Author: Arika

Since the days of yore, tales of imaginary creatures have been spread by storytellers, myth-makers, and drunk guys lost in the woods. But not all are as literary as the Bandersnatch or as hairy as the Yeti—some non-existent creatures, like the ones mentioned below, are nearly nonexistent in language as well.

1. HIPPOCENTAUR

Though one would hope this term referred to a creature one part horse, one part person, and one part hippopotamus, alas: this is simply a synonym for centaur. There’s also an amusing variation that popped up in the early 1600s, described by clergyman Thomas Jackson as “A monstrous Hippocentaurique combination.”

2. YOWIE

This is an Australian term for a shaggy creature familiar to cryptozoology enthusiasts around the world. A 1980 use from Brisbane’s Courier-Journal suggests a lengthy history: “The ‘yowie’, a large hairy animal similar to the Himalayan yeti and American Big Foot, has existed in Aboriginal folklore for thousands of years.”

3. HIPPOGRIFF

Part griffin, part horse, this is one of many hybrid beasts. People have been talking about hippogriffs since the 1600s, and much to my amusement, the term has been used figuratively, like when anything unique is described as a unicorn. In 1837, poet Thomas Carlyle referred to “that wild Hippogryff of a Democracy.” More recently, they’ve been featured in the Harry Potter novels and movies.

4. JERSEY DEVIL

At least as old as the early 1900s, this critter—who inspired the name of the NHL team—was memorably discussed in John McPhee’s 1968 book The Pine Barrens: “This creature has been feared in the woods—on a somewhat diminishing scale—from the seventeen–thirties to the present. It is known as Leeds’ Devil, or the Jersey Devil.” As to the origin, McPhee claimed, “A woman named Leeds … had her thirteenth child, and it growed, and one day it flew away. It’s haunted the earth ever since. It’s took pigs right out of pens. And little lambs … The Leeds Devil is a crooked-faced thing, with wings.”

5. OPINICUS

Since the 1500s, this beast has captured the fevered imaginations of anyone with a dangerously high fever. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines it as “An imaginary creature, freq. represented as having the head and wings of an eagle or griffin, the body and legs of a lion, and the tail of a camel.”

6. TRICORN

You didn’t think the unicorn was immune to the variations of nature, did you? Among other uses, tricorn has applied to a unicorn times three in the horn department. The OED also records bicorn and millecorns, suggesting an infinity of fanciful horned animals.

7. BATSQUATCH

We’ve all heard of the Sasquatch, but a different hairy beast was first spotted near Mount St. Helens in 1980. As described by the National Paranormal Society: “The creature has been reported as having yellow eyes and a wolf-like muzzle, bluish fur, sharp pointy teeth, bird-like feet and leather bat-like wings that possibly span up to 50 feet. The creature is reported as about 9 feet tall and has the ability to affect car engines.”

8. PUSHMI-PULLYU

Read the OED’s definition and weep: “An imaginary creature resembling a llama or antelope, but with a head at either end of the body, pointing away from the torso, so that the creature always faces in two directions at once.” Double yikes. Often, this word refers to something a bit less fanciful: wishy-washy-ness, as seen in a 2001 use from London’s Daily Telegraph: “Ever since the election, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have been engaged in a sort of pushmi-pullyu struggle over the euro.”

9. DUNGAVENHOOTER

Henry H. Tyron’s 1939 book Fearsome Critters detailed a full kookload of imaginary creatures, including the ludicrously named dungavenhooter. Tyron describes the beast as alligator-like but mouthless and paints a freaky picture: “… behind a whiffle bush, the Dungavenhooter awaits the passing logger. On coming within reach of the dreadful tail, the victim is knocked senseless and then pounded steadily until he becomes entirely gaseous, whereat he is greedily inhaled through the wide nostrils.”

10. ICE WORM

One would think the ice worm is quite annoying to the Abominable Snowman and the frost giants of Jotunheim. Fortunately, it’s just as imaginary—or at least it was when first coined in the early 1800s. In the life imitating art department, it turns out there are some actual ice worms out there, particularly in the glaciers of Alaska.

If you’re turning 40 this year, you have something in common with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Saturday Night Fever, and the Chia Pet. You also got to grow up with these words, dated by first citation to 1977 in the Oxford English Dictionary.

