World Wide Words -- 14 Jun 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 13 16:54:14 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 345 Saturday 14 June 2003
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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>
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Leisure sickness.
3. Competition Results.
4. Weird Words: Eyot.
5. Q&A: Bated breath; Deader than Kelsey's nuts.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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MAKE ENDS MEET Several subscribers said that their understanding
of the phrase was that it came from tailoring or dressmaking, in
which the amount of cloth available might only just be sufficient
to complete the garment, so that it would wrap completely around
the body, making the ends meet. A subscriber whom I know only as
Ludwik says there is a similar saying in Polish, "zwiazac koniec z
koncem" ("to tie up one end with the other"); it evokes the image
of a belt or similar item that likewise one had to hope would be
long enough to reach right round the body. It suggests the phrase
may contain a similar idea to "having enough to go round", which
comes from the hope that one has enough food for everyone at table.
It might be that language writers have taken the associations of
the phrase with money too literally in arguing that it's connected
with bookkeeping.
2. Turns of Phrase: Leisure sickness
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If you've been looking forward to a holiday, only to fall ill with
some poorly-defined malady in its first days, you may have become a
victim to a recently named syndrome, "leisure sickness". The
condition has been identified by the Dutch psychologist Professor
Ad Vingerhoets of Tilburg University. There are two varieties. One
refers to symptoms - which can include nausea, fatigue, headaches,
and recurrent infections - that appear whenever the stress of the
working week is suddenly removed, either at the weekend or at the
beginning of holidays. The other sort is found among men and women
who have become tired of the rat race and who have downshifted to
enjoy a quieter life, only to find themselves suffering from these
recurrent minor illnesses plus boredom and depression, another name
for which is "underload syndrome" (an older generation would have
named it "ennui", an expressive word that has rather gone out of
fashion). Whatever it's called, few of us need worry about the
risks of getting it: research evidence suggests it's mainly found
among high-achieving men and women and that only 3% of those
surveyed have experienced it.
The researchers, who presented their findings at a recent meeting
of the American Psychosomatic Society, determined that people who
are perfectionists, carry large workloads and feel very responsible
for their work are more apt to suffer from these symptoms, termed
"leisure sickness."
[Psychology Today, 1 July 2001]
Those lazy days on the croquet lawn can also make you ultra-
responsive to physiological signals of illness. The Dutch
psychologist Ad Vingerhoets coined the phrase "leisure sickness"
after studying 2,000 people who became ill when they had little
to do.
[Independent, 5 Apr. 2003]
3. Competition Results
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You responded splendidly to the invitation to find a word for the
spammers' deliberate misspelling of words to evade spam detectors;
250 entries came in. Some subscribers pointed out that we already
have a word that might be used for that situation, "obfuscation".
Others mentioned the computer slang term "munging", which often
refers to text inserted into an email address to render it invalid
and so useless to spammers (another term for it is "spamblocking").
However, this isn't quite what we were looking for.
So to the results. Tony Augarde, author of The Oxford Guide to Word
Games, very kindly took on the taxing but pleasant task of choosing
the winners. He writes:
'I was very impressed with the quantity and quality of the entries
submitted for your competition. Clearly the people who read World
Wide Words are highly intelligent as well as very numerous - and I
hope they all buy my book!
'Not surprisingly, many people sent in words starting with "spam-"
or "e-" or "filt-" or "obscur-" or "obfusc-" or "mis-". In fact,
several people sent in "spamouflage" (which we had to rule out of
consideration because it is already used on the internet, with a
first recorded date of 1997) and "e-vasion". My favourite "spam-"
coinages included "spambiguity", "spamonyms" and "SP4M", while "e-"
entries included "e-ceit", "e-luders" and "dishonest-e".
'It was an almost impossible task to choose three winners but here
they are. The winning coinages were "camouflogging" (from Claudia
Witzling, who lives in Flanders, New Jersey), "adfuscation" (from
Paul Witheridge of Ontario, Canada), and "newspell" (sent in by
Peter Casey of Naperville, IL).'
Congratulations to our winners, who will each receive a copy of
Tony Augarde's book. Commiserations to the unsuccessful entrants
but thank you all for taking part. Thanks go also to Tony Augarde
and to the Oxford University Press for donating the prizes.
4. Weird Words: Eyot /eIt/
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A small island, especially in the Thames.
You say it like the number eight. Anyone living along the River
Thames upstream of London as far as about Windsor or Reading will
know this word, as it's commonly used in the names of the little
islands that dot the river in those reaches. But for most British
people it surfaces only as a curious term during commentaries on
the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, when places like Chiswick Eyot are
regularly mentioned. It's from Old English "iggath" (or "igeth"),
which is based on "ieg", an island, plus a diminutive suffix. So -
a small island. As you might expect from its Old English origins,
it turns up in a couple of places in J R R Tolkien's Lord of the
Rings: "That night they camped on a small eyot close to the western
bank". (That, I must tuttingly tell the shade of Professor Tolkien,
is a tautology, since all eyots are by definition small.) An older
form that's more clearly connected to the way you say it is "ait",
a spelling retained in the names of some of the Thames islands and
which Charles Dickens used in Bleak House: "Fog everywhere. Fog up
the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down
the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and
the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city".
