Tag Archives: word tasting notes

swive

Posted on April 7, 2015 | 6 comments

Don’t ask me why, but yesterday I had reason to type swive into my iPhone. Now, iPhones have (as you may know) an autocorrect feature that makes up for the general sloppiness of typing on its small touch-screen keyboard; if you didn’t type a word it recognizes, it guesses what word you really wanted to type. For swive it reckoned I really wanted sauce. Hmm…

What is swive? It has that swooshing sw onset… Is it related to swivel? Is it something like swinging? Is it something swine might do? Is there a connection to swinge? Can we make anything of the fact that it sounds like part of housewives?

Well… Yes; In a manner of speaking; Indeed; If you stretch it; and Of course we can, where do you think you are?

One at a time, now. What is swive? It’s a word descended from Old English swifan ‘move in a course, sweep’. This verb is also the source of the noun swivel, something that turns or swings freely from a fixed point, whence also the verb swivel. But swive doesn’t mean ‘swing’ like that. No, it has taken on another meaning. I can think of a similar word that has taken on the same meaning for a second sense: screw. However, while we still use screw in a literal mechanical sense, swive is only ever used (inasmuch as it is used at all) to refer to the act of copulation.

So is swiving like swinging? Well, if you’re a swinger, you may find yourself swiving – other people’s wives or husbands. And, obviously (to address the next question), swine do it, just like birds, bees, and fleas (Ella Fitzgerald tells us that the educated fleas fall in love, but evidence suggests that the uneducated ones at least swive lovelessly).

Is there a connection to swinge? Not an etymological one. Swinge means ‘beat, hit, strike’; there are some slang terms for coitus that avail themselves of this kind of imagery (the verbs boink and bang; the – odious to me – slang expression I’d hit that). Frankly, I’d rather keep the swiving and the swingeing in separate spheres.

Obviously swive is not etymologically related to housewives. But I’m told that there is a “reality TV” franchise, Real Housewives of [fill in name of town here], that sounds like it has quite a focus on swiving – these how-swives certainly know how to swive, at least. And that puts me in mind of a joke. Four women who have just met are talking about themselves. The first says, “I’m a YUPpie – you know, Young Urban Professional.” The second says “We’re DINKs – you know, Double Income, No Kids.” The third giggles and says, “I’m a DILDO – you know, Double Income, Little Dog Owner.” The fourth pours herself more wine and says, “I’m a WIFE – you know, Wash, Iron, F—, Et cetera.”*

Saucy enough?

*Apologies for the censored word, but I know some of my readers would be unduly distracted by the sight of it. Also: In real life, wife comes from Old English wif, ‘woman’, and is not derived from an acronym. Just in case there was any question.

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scrute

Posted on April 6, 2015 | 4 comments

Oh, you sad scraper, scruting some screed scribbled by a scruffy scribe, be it scrubbed on your screen or scrawled in scrimped script on a scroll, or scratched like scrimshaw: so much lexical scree to scramble through, you could just screech. Can a scrupulous scrutator scrounge some scrap of sense from it, or should you just tell the scoundrel to scrute themself?

Scrute? And why not? We have scrutiny and scrutineer and scrutinize, with that in in, but we also have scrutate, and we have inscrutable and also (yes) scrutable. And they all trace back to Latin scrutari ‘examine, scrutinize’. It, in turn, apparently comes from scruta ‘old or broken stuff, trash, frippery, trumpery’ (per OED). Which means that the source sense of scrutiny and all the other scrut words is rag-picking. Digging through the detritus, scraping and scrabbling in the scraps and scree. Scruting.

And yes, scrute is in the dictionary. OK, OK, it’s in the OED, marked with an obelisk, attested with a single citation from 1536. But look – search it in Google Books or where you will – it does get used. True, it is often referring back, ostensibly wittily, to inscrutable, but that doesn’t revoke its word status. And yes, many of the usages you will find are French – scruter is a French word meaning (yes) ‘scrutinize’, so je scrute, tu scrutes, il scrute, elle scrute, nous scrutons, vous scrutez, ils scrutent. But so what? It is also used in English.

