The Wall Street Journal has an article about the lack of apostrophes in US place names titled "Theres a Question Mark Hanging Over the Apostrophes Future." (Reading this makes me apoplectic.)

The U.S., in fact, is the only country with an apostrophe-eradication policy. The program took off when President Benjamin Harrison set up the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. By one board estimate, it has scrubbed 250,000 apostrophes from federal maps. The states mostly—but not always—bow to its wishes.

An apostrophe, the argument goes, implies private ownership of a public place. When names appear on maps, "they change from words having specific dictionary meaning to fixed labels used to refer to geographic entities," the names committee explains in its statement of "Principles, Policies and Procedures."

Ack! The horror!

Thanks to copy editor Jesse Vernon for the link.

From a paean to etymologist Gerald Cohen over on Tablet:

His first major endeavor in this field, beginning in 1976, was a seven-year effort to clarify the origin of shyster. After he had begun his research, Roger Mohovich of the New-York Historical Society drew his attention to newspaper articles in 1843 about the Tombs, the city prison. Editor Mike Walsh denounced scammers who took prisoners’ money by pretending to be lawyers who would get them out. One of the scammers who actually knew something about the law disparaged his rivals by calling them shisers, British criminal slang for worthless people. (It comes ultimately from the German word for excrement.) Walsh misheard it as shiseters, and a new word was born.

In day-to-day talk, I enjoy calling people—even non-attorneys—shysters. Now I can do it with the confidence that "shyster" doesn't just mean "bad lawyer," it means shithead in general.

A slightly more direct version from the Online Etymological Dictionary:

"unscrupulous lawyer," 1843, U.S. slang, probably altered from German Scheisser "incompetent worthless person," from Scheisse "shit," from Old High German skizzan "to defecate."

I always thought "skeezy" was a mashup of "skanky" and "sleazy," but now I wonder if it has some roots in "skizzan."

"If you see the word 'comprise,' it's pretty much always wrong. Unless it's Dave Segal."

From SMBC

Do you say it like a common, American "Ah-muj" or a pretentious, Frenchy "Oh-majsh"? Here's what Merriam-Webster says. Thank Christ.

From the Onion: 4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence

NEW YORK—Law enforcement officials confirmed Friday that four more copy editors were killed this week amid ongoing violence between two rival gangs divided by their loyalties to the The Associated Press Stylebook and The Chicago Manual Of Style. “At this time we have reason to believe the killings were gang-related and carried out by adherents of both the AP and Chicago styles, part of a vicious, bloody feud to establish control over the grammar and usage guidelines governing American English,” said FBI spokesman Paul Holstein, showing reporters graffiti tags in which the word “anti-social” had been corrected to read “antisocial.”

Two things: One, we are Chicago Manual all the way, and we regularly graffiti other newspapers' alleyways with snide comments about the Oxford comma. Two, that "4" should really have been spelled out (i.e., "four"), both because it's less than 10 and because it is the first word of a headline. Or is that part of the joke, Onion? To torture the copy editors who read the article?

This has made me happy all day: "Not my problem" in Polish is "nie moj cyrk, nie moje malpy." Literally "not my circus, not my monkey."

— Howard Tayler (@howardtayler) October 24, 2012

Love that expression.

Sternutation. It jumped out at me from a dictionary while I was looking for the etymology of "staunch." (I know, I'm a dork.) Do you know what it means?

Definition after the jump.

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Hot dog. The OED cites the first usage in 1892: "The ‘hot dog’ was quickly inserted in a gash in a roll, a dash of mustard also splashed on to the ‘dog’ with a piece of flat whittled stick, and the order was fulfilled." Etymonline.com says the name "is said to echo a 19th century suspicion (occasionally justified) that sausages contained dog meat."

Liberty. That one's easy—comes from the Latin liber, or "free." It is, of course, related to "liberal," which has been deployed as praise and as pejorative over the centuries, but first appeared in the mid-14th century to mean "selfless" and "noble" and "abundant."

As Ambrose Bierce wrote in his Devil's Dictionary: "Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."

