October
2005 Archives
Words of Fakeitude or Error: esquivalience; ghost word; obsidian; Lucifer;
gruntled (demerit); copyright trap (honeytoken, canary trap)
Boo! for
Halloween: bugaboo; boomerang kid;
calaboose; boomslang; boohai; booboisie; boobocracy; boot hill
Words of Fakeitude or Error
Today's word, as defined in the New Oxford
American Dictionary ["NOAD"]:
esquivalience
1. the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities; the
shirking of duties: after three subordinates attested to his esquivalience,
Lieutenant Claiborne was dismissed.
2. an unwillingness to work, esp. as part of a group effort: Bovich
was chided by teammates for her esquivalience.
3. lack of interest or motivation: a teenager's esquivalience is not
necessarily symptomatic of depression.
[late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver, "dodge, slink
away."]
This entry is entirely fake.
Soon after NOAD's second edition was published last spring, the scuttlebutt was
that there was a made-up word among its e's. Word-Sleuths hunted, settled upon
'esquivalience' as the prime suspect, and then confronted editor-in-chief Erin
McKean.
Ms. McKean 'fessed up. NOED, she said, had deliberately made up 'esquivalience'
for its first edition and copied it into the 2nd as a trap to catch those
who might violate NOED's copyright. That is, if any other dictionary contained
'esquivalience', it could only have gotten the term by copying NOAD, not from
any use in the real-world use of that 'word'. Its inherent fakeitude is fairly
obvious, McKean said. We wanted something highly improbable."
This week we'll examine words or pseudo-words which, in one way or another,
involve or present error or 'fakeitude'.
[And by the way, 'fakeitude' is itself a fake 'word'.]
Ms. McKean give us one reason why a writer
might deliberately put an error in his/her work.Ή But of course, any such
errors usually arise from the writer's or printer's a slip-up. Thus, a 1934
Webster's dictionary had an entry stating dord (dτrd), n.
Physics & Chem. Density. But no such word
exists. It seems that during preparations an index card noted that the
abbreviation D or d means
"density". Somehow that card wandered from the
"abbreviations" workpile to the "words" pile. There it was
read not as an abbreviation but as a word, thus its D or d was read as Dord.
Such a mistaken word is called a ghost word a non-word that is
presented as being a word, in a dictionary or other work on words, due to the
author's error. Sometimes the term is used more broadly, to include errors
which are produced by novelists or other authors, or by the printer. However,
the above definition of 'ghost word' tracks the use by the philologist who
coined the term, in 1886.
In this class [of
philological literary blunders] may be mentioned (1) Ghost words,
as they are called by Professor Skeat--words, that is, which have been
registered, but which never really existed; (2) Real words that exist through a
mistake;
Professor Skeat
gave a most interesting account of some hundred ghost
words, or words which have no real existence.
Henry Wheatley, Literary Blunders
Wheatley also relates that when the
Inquisition forbade the words fatum and fata, one author simply
wrote facta and then, in his errata sheet, stated "for facta read
fata".
In general, dictionary-writer's errors such
as 'dord' remain dictionary curiosities. I know of no ghost-word that has
entered the language. But many errors by others do enter. We'll look at
a few examples.
[Digression: there's one ghost-word that may have entered the language. In old
print-styles the letter s could look very much like an f (see the
original title page of
obsidian a dark volcanic glass, formed by the rapid cooling of lava
Pliny tells us that this stone is named for the Roman Obsius, who found
a similar stone in
But if the stone is named for Obsius, why isn't it obsian (rather than obsidian)?
Simply because a scribe, copying Pliny's work, erroneously insered the -di-.
Forms both with and without -di- appear in early manuscripts of Pliny, and also
in English and French. In each case the form without -di- seems to appear
earlier. (1398: ye stoon osianus is y-rekened among kynde of
glas, and yis stoon is som tyme grene and som tyme blak and is clere and
bright.). But the form with the -di- has prevailed in English.
[Note: OED instead accounts for the -di- by claiming that the Roman name Obsius
had the alternate form Obsidius. But even the Compact OED adopts
the 'scribal error' theory. I know of no evidence that the gentleman's name had
two forms (can anyone supply?). "Two forms", it seems to me, is just
a convenient invention to explain the stone's name.]
