World Wide Words -- 14 Aug 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 153         Saturday 14 August 1999
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Sent every Saturday to more than 5,400 subscribers in 93 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion                     Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/>   E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
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Contents
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1. Notes and feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Kibibyte.
3. In Brief: Functional drink, Hemispherism, Viral marketing.
4. Weird Words: Gazump.
5. Q & A: Jinx, Taking the piss.
6. Administration.


1. Notes and feedback
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ENCARTA WORLD DICTIONARY. As an update to my review last week, an
Australian edition of the dictionary is being published by Pan
Macmillan Australia. The text is the same as the Bloomsbury one in
the UK. The ISBN is 0-732-90989-9 and the price is AUD$75.00.


2. Turns of Phrase: Kibibyte
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Because of the binary nature of computing, it has long been common
for memory sizes, disk capacities and the like to be measured, not
in units of 1,000, but of 1,024 (the latter being 2 multiplied by
itself 10 times). Lacking a name for their idiosyncratic multiple,
computer scientists borrowed the standard metric prefix for 1,000,
'kilo-'. This was fine while such matters were the preserve solely
of a few computer experts, but now we're all using the things, the
confusion between the two senses of the prefix is getting to be a
problem. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), a
standards body, is proposing a new set of prefixes to sort matters
out. Multiples of 1,024 would be prefixed by 'kibi-', for example
'kibibytes'. Similarly 'mebi-', 'gibi-' and 'tebi-' would replace
'mega-', 'giga-' and 'tera-'. These prefixes are formed using the
first two letters of the existing ones, plus 'bi' (short for
binary). We're several years away from any decisions on this one,
though, and probably a great deal further away from their general
acceptance.

A proposal being circulated internationally by the IEC would
introduce the new prefixes kibi, mebi, gibi and tebi derived as
short unions of the SI prefixes with the word "binary."
                              [_IEEE Standards Bearer_, Jan. 1997]

The new term 'kibibyte' will more accurately describe the number
of bytes in a kilobyte - rather than being 1,000, as could be
inferred by the prefix 'kilo,' a kilobyte actually has 1,024 (2 to
the 10th power) bytes.
                                            [_Edupage_, Mar. 1999]


4. In Brief
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FUNCTIONAL DRINK. We've had 'functional foods' for some time, that
contain ingredients said to promote health and longevity. This
newer term is obviously related and refers to drinks sold in juice
bars - such as blends of beetroot, carrot, parsley, spinach and
celery - that are designed to purify and cleanse the system.

HEMISPHERISM. A form of unconscious prejudice that has become more
obvious now electronic communications make everywhere on the
planet seem the same distance away. 'Hemispherists' are those in
the northern hemisphere who assume that everybody lives by the
same calendar as they do (for example, a "Summer Special" offer in
Britain is not the same as one in Australia).

VIRAL MARKETING. Esther Dyson recently coined this for a form of
online promotion. Users of a product pass on information to others
who are likely to benefit from it, not for money, but because they
will gain advantage from having a larger base of users. The
reference is to a computer virus like Melissa that passes itself
on to all the e-mail addresses it finds on an infected system.


5. Weird Words: Gazump
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Mainly in British English, to unfairly acquire a property by
bidding more than an offer that has already been accepted.

Some dictionaries suggest that this odd word comes from the
Yiddish 'gezumph', to cheat or overcharge. This is supported by
the word's first meaning in English back in the 1920s, to swindle,
but others are less sure. These days it is always applied to house
purchase.

It takes up to three months in most parts of the UK to exchange
formal contracts on the sale of a house. So there's plenty of time
for the 'gazumper' to persuade the seller to accept his higher
offer and unceremoniously dump the previous buyer who thought he
had a firm agreement. Of course, it takes two to 'gazump' - honest
householders stick to their word. But at times when prices are
rising rapidly or demand is high, cupidity is easily excited by a
substantially improved offer. The term can also be applied to a
form of sting in which the person who has agreed to buy is
persuaded to increase their offer because of a real or fictitious
claim that a better one has been made by somebody else.

When the housing market is depressed, a stranger term appears, to
'gazunder', in which buyers arbitrarily reduce the offered price,
usually near the date of exchange of contracts when there is
little chance of the seller finding another purchaser. This
appeared in the late 1980s, and is a rather curious blend of
'gazump' and 'under'.


6. Q&A
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[Send queries to <qa at quinion.com>. Messages will be acknowledged,
but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited. If I can do
so, a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site.]
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Q. What are the origins of the word 'jinx'? It seems such a
strange word. [Mark Raymond, Australia]

A. It does look odd, and its origin is in dispute. Explaining why
is going to need a moment, since along the way we must take in the
Ancient Greeks, the study of birds, witchcraft, nineteenth century
vaudeville and the history of baseball.

