It’s not often that I come across a word on the front page of a major daily newspaper that I’ve never seen or heard — but it happened this morning when I read the first sentence in an article about an on-going battle that has raged this summer on the shores of Georgian Bay. Here’s the lead in a Toronto Star article by Murray Whyte:

“BALM BEACH, ONT. — Idyllic and twee, this little lakeside hamlet, complete with a shabby arcade featuring a menu of greasy summertime delights, would seem the unlikeliest place to be pondering its own version of martial law. But here in the Township of Tiny, on the shores of Georgian Bay, desperate times call for desperate measures.”

I know what you’re thinking — Township of Tiny? Well, it’s true — that’s the name of the township where Balm Beach, the beach the story’s about, is located. But that’s not what snagged me.

What tripped me up was “twee”. So naturally, I had to look it up. Here’s what it means, according to Merriam-webster.com: “chiefly British : affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint”.

I could have guessed it was “chiefly British” (could there have been any doubt?). But even so, I felt like a bit of an illiterate (it was, after all, a word on the front page of the paper) — until, that is, I read the etymology. According to Merriam-webster.com, it is a “baby-talk alteration of sweet“. Well, that makes me feel better — no reason any of us with non-British parents would have been subjected to such excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint a word.

Parse isn’t a word I use, but when I hear it, I usually feel pretty confident that I “get” what it means. That’s certainly how I felt when Andrew Bacevich used it in an interview on Bill Moyers Journal the other day. Here’s the sentence (from the transcript of that interview) in which he used it:

“Parsing every word, every phrase, that either Senator Obama or Senator McCain utters, as if what they say is going to reveal some profound and important change that was going to come about if they happened to be elected.”

From the way he used it I figured it has to do with pulling apart every sentence to try to figure out what the speaker means. (Not a huge intellectual challenge figuring it out from what Bacevich said, I know!)

Though I was confident I had the gist of the meaning, I decide to look it up. Indeed, the second meaning (for the transitive verb), according to Merriam-webster.com, was bang on: “2: to examine in a minute way: analyze critically”.

But what I found interesting was the first definition (for the transitive verb): “1a : to resolve (as a sentence) into component parts of speech and describe them grammatically b: to describe grammatically by stating the part of speech and explaining the inflection and syntactical relationship”. So, my assumption about it having to do with pulling apart every sentence was correct, but I didn’t realize it meant doing so in terms of parts of speech.

I’m guessing, but I suspect Bacevich is of the generation that was taught how to diagram a sentence — so he probably could parse a sentence into its parts of speech. Unfortunately, many of us never learned how to do that. (I think I had a substitute teacher who tried to teach us, but it wasn’t a normal part of our curriculum — and I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been for some time.) That’s a pity, I think…

I guess the only kind of parsing most of us will ever do is the kind described in the second definition.

This week’s word is a reflection of my mood, and the fact that many of my clients have had me “on hold” the past few weeks. All I can figure is that they don’t seem to know what deadline means — or maybe they don’t realize that deadline means the same thing when applied to something they’re suppose to send me as when they expect something from me.

Anyway, in light of this, I thought I’d make deadline my word of the week to suggest to Merriam-Webster.com that it update its definition.

Here’s how they (currently) define it:

1: a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot 2 a: a date or time before which something must be done;b: the time after which copy is not accepted for a particular issue of a publication.

I think they should add this as a third entry: A date or time something is due, or promised, but not delivered by.

I’ve always preferred serif fonts — things like Times New Roman and Courier — and I try to encourage my clients to use them. These days, I’d say more of my clients use sans serif fonts (like Arial), so pushing serif fonts is an uphill battle. (I recently had one client demand use of Verdana, a font that I wasn’t familiar with. When I asked why they wanted Verdana I was told it is the font the company adopted for its web site, but my client didn’t know why. Interestingly, since then I read somewhere else that Verdana was specifically created for web text, so I guess greater minds than mine have decided that.)

Anyway, having given up the battle for serif fonts, lately I’ve taken up a new cause: fighting against using black backgrounds and white (or, worse yet, yellow!) text on web sites. I’ve come across a number of sites with black backgrounds lately and they drive me crazy because they are very hard to read. I don’t want to name any sites here (but if you drop me an e-mail, I’ll give you an example), but I’m sure you’ve seen some yourself.

Please — however boring it may seem — stick to white, or light coloured, backgrounds with dark coloured text. Your readers will thank you. (Actually, that’s a lie. Your readers will not thank you if you use a white background because they won’t notice it. But believe me, they will notice — and be very frustrated — if you use a hard-to-read dark background with white text.)

Those of you who’ve been paying attention to the news the past few days will have seen this word. It’s the name of a Internet search engine that debuted this week. I first saw a reference to it in the letters section of the Toronto Star. I hadn’t seen the original news story to which readers were responding, but I gathered from the letters that this is some new search engine that was/is hoping to go head-to-head with Google.

What I didn’t know when I read the letters was how to pronounce it. As a result, in my mind, I “heard” it as separate letters: C-U-I-L. (In other words, I didn’t sound it out.) Well, since then, I’ve seen/heard more news stories about it and I’ve learned that apparently it’s pronounced “cool”. A cute (if annoying) play on words, I thought.

Well, before sitting down to write this, I thought I better look it up, just in case it’s really a word. (Or very similar to, or inspired by, a real word – kind of the way Google is – arguably – inspired by: googol, which (according to Merriam-webster.com) is the figure 1 followed by 100 zeros equal to 10100.) As I suspected, Cuil is not listed as a word on Merriam-webster.com. (Interestingly, as of today, it’s not listed on WordSpy either.)

