The NY Times has a quiz (archived) headed “A varied assortment of words entered (or re-entered) the lexicon this year. How well do you know them?” I somehow got 5 out of the 10; I assure you it was pure dumb luck, since I was ignorant of almost all the terms and usages.
And a merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah to you all! (Incidentally, the mail recently brought me a copy of Jon Fosse’s Septology, which was highly recommended to me in this thread; there was no indication of who had sent it, so if it was one of you, I’m deeply grateful and very eager to read it.)
Addendum. See now this lively essay by Mallory Valis, “a 16-year-old from Toronto, Ontario, with a penchant for literature and photovoltaics.” It starts:
Bro, this intro is high-key gonna slap. Just let me cook.
Oh wait, I should be more formal.
Uhh. . . . Henceforth I commence my righteous thesis. Yeah.
In the eyes of older generations, Gen-Z slang besmirches the Sacred English Language™ with its base, loose, and astonishingly convoluted wordplay. By now, you’ve heard it before. Words sprouting like weeds in conversations with friends or wriggling through Instagram comment sections: rizz, fit check, girlboss, slay, simp. . . the list spirals downwards into a pit of sacrilege.
A good bit from the middle:
Besides, why should anyone care what words we use? ChatGPT has swept up the dilapidated student into its arms and the two have ridden off into the sunset. Gen Z is free to speak in vapid internet jargon as we scroll through Instagram Reels and let the machines do the brute work. So there mustn’t be anything meaningful to our slang, right?
Cap. (That’s Gen Z for not true.)
This viewpoint entirely discredits the importance of slang itself. While language takes decades to evolve significantly, its fast-living alter ego, slang, shows us how things really are: It has the power to critique and mock contemporary society for the benefit of those stuck in it.
The internet is the esteemed incubator for Zoomer slang. Social media, despite all of its blasphemous repercussions for our well-being, provides youngsters with a sense of—dare I say—comfort in a shifting and uncertain world. This is what makes Gen-Z slang so entirely ours. It blooms in the divide between Gen Z’s internet presence and our physical one, being practically impossible to understand if you have not been born and raised in the slim glass rectangle we call home.
And the ending:
Slang is an organic way of speaking that reflects the lived experience of a group, and it can be just as important as high-level words for conserving both individuality and community. That is not to say that we should neglect high-level language in pursuit of simplicity, but rather that both forms of communication have their purpose in the modern world. Our true linguistic hindrance is AI, not slang.
While the two determinately feed off of one another, the former allows us to sink into complacency in a world free from self-exploration and expression. Language is power. We must understand the significance of our slang and continue working to keep it undeniably, obtrusively, magnificently Gen Z.
You tell ’em, Mallory! (There’s a “Zoomer glossary” at the end of the linked page.)
I briefly considered sending you that article, but the barn cats needed food, the snow wouldn’t plow itself, and I guessed correctly only rhree times.
“ I somehow got 5 out of the 10; I assure you it was pure dumb luck, since I was ignorant of almost all the terms and usages.”
Indeed.
May your celebrations be joyful!
The kids and grandkids are coming over and we’re gonna have chicken paprikash! (With paprika brought from Budapest, so maybe I should call it csirkepaprikás.)
I did the quiz with a friend. Both mid- sixties, but we got 7/10. We knew some and guessed at others. My favorite is the answer to the last question, which I had heard of from somewhere. I could try using it among my bridge-playing friends, among whom I am a youngster, but I fear any attempt at explanation would only cause more perplexity.
Happy holidays to hatters where’er you may be.
That quiz is so not esthetic it had to be made by opps. No cap.
с праздником!
Merry Christmas to all!
Now as for the paprikás, what recipe are we talking?
Will the livers be in ?
Frohe Weihnachten!
I shame to wear a heart so white as Christmas isn’t here. More like Drizzlemas.
In case I’m a suspect in the Septology case, I’m sad to report that I’m innocent. I meant to send the Septology, but Amazon.com wouldn’t let me. I finally figured out it was because it had been ordered by somebody else — but not before I accidentally had bought the Kindle version for myself.
I now have to go out and get the Norwegian original and read that, so that I can compare the English version to it and discuss the translation.
Fredfylt ǰól i Bjørgvin og Dylgja!
My kids insist that Ohio is so 2021 that it would be Ohio to say Ohio.
Happy Holidays, Hatters!
3/10, of which only one could I claim I even understood the possible answers.
So as of 2024 I’m neither hip nor cool nor do I even know what the word is for that, I’m so meh!
Ngā mihi o te Kirihimete ki a koe!
И наше Вам с кисточкой!
God jul!
Chappy Chanúkah!
(Some, like me, find the mispronunciation funny.)
Ashamed to say I got 8/10. Some from knowledge, some educated guesses, some dumb luck.
Happy holidays!
M lɛm yɛl ye, Bareka nɛ ya bʋriasʋŋ! A Nadolig Llawen!
