Taking first things first, we'll start with the word primary, which descends from the Latin primus, "first." Primary, as a shortening of "primary election, is first recorded in 1861. In an election we "pick out" a candidate who we wish to vote for. In Latin e means "out" and lectus "pick or choose."
As the joke goes, the etymology of the word politics derives from poly, "many," and tics, which are blood-sucking parasites. In truth politics issues from the Greek word polities, "city, citizen." Politics may make strange bedfellows, but, as we shall see, politics makes for even stranger, and sometimes colorful, vocabulary.
Campaign is very much a fighting word. The Latin campus, "field," is a clue that the first campaigns were conducted on battlefields. A military campaign is a series of operations mounted to achieve a particular wartime objective. A political campaign is an all-out effort to secure the election of a candidate to office.
When he went to the Forum in Roman times, a candidate for office wore a bleached white toga to symbolize his humility, purity of motive ands candor. The original Latin root, candidatus, meant "one who wears white," from the belief that white was the color of purity and probity. There was wishful thinking even in ancient Roman politics, even though a white-clad Roman candidatus was accompanied by sectatores, followers who helped him get votes by bargaining and bribery. The Latin parent verb candere, "to shine, to glow" can be recognized in the English words candid, candor, candle, and incandescent.
We know that candidates are ambitious; it's also worth knowing that ambition developed from the Latin ambitionem, "a going about," from the going about of candidates for office in ancient Rome.
President descends from the Latin praesidio, "preside, sit in front of or protect." Presidents sit in the seat of government. When we speak of "the ship of state," we are being more accurate etymologically than we know. The Greek word kybernao meant "to direct a ship." The Romans borrowed the word as guberno, and ultimately it crossed the English Channel as governor, originally a steersman. That's why the noun is governor and the adjective gubernatorial.
The original Greek meaning of the word idiot was not nearly as harsh as our modern sense. Long before the psychologists got hold of the word, the Greeks used idiotes, from the root idios, "private," as in idiom and idiosyncrasy, to designate those who did not hold public office. Because such people possessed no special status or skill, the word idiot gradually fell into disrepute.
The vote that we'll soon be casting is really a "vow" or "wish." And this is the precise meaning of the Latin votum. People in our society who fail to exercise their democratic privilege of voting on election day are sometimes called idiots.
A metaphor (the word originally meant "to carry across" in Greek) is a figure of speech that merges two seemingly different objects or ideas. We usually think of metaphors as figurative devices that only poets create, but, in fact, all of us make metaphors during almost every moment of our waking lives. As T. E. Hulme observed, "Prose is a museum, where all the old weapons of poetry are kept."
Take the political expression "to throw one's hat in the ring." The phrase probably derives from the custom of tossing one's hat into the boxing ring to signal the acceptance of a pugilist's challenge. Once the hat is thrown, the candidates start engaging in political infighting as they slug it out with their opponents.
Or take the expression "to carry the torch for someone." During the 19th century, a dedicated follower showed support for a political candidate by carrying a torch in an evening campaign parade. A fellow who carried a torch in such a rally didn't care who knew that he was wholeheartedly behind his candidate. Later the term was applied to someone publicly (and obsessively) in love.
© Richard Lederer
I am a wordstruck, word bethumped, word besotted, wordaholic, unrepentant verbivore.
Carnivores eat flesh and meat; piscivores eat fish; herbivores consume plants and vegetables; verbivores devour words. I am such a creature. My whole life I have feasted on words -- ogled their appetizing shapes, colors, and textures; swished them around in my mouth; lingered over their many tastes; let their juices run down my chin. During my adventures as a fly-by-the-roof-of-the-mouth, user-friendly wizard of idiom, I have met thousands of other wordaholics, logolepts, lexicomaniacs, and verbivores, folks who also eat their words. Becausae you are reading this statement, you must be a fellow verbivore.
What is there about words that makes a language person love them so? The answers are probably as varied as the number of verbivores themselves. There are as many reasons to love words as there are people who love them. How do I love thee, language? Let me count the ways.
Some word people are intrigued by the birth and life of words. They become enthusiastic, ebullient, and enchanted when they discover that enthusiastic literally means "possessed by a god," ebullient "boiling over, spouting out," and enchanted "singing a magic song." They are rendered starry-eyed by the insight that disaster (dis-aster) literally means "ill-starred" and intoxicated by the information that intoxicated has poison in its heart. They love the fact that amateur is cobbled from the very first verb that all students of Latin learn -- amo: "I love."
