Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about words, then I Google them)

douchebag = 1,920,000 hits
douche bag = 799,000 hits

If the Google search is any indication, the dictionaries are making the wrong call. Enter "douchebag" into dictionary.com (which includes American Heritage), Merriam-Webster's site, or Webster's New World College Dictionary's site, and they'll politely suggest "douche bag" instead.

Of all these dictionaries, only dictionary.com acknowledges that the term actually describes a type of bag. The others list it only as an insult or slang.

I love English.

Words I Almost Forgot Existed

gargle

Does anybody gargle anymore?

It seems that, in the '70s and '80s, every other TV commercial and sitcom dad was dedicated to gargling. But I suspect the word has lost relevance. A comparative Google search supports my theory.

gargle = 840,000 hits
gargoyle = 2,160,000 hits

Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about words, then I Google them)

newbie = 98,900,000 hits
newcomer = 23,900,000 hits

American Heritage online, Merriam-Webster online and Dictionary.com all define "newbie" as "newcomer." The two words are synonyms. But, on the Web at least, "newbie" is four times more popular.

I don't like "newbie." It reminds me of a "Seinfeld" episode in which Elaine, flirting with Newman, calls him Newmie. Creepy.

Still, looks like I'd better get used to it.

Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional, sometimes embarrassing series on words I'm looking up)

ought

In his Los Angeles Times column today, Michael Hiltzik writes, "Housing and easy money are unlikely to be the engines of growth in the Twenty-tens that they were in the Twenty-oughts." And, in doing so, he stirred up the mush of information I carry around in my head -- a shockingly large portion of which traces its origins to "Simpsons" episodes.

You see, Grampa Simpson uses "ought"/"aught" this way all the time -- albeit while referencing a period about a century prior. "The year was Nineteen-aught-six. The president was the divine Miss Sarah Bernhardt ..." But, without thinking about it, I had associated "ought"/"aught" with "twenty" instead of with "zero."

And I just now figured out why: In a different episode, Grampa goes off on a yarn that begins: "Now, my story begins in Nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say 'dickety' 'cause the Kaiser had stolen our word 'twenty.' I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles …"

So I had remembered that Grampa used an old-timey word to stand in for "twenty," but I had forgotten that it was one of two words he used in place of years.

Anyway, I was thrilled to see this in Hiltzik's column because, in 2009, it's the first time I've seen anyone use a name for the current decade in the way we used to say "the nineties," the "eighties" and so on. I realize that this could evoke a "Where've you been?"-type response from people who've already observed such a term. That's why I'm a little reluctant to admit all this. But I'm emboldened by the fact that the 2008 book The Stuff of Thought by all-around smart person and keen language observer Steven Pinker also notes that our culture has no nickname for our decade. So wherever I've been is also where he's been, which is not a bad place to be.

Anyhoo, here's the definition:

aught (also ought)
a cipher; zero
archaic: nothing —American Heritage Dictionary

And here's a bonus:

Recipe for June Brain Mush
4 parts sitcom
1 part scholarship
Shake vigorously for 20 years and allow to set in a room tempered by intellectual boredom and post-vacation restlessness.

Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional cleverly named series on words I'm looking up)

index

I could have sworn that, years ago, I learned that the proper plural was "indices" and that "indexes" was a less-preferred form that was slowly gaining dominance.

Nope.

Webster's New World, American Heritage, and Merriam-Webster all list "indexes" as the first choice for the plural. A Google search shows that users feel the same way, 75 million to 42 million in favor of "indexes."

So I pulled out my 1955 Oxford Universal Dictionary, certain I'd find evidence that the preference for "indexes" was a recent development. Nope again. This big dusty book also prefers "indexes."

Too bad. I like "indices." If it were preferred, it would be like a fun plot twist in the middle of written work -- something to keep you on your toes. But no.

Words I Wish Would Go Away Now

plumping

Men may not have noticed, but "plump" has been gaining popularity as a transitive verb. Seems everywhere I turn, some youth pusher is offering to plump my business. They're hawking products that promise to "plump" my lips and "plump up" my wrinkles.

Here are Google News search results for "plumping" for the last nine years (using March 4 as the beginning of each one-year period):

2008-9 = 672 hits
2007-8 = 786 hits
2006-7 = 832 hits
2005-6 = 753 hits
2004-5 = 672 hits
2003-4 = 513 hits
2002-3 = 389 hits
2001-2 = 269 hits
2000-1 = 219 hits

In addition to its day job as an adjective (a plump Christmas goose), "plump" has long worked as a verb. And before the era of Botox and collagen injections, it was mainly a cool one. Its definitions include "to drop abruptly or heavily: plumped into the easy chair," "to give full support or praise: plumped for the candidate" and "to throw down or drop (something) abruptly or heavily: plumped the books onto the table."

