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LOST BY AN ETHNICALITY

Sam's Club is selling garden lanterns of what they call Moroccan design, with signs saying "Ethnical Design." At first I thought the sign writer had tacked on an extraneous syllable to "ethnic" for no particular reason, but maybe he or she had "ethical" in the back of his or her mind.

So would plain lanterns be unethnical?

BLACKBERRY WINTER

Today on the radio I heard a term I've never heard before: blackberry winter. It was chilly today so it was easy to guess he meant a cold spell in the spring. This must be the counterpart of an Indian summer, which according to Wikipedia is called Old Wives summer in England.

ENGLISH AMONG US

Speaking of which ~ England, that is ~ this weekend I met a couple from England who pronounced "ate" as "et". This is a very old English pronunciation, but where it lingers on in the United States it's considered illiterate, or at least incorrect; anyway, rural ("Have you all et yet?"). You'll hear it sometimes in the Appalachians or in the South, where the early settlers retained some of their British pronunciations, and vocabulary too. Why should "et" now be considered subliterate in the U.S.? It must be because the flatlanders look down on mountain people and Northerners look down on Southerners.

One of my students just got back from a vacation in Florida where she also met an English couple. They told her they went to a garden store here and asked for a "pot plant". The sales clerk looked shocked and said, "Ma'am, this is Sunday!" For the British PO readers, they meant a potted plant. Here, a pot plant is a marijuana plant, and you can't hardly find one for sale anywhere even on a Monday.

This same English couple also said people often asked where they were from, because of their accent. When they replied England, one person said, "New England?" "No, Old England." "Where's that?" And yet...in San Diego, a lawsuit is being filed against the state because some students are failing the high school exit exam although it doesn't even require senior-level knowledge. "California's exam tests 10th-grade English, ninth-grade math and level-one algebra. Students need to answer 60 percent of the questions correctly to pass each section." For all we know, there are no questions at all on geography.

GHETTO VS. SLUM

It has become common to call a poor black neighborhood a ghetto, although the original meaning of ghetto was a neighborhood in Europe where Jews were forced to live, such as the Warsaw ghetto. At one time there may have been force involved in restricting black residency, but that's not the case now. Some black writer or perhaps a comedian once called trailer parks the ghetto of poor white people. But what he was talking about is poverty, not racial or ethnic segregation.

The word "slum" isn't used so much anymore. (The word may be related to "slump", which meant a boggy sort of place.) The main difference between ghetto and slum is the word ghetto assumes that someone else forces you to live there. A slum does not suggest proud poverty.

HARD-HEADED

Someone on TV talked about someone else's "hard-fought achievements". This is a confusion of the idiom ~ cliché, actually ~ "hard-won achievements". You may win an achievement, but it's counterproductive to fight it.

PIMP KIDS

In a newspaper exchange about kids and today's culture, one mother said she sees nothing wrong with kids ~ young children ~ using the word pimp; everybody does it now. What the kids mean by it, or think they mean, isn't clear, but it will be centuries (if ever) before the word is far enough removed from its original meaning to be acceptable as a slang word for children to use to mean anything good. There's a mother who needs to be slapped, not with a wet noodle but with an entire box of uncooked spaghetti.

EPONYMS

A little book fell out of our shelves today: Webster's New World Dictionary of Eponyms. An eponym is a word derived from a proper name. The dictionary lists some eponyms that I wouldn't bother to call by such a fancy rhetorical term. For instance, a Benedict Arnold is a traitor, after the general of that name who left the Americans to go over to the British side in the Revolutionary War. His name is a common part of the language but is not strictly speaking a common noun, as opposed to a proper noun. And why bother calling the Wankel engine an eponym because it refers to its inventor? It's the same, grammatically speaking, as Wankel's engine or the engine of Wankel. The dictionary has many entries of this type, such as diseases named after the scientists who identified them and so on.

But there are many other common words listed with origins that are unfamiliar to me, and that have become separated from their beginnings as proper names. "Museum" comes from the Muses, the goddesses of Greek mythology who presided over the arts. I had no idea that "cloth" comes from Clotho, one of the three fates who spins the thread of destiny, also from Greek mythology.

Did you know "blanket" comes from Thomas Blanket, who made blankets in 14th century England? Matches used to be called lucifers, presumably because of Satan's association with fire. The Black Maria, or prison van, is named for Maria Lee, who owned a sailor's lodging house in Boston. She was a large, tough, black woman who helped the police, so they got to calling for help from the Black Maria. Police vans for carrying prisoners are also known as paddy wagons, which I believe comes from nicknaming Irish immigrants "Paddy" (Patrick), so of course it's offensive to people who are offended by that sort of thing. Presumably the early Irish immigrants, who were poor, got in trouble a lot. Then they went on to make up most of the police force of the Eastern cities.

NOUNS FOR VERBS

I ran across maintenance used to mean maintain, but do not think maintenance is a verb, even though it seems analogous to service. Although www.dict.org does not list service as a verb, www.yourdictionary.com does and also has this Usage Note:

Aside from specialized senses in finance (service a debt) and animal breeding (service a mare), the verb service is used principally in the sense "to repair or maintain": service the washing machine. In the sense "to supply goods or services to," serve is the correct choice: One radio network serves three states.

Maintenance doesn't work like that, and is just another example of people feeling that a lengthier word is somehow a better word.

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