Category: Linguistics

Q: I was taught that the meaning of an idiom cannot be derived from the meaning of its words. For instance, “kick the bucket,” which refers to dying, not to kicking or buckets. But many expressions are called idioms even though they make some literal sense (“to keep an eye on,” for example). Doesn’t an idiom have to be nonliteral?

A: Your definition of “idiom” is a bit narrow. An idiomatic expression isn’t always nonliteral.

Broadly speaking, an idiom is simply a peculiarity of language. It’s an expression or some characteristic of speech that’s peculiar to a language, a region, a dialect, or a group of people.

For example an idiom can be, as you say, an expression that can’t be interpreted literally (as in “it’s raining cats and dogs,” or “he reached for the stars”).

But it could also be a speech form that’s grammatically unusual or that just doesn’t parse (“I could care less,” “that dress isn’t you”).

An idiom could be a specialized language or vocabulary used among a particular group of people—like doctors or journalists. Or it could be a particular regional or dialectal speech pattern.

And “idiom” is sometimes used in reference to artistic forms of expression (as in “the idiom of Greek Revival architecture” or “the idiom of Abstract Expressionism”).

The word “idiom” came into English in the 16th century from the French idiome, but its ultimate source is the Greek idioma, meaning a peculiarity or a peculiar phraseology. The root of the word is the Greek idios (one’s own).

In classical Latin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, idioma meant a “special term or phrase used by an individual or group.”

In post-classical Latin (from the 7th to 13th centuries), idioma came to mean a language, a peculiarity, a special property, a dialect, or a spoken form of language, the OED says.

When “idiom” first came into English, in 1573, it meant the individuality or character of a language.

But today when we use “idiom” in the linguistic sense, we generally mean (and here we’re quoting one OED definition) “a form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., used in a distinctive way in a particular language, dialect, or language variety.”

The dictionary’s first citation for the word used in this sense is from a sermon, delivered by John Donne sometime before 1631, that cites “amen” as an example of an idiom:

“There are certaine idioms, certaine formes of speech, certaine propositions, which the holy Ghost repeats severall times, upon several occasions in the Scriptures. … How often does our blessed Saviour repeat his Amen, Amen?” (We’ve expanded the  citation.)

Donne was right. “Amen” (which we’ve written about on our blog) is a pretty good example of a form of expression used in a distinct way.

The OED does include the more specific sense of “idiom” you’re asking about: “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words.”

In other words, the nonliteral truth!

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Q: Why do so many negative words begin with the prefix “re-”? For example: “reprehensible,” “reprove,” “reproach”?

A: Is there something evil lurking in the heart of the prefix “-re”? No, not really. And it doesn’t necessarily have the same meaning from word to word.

In Latin, the original sense of “re-” was “back” or “backwards,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

But in English, the OED adds, “in the large number of words in which it occurs it shows various shades of meaning.”

Here are those various senses, and you’ll notice some overlapping.

(1) Back from a point reached, or back to or towards a starting point. This meaning can be seen in “reproach” which in Anglo-Norman meant “to recall (something disagreeable to someone),” the OED says.

This sense is also in “reflect,” “reduce,” “recede,” “recur,” “refer,” “resilient,” “reluctant,” “refuge,” “retract,” “revoke,” “recall,” “resonate,” “repel,” “recuse,” “rescind,” “remove,” “respect” (literally, to look back), “remit” (to send back), and “reclaim.”

(2) Back to the original position. This sense is present in “restitution,” “receive,” “redeem,” and “resume.”

(3) Again or anew. This meaning is reflected in “recreate,” “renovate,” “reform,” “regenerate,” “retract,” and the many words that have to do with repetition (like “repeat,” “rearrange,” “reignite,” and many more).

(4) An undoing of some previous action (much like the negative prefix “un-”). Thus we have words like “resign,” “reveal,” “reprove” and “reprobate” (both of those last two are descended from the Latin reprobare, to reject or disapprove).

(5) Back in a place. This sense, the OED says, can be seen in words like “reprehend” (and “reprehensible”), “retain,” “relegate,” “refrain,” “reserve,” “remain,” “reside,” “relinquish,” and even “rest” (from the Latin restare).

As the OED points out, the meaning of “re-” isn’t always clearly defined, and in many cases new meanings have arisen and obscured the originals.

