World Wide Words -- 01 Feb 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 31 17:18:25 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 326 Saturday 1 February 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org> <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Boffin.
3. Weird Words: Guiser.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Beyond the pale.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
SFERICS Following the Weird Words piece last week, I must thank
David Landgren and Professor Aharon Eviatar for putting me right on
a couple of points. The atmospherics were actually first observed
during World War I by a German physicist, Heinrich Barkhausen. And
whistlers are caused by radio waves that oscillate between north
and south poles along magnetic lines of force.
BACK ISSUES One of the changes I made to the Web site was to take
out the back issues archive, since few people use it and all issues
since the start of 1999 are available elsewhere anyway. In case you
need a back issue, they are stored at:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/worldwidewords.html
Issues are automatically placed in this archive as soon as they are
sent out each week. The archive is also searchable.
2. Topical Words: Boffin
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The headline in the Sydney Morning Herald last week caught my eye:
"Bin Boffin, Says Scientists", and not only because of the knee-
jerk sub-editorial alliterations.
American readers may be flummoxed by it, since they hardly know the
verb "to bin" in the sense of throwing something away (as into a
rubbish bin), let alone "boffin" , which dictionaries define as a
person engaged in scientific or technical research.
The article quoted Professor Chris Fell, who is President of the
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, a
body that represents 60,000 scientists and technologists in that
country. His argument was that "boffin" is in common usage a jaded
word that borders on the offensive; the word "conjures up images of
weird old men in flapping lab coats, pouring strange chemicals into
test tubes", an image that - understandably - his Federation is not
keen to see perpetuated.
When it first appeared, in Britain during World War Two, "boffin"
was a common colloquial reference to the technical experts, the
backroom boys, who were helping win the war. It was an affectionate
term, though tinged with the practical fighting man's scorn for the
academic brain worker. It is claimed that the term arose among
researchers who were developing radar, but there's some anecdotal
evidence that it was around in the Royal Air Force just before the
War as a general term for experts on aviation. However, we also
know that - confusingly - it is first recorded, in the Royal Navy,
for an "elderly" naval officer (one in his thirties or forties).
I'd argue that - in Britain at least - "boffin" has never quite
taken on the highly negative associations that Professor Fell
ascribes to it. For many young people in Britain, it is indeed
derogatory, but for a different reason. When it came into fashion
among them some 20 years ago, it took on much the same sense that
my generation gave to "swot", as a disparaging description of
someone good at school work - a person acknowledged to be brainy,
but inoffensive and definitely not respected.
All sorts of theories have been put forward for where it came from.
Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the radar pioneer, thought it might be a
combination of the word "puffin" with the Blackburn Baffin, a pre-
war British biplane, but this seems very unlikely. Others, such as
Eric Partridge, point to literary connections, since a Nicodemus
Boffin is a major character, a "very odd-looking old fellow", in
Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. Oddly enough, there are several
other literary connections from that period, since the same surname
turns up in The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope, in News from
Nowhere by William Morris, and in Mrs. Warren's Profession by
George Bernard Shaw, among other places.
So it was certainly common enough as a fictional family name, but
how it got from any of these into RAF parlance - if that was the
route it took - is a complete mystery. As to stamping it out as a
dismissive term for scientists, Professor Fell should know that
language goes where it will, unconstrained by positive thinking or
earnest exhortations.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
AS AN IMPORTANT SPAM-PREVENTION SECURITY MEASURE FOR ME,
IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
ADDRESS TO ONE OF THOSE IN THE 'CONTACT ADDRESSES' SECTION.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Weird Words: Guiser
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A masquerader, a mummer.
It's obvious enough that a guiser is somebody who adopts a guise,
who takes on a different form or appearance. It's the usual name
for participants in local customs in Britain that involve dressing
up and performing an entertainment such as a mummers' play.
One description of guisers appears in Yorkshire Folk-Talk, written
by the Rev M C F Morris in 1892 in writing about the mell supper
(from a dialect word meaning "meal"), a traditional harvest-home
supper in Yorkshire:
No mell supper can take place without dancing, and formerly
the advent of "guisers" formed one of the great features of
the entertainment. These "guisers" were men with masks or
blackened faces, and they were decked out in all sorts of
fantastic costumes. The starting of the dancing was not
always an easy matter, but by degrees, as the dancers warmed
to the work and as the ale horns came to be passed round,
the excitement began to grow; this was increased by the
arrival of the "guisers," and then the clatter of the dancers'
boots doing double-shuffle and various comical figures, set
the entertainment going at full swing.
