From words at QUINION.COM Sat May 6 03:43:30 2000 From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion) Date: Sat, 6 May 2000 08:43:30 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 06 May 00 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 189 Saturday 6 May 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent weekly to more than 8,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK Web: E-mail: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents -------- 1. Notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Captology. 3. Weird Words: Catoptromancy. 4. Q & A: Plurals in -en, Carpet, San fairy ann, Herb. 5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright. 1. Notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- BROUHAHA John Peter Maher wrote to say that he has done some work on the origins of 'brou' in French (with which, as I said last week, 'brouhaha' is linked). He suggests a more likely origin than the Hebrew greeting I mentioned may be bull baiting and it may be linked to the Italian or Spanish 'bravo'. He points to the French 'rabrouer', to taunt, as a connected term. LOVE BUG Not a single copy of that virus has arrived here. I feel deeply unloved (and very grateful). But that may also be because I've not been answering my mail as I should over the past week or so. Apologies to those still awaiting a reply. 2. Turns of Phrase: Captology ------------------------------------------------------------------- This word is still relatively rare outside a group of researchers in the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. The group studies the theory and design of the ways computing technology can be used to influence people. If you think that sounds a bit Big Brotherish, you are not altogether in error. The emphasis is on influencing people for good, for example to encourage healthy living or improve road safety, but the group is aware such methods could just as well be used for baser ends, such as persuading you to buy things, or to hand over personal data that could then be misused. To that end the group, led by Professor B J Fogg, is also studying the implications of the unreasoning trust that many of us put into computers because they are wrongly thought of as as being unaffected by human agency. The word was coined by Professor Fogg in 1996 as a partial acronym - from the initials of 'Computers As Persuasive Technology' - plus the ending '-ology' for a field of study. Someone engaged in the field is a 'captologist'. As pioneers of a nascent discipline called captology, Fogg and a handful of other visionaries are exploring the theory, design and analysis of computers and related technologies as instruments of persuasion. [_Electronic Engineering Times_, Jun. 1999] The class in captology (Computers as Persuasive Technology) is Stanford professor B. J. Fogg's brainchild, a new area of study into ways that computers are particularly useful in persuading people to change attitudes, buy certain products, or relinquish personal information. [_SF Weekly_, Apr. 2000] [I'm grateful to Don Chandler for telling me about this term.] 3. Weird Words: Catoptromancy /ka'tQptr@,mansI/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Divination by means of mirrors. "Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who is the fairest of them all?" At some time or other, almost anything you can think of has been used to foretell the future, from disembowelled chickens to straws on a red-hot iron. But the mirror, that most strange thing that allows not only reflection but self-reflection, has always been special. As a result there are many superstitions about mirrors - such that they must be covered or removed after a death to prevent the soul of the dead person from being stolen. In part it also explains why it is considered bad luck to break one (until modern times, they were also rare, so breaking one really was bad luck). There are records from many ancient civilisations of mirrors being used for magic, and some not so ancient: John Dee, the sixteenth- century English magician of the royal court, had a mirror made of a highly polished piece of coal. Fortune-tellers and magicians would use such stones, or perhaps polished metal mirrors or reflections in bowls of water to answer questions or predict the future. The word comes from the Greek word 'katoptron' for a mirror, plus 'manteia', divination. The same root appears in 'catoptrics', the part of optics that deals with reflection. 4. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Send queries to . 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 long been puzzled by the plural of 'ox'. Someone new to the language might conclude that 'foxen' is the plural of fox, or that 'chicken' means more than one chick. According to my Concise OED, the suffix '-en', among other things, forms the plural of "a few nouns such as children, oxen". However, I cannot find the noun 'childr' in any dictionary. What is the origin of this strange plural-making suffix? What other examples, if any, are there in addition to 'oxen'? [Charles Coon, Canada] A. English grammar a thousand years ago was more like that of modern German, with endings for the noun that varied according to the job it was doing in the sentence. There were about a dozen markers for the plural in all. As the language changed in the centuries after the Norman Conquest most of these were lost. The last survivors were '-s' and '-en', the two most common plural markers in the old language; for a while the two vied for supremacy. The rare plural forms like 'oxen' are left over from that period, with '-en' used for a very few words that fought off the encroachment of '-s' (the only other common one is 'brethren'). 'Children' is a special case. Though 'child' was one of the singular forms, another was 'childer', common in several English dialects. This should have had the plural 'childeren', but the first 'e' vanished, as it often does in unstressed syllables in the middle of words. In modern English we have ended up with the singular from one dialect but the plural from another. In 'chicken', the '-en' ending isn't a plural, but a diminutive, expressing small size or affection, which also turns up in 'kitten' and 'maiden'. ----------- Q. Why does the word 'carpet' mean three in English slang - as in a prison sentence of either three years or three months or, even, a three-pound bet? [John Abbeydale] A. To find the origins of this we have to delve into criminals' and prison slang. The first recorded use of 'carpet' for a prison sentence comes from the book _The Mark of the Broad Arrow_ by "No 77", published in 1903. He suggests that the word was then current prison slang for a six-months' sentence, with the usual term for a three-month one being 'drag'. However, he was either wrong or 'carpet' took over the latter's meaning. I suspect No 77 made a mistake, since 'carpet' came about as the result of a bit of rhyming slang: 'carpet-bag' = 'drag', implying that the two words have always meant the same thing. 'Drag' dates from near the end of the eighteenth century; J H Vaux said in his _Flash Dictionary_ in 1812 that 'drag' was the name given to robbing carts or wagons "of trunks, bale-goods, or any other property" (probably because they were heavy and had to be dragged about), and that 'done for a drag' meant that a thief had been convicted of such a crime, for which the penalty was three months in jail. Some people have said that a three-month sentence was called a 'carpet' because it took that long to make one in the prison workshop, but the rhyming slang joke on an existing usage makes more sense. (It doesn't ever seem to have meant so long a sentence as three years.) The word was later extended to other instances of the number three. These seem originally to have been Australian and include a sum of three pounds, or odds of three to one, or car dealers' slang for a sum of three hundred pounds. ----------- Q. What's the meaning and derivation of 'San Ferry Ann'? Apart from anything else it happens to be the title of a song by Paul McCartney. [John Cooper, Bermuda] A. When the British Tommy arrived in France to fight in the First World War, he was presented with a language he struggled to make sense of. What he did to the pronunciation of French and Belgian place names is a wonder, such as turning Ypres into Wipers. He picked up a lot of French expressions, but he changed them into something that sounded English. This was the fate of 'ca ne fait rien', "it does not matter", which became a British Army catch phrase in that war as an expression of resigned - or cynical - acceptance of some state of affairs, usually brought about by bungling officers. One English version of it was the one you quote, others were 'san fairy anna' and even 'send for Mary Ann', though perhaps 'san fairy ann' was the most common. It largely fell out of use after the War, and seems not to have been taken up by servicemen in the Second World War. ----------- Q. Although this is not strictly a word query, seeing that you mentioned the _Longman Pronunciation Dictionary_, I have wondered why on several American TV programmes, the characters pronounce the word 'herb' without the 'h'. Is this general or just a regional dialect? [Ian Harrison, South Africa] Q. It is standard American English; in a 1993 pronunciation survey quoted in the _Longman Pronunciation Dictionary_, 90% of Americans used the pronunciation without the 'h'. (They do, however, sound it in the proper name Herb.) It does sound odd to anybody from another English-language community; to drop the 'h' in British English, for example, would be classed as a solecism of the deepest hue, whereas in the USA it's the other way around. It's a good example of a type of linguistic conservatism sometimes found in American English. Until the sixteenth century the word was usually spelled 'erb' - the English got it from the French, who didn't say the first letter either. Right down to the nineteenth century, long after the 'h' had been added under later French influence, that was also the way it was said. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American colonists took this state of affairs with them. During the nineteenth century, British people began to sound the first letter, as a result of what linguists call a spelling pronunciation. So Americans kept the old pronunciation while British speakers changed it. A sneaky trick, but there it is. 5. Administration ------------------------------------------------------------------- * To leave the list, send the e-mail message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to the list server address . The subject line of your message will be ignored. For a complete list of commands, instead send the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS. * For a key to the IPA pronunciations used in these mailings, see , or send a blank e-mail message to our autoresponder at . * WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of . =================================================================== From words at QUINION.COM Sat May 13 03:29:31 2000 From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion) Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 08:29:31 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 13 May 00 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 190 Saturday 13 May 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent weekly to more than 8,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK Web: E-mail: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents -------- 1. Notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Bezoar. 