We are constantly monitoring the language to ensure that we keep an up-to-date record.  You can be a part of this enterprise by suggesting a word for our Open Dictionary. Every Thursday Laine Redpath-Cole picks a new entry and goes on about it for a bit. This week’s word is:

gender reveal (noun)

the practice of revealing the sex of your unborn child to friends and family, often at a party with a cake that is coloured pink or blue inside

The first video of a gender-reveal party was posted on YouTube in 2008.| My favorite gender reveal idea is this.|The culmination of the party is the cutting of the Gender Reveal cake by the expectant couple.

(Submitted from the United Kingdom)

At first I thought this was something that came out of the Caster Semenye debacle, but that’s gender verification.

As far as gender reveal is concerned, it just goes to show that for those who believe it is possible to have your cake and eat it, you’re truly on the right planet at the right time. The main issue with finding out the gender of your child before it’s born seems to be that it ruins the ‘surprise element’. By ruining the surprise element for yourself and all your circle, you take away something from the content of the communication immediately following a birth: ‘It’s a boy!’ or ‘It’s a girl!’; ‘OMG I can’t believe it, it’s a wee baby girl!’, ‘It’s a strapping young lad!’

We try to replace that element with a similar sort of excitement about ‘the name’. ‘We’re not going to tell you the name, it’s a surprise!’ Argh. Anyway, so there is a missing element of surprise and excitement and, therefore, attention for the new parents (babies don’t need to do anything for attention, you just can’t help it). In order to catch this missing element some fabulously go-getting Americans have come up with the idea of  ‘gender reveal’ parties. I’m finding it impossible to heave myself into describing all the sordid details of what a gender reveal party is here. This article covers it very well, I think. Basically: you can’t wait to find out – there’s a room to be decorated and paraphernalia to be bought – but you still want all the excitement of the reveal moment.

So, hey, the gender reveal party is a solution to a modern-day problem and who am I to pooh-pooh it? In fact, next time I’m pregnant I’m going to have many cakes and eat them all: I’ll have a fertility party (you know: we’re fertile, bring gifts!) then a fetus party (who can spot the human in this scan? Yay, bring gifts!), a gender reveal party (It’s a pink sort! Cry with joy and bring gifts!), a baby shower (bring gifts!) and a welcome party (meet us at the hospital, bring gifts… and champagne!). What do you think? Am I being too grumpy?

I guess what is more of interest to us on this blog is the choice of the name for the party, gender reveal. It’s horribly clinical. Imagine seeing it on an invite? Surely something cuter is available.

This post is published in the ‘Live English’ channel which provides content for our Global English crowd: international users of English.  Every month we ask our contributing bloggers a question about English and its quirks. The last question was about politeness and April’s question was about synonyms.

What’s your favourite synonym and why?

Personally, I sometimes like longer, softer Latin synonyms for often harder, shorter Germanic words. So “ubiquitous” instead of “everywhere” and “pulchritude” instead of “beauty”. The words flow off your tongue so easily and make a nice change from the more everyday word choices.

BJ Epstein - (lecturer in literature and translation at the University of East Anglia and author of a book on translating children’s books.)

My favourite pair of synonyms: donkey & champagne.

I was once surprised to hear myself say “The donkey IS the champagne!” This is probably rather hard to make much sense of, riven from its context, so let me explain …..

In his model of intonation, David Brazil introduces the term ‘existential synonymy’. While synonymy in general is a relationship of equivalence (or at least near-equivalence) between the denotations of lexical items as they might be recorded in a dictionary or thesaurus, existential synonymy is a relationship of pragmatic equivalence between items in a particular context of interaction.

I was once one of a bunch of people writing a coursebook in Germany. We used to have lengthy and at times productive weekend meetings, and on those occasions we generally stayed in the same hotel. One of the quirks of this hotel was that when you arrived you found a useless little plastic toy – toy? gift? trinket? decoration? novelty? ornament? I’m not sure – in your room. There was a range of maybe about half a dozen of these things, so on two consecutive visits you might get one you’d had before or you might get a new one.

