That sounds about right. As I sit here thinking, and chewing on a Stim-U-Dent plaque remover, mint flavor, which over the years has become my titty-while-writing (couple of packs a day), replacing all forms of tobacco, I wonder whether life in general doesn’t fall somewhere between the cerebral and the dental.
ta
Not an abbreviation of thanks, but a “natural infantile [and adult British] sound of gratitude,” says Ernest Weekley. I’m thinking of taking it up. Despite my firm belief in casual good manners, I get tired of saying “Thank you” so much, and hearing other people saying “Thank you so much,” so much.
I’m thinking in terms of business travel. Cabdriver, ticket-counter person, news-and-notions cash-register person, coffee cash-register person, three or four security persons, airline person who takes my ticket, flight attendant, another flight attendant, the first flight attendant again, person in the seat next to me, flight attendant again, the other flight attendant again, the pilot, and on and on and on:
“Thanks.”
“No, thank you.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Thanks very much.”
“Thankyouthankyou.”
“Tha-anks.”
“Ta” is sufficient, I think. Or “Tak,” Danish, nice and crisp. According to OED, Old Frisian (q.v.—this may elucidate the frog reference) was thonk. AHD says thank and think are both from the PIE root *tong-. Maybe I’ll start saying “Tong.” No, too resonant.
Here are some exotic alternatives from Omniglot.com:
Abenaki, wiliwni; Afrikaans, dankie; Ainu, hioy’oy; Albanian, faleminderit; Aleut, qagaasakug; Arapaho, hohóu; Aromanian, hristo; Basque, eskerrik asko; Bislama, tangkiu; Bulgarian, blagodarya; Cimbrian, Vorbàis Gott!; Corsican, à ringraziè vi; Czech, dík; North Frisian (again, q.v.), foole tunk; West Frisian, tige tank; Georgian, either gmadlobth or didi madloba; Okinawan, nifee deebiru; Zulu, ngiyabonga.
Other people sure talk funny, don’t they? Except the Bislamans.
T and A
If your doctor says, “I recommend we remove your T and A,” he or she is behind the times but not a maniac. T and A used to refer, in medical circles, to tonsils and adenoids.
tare
From the Arabic for “that which is thrown away,” tare means the container as distinct from the contents. If you want to know how much the monkeys in a barrel of monkeys weigh, you weigh the whole thing and then subtract from that the weight of an identical empty barrel, the tare. We might compliment a writer’s style by saying its tare is slight, it is nearly all cargo.
Next we might speak of metonymy, one example of which is the container for the thing contained (“If you ask Aunt Neecy, the theory of relativity is a crock”). But if you ask me, any term for a rhetorical device, as opposed to that device in use, is tare.
The signifier for the signified? Back when I majored in English, you didn’t get into all that crap. Instead you read, like, Yeats, and your eyes bugged out of your head.
tenrec
According to the first edition of AHD, tenrecs are “any of various insectivorous, often hedgehoglike mammals of Madagascar.” A lovely flow of words, even including the sudden, unlikely hedgehoglike. But often hedgehoglike? That raises (no, it does not beg) the question, what is a tenrec like when it’s not hedgehoglike? Does it get to drinking and loom more wolverinish?
Fourth edition AHD’s version is more specific, if less musical: “Any of various insectivorous mammals of the family Tenrecidae, of Madagascar and adjacent islands, similar to the hedgehog but having a long pointed snout and often no tail.” We are left to wonder, now, how it manages to have a tail just some of the time.
See ukulelelike.
their, them, they, the singular
Lani Guinier: “It is easy to understand the idea of viewing an individual on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.” (Would we say “It is easy to understand the idea of viewing an individual on the content of their character rather than the gender of their self”?)
Would we go up to an infant or dog and say to the person with the infant or dog, “How old is they?” No, we would say, “How old is … he … or … she?” Or vice versa. Nothing wrong with that honest tentativeness.
But we can avoid the singular they, them, their without letting gender raise its (its?) troublesome head. Consider this horrible sentence: “If someone who is an authority says, ‘This is what I want to see done,’ those who see them as an authority will pursue that goal or at least support it, not because they feel threatened or powerless, but because that’s what they want to do.”
Feh, on several grounds. But let’s focus on who is them, who are they. Let’s rewrite that sentence into something humanly tolerable: “If someone in a position of authority says, ‘This is what I want to see done,’ then those who have reason to recognize that authority will try to get the thing done, not out of feeling threatened or powerless, but because they want to.” Which you might think would go without saying in a democratic society. But at least in this version the working they aren’t being sucked up into the boss’s them.
How about this story in The New York Times. Headline, fine: A VIDEO POSTED ON LINE POSES A RIDDLE FOR POLICE. Let’s go to the story:
The amateur video lasts for just a few minutes. It shows a group of young people standing over a man seated in a New York subway car, taunting him, waving a plastic bottle in his face and eventually striking him with their hands as he cowers under their blows.
