The fashion world is a fecund, fruitful and fertile source of metaphoric phrases. (Funny, that all these synonyms for "productive" begin with f.) In 1999, an outbreak of bare midsections in the fashion world led this department to a midriff riff: I expressed my preference for the informal term bellybutton to be written as a single word, on the analogy of bellyache; this stand was opposed by a legion of navel-gazers who preferred a two-word usage, on the analogy of belly dancer. The dispute has never been resolved.
We now turn to a related locution spawned by the sight of as much as 15cm of stomach bulging out below a short blouse and above hip-clinging "low-rise" jeans.
When the wearer's abdomen is flat, a display of flesh above and well below the bellybutton produces an eye-catching picture of what the <
"Muffin-Top Mayhem!" was the headline in the New York Daily News this summer, atop a picture of a woman whose midriff was overhanging her belt. The unfortunate loser of this battle of the bulge was said by the writer, Mark Ellwood, to be called a muffin-top. He defined the display as "the unsightly roll of flesh that spills over the waist of a pair of too-tight pants." The locution is not sexist: A male actor, usually characterized as a "screen hunk," photographed in such a state is called a stud-muffin-top. (I am indebted to Ann Wort of Washington for this citation.)
Rarely can slang lexicographers find "first use" of such a phrase, but blogging helps: Coinage is claimed by a Netizen named Dyske Suematsu, who proudly informs the Internet set of having sent the compound noun to www.pseudodictionary.com in May 2003.
Anatomically, muffin-top fills a lexical void. Nearest to a synonym (with over 150,000 Google hits) is "love handles," a jocularly euphemistic neologism of the late '60s, defined in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang as "a bulge of fat at the side of the waist." But the love handles (usually plural) are exclusively on or above the hips; the muffin-top describes the roll of excess flesh spilling out primarily in front but possibly all around.
KLUTZ
"Metaphors matter," Jagdish Bhagwati writes in the Wall Street Journal. The university professor of economics and law at Columbia suggested a new vocabulary for global trade featuring a "kaleidoscopic comparative advantage." He prefers this trope to Tom Friedman's word picture of the new economic world being flat.
Offhandedly, Bhagwati used another word calling up an even more vivid image: "It turned out that the Japanese were real klutzes in the financial sector."
For the skinny on klutz, I turned to Sol Steinmetz, one of the world's great lexicographers. He has just turned out the invaluable and scholarly Dictionary of Jewish Usage, a guide to the use of Jewish terms (Roman & Littlefield, US$49.95) that shows how Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic words are being absorbed into the English language.
Take klutz, defined as "a clumsy person." Steinmetz informs me that the word that has largely replaced the English oaf in common usage is from the Middle High German klotz, "block, log, tree trunk," and that "the Yiddish word took on the figurative meaning of `fool, blockhead.' It came into English in the 1930s, first found in print in Meyer Levin's 1936 novel, The Old Bunch: `He's a klotz. He can't do no repairs. He got wooden fingers.'"
According to Sol, a data-bank search shows klutz to be among the top 10 Yiddishisms in Ameerican English. The others: glitsch, kosher, bagel, maven, mensch, schlock, schmooze, tush and chutzpah.
If you don't know those words, you will have difficulty being understood in American English. (I'm a language maven, occasionally a financial klutz.)
DOORMATS
Jeanine Pirro, described in the Washington Post as "a street-smart and media-savvy Republican prosecutor," began her campaign in New York for the US Senate seat now held by Hillary Rodham Clinton with a charge that the incumbent wanted to use the seat as a "doormat to the White House."
Doormat is a word that has resonance in politics. The mat placed before a doorway to absorb the grime from shoes long ago gained a figurative meaning of "a person or thing easily and submissively misused." In the summer of 1968, an American flag was burned by demonstrators in a South American country and made the television news. As a speechwriter in the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign, I had the job of updating the candidate's stump speech with timely references to the news and submitted the line, "Under new leadership, nobody's going to make a doormat out of the American flag." Nixon added it to his remarks and was startled by the crowd reaction: a roar of defiant approval. "That applause line stays in," he told us, and he used it right through to Election Day. (After the November victory, another speechwriter had the notion of presenting me with an actual doormat with a flag design but wisely decided it would be inappropriate.)
The word that probably came first to mind to Pirro was steppingstone; in politics, a charge that is often leveled at a candidate with ambitions for higher office is that he or she is treating the present campaign merely as a way station to bigger things. Early in 1968, when Governor George Romney of Michigan was running for the Republican presidential nomination and the knock on him in the media was that he was overly devout and evangelical, some wise guy (it could have been me) peddled the gag that "he's only seeking the presidency as a steppingstone."
Doormat is a tad off the point, but it's edgier.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
RSS