August 16, 2024
I was sad to hear that Edna O’Brien had died. She lived a remarkable life and leaves an amazing body of work: she was, in Eimear McBride’s description, ‘one of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature’.
The controversy over O’Brien’s taboo-breaking early books – starting with The Country Girls (1960), which was banned in Ireland – had ebbed by the time I started reading her, but the elegance of her writing and the power of her stories remained, and remains, undiminished.
Recently, revisiting her short story ‘Madame Cassandra’, which was published in the 1968 collection The Love Object and again in 2011’s Saints and Sinners, a rare word in its opening paragraph caught my eye:
I always love the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the coolth and the nectar.
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Posted by Stan Carey
November 8, 2023
I was reading Richard Stark’s crime novel Flashfire when the following line took me down an etymological side street:
He approached the hospital catty-corner, through the parking lots.
I’d come across the phrase catty-corner before, but not often, and only in novels, as far as I can recall. It’s not part of Irish English.
At first I visualized Parker, the protagonist, walking towards the building along the walls or edges, as cats often do. But catty-corner, as you may well know, means ‘diagonally’, and it has nothing to do with cats – at least not originally.
The adverb (and adjective) has a plethora of variant spellings that include catty-corner(ed), cater-corner(ed), cata-corner(ed), and kitty-corner(ed), with and without an -ed or a hyphen. How these phrases are pronounced is correspondingly mixed – but their geographical distribution follows a pattern, at least in the continental US: mostly catty-corner in the South, across to Texas, kitty-corner elsewhere.*
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8 Comments | etymology, language, language history, phrases, spelling, words | Tagged: 000000, cats, compounding, compounds, dialect, etymology, ffffff, folk etymology, language, language history, phrases, Richard Stark, spelling, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
August 15, 2023
The verb greenlight, or green-light, means to give something approval or permission to proceed: you give it the green light, metaphorically. What past-tense form of the verb would you use in these lines?
HBO just [greenlight] Season 2.
Marting said it [greenlight] less conventional works.
The lines are from recent articles in the New York Times. The first uses greenlit; the second, greenlighted. So whatever you chose you probably concurred once, but only once, with the NYT.
If you’re wondering which is correct, the short answer is both. The long answer – well, you’re in the right place for that.
In this post I’ll look at the usage patterns of greenlit and greenlighted, based on corpus data (graphs! lots of graphs!). I’ll describe the verb’s origins and analyze it with reference to irregular verbs generally and -light compounds specifically. Finally, I’ll discuss which to choose, with an eye on future trends.
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18 Comments | editing, etymology, grammar, language, linguistics, morphology, spelling, usage, words, writing | Tagged: corpus linguistics, editing, etymology, film, gaslight, grammar, greenlight, irregular verbs, jargon, language, linguistics, morphology, slang, spelling, usage, Vanity Fair, verbs, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
October 3, 2022
Here’s a verb I don’t remember encountering before. It crops up near the end of this passage in Seamus Deane’s novel Reading in the Dark (1996), where the author describes a dramatic childhood winter in Northern Ireland:
The Germans came only once, made a bombing run on the docks where the American ships were lined up in threes and fours, missed, and never came again. The sirens had given several false alarms before, but this time the throb of the approaching planes seemed to make them more frenetic. We woke to their wild moanings, were carried to safety under the stairs and cradled sleepily between our parents, lightly asperged by the bright drops of cold Lourdes water that my mother would every so often sprinkle on us. I remember the silence when the droning stopped and then the long lamentation of each plane’s dive.
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18 Comments | etymology, language, language history, naming, words | Tagged: asperge, Asperger, aspergillum, aspergillus, dictionaries, etymology, Irish books, James Joyce, language, language history, literature, morphology, naming, Northern Ireland, rare words, religion, Seamus Deane, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
August 11, 2022
Dozens of Irish English words and phrases were added to the OED in March 2022, including Irish words used in Irish English. I’ve written about some of these before (hames, notions, plámás, ráiméis, ruaille buaille); others include a chara, blow-in, bockety, ceol, ciotóg, cúpla focal, delph, ghost estate, grá, guard, sean nós, segotia, and shift.
OED editor Danica Salazar writes:
The words and phrases featured in the OED’s March update provide a small yet vivid snapshot of Irish English usage in the past and present. We will continue our efforts in enriching the dictionary’s coverage of Irish English and feature even more new words and senses in future updates.
This will be welcomed by scholars who feel that Celtic words – and word-origins – in the English lexicon have traditionally been under-acknowledged by linguistic authorities. Loreto Todd, in Green English: Ireland’s Influence on the English Language, says there has been ‘a long-standing reluctance to recognise the presence of Celtic words in the English language’.*
Yet for all the richness and strength of Irish English dialects in Ireland and of Irish literature internationally, the influence of Irish and Irish English on the broader English language has been modest. You might wonder why, given Ireland and Great Britain’s geographical, social, and political (though fraught, i.e., colonialist) closeness.
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Posted by Stan Carey
April 7, 2022
I came across an interesting word in Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (Picador, 2007). It appears in the middle of a conversation between an estranged couple, here discussing their son:
‘We talked about it,’ Keith said. ‘But only once.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Not much. And neither did I.’
‘They’re searching the skies.’
‘That’s right,’ he said.
She knew there was something she’d wanted to say all along and it finally seeped into wordable awareness.
‘Has he said anything about this man Bill Lawton?
‘Just once. He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.’
‘Their mother mentioned this name. I keep forgetting to tell you. First I forget the name. I forget the easy names. Then, when I remember, you’re never around to tell.’
Seeped into wordable awareness is a lovely phrase, and wordable is a curiously rare word, given its straightforward morphology and transparent meaning. It has virtually no presence in large language corpora:
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Posted by Stan Carey
September 21, 2021
Anyone who’s into both word lore and science fiction will have a fine time exploring the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. Call it cyberspacefaring.* Launched in early 2021, the HD/SF was once an official project of the OED but is now run independently by lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower. A work in progress, it aims to:
illustrate the core vocabulary of science fiction; it also aims to cover several related fields, such as critical terms relating to science fiction (and other genres of imaginative fiction such as fantasy and horror), and the vocabulary of science-fiction fandom.
Definitions are ‘comprehensive but brief’ and are supplemented by ample literary quotations, aka citations. These, ‘the most important part of this dictionary’, show each word or phrase in use, from the earliest detected case to more recent examples. Some entries also have etymologies, usage labels, historical notes, and so on.
This beautiful retrofuturist typeface is Sagittarius by Hoefler&Co. –
see the link for an account of its inspiration and development.
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Posted by Stan Carey
Sentence first 