If you’re not sure, don’t worry. Plenty of people will be glad to help you fill in the blanks. When Rahm Emanuel was briefly thrown off the ballot for major of Chicago, Salon called him a “victim of Chicago-style politics.” When William Daley was named Obama’s new chief of staff, William’s brother and longtime Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was forced to deny the appointment was proof of a “Chicago mafia” swallowing the White House like a canoli. Even in small towns like Aspen, Chicago is a reference point for local problems, like when a recent letter writer to the Aspen Times wrote, “It all smells of Chicago-style bully tactics. Crush the opposition, send out your cronies to defame them.” Sounds like we’re living in the perfect era for The Chicago Code, which debuts February 7 and features cops battling—you guessed it—corruption.

Ever since he took office, President Obama has been accused of “Chicago-style politics,” giving new life to an old slur. As a Chicago resident myself, I thought it was worth taking a break from my daily routine of shakedowns, kickbacks, and racketeering to see what “Chicago” really means and how it’s been used over time.

Chicago has been defined by its history of corruption. The political dealings are captured in phrases like “Chicago-style shakedown politics” and “Chicago-style backroom politics." These terms blossomed as Obama opponents hammered the President, but many similar comments have been made over the years. The saying “Vote early and vote often” dates from the mid-1800s and didn’t originally apply to Chicago, but it became closely associated with the city. Over the years, there are hundreds of references to Chicago as shady and sketchy, such as a 1994 Philadelphia Inquirer story on Dan Rostenkowski that discussed how his “... flair for Chicago-style back-room dealing and horse trading propelled him to the upper ranks of Congress.”

For a detailed look at those backrooms and horse trades, check out Mike Royko’s Boss, a journalism classic that describes the first Mayor Daley’s regime. In fact, any collection of Royko’s is a loving portrait of everything Chicago is and was, good and bad. In one column, Royko explained “clout,” a term as Chicago-style as they get: “...what ‘clout’ is in Chicago is political influence, as exercised through patronage, fixing, money, favors, and other traditional City Hall favors.”

Besides political shenanigans, the mafia aspect of Chicago also lingers. The word “Chicago-style” has often been linked to “gun battle,” “gangs,” “murders,” and “gangster.” Anyone who calls Obama’s White House crew a Chicago mafia is playing on this history. One of the most memorable movie quotes ever cemented “Chicago” as a synonym for “brutal.” In The Untouchables, Sean Connery’s Jimmy Malone summed up Chicago-style like so:

You want to get Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way!

Crime and corruption aside, “Chicago-style” is a word soaked in deliciousness and culture. For every reference to “Chicago-style mob slayings,” you can find many more on Chicago-style hot dogs (artery-clogging details here) and Chicago-style pizza (deep-dish). “Chicago-style long-form improv” refers to the Harold, a comedy form developed by Del Close and an important part of Chicago’s amazing comedy history at Improv Olympics and Second City. Speaking of improvisation, jazz mavens know “Chicago-style” when they hear it. “Chicago style” is also shorthand for the Chicago Manual of Style, one of those writing guidebooks that helps and tortures writers, just like MLA and APA.

As a word, “Chicago” is getting more play lately in the title of The Chicago Code. With the tagline, “He built on empire of corruption. These cops are going to bring him down,” it’s pretty clear that “the Chicago code” is synonymous with the shady senses of “Chicago-style.” It remains to be seen whether the show will do justice to the city, but it’s 100 percent filmed in Chicago and created by Shawn Ryan, who helmed The Shield—two very promising facts.

While “Chicago-style” is mainly a synonym for “corrupt,” there’s a broader kind of branding going on when Obama gets slapped with the label. Such insults are part of the hokum that says “city” = “un-American.” As Peter Feld put it in Esquire:

Chicago is only the most recent in a decades-long, almost systematic GOP program to debrand cities of their Americanism, one after another, according to the immediate needs of those who need it. New York and sometimes the whole Northeast; San Francisco; Massachusetts and especially Boston; and now Chicago have all gotten the treatment, remade into symbols of the ‘other,’ far from what Sarah Palin might consider the ‘pro-America areas of this great nation.’

Playing the cities against the “real Americans” is a tired old game, but if forced to play, I’ll suit up for the city I love and cities in general. If it’s us against them, I’d bet on us. Like it or not, Chicago-style tends to be a winning style.

Illustration by Sara Saedi
 

There are no easy answers to those ridiculous questions, which doesn’t stop people from using English’s many indefinite words. I have no idea how many indefinite words there are, but certainly there are gobs—perhaps even oodles, especially when you consider words for thingamajigs such as “thingumbob” and “whangydoodle.” Like euphemisms, nicknames, and slang in general, indefinite words are a testament to our collective creativity, which can never be contained by numbers or knowledge.

“Spillion”—coined in 2010 to express the enormity of the BP oil spill—is only the latest fanciful word to play on real numbers such as “million” and “billion.” The Oxford English Dictionary traces “zillion” back to a 1944 quote: “I love him a zillion dollars' worth.” “Bazillion” is at least five years older than “zillion,” while “jillion” and “gazillion” are first recorded in 1942 and 1978 respectively. ESPN’s Bill Simmons is a fan of “katrillion.” If you Google long enough, you’ll find kazillions, frabillions, and who-knows-what-else-illions. All of these words can be modified to describe the ultra-rich too, as in the bazillionaire and gazillionaire.

At the other end of the spectrum, puny amounts are represented by a whit, a jot, a smidge, a mite, and a scootch, as well as rarer, older amounts like a scraplet, a fractionlet, a smitch, and a tittle. Those words are moderately neato, but I say words for bigger amounts are more fun. I’ve long been a fan of “metric buttload,” a fantastically elastic term. I’ve spotted variations such as “metric monkeyload,” “metric diaper-load,” and “metric smurfload.” Who needs truckloads and boatloads when slang’s metric system is so pliable?

Amount is only part of the story of indefinite words, because even the handiest person sometimes can't tell a doojigger from a hickey-doodle. We all know contraptions, gizmos, gadgets, widgets, doodads, and whatchamacallits, but the lingo of indefinite objects runs deeper and weirder. “Doojigger” has been around since at least 1927, and it has plenty of cousins, including “doobob,” ”doodaddle,” “doodibble,” “doodinkus,” “dooflicker,” “dooflunky,” “doofunny,” “doogadget,” “doojumfunny,” “doowhacker,” and “doosenwhacker.” The Dictionary of American Regional English records all those words, and the similarly wonderful Historical Dictionary of American Slang shows “doo-whanger” in action, circa 1927: "Whoever fired that doo-whanger at him’s a poor shot." Those were banner years for coining and recording such words. In 1931, Louise Pound wrote about them in American Speech, bringing to light terms such as “diddenwhacker,” “fumadiddle,” “hoofenpoofer,” and “rigamajig.”

One of the coolest terms recorded by DARE is “ho-dad with a shufflin’ rod.” Seemingly as vague as the rest, this 1966-era expression has a more specific purpose: It's something you’re supposed to tell a child who asks "What are you making?" Hickeys are better known as marks of love than objects of bafflement, but the thingy-type meaning is older—at least as old as 1909, according to the OED. “Hickey” has inspired many variations such as the popular “doohickey” and the obscure “hickey-jigger” and “hickeymadoodle,” a word to make Ned Flanders proud. Speaking of The Simpsons, that “ma” in “hickeymadoodle” is the same one in “thingamajig” and Homer Simpson’s coinages “edumacation” and “saxamaphone,” conveying a "what the heck is this?" meaning. As I mentioned when writing about Futurama, the writers of that show have a particular love of indefinite words, coining “killamajig,” “neckamajigger,” “freezer-doodle,” and “future-jiggy.”

These words are just the tip of the whatsit-berg. The lexical banquet of the web has produced more than a smattering of creative, bonkers words, many playing on “thingamajig.” Some are specific, like “tupperware-thingy-majigger,” “blog-site-location-amajig,” “twittermajiggy,” and “frappawhatsit,” a nice spoof of the ever-expanding coffee lexicon. Others are inspired by pure wordlust. Even a licensed thingy-ologist would have trouble identifying a “thinga-longwordsomethingortheother-majiggy” or “thingy-majiggy-bobdoohicky-thang-thang.”

A curmudgeon might pooh-pooh a word like “thingy-majiggy-bobdoohicky-thang-thang,” pronouncing it useless and preposterous. I can’t argue with that, except with my favorite Taoist saying, Chuang Tzu’s “Everybody knows the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless.” By any measure, “thingy-majiggy-bobdoohicky-thang-thang” is a useless word, but I wouldn’t want to live in a world without it. Such vague yet strangely vivid words are virtuosic testimony to our endless creative potential. Even when we don’t have a smidge of a clue what a whimmydiddle might be, we just can’t get enough of these wordamajigs.

For the past month, “job-killing” has been the insult du jour in Washington. Everything about President Obama and his administration was described with this catchy adjective: job-killing legislation, job-killing federal regulations, job-killing tax hikes, etc. I’m amazed no one denounced Bo the First Dog as a job-killing pooch.

In the wake of the Arizona killings, there’s been a slight toning down of rhetoric: “Job-killing” will apparently give way to “job-crushing” and “job-destroying.” Perhaps these word changes will lead to meaningless revisions of the bill "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act” and the triple-buzzword-titled report “Obamacare: A Budget-busting, Job-killing Health Care Law” (PDF) If you threw in a “razzin-frazzin” and a “varmint,” those words would sound at home in the mouth of Yosemite Sam. But such talk should sound familiar for other reasons that are equally cartoon-y yet frighteningly real. Words like “job-crushing” and “tree-hugging” have long been lexical clubs used to bludgeon liberals and Democratic politicians. When it comes to word games—especially the blank-blanking kind—the right always seems to play meaner and smarter than the left.

