WordsWordsWords

In my last post, I talked about the word “merkin,” which is a wig for the pubic area. I came across the word in a Facebook post by a teenage acquaintance of mine, which read, “Paintball today. Merkin emm.”

While I was fascinated to learn about “merkin” and all the other related words I stumbled on when writing the post, I was pretty sure that he wasn’t referring in this instance to a yoni rug. I consulted urbandictionary.com, which is my go-to resource any time a young person says something I don’t understand. No luck. So I asked him!

Turns out that he had a typo—”merckin,” a common term in rap, is what he meant to say. He also referred me back to Urban Dictionary. I guess even the kids have to look things up to keep up with the slang!

UD tells me that “merck” means kill, murder, destroy, embarrass, ect. (sic), and is derived from “mercenary.”

Because I don’t typically think of UD as the utmost in etymological authority, I decided I should really check that out a little further. And indeed, it is so.

Neither the OED nor Online Etymological Dictionary contains a matching entry for “merck.” So, I went to Google to see what I could find. My research was made somewhat difficult by the fact that the company name Merck so commonly appears in the context of the mercenary pharmaceutical industry. Even with those hits aside, I found enough instances to confirm the connection. My favorite was on a Barney Miller “favorite quotes” discussion thread¹ from ten years ago. It reads in part, “Harris was taking a statement from a mercenary and the mercenary asks him if he’s ever considered doing ‘merck-work’ in Africa.” (Harris responds dryly, “I can’t wear khaki.”) There is also a book called “MERCS: True Stories of Mercenaries in Action.”

The thing I found most interesting about this little word journey was not just that one dropped letter can so radically affect the meaning, thought that’s true. I am most amazed by the gigantic corpus of text that the Internet provides us, and which made possible my little foray into merkindom/merckindom. The online universe consists of trillions of words used in every possible level of discourse, from highly intellectual political and scientific writings, to the slangiest everyday expressions. Linguists used to have to put in thousands of hours just to create a corpus large enough to perform meaningful analyses on. Written texts were hand-keyed up until the time that word-processed documents became available for direct loading into a database. And the sort of variety seen on the web would have been practically impossible to duplicate. Now, I can sit at my desk and search in a second or two almost more documents than I can imagine.

But I still don’t get what “emm” means.

¹ Dead link as of April 2014

Occasionally I go on a word journey and it takes me to very unexpected places. Sometimes I even cross my own path in these travels. That’s what happened this week. I had the occasion to look up two words that seemingly have nothing to do with one another:

maudlin—overly tearful and emotional
merkin—a wig for the pubic region

I was amazed to find out that they—and many others, as we shall soon see—come from the same source. The culprit is Mary Magdalene.

Magdalene is a New Testament figure probably best known for weeping over the tomb of Jesus. Her name has been transformed and adapted into many forms in different languages. By the time it entered English, it was Maudelen. From there, it’s an easy jump to Maude. Madge¹ is an adaptation, as well as Madeleine, Matilda (and its spelling variants), and of course Magdalena, frequently shortened to Magda in Spanish. Readers may be able to point to additional forms in their own languages. Please leave a comment if you know any others!

It’s easy to see the “teary” connection in the word maudlin because of the biblical description of Magdalene, but there is another line of descendant meanings unrelated to her grief.

There is a separate New Testament story that describes an interaction that Jesus has with an unnamed woman who offers him a drink of water at a well. Jesus informs her, a la John Edwards, that he knows she’s had five husbands and is also currently shacking up without the benefit of matrimony. We’re pretty used to this type of behavior these days, but back then, to be so shamelessly dissolute was frowned upon.

While the reader is not told who the woman at the well is, a tradition has developed that she and Mary Magdalene are the same person. In other passages, it’s stated that Jesus exorcised Mary Magdalene of seven demons. What else would cause a woman to act like Liz Taylor? Demonic possession, of course! So it stands to reason.

Her association with this profligate behavior resulted in a line of Magdalene-derived words related to women and sluttishness. The ones I’ve discovered follow (definitions from OED):

mab—(obsolete) a slattern; a promiscuous woman
maud—(obsolete) an old woman; a hag
malkin—(archaic, regional) a typical name for a lower-class, untidy or sluttish woman
moll—(rare) a girl or woman, especially a prostitute

And finally, merkin. Before antibiotics, mercury was used to treat STDs like gonorrhea and syphilis. Mercury could cause hair loss, and STDs could case genital scarring. Hair might also be shaved to rid oneself of pubic lice. A merkin² could be used to disguise one’s bald real estate so as not to alert a lover/customer to these conditions.

It’s odd to think, isn’t it, that you can pay $75 for a Brazilian wax, then purchase a merkin to cover up your investment?
___________
¹ “You’re soaking in it!”
² Against your better judgment, you may wish to visit the Facebook page of NAME—the National Affiliation of Merkin Enthusiasts.

A special welcome to my new Northwest Linguist readers. Good to see you here!

Recently I’ve been watching a lot of episodes of one of my favorite shows, Forensic Files. When I first discovered it a few years ago, I watched it as frequently as possible, absorbing episode after episode on CourtTV. I tried to catch Forensic Friday every week, when they would run four episodes in a row.

The show seems low budget—it consists primarily of voiceover, cheesy reenactments, and a few talking-head interviews with police, forensic scientists, prosecutors, and family members of the victims. Still, I love to learn about the science that is used to identify and analyze evidence. Things you’d never think possible have helped to solve crimes: DNA collected from traces of saliva on a rape/murder victim’s breast; tool marks made on a small piece of bomb left after it explodes; linguistic analysis of threatening letters¹; the genetic signature of firewood used to burn a body; the unique fade marks on a pair of old jeans, captured on a security camera and later matched up with a pair found at the perpetrator’s home; even a footprint left in a tomato, squashed beneath the window where the murderer climbed in! Who knows. The knowledge I glean here may also come in handy someday in my fledgling private investigation career.

