World Wide Words -- 24 Jun 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Jun 24 07:39:34 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 196 Saturday 24 June 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 8,500 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: Chronopsychology.
3. Weird Words: Katzenjammer.
4. In Brief: Mommy hacker, Silicon Albion, Vice vaccine.
5. Q & A: Moot point, Jukebox, Compleat v complete.
6. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK This newsletter is the last before our break; it
will not be published on the next three Saturdays (July 1st, 8th
and 15th). Normal service will be resumed on Saturday 22 July.
WEB SITE UPDATES From now on, updates to the World Wide Words site
will follow a different pattern. As a subscriber, you will get the
text of updates in advance of visitors to the site. Because of the
holiday break, the pieces in this issue will not appear on the Web
site until Saturday 22 July. Items in that day's issue will appear
on the Web site the following Saturday, and so on.
SUBSCRIPTION MAINTENANCE You may like to know that we have added
two other functions to the page on our Web site that handles Words'
subscriptions, <http://www.quinion.com/words/wordlist.htm>. You can
now use that page to change the address at which you are subscribed
or to leave the list.
BOBO Many subscribers wrote to point out that the origin of this
term as an abbreviation for 'Bourgeois Bohemian' - featured last
week - was a book by the American commentator David Brooks: "Bobos
in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There".
INFORMATION PLEASE I asked last week if anybody knew a name for a
word that contained no repeated letters. One answer was 'isogram',
a word which I am assured is common in this sense in the American
puzzle community, if not elsewhere; a French source provided a word
that can be Anglicised as 'heterogram'. My preference would be for
the latter, as the former has another meaning, and doesn't at once
suggest from its elements what it refers to.
EIGHTY-SIX John Tracy McGrath suggested another possible source
for this expression. If it isn't true, it deserves to be:
"The term was current in the late 30s when I was a teenager
in New York City. It was supposed to have derived from the
street-car line that operated on First Avenue on the East
Side of Manhattan.
"The First Avenue line ran from 14th Street to 86th (both
major east-west streets). As a north-bound car came to the
last stop, the motorman would call out (usually in a rich
brogue), "Eighty-six! End of the line! All out!"
"The expression was picked up by mid-town restaurant workers
as slang between themselves, meaning a menu item was no longer
available. ('The chicken soup is eighty-sixed!' 'Eighty six
the pork chops!')
"Why was not the term 'fourteen!' also used? Aha! Because
around Fourteenth Street on the East Side in those days, no
one spoke much English!"
2. Turns of Phrase: Chronopsychology
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This is the scientific study of the way changes to our daily sleep-
waking cycles can adversely influence our ability to work well. It
applies mainly to shift workers, but also concerns airline pilots,
who regularly move across time zones and who suffer what is grandly
called transmeridian dyschronism (jet-lag to you and me). We may
try to live in a 24-hour society, but chronopsychological research
suggests our biological clocks stubbornly refuse to play ball. It
seems that if we deliberately subvert our natural sleep patterns we
potentially give ourselves a number of health problems, perhaps
even chronic fatigue syndrome, and also reduce our ability to learn
new skills. A number of chronopsychological laboratories have been
established in various places to study these effects and suggest
remedies. As a specialist term, 'chronopsychology' has been around
for several years; it seems slowly to be becoming more widely known
(fans of M-Flo may recognise it as the title of one of their songs,
for example). It has links with 'chronotherapy', featured here not
long ago; the general term for the study of the influence of our
body clock on biological function is 'chronobiology'.
"Since a large percentage of industrial employees work shift work,
factors such as efficiency, safety and profit need to be understood
in relation to the chronopsychological effects," he said.
[_Press Release_, University of Florida, June 1999]
"Anything you care to measure will show a rhythm - hormones,
temperature, alertness, immune functions, urine excretion, sodium,
potassium," says Simon Folkard, a chronopsychologist at the
University of Wales, Swansea.
[_New Scientist_, June 2000]
3. Weird Words: Katzenjammer
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A hangover; anxiety or jitters; a discordant clamour.
In the sense of a hangover, this word was known in the US from the
middle 1840s. It was taken from a well-established German word (it
turns up in works by Goethe, for example) which derives from
'Katzen', cats, plus 'Jammer', wailing or distress, so "cats'
wailing". In German it could also mean a depression that follows
intoxication and so developed in American English a more general
sense of what one might call a case of the willies. The word only
really caught on when Rudolph Dirks used it as the name of the
family he featured in his cartoon strip. This began life in the
Sunday supplement of William Randolph Hearst's _New York Journal_
in 1897. _The Katzenjammer Kids_ featured Mamma Katzenjammer, her
twin sons Hans and Fritz, and The Captain (who suffered so much
from the mischief of the two boys). The strip was modelled on an
earlier one in Germany, _Max und Moritz_, drawn by Wilhelm Busch,
and the family was obviously ethnic German. Since the kids were not
drunk but raucous, Rudolph Dirks seems to have extended the meaning
of 'katzenjammer' to mean noisy quarrelling or confusion.
4. In Brief
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MOMMY HACKER American mothers, worried about where their children
are surfing on the Net and who they're e-mailing, are reported to
be searching their kids' computers to find out - hence the name.
Psychologists urge parents not to do this because they will lose
the trust of their offspring.
SILICON ALBION I wrote a while ago about the craze for inventing
new names for centres of high-tech innovation that their promoters
hope will be as successful as Silicon Valley. This is the newest
name, for the whole UK, describing a technological landscape that
is advocated by the British Government ('Albion' being an old name
for Britain).
VICE VACCINE This is the tag - seemingly invented by the _New
Scientist_ magazine - for experimental vaccines that may stop
people from getting a buzz from banned drugs like heroin, cocaine,
amphetamines and ecstasy, and which may help addicts to detox.
