Word of the week
14 May, 2013
I was listening to the radio last week as someone from Choice Magazine was campaigning against the misuse of “fresh” when applied to fruit and vegetables sold in supermarkets. Her concern is that some fruit and vegetables are stored for up to nine months and are still sold as “fresh” by Australian supermarkets. Fresh is our word of the week.
There is nothing wrong with the food (apart from some reduction in vitamins and nutrient) but can it really be labelled “fresh” when it has been stored for a significant time and perhaps also treated with hormones to ripen? This question is the subject of an on-going debate between consumer groups and the food industry all over the world.
How they keep fruit and vegetables “fresh”
Fruit and vegetables can have their lives significantly prolonged by modern food technology. They can be transported long distances allowing us to buy almost any kind of produce from anywhere in the world all year round. It is a large and lucrative business, for example, 16.8 million tonnes of bananas were transported in 2006 with an estimated value of $US 5.8 billion.
The main method for food preservation is refrigeration. A piece of fruit at 10° C will ripen half as slowly as the same fruit at 20° C. Another process used in conjunction with refrigeration is to use ethylene gas, a natural plant hormone, to artificially ripen fruit ready for sale.
Apples, for instance, store well and are sometimes kept for more than a year after harvest by some supermarkets. An investigation in 2008 by the Sydney paper, The Sun Herald, found that apples in Woolworths were 10 months old and contained excessive levels of ethylene.
However, this mass production and mass transportation of fruit and vegetables comes at a cost. While we benefit from the ready availability of non-seasonal produce and cheap overseas imports we are losing an understanding of real “fresh” food.
Fresh origins
The word “fresh” in modern English, has two ancestors, the Old English word, fersc, meaning not salty, pure, eager, sweet, and the Old French word, fresche, meaning new or recent. Fresh has equivalents in German Frisch, and in Italian and Spanish, fresco (we use al fresco to mean to dine in the fresh air). Therefore fresh takes it’s meaning from a combination or partnership between pure and new.
The dictionary meaning of fresh
Fresh as an adjective is used in many contexts. The many uses give it quite nuanced meanings depending on what it is describing. Because we have to assess these meanings I have listed most of them here with an example of the usage:
- New to one’s experience, not encountered before: fresh evidence
- Novel; different, original: a fresh idea
- Recently produced, or harvested; not stale or spoiled: fresh bread
- Not preserved, as by canning, smoking, or freezing: fresh vegetables
- Not saline or salty: fresh water
- Not yet used or soiled; clean: a fresh sheet of paper
- Free from impurity or pollution, pure: fresh air
- Bright and clear, not dull or faded: a fresh memory
- Having the appearance of youth, healthy: a fresh complexion
- Untried; youthful; inexperienced: fresh recruits
- Having just arrived; straight, latest: fashions fresh from Paris
- Revived or reinvigorated; refreshed: fresh as a daisy
- Fairly strong; brisk: a fresh wind
Most of these meanings combine aspects of purity and newness. The two ideas are closely related—something that is new is likely to be pure and untainted. When we use fresh to describe bread it is newly made and when we talk about fresh water it is pure in that it is not tainted by salt.
The official meaning of fresh fruit and vegetables
A report by the UK Food Standards Agency recognises the difficulties of defining fresh goods:
The description “fresh” can be helpful to consumers where it differentiates produce that is sold within a short time after production or harvesting. However, modern distribution and storage methods can significantly increase the time period before there is loss of quality for a product, and it has become increasingly difficult to decide when the term ”fresh” is being used legitimately.
Their definition for fresh when used for fruit and vegetables is consistent with most developed countries:
The term “fresh” is now used generically to indicate that fruit and vegetables have not been processed (e.g. canned, pickled, preserved or frozen), rather than that they have been recently harvested. This is acceptable provided it is not used in such a way as to imply the product has been recently harvested (e.g. “fresh from the farm”; “freshly picked”).
So are they fresh?
The excerpts above from the UK Food Standards Agency report have given the game away. Suggesting that food is fresh because it is unprocessed may be acceptable to bureaucrats and the food industry but it doesn’t make the product fresh for consumers.
Fresh bread is a manufactured food that is defined as fresh because it is recently produced (supposedly). Fresh fruit and vegetables are defined as fresh because they are non-processed foods even although they are not recently produced or harvested.
Claiming to sell both fresh bread and fresh fruit and vegetables requires that fresh is used in two different senses, one of which is artificial. Real fresh fruit and vegetables should be both non-processed as well as recently harvested or produced. So I am right behind the lady from Choice Magazine.
6 May, 2013
I have just read a review of a life of Thomas De Quincey, an English writer of the 19th century, whose most famous book was Confessions of an English Opium Eater. It was the first book to explore the nature of addiction.
Opium has been known to man for thousands of years and it is believed that most of the ancient civilisations used opium as an analgesic (pain-killer) or as an anaesthetic. The word comes directly from the Latin word, opium, which had originally come from the Greek word, opion, for poppy juice.
Opium is harvested manually by scoring the unripe seed-pod and collecting the dried sap or latex which bleeds out of the wound. Because of this alchemists referred to opium as lachryma papaveris or poppy’s tears.
De Quincey was heavily addicted to laudanum. Laudanum is a tincture of opium, that is, opium dissolved in alcohol. Laudanum was first concocted by Paracelsus, a Swiss alchemist, who identified its potency as a painkiller. His tincture contained precious things such as gold and crushed pearls. Its name comes from either (or both) the Latin words laudare meaning to praise or ladanum meaning a gum resin. De Quincey was not an opium eater but used the title of the book to associate himself with the exotic habits of the opium addicts of the Middle East where some ate the pure resin rather than smoked it or took it as a tincture.
De Quincey throughout his life suffered from stomach pains and, although the dangers of addiction were known, he took opium to relieve the pain. Opium was in widespread use during De Quincey’s lifetime and was used to treat a multitude of diseases including diabetes, syphilis and constipation.
