From words at QUINION.COM  Sat Mar  4 03:12:43 2000
From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion)
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 08:12:43 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 04 March 00
Message-ID: <SAT.4.MAR.2000.081243.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 180           Saturday 4 March 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 7,900 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>
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Notes and feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Fashionista.
3. Weird Words: Rhadamanthine.
4. Q & A: Fine fettle, Boycott, Grass widow.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Notes and feedback
-------------------------------------------------------------------
DECADE  Some time ago, I wrote a piece about a survey that asked
about names for the decade that is upon us. Since then I've seen
newspaper references to it as the Noughts and the Zeroes. In order
to update the piece, I'd be very interested to hear words for the
decade that subscribers come across, if at all possible with full
details of source and date.


2. Turns of Phrase: Fashionista
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a gently sarcastic term for a person who is an enthusiast
for fashion. It covers not only the dedicated followers of fashion
who wear the clothes, but also those who write about them. And it
can refer to those who design, make, model and publicise clothes,
and the fashion buyers whose decisions determine the success of a
collection.

I'm told by researchers at the _Oxford English Dictionary_ that it
goes back to 1993, to a book by Stephen Fried entitled _Thing of
Beauty: the Tragedy of Supermodel Gia_. The word began to become
more widely popular from about 1998 onwards, has just started to
appear in dictionaries, and looks set to become a permanent part of
the language.

It's formed from 'fashion' by adding the suffix '-ista' from
Spanish, equivalent to our '-ist' ending. English has comparatively
recently borrowed this from familiar Spanish-language terms such as
'Sandinista' and 'Peronista'. Such words have often had negative
associations in English and new words using the suffix are usually
derogatory, like 'Blairista' for a supporter of the British prime
minister, Tony Blair. 'Fashionista' was one of this type, and it
has not yet entirely lost its disparaging associations with
triviality.

Last week I finally realized that no matter how hard I try, I'll
never be a true fashionista - one of those guys and gals who can
stumble out of a swamp covered with leeches and still look like a
million bucks.
                         [_Denver Rocky Mountain News_, Sept. 1999]

As founder and editorial director of Wallpaper magazine, the style
and design bible for the fashionista, he is a man on first-name
terms with good taste.
                                     [_Daily Telegraph_, Feb. 2000]


3. Weird Words: Rhadamanthine
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Rigorously just and severe.

We are taught less about the classics than we once were, so the
name of Rhadamanthus (sometimes spelt Rhadamanthys) probably rings
few bells. In Greek mythology, he was the son of Zeus and Europa,
brother to King Minos of Crete and (in some versions of the tale),
Prince Sarpedon of Lycia. In life he was renowned for his wisdom
and justice. When he died, according to Plato, he went to Elysium,
where the most favoured mortals were chosen by the gods to stay
eternally, and there became ruler and judge. Together with Minos
and Aeacus, he decided the fate of everyone who was brought before
him - whether to live forever in Elysium, or be banished to the
underworld - and in judging was able to detect all the sins of
one's life, no matter how well hidden. So Rhadamanthus became a
byword for justice in its most severe and rigorous form. Here's an
example of its use, from _The Egoist_ by George Meredith: "As to
the sentence he pronounces, I am unable to speak, but his forehead
is Rhadamanthine condemnation".


4. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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 do, indeed, feel in fine fettle today. However, a young friend
asked where the word 'fettle' came from as she had never heard of
it. It seems 'fettle' is always used with 'fine' and I realize now
I have never heard it expressed in any other way. If you have the
time I shall appreciate learning its origin. [Pat Cagle]

A. These days, you're indeed likely only to hear 'fettle' when it's
shackled to 'fine' to make a set phrase. It's a fossil, left over
from a time when the word was better known. The repeated initial
letter undoubtedly helped stick them together, which is why you
only rarely (if ever) hear of something in 'good fettle' or 'bad
fettle' or the like. Older works sometimes employ other modifiers:
in 'John Barleycorn' by Jack London, for example, there appears:
"Those fifty-one days of fine sailing and intense sobriety had put
me in splendid fettle".

The word was most typically used as a verb meaning to put things in
order, tidy up, arrange, or prepare. Here's an example, from Anne
Bronte's _Agnes Grey_ of 1847, in the Yorkshire dialect speech of a
servant: "But next day, afore I'd gotten fettled up - for indeed,
Miss, I'd no heart to sweeping an' fettling, an' washing pots; so I
sat me down i' th' muck - who should come in but Maister Weston!".
In northern English it can still have the sense of making or
repairing something. In Australia, a 'fettler' is a railway
maintenance worker, responsible for keeping the line in good shape.
It's also used in some manufacturing trades - in metal casting and
pottery it describes the process of knocking the rough edges off a
piece. But all of these are variants of the basic sense. So the
noun refers to condition, order or shape, and 'fine fettle' means
to be in good order or condition.

Its origins are a bit obscure. It seems to come from the Old
English 'fetel' for a belt, so the verb probably first had the
meaning of girding oneself up, as for a heavy task. It's related to
the German 'Fessel' for a chain or band, but not to the confusingly
similar 'fetter', which actually comes from the same root as
'foot'.

                        -----------

Q. I searched for the word 'boycott' on your site but could not
find anything. A television program recently said, I believe, that
it was about the Revolutionary War and the boycott of British
taxes. [Jennifer, USA]

A. Wrong period and wrong country, I'm afraid. No one who organised
a boycott at that time could have used the word, because it only
appeared in the language in 1880. It's an excellent example of an
eponym, a word based on a proper name, like wellington boots,
garibaldi biscuits or the mackintosh.

Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was an Englishman working in
Ireland. In the 1870s he was farming at Loughmask in County Mayo
and serving as a land agent for an absentee English landlord, Lord
Earne. This was the time of the campaign organised by the Irish
Land League for reform of the system of landholdings. In September
1880, protesting tenants demanded that Captain Boycott give them a
substantial reduction in their rents. He refused. Charles Stuart
Parnell, the President of the Land League, suggested in a speech
that the way to force Boycott to give way was for everyone in the
locality to refuse to have any dealings with him. Labourers would
not work for him, local shops stopped serving him (food had to be
brought in from elsewhere for him and his family), and he even had
great trouble getting his letters delivered. In the end, his crops
were harvested that autumn through the help of fifty volunteers
from the north of the country, who worked under the protection of
nine hundred soldiers.

The events aroused so much passion that his name became an instant
byword. It was first used - in our modern sense of collective and
organised ostracism - in the _Times_ of London in November 1880,
even while his crops were still being belatedly harvested; within
weeks it was everywhere. It was soon adopted by newspapers
throughout Europe, with versions of his name appearing in French,
German, Dutch and Russian. By the time of the Captain's death in
1897, it had become a standard part of the English language.

                        -----------

Q. Where does the term 'grass widow' come from, and why?
[Maryalice Shaw, USA]

A. The usual meaning given in British dictionaries is of a woman
whose husband is temporarily away, say on business. This sense is
known in other English-speaking communities such as Australia. It
has long been used in the USA in the rather different sense of "a
woman who is separated, divorced, or lives apart from her husband",
as the _Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary_ has it.

Some writers have suggested that it's actually a corruption of
'grace-widow'. But etymologists are quite sure that the first word
does in fact refer to the plant, because there are related words in
other European languages, such as 'Strohwitwe' in German (straw
widow) and 'grasweduwe' in Dutch, and the phrase has from earliest
times in English been recorded with 'grass' and not 'grace'.

Another theory is that it's slang from the British Raj for wives
sent away during the hot summer to the cooler (and greener) hill
stations while their husbands remained on duty in the plains. We
can trace this theory back to the famous Anglo-Indian dictionary
_Hobson-Jobson_ of 1886. It says that the term is applied "with a
shade of malignancy", a tantalisingly opaque comment.

The phrase itself is much older than British India. It's first used
by Sir Thomas More in his _Dialogue_ of 1528. But then it meant
something rather different: either an abandoned mistress or an
unmarried woman who had cohabited with several men. It might have
expressed the idea that the abandoned lover had been "put out to
grass". But it could conceivably have come from the same type of
origin as 'bastard'; this is from the Latin _bastum_ for a pack
saddle, suggesting a child born after a brief encounter on an
improvised bed, such as a packsaddle pillow, whose owner had gone
by morning. Could the grass in 'grass widow' refer to surreptitious
love-making in the fields rather than indoors, or the straw in a
barn used for an illicit tryst?

Our modern meaning first turns up in the 1840s. It seems possible
that the term was applied derisively to Anglo-Indian wives sent
away for the summer (were there perhaps well-known opportunities
for hanky-panky in the hill stations?) and that it only gradually
took on the modern sense through a reinterpretation of 'grass' to
mean the green landscape of the hills. That could explain the
"shade of malignancy" comment in _Hobson-Jobson_, though it says
tactfully about the older senses of the word that "no such
opprobrious meanings attach to the Indian use".


