World Wide Words -- 01 Jul 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 30 15:52:29 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 494 Saturday 1 July 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/rypj.htm
Contents
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1. Turns of Phrase: Domotics.
2. Weird Words: Mutoscope.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: There's the rub.
5. Over to you ...
6. Q&A: Tussie-mussie.
7. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Turns of Phrase: Domotics
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Domotics is the application of "intelligent" technology to make a
home more comfortable and convenient. You may be familiar with the
idea under the name "household automation", which is rather more
common; "domotics" tends to be preferred by robotics and computing
specialists and also to be more often used in Europe. Another term
sometimes encountered is "smart house", used in a European scheme
from 2004.
Among the many applications that fall under the heading of domotics
are sensors that automatically adjust lighting levels to meet the
personal preferences of family members. Other sensors could water
your plants according to need or vary the ventilation to make best
use of outdoor climate conditions. With broadband communications
now widely available, in the event of a fire or break-in your house
could call the emergency services and explain in detail what was
wrong. Some experts have described clever fridges that could read
the wireless tags on food, spot when items are getting low and
automatically reorder them. "Intelligent" washing machines could
decide for themselves how much cleaning your garments needed.
People have been dreaming about the automatic house for decades -
it was satirised back in the 1950s by Jacque Tati in Mon Oncle. It
is now possible to implement many of the ideas but the cost is too
high for most people.
"Domotics" blends Latin "domus", a house, with "robotics". The
earliest example I've so far found is from 1994.
* Dr Dobb's Journal, Mar. 2005: Domotic systems that use PDAs, cell
phones, sensors, and Internet access are being used for everything
from alerting emergency services to unlocking the front door,
making it possible for all of us to live fuller lives.
* Daily Mail, 25 Apr. 2004: Buyers of Polaris homes choose 'modern'
or 'rustic' interiors at La Torre, with underfloor heating often
part of the standard package and 'domotics' - the ability to use
your laptop or mobile to turn on air-conditioning or irrigation
systems.
2. Weird Words: Mutoscope
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A device for creating a moving picture from a series of still
photographs.
In the 1890s, something like a technological gold rush took place
to find a practical way of presenting moving pictures. In the US,
for example, Edison demonstrated his kinetoscope in 1894. Alongside
considerable mechanical ingenuity lay great linguistic creativity,
as a little squib that appeared in the Chicago Record in early 1898
will demonstrate:
"The single invention of throwing moving pictures on screen,
variously known as the vitascope or kinetoscope, has added dozens
of new words to the language within the last year or two. Here is a
list of the various names for 'movement photography:' Phantoscope,
criterioscope, vitascope, cinematograph, biograph, kinematograph,
wonderscope, animatoscope, vitagraph, panoramograph, cosmoscope,
anarithmoscope, katoptikum, magniscope, zoeoptrotrope, variscope,
phantasmagoria, projectoscope, cinograph, hypnoscope, centograph,
X-ograph, electroscope, cinegraphoscope, craboscope, vitaletiscope,
cinematoscope, mutoscope, cinoscope, animaloscope, theatograph,
chronophotographoscope, cinnomonograph, motograph, kinetograph,
rayoscope, motorscope, kinetiphone, thromotrope, phenakistoscope,
venetrope, vitrescope, zinematograph, vitopticon, stinnetiscope,
vivrescope, diaramiscope, lobsterscope, corminograph, kineoptoscope
or any other old scope."
Lobsterscope? Craboscope? Was this a joke of the writer's? Buried
in that list was one that was certainly real, mutoscope, a device
created by the American inventor Herman Casler and patented in
1894. The word is assumed to be from Latin "mutare", to change.
Both the kinetoscope and the mutograph required the viewer to peer
into a viewing slot while turning a handle. But whereas Edison's
device used a strip of film, Casler's was very close in idea to the
flip-book, in which riffling through a sequence of still pictures
seems to create a moving image. In the mutoscope the pictures were
arranged around a drum; turning a handle caused them to appear one
after the other at about 16 frames a second, the minimum needed to
give an illusion of movement.
The big problem with both the kinetoscope and the mutograph was
that only one person could watch at a time. The promoters of the
mutoscope, the KMCD Syndicate, tried to get around the issue by
introducing Mutoscope parlors that housed several such machines. An
example was reported in the Newark Daily Advocate in May 1900: "One
of the new features of the park this season is a mutoscope parlor
adjoining the bowling alleys. About 20 machines will be put in this
parlor at the start." But there was no way the machines could
compete with the much more social and comfortable environment of a
seated audience watching projected film. The Syndicate soon
accepted this and introduced the Biograph, which enjoyed much
greater success.
Many people remember the mutograph in the form of the very mildly
risqué "What the Butler Saw" machines, once commonly to be found on
British seaside piers and in amusement arcades.
3. Recently noted
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WAGS This somewhat disparaging abbreviation has been conspicuous
in British newspapers during the soccer World Cup. It stands for
"wives and girlfriends". So far as I can discover, it first became
popular during Euro 2004 - on 13 June that year, the Daily Mail
wrote, "But in Portugal, where England's players will need every
last ounce of team spirit to win, Victoria Beckham was criticised
for seeming to distance herself from the other players' partners,
who have been nicknamed 'Wags' (Wives and Girlfriends)." This year,
derivatives have appeared, such as "waggishness", for the qualities
or characters shared by the WAGS. It has been joined by "MADS",
standing for "mums and dads". The Guardian reported on 23 June, "It
is the Mads who take on duties of care in what, at times, appears
to be a giant creche, and the Mads who, by and large, are not in
town to dance on tables or buy handbags, but to provide unwavering
support during what might be the pinnacle of the career in which
they have lovingly encouraged their son from infancy."
