World Wide Words -- 26 Jan 02

Fri Jan 25 11:35:17 UTC 2002

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 273         Saturday 26 January 2002
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Sent each Saturday to 14,000+ subscribers in at least 114 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>   Mail: <editor at worldwidewords.org>
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Contents
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 1. Feedback, notes and comments.
 2. Turns of Phrase: Personal telco.
 2. Weird Words: Anamorphosis.
 3. Out There: The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
 4. Q&A: Boot a computer, Crap.
 5. How to leave and join the list.
 6. Contact addresses.

 1. Feedback, notes and comments
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-NOMICS  In last week's piece on this suffix, I was unwise enough
to suggest that "Enronomics" was the first word in this ending that
had been created from the name of a corporation as opposed to an
individual. Peter Jones wrote from Belgium: "Naturally, I took the
above as a challenge, as no doubt will other readers". He pointed
out that "Cisconomics" may be found online.

 2. Turns of Phrase: Personal telco
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This is a volunteer or community application of wireless computer
networks. Computer users who have a broadband Internet link can set
up wireless access to it using a system such as Wi-Fi. This allows
anybody within range who has a similar link to use the broadband
connection without having to subscribe themselves. Access is either
provided free, or on a subscription basis at a low rate compared
with individual broadband costs.

Understandably, telecommunications companies ("telcos") are less
than keen on this development, since they are spending vast sums on
setting up their own high-speed wireless infrastructure using
third-generation technologies. The pejorative alternative terms
"parasitic grid" and "piranha grid" for the system seem to come
from that side of the argument.

While rejecting the implications of freeloading, those involved in
providing the links haven't yet settled on a name for them. Terms
such as "community-owned wireless network", "neighborhood area
network", "community wireless", and "open network access point"
have all been spotted in recent months, though "personal telco"
currently seems to be the most popular.

Some of the more established wireless-sharing groups in the United
States include the Bay Area Wireless Group, Seattle Wireless,
Portland's Personal Telco Project, NYCWireless.Net and Boston's
GuerillaNet.
                                          [Toronto Star, Oct. 2001]

 2. Weird Words: Anamorphosis  /,an@'mO:rf at sIs/
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The process of creating an anamorphic image.

An "anamorphic" picture is one that has been distorted so that it
appears normal when viewed from a particular direction or with a
suitable mirror or lens. Hans Holbein's painting, The Ambassadors,
is a famous example, in which a distorted shape lies diagonally
across the bottom of the frame. Viewing this from an acute angle
transforms it into a skull (it seems that the picture was designed
to be hung on a staircase, so that people coming up the stairs
would be correctly placed to see and be startled by it). A more
common example is a warning notice painted on the road, whose text
is extended lengthways so that drivers will see it correctly from
their foreshortened perspective. Some anamorphic images have been
drawn on paper so they only make sense when viewed in a vertical
polished cylinder of the correct diameter placed in the middle. The
word was created in the early eighteenth century from Greek "ana-",
back, and "morphosis", a shaping.

[The Ambassadors is in the National Gallery in London. I won't give
you the quite horrible link to see it online. Instead, visit the
search page at <http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/search/>; under
the heading "Search the Collection On-line" select "Work name" in
the drop-down list, and type "Ambassadors" in the search box.]

 3. Out There: The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
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The website at <http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/> explains its purpose
thus: "Conceived to honor the memory of Victorian novelist Edward
George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, encourage word play, and promote the
universal improvement of mankind, the contest challenges entrants
to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels". Bulwer-
Lytton, a prolific but poor writer, is best known for opening his
novel Paul Clifford of 1830 with the words "It was a dark and
stormy night". Of the winners in 2001, my favourite (because I've
just seen a certain new film) was this from the fantasy section,
sadly only a runner-up:

  "I could tell you stories about this road we shall be
  traveling," the old man told his young companions as he
  leaned on his staff and stroked his silver beard, "of how
  it was built by Dwarves of the Barad-dur in the days of
  Thranduil the Great, numberless years before the Elves of
  the Ered Luin left their silver woods in Lindon, sailed
  their ships over the Western Sea, and passed from the
  knowledge of men, but what would you learn from these tales,
  except that I squandered my college years reading far too
  much Tolkien instead of meeting girls."

[My favourite real opening sentence to a novel is from Anthony
Burgess's Earthly Powers: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first
birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that
the archbishop had come to see me".]

 4. Q&A
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Q. Would you extend your recent answer to the question about "to
boot"? I've love to know how this developed into "to boot a
computer" (or even "reboot" one). [Shirley Willett, Robert E
Thompson, and others]

A. There's actually no connection between these computing terms and
the phrase "to boot" that I wrote about recently (see <http://www.
worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tob1.htm>), which means "in addition,
besides, moreover".