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From words at QUINION.COM  Sat Mar 11 03:39:04 2000
From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 08:39:04 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 11 Mar 00
Message-ID: <SAT.11.MAR.2000.083904.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 181          Saturday 11 March 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 8,000 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>
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Turns of Phrase: Hypernova.
2. Topical Words: Facile.
3. Q & A: Kitty-corner, Over the yardarm, Cock-up.
4. Weird Words: Whilom.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Turns of Phrase: Hypernova
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sometimes the 'super-' prefix just isn't extravagant enough, or
it's been used already, or linguistic inflation has set in. This
term seems to be a product of all three, since it is an even more
spectacular cosmic event than the well-known 'supernova'. But
perhaps the superlative is warranted in this case, as the last such
event spotted from Earth was widely reported as being so intense
that if it had happened near to us we would have fried (luckily, it
actually happened long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away). Such
cataclysmic explosions - the biggest bangs since the Big Bang, NASA
called them, with perhaps permissible overstatement - are about a
hundred times as powerful as the biggest supernovae and may be
caused by the total collapse of a very large star. The concept was
put forward by Bohdan Paczynski of Princeton University in 1997 as
a possible origin of intense bursts of gamma rays that have been
observed by space-borne detectors since the 1970s (he seems also to
have coined the word 'hypernova'). In January 1999 the source of
one was seen for the first time as it was happening.

By this time, theorists had built up a picture in which GRBs
[gamma-ray bursters] result from the collision of two high-density
neutron stars or from a 'hypernova' - the total collapse of a very
massive star.
                                             [_Science_, Mar. 1999]

Really big stars such as Eta Carinae may go out in an even more
spectacular explosion called a hypernova. Such a hypernova could
produce another phenomenon known as a gamma-ray burster, which
sends powerful gamma radiation out into space.
                            [_Minneapolis Star Tribune_, Jun. 1999]


2. Topical Words: Facile
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A job advertisement from a Scottish university this week asked that
applicants should be "facile with numerical programming". It was
obvious enough in context that the university wanted researchers
who were good enough at it that they found it easy. Unfortunately,
the writer of the ad was almost certainly better at mathematics
than he was at English.

'Facile' has two main meanings. The much less common meaning, the
one the university was employing, is the older of the two. It means
something that's easy to understand, or easily accomplished. At one
time it could even imply that a person had good manners, or was
courteous or affable - in other words someone whose behaviour was
easy or effortless.

The word, and its positive senses, came to us through Middle French
from the Latin 'facilis' (so the word is closely connected to our
'facilitate' and 'facility'). When applied to things 'facilis'
meant they were easy to do, but applied to people it meant pliant
or courteous. It first appeared in English in an early printed
book, Caxton's translation of the _Fables of Aesop_ of 1483.

As always, something thought to be easy was valued accordingly: if
it was easy, it couldn't be important or valuable. So a second
meaning grew up, a derogatory one which is now often the first to
be cited in dictionaries: something glib that's superficially
convincing but actually simplistic. If you speak these days of a
man with a facile intellect, you're most likely to be saying that
he is shallow of mind and specious of opinion. As an echo of the
original Latin, it can also mean somebody who is markedly pliant,
easily convinced or swayed by the views of others.

Curiously, only two of my many style guides warn about this word.
The second edition of Fowler does (though the third doesn't). But
Geoffrey Howard is very firm in _The Good English Guide_: "Although
facile means easy and without effort, it always carries with it the
negative meaning of superficial ... facile should never be used in
a complimentary sense". Perhaps the other guides are so certain
this is known they don't feel they need to mention it. But it seems
to have passed our ad writer by.

I wonder how many people will be tempted to apply, on the grounds
that their capabilities with regard to numerical programming are,
indeed, as facile as anyone could ask for? That could be a problem
for the selection board.


3. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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 heard an American friend of mine use the phrase 'kitty
corner' to describe things that are diagonally opposed, as for
example: "The drugstore is kitty corner to the ice-cream parlor".
Have you heard this phrase before and do you have any clue as to
its origin? [Ian McAloon in the UK; Patricia P Miller also asked
about its origin.]

A. It's certainly a very odd-looking phrase. It has lots of variant
forms, such as 'catercorner', 'kitty-cornered', 'catty-cornered',
'cata-cornered', and 'cater-cornered', a sure sign that it puzzles
users.

The first part comes from the French word 'quatre', four. It's
actually quite an old expression that first appeared in English as
the name for the four in dice, soon Anglicised to 'cater'. The
standard placement of the four dots at the corners of a square
almost certainly introduced the idea of diagonals. From this came a
verb 'cater', to place something diagonally opposite another or to
move diagonally, which can be found in the sixteenth century. Some
English dialects had it as an adverb in compounds such as
'caterways' or 'caterwise'. By the early years of the nineteenth
century it was beginning to be recorded in the USA in the compound
form of 'cater-cornered'. It had by then lost any link with the
French word; people invented spellings in attempts to make sense of
it, often thinking it had something to do with cats, which is why
we have forms like 'kitty-corner'.

That wonderful word 'catawampus' is often used in the central and
southern parts of the USA to mean the same thing, though it can
also refer to something that's askew, crooked, out of shape, or out
of joint. The first part of it comes from the same source, though
the second half is mysterious. It has been suggested its source is
the Scots dialect verb 'wampish', to brandish, flourish or wave
about. However, 'catawampus' can also refer to something ferocious,
impressive or remarkable. It may be this is an entirely separate
sense, deriving from 'catamount' for the mountain lion or cougar.

                        -----------

Q. Do you know the meaning and origin of the phrase 'when the sun
has crossed over the yardarm'? I have heard it said when it's lunch
time and okay to have an alcoholic beverage.  [Nora Kelly, Canada]

A. That's the usual naval meaning, though landlubbers have tended
to use it for the early evening, after-work period from about 5pm
onwards. It turns up in various forms, of which the shorter 'the
sun's over the yardarm' is probably the most common, but one also
sees 'not till the sun's over the yardarm' as an injunction, or
perhaps a warning.

The yardarms on a sailing ship are the horizontal timbers or spars
mounted on the masts, from which the square sails are hung. (The
word 'yard' here is from an old Germanic word for a pointed stick,
the source also of our unit of measurement.) At certain times of
year it will seem from the deck that the sun has risen far enough
up the sky that it is above the topmost yardarm. In summer in the
north Atlantic, where the phrase seems to have originated, this
would have been at about 11am, just the time when officers had
their official forenoon break. It appears that officers in sailing
ships adopted a custom of waiting until this time before taking
their first alcoholic drink of the day.

My impression is that the phrase is becoming rare, which is hardly
surprising since the days of sail are so far behind us. Despite its
apparent antiquity, the phrase wasn't recorded in print until the
end of the nineteenth century.

                        -----------

Q. I am not familiar with the term 'cock-up' that you used in a
recent column, and am interested in both its meaning and its
derivation. It is not a phrase that is commonly used in the United
States - indeed, it has connotations that would keep many from
using it in a column read by so many subscribers! [Marian Herman,
USA; related questions came from Richard Lathom in the USA, Anne
Ackroyd in Australia, and others]

A. Oddly, in British English it is not these days a vulgarism, or
at least only a very mild one. It comes from one of several senses
of 'cock', to bend at an angle, as in - for example - cocking a gun
or turning up the brim of one's headgear (so producing an old-time
naval officer's 'cocked hat'). The use of 'cock-up' to mean a
blunder or error was originally British military slang dating from
the 1920s. The slang sense of 'cock' clearly had a lot to do with
its adoption, but this hasn't stopped it being used in respectable
publications, and modern British dictionaries mark it merely as
informal or colloquial. The longer phrase I used it in, "a cock-up
on the [something] front" was coined in a BBC television comedy
_The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin_ some 20 years ago and has
become a minor catchphrase. The original was "there's been a bit of
a cock-up on the catering front", which was spoken by a former army
officer, not over-blessed with savvy, who was totally confused by
civilian life and had either forgotten to buy any food, or run out
of money to do so. [I'm indebted to Nigel Rees for confirming the
provenance of this catchphrase.]


4. Weird Words: Whilom  /'wVIl at m/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
An adjective meaning former.

This adjective is one of three - the others being 'erstwhile' and
'quondam' - all with the same meaning. They are equally strange and
un-English in appearance. But 'whilom' is probably the weirdest of
the set, and also the least used, to the extent that I had trouble
finding a contemporary example. Here's an older one, from J M
Barrie's book _The Little White Bird_ of 1903: "Whom did I see but
the whilom nursery governess sitting on a chair in one of these
gardens", meaning that the lady had once been a governess, but was
one no longer. The word dates to Old English, at a time when the
language was heavily inflected - adjectives, nouns, and verbs
taking different endings depending on the job they were doing.
'Whilom' - then spelt 'hwilom' - was the dative plural of 'hwil',
the same word as our modern 'while'. As English progressively lost
its inflections, the word became a fossil, with its ending stuck to
it permanently; at the same time the meaning shifted to mean
something of a former time, a change that was complete by the
fifteenth century.


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From words at QUINION.COM  Sat Mar 18 03:36:08 2000
From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2000 08:36:08 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 18 Mar 00
Message-ID: <SAT.18.MAR.2000.083608.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 182          Saturday 18 March 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 8,000 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>
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Weird Words: Flabbergasted.
2. Turns of Phrase: Hydrogen economy.
3. News: OED goes online.
4. Q & A: Stationary/stationery, Apple of one's eye, Rod.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Weird Words: Flabbergasted
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To be surprised or astonished.

