Official Dictionary of Unofficial English-Grant-Barrett-0071458042

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with lamb and beef and usually cooked with yogurt), and jammid (a dry, hard cheese made of sheep’s or goat’s milk).

haji n. an Iraqi; any Muslim, Arab, or native of the Middle East. Originally an honorific given to Muslims who have made a pilgrimage to Mecca, during the British control of India and Persia (now Iraq), it was often used less as a title of honor than as a useful shorthand to refer to any pilgrim bound for or returned from Mecca. Because haji is often used as a title or form of address in Arabic, it occurs quite often in daily discourse and is likely to stand out to listeners who are not accustomed to it. Soldiers who have served in Iraq, however, are not necessarily familiar with the religious connotations of the word. Instead, they tend to associate it with Haji, a character on the cartoon television series “The Adventures of Johnny Quest,” which has been in television syndication since 1964. Now, when used by coalition personnel in Iraq, haji, sometimes spelled hajji or hadji, is usually pejorative or scornful. It is often applied to any non-Western national, not just Iraqis. The plural is also sometimes haji, without a terminating s. Haji is also used in an attributive fashion, sometimes being clipped to haj, to create items like haji mobile, a beat-up or dilapidated automobile driven by an Iraqi, or haji mart, a flea market, bazaar, or roadside vendor.

hawasim n. a looter or thief. Arabic from the expression Harb AlHawasim, meaning the “final war” or “decisive battle,” an expression used by Saddam Hussein to refer to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

hillbilly armor n. scavenged materials used by soldiers for improvised bulletproofing and vehicle hardening, esp. in Iraq. American soldiers found that many military vehicles were capable of protecting them against small-arms fire only, leading to make-do and jerry-rigged attempts to harden the vehicles against larger weapons or explosives.

Mortaritaville or Mortar ville n. a military base subject to regular attack. A mortar is ‘a muzzle-loading high-angle gun with a short barrel that fires shells at high elevations for a short range.’ Mortaritaville has usually referred specifically to Logistical Support Area (Camp) Anaconda Is near Balad, Iraq, fifty miles north of Baghdad, although an informant says that a giant, multicolored “Welcome to Mortaritaville” sign was displayed at Log Base Seitz (also known

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as Seitzkatraz or Impact Zone Seitz) in late 2003. Mortaritaville is a play on the Jimmy Buffett song “Margaritaville.”

muj n. among (Anglophone) foreigners in Middle Eastern or Islamic nations, a guerrilla fighter or fighters. Clipped form of Persian and Arabic mujahideen, plural for mujahid, ‘one who fights in a jihad or holy war.’ Muj is used both in the singular and plural. The term was used before the 2002 American invasion of Afghanistan.

POI n. pissed-off Iraqi; uncooperative Iraqi. While this term is not widespread and mostly seems to be used by pundits and policymakers, it sometimes plays a role in demonstrating that, contrary to American hopes, invading troops were not necessarily seen as liberators.

sandbox n. the Middle East; a country in that region. There are many literal uses of sandbox to refer to any arid, desert, or sandy land or country, and in the military, to an area in which an exercise is held. The U.S. Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin, in the Mojave Desert in California, is known as the sandbox. This term is usually constructed with the definite article: the sandbox. It’s also enhanced by other senses of sandbox, such as ‘a figurative or literal play area; an area for testing or planning; a sand-filled scale model of a war zone.’

shako mako n. Arabic, loosely translated as “what’s up?” or more specifically, “what do and don’t you have?” or “what’s there and not there?” It’s similar to shoo fee ma fee used in Lebanese Arabic. Commonly one of the first Iraqi Arabic expressions learned by coalition forces. A common response is kulshi mako “nothing’s new.”

ulug n. thug or lout. Arabic. Repopularized by the former Iraqi Minister of Information Muhammad Saeed Al Sahhaf as a term for Americans. The word had previously been rare.

Other military terms elsewhere in the dictionary include armchair pilot, backdoor draft, bag drag, battle rattle, big voice, birth control glasses, counter-recruiter, boots on the ground, bullets and beans, C41SR, chalk, cross-decking, Dover test, flash-bang, fourth point of contact, fragged, FRAGO, gedunk, ghost soldier, hollow army, horse blanket, hot wash, interview without coffee, jointery, lily pad, mayor’s cell, perfumed prince, purple, rat line, rat-racing, rehat, rice bowl,

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Rummy’s Dummies, shack, teeth arm, thunder run, tiny heart syndrome, toe-popper, twidget, unass, wizzo.

