Specious origins
New books about language myths, slang, and more
Conundrum of the week: If you hear of a language myth for the first time only when you're learning that it isn't true, have you added to your store of knowledge, or just further encumbered your already overtaxed memory?
The question came up as I was reading "Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language" (Random House, $22), the new book by Patricia O'Conner, author of the popular 1996 usage guide "Woe is I," and her husband, Stewart Kellerman. One of the myths O'Conner debunks is that shyster is related to Shylock, Shakespeare's bloody-minded moneylender, and is thus anti-Semitic.
How did I miss learning that myth? I guess, having grown up in a family of non-Jewish lawyers, I knew shyster as a disparaging word for a sleazy practitioner of law (or politics or accounting) long before I married into a family of Jewish non-lawyers. But until recently, the etymology was foggy, and conjectures abounded. Now, it seems, we know the truth: as O'Conner relates, word sleuth Gerald L. Cohen, who's been on the shyster case for decades, has traced the word to an 1843 interview in a New York newspaper. It was spelled shiseter, but the definition, said the editor, was unprintable. Shyster, earlier shiser, comes from the German Scheisser, literally a scatological term and metaphorically "an incompetent or contemptible person."
O'Conner is wary of shyster, but newspaper editors don't seem to have a problem with it. And Cohen himself, in a 2003 posting at the American Dialect Society's listserv, made a plea for preserving it: "Our language will be poorer (and unjustifiably so), if the term is ruled inadmissable in print."
Many of O'Conner's other myths and misconceptions will be familiar to regular readers of this column: It's not wrong to end sentences with prepositions, or to start them with but, or to split infinitives. But you can't say these things too often: Using "their" with a singular referent was not a feminist plot; Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet; and nobody knows the source of "the whole nine yards."
O'Conner's book brings a cheerful realism (shading into resignation) to problem pronunciations (flaccid, forte), changes in meaning (beg the question, decimate), and the bizarre delusion about the spelling of dilemma (not dilemna). This wide-ranging exercise in debunkery - coded quilts on the Underground Railroad? - would be a revelation to your favorite new graduate, and it should offer even a well-informed wordie something new to disbelieve.
But wait, there's more. Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg has a new collection of language commentaries, "The Years of Talking Dangerously" (Public Affairs, $18.95). Many of them were first broadcast on public radio's "Fresh Air," but these are rewarding reading even if you heard them the first time around (and you know you missed some). One of my favorites traces the evolution of the all-American Joe, from Joe to Joe Blow to Joe Palooka to Joe Sixpack to Joe the Plumber (remember him?). Another explains why the Supreme Court, since 1990, "has referred to dictionary definitions in more cases than in the preceding two centuries of its life"; another explains why texting won't ruin the language, any more than the telegraph did: "It will be a cold day at the copy desk before you encounter a smiley in the pages of the Economist."
Then there's Michael Adams's "Slang: The People's Poetry" (Oxford, $23.95) not a collection of words but an examination of the scope and function of slang in our language and our lives. It's scholarly yet highly readable - just as you'd expect from the author of "Slayer Slang," a guide to the language of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." (Did you know that in the Buffyverse there's a difference between hang and hang out? Now you do.)
"The Whatchamacallit: Those Everyday Objects You Just Can't Name (and Things You Think You Know About, But Don't)" (Hyperion, $22.99), by Danny Danziger and Mark McCrum, is a delightful example of the offbeat-dictionary genre. The authors give us not just aglet, the reinforced tip of the shoelace, but five ways to repair or replace one. The definition of bleed nipple comes with instructions on bleeding radiators; umbel with a recipe for elderflower cordial. And Robert Heinlein's waldo is nominated as the word we should adopt for the remote-clicker-zapper-whatchamacallit we now use to operate the TV.
Why waldo? "Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction," edited by Jeff Prucher and just out in paperback ($17.95), has the back story. Waldo, 1942, is borrowed from Heinlein's "fictional inventor of such a device" '; it's "a remotely operated body, arm, etc. used variously to extend the user's natural abilities, perform work in an inhospitable environment or at a distance, etc." For the fan who doesn't know where robot came from - and Prucher says they do exist - here's conclusive evidence that there was extraterrestrial life before "Star Trek."
E-mail Jan Freeman at mailtheword@gmail.com. For past columns, go to boston.com/ideas; visit the Word blog at boston.com/ideas/theword. 
