Welcome to this new blog. It’s a continuation of my general blog, but I’ve decided to create a new, separate one just for words. This is the first post, but as you can see from the title, it picks up from where the general blog leaves off.
Today’s new-to-me word is another one that has come up as part of the vocabulary of Corona/COVID. The word is smize, which is a crunched-down version of “smile with your eyes.” I learned this from Sarah Cooper on Twitter:
The COVID connection for smize is that with everyone wearing masks (in theory), you can’t see someone smiling, but you can see them smizing.
However, and somewhat to my surprise, smize was not coined specifically for the mask situation. Dictionary.com says that smize was brought to the mainstream in 2009 by former model Tyra Banks (as they say, it’s a “Tyraism”) on the TV show America’s Next Top Model. Still, the connection to COVID brought the word to the attention of an audience beyond fans of Tyra Banks, so you’ll see it on lists of new “coronaspeak” (example). (You can also study Tyra Banks in a video that demonstrates smizing and consider whether that’s the same thing as the above-the-mask smiling that we’re talking about these days.)
In a Johnson column about coronaspeak in The Economist (paywall), the author observes that the words smize and smizing are not great portmanteaus. From the word alone, you can’t really figure out what the constituent elements are supposed to be, the way you can with something like covidiot (covid+idiot) or pancession (pandemic+recession). That’s true, but doesn’t seem to have prevented the word from spreading, as evidenced both by its persistence and by its utility these days.
On to origins. I was working in the kitchen the other day and got to wondering where the word garlic comes from. My first instinct was that garlic is associated with the cuisines of the Mediterranean, so probably it came from one of the languages in that area? Italian, Greek, Arabic—it could be one of many.
Boy, not even. Garlic is a good old English (that is, Germanic) word. This makes more sense once you find out that the -lic part is related to leek, which is a word that shows up in Old English and Old Norse and Old High German. (And which is botanically a cousin of garlic, of course.)
The gar- part is an Old English word for “spear,” one of several words for that weapon, and it likewise has Germanic bona fides. In Beowulf, for example, the Gardena are the Spear-Danes.
So garlic is “spear-leek.” Creating compounds like this is a Germanic way to form words as well (see also: Spear-Danes), so garlic really is about as Germanic-language as you can get. Apparently my culinary instincts about this particular ingredient were way off. That’s not the first time.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.