World Wide Words -- 26 Aug 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Fri Aug 25 15:48:35 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 202 Saturday 26 August 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 8,900 subscribers in at least 97 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 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 comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Therapeutic cloning.
3. Topical Words: Gravitas.
4. Weird Words: Etaoin shrdlu.
5. In Brief: Sarah's law.
6. Q & A: Kip, Guff.
7. Administration: How to leave the list, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
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DEADHEAD Several subscribers have pointed out that the term has
yet another sense; this refers to crews who are travelling on a
vehicle in order to start work somewhere else, or sometimes just
going home. I'm told this is now common in the aviation industry.
Robert E Thompson wrote to say that members of his family have been
in the US railroad business for several generations and that this
sense of the term was well-known among them many years ago. Colm
Flannery in Germany suggested that the word might have come from a
well-known Latin tag, 'caput mortuum', literally "death's head" or
skull. This was used by alchemists as their name for the residue in
a flask after distillation was complete. Later it was used for any
worthless residue.
HOLY SMOKE Several subscribers, more versed in the Bible than I,
have pointed out that the phrase probably referred originally to
incense, which has at times been taken as a visible sign of one's
prayers rising to heaven. Gary Mason quoted me Revelation "And the
smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints,
ascended up before God out of the angel's hand". James Campbell
reminded me that in German incense is 'Weihrauch', which can be
translated as 'holy smoke'. But despite your many suggestions, the
phrase seems to have nothing to do with the smoke puffed out of a
chimney in the Vatican during the election of a new Pope.
2. Turns of Phrase: Therapeutic cloning
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Last week's decision in principle by the British government to
permit experimentation on human embryos for limited purposes has
aroused controversy, especially among religious groups and those
opposed to abortion. At the moment, cells taken from embryos at an
early stage of division are the only source of stem cells, which
can grow and specialise into any part of one's body. The hope is
that eventually it may be possible to use such cells to grow spare
parts for organ transplantation: new livers, kidneys, skin, even
pancreatic islet cells to cure diabetes. The eventual aim is to
persuade adult cells to revert to stem cells so that organs can be
cloned from one's own tissues and will therefore not be rejected.
The creation of organs in this way has been named 'therapeutic
cloning', in order to make a careful distinction between this and
'reproductive cloning', the creation of a complete new copy of a
human being from an adult cell. Experimentation leading to the
latter has been outlawed in most developed countries, and is not
the aim of the proposed experiments.
The focus of ethics and public policy has shifted from an alarmist
and rather fanciful preoccupation with human reproductive cloning
to an emphasis on 'therapeutic cloning' for cell and tissue
replacement and repair.
[_New Scientist_, Feb. 1999]
The council acknowledges the advantages of using cloning, which
enables doctors to grow a patient's own tissue, and supports the
use of so-called "therapeutic cloning" with sufficient safeguards,
notably to ensure that donors consent to such research.
[_Daily Telegraph_, Apr. 2000]
3. Topical Words: Gravitas
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Ever since George W Bush picked Richard Cheney as his running mate,
the candidates in the American presidential race have been vying to
see who can demonstrate the greatest 'gravitas', or appearance of
dignity and seriousness. The _Washington Times_ earlier this month
called it the "gravitas gambit", and Rush Limbaugh has been having
fun playing recordings to illustrate how it has become the media
buzzword of the campaign.
It's a Latin word, a noun formed from the adjective 'gravis',
heavy. English borrowed the Latin word via French as 'gravity' at
about the beginning of the sixteenth century. Then, it had much the
same sense as 'gravitas' now has: weight, influence, or authority.
It could also refer to some matter that was 'grave' (which comes
from the same Latin source) or to a solemn dignity, a sobriety or
seriousness of conduct. A weighty word indeed, the opposite of
'levity', a lightness that causes bodies to rise, a tendency for
people to exhibit lightweight attitudes.
It was the natural philosophers of the early seventeenth century
who began to lay the ground for the introduction of 'gravitas' by
borrowing the word 'gravity' for that mysterious force that
generates weight. After Isaac Newton, 'gravity' became so closely
attached to the concept that it slowly lost some of its
associations with the older senses. Writers from the 1920s onwards
began to use 'gravitas' instead, as a direct reference to the
classical Latin authors like Cicero who employed it in much the
same way. It is very noticeable that it was for some decades the
preserve of portentous leader writers, careful always to write it
in italics to tell the reader that, yes, we know it's a foreign
word. But it looked so much more intellectual than 'gravity' and
was so much better for communicating that sense of classical
sobriety that its appeal was irresistible.