The British comedian Frankie Howerd used to say in mock surprise:
"I'm flabbergasted - never has my flabber been so gasted!". That's
about as good an explanation for the origin of this word as you're
likely to get. It turns up first in print in 1772, in an article on
new words in the _Annual Register_. The writer couples two
fashionable terms: "Now we are 'flabbergasted' and 'bored' from
morning to night". ('Bored' - being wearied by something tedious -
had appeared only a few years earlier.) Presumably some unsung
genius had put together 'flabber' and 'aghast' to make one word.

The source of the first part is obscure. It might be linked to
'flabby', suggesting that somebody is so astonished that they shake
like a jelly. It can't be connected with 'flapper', in the sense of
a person who fusses or panics, as some have suggested, as that
sense only emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. But
'flabbergasted' could have been an existing dialect word, as one
early nineteenth-century writer claimed to have found it in Suffolk
dialect and another - in the form 'flabrigast' -  in Perthshire.
Further than this, nobody can go with any certainty.


2. Turns of Phrase: Hydrogen economy
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The principle is simple enough: use the energy of the sun to split
water into its component oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen becomes
a storable fuel that can be used when needed to run fuel cells;
these will provide electricity and power vehicles. The only waste
product of the fuel cells is pure water. It sounds a perfect
solution to the problems of pollution and global warming caused by
the burning of oil and coal, not to mention the exhaustion of the
oil reserves that must come one day. But making it work has been
far from easy, success requiring - among others things - cheap
capture of solar energy and efficient fuel cells. The concept has
been in being for many years, though the name 'hydrogen economy'
for a society based on it is less than a decade old. The concept
has only started to look practicable in recent years, based in part
on research that has been boosted by measures like California's
zero-emission policies and related initiatives from the European
Union. Iceland has recently decided to become the world's first
'hydrogen economy' and this initiative has brought the phrase to
wider notice.

The Icelandic government is working with the two companies to
change its fishing fleet over to hydrogen and has launched a plan
to convert the country entirely to a 'hydrogen economy' over the
next two decades.
                               [_Independent on Sunday_, Jan. 2000]

Mike Brown ... voices deep frustration over Canada's failure to see
the fuel cell and the hydrogen economy as a way for Canada to make
a mark in the world.
                                        [_Toronto Star_, Jan. 2000]


3. News: OED goes online
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The complete Oxford English Dictionary went online on 14 March 2000
as a subscription service. Because I work for the OED part-time as
a reader, and am also currently engaged on another project with the
Oxford University Press, I'm scarcely an objective observer, but I
can't let this milestone pass without comment.

The OED was among the first large reference works to be available
on CD-ROM, eight years ago. Now it has embraced the World Wide Web
and in the process fundamentally revised the way it updates itself.
The site contains the full text of the Second Edition of 1989, plus
the 10,000 new entries that have been added since (mostly published
in three Additions Volumes, a series that is now discontinued) plus
the first group of formal updates to the dictionary, a thousand
entries in the range M-MAH.

Further such sets will be added four times a year, until the whole
dictionary has been revised, at which point - about 2010 - the
Third Edition will be published in various media. So the Web site
is not only a valuable reference tool, but also a snapshot of work
in progress. John Simpson, its Chief Editor, says that "OED Online
will *be* the Dictionary in future. I am sure it will be the version
that most people will consult". He also says that "the OED in
traditional book form is by no means out of the question", but it
is clear the OED considers its future to be electronic.

The site is not really intended for individuals, as the personal
annual subscription rate of GBP350 (about US$550) attests. So,
unless you're well-heeled or desperate for the updated entries, as
an individual you would be much better off getting the OED on CD-
ROM (currently priced at GBP250). The institutional subscriptions
start at GBP400 and go up to GBP1000 (US$1600) if unlimited access
is required, suggesting that many universities and colleges can
afford to make the site available to students and faculty.

[OED Online, <http://www.oed.com>. As a visitor you can see the
word of the day (and the standard page style) by clicking on the
top right button in the opening screen, or by pointing your browser
at <http://www.oed.com/wordofday.htm>.]


4. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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 remember learning the difference between 'stationary' (not
moving) and 'stationery' (letterhead, envelopes, etc.) and even
figured out a mnemonic device - the 'e' is for 'envelope'. But is
there actually any significance to the similarity of the two words
- is there something stationary about stationery? [Julane Marx,
USA]

A. There is indeed. The words come from the same source, the Latin
'stationarius', for a person who was based at a military station.
In medieval times a 'stationarius' was a trader who had a fixed
station - a shop - rather than travelling from fair to fair, like a
pedlar. These were usually booksellers (whose stock was too bulky
to be carried about) and were mostly linked to the medieval
universities, which is why such an elevated Latin word came to be
attached to them. It became 'stationer' in English, a form that's
recorded from the fourteenth century.

Such traders dealt in everything to do with books, not merely
selling them but copying and binding them and selling related
materials such as paper, pens and ink. This was well before the
days of printing from moveable type, remember: every book had to be
copied by hand. So the materials for doing so were as important to
the trade as the finished article. Inevitably, the introduction of
printing caused the stationer's business to change radically. By
the seventeenth century the term 'bookseller' had come in for the
trader in finished books, leaving 'stationer' for the seller of
writing materials.

The obsolete meaning is preserved in the name of the Stationers'
Company (these days the Stationers' and Newspaper Makers' Company),
one of the ancient City of London livery companies, which has
always been a trade guild of booksellers and publishers. From 1557
to 1694 it controlled the production of printed books, and even
down to 1911 it supervised copyrights, which is why old British
books are marked as being "registered at Stationers' Hall".

'Stationery', as a general term for the things sold, appeared in
the eighteenth century. There was much confusion about spelling in
the early days, since 'stationary' as an adjective for things that
don't move about had been in the language for about a hundred
years. But by the middle of the century a clear distinction had
appeared, based on the logic that what a 'stationer' sold had to be
stuff called 'stationery'.

                        -----------

Q. I really like your site and hope you can, at some future time,
post the origin of the phrase 'apple of one's eye'. [Alec MacLeod]

A. This evocative phrase turns up both in the Bible: "He kept him
as the apple of his eye" (Deuteronomy), and in Shakespeare: "Flower
of this purple dye, / Hit with Cupid's archery, / Sink in apple of
his eye", (_A Midsummer Night's Dream_). But it's older than either
of these, almost as old as the language itself, since the first
recorded examples can be found in the works of King Alfred at the
end of the ninth century.

At this time, the pupil of the eye was thought to be a solid object
and was actually called the apple, presumably because an apple was
the most common globular object around. So 'the apple of one's eye'
was at first a literal phrase describing the pupil. Because sight
was so precious, someone who was called this as an endearment was
similarly precious, and the phrase took on the figurative sense we
retain. King Alfred actually uses it in this way, and presumably it
wasn't new then.

Our modern word 'pupil', by the way, is from Latin and didn't
appear in English until the sixteenth century. It's figurative in
origin, too, though in a much more self-obsessed way. The Latin
original was 'pupilla', a little doll, which is a diminutive form
of 'pupus', boy, or 'pupa', girl (the source also for our other
sense of pupil to mean a schoolchild.) It was applied to the dark
central portion of the eye within the iris because of the tiny
image of oneself, like a puppet or marionette, that one can see
when looking into another person's eye.

                        -----------

Q. When reading American Western History written by people of that
period you will run into the word 'rod', used in reference to
distance. For example: "After drinking a bottle of Indian whiskey
he was unable to walk even a rod". What is the measurement of a
rod? Where did the term come from? [Nichole]

A. A rod is indeed a unit of measurement, 16.5 feet or 5.5 yards.
It is also known as a pole or - especially in the USA - a perch, so
leading to that euphonious set of measurements that were printed on
the back of every child's exercise book when I was young: "rod,
pole or perch", which we used to delight in quoting, though none of
us had come across any of them in the real world.

The 'rod' was one of an important set of measures that were
subdivisions of the standard mile. Four rods equal one chain (22
yards - still the length of a British cricket pitch between the
stumps), 40 rods make one furlong and 320 rods equal one mile.

The name comes from the use of a rod as a measuring stick (quite a
big one, you may agree ...). It's first recorded in the fifteenth
century; 'pole' dates from about the same period. 'Perch' to many
people is the name of a fish, but in medieval English it also meant
much the same as 'pole', being derived via French from the Latin
'pertica' for a long staff or measuring rod (it's the same word as
the wooden rod your cage bird stands on).


5. Administration
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From words at QUINION.COM  Sat Mar 25 05:08:12 2000
From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2000 10:08:12 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 25 Mar 00
Message-ID: <SAT.25.MAR.2000.100812.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 183          Saturday 25 March 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 8,000 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>
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: M-commerce.
3. Weird Words: Jactitation.
4. Topical Words: Vegelate.
5. Q & A: Saved by the bell, Sea change, Lizzie Tish.
6. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Feedback
-------------------------------------------------------------------
HYDROGEN ECONOMY  I have coined Quinion's Law: "Any unsubstantiated
assertion about the provenance of a word or phrase will be refuted
instantly by a subscriber with special knowledge". This was a good
example. Dave Fox pointed out that Arthur C Clarke uses the phrase
in his novel _Imperial Earth_ (published in 1975) and Brian Hayes
found an even earlier example in _Scientific American_ for January
1973.

