World Wide Words -- 24 May 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 23 13:56:24 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 342 Saturday 24 May 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: Social software.
3. Article: A test question gets the grammarians arguing.
4. Weird Words: Picayune.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: Harebrained.
7. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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JOSSER In saying that "joss" (as in "joss stick") came from the
Portuguese word "deos" for "god", I should have commented that it
was an archaic form; the modern Portuguese word is "deus".
BROKEN LINK An incorrect URL appeared for the "irregardless" piece
last week. Correctly: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-irr1.htm
If my ISP hadn't chosen that weekend to move its servers and make
it impossible for me to update the Web site, I would have added a
link to the correct page, as I was finally able to on Monday.
2. Turns of Phrase: Social software
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The term has been around for more than a decade, though not always
with the meaning that is now evolving (it seems to have first been
used in the early 1990s as the name of a software company). In the
last year or so it has become a buzzword; the topic was aired at
the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara at the
end of April.
The idea is new enough that people are groping for a definition.
Some use it as a term for any computer software that supports group
communications across networks. In that sense, it encompasses chat
rooms, mailing lists, online gaming communities, Usenet newsgroups,
MOOs, weblogs (blogs), and more. Others would like to limit it to
newer software in which the emphasis is on the community, not on
the technology that makes it possible, and which is adaptable to
the ways in which people want to interact rather than imposing a
structure on them.
Proponents see possibilities in education, health, politics, and
other areas. Some newspapers and media groups, such as the BBC, are
keen to see the traditional one-way process of journalism become a
dialogue and want to use the software to build communities. It's as
yet unclear what these systems will look like in practice - some
critics worry there's too much talk and not enough action - but the
BBC has plans to roll out a package in October 2003.
The artist-engineer, tinkering with alternative human-machine
interfaces, social software, digital aesthetics and more has
effectively been operating in a self-imposed vacuum.
[Afterimage, Sep.-Oct. 2002]
In trial since early November, the service allows users to create a
profile mapped to their postcode, and enter into discussions with
people close to their location. It's this element of location which
has lifted UpMyStreet Conversations out of the old bulletin-board
arena into the trendy new area of social software.
[Guardian, 9 Jan. 2003]
3. Article: A test question gets the grammarians arguing
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As this piece is rather long, too many other items would have had
to be held over to keep this issue to its usual size. And, though
it has been in the news recently, the topic seems esoteric even for
this publication. So I'm trying an experiment, your comments on
which will be welcome. I've instead put the article on the Web
site, at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/ar-pos1.htm
This will be a private view to subscribers, since the page will not
be linked to any other or listed on the home page until the update
next week.
4. Weird Words: Picayune
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Something of small value; an insignificant person or thing.
To judge from a hunt around in newspaper files and such, this word
is now rare. All the recent examples I can find, without exception,
refer to one or other of the American journals whose names include
it, in particular the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
An odd name for a newspaper, you may feel. But when its precursor,
the New Orleans Picayune, began life on 25 January 1837, the main
sense of the word was that of a small coin. It was at first applied
in Florida and Louisiana to the Spanish half-real, worth just over
six cents; in the early nineteenth century it was transferred to
the US five-cent piece. The proprietors of the new newspaper gave
it that name because that's what a copy cost.
The Beeville Bee-Picayune in Texas took its name from the New
Orleans newspaper more than a century ago as a sort of homage.
Could this be true also of other journals that include the word in
their titles? But what the story is behind the town of Picayune,
Mississippi, I've no idea, except that it was given that name in
1904.
Scholars are less than totally certain about where the word came
from, though the immediate origin is the French "picaillon" for an
old copper coin of Savoy (in modern French, "picaillons" is a
slangy term for money). In turn that was from Provençal "picaioun".
Here the trail peters out, but that word might have been taken from
Italian "piccolo", little or small, or more probably from Provençal
"piquar", to clink or sound.
5. Sic!
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Barbara Wolfe e-mailed this comment: "I occasionally take the train
from Philadelphia to Baltimore. One of the stops along the way is
Aberdeen, Maryland. The station platform there is very short and
passengers must disembark from only one or two of the cars, rather
than from the closest door. The standard announcement by the train
staff is 'Next stop Aberdeen. All doors will not open. All doors
will not open'. Which rather makes one wonder why they bother to
stop there if no one can exit the train".
