Budgies and parakeets

I had one of those "What? Americans don't say that?" moments this week when reading Lynne Murphy's excellent blog about the differences between British and American English, where she asserts

But there is a meaning difference for parakeet. AmE uses that name for the little birds that are kept as pets, what BrE (and some US pet bird enthusiasts) call budgerigars or budgies, for short.

Whaaaaat?  No budgies in the US? I had no idea. I am pretty sure that "budgie" is the common name in Canada, rather than "parakeet".

A corpus search does indeed reveal a relative dearth of budgies in the US, compared to Canada and other English-speaking countries.

If you are Canadian or American, please let me know what you call this bird**.

Budgie dates from the 1930s, while its parent, "budgerigar", was a mid 19th-century Australian borrowing of Aboriginal origin, perhaps an alteration of gijirrigaa, the bird's name in Kamilaroi (the language of an Indigenous Australian people whose lands extend from New South Wales to southern Queensland). A budgerigar is a kind of parakeet (a small parrot):

a small gregarious Australian parakeet which is green with a yellow head in the wild. It is popular as a cage bird and has been bred in a variety of colours.

I have always loved it when dictionaries use the word "gregarious" in fauna definitions. I can't help having images of the budgies getting together with their pals for a tea party.

"Parakeet", on the other hand, is a mid 16th-century borrowing from Old French paroquet, Italian parrocchetto, and Spanish periquito; its origin is uncertain, perhaps (via Italian) based on a diminutive meaning ‘little wig’, referring to head plumage, or (via Spanish) based on a diminutive of the given name Pedro.

Now, I know that if I don't head you off at the pass, some of you are going to mention in the comments or in emails a famous Australianism / New Zealandism:

budgie smugglers

plural noun

informal Australian, New Zealand

Men's brief, tight-fitting swimming trunks. [what other varieties of English call "Speedos"]

‘Tarzan, as we dubbed him, took to wearing the tiniest pair of purple budgie smugglers while sunbathing on his corrugated iron roof

The OED, which dates this term from 1998, explains its etymology primly thus:

With reference to the appearance of the male genitals in figure-hugging trunks.

Here's a picture if you lack imagination.

"Parakeet smuggler" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

**By the way, it was lovely hearing from so many of you about "chesterfield" and your linguistic bios. It would seem that "chesterfield" is still alive and well among the over-seventies. So not dead! But it certainly has faded away amongst those younger than that.

Those in their forties, fifties and sixties reported "I used that as a kid, or my parents used it, but sometime in the 1970s/80s I switched over to couch or sofa."

There is a furniture chain in greater Toronto called The Chesterfield Shop. According to their website it is, tellingly, "a family-owned furniture store since 1948", but, equally tellingly, the tabs on their website are for "sofas" and "sofa beds".  So I think "chesterfield" in their name is a kind of fossil.

Budgie photo by Bianca Ackermann on Unsplash

Swimmer photo by Mika on Unsplash

Chesterfield: not quite dead

The cockles of my little Canadian heart were warmed this week when I read that the Crime Writers of Canada 2020 Arthur Ellis Prize has been awarded to 58-year-old Albertan author Wayne Arthurson's The Red Chesterfield, which features a severed foot found in an abandoned sofa. Coincidentally, I had just seen another mention of "chesterfield" in a novel by 62-year-old Nova Scotian Anne Emery the night before. (This is called the first law of lexicography: just when you think a word might not exist, you read it in the paper or hear it on TV.)

For decades in the 20th century, "chesterfield" was a shibboleth of Canadian English. Canadians, and only Canadians, called a multi-seated upholstered piece of furniture a chesterfield rather than a couch or a sofa.

In other varieties of English, a chesterfield is a specific kind of sofa, the kind you might find in smoky gentlemen's clubs, upholstered in tufted leather, with the back and the arms of the same height.