First, the firm facts. The word 'jinx', in the sense of a thing or
person that brings bad luck, is first recorded as sports slang
from the US in the early years of the twentieth century. Most of
the early American citations relate to baseball - for example,
_The Jinx: Stories of the Diamond_ by Allen Sangree of 1910 and
Christy Mathewson's 'Pitching at a Pinch' of 1912, in which he
says: "A jinx is something which brings bad luck to a ball
player". From there it spread out into standard American English
and later to other varieties of the language.

Most dictionaries say with varying degrees of conviction that the
word derives from the classical Greek word 'iunx' for the bird
that we in Britain call the wryneck. It's a member of the
woodpecker family, a species that breeds across Europe and Asia.
It has a strange habit of twisting its neck right round when it's
alarmed or when it's watchfully at rest, hence its English name;
it has an odd courtship ritual, in which the male and female perch
opposite one another, shaking their heads about, and gaping their
mouths to show the pink inside. Such curious behaviour made people
think the wryneck was uncanny, and from the time of the Greeks
there were superstitions attached to it, with links to witchcraft,
divination and magic. Its Greek name passed into Latin and then
into English, either as 'yunx' or 'jynx'. So it's not surprising
that dictionary writers often suggest that 'jinx' comes from this
bird of superstition.

But there are two big holes in this theory: the wryneck is not a
North American bird and the word 'jynx' for it was always a
scholarly and uncommon one even in British English. Appropriate
though it was, it would be surprising to learn that American
sportsmen seized upon it.

Another theory has been put forward by Barry Popik of the American
Dialect Society, an indefatigable researcher into the history of
the American language, especially of sporting vocabulary. He
suggested that it comes instead from a song, _Captain Jinks of the
Horse Marines_. Following his tip, I delved into its history.

It was a famous vaudeville song, written and sung by William
Lingard and first published in 1868. Captain Jinks was an
unsuccessful soldier, who was eventually drummed out of the Army.
The key verse is this:

  The first day I went out to drill
  The bugle sound made me quite ill,
  At the Balance step my hat it fell,
     And that wouldn't do for the Army.
  The officers they all did shout,
  They all cried out, they all did shout,
  The officers they all did shout,
     "Oh, that's the curse of the Army".

This became all the rage, almost immediately spawning another song
by Will Hays about the captain's supposed wife: _Mistress Jinks of
Madison Square_. It grew to be a well-liked square dance tune, and
a popular song of soldiers in the American Army in the decades
after 1870. In 1901, the young Ethel Barrymore starred at the
Garrick Theatre in New York in Clyde Fitch's melodrama of the
1870s which he called _Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines_; in
1902 Ernest Crosby, a friend of Mark Twain, wrote a satirical
anti-imperialist novel about the Spanish-American War with the
title 'Captain Jinks, Hero'.

So, even thirty years after the song originally appeared, it was
still sufficiently well known that a playwright and author of the
early 1900s could separately refer to it in titles in the
expectation that their audiences would understand them. And these
works appeared only three or four years before the first recorded
use of the word in its sense of curse. To support his theory,
Barry Popik has found that many of the early sporting references
spell the word 'jinks'.

Despite the authority of the ranks of dictionaries glowering at me
from my shelves, I must say Mr Popik's theory is persuasive.
What's missing, of course, is direct evidence that Captain Jinks,
that curse of the army, was the inspiration for the term, or how
it came to appear first in sports slang. That we may never
discover.
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Q. Could you throw some light on to the origin of 'taking the
piss'?  My (English) wife seemed to think it meant actually being
made to drink someone else's urine.  [Stephen Balkam]

A. Nothing literal about this one, you will be pleased to hear.
It's usually said that the phrase derives from an older one,
'piss-proud', which refers to having an erection when waking up in
the morning, which is usually attributed to a full bladder
('proud' here being an obvious pun on its senses of something
raised or projecting and of something in which one may take
satisfaction).

It's first recorded, as so many such indecorous expressions are,
in Francis Grose's _A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue_;
in the second edition of 1788 he wrote: "Piss-proud, having a
false erection. That old fellow thought he had an erection, but
his -- was only piss-proud; said of any old fellow who marries a
young wife".

This developed into a figurative sense of somebody who had an
exaggerated idea of his own importance. So to 'take the piss' is
to deflate somebody, to disabuse them of their mistaken belief
that they are special. It's not recorded before the beginning of
the twentieth century.


7. Administration
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