"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 07/12/17 (covfefe)

This year, on the long list of Oxford's Word of the Year was one word that is a very rare example of a new coinage that achieved huge currency everywhere without anyone have a clue what it meant. And it goes back to 30th May when late at night on social media President Trump made one of the most famous typos of all time. He did what he often does at odd hours - he sent a tweet. This one was a bit pizzling. It said, "Despite the constant negative press covfefe" And everyone thought, "Ok, five minutes later he'ii delete it, he'll realise". But he didn't. And it stayed there for a very long time. Ensue complete chaos as people were desperately trying to wonder what it meant, but to have a bit of fun with it as well, of course. Some people made political statements, so one cola company said, "We have no plans to add covfefe to our cola.If you want the taste of incopetence, there are other sodas available". And then there was also a train company that said, "Due to covfefe on the line, our trains will be running a bit late today". And so it went on, everyone having a bit of fun with it. Nobody knows what it means. His Chief of Staff said that it actually did mean something and the President knew exactly what it was. But who knows? And other people say that it played to the greatest strenght of the internet, which was given meaning to be meaningless. But whatever covfefe means, if it gets in the dictionary, I will be fascinated to know what its definition is. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 06/12/17 (cold feet)

I have cold feet for you today. Cold feet is when you have loss of nerve or a loss of confidence, which certanly you can't afford to have in the circus. No-one is quite sure what inspired the idiom but ther's lots and lots of theories, as always with quite tricky word origins. We do know it's been in use since the 19th century, so it's been around for a while, and there is probably, we think, a military history to it because combat soldiers whose feet were frozen or even numbed with fear, or eho got a trench foot due to horrible, horible conditions in the threnchesans unsutable footwear, were exempted from battle. And sometimes they were exempted from battle because, as it would say on the medical statement, they had cold feet. It's quite possible that over time that saying became associated with a loos of nerve and eventually cowardice. But there is another account that might explain why it became so popular, and that a novel in the 19th century by the German writer Fritz Reuter. And, loosing his money and his nerve in a high-stakes game of cards, one of the novel's characters apparently say he has cold feet, and he uses thet as an excuse to withdraw from the game. But all the other players are highly suspicious of this and think it has absolutely nothing to do with his retreat, he was simply fearful of losing the game, losing more money. And so, hence, he lost his nerve by saying he had cold feet. If you want a really prosaic theory it's simply that if you are absolutely paralysed with fear, the physical response is blood rushing from the extremities leaving you feet cold. So that's the third, a little bit technical, expldndtion. But I think the military one is probably the best. As I say, it goes back pre-20th, it was recorded qiuite a long time before that, but carried on through as an excuse for cowardice. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 05/12/17 (ghost words in dictionary)

I mentioned yesterday I was going to look at what lexicographers get up to. Not in their spare time but the mistakes sometines that happen or deliberate coinages, that sort of thing. Today I thought I would talk about mistakes because one question that we're often asked is, " Do you ever slip up and does the wrong word get into dictionary?" The answer is definitely yes. There are some quite famous examples to prove it. They're called ghost words, these kind of words, and either arrive through accident, so it can be a printer's error or it can be dictionary compiler's error. Or sometime they're deliberate. I'll give you a few examples of the errors. Sometimes the definition is just wonderful. If you look at Samuel Johnson's dictionary, he had "foupe" with the great definition "to drive with a sudden impetuosity". Which is just brilliant. Unfortunately he had misread a long S for an F and it was "soupe". But foupe went in the dictionary for quite a long time until we realised that he'd made a mistake. But possibly most famous lexicoghaphical error of the 20th century, and that was the appearance of the word "dord", which appeared in Webster's New International Dictionary. This is looking back to the 1930s. It was listed as a noun with pronunciation meaning density.In those days, dictionaries were comppiled not on computers but through index cards that would be filed in quite elaborate filing systems. This index card has got misplaced from the abbreviation section to the word section and it was supposed to read "D or d"as an abbreviation for density. But people read it all as one word, it became dord and again that survived in the dictionary for a very, very long time until someone spotted it. So the simple answer is we do mistakes. I/m not sure about any in here but I'm sure I'll come across one at some point. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 04/12/17 (phubbing)

I thought I'd talk over the next couple of days about the troubles that lexicographers sometimes get themselves in. One of the most common questions that you get asked if you work in dictionaries is, "How do I get my new word into the dictionary? You know, can I get it in? Here it is. It's brilliant." And the answer is always no. Of cource, if a word is used often enoughover a certain period of time, then it stands a good chance of going into the dictionary, but not until then, so we don't listen to petitions. But it turns out, if it's an inside job, you might get a word in. In 2013, a movement sprang up in Australia that carried the slogan, "Stop phubbing". Phabbing was a blend of phone snubbing, in other words, you are snubbing someone by just looking at your screen. The word just took off, literally. And it was only probably a couple of months later, after the advertising agency had really propelled this into the language, that Macquarie Dictionaries owned up and said it was all part of a dictionary campaign to update your dictionary and it was a completely made-up word by a group of linguists in an office somewhere and they had done what we always say is impossible. But eventually we all had to eat our words because if you look in the Oxford Dictionary here online, you will find that phubbing is in and it's one of the very, very few examples of a word that has been artificially created and has succesfully gone into the dictionary. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 01/12/17 (words from root "anthropos")