The question (the despicability of these young people’s behavior, one way or the other, aside) is whether this video was real or staged. Okay, so far. But here’s what a New York Police Department spokesman said: “We are attempting to see if it was a real event, and if so, did a victim identify themselves.”
Themselves? It is stupid, stupid to refer to a victim as themselves, when we know that he is one individual male. Not only stupid, stupid, but depersonalizing. The singular them is not just dumb, it’s potentially wicked.
Sometimes, however, the person in question is an abstraction, a generality. We don’t know the person’s gender. In that case, what is fussy and awkward about he or she? Here is a sane sentence from Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker: “If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less.” Does something about that offend your sensibilities? Would you rather allude to “the average American” as “they”? The average American isn’t that fat, or that vague, yet.
there
I can see why we say so there, defiantly, as in “I am going to run away with Emil, and get my pet name for him—which happens to be Mr. Goosey—tattooed all up and down both of my arms, and devote my life to his career of inspirational sayings, so there!” We surely don’t know what we are doing when we say that, but we do know what we are saying: “There it is, that’s the deal, get used to it.”
That there is an example, says OED, of there “used interjectionally, usually to point (in a tone of vexation, dismay, derision, satisfaction, encouragement, etc.) to some fact, condition, or consummation, presented to the sight or mind.”
Okay. It’s a little bit like “Now see here!”
But why do we say “There, there,” to comfort someone? Maybe we are saying, “Just step back for a moment, away from the here and now, and look with some detachment at this thing that you are taking so hard. So some weirdo named Emil drove off and left you at a Laundromat in Tegucigalpa. You’re young, you’ll meet somebody else you can call Mr. Goofy.”
“Goosey!”
“Oh … Looks more like an f. I see the e, but I just thought you’d misspelled Goofy.”
“Aaaaarrrr.”
In other words, “There, there” means “Why not be as objective about your heartbreak as I am?” Not very comforting. But there you are.
thigh
Where the leg gets really serious. Yeats’s apocalypic beast approaches “moving his slow thighs.
” Samson attacking Philistines “smote them hip and thigh.” Mercutio tries to call Romeo away from the Capulets’ orchard by invoking the lady Romeo was smitten with, pre-Juliet. Sounds pretty good to me:
I conjure thee by Rosaline’s bright eyes,
By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,
By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh,
And the demesnes that there adjacent lie.
That’s one thing about thighs: what they’re close to. “Don’t you feel my leg, don’t you feel my leg, cause when you feel my leg, you’re gonna feel my thigh, and if you feel my thigh, you’re gonna go up high,” sang Blue Lu Barker and, after her, Maria Muldaur.
But thighs can be impressive in themselves. Larry Brown, the great professional running back, had thighs so robust, each one looked like two thighs bound together.
OED traces the word back to the Lithuanian tukti, to become fat. Which is the context in which I have often heard women discuss this juicy part of the body. “In college they called me ‘thunder thighs.’”
“Yeah, heh-heh—I mean, hey, sounds good to me.”
“Noooo.”
Under thigh-slapper, “an exceptionally funny joke, description, or the like,” OED cites, from The Wall Street Journal, 1965: “The thigh-slapper … the President got off to reporters when Lynda Bird showed up in a billowy muu-muu dress.” I’m betting Lynda Bird Johnson’s reaction was less than full of mirth. (From the same root as merry.)
See elephant.
thong
“Etymologically, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, “a thong is something that ‘binds’ up. The word comes from a prehistoric Germanic *twangg-, which also produced German zwang, ‘constraint.’ In the Old English period it was thwong; it began to lose its w in the 13th century.”
Back then a thong was just a leather strip, a shoelace, for instance. Now it is underwear. I’d like to see it regain not only its w but also its second g, given the resonance of Monica Lewinsky’s thong, or, as I would prefer, her thwongg, in political history.
I wouldn’t want to wear one, though. Talk about binding up.
though, the lazy
I keep seeing lazy though’s in the press. Here’s a random example from The New York Times: “The president has repeatedly challenged [the Washington political and media culture’s] focus on short-term results, though it remains unclear whether he will succeed.” Why though? When though or although introduces a subordinate clause, it means “in spite of the fact that.”
You could make it “ … focus on short-term results, but it remains unclear whether he will succeed.” Or, simply, “ … focus on short-term results. It remains unclear whether he will succeed.” But either of those makes the reader want to respond, “Well, duh.”
You could be assertive: “So far, he is not succeeding.” Or you could risk a bit of wordplay: “ … short-term results. The results of that challenge have not been short term.”
How about this though, from an Associated Press story about “monkey carcasses, smoked anteater, even preserved porcupine” being smuggled into Europe from Africa as “bushmeat”: “Some animals were identifiable, though scientists boiled the remains of others and reassembled the skeletons to determine the species.” I don’t know who is in charge of conjunctions at the AP, but he or she should be advised that that though is neither fish nor fowl.
