Monthly Archives: May 2013

U-ie

Posted on May 3, 2013 | 2 comments

There are some colloquial words that you might say casually every so often for your entire life and never have a good idea of how to spell, even if you’re highly literate. Today’s word may be about the chiefest among them.

You may not even recognize it on sight. What is it? It’s a colloquial term for a U-turn, as seen in phrases such as He pulled a U-ie, He did a U-ie, He made a U-ie, et cetera. It simply takes the U of the usual term and adds the ie suffix, a diminutive or derivative suffix (as in wheelie, meaning to rear up a vehicle on its hind wheel(s)). The suffix is normally spelled ie, so that’s why I spell it that way here; you can also see the word as U-y. And also Uy and Uie, and the same with a lower-case u. And every single one of them looks like a Dutch family name.

Or the stage name of a Korean pop star. Well, that would be Uee or Uie. Or Yui. She acts, she sings, she looks very, very pretty. I suggest looking her up. Especially if you like pictures of pretty Korean pop stars.

The awkwardness of the spelling of this word is just what we get for having such a slippage between the spelling of words and how they are pronounced. If we wrote everything in the International Phonetic Alphabet to reflect how it’s said, this word would be /ju i/. But, then, if we did that, we wouldn’t call it that, because the turn is shaped like U, not like ju.

I hope that you don’t mind that I put serifs on that U. Older Editions of the Chicago Manual of style specified that, for instances such as T-shirt and U-turn, where the letter described the shape of something, serifs should not be used on the letter as it may carry an implication that somehow the course of action has little flares on the ends. I always found that fatuous. People are not that stupid, and for that matter no one expects a T-shirt to be shaped exactly like a T even sans serif. So more recently the advice has made a 180˚ turn and now it allows the shape-descriptive letter to stay in the same font as the other letters.

The turn is also shaped like how this word moves in your mouth, though. Say these letters a few times in a row: U E U E U E. See how at one point the tongue is constricted towards the front, then it pulls back as the lips round, then the lips pull wide and the tongue is forward again, and on it goes, back and front and back and front, every time a boomerang – a U-turn.

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mammothrept

Posted on May 2, 2013 | 1 comment

Visual: This word seems a strange syncretism: the smooth mass of mammo exploding into the ripped mess of thrept. It’s like a string of firecrackers half exploded. Smooth bumps to the left; torn thorns to the right. Overall, long.

In the mouth: There’s little depth to this word: the consonants are almost all on the lips, except for a trip of the tip of the tongue across the teeth and ridge. The vowels are towards the front, going no farther back than the neutral reduced vowel in the middle. The word starts off soft and humming but then, as if a snare has been tripped, turns to the voiceless. And while the first two syllables are simple consonant-vowel, the last is a thick cluster of four consonants nesting just one vowel.

Echoes: You can’t avoid the mammoth. But also think of mammal and mammogram. And then, at the other end of the size scale from a mammoth, you have thrip, along with trip and rep and ripped and stripped perhaps threat. And maybe even strep throat. I suppose if you think about it you could find stripling, but that’s faint at best (mama’s stripling? hmmm). The ending also makes me think of bankrupt.

Etymology: This comes from Greek μαμμόθρεπτος mammóthreptos ‘brought up by grandmother’ (‘grandmother’ being μάμμη), by way of Latin mammothreptus ‘kept at the breast too long’. It has no relation to mammoth, which comes, somewhat modified, from Russian.

Semantics: A mammothrept, in English, is a spoiled child, or someone of immature judgement. This word is a silver salver version of twerp or douchebag.

Overtones: This word is obviously a very erudite insult. The odds are quite good that your hearer will not know its meaning until you explain it, but as long as you say it with the right intonation and in the right context, the general sense is likely to be clear. It has a sound of a muttering and a spitting, and it has about that taste, too, but coming from not an urchin but a dowager duchess.

Where to find it: You’ll find it in a play by Ben Jonson and a novel by Patrick O’Brian, and not much in between. But once you show this word to your friends, you’re sure to see it here and there in their writings.

How to use it: This word isn’t like an ace in the card game of conversation. It’s like slapping down an odd stone as your bet – a stone that could be priceless or worthless, but no one at the table probably knows which. It’s a big woolly mammoth ripping through the grass of verbiage. Use it in writing when you know your readers will look it up. Use it in speech when you can say it with about the same sound and tone as “Mmm, I’m’a throw up.” Make sure you say it so that it clearly starts with a “mamma” and not a “mammoth.”

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