PERCH  Patricia Norton wrote to mention the survival until fairly
recent times of the word as a unit of area for housing plots in New
Zealand: 160 perches make an acre. And while I'm on the subject,
completists might like to note that a perch is also an old volume
measure for masonry: 24.75 cubic feet.


2. Turns of Phrase: M-commerce
-------------------------------------------------------------------
We've only just got used to lots of new forms beginning in 'e-' but
now 'm-' is starting to turn up - for 'mobile'. The advent of WAP
(Wireless Application Protocol) (see <http://www.quinion.com/words/
turnsofphrase/tp-wap1.htm>) and new systems for sending data to and
from mobile telephones at high speeds means Web-style electronic
commerce seems set to become available soon at a mobile phone near
your ear. It may look a very new term - and references to it in the
press have only really begun to accumulate since the middle of 1999
- but it has been recorded as far back as the mid nineties.

For all its hype, however, m-commerce remains in its infancy.
                        [_International Herald Tribune_, Feb. 2000]

Business is moving quickly on m-commerce for a number of reasons.
                                        [_Toronto Star_, Mar. 2000]


3. Weird Words: Jactitation  /dZaktI'teIS at n/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A restless tossing of the body in illness; a boastful or false
statement.

Of the two senses, you're more likely to encounter the first, as it
can still be found in medical writings; it can also refer to the
nervous twitching of a limb or muscle. It comes from an older word
'jactation' with the same meaning, which derives from the Latin
'jactare', to throw.

The other sense comes from the related Latin 'jactitare', to throw
out publicly or to say in public. This became the English term
'jactitation' for a public declaration or public or open
discussion. In _Tristram Shandy_, Laurence Sterne referred to "much
dispassionate enquiry and jactitation of the arguments on all
sides". The sense of boasting or bragging was often attached to the
word, and the even rarer 'jactator' means a boaster or braggart.

This sense is now pretty much dead in English, with its rare users
employing it only for humorous effect. However, 'jactitation' does
still sometimes occur in legal contexts to refer to a false
statement, picking up on the idea of boastfulness; in particular,
it survives in the term 'jactitation of marriage', a false
declaration that one is married to someone.


4. Topical Words: Vegelate
-------------------------------------------------------------------
It's not often that lexicographers can say of a recently created
word that it's already defunct (they mark it 'historical', but
that's what they mean). This rare situation has arisen with one
that has had a good run in the corridors and debating chambers of
the European Union, but has finally been laid to rest.

Some European countries greatly dislike British milk chocolate, in
their view a bastard concoction that ought not to stand alongside
the glories of the product from Belgium and France (the Swiss make
chocolate, of course, but they're not in the EU). British chocolate
makers not only put more milk in it, but add up to 5% vegetable fat
to the cocoa butter.

When Britain joined the European Union in 1973, it secured an opt-
out from the Cocoa and Chocolate Products Directive that prohibited
such practices. But ever since, it has been very difficult to sell
British chocolate in Europe.

As part of their fight against accepting it, European chocolatiers
argued that British chocolate didn't deserve even to be called by
that name. Various alternatives were put forward, such as
'industrial chocolate', 'vegetable fat milk chocolate' or a German
word that roughly translates as 'fat glazed'. But a suggestion from
France in the mid 1980s, the word 'vegelate', became the term
preferred by the continental campaigners (it had nothing to do with
that Australian delicacy 'vegemite', nor with 'veg out', nor a verb
describing an unnatural act with a vegetable; it was the mirror in
language of the British chocolate-makers' supposed sins: a blend of
'vegetable' with 'chocolate').

To cut a long story short, the debate went on for more than two
decades, until the European Commission eventually ruled on the
matter of chocolate harmonisation as part of its review of the
Directive. (Despite what the British press has often said, it has
never been EU policy to use the word 'vegelate'; it's Euromyth No
18 in the list maintained by the Commission in London.)

The European Parliament last week ratified the revised Directive,
which says our home-grown product may be sold throughout Europe,
provided that the presence of vegetable fat is shown on the label
and it's tagged as 'family milk chocolate' (or its equivalent in
other European languages: 'Hauschaltsmilchshokolade' in German, or
in French 'chocolat de menage au lait', household milk chocolate,
which somehow suggests you can consume it only among consenting
adults in private).

Problem finally solved, after 27 years and a lot of bureaucratic
wrangling. And 'vegelate' is no more. It is an ex-word.


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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. A lot of people - including Mike Whitling and Lisa Smith from
the USA and Barrie J Wright from Australia - have asked me about
the truth of the statements in the following piece, part of a
longer one that's been making the e-mail rounds in recent months:

'England is old and small and they started running out of places to
bury people. So, they would dig up coffins and would take their
bones to a house and re-use the grave. In reopening these coffins,
one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the
inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So
they thought they would tie a string on their wrist and lead it
through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell.
Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night to listen
for the bell. Hence on the "graveyard shift" they would know that
someone was "saved by the bell", or he was a "dead ringer".'


A. You may not be pleased to hear that all this is complete and
utter hogwash, just like the rest of the article it appears in.
It's an example of a fascinating process (from a sociolinguistic
perspective, that is) in which people actively seek out stories to
explain phrases, not really caring whether they are true, merely
that they are psychologically satisfying. As a result, they are
powerful memes, strongly resisting refutation. But World Wide Words
is renowned as the home of lost causes, so I'll give it a go.

'Saved by the bell' is actually boxing slang, dating from the
1930s. A contestant being counted out might be saved by the ringing
of the bell for the end of the round, giving him three minutes to
recover. 'Graveyard shift' is an evocative term for the night shift
between about midnight and eight in the morning, when - no matter
how often you've worked it - your skin is clammy, there's sand
behind your eyeballs, and the world is creepily silent, like the
graveyard (sailors similarly know the 'graveyard watch', the
midnight to four a.m. stint). The phrase dates only from the early
years of the twentieth century. The third phrase - 'dead ringer' -
dates from roughly the same period or perhaps a decade or two
earlier. I've written about it previously, so won't explain it
again. See <http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-rin1.htm> if you
want details.

So none of these expressions has anything to do with the burying of
bodies.

                        -----------

Q. The phrase 'sea change' appears frequently in both books and
newspapers, and the only definition I've been able to find for it
is that it is a transformation. How did the phrase come about and
why? [Dave Donnelly, Hawaii]

A. The phrase is a quotation from Shakespeare. It comes from
Ariel's wonderfully evocative song in _The Tempest_:

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Shakespeare obviously meant that the transformation of the body of
Ferdinand's father was made by the sea, but we have come to refer
to a 'sea change' as being a profound transformation caused by any
agency. So pundits and commentators who think it has something to
do with the ebb and flow of the tide, and use it for a minor or
recurrent shift in policy or opinion, are doing a grave injustice
to one of the most evocative phrases in the language. I wish a
figurative full fathom five to such people.

The point at which it stopped being a direct quotation and turned
into an idiom is hard to pin down, though it seems to have happened
only in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The _Oxford
English Dictionary_ finds the first allusive use in one of Ezra
Pound's poems from 1917. But examples can be found a little earlier
than that, as in _The Great White Wall_ by Julian Hawthorne, dated
1877: "Three centuries ago, according to my porter, a sea-change
happened here which really deserves to be called strange". And it's
odd that it seems to be a rare example of a hyphenated phrase
that's losing its hyphen: all the modern dictionaries I've
consulted have it as two words with not a hyphen in sight.

                        -----------

Q. We (three senior citizens) are trying to find the origin of the
phrase 'lizzie tish'. We all remember our mothers calling us that,
but haven't a clue where it came from. We are all from different
ethnic backgrounds, two from New York and one from Connecticut, and
are sure we heard it sometime in the 1940s. Can you find any
reference to this so we can stop thinking about it? It is driving
us nuts, like an itch that you can't reach. [Lucille Zolty]

A. I can relieve your itch. You can't find the original because
your version is a spoonerism. Why or when it became inverted, I've
no way of knowing, but most of the references I can find also have
it as Lizzie Tish. But the original was certainly Tizzie Lish, a
character played by Bill Comstock on the radio show _Al Pearce and
His Gang_. The show began on KFRC in San Francisco in 1929 but
moved to NBC in 1933, where it continued until 1947. Tizzie was
usually all of a dither and she would proceed to dictate very bad
recipes, insisting that listeners find a pencil and paper to write
them down.

I don't usually answer questions about old radio shows, but Tizzy
Lish seems to be linguistically significant. Our word 'tizzy' for
being in a state of nervous excitement, agitation or worry is
recorded first in the US in 1935 and almost certainly comes from -
or at least was popularised by - the radio character. (It was also
once a nickname for a coin, the old British sixpence, but nobody
thinks that had anything to do with the matter.)


