Pic by DRB62 @ Flickr

“Has Tom lost his spherical glass playthings?”, I hear you say. Not at all. The rather lovely and fun title ‘Crash Blossoms’ is, in fact, the term now used for headlines in newspapers, magazines and journals that just don’t read quite right. The term itself comes from an American editor based in Japan, one Mike O’Connell. He spotted a headline that read “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms”. The story was in fact referring to a plane crash. A Japanese Airlines plane had crashed, and the father of the aforementioned violinist was killed. She went on to do rather well, apparently. Obviously, she ‘blossomed’, and the ‘link’ was the fact that she was the hapless man’s daughter. Whew! O’Connell was discussing the fact that he immediately wondered what a ‘crash blossom’ was on an online discussion forum, Testy Copy Editors, and another participant, Dan Bloom, suggested they use ‘Crash Blossoms’ as the term for such ambiguities. By the way, if you’re a fan of language or a completely uptight grammar/punctuation/spelling Nazi, the Testy Copy Editors site is a real find. Check it out when you have the time.

Another great place to go – particularly if you need a few giggles – is crashblossoms.com. Some of the examples below I have shamelessly culled (but the descriptions are mine), and the same goes for Fear Insanity. So with apologies to the site owners, but with a strong recommendation that you pay a visit, here goes:

Jessica Hahn, actress and model, was allegedly drugged and raped by the US TV evangelist Jim Bakker and a co-conspirator. Nothing was ever proven as far as I can tell, but a small payment of some $265,000 would suggest things were not straightforward. Ms Kahn was tired after giving evidence in court, leading to this scatalogical wonder:

Jessica Hahn Pooped After Long Day Testifying

Citing a predicted upturn in the fortunes of the American nuclear power industry, the BBC came up with this eye-popping gem:

US Eyes Boom in Nuclear Reactors

Convinced that there must be a new horror movie out, I read with interest:

Jet-Ski Death Police Seek Youth

Barrister Filmed up Girls’ Skirts – I wonder what he was doing there? Proabably best not to ask.

McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Farmers – that’s going to piss Indiana Jones off.

Volkswagen to cut 20,000 Workers – a bit harsh, just after sacking them.

Black Teen Pregnancy Targets – wishful thinking there, chaps?

No More Grammars, Tories Pledge – indeed.

Apple iTunes Users Growing Fast – well, they’re mostly kids, aren’t they?

Not all mistakes appear in headlines. Any time the English language is shortened, there is a possibility of miscomprehension. My favourite story (although almost certainly apocryphal) involves a telegram sent to the actor, Cary Grant. Enquiring about his age, the sender, for brevity, sent “How old Cary Grant”. Grant sent a telegram by return stating “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”

Until next time,

Tom

Pic by garlandcannon @ Flickr

Hello all, remember me? The one who glibly assured you that I’d be posting more this year? Well, I have been better, but time slips by, and well, you know…

The charming Daphne Wayne-Bough has obviously noted that this blog has been emptier than the manifesto of the British National Party, and has provided me with a nicely done piece. The position of guest blogger is still open if anyone else fancies a go, by the way. Oh, and do visit Daphne’s blog if you get the opportunity – it’ s slightly bonkers, but in a good way. Here, then, Daphne’s opus:

Hasbro’s Scrabble Plus computer game is a goldmine for wordsmiths.  Its
built-in dictionary encompasses American, Australian, South African and Scots
dialect, as well as every technical dictionary known to man, and then some
I think it just makes up as it goes along.  It does allow you to
check if you suspect it of cheating.  Every fish (of which there are
25,000 in the world), mammal, rock, archaeological term, dance move,
cloud formation, generic drug, mathematical term and paint colour  in
the WORLD is in the Scrabble dictionary.   It’s like playing against
Stephen Fry.

The Grammar Nazi, who always manages to sneak up behind me when I am
playing against the computer, rails and rants that
abbreviations, initials, exclamations, proper nouns, foreign words,
slang or acronyms shouldn’t be allowed.  And words he has never heard of.
According to the Wikipedia definition:
“Acronyms or abbreviations, other
than those that have been regularized (such as AWOL, RADAR, and SCUBA),
are not allowed. Variant spellings, slang or offensive terms, archaic or
obsolete terms, and specialized jargon words are allowed if they meet
all other criteria for acceptability.”

