No Love for 'Fiscal Cliff,' 'Spoiler Alert'

JEFF KAROUB, Associated Press
December 31, 2012
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/list-love-fiscal-cliff-spoiler-alert-18098477

Spoiler alert: This story contains words and phrases that some people want to ban from the English language. "Spoiler alert" is among them. So are "kick the can down the road," ''trending" and "bucket list."

A dirty dozen have landed on the 38th annual List of Words to be Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness. The nonbinding, tongue-in-cheek decree released Monday by northern Michigan's Lake Superior State University is based on nominations submitted from the United States, Canada and beyond.

"Spoiler alert," the seemingly thoughtful way to warn readers or viewers about looming references to a key plot point in a film or TV show, nevertheless passed its use-by date for many, including Joseph Foly, of Fremont, Calif. He argued in his submission the phrase is "used as an obnoxious way to show one has trivial information and is about to use it, no matter what."

At the risk of further offense, here's another spoiler alert: The phrase receiving the most nominations this year is "fiscal cliff," banished because of its overuse by media outlets when describing across-the-board federal tax increases and spending cuts that economists say could harm the economy in the new year without congressional action.

"You can't turn on the news without hearing this," said Christopher Loiselle, of Midland, Mich., in his submission. "I'm equally worried about the River of Debt and Mountain of Despair."

Other terms coming in for a literary lashing are "superfood," ''guru," ''job creators" and "double down."

University spokesman Tom Pink said that in nearly four decades, the Sault Ste. Marie school has "banished" around 900 words or phrases, and somehow the whole idea has survived rapidly advancing technology and diminishing attention spans.

Nominations used to come by mail, then fax and via the school's website, he said. Now most come through the university's Facebook page. That's fitting, since social media has helped accelerate the life cycle of certain words and phrases, such as this year's entry "YOLO" — "you only live once."

"The list surprises me in one way or another every year, and the same way every year: I'm always surprised how people still like it, love it," he said.

Rounding out the list are "job creators/creation," ''boneless wings" and "passion/passionate." Those who nominated the last one say they are tired of hearing about a company's "passion" as a substitute for providing a service or product for money.

Andrew Foyle, of Bristol, England, said it's reached the point where "passion" is the only ingredient that keeps a chef from preparing "seared tuna" that tastes "like dust swept from a station platform."

"Apparently, it's insufficient to do it ably, with skill, commitment or finesse," Foyle said. "Passionate, begone!"

As usual, the etymological exercise — or exorcise — only goes so far. Past lists haven't eradicated "viral," "amazing," ''LOL" or "man cave" from everyday use.

Follow Jeff Karoub on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jeffkaroub

The Whole Nine Yards About a Phrase’s Origin

JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
December 26, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/books/the-whole-nine-yards-seeking-a-phrases-origin.html

When people talk about “the whole nine yards,” just what are they talking about?

For decades the answer to that question has been the Bigfoot of word origins, chased around wild speculative corners by amateur word freaks, with exasperated lexicographers and debunkers of folk etymologies in hot pursuit.

Does the phrase derive from the length of ammunition belts in World War II aircraft? The contents of a standard concrete mixer? The amount of beer a British naval recruit was obligated to drink? Yardage in football? The length of fabric in a Scottish kilt (or sari, or kimono, or burial shroud)?

Type the phrase into Google and you’re likely to get any of these answers, usually backed by nothing more than vaguely remembered conversations with someone’s Great-Uncle Ed. But now two researchers using high-powered database search tools have delivered a confident “none of the above,” supported by a surprise twist:

Before we were going the whole nine yards, it turns out, we were only going six.

The recent discovery of several instances of “the whole six yards” in newspapers from the 1910s — four decades before the earliest known references to “the whole nine yards” — opens a new window onto “the most prominent etymological riddle of our time,” said Fred Shapiro, a librarian at Yale Law School who announced the findings in next month’s issue of The Yale Alumni Magazine.

