Celebrating Language Change

I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm a language fuddyduddy, clinging to past-pull-date English. Language is a living thing. I don't expect it to freeze solid in 1969*.

Language chases after change in the real world. Names are born for the new stuff: wiki, tweet, google, go cup, podcast, bitcoin, DNA, penicillin, page view, Peace Rose, moonwalk, on brand, quark. 

Bright, shiny new things, these words.

Words let us look at familiar things in new ways:

right-size,  single-use, metrosexual, non-binary, slipstream,  catfishing, mansplaining, fail as a suffix (skateboard fail,) salty, to "ghost" on somebody, Black Lives Matter, geek, I can't even, slut-shaming, binge watch, photobomb, throw shade, because reasons, because awesome, nerd, gender fluid, double down, rewilding, first world problem, singular they . . .  

 

We play with language.

I adore that**.

*1969 is the first use of "pull date" according to Webster's

 

 ** Careless errors of grammar, OTOH are not useful nor clever nor beautiful.

And, in truth, there are days I stomp grumpily along the transitional boundary where the newfangled grammars ooze into general acceptance, me sneering and fluffing out my feathers.

(The proper use of lie and lay, for instance. Gone. Hrumph.)

So maybe I am a fuddyduddy.

Interesting punctuation

Came across this in Silver Borne by Patricia Briggs, in the heroine's viewpoint. A private detective is guarding a  client. He says on the phone:

"I'm kinda hoping her soon-to-be-ex shows up," he said softly; I thought so she wouldn't hear him.

Semicolons always seem a bit academic and formal to me. Most times when I see one in popular fiction I feel it could be advantageously replaced by two sentences.
Fr'instance:

"I'm kinda hoping her soon-to-be-ex shows up." He said it softly, probably so this client wouldn't hear him.

But .  .  . though my editorial alternative might be slightly clearer,  Briggs' choice — or her editor's choice . . . this 'feels' like an editorial correction — is maybe the better writing. It uses POV so neatly.

Cursing in ASL

For those of you who want to be obscene but not heard.
Or let your time travelling characters curse effectively while moving silently in a dangerous place.
Or exchange rude comments at a Regency ball.

How To Curse in ASL.

Words are cool.

Perfect words

Sometimes in the midst of a beautifully written story ⁠— in this case Coraline by Neil Gaiman — you find a little vibrating diamond of a sentence.

"Terribly slowly, stiffly, heavily, a hinged square of the floor lifted: it was a trapdoor."

. . . which is a Japanese meal of a sentence, perfect in its simplicity. A square of sunlight on the walls of a museum. One wild strawberry growing in the tangle beside the path.

Adventuring In My Own Way

I have a little machine called a Eufy that glides around my floors and picks up dog hair and cat hair from underneath the chairs and the bed. It's like a roomba but cheaper. *
I am a creature of the cheaper alternative, always.

The cat and dog eye the Eufy with grave suspicion but it does not terrify them which is a good way to live one's life.

Today my little machine friend managed to pull out one of the wires essential for the operation of my internet.
The possibilities being manifold it was not immediately obvious which of many potential problems was now mine.
Even after I decided there must be a physical lacunae in the system ., . well, I have lots of cords running around behind the desk.

By dint of** some dusty scrambling about and muttering I finally managed to lay my hand on the cord that had been pulled from its proper mooring. ***
Yeah me.

While I was on my hands and knees doing this I noticed a UBS port on the side of the offboard hard drive I recently added to my collection of mysterious black box sitting about.
It appeared to connect the external hard drive to what may be the router.
I didn't even know I could connect the backup to the router though I had rather wanted to.

So now I have wireless access to my Time Machine.
I am doing backups automatically.
Even though I am not adventuring with the Doctor
my life is bright and shiny and I feel very clever.

I have signed up for pottery wheel access. It starts tomorrow. I will now be both artistic and clever.

 

 

 

 * Here's a video of a cat on a roomba. It is not my cat. My cat is smarter than that.

** The dint in "by dint of," you will be pleased to know, is from Old English dynt "blow dealt in fighting" (especially by a sword), from Proto-Germanic duntiz (related to Old Norse dyntr blow, kick.)
This dint is probably not directly from the co-existing dialected dint of C15 that comes to us from PIE "dent" meaning tooth but doubtless they lived on the same street.

"By dint of" as a phrase for "by force of, by means of," is early C14 so it is a fine, strong, ancient little set of words.

*** This picture is a slight exaggeration of the number of cords I have around my desk.
But not by much.

Exponential

I came across, "He’d lost an exponential amount of blood," in a book recently.

