World Wide Words -- 06 Nov 04
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 5 20:25:29 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 417 Saturday 6 November 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 21,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Bonzer.
3. Sic!
4. Book reviews: Two guides to easily confused words.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: Lurgi.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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WELCOME A special greeting to all the subscribers who have joined
the list as a result of World Wide Words being featured in this
week's issue of Randy Cassingham's "This is True" newsletter under
the heading "Bonzer Web Site of the Week". He features events that
are bizarre but true - I've been a subscriber for years and hate to
miss an issue (http://www.thisistrue.com/). This week's Weird Word
celebrates the Australianism in his title.
FLY-TIPPING "What in Sam Hill is fly-tipping?", e-mailed Donald
Duquet after last week's edition. Other subscribers also queried
its puzzling appearance in a quotation from a London newspaper that
referred to "problems such as litter, graffiti, abandoned cars and
fly-tipping". It's a term used in the UK since the 1960s for the
unauthorised dumping of waste. In Britain we frequently "tip" waste
rather than dump it, often on a "rubbish tip". The first element,
"fly", also appears in the older "fly-posting", putting up posters
without permission. Both derive from the verb "to fly" in that the
culprits tip and fly, or post and fly, where the idea is of an
action done quickly and surreptitiously. Another British sense of
"fly", knowing, clever or worldly-wise, as in "he's a fly one!", is
probably lurking in there as well. Incidentally, "fly-posting" is
not too far in sense from "flyer", an advertising handbill, which
is from "fly-sheet", originally "flying-sheet", a bill printed for
wide and indiscriminate distribution by hand.
2. Weird Words: Bonzer
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Excellent, first-rate.
Together with "dinkum", "cobber", "sheila", "wowser" (a puritanical
or censorious person), and "dunny" (an outdoor toilet), "bonzer" is
an archetypal Australianism, typical of the lively and expressive
slang of that country. Like the others it now feels dated, though
it had a good run from early last century (it was first recorded in
a Sydney newspaper in April 1904) up to the 1940s, when it began to
fall from favour. "Bonzer" was a general term of approval, so that
if the weather was fine, for example, you might say "Bonzer sunny
day!" This early example is in a verse from Songs of a Sentimental
Bloke by C J Dennis, published in 1915:
This ev'nin' I was sittin' wiv Doreen,
Peaceful an' 'appy wiv the day's work done,
Watchin', be'ind the orchard's bonzer green,
The flamin' wonder of the settin' sun.
Where "bonzer" comes from is open to debate (one story, known to be
untrue, says it comes from two Chinese words meaning "good gold", a
similar tale to one told about "dinkum") but early examples suggest
it may be from French "bon", good, influenced by "bonanza". The
latter is Spanish, meaning fair weather or prosperity; as it was
first used in American English in the 1840s for a successful gold
mine, this is intriguingly parallel to the Chinese interpretation.
If the French/Spanish/American origin is correct, "bonzer" flowed
from a linguistic melting-pot, appropriately for the country.
3. Sic!
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A report spotted by Laurie Malone in the Sydney Morning Herald
said: "A man who shot dead a Sydney teenager over a mobile phone
has been jailed for 19 years". Isn't it scary what people can do
with modern technology?
The Queensland Times two weeks ago had a headline on the back page
that seemed to assert an ornithological absurdity: "Popular Swifts
Half Dead at 32". It took Susan Korrel some moments to work it out.
It helps to be thoroughly aware that the Swifts are a rugby league
team in Ipswich, Queensland. It would also have been clearer, she
points out, had the print edition used the headline of the online
version: "Popular Swifts Halfback Dies at 32".
John Neave's newspaper in New Zealand, the Waikato Times, featured
a photograph of a car that had been taken by a security camera at a
service station in Hamilton. He was surprised to read the caption:
"Police are looking for this car that allegedly drove away from two
petrol stations without paying." He comments: "I've been driving
for 35 years, and it never occurred to me that my car might pay for
its own petrol - think of the money I could have saved!"
4. Book review: Two guides to easily confused words
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This time, I look at two books on similar subjects that could not
be more different. One is British, the other American. The divide
between them is as great as the ocean between their countries.
Who's Whose has been compiled by Philip Gooden, who may be better
known as the author of the Nick Revell series of historical
mysteries. He brings together pairs of words that cause confusion
or difficulty, either because they sound the same ("discrete" /
"discreet" or "fazed" / "phased"), or which muddle people because
they seem superficially alike ("insidious" / "invidious" or
"simple" / "simplistic"), or which confuse by having related
meanings ("diagnosis" / "prognosis" or "epidemic" / "pandemic").
Every entry has a headline sentence in bold type that explains the
problem, followed by a more detailed explanation, illustrated by
examples of use and misuse from British newspapers that may cause
some editorial toes to curl in embarrassment. Talking of which,
each pair has been given an embarrassment rating from 0 to 3. The
last sentence of each entry contains useful suggestions about how
to remember the distinctions and avoid the problem.