Opium contains a mixture of alkaloids including morphine, codeine as well as non-narcotic substances. Codeine was named using the Greek word, kodeia, meaning poppy head. Morphine was first isolated by a German pharmacist, Friedrich Serturner, who called it morphium, after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.
Alkaloids are a form of naturally-occurring nitrogen compound that can have a range of effects on humans—apart from the opiates that reduce pain many are toxic, poisonous, or narcotic. The term alkaloid was introduced in 1819 by a chemist called Carl F.W. Meissner. It is based on the late Latin root, alkali, which comes from the Arabic, al-qalwī, meaning the ashes of plants (with the Greek suffix -oid meaning -like). Soap was first developed by combining animal fat with potash made from plant ashes. Hence the term alkali was used for substances with caustic effects (i.e. the opposite of acids).
Opium-like substances are properly known as opioids (meaning opium-like). Opiates are the substances derived directly from opium or that contain opium.
De Quincey was a writer and journalist but found it difficult to finish any substantial work while addicted to opium. It was only by writing about his experiences as an opium user that he could write anything of value. His writings on his experiences were very popular and he is considered a pioneer essayist but a lot of his other writing has been described as dreck.
27 Apr, 2013
Apparently ducks are the funniest animals of all. A “scientific” experiment run by psychologist Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire, UK, in 2002, found that the world’s funniest animal is the duck. “If you’re going to tell a joke involving an animal, make it a duck,” Wiseman said.
I did find a few jokes on the Internet but nothing that would make me think that including a duck in a joke made it funnier.
A man and a duck are walking along a road together. The man notices a low-flying airplane coming right for them. The man yells “DUCK!” and the duck looks back at the man with an angry face and yells “MAN!”
A pretty young duck asks her beautician for some lipstick. The beautician asks the duck how she would like to pay and the duck says “Just put it on my bill, please”!
Duck replaced the Old English word ened as the bird’s name. Other Germanic languages still have similar words for the bird–Dutch has eend and German has Ente. My surname, Entwisle, is derived from a place name thought to mean something like duck island (and by a strange coincidence some of my ancestors were poultry experts but that’s a story for another week).
However, duck derives from ducker, which probably come from the Old English word ducan meaning to duck, bend down low, or dive.
There are essentially two kinds of duck: divers and dabblers. The divers are much better swimmers than the dabblers and feed in deeper water. Dabblers, also known as puddle ducks, rarely dive but eat on the surface or on shallow bottoms by upending themselves on the water surface.
So we guess that the puddleducks or dabblers of Medieval England started to be called duckers because of the way they ducked down to feed. Therefore the duck in my first joke should not have been upset by having his name confused with the action of bending down to avoid the collision.
8 Apr, 2013
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth, says Matthew’s Gospel 5:5 (and also Psalm 37). This is the third of the eight beatitudes, preached by Jesus Christ in his Sermon on the Mount, which were presented as the virtues that would be rewarded by God with salvation.
Meek was originally used to translate mansuetus (related to mansuetudo meaning tameness) from the Latin text of the Bible.
Meek comes from Middle English meke (around the 12th century) which meant gentle, courteous and kind. It originated in Old Norse from mjūkr, meaning soft. However in the 14th century it also took on a meaning of submissiveness. To find out the modern definition I did a little bit of a survey online and from my collection of international dictionaries.
My Shorter Oxford (Third Edition 1973) from the UK defines meek as:
- gentle, courteous, kind, merciful, indulgent
- free from self-will; piously humble and submissive; patient and unresentful
- submissive, humble; easily put upon
My Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary (1976 Edition) from the US defines it:
- Having a patient, gentle disposition
- Lacking spirit or backbone, submissive
My Concise Macquarie (First Edition 1982) from Australia defines meek as:
- humbly patient or submissive
On line the Dictionary.com (based on the Random House Dictionary 2010) :
- humbly patient or docile, as under provocation from others
- overly submissive or compliant; spiritless; tame
- Obsolete. gentle; kind
But if we aspire to inherit the earth, how do we recognise the characteristics of meekness that we need. The difference between the gentle, courteous, pious and kind type of meek (the virtuous meek) and the submissive, compliant, spiritless type of meek (the non-virtuous meek) is quite large. The meaning, however, is seldom clear from the context. The difference between the good meek and the bad meek is not a matter of context but intent.
You can be meek because you choose to be gentle and courteous due to your pious and kind nature. This is a virtue resulting from choice and strength of character
Alternatively you can be meek because you are compliant and submissive due to your weak and spiritless nature. This is not a virtue as it comes without choice and from a weakness of character.
Meek is still used in the modern translation of the third beatitude to represent a virtuous state deserving of the future of the world. The Bible is an active and current publication and its use of meek, particularly in the Third Beatitude, demonstrates its sense as a virtue rather than its sense as a weakness. (I therefore argue that the gentle and kind meaning is not obsolete at all because of the currency of the beautitude).
In defining the quality of meekness last century, Arthur Walkington Pink (1886 – 1952), an influential biblical scholar, wrote:
Some regard it’s meaning as patience, a spirit of resignation; some as unselfishness, a spirit of self-abnegation; others as gentleness, a spirit of non-retaliation, bearing afflictions quietly.
So, dear dictionary writers, if the good meaning of meek is obsolete we must either get the biblical translators to replace it with something like:
Blessed are the patient, unselfish and gentle for they will inherit the earth.
Or be afraid for the future because the dictionary-makers have subverted the meaning of meek and given the world away to the wrong people:
Blessed are the compliant, submissive and spiritless for they will inherit the world.
18 Mar, 2013
Christian and other religions have commemorative days known as festivals. A festival is a time of celebration or commemoration where the participants rejoice and make merry. Festivals are often celebrated by abundant eating and drinking. Hence festival days and feast days are synonymous; and the words feast and festival are close in meaning.
Religious observances that involve solemnity, remembrance or penitence usually involve abstinence from pleasures most importantly an abstinence from rich food or from food altogether which are known as fasting.
Festival comes from Latin, festa, which means holidays or feasts, from festus meaning festive, joyful, merry and related to feriae for holiday and fanum for temple. Decorations at festivals were known as festoons, from the same word, festa, before it became a verb meaning to decorate or adorn.
