Words of the Street

24 June 2005

A toponym is a name of something that denotes a geographical place, usually the place of origin of the thing named. The words spa (a town in Belgium), Watergate (a hotel and office building, site of famous burglary), and rugby (a school in Britain) are toponyms for, respectively, a resort, a political scandal, and a sport.

Among toponyms, a few are street names that have come to be associated with industries and activities located there. Perhaps the most famous is Wall Street, the toponym meaning the US financial markets. The metaphorical use comes from the fact that many of the largest financial institutions have traditionally had their headquarters on that Manhattan Street. The metaphorical usage dates to 1841.

Probably created in emulation of Wall Street, the term Bay Street refers to the Canadian financial markets, after the road in Toronto on which many financial institutions are located. This usage is rather recent, dating only to 1984. On the other side of the continent, Sand Hill Road is emblematic of the venture capital industry that fuels Silicon Valley (another toponym of a sort, but not a street), after the street in Palo Alto where many VC firms reside. The metaphorical use of Sand Hill Road dates to 1988.

Wall Street is not the only New York City street-name toponym. As one can imagine, the most important city in the United States has contributed several others. Sharing the limelight with Wall Street is Broadway, a term for the world of the theater, after the street where many theaters are located. The metaphorical use of Broadway is almost as old as its financial cousin, dating to 1881.

Since 1944, Madison Avenue has served the same function for the American advertising industry. Park Avenue has been a synonym for wealth and high society since 1923. And Tin Pan Alley has referred to the music business since 1903. Unlike the others, Tin Pan Alley is a nickname and not an official name for the street in question, West 18th Street between Broadway and 6th Avenue.

The de facto capital of the US, Washington, DC gives us a couple of street toponyms. The most famous being the Beltway, a reference to the ring road that surrounds the city and standing for the federal government. It is most commonly used in the phrase inside the Beltway (1977) and in the term Beltway bandit (1978), meaning a government contractor.

More recently, Washington has given us K Street, a term referring to political consultants and lobbyists, many of whom have their offices there. The metaphorical use dates to 1984. The most famous incarnation of K Street was in the title of a 2003 HBO series about Washington produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh.

On the other side of the pond, London gives us its share of street name toponyms. Fleet Street is used to refer to the British press, after the numerous newspapers that were once located there. This usage dates to 1882. Even older is Harley Street, since 1830 used to refer to the medical profession, especially the specialists at the top of the profession.

High Street is a term used to refer to retail shops, after the name of the central street in many British towns. The metaphorical use is relatively recent, only from 1959. Its American counterpart, Main Street, has a different metaphorical meaning. Since 1916, it has been used to refer to small town America.

A far cry from Park Avenue, Wall Street, and even Main and High Streets is Skid Row, a synonym for poverty since 1931. Skid Row or Skid Road was a common name in 19th century America for logging roads paved with logs or timber. The claim that the original Skid Row was in Seattle is false—the earliest known use is from the Adirondack region of New York. The metaphorical sense stems from the wild and wooly logging camps found along such roads.

Finally, a synonym for Skid Row is another street, Tobacco Road. This one has a literary origin, it’s from the title of Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel and play.

Theories & Intelligent Design

17 June 2005

The Kansas State Board of Education is currently debating whether a theory called intelligent design should be used to present criticisms of evolution in Biology classes. The board, which has an evangelical Christian conservative majority, is widely expected to approve a measure that requires criticism of evolution be taught in Kansas schools, but the exact nature and wording of the new policy is still in the works.

The current push for intelligent design as an alternative to evolution has its roots in the US courts striking down the teaching of creation science. Creation science is the teaching of the literal text of Genesis as scientific truth. US federal courts have consistently ruled that creation science is a religious doctrine, not scientific truth and its instruction in public schools is a violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which forbids the establishment of a state religion. Intelligent design skirts this prohibition by not advocating any specific creation story, but rather simply argues that the complexity of nature requires that there be a designer; many organisms and biological structures are too complex to have come about by chance.

Despite the current push for intelligent design being a response to the courtroom failures of creation science, intelligent design is the older of the two terms; it even predates Darwin’s concept of evolution by natural selection. The Oxford English Dictionary dates intelligent design to 1847, in an article in Scientific American:

The great store-house of nature—the innumerable and diversified objects there presented to our view give evidence of infinite skill and intelligent design in the adaptation to each other and to the nature of man.

The term creation science, on the other hand, is cited in the OED only as early as 1979, in a cite from the Los Angeles Times:

A law suit seeking to include ‘scientific creation’ as part of biological science classes has been filed by the Creation Science Research Center, a non-profit, San Diego-based group that publishes creation textbooks.

Like intelligent design, the term evolution also predates Darwin. Geologist Charles Lyell first used it in the current sense as an explanation for the origin of species in 1832:

The testacea of the ocean existed first, until some of them by gradual evolution, were improved into those inhabiting the land.

Darwin not use the term evolution himself, preferring the term natural selection, coined by him in 1857 to describe the process driving evolution.

