Category: Language

Malapropos of Nothing

On By Sarah AngletonIn Language, Sayings, Writing15 Comments

I admit to being a little bit of a language snob. Of course I recognize that language evolves and a misspoken word today may be perfectly acceptable tomorrow, at least for some, but know that if you use a malapropism, I’ll probably judge you.

In case you are unfamiliar with the word malapropism, in lame man’s terms, it’s the mistaken replacement of a word with another that sounds similar. The term, derived from the French mal à propos, meaning inappropriate, got picked up in the English language because of playwright Richard Brinsely Sheridan. In his 1775 play The Rivals, a character named Mrs. Malaprop is notorious for muddling up her words. 

One version of Mrs. Malaprop looking “as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile,” which is one of her delightful lines. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

That’s not to say that Sheridan was the only, or even the first, writer to make use of such a character trait, but I suppose that’s a moo point. For all intensive purposes, that’s when the concept entered the English language where it’s been driving language snobs like me bonkers ever since.

I’ve been thinking about malapropisms a lot lately because the publication date of Paradise on the Pike, my new historical novel set in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, is drawing near and I have discovered that not everyone is familiar with the word “pike.” 

If you happen to live in one of the handful of US states that contain a turnpike, you might be able to puzzle out that “turnpike” is another word for toll road and that “pike” is another word for a road. You might even be familiar with the phrase “coming down the pike,” meaning something is going to happen in the future. For example, I have a new novel coming down the pike. 

If you don’t happen to live near a turnpike, then you might mistakenly believe the phrase is “coming down the pipe,” in which case, I’m probably judging you. 

But this particular malapropism does make some logical sense because there is another phrase “in the pipeline” that also refers to something that is going to happen soon. I could, for example, tell you that I have a new novel in the pipeline. Conflating the two seems like a fairly innocuous mistake.

And of course you can go ahead and say whatever you like. It’s a doggy dog world and I don’t always get my way even if I do think malapropisms ought to be nipped in the butt whenever possible. Really, I could care less. Except that the expression, “coming down the pike,” may actually have its roots in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis in which a mile long stretch of road along the north side of the fairgrounds that formed the main entertainment section of the fair was referred to as “the Pike.”

A new historical mystery coming down the pike on April 18, 2024.

The Pike contained all manner of concessions including battle reenactments, rides, a wax museum, fashion demonstrations, mock-ups of exotic locales, dancers, musicians, and animal shows. It was also the site of daily parades, leading to much excitement as people crowded around to catch a glimpse of what wondrous things might be coming down the Pike.

And so, the cover of my newest novel in the pipeline that will be coming down the pike on the 18th of April, just in time to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the 1904 World’s Fair, features a picture looking down the historical Pike. I hope you’ll forgive me for stringing out the cover reveal and keeping you on tender hooks for a few weeks. I also hope you’ll really enjoy the book when it’s finally here. And in the meantime, language snobbery aside, I hope you’ll love the book by its cover.

Challenge Accepted

On By Sarah AngletonIn Language, literature, Writing12 Comments

There’s a rumor running around out there on the Internet where, as everyone knows, all things are true, that William Shakespeare invented more than 1,700 words of the English language. If one considers that the Modern English of Shakespeare’s day was a fairly young language, then it makes sense that new words might have been developing pretty fast. And if you’ve ever met a writer, and particularly a poet, then you’ve probably noticed that they do occasionally invent new words or more likely, new uses of old ones. There’s no question Shakespeare did his fair share of that.

Challenge accepted.

Also roaming around on the Internet lately is a fun challenge in which three columns of insulting Shakespearean words can be combined to come up with a single devastating slight to use in your next piece of writing. Most recently posted by The Writer’s Circle, this was issued as a challenge to me by a friend who knows I’m a writer who likes a good challenge as much as a like a good old timey insult.

Of course I’m only assuming these columns of words show up somewhere among the nearly 29,000 unique words spread across Shakespeare’s forty three surviving works. There are no citations, and I’m not going to take the time to search for them, because regardless of their origin, they make up some pretty fantastic insults.

Still, it’s worth noting I think that if Shakespeare invented 1,700 new words, that means his works contained roughly 6% unique words that would have been entirely unfamiliar to his audience.

