Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[zompist]

Apparently, "housemade" is a New Thing.

I'm guessing that the word "housemaid" had to die off before "housemade" could sound good...

[Linguoboy]

Apparently, "housemade" is a New Thing.

I did consider asking the question in the "Innovative Usage" thread instead.

It's not exactly an innovation, but I have the feeling "nice" has come full circle. In my day, it was most often used sarcastically, to the point where I stopped using it to express approval. But now I'm seeing it used more often at face value (e.g. twice by younger friends only yesterday).

[Zaarin]

It's not exactly an innovation, but I have the feeling "nice" has come full circle. In my day, it was most often used sarcastically, to the point where I stopped using it to express approval. But now I'm seeing it used more often at face values (e.g. twice by younger friends only yesterday).

I'm 29; I've never perceived anything inherently sarcastic about "nice" except in the phrase "That's nice."

[akam chinjir]

It's not exactly an innovation, but I have the feeling "nice" has come full circle. In my day, it was most often used sarcastically, to the point where I stopped using it to express approval. But now I'm seeing it used more often at face values (e.g. twice by younger friends only yesterday).

Back when an undergraduate, 25 going on 30 years ago, I learned "nice" as the wholly sincere opposite of "asshole." Somewhere in there I also read and loved Bertrand Russell's essay "On Nice People" (which somehow is not obviously online?), but that never had as much of an influence on my vocabulary, I think. (One Russell excerpt here, probably not one I would've chosen, though.)

[Linguoboy]

It's not exactly an innovation, but I have the feeling "nice" has come full circle. In my day, it was most often used sarcastically, to the point where I stopped using it to express approval. But now I'm seeing it used more often at face values (e.g. twice by younger friends only yesterday).

Back when an undergraduate, 25 going on 30 years ago, I learned "nice" as the wholly sincere opposite of "asshole."

Perhaps I should have written "Nice." rather than "nice". I'm referring only to the bare predicative use. So "She's nice" (or "She's nice to be around" or "She's a nice person") is unambiguous. But in an exchange like this:

"She told me I looked like death on toast."
"Nice."

The implication is that that was anything but a nice thing to say.

[akam chinjir]

Ah, okay. I'm a much more frequent producer of unironic than of ironic bare "nice", but I couldn't say whether that's changed over the past however many years. (Except that fairly recently my primary partner has picked it up from me, which probably has me using it more, too.)

[Pabappa]

does it matter if the person uses the pronunciation "noice" instead of the normal?

ivew seen "homemade" used to mean things made in the restaurant. e.g. homemade icecream doesnt mean that they brought it in from their homes, it means it was made in the kitchen of the restaurant. thats common, i think. ive never heard "housemade" in any sense/

[Linguoboy]

does it matter if the person uses the pronunciation "noice" instead of the normal?

IME, "noice" is always ironic. In general, the more emphatic the pronunciations, the more likely it is to be sarcastic.

ivew seen "homemade" used to mean things made in the restaurant. e.g. homemade icecream doesnt mean that they brought it in from their homes, it means it was made in the kitchen of the restaurant. thats common, i think. ive never heard "housemade" in any sense/

I've also seen "homemade" used figuratively to mean "in the style of homemade" (however that may be defined for a particular type of food). "Housemade", however, seems to mean strictly "made in house".

[mèþru]

IME, noice is often unironic too.

[Travis B.]

About homemade, I have seen it used so often for commercially produced products that it has ceased to have any meaning for me. As for housemade, I have never heard or, before reading this thread, seen that term at all.

About nice, I am not really used to the ironic meaning, and the word typically has an unironic meaning for me unless it is clear from context that it is intended ironically.

[M Mira]

Me neither. I think it should be "in-house"?

[Travis B.]

I am very familiar with the term in-house, but it has a completely different meaning from homemade, meaning something made (or in the case of in-house staff, people working) within the company one works for rather than purchased or rented or contracted from another company.

[Vijay]

At some point back when I used to edit Wikipedia, I was an undergraduate assistant at the Linguistic Research Center. Some IP user edited the Wikipedia article for it to add my name in a few times; there's also something in it about software being "developed in-house," after which they added, "and who being in the house but that same Vijay John." As flattered as I was, I reverted it.

IME, noice is often unironic too.

IME noice is pretty much never ironic. Nice can be but only in the right context. I myself use noice exclusively with Americans, and even more specifically with Americans who have already used it with me, and only because I worry for whatever reason that saying nice over and over again may just seem boring.