Fast comes from Old English fæstan and its original meaning was to hold firmly (like steadfast and holdfast). It came to mean firm control of oneself and holding to observance (of the religious rules). So fasting came to mean holding to abstinence from food. The use of fast for speed comes from the original meaning, as running fast meant holding steady at speed.
Christianity’s Lent is a period of abstinence which begins on Ash Wednesday (four weeks before Easter). Lent is short for Lenten, the forty days of fasting before Easter. Lenten, in Old English was Lencten the word for spring which derived from the shortening of the Germanic langa-tinaz, meaning long-days (referring to the lengthening days after the short days of winter).
Immediately before Lent is the Mardi Gras, a festival of abundance. Mardi Gras comes directly from French and literally means Fat (gras) Tuesday (Mardi) in reference to the feasting to be undertaken before the long fast.
In Britain Mardi Gras is known as Shrove Tuesday. Shrove is the past tense of shrive which meant to obtain absolution for ones sins through confession and by doing penance. It is also known as Pancake Tuesday because the feast is represented by eating pancakes (Protestant are not so good at indulgence). Carnival is similar to Shrove Tuesday in that it is the feasting before Lent and comes from carne levare (to take away meat).
Yom Kippur, meaning the Day (Yom) of Atonement (Kippur from to atone) is the most important day of the Jewish year (also known as the Sabbath of Sabbaths) and fasting occurs as a means of repentance.
In Islam the month of Ramadan, is the time for fasting and abstinence. Ramadan meant the hot month from the Arabic word ramida meaning to be burnt or scorched. It was originally a summer month, but after changes to the Islamic lunar calendar, it occurs in all seasons over a cycle of 33 years.
Hindus and Jains fast on several days including Ekadasi, meaning the eleventh (day) of the two fortnights in their lunar month.
12 Feb, 2013
With Valentines Day coming we explore if English provides an adequate vocabulary to describe a thousand different kisses. Robert Herrick (1591-1674) wrote much verse about love and the appreciation of life. He was a poet of simple but eloquent language and his work is most valuable in understanding the language of kisses:
Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score;
Then to that twenty, add a hundred more:
A thousand to that hundred: so kiss on,
To make that thousand up a million.
Treble that million, and when that is done,
Let’s kiss afresh, as when we first begun.
Kissing, surprisingly, is not a universal human behaviour (it is thought that rubbing noses is the original exchange of affection). However, kissing has been a habit of English speakers for quite a while as Old English had cyssan, from the Germanic languages kussen. The word kiss does not have a clear ancestry in Indo-European languages (although the ku root is found in several languages: Greek kynein meaning to kiss, Sanskrit cumbati for he kisses and even in the Hittite kuwash-anzi for they kiss).
Some languages have different words for the gentle kisses of affection and for the more amorous kisses of lovers. Latin has saviari for an erotic kiss and osculum (literally little mouth) for an affectionate one. The French have had to use embrasser for a kiss (literally embrace) from the 17th century when their original kiss word, baiser (from Latin basiare), became used as a slang word for copulation.
English poets have written of the delights of the kisses of lovers, but not made a distinction between erotic and affectionate kisses. Herrick best defines a romantic kiss for us in this couplet:
What is a kiss? Why this, as some approve:
The sure, sweet cement, glue, and lime of love.
English has several different words for kisses but they seem to do more to inspire comedy than romance:
A peck is a quick impersonal and unromantic kiss.
Smooch is a modern kiss, but is probably from an older word smouch (from the 1570s), possibly imitative of the sound of kissing and therefore more a wink than a sigh.
Snog is modern English slang from the 1940s for kissing and cuddling and also sounds less than poetic.
Mwah is a very modern kiss (about 1994) and represents the sound of an air-kiss, which of course is less than intimate.
Smack meaning a loud kiss comes from about 1600 and gives us no romantic feeling at all.
Osculation from from the Latin osculationem is very scientific or clinical sounding and hardly gets the passions flowing in anyone but scholars.
Although it is still in dictionaries buss is a bit of an antique. It is the closest thing we have to a word for a passionate kiss. Buss comes from the 1560s and is related to the French baiser (but without the rudeness). If we again believe Herrick from 1648 (who uses wantons here to mean a lascivious woman):
Kissing and bussing differ both in this,
We busse our wantons, but our wives we kisse.
2 Feb, 2013
This week we investigate chutzpah, a Yiddish word made popular by the American writer, Leo Rosten, and now absorbed into all forms of English.
In a recent article about the Australian Prime Minister’s partner, Tim Mathieson (often designated Australia’s First Bloke) the author rather unfavourably compares him to other spouses of previous Australian Prime Ministers:
He has none of the easy charm of Hazel Hawke, none of the magnetic chutzpah of Margaret Whitlam, none of the burning sexual energy of Dame Enid Lyons.
It was the second time that day that I had read chutzpah in an Australian news article. Chutzpah (prounounced huut spa) is a Yiddish word popular in American English but I am surprised to see it used this frequently in Australian English and even more surprised to see it used for Margaret Whitlam. A bit more investigation was needed for this word of the week.
Yiddish is the language of the Ashkenazi Jews (or Ashkehazim), who settled in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Many of the Ashkenazim immigrated to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries taking Yiddish with them. The number of Yiddish speakers in the world has been reduced over the last hundred years because of the Holocaust and also because Israel, as the Jewish state, adopted Hebrew in preference.
Yiddish received a boost with the publication of Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish in 1968. Rosten (pictured) was an American writer, humorist, scholar, social commentator and language enthusiast. He produced a range of fiction and nonfiction works in a long career but was best known for his books celebrating Jewish language, humour and culture (including one of my favourite books, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N). His family were Ashkenazim and had migrated to the US in 1911 when he was a young boy.
The Joys of Yiddish is a vast lexicon of Yiddish expressions and words that have been assimilated into English. It has been credited with establishing chutzpah and many other words into English. Rosten created a definition of chutzpah that is almost universally quoted:
that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.