That’s only to be expected, because words with the “re-” prefix have been in English since the early 1200s. And words can undergo lots of changes in 800 years.

Some of the earliest “re-” prefixed words include “recluse” (adjective), “remission,” “recoil,” “record” (verb), “relic,” “relief,” “religion,” and “religious.”

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Q: We were driving in Arizona when disaster struck. The engine of our classic Porsche 356 (a k a Holly) blew up. No injuries to us but Holly’s engine was toast! Which brings us to our question: Have you done research on this use of “toast”?

A: Yikes! Good luck finding a new engine. The 356 is a real classic, Porsche’s first production automobile.

As for your question, we probably have the actor Bill Murray to thank for phrases like “You’re toast” or “Oh no, we’re toast!”

When the movie Ghostbusters (1984) was filmed, Murray slightly altered the wording of the script, which was written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.

Playing the role of the ghostbusting parapsychologist Dr. Peter Venkman, Murray delivers the line as he’s preparing to fire his laser-like weapon at an androgynous apparition.

The line as written: “I’m gonna turn this guy into toast.”

The line as ad-libbed by Murray: “All right, this chick is toast.”

All this is explained in a note in the Oxford English Dictionary, which says the use of “toast” to mean “a person or thing that is defunct, dead, finished, in serious trouble, etc.,” originated with the movie.

“A considerable amount of the dialogue is ad-libbed,” the OED says, and Murray’s “toast” ad-lib is probably responsible for “the proleptic construction which has gained particular currency.”

A “proleptic” construction refers to something that hasn’t happened yet. For example, a talkative hit man, before pulling the trigger, says, “You’re history.” Or, an angry teen-ager, before storming away, says, “I’m out of here.”

In our opinion, Murray’s alteration made all the difference. There’s a huge semantic gulf between “I’m gonna turn you into toast” and “You’re toast.”

The OED’s next example of “toast” used in Murray’s sense of the word is from a quotation in the Omaha World-Herald (1985): “Shake, Fedya … because you’re toast!”

Carl Hiaasen wrote in his novel Skin Tight (1989): “I’m calling my banker in the Caymans and having him read the balance in my account. If it’s not heavier by twenty-five, you’re toast.”

And the 1994 script for the movie Clueless, written by Amy Heckerling, has another example: “You get your report card?” … “Yeah, I’m toast, you’ll never see me out of the house again.”

The OED also has a pair of “toast” citations that we might call “non-proleptic,” merely meaning that someone or something is … well … history.

In this kind of usage the damage isn’t merely anticipated—it’s already done (like what happened to your car).

Here’s an example from a 1991 issue of Sports Illustrated: “Soon their relationship was toast.”

And here’s the other, from a 2002 article in Mojo, a British music magazine: “Brian at that time was basically a hermit and, to put it mildly, toast.”

[Update: For more on Bill Murray and the  “toast” quote, see our later post.]

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Q: I’ve been wondering about something I swear I learned as an undergrad (longer ago than I’d ever admit) in a development of the English language course. It was about a man who grew up thinking artificial snow was called “Archie Fisher snow.” As a boy in a small town, he’d misheard a reference to the snow in a Christmas display in Archie Fisher’s drugstore. I think this phenomenon has a name but I can’t remember it.

A: By chance, as we were researching another question, we recently happened upon the reference you mention. It’s described in The Origins and Development of the English Language, by Thomas Pyles & John Algeo.

The anecdote is told on page 280 in our copy of the book:

“As a child too young to read, one of the authors of this book misheard artificial snow as Archie Fisher snow, a plausible enough boner for one who lived in a town in which a prominent merchant was named Archie Fisher. In any case, Mr. Fisher displayed the stuff in his window, and for all an innocent child knew, he might even have invented it.”

The story is told in Chapter 11 (“New Words From Old”), in a section called “Blending Words.” This particular blend (Archie Fisher snow) is described in a subsection called “Folk Etymology.”

The authors write: “Folk etymology—the naive misunderstanding of a more or less esoteric word that makes it into something more familiar and hence seems to give it a new etymology, false though it be—is a minor kind of blending.”

Another example is given, in which dance students at an American university described a certain ballet jump as a “soda box.” Questioned by a visiting German teacher of dance, they insisted this was what it was called and even how it was spelled.

