Damien Cave, “2005: In a Word” (New York Times, Dec. 25, 2005)
The viral mutant spawn of celebrity neologisms seems to have taken over. Why so many nicknames?
Linguists point to Washington. The capital has yielded a “Woodstein” (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein), a “Ronbo” (Ronald Reagan and Rambo) and “Billary,” a nickname for the Clintons.
“It comes out of very political bickering,” said Benjamin Zimmer, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s the narcissism of small differences where there is a need to distinguish various political gradations with simplicity. One way to do it is to take two words and smash them together.”
Most political portmanteaus, as these lexical unions are formally known, are intended to insult, to diminish a subject with an association. In pop culture, the genesis seems to have been more playful. …
“Overexposure makes people react in strange ways,” Mr. Zimmer said. “Maybe that’s why you create a word that sounds like some kind of mutant four-legged beast.”
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Interview on Voice of America’s “Wordmaster” program on the use of the term “refugee” for those displaced by natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. (Transcript, audio, download)
William Safire, “On Language: Janus Strikes Again” (New York Times, Jan. 11, 2004)
When I asked the Lexicographic Irregulars if the stirring phrase of indefatigability had a nautical origin, Doug Wilson, a member of the American Dialect Society, came up with an account of the International Sculling Races in The Brooklyn Eagle of Aug. 29, 1886: ”When asked as to his capacity for endurance, Beach replied, ‘I think I can stay the course.”’
Antedating that were citations sent in by Ben Zimmer at the University of Chicago about horses on a racecourse (The Times of London, 1879: ”Jockeys who have ridden him think he cannot stay the course ”) and, even earlier, about rowing competitions (an 1873 New York Times account about Dartmouth’s crew: ”All question as to their staying the course was set at rest”).
But wait — are we going off the semantic track? Zimmer notes that ”before this period, citations for stay the course invariably have the countervailing sense of ‘to stop or check the course (of something).”’ He offers up Edgar Allan Poe, in his 1835 ”Arabesque” tale ”King Pest the First”: ”But it lay not in the power of images, or sensations . . . to stay the course of men.”
Read the rest here.