Alex Steer

229 words | ~1 min

On the subject of Facebook neologisms, Laura Varnam tells me that Stuart Lee, in his English Language lecture (Oxford English FHS Paper 1) the other week set students the challenge of coming up with a new word. (The result of the same exercise last year was 'bipod', meaning to share headphones with someone while listening to an iPod or similar, has made it as far as the Urban Dictionary and was cited as part of the language of the 'MySpace generation' by the Guardian.)

This year's task was to find a word for the moment when you log into Facebook and find someone has posted an embarrassing photo of you. The resulting verb is beautiful: facewhack.

I suspect the influence of 'gobsmack' and 'Googlewhack'. With my lexicographer's hat on, I'd say that the word describes the action, not the resulting feeling: to upload an embarrassing or inappropriate photograph of (someone) to the Facebook website; to cause (a person) shock or alarm by doing this. But however you read it, it's wonderful.

So, if you like it, start using it. Happy facewhacking.

197 words | ~1 min

Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter of the 23rd February directed me to this article (Observer Magazine, 3 Feb 2008, p.9), and to the word sleevefacing: the practice of obscuring one's face (or other body parts) in one's Facebook profile picture by holding up a record sleeve, especially one similar enough to its surroundings to cause a visual illusion.

It's a lovely example of a coinage that will probably never get past its very restricted context of use, and of a word playing catch-up with the phenomenon it describes. 'Sleevefacing' is an unusual creation, probably simply from sleeve + face (n.) + ing, since it would require a new sense of 'face' (v.) meaning something like 'to have (something) as one's face; to make a surface covering of (something)'*, which itself would barely be applicable outside this context.

Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand irregular neologisms in this case, so: http://www.sleeveface.com.

* Cf. OED face v. 13.

157 words | ~1 min

1752 G. A. Stevens Distress upon Distress ii. i. 52 (note) His Interpretation is like the Foreigner's, who mistook the Words, under a Sign, Money for live Hair, to signify, Money for living here.

A wonderfully weak foreigner joke from the mid-18th century, made slightly interesting by the fact that 'hair' and 'here' are only a half-rhyme (if that) in modern English, but in 18th century London English rhymed much more closely (both sounding like modern English 'hair').

Compare what looks like the only half-rhymed (as opposed to full-rhymed) couplet in Blake's 'The Tyger' (in Songs of Innocence, 1794): 'What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?' These two, like the rest of the poem, were probably full rhymes in Blake's late 18th-century English.

Links: Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), transcript and images.