3. Turns of Phrase: Polychronic. 4. Q & A: Loblolly boy, Up in Annie's room. 5. Review: Cambridge International Dictionary of English. 6. Request: Subscribers' countries of origin. 7. Administration: LISTSERV commands, IPA codes, Copyright. 1. Notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- PLURALS IN -EN I may have misled you last week about the plural of 'child'. The dialect form 'childer' was actually a plural that used one of the Old English endings that vanished from the language in medieval times (it survives in German). This was then re-pluralised using '-en' in some parts of the country, perhaps under the belief that 'childer' was singular. Several subscribers wrote to say that the same thing happened in Dutch, to make the plural 'kinderen'. Several people pointed out very reasonably that if 'chicken' is a diminutive form, a chicken ought to be smaller or younger than a chick. It does look that way, but 'chicken' is actually derived from the same root as 'cock' (through several layers of change) and originally referred to a young bird; 'chick' is an abbreviated form of 'chicken' that appeared in the fourteenth century. See for an updated version of the piece. INFLAMMABLE/FLAMMABLE Following the Q&A piece on words in 'in-', many people wrote enquiring about 'inflammable' and why it means something easily set on fire rather than fireproof, as the prefix ought to suggest. The word comes from Latin 'inflammare'. It uses a different 'in-' prefix, one that intensifies the meaning of the root word. It is very confusing; the old form 'flammable' has had to be revived in modern times so that people would not think that something 'inflammable' was fireproof. If only we'd stuck to the older 'enflame' from French, and used it to make 'enflammable', we wouldn't have had the problem in the first place. 2. Weird Words: Bezoar /'bi:zO:/ or /'bEz at UA:/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- A supposed antidote against poison. The 'bezoar' is a stony calcified hairball or gallstone that occurs in the stomachs of cud-chewing animals such as goats (though humans sometimes get them, too). The word is Persian ('pad-zahr', counter- poison or antidote); the bezoar's fame as a cure for poison spread westwards from there in medieval times. You swallowed it, or occasionally rubbed it on the infected part. In _A Voyage to Abyssinia_, written by Father Lobo in the eighteenth century, he says: "I had recourse to bezoar, a sovereign remedy against these poisons, which I always carried about me". Belief in its near- magical properties was then common. Old herbals are full of recipes using it, such as this one from Nicholas Culpeper's _Complete Herbal_ of 1653: "Take of Pearls prepared, Crab's eyes, red Coral, white Amber Hart's-horn, oriental Bezoar, of each half an ounce, powder of the black tops of Crab's claws, the weight of them all, beat them into powder, which may be made into balls with jelly, and the skins which our vipers have cast off, warily dried and kept for use". Culpeper remarks that "four, or five, or six grains is excellently good in a fever to be taken in any cordial, for it cheers the heart and vital spirits exceedingly, and makes them impregnable". Don't try this at home! If you feel like categorising them, a 'trichobezoar' is a hairball, while a 'phytobezoar' is one containing mostly vegetable fibres. 3. Turns of Phrase: Polychronic ------------------------------------------------------------------- This word isn't especially new - examples occur from the early nineties at least - but it has only recently begun to appear more widely, usually in reference to the stress suffered by office workers trying to cope with too many things at once. That has led to buzz phrases such as 'time poor', 'acceleration disorder', 'hurry sickness', and 'compression tiredness'. If you're a 'polychronic' personality, you work happily with many things happening at one time, in a non-linear and emotional way that lets you change your plans at a moment's notice without distress and without worrying about deadlines. It's the opposite of the personality type that human-resource experts say works best in the modern workplace, one that's termed 'monochronic': time-driven, working in a linear and orderly way, intent on getting one job completed before starting the next. Both words contain the suffix 'chronic' that comes from the Greek 'kronos', time; 'monochronic' has another meaning dating from the 1840s that denotes events happening at one period of time. Traditionally, cultures are divided into monochronic (where time is regarded as linear, people do one thing at a time and lateness and interruptions are not tolerated) and polychronic (where time is seen as cyclical, punctuality is unimportant and interruptions are acceptable). [_Daily Telegraph_, Dec. 1999] Our move into a nonstop culture is inevitable. But the question is whether we want it to be a monochronic-type one, or a polychronic- type one? For business the answer is easy, the former, because it means schedules can still be adhered to, but for the rest of us? [_Viewpoint_, Issue Seven, 2000] 4. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Send queries to . 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. After spending a half an hour, I have been unable to locate the term 'loblolly boy', and would therefore appreciate your explaining its meaning, if you can. It is a term often used in Patrick O'Brian's marvellous _Master and Commander_. Tom Goldsmith, Denver, USA] A. Let's start with 'loblolly' itself. This was a medicinal food, a thick oatmeal gruel or porridge, perhaps with a bit of meat or some vegetables in it; another name for it was 'burgoo'. It was given to seamen recovering from sickness or injury, and so it belonged in the same category as that other supposedly restorative foodstuff, 'portable soup', which Patrick O'Brian frequently has Dr Maturin mention; this was soup that had been concentrated into a solid form to preserve it and make it easy to carry about. The loblolly boy was an assistant to the ship's surgeon; one of his jobs was to feed the patients, hence his name. But 'loblolly' had another sense, a figurative one of a rustic bumpkin, which reveals the loblolly boy's position in the hierarchy of the ship - somewhere between the cabin boy and a ship's rat. The word may come from the dialectal 'lob', to bubble while boiling, and 'lolly', for broth, soup, or other food boiled in a pot, both recorded in the English Dialect Dictionary. It's almost certainly connected to 'lobscouse', originally a sailor's dish of meat stewed with vegetables and ship's biscuit. Abbreviated to 'scouse' it has become attached to the English port city of Liverpool and to its dialect and inhabitants. ----------- Q. My grandfather had many weird and wonderful expressions. When something was lost and could not be found, even after a thorough and sustained search, he often said it's 'up in Annie's room, behind the clock'. Could you tell me the origin of this expression? [Jeannette Dam-Hansen, Australia] A. I recognised this immediately and have even occasionally used it, much to the mystification of younger people around me. Could your grandfather perhaps have fought in the First World War, as my father did? It was British army slang of that period and became more widely known from there. According to Eric Partridge, 'up in Annie's room' was a common dismissive reply to a colleague who was asking where somebody was. The implication was that either the speaker didn't know or the person sought either didn't want to be found or didn't want to be disturbed - you could translate it as "don't ask". Partridge suggested the phrase was coined to suggest the person sought was "a bit of a lad with the girls", which sounds rather too much like a rationalisation after the event to be altogether convincing (I suspect it had more to do with the lack of female company in the trenches, so 'he's up in Annie's room' could have meant he's not around, he's no more here than Annie is). It was after the War ended that 'behind the clock' was added, though nobody seems to know why. If anybody has any information, I'd be glad to hear. 5. Review: Cambridge International Dictionary of English ------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cambridge International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM is an electronic dictionary designed for advanced learners of English. Its text is essentially that of the printed edition, but it has various electronic extensions. Every entry has its definition in simple English with an example sentence to illustrate a sense; you can ask it to display a list of related words. Every word has spoken pronunciations in British and American English, accompanied by IPA phonetic transcriptions. You can decide how much detail to show in each entry: whether you want to see phonetic icons, grammar codes, related words and so on. You can add notes to definitions and a history list allows you to backtrack from your current location. You can copy text to the clipboard or into a supported word processor. Full integration with a word processor is said to be possible, but it failed whenever I tried it with Word 97. There is a separate search panel that allows users to find words according to a variety of categories, such as headword, or part of speech (so you can find all the suffixes, for example). A set of study sections gives general background in a variety of grammatical and other topics; on my 500MHz Pentium III these were very slow to display and update, and were a complete system hog while they were doing so. About 150 sets of pictures allow users to identify and look up words for a variety of types of objects, from aircraft to the living room to the playground to types of windows. There are grouped sets of exercises on eight grammatical topics - such as affixes, homophones, and problem verbs - as well as a large number that are based on the picture sets. Many different users can work through these, each with his or her own scoring record. [_Cambridge International Dictionary of English_, published by Cambridge University Press on 20 April 2000; ISBN 0-521-77575-2; price GBP12.72 (+ VAT in Europe). Requires Windows 95/98/2000 with 16Mb RAM, a sound card, and 16-bit graphics card with resolution of at least 800x600. Visit to see it in action, as well as other Cambridge dictionaries, such as the recently published US one.] 6. Request: Subscribers' countries of origin ------------------------------------------------------------------- According to subscribers' e-mail addresses, World Wide Words has readers in the following countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Eritrea, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guyana, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazachstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Montserrat, Morocco, Mozambique, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yugoslavia. If you live in a country that is not on this list, I'd like to hear from you. Please write to me at (but please *don't* write if your country is already listed). 