In honor of Bloomsday (which is today, if you haven't been at an all-day reading of Ulysses like some people), one of the two daily definition/etymology e-newsletters I subscribe to, wordsmith.org's A.Word.A.Day, sent out five words from the Irish last week. They were:

shebeen (shuh-BEEN): An unlicensed drinking establishment.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: From Irish sibin, diminutive of seibe (mug/mugful). The word
is popular in the south of Africa and in Scotland and Ireland.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary respectfully disagrees:

Origin Anglo-Irish; of obscure origin. The ending is Irish -in as in caubeen, colleen, etc.; an improbably conjecture is that the word is founded on Irish seapa, adaption of English shop.

dornick (DOR-nik): 1) A piece of rock small enough to throw. 2) Stout linen.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymologies: 1) From Irish dornog (small stone, literally fistful). 2) After Doornik, the name of a Flemish town where the cloth was first manufactured.

The OED notes the name of the Flemish town for the second definition (which is the first definition in its own listing) and provides no etymology for the first definition (its second).

hubbub (HUB-ub): Excited fuss or tumult of a crowd.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: Perhaps from Irish ubub (an interjection of contempt).

The OED's definition is more certain:

In the 16th century hooboube, -boobe, often referred to as an Irish outcry, and probably representing some Irish expression. Cf. Gaelic ub! ub! ubub! an interjection of aversion or contempt; abu! the war-cry of the ancient Irish.

cosher (KOSH-uhr): To pamper.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: From Irish cosair (feast).

OED etymology: Phonetic representation of Irish coisir feast, feasting, entertainment. Also notable is The OED's different definition of cosher:

1) To feast, to live at free quarters upon dependants or kinsmen. 2) To treat with indulgent fondness, pamper; to cocker or coddle.

smithereens (smith-uh-REENZ): Tiny fragments.

A.Word.A.Day's brief etymology: Probably from Irish smidirin, diminutive of smiodar (fragment).

OED sez:

Variation of smithers [which it lists as "of obscure origin"], with Irish diminutive ending, and either adopted from, or the source of modified Irish smidirín.

The disagreement between Wordsmith and The OED on a few of these reminded me of the controversy over Daniel Cassidy's How the Irish Invented Slang: The Secret Language of the Crossroads. I heard Cassidy present the book at the Irish Arts Center (the actual website for which seems to be down) and will begrudgingly admit to being pretty impressed (hey, I don't know Gaelic for shit!) until Grant Barrett's excellent blog post schooled me on the matter.

Anyway, happy Bloomsday everyone. Time to read a chapter of Ulysses—I dare you!

I finally silkscreened into reality one of the witty (I hope) t-shirt ideas I mentioned awhile back.

These </3 t-shirts are a really geeky double entendre: To IM addicts everywhere this is obviously a broken heart, but for the anal xhtml geeks among us it could also be a validated heart. Or, true, the end of a heart. I like to think it means my heart's written in valid xhtml. (OMG! Just like my blog! Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Anyway, this idea came up during deliriously dorky IM conversations with coworkers at my last job. We were thinking that a regular <3 looked like it was going to get caught by W3C's validator and wondered if </3 would *have* to mean a broken heart.

So now I've got six </3 shirts in four different styles for sale in my new etsy store. Sorry, fellas, there's only one [normal men's shirts now in action] for you right now (sporty style) because I messed up the other men's shirts by silkscreening the </3 upside-down, making it look like <\3. Still broken, but it totally ruins the xhtml joke. Oops!

But there are women's t-shirts (high-maintainence glitter and regular-type) and tank tops. And more men's shirts coming soon, I promise!

update: Men's shirts (finally managed to silkscreen them non-upside-down) and more women's sizes now available. Male model for the men's shirts still nowhere to be seen.

another update: Broken heart/valid heart shirts (and mugs and stickers and magnets and mousepads) are now available at zazzle.com/kenspeckle. Hand silkscreened shirts will only be available while supplies last or by special request.

Only last week, I was speculating to a very skeptical audience that, without the rise of some more realistic and less distasteful monetization model for digital content than AdSense, production of said content may eventually start to trickle off.