In terms of rhythm and meaning, “job-killing” would fit right into one of the best book titles ever: Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. In this 2006 book, the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg looked at how:

...the left has lost the battle for the language itself. When we talk about politics nowadays—and by ‘we’ I mean progressives and liberals as well as conservatives and people in the center—we can’t help using language that embodies the worldview of the right.

Nunberg talks about the demonization of “liberal,” the power of framing (a la George Lakoff), and terms such as “big government” and “compassionate conservatism,” as well as how language structures themselves come to embody political ideas and stereotypes. A very successful strategy has been the linking of the word “elite” to liberals: You rarely ever hear about the conservative elite, even though such creatures obviously exist. Terms like “latte-sipping liberal” are a type of “product placement” (as Nunberg puts it) reinforcing “liberal” and “elite” as synonyms.

These slurs serve the broader agenda of driving the masses and liberals apart by associating the latter with fancy-pants food and products like sushi and Volvos—or brie, as in “brie-eating liberal,” a close relation of the cheese-eating surrender monkey. Nunberg notes that brie “...stands in perfectly for the right’s stereotypes of liberals—soft, pale, runny, and French.” The disciplined repetition of liberals as brie-eating or tree-hugging or job-destroying paints a picture of the left as a bunch of Pepe le Pew-like varmints in Birkenstocks who hate America and your bank account. It’s immature, inaccurate, and effective.

But this trope goes deeper than silly mud-slinging. On Language Log, Nunberg explains that:

...you could trace the whole history of the right's campaigns against liberals via those compounds—from tree-hugging and NPR-listening back through the Nixon era's pot-smoking, bra-burning, draft-dodging, and America-hating, until you finally excavate the crude origins of the trope in nigger-loving, the ur-denunciation of white liberal sentimentality.

So if we measured all these terms with an evil-ometer, “job-killing” (or “job-whatever-ing”) would actually be one of the least awful.

Besides playing on fear and hate, most of these terms are built on a foundation of BS and lies. What we know about the health-care bill doesn’t seem job-killing at all. These word games are indifferent to facts and tell you a lot about the people using them. As Steven Pearlstein put it in the Washington Post:

...the next time you hear some politician or radio blowhard or corporate hack tossing around the ‘job-killing’ accusation, you can be pretty sure he's not somebody to be taken seriously. It's a sign that he disrespects your intelligence, disrespects the truth and disrespects the democratic process.

Sadly for us all, a politician disrespecting the democratic process is about as newsy and shocking as a dog disrespecting the bathtime process. Many hoped the Arizona shootings would create a moratorium on inflated political invective, but Sarah Palin and her “blood libel” squelched that idea fast. Other absurd rhetoric should follow soon. The right loves to use deadly language—as Leslie Savan writes, “job-killing” is of a piece with “death tax,” and “death panels”—and “job-crushing” and “job-destroying” show that the blank-blanking form is too tempting and effective to abandon.

Someday soon, I’m sure President Obama will be slammed as a “baby-eating, Thor-worshipping grandma-stabber” or a “Satan-licking, immigrant-spooning secret werewolf.” Those on the right have worked hard and dirty to make the blank-blanking form their own. They aren’t going to give it up without a fight.

Like any word nerd, the falling of snow reminds me of all those words for the white stuff used by the Inuits—and what a crock that hard-to-kill urban legend turned out to be.

As many people—but especially Geoffrey Pullum in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language—have established, the Eskimos-have-a-bazillion-words-for-snow story is as incorrect as it is enduring. It’s one of many language myths or superstitions with a cockroach-like hardiness, such as the hooey that says you can’t end a sentence with a preposition, or use “I” in academic work, or that adjectives and adverbs are somehow lesser words than nouns and verbs. For some reason, language breeds more myths than Zeus himself.

Here’s the myth I hate the most: the idea that some words are not words. As recent tweets show, it’s a popular gripe:

"STOP SAYING EXPRESSO. IT IS NOT A WORD. ESSSSSSSPRESSSSSSO. It is an S. It comes from a language which DOES NOT HAVE AN X. #anger"
Jan. 7, M W Platts

"To those of you who didn't know. . . Conversate is NOT a word. The correct word is [converse]."
Jan. 5, Jerrica Jones

"You know a word I hate? Blogosphere. It's not even a word, and shouldn't be treated as such."
Jan. 3, Sam Wood

"’irregardless’ is NOT a word. That is all. #badgrammar"
Jan. 2, Michael Jones

"I always want to write 'prolly' when I know it's not a word lol"
Jan. 2, Rish

It’s easy to find plenty of other folks claiming "imma," "north-ness," "electronical," "unsensitive," "catastrophize," "worser," and "spelt" are also not words. (Or not "real words," which is reminiscent of the foolishness over who’s a "real American"). These not-a-word claims are silly, illogical, and can mostly be summed up like so: "I hate this word, therefore it is not a word. So there." This makes as much sense as a deranged birdwatcher who, for some reason, decided warblers were the devil’s work and therefore lacked bird-ness. As Stan Carey memorably put it: "Not a word is not an argument."

So why do people say words are not words? Sometimes, people are just unaware of how established a word is—for example, "prolly" and "irregardless" date from 1947 and 1912, respectively. Other times, people are insecure about their own word choices. In the Boston Globe, the lexicographer and Wordnik founder Erin McKean makes a fantastic point about how babbling about word-ness can discredit a writer:

Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with "I know that's not a real word," hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.

Often, people just don’t trust their own (or other people’s) ability to use affixes, even though it’s the nature of prefixes, suffixes, and infixes to be versatile. In fact, affixes are so versatile that I can use one of each type in the word "pre-Mayan-freakin'-pocalypse," which I just made up to describe 2011. As far as I know, "pre-Mayan-freakin'-pocalypse" has never been used before, but guess what? It's a word. In fact, words like that are a huge part of why I enjoy writing and thinking about language. Without such Lego-like word-making power, we would be stuck talking about blizzards and snowstorms and never hear about a snowpocalypse, snowmageddon, or—more recently—snownado. Affixes are useful tools for making real words—even if they’re not in a dictionary or smiled upon by the chain-rattling ghosts of our sixth grade English teachers.

Fear has a lot to do with this topic, I reckon. Besides ghosts and English teachers, most of us fear chaos. That fear drives us to comforting ideas like, "There are real words and fake words, and all the real words are in 'the dictionary.'" But the world is a helter-skelter place, especially in the lexicon. Dictionaries can never keep up with our ever-changing world of words, so we have to trust ourselves. We should listen to McKean, former editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary, who memorably wrote:

Being in the dictionary is not a badge of honor. People aren't limited to words I've managed to capture and pin down. A dog doesn't have to be registered with the American Kennel Association to be a dog. It still fetches your slippers; it just isn't pedigreed.

So, for the love of pancakes, don’t deny a word its word-ness. Even if a word bugs the living crap out of you, it’s still a word. Just ignore the small percentage of words that are annoying and focus on the enormous, fertile possibilities of English to create new words in any given situation or sentence. The fertility of English should be enjoyed. For example, check out this recent tweet:

"’we've been doofed!’, ‘DOOFED!’, ‘we've been bamboozled!’, ‘we've been smackledorfed!’,’thats not even a word and i agree with ya!!’"

Isn’t the world a better place with “smackledorfed” in it? I’m snorklewhacked that anyone could disagree.

Correction: An original version of this post included a typo of "Inuit" as "Intuit."

Most dictionaries, word-obsessed groups, and individual linguists have already selected their 2010 Word of the Year—the picks have included “refudiate,” “spillcam,” “austerity,” “WTF,” “junk,” and “no.” But the big one is still coming up: During its January 6 to 8 meeting in Pittsburgh, the American Dialect Society will make its choice for WOTY, plus many subcategories such as “Most Euphemistic” and “Most Likely to Succeed.” It’s the oldest such contest, and the only one that’s not trying to sell anything—except maybe a wider appreciation for new words and wordlust in general. For word nerds, ADS is the Oscars.

Everyone has his own idea of what a WOTY should be, but the ADS insists the word (or phrase) should be “new or newly popular in 2010,” “widely or prominently used in 2010,” and “indicative or reflective of the popular discourse.” The best previous winners have been words that rose to prominence and then ended up a part of the lexicon afterward—like “weapons of mass destruction” in 2003. Then again, it’s hard to argue that certain flash-in-the-pan winners weren’t good representatives of their year—like “Y2K” in 1999. Once, the ADS was able to symbolically nail a year while launching a word into the mainstream: in 2005, they (including me) voted Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” as WOTY well before it was popular. Lucky for us, “truthiness” exploded afterward, justifying our choice retroactively.

I won’t be in Pittsburgh to make my own soliloquies and rants on behalf of various words, so I thought I would take a look at five strong WOTY contenders. With apologies to spillcam, hashtag, robo-signer, WikiLeaks, hit the slide, and all the other words covered admirably by Grant Barrett, Nancy Friedman, and Ben Zimmer, the envelopes please...

Refudiate
Sarah Palin’s melding of “refute” and “refudiate” led to plenty of snickering jokes and a tsunami of attention, landing this goof on everybody’s radar. It was a great publicity-grabbing choice for New Oxford American Dictionary WOTY, since lots of people were pleased or perturbed at the choice, because they dislike Palin, worship Palin, or mistakenly thought the word was getting into NOAD itself. For the record, I think “refudiate” will get in dictionaries eventually. This politician-propelled term is potentially very useful, and it’s always tempting to hold onto a word with such a clear launching point (even though it was used pre-Palin too).
Pros: It went from nowhere to everywhere in 2010, and word blends are always among the most successful new words.
Cons: Aren’t we all a little Palin-ed out? She’s making Brett Favre feel fresh.