What they were referring to was the ballet term saut de Basque (Basque leap).

The authors describe another, and more widespread, misunderstanding in which the phrase “chest of drawers” is misheard as “Chester drawers.” This mistake, the authors note, has even appeared in furniture-store advertisements.

We can well believe it. As we’ve said before in our blog, we once spotted a newspaper ad for a sale on “Chip ’n’ Dale” furniture. The store’s ad manager confused “Chippendale” with Chip and Dale, the Disney cartoon chipmunks.

As we mentioned, the Pyles and Algeo book includes such usages among blends traceable to folk etymology, but most people would probably refer to them as malapropisms. A more recent, and more precise, term would be “eggcorns.”

We’ve discussed malapropisms and eggcorns several times on the blog, including postings in 2007 and 2010. A similar term, “mondegreens,” is usually applied to goofy mishearings of song lyrics or poems.

We can’t end this without mentioning an example of mangled usage that we heard about from a blog reader named Mark. When he played hide-and-seek with his little nephew, the boy would say: “Uncle Mark … get set … go!”

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Q: I believe you can “read” an audio book, but some people insist you can only “listen” to it. They feel that engaging in a book with your ears is inferior to using your eyes. What’s your take on this? And what about books written in Braille?

A: In our opinion, reading and listening are different experiences, though we don’t necessarily see one as better than the other.

And by reading, we mean interpreting a written text, whether with the eyes or the fingertips.

As you know, much of the ancient literature that’s survived into modern times was preserved in people’s memories and recited to generations of listeners, until at last it was committed to writing.

But the listener and the reader have different ways of engaging with that literature. Listening can be profoundly absorbing, of course. But it’s absorbing in a way that’s different from reading. 

Listening requires two people—one to recite and one to listen. Reading is more solitary; the only “voice” you hear is your own.

In an audio recording, for example, the voice (often an actor or other professional) might supply interpretive nuances that the reader of a book would have to supply for himself.

That’s what we mean by different ways of engaging. And that’s why we would have to say that one doesn’t read an audio book—one listens to it.

Interestingly, the verb “read” meant a lot more than to take in written words when it showed up in the early days of English.

In Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, “read” also meant to consider, interpret, discern, guess, discover, and so on, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In other words, the process of reading has always meant something more than merely taking in words with our eyes.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) points out that English is “one of the few western European languages that does not derive its verb for ‘to read’ from Latin legere.”

In an etymology note, the dictionary says the Latin verb for read gave the Italians leggere, the French lire, the Germans lesen, and so on.

“Read comes from the Old English verb raedan, ‘to advise, interpret (something difficult), interpret (something written), read,’ ” American Heritage adds.

It seems that Anglo-Saxons also felt that reading was a more involved way of taking in information than listening.

In saying this, we’re not making a value judgment about reading versus listening. We’re merely recognizing that the experiences aren’t the same.

So how do the two of us experience them?

Well, we find ourselves more engaged by words on the page than by words in an audio book.

After all, we can listen to an audio book while driving, though perhaps the driving should get all of our concentration!

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Q: Your True Grit posting reminded me of the old TV show “I Dream of Jeannie.” As a child, I wondered why Jeannie never used contractions. Were they considered a no-no in ancient Persia? I also wonder why some languages, like English, overflow with contractions while others, like French, have hardly any.

A: In the Sept. 18, 1965, pilot episode of the TV show, Jeannie (a genie trapped in a bottle for 2,000 years) supposedly spoke Persian when she was released.

We don’t know whether contractions were frowned on in Old Persian, an ancient language that evolved 2,500 years ago from the Indo-Iranian branch of Proto-Indo-European.

And we suspect that the scriptwriters who dreamed up “I Dream of Jeannie” knew even less than we do about the mechanics of the language revealed in the surviving Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions.

Our guess is that TV writers of the ’60s assumed that any archaic language must have been stiff and formal, hence lacking in contractions.

So Jeannie’s speech was made to sound like their idea of antiquated.

Although we can’t speak for Old Persian, we do know that Old English was full of contractions.

By the way, French actually has many contractions, which, unlike those in English, are required instead of optional.

