Why do the British use "bog" to refer to a toilet ?

I encountered this sentence while reading P.D. James' The Skull Beneath The Skin:

"You'll be beholden to Mr. Gorringe for nothing but his light and heating and the water that flushes his bog."

A quick search this morning finds "bog-roll" for toilet paper (although a "giant bog roll" apparently refers to paper kitchen towels), and "bog standard" to mean ordinary or average:

But, why 'bog standard'? It may be the association with the word bog, which has long been used in the UK to mean toilet... The other most often-repeated theory of the derivation is that it is a mispronunciation of 'box standard', the term referring to unmodified goods coming straight from the box.

There is some discussion re possible etymology of bog=toilet at The Phrase Finder, but I haven't found a satisfactory answer.



The book, BTW, is a classic English-country-house-murder mystery, set in a castle on an island where a half dozen people have reasons to be pleased about the victim's death.  The detective is Cordelia Gray (not James' iconic Adam Dalgliesh).  I rated the book 3+ ("pretty good"), not the 4+ required to make the "recommended books" category in the sidebar, so this post gets filed only under "English language."

It's o.k. to use "verbatim" as a noun

Jan Freeman, writing in Throw Grammar from the Train, was startled to hear "a guest on NPR's "Diane Rehm Show," commenting on the faux-Koch-brother phone call to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, [say] he couldn't quote "the verbatim of the call."  To her surprise (and mine), this is grammatically acceptable:

Google Books effortlessly antedates the noun verbatim to a 1728 edition of John Dunton's "The Athenian Oracle," itself a collection of pieces from Dunton's periodical The Athenian Mercury, published (so says Wikipedia) from 1691 to 1697. "If we take no notice" of a letter-writer's threat, says the Mercury author, "the Verbatim of the Letter is to be Printed (take their own pretty Phrase)."

My Random House dictionary doesn't offer verbatim as a noun (only adj. and adv.), but my OED does.

What the frak is a shibboleth ?

From the Oxford University Press blog:

Naturally the topic of conversation came to words, and I brought up one I had been using a lot lately: frak (the fictional version of “fuck” on Battlestar Galactica)... Matt said, oh that’s a “shibboleth.”

A whateth? According to the OED:

The Hebrew word used by Jephthah as a test-word by which to distinguish the fleeing Ephraimites (who could not pronounce the sh) from his own men the Gileadites (Judges xii. 4–6).

Matt told me that he had first heard the word on The West Wing. Martin Sheen sums it up nicely: a password. A more recent sense in the OED defines shibboleth as:

A catchword or formula adopted by a party or sect, by which their adherents or followers may be discerned, or those not their followers may be excluded. The sect, in my case, is Battlestar enthusiasts.

I've not seen the show either, but at least now I know where "frak" comes from.  You learn something every day.

Update - a big hat tip to Z. Constantine, who found this awesome list of shibboleths - hundreds and hundreds of them!

How do you pronounce "Protestors in Tahrir Square" ?

The pronunciation of "protestor" was discussed this week at both Language Log and The Economist:

Some noun-verb pairs have different stress patterns: you recórd a récord, and a pérmit permíts you to do something. So it is with protest: the verb, the original word, is protést, "to object to something". The origin in the OED is given as "orig. and chiefly Scottish law", by the way, with the earliest citation in 1429. The noun, meaning "objection", appears about half a century later.

The OED gives only one stress pattern for the British pronunciation of the verb: protést. But the American pronunciations are given as protést and prótest both.

More at the links (and their comment threads). "Tahrir Square" presents additional problems:

"... one rule of English phonology—virtually every English speaker knows this, but very few know they know it—is that an [h] can't come at the end of a syllable. We have words like ah and oh, of course, but they're pronounced [a:] and [o:]...

But Arabs can end a syllable in one of two different h-like sounds, one pronounced far back in the throat (a pharyngeal, in the lingo), sounding raspy to an English-speaker... This is distinct from another h-sound much like English's, and also distinct from a third, more truly fricative sound, usually translated kh, like the last sound in Bach. Got it?

