World Wide Words -- 27 May 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 26 16:47:57 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 489 Saturday 27 May 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/ghap.htm
Back issues of both the formatted and e-mail
versions for the past year may be consulted at
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
3. Weird Words: Ensorcelled.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Two-car funeral.
6. 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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LORD LOVE A DUCK Adam Warren writes from France with an intriguing
idea: "I think this may be an anglicised form of the Irish divinity
'Lugh Lamhfada', Lugh of the flaming lance, and guesswork suggests
to me it may have been picked up in the trenches in the First World
War and deformed in the mouths of the Tommies, many of whom were
cockneys. I must have heard it last, many years ago, from the lips
of my Scoutmaster, in the 1960s. He'd been a soldier in both wars."
"Lugh Lamhfada" is said like "loo lavfada", not too dissimilar in
sound, but we have to be wary of such seeming relationships. Bitter
experience shows they're nearly always mere coincidences.
OPODELDOC Many subscribers remembered this preparation from their
childhoods, showing that it - and its name - survived in daily use
longer than the written record suggests. For example, Pat Mackay
recollects, "After I walked into a lamppost at the age of about
five, opodeldoc was applied to the huge lump on my forehead. The
curious word has remained with me, though I haven't heard of the
stuff since. So it was still in use in Belfast in the late 1940s."
Christine Aikenhead recalls, "When I was a child my dad had a
window-cleaning business in Yorkshire. He washed the windows with
chamois leathers which had to be rinsed in a bucket of water many
times in a day. The work was very hard on his hands. In the
evenings, he used to rub a mixture of glycerine and opodeldoc on
his hands. He swore by it."
UPDATES Pages on the Web site about the following words have been
updated: "Deipnosophist", "Heebie-jeebies", "Horsefeathers", and
"Niggardly". Direct links will be on the World Wide Words home page
at http://www.worldwidewords.org for the next seven days. Direct
links are also in the prettily formatted online version (with added
pictures), which is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ghap.htm .
2. Turns of Phrase: Electromagnetic hypersensitivity
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It's a bit of a mouthful, but it describes a condition in which
individuals claim to suffer ill-health as a result of exposure to
electrical or magnetic radiation from kettles, television sets,
computers, power lines, or mobile phone base stations. Symptoms
include burning sensations, fatigue, tiredness, dizziness, nausea,
heart palpitations, and digestive disturbances. The symptoms are
often as non-specific as those with chronic fatigue syndrome.
The term has been around in a quiet way for some time (the first
example I've found is in Robert O Becker's Cross Currents of 1990),
but it has had wide circulation in Britain in the past week or so
as a result of many reports in popular newspapers. The condition is
also known as electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome (EHS) and
sufferers are called electromagnetic hypersensitives or described
as being electrosensitive.
It is controversial, with no study finding a clear link between
low-level electromagnetic radiation and symptoms. Researchers are
sure that those complaining of symptoms are sincere, experiencing a
real problem that can be disabling, but can find no evidence that
suggests a connection with radiation.
* Birmingham Mail, 12 Jan. 2006: We wanted to inform the Health
Secretary about the debilitating symptoms experienced by electro-
sensitive people. Patricia Hewitt was sympathetic whilst seemingly
unaware of the electromagnetic hypersensitivity problem.
* Guardian, 13 May 2006: If there's no real explanation, perhaps a
"placebo" explanation - like "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" -
can have almost all the same properties as a real one.
3. Weird Words: Ensorcelled
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Bewitched, enchanted.
It's not too hard to guess this one, since its middle has echoes of
"sorcerer". That's the origin, because it comes via the Old French
verb "ensorceler" from "sorcier", a sorcerer. Both go back to Latin
"sors", the destiny, fate or fortune of an individual.
Despite the ancient pedigree of the words from which it comes, the
verb "ensorcell" appears in English only in the sixteenth century,
and that briefly. It began to be popular in the nineteenth century,
the classic examples being in the Arabian Nights stories translated
by Sir Richard Burton, which included The Tale of the Ensorcelled
Prince among those told by Scheherazade. "She came forward swaying
from side to side and coquettishly moving and indeed she ravished
wits and hearts and ensorcelled all eyes with her glances."
It has become more common since, though it's hardly a word you will
expect to find in your daily newspaper. It's usually regarded as
literary or poetic but is most frequently to be found in sword-and-
sorcery fantasy novels: "The lock was ensorcelled, protected as if
by some invisible, unbreakable glass" (Lois McMaster Bujold, The
Spirit Ring, 1992); "She was an ensorcelled princess, and only the
evil witches might waken her" (Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky,
1999); "The colossal hammer of the Berserker Khorixas was forged of
the same sky metal as Etjole Ehomba's ensorcelled sword" (Alan Dean
Foster, A Triumph of Souls, 2000).
