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Apart from astroturfing, other words and phrases of the day for today are:

1) Holding pattern. The hype is over. The Ashes cricket series between Australia and England has finally started. In Cardiff of all places (which should remind us that actually England players represent England and Wales). In the build up to the first day’s play, the Aussies were struck with the bad news that super-fast bowler Brett Lee had suffered a side strain and was ruled out of the first Test match. But when the injury was still an unknown quantity, before the results of a scan had come back, the team spokesman described the feeling of limbo like this: “We’re in a holding pattern until [the results of the scan]“. And you thought that was just something planes do over Biggin Hill while they wait for the chance to land at Heathrow?

2) Dinkum. As (almost always) in ‘fair dinkum’. The BBC Test Match Special radio commentary team pondered over the etymology of Aussie slang word ‘dinkum’ today. Listeners wrote in with various explanations: brought over by Captain Cook and originally ‘fair drinking’, brought over by immigrant Chinese goldpanners and originally ‘din gum’ (meaning ‘good gold’), and so on. But, beautifully, it’s going to be one of those word puzzles we’ll never be able to solve

3) Sherpa calls. No this is not some form of Himalayan yodelling. It’s, as The Guardian explains, “conference calls among senior officials” before a major political event – such as the forthcoming G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy. In other words, the officials are like the sherpas – the ones doing all the hard work. The politicians are the Western mountaineers, taking all the glory. But we knew that already. The more interesting point is that the G8 are considering ejecting Italy for its shoddy organisation of the sherpa calls (and many other things, probably, but it’s more fun to think they’ll be kicked out because they couldn’t even organise a conference call at a conference). But guess who stepped in to set up the sherpa calls? Uncle Sam, that’s who. Where would we be without them?

And now for 3 recent words of the day from the Urban Dictionary – which is cheating, sort of, but they deserve wider publication…

4) Hand me up. An amusing new antonym to the much maligned ‘hand me down’: “Where the young generation in a family adopts and purchases new technology product at a fast rate, and old versions (that are in working order but are not up to current standards) of that technology product are given to the parents or older generations of family. Commonly occurs multiple times on commodity technology gadgets, leaving your parents with many gadgets to play with”. It’s time to get your own back for all those years of jumpers, shoes and sportskit your older brother/sister got bored of, that you’d never choose for yourself in a million years, with a bit of free will, but that you still had to accept. Hand me ups are here to stay!

5) Facebrag. A verb. Could be a noun too, in time. The Facebook fightback has begun: “To use Facebook as a platform to brag. Normally about a job, internship, trip, purchase or anything else that nobody really needs to know but you’d like to tell everyone because you’re awesome”. There’s lots of it about

And finally…

6) Sarah Palin Effect. “The principal that expertise on a certain subject can be gained through geographical proximity to it”. As in, ‘I have experience of foreign policy, because Alaska is right next to Russia’. A timely reminder of the SP problem as her resignation from the Alaska Governor’s post is interpreted in some quarters as preparation for a run in the next Presidential election. And to think that the US only just managed to get rid of the last Republican Bossman they were ashamed of. Here comes another one

Back to the grassroots: now to the practice of deliberately corrupting the grassroots level. This is apparently known as astroturfing and it’s a devious tactic employed by big bad Goliath institutions to counter slingshots from well-meaning little David types

Interested? Got any pesky little David types on your case, getting uncomfortably close to the truth? Think it could work for you? Here’s how it goes: “You pay a public relations company to create a fake grassroots movement, composed of people who are paid for their services. They lobby against government attempts to regulate the industry you’re in, seeking to drown out and discredit people who draw attention to the issues your corporation wants the public to ignore”

An example, and that description, comes from George Monbiot’s environment blog on the Guardian website. In today’s posting, he complains that the majority of comments on his articles are now either apparently pre-scripted and not actually directed at the specific issues raised but take a more general swipe at the evidence for or very existence of climate change, or they are just plain and personally insulting against the author

Monbiot believes much of the comment is fired off by the assembled PR artillery of Big Business. And the conspiracy-loving part of your brain wants to believe it. Oil companies, for example, are just one group who stand to lose if governments ever get round to making a serious attempt to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and the manufacturing industry. A shadowy business indeed, this astroturfing

And you see why it’s called astroturfing? It’s a fake grassroots movement, that’s why. Gettit? Wordplay at its best. Humanity (if it’s really happening) close to its worst