It’s a nice, grabby, short word. It has the same scr onset, which shows up on words to do with contracting, grasping, detritus, and writing (among others); it’s a multivalent phonaestheme. The ute gives a rhyme with loot, boot, chute, and various others, but here its high tight round back sound works nicely with the claws and drawstrings of scr. Some speakers may even hear a couple of naughty echoes. It sticks nicely in the mind.

Scrute the record all you want; screw your perspicacity to the sticking point. The word, whether it be backformation or scrupulous Latinate derivation, is out there, and it is clear and sensible and, at least for the moment, a bit brisk and witty. If we prefer the cogent, surely a shorter form is superior. If you insist that we must instead say scrutinize, I invite you to go scrute yourself and your assumptions.

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moreso

Posted on April 5, 2015 | 1 comment

This word is a lexical morceau that, it turns out, is not to everyone’s taste. There are some who believe that it should be – must only ever be – two words, and that moreso is like a miscegenation from the Island of Dr. Moreau. They are prone to making martial morsures into those who leave out that little space. They are peeved like those incensed by incent, or even moreso.

As witness I present a tweet I saw last fall, twotten by someone I will leave unidentified so as not to seem personal about it:

It seems like one would have to have read very little over a lifetime to think that “more so” was one word…

It occurs to me that the more one reads, the more likely one is to encounter variant forms. And since English speakers will often infer that odd variants we see must be correct (unless someone tells us otherwise), I believe that a person who thinks there is a word moreso may well have read quite a bit.

It is true, certainly, that more so exists much more commonly as two words, and that the one-word moreso style seems to have appeared mainly in the US and mainly in the last century or less. Nonetheless, it is used, and sometimes by quite literate people in respected publications; moreover, it can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary (as a “chiefly U.S.” variant of more so), though not all other dictionaries include it.

Now, insofar as it is just more so without a space, is there a case to be made for it at all? We can see why a person may incline to make it one word: we have words such as moreover and insofar, so it wouldn’t be the first agglutination of that sort; also, there is a particular pattern match with also (the al being the same as in words such as already and alright); and this parallelist tendency is abetted by the fact that the so is unstressed.

Now, with already and alright, we can see that all ready and all right can exist as forms with double stress and a different sense. Can more so exist with double stress and a different sense? I can imagine an uncommon instance where so is being used in conjunction with an indicating gesture – “Do you like my hair more so, or more so?” For the most part, though, it is a compound said always with one stress – like how North Americans say ice cream, only moreso.

A compound! Yes, more so is really an open compound, and moreso is the same compound just closed up. It would thus seem like the natural end condition for more so to merge into moreso. Mind you, we still don’t write icecream – well, most of us don’t, anyway. But compounds do close up in many cases. What keeps them from closing up? Tradition… and clarity.

And clarity may yet come into play here. As another Twitterer (who I will also not name, in this case just to be consistent) twet:

Whenever I see someone spell “more so” as one word, I assume it’s Spanish and pronounce it mo-RAY-so.

Indeed, the biggest obstacle to the ultimate supervenience of moreso may be not traditionalists (obstacles though they can be) but English spelling. It runs into the same kind of problem as coworker, which can look distractingly like it should be “cow orker.” Mind you, I would not say that moreso has the problem quite as much so – it is like coworker, yes, but surely less so. Still, combine that with tradition and the lack of other matching forms in its particular set (asmuchso, lessso) and it will be worth watching to see whether moreso can prevail.

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highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow

Posted on April 1, 2015 | 2 comments

My tastes are broad. I appreciate highbrow things such as modern art, classical music (but more so medieval music and 20th-century composers), and scholarly research – all those things that are limned in sesquipedalian disquisitions – but I also appreciate lowbrow things such as naughty jokes, country-style cooking, and the occasional escapist rubbish movie, all those things that are best talked about in plain, plain, plain English. And I do not shun middlebrow things either – the ten thousand daily topics covered in news and conversation, the easy entertainments such as club music, escapes to Disney World and cruise ships, such like… just as long as I’m not stuck in crowds for too long.

