Astroturfing

Astroturf is something that most people associate with the artificial grass (turf) that is often used on sports fields. But astroturfing - the verb - is something quite different. 

Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization. It is when a message that is political, advertising, religious, or part of public relations is made to appear as though it originates from and is supported by "grassroots" participants. It is an attempt - a deceptive one - to give messages or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial connection(s). 

The original AstroTurf is a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to resemble natural grass. Astroturfingplays off the "grassroots" idea that the message wants to seem "true" or "natural" rather than "fake" or "artificial."

An example of the practice came in response to the passage of tobacco control legislation in the U.S. Tobacco companies including Philip Morris, Burson-Marsteller and others created the National Smokers Alliance (NSA) in 1993 which was an aggressive public relations campaign that ran until 1999 and attempted to inflate the amount of grassroots support for smoker's rights that existed. 

In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission settled a complaint with Reverb Communications, which was using interns to post favorable product reviews in Apple's iTunes store for their clients.

Slang for Money

Slang words used to mean money have been around for a very long time and there are too many to cover in any detail here, but here are some of my favorites. 

The term that caught my attention recently that I couldn't figure out is cheddar. As slang for money, the term seemed new to me, but it is not new. At the end of WWII, welfare recipients received parcels of cheese as part of their benefits. The practice continued into the 1970s and the giving out of government surplus cheese was connected by recipients with the money they received.

Another food term is bacon. as in “bringing home the bacon.” One origin story places the phrase in the 1100s in Great Dunmow, England. According to local legend, the church in town would award a side of bacon (called a “flitch") to any man who could honestly say that he had not argued with his wife for a year and a day. Any such man would “bring home the bacon" and be considered a role model.

Another story is from the 1500s coming from country fairs and greased pig competitions. If you were the one who could catch that slippery pig, you got to keep it and so you got to “bring home the bacon."

And then some sources say it is much more modern dating back only to the early 20th century. At the time, bacon was used to refer not only to the strips we know today but to all pork, in general. The word "bacon" comes from old German and French words for “back," since the best cuts of pork come from the back and sides of the animal. 

Green as slang for money is a reference to the color of American money. An older term was greenback which was used to refer to American currency printed in the Civil War. The front of the bill was printed in black while the back was printed in green.

The slang term C note references that "C" equals 100 in the Roman numeral system and stands for the Latin word centum, which means “a hundred.” The Latin also gave us "cent" for one-hundredth of a dollar. A C note is a $100 bill.

Have you heard that "it's all about the Benjamins?" This slang term is also a substitute for $100 and alludes to the appearance of founding father Benjamin Franklin on the one-hundred-dollar bill. I haven't really heard anyone refer to a "Hamilton" for $10 or a "Jackson" to mean a $20 bill.

A very common slang term for dollars is bucks which we believe originated from early American colonists who would often trade deerskins, or buckskin, as a form of money.

Cha-ching (or Ka-ching) to mean money is a word that imitates the sound, as with an onomatopoeia, of an old-fashioned cash register completing a sale. I have heard it used to mean money but more often used as an interjection when money is made. "I made a bet and -  cha-ching - I got 75 bucks!"

And there are a long list of ones that still have no clear origin story. For example, moola (or moolah) is an old term for money, but nobody seems to really know where it originated. Merriam-Webster says the word was first used to mean money in 1936.

Here are others: "cabbage", "clam", "milk", "dosh", "dough", "shillings", "frogskins", "notes", "ducats", "loot", "bones", "bar", "coin", "folding stuff", "honk", "lolly", "lucre"/"filthy "Lucre", "moola/moolah", "mazuma", "paper", "scratch", "readies", "rhino."

Of course, slang varies by geography and money slang in India. Though I might only hear the term dosh used in the UK, I could probably hear dough or bread used to mean money in London or New York. 

synergy

SYNERGY is the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

It appears in English in the mid-19th century with origins from Greek sunergos  "working together" from sun- ‘together’ + ergon ‘work’.

In Christian theology, synergism is the idea that salvation involves some form of cooperation between divine grace and human freedom.

