From Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK Sat Jan 9 03:42:50 1999 From: Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK (Michael B Quinion) Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1999 08:42:50 +0000 Subject: World Wide Words -- 09 Jan 99 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 126 Saturday 9 January 1999 ================================================================== A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK Contents -------- 1. Truncated mailing. 2. Weird Words: Wassail. 3. Q & A. 4. Beyond words. 5. In Brief: Food desert. 6. Housekeeping. 1. Truncated mailing ------------------------------------------------------------------ This mailing is shorter than usual and rather unbalanced in its content because I'm in the middle of a bout of influenza. I hope that normal service will be resumed next week. 2. Weird Words: Wassail /'wQseIl/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ A festive occasion on which toasts are drunk; the ale or wine in which such toasts are made. In Saxon times you would have used the original form of this word, 'was hail', to greet or say goodbye to somebody; literally it means "be in good health". By the twelfth century, it had become the salutation you offered as a toast, to which the standard reply was 'drinc hail', "drink good health". ('Hail' is an older form of our modern word 'hale', "health; well-being" and is also closely connected with our word 'hail', "to salute, greet, welcome".) The toast seems to have come over with the Danes; by the twelfth century the Norman conquerors of Britain regarded it as one of the most characteristic sayings of the country. Later, the word came to be used also for the drink in which the toast was offered, especially the spiced ale or mulled wine that was drunk on Christmas Eve or Twelfth Night. In the western counties of Britain, the tradition grew up on Twelfth Night of toasting the good health of the apple trees that would bear the crop from which next year's cider would be made. Pieces of bread soaked in cider were placed in the crooks of trees, guns were fired to ward off evil spirits, and special songs were sung: Let every man take off his hat And shout out to th'old apple tree Old apple tree we wassail thee And hoping thou will bear. Ceremonies like these have almost entirely died out, though one or two are self-consciously kept alive in Somerset. 3. Q & A ------------------------------------------------------------------ [The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. Send your queries to . I can't guarantee to answer them, or even always to acknowledge your message, but if I can, a response will appear here and on our Web site.] ----------- Q. Can you shed some magical clarity on 'abracadabra' please? [Speranza Spiratos] A. Let me wave my wand ... It's ancient, first mentioned in a poem by Quintus Serenus Sammonicus in the second century AD. It is believed to have come into English via French from a Greek word 'abrasadabra' (the 'c' in English seems to be a confusion with the Greek 'c', which is pronounced as an 's'). It originated as a secret and mystical word with a Gnostic sect in Alexandria called the Basilidians (named after their founder Basilides of Egypt). It was probably based on 'Abraxas', the name of their supreme deity, but is sometimes said to have been constructed from the initial letters of three Hebrew Words: 'Ab', the father, 'Ben', the son, and 'Acadsch', the holy spirit. It was used as a charm, written in the shape of a triangle on a piece of parchment worn round the neck, and was believed to have the power to cure toothaches, malaria and other scourges. And 'Abraxas' itself was said to have magical powers of its own, as a word that represented the number of days in the year, 365. This was derived by adding up the numerical values of its seven Greek letters by a process called gematria. For this reason, it was often engraved on amulets and precious stones. ----------- Q. Any ideas on the origin of 'ringer', meaning a contestant or an athlete who is entered dishonestly into a competition? [Gord Forsythe] A. The origins are moderately obscure. It is US slang, dating from the latter years of last century, originally in connection with horse racing. A horse of better class than that permitted was entered fraudulently into a race, with bets being placed on it by those in the know. The word has spread its associations quite widely since, and can now refer to anything which has been tampered with in order to deceive, such as a motor vehicle. It may be connected with an old sense of 'ringer' for a counterfeit gold sovereign sold at fairs, because a good way to tell if such a coin was genuine was to drop it on a hard surface and listen for it to ring (a real one didn't). By the way, it seems not to be linked with the Australian sense of "something especially good" which comes from sheep-shearing. --------- Q. Please can you tell me what 'mullered' means and how old it is. I have only heard it in the last few months. Some people use it in engineering to mean damaged, but it seems to mean drunk too. [Richard Bolingbroke] A. It's a relatively recent British slang term, so far as I know, certainly only dating from the nineties. I've not come across it in the sense of "damaged", but only that of "intoxicated", either by drink or drugs. It has been said to be a variant form of the older word 'mulled', with the same meaning, which presumably derives from the sense of a drink that's has been made into a hot spicy concoction. --------- Q. I am trying to locate the origin of the word 'pretty' and its early usage. It apparently had a different meaning in early English that is unrelated to the way we currently use it. [Barbara Storm] A. That's correct. It is first recorded in Old English, when it had the sense of "trick, deceit". Then it disappears from the recorded language for some centuries, turning up again in the 1400s in a variety of meanings, none of them exactly equivalent to the Old English form. It could mean "clever, artful", or "something ingeniously or cleverly made". And it could be applied to a man, as "brave, gallant, warlike", which weakened down the years until it was used in the eighteenth century in the phrase "a pretty fellow", meaning a 'swell' or a 'fop'. But the word also existed in a weakened sense, very much like our modern 'nice' - pleasing or satisfactory in a vague sort of way. In this sense it was applied, in rather a condescending way, to young women as a reduced version of 'beautiful'. 4. Beyond words ------------------------------------------------------------------ Supposedly from a catalogue produced by the Swedish furnishing firm IKEA, quoted in the BBC radio programme, _News Quiz of the Year_: "It is advisory to be two people during construction". 5. In Brief: Food desert ------------------------------------------------------------------ The move of retailing away from the inner cities has left some parts of them without easy access to fresh foods at reasonable prices, 'food deserts' in fact. 6. Housekeeping ------------------------------------------------------------------ * To leave the list, send the following message to the list server address (the subject line will be ignored): SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS * To subscribe to the list, send the following message to the list server address from the e-mail address which is to receive mailings: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name * To change address, send a SIGNOFF message from your old address, followed by a SUBSCRIBE message from the new one. * To obtain information on other commands, send the text: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS * Other messages, including feedback and comments, should be sent to (general feedback, problems, screams of rage, etc) or (if you are asking a question). Do *not* send subscription requests to these addresses. ------------------------------------------------------------------ WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other online lists in whole or in part is permitted provided this notice is included. Reproduction in paid-for media or Web sites requires prior permission from the author. The World Wide Words Web site is at . From Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK Sat Jan 16 03:49:48 1999 From: Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK (Michael B Quinion) Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 08:49:48 +0000 Subject: World Wide Words -- 16 Jan 99 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 127 Saturday 16 January 1999 ================================================================== A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK Contents -------- 1. Notes and feedback. 2. Turns of Phrase: Phytoremediation. 3. Topical words: The e- prefix. 4. Weird Words: Furbelow. 5. Q & A. 6. Beyond words. 7. In Brief: Oxytherapy. 8. Housekeeping. 1. Notes and feedback ------------------------------------------------------------------ DEAD AS A DOORNAIL. Following up my piece before Christmas about this phrase, Donna Tarkowski wrote about a note by John Ciardi in his _Browser's Dictionary_. He suggests that a medieval door-nail was not a nail as we know it now, but something more like a rivet: an iron rod that was fixed between metal plates on each side of the door and hammered into place. This was said to be dead because it was immovably fixed in position. PHONETIC SYMBOLS. Time for one of my regular reminders that the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings employ a form of plain text transcription of standard IPA symbols. The key is too long to include in mailings, but is available online or by e-mail. See the Housekeeping section at the end for details. RINGER. My reference to an Australian sense of that word in a Q&A reply last week prompted several subscribers to write. The sense of "something supremely good" is actually an older English dialect meaning which is probably the source of the modern Australian term for the highest performing shearer in a shed. And the slang term meaning "to fraudulently substitute something inferior" seems to have had little or nothing to do with ringing coins to test their genuineness, as I suggested; it derives from a standard English verb 'to ring' based on the older 'to ring the changes', meaning to substitute something inferior. The Australian 'ring-in' with the same meaning also comes from the same source. And the phrase 'dead ringer', another form, meaning a perfect likeness, is just 'ringer' with the intensifier 'dead' added. IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME. Before Christmas, I wrote about this phrase in another Q&A piece, which prompted many subscribers to say how this translates into other languages. In German, the saying is "Das ist mir Spanisch" (that's all Spanish to me), though you may also hear "it's all Bohemian village names to me". The Spanish equivalent is "It's Chinese to me". It seems that the Poles do not quite say "It's all Turkish to me", as I suggested, but also prefer "It's Chinese to me", though Zdzislaw Szczerbinski from Gliwice in Poland says that they do have an expression "to be sitting as at a Turkish sermon" for listening to something that is incomprehensible. The Greeks like "It's Chinese to me", too, which is also used in Hebrew and in French (Ian Simpson wrote to say there was an advertising slogan some years ago encouraging people to learn English: "Pour vous, l'anglais c'est du chinois?", "Is English all Chinese to you?", though the French can also say that it's all Hebrew, as do the Finns). Turks also sometimes say that incomprehensible speech sounds Chinese, though they do on occasion equate it to Arabic, as do the Italians, though to them it can be Turkish as well. I haven't heard of a mainland Chinese expression, but Chris Heinrich tells me the equivalent in Taiwan is the quite wonderful "I'm a duck listening to thunder". The Danes sometimes say "It's all Greek (or all Russian) to me" but sometimes instead say "It's all Volapu"k to me", where Volapu"k is the name of a nineteenth century constructed language. You will not be surprised to hear that Esperantists use much the same expression: "io estas por mi volapukaj^o". PISCATORIAL POSTURINGS. Having been rude in the past about other people's typographical mistakes, it's only fair that I should quote a slightly surreal one of my own, which I managed to catch before it hit the public gaze: "We can't send a gunboat any more, but we can practise a form of Palmerstonian moral fish-shaking". 2. Turns of Phrase: Phytoremediation /'fVIt at UrImi:dIeIS(@)n/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Though this is a cumbersome word that hasn't yet reached any of my dictionaries, it has become a moderately common technical term in recent years because of its environmental implications. 'Phytoremediation' is just beginning practical application after years of research, and the word is now starting to turn up in non- specialist areas such as newspaper articles. It refers to a variety of techniques using plants and trees to clean up sites that are contaminated with heavy metals such as lead or cadmium, or with organic compounds like pesticides or solvents. In the case of the metals, species are grown which are known to concentrate the contaminants in their tissues; plants can then be harvested and burnt to release the pollutant, which can often be recycled. Organic pollutants are often treated with plants that take them up and destroy them as part of their normal metabolic processes. 'Phytoremediation' can be a lot cheaper than conventional methods, which usually involve removing the topsoil layer completely and replacing it with uncontaminated soil, but it is usually much slower. The word is a combination of the prefix 'phyto-', "plant" (from the Greek 'phutos') with 'remediation', the action of remedying something, especially environmental damage. With international conferences, coverage in scientific and trade journals, and industry and government-sponsored implementation, phytoremediation is a significant and growing niche in the environmental marketplace. [_Environmental Technology_, Sep. 1998] Because they also absorb and concentrate toxic metals, such as lead, these natural collectors could help to decontaminate industrial waste sites, a process known as phytoremediation. [_Economist_, Oct 1998] 3. Topical words: The e- prefix /i:/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ It seems that 'e-' is the new 'cyber-': a convenient combining form, tackable at will on to almost any other word to imply the white heat of the technological revolution. This came home to me during the holiday break, when I discovered that a current buzzword for online business is 'e-tail'. It's a less than elegant coinage, even though in Britain it lacks the special resonance of the American slang meaning of 'tail'. More evidence came from Liz Lavallee in the COPYEDITING list; she reported that her local newspaper, the _Potomac News_ in Woodbridge, Virginia, had the headline "1998: A year of truly e- mazing events". Another punning headline of a similar kind was one I found in a British computer magazine, which referred to the 'e- conomy'. And a look through my files reveals 63 other examples of new words formed by tacking 'e-' on the front of an existing word, including 'e-trade', 'e-asset', 'e-envoy', 'e-postmarked', 'e- junkmailer', and 'e-scoop'. Most of these are nonce formations, invented to satisfy a momentary need and not likely to be seen again, but some, such as 'e-cash', 'e-democracy', and 'e-text', have established what looks like a firm foothold in current usage. The daddy of these compounds is the comparatively venerable 'e- mail', first recorded as a noun in 1982 and as a verb in 1987. The 'e-' was at first just a convenient abbreviation for 'electronic'. As the word gained wider currency from the early nineties onwards, many newer users were uncertain whether the initial letter was an abbreviation or a prefix, and whether the word should be written with a hyphen or not. Hence the alternative forms 'E-mail', 'Email', and 'email'. It's an understandable confusion, and especially so as writing the word without a hyphen leads to something that looks foreign (specifically, the French word for enamel). The debate, or possibly the confusion, has not yet wholly worked itself through. But the growth in other words with the same prefix has gone a long way towards settling matters, as the form has become more common and it is more obvious that it can be stuck on the front of a whole range of words. It is also settling down to include the hyphen, perhaps because most of the words that would be formed without it look very odd. You can tell it's a live and fashionable prefix by the range of creations using it, few of them either clever or necessary. We don't need 'e-tail', for example, because we already have 'e- business' and 'e-commerce'. In October a health specialist was quoted in the _Los Angeles Times_ as saying "Everybody in this country knows the phrase 'e-commerce', but nobody knows the phrase 'e-health'". The first half of that is questionable: despite several years of circulation, I would imagine that a quite a large proportion of Americans neither knows the word 'e-commerce' nor cares what it means. But the second half seems true enough: it's another word for the application of telecommunications to medicine, rather more frequently called 'telemedicine' or 'telehealth'. So it's another unneeded coinage. We shall see many more before we're through with this fashion. 