But starting in the early years of the 20th century, Canadians started to apply the word generically to any kind of sofa. There were scatterings of this usage in the US but they faded away. In Canada, "chesterfield" had its heyday through the 1970s, but started to wane, until by the 1990s, fewer than 10% of Torontonians in their twenties were saying "chesterfield", having abandoned it in favour of "couch".

I grew up calling this piece of furniture a chesterfield, but shifted to "sofa", sometime in the eighties, which seems to have been "peak sofa" time in North America. I do use "couch" occasionally. But "sofa", too, has lost the battle to "couch" with most North Americans, although it is still the preferred term for the British.

But "chesterfield" is not yet dead, especially outside Toronto, witness the two authors I have mentioned, who though not spring chickens, are not really old either (I may be a bit biased in this assessment). Where they live is also significant. Searches in Canadian newspapers for the last three years turned up a few dozen chesterfields (fortunately not including severed feet) in the Prairies, BC, and Atlantic Canada. They were, however, vastly outnumbered by couches (over 20,000 hits) and, struggling along, sofas (5,800 hits).

If you're a Canadian, what do you call this item of furniture? Have you ever called it a "chesterfield"? And if so, how old are you and what part of the country are you from? I would love to keep "chesterfield" alive, but I fear it is doomed. The language evolves organically and there is little we can do to change it.

A bit of etymology for these three words:

Sofa ultimately goes back to Arabic ṣoffah, a slightly raised platform covered with carpet and cushions, on which people could sit or recline. It was applied to what we know as a sofa in the 1700s.

Chesterfields are named for one of the 19th-century Earls of Chesterfield.

Couch comes from French coucher, a typical squishing-down of  Latin collocāre to lay in its place, from  com- together + locāre to place.

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Tactical or strategic? Canadianism alert

With the UK election imminent, my Facebook feed is filling up with posts about "tactical voting". 

For those of you who don't live in a first-past-the-post parliamentary system, this is what "tactical voting" is:

tactical voting Politics the practice of transferring electoral allegiance for tactical purposes, esp. in the hope of denying victory to a third party; also tactical vote, tactical voter.

1974   M. Steed in D. Butler & D. Kavanagh Brit. Gen. Election Feb. 1974 317   Some people who would have voted Labour, had they lived in an average constituency with a full choice of parties, voted Liberal or SNP where a Labour candidate had little or no chance of winning. Thus the theory is one of tactical voting. -- Oxford English Dictionary

So, for instance, if you normally vote Liberal but the Liberal candidate doesn't have a hope of winning in your constituency, you might choose to vote (in Canada) NDP to make sure the Conservative candidate doesn't win, so that the Conservatives won't win enough seats to form a government.

BUT! If you're Canadian, by now you're thinking, "Wait a minute, we don't call that tactical voting, we call it strategic voting". 

Indeed we do. The term "strategic voting" (or "vote strategically") is overwhelmingly Canadian, and has been with us since at least the 1970s.

Both these words come ultimately from Greek:

tactic from Greek taktos ‘ordered, arranged’

strategic from Greek, from stratēgos "general" from stratos ‘army’+ agein ‘to lead’

Although military specialists will tell you that there is a difference between strategy and tactics, the first being

The art or practice of planning or directing the larger movements or long-term objectives of a battle, military campaign, etc. Often distinguished from tactics, considered as the art of directing forces engaged in action or in the immediate presence of the enemy. -- Oxford English Dictionary

 in general usage, the two words overlap. 

Or perhaps Canadians are taking a more long-term view at the ballot box whereas the British feel themselves to be "in the immediate presence of the enemy". 

Did you miss last week's post? It's a fun one, about how wacky English spelling is. You can find it here: https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2019/12/how-wacky-is-english-spelling.html

Photo by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash

Saskatchewanians, rejoice!

Photo by Jannes Jacobs on Unsplash

The Saskatchewanism "bunny hug" made its appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in September 2019:

Canadian. A hooded sweatshirt. 

