You may have noticed when looking words up in a dictionary that the origin of the word is given. The etiology will be attributed to Latin, Greek, French, Old English, Middle English, etc.  But fear not all you denizens of the U.S., Americans have come up with some words of our own in the past 300+ years.

One thing I love about some words is that they sound exactly what they mean.  For instance, nefarious – [from the Latin] What a delicious word for reprehensible, despicable, wicked.  Just looking at the word and you know it’s up to no good.

parsimony – [Late Middle English from Latin] Sparing, unwilling to spend, frugal. It makes me think of parsley and how it’s used sparingly as a decorative finish on a meal.

perspicacious – [from the Latin] Insight into and understanding of things.  Reminds me of perspective and periscope – good for looking into things.

Perhaps it’s just me and how I relate to words. 

Now, onto the wonderful newish American words.

antsy - Ever feel agitated, impatient, or restless? This word dates back to the mid-19th century, and is believed to have come from the popular phrase ‘to have ants in your pants’ – a truly unsettling sensation.

cool - No word is more American than cool. Originating in 1930s America as a black slang word for fashionable, it was adopted by jazz musicians to mean hip and acceptable.

dude -  Originally a put-down for a man overly concerned with his clothes, fashion and appearance, and also for a rich man from the city who vacations on a ranch. Today the meaning has shifted to someone you think is cool, or great. Can be synonymous with bro.

bangs – Not a sound, like a gun going off, but a fringe of hair that’s cut straight across the forehead.

bumptious -  First known use in 1803, meaning offensively self-assertive, proud and loud in an annoying way.

catawampus - Originating in the South or Midwest in the 1840s, catawampus means confused or diagonal. It could stem from kitty (or catty-)-cornered.

discombobulate - First recorded in 1916 as discombobracate, then discomboobulate. They all mean exactly what they sound like: to confuse or upset.

d’oh – First known use by cartoon character Homer Simpson in 1993. Used to express sudden recognition of a foolish blunder or an ironic turn of events – hence Homer’s frequent use of it.

druthers - Derived from “would rather” (as in: “If I had my would-rathers, I’d been living in St. Kitts now.)

foofaraw - From the American West, a mutation of the Spanish fanfaron, meaning "show-off." Connotes a fuss about something insignificant or an excessive amount of decoration, hence foo-foo for frilly homey crafts involving lace and hot glue guns.

hornswoggle - First known appearance in 1829, aptly meaning "to trick or hoax."  Another one of those words that once heard or read you know the meaning.

lollapalooza – First known use 1896  meaning: an extraordinary thing, person, or event.

sockdolager - The product of a 19th-century fad to mix Latin roots with slang to create new, often silly, words. Partly derived from sock, "to punch," and possibly from doxology, "the end of a service".  Sockdolager may have been one of the last words Lincoln heard before he was assassinated. (assuming it was in Our American Cousins, the play he was attending, rather than some sort of snide warning from John Wilkes Booth.)

What is with these people on Facebook who have to put, “Keep a tissue handy, I’m still in TEARS,” thinking they will entice you to read their piece?  Or the other hyperbole-wranglers who cry, “This is hysterical!” when it’s patently not.  Why can’t more people be impeccable with their words and, to quote Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, “Say what you mean and mean what you say.”  

“No one saw THIS coming!” is another false claim to get you to watch their video    which invariably shows something quite normal and not all that unexpected taking place and could be pretty much predicted by a child. While we’re on the subject, if you have a loved one serving in the military and you’re invited out onto the ice at a hockey game, or onto the field at a baseball/football game, chances are pretty good said loved one will come up behind you dressed as the team mascot to surprise you because they got home a few weeks early.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for reuniting families with loved ones (especially those who had been in potentially dangerous locales) and can get as sappy and teary eyed as the next person, but would appreciate not being patronized with hyperbole and false claims.