4. Weird Words: Furbelow /'f@:bIl at U/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ A gathered strip or pleated border; showy ornaments or trimmings. 'Furbelows' have nothing to do with 'fur'. The word came into English in the early eighteenth century from the French word 'falbala' for a flounce, decoration or trimming on a woman's petticoat or dress. Though similar words occur in other European languages - such as the German 'falbel' or Spanish 'farfala' - nobody seems to know where it comes from, though I have seen it suggested that it might originate in the Latin 'faluppa' for a valueless thing. Almost from its first appearance in English, its plural has had the sense of something ostentatious or showy. These days it hardly ever turns up at all, but when it does it usually forms part of the set phrase 'frills and furbelows'. 5. Q & A ------------------------------------------------------------------ [The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. Send your queries to . I can't guarantee to answer them, but if I can, I will reply privately first; a response will later appear here and on our Web site.] ----------- Q. Can you please tell me anything about the origin of the phrase "going to hell in a handbasket"? [Brian Walker] A. This is a weird one. It's a fairly common American expression, known for much of the twentieth century. But it's one about which almost no information exists, at least in the two dozen or so reference books I've consulted. William and Mary Morris, in their _Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins_, confess to the same difficulty. A 'handbasket' is just a basket to be carried in the hand (my thanks to the _Oxford English Dictionary_ for that gem of definition). The _Dictionary of American Regional English_ records 'to go to heaven in a handbasket' rather earlier than the alternative, which doesn't appear in print until the late 1940s. But _DARE_ quotes a related expression from 1714: "A committee brought in something about Piscataqua. Govr said he would give his head in a Handbasket as soon as he would pass it", which suggests that it, or phrases like it, have been around in the spoken language for a long time. We can only assume that the alliteration of the 'h's has had a lot to do with the success of the various phrases, and that perhaps 'handbasket' suggests something easily and speedily done. ------------- Q. Have you any idea where 'to wit' came from? [Kirstin Cruikshank] A. 'To wit' is now just a fixed expression. It's a shortened form of 'that is to wit' meaning "that is to know; that is to say; namely", from the English verb 'wit' "to know". This was a strong verb with past tense 'wot', as in "A garden is a lovesome thing, Got wot". In Old English it was spelt 'witan', and even further back it was linked with a Germanic verb meaning "to see". In the first of these senses, it's closely connected with the modern German verb 'wissen'; in the second it's the origin of our 'witness'. It developed further to refer to a person's understanding or judgement or mind (hence "keep your wits about you"). ------------- Q. In Issue 123 you explained the origin of 'chow' for military food. A related word puzzles me: 'mess'. [Robert L McBrayer] A. When it first appeared in English, 'mess' meant a portion of food. This came from the Old French 'mes', "a dish", which in modern French is spelt 'mets'. This comes ultimately from the Latin 'missus', strictly "to put, send" but which could also mean "a course at a meal" (that is, something put on the table). In the fifteenth century, 'mess' came to refer to a group of people, usually four in number, who sat together at a meal and were served from the same dishes. This soon evolved into a name of any group that ate together. For example, in warships, a group of a dozen or so men would usually sit together at one table and were served from the same dishes; this was one 'mess', and those who habitually sat together were 'messmates'; the room was often called a 'mess-room', a space that contained a set of 'messes'. By an obvious process, 'mess-room' was itself later contracted to 'mess', so confusing the place where one ate with the groups of people one ate with. At one time 'mess' could also refer to any cooked dish, especially one which was liquid or pulpy; this is best remembered in the 'mess of pottage' for which Esau sold his birthright in the Bible (though the phrase doesn't appear in the Authorised Version of 1611). The sense of a confused jumble or a dirty or untidy state, which is the first association we have for 'mess' nowadays, evolved from this meaning and seems to have been a disparaging reference to such sloppy food. It is actually a very recent usage, dating only from the nineteenth century (it's first recorded in _Webster's Dictionary_ in 1828). 6. Beyond words ------------------------------------------------------------------ In a report in last Monday's _Guardian_ about a proposal by the Tesco supermarket chain to open their Hastings store for a special nude shopping evening: "Naturists would undress inside the store and *redress* before they left". Good heavens, what would they have been doing that they needed to offer redress? 7. In Brief: Oxytherapy ------------------------------------------------------------------ A weird-sounding technique in which sufferers from cancer, AIDS or multiple sclerosis are treated with ozone in the belief that it provides relief. A common method is 'autohaemotology', also called 'autohaemotherapy', in which blood is removed from the body, ozonated and put back. 8. Housekeeping ------------------------------------------------------------------ * To leave the list, send the following message to the list server address (the subject line will be ignored): SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS * To subscribe to the list, send the following message to the list server address from the e-mail address which is to receive mailings: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name * To change address, send a SIGNOFF message from your old address, followed by a SUBSCRIBE message from the new one. * To obtain information on other commands, send the text: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS * Other messages, including feedback and comments, should be sent to (general feedback, problems, screams of rage, etc) or (if you are asking a question). Please do *not* send subscription requests to these addresses. * A key to the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings is available online at . A plain text version may be obtained any time by sending a blank e-mail message to our autoresponder at . (Note that any text in your message will be ignored.) ------------------------------------------------------------------ WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other online lists in whole or in part is permitted provided this notice is included. Reproduction in paid-for media or Web sites requires prior permission from the author. The World Wide Words Web site is at . From Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK Sat Jan 16 05:48:44 1999 From: Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK (Michael B Quinion) Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 10:48:44 +0000 Subject: World Wide Words -- 16 Jan 99 (correction) Message-ID: > A key to the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings is > available online at . Whoops. No, it isn't. The correct address is: Sorry for any confusion. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael B Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK World Wide Words: From Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK Sat Jan 23 04:15:57 1999 From: Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK (Michael B Quinion) Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 09:15:57 +0000 Subject: World Wide Words -- 23 Jan 99 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 128 Saturday 23 January 1999 ================================================================== A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK Contents -------- 1. Notes and feedback. 2. Turns of Phrase: Business theatre. 3. Topical words: Bluestocking. 4. In Brief: Paramotoring. 5. Weird Words: Octothorpe. 6. Q&A: Groovy; In cold blood; Shiver my timbers. 7. Beyond Words. 8. Housekeeping. 1. Notes and feedback ------------------------------------------------------------------ WOT ROT. As several subscribers gently pointed out after my Q&A item on "to wit" last week, 'wot' is the *present* tense of a variant form of the verb, not the past tense. And the quotation from T E Brown should have read: "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot", not "Got wot". Apologies. BUSY, BUSY. In the past week World Wide Words has been mentioned in the LINGUIST list, the Scout Report, Net-Happenings and several other online newsletters, and was chosen as a Web pick by _USA Today_. As a result, World Wide Words has 750+ more subscribers today than it had this time last week. Partly as a result, the volume of e-mail has gone up substantially and I am way behind with replies to enquiries. 2. Turns of Phrase: Business theatre /'bIznIs ,TI at t@/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ This seems to be a common term of trade in the exhibitions field in North America, dating from the late eighties at least, which has also been spotted in Britain. It seems to be a jargon term not well known outside that business. The need to make an effective impact at business presentations to dealers and customers has led to the techniques of the more high-tech end of modern theatre being applied to sales pitches and promotion. Take a line through the average new car launch: complex stage sets, vast lighting grids, high-powered sound systems, actors, dancers, the whole theatrical experience applied to the business of persuasion. So it's not hard to see how the phrase 'business theatre' (less commonly 'business theater') came to be applied to this approach, even though much of the conference organisation, exhibition creation, and event management that's lumped under the name is considerably more modest than these relatively infrequent set- pieces. It's not like a business theatre show, where you're going into a ballroom, or a stadium show, where you're on a playing field. It was a chance to build conventional scenery, and showcase it. [_Theatre Crafts International_, Apr. 1995] As creative director of Spectrum, a company which specialises in 'business theatre', Elliott has vast experience of designing exhibitions, conferences and live events all over the world ... [_Independent on Sunday_, Sept. 1998] 3. Topical words: Bluestocking /'blu:stQkIN/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Some eyebrows have been raised recently through Amanda Foreman's decision to pose naked for the February issue of _Tatler_ magazine, albeit semi-modestly behind a large pile of her new book. She has just spent five years, as she said in the magazine, "cooped up in libraries" writing the biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and decided "why not have some fun now?". Georgiana was one of the more flamboyant women of the eighteenth century, and researching her seems to have affected Ms Foreman deeply. In a strained bit of wordplay, Cayte Williams commented in the _Independent on Sunday_ last weekend: "It comes to something when Britain's top bluestockings start whipping off their suspender belts". Leaving aside the shaky fashion notes, 'bluestocking' is getting to be rather an old-fashioned pejorative description for an intellectual woman. What is especially odd about the term, though, is that the first bluestocking was a man. He was a learned botanist, translator, publisher and minor poet of the eighteenth-century named Benjamin Stillingfleet. He wrote an early opera and also published the first English editions of works by the Swedish botanist Linnaeus. The story starts in the early 1750s, when a group of independently minded women decided to break away from the stultifying sessions of card playing and idle chatter which was all that tradition allowed them. They began to hold literary evenings, in direct imitation of the established salons of Paris, to which well-known men of letters would be invited as guests to encourage discussion. One of the leading lights of this group was Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, a powerful and rich figure in London society (she was the cousin of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who brought smallpox inoculation back from Turkey). Literary and theatrical luminaries like Samuel Johnson, David Garrick and Lord Lyttleton attended what she and her friends referred to as conversations, but which Horace Walpole, a frequent guest, called petticoteries. Another regular visitor was Joshua (later Sir Joshua) Reynolds, who, to complete the circle of associations, painted a portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in 1786. Mr Stillingfleet was asked to attend by Mrs Vesey, one of the group. He felt he had to decline, as he was too poor to afford the formal dress then required for evening events, which included black silk stockings. According to Fanny Burney, who told the story later, Mrs Vesey told him to come as he was, in his informal day clothes. Which he did, wearing his blue worsted stockings, and started a trend. Admiral Edward Boscawen, who was known to his friends as "Old Dreadnought" or "Wry-necked Dick", was the husband of one of the more enthusiastic attendees. He was very rude about what he saw as his wife's literary pretensions and is said to have derisively described the sessions as being meetings of the Blue-Stocking Society. And so those who attended were sometimes called Blue Stockingers, later abbreviated to blue stockings. (Another name was the French form 'Bas Bleu', which Hanna More, another member, used in her poem, _The Bas Bleu, or Conversation_, which gives a lot of information about the group.) A slightly different version of the story and of the influence of Benjamin Stillingfleet is told by James Boswell in his _Life of Johnson_: "Such was the excellence of his conversation, that his absence was felt as so great a loss, that it used to be said 'We can do nothing without the blue stockings,' and thus by degrees the title was established". With such a wealth of documentary evidence, you might think that the origin of the word was established, as they might have said at the time, beyond a peradventure (though Dr Johnson was dismissive of that word, no doubt repeating at one of those evenings what he said in his dictionary: "It is sometimes used as a noun, but not gracefully nor properly"). But some works say firmly that the tradition goes back to the 1400s, to the blue stockings worn by the members of a society in Venice called 'Della Calza' ("of the stockings"), which later spread to Paris, from which the society ladies of London were supposed to have taken it up. I've not got to the bottom of this one and it may be a false lead (can a blue stocking be a red herring?), but even if Hanna More, James Boswell, and Fanny Burney were all recounting a kind of early urban myth about the circumstances, there's no doubt that the English word was coined as a result of those conversational evenings in the mid eighteenth century. 