#by lingo

[superlinguo]

Goodbye By Lingo

After 8 years and 197 editions, it’s time for me to say goodbye to my regular By Lingo piece in The Big Issue.

I started writing By Lingo for edition 436 (the word was ‘wisdom teeth’). Condensing the story of an everyday word into a 140-word column has been a wonderful opportunity to learn to write concisely. I’m grateful to Alan Attwood, who gave me a chance when he was editor, and Amy Hetherington, who continued to be a supportive and enthusiastic editor. Thanks to the Big Issue team over the years, for letting me follow the story of many words. I’ve made a word cloud of all 197 words I’ve written about for the column.

I’ve posted some of the By Lingo pieces to this blog over the years, you can find them under the By Lingo tag.

Edition 641 of The Big Issue in Australia was my last piece, which was about ‘melodrama’ for a somewhat dramatic exit. By Lingo is now in the excellent hands of Lee Murray.

[superlinguo]

By Lingo: Beforetimes

The last year or so has brought a lot of COVID-related terms into our daily vocabulary, some are brand new (like COVID), and others are old words we’ve blown the dust off and put back to work. One word that’s been given a new lease on life is beforetimes, which first showed up in the middle of the 1400s. Talking about the beforetimes has become common because we are all referring to the same before - rarely does an event radically alter everyone’s lives so quickly and profoundly. If you want to mix things up you can use one of the other old of the word, including aforetimes and foretimes. The Oxford English Dictionary lists beforetimes as ‘archaic’, but that was in, well, the beforetimes.

This piece originally featured in The Big Issue in Australia (Edition 631).

By Lingo is found on the puzzles page in every edition. Every so often I drag out at old favourite to share here on Superlinguo. If you’re in Australia you can pick up a copy of The Big Issue from one of the street vendors every fortnight!

[superlinguo]

Koalas and drop bears 🐨

The first reference to the koala in English was in an 1808 article, in which the koala is described as “another species of the wombat”. Confused settlers also attempted to describe the koala as a species of sloth, opossum and bear. While we don’t know exactly which one of the Australian Aboriginal languages this word was borrowed from, we know that the animal is known as the kūlla in Dippil, and kùla in Kamilaroi. It’s unclear how our modern spelling came to be; a more literal spelling would be koola. The mythical drop bear is said to have been first emerged around the mid 20th century, but the earliest recorded use of the term is only from 1982.

This piece originally featured in The Big Issue in Australia.

By Lingo is found on the puzzles page in every edition. Every couple of months I drag out at old favourite to share here on Superlinguo. If you’re in Australia you can pick up a copy of The Big Issue from one of the street vendors every fortnight!

[superlinguo]

-ish, and its cousin -esque

Words change over time, but so can individual parts of words. The suffix -ish originated in the Gemanic languages to indicate nationality; things like British, Danish, Swedish. It then broadened to indicate a general characteristic; ghoulish, childish. You might recognise a similarity with ish’s classier French cousin -esque, in words like grotesque or Kafka-esque. This comes from Medieval Latin -iscus, which was borrowed from Germanic. -ish can also be used with adjectives or time, where it gives a sense of being only ‘somewhat’ like the property; greenish isn’t very green, going to bed at two-ish is a rather late night. -ish is now breaking away; ask someone if they’re tired after going to bed so late and they might reply ‘ish’.

This piece originally featured in The Big Issue in Australia.

By Lingo is found on the puzzles page in every edition. Every couple of months I drag out at old favourite to share here on Superlinguo. If you’re in Australia you can pick up a copy of The Big Issue from one of the street vendors every fortnight! For those who aren’t in Australia, ‘romance’ featured in edition #553 in 2018.

[superlinguo]

Unicorn was originally anhorn in English 🦄

You don’t need much Latin to know that unicorn means ‘one horn’. It is one of the earliest English borrowings of a Latin uni- word. Before this, rather than borrowing Latin words, Old English scribes translated them. If we continued this, we might still refer to the majestic and elusive anhorn. The Latin was also a translation, from Greek monoceros (mono ‘one’ and ceros ‘horn’, like rhinoceros ‘nose horn’). Lots of words that begin with c in Latin begin with a h in English, cord, cannis and capitum are related to heart, hound and head respectively. This relationship is so common it is one of Grimm’s Laws - the Brothers Grimm collected fairytales across Europe but were also interested in language history. 

