In today’s NY Times, Charles Kurzman presents some depressing news (if you’re a fan of cosmopolitanism):
With the permission of Will Shortz, the Times’s crossword puzzle editor, I recently downloaded all of the newspaper’s crosswords from February 1942, when the puzzle began, through the end of 2015. I created an algorithm to search all 2,092,375 pairs of clues and answers for foreign language words and place names outside the United States.
The results are imperfect, since the puzzles can be tricky and there is a lot of overlap between English and foreign words. But the broad trend is clear. The puzzle today uses one-third fewer non-English clues and answers than it did at its peak in 1966, and makes two-thirds fewer international references than its peak in 1943.
For many years, the puzzle expected educated Americans to know the German word for “with” (mit) and the Latin word for “man” (vir), for example. These words have all but disappeared from the puzzle. Solvers were expected to know details about America’s military operations, such as “Mountain battlefield” in 1943 (etna) and (misleadingly, since the answer is actually Japanese) “Forever!: Korean battle shout” in 1951 (banzai). Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, by contrast, appear in the puzzle barely more often than before the United States sent troops to each country. Since the 1990s, puzzlers were occasionally asked to recognize “Burkina ____” but over the last few years, they were given additional help, “Burkina ____ (African land)” and “Burkina ____ (Niger neighbor)” (the answer is “Faso”). […]
So are we going to see Vietnamese or Korean in The New York Times crossword?
“I want the puzzle to reflect our common culture,” Mr. Shortz notes, meaning that the answers and clues should have at least entered the general conversation before they appear. After a moment’s reflection, Mr. Shortz noted that the puzzle did include a Vietnamese word last year. The clue was “Vietnamese soup” (pho).
“This is a word I did not know a few years ago, but it has now become embedded enough in American culture that I can expect American readers to know it. With Vietnamese restaurants in many cities, it has become mainstreamed,” he said.
Recently, the puzzle added “Vietnamese sandwich” (banh mi).
Kurzman sums up, “When we turn from the New York Times news pages to the puzzle page, the rest of the world fades away.” There are interesting tidbits in the rest of the article, as well as some very cool charts.
I would not have guessed that the Times was using “Banzai” in its crossword in 1951 – not a few of its readers probably heard that “battle shout” under much more unpleasant circumstances only a few years earlier. (But I guess if they thought it was Korean that wouldn’t have occurred to them.)
…Korean doesn’t even have a [z]…
Shortz uses the word ‘culture’– which, maybe unintentionally, offers a better explanation for Kurzman’s observations. In fact, current NYT puzzles often contain pop culture references that older puzzles back in the Farrar/Maleska era would never have used. These days, clues like those cited in the article would be considered ‘bad fill’.
Edited to add: As long as I have the opportunity, I’ll add that crossword puzzle style reflects current cultural truths, but in a fun-house mirror. I’d be cautious about drawing conclusions from cruciverbal fashions.
This makes me wonder about a different question: what %age of “words” used in NYT crossword puzzles would not qualify as “words” for Scrabble purposes, and what sort of shifts over time have there been in that %age? (Obviously one could view the discrepancy as Scrabble being too restrictive or crosswords being too loose or a bit of both or even as not a problem because different skills are being selected for.)
Well, phrases aren’t Scrabble-playable, but they are common in crosswords. Traditionally you got a notice of this, like “2 words”, but you don’t nowadays. (Of course I am speaking of conventional American crosswords, not the related but very different British/cryptic crosswords.)
““Forever!: Korean battle shout” in 1951 (banzai).”
This is a really, really offensive mistake. “Banzai” is Japanese.
The most surprising thing in the article for me was that Will Shortz hadn’t heard of pho until “a few years ago”. Do they not have Vietnamese people in New York?
This is a really, really offensive mistake. “Banzai” is Japanese.
And yet this is still 10 years before Breakfast at Tiffany’s, casual racism towards Asians is unfortunately a well-respected American tradition.
This is a really, really offensive mistake. “Banzai” is Japanese.
When does a mistake become a really, really offensive mistake? Also, are you aware that 1951 was six years after the end of WWII? Do you really think political correctness towards Germans and Japanese was a thing then?
