The fashion world is a fecund, fruitful and fertile source of metaphoric phrases. (Funny, that all these synonyms for "productive" begin with f.) In 1999, an outbreak of bare midsections in the fashion world led this department to a midriff riff: I expressed my preference for the informal term bellybutton to be written as a single word, on the analogy of bellyache; this stand was opposed by a legion of navel-gazers who preferred a two-word usage, on the analogy of belly dancer. The dispute has never been resolved.
We now turn to a related locution spawned by the sight of as much as 15cm of stomach bulging out below a short blouse and above hip-clinging "low-rise" jeans.
When the wearer's abdomen is flat, a display of flesh above and well below the bellybutton produces an eye-catching picture of what the <
"Muffin-Top Mayhem!" was the headline in the New York Daily News this summer, atop a picture of a woman whose midriff was overhanging her belt. The unfortunate loser of this battle of the bulge was said by the writer, Mark Ellwood, to be called a muffin-top. He defined the display as "the unsightly roll of flesh that spills over the waist of a pair of too-tight pants." The locution is not sexist: A male actor, usually characterized as a "screen hunk," photographed in such a state is called a stud-muffin-top. (I am indebted to Ann Wort of Washington for this citation.)
Rarely can slang lexicographers find "first use" of such a phrase, but blogging helps: Coinage is claimed by a Netizen named Dyske Suematsu, who proudly informs the Internet set of having sent the compound noun to www.pseudodictionary.com in May 2003.
Anatomically, muffin-top fills a lexical void. Nearest to a synonym (with over 150,000 Google hits) is "love handles," a jocularly euphemistic neologism of the late '60s, defined in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang as "a bulge of fat at the side of the waist." But the love handles (usually plural) are exclusively on or above the hips; the muffin-top describes the roll of excess flesh spilling out primarily in front but possibly all around.
KLUTZ
"Metaphors matter," Jagdish Bhagwati writes in the Wall Street Journal. The university professor of economics and law at Columbia suggested a new vocabulary for global trade featuring a "kaleidoscopic comparative advantage." He prefers this trope to Tom Friedman's word picture of the new economic world being flat.
Offhandedly, Bhagwati used another word calling up an even more vivid image: "It turned out that the Japanese were real klutzes in the financial sector."
For the skinny on klutz, I turned to Sol Steinmetz, one of the world's great lexicographers. He has just turned out the invaluable and scholarly Dictionary of Jewish Usage, a guide to the use of Jewish terms (Roman & Littlefield, US$49.95) that shows how Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic words are being absorbed into the English language.
Take klutz, defined as "a clumsy person." Steinmetz informs me that the word that has largely replaced the English oaf in common usage is from the Middle High German klotz, "block, log, tree trunk," and that "the Yiddish word took on the figurative meaning of `fool, blockhead.' It came into English in the 1930s, first found in print in Meyer Levin's 1936 novel, The Old Bunch: `He's a klotz. He can't do no repairs. He got wooden fingers.'"
According to Sol, a data-bank search shows klutz to be among the top 10 Yiddishisms in Ameerican English. The others: glitsch, kosher, bagel, maven, mensch, schlock, schmooze, tush and chutzpah.
If you don't know those words, you will have difficulty being understood in American English. (I'm a language maven, occasionally a financial klutz.)
DOORMATS
Jeanine Pirro, described in the Washington Post as "a street-smart and media-savvy Republican prosecutor," began her campaign in New York for the US Senate seat now held by Hillary Rodham Clinton with a charge that the incumbent wanted to use the seat as a "doormat to the White House."
Doormat is a word that has resonance in politics. The mat placed before a doorway to absorb the grime from shoes long ago gained a figurative meaning of "a person or thing easily and submissively misused." In the summer of 1968, an American flag was burned by demonstrators in a South American country and made the television news. As a speechwriter in the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign, I had the job of updating the candidate's stump speech with timely references to the news and submitted the line, "Under new leadership, nobody's going to make a doormat out of the American flag." Nixon added it to his remarks and was startled by the crowd reaction: a roar of defiant approval. "That applause line stays in," he told us, and he used it right through to Election Day. (After the November victory, another speechwriter had the notion of presenting me with an actual doormat with a flag design but wisely decided it would be inappropriate.)
The word that probably came first to mind to Pirro was steppingstone; in politics, a charge that is often leveled at a candidate with ambitions for higher office is that he or she is treating the present campaign merely as a way station to bigger things. Early in 1968, when Governor George Romney of Michigan was running for the Republican presidential nomination and the knock on him in the media was that he was overly devout and evangelical, some wise guy (it could have been me) peddled the gag that "he's only seeking the presidency as a steppingstone."
Doormat is a tad off the point, but it's edgier.
To The Honorable Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜): We would like to extend our sincerest regards to you for representing Taiwan at the inauguration of US President Donald Trump on Monday. The Taiwanese-American community was delighted to see that Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan speaker not only received an invitation to attend the event, but successfully made the trip to the US. We sincerely hope that you took this rare opportunity to share Taiwan’s achievements in freedom, democracy and economic development with delegations from other countries. In recent years, Taiwan’s economic growth and world-leading technology industry have been a source of pride for Taiwanese-Americans.
Next week, the nation is to celebrate the Lunar New Year break. Unfortunately, cold winds are a-blowing, literally and figuratively. The Central Weather Administration has warned of an approaching cold air mass, while obstinate winds of chaos eddy around the Legislative Yuan. English theologian Thomas Fuller optimistically pointed out in 1650 that “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” We could paraphrase by saying the coldest days are just before the renewed hope of spring. However, one must temper any optimism about the damage being done in the legislature by the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), under
To our readers: Due to the Lunar New Year holiday, from Sunday, Jan. 26, through Sunday, Feb. 2, the Taipei Times will have a reduced format without our regular editorials and opinion pieces. From Tuesday to Saturday the paper will not be delivered to subscribers, but will be available for purchase at convenience stores. Subscribers will receive the editions they missed once normal distribution resumes on Sunday, Feb. 2. The paper returns to its usual format on Monday, Feb. 3, when our regular editorials and opinion pieces will also be resumed.
Young Taiwanese are consuming an increasing amount of Chinese content on TikTok, causing them to have more favorable views of China, a Financial Times report cited Taiwanese social scientists and politicians as saying. Taiwanese are being exposed to disinformation of a political nature from China, even when using TikTok to view entertainment-related content, the article published on Friday last week said. Fewer young people identify as “Taiwanese” (as opposed to “Chinese”) compared with past years, it wrote, citing the results of a survey last year by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation. Nevertheless, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) would be hard-pressed
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