World Wide Words -- 04 Jan 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 322          Saturday 4 January 2003
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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. Words of the Year 2002.
3. Topical Words: Murder.
4. Weird Words: Didgeridoo.
5. Q&A: Blockbuster; Hill of beans.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. Beta test request.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BETA TEST REQUEST  I'm working towards a redesign of the Web site
and would appreciate assistance from subscribers. See the last item
for more details.

WEB SITE PROBLEMS  My ISP wishes to apologise for problems with the
server that carries the World Wide Words Web site. It has been out
of action intermittently during the week and for most of yesterday
(Friday). It should now, fingers crossed, be working.

COSTARD  Following the piece about this old name for an apple in
the last issue, many subscribers wondered if there could be a link
with the custard apple. Though the apparent similarity is striking,
the word "custard" here has a different origin. It is said that the
pulp of the fruit reminded Europeans in colour and consistency of a
custard, and the fruit is roughly apple-sized; this was sufficient
to create an entirely misleading English name.

COCKTAIL  The story that I suggested in the last issue sounded the
most probable - Antoine Peychaud's creation in New Orleans of a
mixed drink using bitters - has been rendered less likely as the
result of a message from Mark Brown, the CEO of the Sazerac Company
that markets Peychaud's bitters. It turns out that the chronology
is wrong, as the Antoine Peychaud who opened the apothecary's shop
at 123 Royal Street, New Orleans, did so in 1838, not in 1795, too
late for him to have been the source of the term. The confusion may
have come about because his father, who did arrive in New Orleans
in 1795, had the same name.

ODD SENSE OF HUMOUR, US?  The most special card I sent this year
had the words "To my wife at Christmas" on the front. She spotted
small type on the back that read "Not suitable for children" ...


2. Words of the Year 2002
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At their annual meeting each January, the members of the American
Dialect Society select words and phrases that came to prominence in
the previous twelve months. Though those proposing and voting on
terms include many academic linguists and dictionary makers, this
is definitely lexicography with its hair down.

That's not to say that the selection is trivial or that it doesn't
reflect current concerns. This year's is noticeably more serious
that some that have preceded it and has been deeply affected by
current political and military concerns. Among the words proposed
were "weapons of mass destruction", "regime change" (a change of
leadership through external pressure), "axis of evil", and the less
serious "Saddameter" (an indicator showing the daily likelihood of
war with Iraq), and "Iraqnophobia" (a strong fear of Iraq).

The other major theme this year has been electronic communications,
perhaps surprisingly so in view of the dot.com bust and the general
slowing-down of economic activity in the field. Nominations here
included the verb "to Google", to seek online information by means
of the Google search engine, "blog" (a log of personal events that
is posted on the Web), "datavalence" (surveillance using computer
systems), and the prefix "war-" (as in "war-chalking" and "war-
driving") for various forms of unauthorised Internet access.

The more skittish end of linguistic creativity was also evident in
nominations for "grid butt" (marks left on the buttocks by fishnet
pantyhose), "sausage fest" (a party with more males than females),
"unorthodox entrepreneur" (a panhandler, prostitute, or drug dealer
in a Vancouver park), "diabulimia" (loss of weight by a diabetic
skipping insulin doses), "neuticles" (fake testicles for neutered
pets), and "dialarhoea" (the inadvertent dialling of a cell phone
in a pocket or handbag).

These are the final results in various categories, as voted on
yesterday evening (Friday 3 January) in Atlanta, Georgia:

 Most likely to succeed: Blog.
 Most useful: Google.
 Most creative: Dialarhoea.
 Most unnecessary: Wombanisation (feminization).
 Most outrageous: Neuticles
 Most euphemistic: Regime change.
 Phrase of the Year: Weapons of mass destruction.

Earlier in the week we were also graced with the 28th annual list
of Banished Words from the Lake Superior State University at Sault
Ste Marie, Michigan. This small college's yearly mini PR-fest is
based on words that have been submitted by the general public in
the previous 12 months.

