Short shot #15: bodily hygiene

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky writes:

My new employer has a sign in the bathroom exhorting us that for safety reasons we should not use the bathroom for “bodily hygiene”. That’s what the showers in another building are for. Scofflaw that I am, I persist in washing my hands.

It turns out that usage differs on how much bodily hygiene covers. For Elizabeth’s new company, it refers specifically to bathing or showering, that is, to washing the body, and similarly for historian and anthropologist  Alan Macfarlane in an article on bodily hygiene in England:

Buchman writes that ‘probably not until 1850 did regular personal washing become routine in large numbers of middle-class households,’ Plenty of literary and other material can be found to support such a view. For instance, a doctor writing in 1801 remarked that ‘most men resident in London and many ladies though accustomed to wash their hands and faces daily, neglect washing their bodies from year to year.’

On the other hand, there are sites (like this one) that specifically mention “hand hygiene” (washing the hands) as a type of bodily hygiene.

(I’m not sure how washing the hair fits into this picture, but I’ll bet that Elizabeth’s company doesn’t want people washing their hair in the bathrooms.)

Some of the variation in usage no doubt arises from the fact that bodily hygiene and personal hygiene are “semi-technical terms”, not really part of everyday English, which are pressed into service, essentially by stipulation, to refer to categories that have no simple everyday labels.

Choosing words

Jonathan Lundell notes “belittle the offense” in this report on an English court case:

An English judge, Judge Anthony Pitts, has shocked police and prosecutors by expressly permitting prep school music teacher Helen Goddard, 26, to continue her relationship with a 15-year-old student after she is released from prison. [Goddard] received a 15-month sentence for her lesbian affair with the 15-year-old student.

Pitts did not belittle the offense, saying that “[t]his case is so serious an immediate sentence of imprisonment is inevitable.”

Lundell found “belittle the offense” a bit strange (as do I), but you can find some other uses of the phrase in serious discussions of legal cases (putting aside instances of “belittle the offense” in writing about football and the like).

Still, dictionary definitions have a negative tone for belittle that’s not quite appropriate in the Pitts story. OED2 has ‘depreciate, decry the importance of’ for the relevant usage (first cite from 1797, all except one cite for belittling people). NSOED shortens this to ‘depreciate, decry’. NOAD2 adds detail: ‘make (someone or something) seem unimportant’. AHD4 gets more specific still: ‘represent or speak of as contemptibly small or unimportant; disparage’.

This is all on the strong side for the Pitts story, where the intended sense is something more like ‘play down, treat lightly, minimize the gravity of’. So the use of belittle in the Pitts story represents a small amelioration in the meaning of the verb, one that Lundell and I haven’t made and that lexicographers haven’t yet recognized.

I get a lot of mail from people saying things like “that’s not the word I would have used” and hoping to get some authoritative opinion from me as a linguist. Usually the best I can say is that small semantic changes happen all the time, and that personal tastes differ.

A footnote to the belittle story: OED2’s first cite for the verb is from 1782, from none other than Thomas Jefferson — but in the sense ‘diminish in size, make small’.

Lifting shirts

A little while back I made up some notecards using an ad from 10percent.com (reproduced below), adding the caption:

ABS Show
A few of the guys weren’t
Into shirt-lifting.

The ad shows various degrees of lifting shirts in front, to display the male torso, especially the guys’ “six-packs” (the abs, that is, abdominal muscles). It celebrates fitness, and homoeroticism as well.

Linguistic point here: the synthetic compound shirt-lifting, which turns out to have two families of senses, only one of them illustrated  by the ad. There’s also a synthetic compound shirt-lifter, with two families of senses; the guys in the ad are shirt-lifters in one sense, but not (necessarily) in the other.

And then, of course, from shirt-lifting and shirt-lifter, we get a back-formed compound verb to shirt-lift, again with two families of senses.

to glimpse (at)

From the front page of the NYT on September 18 (Jenny Anderson, “S.E.C. Seeks to Ban Computer ‘Flash Trading’ “):

The S.E.C. on Thursday proposed banning what are known as flash orders, which use powerful computers to glimpse at investors’ orders.

What caught my eye was to glimpse at, the verb glimpse with an oblique object (marked by the preposition at) rather than a direct object. “Use powerful computers to glimpse investors’ orders” would have been possible, but (I realized) it would have a meaning somewhat different from the “glimpse at” version.