"This is my favorite sign," wrote Riva Berleant. "If you travel on
route 4 east through Farmington, Connecticut you might spot it on a
small building on the right: 'This sign is not in use'." That's as
philosophically intriguing as the one that insists, "Do not throw
stones at this notice". And from Peter Bradley: "Another Australian
road sign is 'Falling rocks Do not stop'. Where the hell do they
finish up, in China?"
Marita Llinares said: "Reading about Theis Land [in last week's
issue] reminds me of my late husband's secretary, Marlene. Asked to
type a letter after hours - she already had her hat and coat on to
go to a Jehovah's Witness meeting - she produced the following in a
great hurry: 'Dear Sir, Wet hanky ouf or your letter ...'". Think
about it. Hint: move the spaces.
===================================================================
OLOGIES AND ISMS: WORD BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS
My book is once again available in the USA. Buy now while stocks
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Prefixes and suffixes are among the most important building blocks
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building blocks by explaining what each means in simple language.
With its huge store of examples - over 10,000 across 1,250 entries -
this ready reference illustrates how each is used in everyday
speech and writing. A selective thematic index aids identification.
Anyone who has puzzled over unfamiliar technical terms will welcome
this volume for the assistance and enlightenment it provides.
More details at http://www.worldwidewords.org/ologies.htm
ORDER FROM AMAZON
Use these short links to go straight to the book:
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CANADA: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?OC
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6. Q&A
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Q. I was reading a Lewis Lapham article in which he used the term
"hairbrained". I'd always assumed it was "harebrained". Which is
it, and how did it come about? [Alison]
A. It would be easy to say the right answer is "harebrained",
because that's the first form recorded and the reference is pretty
clearly to the apparently stupidly senseless behaviour of hares in
the mating season (in this, they're not so different from humans, I
note sourly from long observation, but don't let me side-track
myself). Approach the term through mad March hares and you will get
the idea.
So it's equally easy to say that "hairbrained" is wrong. But even a
quick look at the historical evidence stops one. The first example
in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1548, and that has
"hare". But the second is from 1581, and that has "hair". The
editor who compiled the OED entry seems to have deliberately
alternated examples in the two forms, since there's roughly one of
each cited from every century since.
The reason for this, at least in early years, was that "hair" was
at the time an alternate way of spelling "hare". This spelling was
preserved in Scotland into the eighteenth century. As a result,
it's hard to tell when people began to mistakenly write
"hairbrained" instead of "harebrained", in the belief that it
referred to somebody who had a brain made of hair, or perhaps the
size of a hair. When Sir Walter Scott used it in The Monastery in
1820 ("If hairbrained courage, and an outrageous spirit of
gallantry, can make good his pretensions to the high lineage he
claims, these qualities have never been denied him"), he was
probably perpetuating the Scots spelling rather than committing a
folk etymology.
There are many examples of the "hair" spelling, from Britain and
America, throughout the nineteenth century and down to the present
day. A Google search turned up 11600 examples of the "hare" form
and 2670 of "hair", showing that, though in the minority, it's a
substantial minority (though it's hard to tell what proportion is
from people who simply can't spell). Examples even in edited prose
are commonplace both in America and Britain. So it's not enough to
say that one is an error and the other not. At the very least, it's
an error of such antiquity that the patina of age has softened the
hard edges of disfavour.
The current status of "hairbrained" is disputed: some style guides
say that it should not be used, as does the Fourth Edition of the
American Heritage Dictionary: "While hairbrained continues to be
used and confused, it should be avoided in favor of harebrained
which has been established as the correct spelling". The Third
Edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage describes it as an
erroneous form "which is still occasionally found" (rather more
often than that, Dr Burchfield, as my research shows). Other guides
disagree, a case in point being Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of
English Usage which says, "Our opinion based on the evidence is
that it is established".
My own feeling is that it is better to stick to "harebrained"; at
least you have the original mental associations on your side with
which to fight off critics.
7. Endnote
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"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too.
Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate
a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election
time people will solemnly vote against their own interests." [Gore
Vidal; in the Cassell Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1996)]
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C. FAQ of the week
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