4. Recently noted
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CODOLOGY Philip French's review of The Da Vinci Code film in the
Observer last Sunday contained several neat put-downs, such as
"Brown's novel is called a 'page-turner', partly because no one
capable of reading without moving their lips would wish to linger
over his prose", and "The cryptographers are constantly creeping
into crypts, talking crap and copping out". He described the Robert
Langdon character as "professor of religious symbology (a branch of
codology) at Harvard". That sounds like simple exposition, unless
you know that codology has nothing to do with code-breaking. It's
actually an Irish colloquial term that was explained by H V Morton
in 1930 in this way: "There is in Ireland a science unknown to us
in England called codology. Nearly every true Irishman is either a
graduate or a professor. The American for codology is 'bunk', or
perhaps 'bla'; the English is 'leg-pulling'. There is nothing your
true Irishman likes better than putting over a tall story on an
Englishman." Americans may argue that the more recent "kidology" is
a better fit. "Codology" derives from the slightly older slang term
"cod", meaning a joke, a hoax, a parody, or take-off. The Belfast
Newsletter used it like this in November 2003: "Seems like politics
is a chip off the old block for this candidate who assures us he
will not engage in any codology on this campaign."
DEPARTMENT OF STRAINED INVENTION This week's prize goes to Sophie
Watson Smythe, the marketing manager of Q magazine. She needed a
term to describe women who now have the freedom to broaden their
musical horizons through downloading from the Net, so avoiding the
snobbish, list-obsessed, condescending, mainly male assistants in
record shops. This new breed of tech-savvy female music fans she
dubbed the "MP-she generation".
5. Q&A: Two-car funeral
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Q. What is the story behind the expression "two-car funeral"? [Bill
Decker]
A. In US English, it usually turns up the fuller form, "couldn't
organise a two-car funeral". It's a measure of utter incompetence.
Here's an example from the Fresno Bee of February 2004: "When is
the school board going to face the reality that the administration
is incapable of organizing a two-car funeral?" Sometimes the verb
is "manage", as here in an issue of the Cincinnati Post in January
2005: "If Bill Frist's performance as Senate majority leader the
last few weeks is any indication, he would have trouble managing a
two-car funeral let alone the vast U.S. government."
Like most such slangy expressions, trying to tie down its origins
is next to impossible. It became well enough known that it began to
appear in newspapers around 1971; the earliest example I've come
across appeared in a syndicated article in several US newspapers in
February 1971: "The Saigon government at that point could not
organize a two-car funeral."
The standard British equivalent, by the way, is the more forceful
"couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery".
6. Sic!
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Elliot Kretzmer reports that The Debkafile website carried a story
on 15 May 2006 of "four men who turned themselves into Egyptian
police". Quite an arresting development, he thinks.
"Here is an extract," e-mailed Malcolm Hutton, "from the May-June
issue of Booklover, from Dymocks, the Australian booksellers. The
interview was with a new writer, one book published, another in the
offing: 'I've been writing for as long as I can remember. I've got
a whole lot of stuff I've written over the past 20 years in my
wardrobe.'" Writers have it so easy these days; earlier generations
had only a freezing garret to write in.
George Thomas found another noteworthy comment in the same piece:
"I wrote the first sentence exactly five years ago. I knew people
in the book industry and I asked them to read it and got their
feedback. From there, I re-wrote it and got a manuscript assessor
to read it, too. I went down the road of trying to get an agent,
but that was difficult. I then sent it to a publisher who accepted
manuscripts. By the time Hodder got it, it was very polished and I
think they could tell it was not a first draft." That fastidiously
crafted sentence is going to make a disconcertingly slim book.
Remaining for the nonce in Australia, Michael Shannon found this
headline on the news Web site for the National Nine Television
Network: "Man shot dead in park wanted for murder". "America," he
comments, "may have its mean streets but we've got killer parks."
And Gary Smith reports that he found an irresistible treat on a
menu at a Greek restaurant in Adelaide: "fried codpieces".
"The issue of Reader's Digest for November 2005," e-mailed Irene
Heath, "contained the following statement: 'In 2003, 203 people
died when their vehicle collided with a tree.' I don't know what
kind of vehicle can carry 203 people, but the collision can't have
done the tree much good."
Following up comments on the unintentionally humorous effect of
missing letters, Robert Bass recalls: "Just before graduate school
(during the Nixon administration), I was employed as a proofreader
for a typesetting firm. I had worked there for many weeks before I
noticed that the gold-lettered sign on its front door (and proudly
displayed there for a decade) read 'Typsetting'. It was with some
reluctance that I mentioned the problem to the proprietor."
Pete Jones once caused a classic Sic: "Back in the Sixties I worked
for the Press Association as a teleprinter operator. I sent out a
piece which had the Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home, referring to
"the high cost of loving". The error was picked up by the columnist
Cassandra [William Connor] in the Daily Mirror and then repeated in
several other dailies."
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