World Wide Words -- 14 Dec 02
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 13 14:50:20 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 320 Saturday 14 December 2002
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Hidden hunger.
3. Weird Words: Paralipsis.
4. Q&A: Great Scott, Guinea pig.
5. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. Help support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK Next Saturday's issue will be the last for December.
Normal service is scheduled to be restored on 4 January 2003.
PLAIN ENGLISH CAMPAIGN Douglas Yates discovered that the peculiar
pseudo-business text that the Plain English Campaign honoured last
week is generated as automatic placeholder text by an extension (a
plug-in) to the Macromedia Dreamweaver Web design programme called
"Corporate Mumbo Jumbo"!
As another example of what the PEC is fighting, Mark Worden told me
about the mission statement for the Information Awareness Office of
the US military agency DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency), reproduced in the current issue of the New Yorker (the
original is at http://www.darpa.mil/iao/): "The DARPA Information
Awareness Office (IAO) will imagine, develop, apply, integrate,
demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and
prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter
asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful
for preemption; national security warning; and national security
decision making".
COLOPHON Joy Burrough e-mailed from the Netherlands to point out
that the Dutch use the term in a wider sense for a list of everyone
involved in the creation of a work, including the printer but also
the editor, photographer, translator, and so on. As she discovered,
this is becoming common online in an even wider sense. For example,
this is the heading on the home page of one site: "A Colophon is
the description of the tools and such used in creating any work.
This is mine for this web site".
MIND YOUR OWN BEESWAX Last week I gave a New Zealand equivalent of
"mind your own pigeon". A chorus of subscribers' voices, echoing
faintly from the antipodes, said that if it was ever widely used,
it has not been so in living memory. Similar comments were made
about the Australian "mind your own fish". Many people wrote from
pretty much the whole of the English-speaking world to say that
they knew of "mind your own beeswax" as a common childhood saying.
And David Coyne e-mailed from Belgium: "When I was growing up in
Kenya in the Fifties we had a little rhyme which we would quote
whenever someone showed too much curiosity in what we were doing!
It seems that it combines nicely your Australian saying and what I
had always thought was a British one:
Mind your own beeswax
Eat your own fish
And don’t poke your nose
Into my little dish!"
2. Turns of Phrase: Hidden hunger
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This refers not to the overt and obvious hunger of poor people who
are unable to afford enough to eat, but to a more insidious type
caused by eating food that is cheap and filling but deficient in
essential vitamins and micronutrients. A World Health Organisation
report pointed out recently that this problem is widespread, in
particular in the Third World, where families may fill themselves
with cheap rice, say, but be unable to afford the fruit, vegetables
and meat needed to provide a balanced diet. A related cause is that
some of the "green revolution" crops of the 1960s and 1970s that
were created specifically to reduce starvation are often short of
nutrients such as zinc, iron and vitamin A. The term "hidden
hunger" is not often found outside specialist journals and is more
common in news agency copy than in newspapers and magazines: at
some point along the road to publication the phrase is blue-
pencilled by sub-editors who regard it as jargon. It is sometimes
also employed as a general term for the extreme poverty that can
exist undetected or unacknowledged in developed countries; it has
appeared in this sense in the USA and New Zealand in recent years.
He questioned the rationale behind keeping exotic animals and
spending fortunes to feed them while a vast majority of Gambians
are plagued by "hidden hunger".
[Africa News Service, Aug. 2002]
According to Gautam, apart from absolute hunger stemming from lack
of food, there are at least three more types of hunger, for
instance, "hidden hunger" for micronutrients such as minerals and
vitamins.
[Xinhua News Agency, Jun. 2002]
3. Weird Words: Paralipsis /,par@'lIpsIs/
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A rhetorical device.
There are so many technical terms in rhetoric - aporia, hypallage,
paraprosdokian, and zeugma are just a few - that I need to look
them up every time because I can't keep them in mind. (If I had
wanted to learn a stack of weird names, I'd have taken up botany.)
Paralipsis is a kind of irony, a rhetorical trick by which the
speaker or writer emphasises something by professing to ignore it.
Key phrases that give you the clue to an approaching paralipsis
include "not to mention", "to say nothing of", "leaving aside",
"without considering", and "far be it from me to mention". Some
examples may make this clearer: "Far be it from me to mention Mr
Smith's many infidelities"; "It would be unseemly for me to dwell
on the man's drinking problem", "I will not speak of her unsavoury
past", "I surely need not remind you to get your Christmas shopping
done early". You get the idea. It's from Greek "paraleipsis",
passing over. The device is also known as "paraleipsis" and
"paralepsis". Some writers argue that it's the same thing as
"apophasis". They may say that: I couldn't possibly comment.
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4. Q&A
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Q. I was wondering where the phrase "Great Scott" comes from. On
another site I read that it's actually a corruption of the German
greeting "Grüß Gott!". Is it really German? [Jonathon Williams;
related questions came from Stanley Frost in Canada and Peter Botha
in Australia]
A. The late John Ciardi also once believed this, though he recanted
in a radio broadcast in 1985. You can be sure German immigrants to
the US, say from Bavaria or Austria, brought with them their usual
greeting, though it isn't easy to work out how it could have been
converted to "Great Scott" (the second word rhymes, but the first
has a completely different vowel in German). On the other hand, it
is clear that the English phrase does indeed contain a euphemism
for God, and so belongs in the same set as interjections like
"Great jumpin' Jehoshaphat!" and "Great Caesar!".
