World Wide Words -- 11 Jan 2003

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 323         Saturday 11 January 2003
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Problemsome.
3. Weird Words: Humongous.
4. Recently Sighted.
5. Q&A: Beat the band; Comparing -ize and -ise.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BETA TEST PAGES  Thank you all for your helpful responses, which
were a better tutorial on the needs of Web users than I could have
got from any other source. As many as possible of your suggestions
will be incorporated into the final design (bearing in mind that
some are contradictory); however, this won't appear for some weeks,
as there's a lot of material to update. If you would like a sneak
look at my current thinking, the draft pages have been updated:

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


2. Topical Words: Problemsome
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Words sometimes pop up out of nowhere, startling one into a brief
voyage of discovery. This one appeared in a recent speech by the
Republican US Senator Arlen Specter on the Homeland Security Bill.
Presumably it had been coined from "problem" on the model of
"troublesome".

In following it up I first gained the impression that the senator
had created it, since 11 of the 14 examples I found in newspapers
and magazines were quotes from him. Nick Shearing, one of the OED's
editors, kindly searched out the earliest instance in a newspaper,
which was in the Washington News of February 1982. This also quoted
the Senator: "I think it has a very problemsome potential for
Republicans", so seeming to support my theory. But, alas, Fred
Shapiro of the Yale Law School then found an older one in a court
report from 1979 and so brought the whole edifice of surmise
tumbling down.

The story actually turns out to be rather more interesting, since
it looks as though it may have been independently invented by many
people. Searching more widely, I found about 700 examples in Web
pages and Usenet groups, which come from a wide variety of American
sources going back 20 years. A couple of examples have also turned
up from British newspapers. However, it isn't in any dictionary I
know of. It's yet another example of the way that terms can exist
in the language for years without drawing mainstream attention, no
doubt because newspaper sub-editors and publishers' copy editors
blue-pencil it unless it's a direct quote.

Views on it will vary from dismissing it as an illiterate mistake
to regarding it as a valid and intriguing form. My feeling tends
towards the latter: there's nothing about it that renders it odder
than "bothersome", "clamoursome", "grumblesome", "lonesome",
"shuddersome", or any of a couple of hundred others you can find in
big dictionaries. What holds us back from embracing it is our
preference for the more familiar "problematic", which has been
around for 400 years.


3. Weird Words: Humongous  /hju:'mVNg at s/
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Huge, enormous.

This American word has established itself so well in the language
that William Safire reported a couple of years ago it had been put
into the mouth of Thomas Jefferson in a television programme. If
so, that was a sad anachronism, since "humongous" first darted on
to the linguistic stage only about 1968, apparently as a bit of
college slang, but hit the big time almost immediately and has been
with us ever since. That's despite grumpy comments like those of
William Hartston in the British newspaper "The Independent", who
said it was "surely one of the ugliest words ever to slither its
way into our dictionaries" and "a silly and affected synonym for
huge or enormous", adding that "it serves no purpose not covered by
those words and is thus redundant".

Steady on, old chap! It's surely in the same class as skittishly
humorous words like "ginormous" (which arose in World War Two
military slang) and the set of words for large amounts based on
creative augmentations of "million", such as "zillion",
"bazillion", "gazillion", and "squillion". Our word was probably
based on an amalgam of "huge" and "monstrous", influenced by the
stress pattern of "stupendous" or "tremendous".


4. Recently Sighted
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C-DAY  On 17 February, London introduces a daily charge to bring a
vehicle into the central area. Its start is called C-Day, with the
"C" taken by critics to mean, not "congestion", or "charging", but
"confusion" and "catastrophe". There's a widespread belief that the
electronic detection system won't work and that the whole idea will
collapse into disaster.

FEMALE SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION  The British Medical Journal last week
accused drug companies of trying to create a new disease by this
name in order to sell impotence drugs to women. The Journal argued
that such problems are not medical but emotional.

MOBLOG  For a couple of years we've had "weblogs", personal diaries
maintained online by individuals, a term often abbreviated by its
users to "blog". Now the term has been extended to refer to a form
of weblogging carried out using mobile phones, laptops or handheld
computers, hence "mobile" + "weblog".


5. Q&A
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Q. What is the origin of "to beat the band", as in phrases like "it
was raining to beat the band" Is there any reason - beyond muddling
one's phrases - why one would use "to beat the banshee" instead of
"to beat the band"? [Tracey]

A. I've come across a few examples of "to beat the banshee"; it
makes a sort of sense, banshees in legend being known to wail
loudly; but as they traditionally do so only when somebody is about
to die, it's perhaps not a good analogy when you are trying to say
that something is being done or is happening to a superlative
degree. But you're right, of course, to suggest that it's a
variation on the older "to beat the band". There's quite a history
of attempts to explain this phrase.

