World Wide Words -- 05 Jun 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 143           Saturday 5 June 1999
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>From Michael Quinion                        Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Sent every Saturday to more than 5,000 subscribers in 93 countries
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/>   E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
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Contents
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1. Notes and feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Commentariat.
3. Article: Signs for sums.
4. Q & A: Bobby.
5. Beyond Words.
6. Administration.


1. Notes and feedback
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THE WANDERER RETURNS. It's good to be back after my period away
investigating the customs and idiosyncrasies of Virginia and the
Carolinas. Thanks for all your messages. It will take a day or few
more to catch up with the backlog!

LIST SERVER. My return coincided with the Words list server having
to be taken off line for a security upgrade following a hacker
attack. Subscription management has been impossible for the past
week, but should now be back to normal.


2. Turns of Phrase: Commentariat
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This is a jokey journalists' term for that group of people whose
job is to comment on the news. It seems to have first appeared in
the US in the early nineties but only to have become fashionable
in about 1997. It's found often enough to suggest that it may be
here to stay. It remains closely associated with political and
media circles in the USA; when it appears in other countries, it
is mostly in reference to American political affairs. William F
Buckley, writing in the _Sacramento Bee_ in October 1997, defined
it as "the name given to talk-show hosts who opine on the Sunday
shows", but its scope is wider than that, encompassing all those
experts, pundits and pollsters who analyse political events and
discuss their implications. The word is a punning clipped blend of
'commentator' with the suffix '-ariat', a moderately rare ending
derived from French which denotes an office or function (it's
equivalent to one sense of the English suffix '-ate', as in
'directorate' or 'professorate'). The immediate inspiration was
probably one or other of 'proletariat' or 'commissariat' (in the
old Russian governmental sense rather than the military food-
providing one), with a nod towards 'secretariat'.

Even before the recent reports, the commentariat had embraced a
new national parlor game: devising ways for Clinton to extricate
himself from Grand Jury Jeopardy.
                                    [_Washington Post_, Aug. 1998]

Although Lott was eventually reined in (by Jesse Helms, of all
people), that word "timing" became the mantra of the right-leaning
half of the 'commentariat'.
               [_Pilot-Independent_ (Walker, Minnesota), May 1999]


3. Article: Signs for sums
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We're so familiar with the standard set of symbols for arithmetic
operations that appears on every calculator keyboard that we
hardly ever stop to think who created them, or when.

Considering that people have been keeping records on everything
from wax and clay tablets to animal skins and tree bark for at
least 4000 years, it's a bit of a shock to discover that our
symbols for operations like addition and subtraction are less than
500 years old. But it's only in such comparatively recent times
that most calculations have been done by making marks on paper.

An older method was to use a counting frame such as the abacus.
There was a long-running controversy in medieval times about which
was faster, the counting frame or pencil and paper, and
competitions were held between the two systems to try to decide
the matter. There were even names for the disputing groups,
'abacists' and 'algorists'. The second word is closely related to
our modern 'algorithm' for a step-by-step recipe for carrying out
some calculation. Even now, the abacus is far from defunct in many
societies, because in practised hands it's very quick for simple
calculations - and unlike the calculator, it doesn't need
batteries.

For those who did calculations using symbols, it was common in
medieval times to indicate 'plus' and 'minus' by the letters 'p'
and 'm', each with a bar or a wavy line over the top, a system
that grew up in Italy. Our modern symbols for these operations
didn't appear until the late fifteenth century. They first turn up
in a textbook on commercial arithmetic which Johann Widman
published at Leipzig in 1489 under the title _Rechnung uff allen
Kauffmanschafften_. But he didn't use them as we do now, but as
symbols for surpluses or deficits in business problems (though
some historians still argue about what he did mean by them).
There's some evidence they were around in the commercial world
before Widman adopted them, for example as a quick way for
merchants to mark barrels to indicate whether they were full or
not. It seems that the plus sign started out as an abbreviated
scribes' way of writing the Latin 'et', "and", but nobody seems to
know for sure where the minus sign came from. They were gradually
adopted as standard symbols throughout Europe in the century after
Widman's book came out.

The person most responsible for introducing them to England, and
so eventually to the English-speaking world, was Robert Recorde, a
mathematician of the sixteenth century, perhaps the only one of
any stature in a century that saw very few English workers of note
in the field. His mathematical works were written in English. At
the time this was still extremely uncommon (more than a hundred
years later, Newton automatically wrote his books in Latin, as did
many scholars even after him). As a result, Recorde's books stayed
in print as standard texts for at least a century after his death,
and they were correspondingly influential. His most famous work
was the _Whetstone of Witte_ of 1557. In it he introduced these
newfangled signs: "There be other 2 signes in often use of which
the first is made thus + and betokeneth more: the other is thus
made - and betokeneth lesse".

In the same book he introduced our modern equals sign: "I will
sette as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or
Gemowe [that is, twin] lines of one length, thus: ======, bicause
noe 2. thynges, can be moare equalle". His equal signs were
actually quite big, about five or six times the length of ours
today. They varied in length, seemingly being sized to fit the
space available, and were made up of shorter type characters,
which look very like our modern equals sign (it seems the printer
had this character in his case, perhaps as decorative type, or as
a variant on a hyphen). It took more than a century for Recorde's
sign to oust rival schemes, such as the curly symbol of Descartes
(which was probably the astrological sign for Taurus turned on its
side), and for it to be shortened to match the lengths of the
other symbols.