Once, during one of our meetings, we were collectively trying to establish exactly how many of these different items there were. In the course of listing them, somebody said “There’s the donkey, and there’s the champagne …”, and I said “The donkey IS the champagne!” I’d suddenly remembered, you see, that one of these little objects was a donkey carrying a bottle of champagne (not a real one, unfortunately) on its back, so that ‘the donkey’ and ‘the champagne’ were one and the same thing.

No dictionary would ever tell you that ‘donkey’ means ‘champagne’ – or at least I hope not! – but once, at least, at a particular point in space and time, their trajectories crossed, and for a fleeting moment they became existential synonyms.

Jonathan Marks

I’ve always liked ‘oxters’, a word in Hiberno-English for ‘armpits’. Usually I hear it in the figurative phrase ‘up to my oxters’, which is synonymous with ‘up to my eyeballs’, more or less. Maybe a foot less! I just love the sound of the word.

Stan Carey

I am very fond of Yiddish words and particularly like mensch – it suggests a set of qualities that ‘man’ or ‘person’ doesn’t capture. Similarly schlep is a lot more evocative than its nearest synonym, walk. Can I be bothered to schlep down to the post office?  It’s raining and cold … That leads me to my favourite Yiddish synonym of them all. It’s not nice to kvetch or moan but it is a beautiful  word

Kieran McGovern

I don’t actually believe in synonyms. It’s the nature of language and communication that if we have two words, we’ll assign them different purposes. And, with enough context, I’d say that just about any two words could be used as synonyms.  When I rolled my eyes and said the weather was ‘wonderful’ today, it meant the same as ‘horrible’!

So, my favourite synonyms are antonyms.

Lynne Murphy

A few years ago I helped to compile and edit a learner’s thesaurus, organized in synonym groups. We lexicographers would work our way through these groups, considering in turn each set of words with similar meanings, and attempt to explain the differences in meaning and use between them. While I enjoyed working on this book immensely, I think it’s the closest I’ve come to ‘method lexicography’, analogous to ‘method acting’. It was difficult not to feel a bit low-key after spending a day with depressed, gloomy, demoralized, glum, despondent and dejected. Much better for my emotional well-being to become immersed for a while in calm, cool, relaxed, easy-going, laid-back, and so on. And there were times when I found the whole business curiously liberating. I remember the pleasure of marching off, not to mention storming, stomping, stalking and flouncing off, while all the time I was apparently sitting quietly at my desk, not saying boo to a goose.

Andrew Delahunty

My favourite instance of ‘synonymy’ in the spotlight has got to be the short exchange between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in the Woody Allen film, Love and Death.
Boris: Sonja, are you scared of dying?
Sonja: Scared is the wrong word. I’m frightened of it.
Boris: That’s an interesting distinction.
I love this because it’s funny, and because it is, indeed, an interesting distinction. For me, it raises a lot of questions: What criteria do two or more words need to meet to be considered ‘real’ synonyms? Why do we have synonyms? What is it that makes me uncomfortable with the idea of true synonymy?
Of course, in the context of this scene, the distinction and Sonja’s drawing of it, like much of what she says, is laughable. And I laugh every time I hear it. Maybe I’m laughing at myself at the same time? I do spend a lot of time trying to spot a difference between apparent synonyms such as scared and frightened, scary and frightening, frighten and scare, and scare and fright. It’s a relief to just sit back and laugh sometimes.

Diane Nicholls

 

One of the interesting things about English, and other languages too, for that matter, is that a relatively small number of words account for a large percentage of everything we read or hear (or say or write). The most frequent 100 words account for about 45%, and the most frequent 7,500 account for about 90%. These 7,500 words appear in red in our online dictionary, and are graded with stars into three bands.

One of the features of frequent words is that the more frequent a word is, the more likely it is to have lots of meanings, lots of different grammatical patterns, lots of collocates… Take take, for example. Our entry has 26 different meanings, and a lot of phrases too.

