academic (adj.): of no practical or useful significance

Many of you are aware that I spend a disturbing amount of time playing Scrabulous, the third-party app designed for Facebook by a couple of Indian fellows, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, which has quickly become the stickiest and most addictive of the new Facebook add-ins available. When I say “disturbing,” I don’t think I’m exaggerating — the minimum number of games I’ve had going at any time since the app started functioning smoothly is four, and I’ve gotten up to fourteen at times. Whenever it’s not my turn in any of my games (a few of which I play against friends; the large majority of which I play against strangers) I just start new ones. There are always people looking to take on a challenge, and so I’ll play the first few moves quickly and then clean up the backlog of games over the next several days.

As you might imagine, I’ve started getting appallingly good at Scrabulous “regular” (the most common variant played on the app, where the searchable word list is available to you, the system checks each of your plays for validity, and there are no penalties for illegal plays) and so I’ve been looking for greater challenges. One way I’ve done this is to start playing “challenge” mode, where the rules are like actual Scrabble — that is, no dictionary available, and instead of the system checking your plays, it is up the opponent to challenge a move they think is illegal, at which point either the player of the illegal word loses the word and a turn, or else the losing challenger loses their own turn. This is significantly more difficult, especially when you forbid yourself from using an outside dictionary (my compromise is that I have to make my challenge decisions without a dictionary, but after I play my turn, I let myself look the word up and see if I was right or wrong), and I’m already losing a few games due to trigger-happy challenges and lack of confidence in my own vocabulary.

My other advanced version, though, is to play regular Scrabulous using their French dictionary. My French isn’t very good. Despite the fact that corporate clients have been charged upwards of $100 an hour for me to translate their French documents into English, I haven’t been comfortable writing in French, carrying on more than a basic conversation, or reading anything of substance without a dictionary since high school. My grasp of grammar and basic vocabulary (and my fluency in English, which is an underrated skill among document translators) makes me qualified enough to translate written material with a reference work (I like WordReference.com, personally), but lord knows I can’t really look at a seven-letter Scrabble rack and see options in French rather than in English — especially not when a W, a letter not found in native French words, comes out of the bag.

Which is why it’s horrifying to me that the esoteric, Scrabble-only skills I’ve developed playing too much Scrabble still allows me to seize the lead from fluent French speakers. For instance, just minutes ago, poor Monica P. played “TOMBES” building off an existing T and running all the way to the right end of the board. Here’s Uncle Joe’s Scrabble lesson of the day: in a situation like that, never tack on that S. It’s only worth one point, and it allows some asshole who doesn’t speak your language to throw down any word at all and use your S to pluralize it, thus capitalizing on the triple-word scores at the edge of the board.

Anyway, I’d write more right now but I think the jocks are coming to kick my ass.

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retrocessionaire: a reinsurer who assumes risk from another reinsurer

Welcome to Obscure Technical Term Week here at Maybe Tomorrow–Probably Not. Today’s word comes from the wonderful (read “horrifying”) world (read “tiny but incredibly powerful market niche”) of reinsurance (read “voodoo”). I don’t pretend to know all that much about reinsurance, primarily because I’m afraid my eyeballs will explode and leak gracelessly out of their sockets if I read too much about it, but the principle is essentially this:

1.) Insurance companies contract with their clients to assume part of the risk of various ventures and life events.
2.) These insurance companies in turn hedge their bets and create a safety net beneath them by selling their risk on to other companies, called “reinsurers.”
3.) Reinsurers pass risk along to other reinsurers, to create vast redundancies that spread the risk through the market, thus ensuring (ha ha) that in the event of a massive disaster, natural or man-made, no single insurance company is left holding the bag.

Reinsurance is actually an incredibly good idea for societies that have decided that commercial insurance is morally acceptable, because without it, when one big insurance company collapses under the weight of claims brought for a Katrina or, god forbid, a tsunami-level catastrophe, not only do all that company’s policyholders get screwed, but macro-economic shockwaves then roil the insurance industry (and by extension, the global economy). Reinsurance makes sure everybody gets fucked a little, rather than everybody getting fucked a lot.