Now, because I enjoy a challenge, I certainly don’t mind reading a work that is going to make me pick up a dictionary once in a while, but if I have to look up 6% of the unique words I encounter, I’m going to find myself pretty quickly frustrated by the beslubbering hasty-witted joithead who wrote them.

There’s no doubt in my mind that a brilliant insult is forming behind those eyes. Attributed to John Taylor, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s worse than that, too, because the first English-language dictionary wasn’t put together until more than a century after the saucy doghearted coxcomb of a poet William Shakespeare produced his venerated works.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which provides the written origin of English words, wasn’t even attempted until the second half of the nineteenth century and wasn’t completed until 1928. This thanks to somewhere around three thousand contributors who meticulously hunted through centuries of English language works to determine that 1,700 words or so probably came from the mind of that one old English playwright/poet that everyone had actually heard of.

In other words, the editors and contributors of the OED, while dedicated and deserving of our respect and thanks, may have occasionally been loggerheaded tickle-brained foot-lickers when it came to Shakespeare. Arizona State University English professor Jonathan Hope has been particularly effective in pointing out that OED contributors had more access to and read more carefully from Shakespeare’s works than from those of other writers who now in the digital age, we can more easily discover used quite a few of The Bard’s newfangled words before he did.

Just eleven more weeks until the release of my new historical mystery! I can’t share the cover just yet, but this picture gives a hint about the book, which contains no Shakespearean insults and probably very few made up words.
Photo by Winfred C. Porter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I don’t think that discovery necessarily takes anything away from Shakespeare’s works or his influence on English literature and language. In reality, I think it makes him better, because he wasn’t asking his dictionary-deficient audience to puzzle out what he was trying to say. That joy he reserved for the mewling folly-fallen gudgeons in future high school classrooms.

To the audience of his day, and to those who care to notice today, what he did was use words well. And while he probably didn’t use most of the words in this handy kit in quite the same combinations I’ve attempted to use them in this post, there’s no question the man knew his way around an insult.

And now I challenge you to use one in the comments.

Prairie in Progress

On By Sarah AngletonIn Language, Nature18 Comments

In May of 1675 or so, Father Louis Hennepin set out with fur trapper and explorer Robert de La Salle to explore some of the vast western lands of New France. The expedition set off from Quebec to explore the Great Lakes, find a couple of pretty impressive waterfalls, and wind its way through a good portion of the Mississipi and Illinois Rivers, to see what it could see.

What the explorers saw was, according to Father Hennepin, mostly a lot of grass. He wove together some good stories of adventure as well, many of which have made him a little suspect as far as trustworthy historians go, but about the grass, he was absolutely right. There was a lot of it, and he was perhaps the first writer to refer to the middle of what would become the United States as “prairie.”

Depending on who you ask, the tall grasses of North America once covered anywhere from 142 to 200 million acres across what would become fourteen states, where it provided homes for abundant wildlife, occasionally caught fire, and swayed in the wind causing a fair few settlers to feel a little seasick. I realize there is a pretty wide gap between 142 and 200 million, but one thing we can pretty much all agree on is that there’s a lot less of it now.

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

Roughly one third of my own Great State of Missouri used to be covered by prairie grass. Today, the state contains only about 1% of its original grassland, about 70,000 acres in total. Obviously, a lot of that is inevitable because the land got more densely settled and people built cities and suburbs filled with suburban houses that have suburban yards and suburban homeowners associations that don’t like tall grass.

Spring is firmly upon us here in Missouri which means so is lawn mowing season and unlike previous years, this one has found me doing a lot of back and forth and back and forth through my lawn, cutting down the very same plants I am attempting to grow. I have done this maybe four or five times so far this year. As of this moment I am the only one of my household to have completed this task.

That’s not because no one else in my household would willingly take on this job, but it’s because of an unfortunate set of circumstances that include the complicated timing of rainy weather, minor injuries and illnesses, busy activity and work schedules, and one fairly substantial grass allergy. In a normal year, I might mow the grass twice, because my husband actually loves to mow the yard, and is almost always the one to do it.

He’s also a lot stronger than I am and has a strange devotion to his old non-self-propelled push mower. It’s difficult to maneuver, at least for me, through our yard which is fairly large, oddly shaped, terribly uneven, and extremely hilly. Oh, and it also has some areas of really poor drainage. Mowing it is not fun. And it takes a long time. And I am, objectively, really bad at it.