Glishes: Englishes Around the World

No matter where English spreads, the grumbles of dissent are the same: with the widespread adoption of outside terms come foreign ideas that are a threat to identity. What’s uncertain, in most cases, is whether the adoption of English words is the canary in the coal mine, the poisonous gas that kills the bird, or the coal itself. Are Anglicisms adopted because they are needed for new ideas, for new material goods, for new technologies, or for new fashions? Or, are they adopted because the tsunami of Anglophone-dominated worldwide media, entertainment, science, and politics is overprinting perfectly useful and usable existing terms? Are the new words bringing the new concepts, or are the new concepts bringing the new words?

Outside of Europe, English has imprinted itself in few places longer than it has in India. In an attempt to explain Indian English language poetry to outsiders, poet Keki Daruwala has described how before World War II and before Partition, the English language in India was already so Hindified, so Indian, that when he had his first conversation with an Englishman, “he had to repeat himself three times to make himself understood. What an exotic accent, I thought. Why couldn’t the fellow speak English as she ought to be spoken?”¹

It wasn’t just accent, but vocabulary. Daruwala describes the schoolboy slang imported from the British Isles: “It was old slang of course, shipped some three decades ago, which had got lost on the seas, then lay rotting on the docks like dry fish, till it was dispatched by steam rail and later on mule back to those public schools in the mountains.” But it was Indian, too, and to not know it, or to mangle it, made one an outcast.

That the word “Hinglish”—meaning a combination of English and Hindi, one of the most widely spoken Indian languages—was added to the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) in 2005 should not be a surprise to anyone who has experienced what Daruwala did, or even anyone who follows Indian cinema. ODE was simply

1.Daruwala, Keki. “On Writing in English: An Indian Poet’s Perspective.” Daily Star (Dhaka, Bangladesh). Accessed 13 July 2005. www.thedailystar.net/2004/08/ 21/d408212102104.htm.

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acknowledging that, after four hundred–plus years of Anglophone influence on the Subcontinent, English and Hindi had become inextricably linked.

Despite the valid claim Indians have that Hinglish is not a backalley dive joint ripping off the good name of a more successful franchise, but a fully functional regional office for the highly successful enterprise known as English, the integration of the language and the changes it has made to the Indian languages it has come into contact with have not come without complaint. Like the French, some Indians resist the crests and swells of Anglified language. Russians, Malays, and Israelis, too, sometimes find its continuous influence unsettling. The role of English is tied up in the question of Puerto Rican statehood, and its big-booted imprint is a matter that Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have been dealing with for centuries, as Welsh and varieties of Gaelic fade and decline. The various Englishes even battle among themselves: American English today so influences Australian English (or “Strine,” as it’s sometimes affectionately called) that complaint has been made about its effect on national character: blokes and mates aren’t blokes anymore, they’re guys. Within the United States, there’s a renewed battle concerning whether Ebonics is a true dialect of Black Americans or just ungrammatical slang.

As the question of the legitimacy of Anglicisms in other language continues to be discussed, the influence of English spreads and these two-language mixtures take names: Hinglish in India, Konglish in South Korea, Spanglish or Espanglish in the Hispanophone world, Swenglish in Sweden, and a dozen or more others elsewhere. These names are often used in joking speech or to describe the mishaps of language students or grammatical errors made by immigrants.

These are more than clever names, however, although they are not necessarily sufficiently significant so as to represent new language or dialects. For one thing, these various language mixtures tend not to show the distinct and unique characteristics that would warrant calling them a language—for example, grammar and vocabulary that are so consistently and thoroughly different from the parent languages that they prevent mutual intelligibility.

For another thing, they might be called dialects, yet they are not strictly regional as a diaslect usually is (unless you count a country as a region), and their lexicons appear and disappear like slang

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rather than demonstrating sufficient accretion and transmission to successive generations. Of course, definitions of a dialect vary, even among linguists, though in general, a dialect is related historically, politically, and linguistically to a more widely spoken, higherprestige language with which it shares enough grammar and vocabulary as to make speakers of the two languages sufficiently mutually comprehensible. This is true especially in formal or pedagogical situations where the dialect speakers are likely to use the prestige language, while still retaining in the dialect distinct features that permit its speakers to determine an insider from an outsider.