(In a little twist, it has been pointed out that this story was originally told by an earlier, non-Jewish, American humorist called Artemis Ward about a fourteen year old boy in Arkansas who kills his parents with an axe. Therefore it is not based on Yiddish folklore as is assumed but comes from American roots.)
Rosten’s definition doesn’t really explain how we should judge the man. Is it audacious or is it unthinking arrogance? In America where there is still a strong Yiddish-speaking, Jewish community, chutzpah has a conflicted meaning. Michael Wex, a contemporary US writer on Yiddish, points out that when classical Jewish texts use chutzpah to mean courage or strong gumption it is done so only ironically:
There’s nothing good about chutzpah in Yiddish; it’s an unambiguously negative quality characterized by a disregard for manners, social conventions, and the feelings and opinions of others. The chutzpahnik’s self-regard and sense of entitlement are so total that he’s unable to see that other people are just as real as he is.
Chutzpah in Yiddish denotes the behaviour of the selfish chutzpahnik. In contrast, English usage gives chutzpah a mostly positive meaning equating to the behaviour of the confident charismatic person, as in the previous reference to Margaret Whitlam. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as extreme self-confidence or audacity and states that it is usually used approvingly. So those of us outside the US—and not without a little bit of chutzpah ourselves—can take the English, positive meaning of chutzpah with confidence.
28 Jan, 2013
I am always excited by airports. They are full of people heading off to exotic places. Travelling, for me, is a great luxury which is reinforced by the atmosphere in the terminals. Images of beautiful people stare sultrily from posters enticing us to buy perfume, jewellery, clothing from the world’s biggest prestige or luxury brands: Armani, Versace, Hermes, Gucci, Chanel, Moet & Chandon, Rolex, BMW, Audi, Cartier. People are in the mood to shop. There are mountains of shiny glimmering goods to buy at the duty-free outlets.
There is no doubt that the luxury brands are better quality than many of the mass-market brands which is why we buy them. But we also pay a premium price for the brands because of the feeling of success and sense of worth that they give us. A lot of this brand desire is illusory and the result of clever marketing and brand management which convinces us that owning the goods will enhance our status or sense of self-worth.
The illusion of prestige is reflected in the history of the word itself. The adjective, prestigious, has been in English since the 1540s, and first meant practising illusion or magic or being deceptive. It came from Latin praestigious, meaning full of tricks, which is thought to have two parents, praestigiae meaning juggler’s tricks and praestringere meaning to blind, blindfold, or dazzle or to tie up.
Prestige, therefore, is a word that evolved from something that was a trick, something that dazzled but was really only an illusion. For hundreds of years prestige had a negative meaning: it was an illusion of success, of well-being, of success. However, about a hundred years ago, perhaps as mass consumerism started to take hold (and now has evolved into the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption), prestige shifted to its current meaning of providing influence, distinction or enhanced reputation. Prestige gives a person or object cachet, status or increased value.
Where the word prestige has had a history of deceit and illusion, luxury is even worse. It was initially, in 14th Middle English, a word used for sexual intercourse and for lasciviousness and sinful self-indulgence. It had come via Old French from Latin luxuria meaning excess and extravagance. However, by the 17th century, luxury had lost most of its negative meaning and taken on much of the modern sense of indulgence in and enjoyment of rich, comfortable, and sumptuous living. A luxury is something that is considered an indulgence rather than a necessity although there can still be a lingering hint of excessiveness.
The meanings of words can be much more subtle than we think and prestige and luxury are wonderful examples of this. We use them to talk about the finer things in life but embedded in their meanings is the rememembrance that prestige and luxury are excessive and illusionary.
11 Jan, 2013
I predict that 2013 will be the year of the humblebragger (or perhaps humblebraggart). The narcissism encouraged by social media and the concept of self-branding, whether you are a celebrity or businessperson, will send humblebragging to new heights.
And what is humblebragging? It is boasting that tries to disguise itself as self-deprecation. It is a very new word for social media false modesty or fake humility.
Where as brag, which was last week’s word of the week, is a very old word, humblebrag is a very new word, having been coined by American comedian Harris Wittels in 2010. He explained it:
A humblebrag is basically a specific type of bragging which masks the brag in a faux-humble guise. The false humility allows the offender to boast their ‘achievements’ without any sense of shame or guilt. Unfortunately/fortunately, humblebragging is very commonly used in our society and for some reason Twitter seems to be the perfect forum for people to do it.
Wittels has created a Twitter stream where he collects and highlights the worst types of humblebrags. I have used this as a basis of my research.
The New York Times categorised humblebrags into a few key types but based on a quick review and analysis I have found there are ten types of humblebrag.
1. Just too busy
This humblebrag takes the form I am too busy because I am so important, talented and in demand. It tries to disguise the boast about being important with the complaint about how hard it is to manage being so important.
I’ve been signing so many autographs lately, that I was writing a card to my dad and started to write my last name!!
I just started writing a tool that I know I could turn into another million dollar company if I had the time
When I wake up I gotta text back 30 different people!!
2. Such an idiot
The idiot humblebrag disguises itself by using a little mistake as the excuse for the brag—it tries to disguise the big boast with the little foible.
Totally walked down the wrong escalator at the airport from the flashes of the cameras… Go me
If you could ask a US president a question in confidence, what would it be? (Don’t be a dummy like me and ask for his tie!)
I’ve been working at Rolling Stone off and on for the last two years, and I still push the door the wrong way EVERY time I leave.
3. The imposter
The imposter humblebrag is perhaps the most disingenuous of them all as it is a broadcast to the fans that the humblebraggart is just an ordinary person who doesn’t understand why their fans think them so important.
Wow, honoured: @FastCompany’s 50 most influential designers in America includes ME for some reason.
Just passed my billboard on Sunset Blvd—After all these years, I still ask myself “is that me?”
Argh! just seen someone sitting opposite me on train is reading my book. Quite embarrassed. Watching for signs of enjoyment. He’s frowning
4. Reluctant limelight
The irony of the reluctant limelight humblebrag is obviously missed on their authors—I just have to tell everyone on social media that I can’t cope with being loved so much…
A patient grabbed my bicep today and made some comment about muscles. It was a little awkward.