Note: brown type in this post is a digression, but may be of interest
Two stars shine far more brightly than
anything else in the night sky (except the moon), and can even cast a very
faint shadow on a moonless night. They naturally drew attention, as do all
bright objects.
The one that concerns us appears only in the east and, more importantly,
appears only in the hours near the end of the night. Thus, it announces that
dawn is nearing well before the first glimmerings could be seen --- which is
rather useful when you have no clocks to provide that information. Accordingly,
as far back as Homer the Greeks had named the star it from their words for
"light-bringer" or "dawn-light bringer" (Odyssey 13: When
the bright star that heralds the approach of dawn began to show
). The
Romans named it with similar Latin.
The Latin name appears in
Now one could read this as simply, "Lo, how the mighty are
fallen." But a "fall from heaven" also suggests the story that
Satan is an angel who had fallen from heaven. The early Christians interpreted
Isaiah 14:12 as a parable of Satan's fall, and took the word Latin word "morning-star"
to be a name for Satan. Thus the name of a bright star became a name of Satan.
That term, as you may have guessed, is Lucifer.
Lucifer the Devil
I gloss over fascinating matters of astronomy, linguistics,
history and theology, but I hope to add some of them below. For example, who
misread the bible? Did Jerome himself read this passage as referring to Satan
(and use lucifer to mean Satan), or was that reading created by those
who came later?
"lucifer" continuation: astronomy: These two very-bright celestial objects are so bright that
they've been mistaken for an airplane or a UFO! During WWII
I've said that one of them appears in the east, in the hours just before dawn.
The other, reciprocally, appears only in the west, and only only in the early
evening.
Each of these will be seen nightly for several months, and then for a time no
longer appear above the night horizon, in a recurring cycles. There's nothing
unusual about this; many stars are seen, but then sink below the night horizon
for months, only to re-arise later in a yearly cycle. But the unique oddity of
our two very-bright stars is that their cycle is longer, about 584 days. During
that time the two stars never overlap: one appears for several months, and then
(after a interval where neither appears) the other takes its turn for a like
period.
Perhaps this oddity was the clue by which the Greeks ascertained that these two
stars are in fact the same object. In any event, they had reached this
conclusion by about 500 B.C.
This object today goes by the name of the planet Venus. I cannot say whether
earlier Greeks knew that the objects were planets, but even if they did,
Homer's usage shows that the word 'star' was nonetheless used.
'lucificer' continued -- linguistics #1: The morning star appears in the east in the morning. The Greeks
named it after its timing, calling it 'dawn bringer' -- the term Homer uses is Eosphoros.
But their name for the evening star refers not to its timing but to its
position: Hesperus, from their word for west. Why this discrepency? As
far as I know, no one has posed that question.
My theory is that for the evening star, timing was simply of no particular
importance. You don't need a star to tell you that day is about to end, for you
can tell that quite easily from the low position of the sun.
In contrast, at night there is no sun giving you a signal that the night is
about to end. So if a star gave that indication, that would be an important
fact about the star, and naturally the characteristic for which it would be
named.
gruntled pleased,
satisfied, contented. [The precise opposite of its original meaning.]
A grunt is the sound of a pig, or a human sound of disgust. How then did gruntled
come to have an opposite meaning? It comes down to misunderstanding a prefix,
which was added in one sense and then removed in another sense.
In English the double negative isn't impermissible in certain constructions
(such as "not impermissible"), and it means a positive; the
"not" negates the "im-". But that is a new development.
Until a few centuries ago English, like many other languages, freely allowed the double negative as an emphatic negative;
"not not" meant "very much not". Similarly, though the
prefixes dis- and de- can negate the root (disband, dishonor,
decapitate, deodorant), they can instead simply emphasize it, especially if
the root itself is already negative. Examples are distort, dissimulate
and disturb (meaning "to completely twist, pretend or
simulate, and make turbulent"), and denigrate, denude,
delinquent, despoil and define ("to
completely blacken, make nude, leave, spoil, and bound or confine").
