From Wired Blogs comes news that HBO's Chief Technology Officer, Bob Zitter, wants us to stop using the term "DRM" (digital rights management) and start using "DCE" (digital consumer enablement) to refer to the system by which media blood-suckers intellectual property owners make sure that we can only view their material on exactly the terms that they dictate.

If Mr. Zitter is serious he needs a crash course in semantics, and perhaps the history of English.

I've been neglecting this blog for a while, largely the result of going on vacation. I spent two and a half weeks in Malaysia, and another two weeks recovering from jet lag and trying to catch up with other work. We went to introduce our son Aran (now 14 months old) to his great grandmother and the rest of my wife's very large clan. We all had a wonderful time, even Aran, who, after getting over some stranger anxiety, seemed to lap up the attention from all his cousins.

Before I got sidetracked by vagueries, I was actually checking out a variation on the ongoing reanalysis of literal(ly) to mean "figurative(ly)" (i.e., the opposite of literal in its traditional sense).

The usage I mean is most familiar in contexts such as

"I skipped breakfast and lunch, so by dinner I was literally starving to death."

Usage books object to this construction on the grounds that the speaker here is certainly not actually starving. But it's easy to see such constructions as simple hyperbole, which of course speakers deploy all the time.

The question is whether the speaker intends the expression as exaggeration or has actually reanalyzed the word's meaning, thinking that literal means figurative. In sentences such as the one above, it's not really possible to tell, since either reanalysis or exaggeration could explain the sentence. Indeed, a simple substitution of "virtually" or "metaphorically" in the sentence above actually weakens the intended emphasis, so even if reanalysis has occurred, a sense of exaggeration remains.

I was following up a completely different instance of non-standard usage (I'll write about it in another post), when I stumbled upon a new eggcorn, or if not precisely new, at least unrecognized in the eggcorn database before now. (I just submitted it, though.)

Within a blog entry on the Duke Lacrosse scandal, I found this gem:

Writing about ghost words got me thinking about collective terms for animals, especially the weird ones that someone always trots out as a bit of trivia. (I once won a barroom trivia contest for being able to state that a group of rhinoceroses was called a "crash.")

A ghost word is a word that was created by the error of lexicographers, one that has no independent existence. A classic example is Dord, which appeared in the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary. The entry was meant to be an abbreviation (D or d) for density. Snopes.com does their usual fine job of explaining the confusion.

I recently ran into a claim that seems to have risen to the level of folk linguistics. In this version, the claim runs either "in the vast majority of languages" or "in virtually every language" the word for mother begins with m. Google {"word for mother" begin m} and you'll see what I mean.