I’m more sanguine.  It’s the computer’s game.  I have to learn to play by its rules.  But that
doesn’t mean it always wins…

AA
If you thought Aardvark was the first word in the dictionary, you now
stand corrected.  It is Aa.   Aa (pronounced with two syllables, like
ah-ah)  is rough cindery lava found in Hawaii.  Hawaii being part of the
USA, I guess that means all Hawaiian words are acceptable.  Does this
apply to Native American languages?   Of which there are nearly 300
north of Mexico.

AW
This, apparently, is Scots for “all”.  Now I don’t mind common Scots
words such as “Bampot” or “Gobshite”, but the computer seems to take the
view that if it’s in print somewhere, it’s a word, and so every mickle word that
Rabbi Burns ever put down on paper is fair game.

AY
Ever.  Scots, again.

DOH
A deer, a female deer.

ER
Expression of hesitation.

FE
Means the same as fee, don’t argue, it just is.

GI
I got the GN on this one.  He thought it was G.I. (as in American
soldier)  but I knew it was the Japanese word for karate pajamas (being
the Word Geek that I am, I once compiled a list of 50 Japanese words
that everyone should know).  Which brings us to whether a foreign word
in common usage is allowed?  Computer says hai karate.

LITE
Now I would have bought this if it had said “sugar-free” as in Coke
Lite.  But it thinks Lite is the opposite of dark.  And to compound
matters it adds Liten, Liteness, Litenesses, Litening, and Litely.  The
GN goes purple and hops about with rage, and it sure ain’t English, but I will use
it if I get a chance.

NAH
Expression of denial.  See NO, NAW.

PARA
This, it says is an abbreviation of Paratrooper.  The GN feels that this
is an abbreviation and therefore should not be allowed.  I detect an increasingly anti military tone to his objections.

PARAE
A type of fish.   You’ll have to take my word on this one.

RAH
A cheer.  As in rah rah rah.

QUOP
I had a Q, an O and a blank, and there was a triple word square and a
double letter square lined up over a P.  It was too tempting not to
chance my arm.  Q*OP!  72 points! The most I have EVER scored in
Scrabble.    The Scrabble dictionary said quop was a verb, meaning to
throb or pulsate.  It turns out it was ONCE used by James Joyce, in
Ulysses:  ”His heart quopped.”  Now just because James Joyce made up a
word, does that make it a real word?  In which case we can really have
some fun.    I would tend to agree with the GN on this one, but 72
points – brillig!

ZO
A Tibetan breed of cattle, also spelled ZHO.  Now I would have had this down as a proper noun, but who am I to argue with Deep Thought?

It’s a whole new world of words at Hasbro.

Daphne Wayne-Bough

Pic by Ontzy @ sxc.hu

As I am in the habit of doing, I found myself in an idle moment the other day musing upon why the Scottish football team (that would be ’soccer’ to my American readers) Glasgow Celtic is pronounced with a soft c (an ’s’, in effect) rather than following the usual convention of the hard ‘c’ (or ‘k’) sound.

I felt an article coming on, so you won’t be surprised that today’s little missive has a football theme to it. The reason for this apparent mispronunciation comes from the original Greek word keltoi, used to describe the Celtic peoples. As a little aside, you may be interested to know that what we know these days as Celtic culture (that is to say, inhabitants and Celtic speakers in the UK, Ireland, France and Spain) was once a far more widespread affair. Gaulish (including various subsets of it, including Galician) was spoken in countries as diverse as France, Turkey and Belgium. Irish, Scottish and Manx (Isle of Man) Celtic is all part of one linguistic family (Goidelic) as are Welsh, Breton and Cornish (Brythonic). So now you know.

