canard

I heard a TV newscaster say that there is a group of Republicans who "have bought into Trump’s canard that the election was stolen from him." I have heard that word before and assumed it meant a hoax. My wife, a French speaker, said that the word canard in French means "duck." What's the connection?

She looked in one of her dictionaries and found a 16th-century French expression - vendre des canards à moitié. It literally means "to half-sell ducks" but this was possibly a proverb meaning "to fool" or "to cheat." The origin story isn't known but may have come from someone trying to cheat a customer in the sale of a duck at a market. Can you pass off half a duck as a whole duck and so half-sell it? We don't know. 

English speakers adopted this hoax or fabrication meaning of canard in the mid-1800s. 

There is also an aeronautical use of canard which has nothing to do with a hoax. In aeronautics, a canard is an arrangement wherein a small forewing or foreplane is placed forward of the main wing of a fixed-wing aircraft or a weapon. 

XB-70 Valkyrie experimental bomber

The term "canard" may be used to describe the aircraft itself, the wing configuration, or the foreplane. You find canard wings used in guided missiles and smart bombs.

This use of "canard" arose from the appearance of an aircraft called the Santos-Dumont 14-bis of 1906, which was thought to look like a duck with its neck stretched out in flight.

1906 Santos-Dumont 14-bis  CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

tsundoku, sudoku and otaku

A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word adopted from one language (the donor language) and incorporated into another language without translation.

You can probably guess from the title of this article that I'm writing about three Japanese loanwords today. There are a good number of Japanese loanwords in English: karaoke, karate, tsunami, typhoon, teriyaki, sake, sushi, manga, anime, tofu, emoji, origami, shiatsu, ramen, and wasabi make up just a partial list.

Tsundoku is a new loanword for me. It's one of those words that has a larger meaning - almost a lifestyle. It is used to mean acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in your home without reading them. Related words are tsunde-oku meaning to pile things up ready for later and then leave them, and dokusho which means reading books. Tsundoku also seems to refer to those books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf or nightstand. As currently written, the word combines the characters for "pile up" (積) and the character for "read" (読) - a "reading pile."

The word dates back to the Meiji era (1868-1912) and appeared when someone, perhaps jokingly, took out that oku from tsunde oku and substituted doku (to read). Tsunde doku would be difficult to pronounce, so it was compressed into tsundoku.

I initially confused tsundoku with Sudoku, that logic-based number-placement puzzle that my wife plays every morning as a kind of meditation. No connection between the two words other than some letters. These puzzles are quite old, but for Westerners, they became familiar in the 19th century, and then in the late 1970s when they first appeared for Americans in puzzle books. At that time they were known as Number Place puzzles. In 1986, the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli published them under the name Sudoku, meaning "single number."

Otaku literally means “house" but in English and Japanese, the word is used to describe someone who spends a lot of their free time at home. In the original Japanese usage that meant home playing video games, reading manga and watching anime. In either language, this person has little or no interest in more social or outdoor activities. It isn't always considered a bad word to have attached to you since fans of anime and manga use it to describe others with similar interests.

Flea Markets

Montsoreau Flea Market, Loire Valley, France CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

My wife mentioned that with the weather warming up our local flea market would be reopening soon. This got my word-mind working on why you would want to name a shopping place after those pesky little parasites of the order Siphonaptera ("wingless bloodsucker") that infest dogs, clothing, and especially upholstery on old furniture that might be for sale. It seems like very poor marketing. My wife said she doubted that the etymology was that literal. 

A flea market is usually a street market that provides space for vendors to sell previously-owned (second-hand) merchandise. Being outdoors, they are often seasonal. The line sometimes blurs as these places move indoors or become year-round places. Sometimes "swap meet" or "casual market" is the label. I've seen flea markets mixed with farmer's markets where (hopefully) at least the produce is not second-hand! 

And what happens when a group of street vendors begins to gather in one place? Is that a flea market? Probably not, and especially not if they are selling new items as many street vendor do with t-shirts, art etc.

I still view a flea market as a place selling used goods, from collectibles (books, records, toys etc.), to antiques (from jewelry to furniture) and vintage clothing.

There is now a National Flea Market Association which almost seems antithetical to the whole casual concept.

Where did the "flea" part of the term come from? Certainly markets of a similar nature existed in the Middle East and Asia a very long time ago. But the fleas appellation? 

One American theory is that there was a "Fly Market" in the late 1700s in New York City, located at Maiden Lane near the East River in Manhattan. The location was originally a salt marsh and so flies, fleas and other annoying critters were part of it. That Fly Market was the city's principal market by the early 1800s. But no mention of fleas in the name.

Perhaps, the American term made its way over to Europe, but more likely is that the "flea" term came from France to America. This loan translation is known as a calque. For example, the French “cela va sans dire” is loaned to English as “it goes without saying.” [Sidebar: "It goes without saying" is an odd phrase since we almost always follow it by saying what doesn't need to be said: "It goes without saying that she has plenty of money."]

The accepted etymology for "flea market" is an English calque from the French "marché aux puces" ("market of the fleas"). The first reference to this term appeared in stories about a location in Paris in the 1860s which was actually called the "marché aux puces" because items sold there were previously used and worn and so could very easily have contained fleas.

A vintage travel gear seller at Marché Dauphine, Saint-Ouen, the home of Paris' flea market
by Jorge Royan,  CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Head Honcho

"Head honcho" is a casual or unofficial reference to a person in charge of a community or an organization.

