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Ben Zimmer has made his annual Tucker Award post: “We’ve logged yet another fucking year here at Strong Language, so that can mean only one thing: It’s time for our annual awards recognizing excellence in swearing.” He opens with someone going by “Malcolm Tucker” on TikTok, who has created Tucker’s Law: “If some cunt can fuck something up, that cunt will pick the worst fucking time to fuck it up, ’cause that cunt’s a cunt.” Then he gets to the categories; the top Best Fucking Swearing of 2023 award goes to Cory Doctorow for coining “the highly appropriate term enshittification in a blog post on Jan. 21”:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

I thoroughly approve; it’s a great word and has deservedly caught on. The television award goes once again to HBO’s Succession (“sweary insults were always grounded specifically in situational context, appropriate for the character doing the insulting and the one being insulted”); the film award goes to a movie I very much want to see, American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson (warning: spoilers in description):

In the movie, adapted by Jefferson from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, the protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a frustrated novelist who is told his work isn’t “black” enough. Monk writes a book satirizing the tired tropes portraying African Americans in fiction called My Pafology and submits it to his publisher using the pen name Stagg R. Leigh. His novel ends up being an unexpected success, even after he petulantly decides to retitle it Fuck. In an interview with podcaster Pablo Torre, Jefferson said he actually wanted to call the movie Fuck, but he changed his mind. That was probably for the best — and anyway, there already is a movie called Fuck, a 2005 documentary about the word. (It has 857 F-bombs, for those keeping track.)

He also mentions the “Lui, c’est juste Ken” kerfluffle we discussed here. The award for books went to For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun by Rebecca Roache, Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology by Jess Zafarris, and On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down by James Fell, and that for music to Olivia Rodrigo and Andre 3000, with a special recognition of The Offspring “for their excellent response to accidentally releasing a clean version of a vinyl reissue”:
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Geoff Pullum sent me a link to “Does electrical activity in fungi function as a language?” by Michael R. Blatt, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Andreas Draguhn, Barry Bowman, David G. Robinson, and Lincoln Taiz (Fungal Ecology 68 [April 2024], 101326), whose abstract reads:

All cells generate electrical energy derived from the movements of ions across membranes. In animal neurons, action potentials play an essential role in the central nervous system. Plants utilize a variety of electrical signals to regulate a wide range of physiological processes, including wound responses, mimosa leaf movements, and cell turgor changes, such as those involved in stomatal movements. Although fungal hyphae exhibit electrical fluctuations, their regulatory role(s), if any, is still unknown. In his paper “Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity”, Andrew Adamatzky, based on a quantitative analysis of voltage fluctuations in fungal mycelia, concludes that the patterns of electrical fluctuations he detects can be grouped into “words” analogous to those found in human languages. He goes on to speculate that this “fungal language” is used “to communicate and process information” between different parts of the mycelium. Here we argue on methodological grounds that the presumption of a fungal language is premature and unsupported by the evidence presented, that the voltage fluctuations he detects are likely to originate as nonbiological noise and experimental artifacts, and that the measured electrical patterns show no similarity to any properties of human language.

The Adamatzky paper is here; a credulous Graun story (“Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims”) is here and a credulous Ecologist story (“Further research is needed to understand the possibility of fungal language in more detail, such as syntax and grammar”) here. The answer to the titular question is, alas for interspecies communication, in the negative. Thanks, Geoff!

Rachel Gutman-Wei writes for the Atlantic (archived) about penmanship, an evergreen topic for thumbsucking opinion pieces; there’s a fair amount of thumbsucking here, but I thought this section was interesting:

In the age of text on screens, many of us hardly write by hand at all, so we rarely get the chance to assess one another’s character through penmanship. Handwriting, as a language of its own, is dying out.