Chiefly in Saskatchewan. 

Recorded earliest as a modifier.

1978   Shellbrook (Saskatchewan) Chron. 21 June 14/6   Lost—at Memorial Lake Sun., June 18th, one rust colored bunny hug jacket, with prescription sunglasses in pocket.

1982   Trade Marks Jrnl. (Canada) 28 Apr. 4/2   Wares: men's and ladies' clothing, namely, shirts, t-shirts,..bunny hugs, jumpers.

2017   Star Phoenix (Saskatoon) (Nexis) 29 Nov. (Early ed.) a3   He is wearing a blue bunny hug.

(Of course it has been in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary since 1998.) 

Don't forget! Only in Canada, You Say and Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to do with Pigs make great gifts for word lovers and for patriotic Canadians.

How do you pronounce "mauve"?

I was talking to an American friend a few weeks ago, when she uttered the word "mauve". It didn't rhyme with "stove" as it does for me and obviously, therefore, should do for all right-minded people. 

The vowel in her "mauve" was what we would traditionally call a "short o", which you might transcribe variously (depending on your accent) as MAWV or MAHHV or MOV. 

Although I wisely refrained from saying, "How odd that you don't know how to pronounce that. How idiosyncratic!", I have to admit I did think it. Not so fast, Wordlady. A few days later, another American said "mauve" the same way. Curiouser and curiouser.

It turns out that Americans have had this variant short-o pronunciation of "mauve" since sometime in the mid-20th century. In the 1934 second edition of Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary of English, only MOHV was given. But in the third edition, published in 1961, the short-o pronunciation appeared, listed second (i.e. the less frequent of the two). Since then, though, this pronunciation has taken over as much the more common one in the US. It is now listed first in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, and is the only one given when you click on the "hear this word pronounced" icon: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mauve

In a recent survey I did of a group of editors, "short-o" outnumbered "long-o" by a factor of two to one among Americans. (I suppose some of them from the Eastern Seaboard with varieties of English in which "tauter" and "totter" are not homophones may have a third pronunciation, like "MORV" without the R.) One of them even said, "I giggle to think it could rhyme with stove!" Another said, "MOHV is only the pronunciation in French, not in English."

But only Americans have this second pronunciation. Canadians, despite living next door, and being subjected to American home decorating and fashion TV shows, only rhyme it with "stove", and this is also true of the rest of the English-speaking world. The results of my survey with Canadians were a whopping 245 to two in favour of "rhymes with stove". Many Canadians are, like me, stunned to learn that a different pronunciation even exists.

Some commentators, however, complain that the now more common US pronunciation is "wrong", because after all the word came from French (more about that next week) and we should pronounce it as the French do. But Lord knows we have borrowed many French words into English and given them non-French pronunciations. We now say "MARGE ah rin" and not "mar ga REEN" for "margarine", for instance. Whatever the majority of speakers say becomes a standard pronunciation.

(Don't get me started on people who pronounce "brioche" bree-OASH instead of bree-OSH though! Just kidding, but it does bug me in spite of myself.)

Quite frankly, I don't know where short-o "mauve" started out in the US, or why. We borrowed "mauve" into English from French in the mid-19th century, so it is not a case of a pre-colonization pronunciation surviving in the US and being replaced by something else in Britain. (For examples of that phenomenon, see clamber, process, lieutenant, height, primer, herb, ancillary.)

It's not that frequent a word, so it's entirely possible that most people encounter it first in writing, and therefore apply the phonetic rules of their native language to the foreign spelling. But why this phenomenon should have happened for "mauve" only in the US and not in the other English-speaking countries, even those that are less influenced by French than Canada is, is still a mystery. 

The same vowel change has happened with earlier 19th- or 18th-century borrowings:

1. the cooking use of "sauté", more commonly pronounced SAW tay than SO tay in both American and Canadian English, - though not the ballet term, which is only SO tay
2. "vaudeville", by now pronounced almost exclusively VAWD vill

No one, to my knowledge, is suggesting that people should say "SO tay" or "VOH dvill" instead, but one never knows with language cranks.