Signing photos of myself never ceases being a strange & awkward experience.
5. Suffering in the gilded cage
Perhaps the most unpleasant and, based on my statistics, the most common celebrity humblebrag is the suffering from living in the gilded cage. This takes the form: if only you had to put up with the burdens of being rich, famous, gorgeous etc,
My emails send so slowly over here in Cannes! So frustrated!
Mother of God. Tornado coming. Hide in my wine cellar or my theatre? Or my gym.
Owning a house…not a condo…is ALOT of work. mom and dad…i have so much more respect for what u did raising us in a home now. Damn
Remember when limos were cool? Now they’re pretty lame!! Every time I ride in one I feel corny… Glad it’s 3:30 am
I hate my lambo [Lamborghini]! Police is ALWAYS pulling me over just cuz it’s a lambo so they always think I’m speeding but I’m not!! Then they let me go!
6. Denying extraordinariness
This denial humblebrag is one of the most subtle as it feigns modesty (and is similar to the imposter humblebrag). I don’t know why everyone is so attracted to me but they are. I just did something out of the usual but it is OK by me.
In NYC in my bum clothes, and I’ve honestly never been hit on by so many guys in 1 day. I must be ovulating, or something.
Ha. My billboard in times square. Crazy how I worked here 15 years ago and now I have a billboard. So cool
Genuinely blows my mind when I notice hot girls in the crowd singing along to our songs. Dunno what they like about our band.
7. Straw man
This is the fake reputation defence or the straw man defence. You say (or perhaps there is a rumour going around) that I am vain, arrogant and self-important but I have proof that I am not and here it is.
Just in case you think all this has gone to my head, within 36 hours of winning the Oscar, I was back home plunging a clogged toilet
Why is it that every time I have a softball game someone walks up to me and says, are you on roids ! Hahaha dude I don’t even lift weights
Stories are everywhere that I’m too thin. When will the media see women for their accomplishments instead of their weight & appearance?
8. Sharing the fame
This is a humblebrag version of namedropping. I am not important except that I have important/famous/sexy friends.
I never anticipated having the sort of job where I would be on the phone with someone and say, “I have to go. Ang Lee is on the other line.”
That weird moment when you see your friend in the airport… On the cover of WIRED.
Ugh. I just pocket dialed spokesperson for Pentagon
9. By the way
This is a great one because it requires us to suspend our disbelief. This tries to disguise its humblebraggedness as a matter-of-fact statement. I just let this slip about how great I am.
Just gave 100 dollars to the homeless man I see every day here in Vancouver. Irrational kindness does feel really really good
Just bought 2 homeless women near my building dinner. Can’t do this every day but it hurts to see these women begging so hard for help.
The fact that Wikipedia lists me as a notable alumnus of my college speaks of the reliability of crowd-sourced information
When people stop me in grocery stores and tell me they love my music it makes everything I do all worth it.
10. The multi-humble-brag
The multi-humble-brags are the most vainglorious of all brags as they manage to combine several brags into one.
Need to head to the golf course. Stressed about invite to Justin Timberlake’s Charity Golf event (No. 5 and No. 8).
It’s really weird being friends with famous people. You hardly ever get to see them and you have to schedule times to hang-out a week ahead. (No. 5 and No. 8).
Just hung out with Ashton Kutcher for a bit for work and now I feel bad about all the shit I’ve said about him before. ( I’m taller tho. ) (No 2 and No. 8).
Just met President Obama, and he know who I was..WOW (No. 3 and No. 8).
I’m at the Oscars. I go to every hoity toity event where rich & spoiled entertainers throw a party for themselves. My schedule is quite busy (No. 1, No. 4 and No. 8).
5 Jan, 2013
A few weeks ago the word of the week was scold which we found had its origin from Icelandic poets with sharp tongues. The old poets may also have given us the word brag although its history is a lot less clear. The evolution of brag happened mostly outside English which makes the story a little more difficult to tell.
English contains a string of words with the form –ag including bag, brag, crag, drag, fag, flag, gag, hag, jag, lag, nag, rag, sag, shag, slag, snag, stag, swag, tag and wag. This –ag form existed in Old English but there was a shift in pronunciation to the form –aw in Middle English.
Therefore most –ag words in English have been borrowed back from other Germanic languages (with a few exceptions). Stag and shag are the only words that come from Old English. Crag was borrowed from Celtic, slag comes from Low German, and most of the others came from Scandinavian. Brag is a common word in many of the older Germanic languages so its origin is not known.
Some argue that brag may come from the Celtic or Gaulish brâca, a kind of trousers (from which the English word breeches comes) which produced the Provençal word braga, meaning to wear rich clothes and a Swiss dialect word braguâ, to boast or strut. This makes good logical sense but brag was in English before it was found in Swiss or Provençal so the sequence doesn’t work.
Brag existed in old Scandinavian languages in several forms. They give some very strong clues as to how it may have evolved. The most likely origin for brag is from a meaning for brave. In Old Icelandic braga meant to flicker and was used in referring to the northern lights (aurora borealis). Derivatives in other Germanic languages mean to shimmer, shine and to sparkle. It was perhaps from this meaning that the meaning to show-off may have developed.
Bragr was the word for poem in Old Icelandic. Bragi was the god of poetry. Bragi was one of Odin’s sons and was renowned for wisdom, the fluency and skill of his speech and for his long beard. The most important form of poetry at the time of the myth-making was skaldic poetry (from where we get the English word scold, we talked about above), which sometimes involved poetry duels where the poets would show off their skills.
The relationships between the early meanings of brag can only be speculated about but it is tempting to think that poetry, which at that time was not written but performed, was a great shining spectacle where the great Icelandic poets showed off their oratory skills.
31 Dec, 2012
The twenty-first century is having its thirteenth birthday. Thirteen is a native word to English. It comes to us from the Old English languages, þreotene from Mercian and þreotiene from West Saxon. It is a combination of þreo for three and -tene, -tiene meaning ten more than.
