Refudiate - searched for but not found

My summer break from blogging is over. Before I start though, and in case you missed the story, I want to follow-up my previous post with the news that 'refudiate' - the non-word coined by Sarah Palin - topped the list of words searched for at the Merriam-Webster online dictionary over the summer.

Sarah Palin - the portmanteau queen?

The former Governor of Alaska and wannabe Republican president Sarah Palin caused a stir recently when she seemed to coin a new word - refudiate - in an interview on Fox News. The story concerned plans to build a mosque in New York, close to where the twin towers of the World Trade Centre once stood.

 
Refudiate is what is known as a blend or portmanteau word. In this case, a blend of refute (to prove wrong) and repudiate (to deny or reject). 

She used the word again in a tweet a few days later:

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.

The US media had a lot of fun with this and Palin only poured oil on the fire when her original tweet was removed and then followed-up with another:

"Refudiate," "misunderestimate," "wee-wee'd up." English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it! 

This implies she not only puts herself in the same league as George W Bush (misunderestimate) and Barack Obama (wee-wee'd up) but also Shakespeare.

We all know that George W Bush tended to mangle the English language but it comes as a surprise to hear President Obama coin the phrase 'wee-wee'd up', as he did last year:

I sort of understand what Obama was implying with this odd phrase. He was referring to people getting worked up and agitated. I don't classify this as 'mangling' the language. This is genuinely inventive.

However, by comparing herself to Shakespeare, Palin merely gave the twitterverse a subject to really get its collective beak into. As the Huffington Post reported, the hashtag #ShakesPalin quickly became a trending topic. Even better - it led to some clever tweets such as these:

@normative - To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals, or to quit halfterm, and by opposing, rake in speaking fees.

@djsmk - Neither a thinker nor a reader be / for thought oft loses both itself and friend /and reading dulls the edge of Fox TV.

But why are words like refudiate called portmanteaus? It refers to the old type of large travelling case or trunk which had two halves, hinged together. Lewis Carroll seems to have coined the phrase in Through the Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There, with Humpty explaining the meaning of Jabberwocky to Alice:

"Well, slithy means 'lithe and slimy'... You see it's like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word."

Portmanteau words are not a new phenomenon. If they're genuinely useful they'll gain currency and will eventually enter into mainstream dictionaries. We're all familiar with brunch (breakfast and lunch, coined in 1896), smog (smoke and fog, coined around 1900), and motel (motor and hotel, coined 1925).

Modern examples include blog, camcorder, chillax, fanzine, chugger, advertorial, Brangelina and even wikipedia. I recently came across the word 'civilogue' on a website to describe the type of comments they would accept - a blend of civil and dialogue.  

Palinspeak, as Palin's eccentric use of the language is often called, will no doubt throw us more to muse on in the coming years. Am I going to get wee-wee'd up about it? No. It's impossible to misunderestimate her and she's already refudiated her use of the word refudiate.

Raoul Moat: what's in a name?

Raoul Thomas Moat. It's been almost impossible this week to avoid hearing or reading about the improbably named Geordie gunman currently on the run in Northumberland after shooting three people and killing one of them.

It's a serious situation. Yet we have the capacity to find the humour in it - a way of coping with tragedy that all humans share.

And the main thing we find amusing about it all? Mr Moat's name. It's an odd one and in an idle moment earlier this week I found myself attempting to make an anagram of it. The best I could come up with was: oath, trauma looms. Not knowing what to do with it, I posted it on my facebook page. Then, yesterday I included it in a twitter post.

Of course I did. Social media has been an element of the story itself as Mr Moat allegedly made threats via facebook before penning a 49-page handwritten letter to the police. The internet is the place to go for up-to-the-second gossip.

Right now, the internet is awash with comment on what's being said via the media and lots and lots of jokes. Search for 'Raoul Moat jokes' on google and you'll get more than 6,500,000 results. Lots of people want to talk about Raoul Moat; most of them just passing on what they've heard or read.

The story is a trending topic on twitter and among the top tweets (those tweets that have been re-tweeted by others more than 100 times) are:

Manchester City have officially bid £45m for Raoul Moat. They've no idea who he is, but they've heard everyone's after him.

If Raoul Moat wore a stripy jumper and thick glasses he'd be a lot more fun to try and find.

NORTHUMBRIA Police, if u haven't found Raoul Moat By Sat, double the reward from 10k to 20k & call it a Raoul-over.

There is also:

I don't find any of these jokes raoul moatly funny.

I just checked on facebook and more than 17,000 people apparently 'like' the facebook group "Raoul Thomas Moat" Needs To Be Found Before He Kills Again!.

This is all pretty harmless but the problem with all this stuff floating out there in cyberspace is that it's getting harder and harder to filter out all the rubbish from the good stuff and the lies from the truth. This is where you have to exercise the more rational side of your brain. And it's not just individuals who seem to have lost the power of critical thinking.

