From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Jul 7 12:25:16 2006 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2006 17:25:16 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 07 Jul 06 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 495 Saturday 8 July 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to at least 40,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/jvdy.htm Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Net neutrality. 3. Weird Words: Sabrage. 4. Recently noted. 5. Book Review: The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. 6. Sic! A. E-mail contact addresses. B. Subscription information. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- OVER TO YOU World Wide Words subscribers are a knowledgeable lot. Within an hour of the newsletter going out last Saturday, a reply to Martin Rose's query about the name of the traditional building material used around Brighton came in from Pam Davies. The name is "bungaroosh", also spelled "bungeroosh". It was basically lime mortar, bulked out with anything else that was handy, like bricks, flints, bits of wood and lumps of chalk. Rob Fraser, at the time the Conservation Officer of Brighton Borough Council, said in an interesting and detailed article at http://quinion.com?BUNG (thanks to Terence Sims and others for the link), that the material is a horror for those looking after old buildings: "Bungaroosh has to be a little damp. Too dry and the now leached mortar crumbles, too wet and it becomes mobile ... You could probably demolish a third of Brighton with a well-aimed hose." Its origin is obscure, though it has been suggested that it's from "bung" because anything handy was bunged in with the lime mortar. The ending sounds vaguely French. But these are just guesses - we don't really have a clue. 2. Turns of Phrase: Net neutrality ------------------------------------------------------------------- Debates in the US Congress have recently brought this term to wide public attention inside and outside the US. The questions sound simple: should the Internet remain equally accessible to everyone, or should a two-tier system be created that requires companies who pay more or who use more of the Net's capacity to pay a greater share of the cost? And should those who want a faster and higher quality service be asked to pay more for it? The telecommunications companies (the telcos) argue that firms such as Google, eBay and Amazon, and online telephone companies like Skype, have built highly profitable businesses on the Net without contributing their fair share of the cost of running it. Providers of bandwidth-hungry technologies like video-on-demand should pay a higher fee to recognise the risk that they will clog the network. The decision by Channel Four, a British network, to stream many of its broadcasts online at the same time as they are transmitted conventionally is an example of what they're worried about. Earlier this year AOL and Yahoo! announced they were introducing a two-tier e-mail system, in which senders of messages who paid a fee would receive faster service, bypassing the spam filters and other checks that slow transmission. Opponents argue that a dual-pricing system would remove the key characteristic of the Net - that it is equally accessible to all comers. They point out that this neutrality is the reason why it has grown so spectacularly. They are afraid that the scheme would hand power to big businesses at the cost of the individuals and small groups who are its current main users. It might Balkanise the Internet into fiefdoms that would be controlled by individual telcos and ISPs, a possibility which Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has described as an Internet "dark age". The earliest example of the term I can find is in the title of a conference held in Washington in June 2003. A supporter of net neutrality is a "net neutralist". * The Motley Fool, 30 Jun. 2006: The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that idea is often borne out by overzealous regulation, which often has entirely unexpected side effects. Despite net neutrality's proponents' claims, such regulation might actually mean that somewhere down the line, all of us will be stuck on a dirt road instead of an information superhighway. * New Scientist, 24 Jun. 2006: Net neutralists also fear that telcos will use the new freedom to block content that interferes with their own business interests. Telcos could do this by charging extortionately high rates to competitors, slowing down their bits so that their applications do not work well or simply blocking them outright. 3. Weird Words: Sabrage ------------------------------------------------------------------- The act of opening a bottle with a sabre. Imagine opening a bottle with great ceremony by striking off its neck with one sweep of a blade. Traditionally the bottle contains champagne and the implement is always a sabre. You might think the result will be lots of broken glass and mess, but the skill of sabrage lies in hitting the bottle hard just at the bottom edge of the annulus, the glass ring at the top of the neck. The blow breaks the neck off cleanly, complete with cork. Experts advise you chill the bottle very well and avoid shaking it, remove the foil and wire cage, hold it away from you at an angle of about 40 degrees and strike with the bottle seam uppermost. Do not try this at home, kiddies. In truth, a sabre is optional: almost any hard object with an edge will do it. At least one organisation, the Confrérie du Sabre d'Or, maintains this tradition at its champagne parties. But otherwise, both it and the term are rarely encountered. Stories hold that it dates from Napoleonic times and was invented by cavalry who found it difficult to open champagne bottles while on horseback, but did have usefully heavy sabres handy. You may celebrate the ingenuity of this story with a small glass of something bubbly if you wish. Its language origin is definitely the French "sabrer", to hit with a sabre. It's a close relative of "sabreur", one who fights with a sabre, best known in "beau sabreur", a fine soldier or dashing adventurer. But the modern French "sabrage" mundanely refers to cleaning vegetable detritus from sheep fleeces. 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- BLAWGING Those who write or read blogs on legal topics will know I'm behind the curve here, since this term for the type has been around for a year or two. The coiner is said to be the California technology lawyer Denise Howell. It was coined by stuffing "law" into the middle of "blog". (I don't know a proper linguistic term for the process, though it might be referred to as infixing.) GLOBALISATION An example of how legends can accrue around a major figure appeared in the Boston Business Journal on 29 June, in an item announcing the death of the marketing guru Professor Theodore Levitt. The article said that "Levitt was the first to use the word 'globalization', in a 1983 article asserting that technology had created worldwide markets for standardized consumer products at lower prices." The article, "The Globalisation of Markets", did appear in that year (Harvard Business Review, 1 May 1983). But he didn't invent the word: the first instance in the Oxford English Dictionary's entry is from the Spectator magazine of October 1962: "Globalisation is, indeed, a staggering concept." However, he did popularise it in the current business sense and he did invent other terms, such as "marketing matrix". GAK-ADDLED This might be of interest to Grant Barrett (see below). It turned up in this spelling in a piece in the Guardian a week ago last Saturday. The more usual British spelling is "gack-addled". The first part may be from the Irish dialect "gack", to talk idly or chatter. As that's one of the symptoms of cocaine usage, the word came to be used in UK drug culture in the 1990s as a slang term for the drug. As long ago as the seventeenth century "Addled" moved from its standard English sense of a bad egg to refer to somebody whose brains were addled (as in "addle-pated" and "addle- head"). The following century it became part of the vast vocabulary of slang terms for somebody who was under the influence of alcohol. Like "gack", it was re-borrowed in the 1990s to refer to somebody whose brain has been scrambled through imbibing drugs. 5. Book Review: The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English ------------------------------------------------------------------- Much has been said and written about the influence of the Internet on our language, a lot of it by commentators who feel that its love of slang and unconventional terms, its informality, and the poor linguistic abilities of many of its users, show English is going to hell in a handbasket. What is less appreciated is that the Net is semi-formalising the way that people have always communicated, so that we're now able to eavesdrop on unedited conversations that show us the way the language operates when it isn't being mediated by editors and professional writers. Conventional lexicographical research is still largely wedded to the printed page. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, does not cite Net sources and so its researchers don't search for new words and revised senses online. Grant Barrett's book is different. He has created it from the Internet using methods impossible before the Net existed, such as the Google Alerts that send you e-mails when some word or phrase you specify turns up in a news report. Once he has identified a term, he hunts for its origin in the many electronic databases available online: as he says, "etymological work has never been easier". Or more fun. The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English is a teasing title (its subtitle even more so: A Crunk Omnibus for Trillionaires and Bampots for the Ecozoic Age), one that you might expect from a lexicographer who has given his Web site the name Double-Tongued Word Wrester (which is from an obscure 1571 citation in the OED). Grant Barrett spends his life immersed in colloquial language and slang, since his day job is as the project editor for Oxford's Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a work that everybody with an interest in such matters is waiting for with ill-disguised impatience. This book, however, is firmly an extramural activity, though his professional background results in a work created on the best principles of historical lexicography, with terms carefully researched and every entry defined, discussed and illustrated by a set of citations. Despite the modern means of identifying and researching the words in this book, the most obvious feature is how many of them predate the Net. Some of the terms have been around for long enough that they could easily already be in standard works on informal English: "armchair pilot", an aviation enthusiast, recorded from 1934; "cat face", an irregular appearance on fruit or vegetables, which dates from 1890; "heartsink", a feeling of disappointment or dismay, from 1937. Some have indeed already appeared in dictionaries, such as "ASBO" ("Anti-Social Behaviour Order"), a British term from 1997; "colourway", any of a range of combinations of colours in which a style or design is available; "Ediacaran", a Precambrian period; and "molecular gastronomy", the application of science to food choices and preparation. Others are modifications of terms that are well known, such as "to blue-sky", to propose ideas that are as yet unfeasible, which even in its verb form predates the Net. But the group that is largest and most interesting is that of colloquial or slang terms that rarely appear in mainstream works. "Bustdown", for example, a Chicago Black-English term for a woman who is promiscuous or undesirable; "merk", to attack, overcome or defeat somebody or something, a hip-hop term recorded from 1999; "otherkin", people who believe themselves to be something other than human; "skidiot", an unsophisticated computer hacker; "temp", a slang abbreviation for "interpreter"; "wad", to crash, probably a motorcycle, perhaps because that's what the result looks like; the TV series The West Wing accustomed us to "POTUS" ("President Of The United States") but Barrett includes the more recent "TMPMITW" ("The Most Powerful Man In the World"). Terms come from every national variety of English: "half-past-six" is from Singapore and means something bad or shoddy; "gronk", as a general derogatory term for a man, is Australian; "gbege", for an act of vengeful violence, is from Nigeria; "freeco", a cost-free service, item or performance, is West Indian; "vernac", a casual abbreviation of "vernacular", is a derogatory Indian term meaning culturally backwards or unfashionable; "trapo", from the Tagalog word for a dirty rag, in turn from Spanish, is a Philippines term for a corrupt politician. Others come from creative meetings of English and another language, such as Spanglish, Hinglish, or the many other "glishes", as he calls them: "goonda tax", protection money or a bribe, is from Pakistan, with "goonda" being Hindi or Urdu for a ruffian; "freeter" for a temporary worker or freelance is known in German, Japanese and Korean and is variously identified as a blend of "free" with "Arbeit", German for work, or Japanese "arubaito", part-time or casual work. Some are foreign terms that have been included because they have appeared in English, such as the Austrian "Verwaltungsvereinfachungsmassnahmen", a drive against bureaucracy and bureaucratic jargon. >From a British perspective, I must query "handbags at ten paces", a British term for a verbal spat, often in sports - it may have had its origin in a Monty Python sketch, but its earliest datings shows it was influenced by Margaret Thatcher's time as prime minister, in which she was said to keep order among her ministers by hitting them with her handbag; "frogspawn", a schoolboy's term for tapioca, is surely a lot older than the first citation from 1991 would suggest, as I can remember it from my childhood. But these are minor quibbles. If you want to find out more about the way English is being creatively used worldwide, then this is the book for you. Recommended. [Grant Barrett, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, A Crunk Omnibus for Trillionaires and Bampots for the Ecozoic Age, published by McGraw Hill in May 2006; paperback, pp412; ISBN 0071458042; publisher's price US$14.95.