The weakening of the word "exponential" from meaning
"a number that gets multiplied by itself"
to just meaning "a big hulking, scary number"
is very sad.

We take these delicate, specific, useful adjectives and empty them by the slop-bucketful till they're just one more of the thousand bland, lank, meaningless synonyms for common concepts.
Our word shelves become full of Twinkies and Wonderbread.

Thank god for slang, that's what I say.

Viridian

 Learned a new word today:  viridian.

 

This is a bluish-green pigment consisting of hydrated chromium hydroxide or, simply, the color itself. Seems to be one of those words you find just about only in a paint box.

 

I picked it up in Jim Butcher's  Turn Coat.

I love new words.

The painting is Vincent Van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night, 1888, which the stream of time has washed ashore in Ontario.

Pigments Through the Ages tells us:

"Van Gogh used for a painting only some tubes. Never all. For his masterpiece, Night Terrace he used: Prussian blue and viridian and some carmine for the blue air and the door in the front. Yellows were only chrome lemon and for the orange he used the chrome lemon and geranium lake."

Massively impressive. His painter's pallet carried two colors of blue.

side note: viridian in 1888 contained traces of chromium oxide borate as a byproduct of production. Modern viridium doesn't, so modern fakes don't. Though I suppose art counterfeiters have caught on to that by now

Technical Topics -- Talking about Cons

It is just hard to discover how con artists in the Regency period.  I'm fairly sure the current con games practiced in 1910 and in 2010 were practiced in 1810, even though I don't find references to them so much.

The Spanish Prisoner, for instance, is said to date from the late Nineteenth Century.  I imagine it was practiced, though, under another name in the Fifteenth.  And Sixteenth.  And in the regency.  Human nature doesn't change much.


So, what do we know about Regency Con Games and how can we talk about playing them.

Picking up general background stuff:

Mayhew's Characters, which is a generation later, but delightfully detailed and in voice

And more on background criminal behavior
Thieves Kitchen: The Regency Underworld by Donald Low

Grose lists several sort of scamming beggars, largely folks faking injury or war service and so on.  Those are some of the old traditions and accustomed cons.

The shell game is ancient.  It was called Thimblerig, played with three thimbles and a pea or button, is attested from 1825 by this name, though references to thimble cheats, probably the same swindle, date back to 1716.  The term 'Shell Game' is 1890, from a version of three-card monte played with a pea and walnut shells. 

So is fast and loose.  Don't know whether this counts as a con or not. 

The wikis here and here  list some latish Nineteenth Century examples that can't be applied exact and directly to the Regency.

My great sorrow as a writer is that we lack a rich, traditional vocabulary to talk about con men.  I've gone looking for scamming language and almost all the terminology I fall in love with is mid C19 or later.

Here are some of the words we can use:



Bejuggle, to get over by jugglery, to cheat;   (1680) To bejuggle and beguile the silly Rabble.   (1705) Bejuggl'd Mob! you are the Tools, That Priests do work with called Fools.  (1851) No matter how many‥thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed before.


Burn  Meaning "cheat, swindle, victimize" is 1650s.  (One problem is the  C20 meanings may intrude here. c.f.  'Burn Notice')

 (1842) Our people were so ill-burnt, that they had no stomach for any farder medling. ...  (1808)  Burn, to deceive, to cheat in a bargain.    (1844)  Two negro burners were arrested in the act of trying to burn two Pottsville boatmen with a plated chain worth about fifteen cents.

Chicanery c.1600, from Fr. chicanerie "trickery,"

Chisel  Slang sense of "to cheat, defraud" is first recorded in 1808 as chizzel.  Origin and connection to the older word are obscure.  (Obscure, but in period and perhaps useful.)

Chouse "swindler, swindle," 1650s, from Turk. chaush "sergeant, herald, messenger,"  (Good Regency usage for this.)


Con  in the meaning "swindling"  Is 1889, Amer.Eng.  Confidence man is 1849.  Derives from the many scams in which the victim is induced to hand over money as a token of confidence.

Cozen.  To commit fraud, trickery" mid-15C  In use in the Regency.


Diddle "to cheat, swindle," in 1806, from dial. duddle, diddle "to totter" (1630s). One has to be aware of later meanings --  "to have sex with" is from 1879; that of "to masturbate" (especially of women) is from 1950s. 


Dodge   Common from early 18c. in figurative sense of "to swindle, to play shifting tricks." .

Double cross is much older than I thought, dating to 1834, from double + cross in the sense of "pre-arranged swindle or fix." Originally to win a race after promising to lose it. As a verb from 1903, Amer.Eng.