That first h-sound is the one in names like Ahmed. Since we don't have that sound, English-speakers often approximate it with the Bach sound, and people who can't do that will then fill in a k-sound, which is a neighbor to [kh]. This is why you can hear some English-speakers refer to an Ahmed as "Akhmed" or even "Akmed".

The other option is to leave the h-sound out entirely, and that's what some people do with "Aamed". It's also what Mr Kirkpatrick did by saying "Tarir" for "Tahrir"—it's just too weird for most English-speakers to say the [h] at the end of a syllable. If you're unafraid of looking a bit like those journalists who try too hard to sound authentic, try it, and free yourself from your phonetic constraints in the name of Tahrir—"liberation".

"Saucered and blowed"

This colloquial expression, often used to refer "to coffee, too hot to drink until it was poured into the saucer for a moment, blown on, and then drunk from the saucer," is discussed at World Wide Words.  I was surprised at how far back the roots of the phrase can be traced:

The expression is certainly American, turning up at various times in the south and west of the country... In the negative it meant something hadn’t yet been made fully ready — a football coach commented on one of his young players in the Charleston Gazette in 1972 that “He has a long way to go. He hasn’t been saucered and blown yet.”..

The idea goes back a long way, of course, much further than the expression itself. A squib appeared in a British newspaper two centuries ago, in which a Frenchman asked a friend to advise on the correctness of his manners at dinner:

“And the coffee?” “There I am certain I was right; it was boiling hot, and I poured it in small portions into my saucer.” “Which was what no one else did; every body takes his coffee in his cup, and never in his saucer.”   The Courier (Middlesex), 21 Mar. 1826.

The link concludes with an (?)apocryphal story about George Washington saying "“we pour our legislation into the Senatorial saucer to cool it.”

Anglicisms invading the German language

Ach, du lieber!  The Guardian reports that "leaken" has been voted this year's Anglicism of the Year in Germany:

Germans already "chillen" in their downtime, "surfen" the internet and, when they leave a nightclub, they may go on to "eine Afterparty".

But the latest English word to creep into the deutsche Sprache is the verb "leaken", which has just been voted Anglicism of the Year in Germany.

Proving the international influence of WikiLeaks, Germans have quickly shunned their old way of describing information being secretly passed on to others and adapted the English verb "to leak". So they talk of the "geleakte Dokumente" released by the controversial site as an alternative to the somewhat unwieldy "durchgesickerte Unterlagen" of yore...

Coming in second place to "leaken" was "entfreunden", a literal translation of the brutal term "to unfriend", which has become common parlance on social networking sites...

Further shortlisted words included "shitstorm" and "scripted reality".

Why the Toronto Maple Leafs are not the Toronto Maple Leaves

If you've lain awake at night pondering this question, the answer is now available, courtesy of bradshaw of the future:

English has two kinds of compounds: ...headless compounds and headed compounds. Headless compounds are compound words where the meaning is not specified by any of the parts [such as "still life" or "Maple Leaf." A still life is not a kind of life (it's a kind of art work), and a Maple Leaf is not a kind of leaf (it's a hockey player).]

Compare this with headed compounds, where the meaning of the whole compound is specified by the head word: doghouse, blackboard, blackbird... which are kinds of houses, boards, and birds respectively...

Headless compounds are usually pluralized by adding s... As Pinker says, "If low-life does not get its meaning from life, it cannot get its plural from life either." So our headless compounds above are... still lifes [and] Maple Leafs...

On the other hand, headed compounds form their plurals the same way their head words form their plurals. So the headed compound "maple leaf" - a kind of leaf - is pluralized "maple leaves". 

More at the link, which I've excerpted here.

Why is it called a "dashboard" ?

Pictured above is the dashboard from a Jeep.  World Wide Words explains where the word comes from:

This key component of vehicles, with its gauges and controls, has been called a dashboard since early in the history of motoring. Despite the obvious associations, however, it has nothing to do with speed...