[Moose-tache]

Bare predicative nice can be sarcastic IME, but it never made the shift from "positive word used sarcastically" to "negative word used sincerely." If someone asked me "How is that cupcake," and I responded "nice," they would never guess the cupcake was bad. Semantically inherent sarcasm seems to be a pretty rare thing. The closest common phenomenon I can think of is euphemism drift, where words like "retard" will start out as gentle and end up insulting. But euphemism already has a deliberateness to it that normal words don't have, like a curtain that says "don't look behind me." The word nice can only be negative for me because of its default positive meaning, and as long as that remains true, the word can shift back to being entirely positive at any time. Compare "bad," in its meaning of "slick, cool, admirable." I can't remember the last time I heard bad used this way, and as far as I know The Yout have gone back to the ancient ways of using it to exclusively describe negative things.

[Linguoboy]

Bare predicative nice can be sarcastic IME, but it never made the shift from "positive word used sarcastically" to "negative word used sincerely." If someone asked me "How is that cupcake," and I responded "nice," they would never guess the cupcake was bad.

I wouldn't either--but I'd immediately wonder why they were faulting me for asking about the cupcake.

Semantically inherent sarcasm seems to be a pretty rare thing. The closest common phenomenon I can think of is euphemism drift, where words like "retard" will start out as gentle and end up insulting. But euphemism already has a deliberateness to it that normal words don't have, like a curtain that says "don't look behind me."

I occasionally hear people say, "Same to you!" in response to well-wishes like "Have a good weekend!" and it always makes me cringe. For me, that phrase is so thoroughly associated with its usage in responding to insults that it always sounds hostile to me.

The word nice can only be negative for me because of its default positive meaning, and as long as that remains true, the word can shift back to being entirely positive at any time.

"Nice" has negative connotations to me because of the "Nice Guy phenomenon". But that's separate from its sarcastic use.

[linguistcat]

The only time bare "nice" has an ironic meaning for me is when people say it with A Tone, or in text messages if it's ended with a period. (Formal writing of course uses different rules.)

[Neon Fox]

I fairly frequently respond to someone telling me about a thing that happened by saying "Nice!", and it's not ironic. "I logged in and the person I needed to talk to was already there." "Nice!" Which is not to say I never use the word sarcastically, but that takes tone of voice, or in text creative punctuation: "I logged in and he'd just logged out like ten seconds earlier." "...nice. "

[Vijay]

That's how I always use both "nice" and "noice" at work. If I want to be sarcastic, I'll add a few more words (and probably use an adjective that's more specific than "nice," because there are very specific kinds of annoyances at work).

I occasionally hear people say, "Same to you!" in response to well-wishes like "Have a good weekend!" and it always makes me cringe. For me, that phrase is so thoroughly associated with its usage in responding to insults that it always sounds hostile to me.

It makes me cringe also but for a different reason. A common joke among (non-Bengali) Indians about Bengalis plays on the fact that Bengalis use [ʃ] in contexts where other Indians would use [s]:

"Happy New Year!"
"Shame to you!"

[Pabappa]

The Chevrolet car company was named after its founder, whose surname derives from a diminutive of the French word chevreuil, a type of deer, which itself comes from the Latin word capreolus.

This word derives from a word for goat. Perhaps it originally referred to animal movements in general, because it also generated a word for somersault and a series of words for horse-drawn carriages. Of these, the word cabriolet has come down to English, where it formed the basis for the modern abbreviation cab.

Yet before there was a "cab" in the modern sense, the Chevrolet car company created a model called the Cabriolet, and the full form of that word can still be used to denote that type of vehicle, apparently a synyonym of convertible.

Thus we have two words for the same object .... Chevrolet and cabriolet ... both deriving from the same ultimate Latin root, yet separate in meaning for at least a thousand years, and perhaps 2000 years if we assume the deer and horse senses were separate already in early Latin.

[Moose-tache]

Yet before there was a "cab" in the modern sense, the Chevrolet car company created a model called the Cabriolet, and the full form of that word can still be used to denote that type of vehicle, apparently a synyonym of convertible.

I looked up the Chevy Cavalier looking for more coincidental etymologies, and ran across the Chevy Citation. The Citation!?! Why would you name a car that? That's like naming your wine label "DUI Vineyards."