Do my tastes make you raise your eyebrows in surprise or an arch look? Or lower them in a glower or scowl or frown? Or do your brows stay in default position, altogether unsurprised?

And what about the words highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow?

Did you know that they don’t refer to what you’re doing with your eyebrows?

Nope, they come from 19th-century ideas about the size and shape of the head and its relation to intelligence. People – notably explorers and scientists, but not just them – looked at the skulls of various apes and compared them to human heads. They concluded that the difference in skull shape was an index of level of intelligence, not just between species but within species. A high brow on a man was considered an indicator of superior intelligence; a lower one, and flatter forehead and so on, was considered an indicator of lesser wit and a more bestial nature. (However, too high a brow on a woman was considered less attractive. Hmm.) This was also generalized across races, going by stereotypes.

Don’t even bother acting like you might be surprised by this. That’s how things went in the 19th century: the analytical urge was pressed into service of justifying prejudices and fortifying entrenched power. That still happens, of course, but these days it’s not supposed to happen. (Do you raise an eyebrow?)

All that said, though, the word has acquired different tinges and assumptions and no longer carries, at least for most speakers, implications about the relation of head shape to intelligence. If you wish to object to the use of these words on the basis of their history, it’s understandable, since it is now lodged in your mind, but don’t forget about bulldoze.

Anyway, low-browed as meaning ‘unintelligent, bestial’ actually dates back all the way to the 18th century – those 19th-century ideas didn’t come from nowhere; the first noted scientists to associate skull size with intelligence lived in the 18th century, and it’s not likely that no one had had the thought before. High-browed meaning ‘intelligent, cultivated’ shows up in the 1870s. About 10 years later, highbrow as an adjective shows up, meaning ‘intellectual, cultured’; another 10 years, right around the turn of the century, and it’s also a noun – some highbrow undoubtedly thought of that one. Lowbrow as a single-word adjective and noun showed up at about the same time.

Middlebrow took another quarter of a century to show up. And did it really mean a happy medium? Of course not. Even many middle-class people look down on middle-class things. Mediocre is an insult. Nobody wants the average, even though (obviously) not everyone can have everything above average. (See Lake Wobegon Effect.) Middlebrow refers to the unambitious contented cattle of common culture. Not high enough to be highbrow, but lacking the supposed fun and honesty of the lowbrow. Neither hot nor cold but lukewarm, and thus to be spat out. And yet somehow ubiquitous.

There is an exception. If you’re talking about different levels of usage of English – not levels of correctness but levels of formality and abstraction and detachment – you can use the three levels more ingenuously. They are relative, after all. A paper I just read by Jean Ure (“Introduction: approaches to the study of register range,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 35 (1982): 5–24) cites R.D. Huddleston et al. (1968) for this distinction:

Specialized register can be classified in English on two dimensions: kind and degree of specialization. For degree of specialization we have the three-point scale recognized by Huddleston…, for which he uses the term ‘brow’: ‘highbrow’, ‘middlebrow’, and ‘lowbrow’, corresponding, in the printed medium, to research articles, university textbooks, and articles for the educated nonspecialist.

Oh, sorry, I forgot to tell you not to take a drink while reading that. Go clean off your screen now if you must. Yes, that’s right: to the truly highbrow, articles for educated audiences are “lowbrow.” What you’re reading right now, right here, on this blog? Lowbrow.

Oh, stop arching your eyebrows so much. It’s unbecoming. Supposedly.

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limn

Posted on March 31, 2015 | 4 comments

Limn? Damn! How are we to say this word? And why does it have that formn? It looks all folded up, like a stack of sheets turned on its side, or perhaps a shelf of library books. Can we illuminate this a bit? Has it been milled down to minimal elements from some larger animal, or has it grown an extra limb? Are we seeing a liminal word, or is this lexical sediment?

To start with: You don’t say the n. It’s just there for looks. This word is pronounced the same as limb, which may be one reason it’s not used much anymore.

