Friday, 14 July 2017
09:22 AM
Our house went up for sale yesterday, the culmination of many months' efforts to clean, repair, repaint, restain, remove, straighten, sell, give away, and otherwise address stuff. Our final push to get ready meant that unfortunately I had to pass up last week's Friday words. On the other hand, my pressure-washed driveway is so clean you could serve dinner on it. Assuming you would enjoy dinner on concrete with exposed aggregate.
PS Happy Bastille Day! Have fun storming the castle!
Anyway, we're back. This week's new-to-me term is blue lie, a word I encountered in a blog post on the Scientific American site. We know white lie, a lie that you tell to avoid hurting someone's feelings. ("That was delicious!") A black lie, by some definitions, is one that's told for purely selfish reasons.
 But a blue lie? Per the article: "falsehoods, told on behalf of a group, that can actually strengthen bonds among the members of that group." Or as another article has it, a blue lie is one that is "unambiguously helpful to one group while hurtful to another." The ethics of blue lies seem to be dependent on one's point of view. Telling the bad guys a lie to protect your comrades is technically a blue lie, but one that most people would not condemn. More ambiguously, blue lies seem to be a prominent aspect of contemporary politics. (Or perhaps politics since forever.)
Why blue? One authority on lying said in 1994 that the color blue was attached to this term "purportedly originating from cases where police officers made false statements to protect the police force or to ensure the success of the government’s legal case against an accused." I can't verify this, but it does accord with similar uses of blue, as in blue code/blue shield.
On to word origins. Two shortish ones today. The first is dilapidated, meaning "in a state of disrepair." But! If you parse the word carefully, you encounter lapi, which the Latin-inclined will recognize as a word for "stone," as in lapis lazule. Um … stone? Working backward, we use dilapidated as an adjective, but there is (was) a verb dilapidate, which meant to bring into a state of ruin, or more metaphorically, to waste. Going back to Latin, there was dilapidare, which meant "to scatter as if throwing stones." Thus letting your house fall into a state of disrepair (houses again today!) has all the aimlessness of throwing a handful of stones. I share Benjamin Dreyer's sentiment on this etymology:
Bonus etymology today is for the HTTP verb POST, well known to web developers, as explained by Ryan North in Dinosaur Comics:
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[categories]
language, Friday words
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