I’m back

My wife (the Professor) tells me that I should be blogging. The world is being deprived of your wit, wisdom, compassion, and intensity, she says (my words, not hers). I remind her that the world is also being spared a great deal of snark and silliness. Still, she says. I guess that’s the awesomeness of being married to someone who thinks you’re wonderful. You start to believe it yourself. On good days, at least.

While etymology and linguistics will no doubt make appearances in my new posts (for what would life be without the occasional grammatical hijink?), I’m moving to a more general type of musing. My incessant harping about the Oxford comma had grown tiresome, even to me. But words can be about anything, and wordswordswords can triple be about anything! Also, my photography skills have improved a lot since I abandoned wordswordswords in fall 2011, so I suspect a pretty pitcher might crop up now and again too, maybe even after being cropped.

She also tells me I’m eccentric.

Welcome back, everybody.

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Once a decade

I’m not much of a shopper. You can find me at the mall about every 3-6 months, usually in search of something specific I need. Like taking our knives in to be sharpened at the cutlery store, for example, or getting new glasses. Not everyone would even classify these things as shopping.

The Professor does a lot of the laundry, and recently she’s informed me that based on the state of what she’s seeing come through, I should buy some clothes. (Hard to believe, I know, that someone who sits around reading the dictionary doesn’t put a lot of energy into fashion.) She also mentioned that I should “feel free to buy a new coat” if I ran into one.

The winter coat I use most was bought when we moved to Washington in 2001. Coming from Puerto Rico and the Southern border, I didn’t have anything appropriate to protect me against the Pacific Northwest weather. After 10 years, the water resistant coating is long gone, no amount of Spray-n-Wash will get the cuffs clean, and there’s some sort of big black stain that I tend to ignore because it’s hidden under the hood if I don’t have it up. (And when it is up, the stain is behind me and I can’t see it!)

I’m visiting my family in Wisconsin for the holiday. Yesterday, I took advantage of the opportunity to hang out with a friend from grad school who lives nearby. We hit the Jelly Belly visitor’s center, and then she suggested we head over to the nearby Pleasant Prairie Premium Outlets. I was unenthusiastic because of my shopping aversion and because it was Thanksgiving weekend, but anything I do with her has always been fun. Off we went. (Hang tight; I am getting to today’s word…)

We were driving through the parking lot looking at the different stores, and she said, “There’s North Face. Do you need a coat?” Why yes, yes! I needed a coat! This pretty much met the Professor’s criterion of running into one. The Accidental Overcoat, starring me. I wasn’t successful at the first store, but I ended up getting a wonderful coat at Eddie Bauer a couple doors over. My favorite color (purple), and perfect for the Pacific Northwest—an outer layer that’s water/windproof, and a fleece inner layer. You can wear one, the other, or both, giving you three possibilities. Hence, it is christened the 3-in-1 parka. (Whew! Finally there.)

I was thinking about the word parka, and wondered if perhaps it was Inuit. It fits the context of Arctic life—a prominent image of it in our part of the world is this tailfin iconography of Alaska Airlines.

 

The word also seemed to jive with the sounds of other “k” words and place names from that part of the indigenous world—like mukluk, kayak, Sitka, and Alaska itself. (Careful, though. Chukka is Hindi.)

I was close to the right area of the globe, but we have to continue across the Bering Strait to find the origin of this word. Parka comes from Nenets, the language of an indigenous people found in Russia. And in fact, it is the only Nenets word that has made its way into English.

I learned that Nenets is a member of the Samoyedic family of languages. This came as a surprise to me, as I had never heard of the Samoyedic family! If it’s cold and northern where it’s spoken, it might be Samoyedic. Among others, the Finnish language is called Suomi, and Lapps is Saami. The –d  on Samoyed (an indicator of plurality) was misunderstood at some point by the Russians, so accounting for that you can see the similarities in Samoy, Suomi, and Saami.

As usual, my curiosity about one word took me on a journey—this time, to a place I’d never been, both geographically and linguistically.

Stay warm, everybody!

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Best in show

Best sentence heard yesterday, at the annual conference of the WA Assoc. of Legal Investigators: “It was outright borderline.”

Best typo of the day today (so far, though it will be hard to beat), in an article on training for process servers: “…serve sue process notice.”

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All the Single Ladies

I first subscribed to The Atlantic when I was 16. Since then, I’ve been a subscriber many more years than not. The fact that I became a reader was really due to a fluke initially. My friend Russ was selling magazine subscriptions as a fundraiser for some school activity I think. I looked at the selections and thought that I had heard something about The Atlantic that made me think it would be interesting. I sprung for it just to support Russ, but in the long run became a fan.

Lately though, I’ve been a little turned off by perhaps not their choice of cover stories, but by the way they’re actually depicted on the cover. The accompanying photos or graphics all look sort of alarmist, with some pithy headline attached that’s supposed to grab the reader at the check stand (I guess). For example, the latest issue has a long story about how economic and societal changes are affecting marriage. On the front, the author is depicted wearing a cynical glare and a black lace top. Headline: “What, Me Marry?” With that reference, the least they could’ve done is show her with freckles and a gap-toothed grin.

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Only a couple of posts ago, I discussed a word derivation that I learned in their cover article about the NCAA (“The Shame of College Sports”, African-American arm flexed and sporting an NCAA tattoo). This month’s cover story contained a neologism with which I was heretofore unfamiliar. The word is singlism. It was coined in 2005 by Bella DePaulo, whom the article turns “America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience.” The term was meant to be analogous to racism or sexism, and it’s defined as “the stigmatizing of adults who are single, including negative stereotyping of singles and discrimination against singles.”

There are many –ism’s. I’d like to add prism, “a bias against cats,” and schism, “a bias against winter sports.”

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You know you’re a linguigeek when…

This is on your bedside table for a little relaxing nighttime reading:

 

I should probably update. This issue is 2004. The Academy recently released some new spelling conventions and things, so I am falling behind.

By the way, as I looked around when considering the title for this post, I found the following gem of clarification on thesaurus.com: “a geek is any smart person with an obsessive interest, a nerd  is the same but also lacks social grace, and a dweeb  is a mega-nerd.” I decided that geek was the most appropriate term in my case.

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