Over the centuries, the way people read that language has shifted. Until the 1800s, at least in the U.S., writing styles were less an act of self-expression than a marker of your social category, including your profession. “There were certain font types for merchants, for example, that were supposed to reflect the efficiency and the speed with which merchants work,” Tamara Plakins Thornton, a historian at the University at Buffalo and the author of Handwriting in America, told me. Lawyers used a different script, aristocrats another, and so on. The distinctions were enforced—by social norms, by teachers, by clients and colleagues and employers.

Men and women, too, were assigned their own fonts. Men were taught “muscular handwriting,” Carla Peterson, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland, told me. They used roundhand, a larger script that was meant to be produced with more pressure on the quill or pen; women, by contrast, learned the narrower Italian script, akin to today’s italics. The latter style was compressed, says Ewan Clayton, a handwriting expert at the University of Sunderland, in the United Kingdom, in the same way that women’s waists might be limited by contemporary fashion. Eventually, women switched to using roundhand too.

The idea that handwriting styles might differ meaningfully from one person to another—and that those differences could be a means of showing your true nature—really took off in the 19th century, around the time that business correspondence and records started being outsourced to the typewriter. As penmanship was freed from professional constraints, it became more personal. “It was really believed that handwriting could be the articulation of self, that indeed the character of script said something about the character of a person,” says Mark Alan Mattes, an assistant English professor at the University of Louisville and the editor of the upcoming collection Handwriting in Early America.

She goes on to discuss graphology (“basically, phrenology for handwriting”), and there is for some reason a link to Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s lively defense of women’s rights from the February 1859 issue, Ought women to learn the alphabet? (“It is an alarming feature of this discussion, that it has reversed, very generally, the traditional positions of the sexes: the women have had all the logic; and the most intelligent men, when they have attempted the other side, have limited themselves to satire and gossip”). Me, I can barely read my own handwriting these days, so when I write and send actual letters through the mail, I tend to type them on the computer and just add my illegibly scrawled signature after I’ve printed them out. But I still bristle at the mockery by younger generations of the whole idea of handwriting.

It’s been a while since I ranted about linguistic idiocy in the media (a regular feature of this blog back in the days when the sainted Bill Safire perpetrated his NY Times column), but Zach Helfand’s New Yorker piece on tipping (archived) pushed me right over the edge. In the course of a potted history of the practice, Helfand writes:

By the seventeenth century, visitors to aristocratic estates were expected to pay “vails” to the staff. This might have lowered payroll for the estate itself. At least one aristocrat helped himself to some of this new income stream; he threw frequent parties to increase revenues. The system spread. English coffeehouses were said to set out urns inscribed with “To Insure Promptitude.” Customers tossed in coins. Eventually, the inscription was shortened to “TIP.”

When I got to that last sentence, I cursed so loudly I alarmed my wife. It would have been bad enough to see such blithering idiocy in our wretched local paper, but in the New Yorker! This isn’t some obscure byway of etymology about which reasonable people can disagree, this is the kind of dumbass just-so story I would hope the better sort of high school students would be too sophisticated to share. It’s on the level of “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.” For the record, tip is a slang verb originally meaning (in the words of the OED, entry revised 2023) “To give, lend, or present (something) to a person; to do or perform (something) for a person’s benefit” (first citation 1610 “Tip me that Cheate, Giue me that thing”); the OED says:

Origin uncertain. Perhaps a specific use of tip v.¹, with the thing given being regarded as touching the recipient lightly; however, the notion of touching seems generally less obvious here than in such constructions as those at touch v. II.21. Alternatively, perhaps a specific use of tip v.², with allusion to the notion of tilting something towards a recipient so that it can be taken.

But the exact source doesn’t matter; the vital point is that acronymic origin stories are bullshit except in a few modern and well-known cases. In the words of Melissa Mohr’s CSM story, Colorful stories of acronyms are often false:

English words rarely get their start as acronyms. Looking at the number of folk etymologies that explain acronymic origins, though, you might think that many common terms were stitched together from the first letters of other words. English does contain acronyms, of course, but they tend to be produced in academic, military, or governmental contexts, and first appeared in the late 19th century.

