MY YEAR OF NEW WORDS, PART 7: NYMS

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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April is both a personal name and the name of a month. It’s a homonym (a word with two meanings) and nyms are the theme for this post. We’ve got synonyms, acronyms, homonyms (and homophones—which sound alike but spell differently, like bear and bare—and homographs—which spell alike but sound different like bow and bow). A student suggested homosapiens (pronounced like homonyms) for people that look alike. It was a nice idea but too hard to explain the phonetics because homo sapiens would be a homograph. We’ll have to stick with doppelganger, which doesn’t quite capture the idea of a family resemblance. There are hyphenyms, and acronyms and their cousins initialisms (if you say FAQ as letters, that’s an initialism; if you say it as fak, that an acronym).

Retronyms are new compounds that come about when the meaning of an older term shifts: acoustic guitar, snailmail, print book. One of the ways too that we fix the meaning is by reduplication: instead of a print book we may refer to a book book.

There are contranyms, too—words that have two opposite meanings, like oversight (watching over or not noticing) or sanction (to approve or to forbid). When you get a speeding ticket you can call it a citation of expediency (and list it on your resume). The contranym that everyone loves to hate (and vice versa) is literally, which is used to mean either literally or figuratively. Hence the non-word illiterally, meaning either figuratively or literally, I suppose. By the way, don’t blame literally on today’s youth or Rob Lowe’s character on Parks and Rec. It was used by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and others. It’s literally more than a century old.

In the course of the year I wanted to invent a few new nyms, so I added fetonyms (words or meanings joined by folk etymology, such as May Day and mayday, from the French word for help) and transponyms (words that differ only in the switching of two letters, like chai and chia, casual and causal, gasp and gaps). Polyphones are words (like economics or either) that have more than one acceptable pronunciation and a sesquipediment is a very long word that you have to stop and look up.

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MY YEAR OF NEW WORDS, PART 6: VERBING NOUNS AND MORE

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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This post is about some of the non-word tricks that I haven’t been able to use and about some that I have.

One of the tricks that I haven’t been able to use is to verb nouns. Verbing nouns means making verbs out of nouns. So when you workshop a piece of writing or dialogue with someone or snowboard or gift, you are verbing nouns. Linguists call this functional shift because you are shifting the function of one part of speech to another. You can actually verb lots of things: prepositions (to up the ante), interjections (I wowed them), even hesitations (he ums a lot), compound conjunctions and articles (they if, and and butted me to death).

And, by the way, you can noun sentences, fragments and phrases as well: Tell whatshisface I need to see him (my New Jersey persona emerging). Or whatchamacallit, whoziwhatsis, thingamajib, and shitforbrains. You can adverb prepositions (to sit up). You can adjective nouns (a stone wall), and I added the word adjectify just for that. And you can exclaim or interject just about anything. It’s all functional shift and it seems curious sometime because English doesn’t always use affixes much we change a word from one part of speech to another.

As far as making up new words, it would be a bit a cheat to take a noun meaning and list it as a non-word verb. I did that with birch (to walk by someone and pretend you don’t see him/her), an eponym (we’ll talk about these later) suggested by Becky Bartlett. In general, meanings change pretty often. So functional shift is a trick that language uses a lot but I haven’t been able to take advantage of because reasonable readers will object that the words aren’t new new. I added a new meaning to the obscure biological word thecal (relating to a sheath, especially a tendon sheath), extending its meaning to of or relating to a master’s thesis. The joke was impossible to pass up.

Some tricks that I have been able to use, that language doesn’t use much, are internal punctuation and special symbols, and violations of normal English sound patterns (what linguists call phonotactics).

And I’ve tried to invent some words that aren’t just nouns, verbs, and adjectives. This is again, something that languages rarely do. When was the last time you learned a new article, auxiliary verb or preposition? So I introduced wusta (meaning should have and would have if I had thought of it), alsomore (a transitional word used in a sentence after one has already used also.), and ofrom (a blend of off of and from as in I got it ofrom the internet.) and whych, (interrogative pronoun meaning both which and why).

Spelling tricks included o’nomastics, (the yearly process of putting an apostrophe in names beginning with the letter O), artisn’tal (having the quality of artisanal products but lacking the pretension and cost), in@ention (obsessive, unproductive toggling between writing projects and email or social media, whew!able (characterizing a close call, as in a whew!able drive).

And some of the violations of normal English pronunciation include snlob (someone who is snobbish about being a slob), sgaggle (a succession of noisy groups), and fnast (the sound of nasal passages being cleared inward, an ingressive snort). Twalkers (people who walk and text at the same time and nearly run into others) is probably right on the border of possible pronunciation because of the phonetic similarity of the wa and the aw. There’s more on sound structure to come.

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An Interview with Sharan Newman

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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Sharan Newman is the author of the Catherine Levendeur mysteries, 10 historical mystery novels set in 12th-century France. She’s also published three mythbusting “Real Histories” from Berkeley Books, a trilogy of fantasy novels featuring Guinevere of Arthurian legend, and a mystery set in 19th century Oregon. She has coedited a series of anthologies on Crime Through Time and published a collection of short stories titled Death Before Compline.

Her Death Comes As Epiphany won the Macavity Award for best first mystery, Cursed in the Blood received the Herodotus Award for best historical mystery, and The Witch in the Well won the Bruce Alexander award for best historical mystery.

The research for her books has taken her to, among other places, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique France Méridionale et Espagne at the University of Toulouse and the Institute for Jewish History at the University of Trier. Sharan Newman has a Ph.D. in medieval studies.

She is currently working on a biography of Melisende, the first native-born queen and first female ruler of Crusader Jerusalem.

Newman lives in Ashland.

