Glossographia

Last week in my class, we were discussing loanwords as well as semantic change.    You couldn’t ask for a more perfect (although bothersome) news story incorporating these two aspects of linguistic change than this story about a  bilingual promotional campaign in Canada for Vitaminwater, in which random English and French words were paired on the bottom of drink caps.  But it all went horribly wrong when under one cap, the English word ‘you’ was combined with the French word ‘retard’ for ‘late’, as detailed in this article in the Province , and was then found by an Alberta family.   Another cap had the perfectly ordinary French word douche ‘shower’.  Coca-Cola (the parent company) has apologized profusely and cancelled the promotion (to its credit), and has said it was all a coincidence gone awry, although I still wonder whether it could be a rogue employee’s doing.

Learners of second languages are often warned to beware of ‘false friends’ – words that look like English words but in fact, in the other language, have a radically different meaning.  Obviously ‘retard’ has a very specific and highly offensive meaning for most English speakers.   But I’m a little surprised that, in the coverage of this story, there hasn’t been really any mention of the fact that ‘retard’ (with second-syllable stress) is not just a French word meaning ‘late’, but an English verb that, until recently at least, was in common use as a synonym for ‘delay’.     Of course, these days the offensive connotation means that the verb ‘to retard’ is becoming increasingly rare, although it’s not hard to find plenty of examples from recent news articles.     There is not a massive protest every time someone uses this verb in the customary way.   This leads me to conclude that in fact, the real troublemaking word on the bottlecap is not ‘retard’ at all, but rather, ‘you’, which immediately turns the following word from … whatever it was, in English or French … into an insult.  If the English word had been ‘kumquat’, I do not know whether we’d even have heard about this.

The students in my undergraduate course are moving into questions related to changes in language including semantic shifting, so it seems appropriate to mention this fascinating article over at io9, The Bizarre Evolution of the Word ‘Cyber’.  It’s a compelling story of a single lexical item’s path from technical term to productive and trendy morpheme to unfashionability and … maybe back again from the brink?  Anyway, it’s interesting and has lots of detail.

The Google Ngram for ‘cyber’ shows a brief peak from the mid 1970s to about 1982,  followed by a dramatic drop, followed by a slow and steady increase up to 2000 – as I have detailed previously, anything after 2000 isn’t to be trusted at the Ngram viewer, but given the discussion in the article, we might suspect a dropoff.  Looking at the actual Google Books results, we see that the first period is almost entirely results for Cyber model computers (technical manuals, etc.) and then the later stuff is where you start see the more general references to computing and computer-related sexual connotations.   Bear in mind that that chart is just for the word cyber alone, not for compounds like cyberpunk or cybersex , both of which shoot up starting in the late 80s.

I found it curious, on first reading, that the article didn’t mention the term Cylon, referring to the robots from the 70s TV show Battlestar Galactica, later reconceptualized as androids in the 2000s reimagining.   I had always assumed, that the name originated (in 1978, at the show’s initial inception) as some sort of abbreviation or formation involving ‘cyber’.   Upon reflection, in 1978, that wouldn’t have been a likely derivation, and indeed it seems not to have been.  However, for the reimagined (2003) series, the name ‘Cylon’ was reinterpreted and given a new etymology, as an abbreviation for Cybernetic Lifeform Node.