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.

Deadly, not stirred; history and etymology of the Molotov cocktail

Russia’s invasion of a blameless Ukraine has invigorated a citizen response the world hasn’t seen in decades, which in turn has invigorated use of a homemade incendiary device preferred by improvised armies the world over, the Molotov cocktail. But who was Molotov, and why is this guerrilla gasoline grenade deployed in his honor? 

Molotov was an Old Bolshevik who became a great party loyalist to the Soviet Union. A favorite of Stalin and vice versa, Stalin appointed Molotov as his right-hand man, chair of the Council of People’s Commissars, in 1930. He held the post until 1941. 

 

At the outset of World War II, in what is called the First Soviet-Finnish War, the Soviet Union leveraged the chaos of the war as cover to invade Finland, but met unexpected resistance. The surprising weakness of the Soviet machine was noted by an ambitious German leader, who soon afterward launched an ill-fated offensive into Russia. 

 

Here’s where it gets a little convoluted. Soviet propagandists were claiming that visible bomber flights over these little Finnish villages were humanitarian food drops. The local populations began referring to this Soviet fantasy as “Molotov bread baskets.” As tanks and personnel began moving into these villages, they were met with homemade incendiaries they then called “Molotov cocktails,” very real beverages that were intended to complement these non-existent food deliveries from the Politburo. 

 

The idea didn’t originate there, though the name did. A bottle filled with gas and a lit rag is no stroke of genius and has been used as a sabotage for settling scores ever since combustible fuel. Notably though, they were used as a tool of desperation by poorly equipped soldiers in the Spanish Civil War fighting under Franco, and we all know how that ended. The Molotov cocktail. Crude but effective.

 

I guess the most important takeaway is that Molotov cocktails were designed for use on Molotov, not by Molotov. 

 

 

The 100th Grammar Dance article, and it's a doozy

This being my 100^th Grammar Dance article, I thought I’d make it a doozy–that is, I thought I might track down the origins of the word, “doozy.”  

I first heard it watching American cartoons in the 1960s. Just before Bugs Bunny’s antagonist falls off a cliff, into a mine or down an elevator shaft, Bugs would often offer the faux-kindly advice, “The first step’s a doozy!” As a child, I contextualized it to mean an extreme version of whatever category “the doozy” occupied, and accepted it on its face. 

The word’s archaic charm kept it in my unquestioned active vocabulary for decades, and I sometimes employed it when I wished to invoke a mood of waxed-mustache anachronism for an impressive person, place or thing. When I finally took it upon myself to find out about the word's history, I was a little disappointed. I imagined its source being its onomatopoeic resemblance to someone falling, Bugs Bunny-style, down a well or a conflation of "ooh" and "huzzah." Alas, no.

 

“Doozy” is probably the result of the gradual evolution of the word, “daisy,” which in the late 19^th century was a common metaphor for any exemplary thing. “Doozy” begins to emerge in the earliest part of the 20^th century as a comic replacement where “daisy” might have been used before. 

 

There is also a theory that the word derives from popular Italian actress Eleonora Duse, who lived at the turn of the century. Credible or not, this is the etymology I prefer to believe, as she was one of the great stage artists of her time and was known for tackling deeply challenging material.

There is also a theory that it derives from the Duesenberg automobile, whose legendary luxury is tempting to associate with “doozy,” but its usage predates the car company’s widest popularity, so that is unlikely.

 

Most signs point to the mundane transition of “daisy” into “doozy” over the course of the 19^th century’s departure and the arrival of the 20^th, likely at the hands of a series of grinning, bow-tied goobers seeing their first steamship or a nicely carved walking stick. 

That’s where most of the evidence lies, but as is the case with beliefs of such low stakes as these, strongly holding to them even in error bears little consequence. So, in furtherance of the arts and in furtherance of the feminine, I am throwing in all the way with the Eleonora Duse theory, as wrong as I surely am. 

Warren G Harding's coining of the word, "normalcy" is 100 years old this year

The word “normalcy” may seem perfectly normal, but it’s not. Its two chief oddities are that it is having its 100^th birthday this year and that it was created by an American president. 

Normality, which means the same thing as normalcy, has been around since the 16^th century. It was a term for a 90-degree angle in carpentry and carried the second meaning of the way we know it today, as the state of conforming to some generally agreed-upon set of expectations. “Normalcy” only comes into use with Warren G. Harding’s presidential campaign of 1922. 

 

There were some uses of “normalcy” in expressing a sense of the perpendicular in carpentry through the 19^th century, but the way it is known today only begins with Harding’s plea for a “Return to Normalcy” after World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. The coining was successful, as it resides in all major dictionaries and relative to “normality” is the preferred usage for many Americans. According to a Google search hit count, however, “normality” outperforms “normalcy” ten to one.