The two dissimilar senses created confusion with today's word. From grunt
(a sound of dissatisfaction, or to make that sound) came the old word gruntle
(a small or frequent grunt, or to make that sound, that is, to grumble, murmur,
or complain). Around 1682 the dis- prefix was added to intensify the
word, and thus disgruntled emphasized the sulky mood and ill-humor.
But eventually "gruntle" fell out of use and was forgotten, so that
one who knows that dis- can be a negator might think that disgrunted
and gruntled are opposites. P.G. Woodhouse did exactly that in 1938,
re-creating gruntled as the opposite of disgruntled rather than a
less-emphatic synonym.
I could see
that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
P. G. Wodehouse, Code of Woosters
Gruntle has thus
reversed its original meaning!
(Sidebar: The word demerit has much the same history. Its
original Latin form meant "merit", with the prefix being for
emphasis. But "the prefix appears to have been taken in a privative
sense" (OED), and so in medieval Latin the word meant not
"merit" but "fault". The French equivalent word was for a
time used in both senses, which must have been highly confusing for the
French!)
Oddly, there seems to be no word for them. They were called
"Mountweazels" in The New Yorker magazine which exposed
'esquivalience', but no one else has used that name.* Perhaps the best term is copyright
trap:
It is in order to
avoid having to prove access that mapmakers will sometimes include a fictitious
geographical feature in their maps; if that feature (what is called in the
trade a "copyright trap") is duplicated in someone
else's map, the inference of copying is compelling.
7th Cir. Court of Appeals, in Bucklew v. Hawkins, Ash, Baptie & Co.
But as the quote indicates, that copyright
trap seems to be part of the lingo of map-publishing, not publishing in
general. Though many web-sites use the term more broadly, I've found only one
print-publication that did so. (Chicago Tribune, Sep. 21, 2005, discussing
'esquivalience')
Copyrights are not the only area where false or variant data can be used to
trap. For example:
honeytoken computer security: a database entry that has no one
has any proper reason to use or access. Hence, any usage signals improper use
of the database.
[In hospitals]
only certain authorized people have access to patient data. A bogus medical
record called "John F. Kennedy" is loaded into the database. [It] has
no true value because there is no real patient with that name. Instead, the
record is a honeytoken. If any employee attempts to access this
record, you most likely have an employee violating patient privacy.
Lance Spitzner July 17, 2003, on the web
canary trap: Clancy invented this term, but it does not seem to have been
taken up.
"What devil
is this Canary Trap?" "Well, you know about all
the problems CIA has with leaks. I came up with an idea. Each section [of a
report] has a summary paragraph, written in a fairly dramatic fashion. Each
summary paragraph has six different versions, and the mixture of those
paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of the paper. The reason the summary
paragraphs are sowell, lurid, I guessis to entice a reporter to quote them
verbatim in the public media. If he quotes something from two or three of those
paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who leaked it."
Tom Clancy, Patriot Games
*"Mountweazel" refers to a phoney
article in a 1975 encyclopedia, telling of photographer Lillian Virginia
Mountweazel, who died tragically "at 31 in an explosion while on
assignment for Combustibles magazine."
I like to have a special theme for
Halloween, the time for ghouls, ghosts and other things that sneak up behind
you and yell, "Boo!" What could be more appropriate than a theme of
'boo' words? Some even have a meaning that is appropriately chilling for
Halloween. For example:
bugaboo 1. a bogeyman to frighten children. 2a. a recurring or
persistent problem; 2b. a subject of anxious (and typically excessive)
concern
sense 1: For the cooped-up children of bomb-weary
Washington Post, Oct. 16, 2005
sense 2a: Every once in a while I thought I was catching on to the art
of writing a news story, yet, even when I felt I might be getting the hang of
it in terms of speed and efficiency, the top still seemed so terribly far away.
Efficiency was my special bugaboo.
