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can be found Outlier.
Filed Under August 2008, columns | Leave a Comment
Herd word.
Dear Word Detective: In reading internet news sites and web pages analyzing the various presidential candidates’ standings in the various polls (none of which ever seem to agree, by the way), I keep coming across the term “outlier,” which I don’t remember encountering before the last few years. It seems to mean something like an “anomaly” in the poll data, but with overtones of “something bizarre and meaningless.” I’ve also seen the word applied to a few of the candidates themselves. What does it mean and why are we seeing it everywhere all of a sudden? — Rick Carter.
It means that the herd is on the move again. When European settlers arrived in the New World, the western plains were blanketed by gigantic herds of bison, so numerous that the land itself seemed alive (and covered, the settlers noticed after a few moments, with smelly brown fur). Unfortunately, the noble bison was hunted nearly to extinction in the decades thereafter, and today only a small remnant of those mighty herds remains.
Nature abhors a vacuum, however, and the massive herds of bison were gradually replaced by massive herds of political pundits. Like bison, pundits are slow-witted, unimaginative creatures with a passion for conformity. Their primary activity consists of repeating the words of their herd-mates with minor variations and occasionally stampeding as a group, eyes firmly shut, over the nearest cliff. Between bouts of cliff-jumping, the pundits pass the time by glomming on to popular buzzwords and catch-phrases and slowly gumming them to death. Having driven readers to distraction by invoking “at the end of the day,” “stay the course” and “in harm’s way” ad nauseam for the past few years, the herd has now moved on to “outlier.”
“Outlier” (which is pronounced simply “out-ly-er,” although it looks vaguely French) was originally, when it appeared in English in the early 17th century, simply another word for “outsider,” “nonconformist,” or “weirdo.” An “outlier” was, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, “an individual whose origins, beliefs, or behavior place him or her outside a particular establishment or community.” The roots of “outlier” are as simple as its pronunciation: it’s just a combination of “to lie” with “out,” carrying the sense of someone rooted outside the norms of a given community. In a physical sense, we commonly speak of “outlying” houses a bit beyond the edge of town.
The uses of “outlier” by political pundits seem to fall into two categories. One is an extension of the original “outsider” meaning, in which “outlier” is applied to a candidate whose views and pronouncements fall outside the mainstream of party orthodoxy (i.e., the guy at the far edge of the debate stage). The other sense commonly seen today is borrowed from the field of statistics, where an “outlier” is a data point or result that falls substantially outside the boundaries of the distribution expected or predicted by other results, and is usually disregarded. Answers to a survey that revealed that ninety percent of Iowa voters favored invading Mars at the earliest opportunity, for example, would probably be considered an “outlier” by pollsters. Then again, it’s still early in the year.
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Noggin.
Filed Under August 2008, columns | Leave a Comment
From drink to think.
Dear Word Detective: My kids think the word “noggin” is hilarious. I have used it, in reference to their heads, and wondered about its history. Where, when and how did this word come into being? — Juliet.
Well, it was a dark and stormy night in the 1930s as Elwood Noggin, a retired stoat salesman in northern Nebraska, tinkered in his basement with his latest invention, an electric divining rod for locating lost car keys. As Noggin reached for the switch to test his invention, suddenly…. One moment please. I have just been informed that the foregoing story is not true. Oh well, that sort of fable almost never is. One might (as I sometimes do) view human history itself as being one long dark and stormy night, but few of our words have identifiable “moments of origin.” Like Topsy, they just sort of grow.
But the results in cases such as “noggin” are nonetheless splendid. As slang for the human head (or any creature’s head, I suppose, although references to a cat’s noggin in classic literature seem rare), “noggin” is a wonderfully silly word. It’s difficult to imagine using “noggin” when genuine anger is involved, and “noggin” seems far more likely to crop up in an S.J. Perelman story or a Three Stooges episode than in a crime report.
Oddly enough, when “noggin” first appeared in English in the late 16th century, it had nothing to do, at least directly, with the human head. It mean “small cup or mug,” and by a hundred years later, had taken on the meaning of “a small drink of alcohol.” The roots of “noggin” are a mystery, but that second meaning of “small drink” may provide a clue. “Nog” at that time was a term used in England for a type of strong ale (or, by extension, any sort of alcoholic drink). It’s that “nog,” in fact, that underlies our modern “eggnog,” which combines (in its proper form) eggs, cream, sugar, nutmeg and rum. It’s possible that, since liquor affects primarily the head, that “noggin” was originally meant to refer to a head made woozy by drink. In any case, by the mid-18th century “noggin” had come into use as slang for the head, at first as a boxing term, but by the 19th century as a generalized slang term.
It is also possible that the transferred use of “noggin” from “cup” to “head” paralleled the evolution of “mug” in slang. In the 16th century, a “mug” was, as it is today, a heavy cup used for warm drinks. But in the 17th century it became common to decorate mugs with grotesque caricatures of human faces (such creations are still found in many curio and souvenir shops). By the early 18th century, “mug” had become popular slang for the actual human face, a sense we still use in “mugshot” (as well as in “to mug,” which originally referred to hitting a person in the face).
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