Don't Burn Yourself

(WSJ illustration)

The word "toast" conjures pleasant images. A slice of buttered toast can be the perfect start to the day, and raising a glass in a toast fills the room with conviviality.

Bill Murray coined a third definition in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters when his character Peter Venkman declared, "This chick is toast" then blasted the demon with his proton pack.

That use of toast seemed to fill a need for a word signifying death and destruction but with a less ominous tone. It immediately caught on:

The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes Murray’s ad-lib as the earliest known occurrence of “toast” with the modern meaning, calling the usage “proleptic.” Prolepsis is a figure of speech in which a future state is represented as already occurring, so “You’re toast” joined other proleptic expressions like “You’re dead” or “You’re history.”

Your humble blogger doesn't use the term because future states sometimes don't materialize. A sage who says "Putin is toast" or "San Francisco is toast" may very well end up looking stupid. Why confirm what people are thinking if you don't have to?.

Good at Describing How Terrible We're Feeling

Used to help kids express their feelings about disasters in Asia,
this worksheet can be adapted for use by adult Californians.

Saturday's post concerned the series of natural disasters that struck California in the 1860's. But we shouldn't overlook reporter Carl Nolte's remark on how we use the language to make today's problems seem historically important: [bold added]

Everything is dramatic. Even the weather comes with a Hollywood touch: Forecasters now use words like atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones and king tides, all recently coined terms to describe conditions that have happened for thousands of years. You know how it is. A new story every night.

Meanwhile, just before our own big sets of rain and wind, an immense snowstorm swept the East. Mountains of snow and ice — 52 inches of snow in Buffalo. Thirty-seven people died in Erie County. Now that is real weather.

Despite its problems in the 19th century California overcame them and grew. It was the land of opportunity, and the population swelled to 40 million. Now people are leaving, and that's before any truly horrible calamity.

When the 100-year floods and the 9.0 earthquakes eventually come, will we have the strength of character to recover? That's unclear, but I'm sure we'll invent words that will perfectly describe how terrible we're feeling.

The Second Gentleman

(WSJ photo)

Mr. Douglas Emhoff, the husband of the Vice President, has an official designation: the Second Gentleman.

Mr. Emhoff’s honorific uses “gentleman” as the male counterpart to “lady” in the traditional titles of “First Lady” and “Second Lady” for the wives of the president and vice president, respectively. But while his formal designation may be new, it’s built on centuries of linguistic etiquette.

“Gentleman” itself dates back to around 1200 in English, originally modeled on the French equivalent, “gentilhomme.”

“Gentle” originally meant “belonging to a good, upstanding family,” from Latin “gentilis,” meaning “of the same family or clan.” The title was used for a man in the lower tier of respectability—one whose family was not ranked with the nobility yet was still entitled to a coat of arms.

Words, specifically references to men and women, have been one of the flashpoints of the culture wars. Lady and gentleman are terms that still carry with them the "whiff of their aristocratic background despite the country’s ostensibly egalitarian spirit" and are not tainted with historical baggage like, for example, master and mistress.

It's nice to know that at least one subject--the proper way to address Mr. Emhoff--won't be a source of contention.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

For the generations that grew up with only three TV networks (plus PBS), this was a familiar problem:

The Trouble With Words We’ve Read but Not Heard

My high school classmates and I may have developed reasonably large vocabularies and become good spellers, but unless we heard the words spoken aloud in the classroom or on TV, mis-pronunciation was a common “fox pass."

The dictionaries were not much help with their pronunciation keys:

Vowels
                as in…
i              fleece /flis/
i              happy /ˈhæpi/
ɪ              kit /kɪt/
ɛ              dress /drɛs/, carry /ˈkɛri/
æ            trap /træp/
ɑ              father /ˈfɑðər/, lot /lɑt/
ɔ,ɑ          hawk /hɔk/, /hɑk/
ə              cup /kəp/, alpha /ˈælfə/
ʊ              foot /fʊt/
u              goose /ɡus/
ɔr            force /fɔrs/, north /nɔrθ/
ər            nurse /nərs/

If you know how to sound out the symbols in the left column, you were a better student than I.

When a prominent person misspeaks publicly -- for example, when President Obama mispronounced corpsman as "corpse-man" in a speech --it not only lowers our estimation of the person but we also feel pained empathy from remembering our own similar embarrassments.