For the latter, she gives the examples of laser, snafu, and scuba. But posh is not from “port out, starboard home,” news is not from “North, East, West, and South,” and tip is not, repeat not, from “To Insure Promptitude.” Is it too much trouble to just look in a dictionary?

And of course the problem is that once you discover one alleged fact is wrong, you stop giving the benefit of the doubt to others. Did Trotsky really refuse to tip when he was living in the Bronx? I’m sure not taking Helfand’s word for it. Bring back the fact checkers!

Update. I was pleased to see this letter in the Feb. 5 issue of the NYkr:

Tip of the Iceberg

I very much enjoyed Zach Helfand’s thorough and interesting piece on tipping (“Tipping Points,” January 1st & 8th). However, the story about the word “tip” beginning as an acronym for “To Insure Promptitude,” sometime in the eighteenth century, is almost surely apocryphal, as are most rumored etymologies involving acronyms, which did not become widespread until the twentieth century.

According to Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary, the use of “tip” to mean “give a gratuity to” first appeared in 1706, and is believed to derive from its use in thieves’ jargon to mean “give, hand, pass.” In 1909, a version of the claim about the acronym which Helfand cites appeared in Frederick W. Hackwood’s book “Inns, Ales and Drinking Customs of Old England.” A reviewer debunked it that same year, writing, “We deprecate the careless repetition of popular etymologies such as the notion that ‘tip’ originated from an abbreviated inscription on a box placed on the sideboard in old coaching-inns, the full meaning of which was ‘To Insure Promptitude.’ ”

Kate Deimling
Brooklyn, N.Y.

You tell ’em, Kate!

TYWKIWDBI (“Tai-Wiki-Widbee” [“Things You Wouldn’t Know If We Didn’t Blog Intermittently.”]) explains a word hitherto unknown to me; the post opens with a close-up photo of a canceled stamp, and continues:

When I sold this 1902 KEVII official stamp on eBay, I described it as having a “bold full-date upright Liverpool cancel” and mentioned to the winning bidder that it had a “ditzel” that might be removed to enhance the cosmetic appearance, though it wouldn’t add to the substantial monetary value.

The new owner (in Glasgow) messaged me back his pleasure re the stamp but asked for clarification on the word “ditzel,” which was new to him. This surprised me, as I have used the term my entire adult life, so I did some research. I couldn’t find it in my OED, nor in my Random House dictionary. Thence to the internet, where I found this in a StackExchange post about orthography, asking whether “ditzel” is a “real word”:

“When I was a Cardiology fellow at UMass Medical Center, there was a technician who would use a certain word to mean “a little”. It sounded like /a ditzle/. I never asked her how it was spelled and later when I tried to look for the spelling in dictionaries, I never found it. The context would be something like: “Can you see any regurgitation on the screen?”, “Just a “ditzle”, meaning “very little”.” …

[a reply]: “Although not found in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, the term ditzel is universally recognized among radiologists as a very small nodule found in the lung. … The origins of this word are obscure.” [Mundsen RF, Hess KR. “Ditzels” on Chest CT: Survey of Members of the Society of Thoracic Radiology. AJR 2001; 176:1363-1369.]

Since I spent 30 professional years examining chest xrays with radiologists, that may be where I picked up the term, but it’s not unique to radiology. Again, from the StackExchange post:

“In surgery we use the term “ditzel” to mean “a little nothing” or a piece of small, inconsequential tissue. For example, surgeon wipes instrument on sponge, leaving small globule of tissue. Nurse asks “Is this a specimen?”, surgeon replies “No, just a ditzel. ” Meaning it’s nothing, junk, unknown and can be ignored.”

I passed that observation on to an experienced pathologist, who said that in pathology laboratories, specimens are occasionally sorted into categories for examination: surgical specimens, small biopsies, and the incidental “ditzels.”

So, it is a “real word,” in the category of jargon. […] Question for readers: in your experience, does the term “ditzel” extend beyond the medical field to other professional or technical areas? Just curious.