 

My ear prefers “normalcy” to “normality” if I wish to imply something welcome. If it is a safe and warm place of manageable, predictable equilibrium, then “normalcy” it is. If I am characterizing a rigidly off-putting adherence to irrelevant social hierarchies, “normality” might be preferred. There’s a certain jeer to it that fits an invective a little better. 

 

As a prescriptivist, I’m supposed to hear “normalcy” as a bombastic neologism fit only for corrupt presidents (he did help free Eugene Debs, which cuts a lot of ice with me and bears mentioning), but in my opinion there’s better music to  “normalcy” than its more correct counterpart. Unless I went to throw a barb at some icon of conformism, like that corrupt philanderer, Warren G. Harding, I don’t normally use “normality.” As a general rule, both normalcy and normality are to be avoided as descriptions of individuals, mostly because no one is or was normal, Warren G. Harding included. He was a weirdo.

Homonyms, homographs, homophones, oh my!

While there is some disagreement about the distinction between homonyms and homophones, no bar fights have ever broken out over homographs, that is to say, words that are spelled alike but mean different things. 

Punch, for instance. Whether thrown or drunk, “punch” is spelled the same way. It is a homograph pair whose two meanings are pronounced the same. Some homographs sound different, as in describing the brevity of sixty seconds as a minute minute, but even with that second feature (usually one more than is needed to begin a dispute), few grammarians, however sad and lonely, raise an objection to the blanket statement that all word pairs with identical spelling and disparate senses qualify as homographs. 

 

Many homographs are also homophones, which are characterized by their sounding alike, as in the two versions of “punch” above. They are spelled alike and they sound alike, but they mean different things, so they fit the requirements of both categories. "Minute" and "minute" as described in the previous paragraph qualify as a homograph pairs but not as homophones. 

 

I made allusion to some grammar violence in the first paragraph, and homonyms is where you run into it. Many a lip has been bloodied by pinch-nosed prescriptivists who roar into conflict if nastily provoked over the win currently enjoyed by the modern preference of describing both homographs and homophones as homonyms. These hidebound grammar thugs point to the -nym suffix as meaning “name” and as such prefer it to refer only to word pairs that are spelled alike but differ in both pronunciation and meaning. 

 

This notion would provide no distinction then from homograph. The thankfully prevailing view is for homonyms to be the umbrella under which both homographs and homophones reside. In the "all dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs" sort criteria, homonym as a parent category above homograph and homophone serves as a good organizing principle for these grammar terms.

Having cake, eating cake, a phrase's evolution and the Unabomber

Some of the most commonly known quotations are actually misquoted. Here are a few: “Play it again, Sam.” “We're going to need a bigger boat.” “Money is the root of all evil.” These examples’ initial utterance or penning can all be found and examined, and the error can be clearly noted. This makes them misquotes. 

 

Other adjacent categories to misquoting include misattribution and false quoting. The distinction between these two is the existence of a verifiable source. In a typical misattribution, a less-famous person’s bon mot is ascribed to a more-famous person. Voltaire did not write, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire’s biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, coined the expression to describe his outlook on free speech. 

 

In false quoting, some screed or aphorism of unknown origin is falsely assigned to a known wit—George Carlin suffers this mightily. There is a long and dreadful essay that begins, “The paradox of our time in history…” You can find it in a click, and at a glance it is well below Carlin’s standards. False quoting is lampooned to perfection in the iconic Abraham Lincoln meme that reads, “Don't believe everything you read on the internet.”

 

A somewhat different story can be found in, “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” It feels like misquoted Shakespeare, but it’s not. Its earliest usage appears in 16^th century letters, suggesting it was an idiomatic saying of the time. The expression is most commonly known in contemporary parlance as I have written it here, but that was not always the case. 

 

The current usage became prevalent after the 1930s, when it was commonly delivered as “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” This logic works in that once eaten, the cake cannot be had. The modern style explains itself by saying once the eating begins, the having stops. Many of literary criticism graduate school’s leading lights have thrashed this one out, so I won’t get into it. What’s interesting is Ted Kaczynski’s involvement in this little usage melee. 

 

In his manifesto—and as a side note, anytime a piece of writing you’ve done is characterized as a manifesto, you’ve probably lost your audience—Ted Kaczynski wrote, “As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society, well, you can't eat your cake and have it too.” It was a sufficiently arcane usage for an FBI linguist to take note and turn up the heat on all of the smartypants suspects. Kaczynski was on FBI radar already, and upon the deeper investigation inspired by this “eat/have” variant, investigators found a letter he had written to his mother where he employed the same usage. The FBI had their man. And they ate him too.