AWADmail Issue 288
Jan 6, 2007
A Compendium of Feedback on the Words in A.Word.A.Day
and Other Interesting Tidbits about Words and Languages
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From: Mike Pope (mike.pope microsoft.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--wiki
Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/wiki.html
Surely the best-known instance of the word "wiki" these days is in the name
"Wikipedia" http://wikipedia.org , the collaboratively written online
encyclopedia. The concept of a wiki -- in which anyone can make changes to
a page -- was initially viewed with great skepticism by (as we call them)
content providers, who foresaw only anarchy when uncontrolled access was
allowed to content. But the Wikipedia folks have shown that opening up
collaboration to the whole world (pretty much literally) can work pretty
well, tapping the collected knowledge of everyone who wants to edit. The
sheer quantity of information in Wikipedia -- some ok, some good, and some
excellent -- has outstripped in just a few years the size of many printed
encyclopedias. Wikis are a promising model for aggregating knowledge, and
we will see many more of them in the future.
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From: Geo Kloppel (geokloppel clarityconnect.com)
Subject: feedback: adultescent and tween
Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/adultescent.html
Apropos of the word for January 1st, 2008 ("adultescent"), you suggested
that tween is another example of the contemporary marketers' penchant for
inventive demographic slicery. No doubt a great many readers will remember
that the word tween occurs in the very first chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien's
The Fellowship of the Ring, in which situation it is a triple blend (of
teen, twenties, and between) referring to "the irresponsible twenties
between childhood and coming-of-age at thirty three" -- a curious
anticipation of the demographic concept behind "adultescent". Remembering
that our "adult" comes from the past participle of the Latin verb
"adolescere", I find an unfelicitous redundancy in "adultescent" (about
which I'm sure the marketers care not a fig).
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From: Denis Smith (dsmith6 columbus.rr.com)
Subject: Adultescent and Transescent
Thanks so much for Wordsmith. When I was director of language arts for an
Ohio school district some years back, I signed up all of the department
chairs with a subscription so that we would always have some common frames
of reference in our work of encouraging young people to love the study of
language.
Today's word, adultescent, reminds me about an earlier attempt for a similar
construction. In the early 1960s, Dr. Donald Eichhorn, then superintendent
of schools in Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, coined the word transescent to
describe youth between the ages of 10 and 14. This coinage was an attempt
to define that phase in young people's lives when they were not quite
adolescents yet were demonstrably not young children either. In spite of
many attempts by some educational writers, the word never caught on. The
descriptor that did catch on and is still used to describe that phase of
human development is early adolescent.
Years later, when I was an editor of several educational publications, I
would receive manuscripts from some authors who repeatedly used the word
transescent. (I did not care for the word because it was not accepted by
the larger public and no one outside a small circle knew what the term
meant or implied).
The best example of the word not being understood was when a crusty weekly
newspaper editor took my marked-up copy for typesetting (long before desktop
publishing) and repeatedly substituted the word transient for transescent.
When I told this story about a year later to several university people who
used the word, its usage among the educational writers group slowly declined.
Right or wrong, my point was that if an educated and erudite editor, a
writer with a graduate education and thirty years of experience working with
words, did not recognize the word, then we shouldn't use it in our educational
publications. As St. Francis would say, seek first to understand so you may
be understood.
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From: Zachary Martin (zacmart gmail.com)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--commentariat
Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/commentariat.html
I would have thought this was a portmanteau of commentator and secretariat
(rather than proletariat) because of the connotation of power associated
with it.
---
From: Robin HL (robinhl ctc.net)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--commentariat
Surely "commissariat", not "proletariat", both for the sound and for the
meaning.
Unfortunately, when new words appear they don't always come with
a parts list. In this case, it may be better to say the word is
a combination of commentator and a form of the suffix -ate (which
denotes offices, functions, and collective bodies).
-Anu Garg
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From: Sam Samuels (ssamuels email.smith.edu)
Subject: Re: Chav etymology
Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/chav.html
I have heard this word before, and have even heard another theory about its
provenance that is totally unsupported but fun and worth sharing. My daughter
tells me it is an acronym that stands for "council housed and violent".
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From: Jim Franklin (jim.franklin churchwoodfinancial.co.uk)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--chav
We have a colloquial meaning in the UK for chav that stems from
Council House And Versace. A council house is state provided housing and
this indicates that the person has no money but tries to look the part by
wearing designer goods.
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From: Antonio Lopez (alopezs meditex.es)
Subject: Chav
Regarding the word chav, I think that the Romany clue is perhaps the right
one: in Spanish we have chaval, a youngster.
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From: Saurabh Kanwar (saurabhk in.startv.com)
Subject: feedback: chav
Chaava is a word that's part of popular street lingo here in Mumbai, and
it's commonly used by Marathi and Gujarati speakers. In complimentary
usage, a chaava is a sharp-dressing boy, or the good-looking neighbourhood
stud. In deprecatory usage, the implication is that the chaava spends all
his effort on looking sharp, but is ignorant of other things.
The literal Marathi meaning of chaava is a lion cub.
............................................................................
This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.
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