Hit the Road, Dot, and don't you come back to dem reptiles no more, no more ....

The pond was grateful that Apple dropped the last episode of the first season of Pluribus before Xmas ... it had a zinger of a hook for the next season, and there's something in the constant talk of the hive mind which echoes the pond's voyages through the collectivist, jihadist lizard Oz mind - though frankly it's not so much a blissful group who've achieved a group think nirvana, as a bunch of hysterical, screeching Carols lacking the charms of Rhear Seehorn (talk of Pluribus is not a pond endorsement for dropping bucketloads of cash on assorted US streaming services).

Speaking of the latest jihad, the reptiles were still boxing away this day, though there were a few chinks in the armour ...

The Lynch mob was to hand to maintain the rage ...

Bad luck or systemic failure? How the left flipped the script on Bondi
Bondi Beach has produced much more evasive indictments of anti-Semitism. For too many on the left, Islamophobia is the thing and anti-Semitism just a natural consequence of whatever the Israeli government does.

... so it was off to the intermittent archive with him.

The pond has done all the work it intends to do on that matter. 

You want to suffer? Follow the link and hope the intermittent archive is working.

There were pearls of wisdom too, (*archive link), for those yearning for a serve of Dame Groan lite ...

All the pond could think was how typical was the Groaning, and the illustrations, featuring the usual downcast look, or a surly aggressiveness ...

Thank the long absent lord that this groaning dispenser of pearls of wisdom is now a former Treasury assistant secretary.

Curiously the craven Craven broke ranks, with a piece which was as ancient in tone as the aged prof is absent of wisdom ...

The pond decided that all that was needed was a reminder that the reptiles don't do humour ... 

Perhaps reading the craven Craven was even more dysfunctional than enduring a family Xmas dinner, even worse than hunkering down with rellies ...

Reading him trying to be funny about rellies induced a profound sympathy in the pond for anyone who had him for a relative and had to endure his company at Xmas... and as for those illustrations, the long absent lord have mercy on the ghost of long departed lizard Oz graphics department.

Off to the intermittent archive with him ...

The lizard Oz editorialist also tried a walk on the wild side, with one of three featured editorials stepping outside the current jihad to contemplate Vlad the sociopath ...

Strange how the reptiles always fail to mention that it's King Donald and his minions that have enabled Vlad the sociopath ... and that it's the likes of Faux Noise that helped give King Donald and his minions to the world.

And speaking of the King, strangely the reptiles overlooked the stunning Xmas spirit emanating from the disunited states, far more noble than that other King's Xmas message ...

That's more than enough of that, before the pond hits the rellie-laden road, and the reptiles disappear over the horizon ...

Before hitting the road, the pond would like to end on an up note ... words, and more specifically, dictionaries containing words ...

This strand was triggered by Louis Menand, scribbling a few days ago in The New Yorker ...

Is the Dictionary Done For?
The print edition of Merriam-Webster was once a touchstone of authority and stability. Then the internet brought about a revolution. (*archive link).

A teaser trailer:

Apart from being reminded that the pond - once a dictionary fanatic - now never opens a dictionary, amongst the things the pond enjoyed?

Learning new words and concepts ...

...He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word Backpfeifengesicht, which is defined as “a face that deserves to be slapped or punched.” Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro, was his illustration, until he came across a tweet from Ted Cruz’s college roommate. “When I met Ted in 1988,” it said, “I had no word describe him, but only because I didn’t speak German.”

Only Ted Cruz? 

Carol would have a lot more Backpfeifengesichts in her sights ...why, the pond can think of a parade of reptiles who show their Backpfeifengesichts to the world.

The pond was dragged back to the days when a bloody good time was had by all ...

....Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961, flipped the script. Fatsis says that it “changed lexicography.” Web. III had an open-door policy. It was descriptivist. The editors did not abandon the concept of Standard English, which they defined as English “well established by usage in the formal and informal speech and writing of the educated,” and they indicated when a word was considered nonstandard. But they eliminated the label “colloquial” and reduced the number of words labelled as slang. The spirit was nonjudgmental.
This seems unexceptionable today, when even popular language columnists, such as the Times’ John McWhorter, are manifest descriptivists. Language is what people say, not what they ought to say. But Web. III was brutally attacked. This was not too surprising. The people who attacked it were professional writers, and their attacks appeared in leading publications. No groups could have had a greater proprietary interest in Standard English. Verbal punctilio was the very basis of their livelihood. If anything goes in the realm of usage, they go, too.
So the Times attacked Web. III for “permissiveness” and “informality.” “Intentionally or unintentionally,” the paper said, “it serves to reinforce the notion that good English is whatever is popular.” Let the Times decide what’s fit to print, please. The Atlantic called Web. III “a scandal and a disaster.” It was ridiculed at entertaining length by Dwight Macdonald in these pages and, some forty years later, at equally entertaining and longer length, by David Foster Wallace, in Harper’s. (The proximate target of Wallace’s article was A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, but he devoted a lot of his piece to attacking Web. III. Some of his claims about it were erroneous.) In 1964, the Times saw fit to run a story with the headline “Outdated Webster II Still Sells; Educators Like Old Dictionary Better Than New One.”
The flash point was the inclusion in Web. III of “ain’t.” (The president of Merriam-Webster had ruled out “f*ck,”(*amazingly this has to be google bot approved) over the objections of the dictionary’s editor-in-chief, Philip B. Gove.) The “ain’t” taboo is a little odd; the word is just a contraction of “is not,” “are not,” or “am not.” But, in 1961, the use of “ain’t” in the United States was a very clear marker of social class, like saying “I seen him at the mall.” The “ain’t” controversy laid bare the stakes in lexicography: language use as an indicator of status.
This was, after all, the era of “My Fair Lady,” which is entirely about language and class. The setting of the musical is British, but that may be why it was so popular in America. Americans didn’t see themselves being lampooned. The 1956 Broadway production won six Tonys, including Best Musical, and had the longest run of any musical at the time. The cast album reached No. 1 on Billboard and remained in the Top Two Hundred for four hundred and eighty weeks—nine years. “My Fair Lady” touched a cultural nerve, and it prepared the way for the hostile reception of Web. III. The New Yorker, itself a cynosure of proper usage in those days, ran a cartoon showing a receptionist at Merriam-Webster telling a visitor, “Sorry. Dr. Gove ain’t in.” That was no doubt enjoyed by the magazine’s “My Fair Lady” fans.
The war over Web. III was, in short, a culture war, and culture wars are really class wars. Which group is up or down, top or bottom, in or out? Who is calling the shots for whom? In a review for The American Scholar, Jacques Barzun, the Columbia historian, called Web. III “the longest political pamphlet ever put together.” According to the editors of the new edition, Barzun complained, “whatever ‘the people’ utter is a ‘linguistic fact’ to be recorded, cherished, preferred to any reason or tradition.” He made it clear that this was not a cultural dispensation of which he could approve. Is the latitudinarian, post-humanist, post-standard world that Barzun dreaded the world we are living in today?

Remember that Dwight Macdonald reference - what a right royal dweeb he was, the pond will dare to go there - but not before before being startled ...