There’s a lot that you need to know about these frequent words, especially if you’re a learner of English, so it’s hardly surprising that the most frequently looked-up words are high frequency: time, get, make…

Over the last month, the most frequently looked-up low frequency word is albeit. It’s a strange looking word, and one of only a handful of words in English that end -eit. Some others are:

conceit /kənˈsiːt/
counterfeit /ˈkaʊntə(r)fɪt/
Fahrenheit /ˈfærənhaɪt/ (props to those who object that this is hardly an English word, though you can find it in plenty of English dictionaries).

There are three different pronunciations for the final vowels there, so how should we pronounce albeit? Is it

/ɔːlˈbiːt/?
/ɔːlˈbɪt/?
/ɔːlˈbaɪt/?

If you think that might be a trick question, you’re right. It’s none of those — it’s got three syllables and is pronounced /ɔːlˈbiːɪt/, being as it is a compression of all be it, which itself is a mangling of all though it be that. Apparently,  according to the OED, before it became fully synthesized there was also a past tense, all were it, which they support with a quote from Chaucer‘s translation of Boethius’s “De Consolatione Philosphiæ”: Al were it so þat sche was ful of so greet age. That Chaucer quote dates back to 1374, a mere 738 years ago, yet it doesn’t really exemplify the usage of albeit as a word which introduces a contrast or change of circumstance.

For a more illustrative example, here’s one from last Friday, in an article about the first wedding anniversary of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, (or Wills and Kate as they’re also known):

Where the couple, and their PR team, have been particularly successful, commentators say, is in projecting the image of a relatively ordinary pair, albeit one that has access to palaces, castles, glitzy red carpets and the odd butler or two.

As to why this particular low frequency word is so frequently looked up — frankly, I have no idea.

We are constantly monitoring the language to ensure that we keep an up-to-date record.  You can be a part of this enterprise by suggesting a word for our Open Dictionary. Every Thursday Laine Redpath-Cole picks a new entry and goes on about it for a bit. This week’s word is:

hat-tip (noun)

an acknowledgement by a blogger of someone who has brought something to the blogger’s attention

Now the “hat-tip” has long been a simple courtesy, not some kind of moral commandment; its omission from any citation is in no way the sort of punishable offence that failing to attribute any borrowed content would be.

(Submitted by anon from the United Kingdom)

Like in the old days when gentlemen used to tip their hats as a way of acknowledging each other, HT is one of those internet slang terms you use to describe briefly what you would be doing if you were visible to everyone IRL and performing an action …

We’re doing very well preparing for the time when we’re just heads. Body language will take on a whole new meaning. Where it now refers to the way we speak by using our body instead of words  to express our thoughts and feelings, I think the definition will change in the future. Something like:

Body-language: the language that came into being as we gradually and then completely lost the need for a body. Body-language (also known as bondage) is the remnant language that describes physical actions we would have performed in the past in response to sensory stimuli. For example, ROFLMAO (rolling on the floor laughing my ass off) used to mean literally rolling around on the floor in a pile of flesh, bones and appendages laughing in response to something funny.

Note: For literally please refer to the new meaning of literally which means ‘IRL‘  – it was not possible to laugh your ass off even when we had them. Well, it was possible to laugh your ass off when we had them … but only as part of a well-balanced diet with frequent exercise.

Note: For diet and exercise please refer to the old meanings of these two words.

Note: By ‘refer’ we mean: ask Siri.

And you thought dictionaries had no future.

milquetoast (noun)

a man who is timid and unassertive

The lack of masculine courage and willpower is quickly turning America’s men into milquetoasts. Where are the Patrick Henrys, the George Pattons, the Teddy Roosevelts, the Andy Jacksons, or the Harry Trumans today?

(Submitted from the United Kingdom)

My son is currently obsessed with eating food that makes him strong and avoiding food that makes him ‘die more quicker’. Although I’m impressed by this as a minimalist,  if extreme, dietary ethos, it’s challenging my knowledge of foods’ nutritional make-up. It also gets in the way of my desire to avoid thinking about shuffling off every time we have a meal. And then there’s all the philosophical questions that follow such as: Then why does daddy put sugar in his tea? Does he want to die more quicker? What do you mean death is random? Does that mean I could die NOW?! … Then, why can’t I have gin for breakfast? … oh no wait, that was me.

