Word of the day: lucidiots

If Apus can come over all literary, so can I. I came across today's word of the day, 'lucidiots', in a novel - Sacrament by Clive Barker. It's probably easiest if I just quote the relevant passage:

"Glenn's got a great new word, by the way, which is kind of appropriate. Lucidiots. That's what he calls people who talk too fast, seem to be perfectly lucid -"

"-and are, in fact, idiots. I like that. Where'd he get it from?"

"It's his. He made it up. Words beget words. That's the cri du jour."

"Lucidiots," Will said again, most entertained.

So there you go. Lucidiots. Googling it throws up almost no hits at all, so it may well be a Clive Barker neologism.

Nice city, shame about the motto

It seems a very American thing for cities to have mottos (mottoes if you prefer) - and many US cities even have more than one. San Diego, for example, confidently claims to be 'The Place Where California Began', 'Plymouth of the West', 'The First Great City of the 21st Century' and, perhaps most contentiously, 'America's Finest City'.

British cities also have mottos, but they tend to be in Latin, or unknown to the general public, or both. Wolverhampton's motto is 'Out of darkness cometh light'; Sheffield goes the Latin route with 'Deo Adjuvante Labor Proficit' (with God's help our labour is successful); Birmingham laconically chooses 'Forward'.

My nomination for the British city with the worst motto is Derby (which, for all our non-British readers, rhymes with 'Barbie'). Its motto, in full, is 'DerbYes! The city where you can'. My first objection is to the 'DerbYes' part. I am assuming this is a combination of 'Derby' and 'yes', but it is easy to read it as the nonsensical two-word phrase Derb Yes, or possibly as a misspelling of 'Derbies'.

Secondly, 'the city where you can'? Can what? Get mugged? Stabbed? Be homeless? Jobless? Even assuming the motto writers intended something positive, what is it that you can do in Derby than you can't do anywhere else? Except, perhaps, be ashamed of having the worst motto in the country...

Quotes

I'm off on holiday for a week, and am feeling demob happy. So let me share two genuine quotes from BBC Radio 7 which brought me wider awake while half listening to talking books in the small hours. Both are from authors I admire and both made me chuckle.

From The 39 Steps (John Buchan): "I tossed a knife in the air and did the old Mshona trick of catching it in my teeth."

From Sharpe's Fortress (Bernard Cornwell): "He cast a morbid eye over Sharpe's bullocks."

Enormity and enormousness

This is a post about the word 'enormity'.

At work, our intranet is being migrated to another server "to improve back-end performance". On the intranet itself an IT spokesman is quoted as saying: "This has involved over 50 people from across the company due to the enormity of the project."

Enormity? Really? According to the OED, enormity means "the large scale or extreme seriousness (of something bad)". The migration does seem to have a large scale, but I'm not sure whether it is something bad - or if so, whether the spokesman would want to draw attention to this aspect of it.

Perhaps the IT spokesman meant 'enormousness' not 'enormity'.

To be fair, the dictionary does list a secondary meaning of 'enormity' as "(in neutral use) great size or scale", which reflects the changing meaning of this word. The OED even says that this secondary meaning is "now broadly accepted in standard English".

However while the word 'enormity' retains negative connotations for many people, it is probably better and certainly safer to use a different word in a neutral context - enormousness, or hugeness. The IT spokesman could have just used the words 'scale' or 'size'.

Monetary but not financial

Why do some writers believe that archaic or overly formal language improves their copy?

In a perfectly reasonable feature I was subbing yesterday, the writer referred to someone having "a pecuniary interest" in a project. The OED defines "pecuniary" as "(formal) of, relating to, or consisting of money". So "pecuniary" is accurate, but at least some readers would be left scratching their heads – or they would if I hadn't replaced it with "monetary".

My first choice, by the way, was "financial" but when I checked with the OED I discovered that "finance" is "the management of large amounts of money, especially by governments or large companies". So while all financial transactions are monetary, not all monetary transactions are financial.

In everyday speech such differences are hardly earth-shattering. But these subtleties are what makes English such a fascinating language, don't you think?

UK Newspeak

After being overcharged for a train ticket, I went to a Southern railway ticket office and asked for a complaints form. The man in the ticket office gave me, instead of a complaints form, a 'customer comments form'. Apparently Southern no longer has complaints forms, only comments forms.

Apus observed that this is an example of Orwell's Newspeak - as if Southern, by replacing complaints forms with comments forms, can also replace the complaints themselves with comments.

On a similar note, it is interesting that the upcoming smoking ban in England is being brought in under the 'Smoke-Free Regulations 2006'. The title suggests freedom (freedom from smoke) - and freedom is good. If the regs had been called the 'No Smoking Regulations', this would have suggested restriction - and restriction is bad.

Remember children, language is never neutral.

Both or (n)either

While travelling to visit my dear old mum by tube over the weekend I noticed a poster warning that the Circle Line was closed for repairs so "no trains will be travelling in both directions".

Which appears to mean they have one set of trains running clockwise and another widdershins. Yes, I know, the poster's author meant "either" rather than "both", but why didn't he just say "The Circle Line is closed for repairs"?

Pedantic? Certainly. But remember, this isn't a slip of the tongue - it's a publication from a major company and it shouldn't be that hard to use the right word for the job.

Word of the day: Wiiitis

Back in the early 1990s, a US doctor identified a medical condition among the video-game-playing community called Nintendinitis. This is the thumb soreness caused by too much controller button-bashing, and I'm sure many Engine Room readers can relate.

Now gamers are suffering a new condition: Wiiitis (pronounced 'wee-EYE-tis', I presume). This has been identified by a Boston doctor called Dr Bonis who gave himself a form of tennis elbow through hours of playing simulated tennis on his Nintendo Wii games console.

Fortunately, the treatment for acute Wiiitis is simple: "ibuprofen for one week, as well as complete abstinence from playing Wii video games", according to the doc.

(Incidentally, I wonder if there is a medical name for the red weals in the centre of the palm many gamers gave themselves rotating a controller thumbstick in games such as Mario Party? And on a personal level, I once suffered from 'Sensible Fingers' - my digits cramped playing too much Sensible Soccer on my PC keyboard...)

Thanks to Sarah for bringing this to our attention!

Putting the 'help!' in helpdesk

An Engine Room regular (with the unlikely moniker of Gingerous Humerous Maximus) has submitted some of his favourite misuses of the English language as directed at IT helpdesks. Here in his own words:

"The Internet is down." Really, the whole internet has gone down? I know this is probably the natural thing to say, but it would be better to say, “Our internet connection has gone down,” or ask, “Is there currently a problem with our internet connection?”

"Something's wrong with the windows." OK, surely this is a facilities job and nothing to do with IT...

“My mouse keeps doing strange things.” Wow, a piece of computer hardware has come to life – call the government before all the machines arise to destroy us!

"There’s some sort of jam in the printer.” What type of jam? I'm not leaving my desk for anything less than strawberry...

Contributions are always welcome at the Engine Room - it saves Apus and me having to write so much! Feel free to email us and don't forget to check out the comments for each post.