"Tits up" and the case of the purloined definition

To my understanding, the phrase “tits up” has always meant “deceased” for a living being and “not working at all” for an inanimate object such as a car. Makes sense. It was always logical to me as referring to a dead animal lying cartoon-style on its back.  

I've always loved the phrase and have researched its origins as credibly sourced in military parlance from the WWII era, specifically for upside-down airplanes. It quickly metastasized to the farm community (I found Bessie tits-up in a ditch), and not long after found a new home and even a new meaning on Broadway that I’d previously been unaware of.

 

It has come to my attention that “tits up” additionally means “with confidence,” the phrase often shouted as a pre-performance confidence-booster among showgirls. Makes sense. With boobs in bustiers that place them aloft for the 42^nd Street gawkers, those nervous moments before curtain were just aching for a battle cry and beginning in the 1950s or so, they got one. 

 

Usually, a preponderant acceptance among journalists, artists and the general population is required for a word or phrase to begin meaning something other than it previously has. That didn’t occur with “tits up.” It was simply appropriated by the Broadway performer community and used by them for their purposes irrespective of its broader accepted sense. Broadway said, “We like it, we’re taking it.” I admire that kind of linguistic bravado, especially when its usage is so on-the-money. 

 

“Tits up” refers to posture and attitude on the part of the performer but at the same time seems to lampoon and take back the commercialization of the performer’s sexuality. I like it for both those reasons. The phrase has found new popularity with this contextual usage in the TV series, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which is how this meaning previously unknown to me bubbled into my consciousness. 

Perhaps the best advice and a true motto for living might incorporate both meanings: “Tits up until you’re tits up.”

British English usage of hospital and a mild envy

When an English person says someone is “in hospital,” it sounds odd to the American ear.  We prefer someone to be in “the” hospital. Which hospital though? Maybe you’re in a city with multiple hospitals. You wouldn’t say someone is “in a hospital” unless you didn’t know which one. Is it possible our former overlords have this one right? I think they do.

 

In British English usage, you’ve got the option of distinguishing between a physical place and that place’s common purpose. An English person would in fact say, “My brother is in the hospital fixing the MRI machine.” If the brother in question were sick, “My brother is in hospital” would suffice. As Americans, we lack the option to omit a superfluous word and I feel a little ripped off over it. 

 

That convention extends weirdly to “university” in British English and to “college” in American English. We do omit the definite article if we are going to “church,” “school” or “jail” for the purposes of inspiration, education or incarceration (but not if we’re there to fix the plumbing), so why not “hospital”?

The Harris/Walz candidacy and the apostrophe

With the Harris/Walz candidacy fully on the rails, I thought it prudent to review some apostrophe basics, as it has stuck a stick in the spokes of many communicators stymied by what seem to be equally bad choices. Should “Harris” have an apostrophe followed by an “s” or simply an apostrophe? An apostrophe after a “z” followed by an “s” feels weird but it seems right, right?  

The Wall Street Journal’s treatment of the bugaboo is “Harris’s and Walz’s,” but the Associated Press at last check has been printing it as “Harris’ and Walz’s.” The New York Times, which generally subscribes to AP, has been using the WSJ model.

 

There is much crankiness in the editorial community for the AP to move fully to the WSJ model. In AP style, the possessive form of “Paris” is “Paris’s” and the possessive form of “King Charles” is “King Charles’s.” The AP must fully adopt the possessive of “Harris” as “Harris’s” or it will have a shambles on its hands. 

 

The important thing is not to fear the Harris/Walz candidacy’s possessive usage. You must, however, do something. You can’t just leave it like it is with an intended possessive sense and slink away thinking everything’s fine. If you write, “Harris and Walz candidacy promises to be…” you are assaulting your readers. 

Here are your options and my opinions on them:

 

Harris’s and Walz’s: My favorite. A little bulky, but worth it.
Harris’ and Walz’s: Perfectly fine, though a little precious.
Harris’ and Walz’: Writer is a chaos agent and must be stopped.
Harris and Walz: Unclear and reflective of sloth. 

