Tuesday, March 27, 2012

You kids get off my tree lawn!








Monday, March 26, 2012

Baseball and jazz, soda and tonic

Yesterday was Sunday, so I assume you stopped by my former home, the Boston Globe Ideas section, and read Ben Zimmer on the baseball origin of the word jazz. The earliest print citation for the word comes from the Los Angeles Times interview with minor league pitcher Ben Henderson: 
How did the word jump from sports to music? "One likely conduit was the orchestra at Boyes Springs [Calif.] brought in to entertain the [S.F. Seals] players in 1913, led by the drummer Art Hickman and featuring Bert Kelly on banjo," Zimmer writes. Kelly soon formed a jazz band in Chicago, and claimed to be the first to use the term musically, but the exact route of transmission is still mysterious.

If you haven't yet caught up with The Word, you'll find another language story worth a click in yesterday's Globe: Billy Baker's report on the status of a Boston-specific term for soda pop, the fast-dwindling tonic. Inspired by the word's history in the just-published final volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English, Baker went to Mendon, Mass. -- on the dividing line, as far as he can tell, between the tonic-loving city folks and the soda speakers of the greater Northeast -- to do a language survey for  himself. He found just one tonic user there -- a 78-year-old shop owner. That was no surprise to the language expert he consulted:
John McCarthy, a distinguished professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a scholar on the subject of Boston language, said that when he first started polling students in the early 1990s about “tonic,’’ other than a few from urban Boston, the students said it was their parents who used the word. Now, he said, it was their grandparents. 
“It has become stigmatized, like ‘dungarees’ and the broad-A sound, as markers of a dialect that people don’t want to be associated with,’’ McCarthy said.
Not for me, of course; I hail from deep in pop land, from a county colored navy blue on the map at popvssoda.com. Tonic, in my dialect, is what you mix with gin and sip on a summer evening; that's an association it's hard to stigmatize.  

Friday, March 16, 2012

The life cycle of a peeve




Thursday, March 15, 2012

"I could care fewer" (and other NGD musings)


People shouldn't say
"I could care less" when they mean
"I could care fewer"
Words to live by.









Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Turn up your nose, or turn it down?

I was drafting a post about "looking down one's nose" when I was distracted, over the weekend, by the slightly early arrival of the grandchild formerly known as the New March Baby. So when I noticed yesterday that Arnold Zwicky had posted about the idiom "look down one's nose" while I was off toasting little Bridget Frances with pink champagne, I thought maybe I'd been scooped.

But no, it was a just a cosmic coincidence. Arnold's post is about the reanalysis of look down one's nose as a verb + particle rather than verb + preposition, giving birth to the novel construction look one's nose down (at). The innovation I'd heard on the radio was a different one: A week ago on "Talk of the Nation," Ken Rudin referred to Rick Santorum's "turn[ing] his nose down" at the idea of higher education for all.

A nice blend, I assume, of turn up one's nose and look down one's nose. And hardly an unlikely one, since turning up one's nose and looking down one's nose are so closely related that the Oxford English Dictionary defines them together: "(b) to turn up one's nose (at): to show disdain or scorn (for); similarly to look down one's nose (at)." Also, turn down all by itself means "reject, refuse," so it may sound more appropriate for a phrase that conveys dismissiveness.

The OED's earliest cite for the turn up version comes from Colley Cibber's 1721 play "The Refusal": "A Man must be nice indeed, that turns up his Nose at a Woman, who has no worse Imperfection, than setting too great a Value upon her Understanding." Its earliest example of the look down variant is two centuries later, from John Galsworthy: "That chap Jolyon's water-colours were on view there. He went in to look down his nose at them -- it might give him some faint satisfaction" (1921). But Google Books easily antedates it to the mid-19th century: "Be very proud, look down your nose, make him a distant bow" ("The Personal Adventures of Our Own Correspondent in Italy," 1852).

Now, I vaguely remember doing Google searches for turn down one's nose (and finding a few hundred), but I don't see my notes, and I'm too tired to do it again. So I will leave the topic with this almost relevant observation from stand-up comedian Tom Cotter: "We say stupid stuff -- 'He looks down his nose at me.' Well, of course, we all look down our nose. If he could look up his nose at you, either he'd be a freak or you'd be a booger."