing A LIST OF NAMES).

At languagelog: High school students' names spellchecked into surreality in their yearbook. As reported in the New Scientist last year, the April 2007 issue of Contemporary Sociology contained a review article with contributors' last names changed from Gareis to Agrees, Beavais to Beavers, Gerstel to Gretel, and Sarkisian to Sardinian. Ahahahhahaha.

"Yay! I can has operator services!" I said to Wax, as my phone beeped to tell me my airtime refill had arrived. Then I thought, 'Why doesn't the sms just say, 'YES U CAN HAS AIRTIME'? It'd save space and be funny'. Then I thought about the phone's sms-creator dictionaries that allow for auto completion. My phone has English, Swedish, and a few others. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if it had Kitty Pidgin?

And then I thought further: why not TxtMsg? You know the majority of text messagers save time by writing all smses in that shorthand anyway. It would save even more time if auto complete could be automatically set to follow it.

Do I really not have a linguistics tag? Well, oops. That was an embarrassing lack of forethought... I should probably go back and make a lolcat one too.