The words synergy and synergetic have been used in the field of physiology to mean the correlation or concourse of action between different organs in health; and, according to some, in disease.

The word appeared in 1896 from Henri Mazel in social psychology in his La synergie sociale, in which he argued that Darwinian theory failed to account for "social synergy" or "social love", a collective evolutionary drive. The highest civilizations were the work not only of the elite but of the masses too; those masses must be led, however, because the crowd, a feminine and unconscious force, cannot distinguish between good and evil.

In technology and media, it is applied to the compression of transmission, access and use of information. Synergy can also be defined as the combination of human strengths and computer strengths, such as advanced chess. Computers can process data much more quickly than humans, but lack the ability to respond meaningfully to arbitrary stimuli.

In media economics, synergy is the promotion and sale of a product (and all its versions) throughout the various subsidiaries of a media conglomerate. For example, when a movie also has a soundtrack, toys, and video games. Walt Disney is given credit for pioneering "synergistic marketing" techniques in the 1930s by granting dozens of firms the right to use his Mickey Mouse character in products and ads, and continued to market Disney media through licensing arrangements. 

REO Speedwagon

REO SPEEDWAGON in 2010 CC BY 3.0, Link

REO SPEEDWAGON REO (originally R.E.O. Speedwagon) is an American rock band that formed in Champaign, Illinois in 1967. 

Their record sales peaked and they had their biggest hits during the 1970s. The group's best-selling album is Hi Infidelity (1980), which contained four US Top 40 hits and sold more than 10 million copies. 

Over the course of their career, the band has sold more than 40 million records and has charted 13 Top 40 hits, including the number ones "Keep On Loving You" and "Can't Fight This Feeling." 

Though REO Speedwagon's record sales certainly waned in the late 1980s, the band actually remains a popular live act. The band appeared in an episode in the third season of the American TV series Ozark in 2020 and after the appearance, four of REO's songs reentered the Billboard rock charts.

A REO Speed Wagon Fire Truck at Jack Daniel's Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee
by Timj at Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Their name is not the initials of the band's founders. The REO Speed Wagon (alternatively Reo Speedwagon) was a light motor truck manufactured by REO Motor Car Company. It is an ancestor of the pickup truck. First introduced in 1915, production continued through at least 1953. "R.E.O." was the initials of Ransom Elliot Olds, the founder of the company and the name that later was applied to the Oldsmobile Car Company who produced an REO Speedwagon firetruck.

Badge from an REO Speed Wagon Fire Truck by Timjarrett, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Grand Funk Railroad

GRAND FUNK RAILROAD (AKA Grand Funk and GFR) is an American hard rock band popular during the 1970s. They were constantly touring and played many large arenas worldwide. They were very popular but didn't receive equivalent critical acclaim.

The band's name is a play on the Grand Trunk Western Railroad, which is a railroad line that runs through Flint, Michigan, the hometown of the band members.

Grand Funk Railroad was formed as a trio in 1969 by Mark Farner (guitar, keyboards, harmonica, vocals) and Don Brewer (drums, vocals), and Mel Schacher (bass). Brewer had been in the band Terry Knight and the Pack, and Knight became the band's manager and suggested the band's name.

They disbanded in the 1980s but were reformed with replacement members and had "The American Band Tour 2019 - Celebrating 50 Years of Funk" starting in January 2019.

       

walled gardens

There are literal walled gardens in the world. These gardens are surrounded by walls to keep out animals, unwanted human visitors and in some places, the walls shelter the garden from wind and frost. They can also be decorative and there may be smaller walls within the walled perimeter. 

A later development was the walled or gated community. One of the primary purposes of a gated community is to offer its residents safety. Some were built near areas that were considered unsafe. Besides having walls, a gated community increases safety by having membership, guards and by eliminating through traffic.

These days if you hear the term there is a good chance that it is a figurative walled garden that is a closed platform or closed technology ecosystem. Since we borrowed the term "ecosystem" from nature and have since created manmade ecosystems (or damaged others), it makes sense that we turn botanical garden ecosystems into technology ecosystems.