We had the kids and grandkids over for Christmas dinner and I had the bright idea of bringing up the quiz, which we spent a happy hour or so discussing (i.e., the younger members of the party explaining terms to us older folk); many other current terms came up, like feeding ‘making mistakes’ (from gaming, where it refers to a player dying, thus giving the enemy kill rewards), selling ‘doing badly, choking’ (also from gaming), cooking ‘doing well, doing something impressive,’ based (opposite of cringe), cap (‘bullshit,’ often in “no cap!” ‘it’s true!’), crashing out ‘losing it, going nuts,’ -zz words like bruzz ‘brother’ that can apparently be invented ad libitum (from huzz, an insulting term for women), and e-girl (kind of gamer with pale makeup on nose etc.).
cooking ‘doing well, doing something impressive’
How retro! Now we’re cookin’ with gas ! (40s gas company ad, said to be originally a Bob Hope wisecrack)
‘Based’ I knew, courtesy of my hip and happening daughter.
Yes, I was already vaguely familiar with that one — at least I knew it was a compliment.
Why Septology rather than Heptalogy? Did Fosse deliberately reject a “Heptalogien” that would been cromulent in Nynorsk, so the translator feels bound by the author’s choice?
The German translation did go with “Heptalogie”, but it appears that most of the others (not including Greek) kept the original’s hybridization.
I may get the chance to try some of these out on my students, though in the past, I’ve found that even some of the twentyish ones don’t use or even don’t know the alleged latest slang.
4/10, partly through luck, though I think I should have gotten partial credit for knowing the “historical” meaning of rawdogging, which Green dates to 2002. When I was young, I considered slang from twenty-some years earlier old-fashioned, but not “historical”.
Green dates to 2002
Link fail. I see that you wrote
<a>Green dates to 2002</a>
without the URL “…” you want to link. That’s done like so:
<a href=”…”>Green dates to 2002</a>
Note that the following intro with “>” is wrong:
<a> href=”…”
Heptalogi(en) is as cromulent in Nynorsk as in any other Western European language,. I’m also pretty sure that Fosse has more classic erudition than the average 21st century novelist and is perfectly aware of the hybridization. But I don’t think the choice of septo- for hepta- was an artistic consideration. The reason could simply be that when the publisher needed a name for a series of seven short novels, they thought that few would understand hepta-, while a compound with septo- would be immediately transparent.
Has based lost its right-wing connotation? On twitter 4-5 years ago it always seemed to be the mirror image of woke.
My daughter also uses based, enough that it has become a part of my own vocabulary. I got 8/10 on the quiz, although a couple of the right answers were educated guesses.
FWIW, English-language wikipedia has an article on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptalogy whereas if you ask about “Septology” you get redirected to Fosse-related articles. But I don’t know how much weight should be given to that as evidence of understanding-or-lack-thereof by the general reading public, especially by analogy in a Norwegian context.
Separately, I am so old I keep misassociating “based” with “base” as a now-archaic (?) synonym/euphemism for the form/derivative of cocaine more popularly known as “crack.” Cf. Public Enemy’s 1988 track “Night of the Living Baseheads.”
To Ryan’s query, wiktionary says “The term is formerly associated primarily with the alt right, but is currently used colloquially by non-alt right individuals, mostly without any political implications, although it might have political implications for certain individuals.” That sounds like an evidence-based descriptive usage note, although I can’t personally verify how well it does or doesn’t handle whatever evidence is currently out there.
I’m just starting to learn to use basic.
Thanks, Stu. Don’t know how I managed not to copy that link in. Here’s a link to a different article in Green that dates the noun “raw dogg” to 1999.
@Y: That vogue-slang “based” has a positive valence while vogue-slang “basic” is pejorative is a good example of one of those fortuitous things about actual natural language that you could never correctly deduct from first principles of scientific semantics or what have you.
6/10 FWIW, although let me note for the record that “Which popular 2024 term is unlike the others?” is IMHO not a fair question as phrased w/o some further specification of unlike in what sense or dimension. The intended meaning was apparently something like “is deprecated by those who use the other three positively and vice versa,” which was IMHO not the obvious gloss on the question, which could have been phrased more clearly to convey that intended meaning.
in the more tuned-in parts of my worlds, “rawdog” in its extended meaning(s) of “unfiltered; without protective barriers” and “sober; without exogenous chemical assistance” has been around for quite a while – i’d guess a decade.
and while i do see “based” used by people who aren’t of the far right, among folks on the left it’s pretty limited, in my experience, to the Very Online, and i think used with a touch of irony because of its origins. i think it’s more or less parallel to how “[X]-pilled” turns up (outside of descriptive-endonym uses to describe far right types who might use the relevant term about themselves).
Has based lost its right-wing connotation?
I’m guessing so, since neither of my extremely-non-right-wing grandsons brought up any such connotation. If I’d asked, I imagine they would have said “Oh yeah, but that was a few years ago.”
6/10 FWIW, although let me note for the record that “Which popular 2024 term is unlike the others?” is IMHO not a fair question as phrased w/o some further specification of unlike in what sense or dimension.