4. In Brief: Paramotoring ------------------------------------------------------------------ This is a newish aerial sport, which was first developed in France and Germany in the late eighties but is now rapidly spreading world-wide. You fly wearing a paraglider canopy that's combined with a motorised pusher fan. It needs no airfield, as you can take off and land almost anywhere. When you're done, you can fold it up and put it in the back of your car. 5. Weird Words: Octothorpe /'Qkt at UTO:Rp/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Another name for the telephone handset symbol #. This word is just beginning to appear in the dictionaries, but still seems mostly to be jargon of the North American telephone business. But it is one of the few such words with a documented history, thanks to a note that Ralph Carlsen of Bell Laboratories wrote just before his retirement in 1995. He records that Bell Labs introduced two special keys on the then new touch-tone telephone handsets in the early 1960s, both of them now standard. One of these is the symbol '*', usually known formally as the asterisk but which Bell Labs reasonably decided to call the 'star' key. The other was the '#' symbol. This was more of a problem, as there are lots of names for it. In the US it is often called the pound key, because it is used to mark numbers related to weight, or for similar reasons the number sign, which is also one of its internationally agreed names. Elsewhere it is commonly called hash, but it also has lots of other names, such as tictactoe and cross-hatch. In Britain, the Post Office, then responsible for telecommunications, added to the plethora of names by deciding to call it 'square', though that, too, has become an official name internationally. The story as told by Ralph Carlsen is that a Bell Labs engineer, Don Macpherson, went to instruct their first client, the Mayo Clinic, in the use of the new system. He felt the need for a fresh and unambiguous name for the # symbol. His reasoning that led to the new word was roughly that it had eight points, so ought to start with 'octo-'. He was at that time active in a group that was trying to get the Olympic medals of the athlete Jim Thorpe returned from Sweden, so he decided to add 'thorpe' to the end. 'Thorpe' is, of course, also the Old Norse word for a hamlet, village or farm, which is common in British place names. Another story of its origin is that the sign was thought to look like a group of eight fields surrounding a village. The existence of this other story means that dictionaries usually say the word is of disputed origin, though Mr Carlsen's note is so circumstantial and full of detail that it is convincing. Over the past three decades, 'octothorpe' has gradually crept into various official publications and manuals in the North American telecommunications system. But even so it's hardly a common word. ================================================================== IF YOU ENJOY READING WORLD WIDE WORDS ... you probably know other people who would like to read it too. Do forward this mailing to them and suggest they subscribe. ================================================================== 6. Q & A ------------------------------------------------------------------ [The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. Send your queries to . I can't guarantee to answer them, but if I can, I will reply privately first; a response will later appear here and on our Web site.] ------------------- Q. I was a product of the 60's when we used the word 'groovy' constantly. I thought that my generation invented the word. I was surprised to discover recently while watching the original movie trailer for _Miracle on 34th Street_, which was produced in 1948, that the word 'groovey' was used in one of the big graphic headlines which scrolled over the video. I'm sure that you will have an amusing and edifying explanation of how old this expression is, and how it came to be? [Roberta E Richardson] A. I'll just give you the facts, ma'am ... it's even older than 1948, I have to tell you. The first citation in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ is dated 1937. It comes from jazz, when to be 'groovey' (the original spelling) was a shortened form of "in the groove", meaning that somebody was playing brilliantly or easily, perhaps like a gramophone needle slipping along a groove, or making music as perfectly as a needle does in the grooves of a record. Tom Dalzell, in his _Flappers 2 Rappers_, quotes from the _San Francisco Chronicle_ of 13 March 1938, in which Herb Caen is in turn quoting Bing Crosby: "In the groove means just right, down the middle, riding lightly and politely, terrific, easy on the ears". Mr Dalzell suggests that 'in the groove' was not replaced by 'groovey' until about 1941, and that the latter only really caught on from about 1944-5 for a period of less than ten years. So the mid-sixties usage, in its slightly different spelling, was most definitely its second time around. Now, of course, it can only be used as a deliberate anachronism or by the terminally out- of-touch. ------------------- Q. What is the origin of 'in cold blood'? [Andy Cilley]. A. Think of the effect of doing something with emotion, passion or great exertion. The blood flows to your face and you feel hot. At a time before our understanding of the human body was as good as it is now, it was thought that the blood actually grew hot at such times. We still have a set of phrases in the language that reflect this, such as 'his blood boiled' or 'in the heat of passion', which contrast with others that describe a person whose blood is cold or cool, so detached or uninvolved. So, an action that was carried out without excitement or emotional involvement was said to have been taken when the blood was cold (the exact equivalent of the French 'sang froid'). The phrase is now usually taken to refer to some act that might look like an act of passion but which was actually done with cool deliberation; it's first recorded in Joseph Addison's _Spectator_ in 1711. ------------------- Q. Please could you tell me where the phrase 'shiver my timbers' originated? [Tad Spencer] A. This is one of those supposedly nautical expressions that seem to be better known through a couple of appearances in fiction than by any actual sailors' usage. It's an exclamation that may allude to a ship striking some rock or other obstacle so hard that her timbers shiver, or shake, so implying some calamity has occurred. It is first recorded as being used by Captain Frederick Marryat in _Jacob Faithful_ in 1835: "I won't thrash you Tom. Shiver my timbers if I do". It has gained a firm place in the language because almost fifty years later Robert Louis Stevenson found it to be just the kind of old-salt saying that fitted the character of Long John Silver in _Treasure Island_: "Cross me, and you'll go where many a good man's gone before you ... some to the yard-arm, shiver my timbers, and some by the board, and all to feed the fishes". Since then, it's mainly been the preserve of second-rate seafaring yarns. 7. Beyond Words ------------------------------------------------------------------ The newsletter _Tasty Bits from the Technology Front_ this week featured the phrase "to eat our own dog-food", which is a bit of computer-industry jargon meaning that software developers ought to actually use the products they develop, preferably before they start to sell them. _TBTF_ says the phrase has now been verbed, with a Microsoft employee reported as saying "we have to dog-food this architecture before we release it". 8. Housekeeping ------------------------------------------------------------------ * To leave the list, send the following message to the list server address (the subject line will be ignored): SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS * To subscribe to the list, send the following message to the list server address from the e-mail address which is to receive mailings: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name * To change address, send a SIGNOFF message from your old address, followed by a SUBSCRIBE message from the new one. * To obtain information on other commands, send the text: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS * Other messages, including feedback and comments, should be sent to (general feedback, problems, screams of rage, etc) or (if you are asking a question). Please do *not* send subscription requests to these addresses. * A key to the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings is available at . A plain text version may be obtained any time by sending a blank e-mail message to our autoresponder at . (Note that any text in your message will be ignored.) ------------------------------------------------------------------ WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other online lists in whole or in part is permitted provided this notice is included. Reproduction in paid-for media or Web sites requires prior permission from the author. The World Wide Words Web site is at . From Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK Sat Jan 30 04:05:07 1999 From: Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK (Michael B Quinion) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 09:05:07 +0000 Subject: World Wide Words -- 30 Jan 99 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 129 Saturday 30 January 1999 ================================================================== A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK Contents -------- 1. Notes and feedback. 2. Article: Words of 1998. 3. Topical words: Blue moon. 4. In Brief: Judas biography. 5. Weird Words: Deasil. 6. Q & A. 7. Beyond Words. 8. Housekeeping. 1. Notes and feedback ------------------------------------------------------------------ WORD BLOAT. I keep trying to limit these mailings to four pages of text, because I know some subscribers' e-mail systems can't cope with longer messages. But, somehow, there's always so much to fit in that's topical. And there's a huge pile of answers to your questions still waiting to be fed through. The answer is probably a special mailing or two at some point to clear the backlog. Your views will be welcome, as always. E-LAS: Following my piece two weeks ago about the 'e-' prefix (see below), I found 'elance' in a computer journal this week, meaning an "electronic freelance" or computer contractor. This is getting very silly ... ERROR: NO ERROR. The Corrections and Clarifications column in the _Guardian_ each day is regarded by many of us as the best bit of the newspaper, because of its clear-eyed and witty rectification of errors and omissions. In Tuesday's edition, the following note appeared: "The absence of corrections yesterday was due to a technical hitch rather than any sudden onset of accuracy". 2. Article: Words of 1998 ------------------------------------------------------------------ We've had the season of goodwill, of first-footing and wassailing, and we're now well into the season of awards for the best of 1998. HarperCollins in Britain has just announced the result of its competition to choose the word that best represents the year. This follows the similar award by the American Dialect Society on 7 January, and a set of words of the year from Oxford Dictionaries that came out close to Christmas. HarperCollins gave the prize to 'millennium bug', which supports my suspicion that British word usage is running about a year behind that of North America (you may recall it was the choice of the American Dialect Society for 1997, and it was getting a bit shop-worn even then). This year, the ADS has chosen the 'e-' prefix, which I wrote about two weeks ago. It was also voted Most Useful and Most Likely to Succeed, awards I am less sure about. Oxford doesn't select one word, but instead produces a list of some of those which have come to prominence; HarperCollins appends a similar list to its winner and runners-up. ADS also provides a list of runners-up, and the three lists together give a picture of what specialists presumably think have been the most high-profile of the year. The Oxford list is at the same time the longest and the one with fewest surprises. It makes clear it's a selection of words which were spotted by their New Words team in 1998, not necessarily words which are new. If you've been a subscriber to World Wide Words for a while, you will have read about many of them already. (Quite a number of them have come from me, it seems, directly or indirectly; I did wonder why my Web site logs showed such interest from staff at Oxford near the end of last year! And, don't tell Oxford Dictionaries, but I wrote about several of them in 1997.) So, no need to dwell overlong on 'analysis paralysis', 'portal site', 'biopiracy', 'black-water rafting', 'exoplanet', 'global distillation', 'exformation', 'gorge-walking', 'polyamory', 'trickle-up trend', or 'waitress mom'. Some others from the Oxford list: 'call centre' (designed to handle large numbers of phone calls), 'domophobia' (hostility towards the Millennium Dome at Greenwich), 'ecological footprint' (impact or damage to the environment caused by human activity), 'euro-wasp' (a large European species becoming resident in Britain), 'Furby' (that toy), 'horse-whispering' (from that film), 'rage' (in all its variations). 