The phenomenon is one that I’ve looked at on Language Log several times: “intransitivizing P-addition” (the version with a direct object is the historically earlier one); see the brief treatment of P~Ø alternations here, with links to some earlier discussions. It’s typical of such alternations that the two variants are subtly different semantically.

Both variants are very frequent. Here are a couple more hits for to glimpse at:

IntelliScreen® allows you to glimpse at your critical data on your iPhone “Slide to Unlock” screen! (link)

To glimpse at the ways in which science and technology open new avenues for artistic expression, look no farther than Professor Brixey’s “Epicycle” project. (link)

Here’s the history, according to OED2. It starts with older intransitive uses of the verb, in senses like ‘glimmer, glitter’ (from c1400). Then from 1779 we have transitive glimpse in its modern sense, which the OED glosses as ‘catch a glimpse of (either a material or immaterial object); to see by glimpses’ — that is, ‘to catch sight of, briefly or partially’.

A bit later (from 1833) comes intransitive glimpse in its modern sense, glossed by the OED as ‘cast a passing glance’ — that is, ‘look at briefly or partially’. The OED says this one takes at or upon (but it’s easy to find cites with into as well).

The noun glimpse is a nominalization of the verb. Such nominalizations can occur with a NP argument that corresponds to the object of the V that is nominalized. But Ns in English can’t just take NP objects, so the NP must be marked by a P. If the V that is nominalized is transitive, the default P of is supplied: a glimpse of NP corresponds to to glimpse NP (and has the ‘catch sight of’ sense).

But if the V that is nominalized is an intransitive taking oblique objects, the nominalization normally “inherits” the P of the corresponding V: a glimpse at/upon/into NP then corresponds to to glimpse at/upon/into NP (and has the ‘look at’ sense).

Short shot #10: one of the oldest countries

From American Public Media’s Morning Marketplace this morning:

Japan is one of the most indebted countries in the world, and it’s also one of the oldest.

The adjective indebted is unremarkable (NOAD2: “owing money: heavily indebted countries“), but oldest is at first puzzling, until the following context makes it clear that old here means (roughly) ‘having (many) old inhabitants’. Unsurprisingly, neither old nor oldest is in the OED online in this sense.

The usage here is as a non-predicating adjective (see discussion of contagious country and indigenous nudity, with links to earlier postings, here), so many of which require background knowledge, plenty of context, and practical reasoning to interpret. Without these, “one of the oldest countries” would be understood to refer to countries that have been in existence for the longest time.

Nuanced

On NPR’s Morning Edition on Thursday (August 27), reporter Steve Inskeep mixed it up with Michael Steele, the Republican Party Chairman, on health care. Here’s an excerpt from the middle of the transcript:

INSKEEP: You said that’s something that should be looked into. Who is it that should look into that?
Mr. STEELE: I’m talking about those who – well, who regulates the insurance markets?
INSKEEP: That would be the government, I believe.
Mr. STEELE: Well, and so it – wait a minute, hold up. You know, you’re doing a wonderful little dance here and you’re trying to be cute, but the reality of this is very simple. I’m not saying the government doesn’t have a role to play. I’ve never said that. The government does have a role to play. The government has a very limited role to play.
INSKEEP: Mr. Chairman, I respect that you feel that I’m doing a dance here. I just want you to know that as a citizen, I’m a little confused by the positions you take because you’re giving me a very nice nuanced position here.
Mr. STEELE: It’s not nice and nuanced. I’m being very clear.
INSKEEP: You’re giving me, nevertheless, a nuanced position, a careful…
Mr. STEELE: What’s nuanced? What don’t you understand?
INSKEEP: What nuance means is you’re not doing it absolutely black and white. You’re saying you recognize the government has a role to play here, but when you…
Mr. STEELE: Wait a minute. But that is the – is that a…
INSKEEP: …and your party…
Mr. STEELE: …not reality?
INSKEEP: Come to the actual rhetoric, it seems more along the lines of absolutes. It’s between the patient and the doctor.
Mr. STEELE: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t accept your premise. And, you know, you have your view and you can see it as nuanced all you want. But the reality of it is I’m being…
INSKEEP: I’m not saying nuanced is a bad thing, sir.
Mr. STEELE: I’m being very clear. I want to have an open debate. I want to put ideas out there. I want the people to understand what this is going to look like when it’s all said and done. And I’m not – you know, seriously, I’m not trying to be nuanced. I’m not trying to be cute. I’m trying to be very clear. I’m not saying the government doesn’t have a role to play here. It does. It’s managing a Medicare program, so it has a role to play.
INSKEEP: Maybe we’re getting hung up on the word nuance. Maybe I should say complicated. Do you find it challenging to get into this complicated debate and explain things to people in a way that it’s honest to the facts and still very clear and doesn’t just kind of scare people with soundbites?
Mr. STEELE: That’s a good point, then. Well no. Look, no one’s trying to scare people with soundbites. I mean, you know, I’ve not done that, and I don’t know any of the leaders in the House and Senate that have done that. And so, yeah, it’s complicated, and you want to break it down.