Thirteen has a stigma as an unlucky number but this has not always been the case. In medieval England thirteen was lucky as it was the time when you were given a baker’s dozen. Bakers would give a thirteenth loaf to their customers to make sure that they were not short-changing them with weight.
Thirteen has always had a spiritual and mystical meaning because of its association with the moon. There are between 12 and 13 lunar months in a year and in about a third of years there will be thirteen full moons (2012 had 13 full moons but not 2013).
Triskaidekaphobics, those that fear the number 13, are a relatively new phenomenon, the word first being used about a hundred years ago, from Greek treiskaideka for thirteen and phobia for fear. This phobia has created the situation in the modern world where the number 13 is avoided in numbering floors in buildings, seats on aircraft, and where Friday the 13th is considered unlucky.
Superstitions around thirteen started about three hundred years ago when thirteen became closely associated with the thirteen that had sat down for the Last Supper. Thirteen was then associated as an omen for the betrayal of Christ.
But regardless of the unlucky associations of thirteen all the portends for 2013 are good. All the best for 2013. Happy New Year!
23 Dec, 2012
Modern day poets are often characterised as introverted, quiet sorts of people who eke out their existence in garrets and libraries writing deep and meaningful poetry. But once upon a time poetry was the most important entertainment and the bards ruled supreme. Poets were powerful and their words feared by all men.
The Old Icelandic poets publicly recited the Eddas telling the stories of the Scandinavian myths and gods. They also told the great prose sagas that recounted the history and the great voyages of the Germanic peoples. But more important to the people of the time was Skaldic poetry which was composed by their most popular poets, known as the Skalds.
The Skalds’ poems had strict syllabic metre and used ornamental language such as heiti and kennings. Heiti are poetic and fanciful nouns that replace everyday words, for instance, brand for sword and steed for horse. Kennings are metaphorical descriptions such as sword liquid for blood.
The skaldic verse were written in praise of kings and nobles, they contained epitaphs and genealogies and often commemorated or satirised events of the times. There were also other less formal forms of skaldic verse which included dream songs, magic curses and flytings.
Flyting is a ritual, poetic exchange of insults as a form of entertainment. The word comes from the Old English word flītan meaning quarrel, and originally from the Old Norse word flyta meaning provocation. The exchanges would be eloquent but abusive involving accusations of cowardice, sexual perversion, illegitimacy, cuckoldry, sexual impotence, and mock any attribute of the opponent including their appearance, demeanour, clothing, family or nationality. The language was ribald and vulgar but the verse was sophisticated.
Flyting has been recorded in Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Medieval literature. It is known to have been popular in Anglo-Saxon England. The winner would be decided by the audience and would drink a toast in celebration of their victory. The toast was shared with the loser.
The word skald moved into middle English not for poets or someone proficient in flyting, but for someone who was abusive. Eventually a scold became someone (more commonly a woman) who was continuously nagging and grumbling. It is now seldom used.
We are left, however, with the verb form to scold which means to find fault with angrily; to chide; to reprimand. This is a small echo of the great poets of Northern Europe who with a huge command of their languages would entertain and enthral the audiences of their day.
11 Dec, 2012
Taking it is what most of us do with umbrage. Some more unpleasant people also give a bit of umbrage as well (although they should not be thought of as generous). It is better to take umbrage rather than to give it. Taking umbrage is to take offence at something.
But taking umbrage was not always such an unpleasant experience. Taking umbrage initially meant to sit under a tree, or more literally taking the shade (when you take the shade under an umbrella you are taking, what from the Italian, means little shade).
The beautiful aria written by Handel in 1738, Ombra ma fui (Never was a shade), from the opera Serse and also known as Handel’s Largo, is a song in praise of the shade of a plane tree (it was used in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice).
Umbrage comes into English from French ombrage meaning shade or shadow and originally from Latin umbraticus meaning of or pertaining to shade.
Umbra is a scientific and sometimes literary word for the deep shadow cast by an object (and also a ghost or phantom). It is used in astronomy to describe the shadow regions of eclipses where the full shadow region is called the umbra and the partially shaded region the penumbra. Sombre (from the French sombre) is another relative, meaning a dark mood (it comes from Latin subumbrare meaning under shadow).
So taking umbrage meaning to take offence comes from the figurative sense of having your mind shadowed with dark thoughts.
5 Dec, 2012
Percy Bysshe Shelley, the romantic poet, described clouds most beautifully as the … daughters of Earth and Water and the nurslings of the Sky. The word cloud comes from Old English from a most unpoetic and surprising source—originally it meant a lump of rock. It is closely related to other words, its brother, clod, means a lump of soil and its cousin, clot, a lump in a liquid.
So how did our light and airy cloud manage to get a name related to clods and clots? The probable explanation is that large, dense cumulus clouds were thought to resemble lumps of rock so took the name, cloud. Lumps of rock were left being called lumps of rock.
Meteorologists have named clouds in a very ordered and logical way as you might expect. The main types of cloud have good scientific names chosen from solid Latin roots:
Alto – high cloud – from Italian for high and from Latin Altus;
Cirrus – thin, wispy cloud – from Latin for curl, fringe;
Cumulus – tall, fluffy cloud – from Latin for a heap or pile;
Nimbus – rain-bearing cloud – from Latin for raincloud; and
Stratus – a broad flat cloud – from Latin for spread out.
These basic cloud type names can be combined to describe in-between types, for instance, a cumulonimbus is a cumulus cloud bearing rain or a cirrostratus is thin and wispy and spread out.
However, there appears to be some mischievous meteorologists out there who find this all far too dull. Watch out for mammatocumulus or breast clouds (from Latin mamma for breast or udder); tuba clouds that look like trumpets hanging from cumulus clouds; and scud clouds that shoot along under storms (scud, related to scuttle, means to move quickly and perhaps comes from the Middle English scut meaning to race like a hare).
You can only think that Shelley would have been proud of the more imaginative meteorologists.