'superweed' (one that's resistant to herbicides), and, perhaps inevitably, but also rather sadly, 'Monicagate', 'fornigate' and 'zippergate'. The Oxford list is more international in scope than either of the others, and so includes some words I have a feeling I should have featured: 'Hansonism', the political policies of Pauline Hanson, leader of the Australian _One Nation_ party (and the related term 'Asianisation'); 'hoarding', which Oxford says has taken on a new meaning in Indian English that specifically refers to the illegal stockpiling of staple foods made scarce in 1998 by failed harvests (they also give 'ration shop' for an official open-market outlet in India for the sale of essential commodities); and two terms from South Africa: 'gravy', a shortening of 'gravy train', widely used in 1998, Oxford says, to refer to government corruption, and 'muti murder', a spate of killings in Johannesburg that were related to 'muti' (traditional African magic). The HarperCollins appended list is described as "words coined in 1998", a startling assertion, as it includes 'DVD', 'heroin chic', 'middle youth', 'mouse potato', 'grey market', 'pharming', and 'Y2K'. These are newish terms, but I have citations for 'heroin chic' from 1997, 'Y2K' from 1996, 'DVD' and 'mouse potato' from 1994, and 'grey market' from 1993, and I'm sure older examples could be found for all of them. They are words which achieved a certain prominence in Britain in 1998, but they were most certainly not coined in that year. And these are the HarperCollins runners-up in its competition, in descending order based on the votes of readers, I assume mainly from Britain: 'Viagra', 'digital television', 'Millennium Dome', 'Zippergate', 'Monicagate', 'girl power', 'Furby', 'Cool Britannia' and 'docusoap'. Few surprises there, except that voters seem less cynical about the Dome than the press, and that they have been heavily influenced by a certain American scandal. So has the American Dialect Society, whose runners-up to 'e-' included, with what I suspect is a certain tongue-in-cheekness, 'sexual relations' and 'is' (though it surely depends what they meant by that word). Also included were 'Viagra' and the various forms in 'rage'. It's in the other ADS sections that choices reveal much about the lexical state of America (and perhaps what HarperCollins readers will be voting on in early 2000). In the Most Useful category: 'senior moment' (a momentary lapse of memory due to age) got most votes, followed by 'multislacking' (playing at the computer when one should be working) and 'open source' (the source code of software programs available to all). In the Most Unnecessary category, most votes went to the entire Monica Lewinsky word family. Under the Least Likely to Succeed heading, votes were cast for, among others, 'explornography' (tourism in exotic and dangerous places), although 'compfusion' (a confusion over computers) came out on top. One other category: Most Original, won by 'multislacking', followed by 'angst bunny' (a young woman with black clothes and lots of body piercing); 'Preslyterianism' (a cult of Elvis Presley in the South), and 'bililoquy' (a conversation with one's alter ego). What these various lists confirm, as it if needed to be confirmed, is that British English is heavily influenced by American events and culture. 3. Topical words: Blue moon /'blu: mu:n/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Tomorrow (31 January 1999), newspapers have been telling us, we shall see the second blue moon of January, at least we will in Europe and North America. This stopped me dead the first time I saw the phrase a few years ago, as 'blue moon' to me only has the meaning of some event that happens extremely rarely, if ever, so matching a favourite expression of my father's: "never in a month of Sundays". There's nothing in any of my dictionaries or books on phrase origins about two full moons in one month. But the expression has become common in that sense in recent years in north America, to the extent of almost usurping the older meaning. The idea of a 'blue moon' has been traced back to 1528, to a sceptical little item entitled _Rede Me and Be Not Wrothe_: "Yf they say the mone is belewe, we must believe that it is true". This implies the expression had a meaning of something that was absurd, very like another moon-related proverb first recorded in the following year "They woulde make men beleue ... that ye Moone is made of grene chese". Because it was absurd, saying that something happened only 'once in a blue moon' was the same as saying it never happened. And this was what the phrase meant for several hundred years. Charles Earle Funk suggested in 1948 that the two expressions are connected, the green cheese being the freshly pressed round cheese that looks white like the full moon, and the blue moon the one just before the new moon begins to show, when rarely the Moon's surface, bathed only in faint Earthlight, may look blue. This is eminently plausible for 'green cheese', indeed it's the usual explanation of how the saying came about, but his explanation doesn't fit the fact that 'blue moon' then meant "never". The version that most of have grown up with has a sense that has shifted, like the opinion of the captain of the 'Pinafore', from "never" to "hardly ever". This sense was first recorded only in 1821, but is probably eighteenth-century. Various writers have guessed that the change in meaning came about because people realised that the moon can indeed look blue, because of dust in the upper atmosphere, say from forest fires or volcanic eruptions. As with Mr Funk's thesis, that hardly sounds convincing, but as so often there's no evidence either way. So how did 'blue moon' get this new meaning? I'm indebted to Philip Hiscock of the Folklore and Language Archive at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, who has done a lot of research on this phrase, the results of which are presented in the March 1999 issue of _Sky and Telescope Magazine_. He managed to trace it back to an edition of _Trivial Pursuit_ published in 1986; its compilers got it from _The Kids' World Almanac of Records and Facts_ of the year before, which probably got it from a radio programme in 1979 that quoted a reference to a quiz in _Sky and Telescope_ in July 1943, which attributed it to the 1937 _Maine Farmers' Almanac_. And there the trail goes cold. (And, in any case, the _Farmers' Almanac_ article seems to suggest that the term refers to a second full moon within one zodiacal sign, not one calendar month.) What seems clear from reports is that this "two full moons in one month" meaning of 'blue moon' only started to achieve much circulation from about 1988, no doubt principally as a result of the _Trivial Pursuit_ reference. So what we have is a truly modern piece of language folklore, and a fine example of the way that a supposed fact can become widely reported and accepted within a very short space of time. It shows also how an expression can lurk in the language until something causes it to bursts upon the public stage. Astronomers say that this type of 'blue moon' is actually a lot more frequent than the older sort. There is a month with two full moons in it rather more than once every three years. That's because, though 'moon' and 'month' are intimately related words, our months are all, apart from February, a little longer than the interval between two full moons. Much more rare is to have two blue-moon months in one year. This happens this year, as both January and March have two, whilst poor old February has no full moon at all. The next years in which this happens are 2018 and 2037. Now that's what I really call 'once in a blue moon'. [You can find Philip Hiscock's article from _Sky & Telescope_ at . His 1993 piece in the _Griffiths Observer_ is at .] 4. In Brief: Judas biography ------------------------------------------------------------------ Many biographies have appeared in the past few years that presume to tell the truth about some relative or friend. A current British example is the intimate history of Jacqueline du Pre', which has now become the film _Hilary and Jackie_. In the current issue of the _New York Review of Books_, John Updike wrote: "Recent years in America have given rise to what we might call the Judas biography, in which a former spouse or friend of a living writer confides to print an intimate portrait less flattering than might be expected". Another name is 'spiterature'. 5. Weird Words: Deasil /dEs(@)l/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Righthandwards; in the direction of the sun; clockwise. This is a word which now mainly conjures up associations with witchcraft, as it's the much rarer converse of 'widdershins'. Trying to define it immediately runs into the fundamental problem of how to explain the difference between left and right (clockwise is fine, unless you're a clock, or one of those jokers who has one that runs backwards; sunwise works in the northern hemisphere only; just try explaining to an alien visitor which is right and which left, using words only). In immediate origin 'deasil' is a Gaelic word that derives from the same root as the Latin 'dexter', "right, right-handed" which even then could mean "skilful" (hence our word 'dextrous'). In witchcraft, including modern Wicca, to move deasil is to invoke positive qualities. As an example of its associations, here is Sir Walter Scott, in _Chronicles of the Canongate_: "In the meantime, she traced around him, with wavering steps, the propitiation, which some have thought has been derived from the Druidical mythology. It consists, as is well known, in the person who makes the DEASIL walking three times round the person who is the object of the ceremony, taking care to move according to the course of the sun". 6. Q & A ------------------------------------------------------------------ [The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. I'm inundated with questions at the moment; hold off sending me any more until I've cleared the backlog!] ----------- Q. Can you shed light on the meaning or origin of 'it's a dog's life'? Those of us over 50 seem to use to suggest the need to accept the existential fact that things are hard; but in the under-50 set, the idea is that dogs have it easy, and so 'it's a dog's life' equates to "how cushy!". [Stephen P Goldman] A. It certainly seems that the phrase has become more ambiguous than it once was, though I've not come across many examples myself of its use as a description of a pampered existence. Most of our expressions that include 'dog' are old enough to be based in times when dogs were not cosseted, but were kept as watchdogs or hunting animals, not as pets. They often weren't allowed in the house, but were kept in kennels, fed scraps, worked hard, and often died young. So 'going to the dogs', 'dog tired', 'to die like a dog', 'dog's dinner', 'dogsbody', 'dog eat dog', and 'a dog's life' all refer to a state of affairs best avoided. Specifically, 'a dog's life' is first recorded in the sixteenth century and seems to have remained in the language with the sense of "a life of misery, or of miserable subserviency" ever since. I'd hate to lose it myself. ------------- Q. I'm trying to find out the origin of the phrase, 'on the QT', meaning off the record or in confidence. [Mike Willis] A. According to Robert Hendrickson, in _The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins_, the first reference is from a British ballad of 1870, which contained the line "Whatever I tell you is on the QT". It seems to have been just an abbreviated spelling, using the first and last letters of the word 'quiet', the mild obfuscation also suggesting a meaning for the expression. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ has a first sighting from 1884: "It will be possible to have one spree on the strict q.t.". Mr Hendrickson points out that it also occurs in a famous London ditty of 1891, sung by Lottie Collins, which also introduced the famous chorus line "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay": A sweet Tuxedo girl you see, Queen of swell society, Fond of fun as fun can be, When it's on the strict Q.T. ---------- Q. How did 'spoil' (go bad or rotten) come to mean to overindulge someone (as in 'spoil a child' or 'the kid is spoiled rotten')? [Richard Nixon] A. Both meanings of the word are derived from an older sense of the word in English, which was to strip the armour and weapons from a slain enemy. (This came via French from the Latin word 'spolium', which originally meant the skin that had been taken from a dead animal. So the first meaning in English was already a figurative one.) From here, the word came to mean the items so removed, booty or plunder, hence our word 'spoils', as in phrases such as "the spoils of war". The verb could also be used at one time for seizing goods by violence, to "deprive, despoil, pillage, or rob" as the _Oxford English Dictionary_ graphically puts it. It then took on a less literal meaning of depriving someone of some quality or distinction, and later still to impair or damage something to the extent that it became useless. By the end of the seventeenth century, this had reached the point where 'to spoil' could mean "to injure in respect of character, especially by over- indulgence or undue lenience" and "to become unfit for use; to deteriorate; to go bad, decay", the two senses you give. ----------- Q. What is the origin and true meaning of 'knock on wood' or 'touch wood'? [Mike Gast] A. To 'touch wood' is a superstition action to ward off any evil consequences, say of untimely boasting; it can also be a charm to bring good luck. The origin is quite unknown, though some writers have pointed to pre-Christian rituals involving the spirits of sacred trees such as the oak, ash, holly or hawthorn. There is, I'm told, an old Irish belief that you should knock on wood to let the little people know that you are thanking them for a bit of good luck. Others have sought a meaning in which the wood symbolises the timber of the cross, but this may be a Christianisation of an older ritual. The children's game of tag in which you are only safe so long as you are touching wood is not likely to be connected (an indicator of this may be that at times iron was substituted for wood if there was no wood handy). The phrase itself seems to be modern, as the oldest citation for 'touch wood' in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ dates only from 1908; my searches haven't turned up anything earlier. (Incidentally, that work doesn't have a single example of 'knock on wood', which is the American version of the British 'touch wood'.) 7. Beyond Words ------------------------------------------------------------------ The US magazine _Philosophy and Literature_ has announced the winners of its 1998 Bad Writing Contest, which "celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years" though "deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread". First prize was won by Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of Calif- ornia at Berkeley, in a 1997 article in the _Diacritics_ journal entitled _Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time_: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power". More details can be found through a link at . 8. Housekeeping ------------------------------------------------------------------ * To leave the list, send the following message to the list server address (the subject line will be ignored): SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS * To subscribe to the list, send the following message to the list server address from the e-mail address which is to receive mailings: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name * To change address, send a SIGNOFF message from your old address, followed by a SUBSCRIBE message from the new one. * To obtain information on other commands, send the text: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS * Other messages, including feedback and comments, should be sent to (general feedback, problems, screams of rage, etc) or (if you are asking a question). Please do *not* send subscription requests to these addresses. * A key to the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings is available at . A plain text version may be obtained any time by sending a blank e-mail message to our autoresponder at . (Note that any text in your message will be ignored.) ------------------------------------------------------------------ WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other online lists in whole or in part is permitted provided this notice is included. Reproduction in paid-for media or Web sites requires prior permission from the author. The World Wide Words Web site is at . From Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK Sat Jan 9 08:42:50 1999 From: Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK (Michael B Quinion) Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1999 08:42:50 +0000 Subject: World Wide Words -- 09 Jan 99 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 126 Saturday 9 January 1999 ================================================================== A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK Contents -------- 1. Truncated mailing. 