FWIW, my grandsons instantly knew the answer and explained it with brio, so it’s only unfair to us geezers.
Us geezers is the measure of all things, as Protagoras supposedly put it. At least if subjected to a “dynamic equivalence” translation.
J.W.B. led me to seek the source of my geezerdom.
“ geezer (n.)
derisive word for an old man, 1885, according to OED a variant of obsolete Cockney guiser “mummer, one wearing a mask or costume as part of a performance” (late 15c.; see guise). If so, the original notion was “one who went about in disguise,” hence “odd man,” hence “old man” (it still commonly is qualified by old).”
source: etymonline
Diamond geezers are not pejorative and need not be aged.
My impression was that “geezer” in the UK just meant “guy” without any implication of elderliness, unlike in the US. But that’s just from absorbing UK media. And maybe it just applies to Cockney, since I mainly remember it from EastEnders.
When I was growing up, ‘geezer’ mainly meant an old man, but I think the age requirement for admission to geezerdom has softened over the years. Still, I don’t think you’d call a young man a geezer, typically. It may be that the lower bound on age is also affected by manner of dress, poshness or not of accent, and so on. The more scruffy a man looks, the younger he can be and still qualify. But I haven’t lived in England since the mid 1980s so I may be wrong.
My 1990s primary sources for “geezer”:–
UK = dodgy
US = old
A famous Geezer:
I am not anything like a L1 speaker of Cockney, but I acquired a good passive knowledge of it from communicating with the indigenes during the years I spent as a junior doctor in London.
My understanding of “geezer” aligns with Butler’s. I was quite thrown when I first encountered the US misunderstanding of the word, which I think derives from a misanalysis of the common (non-pleonastic) collocation “old geezer.”
Pace Housman, “Terence” was not a very cromulent name for a musician working in the hard ‘n’ heavy rock style. So Terence Butler would have been in desperate need for a stage name, however confusing to future American fans, if he hadn’t already gotten a non-Terence nickname before his musical career got underway. In any event, I take it David E. agrees that “geezer” is a perfectly adequate dynamic-equivalence rendering of ἄνθρωπος as used by Protagoras.
Yes, though I don’t think you can be a female geezer, at least not according to the traditional scheme of things. In Kusaal (to clarify) “geezer” would be dau rather than nid.
Vere was vis geezer wot ad a sprog …
Dau da bɛɛ mɔr biig …
Spike Milligan was another famous Terence.
Ah, but who can be sure what sex any given guiser really was under the guise? One needed to put a lot of trust in the old social conventions that the particular groups that went around in identity-concealing guises were traditionally supposed to be all-male.
One of the Next Big Things in the British rock-music world as of the late Sixties who never quite made it as big as was widely predicted at the time was Terry Reid, more properly Terrance James Reid. The spelling variant Terrance is no more cromulent for a rock and roller than Terence, but Terry seems just fine. The “Terry” in Ray Davies’ lyrics to “Waterloo Sunset” is supposed to be (or be somehow based on) the actor Terence Stamp. I don’t know whether he was informally known as Terry at the time or if Ray (now Sir Raymond, of course, and it’s a shame baronetcies have apparently fallen out of fashion) informalized the name when adapting it to the context of the song.
“Terence” is (or was) common enough as a given name among Londoners (on account of the civilising influence of the Irish) that it acquired a standard short form “Tel.”
Many of us fondly remember one such from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minder_(TV_series)
A bass player can perfectly well get away with being a Terry.
Or Sue. You don’t cheek a bass player about his name.
Ah, but who can be sure what sex any given guiser really was under the guise?
This is actually a plot point in Hardy’s fairly dreadful novel The Return of the Native. (Man should have stuck to his poetry.)
“Terence” is (or was) common enough as a given name among Londoners (on account of the civilising influence of the Irish) that it acquired a standard short form “Tel.”
What was wrong with “Tez”?
As regards the 2024 word quiz, I got 7/10 entirely from regular reading of Youth Culture and New Words news correspondents. As passive vocabulary it’s passivissimo. Retaking the test in 2 years I will score about 1/10; but then again, what will Young People score?
What was wrong with “Tez”?
Alas, I know not. I lack the Sprachgefühl of the natives. Though my experience of field linguistics suggests that direct enquiry on this point would in any case have proved fruitless. One would need, rather, to induce the pattern from an adequately large text corpus, ideally based on recordings made in traditional environments, such as the Queen Vic. Some research funding would be needed.
[…] what will Young People score?
Half a lid?
In the interview with Butler the quote was taken from (7:20), one of the interviewers (who happens to be his wife) refers to him (4:57) as “my husband Terry”, “my boyfriend Geezer”, and vice versa. She and the others sound American.
Quote: “Me father belted hell out of me with his leather belt… that’s what stopped me swearing.”
6 Across in the Grauniad crossword today:
Fish sandwiches geezer rejected – for the hard stuff! (6)
OK, now you have to reveal the answer for us poor Yanks who are no good at that sort of thing.
ENAMEL.