In the past couple of decades, it has become accepted as a proper
English word, is now printed without the italics, and has become
more popular. There are signs that it is losing some of its force:
a headline in the financial pages of the _Daily Telegraph_ last
month shouted that "Vodafone provides the gravitas", meaning only
that the mobile phone company's excellent share performance was
propping up the stock market.
But it still looks a bit poncey and foreign. That final 's' will
forever mark it as not quite English: I expect any moment to see
somebody create 'gravita' from it in the mistaken belief it's a
plural, as some already do with 'kudos'.
Those who prefer to get their authoritative pronouncements from
'gurus' may be surprised to learn that that word comes from the
same ancient Indo-European root: in Sanskrit 'guru' means weighty,
grave or dignified. 'Grief' and 'grieve' are other words from the
Latin root: when one of Bush and Gore has to exchange his
'gravitas' for 'grief' this November, at least he'll still be among
word relatives.
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4. Weird Words: Etaoin shrdlu
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A nonsense phrase; an absurd or unintelligible utterance.
With the idea of speeding up the setting of type, the old Linotype
keyboards had their letters arranged in decreasing order of the
frequency with which they appear in the language, making the first
two rows ETAOIN SHRDLU. This curious phrase is recorded both in the
_Oxford English Dictionary_ and also in the _Random House Webster's
Unabridged Dictionary_. Linotype operators who made a mistake would
often run their fingers down the first two rows of the keyboard to
cast nonsense to fill out the line. The resulting cast slug was
usually put back in the pot to be melted down and reused, but
sometimes, in the heat of night-time composition, the mistake was
missed and ended up being printed.
Each half, and the complete phrase, has occasionally been borrowed
by journalists to mean something that is nonsense or absurd; the
first part is recorded in a story by James Thurber from 1931, and
the whole thing appeared in 1942 as the title of a short story by
Fredric Brown about a sentient Linotype machine. With computerised
typesetting the machines have gone and the associations are almost
lost, but the phrase remains a useful mnemonic for the most-used
letters in English.
5. In Brief
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SARAH'S LAW Following the recent murder of eight-year-old Sarah
Payne in Britain, which has aroused strong passions, a Sunday
newspaper is campaigning for this British equivalent to America's
Megan's Law - a public register of child abusers.
6. Q&A
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[Send queries to <qa at quinion.com>. Messages will be acknowledged,
but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited. If I can do so,
a response will appear both here and on the WWWords Web site.]
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Q. My British friend uses the wonderful word 'kip' which in
American translates to 'nap'; would you happen to know the
origin of that word? [Randa Massot]
A. British people use 'kip' to mean either a nap or a longer sleep;
it can also mean the idea or act of sleeping, as in "Will you be
quiet? I'm trying to get some kip in here!" It can also be a verb:
"They kipped down for the night".
It's just possible that if British people knew more about its low-
life origins they might not use it so much. The ultimate source is
probably the Danish word 'kippe' for a hut or a mean alehouse. It
was first recorded in the middle of the eighteenth century as an
Irish slang term for a brothel. The earliest example known is from
Oliver Goldsmith's _The Vicar of Wakefield_. As Goldsmith was
Irish, educated in Dublin, the implication is that the word was
first used in that city. It has long continued to be used there in
that way, and appears in compound form in James Joyce's _Ulysses_
of 1922: "I saw him, kipkeeper!". That word is remembered in a 1994
book with the title _Dublin Tenement Life_: "Now we didn't call
them 'madams', the outsiders called them madams. We called them
'kip-keepers'. The houses that they lived in were called kips".
Other names were 'kip house' or 'kip shop'.
By the latter part of the nineteenth century in Britain (as opposed
to Ireland) the word had gone further down in the world to mean a
common lodging-house for tramps and the homeless. Soon after, it
transferred in sense from the place where you sleep to the act of
sleeping itself (though in Scotland the word can mean a bed). In
the twentieth century it shifted still further away from slang
towards the modern informal or colloquial usage.
It does suggest that if you speak of a 'quick kip', you should be
careful in what country you say it ...
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Q. A friend said "don't give me any of your guff" and it made me
curious as to the origin of 'guff'. Any clue? [James R Cunningham]
A. The word 'guff' was once used in standard English and in Scots
to mean a puff or a whiff of a bad smell. It may be linked through
Old Norse to the Norwegian 'gufs', a puff of wind. But either way
it's basically imitative and doesn't seem to be connected to
'gust', though that, too, has an Old Norse origin. So talk that
was just idle chatter or nonsense was rudely said to be just a puff
of wind (or perhaps a bad smell).
7. Administration
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