World Wide Words -- 26 Feb 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 25 19:11:43 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 429 Saturday 26 February 2005
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Sent each Saturday to 22,000+ 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. Turns of Phrase: Podcasting.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Flagitious.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: Scuttlebutt.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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THIRD WORLD Roger Depledge pointed out that I erred in saying that
the First Estate of the Estates-General in pre-Revolutionary France
comprised the nobility. They were actually the Second Estate; the
clergy were the First Estate. I also misnamed the Estates-General
as the National Assembly, which was the title of the equivalent
body after the Revolution. And, of course, the Berlin Wall came
down in 1989, not 1991.
MACHINE TRANSLATION Following my little item on this subject last
week, lots of messages came in quoting examples of strange computer
translations. Julian Calvert remembers working on a project for a
major German car maker in the late 1980s using a then state-of-the-
art translation package. Howlers included turning "suction pipe"
into "pig gliding" (through reading "Saugleitung" as Sau + Gleitung
instead of Saug + Leitung). He also remembers the software turning
"Kathoden" (cathodes) into "cat testicle".
But any translation is open to error, even when a human being is
involved, as John McNeil pointed out in an e-mail from New Zealand:
"My wife and I host many Asian students, and last week one gave me
a gift of a pen and pencil set. The set (purporting to have been
manufactured in the USA), came with the following instructions:
'Usage: Dipping penpoint into ink, circumgyrating sopping up in
strument for ink and revolving penholder tight.' As Flanders and
Swann said in one of their skits: so we did that!"
Molly Wolf contributed a fond memory of her days of editing texts:
"In Canada, all published government documents are ultimately
published in both English and French editions. One Parks Canada
historian, many years ago, prepared a report (in French) on an
18th-century fortification that had fraises - stakes driven into
the ground close together and on an angle, as a quite formidable
barricade. The English translation was much gentler: there were
'strawberries on the ramparts'."
2. Turns of Phrase: Podcasting
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Thousands of radio stations around the world now broadcast online
as well as over the air; many bloggers also now publish their work
as sound recordings. All these sources are available to anybody who
has a computer with an Internet connection and the right software.
Another relatively new phenomenon is that very large numbers of
people have portable MP3 music players. Podcasting links the two -
audio recordings that you select are automatically downloaded to
your player as soon as they become available online so that you can
listen to them on the move. The name blends "iPod", the name of
Apple's hugely successful portable player, with "broadcasting";
however, the technique works with many other MP3 players as well.
The system is built on the same RSS protocol by which, for example,
this newsletter is made available each weekend in addition to e-
mail. The word appeared in passing in an article in the Guardian in
February 2004, but it suddenly came to wider public attention in
October. It's a mark of its success that it has been estimated that
the number of podcasting RSS channels has risen from nothing six
months ago to 700,000 in February.
* Evening Standard, 9 Feb. 2005: One of the brains behind
podcasting is Adam Curry, the telegenic former presenter on MTV in
America, who recently moved his family to Guildford to ensure that
the children got a British education. Podcasting is becoming
something of a phenomenon. Curry wrote some software to make it all
happen and thousands of folks visit his website www.ipodder.org to
download a wide variety of podcasts from a wide variety of
podcasters.
* New Scientist, 12 Feb. 2005: The ubiquity of MP3 players, the
emergence of easy-to-use, inexpensive audio-editing software, and
the explosion in the number of blogs where information on new
podcasts is posted, has created an environment ripe for podcasting.
3. Sic!
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Seen by Laurie Camion on the Web site of the San Francisco Bay area
radio station KCBS on 17 February: "The latest tsunami data will
force a redraw of current earthquake seduction maps." "It brings,"
he notes, "a whole new meaning to 'Did you feel the earth move?'"
Ray Cotsell is puzzled: "Australian commercial TV is at present
promoting an Australian tour by what appears to be a popular music
group called 'Velvet Underground'. In big letters across the bottom
of the screen is the legend: 'Touring Live'. I am intrigued by what
alternative might have been considered."
"www.falriverlinks.co.uk is an interesting site," e-mails Brian
Hudson, "which encourages people to leave their cars and walk and
use river transport to explore the River Fal area of Cornwall. I
intend to visit the area this summer, but there's one feature it
lists that I'd like to miss out: 'Better than any one attraction in
the South West, Fal River Links brings together a whole range of
experiences, attractions, walks and detonations with a unique and
completely integrated transport network.'" Might this be the curse
of the spelling checker at work?
