The hiney virus

A few days ago, a friend mentioned the /hájni/ virus, referring to the H1N1 flu virus, but treating “H1N1″ as if it were a piece of leetspeak, with the numeral 1 standing for the letter I, the whole thing pronounced like the North American slang word for ‘buttocks’ (a shortened variant of behind, in combination with the suffix -y). There’s even a t-shirt (and a sweatshirt), on sale here:

The t-shirt uses one of the variant spellings of the buttocks word. The OED entry (draft of December 2006) for the word (which notes that it’s frequently a euphemistic substitute for ass and has cites from 1922 on) gives four spellings: heinie, heiny, hiney, and hinie. Though the OED treats heinie as the main spelling, when the buttocks word appears in combination with virus and flu, the hiney spelling (as on the t-shirt) is by far the most frequent in Google hits. The ordering of the OED’s spelling variants is the  same for X virus and X flu: hiney first, then (well behind it) heinie, then hinie, then heiny. In addition, there are some occurrences of the spellings heiney and hiny.

housemade

On the menu at my local Gordon Biersch restaurant: housemade pretzels.

Housemade for older home-made (or homemade) seems to be sweeping U.S. restaurant menus, though it doesn’t seem to have made it into any of the standard dictionaries yet; and if you search for it, Google suggests you meant homemade; and the English-Test.net site flatly labels it as an error in English grammar.

Literalists have long complained about home-made on menus, on the grounds that it means ‘made at home, made in someone’s home’ and so shouldn’t be used for food that is prepared in a restaurant’s kitchens (much less for something brought in from elsewhere, made it a factory, or bought in a store); this is the meaning given in most dictionaries. Nonetheless, an extended use for ‘made in-house’ has been around for some time.

The innovation housemade serves to convey this meaning clearly. But it also provides a cachet lacking in the homely and amateur-sounding home-made. So, despite the fact that a fair number of people find it pretentious (to judge from comments on the web), housemade is steadily advancing.

Andrew Romano looked at the word for Newsweek this spring (“House Sweet House”, on-line on May 22, in the magazine on June 1) and reported:

Behold “housemade”: the artisanal adjective that has yet to appear in Merriam-Webster but is suddenly materializing on menus across the nation, often where a humble “home-made” used to be. In Brooklyn, restaurants such as the Michelin-starred Dressler rarely deign to serve dishes not described as housemade: housemade gnocchi with morel ragout ($15); cheddar burger with housemade pickles ($13.50); housemade pecan sticky buns ($4); and, lest the liquor feel left out, a cocktail with house-infused orange vodka ($11). According to Menupages.com, 244 New York restaurants now boast housemade (or “house-made”) fare, and the eateries of Los Angeles (118), Washington, D.C. (112), Chicago (79), South Florida (62), Boston (57) and Philadelphia (56) don’t lag by much. In San Francisco, the term has nearly outpaced homemade (192 to 176).

Home-made is of course still available for a contrast with store-bought, especially with reference to non-food items: homemade soap, laundry detergent, garden sprays, weed killer, solar power, wind generators, stun guns, and much more.

publicate

Ian Frazier, in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece “Scratch and Sniff” (October 19, p. 30), about police dogs that sniff out cell phones:

Captain Matthew Kyle: “We don’t want to publicate what the cell-phone smell is exactly. It’s an organic substance that’s in all cell phones–leave it at that.”

What caught my eye was the verb publicate ‘make public, advertise’ (a verbing of the adjective public via suffixation with -ate), which I didn’t recall having seen before. Was it a recent innovation?

Well, you probably know where this story is going to go now.

Meme hybrid alert

Although in my posting on portmanteaus I declared that I wasn’t collecting them — there are just too many, and new ones are invented every day — here’s what I think is an interesting new one, from Virginia Heffernan’s NYT Magazine piece (of August 23) “The Feminist Hawks”:

Like many conservatives, [David] Horowitz appears to have come to feminist-hawkism after 9/11. But in his hands, the ideology has fast became a tenacious memebrid — as Tim Hwang, a sociologist and the director of the Web Ecology Project, calls memes that unite two or more cultural phenomena.

“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere,” he wrote. Furthermore, to depict Islamic regimes less as terrorists than as repressors of civil liberties may appeal even to traditional isolationists, as it “plays off of the strong communities of libertarians that dominate some prominent spaces.”

Now memebrid is a portmanteau, a kind of hybrid, but the memebrid in question, feminist hawk ‘hawk who is a feminist’, is not. Instead, it’s an instance of a different scheme for combining two words to make a new word: compounding. (The OED entry for portmanteau makes the connection between the two phenomena explicit.) A compound has a dual nature: it is a word, but it also consists of two words in sequence; it has an internal structure.

In some portmanteaus, one of the contributing words appears intact (and the other appears only in abbreviated form); this is the case for memebrid, where meme appears intact, while hybrid is shortened to -brid. But many portmanteaus — brunch, spork — have both contributing words abbreviated (br- + -unch, sp- + -ork).

Still other portmanteaus have both contributors intact, but overlapping: bromance is bro + romance, with -ro- shared (in pronunciation and in spelling); the corresponding compound would be bro romance. In fact, there’s often overlapping in portmanteaus in general: Billary is Bill + Hillary, with shared -ill-; Scalito is Scalia + Alito, with shared -ali-. (Overlapping is a property these portmanteaus have in common with one large class of inadvertent blends, called “splice blends” in the literature: originary is original + ordinary, with shared -in-.)

