March 15, 2024
‘Lucky might get going all of a sudden. Then we’d be banjaxed.’ (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
Banjaxed and bockety are a fun pair of words in the Irish English vernacular. Banjaxed I heard from an early age; bockety was not in my west-of-Ireland dialect, but I adopted it later for occasional use.
The words have similar but distinct meanings.
If something is banjaxed, it’s ruined, broken, confounded, or shattered (including in the ‘tired’ sense; cf. killed in Irish slang). It’s often applied to damaged or destroyed machines – vehicles, phones, computers, household appliances – or their parts. It can apply to people, if they’re injured or drunk, for example, or to abstractions like plans or systems.
If something is bockety, it’s physically unsteady, impaired, or imperfect. It’s more likely to be usable than if it’s banjaxed: a bockety chair or bicycle might wobble but function, whereas a banjaxed one is not to be trusted, if it can be used at all. Body parts are often bockety too. I’ll return to this word later.
This car in David Mach‘s installation The Oligarch’s Nightmare, pictured at the Galway Arts Festival 2023, is well and truly banjaxed. And that wheel looks fierce bockety.
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9 Comments | 
dialect, Hiberno-English, Ireland, language, slang, words | Tagged: 000000, banjax, banjaxed, bockety, dialect, etymology, Hiberno-English, Ireland, Irish English, Irish language, Irish slang, language, slang, words | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
January 9, 2024
Lorrie Moore’s 2009 novel A Gate at the Stairs offers among its attractions several passages and exchanges of lexical and linguistic interest. This post looks at some of them.
The book’s narrator, Tassie, is a Midwestern farm girl now in college. She’s also employed as a nanny by Sarah, a restaurateur. One of their early conversations has commentary on the semantic inflation of awesome:
“You have a mother?” I said. “I mean, your mother’s alive?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Awesome,” I said, in that peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding that everything either “sucked” or was “awesome.” We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.
The word’s vexed usage gets another mention later, when Sarah gives Tassie a sweet delicacy to taste:
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2 Comments | books, language, literature, words, writing | Tagged: A Gate at the Stairs, American literature, awesome, books, dialect, grammar, grammatical tense, language, laughter, literature, Lorrie Moore, prepositions, quasi, usage, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
December 8, 2023
A new book spine poem, for the season that’s in it.
*
Wintering
When things fall apart,
Leave the world behind:
Lurking underworld,
Wintering underland,
The beginning of spring,
The will to change
Almost there.
*
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8 Comments | books, literature, poetry, wordplay | Tagged: bell hooks, book spine poem, bookmash, books, Don DeLillo, found poetry, Joanne McNeil, Katherine May, literature, Nuala Ó Faoláin, Pema Chödrön, Penelope Fitzgerald, poetry, Robert Macfarlane, Rumaan Alam, visual poetry, wordplay | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
November 8, 2023
I was reading Richard Stark’s crime novel Flashfire when the following line took me down an etymological side street:
He approached the hospital catty-corner, through the parking lots.
I’d come across the phrase catty-corner before, but not often, and only in novels, as far as I can recall. It’s not part of Irish English.
At first I visualized Parker, the protagonist, walking towards the building along the walls or edges, as cats often do. But catty-corner, as you may well know, means ‘diagonally’, and it has nothing to do with cats – at least not originally.
The adverb (and adjective) has a plethora of variant spellings that include catty-corner(ed), cater-corner(ed), cata-corner(ed), and kitty-corner(ed), with and without an -ed or a hyphen. How these phrases are pronounced is correspondingly mixed – but their geographical distribution follows a pattern, at least in the continental US: mostly catty-corner in the South, across to Texas, kitty-corner elsewhere.*
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8 Comments | etymology, language, language history, phrases, spelling, words | Tagged: 000000, cats, compounding, compounds, dialect, etymology, ffffff, folk etymology, language, language history, phrases, Richard Stark, spelling, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
October 18, 2023
In her terrific 2022 book Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, Dana Stevens reports an interesting account of an attempted collaboration between Keaton and Robert Sherwood, a WWI veteran turned Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning writer and, later, presidential speechwriter.
Between the war and those career-defining turns, Sherwood spent some years writing for Life magazine. In his movie column, ‘The Silent Drama’, he often praised Keaton’s work – even though, Stevens writes, ‘Buster was then still making two-reel shorts, a form not generally afforded close critical attention’.
After Keaton’s feature film The Navigator came out in 1924, the filmmaker asked the critic to write a scenario for him; Stevens suggests that Keaton was ‘familiar enough with Sherwood’s work to sense their affinity’. Sherwood duly came up with a story, provisionally titled The Skyscraper: it was to star Keaton as an elevator operator stranded on the roof with the architect’s daughter while the building was still being built.
Sherwood, Keaton, and a gag writer worked together on the story but could not complete it in a way that would ‘sustain the suspense of the setup and avoid a deus ex machina rescue’. According to Stevens, the problem as Keaton saw it ‘had to do with a mismatch between Sherwood’s cerebral style and the comedic intuition that usually guided the studio’s writing team’:
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4 Comments | books, film, humour, personal, writing | Tagged: books, Buster Keaton, comedy, comedy films, Dana Stevens, film, film history, filmmaking, films, humour, personal, Robert Sherwood, screenwriting, short films, silent film, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
August 15, 2023
The verb greenlight, or green-light, means to give something approval or permission to proceed: you give it the green light, metaphorically. What past-tense form of the verb would you use in these lines?
HBO just [greenlight] Season 2.
Marting said it [greenlight] less conventional works.
The lines are from recent articles in the New York Times. The first uses greenlit; the second, greenlighted. So whatever you chose you probably concurred once, but only once, with the NYT.
If you’re wondering which is correct, the short answer is both. The long answer – well, you’re in the right place for that.
In this post I’ll look at the usage patterns of greenlit and greenlighted, based on corpus data (graphs! lots of graphs!). I’ll describe the verb’s origins and analyze it with reference to irregular verbs generally and -light compounds specifically. Finally, I’ll discuss which to choose, with an eye on future trends.
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18 Comments | editing, etymology, grammar, language, linguistics, morphology, spelling, usage, words, writing | Tagged: corpus linguistics, editing, etymology, film, gaslight, grammar, greenlight, irregular verbs, jargon, language, linguistics, morphology, slang, spelling, usage, Vanity Fair, verbs, words, writing | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
July 26, 2023
A round-up of linguistic items – essays, news, blog posts, papers, and podcasts on language – for your enjoyment and diversion:
Learning Na’vi.
On plurals of hapax.
Birds in English place names.
A selection of Irish-language slang.
Unpacking the Madeline Kripke Collection.
Neutralizing the accents of call centre workers.
The unexpected joys of Denglisch and Berlinglish.
History of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (podcast, 30 min.).
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7 Comments | language, linguistics, link love | Tagged: dialect, Irish English, language, language change, language podcasts, linguistics, links, podcasts, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
Sentence first 