This week an American news website aolnews.com swallowed a spoof Raoul Moat story whole from the News Grind, a website that produces nothing but spoof news. A 'revised' story now states:

...the situation is far different than what we reported in an earlier version of this post, which relied on false information from what turned out to be a satirical news site.

The original report has since been removed from the News Grind site but a blog on journalism.co.uk has a great piece on it.

By the way, as I write this, the latest Raoul Moat 'news' from News Grind, Stupid fat people in hiding after Moat warning', is a response to the warning by police that Mr Moat was now "targetting the wider public".

This story doesn't just have legs, it's got wheels - until they fall off.

English? Globish? Chinglish?

The reach of English is astounding.

English is the third largest language, by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

According to Wikipedia, around 400 million people speak English as a first language and between 199 million and 1,400 million more speak English as a second language. As linguist David Crystal points out in his book 'How language works' (2006), non-native English speakers outnumber native English speakers by about 3:1.

In 2005 between a quarter and a third of the world's population spoke English. In China around 350 million people are currently learning English in their own free time. It's estimated that by 2020, native English speakers may comprise only 15% of up to 2 billion people using or learning the language.

But the question is - what sort of English will they be speaking? English is used internationally for business, science, diplomacy and dominates the internet. Written English is likely to remain largely unaltered.

However, spoken English is already changing at a rapid rate. Apart from all the mother-tongue varieties (British English, American English, Australian English etc.) we already have pidgin versions such as Singlish (Singapore English), Engrish (in Japan) and Chinglish (in China) and many, many more - including Swenglish (used in Sweden - as anybody watching the Wallander series on BBC4 will have noticed).

The phenomenon of a global form of English used primarily by non-native speakers - Globish - cropped up on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week recently, with Robert McCrum discussing his new book  'Globish: How the English language became the world's language'.

Globish is a much-simplified sub-set of English based on about 1,500 words (the OED lists more than 600,000) with simple grammar and no idioms or jokes. It has been described as 'decaffeinated English' or 'English Lite' and is promoted by a former IBM executive, Jean-Paul Nerriere, who wrote a book called 'Parlez Globish'

He had noticed that in international business meetings, non-native speakers of English were using a simplified form of the language to communicate with each other - and actually preferred not to speak with native English speakers, who tend to overcomplicate things.

An article in The Australian newspaper put it like this:

Their florid phraseology and grammatical complexities are often incomprehensible, said Nerriere, who added: "One thing you never do in Globish is tell a joke."

So - no need to worry about Globish taking over anytime soon. But it might force us to

Some people worry about the way that English is changing. The Queens' English Society (motto: good English matters) has even set up an Academy for English to protect it from 'declining standards'. However, it is doomed to fail. English has always changed and evolved, soaking up words and phrases from other languages and is the richer for it.

Given the numbers of Chinese people learning English, my guess is that we'll benefit from new expressions coming from 'Chinglish'. From Chinese English Pidgin we already have 'long time no see', 'look-see', 'lose face', 'no go', and 'no can do'.

As Oliver Ludz Radtke says in his little book 'Chinglish: found in translation': "...the English-speaking traveller more frequently encounters Chinglish in the form of public signs rather than spoken oddities." He aims to show the creative side of Chinglish - a product of Chinese grammar and the English dictionary.

And creative it certainly is.  Where we would have a sign simply saying 'Keep off the grass', in China you might see:

Makes you stop and think, then smile.

Why not swear our way out of recession?

Swearing. It's an emotive subject.  Every so often it flares up as an issue of media interest but the debate is never settled and we carrying on effing and blinding.

Recent research by communications watchdog Ofcom seems to have detected a 'softening' of public attitudes to swearing in broadcast media. An article in The Guardian said the Ofcom report gives detailed guidance on public tolerance of bad language:

"loony", "nutter", "poof" and "queer" can be used at any time of day while the F-word remains unacceptable before the watershed...

The article went on to say:

Viewers are relaxed about words such as "bitch", "wanker" and "shit" after the 9pm watershed, the research suggested, and are even willing to hear them earlier in some circumstances. Other words, including "pussy", "fuck", "motherfucker" and "cunt" are still considered to be unacceptable and should be barred pre-watershed, but very few objected to the them being used after 9pm.

I love that "are even willing..."  Mary Whitehouse must be spinning in her grave.

The Daily Mail, bless it, carried out some research of its own and - surprise, surprise - came to the opposite conclusion. Their survey found that:

Swearing on television offends millions of viewers...A majority also believe bad language on television has worsened over the past decade and that it is directly responsible for an increase in swearing by youngsters, despite findings by Ofcom.