Fleece The verb is 1530s in the literal sense of "to strip a sheep of fleece" and 1570s in the figurative meaning "to cheat, swindle."  It holds that meaning to present day.

Gouge 1560s meaning "to cut as with a gouge,"   Meaning "swindle" is Amer.Eng. colloquial from 1826.

Grab 1580s, "to seize", often with a sense of "to get by unscrupulous methods".  The 'grab game' is a kind of swindle, 1846.

Gull.  cant term for "dupe, sucker, credulous person,"  with a sense of "someone who will swallow anything thrown at him." From 1590s  Still in use today.


Hornswoggle to cheat," 1829. 

Humbug, 1751, student slang, "trick, jest, hoax, deception," also as a verb.  


Jape.  early 14c., "trick, deceit," later "a joke, a jest" (late 14c.) It's been through several transitions, but currently means a joke or jest.
Jig.  "lively dance," 1560s,  A "piece of sport, trick" 1590s.  Phrase the jig is up (first attested 1777 as the jig is over).

Jink  To trick, cheat, diddle, swindle.   (1785) For Jove did jink Arcesius.    (1832) The gipsy, after all, jinked an old rich goutified coffee-planter.  


Mace  To swindle.  (1790)  Potter New Dict. Cant. (1795) "Mace, to cheat."  (1812)  A .‥party of inferior pugilists had been macing in the southern towns.  (1819)  I sometimes raised the wind by‥obtaining goods on credit, called in the cant language maceing. (1885)  Fancy him being so soft as to give that jay a quid back out of the ten he'd maced him of!

Mark. slang sense "victim of a swindle" is 1883.

Pigeon.  one easily cheated, gullible;  to gull, cheat, delude, swindle; esp. at cards or any kind of gaming.  (1675) Of Lies, and Fables, which did Pigeon The Rabble into false Religion.  (1785) They have pigeoned me out of my money.   (1805)  They mean to pigeon him, as their phrase is.   (1807) Having one night been pigeoned of a vast property.

To play.   To use or treat as a counter or plaything, to manage or use for one's own ends (like chessmen or cards in a game). Also, to fool, swindle; to play (someone) for a sucker: to treat (a person) as a dupe; to make a fool of; to cheat.  (1656) Some Wisemen, and some Fools we call, Figures, alas, of Speech, for Destiny plays us all.  (1879) You could have played him on a stranger for an effigy.    

To play upon advantage (obs.): to cheat.   (1668)  Your only way is to turn rook and play upon advantage.   (1826) Once it happened that the enemy took him at advantage. 

Rook. 1570s noun, "a cheat," especially at cards or dice. Verb "to defraud by cheating", originally especially in a game, 1580s.


Sham 1670s, "a trick, a hoax, a fraud,"  Sense of "Something meant to be mistaken for something else" is from 1728.

shark.  To practise fraud or the arts of a ‘shark’, parasite, or sharper; to live by shifts and stratagems. Often to shark for (something).  (1608) I name it gently to you; I term it neither pilfer, cheat, nor shark.  (1765) It is only slipping a puffer or two of quality at them, enough of whom come sharking to every sale for that purpose only.  (1809) Those vagabond cosmopolites who shark about the world, as if they had no right or business in it. (1837) Thou must hawk and shark to and fro, from anteroom to anteroom.

Sharp  "a cheat at games," 1797, short for sharper (1681), probably a variant of sharker

Stall.  Mid-15C as "pretense to avoid doing something." A variant of "stale" -- bird used as a decoy to lure other birds.  In the meaning of "evasive trick or story, pretext, excuse" first recorded 1812.  This sense entwined with that of "thief's assistant" (1590s).
"The stallers up are gratified with such part of the gains acquired as the liberality of the knuckling gentlemen may prompt them to bestow. [J.H. Vaux, "Flash Dictionary," 1812]

Sting  A slang meaning "to cheat, swindle" is from 1812.
The sense of "police undercover entrapment" is from 1975.  (It would be lovely to use in 1812 if it weren't for the C20 meanings layered on top.)


Swindler is 1774,  "giddy person, extravagant speculator, cheat,"  Said to have been introduced in London by German Jews c.1762.
"Stall" is still used as a pickpocket's assistant.



Thug  1810, "member of a gang of murderers and robbers in India who strangled their victims,"  In general sense of "ruffian, cutthroat" first recorded 1839.  (I have used this in 1812 with characters who would have contact with army officers serving in India.  They use it as they would a foreign word.  Kinda.)
 Trump. (v) "fabricate, devise," 1690s, from trump "deceive, cheat" (1510s),  'Trumped up' as  "false, concocted" first recorded 1728.


