Paul McFedries' Tech Tonic

My book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Weird Word Origins is out! This book checks out the weird and wacky histories of nearly 600 words and phrases, from A1 to zydeco.

To learn more the book, see the book's home page. If you have questions or comments about the book, see The Dialogue Box, this site's discussion group.

My book (co-authored with David Pabian) iPhone 3G Portable Genius is now available! This is the first book in Wiley's new Portable Genius series, which features full-color screen shots, a clean, crisp layout, and content that turns the book into a portable version of Apple's Genius Bar. In this case, of course, the content is related to the iPhone 3G smartphone, and you learn all kinds of tips, tricks, and workarounds to help you get the most out of your iPhone 3G.

For much more info about the book, see the book's home page. If you have questions or comments about the book, see The Dialogue Box, this site's discussion group.

In a remarkably sane post about new words, editor John McIntyre of the Baltimore Sun offers the following bit of wordly wisdom:

[T]he point is not whether a dictionary has conferred legitimacy on [a] word; the point is whether the word is comprehensible and appropriate in context.

Exactly.

This applies to cliched speech, as well. In the Globe and Mail op-ed piece that I mentioned in my previous post, the writer objects to phrases such as push the envelope, think out of the box, low-lying fruit, get your ducks in a row, and going forward. She instructs us, upon hearing such phrases, to "take a bold step forward and politely demand clarity." However, with the possible exception of low-lying fruit (the variation low-hanging fruit is much more common), all of these phrases are perfectly comprehensible. If someone tells you about "the guy who pushed the envelope while thinking out of the box," you might think "Dude, get some new vocabulary," but you'd know what the person was talking about.

McKean’s Law (named after lexicographer Erin McKean) states that “any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.” In the op-ed pages of yesterday's Globe and Mail, Laura Rosen Cohen wrote a tirade against buzzwords, clichés, and speech correctness that has no such errors, but it does include a distressing number of tired phrases, including mind-numbing, walking on eggshells, culture of fear, and baby steps. I therefore propose a corollary to McKean’s Law:

Any rant against clichéd speech will contain at least one cliché.

Some folks just don't get it:

The English language is a growing concern. Every year, Collins gets a pile of free publicity by publicly announcing new additions to its dictionary (last year: Facebook (as a verb), poke (as an action on Facebook) and sub-prime (adjective)). The Oxford English Dictionary does the same, just at a more leisurely, scholarly pace. On YouTube, it's a fair bet there's a new acronym coined every second, AIYDBMGAHAL. Not often, however, does anyone stop to ask whether this is a good thing, whether – to paraphrase Migrationwatch – the English language is full.

If you think the English language is “full,” this could be a sign that, like the kid in the old Gary Larson cartoon, your brain is full. Ironic, too, that in a rant against new terms, the writer coins, yup, a new term! The tongue-in-cheek initialism (not an acronym) AIYDBMGAHAL stands for “and if you don’t believe me go and have a look.” Why, I do believe I will, thanks very much.

In a scathing report released today, communications experts have declared that the instant messages teenagers exchange with each other are in reality nothing but gibberish. U.S. Chatmaster General Todd Dood, with technical help from the National Security Agency, examined thousands of instant messages.

"None of it made a lick of sense" he said.

It has long been thought that teen instant messages contained abbreviations (such as LOL for "laughing out loud" and MAIBARP for "my acne is becoming a real problem"), short forms (such as L8R for "later" and R2D2 for "R2D2"), and slang (such as whassup for "what's up" and yo for "Hello, I am pleased to meet your acquaintance. Do you wish to have a conversation?"). However, the report reveals that this so-called "teenspeak" began to change so fast that kids simply could not keep up. Each teen developed his or her own lingo, and the instant messaging system devolved into anarchy.

"The crazy thing is that teen instant messaging is more popular than ever," said Dood. "They seem not to have noticed that they can't understand a word anyone is texting to them." There seems to be a prestige factor at work here. As one teen quoted in the study said, "If you say you don't understand, then you're just like so gay."