But this vowel change has not happened (yet?) with more recent borrowings from the 20th century:

1. "haute (cuisine etc.)" (mostly 20th century though some 19th)
2. "fauve" (admittedly a specialist term) 
3. "taupe" (also a fairly specialist term except that it is used a lot as a colour designation for pantyhose)
4. "auteur"(also a specialist term)
5. "chauffeur"

I suspect that within a generation, short-o may be the only pronunciation of "mauve" in US English.

There's a lot more to the story of mauve. What does it have to do with s'mores, for instance? Tune in next week for the continuation. 

And don't forget to tell me: long o or short o, how do YOU pronounce "mauve"?


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CSI: Spelling. What's wrong with rigour mortis?

Wait. Is that a.... spelling mistake? Why, yes, it is!

I recently saw  someone (no doubt a Canadian) write "rigour mortis" instead of the correct "rigor mortis". 

I suspect a Canadian because we Canadians have a very strong tendency to write "-or" words as "-our" just to prove we're not American -- even when "-or" is the correct spelling. See these posts:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2016/06/canadian-hypercorrection.html
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2013/11/stupor-or-stupour.html
and for the explanation of the :-or/-our" split, see this post:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2011/07/discouver-vancouver.html

"Rigour" derives ultimately from the Latin rigor (unbending quality, stiffness, rigidity), but it came into English in the 1400s by way of Middle French, where rigor had morphed into rigour. British English and other varieties of Commonwealth English retained this spelling, whereas American English opted for "rigor".

"Rigor mortis", on the other hand, was borrowed directly from Latin in the early 19th century.  It retains its Latin spelling in all varieties of English.

And to make life more complicated, the adjective "rigorous" is also so spelled in all varieties of English.

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Ancillary

I was just at a ballet symposium in San Francisco, and was brought up short by hearing speakers pronounce "ancillary" as

ANsill airy

I only say (and thought I had only ever heard)

an SILL uh ree


PRONUNCIATION

Once I got over my "These Yanks talk weird" reaction, I thought I'd better check it out. Yes, American dictionaries give 

ANsill airy

whereas British dictionaries and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary give only

an SILL uh ree  

As is so often the case, the American pronunciation is the older one (see also clamber, process, lieutenant, height, primer, herb). It would seem that the British switchover started in the 19th century and was not firmly established till the 20th.

I'm always rather surprised when I find Canadians opting overwhelmingly for a British pronunciation; usually we are split 50/50 or 75/25. If you are Canadian, please let me know how you pronounce this word!

ORIGIN

Where does the word "ancillary" come from? The Latin word ancilla meant "slave girl", and will be recognized by anyone familiar with the Magnificat: 

Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae; ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.

For he hath regarded : the lowliness of his handmaiden: For behold, from henceforth : all generations shall call me blessed.

I cannot of course omit to mention that this line was given a particularly beautiful setting by Bach:

https://youtu.be/jJIgNvlobek



MISSPELLING

It appears that many people misspell this word "ancilliary" as if it were like "auxiliary", and as a result (or perhaps the cause of the misspelling) pronounce it

an SILLY airy 
or
an SILL yuh ree

Do not do this. 

MEANING

When "ancillary" was first borrowed from Latin in the 1600s, it meant "additional, but less important than". Some people in the 19th century used it to mean "of or pertaining to a maidservant", but the Oxford English Dictionary (uncharacteristically, it must be said) minces no words about its opinion of THAT:

rare and affected.

Take THAT, Thackeray! 

It acquired a new meaning, 

Providing necessary support to the primary activities or operation of an organization, system, etc.

in the early 20th century, and as you can see, enjoyed a  quite rapid increase in popularity, although now it seems to be waning:

How do you pronounce "grimace"?