Today I/m going to unpick a set of words that all come from a common root and it's a beutiful root, it's Greek, anthropos, which mean humankind so man, woman, a human being and it turns out it's the mother of a very large family of words in Ehglish. The most obvious one probably is anthropology which is, of course, the science of human beings, so it's a study of its customs, their beliefs and their physical characteristics, but that's not the only one, by any means. For example, if we assign human emotions and human attributes to animals or to inanimate objects, we're anthropomorphising them. Cartoons like Finding Nemo, Jungle Book, etc, do this all the time aut also in English and language when we talk about the hands of the time or the eye of the storm, that's what we're doing. We're anthropomorphising. There's also a great term, resistentialism, which is a much newer coinage and that's the belief that inanimate objects really have it in you so that if you toast lands butter down, which it always does, that is resistentialism, or if you bump into a sofa, it's the sofa fault, etc. Anyway, that's nothing to do with mankind, I just like that word. Anthropocentric means centring on human beings so that's the belief that human and humanity stands at the centre of everything, and everything revolves around us. But finaly we come to misanthrope, and a misanthrope again has that anthropos within it, the mankind, and it also has the Greek word for hate, miseo, so, a misanthrope, really, is a cynical, unfortunate, absolute hater of humankind. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 30/11/17 (Dutch words: boss, snoop, booze, brandy, gin, cruise, yacht, cookie, bumpkin)

I talked quite recently about enmity between the English and the Dutch, which has resulted in all sorts of rather unflattering idioms to do with the Dutch, including Dutch courage. But, in fact, we do owe an awful lot to the Dutch in a good way, because they gave us so many words that have come into our language and which have lost their Dutch ancestry, mostly because of the way we pronounce them. So, just to give you a bit of  an example, if I asked you, "Is your boss a bit gruff?" Maybe he is a bit prone to snooping. Or you might to go for a booze cruise on his yacht. That contain at least half a dozen words that came over from the Netherlands. The boss of all Dutch words probably is the boss, it's from their word baas, meaning master. It travelled into the USA at the beginning of the 19th century, and it was very much restricted to workmen's slang, so it wasn't used at all in the current, modern context until quite recently. But if he's addicted to snooping, he's not actually spying, as we might thing today. The original meaning of snoop, from the Dutch snoepen, was to eat on the sly by sneaking bits of food out and eating them when no-one was looking. Something kids like to do all the time. I mentioned booze - very, very much a Dutch word, where it meant to drink to excess. It was spelt rather differently, as you might imagine. And you booze of chioce might be brandy, that was originally brandewine from the Dutch brandewijn, which was burnt wine. Burning, because when you burn the alcohol off, and condences back as brandy, basically. Some strong alcohol. Gin is flavoured with juniper berries, and it was traditionally made in the Netherlands. So we have them to thank for our gin and tonics as well. In the early 18th century, it was spelt genever. To do eith juniper. But because people associated this eith the Swiss city, it was colled Holland's genever instead. So, for a long time, if you wnted a gin and tonic, you eould ask for Holland's and tonic. Many, many words to do with the sea and sailing - perhaps because all the Dutch wars that went on on the sea - travelled across the North Sea to Britain. I mentioned cruise, that comes from their word to cross. And a jaghtschip as a fast pirate ship, originally, and we get yacht from there. And finally, worda for items of food. You might think that a cookie is quintessencially American, but, in fact, it started off as a Dutch koekje, which was a little cake. And that's how it travelled into English originally, before it became biscuit that we know today.  Cabbage salad, coleslaw of course, and gherkin also. But probably my favourite is a bumpkin, because in Dutch, a boomken is a little tree or a little barrel, and either way, it began as an insult for a short, stout, rather dumpy man. 

"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 29/11/17 (libel, pamphlet)

Two book-related words today. I'm going to start with something you really don't want in your life, that's libel in any kind. That is a written defamatory statement about you or information about you, as opposed to slander, which is always spoken. Libel goes back to the Latin "libellus", which meant a little book. "Liber" was a book, it gave us library, too. That just what it was originally. It was a very short essey or a treatise on some praticular subject, but it move onto encompass a leaflet or a pamphlet that was a circulated to lots and lots of people. Because of political pressures of the day, very often they would contain quite vehement and agressive attacks on the government and they were often defamatory. So defamatory in fact, that that's where we got, from libellus, that little book, the idea of libel. I mentioned a pamphlet that was distributed around, and I love the story of pamphlet, because it's so far removed from the meaning it has today. Not all of us will appreciate the pamphlets popping through our letterebox most days, but it originated in the late 1300s, it's very, very old. It meant again a small treatise or another work, consisting of pages without covers. But its origin is quite wonderful. It comes from Pamphilet, which was a French title of a completely anonymus but extremely popular 12th-century comic love poem. It was written in Latin - Pamphilus, seu de Amore, or Pamphilus on love. Pamphilus was the name of the hero, who got his name from Pamphilus, maning "beloved by all" in Greek. Don't quite know the subject of the poem, but I do know it was insredibly popular. Pamphilus then produced Pamphilet, a little edition of Pamphilus, if you like. As I say, it was so popular, it was widely copied and passed around from person to person in a form of a very thin leaflet. So from that hero of an extremely popular love poem, we get a very prosaic word pamphlet today.