CourtTV has since morphed into truTV. It now offers what seems like a menu of almost non-stop reality shows, such as Hardcore Pawn², Repo and Lizard Lick Towing. Based on what I see in their trailers, these shows consist primarily of a lot of swearing and fisticuffs between folks who are down on their luck and those with whom the down-and-outers unfortunately have to do business. Once or twice a day, though, FF is still on, and through the magic of DV-R, I can enjoy it at my leisure. I’ve returned to watching every episode aired; even those from 2007 are new again to me by now.

The other day, a law enforcement officer was discussing the course of events in a particular investigation. Initially, the husband was a suspect. (He always is.) As time went by, the police realized that the murderer had to be someone else. The officer said, “There is not one scintilla of evidence” (to indicate that Mr. So And So had anything to do with the crime).

That got me thinking. I knew a scintilla was a tiny bit, but how tiny, exactly? And where does the word come from? I discovered that scintilla is Latin for spark, but is most often used figuratively to designate a minute quantity of something.

I also learned something more interesting to me. The phrase in which I had heard this word—”scintilla of evidence”—is perhaps the most common context in which it appears. It has a long history, going back a few hundred years into English Common Law³. The “scintilla rule” or “scintilla of evidence rule” is a common law concept. It “provides that if there is any evidence at all in a case, even a mere scintilla, that tends to support a material issue, the case cannot be taken from the jury but must be left to its decision.”⁴

A few of the many related forms, gleaned from the OED:
scintill—an Anglicized and now archaic form of scintilla
scintillant or scintillating—giving off sparks or (literally or figuratively) sparkling
scintillation—emitting sparks or spark-like flashes of light (seen in chemistry and other scientific contexts)
scintillating scotoma– hallucinatory flickering patterns and gaps in the visual field as seen in migraine.

Quote:
“But he exults in the anonymity his mystery glasses confer, lending him just a scintilla of cool.”⁵
___________
¹ By Robert Leonard, a Ph.D. linguist at Hofstra University and—believe it or not—founding member of the band Sha Na Na
² Not to be mistaken with Pawn Stars, a History Channel show that explores the history of unique items brought into a Las Vegas pawn shop. The owners are highly knowledgeable; other experts from nearby universities and museums contribute their expertise as well.
³ Body of law based on custom and general principles and that, embodied in case law, serves as precedent or is applied to situations not covered by statute. Under the common-law system, when a court decides and reports its decision concerning a particular case, the case becomes part of the body of law and can be used in later cases involving similar matters. This use of precedents is known as stare decisis. Common law has been administered in the courts of England since the Middle Ages; it is also found in the U.S. and in most of the British Commonwealth. It is distinguished from civil law. (From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, quoted at answers.com)
⁴ West’s Encyclopedia of American Law
⁵ “Glamorous Generic, As a Shield From the Glare,” New York Times, October 26, 2003.

It makes me slightly nervous when someone is described as enumerating something if she isn’t actually saying the numbers before mentioning each item on the list.

A couple of days ago, when I wrote the post about business and laziness, I mentioned that I had learned the word “otiose,” which means being at leisure, ineffective, or useless.

While I was in the dictionary looking for related words, I came across all the words beginning with the oto- prefix. You might be most familiar with this from the medical specialties otolaryngology (ear and throat) or otorhinolaryngology (including also the nose). I considered mentioning this prefix when I brought up “otiose,” but decided that a post with 2 or 3 words each in English and Spanish was already full enough. “I’ll save that for another day,” I thought to myself.

I didn’t know it would be so soon.

I’m currently reading Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach. She is the author of Spook, which examines the existing science on the afterlife; Stiff, which takes a thorough look at what happens to human cadavers; and Bonk, which gives the same freakishly detailed attention to sex. Anyone who can get her husband to have sex in an MRI tube, all in the pursuit of increased understanding of the beast with two backs, has my respect. She also has my interest when she puts a new book out. Packing for Mars was published in August, 2010.

Roach explores the characteristics that space agencies look for in astronauts, the psychology of being in space, the effects of weightlessness on the body, sex in space (you spend most of your time just trying to hold on), and food in space. But the place I stumbled on a new-to-me word with the oto- prefix was in the chapter “Throwing Up and Down: The Astronaut’s Secret Misery.” It turns out that zero gravity is very likely to induce motion sickness. The visual cues that an astronaut’s brain receives about which way is up or down are really scrambled, because there is no consistent up or down! The chapter says that it’s not uncommon for an astronaut to need to hurl after seeing a colleague who is oriented in the other direction. All this motion sickness is a normal human response, but it’s seen by many as a sign of weakness. As a result, NASA has always been full of closet pukers who refused to tell Houston that they were losing their squeeze-packet lunches.

Scientists have known for a long time now that balance and motion sickness are controlled by what’s going on in the inner ear, and that’s where today’s word comes in.

Otolith = oto-, “ear” + -lith, “stone.”

Otoliths are tiny pebbles contained in the inner ear. Their position relative to that chamber—what side they are lying on and touching—is what tells your brain which way is up. If your visual sensory data conflicts with the data from your otoliths, the brain gets confused. It turns out that the area of the brain that is right next to the balance part is the emetic brain, i.e. the vomiting center. The fact that you might toss your cookies on the deck of that yacht is just a vagary of cerebral evolution that put these two areas next to each other.

I have a tendency to get motion sick, and I picked up a tip in the book that might help me. I already knew to look at the horizon or out of the front of the vehicle, but I also now know that minimizing my head movements could reduce my reaction. Next time I’m on the bus, I will try to keep those otoliths still.