7. Administration ------------------------------------------------------------------- * To leave the list, send the e-mail message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to the list server address . The subject line of your message will be ignored. For a complete list of commands, instead send the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS. * For a key to the IPA pronunciations used in these mailings, see , or send a blank e-mail message to our autoresponder at . * WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of . =================================================================== From words at QUINION.COM Sat May 20 03:38:27 2000 From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion) Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 08:38:27 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 20 May 00 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 191 Saturday 20 May 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent weekly to more than 8,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK Web: E-mail: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents -------- 1. Notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Molecular farming. 3. Weird Words: Tawdry. 4. Q & A: Funner and funnest, Settle a score. 5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright. 1. Notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- LOBLOLLY Many people wrote to ask about the loblolly pine, found in swampy areas in places like Florida. 'Loblolly' was used for any material of a gloppy constituency, such as mud (in parts of the southern US, it was a name for a mudhole). The plant name comes from that link. POLYCHRONIC All you Greek scholars out there were right to tell me that the Greek for time is actually 'khronos'; finger trouble on the keyboard left out the 'h'. COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN Thank you for your responses. In addition to those in the list in last week's issue, subscribers come also from St Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica, and the Northern Mariana Islands. ADDRESSES FOR COMMUNICATIONS While I'm on housekeeping, a reminder about e-mail addresses. If you want to comment on a newsletter, do please write to . The address is specifically for queries to the Q&A section. 2. Turns of Phrase: Molecular farming ------------------------------------------------------------------- This term describes growing and harvesting genetically modified crops, with the object of producing pharmaceuticals rather than foodstuffs. The idea is to use such crops as biological factories to generate drugs difficult or expensive to produce in any other way. Genes from other sources, such as microorganisms, are spliced into the plant's genetic apparatus, its genome. During normal growth these modified plants synthesise useful compounds, which are then extracted from the crop. The technique is already being used to produce vaccines for some animal diseases, like mink enteritis virus. Many others are at the experimental stage, such as drugs to fight infant diabetes and Crohn's disease. By one of life's little ironies, tobacco plants are especially suited to this purpose, so one day they may prove to be more valuable as a source of pharmaceuticals than of tobacco. Though the term has been around for a decade in the specialist literature, it is slowly becoming more widely known. A closely related term, 'pharming', seems more widely used for genetically modified animals than plants. Comparisons and parallels continue to be drawn between molecular farming and biotechnology, the latter suffering from more bad press and negative perceptions than the former. [_London Free Press_, Aug. 1999] 'Molecular farming' has seen vaccines, mammalian blood constituents, enzymes, antibodies and low calorie sweeteners produced in tobacco leaves. [_Guardian_, Apr. 2000] 3. Weird Words: Tawdry ------------------------------------------------------------------- Something showy but cheap and of poor quality. To find the source of this word we must travel to Ely, a city whose cathedral dominates the flat fen landscape of East Anglia. Long before the cathedral was built, a small religious house had been established there in the seventh century by Ethelreda, the daughter of King Anna of East Anglia. She died in 679. Sixty years later the Venerable Bede wrote that her death had been caused by a growth in her throat, which she had said was a punishment for wearing necklaces in her youth. She eventually became the patron saint of Ely, under the Norman French name of St Audrey, and her feast day, 17 October, was celebrated by a fair. One of the favourite items sold was a band of fine silk lace or ribbon worn about the neck in memory of the city's patron saint. This became known as 'St Audrey's lace', but by the end of the sixteenth century it had been corrupted to 'tawdry lace'. Eventually the first word was taken to be a description; by the nature of goods sold at fairs they often looked good until the buyer got them home, so the word became attached to such cheap and showy items, and not just at Ely. 4. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Send queries to . 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. Why can we not say 'funner' and 'funnest'? There are other one- syllable adjectives that we can add '-er' and '-est' to, such as 'close' (closer and closest) and 'hot' (hotter and hottest). What is it about 'fun' that would make this impossible? [Gary Claassen, USA] A. Interesting question. 'Fun' has conventionally been said to be a noun, so that you can't make these comparative or superlative forms from it. But it's often difficult to work out exactly what job a word is doing in an English sentence, because it's so easy to shift about between using a word as a straight noun, as in "the television is on", and using it to modify another noun, as in "the television show has finished". In the second case - what grammarians refer to as an attributive use - we know that 'television' is a noun because it turns up in other situations. But if it didn't, we might just as well decide that it's an adjective, as it's doing the same job as an adjective. Because this is so easy to do in English, over time words sometimes shift roles. 'Fun' is a good example; it has moved away from being just a noun to being equally comfortable in an adjectival role. 'Fun' has long been used attributively, as in 'this is a fun game', in a way that's no different from saying 'this is a card game', in which 'card' is certainly a noun (at least, that's true in writing; in speech subtle differences in stress on the two elements give hints of the relationship between them). Examples are recorded in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ from the nineteenth century that use 'fun' in this attributive way, such as "There was a room at Holly House called the 'fun-room', without chair or table". But other examples in the OED from about the same period look decidedly adjectival, such as "Fun jottings; or, Laughs I have taken pen to" from 1853. In 1876 Mark Twain had Huckleberry Finn say in _Tom Sawyer_: "Tom - honest injun, now - is it fun or earnest?" where 'fun' certainly looks like an adjective because it's paired with 'earnest'. This process has accelerated greatly in the past fifty years. The result is that you regularly come across expressions like 'this party is fun', 'it's really fun', 'we're going to have a fun time tonight', 'that game was more fun than the last one', where the distinction between noun and adjective is decidedly blurred (some of these go back a long way in American and British English, especially regionally; I'm happy to use all of them myself, though that view is not shared by everyone). It's also possible to use 'fun' with verbs such as 'remain' and 'seem' that don't usually allow nouns to appear after the verb ('this seems fun'). Once this process got well under way, people started to say things like 'how fun is it?', and 'it's very fun'. The move to adjective has gone so far in the USA that its comparative and superlative are not infrequently found in informal writing: 'funner' for 'more fun' and 'funnest' for 'most fun' ("basketball is funner than football, and soccer is the funnest game of all"). A scan of newspapers in the NEXIS database from 1998 found over a thousand examples of the latter form. Some of these are no doubt intended to be humorous, and some are probably mistakes, but surely not all of them are. What we're seeing here is language evolution in action. So the straightforward answer to your question is: yes, you can use these forms, and people are doing so increasingly often. But if your question was really asking whether it is acceptable to use them in all circumstances, then I have to say firmly that, no, it isn't, not yet anyway. They are definitely informal and they should still be avoided when speaking or writing standard or formal English. ----------- Q. I am trying to help a student with a research project. He must find the origins of the idiom, 'a score to settle' or 'to settle a score'. [Deborah Reese, USA] A. Before the days of paper records, the usual way of keeping count was to cut marks into wooden rods called tallies (hence our verb 'tally', to count). Tally sticks have been used for thousands of years - Roman numerals evolved out of a system for notching them - and they survived until very recently (tallies were usually split in two lengthways so both parties had an identical record). For example, the English government kept its tax records on tallies until they were abolished in 1826 (the Palace of Westminster was gutted in 1834 because somebody over-enthusiastically burned old tally sticks in a furnace under the House of Lords). Cutting the notches on tallies was called 'scoring' (from Old Norse 'scora', to make an incision, related to our 'shear'), a word we still use in much the same sense. >From about 1400, 'score' was also the word for a record or an amount due, the total of the score marks on a tally. It became a common word for the total of a tradesman's or innkeeper's account. So, 'to settle the score' originally meant just to pay one's bill. But it acquired the figurative sense of taking revenge on somebody, and that's usually what we mean by it now. The same idea is behind our word for the number of points achieved in a game; this was first used in print by the famous Edmund Hoyle (as in 'according to Hoyle') in his _Short Treatise on the Game of Whist_ of 1742. The word also turns up in several slang phrases or idioms, such as 'to know the score', to be aware of what's going on, or to 'score points off', to outdo somebody. It is also the origin of 'score' for twenty, though we're not entirely sure how it became linked specifically to that number. A 'score' in music comes from a related idea of engraving or drawing the stave lines. 5. Administration ------------------------------------------------------------------- * To leave the list, send the e-mail message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to the list server address . The subject line of your message will be ignored. For a complete list of commands, instead send the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS. * WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of . =================================================================== From words at QUINION.COM Sat May 27 03:42:17 2000 From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion) Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 08:42:17 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 27 May 00 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 192 Saturday 27 May 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent weekly to more than 8,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK Web: E-mail: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents -------- 1. Topical Words: Arsenal. 