gasoline /ˈgæsəˌlin/

In one of those splendid examples of being divided by a common language, my recent post on petroleum (or petrol, as those wacky Brits like to call it) cries out for a similar investigation into the word gasoline. As far as out motor cars go, they are both the same but etymologically speaking, the are clearly continents apart.

Unlike petroleum, which can be traced back to Greek, gasoline is a relatively new word, dating back to the 19th century, where it starts out life as gasolene or gasoleine – or even gazoline. The OED defines it as follows:

Originally: a light fuel oil made by the fractional distillation of petroleum, used for heating and lighting. Subsequently: a similar petroleum distillate used as motor fuel.

The first recorded mention of the word can be seen in the Hampshire Telegraph & Sussex Chronicle from 1863;

Best and cheapest burning oils for winter… Refined colza, gasolene, petrolene. (12th September)

One interesting possibility for the origin of the word is that it may be an eponym – a word derived from someone’s name. The suggestion is that back in the 1860′s, a London merchant called John Cassell sold lighting fluid for lamps under the trade name Cazelene. Meanwhile, a competitor on Dublin had a similar product called Gazelene, possibly to avoid any legal challenges from Cassell, who had a patent out on Cazelene. And how do we know there was a patent? And ad in the London Times said so;

The Patent Cazeline Oil possesses all the requisites which have so long been desired as a means of powerful artificial light (Times, 27th November, 1862)

Considering that a patent application needs to be around before you start talking about it – let alone printing it – it’s likely that it was around a few years before the 1863 citation of gasolene, and may therefore be an early example of the phenomenon of “genericization” – where a trade name becomes a common word, usually to the dismay of the mark holder!

As we know, the use of gas took off in the US in contrast to the UK’s use of petrol. A quick look at the Corpus of Historical American shows the growth of its use in the phrase “gas station” from 1920 onwards. And both words demonstrate the process of back-clipping – the shortening of a longer word by dropping the end part. So now people talk about gas and petrol, not gasoline and petroleum.

Gas station 1920-2000

Still, the word gasoline itself is a great example of how you can build a word from pieces and parts – or for those who are more academically inclined, how to derive a word morphologically. Clearly there are three parts; gas, -ol, and -ine. So let’s go through each one.

Gas was coined in 1648 (or thereabouts) by the Flemish chemist, J.B. Van Helmont (1577–1644) to describe something that was “a far more subtile or fine thing than a vapour, mist, or distilled Oylinesses.” He modeled it on the Greek word chaos (χάος) and he explicitly said that

A few years later, the more global definition was;

A substance in a state in which it expands freely to fill the whole of a container, having no fixed shape (unlike a solid) and no fixed volume (unlike a liquid); spec. (distinguished from a vapour) such a substance above a critical temperature such that it cannot be liquefied by the application of pressure alone; any substance which normally exists in such a state.

This is pretty much what we currently understand as the meaning of gas.

The next part, -ol, is a suffix used in chemistry to form the names of hydrocarbons – such as that which we refine as fuel for cars. It comes from the Latin oleum meaning “oil,” which in turn appears to be a variation on the Greek elaion (ἔλαιον) or “olive oil.”

The final piece is the suffix -line that was used in the 19th century to create the names of chemical derivatives i.e. chemicals that were created as a result of extracting them using some sort of process – as in the distillation of fuel.

Still, whether you call it petrol or gasoline, it still burns a hole in your pocket!

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nebula /’nɛbjulə/

Back when I was a kid and home science didn’t include computers, the internet, and required much simpler technology such as books, I was fascinated by astronomy. In my early teens, the tools of my trade consisted of a cheap telescope, a stand made by my dad out of some old piping he found at the factory where he worked, and The Observer’s Book of Astronomy by Patrick Moore. In fact, I still have the book, which is dated 1967 and still hasn’t fallen apart.

Moore, now Sir Patrick, is something of an English icon in the world of amateur astronomy and television. He presents a show called The Sky at Night, and has done so since April 24th, 1957, which makes it older than I am. On the March 16th, 2011, Moore presented the 700th episode, which was attended by Queen guitarist Brian May [1] and popular TV physicist Brain Cox, who was inspired to take up astronomy after reading The Observer’s Book of Astronomy. It makes you wonder just how influential that one little book has been on amateur astronomers in the UK.

