I am currently making my way through the new DVD set of the first season of "The Dick Van Dyke Show." In an episode that aired in 1962, Rob and Laura Petrie are horrified that their son has picked up a "dirty word." The viewer does not learn the word itself; Laura only whispers it into the phone, her hand cupped over her mouth, and she and Rob are incensed that their son has been exposed to "evil."

This was certainly a sanitized version of the linguistic reality of the day. But the distortion itself reflects an America that is anthropologically fascinating from our perspective in 2003 . A TV mom whispering a mild curse word into the phone rather than just saying it out loud is hopelessly implausible today, and getting ever more so.

This has never been more clear than it became a couple of weeks ago, when flavor-of-the-month Nicole Richie, appearing on Fox TV's "Billboard Music Awards" broadcast, casually dropped some classic four- (and more) letter words into her reminiscences of her stint on the reality show "The Simple Life." Fox's switchboard lit up with indignant callers, but the network received not even a slap on the wrist from the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that watchdogs on-air language. That's because two months before, unbeknown to many of us, the FCC had decreed a new era in American public language usage.

After receiving complaints that Irish rocker Bono had crowed, "This is really, really f -- -- ing brilliant!"on the "Golden Globe Awards" broadcast last January, also on Fox , the FCC's enforcement bureau ruled Oct. 3 that this adjectival usage of the F-word does not qualify as "patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium." Predictably, this has not gone down well with some, from the Parents Television Council (which organized most of the Bono complaints) to congressmen to FCC Chairman Michael Powell himself, who played no part in the ruling and deemed it "reprehensible" that children might hear the F-word in any form on the air. But like it or not, we'd better get used to it. We are today a society that elevates giving the finger to "the man" to a sign of enlightenment. So there are bound to be more such rulings, and at the end of the day, we are best advised to fasten our seat belts and accept them.

We obsess over the encroachment of vulgar words into public spaces on pain of a stark inconsistency, one that will appear even more ridiculous to future generations than some Victorians calling trousers "nether garments" does to us. At least the Victorians' vocabulary taboos reflected mores that permeated society. Theirs was a world in which an author of a slang dictionary would have had trouble finding a publisher, people sequestered themselves under reams of fabric, illegitimate birth was a scandal, and sex was never spoken of in "polite society." Even as late as the Camelot era, Rob and Laura slept in twin beds and never went to the bathroom.

However we judge all this, it at least comprised a coherent worldview, of the sort that anthropologists deem a hallmark of human social organization. For generations, people were openly uptight about "those things" across the board. But we no longer are. And thus, banning the f-adjective in 2003 becomes a random, isolated gesture, displaying a studied daintiness that can only be defended with stammering vaguenesses.

Our America was just on the horizon when that Dick van Dyke episode I described aired. A few years later, the counterculture movement began. It arose as a rejection of the Vietnam War, segregation and political censorship, but soon broadened into an embrace of more visceral facets of the anti-establishment ideology: an embrace of the spontaneous, the "authentic," the "real." Naturally this included forms of speech once banned from public discourse.

Some of this was merely common speech itself. In 1848, everyday language was so rare on the stage that when the actor Frank Chanfrau ventured Bowery Boy street speech with the line "I ain't a-goin' to run wild wid dat mercheen no more," working-class Irish audiences in New York stopped the show with riotous applause for several minutes. But in the 1960s, this public airing of casual talk became ordinary. Students at Berkeley followed up the political Free Speech movement of 1964 with a "Filthy Speech movement" the next year, featuring placards emblazoned with the F-word. Over the next 20 years, "damn" and "hell" became typical on stage and screen.

Extract from the Washington Post site, article by John McWhorter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33486-2003Dec26?language=printer

Your teenager may not be from a different planet, but they are often speaking another language.

Every generation has had its own code, words the group has adapted to fit its own era.

If you're 'out to lunch' when it comes to the slang of the 21st Century, have no fear; the people at yourDictionary.com will keep you from becoming so 'yesterday.'

The Web site keeps track of slang used by the younger generation to keep the forms of communication groovy or phat.

Though not begun in 2003, the term 'bling, bling,' has made it into what the Web site refers to as standard slang, but it may not be understood by members of the flapper or beatnik generations.

The term is used to describe everything flashy. A woman decked out in bling, bling, is wearing mega jewelry. It can also be used to describe the ring of a cell phone.

The No. 1 word of 2003, according to the Web site, is embedded, which was inspired by Operation Iraqi Freedom to describe news personnel in the field with 'jar heads' and 'grunts.'

In ‘‘the word you've probably never heard before’’ category, 2003 gave us the 'allision.' The word was used by investigators working the Staten Island ferry accident. The National Transportation Safety Board said the accident was not a collision, but an allision, a crash with an immovable object -- freaky.

Our president has made some real bloopers with the English language, inspiring the 2003 term 'Bushism' which is used to identify the mispronunciation of words.

President Bush also inspired one of the top personal names of 2003. Though 'Dubya' (W) has been around since he first ran for president, it made No. 2 on the list.

Not surprisingly, No. 1 was Saddam Hussein -- which inspired another much used word of 2003 when he was captured in what the ranking doughboy referred to as a 'spider hole.'

Extract from the Maysville Online site, article by Betty Coutant

http://maysville-online.thimblemedia.com/article.asp?catid=2&articleid=2601

Gnosis means (direct) knowledge of God. The root is “gn” and is the same in Europe and India. English “know” has “kn” in it and Indian “giyan” is an elided form of “gnan”. In Old English to know was “ken” which is still used in “outside his ken”

The Copts of Egypt gave the country its name. Copt is actually Aigyptios (from Kuptiayos) meaning Egyptian which in turn was originally Hikaptah. Hika means house of sprit of Ptah who was an Egyptian god. In Arabic, Copt is written Qibt.

Egypt means land of the Copts but today the Copts are a minority at risk from bands of fanatic Muslims. In Arabic, Egypt is called Misr (city or country), which is also written as Masr. If you meet a Masari you should know that he is from Egypt.

One woman in morganatic marriage with Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was Maria Qibtia. She was sent by the patriarch of the Egyptian Coptic church after he accepted the Prophet (PBUH) as the new apostle of God.

The Coptic church had quarrelled with the big church at Constantinople on the question of the nature of Christ. The Alexandrian church believed that Christ was physically one (monophysite) mixing godhead and humanity in his person.

This was not acceptable to (duophysite) Byzantium as the land of the main church was called. Monks and bishops were actually done to death on this. The Coptic church in Alexandria decided to break away in 451 AD.

But Egypt was the old home of Pharaonic lore. St Mark of the gospel was supposed to have moved to Egypt and written another gnostic (divine knowledge) gospel there. St Anthony of Lahore’s church was an Egyptian and was the first real hermit in Christianity.

Another aspect of the early Coptic church that no one liked was its gnostic side. The books discovered at Nag Hammadi tell us that the creed included Greek philosophy and Persian mysticism. The gospels discovered here were rejected and called apocrypha.

When the Coptic church became orthodox it sealed the gnostic books named after god of wisdom, Hermes or Thoth, the Egyptian god that the Freemasons revere. That is why when we say hermetically sealed we mean firmly sealed. The other word hermeneutic (about interpretation) is not related to Hermes.

If I told you that English know is the same as our Urdu jan-na you will not believe me. But if I told you that another version of the root “jn” (to know) is also “gn” you will be mystified. Because the “gn” root is close to the “kn” of know.

Urdu jan-na has a Sanskrit predecessor jnan which has another version gnan. Interestingly gnan has gone over to numeration and given us gin-na (to count). The root must have been “gn” because the word for knowledge is giyan (from gnan) which is also used in Urdu.

If the “gn” root means to know then a lot of things become clear. From it we have Sanskrit gan which means that which can be counted. By implication it means a group or an army. The elephant-headed god in India is Ganpati or lord of the armies. We can say that “gn” and “jn” are interchangeable.

Now English “kn” sounds were originally non-eliding, meaning that “k” was not earlier dropped. Know and knee were pronounced with the “k” sound. The etymology goes back to Greek gnosis (knowledge) which is pretty close to Sanskrit gnan.

It develops that giyan and gnosis are the same thing. Gnosis went into Christianity from the church in Egypt and became suspect under Christian monotheism. In Hindu philosophy giyan is a fundamental concept.

...

If Sanskrit gnan (a form of giyan) is knowledge then znaniye is knowledge in Russian. “Zna” (knowledge) is a variant of “gna” and “jna”. It should be noted as it was by the great American expert of languages David Shipley that “gn” root is close to the sense of giving birth. It is so in all languages.