I can’t say for sure that the fact that I don’t like to do it isn’t a factor in my ineptitude, but I am not intentionally bad at mowing. I do try to work in straight lines when I can and I even attempt perpendicular lines from one cutting to the next, but the lot includes curvy landscaping, and big trees, and garden boxes, and even a footbridge to nowhere. There’s a lot going on. In my head, my neighbors are watching out the windows snickering and shaking their heads at the number of times I go back over the same strip of grass for the third time and completely miss the one next to it.*

To my husband’s credit, he has not said a word about how poorly I mow the lawn, and really seems grateful that I have been doing it while he hasn’t yet been able to. If either of my sons were responsible for the sloppy work, I know he would have some thoughts to share. That’s probably why they are both better at it than I am.

But I assume he knows that he needn’t bother offering me constructive yard mowing criticism. I can see he is itching to take over the job again, and I am itching to let him. Because if that doesn’t happen soon, then I’m just going to put up a sign. I’m not sure the homeowners association will much like it, but the Great State of Missouri is fixing to regain a little more prairie. 

*My neighbors are all lovely people who probably have better things to do than snicker at my poor grass cutting skills. Though I’m sure they will also be relieved when the hubs is back on the job.

Harpin’ Boont on the Bucky Walter

On By Sarah AngletonIn Language, Traditions10 Comments

It was somewhere around 1862 when John Bregartes arrived in the Anderson Valley of California, a little more than a hundred miles north of San Francisco, and founded the little town of Boonville. And it wasn’t long after that when the farmers, ranchers, and loggers who came to live in this fairly isolated community started to develop a language of their own.

Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Of course, every region’s got one to some extent. If you come to my corner of the world here in St. Louis, for example, you might drive farty-far to get some t-ravs, go to the laundromat to warsh your clothes, and then grab a concrete for a treat. If someone accidentally bumps into you along the way, you’ll likely hear them say “Ope!” and they’ll expect you to respond with a friendly, “You’re fine.”

We’ve all got our little quirks, maybe made slightly more accessible by the mingling and spreading of regional expressions across the internet where I learned not so long ago that a take-a-plate dinner in New Zealand is the same thing as a potluck supper in the Midwestern US.

But what Boonville, California has going is much more than a few quirky expressions that rose up over time. By the dawn of the twentieth century, it had an entire language all its own.

I’m not sure what the Boontling word is for potluck. U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Though Boontling is based on English, it contains more than a thousand unique words and expressions that show influence from Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Spanish, and Indigenous languages and is peppered with the names and experiences of generations of Boonters.

So, Bucky Walter is a payphone, because bucky is the word for nickel and a guy named Walter was the first person in town to have a telephone. To me this sounds a little like getting directions from a local that include turning left at the corner of the field Fred used to own that once had that big red barn that burned down thirty years ago. Except it’s a whole language with standardized grammatical patterns and there’s no GPS to guide you to the right address.

No one is quite sure why the small town invented its own language, though there are plenty of stories. Most suggest that it was a convenient way for one group of people to speak secretly about another group (wives gossiping about husbands, elders wanting to exclude youngsters, or vice versa), which led eventually to the tightknit residents of Boonville using it to keep themselves to themselves when strangers came to town.

Where St. Louis goes to eat its frozen custard concretes. Philip Leara, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The real mystery to me, however, is why it has persisted for so long. This peculiar language which has never traveled much outside of the Anderson Valley and has probably never been spoken by more than a thousand people at any time its history, has existed for nearly a century and a half. How cool is that?

Unfortunately, the number of fluent speakers has dwindled in recent years to include only a handful of people. Over the years it has generated lots of interest for linguists, but not as much for the youngest generations of Boonters. One source I found laments the fact that the elementary school no longer teaches Boontling, which indicates that at one time it did.

The Anderson Valley Historical Society would like to keep the language alive a little bit longer and has provided a nice glossary to get you started if you’ve a mind to learn to harp Boont on the Bucky Walter. Maybe you can even get together with your apple head, pike to grab aplenty bahl steinberhorn, and have yourself the bahlest harpin’ session you ever had. Or you could just stick to English and go out for concretes.