World Wide Words -- 29 Oct 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 28 16:50:32 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 465 Saturday 29 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: Nut-crack night.
3. Q&A: To a T.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Garbage in, garbage out.
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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DISTANCE LEARNING In a piece in last week's newsletter, I wrote:
"Philips is now virtually unknown and rarely read, and even his
best known lines, from a poem called A Winter-Piece, describing the
rigours of the Danish winter, which was printed in The Tatler in
1709 ("There solid billows of enormous size, / Alps of green ice,
in wild disorder rise"), are merely competent." Carol Hughes, an
adjunct professor in a writing centre at a US university, e-mailed
this comment and request: "I can't remember ever seeing a verb
appear farther from its associated subject. May I use this sentence
for educational purposes? It will be lauded for its grammar and
punctuation, but not for its length - especially where that affects
the distance between subject and verb." I gave permission, of
course - always ready to help!
GONE FOR A BURTON Alan Turner e-mailed in response to last week's
piece on this British expression: "I was surprised to read so many
explanations. Only the last would have come near to being accepted
by my colleagues in RAF Bomber Command during the war. We always
took it to be a reference to one's fate if tempted to soothe one's
nerves with a beer before flying, brewing being the industry for
which Burton was famous."
MISPRINT In that piece, a name was spelled "Brethon" instead of
the correct "Berthon". The device was named after its inventor, the
Reverend Edward Berthon. And it's a collapsible lifeboat, not a
lifejacket.
2. Weird Words: Nut-crack night
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Halloween.
This is an old Scots and Northern English name for the night of 31
October, otherwise called The Oracle of the Nuts. As the chill of
autumn pervaded their homes, people would sit around their fires,
eating newly harvested hazelnuts or chestnuts. Several fortune-
telling customs grew up that involved throwing nuts into the fire,
hence these names for the night.
A young man might give each nut the name of a possible sweetheart
and watch to see which burned the brightest in the flames. This is
evoked in John Gay's poem, The Spell:
Two hazel-nuts I threw into the flame,
And to each nut I gave a sweetheart's name:
This with the loudest bounce me sore amazed,
That in a flame of brightest colour blazed;
As blazed the nut, so may thy passion grow,
For 'twas thy nut that did so brightly glow!
Robert Burns recorded several related customs about this day, one
of which was a fortune-telling game for a young couple in which two
nuts were put in the fire. Their future was predicted depending on
whether the nuts burned quietly together or jumped apart. An
elaborated description appeared in an American publication of 1912,
Games for Hallow-e'en, by Mary E. Blain: "A maid and youth each
places a chestnut to roast on the fire, side by side. If one hisses
and steams, it indicates a fretful temper in the owner of the
chestnut; if both chestnuts equally misbehave it augurs strife. If
one or both pop away, it means separation; but if both burn to
ashes tranquilly side by side, a long life of undisturbed happiness
will be their lot."
3. Q&A: To a T.
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Q. Where did the phrase "to the tee" come from? [Laura Cilento]
A. Stop a moment. Have you heard it in that form, or might you be
mishearing "to a T"? I haven't come across your form and can't be
sure it's the same phrase because you haven't given its meaning.
Just to keep the ball rolling, I'll explain "to a T".
To say "to a T" means that something is exactly or precisely so. An
example appeared in a film review in the Fresno Bee on 30 September
2005: "As Oliver, Barney Clark fits the description to a T: He's
small, angelic and suitably cowed by all the world has to throw at
him." And Jerome K Jerome had some fun with it in Three Men in a
Boat in 1889: "Harris said, however, that the river would suit him
to a 'T'. I don't know what a 'T' is (except a sixpenny one, which
includes bread-and-butter and cake ad lib., and is cheap at the
price, if you haven't had any dinner). It seems to suit everybody,
however, which is greatly to its credit."
You can see from Jerome's usage that the expression is quite old.
In fact, it was first written down almost exactly two centuries
before. That rules out the possibility that it's connected with "T-
shirt", which has been suggested as the origin, but which isn't
recorded before about 1920. Finding out where it came from turns
out to be rather difficult - there are several candidates, but
nobody knows for sure. The obvious suggestion is that it comes from
a tee in golf (or just possibly curling). Another is that it refers
to a T square (a term that appears at about the same date), or to
the correct completion of the letter "t" by crossing it. No
evidence exists that links any of these to the expression.
The origin that most experts point to, rather cautiously, involves
"T" being the first letter of a word. If this is the case, then
"tittle" is easily the most likely source, since "to a tittle" was
in use in exactly the same sense for nearly a century before "to a
T" appeared (it's first recorded in a play by Francis Beaumont and
John Fletcher of 1607 with the title Woman Hater: "I'll quote him
to a tittle").