I’m such a hopeless Yank I don’t get how it works even with the answer. But I know enamel is hard!
Lameen was originally a fish sandwich, before he turned to linguistics ? Is linguistics that hard ?
Apparently that’s how one has to “think” in order to come up with, and “solve”, the “clues” in such a “crossword puzzle”. It’s egregiously un-American, in the same unintelligibility league as Mornington Crescent.
EEL surrounds MAN reversed. But I’d never have gotten it without being given the answer.
Thanks! I would never have equated eel with fish sandwiches — the whole idea is repellent to me.
EEL surrounds MAN reversed.
So where are the sandwich and the geezer ? “MAN reversed” makes no sense.
You haven’t been paying attention: geezer = man. And apparently they make fish sandwiches out of eel. Yuk.
Ah, I forgot that “geezer” allegedly implies nothing about age.
Aalbrötchen.
Enamel, Lameen.
“Sandwiches” refers to the incorporation of NAM within E..EL.
No actual eel sandwiches are implied, though I do not find the concept especially repellent, myself. (The eels would naturally be jellied.)
The “sandwiches” indicates that “eel” is split around the other word. I don’t get “rejected” as indicating “man” should be reversed though.
I recently learned about eel traps from this Stack Exchange question.
I had no idea.
I also have no idea what eel tastes or smells like.
Apparently _Anguilla anguilla_ is not native to the Danube watershed (although they sometimes turn up there), so Aalbrötchen would have historically been more of a menu item in the parts of German-speaking Europe where the rivers and their estuaries drain into the “Atlantic” (via the North Sea or the Baltic).
I don’t get “rejected” as indicating “man” should be reversed though
It’s a fairly trite convention in UK-style cryptic crosswords. The whole thing is actually quite an easy clue, as they go.
A large part of UK cryptics is just knowing the conventions. The actual degree of intelligence needed to solve them is substantially less than the uninitiated might imagine.
It might be pleasant to be taken for more intelligent than one really is on the basis of crossword-solving ability, but sadly, I have yet to meet anyone who regards such an ability as an indication of more than mere nerdiness. Fair.
Rejected = thrown back, I guess. Not that I would ever have gotten this one.
Unagi, yum.
FWIW about 20 years ago a college classmate of mine published what I thought an enjoyable book titled Crossworld: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession. But IIRC its scope is limited to the normal U.S. style and doesn’t delve into weird-beard U.K. variants.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Crossworld/a5jwrsWiRM4C?hl=en
Well, it does say “America’s Crossword Obsession” right there in the title; while there are doubtless a few weird-beard Yanks who obsess about the Brit variety, I would have zero expectation that it would be addressed in such a book.
Knowing that “rejected” means (in a certain context) “spelled backwards” seems very much like knowing that “the Scottish play” is (in a certain context) a euphemism for _Macbeth_. It is a piece of so-called “cultural capital” that is of some value in a specific social/cultural context and of essentially no value otherwise. Opinions may of course differ as to the larger question of the value, if any, associated with the specific social/cultural context in which a particular bit of trivia does function as cultural capital.
As with any such highly convention-bound artforms, what distinguishes the true virtuoso among crossword setters is the inventive way they deploy the conventions. (Arachne is the best of the current Grauniad setters, more or less by common consent. Sadly, she’s not very prolific.) Clues can be very funny, often by exploiting the disconnect between the technical aspects of solving and the literal surface meaning. Setters may also deliberately mislead you by seeming to invoke a conventional trope but not actually doing so.
The best clues are the ones that either make you laugh when you see the solution and/or kick yourself for not having seen it before you actually did.
Charles Moore* revealed himself as a wrong’un by seriously proposing, when he was editor of the Torygraph, sacking the crossword setters and generating the daily crosswords from the existing data bank of clues and solutions. The man has no soul.
* Subject of a clerihew in Private Eye:
Charles Moore
Is only twenty-four.
He says: “Mater and Pater
will be dreadfully pleased that I’ve been made editor of the Spectator.”
Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Man-Eel.
Reminds me of Человек-амфибия (Amphibian Man — see this post).
I also have no idea what eel tastes or smells like.
Smoked (rather than jellied) eel is a delicacy throughout S.E. Asia/Polynesia. If you’re very lucky you might find sushi with slivers of smoked eel atop. There used to be a decent sushi place in Christchurch, N.Z.; sadly it’s gone downhill so the smoked eel or even raw tuna is no more.
Māori trap eel in lowland streams (extensive associated vocab), and smoke it to preserve for eating in the winter. Delicious as part of a hāngī.
“Hot-smoked eel is a specialty in the Northern provinces [of the Netherlands]” says wikip.
There is an eel-smoking championship in a place called Poortvliet…
https://www.recreatievanlangeraad.nl/tweede-plaats-palingrookkampioenschap-voor-wim-wijsman-in-poortvliet/
I learned about eel traps just this month from this Stack Exchange question.