Mine was in high school, when I spent days crafting a speech on moral philosophy. It would have been pretty good had I not pronounced mores like the marshmallow sandwich (S'mores) instead of the eel (Moray). Of course, I wasn't aware of the error until the teacher interrupted with the correct pronunciation.

It's not the million dollar words but the simplest ones that can trip you up.

It Made Sense at the End

Naomi and her daughters-in-law (Chagall, 1960)

On this Sunday morning the passing of Justice Ginsburg prompts this reflection about her first name, Ruth. (I'm old enough to remember when the first name was called the Christian name, but that term has fallen out of favor.)

In the Book of Ruth Naomi and her husband and two sons left Judah for Moab to escape famine. The sons married two Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah (fun fact--Oprah Winfrey was named after the Biblical character Orpah, but Oprah changed her name due to constant mispronunciation). All three men died, and the three widows faced a bleak future.

Naomi decided to seek refuge with her relations in Judah and encouraged Orpah and Ruth to return to their families in Moab; both were young enough to find husbands and bear children. Orpah did go back to Moab after some protest, but Ruth stayed with Naomi:

But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”--Ruth 1:16-17

Ruth's willingness to sacrifice her own future to accompany Naomi has served as a model to generations of Jews and Christians who have been confronted with a similar decision. (Spoiler alert: it works out for Ruth in the end, but it was far from certain that it would.) Ruth is a name with a virtuous antecedent, and being called "ruthless" is not a compliment.

Inspired by the birth of "Baby Ruth" to President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland in 1891, Ruth ("compassionate friend") was a popular girls' name in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In my own family my maternal grandmother and her sisters--Ruth, Esther, Sarah, Eunice, and Bertha--were all named after women in the Bible. My grand-aunt Ruth was the eldest and thus received the first choice of girls' names.

Branches of modern philosophy say that meaning does not exist but is an artifact of the human mind. That may be true, but for your humble blogger people and their names grow old together until the name becomes inextricably linked with the individual. They have meaning together.

It's difficult to imagine Ruth Bader Ginsburg--or for that matter my grand-aunt Ruth--being known by a different name. Somehow it made sense at the end.

British Foods That are Hard to Find Here

In America we don't serve these British foods partly because their names can't even be printed on the menu.

Faggots and groaty dick: Why some foods travel and others don't

Faggots are a kind of meatball

Michelin starred chef Glynn Purnell...said the recent surge in "nose-to-tail" eating - a movement which looks to cook the whole animal rather than focus on choice cuts - has seen faggots popping up at eateries across the UK. "It is estimated that tens of millions of faggots are eaten every year, so they can't be that unpopular"...

Groaty dick: firms up after cooling

The thick meat porridge - sometimes known as groaty pudding - found its way to the Black Country, where it is still made at the Black Country Living Museum's bonfire night.

Made from oat husks, leeks, onions stock and cheap cuts of beef, its appeal once lay in the fact it was "calorie heavy, cheap to make and could be left on the range for hours while out at work or looking after children," said curator Grant Bird....

"In the olden days they'd cook this so thick, let it get cold, then cut it like a cake...the man would take a slice of this in his satchel to work and munch on it."

Both dishes have British working-class origins and are the antithesis of the low-carb plant-based organic foods that the educated folk are eating. If I could find them in the Bay Area, I'd give them a try.

Correct Without a T

Always seeking to improve my vocabulary, I subscribe to Word Genius, whose lesson today was about an adjective others employ to describe your humble blogger.

Doughty --now that's a word I used to encounter often in the tales of King Arthur and Robin Hood.

Wait a minute, my mistake. Drop the T. My friends call me doughy...at least I thought they were friends.

Was It a Typo?

(Dreamstime)

In a story about the number of Anglican worshippers by country:

Unsurprisingly, the country with the largest population of followers is the foundering state, the United Kingdom. The Church of England has an incredible following of 26,000,000 people. In the second position, the Church of Nigeria has about 18,000,000 believers...

The writer meant founding ("the activity or process of beginning an institution"), not foundering ("To fail utterly; collapse: a marriage that soon foundered").

Given the sorry condition of Britain's ship of state (Brexit, immigration), however, foundering may be the correct usage.

