World Wide Words -- 03 Jun 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 2 17:04:38 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 490 Saturday 3 June 2006
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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
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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/fjuo.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Book Review: Far From the Madding Gerund.
3. Weird Words: Eagre.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Circular.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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COULDN'T ORGANISE A TWO-CAR FUNERAL Following my piece on this US
expression last week, Michael Grounds noted that "In Australia they
say 'He couldn't organise a chook raffle'. Raw chooks (which you
call chickens) are often raffled in pubs and clubs to raise money
for some, usually very local, charity." Still in Australia, Robert
Fry suggests "the measure of one's competence is often gauged by
one's ability to 'organise a two-door dunny'" [a dunny being an
outside toilet].
R M Bragg suggests an even more forceful condemnation is "couldn't
organize a game of solitaire." And several subscribers recalled an
earthy Americanism, one often attributed to Lyndon B Johnson: "He
couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed
on the heel".
"Here in the Glasgow area," John Coyne responded, "one often hears
that somebody 'couldnae run a m'noj'. It puzzled me, too, until I
discovered that m'noj is spelled 'ménage', and refers to the kind
of business run by housewives selling goods on commission from a
mail-order catalogue to their circle of acquaintances".
Several US subscribers pointed out that the expression was in fact
a less serious accusation of incompetence than "couldn't organise a
one-car funeral". The earliest example of that version I've found
is from 1968: "Alas, the world is full of bunglers. Some of them
are so good they can even mess up a one-car funeral." That's older
than the first recorded example of "two-car funeral" and so may be
the original form.
2. Book Review: Far From the Madding Gerund
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This book is a collection of articles written by two professional
linguists, Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K Pullum, all of which were
first posted on their Web site, the Language Log. The theme of the
site is grammar and correctness in English.
To take some pieces pretty much at random, the authors express hate
for that supposed arbiter of correctness, Strunk & White, a "horrid
little book", which they castigate - among other awful sins - for
prohibiting sentence-initial "however". They bewail the abandonment
of grammar teaching in American schools (a view often echoed in the
UK), in particular being alarmed at errors of grammar in official
answers to recent SAT practice questions. They explain that Inuit
languages really don't have 80, or 150, or however many words for
types of snow, and why. There's a wonderful deconstruction of the
first few paragraphs of that dreadfully written book, The Da Vinci
Code. They discuss why "wedding vowels" often appears when "wedding
vows" is meant (many North Americans don't fully vocalise final
"l", so that they say "vows" and "vowels" alike). In the section
"Learn your grammar, Becky", with the subtitle "some disastrously
unhelpful guidance on usage", an article on misplaced modifiers
includes this example quoted in the Penguin Dictionary of American
English Usage: "Although widely used by the men, Bashilange women
were rarely allowed to smoke cannabis".
This is a book to dip into, not to be read straight through. Nobody
will find every item interesting - a discussion of how to pronounce
the name of the Iraqi city Samarra, which introduces subtleties of
Arabic pronunciation, may be passed over without loss, though you
might like to know it means "happy is he who sees it"; the article
on analysis of discourse structures will glaze the eyes of anybody
not in the field. If you're flummoxed by such grammatical terms as
"hierarchical ontology", "predicate", "nominalisation", "count
noun", or "prepositional phrase", you perhaps ought to give the
book a miss. If you're not sure, the miracle of the Web means you
can test-read articles by popping over to the Language Log site
(http://www.languagelog.com).
The book is an example of what looks like a trend: the conversion
of blogs into books, or "blooks". Every article in the book is
still available on the Language Log. So why pay money for what you
can read for free? That's a good question that only the publisher's
sales figures may ultimately answer, but it suggests that the old-
fashioned ink-on-dead-trees, no-batteries-required, go-anywhere
book still has some life in it.
[Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K Pullum, Far From the Madding Gerund
and Other Dispatches from the Language Log; published by William,
James & Co, Oregon, on 1 May 2006; ISBN 1590280555; paperback,
pp360; publisher's price US$22.00.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP11.69 http://quinion.com?F18G
Amazon USA: US$14.30 http://quinion.com?F93G
Amazon Canada: CDN$18.67 http://quinion.com?F46G
Amazon Germany: EUR19,50 http://quinion.com?F78G
[Please use these links to buy. More information below.]
3. Weird Words: Eagre /'i:g@(r)/
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A river bore.
A bore is a type of tidal wave, a single wave that flows up a river
estuary as a result of an especially high tide. It's an example of
what scientists call a soliton, a solitary wave that travels with
little loss of energy, retaining its shape and speed but increasing
in height as the river narrows and shallows. Among the most famous
bores is that on the River Severn, a few miles from me.
"Eagre" is said just like "eager" and is an older dialect name for
the phenomenon on the rivers Ouse and Trent as well as the Severn.
It's been written in many ways, among them "hygre", "higre", "agar"
and "aigre". It's now rarely seen in any spelling.
Though we understand how eagres happen, we're no nearer discovering
the origin of that name. One theory was described by Eliza Chase in
her novel Acadia of 1884: "In some northern countries the Bore is
called the Eagre. Octavia says this must be because it screws its
way so eagerly into the land, but is immediately suppressed, and
informed that the name is a corruption of Oegir, the Scandinavian
god of the sea." Dictionary makers are now sure that's incorrect,
but they have nothing to put in its place.
