World Wide Words -- 23 Sep 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 22 17:03:29 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 506 Saturday 23 September 2006
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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
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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/avjr.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Rebarbative.
3. Recently noted.
4. My New Book.
5. Q&A: The elephant in the room.
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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GORMAGON Following up my piece about this word last week, in which
I noted its use in the early eighteenth century for a group that
imitated the Freemasons, Neil Houston told me about Jenny Uglow's
book Hogarth: A Life and a World, which describes its genesis. The
early days of Freemasonry in London in the 1720s were marred by a
serious internecine dispute over its constitution. A member of one
of the opposing parties posted a hoax notice full of "mumbo-jumbo
and pointed invective", announcing that the Ancient Noble Order of
the Gormagons had recently come to England. Hogarth drew a cartoon
in 1725, The Mystery of Masonry Brought to Life by the Gormagons.
Despite my comment last week, therefore, it seems likely that the
name of these Gormagons had either been taken from that of the
beast in the coarse riddle or later became attached to it.
WHEN HECTOR WAS A PUP Janice Hopper e-mailed from Georgia to say
she knew another variation on this expression: "The one I've used
for years is 'since Buck was a calf'" This isn't in any reference
book, either, but I turned it up in The Desert Valley by Jackson
Gregory, dated 1921 ("Haven't seen you since old Buck was a calf.
Where you been keeping yourself?") and in a newspaper of the same
year. But who Buck was, nobody seems to have the slightest idea -
presumably it wasn't a reference to US president James Buchanan,
who had the nickname "old Buck".
2. Weird Words: Rebarbative
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Unattractive and objectionable.
It's a word of no great age: it only began to appear at the end of
the nineteenth century. It's still uncommon, though you may spot it
in the more erudite newspapers or in the work of writers with more
power to their pens than most of us. A couple of examples: "To know
what you like, in short, is not to know much about culture, which
depends on the awkward and the rebarbative for its vigour." (The
Independent, Aug. 2006); "Billy Budd is, for all its gnarled and
even rebarbative syntax, astonishingly moving" (Washington Post,
Sep. 2005).
The touch of weirdness in this word comes not from its unusualness
but from its history. If the middle bit of "rebarbative" makes you
think of barbers, you're on the right track - the ultimate source
is Latin "barba", beard. "Rebarbative" came into English from the
French "rébarbatif" with the same sense. This has been in French
since the fourteenth century - it derives from the verb "se
rebarber", which referred to two men squaring up face to face,
beard to beard, in close-quartered and hairy aggressiveness.
3. Recently noted
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WHITE-ANTED This appeared in a reader's comment quoted in a book
review in the New York Times last weekend: "A nice irony: France
helped America to victory but only at the cost of financial ruin
and the importation of a philosophy that white-anted the feudal
order." The term puzzled several subscribers, mainly because it's
an Australian colloquial term not used in the US. "White ant" is
another name for the termite (which isn't an ant, but never mind).
The idea comes from the way the little beasts munch away inside a
building's timbers, quietly destroying it from within. A figurative
"white ant" can be a saboteur or a person who undermines something,
such as a political party or a policy. According to the Oxford
Australian Dictionary, the term was actually first used - around
the beginning of the twentieth century - for a person's failing
intelligence or sanity, as if the cause were termites eating the
brain.
PERIODICALITY The new managing editor of Time magazine, Richard
Stengel, used this in an interview in the Observer recently: "I
hate to use this word but our periodicality is what people know us
for." I'm rather sorry he used it, too. It can be found on the Web
a few times and is clearly related in meaning to "periodicity" or
"periodism" ("the quality or character of being periodic; the
tendency to recur at intervals", as one of my dictionaries puts
it), which of course is also the idea behind "periodical", from
which the word is almost certainly formed.
BABYMOONING Three recent newspaper articles that mentioned this
all say the term is new. But Grant Barrett, at the Double-Tongued
Word Wrester site (*), has found examples as long ago as 1993. It
is said to have been coined by the childbirth educator and author
Sheila Kitzinger. It began in the sense of a short period after a
child's birth when the parents would grab the opportunity to bond
with the new baby without well-intentioned interruptions. But its
recent appearances have shifted sense to a holiday for expectant
parents as a last chance to get away before the big event.
* http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/babymoon/
BADA BING The most recent quarterly update to the Oxford English
Dictionary on 14 September includes the name of the pole-dancing
club patronised by Tony Soprano and other mobsters in the US TV
series. The entry defines it as an interjection suggesting that
something happens suddenly, emphatically, easily and predictably.
The first example is from 1965. Among the thousand other words
added this time is "plumber's crack", which is defined as "the top
of the buttocks and the cleft between them, as revealed when a
person bends over or crouches down, or by low-cut or ill-fitting
trousers"; it's also known in Britain as "builder's bum".