2. Weird Words: Wassail. 3. Q & A. 4. Beyond words. 5. In Brief: Food desert. 6. Housekeeping. 1. Truncated mailing ------------------------------------------------------------------ This mailing is shorter than usual and rather unbalanced in its content because I'm in the middle of a bout of influenza. I hope that normal service will be resumed next week. 2. Weird Words: Wassail /'wQseIl/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ A festive occasion on which toasts are drunk; the ale or wine in which such toasts are made. In Saxon times you would have used the original form of this word, 'was hail', to greet or say goodbye to somebody; literally it means "be in good health". By the twelfth century, it had become the salutation you offered as a toast, to which the standard reply was 'drinc hail', "drink good health". ('Hail' is an older form of our modern word 'hale', "health; well-being" and is also closely connected with our word 'hail', "to salute, greet, welcome".) The toast seems to have come over with the Danes; by the twelfth century the Norman conquerors of Britain regarded it as one of the most characteristic sayings of the country. Later, the word came to be used also for the drink in which the toast was offered, especially the spiced ale or mulled wine that was drunk on Christmas Eve or Twelfth Night. In the western counties of Britain, the tradition grew up on Twelfth Night of toasting the good health of the apple trees that would bear the crop from which next year's cider would be made. Pieces of bread soaked in cider were placed in the crooks of trees, guns were fired to ward off evil spirits, and special songs were sung: Let every man take off his hat And shout out to th'old apple tree Old apple tree we wassail thee And hoping thou will bear. Ceremonies like these have almost entirely died out, though one or two are self-consciously kept alive in Somerset. 3. Q & A ------------------------------------------------------------------ [The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. Send your queries to . I can't guarantee to answer them, or even always to acknowledge your message, but if I can, a response will appear here and on our Web site.] ----------- Q. Can you shed some magical clarity on 'abracadabra' please? [Speranza Spiratos] A. Let me wave my wand ... It's ancient, first mentioned in a poem by Quintus Serenus Sammonicus in the second century AD. It is believed to have come into English via French from a Greek word 'abrasadabra' (the 'c' in English seems to be a confusion with the Greek 'c', which is pronounced as an 's'). It originated as a secret and mystical word with a Gnostic sect in Alexandria called the Basilidians (named after their founder Basilides of Egypt). It was probably based on 'Abraxas', the name of their supreme deity, but is sometimes said to have been constructed from the initial letters of three Hebrew Words: 'Ab', the father, 'Ben', the son, and 'Acadsch', the holy spirit. It was used as a charm, written in the shape of a triangle on a piece of parchment worn round the neck, and was believed to have the power to cure toothaches, malaria and other scourges. And 'Abraxas' itself was said to have magical powers of its own, as a word that represented the number of days in the year, 365. This was derived by adding up the numerical values of its seven Greek letters by a process called gematria. For this reason, it was often engraved on amulets and precious stones. ----------- Q. Any ideas on the origin of 'ringer', meaning a contestant or an athlete who is entered dishonestly into a competition? [Gord Forsythe] A. The origins are moderately obscure. It is US slang, dating from the latter years of last century, originally in connection with horse racing. A horse of better class than that permitted was entered fraudulently into a race, with bets being placed on it by those in the know. The word has spread its associations quite widely since, and can now refer to anything which has been tampered with in order to deceive, such as a motor vehicle. It may be connected with an old sense of 'ringer' for a counterfeit gold sovereign sold at fairs, because a good way to tell if such a coin was genuine was to drop it on a hard surface and listen for it to ring (a real one didn't). By the way, it seems not to be linked with the Australian sense of "something especially good" which comes from sheep-shearing. --------- Q. Please can you tell me what 'mullered' means and how old it is. I have only heard it in the last few months. Some people use it in engineering to mean damaged, but it seems to mean drunk too. [Richard Bolingbroke] A. It's a relatively recent British slang term, so far as I know, certainly only dating from the nineties. I've not come across it in the sense of "damaged", but only that of "intoxicated", either by drink or drugs. It has been said to be a variant form of the older word 'mulled', with the same meaning, which presumably derives from the sense of a drink that's has been made into a hot spicy concoction. --------- Q. I am trying to locate the origin of the word 'pretty' and its early usage. It apparently had a different meaning in early English that is unrelated to the way we currently use it. [Barbara Storm] A. That's correct. It is first recorded in Old English, when it had the sense of "trick, deceit". Then it disappears from the recorded language for some centuries, turning up again in the 1400s in a variety of meanings, none of them exactly equivalent to the Old English form. It could mean "clever, artful", or "something ingeniously or cleverly made". And it could be applied to a man, as "brave, gallant, warlike", which weakened down the years until it was used in the eighteenth century in the phrase "a pretty fellow", meaning a 'swell' or a 'fop'. But the word also existed in a weakened sense, very much like our modern 'nice' - pleasing or satisfactory in a vague sort of way. In this sense it was applied, in rather a condescending way, to young women as a reduced version of 'beautiful'. 4. Beyond words ------------------------------------------------------------------ Supposedly from a catalogue produced by the Swedish furnishing firm IKEA, quoted in the BBC radio programme, _News Quiz of the Year_: "It is advisory to be two people during construction". 5. In Brief: Food desert ------------------------------------------------------------------ The move of retailing away from the inner cities has left some parts of them without easy access to fresh foods at reasonable prices, 'food deserts' in fact. 6. Housekeeping ------------------------------------------------------------------ * To leave the list, send the following message to the list server address (the subject line will be ignored): SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS * To subscribe to the list, send the following message to the list server address from the e-mail address which is to receive mailings: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name * To change address, send a SIGNOFF message from your old address, followed by a SUBSCRIBE message from the new one. * To obtain information on other commands, send the text: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS * Other messages, including feedback and comments, should be sent to (general feedback, problems, screams of rage, etc) or (if you are asking a question). Do *not* send subscription requests to these addresses. ------------------------------------------------------------------ WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other online lists in whole or in part is permitted provided this notice is included. Reproduction in paid-for media or Web sites requires prior permission from the author. The World Wide Words Web site is at . From Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK Sat Jan 16 08:49:48 1999 From: Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK (Michael B Quinion) Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 08:49:48 +0000 Subject: World Wide Words -- 16 Jan 99 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 127 Saturday 16 January 1999 ================================================================== A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK Contents -------- 1. Notes and feedback. 2. Turns of Phrase: Phytoremediation. 3. Topical words: The e- prefix. 4. Weird Words: Furbelow. 5. Q & A. 6. Beyond words. 7. In Brief: Oxytherapy. 8. Housekeeping. 1. Notes and feedback ------------------------------------------------------------------ DEAD AS A DOORNAIL. Following up my piece before Christmas about this phrase, Donna Tarkowski wrote about a note by John Ciardi in his _Browser's Dictionary_. He suggests that a medieval door-nail was not a nail as we know it now, but something more like a rivet: an iron rod that was fixed between metal plates on each side of the door and hammered into place. This was said to be dead because it was immovably fixed in position. PHONETIC SYMBOLS. Time for one of my regular reminders that the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings employ a form of plain text transcription of standard IPA symbols. The key is too long to include in mailings, but is available online or by e-mail. See the Housekeeping section at the end for details. RINGER. My reference to an Australian sense of that word in a Q&A reply last week prompted several subscribers to write. The sense of "something supremely good" is actually an older English dialect meaning which is probably the source of the modern Australian term for the highest performing shearer in a shed. And the slang term meaning "to fraudulently substitute something inferior" seems to have had little or nothing to do with ringing coins to test their genuineness, as I suggested; it derives from a standard English verb 'to ring' based on the older 'to ring the changes', meaning to substitute something inferior. The Australian 'ring-in' with the same meaning also comes from the same source. And the phrase 'dead ringer', another form, meaning a perfect likeness, is just 'ringer' with the intensifier 'dead' added. IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME. Before Christmas, I wrote about this phrase in another Q&A piece, which prompted many subscribers to say how this translates into other languages. In German, the saying is "Das ist mir Spanisch" (that's all Spanish to me), though you may also hear "it's all Bohemian village names to me". The Spanish equivalent is "It's Chinese to me". It seems that the Poles do not quite say "It's all Turkish to me", as I suggested, but also prefer "It's Chinese to me", though Zdzislaw Szczerbinski from Gliwice in Poland says that they do have an expression "to be sitting as at a Turkish sermon" for listening to something that is incomprehensible. The Greeks like "It's Chinese to me", too, which is also used in Hebrew and in French (Ian Simpson wrote to say there was an advertising slogan some years ago encouraging people to learn English: "Pour vous, l'anglais c'est du chinois?", "Is English all Chinese to you?", though the French can also say that it's all Hebrew, as do the Finns). Turks also sometimes say that incomprehensible speech sounds Chinese, though they do on occasion equate it to Arabic, as do the Italians, though to them it can be Turkish as well. I haven't heard of a mainland Chinese expression, but Chris Heinrich tells me the equivalent in Taiwan is the quite wonderful "I'm a duck listening to thunder". The Danes sometimes say "It's all Greek (or all Russian) to me" but sometimes instead say "It's all Volapu"k to me", where Volapu"k is the name of a nineteenth century constructed language. You will not be surprised to hear that Esperantists use much the same expression: "io estas por mi volapukaj^o". PISCATORIAL POSTURINGS. Having been rude in the past about other people's typographical mistakes, it's only fair that I should quote a slightly surreal one of my own, which I managed to catch before it hit the public gaze: "We can't send a gunboat any more, but we can practise a form of Palmerstonian moral fish-shaking". 2. Turns of Phrase: Phytoremediation /'fVIt at UrImi:dIeIS(@)n/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Though this is a cumbersome word that hasn't yet reached any of my dictionaries, it has become a moderately common technical term in recent years because of its environmental implications. 'Phytoremediation' is just beginning practical application after years of research, and the word is now starting to turn up in non- specialist areas such as newspaper articles. It refers to a variety of techniques using plants and trees to clean up sites that are contaminated with heavy metals such as lead or cadmium, or with organic compounds like pesticides or solvents. In the case of the metals, species are grown which are known to concentrate the contaminants in their tissues; plants can then be harvested and burnt to release the pollutant, which can often be recycled. Organic pollutants are often treated with plants that take them up and destroy them as part of their normal metabolic processes. 'Phytoremediation' can be a lot cheaper than conventional methods, which usually involve removing the topsoil layer completely and replacing it with uncontaminated soil, but it is usually much slower. The word is a combination of the prefix 'phyto-', "plant" (from the Greek 'phutos') with 'remediation', the action of remedying something, especially environmental damage. With international conferences, coverage in scientific and trade journals, and industry and government-sponsored implementation, phytoremediation is a significant and growing niche in the environmental marketplace. [_Environmental Technology_, Sep. 1998] Because they also absorb and concentrate toxic metals, such as lead, these natural collectors could help to decontaminate industrial waste sites, a process known as phytoremediation. [_Economist_, Oct 1998] 3. Topical words: The e- prefix /i:/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ It seems that 'e-' is the new 'cyber-': a convenient combining form, tackable at will on to almost any other word to imply the white heat of the technological revolution. This came home to me during the holiday break, when I discovered that a current buzzword for online business is 'e-tail'. It's a less than elegant coinage, even though in Britain it lacks the special resonance of the American slang meaning of 'tail'. More evidence came from Liz Lavallee in the COPYEDITING list; she reported that her local newspaper, the _Potomac News_ in Woodbridge, Virginia, had the headline "1998: A year of truly e- mazing events". Another punning headline of a similar kind was one I found in a British computer magazine, which referred to the 'e- conomy'. And a look through my files reveals 63 other examples of new words formed by tacking 'e-' on the front of an existing word, including 'e-trade', 'e-asset', 'e-envoy', 'e-postmarked', 'e- junkmailer', and 'e-scoop'. Most of these are nonce formations, invented to satisfy a momentary need and not likely to be seen again, but some, such as 'e-cash', 'e-democracy', and 'e-text', have established what looks like a firm foothold in current usage. The daddy of these compounds is the comparatively venerable 'e- mail', first recorded as a noun in 1982 and as a verb in 1987. The 'e-' was at first just a convenient abbreviation for 'electronic'. As the word gained wider currency from the early nineties onwards, many newer users were uncertain whether the initial letter was an abbreviation or a prefix, and whether the word should be written with a hyphen or not. Hence the alternative forms 'E-mail', 'Email', and 'email'. It's an understandable confusion, and especially so as writing the word without a hyphen leads to something that looks foreign (specifically, the French word for enamel). The debate, or possibly the confusion, has not yet wholly worked itself through. But the growth in other words with the same prefix has gone a long way towards settling matters, as the form has become more common and it is more obvious that it can be stuck on the front of a whole range of words. It is also settling down to include the hyphen, perhaps because most of the words that would be formed without it look very odd. You can tell it's a live and fashionable prefix by the range of creations using it, few of them either clever or necessary. We don't need 'e-tail', for example, because we already have 'e- business' and 'e-commerce'. In October a health specialist was quoted in the _Los Angeles Times_ as saying "Everybody in this country knows the phrase 'e-commerce', but nobody knows the phrase 'e-health'". The first half of that is questionable: despite several years of circulation, I would imagine that a quite a large proportion of Americans neither knows the word 'e-commerce' nor cares what it means. But the second half seems true enough: it's another word for the application of telecommunications to medicine, rather more frequently called 'telemedicine' or 'telehealth'. So it's another unneeded coinage. We shall see many more before we're through with this fashion. 