Today's scholarly linguistic dissertation deals with embodied cognition. (That should clear the room of readers searching for the prurient, offensive and scatological.)
Early last month, the Los Angeles Daily News columnist Bridget Johnson noted that "some recent Hollywood bits that have raised conservative ire include hailing Alfred Kinsey, Nicole Kidman sharing her bathtub with a boy in Birth, euthanasia glorified in Million Dollar Baby and The Sea Inside. Regardless of politics, many agree that the ick factor drives away moviegoers who are looking for something familiar and inspirational on-screen."
A few weeks later, Tara Parker-Pope reported in the Wall Street Journal that a home-screening test for colon cancer is making a comeback.
"Convincing consumers to use the tests may be tough, however," she wrote. "There's the ick factor of fecal tests, which typically require patients to smear stool on a card that is then sent to a lab."
The colloquial noun and interjection ick, as well as its adjectival form, icky, are terms of disgust, distaste and revulsion. A character in Henry Cyril McNeile's 1920 novel, Bulldog Drummond, asked: "Can it be that my little pet is feeling icky-boo? Face going green -- slight perspiration -- collar tight."
This suggests that ick may be derived from sick. An alternative imitative etymology is from sticky, sickeningly sweet: "They blow ickylickysticky yumyum kisses," wrote James Joyce in his 1922 Ulysses; icky was picked up by some jazz musicians in the 1930s to deride the overly sweet, sentimental type of jazz. Today, ick! is an interjection of disgusted rejection, and the ick factor is the problem caused by consumer distaste.
On, if you can take it, to the interjection yuck. In early 1960s theatrical slang, it imitated the sound of laughter, and comedians would "yuck it up" to induce yuck-yucking in the audience. Within a decade, its meaning underwent an extreme makeover, perhaps having to do with certain stomach-turning jokes, and yuck turned into an expression of nose-wrinkling disapprobation.
Seventeen years ago in this space, I wrote that "beginning in 1970, the word took the adjective form yucky and gained the sense of `nasty, sloppy.' ... It seems to have triumphed over the similar icky, has resisted replacement by gross and its derivative grody, but is now being challenged by a variant form, the interjection yecch and its adjectival yecchy. I predict yucky will persevere."
I was too quick to cast out ick. Though usage of yucky is fading, yecch! -- with its back-of-the-tongue concluding sound -- turned out to have legs in expressing revulsion, while the interjection or exclamation ick! is showing real staying power, especially in its mock-serious combination with factor.
"I see this as a case of embodied cognition," says David McNeill, emeritus professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Chicago. "The words are not just words on a page or in the air, but patterns of action."
Reviewing my list of ickisms -- yuck, yecch, bleah, ew and ick -- the linguist observes, "Negative words having to do with disgust seem to be embodied in the experience of expelling unwanted, possibly poisonous, materials from the mouth. All the sounds you cite are made by closing the back of the mouth [keeping the stuff from entering the food canal] and/or opening the front [expelling it]."
Can these imitative sounds be considered words?
"These are words that refer to the sounds we make," says Paul Ekman, an expert in facial expressions and a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco. "They are linguistic representations, resembling the sounds we make when we're disgusted. The face we make with yuck and ick is an expression that refers to the spontaneous act of disgust."
End of imitative ick-factoring. You can now wipe that awful expression off your face.
Blame-game finger-pointing
President George W. Bush's press secretary, Scott McClellan, replied to repeated questions about laxity in the early response to Katrina devastation with two classic counterattacking phrases: "If you want to continue to engage in finger-pointing and blame-gaming, that's fine."
This triggered a counter-counterattack from liberal columnists.
"McClellan must have been unaware," wrote E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, "that the White House had been organizing a finger-pointing, blame-gaming project of its own" -- working, as the New York Times put it, "to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats."
The key word in attacking the counterattack phrases is accountability.
Thirteen years before, after a riot burned out sections of Los Angeles, a group of protesters held up a sign reading, "If You Won't Help Us, Clinton Will." Former president George Bush's response was, "This is no time to play the blame game."
The pointed finger, now a symbol of unfair accusation, began its metaphoric rise in 1829 as the finger of scorn: "It was a shame," wrote Pierce Egan in his British fisticuffs serial, Boxiana, "that pure and honorable men should be suspected of such doings ... for even at him the finger of scorn had been pointed." Then as now, the phrase was an attack on those making charges.
The rhyming blame game has now surpassed the scornful finger, even in this digital age. Who started it? The British critic Kenneth Tynan in 1958 described "the worst of domestic rituals, the Blame Game. I blame my agony on you; you blame yours on her; she blames hers on me."
Perhaps the phrase first appeared in a letter to a columnist named Geraldine in the Nov. 27, 1937, Oakland Tribune, as New Deal controversy grew: "The educated call the rest of the world moron ... while the workers claim the work is too hard and the idle say it's not enough."
Memorably, the anonymous writer concluded, "Let's beat the `blame' game by thinking deeply, talking sensibly and blaming sparsely."
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