5. Q&A
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Q. Where does the term "baited breath" come from, as in: "I am
waiting with baited breath for your answer"? [Steve Gearhart]
A. The correct spelling is actually "bated breath" but it's so
common these days to see it written as "baited breath" that there's
every chance it will soon become the usual form, to the disgust of
conservative speakers and the confusion of dictionary writers.
Examples in newspapers and magazines are legion; this one appeared
in the Daily Mirror on 12 April 2003: "She hasn't responded yet but
Michael is waiting with baited breath".
It's easy to mock, but there's a real problem here. "Bated" and
"baited" sound the same and we no longer use "bated" (let alone the
verb "to bate"), outside this one set phrase, which has become an
idiom. Confusion is almost inevitable. "Bated" here is a contraction
of "abated" through loss of the first vowel (a process called
aphesis); it has the meaning "reduced, lessened, lowered in force".
So
"bated breath" refers to a state in which you almost stop breathing
through terror, awe, extreme anticipation, or anxiety.
Shakespeare is the first writer known to use it, in The Merchant of
Venice: "Shall I bend low and, in a bondman's key, / With bated
breath
and whisp'ring humbleness, / Say this ...". Nearly three centuries
later, Mark Twain employed it in Tom Sawyer: "Every eye fixed itself
upon him; with parted lips and bated breath the audience hung upon
his
words, taking no note of time, rapt in the ghastly fascinations of
the
tale".
For those who know the older spelling or who stop to consider the
matter, "baited breath" evokes an incongruous image, which Geoffrey
Taylor captured in verse in his poem Cruel Clever Cat:
Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Mice to an untimely death.
[I'm indebted to Rainer Thonnes for telling me about this little
ditty. It's from an anthology called Catscript, edited by Marie
Angel.]
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Q. Where does the expression "deader than Kelsey's nuts" come from
and what does it mean? [Shane]
A. I'm told it's an expression that former US President Richard
Nixon was rather fond of using. Like other Americans before and
since, he meant by it that something was unquestionably and
permanently defunct. You might hear somebody say "The battery's
deader than Kelsey's nuts", or "His chances of surviving the
election are deader than Kelsey's nuts".
That takes care of the meaning, but who or what was Kelsey and what
was so special about those nuts? He turns out to have been a real
person, John Kelsey, one of the pioneers of car manufacture in the
USA. With the encouragement of Henry Ford, he set up the Kelsey
Wheel Company in 1910. By 1913 this was based in Windsor, Ontario,
just across the river from Detroit. To start with, he manufactured
the wooden wheels that were then state of the art, but later moved
into making wire-spoke wheels and later steel wheels. As Kelsey-
Hayes Canada Ltd, the company still exists.
The saying refers to the proverbially secure attachment provided by
the nuts and bolts on the wheels that Kelsey's company made. In the
view of the public, nothing could be fixed more tightly. And the
obvious anatomical innuendoes in those nuts made the saying just a
little naughty. Though some examples are recorded from the 1930s,
the phrase began to become more widely known in the 1950s. Early
on, it appeared as "tighter than Kelsey's nuts" to mean a person
who was stingy or mean, and is also recorded in the form "as safe
as Kelsey's nuts", meaning very safe.
By the early 1960s, it had evolved away from these fairly obvious
formations to the imaginative and metaphorical phrase still used
today. It would appear to have been a close parallel to - perhaps
borrowed from - the much older "as dead as a doornail" (see
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-dea1.htm>).
6. Endnote
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"Not in books only, which all acknowledge, nor yet in connected
oral discourse, but often also in words contemplated singly, there
are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of
passion and imagination, laid up - from these, lessons of infinite
worth may be derived, if only our attention is roused to their
existence." [On the Study of Words, by Richard Chevenix Trench
(1851)]
A. Subscription commands
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C. FAQ of the week
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Q. What's the meaning of these strange sets of symbols that appear
sometimes in pieces, like the one this week: /eIt/?
A. They are a way of showing pronunciation. As is usually the case
with British publications, in my Web pages I use the symbols of
the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to show how words are
said. Most IPA symbols do not appear in standard character sets,
so for the newsletter I translate them into SAMPA codes (Speech
Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet), a European system which
instead uses letters of the alphabet plus punctuation. See my
page at <http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm> for the
symbols in both IPA and SAMPA with supporting notes and links.
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