Sunday, March 14, 2010
March language update
Professor Polistra brings us this season's harvest of new or altered words.
Around.
Prof Polistra likes this recently exploding usage. It replaces other prepositions like on or concerning, but its meaning is distinct.
"An invention around a standard."
"How would you address the issues of care, around stockholder value?"
"Recently on the web there has been a lot of activity and discussions around the issue."
"As you well know, the debate around climate change has recently become
highly politically charged."
"There's already a lot of consensus around that idea."
No duh.
"Is the state in a financial emergency? With a general fund budget
about $2.8 billion out of whack, one might answer, No duh."
Not clear how this flipped from plain duh, which has been around for a while. Unfortunately it's backwards. When you say an idea is No duh, you should strictly mean that it's not obvious, not transparent. Prof P thinks no duh may be an illegitimate hybrid of duh with phrases of parallel meaning like no brainer and No shit, Sherlock.
Tolling.
"We're expanding the use of tolling in our highway system."
"We'd be able to use tolling money for those purposes."
An interesting shift of the grammatical center of gravity on a very old word. Toll came to the Germanic tribes from their Roman conquerors in the Dark Ages, with the broader meaning of a tax or payment for government services. Apparently the tollhouse (toloneum in Latin) was named first, then shortened to something like toln, then the word shifted from the building to the coin, requiring the addition of house to describe the building.
Now we finally have a second shift of center and a second re-suffixing. The center of gravity shifted from the booth to the coin, now from the coin to the process of taking the coin. The coin itself is no longer the toll, it's the tolling money.
Professor Polistra brings us this season's harvest of new or altered words.
Around.
Prof Polistra likes this recently exploding usage. It replaces other prepositions like on or concerning, but its meaning is distinct.
"An invention around a standard."
"How would you address the issues of care, around stockholder value?"
"Recently on the web there has been a lot of activity and discussions around the issue."
"As you well know, the debate around climate change has recently become
highly politically charged."
"There's already a lot of consensus around that idea."
No duh.
"Is the state in a financial emergency? With a general fund budget
about $2.8 billion out of whack, one might answer, No duh."
Not clear how this flipped from plain duh, which has been around for a while. Unfortunately it's backwards. When you say an idea is No duh, you should strictly mean that it's not obvious, not transparent. Prof P thinks no duh may be an illegitimate hybrid of duh with phrases of parallel meaning like no brainer and No shit, Sherlock.
Tolling.
"We're expanding the use of tolling in our highway system."
"We'd be able to use tolling money for those purposes."
An interesting shift of the grammatical center of gravity on a very old word. Toll came to the Germanic tribes from their Roman conquerors in the Dark Ages, with the broader meaning of a tax or payment for government services. Apparently the tollhouse (toloneum in Latin) was named first, then shortened to something like toln, then the word shifted from the building to the coin, requiring the addition of house to describe the building.
Now we finally have a second shift of center and a second re-suffixing. The center of gravity shifted from the booth to the coin, now from the coin to the process of taking the coin. The coin itself is no longer the toll, it's the tolling money.
Labels: Language update
¶ 10:05 AM