4. Q&A: There's the rub
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Q. What does the saying "There's the rub" mean and what is the
origin of the phrase? [Paula Conneran-Weig]
A. The phrase is Shakespeare's. It comes from Hamlet's famous "To
be or not to be" soliloquy: "To sleep - perchance to dream; ay,
there's the rub, / For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come
...". By "rub", Hamlet means a difficulty, obstacle or objection -
in this case to his committing suicide.
The origin is the ancient game of bowls (which Americans may know
as "lawn bowling"; nothing to do with tenpin bowling). A rub is
some fault in the surface of the green that stops a bowl or diverts
it from its intended direction. The term is recorded first a few
years before Shakespeare's time and is still in use. It later
became a broader term for an abstract impediment or hindrance. The
Oxford English Dictionary has its first example from Thomas Nashe's
The First Part of Pasquil's Apology of 1590: "Some small rubs, as I
hear, have been cast in my way to hinder my coming forth, but they
shall not profit."
5. Over to you ...
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Martin Rose e-mails about an odd word: "Visiting Brighton recently
I was told the traditional construction material there is something
called 'bungaloosh' (I may have spelled this wrongly): a mixture of
flint nodes and clay, plastered over. It's the devil to repair, and
a nightmare on which to hang shelves. I've been unable to find the
word anywhere. Help?"
Forty years ago, I lived in an old flat in Hove that had walls of
this stuff, and I agree about the problems of hanging shelves: the
drill skitters off the flint and makes a furrow in the plaster. But
my usual sources don't include a word that is anything like this.
Frustratingly, a builder told me the local word at the time but
I've since forgotten it. Can anybody help us?
6. Q&A: Tussie mussie
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Q. I can't find the etymology of "tussie mussie" anywhere! Can you
help? [Richard Hillman]
A. This ignorant linguaphile's first thought was "what in the name
of everything wonderful is a 'tussie mussie'?" A visit to the Web
site of the Royal Horticultural Society sorted that out: "Tussie-
mussies are posies assembled from a carefully chosen selection of
flowers and herbs, usually to convey a specific message." Then I
went to my dictionaries: "Origin unknown".
The Oxford English Dictionary is a little more forthcoming. It says
that it may be a rhyming reduplicated form of "tussy". This may in
turn have come from an unrecorded word "tus" or "tusse" in the
sense of a nosegay or garland of flowers. So its history is indeed
poorly understood and "origin unknown" is a pretty good summary.
The word has gone through lots of different forms, suggesting that
its early users were as uncertain about its antecedents as we are
today. Its first recorded appearance was in about 1440, when it was
written as "tusmose". In later centuries the spelling settled down
to "tuzzy-muzzy".
By the end of the seventeenth century it seems to have disappeared
from the standard language. The reason for this may lie in an entry
in Captain Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, dated
1811, which says "TUZZY-MUZZY. The monosyllable." Jonathon Green's
Cassell's Dictionary of Slang says it was then a slang term for the
female pudendum, so that "the monosyllable" was presumably the C-
word. The term was reintroduced around the 1940s in its original
sense of a nosegay by someone who was ignorant of its long-defunct
slang associations. In the process the spelling was changed to
"tussie-mussie". The first modern case I can find is in the rules
for a flower show in Dixon, Illinois, in September 1947.
Altogether a most interesting word. Thanks for giving me the chance
to write about it, even though I can't answer your question!
7. Sic!
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The appositely named Henry Peacock read this on a local council's
Web site: "Blackpool Zoo has invested £5m during the lst [sic] year
to create new enclosures, year round exhibits ... new conference
and exhibition space, new hops and café, and an outdoor exhibition
theatre". This was presumably for a kangaroo enclosure.
Linda L Kerby read this in an obituary that appeared recently in
the Kansas City Star: "Following cremation there will be a memorial
mass ... Monsignor Charles McGlinn presiding along with homeliest
Fr. Spencer." She comments it's a good thing Father Spencer has a
sense of humour. ["Homilist" - the person who gives the homily.]
Bill Smith followed up a Sic! item of last week. "Your headline
about dodging mum was positively scrutible compared with the one
from the Sydney Morning Herald of 21 June 2006. 'Black oil swamps
ooze fear along Tigris'. Pick a verb, any verb. Is the black oil
swamping the ooze fear or are the oil swamps oozing fear?" Since
the piece concerned the fear that ooze composed of black oil would
pollute local swamps, he points out that there's actually no verb
in the headline at all.
Talking of confusing headlines, last Sunday Earl Morton and Suzanne
McCarthy independently came across a Reuters headline: "Key to Long
Life May Be Mom's Age at Birth." They had previously thought that
everyone's age was pretty much the same at birth. And, thanks to
Anne O'Brien Lloyd, we learned that headlinese also struck the
Daily Mail on Thursday: "Freed foreign prisoner murdered again".
How unlucky can a former prisoner get?
Mike Kennedy spotted a paragraph in the BBC News Online report of
the England-Ecuador match last Sunday that might have been better
expressed: "Lampard twice had chances straight after to double the
lead, first dragging a left-foot shot wide then failing to find
Rooney in the box when he should have shot himself."
The issue of the Courier Mail in Brisbane for 26 June contains an
article on drink driving that suggests the reporter experienced a
momentary failure of concentration: "Regional traffic coordinator
for Brisbane's Metro North Region, Inspector Roger Whyte, said it
was an absolute disgrace that police continued to drink and drive".
For "police", read "people". At least, I hope so ...
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