 

A friend of mine recently posted on facebook that she was surprised to hear a narrator pronounce the word "grimace" as "grim ACE". 

Several others chimed in that this was clearly wrong.  Everyone knows it's pronounced "GRIM us".

I thought so too, but it's always best to check before making pronunciation pronouncements. Lo! It appears that "GRIM us" is an upstart. A hundred years ago, "grim ACE" was the only pronunciation for this word. 

Before that, when we first borrowed the noun in the 1600s from the French grimace, we pronounced it a la francaise "gree MASS". By the time we turned the noun into a verb in the 1700s, it was being pronounced "gree MACE".

It is not uncommon for the stress in English to migrate from the second syllable to the first, leaving the vowel in the second, unstressed syllable to be reduced to a schwa. This is clearly what happened, though it is hard to say when exactly in the 20th century this came about. 

One thing is for sure, when we surveyed Canadians about their pronunciation of "grimace" for the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, no one said "grim ACE", so we included only the "GRIM us" pronunciation. Other dictionaries, however, give "GRIM us" first and "grim ACE" second.
 
There are two theories as to the ultimate origin of "grimace":

1. Middle French, alteration of grimache, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English grīma mask
2. Spanish grimazo caricature, from grima fright.

How do you pronounce "grimace"? 


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Photo credit: Tom Roberts on Unsplash

Dangerous offenders

"Murderer declared dangerous offender," the headline reads.

Well, DUH! you may think.

Unless you're Canadian.

In Canadian English "dangerous offender" is a legal term with a specific meaning (not just an offender who happens to be dangerous):

a person who has been convicted of a serious personal injury offence and constitutes a threat to the life, safety, or physical or mental well-being of others, and whose history suggests little hope of reform, who is imprisoned indefinitely.

This classification has existed since the late 1960s in Canada.

A recent headline in The Globe and Mail would no doubt cause some puzzlement to non-Canadians:

Saskatchewan man who beat woman, set her on fire not dangerous offender: judge

In fact the decision in this gruesome case probably also caused some puzzlement to many Canadians, but not so much of the linguistic kind.

Since 2003, British law has also had a "dangerous offender" classification, with a somewhat different definition:

dangerous offenders will be given an extended sentence of imprisonment, which is a determinate sentence of which the defendant must serve at least half. The defendant may be released during the second half of the sentence, providing he receives a positive recommendation from the Parole Board. In addition to the extended sentence provisions under the Act, dangerous offenders must also receive extended supervision periods of up to five years for nonviolent offenders and up to eight years for violent offenders. 

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Bachelor for Rent: Things You Never Suspected About Canadian English”

A hilarious look at what is distinctive about Canadians and their language

English Schminglish: How Jews have Enriched our Language”

An entertaining look at how Hebrew and Yiddish words have enriched the English language for thousands of years

Of gaggles and scrums

 

I wish the US administration would stop doing unconscionable and reprehensible things, but, as with Rob Ford, it seems that with every new outrage I have another word to talk about.

With the banning of some of the most-respected American news outlets from a recent briefing, I became aware of the word "gaggle" used to mean a kind of informal press conference where reporters can ask questions but not make video recordings.

Like the very similar "cackle" applied to hens, "gaggle" started life in the 1300s as a verb, designating the sound made by geese, and almost certainly originating in an imitation of that sound. 

About 100 years later, it started to be used as a noun to mean a "flock of geese". This was one of those fanciful collective nouns for animals that were made up at the time (a parliament of owls, a murmuration of starlings..) and which for the most part have never caught on in general parlance.

But "gaggle" was  a hit. In the mid-20th century it started to be used for disorderly groups of people, especially if they made a lot of noise. This was particularly appropriate for groups of reporters all asking questions at once:
.