1. SHAPEWEAR

By 1977, girdles were on the way out—but we got shapewear to take their place.

2. NIP AND TUCK

There was an older, 19th century sense of nip and tuck that referred to a close “neck and neck” competition, but by 1977, the phrase was claimed for minor cosmetic surgery.

3. PARTY ANIMAL

The first citation for party animal is from Bill Murray in an episode of Saturday Night Live.

4. BREWSKI

Another Saturday Night Live contribution. Also from Bill Murray, this time complaining to the coneheads that they put brewskis in the kids’ trick-or-treat bags.

5. YOOPER

In 1977, the Escanaba Daily Press had a contest to come up with a name for residents of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, also know as the U.P. The finalists included U.P.ite, which didn’t stick, and Yooper, which did.

6. MICROWAVEABLE

Once we had microwaves, we needed a term to describe the type of packaging that was suitable to put into the microwave. At the same time we got microwaveable, we also got ovenable, for packaging that could, by contrast, go into a more traditional oven—but that word didn’t last as long.

7. WORK-LIFE

“Work-life balance” became an ideal to shoot for in the ’70s, and as a result we got this adjective.

8. NO-NAME

There was a heyday 40 years ago for generics, or non-branded products, at the supermarket. As Time pointed out at the time, “No name groceries have become hot items.”

9. NANOCOMPUTER

We had microcomputer in the ’50s. In the ’70s, we started looking toward the even smaller nanocomputer.

10. MURDOCHIAN

We did see the word Murdochian as early as 1963, but then it referred to the philosophy of the writer Iris Murdoch. In 1977, it was first applied to the sensationalist tabloid style of publisher Rupert Murdoch.

11. PHALLOCRACY

Since 1965, the French had the word phallocratie for a male-dominated society (etymologically, “government run by penises”). In 1977, we made an English version.

12. MOORE’S LAW

In 1965, microchip manufacturer Gordon Earle Moore expressed the idea that the number of components that could fit on a chip would double every year. In 1977, the idea was called Moore’s Law and eventually came to stand for the idea that computers will keep getting better and faster while they also get smaller.

13. A-LISTER

We’ve been talking about the A-list, the most popular, exclusive, and sought-after folks, since the 1930s, but 40 years ago, an article about the band Kiss first applied the term A-listers to the members of this list: “it is snubbed by A-listers, since it panders to 14-year-olds.”

14. AT SIGN

The @ symbol itself has been around for hundreds of years, but we only have evidence for it being called the at sign since 1977. Before that, it was sometimes called the commercial at.

15. BIBIMBAP

In Korean, this dish of mixed rice and vegetables is pronounced more like pibimbap, but 40 years ago, when American culture started getting to know it, it came into English as bibimbap.

16. BRITPOP

The first citation for Britpop, in a 1977 issue of New Musical Express, refers to a band you might not expect: “At home The Sex Pistols are public enemies. In Sweden, they’re an important visiting Britpop group.”

17. POST-PUNK

Punk had barely gotten started in 1977, but already there was a cited mention of a “post-punk disco” where a “new wave” band was to play.

18. STREET CREDIBILITY

A couple of years later, this term for “acceptability among, or popularity with, ordinary people, especially fashionable young urban people” was shortened to street cred. Which definitely has more street cred.

19. ‘BURB

Suburb is a very old word, going all the way back to the Middle Ages. Even suburbia goes back to the 19th century. But the ‘burbs is now a young 40 years old.

20. CATFIGHT (VERB)

Cats have been fighting for a long time, but the verb to catfight or “fight in a vicious, cat-like manner, esp. by scratching, pulling hair and biting” dates to 1977.

21. CRINGEWORTHY

If what is praiseworthy is worthy of praise, then it makes sense that what is worthy of cringing at should be cringeworthy.

22. NEKKID

The pronunciation nekkid had long been a regional variant of naked, but 40 years ago it became its own word with a slightly different meaning: a purposely humorous, eyebrow wagging, sexually suggestive idea of nakedness.

23. FAST-TRACK

The term fast track originally comes from horse racing. By 1977, it had become a verb for doing things on an accelerated schedule.