4. Weird Words: Flagitious /fl@'dZIS at s/
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Criminal; villainous.
"Weird" isn't really the right description for this word, though it
is rather unusual and tends to be high-flown in its applications.
When it started life, in the fourteenth century, it referred to a
person of the lowest morals, one who was "guilty of or addicted to
atrocious crimes; deeply criminal, extremely wicked", as the Oxford
English Dictionary comprehensively puts it.
In the following centuries, it spread its meaning more broadly, so
that writers with an urge to pepper their prose with elevated terms
can now also apply it to ideas and actions as well as individuals -
recent writers have referred to "flagitious acts", "flagitious
leadership", and "flagitious foibles and craven crimes". But that
usage is hardly new. The career of the entrepreneur William Hudson
during the British railway mania of the 1840s was described at the
time as "one vast aggregate of avaricious and flagitious jobbing
for the accumulation of wealth".
The word is from Latin "flagitium", a shameful act, and can be
traced back to "flagrum", a whip. So it's a close relative of
"flagellate", to whip or scourge. But, despite the similarity in
form and sense, and the opinion of some older authorities, it's not
related to "flagrant", something conspicuously offensive, which is
from Latin "flagrare", to burn.
5. Noted this week
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FROSTING Britain had a cold snap this week. This led insurers to
warn against thieves who steal cars whose owners have left them
unattended with the engine running to defrost the windscreen while
they get on with some task elsewhere. A slang term for this in the
UK, I found, is "frosting". I've not heard it before, but an online
search turned up several examples from motoring organisations and
insurers going back to 2000. But it's unclear how common it really
is in the real world.
CAPPER Talking of slang words I haven't come across before (which
is a lot, because I'm not much into slang), a report by an Internet
monitoring company recently used the word capper. This is the term
for a person who records TV shows off air and makes them available
across the Net through BitTorrent or a similar peering network. The
report says that people in Britain download more such files than in
any other country, principally because we're determined to watch
episodes of US television shows like Stargate, West Wing, 24, or
Desperate Housewives before they're aired over here.
6. Q&A
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Q. My friend and I have been trying to figure out the origin of the
word "scuttlebutt". Do you have any thoughts on this? [Clair
Merritt]
A. The second half is easy enough - a butt is just the old word for
a large cask. The first half appears in the language in several
senses with different origins, so we have to be sure we've got the
right one. It's not the flattish open container, made of wickerwork
at one time, whose name survives in "coal scuttle"; that's Old
English, from Latin "scutella" for a dish or platter (its first
sense in English). Nor is it the one that means to move with short
quick steps, perhaps like a spider; that comes from an old English
dialect word.
The sense we want is the one of a hole cut in a ship's timbers.
That's been around since the fifteenth century, when sailors called
any smallish hatchway or opening in the deck a scuttle, especially
if it was covered with a lid of some sort; it was the usual term
for an opening to let in light or air. It's of uncertain origin,
but might be from the Old French "escoutille", meaning a hatchway.
The verb "to scuttle" dates from the mid 17th century, at first in
the sense of sinking a ship specifically by cutting holes in it -
today we use it for doing so by any means.
It was usual to have a water cask on deck so that the crew had easy
access to drinking water during the day. To make it easier to scoop
the water out with a tin pot or dipper, the head of the cask would
be removed. So it became known as the scuttlebutt - the cask with a
hatch in it. Fresh water was so precious that a guard was often
posted by the scuttlebutt to ensure that water was only taken to
drink and not, for example, to wash clothes with.
It was the one place where members of the crew on duty in various
parts of the ship could meet and talk during the working day. This
is how Herman Melville put it in White Jacket; or The World in a
Man-of-War of 1850: "There is no part of a frigate where you will
see more going and coming of strangers, and overhear more greetings
and gossipings of acquaintances, than in the immediate vicinity of
the scuttle-butt, just forward of the main-hatchway, on the gun-
deck." Today's office water coolers have pretty much the same
ambience.
Real scuttlebutts have long since passed into naval history and the
word has shifted its meaning to the rumour and gossip itself rather
than the place where one exchanged it.
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