Common Words missing from OED: mixed message; dual-use technology; podcast; red
state or blue state; bris; treasury bond (T-bond)
Unpleasant Places: Dogpatch; slough of despond (slough); potter's
field; aceldama (intestine); Hooverville; take to the woodshed (or 'to
woodshed'); ghetto
Political Leaders as Eponyms: jimson weed (mow); Queen Anne's lace; quisling;
Nero; Molotov cocktail; Fabian; draconian
mixed message action that gives confusingly contradictory signals
The Supreme Court
gave government officials a mixed message
A closely divided
court said a granite monument that proclaims "I am the Lord thy God"
outside the Texas Capitol is allowed. But it struck down framed copies of the
Ten Commandments in two
Hope Yen, Associated Press, June 28, 2005
Note: "Both
cases were decided on a 5-4 vote, with Justice Stephen Breyer providing the
swing vote and the others consistently voting for or against the
displays." Tom Heinen,
dual-use technology technology that can be used for both peaceful and military
purposes (usually, production of nuclear weapons)
Associated Press, May 27, 2005
podcasts radio
shows and other audio programs posted on the Internet, available for download
Apple Computer
introduced software that includes a directory making it easier to find and
listen to podcasts,
a sort of TV Guide for Internet
audio programs. It hasn't always been easy finding the tens of thousands of
available programs
Apple's embrace of podcasts represents the
biggest endorsement yet of the relatively new but fast-growing phenomenon. Podcasts
let consumers listen to audio programs when they want to, rather than when
broadcasters schedule them. Major media companies are doing podcasts
of their news programming. Thousands of amateur podcasters are a
grassroots movement, showcasing everything from politics, to their favorite
music, to a discussion of breakfast that morning.
Nick Wingfield, Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2005
red state or blue
state
The terms are often used to indicate culture and values. See quotes.
Accent? I thought
I'd purged the last whiff of that red-state stigma during my Okie
[
Blake Bailey, award-winning literary biographer, quoted in The Boston Globe,
June 5, 2005
the Sunday [New York] Times, the single greatest current events icon in the
East Coast, Blue State urban, moneyed and intellectual world. If
anything creates water-cooler buzz in this orbit, it's the Sunday Times.
Dick Meyer, CBS News (on line), June 7, 2005
bris (or brith)
Judaism: the rite of circumcision (male), performed on the eighth day
after birth.
[from Hebrew berξt covenant]
Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg squeezed next to Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the State Assembly,
before a large menorah set up in a small Midtown kosher restaurant. The
Hanukkah ceremony was one in a series of chits that Mr. Bloomberg attempted to
tally with Mr. Silver over the last year. The mayor attended the bris
of two of Mr. Silver's grandsons, paid a condolence call when the speaker's
brother died in August and held news conferences as often as possible in the
speaker's
-
In a recent "guess the theme," the
theme we revealed was, "Even the Oxford English Dictionary includes
several thousand words or meanings for which OED, having absolutely no example
of the word actually being used in context, is relying solely upon other
dictionaries. This week we are giving examples." All these words were in
OED but very rarely used.
This week's theme is the opposite: oft-used words that OED has not included.
Here is a rough measure of frequency-of-use for what we've presented under this
theme. OED has admitted none of them.
418,000 Google hits for mixed message (singular or plural)
77,600 for dual-use technology
(singular or plural)
8,330,000 for podcast (14
million more for ~s, ~ing, ~er, ~ers, and ~ed)
2,074,000 for red state or blue
state (singular or plural)
931,000 for bris
or brith
The functionary who performs a bris is
called a mohel. Interestingly, OED omits bris (931,000
hits) but includes mohel, which has only about 43,000 hits.
treasury bond (or T-bond) long-term debt of a government, issued as a
tradable security.
In the overwhelming majority of usages, the
government meant is the
--- a T-bill is for one year or less;
--- a T-note is over one year up to ten years;
--- a T-bond is more than ten years.
Collectively, they are referred to as treasuries.
OED omits these meanings. Some terms (T-notes; T-bonds) it omits
entirely; some others (T-bills; treasury bills; treasury bonds) it
defines, provincially, as applying only to UK debt but the terms are used for
debt of any country, most often the US. OED does correctly list treasury
note as typically a US security but mistakenly says it is one payable on demand.
This is simply wrong: a US treasury note has a fixed maturity date.
Let's visit some undesirable places.
Dogpatch the prototype of the low-class, rural hick
[From the comic strip Li'l Abner by Al Capp, set in the mythical town of
Dogpatch]
Since this term has not been included in any dictionary, I'll support it with
more citations than usual.
one-time Nixon
aide Monica Crowley writes how her old boss wrote to Bill Clinton in 1992 to
congratulate him on "a very well-run campaign." However, when three
months passed without a reply from the President, Nixon complained, "What
do you expect? They're Arkansas dogpatch."