Is it related to limen and liminal, those words relating to thresholds (threshold, by the way, is a word that compensates for silent letters by having a sound that is not written in – the phantom second h, eliminated or illuminated in the limen)? No, it is not, even though it has so many sounds in common. And eliminate? That’s another threshold word – the e means ‘out’ or ‘from’; thus, ‘toss over the threshold’.

Is it related to limb? No, and they come to their parsley consonants from opposite directions (meeting on the threshold, perhaps?). The word limb meaning ‘arm, leg, tree branch’ comes from an old Germanic word lim. It just happened that there was also a Latin word limbus meaning ‘rim’ that wore down to limb meaning ‘edge of a disc (e.g., moon, sun, planet)’ or ‘expanded part of a leaf, petal, or sepal’ (as per Collins). Most likely this second limb led to the grafting of the b onto lim, because we are drawn to unphonetic orthography as moths are drawn to light.

Which is not to say that these odd spellings illuminate! No, but the n and b are in their way like illuminations: ornamental illustrations added to manuscripts, as for instance ornate capital letters. One might even call them visual hymns. It just happens that they don’t cast much light. But in the case of limn there is a dimn – sorry, dim – glow. When you lit up a manuscript with these illuminations, you could be said (in former usage) to lumine it. You make it luminous! But as candles burn down, so too do pronunciations wear down, and the spelling is trimned. I mean trimmed. So lumine became limn. And it carried the illustrative sense, coming to mean ‘depict, paint a picture, portray’.

Given the sound, one may imagine that it has to do with drawing lines or with laminating. But those words, too, are unrelated. It is simply a word for ‘light’ that has been lightened.

Its semantic emanations are dimned; it is now mainly a word used vaguely by pretentious scribblers to mean ‘drawn, painted, depicted’. It may be a light word, but it carries the weightiness of that excrescent consonant, so those who fancy their own scribery are drawn as a moth to the inevitable luminescent silent n.

Thanks to Ron Callahan for suggesting this word.

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lapsonym

Posted on March 30, 2015 | 4 comments

Kathryn Schulz, @kathrynschulz, tweeted on March 10, “Making up a word because I need it: lapsonym — a word whose meaning you forget no matter how many times you look it up.” She added that her lapsonym is nugatory. It is amusingly ironic that one of the meanings of nugatory is ‘useless, futile’. (The more common meaning, inasmuch as there is one, is ‘of little or no value or importance; trifling’ – and this is how I remember it: nugatory sounds like nougat, which, like trifle, is a dessert – but it’s a rather little one generally, just a nugget. Don’t confuse it with negatory, which is army jargon for ‘no’.)

Is the word well formed?

Well, we know that the -onym is an acceptable and productive combining form for a word, as in eponym, toponym, pseudonym, synonym, antonym, and so on. It has the same Greek root ὄνομα as onomastics and traces to a Proto-Indo-European root *nomn-, which has descendants in pretty much every Indo-European language, from Gaelic ainm to Czech jméno and, of course, all those words that sound more or less like name.

And the lapso- part? I will not make irrelevant mention of Lhasa apso, a breed of dog. No, lapso- is from the Latin noun lapsus, ‘slip, fall’, which shows up in lapse, as in mental lapse. If a word keeps slipping your mind, then of course it’s a lapsonym. Do you object to mixing Latin and Greek? It’s actually quite common in English; such words may be called macaronic, though they make me think as much of mixing meats in meatballs, which can produce very good results. (Also, macaroni these days in Anglo culture doesn’t have a huge mix of different ingredients, as it did in an earlier time and place.)

So this is a word that seems intuitively as well as etymologically to match its sense reasonably well, and it’s a word that’s been needed. (There’s a word for ‘a word that’s been needed’ – I’m trying to remember what it is. Speaking of which, we also need a word for a word you can remember the meaning of but can’t remember the actual word for. I hereby appoint myself neologist for that: I dub it lethonym, from the Greek root λήθη ‘forgetfulness’. Schulz has also invented one for a word that you can’t remember how to spell: orthonym. I think its etymological appropriateness is less secure; it seems to be a clipping from orthography, but ortho– normally means ‘right, correct’.)