Of course English know has come from the Germanic group. In German it has morphed into kennen (to know) and the English borrowing is ken (knowledge). *

Extract from the Daily Times site, article by Khaled Ahmed

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_4-1-2004_pg3_6

The three major dialect regions of the United States identified in Map 1 -- the Inland North, the South, and the West -- correspond to the three vowel patterns first presented in "The Three Dialects of English" (Labov 1991). They are the major expanding patterns that are actively forming the linguistic landscape of the country., As developed in this paper, the phonological center of these opposing patterns are the Northern Cities Shift in the Inland North, the Southern Shift in the South, and the Low Back Merger in the West. Since that time, a fourth phonological pattern, the Canadian Shift, has been reported in Clark, Elms and Youssef 1995. Discussion of this pattern will be presented when the Canadian interviews are analyzed.

 Map 1 also identifies a number of distinct and important dialect areas in the Eastern United States, which were clearly set out in the work of the Linguistic Atlas (Kurath and McDavid 1961): Eastern New England; New York City; and the Mid-Atlantic coastal area encompassing Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore. No phonological basis for a division between the Upper South, the Lower South, and the Gulf States is presented here, though a separate dialect area is recognized around Charleston and Savannah.

 The great contribution of Kurath to American dialectology, the identification of the Midland region, is well represented in Map 1, but somewhat transformed. A major part of the South Midland--the Appalachian cities of Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee--is here rejoined to the South. The Midland region then includes the major cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Akron, Columbus, Dayton, Indianapolis, Peoria, Evansville, the Quad Cities, St. Louis, Des Moines, Kansas City, Wichita,, Lincoln and Omaha. It can be differentiated from the other regions by general phonological criteria, and it is itself divided into a lower and upper half by a characteristic sound change, the fronting of checked /ow/. But in contrast with the Inland North and the South, no single set of sound changes is identified with the Midland region. On the contrary, the various Midland cities show localized patterns, which are shifting and diverging from each other in many ways. The importance of the Midland region in this report rests not upon the description of a single "Midland" phonology, but rather the fact that the northern and southern boundaries of the Midland turn out to be the discrete and influential boundaries that determine the shape of American dialect geography. The North/North Midland line falls almost exactly where it was first placed on the basis of lexical evidence in Kurath 1949, and further developed by Shuy 1962 and Carver 1987 on the basis of additional lexical markers. Although much of this vocabulary is obsolete or evanescent, and the phonological correlates laid out in Kurath and McDavid 1961 have largely disappeared, the North/North Midland line remains as an almost impermeable boundary to the southern expansion of the Northern Cities Shift.

Much of the controversy surrounding the concept of the Midland conept has rested on evidence for the traditional view that the line between North and South is really the most important division in American English, corresponding to the fact that this is the only distinction that can be reliably identified by the American public (Preston 19??). Bailey 1968 argued that the line running along the Ohio River was more important than the Midland boundaries, on the basis of phonological patterns of syllabification. Carver's national map of dialect divisions, based on the data of the Dictionary of American Regional English, makes the North/South division pre-eminent, and reduces the North/North Midland line to a secondary division between Upper and Lower North. Our own delineation of the boundary of the South coincides closely with that of Carver 1987 from Maryland to the Mississippi River, as shown in Map 2. From that point on, our boundary diverges, and extends further north and further west, to include Arkansas, Southern Missouri, and the four speakers in Texas we have studied.

Extract from the University of Pennsylvania site

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/

Some publishers and scholars want to purge the colon from book titles; the only thing that's worse: semicolons

Brenda Wineapple wants to cut out the academy's colon. She has had trouble doing so herself, even in the titles of her own books. Indeed, it is unlikely that a top-notch gastroenterologist or grammarian could help her achieve her aim.

"I hate colons," says Ms. Wineapple, a professor of modern literature and historical studies at Union College, in New York. Her second book, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1996; reprinted by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), is not supposed to have a colon. She wrote the title without one. "Nobody can handle that," she says. So "anyone who ever talks about the book puts it on."

Over the last two decades, academic titles have become increasingly cumbersome, and it is rare to find an academic book title that is not lashed together with a subtitle and its colon. Some books even boast two subtitles, glued tenuously to the title with two colons.

"We joke about the title and the subtitle needing colonoscopies," says Anita Samen, managing editor in the book division of the University of Chicago Press. "People have gone hog-wild with colons."

Academics have always crammed words into titles that they hope will reflect their life's work, say university-press directors. Many of these press mavens are frustrated with a practice that, like tweed, has become a cliché of academics.

Punctuation Parade

According to the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press), "a colon introduces an element or a series of elements illustrating or amplifying what has preceded the colon." But it also advises that when referring to a book, in text and in bibliographies, a colon should be placed between a title and a subtitle, regardless of how they appear on the title page.

Douglas Armato considers the "title: subtitle" arrangement the norm in his business. "The traditional university-press titling protocol is the interesting title that grabs your attention, followed by what is the real title of the book, which is what comes after the colon," says Mr. Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press. Increasingly, authors are forced to use subtitles as publishers put out more books on the same topics. The most obvious titles are already taken, he says.

"We've gone through several campaigns to eliminate subtitles entirely, and we're sort of intermittently vigilant about them," he says.

Carrie M. Mullen, the press's executive editor, says that she and her staff try to make titles sound snappier, unique, and a little more straightforward. "We discuss titles a lot with authors," she says. "They get attached to a certain title. It's sometimes hard to back them off it and get them to see how they read it is not necessarily how everyone will read it."

Searches -- and the increased attention that they might generate -- also play a role. "Sometimes you really need that exact information in the subtitle because all the searches people do on Amazon and everywhere else are dependent on pretty precise words in the subtitle," Mr. Armato says.

Colons became the standard in academic publishing roughly 20 years ago, according to Mr. Armato. It had "something to do with the point when you started attracting broader audiences to university-press books."

Before then, libraries made up 80 percent of the market for university presses. Today, he says, libraries make up only 20 percent of that market, with academic presses selling most of their books to individual students and scholars. To attract the latter, they add the snappy title before the colon.

Semi-Tough

Many academic publishers say that the colon is neither new nor a nuisance. "I've been around forever, close to 40 years, and as far as I can remember, there have always been a lot of colons in academic publishing," says Walter H. Lippincott, director of Princeton University Press. "It's not the colon that's a problem. It's whether the title is clunky or not."

"It could be worse. We could be publishing book titles that have semicolons in the titles," says Kate Douglas Torrey, director of the University of North Carolina Press.

"What the colon does in black tie the semicolon does in khakis," says William Germano, vice president and publishing director at Routledge. "What they have in common in most academic writing is that both tend to be markers of 'watch me do something complicated.'"

Extract from The Chronicle of Higher Education site, article by Jennifer Jacobson

http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i18/18a01401.htm

Now and then, the words "nifty" or "groovy" may drop into a conversation, instantly identifying the speaker as an old fart or, worse, an old hippie.

But the word "cool" doesn't do that. Cool is constant. As a modifier, as the modified, as a noun and as a verb, cool has withstood the fleeting nature of most slang.

What is the reason for cool's longevity? That's an easy question for Keith Covington, a jazz club owner in Baltimore. As long as Miles Davis' classic 1949 work, "Birth of the Cool," remains the best-selling jazz album of all time, cool will stay cool, he says.

Cool still "carries the same weight and definition that it did 50 years ago," Covington says. "Jazz musicians and jazz aficionados still refer to great works as cool."

Cool comes in many flavors. Actress Kirsten Dunst, for instance, isn't cool the way Miles Davis is cool. And yet, in a recent Elle profile, the word cool, used to describe the young actress, is a constant refrain, as in "Kirsten Dunst is inherently, organically, preternaturally cool. She's 'None of my friends are actresses' cool. Catholic schoolgirl cool.'" And on and on.

Cool has been around for quite a while. Shakespeare used a form of cool as a verb, and later the word morphed into an adjective, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. The word cool has been applied since 1728 to large sums of money and used to mean "calmly audacious" since 1825, the same source maintains. Cool, meaning fashionable, is "said to have been popularized in jazz circles by tenor saxophonist Lester Young," according to the etymology dictionary.

Extract from the Chicago Tribune site, article by Stephanie Shapiro

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-040106dpcool-story,1,3137785.story?coll=chi-homepagenews-utl

The Prince of Wales was given a lesson in street slang today and had urban gems such as “wagwan” and “aggie” tripping off his tongue.

While west London speak may not normally be rife in Royal circles, Charles did his best to get to grips with the alternative modern language.

