WHAT’S IN A WORD?: Writers are wordmeisters, word maniacs, word mavens. Some of us stop just short of being “language scolds” who freak out at flagrant verbal or nounal abuse. Some keen new words are coined each year. Annoying ones, too. Here’s one: “othercott.” I saw is used in a 5/16 Denver Post article by writer Andy Vuong about a national boycott of The Da Vinci Code. “ ‘The people involved in this ‘othercott’ are really trying to send a message to Hollywood,’ said Father John Heckers, pastor of the Holy Cross Orthodox Church in Denver. ‘If hundreds of thousands of Christians do this and wind up knocking The Da Vinci Code out of first place (in box-office receipts), then that will get their attention.’ " These groups recommend people go to see another movie, the animated PG-rated Over the Hedge. Maybe this effort should be called “anothercott?” Anyway, “othercott” may find legs or it may end up in the dustbin of language history. “Boycott,” of course, comes from Charles C. Boycott, an Englishman and former British soldier, who was the estate agent of the Earl of Erne in County Mayo, Ireland. The earl was one of the absentee landowners with land holdings stolen from the Irish. In 1880, Irish politician Charles Parnell zeroed in on Boycott to test his land reform policy. It said that any landlord who would not reduce rents or any tenant who took over the farm of an evicted tenant would be isolated by Parnell's supporters. Boycott refused to follow the policy. Members of Parnell's Irish Land League joined with servants, farmhands, and shopkeepers to deny service to Boycott. So his name entered the language as the term for this treatment.
- posted by Michael Shay @ 9:33 AM