I would have guessed that the word had a Spanish origin but it actually comes from a Japanese term. The word would be spelled the same if you translate using the English alphabet. It is a geographic region near Tokyo, but roughly translated, a honchō  referring to a person in Japan is a leader or squad leader.

I have been told that you might easily see signs in Japan that would mean honchō  and that they would probably indicate a place name with this translation meaning "main town."

The "head honcho" in your office is likely to not officially be a boss but bosses everyone else around. This informal use of honcho seems to have been brought into American English slang in the 1940s to mean "officer in charge," and was popular with U.S. soldiers during the Korean War.

In the early 1950s, Gerald Ford declined offers to run for either the Senate or the Michigan governorship, instead aiming for Speaker of the House, which he called "the ultimate achievement. To sit up there and be the head honcho of 434 other people and have the responsibility, aside from the achievement, of trying to run the greatest legislative body in the history of mankind."

Karaoke

Karaoke (and karaoke bars) are a method (and a place) of singing songs by way of a special tape/CD,digital file player that eliminates the vocals from a song and leaves the music. The singer supplies her own vocal rendition of the song, usually with the lyrics appearing synchronized on a screen, much like a teleprompter.

VocoPro CLUB 9009G Professional Club Karaoke System

This is a loan word from Japan, where the activity first gained popularity. Karaoke is a combination of two Japanese words kara meaning empty and the shortened form of the word okesutora  orchestra.

The usage came to prominence outside Japan rapidly in the 1970's as karaoke bars (alcohol being useful to drop stage fright inhibitions, no doubt) and karaoke machines (including those for home use, in case even alcohol won't get you on stage to be Beyonce) became popular around the world.

There are even karaoke systems made for an iPad (below), so you can sing in privacy in the bright acoustics of your home bathroom.



The Late Late Show with James Corden has taken "Carpool Karaoke" - which people have been doing in their cars since cars got radios - to a high professional level. One of my favorites is when James went to Liverpool with Paul McCartney and did a singing tour of the city of Paul's youth. They go to his childhood home where he wrote music with John Lennon. He even performs a few songs in a local pub to an amazed crowd.

With the YouTube closedc aptioning, you can do some karaoke along with James and Paul.

Tsunami

The word tsunami unfortunately turns up in the news regularly as this devastating effect of earthquakes is not uncommon. It is particularly common particularly in the Pacific Islands and coasts. An earthquake far out in the ocean is capable of creating enough vibration to displace massive amounts of seawater and send deadly waves at islands and coastlines.

It should not be surprising that the term comes from the Pacific islands of Japanese. Two words are combined:  TSU  (pronounced sue) which means "harbor" and NAMI (nah me) which means "wave." The word distinguishes other words to describe waves as a very large one that enter a normally safe harbor.

Katsushika Hokusai: The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura) 
The waves in this work are sometimes mistakenly referred to as tsunami (津波),
but they are more accurately called okinami (沖波), great off-shore waves.

Sony

Sony's first unbranded transistor radio - TR-55 (1955)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the transistor radio brought rock and roll music to teenagers and spread it more powerfully than the actual records that were being played by the disc jockeys.

Texas Instruments was the first company licensed by Bell Laboratories to use the newly invented transistor for a small radio. The term transistor was coined by John R. Pierce as a contraction of the term transresistance. The Regency TR-1 weighed 8 ounces, fit in your pocket, turned on instantly and cost $49.95. More than 100,000 were sold.

The Japanese company Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo decided to get into the transistor radio business but wanted a new name that would work with American consumers. They considered using their initials, TTK, but a railway company, Tokyo Kyuko, was known as TTK. They also considered  "Tokyo Teletech" but discovered an American company already using Teletech as a brand name.

Like many other people seeking a new name, they looked to Latin. Looking up "sound" they found "sonus." This sounded a bit like the word "sonny" which was a loan word used in Japan in the 1950s to refer to "sonny boys" - smart and presentable young men. Dropping one "n" in sonny and being closer to the sonus of sound seemed right.

The first Sony-branded product was the TR-55 transistor radio in 1955. The company officially changed their name to Sony in January 1958.

Sony 8-Transistor Radio, Model TR-84, 1959 

Loan Words

A loan word (also loanword or loan-word) is a word adopted from one language into a different language without translation.

In English we use the French café to mean a small restaurant selling light meals and drinks (from French café, which literally means "coffee").

The Persian bāzār, meaning a market, is also a loan word to English.

Many words are loaned from Latin. Modus Operandi  refers to someone’s habits or method of operating. It is heard most commonly in police investigations to to describe someone’s criminal profile and is usually abbreviated to "MO."

A number of legal and business terms are taken from Latin but have found their way into common usage. Mea culpa (my own fault) is used by a person who is admitting guilt or blame. Quid pro quo (literally, "something for something") is often used in negotiations . The idiom "You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours," is a variation on this.

"Loan" itself is a bit of an odd choice of a word to describe this language  transfer since the ordinary meaning of loan is something borrowed that will be returned. No returns on these words

From German, we borrowed "kindergarten" (children's garden) for that first year of school that was once a kind of pre-school where play and socialization was originally emphasized.

Foods offer many examples of loan words as we borrow dishes from other cultures. The Spanish taco, burrito and the rest of a Mexican restaurants menu are examples.

If you want to dig deeper into this linguistically, you will find that a loanvword is distinguished from a calque (loan translation), which is a word or phrase whose meaning or idiom is adopted from another language by translation into existing words or word-forming roots of the recipient language.