Anyway. This morning my son asked me if milk makes you stronger or makes you die more quicker. So, without wanting to get into all that homogenised v raw; organic v non-; skim v whole business; nor the claims of various diets for and against, I declared simply that milk does indeed make you stronger, and hoped to be spared. No rebuffs were made and the morning continued peacefully. One day though, the kid is going to come at me with Literature – I can feel it in my calcium-rich bones. Why, he will say, if milk makes you stronger is it almost always used metaphorically to insult male human beings for being weak, puny, cowardly and/or infantile? Had I not heard of the terms milk-livered, milksop, milquetoast (ok, but it’s pronounced like the two foodstuffs as is nicely illustrated in this example from Michael Quinion’s blog) and, do I not realise that milk-drinker is a terrible insult in the world of online gaming (apparently)?

Perhaps what he should do is mix his milk with blood. That takes the lily-livered element out of it, doesn’t it? And blood is what makes you ‘strong’ (ie manly) in some cultures. I think he may take to it. I’m not saying it’s anything more than coincidence, but my son does share a birthday with Bram Stoker (whose centenary is tomorrow btw), he also has a widow’s peak, a pair of unusually sharp incisors (milk teeth!) and has claimed to be nocturnal since the age of 4. And if he were a vampire, I’d be able to say those impossible words that all parents wish they could say to their children with guilt-free abandon: Don’t worry you’re not going to die. 

But I’m afraid his nature is too full of the milk of human kindness to take a bloody turn and so he must join the ranks of other mortal men who chuck milk on their cornflakes in the morning and balk at the thought of blood.  A toast to milk! And to courage and willpower for all. And to you, Bram Stoker.

Facebooking (noun)

doing any activity on FB social network: e.g. Videos, Photoshop, Chat, posts

In my free time I like reading , jogging and Facebooking.

(Submitted by Mara Rufino from Italy)

I got into a muddle recently when trying to explain to someone how I would be communicating some or other bit of information with them. I ended up saying something like: I’ll Facebook you, I mean, you know, I’ll message you … not … wall you. Can I say that? I mean I won’t write on your wall, I’ll … OMG. Breathe. I’ll send a private message to you via Facebook.

Verbing is a tricky business and we’ve covered it a lot. Here are some of the highlights:

Stan Carey wrote about the impact of ‘impact’ asking:

Impact is part of the core vocabulary of English, ranking as a three-star red word in Macmillan Dictionary. Yet it is subject to constant dispute and ire, appearing frequently in lists of pet peeves and inspiring lengthy discussions in usage dictionaries. Why is this?

Michael Rundell has written a bit on verbing:

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.

And, when talking about how words get into the dictionary:

In Kate Atkinson’s recent novel, Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), there’s an exchange between two of the characters. When one of them mentions a large sum of money, we read that Kelly, the other character, ‘suddenly meerkatted to attention’. Does this mean we have a new verb on our hands, to meerkat? Should it be added to the dictionary?

Finally, Jonathan Marks wrote a post entitled: Netting, texting, impacting and sheeting through the centuries. Ending:

Well, I’m shocked (I’m in a state of shock) to see how long this post has grown. Time to halt (time to call a halt). Finally, though, here’s another memento from Yorkshire, a sign by the roadside at the exit from a quarry in the Yorkshire Dales, reminding lorry drivers to secure their load of stone (the stone they’ve loaded) before setting off on their journey: Have you sheeted?

(sheet: noun 725, verb 1606: when Snow the Pasture sheets – Shakespeare, no less!)

As far as Facebooking goes,  I was on the bus a few weeks ago and overheard two elderly women (this is a true story) say farewell to each other in this sweet way:

“Ok then. Lovely to see you. I’ll give you a ring soon …”

“Wait, I don’t have your number. Do you have mine?”

“No, I don’t…”

“Just Facebook me then, love.”

“Oh yes, good, I’ll do that. I’ll Facebook you.”

