Apple bricking making iPhone owners brick it

In case you’ve been on planet iPod?Couldn’tGiveA, no doubt you’ve already heard all about how Apple are punishing their customers who have dared to unlock the iPhone or install third-party applications.

Stories about this have flared up all over the press and internet, but what I find really curious is the immediate invention and acceptance of a brand new verb.

Apple is repeatedly reported to have “bricked” the unlocked iPhones. “To brick”, in this case, seems to mean “render as useful as a brick.” And while bricks are indeed extremely useful, I’m sure owners of the $399 gadget would hesitate before cementing their prize and joy to another, or throwing it through a shop window. (For the record, the official, unbrickish and frankly dull statement from Apple is that modifying your phone will make it “permanently inoperable”.)

But why a brick? Why not say that a useless iPhone is like a paperweight or doorstop? My hunch is that the instant appeal of calling it a brick is that it hints at the early days of mobile phones, when the phones were literally as big and heavy as bricks. Of course the difference is that despite appearances, those bricks still operated as phones. The iBrick, however, has the exact same phone functionality as its clay brethren.

Another obvious connection is with the verb “to brick it”, a delightful Britishicism meaning to be very nervous or scared. Rumour has it that the origin of this phrase lies with the brick uh, outhouses of yesteryear, where, of course, one went to empty one’s bowels. An action which may or may not have occurred across the world as iPhone owners suddenly realised that their new $399 toy had turned into a brick.

“Hyphens are dying!” declares hysterical BBC

In what must surely be a slow news day, the BBC solemnly reports that the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has removed hyphens from 16,000 words. Hyphens are “enjoying [sic] a difficult time at the moment”, apparently.

As usual, the blame lies in the internet. We’re so busy busy busy writing emails that we don’t have time for hyphens. “When you are sending e-mails, and you have to type pretty fast, on the whole it’s easier to type without hyphens,” exaggerates Geoffrey Leech, former professor of linguistics and English language at Lancaster University.

But why, as a self-confessed linguistics geek, am I being so sneering about this news? Uh, because it isn’t news.

Generally speaking, new compound words use hyphens to make their meaning more obvious. Electronic mail might at first be abbreviated to e mail. But that lonely e might be confusing, so it hold hands with its other half in e-mail. As the word becomes more commonly used, the two halves are considered a whole, and email finally emerges, independent and triumphant.

The truth, of course, is that the hyphen will never die. Not when there are lonely affixes to stick before, in and after words. It’s got nothing to do with the internet. To-morrow and good-bye once had hyphens, and then they lost them too. Boo-flippin-hoo.

The origin of ‘bum’

I was asked the other week to find out the origin of the word “bum”. ‘I write a serious blog about language!’ I spluttered in indignation. But, today, bored on a lunchbreak, I decided that there’s nothing undignified in pursuing the etymological explanation of a mildly provocative expletive.

So here we go: the meaning behind the behind.

(And for any non-British readers who don’t already know, a bum is what we call a posterior, ass, arse, butt, bottom. You get the idea.)

It seems that ‘bum’ was used by none other than a Mr William Shakespeare. The passage is in Measure to Measure, when Escalus asks Pompey his surname. “Bum, Sir” replies Pompey. To which Escalus says, “Troth, and your bum is the greatest thing about you; so that in the beastliest sense you are Pompey the Great.” Hilarious.

So that’s proof that bums existed in Sheakespeare’s day. Disappointingly, my Chambers’ Dictionary of Etymology is clearly and firmly American. Hence bum only appears in the sense of a vagrant or loafer, which can be traced to the German bummeln, ‘to loaf’.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary says that bum heralds from 1387, and is “probably onomatopoeic, to be compared with other words of similar sound and with the general sense of ‘protuberance, swelling.’

Looking up bums was fun, and I’d like to do more. So every now and then I will find another word and look up its origins. It’ll probably be when I have either found a particularly delightful etymology, or when I have nothing else to blog about. And I will also take requests…

David Cameron and the ‘bare knuckle fight’

So David Cameron wants a “bare knuckle fight” with Gordon Brown over the issue of hospitals. Enough of the ridiculous macho verbal foreplay wordplay – why don’t we take politicians literally for once? Brown vs Cameron in a ring – wouldn’t that be hilarious. I think a lot of people would pay a lot of money for ringside seats for that one, and maybe the money could go towards Cameron’s hospital bills. How perfectly apt.

