[kroh-nee] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation | a close friend or companion; chum. |
] [sin-uhs-thee-zhuh, -zhee-uh, -zee-uh] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation | a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color. |
—Related forms
[sin-uhs-thet-ik] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation, adjectiveCHEAPSKATE
A miserly or stingy person.
It’s never nice to be called a cheapskate, especially if it’s true. The second part has nothing whatever to do with any of the more common senses of skate. A writer in the San Francisco Chronicle in September 2007 was way wide of the mark when he wondered if a cheapskate was avoiding paying his share by adroitly sliding past the transaction, as though on skates or a skateboard. And there’s nothing in the least fishy about the word.
The best suggestion we have is that skate was originally a Scots contemptuous word, still known in Australia and New Zealand, where it’s usually written as skite. We retain it in blatherskite for a person who talks at great length without making much sense. It appeared first in a slightly different form in a Scots song, Maggie Lauder, written by Francis Semphill about 1643 (“Jog on your gait, ye bletherskate / My name is Maggie Lauder!”). This was a camp song among American soldiers during the War of Independence and remained popular in the decades that followed. We guess that this may have helped skate or skite to be preserved among emigrant Scots and others in the US during the nineteenth century.
By the way, the fish sense of skate is from Old Norse skata; the word for ice skates and similar devices come to us from Dutch schaats, although its origin is the Old French escache, meaning a stilt; there’s also the South African sense of a disreputable or irresponsible young white man, which may be from Afrikaans skuit, excreta.
SPUTNIK
Thursday saw the 50th anniversary of the successful launch of Earth’s first artificial satellite by the USSR on 4 October 1957. It was a sensation — many people who were around at the time will remember the astonishment with which it was greeted.
British newspapers announce
the launch of Sputnik
What Sputnik also did was introduce a lot of people to the -nik ending, which was reinforced later by the Russian and English term lunik for the rockets the USSR sent to the moon, which came from the Latin and Russian luna. One early result was a lot of short-lived and humorous formations. When the USSR sent up a second satellite on 3 November with the dog Laika on board, some American writers referred to it as Muttnik. The very public failure of the US Navy to launch a satellite on 6 December resulted in sarcastic terms like Kaputnik and Flopnik.
It also led to many figurative creations, mostly intended jokingly but a few of which have permanently entered the language. In 1958, the rise of the beat generation led to beatnik (folk enthusiasts briefly becoming folkniks) and to neatnik, a person excessively neat in his personal habits, the opposite of a scruffy beatnik. A robotnik was a person who blindly obeyed authority, the opposite of a refusenik, one sense of which in the 1980s was a person who refused to obey orders as a form of protest, although its main sense, from the 1970s onwards, was of a Jew in the Soviet Union who was refused permission to emigrate to Israel. A member of a pacifist movement was from the 1960s called a peacenik. In the late 1980s in the UK, noisenik came on the scene for a loud musician, especially one who played a form of rock music.
The -nik ending became so widely used that it is assumed by many people that Sputnik started it. But it’s a long-standing Slavic ending that implies an agent or a member of a class or group. As early as the end of the nineteenth century, a few Russian words ending in -nik became rather rare unnaturalised immigrants into English, such as chinovnik, a minor government functionary or a civil servant, and Narodnik, literally a member of the common people (Russian narod, people) but which in the late nineteenth century meant a member of a socialist political group among the Russian intelligentsia.
The ending is shared in particular with Yiddish and also appears in modern Hebrew, hence kibbutznik, a member of a kibbutz, a term that wasn’t much known in English at the time of Sputnik, though it had been recorded 10 years earlier. In American English, -nik has been an active word-forming agent from the early years of the twentieth century as a result of Yiddish influence. One result was alrightnik, an immigrant Jew who has raised himself from poverty to prosperity (though the main sense of the Yiddish olraytnik, borrowed from US English, was of an upstart, offensive boaster or parvenu who is philistine or smug). His opposite was the nogoodnik, recorded from 1936. Another still with us is nudnik, a nagging, pestering or irritating person, from Yiddish nudyen, to bore. The ending was kept in the public consciousness in the US through Al Capp’s frequent use of -nik words in his Li’l Abner cartoons.
So the entry of Sputnik into the language only reinforced a trend in American English, but one whose linguistic echoes are still with us and which we may celebrate along with the achievements of Soviet rocketry.