2. Weird Words: Semordnilap. 3. Q & A: Begging the question, Dab hand. 4. Review: New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM. 5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright. 1. Topical Words: Arsenal ------------------------------------------------------------------- Along the wires the electric message came, a story from the Press Association: "Nuclear powers promise to eliminate their arsenals", reporting the agreement by the 187 signatories to the Nuclear Non- proliferation Treaty (though the unspecific timescale reminded me of a wayside pulpit sign I saw outside a chapel in Wales: "The promises of God are signed and sealed, but not dated"). The word 'arsenal' has a complicated history. It started in Arabic as 'dar-as-sina', meaning "house of construction" or "house of industry". In the fifteenth century the word was taken over by several Mediterranean nations; both Spanish and Italian borrowed it as 'darsena', a word for a dock. The citizens of Venice acquired it in a different form, losing the first letter and adding 'al' to the end, as the name of their naval dockyard, a substantial base as befitted the leading maritime power in the Mediterranean at the time; to this day it's called the Arzenale. The English may have got the word from French but it is more likely that it came directly from Venetian Italian, since early uses are in descriptions of the dockyard. For example, William Thomas wrote in a _History of Italy_ in 1549 - definitely the book to read at the time if you wanted to know about the main Italian states: "The Arsenale in myne eye excedeth all the rest: For there they haue well neere two hundred galeys" ("In my eyes the Arsenale is greater than all the others: they have almost two hundred galleys there"). Later in the sixteenth century the word's meaning began to shift in English towards naming one part of a dockyard, a warehouse for naval stores and weapons; later still it referred specifically to a place of storage for weapons of all kinds, not just naval ones (a famous examples was the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry which John Brown stormed in 1859) and also for a place where weapons were made and repaired. That remained its principal meaning in English until comparatively recently. A famous example was the Royal Arsenal on the Thames east of London, which stretched for a mile along the river next to the Woolwich dockyard, and which gave its name to the football club. It was only a step further to use it for the whole collection of weapons and other military equipment available to a group or country, a meaning that appeared less than a century ago. Hence the phrase 'nuclear arsenal'. It's a long way from a factory in Persia. 2. Weird Words: Semordnilap ------------------------------------------------------------------- A word, phrase or sentence that makes sense when reversed, but is not the same as the original. A string of letters that reads the same backwards as forwards is a palindrome ("Madam, I'm Adam"; "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!"; "Was it a car or a cat I saw?"). A semordnilap is closely related, but the reversed text must be different. For example, if you reverse "diaper" you get "repaid", and if you invert "desserts" the word "stressed" appears. A more complicated example is "deliver no evil", but you can probably invent better ones for yourself. As semordnilap is palindromes written backwards, it's a self- referential word, one that encapsulates within itself the thing it represents. You could hardly say that it's common, but many earnest palindromists have accidentally discovered it, and it has some small circulation among word wizards. 3. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Send queries to . 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. Recently, I have observed that 'begging the question' has come to mean "raising the question". Is this still an improper usage, or has the meaning of the phrase changed due to the usage? [George Beuselinck] A. This one really bugs people who know some logic and are familiar with the classical languages. From my attempts to research the point, it also seems to cause trouble for dictionary writers and compilers of style guides, so much so that I've not found two authorities that entirely agree on the nature of the problem or which senses of 'beg the question' are acceptable. You can easily find examples of the sense you quote, which is used just as though one might say "prompt the question" or "forces one to ask". Here's an example from the 'Independent on Sunday' about gay weddings: "It begs the question why the Church ever sanctioned something it now abominates?". This meaning of the phrase seems to have grown up because people have turned for a model to other phrases in 'beg', especially the well-known 'I beg to differ', where 'beg' is a fossil verb that actually used to mean "humbly submit". But the way we use 'beg to differ' these days makes 'beg the question' look the same as "wish to ask". It doesn't - or at least, it didn't. The original sense is of a logical fallacy, of taking for granted or assuming the thing that you are setting out to prove. To take an example, you might say that lying is wrong because we ought always to tell the truth. That's a circular argument and makes no sense. Another instance is to argue that democracy must be the best form of government because the majority is always right. The fallacy was described by Aristotle in his book on logic in about 350BC. His Greek name for it was turned into Latin as 'petitio principii' and then into English in 1581 as 'beg the question'. Most of our problems arise because the person who translated it made a hash of it. The Latin might better be translated as "laying claim to the principle". Very often, the fact that you are using the matter to be proved as part of your argument is a good deal more subtle than in these examples. It comes across rather as an attempt to evade the issue or avoid giving a straightforward answer, making the phrase mean "avoid the question". This meaning of the phrase is common and most authorities agree it is now part of standard English. The meaning you give is the newest. It is gaining ground, and one or two recent dictionaries claim that it is now acceptable - the _New Oxford Dictionary of English_, for example, says it is "widely accepted in modern standard English". I wouldn't go so far myself. Because of possible confusion over what you actually mean, and inevitable condemnation from people who have taken the trouble to find out what it once did mean, it's better avoided altogether. ----------- Q. I wondered how the phrase 'dab hand' originated, meaning someone particularly skilled at a task. Any ideas? [Ken Hart, Dundee, Scotland] A. This is mainly a British Commonwealth phrase, commonly used in sentences such as "My son has become a dab hand at renovating cast- off computers". We're able to trace its origin back to the end of the seventeenth century, but then the trail runs into the sand. The phrase 'dab hand' turns up first in the early nineteenth century and is widely recorded in English regional and dialect usage through the century. The first recorded use of 'dab' by itself in a related sense is in the _Athenian Mercury_ of 1691. It's also in the _Dictionary of the Canting Crew_ of 1698-99: a 'dab' there is "an exquisite expert" in some form of roguery. The US word 'dabster' for an expert comes from the same source, and is recorded from about the same time. 'Dab' is often reported as being school slang, but that may be a later development, as the early sightings all seem to have had criminal associations. Nobody is even sure where the original 'dab' came from: it may be linked to the Old Dutch 'dabben' and German 'tappen'. The verb first appears about 1300, when it meant to give somebody a sharp blow; it weakened in sense over time, until in the sixteenth century it arrived at its modern meaning of pressing lightly and repeatedly with something soft (the criminal slang 'dabs' for fingerprints seems to derive from this sense, perhaps with a nod towards 'dab hand'). It's difficult to see how the idea of expertise grew out of the various senses of 'dab' and it's possible that in this sense it is a separate word, perhaps from 'adept'. 4. Review: New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM ------------------------------------------------------------------- When in August 1998 I reviewed the hardback publication of this ground-breaking dictionary, I said no CD-ROM was envisaged. Times move on and we now have that CD-ROM. It's cheaper than the book, and certainly weighs a whole lot less. Oxford has gone to Versaware for the controlling software engine. This permits the publisher to produce other works in the same format which can be indexed and consulted in the same environment. Entries are presented as fully-formatted text, closely similar to the format of the printed work, and can be copied and pasted with formatting intact, or printed out. Material can also be copied and stored for future reference in 'binders', which act like bookmarks; these can be searched separately. You can highlight text and search only the highlighted material. The Versaware system seems not to have been designed with dictionaries in mind and it has some oddities. For example, there's no wildcard facility for searches. The help file implies there is, but the publishers acknowledge it doesn't exist. If you just want to look up a word, there's no problem, but if you want to try something more complicated, such as find all the words that end in 'ology', you're stymied. And if you're looking for a word given in an entry as a derivative, it doesn't appear in the index list. For example, you'll find 'apposite' but not 'appositely', 'serious' but not 'seriousness'. This is less of a problem with this dictionary than it would be with most others, as it brings most derivatives and compounds out as separate entries, but it can be a nuisance, and could confuse a user unfamiliar with dictionaries. (You can find the words by means of a full text search, admittedly, but then you will find other matches too; also, the full text search is slow). A minor nuisance is that the cut and paste facility has been oddly and inconsistently implemented. You can copy using Ctrl-Insert or Ctrl-C, but Shift-Insert doesn't work to paste into search boxes - you have to use Ctrl-V (and don't look for it on the menu: it isn't there). Paste doesn't work at all in the Full Text search box, so you can't copy and paste a word out of another text. So I'm in two minds: it's a nice dictionary (but then I'm biased) but the CD-ROM is not quite as useful as I'd hoped it would be. Of course I may just be an untypical user. [_New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM_, published by the Oxford University Press on 25 May 2000; GBP21.27 (GBP24.99 in Europe including VAT); Windows format only. The original review is archived at .] 