This week, it’s headlines that make you do a doubletake, like “Child’s Stool Great for Use in Garden.” Martha and Grant discuss a few of these bloopers, also known as crash blossoms. Also, if you unthaw something, are you freezing it or unfreezing it? Do hotcakes really sell that fast? What’s the likelihood of getting people to use a new gender-neutral pronoun? And Grant shares the story behind the term knucklehead.
First aired December 12, 2009. Listen here:
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Some call them crash blossoms, those funny turns of phrase that copy editors may or may not intend, like “Milk Drinkers Turn To Powder.” More about crash blossoms in this article in Good by Mark Peters.
Where’d we get the expression they’re selling like hotcakes?
A Pensacola man says he’s invented a gender-neutral pronoun, and wants to know how to popularize it. He’s not the first to try, as shown by linguist Dennis Baron’s chronology of failed attempts to create and popularize epicene pronouns.
If a recipe calls for “unthawed” corn, is that corn supposed to be frozen or unfrozen?
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a quiz called “Scronsonants.” The object is to guess two-word phrases containing a pair of words starting with the same three consonants. Here’s one: “I get a particular joy from the pain of others, but I had to learn how to do it. So I attended ___________.”
A Texas listener says her infant daughter is soothed by white noise. She’s curious as to why it’s called white noise instead of gray noise.
“You knucklehead!” Where’d we get an epithet like that? Grant tells the story about the wartime cartoon that helped popularize the term. Check out the adventures of R.F. Knucklehead in LIFE magazine. More about cartoons used for war-time education.
Grant shares more crash blossoms.
A Southern California woman says she was caught up short when she enthused, “It’s the bomb,” and a 12-year-old had no idea what she was saying. Does our slang need to change as we grow older? Why do we say “the bomb”?
In an earlier episode, the hosts talked about the slang term bobo, meaning “stupid” or “inferior.” Many listeners wrote in to discuss about their own use of bobo and its variants, and to point out that bobos also refers to a kind of cheap canvas shoes. Grant reports on some of their emails.
How should you pronounce the word jewelry? That prompts a conversation about the transposition of letters and sounds called metathesis—not only in jewelry, but many others including realtor, foliage, larynx, and introduce.
Here’s a handy word: fomite. It means “an inanimate object that can transmit an infectious agent” like a doorknob handle or a comb infested with head lice. It also has a picturesque Latin origin. Martha explains, and shares a related word: Dracula sneeze.
If you have a word lover on your gift list, Martha and Grant have book recommendations for you. For adults, Martha recommends linguist Geoffrey Nunberg’s collection of essays, The Years of Living Dangerously. For kids, Grant’s been enjoying David Shannon’s work, which includes, Good Boy Fergus, No, David, David Smells, and David gets in Trouble.
A woman from Dallas wants to know about a verbal habit she grew up with in her Cajun French speaking Louisiana family. It’s use of repetition for emphasis, as in, “it’s hot, but it’s not hot hot.” Grant explains how reduplications, or a repetition of a word or part of a word, appear in many languages, including Cajun French. For more, check out Albert Valdman’s French and Creole in Louisiana, and Mary Ellen Scullen’s paper “New Insights Into French Reduplication“.
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Grant said:
I first thought ‘colonel’ fit into this list, but realized it did not.
However, my daughter had a little angel doll she called, “Tithomy,” named after our at-the-time preacher, Timothy.
Emmett
Are they and them not the correct pronouns to use when the person’s gender is indeterminate?
I think they/them is becoming an acceptable gender-neutral pronoun.
As a speech pathologist, I’m always very self-conscious about saying larynx. I probably overthink it, but as the “expert” I don’t want to mispronounce it.
If ‘fomite’ has its roots in starting fires and such, is it at all related to ‘foment’?
-mpg
So we heard knucklehead was popularized in WWII, but little was given about how/why is was first coined. Why “knuckle”, one wonders? Similar in spirit to “bonehead”, e.g. a “bone-headed” (stupid, ill-considered) action?
