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This is a little advance warning, to long-time readers of the Phrontistery, that I will no longer be featuring linguistic content from my Livejournal page on the homepage of the site. In other words, if you're reading this from the Phrontistery homepage, or if you use an RSS feed to read Phrontistery-related material, very soon, you won't be able to do so. Instead, I strongly encourage readers to visit my blog, Glossographia, which has a large amount of content relating to language and linguistics, going back to 2008. I am looking at options for embedding content from the blog at the Phrontistery homepage (i.e. replacing the Livejournal content). While I had originally thought it wise to try to keep the Phrontistery separate from my academic life, this decision has come to seem increasingly short-sighted and insular over time. It has also proven impossible, given my professional commitments, to manage two entirely distinct sets of language-related essays, with the result being that I have done neither one well. Consolidating is an attempt to make it right. Rest assured that nothing else is changing at the Phrontistery; in fact, I hope that making this decision will allow me to manage things more effectively in the months to come. I hope you will read my work over at Glossographia. Tags: language
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A correspondent to the Phrontistery yesterday posed a very interesting riddle: I was in a pub the other day and saw a barometer on the wall. It was old and has the word pausodonoptic on it. I had never heard of this before and was curious so I did a bit of searching online. I didn't really find any definition of the word anywhere. I was disappointed that I couldn't find it on your site either. Have you any idea what it means? I shall look forward to hearing back from you. I get plenty of these from my dutiful readers, and most of them are easily handled, but this one is a real puzzle: pausodonoptic is not in any of the usual online dictionaries, nor is it in the OED. The correspondent sent a photo of the object, so the spelling is correct. While there are a couple dozen websites that use the word, applied to various items (spectacles, barometers, cameras), but none that give a real sense of what it is supposed to mean. So, a mystery - but one that I was eventually able to solve (I think). My response: You're quite right that 'pausodonoptic' is not used in context anywhere on the web, and indeed, nothing like it is found in the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary. This suggests that it is a coinage used by a manufacturer for the purposes of advertising some feature of the device. Now, 'pausodontic' looks as if it must be Greek-derived, so I turned to the Liddell and Scott classical Greek lexicon. There I looked for words starting with 'pauso-' and found pausodunos 'soothing pain'. This could then combine (a little improperly, and changing the final 'u' to 'o'), with -optic to mean something like 'soothing pain of the eyes', or in other words, relieving eye strain or pain. I was still a little confused, because this doesn't seem to be a suitable characteristic for a barometer. However, looking at the range of products called 'pausodonoptic' using a Google search, I note that there is a pausodonoptic camera and pausodonoptic spectacles. One advertisement from 1890 even says "You will act with discretion if you buy the New Pausodonoptic Spectacles or Eye-Glasses, (convex or concave), so comfortable and cooling to the eyes. They will enable you to read or sew, especially at night, with positive pleasure when others fail." The photo you sent afterwards, with the maker indicated as an optician, confirms this idea. My guess, then, is that the glass used in the barometer must be somehow specially treated in the same way, perhaps to reduce glare. Whether any of the buyers could figure out, or cared about, the Greek-derived coinage is unknown, but manufacturers both then and now often give scientific-sounding names to their products to enhance the sense that they must be effective. So, what do you think of my explanation? Anyone have any alternate suggestions? Tags: language
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Once again, the students in my senior / graduate linguistic anthropology course, Language and Societies, have written abstracts of their research papers, which I have now posted on the course blog of the same name. As always, I am casting a wide net, looking for comments from anyone interested in these subjects. If you have a few spare minutes, I'd really appreciate if you could take a few moments to post a comment on one or a few abstracts that interest you. I am extremely pleased in general with the quality of insight and analysis, and I am confident that several of these papers will eventually end up as conference presentations. Thanks!
Siobhan Gregory: “Detroit is a Blank Slate”: Metaphors in the Journalistic Discourse of Art and Entrepreneurship in the City of Detroit Stephanie Nava: Language Loss and Maintenance in the United States: An Examination of Mexican and Japanese Immigrants and their Kin Scott Shell: The Conversion of Scandinavia by Means of Script Transition Sean Shadaia: Analyzing medical discourse through the lens of the non-English-speaking patient / interpreter / physician interaction Lauren Powers: Hip-Hop Lyrics and the Defaming of Women in Hip-Hop Culture Wendy D. Bartlo: Elderspeak: an examination of language directed at older adults Alex Beaudin: 140 Characters Amelia Baumgarten: “Okay, at this point you’re abusing sarcasm”: Figurative language and negative emotion in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Sophocles Sapounas: A contemporary cross-cultural study of politeness: The universal necessity of politeness in human interaction Nadia Maraachli: Death-related discourse in assisted living facilities Jennifer Schechter: Grammar Nazis, prescriptivism, and snobs, oh my! Social standards and spoken language Colleen Face: Queer Russian intersectionality Robert A. Johnson: “Frugal or spendy?”: public accountability in an online debt support group Junguk Spurrier: American indifference to foreign language learning Tags: language, teaching
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I'm looking at the official description of the boundary of my provincial riding (electoral district) just now, where I learn that it is "that part of the City of Windsor lying westerly and southerly of a line described as follows: commencing at the intersection of the international boundary between Canada and the United States of America with the northwesterly production of Langlois Avenue; thence southeasterly along said production and Langlois Avenue to Tecumseh Road East; thence easterly along said road to Pillette Road; thence southeasterly along Pillette Road and its intermittent productions to the southerly limit of said city."
