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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