4. Weird Words: Furbelow /'f@:bIl at U/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ A gathered strip or pleated border; showy ornaments or trimmings. 'Furbelows' have nothing to do with 'fur'. The word came into English in the early eighteenth century from the French word 'falbala' for a flounce, decoration or trimming on a woman's petticoat or dress. Though similar words occur in other European languages - such as the German 'falbel' or Spanish 'farfala' - nobody seems to know where it comes from, though I have seen it suggested that it might originate in the Latin 'faluppa' for a valueless thing. Almost from its first appearance in English, its plural has had the sense of something ostentatious or showy. These days it hardly ever turns up at all, but when it does it usually forms part of the set phrase 'frills and furbelows'. 5. Q & A ------------------------------------------------------------------ [The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. Send your queries to . I can't guarantee to answer them, but if I can, I will reply privately first; a response will later appear here and on our Web site.] ----------- Q. Can you please tell me anything about the origin of the phrase "going to hell in a handbasket"? [Brian Walker] A. This is a weird one. It's a fairly common American expression, known for much of the twentieth century. But it's one about which almost no information exists, at least in the two dozen or so reference books I've consulted. William and Mary Morris, in their _Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins_, confess to the same difficulty. A 'handbasket' is just a basket to be carried in the hand (my thanks to the _Oxford English Dictionary_ for that gem of definition). The _Dictionary of American Regional English_ records 'to go to heaven in a handbasket' rather earlier than the alternative, which doesn't appear in print until the late 1940s. But _DARE_ quotes a related expression from 1714: "A committee brought in something about Piscataqua. Govr said he would give his head in a Handbasket as soon as he would pass it", which suggests that it, or phrases like it, have been around in the spoken language for a long time. We can only assume that the alliteration of the 'h's has had a lot to do with the success of the various phrases, and that perhaps 'handbasket' suggests something easily and speedily done. ------------- Q. Have you any idea where 'to wit' came from? [Kirstin Cruikshank] A. 'To wit' is now just a fixed expression. It's a shortened form of 'that is to wit' meaning "that is to know; that is to say; namely", from the English verb 'wit' "to know". This was a strong verb with past tense 'wot', as in "A garden is a lovesome thing, Got wot". In Old English it was spelt 'witan', and even further back it was linked with a Germanic verb meaning "to see". In the first of these senses, it's closely connected with the modern German verb 'wissen'; in the second it's the origin of our 'witness'. It developed further to refer to a person's understanding or judgement or mind (hence "keep your wits about you"). ------------- Q. In Issue 123 you explained the origin of 'chow' for military food. A related word puzzles me: 'mess'. [Robert L McBrayer] A. When it first appeared in English, 'mess' meant a portion of food. This came from the Old French 'mes', "a dish", which in modern French is spelt 'mets'. This comes ultimately from the Latin 'missus', strictly "to put, send" but which could also mean "a course at a meal" (that is, something put on the table). In the fifteenth century, 'mess' came to refer to a group of people, usually four in number, who sat together at a meal and were served from the same dishes. This soon evolved into a name of any group that ate together. For example, in warships, a group of a dozen or so men would usually sit together at one table and were served from the same dishes; this was one 'mess', and those who habitually sat together were 'messmates'; the room was often called a 'mess-room', a space that contained a set of 'messes'. By an obvious process, 'mess-room' was itself later contracted to 'mess', so confusing the place where one ate with the groups of people one ate with. At one time 'mess' could also refer to any cooked dish, especially one which was liquid or pulpy; this is best remembered in the 'mess of pottage' for which Esau sold his birthright in the Bible (though the phrase doesn't appear in the Authorised Version of 1611). The sense of a confused jumble or a dirty or untidy state, which is the first association we have for 'mess' nowadays, evolved from this meaning and seems to have been a disparaging reference to such sloppy food. It is actually a very recent usage, dating only from the nineteenth century (it's first recorded in _Webster's Dictionary_ in 1828). 6. Beyond words ------------------------------------------------------------------ In a report in last Monday's _Guardian_ about a proposal by the Tesco supermarket chain to open their Hastings store for a special nude shopping evening: "Naturists would undress inside the store and *redress* before they left". Good heavens, what would they have been doing that they needed to offer redress? 7. In Brief: Oxytherapy ------------------------------------------------------------------ A weird-sounding technique in which sufferers from cancer, AIDS or multiple sclerosis are treated with ozone in the belief that it provides relief. A common method is 'autohaemotology', also called 'autohaemotherapy', in which blood is removed from the body, ozonated and put back. 8. Housekeeping ------------------------------------------------------------------ * To leave the list, send the following message to the list server address (the subject line will be ignored): SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS * To subscribe to the list, send the following message to the list server address from the e-mail address which is to receive mailings: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name * To change address, send a SIGNOFF message from your old address, followed by a SUBSCRIBE message from the new one. * To obtain information on other commands, send the text: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS * Other messages, including feedback and comments, should be sent to (general feedback, problems, screams of rage, etc) or (if you are asking a question). Please do *not* send subscription requests to these addresses. * A key to the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings is available online at . A plain text version may be obtained any time by sending a blank e-mail message to our autoresponder at . (Note that any text in your message will be ignored.) ------------------------------------------------------------------ WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other online lists in whole or in part is permitted provided this notice is included. Reproduction in paid-for media or Web sites requires prior permission from the author. The World Wide Words Web site is at . From Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK Sat Jan 16 10:48:44 1999 From: Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK (Michael B Quinion) Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 10:48:44 +0000 Subject: World Wide Words -- 16 Jan 99 (correction) Message-ID: > A key to the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings is > available online at . Whoops. No, it isn't. The correct address is: Sorry for any confusion. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael B Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK World Wide Words: From Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK Sat Jan 23 09:15:57 1999 From: Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK (Michael B Quinion) Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 09:15:57 +0000 Subject: World Wide Words -- 23 Jan 99 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 128 Saturday 23 January 1999 ================================================================== A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK Contents -------- 1. Notes and feedback. 2. Turns of Phrase: Business theatre. 3. Topical words: Bluestocking. 4. In Brief: Paramotoring. 5. Weird Words: Octothorpe. 6. Q&A: Groovy; In cold blood; Shiver my timbers. 7. Beyond Words. 8. Housekeeping. 1. Notes and feedback ------------------------------------------------------------------ WOT ROT. As several subscribers gently pointed out after my Q&A item on "to wit" last week, 'wot' is the *present* tense of a variant form of the verb, not the past tense. And the quotation from T E Brown should have read: "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot", not "Got wot". Apologies. BUSY, BUSY. In the past week World Wide Words has been mentioned in the LINGUIST list, the Scout Report, Net-Happenings and several other online newsletters, and was chosen as a Web pick by _USA Today_. As a result, World Wide Words has 750+ more subscribers today than it had this time last week. Partly as a result, the volume of e-mail has gone up substantially and I am way behind with replies to enquiries. 2. Turns of Phrase: Business theatre /'bIznIs ,TI at t@/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ This seems to be a common term of trade in the exhibitions field in North America, dating from the late eighties at least, which has also been spotted in Britain. It seems to be a jargon term not well known outside that business. The need to make an effective impact at business presentations to dealers and customers has led to the techniques of the more high-tech end of modern theatre being applied to sales pitches and promotion. Take a line through the average new car launch: complex stage sets, vast lighting grids, high-powered sound systems, actors, dancers, the whole theatrical experience applied to the business of persuasion. So it's not hard to see how the phrase 'business theatre' (less commonly 'business theater') came to be applied to this approach, even though much of the conference organisation, exhibition creation, and event management that's lumped under the name is considerably more modest than these relatively infrequent set- pieces. It's not like a business theatre show, where you're going into a ballroom, or a stadium show, where you're on a playing field. It was a chance to build conventional scenery, and showcase it. [_Theatre Crafts International_, Apr. 1995] As creative director of Spectrum, a company which specialises in 'business theatre', Elliott has vast experience of designing exhibitions, conferences and live events all over the world ... [_Independent on Sunday_, Sept. 1998] 3. Topical words: Bluestocking /'blu:stQkIN/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Some eyebrows have been raised recently through Amanda Foreman's decision to pose naked for the February issue of _Tatler_ magazine, albeit semi-modestly behind a large pile of her new book. She has just spent five years, as she said in the magazine, "cooped up in libraries" writing the biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and decided "why not have some fun now?". Georgiana was one of the more flamboyant women of the eighteenth century, and researching her seems to have affected Ms Foreman deeply. In a strained bit of wordplay, Cayte Williams commented in the _Independent on Sunday_ last weekend: "It comes to something when Britain's top bluestockings start whipping off their suspender belts". Leaving aside the shaky fashion notes, 'bluestocking' is getting to be rather an old-fashioned pejorative description for an intellectual woman. What is especially odd about the term, though, is that the first bluestocking was a man. He was a learned botanist, translator, publisher and minor poet of the eighteenth-century named Benjamin Stillingfleet. He wrote an early opera and also published the first English editions of works by the Swedish botanist Linnaeus. The story starts in the early 1750s, when a group of independently minded women decided to break away from the stultifying sessions of card playing and idle chatter which was all that tradition allowed them. They began to hold literary evenings, in direct imitation of the established salons of Paris, to which well-known men of letters would be invited as guests to encourage discussion. One of the leading lights of this group was Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, a powerful and rich figure in London society (she was the cousin of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who brought smallpox inoculation back from Turkey). Literary and theatrical luminaries like Samuel Johnson, David Garrick and Lord Lyttleton attended what she and her friends referred to as conversations, but which Horace Walpole, a frequent guest, called petticoteries. Another regular visitor was Joshua (later Sir Joshua) Reynolds, who, to complete the circle of associations, painted a portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in 1786. Mr Stillingfleet was asked to attend by Mrs Vesey, one of the group. He felt he had to decline, as he was too poor to afford the formal dress then required for evening events, which included black silk stockings. According to Fanny Burney, who told the story later, Mrs Vesey told him to come as he was, in his informal day clothes. Which he did, wearing his blue worsted stockings, and started a trend. Admiral Edward Boscawen, who was known to his friends as "Old Dreadnought" or "Wry-necked Dick", was the husband of one of the more enthusiastic attendees. He was very rude about what he saw as his wife's literary pretensions and is said to have derisively described the sessions as being meetings of the Blue-Stocking Society. And so those who attended were sometimes called Blue Stockingers, later abbreviated to blue stockings. (Another name was the French form 'Bas Bleu', which Hanna More, another member, used in her poem, _The Bas Bleu, or Conversation_, which gives a lot of information about the group.) A slightly different version of the story and of the influence of Benjamin Stillingfleet is told by James Boswell in his _Life of Johnson_: "Such was the excellence of his conversation, that his absence was felt as so great a loss, that it used to be said 'We can do nothing without the blue stockings,' and thus by degrees the title was established". With such a wealth of documentary evidence, you might think that the origin of the word was established, as they might have said at the time, beyond a peradventure (though Dr Johnson was dismissive of that word, no doubt repeating at one of those evenings what he said in his dictionary: "It is sometimes used as a noun, but not gracefully nor properly"). But some works say firmly that the tradition goes back to the 1400s, to the blue stockings worn by the members of a society in Venice called 'Della Calza' ("of the stockings"), which later spread to Paris, from which the society ladies of London were supposed to have taken it up. I've not got to the bottom of this one and it may be a false lead (can a blue stocking be a red herring?), but even if Hanna More, James Boswell, and Fanny Burney were all recounting a kind of early urban myth about the circumstances, there's no doubt that the English word was coined as a result of those conversational evenings in the mid eighteenth century. 