FLETCHERISE
To chew thoroughly.
The word commemorates The Great Masticator, a title that these days might lead to hearers getting the giggles. He was Horace Fletcher, a food faddist of the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. He advised people to chew each bite of their food 32 times, to eat small amounts, and only to eat when hungry and free from stress or anxiety. Hence this rhyme of the time:
Eat somewhat less but eat it more
Would you be hearty beyond fourscore.
Eat not at all in worried mood
Or suffer harm from best of food.
Don’t gobble your food but “Fletcherize”
Each morsel you eat, if you’d be wise.
Don’t cause your blood pressure e’er to rise
By prizing your menu by its size.
The Great Masticator
Fletcherism was taken seriously by many people and had some distinguished adherents; it lasted until the 1930s. Unfortunately, eating meals took much longer than usual and there were complaints that it severely restricted the conversation at dinner parties.
UNCONFERENCE
To hold an unconference sounds like a contradiction. In fact, it’s practical anarchy applied to a discussion meeting. A participant was quoted in the Guardian in September 2007 as saying that unconferences are “coffee breaks that last all day”. Putting it more formally, an unconference has an open-ended agenda in which the topics discussed are driven by the participants, who are all encouraged to contribute. As the writer of the Guardian article described it, “You join an informal group on a particular theme that interests you, listen, discuss and then, if you find something boring, move on to another group.” In Podcasting for Profit (2007), Allan Hunkin notes another feature: “What makes the unconference model different from a conference is that attendees don’t pay to register, speakers aren’t paid to speak, and expenses are covered by sponsors.” The term is originally from the US and goes back a long way. The first example I know of appeared, appropriately, in a list of anarchist summer events on Usenet in April 1993. It has remained a niche term until recently, but is becoming more common, especially in the computing and IT worlds.
So how does an unconference work? It’s designed to perpetuate the buzz arising during the traditional breaks for coffee, lunch and tea when people communicate informally.
[Guardian, 18 Sep. 2007]
There is no set program for BarCamp Orlando, which is billed as an “unconference” because of its loose structure. The agenda will be determined the day of the event by those who post on a sign-up board at the door, notes co-organizer Larry Diehl, 20, an information-systems student at UCF.
[Orlando Sentinel, 11 Sep. 2007]
PUSILLANIMOUS
Faint-hearted, cowardly.
It first appeared in the sixteenth century and is still very much with us, though it’s a writer’s word, hardly one you’re likely to hear in your local bar unless the patrons are literary types. Back in the 1970s US Vice President Spiro Agnew famously accused his opponents of “pusillanimous pussyfooting.” In 1936, the humorist A P Herbert wrote in What a Word that “Modern dictionaries are pusillanimous works, preferring feebly to record what has been done than to say what ought to be done.” (He wrote in the same book, “American slang is one part natural growth and nine parts a nervous disorder.” But then he wasn’t much in favour of American English of any kind.)
Pusillanimous is a fine word to disparage your enemies with, one that rolls extravagantly off the tongue. Its unusualness makes it all the more effective.
WHELMED
[Q] From Steve Simoneaux, Atlanta, GA: “I’ve been overwhelmed and I’ve been underwhelmed. Is it possible to ever just be whelmed?”
[A] You could once. But remember that underwhelmed started life as a joke based on overwhelmed and in language terms is relatively recent — it was first recorded in 1956, but became popular only a decade or so later. It’s common these days, because it fills a need for a single word to communicate the concept of failing to impress.
The verb whelm does exist, though you might search for some time before you find examples in modern prose. That’s excluding fantasy and historical fiction, of course — when S M Stirling wrote in On the Oceans of Eternity, “Whelm not our ships with Your anger, but give us swift voyaging and good winds, full nets and victory”, his choice of whelm was deliberately archaic, to help convey to his readers the sense of being in another time and place. On the other hand, to come across “It was a late-arriving crowd that saw the Hurricanes whelm the Philadelphia Flyers Saturday night”, which appeared in The News & Record of North Carolina back in 1998, is to be brought up short, wondering if the word’s a misprint.
Whelmed
But a writer can’t use any of these senses any more, unless he’s deliberately using an archaism for effect, or is showing off his knowledge of language, or is perhaps archly trying to invent a new word, not knowing that whelm exists.
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