Inception
I saw Inception three times in the theater and loved it more than anything I’ve seen since Christ was a cowboy. So I'm a tad biased. Still, you can’t deny that the word “inception,” though old, felt new and was prominent in 2010.
Pros: Did I mention the movie rocked?
Cons: Much as I love the concept of breaking into people’s dreams to plant an idea, it’s pretty much limited to Inception-heads and real-world dream thieves funded by Obamacare (another WOTY candidate, I would say).

Vuvuzela
This word was everywhere as World Cup mania gripped the entire planet, even the United States, this summer. I still think the best comment on this annoying, buzzy, instrument of torture was the Twitter account “vuvuzelahorn,” which tweeted nothing but “ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.”
Pros: Another word that went supernova in 2010. It’s memorable, unique, and fun to say.
Cons: Thor willing, we shouldn’t have much use for this word in the future, so we might as well stop paying attention to it.

Boobquake
Perhaps you’ve forgotten Boobquake Day, but this word deserves mention for a few reasons: (1) it was part of a powerful, humorous protest again misogynistic insanity; (2) it was pro-science, and (3) it featured lots of boobs. No other word can match that trifecta. In 10 years, I predict Boobquake Day will rival Festivus as one of our most successful invented holidays.
Pros: All of the above. How can you oppose a boobquake?
Cons: I suppose if you think the WOTY should possess gravitas, you could oppose a boobquake.

Tea Party
This political movement went supernova in 2010, influencing the mid-term shellacking (FYI,  another WOTY candidate) suffered by the Democrats and turning up in eleventy-billion news stories. The term has had a literal meaning since the late 1700’s, and has taken on a surprisingly large number of other uses over the years, including a hubbub or brouhaha, a bong-soaked gathering (in reference to the weed meaning of “tea”), and, as the OED puts it, “bland, insipid, trite, trivial.” For that sense, the OED collects references to “dull English tea-party stuff” and “Liberal do-gooders with a tea-party attitude towards race” that sure don’t apply to the Tea Party of today.
Pros: Mega-ubiquitousness.  
Cons: Because of the politics involved, this choice would cause irrational glee and anger, two cans of worms that might be best left unopened.

What's your choice for the Word of the Year 2010?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the legacy of the word “legacy” has taken a B.S.-soaked turn.

The Tron sequel isn’t Tron 2, but Tron: Legacy. The latest version of The Pretenders has been described as “a so-called legacy act—one that relies almost entirely on decades-old hits.” “Legacy airlines” are really, really old airlines, while our dying newspapers can take comfort in having “legacy newsrooms,” and fossil-fuel-caused damage to the environment is sometimes known as “legacy effects.” Quietly, “legacy” has become one of our most pretentious, preposterous, and euphemistic words.

“Legacy” smells most fishy when used as an adjective, though some examples are fairly tame, like the “Legacy Mode” of a boxing video game, or a reference in the Chicago Tribune to “legacy wine.” In the omnipresent, annoying world of branding, there are issues such as “Maximizing the Potential of Multi-Drug Portfolios Without Cannibalizing from a Legacy Brand.” In these cases, “legacy” is mainly a way of not saying “long in the tooth,” an avoidance made explicit in a comment by Dennis Howlett that refers to “the old, legacy way of the world.”

If these were the only uses, I would hardly have thought “legacy” worth a column. But the B.S. gets piled deeper and weirder. Look at this reference to the omnipresent Conan O’Brien by Scott Collins in the Los Angeles Times: “...O'Brien's switch from legacy broadcaster to basic-cable outpost represents a hugely symbolic moment in the evolution of late-night TV, as the audience tilts away from aging franchises such as ‘Tonight’ to younger competitors.” My decoder ring exploded trying to figure out that one, but another use of “legacy broadcaster” (about ABC) supports my theory that “legacy” almost always conveys a status somewhere between the bingo hall and the grave: “If we are to survive as anything more than a shell—a legacy broadcaster, an empire in decline—this is what we must do.”

Still, “legacy broadcaster” seems positively transparent and straightforward next to a term used by Eric Johnson in Metro Spirit: “They call it legacy waste. It’s the radioactive leftovers from the Cold War and, ever since the Cold War ended, the Savannah River Site has been making sure those leftovers will never be warmed up and used for weapons again.” Then there’s this example I spied in a 2009 article by Eric Patterson: “Sadly, legacy landmines—some of which have been in the ground for decades—do not discriminate between warriors and innocents, making them an additional passive, yet deadly, disruptor of prosperity.” Legacy waste? Legacy landmines? If the expression “lipstick on a pig” didn’t exist, you’d have to invent it to describe these ridiculous terms.

So how did “legacy” get besmirched? The spread of “legacy assets”—a transparent rebranding of toxic assets—was influential a couple years ago, but the history goes deeper. The primary parent of this horsecrap seems to be a computer-related sense, which the OED traces to 1989 and defines as “Designating software or hardware which, although outdated or limiting, is an integral part of a computer system and difficult to replace.” This meaning can be found in recent examples of legacy applications, platforms, interfaces, devices, networks, servers and the absurdly named “legacy customer relationship management tools.” One OED example (from 1993) suggests how extended and distended this word would become: “Too many IT people ossify with the IT they are comfortable with—they become legacy people, and that's dangerous.”

Other legacy silliness may be related to the sense of a “legacy” as someone who applies to a college or frat that a family member attended, thereby greasing the wheels of admission. This meaning goes all the way back to 1930, and a 1974 quote shows how these lucky few are regarded: “Legacies, the sons of members who've done a lot for the Club who get in ... are disappointments.” You can see how this meaning may have led to “legacy” being applied to all sorts of undesirable stuff that history dumped in our collective lap.

It’s a bummer to see the watering down of a word should feel weighty. Recent articles about the legacy of John Lennon and Elizabeth Edwards are a reminder that “legacy” can still pack a punch and have solid, substantial meaning. When I hear “legacy,” I don’t want to think about toxic waste, landmines, or piece-of-crap computer equipment. You can’t stop word evolution, but in this case, I wish I could.

Then again, as I get older, maybe this all-purpose word could serve my own crass needs. By the time I’m old enough for senior moments in the nursing home, I bet rebranding will allow me to say I’m having legacy lapses in a luxurious legacy land. And I’m sure I’ll never need an adult diaper—not when I’m swaddled in the tight embrace of my legacy loincloth.

From The Social Network to The Walking Dead, geeks are everywhere in pop culture these days. But what are the roots of this occasionally hip pejorative?

I was going to start this column with some version of “the geeks will inherit the earth”—until I realized that expression has been beaten to death as soundly as the notion that geekdom is a bad thing.

It feels like I’ve been reading “Geeks are cool” articles for 10 years or more, and The Social Network’s mega-success continued the trend, when Entertainment Weekly dubbed its stars the “Sexiest Geeks Alive.” Wherever you look, it’s easy to spot references to kitchen geeks, Big Ten geeks, gastro-geeks, science geeks, film geeks, and foreign policy geeks. The recent “Geek the Library” campaign and the use of “geeks” on The Walking Dead show this omnipresent word isn’t done evolving. Everyone seems to be getting their geek on.

The Oxford English Dictionary—without a doubt, the word geek’s best friend—traces three main meanings of “geek” since the late 1800’s. First, it was a word for someone “foolish, offensive, worthless.” That meaning became ultra-specific in the early 1900s, when it started referring to circus performers who leaned toward the freaky and grotesque. The OED’s geek citations mention “a degenerate who bites off the heads of chickens in a gory cannibal show” and “a dumb sideshow stooge whose daily routine consists of being exhibited in a pit which he has to dig for himself.” Thankfully, these freak-type geeks are rare these days, though their spiritual descendants can be found on Jersey Shore.

Then there’s the sense of “geek” as a nerdy, dweeb-ish, Poindexter type. The earliest known example of “geek” meaning “brainy” popped up in a letter of Jack Kerouac’s circa 1957, in which the legendary writer said, “Brooklyn College wanted me to lecture to eager students” who had “big geek questions to answer.” This meaning is powerful and still holds, though during the eighties it started shifting from a bad thing to a good thing, as geekery gained respect, particularly in reference to computer geeks. A 1993 OED use offers insight and advice: “Geek is the proud, insider term for nerd. If you are not a dedicated techie, don't use this word.” Another use (from 2001) goes beyond warning to manifesto: “We're the nerds, the geeks, the dweebs: the men and women who can spend 20 hours straight contemplating 600 bytes of obscure, arcane, impenetrable computer code.”

Though the stereotype of a geek allows for little dating, much less procreation, “geek” has been a fertile word. In Visual Thesaurus, The New York Times On Language columnist Ben Zimmer mentioned some of geek’s children: “... geeks get geeked or geeked out about the topics that excite them, indulge in geekfests, and achieve geekdom in geeksville. Best Buy has its Geek Squad, and fans of the TV show Glee proudly call themselves gleeks.” More Gleekage can be found here.