Smoked eel used to be part of a high-end cold lunch menu in Denmark; overfishing led to its absence for a number of years, but it has returned at what seems to be a higher price, and people in my family who ought to know tell me that its preservation status and the propriety of current non-zero fishing quotas are both contentious. It sells for the equivalent of 5 dollars an ounce plus VAT, so I imagine that consumption is less than in the old days.
(I naively thought that being able to buy it meant that concerns had been addressed satisfactorily, but that is clearly not the way it works. I bought it once because my Mum wanted it, but the price was so ridiculous that we agreed it was nice once for old times’ sake, but otherwise not worth the price or the moral regrets. Smoked mackerel, herring or trout are just as good at lower price points, morally and money-wise. Smoked lumpfish is earnestly to be avoided, though).
I learned about eel traps just this month from this Stack Exchange question.
In the Tenniel illustration, I see the son’s legs are uncommonly spindly, with wrinkled stockings in the style of William William’s Williams. Was this a portraitist’s thing at the time? Or did everybody suffer rickets?
The son is Father William’s son. Perhaps named the same: William’s William, if you Will.
@AntC: The spindly legs and oversized head were among John Tenniel’s standard ways of making his caricatures look funny.
Thanks @Brett. At that link July 1893 a (presumably later/repurposed) reworking of Father William, sans spindly legs, sans wrinkled stockings and sans eel traps. The eel-to-balance is marked ‘Home Rule’, so the Father is presumably (William) Gladstone. I’d expect the dude distastefully holding the wriggling ‘War Bill’ would be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but that doesn’t fit with the military tunic and boots, nor the fancy headgear, neither is the depiction anything like Sir William (again!) Harcourt. (I have no intel on the spindliness of Harcourt’s lower limbs.)
Tenniel supplied caricatures for all 4 themes of the Father William spoof; the yoof spindly and be-stockinged in each.
July 1893: The younger man is wearing a hat of a type I don’t recognize, with a cross on top, clearly of no use in combat. And while the rest of his attire looks a bit like a military uniform, with the braiding and very small epaulets, and the contrast stripes on the trouser legs, there are no regimental markings or anything. Some sort of Anglican functionary? But riding boots with spurs.
(I’m aware that the outfit just serves to strengthen an identification that it probably took 1893 readers a split second to make).
This hat has various Irish symbols, the cross and a woman with a shawl and a child wrapped in a blanket, to portray Irish separatism (or the influence of Irish separatists on Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill), which the cartoon is satirising as trying to balance a snake on one’s nose.
@Lars Mathiesen: It’s Kaiser Bill, as can be more obviously seen in the earlier cartoon from October, 1891. (Moreover, Tenniel would never show anyone other than a royal wearing a crown) Tenniel’s most famous depiction of the Kaiser is, of course, “Dropping the Pilot” from March 1890, but that only shows his upper body behind folded arms, as well as showing him wearing an English-style crown, rather than the more accurate one shown the 1891 and 1893 cartoons.
The context appears to be that the Kaiser is going to be joining Gladstone in the eel-balancing activity. At that time, Gladstone was making his second attempt to get Irish Home Rule through Parliament. The first Irish Home Rule Bill had failed to pass the House of Commons in 1886, and while the second, in 1893, eventually did pass the Commons, it was voted down overwhelmingly in the Tory-dominated House of Lords. At the same time, in Germany, there was the Army Bill, which was finally passed in 1893 after about nine months of debate. It looks like the context of Tenniel’s cartoon was the final push to get the bill through the Reichstag. The bill was controversial in Germany, because it would be very expensive, and, following the Panic of 1893, the world economy was in the worst depression it would experience prior to the Great Depression. So there had been new elections in June 1893 to elect a Reichstag that would be more compliant with the desires of the emperor, the chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, and the Junkers class to have a larger military. (Here is a 1979 masters thesis on the bill and the German political situation of the time.)
@Brett, yes, it must be he. But I’m used to seeing slightly more flamboyant pictures of the Kaiser, so that relatively modest crown didn’t ring a bell.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krone_Wilhelms_II.
You can see the cross is very different from the cartoon (also the shape of the “crown”). I took the hat to be a “posterboard” for symbols. But maybe there was another crown or representation of one known in England.
@PlasticPaddy: This appears to be the crown design, created for Wilhelm I but never actually manufactured, that Tenniel was depicting.
I was not aware that German spelling conventions put a period after regnal numbers to the extent that it appears in the URL of the article: “
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krone_Wilhelms_II.” which WordPress gets wrong if you rely on automatic link recognition. (It leaves the period out of the link. Now you know).(Sorry, PP, if you actually did make a proper A element with the correct URL. What came out of WordPress was wrong in any case).
Firefox is a co-culprit, it overrides the text of an explicit link to make its own highlighted link omitting the period. Including only giving link color to the part it likes. Surrounded by idiots we are. So i had to wrap it in an extra CODE element to show what I meant. Now it works on my PC!
“Firefox is a co-culprit, it overrides the explicit link to make its own highlighted link omitting the period.”
Guilty as charged, sorry I did not check by clicking on link during edit time.