Contemporaneous American narratives of the Korean War sometimes used “banzai attack” (or “‘banzai’ attack”) to refer to a particular tactic employed by the enemy that seemed reminiscent of Japanese WW2 practice, but without necessarily implying the specific word was shouted by the attackers, and that usage could have led to some misunderstanding on the home front. There are also apparently a few scattered contemporaneous reports of North Korean attackers actually yelling “banzai” while attacking, which may or may not be accurate (certainly some of the North Korean troops had previously served in the Japanese forces during the prior war, or might have otherwise heard second-hand that yelling this particular phrase might unnerve American troops, but it’s also plausible that American listeners might have misconstrued some Korean word or phrase being yelled, even if it would not have been thought a close homophone for “banzai” if heard in a low-stress non-combat environment).
I don’t know how it was back then, but in today’s North Korea there’s a huge stigma against anyone whose ancestors are thought to have supported the Japanese.
FWIW, ethnic Vietnamese are not particularly numerous in NYC all things considered and certainly not as prominent a part of the local ethnic-restaurant scene as in California or in the Houston or Washington DC metro areas. Although there’s now a pretty good banh mi place on 3d Avenue in midtown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_large_Vietnamese-American_populations.
@Hat: I took Jim’s point to be that It would have ben really offensive to Koreans to attribute a Japanese word to them. And since it was only six years after WWII, it makes me wonder if the author of the clue was fifteen years old.
Lazar: and probably in South Korea as well, but I would tend to assume neither side had fully retconned the messiness of their actual history by 1950 and that the Communists were probably not so pure as to refuse to avail themselves of the services of anyone with actual prior military experience.
@Hat: I took Jim’s point to be that It would have ben really offensive to Koreans to attribute a Japanese word to them.
Maybe, but it just strikes me as importing today’s notions of correctness and offense into the past. And I find the idea of moral outrage concerning a 1951 crossword fairly risible. (Also, it’s quite possible a lot of Americans didn’t know there was such a thing as the Korean language; Korea had been part of Japan for many decades, and Japan had officially imposed the Japanese language pretty thoroughly. Many people may have just assumed Koreans spoke Japanese.)
@ Lazar, J.H. Brewer: The Kim Il-sung regime, at least, wasn’t particularly hard on Japanese collaborators (note that his younger brother Kim Yŏng-ju served in the Imperial Army and supposedly even called upon Kim Il-sung to surrender, though of course none of that means he was a willing collaborator). The North Korean cultural apparatus in particular had a number of former collaborators in high-placed roles; the most notable was probably Han Sŏ-rya, who went practically overnight from writing panegyrics to the Emperor to writing panegyrics to Kim Il-sung—he was supposedly the first to describe Kim as “our sun” 우리의 태양, all the way back in 1946.
If one chooses to interpret “Korean battle shout” as “battle shout in Korea” rather than “battle shout in Korean”, it becomes slightly less inaccurate.
Excellent point, and I’ll bet that’s what they had in mind.
As far as the content of foreign terms is concerned, I guess political and/or social developments should be taken into account. Could a word like “Taliban” or “jihad” make it to a 1960’s crossword puzzle? The same could perhaps be said about “pheng shui”, “jacuzzi” or “Tiananmen (Square)”. On the other hand, why should anyone nowadays be expected to know of an Asian battle cry of the Cold War era? Whatever new or exotic is promoted by and repeated in the media is bound to become part of everyday vocabulary, the rest gradually fades away from memory and from recreation.
@Ariadne: I would be very surprised if somebody who did the New York Time crossword did not know the word “banzai.” It’s very famous, though not from the Cold War but the Second World War.
Whatever new or exotic is promoted by and repeated in the media is bound to become part of everyday vocabulary, the rest gradually fades away from memory and from recreation.
Yes, but the point is not that particular words have faded, but that the entire category of foreign items has drastically decreased.
@Brett: Right. ‘Banzai’ clued as, e.g., ‘Japanese battle cry’ would be regarded as a gimme in an NYT puzzle. Or, any crossword puzzle, for that matter.
While it wouldn’t affect the bulk statistics, I wonder how the database coded the puzzle from November 5, 1996. (It had two solutions, one with “CLINTON ELECTED,” one with “BOB DOLE ELECTED.”)
