Recently in Words & terms Category

Words have a strange power. Take the word "surgery", for example. This week, I discovered that it's a word that strikes fear and concern into the heart of many. And conjures up certain images as well as ideas.

I was scheduled to undergo minor surgery, an outpatient procedure to remove a lump from a place where lumps had no business to be. When I told my friends, all of them reacted with shock, concern and a great deal of worry on my behalf. I felt like a fraud. Mine wasn't a severe condition or a life-threatening matter -- I wasn't even going to be spending a night in the hospital!

My best guess is that "surgery" is associated with grave and somber procedures such as "heart bypass". But the Compact Oxford English Dictionary merely defines surgery as "the branch of medicine concerned with treatment of bodily injuries or disorders by incision or manipulation".

Which I tried to explain to my friends. "It's minor surgery," I said, emphasising the word minor. "The surgeon is just going to cut that part open, take the lump out, and sew me back up. No big deal!"

"These doctors, they always tell you it's minor. Everything is minor to them!" was the reply. I grinned to myself; likely this friend had forgotten that my father is a medical practitioner!

I suppose my background (with my doctor dad) had denuded the word surgery of its 'stigma' in my sight. On the day of the operation, several people asked if I was worried or nervous and I said no, what is there to be worried about? I'm sure I got many strange looks, and even stranger ones when, the next day, I declared I wanted to go out and about.

"You should stay home and rest!" a friend insisted. "You just had surgery!"

"Good grief, I had minor surgery to take out a lump. All the rest of me is okay apart from the part where the surgeon made his incision. I can still walk and everything!" I replied.

My friend's mind was boggled. Not needing to recuperate after surgery? How can this be?

I'd never realised that this word carries so many heavy associations for others. To me, it merely describes a medical procedure; it's the type of surgery that lends weight to the word. That's why I increasingly feel that it's very important to be careful of the words I use, in order that I should convey my intended meaning to others. Sometimes it's not that we use the wrong words; it's that the hearer or reader interprets them differently from the exact dictionary meaning. T'was a good reminder, this.

 

 
Shocking, isn't it? The rating, I was informed, was given based on the presence of the following words on this blog:

• ass (3 occurrences),
• suck (2 occurrences), and
• death (1 occurrence).

"Any word is an innocent collection of sounds until a community surrounds it with connotations and then decrees that it cannot be used in certain speech situations," Peter Farb wrote in his 1973 book Word Play. "Prohibiting certain words actually elevates them in a neurotic way by encouraging the strategy of talking dirty; it endows them with titillation, shame, and a vulgarity that the things they stand for do not themselves possess."

After all, an ass is an ass, whether or not you use the word ass to refer to it. You can call it bottom, buttocks, rear end, backside, behind, butt, posterior, derriere, fanny, rump, tush, or whatever, but it'll still be what it is.

The funny thing is that new words are introduced into the language to take the place of so-called "taboo" words, but then these new words become similarly tainted and are then replaced by other words. For example, at one point privy was deemed less polite than toilet, but these days the terms restroom or washroom are considered more acceptable -- toilet has become too direct, too raw and vulgar. In the end we move further and further away from calling a spade a spade. We end up with euphemisms of euphemisms.

Farb traced the habit of creating euphemisms back to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. The ruling Normans considered themselves superior to the native Anglo-Saxons and thus, it came to be that their Norman-derived words were considered more "high-class" and polite, whereas Anglo-Saxon words were deemed uncouth, vulgar, and suitable only for use among the lower classes -- mainly the natives themselves.

The farmer today still looks after his Anglo-Saxon cows, calves, swine, and sheep -- but once they are served up appetizingly in a restaurant or supermarket, they become French beef, veal, pork, and mutton. Whenever the speech community must discuss anything it deems unpleasant, the discussion is acceptable on the condition that it is carried on in the elegant vocabulary bestowed on English by the Normans.

The problem with having taboo words is that some ass (sorry, couldn't resist!) will purposely break the rules and use the words just to show that he can, or to shock those around him, or even to provoke somebody by knowingly being rude. If we would just use the words to mean what they mean, they would lose their power to offend.

So powerful is the taboo on the word cock that Louisa May Alcott's father changed his family name from Alcox to Alcott to avoid any chance of being associated with -- and tainted by -- that word. Absurd, isn't it? I find it a bit sad that a person would feel the need to change his name just because it sounds similar to a certain word, a word that would have been perfectly innocuous if not for the unfortunate meaning imposed upon it. A word that, in fact, was perfectly innocuous -- it refers, so the Oxford English Dictionary tells me, to "a male bird, especially of a domestic fowl". Unfortunately, it has also come to refer to the penis.

