10 Words That Sound Rude (But Really Aren’t) - 500 Words Ep. 32

A few days ago, HH tweeted this:

If you’re CUNCTATIVE then you’re prone to delaying or procrastinating.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 12 August 2016

It’s one of those words that, if you’re not careful, could be taken in a very, very questionable direction. But there are plenty of words that don’t even have to be mispronounced to raise eyebrows—they’re just straight-up dirty. Or, at least, that’s how it might seem.

‘To be in a panshit’ is an old Scots expression meaning ‘to be in a fit of excitement’.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 29 May 2016

CLATTERFART is a 16th century word for a gossip or telltale.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 17 November 2015

In 18th century slang, a PRIME-COCK-BOY was a keen, energetic novice or freshman.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 21 April 2016

Peniaphobia, for instance, is nothing more than the fear of poverty and destitution. Pissasphalt is a type of bitumen. A tittynope is a crumb or portion of something, left over after all the rest has been used. A cockchafer is a beetle. A cock-bell an icicle. In fact, whether you’re talking about assart or spunk-water (you can thank Tom Sawyer for that one), there are quite a few words in the English language that sound rude, but really—genuinely—aren’t.

So brace yourselves, because it’s 10 of those that are the subject of this week’s YouTube video:

If you haven’t had your fill, there are nearly 100 words like these for your perusal over on Mental Floss, any one of which could have made the final cut here. One word that didn’t, however, and that perhaps needs a little more explanation, is this:

A COVERSLUT is an item of clothing worn to cover up a stain on a garment underneath.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 15 June 2015

The key to this word (and others like it) is that sluttish originally meant just “untidy” or “slovenly”, while labelling someone (of either sex—Chaucer describes a man as sluttish in the Canterbury Tales) as a slut once simply implied that they were messy or disorganised.

But by the end of the fifteenth century that meaning had begun to broaden. Now it was people’s characters and morals—and, wholly unfairly, women’s morals in particular—that were being described as sluttish, if they were loose or disreputable, and it’s from there that the word’s modern connotations eventually emerged.

The older use of slut and sluttish to mean “untidy” survived right through to the early 1900s, giving the word coverslut more than enough time to emerge in the language in the mid-1600s. Essentially, it referred to nothing more than a garment warn to disguise untidy clothes underneath, or to protect your clothes from messy work or chores. So despite appearances, it was really nothing more than an apron.

DOLLY-TRIPE is an old Warwickshire dialect word for an untidily-dressed woman. pic.twitter.com/ir0FIE5YBF

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 25 October 2015

10 Words Borrowed From Other Languages - 500 Words Ep. 31

A long, long time ago over on HaggardHawks, this little fact popped up:

Around 30% of the English language is derived from French.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 17 January 2014

In retrospect, that’s a little disingenuous (not least because linguists can’t really decide what actually constitutes a word), but regardless of the parameters involved, studies of etymology tend to agree that anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the English language has been borrowed directly into English from French.

Elsewhere in the dictionary, things get increasingly far-flung: besides the likes of German, Spanish and Italian, English has adopted words from practically every major European language, including Norwegian (slalom), Finnish (sauna), and Czech (robot), as well as a number of global big-hitters like Russian (vodka), Arabic (almanac), the Chinese (lychee) and Japanese (karate) languages, and Hindi (juggernaut), Bengali (jute), Urdu (cummerbund) and all the other languages of the Indian subcontinent.

And it’s borrowed words and the languages we have taken them from that are up for discussion in this week’s HH video:

We might owe the humble word tattoo to (SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t seen the video) one of the furthest of the far-flung languages of the south Pacific, but it is by no means alone. 

Other somewhat surprising languages to have provided words to English include Tamil, another Indian language and the official language of both Sri Lanka and Singapore, which is the origin of the likes of catamaran, cheroot and pariah. Javanese, the most widely spoken language in Indonesia, is the origin of batik and lahar, another name for a volcanic mudflow. 

The native Aboriginal languages of Australia have given us billabong, budgerigar and dingo. When you run amok, you’re using a Malay word (borrowed into English via Portuguese) meaning “attacking frenziedly”. The boondocks take their name from a Tagalog word meaning “remote place”. And over in the Caribbean, the Taíno language is responsible for a number of very familiar words adopted into English via Spanish Caribbean colonists, including tobacco, hurricane, potato, canoe and even Caribbean itself. But these words, and several others like them, are almost all that remains of the Taíno civilization.

