The English language is alive and well—and changing. And that is probably agood thing, as much as grammarians like me resist some of these changes. However, this post isn’t about grammar and punctuation “rules” changing (they really don’t change that often); it is about words themselves adapting to societal changes. Think about George Orwell’s 1984: Big Brother was trying to make the language smaller because the fewer ways we have to express ourselves, the fewer feelings, thoughts, and opinions we can express. And that is a bad thing.
Words and their uses change in many ways. Here are just a few of those ways:
Some words retain their original meanings but take on new slang meanings.
Some words take on an additional part of speech.
Some words take on new technological meanings while retaining their old meanings as well.
Some words just find new, weird ways of being used.
Words with Slang Meanings
These examples are not actually new, but are slang definitions of common words:
epic: The usual meaning is “heroic or unusually majestic,” but you might come home from a party and describe it as being “epic.”
crib: It is where a baby sleeps, but it also means “where I live,” as in “Come see my new crib; it’s epic!”
ride: It still means what you think it does, but it also refers to “my car,” and usually a nice one. “Check out my new ride.”
blast: While it still means an explosion, it also means a severely fun time. “That epic party was a blast!”
Words with New Parts of Speech
Some adjectives have been turned into nouns (mostly in advertising), and some nouns have been turned into verbs.
Use Nutella and you are “spreading the happy.” (Well, who wouldn’t agree with that one!) But what is “the happy”?
Buy makeup at Sephora and you are “celebrating your extraordinary.” Notice on this one that if you mistakenly use you’re instead of your, it all makes sense, and extraordinary is back to being an adjective!
Connect to the internet with AT&T and you are “rethinking possible.”
We used to have friends. Now we friend people, usually on social media. Many times we don’t even know these people.
A network used to be something we watched on television. Then it was something we belonged to. Now we actually have to get up and do it!
New Tech/Social Media Meanings
Many words have taken on additional meanings because of social media and technology.
Whenever someone talks about their data being stored in the cloud, I still look up at the sky and imagine a big cumulus cloud filled with “stuff.” But the cloud is just a big room filled with computers.
Bandwidth has always been a technical term, but now it applies to humans too, as “I don’t have enough bandwidth to remember all this information.”
Catfish isn’t just dinner anymore. It is making up a fake profile and pretending you are who you aren’t on social media.
I might take a swipe at you. Or I might just swipe my credit card through a machine, that is, if it doesn’t have a chip. And I don’t mean potato chip.
Remember when a troll was a little funny-looking doll with wild orange hair? Well, now you can be trolled by a troll who is posting things to you on social media to cause a reaction.
A tag gives you the price and washing instructions for your new purchase. It’s also a kids’ game. But now it is also a verb meaning to identify someone on social media.
Your car was blocking my driveway. But now I am blocking you on Facebook because I don’t like your opinions.
Footprints used to be simple, although they could be used as evidence in crimes. Now they are ecologically significant as well.
Your prominent nose used to play a big part in your profile. Now your profile tells more about you than your nose and chin.
We never used to want to catch anything viral. Now we all want to go viral.
If you get tired of all this newfangled language, all you have to do is unplug for a while. And I don’t mean the toaster.
And a Couple of Weird Things
We may have learned in elementary school not to begin a sentence with because. Of course, that isn’t even true. The teacher was just trying to prevent us from writing a sentence fragment (Because I said so.). Now, because has taken on a whole new weirdness: I am tired because homework. What???? Aren’t there some words left out there?
“It’s a thing” is now a thing. (I hear this particular “thing” comes from the television show The West Wing, which I never watched, so I don’t know.) Yup! Avocado toast is “a thing” now.
(P.S. The Oxford English Dictionary is updated quarterly, with over 1,000 words added each quarter. So if you don’t like the words, wait three months!)
Next week’s blog post will be the second part of this two-part series of weird ways with words. Check out some other posts about weird words: Wait on This I Could Care Less and Other Such Things and the Weird and Wonderful Words Series.
I am happy to present to you a guest post by Jags Arthurson . . .
