A new tool for computer language analysis can evaluate your mind based on your Tweets (and might help psychologists, too)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or among the molemen, you’ve probably enjoyed the humor of @s–tmydadsays, the popular Twitter account of Justin, who describes himself like so: “I’m 29. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down s–t that he says.” That s–t consists of cranky honesty like “I need to change clothes? Wow. That’s big talk coming from someone who looks like they robbed a Mervyn’s” and “Oh please, you practically invented lazy. People should have to call you and ask for the rights to lazy before they use it.”

Most agree that s–tmydadsays is funny, but did you realize his emotional style is angry, his social style is personable, and his thinking style is analytic, sensory, and in-the-moment? These psychological insights can be gleaned by plugging s–tmydadsays into Analyze Words, a new Twitter-analyzing tool put together by James W. Pennebaker, his colleagues Roger Booth and Chris Wilson, and his daughter Teal. Pennebaker—a University at Texas Professor of Psychology—is a longtime innovator in using computer analysis of language to study how we think.

I asked Pennebaker by email for insight into the s–tmydadsays results, and though he said the sample size was a bit small, “…the analyses catch the emotional tone perfectly. Some serious hostility, depression, and anxiety is in the air. Socially, the writing suggests someone immersed in his social world, with constant references to other people—wife, mother, father, son. In other words, very different from someone who writes about computer components. Low in arrogance because he does not use big words and complex sentences and a high rate of articles—all of which are markers of psychological distance. The valley girl language probably reflects his high use of present tense verbs and punctuation.”

Yes, s–tmydadsays scored high in the social style category “Spacy/Valley Girl,” which is kind of a brain-bender. If you’re equally surprised that this category is included at all, it’s because it can measured—not every emotional, social, and thinking style has reliable linguistic symptoms. As Pennebaker said in a phone interview, “I know what I can measure and what I can’t.” It would be wonderful to measure something like “guilt-riddenness,” for example, but that tendency can’t be quantified yet.

Pennebaker has worked for decades on figuring out just how words and mental states are associated, in an effort to “come up with a way to measure healthy writing.” Starting in the early nineties, he first collaborated with grad student Martha Francis and later with New Zealand immunologist Roger Booth to create LIWC—Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, pronounced “Luke”—which provides the methodological basis for the Analyze Words site. Using language as a window into the mind is as old as listening for Freudian slips, but Pennebaker’s work is groundbreaking in how it links, as he puts it, “low-level words with broad psychological processes.” It turns out that style words (such as articles and prepositions) actually reveal more about what’s on our minds, psychologically and socially, than content words (like dog, airplane, etc).

Many of Pennebaker’s discoveries are counterintuitive, to say the least—particularly with regard to that pesky pronoun “I.” To many, “I” feels like a word of the powerful and arrogant, but it isn’t really: It turns out that women, followers, young people, poor people, depressed people, crappy students, and sick people all use “I” more than men, leaders, older people, rich people, happy people, good students, and healthy people. That paints a clear overall picture: “I” is a marker of low status, mainly because people who are lower status are more self-conscious. (“I” is also used more often by people telling the truth, as well as the worried more than the angry). In looking extensively at President Obama—who critics have incorrectly accused of being in love with the word “I”—Pennebaker found just the opposite: Obama is an infrequent I-user, reflecting self-confidence, coolness, and psychological distance.

President or peon, our words give away emotions and thoughts we might prefer to conceal. As Pennebaker wrote in “The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods” (co-authored with Yla R. Tausczik), “The words we use in daily life reflect what we are paying attention to, what we are thinking about, what we are trying to avoid, how we are feeling, and how we are organizing and analyzing our worlds.” Digital tools like LIWC allow those symptoms to be collected and quantified with tremendous ease. As Pennebaker puts it, “In the amount of time it takes to run a single participant in a social psychology language study, we can now download thousands of personal writings, interaction transcripts, or other forms of text that can be analyzed in seconds.”

That said, Pennebaker emphasizes that while style words are “reflections of what is going on in people’s heads,” but they’re not a tool for getting someone to change their way of thinking. In other words, you can’t ask someone to mindlessly repeat more “positive” words and expect them to become less depressed or suicidal. LIWC’s real use is in detecting problems such as excessive worry or anger and then showing when progress has been made. When we become more mentally healthy, our language changes unconsciously, because we are changing perspectives. The internal world manifests in the lexical world.

Let’s just hope Pennebaker detects minimal “progress” in s–tmydadsays. When it comes to humor, anger and worry are pure gold.

Ever wonder how people really talked in the 1800s, or 1500s, or earlier?

You can stop building the time machine. Such questions are now easier to answer than ever before, with the publication—after 44 years of work—of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. At almost 4,000 pages and about 800,000 meanings, this mind-boggling reference work is the biggest thesaurus ever and the world’s first historical thesaurus: It takes the enormity of the OED and arranges it thematically and chronologically. A glance at any page is a look at language evolution from Old English to the present, and it’s no less startling and amazing than watching sea slime slowly morph into monkeys and Neanderthals.

