Redefining a word isn’t always the same as giving it a new meaning. Sometimes you’re just trying to pare it down to the core concept that people missed the first time around. Dictionary definitions of “camera” used to mention film and plates; now they just refer to a photosensitive surface. But the meaning of “camera” isn’t different; it’s just that now technology lets us see what its essence has been all along.

— Geoff Nunberg on how dictionaries are even grappling with getting ‘marriage’ right

Equality,” “prejudice,” “race” itself — how can you have mid-nineteenth-century characters use words like those without anachronistically evoking the connotations they have for us? To many of Lincoln’s contemporaries and even his allies, “equality”still evoked alarming echoes of the French Revolution. To speak of “race equality” implied not just that people should all be treated alike, but that the races really were morally and intellectually equivalent. That was an extreme and dubious proposition to all but a few radical Republicans, like Thaddeus Stevens.

— Geoff Nunberg on how connotations have changed since the 19th century and how those connotations are alluded to in Tony Kushner’s screen adaptation of Lincoln.

Geoff Nunberg looks at how the language of the past is used and abused in the pop culture of the present:

Spotting linguistic anachronisms in Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey is as easy as shooting grouse in a barrel. “I couldn’t care less,” Lord Grantham says. Thomas complains that “our lot always gets shafted.” Cousin Matthew announces he’s been on a steep learning curve, a phrase that would have been gotten a blank reception even in the Sterling Cooper boardroom.

Disclaimer: the above are not direct Downton Abbey quotes.

Image via Telegrams from Downton

Geoff Nunberg on the linguistic anachronisms of Downton Abbey:

No, Mrs. Patmore probably wouldn’t have said “when push comes to shove,” and Lord Grantham should have waited a couple of decades before telling his chauffer to step on it. But that isn’t the problem with Downton’s vision of the past. Even when the characters are speaking authentic period words, they aren’t using them to express authentic period thoughts. The Earl who frets over his duties as a job creator, the servants grappling with their own homophobia — those are comfortable modern reveries. Drop any of them into a drawing-room comedy by Shaw or Pinero and they’d be as out-of-place as a flat-screen TV.

Downton Abbey Anachronism Watch via @Slate

Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the derivation of the phrase “the whole nine yards”:

In 1982, William Safire called that “one of the great etymological mysteries of our time.” He himself thought that the phrase originally referred to the capacity of a cement truck in cubic yards. But there are plenty of other theories. Some people say it dates back to when square-riggers had three masts, each with three yards supporting the sails, so the whole nine yards meant the sails were fully set. Another popular story holds that it refers to the length of an ammunition belt on World War II fighters — when a pilot had exhausted his ammunition he said he had shot off the whole nine yards. Or it was the amount of cloth in the Queen’s bridal train or the Shroud of Turin. Or it had to do with a fourth-down play in football. Or it came from a joke about a prodigiously well-endowed Scotsman who gets his kilt caught in a door.

Geoff Nunberg on his Word of the Year, “Big Data”:

But Big Data is no more exact a notion than Big Hair. Nothing magic happens when you get to the 18th or 19th zero. After all, digital data has been accumulating for decades in quantities that always seemed unimaginably vast at the time, whether they were followed by a K or an M or a G. The fact is that an exponential curve looks just as overwhelming wherever you get onboard. And anyway, nobody really knows how to quantify this stuff precisely. Whatever the sticklers say, data isn’t a plural noun like “pebbles.” It’s a mass noun like “dust.”

Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the Britishisms entering our American-English:

Adding a foreign word to your vocabulary is like adding foreign attire to your wardrobe. Sometimes you do it because it’s practical and sometimes just because you think it looks cool.

(Photo credit: Zdenek Ryzner/iStockphoto.com)

The real outlier in this last debate was Romney. He addressed the president directly 37 times, either as Mr. President or just as “you” — almost twice as often as he referred to the president in the third person. That was dramatically different from Obama, who referred to Romney in the third person fifty times and addressed him directly only six. It was as if Romney had shown up armed for a cable news face-off, while the president was prepared for an episode of Meet the Press. That’s presumably why Obama spoke to the moderator Jim Lehrer with the slightly hesitant style he uses when he wants to convey thoughtfulness to an interviewer, drawing out words like “and” and “but” and pausing briefly between word groups, as if he were carefully composing each sentence on the spot. 

- Linguist Geoff Nunberg: One Debate, Two Very Different Conversations

Our debates about usage still have that melodramatic tenor, but they don’t have the same cultural significance. Nobody objects now when a dictionary includes some hip-hop slang or a texting abbreviation. Oxford boasts about adding “wassup” and “BFF”; Merriam counters with “sexting” and “ear worm”; the American Heritage adds “manboob” and “vuvuzela.” Nowadays, a dictionary entry is about as hard to come by as a Facebook profile.

Since the time of Webster’s Third, people have been framing usage issues as a pseudo-philosophical dispute between “descriptivist” and “prescriptivist” views of language, the one telling it like it is and the other telling it like it ought to be. But actually all dictionaries are in the business of describing the language as it is. What really changes is the conception of the language itself.

Back in Macdonald’s era, it was still just possible to think of the English language as a single great stream with its sources in literary tradition, rolling majestically past the evanescent slang and jargon scattered on its banks. That was a glorious fiction even then. But it isn’t a credible picture when all the old distinctions have been effaced — between high and low, formal and casual, print and oral, public and private.

Where do you locate the mainstream of English in the flood of words that pours in over all the different screens in our lives? It’s not a stream at all, just a limitless ocean of yammer. Even with their modern tools, you have to feel for the lexicographers who are out there trying to sift through it all.

— Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the significance of language wars

You can’t have profanity if there are no prudes left to be shocked by it.

— Geoff Nunberg, “Swearing: A Long And #$%#$% History”

Floating modifiers are mother’s milk to English grammar.

— Geoff Nunberg

My choice of words was not the best,” Rush Limbaugh said in his apology. That’s the standard formula for these things — you apologize not for what you said but for the way you said it. Though in this case, there didn’t seem to be a lot of distance between thought and word. What was the point of saying Sandra Fluke was asking to be paid for sex and then adding “What does that make her?” if not to get to that potent monosyllable “slut”?

— Linguist Geoff Nunberg observes that our reaction to the word ‘slut’ says quite a lot about the society we live in.

Pro Tip

If you’re running a commentary from linguist Geoff Nunberg about the history and subtle nuances of the word ‘slut’ on your public radio show today, and you decide to search Tumblr for the word ‘slut’ to see if there are any pictures you can reblog with the article, DON’T DO IT ON A WORK COMPUTER EVER DO IT OMG MY EYES.

Why not make “the 99 percent” itself the word of the year? Well, for one thing, occupy is that rare linguistic phenomenon, a word that bubbles up out of nowhere and actually helps to create the very thing it names. And anyway, “the 99 percent” wouldn’t be part of our political discussions if occupy hadn’t gotten there first.

— Geoff Nunberg explains why ‘occupy’ — and not ‘the 99 percent’ — is his word of the year for 2011.

‘Occupy:’ Geoff Nunberg’s 2011 Word Of The Year