24. FRO-YO

Calling frozen yogurt fro-yo made it sound a little more fun, but still didn’t make it ice cream.

25. GUILT-TRIP (VERB)

The noun guilt trip goes back to 1972, but by 1977 we had cut back the lengthy “lay a guilt trip on” to the simple verb, to guilt-trip.

26. INCENTIVIZATION

In the 1940s and ’50s, people started talking about the concept of “incentive pay” or bonuses to encourage workers to be more productive. By 1968, we had the verb incentivize, and 1977 brought us incentivization.

27. KARAOKE

Karaoke (from a Japanese compound meaning “empty orchestra”) started in Japan in the 1970s. Though it didn’t really hit big in the English-speaking world until the ’90s, we had already borrowed the word for it by 1977.

28. PLUS-ONE

Plus-one, for a guest brought to a party by someone else who was invited, got its start with the backstage music scene.

29. LOOSE CANNON

If a cannon is not tied down on a storm-tossed ship, it’s liable to do a lot of damage. People had long used this image as a metaphor for dangerously unpredictable behavior, but loose cannon became a set phrase for that metaphor 40 years ago.

30. SHOPAHOLIC

We got this word just in time for the dawn of mall culture.

31. UPSELLING

The idea of getting customers to buy something more expensive than they intended was already old 40 years ago, but this abstract noun for the idea was new.

32. SICKO

Pinkos, weirdos, and winos had already been around for a while by the time we came up with sicko.

33. STEADICAM

The patent for the Steadicam, an actively stabilized video camera, was granted to filmmaker Garrett W. Brown in 1977.

34. STEP-PARENTING

A 1977 article in the Washington Post referred to “step-parenting” problems.

35. STRAPPY

Strappy is 40 in the sartorial sense of strappy sandals and strappy sundresses.

36. SUPERSIZE (VERB)

Supersize as an adjective goes back to 1876, but the verb, to supersize something, shows up in 1977. It was popularized in the fast food sense after 1994.

37. TEXT MESSAGE

This phrase was introduced with the publication of “Standard for Format of ARPA Network Text Messages” from the Internet Engineering Task Force.

38. THINSULATE

This proprietary name for an insulating synthetic fabric has been with us for 40 years.

39. TRANSCRIPTIONIST

In the ’70s audio recording had become easy and portable enough to be relied upon in many fields. This created the requirement for a new type of job: transcribing from audio. The first citation for transcriptionist is from a job ad for a medical transcriptionist.

40. WEDGIE

The OED dictionary definition for this word is delightfully thorough: “An act of pulling the cloth of a person’s underwear, trousers, etc., tightly between the buttocks, esp. as a practical joke; any positioning of a person’s underwear, pants, etc., resembling the result of such a pulling.”

It’s an error you see a lot these days: the use of bias in place of biased. Bias is a noun. You can have a bias, show a bias, or worry about bias. But when used as an adjective to describe something, the word is biased. It’s incorrect to say, “your opinion is bias,” “that’s a bias statement,” or “don’t be so bias.”

There are a number of factors that make this mistake likely and even hint at the notion that one day it could stop being seen as a mistake. First, in speech people drop the d or t sound from the end of words so often that linguists have a label for the phenomenon: “t/d deletion.” Think about how you say “I passed through.” If you think very carefully about it, and speak very slowly you can get all the sounds in there, but in casual speech, it will come out as “I pass through.”

If a sound is often missing in speech, it’s likely to get left off in writing, too. There are a number of common errors where the –ed ending is left off of adjective forms. You see stain glass for stained glass, can goods for canned goods, bake chicken for baked chicken, and hundreds more like these (especially on menus).

When an adjective-noun phrase is used often enough, the –ed may eventually go missing for good. Skim milk, popcorn, and ice tea began their lives as skimmed milk, popped corn, and iced tea. Whip cream is well on its way to crossing over. Do you go over things with a fine-toothed comb or a fine-tooth comb? Either way works.

The process for biased losing its ending doesn’t quite fit this pattern. It doesn’t participate in any set phrases with a following noun of the skimmed milk variety (the most common words that follow biased are the prepositions against and toward). But bias fits another pattern: many adjectives that describe stances toward the world end in –ous, among them jealous, oblivious, righteous, serious, cautious, meticulous, treacherous, generous, callous, and pious. Bias might get a boost from the –ous family of adjectives because it ends in the same sequence of sounds.