Yatty (girl), blood (friend) and bitchin (to complain) were just some of the terms he heard during his visit to a youth centre in Queen’s Park, London.

Watching Backslang – a DVD made by members of the New Avenues Youth Project – he was given a beginner’s guide on how to talk street.

He heard that aggie means to beat or rough someone up.

Charles, taking an interest in its origin, asked: “How did aggie develop?”

He was also told that wagwan is a new word for hello after he had a go at pronouncing it.

The Prince was handed a dictionary of more than 200 definitions to take home to Highgrove.

“Next time you come here you can talk to us,” 17-year-old Kusu Biti told him.

In the small dictionary, compiled by members of the centre, words such as zoot (marijuana cigarettes), cotch (to relax) and buff (which was defined as sexually attractive) can be found, and their meanings fully explained.

Some of the adjectives and nouns were for everyday use, but even a few of the youth groups admitted that the list contained a number of derogatory or rude terms.

Kusu added afterwards: “He’ll probably use wagwan – it’s a greeting to say hello. He might use cotchin which means he’s just chillin.

“Yatty – William and Harry would use that. It means women, and they might use brer for friend.”

As he officially opened the centre, which offers young people the chance to escape social exclusion by becoming involved with the centre’s radio station or by learning to work in a recording studio, Charles revealed he would be studying his new guide book:

“I know a considerable amount about street talk. I have got a dictionary which I shall go away with and learn,” he declared.

Extract from Scotsman.com

http://www.news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2283369

Ironic, then, that a talented movie sidekick has the potential not only to steal a scene but also to snatch an Academy Award nomination and pocket a win in the bargain.

With word of mouth building for his moving portrayal of hero hobbit Frodo's trusty chum Sam in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Sean Astin may have an outside chance to grab the gold Oscar ring for himself.

Extract from USA Today

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2004-01-06-sidekick-oscars_x.htm

Strange new words came out of our mouths in 2003:

Bennifer.

Embedded.

Spider hole.

SARS.

Every year boasts its own vocabulary, a unique set of words and phrases that suddenly become culturally relevant.

Not all the words are necessarily new. But they possess a fresh importance, given current events.

"Language is a nice way to remember things," said Erin McKean, senior editor for U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press in New York. "January 2003 seems so dim now, but seeing the word SARS brings it into clearer focus. And words are reflective of what we were thinking about as a culture."

In a less-than-scientific roundup of the au courant verbiage this year, a few points are noticeable.

For example, we've allowed more than a bit of military-speak to infiltrate the language, given our nation's adventures in the Middle East.

The khaki-and-camouflage set injected the practically poetic phrase "spider hole" into the lexicon. It refers, of course, to the dusty subterranean refuge where a bushy Saddam Hussein was discovered by U.S. troops in December.

The media eagerly appropriated the phrase, unusually descriptive as military terms go.

Then there is hajjis, a slang term U.S. soldiers use for Iraqis (sometimes, specifically for the local insurgents). It comes, said linguist Wayne Glowka, from the Arabic word hajj, which is a pilgrimage to Mecca.

Glowka, who is chairman of the new words committee for the American Dialect Society, added that the war has offered our mother tongue what may well turn out to be the society's word of the year: the noun "embed," which refers to a reporter who became part of a military unit to cover the invasion of Iraq. It now also describes a reporter covering a political campaign, Glowka said.

The word of the year, by the way, will be announced Jan. 9 in Boston by the dialect society, which has been monitoring American parlance since 1889.

Extract from the Indianapolis Star site,

http://www.indystar.com/articles/1/107900-6321-047.html

If you want to txt msg, you'd better learn the language.

Otherwise, when you get a msg, you won't be able to tell if it's a qt trying to ;-) or some bzar om who wants you to join him in his jacuz. uv!

According to Verizon Wireless, eight times as many people in the United States sent text messages in 2002 than in 2001. The explosive growth continued in the first half of this year, when more than a billion text messages were sent on the Verizon Wireless network alone.

That has prompted Verizon to publish a dictionary covering the shorthand lingo that has evolved to make text messaging on mobile phones and instant messaging on computers quicker and more efficient.

If you had the dictionary, you'd know the second paragraph in this article reads: Otherwise when you get a message, you won't be able to tell if it's a cutie trying to flirt or some bizarre old man who wants you to join him in his Jacuzzi. Ugly visual!

People who text regularly probably know this stuff, but if you're clueless, the 40-page booklet TXT ME(ssaging) will get you into the game. The dictionary has a section that translates English phrases to their common text message abbreviations and vice versa.

It's available free at Verizon Wireless retail locations.

Here are a few sample definitions:

• a/s/l: Age, sex, location? (an essential question for cyber cruising)

• cmiiw: Correct me if I'm wrong.

• f2f: Face to face (an antiquated mode of interpersonal communication).

• ilbcnu: I'll be seeing you.

Extract from the Wireless NewsFactor site

http://wireless.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Learn_Txt_MSG_Language&story_id=22910&category=mblmd,wlsweb

1. A Concise Dictionary of English Idioms, compiled by BA Phythian
Dictionaries of idioms are invaluable to people who love English, because they remind us how figurative our everyday language is. Definitions may seem redundant ("arm of the law - criminal law, personified by the police"), but open this book at any page and just revel in the imagery: not see the wood for the trees, run to seed, send packing, take leave of one's senses, separate the sheep from the goats, whited sepulchre, serve him right.

2. The Oxford Guide to Style by RM Ritter
This is the successor to the classic Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers, and the Bible of those who toil in print. Those who want to know the difference between "galley proof", "page proof", "clean proof", "author's proof", "marked proof", "first proof", "collated proof", "revised proof", "scatter proof" and "final proof" can confidently refer to its pages. This book deals with everything from the nitty gritty of the words on the page to the responsibility of the publisher in a case of "negligent misstatement". In its latest incarnation...

3. The New Fowler's Modern English Usage by RW Burchfield
To consult Fowler is to consult the oracle. Those of us who get worked up about English ("But I don't understand the double possessive!") can turn to Fowler: he smoothes one's fevered brow. Looking up "enormity, enormousness", for example, I find two columns of closely printed reasoning, and the useful conclusion: "It is recommended that for the present 'enormity' should not be used in plain contexts where the physical size of an object is the only feature involved: in other words, one should eschew the type 'the enormity of the pyramids'. It is more difficult to find fault with 'enormity' used of the size or immensity or overwhelmingness of abstract concepts, especially when any element of departure from a legal, moral or social norm is present or is implied." I can't tell you what a relief that is...

4. The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage by Kingsley Amis
Cantankerous but very enjoyable rulings on the state of the language. Personally, I wish Amis had not included the breathtakingly misogynist section on "womanese" (evidently women "are always getting set phrases wrong"). But there is much joy to be had elsewhere in the book. Where would we be without Amis's brilliantly abusive classification system of "berks and wankers"? (Berks being those who care less than us about the fate of the language; wankers being those who care more.)

5. The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase, Saying, & Quotation, edited by Elizabeth Knowles
First: note the very prominent "Oxford comma" in the title of this book. What a big fat one, eh? To be honest, I haven't referred to this book as much as I thought I would, but it's an interesting concept for a reference book: to put together quotations with proverbs and phrases. Thus, under "meaning", there are quotations from Milton and so on ("Where more is meant than meets the ear"), then proverbs ("Every picture tells a story") and finally phrases ("all my eye and Betty Martin").

6. Le Mot Juste: The Penguin Dictionary of Foreign Terms and Phrases, edited by Eugene Ehrlich
Very comprehensive listing of foreign words and phrases. I am always shocked if there's something it doesn't include. Although I have never searched for a phrase for "When they are silent, they cry loudest", it is good to know of the existence of the Latin "Cum tacent, clamant", which really does say it better, somehow.

7. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr and EB White
The classic American style guide, with its emphasis on "cleanliness, accuracy and brevity" and teaches "Omit needless words!" Marvellously out of touch with modern usage, it won't allow "contact" as a verb. The entry for "clever" reads: "Note that the word means one thing when applied to people, another when applied to horses. A clever horse is a good-natured one, not an ingenious one." ...

8. English Our English (and How to Sing It) by Keith Waterhouse
Another classic, full of good practical guidance on the elements of writing, from a great wordsmith. Very good on wandering participles, such as: "Being in need of a paint job, I got £200 knocked off the list price". Also very sound on punctuation. The book's conclusion is a typical piece of Waterhousean wisdom: "If, after all this advice, a sentence still reads awkwardly, then what you have there is an awkward sentence. Demolish it and start again."