4. In Brief: Paramotoring ------------------------------------------------------------------ This is a newish aerial sport, which was first developed in France and Germany in the late eighties but is now rapidly spreading world-wide. You fly wearing a paraglider canopy that's combined with a motorised pusher fan. It needs no airfield, as you can take off and land almost anywhere. When you're done, you can fold it up and put it in the back of your car. 5. Weird Words: Octothorpe /'Qkt at UTO:Rp/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Another name for the telephone handset symbol #. This word is just beginning to appear in the dictionaries, but still seems mostly to be jargon of the North American telephone business. But it is one of the few such words with a documented history, thanks to a note that Ralph Carlsen of Bell Laboratories wrote just before his retirement in 1995. He records that Bell Labs introduced two special keys on the then new touch-tone telephone handsets in the early 1960s, both of them now standard. One of these is the symbol '*', usually known formally as the asterisk but which Bell Labs reasonably decided to call the 'star' key. The other was the '#' symbol. This was more of a problem, as there are lots of names for it. In the US it is often called the pound key, because it is used to mark numbers related to weight, or for similar reasons the number sign, which is also one of its internationally agreed names. Elsewhere it is commonly called hash, but it also has lots of other names, such as tictactoe and cross-hatch. In Britain, the Post Office, then responsible for telecommunications, added to the plethora of names by deciding to call it 'square', though that, too, has become an official name internationally. The story as told by Ralph Carlsen is that a Bell Labs engineer, Don Macpherson, went to instruct their first client, the Mayo Clinic, in the use of the new system. He felt the need for a fresh and unambiguous name for the # symbol. His reasoning that led to the new word was roughly that it had eight points, so ought to start with 'octo-'. He was at that time active in a group that was trying to get the Olympic medals of the athlete Jim Thorpe returned from Sweden, so he decided to add 'thorpe' to the end. 'Thorpe' is, of course, also the Old Norse word for a hamlet, village or farm, which is common in British place names. Another story of its origin is that the sign was thought to look like a group of eight fields surrounding a village. The existence of this other story means that dictionaries usually say the word is of disputed origin, though Mr Carlsen's note is so circumstantial and full of detail that it is convincing. Over the past three decades, 'octothorpe' has gradually crept into various official publications and manuals in the North American telecommunications system. But even so it's hardly a common word. ================================================================== IF YOU ENJOY READING WORLD WIDE WORDS ... you probably know other people who would like to read it too. Do forward this mailing to them and suggest they subscribe. ================================================================== 6. Q & A ------------------------------------------------------------------ [The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. Send your queries to . I can't guarantee to answer them, but if I can, I will reply privately first; a response will later appear here and on our Web site.] ------------------- Q. I was a product of the 60's when we used the word 'groovy' constantly. I thought that my generation invented the word. I was surprised to discover recently while watching the original movie trailer for _Miracle on 34th Street_, which was produced in 1948, that the word 'groovey' was used in one of the big graphic headlines which scrolled over the video. I'm sure that you will have an amusing and edifying explanation of how old this expression is, and how it came to be? [Roberta E Richardson] A. I'll just give you the facts, ma'am ... it's even older than 1948, I have to tell you. The first citation in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ is dated 1937. It comes from jazz, when to be 'groovey' (the original spelling) was a shortened form of "in the groove", meaning that somebody was playing brilliantly or easily, perhaps like a gramophone needle slipping along a groove, or making music as perfectly as a needle does in the grooves of a record. Tom Dalzell, in his _Flappers 2 Rappers_, quotes from the _San Francisco Chronicle_ of 13 March 1938, in which Herb Caen is in turn quoting Bing Crosby: "In the groove means just right, down the middle, riding lightly and politely, terrific, easy on the ears". Mr Dalzell suggests that 'in the groove' was not replaced by 'groovey' until about 1941, and that the latter only really caught on from about 1944-5 for a period of less than ten years. So the mid-sixties usage, in its slightly different spelling, was most definitely its second time around. Now, of course, it can only be used as a deliberate anachronism or by the terminally out- of-touch. ------------------- Q. What is the origin of 'in cold blood'? [Andy Cilley]. A. Think of the effect of doing something with emotion, passion or great exertion. The blood flows to your face and you feel hot. At a time before our understanding of the human body was as good as it is now, it was thought that the blood actually grew hot at such times. We still have a set of phrases in the language that reflect this, such as 'his blood boiled' or 'in the heat of passion', which contrast with others that describe a person whose blood is cold or cool, so detached or uninvolved. So, an action that was carried out without excitement or emotional involvement was said to have been taken when the blood was cold (the exact equivalent of the French 'sang froid'). The phrase is now usually taken to refer to some act that might look like an act of passion but which was actually done with cool deliberation; it's first recorded in Joseph Addison's _Spectator_ in 1711. ------------------- Q. Please could you tell me where the phrase 'shiver my timbers' originated? [Tad Spencer] A. This is one of those supposedly nautical expressions that seem to be better known through a couple of appearances in fiction than by any actual sailors' usage. It's an exclamation that may allude to a ship striking some rock or other obstacle so hard that her timbers shiver, or shake, so implying some calamity has occurred. It is first recorded as being used by Captain Frederick Marryat in _Jacob Faithful_ in 1835: "I won't thrash you Tom. Shiver my timbers if I do". It has gained a firm place in the language because almost fifty years later Robert Louis Stevenson found it to be just the kind of old-salt saying that fitted the character of Long John Silver in _Treasure Island_: "Cross me, and you'll go where many a good man's gone before you ... some to the yard-arm, shiver my timbers, and some by the board, and all to feed the fishes". Since then, it's mainly been the preserve of second-rate seafaring yarns. 7. Beyond Words ------------------------------------------------------------------ The newsletter _Tasty Bits from the Technology Front_ this week featured the phrase "to eat our own dog-food", which is a bit of computer-industry jargon meaning that software developers ought to actually use the products they develop, preferably before they start to sell them. _TBTF_ says the phrase has now been verbed, with a Microsoft employee reported as saying "we have to dog-food this architecture before we release it". 8. Housekeeping ------------------------------------------------------------------ * To leave the list, send the following message to the list server address (the subject line will be ignored): SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS * To subscribe to the list, send the following message to the list server address from the e-mail address which is to receive mailings: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name * To change address, send a SIGNOFF message from your old address, followed by a SUBSCRIBE message from the new one. * To obtain information on other commands, send the text: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS * Other messages, including feedback and comments, should be sent to (general feedback, problems, screams of rage, etc) or (if you are asking a question). Please do *not* send subscription requests to these addresses. * A key to the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings is available at . A plain text version may be obtained any time by sending a blank e-mail message to our autoresponder at . (Note that any text in your message will be ignored.) ------------------------------------------------------------------ WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other online lists in whole or in part is permitted provided this notice is included. Reproduction in paid-for media or Web sites requires prior permission from the author. The World Wide Words Web site is at . From Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK Sat Jan 30 09:05:07 1999 From: Michael at QUINION.DEMON.CO.UK (Michael B Quinion) Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 09:05:07 +0000 Subject: World Wide Words -- 30 Jan 99 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 129 Saturday 30 January 1999 ================================================================== A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK Contents -------- 1. Notes and feedback. 2. Article: Words of 1998. 3. Topical words: Blue moon. 4. In Brief: Judas biography. 5. Weird Words: Deasil. 6. Q & A. 7. Beyond Words. 8. Housekeeping. 1. Notes and feedback ------------------------------------------------------------------ WORD BLOAT. I keep trying to limit these mailings to four pages of text, because I know some subscribers' e-mail systems can't cope with longer messages. But, somehow, there's always so much to fit in that's topical. And there's a huge pile of answers to your questions still waiting to be fed through. The answer is probably a special mailing or two at some point to clear the backlog. Your views will be welcome, as always. E-LAS: Following my piece two weeks ago about the 'e-' prefix (see below), I found 'elance' in a computer journal this week, meaning an "electronic freelance" or computer contractor. This is getting very silly ... ERROR: NO ERROR. The Corrections and Clarifications column in the _Guardian_ each day is regarded by many of us as the best bit of the newspaper, because of its clear-eyed and witty rectification of errors and omissions. In Tuesday's edition, the following note appeared: "The absence of corrections yesterday was due to a technical hitch rather than any sudden onset of accuracy". 2. Article: Words of 1998 ------------------------------------------------------------------ We've had the season of goodwill, of first-footing and wassailing, and we're now well into the season of awards for the best of 1998. HarperCollins in Britain has just announced the result of its competition to choose the word that best represents the year. This follows the similar award by the American Dialect Society on 7 January, and a set of words of the year from Oxford Dictionaries that came out close to Christmas. HarperCollins gave the prize to 'millennium bug', which supports my suspicion that British word usage is running about a year behind that of North America (you may recall it was the choice of the American Dialect Society for 1997, and it was getting a bit shop-worn even then). This year, the ADS has chosen the 'e-' prefix, which I wrote about two weeks ago. It was also voted Most Useful and Most Likely to Succeed, awards I am less sure about. Oxford doesn't select one word, but instead produces a list of some of those which have come to prominence; HarperCollins appends a similar list to its winner and runners-up. ADS also provides a list of runners-up, and the three lists together give a picture of what specialists presumably think have been the most high-profile of the year. The Oxford list is at the same time the longest and the one with fewest surprises. It makes clear it's a selection of words which were spotted by their New Words team in 1998, not necessarily words which are new. If you've been a subscriber to World Wide Words for a while, you will have read about many of them already. (Quite a number of them have come from me, it seems, directly or indirectly; I did wonder why my Web site logs showed such interest from staff at Oxford near the end of last year! And, don't tell Oxford Dictionaries, but I wrote about several of them in 1997.) So, no need to dwell overlong on 'analysis paralysis', 'portal site', 'biopiracy', 'black-water rafting', 'exoplanet', 'global distillation', 'exformation', 'gorge-walking', 'polyamory', 'trickle-up trend', or 'waitress mom'. Some others from the Oxford list: 'call centre' (designed to handle large numbers of phone calls), 'domophobia' (hostility towards the Millennium Dome at Greenwich), 'ecological footprint' (impact or damage to the environment caused by human activity), 'euro-wasp' (a large European species becoming resident in Britain), 'Furby' (that toy), 'horse-whispering' (from that film), 'rage' (in all its variations). 