Back to the subject, because it didn’t come to us directly from Greek, but from French (via Latin), the C is a soft one, as is customary before an E in the French language – centrale, cercle or célébration are near-English examples. Perfect, so now we know why it’s pronounced selltic, don’t we? No, in fact, we don’t. You see, the modern-day pronunciation is almost always kelltic, with the Greek hard K. This is because many scholars and educated people over time have come to accept this as ‘correct’, because the root word is Greek, the hard C is ataken as the correct form. Even today, the German language will use a K in place of a hard C when the root is Greek – Kinema, for example.

The reason for the soft C of Celtic FC is that the club was formed by an Irish Marist (devotee of Mary) brother by the name of Brother Walfrid, in order to “alleviate poverty in Glasgow’s East End parishes”. The name Celtic (selltic) was proposed by him to “reflect the club’s Irish and Scottish roots”. Because he pronounced it with a soft C, that’s how it’s always been pronounced.

While we’re here, I will tell you why it’s known as soccer and not football in certain parts of the world. In the USA and Canada, for example, it is used to distinguish the game of Association Football from American Football or Gridiron. Naturally, the Americans and Canadians refer to their game (a variation on the many forms of Rugby Football that were being played in America in the early days) as ‘football’, and thus needed a name for the other kind.

Luckily, there was a term that had been hanging around in the UK for a long time – soccer. The term is often attributed to Charles Wreford-Brown, captain of the English national team in 1894 and 1895. He allegedly (I say ‘allegedly’, as there is little or no evidence to the claim) preferred to shorten words and give them a more ‘chummy’ feel. When asked if he’d like a game of ‘rugger’ – the common abbreviation for Rugby Football – he answered that he’d prefer a game of ‘asoccer’, a contraction of Association Football. The term stuck and became shortened to soccer.

A note to all those not from the UK: We call it football. It is never, ever, called soccer.

Yours, sitting on the sideline with a meat pie and a Bovril,

Tom

Rounding up this week’s mystery words

image courtesy of gumdropgas @ flickr

Nothing specific this time around, word fans. More a collection of bits that have blipped on my radar recently. I’m going to have to stop talking to Mrs Joad, as she invariably says something to the effect of “hey, word man – what does (insert one of the many things I have no idea about) mean?” I am sent scurrying to my reference books and the good old internet in order to find an answer but luckily, that also gives me something to write about.

Tad: My first semi-failure of the week, and a direct result of one of those queries by Mrs Joad. Apart from being recognized as a diminuitive form of Thaddeus (or Thaddaeus), there is very little known about the roots of this word, generally accepted nowadays to mean ‘a small amount’ or ‘a little piece of’. My etymology resources (including the OED) are all of the same opinion, that it is a shortened form of tadpole. The only thing that really supports this theory (though fairly tenuously) is that the word tadpole comes from Middle English – tadde meaning toad, and pol meaning head. It’s sketchy, but it’ll have to do.

Jonesing: One that will be familiar to my American readers. I’m glad it’s familiar to them, because nothing I’ve read can shed a lot of light on this. The context in which I have always heard it has been that someone is badly craving something “Boy, I’m jonesing for a smoke”, for example. There are some theories that it comes from the popular expression keeping up with the Joneses, in that you need a bit more to keep up, which sounds plausible, but I’m not sure. More likely is that as Jones was old slang (circa 1930s US) for heroin, the idea of jonesing for more is somewhat more believable. One final (but unlikely) theory is that it comes from the Grateful Dead song Casey Jones. Sure, the songs’s about cocaine (this is The Dead, after all) but that’s really where any similarity ends.

Not a prayer: I know, it’s a phrase, not a word. Indulge me. This is something else  pointed out by Mrs Joad. It’s an expression I’ve used for a long time, but nobody else I know seems to have heard of it. It appears in my thesaurus as a valid phrase meaning not a chance or not a hope in hell, but any documentary evidence of the origin of this phrase is, as far as I can tell, non-existent. Feel free to chip in if you have any information on this or anything else on the site.

Until next time,

Tom

No, this is not a post about absentee landlords.

OK, two resolutions for the new year. First, post more on Word du Jour, second, stop the crap jokes. Anyone care to take bets on which one collapses first?

