World Wide Words -- 19 Jul 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 18 18:58:09 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 350 Saturday 19 July 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. Turns of Phrase: Bright.
3. Weird Words: Cymbocephalic.
4. Sic!
5. Topical Words: Lasagne.
6. In Passing?
7. Q&A: Cooties.
8. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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WILE VERSUS WHILE A few subscribers mentioned, following my piece
about these two words last week, that "wile" may have grown up as
an alternative to "while" through the associations of the word with
deceit or deception, and that the idea in "to wile away time" may
have been to steal time illicitly from one's proper duties. Steve
Doerr e-mailed in elaboration: "the French expression 'tromper le
temps' and the Latin 'decipere tempus', both mean to 'deceive'
time". This explains the comment by the OED's editors that the
spelling may have been influenced by the older "to beguile time",
which has much the same meaning.
HORBGORBLE Following my request for information on this strange
word, several subscribers commented that they came across it in
Chosen Words by Ivor Brown, published in 1955. Brown said (and for
this I am indebted to Ian Paterson) that the word means "to putter
about in a feckless ineffective way" and that Brown heard of it in
connection with the trial of a Caithness man for sexual assault on
a young girl. The girl said in Court that the defendant was just
horbgorbling and no worse, so that the case was dismissed. It was
suggested by other subscribers that it is a variant pronunciation
(with spelling following it) of "hobgoblin", though this doesn't
explain the sense. Mystery not yet solved, I'm afraid.
HOLIDAY SLOWDOWN Though World Wide Words will not close entirely
during August, I'm going to take a semi-break by reducing its size
substantially for the five issues between 2 August and 30 August
inclusive. Each issue will consist of the Weird Words item plus
possibly one other piece. Next week's issue will be the last of
full size before the break. Normal service will be restored on
Saturday 6 September.
2. Turns of Phrase: Bright
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It's a noun, not an adjective. If you say, "I'm bright", that's an
immodest (and possibly inaccurate) statement. But "I'm a bright"
says that you don't believe in God, more strictly that your view of
the world is naturalistic, free of what its inventors describe as
"supernaturalism and mystical elements of all kinds". The term has
only recently been coined by Paul Giesert and Mynga Futrell, two
educators from Sacramento, California. They modelled it on "gay",
to provide an umbrella term for a potential coalition of all those
who felt themselves isolated and without political influence in the
USA because they professed no religious belief. The philosopher
Daniel Dennett has taken it up and publicised it in newspaper
articles, from two of which the quotations below have been taken.
Whether we brights are a minority or, as I am inclined to believe,
a silent majority, our deepest convictions are increasingly
dismissed, belittled and condemned by those in power - by
politicians who go out of their way to invoke God and to stand,
self-righteously preening, on what they call "the side of the
angels."
[New York Times, 12 Jul. 2003]
Look on the bright side: though at present they can't admit it and
get elected, the US Congress must be full of closet brights. As
with gays, the more brights come out, the easier it will be for yet
more brights to do so. People reluctant to use the word atheist
might be happy to come out as a bright.
[Guardian, 21 Jun. 2003]
3. Weird Words: Cymbocephalic
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Having an abnormally long and narrow skull.
I flew to the medical dictionaries for elucidation on this one. It
refers to a misshapen skull caused by a congenital condition. What
happens is that one or more of the sutures in the head - fibrous
joints between the bones of the skull - close before the brain has
finished growing. For some reason, the condition is recorded under
several different names; it's also known as "dolichocephaly" (Greek
"dolikos", long), "tectocephaly" (Latin "tectum", a roof), and
"scaphocephaly" (Greek "skaphos", a light boat or skiff). In all
these, the last part is from Greek "kephale", head, but in our word
"cymbocephalic" the first part is from another Greek word for a
small boat, "kymbe".
4. Sic!
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Jamie Greenbaum e-mails from Australia: "Walking to my local club I
pass a building that advertises 'Occasional Child Care', and wonder
what sort of parent places their child there. But I don't wonder
for very long because my club comes into sight and monopolises my
attention by promoting a 'Monster Meat Raffle', a type of meat I've
never tried but the thought of which never fails to excite me".
Browsing the Web looking for information on falconry, I found a
site which said that the sport had been "practiced by the mid-evil
empire, egyptians and every culture worldwide". We used to hear a
lot about the Evil Empire, but where - I wonder - would a mid-evil
empire stand in the catalogue of infamy? Actually, one shouldn't
single out that site, because a follow-up search found about 3000
examples of the same spelling mistake for "medieval" online.
