86/eighty-six – as in “86 halibut”
The origin of this term has
come up recently in two conversations I’ve had, so I figured, why not look it
up? Unfortunately, the OED only has a rather brief word history:
eighty-six, n. in restaurants and bars, an expression indicating that the
supply of an item is exhausted, or that a customer is not to be served; also, a
customer to be refused service. Also transf.
1936 Amer. Speech 11 43/1 Eighty-six, item on
the menu not on hand.
1944 G. Fowler Good Night, Sweet Prince iii. i. 227 There was a bar in the
Belasco building,..but Barrymore was known in that cubby as an ‘eighty-six’. An
‘eighty-six’, in the patois of western dispensers, means: ‘Don't serve him.’
1971 P. Tamony Americanisms (typescript) No. 28. 16 Eighty-six.
Bar and restaurant usage, ‘nix’, i.e., customer has had enough to drink or
house is out of comestible ordered. Basically, simple rhyming slang but among
habitues has as many [e]tymons as Homer had home-places, such probably being
boozed up ex cathedra.
1977 Washington Post 17 May b1/5, 86 means you're all out of something or
you cut some guy off.
1981 W.
Safire in N.Y. Times Mag. 15 Mar. 10/2
Eighty-six on etymologies for “cocktail.”
eighty-six,
v. trans., to eject or debar (a person) from premises; to reject
or abandon.
1959 Observer 1 Nov. 7/6 ‘Eighty-sixed some square
bankers from the temple’..eighty-sixed means evicted.
1963 J. Rechy City of Night ii. 186 I'll have you eighty-sixed out of
this bar.
1968 N.Y. Times 31 July 29 On the evening of July 22, Mr.
Mailer was filming a dream sequence at the house of Alfonso Ossorio in East
Hampton, when Mr. Smith came into the house. ‘He told me, “You're 86'd”,’ Mr.
Smith recalled yesterday. This is a barroom phrase that means ‘you're banned in
here’.
1980 New Yorker 30 June 67 Most of the program was devoted
to the lessons in campaign management that could be learned from Presidential
races, real and fictional (A scene was shown from the movie ‘The Candidate’, in
which the media adviser said to Robert Redford, ‘O.K., now, for starters, we
got to cut your hair and eighty-six the sideburns’).
My own experience with this term is a little more syntactically
flexible, and I don’t actually think I would ever use it as a noun. I have used
it/heard it used as a verb, but not necessarily in that way, e.g., when chef
tells me to 86 something it means I need to write 86 Halibut up on the server board, and it also means I need to
inform everyone else on the floor that Halibut has been 86ed. I would also
consider the sentence Halibut has been
86ed to be a well-formed statement.
It might also be used as an adjective/adverb, as in
Server 2: “Are we 86 anything?”
Server 1: “Yes, we are 86 halibut, chef is using fluke instead.”
Where it describes a state of being out of something. In the
case above 86 stands in only for out of.
It is interesting that the OED treats this as a noun, because
even when I consider what it stands in for ([we
are] out of), it doesn’t seem to follow any of the noun rules.
Morphologically, I wouldn’t say it takes on –ion, –er, or –ness; syntactically it
does not seem to require a determiner, or act as a subject/object. I suppose
this might be an archaic form, seeing as its last reported use was in 1981, but
I’d be interested to hear what other people who know and use this word have to
say. I’ve only ever heard it and used it in the restaurant industry.
This ‘word’ also brings back some of the issues we discussed
about defining the parameters of a word. This word can be represented with
letters or numbers, or a combination there of, complicating orthography in a
way most definitions would not anticipate.
Disabuse, v. – as in “we need to disabuse him
of that notion.”
For whatever reason, whenever I say this word out loud I feel
like I might be saying it wrong, so I set out to determine what is the ‘right’
way to say it once and for all.
The OED pronunciation lists it as /dɪsəˈbjuːz/, which
is exactly how I say it, so hopefully I will feel more confident now whenever I
use it. Speaking of use…
1.
To free from abuse, error, or mistake; to relieve from fallacy
or deception; to undeceive.
The first recorded use was in 1611, and though the last recorded
use was in 1872, I still use this word though, so it must still be a word.
2.
As an intensive of abuse:
To mar, spoil, misuse.
The first, and only recorded use (according to the OED) was in
1825. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard it used in this way, but it is not
listed as obsolete.
The etymology is the prefix dis
with the verb abuse, creating an
oppositional concept. This, however, is also interesting, since I don’t think I
would say that to abuse and to disabuse are exactly opposite
concepts. They are related certainly, but direct opposites no. The quotation
history does not really clarify how it was first used in context, and the 1653
quote offered is an example akin to common usage today.
Frequent, v. – as in “I frequent the local
market place.”
