Editor's Corner

On December 19, Merriam-Webster announced its 2016 word of the year. It was the third dictionary publisher to do so (after Oxford Dictionaries and Dictionary.com).

Like Dictionary.com (and unlike Oxford Dictionaries), Merriam-Webster honors an existing word, not a recent coinage.

In 2006 and 2007, Merriam-Webster tried letting website visitors vote for the word of the year. After voters chose a joke word (truthiness) and video game slang (w00t), Merriam-Webster reverted to using search volume as the main criterion.

Specifically, Merriam-Webster chooses an existing dictionary entry that had a significant increase in number of searches, compared to the previous year.

For 2016, Merriam-Webster honored the word surreal:

· surreal: marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream

Some of Merriam-Webster’s shortlisted words spiked in popularity after notable appearances in pop culture (revenant) or politics (bigly and deplorable). Surreal was unusual in that it had multiple spikes throughout the year.

“Beginning with the Brussels terror attacks in March, major spikes included the days following the coup attempt in Turkey and the terrorist attack in Nice, with the largest spike in lookups for surreal following the U.S. election in November,” according to Merriam-Webster. “Surreal is looked up spontaneously in moments of both tragedy and surprise, whether or not it is used in speeches or articles.”

Merriam-Webster noted, “Surreal was also used in its original sense, referring to incongruous or unrealistic artistic expression, in reviews for the movie The Lobster.”

You can read about the other finalists for word of the year at Merriam-Webster.com.

Ben Ritter | Technical Editor | Symitar®
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It’s my birthday today, so as a present to you, I’m sharing some of my favorite items from the idiom contest. I’m not sharing the naughtier ones, but there are a few here that you may not appreciate if you are easily offended.

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

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It’s not even my birthday yet and I got some new books! One is called Comma Sutra, which promises some interesting lessons on good grammar and includes quizzes. Now, since the title is a play on words with the Indian book of sex and love, I may have to change things up before I share them with you, but still it should be fun!

I also bought another book called What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. Okay, that one might be completely unquotable. We’ll see.

And finally, I purchased You’re Saying It Wrong, by Ross and Kathryn Petras. Not only is it a pronunciation guide, but it provides historical tidbits on the words it reviews. So today, let’s have a look at an excerpt from this book.

Anyway

[EN-EE-way]
anyhow, nonetheless, supports or refers back to a previous statement or point

What is this simple word doing in a collection of shibboleth words? Yes, of course you know how to pronounce this. Good for you…since an alarming number of people seem to think there is an s at the end of it. “Anyways,” they say. “I was going to say it correctly anyways.”

But it’s anyway, singular, derived from the phrase “by any way” dating back to the 1300s. It’s possible the errant s added to anyways stemmed from the Middle English ani-gates (somehow, in any way), since any ways has appeared in texts from about 1560. But it doesn’t matter: no s, any and way. That’s it—pure and simple.

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

Symitar Documentation Services

NOTICE: This electronic mail message and any files transmitted with it are intended
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Movie awards season is just getting started, but word of the year awards season is wrapping up.

Donna previously wrote about Dictionary.com choosing xenophobia as their word of the year. Two other publishers (Oxford Dictionaries and Merriam-Webster) recently announced their picks.

Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year

Each year, Oxford Dictionaries nominates about 10 words and chooses one as word of the year. They sometimes choose separate words for the United States and the United Kingdom, but not since 2012.

The Oxford Dictionaries word of the year is largely a publicity stunt (remember “Face with Tears of Joy”?), and the word is not necessarily added to the OxfordDictionaries.com website, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of English, or the New Oxford American Dictionary.

One problem with a dictionary trying to capitalize on trending hashtags is that we don’t yet know whether those words will have any staying power. Will anyone be using the shortlisted words “adulting” or “Brexiteer” 10 years from now? Time will tell.

Post-Truth

This year, Oxford Dictionaries cruelly snubbed the “Smiling Face with Heart-Shaped Eyes” emoji and picked a proper word:

· post-truth: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief

Use of the word post-truth increased 2,000 percent last year, according to Oxford Dictionaries: “The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States.

“Rather than simply referring to the time after a specified situation or event—as in post-war or post-match—the prefix in post-truth has a meaning more like ‘belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant.’ This nuance seems to have originated in the mid-20th century, in formations such as post-national (1945) and post-racial (1971).

“Post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine. Reflecting on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, Tesich lamented that ‘we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world.’”

You can read the full press release, including the other shortlisted words, at the Oxford Dictionaries website.

Ben Ritter | Technical Editor | Symitar®
8985 Balboa Avenue | San Diego, CA 92123
619-682-3391 | or ext. 763391 | www.Symitar.com

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Today I have some more idioms for you! I mentioned the plethora of ways people have to say someone is less than brilliant, so I thought I’d share those. I also have a few that mean ugly—extremely ugly. Be nice and try to keep your use of these to a minimum!