When a headline on Facebook or Twitter contains the words obliterates, devastates, destroys, etc., I’m guessing none of those things happened and will make a mental note to avoid that poster.

Another beef with some social media posters – and they’re generally of the female persuasion – why must they feel the compunction to share with us their glee each time their ‘hubs’ or ‘DH’ (dear husband) brings them a cup of coffee, tea, wine, chocolate, etc.?   We get it.  You’ve got a husband (allegedly) who dotes on you (allegedly) and you’re delighted with that fact (alleged fact).  Notice that men manage to refrain from that form of bragging.  I can’t recall seeing, “The wife just brought me a [fill in the blank] beer, coffee, beef jerky.”   [God knows they can and do brag about plenty of other things that are just as boring, but rarely the aforementioned doting spouse trope.]

The penultimate social media oversharer is the tweeter or FBer who feels the need to keep their friends/followers up to date on their every move.  The ones on vacation truly mystify and irk me. 

“Here we are on the [fill in the blank: plane, train, boat, cruise ship, catamaran, International Space Station – now, the latter would admittedly be impressive, but still].” 

“Here we are arriving in [fill in the blank: Vegas, Maine, London, Paris, the Mekong Delta, Tahiti.” 

“Here we are [fill in the blank: water skiing, hang gliding, zip lining, bungee jumping, wrestling rabid wildebeests, playing volley ball on a nude beach.”

Wherever you’ve gone, whatever you’re doing there, and with whomever you’ve gone there with – we don’t care.  Honestly.  Go.  Have fun.  Enjoy.  Tell us about it when you get back.  We really don’t need a blow-by-blow description of your travels.  Seriously.  How about you live in the moment and experience your own vacation while it’s happening?   While we’re relieved not to have to sit and watch a hundred slides of your trip as in days of yore, likewise, we do not want to see multi images of you on social media wrestling rabid wildebeests on the International Space Station.

One final complaint.  [It’s my birthday, I’m allowed.]

I think a brief revisit is in order re: the excessive overuse of the word hero. [You know my feelings on this.] According to social media, as well as the regular media, nearly everyone and their granny is a hero.  A cop who helps little baby ducklings from a rain grate and reunites them with their anxious mother does not a hero make.  If said officer climbed down into a putrid alligator-infested sewer pit to rescue the fluffy little critters, that’d be a different story.

And while it’s more than commendable for children to fork over their lemonade stand profits to a charity or worthy cause, this act alone does not constitute the stature of hero.  They are good deed doers who will hopefully carry that generosity of heart with them throughout the remainder of their lives. There is a vast difference between making of monetary donation to a cause you endorse and diving on a live grenade to save your colleagues, or entering a burning building to rescue a person or animal, especially if they are strangers.

It’s exhibiting courage and bravery, risking life and limb, to save someone else – be they human or animal – that makes a hero, not just someone who has done ‘the right thing’.  It’s a sad state of affairs that too few people are ‘doing the right thing’, so that when someone does, they are elevated to hero status.

Watch this space – where next time we’ll chat about the 1960 Pulitzer Prize winning novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ which I feel was highly overrated, and why its sequel ‘Go Set a Watchman’(which was actually written first but lay hidden for 55 years beneath some other papers in a safe deposit box, allegedly), and portends to depict Atticus Finch* not as an open-minded caring person, but as a racist who has attended a KKK meeting and rails against desegregation. At a time when so many racial atrocities are happening it could appear to some that author Harper Lee and her ‘people’ have decided to release this second volume now feeling it could be quite profitable. 

One can only have concern for the 89-year old Ms. Lee who, by all appearances, seemed content to live a quiet life off the royalties of her first (and until now, her only) book. Word has it she lived rather simply, even frugally by the looks of her self-inflicted haircut.  It gives one pause to hear Ms. Lee’s attorney and trustee of her estate, Tonja Carter, hint there may even be a third recently uncovered novel bridging the two.  Can I get an Amen and a Halleluiah?

