East Meets West? Chinese Rap Not Exactly Gangsta

I believe this is my first post that deals with a foreign language. I doubt that it'll be my last.
Victor Mair at Language Log has posted a video of a rap out of Beijing. His comments about it have to do with Chinese pronunciation. If you have some interest in Chinese, you might find all that interesting. Regardless, this is a neat song. Mair translates the lyrics of the song, but I suggest you listen first before you read. Although I admit that my exposure to rap in the US is extremely limited, but I don't think this is the kind of piece you'd hear around here today.

Adopting a Vocabulary

Over at SaveTheWords.org, you can help return an archaic word to circulation. Many fun words are available for "adoption" — all you have to do is sign up, choose from many available words, and agree to use the word in your daily life as often as you can.

I adopted the word xenization, the fact of being a stranger, which describes me to a T when I step into an auto parts store.

SaveTheWords.org is apparently somehow affiliated with the OED, though I couldn't find a link to it at the OED site. What's worse, the site is in a temporary state of apanthropinization — withdrawal from the human world.

But when the site gets up and running, I encourage you to check it out, if only window shop through the words up for adoption. For a logophile, it can be a lot like watching the puppies in a pet store window, only you don't have to worry about doggie mills. If you're feeling super-loquacious, adopt a word. Adopt two. Hell, you could become the Angelina Jolie of archaic vocabulary!

Super-sexagenarian Americans

Jane Gross at the New York Times tells of a new style guide from the International Longevity Center and the Aging Services of California that is designed to guide people in the media through the maze of ageist language. Apparently, there are very few terms left to refer to someone who has exceeded six-and-a-half decades that aren't somehow inherently ageist. At least according to these people.

Even the seemingly neutral word elderly should "be used carefully and sparingly" and only to refer to a group of people — "corralling the elderly like lost sheep" — and not to a specific person — "the elderly woman who rear-ended me."

Also on the verboten list: senior citizen, the golden years, feisty, spry, and grandmotherly, along with the more obvious words that you would never use around an *old person who has no sense of humor about himself — codger, coot, crone, geezer, etc. One should also take care when referring to institutions that care for the elderly.

To quote from one of the comments to the article that I agree with, "Unlike some of the other [racist and sexist] terms, elderly offensiveness makes sense mostly in the context of a culture that is ashamed of accepting age." Calling someone "elderly" can be considered a derogatory term only in a society that thinks there's something bad about being old. Calling a woman a hottie in a news article is obviously derogatory because it objectifies her, making her a sexual object instead of an individual. Not so with elderly. Calling an old person elderly shouldn't be any more politically incorrect than calling a woman a female or black man black. Sure, it points out a specific characteristic of a person — but that is often necessary depending on what you're trying to say — but it does so in a neutral, sterile way.

I just don't get it. Shouldn't this just be a matter of common sense? Certainly there is ageism going on out there, but this style guide isn't designed to help curb that. Sure, watching your language when you write is important — you don't want to piss off your audience — but how do you get a whole book out of it without either a lot of blank space or a lot of bunkum? This should be a healthy-sized essay at most.

Today's Word: schadenfreude

schadenfreude: The joy felt by someone else's misfortune. It's a sad statement about human nature that this word exists outside of psychological circles, though it's perhaps fitting that the word is German. It's something we've all felt at one time or another. Remember how you felt when you saw a scraggly, dirty Saddam Hussein after his capture? How did you feel when you learned that he had been hanged? Anyway, to get the image of SH out of your head, here's a fun way to teach your kids about the joys and dangers of schadenfreude:
Image from the rut.

Today’s Word: felicide

felicide: The killing of a cat. It seems that every cartoon that has a cat in it has some felicidal antagonist to match. Think Tom and Jerry, Tweety and Sylvester, Itchy and Scratchy. Uh, Ren and Stimpy (one of them was a cat, right?) You might also consider most of the murders on CSI: Miami a form of felicide: One jilted swimsuit model murders her ex-boyfriend's new lingerie-model girlfriend and tries to frame her bisexual one-time-college-roommate debutante. Cat fights writ large.

Wordsmiths, Know-It-Alls, Cash Prize

Put your knowledge and your words together, and win $1,000! Google Knol and Dummies.com have gotten together to host a how-to contest. Write a how-to article about anything and submit it to Knol and Dummies. Dummies editors will pick the best one, post it at Dummies.com, and send you a check. More information here:

• From the Google Knol Blog
• Contest microsite.

