Going through a phase

Wait, is this a phaser or a fazer?

  Which of these sentences is spelled correctly?

1. But nothing fazes Richard, so he'll be up for it.
2. But nothing phases Richard, so he'll be up for it. 

Did you say "phases"? If so, you were WRONG (ok, I admit it, it gives me a little thrill to be able to say that occasionally). Nothing fazes Richard.

The word meaning "disconcert, trouble" has nothing to do with "phase".  FAZE is a very old word, derived from Old English fésian (to drive away), which by the 15th century was also being used to mean "frighten, alarm". Like so many words that have died out of Standard British English, this one survived in North America, and by the 1830s had taken on the meaning "disconcert, disturb". It was subsequently revived in British English.

The homophone PHASE comes ultimately from the Greek word designating each of the aspects of the moon or a planet, according to the amount of its illumination. It is a mere stripling compared to "faze", having entered English in the 17th century. Very quickly its use was extended from the strictly astronomical sense to mean "a distinct period or stage in a process of change or development".

And then, GUESS WHAT??? It BECAME A VERB. 

First, in the early 1900s, in electrical engineering:

To adjust the phase of (an oscillation, alternating current, etc.), esp. in order to bring it into phase or synchrony with something else.

and then, in the late 1940s, more generally: 

To organize, carry out, or introduce in phases. Freq. with in (or out): to introduce into (or withdraw from) use, operation, etc., gradually or in stages.

Remarkably, people were unfazed by this function shift. As they should be.


COMING THIS FALL! My ever-popular Rollicking Story of the English Language course. REGISTRATION NOW OPEN AND SPACE IS LIMITED. More info here: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/p/history-of-english-language-courses.html
 
Would you enjoy talking about words with Wordlady over many, many glasses of wine? Why not check out my trip to Bordeaux and Toulouse in July 2017. Unlike most of my Tours en l'air trips, this is more about food, wine, and sightseeing than about ballet (though there is some of that too). BOOKING NOW, SIGNUP DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 20. More info here:
http://toursenlair.blogspot.ca/2016/08/toulouse-bordeaux-ballet-trip-july-2017.html

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! SUBSCRIPTION IS FREE! You can either:
use the subscribe window at the top of this page  
OR
(if you are reading this on a mobile device): send me an email with the subject line SUBSCRIBE at wordlady.barber@gmail.com

Privacy policy: we will not sell, rent, or give your name or address to anyone. You can unsubscribe at any point.

It ain't what it used to be

"Hey, Mildred! Remember the good old days?"

As is often the way with political campaigns, those we have endured in 2016 have promised voters a return to a supposed previous idyllic state. Yes, where would politicians be without ... nostalgia?

The surprising thing about the word "nostalgia", however, is that its current meaning, "A sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past"  is really quite recent. Here is the earliest example the OED could find:

1900   Amer. Jrnl. Sociol. 5 606   It is reason and convenience that lure him [sc. man] from the time-hallowed; it is nostalgia that draws him back.

Before then, nostalgia existed, but the word designated very specifically a kind of homesickness so intense that doctors considered it to be a mental illness.

The word had been invented by an Alsatian doctor, Johannes Hofer, in 1688, to  describe the particularly acute neurotic symptoms displayed by Swiss mercenaries longing for home. Often the clinking of a cowbell would set them off.  But it was not just a hankering for their daily Toblerone bar; they suffered the usual shell shock symptoms of lack of concentration, palpitations, depression, and loss of appetite, with some of them starving themselves to death. In German, the word for this  "home pain" was Heimweh, which Hofer translated into Modern Latin using the Greek elements nostos (return home) and algia (pain). 

Surprisingly, the very word "homesick" did not enter English till fifty years later, in the mid-1700s, once again as a translation from the German Heimweh. It is odd to think we did not have a word for this concept before then.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, acute homesickness was considered very seriously by the medical establishment, and "nostalgia" had this specifically medical meaning. More than 5,000 cases of nostalgia were diagnosed during the American Civil War.  Gradually, however, it ceased to be used in medicine, and its current sense took off.

Considering the foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric of some politicians determined to make us believe that everything was better in the past, perhaps it is time to treat nostalgia once again as a pathological condition.



COMING THIS FALL! My ever-popular Rollicking Story of the English Language course. REGISTRATION NOW OPEN AND SPACE IS LIMITED. More info here: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/p/history-of-english-language-courses.html

Would you enjoy talking about words with Wordlady over many, many glasses of wine? Why not check out my trip to Bordeaux and Toulouse in July 2017. Unlike most of my Tours en l'air trips, this is more about food, wine, and sightseeing than about ballet (though there is some of that too). More info here:
http://toursenlair.blogspot.ca/2016/08/food-wine-sightseeingand-ballet-trip.html
Booking will open in the next couple of weeks.  

