World Wide Words -- 24 Sep 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 23 17:32:27 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 460 Saturday 24 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. Weird Words: Vinolent.
3. Book review: Word Origins and How We Know Them.
4. Noted this week.
5. Turns of Phrase: Extraordinary rendition.
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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ISSUE DATING The date and issue number of last week's edition were
mistakenly a repeat of those of the week before. Sorry about that.
KAKURO Alan Harrison commented on this import from Japanese which
I featured in the last issue: "Kakuro demonstrates a Japanese way
of coping with consonantal clusters, which cannot occur in the
Japanese pronunciation system, where N is the only stand-alone
consonant. It isn't untypical of Japanese inventiveness with loan
words. While English is the most common source (especially in its
American variant, such as the popular Japanese sport 'beisuboru'),
two odd examples come from other languages. 'Arubaito' (a part-time
job) is German 'Arbeit' (work) and 'abekku' (boy or girl friend,
the person you are 'with') is French 'avec'. I am reminded of a
rather difficult conversation with a Japanese lady who referred to
the Arubato Whore, whom I assumed to be a minor character in the
Tale of Genji. She was actually referring to that large public
building in London, the Albert Hall."
2. Weird Words: Vinolent /'vaIn at l@nt/
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Addicted to wine; intemperate or drunken.
In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote "In woman vinolent
is no defence, This knowen lecchours by experience", meaning that
lechers succeed by getting women drunk. This is easily the most
famous appearance of the word in literature, because "vinolent" was
never common and has become even rarer since his time (though a Web
search did turn up a firm apparently willing to print the word on a
T-shirt for you; if you wore one it might provoke spectators to ask
whether you were boasting or complaining).
I thought it had quite dropped out of daily use, but then instances
emerged from the interstices of the Internet. The Business Law
Journal of January 2005 has: "During this term, the United States
Supreme Court will hear arguments on a matter that will have broad
economic impact for winemakers and vinolent consumers." Hugh and
Colleen Gantzer turned it into a noun in the Business Traveller in
August 2002: "But then, not even the most dedicated Swiss vinolent
can hope to taste all the great, and subtly evolving, wines of
Switzerland!"
These suggest that the word has lost its links with intemperance
and drunkenness and has taken on a meaning of "lover of wine". This
is a pity, etymologically speaking, since its source is the Latin
word "vinolentus", meaning drunk on wine, from "vinum", wine. That
also bequeaths us "vine" (the first part of "vinolent" is said the
same way).
3. Book review: Word Origins and How We Know Them
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When a man has spent the past 17 years working on a dictionary of
etymology, with no end in sight, the one failing that you cannot
tax him with is lack of patience. That he should find enough time
to stand back from his labours - and his full-time academic duties
- and write an overview of the whole subject for non-specialists is
very welcome, particularly when he manages to inject gentle humour
into what can be an excessively dry subject.
Professor Anatoly Liberman has avoided this pitfall by dividing his
subject into 18 themed chapters on various aspects of the study of
the history of our language. The style of the book is deliberately
old-fashioned in one respect (reflected in the cover design, which
features a map of the original gerrymandered voting district), with
each chapter headed by a contents list and an introduction like one
in an eighteenth-century novel ("Chapter One, in which the author
introduces himself, assumes a confidential tone, and suggests that
etymology and entomology are different sciences"). If you find
these affected or cutesy, they are easily passed over in favour of
the meat below, which is straightforwardly written.
The first part of his research was to compile a vast bibliography
of pretty much everything that's been written over the past 500
years in some 25 languages about the origins, or supposed origins,
of English words. As a result, he often has a different take on
sources to those in the standard works. This makes his dictionary
something to look forward to. The bibliography, in two volumes,
plus a sample volume containing 50 entries, are to appear in 2006;
the full work will come out in parts (let's call them fascicles, as
the Oxford English Dictionary's editors did a century ago) every
couple of years after that.
As an example of his take on words, the OED considered the final
part of "ragamuffin" to be fanciful, but he points out that in a
Cumberland dialect "Auld Muffy" is a name for the Devil, related to
French "maufé", ugly or ill-featured, and that "rag" also refers to
the Devil (from the medieval "Ragman"). So "ragamuffin" may well
have been the tautological "devil-devil", only later changed in
sense under the influence of that initial "rag" to mean a tattered
street urchin. He is also doubtful of the conventional view that
the first element of the American "cater-cornered" (diagonally
opposite) is from French "quatre", a square ("it has little to
recommend it"), arguing that its true origin is in a word like
Danish "kejte" (left hand) or "kejtet" (clumsy), left-handers often
being considered such. The book has other such revisionist views,
all argued in detail.
