The Phrase of the Week Christmas Quiz!!

Okay, all. Once a week I get an email with the origin of one English phrase a week, courtesy of this fellow. You are able to subscribe to receive these emails from that page, or you can click here. It’s about halfway down the page. Apparently, once a year a quiz is sent out testing whether people know why we say the things we do.

Behold, the quiz!

I took the quiz, and realized how many of them I didn’t know. I should caution the potential quiz-takers out there – it is a British website, and as such a number of the expressions are entirely unfamiliar to us. It was fun guessing the ones I hadn’t heard of.

Sadly, I cannot report superior test results; I scored a 76% on the quiz. It was rather hit-or-miss for me.

I hope you enjoy!

Not an egress

I was walking along John Street in lower Manhattan on my way to the gym, and I was rather surprised with what I saw.

Really? Not ‘Exit’? Why use ‘egress’ instead of the word preferred in every construction site in the English-speaking world? I have no actual issue with the usage ( I actually rather like the word) but I found the choice really strange. I guess this particular construction company caters to a more well-read crowd.

egress
Definition of EGRESS

1: the action or right of going or coming out 2: a place or means of going out : exit

How Christina Aguilera taught some of us English (really)

Hi all. It’s been a while since I posted on this blog, but I noticed this, and found it worthy of pointing out.

Much has been made of Christina Aguilera’s making up her own version of the national anthem at the Super Bowl this year – I’m sure Francis Scott Key is rolling in his grave now. You can actually watch the video of her “performance” by clicking on the image above. In her excitement of the moment and in a lapse in her otherwise patriotic fervor, she left out the words   “O’er the ramparts we watched / Were so gallantly streaming”, and instead sung something similar to the line before.

All that is rather a sad story state of affairs, but worry no longer! Some good has come out of this after all.

Courtesy of Merriam-Webster’s online site:

“Rampart”

When:

Lookups spiked on February 7, 2011 – the day after the Super Bowl

Why:

During her rendition of the national anthem that preceded the game, Christina Aguilera botched the lyrics and never sang the words “O’er the ramparts we watched / Were so gallantly streaming.” She instead improvised a line that closely resembled a previous line in the song (“What so proudly we hailed / At the twilight’s last gleaming”).

A rampart is a wall that is built to protect a castle, fort, or city. Francis Scott Key, who wrote the poem that became the “Star-Spangled Banner,” was observing the British attack on Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore in 1814 when he wrote the famous words.

Rampart comes from the Middle French word meaning “to protect” or “to defend.”

See?! Because of her momentary lapse in concentration, many people became curious enough to look it up, and now people learned a new word – all courtesy of Christina Aguilera!

Lake Superior State University 2011 List of Banished Words

From Newsweek:

The college, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, releases an annual list of words, expressions and phrases that have reached their limit in societal vernacular and should probably be laid to rest.

You can view the full list here. Some of the words weren’t surprising. Hearing about pictures or videos going ‘viral’ has definitely run its course. Another word they choose is ‘epic’, meaning ‘crazy’ or ‘noteworthy’, as in ‘epic fail’. Which brings is to the word I am happiest about not hearing anymore – ‘fail’. A ‘fail’ is anything that doesn’t work as planned. Rainy out? Picnic fail. Comedian not getting laughs at a show? Stand-up fail. Ugh. Please stop.

There are plenty of other juicy choices, like using Facebook or Google as verbs, e.g. “I Facebooked her to see if we were still on for our meal” or “I Googled him to see if he had any prior criminal record”.

Check the list out. Remember – if one of the words clicks in your head and makes you think of something wild and zany, don’t exclaim, “OMG I HAD AN AWESOME A-HA MOMENT AND NOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE!”

Eww.

via

Origins #25: ‘Blue’ comedy

The seventh definition in the Merriam-Webster entry for the word blue is:

a : profane, indecent <blue movie> b : off-color, risqué <blue jokes>

Great. We kind-of already knew what it means, but why blue?

The answer, courstesy of Wikipedia:

The term comes from the music hall comedian Max Miller who kept all his adult jokes in a blue colored notebook. ^[2]

“Working blue” refers to the act of performing this type of material. A “blue comedian” or “blue comic” is a comedian who usually performs blue, or is known mainly for his or her blue material. Blue comedians often find it difficult to succeed in mainstream media.

