by Kevin Burton
So you read the headline “uptown words” and your mind immediately goes to Uptown Girl, the Billy Joel song, right?
One could take that song as a celebration of an uptown girl. I take it as the celebration of the virtues of a downtown man. “That’s what I am,” Joel sings.
Well I am certainly not uptown and probably not downtown either. As I have written before, I am more of a moon man, a combination of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” and Paul McCartney’s “Fool On A Hill.”
Without apology, I promise you.
But for the uptowners out there, here’s a nod from the Merriam-Webster dictionary and what it calls “Snappy Words For Style.” I may be suspicious of it all, but as Merriam-Webster says, “a good vocabulary is always in fashion:
Mod
Mod is a shortening of modern—and perhaps modernist, a term used to describe a player or aficionado of modern jazz. In 1960s Britain, mod identified a young person who dressed stylishly in tailored suits or miniskirts and rode around on a motor scooter listening to the blues and to soul music—rather than the heavier rock music emerging at the time. By association, the name came to be used as an adjective for fashionable people and for things stylish and trendy (in other words, modern).
Modish is also an adjective meaning “fashionable” and “stylish,” but it is a much older one (entering English in the mid-1600s) and unrelated, being based on the French word mode, which denotes a way of living, thinking, or dressing.
Rakish
You might be familiar with rake as a word for a dissolute person who leads an immoral life. That rake is a shortening of rakehell, which is presumably derived from the phrase “to rake hell.” The expression implies that a person is so bad that one would have to rake the grounds of hell to find his or her equal.
The adjective rakish itself has been used to describe rakehells since the late 1600s. In the early 19th century, another rakish surfaces in English to describe the trim, streamlined appearance of pirate ships. It is based on nautical use of rake for the backward inclination of a ship’s mast or the inward slope of its bow or stern. The unconventionality of a ship having a rakish build influenced the use of rakish to describe other things deviating from formality and convention—but, nevertheless, eye-catching—like a hat at a rakish angle.
Fad
Fad applies to anything considered fashionable that is eagerly sought after or pursued, but only for a short period of time. The three-letter word is of unknown origin, which means many armchair etymologists have speculated about its etymology as an acronym. A common notion is that it is an abbreviation of “For A Day.” It’s compelling, but, according to early print evidence, the word appears in the 19th century to refer to something peculiar that is regularly done out of custom—not because of some transient craze.
Others have suggested that fad is a shortening of faddle in fiddle-faddle (a reduplication of fiddle, as in fiddlesticks), or even faddle itself, which was once used as a dialectal noun meaning “nonsense” or “foolishness.” Another proposed source is fid-fad (a shortening of fiddle-faddle) that is also used in the 19th century in reference to frivolous or trifling people and things.
A more traditional approach to etymology suggests that fad is derived from French fadaise, a word meaning “trifle” or “nonsense.” We’ve fiddled with that, as well as the other ideas on how fad came to be, but have yet to find any concrete evidence supporting the theories.
Trendy
In Middle English, the verb trend had a much different meaning than it does now. Back then, a person trending might be rolling onto his bed or revolving an idea in his head.
The “turning” sense of the word then came to refer to the direction that a coastline, river, etc., turned, as in “a coastline that trends westward.” By the 19th century, the verb was extended to denote any turning in some direction—for example, “the conversion trended in the direction of politics” or “prices trending upward.”
Today, the verb most commonly refers to attention to some hot topic or subject matter. As wordies, we’re no strangers to following words that trend. This sense is also behind the participle adjective trending, as in “trending hashtags.”
It’s also in the 19th century that trend appears as a noun to indicate prevailing tendencies or inclinations (“trends in education”) and then current styles or preferences (“new fashion trends”). By mid-20th century, the adjective trendy starts being used to describe people and things being in accordance with the most recent fashions and current ideas.
Tomorrow, more style words, beginning with life on the funky side.
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