The Original Mitt

So Mitt won the Ohio GOP primary by a nose or, shall we say, by a finger.

Time for a MITT post.

Mitt, the kind we'd heard of before we'd heard of Romney, is shortened from mitten. What is a mitten? If you know German, you know that Mitte means "middle" or "center." In this case, the sense is something that has been divided down the middle, specifically a glove that has been divided down the middle. A mitten (Old French "mitaine" was a half of a glove, i.e. a fingerless glove). Later it became the mitten we know today, with one section for the fingers and another for the thumb.

The baseball sense of "mitt" is from 1892. But is it called a mitt or a glove? I think technically a glove, and I refer you a very cleverly titled book called Glove Affairs in which players fondly remember their first gloves. Baseball people can confirm, but my understanding is that glove is the general term, but the handwear of first basemen and catchers are called mitts because they lack individual fingers.

Let's not forget the mitten crab, an olive-green Asian crab with hairy pincers.



The real question is why a person named Willard gets nick named Mitt. Or why any person is nick named Mitt. Jon Stewart suggested Mitt was named for the shape of his home state.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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The name Mitt was apparently taken from the nickname of Romney's father's cousin, football player Milton "Mitt" Romney (1899-1975) who was a quarterback for the Chicago Bears from 1925-1928.

Superfine Tuesday

It's SUPER TUESDAY, and I'm wondering about our American obsession with SUPER stuff.

Back before I started this blog, I commented on my facebook page on the origins of the term SUPER BOWL, which seems to owe itself to some serendipity, connected to another instance of "super" in American lore, the SUPER BALL:

SUPER BOWL. The use of "bowl" to refer to a football game began when the Rose Bowl (stadium) opened in Pasadena in 1923. The stadium was modeled after the Yale Bowl in New Haven, CT, named for its shape. And "super"? Lamar Hunt, owner of the AFL's Kansas City Chiefs, first used the term during the 1966 AFL-NFL merger talks, saying it was likely in his head because his children had been playing with a Super Ball toy (i.e. a bouncy ball). In a July 25, 1966, letter, Hunt wrote, "I have kiddingly called it the 'Super Bowl,' which obviously can be improved upon."

Scholars of American history can comment on the history of Super Tuesday itself, which seems to date from 1984, an attempt to consolidate primaries into something that looks more like a national primary (as opposed to the limited state contests of Iowa and New Hampshire).

I'm wondering for now about why everything big or great is "super" in this country, from super-sized fast food (and Morgan Spurlock's documentary Supersize Me). It's every company's favorite adjective, too, from SuperShuttle to Supercuts to Super Nintendo.

The story is something as follows: Super is a pretty run-of-the-mill Latin adverb and preposition, meaning above, on top of, or beyond (and some other variations). It became common as a prefix, particularly in the sciences, and in many other words that made their way into English, like superintendent and superstructure (and lots and lots of others).

But it took until the 19th century before super started appearing on its own as an adjective in English. The Oxford English dictionary thinks that it came originally from SUPERFINE, a word used for manufactured goods meaning "extremely fine in quality," which then got extended to mean "Very good or pleasant, first-rathttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife, excellent."

This is still the sense that we observe in most colloquial uses, and most brandnames, but increasingly we're seeing it get used to refer to size or scope, which the OED doesn't pick up on but the American Dictionaries do (see Merriam-Webster's, e.g.)

Update: It may have been a SUPERMOON (when the moon is full during its closest approach to earth) that sunk the Titanic. It sounds like the conspiracy-est of conspiracy theories, but it was published in National Geographic.

Harvard is Cheaper than Cal State

It messes with our sense of what elitism is: Harvard and Yale (and other similar places), the elitist of the elite, are rich enough with their hefty endowments that they are able to generously fund up to comfortably middle class students with little if any loan burden.

Meanwhile, state universities (and California is particularly messed up in this regard) are slashing their state university systems and hiking their tuition rates.

So it's come to this, says the San Jose Mercury News:

Top private schools, with their generous aid, have been among the most affordable options for poor students for a few years, but rising tuition has only recently sent California State University and University of California prices shooting past the Harvards and Yales for middle-class students.

MLA: How to Cite a Tweet

The MLA Weighs In: How to Cite a Tweet (h/t DKM)

I find it interesting that the protocol is to cite the tweet in its entirety. A tweet cannot be subtweeted? Curiously, it also has nothing about hashtags.

How do I cite a tweet?

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

The date and time of a message on Twitter reflect the reader’s time zone. Readers in different time zones see different times and, possibly, dates on the same tweet. The date and time that were in effect for the writer of the tweet when it was transmitted are normally not known. Thus, the date and time displayed on Twitter are only approximate guides to the timing of a tweet. However, they allow a researcher to precisely compare the timing of tweets as long as the tweets are all read in a single time zone.

In the main text of the paper, a tweet is cited in its entirety (6.4.1):

Sohaib Athar noted that the presence of a helicopter at that hour was “a rare event.”

or

The presence of a helicopter at that hour was “a rare event” (Athar).

FLUKE -- it all seems a little fishy

Rush Limbaugh's recent target of opprobrium has a demonstrably unusual surname: FLUKE.

FLUKE can mean one of several things
1) a flat fish, similar to a flounder.




2) one of the triangular plates of iron inside the anchor which enter the ground and hold the ship in place--so named because the resemble in shape the fluke fish.
3) in billiards: a successful stroke made by accident or chance, more generally, any thing accomplished by luck or chance. (and the origin of this one is unknown).

BODICE

BODICE, an oddly spelled plural of "body," because this contraption was originally made of two parts that fastened in the middle (formerly sometimes called "a pair of bodies").

GAFFERS and GAFFES

If you've ever wondered when the credits rolled: GAFFER: in the 16th century it meant "elderly rustic," apparently a contraction of godfather; originally "old man," it was applied from 1841 to foremen and supervisors, and this sense carried over in the twentieth century to the specific meaning of "electrician in charge of lighting on a film set."

I discovered this while looking for the origin of GAFFE, which Romney has been making a few of lately. The origins are unclear, so nothing coherent to report, but it appears to be originally a slang term that entered English from French in the 20th century.