Many comedians who are normally family-friendly might choose to work blue when off-camera or in an adult-oriented environment; Bob Saget exemplifies this dichotomy. Private events at show business clubs such as the Bob Saget Club and The Masquers often showed this blue side of otherwise cleancut Bob Saget; a recording survives of one Masquers roast from the 1950s with Jack Benny, George Jessel, George Burns, and Art Linkletter all using highly risque material and, in some cases, obscenities.

Origins #24: Hunky-dory

Merriam-Webster defines hunky-dory as follows:

Definition of HUNKY-DORY
quite satisfactory :fine

Interestingly, the folks at M-W have no idea what the origin is:

Origin of HUNKY-DORY
obsolete English dial. hunk home base + -dory (of unknown origin)
First Known Use: 1866

I found a site called World Wide Words that has an pretty good explanation:

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang suggests that the term may have been introduced in America about 1865 by a popular variety performer named Japanese Tommy. Other references suggest that it may have been sailors’ slang for a street in Yokohama that catered for what one might describe as the special needs of sailors. In Yokohama today a broad thoroughfare called Honcho-dori runs from the centre of the city to the port area, so one that would have been familiar to sailors (dori is the Japanese word for a road, in particular a broad or important one).

What seems certain is that hunky-dory was a play on an existing sense of the word hunky for something that was fine, splendid or satisfactory. In turn, this probably derives from the adjective hunk, which means that one is all right or in a safe or good position. This derives from the Dutch honk, meaning “goal” or “home” in a Frisian variant of the game of tag. This word (and presumably the game, too) was said to have been taken by the Dutch to New Amsterdam, later New York, but was first recorded only around the 1840s. It has links to another reduplicated term, hunkum-bunkum. Though the first part sounds a bit like the hunker of hunker down (which is also of Dutch origin), the words seem not to be related.

It may be that hunky-dory was the result of a bilingual pun, perhaps invented because American sailors knew the word dori and prefixed it with hunky as an imagined Japanese street of earthly delights.

Two words I just learned are mashup words – Chortle and Smog

Chortle

Chuckle + snort, created by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass:

“‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? / Come to my arms, my beamish boy! / O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ / He chortled in his joy.”

Carroll was a great inventor of mashup words – or, to use the word he coined, portmanteau words. However, not all of his new words caught on.

For example, slithy (slimy + lithe) and mimsy (miserable + flimsy), however delightful, never really made it out of his books.

Smog

This word, which dates back to the late 1800s, is so engrained in our language that we might not even think of it as a combo.

But there it is, (un)clear as day: smoke and fog.

Definitions courtesy of Merriam-Webster.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste…

I was skimming through The Grammar Log looking for something else, and saw this Q&A, which had never occurred to me. Behold:

Question:

The long held motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”, is still being used, even though it is incorrectly written. The correct version would be written: “It is a terrible thing to waste a mind.” I have long known this, as have many who know proper English, but I would like to know the descriptive function for this, so as to explain it to others. Sadly of course, I know we’ll never see it used in its corrected form, as that would now be “politically incorrect”. Answer please?

Answer:

The problem with the motto is that the word terrible is modifying the word mind (as a predicate adjective), which doesn’t make sense (the mind, of course, is not a terrible thing at all); it should be modifying the action of wasting, instead, as you point out. I don’t think that correcting it is a matter of political incorrectness, though. The motto has become a kind of shorthand for what’s really intended. This is surely not the first time this kind of thing has happened, nor is it the last.

Quick Quiz from Merriam-Webster

Via their Twitter feed:

Quick Quiz: “Balloon” has two consecutive pairs of doubled letters; what word has three pairs?

I’m not gonna lie, I had no patience and clicked right away. Interesting.

The answer can be found here.

Origins #23: (I’ll bet you) dollars to donuts

I’ve always wondered where the expression came from. Betting someone ‘dollars to donuts’ means that they’re confident something is correct, or going to happen.

It comes from the idea of betting. Betting a dollar to a half-dollar, for instance, means that you’re giving 2 to 1 odds–you’re willing to risk a dollar to win only a half-dollar. Being willing to bet dollars against doughnuts (viewed as worthless) means that you’re totally confident that you’re right, so confident that you’ll bet money against nothing.

The expression is also found in a number of variants, including dollars to buttons, dollars to dumplings, and dollars to cobwebs, each of these objects being considered worthless.

Dollars to doughnuts as an adjectival or adverbial phrase is first found in the late nineteenth century in America. The first explicit reference to betting is not found until the 1920s, in a story by “Ellery Queen”–”I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts Field played the stock market or the horses”–but betting is unquestionably the origin of the expression.

Origin courtesy of The Maven.