World Wide Words -- 15 Jan 00 (RESEND)

Michael Quinion words at QUINION.COM
Sat Jan 15 13:35:58 UTC 2000


[Apologies; in my haste, I forgot to take the formatting tags out
of the mailing. Herewith a more readable version! -- MQ]


WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 173          Saturday 15 January 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 7,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion        Thornbury, South Gloucestershire, 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: Grocerant.
3. In Brief: B2B, Go post-economic, WRAP.
4. Weird Words: Pound.
5. Q & A: Organogram, Like a banshee, Blow the gaff.
6. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.


1. Notes and feedback
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SUBSCRIPTIONS  As you may have spotted in the header, subscriptions
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Wide words this week in the Christian Science Monitor, the St Paul
Pioneer Press-Dispatch, and the Online Writing digest. In fact, the
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thank you all for joining this continuing exploration of the quirky
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the merrier, do tell your local media about World Wide Words, as
well as anybody who might be interested in subscribing!


2. Turns of Phrase: Grocerant
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This is yet another consequence of our high-speed, must rush, no-
time-to-stop, flat-out living lifestyle. The number of people who
cook proper meals seems to be going down in inverse proportion to
the number who buy cookbooks (in Britain, cookery books), which
makes one wonder what the people who buy them do with them. One of
the newer solutions for people who want to eat but don't have time
to cook is this American invention. Essentially it's a restaurant
inside a supermarket, a natural enough progression from in-store
bakeries and a subtly different take on the take-out (in Britain
the take-away) food outlet. No longer do you go to the store just
buy the ingredients to cook with. Now you can buy the complete
cooked meal, freshly prepared and ready to eat either in the
supermarket, at your place of work, or to serve to the family at
home. The name seems to have been created sometime around 1996 as
an obvious blend of 'grocery' and 'restaurant' and remains a jargon
term of the food business, almost entirely unknown to customers,
though it has on occasion turned up in newspapers on both sides of
the Atlantic.

Whether it's a personal chef service, a supermarket offering
prepared meals or a grocery store/restaurant hybrid ('grocerant'),
the food offered by these alternatives to traditional fast-food
fare is being gobbled up.
                        [_Entrepreneur Magazine_, Dec. 1997]

He cites the 'grocerant' concept which is currently sweeping the
US. This is shorthand for a supermarket grocery counter which is
also a takeaway restaurant.
                        [_Independent on Sunday_, Jan. 2000]


3. In Brief
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B2B  Short for Business-to-Business, this is another new buzzword
in the e-commerce field. It denotes those electronic businesses
that chiefly trade with others of like kind. It's predicted that
this is the form of online commerce that will grow the fastest in
the coming years, not selling things to end-customers.

GO POST-ECONOMIC  A sardonic expression apparently used in high-
tech circles in Silicon Fen (around Cambridge, UK) for making so
much money that you won't ever to have to work again.

WRAP  We've heard a lot about connecting kitchen appliances to the
Internet, so you can check your bank balance using the microwave,
or get the fridge to reorder food. This is what makes it possible:
the Web-Ready Appliances Protocol.


4. Weird Words: Pound
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An enclosure for straying farm animals.

Just across the road from our parish church is the old town lock-
up, or clink with the walled enclosure of the 'pound' alongside it,
now a private garden for the cottage next door. In earlier times
this was the place where stray animals were brought to be kept safe
until their owners could claim them by paying a fine. Such 'pounds'
went out of use in the nineteenth century because the law changed
to permit the impounder of the animals to keep them on his own
land, so there was no longer any need for a separate parish
enclosure. This sense of 'pound' is one of those mysterious words
for which no sure origin can be found, a linguistic orphan. It's
recorded as far back as Middle English, but nobody has discovered a
link to words in related languages. At one time it had the form
'pundfald' or 'pundfold', and so is really the same word as
'pinfold' and 'penfold', other names for the same thing. It's also
closely linked to 'pond', which comes from the related Old English
word 'pyndan'. The words 'pond' and 'pound' were often used
interchangeably (which is why 'impound' can have the sense of
storing water in a reservoir). The other senses of the word - the
unit of British currency, the unit of weight, and the verb to
strike heavily - are all unconnected.


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 WWWords Web site.]

                        -----------

Q. I have recently come across the word 'organogram' as a
description of a company's structure. It is presumably a truncation
of 'organisation diagram'. Have you come across this travesty
before? I am assured it is common business usage by the person who
wants to use it on our intranet site, but I think they'll be
stepping across my stiffening body before it gets published.
[Andrew Arnold, Denmark]

A. I'm sorry to have to tell you that I first came across this bit
of organisational jargon, so spelled, in a British Sunday newspaper
in June 1994, and it was some way from new even then. The original
spelling was the more correct 'organigram' and it can be dated back
to 1962. Oddly, the first example in the _Oxford English
Dictionary_ - from Antony Sampson's _Anatomy of Britain_ - spells
it with an 'o'. However, for the next couple of decades the 'i'
form seems to have predominated.