A good example of such an ecosystem is Apple’s hardware, software and services which work harmoniously together and do not work with other hardware, software and services. Apple users tend to remain, not always by choice, in their walled garden. This has also led to antitrust scrutiny (note the Epic vs. Apple case. Google, Facebook and others would like to keep you in their walled gardens.

Coleslaw

My wife made coleslaw this past weekend for a barbecue and I asked some guests why it is called coleslaw. No one knew. One person said it's cold slaw and it means cold salad. Wrong and right.

coleslaw Wikimedia CC BY 3.0, Link

Coleslaw is the correct spelling for the cabbage-based side salad often served alongside barbecue. It is sometimes mistaken as "cold slaw" as it is usually served cold. The word derives from the Dutch koolsla, with cole referring to cole crops such as cabbage.

purple cabbage slaw, Wikimedia CC BY 3.0, Link

Coleslaw's origin can be traced back as far as the ancient Romans, who served a dish of cabbage, vinegar, eggs and spices. The version Americans generally eat today comes from the Dutch who founded New York state. They grew cabbage around the Hudson River that they used in a shredded cabbage salad they called koosla. Kooll means cabbage and sla is salad

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.

Why a fount but not a font of wisdom?

I saw someone post on a blog about a teacher who had been for him a "font of wisdom" in his high school days. "Font" looked wrong to me. Was it supposed to be a "fount of wisdom?" 

I had to look it up. 

A "font" these days is most commonly used to refer to a typeface, such as a serif, sans serif, or Helvetica or Times New Roman. That origin comes from the late 16th century from French fonte, from fondre "to melt" in reference to the process of casting or founding the actual pieces of type once used in printing. 

This didn't seem to play any role in the wisdom expression. 

Font can also mean a structure in a church that contains water for baptism ceremonies. The water in a baptismal font is still, but the water in a fountain spurts with abundance. So, fount (a fountain shortening similar to mount for mountain) is more symbolically fitting for the sense of someone or something putting forth an abundance of knowledge or wisdom.

A fount of knowledge is used to something, but more likely someone, who contains all the answers or information.  

 Saying font for fount might also be considered a mondegreen - that's the topic another post.

Mondegreens

 

A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. They most often are created when listening to a poem or a song. If the listener mishears a word or phrase and substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense, a mondegreen is created.

The word's origin goes back to 195a4 and was coined by American writer Sylvia Wright. She said that when she based it on a childhood incident. Her mother was reading her a poem called "The Bonny Earl of Murray."  she had misheard the lyric "" in as "Lady Mondegreen".[4]

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o' Moray,
and layd him on the green.

Sylvia heard "and layd him on the green" as "and Lady Mondegreen."

The thing is that with a good mondegreen the misheard words should make a kind of sense in the context, if not a bit out of place. Sylvia's mishearing does make sense as "They have slain the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen."

She didn't know a word to describe the situation so she created one. "Mondegreen" was included in the 2000 edition of the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, and in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary added the word in 2008.

I only heard the word recently, but I've been hearing examples of mondegreens my entire life. They are particularly common in song lyrics. 

A website full of misheard lyrics is kissthisguy.com (also a book -see bottom of post). If that sounds like an odd name for the website, here's the explanation. It seems that more than a few people have misheard a line in the song "Purple Haze" by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" became "Scuse me while I kiss this guy." Jimi's psychedelic line becomes one making him bisexual.

Some others:

• From the first line of the national anthem of the United States - "O say can you see, by the dawn's early light" becomes "Jose, can you see, by the dawn's early light."
• "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival - "There's a bathroom on the right" is actually "There's a bad moon on the rise."
• From the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" someone seems to have misheard "The girl with kaleidoscope eyes" as "The girl with colitis goes by."
• "The ants are my friends / They're blowin' in the wind" instead of Bob Dylan's "The answer my friend/Is blowing' in the wind." 
• "Sweet dreams are made of cheese" is the misheard in the Eurythmics "Sweet dreams are made of this." 
• Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has in its garbled lyrics the line "here we are now, entertain us" which has been misheard as "here we are now, in containers", "here we are now, hot potatoes" and other things.
• Two mondegreens that my mother created: She misheard Barry Manilow's title/lyric "Looks like we made it" as "Looks like tomatoes."  She also heard on the radio in my car Paul Young's "Every Time You Go Away" and told me it was a stupid song because she heard the chorus not as "Every time you go away you take a piece of me with you," but as "Every time you go away you take a piece of meat with you." She was right. That is stupid.

