The Put-Down From Which There’s No Pick-Up

Today was a sad day for us. After two years of steady weight loss (and one month of precipitous weight loss), and having more or less constant kidney problems, our 18-year-old cat Barney finally reached the point where his prognosis was a matter of days. We decided earlier in the week that we would kill him today. Or to be more accurate, have the vet kill him.

Ugh. All I’m doing is avoiding the euphemisms for this kind of thing — put him down/to sleep/out of his misery, euthanize him — and all of a sudden it sounds so heartless. It was a tough decision, since Barney hadn’t reached the point yet where we could say, “He’s obviously in constant pain, and we need to end it”; but he had clearly declined enough that we didn’t want to wait for him to die during a frightening, painful crisis, the way his brother did a few years ago. And in the midst of questioning ourselves about our decision, we had to explain it confidently to Doug and Adam. They cried about it off and on for the past three days as they got in their last Barney-petting, and Doug continually pointed out how he thought Barney had gained a little bit of weight (his spine didn’t stick out quite as much as before), that he seemed like he was feeling OK today, and if we somehow got up to, say, eight pounds, would they put him to sleep then?

During one of these discussions, Doug told me about the time a couple of years back when he learned what it meant to put someone to sleep. His neighborhood friend’s dog had had to be euthanized, and his friend tearfully told him, “They had to put Rocky to sleep.”

Trying to cheer up his friend, Doug offered, “It’s OK, I’m sure he’ll wake up soon.” It didn’t work, and Doug said it a few more times, figuring his friend just hadn’t heard him clearly. Finally another friend who was there couldn’t stand it anymore, and clued Doug in.

Ah, Doug, you have so many euphemisms yet to learn!

Don’t Mention It

A couple of weeks ago, when I read that a member of the cast of Grey’s Anatomy named Isaiah Washington told a reporter at the Golden Globe awards,

No, I did not call [co-star] T. R. [Knight] a faggot. Never happened.

I had two reactions. One: Someone must have said he called T. R. Knight a faggot. Two: That was kind of an awkward denial. Oh, well.

Over the next week, I became aware that not only his alleged name-calling, but also the denial was getting him into trouble. I was puzzled at first. People were talking about his gaffe at the Golden Globes and I didn’t know what they meant. It was only when I read in one story, “Mr. Washington moved to the microphone and denied that he had ever used the slur to describe Mr. Knight, at the same time repeating the word” that I realized they really were talking about the denial, not the actual insult. Arnold Zwicky has written a cogent linguistic perspective on the whole incident, starting off with the point that was the source of my confusion: Washington did not use the word faggot, he mentioned it. I particularly like this sentence from his conclusion:

Believing that some words are so intrinsically offensive that they should never be uttered, even to describe their offensiveness or to report on offensive uses, is believing in verbal magic.

But now that I’ve thought about the matter some more, I think I can understand at least a little bit the discomfort/offense/outrage at Washington’s mention of the word in his denial. First of all, I’m not so sure anymore that call [someone] a faggot is a mention of faggot rather than a use. Faggot has two syllables is a mention; I never said he was a faggot is a use; I never called him a faggot I’d say is a use, too. It’s not saying anything about the word faggot; it’s a sentence about whether the individual denoted by him is in the set denoted by faggot. But let me call it a mention, for the sake of argument. It reminded me of something that happened with Doug and Adam not too long ago… yes, I’m remembering it now… screen.. getting.. wavy.. harp music.. playing…

“What’s so funny?” my wife was asking Doug and Adam. They were laughing hysterically in the next room.

Adam told her. Apparently, Doug had been telling Adam something funny that had happened that day, something that involved somebody farting. As Adam relayed the story to his mom, he used Doug’s words, including the word fart.

My wife hates the word fart. For her, it’s not a funny word that you just have to laugh when you hear (like booger), but a disgusting word that’s just as bad as that other f-word (aside from finesse). Adam, of course, knows this, so he thoughtfully apologized before his mom could say anything:

I’m sorry I said “fart,” Mom. I only said “fart” because Doug said “fart” and I was telling you that he said “fart.”

I don’t remember whether Adam used or mentioned fart the first time, but the last four times were definitely mentions, not uses, and yet it was those mentions, not the original use, that irritated my wife the most. Clearly, Adam was hiding behind the use/mention distinction in order to launch a few penalty-free farts. It would have been easy enough to say that word instead of fart if his apology had been pure, but he chose to repeat fart four times, which transformed his mention into, I guess you’d call it a meta-use.