An indigenous Arawak people, the Taíno were once the most numerous people in the entire Caribbean. As such were the first Native Americans that Christopher Columbus came into contact with when he arrived in the Americas in the late 1400s; Columbus’s misinterpretation of the Carib people’s word for themselves, Caniba (as well his misapprehension that they were anthropophagous) even gave us the word cannibalism.

But as more Europeans arrived in the Caribbean, the Taíno population collapsed as its people contracted diseases for which they had no natural immunity, most notably smallpox. Within three decades, their numbers had dwindled by as much as 90%; according to some accounts, by the mid 1500s there were fewer than 500 individual Taíno people alive in the world. 

Although the population understandably never recovered, pockets of Taíno people survive across North America today. But their culture and language suffered so terrifically in the aftermath of Columbus’s arrival that the handful of Taíno words to have survived in English offer an extraordinary and tantalizingly rare glimpse of a long-lost civilization... 
  

10 Words For Other Words

If you’ve been keeping up with the HH “500 Words” YouTube series, you’ll so far have found out about 280 of the 500 words we’re going to look at this year. But this week, we’re turning things around. 

So from hypernyms and hyponyms to holonyms and holophrases, this week’s video is looking at 10 Words for Other Words.

(And for more words like those, then be sure to check out the HH article that inspired it over on Mental Floss.)

One word that didn’t make the final cut here, however, is backronym. We’ve discussed some backronyms on YouTube before—mainly in our 10 Word Origins Stories That Are Completely Untrue video—and it’s a myth-busting topic that’s always worth revisiting.

Backronyms are words or phrases that are widely and mistakenly believed purported to be acronyms. Posh, for instance, is often claimed to stand for “port out, starboard home”, a reference to moneyed cruise ship passengers paying for the best views on both the outward and homeward bound parts of their voyage. Golf too is said to stand for “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden” (or ladies do something else that begins with F). And the distress signal SOS is famously claimed to stand for “save our souls”, or “save our ship”.

“It says, ‘you may have been missold PPI.’”

None of these is true, of course. Posh is simply thought to come from an old slang word for cash or loose change. Golf is probably descended from an old Dutch word for a club, colf or kulf (albeit with perhaps some influence of a Scots word for a stout blow to the head). And the letter combination “SOS” was chosen as a distress signal for no other reason than that its rhythmic and symmetrical combination of dots and dashes [· · · – – – · · ·] is so immediately noticeable. Incidentally, precisely the same combination of dots and dashes could also be used to spell the letters “VTB” in Morse code, but the designation SOS was used because of its own symmetry and memorability.

In Morse code, the distress signal SOS [· · · – – – · · ·] could just as accurately be interpreted as the letters VTB.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 22 July 2016

Before SOS was adopted in the early 1900s, however, the standard telegraph distress signal was “CQD” [– · – ·    – – · –    – · ·]. It’s fair to say that that’s hardly the most recognisable or memorable arrangement of dits and dahs on offer, so why pick that?

Well, on their own the letters “CQ” had long been used as a telegraphic distress signal as they sound identical to the French word “sécu”, an abbreviation of sécurité. The Marconi Telegraph Company simply added a letter D to this to make their first recommended distress signal, CQD. But just like SOS, CQD also fell foul of backronymy and before long myths had emerged claimed that it stood for “come quickly—danger!”, or “come quickly—drowning!”

Problems with interpreting the confusing set of letters “CQD” over a poor signal, however, eventually led to calls for a more immediately recognizable distress signal to be adopted, and so SOS was officially introduced in 1906. 

Carpet

Since the first HaggardHawks post for BuzzFeed went up last week, it’s been viewed more than 300,000 times and, incredibly, has boosted the Twitter account past the 13,000 followers mark—so you can now pit your wits against the fourth HaggardHawks Quiz… But of all 53 language facts cherry-picked from the Haggard Hawks fact book for BuzzFeed, one has attracted far more attention than all the others put together: 

Nothing rhymes with CARPET. http://t.co/oLcpVgYaIF

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) July 18, 2015

This fact actually went up on the Twitter account a few months ago (bonus fact: nothing rhymes with month either), and caused quite a stir back then too. But in the comments section over on BuzzFeed, the same debate has been sparked all over again:

So. Does nothing really rhyme with carpet? Exactly what does it take for two words to be classed as rhymes? And just how rare are unrhymable words anyway?

