World Wide Words -- 25 Sep 99
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Sep 25 07:41:35 UTC 1999
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 159 Saturday 25 September 1999
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Sent every Saturday to 6,000+ subscribers in at least 94 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/> E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
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Contents
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1. Notes and feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Moletronics.
3. Weird Words: Orrery.
4. Book review: Words Fail Me.
5. Q & A: Nonce, Hunker down.
6. Affixia: Infra-.
7. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.
1. Notes and feedback
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CANADA GOOSED "Repeat after me, the United States is not North
America", wrote a Canadian subscriber, Peter Calamai, concerning
my strictures on malt vinegar. It's known in his country because
"Canadians have chip wagons and Americans don't". Brian Ashurst,
who had been in the fish-and-chip trade in Britain for 15 years,
points out that if it says vinegar on the label then by the food
regulations the contents must be brewed. Thanks for the updates.
COUNTRY WISE Thank you all for responding to the mini survey that
went out during the week. In particular, it provoked replies from
subscribers in Bahrain, the Marshall Islands, Monaco, Nigeria, St
Kitts & Nevis, and Puerto Rico, so increasing the country count!
2. Turns of Phrase: Moletronics
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This is an abbreviation for 'molecular electronics', the idea that
individual elements of computer circuits could be formed using
single molecules of substances. This would permit huge increases
in the density of circuits on a chip and allow them to run much
faster and cooler. Actually, the idea - and the term 'molecular
electronics' as well as an older version of the abbreviation,
'molectronics' - go back at least as far as a US Air Force project
in association with Westinghouse in 1959, before even the
integrated circuit had gone into production. That project came to
nothing in a couple of years, because they couldn't work out how
to achieve their goal. This time around, prospects are more
hopeful, as researchers from Hewlett-Packard and the University of
California, Los Angeles, announced in July 1999 that they've
actually made logic circuits that use molecular level chemical
processes. These rely on a network of weird organic molecules
called 'rotaxanes' that contain a ring of atoms threaded on a
central molecule, like a bead on a wire, with blocking elements at
each end to keep it on. Reports have claimed that we shall soon
have "computers the size of grains of sand", which common sense
suggests we should take with a different sort of grain altogether.
Indeed, the new era of moletronics is beckoning just as silicon-
era technologists are reaching their own stunning levels of
transistor density.
[_New York Times_, July 1999]
The field of molecular electronics - moletronics - is growing
fast, and while researchers are keeping their feet on the ground
for now, the ideas are flowing thick and fast.
[_Personal Computer World_. Nov. 1999
(this gets my vote for cliche-ridden sentence of the year)]
3. Weird Words: Orrery
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A mechanical device to show the motions of the planets.
The 'orrery' was invented by George Graham about 1710; the first
example was constructed by the London instrument maker John
Rowley. It was a device of arms and balls and gears, run by
clockwork, that showed how the planets and their satellites moved
around the sun as time passed; the Earth typically took about ten
minutes to go round once, so it could hardly have been an
enthralling spectacle by the standards of today. We ought to call
it a 'graham', after its inventor, but John Rowley made a copy for
Charles Boyle, the fourth Earl of Orrery, and named it in his
honour. It's really a reference to a geographic area, since the
Boyles took their title from an ancient term for a part of County
Cork, Ireland. (Boyle was described later that century as "one of
the literary ornaments of the reign of Queen Anne"; he was a
relative of the more famous Robert Boyle, he of Boyle's law.) The
'orrery' became a popular amusement and teaching device; no
progressive educational establishment was without one. But not
everybody was enthralled by it; in 1833 the Astronomer Royal, John
Herschel, called it a "childish toy", and Charles Dickens wrote an
unflattering description of a public lecture that featured one in
_The Uncommercial Traveller_: "My memory presents a birthday when
Olympia and I were taken by an unfeeling relative - some cruel
uncle, or the like - to a slow torture called an Orrery ... It was
a venerable and a shabby Orrery, at least one thousand stars and
twenty-five comets behind the age. Nevertheless, it was awful".
4. Book review: Words Fail Me
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Patricia T O'Connor has written a sassy and entertaining guide to
the pitfalls, snares and difficulties of turning one's thoughts
into well-honed and effective prose. It follows her successful
essay into the mysteries of grammar, _Woe is I_.
"If the good news from cyberspace," she says in her introduction,
"is that we're writing more, the bad news is that most of us
aren't very good at it." And yet, she argues, writing well isn't
some arcane art that some of us are born to but the rest of us
can't learn: she firmly and rightly says it's a skill that anyone
can acquire, one that's more craft than art.