Now Isaiah Washington said faggot only once during his denial, so why the uproar? I think it probably would have been OK if he’d said something like, “Faggot is a demeaning and inappropriate label to put on anyone, and I never used it to refer to T. R. or anyone else.” I think his castmates’ unease, and other people’s outrage, arose from reasoning along the following lines:

1. You have already been accused of using the word faggot with malicious intent.
2. Therefore, one would expect you to exercise greater-than-normal caution in using or mentioning this word when discussing the incident, to avoid giving the impression that you habitually use this word.
3. You chose not to do so.
4. Therefore, it seems you think the accusation is not to be taken seriously.
5. Therefore, it seems you are the kind of person who thinks it’s OK to call people faggot.

That, plus the re-assertion by fellow castmembers that he really did call T. R. Knight a faggot, was enough to require the now-standard celebrity public-contrition routine.

Starts With B, Rhymes With Custard

Cal Thomas wrote in yesterday’s column about declining standards of decency on television:

Certain words are supposed to cross the line, but apparently only if they begin with f…. Words that begin with b apparently do not cross the line. One rhymes with custard and the other rhymes with witch. One frequently hears those words on network TV.

Starts with b and rhymes with custard, eh? OK, I can figure this one out. That would be … bustard? A long-legged Old World and Australian game bird in the family Otitidae? I’m with Thomas on a lot of his points about what gets shown on TV, but I have to disagree with him here. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this word on TV (though maybe I would if I watched more Discovery channel), and wouldn’t be offended if I did.

However, this word does remind me of a b word that rhymes with mastered and plastered, which I’m surprised Thomas didn’t mention. I don’t know why bastard should be considered such a nasty word, since it isn’t scatological, sexual, racial, or religious, and it appears often enough in historical discussions of royal families. Still, I do know a kid could get sent to the principal’s office for saying it in school. But I wonder what would happen if they called someone a niggardly bustard?

Forbidden Words

In books on historical linguistics, a lot of attention is paid to kinds of phonetic change, processes of analogy and grammaticalization, and language contact. One topic that gets significantly less attention is taboo-induced change. For example, in the second edition of Hock’s Principles of Historical Linguistics (1991), taboo is discussed on nine out of 679 pages of text, whereas phonetic and phonological issues take up six chapters; analogy, three chapters; linguistic contact, three chapters; and the comparative method, two chapters. The five remaining chapters cover various other topics; most of the discussion of taboo occurs in the chapter on semantic change. But what Hock does write leaves the reader (OK, me) wanting more:

[T]aboo can lead to a constant turnover in vocabulary, such as in the English expression for ‘toilet’…. In some societies, the effect may be much more far reaching. For instance, it has been argued that the difficulties in tracing Tahitian vocabulary to its Proto-Polynesian sources are in large measure a consequence of massive taboo: Upon the death of a member of the royal family, every word which was a constituent part of that person’s name, or even any word sounding like it became taboo and had to be replaced by new words. (p. 294-295)

Remembering passages like that one, and having written about taboo language here, here, here, and here, and having read too many Language Log postings on taboo language to try to provide links to (but which are now indexed here), I was eager to read a piece of blog swag called Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language by Keith Allan and Kate Burridge.

2 Funny

Today was parent-teacher conference day. When we met with Adam’s preschool teacher, she told us that Adam will sometimes make funny observations or suggestions in class, and that he seems to enjoy wordplay. Like his dad, she added. I wondered what she was remembering that prompted her to make that last comment. Could it be that she reads this very blog, and has been impressed by the refined linguistic humor regularly found herein? Or have my literal-minded sensibilities come through in my conversations with her? Or maybe it was something that happened on one of the days when I was in the classroom, observing Adam? You know, come to think of it, I seem to recall an incident now… I remember it like it was a couple of months ago…

A couple of months ago, I was sitting at a table near the handwashing station, cutting capital and lowercase C’s out of construction paper for their coming letter-of-the-week art project. As I sat there, I watched Adam and his classmates do their various free-choice and mandatory-assignment activities. At the writing station, their task was to trace a number 2.

Just before snacktime, Adam’s teacher was sitting at a table about five feet away, recording what each kid had done that day. One by one, she’d call them over, and ask, “Did you cut out the kite picture? Did you play with the snow? Did you make a number two?”

I sat there cutting out C’s, silently grinning every time I heard her ask, “Did you make a number two?” Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I shared my amusement with the teacher’s aide, who was passing by. Adam’s teacher saw us laughing, so the aide let her in on the joke.

After that, I continued cutting out the C’s and listening to Adam’s teacher conduct her interviews: “Did you cut out the kite picture? Did you play with the snow? Did you write a number two?”

Silent Pee

I could tell something was on Adam’s mind last night as I got ready to brush his teeth. He was staring into space as I put the toothpaste on the brush, and said, almost to himself, “Silent P.”