Well, as some commenters quite rightly pointed out, determining whether or not two words rhyme depends of course on your pronunciation, and what kind of rhyme you’re looking for. As a benchmark, rhyming dictionaries understandably limit themselves to one standard accent of English, and to finding only the most accurate and most straightforward form of rhymes, known as ‘perfect’ or ‘full’ rhymes—otherwise they’d be overflowing with words, pairs of words, and entire phrases that almost-but-not-quite rhyme with one another.

British English rhyming dictionaries tend to use standard Received Pronunciation as their basis, but naturally things are different elsewhere—that’s why American English rhyming dictionaries, based on General American pronunciation, will tell you that nothing rhymes with iron (pronounced /aɪərn/, with a noticeable R sound), aside from derivatives like gridiron and andiron, while British dictionaries (which give the pronunciation /ʌɪən/, without a heavy R) will quite happily tell you that it rhymes with a whole clutch of words, including the likes of lion, Ryan, O’Brien and Uruguayan. (Note to self: write a poem later about a Uruguayan lion named Ryan O’Brien.)

Regardless of your accent, however, seriously—nothing rhymes with carpet. 

According to The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, for two words to form a perfect rhyme, the final stressed vowels in both words and all the sounds following them have to be identical. In the case of carpet (RP: /kɑːpɪt/, GM: /kɑɹpɪt/), the stressed vowel is the ar sound in the first syllable, which means that any word or words that we can safely say rhyme with carpet have to end with the full combination of sounds /-ɑːpɪt/, or /-ɑɹpɪt/. And in English, there just isn’t anything else that works.

Pet is too short (and is pronounced /pɛt/, not /pɪt/ or /pət/). While trumpet, armpit, basket, pulpit, market, parapet, and all the other suggestions being thrown back and forward in the comments section don’t follow the same pattern, and so don’t quite fit the bill. Almost-but-not-quite rhymes like these are often labelled ‘slant’, ‘half’, or ‘imperfect’ rhymes, but by definition the consonants in a slant rhyme should remain the same, while the vowel sound varies (like hand and bend, or rhyme and Rome); market, trumpet and basket all just take too many liberties.

By far the best suggestion here is tar pit, which appears to match all of the phonological criteria required. The trouble is that both the Oxford English and Merriam-Webster Dictionaries list tar pit as two separate words—and if separate words are required to form a rhyme, then it’s no longer classed as a perfect rhyme but a ‘mosaic’ rhyme. After all, we could just as easily claim that car pit, star pit, sitar pit, or Jordanian dinar pit rhyme with carpet if we’re not fussed about ‘mosaicking’ words together.

There are, of course, lots of different forms of rhyming, and some intrepid poet will no doubt at some point have used the word carpet and quite happily (and successfully) rhymed it with armpit or parapet. (In fact, the stories behind two undeterred writers’ attempt to write a poem about a carpet and rhyming story about oranges are explained in Word Drops.) But so long as we’re drawing the line at perfect rhymes based on a standard pronunciation, then it’s true—nothing rhymes with carpet.

But just how rare are unrhymable words? Well, although a lot of words you might think have no rhyme actually do, the problem with limiting ourselves to perfect rhymes—which require the stressed vowel and everything after it to rhyme—is that the further back from the end of a word the stressed vowel is located, the more troublesome finding an appropriate rhyme for it becomes. 

So while a handful of monosyllabic words—like month, scarce, gouge and ninth—contain such a tricky combination of sounds that nothing else matches them, in polysyllabic words, as the stress shifts further and further back in the word (to the penultimate syllable, as in carpet, neutron or penguin, or even the antepenultimate, as in animal, dynamo or citizen), the rhyming element of the word (–arpet, –ynamo, –itizen) becomes longer and more complicated, and the chances of finding a perfect match for it diminishes. So potentially there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of unrhymable words in English—of which carpet is just one.

Now then. There once was a lion named Ryan. Whose passport was stamped Uruguayan...