Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

GONE PHISHING

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucjk/20061113/cm_ucjk/gonephishing

Opinion
James J. Kilpatrick
Sun Nov 12, 8:25 PM ET

One of the many glories of the English language is that it grows even
faster than crabgrass. As a prime example, take the verb "to phish."
Take it away. Take it far away!

One learns from Google that "to phish," clumsily defined, is "the act
of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established
legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering
private information that will be used for identity theft."
Unbelievably, Google reports 622,000 hits on this phatuous coinage.

For example, in March 2005, The New York Times reported: "On E-Bay,
E-Mail Phishers Find a Well-Stocked Pond." A month later, U.S. Law Week
reported from Virginia that Gov. Mark Warner had signed a bill to
prohibit phishing, i.e., "using a computer to fraudulently gather
information of another." This past April, USA Today reported that
professional phishers have moved from preying upon big phish to plying
their wily arts upon little phish. It is phutile to complain. Stop
phussing!

And apropos of fussing: A clipping comes to hand from the Waco (Texas)
Tribune-Herald about Rep. Bob Barr. When he learned that the U.S. Army
was recognizing Wicca as a religion on a par with Judaism and
Christianity, "he went into the hissiest of fits." The Dictionary of
American Regional English dates "hissy" from the 1930s and "hissy-fit"
from 1976, with citations ranging from Virginia to Texas. For the
record, Google has recorded 765,000 cites for "hissy" and its
derivatives. Also, for the record, the tirade of a brazen woman is a
hussy-hissy.

A reader who recently returned from London has passed along a clipping
from The Times about a woman who confessed to an aversion to doctors:
"Thank goodness," she said, "the NHS is too skint for home visits." Too
skint? Only three of my dictionaries ever heard of it, but Google has
recorded 1,400,000 cites. One who is skint is "poor, broke, hard up,
out of funds, in the red, on the rocks." My ear picks up a faint echo
of "skinny, skin-flint, skin and bones." Maybe "skint" is a cousin to
"scant." I would leave this one in London.

In her recently published memoir, "Garlic and Sapphires," Ruth Reichl
recounts an unwelcome incident in the life of a restaurant critic. She
accepted an invitation from an admiring reader to join him for dinner
at the famed Lespinasse in New York. The food was wonderful, but her
boorish host was not: He engaged in "some unwelcome knee frottage."

Contrary to instant surmise, it turns out that "frottage" is only a
semi-dirty word. The noun's first definition, disarmingly, is "the
technique of creating a design or image by rubbing over an object
placed under a paper." The second definition -- the one that defines
the incident at Lespinasse -- is "the act of obtaining sexual
stimulation by rubbing against a person or object." The gurus of Google
have tallied 263,000 hits on "frottage," but they cannot say which of
the two definitions drew the majority vote.

(I had begun work on a limerick in which the fifth and final line would
rhyme "frottage" with "cuisine not meant for a cottage" and
"Lespinasse's incomparable pottage," when a Voice of Experience cried,
"Look it up!" Sure enough, "frottage" is pronounced "frah-tazh." At
Lespinasse, it could not be otherwise.)

Have you met the verb "to bogart"? It turned up in USA Today in a line
attributed to TV commentator Chris Matthews. He said his competitors
"are not going to bogart me," i.e., they were not going to steal his
stuff. To my surprise, the verb dates from 1966, a decade after the
actor's death. Since then, "to bogart" has racked up 4,810,000 Googles.
That's impressive, but that's how time goes by.