GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – I didn’t know that a cougar is an older woman seeking a sexual relationship with a younger man, but now I do, thanks to the new Concise Oxford Dictionary, which keeps us up to date on the language we’re using. Clearly, I lead a dull life, as I haven’t needed to use “sextings”, either (nothing to do with people over 60, like sexagenarians).

CNN sent me scurrying to the OUP (Oxford University Press) blog post on the 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary to see what other gems we’ve recently invented. The Concise Oxford is celebrating its 100th birthday with the new edition.

Even better than finding new words was my discovery of the pleasure of the Oxford Words Blog itself, where I’ve just learned that the word “riot” meant an extravagent lifestyle during its first 100 years, which makes me wonder what “retweet” will mean in 2711.

And then there’s Italy’s contributions to our food vocabulary. And I’m sure the list of phobias will come in handy one of these days, maybe when I have to write about my fear of them. Palms are getting sweaty as a I write, the shakes are coming over me. Oh no! It’s phobophobia, I think!

I really enjoyed most of, let’s say the first 76 percent of, Michael Agger’s Slate post on how to write faster. I’m a fast writer and never quite know how to answer people who ask for tips on this; improve your typing skills? sounds a bit feeble. He has some good points, has done some interesting research. As I continued to read, faster and faster, I realized he’s done one thing I counsel other writers to avoid: stop writing for the web as you would for print, and the best way to do that is to write shorter, so people read to the end. I nearly did.

I wanted to ask him how long it took him to write the post, but all the Slate options for leaving comments require me to give my address books and half my life to Google or Twitter or other places where I hang out online, and I like my privacy and that of my friends too much for that.

Linking the right to comment to a swap whereby the other party gets to post on your pages is one of my pet peeves with social media because I see too much rubbish on some people’s FB or Twitter pages as a result. Writing faster runs parallel to speeding up time spent looking at stuff you really don’t care about.

And while we’re on pet peeves related to writers, I do wish manic writers would stop invading every networking site they can find, with crazy numbers of posts. Ever met someone at a party you couldn’t get away from, who just couldn’t stop talking, and seemed to think everything they had to say was of interest? Hmmm, they’ve moved to the online party.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – NoViolet Bulawayo is the winner of the £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing, which the BBC refers to “as Africa’s leading literary award”. She won the award, announced Monday evening 11 July, for her short story, “Hitting Budapest”, about a group of shantytown children who steal guava fruit from a wealthier part of town.

Bulawayo is from Zimbabwe, recently completed a master of fine arts at Cornell University in the US, where she now teaches English and writes.

The chairman of the jury, Hisham Matar, says, “The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles. Here we encounter Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho, a gang reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. But these are children, poor and violated and hungry. This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language.”

The story was published in The Boston Review, Vol 35, no. 6 – Nov/Dec 2010.

Complete press release, interview with The Zimbabwean, UK

NoViolet Bulawayo web site and blog

I think this is not a word, but who wants to argue with the US Senate Finance Committee chairman? Will Scrabble let you use it? “Irrebuttably” is the gem, and I can see how a senator might like the concept that his arguments are so sound they are irrebuttable. But do we need a new word when another one exists, that seems to work well: irrefutable arguments.

Here is his sentence, circa 1998:

“Any individual with a net worth of $500,000 or more (adjusted for inflation) on the date of expatriation or who has an average annual net income tax liability for the five years preceding expatriation of $100,000 or more (adjusted for inflation) is irrebuttably presumed to have expatriated for tax-motivated reasons (except as discussed below), and thereby is subject to tax under section 877 regardless of actual intent.”

It turns out that this is a legal term, and is generally used only in a legal context, but perhaps we could extend its shelf life by adopting it for parental decisions about staying out later (irrebuttably decided . . .) or apartment building laundry policies (it is irrebuttably clear that after 10pm . . .).

Irrebuttable means incapable of being rebutted. Irrefutable may be a synonym, most often couple with the word “evidence”, but it has a gentler feel, doesn’t seem quite the verbal equivalent of a blunt object.

This might explain why Webster’s online dictionary says this: “irrebuttably – Virtually never used adverbial inflection of the rarely used adjective irrebuttable.”

Leave it to the US Senate Finance Committee to find it useful.

(video, The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks) If you’re reading this, you’re probably a word lover like me. We’re an odd bunch, people who get a thrill from dictionaries. Most of us enjoy new words, but many of us, I suspect, have shifted to looking up definitions online more often than in the fat old tomes that were once our only option.