Michael Samuels, a University of Glasgow Professor of English Language, was the founder of the HTOED back in 1965, as the Herculean task of data collection began. The project took many body shots over the years—mostly due to never-ending funding difficulties—but it suffered a near-fatal blow in 1978. By email, editor Christian Kay (who has worked on the HTOED since 1969) described the near disaster: “The department was housed in an old terraced house, which went on fire (as we say in Glasgow); the cause was never discovered. Luckily the blaze was spotted fairly quickly by students in a nearby building. The building was gutted but the thesaurus, which then existed only as paper slips in a single copy, was saved because it was housed in metal filing drawers inside metal cabinets. After that we did all slips in triplicate and stored two copies elsewhere.”

That sounds pretty primitive in the era of Wordnik, OED online, and a kabillion other online dictionaries. We take the use of computers for granted, but it wasn’t always that way. In addition to being a unique word project, the HTOED was a pioneer in computer use in the humanities. Kay recalls, “…(computers) were common enough in science, but very expensive. We got our first one in 1981, mainly in order to prepare a tape for the publisher, Oxford University Press, who were moving into electronic publication. The first one was a Superbrain, a large, noisy machine which everyone regarded with awe.” That’s a far cry from the present. As Kay happily says, “Now I can put the whole thing on a memory stick.”

To understand what’s so awesome about the HTOED requires an understanding of what’s so lame about a regular thesaurus, which typically consists of piles of words that are synonyms—or so they appear. The fact is, few words are really synonymous, and the HTOED addresses this problem with subcategory after subcategory of finely tuned meanings. For example, “magically” would be specific enough a category for most thesauruses, but the HTOED includes sub-meanings such as “by miracle” and “in the manner of necromancy.” A careful writer need never write “veneficiously” (“by means of malignant sorcery”) when they mean “theurgically” (“by white magic”). After all, magic isn’t all the same anymore than robots or lizards are, and the HTOED maps the differences.

This specificity is displayed throughout three broad headings—the external world, the mental world, and the social world—which are subdivided into 236,400 categories and 797,120 meanings. I don’t even want to know the kinds of migraines that were involved in selecting where certain topics and subtopics went. As Kay said on the OUP blog, even without funding and fire disasters, 44 years might be considered speedy work: “If you are faced with, say, 10,000 slips containing words which have something to do with Food or Music, arriving at an acceptable classification is not the work of a few hours.”

Besides word geeks and history buffs, the HTOED is a godsend for writers, especially writers of historical fiction, TV, or movies. As Michael Quinion wrote in World Wide Words, “There’s no excuse any more for anachronisms. If you’re creating an historical novel or film or adapting a classic for television, you can check in this monumental agglomeration…” So let’s say I wanted to write a short story about one of my favorite topics: dogs. I can quickly find words under “Dog” for yelping (“bawling,” “yawping,” “yow-yowing”), love of dogs (“philocynism,” “canophilia”), and dogdom itself (“dogkind,” “canility,” “dogginess”). I can locate Old English terms for “doggish” such as “hunden” and “hundlic” along with the humorous 16th century term “canicular.” I can see that a sheepdog might have been called a “shepherd’s dog” in the 1400s, and a terrier was called an “earth-dog” in the 1600s. I have more information that I could ever need.

For now, the $360 tag is going to put this one out of almost everybody’s price range, so get thee to a library. But Kay told me about a potential digital oasis that is already making me thirsty: “They plan to run HTOED alongside the online OED so that people can toggle back and forth between the two.” Until Steve Jobs makes an affordable time machine, that should get the job done.

Confusing parenthood and pet ownership: The words of the dog world.

Kids chase fewer squirrels and postal workers than dogs, but the way we pamper our poodles and great danes and mutts has a lot in common with how we treat our toddlers and teens.

Though I try not to over-kid-ify my canine, the bounds of sane dog owner behavior are blurry. I frequently arrange playdates for my rat terrier Monkey, and, I hate to admit, once shoved him into a Dracula costume and took him to a dog party, which included dog cake, dog champagne, and a doggie masseuse (who terrified my pooch—I think Monkey considered her a type of vet). So far, I’ve resisted the call of doga—dog yoga—but who knows what the future will bring?

The pet-as-child mindset is hard to avoid: confusing pet ownership and parenthood is a pervasive aspect of the pet world that’s reflected in money spent, canine behavioral therapists hired, and terms coined, such as “bark mitzvah,” “puppy leave,” and “furkid.” These are just a few lexical symptoms of the weird and intense relationship we have with our dogs.

(FYI: Some of these terms apply to cats too, but since felines have a Darth Vader-like influence on my allergy-prone respiratory system, I keep my distance. I suspect cat people have been traveling a parallel road).

One way the child-ification of dogs can be seen is the importation of parenting lingo like “playdate” and “potty training,” which are often and casually used. In other cases, new words are coined. Paul McFedries’ The Word Spy records several parent-y pet terms, such as “latchkey dog” (a dog left unmonitored in the streets or at home alone), “pupperware” (dog toys, clothes, and other paraphernalia sold at tupperware-like parties), and “puppy leave” (much like baby leave, but with a barkier infant).

Plenty of others turn up on Grant Barrett’s Double Tongued Dictionary, such as “pawsenger” (a dog on a plane), “pawspice” (canine hospice), and “puppy pawty,” which is similar to a “bark mitzvah”—a dog celebration observed with varying degrees of seriousness, sometimes at the dog’s thirteenth year.

