It seems there’s a new, and somewhat disturbing, wiki on the block – wikileaks.

Apparently a whistle-blowing website where sensitive material can be posted online in such a way as it to be untraceable, wikileaks has come to the nation’s interest amidst news of leaked details about the US military campaign in Afghanistan. (I say ‘apparently’, since I’ve been unable to access the site myself – it keeps timing out, probably due to too much traffic! – and so am basing this on The Guardian’s coverage of the incident.)

The word wiki, of course, relates to websites that can be added to and modified by users themselves, for example Wikipedia. We also now have  WikiAnswers, WikiMapia and wikibooks. Around the websites themselves, we see wiki communities (groups bound together by use of a wiki), wiki nodes (pages on wikis that describe related wikis), neighbour wikis (containing similar information or appealing to the same audience) and delegate wikis (sort of the next rung down the ladder in the information hierarchy). And then of course there’s wikiality – something which is deemed to be true simply because a lot of people believe it, rather than on the basis of any actual evidence.

In a similar sort of vein, we’ve seen hacktivist for someone who changes or manipulates information on someone else’s website, in order to get their own political views across (based, of course, on hacker), and rumint – intelligence information that comes from unreliable sources, especially rumours. (This latter I find worrying enough, without the thought of it then appearing on the web for any old nutter to act on!)

Whilst I like the basic wiki idea, I do find the latest addition to the stable pretty scary. Apparently, anyone can go onto the site and publish anything – national security information, state secrets – that they believe the public has a right to know. The White House has already condemned the site and accused it of putting the lives of military personnel at risk. The site’s founder defends it, saying the information was old enough to be of only ‘investigative’, rather than ‘operational’ significance, and that information is vetted before being published.

What the correct balance is between ‘need to know’ and ‘right to know’, I’m not sure, but I do go slightly cold at the thought of a random bunch of people sitting round a piece of web editing software making the decision, given that they don’t necessarily have access to all the information. Then again, even with (allegedly) all the information, those making the on-the-ground decisions don’t have the best track record, so maybe it’s not as bad as it seems.

Either way, wiki is proving to be a highly productive word, and its reach is steadily growing. Wikipedia alone lists more than 80 wikis, ranging from aviation safety information (SKYbrary) to ancient Chinese board games (Go). And I’m sure there’s plenty more to come.

So, somebody please tell me when the word fine stopped being fine?

When exchanging greetings with friends, I used to reply to any enquiry as to my health as ‘Fine, thanks’. When I still lived up North, a wry ‘Mustn’t grumble’ would usually suffice. This does not seem to be adequate any longer. People have begun to come back at me with ‘Just fine?’. What does that mean?! Isn’t fine fine anymore?

In the 1990s I worked for a US employer and there, uttering the word fine in response to a ‘HEY! How are ya?’ was tantamount to sharing suicidal feelings with a colleague. When asked how he was faring, my boss would gush in excruciatingly jolly tones, ‘I’m doing just GREAT thanks!’.  I find nowadays that my standard response is similar: ‘Great, thanks … you?’. Vicki Hollett talked about the difference between British and American meanings of certain words last week.

The thing is that fine these days just seems to mean ‘Oh, OK I suppose’, and it has also developed other, even less positive connotations:

‘So you won’t be able to make our anniversary dinner because you have to work late again? … FINE!’ – a declaration of war if ever I heard one.

Why won’t fine do anymore? Philip Kerr’s recent series on Hooray and Boo words in MED Magazine seems to sum it up for me. This is the concept that certain words produce a very definitely positive or negative response in a reader or listener. Everything has to be big and extreme and elicit an ecstatic response – otherwise we are not truly engaged, not truly alive. Why feel just fine, when you can feel GREAT? I just wonder what made fine slip to the bottom of the acceptably-positive league table all of a sudden?

The African Americans have reclaimed this word in a most inspiring way. They have taken it right back to its loveliest meaning. Not for them does ‘you look fine’ mean ‘you look perfectly acceptable’. They mean ‘you look FINE!’: think fine fabrics; fine jewellery, fine wines, kind of fine. I think these chaps have the right idea and that we should follow suit and make fine FINE once again.

If anyone reading this has found any words in the Macmillan Dictionary that have slipped or slunk from one meaning in common usage to another, please feel free to add such comments below – it’s FINE with me!

