Tuesday, February 07, 2017
Language update for snow
Professor Polistra takes her classroom on location for just one word.
Burm.
Berms are a hot topic here, since everyone shares the experience of painfully shoveling out a driveway and a sidewalk, then watching the idiot "city" snowplow close you into a box canyon with superheavy ice.
It wasn't always that way. Decades ago, Spokane's street department actually INVENTED a hydraulic gate that the plow driver could drop when passing a driveway. Other cities learned from Spokane. Sometime in the late '90s, for unclear reasons, Spokane gave up the practice and started the box canyon technique.
It's interesting to watch an unusual word sliding into consistency. Berm is not a word you learn in school, and it's not a word you ever write unless you're a civil engineer. So when people feel the need to write it in a discussion of snow plowing, regularity takes hold, and burm quickly becomes the norm.
But which regularity? Similar words seem to go both ways. Burn certainly pulls in the correct direction, but Bird and Bernie and Term pull the other way. Many of these folks are using Autocorrect, which certainly wouldn't steer you into burm. It's not in the dictionary.
The most obvious pull is CURB, which doesn't share as many phonemes but shares meaning. (A berm is ON a curb.) In fact CURB already followed the very same path toward parallelism, regularizing from British kerb.
Burm.
Berms are a hot topic here, since everyone shares the experience of painfully shoveling out a driveway and a sidewalk, then watching the idiot "city" snowplow close you into a box canyon with superheavy ice.
It wasn't always that way. Decades ago, Spokane's street department actually INVENTED a hydraulic gate that the plow driver could drop when passing a driveway. Other cities learned from Spokane. Sometime in the late '90s, for unclear reasons, Spokane gave up the practice and started the box canyon technique.
It's interesting to watch an unusual word sliding into consistency. Berm is not a word you learn in school, and it's not a word you ever write unless you're a civil engineer. So when people feel the need to write it in a discussion of snow plowing, regularity takes hold, and burm quickly becomes the norm.
But which regularity? Similar words seem to go both ways. Burn certainly pulls in the correct direction, but Bird and Bernie and Term pull the other way. Many of these folks are using Autocorrect, which certainly wouldn't steer you into burm. It's not in the dictionary.
The most obvious pull is CURB, which doesn't share as many phonemes but shares meaning. (A berm is ON a curb.) In fact CURB already followed the very same path toward parallelism, regularizing from British kerb.
Labels: Language update
¶ 2:28 AM