No overlapping in memebrid, however.

A grow

A New York Times story (“Deep in California Forests, An Illicit Business Thrives”, by Jesse McKinley, 8/22/09) tells us about Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department officers hunting for

… workers at one of the scores of remote, highly organized outdoor marijuana “grows” that dot the vast forests of California, largely on federal property.

Of course, I picked up on the nouning grow (a count noun meaning, roughly, ‘plot of land under cultivation for a crop’). And was shocked, shocked to realize that the English language had no word for this concept — no “word”, in the sense ‘ordinary-language fixed expression of some currency’ (see discussion here). Appalling! What simple creatures English speakers must be, able to make specific distinctions — fields, vineyards, (rice) paddies, orchards, gardens, (pot) grows, etc. — but hobbled by their inability to conceive of the overarching abstraction! But that’s the way of primitive peoples.

Short shot #6: adverbial scary

Ann Burlingham wrote me a while back with a sighting of innovative scary different, roughly ’scarily different, different in a scary way’. It’s from Business Week, in a quote:

Even stronger government intervention may be required, several economists said on Mar. 4. “I’ve gone through a number of cycles as an economist on Wall Street, but this one’s different,” says Brian Fabbri, chief economist for BNP Paribas. “This one’s scary different.” (link)

Googling on {“scary different”} pulls up a number of instances that are pretty clearly conveying ‘both scary and different’, but also some predicative examples like the one above, for instance:

It is amazing. It is fun. It is exciting. It is always different but never scary different. It’s enlighteningly different, fun different. (link)

Note the pairing with the adverb enlighteningly. And the adverbial use of fun, conveying ‘in a fun way’ (with the innovative use of fun as an adjective). Here’s another pairing with fun:

The sushi rolls are a little different from the usual California roll and spicy tuna roll – not scary different, but a fun kind of different. (link)

Adverbial scary can modify some other adjectives:

They’re scary huge, but oh so tasty. (link)

There are probably other adjectives, beyond scary and fun, that have been adverbialized (“adved”?).

Introducing short shots

Introducing a new feature on this blog: Short Shots, brief items with little comment. This inaugural posting has five items in it.

What are the haps

Thanks to our shout-outs/shouts-out exchange, Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame) and I have been going back and forth about his use of language on the site. The first thing to say is that it’s self-aware; he understands that he’s playing with language, and revels in it.

Our exchange started with my noticing one of the headings on the site:

WHAT ARE THE HAPS MY FRIENDS

From the context, I gathered that haps (which was, I think, new to me) was, roughly, ‘happenings’, so that the question conveyed was ‘What’s happenin(g)? What’s goin(g) on? What’s up?’

(I’ll save the punctuational issues — no apostrophe for the vocative “my friends”, no final question mark — for later postings.)

Ryan agreed with my reading. I thought he’d invented haps himself, but what he said was:

The backstory is that I really don’t like the word “blog”, so I wasn’t going to call this little blurb beneath my comic “RYAN’S BLOG O’ THE DAY”.  The synonyms for “blog” all sound equally unappealing to me (“internet diary”, etc), and I wanted something that said “Here’s some news that you might find interesting” in a way that was friendly and different – most other comics just say “Newspost” or “Rant”.  ”What are the haps” (short for “what are the happenings”, “what is going on”, etc) was a phrase I’d heard used semi-ironically (or at least, a phrase I’d never seen used fully sincerely) a few years back, and adding “my friends” to the end gave the phrase a bumpy cadence that I liked.

So I’m hoping it conveys a sort of “Hey!  What’s going on, guys?” casual tone to what follows below, as if the title is asking “What’s going on?” and the post below is saying “Hey, here’s what’s new with me!”.

So, lost in the mists of time. But Ryan’s use has been the impetus for the spread of haps all over the net; search on {“what are the haps”} and you’ll get a lot of stuff. Ryan himself was surprised.

There are precedents for haps: props ‘propers, proper respect or recognition’ , in particular.

[Yes, these things are slang and consequently are mostly restricted to certain users, contexts, purposes, and audiences, but so what? I'm not recommending such usages as formal written standard English. I'm not here as an arbiter of taste, but as a reporter on the passing scene.

And, in any case, formal written standard English is a variety with a very small -- in comparison to the full collection of varieties of English out there in the world -- niche. Granted, a niche with extraordinary social and political significance, but it's not the world, only a tiny part of it.

(I say this because I get a certain amount of flak when I write about demotic variants.)

(And I am, of course, writing in, mostly, formal written standard English, because that's what the context calls for.)]

In this particular case, I celebrate the playful and creative deployment of language in Ryan’s cartoons.

The cartoons come with auxiliary material under four headings:

(1) WHAT ARE THE HAPS MY FRIENDS

(2) ADS WOO

(3) GUYS YOU CAN TOTALLY BUY THIS SHIRT I MADE

(4) BIG UPS AND SHOUT OUTS

Heading (1) is what I started with. Heading (2) is over, well, ads; Ryan can’t just do this stuff for free (as the Language Loggers and other linguabloggers do), but needs some source of income. Woo is fascinating on its own.

Heading (3) is more commerce, enlivened by the extension of degree totally into interesting new territory.

And heading (4) has both shouts out and another -s innovation (not Ryan’s, but still recent), ups. Several sites gloss big ups as ‘massive props’, which pleases me a lot.