For many years I would spend evenings in the back yard of our two-up, two-down terraced house, pointing my telescope over the wall and turning on my flashlight [2] now and again to check my little book. And one of the things I wanted to see was the famous Horsehead Nebula in the constellation of Orion [3]. Sadly my telescope had all the magnification power of a pair of spectacles so I could never see the nebula as it was portrayed in Moore’s book.

Horsehead Nebula

As I became more interested in psychology and then linguistics, I never realized how much the language of astronomy would actually help, with its many words derived from Latin and Greek. And the stories of the constellations undoubtedly contributed to my fascination with the Classics and mythology in general.
In the world of astronomy, the word nebula means;

…an indistinct cloud-like, luminous object seen in the night sky, such as a cluster of distant stars, a galaxy, or a cloud of gas or dust. Now (usually): spec. a mass of gas or dust within a galaxy, typically visible either as a luminous patch or as a dark silhouette against a brighter background.

It comes from the Latin nebula meaning fog, mist, or cloud, which is how the nebula first appeared in early telescopes. This notion of cloudiness is why it was also used in the 5th century CE as a medical term to describe the look of infected urine i.e. cloudy. In the 17th century, it was also used in ophthalmology to describe any thin-film that coated the eye.

At the same time, it began to be used to describe sunspots, or the hazy ring that surrounded a sunspot. But by the beginning of the 18th century, the word was more likely to be applied in general to indistinct, cloudy celestial objects that we not stars or planets. The Horsehead nebula was identified in 1888 and became famous because of its distinctive shape that mimics a horse’s head.

The Greek word for “cloud” or “mist” is nepheli (νεϕέλη) and in mythology, Nephele was a cloud that Zeus shaped into an image of his wife, Hera, with the intent of tricking King Ixion into seducing her. Sadly for Ixion, he was weak and  attempted to rape her, for which he was punished by having to spend eternity in Hades strapped to a burning wheel. It’s never a good idea to piss off a Greek god, especially Zeus.

Ixion on his wheel

In another story, Nephele is the mother of Phrixus and Helle, who were about to be sacrificed when Nephele sent a golden ram to carry them to safety. Ultimately, Phrixus married the daughter of King Aeetes and sacrificed the ram in honor of their nuptials. The King then took this Golden Fleece and hung it on a tree where it was found by Jason and his Argonauts.

It is hypothesized that there is an Indo-European ancestor to the word as we see variations of it in Old High German nebul meaning “mist” and Icelandic njol meaning “night.” It’s worth noting that the word nebule was also used in the 15th century to mean “cloud” or “mist.”

People with asthma and other respiratory illnesses may be familiar with device called a nebulizer, which is used to spray a fine mist of drugs in suspension directly into the lungs. The word nebulizer comes, as you might guess, from nebula.

I no longer spend time as an amateur astronomer. Occasionally I’ll sit out in my back garden and look up at the stars for a few minutes but the old passion has gone. It’s disappeared – just like a cloud in the wind.

Notes
[1] Queen fans are well aware that Brian May was part way through a doctoral program in astrophysics before deciding to give it up due to the rising demands of his life as the lead guitarist for the band. After some 35 years of creating a back-catalog of albums that is impressive by anyone’s standards, he completed his Ph.D. and became Dr. May in May 2008.

[2] Although I use the word flashlight now, that’s because I’m bilingual and speak both British and American English fluently. As a kid, I called it a torch, with torch and flashlight being something of a shibboleth that labels you as English or American. When they were invented, they were originally called electric torches to distinguish them from flaming brands but over the years, the electric piece was dropped leaving just torch.

[3] For my younger daughter’s 13th birthday, I bought her a star in the constellation of Orion from the International Star Registry. The star now bears her name and can be found in Orion at right ascension 6h 1m 40s and declination 15 degrees and 57 minutes. Those of you with clever telescopes can check this out. She asked if it really was her star, and I told her that she could go and pick it up any time she liked.

For those of you wanting to buy someone a little something special, it’s well worth going to the International Star Registry and buying a little piece of the cosmos. “But darling, now every time I look at the stars, they remind me of you…”

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humblebrag /hʌmbelˌbræg/

So what do the following tweets have in common?

