World Wide Words -- 30 Jul 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 29 18:02:26 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 451 Saturday 30 July 2005
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Sent each Saturday to at least 25,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
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: Olitory.
3. Recently noted.
4. Book review: The Unfolding of Language.
5. Q&A: Smarty pants.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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CONFLICTING PRIORITIES The research and writing of my next book is
taking a lot of time, so other matters must perforce be neglected.
So do accept my apologies if you have sent me a message that hasn't
received a reply. In the interests of retaining sanity and limiting
work to no more than a 26-hour day, I've had to adopt a rule that
I've been resisting for some years - that I will only respond to an
e-mail if it obviously needs one or there's something useful to
say. But all will continue to be acknowledged and read!
NEWSLETTERS Just a reminder that you are very welcome to forward
copies of this newsletter to friends. Please do, in fact - many new
subscribers come by this means. Do send the whole mailing, though,
including the details at the end of how to subscribe.
2. Weird Words: Olitory /'QliIt at rI/
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Relating to vegetables or the kitchen garden.
If it would be overly grand to refer to our vegetable patches as
kitchen gardens, how much more so it would be to use this word to
describe them or their products. It is from Latin "(h)olitorius",
belonging to a kitchen gardener or vegetables, which in turn is
from "olus" for a potherb or vegetable. The latter is the source of
"oleraceous", pertaining to a potherb or other vegetable used in
cookery, and to "olericulture" for the process of growing them. All
these are pretty much defunct, though words from the same Latin
root occasionally turn up as part of the botanical names of useful
plants, the best known being Brassica oleracea, whose varieties
include cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower.
A rare foray into the public arena appeared in The Art of Living in
Australia by Philip E Muskett, published in 1894. In regretting the
paucity of market gardens in that country, he noted that "there is
not much reason for congratulation from an olitory point of view"
and says "If the potato and the cabbage were taken away, Australia
would be almost bereft of vegetables."
[See http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm for a key to the
pronunciations used in newsletters.]
3. Recently noted
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HEARWEAR A temporary exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in
London has this title, a neologism not invented for the show but
recent and otherwise uncommon. It aims to show the possibilities
for the design of hearing aids that would turn them into something
that people will want to wear rather than just put up with. Among
the examples are glasses with microphones built in to the frames
and a table fitted with a built-in microphone system that helps
communication in noisy situations, as well as fresh approaches to
designing the aids to turn them into fashion accessories. Designs
also suggest ways to improve the hearing experience for everybody,
such as a remote control you could use to instantly block out the
sound of noisy builders or a screaming child.
SOUNDBITE Brief and pithy comments in news reports have had this
name since at least 1980 and the word has since became a verb, to
soundbite. But what's the past tense - soundbitten or soundbited?
The usual rules of compounding suggest the first, since that's the
usual past participle of "bite". Most writers agree, because that's
the one which usually appears in print. But this week I came across
a case of the other form. A look in the archives found examples
going back to 1997. Not a lot of them, but enough to show that the
word is being viewed by some people not as a compound of "bite",
but as a new verb. And newly-minted verbs are invariably regular
and weak - hence "soundbited".
4. Book review: The Unfolding of Language
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Guy Deutscher makes an original and brave attempt to answer one of
the most difficult questions in linguistics: where did language
come from? Speech is certainly the greatest human invention but it
was never really invented. "Language seems so skilfully crafted,"
he writes, "that it appears to be the work of a master architect -
and yet its complex structure must somehow have arisen of its own
accord." It evolved over millennia, as organisms evolve, through a
variety of processes that he investigates. Though we only know for
sure about the history of language from the comparatively recent
past, when cultures learned to write things down, he suggests it is
possible to work back from the historical period by analogy with
trends and forces still at work today. His arguments are drawn from
recent developments in linguistics and are illustrated by hundreds
of examples in many languages, not just the Semitic ones in which
he specialises.
A perennial complaint is that language is going to the dogs, that
our speech is decaying from its earlier pristine state. Languages
do tend to simplify. Old English, to take a familiar instance, was
full of complex case endings that have almost completely vanished
in the modern tongue. Latin was a much more complicated language
than its successors such as Italian or French. But if the trend is
always towards simplification, where did these complex forms come
from in the first place? At one time, scholars believed that all
language change was degeneration, and that as we went back in time,
languages became progressively more perfect. But linguists reject
that argument out of hand these days, countering that corruption
and renewal are opposing aspects of related processes. Languages in
prehistoric times, he argues, were no more perfect than they are
today - there never was a Golden Age. "The English of today is not
what it used to be," he remarks, "but then again it never was."
He takes readers through introductory topics such as syntax, case
endings, grammatical gender, and the curiosities of Semitic nouns,
in which a set of three consonants creates a template within which
detailed meaning is carried by the interspersed vowels (so shalom,
salaam, Solomon, Islam, and Muslim are variants on the root s-l-m,
meaning "peace"). He quotes examples in English of what seem to be
abrupt changes in sense - "repent" three hundred years ago mean to
appreciate or feel grateful for, practically the opposite of its
modern sense.