Brett-thanks, I had not seen this, I still think the shape of the cross is different, but maybe the difference is deliberate (more German?)
@PlasticPaddy: I think the way the cross is drawn is mostly just the standard cartoon way of drawing the cross atop a crown. Tenniel certainly drew the crosses atop the crowns of British, German, Austrian, and Italian monarchs as more squared, less partee than they actually were. This reminds me of the gradual stylization of the cross atop the king in Staunton chess set designs. The earliest ones had crosses much more like those found on some real crowns (flat but distinctly flared, a bit like the British state crown—although that is actually an odd one, since the flaring is so strong that the cross is not actually a cross); however, the modern standard design of the piece has a crown with exclusively right angles.
Regnal numbers are ordinals, so they get a period. Very simple until the computer was invented…
That said, from what I’ve read, Wilhelm der Zweite was actually called Willem Zwo on the street in places like Berlin.
Are there varieties of German where zwo is used exclusively, never zwei?
@PlasticPaddy: It looks a lot like the crown of the Holy Roman Empire–eight arched plates with a cross on top.
@Y: In Bavarian I think it’s “zwoa” rather than “zwo” although I may be overgeneralizing wildly from the eye-dialect spelling preferred by a Bavarian rock band that was in vogue in the early Eighties.
Probably; I can’t exclude that this is traditional in Berlin. Historically, it is the feminine form, while zwei was neuter (and the masculine zween appears to have died out completely).
There may also be registers of German where zwo is used exclusively in order to avoid confusion with drei; marching in the military stereotypically begins with Links, zwo, drei, vier!, and announcements through bad loudspeakers often use zwo.
In any case it has nothing to do with the western Bavarian [oɐ̯], which is the regular cognate in these dialects of “old ei“. (Eastern is [a]. “New ei” is found in drei.)
In the varieties of German I am familiar with, zwo is used mostly in numbering (like the Wilhelm example) and in counting sequences / communicating strings of numbers in order to avoid confusion with drei, rarely as cardinal number with counted items; e.g., zwo Bier sounds weird to me.
@Hans: The Bavarian-rock example I was remembering is the song “Zwoa Zigarettn” (rhymes with “auf da Schuitoilettn” where I guess you weren’t supposed to smoke but maybe did anyway?) by [the?] Spider Murphy Gang from 1981. That seems like cardinal number with counted items, but I just took it on faith that they were being vernacular-idiomatic in some variety of German my American schoolteachers hadn’t taught us, and maybe I was wrong about that.
You can find a list of the other song titles released on the same album, and thus reach your own judgment about the dialect-idiomaticity of those with orthographic signals that they’re not to be taken as standard Hochdeutsch, here: https://www.discogs.com/master/88561-Spider-Murphy-Gang-Dolce-Vita
@JWB: As DM pointed out, Bavarian zwoa is the equivalent of Standard German zwei, not of zwo, so it doesn’t contradict what I said.
rhymes with “auf da Schuitoilettn” where I guess you weren’t supposed to smoke but maybe did anyway?
Exactly.
@DM, to a Dane the II. is surprising, we do have the convention of a period after ordinal numbers, but not for Roman numerals. The King is Frederik X, and nobody would write Frederik den 10. even if that is what we say.
(And because of weirdnesses like den treoghalvtredsindstyvende which is the only possible form of the ordinal for 53 even though the numeral is just treoghalvtreds, I think ordinals are dropping by the wayside and being replaced by nummer treoghalvtreds, even down to single digits).
Wiktionary has English citations for IIIrd, IVth, Vth, etc, but I suspect some of the recent ones are L2 or AI.
Danish did use to use superscript abbreviations for the endings of ordinal numbers, but I don’t know if it was done with Roman numerals too. In any case, it was replaced by the convention of just a period before I was even born. (There might be a story in that, as in the period developed from the earlier conventions. Maybe we can blame typewriters).
The period is all over central and eastern Europe, for a rather western definition of “central”.
@Lars Mathiesen
My former spouse cooks a (delicious) full,12-course Julefrokost every year, though impossible to get proper fiskefilet here in the Midi. One of my daughters brings a smoked eel, along with the sild, back from DK. She says that this year it cost about 400kr (c. 55 $ or €, £45). It is readily to be had in any good fishmongers, though of course they are only concerned to sell it and there was no indication that it is an endangered species.
I have no strong views on Danish ordinals, though surely the period a) denotes an ordinal and b) indicates the abbreviation of the –de.
I just noticed the addendum. I enjoyed it, even without the Proto-Voltaic I mistakenly expected.
@ardj, 12 is a lot, not because I couldn’t make a list that long but because who can eat that much. I don’t know how much a whole eel weighs, but at 1200 DKK/kg it is one of the most expensive items at the local butcher’s (which carries all the paraphernalia for open sandwiches, as do most such shops since the abolition of the regulations separating slagtere [as a shop designation, beef only retailers, as I understand it] and viktualiehandlere [pork, often cooked; think delicatessen if not for the choice of meat]. Fish and poultry had their own specialist shops, as did cheese and milk+butter. Grocers were only allowed to sell dry goods).