I love words. Not just the meaning of words but their etymology: where they came from; how they evolved; how their meanings, sounds, and rhythms have changed with changing culture and social mores. Words tell us so much about how times and thinking have evolved. For example, think of all the words earlier generations used that are no longer acceptable or “politically correct.” And swear words—the worst words we can utter—lose their impact and soften over time. “By Our Lady” (absolutely obscene in the Middle Ages) became “bloody” (still quite risqué when I was 11 and caned for using it), now so mild as to be almost acceptable in front of children.
Every concept needs words to express it and without the words simply cannot exist. The Sami people of Lapland, the so-called “Eskimos of Europe,” have nearly ninety words for snow. They need these in order to survive. We get by with snow, sleet, slush and a few others, but they need to be able to tell each other when snow is safe to walk on or if it will swallow a sled and team in an instant. Will it allow fast passage? Or cling to the runners, dragging on progress and tiring the reindeer? (Try Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg.)
On the other hand, giving certain meanings to words can control the way we think. There are people in Africa who physically cannot tell the difference between certain shades of blue and green … because they use just one word to describe all those colours. This idea is explored in some detail in George Orwell’s 1984 when Big Brother changes the meaning of words on an almost daily basis in order to control the thinking, and therefore behaviour, of the people.
And if you think you are immune, here is a perfect example:
In Europe we have a bird, the European Robin, Erithacus rubecula. “Robin Redbreast”—usually depicted standing on a snow-covered log—adorns Christmas cards across the globe, even in countries that have never seen a living example of the creature.
Ask anybody, from the tiniest tot to a grown adult, to draw one or colour in an outline, and the first colour they will reach for is scarlet. Everybody knows the colour.
So red are the chest feathers of this bird that there are folk stories from across Europe telling how this colour arose, mainly involving the blood of Christ during the crucifixion.
When the Victorians introduced the world’s first national postal delivery system, the delivery boys’ uniforms included a crimson waistcoat and they were immediately nicknamed “Robins.”
In Latin rubecula indicates “red.”
But there is a problem because the breast of the European Robin is not red—it’s orange! Even people who see these birds on an almost-daily basis will insist this statement is incorrect, and the breast is red. Shown a photograph as proof, they may suggest there was something wrong with the development process, or the film, or the camera … anything except that they might have been misled, or have misled themselves, all these years. Okay, have you just Googled “European Robin”? Were you surprised that I am right? Proof of the power of words.
So how did this strange situation come about?
The problem is that the bird has existed alongside man for tens of thousands of years, but the word orange didn’t enter the English language until the sixteenth century. Until then there was “red” and variations of “red.” The nearest the language had to orange was “yellow-red” (geoluread—geh-olloo-reh-ahd—in Old English). But “Robin Geoluread-Breost” doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?
The word orange probably originated as the name of the fruit in Sanskrit or Tamil, arriving in Europe via the Arabic naranj (they’re all very similar to modern Spanish’s naranja). When the Europeans acquired the “yellow-red” fruit, they started using the name to describe the colour.
But wait a minute. How did naranj morph into orange? By a process called “rebracketing” or “wrong word division,” and it’s easy to see how “a naranj” became “an aranj” and finally “an orange.” This process was also seen when, for example, a napron became an apron, or in reverse when an eke name (literally an “also name”) became a nickname.
But orange presented another difficulty to the English language in that it is one of the few words for which there is not a perfect rhyme. But on that score I think we might also have struggled with geoluread too.
Jags Arthurson
Jags Arthurson is the pen name of a Brighton, UK writer. Jags has been a research chemist and company director. He has lived and worked in over 40 countries. His acclaimed first novel, the crime thriller Pagan Justice, is available on Amazon with all proceeds going to charity.
We know what a verb is. And we know that a phrase is a group of words, usually a small group. So a phrasal verb is a verb that is more than one word. Usually it is a verb followed by a preposition:hand out. Well, that isn’t quite right because handis a noun. But when paired without,it becomes a verb. You can also pairhandwith in, off, over,and toand voila! You have a verb. Most phrasal verbs, however, are verbs paired with prepositions — or what seem to be prepositions. Actually, they are often referred to as adverbs, not prepositions.