Bias wouldn’t be the first such word to become an adjective because it coincidentally sounded like one. That’s what happened to the word genius, which has nothing to do with the –ous ending and was not used as an adjective until the 1920s, when people started saying things like “What a genius idea!” There are other words that coincidentally sound like they end in –ous, like prejudice and jaundice, which also seem especially susceptible to word errors of the bias type. “Are you prejudice?” gets thousands of hits on Google. “He was jaundice” and “She was jaundice” get thousands more.

Bias, prejudice, and jaundice are less likely than genius to become fully acceptable as adjectives because their spellings don’t fit as closely with the expectations for –ous words. They are still errors. But they are errors that reveal a complex sensitivity to the patterns of English. You might say the language is biased toward them.

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Despite the constant interaction made possible by internet connectivity, people still use words differently depending on where they live. You’ve seen the maps of where we say pop vs. soda, and y’all vs. you guys. Now you can make your own maps to explore the regional variation of words with the Great American Word Mapper at Quartz.

The addictively usable tool, designed by Nikhil Sonnad, builds on the work of researchers Jack Grieve, Andrea Nini, and Diansheng Guo. It uses geolocation and statistical clustering techniques to map some of the top 100,000 words used on Twitter in 2014.

You can look at names, sports teams, slang, naughty words, or anything you might expect to see used on Twitter (in 2014). It’s incredibly fun to play with. Here are a few comparisons I did.

See what other people have found and shared on Twitter.

Check out the Great American Word Mapper yourself at Quartz.

The word of the year tradition began with the American Dialect Society, which has just held its annual Word of the Year vote for the 27th time. A group that includes linguists, lexicographers, editors, students, and independent scholars gathered in a crowded conference to vote the old-fashioned way, by raised hand, for the vocabulary items (which can include words, phrases, hashtags, and emojis) that capture the zeitgeist of 2016 in a variety of categories. Here are a few of the choices.

1. DUMPSTER FIRE // OVERALL WINNER

Defined as an “exceedingly disastrous or chaotic situation,” this was the winner for word of the year. Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal, said, “In pessimistic times, dumpster fire served as a darkly humorous summation of how many viewed the year’s events.”

2. POST-TRUTH // POLITICAL WORD OF THE YEAR

The election put so many political words in play this year a category was created for it. Post-truth won, beating other choices like deplorables and nasty woman.

3. WOKE // SLANG WORD OF THE YEAR

In the category of slang, woke, meaning “socially aware or enlightened” beat receipts (“proof, as in ‘show me the receipts’”) in a runoff.

4. LAISSEZ-FAIRYDUST // MOST CREATIVE

Laissez-fairydust is defined as the “magical effect brought upon by laissez-faire economics.” In the Most Creative category, it just edged out the –exit ending from coinages like Brexit, Calexit, Brangelexit, etc.

5. FIRE EMOJI // EMOJI OF THE YEAR

The fire emoji is used to mean “lit” or exciting. It also participates in the emoji version of the Word of the Year choice, which looks like this:

If you were born in 1992, not only are you as old as the Mall of America, the nicotine patch, and Super Mario Kart, you got to grow up with these words, all dated by first citation to 1992 in the Oxford English Dictionary.

1. VACAY

It was a time when people started going on vacation before the vacation even started by clipping off a whole syllable and saying they were going on vacay.

2. TRUSTAFARIAN

This blend of trust fund and Rastafarian got a first mention in the Washington Times, where it was defined as a “guy who has long hair and a trust fund, drives a Saab or Jeep, listens to reggae, and doesn’t let a whole lot bother him.”

3. PHOTOSHOP (VERB)

The image editing program Photoshop was released in 1990. By 1992, the name had become a verb, to Photoshop.

4. SQUOVAL

This blend of square and oval was formed to name the hot manicure style of 1992, a squared-off oval nail shape.

5. SKEEZY

First there was sleazy, which has been around since 1644. In 1976, we got skeevy, and after we added skeeze in 1989, it was inevitable that we’d come around to skeezy eventually.

