World Wide Words -- 14 Apr 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 13 16:52:31 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 535 Saturday 14 April 2007
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Voluntourism.
3. Weird Words: Tolley.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Home in on.
6. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SHARPSHOOTER Following last week's piece on this word, Harald Beck
tells me that its German equivalent, Scharfschütze, is recorded in
Jacobsson's Technologisches Wörterbuch, dated 1781. So the English
word is a calque or loan translation of the German, in which each
part of the word has been translated literally. Other subscribers
have mentioned the use of sharpshooters during the American War of
Independence. However, I cannot find a use of the term itself in a
contemporary document.
2. Turns of Phrase: Voluntourism
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The term combines "volunteering" with "tourism", far from a new
concept, but one that its proponents claim is rapidly becoming the
next big thing in travel. It began to appear in the press early in
2005, joining "responsible tourism", "ecotourism" and similar terms
that also imply giving something back to the communities that one
visits. It might be something as easy-going as giving time to local
libraries and schools, as straightforward as taking a day out to
clear paths in a national park, or as hard work as constructing new
homes or digging latrines. It differs from much organised volunteer
activity by taking place within a conventional one- or two-week
holiday, usually combined with more conventional vacation activity.
It is also increasingly being tailored to suit the abilities of
participants over a wide age range, including those in their 50s
and 60s. US commentators have noted the rise in popularity of the
idea since Hurricane Katrina, which has persuaded large numbers of
people to spend vacation time helping to rebuild New Orleans.
* Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, 29 Mar. 2007: Voluntourism is
catching on in college campuses, where many students would rather
spend spring break doing something altruistic than carousing.
* Chicago Tribune, 7 Mar. 2007: He describes voluntourism as the
practice of devoting some vacation time to building housing and
schools or other community service.
2. Weird Words: Tolley
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The shooter in the game of marbles.
Americans, for whom marbles has been an organised competitive sport
for the better part of a century, may gently disparage the title of
the World Marbles Championships, held in Tinsley Green in West
Sussex each Good Friday (but then, let's not mention baseball's
World Series). Its organisers claim that the game has been played
there since 1588, which - if true - gives them an unimpeachable
claim to seniority, if not planetary dominion.
In this form of the game, play is confined to a six-foot-diameter
circle in which 49 marbles are placed. Players, in teams of six,
compete to knock the marbles out of the ring by flicking their
tolleys at them with the middle joints of their thumbs. Each
success gains one point and the first team to reach 25 points wins.
Some marbles terms are ancient, especially "knuckle down", meaning
to place one´s knuckles on the ground preparatory to flicking the
tolley, which is recorded from 1740 and may be the same phrase as
"knuckling down" or "knuckling under" for submitting or giving in.
Less well recorded is "cabbaging": shooting your tolley from a spot
closer to the target marbles than the rules allow; this seems to be
Tinsley Green jargon, as is "nose drop", their version of the coin
toss, in which players drop their tolleys from their nose to a line
in the sand. The player whose tolley lands nearest the line goes
first.
This word "tolley" for the shooting marble is surprisingly recent,
at least in the written word. It suddenly appears in news reports
in Britain and America in 1970 concerning a controversy resulting
from the decision that year to ban women from taking part in the
Tinsley Green championship.
The Oxford English Dictionary is sure that "tolley" isn't a local
term but a corruption of "taw-alley". Both halves of that refer to
a marble. A "taw" (origin unknown) is a large or choice marble
that's usually made of glass these days, though once, of course, it
would have been carved from marble. "Alley" is said to be a
corruption of "alabaster", meaning a "real" marble as opposed to
cheaper ones moulded from clay or terracotta.
4. Recently noted
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WILF It's not short for "Wilfred", it's the newest acronym around,
short for "What (Was) I Looking For?" It refers to an aimless and
time-consuming browsing through Web sites. It was invented to catch
the attention of news editors by the writers of a research report
published by the YouGov polling group this week. In this it was
successful, as the word has turned up not only in papers in the UK,
but also in the USA, Canada, India, South Africa and Australia. The
survey claims that wilfing has become almost a national pastime in
the UK, with a quarter of those polled admitting they spent a third
of their online time just surfing the Web with no real purpose in
mind. The survey says this adds up to two working days a month. Men
were more likely to be wilfers than women and younger people more
than older ones. The problem seems to be that the Web contains such
an unlimited pool of information that it is all too easy to become
distracted.
5. Q&A: Home in on
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Q. For most of my life, the common usage here in the USA was "to
home in on" something. Recently however, I increasingly notice the
usage of "hone in on" instead. I know that English usage changes
over time, but it seems the latter phrase has almost completely
replaced the former in a short while. I would appreciate your views
on the subject. [T J Wentzel]
A. It's an interesting shift, one we're actually able to watch as
it happens.
The "home" version is from early aeronautics. Pilots were guided to
their destinations and back to their home bases by radio beacons.
In the jargon of the time - the early 1920s - they were said to
"home" on the beacons. This is obviously an echo of the older sense
that we use when we speak of homing pigeons and of animals finding
their way home by instinct. In later years, beacons were fitted to
aircraft so that one could home on another. By this time - around
1940 - "home" had lost much of its literal link with going home and
had taken on the figurative idea of "guiding an aircraft to its
target or destination by means of a radio signal".
The exact expression "to home in on" began to appear during World
War Two. American researcher Ben Zimmer has discovered the earliest
known example in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1944: "The Oahu radio
was coming in strong. They had left the station on all night so we
could 'home in' on its frequency." well After the war, people began
to use it in the current figurative sense of focusing one's
attention on a single matter.
That's now the only situation in which most people encounter it.
It's hardly obvious to somebody who hasn't come across it before or
who doesn't know the background. Why "home"? This lack of context
makes it easy for speakers to change the word into something that
seems to be more appropriate or make more sense. "Hone in on" is a
classic example of the type of word shift that has become known in
recent years among linguists as an eggcorn: a change in word form
due to error or misunderstanding.
In this case, it seems to be the figurative sense of the verb "to
hone", meaning to sharpen a tool, that has led to the change, since
it's widely used to mean making something work better, for example
when we say somebody is "honing her skills". If you are honing in
on a topic, you can imagine people thinking, then you're improving
your understanding of it.
It came to public attention and gained some notoriety when George
Bush used it in his presidential campaign in 1980 - he spoke of
"honing in on the issues". He wasn't the earliest user: George
Plimpton wrote about his time with the Detroit Lions football team
in Paper Lion, published in 1965; in that book he described a
player "looking back for the ball honing in to intercept his line
of sight".
You're correct in your comment that the shift from "home" to "hone"
has now gone so far that the latter is becoming the usual form.
Some people even assume that the "home" form is a misprint. There
seems little doubt that "hone" will eventually take over
completely.
6. Sic!
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"In an article in today's Bangkok Post," e-mailed Gordon Robinson
on Monday, "about the local real estate market, particularly for
condominiums, the author constructed, or should it be erected, this
splendid sentence: 'Also, not all live in condoms, with single-
owner apartment buildings and serviced apartments putting up stiff
competition.'"
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