A lot of dog lingo is euphemistic yet not especially goofy. Playful puppy biting is “nipping,” the cage used to train puppies is a “crate,” and peeing from excitement is “sprinkling.” Other euphemisms are much sillier. While I sympathize with pitbull owners who want to change the image of their dogs, I don’t know if “petbull” is going to fool anyone. Similarly, if “mutt” is hurting your dog’s self-esteem, the terms “canine cocktail,” “party pup,” and “unbreed” are available, though not recommended, at least by me. You’d think “mutt” would have been elevated forever after President Obama said, in regards to needing a hypoallergenic dog breed,  “…our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but obviously a lot of shelter dogs are mutts, like me.”

The king of canine euphemisms—as well as the most clear example of pet/kid confusion—has to be the word “furkid,” which appeals to folks who don’t like the word “pet,” and think “companion animal” doesn’t go far enough. Before starting this article, I hoped that “furkid” was a linguistic urban myth, but many use this word unselfconsciously and frequently. Recent tweets include mentions of “My baby furkid Toto” and “the joys of furkid parenthood,” as well as the admonition that there “…should be no fighting in front of the furkid.” There are also related terms such as “furbaby” and “furparent,” not to mention “humom” (a human mom with pets).

Why such forced, artificial, barf-worthy language? Well, for many pet owners, no amount of cutesiness is too much. The cuteness-craving impulse animating “purp” (a word that alters “pup” much as “lurve” modifies “love”) probably has something to do with the existence of “furkid” too.

But no matter how goofy or pretentious some of these terms seem, they’re inspired by a love for canines. Maybe that love gets a little out of hand—no dog really wants to be an Ewok for Halloween, no matter how perfect he looks—but “Must Love Dogs” is a way of life as well as a movie for many of us.

Odd words are just a harmless byproduct.

How Liz Lemon and company have enriched our lexicon.

Since its debut in 2006, there hasn’t been a more quotable comedy than 30 Rock. Memorable lines include the quacky pronouncements of Dr. Spaceman (“Medicine’s not a science”), Jack Donaghy’s non-compliments (“Lemon, don’t ever say you’re just you, because you’re better than you”), Tracy Jordan’s bizarre endorsements (“I love this cornbread so much, I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant”), Liz Lemon’s grammatical breakdowns (“I want to go to there”), and Tracy’s awesome advice (“Live every week like it’s Shark Week”).

But it’s a trio of terms that are 30 Rock’s most significant linguistic impact, so far: “blurgh,” “lizzing,” and “mind grapes.”

“Blurgh” (sometimes spelled “blergh”) is a synonym for “bleah” and “ugh” that was first used in “Cleveland” (April 19, 2007), a first-season episode featuring four different blurghs, each expressing a slightly different form of revulsion, deflation, or disgust.

On the 30 Rock website, Tina Fey gave some insight into the term on April 26, 2007: “Blurgh is something we say around the writer’s room and also since we’re on network television we can’t curse or anything…sometimes we run out of non-cursing ways of saying things. So we started to make up expletives…feel free to use it!” Folks have done just that—especially on Twitter, the most bountiful home of unselfconscious language use these days:

“Meetings, a morning of meetings, a meeting of meetings – want to go to sleeeeep….blurgh”
Oct. 21, 2009, Adam Clare

“Sorry all, my mind is too blurgh with sickness to be able to write understandable reviews. I’ll catch you up on your next update”
Oct. 19, 2009, Simone Rigley

“blurgh, i really need to fix up my myspace, its outta date and cluttered…”
Oct. 16, 2009, Jay Rowland

That Oct. 19 use shows that, much like The Simpsons’ “meh,” “blurgh” has migrated from interjection to adjective. “Blurgh” also has something in common with “doh” and “yada yada,” which were popularized by The Simpsons and Seinfeld, but not created there—“blurgh” is older than 30 Rock. The oldest use I found was in a 1993 Texas Magazine story by Nguyen Phan:

Me: WHOOOAHH! Here comes another one!
Him: Uh huh.
Me: WHOOOAHH! MOMMY!
Him: Blurgh! (sound of him vomiting)
People below: Look out! Incoming!

Speaking of bodily fluids, Liz Lemon’s blend of laughing and whizzing—“lizzing,” which also plays on the heroine’s name—has been very successful since debuting in “Apollo, Apollo” (March 26, 2009). Many uses of the word directly reference lizzing (or Lizzing) in response to 30 Rock, but for true signs of success, you can’t beat real-life examples that don’t mention the show at all:

“@kangaroocaz I lizzed ALL over yesterday from pure joy and rapture.”
Oct. 18, 2009, Jerryn C. Currie

“OK please review this. If you want to laugh so hard that you will be ‘lizzing’ ….
Oct. 16, 2009, Kwesi Robertson

“Modest Mouse MAKES ME FEEL LIKE “LIZZING!” LIZZING LIZZING! HELP!!!”
Oct. 14, 2009, cutoffjeans

Since “lizzing” is a timeless concept that lacked a word, its success isn’t a surprise. But some terms succeed no matter how little the world seems to demand them. Case in point: mind grapes.