I was doing a New York Times crossword from a couple weeks ago (I get them online for free, and I have no intention of ever giving the FTFNYT any of my money) and once again took some perverse joy in finding a mistake in their supposedly perfectly curated puzzles. This mistake was talking about an “N.F.L. team”—but the National Football League is abbreviated “NFL” with no periods. “N.F.L.” is the older National Forensic League.
the National Football League is abbreviated “NFL” with no periods. “N.F.L.” is the older National Forensic League.
Are you sure that’s the case in Times style? These things are not graven on stone tablets, after all.
I’ve never heard of an editorial style that left it up to individual organizations whether their initialisms had periods. That sounds like a recipe for wasting copyeditors’ time and looking inconsistent to readers.
Current New York Times style is apparently “NFL” in the sports section, “N.F.L.” in the news section. Google “sunday ticket lawsuit site:nytimes.com” for examples of both styles from last week.
“N.F.L. for the National Football League”, says the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (2015). The New Yorker also uses the periods. I can’t find any statement from the NFL itself on the question.
I’ve never heard of an editorial style that left it up to individual organizations whether their initialisms had periods. That sounds like a recipe for wasting copyeditors’ time and looking inconsistent to readers.
Exactly.
I knew the NYT had a different style in the sports section with regard to the (non)use of Mr./Ms., but a difference in handling abbreviations seems odd.
Hmm, I didn’t check on paper; it looks like it’s actually “N.F.L.” in articles originating from the NYTimes, but “NFL” at The Athletic, a (primarily) online subsidiary. Same for other sports. I don’t generally read the sports section, so I missed this:
Seems reasonable for the subsidiary to keep its own style. And searching in 2022 and earlier, it looks like it was in fact “N.F.L.” in the New York Times sports section, when it had one.
I just discovered this chemistry-themed cryptic crossword, for those of you inclined toward this sort of thing.
Ben Yagoda has also noticed that “Athletic pieces aren’t subject to Times style rules or editing. As a result, in the coverage not only of international sports but also of Premier League and European football, the Athletic is poised to be a massive source of NOOBs.” (In this post, he observes an English sportswriter using BrE slang “nous” and several other Britishisms.)
The [Manchester & London] Guardian having lately made strategic pushes into the US and Australian markets means its online articles’ style is no longer monolithically British, and indeed varies not just in the region-specific articles within the News section. I might be reading a Science story about a discovery, and notice some odd wording and then twig that the research was in Macquarie University. Outside individual articles, I guess framework presentation text is localised by browser location; Ireland is treated as “Europe” rather than “UK”, which is nice except my timezone is assumed to be CET.
twig
TIL. I never knew that meaning before.
Australian markets … [I’d also include their NZ coverage, although it’s rather intermittent]
Yair, Aussie press is in general just awful. Murdoch influence presumably, although even ABC is pretty dire (even their ‘News’ is more ‘Lifestyle’ or syndicated from overseas). Guardian is best/ not that that’s saying much.
twig … TIL.
Impressively long-lived slang, documented since the 1700s and still current.
Huh, I immediately understood and passed over ‘twig’ as being a term I understood and have known for a long time (also different forms of the verb; “twigged”; “twigging”), but Y’s comment made me wonder, how do I know that word?
Wiktionary is no help; the quotations are from material either too late to have been an influence, or from sources I am pretty sure I never read. The same for the OED. ¹
Was there some popular author who used “twig” in that slang sense?
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1: Hm. The OED has “Of unknown origin”; Wikt says: “From Irish and Scottish Gaelic tuig (“to understand”). ” Was such an obvious meaning missed by the OED?
how do I know that word?
Might as well ask how you know ‘cat’ or ‘spoon’. My family used it as run-of-the-mill.
Our stock of twisted usages usually came from BBC radio humour (esp. Goon Show); but they seem to have used it only as small branch — see “throw it on the furnace”.
ngrams shows twigged steadily declining since the early 1800s, and then jumping back, fivefold, in the last 40 years or so in the UK, 25 years in the US.
Cotton grows on twigs, hence “cotton on”. No but seriously folks, twig from tuig was supported by Skeat 1912 There is apparently an Eric P. Hamp paper “On the Celtic origin of English slang dig/twig ‘understand’” in Comments on Etymology* (1981) v10 n12 pp2-3. Of course a Daniel Cassidy endorsement does not inspire confidence.