9. Mother Tongue: The English Language by Bill Bryson
This is a book packed with love, but sometimes rather frighteningly erudite. For example, Bryson can't explain the principles of rhyming slang (china plate=mate; loaf of bread=head) without mentioning that when the rhyme comes from a part of the phrase that has been dropped (titfer=hat; tom=jewellery) this is technically known as "hemiteleia"...

10. Oxford Dictionary of English (second edition)
The latest one-volume OED has no entry for "hemiteleia". Damn. Can't check up on Bryson, then. However, it is a splendid and beautiful dictionary, with helpful little boxes to explain thorny issues of usage. Looking up "enormity" (I know, I'm obsessed), I find a very tolerant attitude towards such phrases as "the enormity of French hypermarkets" which, I must admit, sends me back to Fowler for comfort.

Extract from the Guardian Unlimited site

http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s/top10/0,6109,1111879,00.html

Haadyai Ministery 

HERE’S something I came across at the Malaysian-Thai border in Haadyai: “Ministery of Health Malaysia”, which should of course be “MINISTRY”. 

What will tourists entering our country think of our government departments if we can’t spell words correctly? – Ranjit Singh 

Ministry’s misspelling 

IN a recent job advertisement put out by the Langkawi Tourism Action Council (Ministry of Culture, Arts & Tourism), the word “proficiently” was misspelled. Those who didn’t know better might think that is the correct way to spell the word.  

When in doubt, it’s wise to look up the dictionary. – M.R. Samurai 

NOTE: Campaign for Better English is aimed at errors in English usage perpetrated by government departments and agencies. If you come across any, please send them to us. 

Jack Bentley of Pound, Va., wonders why people say "a long ways to go."

"When you use the article 'a' you are saying that a singular noun is following," he wrote.

We say "ways" because English speakers and writers have been saying it for a very long time. The earliest recorded use of "ways" to mean "distance" dates to about 1588, the year Sir Frances Drake demolished the Spanish Armada. The Spaniards had a long ways to go to get back home. Respectable writers, including Henry Fielding, the 18th-century English novelist; Lord Byron, the 19th-century English poet; and Stephen Crane, 19th-century American writer, author of "The Red Badge of Courage," have all used "ways" in this sense.

The expression has died out in England, but persists in the United States, especially in spoken English. British dictionaries refer to it snootily as "North American." Some critics tolerate it as "colloquial." Webster's Dictionary of English Usage regards it as standard, but also notes that "a long way to go" is more common and far less controversial.

Extract from the Mobile Register site, article by Gene Owens

http://www.al.com/news/mobileregister/gowens.ssf?/base/news/107295214497030.xml

To help the readers find the answer to the problematic and stressful life today, a new monthly, 'The Quest', is being launched for the New Year 2004. The Quest will dedicate itself to the investigation into life and into the myriad of problems connected with this thing called living. The Quest will also feature columns in order to enhance the readers' English usage skills, and promote literary and creative _expression.

Extract from the People's Review

A NEW generation of children will bring school playgrounds echoing with names that seem half American and half a cast list of quickly forgotten television programmes.

The increasing standardisation of names between Britain and the United States has led to Emily becoming the English-speaking world’s favourite name. Official figures showed yesterday that it has become Britain’s most popular girl’s name, taking over from Chloe. In America it is already ranked first, and in Australia it is seventh.

The rising popularity of names such as Ethan, previously more common in America, show that new parents searching for inspiration can be influenced more by television, film and the internet than by tradition, experts say.

Chardonnay, the name given to 91 girls last year, was inspired by one of the characters in the drama Footballers’ Wives. The BBC talent show Fame Academy made its contribution as scores of parents called their children Lemar, Malachi and Sinead — all the names of successful contestants on the show.

Jack is Britain’s best-loved boy’s name for the ninth consecutive year, according to the study by the Office for National Statistics. It is second favourite in Australia. The top five boys’ names in Britain have been virtually unchanged for eight years.

Julia Cresswell, a philologist and author of Bloomsbury’s Best Baby Names, said: “There is also a phenomenon where parents are giving their children pet names. John has become Jack, Alexander has become Alex — it is an informality you might say has also come from abroad.

“What we have got is a sort of rapidly accelerating false intimacy. We have more or less given up on calling each other by our surnames so we need to rely on an evergrowing pool of first names to try to differentiate.

“I predict that American trends, such as using surnames as first names, like Taylor, and names with obvious meanings, such as Destiny or Storm, will become popular. Already you are seeing names like Summer becoming more popular in this country. More people around the world are watching the same television programmes.”

Extract from the Times Online site, article by Stefanie Marsh

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-953270,00.html

English is such a wonderfully malleable language, especially the American branch of it. New words, phrases, even recombined bits and pieces of words pour out of our mouths (or our computers) and -- poof -- before you know it, they're in our lives and the dictionaries. Our new realities -- whether the Internet (after all, I'm a "blogger" less than three years after I discovered the Internet existed) or George Bush's global crusade, his "war on terrorism" (itself a new combination of words) -- produce new vocabularies all the time, or drive more specialized vocabularies into wider usage.

"Blowback," to take but one example, was an old CIA term for "the unintended consequences of covert operations [to overthrow foreign governments], kept secret from the American public." An insider's term, it initially appeared in the CIA's after-action report on the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh's government in Iran, the first successful CIA operation against a properly constituted government in our history. In 2000, Chalmers Johnson published a book by that title. It warned of "blowback" from global operations by our government of which Americans were largely ignorant. A little over a year later, members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda -- in the early 1980s one of the Islamic fundamentalist groups armed and encouraged by the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence service in order to bleed the Russians dry in Afghanistan -- smashed hijacked jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, offering a horrific televised example of blowback. The book, by then in paperback, made it to the center of 9/11 tables in bookstores around the country and the word left the precincts of Langley, Virginia, and along with "unintended consequences" entered our lives. It's already in the dictionaries.

All this is my way of saying that, in the course of my daily readings, I'm often taken aback by terms -- new to me at least -- which seem to be bleeding out of various dark nooks and crannies of this administration. This is distinctly in the American grain. Whether the terms themselves are in the American grain -- or what exactly our "grain" is these days - well, that's another question, isn't it?

Words and phrases of this sort bubbling into print are just little signs pointing to stealth phenomena of all sorts, should we care to look. And we should. I thought I might use a couple of them today to launch a little Tomdispatch Contest (more details to follow below).

Here are two that I happened to stumble across in my readings of the last 24 hours -- with a few comments:

Extraordinary rendition: Try to guess, as a start, what this pretzel phrase, right out of the murky but ever better funded world of "intelligence," could possibly mean.

It's actually an extraordinary rendition of and euphemism for torture -- and not just any kind of torture either. I found the term in Christopher Pyle's Torture by Proxy, a piece in last Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle Insight section, that lays out how immigration officials seized a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, as he changed planes at New York's Kennedy International Airport, after he turned up on one of our murky watch-lists for possible terrorists. In a bleak odyssey of imprisonment, he then passed through the none-too-gentle hands of the New York City Police, the FBI, and finally ("presumably") the CIA -- or some unidentified Americans anyway -- who flew him from Washington to Jordan where he was turned over to the Syrians for interrogation as a possible terrorist. Pyle writes:

"This covert operation was legal, our Justice Department later claimed, because Arar is also a citizen of Syria by birth. The fact that he was a Canadian traveling on a Canadian passport, with a wife, two children and job in Canada, and had not lived in Syria for 16 years, was ignored. The Justice Department wanted him to be questioned by Syrian military intelligence, whose interrogation methods our government has repeatedly condemned."

He was put in a cell the size of a grave and "interrogated" -- tortured -- for ten months before being released when it became apparent that his ties to terrorism were nonexistent. And so to our term:

"Our intelligence agencies have a name for this torture-by-proxy. They call it 'extraordinary rendition.' As one intelligence official explained: 'We don't kick the s -- out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the s -- out of them.' This secret program for torturing suspects has been authorized, if that is the right word for it, by a secret presidential finding. Where the president gets the authority to have anyone tortured has never been explained."

All in all, not just an extraordinary rendition of torture but a verbal reflection of a new reality -- that we have created a global mini-gulag that ranges from Guantanamo to Afghanistan and whose extralegal rules include the turning of "suspects" over to "friendly" -- or even, it seems, in the case of Syria, less than friendly -- regimes ready to apply kinds of the pressure we may prefer not to apply ourselves.