29 Nov, 2012
There really is such a word as batrachomyomachia. It is an obscure word and I can’t imagine how I would drop it into a conversation. I certainly wouldn’t be able to claim I was writing plain English if I used it in a business document. Nonetheless, it is a real word with an interesting history, which is more than a good enough reason to make it our word of the week.
So what does it mean? Although it looks like a term for a disease of the throat (or indeed sounds like that) it is not a medical or scientific term. It has a much older origin and its meaning is far more mundane.
Like many words we can try to find its meaning by chopping up the word into components and analysing the pieces. The three components are: batrachos meaning to do with frogs or toads; myo meaning to do with mice (as mus in Latin); and machia meaning power (from Proto-Indo-European magh).
It literally means the battle of frogs and mice, which would make it a very obscure word for what is a highly unlikely event.
What it really means is a fight over nothing, a storm in a teacup, a silly altercation that has escalated into something much worse! It comes from the title of a mock-heroic epic poem, once thought to have been written by Homer, The Batrachomyomachia. Modern scholars now think it is the work of an unknown poet from the time of Alexander the Great (about 340 BC).
The Batrachomyomachia
The story starts in the morning. A mouse prince, drinking from a lake, meets the Frog King, who invites him to his palace. The Frog King starts to swim across the lake with the mouse on his back.
But things go horribly wrong! A hungry watersnake appears. The Frog King dives deep into the water but forgets about the mouse on his back. The mouse drowns.
The mouse’s brother seeing the disaster runs to tell his mates. The mice form an army to avenge the Frog King’s treachery, and send a messenger to the frogs with a declaration of war. The frogs blame their King who denies knowing anything about it.
Meanwhile, Zeus, seeing the war brewing, suggests that the gods take sides but they decide not to intervene.
The mice easily win the battle. Zeus, feeling a bit guilty, summons an army of armoured crabs (much like tanks) to prevent the frogs being massacred. The crabs force the mice to retreat and the battle is ended just as the sun goes down.
19 Nov, 2012
On 15 May 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach was appointed Cantor of St. Thomas in Leipzig after the preferred candidate had turned down the offer. The year before Georg Phiipp Telemann, Bach’s friend and rival, had also turned down the job.
The position of Cantor meant that Bach would be Director of Music at St Thomas School (Thomasschule) and choirmaster (kappellmeister) of St Thomas Church (Thomaskirche) and St Nicholas Church (Nikolaikirche) in the town.
In a Christian context a cantor, is the leader of singing in a church choir. In Judaism a cantor leads the service in a synagogue, and keeps the worshippers to the traditional modes and melodies. Cantor comes from the Italian word cantare to sing.
The Augustine Monks had previously run the church and school. The role of cantor within a monastic order had been a prestigious position needing a thorough knowledge of the church chants and held responsibility for the ecclesiastical choir and for the preparation of mass and other divine services.
In Leipzig (as elsewhere in Northern Germany) the position of Cantor survived the conversion to the protestant Lutheran Church and became a lay position selected and appointed by the town council. The Lutherans saw music as an important part of the church services but they wanted the music to be accessible and sung in German by the community (and no longer in Latin as the Catholic Church had insisted upon). This put an extra requirement on the cantor in a Lutheran church to compose the church music. Bach was an accomplished composer (although he was most famous as an organist) and produced over 200 cantatas for performance in church services, one of the greatest bodies of church music ever written. It is thought that what we have today is only about half of what he wrote.
Bach’s cantatas are a rich and abundant musical output that is without comparison. He wrote each cantata specifically for each Sunday or holy day of the liturgical calendar, for instance, Epiphany, Pentecost, Trinity, Easter, Christmas, etc. He wrote several years’ worth.
A cantata is a vocal composition accompanied by instruments. They are made up of several parts or movements which can be sung by soloists or by a choir as well as instrumental movements. The cantatas evolved from the single voice madrigal of the early 17th century, to the multi-voice secular cantatas (cantata da camera, or chamber cantata) and the church cantatas (cantata da chiesa). Cantatas are similar to but shorter than oratorios (such as Handel’s Messiah).
So if you haven’t guessed the word cantata refers to pieces of music that are sung (also from Italian cantare). Its cousins are sonatas which are instrumental pieces of music (from sonare to sound) and toccatas, most often keyboard pieces of music (from toccare to touch).
14 Nov, 2012
What is perry?
Between 2004 and 2006 my family and I lived in Tewkesbury in England. As a history buff, I had a great time in Tewkesbury as it is the site of one of the great battles of the War of the Roses and it has a magnificent medieval abbey church. As a rugby tragic, I got to play in the local veterans rugby team and sample the local ales, beers and traditional ciders with my fellow connoisseurs.
I don’t want to weave too elaborate a tale around this but at the intersection of these things is my word of the week—perry. Perry is an alcoholic beverage made from fermented pears and is most commonly made in the West Country of England,and particularly (according to Wikipedia) in the three counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. Tewkesbury is in on the border of Gloucestershire and only six miles from Bredon Hill in Worcestershire. It is in the heart of perry and cider country.
I was introduced to perry by a cider maker at the Tewkesbury Farmers Market held in the abbey church car park. I had never heard of perry before and the cider maker let me sample some and also pointed out to me that the small hill behind the church was called Perry Hill. Perry Hill was where the monks had grown pears to make their perry. It was also where the Lancastrian army had camped the night before their defeat at the Battle of Tewkesbury. It now also has some of the town’s rugby grounds, where I had played a few rather excellent games for the Tewkesbury Gentlemen’s XV.
What is cider?
Perry is a fermented pear drink in the same way that cider is a fermented apple drink. This leads me to my gripe. I have now noticed that in local pubs in Sydney they are selling “pear cider”. I was a little annoyed at this. It is like calling a motorcycle a two-wheeled car. We have a word for fermented pear drinks, which is perry, and we have a word for fermented apple drinks, which is cider.
Why is pear cider so wrong?
So why is calling it pear cider so wrong? It comes down to marketing. No-one knows what perry is so marketing people have come up with the name, pear cider, to sell the product. I don’t have a problem with using words to make things clearer, or indeed to sell products, but what I am upset about is that we are missing out on using the word perry, which is a far more accurate, interesting, useful and concise word.
