March 2010 new words

Despite their kinship with noise, interjections don't seem to attract much attention from language commentators. It's true that in many cases there is little to say about their origins and meanings. Typically, they're simple (if varyingly effective) attempts to evoke and transcribe natural sounds or involuntary exclamations; imitative in OED's description. However, in terms of historical research, they're interestingly unpredictable. At any point in the history of English, a writer might have decided to transliterate birdsong as seep or peep or chirrup or tweet or twit, and indeed OED dates most of these to the 16th century.

Included in OED's latest release, arf seems to be a much more recent addition to the canon of interjections; part of a wave traceable to the emergence of syndicated comic strips in newspapers and magazines during the early decades of the 20th century. Arf is slightly unusual in that it's been used to convey not one but two common sounds -– a dog's bark and a person's laugh – with both senses arising around the same time, and both enduring to the present day.

Our research to date indicates that the earlier of the two senses is the dog's bark, which we date from 1916 (the laugh sense we've traced from 1931). OED records scores of words imitating dogs' barks: some enduring and familiar (bow-wow, woof, wuff, yap, yelp, yow), others ephemeral, obsolete, or forgotten (baff, baugh, blaff, bough, nyaff, ouch – yes, really – ouff, waffle, yaffle, yamph). Some are generic descriptions, others more specific: arf is generally used to convey the bark of what comedian Eddie Izzard calls “the small yappy-type dog” (OED's more sober definition is: representing the bark of a (small) dog, or a human imitation of such a bark).

As with any category of word, some interjections survive simply because they're highly evocative of (or genuinely close to) the sound itself. Others succeed through artistic patronage. The 16th-century bow-wow isn't, on reflection, the most evocative rendering of a dog's bark, but if you wonder why it lasted while others from the period – baff, bough, buff – faded, one simple answer is Shakespeare, who uses it in The Tempest, Act I, Scene ii: Harke, harke, bowgh wawgh: the watch-Dogges barke.

Similarly, both senses of arf were popularized by their associations with irrepressible icons of American comic strips: Little Orphan Annie and Popeye the Sailor. Sandy, Little Orphan Annie's “canine companion”, wasn't the first cartoon dog to utter an arf, but his was the bark heard around the world (or at least read across America, in Harold Gray's widely syndicated cartoon). The Popeye character does seem to have been the source of arf as a representation of laughter, though his distinctive hearty laugh was also represented by original cartoonist Elzie Crisler Segar as erf! erf!

One notable after-effect of written exclamations is their capacity to transform or replace the vocal sound they imitate. You may know someone – I do – who laughs with a sort of he-he-he sound straight out of The Beano. I don't know if this is conditioning or contrivance, and it would probably be futile (as well as impolite) to ask. More often, people will voice the written form as a means of suggesting irony or, ahem, archness. Now, as in that last sentence, one can add a further layer: a written version of the ironic vocalisation. Our evidence for arf shows that it has acquired this status (if you can call it that) as a bet-hedging way to venture a weak joke, pun, or double entendre:
1989 Empire Sept. 103/1 Its sometimes rather shallow (arf arf) story-line is compensated for by its stunning Bond-like locations.
Popeye – not given to irony – probably wouldn't have laughed at that, but the thought of appearing as a character in the OED's own long-running serial might have raised an arf or two from him, or from Sandy.

Below Graeme Diamond, Principal Editor of OED's New Words Group, comments on some of the other newly published entries in this quarterly release:

Generation Y n.

As the entry for echo boom demonstrates, labelling generations of people with reference to preceding generations is not new, but here, the handy alphabetical reference point provided by Generation X (itself only added to OED Online in 2001) is utilized to provide a shorthand for the generation that followed. As the first quotation suggests, the homophony of "Y" and "why" also supplies the term with a vague implication of a need to search for answers.  Whether we see a Generation Z, and face an alphabetical impasse after that, remains to be seen.

re-rub n.

Although straightforward enough in terms of meaning, this word, from the world of dance music, for a remixed version of an existing piece of music, is somewhat more mysterious with regard to its origin. Our first recorded instance is from the title of a 1992 remix, but quite why the second element rub is employed is not entirely clear. A link with redub seems possible, perhaps via a punning use of rub-a-dub, or it's just possible that the sense intended is something like "a second polish". No conclusive evidence has as yet been uncovered.

superbug n.

As a strain of bacteria resistant to antibiotics, this is a very familiar word to most, especially from media reports about MRSA. Our entry demonstrates that it has other meanings, however, some of them even somewhat laudatory. It first appears in 1916, with reference to bugs of the insectile sort, then moves on to microorganisms in 1945, initially of the exceptionally vigorous type which leads to our well-known antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but additionally, in 1959, giving rise to a bug super in a more orthodox way, one with unusual properties which make it potentially useful.

techy adj.¹ and techy adj.²

This quarterly release for OED Online features revised entries for the terms beginning with tech-, and these two adjectives, with different etymological derivations, highlight two of the more modern developments which characterize this sequence of words. The first is a somewhat informal way of designating technological sophistication or complication, and the people with expertise in or enthusiasm for this field. The second, taking up the dance music theme from re-rub above, relates to music which shows to some degree the influence of the techno genre.