Here then is my second term:

Hunter-killer teams: If "extraordinary rendition" has all the bizarre power of euphemism behind it -- as an unnaturally tortured verbal combination, doesn't it actually seem worse than "torture by proxy"? -- "hunter-killer teams" seems quite straightforward. I learned about them in some detail in a recent piece in the Washington Post by Gregory L. Vistica, Military Split On How to Use Special Forces In Terror War. A hunter-killer team or "Special Mission Unit" is, essentially (as its name implies), a military assassination squad let loose on the world, sent "to kick down the doors"; that is, to hunt down terrorists and assumedly other enemies without regard to national boundaries, declarations of war, or, evidently, legalities "niceties" of any sort.

Extract from the Progressive Trail site

http://progressivetrail.org/articles/040107Engelhardt.shtml

Sometime ago, my wife Leonor brought home something that took me off balance for a moment, then had me laughing in stitches for minutes. It was an imported product in a white polypropylene tube labeled “Glowing Skin Cream,” with this product claim right below it: “One Minutes Dispel Horniness.” I must admit that I had not displayed so great an ardor in such matters in recent years that my wife should want to curb it, nor that a glowing aspect was ever needed for such things, so I concluded offhand that the tube was a practical joke. But a practical joke it wasn’t, as evidenced by the apparently sober instructions that came right below the label, which I now quote verbatim: “USE: Days for sub-two,first shall face wetness, and weild then product gently knead, then with cleanly water washing. Notice: avoid into eyeball, if immodesty,shortly washing for cleanly water.”

Only after reading the instructions did it dawn on me that the product was for real; that it was, in fact, an honest-to-goodness skin-whitening cream; that by “horniness” it meant “roughness”; that “first shall face wetness, and weild then product gently knead” meant “wet the face first, then gently apply and rub the cream”; that by “Days for sub-two” it meant “during the first two days”; that “avoid into eyeball” meant “do not apply near the eyes”; and that “if immodesty,shortly washing for cleanly water” meant “if applied in excess, wash with clean water right away.” In short, the English I was reading was a literal, word-for-word translation of the original Chinese elsewhere on the tube. When I stopped laughing, I pondered how lucky Filipinos were for having been exposed to English usage for at least 100 years, thus making them incapable of committing such a linguistic atrocity.

Several months after that incident, however, I am no longer too sure if the Filipinos do have a firm hold on that century-long advantage. We may have made a quantum leap in the use of cellular telephony, and over 12 million of us may have already spread to practically every point of the globe, but in matters of English, we may in fact be backsliding to the point of writing the same English as that of the Chinese “horniness cream” ourselves. Consider these few unsettling examples of our current English usage:

(1) In the Ortigas Complex in Pasig City, inside some of the 180 men’s rooms of a twin-tower building there (and presumably inside some of the 180 women’s comfort rooms as well), is posted this sign: “Kindly flush the toilet after used.” This misguided use of the noun-form “use” in the past tense (or maybe the past participle, who knows what the true grammatical intention was?)—done perhaps only because the word was preceded by “after”—must have made thousands of expatriate managers and foreign dignitaries squirm and think so low of us while perusing the bad English. Quite simply, of course, that sign should read: “Kindly flush the toilet after use.” Here, “use” is a noun, not a verb.

Extract from the Manila Times

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2003/dec/18/yehey/top_stories/20031218top13.html

Have you ever felt the desire to animadvert with anfractuous brimborions? Balladromise yourself towards a loganamnostic state of mind? Indulge in happy hours of verbal scintillation rather than sit in longanimity?

If the answer to all of the above is yes, then Peter Bowler is your man; a kindred ultramontane spirit.

This avuncular Australian is a man of words - but only those convoluted tongue twisters and arcane adjectives tailor-made to extract you from ignominy at any dinner party and reduce your colleagues to embarrassed silence.

Bowler's excursion into words began two decades ago with the word ilk and has ended with three published books.

The Superior Person's Book of Words appeared in the early 1980s, followed by the Superior Person's Second Book of Words. A third volume of pellucid peregrinations through the lesser- known nooks and crannies of the English language will be released in the United States in 2004.

Bowler was a diligent public servant in New South Wales before the word "ilk" insinuated its way into his brain and refused to depart. He then took the fateful step of consulting a dictionary about its meaning and derivation and became a linguistic junkie, hopelessly hooked on locating and dissecting words, preferably as complex as possible.

"Words are not only tools; they are also weapons. The first object of these books is to provide the ordinary man in the street with new and better verbal weapons - words which until now have been available only to philologists, lexicographers and art critics," Bowler says.

"Hitherto the man or woman who has known the precise meaning of egregious, pejorative and usufract has been able to enjoy a position of unfair advantage over the rest of us. We yield to him or her in debate, not because his arguments are more cogent but because they are less intelligible. We accept him as a Superior Person because his vocabulary is a badge of rank as compelling as a top hat or painted forehead.

"Armed with Oxford, Webster's and Chambers dictionaries, reinforced with reference works ranging from the Dictionary of Psychiatry and Psychology to Mrs Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words, Peter Bowler retired to the living room couch, coffee table, and laptop for several months of intensive immersion in the fascinating highways and byways of words.

His goal was a simple one - "to give my reader a fuel-injected turbo engine for the language that they speak so that they may the more readily assert a fitting ascendancy over their fellows at the traffic lights of life". To date, you can power your vocabulary with a total of 1100 words.

There have been other books on hard words, but Bowler's books go beyond these by offering practical assistance in how to use them in real life. Thus, when confronted by a miscreant motorist or thuggish adolescent, you may grasp one of Bowler's books firmly, look the offender in the eye and with a disarming grin inform the party that he is rebarbative (repulsive), oligophreniac (feebleminded, retarded) and fully deserving a vapulation (flogging).

Frequent recourse to Bowler will also lessen the risk of suffering from kakorrhaphiophobia (fear of failure), while building up an urbane lorication (hard protective crust) and prevent the mind from becoming lurdanic (dull, lazy) or even, God forbid, lutulent (muddy, thick or turbid).

Extract from the Stuff site

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2778100a4501,00.html

Billboards on either side of Bozeman inform passing motorists that "kid's eat & stay free" at the local Holiday Inn.

I had to wonder: "The kid's what eats free? The kid's hamster? And what stays free? The kid's parents?

I'm no grammar Nazi, living as I do in a glass house, but the general rule that English words are made plural by adding an "s" never struck me as a terribly difficult one to remember.

A colleague of mine theorized that cartographers may be partly to blame. For years, they have removed nearly all apostrophes from maps, resulting in strange place names like Pompeys Pillar, Marias River, Eddies Corner and the Clarks Fork River.

Maybe there is a finite number of apostrophes in the universe, my colleague speculated, and because billions of apostrophes were removed from millions of maps, they turned up somewhere else in order to restore the cosmic balance of punctuation elements. I'll buy that, since I don't know how else to explain the phenomenon.

Extract from the Billings Gazette site, article by Ed Kemmick

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2004/01/11/build/local/50-citylights.inc

LOS ANGELES -- On a muggy Sunday afternoon at the Duenas, mariachi music jumped from a boombox on the concrete in the driveway. The roasted smells of "carne asada" lingered over a folding picnic table, like the easy banter between cousins.

 "Le robaron la troca con everything. Los tires, los rines," a visiting cousin said.

Translation: "They robbed the truck with everything. The tires, the rims."

"Quieres watermelon?" offered Francisco Duenas, a 26-year-old housing counselor, holding a jug filled with sweet water and watermelon bits.

"Tal vez tiene some of the little tierrita at the bottom."

Translation: "Want watermelon? It might have some of the little dirt at the bottom."

When the Duenas family gathers for weekend barbecues, there are no pauses between jokes and gossip, spoken in English and Spanish. They've been mixing the languages effortlessly, sometimes clumsily, for years, so much so that the back-and-forth is not even noticed.

Spanglish, the fluid vernacular that crosses between English and Spanish, has been a staple in Hispanic life in California since English-speaking settlers arrived in the 19th century. For much of that time, it has been dismissed and derided by language purists -- "neither good, nor bad, but abominable," as Mexican writer Octavio Paz famously put it.

The criticism has done little to reduce the prevalence of Spanglish, which today is a bigger part of bilingual life than ever.

Now, it's rapidly moving from Hispanic neighborhoods into the mainstream. Spanglish is showing up in television and films, as writers use it to bring authenticity to their scripts and get racy language past network executives.

Marketers use it to sell everything from bank accounts to soft drinks. Hallmark now sells Spanglish greeting cards. McDonald's is rolling out Spanglish TV spots that will air on both Spanish- and English-language networks.