Those who advocate for intelligent design or creation science or whatever the term du jour is, criticize evolution as being "only a theory." They argue that it is not a law and therefore not proven. This argument is at best ignorant and at worst disingenuous. The word theory, like most English words, has multiple meanings. One of these meanings is that of a hypothesis, an untested explanation. This may indeed by the most common use of the word, as in "I have a theory about that," but this is not the meaning used by scientists when they say the "theory of evolution" or the "theory of relativity." The OED defines this sense of theory as:

A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.

Theories do not become laws when they are proven. Rather a scientific law is something else entirely. The OED defines this sense of law as:

A theoretical principle deduced from particular facts, applicable to a defined group or class of phenomena, and expressible by the statement that a particular phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions be present.

Principles or laws flow from theories. The explanatory power of a theory allows for laws to be deduced.

This also points to one of the primary failings of intelligent design—it is not a theory as it lacks explanatory power. It cannot be used as a basis for further scientific work. Successful theories are predictive; they allow the conceptualization of natural phenomena long before they are actually observed. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, for example, postulated that gravity could alter the path of light a half century or so before astronomers actually saw objects behind stars because the light from those objects was being "bent around" the stars in its path. Natural selection predicted that adaptations like antibiotic resistant bacteria and changing camouflage patterns corresponding to long-term environmental change would be observed by scientists. Intelligent design simply states that a "designer" created life. It offers no mechanism for this creation, no predictions about future discoveries, no laws that can be deduced from it, nothing on which to build a basis for further inquiries. It is not science, but dogmatism.

Intelligent design lacks another primary element of science—it is not falsifiable. It cannot be proven to be wrong; it is untestable. One cannot prove that a designer does not exist. Science is founded on the principle of falsifiability, of being able to test whether or not something is true.

So what does this have to do with language? To be sure, we’ve examined the definitions and origins of a few words, but the debate over intelligent design has little to do with the subjects we usually address here. But it does have relevance to linguistics (and any other systematic form of inquiry). It goes to the integrity of science, not just the "hard sciences" of physics, chemistry, or biology, but to all forms of empirical inquiry.

I wrote a book on linguistic myths, myths propagated by those who do not apply commonly accepted standards of inquiry and evidence, just as the advocates of intelligent design fail to apply the standards of scientific inquiry to biology. The linguistic tales I debunked in my book are not of great consequence, but our understanding of biological world is and the prospect of a state school system deliberately turning its back on 500 years of scientific and technical achievements is not only appalling, but the abandonment of science is a grave threat to our continuing economic prosperity.

OED Quarterly Update

10 June 2005

Oxford University Press has published its June newsletter that outlines the changes to the OED online over the last quarter.

This quarter the entries from papula to Paul have been updated, along with a number of new entries from across the alphabet.

The newsletter also contains several interesting articles by Oxford’s library researchers that give insight into the process of creating dictionary entries.

BBC Wordhunt

10 June 2005

Did you call someone a minger rather than just pig-ugly before 1995? Did you sport a mullet and call it that before the 1994 Beastie Boys song Mullet Head? Were you dubbed the nit nurse before 1985? And, do you have the evidence to prove it?

BBC Two and Oxford University Press are sponsoring a new project to find the origins of a number of slang terms. The project will provide data to both the OED and to a BBC television series.

The initial appeals list for the project consists of the following terms:

  • back to square one (1960) *

  • balti (1984) *

  • Beeb (1967)

  • boffin (1941) *

  • bog-standard (1983)

  • bomber jacket (1973)

  • to bonk (sexual intercourse) (1975)

  • bouncy castle (1986)

  • chattering classes (1985)

  • codswallop (1963) *

  • Crimble (1963)

  • cyberspace (1982)

  • cyborg (1960)

  • ditsy (1978) *

  • dosh (1953) *

  • full monty (1985) *

  • gas mark  (1963)

  • gay (homosexual sense) (1935)

  • handbags (at dawn)  (1987)

  • her indoors (1979)

  • jaffa (cricketing term) *

  • Mackem (1991)

  • made-up (1980)

  • minger (1995)

  • minted (1995)

  • moony, moonie (1990)

  • to muller (1993) *

  • mullet (hairstyle) (1994) *

  • mushy peas (1975)

  • naff (1966) *

  • nerd (1951) *

  • nip and tuck (1980)

  • nit nurse (1985)

  • nutmeg (football use)  (1979) *

  • Old Bill (police) (1958)

  • on the pull (1988)

  • pass the parcel (1967)

  • pear-shaped (1983)

  • phwoar (1980)

  • pick and mix (1959)

  • ploughman’s lunch (1970)

  • pop one’s clogs (1977)

  • porky (1985)

  • posh (1915) *

  • ska (1964) *

  • smart casual  (1945)

  • snazzy (1932) *

  • something for the weekend (1990)

  • throw one’s toys out of the pram (or cot) (1989)

  • tikka masala (1975)


* = origin unknown