6. SADSTER

According to the OED, a sadster is “a pathetic or contemptible person.” According to the Urban Dictionary it’s “an emo dude who is always downbeat, yet more earnest and cooler than you. Basically a hipster sad-sack.”

7. POLYAMORY

This term for “the fact of having simultaneous close emotional relationships with two or more other individuals” first appeared in a 1992 proposal for a new Usenet group on the subject.

8. ON MESSAGE

Politicians and organizations have always come up with plans to get their positions across to the public, but it wasn’t until 25 years ago that they referred directly to those plans with comments about staying on message.

9. METAVERSE

Metaverse, from meta-universe, became a term for virtual worlds after it was introduced by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash.

10. MEH

The word meh was not invented in 1992. It’s a Yiddishism that goes back a long way. But it first shows up in attested written form in a 1992 Usenet post about the TV show Melrose Place with “Meh … far too Ken-doll for me.”

11. INTERNAUT

Just 25 years ago, we needed a special term for a habitual internet user. This blend of internet and astronaut was the answer. Now we don’t need a special word for this, because it’s all of us.

12. GRRRL

This blend of grrr and girl was first applied to the “riot girl” feminist punk movement. By 1992, it was a general term for “a young woman perceived as strong or aggressive, esp. in her attitude to men or in her expression of feminine independence and sexuality.”

13. BIOHACKING

The ethical problem of renegade hobbyists playing around with genes was something worrying enough to warrant the creation of the term biohacking in 1992.

14. FRANKEN-

The new possibilities of genetic manipulation also gave rise to the idea of “Frankenstein food”—food that had been irradiated or genetically modified. In 1992, the Franken- detached and became its own prefix in words like Frankenfood and Frankenfruit.

15. ALTERNA-

Another prefix achieved independence from alternative in 1992. First applied to music styles like alternapop, alterna-rock, and alterna-metal, it also became a way to describe alternadads and alternateens who were into alternathings.

16. FASHIONISTA

The ’90s supermodel years brought the whole fashion industry into the popular imagination, and this term, so much more worldly and evocative than “fashion industry employee,” gained its high-heeled foothold in the vocabulary.

17. DIGERATI

The ’60s gave us the idea of the jet-setting glitterati, and the ’90s gave us the digerati, from digital + literati, for the computing and information technology class.

18. CYBERWAR

The first new word coinages with cyber- (from the 1948 term cybernetic) started in the 1960s, but cyberwar gets its first print citation with a 1992 Chicago Sun-Times article header: “Cyberwar debate: a new generation of ‘brilliant weapons’ has sparked a debate between scientists and the military about who should wage war, man or machine.”

19. BOOTYLICIOUS

The original citation for bootylicious is from a 1992 line rapped by the then-called Snoop Doggy Dogg (“Them rhymes you were kickin were quite bootylicious”) where it had a negative meaning—weak. Later it came to be a positive word for shapely and attractive.

20. BADASSERY

Badass had been around since 1955, but in 1992, it got extended into the abstract noun for the whole general quality of being a badass.

21. ACHY-BREAKY

Billy Ray Cyrus had a hit with his 1992 song “Achy Breaky Heart,” and achy breaky went on to a life of meaning generally sad in a country, twangy, way.

22. EATERTAINMENT

This blend of eat and entertainment was formed to put a simple label on a new ’90s trend of theme restaurants that included entertainment, memorabilia, and gift shops.

23. RESTOBAR

Another blend for a type of bar/nightclub that also serves food, from restaurant + bar plus a hip, European feel.

24. TURNTABLIST

A DJ might spin records, but in 1992, the manipulation of the turntables for effect with scratching, mixing, etc. was elevated to its own type of art from with the word turntablist.

25. URL

The Uniform Resource Locator, a format for specifying a web address, wasn’t yet a standard in 1992, but it was mentioned, and called a URL, in a 1992 electronic mailing list post of minutes from an Internet Engineering Task Force meeting.

It’s a crucial line in the 1990 movie Ghost, a favorite phrase of Rush Limbaugh’s dittoheads, and the reigning copy machine of the mid-20th century, but what does ditto really mean, and where did it come from?