Just seen the TV ad for the unauthorised book on me. Yikes! (@SimonCowell)

Being a celebrity has afforded me many opportunities but has also boxed me in creatively (@kanyewest)

The desk is almost clear. Work on memoir, film all but done. Maybe I can allow myself the weekend off before beginning work on my TV series? (@SalmanRushdie)

Well, they are all examples of humblebrags, and a humblebrag is defined by the sporadically accurate but always entertaining Urban Dictionary as;

When you, usually consciously, try to get away with bragging about yourself by couching it in a phony show of humility.

The rise of Twitter has ushered in a golden age of humblebragging, and not only for celebrities. Here are a few examples from ordinary folks, just like you and me;

I gave a speech at TEDx and now it’s on the internet. If you’d like to be uninspired for fifteen minutes, click here:

Great. The same week I lose my fake tooth down a sink, I get asked to be a photoshoot model. I’ll be serving gap-toothed realness.

I hate when people tell me, ‘You’re too pretty for tattoos’ …shut up …it’s art.

As you have probably worked out, the art of the humblebrag is to combining shameless self promotion along with fake humility. In all of the examples above, you’ll see the two basic components; the brag and the self-deprecation. For example, the underlying structure of the statement from Simon Cowell is;

The Deprecate [1]: Yikes, I am the victim of an unauthorized biography.
The Brag: I am so famous people want to write whole books about me.

In the Kanye West example:

The Deprecate: I am stifled by my celebrity status.
The Brag: Hey, I’m a celebrity!

And in the Salman Rushdie tweet:

The Deprecate: I’ve been so busy and need a rest.
The Brag: I’m so busy because I’m so clever and have TV shows and memoirs.

The Brag/Deprecate structure can, I suggest, be applied to any humblebrag. The deprecate also functions to try and give the impression that the braggart is “just a regular person” but is clearly just a smokescreen to allow for the brag.

And even the Merriam-Webster lexicographer Peter Solokowski is not above the occasional humblebrag, as evidence in this recent tweet:

I’m very humbled by the wonderful piece in @slate‘s @browbeatslate blog by @abbyohlheiser: http://slate.me/LOpxCp Thank you!! Welcome all

And the underlying structure?

The Deprecate: How humble I feel.
The Brag: Look, the folks at Slate are writing about me!

It’s possible that some folks unconsciously fall into humblebragging, but in the Twitter environment, one of the major points of the entire system is to allow people to talk about themselves and share their lives with a world that they think cares. Twitter is, by and large, an example par excellence of the “Me Generation,” [2] and is up there with Facebook, its more wordy companion.

Facebook takes humblebragging to extremes. It’s an opportunity to people to post to the world how special they are, how great their lives are, how talented/beautiful/important they are, and indulge in an orgy of mutual appreciation. It’s tailor-made for parent humblebraggers, whose postings are always thinly veiled brags about how smart their kids are.  The subtext for “My 18-month-old won’t stop talking and it is driving me crazy!” is;

The Deprecate: I’m stressed, just like normal parents.
The Brag: Look how smart my kid is! Talking at 18-months. Must be a genius. [3]

A colleague of mine will go for months without posting to Facebook – until she takes a trip abroad and starts the rounds of “OMG, so tired after landing in Sydney” or “Almost fell asleep in the Sydney Opera house because of the jet lag.” Once back home, we never hear “Just got back from Wal-Mart with a new can opener” or “Took the trash out and it was raining.” Nope, it’s only the glamorous world that we hear about.

And that, of course, is what humblebragging is ultimately about; it’s a way of creating the image we want to be, as opposed to displaying the image of what we actually are.  We post the edited highlights of our lives and polish them up just a little because we don’t want to appear – heaven forbid! – boring.

Tweets and Facebook posts therefore take on an air of excitement and drama, which is the purpose behind editing. The film director, Alfred Hitchcock, once famously said;

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

Hence the rise of the humblebrag. We become dramatic; we become interesting; but we also want to be simultaneously special and ordinary. Kanye West may want to sound like “just like an everyday person” but he doesn’t actually want to be one! When celebrity Tila Tequila tweeted;

I hate my lambo! Police is ALWAYS pulling me over just cuz its a lambo so they always think I’m speeding but I’m not!! Then they let me go!

..you know she’s trying to sounds “just like one of us who gets pulled over” but she also wants you to know she (a) has a Lamborghini and (b) gets let off because she’s a celebrity.

Tila’s lambo: Such a bore

The humblebrag is essentially a form of paralipsis, which is a rhetorical device used by a speaker to bring attention to something by professing to be ignoring it. If a politician says, “Irrespective of my honorable friend having once been charged with tax evasion, I believe there are many reasons for not voting for his being Head of the Treasury,” that’s paralipsis.