It features in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860): "Above
all, the great Floss, along which they wandered with a sense of
travel, to see the rushing spring-tide, the awful Eagre, come up
like a hungry monster", and in A Protégée of Jack Hamlin's by Bret
Harte (1894): "The steamer Silveropolis was sharply and steadily
cleaving the broad, placid shallows of the Sacramento River. A
large wave like an eagre, diverging from its bow, was extending to
either bank, swamping the tules and threatening to submerge the
lower levees." [The tule is a clubrush common in California.]
4. Recently noted
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EUROPEAN MONSOON It has been raining hard here. Until the weather
cleared up this week we had suffered a month of bands of heavy rain
sweeping north-east and hadn't seen the sun other than in brief
glimpses. Rainfall has been about one and a half times the monthly
average. Yes, typical Brits, always talking about the weather. But
it was only this week that I learned that we've been experiencing
what some meteorologists call the European monsoon, except we got
it a bit early and rather badly this year. High temperatures over
continental Europe interact with cold air over Greenland ice sheets
to intensify the Westerlies coming off the Atlantic. Compared with
the Indian monsoon, it's a drop in the ocean, so to speak, but in
normal years it washes out the Glastonbury festival and interrupts
play at Wimbledon. The experts predict that it will strengthen in
the future as a result of global warming.
CUB This abbreviation has become known in Australia. It stands for
"cashed-up bogan" and refers to a type of young white working-class
male. "Bogan" by itself has been used both in Australian and in New
Zealand in recent decades, either for someone stupidly conventional
and old-fashioned or a person who is uncouth or uncultured. It's
said to have started in Melbourne and to have been popularised by
The Comedy Company, a television programme that aired in Australia
for a couple of years in the late 1980s. Where it comes from is
uncertain. Several places in New South Wales have it in their names
(and there's also "Bogan shower", a dust storm). Pam Peters of the
Australian Dictionary Research Centre suggests that these may have
been borrowed in the nineteenth century from the name of a local
tribe of aborigines. The other half of the name, "cashed-up", is an
Australian colloquial term meaning well-supplied with money, which
was originally applied to seasonal workers who had just been paid.
>From my position half a world away, there seems to be disagreement
about the true nature of cubs. An article in the Age of Melbourne
describes them as "extremely well-heeled, skilled, blue-collar
workers" and says they are being wooed by advertisers because they
are both moneyed and aspirational. But other sources describe them
in derogatory terms as violent, anti-social and unintelligent, so
sounding like the much-derided British chavs.
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5. Q&A:
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Q. I work for the Federal Government. At the end of a presentation
the other day, on a regulation from the Office of Management and
Budget, the speaker asked if anyone knew why such regulations were
called "circulars". She explained that in the early days of the
Republic such regulations went out on paper that was scrolled up to
look like a tube. Do you have any idea if this was actually the
derivation of the term for government regulations for Federal
agencies being called "circulars?" [Moshe Haven]
A. Assuming the speaker wasn't having a bit of quiet fun, that's a
splendid example of popular etymology, one to add to my collection.
(If they keep coming in, there will soon be enough material for a
sequel to Port Out, Starboard Home. End of plug.) You might as well
argue that circulars are called that because they were originally
printed on round pieces of paper.
The origin of their name is as straightforward as you could want.
"Circular" was originally an adjective in phrases like "circular
letter". Certain types of missives came to be called that because
they were circulated among a group of people. Presumably it began
because each in turn read it and passed it to the next recipient,
eventually returning it to the original sender (think of office
documents with a distribution list attached). But by the time of
the first known example, in Bishop Brian Walton's "The Considerator
Considered" of 1659, the idea of individual copies being despatched
to a list of recipients is presumably meant: "Their chief Priest
... sends circular letters to the rest about their solemn feasts."
In time, the phrase "circular letter" came to be abbreviated. When
Henry Todd produced an updated version of Dr Johnson's dictionary
in 1818, he added what we would now call a usage note to the entry
on "circular letter": "Modern affectation has changed this
expression into the substantive; and we now hear of nothing but
'circulars' from publick offices, and 'circulars' from
superintendants of a feast or club."
6. Sic!
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Paul Birch reports that the Vancouver Bach Choir recently performed
Mozart's Requiem, conducted by Bernard Labadie. Concert goers were
told about the event by e-mail, but the message must have been put
through a spellchecker before being delivered: "Maestro Libido will
conduct this outstanding choir, which has previously sung in London
at St. Martini's-in-the-Field."
Leonard Blomstrand was startled by a headline on the BBC News Web
site, "Tailoring lessons for every pupil". He commented that "The
prospect of all children being taught how to make their own clothes
made me sit up."
Molly Cutpurse (a nom-de-net, I presume) tells me that she saw this
in the Purfleet Heritage Centre in Essex: "The three ballads all
relate to the same event - the murder in 1874 of Alice Boughen, a
child of five, by Richard Coates, aged twenty one, her schoolmaster
and a gunner in the Royal Artillery at Purfleet. They are now in
the Thurrock Museum." And there were we thinking that they'd been
decently buried long ago.
George Thompson confided, "I saw a sign yesterday in front of a
nail salon on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York City,
offering 'manicures and penicures'. Please tell me this is an
error."
A. E-mail contact addresses
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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
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