And what is my personal lapsonym? My personal lapsonym is also, at least at this moment, a lethonym. That is to say, I am with @JosephHucks, who replied to Kathryn Schulz, “I can’t remember mine.”

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bucolic

Posted on March 29, 2015 | Leave a comment

I grew up in bucolic surroundings. But until sometime in my adolescence, I wouldn’t have thought so. Not because I didn’t think where I lived was rural, pastoral, etc. – no, that much was obvious. It was just that before I learned what the word bucolic meant, it would not have seemed to me to mean what it meant.

Just look at it: does it really seem so pastoral? I mean, I suppose you might think of Buford, a stereotypical rural hick name, or a calf with colic, or some young buck, or a cow lick, or something like that. But you could as easily think of a baby with colic, or something abusive or belligerent, or for that matter osso buco, or a belt buckle, or a back alley, or even Lauren Bacall…

As @wettbutt on Twitter put it, “bucolic is the most thesaurus outing adjective ever. it doesnt sound like what it is at all..it’s a bullshit trap word crafted by pranksters.” In response, @GalaxyDogg said, “it always makes me think of uncontrollable vomiting for some reason”; @Austin_H2O said, “sounds like a disease for rich babies”; and @Krinkle8 caught another overtone with “bucolic plague.” Not everyone agreed, of course. But you can see the problem.

The big problem is that when you encounter an uncommon word, you probably hope it will at least sound appropriate to the sense. You may like the crispness of crepuscular, but it hardly sounds like twilight, does it? You may hesitate to use pulchritude because it sounds more appropriate to ugliness than to beauty. Dazzling, brilliant things may be called fulgurant or coruscating, but those words, gah, hardly produce the best effect! And so on. There’s a sort of phonetic “You don’t belong around here.”

So why do we have this word? Well, we got it from the Romans, and the Romans got it from the Greeks. The Greeks had a word for ‘cow’, βοῦς bous, which comes through Latin to us in words such as bovine. They also had a word for ‘watcher’ or ‘keeper’, κολος kolos. From those they got βουκόλος, ‘cowherd’, and the adjectival form of that was βουκολικός, which became Latin bucolicus. I’m sure it all sounded perfectly reasonable to them.

In fact, if we called a cowboy a bucolos, I doubt too many people would find that a phonetically inappropriate word. The sounds are pretty similar between cowboy and bucolos (more so with the plural bucoloi – though if we went with the Latinized version it would be bucolus and bucoli), and cowboys do often wear belt buckles, after all.

But bucolic has not transferred to the cowherders in English. Nope, it’s transferred to the rural setting. Places where cows are herded. The opposite of urbanity. And it partakes in our stereotypes and ideals: these rural places are sleepy, quiet, calm, laconic (there’s another sound match), maybe a bit backwards (hmm… back, buc). Happily isolated. People used to write bucolic poetry, even.

Well, if you go somewhere bucolic right now, in the early spring, you may hear a quiet countryscape, the wind, some tractors, a few cows, and some tweeting. But the tweeting may not agree with your choice of adjective…

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isopropyl

Posted on March 28, 2015 | 2 comments

This word has a sharp smell for me. A smell of sharpness, in fact.

Isopropyl alcohol isn’t the only isopropyl, but it’s the one I know. It’s common enough. We keep a squirt bottle of it in the kitchen for disinfecting surfaces: to disinfect blood and formica on the counter, or the same for fat and wood on the cutting board. My wife uses it more often than I do. When she’s used it, I can smell it quite a distance away.

And when I smell it, the inside of my elbow prickles. Or, well, I have a memory of sharp sensations on the inside of my elbow.

Isopropyl alcohol, for me, has its strongest association as the disinfectant used on an area of skin about to be punctured with a needle. I don’t know if it’s what is always used now, but I do believe it was when I was young.

But is isopropyl really a sharp word, memories aside?