5. Administration ------------------------------------------------------------------- * To leave the list, send the e-mail message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to the list server address . The subject line of your message will be ignored. For a complete list of commands, instead send the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS. * WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of . =================================================================== From words at QUINION.COM Sat May 6 07:43:30 2000 From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion) Date: Sat, 6 May 2000 08:43:30 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 06 May 00 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 189 Saturday 6 May 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent weekly to more than 8,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK Web: E-mail: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents -------- 1. Notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Captology. 3. Weird Words: Catoptromancy. 4. Q & A: Plurals in -en, Carpet, San fairy ann, Herb. 5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright. 1. Notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- BROUHAHA John Peter Maher wrote to say that he has done some work on the origins of 'brou' in French (with which, as I said last week, 'brouhaha' is linked). He suggests a more likely origin than the Hebrew greeting I mentioned may be bull baiting and it may be linked to the Italian or Spanish 'bravo'. He points to the French 'rabrouer', to taunt, as a connected term. LOVE BUG Not a single copy of that virus has arrived here. I feel deeply unloved (and very grateful). But that may also be because I've not been answering my mail as I should over the past week or so. Apologies to those still awaiting a reply. 2. Turns of Phrase: Captology ------------------------------------------------------------------- This word is still relatively rare outside a group of researchers in the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. The group studies the theory and design of the ways computing technology can be used to influence people. If you think that sounds a bit Big Brotherish, you are not altogether in error. The emphasis is on influencing people for good, for example to encourage healthy living or improve road safety, but the group is aware such methods could just as well be used for baser ends, such as persuading you to buy things, or to hand over personal data that could then be misused. To that end the group, led by Professor B J Fogg, is also studying the implications of the unreasoning trust that many of us put into computers because they are wrongly thought of as as being unaffected by human agency. The word was coined by Professor Fogg in 1996 as a partial acronym - from the initials of 'Computers As Persuasive Technology' - plus the ending '-ology' for a field of study. Someone engaged in the field is a 'captologist'. As pioneers of a nascent discipline called captology, Fogg and a handful of other visionaries are exploring the theory, design and analysis of computers and related technologies as instruments of persuasion. [_Electronic Engineering Times_, Jun. 1999] The class in captology (Computers as Persuasive Technology) is Stanford professor B. J. Fogg's brainchild, a new area of study into ways that computers are particularly useful in persuading people to change attitudes, buy certain products, or relinquish personal information. [_SF Weekly_, Apr. 2000] [I'm grateful to Don Chandler for telling me about this term.] 3. Weird Words: Catoptromancy /ka'tQptr@,mansI/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Divination by means of mirrors. "Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who is the fairest of them all?" At some time or other, almost anything you can think of has been used to foretell the future, from disembowelled chickens to straws on a red-hot iron. But the mirror, that most strange thing that allows not only reflection but self-reflection, has always been special. As a result there are many superstitions about mirrors - such that they must be covered or removed after a death to prevent the soul of the dead person from being stolen. In part it also explains why it is considered bad luck to break one (until modern times, they were also rare, so breaking one really was bad luck). There are records from many ancient civilisations of mirrors being used for magic, and some not so ancient: John Dee, the sixteenth- century English magician of the royal court, had a mirror made of a highly polished piece of coal. Fortune-tellers and magicians would use such stones, or perhaps polished metal mirrors or reflections in bowls of water to answer questions or predict the future. The word comes from the Greek word 'katoptron' for a mirror, plus 'manteia', divination. The same root appears in 'catoptrics', the part of optics that deals with reflection. 4. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Send queries to . 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 long been puzzled by the plural of 'ox'. Someone new to the language might conclude that 'foxen' is the plural of fox, or that 'chicken' means more than one chick. According to my Concise OED, the suffix '-en', among other things, forms the plural of "a few nouns such as children, oxen". However, I cannot find the noun 'childr' in any dictionary. What is the origin of this strange plural-making suffix? What other examples, if any, are there in addition to 'oxen'? [Charles Coon, Canada] A. English grammar a thousand years ago was more like that of modern German, with endings for the noun that varied according to the job it was doing in the sentence. There were about a dozen markers for the plural in all. As the language changed in the centuries after the Norman Conquest most of these were lost. The last survivors were '-s' and '-en', the two most common plural markers in the old language; for a while the two vied for supremacy. The rare plural forms like 'oxen' are left over from that period, with '-en' used for a very few words that fought off the encroachment of '-s' (the only other common one is 'brethren'). 'Children' is a special case. Though 'child' was one of the singular forms, another was 'childer', common in several English dialects. This should have had the plural 'childeren', but the first 'e' vanished, as it often does in unstressed syllables in the middle of words. In modern English we have ended up with the singular from one dialect but the plural from another. In 'chicken', the '-en' ending isn't a plural, but a diminutive, expressing small size or affection, which also turns up in 'kitten' and 'maiden'. ----------- Q. Why does the word 'carpet' mean three in English slang - as in a prison sentence of either three years or three months or, even, a three-pound bet? [John Abbeydale] A. To find the origins of this we have to delve into criminals' and prison slang. The first recorded use of 'carpet' for a prison sentence comes from the book _The Mark of the Broad Arrow_ by "No 77", published in 1903. He suggests that the word was then current prison slang for a six-months' sentence, with the usual term for a three-month one being 'drag'. However, he was either wrong or 'carpet' took over the latter's meaning. I suspect No 77 made a mistake, since 'carpet' came about as the result of a bit of rhyming slang: 'carpet-bag' = 'drag', implying that the two words have always meant the same thing. 'Drag' dates from near the end of the eighteenth century; J H Vaux said in his _Flash Dictionary_ in 1812 that 'drag' was the name given to robbing carts or wagons "of trunks, bale-goods, or any other property" (probably because they were heavy and had to be dragged about), and that 'done for a drag' meant that a thief had been convicted of such a crime, for which the penalty was three months in jail. Some people have said that a three-month sentence was called a 'carpet' because it took that long to make one in the prison workshop, but the rhyming slang joke on an existing usage makes more sense. (It doesn't ever seem to have meant so long a sentence as three years.) The word was later extended to other instances of the number three. These seem originally to have been Australian and include a sum of three pounds, or odds of three to one, or car dealers' slang for a sum of three hundred pounds. ----------- Q. What's the meaning and derivation of 'San Ferry Ann'? Apart from anything else it happens to be the title of a song by Paul McCartney. [John Cooper, Bermuda] A. When the British Tommy arrived in France to fight in the First World War, he was presented with a language he struggled to make sense of. What he did to the pronunciation of French and Belgian place names is a wonder, such as turning Ypres into Wipers. He picked up a lot of French expressions, but he changed them into something that sounded English. This was the fate of 'ca ne fait rien', "it does not matter", which became a British Army catch phrase in that war as an expression of resigned - or cynical - acceptance of some state of affairs, usually brought about by bungling officers. One English version of it was the one you quote, others were 'san fairy anna' and even 'send for Mary Ann', though perhaps 'san fairy ann' was the most common. It largely fell out of use after the War, and seems not to have been taken up by servicemen in the Second World War. ----------- Q. Although this is not strictly a word query, seeing that you mentioned the _Longman Pronunciation Dictionary_, I have wondered why on several American TV programmes, the characters pronounce the word 'herb' without the 'h'. Is this general or just a regional dialect? [Ian Harrison, South Africa] Q. It is standard American English; in a 1993 pronunciation survey quoted in the _Longman Pronunciation Dictionary_, 90% of Americans used the pronunciation without the 'h'. (They do, however, sound it in the proper name Herb.) It does sound odd to anybody from another English-language community; to drop the 'h' in British English, for example, would be classed as a solecism of the deepest hue, whereas in the USA it's the other way around. It's a good example of a type of linguistic conservatism sometimes found in American English. Until the sixteenth century the word was usually spelled 'erb' - the English got it from the French, who didn't say the first letter either. Right down to the nineteenth century, long after the 'h' had been added under later French influence, that was also the way it was said. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American colonists took this state of affairs with them. During the nineteenth century, British people began to sound the first letter, as a result of what linguists call a spelling pronunciation. So Americans kept the old pronunciation while British speakers changed it. A sneaky trick, but there it is. 5. Administration ------------------------------------------------------------------- * To leave the list, send the e-mail message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to the list server address . The subject line of your message will be ignored. For a complete list of commands, instead send the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS. * For a key to the IPA pronunciations used in these mailings, see , or send a blank e-mail message to our autoresponder at . * WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of . =================================================================== From words at QUINION.COM Sat May 13 07:29:31 2000 From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion) Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 08:29:31 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 13 May 00 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 190 Saturday 13 May 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent weekly to more than 8,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK Web: E-mail: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents -------- 1. Notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Bezoar. 