Examples include contractions with articles (as in l’homme); pronouns (as in je t’aime, j’ai, il s’appelle); with the conjunctions puisque and lorsque (puisqu’on, lorsqu’il); with the prepositions à and de (du, d’, aux, etc.); with single-consonant words ending in vowels (qu’il, n’est pas, s’ils, c’est); and in miscellaneous constructions like aujourd’hui, quelqu’un, and jusqu’alors.

In German, prepositions and articles are contracted without apostrophes, as in ums for um das (“around the”). Then there’s the common German greeting Wie geht’s (“How goes it?”). This is a contracted way of saying “How goes it for you?”—Wie geht es dir? (informal) or Wie geht es Ihnen? (formal).

We aren’t scholars of languages, but we do know that some languages lend themselves to contracting more than others do. This sounds like a good idea for a master’s thesis in linguistics, no?

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Q: So if “junk” can mean male genitalia, how did “junk in the trunk” come to mean rear end, particularly a female rear end? In other words, what is the difference between junk male and junk female?

A: Enough already! We’ve written blog items about the use of “junk” in reference to genitalia, food, and other things. Now, female rear ends? OK, OK, we’ll do one more.

The new three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang describes this use of “junk in the trunk” as black American English for large buttocks.

The dictionary, by Jonathon Green, says the word “trunk” here is a reference to the rear or “boot” of a car.

The slang dictionary lists two Internet citations, including this 2000 example from the Ebonics Primer: “Hey you see dat big booty sista right there? She got junk in the trunk!”

Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, which is edited by Green, also describes it as US black English, and says the usage originated in the 1990s.

However, the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, edited by Jonathan E. Lighter, doesn’t indicate a racial origin of the expression.

The earliest citation for the usage in Random House is from a 1995 broadcast of the The Jerry Springer Show: “I’ve got too much junk in my trunk [woman shakes her very large buttocks].”

The next two citations are from the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless, including this one from a 1997 broadcast: “That girl’s got some junk in the trunk.”

Hmm. Maybe it’s time for us to go on a diet. 

Update: A couple of hours after we posted this entry, the linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer sent us this comment:

“I know you don’t want to hear any more ‘junk’ talk, but I thought you’d like to know that the callipygian sense goes back to the 1993 hiphop song ‘Dazzey Duks’ by Duice. You can find some discussion on Arnold Zwicky’s blog, in a post following up on my On Language column about the other kind of ‘junk.’

“(By the way, I got dozens of emails from that column asking me why I didn’t talk about ‘junk in the trunk’!)”

Thank you, Ben. And we’d like to say here that we were sorry to see the New York Times Magazine drop the On Language column. We’ll miss it—and you. 

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Q: Is there a term for those strings of symbols, like %&*&##@, used in comic books to represent obscenities?

A: Not only is there a term for those thingies, there are two terms: “grawlix,” coined 47 years ago by the cartoonist Mort Walker, and “obscenicon,” introduced in 2006 by the linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer.

We prefer “grawlix.” It’s far more popular (6,480 vs. 96 hits on Google when we checked), though “obscenicon” is arguably more precise.

In “Let’s Get Down to Grawlixes,” a 1964 article for the National Cartoonists Society,  Walker writes that cartoonists have a variety of acceptable curse words, “but the real meat of the epithet must always contain plenty of jarns, quimps, nittles, and grawlixes.”

In The Lexicon of Comicana, Walker’s humorous 1980 book about the conventions used in cartooning, he shows “jarns” as spirals, “quimps” as astronomical characters, “nittles” as stars, and “grawlixes” as scribbles.

(Walker’s comic strips include Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois.)

Despite its scribbled origins, “grawlix” generally seems to be used now for those strings of symbols in comic books, at least that’s the impression we have from checking out a few dozen Google results.

As for “obscenicon,” Zimmer introduced the term in a Language Log posting in which he describes a New Yorker cartoon as “meta-commentary on cursing characters (let’s call ’em obscenicons).”

The linguists Arnold Zwicky and Gwillim Law, among others, later commented on the Language Log about the merits of the two terms.

Zwicky, citing the squiggly origins of “grawlix,” leaned toward “obscenicon” as more precise (it’s a blend of “obscene” and “icon”). Law,  a “grawlix” supporter, noted its early origins and popularity.

If you’d like to read more, Law has written an interesting article, “Grawlixes Past and Present,” with illustrations of various typographical obscenities in comics over the years (from a 1909 Katzenjammer Kids to a 2010 Jump Start strip).

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