Its crispest sounds are /p/ and /p/, which are more flat-blade consonants to my mind, not acute like /t/. It starts with /s/, which may seem cold like alcohol, or hiss like a snake with needle fangs, but is not really sharp per se. The other two consonants are liquids, /l/ and /r/. The blood flowing out to fill the syringe or sample bottle, or the isopropyl alcohol? Maybe a bit of a stretch. And the echoes of the word are more like ice (cold like alcohol) and propeller and perhaps even eyes and popular.

And the etymology? It’s the same for fat and wood.

What? Is that all Greek to you? Well, it is all Greek.

The same: iso, from ἴσος ‘equal’. Chemically it has two of the same CH3 group.

For fat: pro, from προ ‘for’, and pion, from πίων ‘fat’, but the latter trimmed down in this form to just p, just as we trim the fat off the meat. Propionic acid is the first in the fatty acid series, and gives its name to isopropyl.

Wood: yl, from ὕλη ‘wood, material’ (see ylem). In chemical names it denotes a basic chemical formed of two or three elements.

So, etymologically, this word has less to do with the sharp feeling I experienced due to needles in the arm, and more to do with the sharp sensation the meat on the cutting board probably doesn’t feel, but would if it could. And the sharp smell that comes after, if my wife decides the cutting board needs it. (I just use soap and water.)

And chemically? Isopropyl alcohol is C3H7OH, or CH3CHOHCH3 – which looks a bit like an ancient Aztec word. Or perhaps the sound I made when I was a child having a needle stuck in my arm.

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squicky

Posted on March 26, 2015 | Leave a comment

This is an adjective. Just looking at it by itself, do you have a sense of what it means?

Don’t bother looking in your dictionary. It’s not in Oxford, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Dictionary.com… Too recent. But people use it. More often than many words that are in those dictionaries.

What does it have a taste of? Sick, quick, squeaky, squawk, slick, ick…

Let’s have some context: “I can’t look at dermatology journals. The pictures make me squicky.” “Ted Cruz’s smile is, um, squicky.”

How about a bit of etymology?

Yes, there is etymology for this. The bad news is that it’s just that squicky comes from the word squick, which can be a verb or a noun: “That picture gives me squick.” “That picture is a squick.” “That picture squicks me.” “I squick at that picture.” As you can see, both causative and resultative senses are in use.

The exact sources of squick are subject to some speculation. A sound effect? A portmanteau of squeamish and ick? Perhaps just a word that sounded right for the situation and was used in a context where it caught on among a small group and gradually spread farther?

Either or both of the first two may be true, but that last one is pretty reliable. The word squick first showed up in some Usenet news groups around 1994 – possibly alt.sex.bondage, or possibly fanfiction, depending on whom you ask.

The word seems like a fairly impressionistic sound slap to express, in some self-consciously inventive way, the concept of ‘disgusting’ or ‘sickening’. But this is one instance of an impressionistic word where an explanation of the definition helps, because there is an important distinction between “that disgusts me” – or “that makes me sick” – and “I have an automatic queasy or repelled physical response to that”: the latter implies no moral judgment on the object.

And that’s the thing. If something squicks you, if it’s a squick, if it’s squicky and makes you feel squicky, if – in brief – it participates in a squickening, that means simply that it engenders a reflex. Imagine watching someone perform dental surgery: cutting and peeling away the gums, drilling into the – Stop? Yes. If you’re like me, dental surgery is a horrible squick. Writing that made me shudder. But it’s not morally repellant. Likewise, there are many activities and foods and so forth that some people enjoy that others find utterly squicky. But that doesn’t mean those others condemn it, or that the foods or activities are in any particular way worthy of condemnation. (They may be, but that’s a separate issue.)

How, if this word is not in the standard dictionaries, can I have all this information about it? It’s not because I did a lot of in-depth primary-source research. It’s because there are a couple of dictionaries that have it: Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary. They are crowd-sourced and much more responsive. They are not utterly reliable, of course. But you can get useful information and confirmation.

