Alex Steer

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.