In “Tracy Does Conan” (Dec. 7, 2006), Jack reads Liz a draft of a possible quip he’s thinking of using to introduce Jack Welch at a $1000-a-plate fundraiser: “Jack Welch has such unparalleled management skills they named Welch’s grape juice after him, because he squeezes the sweetest juice out of his worker’s mind grapes.” Liz and Jack quickly agree this doesn’t make sense, and to underscore that point, we cut to Tracy wailing, “What else? What else is on my mind grapes?”

I would have wagered that “mind grapes” would stay confined to this episode and only be remembered by the 30 Rock equivalent of Trekkies. Yet this term also turns up in plenty of tweets, showing even greater versatility than “blurgh” and “lizzing”:

“@syncretized flip flops? in this weather? you must have crushed some of your mind grapes.”
Oct. 19, 2009. seandammit

“is psyched about my thesis direction. Solid 2 days of mashing mind grapes that are turning into delicious thesis wine. I hope. Haha.”
Oct. 14, 2009, Kunal D. Patel

“Plant-able birthday cards? My mind grapes just turned into raisins!…”
Oct. 11, 2009, jubjub

What’s super-cool (and lexically significant) about these and others uses of “mind grapes” is how people are extending and developing the term, taking a throwaway joke and making it truly useful. On the show, mind grapes were only squeezed, but tweeters imagine them being mashed, fed, sapped, crushed, and turned into wine or raisins. Krisco420 suggests that some rhymes may peel one’s mind grapes—a vivid alternative to “blow your mind” if I ever heard one.

A curmudgeon might reasonably point out, “Why the blue hell do I need to talk about ‘mind grapes’ when the word ‘mind’ is working just fine?” Well, as Cosmo Kramer once asked, “Why go to a fine restaurant when you can just stick something in the microwave? Why go to the park and fly a kite when you can just pop a pill?” Language isn’t always about brevity. People like to be clever, and they like to reference clever shows like 30 Rock. Whether that makes you blurgh or liz is up to you.

Linguists give a name to an old headline hazard.

If brevity is the soul of wit, it is also the trapdoor of ridiculousness—at least in the world of headlines, which have long been prone to unintentional comedy along the lines of “Woman Better after Being Thrown from High-rise” and “Scientists Are at Loss Due to Brain-eating Amoeba.”

Now there’s a name for the phenomenon of ambiguously or bizarrely worded headlines: “crash blossoms,” as suggested by a poster at the Testy Copy Editors site in response to the headline “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms.”

Whoever crafted that nugget of nonsense was trying to say that the musician’s career flourished after a plane crash, but the odd syntax and unintentional coinage of “crash blossoms” flummoxed readers. The example quickly mutated into a term, which was soon picked up by John McIntyre, the Language Loggers, and beyond.

A near-perfect example was shared by Laurence Horn (via Steve Anderson) on the American Dialect Society listserv recently: “McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers“. As Stan Carey pointed out, one punctuation mark would have made the meaning clear: “McDonald’s fries: the holy grail for potato farmers.” But if you read the headline as is and in the most direct way, you might wonder what potato farmers and McDonald’s have against the holy grail, when McDonald’s found the sacred chalice, and why its mysteries are better plumbed when fried. That’s the kind of humorous mental journey a good crash blossom can inspire.

The Columbia Journalism Review has been on the crash-blossom case a long time, most notably publishing the book Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim and Other Flubs from the Nation’s Press (compiled by Gloria Cooper in 1980). This collection has many a howler, including grisly humor (“Lawmen from Mexico Barbecue Guests,” “Lucky Man Sees Pals Die”), physical impossibilities (“Genetic Engineering Splits Scientists,” “Milk Drinkers Turn to Powder”), logical absurdities (“War Dims Hopes for Peace”), inadvertent racism (“Greeks Fine Hookers”), unknowing sleaziness (“Prostitutes Appeal to Pope,” “Pastor Aghast at First Lady Sex Position”), ew-provoking nastiness (“Child’s Stool Great for Use in Garden”), and innovative adventures in law enforcement (“Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant,” “Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case”).

The word “headline” itself has a far less colorful history, but it does have some highlights, as collected by the Oxford English Dictionary. In the early 1600s, it meant “One of the ropes that make a sail fast to the yard,” but by later in that decade “headline” was used in a way similar to its current meaning, though in reference to letter-writing. It wasn’t until the 20th century that “hitting (or making) the headlines” came into vogue, and since 1927, the crash blossom-prone style of headlines has informed the word “headlinese,” meaning “The elliptical style of language characteristic of the headlines, esp. in popular newspapers.” Here’s the first known use: “In the headlines of general newspapers you see time after time such words as ‘Probe’, ‘Quiz’, ‘Tilt’, ‘Pact’, etc. In newspaper offices such language is referred to as ‘Headlinese’. We banned it from the headlines of The [United States] Daily.” A 1966 quote highlights the brevity that often leads to crash blossoms and other problems: “In headlinese you don’t marry, you wed… You don’t advance arguments against, you score.”