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: GBP7.19 http://quinion.com?S94K Amazon USA: US$10.17 http://quinion.com?S37K Amazon Canada: CDN$15.16 http://quinion.com?S52K Amazon Germany: EUR13,50 http://quinion.com?S46K [Please use these links to buy. More information below.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- The People, a British Sunday newspaper known for its exposés, ran a story two weekends ago under the headline "Disgraceful security lapses at Prince William's military academy are today exposed by The People". An appeal appeared at the bottom: "Do you know of a sandal? Call our newsdesk ..." I know of two, size nine, that may be disreputable enough for them. Campbell Downie e-mailed from South Africa: "Our municipal public library has been extended and modernised recently, aided by a grant from the Carnegie Foundation. The official opening is to take place today, and the following notice appeared in the newspaper, 'The library will be closed today due to the opening'." The caption under a photograph in The Independent of Northumberland County, Ontario read: "Seven students were part of a drum quartet at Spring Valley's talent show this month." Denis Barter felt this to be seriously numerically challenged. "How many would be needed to form an octet?" he wonders. And anyway there are actually nine people in the picture. Bitter complaints are raging about leakage from the pipes of Thames Water, the water company that supplies London. The Notes & Queries column of the Guardian was asked where all the lost water went. One reply began "The aquifers for London are the North and South Downs, which are made of chalk and continue under London where they are capped by a thick bed of London clay laid down by Thames Water." Janet Swisher was listening to a report on National Public Radio. "It probably made better sense when the reporter wrote it out with parentheses, she says, "but it gave me a giggle when I heard it read on the radio." It concerned the launch of the space shuttle Discovery: "The astronauts will resupply the space station and do some experiments. Some fruit flies are hitching a ride. They'll take a couple of walks in space to inspect the shuttle and do some chores." A. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments on newsletter content: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org Questions for the Q&A section: wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org Problems with subscriptions: wordssubs at worldwidewords.org B. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscription centre: http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/ Recent back issues: http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- Please order goods from Amazon, which gets World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you: Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX Donations may be made through PayPal: http://quinion.com?PP ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2006. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Jul 14 13:47:44 2006 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 18:47:44 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 15 Jul 06 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 496 Saturday 15 July 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to at least 40,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/xdef.htm Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Passive survivability. 3. Weird Words: Sponging-house. 4. Recently noted. 5. Q&A: Believe you me. 6. Sic! A. E-mail contact addresses. B. Subscription information. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- OOPS In my review of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English last week, a typing error turned the abbreviation for "interpreter" into "temp" rather than the correct "terp". 2. Turns of Phrase: Passive survivability ------------------------------------------------------------------- This term has come to the fore in the USA and elsewhere in recent months largely as a result of hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and the Gulf coast last August. The concept is that buildings should be designed so that they can survive the loss of essential services - electricity, piped water, sewerage - in the event of a natural disaster. It grew out of a post-hurricane reconstruction conference held in Atlanta in November 2005. This led to a set of proposals with the title "The New Orleans Principles". One of these states, "Provide for passive survivability: Homes, schools, public buildings, and neighborhoods should be designed and built or rebuilt to serve as livable refuges in the event of crisis or breakdown of energy, water, and sewer systems". Techniques include many that are also advocated by green campaigners: use natural ventilation, heavily insulate buildings against heat loss, use natural daylight, collect and store rainwater, install solar electricity generation, and so on. Advocates point to the risk of terrorism that might lead to similar losses of public services. They also argue that possible shortages of fuel in decades to come will require buildings to use much less energy than they do now. * Guardian, 20 Jun. 2006: There is now talk among some enlightened architects of incorporating "passive survivability" into their designs - the ability of a building to operate on its own should systems such as water and electricity ever fail by, for example, using better "thermal envelopes", natural daylighting and rainwater storage. * HPAC Engineering, Jan. 2006: Passive-survivability measures are so important that it may make sense to incorporate them into building codes. Most, but not all, passive-survivability features will add some cost to a building, so the impact on affordability needs to be considered if such measures are to be required by code. 3. Weird Words: Sponging-house ------------------------------------------------------------------- A one-time place of temporary confinement for debtors. Here's how it used to work: you got into debt, your creditor laid a complaint with the sheriff, the sheriff sent his bailiffs, and you were taken to the local sponging-house. This wasn't a prison, not as such, but a private house, often the bailiff's own home. You were held there temporarily in the hope that you could make some arrangement with your creditors. Anthony Trollope set out the system in his novel The Three Clerks of 1857: He was taken to the sponging-house, and it was there imparted to him that he had better send for two things - first of all for money, which was by far the more desirable of the two; and secondly, for bail, which even if forthcoming was represented as being at best but a dubious advantage. If you couldn't sort matters out quickly you were then brought up in court and sent to a debtor's prison. How you were ever expected to pay off your debts while incarcerated is hard to imagine, but that was the system. Sponging-houses had a terrible reputation, which was made clear in a description by Montagu Williams, a London lawyer who surely knew them well, in his Down East and Up West of 1894: Ah, my dear fellow, you´ve never seen a sponging-house! Ye gods - what a place! I had an apartment they were pleased to call a bedroom to myself certainly, but if I wanted to breathe the air I had to do so in a cage in the back garden - iron bars all round, and about the size of one of the beast receptacles at the Zoo. For this luxury I had to pay two guineas a day. A bottle of sherry cost a guinea, a bottle of Bass half-a-crown, and food was upon the same sort of economical tariff. The idea of the sponging-house was based on that of the sponge that gave it its name, which readily gives up its contents on being squeezed. The sponging-house was the place where a debtor had any available cash squeezed out of him, partly to the creditor's benefit, but also to that to the bailiff who ran it. 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- RHUBARB ORCHARD I'm not sure whether this is a Sic! item or a note flagging an unusual usage. Andrew Turner was reading the label on a jar of Tesco's Finest Champagne Rhubarb Yogurt. It was described as "Sweet and tender champagne rhubarb from selected fruit orchards blended with cream and West Country milk." Yummy. I'd never speak of a "rhubarb orchard" but - as he points out - Google has a couple of examples. So what do you call a rhubarb growing ground if you don't call it an orchard? A rhubarb field, presumably? WYATTING A newish phenomenon in British pubs is the device dubbed the infinite jukebox, one connected to the Internet and so capable of playing tens of thousands of tracks. Some pranksters subvert the machines by choosing avant-garde tracks to disrupt the conviviality and stop others from playing the same pop tracks over and over. The favourite tracks among the exponents of this cruel cultural warfare include Brian Eno's ambient music Thursday Afternoon, anything by Philip Glass, and Robert Wyatt's Dondestan, hence the name. The idea was mentioned in a New York Times article by Wendy McClure and then picked up by blogger Simon Reynolds and by others, though the name is said to have been coined by schoolteacher Carl Neville of South London, who described it as "the cowardly white muso boys anonymous attempt at provocation and civil disobedience". 5. Q&A: Believe you me ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Why do people use the phrase "believe you me", when they want to emphasise a point or opinion? I really don't think it makes any sense; possibly it would be better if it were "believe me you", but even that is poor English. [Andrew Gerrie] A. It's a puzzling way of speaking because we don't use English in that way any more. My knowledge of formal grammar being more than a bit shaky, I went for information to Professor Geoffrey Pullum, co- author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, the 1800- page volume that is the standard work. Because English doesn't add endings to words to show how they are being used in a sentence, word order is crucially important. Today, virtually all sentences that make a statement have to be put in the order subject-verb-object (SVO): "The man pats the dog". That makes clear who is doing what to whom. "The dog pats the man" has a quite different sense. At one time, however, English used to allow verb-subject-object (VSO) in certain situations, mainly imperatives. The 1611 King James version of the Bible has many examples: "And he went out to meet Asa, and said unto him, Hear ye me"; "Ask me of things to come concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye me"; "For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live"; and "Lay ye them in two heaps at the entering in of the gate until the morning." And here's G Herbert Temple in 1633: "Come ye hither all, whom wine Doth define" and another writer in 1695: "Mark ye me; that's holy stuffe". These days, we only see them in old writings or fossil expressions like: Mind you, she's very intelligent. This was the fifth time, mark you. Oh, come ye back... In every case, "you" or "ye" is the subject, but it comes after the verb it's attached to. "Believe you me" belongs in this set. It seems odd to us today because English language rules forbid us to construct such expressions. We can't naturally say "Take you care of yourself, now!" for example. But, having said all that, an oddity is that "believe you me" is relatively modern. The Oxford English Dictionary's first example is from 1926. I've only been able to improve on that by six years - it turns up in the USA in 1919 as the title of a novel by Nina Wilcox Putnam. For further help here, I turned to Benjamin Zimmer, at the University of Pennsylvania, an ace at researching historical word usage. He tells me that there are earlier examples, but that nearly all of them are in verse, where the phrasing is useful for scansion. He has been able to find only three examples in prose from the nineteenth century. What seems to have happened is that a once-standard phrase that had been lurking in the language for generations suddenly became much more popular and widespread around the 1920s. What we have here is a revitalised fossil, a semi-invented anachronism. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Greg Payne spotted a sign on the highway in Norwalk, Connecticut: "Superman Returns Toys." He found himself asking, "Why, was he dissatisfied with them?" Amazon.co.uk's review of the Steve Coogan movie Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story included this, to the surprise of Paul Hassett: "Nor is the versatile filmmaker a stranger to the post-modern romp, like 24 Hour Party People. In that peon to Manchester's music scene, Steve Coogan was Factory honcho Tony Wilson." "I always knew that moving up in a corporation was hard work," Reg Brehaut e-mailed, "but now it has been documented: an editorial in Computerworld (Vol 22, No. 12) refers to their current Salary Survey results, in which 'Every wrung of the corporate ladder is represented.'" Susan Gable found a comment in the Mashpee Enterprise, a newspaper based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, that may arouse an image you'd prefer to avoid at the breakfast table: "Coyotes will gladly go for food left in unsecured garbage cans and household pets." Our old favourite the misplaced modifier has turned up again, this time in the Netscape News Anchor Commentary last Monday about that building that collapsed in Manhattan: "There was one person inside the building at the time of the explosion, a doctor of Emergency Medicine. After spending about 90 minutes trapped in the rubble, firefighters pulled the doctor to safety." You've got to admire those firefighters; even being buried doesn't stop 'em. And finally, a couple of headlines that might be errors or could be quiet jokes by bored sub-editors. Michael Keating found this one on the normally extremely sober news at nature.com site: "Bruno the bear: released to the Italian Alps, meets grizzly end in Germany." And a headline from last Monday's Guardian: "Rare flower found on site is a plant, says developer." [A word of explanation is perhaps needed here: a California developer claims a rare protected plant called the Sebastopol meadowfoam found on a site he is about to develop was transplanted there by opponents in order to stop him. The dispute has become known as Foamgate.] A. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments on newsletter content: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org Questions for the Q&A section: wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org Problems with subscriptions: wordssubs at worldwidewords.org B. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscription centre: http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/ Recent back issues: http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- Please order goods from Amazon, which gets World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you: Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX Donations may be made through PayPal: http://quinion.com?PP ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2006. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Jul 21 13:10:07 2006 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 18:10:07 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 22 Jul 06 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 497 Saturday 22 July 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/zevs.htm Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Weird Words: POTUS. 2. Recently noted. 3. It was a dark and stormy night. 4. Q&A: Hooker. 5. Sic! A. E-mail contact addresses. B. Subscription information. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Weird Words: POTUS ------------------------------------------------------------------- President of the United States. The acronym has been common among Washington insiders for several decades. It has spread far wider in recent years, even outside the US, as a result in part of TV programmes like The West Wing. It has to be said it's a pretty obvious abbreviation, one that must have occurred to many people down the years. But we're sure its genesis lies with Mr Walter P Phillips, at the time a telegrapher for the United Press Association but who later became the president of the Columbia Gramophone Company. Mr Phillips created his code in 1879 to streamline the reporting of court proceedings. It was used for many decades by news agencies and newspaper offices and would have been known to everyone dealing with copy coming in on the wire. It was a shorthand, in which those expressions most likely to appear in news reports were abbreviated: "fapib" meant "filed a petition in bankruptcy"; "ckx", "committed suicide"; "utaf", "under the auspices of the". The names of people in the news were frequently reduced to initials, as in this example that appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1910: "T trl o HKT ft mu o SW on Mu roof garden, nw in pg ...", which the transcriber would at once have rendered as "The trial of Harry K Thaw for the murder of Stanford White on the Madison Square Roof Garden, now in progress ..." The numerical code "73" was short for "best regards"; "30" meant "end of message" and is still used by some reporters to mark the end of stories. A writer in the Daily Northwestern of Wisconsin said this about the code in 1921: One or more letters may mean one word, or may mean a group of words. For instance, a dot, dash and a dot, or the letter f, means "of the;" potus, "president of the United States", xn, "constitution", and hundreds of others, which, when sent at a high rate of speed, keep an operator's attention constantly riveted on every dot and dash in order that he may transcribe the conglomeration, on a typewriter, into reading matter such as appears in the daily newspapers. "POTUS" appeared in every edition and is first recorded in print in the Fort Wayne News of Indiana on 25 February 1903: "This is the way a message is sent on the wire: T potus, ixs, wi km to Kevy ... This jargon of letters conveys the following information: The president of the United States, it is said, will communicate to King Edward VII ..." "SCOTUS", Supreme Court of the United States, was also in the code. ("FLOTUS", for First Lady of the United States, is much more recent and less common.) As a result of the Phillips code, both acronyms can lay claim to being the earliest known, beating "AWOL", Absent Without Leave, which newspaper reports show was being said as a pronounceable word around 1918. 2. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- NON-EVOLVED GRANDMOTHER This splendid bit of sociological jargon turned up in the Jamaica Gleaner last week. It doesn't meant that your elderly maternal relative is still swinging from the trees. It refers to a situation in which she is still actively involved in caring for children in her later years. The theory is this stops her moving on to her traditional role as grandmother, so leading to a confusion of roles in the household. The term was created by a sociologist named F Colon in 1980. VISHING More Internet-related slang. This one is a variation on phishing - itself a respelling of "fishing" - which refers to the obtaining of passwords and other personal information by a ruse. Vishers target individuals by telephoning them, taking advantage of the low costs of calls made via the Net using a technique called Voice-over-IP or VoIP (hence "vishing": "VoIP" + "phishing"). A recorded message asks the victim to ring their credit-card provider to verify account information. When he or she does so and enters a credit-card number to authenticate themselves, the visher captures the number and uses it to make fraudulent purchases. OCPO The British government does love acronyms. I've mentioned previously the controversial ASBOs, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. Now the proposal has appeared for a sort of super-ASBO to target those involved in organised crime, especially drug and people trafficking and money-laundering. Because hard evidence is hard to come by, the idea is to create a court-imposed civil order that requires a lower standard of proof than the "beyond reasonable doubt" of the criminal law. The acronym is short for Organised Crime Prevention Order. 3. It was a dark and stormy night ------------------------------------------------------------------- I've always been ambivalent about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for Bad Writing. He wasn't that awful a writer and doesn't deserve such mockery. Admittedly, he wrote floridly, as did many authors of the nineteenth century, but we don't point the finger of accusation at Dickens, whose pages are often at least as enpurpled. To mock decidedly bad writing, it should be renamed the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code Bad Fiction Contest. Trying to outdo him really would be a challenge. But the San Jose State University's annual event throws up some intriguing attempts to deliberately write badly. This year's winner - announced last week - was Jim Guigli of California, who submitted this: "Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean." Roll over, Raymond Chandler. The runner-up, it may be argued, doesn't conform to the rules of the contest, since it is a parody, not an attempt to write badly, but it may be particularly appreciated in this forum. It was penned by Stuart Vasepuru of Edinburgh: "'I know what you're thinking, punk,' hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, 'you're thinking, "Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?" - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel loquacious?" - well do you, punk?'" 4. Q&A: Hooker ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. In a biography of General U S Grant, there was mention of a charismatic American Civil War general called 'Fighting Joe' Hooker, and his female camp followers, known as Hooker's women, or Hookers, for short. Do you know, is this the origin of the word 'Hooker' for a lady of negotiable affections, or is it folk etymology? [Vince Baughan, UK] A. This is a persistent story in the USA, but it's untrue. General Hooker was a real person, though one not universally popular - one biographer calls him "a conniver and carouser" - because he was quarrelsome, deeply disrespectful of his superiors, a womaniser, a drunkard, and (worst of all) an unsuccessful soldier. Hooker's headquarters were described as a combination of bar and brothel into which no decent woman could go. It is also said that his men were an undisciplined lot who often frequented prostitutes (a red-light area of Washington is supposed to have briefly been called "Hooker's division" for this reason). So it's not surprising that "hooker" is often assumed to derive from his short-lived command. However, there's a fatal flaw: the word is recorded several times before the Civil War. It's listed in the second edition of John Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms of 1859 and another example is known from North Carolina in 1845. An even earlier instance was turned up by George Thompson of New York University in The New York Transcript of 25 September 1835, which contains a whimsical report of a police court hearing in which a woman of no reputation at all is called a hooker because she "hangs around the hook". This obscure reference is to Corlear's Hook, an area of New York. Bartlett suggests the same origin for the term, based on "the number of houses of ill-fame frequented by sailors" in the area. Though this origin sounds plausible, it may well be that John Bartlett and others who made this connection were falling victim to an earlier version of folk etymology. There is some evidence to suggest that it really comes from a much older British low slang term for a specialist thief who snatches items using a hook. In 1592, in a book on low-life called The Art of Conny Catching ("conny" or "cony", the old word for a rabbit, was then a cant term for a mark or sucker), Robert Greene says that such thieves, "pull out of a window any loose linen cloth, apparel, or else any other household stuff". The implication is that the hooker catches her clients by similar, albeit less tangible, methods. [A version of this piece appears in my book, Port Out, Starboard Home (Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds in the US), which is available in good bookshops everywhere. See http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm .] 5. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- "An item in this evening's BBC local news 'South Today'", e-mailed Peter Zivanovic, "reported the visit by their Colonel in Chief, the Duke of Gloucester, to the Hampshire base of the RAMC. Members of the regiment were interviewed and the caption showing their names also showed their unit as the "Royal Army Medical Core". Perhaps they felt that Corps(e) would be far too defeatist as a name for a medical unit?" Not entirely incidentally, the article I mentioned here two weeks ago about a seven-member drum quartet resulted in several messages pointing out that it also referred to a "bugle core". This turns out to be extremely common online but also appears from time to time in newspapers. It may one day even become the usual spelling. Yet another recipe for eternal life was found on MSNBC by Jennifer Painter: "The study of 302 people aged 70 to 82 found those who engaged in more physical activity - not necessarily formal exercise - were much less likely to die than those who did not move as much." Riva Berleant reports that in the summer of 2004 she came across a notice posted on a commercial fishing dock in Stonington, Maine: "TWO HOUR BIRTHING LIMIT Violators may be towed at owners expense! All birthing shall be at your own risk." She wonders if it's still there. A sign outside a DIY store in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, caught Kenneth Peterson's eye last weekend (and his camera's: a photograph is included in the online version of this newsletter): "Confused In Home Consults Available". Some punctuation would have helped. "You may be amused," says Louis McMeeken, "by this item from The Independent on 15th July: "A postman was jailed for nine months yesterday after police found more than 34,000 items of unopened mail at his home. Sheffield Crown Court heard that when police turned up at 49-year-old Roger Parkinson's home, near Barnsley, he said: 'I'm glad in a way. It needs sorting.'" A. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments on newsletter content: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org Questions for the Q&A section: wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org Problems with subscriptions: wordssubs at worldwidewords.org B. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscription centre: http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/ Recent back issues: http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- Please order goods from Amazon, which gets World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you: Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX Donations may be made through PayPal: http://quinion.com?PP ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2006. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice immediately above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Jul 28 15:27:27 2006 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 20:27:27 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 29 Jul 06 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 498 Saturday 29 July 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/fjrd.htm Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Menaissance. 3. Weird Words: Epeolatry. 4. Recently noted. 5. Q&A: Banter. 6. Sic! A. E-mail contact addresses. B. Subscription information. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- CORRECTION In the piece on POTUS last week, I stated that Walter Phillips had been president of the Columbia Gramophone Company. As John Winn noted, the firm was the Columbia Graphophone Company (The Gramophone Company, better known by its slogan His Master's Voice, had grabbed the word "gramophone".) ENPURPLED Lots of people queried this, which appeared in the piece on the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, because they couldn't find it in their dictionaries. I have to confess I'd made it up in the heat of composition, being in need of a word to communicate the idea of excessively flowery language. Roger Cooper pointed out that English doesn't like "enp-" and very few words begin with it. One British example is "enprint" for a standard-sized photo, though that's an invented term that really ought to be hyphenated, and there's also the aviation term "enplane" for getting passengers on board. But - and this is why it may be worth all this space - "enpurpled" feels right to me while the alternative given in the bigger dictionaries, "empurpled", doesn't. That this isn't solely an idiosyncrasy is due to the Daily Mail of 13 June 2003: "Lord Irvine of Lairg brought to the historic House of Lords a whole new meaning to our concept of enpurpled majesty", as well as many historical examples. Now having started this hare running, I mean to try to catch it and store it between the pages of the OED. 2. Turns of Phrase: Menaissance ------------------------------------------------------------------- Farewell metrosexuals, with your gelled hair, moisturised skin and impeccable clothing. Hello real men: macho, carnivorous, hanging- out-with-your-mates, beer-swilling, sexist. It's the menaissance. It's the backlash. American newspapers, quick to spot a trendette, have pounced on a series of recent US television advertisements that pander to one's inner caveman, and on books like The Alphabet of Manliness by George Ouzounian (alias Maddox), I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell by Tucker Max, and Real Men Don't Apologize by Jim Belushi. In various ways, all preach a return to a pre-modernist old-style masculinity. Another term for the unreconstructed (or reconstituted) male that pops up in some articles is "retrosexual". Thoughtful commentators point to the male sex's struggle to adjust to a world of sexual equality as the main driver for the backlash. Professor Harvey Mansfield's recent book Manliness argues that men need to recapture some virtues of manliness - such as decisiveness and assertiveness - and not be afraid to display them. * Daily Mail, 12 Jul. 2006: Of course, advocates of the Menaissance may argue that we shouldn't be too concerned about what kind of a man women want these days. Isn't that, they would say, the way we arrived at simpering metrosexuals desperate to please their other halves? * Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 Apr. 2006: A woman friend tells me there's a desperate need for a "menaissance." Many women are weary of sensitive emo-boys and metrosexuals. 3. Weird Words: Epeolatry ------------------------------------------------------------------- The worship of words. Though an appropriate term for this forum, it hasn't achieved any great success in the world at large. It's not even especially old, since its first known user, and presumably its creator, was Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his Professor at the Breakfast Table of 1860: "Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified." It derives from Greek "epeos", a word, plus the "-latry" ending from Greek "latreia", worship, that turns up also in words such as "idolatry". For some reason, "epeos" lost out in the Greek-roots popularity stakes to "logos". However, "epic" is from the same source, an "epoist" is a writer of epic poetry, and "cacoepy" means faulty pronunciation (a word that's suitably easy to say wrongly: it's CACO-ipi). Its appearances are so few that the tag "obscure" attached to it in some dictionaries is all too apt. However, I did find it in a work called Anurada Negotiates Our Wobbly Planet, a self-published title of 2006 by Roger Day: "I read my dictionary for a few more minutes, until tiredness eventually brought my epeolatry to an end for the day." 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- HOTITUDINAL SKINTERNS The Washington Times told the story on 5 July: "Tank tops, flip-flops, bare flesh and cleavage. It's the unofficial uniform of the summer interns, gaggles of college-age women and recent graduates who invade buttoned-down conservative Washington every summer, bringing a large dose of hotitude to offices from Capitol Hill to K Street." The piece explained that the nickname for these barely dressed incomers is "skinterns". DEMOCRAZY Stephen Colbert used this in his US TV show The Colbert Report this week in reference to events in the Middle East. Unlike his "truthiness" last year, which was selected as Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, this one isn't original to him, despite at least one commentator's belief that it is. For starters, a film of 2005 and the 2003 album by Damon Albarn both have that title. The earliest print example I've so far found is in the title of an article in the National Review of 8 January 1992, which began "At the Japanese war trials of 1946, the defunct empire's former propaganda minister, Shumei Okawa, inadvertently made a good pun. Leaping to his feet, he screamed in his uncertain English: 'I hate United States! It is democrazy!'" But the current winner is the Smith's album of 1991, so titled. ENVELOPMENTAL JOURNALISM This appeared in a piece in a Philippines newspaper last week and was new to me, though it turns out to have long been known in that country and elsewhere. It refers to giving journalists envelopes containing money - bribery, in other words - to put a favourable gloss on reporting a story. 5. Q&A: Banter ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. What is the origin of the word "banter"? [Donald Hopkins] A. Presumably you would prefer not to settle for "origin unknown"? It makes a short answer and is accurate, but is hardly satisfying. There is a story behind it, though, that may be worth the telling. The word began as low slang around the last third of the seventeenth century. The verb came first, then the noun. When it first appeared, it referred to exchanges that were more aggressive and vicious than the mild, playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks, usually preceded in descriptions by "good-natured", that it became later. It variously meant then to delude or bamboozle somebody, to hold them up to ridicule and to give them a roasting, in a term of the day we still possess. You can see that in the first appearance of the verb in Madam Fickle, a play dated 1676 by Thomas D'Urfey, in which Zechiel cries to his brother: "Banter him, banter him, Toby. 'Tis a conceited old Scarab, and will yield us excellent sport - go play upon him a little - exercise thy Wit." A letter of 1723 equated banter with Billingsgate, the foul and vituperative language of the porters at the London fish market of that name. "Banter" became notorious because of a spirited attack on it by Jonathan Swift in a famous article he wrote for The Tatler in 1710. In it he attacked what he called "the continual corruption of our English tongue": The third refinement observable in the letter I send you, consists in the choice of certain words invented by some "pretty fellows"; such as "banter", "bamboozle", "country put", and "kidney", as it is there applied; some of which are now struggling for the vogue, and others are in possession of it. I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of "mobb" and "banter", but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me. The same year he wrote of the word in his Apology to The Tale of a Tub ("apology" meaning a formal defence of the work), that "This polite word of theirs was first borrowed from the bullies in White- Friars, then fell among the footmen, and at last retired to the pedants; by whom it is applied as properly to the productions of wit, as if I should apply it to Sir Isaac Newton's mathematics." Note that nobody has anything to say about where those bullies took it from. That is lost in the mists of ancient linguistic invention. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Alvin Rymsha e-mailed from the US Virgin Islands with news of an article in the Boston Magazine for July 2006: "Barnacle Billy's is an Ogunquit institution. And so is its owner Billy Tower, who's been catching, cooking and feeding rich, famous and dedicated lobster-lovers for 45 years." Ummmm! Those crusty New Englanders! John Carrick reports: "In real-estate advertisements in Sydney and elsewhere in Australia, a desirable property is increasingly being called 'sort-after', although not always with the luxury of a linking hyphen. This practice seems to be spreading, presumably through online advertising, where agents see each other's ads and presumably copy this especially keen usage from each other." Speaking of Australia ... while researching a possible holiday in outback New South Wales, Elizabeth Chow went to the National Parks Web site. One of the tours looked interesting: "Tours leave from the Historic Woolshed. Participating vehicles need to be high clearance, a hat, cup, drink, sturdy shoes & sunscreen." The 21 July issue of the Saanich News, the local paper of both Don Wilkes and Peter Weinrich, included a picture caption: "Jagged glass marks the holes left by a trio of builders an angry man tossed through the windows of the CBC's Pandora Avenue studios Tuesday." Fortunately the article makes it clear that "boulders" were meant, and not that the man was offended by the creators of the building. Judith Rascoe tells me that the San Rafael greenmarket, a Sunday rendezvous in Marin County, California, is known for its organic produce and 'artisanal' food products competing for the foodies' dollars. For years it's been the place to buy heirloom tomatoes, those special varieties revived by small-scale market gardeners. But maybe they're demodé these days, she says, since last Sunday she encountered a stall featuring bins of "air loom tomatoes." >From the Guardian of 20 July: "The less ignorant will be aware that Joseph Pilates, a German of Greek descent, first developed his system of 'contrology' in order to rehabilitate victims of the 1918 flu pandemic while he was interred in the Isle of Man during the first world war." That would have been a neat trick, but then he had merely been interned, not interred. A. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- If you want to respond to something in a newsletter, ask a question for the Q&A section, or otherwise contact Michael Quinion, please send it to one of the following addresses: * Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org * Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead) * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org Please ask before sending attachments with messages. B. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm . You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a full list of commands, send a message containing the following two lines to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS END The "END" ensures that the list server doesn't get confused by your signature or other text added to the outgoing message. This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. The address is http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ This page also lists back issues of the online formatted version (see the top of this newsletter for the location of the current issue). C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words newsletter and Web site are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, here are some ways to do so. If you order any goods from any of these online stores (not just new books), you can use one of these links, which gets World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you: Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX If you would like to contribute a sum to the upkeep of World Wide Words through PayPal, enter this link into your browser: http://quinion.com?PP You could also buy one of my books, of course. See http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm and http://www.worldwidewords.org/ologies.htm . ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2006. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice immediately above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Jul 7 16:25:16 2006 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2006 17:25:16 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 07 Jul 06 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 495 Saturday 8 July 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to at least 40,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/jvdy.htm Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Net neutrality. 3. Weird Words: Sabrage. 4. Recently noted. 5. Book Review: The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. 6. Sic! A. E-mail contact addresses. B. Subscription information. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- OVER TO YOU World Wide Words subscribers are a knowledgeable lot. Within an hour of the newsletter going out last Saturday, a reply to Martin Rose's query about the name of the traditional building material used around Brighton came in from Pam Davies. The name is "bungaroosh", also spelled "bungeroosh". It was basically lime mortar, bulked out with anything else that was handy, like bricks, flints, bits of wood and lumps of chalk. Rob Fraser, at the time the Conservation Officer of Brighton Borough Council, said in an interesting and detailed article at http://quinion.com?BUNG (thanks to Terence Sims and others for the link), that the material is a horror for those looking after old buildings: "Bungaroosh has to be a little damp. Too dry and the now leached mortar crumbles, too wet and it becomes mobile ... You could probably demolish a third of Brighton with a well-aimed hose." Its origin is obscure, though it has been suggested that it's from "bung" because anything handy was bunged in with the lime mortar. The ending sounds vaguely French. But these are just guesses - we don't really have a clue. 2. Turns of Phrase: Net neutrality ------------------------------------------------------------------- Debates in the US Congress have recently brought this term to wide public attention inside and outside the US. The questions sound simple: should the Internet remain equally accessible to everyone, or should a two-tier system be created that requires companies who pay more or who use more of the Net's capacity to pay a greater share of the cost? And should those who want a faster and higher quality service be asked to pay more for it? The telecommunications companies (the telcos) argue that firms such as Google, eBay and Amazon, and online telephone companies like Skype, have built highly profitable businesses on the Net without contributing their fair share of the cost of running it. Providers of bandwidth-hungry technologies like video-on-demand should pay a higher fee to recognise the risk that they will clog the network. The decision by Channel Four, a British network, to stream many of its broadcasts online at the same time as they are transmitted conventionally is an example of what they're worried about. Earlier this year AOL and Yahoo! announced they were introducing a two-tier e-mail system, in which senders of messages who paid a fee would receive faster service, bypassing the spam filters and other checks that slow transmission. Opponents argue that a dual-pricing system would remove the key characteristic of the Net - that it is equally accessible to all comers. They point out that this neutrality is the reason why it has grown so spectacularly. They are afraid that the scheme would hand power to big businesses at the cost of the individuals and small groups who are its current main users. It might Balkanise the Internet into fiefdoms that would be controlled by individual telcos and ISPs, a possibility which Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has described as an Internet "dark age". The earliest example of the term I can find is in the title of a conference held in Washington in June 2003. A supporter of net neutrality is a "net neutralist". * The Motley Fool, 30 Jun. 2006: The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that idea is often borne out by overzealous regulation, which often has entirely unexpected side effects. Despite net neutrality's proponents' claims, such regulation might actually mean that somewhere down the line, all of us will be stuck on a dirt road instead of an information superhighway. * New Scientist, 24 Jun. 2006: Net neutralists also fear that telcos will use the new freedom to block content that interferes with their own business interests. Telcos could do this by charging extortionately high rates to competitors, slowing down their bits so that their applications do not work well or simply blocking them outright. 3. Weird Words: Sabrage ------------------------------------------------------------------- The act of opening a bottle with a sabre. Imagine opening a bottle with great ceremony by striking off its neck with one sweep of a blade. Traditionally the bottle contains champagne and the implement is always a sabre. You might think the result will be lots of broken glass and mess, but the skill of sabrage lies in hitting the bottle hard just at the bottom edge of the annulus, the glass ring at the top of the neck. The blow breaks the neck off cleanly, complete with cork. Experts advise you chill the bottle very well and avoid shaking it, remove the foil and wire cage, hold it away from you at an angle of about 40 degrees and strike with the bottle seam uppermost. Do not try this at home, kiddies. In truth, a sabre is optional: almost any hard object with an edge will do it. At least one organisation, the Confr?rie du Sabre d'Or, maintains this tradition at its champagne parties. But otherwise, both it and the term are rarely encountered. Stories hold that it dates from Napoleonic times and was invented by cavalry who found it difficult to open champagne bottles while on horseback, but did have usefully heavy sabres handy. You may celebrate the ingenuity of this story with a small glass of something bubbly if you wish. Its language origin is definitely the French "sabrer", to hit with a sabre. It's a close relative of "sabreur", one who fights with a sabre, best known in "beau sabreur", a fine soldier or dashing adventurer. But the modern French "sabrage" mundanely refers to cleaning vegetable detritus from sheep fleeces. 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- BLAWGING Those who write or read blogs on legal topics will know I'm behind the curve here, since this term for the type has been around for a year or two. The coiner is said to be the California technology lawyer Denise Howell. It was coined by stuffing "law" into the middle of "blog". (I don't know a proper linguistic term for the process, though it might be referred to as infixing.) GLOBALISATION An example of how legends can accrue around a major figure appeared in the Boston Business Journal on 29 June, in an item announcing the death of the marketing guru Professor Theodore Levitt. The article said that "Levitt was the first to use the word 'globalization', in a 1983 article asserting that technology had created worldwide markets for standardized consumer products at lower prices." The article, "The Globalisation of Markets", did appear in that year (Harvard Business Review, 1 May 1983). But he didn't invent the word: the first instance in the Oxford English Dictionary's entry is from the Spectator magazine of October 1962: "Globalisation is, indeed, a staggering concept." However, he did popularise it in the current business sense and he did invent other terms, such as "marketing matrix". GAK-ADDLED This might be of interest to Grant Barrett (see below). It turned up in this spelling in a piece in the Guardian a week ago last Saturday. The more usual British spelling is "gack-addled". The first part may be from the Irish dialect "gack", to talk idly or chatter. As that's one of the symptoms of cocaine usage, the word came to be used in UK drug culture in the 1990s as a slang term for the drug. As long ago as the seventeenth century "Addled" moved from its standard English sense of a bad egg to refer to somebody whose brains were addled (as in "addle-pated" and "addle- head"). The following century it became part of the vast vocabulary of slang terms for somebody who was under the influence of alcohol. Like "gack", it was re-borrowed in the 1990s to refer to somebody whose brain has been scrambled through imbibing drugs. 5. Book Review: The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English ------------------------------------------------------------------- Much has been said and written about the influence of the Internet on our language, a lot of it by commentators who feel that its love of slang and unconventional terms, its informality, and the poor linguistic abilities of many of its users, show English is going to hell in a handbasket. What is less appreciated is that the Net is semi-formalising the way that people have always communicated, so that we're now able to eavesdrop on unedited conversations that show us the way the language operates when it isn't being mediated by editors and professional writers. Conventional lexicographical research is still largely wedded to the printed page. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, does not cite Net sources and so its researchers don't search for new words and revised senses online. Grant Barrett's book is different. He has created it from the Internet using methods impossible before the Net existed, such as the Google Alerts that send you e-mails when some word or phrase you specify turns up in a news report. Once he has identified a term, he hunts for its origin in the many electronic databases available online: as he says, "etymological work has never been easier". Or more fun. The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English is a teasing title (its subtitle even more so: A Crunk Omnibus for Trillionaires and Bampots for the Ecozoic Age), one that you might expect from a lexicographer who has given his Web site the name Double-Tongued Word Wrester (which is from an obscure 1571 citation in the OED). Grant Barrett spends his life immersed in colloquial language and slang, since his day job is as the project editor for Oxford's Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a work that everybody with an interest in such matters is waiting for with ill-disguised impatience. This book, however, is firmly an extramural activity, though his professional background results in a work created on the best principles of historical lexicography, with terms carefully researched and every entry defined, discussed and illustrated by a set of citations. Despite the modern means of identifying and researching the words in this book, the most obvious feature is how many of them predate the Net. Some of the terms have been around for long enough that they could easily already be in standard works on informal English: "armchair pilot", an aviation enthusiast, recorded from 1934; "cat face", an irregular appearance on fruit or vegetables, which dates from 1890; "heartsink", a feeling of disappointment or dismay, from 1937. Some have indeed already appeared in dictionaries, such as "ASBO" ("Anti-Social Behaviour Order"), a British term from 1997; "colourway", any of a range of combinations of colours in which a style or design is available; "Ediacaran", a Precambrian period; and "molecular gastronomy", the application of science to food choices and preparation. Others are modifications of terms that are well known, such as "to blue-sky", to propose ideas that are as yet unfeasible, which even in its verb form predates the Net. But the group that is largest and most interesting is that of colloquial or slang terms that rarely appear in mainstream works. "Bustdown", for example, a Chicago Black-English term for a woman who is promiscuous or undesirable; "merk", to attack, overcome or defeat somebody or something, a hip-hop term recorded from 1999; "otherkin", people who believe themselves to be something other than human; "skidiot", an unsophisticated computer hacker; "temp", a slang abbreviation for "interpreter"; "wad", to crash, probably a motorcycle, perhaps because that's what the result looks like; the TV series The West Wing accustomed us to "POTUS" ("President Of The United States") but Barrett includes the more recent "TMPMITW" ("The Most Powerful Man In the World"). Terms come from every national variety of English: "half-past-six" is from Singapore and means something bad or shoddy; "gronk", as a general derogatory term for a man, is Australian; "gbege", for an act of vengeful violence, is from Nigeria; "freeco", a cost-free service, item or performance, is West Indian; "vernac", a casual abbreviation of "vernacular", is a derogatory Indian term meaning culturally backwards or unfashionable; "trapo", from the Tagalog word for a dirty rag, in turn from Spanish, is a Philippines term for a corrupt politician. Others come from creative meetings of English and another language, such as Spanglish, Hinglish, or the many other "glishes", as he calls them: "goonda tax", protection money or a bribe, is from Pakistan, with "goonda" being Hindi or Urdu for a ruffian; "freeter" for a temporary worker or freelance is known in German, Japanese and Korean and is variously identified as a blend of "free" with "Arbeit", German for work, or Japanese "arubaito", part-time or casual work. Some are foreign terms that have been included because they have appeared in English, such as the Austrian "Verwaltungsvereinfachungsmassnahmen", a drive against bureaucracy and bureaucratic jargon. >From a British perspective, I must query "handbags at ten paces", a British term for a verbal spat, often in sports - it may have had its origin in a Monty Python sketch, but its earliest datings shows it was influenced by Margaret Thatcher's time as prime minister, in which she was said to keep order among her ministers by hitting them with her handbag; "frogspawn", a schoolboy's term for tapioca, is surely a lot older than the first citation from 1991 would suggest, as I can remember it from my childhood. But these are minor quibbles. If you want to find out more about the way English is being creatively used worldwide, then this is the book for you. Recommended. [Grant Barrett, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, A Crunk Omnibus for Trillionaires and Bampots for the Ecozoic Age, published by McGraw Hill in May 2006; paperback, pp412; ISBN 0071458042; publisher's price US$14.95.