"Left-footed" explained

I encountered a new term while reading "Good Omens" yesterday:

"He quite liked nuns.  Not that he was a, you know, left-footer or anything like that.  No, when it came to avoiding going to church, the church he stolidly avoided going to was St. Cecil and All Angels, no-nonsense C. of E..."

My wife found an explanation in an old column at The Guardian:

Why are Catholics sometimes called 'left-footers'? 

The saying turns on a traditional distinction between left- and right-handed spades in Irish agriculture...

Most types of digging spade in Britain and Ireland have foot-rests at the top of their blades; two-sided spades have foot-rests on each side of the shaft and socket, while an older style of one-sided spade had only one. Two-sided spades may well have been introduced by the Protestant 'planters' in the sixteenth century. By the early nineteenth century specialised spade and shovel mills in the north of Ireland were producing vast numbers of two-sided spades which came to be universally used in Ulster and strongly identified with the province.

One-sided spades with narrow blades and a foot-rest cut out of the side of the relatively larger wooden shaft continued in use in the south and west. The rural population of Gaelic Ireland retained the Catholic faith and tended also to retain the one-sided spade and 'dig with the wrong foot'. 

In fact, the two-sided spade of Ulster was generally used with the left foot whereas the one-sided spade tended to be used with the right foot. Instinctively, the 'wrong foot' of the Catholics has come to be thought of as the left foot...

--Hugh Cheape, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh.

The best image I've found of such a shovel in use is this one, from Jim Orr Photography -

- of a "loy spade" (from the Gaelic word laí, for spade).  His gallery of photographs of the shovel in use includes a closeup of the narrow-bladed tool (about half the width of a conventional shovel).

Top two photos from here (this one appears to me to be designed for use with the right foot) and (cropped from) here.

Addendum:  A tip of the ushanka to reader Aleksejs for finding the following explanatory video:

YouTube link.

I'll bet the ancient Irishmen would have loved to have had someone attach bicycle handlebars to their spades.

"I swear to avocado..."

An article about shopping at Target contained this phrase:

"I'm not a big shopper, but I swear to avocados that once I start roaming the aisles..."

I presume it originated as a polite way to avoid taking God's name in vain, but I've never encountered it before, either in conversation or six decades of reading.  I wonder if this phrase is a local colloquialism from some part of the country where I've never lived.

"Happy as a dead pig in the sunshine"

"When a pig dies, presumably in a sty outside, the sun dries out its skin. This effect pulls the pig’s lips back to reveal a toothy “grin,” making it look happy even though it’s dead. This phrase describes a person who’s blissfully ignorant of reality."

From "13 Southern Sayings That The Rest Of America Won't Understand." Also explained at the link -

• "We're living in high cotton."
• "He could eat corn through a picket fence."
• "You look rode hard and put up wet."
• "That thing is all catawampus."
• "He's got enough money to burn a wet mule."

And others.  I spent two decades living in "the south," but some of these were new to me.

Belt buckle = shiv

Found in a thrift store.  The best comment from the Reddit thread:  "Rick donated this after realizing that any combat advantages gained by having a small knife were immediately lost by no longer having his pants stay up."

And regarding shivs:

A shiv (possibly from the Romani word chivomengro, "knife") is a slang term for any sharp or pointed implement used as a knife-like weapon. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests shive, a razor, documented in 1915, as the root word.

Composite image made from photos posted at imgur.

"Getting into the weeds"

I heard the phrase this afternoon on an NPR radio program about recent Congressional shenanigans and had to look it up.  The best I could find was a column in The Word Detective from 2011, excerpted herewith:

“[I]nto the weeds” now seems to be very, very popular, to the point where it earned its own article in the Christian Science Monitor in 2008. That article, in turn, heavily relied on an immensely helpful 2006 post on the excellent linguistics blog Language Log by Mark Liberman, who did some solid research on the phrase.

There seem to be two different uses of “getting into the weeds” out there in the wild. One is the “getting into too much (possibly irrelevant) detail” sense that you mention. This is evidently a very popular figure of speech among policy wonks, beltway insiders in Washington, D.C., and savvy observers such as Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, who has frequently used the phrase in his articles. The other sense is a restaurant term invoked when the staff is overworked, everything is going wrong, and total chaos is only a burnt fillet of sole away. Back in 2000 there was actually a Molly Ringwald movie about the staff of a restaurant dealing with a bad night called “In the Weeds.”

Golf, rather than farming, is favored for the etymology (details at the link).

Brit-speak

Duncan Green, a strategic adviser for Oxfam who posted it online, described it as "a handy guide for our fellow Europeans and others trying to fathom weaselly Brit-speak". Mr Green said: "Sadly, I didn’t write it. It’s just one of those great things that is being passed around on the internet."

Although the author of the table is unconfirmed, it is thought it may have originally been drawn up by a Dutch company as an attempt to help employees working in the UK. 

Via The Telegraph.