Zimmer’s article featured the “Geek the Library” campaign, which pioneered a new use of “geek” as a verb, where “to geek” means something like “to love” or “to heart.” The site asks readers to “Share what you geek” and shows videos of people who geek worms, engineering, art, vampires, barbecue, and so forth. This use is new, but “geek” has been verbed before. It’s meant to quit or back down, as well as to get the jitters or whim-whams, as in this 1984 quote: “It always used to geek me up when we were facing third-and-one or first-and-goal, and they would send me in to get it.” “Geeking” has also meant to live the geek life, either in the studious or circus senses.

The always informative Word Spy lists other variations, like the “geek gap,” which is “The disparity between executives who approve or oversee technological projects that they don't understand and the information technology workers who implement and maintain those projects.” A result of geek-gap-based misunderstandings could be “geeksploitation,” which sounds like a disturbing film genre but actually consists of  “induc(ing) young computer programmers to work long hours by taking advantage of their enthusiasm and high energy levels.“ Mega-successful geeks are part of the geekerati, and a top geek is an alpha geek. Believe it or not, there’s even such a thing as “geeksta,” a play on “gangsta” that is apparently a techie-focused form of hip-hop (also known as nerdcore) that I hope to avoid for the rest of my natural life.

Speaking of life and its grim alternative, there is one recent use of “geek” that swims against the tide of positive uses. On The Walking Dead, where the terms “zombie” and “Undead American” are never heard—the shambling brain-munchers are called “walkers” and “geeks.” This seems like a strange choice, but it does fit well with the freaky, outcast-related senses of the word. Plus, it’s an easy word to yell when geeks are lurching your way.

It’s kind of satisfying that “geek” has come full circle—what was formerly a person who bit the heads off live chickens is now a former person who bites the heads off live persons. I guess even death can’t end the love affair between geeks and brains.

The airport has long been a source of frustration and humor, as you well know if you’ve ever missed a flight, endured a screaming baby, or watched Airplane (RIP, Leslie Nielsen). The annoyance and comedy rose to new levels in the past month, as the Transportation Security Administration unveiled the new “whole-body imagers,” along with the enhanced pat-downs that you’ve either experienced or (more likely) heard about by now. These aggressive gropings caused a national outcry that could be summarized by the words of Alias’s Sydney Bristow, who once responded to a full-scale frisk by pointing out, “It’s not a date!”

Between the TSA’s own terminology and the enraged public’s stream of sarcastic terms such as “porno scanners,” you could write a small dictionary about the words that have debuted or risen to new prominence. Airportese is our fastest growing language.

The most prominent term is probably “enhanced pat-down.” The New York Times On Language columnist Ben Zimmer aptly noted the resemblance to “enhanced interrogation procedures,” the most famously awful euphemism for torture in recent times. You don’t have to be a branding expert to think that using a word associated with torture for a physically invasive new security procedure may not have been the swiftest move. “Enhanced” has been used since the 1500s, and it’s always contained the seeds of BS that have bloomed fully in the last decade. This 1872 OED example could have been written yesterday: “Buying up the stock of any commodity to sell it again at an enhanced price.”

Fortunately, sarcasm and humor have always been antidotes for BS. In The Boston Globe, Erin McKean points out some of the terms disgruntled travelers have coined for the pernicious pat-down procedures, such as “...gate rape, freedom pats, freedom fondles and freedom frisks, grope-a-palooza, and love pats (that last by Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri). The whole process has been called a peel and feel.” “Peel and feel” is one of many rhyming phrases for unpleasant tasks such as “strip and flip” and “spray and pray.” “Peel and feel” is also further proof that there’s nothing so unpleasant that people won’t rhyme about it.

As we’ve seen in the case of BP, anytime a company with initials in its name fouls the waters (literally or metaphorically), people eagerly suggest what their name “really” means. You can find examples of backronyms such as “Totalitarian Sex Addicts” all over the net, but the folks at Reason Magazine seem to have mined this well the deepest. Many aren’t any cleverer than your typical Internet comment, but some are pretty memorable. I liked Taking Scissors Away, Touching Stuff Aggressively, Trampling Several Amendments, and Too Stupid for Arby’s (that’s too harsh on underpaid TSA workers, but I always enjoy a shot at Arby’s). 

Speaking of junk food, the word “junk” has spread like an STD in the form of the “Don’t touch my junk” catchphrase. That term for the genitalia has been around at least 15 years and was catching steam in the mainstream as part of Brett Favre’s texting-your-junk-gate. “Junk” has had dozens of meanings over the years, including stuff, jewelry, nonsense, garbage, drugs, medicine, and baseball pitches. Maybe it’s because I’m a good American Catholic boy raised to despise his own body, but I have always enjoyed the word “junk” as a term for the genitals, though not everyone does. When a friend was wiping up her baby a few months ago, and I advised her to wipe in a direction opposite the baby’s junk, my word choice was strongly pooh-poohed. 

Before a TSA behavior detection officer catches me, let me suggest a term that could solve all our security and linguistic problems. It was coined on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in the episode “The Gang Hits the Road,” as would-be sheriff Mac assured his friends that a hitchhiker was not dangerous by saying, “I did an ocular pat-down of him ... I did an ocular assessment of the situation, garnered that he was not a security risk, and I cleared him for passage.”

There is much to recommend the ocular pat-down. Requiring only eyeballs, it entails neither a freedom grope nor a deadly dose of freedom rays. As for its effectiveness, the hitchhiker Mac cleared soon stole the group’s car. That makes the oracular pat-down is as reliable as any security measure currently in use. Maybe the TSA should try it.

What the history of the word OK can tell us about American concision, psychology, and language.

OK is a word so omnipresent, useful, and casual that it feels like it’s existed since the dawn of time. It’s hard to imagine how people could have spoken and written with those two little letters.

It’s also hard to imagine that two letters could encompass as much history and human experience as OK, but there’s no need for the imagination: Allan Metcalf’s book OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word traces its journey from “joke to business tool and then to staple of everyday conversation and an attitude toward life.” Metcalf provides many snapshots of American history, with detours into the worlds of business and celebrity and psychology, while painting a vivid portrait of the weird, wild process of word evolution. I think you’ll find the yarn Metcalf spins to be far better than OK.

The origin of OK is an odd, unlikely one: It was a joking abbreviation for “all correct,” invented by Charles Gordon Greene in 1839 in the Boston Morning Post. In anticipation of your “huh?” you have to understand that abbreviations, especially humorous abbreviations, were in vogue in Boston at the time, kind of like our current world of LOL, ROTFL, and ZOMG. This trend produced many unsuccessful terms such as OW—an OK-like term for “oll wright” (all right) that flopped.

This origin was a lot for OK to overcome. Words that are jokes have a difficult route to success, and the silliness and obtrusiveness of OK should have doomed it to a quick exit from the language. As Metcalf showed in his previous book, Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success, words that are most likely to succeed blend in as if they were there all along; successful words tend to be stealthy and unassuming. OK was as stealthy as a dinosaur bone dropped in a punchbowl.

Fortunately, OK was as lucky as it was weird. Its first bit of good fortune was that Martin Van Buren’s hometown of Old Kinderhook allowed “OK” to be appropriated in 1840 as a name for the “OK Club”—which was part of the Democratic Party—and as a rallying cry for Van Buren, who ran for reelection (unsuccessfully) against William Henry Harrison. That started OK fever. With the real origin already forgotten, many false etymologies popped up, until a persuasive one took hold. Taking advantage of Andrew Jackson’s reputation as an uneducated rube, James Gordon Bennett concocted a false document that showed Jackson using and coining OK as an abbreviation of “Ole Kurrek.” This story was compelling and solidified OK’s place in English, where it soon spread as a tool for approving documents. So just as a joke accompanied OK’s birth, a hoax allowed it to live to a ripe old age.

I’m leaving out about 8,000 steps in OK’s story, but here’s one step I won’t neglect: In the early 1960’s, lexicographer Allen Walker Read uncovered the Boston origin of OK. Without him, we would probably still believe some of the bushels of OK-related bunk that exist, such as the theories that it came from a Choctaw or African word, or that it really was Andrew Jackson’s goof rather than Charles Gordon Greene’s joke. If Metcalf is the Michael Jordan of OK, Read is the Bill Russell.

Like, any successful word, OK has children. “AOK” was an invention of astronauts that was easier to hear over static than plain old OK. We’ve been saying “okey-doke” since the 1920s and “okey-dokey” since the thirties. We have Ned Flanders to thank for “okeley-dokely,” while South Park’s Mr. Mackey is the patron doofus of “m’kay” (though it was used earlier on Beavis and Butthead and Office Space). The “old okey doke” dates from the sixties, and refers to a type of hoodwinking or trickery. Since 1972, folks have been referring to the mythical OK Corral as a place for showdowns and smackdowns, as seen in the first known use: “‘California’, said Carl Wagner, at 26 a seasoned veteran of the McGovern primary battles, ‘is the gunfight at OK Corral.’”

A major factor in OK’s success is its adaptability. Metcalf praises its “hydra-headedness,”—meaning that OK can be a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection, abbreviation, or acronym (technically, an initialism). It can be spelled “o.k.,” “ok,” “O.K.,” “OK,” “okay,” and sometimes “okey” or “okeh.” That adaptability also applies to its meaning. OK is affirmative, but it doesn’t gush or overpromise. Few things in the world will ever be outstanding, wonderful, top-notch, or world-class, but many things are OK. Such flexibility made OK perfect fodder for Thomas A. Harris, when his 1967 book I’m OK, You’re OK merged transactional psychology and OK in a marriage that took both to greater heights. That book had a huge effect on OK’s legacy. As Metcalf puts it “...it could be argued that with I’m OK, You’re OK as a catalyst, in the 21st century OK became a whole two-letter American philosophy of tolerance, even admiration, for difference.”

