World Wide Words -- 16 Dec 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 15 16:57:08 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 518 Saturday 16 December 2006
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Sent each Saturday to at least 45,000 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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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ucaz.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Oaf.
3. Q&A: Trig and trim.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Disgruntled.
6. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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TINNY Australian subscribers suggested that one possible reason
why this word is losing its meaning of "lucky" is that other senses
have grown up in recent decades, notably those of a tin or can of
beer and of a lightweight aluminium boat. Bruce Thorpe noted that
in New Zealand the word these days refers almost exclusively to
small amounts of marijuana sold from suburban addresses known as
tinny houses. The name is from the wrapping of tinfoil around the
drug.
2. Weird Words: Oaf
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A stupid, boorish, or clumsy man.
There's an intimate connection between oafs and elves. In ancient
legend, elves weren't the noble creatures portrayed in Tolkien's
stories but powerful and dangerous supernatural beings more likely
to harm humans than to help them. Their name says so: it comes from
an ancient Germanic term for a nightmare, a close relative of the
first element of the modern German "Albdruck" with the same sense.
Among other nasty habits, elves were thought to bring humans bad
dreams and to steal their children, leaving changelings in their
place.
It's from that belief that "oaf" first appeared in English, in the
seventeenth century. Originally an oaf was an elf's child, one that
had been left in a poor exchange for a stolen human one. In popular
superstition, such children were assumed to be ugly or stupid. The
first forms to appear were "ouphe" and "auf", the former turning up
several times in Shakespeare's plays, though he used it to mean an
elf or goblin. "Auf" appears in 1621 in the Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton: "A very monster, an aufe imperfect". By the end
of the seventeenth century it had settled to the modern spelling
and "oaf" had moved to mean "idiot child" or "halfwit", then later
took on the senses of a large and clumsy or a rude and boorish man.
3. Q&A: Trig and trim
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Q. While reading a shipping report dated 1877, I came across the
phrase "trig and trim" that referred to a ship that had arrived at
Dunedin from the Old Country in superb condition. Are you able to
provide, please, a dissertation on its origins? [Peter Wells, New
Zealand]
A. I was nearly stopped dead in my research when I found that the
Oxford English Dictionary online doesn't contain a single example
of the phrase; a call to the lexicographers confirms they have few
examples of it. But then I found it in Dylan Thomas's Under Milk
Wood of 1954: "In her iceberg-white, holily laundered crinoline
nightgown, under virtuous polar sheets, in her spruced and scoured
dust-defying bedroom in trig and trim Bay View, a house for paying
guests ..." and in a very different work, Bill Tilden's The Art of
Law Tennis (1920): "Miss Browne is a trig and trim little figure on
the court as she glides over its surface. It is no wonder that her
public love her." Marie Corelli included a naval reference in her
book of 1886, Vendetta: "And she has been newly rigged and painted,
and she is as trig and trim a craft as you can meet with in all the
wide blue waters of the Mediterranean."
All these examples confirm that it means exactly what you suggest:
that something is neat and tidy, in good order, immaculate.
It's hard to be sure how old it is. It was a bit of a struggle, as
it happens, to find an example even as old as yours. But I've now
turned up an earlier one in the first volume of Robert Chambers'
Cyclopaedia of English Literature, dated 1843: "The same reason I
find true in two bows I have, whereof one is quick of cast, trig
and trim, both for pleasure and profit."
The OED does give a good account of "trig", which it says is from
an old Scandinavian word "tryggr", meaning faithful or secure.
(Nothing to do with "trigger", which is from a Dutch word meaning
to pull.) "Trig" today is mainly found in northern England and
Scotland and can mean someone who is nimble, brisk and alert, or a
person who is neatly or smartly dressed, or someone or something
that is in good physical condition, strong or sound.
It would seem it was put together with "trim", in its sense of
neat, sometime in the nineteenth century to make one of those
reduplicated phrases that English speakers so like, perhaps after
the model of the much older "spick and span".
4. Recently noted
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WORD OF THE YEAR Merriam-Webster has been running a competition,
asking visitors to its Web site to nominate the Word of the Year
for 2006. The runners-up were, in decreasing order of popularity,
google, decider, war, insurgent, terrorism, vendetta, sectarian,
quagmire, and corruption. Astonishingly, the winner - announced on
8 December - is "truthiness". It triumphed by such a large margin,
5 to 1, that an unbiased observer must wonder about the possibility
of ballot-stuffing. That would be fitting for a word that means the
quality of stating concepts or facts that one wishes or believes to
be true rather than those known to be true. The word was invented
by Stephen Colbert in his first-ever show on the Comedy Channel in
October 2005. "Truthiness" was given a push last January when it
was chosen as its 2005 Word of the Year by members of the American
Dialect Society. But even after this double whammy of accolades,
the experts are very uncertain whether it will survive. Newspaper
searches throw up only a small number of cases in which it has been
used without reference to Colbert or to its winning awards. Because
of this, Merriam-Webster are reported as having no plans to add the
word to their dictionaries. For more on the story behind the word,
see http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-tru1.htm .
ENGLEUTSCH? Though the influx of English words into German has
been great enough to result in a mixed language sometimes called
Denglish, the flow the other way has not been so sizeable, though
we do have Schadenfreude, Kindergarten and Zeitgeist, plus a good
number of technical terms. The Goethe Institute in London has been
running a competition to find the German word whose acceptance into
English would most improve our language. Some good suggestions were
put forward, including "Backpfeifengesicht", a face that makes you
want to hit it, "Torschlusspanik", a door-closing panic, a fear of
being left on the shelf, and "Kummerspeck", "grief bacon", for an
excessive gain in weight caused by overeating emotional problems.