Other language experts agree about the import of the discovery. “The phrase is interesting because it’s so mysterious,” said Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of Visual Thesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com, who has written previously on the search for its origin. “It’s been a kind of Holy Grail.”

Like the Holy Grail “the whole nine yards” has inspired both armchair mythologizing and years of hard and often fruitless searching through random books and miles of newspaper microfilm. Not that the expression is necessarily all that old. The first scholarly dating, in a 1986 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, traced it to 1970. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang then pushed it back to 1967, with a citation from “The Doom Pussy,” Elaine Shepard’s novel about Air Force pilots in the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile popular obsession with the phrase was growing. Mr. Shapiro, editor of “The Yale Book of Quotations,” attributes the interest to William Safire, who was a political and language columnist for The New York Times, who died in 2009. In 1982 he made a public appeal for information about its origins on Larry King’s radio program. Mr. Safire went on to write no fewer than nine columns related to the phrase, including one chiding the White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan for referring to “the whole seven yards.”

“There goes his credibility with me,” Mr. Safire wrote, before confidently declaring that the expression referred to a fully loaded concrete truck, whose contents are typically measured in cubic yards.

But Mr. Safire was writing before searchable digital databases, which over the past decade have largely supplanted the painstaking work of poring over microfilm and given rise to a culture of ferociously competitive “antedaters,” often amateurs, eager to disprove various theories.

The first new break on “the whole nine yards” came in 2007, when Sam Clements, a coin dealer and avid word sleuth from Akron, Ohio, discovered it in a 1964 article in The Tucson Daily Citizen about space program slang. By 2009 two other researchers had pushed it back to 1962, when it appeared in a short story about a brush salesman and an article in a car magazine.

Some lexicographers thought the evidence was creeping closer to a World War II-era origin, and possibly some connection to the military, though there was still no hard evidence for the popular ammunition-belt theory. Then, in August, Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a neuroscience researcher in North Carolina who had been searching for variants of the phrase via Google News Archive and Google Books for five years, posted a message on the e-mail list of the American Dialect Society noting a 1956 occurrence in an outdoors magazine called Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground, followed in September by a more startling twist: a 1921 headline from The Spartanburg Herald-Journal in South Carolina reading “The Whole Six Yards of It.”

The somewhat cryptic headline, atop a detailed account of a baseball game that did not use the phrase, initially caused some head scratching among the society’s members. One person asked whether the headline referred to the ball fields, or “yards,” of the six teams in the league discussed in the article.

But then Mr. Shapiro, searching in Chronicling America, a Library of Congress database of pre-1923 newspapers, found two 1912 articles in The Mount Vernon Signal in Kentucky promising to “give” or “tell” the “whole six yards” of a story. Ms. Taylor-Blake also found another instance from 1916, in the same paper.

The dating clearly refutes the popular ammunition-belt and concrete-mixer theories, Mr. Shapiro said, while the Kentucky focus suggests a probable “backwoods provenance.” As for the meaning of the phrase, he added, the slippage from six yards to nine — part of the same “numerical phrase inflation,” as he puts it, that turned “Cloud 7” to “Cloud 9” — suggests it doesn’t refer to anything in particular any more than, say, “the whole shebang” does.

Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, agrees. “The existence of a six-yard variant shows pretty clearly that this is not about yards of anything,” he said. “It’s just a random number.”

Mr. Shapiro concedes that he and Ms. Taylor-Blake have found only “negative evidence,” and a firm origin story may yet emerge. But neither he nor Mr. Sheidlower is confident that scholarly research will dispel the urban legends that cling to expressions like “the whole nine yards.”

Mr. Sheidlower points to the persistent belief that Chicago’s reputation as “the Windy City” springs from its blowhard politicians boasting about the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and not, as occurrences in newspaper articles dating to the 1860s suggest, its weather.