'superweed' (one that's resistant to herbicides), and, perhaps inevitably, but also rather sadly, 'Monicagate', 'fornigate' and 'zippergate'. The Oxford list is more international in scope than either of the others, and so includes some words I have a feeling I should have featured: 'Hansonism', the political policies of Pauline Hanson, leader of the Australian _One Nation_ party (and the related term 'Asianisation'); 'hoarding', which Oxford says has taken on a new meaning in Indian English that specifically refers to the illegal stockpiling of staple foods made scarce in 1998 by failed harvests (they also give 'ration shop' for an official open-market outlet in India for the sale of essential commodities); and two terms from South Africa: 'gravy', a shortening of 'gravy train', widely used in 1998, Oxford says, to refer to government corruption, and 'muti murder', a spate of killings in Johannesburg that were related to 'muti' (traditional African magic). The HarperCollins appended list is described as "words coined in 1998", a startling assertion, as it includes 'DVD', 'heroin chic', 'middle youth', 'mouse potato', 'grey market', 'pharming', and 'Y2K'. These are newish terms, but I have citations for 'heroin chic' from 1997, 'Y2K' from 1996, 'DVD' and 'mouse potato' from 1994, and 'grey market' from 1993, and I'm sure older examples could be found for all of them. They are words which achieved a certain prominence in Britain in 1998, but they were most certainly not coined in that year. And these are the HarperCollins runners-up in its competition, in descending order based on the votes of readers, I assume mainly from Britain: 'Viagra', 'digital television', 'Millennium Dome', 'Zippergate', 'Monicagate', 'girl power', 'Furby', 'Cool Britannia' and 'docusoap'. Few surprises there, except that voters seem less cynical about the Dome than the press, and that they have been heavily influenced by a certain American scandal. So has the American Dialect Society, whose runners-up to 'e-' included, with what I suspect is a certain tongue-in-cheekness, 'sexual relations' and 'is' (though it surely depends what they meant by that word). Also included were 'Viagra' and the various forms in 'rage'. It's in the other ADS sections that choices reveal much about the lexical state of America (and perhaps what HarperCollins readers will be voting on in early 2000). In the Most Useful category: 'senior moment' (a momentary lapse of memory due to age) got most votes, followed by 'multislacking' (playing at the computer when one should be working) and 'open source' (the source code of software programs available to all). In the Most Unnecessary category, most votes went to the entire Monica Lewinsky word family. Under the Least Likely to Succeed heading, votes were cast for, among others, 'explornography' (tourism in exotic and dangerous places), although 'compfusion' (a confusion over computers) came out on top. One other category: Most Original, won by 'multislacking', followed by 'angst bunny' (a young woman with black clothes and lots of body piercing); 'Preslyterianism' (a cult of Elvis Presley in the South), and 'bililoquy' (a conversation with one's alter ego). What these various lists confirm, as it if needed to be confirmed, is that British English is heavily influenced by American events and culture. 3. Topical words: Blue moon /'blu: mu:n/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Tomorrow (31 January 1999), newspapers have been telling us, we shall see the second blue moon of January, at least we will in Europe and North America. This stopped me dead the first time I saw the phrase a few years ago, as 'blue moon' to me only has the meaning of some event that happens extremely rarely, if ever, so matching a favourite expression of my father's: "never in a month of Sundays". There's nothing in any of my dictionaries or books on phrase origins about two full moons in one month. But the expression has become common in that sense in recent years in north America, to the extent of almost usurping the older meaning. The idea of a 'blue moon' has been traced back to 1528, to a sceptical little item entitled _Rede Me and Be Not Wrothe_: "Yf they say the mone is belewe, we must believe that it is true". This implies the expression had a meaning of something that was absurd, very like another moon-related proverb first recorded in the following year "They woulde make men beleue ... that ye Moone is made of grene chese". Because it was absurd, saying that something happened only 'once in a blue moon' was the same as saying it never happened. And this was what the phrase meant for several hundred years. Charles Earle Funk suggested in 1948 that the two expressions are connected, the green cheese being the freshly pressed round cheese that looks white like the full moon, and the blue moon the one just before the new moon begins to show, when rarely the Moon's surface, bathed only in faint Earthlight, may look blue. This is eminently plausible for 'green cheese', indeed it's the usual explanation of how the saying came about, but his explanation doesn't fit the fact that 'blue moon' then meant "never". The version that most of have grown up with has a sense that has shifted, like the opinion of the captain of the 'Pinafore', from "never" to "hardly ever". This sense was first recorded only in 1821, but is probably eighteenth-century. Various writers have guessed that the change in meaning came about because people realised that the moon can indeed look blue, because of dust in the upper atmosphere, say from forest fires or volcanic eruptions. As with Mr Funk's thesis, that hardly sounds convincing, but as so often there's no evidence either way. So how did 'blue moon' get this new meaning? I'm indebted to Philip Hiscock of the Folklore and Language Archive at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, who has done a lot of research on this phrase, the results of which are presented in the March 1999 issue of _Sky and Telescope Magazine_. He managed to trace it back to an edition of _Trivial Pursuit_ published in 1986; its compilers got it from _The Kids' World Almanac of Records and Facts_ of the year before, which probably got it from a radio programme in 1979 that quoted a reference to a quiz in _Sky and Telescope_ in July 1943, which attributed it to the 1937 _Maine Farmers' Almanac_. And there the trail goes cold. (And, in any case, the _Farmers' Almanac_ article seems to suggest that the term refers to a second full moon within one zodiacal sign, not one calendar month.) What seems clear from reports is that this "two full moons in one month" meaning of 'blue moon' only started to achieve much circulation from about 1988, no doubt principally as a result of the _Trivial Pursuit_ reference. So what we have is a truly modern piece of language folklore, and a fine example of the way that a supposed fact can become widely reported and accepted within a very short space of time. It shows also how an expression can lurk in the language until something causes it to bursts upon the public stage. Astronomers say that this type of 'blue moon' is actually a lot more frequent than the older sort. There is a month with two full moons in it rather more than once every three years. That's because, though 'moon' and 'month' are intimately related words, our months are all, apart from February, a little longer than the interval between two full moons. Much more rare is to have two blue-moon months in one year. This happens this year, as both January and March have two, whilst poor old February has no full moon at all. The next years in which this happens are 2018 and 2037. Now that's what I really call 'once in a blue moon'. [You can find Philip Hiscock's article from _Sky & Telescope_ at . His 1993 piece in the _Griffiths Observer_ is at .] 4. In Brief: Judas biography ------------------------------------------------------------------ Many biographies have appeared in the past few years that presume to tell the truth about some relative or friend. A current British example is the intimate history of Jacqueline du Pre', which has now become the film _Hilary and Jackie_. In the current issue of the _New York Review of Books_, John Updike wrote: "Recent years in America have given rise to what we might call the Judas biography, in which a former spouse or friend of a living writer confides to print an intimate portrait less flattering than might be expected". Another name is 'spiterature'. 5. Weird Words: Deasil /dEs(@)l/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Righthandwards; in the direction of the sun; clockwise. This is a word which now mainly conjures up associations with witchcraft, as it's the much rarer converse of 'widdershins'. Trying to define it immediately runs into the fundamental problem of how to explain the difference between left and right (clockwise is fine, unless you're a clock, or one of those jokers who has one that runs backwards; sunwise works in the northern hemisphere only; just try explaining to an alien visitor which is right and which left, using words only). In immediate origin 'deasil' is a Gaelic word that derives from the same root as the Latin 'dexter', "right, right-handed" which even then could mean "skilful" (hence our word 'dextrous'). In witchcraft, including modern Wicca, to move deasil is to invoke positive qualities. As an example of its associations, here is Sir Walter Scott, in _Chronicles of the Canongate_: "In the meantime, she traced around him, with wavering steps, the propitiation, which some have thought has been derived from the Druidical mythology. It consists, as is well known, in the person who makes the DEASIL walking three times round the person who is the object of the ceremony, taking care to move according to the course of the sun". 6. Q & A ------------------------------------------------------------------ [The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. I'm inundated with questions at the moment; hold off sending me any more until I've cleared the backlog!] ----------- Q. Can you shed light on the meaning or origin of 'it's a dog's life'? Those of us over 50 seem to use to suggest the need to accept the existential fact that things are hard; but in the under-50 set, the idea is that dogs have it easy, and so 'it's a dog's life' equates to "how cushy!". [Stephen P Goldman] A. It certainly seems that the phrase has become more ambiguous than it once was, though I've not come across many examples myself of its use as a description of a pampered existence. Most of our expressions that include 'dog' are old enough to be based in times when dogs were not cosseted, but were kept as watchdogs or hunting animals, not as pets. They often weren't allowed in the house, but were kept in kennels, fed scraps, worked hard, and often died young. So 'going to the dogs', 'dog tired', 'to die like a dog', 'dog's dinner', 'dogsbody', 'dog eat dog', and 'a dog's life' all refer to a state of affairs best avoided. Specifically, 'a dog's life' is first recorded in the sixteenth century and seems to have remained in the language with the sense of "a life of misery, or of miserable subserviency" ever since. I'd hate to lose it myself. ------------- Q. I'm trying to find out the origin of the phrase, 'on the QT', meaning off the record or in confidence. [Mike Willis] A. According to Robert Hendrickson, in _The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins_, the first reference is from a British ballad of 1870, which contained the line "Whatever I tell you is on the QT". It seems to have been just an abbreviated spelling, using the first and last letters of the word 'quiet', the mild obfuscation also suggesting a meaning for the expression. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ has a first sighting from 1884: "It will be possible to have one spree on the strict q.t.". Mr Hendrickson points out that it also occurs in a famous London ditty of 1891, sung by Lottie Collins, which also introduced the famous chorus line "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay": A sweet Tuxedo girl you see, Queen of swell society, Fond of fun as fun can be, When it's on the strict Q.T. ---------- Q. How did 'spoil' (go bad or rotten) come to mean to overindulge someone (as in 'spoil a child' or 'the kid is spoiled rotten')? [Richard Nixon] A. Both meanings of the word are derived from an older sense of the word in English, which was to strip the armour and weapons from a slain enemy. (This came via French from the Latin word 'spolium', which originally meant the skin that had been taken from a dead animal. So the first meaning in English was already a figurative one.) From here, the word came to mean the items so removed, booty or plunder, hence our word 'spoils', as in phrases such as "the spoils of war". The verb could also be used at one time for seizing goods by violence, to "deprive, despoil, pillage, or rob" as the _Oxford English Dictionary_ graphically puts it. It then took on a less literal meaning of depriving someone of some quality or distinction, and later still to impair or damage something to the extent that it became useless. By the end of the seventeenth century, this had reached the point where 'to spoil' could mean "to injure in respect of character, especially by over- indulgence or undue lenience" and "to become unfit for use; to deteriorate; to go bad, decay", the two senses you give. ----------- Q. What is the origin and true meaning of 'knock on wood' or 'touch wood'? [Mike Gast] A. To 'touch wood' is a superstition action to ward off any evil consequences, say of untimely boasting; it can also be a charm to bring good luck. The origin is quite unknown, though some writers have pointed to pre-Christian rituals involving the spirits of sacred trees such as the oak, ash, holly or hawthorn. There is, I'm told, an old Irish belief that you should knock on wood to let the little people know that you are thanking them for a bit of good luck. Others have sought a meaning in which the wood symbolises the timber of the cross, but this may be a Christianisation of an older ritual. The children's game of tag in which you are only safe so long as you are touching wood is not likely to be connected (an indicator of this may be that at times iron was substituted for wood if there was no wood handy). The phrase itself seems to be modern, as the oldest citation for 'touch wood' in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ dates only from 1908; my searches haven't turned up anything earlier. (Incidentally, that work doesn't have a single example of 'knock on wood', which is the American version of the British 'touch wood'.) 7. Beyond Words ------------------------------------------------------------------ The US magazine _Philosophy and Literature_ has announced the winners of its 1998 Bad Writing Contest, which "celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years" though "deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread". First prize was won by Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of Calif- ornia at Berkeley, in a 1997 article in the _Diacritics_ journal entitled _Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time_: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power". More details can be found through a link at . 8. Housekeeping ------------------------------------------------------------------ * To leave the list, send the following message to the list server address (the subject line will be ignored): SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS * To subscribe to the list, send the following message to the list server address from the e-mail address which is to receive mailings: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name * To change address, send a SIGNOFF message from your old address, followed by a SUBSCRIBE message from the new one. * To obtain information on other commands, send the text: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS * Other messages, including feedback and comments, should be sent to (general feedback, problems, screams of rage, etc) or (if you are asking a question). Please do *not* send subscription requests to these addresses. * A key to the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings is available at . A plain text version may be obtained any time by sending a blank e-mail message to our autoresponder at . (Note that any text in your message will be ignored.) ------------------------------------------------------------------ WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other online lists in whole or in part is permitted provided this notice is included. Reproduction in paid-for media or Web sites requires prior permission from the author. The World Wide Words Web site is at .