verbing - using a noun as a verb

I’ve read a new word lately. It’s the verb to Milo. Weird. I noticed it on the label of my new tin of this delicious drink.



I presume it’s an advertising campaign hoping to cash in on the impact of verbing, the use of a noun as a verb. Some people get upset when language is altered in this way, but it’s just one one of the ways languages change and adapt to modern life. It's often the subject of discussion on the Net.

It’s an old process - Shakespeare, for instance, was a master of the art and examples abound of his use of verbs as nouns. I read somewhere that he introduced nearly three thousand new words into the language. He loved using nouns as verbs. For instance, ‘I’ll unhair thy head’ or ‘the thunder would not peace at my bidding’. Other verbal expressions first used by Shakespeare and now accepted as good English are to champion, to humor, to elbow and to rant.

Henry Bolingbroke, in the play “Richard II”, says of his enemies that he will make sure that ‘Destruction straight shall dog them at the heels’. If you have ever been followed around your house by your dog, nudging at your calf, you know the image that Shakespeare conveyed so succinctly.

However, I can’t see the new verb, to Milo, catching on. In fact when I went to the wesite on the label of the tin, the promotion of this campaign was already finished!

skewiff

After enjoying the novel Jack Maggs by Peter Carey, I read a review of it on his website. The review's by Peter Kemp, in the Sunday Times of September 21, 1997 and in part he says:

Freakish figures with quirky mannerisms and odd names - Mrs Halfstairs, Captain Constable - lurk in skewwhiff little rooms or down narrow corridors lined with ancient, mildewed ballgowns.

Skewwhiff - a word I've used all my life but never seen written. I would have expected it to be skewiff, so I searched for that spelling.

Wordnik has some citations of this spelling, but no definitions. A not-too-persistent search found some discussion of this spelling, but no authoritative definitions.

Skewwhiff, however, appears on lots of dictionary sites. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines skew-whiff as not straight (=crooked) and points out that it isn't used before a noun. But note that Peter Kemp in the quote above has used it before a noun.

The Urban Dictionary has two spellings - skew-wiff, meaning all messy, disheveled. Colloquial British term somehow derived from "askew"
and skew-whiff, defined as turned or twisted toward one side. Common usage in the UK.

My mum came from Edinburgh, and in our family we still retain a few northern English, lowland Scottish expressions, so I think that might be why we grew up saying this word.

The Viking Network relates the word askew - which we didn't use - to skew-whiff and says they're both of Scandinavian origin.

collated screws

 

Words are, indeed, all around us. There I was, driving along Heidelberg Road and a huge sign caught my attention. Collated screws. What is a collated screw?

Wait a minute... If you collate some pages, you join them together. So I wasn't surprised to discover that collated screws are stuck together in a band so they can be used in a screw gun.

Here's a photo from flickr. I wish I could post it here, but the rights are reserved.

Basically it comes from a Latin word that means to bring together.

And now I'm wondering if it's possible to buy collated nails...

Yes, and here they are.


It's always good to know how to use new words. Next time I'm chatting to a builder or a plumber, or even a carpenter - maybe - I'll be able to hold up my end of the conversation.

origin of the word 'kangaroo'

Papillon Bleu - whose blog I love to visit - asked me recently whether I'd heard the story that the Australian word kangaroo means I don't know in an Aboriginal language.

I've heard the story, but it didn't seem likely to be true, so I had a look in a couple of reference books on my shelf. They're general interest books, not specialist books, but they did have some information about this word.

Aboriginal Words of Australia, originally published way back in 1965, didn't have much. It does mention that the Aboriginal people at the time of early settlement by Europeans thought this was an English word, and also refers to the story that it meant 'I don't know', but says there is no evidence for this theory.

Australian Aboriginal words in English, Their Origin and Meaning, first published in 1990, points out how unlikely it was that any Aboriginal person would have said they didn't know the name for a kangaroo, given that it was a staple food throughout the continent.

The reference says this is the first and best-known borrowing of an Aboriginal word into English. Cook learned it from local people in 1770 when he was forced to make repairs to the 'Endeavour' in north Queensland. It was the local language's term for one particular species of dark grey kangaroo but the Englishmen thought it was a general term for a variety of marsupials and the speakers of other Aboriginal languages supposed the unknown word was an English term.