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: GBP7.19 http://quinion.com?S94K Amazon USA: US$10.17 http://quinion.com?S37K Amazon Canada: CDN$15.16 http://quinion.com?S52K Amazon Germany: EUR13,50 http://quinion.com?S46K [Please use these links to buy. More information below.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- The People, a British Sunday newspaper known for its expos?s, ran a story two weekends ago under the headline "Disgraceful security lapses at Prince William's military academy are today exposed by The People". An appeal appeared at the bottom: "Do you know of a sandal? Call our newsdesk ..." I know of two, size nine, that may be disreputable enough for them. Campbell Downie e-mailed from South Africa: "Our municipal public library has been extended and modernised recently, aided by a grant from the Carnegie Foundation. The official opening is to take place today, and the following notice appeared in the newspaper, 'The library will be closed today due to the opening'." The caption under a photograph in The Independent of Northumberland County, Ontario read: "Seven students were part of a drum quartet at Spring Valley's talent show this month." Denis Barter felt this to be seriously numerically challenged. "How many would be needed to form an octet?" he wonders. And anyway there are actually nine people in the picture. Bitter complaints are raging about leakage from the pipes of Thames Water, the water company that supplies London. The Notes & Queries column of the Guardian was asked where all the lost water went. One reply began "The aquifers for London are the North and South Downs, which are made of chalk and continue under London where they are capped by a thick bed of London clay laid down by Thames Water." Janet Swisher was listening to a report on National Public Radio. "It probably made better sense when the reporter wrote it out with parentheses, she says, "but it gave me a giggle when I heard it read on the radio." It concerned the launch of the space shuttle Discovery: "The astronauts will resupply the space station and do some experiments. Some fruit flies are hitching a ride. They'll take a couple of walks in space to inspect the shuttle and do some chores." A. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments on newsletter content: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org Questions for the Q&A section: wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org Problems with subscriptions: wordssubs at worldwidewords.org B. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscription centre: http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/ Recent back issues: http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- Please order goods from Amazon, which gets World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you: Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX Donations may be made through PayPal: http://quinion.com?PP ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2006. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Jul 14 17:47:44 2006 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 18:47:44 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 15 Jul 06 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 496 Saturday 15 July 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to at least 40,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/xdef.htm Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Passive survivability. 3. Weird Words: Sponging-house. 4. Recently noted. 5. Q&A: Believe you me. 6. Sic! A. E-mail contact addresses. B. Subscription information. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- OOPS In my review of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English last week, a typing error turned the abbreviation for "interpreter" into "temp" rather than the correct "terp". 2. Turns of Phrase: Passive survivability ------------------------------------------------------------------- This term has come to the fore in the USA and elsewhere in recent months largely as a result of hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and the Gulf coast last August. The concept is that buildings should be designed so that they can survive the loss of essential services - electricity, piped water, sewerage - in the event of a natural disaster. It grew out of a post-hurricane reconstruction conference held in Atlanta in November 2005. This led to a set of proposals with the title "The New Orleans Principles". One of these states, "Provide for passive survivability: Homes, schools, public buildings, and neighborhoods should be designed and built or rebuilt to serve as livable refuges in the event of crisis or breakdown of energy, water, and sewer systems". Techniques include many that are also advocated by green campaigners: use natural ventilation, heavily insulate buildings against heat loss, use natural daylight, collect and store rainwater, install solar electricity generation, and so on. Advocates point to the risk of terrorism that might lead to similar losses of public services. They also argue that possible shortages of fuel in decades to come will require buildings to use much less energy than they do now. * Guardian, 20 Jun. 2006: There is now talk among some enlightened architects of incorporating "passive survivability" into their designs - the ability of a building to operate on its own should systems such as water and electricity ever fail by, for example, using better "thermal envelopes", natural daylighting and rainwater storage. * HPAC Engineering, Jan. 2006: Passive-survivability measures are so important that it may make sense to incorporate them into building codes. Most, but not all, passive-survivability features will add some cost to a building, so the impact on affordability needs to be considered if such measures are to be required by code. 3. Weird Words: Sponging-house ------------------------------------------------------------------- A one-time place of temporary confinement for debtors. Here's how it used to work: you got into debt, your creditor laid a complaint with the sheriff, the sheriff sent his bailiffs, and you were taken to the local sponging-house. This wasn't a prison, not as such, but a private house, often the bailiff's own home. You were held there temporarily in the hope that you could make some arrangement with your creditors. Anthony Trollope set out the system in his novel The Three Clerks of 1857: He was taken to the sponging-house, and it was there imparted to him that he had better send for two things - first of all for money, which was by far the more desirable of the two; and secondly, for bail, which even if forthcoming was represented as being at best but a dubious advantage. If you couldn't sort matters out quickly you were then brought up in court and sent to a debtor's prison. How you were ever expected to pay off your debts while incarcerated is hard to imagine, but that was the system. Sponging-houses had a terrible reputation, which was made clear in a description by Montagu Williams, a London lawyer who surely knew them well, in his Down East and Up West of 1894: Ah, my dear fellow, you?ve never seen a sponging-house! Ye gods - what a place! I had an apartment they were pleased to call a bedroom to myself certainly, but if I wanted to breathe the air I had to do so in a cage in the back garden - iron bars all round, and about the size of one of the beast receptacles at the Zoo. For this luxury I had to pay two guineas a day. A bottle of sherry cost a guinea, a bottle of Bass half-a-crown, and food was upon the same sort of economical tariff. The idea of the sponging-house was based on that of the sponge that gave it its name, which readily gives up its contents on being squeezed. The sponging-house was the place where a debtor had any available cash squeezed out of him, partly to the creditor's benefit, but also to that to the bailiff who ran it. 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- RHUBARB ORCHARD I'm not sure whether this is a Sic! item or a note flagging an unusual usage. Andrew Turner was reading the label on a jar of Tesco's Finest Champagne Rhubarb Yogurt. It was described as "Sweet and tender champagne rhubarb from selected fruit orchards blended with cream and West Country milk." Yummy. I'd never speak of a "rhubarb orchard" but - as he points out - Google has a couple of examples. So what do you call a rhubarb growing ground if you don't call it an orchard? A rhubarb field, presumably? WYATTING A newish phenomenon in British pubs is the device dubbed the infinite jukebox, one connected to the Internet and so capable of playing tens of thousands of tracks. Some pranksters subvert the machines by choosing avant-garde tracks to disrupt the conviviality and stop others from playing the same pop tracks over and over. The favourite tracks among the exponents of this cruel cultural warfare include Brian Eno's ambient music Thursday Afternoon, anything by Philip Glass, and Robert Wyatt's Dondestan, hence the name. The idea was mentioned in a New York Times article by Wendy McClure and then picked up by blogger Simon Reynolds and by others, though the name is said to have been coined by schoolteacher Carl Neville of South London, who described it as "the cowardly white muso boys anonymous attempt at provocation and civil disobedience". 5. Q&A: Believe you me ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Why do people use the phrase "believe you me", when they want to emphasise a point or opinion? I really don't think it makes any sense; possibly it would be better if it were "believe me you", but even that is poor English. [Andrew Gerrie] A. It's a puzzling way of speaking because we don't use English in that way any more. My knowledge of formal grammar being more than a bit shaky, I went for information to Professor Geoffrey Pullum, co- author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, the 1800- page volume that is the standard work. Because English doesn't add endings to words to show how they are being used in a sentence, word order is crucially important. Today, virtually all sentences that make a statement have to be put in the order subject-verb-object (SVO): "The man pats the dog". That makes clear who is doing what to whom. "The dog pats the man" has a quite different sense. At one time, however, English used to allow verb-subject-object (VSO) in certain situations, mainly imperatives. The 1611 King James version of the Bible has many examples: "And he went out to meet Asa, and said unto him, Hear ye me"; "Ask me of things to come concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye me"; "For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live"; and "Lay ye them in two heaps at the entering in of the gate until the morning." And here's G Herbert Temple in 1633: "Come ye hither all, whom wine Doth define" and another writer in 1695: "Mark ye me; that's holy stuffe". These days, we only see them in old writings or fossil expressions like: Mind you, she's very intelligent. This was the fifth time, mark you. Oh, come ye back... In every case, "you" or "ye" is the subject, but it comes after the verb it's attached to. "Believe you me" belongs in this set. It seems odd to us today because English language rules forbid us to construct such expressions. We can't naturally say "Take you care of yourself, now!" for example. But, having said all that, an oddity is that "believe you me" is relatively modern. The Oxford English Dictionary's first example is from 1926. I've only been able to improve on that by six years - it turns up in the USA in 1919 as the title of a novel by Nina Wilcox Putnam. For further help here, I turned to Benjamin Zimmer, at the University of Pennsylvania, an ace at researching historical word usage. He tells me that there are earlier examples, but that nearly all of them are in verse, where the phrasing is useful for scansion. He has been able to find only three examples in prose from the nineteenth century. What seems to have happened is that a once-standard phrase that had been lurking in the language for generations suddenly became much more popular and widespread around the 1920s. What we have here is a revitalised fossil, a semi-invented anachronism. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Greg Payne spotted a sign on the highway in Norwalk, Connecticut: "Superman Returns Toys." He found himself asking, "Why, was he dissatisfied with them?" Amazon.co.uk's review of the Steve Coogan movie Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story included this, to the surprise of Paul Hassett: "Nor is the versatile filmmaker a stranger to the post-modern romp, like 24 Hour Party People. In that peon to Manchester's music scene, Steve Coogan was Factory honcho Tony Wilson." "I always knew that moving up in a corporation was hard work," Reg Brehaut e-mailed, "but now it has been documented: an editorial in Computerworld (Vol 22, No. 12) refers to their current Salary Survey results, in which 'Every wrung of the corporate ladder is represented.'" Susan Gable found a comment in the Mashpee Enterprise, a newspaper based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, that may arouse an image you'd prefer to avoid at the breakfast table: "Coyotes will gladly go for food left in unsecured garbage cans and household pets." Our old favourite the misplaced modifier has turned up again, this time in the Netscape News Anchor Commentary last Monday about that building that collapsed in Manhattan: "There was one person inside the building at the time of the explosion, a doctor of Emergency Medicine. After spending about 90 minutes trapped in the rubble, firefighters pulled the doctor to safety." You've got to admire those firefighters; even being buried doesn't stop 'em. And finally, a couple of headlines that might be errors or could be quiet jokes by bored sub-editors. Michael Keating found this one on the normally extremely sober news at nature.com site: "Bruno the bear: released to the Italian Alps, meets grizzly end in Germany." And a headline from last Monday's Guardian: "Rare flower found on site is a plant, says developer." [A word of explanation is perhaps needed here: a California developer claims a rare protected plant called the Sebastopol meadowfoam found on a site he is about to develop was transplanted there by opponents in order to stop him. The dispute has become known as Foamgate.] A. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments on newsletter content: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org Questions for the Q&A section: wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org Problems with subscriptions: wordssubs at worldwidewords.org B. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscription centre: http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/ Recent back issues: http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- Please order goods from Amazon, which gets World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you: Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX Donations may be made through PayPal: http://quinion.com?PP ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2006. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Jul 21 17:10:07 2006 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 18:10:07 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 22 Jul 06 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 497 Saturday 22 July 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/zevs.htm Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Weird Words: POTUS. 2. Recently noted. 3. It was a dark and stormy night. 4. Q&A: Hooker. 5. Sic! A. E-mail contact addresses. B. Subscription information. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Weird Words: POTUS ------------------------------------------------------------------- President of the United States. The acronym has been common among Washington insiders for several decades. It has spread far wider in recent years, even outside the US, as a result in part of TV programmes like The West Wing. It has to be said it's a pretty obvious abbreviation, one that must have occurred to many people down the years. But we're sure its genesis lies with Mr Walter P Phillips, at the time a telegrapher for the United Press Association but who later became the president of the Columbia Gramophone Company. Mr Phillips created his code in 1879 to streamline the reporting of court proceedings. It was used for many decades by news agencies and newspaper offices and would have been known to everyone dealing with copy coming in on the wire. It was a shorthand, in which those expressions most likely to appear in news reports were abbreviated: "fapib" meant "filed a petition in bankruptcy"; "ckx", "committed suicide"; "utaf", "under the auspices of the". The names of people in the news were frequently reduced to initials, as in this example that appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1910: "T trl o HKT ft mu o SW on Mu roof garden, nw in pg ...", which the transcriber would at once have rendered as "The trial of Harry K Thaw for the murder of Stanford White on the Madison Square Roof Garden, now in progress ..." The numerical code "73" was short for "best regards"; "30" meant "end of message" and is still used by some reporters to mark the end of stories. A writer in the Daily Northwestern of Wisconsin said this about the code in 1921: One or more letters may mean one word, or may mean a group of words. For instance, a dot, dash and a dot, or the letter f, means "of the;" potus, "president of the United States", xn, "constitution", and hundreds of others, which, when sent at a high rate of speed, keep an operator's attention constantly riveted on every dot and dash in order that he may transcribe the conglomeration, on a typewriter, into reading matter such as appears in the daily newspapers. "POTUS" appeared in every edition and is first recorded in print in the Fort Wayne News of Indiana on 25 February 1903: "This is the way a message is sent on the wire: T potus, ixs, wi km to Kevy ... This jargon of letters conveys the following information: The president of the United States, it is said, will communicate to King Edward VII ..." "SCOTUS", Supreme Court of the United States, was also in the code. ("FLOTUS", for First Lady of the United States, is much more recent and less common.) As a result of the Phillips code, both acronyms can lay claim to being the earliest known, beating "AWOL", Absent Without Leave, which newspaper reports show was being said as a pronounceable word around 1918. 2. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- NON-EVOLVED GRANDMOTHER This splendid bit of sociological jargon turned up in the Jamaica Gleaner last week. It doesn't meant that your elderly maternal relative is still swinging from the trees. It refers to a situation in which she is still actively involved in caring for children in her later years. The theory is this stops her moving on to her traditional role as grandmother, so leading to a confusion of roles in the household. The term was created by a sociologist named F Colon in 1980. VISHING More Internet-related slang. This one is a variation on phishing - itself a respelling of "fishing" - which refers to the obtaining of passwords and other personal information by a ruse. Vishers target individuals by telephoning them, taking advantage of the low costs of calls made via the Net using a technique called Voice-over-IP or VoIP (hence "vishing": "VoIP" + "phishing"). A recorded message asks the victim to ring their credit-card provider to verify account information. When he or she does so and enters a credit-card number to authenticate themselves, the visher captures the number and uses it to make fraudulent purchases. OCPO The British government does love acronyms. I've mentioned previously the controversial ASBOs, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. Now the proposal has appeared for a sort of super-ASBO to target those involved in organised crime, especially drug and people trafficking and money-laundering. Because hard evidence is hard to come by, the idea is to create a court-imposed civil order that requires a lower standard of proof than the "beyond reasonable doubt" of the criminal law. The acronym is short for Organised Crime Prevention Order. 3. It was a dark and stormy night ------------------------------------------------------------------- I've always been ambivalent about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for Bad Writing. He wasn't that awful a writer and doesn't deserve such mockery. Admittedly, he wrote floridly, as did many authors of the nineteenth century, but we don't point the finger of accusation at Dickens, whose pages are often at least as enpurpled. To mock decidedly bad writing, it should be renamed the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code Bad Fiction Contest. Trying to outdo him really would be a challenge. But the San Jose State University's annual event throws up some intriguing attempts to deliberately write badly. This year's winner - announced last week - was Jim Guigli of California, who submitted this: "Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean." Roll over, Raymond Chandler. The runner-up, it may be argued, doesn't conform to the rules of the contest, since it is a parody, not an attempt to write badly, but it may be particularly appreciated in this forum. It was penned by Stuart Vasepuru of Edinburgh: "'I know what you're thinking, punk,' hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, 'you're thinking, "Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?" - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel loquacious?" - well do you, punk?'" 4. Q&A: Hooker ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. In a biography of General U S Grant, there was mention of a charismatic American Civil War general called 'Fighting Joe' Hooker, and his female camp followers, known as Hooker's women, or Hookers, for short. Do you know, is this the origin of the word 'Hooker' for a lady of negotiable affections, or is it folk etymology? [Vince Baughan, UK] A. This is a persistent story in the USA, but it's untrue. General Hooker was a real person, though one not universally popular - one biographer calls him "a conniver and carouser" - because he was quarrelsome, deeply disrespectful of his superiors, a womaniser, a drunkard, and (worst of all) an unsuccessful soldier. Hooker's headquarters were described as a combination of bar and brothel into which no decent woman could go. It is also said that his men were an undisciplined lot who often frequented prostitutes (a red-light area of Washington is supposed to have briefly been called "Hooker's division" for this reason). So it's not surprising that "hooker" is often assumed to derive from his short-lived command. However, there's a fatal flaw: the word is recorded several times before the Civil War. It's listed in the second edition of John Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms of 1859 and another example is known from North Carolina in 1845. An even earlier instance was turned up by George Thompson of New York University in The New York Transcript of 25 September 1835, which contains a whimsical report of a police court hearing in which a woman of no reputation at all is called a hooker because she "hangs around the hook". This obscure reference is to Corlear's Hook, an area of New York. Bartlett suggests the same origin for the term, based on "the number of houses of ill-fame frequented by sailors" in the area. Though this origin sounds plausible, it may well be that John Bartlett and others who made this connection were falling victim to an earlier version of folk etymology. There is some evidence to suggest that it really comes from a much older British low slang term for a specialist thief who snatches items using a hook. In 1592, in a book on low-life called The Art of Conny Catching ("conny" or "cony", the old word for a rabbit, was then a cant term for a mark or sucker), Robert Greene says that such thieves, "pull out of a window any loose linen cloth, apparel, or else any other household stuff". The implication is that the hooker catches her clients by similar, albeit less tangible, methods. [A version of this piece appears in my book, Port Out, Starboard Home (Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds in the US), which is available in good bookshops everywhere. See http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm .] 5. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- "An item in this evening's BBC local news 'South Today'", e-mailed Peter Zivanovic, "reported the visit by their Colonel in Chief, the Duke of Gloucester, to the Hampshire base of the RAMC. Members of the regiment were interviewed and the caption showing their names also showed their unit as the "Royal Army Medical Core". Perhaps they felt that Corps(e) would be far too defeatist as a name for a medical unit?" Not entirely incidentally, the article I mentioned here two weeks ago about a seven-member drum quartet resulted in several messages pointing out that it also referred to a "bugle core". This turns out to be extremely common online but also appears from time to time in newspapers. It may one day even become the usual spelling. Yet another recipe for eternal life was found on MSNBC by Jennifer Painter: "The study of 302 people aged 70 to 82 found those who engaged in more physical activity - not necessarily formal exercise - were much less likely to die than those who did not move as much." Riva Berleant reports that in the summer of 2004 she came across a notice posted on a commercial fishing dock in Stonington, Maine: "TWO HOUR BIRTHING LIMIT Violators may be towed at owners expense! All birthing shall be at your own risk." She wonders if it's still there. A sign outside a DIY store in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, caught Kenneth Peterson's eye last weekend (and his camera's: a photograph is included in the online version of this newsletter): "Confused In Home Consults Available". Some punctuation would have helped. "You may be amused," says Louis McMeeken, "by this item from The Independent on 15th July: "A postman was jailed for nine months yesterday after police found more than 34,000 items of unopened mail at his home. Sheffield Crown Court heard that when police turned up at 49-year-old Roger Parkinson's home, near Barnsley, he said: 'I'm glad in a way. It needs sorting.'" A. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments on newsletter content: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org Questions for the Q&A section: wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org Problems with subscriptions: wordssubs at worldwidewords.org B. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscription centre: http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/ Recent back issues: http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- Please order goods from Amazon, which gets World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you: Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX Donations may be made through PayPal: http://quinion.com?PP ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2006. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice immediately above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Jul 28 19:27:27 2006 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 20:27:27 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 29 Jul 06 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 498 Saturday 29 July 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/fjrd.htm Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Menaissance. 3. Weird Words: Epeolatry. 4. Recently noted. 5. Q&A: Banter. 6. Sic! A. E-mail contact addresses. B. Subscription information. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- CORRECTION In the piece on POTUS last week, I stated that Walter Phillips had been president of the Columbia Gramophone Company. As John Winn noted, the firm was the Columbia Graphophone Company (The Gramophone Company, better known by its slogan His Master's Voice, had grabbed the word "gramophone".) ENPURPLED Lots of people queried this, which appeared in the piece on the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, because they couldn't find it in their dictionaries. I have to confess I'd made it up in the heat of composition, being in need of a word to communicate the idea of excessively flowery language. Roger Cooper pointed out that English doesn't like "enp-" and very few words begin with it. One British example is "enprint" for a standard-sized photo, though that's an invented term that really ought to be hyphenated, and there's also the aviation term "enplane" for getting passengers on board. But - and this is why it may be worth all this space - "enpurpled" feels right to me while the alternative given in the bigger dictionaries, "empurpled", doesn't. That this isn't solely an idiosyncrasy is due to the Daily Mail of 13 June 2003: "Lord Irvine of Lairg brought to the historic House of Lords a whole new meaning to our concept of enpurpled majesty", as well as many historical examples. Now having started this hare running, I mean to try to catch it and store it between the pages of the OED. 2. Turns of Phrase: Menaissance ------------------------------------------------------------------- Farewell metrosexuals, with your gelled hair, moisturised skin and impeccable clothing. Hello real men: macho, carnivorous, hanging- out-with-your-mates, beer-swilling, sexist. It's the menaissance. It's the backlash. American newspapers, quick to spot a trendette, have pounced on a series of recent US television advertisements that pander to one's inner caveman, and on books like The Alphabet of Manliness by George Ouzounian (alias Maddox), I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell by Tucker Max, and Real Men Don't Apologize by Jim Belushi. In various ways, all preach a return to a pre-modernist old-style masculinity. Another term for the unreconstructed (or reconstituted) male that pops up in some articles is "retrosexual". Thoughtful commentators point to the male sex's struggle to adjust to a world of sexual equality as the main driver for the backlash. Professor Harvey Mansfield's recent book Manliness argues that men need to recapture some virtues of manliness - such as decisiveness and assertiveness - and not be afraid to display them. * Daily Mail, 12 Jul. 2006: Of course, advocates of the Menaissance may argue that we shouldn't be too concerned about what kind of a man women want these days. Isn't that, they would say, the way we arrived at simpering metrosexuals desperate to please their other halves? * Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 Apr. 2006: A woman friend tells me there's a desperate need for a "menaissance." Many women are weary of sensitive emo-boys and metrosexuals. 3. Weird Words: Epeolatry ------------------------------------------------------------------- The worship of words. Though an appropriate term for this forum, it hasn't achieved any great success in the world at large. It's not even especially old, since its first known user, and presumably its creator, was Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his Professor at the Breakfast Table of 1860: "Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified." It derives from Greek "epeos", a word, plus the "-latry" ending from Greek "latreia", worship, that turns up also in words such as "idolatry". For some reason, "epeos" lost out in the Greek-roots popularity stakes to "logos". However, "epic" is from the same source, an "epoist" is a writer of epic poetry, and "cacoepy" means faulty pronunciation (a word that's suitably easy to say wrongly: it's CACO-ipi). Its appearances are so few that the tag "obscure" attached to it in some dictionaries is all too apt. However, I did find it in a work called Anurada Negotiates Our Wobbly Planet, a self-published title of 2006 by Roger Day: "I read my dictionary for a few more minutes, until tiredness eventually brought my epeolatry to an end for the day." 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- HOTITUDINAL SKINTERNS The Washington Times told the story on 5 July: "Tank tops, flip-flops, bare flesh and cleavage. It's the unofficial uniform of the summer interns, gaggles of college-age women and recent graduates who invade buttoned-down conservative Washington every summer, bringing a large dose of hotitude to offices from Capitol Hill to K Street." The piece explained that the nickname for these barely dressed incomers is "skinterns". DEMOCRAZY Stephen Colbert used this in his US TV show The Colbert Report this week in reference to events in the Middle East. Unlike his "truthiness" last year, which was selected as Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, this one isn't original to him, despite at least one commentator's belief that it is. For starters, a film of 2005 and the 2003 album by Damon Albarn both have that title. The earliest print example I've so far found is in the title of an article in the National Review of 8 January 1992, which began "At the Japanese war trials of 1946, the defunct empire's former propaganda minister, Shumei Okawa, inadvertently made a good pun. Leaping to his feet, he screamed in his uncertain English: 'I hate United States! It is democrazy!'" But the current winner is the Smith's album of 1991, so titled. ENVELOPMENTAL JOURNALISM This appeared in a piece in a Philippines newspaper last week and was new to me, though it turns out to have long been known in that country and elsewhere. It refers to giving journalists envelopes containing money - bribery, in other words - to put a favourable gloss on reporting a story. 5. Q&A: Banter ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. What is the origin of the word "banter"? [Donald Hopkins] A. Presumably you would prefer not to settle for "origin unknown"? It makes a short answer and is accurate, but is hardly satisfying. There is a story behind it, though, that may be worth the telling. The word began as low slang around the last third of the seventeenth century. The verb came first, then the noun. When it first appeared, it referred to exchanges that were more aggressive and vicious than the mild, playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks, usually preceded in descriptions by "good-natured", that it became later. It variously meant then to delude or bamboozle somebody, to hold them up to ridicule and to give them a roasting, in a term of the day we still possess. You can see that in the first appearance of the verb in Madam Fickle, a play dated 1676 by Thomas D'Urfey, in which Zechiel cries to his brother: "Banter him, banter him, Toby. 'Tis a conceited old Scarab, and will yield us excellent sport - go play upon him a little - exercise thy Wit." A letter of 1723 equated banter with Billingsgate, the foul and vituperative language of the porters at the London fish market of that name. "Banter" became notorious because of a spirited attack on it by Jonathan Swift in a famous article he wrote for The Tatler in 1710. In it he attacked what he called "the continual corruption of our English tongue": The third refinement observable in the letter I send you, consists in the choice of certain words invented by some "pretty fellows"; such as "banter", "bamboozle", "country put", and "kidney", as it is there applied; some of which are now struggling for the vogue, and others are in possession of it. I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of "mobb" and "banter", but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me. The same year he wrote of the word in his Apology to The Tale of a Tub ("apology" meaning a formal defence of the work), that "This polite word of theirs was first borrowed from the bullies in White- Friars, then fell among the footmen, and at last retired to the pedants; by whom it is applied as properly to the productions of wit, as if I should apply it to Sir Isaac Newton's mathematics." Note that nobody has anything to say about where those bullies took it from. That is lost in the mists of ancient linguistic invention. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Alvin Rymsha e-mailed from the US Virgin Islands with news of an article in the Boston Magazine for July 2006: "Barnacle Billy's is an Ogunquit institution. And so is its owner Billy Tower, who's been catching, cooking and feeding rich, famous and dedicated lobster-lovers for 45 years." Ummmm! Those crusty New Englanders! John Carrick reports: "In real-estate advertisements in Sydney and elsewhere in Australia, a desirable property is increasingly being called 'sort-after', although not always with the luxury of a linking hyphen. This practice seems to be spreading, presumably through online advertising, where agents see each other's ads and presumably copy this especially keen usage from each other." Speaking of Australia ... while researching a possible holiday in outback New South Wales, Elizabeth Chow went to the National Parks Web site. One of the tours looked interesting: "Tours leave from the Historic Woolshed. Participating vehicles need to be high clearance, a hat, cup, drink, sturdy shoes & sunscreen." The 21 July issue of the Saanich News, the local paper of both Don Wilkes and Peter Weinrich, included a picture caption: "Jagged glass marks the holes left by a trio of builders an angry man tossed through the windows of the CBC's Pandora Avenue studios Tuesday." Fortunately the article makes it clear that "boulders" were meant, and not that the man was offended by the creators of the building. Judith Rascoe tells me that the San Rafael greenmarket, a Sunday rendezvous in Marin County, California, is known for its organic produce and 'artisanal' food products competing for the foodies' dollars. For years it's been the place to buy heirloom tomatoes, those special varieties revived by small-scale market gardeners. But maybe they're demod? these days, she says, since last Sunday she encountered a stall featuring bins of "air loom tomatoes." >From the Guardian of 20 July: "The less ignorant will be aware that Joseph Pilates, a German of Greek descent, first developed his system of 'contrology' in order to rehabilitate victims of the 1918 flu pandemic while he was interred in the Isle of Man during the first world war." That would have been a neat trick, but then he had merely been interned, not interred. A. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- If you want to respond to something in a newsletter, ask a question for the Q&A section, or otherwise contact Michael Quinion, please send it to one of the following addresses: * Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org * Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead) * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org Please ask before sending attachments with messages. B. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm . You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a full list of commands, send a message containing the following two lines to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS END The "END" ensures that the list server doesn't get confused by your signature or other text added to the outgoing message. This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. The address is http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ This page also lists back issues of the online formatted version (see the top of this newsletter for the location of the current issue). C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words newsletter and Web site are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, here are some ways to do so. If you order any goods from any of these online stores (not just new books), you can use one of these links, which gets World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you: Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX If you would like to contribute a sum to the upkeep of World Wide Words through PayPal, enter this link into your browser: http://quinion.com?PP You could also buy one of my books, of course. See http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm and http://www.worldwidewords.org/ologies.htm . ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2006. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice immediately above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . -------------------------------------------------------------------