The idea for this post comes from my curiosity about why the name Dalziel is pronounced ‘Dee-ell’ in English. On my way to uncovering this mystery, I was reminded of other things, and thought “hello, why not make a post of it?” So here it is, a small introduction to some letters formerly used in the English alphabet. In truth, the alphabets vary from Saxon to Middle English to (mainly) Old English, but if you don’t mind me mixing and matching, I’ll continue.

Yogh

To begin, then, a description of the Dalziel/Dee-ell  problem. The culprit is the Old English letter ‘Yogh’. Written like this: Ȝ (or lowercase ȝ). Old English employed the yogh as a ‘g’ sound, borrowing it from Anglo-Saxon, as a ‘modern’ transliteration of a rune – Gyfu – used to represent the soft and hard ‘g’ sounds in the original Germanic. By the time yogh got to Middle English, its remit had been expanded to encompass the sounds of several letters – notably G, J, I, W and sometimes X, depending on context. This was all well and good, as most people understood the rules, but one big problem stood out. Yogh looked vey similar to the way the letter Z could (and can still be) written in cursive lowercase script. Still, no problem, you might think. Except that about this time people like Caxton and Guttenberg spoiled things by beginning to print things. Typesetters of the day often did not have the correct character for yogh (and other letters), partly because the Normans found the use of non-Latin characters annoying, and replaced them whenever possible with whatever they felt appropriate. In the case of yogh, the Latin Z was deemed the most useful substitution, most likely because of the similarity with cursive yogh.

For this reason, a handful of words and names still exist with the replacement Z standing in for the yogh. ‘Menzies’ is one such name, and should, apparently, be pronounced ‘ming-iss’. The G is intoned as in ’singing’ not as in ‘linger’.  However, care should be taken to add a Y sound to the end of the G in order to properly recreate the Middle English way of saying it. The end product should be something like ‘ming(y)-iss. The Scots surname Mackenzie used to be pronounced ‘Mackenyie’, and sometimes still is. Other examples include Finzean (roughly, fing(y)-ean), Glenzier (gling(y)-er) and, of course, Dalziel. British readers may be surprised to find that the country-wide newsagents chain John Menzies prefers the old pronunciation, and have a little ditty on their web site to help you remember:

A lively young damsel named Menzies
Inquired: “Do you know what this thenzies?”
Her aunt, with a gasp,
Replied: “It’s a wasp,
And you’re holding the end where the stenzies.”

Thorn and Wynn

Not to be confused, but rather lumped together in this description in the hope of differentiating them. The problem is that Thorn (written: Þ or lowercase þ), looks very similar to Wynn (Ƿ, lowercase ƿ or runic ᚹ), especially if your handwriting is as bad as mine.

There’s not much in the way of a back story to wynn (or ‘wen’, as it is sometimes pronounced and spelled). In very early versions of Old English, the letter and sound (or phoneme) we now know as W was represented by the letter ‘uu’. For some reason, scribes of the time decided that this was not a good idea, and that it would be far better to use the old rune ᚹ instead. History does not relate why they thought this was such a brilliant plan, but it does recall that by the time we arrived at Middle English, the idea had been dropped and ‘uu’ made a comeback, to be replaced later by W.

Thorn, however, has quite a funky history, and is still used in the Icelandic alphabet even today. Hey – if it’s good enough for Björk, it’s good enough for me. A strange history, really. Thorn began as a transliteration of the runic letter thorn (or thurs), representing the soft and hard ‘th’ sounds (the sounds produced in ‘this’ and ‘the’, for example). Over time, via Old English and Middle English, and later into the ‘modern’ English of the 17th and 18th centuries, it started to look a lot like wynn, and from there became corrupted so far as to resemble a Y.

The interesting upshot of this transformation is that all European printers had a Y in their typefaces, but not all had a thorn, so Y became the de facto standard replacement character for thorn. If you ever wondered why you see ‘Ye Olde iPod Shoppe’ when businesses are trying to be quaint (and failing, in my opinion), it’s because of the old thorn character. ‘Ye’ should properly be pronounced ‘the’, as the thorn is replaced by a Y, but is almost always pronounced ‘yee’, either in jest or because the user is unaware (as was I before I began researching this). There are so many yings I still don’t know.