(Disclaimer: I am by no means a GordonBrownaphile, however I do dislike the tories more than I do labour. I don’t condone violence – except when it is consenting, done for money and involves politicians.)

I say I say I say…

Here’s a geeky linguistics joke for you:

A linguistics professor was giving a lecture one day. “In English,” she said, “a double negative forms a positive. In many languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language in which a double positive can form a negative.”

And a voice from the back of the room muttered “Yeah, right…”

Firefox’s subtle commentary on global linguistic diversity

Interesting observation from my dad:

“I just installed an update to Firefox and then installed the spell check dictionary. I notice the American English dictionary is smaller than the British one; and the Australian one is even smaller…”

Do Brits really have so much more to say? Or is it down to how we love to colour our words with unnecessary letters?

OMG! It’s just so, like, now!

I love David Crystal’s latest blog entry. It’s basically a very well-informed and elegant way of saying ‘Get a grip!’ to someone who is worried that the world will end because the kids are talking in txt.

It’s a wonderfully intriguing concept though, teenagers actually saying OMG instead of ‘oh my god’ and LOL instead of ‘laugh out loud’. (Or, in fact, actually laughing out loud.)

I bet it’s just a really-short lived fad which will embarrass these kids in a couple of years, and then amuse them a few years after that. Just like their haircuts will.

Does language decide what you think?

Native Russian-speakers see the colour blue differently from native English-speakers, reports New Scientist.

Russian has no single word to describe the colour we (English speakers) understand as ‘blue’ – instead they make a distinction between light blue, pronounced “goluboy”, and dark blue, pronounced “siniy”. As a result, Russians are 10% faster at distinguishing light and dark blue colours.

“So Ruskies can get dressed quicker in the morning, so what” you might be thinking. Well, in addition to being a natty fact you can casually drop in to your next dinner party conversation to trump that old Eskimo /words for snow myth (more on that another day), this is good news for fans of the Sapir–Whorf school of linguistic thought.

Put simply, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis claims that language is not merely a passive mirror for our world, it actually influences the way in which we think about life.

Perhaps the best (and most sinister) example of S-W thinking is ‘Newspeak’, the fictional language of George Orwell’s 1984. Newspeak is a language with no way of expressing supposedly undesirable concepts such as ‘freedom’ – the belief being that if you can’t say it, you can’t think it.

Newspeak is obviously Sapir–Whorf-ing to the max, totally totalitarian-style, so don’t go assuming that SW is automatically A Bad Thing.

In any case, Noam “language is innate” Chomsky and Steven “thought is independent of language” Pinker have tag-team-trashed the Sapir–Whorf thinking pretty hard in recent years, so it’s not much to worry about any more.

Well, until these fascinating Russians and their blues of course – who’s up for another Sapir–Whorf revival?

Who’s top dog? Read your emails

How emails are addressed say a lot about office politics, according to Norwegian scientists.

Karianne Skovholt studied over 700 work emails over a five-month period, and became very interested in why colleagues ‘cc-ed’ their workmates into emails.

She found that there were three main reasons for cc-ing:

1) To inform and document
2) To invite participation and seek support in conflicts

And, most interestingly,

3) To create visibility and positioning

You might have suspected it, but now you know it’s true: the humble cc field is a way of asserting rank and developing a complex work hierarchy.

“Employees can use an email’s cc function to position themselves in the organisational hierarchy under cover of simply wanting to provide information,” explained Skovholt. Not only this, but by copying in superiors, workers subtly exert pressure on the person the email is primarily addressed to.

Something to think about next time you send an email around the office…

Crystal a-maze

Being the linguistics geek I am, I’m chuffed to have found David Crystal’s blog! To be honest it never even occurred to me to look for it, but I tripped over it this afternoon and I’m rather pleased.

For those who don’t know (or don’t particularly care), David Crystal is one of the most influential living linguist in the world. In fact I would rate him #1, except that Noam Chomsky is still alive (although I did think he was already dead – oops.)

Crystal is famous for writing a lot of very accessible books on language, including how we learn and process language, how we use it, change it, kill it.

His blog seems to be mostly about the tiny fascinating details of language, and it’s refreshingly informed in the middle of the blogosphere’s usual muddled hot air.