Defining a "burger"

It depends on which side of the Atlantic you live on, according to separated by a common language:

The British focus on the bread: a burger is a cooked thing served in a round bun... So, order a chicken burger at Nando's or Gourmet Burger Kitchen, and you'll get what Americans would call a chicken breast sandwich. For Americans, a burger is a (chiefly AmE) patty made of (AmE) ground/(BrE) minced meat, so we can be heard to express surprise when the chicken burgers we order in the UK are chicken breasts. (Not necessarily disappointed, but surprised. One doesn't hear chicken burger that much in the US, but turkey burger is fairly common--and always ground/minced.)...

In fact the 'burger' is so much associated with the meat that (orig. AmE) hamburger can also be used in AmE to refer to ground/minced beef even before it's cooked. Hence Hamburger Helper, and its 'Add hamburger' in the top right corner of the package.

Indigenous languages of Australia

Who knew there were so many?  And apparently these are not minor dialect variations, because the source text says:

This map indicates only the general location of larger groupings of people which may include smaller groups such as clans, dialects or individual languages in a group. Boundaries are not intended to be exact. 

Large, high-resolution map.

Rules for hyphenation

The phrase "screw fastened shoes" reminded me of a column in the Columbia Journalism Review regarding hyphenation:

The “rules” under which hyphens are used to connect multiple modifiers, like “well(-)known man,” are varied and difficult to remember. Some style guides try to avoid hyphens except when their absence would create confusion: Don’t hyphenate “local business owner,” for example, but do hyphenate “small-business owner,” since it could be read that either the business or the owner is small. Others suggest hyphenating most of these compound modifiers for consistency: “mental-health officials.” For our man of renown, some style guides call for a “well-known man” before the noun, but “as a man, he is well known,” with the compound following the noun...

Part of the reasoning for not using a hyphen after “-ly” adverbs is that, appearing before a verb as it does, an “-ly” adverb is obviously attached to it, so no confusion is possible... As Chicago notes, “not every word ending in -ly is an adverb—some are adjectives (e.g., lovely, curly).” Those might take hyphens in compounds to avoid confusion: “The curly-haired girl” means the girl’s hair is curly, not the girl herself... But there are times when a “ly” adverb does need a hyphen. As Chicago notes, the adverb in “a sharply worded reprimand” does not take a hyphen, but the one in “a not-so-sharply-worded reprimand” does. The adverb itself isn’t taking a hyphen, but the whole phrase “not-so-sharply-worded” is a gigantic adjective.

I think screw fastened shoes should be hyphenated.

A U.S. map of English as a second language

"More than a quarter of counties in the United States have at least one in 10 households where English is not the language spoken at home. Spanish is, by far, the most common language other than English spoken in the home, especially on the West Coast, in the Southwest, the Eastern urban corridor and other big cities. Native American languages are also common in the West, as is French around New Orleans and in some counties in the Northeast. German is a common language in some Midwestern and Western areas." 

A larger, interactive map, where you can click for information on your county, is at the Washington Post.

Words for epeolatrists

A selection of adjectives, from Laurence Urdang’s Modifiers (1982):

abbatial, of an abbot
buccinal, of trumpets
compital, of a crossroads
contabescent, of atrophy
frumentaceous, of wheat
haruspical, of a soothsayer
macropodine, of kangaroos
obumbrant, of an overhang
orarian, of the seashore
pavonine, of peacocks
smaragdine, of emeralds
sphingine, of a sphinx
suspirious, of a sigh
trochilidine, of hummingbirds
veliferous, of sails

There are several more in the Futility Closet.

"Epeolatry literally means the worship of words. It derives from ἔπος épos, which unlike λόγος lógos more specifically means word in Greek, and was apparently coined in 1860 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr."

"A blizzard of horseradish" explained

I had not heard this phrase before, but I had heard of "horsefeathers."  They are related, as noted at World Wide Words:

Most examples from newspapers imply that a blizzard of horseradish is a torrent of unhelpful or irrelevant political verbiage:

All the righteous indignation which drifts down Capitol Hill like a blizzard of horseradish is simply partisan politics.

The News and Tribune (Jefferson City, Missouri), 3 Feb, 1974.

Horseradish is on record from the 1920s meaning arrant nonsense or rubbish, a relative of horsefeathers. Both terms are euphemisms for horseshit or bullshit. It’s possible that an unbowdlerised alliterative form blizzard of bullshit could already have been in use around that date; it’s recorded only within the past decade, but that doesn’t mean a lot as it would have been considered too rude to print much before then...

A few sources suggest where it comes from:

The death of Ho Chi Minh has left policy-makers at the State Department, and the men who convey their thinking to the public, lost in what Groucho Marx once called “a blizzard of horseradish.”

Naugatuck Daily News (Connecticut), 10 Sep. 1969.

You learn something every day.  Now I have a new euphemism to use.

Latin plurals used in the English language

An excerpt from an article at Macmillan Dictionary:

English constantly imports words from other languages, and over time these loan words can become thoroughly anglicised and may therefore be pluralised in the usual English ways: typically by adding -s or -es. Persona retains its Latin flavour and so the Latin plural personae survives, though some restrict it to literary and technical contexts. The anglicised plural personas is also frequently seen; indeed, both forms are on the rise.