 

Devising mnemonic devices

Mnemonic devices are useful for preventing finger-in-the-air proclamations at cocktail parties that are dead wrong. One classic example is differentiating word origins and the insect kingdom with clarity between etymology and entomology. You don’t want to be schmoozing it up at a garden party with Thurston Howell the Fifth—millions at stake—and blather on about the Japanese entomology of “tycoon.” Your sycophancy will have been all for naught. The easy solution for avoiding the etymology/entomology trap is to associate "entomology" with ants. 

The mnemonic I like for remembering that “mnemonic” begins with a silent “M” is by associating the word with that modern master of morphology, Eminem. Do you have any favorite mnemonics?

Bird versus fowl

With Thanksgiving approaching, the time has come to distinguish between birds and fowl. Your fine feathered friends outside the window are birds, whereas the 40-pound behemoth you and yours are planning to devour is fowl. Note that it’s not “a fowl,” as the word “fowl” is a non-count plural noun that refers to a class of bird kept or hunted for its meat or eggs. All fowl are birds, but not all birds are fowl. The wild varieties include landfowl (like pheasants and quail) and waterfowl (like ducks and geese). Roosters and hens are landfowl, but with the distinction of being raised, which also makes them domestic or barnyard fowl. What makes a bird? You need five things: lungs, legs, wings, warm blood and eggs. Bats’ egglessness renders them winged mammals, and egg-laying reptiles miss the classification by being cold-blooded (though most lizards prefer ectothermic as being both more descriptive and less prone to stigma). Your wings don’t have to fly and your legs don’t have to be able to do a Texas two-step either, but if you want to claim to be a bird, you need to hit this list five for five. If in addition to all of this you are a candidate to be eaten, you are fowl. 

Eponyms, Malthus and coyotes

An eponym is a word whose source and meaning refers to a person. The person can be historical or fictional, living or dead. Perhaps the most famous eponym is pasteurize, which refers to Louis Pasteur, who pioneered the process of heating milk to a point where harmful microbes are killed without affecting the milk's taste or nutritional value. Other such words include sadistic, platonic and gerrymander. Braggadocio is a fine eponym that references a fictional character, Edmund Spencer's empty, boasting narcissist finding new life in modern English. America is itself an eponym. 

Recently returned to Southern California after a wonderful summer and early fall in Maine, I was serenaded last night by a pack of coyotes, and the word “malthusian” came to mind, as that is a feature of the Los Angeles coyote population. "Malthusian" references English economist and pessimist, Thomas Robert Malthus, who espoused the notion that populations grow to the limit of the sustenance systems that support them, and that human population reductions only occur in the inevitable event of famine, war and disease. Malthus was a lot of fun at parties. The malthusian attribute is most certainly true of the coyote population in the Los Angeles suburbs, whose supply of jackrabbits and Jack Russells are the sole determinant for its density. 

 

Though both plentiful and reviled, coyotes are protected here–in large part for this reason. As satisfying as slaked bloodlust over the loss of poor little Pookins might be, an open season on coyotes would achieve little. Grief-stricken, below-the-line movie professionals  littering their front lawns with leg-hold traps and staggering through the streets of Woodland Hills with an air rifle has plenty of potential downside and no realistic upside because the practical result would be nil. The coyote population is malthusian, and even subsequent to an all-out rout would rebound to the degree the land could sustain them within a season or two. Malthusian.

Jeffrey Clark's error offers a learning opportunity for using noun/verb homophones

In a broadcast from the Center for Renewing America studios, former Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division Jeffrey Clark expressed his objection to 50 Trump officials having received DOJ subpoenas. “All of this makes me angry,” Clark said. “It seems like they won’t stop. This is really causing a lot of upsetment in the country.”

The use of the non-word, “upsetment,” was intended to express the noun form of the verb, “to upset.” The word he was going for of course is very simply, “upset.” The verb/noun relationship of upset/upset is just one example of dozens that exist in the English language in which the noun/verb forms are homophones. In these cases, however, they are of course not homonyms because that would be maddening.

 

In the noun form, the accent is on the first syllable, whereas in the verb form, the accent is on the final syllable. Two-syllable examples include “survey,” “implant,” and “conscript.” For another example, the code enforcement agency will only permit you to build if you have a permit. 

 

One disclaimer here–you may find "upsetment" in Wiktionary or other highly permissive dictionaries. It has been coined before, but it hasn't caught on in journalistic, fiction or historical writing, nor has it been welcomed into the benchmark dictionaries.