ETA:  Janet McC sends further era-appropriate terms and expands on some I mentioned -- shrak, mace, burn, bejuggle, pigeon, play, play upon advantage, jink.

Technical Topic - Pronunciation

I put this together because the Penguin Audio people wanted to get the pronunciation right.  Or at least, get it the way the author wanted it, which is not quite the same thing.  It's very conscientious of them, isn't it? 

This is part of what authors do, I guess, when they are tearing their hair out and not writing the JUSTINE manuscript because her voice just won't come to them.

 So maybe you're interested in how it's all pronounced.
Or maybe you're not . . .  That's good too.

I've put the looong chart with the pronunciation below the fold

 

Talking about the name, Annique

Excellent commenter mst3kharris brought up the point --

I'm curious: Annique's name is being spelled as Anneka. Was the spelling changed for the new edition? Also, does this mean I've been pronouncing Annique's name wrong all this time? I've always thought of it as like unique but with Ann.


I'm taking it out of the comment trail and posting it here because the answer got long.

Injecting Present Tense

I was pondering verb tenses the other day. Thinking about the tenses we employ when we write in Past Tense, as we generally do.


'Past Tense' should really be called 'past tenses' because you got yer
Simple Past Tense, [Myrtle hunted,]
and yer Past Progressive, [Myrtle was hunting,]
and yer Past Perfect, [Myrtle had hunted,]
and yer Past Progressive, (or Past Perfect Continuous,) [Myrtle had been hunting.]

And there may be some others, for all I know.  All these verb tenses carefully define relationships between the particular bits of the past when stuff is happening. They are the 'home tense'.

Technical Topics -- Historical Words for Explicit Content

In the interest of providing useful bibliographies . . . here's a list of references for  words in use in the Regency Period for explicit behavior.

You'll note a good many of these works are fifty or sixty years after the Regency. If you find a promising word or phrase in some later reference, you'll need to go back and check it.

Educated folks would have also read French and Latin erotic classics. The Satryicon was available in German in the Regency era, for instance.

The Slang Dictionary. Hotten. 1859. Here.

Grose's Classical Ditionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Pierce Egan. 1823. here.

A Physical View of Man and Woman in a State of Marriage. de Lignac. 1798. Here.

Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant. Barrere and Leland. 1889 Here.

The Works of Francis Rabelais. Here .

Slang. Badcock. 1823. Here.

A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant. Leland. 1890. Here.

Philosophy in the Bedroom and 120 Days of Sodom. De Sade Here.

The Lustful Turk. John Benjamin Brookes. 1828. Here.

A Night in a Moorish Harem. Anon. 1896. Here.

Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs. John Davenport. 1869. here.

Autobiography of a Flea. Anon. 1901. Here.

My Secret Life. Anon. 1888. Here.

The Kama Sutra of Vatsayayana. Richard Burton. Here.

Liber Amoris or the New Pygmalian. William Hazlitt. 1823.here.

The London Bawd. Anon. 1705. here.

Memoirs of a Young Rakehell. Guillaume Appollinaire. 1907.Here.

The New Ladies Tickler. Anon. 1866. Here.

The Romance of Lust Anon. 1873. Here.

The Three Chums. Ridley. 1882. Here.

The Way of a Man with a Maid. Anon.
I don't know where this is free online, but it can be downloaded for a small fee several places.

ETA:

I'd recommend picking up C18 and C19 erotic wordage from the period literature rather than period dictionaries.

The couple few C18 slang 'dictionaries' are irreplaceable for confirmation of earliest date.
They're less reliable for showing usage.

What it is -- these early dictionaries were intended for entertainment rather than scholarly reference. They conflate clever one-offs, (a good many created by the author, I suspect,) with true slang.

So it's cute to call a coachman a 'Knight of the Whip'? as per Grosse, but it sounds like literary affectation, not what one character could say to another. And calling a whore an 'Athanasian wench'??
Not so much.

The slang, 'blowen' -- meaning a woman -- gets 630 hits on googlebooks for the 1700-1830 time period. 'Athanasian wench' appears only in Grosse.

So I'd pull erotic usage out of the literature and then check the dctionaries for confirmation.  Or googlebook search.
I am just in love with googlebook search.