A hoard of new words for you this fine July Friday. First we have survivability – which relates to, as it suggests, one’s ability to have survived something. This one cropped up in a report of a tragic event in which two swimmers were swept out to sea off Weston-super-Mare. Commenting on the chances of finding the men alive, a coastguard said: “In terms of their survivability, obviously now a long time has elapsed. I think we are more looking at a recovery operation, rather than a rescue now”. And sure enough, both bodies have now been found

Sorry for the morbid start, but you have to know the context if you’re going to get to grips with these new words. And there’s more: there’s an extra layer of context to the survivability story. This is its obvious similarity to bouncebackability – a rare success story of the post-football-match interview. Iain Dowie, manager of Crystal Palace at the time, coined the word and it has since cropped up in other sports, in business and politics, and all over the world. So now we have two words formed the same way – survivability and bouncebackability (and of course the two are linked in more ways than morphology)

Next up we’re back at Wimbledon. Where players no longer simply change how they play in terms of tactics: they change it up! So said Greg Rusedski commentating on the Haas-Federer semi final today. Haas was complimented for taking a different approach to his serve when facing a break point. So, he changed it up. Change is not enough, take note

Meanwhile, in the women’s draw, Venus Williams engaged us in some US fly talkin’ when explaining sisterly antics with Serena: “No, we’re not so competitive off the court. She tricks me a lot, but I get hip to her tricks. Like we could be in the store trying something on, and she’ll be like, No, that doesn’t look good. As soon as I put it down she tries it on, but I got hip to that. So soon there will be another trick that I have to get hip to…” Get hip to, ‘to work out, realise, get wise to’ – remember where you heard it first. Why not try and use it? You may even like it

In case we were getting carried away with all this yellow ball, Centre Court, love-forty action, the cricket journalists have been chirping away to remind us about that small matter of The Ashes. Any story’s a good story so it seems. And so we have Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff in the naughty corner again. This time for missing the scheduled 8:10am team bus leaving for the site of the Battle of Passchendaele. That’s early by anyone’s standards. And most of us would need to set an alarm to be sure of making it (the real story is that only one player missed the bus). Whereas the rest of us have to concede the times we oversleep when we arrive late for work, school, etc, the professional sportsman cannot be seen to have the same frailties as mere mortals. Instead, he was said to have had an “alarm-clock issue”. As in, he forgot to set it, he forgot to bring it, or he threw it across the room and broke it when it went off? The details were not disclosed

Finally, in the fourth sport referenced today, here in town we were made aware of the possibility of thunderstorms at the outdoor swimming pool today. Of course, thunder comes with lightning as sure as smoke comes with fire. And that’s not a good time to be swimming. But the warning that the pool would have to close if a storm broke was jargonised somewhat: “Please be aware if we experience thunder conditions we will have to close the pool”. Thunder conditions? It’s not the thunder conditions we’re worried about. It’s the lightning conditions which can seriously affect one’s survivability

Yet more turmoil on Twitter: this time concerning a rumour which went round cyberspace that Rick Astley of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ fame had died. With Jacko passing away so recently, to lose two Kings of Pop at once would have been too much to bear. Except that the rumour turned out to be fake

Nevertheless, the twittering commotion was enough to push “Rick Astley” onto the list of ‘Trending Topics’ – Twitter’s ever-changing chart of the top ten most talked about issues. Today “Wimbledon”, “Michael Jackson” and “Happy Canada Day” are in there. Yesterday, at some point, Astley made the list alongside Jackson and “#iranelection” (the ‘hashtag’ which Habitat tried to hijack last week), and it stayed there for a few hours – an eternity in Twitter World

Rick Astley is perhaps the current cult hero of the internet. There’s a whole e-phenomenon named after him: ‘rickrolling’. This is the practice of posting or sending a link to an apparently serious topic, only for a trap to be set so that the hapless web user would be redirected to the ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ music video. As a result, the particular YouTube page has been viewed over 20 million times. Unfortunately, how many of those stayed for the 3 minute 32 second duration is not recorded. (Assurance: none of the links in this post are rickrolls)

If you’ve ever been rickrolled (or “rickroll’d” as it seems to be) you may not like it, but it’s popular: they even did a flashmob rickroll at London’s Liverpool Street train station. And now: they said he’d died. Fans of bad 80s pop music everywhere were almost inconsolable. But he hadn’t. So rickrolling may carry on uninterrupted by any period of mourning. As for the word itself, it’s an adaptation of the word “duckroll” – named for the little image of a yellow duck on wheels that you can encounter when something’s gone missing on a website

All of this was much to the amusement of Andy Roddick, tennis player, who’d tweeted about Rick Astley for a relatively legitimate reason: to defend the presence of Astley on his iPod, having been outed about this by his wife. The matter became the talking point of his post-match press conference last Thursday (what did you think it would be about.. tennis?)