In academia, once a bastion of anti-Spanglish sentiment, the vernacular is studied in courses with names like "Spanish Phonetics" and "Crossing Borders." Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans published a Spanglish dictionary with hundreds of entries -- from "gaseteria" (which means "gas station") to "chaqueta" (for "jacket," instead of the Spanish word "saco"). Stavans said new Spanglish words are created all the time, altering traditional notions of language purity that remained strong a generation ago.

Extract from the boston.com site, article by Daniel Hernandez

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/11/spanglish_moves_into_mainstream/

In the recent spate of bad comments about the herbal supplement, ephedra, which is designed, according to the manufacturers, "for weight control, building muscles and boosting energy," the root of the problem, at least linguistically, seems to lie in the usually benign posture of sitting.

The root of "ephedra," according to the Greeks, comes from the feminine singular noun "hedra," meaning an innocent seat or chair, as in a bishop's cathedra or a university chair, a symbol of authority. Ephedra itself means a "sitting at or by: a siege, blockade," equivalent, in Latin, to "obsessio," which in psychiatry is the neurosis characterized by the persistent intrusion of unwanted thoughts ("thoughts that annoyingly confront one"). The Food and Drug Administration claims that ephedra, which it has linked to some 155 deaths, can also cause heart attacks and strokes, even in healthy young adults. In view of these mortality rates, the very etymology itself is scary, even insidious.

Extract from the HeraldTribune site, article by E. Leo McMannus

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040111/OPINION/401110572/1029

I've tried to tackle some big issues in this space, from the debates about news judgment to the challenge and responsibilities of writing headlines. But good journalism is about the small things as well as the big.

At the Copy Desk, known affectionately/derisively in some circles as the Department of Corrections, small things are our butter, if not our bread. We're expected to hold the line on a lot of issues - respectful use of English, consistent grammar, etc. - yet we have to be flexible in a number of ways, from respecting a writer's style to not losing sight of bigger issues.

Extract from the Richmond Times-Dispatch site, article by Lewis F. Brissman

http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%2FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031773037048&path=!news!columnists&s=1045855935174

In other words, we try not to follow a rule out the window.

A former colleague once noted that our reference materials implied that, like stepmother and stepbrother, the term stepuncle could be one word. But there's no way around how that looks like ste-PUNK-el, so we hyphenate step-uncle for clarity of reading.

Few people would take issue with that. Yet there are countless small decisions in editing that can raise a question or warrant an explanation.

Sometimes these moments become flashes of enlightenment to a colleague or a reader - for example, that William H. Rehnquist is chief justice of the United States, not of the Supreme Court. And sometimes these become moments of ridicule - for many years, we did not use host as a verb, and our only explanation was that it was Associated Press style, which is the framework for most newspapers.

Making such distinctions, frankly, is like chasing our tails. We could spend a lifetime enveloped in the fog of style, but since we publish the equivalent of a small novel every day, we have to pick our moments. Here are a few - and, boy, do I mean few - of the "small things" and distinctions we consider every day:

• Partridge says that it's late 19th C Canadian and suggests that its source is 'Putzi', a common German name for a lap-dog. However, if it first referred to small dogs, the source could be a variant of pouch dog.
  Peter Brooke, Kinmuck Scotland

• According to Merriam-Webster, its first substantiated usage was in 1924, but its origin is 'unknown'.
  Max Wurr, Stanmore United Kingdom

• The current OED confesses defeat with "Etymology obscure", but says, surprisingly enough, that it is "Orig U.S". The first reference they have is from 1924, but, as the questioner says, it must be much older.
  David J Wilson, Albuquerque USA

• Perhaps because the word emanates from the United States and thus is not deemed worthy of an entry in the OED
  Jack Hill, St Albans England

• The On-line Etymology Dictionary has this to say: pooch - 1924, "dog," Amer.Eng., of unknown origin. Whilst this is not terribly helpful, it might explain why a 40-year old OED does not contain the word at all. I hope this assists!
  Geoff Simpson-Scott, New Malden England

Extract from the Guardian Unlimited site

http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-27673,00.html

In a Main Street Program committee meeting last week, the words "revitalization," "restructuring," "renovation," "reconstruction," "revision," "reconfiguring," and "reordering" (as in priorities, not coffee, though we did that too), were used in the conversation a total of 268 times.

(Full disclosure: the number 268 is based not on a full word count, impossible under the circumstances - the author was a participant, not a scribe - but is an estimate based on a statistical sampling from the author's notes. Those notes included 67 uses of variant "re-" words. Presuming that the notes captured 25% of the discussion, the total "re-" usage can be extrapolated to 268. There were no hanging chads.)

(Furthermore, there were six participants, and the meeting ran for a full one hour and sixteen minutes. That makes 47 "re-"s per person, and 3.53 "re-"s per minute.) Let's just say that we were "re-"ing with abandon.

"Re-" is a profligate prefix, one that can and will attach itself to just about any verb. If you did something once, you can always "re-" it and do it again. Handy. A Prefix of Maximal Utility.

The Main Street committee certainly was not doing anything out of the ordinary. We "re-" a lot in the course of the day. We "re-wind" (to get back to the beginning) and "re-boot" (to get back to a fresh start -- although I can't for the life of me remember when I ever just booted). The cosmetics industry thinks we will buy if a product "re-juvenates" (makes youthful) or "re-plenishes" (brings back a lot of something we presumably had before). Journalists work on "re-visions" (not just as in changing a word or a comma, but literally to "see" their work again). Some of us are encouraged to "'re-think' that tie" (which, in current flippage, is short for "You don't get out much, do you?").

We can even double the fun: academics "re-research" a subject, digging up something that was dug up before (presumably necessary since the number of academics per square foot has grown exponentially, and methods of re-search are constantly re-vised).

To "re-" isn't even an activity of modern invention. The American Founders did it, politically: the "re-volution" of 1776 was literally a turning around to political practices older than George III's and those of his Parliament. John Calvin and Martin Luther did it, religiously: a "re-formation" of the Church was accomplished by "re-turning" to older practices and thought. Shakespeare did it, creatively: nobody had ever "re-greeted" until Sir John Oldcastle did it to Henry V (though I'm not certain that anyone has "re-greeted anyone since). The ability to "re-re-" something was even noted (by the Oxford English Dictionary) as early as 1778. In fact, speakers of Latin did it first. It's hard-wired in Latin, and English simply plugged in an extension cord.

Extract from the PhoenixvilleNews.com site, article by G. E. Lawrence

http://www.phoenixvillenews.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1673&dept_id=17918&newsid=10790141&PAG=461&rfi=9

Gathered at a Borders in Carmel Mountain Ranch, the small crowd has a choice. "I can read from my new book," the man who wants to be America's English Teacher tells them, "or I can do riffs."

By a show of hands, riffs win.

"English is a strange language," Richard Lederer begins, and then off the top of his head gives examples:

The third hand on a clock is called the second hand. Our noses run and our feet smell. A wise man and a wise guy are opposites.

"We never call things what they are," he continues. "If we go into a restaurant, sit down for several minutes, order from the menu, then sit around some more, why is the person who brings us our food called the waiter?"

And this: "If olive oil is made out of olives, what is baby oil made out of?"

OK, so it's not Letterman, but the crowd loves it. One guy is laughing so hard Lederer grows concerned. "Careful there," he says. "You're turning awfully red. You're the apoplectic of my eye."

More laughter.

For two hours, the 65-year-old San Diegan holds court. He can't help himself. An insatiable collector of words and phrases, he dissects their meanings and manipulates their letters. The teacher in him makes him want to share.

"I'm heels-over-head in love with the English language," he says, and then explains why that's more accurate than head-over-heels.

This is a busy time for Lederer. His new book, "A Man of My Words," is just out, along with a re-release of an earlier volume of bawdy humor, "The Cunning Linguist."

For much of the past month, he's been making two public appearances daily, mixing speeches with book signings while also taping segments for the weekly KPBS radio show he co-hosts, "A Way With Words."

At the Borders event, he talks to the crowd about the greatest pun of the last millennium (Dorothy Parker's "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy") and explains why he doesn't golf ("I'm not interested in any activity in which the goal is a sub-par performance").

At the end of the session, somebody brings him a slice of chocolate cake. He had a piece earlier but now he's full. He offers it to the audience.

"Come on," he says, "somebody take the cake." And then he's off again, tracing the etymology of "take the cake" to contests among slaves.

A carnivore eats meat. A herbivore eats plants.

Richard Lederer calls himself a verbivore. He eats words.