@ Lars Mathiesen
Agreed, 12 courses a bit much, but in fact I was carelessly including beilage. But given that the meal starts at lunchtime and goes on till early evening, perhaps it is not inordinate.
We had 2x sild, smoked eel, sylte (yes, the teeth were brushed) – with beetroot, leverpostej with red cabbage, frikadeller came in somewhere, and of course flæskesteg – with brunede kartoffler, of course.
Then cheese, and bûche rather than ris à l’amande (in deference to French guests), followed by coffee with vanillakranse, pebernøder, &c. and chocolates – all except the sild and eel home made; and all helped down with such beer as one can get in the depths of Occitanie and a bottle each of Linie and Aalborg snaps.
Everyone bore up wonderfully under the strain.
I was in a hotel in Ouagadougou one New Year’s Eve, where, for obscure reasons, the only choice available for an evening meal in the restaurant was a twelve-course set menu. It was the only time in my life that I have ever eaten frog’s legs (hey, I was going to get my money’s worth.)
Prix fixe à Ouagadougou sounds like the title of a novel. I’d read it.
Hey, I thought I was original in the other thread!
This is a serious problem. I don’t think Prix fixe á Ouagadouogu works as the title of the novel that starts I lost my gall bladder in Ouagadougou.
No, but they’d make a nice pairing. Sort of the Ouagadougou version of Barbenheimer.
I’m really surprised to see earlier comments imply that “based” in its current slang sense originated with the alt-right. Is there any reason to think the alt-right didn’t get it from Lil B “the BasedGod”, the rapper who’s built his whole brand around the term “based” since at least 2010? There’s an obvious overlap on 4chan — Lil B was popular there in the early 2010s.
I was never on Twitter and did my best to ignore internet politics during Trump’s first presidency, so maybe I missed a key period in the late 2010s that cemented a far-right association? But from my perspective “based” went from a term used by fans of Lil B in the mid-2010s (I learned about the term from the UC Berkeley student newspaper*, not an alt-right publication!) to being used completely un-ironically by pretty much everyone on Tumblr in the 2020s**. I never noticed this “touch of irony” that rozele mentions.
*I don’t want to be caught in the spam filter so I’m going to cite the article headlines and dates instead of links, hopefully google can find them for you if you want to read:
1. “The Based God blesses Memorial Glade” by Anya Schultz | Senior Staff Jan 26, 2015
2. “BASED. presidential candidate runs on platform of positivity” By Elaina Provencio Apr 2, 2015
If you read these articles, they aren’t using “based” in quite the same way as the 2024 usage, but it’s not far off. In particular “Thank you Based God” was already getting memed and mutated in 2012 (e.g. “Thank you based Madoka” in an anime parody song) in a way that looks much more similar to modern usage to me.
**Again, don’t want to linkspam, so I’m gonna provide quotes and dates. I know it’s hard to tell without context whether these are ironic or not, but I believe all of them are genuine/approving. I guess if people want to check for themselves I can post a followup comment with the links?
1. “transhumanism is based on its own but the groups it pisses off really elevate it to the next level” (posted 5 July 2021, from a pro-transhumanism blog)
2. “[screenshot of a news story about a parent in Florida using right-wing coded “school indoctrination” buzzwords to argue that the Bible shouldn’t be taught in schools] based” (posted 2 July 2023, from a blog that is broadly left/liberal and opposed to Ron DeSantis’ agenda)
3. “Was going through the blogs I follow and realized I’ve never seen a take from you that wasn’t based. What’s it like being right about everything?” (posted 26 October 2023)
4. “[link to a news article about a proposal to build a nuclear power plant in Alberta] based” (posted 8 October 2024, from pro-nuclear power blogger who lives in Alberta)
5. “Tether can’t stop lying to the government. Which, to be clear, based, but I don’t know how good they’d be to work for.” (posted 11 December 2024)
Of course, these examples are almost by definition Very Online, as they come from Tumblr (n.b. my examples are all from Tumblr because that’s the only social media platform I still use much, but I have no reason to think Tumblr’s usage is different from the rest of the web). Some of my friends use “based” in in-person conversation in much the same way, but I think most of my friends also count as Very Online. Incidentally, my friends and the posters above — at least those whose ages I know — are all mid-20s or older. Maybe the gen-Zers are using it ironically, I wouldn’t know 😛
Thanks for those examples! I am the opposite of Very Online, but I too was surprised by the alt-right connection — I learned “based” from my grandsons, who are the opposite of alt-right.
It’s not at all implausible for there to have been a sequence like:
1. Catch-phrase/meme arises in Very Online circles that are not alt-right and maybe not particularly political.
2. C-P/M subsequently becomes trendy in Very Online alt-right circles.
3. Very Online anti-alt-right circles become aware of the alt-right usage (possibly without really knowing about the prior phase 1 usage) and further publicize it by trying to Raise Awareness and simultaneously try to create a taboo against its use by Respectable People.