We know "tittle" now mostly in the set expression "jot or tittle",
meaning some very small amount and in which both words refer to a
tiny quantity. "Jot" comes via Latin from Greek iota, the smallest
letter of the Greek alphabet, which we also still use to refer to
some minuscule amount; "tittle" is from the same Latin word that
has given us "title", but has usually been taken to mean a small
stroke or mark in writing, notably the dot over the letter "i".
4. Noted this week
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MOST ANCIENT OF TREES Last Sunday, examples of that extraordinary
tree the Wollemi pine were auctioned in Sydney. The Wollemi is an
incredible rarity, a survivor of ancient times, the coelacanth of
the botanical world. It was found in 1994 in the Wollemi National
Park outside Sydney. Newspapers call it the "pinosaur" because it
has survived from the time of the dinosaurs 250 million years ago.
HOW MANY MILES TO THE GALLON? From the large and ancient to the
new and tiny: the nanocar. Newspapers had great fun this week with
a report that researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas,
have made a vehicle out of a single molecule. It has a chassis, two
axles and four wheels, even though you can fit 20,000 of them side
by side on a human hair. It's a test bed for devices that one day
might be used to move atoms around.
POLITICAL SLANG Could it be that the decision by Harriet Miers to
remove herself from contention for appointment to the US Supreme
Court will result in "miered" entering the language? If it did, it
would be a parallel development to the verb "to bork", in reference
to the failed nomination by Robert Bork in 1987 and which the New
York Times once defined as "to destroy a judicial nominee through a
concerted attack on his character, background and philosophy." No
example of "miered" has yet appeared in the public prints, so far
as I know, though it has been widely used in blogs for the past
couple of weeks. One definition online is "to put your allies in
the most untenable position possible based upon exceptionally bad
decision-making".
5. Q&A: Garbage in, garbage out.
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Q. What is the origin of the cynical techspeak "garbage in, garbage
out"? Is it a play on the old acronyms LIFO (last in, first out)
and FIFO (first in, first out)? It seems to be somewhat widely
known as a general principle in the information sciences: if you
input data that's junk, the result is unreliable junk. [Martin
Schell]
A. That's certainly what the expression means: that the results of
a computation are only as reliable as the data you input.
Both the expression and its abbreviation GIGO have been around, I
suspect, since the early days of commercial computing. But the
first example I can find is in a syndicated article about the first
stages of computerisation of the US Internal Revenue Service that
appeared in several US newspapers on 1 April 1963. As a reminder of
the state of the art in those days, it rather sweetly referred to
the computer at the centre of the system as a robot and described
data being input in local offices on punched cards, transferred to
magnetic tape, and flown to the computer centre for processing. The
article quoted the full expression, which it said even then was "an
adage of computer men". The abbreviated form "GIGO" is recorded the
following year and both the expression and the acronym become quite
widely known soon after.
Though it was popular with computer people because it encapsulated
a fundamental truth about data handling, it seems also to have
caught the imagination of the general public - worried about the
implications of automation for their jobs - because it reassured
them that these new-fangled computers were just dumb beasts that
needed handling by intelligent beings.
As you might guess, we've no idea who coined it. The OED's first
example, from 1964, appeared in a book entitled The Impact of
Computers on Accounting. That supports your view that GIGO was
based on the two accounting terms LIFO ("Last In, First Out") and
FIFO ("First In, First Out"), which became computing terms for ways
to manage the stacking and order of processing of data. Accountants
had been using them to describe ways of managing stock levels or
valuing a company's goods at least since the 1930s, though the
acronyms only appeared in print for the first time around 1945.
6. Sic!
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Lee Schlesinger noted that on the Church of Reality's Hidden Agenda
page, the organisation asks, "In an age where everyone is lying
about something, what is the Church of Reality really about? Is it
politics? Is it world domination? Are we really Satan's mignons?" I
wondered where that smell of cooking was coming from.
Subscriber Katie followed up Robert Sharp's comment here last week
about missing "-ed" endings: "At least one of Mr. Sharp's missing
eds is located in southeastern Arizona. The local NAPA outlet has a
sign requiring 'pictured ID'. I have pointed out to them that this
means a photo of my driver's license would suffice; they understand
what I mean, but they never change the sign. I am apparently the
only person in the county who has ever noticed it."
A story in John Benz Fentner's local newspaper this week discussed
the flooding on the Farmington River after a week of heavy rain.
One official was reported as saying: "There was a lot of sentiment
in areas over the Summer and the water was warming up. The rain is
washing the sentiment out of the system." "A tragic twofer," Mr
Fenter comments, "for our formerly much beloved river."
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