Human Events, April 26, 2004
Benyamin Cohen, editor of the online publication Jewsweek, went to see The
Passion Of The Christ and came out homicidal: "My first comprehensible
thought was this: I really want to kill a Jew." Maureen Dowd of The New
York Times agreed: "Here, you want to kick in some Jewish and Roman teeth.
And since the Romans have melted into history...." But I reckon Dowd and
Cohen are faking it. They don't mean that marquee columnists and liberal Jewish
New Yorkers will be rampaging around looking for Jews to kill, they mean all
those rubes and hicks in Dogpatch who don't know any better will
be doing so.
Mark Steyn, Jerusalem Post, March 2, 2004
Puerto Ricans will cast their ballots for statehood, independence or a
continuation of commonwealth status. But don't Americans have the right not to
be saddled with an impoverished, crime-ridden island of non-English speakers as
our 51st state?
It's hard to imagine a worse candidate for admission to the
Union than this Caribbean Dogpatch.
Don Feder, No Statehood for Caribbean Dogpatch, Boston Herald,
Nov. 30, 1998
Hillary Clinton raised the dread specter of a vast anti-Arkansas conspiracy as
the hidden factor behind her husband's legal plight. "I think a lot of
this is prejudice against our state," the first lady declared. The Dogpatch
defense seems bizarre enough to pass the sincerity test.
This is not the
first time that Mrs. Clinton has portrayed Arkansas as an unfairly maligned
state.
Walter Shapiro, Hillary's Dogpatch Defense, Slate Magazine,
Aug. 11, 1998
They depicted Paula [Jones] as a Dogpatch Madonna who cut lose
after a strict religious upbringing
smoking, drinking beer, dancing, and
doing other things that were forbidden at home.
Melinda Beck, Newsweek, May 23, 1994
A slough is a stagnant bog or mire,
mucky and difficult to slog through. Hence,
slough of despond a state of extreme depression
[From John Bunyan's allegory, Pilgrim's Progress: "Now I saw in my
dream, that
they drew near to a very miry slough
; and they, being
heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was
Despond. Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed
with the dirt; and Christian
began to sink in the mire."]
Jennifer Capriati,
for instance, has credited her black Lab-boxer puppy with helping her emerge
from her own slough of despond.
Tom Junod, Sports Illustrated, April 10, 1995
potter's field - a burial ground for burying paupers and unclaimed bodies; also
figurative
[alludes to the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 27]
The term is more interesting when used figuratively. For example:
Hardly a book of
human worth is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a
Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's
field of the newspapers' back pages.
Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977), U.S. author, critic; "For Sale," Alms
for Oblivion (1964)
Trite terms represent simplications of real and sometimes important concepts
that can be very useful, until we forget what it was they were supposed to be
useful about. They then become dangerous, empty reifications or are relegated
to menial uses and finally buried in the potter's field of
pedantry.
Lawrence B. Slobodkin, Simplicity and Complexity in Games of the Intellect
Ventures into Verse: Being Various Ballads, Ballades, Rondeaux, Triolets,
Songs, Quatrains, Odes and Roundelays. Rescued from the Potters' Field
of Old Files and Here Given Decent Burial [Peace to their Ashes]
Title page of H.L. Mencken's first book, 1903 (very rare; 100 copies printed,
only 37 survive)
The Bible tells that Judas was paid thirty
pieces of silver to betray Christ. That money was used to buy a potter's field,
which became known as the "field of blood" which, in the local
tongue, was Alcedama. Acts
1:19; Matthew
27:8. Hence today's word, which is quite rare.
aceldama a field of blood; a bloody battlefield
The struggle
between the Macedonians and Greeks, for an unprofitable superiority, form one
of the bloodiest scenes in history.
we cannot judge that their intestine
divisions, and their foreign wars, consumed less than three millions of their
inhabitants. What an Aceldama, what a field of blood Sicily
has been in ancient times. You will find every page of its history dyed in
blood.
Edmund Burke (private letter)
(US Civil War, 1862): During the ten days I remained at Corinth the town was a
perfect aceldama
The wounded were brought in by hundreds. Above
5000 wounded men, demanding instant and constant attendance
A much larger
proportion of amputations was performed than would have been necessary if the
wounds could have received earlier attention. On account of exposure, many
wounds were gangrenous. Where amputation was performed, eight out of ten died.