This doesn’t mean that reinsurance isn’t mind-numbingly boring or mind-numbingly complicated — believe me, it’s both. I’ve been working on a reinsurance-related case here at Bozack & Dingdong LLP recently, and I have no hesitation in averring that the only interesting thing about reinsurance is the graceful and lovely word “retrocessionaire.” It is so rare as not to be listed in Merriam-Webster Unabridged, and it’s a peculiar amalgam of pieces: a retrocession is the hyper-Latinate (from retro-, back, + cedere, to go, yield, withdraw, etc.) result of retroceding something — assigning risk back along the chain of reinsurance to another company — but the French suffix -aire seems to come out of left field. It gives a soft landing place to the crisp consonants and soothing sibilants at the beginning of the word, providing an oasis of aesthetics in a desert of actuarial precision.

The opposite of a retrocessionaire is a “retrocedant,” one who retrocedes one’s risk, and somehow I think the word’s bland, technical, formalistic nature suits the shame and dishonor that must come with admitting you don’t have the sack to keep all that risk for yourself, you big puss. No, the elegant title goes to the courageous, manly company that seizes the risk — carpe periculum! — and raises it as its own, helping out a sissy little bitch in need. RETROCESSIONAIRE, WHAT!

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warmthiness (n.): the characteristic expressed or emotion projected to imitate warmth for outside observers. Compare WARMTH, TRUTH, TRUTHINESS.

Just a quick note to point out that Language Log today identified the use of “warmthiness” in James Wolcott’s Vanity Fair article “The Simple Life: White House Edition.” Wolcott observes that Laura Bush manages never to make her presence felt to the television viewer watching the First Couple, that “she hasn’t been supplying the warmthiness that every presidency and reality-TV series requires and desires as a sweetener.”

Language Logger Eric Bakovic points out the handful of other uses that predate it on the web, but neglects to mention that those earlier coinages merely imitate the ending phoneme of truthiness without seizing on the semantic nuance, while Wolcott has with a masterful stroke transposed the -iness suffix and brought into stark relief its meaning: that one can take an attributive noun and, with the addition of “-iness,” render it invented, artificial, and disingenuous. The question remains open whether this only holds true for nouns ending in “-th.” I have no doubt that “mirthiness” is a legitimate coinage (and, by the way, dibs), but could one comment on Garrison Keillor’s “wistiness?” Please feel free to answer below.

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index (n.): a character used to direct particular attention (as to a note or paragraph) and as the seventh in series of the reference marks — also called fist or hand

The index or fist was remarkably enough considered a piece of punctuation, standard in typesetting, for a certain period of time — I’ll go out on a limb and hypothesize that it’s between about 1840 and the end of the First World War. This is why, I suppose, it appears on old timey posters and ersatz old timey posters (see under the word “NOTICE!”), and serves as a recognizable denoter of that vague, undefined cultural era. What I find especially delightful, though, is that through the wonder of Unicode, this character has survived to this day (at 261E) and thus can be copied and pasted directly into my post, like so:
☞

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barfbag (interj.): –an expression of revulsion, disgust, dismay, disappointment, or sympathy in response to adverse events or conditions

The above sense of “barfbag” was first employed, to dramatic effect, by prized bestie Liz, who curiously enough debuted it very soon before or after I first heard fellow Action Painter Allison employ the fabulous nonce interjection “barf.com.” Zeitgeist, I suppose. Anyway, I immediately latched on to the word and began using it almost ceaselessly, so naturally it was the first thing that sprung to my lips after I read today’s Get Fuzzy.

See, rennet, I learned today, is the lining of an unweaned calf, used for its milk-digesting enzymes to process cheese. Rob’s exclamation of “veal byproduct?!” is because (I presume) the cheese and veal industries are joined to some degree in an unholy alliance by which leftover stomachs are traded to cheese producers in exchange for (I presume) a lifetime supply of Kraft singles and two draft picks. Barfbag!

