'to app' - my favourite new verb

Last night I went out with some of my lovely friends to a local brewery that opens the doors to its own bar once or twice a week. It was a great chance to catch up with friends - but it never matters how pleasant the company is, how tasty the food is or how beery the beer is in these situations there's a part of my brain that just never stops thinking linguistics.

And so, at the end of the night when one of my responsible friends pulled out her phone to summons a taxi my ears pricked up when she said:

'I'm going to app a cab'

App a cab! This is excellent and mysterious, I thought. I asked my friend to explain. It transpires that there is a smart phone app that lets you order a cab and check the progress of your order. For the act of summonsing a cab using this app my friend appropriated the word app as a verb. This is not very exiting in itself, English is always taking nouns and making them verbs, it's something that English does very well - think of things like 'to email', 'to fax', 'to kindle' which all started out as nouns.

The linguist in me immediately set about trying to discern the meaning of the verb. It turns out that by checking TramTracker (A staple on any Melburnian's app list) one does not 'app a tram' but if there were an app that let you order pizza one could perhaps be 'apping a pizza' - among my small test group the jury was still out on that one.

I wonder whether 'to app' will make it into wider use. My friend told me that she acquired the verb from the same friend she acquired the app from, so it's not just a one-off coinage. It made me realise just how far 'app' has come from simply being the shortened form of 'application software' - it now has a life of its own. It's a potentially pertinent point given that Microsoft and Apple are currently having a bout of legal fisticuffs over the trademarking of 'App Store.'

Style Cream

Every time I see these chips in a store I have to giggle - and wonder what 'style cream' is supposed to taste like. I finally got around to buying a packet just for the photograph.

It may look like a very simple type setting error, but there's actually a reason for such an error. There are half a dozen flavours to chose from, and all of them are named for a country. So, off the top of my head, there's also "Italian Tomato" and "Indian Marsala." Only the "American" flavour is "style," that is, "in the manner of." Therefore it's no surprise that a non-native speaker parsing these packets would assume that "style" is modifying "cream" and not "American."

Even understanding the reason for the error doesn't stop me staggering every time. I'm sad to report that the chips do taste like sour cream and onion in American style, and not style cream, which I imagine would be a bit like eating hair styling products.

Where linguists go to party

Sorry to the non-linguists reading today. This is a photo of a bar in Pokhora. For those who need the joke explained, X-bar is a very popular way of dealing with syntax. And for those who need that explained, syntax is figuring out the rules of how words and stuff fit together to make sentences.

Scarlett's a Flop

While getting my usual dose of trashy celebrity news a few days ago, I came across an article about Scarlett Johansson and her problems with sweating:

http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/people/scarlett-johanssons-sweaty-problem-20100506-ubek.html

Rather than muse over why I find it necessary to waste my time reading about the bodily functions of people I don't know, I want to look at something in particular Johansson was quoted as saying in the article

"I like the getting ready part. I like the hair and the make-up and the pretty dress... It's just getting on the red carpet I just instantly flop sweat."

What the heck is "flop sweat"? It's certainly a phrase I've never heard before. For once the Oxford English Dictionary wasn't able to come to my rescue - It had no information on the phrase. Webster's online was much more helpful, unsurprising perhaps, given it was used by an American - it appears that only Americans "flop sweat" ( http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flop+sweat ). I was somewhat surprised to see that it's earliest cited reference was in 1953. Clearly Americans have been suffering this problem without telling us for a while.

Webster's tells us that this phrase acts as a noun in English, but I'm pretty unconvinced by that. Given the context above, it's very much functioning as a verb - there's no other verb in " I just instantly flop sweat" and it's being modified by the adverb "instantly" - nouns modified by adverbs don't really happen in English.

Even though it's clearly not a noun, but some kind of verb, as an Australian English speaker I find it difficult to parse. I'm not very sure which part is the core verb of the construction, which is made rather difficult by the fact that both "flop" and "sweat" can be either nouns or verbs. Option a) is that "flop" is the verb, and matches with things like "I drip sweat" and "I shed skin". Option b) is that it is "sweat" that is the verb and "flop" is a modifier, like "heat sweat" and "stress eat".

If we were to turn it into a progressive aspect (that's basically an -ing form in English) then we would have to place the progressive suffix on the verb of the sentence:

Option a) "I was flopping sweat"
Option b) "I was flop sweating"

I thought that option a) was more likely before I did this test, but perhaps it is "sweat" that is the verbal element here. I'm still confused. If anyone else has heard this phrase before, or has any thoughts on it I'd love to hear.