It’s a charming word that I will try to add to my repertoire (it will alternate with “tad” and “skosh”), and I second the final question. Thanks, hat_eater!

Laudator Temporis Acti is posting excerpts from Robert Hughes’ Barcelona, and I couldn’t resist this one:

The earliest names for the two rivers that bordered the medieval city of Barcelona were the Merdança (shit stream) and the Cagallel (turd bearer), whose waters were totally unfit to drink by the fourteenth century and have remained so ever since. The first item in the invaluable collection of Versos Bruts (Coarse Poems, edited by Empar Pérez-Cors) was written in the early thirteenth century and takes the form of a discussion between two nobles, Arnaut Catalan and Ramon Berenguer V, count of Provence and Cerdanya, concerning a hundred noble ladies who went to sea in a boat and, becalmed, got back to shore by farting in chorus into its sails. One of the durable favorites of Catalan verse was Vicent Garcia (c. 1580-1623), rector of Vallfogona, a village in the Pyrenean foothills, who wrote sonnets in imitation of Luis de Góngora and Francisco Gómez de Quevedo, but whose real popularity depended on his burlesques, banned by the Inquisition. They included such works as To a Monumental Latrine, Constructed by the Author in the Garden of his Rectory and On a Delicate Matter, which roundly asserts that no person, however low, not even a Portuguese, could have anything bad to say about shit. Excrement, Garcia wrote in a Dalí-like transport of enthusiasm, is beneficial, the sign of our true nature, a kind of philosophers’ stone that “the pharmacists of Sarrià / contemplate night and day.” In doing so he evoked the peasant origins of the cult: shit as the great fertilizer, the farmer’s friend, the emblem of root and place.

(I like “not even a Portuguese.”) This is, of course, connected with that great Catalan Yuletide tradition the caganer, for which see this post. And a very happy new year to all Hatters!

Anthony Ham reported for the NY Times back in August (archived) on attempts to understand a nonhuman species:

A male saltwater crocodile approached a female saltie — as they’re known in Australia — in the same enclosure at Australia Zoo. He snapped at her aggressively. But then in a change of heart that wasn’t what you’d expect from one of Australia’s most fearsome predators, he appeared to think better of it. “He went down under the water and started blowing bubbles at her,” said Sonnie Flores, a crocodile researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast who observed the interaction. “It was kind of sweet. It was almost like he was blowing her a kiss.”

Trying to decipher what crocodiles like that one are saying is at the center of ongoing research by Ms. Flores and her colleagues to create the world’s first crocodile dictionary. Such a gator glossary would catalog different forms of crocodilian communication and unlock their meanings. If successful, it could even help prevent conflict between humans and crocodiles.

Like all reptiles, crocodiles and alligators don’t possess a larynx and their vocal cords are rudimentary. And unlike those of most mammals, crocodilian lung muscles can’t regulate the vibrations of those vocal cords. But crocodiles and alligators have overcome their physical limitations to become the most vocal of all reptile species.

[Read more…]

I was flipping through Alan Davidson’s Penguin Companion to Food (see this 2005 post) when my eye fell on the entry Paximadia, “an exceptionally interesting Greek item in the frontier area between breads and biscuits.” It ends:

Paximadia do not belong only to Greece. Kremezi’s essay and Dalby (1996) between them illuminate their wider distribution and the likely derivation of their interesting name.

Which of course sent me on a quest. Wikipedia says:

The name paximathia comes from the Greek term paximadion (Greek: παξιμάδιον), which is derived from Paxamus, a 1st-century Greek author who wrote, among many things, a comprehensive cookbook. The word first appears in a recipe for laxative biscuits composed by the Greek physician Galen.

Wiktionary says “Ultimately from Ancient Greek παξαμᾶς (paxamâs, ‘biscuit’) and says the latter is “From Πάξαμος (Páxamos), the name of a baker.” I’m not saying that’s wrong, but it has a whiff of folk etymology to me, and I’m wondering how convincing it is to others. (Also, if anyone has tried them, are they perceptibly different from your basic rusk?)