"Plump" also has some fun gigs as noun (a heavy or abrupt fall or collision), an ajective (blunt, direct), and an adverb (with a full or sudden impact: walked plump into the pole).

But its recently popularity as a marketing tool for beauty products is working my nerves. I don't want to buy something that plumps me or any part of me -- at least not while I'm working so hard to squeeze into skinny jeans.

Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about words, then I Google them)

LATE ADDENDUM: Same wonderings, better Googlings

In response to 8'FED's suggestions in comments below, I decided to try to Google smarter. Eschewing his scientific approach for what we'll call a journalist's approach (which 1. thinks in terms of news sources and 2. still allows for incredible laziness), I tried a Google News search instead of a Google Web search.

Low and bee-holed (I always wanted to write that), turns out Google has a new "Timeline" feature in its news archive search feature that sorts stuff by year. So here is a survey of "snarky" in Google-logged news sources for the last four years:

2005 = 1,660 hits
2006 = 2,540 hits
2007 = 2,690 hits
2008 = 3,000 hits.

So this new, more scientific evidence is better proof of how wrong I was when I guessed that "snarky" was on its way out.

Aaaah ... it's good to be right about being wrong.

* * * * BEGIN ORIGINAL POST ********

Okay, this one is hardly scientific. But it's the best I could do given the limitations of this here Google tool.

I wanted to know whether the word "snarky" had passed its prime. In my personal experience, its use peaked a few years ago and has been on the wane ever since. So I tried the following (obviously flawed) search terms and came up with some interesting results.

snarky and 2001 = 162,000 hits
snarky and 2002 = 181,000 hits
snarky and 2003 = 267,000 hits
snarky and 2004 = 378,000 hits
snarky and 2005 = 495,000 hits
snarky and 2006 = 673,000 hits
snarky and 2007 = 897,000 hits
snarky and 2008 = 1,141,000 hits

Obviously, not everyone who ever used the word "snarky" prefaced it with "I am writing this in the year 2007," for example. Still, to whatever extent searched pages contain mention of their dates of creation, this sure as heck disproves my "ding, dong, the snarky is dead" theory.

If only the stock market could reflect a similar pattern.

Some Words from Today's Headlines

This AOL headline today caught my eye and grated my ear.

Natalie Facing Ugly Allegations; Murdered Boy's Stepfather Sues Chick for Spreading Lies

It took me a while to realize why someone would use "Chick" here. The person in question is a member of the species known collectively as "Dixie Chicks." (Not my scene, man, which is why it took me a minute to piece it together.)

I've long had a spinal reaction to the word "chick." It's not just a feminist thing. I find it more icky when women use "chick" than when men do. A man's use of "chick" has a sort of Richie Cunningham connotation: a boy who likes girls. A woman's use of "chick" has the opposite ring in my ear: It sounds competitive and kind of hateful: a girl who hates other girls. Like, "There's this chick in school who's a total slut." Clearly, this is based on my limited experience (and also a glimpse into why I didn't find high school the most pleasant environment). But that's how it strikes my ear.

Of course, the band name the Dixie Chicks is self-referential, which in my mind means different rules apply. It's not a pretty sound, but it's not hateful, either. The K sound and the S sound in "Dixie" are a little harsh, and added to the K sound and the S sound in "chicks," it's rough on the ear. At least it's not dripping with high-school-girl contempt, though.

Here's another of today's headlines that caught my interest word-wise:

Stocks Rebound on Defensives and Banks

I hadn't heard "defensives" in a market context before. I wondered if it meant defense stocks. But no, the writers used it to mean a group of stocks including biotechs.

The first noun form of "defensive," according to my Webster's, is:

[Obs.] something that defends.

That "obs." means obsolete. So either the headline writers revived a basically dead word, or this dead word is not dead in the specialized lingo of the stock market and I'm just too much of an outsider (not my scene, man) to know it. (I'm chicky like that.)

Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about words, then I Google them)

Here are some sample hits from a search for the word atrocious.

The atrocious sequel to Are We There Yet?

We've been keeping tabs on the Associated Press's atrocious campaign
coverage this year.

$100 million private-equity buyout boosts (are) atrocious

Do you remember the atrocious and disappointing OECD report on
counterfeiting?

And here are some sample hits for this adjective's noun form, atrocity(ies).

Conditions of atrocity: The crimes at Abu Ghraib are a direct expression of
the kind of war we are waging in Iraq.

In the first months after 9/11, the administration's ruthless exploitation
of the atrocity was a choice, not a necessity.