American English month continues with a guest post by Denise Du Vernay. Denise has been teaching composition, literature, humanities, speech, and courses on The Simpsons for over ten years. She is co-author of The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with the Wisdom of Springfield (www.simpsonology.com). Denise lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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On the eve of its twenty-second season, The Simpsons deserves praise, not just for what it has done for television (you’re welcome, South Park and Family Guy fans), but it has also had an enormous effect on American popular culture and the English spoken in the United States. Several neologisms have become so ubiquitous that even non-fans of the show use words or phrases made popular by The Simpsons. They may not even realize that they have The Simpsons to thank for some of the things they say!

In linguistics, neologism refers to a newly coined term or meaning, and The Simpsons is to thank for many neologisms. Woohoo and d’oh, for example, were coined by The Simpsons through Homer. D’oh, an expression used when the speaker realizes he/she has done or said something stupid, is listed as a variant of doh in the OED, and two of the citations are attributed to The Simpsons. In the past years it has cropped up everywhere: it is often used on cable news networks in headlines and in error messages on popular websites. The expression woohoo is often used as a hashtag on Twitter to mark posts with a happy message. “Woohoo! As good as it gets!” appears when a user gives 5 stars to a business on Yelp.com. In several episodes, the word meh is used (to mean so-so), and its popularity has since taken off. In fact, the word is now included in some dictionaries with The Simpsons cited as the source.

It’s not just all about Homer. The writers of the episode “Lisa the Iconoclast” created the words embiggen (meaning “to make or become bigger”) and cromulent (meaning “fine, acceptable, legitimate”). In the following scene, two teachers are chatting at the back of a classroom during a film about the town’s founder, Jebediah Springfield:

Jebediah Springfield: [on film] A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
Edna Krabappel: “Embiggens”? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
Miss Hoover: I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.

Although cromulent and embiggen are not yet included in any standard dictionary, they are everywhere, frequently used by fans and non-fans alike. Many pop culture and encyclopedia sites, including aintitcool.com and Flickr, invite users to click small images in order to “embiggen” them and Tech Digest used it in a headline in May, 2009: “Embiggen Your iPod to 240GB and 42,000 Tracks.” A bookstore and art gallery called Embiggen Books is located in Queensland, Australia. The website for the Cromulent Shakespeare Company (Twin Cities, Minnesota) announces the company’s goal to “embiggen the Bard.”

Neologisms are often coined through blending (a blend is a new word created by combining two existing words together) and many new blends have been created by The Simpsons, including craptacular (a blend of crap and spectacular, from “Miracle on Evergreen Terrace”), which was used in The Wall Street Journal by journalist David Gaffen in September of 2008 (although he didn’t seem aware that he was using a blend already introduced by The Simpsons). Some other Simpsons-created blends that I hope have a future in American English are Euroific (a blend of European and terrific, from “Bart Carny”) and traumedies (a blend of trauma and comedy, from “Faith Off”). Chief Wiggum expects to be shot just days before retirement, saying that in the business it’s called retirony (which combines retire(ment) and irony and originates from “Homer vs. Dignity”).

Linguists have a lot to work with when looking at the ways The Simpsons uses language to create humor. Not just in its neologisms, as I’ve described, but also in its various examples of wordplay, including malapropisms (Homer is a known “xylophobe”*) and double meanings (in a bowling episode, newscaster Kent Brockman refers to Homer as a “local pinhead”**). The show provides layers in its humor and dialogue that makes a second (or third, or fourth) viewing of an individual episode not only fun, but rewarding, as we keep finding jokes we missed before. I’m grateful for the previous twenty-one seasons of The Simpsons, and look forward for the linguistic fun to come. What will the next Simpsons-inspired word added to the OED be? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Notes
* The word xyolophobe comes from Homer saying he supports the town’s “xylophobia” when he means xenophobia. His misuse of the word (and invention of a new one) causes both Ogdenvillians (neighboring townspeople) and xylophones to be banned from Springfield. (The episode is called “Coming to Homerica.”)
** Homer is called a pinhead, slang for a stupid person, by the newscaster. Because the episode is about bowling, this is a pun on bowling pins.

I feel I must begin this post by clarifying a couple of things. No, I don’t have a best mate called Tracey, and no, I’ve never in my life danced around my handbag in white stilettos in a nightclub. OK, glad we got that cleared up.

Non-native English speakers may be wondering what on earth I’m going on about, but the rest of you out there probably know exactly what I mean – the stereotypes that are associated with names.

As soon as someone hears your name, a whole slew of adjectives come to mind, some of them justified, some of them not. Introduce yourself as ‘Tristan’ or ‘Sebastian’ and people immediately think ‘wealthy’ and ‘privileged’, regardless of whether there’s anything to support that view. Tell someone your name’s ‘Kylie’, though, and they immediately think ‘working class’, simply because of the association with popular culture. ‘Sharon’, meanwhile, draws pictures of ‘party girl’ and ‘probably not that bright’ (much to my chagrin).