The poet William Cowper once wrote of
philologists who traceWordsters of etymological persuasion love to intrepidly hunting for the origins of phrases. Take "sitting in the catbird seat." The expression was popularized by Red Barber, the colorful broadcaster for the Brooklyn Dodgers, who also spread the likes of "tearing up the pea patch" and rhubarb, used to mean "an argument on a baseball diamond." The Mississippi-born Barber once explained that "sitting in the catbird seat" was a Southern expression for which he had literally paid. In a stud poke game Barber continually bluffed with a weak hand until he lost to an opponent who met every raise. According to Red, the winner, who held an ace showing and an ace in the hole, said, "Thanks for all those raises. From the start, I was sitting in the catbird seat."
A panting syllable through time and space,
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark
To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark.
The catbird commands a good view from its lofty perch, but so do many other birds. My reading of ornithology books reveals that the catbird does not usually sit high up in branches, where it could get the best view, but rather lurks half-hidden in shrubbery. What's so special about the catbird and its vantage point? Intrepid bird watchers, word botchers, and phrase-hunters will never rest until they track down the answer.
Still another denomination of verbivore sees words as collections of letters to be juggled, shuffled, and flipped. Lovers of logology - the art and craft of letter play - are spellbound by the fact that TWENTY-NINE is spelled with straight letters made of straight lines only - twenty-nine of them, to be exact - and that AMBIDEXTROUS is alphabetically ambidextrous. Its left half, AMBIDE, uses letters from the left half of the alphabet, and its right half, XTROUS, uses letters from the right half of the alphabet.
As RIDDLER REACHER (a full anagram for RICHARD LEDERER), I am here to tell you that the infinite variety of William Shakespeare's characters, themes, and language is reflected in the many full anagrams of his name: I SWEAR HE'S LIKE A LAMP, WE ALL MAKE HIS PRAISE, HAS WILL A PEER? I ASK ME, and AH, I SPEAK A SWELL RIME.
Then there's the breed of logophile who enjoys trying to turn the brier patch of pronoun cases, subject-verb agreement, sequence of tenses, and the indicative and subjunctive moods into a manageable garden of delight.
Throughout my life as a teacher, I have striven mightily to teach the difference between the verbs lie and lay. Lie means "to repose"; lay means "to put." Lie is intransitive; it never takes an object. Lay is transitive; it always takes an object. Pardon the fowl language, but a hen on its back is lying; a hen on its stomach may be laying - an egg.
Alas, all my efforts have been swept away by the Enron debacle. Here's a little ditty I've written about the company that made an End Run around ethics. Please recall that the disgraced CEO of the company was Kenneth Lay:
TAKE THE MONEY ENRON
The difference between "lie" and "lay"Among my favorite wordmongers are those who prowl the lunatic fringes of language, lunatic because the ancients believed that prolonged exposure to the moon (Latin luna) rendered one moonstruck, or daft. These recreational wordplayers wonder why we drive in a parkway and park in a driveway, why our nose can run and our feet can smell, why the third hand on a clock is called the second hand, and why, if adults commit adultery, infants don't commit infantry. Why is it, they muse, that a man puts on a pair of pants but a woman puts on only one bra? Why is it that a man can call a woman a vision, but not a sight -- unless his eyes are sore?
Has fallen into deep decay.
But now we know from Enron's shame
That Lay and "lie" are just the same.
Finally, there are the legions of pundits, punheads, pun pals, pun-up girls, and pun-gents who tell of the Buddhist who said to the hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything." That's the same Buddhist who never took Novocain when he had teeth extracted because he wished to transcend dental medication. These punderful verbivores become even bigger hot dogs when they tell about Charlemagne, who mustered his Franks and set out with great relish to assault and pepper the Saracens, but he couldn't catch up. (Frankly, I never sausage a pun. It's the wurst!)
Punnery is largely the trick of compacting two or more ideas within a single word or expression. Punnery challenges us to apply the greatest pressure per square syllable of language. Punnery surprises us by flouting the law of nature that pretends that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Punnery is an exercise of the mind at being concise. Punnery is a rewording experience.
A good pun is like a good steak - a rare medium well done. Cardinal Richelieu once wrote that "the pen is mightier than the sword." I would update that pronouncement: "The pun is mightier than the sword, and these days you are more likely to run into a pun than a sword." Three centuries ago John Dennis sneered meanly, "A pun is the lowest form of wheat." My version of that statement is: "A bun is the doughiest form of wheat."