Crash blossoms are a variation of “garden path sentences,” a type of sentence that leads the reader into grammatical or logical sinkholes that were not intended. In the 2001 academic paper “Misinterpretations of Garden-Path Sentences: Implications for Models of Sentence Processing and Reanalysis,” Fernanda Ferreira, Kiel Christianson, and Andrew Hollingworth wrote that their research challenged “…the fundamental assumption in psycholinguistics that comprehension is based on the creation of full, accurate, and detailed representations. It appears, instead, that people work on sentences until they reach a point where it subjectively makes sense to them and then processing may cease.” In other words, if a headline sounds good and a deadline is looming, the editor may not ponder every possible meaning; therefore, “processing may cease” because there just isn’t time for more reflection and revision. With brutal deadlines and space restrictions that make Twitter seem commodious, it’s no wonder crash blossoms blossom again and again.

It’s a bit early to say if “crash blossom” will truly catch on the way “eggcorn,” “snowclone,” and “Cupertino” have in the word-nerd world, but so far its future looks bright. Headlines breed like rabbits, and even though the Internet makes it easier to fix them, there are hordes of nitpickers and humorists ready to capture a goof before it’s changed. Plus “crash blossom” itself is a juicy, vivid term—even though, as Ben Zimmer has pointed out, a Crash Test Dummies/Gin Blossoms cover band really missed the boat on this one.

Photo illustration by Atley Kasky

Jag Bhalla collects the world’s odd idioms and out-dated metaphors.

When describing you to prospective dates and employers, do friends say you “Have one on the waffle” or “The roof has slid off”?

If they have (and I hate to tell you this), your friends think you have bats in the belfry—they’re just using idioms from other languages. As Jag Bhalla has shown with his book, I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, the world of idioms is one of the most amusing and entertaining areas of language. I’m not pulling the hair out of your nostrils (to use a Japanese idiom meaning “pulling your leg”) when I say that, for people with an interest in language, reading Bhalla’s collection is like living on a large foot (living in luxury, as they say in German).

Bhalla defines an idiom as “a group of words always used together as a phrase, where the meaning of the phrase isn’t clear from the meaning of the words in it.” These “fossilized metaphors,” as Bhalla calls them, become stuck in the lexicon, sometimes long after their literal meanings fade. As Bhalla said by email, “One illustration is idioms that preserve words that are no longer in use in the rest of English. For example, we no longer say kith, shrift, haw, raring, kilter, fangled, fro, spick, boggle, and hither, though we still say ‘kith and kin,’ ‘short shrift,’ ‘hem and haw,’ ‘raring to go,’ ‘off-kilter,’ ‘newfangled,’ ‘to and fro,’ ‘spick and span,’ ‘mind-boggling,’ and ‘come hither.’”

With chapters focusing on time, animals, emotional states, food, numbers, and other areas, Bhalla offers florid phrases from a terrific range of languages. If you ever needed almost two pages worth of expressions involving the stomach/torso/midriff/back, you’re in luck. (My favorite of that section: “Bury an umbilical cord,” meaning “a hereditary claim on land” in Hindi). Hanging Noodles also offers a tour of the major thinkers about language, such as Noam Chomsky, David Crystal, George Lakoff, and Steven Pinker. Bhalla’s own prose, for its part, is as creative and vibrant as the language he collects.

In Hanging Noodles, Bhalla says, “I’m hoping that this book can, in a small way, contribute to the wholesale jewel thievery that has characterized the progress of English.” That’s a cause I can rally behind, and though you can find hundreds of others in the pages of Bhalla’s book, here are seven I think would sound particularly good in the latest tweets and health-care reform bills:

donkey killer
As a language columnist, how can I resist this Spanish term for a dictionary? It gives word geeks a much-needed image makeover. Instead of a nerdy doofus geeking out, I am dangerous. There better not be any donkeys around this coffee shop.

mouse milker
In German, a mouse milker is “one overly concerned with details.” That’s a lot more appealing than the overused and corporate “micromanager.”

live like a maggot in bacon
If you like grossing out your friends while communicating with terrific accuracy, then I don’t think you can go wrong with this German expression for being really happy. I, for one, would be happy to live in bacon, as is, no Kafka-esque maggot transformation required.

window-licking
I bet the retail industry could get behind this French-ism for window-shopping, which makes non-buyers sound non-hygienic too.

you have a pretty green hat
In Chinese, this isn’t an innocent comment that would prove flattering to any fez or beanie-wearer: it means your wife is cheating on you.

octopus in a garage
This Spanish term for a fish out of water is so much more vivid than “fish out of water” that I propose the English-speaking world adopt it immediately.

the pure potato
A Spanish term for “cold, hard cash,” this idiom could be easily borrowed and broadened. It sounds, to my ears, like a natural synonym for “the real deal” or “the bomb.” For example, I have often noticed that Mary Louise Parker is the pure potato. How can you argue with that?

Saying goodbye to the consummate language columnist.

If you enjoy this language column—or any language column at all, anywhere—then you should take a minute to remember William Safire, who died Sunday of pancreatic cancer at 79. The Nixon speechwriter was a prolific and Pulitzer-winning conservative columnist, the author of four novels, and chairman of the Dana Foundation, which funds research in neuroscience, but he was best known as the word nerd who paved the way for lucky people like me to turn their obsession into an actual job. As the author of the New York Times “On Language” column (since 1979) and many books about language, Safire has long been part of the lexical firmament.