I was reading Stephen Sedley’s LRB review (Vol. 44 No. 18 · 22 September 2022; archived) of The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid by Thomas Grant when I hit this paragraph:

When the trial began in August 1970 Kentridge, brought in as leading counsel, took the preliminary point that the new indictment was so similar in detail to the one on which the accused had been acquitted that this amounted to an illicit retrial. To his and everybody else’s surprise, the judge (Justice Viljoen, an individual with no liberal credentials) accepted the submission – still known in Law French as ‘autrefois acquit’ – and stopped the trial. The work by Kentridge and his team, matching each detail of the second indictment with the first, had been colossal, but the submission it yielded was unanswerable.

I always enjoy bits of Law French, and of course I wanted to know the traditional pronunciation, so I went to the OED (entry revised 2017) and found the very satisfying /ˌəʊtərfɔɪz əˈkwɪt/ (oh-tuhr-foyz-uh-KWIT). U.S. English has the pathetic /ˌoʊtrəfwɑ əˈkwi/ (oh-truhff-wah-uh-KWEE) and the merely boring /ˌoʊtrəfwɑ əˈki/ (oh-truhff-wah-uh-KEE) as well, but as usual I’m sticking with Ye Good Olde Wayes.

For the benefit of the lawyers among us, I’ll quote the next paragraph as well:

In addition to the fruits of hard work, every advocate is entitled to one piece of dumb luck. In Kentridge’s case this came when, following the Biko verdict and the announcement that no police officers were to be prosecuted, an informal gathering was held at his home in Cape Town to discuss the possibility of bringing a civil lawsuit for damages on behalf of Biko’s family. By mistake an invitation was sent to the state pathologist, Johan Loubser, who had testified at the inquest that prompt medical attention would not have saved Biko’s life. Loubser turned up at the meeting, and Kentridge, instead of getting rid of him, invited him to start the discussion. Loubser, unprompted, said he now thought Biko might have survived if given early medical attention, and the state eventually settled the family’s claim for a realistic sum. You can call it luck, but how many lawyers would have simply asked Loubser to leave?

Lameen has posted “The Sound of Music” across three languages:

You may well be familiar with The Sound of Music, an American musical from the 1950s loosely based on the von Trapp family’s memoirs. It features a neat little song for teaching musical notes, “Do, a Deer”, which has been translated into a number of languages. Let’s contrast three versions – English, Japanese, and Arabic – and see what they suggest.

That is, of course, just the sort of thing I love, and after giving the versions (Japanese: ドはドーナツのド Do is for “donut” [dōnatsu], Arabic: دو دروب ومعاني Do is “paths” [durūb] and meanings), he concludes:

As should be obvious, the Arabic version is derived from the Japanese one (via a popular anime of the 1990s) rather than directly from the English one. However, it contrasts sharply with both in the choice of note-mnemonics. In English, each note name (well, except “la”) is mapped directly to a near-homophonous monosyllabic word, taking advantage of English’s relatively short minimal word length; most of these are widely familiar, high-frequency items. In Japanese, the word choices are necessarily longer and perhaps more obscure (the syllable fa is found only in relatively recent loanwords anyway), but in each case the note is mapped perfectly to the first syllable of a single word, usually referring to something readily visualisable. In Arabic, the note is again mapped (increasingly approximatively) to the first syllable, not of a word, but of a 2-4 word phrase; not a single one of these phrases refers to anything concrete enough to visualise. High-flown slogans replace the original’s homely whimsy.

I have no way of proving it, but I believe this is symptomatic – certainly of the Arabic dubbing in the cartoons I used to watch in the early 1990s, and plausibly of Modern Standard Arabic discourse in general: an imagination based on recitation rather than visualization, preferring stirring abstractions to concrete details. After all, concrete details travel poorly in this diglossic context.