Although humblebrag has not yet made it into any of the standard dictionaries, it did make it into the American Dialect Society 2011 Word-of-the-Year list, an although it lost out as WOTY to occupy, it did place first in the “Most Useful” category. It therefore may simply be a matter of time before it becomes a dictionary word.

Clearly it’s a portmanteau word made from humble and brag. The OED defines humble as;

Having a low estimate of one’s importance, worthiness, or merits; marked by the absence of self-assertion or self-exaltation; lowly: the opposite of proud.

It appeared in Middle English as umble, humbul, humbyll, and oumbbylle, originating from the Latin humilem, meaning lowly, small, or insignificant. This, in turn, came from humus meaning earth or ground.

Back in the 16th century, brag meant, “A loud noise, the bray of a trumpet,” and it is that sense of a braying trumpet that lead to the modern meaning of arrogant or boastful language. There’s still uncertainty about the word’s origins but one suggestion is that it derives from the Old Norse brak, which is a “creaking noise.” Another is that it is from Old Norse bragr meaning “the best, the foremost, the boast or toast.”

Whatever the origin may be, I’m betting that humblebrag will slide into the dictionaries within 5 years – unless we all suddenly decide that self-promotion is a bad thing. And my guess is that the world will end before true humility makes a comeback.

Postscript 6/11/12
Remiss of me not to mention the excellent @humblebrag Twitter stream run by Harris Wittels. It’s well worth following for the splendid examples of painfully obvious false humility, or just catch up now and again at http://twitter.com/humblebrag

Notes
[1] I’m using the term deprecate to refer to the element of the sentence (or narrative) structure that is used to convey a sense of “ordinariness.” The word itself derives from the Latin deprecare meaning “to pray away” or “to ward off.”

[2] Twenge, J.M. (2006) Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before. New York, NY: Free Press.

See also Twenge, J.M. (2009) The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. New York, NY: Free Press.

[3] Sadly, the bitter truth is that although everyone believes their children are above average, statistically that cannot be the case. The odds are that your kiddo is average and no amount of humblebragging will change that. I am, in fact, so confident of my claim that I predict that YOU who is reading this NOW will be convinced I am wrong and that your child is the exception, and although you might grasp the statistical truth, you are psychologically unable to accept that your offspring is anywhere other than at the top end of the bell curve.

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plagiarism /’pleɪd͡ʒəˌrɪzəm/

Those of us who write and  are not digital natives will remember a most excellent piece of technology called a typewriter. Anyone under 30 may well never have used one, nor even seen one, bizarre as that may seem to we “oldies.”

The typewriter was a predecessor to the word processor and was a mechanical device that printed letters on paper when you pressed the keys on a keyboard. When you hit a key, a small metal block with a letter embossed on it would hammer against a piece of paper through an intervening inked ribbon.  Here’s a short clip of someone using a typewriter, especially for our younger readers:

One of my first purchases when I went to university in the late 1970′s was a Smith-Corona blue typewriter, which I used to make my reports and essays more legible because my handwriting was never all that good. It still isn’t. At the time it was pretty much cutting edge, and, if memory serves, it had two colors; black and red. Cutting edge indeed!

Still, the act of creating an essay was laborious, especially if an error was made because there was, of course, no delete key available. The process of deletion involved using a white correction fluid to cover the mistake, then, once you’d let it dry, retype the intended word – or even sentence.

The temptation to make life easier by copying whole chunks of text from articles and books was always there. However, when you were “pulling an all-nighter” [1] it was actually easier to hammer out authentic text than copied, although there was always an element of rephrasing going on.

The act of taking whole chunks of someone else’s work is called plagiarism, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as;

The action or practice of taking someone else’s work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one’s own; literary theft.

The first written example dates from 1621 in Richard Montagu’s Diatribæ upon the first part of the late history of tithes in the phrase, “Were you afraid to bee challenged for plagiarisme?” Yet only a few years earlier we see the word plagiary also being used, and so both plagiarism and plagiary existed together.

Both words can be traced to the Latin plagiarius, a person who abducts the child or slave of another, or even a kidnapper, seducer, or literary thief. The Latin plagium means “kidnapping,: and so the modern notion of plagiarism fits well with the metaphor of “kidnapping an idea.”