5. Topical Words: Lasagne
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British newspapers have been thumbing their noses at the Italians
this week, following an announcement by researchers that they have
discovered lasagne is in fact an English dish that was described in
"the world's oldest recipe book".
There are two separate claims here; let's consider the second one
first, as it will measure the abilities of the researchers. The
recipe book is The Forme of Cury, which was commissioned by Richard
II in 1390. This is certainly the oldest known recipe book in
English, but any cook with even a soupçon of historical gumption
knows that such books go back a lot further than 1390. The earliest
one in anything like the modern form, I am told, is actually De Re
Coquinaria from the fourth century AD, though individual recipes
are older (there's a famous one for beer in a 4000-year-old
cuneiform tablet).
Their other claim is a little harder to refute. The word appears in
The Forme of Cury as "loseyns", in a recipe for a dish made from a
pasta-like dough and a cheese sauce. The text the researchers found
is this (it's in Middle English, but you should be able to puzzle
most of it out): "Take good broth and do in an erthen pot. Take
flour of paynedemayn and make erof past with water and make erof
thynne foyles as paper with a roller; drye it harde and see it in
broth... Take chese ruayn grated and lay it in dishes with powder
douce and lay eron loseyns isode as hoole as you myght and above
powdour and chese; and so twyse or thryse & serue it forth" (here
"paynedemayn", lord's bread, was made from the best-quality white
flour; "past" = paste; "see" = seethe; "serue" = serve). The
researchers say "loseyns" was said like "lasan" and that it is the
same word as our modern "lasagne".
However, Nick Shearing, one of the staff of the Oxford English
Dictionary, having paused only to restore his eyebrows to their
normal position, found within minutes of reading the story that the
first mention of lasagne in Italian was in a work of 1281, a
century before it was supposedly invented in England. In fact, the
word is first recorded in English in 1760; its wide popularity is
quite recent. It derives from the Vulgar Latin "lasania" for a
cooking pot, though its insalubrious origins are in the older Latin
"lasanum" for a chamber pot. (Lasagne is the Italian plural of
lasagna, meaning one piece of this type of pasta; Brits prefer the
plural both for the pasta and the dish made from it, while
Americans usually plump for the singular in both cases.)
The newspaper pieces say that the research was done in preparation
for a medieval banquet at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. The
story provided some useful PR puffing the forthcoming festivity.
What won't surprise many people is that several British newspapers
swallowed it uncritically and published these wild claims without
the most basic checks.
So what is this word "loseyns"? Well, there are a couple of
instances of it in the Oxford English Dictionary. It's an old form
of "lozenge".
6. In Passing?
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SNOWY PEAK SYNDROME This is a current British buzz phrase for an
organisation which has nobody from an ethnic minority in a senior
position. It was publicised at the beginning of July in a report by
Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the UK Commission for Racial Equality
(see <http://www.cre.gov.uk/media/nr_arch/2003/nr030703a.html>).
7. Q&A
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Q. Children always say they're afraid of "cooties", and I've always
been curious where the word came from. [Sarah]
A. Ah, yes, playground taunts. How they take me back. Though, being
British, nobody accused anyone else in my days of having cooties,
that dreaded disease, because the word is hardly known on this side
of the Atlantic Ocean. American children have been telling each
other they have the cooties for half a century (perhaps longer),
though you will have a hard time identifying what it refers to,
apart from some generalised repulsive state that only people you
don't like ever get. To have the cooties, of course, is to suffer
from a fictitious affliction.
The original cooties were very real and extremely nasty, since the
word was first applied to body lice. It's a slang term intimately
(and I mean that sincerely) associated with the military in World
War One. It's first recorded in print in 1917, but is presumably
rather older.
The word sounds Scots, and indeed at one time "cootie" was a good
Scots adjective applied to farmyard fowls with feathered legs (it's
probably from "cuit", ankle); a cootie could at one time also be a
small wooden dish used in the kitchen for various purposes. But
"cootie" in the sense of louse doesn't seem to be linked to these
(and great powers of invention would be needed to derive our sense
from either of them).
The most common theory is that it is from Malay, where "kutu" is a
biting insect, though nobody has been able to say how it got from
there into the slang of soldiers who had to suffer the louse-ridden
trenches of the European conflict. There's probably an interesting
story here, but nobody knows what it is.
8. Endnote
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"As anyone who works on a newspaper knows, there's a wild,
imprecise world out there in which 'fewer' is confused with 'less',
'prevaricate' is muddled with 'procrastinate', 'flout' and 'flaunt'
are used as synonyms, no one can spell 'stationary', and in which
you have to be more than 65 to appreciate the joy of a well-placed
semi-colon." [Robert McCrum, The Observer, 13 July 2003]
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