Eth

Eth or edh (Ð or ð lowercase) was seldom used, even in Old English, when it was supposed to represent ‘th’. “But wait, what about thorn?”, I hear you cry. Yes, the reason it wasn’t heavily used is because thorn was already doing the job of TH, and having more than one way of writing it must have been a pain for scribes all over the country. The thorn was generally the most used and became standard, up to its demise early in the 16th century. The eth still exists in the Icelandic language, and still represents what English speakers would describe as a ‘th’ sound.

Wikipedia reliably informs me that eth can also be used in mathematical notation to denote a partial derivative, explaining it thus: “a partial derivative of a function of several variables is its derivative with respect to one of those variables, with the others held constant”. If you’re feeling particularly suicidal, you may read the whole article here.

Long S

This often confuses people, and not without good reason. If it’s any consolation, the people who used to use this letter were probably as confused as you about it. Long S (written as ſ or ſ ), seems to have many and varied rules regarding it usage. There seems to have been much advice available about when and where to use the long s correctly, but most of it appears to have been conflicting. A good rule of thumb is that the long s was used at the beginning or in the middle of a word, but never at the end. Furthermore, in the case of a double s, the first was long and the second ’short’. It seems people were contriving to complicate the issue and succeeding.

The problem, of course, is that long s looked quite like a lowercase ‘f’, especially as some writers liked to attach a backward-facing nub to make it look even more f-like. This made for comedy gold in later years, some of the more innocent exponents of such mirth being Flanders and Swann in this typical monologue: “Kydd took the scroll, unrolled it – it rolled up again, they always did. Unrolled it again – at the bottom were several rows of very square highly illuminated notes, and at the top it said Greenfleeves. Kyd looked at it and thought “Well this is a pretty unlikely title for a fong”.

The long s still survives as a mathematical symbol denoting an integral. Now, it’s no good asking me about any of this, because I’m a total duffer at maths. All I could gather from what seemed like hours of research is that it had something to do with the relationship to the Greek symbol used for sumnation, sigma (Σ). If anyone can explain what I’m missing in words I can understand, please post a comment.

Invaluable in my research has been the quite marvellous blog Babel Stone, visit it if you get a chance, it is truly a place of wonder.

I hope you enjoyed reading this little missive. If you enjoyed it, tell your friends. If not, tell me. Not that it will change anything.

Oh, and a happy new year to both my readers.

Tom.

[singlepic id=3 w=320 h=240 float=left]Another post following a conversation in which I tried to be smug and clever and failed. Everyone knows where the days of the week get their names, right? I thought I did, but became hopelessly lost on definitions for Tuesday and Friday. So, it was a little like naming the seven dwarves: Grumpy, Sneezy, Doc, and the other four. In order to save you, dear reader, the ignominy of starting out clever and ending up looking – as the colloquial term would have it – a right dick, I present for you now the origins of names for days of the week.

So, for an easy kick-off: Sunday. Can you guess? Of course, it comes from our old chums the Romans,. Originally the name of a pagan festival, dies solis, or ‘Sun’s day’ became attributed to what some argue is the first day of the week (but who are wrong). OK, it was originally in the good old days, but these days, Sundays are for overeating and/or recovering from Saturday’s hangover.

Onto Monday: Another gift for the would-be clever-clogs. A good old-fashioned bit of Anglo-Saxon here, with a contraction of their Mōnandæg (pronounced monn-en-day), or ‘Day of the Moon’, and quite possibly nicked from the Romans, who called it dies luna.

Tuesday: Now this is one of the little buggers that had me on the ropes. Of course, I now know, and had I not confessed in the opening remarks above, could pretend to be really clever by regaling you with its roots. Honesty is the best policy – I had to look it up, which could well be how you ended up here. The day is named after  the Norse god Týr (also known as ty, tyr, tiwaz and in Old English, Tīw). Tīw was the god of (among other things) heroic victory, and was also once more highly placed than Odin or Thor. He must have missed a meeting or two, because his popularity dropped off, which may account for why I’d never heard of him. Anyhow, his day – Tīw’s  Day – is how we still refer to it in modern times, more or less.