When news of Safire’s death broke, testimonials and praise from the language-loving crowd poured in, and that faucet isn’t going to stop soon. Grant Barrett recalled Safire’s kindness, while Ben Zimmer remembered his ethics and humor: “He was always quick to give credit where credit was due, and he also enjoyed coming up with warm-spirited epithets for those who helped him. (I was on the receiving end of ‘that etymological Inspector Javert,’ ‘netymologist,’ and ‘longtime capo of the Phrasedick Brigade’— sobriquets that I will always treasure.)” Even frequent Safire critics such as Stephen Dodson could become a fan after working with the man, in this case on Safire’s Political Dictionary.

By email, Zimmer confirmed my suspicion that “Safire was indeed like Cronkite the anchorman, in that he quickly embodied the role of language columnist like no one else, though he wasn’t the first to fit that description.” Safire had a reputation for being a stern prescriptivist, but Zimmer says that pre-Safire language guys such as Esquire’s John Simon and pundit Edwin Newman were far more dour, unscientific, and English-is-going-to-hell-y. Says Zimmer:  “…when you think about what Americans were being subjected to with the rants of Simon and Newman, you can appreciate Safire’s moderate approach all the more.”

As befits the most well-known word nerd of our time, a few words have attached themselves to Safire, including “language maven” and “The Lexicographical Irregulars,” as he called his unofficial group of researchers. Appropriately, Safire is quoted many times in the Oxford English Dictionary, in comments that demonstrate the use of terms such as “schmooze,” “wordsman,” “academese,” and “dweeb,” which Safire dryly used back in 1982: “Synonyms for earnest students, or ‘pre-professional dweebs’, are proliferating.” Weirdly, he is quoted only once in the Yale Book of Quotations, though it is a beauty: “A man who lies, thinking it is the truth, is an honest man, and a man who tells the truth, believing it to be a lie, is a liar.” A few of his speechwriting phrases have been fondly remembered, especially two written for Vice-president Spiro Agnew: “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history” and “nattering nabobs of negativism.” He also wrote a lunar eulogy that was happily unnecessary.

I never had any contact with Safire, but his name was enormous in my world. When trying to explain what I do to baffled folks, all it would take is one mention of William Safire to get the reaction, “Oh! So that’s a language columnist.” Anyone writing about words on a regular basis owes the guy a huge thank you, for making “language columnist” seem like a reasonable thing for a newspaper or magazine to have. Not sure if that makes him the Walter Cronkite, Babe Ruth, or Empire State Building of language columnists: He’s probably all three, and I’m happy to be the William Safire of GOOD.

Illustration by Will Etling

How words drift toward the famous, regardless of the facts.

That Mark Twain was something else, wasn’t he? He said so many memorable things, like “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes” and “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” What a writer, what a guy.

Unfortunately—even though Twain is the great American humorist—he didn’t say either of those things. Twain is what scholar Fred Shapiro calls a “quote magnet,” someone who receives credit for sayings and proverbs that never passed their lips or pens. Also called “Churchillian drift” by Nigel Rees, quote magnetism is a common phenomenon that infects everything from student papers to political speeches, and respected books of quotations aren’t immune. As quote experts Rees and Shapiro have shown, “So-and-so said” are some of the least trustworthy words in the language.

Rees—who founded and hosts the U.K.’s “Quote…Unquote” program and has written books such as Brewer’s Famous Quotations and More Tea, Vicar?—came up with “Churchillian drift” to “describe the process whereby the actual originator of a quotation is often elbowed to one side and replaced by someone more famous. So to Churchill or Napoleon would be ascribed what a lesser-known political figure actually said.” By email, Rees said, “I coined the phrase in 1983 when specifically writing about the remark ‘Donny Osmond has Van Gogh’s ear for music’ which had been attributed to Orson Welles, whereas it was said by Billy Wilder about an actor called Cliff Osmond. Donny was more famous than Cliff and Welles more famous (and fatter) than Wilder!” So that quote drifted away from the shores of accuracy in two directions.

I interviewed Fred Shapiro, librarian and lecturer at Yale Law School and editor of The Yale Book of Quotations by phone, and he said that while Churchill may be a top quote magnet in England, there’s no doubt the top American is Mark Twain. For example, Shapiro found the New England weather quote in print 10 years before the earliest attribution to Twain; the golf quote appeared 35 years before. Shapiro advises skepticism regarding all Twain-isms: “If you just assume that any quote from Twain is apocryphal, you won’t be wrong very often.”

In America, Shapiro said that “people associated with folksiness” such as Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Yogi Berra are the big quote magnets. Another folksy fellow is George W. Bush, who often gets credit for the supposed Bushism “strategery,” which was actually coined by Bush impersonator Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live. Similarly, the Sarah Palin one-liner “I can see Russia from my house” is a Tiny Fey-ism, not a Palinism. Shapiro believes that Palin could be the next big quote magnet, and that “stupid quotes in the future will get pinned on her.”

There are many ways a quotation can be disapproved, as Shapiro and his research assistants learned during the six years it took to compile the Yale Book of Quotations. If the newspaper databases don’t yield anything from the alleged quotee’s time, that’s a red flag. Sometimes biographical facts disprove a quotation. One purported Twain saying—“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years”—is disproved by the fact that Twain’s dad died when the author was eleven. Other quotations raise suspicions for being too modern-sounding, or just out of character for the person saying them, such as religious quotes attributed to Albert Einstein.

