My cousin, who might remember how we used to Mash Up the horses’ food in winter, a great mix of steaming hot bran and meal to fortify them against the icy Scottish weather, suggested that the word Mashup would be interesting. He sent me a link to an amazing blog where there are lots of Google Maps mashups – Google Maps Mania. Here we have the Road Rage Mapper, the Wii Friend Codes, and the Mumbai Metro Rail System, to name but a few. I searched on the blog for Horse without luck. I searched for Bran and retrieved Branch. I also searched for Potato, which is another thing we used to Mash Up when I was young, but as yet there are no potatoes on this blog. However, Potato and Mashup in Google produce 442 thousand hits. You may think this is a lot. It is not – Google and Mashup produce over 29 million hits. The Google Mashup has certainly arrived!
Susie Dent alerted us to the importance of the word Mashup in her wonderful book The Language Report of 2006, where she described it as one of the “Words of the Moment”. She says that it arrived in the late 1990’s from a musical context but that it is now used more in an information/data context.
There is a good definition of the term on Webopedia where it talks about overlaying data from one source on the internet over another, possibly competing, source. It also mentions its origin in the hip-hop music scene where different songs were mixed together.
Mixing bran and meal, mixing disparate songs, mixing competing data sources – the common elements of the Mash Mix can be clearly seen.
ETYM
Mashup, also sometimes Mash up, and Mash-up
To mash up – phrasal verb, transitive.
A mashup – noun.
I can spot similarities in structure and possibly content with the following words:
Cut-up – an artistic technique used by William Burroughs and the Surrealists.
Hash-up (verb, transitive) – to do something very badly.
(Hash – a dish of cooked meat cut into pieces, a mixture, a mess.)
A word, whose name will not be spoken on this blog, because the base spammers of the internet who have already been attracted to the item on this blog that starts with Chat, I assume because of the three letter ending. The word in question, I cryptically suggest, begins in F and has four letters, can also be followed by Up so creating a phrasal verb, or it can create a noun, with or without a hyphen that means a mess or a muddle. So F234 Up leads to F234up just as Mash Up leads to mashup.
Other derivations
Masher – a fop who frequented music halls, a lady killer.
(To mash – to excite sentimental admiration in another person.)
In case you think these deriviations /connections /connotations are a bit far fetched (which I have wondered myself – am I indulging my imagination too much?) it is interesting to look at the definition of Masher given by die.net. He/it is either a man who is aggressively amorous towards women or an implement for mashing potatoes.
We have arrived back where we started. We have an aggressive mix – men chasing women in the music halls, disparate music sources being mixed, potatoes being mashed as well as bran and meal, data sources from sometimes competing environments blending in a crazy fashion on the web creating a new form of surrealist expression, or a mess or a muddle, that reflects our confused times in which even the English language cannot be expressed in a straightforward fashion as certain words must be avoided to evade the spammers.
(Looking up spam and my three letter offending suffix I realize that a spam cryptic-123 is an email address collecting program – you learn something every day!)