So get this book, OK? If you love words, history, or Americana, you’ll find it fascinating. You may even agree with Metcalf that we should celebrate OK on March 23, its birthday. “OK Day” certainly has a ring to it.
 

The word “gay” is everywhere you look these days. Gay activists support gay rights such as gay marriage, while gay-bashers protest all things gay, including the gayby boom. There’s also been a rash of suicides involving gay youngsters who were bullied—which is perhaps why the trailer for The Dilemma caught major flak. In it, Vince Vaughn says: “Ladies and gentleman, electric cars ... are gay. I mean, not homosexual gay, but, you know, my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay.”

That controversy has passed, the director Ron Howard opted to keep the lines in the movie, and we all moved on to other business. But this incident raises some major issues, not just socially and artistically, but in the realm of word meanings. Most people are very aware of the meaning of “gay” as happy or lame, but the word has had an astounding range of other meanings as well. What “gay” means depends entirely on your time period and perspective, and these days, perspective can be hard to find.

The original sense of “gay” was entirely positive. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it: “Noble; beautiful; excellent, fine.” The sense of “gay” as happy or merry dates from the 1400s and inspired some bizarrely specific senses, such as “of a horse: lively, prancing” and “of a dog's tail: carried high or erect.”

In several earlier definitions, we can see the seeds of “gay” beginning to mean homosexual, if only because these meanings fit with what would become gay stereotypes. “With gay abandon” started meaning “with reckless abandon” in the mid-1800s. “Gay” also meant something like “prostitute-y” in the 1800s, as a “gay woman” or “gay girl” was what we call a sex worker these days. Another sense, used since the 1500s, fits gay stereotypes like a reductionist glove: “...dedicated to social pleasures; dissolute, promiscuous; frivolous, hedonistic ... uninhibited; wild, crazy; flamboyant.” That meaning was intended here, in 1879: “Besides being very handsome, there are reasons to fear that Mr. Charles Victor Fremy was sometimes very, very gay.”

As far as we can tell, “gay” only started meaning homosexual in the early 1940s. Earlier citations only appear that way retroactively, like this 1922 quotation from Gertrude Stein: “Helen Furr and Georgina Keene lived together then ... They were together then and traveled to another place and stayed there and were gay there ... not very gay there, just gay there. They were both gay there.”

The earliest OED examples of “gay” meaning homosexual are from 1941. This example from that year shows just how in-flux (and covert) the meaning was: “Supposing one met a stranger on a train from Boston to New York and wanted to find out whether he was ‘wise’ or even homosexual. One might ask: ‘Are there any gay spots in Boston?’ And by a slight accent put on the word ‘gay’ the stranger, if wise, would understand that homosexual resorts were meant.”

Meanwhile, examples of “gay” meaning “lame” don't turn up until the 1970s. The first known use is from 1978: “‘It looks terrific on you.’ ‘It looks gay.’” This takes us back to the Vince Vaughan lines. Let’s take another look at them: “Ladies and gentleman, electric cars...are gay. I mean, not homosexual gay, but, you know, my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay.”

I have mixed feeling about this. On the one hand, it’s 100 percent understandable why GLAAD is a little sensitive to anything that sounds like gay-bashing. If I could, I would personally bash gay-bashers with a nuclear bomb. On the other hand, I don’t think the lines deserve much, if any, criticism. Though this has been widely referred to as a “gay joke,” I don’t see any joke at all. It's just an observation with an unfortunate connotation that the screenwriters went out of their way to make clear wasn’t intended. Isn’t Vaughn’s clarification—“not homosexual gay, but, you know, my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay”—equivalent to the famous Seinfeld “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”? So what’s wrong with that?

I also have trouble seeing what the “lame” sense of “gay” has to do with homosexuality. Does anyone in the world think gay folks are lame? As I understand the homophobic viewpoint, gay people are considered sinners and evil-doers—a lot worse than lame, right? If the collective gay people of the world could magically transform all “gays are abominations” sentiment to “gays are like, totally lame,” I have a feeling they would take that bargain, because nobody bothers to legally discriminate against the lame. Maybe gay people can commiserate with the physically lame, who lost the battle over that word years ago.

The dislike of “gay” is an awful lot like the dislike of “retard”—both words, when used insultingly, are hated for reasons that are very compassionate. But language is an amoral beast that operates and evolves on its own, and “retard” is just one of many terms for someone of low intelligence—like “idiot” and “moron”—that moved from medicine to slang. You can’t stop language change, and I think that’s OK. It’s more important to take care of people who are retarded than to police every use of the word “retard”—even when it’s used by morons.

Similarly, with so much real, horrible homophobia in the world, trying to censor the “lame” sense of gay is a waste of energy and a losing battle. Fighting losing battles is retarded. And kind of gay.?
 

An ode to the wonderful “schm” sound.

I never knew Sol Steinmetz, the lexicographer and hall-of-fame word-herder who recently died. I wish I had. As the editor of many dictionaries and the author of word books, such as There’s a Word for It: The Explosion of the English Language Since 1900, he was a heavyweight in the word game. He also sounds like a wonderful human being, as indicated by comments from Oxford English Dictionary editor-at-large Jesse Sheidlower: “He never had a bad word to say about anyone ... And he knew a lot of bad words.”

Some of those bad words (and many of the great ones) are Yiddish—one of Steinmetz’s main interests, which he wrote about in Yiddish and English: A Century of Yiddish in America and as co-author of Meshuggenary: Celebrating the World of Yiddish. I’ve been looking for an excuse to talk about words such as “klutz,” “maven,” “kvetch,” “plotz,” and “kibosh” for years, so in honor of Steinmetz and his work, here’s a look at the wonderful legacy of Yiddish in English—but only one part of that legacy. I haven’t the space to do justice to the full impact of Yiddish, so I’m sticking with its most memorable and distinctive sound: “sch,” which remains so useful in English when you meet a schmuck or feel like a schmo.

As Steinmetz (who was an ordained rabbi) and co-authors Payson R. Stevens and Charles M. Levine put it in Meshuggenary, “Yiddish S-words fill the mouth, pucker the lips, and push the tongue against the hard palate. They’re meant to hiss or shush with that acid 's' or noisy 'sh' flowing off the first syllable. They sound funny and immediately evoke the image of whom they’re describing.” The poster child of such words has to be “schmuck,” a perennial put-down the Oxford English Dictionary first spots in 1892:  “Becky's private refusal to entertain the addresses of such a Shmuck.” As its use in Dinner for Schmucks shows, “schmuck” is alive and well, though a few years ago it was a basis of a memorable Onion article titled “Mel Brooks Starts Nonprofit Foundation To Save Word 'Schmuck.'”

Schmuck-like Yiddish insults include “schlump,” “schmo,” “schmendrick,” “shlemiel,” “shlimatzel,” “shmeggege,” and “schnook.” The differences between these terms are subtle; a 1948 OED quote distinguishes between two of them: “Schlump is a friendlier, more sympathetic term than ‘schmo,’ which has completely replaced ‘jerk.’ A schmo, of course, is a person who stands watching a machine make doughnuts, and (1) cannot understand the process, (2) cannot get up will power to leave.” I think we all know a few schmos like that.

Meanwhile, Steinmetz and company write that the schlimazel is “...a good buddy of the schlemiel. You can distinguish them by remembering that a schlimazel gets soup spilled on him by a schlemiel.” “Schlong” can be used as a similar insult, though like “putz” it also means a part of the anatomy you can probably figure out from this 1969 Philip Roth quote: “His shlong brings to mind the fire hoses coiled along the corridors at school.” Even Larry David got in the act with his Curb Your Enthusiasm coinage “schmohawk,” which isn’t authentic Yiddish but sure sounds like it.

Other s-words are not insults, but have a schmeer of insulting flavor. “Schmutz” is gunk—never a crowd-pleaser. Schmoozing can be good or bad, but has a faintly ingratiating whiff. Schmaltz and schlock are, respectively, sentimental or shoddy stuff.  Though sex and noses can be natural, beautiful things, there are definitely more respectful ways of describing them than “schtupping” and “schnozz." For info on shleppers, shnorrers, and shnuckles, check out David Geller’s 1934 piece on shoe-salesman slang, recently reprinted in Schott’s Vocab.

Yiddish s-words are so linked to insults that “schm” developed its own identity as a Swiss army knife-like, one-size-fits all diminisher, as mentioned in my column on linguistic reduplication of all sorts. The OED’s earliest example of schm-reduplication is from 1929: “‘I know he made Davy go to the Palace to-day with the idea of hastening on the crisis in his illness.’ ... ‘Crisis-shmisis!’ mocked Barnett disparagingly.” They collect other examples since such as “Time; schmime,” “Child, schmild,” “Trotsky-shmotsky,” “Oedipus, Schmoedipus,” “Gods, schmods,” and “Listen schmisten.” My favorite example dismissively refers to a certain rock in the sky as “moon-schmoon.”

For a thorough look at the history and vocabulary of Yiddish, you should read Meshuggenary—a fantastically entertaining and informative book you don’t need to be a word nerd to enjoy. In honor of Sol Steinmetz, the wonderful Yiddish language, and some of the many words I’ve neglected in this column, I urge you to make fuller use of Yinglish in your writing and speech, like so:

Don’t snack with experts—nosh with mavens. Don’t say “diddly-squat”—say “diddly-bupkis!”  “Congratulations” is boring—go with “Mazel tov!” Don’t give trinkets, baubles, or knickknacks—give a tchotchke. Stop drooling about how voluptuous Christina Hendricks is—drool because she’s zaftig. And don’t call this paragraph a hodgepodge—call it a mishmash.