Wednesday:  I positively radiated smugness for knowing this one. I must have been paying attention at school that day. Except I wasn’t quite right. Wednesday is named after an Anglo-Saxon god called Woden (or sometimes Wuotan or Wodan), and not Odin as I thought. There is the possibility that they are one and the same, but the jury’s out. Woden was pretty much the big kahuna of his religion, and a more-or-less exact match for the Roman god, Mercury, who also lends his name to Wednesday in the Romance languages – miércoles (Spanish), mercoledì (Italian) and mercredi (French). In researching this day, I discovered a new word (new to me, that is). Mercury and Woden were both psychopomps, that is to say, a deity or being whose job it is to escort the souls of the newly deceased to the afterlife.  You learn something new every day, eh? So, anyway Wednesday is Woden’s day with a slightly off spelling.

Thursday: Old English again, referring to – of course – Thor. The famous Norse god of thunder and rain and also, strangely, farming. Originally known as Þūnresdæg (pronounced, roughly, Thorn-res-day). In case you’re wondering, the funny D-shaped thingy at the beginning of the word is thorn, a character used in Norse and Middle English alphabets and which still exists in the Icelandic alphabet. I’ll be doing a piece on this and other out-of-favour letters shortly, so stay tuned. Thor’s day. Easy.

Friday: The other one that I simply had no idea about. And an odd one, too. The Fri- prefix is a corrupted or possibly contracted form of the name of one, or possibly two goddesses from Norse mythology, Frige (pron. Fray-a). The reason I say “possibly two” is that there seems to have been two goddesses with similar names, both powerful in their own ways, and a least one of whom having been married to none other than Odin himself. Much of the lore of one has been transposed to the other over time, and we end up with something of a hybrid. She is known by many names, including: Frijjō, Frigg, Freyja, Frike, Freke, Frig and Susan. I may have made that last bit up. Long story short, Norse god.

Saturday: The ‘day of Saturn’ (dies saturni) comes, as you might expect, from the Romans again. Saturn was the god of fertility, agriculture, justice and time, so he had a quite a bit of work on. The Greeks knew him as Kronos, but I feel that Saturday sounds better than Kronoday.

I hope you enjoyed reading this. Don’t forget to bookmark, Twitter, RSS or whatever.

[singlepic id=2 w=320 h=240 float=left]Indulge me here, dear reader (you know who you are) while I regale you with a story of how a joke can be pushed a little too far – even on the internet, where the boundaries of taste and other things differ wildly from real life.

Lolcats – and lolcat speak – thatz liek soooo last year. What started off as an internet meme on message boards like 4Chan (caveat lector), and was popularized further by the big hitters in internet time-wasting, Digg and Reddit is now being written about in major publications. OK, they think it’s a new thing, and there are probably many slow news days, who am I to cast the first stone? Lolcat speak is a combination of purposely misspelled words and phrases, and the baby talk some people use when talking to their cats. In case you are reading this and haven’t had access to the internet for a couple of years, it can be best explained visually, here.

Why the fuss? Well, I recently learned that there has been a concerted effort over some months to translate The Bible into LOLCat. I understand that people like to introduce their favourite flavour of religion to others, and I have no problem with that per se, except when standing in my dressing gown, hung over, at 8.00 on a Sunday morning, but  I digress.  In case you’re simply itching to know what shape such an enormous collective effort might take, here’s a taster. I have chosen the first five verses of Genesis, as at least most people brought up in a Christian country will have an idea how they should look:

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.

4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.

5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

Some might say that however the message of The Bible reaches people matters not, as long as they are reading it, but even from my atheist viewpoint, it would be a sad day for Christians worldwide if their religion was reduced to a badly-spelled internet gag.

Quite apart from any religious angle, when it comes to such things, I find myself reflecting on the fictitious quote by Samuel Johnson in the Blackadder TV series: “…like fitting wheels to a tomato. Time consuming and completely unnecessary”.