Some examples really don't make much sense, but one that does comes from "Blinded by the Light" by Bruce Springsteen. He has the line "cut loose like a deuce" was misheard and recorded by Manfred Mann's Earth Band as "revved up like a deuce." Both the proper lyric and the mondegreen make sense as references to a deuce coupé, the 1932 Ford coupé that was popular with hot rodders. But there are more than 30 other mishearings from that song recorded on that website.

Mondegreens are not only in poems and songs. The book A Monk Swimming by Malachy McCourt got its title from a childhood mishearing of a phrase from the Catholic rosary prayer, the "Hail Mary."  From "Blessed art thou among women" is the misheard and slightly logical "a monk swimmin'"

Another book title taken from a mondegreen is Olive, the Other Reindeer, a children's book by Vivian Walsh. The title is a mondegreen of the line, "all of the other reindeer" in the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." 

The film The Santa Clause plays with the idea of a misheard line. A child hearing the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas ("Twas the Night Before Christmas") hears the line "Out by the roof there arose such a clatter" as "Out by the roof there's a Rose Suchak ladder" which doesn't any sense. But in the film, Santa uses a ladder to climb to a chimney and it has the label Rose Suchak Ladders. That means the mondegreen is the lyric we think is the right one since the child's version is actually correct. 

Ampersand

The ampersand or &  is a curious thing in our language that dates back to the 1st century A.D.

Originally, it was a ligature of the letters E and T. What's a ligature? In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components.

Suffice it to say, the ampersand is the most common one we use in English.

"Et" is Latin for "and" - as in et cetera - which is such a mouthful that we feel the need to shorten it to etc. It can actually be further shortened as &c. We are no language lazy.

I suppose if you look closely at the modern ampersand, you might still see the E and T hiding in there depending on the font. 

It is so commonly used that it is now considered more of a logogram than a ligature.

Is it a letter? No.

The dollar sign $ is another possible ligature/logogram. One theory is that it came from a ligature used for "pesos" and the Spanish peseta, but that's confiremed.

The word ampersand itself is a conflation of the phrase "and per se and." I have seen that explained as meaning "and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and" which makes no sense to me. 

The ampersand is something I have never been able to make with a pen. Mine always looked like little pretzels. Start at the bottom right corner, make a line up and to the left or reverse a 3 with a dash through it, from top to bottom twice. 

I just hit Shift-7. 

All this pondering on ampersands came from a curious little book by a wonderfully odd author, Craig Conley, which is logically titled Ampersand.

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

Words That Are Their Own Opposites

In Roman mythology, Janus presided over the beginning and
 ending of conflict, including war and peace.

Most people learned in school that an antonym is a word that means the opposite of another word. Children learn about opposites at a young age: up/down, in/out, hot cold. Contronyms are somewhat related but quite different.

An example of these words that are their own antonyms is "oversight."  What does this sentence mean?  "The supervisor's oversight led to the procedure's approval." Does it mean that the supervisor was inattentive and so allowed something to be approved that shouldn't have been approved? Or, does it mean that because he was overseeing a procedure properly it was approved?

That's a contronym. You may also see them referred to as an auto-antonym or autantonym, or Janus word - a word with multiple meanings of which one is the reverse of another.

I heard on the news recently that some members of Congress might be sanctioned, meaning a penalty will be imposed upon them. But a sanction can also mean "to give official permission or approval" which is quite different in meaning.

A few others:

Cleave can mean "to cling to or adhere," and also "to split or sever."

Fast can mean "moving rapidly," as in running fast, or "fixed, unmoving," as in holding fast. 

You can weather a hurricane (to withstand or come safely through) but a seaside home can look weathered because it has been worn away by the elements, because weather is a contronym.

Here are some more examples