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.]
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Q. Did the phrase 'a moot point' originally mean "a debatable
point"? Nowadays it seems to mean "an irrelevant point" or even "a
point so irrelevant it's not worth debating". Some actually have
taken to referring to it as a 'mute' point. What's the history
here? [Nancy Maclaine]
A. 'Moot point' is one of those phrases that once had a firm and
well-understood meaning, but no longer does. It was just as you
say: a matter that was uncertain or undecided, so open to debate.
It comes from the same source as 'meet' and originally had the same
meaning. In England in medieval times it referred specifically to
an assembly of people, in particular one that had some sort of
judicial function, and was often spelled 'mot' or 'mote'. So you
find references to the 'witenagemot' (the assembly of the witan,
the national council of Anglo-Saxon times), 'hundred-mote' (where a
hundred was an Anglo-Saxon administrative area, part of a county or
shire), and many others. So something that was 'mooted' was put up
for discussion and decision at a meeting - by definition something
not yet decided.
The confusion over the meaning of 'moot point' is modern. It is a
misunderstanding of another sense of 'moot' for a discussion forum
in which hypothetical cases are argued by law students for
practice. Since there is no practical outcome of these sessions,
and the cases are invented anyway, people seem to have assumed that
a 'moot point' means one of no importance. So we've seen a curious
shift in which the sense of "open to debate" has become "not worth
debating".
The 'mute' spelling is a development that has come about because
'moot' is now a fossil word, usually encountered only in this
phrase; there is an understandable tendency to convert the unknown
into the known, and 'mute' seems to fit the new meaning rather
better. But it's wrong.
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Q. I've always been a word junkie and love finding sites like
yours. I've been looking for the origin of the word 'jukebox' for
some time. Do you have an answer? [Sue Katz]
A. Yes, but it requires some delving into creoles, West African
languages, and a bit of low-life.
Creoles are languages that arise spontaneously when people without
a tongue in common have to work and live together. The first stage
is a pidgin, a simplified amalgam of elements from the colliding
languages; a creole is a pidgin that has gone up in the world and
become a mother tongue. There are many examples in and around the
Americas, including several in the Caribbean, and (most relevantly
for your question) in the Sea Islands off the Carolinas, where
Gullah is spoken. This is a creole of English and several West
African languages that were brought in by slaves in the eighteenth
century.
In Gullah, there is a word 'jook' or 'joog', which means disorderly
or wicked. This comes from one of these West African languages,
either from Bambara 'dzugu', meaning wicked, or from Wolof 'dzug',
to live wickedly. (As you may guess, these languages are related.
Both are members of the Niger-Congo group; Wolof is in effect the
national language of Senegal, and is also spoken in Gambia; Bambara
is a dialect of Mandekan, the administrative language of the old
empire of Mali, now an official language of Mali and an important
trade language in the area.)
The Gullah word appeared in the Black English 'jook house' for a
disorderly house, often a combination of brothel, gaming parlour
and dance hall, sometimes just a shack off the road where you could
get a drink of moonshine, sometimes a tavern or roadhouse providing
music and the like. This was shortened back to 'jook' and is
recorded in this form from the 1930s, though - in the way of such
matters - it is almost certainly much older.
The jukebox was invented in the late 1930s to provide music in
those jooks that didn't have their own bands. The first recorded
appearance of the word was in - of all places - _Time_ magazine, in
1939: "Glenn Miller attributes his crescendo to the 'juke-box',
which retails recorded music at 5c a shot in bars, restaurants and
small roadside dance joints". It's gone up in price a bit since,
but next time you see one, think of the long linguistic journey
implied by its name.
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Q. Are 'compleat' and 'complete' really two separate words, as the
American Heritage Dictionary seems to say? Or is the former merely
an alternate spelling of one meaning of the latter? While
'compleat' is said to mean, essentially, quintessential, one
meaning of 'complete' is closely related as "skilled;
accomplished". [Dallman Ross, Germany]
A. In Britain, 'compleat' is archaic, used in writing only as a bit
of whimsy, and at that rather rarely. It is more common in North
America, though often equally whimsical; a quick search of the Web
turned up more than 40,000 instances, of which all those I sampled
were from the USA.
The _Oxford English Dictionary_ says that 'compleat' is just an
archaic spelling of 'complete'. It died out around the end of the
eighteenth century. One of its last appearances was a reference to
George III in the US Declaration of Independence: "He is at this
time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat
the works of death, desolation and tyranny". The OED also says that
one sense of the word (in either spelling) is the one you quoted -
referring to a person who is accomplished, "especially in reference
to a particular art or pursuit".
This sense died out in Britain in the early nineteenth century but
was reintroduced in the archaic spelling at the beginning of the
twentieth. For this we have to blame Isaak Walton, the author of
_The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man's Recreation; Being
a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, not unworthy the perusal of most
Anglers_. Writing in 1653, he naturally used the older spelling of
'complete' and modern editions retain it.
Because Isaak Walton's book title has remained so well-known, one
unexpected result has been that the word in that spelling and in
that old sense has been taken as a model in modern times. For
example, when Messrs W and A Gilbey published a book on wine in
1953, they couldn't resist calling it _The Compleat Imbiber_. You
may also find phrases like 'compleat actor', for someone who has
all the skills and qualities of that craft. And the science-fiction
writer Ben Bova wrote in his book _Mars_ in 1992: "Jamie realized
that his father had become the compleat academic: nothing really
touched him anymore; he saw everything in the abstract". This
usage, as I say, is more common in the US than in Britain.
So the short answer is that 'compleat' and 'complete' were
originally different spellings of the same word, but under the
influence of Isaak Walton's book title the older spelling has taken
on a distinct meaning, especially in modern American English.
6. Administration
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