Everybody’s Facebooking – please Facebook us your favourite verbed neologism on our new Facebook page (for logophiles only).

spanner (noun)

an offensive word for a stupid person

I never had any great love for Enid Blyton because the children in her books were always such insufferable spanners.

(Submitted from the United Kingdom)

It’s always good to learn a new word for “stupid”. Not that this one is particularly new – whenever there has  been a spanner in the works, that spanner invariably has a face … and a name. And when there’s a tool in the works it’s always a spanner. Tool is a wonderful alternative term for stupid and spanner takes tool to a whole new level – you could be forgiven for inferring that spanner, then, is a specific kind of stupid. “Tool? Tool’s too vague for what he is!” I particularly like to learn new words for stupid because I am completely unable to actually call someone stupid to their face. Stupid was absolutely not allowed in my household growing up and the taboo has remained, along with an echoing threat of soap in the mouth. We had to get creative with our insults as a result, but picked  garden over  garage with insults like: pumpkin head, banana bum (I know, weird, but shows, I think, an early attraction to alliteration), dirt face, pea brain.  My collection of insults has grown splendidly ever since that fertile beginning and I think if my parents could have seen this far ahead they would probably beg me to swear my allegiance to stupid for life.

Insulting others can be a hugely satisfying pastime, if done with creativity and taste. Shakespeare is a beacon of inspiration in the search for creative insults. He did some garden time too – but oh, what a magnificent gardener: Thou weedy shard-borne dewberry! And, [Thou art] not so big as a round little worm.  There’s a Shakespearean Insulter that will provide you with inspirational material in those dry times of insulter’s block.

One last thing about insulting: I think  that when it comes to insulting others, you can judge the severity you believe the insult to carry by asking yourself whether you’d be able to say it to your children. A good insulter must have a scale of severity by which to measure the force of possible offence so as to save the real corkers for true idiots and not waste them on momentary lapses by perfectly nice human beings.  It turns out that by this measure my tamest insult is ‘numpty’ – I even use it as an endearment, a harmless insult that seems to float like cotton wool towards the target rather than thud at it lethally like a a hammer to a head – I save that sort of thing for total ***************s.

If you’d like to leave your own choice insults in the comments below, that would be wonderful – but keep in mind that there are obviously some things we just can’t and won’t publish. So don’t be a pillock about it.

Here in Britain, we’ve been advised by a government minister to keep a jerrycan of petrol in our garages as a precaution against a proposed strike by the drivers of petrol tankers which threatens to leave most of our petrol stations dry.

A jerrycan is a kind of container for petrol, water, or other liquids, and the word jerrycan is one of only four listed in MED to begin with the sound /dʒeri/.

The other three are geriatric(s), gerrymandering, and jerry-built. So we have a total of four words whose first two syllables sound identical. Spelling suggests that there must be more than one etymology, but in fact all four come from a different source.

Geriatric comes from Greek, where the prefix refers to old age, and is one of those semi-technical terms in medicine like pediatrics and bariatrics  that are becoming more mainstream than they used to be.

Of the other three, two are clearly pejorative. No one wants to live in a jerry-built house, and no politician wants to be caught gerrymandering. It’s tempting to think that the prefix derives from Jerry, an insulting word for a German, which became common during World War Two. But in fact, it’s only jerrycan that has this etymology. That particular design of container was originally used in Germany, and was adopted by allied forces during the war. They could, I suppose, have called them Germancans, but they didn’t, and they’ve remained jerrycans to this day.

Gerrymandering goes back over a hundred years earlier, and emerged from an election incident in Massachusetts in 1812. OED points to this example from 1881 when giving the etymology:

In 1812, while [Elbridge] Gerry was governor [of Massachusetts], the Democratic Legislature, in order to secure an increased representation of their party in the State Senate, districted the State in such a way that the shapes of the towns, forming such a district in Essex [County], brought out a territory of singular outline. This was indicated on a map which Russell, the editor of the Centinel, hung in his office. Stuart, the painter, observing it, added a head, wings, and claws, and exclaimed, ‘That will do for a salamander!’ ‘Gerrymander!’ said Russell, and the word became a proverb.

