Wordorigins.org

The Oxford English Dictionary has 62 words with first citations from 1994. In that year, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa; investigators begin to look into the U. S. President Clinton’s involvement in the Whitewater development project; Russia sends troops into Chechnya; Olympic skater Tonya Harding tries to have rival Nancy Kerrigan kneecapped; Kurt Cobain, frontman of the grunge band Nirvana, commits suicide; comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 strikes Jupiter; the Netscape Navigator web browser is released; Lorena Bobbitt is found not guilty by reason of insanity of mutilating her husband’s genitals; and former American football star O. J. Simpson is arrested for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman.

A southpaw is a left-hander or the left hand. Today, the word is primarily used in baseball, but appears in other contexts as well. But despite its use in baseball, the term almost certainly did not originate with that sport. Use of southpaw to mean the left hand goes back all the way to 1813, long before baseball, as we know it today, existed. It’s used in a letter appearing in the Philadelphia newspaper The Tickler on 30 June of that year:

“Luk here mon, and convince yourself,” said he, holding up the Tickler, in the right paw, between the ceiling and the floor, and with the south paw pointing to the “bow, vow, vow.”

The south is most likely simply a reference to the opposite orientation than is usual and the paw is self-explanatory.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 99 words with first citations from 1993. In that year, Islamic terrorists bomb the World Trade Center, killing six and injuring over a thousand; the Chemical Weapons Convention is signed, outlawing those weapons worldwide; E. Annie Proulx’s book The Shipping News is published; director Stephen Spielberg has two of the four top-grossing films of the year, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List; mathematician Andrew Wiles publishes his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem; astronauts conduct a repair mission to correct the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope; and Intel ships the first Pentium microprocessors.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 99 words with first citations from 1992. In that year, the digerati were in nerdvana over URLs and P2P; university students used facebooks to find the bootylicious grrls; Frankenfoods started scaring people; the cultural elites could be found in the red states; and a host of Clintonian terms appear.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 87 words with first citations from 1991. In that year, riot girls and new lads occupied different ends of the gender spectrum; political commentators complained about vast right-wing conspiracies and invoked Godwin’s law; PGP could help keep your cybersex on the down-low; and the appearance of Linux and SMS hinted at a different high-tech future.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 113 words with first citations from 1990. In that year, bicurious people might seek out a polyamorous relationship; malware, applets, and hentai could be found on the World Wide Web; one could give a friend a shout-out or engage in smack-talking; and university professors on the gray list kept lecturing about DWEMs.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 127 words with first citations from 1989. In that year, people were afraid of youths on a wilding giving them a beat-down; lattes and cosmos were the drinks of choice; C-listers were hawking abdominizers on late-night television; boomerang babies were coming back; Billary were the ultimate Arkansas power couple; and LOL began appearing in Cyberia.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 137 words with first citations from 1988. In that year, you could microchip someone with a product made by a mid-cap, fabless semiconductor company; pimped-out, gangsta wiggers dropped the F-bomb; acid jazz and techno were on the music charts; Hamas had many people afraid of rising Islamofascism; and one could use one’s gaydar to find out if that himbo was a potential partner.

Lynne Murphy has a nice blog post over at Lingua Franca on whether or not a first year writing course is useful to a university student. Murphy comes down squarely on the side of yes, as do I.

Murphy observes that students in Britain don’t know how to structure an argument or, for that matter, a paragraph. From my limited, but growing, experience at a Canadian university, I agree with her assessment. The problem is not, as most grammar manuals would have it, how to write an intelligible sentence or use standard punctuation. The students have that down. (Well, maybe not punctuation, but that’s a mechanical exercise and relatively easy to correct.) My students also tend to have problems with register, tone, and the academic style. Many don’t realize that there are different registers to writing and that the style they write in an email to friends is not the one to be used in an academic paper. Those that do recognize that there is such a thing as an academic style try to imitate what they read in critical literature and the result is usually a mess. They don’t have the basics of writing a coherent essay down yet, and they couch those troubled arguments in stilted and hypercorrect language. (When I see this, I tell the student to just try to write a clear essay in plain English. Mastering the style of academic discourse will come as they continue to read critical literature.)

When I was an undergrad, I placed out of freshman comp. Due to my test scores and advanced placement credits I was permitted to jump right into the English literature courses, but I opted not to skip the class, and it was one of the best decisions of my undergrad career. I did not do so because I thought it would be an easy A, but with forethought my eighteen-year-old self had seldom exhibited, I determined that writing was an essential skill and no matter how good I was, I could always get better. Since I’d had excellent writing teachers in high school, I had mastered the basics and in the university composition class I was able step back and view my writing more objectively and to understand different purposes and approaches to good writing. For the first time I considered factors such as audience in crafting my writing. I’m sure the class was equally valuable, albeit in another way, to those students who were still having trouble with the basics.

One thing that I would disagree with Murphy on is whether North American and British universities are all that different. When I was applying to grad school, the comp requirement was something I looked at, because as a grad student I would be expected to teach composition if it were offered. I found that North American schools, or at least the ones that offered PhD programs in English, split about 50/50 as to whether or not they offered freshman comp. The University of Toronto does not, for example. There are remedial and ESL writing courses available to those that need them, but there is no general requirement for freshman comp. Perhaps there should be.

The Oxford English Dictionary has 128 words with first citations from 1987. In that year, nominees to high government positions might be Borked or given a figurative bitch slap; scientists discussed branes, cryovolcanism, and patient zero; Gorbymania threw political junkies into eppies; and Canada created a new kind of loonie.