All varieties of atrocity: battle deaths, civilian casualties of war,
democide, famine caused by the economic disruption.

Other hits for atrocity/atrocities referenced Nuremberg, the Nanjing Massacre, and "Bosnian Muslim atrocities in Srebrenica."

Okay, so now that I've thoroughly bummed you out, I hope you don't mind me pondering the question: How did these two words -- really the same word as different parts of speech -- come to have such very different connotations?

Atrocity, it seems, is used to mean slaughter and bloodshed and torture, while atrocious is often used to ridicule bad sitcoms, bad hair days, and other non-brutal bad choices.

Why? I don't know. But I have a theory. It's a conspiracy theory pointing to a 6-foot-tall English-speaking mouse. A tyrant whose atrocities include forcing innocent children to wear plastic ears and those "Escape from Witch Mountain" movies of the '70s.

My evidence: "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious. ..."

Yes, methinks mesmells Mickey brand sanitizer.

Barf-inducing Language Trend du Jour

Enjoy a mani and a pedi.

... meaning "manicure and pedicure."

Yacktacular.

P.S. I copy edit stuff like this. Please don't think I would read material of this nature unless I was being paid to.

Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about words, then I Google them)

"media are"— 5.4 million hits
"media is"— 14.7 million hits

Silly Words I Can’t Do Without

dis — I realize this word isn’t silly for everyone, but when it’s coming out of a 40ish white woman — well, let’s just say it gets people primed for my crunk routine. I use this word so much that the copy editors at Penguin actually included it in the little style guide they made to edit my books.

schmutz — What else could you possibly have on your chin after eating the artichoke and spinach dip?

dude — I don't like it either. But this is California. It's the law.

bubkes — A word no comedy-minded nihilist can do without.

noggin — Someday, respectable folks will take back the word "head." But until then ...

Words I'm Looking Up (One in an occasional, cleverly named series on words I'm looking up)

clad

File this one under Lessons from the Spam Folder. Today I got an e-mail with the subject line, "Clad your feet in luxury." I realized I'd never heard the word "clad" in the imperative -- or even the simple present tense, for that matter. I hear it only as a past tense or past participle: "Clad in his best armor, the knight rode into battle. "

I realize that a lot of people might know what the present tense of clad is, but I (and I'm not too mortified to admit it) did not. Here's American Heritage Dictionary:

v. a past tense and a past participle of clothe.

Therefore (surprise, surprise) the spammer used it wrong.

Words That Should Get a Divorce (One in an occasional series on words whose relationships have grown tired)

treasure and trove

This trove goes beyond typical codependent words such as the pomp in pomp and circumstance.

Webster's New World demonstrates why trove is the ultimate second-class citizen of the word world. Not only is it attached to treasure with a hyphen -- treasure-trove -- but it doesn't even retain its own definition. Of trove, Webster's says only, "short for treasure-trove." As such, it's barely clinging to life.

I say we put it out of its misery.

Down With 'Down With'

In an old Simpsons episode, a group of feminist protesters marches in front of an ad agency, presumably protesting some chauvinistic ad campaign. The women are carrying signs and chanting, "Down with sexism! Down with sexism!" In what turns out to be a spoof beer commercial, some construction workers spray them with beer and they turn into giggling bikini party girls. (So like life, those Simpsons.)

This well-known usage of "down with" appears in Webster's New World College Dictionary, curiously flush with exclamation points:

down with! overthrow! do away with!

Yet the online version of the American Heritage Dictionary also lists that other, hipper version of "down with":

Slang. Having knowledge of; aware; "He was not, I detected, 'down with the revolution'" (Clarence Page).

And urbandictionary.com reports the next phase of this term's evolution:

down wit dat: to be in agreement

And here we have yet another example of why native English speakers should go easy on anyone trying to learn this language: The protesters who were originally "down with!" sexism changed their minds and instead became "down with" sexism.

Expressions I'm Glad I Don't Hear Anymore

Serious as a heart attack.

Words That Should Get a Divorce (One in an occasional series on words whose relationships have grown tired)

nook and cranny

A Google search for cranny shows more than 1.1 million hits. A Google search for cranny minus nook gets just 277,000. If that's not a codependent word relationship, I don't know what is.

Think about that some morning while sipping coffee in your breakfast cranny.

Words I'd Like to See Make a Comeback (One in an occasional series)

scalawag

n. 1 [Informal] a scamp; rascal 2 a Southern
white who supported the Republicans during the Reconstruction: an opprobrious
term used by Southern Democrats

Words I'd Like to See Make a Comeback (One in an occasional series on words I'd like to see make a comeback)

negligee

Words I Would Like to See Make a Comeback (First in an occasional series on words I would like to see make a comeback)

upchuck