I was curious about the use of the noun production and in particular the phrase intermittent productions. I wasn't familiar with this usage, so I presumed it must be some sort of legalese. When I Googled "intermittent productions" it seems to be the name of a film production company which drowns out a handful of results that lead to descriptions of Canadian electoral districts, including mine. You see it more clearly on the Image Search where five of the first-page results are electoral district maps. So what's going on?
The OED helps a little; it tells me that one of the senses of production is "6. Extension or lengthening in space or time" and one of the quotations seems relevant:
1984 Victoria Govt Gaz. 8 Aug. 2831/1 All that land bounded by the southern alignment of Arden Street, the western alignment of Laurens Street, the production of the southern alignment of Miller Street and a line 6 metres east of the Coburg railway line. So from this, along with some basic knowledge of my city, I figured out that a production is what you get when you project a street along a straight line beyond its actual extent (in this case, into the Detroit River). This makes sense of 'the northwesterly production of Langlois Avenue', since that's exactly where the electoral boundary meets the international boundary (in the middle of the river right along the line followed by Langlois). And this, then, is the explanation for 'intermittent productions', because Pillette Road is not a single road (any longer) but is divided up into several segments separated by rail lines, a freeway, an airport, etc. The electoral boundary thus follows Pilette's various segments, and where there is no street, follows the intermittent productions that result from extending the street along an imaginary line. Mystery solved. Tags: language
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An astute Phrontistery reader inquires: I was wondering if you could help me with a word issue. I was just reading some stuff on the Internet today and came across pleonasm. Later on in the article, they used the term "pleonastic". A look up one m-w.com confirmed that this was a correctly derived form of the word "pleonasm". Seconds before reading this word, though, I wrote down (notes for my own enjoyment) the term *"pleonasmic". What is going on here that makes my word not a word? Is this a rule of English that I have neglected to learn, or is this just a quirky irregularity of this splendid/abysmal language?
The phenomenon you're observing results from the tension between Greek principles for forming adjectives and English ones. In English, -ic is productive (i.e. you can use it as a suffix on new words and are unlikely to cause any eyebrows to rise). In contrast, -astic is not productive, which is why you coined 'pleonasmic', which sounds lovely to me. However, all English words ending in -asm derive from Greek, and the vast majority of them form adjectives using '-astic', which is the anglicized version of the Greek suffix -astikos: spasm --> spastic iconoclasm --> iconoclastic sarcasm --> sarcastic enthusiasm --> enthusiastic phantasm --> fantastic pleonasm --> pleonastic In fact, plastic also follows this model, although plasm is far less common than plasma, and is mostly used in the phrase germ plasm. But there is one common word where the -asm / -astic pattern does not hold true, and where -asm becomes -asmic: orgasm --> orgasmic. Partly this may be because while Greek orgasmos is attested in ancient texts, orgastikos (the expected form) is not. Partly it may be that orgasm came into English via the intermediary of French rather than one of the classical languages. And partly it may be that orgasm is used in different, uh, contexts. There is actually an archaic form orgastic, but it has long since fallen out of use: you can see its rise and fall here, and see that in fact orgastic was more common than orgasmic in English until about 1965. Make of that what you will. However, some of those hits for orgastic may be misspelled or improperly scanned orgiastic. Surprisingly, orgy/orgiastic and orgasm/orgasmic, although both are Greek-derived, are basically unrelated to one another; orgasmos derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *wrog- 'to burgeon, to swell', while orgy derives from Greek orgia, 'secret rites in honour of Bacchus', and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *werg- 'to work' and is closer to ergonomic, organ, or urge, etymologically, than it is to orgasm. Or so says the OED. Two other -asm words that normally take an -asmic rather than an -astic adjectival form are protoplasm and ectoplasm, but these are really quite rare and both, like orgasm, have archaic -astic variants. Also, there are several -astic words like drastic and elastic that, while of Greek derivation, have no -asm nominal form either in Greek or in English (e.g. * elasm, * drasm). Finally, chasm has no common adjectival form, although a couple of centuries ago you might find chasmic or chasmatical or chasmal. Thanks very much for your interesting question! I greatly enjoyed looking up semi-naughty words in the dictionary (who doesn't?), in the cause of research. Tags: language
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So apparently Arthur has overcome his longstanding hatred of the French language. For those of you who don't know, he was in a French-only daycare for a year in 2007-08 and picked up nothing, although he did learn to count to four in Spanish from Handy Manny. So today, after finishing playing with his new Nintendo 3DS (for which many thanks go out to various relations who sent him birthday money), he was looking at the various pamphlets and flyers telling him about all the accessories he could buy, and remarked, "The French for 'Wii Kid Friendly Remote' is 'Télécommande Playchuk Mini'. I bet you didn't know I knew that in French". I then noted that it said below that, "Available in pink and green / Disponible dedans rose et vert," and I showed him how rose and vert meant 'pink' and 'green'. We then worked through the rest of the French colours using the colours on his Spiderman pajamas. Then we moved on to brushing his teeth, since it was bedtime. Me: "See, your toothpaste is sort of vert and sort of bleu." Arthur: "It's vert-bleu." Me: "Yeah, you could say that." Arthur: "What's the French word for 'ish'?" Me: "... well, I guess 'esque'." Arthur: Esc! Like on the keyboard! Me: [breaks out laughing] Arthur: It's vert-esc-bleu. So that's coming along. Tags: arthur, language
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