4. The attempted taboo-imposition eventually fails and the C-P/M becomes widespread among non-alt-right types (including but perhaps not limited to the Very Online). Which may either be a direct survival of phase 1 that was never actually suppressed during phase 3, or may just be an adaptation of the phase 2 usage by people who think the baggage need not come with it.
Alas, the OED entry was revised in 2011, too early to include this sense.
@languagehat — glad you found them interesting 🙂
@JWB — yeah, that seems very plausible. I would guess that some of both “survival of phase 1” and “adaptation of phase 2” happened in different groups of people, explaining why some of us saw an ironic phase and some of us didn’t.
Also (still @JWB), forgot to say yesterday but re: your earlier comment about the sense related to cocaine — if the Lil B connection is correct, then yes, they are directly connected! A common explanation of Lil B’s brand (courtesy a Hackernews thread which also serves as a nice microcosm of the “Is based an alt-right term?” debate in 2021):
> It’s a reference to freebasing cocaine. Lil B’s detractors (apocryphally) used to call him based as an insult (analogous to crackhead) and he then started calling himself the Based God.”
Oh wait Wikipedia has a quote from Lil B himself:
> When I was younger, based was a negative term that meant like dopehead, or basehead. People used to make fun of me. They was like, “You’re based.” They’d use it as a negative. And what I did was turn that negative into a positive. I started embracing it like, “Yeah, I’m based.” I made it mine. I embedded it in my head. Based is positive.
the lil B origin seems clear, and is new to me (wrong subcultures!). thanks so much, sarah!
and i think within JWB’s overall framework one flow that would end up with the usage i’ve seen (also largely on tumblr, and to some extent twitter) is something like:
– lil B’s original script-flipping
– 4channers of various flavors picking up the term
– circulation in Very Online circles spreading from 4chan, including the far right
– first containment break: spread from Very Online far right to Online and Barely Online right circles
– reduced use, and ironic use, by Very Online left (as it’s noticed with wider circulation on the right, and as 4chan aesthetics come into disrepute)
– continued spread in other Very Online circles
– full containment break: jumps in multiple directions to Online and Barely Online circles
– continued reduced, or ironic, use by Very Online left
rozele: 4chan has not been active for a decade now. But people 4-chan [adladianed] are still out there. It is not prudent to mention that name. But it’s a lost cause now. It’s like Hubology, the moment you mention them you’re already on their radar.
Since you’ve already mentioned Hubology: what is it?
4chan is still around. Maybe V is thinking of when Hiroyuki Nishimura bought the site from its original creator in 2015? But the website is still up, with the same name and active message boards operating the same way they have for as long as I’ve been aware of the site.
I’ve never heard of Hubology, but googling it pulls up a bunch of results from the Fallout video game franchise so i assume its an analogy to that? It seems like the Fallout equivalent to Scientology.
Also I’m sorry if I’ve troubled people by bringing up that website. I’m aware of its reputation, but I’ve also seen other sides to it (e.g. my favorite webcomic, Unsounded, has a good following on /co/ and I appreciate when their discussions and theories cross over to spaces where I hang out). I will say that I discuss the website often enough in contexts like this that I’m not worried merely typing the name will summon a wave of troll comments or something.
@rozele — good point about the “Very online” to “less online” distinction within/across subcultures — I hadn’t t think you’re right that would explain the different associations of the term well
And one more comment to get back on topic for this post 🙂
I visited my sister this weekend and showed her the quiz — she’s on the millenial/gen-z boundary, but she’s a grad student who TAs for a lot of undergrad classes. Shes also involved in a writing club of mostly undergraduates and they have a lot of fun teaching “grandma” (my sister) all the hip new slang 😛 However, their tutoring only helped so much — she got 7/10 (better than my 5/10 though). We were both surprised by the new meaning of”preppy”, the opposites to “tradwife”, and “solo polyamory” — clearly we are not on tiktok! But we both know a few people in polyamorous relationships… guess the term hasn’t reached out friends yet?
However, she’s also passed along the quiz to her undergrad writing club and we’re looking forward to their responses. So far theres been some 10/10s but also some 5/10s, which makes me feel better 🙂
===
Also, not related to the above (though my sister agrees with me), I take issue with the quiz marking the “eat hotdog without a bun” answer wrong. I get that they were trying to trip up people who thought the “dog” in “rawdogging” was connected to hotdogs….but it fits the extended metaphorical meaning! As rozele put it above “unfiltered; without protective barriers” — is not the bun a protective barrier between the greasy sausage and your fingers?
So far theres been some 10/10s but also some 5/10s, which makes me feel better 🙂
Corroboration of my suspicion that just as “we” did not all watch some movie or hear some song last year, “young people” aren’t all in the possibly big subculture that uses this slang. Some of my students are working a job or two and taking care of family members and taking classes, and some are probably enmeshed in one particular video game and playing in a band, and they don’t have time to watch videos of their friends’ shopping hauls, if their friends post such videos.
to get back on topic for this post
Speaking of which, that reminds me…