6. Administration
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From words at QUINION.COM  Sat Mar  4 08:12:43 2000
From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion)
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 08:12:43 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 04 March 00
Message-ID: <SAT.4.MAR.2000.081243.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 180           Saturday 4 March 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 7,900 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>
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Notes and feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Fashionista.
3. Weird Words: Rhadamanthine.
4. Q & A: Fine fettle, Boycott, Grass widow.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Notes and feedback
-------------------------------------------------------------------
DECADE  Some time ago, I wrote a piece about a survey that asked
about names for the decade that is upon us. Since then I've seen
newspaper references to it as the Noughts and the Zeroes. In order
to update the piece, I'd be very interested to hear words for the
decade that subscribers come across, if at all possible with full
details of source and date.


2. Turns of Phrase: Fashionista
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a gently sarcastic term for a person who is an enthusiast
for fashion. It covers not only the dedicated followers of fashion
who wear the clothes, but also those who write about them. And it
can refer to those who design, make, model and publicise clothes,
and the fashion buyers whose decisions determine the success of a
collection.

I'm told by researchers at the _Oxford English Dictionary_ that it
goes back to 1993, to a book by Stephen Fried entitled _Thing of
Beauty: the Tragedy of Supermodel Gia_. The word began to become
more widely popular from about 1998 onwards, has just started to
appear in dictionaries, and looks set to become a permanent part of
the language.

It's formed from 'fashion' by adding the suffix '-ista' from
Spanish, equivalent to our '-ist' ending. English has comparatively
recently borrowed this from familiar Spanish-language terms such as
'Sandinista' and 'Peronista'. Such words have often had negative
associations in English and new words using the suffix are usually
derogatory, like 'Blairista' for a supporter of the British prime
minister, Tony Blair. 'Fashionista' was one of this type, and it
has not yet entirely lost its disparaging associations with
triviality.

Last week I finally realized that no matter how hard I try, I'll
never be a true fashionista - one of those guys and gals who can
stumble out of a swamp covered with leeches and still look like a
million bucks.
                         [_Denver Rocky Mountain News_, Sept. 1999]

As founder and editorial director of Wallpaper magazine, the style
and design bible for the fashionista, he is a man on first-name
terms with good taste.
                                     [_Daily Telegraph_, Feb. 2000]


3. Weird Words: Rhadamanthine
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Rigorously just and severe.

We are taught less about the classics than we once were, so the
name of Rhadamanthus (sometimes spelt Rhadamanthys) probably rings
few bells. In Greek mythology, he was the son of Zeus and Europa,
brother to King Minos of Crete and (in some versions of the tale),
Prince Sarpedon of Lycia. In life he was renowned for his wisdom
and justice. When he died, according to Plato, he went to Elysium,
where the most favoured mortals were chosen by the gods to stay
eternally, and there became ruler and judge. Together with Minos
and Aeacus, he decided the fate of everyone who was brought before
him - whether to live forever in Elysium, or be banished to the
underworld - and in judging was able to detect all the sins of
one's life, no matter how well hidden. So Rhadamanthus became a
byword for justice in its most severe and rigorous form. Here's an
example of its use, from _The Egoist_ by George Meredith: "As to
the sentence he pronounces, I am unable to speak, but his forehead
is Rhadamanthine condemnation".


4. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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 do, indeed, feel in fine fettle today. However, a young friend
asked where the word 'fettle' came from as she had never heard of
it. It seems 'fettle' is always used with 'fine' and I realize now
I have never heard it expressed in any other way. If you have the
time I shall appreciate learning its origin. [Pat Cagle]

A. These days, you're indeed likely only to hear 'fettle' when it's
shackled to 'fine' to make a set phrase. It's a fossil, left over
from a time when the word was better known. The repeated initial
letter undoubtedly helped stick them together, which is why you
only rarely (if ever) hear of something in 'good fettle' or 'bad
fettle' or the like. Older works sometimes employ other modifiers:
in 'John Barleycorn' by Jack London, for example, there appears:
"Those fifty-one days of fine sailing and intense sobriety had put
me in splendid fettle".

The word was most typically used as a verb meaning to put things in
order, tidy up, arrange, or prepare. Here's an example, from Anne
Bronte's _Agnes Grey_ of 1847, in the Yorkshire dialect speech of a
servant: "But next day, afore I'd gotten fettled up - for indeed,
Miss, I'd no heart to sweeping an' fettling, an' washing pots; so I
sat me down i' th' muck - who should come in but Maister Weston!".
In northern English it can still have the sense of making or
repairing something. In Australia, a 'fettler' is a railway
maintenance worker, responsible for keeping the line in good shape.
It's also used in some manufacturing trades - in metal casting and
pottery it describes the process of knocking the rough edges off a
piece. But all of these are variants of the basic sense. So the
noun refers to condition, order or shape, and 'fine fettle' means
to be in good order or condition.

Its origins are a bit obscure. It seems to come from the Old
English 'fetel' for a belt, so the verb probably first had the
meaning of girding oneself up, as for a heavy task. It's related to
the German 'Fessel' for a chain or band, but not to the confusingly
similar 'fetter', which actually comes from the same root as
'foot'.

                        -----------

Q. I searched for the word 'boycott' on your site but could not
find anything. A television program recently said, I believe, that
it was about the Revolutionary War and the boycott of British
taxes. [Jennifer, USA]

A. Wrong period and wrong country, I'm afraid. No one who organised
a boycott at that time could have used the word, because it only
appeared in the language in 1880. It's an excellent example of an
eponym, a word based on a proper name, like wellington boots,
garibaldi biscuits or the mackintosh.

Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was an Englishman working in
Ireland. In the 1870s he was farming at Loughmask in County Mayo
and serving as a land agent for an absentee English landlord, Lord
Earne. This was the time of the campaign organised by the Irish
Land League for reform of the system of landholdings. In September
1880, protesting tenants demanded that Captain Boycott give them a
substantial reduction in their rents. He refused. Charles Stuart
Parnell, the President of the Land League, suggested in a speech
that the way to force Boycott to give way was for everyone in the
locality to refuse to have any dealings with him. Labourers would
not work for him, local shops stopped serving him (food had to be
brought in from elsewhere for him and his family), and he even had
great trouble getting his letters delivered. In the end, his crops
were harvested that autumn through the help of fifty volunteers
from the north of the country, who worked under the protection of
nine hundred soldiers.

The events aroused so much passion that his name became an instant
byword. It was first used - in our modern sense of collective and
organised ostracism - in the _Times_ of London in November 1880,
even while his crops were still being belatedly harvested; within
weeks it was everywhere. It was soon adopted by newspapers
throughout Europe, with versions of his name appearing in French,
German, Dutch and Russian. By the time of the Captain's death in
1897, it had become a standard part of the English language.

                        -----------

Q. Where does the term 'grass widow' come from, and why?
[Maryalice Shaw, USA]

A. The usual meaning given in British dictionaries is of a woman
whose husband is temporarily away, say on business. This sense is
known in other English-speaking communities such as Australia. It
has long been used in the USA in the rather different sense of "a
woman who is separated, divorced, or lives apart from her husband",
as the _Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary_ has it.

Some writers have suggested that it's actually a corruption of
'grace-widow'. But etymologists are quite sure that the first word
does in fact refer to the plant, because there are related words in
other European languages, such as 'Strohwitwe' in German (straw
widow) and 'grasweduwe' in Dutch, and the phrase has from earliest
times in English been recorded with 'grass' and not 'grace'.

Another theory is that it's slang from the British Raj for wives
sent away during the hot summer to the cooler (and greener) hill
stations while their husbands remained on duty in the plains. We
can trace this theory back to the famous Anglo-Indian dictionary
_Hobson-Jobson_ of 1886. It says that the term is applied "with a
shade of malignancy", a tantalisingly opaque comment.

The phrase itself is much older than British India. It's first used
by Sir Thomas More in his _Dialogue_ of 1528. But then it meant
something rather different: either an abandoned mistress or an
unmarried woman who had cohabited with several men. It might have
expressed the idea that the abandoned lover had been "put out to
grass". But it could conceivably have come from the same type of
origin as 'bastard'; this is from the Latin _bastum_ for a pack
saddle, suggesting a child born after a brief encounter on an
improvised bed, such as a packsaddle pillow, whose owner had gone
by morning. Could the grass in 'grass widow' refer to surreptitious
love-making in the fields rather than indoors, or the straw in a
barn used for an illicit tryst?

Our modern meaning first turns up in the 1840s. It seems possible
that the term was applied derisively to Anglo-Indian wives sent
away for the summer (were there perhaps well-known opportunities
for hanky-panky in the hill stations?) and that it only gradually
took on the modern sense through a reinterpretation of 'grass' to
mean the green landscape of the hills. That could explain the
"shade of malignancy" comment in _Hobson-Jobson_, though it says
tactfully about the older senses of the word that "no such
opprobrious meanings attach to the Indian use".