The selection, as so often, reflects idiosyncratic dislikes. Some
sponsors of terms were troubled by the lack of logic demonstrated
by their creators and users. "Untimely death" was disliked by
several people on the grounds that few deaths are actually timely;
"on the ground" was cordially hated because it is where we spend
most of our time anyway; "must-see TV" is taken by its detractors
to mean the opposite; "material breach" grates, one submitter
argued, because it "suggests an obstetrical complication that pulls
a physician off the golf course", rather than an issue of crucial
diplomatic and military relevance. Others proposed "weapons of mass
destruction", "homeland security" and "now, more than ever ..." for
various reasons, but in essence because they are becoming clichés
through overuse.

Other examples cited included the overuse of "extreme" in sports
and marketing, the common saying by sports commentators that "there
is no score" (when what they mean, it was argued, is that the score
is 0-0) and the too-frequent appearance of "having said that" and
"that said" in the news media.

The full list is at <http://www.lssu.edu/banished/>.


3. Topical Words: Murder
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Lazing in front of the television, as so many of us do during the
holiday season, is a more perilous occupation for lexicographers
than for the ordinary run of mortals. You never know when your soul
is going to twitch in dismay at the inability of screenwriters to
think historically about language.

I was figuratively so affected twice this Christmas, and each time,
oddly enough, by the same phrase. In the film Topsy Turvy, Richard
D'Oyly Carte remarked to Gilbert and Sullivan after a tense
discussion, "I could murder a pork chop". And a BBC adaptation of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles had Sherlock
Holmes uttering much the same sentiment to Watson.

Mike Leigh and Allan Cubitt, who wrote the respective scripts, have
sadly committed an unfortunate anachronism. This expressive way of
saying that one could consume something greedily and with relish
has seduced them into using it in contexts some 75 years before its
actual first appearance.

Some caution is needed, since this phrase is hard to date - so much
so that the Oxford English Dictionary put out a request for help
two years ago. Their earliest example then was from Punch magazine
in 1986: "I could murder a plate of ham and eggs", but the editors
were rightly sure it was older. I can improve on that a little,
since a 1975 edition of the BBC television SF series Dr Who has
Sarah Jane Smith saying to the Doctor "Ooh, I could murder a cup of
tea". Many readers, though, will have first come across it in print
in Terry Pratchett's Mort of 1987, in which Death says
reflectively, "I could murder a curry".

It's new enough that to a lot of people it comes as though freshly
minted; certainly it's too recent for most slang dictionaries. It
has been said it evolved from an older American figurative sporting
sense of "murder", to trounce or soundly defeat another person or
team, which appeared in the boxing world soon after the start of
the twentieth century. I'm not so sure about a US origin, and the
New Oxford Dictionary of English backs up my intuition and search
results by suggesting it's really British.

It might possibly be a truncated form of "I could murder to get a
..." or "I could murder for ..." something. But really that's no
more than a guess and the few examples of "I could murder for ..."
that I've seen online look as though they are misunderstandings of
the "I could murder a ..." idiom. All very puzzling.


4. Weird Words: Didgeridoo
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An Australian Aboriginal musical instrument.

What could be more Australian than the droning sound of this native
instrument? Yet there's a linguistic mystery about it. Firstly, the
name isn't recorded in Australian English until 1919, astonishingly
late. And it isn't Aboriginal - native names include "yidali",
"illpera" and "bombo", but nothing that sounds even vaguely like
"didgeridoo". Lexicographers have traditionally got round this by
saying it is imitative, but "didgeridoo" bears scant relation to
the noise the instrument makes. Now Dymphna Lonergan, currently
working on a PhD thesis about the Irish influence on Australian
English, may have solved the problem. Her theory appeared in
Australian newspapers six months ago, and is reported in more
detail in the current issue of Ozwords, published by the Australian
National Dictionary Centre. She points to a possible Irish source
in two words "dúdaire" and "dubh". Gaelic spelling is in a class by
itself: the words are actually said rather like "doodjerreh" and
"doo". The first means  "trumpeter"; the second means "black". Put
them together (adjective following noun in Gaelic) and you get a
phrase that means "black trumpeter" and which sounds remarkably
like the instrument's name.