His later chapters expand on mechanisms by which language evolves,
including what he calls the principle of least effort, also known
as laziness. This is balanced by the desire to be expressive, by
which vocabulary expands through metaphor (he points out that most
words for abstract concepts derive from the expansive borrowing of
terms for physical things). A further force is analogy, by which
people tend to tidy up exceptions and irregularities - strong verbs
are turned into weak ones, for example. But this isn't universal,
since sometimes very common strong verbs persuade weak ones to go
the other way, as "dove" has recently come into being as the past
tense of "dive", presumably by analogy with "drive" and "drove".
Language evolution doesn't follow an overall design. He shows how,
under the influence of these and other mechanisms, language could
have evolved from what he calls the "Me Tarzan" stage.
One argument he keeps clear of is that of the extent to which we
have an innate ability to learn languages. He points out that the
Chomskyian idea that our brains are hard-wired to learn language is
by no means universally accepted, but that the topic isn't one that
needs to be faced in his historical investigation. I'm not so sure
you can disregard the idea altogether. If humans suddenly gained
the ability to articulate and learn to communicate through genetic
change (some palaeontologists believe this is the reason why Homo
sapiens gained its ascendancy), then any hard-wiring of the brain
might have had a profound effect on the way early languages came
into being. But the topic is impossible to research, so one can
understand his wishing to leave it out of consideration.
Though his arguments are subtle and require some mental effort to
comprehend, his light style and chatty approach make the concepts
understandable to non-specialist readers. Some academics object to
his style as patronising, and at times it does verge dangerously
near whimsy; the Socratic dialogues he employs at one point sound
forced and sometimes even his best efforts leave a topic obscure.
But he writes clearly and effectively, and it's hard to imagine a
more accessible work.
[Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language, published by William
Heinemann on 5 May 2005; hardback, pp360; ISBN 043401155X; in the
USA published by Metropolitan Books, ISBN 0805079076; publisher's
UK price GBP20.00; in the USA, $26.00.]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon USA: US$17.16 (http://quinion.com?U37L)
Amazon Canada: CDN$22.30 (http://quinion.com?U92L)
Amazon UK: GBP14.00 (http://quinion.com?U83L)
Amazon Germany: EUR32.50 (http://quinion.com?U55L)
[Please use these links to buy. See C below for more details.]
5. Q&A
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Q. Do you have any idea from whence we get the expression "smarty
pants?" It has lately been concerning me. I obviously have too much
free time on my hands. [Lisa Birnbach]
A. No, you just have a well-developed curiosity about the history
of our language - welcome to the club.
Most English speakers, I would guess, know this classic Americanism
for a know-all who, like others of his type, often knows less than
he thinks he does or would like us to think he does. The books say
it dates from the early 1940s, but it's really a little older. A
record of that title by the society bandleader and pianist Eddy
Duchin came out in 1939. Its first appearance in print I've turned
up is from 1937, in a story in a Wisconsin newspaper in which a
coach is giving advice to a rookie football player: "And listen -
you've got to kid him. Get his goat. Call him 'hot shot,' 'big
britches,' 'smarty pants' or even 'Toots' until he gets so nervous
he doesn't know which goal is which."
A waspish description of the type appeared in an Ohio newspaper the
following year: "But the Smarty Pants breed is peculiar to the 20th
Century. Unlike the common garden variety of Swell Heads, the
Smarty Pants is not happily content with grabbing the spotlight for
himself - he must kick someone else in the shin while so doing. It
is not enough to boost his own stock - he must simultaneously
belittle the other fellow's."
Where it comes from is, as usual with slang, rather unclear. But we
do know that "smarty" by itself dates from the 1860s (it turns up
as a dismissive retort in Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer in 1876); the OED
says this referred to a "would-be smart or witty person". So it
looks as though "smarty-pants" (and its British relative, "smarty-
boots") were elaborations on the theme, perhaps because "smarty" by
itself was becoming shopworn.
6. Sic!
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The ABC News Web site last Wednesday featured a story about a foul-
mouthed parrot: "Barney, a five-year-old macaw, is now kept indoors
at Warwickshire Animal Sanctuary in Nuneaton in central England,
when outsiders visit after abusing dignitaries with swearword-
littered insults." Thanks to Peter Banks for that.
Barbara K Timmons found this in the safety rules of a boat rental
business in Saco, Maine: "We refuse to rent due to intoxication and
disorderly conduct." A case for a sober new management, it seems.
"Here in Israel," e-mailed Yosef Bar-On, "English speakers have
their own spectator sport. We revel in the attempts at translation
into Hebrew subtitles of the English of movies and TV shows. Just
this week, watching a show on the History Channel about the British
Army, the Scots Guards appeared in translation as 'the Scottish
lifeguards' (as on the beach). But the best I've encountered is the
translation of the phrase 'Circuit Court' as 'King Arthur's Round
Table'. It took me a while to figure this out."
A. E-mail contact addresses
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