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And thanks to everyone who entered this contest for adding some terrific books to my reading list. Be sure to stay tuned for more book giveaways in the future.
Happy reading!
Win a copy of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
I’m always on the hunt for great books to read, so I’ve decided that for this giveaway I’m going to get you to tell me about your favourite book.
Just leave a comment on this post, including the title and author of the book you can’t live without and think everyone else ought to read, too, and you’ll be entered in a draw to win a copy of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much.
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Vest-Pocket Vocabulary
Quod’libet, n. a nice point for discussion.
Word in the Wild: Their discussion came to a standstill after Monique’s shocking confession, and the party goers looked desperately about for someone to save them from the conversational vacuum that followed. Lucky for them, Punam was in attendance and saved them all by tossing out a fascinating quodlibet.
The word quodlibet comes from Latin and means “whatever you please.” (Quod = what and libet = it pleases.)
And while The Vest-Pocket Dictionary gives us this colloquial use of the term quodlibet, the OED defines it as a specifically academic excercise wherein a student must answer any question an audience member wishes to ask about a particular field of study (which sounds a lot like a modern-day comprehensive exam).
Interestingly, the meaning of this word changes altogether should you add an s: according to The Vest-Pocket Dictionary a quodlibets is a confused or disconnected collection. And according to the OED a quodlibet (without the s) can also be a quibbling point of argument or a musical composition containing more than one melody.
You can find a complete listing of the Word Blog’s Vest-Pocket Vocabulary entries and learn more about where they come from here.
Lexical Vexations
wet 1. adj. soaked with or coverd by liquid. 2. v. to cause to be soaked with or covered by liquid.
whet v. to sharpen, both literally (as in to whet a knife) and figuratively (as in to whet one’s appetite).
Words in the Wild: Nancy’s curiosity was whetted when she saw the fluffy mogwai at the pet store. And though the clerk said she shouldn’t get it wet, she couldn’t wait to take it home and give it a good bath.
Still vexed? You can find a complete list of the Word Blog’s lexical vexations here.
Twists & Turns of Phrase
The last straw or final straw is a problem or annoyance that on its own would be a trifling matter, but that, when added to series of previous irks and irritations, seems intolerable.
This turn of phrase originated in the longer proverb the last straw breaks the camel’s back, a metaphor suggesting that there is a threshold to the burdens we can bear and that even the smallest additional burden beyond that threshold can break us.
This proverb can be traced back to Charles Dickens, who in his 1848 novel Dombey and Son wrote:
As the last straw breaks the laden camel’s back, this piece of underground information crushed the sinking spirits of Mr. Dombey. He motioned his child’s foster-father to the door, who departed by no means unwillingly: and then turning the key, paced up and down the room in solitary wretchedness. For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped blinding tears from his eyes as he did so; and often said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have had a witness, `Poor little fellow!’
Still earlier forms of this idiom have been traced to the 1600s and involved feathers and horses instead of straws and camels.
Vest-Pocket Vocabulary
Pleonas’tic, adj. containing unnecessary words.
Word in the Wild: Say what you will about Aunt Vera’s cell phone addiction, but I still prefer her 140-character texts to all the pleonastic emails she used to send.
The OED says this word dates back to 1776, but the noun pleonasm, meaning the use of too many words, goes all the way back to 1610.
You can find a complete listing of the Word Blog’s Vest-Pocket Vocabulary entries and learn more about where they come from here.
Recommended Read
Ghomeshi, Jila. Grammar Matters: The Social Significance of How We Use Language. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010. [ISBN-13: 978-1894037-44-0]
If English is going to hell in a hand basket, how is it that there are so many rigidly prescriptive grammar guides in bookstores? I sometimes wonder about this when hunting between such guides for books like this one. In Grammar Matters Jila Ghomeshi points out that this public appetite for grammar guides, word-of-the-day email subscriptions, punctuation-related Facebook groups, and so forth actually demonstrates that the general population has a rather strong interest in language and in getting it “right.” And this appetite belies the idea that a general ignorance and disregard for correct language use somehow has the entire English language on the ropes.
Ghomeshi reminds us that warnings about the imminent collapse of English into babel have been with us for hundreds of years (pretty well dating to the invention of the first guides to English usage) and that the apocolypse doesn’t seem to have struck yet. To be sure, the language has changed in those hundreds of years—languages change as time ticks past, just as they change from one place to another, one job to another, one neighbourhood to another, and one playground to another. We tailor our language to our needs, and we each draw on several varieties of a language as we wander from one place and time to another.
I have one English I use with friends, another I use at work, one I use with small children, and another I use to write to my member of parliament. One of these is not better than the others—each has its moments when it’s the best one to use. Yet as Ghomeshi writes, “While we don’t freely express judgements about people based on their race or socio-economic status, we not only feel free to do so on the basis of the way they sound, but feel smug while doing so.”
This practice seems to stem in large part from two erroneous assumptions: (1) that standard English is innately better than other forms like AAVE or txting and (2) that those who use other forms do so because they don’t know how to use standard English. It’s my suspicion that this disapproval of nonstandard forms is oftentimes due to the declaimer’s discomfort at their own inability to understand other Englishes.
Does this mean, then, that there should be no standards whatsoever? Not at all. Ghomeshi recognizes the value of a standard dialect of English, offering as it does a broadly shared form of the language that, in its breadth, has the potential to be easily understood by all sorts of English speakers in all sorts of places. And she recognizes, too, that not having a knowledge of standard English can be, fair or not, a real barrier to social and economic opportunities.
Okay, but does this mean we can’t form opinions about our own language preferences? Again, no. Ghomeshi simply reminds us that that is all they are—preferences and not some intrinsically superior form of the language. The perennial charges that some forms of language use are lazier, less elegant, or unclear are all handily dismissed by Ghomeshi with examples galore of how these charges just don’t hold up to scrutiny. As she writes, “When someone declares another person’s language to be unclear and imprecise, what is implicit is that it is unclear and imprecise to them. Such statements obscure the shared responsibility we have for achieving understanding.”
Lexical Vexations
defuse v. to disarm a bomb or, more metaphorically, a tense situation.
diffuse adj. spread or scattered over an area.
Words in the Wild: There wouldn’t have been a diffuse pink mist in the room if the secret agent had managed to defuse the bomb in time.
Still vexed? You can find a complete list of the Word Blog’s lexical vexations here.
The past couple of weeks I’ve been wandering around in Sydney, Australia, so it seems fitting to make today’s post a roundup of fun and informative links about the ways that English happens down here.
And now I’m off to the beach…but purely on a language fact-finding mission, I assure you.
