Of the three folks currently in the US Presidential Primary race, none have (at the moment) a surname that has a citation in the Oxford English Dictionary. The online OED is ever helpful though, and suggests a possible near-match candidate when a specific lookup fails, and so we get this list:
Obama — obambulate: intr. To walk about; to wander here and there.
Clinton — clintonite: a variety (or a synonym) of
McCain — McCarthyism: …oof.
Quick pointer to another language question on Ask Metafilter, this one from use whatzit. The meat:
For example, “Yes, I am” is okay. “Yes, I’m” is not. I haven’t been able to find any good logic for this case or that works for the different contractions in general (”don’t” can also stand alone, “I’d” and “I’ve” cannot).
Interesting question about grandpaternal nicknames on Ask Metafilter today, from user 23skidoo:
Do you call your grandfather Bumpy?
How common is the title “Bumpy” for a grandfather? Like “Grampa Joe” or “Peepaw Frank”… do you say/understand the usage “Bumpy Jackson” for a grandfather? If so, where did you grow up?
Responses so far have folks who’ve never heard of it (I’m in that camp), folks who have, and folks who know some similar variation. I’ve done a little googling that suggests that (1) it’s not something restricted to some chance acquaintences of 23skidoo, and (2) there are probably a lot of other variations on this theme, e.g. “bumpa”.
I somehow found myself looking at a Wikipedia writeup on rejected Star Trek captain Christopher Pike, where there’s this little oddity:
Little is known about Pike’s personal life. According to dialog in “The Cage”, Pike is from the city of Mojave in North America on Earth in Southern California, and at one point owned a horse named “Tango”.
Emphasis mine. What’s so strange to me is the order of these geographic labels. Why place “Southern California” at the end of that list? Clearly, Earth isn’t in SoCal but vice versa, and the rendering can be read as true if you choose to do so:
- city of Mojave (which is in North America (which is on Earth)), which is in Southern California
So there’s a style question and a linguistic question:
Style: why not put SoCal between Mojave and N. America? Intentional choice or product of collaborative, cumulative authorship under the wiki model?
Linguistics: why does this ordering jump out at me so brightly when the meaning is unambiguous regardless of the ordering? Is this a “little red wagon” vs. “*red little wagon” thing?
I wrote a little about variant spellings of “by the by” a while back, but at the time I was thinking the phrase in terms of its use as an alternative to “by the way” in the sense of being a sort of clarifying interjection.
And I’m at least familiar with a similar-but-different usage, “[in the [sweet]] by-and-by” for the (sometimes concurrent) passage of time.
What I don’t think I’ve noticed before is “[is] by the by” as an alternative to “beside the point” or maybe “neither here nor there”, as in this metafilter comment de-emphasizing the role of scammers in the purported collapse of eBay:
“It happens all the time and will keep on happening. The fact that Nigerian scammers helped speed up that decline is by the by.”
A google search for “is by the by” turns up about 14K raw hits.
That includes some noise, such as comma-offset uses of the by-the-way meaning (”Which is, by the by, the way in which the Jesus story is different than…”, “Wynad is, by the by, remarkably full of antiquities”) or weird hyphen-boundary collisions (”…and is by the by-laws considered…”, “‘If the election has not been held on the date so designated (that is, by the by-laws)”).
But the noise seems to be a minority; most of the results are genuine hits.
There are a lot of sentence-terminal hits, with some sort of unesettled question (”Whether or not it’s merely engendered…is by the by.”, “this may or may not actually be so, but that is by the by.”, “Whether you agree or not is by the by.”) or an assertion (”The fact these alleged incidents took place at an Embassy, is by the by.), or some sort of pronominal representation of same with “this”, “that”, “all this” (Hi, languagehat!), etc standing in before the final “is by and by”.
I’m also finding people using it in non-terminal positions in sentences/clauses (”If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if…”) and in some cases using the phrase not as a noun itself but a modifier of some other noun (”All of which is by the by ramble on my part I suspect…”).
None of which strikes me as surprising, to be clear. But it’s something that jumped out at me this morning; I’ve managed to just plain not notice whatever occurances of this I might have encountered in the past. Have I in the past heard or read it and gotten the context but dismissed the specific usage? Been puzzled but let it go? Misanalyzed it as taking the by-the-way meaning and just shrugged off any oddities produced thereby? Heck if I know!
Is this a regionalism to some extent, more common in English-speaking cultures outside of the US or the Pacific Northwest of same? I happen to know that the commenter from mefi, above, is Australian, and a fair share of the hits include .au or .co.uk urls, but that’s pretty thin stuff on which to base such a speculation.
From an ask metafilter question about Southern idioms, this:
“Shinola’s a shoe polish? Wow. That expression makes a lot more sense now.”
Heh. Been there.
From the Seattle Times, on a 12-year-old austic artist:
In the past, Wil would have been called a “savant,” a term now considered insensitive. Dager calls him extraordinarily talented.
“Savant” is insensitive? The more precise term I think of, and one that I can understand the dislike for, is “idiot savant“, where the juxtaposition of mental incapacities and shocking (savantish) talent is expressed explicitly.
But savant by itself? I’m wondering if this is me being out of touch with usage preferences and taboos in the autistic/special-needs/mental-health sector (possible), or there was some editing damage done to this article that reduced “idiot savant” to “savant” out of the same sensitivity that was then still being vestigially addressed in the paragraph.
Sounds like a research project.
Metafilter is a website, but it’s also, judging by usage both on MeFi and off, a verb. But what does it mean?
Searching for “to metafilter” is asking for trouble; uses of ‘metafilter’ as a noun referring to the site itself dwarf verb-form uses, and “to metafilter” turns up lots of hits for, likewise, noun forms with to as prepositional glue (”subscribe to metafilter”, “strong connections to metafilter”, “POSTING ASCII ART TO METAFILTER”), dwarfing whatever infinitive “to Metafilter” cites might be out there.
Alternate tack, then: search for “metafiltering”. And this works pretty darned well, dishing up in total a few dozen uses of the phrase on mefi itself as well as some off-site usage (some related to the site, some not). It turns out that metafiltering can mean a few different things.
(Note: there are at least a couple other obvious suffix-based tactics which I have ignored for this writeup: “metafiltered” and “metafilterer”. Both turn up some interesting results, but I’ve found “metafiltering” to be the most engaging of the three; +ed and +er will have to wait for a separate writeup.)
So what sorts of things does “metafiltering” mean?
From Ian Ayres posting over at Freakonomics, a collection of reasons given for source anonymity by various news publications following a 2004 change to NYT’s confidentiality policy.
A few of the cited reasons:
Ian’s writeup touches on some of the variations in both phrasing and the nature of the justification in various citations. He also mentions that “…by 2005 there were 9,451 articles using the phrase.” Which is the sort of thing that makes me drool a little.
I was surprised by the end of this sentence, from user drpynchon in a comment on Ask Metafilter:
It’s not entirely crap — there are some kernels of corn too in there, but…
The autocomplete function of my brain expected the kernals to be of truth; the persistence of the cliche in action, I suppose. The use of “corn” instead both is more literal a metaphor and evokes a much more visceral reading of the preceding “crap” than I would have had with the “truth” version.