3. Turns of Phrase: Polychronic. 4. Q & A: Loblolly boy, Up in Annie's room. 5. Review: Cambridge International Dictionary of English. 6. Request: Subscribers' countries of origin. 7. Administration: LISTSERV commands, IPA codes, Copyright. 1. Notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- PLURALS IN -EN I may have misled you last week about the plural of 'child'. The dialect form 'childer' was actually a plural that used one of the Old English endings that vanished from the language in medieval times (it survives in German). This was then re-pluralised using '-en' in some parts of the country, perhaps under the belief that 'childer' was singular. Several subscribers wrote to say that the same thing happened in Dutch, to make the plural 'kinderen'. Several people pointed out very reasonably that if 'chicken' is a diminutive form, a chicken ought to be smaller or younger than a chick. It does look that way, but 'chicken' is actually derived from the same root as 'cock' (through several layers of change) and originally referred to a young bird; 'chick' is an abbreviated form of 'chicken' that appeared in the fourteenth century. See for an updated version of the piece. INFLAMMABLE/FLAMMABLE Following the Q&A piece on words in 'in-', many people wrote enquiring about 'inflammable' and why it means something easily set on fire rather than fireproof, as the prefix ought to suggest. The word comes from Latin 'inflammare'. It uses a different 'in-' prefix, one that intensifies the meaning of the root word. It is very confusing; the old form 'flammable' has had to be revived in modern times so that people would not think that something 'inflammable' was fireproof. If only we'd stuck to the older 'enflame' from French, and used it to make 'enflammable', we wouldn't have had the problem in the first place. 2. Weird Words: Bezoar /'bi:zO:/ or /'bEz at UA:/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- A supposed antidote against poison. The 'bezoar' is a stony calcified hairball or gallstone that occurs in the stomachs of cud-chewing animals such as goats (though humans sometimes get them, too). The word is Persian ('pad-zahr', counter- poison or antidote); the bezoar's fame as a cure for poison spread westwards from there in medieval times. You swallowed it, or occasionally rubbed it on the infected part. In _A Voyage to Abyssinia_, written by Father Lobo in the eighteenth century, he says: "I had recourse to bezoar, a sovereign remedy against these poisons, which I always carried about me". Belief in its near- magical properties was then common. Old herbals are full of recipes using it, such as this one from Nicholas Culpeper's _Complete Herbal_ of 1653: "Take of Pearls prepared, Crab's eyes, red Coral, white Amber Hart's-horn, oriental Bezoar, of each half an ounce, powder of the black tops of Crab's claws, the weight of them all, beat them into powder, which may be made into balls with jelly, and the skins which our vipers have cast off, warily dried and kept for use". Culpeper remarks that "four, or five, or six grains is excellently good in a fever to be taken in any cordial, for it cheers the heart and vital spirits exceedingly, and makes them impregnable". Don't try this at home! If you feel like categorising them, a 'trichobezoar' is a hairball, while a 'phytobezoar' is one containing mostly vegetable fibres. 3. Turns of Phrase: Polychronic ------------------------------------------------------------------- This word isn't especially new - examples occur from the early nineties at least - but it has only recently begun to appear more widely, usually in reference to the stress suffered by office workers trying to cope with too many things at once. That has led to buzz phrases such as 'time poor', 'acceleration disorder', 'hurry sickness', and 'compression tiredness'. If you're a 'polychronic' personality, you work happily with many things happening at one time, in a non-linear and emotional way that lets you change your plans at a moment's notice without distress and without worrying about deadlines. It's the opposite of the personality type that human-resource experts say works best in the modern workplace, one that's termed 'monochronic': time-driven, working in a linear and orderly way, intent on getting one job completed before starting the next. Both words contain the suffix 'chronic' that comes from the Greek 'kronos', time; 'monochronic' has another meaning dating from the 1840s that denotes events happening at one period of time. Traditionally, cultures are divided into monochronic (where time is regarded as linear, people do one thing at a time and lateness and interruptions are not tolerated) and polychronic (where time is seen as cyclical, punctuality is unimportant and interruptions are acceptable). [_Daily Telegraph_, Dec. 1999] Our move into a nonstop culture is inevitable. But the question is whether we want it to be a monochronic-type one, or a polychronic- type one? For business the answer is easy, the former, because it means schedules can still be adhered to, but for the rest of us? [_Viewpoint_, Issue Seven, 2000] 4. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Send queries to . 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. After spending a half an hour, I have been unable to locate the term 'loblolly boy', and would therefore appreciate your explaining its meaning, if you can. It is a term often used in Patrick O'Brian's marvellous _Master and Commander_. Tom Goldsmith, Denver, USA] A. Let's start with 'loblolly' itself. This was a medicinal food, a thick oatmeal gruel or porridge, perhaps with a bit of meat or some vegetables in it; another name for it was 'burgoo'. It was given to seamen recovering from sickness or injury, and so it belonged in the same category as that other supposedly restorative foodstuff, 'portable soup', which Patrick O'Brian frequently has Dr Maturin mention; this was soup that had been concentrated into a solid form to preserve it and make it easy to carry about. The loblolly boy was an assistant to the ship's surgeon; one of his jobs was to feed the patients, hence his name. But 'loblolly' had another sense, a figurative one of a rustic bumpkin, which reveals the loblolly boy's position in the hierarchy of the ship - somewhere between the cabin boy and a ship's rat. The word may come from the dialectal 'lob', to bubble while boiling, and 'lolly', for broth, soup, or other food boiled in a pot, both recorded in the English Dialect Dictionary. It's almost certainly connected to 'lobscouse', originally a sailor's dish of meat stewed with vegetables and ship's biscuit. Abbreviated to 'scouse' it has become attached to the English port city of Liverpool and to its dialect and inhabitants. ----------- Q. My grandfather had many weird and wonderful expressions. When something was lost and could not be found, even after a thorough and sustained search, he often said it's 'up in Annie's room, behind the clock'. Could you tell me the origin of this expression? [Jeannette Dam-Hansen, Australia] A. I recognised this immediately and have even occasionally used it, much to the mystification of younger people around me. Could your grandfather perhaps have fought in the First World War, as my father did? It was British army slang of that period and became more widely known from there. According to Eric Partridge, 'up in Annie's room' was a common dismissive reply to a colleague who was asking where somebody was. The implication was that either the speaker didn't know or the person sought either didn't want to be found or didn't want to be disturbed - you could translate it as "don't ask". Partridge suggested the phrase was coined to suggest the person sought was "a bit of a lad with the girls", which sounds rather too much like a rationalisation after the event to be altogether convincing (I suspect it had more to do with the lack of female company in the trenches, so 'he's up in Annie's room' could have meant he's not around, he's no more here than Annie is). It was after the War ended that 'behind the clock' was added, though nobody seems to know why. If anybody has any information, I'd be glad to hear. 5. Review: Cambridge International Dictionary of English ------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cambridge International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM is an electronic dictionary designed for advanced learners of English. Its text is essentially that of the printed edition, but it has various electronic extensions. Every entry has its definition in simple English with an example sentence to illustrate a sense; you can ask it to display a list of related words. Every word has spoken pronunciations in British and American English, accompanied by IPA phonetic transcriptions. You can decide how much detail to show in each entry: whether you want to see phonetic icons, grammar codes, related words and so on. You can add notes to definitions and a history list allows you to backtrack from your current location. You can copy text to the clipboard or into a supported word processor. Full integration with a word processor is said to be possible, but it failed whenever I tried it with Word 97. There is a separate search panel that allows users to find words according to a variety of categories, such as headword, or part of speech (so you can find all the suffixes, for example). A set of study sections gives general background in a variety of grammatical and other topics; on my 500MHz Pentium III these were very slow to display and update, and were a complete system hog while they were doing so. About 150 sets of pictures allow users to identify and look up words for a variety of types of objects, from aircraft to the living room to the playground to types of windows. There are grouped sets of exercises on eight grammatical topics - such as affixes, homophones, and problem verbs - as well as a large number that are based on the picture sets. Many different users can work through these, each with his or her own scoring record. [_Cambridge International Dictionary of English_, published by Cambridge University Press on 20 April 2000; ISBN 0-521-77575-2; price GBP12.72 (+ VAT in Europe). Requires Windows 95/98/2000 with 16Mb RAM, a sound card, and 16-bit graphics card with resolution of at least 800x600. Visit to see it in action, as well as other Cambridge dictionaries, such as the recently published US one.] 6. Request: Subscribers' countries of origin ------------------------------------------------------------------- According to subscribers' e-mail addresses, World Wide Words has readers in the following countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Eritrea, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guyana, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazachstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Montserrat, Morocco, Mozambique, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yugoslavia. If you live in a country that is not on this list, I'd like to hear from you. Please write to me at (but please *don't* write if your country is already listed). 