See but.
tight like that
Ian McEwan, quoted in The New Yorker: “You spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They’ve got that twist, a little trip, that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you’re fiddling around with something that’s already there. You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be.”
tit
This is the original spelling. It captures the ticking noise that a nursing baby makes. The unphonetic teat replaced tit, as more polite. Still pronounced tit. Why are people embarrassed by sonicky spelling?
(For breast the French have sein and mamelle, both from the Latin, but they also have tette, meaning tit, and téter, to breast-feed. An infant’s feeding time is l’heure de la tétée.)
toadless
If I asked you whether you thought OED had toadless in it, your answer would be, “Is the Oxford English Dictionary toadless? No toads in it? Of course there must be, reflecting the influence—”
And I would interrupt: “No, I didn’t ask whether you thought OED was toadless, I asked whether you thought OED had toadless in it.”
“Toadless? How do you mean?”
“I mean the word toadless. A separate entry for that word.”
“Shouldn’t think so. Silly sort of word.”
But OED does have toadless. It doesn’t have frogless, lizardless, crabless, duckless, goatless, rabbitless, gooseless, chickenless, snailless, hareless, squirrellless , ferretless, moleless, otterless, mouseless, ratless, badgerless, or weaselless. It does have toadless. And it doesn’t even call toadless a nonce word (one coined for a specific occasion), as it does cowless.
Toadless. The elements are toad, whose derivation is obscure (“The etymological jungle stretching around the designations of the toad is almost impassable,” writes Anatoly Liberman, who does draw a tentative connection to toddle), and -less. The meaning is “devoid of toads.” A 1921 example: “No dog can be thoroughly happy in a toadless garden.”
The OED also has toadess, “a female toad,” with only one example: “The toad’s highest idea of beauty is his toadess.” And toadery, “a place where toads are kept or abound.” And toadlet and toadling, each meaning “a young or little toad.” And toadality, “the personality of a toad.”
“Bless my soul,” you will say. “But we both must know,” you will add, “whose influence this reflects.”
Mr. Toad, of Toad Hall.
touchy
I continue to assume, as I have always assumed, that a touchy person is an oversensitive one—who is too readily, and irritably, provoked. (Similarly, a spooky horse is one that is easily spooked.) But -y as an adjectival suffix most often means “inclined to.” A picky person is not one who is inclined to be picked, but one who is inclined to pick. A pushy or needy or jumpy person is inclined to push or need or jump. A touchy-feely person is inclined to touch and feel. The other day in an airport I heard one young woman say to another, “He’s too touchy. And his hands are all sweat. Uighlk.” Here’s an Urbandictionary.com definition: “Touchy McToucherson: Refers to someone who cannot keep their hands to themselves,” seven thumbs up, none down. If the meaning of touchy is shifting toward “touching too much,” then its long-standing meaning is beginning to reverse, and misunderstanding will ensue:
“Don’t be so touchy!”
“What? Me touchy? I’m not leaning far enough away from you? You’re the one with the big paws!”
translation, of Mark Twain, into English
The English author Bram Stoker, in Dracula, had Van Helsing, the vampire hunter, refer to “an American” who defined faith as “that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.”
Stoker had met, near worshipfully, Mark Twain, who had observed that “faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
tsk-tsk
Not only animal sounds but also human ones are hard to spell. This timehonored orthographical venture is an attempt to spell the sound, closer perhaps to tsch-tsch or tch-tch (almost has a j in it, but not quite—see, it’s hard), made by the tongue against the hard palate to express commiseration or disapproval. Tsk-tsk (or tsk, tsk, which is slower and a touch more reproachful) has come to be pronounced sometimes as if it were a word, tisk, tisk.
OED offers no pronunciation of tsk but helpfully calls it “alveolar click formed by suction” and records Lawrence Durrell’s alternate version: “Balthazar … walked slowly … ma
king the little clucking noise he always made with his tongue … Tsck, tsck.” That’s pretty good, better than Kipling’s attempt (see OED’s tck entry), “Tck! Tck! And thou art in charge.”
OED suggests we compare tsk to tchick, which it defines as “a representation of the click made by pressing some part of the tongue against the palate and withdrawing it with suction. Properly, the unilateral palatal click, used to urge on a horse.” Withdrawing it with suction—nicely put. But wouldn’t withdrawing it from suction be better?
Here is an anecdote recorded by Zora Neale Hurston. A man sends his daughter off to school for seven years, and when she returns he sits her down and dictates a letter to his brother:
“Our mule is dead but Ah got another mule and when Ah say (clucking sound of tongue and teeth) he moved from de word.”
He asks his daughter whether she’s got that. She says no, sir. He waits awhile and asks again. She says no, sir.
How come?
“Cause Ah can’t spell (clucking sound).”
“You mean to tell me you been off to school seben year and can’t spell (clucking sound)? Why Ah could spell dat myself and Ah ain’t been to school a day in mah life. Well jes’ say (clucking sound) he’ll know what yo’ mean and go on wid de letter.”
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