Sands of Time

(Google Maps)

Without a second thought, we've headed to Ocean Beach after workdays and on weekends. Driving the eight miles from the Financial District to the Cliff House takes one hour by bus and half an hour by car.

It's hard to comprehend that 134 years ago "thousands" of San Franciscans had never seen the Pacific Ocean : [bold added]

During the city’s first three decades, its western edge was difficult and expensive to get to. An 1863 toll road, Point Lobos Avenue, ran from Bush and Presidio to the Cliff House, but using it required owning or renting a horse and carriage, and its round-trip fare of $1 was beyond the means of most people. A decade later, paved roads to the beach were opened in the new Golden Gate Park, but the Park Commission did not allow commercial lines to use them.

Leland Stanford and fellow "plutocrats" who ran the Southern Pacific built a rail line to the beach in advance of securing approvals, and

On Sunday, Dec. 9, 1883, more San Franciscans were at the beach than ever before in the city’s history. A reported 18,000 people filled the northern end of Ocean Beach, packed the Cliff House and spilled south toward Golden Gate Park.

“Along the Ocean Beach a sight was presented such as has not been seen before by those who for years had made almost daily trips to the beach in hack or buggy,” the Daily Alta California reported. “In spite of the cold wind the Cliff House end of the beach was literally thronged with people. Children, playing in the sand, looked at the ocean for the first time in their lives.”

The round-trip fare was 20 cents, the equivalent of $16 today, and was gladly paid by thousands of San Franciscans.

Please note, language mavens, that even in the 19th century, literally did not necessarily mean "exactly true."

The Power of Three

The Trinity plate at Armadillo Willy's has three barbecued meats

Trinity means three, but its ancient meaning refers to the Christian God who is both all-powerful and three-in-one, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Trinity is the name given to the first nuclear test of the Manhattan project.  Robert Oppenheimer was inspired by John Donne's poetic reference to the Deity ("batter my heart, three-personed God")

Trinity connotes power, awe, and other-worldly mystery....

You Say Potato, I Say Solanum Tuberosum

The College Board will eliminate "obscure vocabulary words" (BTW, isn't "vocabulary words" a redundancy?) from the SAT. Its January 26th press release reveals a sense of humor that the erudite educators have kept well hidden for 100 years:

New York — Throughout its 100-year history, the abstruse vocabulary words of the SAT® have engendered prodigious vexation in millions of examinees annually. On Saturday, Jan. 23, students across the country participated in the terminal transpiration of the SAT in its habituated gestalt.

To adumbrate the changes to be manifest in future administrations of the assessment: The new SAT will be more trenchant and pellucid, and the format will no longer pertinaciously reward students who punctiliously engage in the antediluvian praxis of committing idiosyncratic words to memory.

College Board President David Coleman promulgated, “Your invectives and maledictions have been heard. Clemency has been granted.”

I somewhat disagree. Rote memorization is good for the soul, praxis makes perfect, and I wish those kids would get off my lawn.

The Power of No

(pinterest image)

Learning to say no is a healthy sign in a child's development:

If your toddler's favorite word is "no!" and his default position is defiance, relax. New research suggests that willful behavior in very young children is both normal and a sign of a healthy parent-child relationship.

For adults the reluctance or inability to say "no" is a major source of stress:

A prime reason for our modern busyness is, of course, our inability to just say no: no to the recurring, unproductive meeting, no to volunteering to be class parent, no to the endless demands on our time.

The WSJ writer suggests creating a set of personal policies (example: "I don't take calls on weekends") that reflect one's values, then broadcasting them to family, friends, and business associates. Saying "no" should become easier.

Further thoughts:
1) I'd rather do a few things well than a lot of things poorly.
2) The people doing the asking (e.g., salesmen) are often not my friends.
3) For both the employee and employer's sake it's important that written policies explain clearly the circumstances when after-hours work will be necessary. (For most of my career employers assumed that they could call on my services 24/7; in 2015 that assumption is no longer operative.)
4) It's nearly always better to get the "no" out of the way sooner than later.

I'd Rather Be Lucky, Though

According to research, appearing intelligent is not too difficult to pull off if one practices certain behaviors [bold added]:

They include showing self-confidence, speaking clearly and smoothly, and responding thoughtfully to what others are saying, research shows. And put away that phone: One of the strongest and most accurate signs of intelligence is looking at others when you are speaking to them.