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From words at QUINION.COM  Sat Mar 11 08:39:04 2000
From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion)
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 08:39:04 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 11 Mar 00
Message-ID: <SAT.11.MAR.2000.083904.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 181          Saturday 11 March 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 8,000 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>
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Turns of Phrase: Hypernova.
2. Topical Words: Facile.
3. Q & A: Kitty-corner, Over the yardarm, Cock-up.
4. Weird Words: Whilom.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Turns of Phrase: Hypernova
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sometimes the 'super-' prefix just isn't extravagant enough, or
it's been used already, or linguistic inflation has set in. This
term seems to be a product of all three, since it is an even more
spectacular cosmic event than the well-known 'supernova'. But
perhaps the superlative is warranted in this case, as the last such
event spotted from Earth was widely reported as being so intense
that if it had happened near to us we would have fried (luckily, it
actually happened long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away). Such
cataclysmic explosions - the biggest bangs since the Big Bang, NASA
called them, with perhaps permissible overstatement - are about a
hundred times as powerful as the biggest supernovae and may be
caused by the total collapse of a very large star. The concept was
put forward by Bohdan Paczynski of Princeton University in 1997 as
a possible origin of intense bursts of gamma rays that have been
observed by space-borne detectors since the 1970s (he seems also to
have coined the word 'hypernova'). In January 1999 the source of
one was seen for the first time as it was happening.

By this time, theorists had built up a picture in which GRBs
[gamma-ray bursters] result from the collision of two high-density
neutron stars or from a 'hypernova' - the total collapse of a very
massive star.
                                             [_Science_, Mar. 1999]

Really big stars such as Eta Carinae may go out in an even more
spectacular explosion called a hypernova. Such a hypernova could
produce another phenomenon known as a gamma-ray burster, which
sends powerful gamma radiation out into space.
                            [_Minneapolis Star Tribune_, Jun. 1999]


2. Topical Words: Facile
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A job advertisement from a Scottish university this week asked that
applicants should be "facile with numerical programming". It was
obvious enough in context that the university wanted researchers
who were good enough at it that they found it easy. Unfortunately,
the writer of the ad was almost certainly better at mathematics
than he was at English.

'Facile' has two main meanings. The much less common meaning, the
one the university was employing, is the older of the two. It means
something that's easy to understand, or easily accomplished. At one
time it could even imply that a person had good manners, or was
courteous or affable - in other words someone whose behaviour was
easy or effortless.

The word, and its positive senses, came to us through Middle French
from the Latin 'facilis' (so the word is closely connected to our
'facilitate' and 'facility'). When applied to things 'facilis'
meant they were easy to do, but applied to people it meant pliant
or courteous. It first appeared in English in an early printed
book, Caxton's translation of the _Fables of Aesop_ of 1483.

As always, something thought to be easy was valued accordingly: if
it was easy, it couldn't be important or valuable. So a second
meaning grew up, a derogatory one which is now often the first to
be cited in dictionaries: something glib that's superficially
convincing but actually simplistic. If you speak these days of a
man with a facile intellect, you're most likely to be saying that
he is shallow of mind and specious of opinion. As an echo of the
original Latin, it can also mean somebody who is markedly pliant,
easily convinced or swayed by the views of others.

Curiously, only two of my many style guides warn about this word.
The second edition of Fowler does (though the third doesn't). But
Geoffrey Howard is very firm in _The Good English Guide_: "Although
facile means easy and without effort, it always carries with it the
negative meaning of superficial ... facile should never be used in
a complimentary sense". Perhaps the other guides are so certain
this is known they don't feel they need to mention it. But it seems
to have passed our ad writer by.

I wonder how many people will be tempted to apply, on the grounds
that their capabilities with regard to numerical programming are,
indeed, as facile as anyone could ask for? That could be a problem
for the selection board.


3. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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 heard an American friend of mine use the phrase 'kitty
corner' to describe things that are diagonally opposed, as for
example: "The drugstore is kitty corner to the ice-cream parlor".
Have you heard this phrase before and do you have any clue as to
its origin? [Ian McAloon in the UK; Patricia P Miller also asked
about its origin.]

A. It's certainly a very odd-looking phrase. It has lots of variant
forms, such as 'catercorner', 'kitty-cornered', 'catty-cornered',
'cata-cornered', and 'cater-cornered', a sure sign that it puzzles
users.

The first part comes from the French word 'quatre', four. It's
actually quite an old expression that first appeared in English as
the name for the four in dice, soon Anglicised to 'cater'. The
standard placement of the four dots at the corners of a square
almost certainly introduced the idea of diagonals. From this came a
verb 'cater', to place something diagonally opposite another or to
move diagonally, which can be found in the sixteenth century. Some
English dialects had it as an adverb in compounds such as
'caterways' or 'caterwise'. By the early years of the nineteenth
century it was beginning to be recorded in the USA in the compound
form of 'cater-cornered'. It had by then lost any link with the
French word; people invented spellings in attempts to make sense of
it, often thinking it had something to do with cats, which is why
we have forms like 'kitty-corner'.

That wonderful word 'catawampus' is often used in the central and
southern parts of the USA to mean the same thing, though it can
also refer to something that's askew, crooked, out of shape, or out
of joint. The first part of it comes from the same source, though
the second half is mysterious. It has been suggested its source is
the Scots dialect verb 'wampish', to brandish, flourish or wave
about. However, 'catawampus' can also refer to something ferocious,
impressive or remarkable. It may be this is an entirely separate
sense, deriving from 'catamount' for the mountain lion or cougar.

                        -----------

Q. Do you know the meaning and origin of the phrase 'when the sun
has crossed over the yardarm'? I have heard it said when it's lunch
time and okay to have an alcoholic beverage.  [Nora Kelly, Canada]

A. That's the usual naval meaning, though landlubbers have tended
to use it for the early evening, after-work period from about 5pm
onwards. It turns up in various forms, of which the shorter 'the
sun's over the yardarm' is probably the most common, but one also
sees 'not till the sun's over the yardarm' as an injunction, or
perhaps a warning.

The yardarms on a sailing ship are the horizontal timbers or spars
mounted on the masts, from which the square sails are hung. (The
word 'yard' here is from an old Germanic word for a pointed stick,
the source also of our unit of measurement.) At certain times of
year it will seem from the deck that the sun has risen far enough
up the sky that it is above the topmost yardarm. In summer in the
north Atlantic, where the phrase seems to have originated, this
would have been at about 11am, just the time when officers had
their official forenoon break. It appears that officers in sailing
ships adopted a custom of waiting until this time before taking
their first alcoholic drink of the day.

My impression is that the phrase is becoming rare, which is hardly
surprising since the days of sail are so far behind us. Despite its
apparent antiquity, the phrase wasn't recorded in print until the
end of the nineteenth century.

                        -----------

Q. I am not familiar with the term 'cock-up' that you used in a
recent column, and am interested in both its meaning and its
derivation. It is not a phrase that is commonly used in the United
States - indeed, it has connotations that would keep many from
using it in a column read by so many subscribers! [Marian Herman,
USA; related questions came from Richard Lathom in the USA, Anne
Ackroyd in Australia, and others]

A. Oddly, in British English it is not these days a vulgarism, or
at least only a very mild one. It comes from one of several senses
of 'cock', to bend at an angle, as in - for example - cocking a gun
or turning up the brim of one's headgear (so producing an old-time
naval officer's 'cocked hat'). The use of 'cock-up' to mean a
blunder or error was originally British military slang dating from
the 1920s. The slang sense of 'cock' clearly had a lot to do with
its adoption, but this hasn't stopped it being used in respectable
publications, and modern British dictionaries mark it merely as
informal or colloquial. The longer phrase I used it in, "a cock-up
on the [something] front" was coined in a BBC television comedy
_The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin_ some 20 years ago and has
become a minor catchphrase. The original was "there's been a bit of
a cock-up on the catering front", which was spoken by a former army
officer, not over-blessed with savvy, who was totally confused by
civilian life and had either forgotten to buy any food, or run out
of money to do so. [I'm indebted to Nigel Rees for confirming the
provenance of this catchphrase.]


4. Weird Words: Whilom  /'wVIl at m/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
An adjective meaning former.

This adjective is one of three - the others being 'erstwhile' and
'quondam' - all with the same meaning. They are equally strange and
un-English in appearance. But 'whilom' is probably the weirdest of
the set, and also the least used, to the extent that I had trouble
finding a contemporary example. Here's an older one, from J M
Barrie's book _The Little White Bird_ of 1903: "Whom did I see but
the whilom nursery governess sitting on a chair in one of these
gardens", meaning that the lady had once been a governess, but was
one no longer. The word dates to Old English, at a time when the
language was heavily inflected - adjectives, nouns, and verbs
taking different endings depending on the job they were doing.
'Whilom' - then spelt 'hwilom' - was the dative plural of 'hwil',
the same word as our modern 'while'. As English progressively lost
its inflections, the word became a fossil, with its ending stuck to
it permanently; at the same time the meaning shifted to mean
something of a former time, a change that was complete by the
fifteenth century.


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From words at QUINION.COM  Sat Mar 18 08:36:08 2000
From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion)
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2000 08:36:08 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 18 Mar 00
Message-ID: <SAT.18.MAR.2000.083608.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 182          Saturday 18 March 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 8,000 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>
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Weird Words: Flabbergasted.
2. Turns of Phrase: Hydrogen economy.
3. News: OED goes online.
4. Q & A: Stationary/stationery, Apple of one's eye, Rod.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Weird Words: Flabbergasted
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To be surprised or astonished.