The most frequent suggestion was "Ohrwurm", literally an ear worm,
a tune so catchy that you can't get it out of your head. However,
the winner, announced on 8 December, was "Fachidiot". Literally
"subject idiot", it refers to a person who has become such an
academic specialist, so deeply immersed in his subject, that he has
lost all interest in or understanding of what is going on in the
world around him. We do have "nerd", of course, though that hardly
plumbs the same depths of unworldliness.
The Deutsche Sprachrat, the German Language Council, part of the
Goethe Institute, has also been running a contest, called Word
Migrations, for the German word that has most interestingly moved
into another language. Many people submitted "vasistas" (Was ist
das?, what is that?), French for a skylight or fanlight. There's
also the famous Japanese arubaito for a student or part-time job
(from "Arbeit", work). But the winner was "Kaffepaussi", Finnish
for a coffee break or temporary break in service, which the winner
discovered on the automated destination board of a public-transit
bus that was on a break.
BESTSHORING A poster to the comments column of the San Francisco
Chronicle on Tuesday remarked that his firm had laid off workers
this year through bestshoring. The earliest example I've found is
in an article by Senator Hillary Clinton in the Wall Street Journal
in 2004. We've long had offshoring, sending certain kinds of work
to overseas countries where it can be done more cheaply. That has
led to nearshoring, in which the work goes to companies with the
economic benefits of an offshore location, but a closer cultural,
linguistic and geographic fit with the user firm, and onshoring or
homeshoring, which is outsourcing to a cheaper company within your
own country. We've even seen the creation of onshore offshoring,
which instead involves bringing the skilled workers from foreign
countries to your own. This plethora has led to "bestshoring",
which is a combination of onshoring, nearshoring and offshoring,
depending on the requirements of the moment. We are cast up on the
shores of a sea of neologisms.
5. Q&A: Disgruntled
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Q. I have for some time been fascinated by the word "disgruntled".
How may you be disgruntled if you are not already gruntled? I do
not know what gruntled is and I have not been able to find that
word in the dictionaries that I have examined. Any thoughts about
gruntled and disgruntled? [John Carlson]
A. Years ago I wrote a piece about such unpaired opposites (online
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/unpaired.htm ), whose
first example was this word. It quoted P G Wodehouse's The Code of
the Woosters, published in 1938: "He spoke with a certain what-is-
it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled,
he was far from being gruntled." So, if you were the opposite of
disgruntled you would be pleased, satisfied, and contented.
Wodehouse invented this sense and has been quoted or flatteringly
imitated many times since (as in Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett:
"'No, that man,' said Angua, '[with a] face like someone very
disgruntled.' 'Oh, that was Captain Vimes. But he's never been
gruntled, I think.'")
The assumption behind it is that putting "dis-" on the front of a
word makes it negative in meaning in some way, as in "disappear",
"discontent", "disconnect", "dishonest", and dozens of others.
That's still an active way of making new words - it has been used
in recent decades to create "disinformation", "disambiguate" and
many others. Sometimes, however - very rarely and only in old words
- "dis-" is what the grammarians call an intensifier: it makes an
existing sense stronger. For example, the unusual word "disannul"
was used in the sense "to make null and void, bring to nothing,
abolish" and "dissever" means "to divide, separate, disjoin". A
third example is "disgruntle", which at root suggests somebody is
more than merely gruntled. But "gruntled" here doesn't have its
Wodehousian sense, quite the reverse.
Now a second grammatical term, "frequentative" (or "frequentive" if
you prefer). This is a trick of word formation, now obsolete, in
which an ending created a verb to suggest that some action is often
repeated. The one used for this most often is "-le". So "curdle" is
the frequentative of "curd", "gamble" that of "game" and "sparkle"
of "spark". The verb "gruntle" is the frequentative of "grunt".
The first sense of "gruntle" was of a repeated grunt, especially
the noise that pigs make in company. An example is in The Life and
Death of Mr Badman, by John Bunyan, of 1680: "After this his speech
went quite away, and he could speak no more than a Swine or a Bear.
Therefore, like one of them, he would gruntle and make an ugly
noise, according as he was offended, or pleased, or would have any
thing done." It is rarely used of humans, but an example occurs in
a 1922 book, The Covered Wagon, by Emerson Hough, "They dismounted.
The two Indians, short, deep-chested, bow-legged men, went to the
packs. They gruntled as they unloaded the two larger mules."
"Gruntle" appeared in the fifteenth century; by the end of the next
century it had begun to be used to mean grumbling or complaining. I
imagine it as old-retainer mumble, the noise that someone fed up
with their condition will make under their breath all the time.
If we put the intensifier and the frequentative together in one
word, "disgruntled" has its current meaning, which the Oxford
English Dictionary describes as a state of "moody discontent, sulky
dissatisfaction or ill-humour".
6. Sic!
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The December issue of Which? magazine has an article entitled "All
you don't want for Christmas" that contains a list of unwanted or
useless presents. It quotes someone who complains "I had asked all
my friends and relatives to either buy me nothing at all or to buy
an animal for a family abroad. Quite a lot of people ignored this
or did both." Mike Cottrell suggests there's something seriously
wrong with the logic in that statement.
A scandal in the UK in recent weeks concerns the collapse of a firm
named Farepak, which ran a kind of savings scheme that allowed low-
income families to save up over the year to get hampers of goods at
Christmas. Michael Hocken read an article in the Daily Mail of 8th
December about a rescue package for Farepak customers. The headline
read "Farepak victims' hamper rescue". He had to read the article
to be sure what was meant.
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