The 218 pages that follow are a foundation course in acquiring the
basics of the writer's craft: know your audience; get yourself
organised; realise the importance of those crucial first few words
(among other examples she quotes the beginning of George Orwell's
_Nineteen Eighty-Four_: "It was a bright cold day in April, and
the clocks were striking thirteen"); don't attempt perfection, but
relax, get writing, get something - anything - down as a first
draft and polish it later; avoid pompous, pretentious, vague or
evasive words, and stay clear of affectations, fashionable words
and meaningless phrases that sound good; avoid belabouring the
obvious; keep clear of cliches; eschew redundancies (especially,
as she says, superfluous ones ...).
Along the way she gives lots of sensible, punchy advice on ways to
structure sentences and paragraphs, on the basics of good grammar,
and how to maintain a proper perspective and focus to keep your
reader mentally with you. And I'm delighted to see that she spends
a whole chapter on the need to achieve a rhythm in one's writing -
after all, good prose always aspires to the status of poetry.
You'll find much good advice here that's similar to that in other
books on how to write, but Ms O'Connor adds a personal, and to my
ear a very American, humorous touch that softens her strictures
and makes her book easy to read and her advice easy to absorb.
Carrying it out - now, that's the hard part ...
[Patricia T O'Connor, _Words Fail Me: What everyone Who Writes
Should Know About Writing_, published by Harcourt Brace in
September 1999, ISBN 0-15-100371-8. Price US$18.95, though widely
discounted.]
5. Q&A
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[Send queries to <qa at quinion.com>. Messages will be acknowledged,
but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited. If I can do
so, a response will appear both here and on the Words Web site.]
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Q. You used 'nonce' in one of your mailings: "transient or nonce
compounds are created in books and newspapers". Where does this
come from? [Richard Lathom]
A. I wince now at the infelicity of that phrase. It's an uncommon
word outside dictionary making. It usually turns up in the fossil
phrase "for the nonce", meaning temporarily.
It's recorded right back into medieval times but was originally
created by mistake. It was at first 'then anes', meaning for the
one purpose or occasion, where 'anes' is a variant form of 'one'
and 'then' is a defunct form of 'the'. But people misunderstood
where the break between words came, and turned 'then anes' into
'the nanes' (said, I think, as though it was spelt 'nanse').
Eventually this evolved into 'the nonce'. (This isn't the only
word known to have been transformed in this way; for example
there's 'newt', which was at first 'an ewt', and 'nickname', which
started life as 'an eke name'.)
The use of 'nonce' in the sense in which I employed it seems to
have begun with the compilers of the first edition of the _Oxford
English Dictionary_. In fact, the entry under 'nonce' in the
Second Edition cites the editors themselves: "nonce-word, the term
used in this Dictionary to describe a word which is apparently
used only for the nonce". It's mainly a term of trade among
lexicographers and linguists and turns up also in phrases like
'nonce compound', 'nonce borrowing' and 'nonce formation'.
There's almost certainly no connection by the way, with the
British criminals' slang use of the word for a sexual offender,
whose origin is uncertain, though it may be connected with
'nancy'.
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Q. When Hurricane Floyd was threatening the American east coast,
every weatherman seemed to use the phrase 'hunker down'. Do you
have any idea where this word and phrase came from? [W Walker]
A. It sounds like the most typically American of phrases, but it
seems originally to have been Scots, first recorded in the
eighteenth century. Nobody seems to know exactly what its origin
is, though it has been suggested it's linked to the Old Norse
'huka', to squat; that would make it a close cousin of the modern
Dutch 'huiken' and German 'hocken', meaning to squat or crouch,
which makes sense. That's certainly what's meant by the word in
American English, in phrases like 'hunker down' or 'on your
hunkers'. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ has a fine description
of how to hunker: "squat, with the haunches, knees, and ankles
acutely bent, so as to bring the hams near the heels, and throw
the whole weight upon the fore part of the feet". The advantage of
this position is that you're not only crouched close to the
ground, so presenting a small target for whatever the universe
chooses to throw at you, but you're also ready to move at a
moment's notice. 'Hunker down' has also taken on the sense of to
hide, hide out, or take shelter, whatever position you choose to
do it in. This was a south-western US dialect form that was
popularised by President Johnson in the mid 1960s. Despite its
Scots ancestry, 'hunker' is rare in standard British English.
6. Affixia: Infra-
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This comes from the Latin 'infra' meaning below, underneath, or
beneath. It's given rise to a number of terms in scientific and
medical writing, such as 'infrarenal', lying below the kidney, and
'inframammary', situated below the breasts (these are just two
examples of a large group of medical terms, most of them rather
rare); 'infraclass', a taxonomic classification in biology that
ranks below a subclass; and 'infrasound' (adjective 'infrasonic'),
for sound which is too low in frequency to be audible by human
ears. The prefix is most often found in the words 'infrared', that
part of the spectrum lying below visible light in frequency which
we may perceive as heat, and in 'infrastructure', the physical and
organisational substructure or foundations (roads, buildings,
power supplies) needed for the operation of a society.
7. Administration
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