For me this word is also about how it is said. I tend to place
the emphasis on the second syllable (freQUENT) rather than the first
(FREquent), which is what I would do if I were using it as an adverb, i.e., she comes her frequently. I used it in
conversation the other day, and someone stopped me to ask, if that was really
how it was said, I said yes, but I had never actually looked it up.
The OED’s pronunciation is stated thus: /frɪˈkwɛnt/, which I
think conforms to my pronunciation, although the stress is not clarified. It
comes from the Latin frequentāre, originally,
but likely came to English through the French fréquenter.
The OED has several different definitions for it:
1.
To visit or make use of (a place) often, to resort
habitually; to attend (a meeting, etc.). First recorded use 1555.
2.
To visit or associate with (a person); to be frequently
with (a person) or in (his company). This definition is now somewhat rare, with
the last recorded use in 1889.
3.
Obsolete definitions include:
a.
Of a disease; to attack often. This definition is
archaic, no longer in use, with the last recorded use in 1632.
b.
To use habitually or repeatedly; to practice. This is
another obsolete version of the verb, to
frequent. 1485-1668.
c.
To celebrate (a sacrament, etc.); to honour with
observances. Cf. French fréquenter.
1565-1581.
d.
refl. To busy
oneself about something. 1562.
e.
To familiarize with. Last recorded use in 1588-1632.
f.
To resort to or
unto (a person or place); to
associate with (a person); to be
often in or about (a place). Last recorded use 1577-1810.
g.
To crowd or pack closely; to supply abundantly. Last
recorded use 1578-1682.
With the exception of f. these obsolete definitions all ‘died
out’ between 75-130 years after the introduction of the first recorded use of
the now popular definition. They also all seem to have emerged in use within
10-20 years of one another. This seems like it could be some sort of Survival
of the Fittest: Word Version.
Some Other Interesting Things
1. #madisonwatersucks – as in “
It's incredible how
much better my coffee tastes when I use purified water #madisonwatersucks.”
This was my first ‘hashtag,’ as they are called. I posted it
on as a part of a Facebook status on Tuesday, September 17, 2013, and it’s an
interesting example of some of the issues with defining words that we’ve been
talking about in class. I think it is probably fair to say that most people would
parse this as 3 words, madison, water, and sucks, but when these three words are compounded together, in the
context of a hashtag, they seem to take on a concept that is greater than the
parts: the collective—sometimes affectionate—disgust of the resident population
at the quality of Madison’s public water supply.
Wikipedia defines a hashtag as “a word or phrase prefixed
with the symbole ‘#.’” (Side note: interesting choice to use the word prefix.) Hashtags
in general are a phenomenon popularized by Twitter, where the hashtagged word
or phrase links to the page for that topic. Hashtags have since also become a
phenomenon used outside the context of just twitter, on Facebook, in texts, and
in spoken conversation. As such, they seem to have expanded beyond the scope of
a functional link, and become stylistic in nature.
2. Duct = Duck, Schwan = Swan
As I was walking to class the other day I saw this truck,
which is presumably a duct cleaning service:
Notice that there is a picture of a duck as a part of this
logo. Linguistically this points to the phonological similarity between /dʌks/
(ducks) and /dʌkts/ (ducts). Based on my own experience this may also be
because when people say ducts it
often sounds like ducks. In my case,
I can remember thinking duct tape was duck tape, and wondering why ducks needed
tape.
Another example of this is Schwan’s Food Company (pronounced
/ʃwan/), which has in its logo a swan (/swan/):
3. A Reverse Mondegreen: “Some Beach” – Blake Shelton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTT2LEyjdC4
On this topic, and that of unintentional mondegreens from
last week, I was listening to my country playlist when “Some Beach,” by Blake
Shelton came on. When I first heard this song—years ago, I thought he was
really just trying to center himself by thinking of a nice beach somewhere far
away, which would prevent him from negatively reacting to the instances he
describes in the song. My dad was actually the one who pointed out to me that some beach (/sʌmbitʃ/) was a stand in
for son-of-a-bitch (/sʌnʌvʌbɪtʃ/),
which is an expletive often directed at the instigators of situations such as
those described in the song. The difference between this situation and the ones
people posted about under “My Mondegreen,” is that it is intentional on the
part of the artist.
4. NYT Magazine Word of the Week.
Every Sunday the New York Times puts out the NYT Magazine
with the paper and in the first couple of pages you come across the section
entitled “One Page. The Magazine.” Among a number of witty and sarcastic
columns is one called “That should be a word.” This is an example of the sort
of top-down word change Professor Wanner was discussing in class on Tuesday,
although it’s a much less serious version of the gender-neutral function word she
used as an example. The words offered up are lexical in nature, adhere to the
word formation rules, and embody a funny or ironic, but believable and/or
relatable situation. I don’t think any of these actually take, as is typical
with top-down cases, but it is an interesting study in word formation.