Writers are cautioned not to begin their story with the protagonist waking up, especially from a dream.  I try to adhere to that caution.  However, real life is something different.  Sometimes, in those moments on the precipice of waking or dozing, thoughts, ideas, snippets, or simply a name come to me.  Short of whipping off the covers and leaping out of bed to scribble the thought, idea, snippet, or name, I’ll let it play in a loop, round and round in my head as I begin to tinker with it, see where it leads.  Is it something to include in my work in progress or something to be filed away for the next project?  Only time will tell.

The other morning it was just the one word, Ozymandias.  Lovely word, that.  I knew I knew it, just had to place it.  Turns out – as you probably may recall from your school days – it’s the title of one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnets.  A spiffy poem he wrote about a statue in ruins of Rameses II.  It rhymes in accordance with the strict guidelines of a sonnet and I like that.  While it doesn’t have to rhyme in a sing-song-y way like Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat, I do like poetry to rhyme here and there.  Otherwise it’s just prose, no?   

The title of my recently released paperback Death at the Drive-In (available on Amazon.com) (shameful product placement) came to me in one of those drowsy moments of pre-awakeness.  It was definitely a catchy title – and I say that in a non-braggy way because it was just there, fully formed and begging for a novel to be written around it.  And so I complied.  One likes to comply with the Universe, especially when it so nicely lays something spiffy in ones lap.  I’ve even woken to some of my characters exchanging dialogue that later found a place in one of my novels.  It’s like pennies from heaven, these gifts bestowed in the semi-slumber moments, generally the lucky ones with heads on both sides.

I don’t like Jazz.  There, I said it.  I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Jazz, and I’m certainly not saying those who enjoy it are pretentious, maladjusted, drug-addled ne’er do wells.  I just don’t like the way the musicians begin at relatively the same time, then sort of wander off doing their own thing and not in a drum or guitar solo sort of way we’re accustomed to and that can be tedious at best when over indulged, but in a free-for-all, hodge-podge, discordant mélange of noise that can sometimes build to a frenetic peak that almost makes you want to jump out of your skin, and then they seem to realize they’ve run too far afield and manage to get back on track to end at approximately the same time.  The only thing worse than Jazz is scat singing; that singing with nonsense syllables usually to an instrumental accompaniment sung by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme.  You know you’ve entered one of the Circles of Hell (somewhere between Limbo and Lust, I believe) when the Jazz begins and the scat singing commences.  At the first few bars of “A Tisket, A Tasket, A Green and Yellow Basket”, hike your skirts and leg it for the comfort of a cozy spot where you can listen to a soothing Beatles, Blur or Billy Joel song that has real words.  

For the most part, gone are the days when you’d be classified a social pariah for wearing white shoes after Labor Day. Perhaps if you’re from old money, reside in Connecticut, and speak as if you’ve got lock jaw, the white shoes/Labor Day thing persists in giving you the pip.  I’m not saying the Binky and Muffy’s of the world need to ‘get with the times’ or ‘choose their battles’ (you know how I detest clichés).  But there are more important things (in my opinion) than the choice of foot wear in early September.

And one of those important things is to make a concerted effort to not sound ignorant.  A lofty goal some might say.  Perception is everything, some say, and one way in which we can try to sound intelligent if by making the effort to speak properly.  I realize for some it’s a massive endeavor, a Herculean feat even, but let’s give it a try, shall we?

In our defense, we are the result of the metaphorical melting pot of accents and dialects.  Perhaps the pot needs the lid removed, the heat reduced to a simmer and  some sturdier stirring to get those stuck bits off the bottom.  Perhaps too much seasoning’s been added – alluding to texting and tweeting and permitting a little device to ‘auto-correct’ us when some of us wouldn’t know if we’d been incorrect to begin with.