(Psychology News photo)

Note, however, that the aforementioned are social signals that don't necessarily correlate with the mathematical and pattern-recognition intelligence that is highly valued by many who live here.

The type of personality that likes to dive deeply into a computer program often makes a poor salesperson for herself as well as her company.

We're probably overthinking this: just wear eyeglasses.

Sounding Like an MBA

Your humble observer believes that the various flavors of capitalism are much superior to socialist/statist alternatives. But he is not blind to the human weakness and dastardly goings-on that can arise when individuals pursue their own self-interest.

The top-50 business buzzwords are ingenious and often ruefully amusing. Some, like synergy and poison pill, have been around for decades (the most creative, IMO, are in red):

A “granular” perspective: To examine something in detail – “course-grained” is to focus on the big picture, “fine-grained” the nitty-gritty.
Deep diving: A liquid, “in-depth” take on the above.
Deep pyramid: The structure of a centralised organisation consisting of many layers.
Excentralise: The trend towards flatter corporate pyramids.
Deliverable: An output, product, result, or outcome.
Paradigm shift: Something revolutionary.
Game changer: A step down from the above.
Ideation: The ability to come up with effective new ideas.
Resonance: The impact of an idea across the organisation.
Vision statement: An explanation of what you one day hope to achieve.
Decruiting: Current euphemism for firing people.
Don’t boil the ocean: Don’t waste time or resources.
Pain points: Mumbo-jumbo for problems or challenges.
Emotional leakage: Anger or disappointment that transfers from one person to another.
Eyebrow management: Arms-length management style in which a top exec can stop a course of action by the slightest hint of disapproval.
Falling forward: Risk management term for a learning process that consists of trying something – a product, strategy or organisational change – and scrapping it for a better idea if it doesn’t work.
Gatekeeper: Any person or department that screens or selects.
Bleeding edge – Leading or cutting edge.
Seamless integration: Patching things together so that nobody will notice.
Pushing the envelope: Testing the boundaries.
Data colouration: White lies that percolate up the line as employees at all levels report the state of their business in the most favourable light.
Quick wins: Results that look good but can be achieved with minimal effort.
Let’s speak “offline”: A one-on-on, face-to-face conversation.
Out-of-the-box: To think outside the box, don’t you still have to think about the box?
Informativity: The degree of efficiency with which a company’s information needs are handled.
Disruptive thinking: Being innovative, only more so.
Intrapreneurship: Innovation and creativity developed within an existing company.
Dawn raid (daybreak attack): A surprise takeover move by a predator company.
Death Valley curve: The stage in a new company’s existence when losses erode its equity base, damaging its ability to raise funds.
Hot button: The thing you push to get a strong response.
EEE sensation: Proceeding in the direction you are moving because it’s “easy, effortless and enjoyable”.
JIC and JIT: Just in case and just in time.
CSF: Critical success factor – be it great service, price, technology, etc.
OVA: Stands for overhead value analysis.
MIPS war: Acronym for speeding up computer power to handle “millions of instructions per second”.
MEGO effect: The impact on an audience by an inept presenter: “My eyes glazed over.”
Organic growth: The expansion of business through internal development.
Golden retriever: A cash bonus that lures a retired executive back into an active business role.
Layered: What happens when your responsibilities are eroded by a new layer of management.
Mushroom management: A management technique that keeps employees in the dark.
High-touch: Management style practised in people-oriented companies, where “touchy-feely” methods are popular.
Poison pill: Debt and other liabilities taken on by companies that corrupt their balance sheet.
Psychic income: The satisfaction derived from your job – usually a substitute for money.
Spear carrier: Second-tier representative top managers send to the frontline to save themselves.
Share of mind: A key factor in achieving brand recognition.
Low-hanging fruit: Go for the easiest pickings first.
Quant: A numbers man or woman.
Synergy: A chronically overused buzzword that generally refers to cooperative interaction among groups.
Big data: Lots of interpretations, but usually refers to the explosion of digitised data created by people, machines, sensors and the like that can act as an audit trail.
Bandwidth: In its latest incarnation in the corporate sector, means the energy or mental capacity required to deal with a situation.

Win by Losing

Word of the day:

Propaedeutics or propedeutics is a historical term for an introductory course into a discipline: art, science, etc. Etymology: pro- + Greek: paideutikós, "pertaining to teaching".