7. Administration ------------------------------------------------------------------- * To leave the list, send the e-mail message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to the list server address . The subject line of your message will be ignored. For a complete list of commands, instead send the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS. * For a key to the IPA pronunciations used in these mailings, see , or send a blank e-mail message to our autoresponder at . * WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of . =================================================================== From words at QUINION.COM Sat May 20 07:38:27 2000 From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion) Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 08:38:27 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 20 May 00 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 191 Saturday 20 May 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent weekly to more than 8,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK Web: E-mail: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents -------- 1. Notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Molecular farming. 3. Weird Words: Tawdry. 4. Q & A: Funner and funnest, Settle a score. 5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright. 1. Notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- LOBLOLLY Many people wrote to ask about the loblolly pine, found in swampy areas in places like Florida. 'Loblolly' was used for any material of a gloppy constituency, such as mud (in parts of the southern US, it was a name for a mudhole). The plant name comes from that link. POLYCHRONIC All you Greek scholars out there were right to tell me that the Greek for time is actually 'khronos'; finger trouble on the keyboard left out the 'h'. COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN Thank you for your responses. In addition to those in the list in last week's issue, subscribers come also from St Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica, and the Northern Mariana Islands. ADDRESSES FOR COMMUNICATIONS While I'm on housekeeping, a reminder about e-mail addresses. If you want to comment on a newsletter, do please write to . The address is specifically for queries to the Q&A section. 2. Turns of Phrase: Molecular farming ------------------------------------------------------------------- This term describes growing and harvesting genetically modified crops, with the object of producing pharmaceuticals rather than foodstuffs. The idea is to use such crops as biological factories to generate drugs difficult or expensive to produce in any other way. Genes from other sources, such as microorganisms, are spliced into the plant's genetic apparatus, its genome. During normal growth these modified plants synthesise useful compounds, which are then extracted from the crop. The technique is already being used to produce vaccines for some animal diseases, like mink enteritis virus. Many others are at the experimental stage, such as drugs to fight infant diabetes and Crohn's disease. By one of life's little ironies, tobacco plants are especially suited to this purpose, so one day they may prove to be more valuable as a source of pharmaceuticals than of tobacco. Though the term has been around for a decade in the specialist literature, it is slowly becoming more widely known. A closely related term, 'pharming', seems more widely used for genetically modified animals than plants. Comparisons and parallels continue to be drawn between molecular farming and biotechnology, the latter suffering from more bad press and negative perceptions than the former. [_London Free Press_, Aug. 1999] 'Molecular farming' has seen vaccines, mammalian blood constituents, enzymes, antibodies and low calorie sweeteners produced in tobacco leaves. [_Guardian_, Apr. 2000] 3. Weird Words: Tawdry ------------------------------------------------------------------- Something showy but cheap and of poor quality. To find the source of this word we must travel to Ely, a city whose cathedral dominates the flat fen landscape of East Anglia. Long before the cathedral was built, a small religious house had been established there in the seventh century by Ethelreda, the daughter of King Anna of East Anglia. She died in 679. Sixty years later the Venerable Bede wrote that her death had been caused by a growth in her throat, which she had said was a punishment for wearing necklaces in her youth. She eventually became the patron saint of Ely, under the Norman French name of St Audrey, and her feast day, 17 October, was celebrated by a fair. One of the favourite items sold was a band of fine silk lace or ribbon worn about the neck in memory of the city's patron saint. This became known as 'St Audrey's lace', but by the end of the sixteenth century it had been corrupted to 'tawdry lace'. Eventually the first word was taken to be a description; by the nature of goods sold at fairs they often looked good until the buyer got them home, so the word became attached to such cheap and showy items, and not just at Ely. 4. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Send queries to . 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. Why can we not say 'funner' and 'funnest'? There are other one- syllable adjectives that we can add '-er' and '-est' to, such as 'close' (closer and closest) and 'hot' (hotter and hottest). What is it about 'fun' that would make this impossible? [Gary Claassen, USA] A. Interesting question. 'Fun' has conventionally been said to be a noun, so that you can't make these comparative or superlative forms from it. But it's often difficult to work out exactly what job a word is doing in an English sentence, because it's so easy to shift about between using a word as a straight noun, as in "the television is on", and using it to modify another noun, as in "the television show has finished". In the second case - what grammarians refer to as an attributive use - we know that 'television' is a noun because it turns up in other situations. But if it didn't, we might just as well decide that it's an adjective, as it's doing the same job as an adjective. Because this is so easy to do in English, over time words sometimes shift roles. 'Fun' is a good example; it has moved away from being just a noun to being equally comfortable in an adjectival role. 'Fun' has long been used attributively, as in 'this is a fun game', in a way that's no different from saying 'this is a card game', in which 'card' is certainly a noun (at least, that's true in writing; in speech subtle differences in stress on the two elements give hints of the relationship between them). Examples are recorded in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ from the nineteenth century that use 'fun' in this attributive way, such as "There was a room at Holly House called the 'fun-room', without chair or table". But other examples in the OED from about the same period look decidedly adjectival, such as "Fun jottings; or, Laughs I have taken pen to" from 1853. In 1876 Mark Twain had Huckleberry Finn say in _Tom Sawyer_: "Tom - honest injun, now - is it fun or earnest?" where 'fun' certainly looks like an adjective because it's paired with 'earnest'. This process has accelerated greatly in the past fifty years. The result is that you regularly come across expressions like 'this party is fun', 'it's really fun', 'we're going to have a fun time tonight', 'that game was more fun than the last one', where the distinction between noun and adjective is decidedly blurred (some of these go back a long way in American and British English, especially regionally; I'm happy to use all of them myself, though that view is not shared by everyone). It's also possible to use 'fun' with verbs such as 'remain' and 'seem' that don't usually allow nouns to appear after the verb ('this seems fun'). Once this process got well under way, people started to say things like 'how fun is it?', and 'it's very fun'. The move to adjective has gone so far in the USA that its comparative and superlative are not infrequently found in informal writing: 'funner' for 'more fun' and 'funnest' for 'most fun' ("basketball is funner than football, and soccer is the funnest game of all"). A scan of newspapers in the NEXIS database from 1998 found over a thousand examples of the latter form. Some of these are no doubt intended to be humorous, and some are probably mistakes, but surely not all of them are. What we're seeing here is language evolution in action. So the straightforward answer to your question is: yes, you can use these forms, and people are doing so increasingly often. But if your question was really asking whether it is acceptable to use them in all circumstances, then I have to say firmly that, no, it isn't, not yet anyway. They are definitely informal and they should still be avoided when speaking or writing standard or formal English. ----------- Q. I am trying to help a student with a research project. He must find the origins of the idiom, 'a score to settle' or 'to settle a score'. [Deborah Reese, USA] A. Before the days of paper records, the usual way of keeping count was to cut marks into wooden rods called tallies (hence our verb 'tally', to count). Tally sticks have been used for thousands of years - Roman numerals evolved out of a system for notching them - and they survived until very recently (tallies were usually split in two lengthways so both parties had an identical record). For example, the English government kept its tax records on tallies until they were abolished in 1826 (the Palace of Westminster was gutted in 1834 because somebody over-enthusiastically burned old tally sticks in a furnace under the House of Lords). Cutting the notches on tallies was called 'scoring' (from Old Norse 'scora', to make an incision, related to our 'shear'), a word we still use in much the same sense. >From about 1400, 'score' was also the word for a record or an amount due, the total of the score marks on a tally. It became a common word for the total of a tradesman's or innkeeper's account. So, 'to settle the score' originally meant just to pay one's bill. But it acquired the figurative sense of taking revenge on somebody, and that's usually what we mean by it now. The same idea is behind our word for the number of points achieved in a game; this was first used in print by the famous Edmund Hoyle (as in 'according to Hoyle') in his _Short Treatise on the Game of Whist_ of 1742. The word also turns up in several slang phrases or idioms, such as 'to know the score', to be aware of what's going on, or to 'score points off', to outdo somebody. It is also the origin of 'score' for twenty, though we're not entirely sure how it became linked specifically to that number. A 'score' in music comes from a related idea of engraving or drawing the stave lines. 5. Administration ------------------------------------------------------------------- * To leave the list, send the e-mail message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to the list server address . The subject line of your message will be ignored. For a complete list of commands, instead send the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS. * WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of . =================================================================== From words at QUINION.COM Sat May 27 07:42:17 2000 From: words at QUINION.COM (Michael Quinion) Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 08:42:17 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 27 May 00 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 192 Saturday 27 May 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent weekly to more than 8,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK Web: E-mail: ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents -------- 1. Topical Words: Arsenal. 