Look, we are all judged and judge and if we say we don’t, we’re liars or up for canonization.  (As a side note: hearing much talk recently about a certain female who held a pretty impressive position in a political organization in which she was passing as black until being outed by her own parents for being white.  Rather than calling her a liar or saying she was lying, I heard many people – both pundits on race relations as well as some of her family members – say she spoke in ‘untruths’ and was ‘less than honest’.  Now, I like a nuance as much as the next person, but come on. Is it now unPC to say someone’s a liar or is or has been lying?  We are judged for all the obvious reasons: bad hair day, no hair day, wearing high-water pants when not in Brooklyn’s hipster areas, excessive facial piercings or not enough facial piercings – depends upon which side of that coin you’re on, too tall, too short, too fat, too thin., wrong religion, wrong ethnicity, wrong political party, and on it goes.

So, let’s face it.  The playing field will never be leveled in our lifetime.  But rather than throw our hands in the air and surrender, we can try to lessen the judging by making the effort to speak better.  Most of us have verbal quirks.  Some are cute and kind of endearing.  Others not so much.

I knew a man who said he ‘was raped over the coals’ in some business deal gone awry.  My natural instinct was to correct him and say, ‘raked’ but he was a misogynist and I figured he said it to provoke outrage.  I felt ignoring him was better. 

With that in mind, here are just a few of the myriad words that are misused or mispronounced that tend to make the speaker sound less than scholarly:

Aks – instead of ask.  This is what we in the word biz like to refer to as a dyslexic mispronunciation (caused by switching the order of the letters).  Having spent most of my life in New York, I thought aks was a New York thing but since I haven’t had the opportunity to spend most of my life in the other 49 states, I’ll have to take my word for it.

Drug vs. dragged – as in “I drug that dead body into the woods.’   This tends to be a Southern thing but we all know how easy it is for slang to become pervasive and creep north, east and westward.  A drug is something one gets at the pharmacy or from that shifty co-worker who always has the munchies or is always wiping their nose and blaming it on allergies.  Whereas dragged is the verb you’re looking for to convey the fact that you lugged that dead body into the woods.

Duck tape – it is neither made from ducks, nor intended to be used on them. It is duct tape – to be used on air ducts and the like.

Expresso vs.  Espresso - We all know it’s espresso so just stop saying expresso.

Heighth – this one’s been around for decades (if not longer).  The correct pronunciation/spelling is height.  It is probably being confused with width.  It seems to be a favorite among TV color commentators (a sports commentator who assists the play-by-play announcer, often by filling in any time when play is not in progress.  [Weren’t they simply called TV commentators before the advent of color television?  Can’t the ‘color’ bit be dropped now after half a century of use?]  You can hear heighth being used with not a little frequency at the Olympics and other sporting events referencing the impressive heighth the athlete has achieved in the high jump, etc.  Even anchorpersons and TV hosts use the word.  Don’t they all have those ear pieces where the producers tell them things?  Why aren’t these producers telling them to STOP saying heighth?!

For all intensive purposes is another one that seems to trip some people up.  Now, your purposes may be quite intense, but you mean to say: for all intents and purposes.

Irregardless  - The less at the end says without, so no need to repeat the same sentiment with ir at the beginning.  It’s just plain old regardless.

Snuck – no such word as snuck. Don’t say, ‘We snuck into the movie.”  You ‘sneaked into the movie’ (and should be ashamed of yourself).

Yoke vs. Yolk – Yoke is the wooden frame connecting two animals – generally oxen – to work together.  Yolk is the yellow gelatinous bit of over-easy egg built for dipping toast.

Some of these mispronunciations are due to regional dialects.  Some to laziness.  If you can’t differentiate between the correct pronunciation, chances are you’ll misspell the word as well giving you a bonus point in the dopey column.  Memorization may be your last and best resort.

Now, it would be harsh to simply label those who mispronounce as stupid.  They’re just less concerned with words and how they are perceived by others and probably feel no compunction to cease wearing white shoes even in December.

Watch this space where perhaps next time we’ll discuss redundant words such as: Luxury Yacht .