The British comedian Frankie Howerd used to say in mock surprise:
"I'm flabbergasted - never has my flabber been so gasted!". That's
about as good an explanation for the origin of this word as you're
likely to get. It turns up first in print in 1772, in an article on
new words in the _Annual Register_. The writer couples two
fashionable terms: "Now we are 'flabbergasted' and 'bored' from
morning to night". ('Bored' - being wearied by something tedious -
had appeared only a few years earlier.) Presumably some unsung
genius had put together 'flabber' and 'aghast' to make one word.

The source of the first part is obscure. It might be linked to
'flabby', suggesting that somebody is so astonished that they shake
like a jelly. It can't be connected with 'flapper', in the sense of
a person who fusses or panics, as some have suggested, as that
sense only emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. But
'flabbergasted' could have been an existing dialect word, as one
early nineteenth-century writer claimed to have found it in Suffolk
dialect and another - in the form 'flabrigast' -  in Perthshire.
Further than this, nobody can go with any certainty.


2. Turns of Phrase: Hydrogen economy
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The principle is simple enough: use the energy of the sun to split
water into its component oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen becomes
a storable fuel that can be used when needed to run fuel cells;
these will provide electricity and power vehicles. The only waste
product of the fuel cells is pure water. It sounds a perfect
solution to the problems of pollution and global warming caused by
the burning of oil and coal, not to mention the exhaustion of the
oil reserves that must come one day. But making it work has been
far from easy, success requiring - among others things - cheap
capture of solar energy and efficient fuel cells. The concept has
been in being for many years, though the name 'hydrogen economy'
for a society based on it is less than a decade old. The concept
has only started to look practicable in recent years, based in part
on research that has been boosted by measures like California's
zero-emission policies and related initiatives from the European
Union. Iceland has recently decided to become the world's first
'hydrogen economy' and this initiative has brought the phrase to
wider notice.

The Icelandic government is working with the two companies to
change its fishing fleet over to hydrogen and has launched a plan
to convert the country entirely to a 'hydrogen economy' over the
next two decades.
                               [_Independent on Sunday_, Jan. 2000]

Mike Brown ... voices deep frustration over Canada's failure to see
the fuel cell and the hydrogen economy as a way for Canada to make
a mark in the world.
                                        [_Toronto Star_, Jan. 2000]


3. News: OED goes online
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The complete Oxford English Dictionary went online on 14 March 2000
as a subscription service. Because I work for the OED part-time as
a reader, and am also currently engaged on another project with the
Oxford University Press, I'm scarcely an objective observer, but I
can't let this milestone pass without comment.

The OED was among the first large reference works to be available
on CD-ROM, eight years ago. Now it has embraced the World Wide Web
and in the process fundamentally revised the way it updates itself.
The site contains the full text of the Second Edition of 1989, plus
the 10,000 new entries that have been added since (mostly published
in three Additions Volumes, a series that is now discontinued) plus
the first group of formal updates to the dictionary, a thousand
entries in the range M-MAH.

Further such sets will be added four times a year, until the whole
dictionary has been revised, at which point - about 2010 - the
Third Edition will be published in various media. So the Web site
is not only a valuable reference tool, but also a snapshot of work
in progress. John Simpson, its Chief Editor, says that "OED Online
will *be* the Dictionary in future. I am sure it will be the version
that most people will consult". He also says that "the OED in
traditional book form is by no means out of the question", but it
is clear the OED considers its future to be electronic.

The site is not really intended for individuals, as the personal
annual subscription rate of GBP350 (about US$550) attests. So,
unless you're well-heeled or desperate for the updated entries, as
an individual you would be much better off getting the OED on CD-
ROM (currently priced at GBP250). The institutional subscriptions
start at GBP400 and go up to GBP1000 (US$1600) if unlimited access
is required, suggesting that many universities and colleges can
afford to make the site available to students and faculty.

[OED Online, <http://www.oed.com>. As a visitor you can see the
word of the day (and the standard page style) by clicking on the
top right button in the opening screen, or by pointing your browser
at <http://www.oed.com/wordofday.htm>.]


4. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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 remember learning the difference between 'stationary' (not
moving) and 'stationery' (letterhead, envelopes, etc.) and even
figured out a mnemonic device - the 'e' is for 'envelope'. But is
there actually any significance to the similarity of the two words
- is there something stationary about stationery? [Julane Marx,
USA]

A. There is indeed. The words come from the same source, the Latin
'stationarius', for a person who was based at a military station.
In medieval times a 'stationarius' was a trader who had a fixed
station - a shop - rather than travelling from fair to fair, like a
pedlar. These were usually booksellers (whose stock was too bulky
to be carried about) and were mostly linked to the medieval
universities, which is why such an elevated Latin word came to be
attached to them. It became 'stationer' in English, a form that's
recorded from the fourteenth century.

Such traders dealt in everything to do with books, not merely
selling them but copying and binding them and selling related
materials such as paper, pens and ink. This was well before the
days of printing from moveable type, remember: every book had to be
copied by hand. So the materials for doing so were as important to
the trade as the finished article. Inevitably, the introduction of
printing caused the stationer's business to change radically. By
the seventeenth century the term 'bookseller' had come in for the
trader in finished books, leaving 'stationer' for the seller of
writing materials.

The obsolete meaning is preserved in the name of the Stationers'
Company (these days the Stationers' and Newspaper Makers' Company),
one of the ancient City of London livery companies, which has
always been a trade guild of booksellers and publishers. From 1557
to 1694 it controlled the production of printed books, and even
down to 1911 it supervised copyrights, which is why old British
books are marked as being "registered at Stationers' Hall".

'Stationery', as a general term for the things sold, appeared in
the eighteenth century. There was much confusion about spelling in
the early days, since 'stationary' as an adjective for things that
don't move about had been in the language for about a hundred
years. But by the middle of the century a clear distinction had
appeared, based on the logic that what a 'stationer' sold had to be
stuff called 'stationery'.

                        -----------

Q. I really like your site and hope you can, at some future time,
post the origin of the phrase 'apple of one's eye'. [Alec MacLeod]

A. This evocative phrase turns up both in the Bible: "He kept him
as the apple of his eye" (Deuteronomy), and in Shakespeare: "Flower
of this purple dye, / Hit with Cupid's archery, / Sink in apple of
his eye", (_A Midsummer Night's Dream_). But it's older than either
of these, almost as old as the language itself, since the first
recorded examples can be found in the works of King Alfred at the
end of the ninth century.

At this time, the pupil of the eye was thought to be a solid object
and was actually called the apple, presumably because an apple was
the most common globular object around. So 'the apple of one's eye'
was at first a literal phrase describing the pupil. Because sight
was so precious, someone who was called this as an endearment was
similarly precious, and the phrase took on the figurative sense we
retain. King Alfred actually uses it in this way, and presumably it
wasn't new then.

Our modern word 'pupil', by the way, is from Latin and didn't
appear in English until the sixteenth century. It's figurative in
origin, too, though in a much more self-obsessed way. The Latin
original was 'pupilla', a little doll, which is a diminutive form
of 'pupus', boy, or 'pupa', girl (the source also for our other
sense of pupil to mean a schoolchild.) It was applied to the dark
central portion of the eye within the iris because of the tiny
image of oneself, like a puppet or marionette, that one can see
when looking into another person's eye.

                        -----------

Q. When reading American Western History written by people of that
period you will run into the word 'rod', used in reference to
distance. For example: "After drinking a bottle of Indian whiskey
he was unable to walk even a rod". What is the measurement of a
rod? Where did the term come from? [Nichole]

A. A rod is indeed a unit of measurement, 16.5 feet or 5.5 yards.
It is also known as a pole or - especially in the USA - a perch, so
leading to that euphonious set of measurements that were printed on
the back of every child's exercise book when I was young: "rod,
pole or perch", which we used to delight in quoting, though none of
us had come across any of them in the real world.

The 'rod' was one of an important set of measures that were
subdivisions of the standard mile. Four rods equal one chain (22
yards - still the length of a British cricket pitch between the
stumps), 40 rods make one furlong and 320 rods equal one mile.

The name comes from the use of a rod as a measuring stick (quite a
big one, you may agree ...). It's first recorded in the fifteenth
century; 'pole' dates from about the same period. 'Perch' to many
people is the name of a fish, but in medieval English it also meant
much the same as 'pole', being derived via French from the Latin
'pertica' for a long staff or measuring rod (it's the same word as
the wooden rod your cage bird stands on).


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From words at QUINION.COM  Sat Mar 25 10:08:12 2000
From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion)
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2000 10:08:12 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 25 Mar 00
Message-ID: <SAT.25.MAR.2000.100812.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 183          Saturday 25 March 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 8,000 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>
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: M-commerce.
3. Weird Words: Jactitation.
4. Topical Words: Vegelate.
5. Q & A: Saved by the bell, Sea change, Lizzie Tish.
6. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Feedback
-------------------------------------------------------------------
HYDROGEN ECONOMY  I have coined Quinion's Law: "Any unsubstantiated
assertion about the provenance of a word or phrase will be refuted
instantly by a subscriber with special knowledge". This was a good
example. Dave Fox pointed out that Arthur C Clarke uses the phrase
in his novel _Imperial Earth_ (published in 1975) and Brian Hayes
found an even earlier example in _Scientific American_ for January
1973.

