Alex Steer

526 words | ~3 min

Finding myself at a car boot sale over the Easter weekend, I started reflecting (because there wasn't much worth buying) on the phrase to go car booting, and its formation. The compound car boot is its most obvious component. It's in a specific sense, meaning (and shortened from) car boot sale (which is, in turn, taken from the more literal sense of car boot, being that from which one's unwanted stuff is sold). One can say, in British English, 'I went to a car boot this morning', and no-one will think you're strange (unless it's a cold morning).

But what about the -ing? The automatic assumption is that to go car booting (or to go running, fishing, etc.) involves a participle of the verb, so there must be a verb to car boot, meaning to attend, buy, or sell at a car boot sale. However, the -ing forms in these examples are properly nouns: to go ?-ing is a contraction of to go on ?-ing or to go a ?-ing (think of the carol 'Here We Come A-wassailing'), with the -ing-word the name of the activity, and a noun. So, car booting in to go car booting is a (compound) noun. Nor does it even presuppose the existence of a verb to car boot: nouns ending in -ing can form by taking an existing noun and adding the suffix -ing, without the need for a verb to act as an intermediary. (The word parenting is a good example: it forms from parent (the noun) and -ing, not from the much rarer verb to parent.) An important caveat is that while nouns of action do not suppose the existence of the verb, gerunds of action do. If you say 'I like running', then running is the noun. But if you say 'I like running races', then running is a gerund, a word with some of the properties of a noun (in this case, being something it is possible to like) and some of the properties of a verb (in this case, taking an object, 'races'). Gerunds are considered to be forms of verbs. So, if you saw a new word chopsticking in the phrase 'I hate chopsticking', that could be a noun of action derived straight from the noun 'chopstick'. But if you saw it in 'I hate chopsticking prawns' (i.e. taking 'prawns' as an object), you'd have to assume that you were dealing with the gerund of chopstick, verb, because nouns can't take objects.

As it happens, there are examples of both car booting as a noun and car boot as a verb going back to at least the late 1980s. Roughly the time some of the things you see for sale at certain car boot sales first hit the stands, by the looks of them.

247 words | ~1 min

This came up in a pub conversation (as many of the best things do): should daddy longlegs (or long legs), another name for the crane fly in British English and the harvestman in American English, be pluralized as daddies longlegs?

My well-trained lexicographer's response, of course, was 'it really doesn't matter': it could be pluralized like that, or as daddy longlegses, or without alteration as daddy longlegs. But, in the interests of interest, here are the resulting (and no doubt massively noisy and so only slightly suggestive) results for number of Google hits:

Daddy longlegs: c124,000 Daddy long legs: c460,000 Daddies longlegs: 9 Daddies long legs: c391 Daddy longlegses: c216 Daddy long legses: c585 Daddies longlegses: 1 (!) Daddies long legses: 0

Finding the unmutated plural is trickier, but "daddy longlegs are" returns c1780 hits, and "daddy longlegs have" c536.

The conclusions?

1. Plural forms with legses are more common than those with daddies.
2. If anywhere near accurate, daddy long(-)legs may be the commonest plural, suggesting that the plurality of the legs component may be tacitly extended to the whole lexical item.
3. It really doesn't matter.

131 words | ~1 min

And a quick note to herald the arrival of the latest updates to OED Online. These, published yesterday, represent a quiet revolution in historical lexicography, as the new published material consists of high-profile ranges of words revised out of sequence (much as the OED has for some years added high-profile new entries across the alphabet), rather than the next part of the normal alphabetical rolling revision (currently complete from M to quit shilling). More info about the out-of-sequence revision here.

I worked on some of these entries myself (and no, I'm not saying which ones), so it's good to see them available to the public.

426 words | ~2 min

This post by John Crace on the Guardian Arts blog is unfortunate. It contains a claim by a former lecturer of mine concerning Milton's contributions to the English language:

According to Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge University and fellow of Milton's alma mater, Christ's College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing some 630 words to the English language, making him the country's greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229.

There are two things wrong with this. The first one Gavin Alexander concedes quite readily, to some extent: 'The OED does tend to privilege famous writers with first usage,' he writes. This is true, though it's too often been used to create the mistaken impression that famous authors have been given first dibs because they're famous. Not so: the OED's policy has always been to include the earliest available example for a sense that may be found. It's easy to forget, in these days of EEBO, Google Books, etc., that during the initial round of editing (the first edition was published in fascicles from 1884 to 1928) there were quite severe restrictions on what was available in consultable editions or concordances, especially for the medieval and early modern periods. Though it's now routinely possible to antedate these first examples from Milton, Shakespeare, et. al., it wasn't then. It's a case of material constraint rather than editorial bias.

But the other mistake is more serious, and has begun to be pointed out in various quarters. The numbers suggest that Gavin Alexander has searched for 'Milton' and 'Shakespeare' in the 'first cited author' module available in the OED Online advanced search. What he's neglected to realize, though, is that until the current round of revision (from 2000 onwards) the OED abbreviated 'Shakespeare' as 'Shakes': type this in, and you will get a further 1663 results for Shakespeare as first-cited author. Milton does not even come close to second place, either: searching 'Chaucer' returns 2006 results, 'Cursor' (for Cursor Mundi) has 1609, 'Lydg*' (for John Lydgate) 783, etc.

A definitely cautionary tale, this one, about the dangers of hasty corpus linguistics. (Not a phrase I thought I'd use today.)

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.