William G. Stevenson, quoted in Harold Elk Straubing, In Hospital and Camp
while carnage was laying its scores of victims around him-we behold him
riding from point to point, bringing order out of confusion, and leading away
from that aceldama the shattered battalions of the proud army of
the morning
B.J. Lossing, George Washington's Mount Vernon
Notice the unusual use of intestine
in the first quote.
intestine (adj.) internal
Hooverville a shantytown of temporary homes
[Areas like this, thrown up at the start of the Great Depression, were
sardonically named after then-president Herbert Hoover]
Would you agree that this term, unlike (say) 'slum' or 'shantytown', conveys a
sense of disconnection, dispossession?
One of the most
popular stories circulating today has to do with a variously described
"death" of the American Dream. All the key words of the pronouncement
are fuzzy - What exactly is the American Dream? Just who qualifies as middle
class? - but there is a palpable sense that we are living in a barren ruin of a
country, a Hooverville from sea to shining sea.
Nick Gillespie (book review), Reason, Dec. 1996
[Review of the movie "Cinderella Man'] Poverty is an inadequate word to
describe the circumstances Americans found themselves in during the period.
While Howard does create a sense that it was a very short stroll from Hooverville
to Potters Field, he neglects the larger social and
economic forces that drove the downturn.
Duane Dudek, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 3, 2005
take to the woodshed (or 'to woodshed') U.S politics: 1. orig.:
to 'grill' someone brutally, in private; to subject to no-holds-barred
questioning 2. more commonly: to criticize scathingly.
From the image of a pioneer father taking his son "out behind the
woodshed" for a serious talking-to, perhaps using a leather strap to
emphasize his point.
Howard Dean
accused Republicans of never "having done an honest day's work in their
lives" [etc.]
Called to the woodshed by Senate leaders
when his hate-filled attacks diverted attention from the Democrats' message,
Mr. Dean slightly toned down his rhetoric.
Bill Sammon, The Washington Times, June 22, 2005
To explain and use the original sense, we
turn to A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures by newspaper
editor Ben Bradlee, whose reporters broke the Watergate story.
take
"to
the woodshed," an old political practice described to me by Jim Rowe, a
longtime Washington powerbroker. Jim Rowe had taken Hubert Humphrey to
the woodshed at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson, before LBJ
decided on Humphrey as his vice-presidential running mate. When you take
someone to the woodshed, Rowe told me, you get him off in a room alone and
grill him about his taxes, his health, his girlfriends, his finances, his war
record, his debts, his addictions, his innermost secrets.
Dusko Doder, our cigar-chomping
expert on Soviet affair for the last twelve years
we couldn't pull Doder off
the [story] on the basis of hearsay testimony from a once and future KGB agent.
Ed Williams took Doder to the woodshed, as we had
requested, grilling him for almost two hours, and reporting back to me:
"Fuck 'em
he's a terrific guy
the charges are horse shit."
A reader notes that the term also has a musical meaning "To practise or rehearse, esp. privately"
ghetto a part of
a city in which a group is isolated (esp. a poor part, with confinement
by social, legal, or economic pressure). fig: a similarly isolating
situaton (esp. one of poor status or poor opportunity)
Though the word is familiar, its origin is not. It comes from the area in which
14th-century confined its Jews. The neighbor had formerly been an iron foundry;
in Italian, getto.
A 1555 papal bull forced the Jews of Rome to live only in the designated ghetto
area. It is perhaps appropriate that the title of that bull was Cum nimis
absurdum.
It's been a while since we looked at
eponyms, words from names of people. This week we'll enjoy a few.
jimson weed (or jimpson weed) a certain noxious poisonous weed,
with rank-smelling foliage and narcotic/hallucinogenic properties. A corruption
of Jamestown weed.
Jamestown, Virginia, named for King James I, was the first permanent British
settlement in the New World. The British troops in Jamestown suffered a comical
incident in 1676, involving the weed. Here's the story.
'This was gathered
for a boiled salad, by some of the soldiers sent thither [to Jamestown] to
quell the rebellion of Bacon; and some of them ate plentifully of it, the
effect of which was a very pleasant comedy, for they turned natural fools upon
it for several days: one would blow up a feather in the air; another would dart
straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a
corner like a monkey, grinning and making mows at them; a fourth
would fondly kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces, with a
countenance more antic than any in a Dutch droll. In this frantic condition
they were confined, lest they should, in their folly, destroy themselves,
though it was observed that all their actions were full of innocence and good
nature. Indeed, they were not very cleanly; for they would have wallowed in
their own excrements, if they had not been prevented. A thousand such simple
tricks they played, and after eleven days returned to themselves again, not
remembering anything that had passed."