PERCH  Patricia Norton wrote to mention the survival until fairly
recent times of the word as a unit of area for housing plots in New
Zealand: 160 perches make an acre. And while I'm on the subject,
completists might like to note that a perch is also an old volume
measure for masonry: 24.75 cubic feet.


2. Turns of Phrase: M-commerce
-------------------------------------------------------------------
We've only just got used to lots of new forms beginning in 'e-' but
now 'm-' is starting to turn up - for 'mobile'. The advent of WAP
(Wireless Application Protocol) (see <http://www.quinion.com/words/
turnsofphrase/tp-wap1.htm>) and new systems for sending data to and
from mobile telephones at high speeds means Web-style electronic
commerce seems set to become available soon at a mobile phone near
your ear. It may look a very new term - and references to it in the
press have only really begun to accumulate since the middle of 1999
- but it has been recorded as far back as the mid nineties.

For all its hype, however, m-commerce remains in its infancy.
                        [_International Herald Tribune_, Feb. 2000]

Business is moving quickly on m-commerce for a number of reasons.
                                        [_Toronto Star_, Mar. 2000]


3. Weird Words: Jactitation  /dZaktI'teIS at n/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A restless tossing of the body in illness; a boastful or false
statement.

Of the two senses, you're more likely to encounter the first, as it
can still be found in medical writings; it can also refer to the
nervous twitching of a limb or muscle. It comes from an older word
'jactation' with the same meaning, which derives from the Latin
'jactare', to throw.

The other sense comes from the related Latin 'jactitare', to throw
out publicly or to say in public. This became the English term
'jactitation' for a public declaration or public or open
discussion. In _Tristram Shandy_, Laurence Sterne referred to "much
dispassionate enquiry and jactitation of the arguments on all
sides". The sense of boasting or bragging was often attached to the
word, and the even rarer 'jactator' means a boaster or braggart.

This sense is now pretty much dead in English, with its rare users
employing it only for humorous effect. However, 'jactitation' does
still sometimes occur in legal contexts to refer to a false
statement, picking up on the idea of boastfulness; in particular,
it survives in the term 'jactitation of marriage', a false
declaration that one is married to someone.


4. Topical Words: Vegelate
-------------------------------------------------------------------
It's not often that lexicographers can say of a recently created
word that it's already defunct (they mark it 'historical', but
that's what they mean). This rare situation has arisen with one
that has had a good run in the corridors and debating chambers of
the European Union, but has finally been laid to rest.

Some European countries greatly dislike British milk chocolate, in
their view a bastard concoction that ought not to stand alongside
the glories of the product from Belgium and France (the Swiss make
chocolate, of course, but they're not in the EU). British chocolate
makers not only put more milk in it, but add up to 5% vegetable fat
to the cocoa butter.

When Britain joined the European Union in 1973, it secured an opt-
out from the Cocoa and Chocolate Products Directive that prohibited
such practices. But ever since, it has been very difficult to sell
British chocolate in Europe.

As part of their fight against accepting it, European chocolatiers
argued that British chocolate didn't deserve even to be called by
that name. Various alternatives were put forward, such as
'industrial chocolate', 'vegetable fat milk chocolate' or a German
word that roughly translates as 'fat glazed'. But a suggestion from
France in the mid 1980s, the word 'vegelate', became the term
preferred by the continental campaigners (it had nothing to do with
that Australian delicacy 'vegemite', nor with 'veg out', nor a verb
describing an unnatural act with a vegetable; it was the mirror in
language of the British chocolate-makers' supposed sins: a blend of
'vegetable' with 'chocolate').

To cut a long story short, the debate went on for more than two
decades, until the European Commission eventually ruled on the
matter of chocolate harmonisation as part of its review of the
Directive. (Despite what the British press has often said, it has
never been EU policy to use the word 'vegelate'; it's Euromyth No
18 in the list maintained by the Commission in London.)

The European Parliament last week ratified the revised Directive,
which says our home-grown product may be sold throughout Europe,
provided that the presence of vegetable fat is shown on the label
and it's tagged as 'family milk chocolate' (or its equivalent in
other European languages: 'Hauschaltsmilchshokolade' in German, or
in French 'chocolat de menage au lait', household milk chocolate,
which somehow suggests you can consume it only among consenting
adults in private).

Problem finally solved, after 27 years and a lot of bureaucratic
wrangling. And 'vegelate' is no more. It is an ex-word.


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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. A lot of people - including Mike Whitling and Lisa Smith from
the USA and Barrie J Wright from Australia - have asked me about
the truth of the statements in the following piece, part of a
longer one that's been making the e-mail rounds in recent months:

'England is old and small and they started running out of places to
bury people. So, they would dig up coffins and would take their
bones to a house and re-use the grave. In reopening these coffins,
one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the
inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So
they thought they would tie a string on their wrist and lead it
through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell.
Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night to listen
for the bell. Hence on the "graveyard shift" they would know that
someone was "saved by the bell", or he was a "dead ringer".'


A. You may not be pleased to hear that all this is complete and
utter hogwash, just like the rest of the article it appears in.
It's an example of a fascinating process (from a sociolinguistic
perspective, that is) in which people actively seek out stories to
explain phrases, not really caring whether they are true, merely
that they are psychologically satisfying. As a result, they are
powerful memes, strongly resisting refutation. But World Wide Words
is renowned as the home of lost causes, so I'll give it a go.

'Saved by the bell' is actually boxing slang, dating from the
1930s. A contestant being counted out might be saved by the ringing
of the bell for the end of the round, giving him three minutes to
recover. 'Graveyard shift' is an evocative term for the night shift
between about midnight and eight in the morning, when - no matter
how often you've worked it - your skin is clammy, there's sand
behind your eyeballs, and the world is creepily silent, like the
graveyard (sailors similarly know the 'graveyard watch', the
midnight to four a.m. stint). The phrase dates only from the early
years of the twentieth century. The third phrase - 'dead ringer' -
dates from roughly the same period or perhaps a decade or two
earlier. I've written about it previously, so won't explain it
again. See <http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-rin1.htm> if you
want details.

So none of these expressions has anything to do with the burying of
bodies.

                        -----------

Q. The phrase 'sea change' appears frequently in both books and
newspapers, and the only definition I've been able to find for it
is that it is a transformation. How did the phrase come about and
why? [Dave Donnelly, Hawaii]

A. The phrase is a quotation from Shakespeare. It comes from
Ariel's wonderfully evocative song in _The Tempest_:

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Shakespeare obviously meant that the transformation of the body of
Ferdinand's father was made by the sea, but we have come to refer
to a 'sea change' as being a profound transformation caused by any
agency. So pundits and commentators who think it has something to
do with the ebb and flow of the tide, and use it for a minor or
recurrent shift in policy or opinion, are doing a grave injustice
to one of the most evocative phrases in the language. I wish a
figurative full fathom five to such people.

The point at which it stopped being a direct quotation and turned
into an idiom is hard to pin down, though it seems to have happened
only in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The _Oxford
English Dictionary_ finds the first allusive use in one of Ezra
Pound's poems from 1917. But examples can be found a little earlier
than that, as in _The Great White Wall_ by Julian Hawthorne, dated
1877: "Three centuries ago, according to my porter, a sea-change
happened here which really deserves to be called strange". And it's
odd that it seems to be a rare example of a hyphenated phrase
that's losing its hyphen: all the modern dictionaries I've
consulted have it as two words with not a hyphen in sight.

                        -----------

Q. We (three senior citizens) are trying to find the origin of the
phrase 'lizzie tish'. We all remember our mothers calling us that,
but haven't a clue where it came from. We are all from different
ethnic backgrounds, two from New York and one from Connecticut, and
are sure we heard it sometime in the 1940s. Can you find any
reference to this so we can stop thinking about it? It is driving
us nuts, like an itch that you can't reach. [Lucille Zolty]

A. I can relieve your itch. You can't find the original because
your version is a spoonerism. Why or when it became inverted, I've
no way of knowing, but most of the references I can find also have
it as Lizzie Tish. But the original was certainly Tizzie Lish, a
character played by Bill Comstock on the radio show _Al Pearce and
His Gang_. The show began on KFRC in San Francisco in 1929 but
moved to NBC in 1933, where it continued until 1947. Tizzie was
usually all of a dither and she would proceed to dictate very bad
recipes, insisting that listeners find a pencil and paper to write
them down.

I don't usually answer questions about old radio shows, but Tizzy
Lish seems to be linguistically significant. Our word 'tizzy' for
being in a state of nervous excitement, agitation or worry is
recorded first in the US in 1935 and almost certainly comes from -
or at least was popularised by - the radio character. (It was also
once a nickname for a coin, the old British sixpence, but nobody
thinks that had anything to do with the matter.)


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