World Wide Words -- 24 Jun 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 23 17:36:19 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 493 Saturday 24 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/sunb.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Corpus.
3. Weird Words: Umquhile.
4. Q&A: Put the mockers on.
5. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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C3 In my piece on this abbreviation last week, I quoted a line
from P G Wodehouse, "as C3 a performer as ever wielded a skillet".
This brought a comment from Valerie Grosvenor-Myer: "This is an
example of Wodehouse's Americanisation. He lived in the States most
of his life, and his stories of English life mostly appeared first
in the Saturday Evening Post. So he makes his narrators use a sort
of Americanese. 'C3' is, of course, English, as the question you
were replying to shows; but 'skillet' is American for what we call
a frying pan." "Skillet" does exist in British English, but it is
now an outmoded term for a small metal cooking pot with legs and a
long handle.
GELATOLOGY The Weird Words piece last week was less than adequate
because I hadn't realised that this spelling, the one I had come
across - its source shall remain nameless to protect the guilty -
was not standard. The more usual form is "gelotology", which Nick
Lingris pointed out better reflects the original Greek. A partial
rewrite of the piece has been needed; rather than include it here,
I've put it online at http://quinion.com?GELO .
A SPECIAL WELCOME to everybody who has joined the mailing list as a
result of reading about World Wide Words (and my most recent book)
in William Safire's On Language column in the New York Times and
elsewhere, or through Kate Russell's feature in the television
programme Click on BBC World and BBC News 24.
2. Topical Words: Corpus
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Oxford Dictionaries have been making proud announcements recently
about their research resource, the Oxford English Corpus (OEC).
A corpus is a collection of written material in machine-readable
form that has been put together for linguistic research. The word
is the Latin for body and is the source of several other English
words, such as "corpse", "corporeal", "corpulent", "corpuscle",
"corps", and "corporal". "Corporate", of a business or firm, has
the same origin, so "body corporate" is etymologically speaking a
tautology. Crime writers are fond of "corpus delicti", for the
facts and circumstances surrounding a crime (literally, it means
"body of offence"). English writers have been using "corpus" for a
body of writing since the early eighteenth century (the first known
usage was in Chambers Cyclopaedia); linguists only started to use
it in this specialised sense in the 1950s.
The OEC began in 2000 and by April this year had grown to contain
more than a billion (a thousand million) words (not all different,
of course: the humble word "the" alone appears about 50 million
times). It represents every type of English, from literary novels,
specialist journals, newspapers and magazines to the text of
Hansard and the contents of chatrooms, e-mails, and weblogs. All
the material has been trawled from the World Wide Web using a
custom-built web crawler (similar to those that search engines like
Google use to index the Web), so there are probably some World Wide
Words pages in it somewhere. The OEC also includes every regional
variety of the language, not only the major ones of the UK and US
that make up about 80% of the total, but also material from the
Caribbean, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Africa.
One of its more valuable features is that researchers can discover
which words most often appear together, for which the dictionary
makers' term is "collocation". When, for example, the corpus is
examined for verbs which are most often used with "man" or "boy"
but not "woman" or "girl", they discover that men assault, hijack,
crouch, kidnap, rob, grin, shoot, dig, stagger, leap, invent, or
brandish. But they don't consent, faint, sob, cohabit, undress,
clutch, scorn, or gossip because, according to the corpus, that's
what women do. "Eccentric" usually appears with words like
endearingly, old, and millionaire, suggesting that only elderly,
wealthy people can be eccentric, the rest of us just being plain
crazy. The word "vivacious" most often appears with beautiful,
young, blonde, outgoing, and intelligent and the corpus evidence
makes clear that women may be vivacious but men may not. Evidence
like this helps to tie down what we really mean by words; for
example, "vivacious" is now defined in the Oxford Dictionary of
English as "(especially of a woman) attractively lively and
animated".
To mark the publication of the revised 11th edition of the Concise
Oxford Dictionary, a list of the 25 most common nouns in the corpus
has appeared this week. It is a mark of our hurrying lifestyle that
the word at the top of the list is "time". The complete list, in
decreasing order of frequency, is: time, person, year, way, day,
thing, man, world, life, hand, part, child, eye, woman, place,
work, week, case, point, government, company, number, group,
problem, and fact. You could erect a novel on that scaffolding.