EB: How did you become a mystery writer?

SN: I had been writing fantasy but realized that I was reading more mystery. Then I came across an historical puzzle that seemed perfect for a mystery.

EB: What was that?

SN: In his account of the building of the abbey church of St. Denis, Abbot Suger wrote that the nobility had thrown jewels and gold chains into the mortar of the cornerstone. But archaeologists found no trace of them. It was when an engineer told me how long it took mortar to set back then that I realized there had been a chance for some skullduggery. The question was, by whom. The mystery started unfolding from there.

EB: Your first series featured Queen Guinevere. How did you decide on the character of Guinevere as series focus?

SN: I had taken three terms of graduate courses in Arthurian literature. At the time (early 80s) there was almost nothing on Guinevere, either in fiction or academic work. She always came across as super-bitch. I began to wonder why and the story grew from that.

EB: What accounts for the continuing popularity of Arthurian legend? And for our fascination with medieval times generally?

SN: Arthur is infinitely mutable to the era. The idea of a man who tries to create a perfect society and fails is very compelling. People seem to be fascinated with medieval times because they have no idea what they were really like; most people base their interest on either positive or negative myths. (Don’t get me started. This is a hobby horse of mine.)

EB: Your Catherine Levendeur mysteries followed the life of a former novitiate in the Order of the Paraclete. What was the Order of the Paraclete?

SN: It wasn’t an order but a Benedictine convent, rather unorthodox. It was founded by Peter Abelard and given by him to his wife, Heloise. The 16th century convent still exists as a private estate in Champagne.

EB: So far there have been 10 books in the series. How does Catherine develop over the course of the series?

SN: She grows up, has children, becomes less clumsy and more aware of the world. Rather like her creator.

EB: Did she take on a life of her own, or were you always in control?

SN: My characters are constantly bolting from me. Catherine is better than most but the men are always surprising me. I hadn’t thought about it in terms of gender before but I do find the men harder to predict. Hmm… I need to think about this.

EB: You’ve got a PhD in medieval studies and are still an active scholar. As a writer how do you balance the roles of historian and storyteller? Are they at all in conflict?

SN: No. I have a firm rule that the stories can’t diverge from what I know of the history. But writing history is storytelling. The story is just based on documentary evidence. I think
that the best modern fiction, even fantasy, has a firm base in fact. Practically, I veer between books with footnotes and books with dialogue.

EB: You’ve also written two books about the Knights of the Templar The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code and The Real History Behind the Templars. Was your idea to dispel some of the unreal history?

SN: Absolutely.

EB: Did you get any feedback from true believers in the various myths and conspiracies?

SN: Oh, yes. One person assured me that the Masons were directly descended from the Templars because he had been a member of Demolay. Others are just sure that historians are part of the conspiracy. There’s not much one can do about that.

EB: Those led to The Real History of the End of the World, which among other things, reassured us that the world was not going to end last year when the Mayan calendar ran out. Does all apocalyptic thinking have something in common?

SN: I believe so. The oddest thing is that most people believe that they will survive, either physically or spiritually. We can think about the end of the world, but not our own extinction.

EB: Do all cultures have some version of this end-of-the-worldism?

SN: So far all the ones I’ve studied have something, either constant destruction and recreation or an ultimate end.

EB: What’s likely to be the next apocalyptic moment?

SN: Comets are popular right now. Global warming is too slow for most people but they do like the idea of it causing a sudden ice age.

EB: I want to ask you about your 2008 mystery, The Shanghai Tunnel, featuring an Oregon widow in the 1860s dealing with her husband’s past. How did you get interested in Oregon history?

SN: I grew up in Portland. My mother was ill and I wanted to write something that wouldn’t require foreign research. There was an article in the Oregonian about a Chinese graveyard that had been forgotten and rediscovered during road building. That started me off. In researching, I discovered that I had been taught nothing in school about the real history of Oregon. I didn’t know about the political corruption, treatment of Chinese or the fact that Oregon had been admitted as a free state but didn’t allow black settlers. Also, there is so much primary material still extant. I was thrilled.

EB: Do you see any similarities between medieval France and frontier Oregon?

SN: Only those that create reasons for people to murder.

EB: What’s your current project? I hear you are working on a biography?

SN: The tentative title for the next book is Defending the City of God: A Medieval Queen, the First Crusades, and the Quest for Peace in Jerusalem, but that may change. It’s based on the life of Melisende, the half-French, half-Armenian queen of Jerusalem from 1138-1161. But it encompasses the views and experiences of the inhabitants of the Levant who don’t normally have a voice. The research is tricky, but rewarding.

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QUIET WEEK or DEAD WEEK?

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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It’s QUIET WEEK on my campus—the week before finals, when students are hopefully finishing projects, preparing for exams, and writing papers. The idea of QUIET WEEK is to transition gently into finals exams, with instructors not making any last minute changes to the syllabus and not giving any finals early.

QUIET WEEK used to be called DEAD WEEK but was officially renamed a few years back. The intent was to make it clearer that work was still doing in during the week—classes were being met, readings done, assigned papers collected, presentations made, etc., but that things were slowing down.

However, the name QUIET WEEK has been a hard sell with students. It’s hard to change reality merely by changing language, and so far the name hasn’t caught on.

And I have a theory about this (which arose when a student explained the term DEAD WEEK to me). “It’s because students are dead on their feet,” she said. That etymology makes sense (you try writing four terms papers in ten weeks). I had always assumed that the dead of DEAD WEEK meant inert and thus that QUIET WEEK could be a possible and suitable synonym. But the double metaphor of DEAD WEEK (the intertia of the end-of-term and the exhaustion of the students) has made DEAD WEEK hard to kill, as it were.

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