Mentally challenged:

· Not the brightest bulb

· A few cards shy of a full deck

· Not playing with a full deck

· Not the sharpest crayon in the box

· Dumber than a box of rocks

· Not the sharpest tool in the shed

· The lights are on but no one’s home.

· The cheese has slipped off his cracker.

· Dumb as a box of rocks

· His elevator doesn’t go all the way up to the top.

· I’m not saying he’s stupid, but if his IQ were three points higher, he’d be a tree.

· Dumber than a seaside clam

· She is as dumb as a sack of hair.

Ugly:

· Uglier than a two-faced ugly person

· Uglier than a mud fence in a rain storm

· Uglier than homemade soap

· Uglier than homemade soup

· Ugly enough to stop an eight-day clock

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

Symitar Documentation Services

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Hello!

Thank you all for the idioms you sent in to the Editor’s Corner contest. I received over 400 idioms, so I will share them with you over the months to come. Just a few things I noticed about them in general:

· A lot of idioms focused on animals (especially cats and monkeys).

· Many idioms focused on weather.

· There are quite a few ways to call people “stupid” without using that word.

· The southern states are a hotbed of idiomatic phrases.

· Some of you aren’t really clear on what’s too naughty for work (but I certainly had a few laughs).

· Some of you aren’t really clear on what an idiom is (but I gave you points anyway).

Okay, so let’s get to our winners and the prizes:

· Mary Fleenor (Anguished English)

· Carolin Hopkins (Anguished English)

· Jamie Roller (More Anguished English)

· Scott Murray (American Trivia book)

· Herman Piete (T-shirt, “I’m silently correcting your grammar”)

And now, a definition from Google:

idiom: a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g., rain cats and dogs, see the light).

Our first idioms are just of few of the ones I received relating to animals. Enjoy!

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services

Before I get started with today’s topic, I want to thank everyone for sending in new subscriber names and hundreds of idioms! I still have a few to add to the list, so I will announce the winners tomorrow. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Today’s Editor’s Corner is about the Dutch. Specifically, the idiomatic phrases going Dutch and Dutch treat. The following definitions come from The Grammarist.

Going Dutch and Dutch treat are two related idioms that have their origins in the 1600s. We will look at the meaning of these two terms, where they came from and some examples of their use in sentences.

Going Dutch describes a situation where each participant in an activity pays his own way. Dutch treat also describes a situation where each participant in an activity pays his own way, the idea being that a Dutch treat is in fact no treat at all. The idea of the Dutch treat is a pleasant way to avoid any misunderstandings, though the terms going Dutch and Dutch treat were once great insults. In the 1600s, the British and the Dutch sparred over trade routes and political boundaries. The British used the word Dutch to refer to anything false. For instance, a Dutch auction refers to offering an item at an increasingly lower price until a buyer is found, the opposite of a true auction. Dutch courage is false bravado gained by consuming alcohol. Most of these uses of the word Dutch to mean something false have fallen out of use, but going Dutch and Dutch treat remain in the language. The terms no longer have a pejorative meaning, in fact most people are unaware of their origins as insults. Related terms are go Dutch, goes Dutch, gone Dutch. Note that the word Dutch in each of these terms is capitalized.

Example:

The latest survey revealed that most men would now ask for a contribution from a female partner on a first date with the vast majority (51 per cent) happier to go Dutch and split the bill.

Then there’s the Flying Dutchman, a ship from legends that is never allowed to come to port; it is destined to spend eternity traveling around the sea. The Pirates of the Caribbean adopted the lore of the Flying Dutchman and put it under the command of the fictional Davy Jones (of Davy Jones’s Locker fame). Davy Jones’s Locker is a idiom for the bottom of the sea, the home of dead sailors and shipwrecks. Yikes. This turned dark quickly!

The Flying Dutchman

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services

On the twelfth day of English

My true love gave to me

12 common errors from the book Common Errors in English Usage, by Paul Brians. He definitely has a sassy attitude at times; you may find it apparent in some of his definitions and explanations.

Happy Holidays!

1. accept/except: If you offer me Godiva chocolates I will gladly accept them—except for the candied violet ones. Just remember that the “X” in “except” excludes things—they tend to stand out, be different. In contrast, just look at those two cozy “C’s” snuggling up together. Very accepting. And be careful; when typing “except” it often comes out “expect.”

2. ambivalent/indifferent: If you feel pulled in two directions about some issue, you’re ambivalent about it; but if you have no particular feelings about it, you’re indifferent.