Katharine Graham, Personal History
sense 2b: Everybody can't be as competent as you, my dear. We must help
the others. It's the moral duty of intellectual leaders. What I mean is we
ought to lose that bugaboo of being scared of the word compulsion
. It's not compulsion when it's for a good cause.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
sense 2a? 2b?
security has long been a bugaboo for
wireless information in the financial services arena
Michael Sisk, Bank Technology News, Oct. 2005
Your children have grown, and the last has
finally left the home and off to college. It is bittersweet, but you have
adjusted to having the TV available, to the car at your free disposal, to
evenings free from worry when it is late and a child is still out, and to the
delicious absence of popular "music"! These joys are now part of your
settled life-style.
And then, at Halloween, there appears at your door the most horrifying monster
imaginable.
boomerang kid a young person past high-school age who, after college or
a period of independence, returns to live in the parental home
Once upon a time,
only the prodigal son or daughter went back to the parental home. If you were
over 21, it was a social stigma for you to slink back to the bedroom where your
teddy bear still sat in pride of place
No more. Nowadays, even young men and
women who boast a job and a partner are shamelessly moving back to Mum and Dad.
A recent survey shows that nearly 50 per cent of adults who own their own
property still regard their parents' houses as their real homes, while one in
10 people aged from 35 to 44 still takes washing and ironing back to Mummy.
beyond the relief from bills, mortgage and rentals, moving back under the
parental roof offers the boomerang kid an emotional connection
Cristina Odone, The Observer, March 24, 2002 (edited)
Folks overly joyous in their Halloween
activities may find themselves in the calaboose.
calaboose a jail
[from Sp. calabozo "dungeon ", via Louisiana French. Chiefly S
& W U.S.]
Anyway, they had
so many books in
Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
boomslang a large
and dangerous snake, up to 6 feet long and one of the most venomous snakes in
the world.
Boomslangs often hide in trees. Makes you a bit nervous about walking under
trees as you trick or treat, doesn't it? But most of you can relax: the
boomslang is native to southern
A reader notes: boohai - an out of the way, remote or non-existent place; often in
"up the boohai" to mean lost, or "up the boohai shooting
pukakas" meaning lost, possibly in the head. (Tsuwm's Dictionary) Has
anyone heard of that before?
Two delicious terms, coined by H.L. Mencken,
which deserve much greater currency:
booboisie the general public implies that its members are stupid,
uncultured boobs inferior to the speaker
[blend of boob and bourgeoisie]
The New York Times
felt it needed to explain why Rush Limbaugh's book spent more than a year at
the top of its best-seller list. One reviewer helpfully spelled out that the
book appealed "to a part of
Timothy P. Carney, Human Events, July 1, 2002
[Bill Clinton] has continued to sell both the elites and the Booboisie
the incredible line that diddling employees
is a matter to be adjudicated not
by the public or the legal authorities, but by his wife.
Thomas W. Hazlett, Reason, Nov. 1998
boobocracy that same
public, viewed as a social or political force
Consider the civil servant (there's an oxymoron!) Have you suffered from the
governmental bureaucrat who gums up the works with such infuriating laziness or
incompetence that one wonders if it might be malicious? Wouldn't boobocrat
be a fine term for such a one?
traditional
middleclass prejudices against the "boobocracy"
Steven Kelman, Commentary, Feb. 1969
From [Andrew] Sullivan & Co. 's perspective, Bush's public courting of the
fundamentalist boobocracy suggests a want of taste. Sullivan
can't come out and say that, so he is contenting himself by being pessimistic
and snippy from the sidelines.
Jay Currie, The American Spectator, Feb. 11, 2004
Our final boo-word provides a transition to
our next theme, for it is a toponym that is, a word derived from a
place-name.
boot hill a graveyard, esp. one whose occupants died in a violent
fight (but note 2nd quote)
The consignment of
Comanche to the Boot Hill of Army research and development
(R&D) projects was another sad ending to an Army program that had once
seemed so necessary and so promising.
Frederick J. Kroesen, From Cheyenne to Comanche, Army, May 2005
It was only a matter of time before Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Ian Blair's
shoot-to-kill policy came home to haunt him.
policemen under pressure will
turn quickly from constable to cowboy. An innocent man dead on a tube train
floor with his head shot away while
Richard Stott, Sunday Mirror, Aug. 8, 2005
The railroad boomtown of
In early
By the way,