We could call these two-language mixtures sociolects, which is a broad, general term for languages spoken by cohesive, nonmainstream classes or subcultures, but each non-English language that forms the mixtures tends to span several classes and cultures, although that depends upon the language in question. Also, these language mixtures are identified closely with ideas and cultural shifts more than they are to cohesive ethnic groups. They also do not show the simplicity of a pidgin, in which grammar and lexicon are reduced to very simple forms.

So, for want of a better term, we’ll call these English-influenced linguistic creations glishes. This term borrows the last syllable of English, like so many of the coinages for the mixtures do. A glish is created when words, ideas, and structures are borrowed from English by another language with increasing frequency, over a substantial period of time, up until such time as the mixture is clearly, by most definitions, a dialect.

A glish tends to have the following characteristics:

•It is a mixture of a language with English, including direct borrowings (a word is taken from English with the same spelling and meaning, though the pronunciation usually changes), modified borrowings (the spelling and/or meaning are altered, but the new form is still related to the original English), and calques (idiomatic terms that have been translated literally from English to the second language).

•It appears where two cultures come in constant contact with nearly equal force and endurance.

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•It has transparency. When a word or term is borrowed or adapted from English, what is meant tends to be clear through context in the borrowing language.

•In conversations, its speakers demonstrate hybrid vigor, in which the most appropriate words, phrases, or constructions are used from the language in which they are the easiest to say or spell, or most likely to be understood by others.

•It may include grammatical errors when judged by the rules of the parent languages, but those errors are consistent, regular, and shared among multiple speakers.

•In general, its English-influenced words and structures can be discarded from the idiolect without impoverishing the speaker’s ability to communicate in the non-English language.

•It has a tendency to create words, forms, and grammar that exist independent of the two parent languages, while still not qualifying as a fully formed dialect.

•In its simplest form, it is clearly not a fully formed dialect or language, meaning it does not have a distinct body of literature, is not used by an elite class, does not have prestige, is not taught in schools, is not the exclusive form of communication of its users, is not thoroughly exclusive of outsiders, and is not the exclusive language of a commonly recognized nation.

•Over the short term, it often contains instant borrowings that fill a momentary need for an idea or word that seems unavailable to the speaker of the non-English language. These borrowings might exist only for the length of a conversation (or only in a screenplay).

•Over the long term, it is distinguished from permanently but individually absorbed Anglicisms in that it has a large body of transient, unassimilated words that are culturally related, such as those dealing with trades or popular culture. While the influence of English may remain consistent, individual incidences of its influence tend to be temporarily popular, remaining well-used only as long as the cultural, technological, or political waves that brought them persist. These borrowings might exist in daily discourse for years or decades, depending upon such things as the endurance of a music fad, style of clothing, the availability of certain types of work, etc.

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• At the very latest stages and in its most complex form, it includes a permanent lexicon of habitually borrowed words and forms. The lexicon is used by those who do not speak any English at all, it is transmitted to successive generations, and there is often no notion on the part of speakers that the language is adapted from English. At this stage, a glish meets some definitions of a dialect.

Spanglish

Spanglish is a well-known example of a glish. It was recognized as a distinct form of language as early as 1954 by Salvador Tío, a Puerto Rican journalist and writer. In A Fuego Lento he wrote, “Esta lengua nueva se llamará el ‘Espanglish’. La etimología es clara. Viene de español y de english.” Translated: “This new language will be called ‘Espanglish.’ The etymology is clear. It comes from Spanish and English.”

In 1970 Rose Nash summarized Spanglish in a way that applies to the other varieties that have since appeared. It is, she wrote, “a gradual relexification of...Spanish through borrowings, adaptations, and innovations of the kind observable in every living language.”²

Spanglish, as she defines it, generally could be said to be a variety of Spanish that contains English words in a Spanish sentence structure. The differences between the two parent languages and Spanglish have most to do with borrowed words and rather little to do with borrowed grammar. So word order, pronunciation, emphasis, and sentence rhythm are typically Spanish, and English verbs may be conjugated according to Spanish rules. “To like” becomes likear (gustarse in Spanish) and “to delete” becomes deletear (suprimir or eliminar in Spanish).

A glish like Spanglish is not “bad” Spanish resulting from a momentary confusion of rules nor is it the intentional mixing of the two languages for comic effect. It’s ordinarily unconscious and done out of need, although it is not the same as code-switching, in which a speaker moves back and forth between two languages while retain-

2.Nash, Rose. “Spanglish: Language Contact in Puerto Rico.” American Speech. 45.3 (1970) 223–333; “Englanol: More Language Contact in Puerto Rico.” American Speech. 46.1 (1971) 106–122.