It’s an example of technological and linguistic conservatism... The builders of the early motor vehicles likewise borrowed their methods and their language from the horse-drawn vehicles they had long been familiar with...

"In front there is a high leather dashboard to protect the riders against the splashing from the hooves of the absent animal..."

The sense of dash is the one that refers to the “violent throwing and breaking of water or other liquids upon or against anything”, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. The dashboard was a wooden board, or a leather apron like the one that the article mentions. It was placed at the front of a carriage, sleigh or other vehicle to catch the mud or water thrown up by the horses’ hooves and stop it from soaking the driver and his passengers...

It has recently stepped even further away from its origins by being borrowed for a computer display that shows useful real-time data such as the time, weather, news headlines, stock prices and phone numbers...

More at the link.  Photo credit.

Word for the day: isogloss

I had never heard this word before, but encountered it today at The Big Think.  First, a definition of  an "isogloss" map:

"an isogloss map shows the geographical borders between linguistic features, be they related to syntax, semantics or pronunciation. They can focus on one particular element (like this time-telling one) or show the boundary between a complex of features (e.g. the borders between different dialects)." 

Excerpts from a discussion of the map:

If it's 10:15 in the germanosphere, you'll have at least four options of expressing that particular moment. Those four options are all regional variants, so that, in German, you can tell with some degree of certainty which general area someone hails from by the way they tell the time at quarter past ten...

This isogloss map shows that in a large part of north-western Germany, from the Danish to the French border, the preferred option is viertel nach zehn ('quarter after ten'). This viertel is considered a fixed point in time, and its point of reference is the previous full hour...

In what used to be East Germany, the same clock time is referenced as viertel elf ('quarter eleven'). This viertel is not a point in time, but a period of time, i.e. one-fourth of the next hour. This area doesn't stop at the former German-German border, but extends into northern Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.

An option limited to German-speaking Switzerland is to call this particular time viertel ab zehn ('quarter from ten'). Like the first viertel, this one is distanced from the previous hour by a preposition, albeit not a unidirectional one. In theory, this moment could both be before or after ten. Common usage will probably make such confusion improbable...

More at the link.  This reminds me of the U. S. map of "pop," soda," and "coke."

"Palin" is Greek for "again"

You learn something every day.  Last night I was using the apparent last hours of free access to the online OED to look up words, including "ecpyrosis," which turned out to be a Stoic belief in the periodic destruction of the cosmos by a great conflagration, recreated by palingenesis.

Then of course I needed to find out what palingenesis was.  The Stoics used the term for the continual re-creation of the universe by the Creator after its absorption into himself, and...

"In biology, it is another word for recapitulation - the phase in the development of an organism in which its form and structure pass through the changes undergone in the evolution of the species. In theology, the word can be used to refer to reincarnation and Christian spiritual rebirth during baptism."

I wonder if she knows that?  Could she incorporate it into her campaign?  If so, she will need to be aware of a politically incorrect aspect of the word...

Although Josephus used the term for the national restoration of the Jews, the core tenets of the political ideology of fascism earn its description as a "palingenetic ideology", primarily as a result of the notion that fascism itself is the rebirth of a state and/or empire in the image of that which came before it - thus, the ancestral political underpinnings. Specifically academic political theorist Roger Griffin refers to fascism as "palingenetic ultranationalism". The best examples of this can be found with both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany - Italy looking to establish a palingenetic line between the 20th century regime under Benito Mussolini as being the second incarnation of the Roman Empire, while Adolf Hitler's regime was seen as being the third palingenetic incarnation - beginning first with the Holy Roman Empire ("First Reich") then with Bismarck's German Empire ("Second Reich") and then resulting in Nazi Germany ("Third Reich").

"The Absence Paradox"

If you are somewhere else, you are not here.
You are not in Rome; you are somewhere else.
Therefore you are not here.

Found in the Futility Closet.