4. My New Book
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Words vanish from our language for many reasons, not least that the
thing described has gone out of use. Would you wear a billycock or
gallygaskins, take rosolio as medicine, dance the gorlitza, play
loggets, eat botargo, or work as a saggar-maker's bottom knocker?
Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of our Vanishing Vocabulary, describes
the origin of and background to all these and more than a thousand
others. It will be published in the UK by Oxford University Press
on 28 September and worldwide soon after.
For full details see http://www.worldwidewords.org/gallimaufry.htm
For advance orders via Amazon, follow these links:
Amazon UK: GBP7.79 http://quinion.com?G84Y
Amazon USA: US$16.50 http://quinion.com?G34Y
Amazon Canada: CDN$19.77 http://quinion.com?G91Y
Amazon Germany: EUR21,90 http://quinion.com?G27Y
5. Q&A: The elephant in the room
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Q. I came across the expression "The elephant in the room" in the
Guardian and wondered if you could shed any more light on where the
phrase comes from. [Rhona Dunphy]
A. The expression is now common - in the article you mention, on
Wednesday this week, Marcel Berlins called it "the phrase I most
hate in the whole world", because it has become such a cliché. It
refers to some big problem or controversial issue that's obviously
present but which everyone ignores or avoids mentioning, usually
because it's politically or socially embarrassing. The term is also
topical because my local street artist, Banksy, rendered the phrase
palpable in his exhibition in Los Angeles last weekend. He painted
a fleur-de-lis wallpaper pattern on an elephant and put it in a
living-room set (you may have heard that he was forced to clean the
paint off because the local authorities held it was animal abuse).
Marcel Berlins commented he had traced the expression to a 1989 BBC
television film whose director had said he had taken it from the
Belfast writer Bernard MacLaverty. The latter had described the
situation in Northern Ireland as like "having an elephant in your
living room", though with the sense of something difficult in your
life that you got accustomed to and tried your best to ignore, as
people in Northern Ireland did with the Troubles. Marcel Berlins
said that MacLaverty had used the idea in a children's story of
1978, A Man in Search of a Pet.
The Oxford English Dictionary has recently added an entry for the
expression to its online service. It doesn't mention MacLaverty and
instead argues it's originally American. The first example it has
in our current sense is the title of a well-known American book of
1984 by Marion H Typpo and Jill M Hastings, "An Elephant in the
Living Room: a leader's guide for helping children of alcoholics."
There are earlier examples. A piece in the Winnipeg Free Press in
October 1976 said, "What is big and unfamiliar is mistrusted.
Anyone would feel uncomfortable with an elephant in the living
room, no matter how friendly it might be." The OED's entry also
notes an example from the New York Times of June 1959: "Financing
schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in
the living room. It's so big you just can't ignore it." Neither of
these are in our current sense.
The idea seems to have around for some time, most probably being
reinvented from time to time by writers seeking a vigorous image.
Bernard MacLaverty's claim to priority is looking distinctly shaky
and it does indeed appear to be American in origin.
6. Sic!
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An advertisement for a sleep study test sent in by Gloria Adamson:
"To qualify for participation in this study, you must be aged 65 or
older [and] experiencing problems falling asleep and staying asleep
for at least 3 months". Failed Rip Van Winkles only should apply.
John Gray reports that the issue of the Gloucester Citizen for 14
September had a story about the row that erupted after contractors
cut down trees outside the city's police station. "A spokeswoman
for the force said some of the trees would be replaced. She added:
'The trees in front of the police station have been removed for
operational reasons and only after all other possible avenues had
been explored.'"
"Senate weighs 700-mile Mexico border fence" was the headline over
a story on MSNBC on Thursday. Robert Bendesky very reasonably asks
where they could find scales that big.
"A local family was preparing to leave their old house," e-mails
Michael Shannon. "In an effort to divest themselves of some old
junk they did what many people do. Last weekend they proudly hung a
sign outside their property announcing a 'Moving Garage Sale'. My
wife and I were unsure if this meant the garage was genuinely in
motion or if it was simply an emotional event."
On holiday in New South Wales, Neville Reid saw an estate agent in
Wentworthville advertising a "specious 3 bedroom apartment". "If
one of the so-called bedrooms is really a broom cupboard," he
comments, "then all credit to the agent for giving the game away."
A notification to the State of Alaska IT department e-mail list
headed "Sun Spots causing service interruption" was read by Chris
Luth: "The State of Alaska Service Center has been advised of a
service interruption ... because of Sun Outages." He wryly notes,
"I know we don't get a lot of daylight during the winter up here,
but I didn't know it was because the IT department was having
problems keeping the Sun running..."
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