5. Q&A
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Q. What is the derivation of "blockbuster"? [Martin Jones]

A. Having just sat through the latest Harry Potter and Lord of the
Rings episodes, each of which seemed to be about nine hours long, I
begin to understand the deepest meaning of this term, though in my
case by the end of each it wasn't the block that was busting.

The first blockbusters were much more serious and deadly: large
bombs developed in the early years of World War Two by the Royal
Air Force. The first examples, from April 1941 onwards, weighed
4000 pounds (1814kg) and were carried by Wellington and Lancaster
bombers on raids into Germany. They were called "block busters"
supposedly because they were capable of destroying a whole block at
one time. ("Block" here has the usual British sense of a large
single building subdivided into separate rooms, flats or offices,
not the common American sense, as in "city block", of an assemblage
of buildings enclosed by streets, since that sense of the word was
hardly known in Britain at the time.)

It was attached to books, plays or films with a figuratively
similar explosive force only after the War - the first example I
can find is from 1957.

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Q. Recently the expression "a hill of beans" has been used by
Samuel L Jackson in a Barclays commercial and also in a recent
Vodafone commercial. But what does it actually mean? Several of us
would love to know! [Spencer James]

A. A hill of beans in colloquial American is a symbol for something
of trifling value, as in expressions like "it ain't worth a hill of
beans".

The mundane bean has for at least eight centuries been regarded as
the epitome of worthlessness. Even if you know how many beans make
five you are unlikely to consider any one of them to be valuable.
Part of the strength of the fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk is
the contrast between the valueless beans Jack was given in exchange
for the cow and the riches revealed by the full-grown beanstalk.

The expanded formula of "a hill of beans" is American. From the
evidence, it seems to have appeared in the modern sense about 1860.
It is yet another example of the expansive hyperbole so typical of
US English in that period. An example from rather later is in The
Indiscretions of Archie by P G Wodehouse: "Here have I been kicking
because you weren't a real burglar, when it doesn't amount to a
hill of beans whether you are or not".

The original sense of "hill of beans" was literal. For example, a
book on rural affairs by one J J Thomas dated around 1858 used it
in describing how to grow lima beans: "A strong wire is stretched
from the tops of posts placed at a distance from each other; and to
this wire two diverging cords from each hill of beans are
attached". A little drawing alongside makes clear that the writer
is referring to the mounding along the row of bean seeds.

It would seem that this is the origin of the phrase, and that it
was then applied figuratively to the illogical idea that if one
bean was worthless, a whole hill of them would be even more so.


6. Endnote
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"After writing for fifteen years it struck me I had no talent for
writing. But I couldn't give it up: by that time I was already
famous." [Attributed to Mark Twain and also to Robert Benchley;
quoted in The Cassell Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (1998)]


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C. Beta test request
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I'm working on redesigning the Web site, mainly to modernise its
underlying coding structure, but also to simplify and improve the
design, which has become rather fussy. Two sample pages, at

  <http://www.worldwidewords.org/betatest/index.htm>, and
  <http://www.worldwidewords.org/betatest/ww-lag1.htm>

show how it might look (though the design is not yet fixed).

My aim is to gauge how compatible this design is with the range of
browsers currently in use. So I would especially like to hear from
anybody who uses an operating system other than Windows (such as
Mac, Linux, or Unix) or who has a disability that requires special
techniques to view pages. (I know that the coding works in Netscape
7 and Internet Explorer 6 under MS Windows.)

The page ought to look similar in layout to the old design, with a
navigation column down the left-hand side; you should be able to
see the whole page width at one time if your screen resolution is
800x600 or higher. Does the page looks reasonable to you? Do you
see strange characters or odd placement of elements? Is the main
text justified (vertical margins right and left)? Does it look like
a printed page, especially with regard to dashes and apostrophes?

(Note that though most links in the navigation column will send you
to existing pages that still have the old design, some don't work.)

Your comments on the appearance of this page will be very welcome.
Please send them to betatest at worldwidewords.org.

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