Incorrigible pun-gent that I am (don't incorrige me!), I love sharpening my pun cells for the moment when everything comes together to form an incisive and contextual prey on words:
During my first tour of our San Diego Wild Animal Park, I went to an area where giraffes lean forward over a parapet and accept food from visitors. I suggested to the keeper that the area be named Giraffic Park. Watching an Imax film about volcanoes from Fiji to Hawaii, I noted the title, "Ring of Fire," turned to my long-suffering wife, and commented, "They've missed the best title for this movie - Ash from a Hole in the Ground." At an airport security area I removed and then placed my shoes in one of the small tubs because my size 14s are supported by large steel shanks that unfailingly set bells a ringing. When , after a long wait, the attendant finally returned my shoes, and I said, "Thank you for the shoe shank redemption!" I love pushing the envelope of language, even if it causes those around me to be out of sorts and go postal.
Language derives from lingua, "tongue," so it is no surprise that many verbivores care deeply about the pronunciation of words. The sounding noo-kyuh-lur has received much notoriety because a number of presidents from Dwight David Eisenhower to George W. Bush have spoken the word that way. A great many people riding our fair planet simply cannot hear the difference between noo-kyuh-lur and noo-klee-uhr.
Noo-kyuh-lur is an example of metathesis, the transposition of internal sounds, as in Ree-luh-tur for Realtor, joo-luh-ree for jewelry, lahr-niks for larynx, and, more subtly cumf-ter-bull for comfortable. But while the metathesis cumf-ter-bull (in which the er and the t have been transposed) is fully acceptable and entrenched in our language, cultivated speakers generally consider noo-kyuh-lur, ree-lah-tur, and their ilk atrocities. The San Diego Union-Tribune recently polled its readers to find out the grammar and pronunciation abuses that most seismically yanked their chains and rattled their cages. Noo-kyuh-lur was the crime against English mentioned by the greatest number of respondents. Noo-kyuh-lur made them go ballistic, even noo-klee-ur. Despite its proliferation, noo-kyuh-lur has failed to gain respectability. Noo-kyuh-lur may be a sad fact of life, but resistance to it is hardly a lost cause. Although we hear it from some prominent people, it remains a much-derided aberration.
I have always had a heels-over head love affair with language. May you be nourished by a wordaholic, logoleptic, lexicomaniacal, verbivorous life that shares that love.
That's our teenagers' way of saying that slang is super cool, fantastic, awesome. One of the purposes of student slang, like the thieves' cant to which it is close kin, is to bond members of the group together and to ensure that their parlance will not to be understood by the uninitiated. Among the uninitiated may be you, gentle reader.
To enhance your vocabulary and your ability to communicate with your children and grandchildren, here's an uber, wooka glossary of the current slang of school hangouts and college campuses. Don't be a dillweed. Don't be a dipstick. Master these hella dank words. But as soon as enough of us chronologically gifted folks unlock their meanings, their insider mystique will go missing and the kids will hurriedly drop them from their parlance. That's fo'shizzle.
A'ight (pronounced "ight"). All right.
Amped. Jazzed up with frenetic activity.
Bag. To make fun of.
Bangin'. Good lookin', foxy, hunky.
Blaze. Exceptionally bangin'. Knockout, drop-dead gorgeous or handsome.
Bloke. A guy's guy
Boo. Boyfriend, girlfriend, main squeeze, flame.
Bootylicious. Sexually attractive. Pertains to females.
Boo-yah! An exclamation used in celebrating a victory. Close kin to who's your daddy!
Breezy. A female.
Chassy. A beautiful girl. Also freak, hottie.
Cheddar. Money. Dough, shekels. Also benjamins, chips, dead presidents, duckets, ends, grain, paper, scrilla.
Cheezin'. Smiling.
Chop it up. Talk to someone. Shoot the breeze.
Dawg. Friend. Also homie.
Dillweed. Social incompetent. A dork, a loser. Also dipstick.
Drop the dime. To tell on someone.
Flossin'. Showing off one's belongings or wealth.
Fo'shizzle. For sure. Also fo' sho', fo'sheezy, fo'rizeal.
Hack. To make fun of someone.
Hecka. Heck of a. Heckishly.
Hella. Hell of a..Hellishly. Hella and hecka are often used adverbially, as in "hella sick."
Janky. Broken, in bad shape. Also raggedy.
Jockin'. Trying to become the girlfriend of a guy. Flirting.
Kickin' it. Hanging out with friends. Also chillin', chizzlin', coasting.
Marinate. Relax, chill.
Old school. Anything that is old, but not necessarily bad.
On your jock. Obsessed with a guy or girl.
Props. Compliments, respect.
That bites. That stinks, sucks.
Tree. To score in the classroom or on the playing field way beyond your ability. Out of your gourd, in the zone.
Uber. A general emphatic. Very, super. Also wooka.
Whasup. What's up? How is it going? Good to see you.
Whip. A vehicle. Jalopy, wheels.
Now that you've absorbed this uber guide to kidslang, it's totally time for us to bounce, clip, drop out, and roll out. Peace out, dawg.
© Richard Lederer
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