These goofs happen both consciously and unconsciously. Shapiro said, “There’s a tendency to improve quotes.” That improvement works in a few ways: If I cite Mark Twain instead of my cousin Billy, the quote is improved and my own case bolstered. Wording gets revised, too. For example, Shakespeare’s “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him” is oft-misquoted as “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well,” which Shapiro notes is “better than the original.” Shapiro says that quotes are made more concise and memorable, and archaic words may be replaced.

Also, once people hear something is true, they tend to believe it, and the folk etymology of words (including eggcorning) is very similar to how quotations get mangled and massaged over time. Shapiro said, “I have an uncle who insists the expression ‘ciao’ meaning goodbye comes from ‘chow’ meaning food, because he heard this on the radio once. And it’s totally untrue. I can tell this to my uncle till he’s blue in the face and he’s never going to believe it because he heard it on the radio.” More blame for the spread of nonsense goes to prescriptive, loud, and marginally informed English teachers, who have a way of planting the seeds of language misinformation deep in young minds. As Shapiro put it, “If your seventh grade English teacher said it, you may go your whole life believing it.”

Unfortunately for us all, even highly respected reference works like Bartlett’s repeat erroneous attributions—“They don’t actually do much research,” Shapiro said, adding that he found hundreds of bogus quotations in so-called authoritative quote books. If you want to help sniff out incorrect quotations, subscribe to Rees’ “Quote…Unquote” newsletter or join the Project Wombat list, which has helped Shapiro in the past. And next time you hear “Mark Twain said this” or “Sarah Palin said that,” you might want to take such claims with an entire pillar of salt.

Anyhoo… The latest additions to the Oxford English Dictionary are a mixed bag.

Many of us welcome autumn for bringing gorgeous weather, Octoberfest beers, and the merciful resumption of football.

But for a small number of your fellow citizens, fall brings another blessed event, one that is no less heaven-sent because it occurs every season: the Oxford English Dictionary online hauls out a host of new entries, as the largest word book in the world gets even larger.

As always, the additions are a mixed bag, a bag commodious enough to include words diverse as “dot-org,” “globalist,” “hand relief,” “red state,” “three-way,” and “unmixed blessing,” plus many others, along with a beefing up of major entries such as “clone,” “drug,” and “thought.”

The OED—started in 1857 and digitally updated since 2000—is a historical dictionary, which means it includes example sentences over a wide period of time. This makes it so much more useful than most other word books, since you can actually see the word in action. It’s like learning about frogs by watching them hop around a pond instead of dead on a desk in high school bio class.

So please enjoy this sample platter of linguistic nuggets and lexical enchiladas from the latest revisions, which are only a week old. As always, these facts should dazzle that English grad student you’ve been drooling over in the coffee shop, and maybe they’ll even invite you over for a cozy night of citing on the couch.

•    Twitter is on everyone’s mind and handheld device these days, but the word “twitterpated” has zip to do with it, and its recent entry is a coincidence. Two meanings—“Love-struck, besotted. Also: thrilled, excited; obsessed” and “Foolish, silly; flighty, scatterbrained”—date from the 1940’s, launched by the 1942 Bambi movie.

•    Who says having your nose in a digital library all day can’t lead to a greater appreciation for nature? Since the additions also covered extensive revisions from “red” to “refulgent,” subentries were added for the red-kneed tarantula, red-chested cuckoo, red-backed salamander, red-legged locust, red-lipped snake, and red-rumped parakeet. In related news, the red-handed howler monkey is now on my list of awesomely named animals that are a little impolite, along with the goliath bird-eating spider, naked mole rat, and giant spitting earthworm.

•    My rare-word itch was well-scratched by “thinking mug”—a term labeled slang, obscure, and rare—for the head, with only one recorded use in 1849: “Bout four years ago, it came into my thinking mug that there must be plenty of gold in the bed of Coosa creek.”

•    The recency illusion, as coined by University of Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky, is the tendency to think “Whoa, that’s new to me. It must be new to the world!” I had a little bout of the recency illusion with the word “thoughty,” which has meant “thoughtful” for centuries, as here in 1702: “A minister should be a very thoughty man.” This is similar to how 19th-century uses of “truthiness” meant truthful, as opposed to today’s Colbertian truthiness, which encompasses many types of BS such as “globaloney,” another new entry. That one goes back to 1943: “Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still ‘globaloney’.”

•    Regular readers know I’m entranced by suffix mayhem, such as the promiscuous ways of “-gate” and “-istan.” So I was happy to see the suffix “-think”—as in groupthink and doublethink—get its own entry. A 1984 quote has my favorite example (“This is yet another example of ninny-think.”) though I hope to someday be known as the founder and seminal contributor to doofus-think.

•    You’re probably familiar with the common sense of “batsh*t,” even if batsh*t insanity doesn’t flow through the branches of your family tree (not that I would know anything about that). But an almost opposite meaning exists in Australia, perhaps due to blander bat diets: “My personal life is the same as anyone else’s and it’s as boring as batsh*t to read about.”