Seth Godin neologizes: 

So, very soon, you will own a cell phone that has a very good camera and knows where you are within ten or fifteen feet.

And the web will know who you are and who your friends are. What happens? Well, when you take a photo, you can automatically send it to the clowd. The clowd can color correct and adjust the photo based on the million other photos it has seen just like this. [Debbie wonders, isn't it called a "cloud"? I guess I was subconsciously coining a new term--which I so rarely do--this time, combining crowd and cloud into something new. I think I like it, even if it is a bit artificial].

I first thought the term was an insult (because it looks like a blend of clown and clod), but it's not. Clowd combines crowd (as in crowdsourcing) and cloud (that haze of data and connections that exists "out there" on the Internet).

 Perhaps the folks who coined manstincts should read this:

Over the past year, there has been plenty of talk in bar and restaurant circles about wine-based cocktails. Some people in the industry have even coined the term "winetails," I guess mainly because people can't resist coining ridiculous terms. 

When a man has anything of his own to say, and is really in earnest that it should be understood, he does not usually make cavalry regiments of his sentences, and seek abroad for sesquipedalian words. —Charles Dickens, Household Words, 1858

A sesquipedalian word is one that's either very long or has many syllables (it comes from the Latin phrase sesquipedalia verba, "words a foot and a half long"). The current (albeit disputed) king of Sequipedelia is the full chemical name of the protein titin, which contains a whopping 189,819 letters. Mind-blowing, right? Hah! It's a mere piker compared to the new longest word champ: a 3,609,750-letter behemoth found in The Blah Story, Volume 19, by the writer, director, artist and linguistic provocateur Nigel Tomm. The word, which begins with "'somewhenotoday" and ends (800-plus pages later) with "dingown," refers to "the current day or date between the real and imaginable today." (Pause for inevitable head-scratching.) It forms part of the world's longest sentence, which contains 2,403,109 words and makes up the entirety of The Blah Story Volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19.

Apparently Tomm's neological method (or is it madness?) is to string together words where the last letter of one word is the same as the first letter of another. So "somewhennotoday" comes from "somewhen", "not", and "today" (with the common first and last letters reduced to one character). The word also includes all of the acknowledged sesquipedalian gems, including the following:

• lopado­temakho­selakho­galeo­kranio­leipsano­drim­hypo­trimmato­silphio­karabo­melito­katakekhy­meno­kikhl­epi­kossypho­phatto­perister­alektryon­opto­kephallio­kigklo­peleio­lagōio­siraio­baphē­tragano­pterýgōn (a fictional dish mentioned in Aristophanes' comedy Assemblywomen; 184 letters).
• bababadal­gharagh­takammin­arronn­konn­bronn­tonn­erronn­tuonn­thunn­trovarrhoun­awnskawn­toohoo­hoordenen­thurnuk (the symbolic thunderclap associated with the fall of Adam and Eve, as imagined by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake; 101 letters)
• Taumata­whaka­tangi­hanga­koauau­o­tamatea­turipukaka­piki­maunga­horo­nuku­pokai­whenua­kitana­tahu  (New Zealand place name; 85 letters)
• pneumono­ultra­micro­scopic­silico­volcano­coniosis (a lung disease; 45 letters)

There's no word on whether this Franken-term incudes super­cali­fragi­listic­expi­ali­docious or Two­all­beef­patties­special­sauce­lettuce­cheese­pickles­onions­on­a­sesame­seed­bun.

In yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times, Lewis Lazare wrote about a new marketing campaign that Kraft Foods is running for Planters nuts:

Planters, a unit of packaged foods behemoth Kraft Foods, decided sometime last year to shift the marketing focus for its iconic nuts brand to men.

Okay, so far so good; this kind of thing is routine with marketing types. However, soon we learn of an unfortunate venture into neological territory:

Planters also has taken its male-focused advertising and marketing online, where there is now a dedicated "manstincts" section at the www.planters.com Web site.