Now you may think that this is so very unimportant but I am not alone in this. CAMRA, the campaign for real ale and champion of traditional beverages in England, is suggesting that there is a risk of confusing pear cider, which is apple cider flavoured with pear juice, with perry, which is made purely from pears. CAMRA advocate for the stricter use of pear cider to refer to cider with pear juice added.
If you think this a bit excessive compare it to the winemakers of France who have protected the name of champagne from use by sparkling wine makers in Australia, South Africa and California.
What is jerkum?
I am also hoping, rather vainly, that increased interest in perry may open the door for an even more obscurely named West Country drink, plum jerkum. Jerkum was made by fermenting plums in the same way that cider and perry are produced. Jerkum was native to Worcestershire and is most often mentioned in the works of John Moore, a British conservationist and author, born in Tewkesbury in 1907 and Fred Archer, an author of countryside stories, born on Bredon Hill in 1915.
How can you help to save perry?
If you are interested in supporting the campaign for using real words for alcoholic drinks you should drink only perry that calls itself perry and boycott pear cider (unless of course it is pear-flavoured apple cider). Try to educate your local publican and the bar staff by asking for perry rather than pear cider. You might even impress them with your knowledge!
So lets fight the fight for perry and hope that if we win we might one day get a chance to drink jerkum in the pubs of Sydney.
6 Nov, 2012
They say that people are separated into two groups: those that admit to swearing and those that lie. This week’s word, shit, is one of the swearwords that a lot of us drop into our conversation when we are in informal situations. We use it when we hurt ourselves. We use it to describe people and things we don’t like. We even, sometimes, use it in its literal sense.
We try not to use it when we are around people we don’t know well. Nor do we use it in written English. It is one of the most common swear words in the English language but so ingrained are the taboos about its use we don’t often write it down. Taboo words are not acceptable in formal situations and are shunned in polite conversation. Shakespeare, whose work is full of vulgar jokes and puns, avoided it completely. Even in modern times it has been censored from literature (including Ulysses by James Joyce in the 1920s) and was even excluded from some dictionaries (into the 1970s). In the US it is one of the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, a concept developed by comedian, George Carlin, in 1972 in one of his routines which despite being 40 years old is still the norm on US TV.
Shit is a legitimate word with a long history in English. It comes from the Old English word scitan, which derived from the ancestral word, Skheid, which meant split, divide or separate. Shit has quite a lot of close relations: the verb shed meaning to separate from the body; schism meaning to separate a group into factions; and science is derived from the concept of a separate set of knowledge.
One of the more sophisticated synonyms for shit, excrement, comes from exactly the same concept in Latin, excernere, meaning to separate.
There are numerous alternative words for shit but none of them have quite the same power, brevity or preciseness. So we have to keep using it in the company of people we know well and hope that we don’t say it in front of television censors, the clergy, or people interviewing us for jobs.
31 Oct, 2012
Serendipity must be one of my favourite words. Its adoption into English is a wonderful tale. In 1754 Horace Walpole, the son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, composed a letter that introduced serendipity into the English language:
… It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of … now do you understand serendipity?
The Three Princes of Serendip was published in Venice in 1557 as a translation of the Italian Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo which was itself a translation of part of a Persian poem, the Hasht Bihisht (The Eight Paradises) of 1302, which is the first mention of the three princes.
The story of the three princes involves a piece of deduction about a missing, lame, blind, toothless, camel carrying a pregnant woman, honey and butter. By identifying the particular camel the princes are rewarded by a king and set off on adventures in which they make accidental discoveries due to their undoubted cleverness.
The three princes were from Serendip, the old name for Ceylon or Sri Lanka. Serendipity, meaning the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident, comes directly from this tale. Serendipity has been incorporated into other languages: French sérendipicité or sérendipité, and Italian serendipità.
Some argue that the definition should also include the preconditions of intelligence and wisdom for serendipity to truly occur—as in the story of the three princes—or the discovery is merely luck. However, I think it is not so much luck nor intelligence but as John Barth wrote in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991):
You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it.
You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously.
24 Oct, 2012
I need to get spruced up when I go to visit my clients. I put on a suit and a tie for the city offices but don’t get quite so spruced up for the more hands-on firms. Being spruced up is a common expression for dressing something up cleanly and neatly. Its meaning comes to us along a very oblique path stretching back to medieval times. Spruce is a relic of the heyday of a great medieval trading federation that stretched across Northern Europe.
Spruce is an adaption of pruce, an Old French word for Prussia, now part of Germany. From the 14th to the 17th centuries merchants from what are now Dutch and German cities along the Northern European coast formed what was known as the Hanseatic League. The league got its name from the Hansa which were the merchant guilds that formed in each of the cities to trade with each other and especially to import commodities from the eastern Baltic, a rich source of timber, wax, amber, resins, furs, and grain. The German airline, originally Deutsche Lufthansa, was named after the Hansa, and is literally German air Hansa.
The Hanseatic League traded strongly with England and established a Kontor (a major trading post and goods depot) in 1320 west of London Bridge. Known as the Steelyard (Stalhof) it eventually grew into the largest medieval trading complex in Britain with its own warehouses, weighhouse, church, offices and houses. There were also smaller warehouses dotted around England including at York and Bristol.
Commodities brought to England by the Hanseatic merchants from Northern Europe were collectively known as spruce as they were seen as goods from Prussia (just as we in Australia refer to linen goods as Manchester because they used to be imported from the Midlands of England). Timber from the Baltic was exported to England and was also known as spruce, thus giving the name to that family of trees from the tundra regions.
As trade grew so did the quality of the commodities. The league were manufacturing high quality wool, linen and even silk fabrics as well as leather goods. Spruce became synonymous with high quality fabrics so that when you got “spruced up” you were getting dressed in your best clothes.
The Hanseatic League eventually disappeared replaced by traders from Britain, the Netherlands and the rising Ottoman Empire. However spruce, is our little reminder of their glory days.
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