The really funny part is that the local Aboriginal people in one place thought it was the English word for 'edible animals' and it eventually was taken back into one language as the local word for a horse.

Australian Aboriginal place names

I took a trip on the Smartbus yesterday, pretending to be a tourist in my own city, and it was most enjoyable. A friend and I boarded the bus at Heidelberg and went to Mordialloc, breaking our journey at Chadstone Shopping Centre.

When we were sitting on the beach at Mordialloc, enjoying the overcast but warm day, I was struck by the fact that Mordialloc sounds as if it might be an indigenous place-name and that it phonetically resembles Woori Yallock, the name of a town in the Upper Yarra Valley.

When I looked on the Dictionary of Aboriginal Placenames in Victoria, I found that the traditional name for the beach I was sitting on was Murdayaluk, with murda meaning low/short and yaluk meaning river or creek.

Woori Yallock means running creek.

There were other places in the database with Yallock in the placename.

As I sat there, I wondered who had rested on this beach in the past, and how they had lived. And I wondered when they had told the newly-arrived Europeans what they should call the place.

Given that before the nineteenth century place names were recorded orally rather than in written form, I guess it's not surprising that the written forms of names were not consistent.

At the Victorian Government's Land Channel, it says:

The widespread use of Indigenous names provides a strong connection to our Indigenous heritage and acknowledges Indigenous culture. However some names may not be strictly accurate because of unfamiliarity with Indigenous language and culture at the time they were originally recorded.

Most of the Indigenous languages did not have a written form when Victoria’s places and features were being named under European settlement (although some Indigenous communities used message sticks to convey information between groups).

The people who first recorded fragments of these languages were not linguists paying careful attention to subtleties of pronunciation they were generally surveyors and explorers, who were usually the first Europeans to travel through the land and record names in their maps, charts and fieldbooks.

a new punctuation mark available for purchase

I've just read on Slavenka and Obi's blog about a new punctuation mark that is available for purchase. As it so succinctly suggests in the name, SarcMark, it's for letting readers know your sentence is sarcastic.

It might have been useful when a British woman said, "It's jolly decent of them to let me have a half share of my win,"as a court awarded her only part of the prize in a lottery after the winning ticket fell from her pocket and someone else claimed to have won.

Yes, that sentence could have benefited from a specific punctuation mark.

I looked at the YouTube commercial for the SarkMark and, at first, I thought the examples weren't actually sarcasm, because they were so unsubtle and heavy-handed. But when I visited The Online Etymology Dictionary, where there is a table of types of humor (from Fowler's Modern English Usage, 1926, I began to think the British woman's remark may have been sardonic rather than sarcastic, because they were possibly self-directed and aimed at dealing with adversity, rather than aimed at a victim or bystander and intended to wound.

The SarcMark YouTube examples certainly fit the definition of sarcasm at WordNet - expressing or expressive of ridicule that wounds.

I was thinking of downloading the symbol - it's only a couple of dollars - but now that I've become more aware of the hurtful aspect of sarcasm I'm not going to do so.

The poet, the murderer and the Global Financial Crisis

The Poet and the Murderer is the story of a forged Emily Dickinson poem and of the man who made it.

The forger, Mark Hofman, was brought up in the Mormon faith, but became disillusioned with what he saw as the hypocrisy of the leaders of his society, and eventually began to forge documents to discredit the whole movement. However, he may not have taken this direction if not for an interest in electroplating when he was fourteen. He changed the mint mark on a historic Mormon coin using electroplating and discovered no-one could tell it was a forgery.

On page 77 the author, Simon Worrall, writes this about the word credit:

The experience also showed Hofman that most people, unless they have strong evidence to the contrary, are extremely trusting. Above all, it taught him how thin is the membrane separating the real from the fraudulent. Value, he instinctively understood, is not absolute, but relative. Ultimately it depends on an agreed set of assumptions. Credit, it is worth noting, derives from the Latin word credere, to believe.

It seems to me that the recent global financial crisis also showed how thin is the membrane between belief and disbelief. As long as we all believed debts would be paid and that credit would be endlessly available, the world economy worked. As soon as we no longer believed in each other, the credibility of that system was lost.

What an important word that is: credit.