Extract from the SignOnSanDiego.com site

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/features/20040111-9999_1c11words.html

Last year the editors of the American Heritage Dictionary released the long-awaited fourth edition of the American Heritage College Dictionary, and to mark the occasion they compiled a list titled "100 Words That Every High School Graduate Should Know." A senior editor of the dictionary, Steven Kleinedler, explained, "This list is a benchmark against which graduates—and those long out of high school—can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language." The words have been printed on a poster, and I've had it taped to my wall for several months now.

In some ways the list is a curious one. A number of the words clearly draw on recent news (euro, reparation, impeach), but it isn't always clear why certain others were deemed urgent enough to make the cut (facetious, gauche, sanguine). There are numerous words involving science (gamete, kinetic, quasar), politics (enfranchise, gerrymander, loquacious), and publishing (bowdlerize, expurgate, plagiarize), but none involving religion (except nonsectarian). Lexicon is on the list, presumably ex officio.

The editors emphasize that the hundred words "are not meant to be exhaustive" (you'll definitely need a few others to get by), but I recently tried to describe current events with mainly the arsenal provided, and did surprisingly well. Corporate malfeasance was easy to conjure: "Fiduciary nihilism wrought incontrovertible pecuniary chicanery." The prospect of a war with Iraq by winter's end was not difficult to convey: "Before equinox, near ziggurat, omnipotent laissez-faire hegemony subjugates bellicose totalitarian." Even the saga of Trent Lott proved more or less manageable: "Unctuous hubris recapitulates antebellum paradigm in churlish kowtow to filibuster oligarchy."

The American Heritage list is something of a throwback. The first English lexicons were not zoological collections of all the specimens in a language but, rather, lists of especially hard words for the educated classes. They were the literary analogue of the manuals of behavior for young people of noble rank—a genre that runs from the medieval "Mirror of Princes" through George Washington's famous "Rules of Civility" to the vast prescriptive-pamphleteering industry of our own era.

"What Every American Needs to Know" was the subtitle of Cultural Literacy (1987), a work that has now been through several best-selling versions. Here, in a few hundred pages, E. D. Hirsch Jr. and his disciples sought to establish an entire taxonomy of core knowledge—the thousands of dates, names, facts, ideas, and expressions that an educated person can't be seen without: 1066, 1914, Tolstoy, Ellison, Giotto, Jack Sprat, "In the beginning," flapper, uncertainty principle, zeitgeist.

Extract from the Atlantic online site, article by Cullen Murphy

The fascination of from where names, surnames, words and many other details originated, has always been an attraction for research. In recent years we have had not only dictionaries, thesaurus and other dictionaries of many sorts published, but recently there has been published an important dictionary which can be said to be a first in its line of study.

The importance of knowing about the origins of Maltese surnames is manifold. There have already been some studies, but these were concerned with restricted periods in time, and with the distribution of the names, rather than a systematic study of the origins of the same surnames. With this work I am sure that there would be a good number of people who would not only want to have such a book in their library, but they would also like what they would be able to read.

Such a book is never meant to be something to be read. It is a book that first and foremost would be dealt with throughout many hours of study and research. Researchers would be able now to have a date to when a surname had surfaced for the first time in Malta. This would help the same researcher on the various details that can be extracted from such information.

What kind of details is one to meet with in this dictionary? There is the usual alphabetical list of the surnames as recorded and collated by the author, and then the same entry is elaborated on. Information is given about its origin, the meaning of the same surname, and the various variations in the way that the surname is and has been written in the past. There are also the details about when it was first recorded in Malta. This has made the author to delve deeply into various studies, researches and publications in order to manage to compile the dictionary.

Probably the most interesting details that emerge from this research would undoubtedly be the dates of when the surnames have been reported first in Malta, or somewhere in the vicinity of the islands. As an example the surname of Zammit has been attested to be present in Sicily in 1183. While that of Scerri is even earlier. The same kind of information is then given with regards to the surname's presence in Malta. Another interesting feature in the reading of these surnames is that some of them were to be found in Medieval Malta, and then for some reason or another, the surname would have disappeared. Later on, the same surname would have been re-introduced into Malta. One of these surnames is that of Demajo, which rather than being Spanish seems to be very much Sicilian and southern Italian, like many of the Maltese surnames.

Extract from the di-ve site, article by Vincent Zammit

http://www.di-ve.com/dive/portal/portal.jhtml?id=119425&pid=1 

Here are the final vote tallies for the 2003 Words of the Year from the American Dialect Society at its annual conference, held this year in Boston. These are the words which most colored the nation's lexicon, or otherwise dominated the national discourse.

Note that voting tallies for each category will vary in their totals, for not all attendees voted in all categories. Votes were held in a series of run-offs until a clear winner was recognized. Votes are listed according to voting rounds, first-second-third.

WORD (OR PHRASE) OF THE YEAR

This is the word or phrase which most signifies 2003.

Winner: metrosexual: noun, a fashion-conscious heterosexual male, or, as coiner Mark Simpson put it, a man who "has clearly taken himself as his own love object." 20-36-35

pre-emptive self-defense: noun, an attack before a possible attack.18-10

embed: verb, to place a journalist with troops or a political campaign. Noun, a journalist who is so placed. 7

zhuzh, tjuzs: verb, to plump up, fluff up or primp. 4

governator, gropenator, gropenführer: noun, the current Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. 3

weapons of mass deception: plural noun, the hunt for weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for war. 10

weapons of: formative, including weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass distraction. 3

SARS: acronym for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. This was a surprise entry after the first elimination round, unorthodoxly nominated by one of our members from China. (no first round)-24-31

MOST USEFUL: word or phrase which most fills a need for a new word

Winner flexitarian: noun, a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat. 31-41

SARS: 12-9

-shoring: formative, indicating the location of jobs or businesses, including offshoring, moving businesses or jobs out of the country; rightshoring, returning them to the US; and nearshoring, moving them to Canada. 3

Extract from the American Dialect Society

http://www.americandialect.org/

It is possibly the most versatile word in the human language, yet people are still afraid to say it in polite company.

"It" is of course the "F-word."

The origin of the word is not completely known, but some believe that it may have its roots in Latin. Most likely, it was associated with physical beating or sexual intercourse, according to The Latin Sexual Vocabulary by James N. Adams.

However, the first time the word appeared in print is known. According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the infamous word appeared in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500. The poem titled "Flen flyys," which means "fleas flies," is a satire on the Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England.

The line that contains f___ is written in code and reads, "Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk." The Latin words at the beginning of the poem mean "they (the friars) are not in heaven, since." The rest of the line can easily be broken down by substituting the previous letter in the alphabet, and taking into account the differences in the alphabet and spelling between then and now. When this is all done, the whole line is translated to read, "They are not in heaven because they f___ wives of Ely (a town near Cambridge)."

While now the "F-word" is seen as amazingly profane, Christine Shea, professor of classics, said that there was a time when this was not the case.

"It really was not a taboo word," she said. "It was really rather common."

Extract from the Ball State Daily News site, article by Cole McGrath

http://www.bsudailynews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/01/15/4006307852ffa

BOARDER

Years ago, if you stayed at an inn for more than a few days, you'd be called a boarder. Why is that?

In the first half of the song, Andre belts out, "Caroline, you're the reason for the word 'bitch'." Later Big Boi eloquently says, "But game been peeped, dropping names she's weak. Trickin' off this bitch is lost. Must take me for a geek." Andre continues with this theme: "Better come back down to Mars. Girl, quit chasin' cars. What happens when the dough gets low? Bitch, you ain't that fine. No way... no way... no way!" Then at the end of the song, several times, Big Boi chants "Crazy Bitch."

@#$%!!!! What is it with this word? Everywhere I turn my ear I hear it.

For a while, women tried to reclaim the word, just as black people tried to reclaim the word "nigger." It didn't work. Instead, use of the word — not by women to empower women, but by men to demean women — has multiplied, in music, on television, in books, in movies, in arguments, in everyday life as a whole. The B-word crosses color and age and class lines. It seems like everyone feels entitled to use it.

I have no problem with curse words (as long as they aren't used too often or around children). Sometimes they're the only way to express what one is feeling. But I take exception to the B-word. This word has a key linguistic issue that no other curse word in current American slang has.

What makes a woman a "bitch"? There seem to be infinite criteria, but only one is really necessary. To be a "bitch," all you have to be is a woman. Any other attributes — positive, negative — are secondary. These days, people use "bitch" when they mean "woman" — it's an insult that attacks the core of one's identity.

These days, men sometimes face the B-word, too. The reason it's insulting to call a man a bitch is the same reason men don't want to, for example, hit the baseball "like a girl." To call a man a bitch is calling him a woman. In our sexist society, that alone is an insult.