“People are drawn to colorful etymologies,” Mr. Shapiro said. “But they are almost always wrong.”

Audacity of 'austerity,' 2010 Word of the Year

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101220/ap_on_re_us/us_word_of_the_year

Audacity of 'austerity,' 2010 Word of the Year
RUSSELL CONTRERAS, Associated Press
Mon Dec 20, 2010

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – As Greece faced a debt crisis, the government passed a series of strict austerity measures, including taxes hikes and cutting public sector pay.

The move sparked angry protests, strikes and riots across the country as unemployment skyrocketed and the crisis spread to other European nations. The move also incited a rush to online dictionaries from those searching for a definition.

Austerity, the 14th century noun defined as "the quality or state of being austere" and "enforced or extreme economy," set off enough searches that Merriam-Webster named it as its Word of the Year for 2010, the dictionary's editors announced Monday.

John Morse, president and publisher of the Springfield, Mass.-based dictionary, said "austerity" saw more than 250,000 searches on the dictionary's free online tool and came with more coverage of the debt crisis.

"What we look for ... what are the words that have had spikes that strike us very much as an anomaly for their regular behavior," Morse said. "The word that really qualifies this year for that is 'austerity'."

Runners-up also announced Monday included "pragmatic," "moratorium," "socialism," and "bigot" — the last word resulted from public uses by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former CNN host Rick Sanchez and former NPR senior analyst Juan Williams.

Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor-at-large, said this year's top 10 words were associated with a news event or coverage, which editors believe resulted in prolonged jumps in searches.

"Sometimes it's hard to pinpoint the searches on one particular news event, but typically that is what sparks people's curiosity in a word," Sokolowski said.

For example, "socialism" was searched, editors believe, because of coverage around federal bailouts and Democratic-backed federal health care legislation. And editors noticed that "pragmatic" was looked-up a number of times after midterm elections.

According to Morse, the dictionary's online website sees more than 500 million searches a year — with most of those being usual suspects like "effect" and "affect." But he said words selected for the dictionary's top 10 were words that had searches hundreds of thousands of out-of-character hits.

Also making the top ten list was the word "doppelganger." Sokolowski said the word saw a jump in searches after George Stephanopoulos of ABC's "Good Morning America" called "Eat, Pray, Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert "Julia Roberts' doppelganger." Roberts played Gilbert in the book's film adaptation and resembles the writer.

"Doppelganger" was also used in the popular television show, "The Vampire Diaries."

"Sometimes, that all it takes," Sokolowski said.

Words "shellacking," "ebullient," "dissident," and "furtive" also made this year's top list.

Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and author of "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word," said the list of words shows how the country is evolving because the public is looking up words that used to be very common.

"Around 20 to 30 years ago, everyone would know what 'socialism' was," said Metcalf, who is also executive secretary of the American Dialect Society. "Same with bigot. That fact that they have to be looked up says something about us."

That's true with some words like "shellacking," said Jenna Portier, an English instructor at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La. Although Merriam-Webster editors said searches for the word spiked after President Barack Obama said he and his party took "a shellacking" from voters in midterm election, Portier said the word is very common in southern Louisiana. "Where I'm from, it means to varnish something like wood," Portier said.

Shana Walton, a languages and literature professor also at Nicholls State University, said she understands how news events maybe influenced the dictionary's list.

"If 'moratorium' is one of the most looked-up words, that's clearly a reflection of how often the word was used in the wake of the BP oil spill," said Walton, a linguistic anthropologist who is doing research on oil and land in south Louisiana. "Many people in south Louisiana expressed much more outrage about the moratorium, frankly, than about the spill."

Metcalf said the American Dialect Society will release its "Word of the Year" winner in January, but it's selected by the group like Time's Person of the Year.