And, whaddya know, Your Daily Awesome has stopped blogging, due to the enormous time investment of "noodl[ing] around on the internet every night, hunting for something appropriately awesome to blog."

And even the Jason Kottke, the unstoppable blogging machine who pointed to Your Daily Awesome's closure, can relate to the enormous output required to maintain a respectable level of content production. (How could he not? The man blogs like a banshee.*)

So. Should we fear for the production of duly awesome content in a world where information has to be free to be even remotely relevant?

*Wondering where the expression "[verb]s like a banshee" comes from? Me too!

banshee drawing from Ireland's Eye

First off, as you may or may not know, a banshee, says the wikipedia, "is a female spirit in Irish mythology, usually seen as an omen of death and a messenger from the Otherworld." More significant to the etymology of the phrase "like a banshee," however, is the fact that, "[a]ccording to legend, a banshee wails around a house if someone in the house is about to die."

According to world wide words:

The basic phrase like a banshee has been used many times over the past couple of hundred years as a figurative expression to describe someone screaming or making a noise, usually in an excess of emotion.
[…]
It seems that the idea of a banshee being a noisy spirit in torment has been extended so far it has snapped, most likely out of ignorance of what a banshee actually is…

Well, I'm glad to have contributed, if only a little, to modern society's ignorance of what a banshee actually is.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if there's any better metaphor for a blogger than a noisy spirit in torment.

Blogs buzzed this week with a headline that sent high school English teachers everywhere running in horror: Passive Voice is Redeemed for Web Headings.

Usability super-guru Jakob Nielsen's claim isn't actually quite as incendiary as you might think: He just backs up a somewhat accepted sentiment that passive voice is ok when it's necessary to bring keywords to the front of a headline with sexy eyetracking research showing that web readers, fanatically scanning the thousands of unread items in their RSS readers or whatnot, often read only the first two words of a paragraph.

Active voice automaton I may be, but even I can get behind the occasional passive construction of absolutely necessary for grabbing readers' attention. Unfortunately, though, I'm not convinced by either of Jakob's primary examples.

First off, the in-text example:

13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.

According to Jakob, the words "design guidelines" carry the most weight in this sentence, and "13″ is short enough to not count in the "first two" rule of thumb.

So why not make 13 design guidelines the subject rather than the object?

13 design guidelines for tab controls make Yahoo Finance easy to navigate, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.

And activating the construction of that the-medium-is-the-message headline of Jakob's piece is even easier:

Passive Voice Works Best for Web Headings

…or does it?

I always cringe when I stumble across accusations of ethnic self-hated, which generally consist of the accuser taking the acusee's words completely out of context and twisting them beyond recognition.

But what if a word hated itself? Now that would be fascinating!

Well, the word "snob" takes being an auto-antonym to a seemingly impossible extreme. While your traditional auto-antonym simply contradicts itself (by containing multitudes, Walt Whitman-style), the word snob loathes its origins more heartily than even a guilt-ridden reformed snob might.

Compact O.E.D.

You see, my Compact O.E.D. doesn't list the current use of snob until definition 3d:

One who despises those who are considered inferior in rank, attainment, or taste.

Now, if for some unimaginable reason you were compelled to write in the distinctive style of dictionary definitions, how might you describe the object of a snob's scorn? As "a person belonging to the ordinary or lower classes of society"? As "one who has little or no breeding or good taste"?

That's precisely what I thought you'd say! And, believe it or not, those are snob's definitions 3a and 3b, respectively. Poor snob—trapped in the dictionary, one of its definitions hating two others. But how did this happen?

Well, the O.E.D. provides seemingly unrelated entries for definitions 1a ("a shoemaker or cobbler") and 1b ("the last sheep to be sheared"), but definition 2 holds some potential relevance for the self-loathing plight of snob: Apparently the word was used around the campus of Cambridge from 1796 to at least 1865 to describe (scornfully, of course), townspeople who were not studying at the university.