For the computer sense, we have to think of footwear, in particular
the saying "to lift oneself by one's own bootstraps". That's hardly
a practical proposition, but it does give the intended idea of a
person achieving success by his own, unaided efforts. A bootstrap
is not a bootlace, by the way, but a pair of loops inside the top
of a heavy riding boot, something to pull on to get the foot past
that awkward bend at the ankle.

The idea of lifting oneself off the ground by pulling on them is
sometimes said to date back to a tall story included by the German
writer Rudolph Raspe in his book of 1785, Baron Munchausen's
Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, in
which the famous Baron saved himself by this incredible feat.
However, the exploit doesn't appear in the version of the book I
have access to. (The term "bootstrap" itself, as well as the
saying, seem to have originated in the USA early in the nineteenth
century - at least, the phrase was well known in that country by
the 1860s.)

In the early days of computing, in the early 1950s, the phrase was
borrowed to describe the tortuous process of getting a computer to
start. The process involved reading in a short program, either by
pressing keys on the console or reading them from paper tape. This
series of commands was just powerful enough to read in a slightly
more complicated program, say from punched cards. In turn, this was
just sufficiently complex to load the whole operating system from a
disk drive. Modern personal computers still do something very much
like this: when you turn one on, it first runs a program that is
permanently wired into a chip in the machine. This loads a small
start-up program from disk, which in turn loads the main operating
system.

(A similar process is that of getting a towing hawser from one ship
to another at sea. The hawser is far too heavy and stiff to pass
across on its own, so seamen first send over a light line. Pulling
on this brings over a succession of heavier ropes, the last of
which is stout enough to carry the weight of the hawser itself.)

Computer people borrowed the idea of "lifting oneself by one's own
bootstraps" for this process of starting the computer up. In the
early days, the initial bit of program code was called a "bootstrap
loader", but this was abbreviated, first to "bootstrap", and then
to the verb "to boot". "Reboot", for repeating the process,
followed shortly afterwards.

Those of us tempted by recalcitrant electronics to give our
computers a swift kick in a vital place (for which a technical term
is "percussive maintenance") are just returning to the original,
literal sense of "boot" ...

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Q. I would love to have your thoughts on crap, the word "crap",
that is, and its connections with Thomas Crapper. [Andy Bell, Hong
Kong]

A. You quoted a text from a website in your question - too long to
reproduce - which seeks to link "crap", for defecation, and
"crapper", for the place where one does it, with the late Mr Thomas
Crapper, plumber of London.

Since Mr Crapper died on 27 January (in the year 1910), this is a
suitable moment at which to consider his life and works as well as
these two items of mildly coarse slang. Though he achieved a great
deal in his lifetime, he was neither the inventor of the flush
toilet (as some have said), nor is there any evidence his name is
connected with these words other than by an odd coincidence.

"Crap" is actually Middle English. It seems to be a mixture of two
older words - one thread comes from Dutch "krappen", to pluck off,
cut off, or separate; the other may be from Old French "crappe",
siftings or waste or rejected matter, from medieval Latin "crappa",
chaff.

The first sense in English was indeed "chaff", and was also used in
some places as the name for weeds that infested cereal crops, such
as darnel, rye-grass, or charlock. Later (we're talking about the
end of the fifteenth century here) it took on an extra meaning of
the residue that was left after rendering fat.

Its application to excretion appeared in the 1840s. There's an
example in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1846 that refers to a
"crapping ken", a privy, where "ken" means a house. This seems to
be where the sense came from, but it doesn't derive directly from
the word "crap" already mentioned. Older examples show that this
term for a privy was originally "croppin ken". Its source may be a
dialect English word meaning a tail, which developed in sense from
the obvious anal associations.

What seems to have happened is that "croppin ken" got changed to
"crapping ken" around the middle of the nineteenth century under
the influence of the idea of "crap" as smelly rubbish, and "crap",
noun and verb, later came from "crapping" by a process called back-
formation. "Crapper" is American slang, which dates from the 1920s,
and is an obvious enough extension of the older noun and verb. The
common story that American servicemen stationed in London in the
First World War saw Mr Crapper's name on sanitary ware and borrowed
it are unsupported by any facts.

As Thomas Crapper didn't start his business until 1861, and didn't
become well known until much later, it's clear his name had no
influence on the development of the word "crap". A lot of the
confusion about Crapper the man is due to a tongue-in-cheek book of
1969 by Wallace Reyburn, Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas
Crapper, which told a lot of falsehoods about him, and even led
some people to conclude that he had never existed.

He was, however, a successful businessman and salesman, and sold
great numbers of items of sanitary ware from his base in London.
Examples of his work with his name on them may still be seen even
now, for example on the occasional manhole cover.

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