The OED cites the first usage as a 1384 translation from 2 Corinthians: "Forsooth where is the spirit of God, there is liberte."

Fireworks. The OED points to the first usages, in the first years of the 1600s, as broad: military, pyrotechnic, and even "tobacco smoking." But Etymonline.org says about "fire": "PIE [Proto-Indo-European, the common ancestor to languages as diverse as Celtic, English, Sanskrit, and Kurdish] apparently had two roots for fire: *paewr- and *egni- (cf. L. ignis). The former was 'inanimate,' referring to fire as a substance, and the latter was 'animate,' referring to it as a living force." Fire is alive!

America. You know this story—the navigator Amerigo Vespucci and all that. But where did "Amerigo" come from? Etymonline.com says: "The name Amerigo is Germanic, said to derive from Goth. Amalrich, lit. 'work-ruler.'" The origins of our national name are surprisingly boring. (Or, for the Marxists in the house, unsurprisingly labor-oriented.)

Freedom. Our liberty comes from Latin, but our freedom comes from the Old English freodom, which comes from the Proto-Indo-European prijos, meaning "dear" or "beloved."

Etymonline.com says of prijos: "The primary sense seems to have been 'beloved, friend, to love'; which in some languages (notably German and Celtic) developed also a sense of 'free,' perhaps from the terms 'beloved' or 'friend' being applied to the free members of one's clan, as opposed to slaves..."

And a note on freedom from the old storyteller Utah Philips (while he was talking about the IWW's Spokane free-speech fight of 1909):

The state can't give you free speech, and the state can't take it away. You're born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free...

Happy freedom, everyone.

From the NYT's Draft blog, an article that won my heart when, in the first paragraph, it used the words "bibliomancy" and "malapropism" and then made a Princess Bride reference. It also contains the phrases "lexical dark matter" and "laggard lexicographers." It's a good read and a good reminder that dictionaries are meant to reflect language, not the other way round.

Scholars recently analyzed more than five million digitized books, about 4 percent of all the books ever printed. Publishing their findings in Science, the researchers discovered that, by their estimation, "52 percent of the English lexicon—the majority of the words used in English books—consists of lexical 'dark matter' undocumented in standard references."

Also: "Since editors at most traditional dictionaries won’t include a word until they see published evidence of its use, holding off on using a word just because it’s not in the dictionary can actually delay its inclusion."

And that concludes our daily word nerdery. You're welcome.

The New Yorker asked which one single word should be eradicated from English, and lots of people answered. Some popular candidates:

· literally (we should keep this one, but misuse should be punishable by death; we recently got a pitch for a story that said, "The conference was literally mind blowing"—um, NO, BUT TOO BAD IT WASN'T)
· actually (should also be kept, but people should cease overuse [cough PAUL CONSTANT cough])
· awesome (again, overused, and almost always used outside its real meaning, but doesn't it always make you feel good—maybe a little dumb, but good?)
· moist (a perenially unfavorite and amply discussed at the link above)

The winner/loser is after the jump (in case the post at the link is too long for you to read—it's at the end of it).

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"Fun" originally meant "cheat."

fun (n.)
"diversion, amusement," 1727, earlier "a cheat, trick" (c.1700), from verb fun (1680s) "to cheat, hoax," of uncertain origin, probably a variant of M.E. fonnen "befool" (c.1400; see fond). Stigmatized by Johnson as "a low cant word." Older sense is preserved in phrase to make fun of (1737) and funny money "counterfeit bills" (1938, though this may be more for the sake of the rhyme).

Here, according to Google, is where you can have "fun" in Seattle:

• goog

If you're having trouble having fun, you might try the suggestions on this list of "how to have fun." Step four is: "Use a time-planning tool to plan activities for different days."

That, however, does not sound fun.

Our man in Thailand (formerly known as our man in Vietnam) sent a photo of a newspaper ad that contained a word I hadn't seen before: orchiectomy.

• c.