If you want to see some interesting coinages, innovative grammar and spelling, and language generally at play then you could do worse than look at Twitter. In fact trying to track the various new usages would be enough to keep a blogger happy full time. So just a dip in the water, that’s all

Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac tweeted (see previous post on this verb) from Glastonbury during the closing set by Blur: “There is serious group huggage going on in a muddy field at glasto.. This too much”. The ‘group hug’ is only a late 20th century phenomenon in itself, conceived of Friends, The Spice Girls and a general encouragement of touchy-feeliness by those who know what’s best for us. And now we have ‘group huggage’, more like an activity than an act. It’s a productive little suffix, old -age. It’ll go on just about any little noun you fancy. Up for some drinkage tonight? Or maybe some filmage? No? Just a sandwich then? Oh

Miss Mac also brought us the (clean) use of ‘kotch’ as a noun meaning ‘chill out time’ or something lazy like that: “Jus come back to the hotel for a shower and a kotch. It feels weird to be in a building..” She wasn’t the only one with relaxation on her mind this weekend. Wimbledon 6th seed Andy Roddick twittered thus: “ok so i definitely heard a guy use the term “chillax” today and he was dead serious……….” This one’s been around for a while – hence the number of pages devoted to it on the Urban Dictionary – but Roddick claimed never to have heard it (”people really say that??? seriously??? with a straight face???” was his next twitter)

But A Rod is too late on the case – ‘chillax’ is already destined for the knacker’s yard. As is the danger with any slang term, it’s well past its use by date. Witness this entry on the UD: “chillax: Is commonly used by wiggars, posers, and wannabes. These people try to use this to be cool when they know they aren’t” (a ‘wiggar’ by the way is another blend – the ingredient words should be fairly obvious). The OED it ain’t

But Twitter can have a serious side. Well, when the media get hold of a story it can. And who’s in hot water? None other than one of our favourite high street retailers: Habitat have been hashtagging and have got burned! Reports the BBC: “Furniture store Habitat has apologised for causing offence after accusations it exploited unrest in Iran to drive online Twitter users to its products. Keywords – called hashtags – such as ‘Iran’ and ‘Mousavi’ were added to its messages so people searching for those subjects would see the firm’s adverts”. Here’s one of the bad examples: “#MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card”

But then again what they couldn’t get away with on Twitter the BBC have done for them. At least now everyone knows about their database. It’s still the media stalwarts who can help you most

As far as the 21st century saga goes, the Brad Pitt / Angelina Jolie / Jennifer Aniston story has a lot going for it. Not least magazine sales (as well as the best blend of modern times: Brangelina). This piece in The Guardian highlights just how flimsily-based the sensationalist journalism can be. No surprise there, right?

But perhaps you’d be interested to know about the demise of the two-way true-false distinction, a dichotomy which has obsessed our politicians, lawmakers and poets since time immemorial (= ‘before memory or record’ while we’re on the subject). Now no longer. The celebrity machine has spoken. Instead we now have an inbetween category – neither lie nor truth: “A tabloid version of a fact isn’t exactly a lie,” is how one editor at a prominent celebrity weekly puts it. “But it isn’t the truth. You know what I mean?”

Well sure. Kind of. So it must be one of those half-truth things we hear about. A little bit true a little bit false. Perhaps there are three categories of the true-false type: Truth, Lie, Half-Truth. Or is it actually a scale? Can something be more true than something else? Or more false? Maybe we’ve had points on this scale for a while: a white lie for example, a lesser lie. And it can just depend if it’s a glass half-empty or half-full view whether you call something not-entirely-true-not-entirely-false a half truth or a white lie

It’s a bit like fruit, you see. An apple is considered to be more of a fruit than a courgette. But both are still fruit in a categorial sense. It’s just that one is more typically fruity than the other. If someone offered you some fruit you wouldn’t ask for courgette (would you?). Don’t take my word for it. All sorts of studies have been done on this

All that is prototype theory – the idea that we have prototypical examples for various concepts – and takes us into the murky field of Semantics, so let’s leave it at that. Suffice it to say that you’ll never look at the humble courgette/zucchini the same way again: crisper drawer or fruit bowl?

There are many surprises in this article about Neil Armstrong’s celebrated transmission from the surface of the Moon: “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind” (did he or did he not say, ‘one small step for a man’?)