....Looking at online dictionaries, you can see plenty of selection going on, but it’s hard to grasp the principles that are guiding it. Take “groyper,” a name for followers of Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist Svengali. (“Svengali” is in the O.E.D. and Merriam-Webster, but not in Cambridge.) “Groyper” has popped up a lot recently, because Fuentes was in the news. But the word is reportedly eight years old—and it has still not made it into the online O.E.D., Merriam-Webster, or Cambridge dictionaries.
It does have an entry in Wikipedia, whose policy of giving entries to everything helps it keep ahead of the dictionaries. It can also operate quickly because it’s crowdsourced. It does not employ experts. Having found the definition for “groyper” somewhere, you might care to know how to spell it. In Wikipedia, the word is capped as a proper noun, but the Washington Post lowercases it in most uses. Normally, you’d look to a dictionary to tell you which is correct, but, since most popular online dictionaries do not recognize “groyper” as a word, this can’t be done. Welcome to the desert of the virtual.
On the other hand, the free Merriam-Webster online does list “cheugy,” a word meaning uncool, used especially as a put-down of trends associated with millennials. It is possibly related to the excellent Australian word “daggy,” but the coinage is credited to one Gaby Rasson, who is supposed to have used it with her friends at Beverly Hills High School in 2013. Not exactly Dr. Johnson territory. “Cheugy” has no etymology. It’s a nonsense word. Rasson said it just sounded right. “Cheugy” is pretty niche. It’s missing from Cambridge, the O.E.D., and even the American Heritage Dictionary, and it seems to have lapsed into disuse. It is also missing from the latest print edition of Merriam-Webster—the twelfth, which was released in November—and will presumably proceed to disappear down a lexical memory hole.
Scientific and medical terms are a problem, partly because there are so many but mainly because nonspecialists almost never use them. The standard edition of Merriam-Webster does not give us a lot of help with even the brand-name versions of these terms. It defines “Prozac” as “a preparation of fluoxetine”—technically correct, but not what people are thinking when they use the word. Merriam-Webster admits “Lipitor” as a word online; the O.E.D. does not.
Product names generally are an area of oversupply. Merriam-Webster has “Kleenex,” but not “Triscuit,” even though Triscuits have been around longer. American Heritage does not have “Triscuit,” though it does have “Kleenex” and “Coke.” The O.E.D. has all three brand names, plus “Guinness.” Speaking of brands, “OED” is a word in the O.E.D.

Daggy.

So it's not just the pond that appreciates Tamworth...though really Barners had grown out of "daggy" into disreputable clown.

And then there was this ...

...If you’re too old or too young (and you always are), generational slang is impossible to stay current with—and what’s the point, anyway? Any Gen Z-er can tell you what “gooning” means, but it’s not in most dictionaries; nor is its near-synonym “edging.” For such words, on the borderline of respectability, the fallback resource is the online Urban Dictionary (which has “fleece quarter zip” without a hyphen). But it, too, is crowdsourced, and you will often get random irreconcilable meanings, along with an alarming amount of contributor trash talk. Is “Skibidi” a word? Is “six seven”? How do you define them? They have no content. What about “bigly”? A lot of what comes out of our mouths is word salad.

The pond has been startled to note of late that the Daily Beast has taken to referring to King Donald's minions as "goons" and as members of assorted "goon squads", a sad traducing of a noble BBC comedy show which introduced the notion of excellent bacon that could only be had before the war ...

It got darker, because bringing up the goons reminded the pond of an outing by Daniel Kolitz in Harpers:

The Goon Squad
Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation

Endless masturbation? That reminded the pond of the lonely business of looking at the reptiles, hunched over and going hard at it ... 

This past January, a few dozen young men in hoodies and baggy jeans congregated outside a coffee shop in Tempe, Arizona, to mourn the death of a twenty-seven-year-old man named Nautica Malone. They arrived on foot and riding shotgun in parents’ cars; they carried flowers and votive candles, homemade placards and shirts printed with Malone’s smiling face. The café where they were gathered, Bikini Beans, was part of a chain whose baristas wear bikinis. Days earlier, Malone had pulled up to the drive-through window, nude from the waist down, a hand on his penis. The barista was already filming by the time the car reached her window. It’s hard to say why this particular sex crime went viral. Maybe it was something about Malone’s expression: he looked confident, even sultry, like he was hoping somehow to seduce the barista. Whatever the reason, the video was soon inescapable online. The view count was still climbing when Malone drove a few towns over and shot himself in the head in the front seat of his Dodge Challenger, leaving a note to his wife and young children asking for their forgiveness.
Malone’s death was covered widely in the tabloids and trended on social media, where it was described as the “Goonicide.” His vigil, meanwhile, was an ironic, livestreamed stunt that came to be known as the “Gooneral.” Remarkably, this language—Goonicide, Gooneral—was broadly legible to hundreds of thousands of people who engaged with it online. The implication, unmistakable, was that the verb “to goon,” the root of these terms, had broken containment. By the time you read this article, a full definition might be needless, but in the sincere hope that that day has yet to—will never—arrive, I will provide one.