3. both/each: There are times when it is important to use “each” instead of “both.” Few people will be confused if you say “I gave both of the boys a baseball glove,” meaning “I gave both of the boys baseball gloves” because it is unlikely that two boys would be expected to share one glove; but you risk confusion if you say “I gave both of the boys $50.” It is possible to construe this sentence as meaning that the boys shared the same $50 gift. “I gave each of the boys $50” is clearer.

4. coma/comma: Some people write of patients languishing in a comma, and others refer to inserting a coma into a sentence. A long-term unconscious state is a coma; the punctuation mark is a comma.

5. explicitly/implicitly: To be explicit about something is to be clearer than to merely imply it, so it’s not surprising that people wanting to make clear that they really trust someone often mistakenly say that they trust the person “explicitly.” But the traditional expression is that you trust someone “implicitly” because your trust is so strong that you don’t need to say anything explicitly—it goes without saying.

6. flaunt/flout: To flaunt is to show off: you flaunt your new necklace by wearing it to work. “Flout” has a more negative connotation; it means to treat with contempt some rule or standard. The cliché is “to flout convention.” Flaunting may be in bad taste because it’s ostentatious, but it is not a violation of standards.

7. jam/jamb: The only common use for the word “jamb” is to label the vertical part of the frame of a door or window. It comes from the French word for “leg”; think of the two side pieces of the frame as legs on either side of the opening.
For all other uses, it’s “jam”: stuck in a jam, traffic jam, logjam, jam session, etc.

8. lama/llama: A Tibetan monk is a “lama” and the Andean animal is a “llama.” Although both are pronounced the same in English, those who speak Castillian Spanish pronounce the animal’s name “YAH-muh.”

9. Please RSVP/Please reply: RSVP stands for the French phrase Répondez s’il vous plaît (“reply, please”), so it doesn’t need an added “please.” However, since few people seem to know its literal meaning, and fewer still take it seriously, it’s best to use plain English: “Please reply.” It is a mistake to think that this phrase invites people to respond only if they are planning to attend; it is at least as important to notify the person doing the inviting if you cannot go. And no, you can’t bring along the kids or other uninvited guests.

10. sceptic/skeptic: Believe it or not, the British spellings are “sceptic” and “scepticism”; the American spellings are “skeptic” and “skepticism.”

11. squash/quash: You can squash a spider or a tomato; but when the meaning you intend is “to suppress,” as in rebellions or (especially) legal motions, the more sophisticated term is “quash.”

12. souse chef/sous chef: What’s a “souse chef”? Is it the fellow who adds a dash of brandy to your dessert?
No, it’s just a misspelling of sous chef, a French phrase meaning “assistant chef.” The first word is pronounced just like “sue.”

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services

On the eleventh day of English

My true love gave to me

Eleven types of words that should begin with a capital letter.

I’m sorry, I give up with the rhyming. I never really had it anyway! Here are the types of words you should use a capital letter for:

1. The first word in a sentence

2. Proper nouns: Barney the dog, Master Wayne, Judge Johnson

3. Places: the Canary Islands; Death Valley; Bend, Oregon; the Amazon River

4. Historical events: the Middle Ages, the Crimean War, World War II

5. Calendar events: Wednesday, Thanksgiving, Groundhog Day

6. Organizations: Elks Club, Democratic Party

7. Languages: Latin, Spanish, Greek

8. Religious references: God, Buddha, the Torah

9. Special places and items: Saturn, the Statue of Liberty, Nobel Peace Prize

10. Titles: Miss Jelly Doughnut, Dr. Strange, Rabbi Edelman

11. Proper adjectives: Victorian story, Japanese food

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

Symitar Documentation Services

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On the tenth day of English

My true love gave to me

Ten diminutive terms such as

Bunny and ki-i-i-tty.

From Words of a Feather: A Humorous Puzzlement of Etymological Pairs, by Murray Suid. (pp. 182–183)

Diminutives

The slogan for this section might be “think small.” A diminutive is a word formed from another word by adding a suffix that conveys the idea of small size, affection, or cuteness. Often the original word is in plain view:

1. Annie from Ann

2. Booklet from book

3. Cigarette from cigar

4. Duckling from duck

5. Kitty from kitten

6. Kitchenette from kitchen

In other cases, the original word has disappeared from current use or is from another language:

7. Jacket from jack, a medieval soldier’s sleeveless coat

8. Marionette from Marion, a given name

9. Pocket from poque, French for “pouch”

10. Puppet from poupe, French for “doll”

As a side note, the Greeks use –iki as their diminutive. A dog is a skilo and a puppy is a skiliki. In Spanish it is –ita or –ito, so girl (chica) and boy (chico) are chiquita and chiquito if they are little. I’m sure there are plenty more where those come from!

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

Symitar Documentation Services

NOTICE: This electronic mail message and any files transmitted with it are intended
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