The word may derive from the earlier Latin plaga meaning “net” or “snare,” or perhaps the earlier ancient Greek πλάγιος, which means oblique or slanted. Either way, it’s almost poetic to describe the stealing of someone’s work as a kidnapping of ideas. It almost makes it sound fair.

The Internet, with its easy access to text, has now made plagiarism much easier. Stunningly easier. As bloggers cut and paste wholesale from online newspapers, publishers are scrambling to know what to do. When does “fair use” become outright plagiarism? And how do you stop it when tossing bits and bytes across the Net takes no more than a click of a button and can be routed through computers across the entire world, many of which sit outside the jurisdiction of law enforcement?

The “plague of plagiarism” [2] is with us for the foreseeable future. And in case you were wondering, sadly plague does not come from the same source as plagiarism, despite it sounding so similar. The Latin plaga also exists as a word meaning “wound” or “gash” or “strike,” which is different from the “net” meaning of plagiarism. This meaning also carries the association with a wound or blow due to some form of divine retribution, hence the link to the modern meaning of plague.

It's a crime

Footnotes
[1] An “all-nighter,” as the word suggests, is a mode of action favored by procrastinators, idlers, and party-loving students, who wait until the night before an essay is due to actually write it. Knowing that your work had to handed in at a specific time less than 24-hours away focuses your concentration wonderfully. Much as I tried to avoid these things, I found that drinking copious amounts of tea would help the process along, and for that very reason I bought myself a pint mug to make large drinks. On a tough essay, I could go through up to four pints of tea before I’d finished.

[2] To avoid the charge of being a plagiarist, I have to ‘fess up to the fact that although I came up with the phrase “plague of plagiarism” on my own, it sounded so appropriate that I couldn’t believe no-one else had ever used it. Not surprisingly, it isn’t unique.  A Google search popped up 77,800 hits, with the first being to an article by Dr. Irving Hexham from the University of Calgary. In it, he says that to avoid the charge of being a plagiarist you should cite where you find text. So here’s the link to Dr. Irving’s original essay, The Plague of Plagiarism.

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salmagundi /ˌsælmʌ’gəndɪ/

On a recent trip to the UK, I picked up a copy of Simon Schama’s collection of essays entitled Scribble, Scribble, Scribble. This is a reference to a quote attributed to Prince William Henry, the Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh who, when he received another volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said, “Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr. Gibbon?” At his most populist, Schama is fun to read and capable of some hilarious turns of phrase; at his more scholarly, I’m afraid he reminds me of how stupid I am and how little I know. I get the impression that if we were sat at Hooters just chatting about anything, he’d not only already know what I was talking but always have something else to add that I didn’t know, making for a miserable time until the alcohol kicked in and I said, “Simon, just quit being a smart arse tell me who you think’s going to win the World Series this year.” Beer, boobs and baseball are great levelers.

Schama describes his collection as a salmagundi, which he defines as “a thing of various tastes and textures.” In that sense, it’s close to a potpourri, a cornucopia, or a gallimaufry. I’m sure he could have used any of those words and been just as happy to quote the etymology of each and every one. However, I’m just interested in the one.

The OED tracks its first citation in Thomas Blount’s 1674 edition of Glossographia, where he defined as;

…a dish of meat made of cold Turky and other ingredients.

The OED itself gives the following definition:

Cookery: A dish composed of chopped meat, anchovies, eggs, onions with oil and condiments.

Blount says it is of Italian origin whereas the OED cites it as French, presumably noting its entry into English via French cuisine rather than Italian. Its variations into salmagondi, salamongundy, and salad-magundy.

Salmagundi

I was originally struck by how similar it sounded to a children’s rhyme I used to sing called Solomon Grundy, which went like this;

Solomon Grundy,

Born on a Monday,

Christened on Tuesday,

Married on Wednesday,

Took ill on Thursday,

Grew worse on Friday,

Died on Saturday,

Buried on Sunday.

This is the end

Of Solomon Grundy

Well wouldn’t you know it, this appears not to be a coincidence. The suggestion is that Solomon Grundy is simply a corruption of salmagundi. What’s also fascinating to me – at least – is that when I now reread the rhyme, it could, indeed, be a poetic description of a stew made up from all the odds and ends that were hanging around on a Monday! You could eat it on Tuesday, even on Wednesday, but by Thursday, in the absence of a refrigerator, it would certainly begin to turn sickly. By Saturday, it would be no use at all, hence its burial on the Sabbath. In fact, this make more sense than applying it to a fictional person with a one-week lifespan.