“Silent P? Where?” I asked. I looked all around the bathroom, but didn’t see any obvious text anywhere that he might be noticing, much less one with a silent P in it. I mean, he’s familiar with the concept of silent letters (and likes to listen to this song in the car), but I didn’t think he’d ever seen any words with a silent P. Psychologist, pneumonia, he’s never seen those written. Pteranodon, maybe, but he’s really not into dinosaurs* as much as Doug was, so we hardly ever read him books with that word in them. So what word was he seeing that had a silent P in it?

As I was thinking about all this, Adam said, “Tinkle.”

Ohhh, now I got it. He was thinking about the library book we’d read the night before. The book was I Have to Go, in which the phrase, “I have to go pee!” appeared in several places, in large print. Out of consideration for Doug and Adam’s mom, when I read the book I’d systematically replaced pee with tinkle, using the terminology that Doug and Adam learned from her and their grandma and their aunt. Little did I know that for 24 hours, Adam had been silently struggling, trying to reconcile the phonetic string tinkle with the orthographic string P-E-E that he saw on the page. And now he’d finally arrived at his conclusion: It must be a silent P. I had to admire his reasoning–I do believe he’s gonna turn out to be a real whiz kid!

BTW, I personally don’t care for the word tinkle, and much prefer pee. But standardly using tinkle from the time Doug and Adam were in diapers has honed my appreciation for the strange semantic journey it’s undergone. First there’s its onomatopoetic meaning, which I assume is the basis for its use as a euphemism for “urinate.” From there, the verb tinkle can be used to refer to the bodily waste itself, reproducing the verb-noun polysemy seen in pee, piss, poop, and shit. Tinkle the noun can be turned into the adjective tinkly, as in, He has a tinkly diaper. And at this point the irony kicks in when you try to get back to the original meaning of the word. It’d seem that tinkly ought to refer to things like windchimes or ice cubes in a glass, but instead, we find it describing something that goes squish when you poke it and plop when you drop it on the floor.

*Yes, I know, Pteranodon is not a dinosaur.

Endocentric and Exocentric Insults

This post is longer than my other posts, extensively discusses the meanings of some obscenities, and has a number of possibly offensive pictures to illustrate the meanings. For that reason, I’m not putting it up here, but those who are interested, and of course are at least 18 years of age, can follow the link below.

UPDATE: Now that my regular readers have had a chance to read the post, I’m removing the link. If you want to read the post, contact me and I’ll provide the URL for it.

Sedated but Arousable

I heard a well-known talk radio personality getting a big chuckle out of a quote regarding former president and well-known horndog Bill Clinton’s status after his heart surgery:

He’s sedated but arousable.

The host was so amused by that statement that you could hear him slapping his desk with glee as he went on about it. Finally he said, “I know what they meant. They meant rousable.” (Didn’t want people to think he was too literal-minded, after all.)

I looked in my 1973 Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and I was surprised to find that the sexually related meaning, so prominent for the radio host as to be the only one, isn’t listed at all. A transitive and an intransitive “wake up” meaning are listed, and one for inducing someone to take action. The relevant meaning does show up in the online dictionaries I’ve checked, but the “wake up” definitions are still listed. But in the mental lexicons of at least one and probably many other speakers, the late-arriving “stimulate sexual desire in” definition is now the only one.

So it’s come to this. Now I have to add arouse to this list I’ve been keeping, of words that have been contaminated by their co-occurrence with sexual or sexually:

• explicit
• intercourse
• molest

Just as you lose no information by omitting the male in male chauvinist, you can omit the sexual(ly) in sexually explicit, sexual intercourse, and sexually molest and convey (to many speakers, not including my dad) the same meaning as you would if you included it. The remaining word (the head of the phrase) has absorbed the meaning contributed by sexual(ly), leaving it superfluous. Harass seems to be going the same way. For some time, I’ve been wondering if these sexual compounds are more likely to have this happen to them more than other compounds, and if so, if it’s because of the taboo status of sexual. I don’t know.

I can think of some cases where it hasn’t happened, for example, sexual frustration. If your friend told you he was frustrated, you wouldn’t raise your eyebrows nearly as high as you would if he told you he’d molested, or even aroused, a sleeping kid. And there are enough other kinds of abuse that the sexual in sexual abuse is still necessary.

On the other hand, aside from male chauvinist, I can’t think of compound nouns or adjectives whose non-head word transfers its meaning to the head and then fades away.

BTW, I checked the other words in my list in the 1973 dictionary, and intercourse and molest each had listings for the sexual meanings. Explicit didn’t, but its sexual meaning is duly listed in Dictionary.com. So it’s another relative latecomer to the sexually contaminated wordlist.