-mpg
thawed, unthawed – The words that come to my mind are flammable and inflammable. Dictionary.com says this:
Usage note:
Inflammable and flammable both mean “combustible.” Inflammable is the older by about 200 years. Flammable now has certain technical uses, particularly as a warning on vehicles carrying combustible materials, because of a belief that some might interpret the intensive prefix in- of inflammable as a negative prefix and thus think the word means “noncombustible.” Inflammable is the word more usually used in nontechnical and figurative contexts: The speaker ignited the inflammable emotions of the crowd.
(“inflammable.” Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 15 Dec. 2009. .)
Someone once wrote (and I’m paraphrasing): Many people think “inflammable” means the opposite of “flammable,” when in fact they both mean combustible. If it would save any lives, then by all means use FLAMMABLE.
crash blossom –
The headline read: “5 Women to Become 500 Princesses”
As it turns out, the newspaper article was about female college students who had won positions in the beauty pageant for the Speedway 500 car race in Indianapolis that year. (Oh, THAT “500″!)
When I first read the headline (before reading the article), I was quite startled and perplexed.
I asked a co-worker how this would be possible. He replied, “Slice ‘em r-e-a-l thin.”
On our last trip to Washington D.C., my wife and I had the opportunity to visit the Newseum. Upon first entering, we stopped in the restrooms and both came out laughing. They had many of the wall tiles reproducing various crash blossoms. One sure item on our gift-shop list was their book of these collected crash blossoms, Correct Me If I’m Wrong. Since this is a news museum, all of the quotes come complete with reference citations.
Newseum Site
Some of the charmers are:
If you like crash blossoms, go to the Newseum.org online shop and buy the book.
There is a word for saying “Joo-ler-y”, “ree-la-tor”, “lare-nicks” or “foil-age” — and it’s MISPRONOUNCED. It’s SAID WRONG. It is NOT an “acceptable variation” on pronounciation. No, no, NO!
The worst one in modern times has been Eisenhower and both Bushes (and countless others) talking about “nu-cyoo-lar” energy or bombs. What’s so hard about “nuclear”?
Likewise, soldiers on horseback are cavalry. Christ died on a hill called Calvary. They are not interchangeable.
Neither are “climatic” (about the climate) and “climactic” (at the climax).
The mispronounciations that bug me the most are when whole letters and syllables get dropped, not re-arranged. Common examples:
cellular (not “seh-yer”) deteriorated (not “deteer-y-ated”)
Europe (not “Yurp”) necessarily (not “nes-sarily”)
regularly (not “reg-ya-ly”) terrorism (not “terr-ism”)
problem (not “prah-bm”) rural (not “rool”)
My mother ground her teeth over “liberry” (for library), “Feberary” (for February) and “artic” (for Arctic”). I’ve practically given up on newscasters who talk about the “goverment” or “baskaball.” But it was a bit alarming to hear a major team referred to as the “St. Louis Carnals.”
If Tiger ever picks up baseball, he could play for them.
Crowds Rushing To See Pope Trample 6 To Death
I suspect your mother hated doing the ironing, especially on Wednesday, and rarely, if ever, bought Worscestershire sauce.
There is a word for saying “Joo-ler-y”, “ree-la-tor”, “lare-nicks” or “foil-age”
I haven’t caught up on my podcasts yet….I can figure out the mispronounciation of realtor, larynx, and foliage….but what are the various pronounciations of jewelry? I know, I know…if I have to ask, I’m probably saying it wrong.
My pet peeve is “kindergarten” being pronounced “kindy-garten”.
These two are listed in many dictionaries:
/dʒu(w)əlri:/ Joo-wul-ree
/dʒu:lri:/ Jool-ree
This one is the bugaboo:
/dʒu:ləri:/ Joo-luh-ree
Yup, I mispronounce “jewelry”. Oh well.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. It is time to make yourself heard. There are lots of people who don’t mind ironing on Wednesdays. You might even enjoy Worscestershire sauce.