Solomon Grundy

The OED chooses to consider its origins earlier than the 17th century as being obscure, which is not that I suspect they don’t think there are contenders to the throne but that they feel these to be pretenders and not verifiable royalty.

This wasn’t always the case. Way back in 1888, the Oxford University Press published An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Walter William Skeat, the Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of (shh!) Cambridge.

Skeat was the first to use the term “ghost word” to refer to words;

… which had never any real existence, being mere coinages due to the blunders of printers or scribes, or to the perfervid imaginations of ignorant or blundering editors.

One example he gives is the word morse in the following sentence by Sir Walter Scott in the book, The Monastry: “… dost thou so soon morse thoughts of slaughter?”

One etymologist at the time explained the words as being derived from the Latin mordere meaning “to bite” and so morse meant “to indulge in biting, stinging or gnawing thoughts of slaughter.”

Tragically for his reputation, the truth turned out to be that it was a misprint of the word “nurse!” Sometimes, etymologists can be too clever for their own good. Which is another reason why the OED possibly wanted to avoid entertaining speculations about the pre-17th century origins of salmagundi.

But not Skeat. He was quite happy to point out that;

We may fairly explain it from Italian salame, salt meat, and condito, seasoned. This is the more likely, because the Ital. salame would make the pl. salami, and this was once the term in use… The derivation of Ital. salami is clearly from Lat. sal, salt, though the suffix is obscure. The F. -gondi, for Ital. condito (or pl. conditi), is from Lat. conditus, seasoned, savoury, pp. of condire, to preserve, pickle, season. Thus the sense is ‘ savoury salt meats.’ (Skeat, 523)

This sounds pretty convincing, both from the sense aspect and from the phonetics. I’d be OK with taking Skeat’s assessment and inclined to believe that this is NOT an example of one of his ghost words.

Meanwhile, it seems that salmagundi also found its way to Jamaica as a fish paste dish called Solomon Gundy. Yes, the name is just an /r/ away from the British Solomon Grundy and it is likely to have originated from that. And apparently, there is a dish served in Nova Scotia consisting of pickled herring and onion in sour cream that is also called Solomon Gundy.

Jamaican Soloman Gundy

It’s use in a transferred non-cooking sense is first noted by the OED as in 1761, and since then had cropped up with this meaning, although not as a particularly high-frequency word. The Corpus of Historical American English shows 60 examples between 1810 and 2000, with the decade from 1910 to 1920 being the highest scoring period with 11 examples.  Compare that with the British National Corpus that includes only shows three instances during the 1980s through to 1993, and all these are in reference to an American journal called Salmagundi. So, not exactly a popular word.

So if you enjoy reading essays, it’s worth taking a look at Schama’s smorgasbord. Just be prepared for the occasional spoonful of stodge.

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planking /’plæŋkɪŋ/

Ever one for checking the etymological pulse of the world of pop culture, the word planking has caught my eye by exploding onto the media scene as the latest dangerous craze/fad/gene-pool-thinner. The act itself involves laying face down, like a plank or wood, in weird and/or unusual places, and then taking a picture to be shared across the internet. That’s it!

Get you plank on!

Now, like all stupid and pointless activities, the reason for it being catapulted into the collective consciousness is that someone has died, and nothing excites the media like Death, except Sex, and if you can link the two, you’re pretty much guaranteed a slot on Fox News. Curiously, many of the news reports refer to the dead man, Australian Acton Beale, as a “victim” of planking, which is an interesting metaphor to use considering that his death was caused by his own recklessness and not some wicked, third-party agent. Of course, one of the first steps to demonizing something is to turn it into a living thing by the metaphorical process of objectification. It also confers onto planking the status of an illness or disease, and therefore reinforcing that it’s a “bad thing.” Ah, how quickly our use of language can shape our perceptions of the world!

Still, if you must do it – and the 100,000 members of the newly swollen Facebook page, Official Planking apparently are at least considering it – there are some rules on how to plank safely:

1. You must always lay face down, ensuring your face remains expressionless for the duration of the Plank.
2. Your legs must remain straight, and together with toes pointed.
3. Your arms must be placed by your side, held straight and fingers pointed.
4. You must make it known that you are Planking. Saying “I am Planking” usually get this across. Sternly announcing it will ensure a good result.
5. Your safety should always be considered. Properly thought through Planking procedures should always go to plan. Never put your self at undue risk.
6. Every Plank that is captured must be named.