Propaedeutics may be defined as knowledge necessary for learning, but not for proficiency.

Whenever your well-educated friends are getting the better of you in an argument, concede by saying "I only know the propaedeutics of the subject, but I'm no expert."

Double Meaning

English is a confusing language, and no more so than in the use of contranyms - words that have meanings that are the opposite of each other. Wordsmith Ben Zimmer ruminates about the dual use of "sanction":

we are supposed to understand the verb "sanction" to mean "to impose a heavy penalty on," even though it can also mean "to authorize or encourage by approval."

IMHO, I think writers should avoid contranyms because they disrupt the flow of the piece; the reader must take a break to search the sentences before and after sanction, for example, to decipher which meaning the author intended.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if words like sanction were sanctioned? Now that would be sick.

Your Name Determines Your Destiny

Headline: Ottawa Police Arrest Donald Popadick for Indecent Exposure in Public Park

The meaning of Donald is dark stranger. 

Boomerang

ESPN screenshot captured by Larry Brown Sports

There's still too much racism in America, and that's not big news. The insults sting less over time, though, because of the knowledge that the epithets boomerang far worse upon the speaker than upon the target. People are free to speak, insult, and mock, but they are not free from the consequences of speech. Whoever wrote the ESPN headline is likely to get fired or at least reprimanded.

Most Americans have curtailed the use of words (e.g., coon, chink, fairy, retarded) whose secondary meanings are considered offensive to certain groups. (Even "niggardly" is now off limits because it just sounds too much like another word.)

It must also be said that there's too much political correctness and hyper-sensitivity. Allowances need to be made for the age of the speaker. Older people who grew up using now-objectionable words and phrases should be cut some slack. It's not easy to change habits built up over a lifetime. To the offended: please relax, the language will soon pass from the scene.

Back to ESPN, however. It's a media company whose products are images, words, music, and moving pictures. It won't do to say, disingenuously, that "chink in the armor" is a venerable and appropriate phrase. In the context of the first Knicks loss with Jeremy Lin as a starter, the headline writer conveyed the double meaning he intended. He must have really fallen in love with his own wittiness, because the boomerang will be painful.

[Update - 2/19 ESPN statement: “We are conducting a complete review of our cross-platform editorial procedures and are determining appropriate disciplinary action to ensure this does not happen again,” the network said in a statement. “We regret and apologize for this mistake."]

[Update - 2/20: After ESPN fired him, the headline writer apologized and said that he meant no insult, having used the phrase "at least 100 times."]

K.M.A.

The first American missiles were fired only a few days ago, and already the battle for Libya--or whatever the historians end up calling it--has bequeathed to the English language another euphemism for waging war. Kinetic military action is more benign than "incursion" or "invasion" and sounds more active than "police action." IMHO, however, it will not have a lot of staying power.

The phrase has been the target of mockery less than 24 hours after it was uttered, and not only from political opponents. Its too-cleverness engenders ridicule, which left unchecked causes lasting damage to the respect which every Administration needs in order to govern.

Another negative is the abbreviation for Kinetic Military Action. "KMA" has a different meaning in the urban dictionary. The mild vulgarity coincidentally has been used by Democratic politicians in some well-known examples.

We can't be too critical of NSA official Ben Rhodes for his coinage. "Kinetic" had already been used in Bush Administration briefings, and "kinetic military action" seemed to be a logical construction. It turned out to be a bridge too far.

More Education Needed

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach [marvelous name!] says that Sarah Palin's use of the term "blood libel" is justified. 

Despite the strong association of the term with collective Jewish guilt and concomitant slaughter, Sarah Palin has every right to use it. The expression may be used whenever an amorphous mass is collectively accused of being murderers or accessories to murder.

The abominable element of the blood libel is not that it was used to accuse Jews, but that it was used to accuse innocent Jews—their innocence, rather than their Jewishness, being the operative point. Had the Jews been guilty of any of these heinous acts [murdering children] the charge would not have been a libel.

In recent years we have seen words like "genocide" and "holocaust" applied to acts, which, while horrible, are on a much smaller scale or less redolent of evil than the original events that gave rise to these terms' widespread use. Hyperbole goes uncontested, while an appropriate use of an historical term is criticized. Perhaps Governor Palin is not as ignorant nor her critics as educated as we have been led to believe.