New Words

Reading here, The Lake Superior State University 2010 List of Banished Words.
They dislike; tweet, app, friend as a verb, shovel-ready, toxic assets, stimulus as in stimulus package, teachable moment, transparency in terms of public access, czar, bromance, sextexting, chillaxin', In these economic times, too big to fail, and Obama-prefix-suffix.

It's odd that I should be more flexible than a bunch of college kids . . .  but I actively like about half of these.

Tweet, app, and 'friend as a verb' are all cases where new technology has created new behavior. We need words to describe a new world.
These delight me.
I am especially pleased that the old, old word 'friend' is not weakened by this new use.

I'm also a fan of technical jargon.

Now, I may not be fond of 'deplane' or 'preboarding', which are about as ugly as words can be, but most technical jargon -- 'boot', 'baby-catcher', 'WIP', 'malware', 'just-in-time', 'shrinkage' -- is wonderful. Working people create useful, thumping, earthy, in-the-field, kinda words.

While I haven't come across it myself, shovel-ready strikes me as one of these useful terms. It's colorful and clear. I can think of several phrases that mean the same thing, but not a better single word.

Toxic assets -- technical jargon -- comes from those hands-on economists-in-the-field. Toxic asset has a limited and specific meaning. Why spend ten words describing this concept when two will do? I can't understand the objection.

Stimulus, when reffing the Stimulus Package components, is also technical jargon, and useful in that narrow technical sense. It's confusing when anyone applies it beyond that immediate and specific usage. I wish they had come up with a more distinct jargon word for the bill.

Teachable moment, OTOH, is pseudo-jargon. It's 'invented' jargon introduced by folks whose job is not to do work, but to write about doing work and invent jargon for it. Bad phrase. Bad Bad.  Nauseating language.

Transparency is not a new word, of course, but a hazy and poorly defined usage of a lovely old one. That haziness is deliberate. Transparent is the word we use to speak of public access when we do not want to use words like honesty or openness.
Not an admirable word in this guise, but a useful one that has no exact replacement.

Moving to those words and phrases I agree we could do quite well without ...

Czar, to mean 'maven' or 'head honcho' or 'high muckety-muck', was apt in its early use, wearisome now that it has become diluted and routine. We will eventually have Parks and Recreation Czars in every small town. Refreshment Committee Czars at the church social.

I wish this usage would just disappear. I have many wishes about words. If wishes were horses, I would  be trampled to death every time I opened a book.

Sextexting will, I believe, disappear as a redundancy. Sexxing, however, is here to stay. Bromance will be, thank God, temporary. Metrosexual will probably last. Chillaxin' became dork-speak immediately after coinage. This will not be recognized by the people who use it.

Catch phases like, in these economic times, too big to fail, and Obama-prefix-suffix merely remind us that folks who write about politics are not very original. This flock of honking geese will fly overhead and be replaced by the next lot.

Technical Topic -- Of Historical Hyphens

Let me say right off that this is a posting only for the linguistic and philological of heart.

Discerning reader Annie posted this question:

. . .What most interested me about your post, though, is what you say about 1790s usage.

In previous posts, you've touched on when and why using a slightly anachronistic term makes more sense than rigidly adhering to contemporary vocabulary. Given your attention to detail, I'm not surprised you pay the same attention to punctuation. But I am wondering how you decide when, for example, leaving a space between counter and revolutionary helps to keep the reader in the world of the novel and when it might be distracting.

I acknowledge that folks whose pasts do not include several years deciding when to hyphenate are probably delightfully oblivious to the author’s choices in this regard, but I'm still curious.


To which I reply …

The most important thing about all this word choice is -- I’m not writing 1790s language. I couldn't, any more than I could write authentic Shakespeare-era language. My readers, (they may number in the four digits by now,) do not expect me to reproduce real 1790s-speak.
If they want the authentic they can go to Walpole and Richardson.

I 'hum a few bars and I'll fake it' my way along. You could say I’m gelding modern English by cutting off all the Victorian constructions. Then, happily mixing metaphors, I slap on a light coat of 1790s slang.

But when the reader goes, 'Boing! 20th Century American phrase!' I've failed her.
(When Lazarus says, "That's a sweet idea," that was written before it became American slang. Not my fault. Not my fault.)

I write Standard English. I avoid hitting the reader over the head with big clunky modernisms, but I don't try to reproduce the 'voice' or the word choice of an Eighteenth Century writer.
I make a plentitude of mistakes.
Though I don't indulge in outright erroneous language when I happen to see myself doing it.
Except sometimes when I cheat.

ETA:  The rest of some tiresome commentary on the use of historical language in a 2010 book  is below the cut, where it is doubtless happy to stay.