Sorry, Mr Kolitz, TMFI, and you can call that a word ...

Back to Dwight, and one of the joys of the intertubes is that you can visit long lost times ...

The String Untuned
A review of Webster’s “New International Dictionary, Third Edition, Unabridged,” edited by Philip Gove, in comparison with Webster’s Second and the Oxford English Dictionary. (*archive link)

If you happen to subscribe to The New Yorker, you can read the text in situ, and at that point the advertisements offer a real distraction.

You learn a lot about the magazine and the demographic that Macdonald was writing for ...

Discerning females...

Mobile men ...

 

A lust for air travel... including good old Qantas ...

And above all, a seemingly unquenchable thirst for grog ...

 

And throughout all the advertising, a deep desire to be in Europe, or be European, or at least drive British cars, or swallow imported expensive grog while dressed in fashions that emulated a sense of European style.

There was more, a lot more. There were ads for the Saturday Evening Post, for the TV Guide, for clothing, for hotels, for diamonds as big as the Ritz, for Sony, an advanced technology marvel ...

How different it now is, while in between the ads, Macdonald burbled on, outraged by any hint of dictionary modernism ...

Enough already.

It's all there in the intermittent archive for those who want more ...

All gone now ... the past is a different country...but speaking of the breezy air of the present, the pond was exceptionally disappointed that Menand didn't mention the real word of the year ....

...Texting has produced a substantial vocabulary of acronyms and shorthand expressions, many of which date to when cellphones had numeric keypads, or at least to when messages were restricted to a hundred and sixty characters. (How did we ever live like that?) Many of those terms have migrated into e-mail and even into print. Merriam-Webster acknowledges the text-speak invasion by including LOL, TMI, IRL, and IMHO. But it does not recognize SMH, LMK, or JK—or “u” for “you” or “r” for “are.” “JK” can be important to know. The practice of acronyming and nicknaming is now widespread, part of a general speeding up of speech: “def,” “rando,” “preggers,” “fomo,” “homes,” “GOAT.” Are these words? They function as words.

Once a word is in print, is it permanently in the lexicon? Or do words have a sell-by date? If you search the O.E.D. for words used in print for the first time in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” you will get, amazingly, a hundred and seven results. Many of those words became part of the language, but many others (“fardel,” “bisson,” “drossy”) were nonce words that are now considered obsolete. Should they be included in a dictionary, since Shakespeare is Shakespeare and people still read “Hamlet”?

Then, there is linguistic play with parts of speech—nouns recently converted to verbs, verbs used as adjectives. I suspect that blogging and online writing in general have increased this kind of stylistic freebooting (one of the best things to happen to American prose, IMO). But the question of when a grammatically trans term deserves a dictionary entry remains unsettled. Merriam-Webster has the verb form of “nail,” for instance, as used in the sentence “She nailed the test,” but not the adjectival form, as in “Tom Brady was nails in the fourth quarter.” None of the online dictionaries carries “awkward” as a noun, as in “Being seated next to his ex at the company dinner served up a big bowl of awkward.”

There are also what could be called pop-up words, labels that attach to a certain social or cultural phenomenon as it flashes across the sky. Some of these are minted for the occasion, like “TACO,” for Donald Trump’s tariff waffling, and others are older words given new prominence, like “quarter zip.” But is “quarter zip” spelled with a hyphen? Don’t ask Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, or the O.E.D. None of them has it. By the time they do, quarter zips may already be too cheugy for school.

What, no mention of FAFO?

The pond can't think of a more relentless activity this past year, and there's going to be a heck of a lot of FAFO'ing done in the new year ...

But that's for later ...sharpies ready at the noggin, with the lizard Oz reptiles sublimely unaware of what their US kissing cousins helped unleash on the world ...

Cue a final bit of trolling ... just to keep that US-UK flavour rolling …