A preposition is generally thought to be part of a prepositional phrase: preposition+article (usually)+noun or pronoun:
In any case, a verb that contains more than one word is a phrasal verb. And many phrasal verbs are also nouns. However, when you make a phrasal verb into a noun, it usually becomes one word, and that is where many people mess up. I see phrasal verbs written as one word, when they should be two. It is the noun that is one word. It is not as common that I will see the noun written as two words. Here are some examples of phrasal verbs and the nouns they become:
by Arlene Miller, The Grammar Diva
Here we go with Part 3 of commonly mispronounced words: L through R
Here are Part 1 and Part 2 if you didn’t read them.
Liable –This word has three syllables and in legal terms means obligated. Libel has two syllables and is a defamatory statement.
Library –An oldie but goodie! It is a little hard to put in that first R, But it isn’t liberry.
Mauve– This is a purplish color and it does not rhyme with stove. The au is pronounced like the o in odd and like the au in slaughter.
Meme– Invented by a British scientist in 1976, it rhymes with seem, and is not pronounced mee-mee, may-may or mem.
Mischievous – This is my pet peeve of mispronunciation. It is neither spelled nor pronounced as mis-CHEE-vee-us. The word has three syllables. There is no I in the last syllable, and the accent is on the first syllable. So many people pronounce this incorrectly and tell me I am wrong when I tell them so. Rachel Maddow pronounced it wrong on her show this past week, and I almost blew a gasket.
Niche – It comes from the French. Some people (wrongly) go for a French sound and say ni-chay. Others go for a super Anglican pronunciation and say nitch. The preferred pronunciation is neesh in most dictionaries. However, nitch has become so common, it is preferred by other dictionaries.
Often – Pronouncing the t is officially a no-no, according to Merriam-Webster.
Nuclear –Another oldie but goodie. At least four presidents (Bush, Clinton, Carter and Eisenhower) have messed it up and said nucular. Switching the adjacent sounds is a linguistic phenomenon called metathesis.
Prelude – The first syllable doesn’t sound like pray. The correct pronunciation is prel-yood.
Pronunciation– I think this is a weird one. The verb is to pronounce. However, when it becomes a noun, the o gets left out.
Regime – Doesn’t sound like RUH-geem. The correct pronunciation is RAY-geem.
Want to brush up on your grammar? Check out my books on amazon or goodreads.
BY ARLENE MILLER, The Grammar Diva
Motherhood: All love begins and ends there – Robert Browning, English poet, 1812–1889
Whether it’s Mother’s Day, Mothers Day, or Mothers’ Day (it appears to be Mother’s Day), welcome to our annual Mother’s Day post. Some facts about Mother’s Day: 1 Mother’s Day is celebrated on various days and in many parts of the world—most commonly in the months of March or May. For example, in Egypt, Mother’s Day is celebrated on March 21, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. 2 In the United States, the celebration of Mother’s Day began in the early 20th century. 3 In 1908, the U.S. Congress rejected a proposal to make Mother’s Day an official holiday. 4 By the early 1920s, Hallmark Cards and other companies had started selling Mother’s Day cards. 5 By 1925, carnations had become associated with Mother’s Day, and the American War Mothers raised money by selling carnations. Wearing a colored carnation meant that a person’s mother was living. A white carnation indicated that a person’s mother was deceased. 6 In 2015, 26.4 was the average age in the United States for first-time mothers. 7 In its early days, people observed Mother’s Day by going to church and writing letters to their mothers. 8 More people purchase fresh flowers and plants for Mother’s Day than for any other holiday except Christmas and Chanukah. 9 In 2018, the National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates that U.S. consumers will spend $23.1 billion celebrating Mother’s Day. 10 Each shopper will spend an average of $180 on Mom. 11 Most consumers will give cards (77%) and flowers (69%) to their mothers or take her out to eat (55%) in 2018, but more money will be spent on jewelry ($4.6 billion) than any other category, according to the Retail Foundation. 12 According to the Insure.com 2017 Mother’s Day Index, the various tasks moms perform at home would be worth $67,619 (up from $65,523 in 2016) a year in the professional world.