The word has had other forms, such as "guisard" and the Scots
"gyser". Another dialect form, "geezer", has become a common term
of mild derision applied mainly (but by no means exclusively) to
elderly men.
4. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscriber Laurie Malone spotted an advertisement in the Sydney
Morning Herald last week for a 9.5 ft dinghy which came complete
with "spas". How could they fit even the one spa into such a small
boat, he wondered?
A spam e-mail that arrived here this week had as its subject line
"Professional steak knife liquidation", which must surely be far
too messy a way to dispose of one's enemies, no matter how well the
job was to be carried out.
And I'm still chuckling over the Safeway package of eight "outdoor
reared pork chipolatas" that my wife bought recently. It must be
cruel to make those poor sausages live out in the weather. Perhaps
they were reared by the people in the coarse farmhouse (the ones
who made the "coarse farmhouse paté" we bought at the same time).
[My spell checker wanted to turn "chipolatas" into "shiploads". The
word's been around in English since 1877, for heaven's sake!]
Lance Nathan's brother spotted another misplaced modifier as the
caption for a link on ESPN.com: "Jason Priestley does his first
interview since his near fatal crash with ABC's Barbara Walters".
Lance commented: "As we all know, running into Barbara Walters is a
leading cause of injury in America."
5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Any idea where "beyond the pail" comes from and what it means?
[Jon Pearce]
A. That's a common misspelling these days because the word that
really belongs in the expression has gone out of use except in this
one case. The expression is properly "beyond the pale". That word
"pale" has nothing to do with the adjective for something light in
colour except that both come from Latin roots. The one referring to
colour is from the Latin verb "pallere", to be pale, whilst our one
is from "palus", a stake.
A pale is an old name for a pointed stake driven into the ground to
form part of a fence and - by obvious extension - to a barrier made
of such stakes, a fence (our modern word "paling" is from the same
source, as are "pole" and "impale"). This meaning has been around
in English since the fourteenth century. By 1400 it had taken on
various figurative senses, such as a defence, a safeguard, a
barrier, an enclosure, or a limit beyond which it was not
permissible to go.
In particular, it was used to describe various defended enclosures
of territory inside other countries. For example, the English pale
in France in the fourteenth century was the territory of Calais,
the last English possession in that country. The most famous one is
the Pale in Ireland, that part of the country over which England
had direct jurisdiction - it varied from time to time, but was an
area of several counties centred on Dublin. The first mention of
the Irish Pale is in a document of 1446-7. Though there was an
attempt later in the century to enclose the Pale by a bank and
ditch (which was never completed), there never was a literal fence
around it.
The expression "beyond the pale", meaning outside the bounds of
acceptable behaviour, came much later. The idea behind it was that
civilisation stopped at the boundary of the pale and beyond lay
those who were not under civilised control and whose behaviour
therefore was not that of gentlemen. A classic example appears in
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, dated 1837: "I look upon
you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of
society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public
conduct". The earliest example I've found is from Sir Walter Scott
in 1819.
It may be older than this, but it surely doesn't date back to the
period of the Irish Pale, or anywhere near. It is often said that
it does come from that political enclosure, but the three-century
gap renders that very doubtful indeed.
6. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"We are all one-syllable people now, two at the most. So we mumble
and stumble into our futures. But it is still our task and our
reward to scavenge through the universe, picking up the detritus of
lost concepts, dusting them down, making them shine. Latin was the
best polishing cloth of all, but we threw it away." [Fay Weldon;
quoted in the "Cassell Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations"
(1996)]
A. Subscription commands
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm. You
can also send a gift subscription: see the same page for a link.
Or, you can send a message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org
from the address at which you are (or want to be) subscribed:
To leave, send: SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS
To join, send: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First-name Last-name
B. Contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Do not use the address that comes up when you hit 'Reply' on this
mailing, or your message will be sent to an electronic dead-letter
office. Either create a new message, or change the outgoing 'To:'
address to one of these:
For general comments, especially responses to Q&A pieces:
TheEditor at worldwidewords.org
For questions intended for reply in a future Q&A feature:
QandA at worldwidewords.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2003. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or in part in other free
media online provided that you include this note and the copyright
notice above. Reproduction in print media or on Web sites requires
prior permission: contact <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list