Notice that planking is crossing word-class boundaries. In the phrase “I am planking” it is taking on verb characteristics, whereas in “…Planking procedures” is is more adjectival, describing the type of “procedures.” But in the shock headlines where planking is used to refer directly to the activity, it is used as a verbal noun, or what we oldies prefer to call a gerund, if only because the word gerund sounds much more fun, cute, and cuddly than the more clinical, academic verbal noun. On the other hand, the rules above also refer to “the duration of the Plank,” so we now have the word “plank” without the -ing being used as a noun too!

What we need to watch for are references to someone who “planked himself to death” or perhaps “he planks regularly,” where the use of the -ed and -s suffixes establish the verbiness of plank meaning “to lie like a plank in an odd place.” Oh wait, the T-shirt is already here…!

"I planked" T-shirt

Planking previously had to significant meanings. The first is to refer simply to a collection of planks;

Planks collectively; the planks of a structure; plank-work. Also: a layer or surface made of planks, spec. one forming the outer shell or inner lining of a ship’s hull. (OED)

So you might say something like “I fell through the rotten, loose planking through to the deck below. Or you might just decide to fix the deck.

Another use is in the gerundial form as the “action of providing or covering something with planks,” such as in the sentence “When the planking was completed, he had the laborious job of caulking to do.”

In the US, planking is also the name given to a form of cooking that involves nailing fish or meat to a slab of wood:

Planking‥involves nailing the fish to thick oak boards coated with shortening, propping those boards on racks around a bonfire of logs‥, continually basting with the secret sauce‥and waiting for five hours in the middle of the night until the smoke has thoroughly roasted hundreds of pounds of shad. (Washington Post, 10th June, 2004).

Planking on the grill

Going back to the day when people wore hats other than backward-facing baseball caps, planking described the process of shaping and hardening a hat on a plan;

Planking,‥the felting of hat bodies by rolling them on a plank, and frequently immersing them in acidulated water. (OED)

Finally, an even more obscure meaning is “the action of levelling land by drawing a plank across it,” which sounds rather similar to the process by which folks who create crop circles work but in a much more artistic fashion.

Planking crop circles

The word plank appears in Middle English as plakys, planak, planc, and a host of others. It came to the language via Anglo-Norman and Old French roots, and can be traced to be a variant of the Old French planche meaning “little wooden bridge.” Going back a little further , classical Latin has the word planca for “board, plank, or slab.” It’s the notion of stiff, wooden, and slab-like that has lead to the word planking taking on its new connotation.

At the time of writing (19th May, 2011) this definition of the words is so new that even the usually current Urban Dictionary has an older meaning;

When one individual proceeds to lie naked, face to face, on top of another person, in a rigid horizontal state.

Of course, I have taken the opportunity to submit my own entry and I’ll post the results of this in the future. Meanwhile, stay sensible and always practice safe planking.

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cerastes /sɪ’ræstiz/

One of my favorite books is an illustrated copy of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, which I picked up on sale at a Barnes &Noble store, but you can find online at the Barnes & Noble web site.

The illustrations are by Gustav Doré, who has to be one of my favorite illustrators. The pictures are in black and white and are for me depict just what I think things should be like in the Afterlife.

In Canto IX, Dante and Virgil come across the Erinyes or Furies.
Because mine eye had altogether drawn me
Tow’rds the high tower with the red flaming summit,
Where in a moment saw I swift uprisen
The three infernal Furies stained with blood,
Who had the limbs of women and their mien,
And with the greenest hydras were begirt;
Small serpents and cerastes were their tresses,
Wherein their horrid temples were entwined.

"This is Meghera on the left-hand side..."

The word cerastes is new to me, although I had clearly read it in the past and simply skipped over it.

A cerast(e) is a horned serpent typically found in Africa and parts of Asia. In the poem, Dante is trying to evoke the image of Medusa, so using “serpents and cerastes” does the job.

Ceraste

The word derives originally from the Greek, κεράστης, which means horned (κεράσ = horn). Note the initial letter is a hard /k/ sound in Greek. However, that softened when the word became the Latin, cerastes, and took on the initial /s/sound instead.

The word ceratinous is an adjective that means horny or of a horny structure or nature and a cerastium is a horn-shaped plant.

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