“Ditto” as a response meant as “same here” or “what you said” has a modern, almost slangy feel to it, so many people assume that it was taken from the copy machine use. The reading is that a ditto machine makes copies, so saying ditto creates a “copy” of something that was just said. But the “what you said” use is centuries older than the machine.

It comes from Italian ditto, a dialect variation on detto, meaning “said,” the past participle of dice, “to say.” It was used in Italian as in il ditto libro, “the aforesaid book.” In English, it came to be used in the 17th century to avoid having to repeat words and phrases in accounting and commercial language. Instead of repeating something like January 29 or Newcastle upon Tyne in a list, one could just put ditto in after the first occurrence.

Ditto gradually drifted from a noun meaning “the aforesaid” or “the same” (as in a 1759 cookbook: “Parsley roots, and leaves of ditto”) to an adverb meaning “I agree with what you just said.”

The force of ditto goes beyond mere agreement though. If the Patrick Swayze character in Ghost said “I love you” and Demi Moore said “Agreed” or “I concur,” it would sound like she was agreeing only with the proposition he expressed: that he loved her. Kind of rude. What she means is not just “I agree,” but “I hereby say the same.” Ditto still carries the concept of actual saying with it. It performs an act of saying by merely pointing back to already said words.

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It’s that time again when we’re busy buying, wrapping, and giving them. Sometimes we call them gifts, sometimes presents. Is there a difference?

The words come to us from different language families. Gift comes from the old Germanic root for “to give.” It referred to an act of giving, and then, to the thing being given. In Old English it meant the dowry given to a bride’s parents. Present comes from the French for “to present.” A present is the thing presented or bestowed. They were both in use for the idea of something undergoing a transfer of possession without expectation of payment from the 13th century onward.

The words gift and present are well-matched synonyms that mean essentially the same thing, but even well-matched synonyms have their own connotations and distinctive patterns of use. Gift applies to a wider range of situations. Gifts can be talents. You can have the gift of gab, or a musical gift. Gifts can be intangibles. There is the gift of understanding or the gift of a quiet day. We generally don’t use present for things like this. Presents are more concrete. A bit more, well, present. If your whole family gave donations to your college fund for your birthday would you say “I got a lot of presents”? It doesn’t exactly sound wrong, but since you never hold these donations in your hand, gifts seems to fit better.

Gift can also be an attributive noun, acting like an adjective to modify another noun. What do you call the type of shop where you can buy presents for people? A gift shop. What do you call the basket of presents that you can have sent to all your employees? A gift basket. Present doesn’t work well in this role of describing other nouns. We have gift boxes, gift cards, and gift wrap, not present boxes, present cards, and present wrap.

Gift appears to be more frequent than present, though it is difficult to get accurate counts, because if you compare occurrences of the noun present with the noun gift, you include that other noun present, meaning the here and now. However, the plural noun presents captures only the word we want. Gifts outnumbers presents in the Corpus of Contemporary American English by four to one.

Still, according to my personal sense of the words, present—though it may not be as common—is more casual sounding than gift. I expect a child to ask Santa for lots and lots of presents, not many, many gifts. But whether it’s gifts or presents you prefer, I wish you many and lots this year, of both the tangible and intangible kind.

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Comienza la primera edición de #Ñuqanchik con Clodomiro Landeo y Marisol Mena. Sigue la transmisión en vivo aquí ►https://t.co/Lc3uKSKNJ7 pic.twitter.com/FPVD3owFSc

— TVPeruPE Noticias (@noticias_tvperu) December 12, 2016

Of all the remaining indigenous languages of South America, Quechua is one of the most robust. It has approximately 8 million speakers distributed across areas once belonging to the ancient Inca empire; about half of them live in Peru.

But despite its relatively healthy numbers, Quechua is threatened by the same forces that indigenous languages in many places face. It is marginalized and looked down upon as a language of the poor and provincial, and children who grow up in Quechua-speaking households increasingly abandon it in favor of Spanish. Now, reports The Guardian, in an effort to raise the profile of the language and reach out to its community of speakers, Peruvian television will air a regular news program in Quechua for the first time. It is called Ñuqanchik, which translates as “all of us.”

The broadcast team for the program is made up of native Quechua speakers who will report the news not only in the Quechua language, but from a Quechua cultural perspective. Prime Minister Fernando Zavala hopes that this effort “will transform the relationship between the government, the state, and those people who speak a language different from Spanish.”