In particular, the most upvoted definition at Urban Dictionary for squick is a well-written one posted in 2004 by Ian Osmond. He notes the following: “Stating that something is ‘disgusting’ implies a judgement that it is bad or wrong. Stating that something ‘squicks you’ is merely an observation of your reaction to it, but does not imply a judgement that such a thing is universally wrong.” And he adds, “In general, distinguishing between ‘squick’ and ‘disgust’ is an important part of living in a tolerant society.” Many people, he contends, mistake squick for disgust and thereby condemn things as wrong on the basis of distaste.

Either ironically or appositely, people who mistake distaste for infallible moral judgement squick me a bit. But mainly they just irritate me. The most recent true intense squick reflex I’ve felt was when I made the mistake of doing a Google image search on impetigo. (Don’t. Just don’t. You know they always show the worst cases.)

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numpty, nudnik

Posted on March 18, 2015 | 10 comments

For once and for all, let’s stop using the term grammar Nazi.

The Nazis were not just people who got all up in your face about small things. Do I even need to tell you about them? Are you really OK with using Nazi as a synonym for meanie or taskmaster or martinet or pedant?

Sure, we need a term for people who can’t seem to resist being dicks about other people’s grammar. But I don’t think we need to call them grammar genocidal megalomaniacs. There’s a better term, much better, that was drawn to my attention by one of the language gang on Twitter, @mededitor, who tweeted a flow chart made by David Bradley: “A simple flowchart to avoid becoming a grammar numpty.”

Ah, yes, grammar numpty. As @mededitor explained, “‘Numpty’ is a UK pejorative, meaning chowderhead.” It’s actually a fairly new word; it seems to have started showing up in the last 30 years. It’s likely derived from numps, a much older word (around since the time of Shakespeare) also referring to a stupid, silly, foolish, or ineffectual person, and possibly formed from the name Humphrey; numpty is quite possibly modelled on Humpty-Dumpty (which may also come from Humphrey – way to Bogart that name), gaining effect from echoes of numbskull and dumb and the effect of the dull “uh” vowel and the soft nasal consonant. And, for the grammar pickers, an echo of “harrumph.” It can be a noun or an adjective.

I should say that David Bradley (who, by the way, is British) is not the first person to use grammar numpty. I found a tweet from last November, for instance, directed at the Twitter account of a company that sells grammar-checking software (a company that also published an appallingly stupid article supposedly “correcting” “mistakes” in a popular novel series – mainly presenting style choices as rules, and making some truly cack-handed recommendations – so I won’t be naming them); they picked on a headline with what was probably an intentional error for the sake of humour, and @onekind (who is Australian) tweeted at them, “IT’S A JOKE YOU GRAMMAR NUMPTIES”.

Now, admittedly, people who I may want to call grammar numpties (because they’re needlessly prickish about other people’s usage) might well feel inclined to call their targets grammar numpties, because it is somewhat subjective just who is a numpty. Therefore, I do have an alternate available for those who would like one: grammar nudnik.

I like the word nudnik because it’s more specific. It’s not like numpty, which just means that you think the person is obtuse. Nudnik refers to a pest. A person who is boring, a person who buttonholes you and tells you inane details at length, a person who picks at you incessantly. A person who is like slimy celery leaves clinging to your finger. It’s less goofy-sounding than numpty; it has that sharp prick of ik at the end, suitable for dickish behaviour. The u is as in noodle, not as in dump, so it’s more focused and tense (like a lurking version of needy), but at the same time it has the lowest resonances of any vowel (if you want to know more about those resonances, read “The world speaks in harmony”).

Where does nudnik come from? Yiddish. (And I do think I’d rather have a word from Yiddish than one – Nazi – naming the people who murdered millions of Yiddish speakers.) It comes from the verb nudyen ‘bore’ and traces ultimately to Proto-Slavic. Although it has (for us) an echo of rude, it doesn’t automatically connote rudeness, though it allows it. Mainly it just means the sort of person who soon has you thinking, “Will. You. Shut. Up.”

So you have a choice of two. When some twit starts picking at others on small points of grammar that he or she may or may not even be right about, you can call the twit a grammar numpty or a grammar nudnik. And you don’t need to use that other word at all.

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