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ing the integrity of each language without inventions, changes, or coinages.

Like Singlish, the English hybrid spoken in Singapore, Spanglish has sometimes been called a dialect of English. Both of these, while still showing many of the characteristics of glishes, are welldeveloped enough that they might match certain definitions of a dialect. For one thing, both are regional, although Spanglish is multiregional, with variants in New York, Puerto Rico, Texas, California, and elsewhere. Spanish spoken on beaches in Spain by British holidaymakers meets a few characteristics of a glish—mainly, it features the best use of words from either language for the purposes at hand—but it is English borrowing Spanish, not the other way around. For another, Spanglish and English are often used institutionally in media and by government.

Certainly the Spanish used in public service advertisements on behalf of New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority or on the city’s talk radio stations is not strict Castilian Spanish, nor is it completely Puerto Rican, Dominican, or Mexican—but it is comprehensible to the city’s large body of Hispanophones, or nuyoricans (also sometimes called nuyorricans or nuyoriqueños). New York’s Spanish-speakers, even those that are third-generation speakers who have never been outside of the five boroughs, can still make themselves understood when speaking to Spaniards, Chileans, or other speakers of other Spanish variants. This is especially true when they speak slower, since the number one complaint is that they speak too fast, pretty much the same complaint outsiders have of New York’s English-speakers, too. The Spanish language as spoken in New York City certainly has undergone changes, but only those words that are derived from encounters with English qualify as a glish. The others merely demonstrate natural language change and its possible status as a dialect.

Singlish, too, is not just a mix of English and one other language. It also includes Hokkien Chinese, Malay, and a big dose of words from other languages. So, technically, while some facets of Singlish are glish-like, it is not a perfect example of a glish.

Various Glishes

Many of the following glishes are rarely used. Others, like Spanglish, Japlish, Hinglish, and Franglais, can be found in standard dic-

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tionaries. Many of them are joke terms, especially when they are used informally to describe someone who either speaks heavily accented or ungrammatical English, or to describe an Anglophone who is mangling and bastardizing a foreign tongue.

Amlish: American English Anglicaan: Afrikaans Anglikaans: Afrikaans Anglonorsk: Norwegian Arablish: Arabic Benglish: Bengali Bonglish: Bengali

Camfranglais: English and French mixed in Cameroon Changlish: Chinese

Chinglish: Chinese

Denglish: German Deutschlish: German Dutchlish: Dutch

Englañol: Spanish and British English Englog: Tagalog

Espanglish: Typically, English borrowings into Spanish Eurolish: European English

Finglish: Finnish

Fingliska: Finnish and American English Franglais: French

Frenglish: French

Gerlish: German

Germerican: German and American English Germish: German

Gernglish: German Greeklish: Greek Gringoñol: Spanish Hindlish: Hindi

Honglais: Hong Kong English Hunglish: Hungarian

Indlish: Subcontinental Indian English Indoglish: Bahasa Indonesia Indonglish: Bahasa Indonesia Italglish: Italian

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Jamlish: Jamaican English Janglish: Japanese Japanglish: Japanese Japenglish: Japanese Japglais: Japanese

Japlish: Japanese

Konglish: Korean

Krautlish: German Malish: Malay Manglish: Malay

Minglish: Manx Gaelic, Maltese, mangled English (mixed with any other language)

Punglish: Punjabi

Punjlish: Punjabi

Runglish: Russian

Russlish: Russian

Simlish: Language of characters in the multiplayer video game “The Sims”

Singlish: Singaporean English (Most linguists would agree that this is a dialect of English.)

Spanglish: Spanish

Swedlish: Swedish

Swenglish: Swedish Taglish: Tagalog Tamlish: Tamil

Tanglish: Tamil, especially in the written form where the Roman alphabet is used instead of the Tamil

Thanglish: Tamil

Tinglish: Tamil

Wenglish: Welsh

Yinglish: Yiddish

Words to Watch

Zillions—no, gazillions—of new words are coined every year, but only a few catch on. Here are a few that have yet to catch fire.

agnotology n. the science or study of ignorance caused by the characteristics, beliefs, or actions of a society or culture. Agnotology includes the breaking of the chains of passed-along knowledge due

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