The Words of the Year

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/weekinreview/19sifton.html

The Words of the Year
The Justin Bieber, Shellacking, Vuvuzela: Three new additions to the lexicon.
SAM SIFTON and GRANT BARRETT
December 18, 2010

Vuvuzela is a great word, one of the best to enter American popular culture in 2010, though it sounds nothing like an actual vuvuzela. A vuvuzela sounds like a long, droning moan, a sound full of garbage and tennis balls.

The vuvuzela’s long, plastic barrel provided Americans with the junk shot of sounds this year, the sort of noise you could hear even through a containment dome placed over a gushing underwater oil well owned by BP. (Though if you take a vuvuzela to the airport, you’re going to get an enhanced pat-down, sure as we could be entering a double-dip recession.)

Close your eyes while someone blows a vuvuzela and you can see all this clearly, as if it were playing on a spill-cam over your Web browser at work. Open them and it’s just a World Cup game highlight (speaking of great words: Uruguay vs. Ghana).

And the oil kept coming, all summer long, and with it new words — top kill, static kill, bottom kill — that meant failure, until at bottom they didn’t. (There may be put-backs for mortgage bonds. It doesn’t work so well with oil.)

Everyone was glad that the fish kill wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Dispersants may have worked. But the blowout preventer did not.

Refudiate is almost a better word than vuvuzela, because it’s not so much a real word as a neologism, one much of America attributes to Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, who used it in a Twitter message in July. (She took a real shellacking for that.) The Oxford University Press called it the word of the year.

But refudiate was not Ms. Palin’s word first, even if she unpacked the portmanteau all by her lonesome. David Segal of The New York Times had it in print in late June, in an article about people who sell marijuana for a living. They are not easy to interview.

“Simple yes-or-no questions yield 10-minute soliloquies,” he wrote. “Words are coined on the spot, like ‘refudiate,’ and regular words are used in ways that make sense only in context.”

It’s like a halfalogue, talking to those guys.

Speaking of, did you see “Inception”? (Can Ms. Palin refudiate a claim that she took the word refudiate from a sleeping marijuana salesman?) Did you i-dose on Justin Bieber videos (I’m a Belieber!) or contemplate becoming one of the Hollywood star whackers who sent Randy Quaid around a bend and up to Canada to seek asylum? Did you weep along with HungryBear’s double rainbow on YouTube, then seek double rainbows yourself?

Most important of all, did you stand for or against the ground zero mosque near the ground zero Century 21, some blocks away from ground zero itself but almost directly next door to a bar?

G.Z.M. was a big word for 2010, until it was not. On that subject, there was quantitative easing as soon as the midterm elections were over.

QE2! — Sam Sifton

The Words That Made the Year

The old and new puns, slang and jargon that we lived with this year. Compiled by Grant Barrett.

Pop Culture

belieber: A fan of Justin Bieber, the Canadian pop singer who also spawned ...

the Justin Bieber: A haircut also known as the flip and switch, the flow, or the twitch. Now driving parents crazy everywhere.

G.T.L.: For “gym, tan, laundry,” the life philosophy of the Situation, otherwise known as Mike Sorrentino of the reality TV program “Jersey Shore.” You laugh, but it’s worked for him.

i-dosing: A supposed digital drug. Certain soundwaves, the claim goes, give listeners a high. Skeptics abound, watchful parents are everywhere.

star whacker: The latest in celeb coinage. In October, the actor Randy Quaid and his wife, Evi, begged for asylum in Canada, claiming fear of star whackers, people who had already killed other famous people and were out to get them, too.

Communicating

coffice: In South Korea, a coffee shop habitually used as an office by customers, who mooch its space, electricity, Wi-Fi and other resources. Presumably, they pay for the coffee.

halfalogue: Half of a conversation, like an overheard phone call. The term was coined in the research paper “Overheard Cell-Phone Conversations: When Less Speech is More Distracting” in the journal Psychological Science.

sofalize: A British marketing term created for people who prefer to stay home and communicate with others electronically.

mansplainer: A man compelled to explain or give an opinion about everything — especially to a woman. He speaks, often condescendingly, even if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about or even if it’s none of his business. Old term: a boor.

social graph: The structure of personal networks, who people know and how they know them, especially online. The term probably came from the internal lingo at Facebook, but it has spread widely among technology companies.

