World Wide Words -- 15 Oct 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 14 17:33:53 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 463 Saturday 15 October 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: Incalescence.
3. Q&A: Cockpit.
4. Noted this week.
5. Book review: Fanboys and Overdogs: The Language Report.
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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SCUTCHING This word has even more senses than I gave in my piece
last week. Virginia Edmunds e-mailed from Cumbria: "I thought you
may be interested to hear that my children use the versatile word
scutching in the sense of wheedling out or begging for. It is also
used as a noun for the one who undertakes these operations with the
cry 'don't be such a scutch!'" Mike Daplyn pointed out yet another
developed meaning - to prepare masonry or paving for plastering or
rendering by pecking the surface with a scutching or scutch hammer.
And one more came from Helen Fetzer: "In the Bronx, scutching was
holding onto a car's bumper as it started to move and holding on as
long as you could, sliding on the Macadam surface."
TO SERVE MAN About a million (subjective count) subscribers told
me off for not checking (in "Sic!" last week) the correct title of
the edition of The Twilight Zone that was based on a short story by
Damon Knight. In this, aliens come to Earth offering riches, only
for humans to discover that the aliens regard them as a delicacy
and that the alien book of the title is actually a cookbook. George
Dunn reproved me: "You should have realized that the gratuitous
'How' removed the ambiguity from the episode title and that of its
namesake alien book."
RADIO BROADCAST You can hear an item with Adam Jacot de Boinod and
myself in the BBC World Service programme The Word next Monday, 17
October. It goes out at 09.32, 14.22 and 19.22 GMT. To listen to it
online, visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/ .
2. Weird Words: Incalescence
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The process or action of becoming warm or hot.
This is an extremely rare word. In 1888, the New York Sun (surely
the most appropriate journal to lay claim to it) included it in a
squib that borrowed the mantle of Dr Samuel Johnson to complain
magniloquently about the perils of riding a commuter train in the
city on cold winter days:
"Sir," said Dr. Johnson, "the corporeal gelidity and horripilation
superinduced by the niveous atmosphere cannot be mitigated even by
the mental incalescence evolved by indignation." "He means,"
whispered Mr. Boswell, "that it's so infernally cold in the cars of
the Third Avenue elevated that even swearing at the directors won't
warm you."
"Incalescence" dates from the early seventeenth century; it was one
of many words that were imported from Latin by scholarly writers
around this time, in this case from "incalescere", to become warm
or hot. That's from "calorem", heat, which is also the source of
"calorie", "calorimeter", and other words.
Another rare appearance was in The Ladies' Repository of December
1866: "What the flexible imagination is to the ordinary activity of
the mind, the fiery is to its creative energy. Little depends upon
the degree of its incalescence - more upon its living, energetic,
thoughtful activity and rapid but thorough progress."
3. Q&A
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Q. If I don't find out where the air force term 'cockpit' came
from, I'm going to go mad. What do you think? [Rick Loiacono,
Florida]
A. When you stop and think about it, the term for the pilot's cabin
on an aircraft - and other spaces such as the driver's compartment
in a racing car or a helmsman in a small yacht - is curious, isn't
it? Its origin is exotic and disquieting to modern minds.
The experts are sure that it does come, as its name might suggest,
from a place where cock fights were held. The word is recorded from
the latter part of the sixteenth century, during the reign of the
first Elizabeth. It came about because the fighting area for cocks
(one of the favourite recreations of the time, together with bull-
and bear-baiting) was often thought of as a pit. It was a roughly
circular enclosure with a barrier around so that the birds couldn't
escape, fitted up with rows of seats like a small theatre so that
the spectators could look down on the action. The first recorded
mention is in Thomas Churchard's The Worthiness of Wales of 1587:
"The mountains stand in roundness such as it a Cock pit were".
Shakespeare uses it as an allusion to the round shape and noisy
crowdedness of a theatre when the Chorus in Henry V laments its
inadequacy to portray tumultuous events: "Can this cockpit hold /
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram / Within this wooden O
the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?"
More than a century earlier, Elizabeth's father, King Henry VIII,
had bowling alleys, tennis courts and a cock-pit built on a site
opposite the royal palace of Whitehall. A block of buildings later
erected on the site were taken over in the seventeenth century for
government offices such as the Treasury and the Privy Council. That
explains the entry in Samuel Pepys's Diary for 20 February 1659:
"In the evening Simons and I to the Coffee Club, where nothing to
do only I heard Mr. Harrington, and my Lord of Dorset and another
Lord, talking of getting another place at the Cockpit, and they did
believe it would come to something."
A little later, the term came to be applied to the rear part of the
lowest deck, the orlop, of a fighting ship ("orlop" is from Dutch
"overloop", a covering). During a battle it became the station for
the ship's surgeon and his mates because it was relatively safe and
least subject to disturbance by the movements of the ship. Like all
lower-deck spaces, it was confined, crowded, and badly lit. During
a battle, it was also noisy, stinking and bloody. All this reminded
people of a real cock-pit, hence the name. Almost exactly 200 years
ago, on 21 October 1805, Admiral Lord Nelson died in the cockpit of
HMS Victory during the battle of Trafalgar.
