Who you calling ant, you uppity rutabaga? And step off, butter cookie!

Ah, those racial slurs keep piling up. Over at the Racial Slur Database, they are up to 2,552. Yes, your ethic group is heavily represented.

You needn't go over there if you are quickly bored. Trolling through the database, I marvel over how rare truly imaginative slurs are. But I suppose that's not surprising: to be effective, the ugliness of the bigot's slur must be instantly apparent to the victim. Setting aside the fact that most vocal bigots are themselves short on wit, conjuring a rich, imaginative slur would be a waste of effort, its originality lost on the presumably dull-witted victim.

Even so, "ant" is inspired, denigrating as it does the native peoples of Antarctica, of which there are none. A preemptive slur, we could call it.

I also like "rutabaga." The database says it applies to Swedes, and this may be true, since the Swedes (and the rest of us in Scandinavia) enjoy them and other root vegetables -- though in 20+ years of living in Scandinavia, I have never heard of it used as an epithet. But when you think about it, rutabaga could be a useful universal epithet. It's an ugly word (though a fricative or sibilant wouldn't go astray), sounds harsh and mean in all the languages I'm marginally familiar with. Yeah, you can put a lot of hate onto your face just ordering rutabaga. I guess that's what makes a good slur.

Then there's "butter cookie." The database tells us, with no documentation, that "butter cookie" really puts Danes in their proper place. I suspect this is news to the entire population of Denmark, from the Queen to the newest newborn.

Hat tip to Doug Fisher. Doug suggests the Racial Slur Database as a good tool for editors and journalists. I'm not sure I'd go that far. 90% of the slurs -- I don't need to spell them out -- are obviously off limits. Some, like "butter cookie" and "rutabaga" and "ant" are absurd. Some, such as "8 Miler," seem more cultural references than slurs (though, as I live outside the US, I am not always 100% tuned into American culture).

    Technorati : ants, butter cookies, racial slur database, racial slurs, rutabagas

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:11pm in Logophilia | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1)

"Wow, Dave, what happened to you?" "Hit some low-hanging fruit and fell on my cutting edge."

A couple of years back, I ranted a little about crappy, irritating business jargon. I secretly find it satisfying to sneer inwardly at people who bandy about "proactive," "low-hanging fruit" or "stretch target." I'm particularly down on people who talk about being "cutting edge" -- great, pal, you've learned not to use the back of the knife.

If you're nodding in agreement, head over to The Office Life Business Jargon Dictionary, where they have codified the most commonly encountered business cant. Dip into it sparingly; it's much too depressing to go from A-to-Z in one go. But a fine resource.

Hat tip to "Marcus."

Technorati : cant, counter words, jargon, language

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:19pm in Communication, Language & Linguistics, Logophilia | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1)

Protesting words

Language Log tips me off to a disturbing idea: lobbying dictionaries to remove words that offend your interest group.

British potato farmers want 'couch potato' removed from the OED, according to The Times, the AP and others. Farmers, flacks and a celebrity chef demonstrated outside Parliament yesterday, in what may be the first such protest in the annals of lexicographic politics.

 

"The potato industry are fed up with the disservice that 'couch potato' does to our product when we have an inherently healthy product," said Kathryn Race, head of marketing at the British Potato Council, a body set up by the government to run advertising campaigns promoting potato consumption and research issues linked to the vegetable.

This is also why Americans insist upon saying canola oil instead of rapeseed oil.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 12:43pm in Bizarre & Unexpected, Logophilia | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Shel Holtz Slashes Pedants, Channels Henry Fowler

My usually good-natured friend Shel Holtz has pulled out the long knives on his blog & has proceeded to skewer those who believe blog and blogosphere to be barbarisms.

"Over the last two days, I’ve read probably a dozen posts on various blogs that complain about the words “blog” and “blogosphere.” Most of these turn their noses up, offering such disclaimers as “I refuse to use that stupid word ‘blogosphere.’”

Oh, please. Give it up. Blog, blogosphere, podcasting...they’ve all reached the plateau of common usage. This is what these things are called and all the whining and bitching in the world won’t change it."

In slaying pedants, he channels the great Henry Fowler, whose Modern English Usage should be required reading for anyone tasked with writing a press release.

"Barbarisms:  What after all is a barbarism? It is for the most part some word that, like its name, is apt to wound feelings -- the feelings, however, of much fewer persons. They will only be those who have not merely 'a profound convictions that there are such languages' as Greek and Latin, but a sufficient acquaintance with and love of those languages to be pained by outrages upon their methods of word formation. In this era of democracy it can hardly be expected that the susceptibilities of so small a minority should be preferred to the comfort of the millions, and it is easier for the former to dissemble their dislike of barbarism than for the latter to first find out what they are and then avoid them."

Shel goes on to ask What other words have entered the realm of common usage that you wish hadn’t but you use anyway?

Proactive springs instantly to mind, as does the phrase living document (we shot the last one for lack of proactivity). I'm sure I've been guilty of both, as much as I detest them.

But misuse of the word momentarily sends me around the bend. Every time a pilot announces "We'll be taking off momentarily, folks" I think "either he means it, in which case we are in trouble, or he's an ignorant ass who shouldn't be entrusted with an airplane."

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:23am in In Defense of Elitism, Logophilia, Writing & Grammar | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (8) | TrackBack (0)

Chill, blogophiles; you're not the first to do what you're doing

I love that headline, which I lifted from USA Today's Tuesday article on blogs. If nothing else, for the use of "blogophile" . Google "blogophile" and you will get 396 answers, but Google will also ask "Did you mean "logophile." How serendipitous is that, since I am both a blogophile and a logophile?

But what's great about the article is that a) America's McPaper takes a serious look at citizen journalism and b) passes on the meme that citizen journalism is anything but new.

"Take Luther in the early 1500s. About 60 years before, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Before that, only the church and governments could afford to reproduce and manage information, keeping a lock on ideas and power. The printing press gave Luther a way to distribute his thesis — an early version of blogging. Next thing, we had Protestants.

"In Paine's time, the key was the falling cost of printing pamphlets. That allowed Paine to get out his ideas in Common Sense, which greatly influenced the American Revolution. Pamphleteering was quite the bloglike craze in the 1700s, though most amateur writers stuck to politics and religion. The colonists didn't get anything like one current blog, called, “Adventures of a Domestic Engineer: The day-to-day travails of a sleep-deprived mother of three.”

"Orwell wrote pamphlets before writing 1984. Lamb was maybe the first video blogger, or vlogger. In the 1970s, when ABC, NBC and CBS reigned supreme, cable opened TV to low-budget operations. Lamb worked in the Pentagon's public relations department before launching C-Span in 1979. He was a nobody who took a small bite out of major media's influence."

Faithful readers of Desirable Roasted Coffee will, however, search in vain for references to Pepys or the Federalist Papers.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 08:30am in Citizen Journalism, Logophilia, Online Media | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)