I find myself slightly annoyed, therefore, with Dr Oliver Sacks because in one book alone, he’s given me far too many words to look up. I curl up in fat chairs or my bed to read books like his, extraordinary tales of the neurological oddities people live with on this planet, and I don’t want to turn to a computer screen while I’m doing this. Generally, I can remember two or three words that I don’t know and look them up later, but his latest book, which I’ve just finished, had a word new to me on virtually every page. Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much.

The writer’s dilemma: when to use less common words

It raises the old question a student once asked me, “What’s the point of using words people don’t know?” His argument was that the writer was stupid to expect people to look up words when there was a perfectly serviceable batch of easier, more widely used words out there. My argument, as you’ve probably guessed, was that we have a bigger pool of words to allow us to be more precise, more elegant, to better communicate, and that the intelligent reader will hold up his or her end of the bargain and learn new words.

Dear Dr Sacks, I felt a little like my student, annoyed with you while reading The Mind’s Eye, a book I otherwise found wonderful. I have an 18-year-old daughter who has never spoken, but who communicates, and I’ve gained insights from this book that will help me help her. But I had to ignore some words to stay focused.

Writing is a bit like cooking: it’s more interesting if we use spices, but they need  to be balanced. I made a soup last week with several wonderful herbs, a good blend I think, but at the last minute I threw in far too many peppercorns. I had to really work, while eating that soup, to find the oregano and thyme and other flavours lurking under those mad little black balls scooting around in the broth.

In fairness to Sacks, who came to my attention with his wonderful “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, many of these words are probably familiar to the medical world. One way writers can handle specialty-specific words is to make their meaning clear in the sentence, which Sacks often does admirably, particularly in the first part of the book. Example: “Mimesis, the deliberate and conscious representation of scenes, thoughts, feelings, intentions and so on, by mime and action, seems to be a specifically human achievement, like language (and perhaps music).”

The danger to the writer is that the text will stop flowing, weighted down by definitions.

If the story is strong enough, we’re pulled along by it and don’t realize the dictionary work is being done for us by the writer: “Yet he was surprised to find, as a nurse reminded him, that he could still write, even though he could not read; the medical term, she said, was ‘alexia sine agraphia.’ Howard was incredulous—surely reading and writing went together; how could he lose one but not the other?”

Sacks seems, as the book progresses, to be pulled more sharply into his subject matter, almost appearing to forget the reader at times in his haste to better understand his own subject matter. There is a good explanation for this, and in the end I forgive him his bonanza of big words. Oliver Sacks has eye cancer and has lost vision on one side, so when he explores the difficult world of his patients, he now includes himself.

There is a level of intimacy here that was not in his previous books, and we discover a writer whose vocabulary is far richer than most people’s.

I had to look up one word in these sentences, but it was worth the trouble because I learned something I didn’t know, and this is why I read. “As early as three months, infants are learning to narrow their model of ‘faces’ to those they are frequently exposed to,” writes Sacks, referring to research by Olivier Pascalis . “The implications of this work for humans are profound. To a Chinese baby brought up in his own ethnic environment, Caucasian faces may all, relatively, ‘look the same’, and vice versa. One prosopagnosic acquaintance, born and raised in China, went to Oxford as a student and has lived for decades in the United States. Nonethless, he tells me, ‘European faces are the most difficult—they all look the same to me.’”

I love concise writing. So the idea of the new Ted books, from the people who do the amazing Ted conferences, has great appeal. The starting point is excellent: ideas worth spreading. And the length of the books is just right, at under 20,000 words, for what they describe as “long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.” I wish them well, while I debate which one to try first.

A loving, lackadaisical dad

Palin, prompting a fine brouhaha

Two words we don’t hear often enough have each appeared more than once this week, on my radar: the low-energy lackadaisical and the high-energy brouhaha.

“Lackadaisical” was used by a son at his father’s large 60th birthday party to describe Dad’s parenting approach, which the son, born in the mid-1970s, said he only fully appreciated for what it was once he had his own small child. “Laid-back” was the term Roger’s (not his real name) friends used to describe him in the 1970s, a time when despite fatherhood he went off to India for weeks on end. Untroubled and unfettered, as we saw him. Lackadaisical conjures up images of someone who is dreamy, languorous, his attention perhaps elsewhere.

The kids turned out just fine, as the son, a much stricter father with his own small child, hastened to tell the birthday party crowd. The day after the party, taking a plane home from southern Spain where it was held, I was reading Jane Smiley’s novel A Life and she used it to describe one of her characters.

Palin’s penchant for creating a brouhaha

Thanks to Sarah Palin, we get to hear brouhaha mentioned this week on American political web pages, where she comes in for heavy criticism, followed promptly by heavy defense, for her use of the term blood libel.