Using such words may take some testicular fortitude—wait, no it won’t. It will merely take a little chutzpah.
 

As kids, most of us were probably on both sides of bullying. That was the case with me. As an unconfident, skinny dork, I was a tempting target for certain jackasses—but I wasn’t above contributing to class-wide bullying of the most put-upon social pariahs. It didn’t take much guts or brains to intimidate me, and it took even less balls of my own to dish out mean words to kids who were already taking it from nearly everyone. I guess it evened out.

If only it always did. As we now know, bullying is a lot more serious than what many of us did or had done to us: It seems like you can’t turn on the computer without reading about a gay—or presumed gay—kid who commits suicide, with bullying as a major factor. (This epidemic had one positive effect: the “It Gets Better Project” founded by Dan Savage.) Of course, you don’t have to be gay to be bullied. Earlier this year, a 15-year-old girl hanged herself after vicious taunting and threats, and cyberbullying against all kinds of kids has become common. Given the seriousness of the matter, I feel a little bad for even thinking about such a trivial aspect of the topic as word history, but this is what I do.

There’s a popular theory about the origin of “bully”: Since bulls are so bullish to riders (and China shops), they must be the source of the word, right? Wrong. The real origin is muddy at best. “Bully” appears to have Dutch and German roots, evolving from words for “lover” and “friend.” Indeed, its earliest meaning was positive. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was “a term of endearment and familiarity, orig. applied to either sex .... Later applied to men only, implying friendly admiration: good friend, fine fellow, ‘gallant’.” You’d never see sentences today like this one, from 1599—“From heartstring I loue the louely Bully”—or this one, from 1754—“I haue promised to be with the sweet Bully early in the morning of her important day.”

In the 1600s, the word began branching off into creepier meanings that are closer to today’s bullies. “Bully” started to mean “A blustering ‘gallant’; a bravo, hector, or ‘swash-buckler.’” That sounds very cool and Han Solo-y, but it’s also a step closer to an aggressive bully. Another meaning sounds a little bizarre today: “protector of a prostitute.” Slowly, the word darkened in meaning, eventually living down to one of the OED’s most perfect definitions: “a tyrannical coward who makes himself a terror to the weak.” Here’s a 1780 use that conveys that cowardice well: “The most swaggering, swearing bullies in fine weather, were the most pitiful wretches on earth, when death appeared before them.”

Bullying can take on frighteningly specific forms, as seen in cyberbullying, one of the strongest reminders that the effects of technology are never entirely positive. There’s also “allergy bullying,” which is used in a 2008 example collected by The Word Spy’s Paul McFedries: “Whether it's an extension of garden-variety bullying or a backlash against greater restrictions on peanuts in schools, parents of children with severe allergies say their kids are increasingly facing threats of being touched or, worse, forced to eat the food they have spent their lives avoiding.” For older students, too much ale or lager can turn some into beer bullies, while “bullyproofing,” has been attempted in schools since at least the 1990s.

Metaphorical bullying is common too, and includes the trademark bully. The “bully offer”—an extravagant and somewhat shady offer for a house—is another sign of the unfortunate success of this word. Theodore Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit” is probably the most well-known variation. It referred more to the “outstanding” bully-for-you sense of “bully” than for any aggressiveness on Roosevelt’s part, but it’s hard to hear the positive sense of “bully” these days.

“Bully” is one of the scariest words I’ve ever written about, because it can mean so many things: excluding, teasing, rumor-spreading, harassing, abusing, coercing, online-terrorizing, torturing, and even driving to suicide—or “bullyicide,” as it has been called. That’s a frightening range. It’s enough to make you wish we all lived in a Simpsons episode, where Lisa Simpson could identify and eliminate a chemical like “Poindextrose” that sets bullies off. In our five-fingered, non-animated, all-too-real world, the solutions are slow; let’s hope they arrive before more lives are damaged or ended.
 

Recently, a United States circuit court judge overruled a Vermont statute that said you can’t use your license plate to send religious messages. The case in point was a would-be 2004 plate saying "JN36TN"—which meant John 3:16, according to its owner Shawn Byrne. The judge who overturned the anti-religion statute said that since other types of personal beliefs and affiliations were all OK—such as “THINKPOS” and “ARMYMOM”—there’s no reason a religious message shouldn’t be allowed as well.

Though they make Twitter seem like a Russian novel, and they’ve long been a source of humor, vanity plates are also a front in the free-speech wars. Cases like the Vermont ruling show that there is no writing genre so small that people won’t use it to express themselves and become litigious. Vanity plates also provide an interesting study in language compression and a perfect example of the inherent ambiguity of language.

Like every other issue left to the states, there’s a lot of variation in vanity-plate rules across our enormous country, but a common denominator seems to be the issue of interpretation. For example, the New York state vanity rules includes this command: “You must explain what the combination [of letters and numbers] means or what the combination represents.” Such explanations can reveal or hide the truth, and they could’ve made the Vermont case a total non-issue.

As Andrew Cohen writes, Vermont initially denied “JN36TN” as a plate “because Byrne's supplied meaning indicated his intent to refer to the biblical passage John 3:16. However, as Byrne argues, and the record supports, Vermont would have approved that very same combination had Byrne supplied a secular meaning for it—e.g., `[M]y name is John, I am 36, [and] I was born in Tennessee.'" (It could also mean “Join the 36th Transcendent Nunnery,” which I just made up. I don’t envy the vanity-plate overlords who have to read the tea leaves and judge the motives of vanity-plates-wanters.)

With interpretation being such a sticky issue, it allows some to get away with plates that are creepy at best. I’m thinking of the South Dakota person with the “FUHRER” plate who disingenuously pointed to the literal German meaning of “leader” while completely ignoring the genocide-ridden meaning the entire world knows: Hitler. Such clinging to original meaning is common and always misguided: Sure, the swastika may have originated as a symbol of peace, but that meaning has been utterly destroyed. Original meaning doesn’t mean much, because meanings change. A less disturbing case involved a tofu-loving Denver vegan who picked the plate "ILVTOFU" to support her favorite food. If you think hard enough about those last two letters, another meaning comes to mind; the plate was denied.

A vanity-plate novice might be surprised how many types of plates there are. The above cases are in the same genre as the “ASSMAN” episode of Seinfeld, when Kramer mistakenly received a proctologist’s plates. Though “vanity” is a perfect word for such plates, they go by “personalized” or “custom” plates, too. There are also historical plates, vintage plates, antique plates, exhibit plates, and picture plates: These all feature some writing or images in the non-numbers parts of the plate, and they’ve been just as controversial.

At the First Amendment Center, David L. Hudson Jr. traces the issue back to a 1976 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that it was OK for a New Hampshire couple to obscure their state’s “Live Free or Die” motto, because they preferred to Die Unfree or Live, I guess. Plates with anti-abortion messages and Confederate flags—plus messages such as “GETOSAMA” and “MPEACHW”—have also raised hubbubs. Many more cases and examples can be found here.

In The New York Times, Richard S. Chang made an observation I wish I could take credit for: “It's a wonder states put up with all of this trouble to continue the service. One big reason: vanity and specialty plates generate millions of dollars in revenue for the states every year.” Yep, there’s nothing like wads of cash to make mountains of hassle seem like molehills. And for anyone who wants to create their own vanity plate, or start text messaging, or just be very, very annoying to the rest of us, here’s a list of abbreviations intended to aid the vain. If you like XNTRK RYTN, you might even find the list 1DRFL
 

Holy god, do I love Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. I’m addicted to Mint Chocolate Cookie. I’m also a fan of Milk and Cookies and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. Basically, my four food groups are Ben, Jerry, ice cream, and cookies.

My lust for it isn’t diminished at all by the recent news that Ben and Jerry's will be removing the label “all natural” from their ice cream because it includes some factory-made products. Hell, I like the stuff so much that if you told me it was made from toxic sludge and orphans, I’d be cool with it. But it does raise an interesting issue: What do “all-natural” or “natural” even mean on a food label or elsewhere? Spoiler alert: absolutely nothing. In any context, “natural” is so vague, all-encompassing, and subjective that it is pretty much meaningless.

Naturally, our giant friend the Oxford English Dictionary has dozens of meanings and sub-meanings for “natural” that have evolved over the years. The most important one for our purposes is “Involving no artificial or man-made ingredients, chemicals, etc.; ecological, organic; spec. (of food and drink) containing no artificial colourings, flavourings, or preservatives.” That sense was first found in 1802 in a reference to “Natural Sherry.” The OED doesn’t list “all-natural,” and I respect them for that: “all” is a meaningless add-on to “natural,” adding three letters of hooey and nothing more. You might as well go with “maxi-natural,” ultra-natural,” or “supernatural”—well, maybe not supernatural, unless your food is endorsed by Christine O’Donnell.

Much as the OED dominates my word-loving life, I have to admit the FDA has more influence on what goes into my piehole. Unfortunately, the FDA is about as rigorous as a stoner eating a pint of ice cream when it comes to policing what “natural” means. It provides no clear guidance or enforcement on “natural” as a label. It’s as reliable a product description as “delicious,” “gourmet,” “handcooked,” “fresh,” “healthy,” and—as Jennifer LaRue Huget points out—“Vermont’s best.”