Ouch. That is one ugly word and, as Lazare points out, its problems don't end there:

First, there's the matter of the title "manstincts." Of course, we know the creatives were trying to reference something to do with men and their instincts as they relate to nuts. In fact, a "manstinct," we're told, is nothing more nor less than an all-consuming passion for Planters nuts. Maybe so. But when we say the neologism, what we hear is "man stinks."

Rest assured that you won't be seeing "manstincts" on Word Spy anytime soon. Not that you can completely trust me on these things. After all, I'm the guy who posted terms such as manscaping, man date, manny, and, perhaps most regrettably, mancation.

Last month on Word Spy, I posted the phrase silent disco, which I defined in part as "a party where each person dances to whatever music is playing on his or her MP3 player." In today's New York Times Magazine, Rob Walker provides a synonym, mobile clubbing, and provides a terrific detail -- the "bud-removal greeting":

A prototype called Doffing Headphones included an absurd handle attached to one of a pair of earbuds. The designer Synnove Fredericks noticed that participants in “mobile clubbing” events in London (a group of friends dancing in public to whatever is playing on each individual’s music device) would remove one earbud when acknowledging a new arrival -- like a dandy doffing his cap. The Doffing Headphones’ handle, then, would make the most of the purely symbolic bud-removal greeting.

I just started up a couple of Twitter accounts, if you do the Twitter thing:

• My personal Twitter account
• Twitter account for Word Spy posts

Feel free to follow along.

My book Build It. Fix It. Own It.: A Beginner's Guide to Building and Upgrading a PC is now available at fine bookstores everywhere. This book teaches you how to build a PC with the sweat of your own brow, and shows you that it takes very little sweat indeed, even if you've never so much as glanced at the inside of a computer. You learn what parts you need, how to make smart buying decisions, how to set up your work area, and what tools you need. From there, you learn how to build various types of PCs, from a simple-but-functional basic machine for those on a budget, to a screaming gaming PC that will handle any anything you care to throw at it.

For much more info about the book, see the book's home page. If you have questions or comments about the book, see The Dialogue Box, this site's discussion group.

While looking for something else, this morning I stumbled over a Business Wire story about a survey conducted by WhiteSmoke, a software developer specializing in writing and grammar tools:

In the survey, adults were shown 20 words and asked to pick out the correct spelling. 'Calendar' was misspelled by 19 percent of people, 20 percent were clueless when it came to spelling 'embarrass' and 'referring' drew blanks from 28 percent. Another 38 percent had no idea how to spell 'definitely'.

Almost a third were stumped by the spelling of 'liaison' and 40 percent got 'questionnaire' wrong, followed by 'accommodate,' which was misspelled 38 percent of the time. Even 'receive' was misspelled by 15 percent of respondents.

It's all quite pathetic, particularly when you take into account the eyebrow-raising fact that, unlike the brave contestants in this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee who actually have to spell each word, the survey respondents were given a choice of just three spellings and were asked to select the correct one. A Rhesus monkey could get at least 33% correct in that kind of "test." Ah, but here's the kicker:

When asked why their spelling was not up to par, two-thirds blamed technology — especially mobile phone predictive spelling and text speak abbreviations such as CUL8TR for see you later.

Hah! I'll bet those same two-thirds also "blame technology" when they run out of milk (stupid refrigerator!) or when they oversleep (stupid alarm clock that doesn't set itself).

Check out the setup I'm using for my MacBook Air while I write my forthcoming book MacBook Air Portable Genius (coming to fine bookstores everywhere this November!):

That's a USB/FireWire hub connected to the MacBook Air's single USB port, with a FireWire DVD burner, USB external hard drive (for Time Machine backups), and Apple's USB network adapter connected to the hub. I also use an Apple Bluetooth Mighty Mouse (not shown), which I find faster than using the trackpad.

Obviously the following Lenovo ad isn't so far off the mark:

Many thanks to Ed Bott for the link to the Lenovo ad.