Eric Partridge (whom several reference works follow) suggested it
was linked to a yet older expression "to beat Banagher", to surpass
everything, which is known from 1830. Banagher is a town on the
Shannon in County Offaly, Ireland; before the Great Reform Act of
1832 it was a rotten or pocket borough, one which sent two members
to Parliament but which had a tiny electorate controlled by the
local magnate, who therefore had the election "in his pocket". It
is said that when somebody referred to a particularly egregious
example of a rotten borough, say one in which every voter was a man
employed by the landowner, the reply might come back "Well, that
beats Banagher". The story sounds highly suspect, not least because
there's an entry in Captain Francis Grose's Dictionary of the
Vulgar Tongue of 1785 which says: "He beats Banaghan; an Irish
saying of one who tells wonderful stories. Perhaps Banaghan was a
minstrel famous for dealing in the marvellous". So it's far from
certain that the original had anything to do with Irish rotten
boroughs.

Whatever the original form, and despite those who advocate it, it's
unlikely to be the true origin of "to beat the band", for two
reasons. Firstly, the American version of the Banagher story always
seems to have been in the form "that bangs Banagher", as here from
The Living Age of 1844: "That bangs Banagher, and all the world
knows Banagher bangs the devil". Secondly, "to beat the band"
appears only at the end of that century (it's recorded first from
1897) and originally seems to have turned up in direct references
to music making. As here in a story, The Transit of Gloria Mundy
(ho, ho) by Chester Bailey Fernald in The Century magazine in 1899:
"Then it was 'The Sweet By and By,' with all hands going as ye
please in the chorus, and she belting the little music-box to beat
the band". And here in a little skit of 1900 by Guy Wetmore Carryl,
The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven, in which he humorously
retells Aesop's fable:

  "Sweet fowl," he said, "I understand
  You're more than merely natty:
  I hear you sing to beat the band
  And Adelina Patti.
  Pray render with your liquid tongue
  A bit from 'Gotterdammerung.'"

I'm fairly sure that "to beat the band" originally meant that you
sang or played or shouted louder even than an orchestra and so, by
later extension, came to refer to anything superlative. Just for
once, the common-sense explanation may be the correct one, and
there's no need to invoke Irish towns or Irish storytellers, let
alone banshees.

                        -----------

Q. In words including the ending "-ize" or "-ise", such as
"organize" and "categorize", does British English spell them with
an "s" or a "z"?  I would also appreciate a comment on derivation.
[Sid Murphy]

Q. The broad rule is that the "-ize" forms are standard in the US,
but that the "-ise" ones are now usual in Britain and the
Commonwealth in all but formal writing. For example, all British
newspapers use the "-ise" forms; so do most magazines and most non-
academic books published in the UK. However, some British
publishers insist on the "-ize" forms (Oxford University Press
especially), as do many academic journals and a few other
publications (the SF magazine "Interzone" comes to mind). Most
British dictionaries quote both forms, but - despite common usage -
put the "-ize" form first.

The original form, taken from Greek via Latin, is "-ize". That's
the justification for continuing to spell words that way (it helps
that we say the ending with a "z" sound). American English
standardised on the "-ize" ending when it was universal. However,
French verbs from the same Latin and Greek sources all settled on
the "s" form and this has been a powerful influence on British
English. The change by publishers in the UK has happened
comparatively recently, only beginning about a century ago (much
too recently to influence American spelling), though you can find
occasional examples of the "-ise" form in texts going back to the
seventeenth century.

I like the "-ise" forms myself, in part because being British I was
brought up to spell them that way, but also because then I don't
have to remember the exceptions. There are some verbs that must be
spelled with "-ise" because the ending is a compound one, part of a
larger word, and isn't an example of the suffix. An example is
"compromise", where the ending is "-mise", from Latin "missum",
something sent or placed. Some other examples spelled "-ise" are
verbs formed from nouns that have the "s" in the stem, such as
"advertise" or "televise".

At the risk of sounding like a style guide, but in the hope you may
find them useful for reference, these are the words always spelled
in "-ise", whatever your local rule about the rest: "advertise",
"advise", "apprise", "chastise", "circumcise", "comprise",
"compromise", "demise", "despise", "devise", "disfranchise",
"enfranchise", "enterprise", "excise", "exercise", "improvise",
"incise", "premise", "revise", "supervise", "surmise", "surprise",
"televise".


6. Endnote
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"Writing a book is an adventure: it begins as an amusement, then it
becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant." [Winston
Churchill; quoted in the "Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous
Quotations" (2001)]


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