More news programs are planned for other native languages in Peru, including Aymara, Ashaninka, and Awajun.

[h/t The Guardian]

You could call someone stupid, or you could say he hasn’t the sense to find his rear-end with both hands and a roadmap. “She’s an idiot!” you could proclaim, or, “If her brains were dynamite, she wouldn’t have enough to blow her nose.” Get smart about how to say “stupid” with these nine regional idioms brought to you in our continued partnership with the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE).

1. NOT ENOUGH SENSE TO COME IN OUT OF THE RAIN

When DARE surveyed readers to complete the sentence “He hasn’t sense enough to,” the phrase “come in out of the rain” got the most responses. It also has a slew of variations, including get in out of the rain, come in out of the wet, and get out of a shower of rain.

2. NOT ENOUGH SENSE TO GREASE A GIMLET

A gimlet, in addition to being a delicious cocktail, is a tool used for boring. So someone who doesn’t think to grease one isn’t the sharpest gimlet in the toolbox. According to DARE, you might hear this put-down in Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, and New York.

3. NOT ENOUGH SENSE TO BELL A BUZZARD

Why would anyone want to bell a buzzard, and why would you be considered a numbskull if you didn’t think to do so? Alternates of this saying include bell a bull or cow, which make more sense. But a buzzard? DARE says belling and releasing these birds of prey was an occasional practice, at least according to “scattered 19th- and early 20th-century accounts,” and “that such birds were regarded by some with superstitious fear.” But there’s no explanation as to why “the practice should have been regarded as self-evidently desirable or simple.”

4. NOT ENOUGH SENSE TO POUND SAND DOWN A RATHOLE

The same seems to go for pounding sand down a rathole, something you’ll hear chiefly west of the Mississippi River, according to DARE, and in the North Central region and upstate New York. The idiom pound sand means to waste time or act ineffectively. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from 1857; slang expert Jonathan Green says that it might be a euphemistic shortening of go pound sand up one’s ass. However, like belling a buzzard, why pounding sand down a rathole would be considered basic isn’t clear.

5. NOT ENOUGH SENSE TO POUR PISS OUT OF A BOOT

Or, if you want to get even more colorful, pump piss out of a boot with the directions on the heel. Dumping urine from footwear before putting it on definitely seems smart, but we wonder how the pee got in there in the first place.

6. NOT ENOUGH SENSE TO CARRY GUTS TO A BEAR

This odd expression might be heard in Maine, New Hampshire, Maryland, Virginia, and Louisiana. There’s also he’s not fit to carry guts to a bear, or he’s unable “to do the most menial or simple task.” The idea might come from old-timey bear-baiting days, when carrying innards to the poor beasts was apparently elementary. The OED’s earliest citation is from 1692: “Wee, the Kings Officers, crys the Fellow that carrys Guts to the Bears.”

7. NOT TO KNOW B FROM A BULL’S FOOT

This expression meaning someone “ignorant or illiterate” is chiefly used in the South and Midland regions, perhaps from the idea that “the foot- or track-print of a bull is somewhat like the letter B,” or perhaps simply as a colorful play on not knowing A from B. Varieties include not to know bee from a bull’s foot, not to know beeswax from bull foot, and not to know beef from bull’s foot.

8. NOT TO KNOW SPLIT BEANS FROM COFFEE

In the South Midland and Texas, you might say this of someone who is “very ignorant or stupid.” From a December 2005 issue of the Austin American-Statesman: “Former Rep. Barry Telford of DeKalb [TX], a Democratic leader under Laney, said: ‘Bush didn’t know split beans from coffee about the Legislature when he was first elected.’”

9. NOT TO KNOW SIC ‘EM

You’ll hear this ignoramus phrase in the Inland North, the Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountains, and Upper Midwest. But what does “sic ’em” mean? William Safire explored this back in 1993 when then Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole told him, “Those guys in the White House just don’t know sic ’em.” Safire put in a call to DARE and found out that at least one reader thought someone who doesn’t know sic ’em is as lazy and shiftless as a dog who shows no “instant reaction to the command ‘sic ’em.’”