Robert Beverly, The History and Present State of Virginia
bonus word:
mow a grimace (some sources suggest the
grimace of sticking out the lower lip)
We started with a noxious plant named after
British royalty. We counter with an attractive plant that seems to be so named
but the name is an etymological mystery.
Queen Anne's lace a common wildflower with a large, lacy white head
(8th picture here). Akin to the carrot; can be used as a garden flower.
Pretty cut flower
or a weed? Queen Anne's lace or Devil's plague--these two common
names reveal its dual nature. Under some circumstances, it is a weed that takes
over vacant lots and roadsides, but it can also be a pretty cut flower if you
can keep the plants under control.
Sunset, November 1, 1986
... one of [Eudora] Welty's last admirers stepped forward and held out a
handful of limp vegetation. I saw that the offering was wilted Queen
Anne's lace from a roadside. ... As if taking orchids, she then
accepted the scraggly bouquet in her left hand, admired it, and, with her
right, wrote a personal message above her signature. Miss Eudora Welty-tough
under fire, tender enough to turn weeds into orchids.
Doris Betts, quoted by Wanda Butler, Southern Living, Apr. 1999
Oddly, no one knows what 'Queen Anne' this
flower is named for. Some name Queen Anne the spouse of the same James I we
cited for jimson weed. A more likely source is the Queen Anne who
reigned about a century later, for a dozen years ending in 1714. And there are
other candidates. But all are speculations for which no one has come up with
any evidence.
Moreover, the first known usage is in the 1890s, long after either Queen Anne,
and is in the US, not in the UK.
What do you in the UK call this plant?
quisling a traitor
to one's country, esp. one who is collaborating with occupying forces; also
fig.
[Vidkun Quisling, Norwegian army officer, headed puppet government during
Germany's WW II occupation of Norway; executed for treason after Germany's
defeat. The word entered the language very quickly after Quisling took office.
It almost immediately spawned offshoots such as 'to quisle'.]
A gray stone
medieval boarding school reeks of disinfectant and is ruled by boy quislings
and adult despots.
John le Carre, Absolute Friends
The first three Ptolemies were unusually enlightened, but later decadence set
in, and the line ended with the Quisling Queen Cleopatra.
Petr Beckmann, A History of Pi
As you may have noticed, the eponyms
presented this week all come from political leaders.
Nero a person resembling Nero, esp. in displaying cruelty, tyranny, or
profligacy.
[Nero Claudius Caesar, Roman emperor A.D. 54-68]
[at Ronald Reagan's death:]
his critics believe that
Cutting taxes while at the same time allowing
military spending to soar was the act not merely of a conservative, but of a Nero.
Mark Helprin, National Review, June 28, 2004
Molotov cocktail an easily-made incendiary bomb: a bottle, filled with
flammable liquid and stuffed with a rag wick
[Used and named by Finns in the Russo-Finnish War, 1940; served as an anti-tank
weapon; named for Molotov, Soviet foreign minister]
Killing them with a single
bullet, a stab, a device made up of a popular mix of explosives or hitting them
with an iron rod is not impossible . Burning down their property with Molotov
cocktails is not difficult. With the available means, small groups
could prove to be a frightening horror for the Americans and the Jews.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Knights Under the Prophet 's Banner, as quoted by
Michael Scheuer in Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam
& the Future of America
A reader notes: The cocktail is named
for the Stalin's Prime Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. This is special, because
it is an eponym of pseudonym.
it
derives from the Russian "molot" or hammer. This was a nice
complement to Stalin's own pseudonym, from the Russian for steel.
Fabian of
cautious delaying tactics to wear out an enemy, avoiding decisive battle
[Quintus Fabius Maximus, Roman general who used such tactics to defeat
Hannibal. See our entry for 'cunctation',
third item at link]
Fabian of the Fabian
Society, which aimed to reach socialism by non-revolutionary methods
[In 1216 Henry III, age 9,
succeeds the hated King John. The leaders confer at Bristol.] It was generally
agreed that it would not be wise to risk everything on a pitched battle with
the [French] invaders, who still had a great preponderance of strength. It was
decided instead to use Fabian tactics while recruiting more
adherents and accumulating strength.
Thomas B. Costain, The Magnificent Century
draconian (of laws)
excessively harsh
Draco, an Athenian legislator (7th century BCE) whose laws provided a death
penalty for minor crimes
Some of that cultural
unification was ferocious: for instance, the first Qin emperor condemned all previously
written historical books as worthless and ordered them burned, much to the
detriment of our understanding of early Chinese history and writing. Those and
other draconian measures must have contributed to the spread of
North China's Sino-Tibetan languages over most of China, and to reducing the
Miao-Yao and other language families to their present fragmented distributions.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (winner
of Pulitzer Prize)