"Curfew" explained

Anyone who has listened at any length to coverage of the developments in Egypt has heard numerous references to "curfew" being imposed (and ignored).  It's quite an interesting word; we begin with the etymology from the OED:

Etymology: < Anglo-Norman coeverfu, = Old French cuevre-fu, quevre-feu, covre-feu (13th cent.), < couvre, imperative of couvrir to cover + feu fire...

and the definitions:

1a. A regulation in force in mediæval Europe by which at a fixed hour in the evening, indicated by the ringing of a bell, fires were to be covered over or extinguished; also, the hour of evening when this signal was given, and the bell rung for the purpose.

1b. Hence, the practice of ringing a bell at a fixed hour in the evening, usually eight or nine o'clock, continued after the original purpose was obsolete, and often used as a signal in connection with various municipal or communal regulations; the practice of ringing the evening bell still survives in many towns. In extended use: a restriction imposed upon the movements of the inhabitants of an area for a specified period. The primary purpose of the curfew appears to have been the prevention of conflagrations arising from domestic fires left unextinguished at night. The earliest English quotations make no reference to the original sense of the word; the curfew being already in 13th c. merely a name for the ringing of the evening bell, and the time so marked. 

More details (and the image above) from Chambers' Book of Days, via Scribal Terror:

In those old times, people, in general, possessed nothing like clocks or watches; they learned, by the practice of observation, to judge roughly of the time of the day, but in cases where it was necessary to know the exact hour, they were entirely at a loss. Any implement for measuring time was rare, and belonged only to a public body, or institution, or to some very remarkable individual, and the only means of imparting to the public the know-ledge gained from it, was by ringing a bell, or blowing a horn, at certain hours of the day. This practice was first introduced in the monastic establishments..

It was attempted, in towns especially, to meet this evil [nocturnal lawlessness], by making it criminal to be found out of doors after a certain hour; and, as otherwise offenders might plead ignorance, it was ordered that the hour should be publicly sounded, generally by the town-bell, and when that was heard, all people were compelled to shut the doors of their houses, put out their fires, and retire to bed, those who were out of bed after the sounding of the bell being liable to severe punishment. It was an efficacious way of clearing the streets. The bell sounded for this purpose was, in France, called popularly the couvre-feu, or cover-fire...

The curfew is still rung in many towns and parishes in England, in some at eight o'clock, and in others at nine. At the end of the last century, as we learn from the Gentleman's Magazine for 1790, the curfew was announced at the latter hour at Ripon, in Yorkshire, by a man with a horn, which he blew, first at the market-cross, and then at the mayor's door...

It is quite a mistake to suppose that the curfew-bell was peculiar to this island—it was a natural expedient for serving a generally useful purpose, and was adopted in France, Italy, and Spain, and probably in all parts of continental Europe. More-over, a corresponding bell was rung in the morning, to inform people of the hour at which it was customary to rise...

And  finally, some tidbits from Elfinspell: the Curfew Bell, from Old Church Lore:

In England, the curfew law is said to have been made an established institution by King Alfred. When that monarch restored the University which had been founded at Oxford by St. Frideswide, he ordained, among other thoughtful regulations, that a bell should be rung every night at eight, when all the inhabitants of Oxford should cover up their fires and go to bed. The intention was not that the fires should be put out, but merely deadened. As Mr. Lomax observes, “The old fires were made in the centre of a large hearth, and the accumulated ashes were swept to the back and sides. At the curfew, the large logs were removed, and the cold ashes raked over the fire so as to cover it. A fire so covered will often keep smouldering for days, and can be re-lighted by adding fuel and admitting air, a most important consideration in the days of tinder-boxes. The same custom is still pursued in the backwoods of America, in the Australian bush, and in our own ‘black country,’ where the great coal fires are ‘raked’ in the old fashion nightly.”..

“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day...” [Thomas Gray's Elegy written in a Country Churchyard].

"Cousin-german"

I don't know where or when I encountered this word; it's been on my "words" list for years waiting to be looked up.  I was a bit surprised by what I found in the OED:

1a. The son or daughter of (one's) uncle or aunt; (one's) first cousin. (1826 R. Southey Lett. to C. Butler 232 The marriage of cousin-germans‥was allowed in the first ages of the church.)