3. Weird Words: Umquhile
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Formerly, previously; former, late.
Last November this section featured the word "whilom", one of three
words, I said then, with closely related meanings, the others being
"erstwhile" and "quondam". There is a fourth, as correspondent Mark
Harvey instantly pointed out: "umquhile". As you can tell from its
alternative spelling of "umwhile", the "q" isn't pronounced. It's a
nice Scrabble word, but not one to be found in everyday prose.
It's from the Old English "ymb hwíle", which progressively changed
to "umbewhitle" and hence to "umwhile" or "umquhile". The last of
these is the Scots spelling, which is why it so often turns up in
the works of Sir Walter Scott. One appearance was in The Heart of
Midlothian of 1818: "Above the inner entrance hung, and had hung,
for many years, the mouldering hatchment, which announced that
umquhile Laurence Dumbie of Dumbiedikes had been gathered to his
fathers in Newbattle kirkyard". Another was in The Fair Maid of
Perth (1828): "The Lady of the umquhile Walter de Avenel was in
very weak health in the Tower of Glendearg".
As early as 1832, Frances Trollope was noting it as obsolete, in
her Domestic Manners of the Americans (she didn't like them). It
has been recorded a few times in the twentieth century, but always
in a self-consciously archaic context.
4. Q&A: Put the mockers on
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Q. Could you please tell me where the phrase "put the moccas on"
comes from? It is also spelled "mockas" and "mokkas". It is a
rather rare phrase here in Australia. [Tim Falkiner]
A. These are relatively recent respellings of the canonical form,
"to put the mockers on", these days mainly British. It means to
jinx or bring bad luck on an activity or to hinder it, perhaps
through an adverse circumstance that may be regarded as bad luck.
Some examples from newspapers may help. This was in the Newcastle
Evening Chronicle dated 11 November 2005: "Radio presenter Tony
Horne's training for the Great Ethiopian Run could all have been in
vain due to political unrest [which] may have put the mockers on
it." The Racing Post of 23 January 2006 had: "The only thing I
don't like about it is he's favourite already and that usually puts
the mockers on them!" Another report said that continuing rain "put
the mockers on" any chance of resuming play in a cricket match. A
piece on a football match quoted a supporter who jokingly argued
that complimentary comments made in a previous report "put the
mockers on" their chance of winning.
I would have said that the expression was old-fashioned and dated
but my search through the newspaper archives suggests that it's
enjoying an active retirement on the sports pages.
The first example recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is from
an Australian novel of 1922. The editors are sure the expression
was indeed originally Australian - it seems to have been brought to
the UK rather later than that date, perhaps during the Second World
War, but it certainly became popular here. An earlier form, known
only in Australia, is "put a mock on", which is known there from at
least 1911.
It has been suggested that it is from the Romany words "mokardi" or
"mokodo" for something tainted, or possibly from Yiddish "make", a
sore or scourge. It doesn't seem to be connected with the outdated
Australian term "mocker" or "mokker", meaning clothing or attire,
whose origin is unknown (though Jonathon Green suggests it might be
linked with Yiddish "macha", a big man, or a big shot). The Oxford
dictionaries are sure it straightforwardly comes either from "mock"
in the sense of deride, or "mocker", meaning somebody who mocks.
5. Sic!
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In Blue Death by Michael Collins, Michael Hennessey noted, "In my
car I found a telephone booth, called Dr. Foley's secretary."
This section only features mere misprints when they are especially
egregious. Tony Rocca found one: "I thought you might like to know
that the 2006 Writers' & Artists' Yearbook is its 'Ninety-nineth
Edition' - at least, according to publishers A&C Black (London) who
trumpet the feat on the frontispiece. Roll on, the Hundredeth."
The online version of this newsletter (see above) has a photograph
taken by Clifford Milner of an embarrassing error on a hotel sign
he saw in Lee, Massachusetts.
This one isn't an error but headlinese. Mick Loosemore saw it on
the CBC Web site last Tuesday, 21 June: "DODGE MUM ON INTEREST RATE
HIKE". It transpires that the governor of the Bank of Canada, David
Dodge, had avoided commenting on a possible rise in interest rates.
A. E-mail contact addresses
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