Brouhaha is a word that I’ve always associated with bubbling cauldrons, but when I looked for its origins it seems I have this wrong. At it simplest level the word is defined as a stir, an uproar (wiktionary), but WordNet defines it as “a confused disturbance far greater than its cause merits.” It once had more negative connotations than it does today, when it is often used to describe the “noisy clamourous response to a stimulus, produced by a crowd” (bookrags).

A synonym is hubbub, but the emphasis here is somewhat more on the noise itself, perhaps with fewer negative connotations, and it is more often used to describe physical rather than metaphorical noise: a hubbub on the web over Palin’s words doesn’t quite work.

Hubbub’s origins make for a nice story on the Free Dictionary, which suggests that it is “likely that a certain English contempt resides in the adoption of the word hubbub from a Celtic source, which is probably related to ub ub ubub, a Scots Gaelic interjection expressing contempt, or to abu, an ancient Irish war cry”.

The guesses about the origins of brouhaha are mostly unconvincing, ranging from old Hebrew for “welcome” to Spanish for “bull-baiting”, akin to “bravo”, or an exclamation made by the devil in old French dramas. The Free Dictionary buys the devil’s tale, saying it from French, “of imitative origin”. Merriam-Webster says its first known use was 1890, but doesn’t tell us where or how it was used.

I prefer my (and some others’) onomatopoeia explanation, the sound of the babbling, bubbling crowd, a kind of soup of incoherent voices.

“Onomatopoeia”, by the way, should be in every spelling bee. Hardly anyone remembers off the bat how to spell it correctly, I suspect. Another commonly mistake is to misplace or leave out the “u” in “languor”, used above, especially when it drifts into “languorous”.

This is probably news to a lot of people: you should pronounce the “f’ in twelfth, as in the Twelfth Day of Christmas, ladidadi. Here’s your chance to sing it. If you’d rather listen to John Denver and The Muppets sing it, see the video below.

This gives me a golden opportunity to ask if you know how to spell the word, and if you hesitated, you might want to check out this very good list of commonly misspelled words.

They use the old-fashioned UK-US spelling divide, whereas GenevaLunch uses international English spelling guidelines, but they have plenty of company, mainly based in the UK or US, where they tend to forget that English is spoken and written in several other places such as Ireland, Canada, South Africa, India, New Zealand and so on.

And if you want to know more about those strange lyrics in the Christmas song, wikipedia offers some background.

Merry Christmas, with or without that cheap shopping list shortcut, Xmas!

I read a sentence three times today before I realized what bothered me about it. This is one of those subtle not-quite-right word problems, the difference in usage between requisite and required. The sentence read “about 25 states have the economic requisites” needed to build a system.

There are two problems here. The word requisite can be used as a noun, but it means a necessity, something that is absolutely necessary, indispensable, according to the Free Dictionary. This is stronger than a requirement, which in the sample sentence above is the sense, so requirement is a better word.

The second problem is that while requisite can be used as a noun, it is more commonly used as an adjective, as in this example from Your Dictionary:

“Students wishing to take such units must be able to demonstrate that they have the requisite linguistic competence.”

Many people will be familiar with a cousin noun, pre-requisites, from reading university catalogues.

Karl Marx offers a fine example of requisite as a noun: “The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.”

It doesn’t take much to turn all the foreigners in Switzerland into convicts, and I don’t mean the vote Sunday 28 November or even the infamous black sheep posters by the UDC (People’s Party). It’s much easier: a comma will do the trick nicely.

There are many uses for commas, but one of the most abused and mis-used is the comma that isolates weak interruptions to sentences: Check that these words really are an interruption and that if you lifted them from the sentence it would still make sense. Then re-read it to be sure it says what you want it to say.

Here is a fine example of a weak interruption, with commas used correctly. It’s from a comment posted on swissinfo’s lengthy article about the reaction of foreigners in Switzerland to the vote approving automatic expulsion of criminals who are foreigners, once they’ve served their prison sentences.

‘Your title is misleading. It should read “Foreigners, who are criminals, alarmed by Swiss Expulsion vote”…

The title of the article is “Foreigners alarmed by Swiss expulsion vote”.

Once you’ve checked that your use of the commas for a weak interruption is correct, read it again to be sure this is what you mean. Write what you mean and mean what you write.

Try the comment author’s sentence above, without commas, to see how this shifts the meaning.

“Foreigners who are criminals alarmed by Swiss expulsion vote.”

Well, they would be, wouldn’t they?

But it doesn’t say anything about what the rest of us think.