The word 'whetstone' in the title of Recorde's book, by the way,
was a pun on the word 'coss', then used in English for the unknown
thing in algebra (and hence 'the cossic art' or the 'rule of coss'
for algebra). This word had come through French from the Italian
'cosa' as a translation of the Arabic 'shai', "a thing", but
Recorde probably got it from German, where it was also used. The
pun arises because in Latin 'cos' means a whetstone. Recorde may
have written in English, but he still expected his audience to
appreciate a trilingual pun!

Our modern multiplication sign seems to have been invented by the
British mathematician William Oughtred. He used it in his _Clavis
Mathematicae_ (Key to Mathematics), which was written about 1628
and published in London in 1631. It had turned up in an appendix
to a posthumous work by the Scottish mathematician John Napier a
decade before, but it's suggested that Oughtred wrote that, too.

The symbol for division was first used by Johann Rahn in _Teutsche
Algebra_ in 1659, though it could be that John Pell, who edited
Rahn's book, may really be responsible for introducing it. The
symbol wasn't new. It had been used to mark passages in writings
that were considered dubious, corrupt or spurious. Sometimes a
dash had been used instead, so in historical origin the division
sign could be a dash with a dot above and below it. It has also
been suggested that it's a minus sign with added dots; this is
supported by its surviving in Denmark until recently, very
confusingly, as a symbol for subtraction, not division, though it
has fallen out of use as Danes adopt our symbols under pressure to
conform with international usage.

The division sign was in Rahn's time known either as the 'obelus'
or sometimes the 'obelisk', from a Greek word meaning a roasting
spit. The idea seems to have been that such dubious matter was
thrust through, as with a spit; the word is the same as that for a
tapering pillar, another object with a pointed end. Confusingly,
the word 'obelus' was later used for the printer's character we
often call a 'dagger', another symbol with a point.

As an aside, when people began to write our newer computer
languages from the sixties onwards, they were hampered by the
limitations of the ASCII character set. This contains the plus,
minus and equals signs, but not those for multiplication or
division. So computer scientists had to improvise by borrowing the
asterisk for multiplication and the forward slash for division.
This latter mark has a number of aliases, being known also as the
'solidus', 'oblique' or 'virgule', among other names. So now we
have two sets of symbols for these operations, though the computer
set hardly impinges on the lives of most of us.

Like the words in our language, arithmetic signs have evolved
through historical accident, influenced by a very few pioneers.
They could so easily have been otherwise.

[Mark Brader's help is gratefully acknowledged. He supplied extra
information from his own research, and commented on a draft of
this piece. Thanks also to Dermod Quirke and Brian Holser for
additional comments. Any mistakes are mine, of course.]


4. Q & A
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[Send queries to <qa at quinion.com>. Messages will be acknowledged,
but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is so limited. If I can do
so, a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site.]
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Q. Since you've included 'bill', 'copper' and 'fuzz' as names for
the police, you might want your archives to include 'bobby'. My
understanding is that it derives from Robert Peel. Can you
confirm? [Peter Williams, Winnipeg]

A. That's the usual explanation for the origin of 'bobby'. It's a
familiar form of the first name of Mr (later Sir) Robert Peel, a
British Tory politician of the early part of the nineteenth
century who was Prime Minister in two administrations in the 1830s
and 1840s. In 1828, while he was Home Secretary, he reorganised
the old London police force (the Bow Street Runners) into a more
efficient service. But to start with the officers of the new force
were nicknamed 'peelers'. That name had earlier been given to
members of the Irish constabulary founded by Peel when he was
Secretary for Ireland between 1812 and 1818 (he was so anti-
Catholic that the locals nicknamed him Orange Peel). In London,
for reasons we can only guess at, the name 'bobby' eventually won
the battle for survival over 'peeler'. It has been suggested that
'bobby' was actually a transferred epithet. The Victorian writer
John Hotten said in his _Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and
Vulgar Words_ in 1867: "The official square-keeper, who is always
armed with a cane to drive away idle and disorderly urchins, has,
time out of mind, been called by said urchins 'Bobby the Beadle'.
'Bobby' is also an old English word for striking, or hitting, a
quality not unknown to policemen". The _Oxford English Dictionary_
does not admit the existence of either term, though it does allow
'bob' for a blow.


5. Beyond Words
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Jake Loddington spotted a painful problem in _The Times_ for
Friday 30 April. In an article by Charles Bremner, a line read:
"America still has about 2000 Tomahawks in its arse". At this
point there was an end-of-line hyphen and the article then
continued "nal, but now has fewer than a hundred air-launched
missiles ...".

The _Daily Telegraph_ reported on 1 May that a reader was having
difficulties with his voice-activated computer. It seems it was
regularly confused by seagulls outside his window. Every time one
squawked, the system displayed "Aldershot" on the screen ...


6. Administration
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