The two spellings’ coexistence – some call it competition – is not unusual: witness appendixes and appendices, formulas and formulae, millenniums and millennia, referendums and referenda, stadiums and stadia, and thesauruses and thesauri, all used regularly...

There are no hard and fast rules about which plural to use and when. In certain cases the Latin is more formal or even affected, but not predictably so. Occasionally the two spellings differentiate in meaning. For example, stigmata normally implies a religious context, while stigmas is the general-purpose plural. Some authorities advise limiting mediums to spiritualists and using media for all other senses of the word, but usage varies.

More at the link, via Sentence First.

The history of the word "cracker"

Last week, Rachel Jeantel took the stand in the murder trial of George Zimmerman...  Jeantel said that Martin told her that a "creepy-ass cracker" was following him...

"Cracker," the old standby of Anglo insults [is] older than the United States itself. It was used to refer to poor whites, particularly those inhabiting the frontier regions of Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. It is suspected that it was a shortened version of "whip-cracker," since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip... Over the course of time it came to represent a person of lower caste or criminal disposition...

But it turns out cracker's roots go back even further than the 17th century. All the way back to the age of Shakespeare, at least...

Ste. Claire pointed me to King John, published sometime in the 1590s. One character refers to another as a craker — a common insult for an obnoxious bloviator. What craker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?...

"In official documents, the governor of Florida said, 'We don't know what to do with these crackers — we tell them to settle this area and they don't; we tell them not to settle this area and they do," Ste. Claire said. "They lived off the land. They were rogues."

By the early 1800s, those immigrants to the South started to refer to themselves that way as a badge of honor and a term of endearment...

Ste. Claire said that by the 1940s, the term began to take on yet another meaning in American inner cities in particular: as an epithet for bigoted white folks...

"Just because you lived in the South doesn't mean you're a cracker," Ste. Claire said. "To really call yourself a cracker you have to live the cracker way — you have to start your kitchen at 4 in the morning," he said.

Just like all those touristy, overpriced soul food joints, Ste. Claire said that you can find fancified cracker cuisine for sale at restaurants all over the South. "You can spend $40 on cracker food," he said. "I call that the revenge of the crackers. I'm sure a lot of crackers are rolling over in their graves at that."

More details at the Code Switch blog at NPR, via Sentence First.

"Bunny boiler" explained

I encountered "bunny boiler" for the first time in the subtitle of a Telegraph article:

Lisa Jewell on literary bunny-boilers

Had to look it up:

The slang term "bunny boiler" has passed into popular parlance as a term for a jealous mistress, based on [Fatal Attraction's] infamous rabbit boiling scene. The phrase's first use in print was on December 6, 1990 in The Dallas Morning News, in which Glenn Close described her character in that film using the term.

YouTube link. 

...we witness Beth Gallgher’s (Anne Archer) walk to the hob, taking the time to put her bag down as the camera cuts to show a single shot of the pan boiling. Then as she continues her walk the action gradually starts to increase with the cut to her daughter running in the garden, cut back to Beth and then straight back to the daughter again creating a frenzied and disorientating effect necessary to the pay-off at the end when the lid to the pan is raised. At this moment we cut back once more to the girl screaming by the rabbit cage and then hear Beth’s scream as we are offered a glimpse of the cooked bunny.

Unusual pizza

A quick search suggests that the language is Croatian, and the mistranslation may be "smallpox" for "shrimp" (??odd).  Can anyone confirm?

Addendum:  Definitive answer in the Comments.  Hat tip to an anonymous reader.

Via Nothing to do with Arbroath.

The Commonwealth of... Virgina?

In total, 1,481 undergraduate and graduate diplomas from fall 2012 and spring 2013 were misspelled, according to Joe Carpenter, Radford's chief communications officer. In a statement, Carpenter told ABCNews.com that the diplomas actually had two spelling errors on them. In addition to "Virginia" being misspelled "Virgina," the word "thereto" was spelled "therto."

Story at Yahoo!  Photo: ABC News/Courtesy Meghan McNeice.

Dialect maps of the United States

The maps should be self-evident; if not, this explanation is offered:

Using data from Bert Vaux's dialect survey, we examine regional dialect variation in the continental United States. Each observation can be thought of as a realization of a categorical random variable with a particular parameter vector that is a function of location—our goal was to interpolate among these points in order to estimate these parameter vectors at a given location, making use of a combination of kernel density estimation and non-parametric smoothing techniques.

There are over a hundred more maps from the project, which wordsmiths will enjoy exploring.

A "motley crew" dance for you

YouTube link.

Via Boing Boing.

A good excuse to review "motley":

The word motley is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as a cognate with medley, although the unrelated mottled has also contributed to the meaning... When used as a noun, it can mean "a varied mixture." As an adjective, it is generally disparaging — a motley collection is an uninspiring pile of stuff, as in the cliche motley crew.

The word originated in England between the 14th and 17th centuries and referred to a woolen fabric of mixed colors. It was the characteristic dress of the professional fool...

[M]otley did not have to be checkered and has been recently thought to be one pattern with different colored threads running through it.

Motley is the only wear.

—Shakespeare, As You Like It, ii. 7

"Legislation calls for one armed employee at each New Mexico school"

Via Criggo (of course).