Sometimes these stereotypes can be simply amusing, other times downright misleading and annoying (consider the ‘not that bright’ one when you’re fresh out of college and trying to break into your chosen career!). Being named ‘India’ might mean your parents loved to travel, or even that you were conceived in India – it makes you sound exotic and perhaps a bit ‘hippyish’ – but if people automatically relate to you in that way, you could wind up feeling that no-one’s taking you seriously. (Even worse, if you’re called ‘Sky’ or ‘Storm’!) And just because your name’s ‘Kevin’ doesn’t mean you actually have to drive a Ford Escort with your name emblazoned across the top of the windscreen. How seriously is the salesman in the Ferrari dealership going to take you, once he finds out your name? All those zeros in your bank balance suddenly won’t matter a jot.

So, what words or stereotypes are attached to your name, and what’s the worst one you’ve ever been faced with (or, indeed, the funniest)? And how have you fought back against them? Years ago, a friend causally mentioned to me that I was ‘the most unSharon-like Sharon’ he’d ever met, so I decided the best way to beat the stereotype was to turn it on its head and just be as unSharonish as possible. It seems to have worked out OK – no-one’s ever that surprised at my dislike of nightclubs anyway!

Have you noticed how so much of the language of bureaucracy today is made up of abbreviations?  We’ve got quangos, NGOs, and any number of G-somethings (G7, G8, G20).  It’s getting to the point where you need a Dictionary of Bureaucratic Abbreviations just to be able to understand the News!

It’s all a little bit George Orwell-1984-Newspeak, and you could start to wonder if half of us even know what it is we’re talking about when we use these terms. Then again, maybe that’s the point; if we don’t know what the abbreviations mean, what chance is there that we’ll understand what the organisation/department does, and hence be able to challenge it, if challenging is what it needs? Perhaps the thinking is that if they blind us with incomprehensible jargon, we’ll get so fed up, we’ll just let them get on with it.

For example, not only do we have the G7, G8 and G20, but it turns out there’s also been a G22, a G33 and probably others as well. And the difference between them? Well, the latter two were the precursors to the G20, the group of international financial bigwigs seeking to reform the global monetary system, and the different names just reflect the changing composition of the invitation list. The G7 is a get-together of the finance ministers of the seven major industrialised nations (prior to that, it was, unsurprisingly, called the G6), while the G8 is a meeting of heads of government of those seven nations, plus Russia. Are you confused yet? Me too.

Elsewhere in government, we have PFIs (Private Finance Initiative) that perhaps go through the NAO (National Audit Office) to see whether or not they provide VFM (value for money). Maybe we’d be better off going for a PPP (Public Private Partnership), but that might raise some PQs (Parliamentary Questions). Then we just have to wait for the publishing of a PSA (Public Service Agreement). Perhaps at that point, they’ll call in an NDPB (Non-Departmental Public Body) to offer assistance. Who knows.

Or maybe they’ll just hope that one of the dozens of different types of NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) that now exist will step in and save the day. After all, you’ve got your BINGOs (Business Friendly International NGO/Big International NGO), your ENGOs (Environmental NGO) and your GONGOs (Government Operated NGO), not to mention the MANGOs (Market Advocacy NGO) and TANGOs (Technical Assistance NGO). Then of course there are the QUANGOs (Quasi Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation), the CSOs (Civil Society Organisation) and the CHARDS (Community Health and Rural Development Society).

I don’t know about you, but to me it’s all starting to sound like some kind of exotic recipe. It’s no wonder most of us just throw our hands up and tune out of the whole thing. Maybe we should just agree that anybody who overuses these irritating abbreviations is nothing more than a drongo…?

The Times recently carried a report on the Academy of English, an organization set up by the Queen’s English Society to “protect the language from impurities, bastardisations and the horrors introduced by the text-speak generation.”

Anyone who’s now cowering behind the sofa in fear and trembling of these text-speak horrors can safely come out and calm down by reading David Crystal’s Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, or reading his article here on the topic.

The extraordinary thing about this academy is that it is modelled (very loosely) on the Académie Française (and other European guardians of language purity). Yet history has demonstrated that such academies are largely powerless in the face of the real owners of the language – the users.

To take just one example: the French Academy sees the English word email as an unwelcome intruder, and decreed in June 2003 that the official French word is courriel. The decree was published in the Journal officiel, and says that e-mail is a foreign equivalent, and that the term courriel abolishes and replaces the (previously official) term courrier électronique.