In fact, the government can take none of the credit for Ben and Jerry backing off “all natural”—the change was made because of pressure from the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The Executive Director of that group, Michael F. Jacobson, discussed the issue recently, emphasizing that even though “Ben and Jerry's kept on passing off ingredients like anhydrous dextrose and maltodextrin as gifts from nature,” that didn’t mean they were dangerous or unhealthy. He said: “The real fuss over ‘all natural’ isn't about nutrition, or food safety, it's about money. It's one of the catch phrases that food marketers love because it allows products thusly labeled to sell better or fetch a slightly higher price. And that's why this was a particular problem for Ben NS Jerry's. It's a company that loves wearing its hippie halo.” That halo doesn’t fit so well when your products are packaged with fibs. But “natural” has been a slippery word for centuries; fibbing is in this word’s DNA.

We’ve been talking about natural childbirth since 1933, and natural highs since the drug-soaked year of 1971. “Natural fool” and “natural idiot” are terms for people with mental disabilities dating back to the 1400s, and “natural number”—used since at least 1763—distinguishes good, honest, All-American numbers like 3 and 675 from sneaky negative numbers like -65. The most perfect example of how unwelcome “natural” can be is “natural causes”—an explanation that has referred to death since the 1800s. I would need 10 columns to thoroughly discuss its other compounds, including natural day, cement, gas, immunity, liberty, park, price, rate of unemployment, resources, and so forth. As you can see, “natural” goes all over, under, and outside the map. It’s a mess.

Every year, Lake Superior State University puts out a list of “Banished Words” that they, and probably a lot of other people, would like to throw out of the language. Mainly, their lists consist of political buzzwords (“transparency,” “czar,” “shovel-ready”) and other trendy lingo (“tweet,” “bromance,” “sexting”). Maybe this group or some other cabal of peevologists should stop shaking sticks at minor offenders and aim the heavy artillery at a big target: “natural”—a word that deserves to be sent on a one-way journey out of our mouths and dictionaries.

Such banishment is unnatural and impossible, sure, but I can dream, can’t I? Now pass the ice cream, please.
 

No one can agree what the word means, which might explain why everyone insists they're not one.

Hipsters are everywhere these days—and so are the people who make fun of them. Websites like Unhappy Hipsters and Look at This Fucking Hipster attract hordes of finger-pointers, especially at guys like this, with crayons in his beard. People love to make fun of hipster glasses, ridiculous facial hair, inappropriate hatwear, and other signs of being too cool for school and the rest of the planet. But why does hipster humor seem to be, according to my hipster-dar, more prolific than hipsters themselves? And how did making fun of hipsters become so hip?

It isn't easy to define exactly what a hipster is, but that’s not from lack of trying. The Hipster Handbook diagnoses the afflicted as: “One who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool ... The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2 percent body fat.” (My friend Eileen will like that last bit, since she believes that “white men under 5'8", less than 160 pounds form the core of male hipsters.”) A recent Psychology Today piece excerpted Andrea Bartz and Brenna Ehrlich’s book Stuff Hipsters Hate, which defines a hipster as “A creative 20-something who defines him- or herself by a sighing superiority over mainstream society; appears to subsist entirely on pain and art.” Ouch. In an angst-soaked nutshell, today’s hipster is considered a pretentious, clueless jackass.

It wasn’t always so. “Hipster” used to ooze coolness. First, there was “hip,” which once had a sister word “hep”—both were first found in the early twentieth century, meaning "in the know" or "aware." You could be hip or hep to all sorts of information, as in this Oxford English Dictionary 1904 example: “At this rate it'll take about 629 shows to get us to Jersey City, are you hip?” Both words broadened to mean sophisticated and sharp, and then narrowed to mean uber-fashionable. In the 1930s and through the 1950s, “hep” gradually lost the lexical Darwinian struggle to “hip,” but not before producing variations that included “hepcat,” “hep kitten,” and—you guessed it—“hepster.” Mainly, those words referred to people who loved swing music.

“Hipster” first popped up in 1940, and The Historical Dictionary of American Slang’s first use includes the statement that “A hipster never teaches a square anything.” The OED’s early examples include semi-definitions such as “know-it-all” (1941) and “man who's in the know, grasps everything, is alert” (1946). Those descriptions sound groovy, but in the HDAS’s definition of “hipster,” we can find the seed that grew into today’s widespread hipster-phobia: “A person who is or attempts to be hip, esp. a fan of swing or bebop music.” It’s that attempting—especially in clumsy, transparent ways—that make the hipster horrible. The fact that hipness was stolen from black people by white people, and then ruined, supports another time-tested theory: White people ruin everything.

Though “hipster” and “hippy” now seems as dissimilar as a can of PBR and a bong, the words did start out as synonyms. The HDAS’s first use of “hippy” is from 1952, and it wasn’t until the sixties that the word took on its long-haired, psychedelic implications. On Seinfeld, Elaine called Kramer a “hipster doofus.” Other terms, such as “yuppie” and “grup” (a Star Trek-inspired term for adults who won’t grow up), have been modified as “yupster” and “grupster,” word-blends that wed hipsterdom to something equally awful.

Perhaps Jeff Wise said it best when he wrote on the Psychology Today blog, “Nobody likes hipsters, not even hipsters.” In discussing some consumer research, he notes that “people who legitimately enjoy all the trappings on hipsterhood ... must psychologically distance themselves from the demographic group of which they are so clearly a part.” As Wise puts it: “This, then, is the essence of being a hipster. Pretending you aren't one.”

Given the psychological mindgames hipsters play on themselves, I wonder if the whole phenomenon of hipster humor isn’t just another aspect of hipster self-denial. I live in a gentrified Chicago neighborhood, the kind of place hipsters supposedly roam. While I do see some obnoxious glasses and, occasionally, a goofy hat, I don’t see any folks as ridiculous-looking as the specimens on Look at This Fucking Hipster. But even if I did—are they really that interesting? That deserving of so much attention?

My theory: Hipster-hating is the ultimate “He who smelt it, dealt it” situation. It’s a bit like homophobic politicians and religious leaders who inevitably are revealed to be gay as a picnic basket themselves. In other words, if you’re thinking and writing and worrying about hipsters, you’re a hipster.

Oh crap.
 

From man caves to man Spanx, a word trend grows a pair.

Have you seen the manmercials for Old Spice? Do you feel like we’re still stuck in a mancession, as some pundits call our economic woes, due to their dude-devastating ways? Have you gotten your fella a mangagement ring? Or if you don’t care for men, maybe you need a manllow—a half-man, half-pillow hybrid written about by Nancy Friedman.

Man-words—such as “mankini,” “man-date,” and “mancation”—are part of a silly category of words that goes back centuries, gained steam in the 1990s, and continues to produce preposterous examples. But man-words aren’t all about fun and manscaping: They’re a linguistic symptom of confusion over gender roles. Interestingly, this symptom of gender anxiety is also being used as a cure, or at least a tool for marketers to make men feel OK about buying mascara and girdles, by calling them manscara and mirdles. “Manning up” increasingly means paying up for all sorts of stuff.

Man-words fall into a few categories—one is for things, especially clothes, that have traditionally been the domain of women, such as “mantyhose,” “mantiques," and the atrocity known as “man spanx.” On Seinfeld, which helped boost the man-word trend in the 1990s, man-words were used for gender-panicky comedy: Jerry’s wearing a man-fur! His date has man-hands! George’s dad needs a manssiere! The trend of man-words being coined for clothing even spread to Iraq war slang, which has featured the “man-dress” for the dishdasha worn by Muslim men. A few much older terms seem in the same spirit, such as “manbag” (1968), “man-witch” (1886), and “man-nurse” (1530).

Those man-words are basically saying, “This is girl stuff, but for guys.” Other man-words emphasize how mega-manly something is, even if it lacks a womanly history. Here, “man” functions like a “girls keep out” sign on a treehouse. Words of this sort include “mancation” (spread by 2006’s The Break-up) and “man cave,” which The Word Spy’s Paul McFedries defines as “An area of a house, such as a basement, workshop, or garage, where a man can be alone with his power tools and projects.” Miller Lite’s “Man Laws” commercials and Jimmy Kimmel’s old The Man Show were also in this category.

A blurb for the DIY Network's show Man Caves shines a self-help-marinated light on the subject: “Guys need an exclusive space to hang out in their homes—a refuge where they can enjoy what they love, whether it's a soundproofed basement used as a rock 'n' roll lounge and adorned with limited edition guitars; a room where diehard ski fans can chill out with a roaring fireplace and alpine atmosphere; or a lush golf-lover's paradise, featuring a state-of-the-art virtual reality driving range, media center, and top-notch equipment storage space.” If you can afford all that crap, then “there's an environment for every guy that makes him feel fulfilled.” What a sales pitch: The way to embrace your inner guy is to interior decorate like a madwoman.

Indeed, man-words are often used by advertisers, hoping to tap into a popular trend and new markets. I talked to branding expert Nancy Friedman about the use of “man” in product-naming, and she reminded me of the Manwich—feeding men since 1969. She also brought several new examples to my attention: “MANterns” and “Mandles”—two fella-focused candle brands, plus “ManGlaze” nail polish for men. Friedman notices a couple motivating factors behind the trend. One is that “Men feel uncomfortable (threatened?) about buying and using these products, which have strong feminine associations” and therefore “need to be told in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS that these girly or gay-ish products are OK for men. Nothing more subtle than the word MAN will suffice.”

However, the topic of man-words isn’t as grim as a drum-beating men’s studies class. Ranging from silly to preposterous, nearly every man-word is at least a little funny. Friedman says advertisers play on this humor, appealing to “an audience that isn’t afraid of a little self-mockery. ‘Mandles’ is just funny. ‘Man’ in a brand name is as air-quote-y as ‘the ladies.’”