The move to today's sense came through its use for the steering pit
or well of a sailing yacht, which also started to be called the
cockpit in the nineteenth century. This was presumably borrowed
from the older term because it was a small enclosed sunken area in
which a coxswain was stationed. (The word was "cockswain" to start
with, he being the swain, or serving man, who was in charge of a
cock, a type of ship's boat.) From here, it moved in the early
twentieth century to the steering area of an aircraft, and later
still to other related senses.
4. Noted this week
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DON'T DO IT, BOSS! The day-to-day head of a business may be called
the Chief Executive or the Chief Executive Officer. But I hadn't
come across the term as a verb until this week, when it appeared in
a newspaper quote. When asked why the Chief Executive of Cable &
Wireless couldn't meet the press, a spokeswoman said, "He's a busy
man, he's chief executing." Stress on the second syllable, please.
5. Book review: Fanboys and Overdogs: The Language Report
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Publishers have made various attempts at providing a regular update
concerning the state of the English language, including The Oxford
Dictionary of New Words, which ran to a sequel in 1996 that I
contributed to, and John Ayto's The Longman Register of New Words,
editions of which appeared in 1989 and 1990. This time around, it
seems that Oxford University Press and editor Susie Dent may have
succeeded in creating a format that builds its audience from year
to year. This is the third annual volume - the first, in 2003, was
just called The Language Report, but last year's had the main title
Larpers and Shroomers. Both are still in print, if you want to
catch up with them.
This edition is a meaty little volume, one of whose ambitions is to
give a picture of changes to our vocabulary over the past year or
so, as well as illuminating language change over a greater span.
Chapters include discussions of words that have recently burst into
the limelight ("gene editing", "botnet", "manbag", "bluesnarfing",
"hotsaucing", "happy slapping"), on changing slang, on the language
of politics (including "dog-whistle politics", imported to Britain
from Australia during this year's election), and new musical genres
such as crunk. Other chapters investigate the stories behind words
associated with recent events, such as "morganatic", "chav", "road
map", "peace process", "saviour sibling", "human shield", and
"tsunami", which was, before the disaster of last Christmas, a word
mostly known by geographers and earthquake experts. Other chapters
range over language change in various ways, such as exaggeration
and euphemism, images and allusions, how the words of 2005 compare
with those of a century ago, the way that usage is changing, and
the recent phenomenon of British-specific terms (like "sell-by
date", "went missing", and "full marks") that are finding a place
in the USA.
Another chapter takes as its starting point the 250th anniversary
this year of the publication of Johnson's dictionary, showing how
some of his words have changed meaning in the years since (such as
"high-flyer", which to Dr Johnson meant a person who "carries his
opinion to extravagance", and "autopsy", which was defined in 1755
as "ocular demonstration; seeing a thing one's self", which was the
sense in Latin and Greek of the root it came from).
The book poses and answers the question of where new words come
from, pointing out that only about 1% of newly reported words are
actually freshly minted. The rest are revivals, new senses of older
words, terms borrowed from other languages, blends or compounds of
words already known, or words that have shifted their function from
noun to verb, or verb to adjective.
Recommended.
[Susie Dent, "Fanboys and Overdogs: The Language Report, published
by Oxford University Press on 6 October 2005; hardback, pp163; ISBN
0192806769; publisher's UK price GBP10.99.]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP7.69 http://quinion.com?F65D
Amazon Canada: CDN$18.17 http://quinion.com?F98D
Amazon USA: US$13.57 http://quinion.com?F24D
Amazon Germany: EUR18,50 http://quinion.com?F73D
[Please use these links to buy. See C below for more details.]
6. Sic!
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Tricia Perham e-mailed: "Here in New England we often see bumper
stickers proclaiming 'My child is an Honor Student', along with the
school name. Yesterday I saw one with the text 'Your kid may be an
honor student but your still an idiot.' I'm trying to decide if the
error was intentional."
"I was rather taken with the huge posters all over a local shop,"
noted Caroline Picking from Milton Keynes. "They all say in big,
brash lettering 'EVERYTHING MUST GO!!' - but underneath, in small
print, it says 'Selected items only'. Hmmm ..."
Walter Sheppard found a logically irrefutable comment in a review
of a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra (solo violinist
Nikolaj Znaider) in the Washington Post on 7 October. Critic Tim
Page wrote, "The performance was also technically impeccable: If
Znaider missed a note, I didn't hear it."
>From the Destruction Derby rules published for the 2005 Arizona
State Fair, discovered by Jim Veihdeffer: "SPECIAL NOTICE: Please!!
No one under the age of sixteen (16) years of age is allowed in the
pit area unless he/she is a bonified, working member of the pit
crew".
Colin Hall e-mailed from Scotland: "I know you wanted to drop the
'Sic!' section, but it must give an awful lot of your subscribers
pleasure every week, as it does me. You might like to include a
sign I saw this afternoon in a shop-window in Broughty Ferry.
'Flexible staff required for part-time work'. I suppose the rigid
ones are on full-time contracts."
A. E-mail contact addresses
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C. Ways to support World Wide Words
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