Call me an old cynic if you like, but I thought I’d turn to Google to see what’s happening out there on the Internet. If you ask for courriel or courriels on .fr domains, you’ll find 9.46 million occurrences. However, a search for email or emails reveals 21.5 million occurrences, so two out of three French people who refer to email on the Internet seem to be ignoring the Académie and opting for the English (or should that be multinational?) email.

Back to the Académie Anglaise: they are quoted as saying that the other language academies “do not stop the language from changing over the years, but they do provide a measure of linguistic discipline and try to retain valid and useful new terms, while rejecting passing fads.”

Providing a measure of linguistic discipline is one thing, but rejecting passing fads? By definition, passing fads are rejected by the people who matter most – the users. Fads don’t pass because an academy decrees that they are passing fads; they pass because users of the language stop using them of their own accord.

The message, it seems to me, is fairly clear. Official bodies cannot dictate the way a language is used – language follows the will of the people who use it. And rather than look up to a self-appointed academy autocratically dictating the rights and wrongs of language use, we should look within our language communities to our teachers, lexicographers, and materials writers to provide descriptions that recognize and describe the range of the language and that allow for different registers in different contexts. The key to language use is appropriacy for a situation, not blanket decrees that outlaw words or structures at a stroke.

English morphology is famously simple. Most nouns have just two forms (dog, dogs), most verbs only four (walk, walks, walking, walked). By contrast, a regular Spanish verb can have 42 forms, while in Hungarian that can easily go up to 60 or more (see example verb here). And – since we are in South Africa month –  it is worth mentioning that some of the languages of that region (such as Zulu and Xhosa) have such complex morphologies that a verb or noun may have thousands of different forms. (I hope someone will correct me if this isn’t true.) But the apparent simplicity of English causes its own problems, one of which is that the same word form can sometimes be a noun, a verb, and an adjective (think of flash, sound, or tense). About five years ago, a book about punctuation became an unlikely bestseller in the UK, partly perhaps because of its clever title: Eats Shoots and Leaves. This comes from an old joke about a panda who goes into a restuarant and orders a meal. When he has finished he gets up, shoots the waiter, and walks out. The manager calls after him: “What do you think you’re doing?”, to which the panda replies: “I’m a panda – look it up”. Sure enough, the manager’s dictionary (not Macmillan Dictionary apparently) defines panda as: “A tree-dwelling marsupial of Asian origin, with distinct black and white colouring. Eats shoots and leaves.”

The problem can be especially acute in newspaper headlines, whose writers are fond of piling up large numbers of nouns – many of which could be verbs. It took me a while to work out what this story was about:

Chinese mine flood relatives fear toll cover-up

But it all makes sense once you realize that the only verb here is ‘fear’.

When the veteran British politician Michael Foot died earlier this year, we were reminded of one of the best newspaper headlines of this type. Long before he became leader of the Labour Party, Foot was appointed to run a European committee tasked with forming a policy on nuclear disarmament. The headline in the Times read:

Foot heads arms body

For some reason, the practice of making nouns into verbs seems to annoy linguistic purists, who often rail against the use of verbs such as impact or progress (or for that matter task, as used in the previous paragraph).  But this process has a long history in English and we may as well get used to the fact that many writers quite like verbing their nouns.

Could it be that the Macmillan Dictionary Blog has become a hotbed of nihilist political views? Are we seeing political apathy in extremis?

Nah.

Just want to whinge on about one of my old bugbears, namely, the misuse of the words hanged and hung.

One of the many embarrassing truths about our past is that Blighty used to have the death penalty. Not for us the pharmaceutical complexities of the ‘lethal injection’, nor the energy-spike-causing surge of the electric chair. No, cheap and (not particularly) cheerful was the way to go and the snappy little death sentence in the UK used to go like this:

“[full name of prisoner] you will be taken hence to the prison in which you were last confined and from there to a place of execution where you will be hanged by the neck until you are dead and thereafter your body buried within the precincts of the prison and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul”.
(‘The sentence of death’ on www.capitalpunishment.org)

Notice the word hanged? This word is used very specifically in this context as the past participle of hang, yet many people use the word hung – a whole different continent of a word entirely!

The Macmillan Dictionary definition of hang is: ‘to kill someone by putting a rope around their neck and making them fall’ and its past participle is listed for this one sense, as hanged, not hung. For all other senses of hang, the regular past participle is hung.

Part of the confusion may lie in the fact that, interestingly, hanged is only used when the intention of the act is to actually kill someone by putting a rope around their neck and suspending them above the ground. Being hung, drawn and quartered describes what is actually an act of torture, where the hanging up of a person by a rope is merely for convenience and is certainly not meant to kill the person, as then their death might be quick and painless, rather than long and agonizing.

