Walking the streets in fits and starts

My dog Penny and I set off briskly. After all, we hadn't had breakfast yet, but given the prediction of a hot day, we were trying to beat the heat. What was this? Oh yes, an interesting tree to sniff, and grass that might contain some recent pee-mails by local dogs.

We proceeded. And stopped again. Lamp-posts are always fascinating.

And so it  went, around the streets.

This surely must be the definition of  a walk that proceeds in fits and starts. Literally.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary: Luxury Edition defines this phrase as with irregular bursts of activity.

Yep. That's how it went.

The Word Detective looks at the phrase in some depth. In part, he says:

"Fits and starts" does indeed mean "intermittent" or "off and on, spasmodically, not making  steady progress."

Spot on!

The writer explains that the expression 'by starts' probably appeared around 1421, and the expression 'by fits' can be dated to 1583. Joining the two is described as a more-is-better model, like similarly redundant phrases such as 'in leaps and bounds.'

Once I had mentioned to Penny that breakfast awaited us in the kitchen, the pace picked up amazingly. Vertical surfaces lost their appeal. We raced home.

attaboy!

Today's email from A Word A Day was attaboy! (The focus this week is on interjections, those useful little words or phrases that act as a 'filler' and have no grammatical relationship to the rest of the sentence.)

I can't recall the last time I heard anyone use this interjection, but I know it was used in my family when I was growing up. Of couse, I preferred attagirl! seeing I'm female. I suppose the current household equivalent would be the frequent use of good girl! when my dog Penny earns some praise.

I'd have thought it was a typically Australian usage, but Word A Day is an American institution, so I guess it might be a more universal phrase than I realised.

The online Macquarie thesaurus (Australian) includes attaboy in a selection of interjections synonymous with well done!

good for you, good on you; Informal: (you) (little) beauty, attaboy, attagirl, beaut, bewdy, bully, bully for …, curl the (or a) mo, good egg, good iron, good show, great, man, nice one, onya, that's the shot, your blood's worth bottling;

I've never used onya as an interjection, but I have used good onya (meaning good on you).

A Word A Day emails include a quote or two to show the usage of the daily offering, and here are the quotes for attaboy:

"The employees are not asking for a whole lot -- just an Attaboy! or an Attagirl! And news of this small gesture moves like wildfire through the ranks."
Labonita Ghosh; Five Ways to Reward the B-player in Your Team; The Economic Times (New Delhi, India); Feb 1, 2011.

"Dr. Burton refutes the notion that present-day parents have coddled and attaboyed their children."
Michael Tortorello; Mom, You're One Tough Art Critic; The New York Times; Jan 27, 2011.

So...
the first quote shows the word is used in India and the second one shows it has morphed into a verb. Verbing is one of my favorite linguistic processes. As Mark Liberman on Language Log says, '... you can pretty much verb any noun you want to verb.' There are myriad examples of nouns used as verbs, from Shakespeare's day to today, but I don't know many examples of interjections as verbs. (I'm sure linguists know lots of them, lol.)

lost consonants

As I waited for the train today, I wandered down to the end of the platform and saw this sign:



I didn't feel very exciting, but my hand itched to reach into my handbag, pull out a black texta and add a letter 'c' to that first word. Luckily I didn't have a texta with me.

Which got me thinking about a great little book I had at home called 'Lost Consonants'. It has pictures of such gems as 'The collected woks of William Shakespeare', or 'administering electric sock treatment'.

And I've come across a site where the creator of these art works, Graham Rawle, answers questions (hilariously) about his work .

And he has a site.

And a blog!

I treasure my copy of his book, but now even more so, as I see that the one I have is out of print.

black swan events

I've learned a new expression today, and with it a new concept. On ABC Radio's Counterpoint program this afternoon I was listening to three philosophers discuss Enlightenment Values in the Twenty- First Century , and one of the speakers referred to what I thought was a black swan effect.

Or maybe he referred to a black swan event.

It was immediately apparent that it meant a circumstance that wouldn't have been predicted, because no previous experience suggested such a thing was possible.

A quick look around the Net told me that it's a theory proposed by Nassim Taleb. Here's a brief quote from his work, posted on Wikipedia:

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.

Taleb says there's a 'nice summary' of his ideas at Arlene Goldbard's blog.

She finishes with these points:

Since we can’t control unpredictable events, we should accept uncertainty and seek to maximize our exposure to serendipity, as by putting ourselves in the way of new ideas.

Since there is such danger in accepting conclusions based on too little information simply because they confirm our beliefs, we should try to remain aware in the present of what we are doing, paying attention to what actually happens and refraining as far as possible from imposing theories on our experience.

We should recognize our poor record as a species in predicting the future, that we are much better at doing than knowing. Some things are more predictable than others: we are safe enough in expecting tomorrow’s sunrise to plan on breakfast. We can start noticing which situations are most susceptible to black swans, and when we encounter them, remember how little we truly know so our ignorance doesn’t lead us around by the nose.

calling a barley truce in a game

When my dog jumps onto her green mat during a game of chase-her-to-get-the-ball, it's called barley, which in our family means a truce and no-one can grab the ball from her.



I got to wondering whether other families use the expression 'barley' in this sense, and found it's not widely used.

The Virtual Linguist is collecting examples of the use of this and similar words. A Wikipedia article refers to the use of this term, with variants, in Australia.

It said

Peter Opie, who in 1959 conducted the most extensive study on the subject to date, considered the truce term to be the most important word in a schoolchild's vocabulary and one for which there was no adult equivalent...However, research into early recorded use of these terms found examples of some of these terms being used as a sign of surrender in battle or adult fights or quarrels as late as the 18th century.

It seems to me the phrase will stay in an adult's vocabulary if the adult continues to play, in the kind of innocent way children play - and, of course, that's what pet dogs teach us to do.

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren,by Iona and Peter Opie, was published in 1959, with an introduction by Marina Warner that says, in part

In the chapter called “Code of Oral Legislation,” they give a truly mind-boggling list of over fifty “truce terms,” including variations on “barlay,” “crosses,” and “squits,” by which children “obtain respite” from one another during a fight or other kind of struggle; a gloss provided by J. R. R. Tolkien himself connects “Fains” (pronounced “Veins” at my convent school in the Sixties)
with Old French se feindre, and he is able to use it to throw light on a crux in Chaucer, making the term five hundred years old. It must be said that the beautiful “distribution maps”—no less than six in this chapter alone, here illustrating truce terms’ usage—add considerably to the impact of the data; with something of the quality of a handdrawn treasure map in an adventure story, they reach a high-water mark that published scholarship in this field will probably never attain again.

I notice the word is spelled barlay in the Opie book.

I think I'll look for a copy of the book, after reading a review of it by Kenneth Rexroth (written in 1960).

when expressions go extinct

As I was listening to a discussion today on the ABC about the future of the Southern Bluefin Tuna, an expert in the area said they might possible go extinct if we don't work out whether we are overfishing this species.

I don't say "go extinct". I would normally say become extinct. I was surprised to hear the former phrase used on the ABC, and by an expert. I had noticed the same phrase used in the book I mentioned on 17 September, The Link, by Colin Tudge.

It appears I am behind the times, so I'd better adjust my vocabulary to the twenty-first century.

A quick Google search on the phrases 'go extinct/become extinct' comes up with a list of sites almost equally divided between the two phrases, but the interesting thing is that many of the brief summaries use both expressions interchangeably.

So maybe I can keep on saying it my way. My way is not extinct yet.