A quick Web search threw up more than 1,500 examples of the 'o'
spelling (as well as several other examples from British newspapers
that included the _Economist_ and the 'Daily Telegraph'), as
against 2,700 examples spelled with an 'i'. Someone in the human
resources business seems to have decided in the early to mid
nineties that 'organogram' with an 'o' looked more sexy than the
other spelling (or perhaps Mr Sampson's book suddenly became
fashionable again). It may be gradually taking over and we may
eventually be stuck with it in this spelling. But that doesn't
necessarily mean you have to use it: there's nothing like being a
last-ditcher against the onrush of barbarianism to make life
interesting.

I agree with you about its infelicity - it's a ghastly word which
should have been strangled at birth. It looks confusingly like a
unit of weight, a misapprehension heightened in the 'o' spelling,
which confuses it with the perfectly respectable prefix 'organo-'
("Two hundred organograms of my best parsnips? Coming right up,
sir!"). It's best avoided in the real world, I suggest, where
'organisational diagram' will be better understood, but if your arm
is being viciously twisted, do at least spell it with an 'i'!

                        -----------

Q. Have you ever heard the expression 'like a banshee', as in
"He/she made out like a banshee"?  I see the definition of the word
banshee is a female spirit that would wail under a window sill of a
house where someone was going to die.  That being the case, I am
really confused where the expression came from. [Paul LeRoy, USA]

A. I've never heard the saying in the modern American slang sense -
it hasn't made it across the Atlantic into British English - but it
is recorded in the _Random House Historical Dictionary of American
Slang_, with a first example from 1976. Now rather dated, it
indicates something out of the ordinary or excessive.

The basic phrase 'like a banshee' has been used many times over the
past couple of hundred years as a figurative expression to describe
someone screaming or making a noise, usually in an excess of
emotion. This has often appeared in the set forms 'wail like a
banshee' or 'scream like a banshee'. A modern example is in Steven
Levy's _Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution_ of 1984: "An
absurdly expensive musical instrument upon which you could
improvise, compose, and, like the beatniks in Harvard Square a mile
away, wail like a banshee with total creative abandon".

Examples in RHHDAS include 'party like a banshee' and 'run like a
banshee'. It seems that the idea of a banshee being a noisy spirit
in torment has been extended so far it has snapped, most likely out
of ignorance of what a banshee actually is, and probably through
confusion with 'like a bandit', another American slang expression
which came into the language at about the same time.

                        -----------

Q. What is the gaff in 'blow the gaff'? [David Sutton, UK]

A. Dictionaries give a number of possible sources for this, while
others candidly admit they don't know. I think we can do better
than the latter, while having to admit that the matter is clouded
by the fog of ages and the poor state of recording of early slang
usage. There are all sorts of meanings for the word 'gaff',
something that has added greatly to the confusion.

The standard English sense is of a hooked stick or barbed spear
used for landing fish; this comes from the Provençla;al word
'gaf' for a boat-hook; in French this took on the figurative sense
of a blunder, perhaps because the emotional effect of one is like
being 'gaffed', and is the origin also of the standard English word
'gaffe' for an embarrassing remark or blunder. Together with the
English dialect 'gaff' for loud and coarse talk, or the same Scots
word 'gaff' which meant to talk loudly and merrily, this gave rise
at one time to a peculiarly American slang sense of 'gaff' that
referred to severe criticism, treatment, or hardship (as in 'stand
the gaff' or 'give the gaff'). Then there's the British slang
meaning of 'gaff' for the place where one lives ("come round my
gaff for a coffee"), which is almost certainly derived from the use
of 'gaff' in the eighteenth-century to mean a fair, and later a
cheap music-hall or theatre (as in the famous 'penny gaff'); this
probably comes from the Romany word for a town, especially a market
town.

(Just as an aside, 'gaffer', used in British slang to mean the
foreman or boss, and in the film industry everywhere for the chief
electrician on a production, comes from a shortening of 'godfather'
or 'grandfather' - it was at first applied to any old man - and so
is a quite distinct word.)

But I would suggest that none of these is the immediate source for
'blow the gaff'. For that, we must look at yet another meaning of
the word - a low slang term for some hidden trick or gimmick used
as a cheating device in gambling. Originally this was a small hook
set in a ring that was used by card-sharps to grip the cards, so
the origin is probably in the hook sense of 'gaff', perhaps
augmented by some idea of hooking a sucker. As 'gaff' was also used
for the spurs attached to the heels of fighting cocks, and as such
pastimes and gambling were intimately associated with fairs, it may
be that several literal and figurative slang senses of the word
came together in this meaning. (Later, the word developed a sense
in America of a fraud or racket.)

And for at least three hundred years the verb 'to blow' has had an
informal meaning of informing on, betraying or exposing someone.
For example, there was a slang expression around in the eighteenth
century, 'to blow the gab', to betray a secret, in which 'gab'
comes from the standard English word for speech or conversation (as
in 'gift of the gab').

What may have happened was that 'blow the gab' became the model for
a newer phrase, 'blow the gaff', under the influence of the
cheating trick sense of 'gaff', where it would at first have meant
exposing the trade secrets of gamblers and cheats. It's then a
short step to extend it to the meaning of the older phrase - and
indeed to supplant it as the older one went out of fashion.


6. Administration
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