Oh, I forgot I can't say the word penis. I meant, of course, the male sexual organ. *cough*

"Irene Kiew" spells out "Eerie Wink". Or "I Wee Inker".

Anagrams... I've never quite understood how people can come up with them. I mean, shuffling the letters around sounds great in theory, but in practice... who has the time to sit down and fiddle with all that?

This calls for a computer brain.

All I had to do was google "anagrams", and a bunch of free online anagram generators popped up on the first page of the search results. Pretty cool, although they just put together a jumble of words that fit, and you have to look through the list to find the combinations that have a modicum of meaning.

My Chinese name, Kiew Sieh Ping, turned up "I win hip geeks". I sure hope that's a prophecy, although I don't need hip geeks in the plural; I only need one!

It also yielded I HIS KING WEEP, not to mention I NEIGH WE SKIP, WHEE I SKIN PIG, and, err... I SEEKING WHIP. *gulps*  Read into that what you will...

I think these anagram generators might be my new favourite time-waster for the week!

Puzzles, much like classroom lessons, must be stimulating and challenging -- but not too difficult, or they will cross the line from "challenging" to "daunting".

It's a delicate balance. One of the theories of how we learn (or acquire) language says that the learner must keep receiving input that is one step above his current language level. Stephen Krashen -- whose theory it is -- explains that the learner will then employ what he knows about the way the language is used and the forms of the language (eg. sentence structures, grammar, etc.) in order to understand this input. In the process he will acquire new knowledge of the language.

So I like doing word puzzles that stretch me just a little, but not too much. I suppose you could say their difficulty level should be just one step above my abilities and knowledge; otherwise they become too much work.

I was tackling a crossword puzzle the other day and asked my housemate to help me brainstorm. "One to whom cheque made out. Five letters," I called out.

"Lucky," she replied.

I read somewhere that the relationship between words and their meanings are arbitrary. We learn that a chair is called a chair and a table is called a table... but when we come down to it, why is a chair called a chair? Why not call it a glip? Or a wubbie?

Of course, you can always dig into history and find out how the word originated; rhinoceros is from the Greek words rhis (nose) + keras (horn). There, that makes sense, right? The animal with a horn on its nose. But how did a nose come to be a nose and a horn come to be a horn? We know that nose is from the Old English nosu and that, in turn, came from some Germanic language. Still, that hardly explains why a nose is a nose. It only serves to explain how the word has evolved over the years.

Hunter Diack (Language for Teaching, 1966) points out that because of this, "most of the words in a language have to be learnted as separate units". When you're a child, you learn that the colour blue is blue, and yellow is yellow. You learn what happy looks like and sad looks like. You learn that fire is hot and ice-cream is cold. And so on, so forth -- you learn words as separate units.

Why? Because even when words happen to refer to things within the same category, they often take on such different forms that you can't find any logical connection between the two. We have, for example, river and stream, which both refer to things that are very similar. But the words are totally different. You'd never think that they were related. If you knew what a river is, you wouldn't be able to deduce from there that a stream is a "small, narrow river" (as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary).

Diack therefore concludes:

...language is untidy; it is not cut and trimmed and designed for efficiency.

Sheikh is a great word on several levels. First, there’s the silent h on the end that practically says “fuck you.” It doesn’t even pretend to be working. I like consonants with attitude.
—Scott Adams, The Dilbert Blog

I've just finished going through the entire Oxford Dictionary of Abbreviations. That's what you do when your lecturer insists that you come up with examples other than the ones she provided in class -- and you can't think of any. It's also what you do when you are somewhat kiasu (afraid of losing out, or uber-competitive), and mild symptoms of OCD start to pop up.

We've been learning about the way new words are formed. Of course one of the most common ways to come up with a new word is to simply borrow a word from another language. Then there are the words that echo sounds (meow, moo, woof, clink, bang, pop), and words that are formed by joining two words together (lightweight, fanfare, lovesick). Not to mention, words created by adding prefixes (mis-, de-, un-, etc.) and suffixes (-tion, -ly, -ist, etc.).

Abbreviations are a whole different kettle of fish.