*previously at LH
Unlike ‘cat’ or ‘spoon’, ‘twig’ meaning ‘understand’ was never used in the region I grew up in. I am fairly certain it was, for me, a literary term, not one I can recall being spoken.
Gotta check for context. An actual Google Books search, for works in the 20th century, shows ‘twigged’ used to refer to trees. Not necessarily plants, even:
Text: Geometry, Topology, and Dynamics, v 15, Ed. by Francois Lalonde, pg 40
(This is actually part of a paper titled ‘Classification of Topologically Trivial Legendrian Knots’, by Yakov Eliashberg and Maia Fraser, which uses ‘twig’ as a technical term earlier than this particular page)
Quote: “Now , based on the record of De’s structure that is stored in a projected twigged tree , a wavefront will be constructed . In general : if T is a projected twigged tree , we shall denote by Wr the front …”
It’s also used a lot as part of horticultural/agriculture/silviculture/gardening/landscaping descriptions, particularly in Canada:
Red-twigged dogwood
Purple-twigged dogwood
Yellow-twigged dogwood
Red-twigged willow
Yellow-twigged willow
Blue-twigged willow
It also shows up in reference to casks (“twigged” or “notched” hoops – some sort of difference in appearance due to the manufacturing processes? A deliberate decoration?), and in the sense of being beaten or whipped…
The only place I’ve found it to mean “understood” is Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present
A Dictionary … with Synonyms in English, French … Etc. Compiled by J.S. Farmer [and W.E. Henley] · Volume 7
Oh, wait, a 1910 work “The Romance of a Monk” is definitely the slang sense. And a couple more instances of the above slang dictionary.
After 10 pages of Google Books search, it certainly looks like about 95 of the 100 entries do not refer to the slang term. Maybe call it 90 to be generous, since there were some I couldn’t preview. Most hits were definitely in the sense of “having twigs”.
Hm.
@Owlmirror: Unlike ‘cat’ or ‘spoon’, ‘twig’ meaning ‘understand’ was never used in the region I grew up in. I am fairly certain it was, for me, a literary term, not one I can recall being spoken.
I learned it in my twenties, from reading a scambaiting site that had started out with a primarily British user base.
Yeah, any American who knows the word has learned it from some UK source. I can no longer remember where I got it, but it was undoubtedly a British novel.
I found an explanation of twigged vs notched hoops in the “Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society”. I kept thinking of metal hoops, but I was so wrong.
I’ve always known “twig”; however, it means “come to understand” rather than “understand.”
You can’t say* “Do you twig X-bar theory?”, but you can say “Have you twigged yet that Chomsky’s entire elaborate edifice of X-bar theory is of virtually no practical use in linguistics?” And you could not sensibly reply to this: “I twigged it this morning, but I can’t twig it any more.”
* Unless you want to.
I was looking at this a bit, based on OM’s query for popular culture.
From 1950-1990
—
https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/
James M. Cain 1962 “Mignon” and an article in “People” magazine about Dustin Hoffman and someone who did not “twig” it was a man when DH appeared in his “Tootsie” costume.
On the TV and movies corpora all hits are from English/Irish productions (e.g., “Carry On, Girls”).
—
COHA has some much older hits from the 1800’s, but I think most of these are used for “see”, not “understand”. If you are looking for authors people or their parents may have found the word in, Joyce used it both in Dubliners and Ulysses, Green’s dictionary has the citations.
@Owlmirror: point taken. And yet, “twigged it” also shows a spike since 2000, with most instances referring to the usage at hand. Here the spike occurred at about the same time in BrE and AmE, following relative disuse in the 20th century.
If you are looking for authors people or their parents may have found the word in, Joyce used it both in Dubliners and Ulysses
That may well have been my source.
As another American who (probably — couldn’t swear to it) only knows “twig” from reading, I’m relieved to find that my sense of it is exactly what David E says — I was about to post similar examples.
Ye olde Farmer-Henley slang dictionary (1904) has an extensive entry on “twig”, offering “tumble to” as a synonym, and this de-haut-en-bas, handled-with-tongs citation:
(“William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education”, says Wikipedia.)