2. A person or thing closely related or allied to another; a near relative. 1822 W. Irving Bracebridge Hall (U.K. ed.) II. 85, I had been apt to confound them [sc. rooks] with their cousins-german, the crows.)

One's brother and sister can similarly be called your "brother-german" and "sister-german," with some implications for the genetics.  Nowadays the term means the person is your brother/sister via both your parents, as opposed to a "brother on the father's side" or a "brother-uterine" (brother via your mother with a different father).

And the "german" part?  Here's the head-slap moment - it's a variant of "germain" [O.F. < Latin], which of course means "closely-related" or "relevant."

I was going to publish this without a picture, but when I ran the term through Google Images, I kept seeing moths.  Turns out there are several species of moths called the "Cousin German."  The embedded one I found here; the UK Moths site says "A rare and local species, restricted to birch woodland in the Highlands of central Scotland.  They are also illustrated in BugGuide.  Why they should have been given that common name, I have no idea.

Australian English

Excerpts from an interesting article at the OED (where the free access offer is entering its final week): 

Australian English differs from other Englishes primarily in its accent and vocabulary. The major features of the accent were established by the 1830s. In the period between colonial settlement (1788) and the 1830s, when the foundation accent was being forged, new lexical items to describe the new environment...

And then, at the end of the nineteenth century, something curious and largely unpredictable happened to Australian English. In response to a newly-developed concept of Received Pronunciation in Britain, which was closely tied to notions of social prestige, some Australian speakers modified their vowels and diphthongs in order to move them towards the British exemplars. From the 1890s, and well into the 1950s, elocution was in the air, and elocution teachers found a ready market for the teaching of British vowels and diphthongs to the socially-aspirational classes. This modified form of Australian speech came to be called Cultivated Australian.

As if in response against this new British-based Cultivated Australian, a diametrically opposed form of Australian English developed in the first part of the twentieth century. This form moved the Australian vowels and diphthongs even further away from what was now the British standard of pronunciation, and emphasized nasality, flatness of intonation, and the elision of syllables.This second modified form of Australian speech came to be called Broad Australian. While it is true that when non-Australians hear any Australian say ‘mate’ or ‘race’ they are likely to mistake the words for ‘mite’ and ‘rice’, the mishearing is most likely to occur with speakers of Broad Australian.

The majority of Australians continued to speak with the accent that had been established in the first fifty years of settlement, and this form of speech came to be known as General Australian. General Australian was now book-ended by Cultivated Australian and Broad Australian, and these forms of Australian English came to carry with them very different sets of values. Cultivated Australian, for example, came to express a longing for British values and a nostalgia for a country that was still regarded by many as ‘home’. Broad Australian was strongly nationalistic, and carried with it notions of egalitarianism that were antagonistic to a perceived class-obsessed and hierarchical Britain....

More at the link, especially regarding the lexis.

Stop

When I saw the image above in a photoessay about the Ukraine, I was immediately reminded of this comment by Bill Bryson, in his book The Mother Tongue; English and how it got that way - 

“In Yugoslavia they speak five languages. In not one of them does the word stop exist, yet every stop sign in the country says just that.” (p. 179)

I wonder if other countries also use the word "Stop" on signs, but not in the native language.

Addendum:  Andrew and Fletcher indicate Portugal and Spain use the word "Stop" on their signs.  And ch.zimmerman found a Wikipedia page on this topic - with interesting photos of Stop signs in many countries.

"The river Thames"

I recently posted an article about the impressive cleanup of the Thames, and raised the question of why that river (and other English rivers) are often identified as "the river Thames" rather than "the Thames river" (or Thames River).  It is apparently a classic American English / British English difference.  Kniffler was able to provide and excellent link on the subject, from the separated by a common language blog:

Before the late 17th century (according to the OED), the normal way to refer to rivers was the River of X... From the late 17th century, the of started to be dropped, so then we get the River X, as in the River Thames, the River Clyde, the River Cam, etc. But what else was going on in the 17th century? Oh yeah, the English coloni{s/z}ation of North America. So this is about the time when we'd expect to see transatlantic differences starting to develop...