2. Weird Words: Semordnilap. 3. Q & A: Begging the question, Dab hand. 4. Review: New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM. 5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright. 1. Topical Words: Arsenal ------------------------------------------------------------------- Along the wires the electric message came, a story from the Press Association: "Nuclear powers promise to eliminate their arsenals", reporting the agreement by the 187 signatories to the Nuclear Non- proliferation Treaty (though the unspecific timescale reminded me of a wayside pulpit sign I saw outside a chapel in Wales: "The promises of God are signed and sealed, but not dated"). The word 'arsenal' has a complicated history. It started in Arabic as 'dar-as-sina', meaning "house of construction" or "house of industry". In the fifteenth century the word was taken over by several Mediterranean nations; both Spanish and Italian borrowed it as 'darsena', a word for a dock. The citizens of Venice acquired it in a different form, losing the first letter and adding 'al' to the end, as the name of their naval dockyard, a substantial base as befitted the leading maritime power in the Mediterranean at the time; to this day it's called the Arzenale. The English may have got the word from French but it is more likely that it came directly from Venetian Italian, since early uses are in descriptions of the dockyard. For example, William Thomas wrote in a _History of Italy_ in 1549 - definitely the book to read at the time if you wanted to know about the main Italian states: "The Arsenale in myne eye excedeth all the rest: For there they haue well neere two hundred galeys" ("In my eyes the Arsenale is greater than all the others: they have almost two hundred galleys there"). Later in the sixteenth century the word's meaning began to shift in English towards naming one part of a dockyard, a warehouse for naval stores and weapons; later still it referred specifically to a place of storage for weapons of all kinds, not just naval ones (a famous examples was the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry which John Brown stormed in 1859) and also for a place where weapons were made and repaired. That remained its principal meaning in English until comparatively recently. A famous example was the Royal Arsenal on the Thames east of London, which stretched for a mile along the river next to the Woolwich dockyard, and which gave its name to the football club. It was only a step further to use it for the whole collection of weapons and other military equipment available to a group or country, a meaning that appeared less than a century ago. Hence the phrase 'nuclear arsenal'. It's a long way from a factory in Persia. 2. Weird Words: Semordnilap ------------------------------------------------------------------- A word, phrase or sentence that makes sense when reversed, but is not the same as the original. A string of letters that reads the same backwards as forwards is a palindrome ("Madam, I'm Adam"; "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!"; "Was it a car or a cat I saw?"). A semordnilap is closely related, but the reversed text must be different. For example, if you reverse "diaper" you get "repaid", and if you invert "desserts" the word "stressed" appears. A more complicated example is "deliver no evil", but you can probably invent better ones for yourself. As semordnilap is palindromes written backwards, it's a self- referential word, one that encapsulates within itself the thing it represents. You could hardly say that it's common, but many earnest palindromists have accidentally discovered it, and it has some small circulation among word wizards. 3. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Send queries to . 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. Recently, I have observed that 'begging the question' has come to mean "raising the question". Is this still an improper usage, or has the meaning of the phrase changed due to the usage? [George Beuselinck] A. This one really bugs people who know some logic and are familiar with the classical languages. From my attempts to research the point, it also seems to cause trouble for dictionary writers and compilers of style guides, so much so that I've not found two authorities that entirely agree on the nature of the problem or which senses of 'beg the question' are acceptable. You can easily find examples of the sense you quote, which is used just as though one might say "prompt the question" or "forces one to ask". Here's an example from the 'Independent on Sunday' about gay weddings: "It begs the question why the Church ever sanctioned something it now abominates?". This meaning of the phrase seems to have grown up because people have turned for a model to other phrases in 'beg', especially the well-known 'I beg to differ', where 'beg' is a fossil verb that actually used to mean "humbly submit". But the way we use 'beg to differ' these days makes 'beg the question' look the same as "wish to ask". It doesn't - or at least, it didn't. The original sense is of a logical fallacy, of taking for granted or assuming the thing that you are setting out to prove. To take an example, you might say that lying is wrong because we ought always to tell the truth. That's a circular argument and makes no sense. Another instance is to argue that democracy must be the best form of government because the majority is always right. The fallacy was described by Aristotle in his book on logic in about 350BC. His Greek name for it was turned into Latin as 'petitio principii' and then into English in 1581 as 'beg the question'. Most of our problems arise because the person who translated it made a hash of it. The Latin might better be translated as "laying claim to the principle". Very often, the fact that you are using the matter to be proved as part of your argument is a good deal more subtle than in these examples. It comes across rather as an attempt to evade the issue or avoid giving a straightforward answer, making the phrase mean "avoid the question". This meaning of the phrase is common and most authorities agree it is now part of standard English. The meaning you give is the newest. It is gaining ground, and one or two recent dictionaries claim that it is now acceptable - the _New Oxford Dictionary of English_, for example, says it is "widely accepted in modern standard English". I wouldn't go so far myself. Because of possible confusion over what you actually mean, and inevitable condemnation from people who have taken the trouble to find out what it once did mean, it's better avoided altogether. ----------- Q. I wondered how the phrase 'dab hand' originated, meaning someone particularly skilled at a task. Any ideas? [Ken Hart, Dundee, Scotland] A. This is mainly a British Commonwealth phrase, commonly used in sentences such as "My son has become a dab hand at renovating cast- off computers". We're able to trace its origin back to the end of the seventeenth century, but then the trail runs into the sand. The phrase 'dab hand' turns up first in the early nineteenth century and is widely recorded in English regional and dialect usage through the century. The first recorded use of 'dab' by itself in a related sense is in the _Athenian Mercury_ of 1691. It's also in the _Dictionary of the Canting Crew_ of 1698-99: a 'dab' there is "an exquisite expert" in some form of roguery. The US word 'dabster' for an expert comes from the same source, and is recorded from about the same time. 'Dab' is often reported as being school slang, but that may be a later development, as the early sightings all seem to have had criminal associations. Nobody is even sure where the original 'dab' came from: it may be linked to the Old Dutch 'dabben' and German 'tappen'. The verb first appears about 1300, when it meant to give somebody a sharp blow; it weakened in sense over time, until in the sixteenth century it arrived at its modern meaning of pressing lightly and repeatedly with something soft (the criminal slang 'dabs' for fingerprints seems to derive from this sense, perhaps with a nod towards 'dab hand'). It's difficult to see how the idea of expertise grew out of the various senses of 'dab' and it's possible that in this sense it is a separate word, perhaps from 'adept'. 4. Review: New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM ------------------------------------------------------------------- When in August 1998 I reviewed the hardback publication of this ground-breaking dictionary, I said no CD-ROM was envisaged. Times move on and we now have that CD-ROM. It's cheaper than the book, and certainly weighs a whole lot less. Oxford has gone to Versaware for the controlling software engine. This permits the publisher to produce other works in the same format which can be indexed and consulted in the same environment. Entries are presented as fully-formatted text, closely similar to the format of the printed work, and can be copied and pasted with formatting intact, or printed out. Material can also be copied and stored for future reference in 'binders', which act like bookmarks; these can be searched separately. You can highlight text and search only the highlighted material. The Versaware system seems not to have been designed with dictionaries in mind and it has some oddities. For example, there's no wildcard facility for searches. The help file implies there is, but the publishers acknowledge it doesn't exist. If you just want to look up a word, there's no problem, but if you want to try something more complicated, such as find all the words that end in 'ology', you're stymied. And if you're looking for a word given in an entry as a derivative, it doesn't appear in the index list. For example, you'll find 'apposite' but not 'appositely', 'serious' but not 'seriousness'. This is less of a problem with this dictionary than it would be with most others, as it brings most derivatives and compounds out as separate entries, but it can be a nuisance, and could confuse a user unfamiliar with dictionaries. (You can find the words by means of a full text search, admittedly, but then you will find other matches too; also, the full text search is slow). A minor nuisance is that the cut and paste facility has been oddly and inconsistently implemented. You can copy using Ctrl-Insert or Ctrl-C, but Shift-Insert doesn't work to paste into search boxes - you have to use Ctrl-V (and don't look for it on the menu: it isn't there). Paste doesn't work at all in the Full Text search box, so you can't copy and paste a word out of another text. So I'm in two minds: it's a nice dictionary (but then I'm biased) but the CD-ROM is not quite as useful as I'd hoped it would be. Of course I may just be an untypical user. [_New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM_, published by the Oxford University Press on 25 May 2000; GBP21.27 (GBP24.99 in Europe including VAT); Windows format only. The original review is archived at .] 5. Administration ------------------------------------------------------------------- * To leave the list, send the e-mail message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to the list server address . The subject line of your message will be ignored. For a complete list of commands, instead send the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS. * WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of . ===================================================================