Date	(1999/08/23)
Title	Is Nothing Private?
Author	JOHN F. STACKS
Source	http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,991797,00.html

When it was reported that Senate minority Leader Tom Daschle told a gaggle of Washington reporters he thought George W. Bush had the right to refuse to answer questions about his long-past personal behavior

By 2004, we see it being applied specifically to the mini press conference:

Date	(2004/09/27)
Title	Bush's Iraq: A Powerful Fantasy
Author	JOE KLEIN
Source	http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995237,00.html

FLYING TO MINNESOTA ON AIR FORCE ONE LAST WEEK, WHITE House press secretary Scott McClellan held a " gaggle " -- that is, a mini-press conference -- with reporters in the back of the plane.

 The analogous word in Canadian English is "scrum", taken from rugby. "Scrum" is a shortening of "scrummage", a variant of "scrimmage", which is ultimately related to "skirmish". 

For why the plural of "goose" is "geese", click here. 


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The dossier on "dossier"

A thick dossier

This week, according to Merriam-Webster dictionaries,

Lookups for 'dossier' spiked after the news that U.S. investigators had confirmed portions of a dossier on Trump's ties to Russia

Why do we call a collection of documents about a person or event this? 

The French dossier comes from the word for "back" (dos); a bundle of documents on a particular subject was called this because it had a label on the back. We borrowed "dossier" in the mid-19th century, although we had the perfectly good "file" already (more about that later). Of course English has never been reluctant to acquire more synonyms for words it already has. 

The early quotation that Merriam-Webster gives is

I may, however, mention from high legal authority, that the President laboured under a mistake when he demanded the displacement or even communication of the “dossiers” (legal papers) of the Boulogne and Strasburg affairs.
—Freeman’s Journal (Dublin, Ireland), 11 Jan. 1849

Various criminal cases in French-speaking jurisdictions were reported on in English newspapers, and the Dreyfus affair at the end of the 19th century gave the word a bit of a bump in English as journalists reported on the scandal. Perhaps the fact that French was the language of diplomacy contributed to the word being borrowed in government circles.

DOSSY-ay or DOSSY-ur?

It seems that "dossier" first entered English through print rather than speech, because the OED's entry, written in 1897, gives as its first pronunciation not the French "doe SYAY", but rather the anglicized "DOSSY uh". But, while a very few people still do say this (or its r-ful North American variant, "DOSSY ur"), with English speakers becoming more familiar with French, we have, over time, ended up with a hybrid English/French pronunciation: "DOSSY ay" is now overwhelmingly most common in all varieties of English.  A very small number of anglophones do, however, pronounce this word "DOE see ay".

FILE

Now, what about file? (Thank GOD everyone pronounces it the same!)

In Latin, the word fīlum meant "thread". This came into Old French as fil (pronounced "FEEL"), and it means "thread" to this day in French (as well as "wire" and other extensions of meaning). 

But English went a different way with "fil" after we borrowed it from French in about 1500, using it for a very specific kind of thread: a string or wire on which papers and documents were strung for safekeeping and reference. From there it was just a short step for "file" to refer to the papers themselves, and then to other methods of keeping and organizing them, until in the 21st century our "files" are made of electrons.

A CANADIANISM!

Here in Canada we have our very own extension of the word "file":

• 4. Cdn issues and responsibilities in a specified area, considered collectively: what progress has the prime minister made on the unity file?

Oddly enough, this is a context where other varieties of the language might use the word ... "dossier"! In fact, I suspect that this is a usage that arose as a loan translation of the French dossier in Canada's bilingual federal public service.

OTHER FILES

The "single file" sense of "file" is also ultimately derived from the same Latin word meaning "thread". The file we use on our fingernails is a different word, dating all the way back to Anglo-Saxon.  

And of course, all of these "files" have, quite naturally, generated verbs. Yes, more of those. No sign of "dossier" being used as a verb yet, but it's a fairly new word in English so it may be only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, please do not consign this blog post to the "circular file" (a term celebrating its 50th birthday in 2017)!

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