…that’s how long it’s been since I posted anything.  Well, I’ve been busy, what with one thing and another, you know.

Nothing too weighty this time around – just a bit of fun. I must admit to having been quite stumped when asked by Madame Joad (who considers me something of an authority on English colloquialisms) what the ‘H’ in ‘Jesus H Christ’ stood for. My initial guess (wrong) was that it was there purely for emphasis, something like tmesis. I decided to research it on the oracle of all that is true and 100 per cent correct, the internet. To my utter surprise, several of the top Google hits put forward a very reasonable and plausible theory as to how the H got there. My favourite, not least because of the reference to the Lord’s Prayer: “Our father, who art in heaven, Harold be thy name”, is this site, which provides a very interesting and believable etymology for the origins of this whimsical piece of blasphemy.

Whiny-moany time now. The ‘F-Bomb’. Why the fuck is this a problem (see what I did there)? Seriously, there must be a billion other things worse than saying naughty words on telly. Usage of this inane phrase is largely contained in the US, where apparently nobody ever swears. I may be wrong, but I think the writers sneaked a few rude words into Pulp Fiction and The Big Lebowski. Maybe I’m just corrupted from having been exposed to swearing since my schooldays. Under duress, when happy or sometimes just because, people can and will say “fuck”. It’s such a hugely versatile word, it’s surprising it isn’t used more on TV. I’m not advocating an expletive-littered free-for-all on the telly, but I don’t think someone accidentally swearing warrants public outrage or large fines by broadcasting commissions (yes, FCC, I’m looking at you). I certainly think that comparing it linguistically with the ‘A-Bomb’ and the ‘H-Bomb’ is hyperbole.

Cankles are the new moobs: Ankles that look as thick as the calves have finally been given a name – cankles. A simple portmanteau word, but one that has quite a good ring to it, I feel. Moobs (man boobs) are soooo last year, darling, but news reaches me that if a man suffers from the aesthetic unpleasantness of cankles, they become ‘mankles’.  Things are getting a bit silly now.

It’s a funny thing, language. I am guilty of defending the usage of the English language and its grammar (if ‘guilty’ is the correct term), but I am also prepared to concede that the reason English has become the worldwide lingua franca is entirely due to its malleability and adaptability. Let’s face it, the Aussies and Kiwis use it, and it’s still recognizeable – barely. I don’t even have a huge problem with our American cousins and their kooky ways of spelling things. Hmmm. Wait – on second thoughts, that’d be most things. Color and thru are still wrong, and happy holidays means nothing at all. It’s Christmas, my US chums – Christmas. You are a Christian country (yes, I know, secular society, church and state, blah blah), so please feel free to use the name, for Bhudda’s sake. Where was I? Oh yes – tangental ranting aside, the horrible truth is that the inhabitants in those most united of states have good reason for ‘-izing’ everything. I will not regurgitate all the arguments why, because all you need to know is right here. It’s well worth a read, I assure you.

So, having set out my stall as part-time defender of English, friend to American people and all-round good egg, let me share a few things with you. I have things I need to get off my chest.

A bad thing: Using ‘impact’ as a verb. “Greg says the recession has impacted the Q4 projection”. Really? Then Greg should be taken outside and beaten. There is only one legitimate use of ‘impacted’ as a verb, and that’s when describing something as squashed or wedged together, such as an impacted molar in dentistry. Other ‘verbed nouns’ – which are the last bastions of scoundrels and regional sales managers – include: task (“he was tasked with data input”), breakfast (“she breakfasted Jack”) and action (“the last point was actioned by Sarah”). It’s wrong and it makes you look stupid. Stop.

A good thing: New words. Probably more like ‘new-ish’, to be honest. Since the public smoking ban in many European countries, quick-witted fans of the fags (no, Americans – the other kind) have seized the opportunity presented by being herded out of anywhere comfortable to chat up ladies/men. This process is known as smirting – a contraction of smoking and flirting. Non-smokers are still stuck with finding something else to have in common with their potential new significant other. The best new word of recent times has to be chillax, a contraction of chill (out) and relax, having the stress on the second syllable. A wonderful example of the creative use of English, but sadly not one I can ever use. Anyone over the age of 20 found using this word is immediately reported to the cool police and pointed and laughed at, like a geography teacher trying to pull off a cap/hoody combo.