There's some confusion about this one, with various possibilities
being put forward for the Scott in question - sometimes a generic
archetypal Scot is suggested and even Sir Walter Scott has been
mentioned (this last one isn't so daft as you might think, as I've
found several examples in nineteenth-century writings to "the great
Scott" in reference to him).
Let's look at the facts. Until recently the earliest known example,
in the big Oxford English Dictionary, was from F Anstey's Tinted
Venus of 1885: "Great Scott! I must be bad!". But the digitising of
electronic texts and the recent publication of the diary of an
American Civil War veteran have moved the saying back in stages to
the time of that conflict. The diary is Eye of the Storm: a Civil
War Odyssey, written and illustrated by Private Robert Knox Sneden.
He says in his diary entry of 3 May 1864: "'Great Scott,' who would
have thought that this would be the destiny of the Union Volunteer
in 1861-2 while marching down Broadway to the tune of 'John Brown's
Body'".
So it's almost certainly American, of Civil War era at the latest.
Two later examples that I recently found suggest that it may have
referred to a real person. One is from Galaxy magazine of July
1871: "'Great—Scott!' he gasped in his stupefaction, using the name
of the then commander-in-chief for an oath, as officers sometimes
did in those days". The other is from a book of 1872, Americanisms;
the English of the New world by the excellently named Maximilian
Schele De Vere: "'Scott, Great!' a curious euphemistic oath, in
which the name of a well-known general is substituted for the
original word, probably merely because of its monosyllabic form".
Another electronic search, by Fred Shapiro of Yale Law School,
turned up an earlier example from a May 1861 issue of The New York
Times: "These gathering hosts of loyal freemen, under the command
of the great SCOTT".
There was indeed a famous American general named Scott, who did
have the title of commander-in-chief of the US Army at the time of
the outbreak of the Civil War, though he is best known as one of
the two American heroes of the Mexican War of 1846-48 (if, that is,
you're American and not Mexican). This was General Wingfield Scott,
known to his troops as Old Fuss and Feathers. It seems plausible
that he is the source being pointed to.
There's nothing new in this attribution, however. Wingfield Scott
has previously been fingered as the origin by several writers,
among them Eric Partridge. And we still can't be absolutely sure
that he was the Scott being alluded to. But the combination of
dates and the references written so soon after the event point to
him quite strongly.
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Q. I told someone recently that they were being used as a guinea
pig, which puzzled them. I explained the meaning but was at a loss
to explain its origins. The obvious reason is that the creatures
were used in experiments but this seems odd: why would scientists
use a creature that would cost a lot to import when rats and mice
would have been free? [Steve Lawson, York]
A. There are many puzzles about this inoffensive little animal, not
least that it isn't a pig and it doesn't come from Guinea. It's
actually a rodent from central South America, though the variety
that children have as pets doesn't occur in the wild.
Why it should have that name is a mystery; the Oxford English
Dictionary hazards a guess that it might have been confused with
the Guinea hog, a hardy species of pig which did come from the
Guinea coast of Africa, was taken to the US as part of the slave
trade, and was at one time a common homestead pig in rural America.
The problem with this, as the OED's editors surely knew, is that
"guinea pig" is actually about a century older as a term in English
than "guinea hog", which is known from 1664. The guinea pig was
early on also called the "Spanish coney" (coney being the old name
for a rabbit, which was applied by sailors and explorers to any
small, furry, vaguely rabbit-like animal they encountered; Spanish
because it came from the Spanish colonies in South America); it has
been suggested that "coney" became corrupted to "guinea". Yet a
third story suggests that it was first brought to Britain in
Guineamen, vessels that did the triangular voyage to Guinea and the
New World as part of the slave trade, but similar problems about
dating crop up here. Either way, it seems to have ended up being
called a pig because it does squeal a bit like one. The animal was
domesticated three centuries ago and became widely distributed in
Europe and America.
I've gone into all that partly because people often ask me, but
also as a consolation prize because I can't answer your question. I
just don't know, nor does anyone that I've asked. The guinea pig
was certainly used for medical experimentation in the nineteenth
century - there are many examples mentioned in the literature going
back at least as far as the 1850s. Its advantages may have been
those that also recommended it as a pet - it doesn't bite much,
it's not a fussy eater, and it's long-lived. We now know that in
some respects the guinea pig is rather like us, for example in its
immune reactions and its need for vitamin C in its diet, but that
could hardly have been known to the early experimenters. It seems
just to have been a convenient and easily-obtained animal at the
time, though these days it's rarely used.
The first known use of "guinea pig" to refer to a human who was
being experimented upon is by George Bernard Shaw in 1913. But it
has proved impossible to make any direct link to experiments that
used the animals or why that particular experimental subject should
have so caught the imagination that it should have been taken up as
a metaphor (except that "guinea pig" sounds more exotic than "lab
rat"). My suspicion - and I can hardly rate it any higher - is that
it was the experiments of Louis Pasteur in Paris on infectious
diseases, especially rabies, in the 1880s and 1890s that brought
guinea pigs to wide general attention in this context. I've been
able to establish that he did in fact test vaccines on them and
that the fact was public knowledge at the time. Beyond that it's
impossible to go.
5. Endnote
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"Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we
meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is
more urgently in need of control than the economic variety."
[Trevor Nunn, in the Evening Standard, 3 June 1999; quoted in the
Oxford Dictionary of Thematic Quotations (2000).] ["Strapline": a
subsidiary heading or caption in a newspaper or magazine.]
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