Language update for June


Professor Polistra has been focusing on language in several recent posts, but failed to load up her usual bucket of wordshit. She apologizes.

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Blowhorn:

Another good malaprop from Spokane-News.

Corner of Standard & Sanson Ave, 2 police cars w lights flashing, using blow horn talking to resident

The bull in bullhorn comes from an old and forgotten slang term for cops. Blowhorn makes more direct sense. Parallel to blowhard.

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Aspired:

Fake word to make you think 'conspired'.

Headline at VOA:

US Intelligence Charges Russia, Putin Aspired to Help Trump Win

Sort of like Hong Kong knockoff brands.

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Insouciant:

Getting a lot of hard mileage lately, and the meaning is starting to spread out.

Etymologically insouciant means not caring or worrying.

Traditionally insouciant has meant something like flippant or sassy. Doing your own thing with a bit of style, not bothered by hard stares from the bluenoses.

She had short dark hair, a pretty heart-shaped face, and an insouciant, slightly reckless air...

The typical new use returns to the literal origin, basically apathetic.

When the gullible and insouciant American public and the presstitutes who participate in the deceptions permitted the Deep State to get away with the fairy tale that a few Saudi Arabians under the direction of Osama bin Laden, ...

Some new uses move toward a harder form of uncaring:

Dreher did not read Secularization and Moral Change, and we know this from the potted history he gives us as when, e.g., he insouciantly claims that "the loss of the Christian religion is why the West has been fragmenting for some time now...

Here insouciant seems to mean cynical. The author thinks that Dreher knows he's engaging in false representation.

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Migrating background:

This atrocious euphemism began in Krautland, specifically at Deutsche Welle. Now it's spreading through all of Sorosia. RFI is interviewing a supporter of Macron, running the usual Robust Debate in which ONLY ONE VIEW IS POSSIBLE and the only permissible disagreement is HOW FAR WE GO in obeying Soros and the "disagreement" MUST lead in the direction of MORE PERFECT OBEDIENCE OF SOROS. In other words, an auction to maximize genocide and chaos and blood and guts. The "announcer" and the "advocate" are both using "of a migrating background" to mean Arabs.

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Supersonic heterodyne:

This doesn't belong in a list of new words, but Prof Polistra was impressed by its appearance in one old radio magazine. It reveals two word histories at once.

First the true origin of superhet. Superhet isn't super because it's wonderful, it's supersonic because the heterodyned wave is above human hearing. Heterodyning is always a common phenomenon in radio; you can still hear it often on the AM band. But the heterodyning that you hear is by definition NOT supersonic. The key to the superhet circuit was producing a heterodyned product wave up in a range where it can be filtered and processed by fixed-tuned resonant circuits of a practical size. (Resonant circuits for audible waves are BIG.) After the processing, the wave can then be rectified and detected as if it's a regular radio signal.

The phrase also reveals a second change in terminology. In 1925 airplanes that could exceed the speed of sound were fictional, so we didn't need a word to describe them. Supersonic and ultrasonic both meant waves above the audible frequency range. When jet planes exceeded 1100 fps, supersonic became standard in that context, so ultrasonic had to specialize on waves over 30kc.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 1:35 AM