[Philip Gooden, Who's Whose?: A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily
Confused Words; published by Bloomsbury Reference; hardback; pp250;
ISBN 0747572313; publisher's price GBP9.99. Available outside the
USA only; a US edition is not planned.]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon Canada: CDN$17.47 (http://quinion.com?G95D)
Amazon UK: GBP6.99 (http://quinion.com?G27D)
Amazon Germany: EUR16,50 (http://quinion.com?G84D)
[Please use these links to order. See Section C for more details.]
The wordy title of my second book, 100 Words Almost Everyone
Confuses & Misuses, nearly overfills the cover of this little
handbook and is unfortunately characteristic of what lies within.
The introduction claims entries are "easy to read and comprehend".
Not always. The note attached to No 93, "unique", begins: "For many
grammarians, unique is the paradigmatic absolute term, a shibboleth
that distinguishes between those who understand that such a term
cannot be modified by an adverb of degree or a comparative adverb
and those who do not." How many readers in need of this book will
get further than that convoluted opening sentence or understand
fully what all the words mean? Thankfully, most of the notes are
more direct, though all tend towards rotund language and complex
sentences. Take "penultimate", the end of whose entry reads: "Thus,
people who know the correct meaning of penultimate would reject its
use as a synonym of ultimate and they may view the speaker or
writer as not only pretentious, but ignorant as well." It's good
knockabout stuff for the university senior common room but hardly
appropriate for the rest of us.
[100 Words Almost Everyone Confuses & Misuses; published by
Houghton Mifflin; paperback; pp120; ISBN 0618493336; publisher's
price US$4.95.]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon USA: US$4.95 (http://quinion.com?W83S)
Amazon Canada: CDN$6.06 (http://quinion.com?W56S)
Amazon UK: GBP2.76 (http://quinion.com?W33S)
Amazon Germany: EUR4.49 (http://quinion.com?W98S)
Barnes & Noble: US$4.95 (http://quinion.com?W26S)
[Please use these links to order. See Section C for more details.]
5. Noted this week
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THEY DON'T WRITE LIKE THIS ANY MORE, THANKFULLY An extract from a
message to his readers from the editor of the New England Magazine
in 1834, which I spotted while looking for something else: "If you
have been our reader from the commencement of the Magazine, let not
our three-year-old acquaintance be now broken off. Bear with us, we
pray you, for another term, and our intercourse may grow into a
familiarity, that may at length ripen into an affection, which the
destruction of existence only shall terminate. If the birth of our
connexion be of more recent date, its continuance has been too
brief to enable you to decide on its utility - a reason fair, why
you should accompany us on another stage of our journey." Or,
putting it another way, please renew your subscription.
6. Q&A
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Q. Do you know the etymology of the phrase, "the dreaded lurgy"? I
know it's related to illness and the Cambridge online dictionary
says it is 'a humorous way of speaking of any illness which is not
very serious but is easily caught'. [Iain McGuffog]
A. Your question neatly ties together two of my great interests:
the history of words and old BBC radio comedy shows. It's also
timely, since the dreaded lurgi (so written in the script) struck
Britain fifty years ago next Tuesday (9 November 1954), in the
seventh programme of the fifth series of The Goon Show. This
anarchic and surreal radio comedy series starred Peter Sellers,
Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe; it was written by Spike Milligan,
between bouts of depression, though on this occasion Eric Sykes
(who shared an office with him at the time) did most of the work.
The plot, such as it was, dealt with an outbreak of a previously
unknown disease. It was solemnly announced in the House of Commons
that "Lurgi is the most dreadful malady known to mankind. In six
weeks it could swamp the whole of the British Isles." Of course,
there was no epidemic - it was a fraud perpetrated by those arch-
criminals, Count Jim "Thighs" Moriarty and the Honourable Hercules
Grytpype-Thynne (trading as Messrs Goosey and Bawkes, a barely-
disguised reference to the music publisher Boosey and Hawkes) who
put it about that nobody who played a brass-band instrument had
ever been known to catch lurgi; this resulted in their disposing
profitably of vast amounts of merchandise.
The Goons were then highly popular and the episode resulted in the
phrase "the dreaded lurgi" becoming a school playground term for
some horrid infection you had supposedly contracted, especially one
you had as a result of being dirty or smelly or just not like the
other kids. It has survived to the present day, not only among my
generation, but as a slang term in schools across Britain among
children who have no idea where it comes from. The disease is also
known in Australia and New Zealand, but all Americans seem to be
inoculated against it at birth, since it's virtually unknown to
them (but then, they have cooties instead).
OK, so much for the background. Where did this word "lurgi" or
"lurgy" come from? One school of thought holds that Milligan (or
Sykes) invented it. But there's some evidence they borrowed an
existing English dialect term, perhaps one they had heard in the
Army during World War Two. The English Dialect Dictionary notes
"lurgy" from northern England as an adjective meaning idle or lazy.
This may well be linked with "fever-largie", "fever-lurden" or
"fever-lurgan", a sarcastic dialect term for a supposed disease of
idleness; this was recorded as still current in some places at the
time the dictionary was compiled at the end of the nineteenth
century (I mean that the term was still being used, but presumably
the malady was lingering on as well).
One can imagine Milligan and Sykes being tickled by the idea of an
epidemic outbreak of idleness.
A. Subscription commands
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