For the record, I fall into the two-syllable pronunciation minority, ie. jewel is monosyllabic and rhymes with cool, yule, gruel (don’t judge me!).
LOL, but I do pronounce ‘February, climactic, arctic, and picture’ correctly….but not ‘often’
Just read this headline on slate’s XXfactor blog: “No More Sexting With Sotomayor on the Court”
Seems like a positive change… it’s just inappropriate to distract a justice while she’s working like that!
On our last trip to Washington D.C., my wife and I had the opportunity to visit the Newseum. Upon first entering, we stopped in the restrooms and both came out laughing. They had many of the wall tiles reproducing various crash blossoms. One sure item on our gift-shop list was their book of these collected crash blossoms, Correct Me If I’m Wrong. Since this is a news museum, all of the quotes come complete with reference citations.
Newseum Site
Some of the charmers are:
If you like crash blossoms, go to the Newseum.org online shop and buy the book.
Regarding reduplications in French. I haven’t looked at the links, but they’re all over the place in current French, in particular in children’s language.
For example, the words (same or similar in English) for family:
maman, papa, with a variant mamie or papy, used for grandmother and grandfather. Similarly tata (aunt from tante) and tonton (uncle, from oncle), with tatie being an aunt, or more commonly, a great aunt.
They’re also common in nicknames:
Christophe gives CriCri and Totophe, Isabelle gives Zaza and Zazie, Honoré give Nono, André gives Dédé, Claude gives Cloclo (as in Claude François), Henri gives Riri, etc. Other names give their own particular models of nickname (Jean gives Jeannot, for example), and there seem to be some names with no nicknames (I can’t think of one for François, for example).
From Regret The Error:
I have been using the singular “they” for about seventeen years. I do not know how I learned it since I was not aware of other people using it at the time. It just occurred to me spontaneously and struck me as perfectly natural so I did not feel awkward using it and people that I spoke with did make a fuss either. I was shocked when I eventually read “What Color is Your Parachute?” by Richard Bolles because, in the introduction, he declares that he has uses the singular “they” in the book and that this use has precedent in some earlier form of English. (He doesn’t specify which form but I am guessing pre-Norman Invasion Old English.) I wonder if English has some kind of subliminal memory that allowed me to use the word without knowing that it existed.
He/him is officially correct for the indeterminate gender. (Historically.) It doesn’t make sense, which is why I deliberately used they/them and lost some points on my SATs. This was a couple of decades ago, so it may have gotten into a lot more style guides since then.
“He” used to be the official rule. However, I have not seen it used in any contemporary books or articles in a long time so it is clearly not the official rule any more. The current practice seems to be to either awkwardly circumlocute around the issue or to switch back and forth between “he” and “she”. (Both annoy me almost as much as using “he” only.) Even when “he” was the official rule, it did not reflect the reality of the language. An English teacher I had in high school illustrated this by using it in a sentence that clearly applied to females. For example, “My gynecologist is the best. If anyone here ever has really bad menstrual cramps HE should definitely see Dr. X.” or “I could not tell whether the attacker was male or female. All I could tell was that HE wore a red jacket.” I don’t know how many hundreds of years you would have to go back before these uses of “he” would make sense or if they ever did.
Does the word “reduplication” sound redundant to anyone else?
Yes.
Grant
1. do you know CRASH BLOSSOMS made New York Times lsit of top words of
2009 via BEn SChott blog?
2. do you know that I coined the term ”CRASH BLOSSOMS”, ask
me when and how and why i did it and maybe blog on it later…the
truth….”Nessie3” gave example of one of those crazy headlines on
testycopyeditors org and i read it and i sugested to him Nessie3 that
from now on we call those hedlines “crash blossoms” afer the words in
his found headline and everybody agreed it was a good idea so i
started first blog on it called http://amafubme.blogspot.com
AMFUBME means? gueess?
ahppy 2010
Had to revisit this post to be reminded of the term “crash blossom”, after encountering this choice one:
“Emotional benefit for teens killed in crash”
…which is really about a fund-raiser/memorial, not feeling good about being dead…
Unless things have really changed while I wasn’t looking, there’s nothing of indeterminate gender in this example except Dr. X. “She” was perfectly correct in the old days in this circumstance, and no reason to make it “they” today. Unless, of course, “anyone” is plural.