Curious about this new word and new search engine, I went on Cuil.com to see whether it explained the genesis of the name. According to them, “Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge.” Not having access to an old Irish dictionary, I couldn’t verify this claim – but it certainly sound impressive.

Anyway, for the time being, Cuil isn’t a word I’ll be using. But, my guess is Cuil will probably make it into common parlance sooner than we think. (Given the initial reviews and commentary about the search engine, Cuil could become the 21st century equivalent of the Edsel, but I hope not.)

It certainly comes as no surprise to me that there are lots of people as interested in words as I am. That said, I was surprised when I came upon Word Spy, a web site devoted to “lexpionage“, which it describes as “sleuthing of new words and phrases”. To make it onto Word Spy the word (or phrase) has to have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites and other recorded sources.

I don’t know who’s behind the site, but it’s a neat idea and fun to scroll through and see how creative some folks are with words. So, enjoy…

“Ontario will protect a huge swath of its northern boreal forest in an effort to fight climate change and save polar bears and other threatened species.” When I read this in an article in the Toronto Star on July 14, 2008, I thought to myself, “Gee, I wonder what kind of trees are in a “boreal forest”.”

My confusion continued the next day (July 15^th) when I read the lead in another story (by the same writer) in the Toronto Star. This one started out, “Ontario has made the largest conservation commitment in Canadian history, setting aside at least half the Northern Boreal region — 225,000 square kilometres — for permanent protection from development…”. Hmmm… capital N, capital B — sounds like it’s a proper name. Now I’m really confused.

Unfortunately, an editorial on July 15^th in the Toronto Star didn’t clear up my confusion — it actually added to it. Here’s the first line of it: “For most Ontarians, the vast boreal forest that blankets the province’s far north is little more than an abstraction.”

That makes me think (again) that a boreal forest is a type of forest. So, after that, I did what I should have done the first time I read about the boreal forest. I looked up boreal. Here’s how Merriam-webster.com defines boreal: 1: of, relating to, or located in northern regions (boreal waters) 2: of, relating to, or comprising the northern biotic area characterized especially by dominance of coniferous forests.

Given this definition, my view is that unless the “Northern Boreal” forest is a proper name for a region, it’s redundant to refer to it as that, and it’s also redundant to tell readers that the boreal forest blankets the province’s far north — where else would it be?

A friend and I were driving and listening to the local news on the radio. One of the news stories was about a guy who was killed the previous night. Along with telling us where he was found, the newscaster also mentioned that the deceased had been in an altercation earlier in the evening. No other information was given, but my friend and I took this additional bit of information to mean that the fact he was involved in an altercation had something to do with his death.

Immediately after that news story my friend asked me the definition of altercation. I said I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was a fight — a physical fight. My friend wasn’t sure, but he tended to agree with me. Both of us agreed that, in any event, “altercation” was vague.

When I got home, I looked altercation up. Here’s how Merriam-webster.com defines it: “a noisy heated angry dispute; also: noisy controversy synonyms: see quarrel.

Clearly, I was wrong in thinking an altercation is a physical fight — it is verbal. That being the case, it would have been lots clearer (to more listeners, I’d venture to say) had the newscaster simply said the guy got into a heated argument earlier in the evening.

So, the question I couldn’t help wonder was why the newscaster didn’t use argument instead? Did he think listeners would’ve thought less of him if he’d used a simpler, more widely-understood word? I don’t think many would have minded. Indeed, if anything, I think more listeners would simply have understood what he said and would have listened for the next news item, rather than get distracted (like my friend and I did) trying to figure out what he meant.

The following is from a recent Toronto Star editorial about a Supreme Court of Canada case on free speech:

“In an on-air commentary, Rafe Mair, an ex-politician turned bloviator for a Vancouver radio station, compared Kari Simpson, an anti-gay activist, to Hitler, among others. She sued him on the grounds that his remarks suggested she condones violence against gays and were, therefore, defamatory. The British Columbia court of appeal sided with the plaintiff, but the Supreme Court overturned that ruling. …

“That’s good news for talk-show hosts, newspaper columnists, bloggers … and editorial writers.”

I had certainly heard the word bloviate before, and, given the context in which it was used, I was pretty sure I knew what it meant. But, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it used in print. What I wondered was whether it’s a relatively new word — like blog and blogosphere — that’s now made its way into common usage — or at least common enough for use in editorials.

So I looked it up. According to Merriam-webster.com, bloviate means “to speak or write verbosely and windily”. The definition didn’t surprse me; what did, however, was that it is hardly a new word. Indeed, according to Merriam-webster.com it is “circa 1879”. So, I guess we can’t blame talk radio and the Internet for creating bloviators — just for giving them a more wide-reaching forum.

This week I was at a jazz festival. Improvisational riffs back and forth between musicians have always fascinated me, as has the word “riff” itself. I know, strictly speaking, riff’s not onomatopoeic, but it is fun to say, which I think is the main reason I like the word. Anyway, given that it’s been on my mind, I thought riff would be a good choice for Word of the Week.

But, when I started writing this, I did a quick check to make sure riff doesn’t fit the definition of onomatopoeia. Turns out I was right, Merriam-webster.com defines onomatopoeia as: 1 the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it (as buzz, hiss), and 2 the use of words whose sound suggests the sense.

After looking it up, I realized that onomatopoeia should be the Word of the Week. After all, it’s even more fun to say than riff, which means it’s an even better reminder that words can live in our ears and mouths, as well as on the page.