•    Of course, capturing the world in words isn’t all red-handed monkeys and thoughty twitterpations: ugly reality intrudes, this time in the form of the mega-successful word “waterboarding.” The first known use is as recent as 2004; minus the “ing,” the term is older: “Upon capture the ‘POWs’ are roughed up and given their first taste of the dread water board: they are strapped head down onto an inclined board, with a towel placed over their faces and cold water poured onto it. They choke, gag, retch and gurgle” (1976).

•    Also dating from 1976 is the basketball and general-purpose insult “in your face!” Speaking of faces, the first face-plant was probably done by a clumsy cave-dude, but we’ve only been talking about “doing a face plant” since the eighties.

•    “Anyhoo” is a word I enjoy using, and it turns out I’m using it “right,” which to dictionary-makers just means in the most common way: “used (humorously) to indicate a change of topic, or a return to a previous topic after a digression.” I was surprised to learn that it was originally a regional pronunciation of “anyhow” and disappointed to learn that variations “anyhoozle” and “anyhoodle” didn’t make the cut (yet).

Anyhoo, I could go on till 2012, or even the apocalypse after that: there’s no end to this stuff. People sometimes wonder if I feel bad not knowing another language, and I don’t. I feel like I barely know one language. The OED will give you that feeling, in the best way possible.

Though language is my beat, I couldn’t help making some geographical observations:

“Vietnam-istan” is one name and opinion of Afghanistan.

Other writers call the troubled country “Half gone’istan,” “Warlord-istan,” “I-give-up-istan,” and “Mastercard-istan.”

A TV recapper quips about women from Average-Looking-Brunette-istan, while a dating advisor discusses the popular destination of Divorce-istan.

I just hope no one reading this article is forced to flee to I’mboredsowhere’sthepornistan.

It’s not a new trend, but the use of “-istan” or just “-stan” is an interesting case where neverending political chaos (especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan) and ongoing verbal creativity (all over the web) meet in a word trend that can be political, derogatory, or just silly and humorous, depending on the context.

Since at least 1932, “stan” has migrated from Indo-European languages to English as a word for countries such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as shown here in this Oxford English Dictionary quote: “When all the land in the Stans is collectivized in cotton plantations, say the Soviet governors, then the wheat, meat and vegetables are to come over from the Ukraine, Siberia, and the Caucasus.” Though “-stan” and “-istan” still have a fresh feel as suffixes in English, they’ve been used that way for longer than you would think. The OED finds examples as far back as 1960: “However much we may cut it up into ‘Bantustans’ and ‘Whitestans,’ South Africa will have to remain an interlinked economic and political unity.”

Many stan-words are derogatory, and some OED examples sound mildly disparaging  (“…the U.S. Ambassador to Somewherestan…”) or severely disparaging (“I want Bush to stop tolerating the nastystans of Central Asia”). Some insulting variations have become established, especially “Trash Can-istan,” which Grant Barrett defines as Afghanistan or “any poor Middle Eastern country or central Asian republic.” Barrett has also located the terms “Dearbornistan” and “Londonistan,” noting that these terms are used to signal an abundance and disapproval of Muslims. That association extends, in a less awful way, to the web, where “Weblogestan” is the Iranian slang term for their blogs, and I have to second Barrett’s motion that this term deserves wider use.

But if nasty insults were the whole story of “-stan,” I wouldn’t have written this column. In many cases, the origin of the suffix is as far away as the counties that spawned it, and the new words are pure, gleeful cleverness, with no slur intended. As with so many word trends, the financial crisis has grabbed a piece of the action, as writers living in Debt-istan and Bailout-istan have speculated that our next stop might be Cardboard Box-istan. Sometimes, the suffix is just a way of being redundantly amusing, like when my friend Jack wrote, in an email, “Back to Minneapolis-stan.” As usual, my favorites are the kind of goofy, giddy one-offs I collect in my Wordlustitude blog, such as “Dejuvu-istan,” “Hey-look-over-there-istan,” and “Outer Bungholestan.”

There’s a lengthy history of slangy references to place, as you well know if you’ve ever been on Easy Street or remember Veronica Corningstone’s pre-sex demand in Anchorman: “Take me to Pleasure Town!” When you’ve spent as much time in Loserville as I have, you know that “ville” is used the same way, and it has been for a long time: the OED traces its use as a suffix back to 1567. The term seems to have spread in the U.S. in snowclone-like sentences like these quotes from 1891 (“Then he was as frisky as a young colt and a slugger from Sluggersville”) and 1932 (“I’m telling you you’re the biggest bonehead from Boneheadville”). Geographically and linguistically, there’s not much distance between Boneheadville and Lower Buttmunchistan.

Why do these words flourish? As Michael Adams pointed out in Slang: The People’s Poetry, suffix mayhem is a common feature of language creativity, and “Like poetry, slang is the aesthetic exercise of linguistic ingenuity.” Lexically, it’s just more fun to go to Sex-istan than to have sex, and it’s better taking a one-way trip to Demise-istan than to die. The “-istan” suffix is fresh enough that it can knock us out of our habits and stupors, fulfilling, as Adams says, “the complementary needs to fit in and to stand out.”

Now if you need me, I’ll be seeking asylum in The Shield season-five-istan, my favorite vacation spot.