OK, I might be running away with myself a bit here but for me, this irregularity, this idiosyncratic past participle is one of the things that makes the English language so beautiful. It certainly doesn’t make it easy for learners of the language but at least they can feel they have really mastered this complex tongue when they are able to use this irregular little blip – and perhaps even correct native English speakers who wrongly use hung in this context. After all, if people are allowed to continue with incorrect usages of the words too often, then those incorrect usages themselves become the norm.

Britain’s general election looms large upon our social, political, economic and media landscapes and I cannot help smirking every time I hear the term hung parliament. Perhaps there are those who have only heard hung used where hanged should have been and wonder if we are planning a horrible end for the three men who would be king.

The UK is in the grip of election fever, and elections – like wars – always give rise to new words and phrases. Like the last US presidential election, this is the first major British one of the Web 2.0 era. This adds to the unpredictability of it all, and ensures that anything interesting spreads at the speed of light. One effect is that the parties have almost abandoned the use of big posters: earlier in the campaign, every new poster that was unveiled was almost instantly ‘vandalized’ and circulated on the net with a new (and uncomplimentary) caption.

The campaign’s biggest gaffe came when Prime Minister Gordon Brown had a friendly chat with a member of the public, then drove off muttering that she was a ‘bigoted woman’ – not realizing that his radio microphone was still on. Within seconds, the clip went viral, and a new word was born: bigotgate (by analogy with Watergate and all the other –gate words). As I write, there are over 200,000 instances of bigotgate on Google.

The other big story is that (surprisingly) this is the first time there have been televised debates between the party leaders. The TV stations have a group of floating voters watching the debate, equipped with electronic voting pads. As each leader speaks, the audience reaction can be monitored from minute to minute, and the results are displayed in the form of a line that wriggles up and down in response to positive or negative feelings: this is called the worm. You can see the worm in action in this video:

As a consequence of the debates, the election is no longer a two-horse race. Until now, British elections (just like those in the US) have been dominated by two major parties. The newspapers even talk about Buggins’ turn – the idea that when one party has been in power for some time, the other one deserves a go.

But this time it’s different. Nick Clegg, leader of the third-largest party (the Liberal Democrats), and up to now not very well known, took part in the debates on equal terms with the Labour and Conservative leaders. The general view was that he performed well, and suddenly the race was wide open. Some papers talked about Cleggmania (echoing the Obamania that swept the US in 2008), while supporters said they were in Cleggstasy (a political nerd’s version of ecstasy). The big question now is whether the election will lead to a hung parliament – the most frequently looked-up word in the Macmillan Dictionary during the past week or so. The two largest parties issued dire warnings about the dangers of a coalition government, so supporters of the idea gave it a less scary name: not a ‘hung’ parliament but a ‘balanced’ parliament. For once, the experts don’t have a clue what will happen, and parliament may already be hung by the time you read this.

This week’s BuzzWord is robocall, and takes a look at those irritating automated phone calls that have become a feature of so many sales, marketing, and now electoral campaigns in recent years. I should warn you, though, I’m about to get on my soapbox; I absolutely hate automated phone calls.

To my mind, there is no more intrusive method of selling – whether it be a product or a philosophy – than to phone someone up, uninvited, and start wittering on. It’s the one time I feel perfectly justified in being rude enough to hang up, since the caller has already been rude enough to force his/her way into my home to try and get me to buy something I’ve never expressed the slightest interest in.  Do they really think I’m going to shell out my hard-earned cash – or indeed my political allegiance – just because some faceless, disembodied voice exhorts me to? I don’t think so.

The only defence against this tide of irritatingness (I know, I’m making up my own words now, but you get my drift) is to sign up to the Telephone Preference Service. UK-based companies (and anyone calling on their behalf) are required to check the TPS lists, and refrain from calling anyone who’s registered. Callers from overseas firms, however, are not thus restricted, and they can still get your number and dial you up with annoying messages about cruises or holiday homes. Being ex-directory helps not a jot, and there’s very little you can do to stop these foreign calls (I know, I’ve tried).

And now – picture me, head in hands, in despair – the method is being used in the political arena too. Don’t think it’s just in the US though – all of the major political parties in the UK have been caught at it in the past few years (take a look here, here and here), though thankfully they seem to have omitted this from their toolbag for the current election campaign.

There is light at the end of the tunnel though. If the very thought of all this has the same effect on you as it does on me, take a look at this clip – it’ll cheer you up no end!