I understand the need for a neutral singular pronoun, but I find it very, very difficult to use the plural as a substitute. When the need arises, and when I remember (and I have a very vocal 28-year-old daughter to remind me) I do use the clumsy “he or she” or the abysmally awkward circumlocution, but never the alternation of gender. Seems to me that that method requires making it come out even every time. It may be that those plurals are making the shift to singular as well–it seems to work all right with “you”–but I suspect that I will always struggle with it.
Peter
Unless things have really changed while I wasn’t looking, there’s nothing of indeterminate gender in this example except Dr. X. “She” was perfectly correct in the old days in this circumstance, and no reason to make it “they” today. Unless, of course, “anyone” is plural.
The point is that if “he” was gender neutral, as some claim, then it would work in a context where a female was clearly indicated. Also, in my example, “anyone here” does have indeterminate gender. The speaker might not even know the sexes of the people being spoken to.
While I don’t think that gender neutral is the term I would use for the use of he in generic contexts, I would say that you can’t assume a gender-neutral term can always correctly be substituted for a gender-specific term in all contexts. I also think you must distinguish between gender neutrality (can be used in all contexts; e.g. they can be used for men, women, mixed groups, books, animals, hairpins), gender ambiguity (can be used when gender is indeterminate; e.g. who, somebody), and gender duality (i.e. can be used equally well for either gender; e.g. parent, child)
It is interesting that languages with strong grammatical gender struggle with combining grammatical gender with biological gender. This can often come up when considering professions.
For some professions, the word is identical (I think of these words as dual m/f) in masculine and feminine, but the article, when used, would distinguish biological genders. In other languages, the gender of adjectives applied to a grammatically masculine profession word are masculine, but then the verb form and predicate adjective would be dictated by the biological gender, and be in a feminine form if the professional were known to be a woman. Yesterday, my(m) family(m) doctor(m) was(f) ill(f).
Many languages are in transition on these topics, and have a much more tangled set of questions to resolve than English has.
In Russian, for example, the grammatical gender makes the biological gender of an animal irrelevant: the pregnant whale swam slowly (N.B. whale in Russian is grammatically masculine) would be rendered properly by pregnant(m!) whale(m) swam(m) … . In Russian, there has arisen some significant variation in applying grammatical gender only when it comes to the biological gender of people. The sentence above,
Yesterday, my family doctor was ill.
could be rendered in Russian for a woman doctor as:
my(m) family(m) doctor(m) was(f) ill(f) — especially in more formal contexts
or
my(f) family(m) doctor(m) was(f) ill(f) — especially in less formal contexts
I stand corrected on “anyone here”; however, as to the pronoun, we were discussing indeterminacy, not neutrality. Menstrual cramps are not gender indeterminate, and need not, I think, be referred to neutrally. Perhaps I’m misconstruing something, but I don’t believe there’s an issue about substituting neutrality where gender is clearly indicated. Is anyone advocating that? I understand the use of “he” in the indeterminate, and I understand, even applaud, the opposition to it. I certainly do not understand the claim that “he” can be gender neutral. We could use “it” as a gender neutral pronoun, but for some reason no one seems to want to apply it to a person. Too neutral?
Glenn, thanks for your elaborations. It is fascinating to try to look at language issues filtered through different rules.
Peter
During the repeat, I noticed again the mention of the MAD Magazine cartoon of the puzzled hotcakes vendor. If memory serves, he was more than just puzzled, he was annoyed by someone who had innocently asked him how they were selling. (Or maybe there was a cartoon on the same topic in some other magazine.)
Anyway, I may have been influenced by that cartoon when I came up with this one: