Minced Oaths

Following my recent post about the euphemism crimanetly, I have heard about many additional expressions/exclamations of irritation from friends and readers. Upon looking up some of these expressions, I learned something new - there is a special category of euphemisms called "minced oaths" which is applied to exclamations.

According to a site called The Phrase Finder, "Minced oaths are a sub-group of euphemisms used to avoid swearing when expressing surprise or annoyance. They are usually, although not exclusively, religious in nature and date from the days when it wasn't acceptable to use the name of God, Jesus or other religious notables in everyday speech. To mince your words, or mince matters, means to choose words so as not to offend anyone."

Wikipedia notes that a minced oath is also sometimes called a pseudo-profanity or an expletive-deletive.

Here are some examples:

Begorrah = By God

Bejabbers = By Jesus

Blimey = Blind me

Blinking heck = Bloody Hell

By George = By God

By golly = By God's body

By gosh = By God

Cheese and Crackers = Jesus Christ

Cor blimey/Gorblimey = God blind me

Crikey/Cripes = Christ

Crivvens = Christ defend us

Dagnabbit/Dangnabbit/Dagnammit = God damn it

Dang/Darn = Damn

Drat = God rot it

Flaming/Flipping heck = Fucking Hell

For crying out loud = For Christ's sake

For Pete's sake = For St. Peter's sake

For the love of Mike = For St. Michael's sake

Freaking/Flipping = fucking

Gadzooks = God's hooks

Good garden party = Good God

Holy spit = Holy shit

Jason Crisp/Jiminy Cricket/Judas Priest = Jesus Christ

Jebus/Jeez/Jehosaphat = Jesus

Jumping Jehosaphat = Jumping Jesus

Land sakes = For the Lord's sake

Lawks a mercy = Lord have mercy

Odds-bodkins = God's sweet body

Sacré bleu = Sang de Dieu (God's blood)

Sam Hill = Hell

Shoot/Shucks = shit

Strewth = God's Truth

Suffering succotash = Suffering Saviour

Tarnation = Damnation

What in Sam Hill? = What in damn Hell?

Zounds = God's wounds

The Phrase Finder site also points out that even though new euphemisms appear on a regular basis, new minced oaths are quite rare and this may be because, "restrictions on swearing out loud when surprised or annoyed have slackened somewhat."

Interesting observation...if you ask me, restrictions hardly exist at all anymore and expletives are more the norm than the exception.

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Weiner Dog

A Homonym Makes for a Wonderfully Appropriate Advertising Slogan - No Ifs, Ands or Buts About It

"No Ifs, Ands or Butts."

Apparently Hebrew National has been running 15- and 30-second spot television commercials with the above illustration and slogan for a couple of years now. As I don't watch a whole lot of TV, I just saw saw the ad for the first time about a week ago and I love it.

I grew up loving hot dogs, all the while being told that they are made out of the least desirable parts of animals, so I love the homonymical wordplay involved with the cliche "no ifs, ands or buts about it," and with the word "butt."

Would That Be an Example of Ambiguity or Vagueness?

The answer is both when talking about the word "triangle."
The word "triangle" is ambiguous when it is unclear on whether it is denoting the shape, the musical instrument or the drafting tool. The word "triangle" is vague when it is referencing the shape because it is indefinite about whether it denotes a scalene, isosceles, obtuse, right, acute or equilateral triangle.

Ambiguous words have more than one meaning, for example: the word "light" meaning "not heavy" and the word "light" meaning "not dark."

Vague words have more than one sense of the same meaning, for example: the word "child" is defined as "a young person" and that young person could be either male or female.

A test to help determine a word's ambiguity status is whether or not the word has two unrelated antonyms, for example: the word "hard" is ambiguous because it has the antonyms "soft" and "easy."

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Haircut Semantics

Linguistic Doublets - Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun

When a pair of words has entered a language through different routes and each of the words came from the same etymological root the words are considered linguistic doublets (sometimes called "etymological twins").

Doublets occur in languages either because each of the individual words was borrowed from a single source language at a different stage in time, or because one of the words was borrowed from a main language and the other was borrowed from that language's daughter language.

Following are some examples of linguistic doublets that are listed on Wikipedia:

shirt and skirt (both Germanic, the latter from Old Norse)
chief and chef (both from French at different times)
secure and sure (from Latin, the latter via French)
plant and clan (from Latin, the latter via Old Irish)
ward and guard (from Norman, the latter via French); also warden and guardian.
frenetic and frantic (both from Greek, via Old French and Latin)
cave and cavern (from Latin 'cavus', via Fench and Germanic languages respectively)

By the way, for some odd reason whenever I hear about doublets the Wrigley's Doublemint Gum song pops into my head.

Simpsons, Meet the Simpsons

I grew up watching The Flintstones; however, as I do not watch much TV these days I was surprised to find out that the expression "meh" came from The Simpsons. This discovery was made when I commented about my sons' frequent use of the word "meh" on an Engine Room post about neologisms. When I made the comment I had no idea where the word came from; I was simply stating my dislike for the expression. Thank you for filling me in J.D.

By the way, my teenage sons also tell me they are "hungy" all the time and it drives me crazy because I think they are speaking in baby talk. Little did I know, the word "hungy" is also a Simpson's coinage.

I now know that there are numerous Simpson's Dictionaries and word lists all over the Internet (too many to give credit to) and I certainly don't want to take away from any of them, but in honor of my sons' summer vacation I thought I would share some of my favorites.

Adultivity: The state or condition of being an adult.

Banjologist: An expert in banjo based musical styles.

Beginualize: A portmanteau of "actualize" and "begin."

Car Hole: A garage.

Craptacular: A portmanteau of "crappy" and "spectacular."

Deceleratrix: The service brakes on a car.

Embiggen: To make something better. The opposite of belittle.
Introubulate: The act of getting someone into trouble.

Jerkass: A portmanteau of "jerk" and "jackass."

Knowitallism: A word that describes Lisa Simpson’s personality.

Learning juice: Beer.

Malparkage: The state or condition of being illegally parked.

Poindextrose: The chemical which is emitted by geeks, dorks, and four-eyes.

Pointy kitty: A rat.
Telepanhandling: A portmanteau of "telemarketing" and "panhandling."

and last but not least, my personal favorite

Word hole: A mouth.

For the boys:
Meh: An expression of adolescent indifference.
Hungy: Homer’s pronunciation of the word “hungry,” shortened because of hunger strike fatigue (not baby talk, to my surprise).

Here is a link to one of the more thorough Simpson's word lists I came across at wikiSimpsons.

The Etymology of the Detroit Red Wings

GO RED WINGS

Well the big game is tonight and last year I posted about the semantics of sports award names in honor of The Stanley Cup Playoffs so this year I thought I would mention the history of the Red Wings' team name in hopes that the Red Wings will win the Stanley Cup tonight.

The team that has become the Red Wings started out as the Detroit Cougars in the fall of 1926. In the 1930-31 season, the coach and general manager, Jack Adams, changed the team's name to the Detroit Falcons. It wasn't until 1932 that the Red Wings became the Red Wings. The name that stuck came about because James Norris Sr., a grain millionaire and shipping magnate who purchased the team had played hockey for a team called the Winged Wheelers from the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association. When Norris and Adams first met they agreed to call the team the Red Wings and they agreed that the team's new logo would be a winged wheel similar to the Winged Wheelers logo.

GO RED WINGS

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Hold the Line

Wishful thinking for some, I'm sure.

Portmanteau Furniture a.k.a. Frankenfurniture (Frankenstein + Furniture)

A good friend recently brought an unusual portmanteau word to my attention -

There is a store in Gaylord, Michigan called The Old Spud Warehouse that sells, what they claim to have named, "Frankenfurniture."

The following photos and wording are shown as they appear on The Old Spud Warehouse website:





"It Lives!!!!
FRANKENFURNITURE (noun): a spudword refering to discarded vintage pieces brought to life by combining parts to make useable furniture...
oh so spudly!!!"


Aside from the fact that referring is spelled with two "r"'s and the preferred spelling of usable does not include an "e", what I found interesting is that this website was created in 2007 and since 2005 there has been a definition on the Urban Dictionary website which defines frankenfurniture as, "crappy/cheap furniture you have to put together yourself. Usually made of particle board, wood by-products, etc. and has obscenely difficult instructions for something that should be relatively simple. I got the cutest new desk from IKEA but when I got it home it was total frankenfurniture!"

Advertising Slogans

I just received an e-mail from a friend of mine who works in the advertising business. He was responding to a voicemail I left him three days ago that he just received today.

Verizon - We never stop working for you. Then again, we may.
Verizon - Stay connected. Get a land line.
Verizon - More bars than any other service, except in (name your town) which already has more than enough bars.*

*Nice use of a homonym as he was referring to the number of establishments that sell liquor in the town which I won't mention by name.

Thanks for the laugh my friend.

The Southern Drawl - A Regional Dialect Described

I just came across a wonderful, linguistically descriptive definition for the word "drawl" in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Since I have posted many times about dialects, and a Southern drawl is a regional dialect, I thought I would share:

"to speak slowly esp. as a matter of habit with vowels greatly prolonged so that vowels monophthongal in other styles of speech are often diphthongized (as in bin, web, bad, knob, talk, good)."

If you are unfamiliar with the words "monophthong" and "diphthong," they are defined as follows by thefreedictionary.com:

mon·oph·thong
n.
1. A single vowel articulated without change in quality throughout the course of a syllable, as the vowel of English bed.
2. Two written vowels representing a single sound, as oa in boat.

diph·thong
n.
A complex speech sound or glide that begins with one vowel and gradually changes to another vowel within the same syllable, as (oi) in boil or (1) in fine.

Linguistics Cartoon Favorites - Spelling Grades

Before There Was Ghoti - An Earlier Example of Spelling and Pronunciation Inconsistencies in English

A previous post on this blog was about George Bernard Shaw's alternate spelling of the word 'fish' as ghoti. He supported using this spelling to demonstrate the inconsistencies in English spelling and pronunciation.

According to "The Word Weavers" by Jean Aitchison, before the spelling ghoti was used for 'fish' there was another word with an alternate spelling used by an individual who was unhappy with the spelling of English words.

In 1845, Alexander Ellis spelled the word 'orthography' as eolotthowghrhoighuay based on the following sounds: George, Colonel, Matthew, knowledge, ghost, rheumatic, Beauvoir, laugh, and quay.

Adjective Verbing Nouns

from Toothpaste for Dinner

Food Language - Homemade vs Housemade

The June 1st issue of Newsweek magazine includes an article about the current trend that has restaurants labelling menu items with the neologism "housemade" instead of the well-known adjective "homemade."

In regards to the word homemade, Chef Brian Bistong from Braeburn is quoted as saying, "The word has lost its meaning, it sounds either amateurish (Aunt Edna's homemade pie) or hokey (Chevy's homemade ranch dressing). Housemade has more cache."

The article also states that many chefs "insist that the shift from homemade to housemade is a mere linguistic correction; one dines 'on the house' after all."

The Baltimore Sun restaurant critic, Elizabeth Large, posted the following comment from a friend on her blog -

"What's with restaurants calling things 'homemade' anyway? Does someone live at the restaurant? Did the chef make it at home before coming to work?"

Large responds that the reason restaurants do this is that "they want to convey that their food is just like the food that you could lovingly fix for yourself at home, only better."

In regards to the difference between "homemade" and "housemade," Large points out that

"'housemade' isn't any more or less accurate when you think about it; a restaurant isn't a house either."

In my opinion, the difference between the two words is a simple matter of subtle semantic innuendo and status. A Ritz Carlton restaurant is far more likely to have a "housemade" item on their menu than a Big Boy restaurant is, just as a Big Boy restaurant is far more likely to have a "homemade" item on their menu than a Ritz Carlton restaurant is.

By the way - I don't know about you, but I can't stop chuckling at the name of the restaurant critic from the Baltimore Sun.