Thus, the "ordinary" person that definition 3a contrasts with ranked gentry could have been a synechdochal evolution of the contrast between the Cambridge locals and its supercillious students. But there's no verifying this theory, especially in light of the following:

A) The distinct possibility that the lower-class definition of snob came from an abbreviation of the Latin sine nobilitate, as AskOxford's linguistic faqs explain.

B) The implied etymology of the O.E.D.'s first citation for the ordinary-person definition of snob: In July 1831, the Lincoln Herald wrote, "The nobs have lost their dirty seats—the honest snobs have got 'em." Indeed, "nob" has a slang entry as "a person of some wealth or social distinction," and the transition from nob to its antonym snob is almost too simple.

William Thackeray

The transition from snob meaning "commoner" to snob meaning "one who hates commoners," however, is somewhat more subtle. In 1848 Willian Thackeray popularized the word snob with The Book of Snobs, which classifies a snob as "he who meanly admires mean things."

How Thackeray came to this definition is a mystery to me, but he clearly specifies that it's "a great mistake to […] think [Snobs] exist among the lower classes merely." According to Thackeray, "A great per-centage of Snobs […] is to be found in every rank of this mortal life" (page 3).

So there you have it. The word snob hates itself, and owes it all to Thackeray, who quite perfectly calls himself one repeatedly throughout the book that started all this etymologic self-loathing.

I recently heard a new term being bandied about the office: "deck," meaning PowerPoint presentation. After a quick google, I'm kind of surprised I've never heard it before. I'm also somewhat befuddled by its origin.

This comment on a metafilter post asking for synonyms for PowerPoint (apparently they poster was unsatisfied with "presentation") explains deck as a physical metaphor. Like, if you conceive of your slides physically they might remind you of a deck of cards. Having personally conceived of PowerPoint slides physically (through, you know, a printer), I must say I didn't find them particularly reminiscent of playing cards.

A later commenter claims that the term "deck" makes sense if you're "old-school enough to have been really into HyperCard on a Mac," an idea echoed by a comment on mamamusings and solidified by google.

Now, I can see why you'd use "deck" in reference to HyperCard (a fascinating pre-www hypermedia program)—the program, in Wikipedia's words, "was based on the concept of a "stack" of virtual "cards."" It has cards in its logo and even in its name! But how that terminology carried over to PowerPoint—with a card-free logo and name, and no immediately recognizable card-like characteristics—is a mystery to me.

Yes, I might be the biggest nerd alive. (And, yes, I know, I'm late and the LOL backlash has begun.) But after stumbling across those loltheorists, I couldn't help but think, don't the non-theoretical writers who provided the material that inspired all that literary theory to begin with deserve as much LOL love as their theorist counterparts?

Yes, of course they do! And what authors offer better LOL fodder than members of the OULIPO—the mostly French cliqué of writers and mathematicians who unleashed their creativity by writing under unusual (and generally mathematically significant) constraints. OULIPO, in case you were wondering, is an acronym, and the words it stands for in French translate roughly to "workshop of potential literature."

Anyway, here's my lolOULIPO:

Georges Perec, whose novel La Disparition does not include the letter "e" even once in 300 pages.

Raymond Queneau, whose collection of ten sonnets is printed on paper that's sliced to allow the reader to flip through individual lines, providing a hundred thousand billion unique sonnets.

Italo Calvino, whose novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler includes the reader as a character.

Now, so you don't think I've totally gone bananas with this LOL nonsense, here's a handful of the best OULIPO materials to be found online:

interactive Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
Create your own sonnet (of the hundred thousand billion available) in French and English.

OULIPO collection
A special issue of the online literary mag drunken boat. From the introductory essay, "OULIPO at 45" by OULIPO president Paul Fournel:

…the role assigned to Oulipo is simply that of proposing a constraint, giving a model of that constraint, and thus, allowing it to meet the text that will take on its form. […] There is no ideal Oulipian text. The proposed structure is like that of the sonnet, into which Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé may choose to pour their singular talent.

Into the Maze
An essay by poet/translator Mónica de la Torre. Quote: "the more difficult the task, the better it feels to achieve it."

official OULIPO site
For francophones only.