So how did "orchid" and "testicles" get so close? Bam!

orchid

1845, introduced by John Lindley in "School Botanty," from Mod.L. Orchideæ (Linnaeus), the plant's family name, from L. orchis, a kind of orchid, from Gk. orkhis (gen. orkheos) "orchid," lit. "testicle," from PIE *orghi-, the standard root for "testicle" (cf. Avestan erezi "testicles," Arm. orjik, M.Ir. uirgge, Ir. uirge "testicle," Lith. erzilas "stallion"). The plant so called because of the shape of its root. Earlier in English in Latin form, orchis (1560s), and in M.E. it was ballockwort (c.1300; see ballocks). Marred by extraneous -d- in attempt to extract the Latin stem.

Bastard, retard, dastard, dotard... where did all these insulting "-tard" words come from?

First, let's dispense with "leotard," which came from Jules Léotard, a trapeze artist from Toulouse, France—it doesn't fit in with the rest of the words.

The Online Etymological Dictionary says "retard" comes from the Latin retardare, by way of the French verb retarder, which first appears in the 13th century. So how did it come be considered an insulting word?

There is, of course, the whole scientific-political debate about whether certain people should be regarded as "slower" and "behind" or simply differently abled. But there's a linguistic reason, too—lots of insulting nouns in the English language end with -ard. Again, from the Online Etymological Dictionary:

-ard
also -art, from O.Fr. -ard, -art, from Ger. -hard, -hart "hardy," forming the second element in many personal names, often used as an intensifier, but in M.H.G. and Du. used as a pejorative element in common nouns, and thus passing into M.E. in bastard, coward, blaffard ("one who stammers"), etc. It thus became a living element in English, e.g. buzzard, drunkard.

Obviously, this isn't the case with inanimate nouns like "custard" and "mustard"—but it tends to work with words that describe people. "Dastard" came along in the 15th century to mean "one who is lazy or dull," probably from a marriage of daze plus -ard. "Drunkard" (originally "droncarde") came along in the 1500s from a similar marriage of drunk plus -ard, and so on.

This...

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community. Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem.

Counterintuitively, it may have originated from a world meaning lower-class—the Dutch heiden, "rustic, uncivilized man," which was related to heathen. The first usage in the OED is from 1668, describing what sounds like an orgy for widows: "The Widows I observ'd . . Chanting and Jigging to every Tune they heard, and all upon the Hoyty-Toyty like mad Wenches of Fifteen."

And the online etymological dictionary says:

also hoity toity, 1660s, "riotous behavior," from earlier highty tighty "frolicsome, flighty," perhaps an alteration and reduplication of dial. hoyting "acting the hoyden, romping" (1590s), see hoyden. Sense of "haughty" first recorded late 1800s, probably on similarity of sound.

Maybe it just goes to show that in the old days, the peasants had more fun. And when the landlords started having more fun—and looking down their noses at their renters/peasants—the word switched to them.

Snopes says that the popular etymology—haut toit, French for "high roof"—is false.

I find lists like this fascinating. Hugo Lindgren, now editor of the New York Times Magazine, inherited a list of words, titled simply "Words We Don't Say," from his predecessor at a previous job. It's a list of words that the former editor "found annoying and didn’t want used in his magazine." For example, alphabetically:

AUTHORED
BIGS (meaning “prominent people”)
BISTRO (okay in restaurant reviews, but sparingly)
BOAST (meaning “have”)
CELEB
COMELY
COMFORT FOOD
DUO
DON (meaning “put on”)
DUBBED
EATERY

We do not have a physical list like this in our office, but they exist in editors' heads. For example, our managing editor, Bethany Jean Clement, is opposed to virtually all uses of the word "moniker." I would second that (but less ferociously), and include from the above list "dubbed" and "boast." We've had recent editing discussions about the use of the simple-but-sometimes-necessary word "great" in reviews (some people are pro, some are con).

The post containing the list asked readers which words annoyed them, and Lindgren went ahead and printed a list of all of them and hung that in his office below some skull-and-crossbones symbols for good measure. I love knowing other people's word-related pet peeves ("pet peeve" is one of mine, actually). I have a feeling quite a few people are adding "snowpocalypse" to theirs right now.