Steele seems to think that nuanced means something like ‘unclear’ or ‘obfuscated’ and so conveys a negative judgment. This as against the OED’s definition (draft revision December 2003) — ‘Possessing or exhibiting delicate gradations in tone, expression, meaning, etc.’ — which is certainly positive.

But you can see how someone might come to Steele’s understanding of nuanced, from contexts in which some position is expressed with provisos, limitations, exceptions, and the like, which some might see as obfuscating a point that should be clear. That is, the negative understanding of nuanced is a “private meaning” (see Language Log discussion here).

Painting food

One of the incidental pleasures (for a linguist) of spending time with small children is being reminded (or actually discovering) things about the language(s) you share with them.

Case in point: at breakfast with my daughter (Elizabeth) and her daughter (Opal) a little while ago, we got into a discussion of paintings. One of us observed that lots of paintings were of people, and Elizabeth volunteered that such paintings were called portraits. (Middle-class parents are given to commenting explicitly to their children on vocabulary.) I concurred, and Opal was happy with that.

Getting into the spirit of the thing, I went on to say that many people painted food, in particular fruits and vegetables.

Opal made her EWW face, at which point Elizabeth and I realized she was thinking we were saying that some people applied paint to fruits and vegetables — which would, of course, in most cases make them entirely inedible. The sense of the verb paint she got was that of painting buildings, walls, faces (facepainting children is a popular event at community festivals), and the like.

Obviously, she had more than one sense of the verb, since she used paint as ‘make a painting of’ in other contexts. The trick is in selecting the appropriate sense in this particular context, and that requires knowing not just the meanings of the verbs but also knowing a good bit about cultural practices (for instance, that artists generally do not apply paint to foodstuffs).

Oh yes, Elizabeth and I took the occasion to introduce the expression still life.

Love and marriage in the dictionaries

Following up on my posting on marriage equality, ADS-L has had a series of postings about bringing dictionaries up to date in the domains of love and marriage.

Orphaned at 55

From Christopher Buckley’s “Mum and Pup And Me”, New York Times Magazine, 26 April, p. 22:

To the extent that this story has a dimension beyond the purely personal, I suppose it’s an account of becoming an orphan. My mother and father died within 11 months of each other in 2007 and 2008. I do realize that “orphan” sounds like an overdramatic term for becoming parentless at age 55, but I was struck by the number of times the word occurred in the 800 or more condolence letters I received after my father died. I hadn’t, until about the seventh or eighth reference, thought of myself as an “orphan.” Now you’re an orphan. . . . I know the pain myself of being an orphan. . . . You must feel so lonely, being an orphan. . . . When I became an orphan it felt like the earth dropping out from under me. . . . A certain chill began to encroach, until I was jolted out of my thousand-yard stare by an e-mail message from my old pal Leon Wieseltier, to whom I’d written that I was headed off to Arizona for some R and R: “May your orphanhood be tanned.”

I wrote a bit about orphan and related lexical items on Language Log a few years ago. That posting elicited a huge number of responses, which I still have not replied to in a follow-up posting. But some of these responses mentioned the very extension of the meaning of orphan in Buckley’s passage above.

The central meaning of orphan in modern English is something like ‘a child whose parents are dead’ (NOAD2). That is, it refers specifically to a child. The point where childhood ends might be somewhat unclear, but a 55-year-old man is certainly way past that point. So the use above — to cover anyone, of any age, whose parents are dead — is certainly a meaning extension, but a natural one, especially to or about someone whose parents have recently died, since the language has no lexical item with this meaning.

Black historian

In my piece on the late John Hope Franklin, I didn’t use the descriptor black historian, though it would have been appropriate — in both senses, ‘historian who is black’ and ’scholar of black history’, that is of the history of black people. (Here I’m putting aside the further question of how we interpret black in in these expressions and the question of choosing between black and African American — while noting that African American historian presents the same ambiguity as black historian.)