By Hugh Rawson

As if reading and writing English is not difficult enough, the language includes a number of words with opposite meanings within themselves. These are often called Janus words, after Janus, the Roman god of doors and beginnings. (January, the first month of the year, is named for him.) Janus usually was represented in art as having two bearded faces that faced in opposite directions, as do doors — and as do Janus words.

Among the most commonly encountered Janus words are cleave, hew, and sanction. For example, one can be said to cleave a block of wood, meaning to split it, or to cleave to one’s principles, meaning to cling to them. Hew is almost synonymous in both senses. When a lumberjack hews a tree, he is cutting it down, but a politician who hews to a party platform, or a party line, is adhering closely to it. (Party line, by the way, usually is associated with the Communist Party, but is a lot older:  Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri used it in a political context in a memoir published in 1854.) Sanction, meanwhile, may refer either to formal approval or permission, as in “Some states now sanction gay marriage,” or to an official ban, penalty, or deterrent, as in “The Treasury Department has imposed sanctions on Japan’s biggest organized-crime syndicate, known as the yakuza” (New York Times, Feb. 24, 2012). Continue reading “Janus Words – Two-faced English” →

By Hugh Rawson

Yiddish has enriched the English language with many lively, often earthy contributions to everyday speech.  A previous post listed a number of examples of what is sometimes called Yinglish. Here are some more:

kibitz. To look on at a card game or other activity in an officious way; by extension, to stick one’s nose into another person’s business. The person who does this is a kibitzer. The word stems from the German name of a bird, kiebitz, the lapwing or pewit, a member of the plover family. The lapwing has long symbolized forwardness because it is so active so soon after hatching. This is the bird that is often portrayed in cartoons as running around with its head still in its shell. Continue reading “Yet More Yiddish” →

Hugh Rawson, a regular contributor to the Cambridge Dictionaries Online blog for the first two and a half years of its existence, died unexpectedly on June 1st. He was 76.

Hugh’s love of the English language was evident in his posts. All aspects of the language engaged him, and his enthusiasm came through in his writing. He also loved talking about words with others, as can be seen from the responses to readers he posted in the Comments. He loved puns and word play, and was fascinated by the ways words can be used to disguise or expose the truth. Hugh felt that people – especially politicians – are too easily tempted to obfuscate what they mean, and he was amused by linguistic efforts to disguise reality, especially with regard to bodily functions, behind “polite” terms. He understood the power that language can have, and the responsibility we all share to use language wisely, and well.

His three books about language – Rawson’s Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk, Wicked Words (which covers personal insults, ethnic slurs, political attacks, and the so-called four-letter words, among others), and Devious Derivations which explores folk etymologies) – are classics in the field. He also wrote Unwritten Laws: The Unofficial Rules of Life as Handed Down by Murphy and other Sages and, with his wife, Margaret Miner, co-authored five dictionaries of quotations: The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations, The New International Dictionary of Quotations, A Dictionary of Quotations from the Bible, A Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare, and the American Heritage Dictionary of Quotations.

Earlier in his career, Hugh worked as an editor at various New York publishing houses. I was lucky enough to land a job as his assistant when I started to work in publishing, and learned a great deal from him not just about how to deal with the text on a page (or, later, on a screen) but about how to deal with the people whose work is being published and the colleagues who are also involved in that effort. His warmth, intelligence, and decency touched everyone who came into contact with him and served as an example. It was an honor, all these years after he first took me under his wing, to be able to publish his posts and bring his insights to a new audience.

All of us at Cambridge Dictionaries Online who worked with Hugh were touched by his humanity. We will miss him, and we suspect a lot of you will miss him too. He was, to use a term from one of his last posts, a real mensch.

by Paul Heacock

by Liz Walter

The phrase ‘nudge, nudge‘ used to be synonymous with saucy innuendo. Nowadays, nudge theory (based on an influential book by US economist Richard Thaler) is all about gently persuading people to do what is best for them, from insulating their lofts to taking out pensions to eating more fruit and veg. The UK prime minister, David Cameron, was so impressed by Thaler’s ideas that he decided to set up his own ‘Behavioural Insights Team’, quickly dubbed the ‘nudge unit’.
Continue reading “Nudge, nudge – off to the adult playground with you!” →