Yes, “realise something” is actually the first sense given by Wikt, which is certainly “come to understand”. But plain “understand” is (or maybe was?) also an meaning.
Yes, and not just “see”, but “to look at”, “to watch”, “to inspect”. Also “To become aware of by seeing; to perceive, discern, catch sight of; to recognize” (OED defs 1.a and 1.b)
These are the meanings that match the usage of the very earliest citations, from the 1700s. Which might be why the OED was reluctant to accept the Gaelic source?
any American who knows the word has learned it from some UK source
Let’s check that with Ben Yagoda. Yes, he’s covered it:
Followed by discussion and comments on whether “twig onto” should be just “twig”. There are also a couple of comments pointing out a severe problem with the proposed Irish origin:
“tuig” actually sounds much more like “tig” (or even, “tick”). The “u” in the Irish word is not itself pronounced: it’s there simply to indicate that the t is velarized (pronounced with the back of the tongue raised).
Yes, that’s what’s always bothered me about the Irish etymology.
The modern pronunciation of uisce (beatha) lacks the /w/ or /ʍ/ of English whisk(e)y. Might whatever explains that discrepancy also explain away the /w/ in twig?
Cf. eDIL s.v. do-beir; scroll down to “Forms of do-ucci understands”, where you will find this typically dizzying array of forms:
This one is so messy even the sainted Thurneysen screwed it up; in §759 II (p. 469) he writes:
I have an annoyed marginal note correcting “In the meaning ‘bring’ by do-uc(ca)i tuc(ca)i” to “In the meaning ‘bring’ by do-uic” and adding that the forms he gives mean ‘understand.’
Skeat 1912
I think you meant to say “Skeat, who died in 1912”; your link goes to an 1888 edition, and the Irish derivation is already in the first edition, from 1882.
But by the last edition (1910), Skeat had some doubt and suggested alternate derivations:
(“Stokes-Fick” is a German dictionary from 1894, but I wonder if that isn’t a circular reference, with Stokes having taken the idea from Skeat.)
The OED couldn’t have been unaware of Skeat’s theories in 1916, when their “twig” entry was written, so I think they must have had some reason for rejecting them. How well did Skeat know Irish?
Hmm, do-thuig — do /d>t/ th /h>ʍ/ ui /i/ g /g/ ??
twig, to pull quickly
Mystery solved: it’s a loan from Kusaal tɛɛg “pull.”
This is one word that I know where I learned. Beetle (a fictionalized version of the author) has to come up with an ending for the boys’ Aladdin pantomime.
Rudyard Kipling, “Slaves of the Lamp, Part I” (1897). Fortunately, the edition of Stalky & Co. that I read had a glossary.
So Dickson Quartus is apparently the answer to that age-old question: What’s a… ?
I am reminded that Google allows you to use vertical bars to indicate possible alternate words in that position. Thus
"twigged|twigging it|that|onto"means all possible phrases that use one of the words in the first position with one of the words in the second position. That’s much more productive of works that have the slang usage, in Google Books.One famous work that has it:
“I twigged it, knew it; had had the gift, might readily have prophesied it–for when I clapped my eye upon his skull I saw it.”
— Moby Dick Or The Whale, by Herman Melville · 1902
(But I have never read the full text of that myself)
@Owlmirror: That’s from a chapter narrated by the second mate Stubb, and Stubb uses the expression again in later dialogue. He has his own distinctive idiom, different from those of Ishmael, Starbuck, and Ahab. I think Stubb’s diction is supposed to sound characteristic of a widely-traveled sailor (and perhaps it includes some long-forgotten stereotypes about Cape Cod speech as well).
More hits are found by
"twigged|twigging it|that|to|on|onto|the"I should not have put 1902 as the date for Moby-Dick (1851). Google found a 20th century edition, that’s all.
Stubb’s other usage, is I think, more obviously the older meaning of “watching/looking at/staring at”, which is interesting.
I broke it off for clarity, but Stubb just rattles on and on for quite a bit longer:
obligatory (to my minig) Moby Dick as Doubloon nod, while we’re here.
So Dickson Quartus is apparently the answer to that age-old question: What’s a… ?
For finding Aladdin a group of lasses?
He’s president of Finland now, so that figures.