Politics

demon sheep: The political ad that captured critics everywhere for being “baaad,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. The Senate campaign of Carly Fiorina used and retired the ad, but other campaigns quickly created their own parodies.

mama grizzly: Coined by Sarah Palin, “mama grizzly” is the conservative woman’s battle cry, referring to mothers who ferociously defend their children or policies that benefit them. Often used with humor. In her new book, Ms. Palin wrote that it’s “bear propaganda” to insist that these bears are cute and cuddly.

poutrage: False outrage, usually put on for personal, financial or political gain.

refudiate: Another Palinism, this time a blend of refute and repudiate. Now used with an eyebrow raised.

shellacking: President Obama’s preferred way to describe what happened to Democrats in the midterm elections. Some might call it a knock-down punch.

Travel

cuddle class: Economy-class airplane seats that unfold into a bed or couch, as proposed by Air New Zealand, which calls them “Skycouch” seats.

porno scanner: A full-body security scanner that provoked outrage at airports and on blogs. Also called strip-search scanners and, more politely, by the Transportation Security Administration, advanced imaging technology.

enhanced pat-down: Frisking in which security workers slide the palms of their hands down a person’s body in a search for contraband or weapons.

Economy

double-dip recession: What economists talked about, and what every Obama administration official feared.

flash crash: The mystery of the financial markets this year: a May 6 market drop of almost 1,000 points.

peak water: Like “peak oil,” a theory that humans may have used the water easiest to obtain, and that scarcity may be on the rise.

QE2: Not the ocean liner, but the abbreviation for the Fed’s latest round of quantitative easing, its purchase of Treasury bonds. The term is usually used by critics derisively, and often in combination with another disaster, the sinking of the Titanic.

robo-signer and put-back: Even for people who never read their mortgage documents, these terms became inescapable as the foreclosure crisis hit. For the record, a robo-signer approves mortgage foreclosure notices without verifying its contents. A put-back is a mortgage sold back to an institutional seller because of problems with documentation.

The Oil Spill

containment dome: After the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, everyone became an engineer. The containment dome? Yes, that seals the leak.

junk shot: Plugging the leak with old tires, golf balls and other debris.

static kill: Sealing the well by pumping in a synthetic mud from the top.

bottom kill: The same technique, only many thousands of feet further down the well through a relief well. How we got this education: the 24-hour spillcam that broadcast the leak.

Things

inception: Popularized by the movie “Inception,” the word expanded from its usual meaning and now refers to ideas planted in the dreams of other people.

double rainbow: A phrase from the hugely popular YouTube video by Paul Vasquez, featuring his breathless amazement at the sight of two rainbows at Yosemite National Park. It spawned parodies, television commercials, dance mixes, Auto-Tune versions, parties and Halloween costumes, and is now used to refer — ironically and not — to something amazing.

E.V.: An electric vehicle. While the term has been around for decades, there are now more cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt, which makes it more than an environmentalist’s pipeless dream.

G.Z.M.: An acronym for ground zero mosque — the shorthand term for a controversial Muslim community center proposed near the site where the World Trade Center was attacked.

vuvuzela: The South African plastic trumpet that invaded, like locusts, the World Cup matches in Johannesburg. Television viewers, as well as participants, couldn’t escape the buzzzzz.

Weird: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, an acronym and criticism of the typical subjects in studies by behavioral scientists. That is, they tend to be the easiest to recruit: undergraduates.

Grant Barrett is a lexicographer specializing in slang and new words. He is a host of the public radio program “A Way With Words” and vice president of the American Dialect Society, devoted since 1889 to the study of English in North America.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 19, 2010, on page WK1 of the New York edition.