Cabbages and kings
IF our cover feature got your head spinning, wait until you hear that digital dictionaries can now decipher the people who use them. According to a feature on The Chronicle website this month, Merriam-Webster Inc, which started putting its dictionary content online in 1996, has been tracking the most searched-for words and has found interesting spikes that correspond to current events.
After Princess Diana’s death in 1997, a host of users looked up the word “cortège”, which is a ceremonial funeral procession, not a spray of flowers worn to one’s matric dance (that’s a corsage). In 2001, reports following the 9/11 tragedy made extravagant use of the words “rubble” and “surreal”, both of which became the most looked-up words online. After Michael Jackson’s death, millions wanted to find out what “emaciated” meant.
Most recently, after the discovery of the ancient bones of England’s King Richard III under a parking lot in Leicester, “Plantagenet” (his surname) has been the most popular search. The digital tracking mechanism cannot, unfortunately, record whether people are surprised by the definition they find, but I bet there were some bewildered frowns on the faces of those who thought a Plantagenet was something that keeps insects away from your petunias.
At least people are still interested in words and what they mean. Celebrities are often the conduits of linguistic enlightenment, albeit unwittingly. If it wasn’t for British chattering-show host Michael Parkinson, I wouldn’t have learnt how to pronounce two words that I’d been saying incorrectly for years. The first was “albeit”, used at least a dozen times by Princess Diana in her famous confessional session with Parkie. She said “all-be-it”, which is exactly what it means and how it should be said — not “ull-bait”.
The second was “segue”, a word which Gwyneth Paltrow must have discovered just before her Parkie appearance, because she used it almost as many times as the other princess used “albeit”. If you’ve never heard the word off the page, you are forgiven for thinking it is pronounced to rhyme with “league” (I did). It is, however, “seg-way”, a term used in music that means to move smoothly without pause to the next section or theme, as the inventors of the phonetically spelt two-wheeler may or may not have known.
I wonder, in these past weeks of popefever, which words have sent people scrabbling at their keyboards. I’d put my money on “conclave”, “humility”, or perhaps “red shoes”. A more intriguing question is: do the official pope selectors know that “Latin American” does not mean an American who speaks Latin?
The digital ability to track words of the moment tells us a great deal about people’s interests. So far it seems to report only global spikes, but I imagine things vary from place to place. Members of the Seshego community in Limpopo are probably looking up “coleslaw” right this second. Something has to be done with all those seized cabbages.