Posts tagged semantics

I’ve had a fun month of wandering throughout Europe - a lovely mix of catching up with family and friends, library adventures, meeting up with some amazing linguists and a bit of sightseeing on the side. I have a suitcase full of Euro-goodies to take home, but I think that ideally I’d like to souvenir a couple of words from some of the countries that I’ve visited. Of course, you can capture all of these ideas in English, but there’s something really nifty about wrapping it all up in a single little word.

Fusy n. Polish It’s a word that captures both the grounds left in a coffee pot and tea leaves left in a tea pot. It doesn’t have the same negative extension that ‘dregs’ carries. Given that we’re a pluri-beverage household we’re always dealing with fusy when it comes to washing up time.

Fika n. or v. Swedish This is the kind of word that always gets wheeled out in ‘why doesn’t English have a word for X’ articles - and for good reason, because it really is a lovely concept. Fika is the combination of a non-alcoholic beverage (usually coffee) and some kind of cake (usually outrageously sweet) and taking time to chat with friends/family/colleagues. It’s not entirely dissimilar to how the word ‘coffee’ is used as a verb in my lab, but I really like the emphasis on the social aspect (and the cake). Needless to say I made the most of every fika opportunity while in Stockholm.

Syrah n. French/English Ok, this one always existed in English. I always thought it was some obscure little grape variety. Turns out that it’s the French name for what Australians and New Zealanders more often call shiraz. In what can only really be a classic case of sound symbolism, if you’d asked me to describe these grapes before I knew this crucial fact I’d have said that shiraz is bolder and more peppery. This trip I’ve learned a new (for an Aussie) wine word, and made sufficiently sure to drink enough syrah to ascertain that it is just as peppery as a shiraz.

Over lunch with a few friend the other day it transpired there were two very different opinions about the meaning of the term ‘lucked out’ that divided the group. Half of us firmly believe that it is a good thing to luck out, while the other half thought that it was a very bad thing to luck out.

The results beyond out little lunch time gathering were just as mixed - so we’re definitely not the only people who are likely to have this argument. Urban Dictionary, that most authoritative of lexicographic tools, argues that the ‘luck out’ divide is one between US and UK English, with it being used positively in the US and negatively in the UK. My pitifully small sample number of approximately 1.5 UK English speakers and 0.5 US English speakers would appear to conform to this analysis, but those numbers are much too low for me to throw my opinion behind.

Looking very quickly at a comparison between newspapers from different countries. Note, I took a wild guess this would be the most common form used in news reports and didn’t bother searching variants like ‘lucking out.’ The New York Times up to 2007 had 326 references for ‘lucked out’, The Independent (UK) had 19 references since 1994 and for an Australian angle The Age had 44 search items with ‘lucked out’ since 1995. I’d love to spend all day going through the clippings, and tallying which sense is used where, and the oldest reported uses etc, but work calls . With only a quick flick it looks like the NYT references are all using the positive sense. the Independent also mostly uses the positive sence but the term mostly crops up in American references and quotes, such as this article on US beaknik Sarah Jepp:

but despite having “lucked-out” with an inexpensive room on the Venice Canals, L.A’s vacuous side was beginning to grate.

I’m not sure if a more colloquial UK newspaper would have given a different result, but I’m not plunging into an archive of The Sun this early in the morning.

In The Age there are a mixture of usages, much like our small Australian contingent at the lunch table showed mixed attitudes to the meaning of ‘luck out.’ This rather pointless article about a pampered dog (From Zero to Hero, 22/05/95) uses the positive sense:

MAX, the five-year-old chihuahua, started life as a pet shop boy. For three weeks, his owner-to-be visited the pet shop almost every day, eyeing this sweet little fur ball all alone in a cage. At the end of three weeks, Jean Pierre Heurteau could resist no longer, so he bought Max and home they went. Max didn’t realise it then but he had lucked out he was to start a lifestyle to die for.

While this article on seafood (From the deep 01/07/03) uses the other sense:

“I marinated pieces of the squid in seven different marinades for 12 hours and 24 hours to disguise the flavour, yet this made things little better.

“It’s safe to say it won’t be appearing on our menu,” says Kerry.

Munro is mortified and suggests Kerry must have lucked out with the samples he supplied, but if you’re a chef, supply-chain failures in the quality of the product cut little mustard.

You won’t find lucked on in Merriam-Webster online. But it does occour in the Oxford English, although, interestingly, only the positive sense, which they site as a US term:

e. to luck out (U.S.), to achieve success or advantage by good luck in a difficult, testing, or dangerous situation.

In the interest of full disclosure, I only ever use ‘luck out’ as a negative thing. If you lucked out things certainly didn’t go your way.

[Lauren is away for a couple of weeks enjoying the beach and the cocktails while on holiday in Thailand. She apologises for not inviting you along and instead hopes you enjoy some old posts from her fieldworking blog.]