The TV watchdog's study...was based on just 130 viewers with a disproportionate focus on minority groups, including travellers and transsexuals.

I love that "including travellers and transsexuals." I guess Mary can stop spinning now.

Love it or hate it, the fact is that we'll never stop swearing. There will always be words that are socially unacceptable or even taboo - but they'll get said.  Sometimes they are the only words that will adequately express your rage, pain, surprise, frustration or even delight. As a swearer I have to admit I enjoy letting rip - usually in the car - saying substitute words like 'sugar' or 'frigging' doesn't do it for me.

Here's the ubiquitous Stephen Fry on the irrational response of most people to swear words:




Gordon Ramsay is surely the King of the F-word. People actually count how many times he uses it during his TV shows.

Which brings me to an interesting idea - the swearer's bank - first proposed more than 250 years ago in a satirical pamphlet by Jonathan Swift. His idea was, through an act of parliament, to levy a shilling from everyone caught indulging in 'profane swearing'. In this way, the country could raise a 'vast revenue'.

The British are known to be prolific swearers (Daily Mail readers excluded) and are perhaps swearing more than ever. We also happen to have a massive budget deficit. So...why not have a national swear box? There's 61 million of us. By paying in a quid every time we swear, we could balance the budget in no time. Gordon Ramsay could single-handedly lead us out of recession.

Siphon the python

How weird that the day after my last post I should stumble upon a news story in The Guardian Science blog about an Australian scientist who has successfully challenged the Oxford English Dictionary over its definition of the word 'siphon'.

It seems while preparing an article on siphoning Dr Stephen Hughes, a physics lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, realised that the dictionary definition was wrong as it stated that atmospheric pressure rather than gravity forces liquid through a siphon tube. When Dr Hughes pointed this out to the OED, they admitted that he was the first person to point out the error (the entry dates from 1911) and will now be revising the text using some of his 'helpful comments' in the next edition.

What's so lovely about this is that the word siphon appears in a well-known piece of Australian slang. To 'siphon the python' means to urinate.

Budgie smugglers and free traders

Andrew Marr's Start the Week on Radio 4 yesterday was a wonderful distraction from the seemingly interminable talk of hung parliaments, coalition governments, proportional representation, progressive alliances, and political dealings of all shades.

Why? Because one of my favourite Australian phrases, Budgie Smugglers, popped up in a discussion with the legendary Australian poet Les Murray, who is in London to give the Poetry Society Annual Lecture - Infinite Anthology: Adventures in Lexiconia.

As the Urban Dictionary puts it, Budgie Smugglers describes: "Any item of male bathing costume or underwear that encloses the wearer's genitalia in a manner that resembles the concealment of a budgerigar."

Australia's unique origins as a penal colony, its use of English dialect words (e.g. 'dinkum', a Midlands dialect word for 'work'; 'fair dinkum' means a fair day's work) together with the playfulness of Cockney and Irish English plus borrowings from Aboriginal culture (budgerigar, billabong) has created a distinct variety of English. For more on Australian English see the Wikipedia entry here.

Australians are direct, dislike authority and loathe anyone who looks like he might be 'up himself'. And their language reflects this - it's earthy, often pretty filthy but also funny.

I lived in Melbourne in the 1990s and was intrigued to discover words such as 'dag', 'nong' and 'drongo' (for idiot), to dob in (to betray), and dole bludger (someone too lazy to work). other words I came to enjoy included furphy (a rumour or false story), snag (sausage), sanger (sandwich), grog (alcohol) and bottle shop (off licence). I was also impressed with the different ways the word 'mate' could be used - from a warning to a friendly greeting. While I lived there, the Prime Minister at the time, Paul Keating, memorably referred to Australia as being located "at the arse end of the world".

But back to Les Murray. As well as being Australia's best-known poet, he works as a consultant to the Macquarie Dictionary, a job described on Start the Week as a "word catcher". Just as Webster's Dictionary in the US captures American English, the Macquarie Dictionary captures Australian usage.

According to The Age (Melbourne's daily broadsheet):

The gig with the Macquarie – "an honest day's work, pulling words out of word lists" – is the perfect job for a man who suffers from what he calls "verberation", the state of having words running through your head all the time. And it gave him Infinite Anthology, a poem about definitions for the new book: "creators of single words or phrases are by far the largest class/of poets. Many ignore all other poetry."

Les's favourite Australian word apparently is 'eight-hour day'. This stems from direct action by workers in Melbourne during the 1850s who demanded (and got) eight hours a day each for work, rest and play.

Other words he mentioned included: Pobbledonk ("a red-sided banjo frog with a resonant voice"), window licker (a voyeur), ranga (a redhead), papped (to be snapped by the papparazzi) and free traders ("split bloomers worn under voluminous skirts") - which brings us inevitably but rather neatly back to underwear, although of a more ancient nature.