I can’t deny that. I hope, barring traumatic brain injury, to never wear a mirdle, put on manscara, or get a manzilian, but I’m giddy as a school girl to use the words “mirdle,” “manscara,” and “manzilian.”

I hope such silliness takes this column out of the realm of the patronizing, know-it-all, blowhardy mansplanation. A real man doesn’t mansplain.
 

Though I worship at the altar of comedic goddess Jane Lynch, I will not be watching Glee when it returns to TV on Sept 21. I have never seen an episode, and I never will. Just thinking about a show where folks routinely burst into song makes me want to burst into flames. I will never be a Gleek—as Glee’s devoted fans are called.

And yet I’m definitely a word geek who is very capable of appreciating the term “Gleek,” a hall-of-fame word blend and one of many labels for a set of rabid fans. Such Deadhead-like terms are a badge of honor for the most fanatical of fans, and there seems to be a new one coined every day.

Without a doubt, the primordial predecessor of these terms is “Trekkie” (along with its lesser-known twin, “Trekker”). Star Trek fans set the standard for intense, obsessed cult fandom, and without those words, there probably wouldn’t be any X-philes or Avatards (as fans of The X-files and Avatar call themselves). Though “Trekkie” and “Trekker” appear to be perfect synonyms, they aren’t. A 1970 example collected in Jeff Prucher’s Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction shows the difference, as a writer confesses to “...acting like a bubble-headed trekkie (rather than a sober, dignified—albeit enthusiastic—trekker).”

Among Trekkers, “Trekkie” is used for the stereotypical Trek fan: the loser with Vulcan ears who never got a date but memorized every line of Yeoman Rand. Yet to the unwashed masses, “Trekkie” is pretty much the accepted term for any Trek devote. Trekkers lost this battle a long time ago. A similar war of words played out more recently as Twilight fans debated whether they are “Twilighters” or “Tri-hards.” Since I have it on good authority from friends and librarians that one of the primary messages of Twilight is “Domestic violence is awesome,” I’m going to ignore Twi-whatevers for the rest of this column and my life.

On a happier note, fans of The Big Lebowski are Achievers, after a word that pops up many times in the movie, mainly in contrast to The Dude’s non-achieving ways. Lovers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and other Joss Whedon productions are Whedonites. More specifically, fans of Whedon’s prematurely canceled Firefly are Browncoats, after a faction within that series. Appropriately, Lord of the Rings fanatics are “Ringers,” while Bob Barker dubbed The Price is Right fans “Loyal Friends and True.” Music-lovers get in on the fun too. Beliebers, Grobanites, and Glamberts get their boats floated by Justin Bieber, Josh Groban, and Adam Lambert respectively, while Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters give new meaning to that term.

Those music-loving factions may be riding high these days, but they have a long way to go if they’re ever going to match the KISS Army, who have been rocking hard, frequently, and out since the mid-seventies. Even older are the Deadheads. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word back to this non-prophetic 1971 use: “The Grateful Dead: Vintage Dead... For Dead ‘heads’... Passing the acid test of time will probably be the privilege of very few groups, and I don't think the Grateful Dead will be among them.” FYI, “deadhead” has had many meanings, the oldest going back to the 1500s.

No doubt the success of “Deadhead” helped “head” gain currency as the most common way to coin a word for a fan of any sort. Phish-heads and Parrotheads are devoted to Phish and Jimmy Buffet, and it’s easy to find examples of “Losthead” and “Battlestarhead” too. Some other very established words take this form, like “metalhead” and, in the political realm, “dittohead.” Though The Word Spy definition—“people who mindlessly agree on an issue or idea because it fits in with their ideology or because they are followers of the person who put forth the idea in the first place”—shows how “dittohead” has broadened, it began as a word for Rush Limbaugh fans. And with football season underway, we can’t forget the Green Bay Packers’ adoring Cheeseheads.

It’s interesting how many of these words have a hint—or a heaping helping—of insult. “Deadhead” doubles as a flat-out synonym for numbskull, while “Avatard” contains one of our most popular and offensive suffixes. The stigma of “Trekkie” is well-known, and over the years, “Monsters” are the kind of folks who usually get chased by pitchfork-wielding villagers. “Cheesehead” was an insult for a person from Wisconsin before it was adopted by Packers fans. It’s only recently that “geek” has taken on a positive connotation, but “Gleek” still sounds a little like someone who bites the heads off chickens in a freak show—or a Trekkie.

This subversion of accepted meanings is part of being a Gleek or Lostaholic. The thought process goes something like this: “Society thinks being a deadhead is bad? Well, society sucks—being a Deadhead is great.” True, devoted fans end up making their own societies based on narratives or songs that make more sense to them than the popular ones about family, flag, and the Lord Baby Jesus. Flipping a word on its head is just part of the fun.
 

Swagger Jackers and Harlot Davidsons Get the Ews!

Ah, college... What memories. I was the chicken-finger-eating champion of my dorm. I introduced Evildead 2 to approximately 47 friends. I marched on Washington for causes I have completely forgotten, and I danced myself silly at hundreds of concerts. Despite having less musical ability than a brick, I was in two bands myself.

I was also more saturated in slang than at any other time of my life. College has always been an ultimate petri dish for slang: That’s what you get when hordes of young people with identities in flux gather and gab. In honor of the recently begun college year, here’s a look at some current college slang that is totally off the chain.

In his remarkable book Slang: The People’s Poetry, Michael Adams praised the creativity of slang, saying that “Like poetry, slang is the aesthetic exercise of linguistic ingenuity.” It’s easy (and boring) to say that someone is crazy or (more respectfully) that they have mental health issues. Only with slang can say how we really feel at times: that a dude is a total weapons-grade nutbucket.

Besides this creativity and irreverence, slang also tends to exist within specific groups, and to reinforce the boundaries of those groups. As Connie Eble wrote in Slang and Sociability: In-Group Language Among College Students, “Sharing and maintaining a constantly changing in-group vocabulary aids group solidarity and serves to include and exclude members. In this respect, slang is the linguistic counterpart of fashion and serves much the same purpose.” So a slang term is the equivalent of one of those odd moose hats worn by lodge members—it may be goofy and over-the-top, but hey, it’s just what we do around here.

Eble—an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—was kind enough to share her latest slang list with me. She’s been collecting such lists of “good, current campus slang” since 1972 in her undergraduate English classes. The lists are not just about collecting new slang, but about seeing what older slang is still in use, so I wasn’t surprised to find familiar terms like “absofreakinlutely,” “alrighty,” “blow off,” “craptastic,” “food coma,” “hammered,” “hook up,” “preggers,” “splitsville,” and “tramp stamp.” Though slang has a reputation for being ephemeral, some terms do stick around for decades—look at what a run “cool” has had.

On her list were also many terms I have never seen before. Before I get to them, a disclaimer: these terms don’t necessarily go beyond undergrads at the University of North Carolina, though many obviously do. You could probably find most of them on Urban Dictionary and who knows where else. The point is that they are verified ingredients in the cauldron of slang among current students. As Adams writes, “Slang is a flexible set of linguistic practices (including but not limited to vocabulary) that we use to fit in and to stand out, that is, that we use to mark group membership on one hand, individual social and linguistic identity on the other.” These terms are part of how UNC students are fitting in, standing out, and having a linguistic blast.

Eble’s collection includes terms formed by just about every method of word creation. There are blends like “beeramid” (a pyramid of empty beer cans), “Helltober” (hell plus October), and “procrastichat,” (a chat that is a form of procrastination—a college classic). There are exaggerated pronunciations—like “bruh” for bro and “mayne” for “man.” Rhyme creates some terms, like “dorm storm,” meaning to annoy residents by going door-to-door looking for signatures. Some words shift in meaning, such as “belligerent” as a term for drunk, no doubt due to the time-honored tradition of the belligerent drunk. Terms also shift in part of speech, as shown by the movement of “ew” from interjection to noun. Eble provides this example: “My date was nice, but he gave me the ews.” (Like the heebie-jeebies, the creeps, and the willies, you do not want the ews.)

Pop culture makes a big impression on college slang. Many terms—like “guido,” “creep on,” and “pouf”—are popularized by Jersey Shore. The expression “The cake is a lie!” comes from the videogame Portal. “Meh” and “totes magotes” (meaning “totally”) come from The Simpsons and I Love You, Man respectively. “M’kay” was used on Beavis and Butthead as well as by smarmy Lumbergh in Office Space. “That’s what she said” is older than The Office, but the American version made it a staple of slangy humor. By email, Eble said, “My impression is that more and more references to popular culture are showing up.” That seems like a valid impression, and she’s planning a more scholarly look at past slang lists to see if the numbers back it up.

Some terms are spectacularly creative and useful. “Ham sandwich!” is a “Holy crap!”-like exclamation that would fit well in the absurd world of Anchorman. We all probably know an “askhole”—the kind of person who asks a lot idiotic questions. A “Harlot Davidson” isn’t a female biker, but a woman in a long-distance relationship who blabs about that relationship at a party and then hooks up with another dude anyway. Then there’s “fubarose”—a mix of F-word-derived slang and chemistry jargon used by chem majors to mean an “impure carbohydrate mixture, an undesired product of sugar synthesis.” Though “fubarose” has a science-specific meaning, I wonder if the inventors of this word have accidentally found the building block of everything in the universe. If we’re all made of fubarose, that would explain a few things.

Though I am usually a proponent of expanding your vocabulary and adopting lonely words into new homes, I can’t recommend slipping any of these terms into your latest blog posts and protest signs. The risks of sounding like a swagger jacker—“someone who copies another's distinctive style"—are just too great.