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! SUBSCRIPTION IS FREE! You can either:
use the subscribe window at the top of this page  
OR
(if you are reading this on a mobile device): send me an email with the subject line SUBSCRIBE at wordlady.barber@gmail.com

Privacy policy: we will not sell, rent, or give your name or address to anyone. You can unsubscribe at any point. 

Love it or hate it

 http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01906/marmite_1906152b.jpg


Today I was reading a ballet review that referred to the Bolshoi's Taming of the Shrew as a "marmite production". 

This puzzled me.

What was that disgusting black sludge that the British inexplicably like to eat on toast doing in a ballet?

But it turns out that "marmite" has become an adjective in British English, meaning "eliciting extremely opposite opinions; designating something that people will either love or hate".  (Apparently some people do indeed love Marmite). 

The sludge's voyage from tradename to adjective has been quite an interesting one. In 1996, Marmite launched a very successful ad campaign "Love it or hate it", the tagline of which is still going strong. 

By the early 2000s, describing someone or something as "like Marmite -- love it or hate it"  or "the marmite of X" had become something of a cliché. 

2kg of Parma Violets - Lovehearts

shop.lovehearts.com/2kg-of-parma-violets

Jan 31, 2001 - 2kg of Parma Violets. The marmite of the sweet world - these little rolls are sure to stimulate debate!

It took less than a decade for the cliché to become an adjective, apparently first among sportswriters. The earliest I could find is this one:

pesstatsdatabase.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8969 
Dec 9, 2008 - Possibly the most Marmite player there is, Bravo is speedy and determined, he is a fine all-round attacking force, able to penetrate on the flanks.

By 2010, "marmite" was being used in political  and entertainment contexts.

Country/date
IE 2010 (10-10-21)
Title
A chat with Mitzeee from 'Hollyoaks'
Source
http://www.digitalspy.com/soaps/hollyoaks/news/a283479/a-chat-with-mitzeee-from-hollyoaks/

  I've had such a positive reaction to the role, which I was a little bit shocked about! I wasn't quite sure how people would take her, because I thought she'd be a Marmite kind of character where you either love her or you hate her! But everyone's reactions have been so lovely, and people seem to like her!

.

Country/date

GB 2010 (10-06-14)

Title

Labour leadership: Ed Miliband picks up second preferences

Source

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7827518/Labour-leadership-Ed-Miliband-picks-up-second-preferences.html

According to the poll, Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, is emerging as a compromise candidate, with the second highest number of first preferences, and the most second and third preferences. # In contrast, David Miliband is a " Marmite candidate " -- either liked strongly or disliked -- and is struggling to pick up second and third preferences. 

Clearly this is a useful concept, as the word has definitely caught on. Although it is often still glossed with "love it or hate it", and still often written in quotation marks, we are seeing more and more unglossed examples like the one on my ballet chat site and this one a few months ago in The Guardian:

Cannes gets its first marmite sensation with Olivier Assayas’s uncategorisable – yet undeniably terrifying – drama about a fashion PA trying to exorcise herself of her dead twin

I can't think of a North American equivalent. Can you? 


COMING THIS FALL! My ever-popular Rollicking Story of the English Language course. REGISTRATION NOW OPEN AND SPACE IS LIMITED. More info here: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/p/history-of-english-language-courses.html

Would you enjoy talking about words with Wordlady over many, many glasses of wine? Why not check out my trip to Bordeaux and Toulouse in July 2017. Unlike most of my Tours en l'air trips, this is more about food, wine, and sightseeing than about ballet (though there is some of that too). More info here:
http://toursenlair.blogspot.ca/2016/08/food-wine-sightseeingand-ballet-trip.html
Booking will open in the next couple of weeks.  

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! SUBSCRIPTION IS FREE! You can either:
use the subscribe window at the top of this page  
OR
(if you are reading this on a mobile device): send me an email with the subject line SUBSCRIBE at wordlady.barber@gmail.com

Privacy policy: we will not sell, rent, or give your name or address to anyone. You can unsubscribe at any point. 

The Dictionary: Coming Soon to a Movie Theatre Near You

Quiz: which of these two men edited the original Oxford English Dictionary?

 

News broke this week that Simon Winchester's book about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary will indeed be made into a movie starring Mel Gibson as James Murray and Sean Penn as William Minor. Already  the media are getting the facts wrong, with The Guardian calling the two men "creators" of the dictionary and saying that Minor contributed "10,000 entries" (when he in fact supplied 10,000 quotations to support entries).

So, knowing that Hollywood will take even more liberties with the truth, I think it's time to reprint the review I wrote for The Globe and Mail when the book first came out in 1998.

The Professor and the Madman
A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

Simon Winchester

HarperCollins,  240 pp., illustrated,
ISBN 0-06-017596-6, $29.00 Cdn

Of all the fates that could befall a dictionary project, surely being "made into a major film by Luc Bresson, in probable association with Mel Gibson" is the most unlikely.  