Yosh (@yoshw) over at Twitter hit us up with a deceptively simple question:

you step in a puddle which turns out to be 2m deep. Is it ‘deceptively deep’ or ‘deceptively shallow’?

This is something many of us have angsted over when we have faced the real estate market. Is a room described as “deceptively large” really actually small and pretending to be large, or appears to be large and is so.

Fortunately, some linguists have already put their heads together on this one! I would like to thank the Melbourne Uni Semantics class of 2007 for their excellent research on this one, and their Professor Leslie Sterling for sharing their work. 

The OED definition is similar to, and as useless as, many other dictionaries:

“In a deceptive manner, so as to deceive.”

But what kind of deception is happening here? Broadly speaking there are three different meanings of the word deception.

The first meaning is that X  appears to be A and is not A. I would say that this is the older sense of the word, but I don’t have a lot of corpus data to back that up and will be happy to be proven wrong. For this sense a deceptively simple process would appear to be simple but would really be complex. Thus the puddle would be deceptively shallow, because it’s really deep. 

The second meaning is that X does not appear to be A but is A. In this variation, the puddle would be called deceptively deep, because it doesn’t appear to be so, but it is. This is a favourite of real estate and generally marketing jargon. Deceptively spacious interiors, deceptively modern fittings, etc. etc. generally mean that the car looks cramped, the taps look shitty and old, but that’s not true at all (or so they would like us to believe).

The final meaning is that X appears to be A and is A. This variation on deceptively is a little hard to get your head around at first. It’s often used in contexts where there is an unexpectedly related property. For example a deceptively shallow puddle, would be one which is shallow, but so fully of sticky mud that you’d be stuck there and drown anyway (a particularly dramatic and unexpected demise).

The important thing then is that context is everything in sorting out these differences. We use deceptively in most contexts without even thinking about it, even though it is a deceptively tricky word to define!

The many SlutWalk rallies happening around the world this month have raised awareness about the insidious culture of victim-blaming that pervades society’s view of sexual assault.

Along with this important work has been a push to reclaim the word ‘slut’. Reclamation aims to remove the negative connotations of the word and reevaluate its place in our lexicon. Historically ‘slut’ has been used as a judgemental and damaging slur designed to shame women and men who enjoy sex, whether it’s for work or pleasure (or both). Its etymology also points to its past usage as a word meaning ‘dirty’ or ‘slovenly’. SlutWalkers are standing up to say that they’re not ashamed of their sexuality or liking sex, and that being a slut should not invite judgement or violence.

I’m a feminist and a linguist, so this idea of ‘slut’ reclamation is fascinating on both those levels. There’s been much debate online and offline about what it means to call yourself (or others) a slut, and about whether it’s possible to entirely reclaim a word and strip its negative or malicious intent and control.

The process of language reappropriation is one where a word was at one time a pejorative used to malign, control or victimise, is brought into acceptable (or even preferable) usage.

It’s not necessarily a straightforward process, but sluts everywhere should be heartened by the examples of other words successfully reappropriated so far in our social and linguistic history. There are some notable examples of reappropriated words and language in common usage: ‘gay’ was previously considered an insult but is now strongly favoured as the preferred term to describe homosexuality.

In Australia, ‘wog’ began as a racist term during the wave of Southern European immigration in the 50s and 60s. Through the phenomenon of Mediterranean-Australian performing artists taking ownership of the term “wog” its original pejorative nature has been defused, for example the Wog Boy films, the TV series Pizza (more on the ethno-Australian accent to come in a later blog post, methinks!). Similarly, ‘crip’ has been reclaimed by sections of the disabled community.

Let’s look at how exactly this semantic shift occurs. To reappropriate a word or phrase, a deliberate intervention is made into its common or hegemonic (for the cultural studies majors amongst us) usage. This common usage as a word of oppression, hurt or victimisation is challenged and reevaluated. The word may attain a neutral or acceptable connotation and become absorbed into broader cultural use. It may even attain a positive connotation within informed and aware groups.

Language reappropriation usually takes place within the oppressed community affected by the word’s original meaning. Often, use of the word outside that community retains its derogatory meaning. An example of this is the word ‘nigga’ – a still-controversial term reclaimed by parts of the African-American community, which is not generally accepted when it’s used by a person outside that community.

This remind us that we shouldn’t forget our ol’ friend context (as discussed by Lauren in a previous Superlinguo post) which plays a huge part in our linguistic interactions. Word meaning is decoded within a context – how it’s conveyed, by whom, when, where and why all have effects on the intent and receipt of a word.

The SlutWalks happening around the world are working as a deliberate intervention into the way the word ‘slut’ is used. Women and men are working to redefine a ‘slut’ as someone in control of their sexuality, who enjoys sex and who doesn’t invite sexual, physical or emotional violence by virtue of their promiscuity.