WordsWordsWords

Today’s entry comes via The Professor. Pearls is her favorite comic.

This is my second installment in the series of words that I can never seem to remember the meanings of, no matter how many times I encounter them. Repetition is supposed to be a major key to learning. Then why don’t multiple trips to the dictionary make me remember these, any more than Bart Simpson’s 100-repetition blackboard scribbles make him behave? I’ve decided that blog posts are the answer to my dilemma. Perhaps Bart’s teacher should make him write a whole essay?

Today’s my-thick-skull words are “limn” and “limnology.” Having looked at the etymologies for them, I think my confusion around these two terms results from the fact that they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

“Limn” means to draw or portray (either with words or physical media) and comes ultimately from the Latin word for illuminate (inluminare). “Limnology,” meaning the study of bodies of fresh water, comes from the Greek word (limne) for pool or marsh! How is that fair?

While the fresh-water science wasn’t named until 1893, the draw/portray sense of “limn” has been around for five or six centuries. One can see the progression of the meaning if she knows that there was another use of limn, now obsolete—to illuminate a manuscript. It’s easy to understand the transition from a meaning of illuminating with light, to illuminating a manuscript with drawings, to a general sense of “to draw or portray” for this word.

Below, the Macclesfield Psalter, believed to have been created in 1330. It is considered a national treasure in Britain, and is a beautiful example of medieval manuscript illumination.

One of the volumes in my growing collection of books on words, grammar, and language is Dictionary of Word Origins: A History of the Words, Expressions, and Clichés We Use, by Jordan Almond. It’s a bit of an odd work. Many of the expressions in it I have never heard before, even though they’re referred to as if they’re the most commonly occurring thing you could imagine. For example, he asks, “Where did the expression ‘he fights like King John of Bohemia’ come from?” A number of Internet sources call this an “obsolescent idiom,” yet the book was copyrighted in 1985. The typeface and layout even look a little old-fashioned. I wonder what’s up with this mystery tome.

And don’t you wonder whether “Jordan Almond” is an alias? One of the expressions discussed in the book is just that. He asks, “Has the name ‘Jordan Almond’ anything to do with the River Jordan?” (No.) In the answer, he doesn’t even refer to the fact that this is also supposedly the author’s name.

Despite my puzzlement, from time to time I will flip through the book for a bit of entertainment. I don’t believe I’ve ever picked it up and found an answer when I was seeking for one, but I enjoy it for what it is.

Today, I focused in on “point blank,” the phrase we use to describe a shot taken from a very short distance away. This expression comes from French. The center of a target was once a small white (blanc) spot. Point means “aim,” so point blank means to aim at the center of the target. Implied is that this is done from a distance so close you can’t help but get a bull’s eye.

Blanco also means the center of the target in Spanish, but “point blank” is the really interesting thing I want to tell you about. The translation is a quemarropa—literally, “at clothes burning” distance. That singe in your shirt around the bullet hole is what you get if you’re shot a quemarropa. I learned this expression in an interpreter training, but unfortunately (fortunately?) I have never gotten to use it in the courtroom.

In a recent post, I discussed how “unfriend” had returned to common use, thanks to Facebook. As I thought about that, I came upon the word “frenemy,” a great example of a portmanteau word. Lewis Carroll coined that term; linguists typically call them “blend nouns.” They are derived by combining portions of two or more separate words¹. The two words here, of course, are “friend” and “enemy.”

“Frenemy” feels very new to me—a product of the Mean Girls generation. I was surprised to find out that it dates back to 1953! The first documented instance listed in the OED is in the Nevada State Journal²–“Howz about calling the Russians our Frienemies?” While both spellings—”fren” and “frien”—are still in use, a quick Googlefight tells me that “fren” is about 13 times more common than its competitor.

Below you’ll find a list of portmanteau words gleaned from Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Oxford English Grammar, and Garner’s Modern American Usage. You’ll see that some of them have come to feel so at home in our language that you’ll barely recognize them as blends. Others still feel fresh or awkward. Can you identify the two words from which each is constructed?

Dumbfound
Motel
Ginormous
Infomercial
Doff
Workaholic
Smog
Emoticon
Paratrooper
Sitcom
Televangelist
Bit
Camcorder
Contraception
Modem
Spanglish
__________
¹Fowler’s Modern English Usage
²Combined in 1983 with the Reno Evening Gazette, now the Reno Gazette-Journal

A spoonerism is a phrase generated by the (usually unintentional) transposition of sounds between words. While this type of speech error has undoubtedly been occurring for much longer than a century, our word for them came from William A. Spooner (1844–1930), who had a reputation for these tips of the slung.

I’ve been a spoonerist for as long as I can remember. (I’m a spooner, too, as The Professor will attest…but I digress.) In doing a little reading on spoonerisms, I was hoping to find out that they were an indication of high intelligence, good breeding, or at the very least low cholesterol. But alas. No one seems to think so.

In the last few days, I’ve jotted down four spoonerisms that I generated unintentionally. There are more where these came from, because I do this fairly frequently.

It’s only a few hundred yards as the clow fries. (clow rhymes with sew)
Jat & Panet (our best friends)
Is that program houd closted? (or is it on your computer)
Crau pryler (crau rhymes with chow—person who steals things from vehicles)

Spoonerisms are also used intentionally for comic effect. My favorite intentional spoonerism of all time is attributed to various people, of whom I find Dorothy Parker to be the most credible: “I’d rather have a bottle in fronta me than a frontal lobotomy!”