Disputed Words: forebear, forbear, and for(e)bearer

A forebear (main accent on the first syllable) is simply an ancestor; there's no dispute there. To forbear (accent on the second syllable) means to abstain or avoid something; also no dispute. (Its past tense is forbore, and something could have been forborne.)

A problem occurs, though, with for(e)bearer. Sometimes a person giving a speech wants to find a more politically correct term for the now clichéd forefathers. They sometimes choose forebearers, which makes a certain sense because our forefathers had to bear the responsibility of government before us. But the bear in forebear stems from the verb be plus the suffix -er, that is, forebears are really fore-be-ers — they existed ("to be") before us. In contrast, the bear in forbear is from the word meaning "to carry."

Somewhere in the middle is the idea of to bear a child.

So with the e (forebearers), the extra -er is simply redundant — like engineerer (a person who engineers?) or pioneerer (a person who pioneers?). Without the e (forbearers), it ought to describe "a person who forbears," as in, "Those who chose to receive their cootie shots had no problems; the forbearers of the shots, however, were afflicted with the spontaneous amputation of their pinky toes."

So, by all rights, forbearers ought to always be defined as the latter. But you don't always have a dictionary handy, and neither word (forebear and forbear) is common enough that hoi polloi are tacitly versed in the differences. Using for(e)bearers to mean forbears happens often enough, though, that we might consider that a "new" meaning — one not originally intended — has arisen. (I write "new" because the usage would be new only to the dictionary; people have been making this "mistake" for a long time, so it isn't new in speech and writing. I write "mistake" because . . . oh, never mind.)

This is how language evolves. And, just like speciation, it isn't always clear when a new definition (species) has been created.

None of this is to be confused, of course, with Fourbears, a children's story sequel about interracial (err, make that interspecies) adoption in which Mama Bear and Papa Bear attempt to legally adopt Goldilocks, creating a controversy in the courts and ultimately leading an attention-starved Baby Bear into a meth addiction.

Today's Words: algid and gelid

algid, gelid: Although at first glance, these might seem like scientific taxonomic terms — phylla or species maybe — they're really just fun, fancy, Scrabble-friendly words for cold. Algid comes from the Latin algidus, cold; gelid comes from the Latin gelidus, frost. (The word gelatin stems from the same root.) Gelid temperatures are therefore colder than algid temperatures. And you can nounify both of them as algidity and gelidity.

And it's certainly gelid here in the Midwest today, with temperatures just below 0ºF, and wind chills about 15 degrees lower than that. The worst part about such frigid temperatures, aside from snot freezing in my nostrils, is that as the gelidity goes up (or would it be down?), drivers' common sense abates. I've always said that the worst part about driving is other people on the road; that goes double for wintertime driving.

On the subject of whether algidity and gelidity (and frigidity, for that matter) goes up or down as it gets colder, consider this: French astronomer Joseph-Nicholas Delisle created a mecury thermometer in 1732 for Peter the Great. Delisle's scale was based on the contraction of mercury, not on its expansion, as today's temperature scales are. In the Delisle scale, at sea level, water boiled at 0º and froze at 150°, so the higher the number, the colder it was. If that seems odd, what many people don't know is that the original Celsius scale, credited to Anders Celsius around 1742, was inverted: water froze at 100º and boiled at 0°. Other scientists later turned the scale around.

For more about temperature scales, take a look at these two articles written by a guy I know:

How did we end up with both Fahrenheit and Celsius scales?
What is absolute zero?

Today's Word: porcine

porcine: Of or like pigs. (Notice the resemblance to the word pork.) Porcine has a certain elegant feel to it, one of those words you can use to insult someone without them knowing it. "Porcine? That sounds French!"

Today's Word: quincunx

quincunx: An arrangement of five objects with one in the center and one at each corner — like the 5 face on a die. It also a) happens to be the last word on p. 1177 of my dictionary, so I see it in that upper-right corner an ungodly number of times when I'm flipping through the dictionary; and b) is a great Scrabble play if you have one of the letters open: the letter tiles are worth 26 points, plus whatever bonus tiles you can grab, plus 50 points for using all seven of your tiles.

There also appears to be a band called The Quincunx. Visit their site to see a few other uses of this word. Quincunx also has botanical uses to describe a specific arrangement of five flower petals.

"The Beatles surrounded Yoko Ono, creating a quincunx with the doomed interloper at the center. Three of them began cudgeling her with ham-sized halibuts while the fourth wrote a song about it."