Vocabulated

Today’s Zippy, featuring Griffy and Claude:

Floccillation is indeed an attested word in English, though one few people know and few have a use for.

Doing the Zwicky

By accident, I stumbled on this Urban Dictionary entry this morning:

758. the-Zwicky: A sexual maneuver where you are getting blown, and as you are about to cum, pull out, stick your dick in her ear and jiz. When she screams, you quickly haul back and dick slap her across the forehead to shut her up.

“Dude, I pulled the Zwicky on a chick last night, and now she’s got an ear infection (by Zwicks Aug 31, 2004)

Clearly a made-up gross-out entry by someone named Zwick or Zwicky. There are four other equally unpleasant entries contributed by this guy.

For the record, I disassociate myself from any such sexual practice, with woman, man, or beast.

 

Words

Commenting on my posting on The Simpsons, Doug Wyman says in e-mail:

I just read your blog on the Simpsons and words.  I notice that the 10 words in the referenced blog contain diddly.  Now I *know* diddly can’t have been originated in the Simpsons since we used it as children.  Often it was diddly squat as in nothing but often just used alone as an indication of nothing or non-consequence.

Now I wonder when it really got started as a word.

This issue comes up repeatedly. In an effort to avoid unnecessary technicality, I generally use the word word when the appropriate term is in fact lexeme (or lexical item). But that can sow confusion, since non-linguists generally use word to refer merely to physical substance — pronunciation and/or spelling — while a lexeme is a pairing of physical substance with meaning. There are several distinct lexemes pronounced /pɛn/ and spelled PEN; at least two distinct lexemes pronounced /tu/ and spelled TO (a preposition and the infinitive marker); and so on. So the crucial question is what /dɪdli/ DIDDLY *means* in the Simpsons context.

Matt Groening

Posting on Underdog reminded me that this would be a good time to pay homage to that animated monument of language play, Matt Groening’s The Simpsons (along with his Life in Hell cartoons, many of which are linguistically interesting).

Terminological precedence

In a comment on my posting on john ‘prostitute’s client’, Michael  Vnuk objects to my use of narratophile in that posting:

I wondered if you had made up ‘narratophile’ (simply ‘lover of stories’), so I checked and found that ‘narratophilia’ (not in the OED) already has a more specific fetish meaning (eg see Wikipedia). Perhaps a different word is needed for the general sense you want. It is certainly a useful concept, not only for folk etymology, but also for any other time that people develop a story to explain something. Such a word may be already out there, but I couldn’t find it quickly.

The idea here is that the first use of some expression takes precedence over other uses, so that new inventions (even transparent ones) are banned. This is a very silly idea, barring ambiguity (whereas ambiguity is all over the place — it’s a central feature of language —  and is managed by interpretation in context).

A word for it

Over on Facebook, Arne Adolfsen reported an entertaining semantic extension on Wonkette, in a story on a parody video showing a panda performing oral sex on (performing cunnilingus on, going down on, giving head to) Hillary Clinton:

Here at Wonket, we are pretty grateful for FreedomWorks. They’re like the snotty libertarian half-brother of grownup GOP PACs. Their notorious infighting devolved into a downright theater of the absurd when Dick Armey showed up WITH GUNS to remove top employees. Way to make office politics interesting, Dick! Speaking of interesting…ok, you know what? We’ve got no way to make this sound even more crazy than it actually is, so we’ll just dive in and tell you about the FreedomWorks parody video featuring a panda fellating Hillary Clinton

That’s fellate, extended to use for direct objects referring to women as well as men; that is, it takes on the sex-neutral syntax of perform oral sex on, go down on, and give head to. And it has the advantage of brevity: it’s a single word rather than a phrasal lexical item.

It turns out that, as several commenters on Facebook noted, English already has (in some sense of have) a one-word verb for this purpose: gamahuche. But hardly anyone knows it, and no one uses it these days; it comes with the whiff of the 19th century.

The vocabulary of blight

Yesterday’s Zippy:

A catalogue of ills afflicting trees, but also a catalogue of vocabulary that entertains Bill Griffith, beginning with the rhyming knurls and burls, moving through knees (echoing knurls) and on to the rhyming blight and mite, and so on (with trolls thrown in for fun, and a gnome at the end).

 

greeblies

A story from almost 50 years ago, in Cambridge MA, in which a young woman talks with exasperation about the slapdash housekeeping skills of some male friends of hers sharing an apartment in Cambridge. One of them had done a load of laundry, washing, along with a lot of dark clothes, a brand-new fuzzy yellow garment, with the predictable unfortunate outcome that, as she put it:

*Everything* was covered with little yellow greeblies!

Ann and I hadn’t heard the word greeblies before, but from the context and the word’s sound, it was clear what the greeblies were: little bits of fluff (which attached themselves unwelcomely to other things). And when we told the story to others, no one had any problem dealing with the unfamiliar word.

(Greeblies are relevant in my life right now, because I’m washing my new plush bathrobe, which has shown some tendency to shed the occasional greebly here and there, and has to be washed on its own, not even with other dark-colored clothes, so as not to risk a plague of dark blue greeblies. Not for me the mistake of those guys back in Cambridge.)

And it seems that people have invented this noun (and the similar noun greeble), independently, many times, using the phonosemantic resources of English to craft a new word that vividly suggests the image they have in mind.

peened

Yesterday’s vocabulary items

… were the adjective edematous and the N + N compound needle aspiration. We are back in the world of orthopedics.

In the last installment, describing Sunday’s events, I’d failed to make it through an MRI looking at my osteoarthritic hip. Follow-up yesterday, which is where the vocabulary items come from.