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litigious (adj.): prone to engage in lawsuits

My fellow Americans,

We’ve all become used to the phenomenon of the self-pitying American “victim” suing businesses big and small for their own accidents, misfortunes, or just plain stupidity. I know the first time I became conscious of this tendency of our national character was the McDonald’s coffee case (formally Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, No. D-202 CV-93-02419, 1995 WL 360309 (Bernalillo County, N.M. Dist. Ct. Aug. 18, 1994) [paralegal's note: there was never a published opinion in this case, and the foregoing citation is standard Bluebook format for a case whose opinion is only available on Westlaw]). Settlements and judgments of this kind have encouraged a growing stream of marginally frivolous product liability lawsuits and steadily increasing jury awards, presumably due to the same psychological phenomenon that causes the poor and middle class to decry estate taxes — because someday, the average Homo americanus hopes to be in a position to benefit from the same treatment.

A side result of this tendency in our society is the promulgation of increasingly ludicrous product disclaimers, designed to warn the customer about every conceivable danger one might imagine resulting from the product’s use. Today’s irons say “Do not iron clothes while on body,” Halloween costumes warn that “Cape does not enable wearer to fly,” and packages of peanuts say “Caution: Contains peanuts.” This is a state of affairs that we’ve grown accustomed to.

Today, I was at the hardware store having a couple of keys cut, and I noticed a product disclaimer that, while obviously meant for liability limitation, was aimed at people who were not so much stupid as absent-minded, and it was just so damn polite and helpful that I had to smile. On a small safe, designed for home use, was a label that read, “Be careful not to store key inside safe!” Duly noted, guys, duly noted.

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feist (n.): a small dog (chiefly dialect)

Most of you are familiar with the word “feist” as the lone name of Toronto-based chanteuse Leslie Feist. (By the by, is there a word for single names, or for people who go by only one name, like Madonna, Cher, Beyonce, Shakira, Prince, Feist, et al? I guessed at “unonym” as a word for such a name, but that appears only to be attested as a neologism meaning “a word with a one letter difference from another word.”) Were you aware, though, that in addition to being German for “fat” or “stout,” “feist” is actually an obscure English word meaning a small dog? And furthermore, did you know that it derives from the obsolete phrase “fisting hound,” from the obsolete verb “fist,” meaning “to break wind?”

I pose the question to the gods of the internet, who have infinitely more time and patience than I do, as to why there needed to be a noun phrase to denote “farting dog” in English, and why small dogs in particular are thought to be more flatulent than large ones.

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French leave (n.): leave of absence without permission or without announcing one’s departure

Merriam-Webster doesn’t mention the first half of this definition and claims the phrase derives from “an 18th century French custom of leaving a reception without taking leave of the host or hostess.” It’s possible that this custom existed — that the French thought it polite to depart from a party without disturbing the host, who would naturally be otherwise occupied — but I can’t find a reliable attestation. In fact, I’m fairly certain the phrase derives from the common custom in English of using “French” as a pejorative. In general, this manifests itself in phrases that paint the French as oversexed and decadent (see “French kiss,” “French tickler,” “French letter,” etc.) but the English and, since World War II if not earlier, the Americans also have a popular stereotype of the French as cowardly or deceptive. (I have an unconfirmed suspicion that the name of the magic trick the “French drop” may come from this sense.)

Thus I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to presume that “French leave” dates from the heights of Anglo-French hostility in the 18th century — particularly because the French phrase meaning “absent without leave” is filer à l’anglaise — to take English leave.

Also of note: the French word for “roller coaster” is montagnes russes, or “Russian mountains.” WTF?

Tags: cowards, French, nausea, Russians
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reuptooked (v., perfect aspect): what SSRIs prevent seratonin from being

Penetrating linguistic insight from your humble narrator, yes? Consider this a table scrap for those gnawing at my ankles for more posts — I’ll deliver something real when I have more time.

Tags: coinages
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redux (adj.): brought back — used postpositively (e.g. “eponymous redux”)

Just wanted to point out that today’s Scary Go Round features Amy wearing a shirt that says “bra” and a hoodie that says “knickers.” The labeling of things with what they are not is a secondary level of hilarity (lookie here, fr’instance), and, dear readers, if ever you should see examples of either the primary labeling described yesterday or the meta-labeling described today, please send ‘em in (joseph.hankin [at] gmail [dot] com) and I will [heart] you forever.

P.S.: Mikey K.: Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.

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