Bokeh becomes a verb, by Apple

Is it not soooooo exciting to see the birth of a new word?! It certainly was so when I saw a new ad by Apple. The ad is about the depth control of iPhone, and three mothers talk about how the picture of a child is blurred by using the word "bokeh".

Bokeh comes from a Japanese word ぼけ (blurr, hazy), and my ignorance pains me, but the word is fairly universal in the world of photography. The word was introduced and popularized in 1997 in a photography magazine. The Japanese word ぼけ has several meanings, but the photographic technical term bokeh means a kind of artistic haziness / blur, and photographic magazines takes it up as technical topics in their articles. Back then, the term bokeh was used as a noun, which seems to be the usual start of neology ('to achieve great bokeh', 'bokeh produced by ** lens', 'creative application of bokeh' ),.

Now, the noun bokeh has come to a new phase - it has become a verb! And I feel that it will be firmly and casually accepted in our vocabulary, owing to the power of Apple. The mothers in the ad talks as below:

mother 1 : Did you bokeh my child?
mother 2 : Um, no, that was totally unintentional...
               Look, I can un-bokeh, see...  Bokeh, un-bokeh.
mother 1 : Wow, what kind of person bokehs a child?
               I would never bokeh your child.


The word is so naturally conjugated as a regular transitive verb, used in interrogative sentence, affixable too.

This verb-ing of the word may already have been done among photograph enthusiasts, but the impact of the ad by the "Apple" certainly will get the word accepted universally.

Oh, and please do read the comments sent to the article  about this verb-ing of Bokeh by Apple. Many photograph lovers write about the word bokeh, how the term was used as a noun first, and it does not mean just a blur but the quality needs to be considered... etc.

Abso-bloomin-lutely in "My Fair Lady" Affixation

Another article from my favourite movie "My Fair Lady"

Eliza is a common flower girl, her life is far from grand, but with her Covent Garden fellows, giving herself airs and graces, she imagines her ideal life singing "Wouldn't it be Loverly?"

All I want is a room somewhere
Far away from this cold night air
With one enormous chair
Aow, wouldn't it be loverly?

Oh so loverly sitting
Absobloominlutely still
I would never budge 'till spring
Crept over me winder sill


Eliza dreams of a modest decent life like a lady, but she uses a word that a lady would not use - absobloominlutely.

This word is now Googlable, but it is not in the English dictionary I have around me. It is a variation of "absolutely" with the word "blooming" inserted. You could say that "blooming" is an infix intensifying the meaning "absolutely".

For Eliza, the word "blooming" is a casual intensifier but I presume it was quite a shocking swear word in the early 20th century. Later in the movie, Eliza gets too excited watching a horse race and shouts,
"Move your BLOOMIN' ARSE!!"
All the upper class people at the race are aghast, some ladies fainting, at her words.

blooming : a mild swear word, used to emphasize a comment or a statement, especially an angry one. (OED)

100 years later, the word has become mild. Once shocking, but now not so, so people come up with a new expression that can replace it, and also apply the same rule in forming new words - absof*ckinlutely.

Now, I say that word is shocking. I would not dare use it, cannot even write the whole word. (However, you can hear it used in the American drama, "Sex and the City")

HEGE-TALE (a weak-kneed coward) and Linguistic Intuition

A TALE tale to tell.

へげたれ /he-ge-ta-le/ is a dialect of west of Japan, and if you are not from that region you would probably have no idea what it means. HEGETALE means a weak-kneed coward.

My great grandfather who was from Shingu, the west part of Japan, wrote this word in his private letter and also drew a little picture of a HEGETALE on the side of the sheet. I love the sound and the picture of this word so much that the word always shows up on my PC as a screen saver.

Now, when a person sees the word HEGETALE on my PC screen, usually they would ask me,
"What does HEGETALE mean?"
And I would tell them the meaning. "It means a weak-kneed coward."

However, Roki, my blog partner, when he saw this word on my PC screen, gave a very different question that nobody had given me.

"What does HEGE mean?"

I was wild with fascination.
He asked only about the HEGE bit, not the TALE bit, and it was perfectly reasonable way to break up the word. I thought,
 "Now! Here is a person who has a very sharp linguistic intuition!"

-TALE is an suffix which is roughly equivalent to -ling as in "duckling"and "changeling" (and although we do not see these words so often without their suffix,  "darling" is "dar (dear) + ling" and "sibling" is "sib + ling") . The Japanese suffix -TALE functions similar to the English suffix -ling, is added to an adjective or a noun to mean a person carrying that characteristics, adding a diminutive sense.

Here are some common Japanese words with -TALE suffix.
ばかたれ BAKA -TALE  : a thick-witted daft
はなたれ HANA -TALE  : a snotty-nosed kid
しみったれ SHIMIT -TALE : a stingy miser

As you can see, the words with -TALE ending tend to be light insults, and used quite casually in conversation. So people are familiar with this suffix -TALE, but strangely nobody, except for Roki, had asked me the meaning of the word breaking it up into root and suffix.

My blog partner, with his very sharp linguistic intuition, is a barefooted philologist.