World Wide Words -- 17 Sep 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 16 17:35:47 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 458 Saturday 10 September 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. Turns of Phrase: Kakuro.
3. Weird Words: Kinetoscope.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Big Shot.
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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OVER TO YOU I was pleasantly overwhelmed by the number of people
who offered examples of words that have gone out of regular use in
their lifetimes. Thanks also to those of analytical mind who wrote
sorting words of this kind into several logical groups. I have been
unable to acknowledge or thank writers individually, so I will do
so collectively now. You've all been very helpful.
PORT OUT, STARBOARD HOME Last Saturday was eventful. Not only did
I have the largest e-mail postbag for months, but Nicholas Lezard
featured the paperback edition of my book as his paperback of the
week in the Guardian. He was very nice about it, though he did make
it seem like an amorous anaconda: "It's the kind of work that you
have a hard time disentangling yourself from." This is a preamble
to saying that it is now available in the UK and within a couple of
months will become so in the rest of the world outside the USA.
(The US paperback will come out next Spring from HarperCollins.)
Follow the short link http://quinion.com?LEPZ to read the review,
or follow these to buy or order it online:
Amazon UK: GBP6.39 (http://quinion.com?P39H)
Amazon Germany: EUR13,50 (http://quinion.com?P46H)
Amazon Canada: CDN$11.99 (http://quinion.com?P11H)
2. Turns of Phrase: Kakuro
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The craze for sudoku (see http://quinion.com?SUDO) now seems to be
levelling out in the UK, though far from over. As one part of the
Guardian's complete redesign on Monday (which included changing the
paper's size to one called the Berliner, used in continental Europe
but not previously in the UK, and putting colour on every page), it
decided to go one better by importing another popular Japanese word
puzzle. It's similar in concept but uses a differently shaped and
sized grid, a cross between sudoku and a crossword puzzle, which is
based on another US-invented game called Cross Sums. The name is a
wonderful example of cross-language fertilisation, created by McKee
Kaji, who introduced it to Japan and publishes the puzzles there.
An article in Wednesday's issue explained: "Kaji named his version
kasan kurosu, a combination of the Japanese for 'addition' and the
Japanese pronunciation of the English word 'cross'. It was soon
abbreviated for marketing effect - becoming the catchier kakkuro,
or, in its British incarnation, kakuro."
3. Weird Words: Kinetoscope
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An early motion-picture device.
In the early 1890s, Thomas Alva Edison experimented with ways to
link his then new phonograph with the equally new moving pictures,
to make "an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph
does for the Ear." To start with he called the machine he created a
"kinetophonograph", but later it became "kinetoscope", which used a
series of images on celluloid film. These were in turn created by
means of a "kinetograph", an early film camera. All three are from
the Greek "kinetos", movable.
The film ran on rollers inside a cabinet; one person at a time
viewed the result through a lens at the top, with the sound from
the phonograph piped to his ears through a sort of stethoscope. A
reporter visited Edison's famous workshop in April 1894 and was
shown the device by his assistant William Dickson, the leader of
the team who had actually developed the devices: "An electric light
was burning inside and the noise of rapidly running machinery was
audible. The scene that was reproduced was that of a barber shop,
and a placard on the wall informed the observer that it was 'The
Latest Wonder, Shave and Hair Cut for a Nickel.' It pictured a man
shaved while two others sat by and enjoyed a joke which one of them
had discovered in a comic paper."
Not perhaps the stuff of Academy Awards, but a marvel of the times.
4. Noted this week
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STINKING BISHOP Small producers often invent weird names for their
foods as a way to distinguish them. This one is a cheese, made in
Dymock, on the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border. Its name comes
from the variety of perry pear (perry being the pear equivalent of
cider), whose alcoholic product is used to wash the curds and give
the cheese a unique flavour (one writer says that it has a "sticky
yellow-orange rind and smells of old socks"). It's about to be even
more famous, because it features in the new Wallace & Gromit film
from Ardman Animations, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which comes
out next month. Surely they can't have gone off Wensleydale?
5. Q&A
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Q. I see that you covered "big cheese" on your site, but what about
"big shot"? [Jim McKelvey]
A. Ah, another of those "simple" questions.
People in the US started to use "big shot" for a celebrity or for
an important or influential person around 1926-7. Within a year it
had blossomed into a fashionable slang term with examples appearing
everywhere, especially to describe the bosses of criminal gangs -
in April 1930, the Lincoln Star of Nebraska remarked, "Unless the
memory plays us a trick, Al Capone is the 'big shot' of Chicago
gangland."
Where it comes from is a surprisingly long story. From about 1400 on,
the newly invented gun was divided into two types: "small guns" that
could be carried by soldiers, such as the early types of musket, and
the "big guns" or "great guns", which were the heavy wheeled pieces
like cannon. Though the terms are long since obsolete in formal terms,
the phrase "big gun" remains common for a large piece of ordnance.
Around the 1830s, again in the USA, "big gun" began to be applied to
men whose power and influence metaphorically rivalled that of these
weapons - an Ohio paper in 1837 referred to the big guns of Tammany
Hall in New York (this usage survives, of course, especially for a
pre-eminent person in some field, especially in sports, indeed any
substantial resource, even horses: "We will be relying on Kerrin to
ride all our big guns and when we have more than one in a race we will
go for the best available" - London Evening Standard, 5 June 2005).
The related term "big shot" came along in the middle of the nineteenth
century, but to start with it was a literal description of a large
bullet or shell. Around 1900 it starts to be recorded as a mining
term. In July 1905, the Washington Post ran a story under the headline
"BLAST KILLS EIGHT Hurled to Their Deaths by Premature Explosion",
on a railway construction accident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
It reported that a foreman had gone to the scene "to personally
superintend the preparations for what is called a 'big shot' to be
fired to-morrow morning. A 'big shot' consists of a series of
blasts, the holes having been drilled in a row, and the charges
being set off simultaneously by an electric spark." Other reports
of the time show that this was a standard term, not a one-off, and
it was used figuratively as early as 1911 in an advertisement in an
Ohio paper promoting a sale: "It is now past the middle of May and
we are going to take one 'BIG SHOT' at the remainder of the Stock
at HALF and LESS."
The next stage occurred sometime in the 1920s, when "big shot"
began to be used for a crucial sporting contest, particularly in
boxing. A good example - though not by any means the earliest -
appeared in a Texas paper in 1926: "The first 'big shot' - as the
boys call 'em - in Gene Tunney's ring life was his battle with
Georges Carpentier, the Frenchman." By then it had shifted to also
mean the opponent in such bouts ("He was having trouble making the
weight and he was running out of big shot opponents" - Mexia Daily
News, March 1925) and also to star performers, such as Jack Dempsey:
"Not once since he became a big shot in the knuckling industry has
he failed to show a heavy beard as he climbed through the ropes for
an important battle" (Appleton Post Crescent, September 1926).
The move out of sports into mainstream life came soon after.
6. Sic!
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Marie-Louise Edwards spotted a curious sentence on the Telegraph
Web site: "The Prime Minister's wife made a series of candid
comments about her own political ambitions, her husband's policies
and her childhood dreams of falling in love with an Indian raja
during an informal lunch with female journalists." Some dream.
"There are four 's's in that word, not three," Prof. W Douglas
Maurer retorts, having read a picture caption in the issue of The
Examiner, a free newspaper in Washington, DC, for 10-11 September:
"Road construction workers asses and begin repairs to the overpass
from Route 1 South to Interstate 495 North".
A. E-mail contact addresses
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