Chapters cover such subjects as the way words are formed, such as
those formed by reduplication ("shilly-shally", "hubbub"), words
created by pasting a word or part of a word inside another word
("infixation"), those made by adding prefixes and suffixes, those
that have been created from names, coinages by known individuals,
and words that have been borrowed from other languages. The book
ends with a brief note on the current state of English etymology.
A sub-title of the book is "Etymology for Everyone", which is true
for a special case of "everyone": those seriously interested in the
origins of our language, who actively want to find out more about
the way etymologists work, and who along the way don't mind taking
in some sobering guidance on the pitfalls of ferreting out word
histories. It will repay careful reading, but the casual browser
may find it hard work.
[Anatoly Liberman, Word Origins and How We Know Them, published by
Oxford University Press USA in April 2005; hardback, pp312; ISBN
0195161475; publisher's US price $25.00.]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon USA: US$16.50 (http://quinion.com?W23P)
Amazon Canada: CDN$23.07 (http://quinion.com?W31P)
Amazon UK: GBP12.27 (http://quinion.com?W94P)
Amazon Germany: EUR23,50 (http://quinion.com?W87P)
[Please use these links to buy. See C below for more details.]
4. Noted this week
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ESQUIVALIENCE Nathan Bierma's "On Language" column in the Chicago
Tribune this week reports that the New Yorker has found a fake word
in the New Oxford American Dictionary. Its editors inserted it in
the first edition of 2001 as a copyright trap. It's often said that
compilers of reference works do this as a way to reveal competitors
whose admiration for their work becomes - let us say - a little
over-enthusiastic, but for obvious reasons it's usually difficult
to confirm this. The word is now known - if you have a copy of the
NOAD, please ignore the entry for "esquivalience", supposedly the
wilful avoidance of one's official responsibilities or the shirking
of duties (the duty being to check from your own research that the
word exists). LINK: http://quinion.com?FAKE
UNSCROLL This turned up in a report by Simon Hoggart in Thursday's
Guardian about the Liberal Party conference: "Probably most of the
delegates weren't aware that the whole speech was unscrolling on a
giant screen hung from the balcony of the ballroom." But can any
item unscroll, rather than just scroll? It's hard to imagine such a
process. Deadline pressure presumably caused Hoggart to conflate
"scroll" with "unroll". But it's not unique: there are dozens of
cases in British and American newspapers over the past decade. One
in the Evening Standard on 11 July referred to a bus journey: "We
would rather sit in overheated proximity to the futures trader and
the office cleaner, watching London unscroll in fits and starts and
fare stages, than take the loathed Tube." I started out thinking
this was an item for "Sic!", but it looks as though a new verb has
formed under our noses, illogical though it may seem.
5. Turns of Phrase: Extraordinary rendition
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This legal term has gained much attention in the press in the past
couple of years because of reports that the CIA has been capturing
terrorism suspects in one country and delivering them with no court
hearing or extradition process to a second, in which torture is
practised, in order to get confessions or useful intelligence. The
term dates to the end of the 1980s at the latest, but is in the
news at the moment because of accusations that the CIA is being
actively aided by the British government, and because of a court
case last month in New York in which a Canadian citizen challenged
his removal to Syria in this way.
The core of the term is "rendition", an old but little-known legal
principle. It comes from an obsolete French term that derives from
"rendre", to give back or render. Most people know "rendition" as a
posh word for the performance of an actor or musician, but in the
time of the first Queen Elizabeth - about 1600 - it referred to the
surrender of a garrison (the occupants rendered, or gave themselves
up, to the victors). In US law rendition refers to the transfer of
individuals by what is called extra-judicial process (kidnapping,
in plain speech) from a foreign country to the USA to answer
criminal charges. The defendant is said to have been rendered up to
justice.
A problem for the security forces is that once brought to the USA
the person is subject to US law and the rules of due process, which
of course excludes torture. Hence "extraordinary rendition", a
euphemism for taking them to a country where these rules do not
apply.
* From the Independent, 1 Jul. 2005: One week ago a judge in Milan
signed warrants for the arrest of 13 of the agents, which has
thrown covert CIA activities outside the US under the spotlight and
drawn attention to the increasingly common practice of so-called
'extraordinary rendition', by which the US seizes terror suspects
and removes them to countries known for their use of torture.
* From the New York Times, 18 Feb. 2005: Extraordinary rendition is
antithetical to everything Americans are supposed to believe in. It
violates American law. It violates international law. And it is a
profound violation of our own most fundamental moral imperative -
that there are limits to the way we treat other human beings, even
in a time of war and great fear.
6. Sic!
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A disconcerting image is evoked by an article seen by Roger Beale
in the Welwyn Hatfield Times of 21 September. It's about the 70th
anniversary of Welwyn Garden City's Catholic church: "The former
coal cellar below the church has been converted into a drop-in
centre."
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