This piece originally featured in The Big Issue in Australia.

By Lingo is found on the puzzles page in every edition. Every couple of months I drag out at old favourite to share here on Superlinguo. If you’re in Australia you can pick up a copy of The Big Issue from one of the street vendors every fortnight! For those who aren’t in Australia, ‘romance’ featured in edition #580 in 2019.

[superlinguo]

Romance languages and the language of romance

I’m a little late for Valentine’s Day, but on such a day a few years ago I was thinking about the relationship between Romance languages (French, Italian, etc) and the genre of romance, which lead me to write this Big Issue piece.

A passionate fling in Southern Europe could very well be a Romance romance – There’s a reason that French, Italian and Spanish are all referred to as languages of love. The Romance languages are so called because roman was the term used in the middle ages for the ‘vulgar’ dialects of Latin from which the modern languages would develop. Around this same time, stories written in these ‘dialects’ about knights and heroes were referred to in Old French as romanz, meaning ‘translated into the vulgar dialect’. These stories arrived in England thanks to the Norman conquest. The literary genre extended to love stories in the 1660s, and then to real life love affairs in the early 20th Century.

This piece originally featured in The Big Issue in Australia.

By Lingo is found on the puzzles page in every edition. Every couple of months I drag out at old favourite to share here on Superlinguo. If you’re in Australia you can pick up a copy of The Big Issue from one of the street vendors every fortnight! For those who aren’t in Australia, ‘romance’ featured in edition #496 in 2015.

[superlinguo]

Spruiking this good Aussie word

A spruiker is someone who holds forth in public, particularly with a bit of flair, and often in an attempt to get you to part with your money. For many Australian English speakers this word is common enough that a definition is unnecessary. This word is, however, basically unknown beyond Australia and New Zealand. Not only is it exclusively found in our Southern variety of English, but its origins are unclear. The earliest reference in the Australian National Dictionary is in the Truth newspaper in 1911. The unusual ui vowel combination have lead some to suggest a possible German, Dutch or Yiddish origin. There is no substantial evidence for a Germanic origin, as far as we know this is a dinky-di Aussie word.

This piece originally featured in The Big Issue in Australia. By Lingo is found on the puzzles page in every edition. Every couple of months I drag out at old favourite to share here on Superlinguo. If you’re in Australia you can pick up a copy of The Big Issue from one of the street vendors every fortnight! For those who aren’t in Australia, ‘anniversary’ featured in edition #510 in May 2016.

See the By Lingo hashtag for more word stories

[superlinguo]

100th By Lingo in The Big Issue

Edition #541 of The Big Issue is currently out in Australia. This edition marks the 100th By Lingo column that I’ve written for the magazine since ‘wisdom teeth’ appeared in #436 in 2013.

To celebrate, here’s the By Lingo on Anniversary from edition #513. Of course, By Lingo follows the strange paths that words have taken over the years, so ‘celebrating’ in this case involves dead people, marketing gimmicks and some Old English.

Anniversaries are often celebrated as happy occasions, but when the word anniversary entered English some time around the early 13th century it was used to mark the day of a person’s death, particularly Saints Days. From the Latin anniversaries, meaning ‘returning annually’, or more literally anni ‘year’ versus ‘turned’, we now use the word for a major annual milestone, particularly for weddings. Silver (25 years) and Gold (50 years) Anniversaries have a long tradition in Europe, but the codification of many of the other anniversaries (e.g. pottery for a 9th wedding anniversary) are recent marketing constructions. Before the word anniversary entered the English vocabulary an older word in Old English was mynddæg or ‘mind-day’.

This piece originally featured in The Big Issue in Australia. By Lingo is found on the puzzles page in every edition. Every couple of months I drag out at old favourite to share here on Superlinguo. If you’re in Australia you can pick up a copy of The Big Issue from one of the street vendors every fortnight! For those who aren’t in Australia, ‘anniversary’ featured in edition #513 in June 2016 for The Big Issue’s 20th Anniversary edition.

See the By Lingo hashtag for more word stories.