It seems to me that there are at least four types of abbreviations:

1. Blending: Where two or more words have been abbreviated and joined together to form a new word, like brunch (breakfast + lunch), or sitcom (situation comedy);
2. Clipping: Informal abbreviations that shorten longer words, like vet (veterinary surgeon) and fridge (refrigerator);
3. Acronyms: Initials that are read out as a word, like NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) or NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation); and
4. Alphabetisms: Initials that are read out by each individual letter, like WTO (World Trade Organisation) or UN (United Nations).

From what I've read online, there seems to be some dispute as to whether the last two categories should really only come under one, but I'm going to go with what I've been taught.

There are no end to acronyms and alphabetisms, but when it comes to words formed by clipping and blending, I've ended up scratching my head for new examples.

Still, it's not that bad. Leaving abbreviations aside, the worst -- the absolute worst -- is trying to come up with examples of proper nouns that have ended up being used as a common noun. Like how Tupperware now is used to generally refer to any kind of plastic container, and Maggi mee, in the Malaysian context, is taken to mean any kind of instant noodles. I think I might need to spend yet more time reading through the dictionary.

Who knew a comic would have me scrambling for a dictionary?

Louche, adj.
Disreputable or dubious in a rakish or appealing way.
(Oxford English Dictionary)

When I was a child, whenever I asked my parents what a word meant, they'd say, "Look it up in the dictionary." Immensely aggravating, I can tell you. I admit that I wasn't always diligent; lots of times I'd just guess at the meaning from the context -- inimitable is a good example; I know the word but am not too sure what it means exactly.

But sometimes my curiosity would get the better of me. I have this indescribable desire to know, to discover, and I'd go get out our dictionary and look the word up, and breathe, "Ohhhh..." in a greatly enlightened tone of voice.

Today, I still happily look up the dictionary every time a word stumps me or looks particularly unfamiliar. With the Internet, this process has gotten even easier -- Dictionary.com is almost indispensible to me.

I'm fascinated by words and always enjoy discovering the more obscure ones, but I don't consciously use them to impress. Whenever I use a "big word", it's a case of my brain slotting in what it thinks is the most appropriate term to use rather than me choosing to favour a complex word over a simpler one. I think if you tend to slip in big words just because you can, it will tend to show in your writing; and I don't think it necessarily makes your writing any more impressive. Why say pulchritude, why not just say beauty? Using unnecessary big words can clutter up your piece, making it more difficult for readers to wade through the work. They distract readers and can hinder readers from grasping the overall message you are trying to convey.

Did you know that there actually is such a thing called krypton? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:

An inert gaseous chemical element, present in trace amounts in the air and used in some kinds of electric light.

I always thought it was something the creator of Superman made up! Amazing the things you discover when you flip through the dictionary at random, hoping to find suitable words to use as examples in your linguistics assignment.

Oh, and the word 'krypton' is apparently derived from the Greek krupton, meaning 'hidden'. Superman's weakness is a hidden one, only manifesting when he is in close proximity with the green-coloured (and fictional) kryptonite stone. How cool is that?

You know how some people keep peppering their speech with certain words or phrases? Like "just", "actually", or "well"? They do it unconsciously, but it tends to be pretty obvious to the listener. When I was in high school, we students used to imitate teachers who did that and make fun of them. Now I find out that words used in this way have a name: they're called conversation markers.

A close friend commented tonight that I use the word 'like' a lot when I speak. I'd never noticed. We went on to talk of other things and then it happened. I blurted out the word, and immediately burst into laughter. After I recovered enough to speak, I found myself mentioning the word again, and again dissolved into laughter. My goodness, I really never realised!

Now I'm getting terribly self-conscious when I talk to people... especially that particular friend.

It's intriguing, though, to read on a New Zealand educational website that students who are learning English as a second language start speaking more English fluently once they begin to use these "markers". Is it because that's part of catching the rhythm of the language? Or is it a sign that they're starting to feel comfortable speaking English? Or maybe it's because they've stopped working so hard at following all the rules. I know a lot of people are worried that they'll use the wrong word or phrase things wrongly or make a grammatical mistake, and they're so focused on getting it right that everything comes out stilted and awkward, even disjointed -- and very formal-sounding.

I wonder whether everybody has one or more conversation markers. They're definitely more obvious in some people's speech than in others'. I think I'm going to listen extra closely to the people around me this week. So if I seem to be regarding you with an intense expression on my face as you speak to me, you'll know why. Hehehe.