Notes on OED's June 2009 release of new words

bailout n.2

Bailouts of banks and other institutions have been prominent in the news recently, but the word has a long history, dating back to 1939. Although a more general sense exists, meaning a rescue of any kind, from the very start the context was financial; our first quotation comes from an article in Time discussing arrangements for a payment of $40,000,000 earmarked to help the tobacco industry (perhaps less likely to be the recipient of a bailout today), after a bad crop. Although the derivation of the noun bailout is straightforward, from the phrasal verb to bail out (also included in this release), the metaphor underlying this is unclear; whether the idea is that money is provided to ‘get someone out of jail’, or that metaphorical water is being bailed out of a ‘sinking ship’. It is possible that two originally distinct idioms have merged to create this sense.

car-booter n.

Although arguably a perfectly transparent compound (at least to a British person), this is a nice demonstration of the ways in which a logically formed word can appear baffling to someone who does not share the cultural background from which it comes. A person who kicks cars? Or (at a stretch) starts them, as one would boot a computer? Without prior knowledge of the existence of car-boot sales (and indeed that the rear storage compartment on a British car is a ‘boot’ not a ‘trunk’), one might not guess that this is simply a word for a person who attends them.

rechallenge v. and rechallenge n.

The latest release of material for OED Online, running from rean to recyclist, predictably contains many formations utilizing the prefix re-. In some ways these are typical examples, re- prefixing to a verb or noun to indicate repetition of the action or fact of challenging. What's interesting here is that unlike many such formations, which, after they are first used, tend to retain currency unless the root verb or noun falls out of use, the rechallenge words have enjoyed two discrete flurries of usage with nothing in between; in the early 18th century, and then from the mid 20th century onwards. Quite what made speakers so unlikely to say "rechallenge" in the intervening 200-plus years is unclear. Usage in the 20th century has been bolstered by the appearance of a specific Immunology sense.

turducken n.

A coming together of three words and of three birds. As a blend of the nouns duck and chicken are affixed to the first part of the word turkey, so a boned chicken is used to stuff a boned duck, which is in turn used to stuff a partially boned turkey. The result, in both cases, might equally be regarded as inventive, elegant, and appetizing, or as an ungainly way of overdoing things somewhat.