The first surprise which strikes you might be that anyone still cares about this. Especially given that the phrase as it was recorded has gone down in history as such and is still immediately recognisable

The second, though you may have known this already, is that Armstrong maintains he meant to say ‘a man’, but wasn’t sure if he actually did – sparking the explanatory theories that either radio static or Armstrong’s drawl obscured the most keenly pursued indefinite article of all time

The third is that there’s such an occupation as ‘forensic linguist’. Yes, ever since CSI made forensics sexy, we even have detective linguists these days. Well, there’s been one of them in a professional sense. There may be many amateurs out there

James R Fitzgerald was the FBI’s man of words for 20 years and is best known for his involvement in the case against Theodore ‘The Unabomber‘ Kaczynski. Fitzgerald matched the written style of the anonymously published Industrial Society and its Future (nicknamed ‘The Unabomber Manifesto’) with that of Kaczynski’s private writings seized by FBI, providing crucial evidence for the prosecution

So be careful what you write. How you construct sentences, phrases and idioms can be surprisingly distinctive. But above all, don’t do anything the FBI wouldn’t like you to be doing

The troubleshooting pages. Now that’s the section of a manual you never want to see. Because it always means you’ve hit a snag in setting up your computer, using your iPhone, constructing your flatpack furniture, etc. But it’s always a case of trial and error isn’t it? ‘If the problem is this, try X. If the problem persists, try Y. If the problem persists, try Z. And so on…’

So it’s mildly discomforting to know that an Airbus spokesman says that to deal with the faulty air speed readings on their A330 model – a possible contributor to the loss of Rio-to-Paris flight 447 somewhere over the Atlantic – “flight crews should maintain thrust and pitch and – if necessary – level off the plane and start troubleshooting procedures as detailed in operating manuals”

That makes it sound so calm – which we can be sure the flight crew are – but also as if there’s so much time up there. You know: make a cup of tea, settle down to find the appropriate section of the manual in your language, get to grips with the jargon, the diagrams, the gist of what you have to do… Oh well, best for the rest of us not to dwell on such matters. Perhaps aircraft instruction manuals are a different breed from the usual indecipherable doorstops we’re so familiar with

So let’s move away from such anxious thoughts and consider the linguistic element to this post: troubleshoot. Clearly a combination of ‘trouble’ and ’shoot’. The OED comments that originally this was not the military or hunting term that it might appear to be – the shooting involved was metaphorical from the outset. At first, a troubleshooter was “a person who traces and corrects faults in machinery and equipment on a telegraph or telephone line”

At some point between its origins in the late 19th century and the present day, it’s developed a meaning synonymous either with consultant (”A self-proclaimed expert that extorts inflated fees from a host company in return for vague and predominantly incorrect business advice”, the Urban Dictionary). Or more commonly something like, ‘person on verge of burning instruction manual out of despair as to why this f#$%ing thing won’t work’

But still. That is an everyday experience. Let us be reassured that the authors of the Airbus operating manuals are clear, concise and entirely successful in communicating their solutions. And that the flight crew are quick readers

Obsession. Some collect Top Trumps. Some catch butterflies. Some intend to visit the stadium of every football league club in the country. 92 grounds on an annually changing list. That’s tough. Not to mention expensive, time consuming, masochistic… But it’s nothing compared to starbucking – attempting to have a coffee in every single Starbucks the world over. Such is the contribution to the human race of ‘Winter’ (formerly known as Rafael Antonio Lozano Jr), a 37 year old software engineer from Houston

That’ll be more than 12,000 cups of coffee. The same coffee everywhere. There must be more to life. But not in Winter’s mind there isn’t. He’s three quarters of the way there and has so far spent $100,000 dollars on his campaign, not to mention 12 years and all apparent contact with reality

“My project is not about the coffee, it’s about the experience”, he says. Oh dear. Let’s hope he doesn’t come to rue those words when pulling in to the Baldock Services outlet

But the point of the post is: starbucking from the verb, to starbuck, presumably. A prime example of a freshly minted one-off word (because no one will do it again, will they?)

High Vis jacket does not always = Village People look

Andrew Neil was caught spoonerising on The Daily Politics tv show he presents. Talking of Sir Menzie (pronounced Ming-is ‘The Merciless’) Campbell, he started out saying “the best of the gay-”, stopped in his tracks and laughed out loud. As did all looking on in the studio, as well as Old Ming by satellite link

Of course, what he’d meant was, ‘guest of the day’, but that’s how spoonerisms work. Embarrassing as anything. Rev’d W.A. Spooner had it the worst. Lecturing in Oxford in the late 19th century, he claimed only to have slipped up once – ‘The Kinquering Congs Their Titles Take’ – but many more spoonerisms have been attributed to him, and since the whole thing takes his name, it’s better to believe at least some of the others are true