Some mistakes that are easy to rectify, but are still like a veneral disease on the organs of productive English: ‘Loosing’, for starters. “I was afraid I might be loosing my grip”. Can you see the ambiguity oozing out of that statement? Was the subject fearful of letting go of an object, or of going colloquially insane, perhaps? There is a reason why loosing and losing are spelled differently. If it helps, think of losing as having lost the second ‘O’. Or just get it bloody well right in the first place. Really – it’s not tricky. Americans beware – anti-US-English rant ahead. “I could care less about what he says” – then why don’t you? This expression has popped up a few times over the past few months, and every time it has irritated me. It’s “I couldn’t care less”. Think about it. There is one word, however, I am a bit stuck as to whether I should hate or not. The data is being read or the data are being read? I do know which is grammatically correct, but ‘the data are‘ still seems very clumsy, in speech at least. Why is pedantry so difficult?

Those of you who are both English and easily offended may look away now. Everyone else, welcome. If I were childish and silly enough to pick a favourite swear word – and luckily I am, or this would be a very short post – it would have to be ‘bollocks’. It’s just one of those words you can use when really nothing else will do. It can be said with such vitriol or mirth that it makes it useful for any situation where an expletive is called for, except maybe for christenings and bar mitzvahs.

Quite different from its four-letter bedfellows, bollocks has at least four, and possibly even more, spelling variations: bollocks, ballocks, bollox and bollix. When I came to research this wonderfully fruity bit of good Old English swearing, I was quite surprised to find a huge body of work already written about it. The OED has devoted quite a bit of space to the etymology and usage of the word. Perhaps they really do prefer researching the swear words as much as schoolchildren enjoy reading them. In order to not plagiarise anyone, I will simply provide here a summary of the more common applications of the word.

As a noun:  Simply yet another word for the testes (nadgers, stones or just plain old balls to you and me). Let’s put it this way, if you were playing cricket (or insert your favourite ball game here) and the ball hit you squarely in the family jewels, the last thing on your mind would be to shout “oh, my testes”. In fact, if that would be the first thing you thought to shout, seek psychiatric help immediately. Euphemisms for the word are popular too, the more famous being Jackson Pollocks, after the famous abstract expressionist, and my personal favourite (a spoonerism) Betty Swallocks. This is often shortened to simply ‘The Betties’. Confused? We have but scratched the surface (if you’ll pardon the use of the phrase).

As an interjection: “Put down your newspaper and get back to work”. “Bollocks!”

As a negation: “Was the train on time this morning?” “Was it bollocks!” The expression “That’s a load of old bollocks” is also a very popular way to use the word. Obviously, this statement intends to convey the sentiment that the previous statement is not appreciated or believed. Conversely, the “dog’s bollocks”, or simply “the bollocks” is something very good indeed, like the bees knees, or latterly (and similarly), the mutt’s nuts. This is an obvious reference to the importance of dog’s testicles to him in life. So be aware that in its shortened form, only the word the separates something wrong or bad from something truly excellent “That is just the bollocks” versus “That is just bollocks”.

As an admonition: To be told off very harshly, especially when much shouting and screaming is directed at you is called “being given a bollocking”. I don’t know why, but it really sums it up, doesn’t it?

As a transitive verb: If you have made a real mess of things, a colleague or friend may say “Well, you really bollocksed that up, didn’t you?”. This depends on how kind and caring you friends or colleagues are, I suppose.

To refer to a stupid person: Mostly used in Irish English, and usually spelled bollix, it can be used to indicate that someone is stupid, annoying, useless, or any combination thereof. “Did ye see yer man Davey on the telly last night? Jeez, what a bollix”.

As this is something I’ve wanted to write about for some time, I hope you found it to be the bollocks and not just bollocks. If you didn’t like it, maybe I dropped a bollock. Bollocks to it – I’m off.