And so to jerry-built. I wish I could offer a cast-iron etymology for this, but I can’t. The word has been around since at least 1869, and in 1884 it was mooted that Jerry referred to a building company on the Mersey, but this claim has not been substantiated.

Another possibility is that it is somehow related to the word jury, which occurs in the nautical term jury-rig – a temporary mast constructed to replace one that has been damaged or broken, and which thus has something makeshift about it. But that etymology too is uncertain. The jury, as they say,  is still out on that one.

Robin Hood tax (noun)

a very small (0.05%) tax on every speculative financial transaction made by banks; also called Tobin tax

The Robin Hood Tax is designed to hit only speculative, “casino” trading and not the high street banks used by the public.

(Submitted from the United Kingdom)

It’s been a taxing past few weeks for out-of-touch politicians. Nicolas Sarkozy may be introducing the Robin Hood tax in France … but his nickname Le President Bling-Bling is a better reflection of the celebrity president’s reputation. Bling, of course, stands in blindingly stark contrast to the austerity vibe that prevails at the moment and has done since, you know, that crisis  -  austerity was one of our top words for last year, along with occupy and inequality, so bling doesn’t fit in well here.

It has been suggested that Sarkozy is the Mitt Romney of Europe - the out-of-touch label is placed on both these men. Mitt Romney’s the regular guy who when asked if he follows the NASCAR like other regular guys replied that some of his friends are NASCAR team owners. And on this very day, to add to the sparkling line-up of out-of-touch politicians in a world currently defined by crisis, austerity, 99 per centers and bailouts – David Cameron and his Pastygate erupt into the media.

Would Robin Hood have eaten baked goods? I reckon so. You can imagine him and the Merry Men sitting round in that forest eating pasties while plotting their thieving from the rich to give to the poor  – laughing over Cameron’s porky pie about buying his last Cornish pasty from a bakery that has been closed for 5 years, plotting to steal Le President Bling’s bling and Ann Romney’s couple of cadillacs.

When he’s a grown man who works in a stable, would seem to be the answer.

The Macmillan English Dictionary defines a lad as: ‘a boy or a young man’ or ‘a man who does things thought to be typical of young men, for example drinking a lot of alcohol…’

Put the word stable in front of the word lad, however, and you could be talking about a man of any age whose job is looking after horses, especially racehorses. When,during the Cheltenham festival a few weeks ago, Conor Murphy won £1m on an accumulator bet on horses from the stable where he works, reports of the event had two striking features.

One was the general pleasure in his good fortune; the other was the fact that everyone concerned referred to him as a lad, even though he is clearly well past the age of majority (his age was variously reported as ‘in his forties’, 30 and 31). The headlines were almost unanimous in referring to him as a stable lad while his employer, the racehorse trainer, said:

It’s absolutely wonderful, he’s such a lovely lad.

or perhaps

I’m thrilled. He’s a lovely lad.

or even

He’s such a lovely lad, one of the nicest you could ever meet.

depending on which report you read. The BBC’s Clare Balding, meanwhile, tweeted:

The lad who looks after Finian’s Rainbow had a 5-timer on Nicky Henderson winners & has won £1 million!

As well as not necessarily being either young or given to rowdy behaviour, it seems that a lad may also be a lass, since a search of the Oxford English Dictionary entry for lad reveals the following, with a citation from a Dick Francis novel to back it up:

1c. A stable-groom of any age; also, a female one.
I called on the trainer, whom I saw almost every time I went racing. ‘Did you find Sandy Willes?… She’s one of my best lads.’

There is a female equivalent of stable lad – stable girl – and a gender-neutral term stable hand, which some newspapers used in their headlines. However, incongruous as it may seem to outsiders to refer to an adult man as a lad, this appears to be the preferred term in racing circles.

Mr Murphy’s piece of luck had another effect: in the week of 12th-18th March, lookups of the term stable lad in the online Macmillan English Dictionary increased almost  one hundred-fold compared to the previous week. Obviously I’m not the only person who was struck by this slightly odd use of lad.