Allo, Mary Poppins…

A note from the intersection of lexicography and hip-hop: listening to ‘American Boy’ by Estelle feat. Kanye West is a worthwhile experience in itself because it’s a good tune, but the rap section in the middle particularly deserves attention because of its rather playful appropriation of contemporary British slang.

Who killin em in the UK. Everybody gonna to say you K, reluctantly, because most of this press don’t f**k wit me. Estelle once said to me, cool down down don’t act a fool now now. I always act a fool oww oww. Aint nothing new now now. He crazy, I know what ya thinkin. Ribena, I know what you’re drinkin. Rap singer. Chain Blinger. Holla at the next chick soon as you’re blinkin. What’s you’re persona about this Americana? Brama? Am I shallow cuz all my clothes designer? Dress smart like a London Bloke. Before he speak his suit bespoke. And you thought he was cute before. Look at this P Coat, Tell me he’s broke. And I know you’re not into all that. I heard your lyrics, I feel your spirit. But I still talk that CAAASH, cuz a lot wags want to hear it. And I’m feelin like Mike at his Baddest. The Pips at they Gladys. And I know they love it. so to hell with all that rubbish.

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Ing-ing

Finding myself at a car boot sale over the Easter weekend, I started reflecting (because there wasn’t much worth buying) on the phrase to go car booting, and its formation. The compound car boot is its most obvious component. It’s in a specific sense, meaning (and shortened from) car boot sale (which is, in turn, taken from the more literal sense of car boot, being that from which one’s unwanted stuff is sold). One can say, in British English, ‘I went to a car boot this morning’, and no-one will think you’re strange (unless it’s a cold morning).

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Fun with unbalanced corpora

This came up in a pub conversation (as many of the best things do): should daddy longlegs (or long legs), another name for the crane fly in British English and the harvestman in American English, be pluralized as daddies longlegs?

My well-trained lexicographer’s response, of course, was ‘it really doesn’t matter’: it could be pluralized like that, or as daddy longlegses, or without alteration as daddy longlegs. But, in the interests of interest, here are the resulting (and no doubt massively noisy and so only slightly suggestive) results for number of Google hits:

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OED update

And a quick note to herald the arrival of the latest updates to OED Online. These, published yesterday, represent a quiet revolution in historical lexicography, as the new published material consists of high-profile ranges of words revised out of sequence (much as the OED has for some years added high-profile new entries across the alphabet), rather than the next part of the normal alphabetical rolling revision (currently complete from M to quit shilling). More info about the out-of-sequence revision here.

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Errours endlesse traine

This post by John Crace on the Guardian Arts blog is unfortunate. It contains a claim by a former lecturer of mine concerning Milton’s contributions to the English language:

According to Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge University and fellow of Milton’s alma mater, Christ’s College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing some 630 words to the English language, making him the country’s greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229.

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You’ve been facewhacked

On the subject of Facebook neologisms, Laura Varnam tells me that Stuart Lee, in his English Language lecture (Oxford English FHS Paper 1) the other week set students the challenge of coming up with a new word. (The result of the same exercise last year was ‘bipod’, meaning to share headphones with someone while listening to an iPod or similar, has made it as far as the Urban Dictionary and was cited as part of the language of the ‘MySpace generation’ by the Guardian.)

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Sleevefacing

Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words newsletter of the 23rd February directed me to this article (Observer Magazine, 3 Feb 2008, p.9), and to the word sleevefacing: the practice of obscuring one’s face (or other body parts) in one’s Facebook profile picture by holding up a record sleeve, especially one similar enough to its surroundings to cause a visual illusion.

It’s a lovely example of a coinage that will probably never get past its very restricted context of use, and of a word playing catch-up with the phenomenon it describes. ‘Sleevefacing’ is an unusual creation, probably simply from sleeve + face (n.) + ing, since it would require a new sense of ‘face’ (v.) meaning something like ‘to have (something) as one’s face; to make a surface covering of (something)’*, which itself would barely be applicable outside this context.

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