BrE speakers generally use the American word order when referring to American rivers. One doesn't hear the River Mississippi much... and this seems to extend to the rest of the new world--BrE prefers Amazon River (7 British National Corpus hits) over the River Amazon (2 hits), but really prefers just the Amazon (over 300 hits). For European and African rivers, it's River X all the way...

I've had a quick look for rivers in the US and UK that have the same name, but haven't succeeded in finding any--but we can see what happened when the English River Avon went to Canada and Australia. According to Wikipedia, the New World versions are Avon Rivers.

Elsewhere the same blog addresses the differences between "The University of X" and "X University."

People outside the US often get American university names wrong in this way, since elsewhere University of X and X University are synonyms. Thus in the UK, University of Essex and Essex University are two names for the same thing. But in the US, University of X may very well be the name of a different university from X University. Some examples:

University of Miami is in Florida; Miami University is in Ohio...

University of Washington is in Washington State; Washington University is in Missouri.

New York University is a private university; {City/State} University of New York is city/state-funded.

University of California is in California; California University is in Pennsylvania.

I have a question about grammar

What is the proper way to indicate an ellipsis when quotation marks are involved?  When I'm embedding text from a linked article, I don't like to copy/paste the entire text; I believe it's more ethical to take small excerpts and refer the reader to the primary source.  So I'll typically cite a couple paragraphs and even condense those paragraphs to retain only the most salient points.

I indicate citations in the blog by the common convention of using nested text, and I indicate where I've omitted text by replacing it with an ellipsis (...), but sometimes it gets awkward, as shown here:

Denouncing this situation as an "intolerable societal reality," the document concludes that the "only way" toward a solution is the amendment of the Constitution "to define persons as human beings.”...

There is a groundswell of support: 76 percent of Americans, according to a recent ABC News poll, said they opposed the Citizens United decision.

An entire paragraph has been omitted between those sentences, but the three dots that indicate that look totally awkward sitting there by themselves.  On the other hand, if I put them inside the quotation mark ("...as human beings...."), then it seems to indicate that the deletion was from the quotation, which is not the case.  Sometimes I move the (...) to the start of the next sentence, but if that also has quotation marks, I'm no better off.

This isn't a big deal, but I know there are some readers of this blog with true copyeditor skills, so I'd appreciate any advice you can offer.

Thanks in advance.

How should you address God?

An article at the BBC this morning discusses the impact the King James Bible has had upon the English language, enumerating the number of phrases that have come into our language from that source (257 to be exact, according to one scholar), and the number of new words (about 40 - much fewer than the thousand or so introduced by Edward deVere).

What I found most interesting in the piece was this bit about forms of address used when speaking to God:

Has the KJB kept Christian language stuck in the 17th Century? "We thank thee, O God, for the manifest blessings that thou hast vouchsafed unto us," is one example of such a passage.

"It's the last thing the translators would have wanted," argues Simon Jenkins, editor of the Christian website shipoffools.com. "Ironically, at the time, 'you' was a more formal way of addressing someone, and 'thou' was more familiar, but they decided not to use any special grammar for God. He was 'thou' just like everybody else.

"But when I was being brought up, people were still talking to God as 'thou''. it's hopelessly antiquated and alienating. The translators made the right decision at the time, but what the church later did with it doesn't convey that intention at all."

More at the BBC.

The etymology of "nachos"

While browsing the OED website last night (see post below), I found this interesting article about how a library researcher tracked down the initial usage and etymology of the word "nachos."

In September 1988 a slip of paper (the usual 4 x 6) for this word came from one of the editors, stating that the earliest quotation in the OED files was from a 1978 issue of the Tucson (Arizona) Magazine...  Could I antedate? Added was a postscript asking if I could find its etymology. WNCD had suggested it might be 'fr. Sp. "nacho" flat-nosed'. Could I confirm this?...