A little more background on the history of this word: According to The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, "The word bitch became a naughty word in Christian Europe because it was one of the most sacred titles of the Goddess, Artemis-Diana, leaders of the Scythian alani or 'hunting dogs.'...In Christian terms, 'son of a bitch' was considered insulting not because it meant a dog, but because it meant the devil — that is, a spiritual son of the pagan Goddess."

So basically, a goddess has been turned into a curse word. A true sign of the times.

Extract from the Africana site

http://www.africana.com/articles/voices/ls20040115bword.asp

• Europa - a lover of Zeus from Greek mythology. To protect her from his jealous wife, Zeus appeared as a white bull who swam to safety across the ocean with Europa on his back.
  R Watkin, Oxford

• From the Phoenician word EROB, meaning where the sun set (west of Phoenicia).
  Roy Nicol, Toronto Canada

• From fecund EUROPA: a Phoenician princess carried off by Zeus in the form of a white bull and by him mother of Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Sarpedon.
  Trevor, Newcastle UK

• EUROPA - Overcome by the Phoenician woman's beauty, but sensing her shy nature, Zeus changed himself into a white bull. Europa was attracted to this majestic animal, and was soon riding on the bull. At that point, Zeus started running over the waves, leaving Europa's native Sidon and friends behind. The ride was smooth, as the sea nymphs created a waveless path for the travellers. The couple ended up on Crete, where Europa bore Zeus three sons: Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Sarpedon. Minos became king of Crete; Rhadamanthus a judge in the underworld.
  Odysseus Mikalis, Rockville USA

• (From "The New First Aid in English" ISBN 0 7169 4409 x): "Some say it was named Eref by the Phoenicians, meaning 'the land of the setting sun' ... Others say it was named after Europus, a town in Macedonia"
  Mike Whittaker, Stapleton UK

• Europa, Europe comes from the Phoenician word EROB, meaning where the sun set (west of Phoenicia,west of Bosphorus, Sea of Marmora). Erebo: I go under. Ereba: The land where I go under. Acu (pronounciatian asu) the land where I (the sun) are coming up: Ereb, ereba= europa Asu = Asie, Asia. Morningland-Eveningland, seen by the Phoeniciers That's why Bosphorus always has been the geographical border between Europe and Asia. Anatolie /= Asia-minor,which forms 97% of todays Turkey, comes from greeche language and means : east, east of what ? East of European Greece!
  Hans Thijssens, Amsterdam Netherlands

Extract from the Guardian's "Notes and Queries" site

http://www.guardian.co.uk/notesandqueries/query/0,,-10344,00.html

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following column includes numerous explicit occurrences of some taboo words. To avoid wearing out my asterisk key, I have made the following substitutions, which I am afraid you will have to keep in mind as your read: "pop" for the common f-word, "plum" for the human rear end, and "peg" for the male organ of generation. So when your eye sees a "pop," a "popped" or a "popping," just mentally substitute a "f***," a "f***ed" or a "f***ing," and similarly for "plum," etc. Got it? Good. Then I'll proceed.

I see from the New York Post that in the last week of 2003 our governor issued a posthumous pardon to the comedian Lenny Bruce. The pardon was for a 1964 conviction on obscenity charges under New York law. Bruce died in 1966, at age 40, from a heroin overdose. The obscenity conviction related to a stand-up routine Bruce had developed for use in private clubs, involving lots of taboo words — sexual, scatological, and racial.

Bruce was one of those annoying people who do not see the point of the kind of mild, harmless hypocrisy that allows us to get through life without having to think about unpleasant things too much. At some moment in their youth, people of Bruce's kind stumble on the fact that when a stranger greets me with "How ya doin'?" the stranger does not, in fact, give a fig about how I am doing, and would be very little distressed to learn that I was suffering from Bright's disease or lymphatic cancer. "How ya doin'?" is just an empty form of words used to soften the bumps and abrasions of our social encounters.

Of course, this reflection occurs to us all at some point. Most of us, though, cleave to the Yiddish precept that: "A false 'Good morning' is better than a sincere 'Go to hell'." People of the Lenny Bruce type prefer the converse principle. To them, the discovery that we use empty forms of words in our trivial exchanges is a tremendous revelation, on the scale of Keats first looking into Chapman's Homer. People are lying! They are going round LYING TO EACH OTHER!! All day long!!! Lying, lying, lying — so-called polite society is just a TISSUE OF LIES!!!! And off they go, the Lenny Bruces, on a crusade to expose and sweep away all the lies, all the hypocrisy, and restore truth, honesty, frankness, and justice to human affairs.

The campaign to get Bruce a pardon was led by his ex-wife and daughter, together with Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers comic team (one of whom, I forget which, was the first to utter the word "bra" on network TV — there's glory for you!), Robin Williams, and a pack, or whatever the proper collective noun is, of First Amendment lawyers. The pardon was hailed in the liberal press as a great victory for First Amendment principles.

This, if anyone wants to know what I think about it, is a crock. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law abridging the freedom of speech. None of the people who wrote those words, and hardly any grown-up person in the USA from that time to this, thinks that the First Amendment makes it O.K. for citizens to go around yelling obscenities at each other in the street. I doubt even Robin Williams believes that.

The acceptable use of taboo words has always been fenced off in a few, mostly all-male, regions of social intercourse: the military and the merchant marine, manual workers like stevedores and lumberjacks, professional athletes, actors, traders in stocks and bonds. (Yes! I was stunned when I first went to work on Wall Street at how foul were the mouths of securities traders wearing thousand-dollar suits and toting million-dollar compensation packages. Back office, too: Almost the first words I heard on joining First Boston in 1986 came from a senior back-office department manager who was speaking on the phone to a trader: "Whaddya mean, you don't know the popping price of the popping security? You're the popping trader, aren't you?") All that Lenny Bruce did was to add one other small zone — comedy clubs — in which dirty talk was acceptable. The rest of society went on pretty much as usual.

Pretty much. There has been some loosening of restraints all around since, of course, the 1960s — most notably in the movies. I doubt anyone could prove that Lenny Bruce was responsible for all of that, though. It was just part of The Great Disruption, as he himself was. The loosening had actually begun some years before Bruce showed up, led by writers like Norman Mailer.

Extract from the National Review Online site, article by John Derbyshire

http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire200401060903.asp

People were rocking with laughter; some were in tears. Deadpan, Don Watson waited. One audience member said later it was the funniest dinner of academic deans he had ever attended. But Watson was not joking. He was reading from a university mission statement and other material on its website.

"To provide outcome-related research and consultancy services that address real-world issues" - shrieks of laughter. The university's "approach to quality management is underpinned by a strong commitment to continuous improvement and a whole-of-organisation framework" - uproar in the room.

The university in question was RMIT but it could have been any of them. Go to your website and read the language, Watson urged guests at a recent Deans of Education dinner. That made people laugh even more. They worked at universities; they knew what he was talking about. Some of them probably even wrote this stuff. It was a surreal moment.

But to Watson the joke has a sting. It is funny and it is awful. A terrible thing is happening to the language, he believes, and at the end of the day, in a globalised world, it is not a positive communications outcome. In other words, there is a pox upon our public speech.

...

Social democrats try to sound like corporate executives, with objectives and strategies and commitments ("Some of the Bracks Government stuff is appalling," says Watson). Meanwhile, business people try to sound like social democrats, committed to social capital and the triple bottom line. And because corporations have no familiarity with the old language of justice and struggle it sounds hollow and dead in their mouths, whether it is or not.

"Friends, Romans, customers" - Watson writes, putting the modern benchmark on the world-best implementer of language. Which organisation, he asks, now claims in its mission statement to have "a deep commitment to the customer"? Safeway? McDonald's? No, the CIA.

Even football is infected, he laments. Players must be accountable, stick to the game plan, provide flexibility on the forward line, going forwards. "What we are losing is language expressing character or imagination, which interests one human being in another, and from which the game's spirit springs."

But here is the rub. As widespread as this newspeak is, it is almost impossible to find someone who will admit to writing it. The email print-out Watson pushes across the table contains another monster quote, this time from a report by a government-funded arts body. "Our poor project officer has to put all this crap in a document," wrote the mole inside the organisation who smuggled it out to Watson. "A Bex and a good lie down is needed all around."

"There is concern about it everywhere," Watson says. For the past month or so he has spoken in public on the subject. "People always laugh like buggery when you speak it. They begin to get hysterical." And they also say: "We write it (reports) as best we can and we're told, 'Put it into dot points'." If this writing expresses the dominant ideology of the day, it is remarkable how few people want to own it.

Extract from "The Age" site

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/31/1067566083688.html?from=storyrh