Yet this destiny is said to await The Professor and the Madman, the "central figure" of which, claims its author, is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). But, as the lurid title suggests, the OED really takes only a secondary place to the sensational aspects of an admittedly unusual tale - the true story of William Minor, an American surgeon who, though confined to a British insane asylum for murdering a total stranger, was one of the army of volunteers across Victorian England who read their way through centuries of literature to supply the quotations on which the dictionary's editors based their historical analysis of English.

Indeed, it is one of the strengths of this book that it will, by its very sensationalism, attract and inform readers who might never normally lay down cold hard cash for what Winchester calls the "fascinating story of the history of English lexicography", which he surveys in a highly readable, entertaining and informative fashion, though he amazingly fails to mention Noah Webster altogether.

The story of the OED in particular, with its colourful characters and astounding achievements, is one that deserves retelling in a popularly accessible form, though sometimes Winchester's desire to be entertaining and to bring the characters to life creates distortions. Frederick Furnivall, a man of great scholarly accomplishments, comes across as a mere eccentric who spent all his time sculling with buxom teashop waitresses.  Henry Bradley, who edited over one-third of the OED's entries but perhaps had the misfortune to be boring, is mentioned only once in passing.  

In fact, Winchester is so lost in his (admittedly understandable) admiration of his principal subject, Minor, and James Murray, the dictionary's chief editor, that he calls the OED "the creation of [their] combined scholarship", a vast exaggeration.

Indeed, he lapses into hyperbole more than once, saying that Murray has achieved the status of a "mythic hero", for instance. In his assessment of Minor's contribution, he diminishes that of other readers (one of whom submitted an astounding 165,000 quotations) who would "simply read their assigned books, note down interesting quotations on their slips of paper as they came across them and send them off in bundles." This process, in fact - and there is nothing simple about it - is exactly what Murray asked for, but Winchester is overly laudatory in recounting that Minor chose not to do this, creating instead a kind of concordance to his books and sending off quotations only in response to editors' requests for more evidence for specific words.  But if the other readers had not completed the monumental task of writing out slips and sending them in before editing started, the lexicographers would not have known where to start, or which words required more evidence that Minor could perhaps supply.  If everyone had adopted Minor's method, the OED would never have been completed.

Winchester has clearly researched his  material thoroughly, so thoroughly in fact that he not infrequently succumbs to the temptation to recount every detail he has discovered whether or not it is relevant and necessary. Digressions are many, the most staggeringly irrelevant being a comment on Rex Harrison's "pig-headedness" in a sentence about the phonetician Henry Sweet.  

Because the author obviously (and commendably) wanted this to be a popular history  uncluttered by such minutiae as footnotes, it is difficult to know when his historical reconstructions (which are very vivid, as in the case of his description of gruesome Civil War battles and the branding of a deserter which was said to cause Minor's madness) are a matter of record, and when they tip over into the realm of imagination and speculation.  Some of his speculations, indeed, are a little difficult to stomach, such as his oft-repeated theory that the sight of young Ceylonese girls cavorting in the surf (described in rather too loving detail for my taste) and the fact that Minor did not satisfy his sexual impulses at the age of 14 were what really caused him to lose control of his reason.

To those who know little of lexicography, this book is an entertaining,though not wholly reliable, introduction to the subject, particularly enlightening for those who labour under the delusion that the OED's role is to prescribe what is "proper" and "improper" English.  It vividly evokes diverse aspects of 19th-century life that one would not expect to find united in one book: the seedy underbelly of Victorian London, the
horrors of the American Civil War, life in an asylum, and the mobilization of almost 1000 volunteers to contribute to a monumental description of the English language.  In its careful reconstruction of William Minor's life, it is a testament to the ability of a person with a severe mental illness to contribute meaningfully to society. 

And, as the lexicographers in Oxford grapple with a total revision and updating of the great dictionary, it renews our awe and admiration for the OED itself, for those who undertook the daunting task in the first place, and for those who carry on the work into the twenty-first century.

COMING THIS FALL! My ever-popular Rollicking Story of the English Language course. REGISTRATION NOW OPEN AND SPACE IS LIMITED. More info here: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/p/history-of-english-language-courses.html

Would you enjoy talking about words with Wordlady over many, many glasses of wine? Why not check out my trip to Bordeaux and Toulouse in July 2017. Unlike most of my Tours en l'air trips, this is more about food, wine, and sightseeing than about ballet (though there is some of that too). More info here:
http://toursenlair.blogspot.ca/2016/08/food-wine-sightseeingand-ballet-trip.html
Booking will open in the next couple of weeks.  

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! SUBSCRIPTION IS FREE! You can either:
use the subscribe window at the top of this page  
OR
(if you are reading this on a mobile device): send me an email with the subject line SUBSCRIBE at wordlady.barber@gmail.com

Privacy policy: we will not sell, rent, or give your name or address to anyone. You can unsubscribe at any point.