I called several Texan friends in Washington that evening and each of them wanted to tell me all about nachos but none knew how the name had been derived. After three phone calls (and three different recipes for perfect nachos) I gave up on nachos that evening.

As I walked down the long corridor leading back to the library's central core, I heard a voice softly calling my name. There was a young woman I recognized as a staff member of the Hispanic Division. She had overheard our discussion of nacho in the reading room but had been reluctant to interrupt us. She told me she had been born and raised in Mexico and there nacho has only one common usage: it is the word used as a diminutive for a little boy who had been baptized Ignacio. His family and friends call him Nacho. She thought I should know this. What a wonderful bit of information!.. Now I was convinced there was a real Nacho somewhere who had dreamed up a combination of tortilla pieces with melted cheese and jalapeño peppers...

Several 1965+ quotations surfaced, and eventually I found A Taste of Texas, edited by Jane Trahey in 1949 with a perfect nachos quote on page 27:

Pedro left. Sometime later he returned carrying a large dish of Nachos Especiales. 'These Nachos,' said Pedro, 'will help El Capitan—he will soon forget his troubles for nachos make one romantic.'

And to add to the satisfaction, we have recently, with the help of the Rector and one of the parishioners of the Church of the Redeemer, Eagle Pass, Texas, been able to verify a quotation from that elusive 1954 St Anne's Cookbook which confirms the existence of Ignacio 'Nacho' Anaya, gives the Victory Club as the place in which he invented his 'nacho specials', and provides his own original recipe...

Armed with that information, you should be able to corral a free Dos Equis next time you go out for a Mexican dinner with friends.

Access the OED online - free - until February 5

I've previously blogged about my introduction to the OED.   The compact edition stays within reach of my desk, but the $300 subscription fee has always been a deterrant to using the online version.  Then yesterday I read a post at 22 words indicating that online access to the OED would be free until February 5.

I could NOT find a confirmation of the free trial at Oxford University Press' OED website, but I did encounter the same information at Wordorigins and Languagehat, the latter citing Ben Zimmer of the NYT.  All of them indicated that all one has to do is type "trynewoed" as the login and the password.

So that's what I did last night.  And it worked.  I didn't get any blogging done after that because I maintain a list on my computer that I call "Words," which has about 40 pages of 9-point text of interesting words, interesting etymologies, words I encounter while reading to look up later, etc.  Re the latter there were lots of blank spaces to fill in with definitions and etymologies, so last night I filled in the 60 blank spots under the letter "A", including -

abatis -  defense using felled trees c branches toward enemy (Fr abatis = mass of things thrown down)
acicular  - needle-shaped (L. acicula = small pin)
afflatus  -  breathing (L. ad + flare = blow), hissing; inspiration; a type of sudden erysipelas
afrit  -  an evil demon or monster of Muslim mythology.
aigrette  - egret; tuft of feathers/gems etc worn on head. Other tufts like dandelion or rays of light.
alegar   -  sour ale; vinegar from ale. ale + eager=Fr “sharp, sour”
alnico  - aluminum + nickel + cobalt and copper. Used for magnets.
ambeer  -  tobacco juice; saliva stained by tobacco; originally water stained with tobacco refuse.
anadromous  - fish that ascend a river to spawn (Gk ana = up + dromo = run)
apercu  - summary exposition; revealing glimpse; insight (Fr ppl of apercevoir = perceive)
aplomb  - poise; the vertical position (F. a plomb=according to the plummet; straight up and down)
apostrophe  - figure of speech by which speaker turns to address a person or thiing
ascesis  -  the practice of self-discipline (see ascetic) (Gk = exercise)
athanasy  - immortality. (L. a + thanatos)
avatar  - Hindu myth descent of deity to earth as incarnate form; manifestation (Sanskrit = descent)

... and so on, for hours last night.  I have to admit that using the OED online is much faster and more convenient than poring over the compact edition with a magnifying glass - especially because of the abundance of internal hyperlinks.  I'm not sure I can afford it yet, but it's certainly an outstanding resource.