World Wide Words -- 28 Apr 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 27 16:55:15 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 537 Saturday 28 April 2007
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Sent each Saturday to at least 48,000 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/hrey.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Nincompoop.
3. Turns of Phrase: Two-factor authentication.
4. Recently noted.
5. Book Review: Balderdash & Piffle.
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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EGGCORNS Michael Boddy e-mailed from Australia to point out that
"chaise lounge" is not solely an American eggcorn, but one that is
also extremely common in his country. Julia Cresswell remarked that
"The damp squid is well established in the UK as well. I heard it
in a BBC Radio 4 interview about six weeks ago for the first time,
but asking round, found a number of people who were familiar with
it, to the extent that it was even an office standing joke."
2. Weird Words: Nincompoop
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A foolish or stupid person.
It's a silly-sounding word for a silly sort of person.
Many writers have tried hard to find an origin for it, though most
dictionaries play safe and list it as "origin unknown". The good Dr
Johnson, in his famous Dictionary of 1755, thought it might be from
Latin "non compos", as in the legal and medical phrase "non compos
mentis", not mentally competent. As the Oxford English Dictionary
commented 150 years later, this supposed origin doesn't explain the
early versions of the word that were around in the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries, such as "nicompoop" and "nickumpoop".
The late John Ciardi, in A Browser's Dictionary, dismissively calls
Johnson's idea "a clerk's guess" and asserts that it comes instead
from the Dutch words "nicht om poep", meaning "the female relative
of a fool" ("poep", a fool, said like the English "poop"). He said,
"And if that does not work out ... I will be a monkey's uncle".
Conceivably not, but such a stretched derivation from a foreign
language is typical of a type of folk etymology that turns up a
lot.
A more intriguing idea, one with a fair level of acceptance, links
it with the given name Nicodemus, especially the Pharisee of that
name who questioned Christ so naively in the Gospel of St John.
This word still exists in French as "nicodème", a simpleton, and it
may have been modified by the Dutch "poep" that Ciardi referred to.
3. Turns of Phrase: Two-factor authentication
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Why, you may reasonably ask, is this arcane bit of computer jargon
popping up here? Agreed, it's never going to trip lightly off the
lips of your neighbourhood bank teller, but it refers to a trend in
banking that's likely to affect all of us, even if we never come to
know it by that name.
The problem is that of security, or rather the insecurity of the
usual form of security, passwords. Everybody knows they're bad at
their job: people forget them or create ones too easy to guess,
mislay them, write them down where somebody unauthorised can read
them, or can be all too easily persuaded to give them over the
phone to a conman with a plausible line of patter. Online, matters
are even worse. Banks spend huge amounts of effort trying to stem
the flood of phishing sites that pretend to be the real thing so
that they can grab your log-in details and plunder your accounts.
So the quest has been on to find an alternative that is acceptable
to the public, which works, and which won't be too much trouble to
use. The basic idea is to add a second level of protection to the
password - so two factors of authentication. Practicality rules out
methods like retinal or fingerprint scans so the current focus is
on little electronic devices that do the job for you. You plug in
your card and enter your PIN. The device issues you with a time-
sensitive code (in the jargon, a one-time password) that you must
type in to gain access.
The term "two-factor authentication" has been around since the
early 1990s and appears extremely widely in technical documents,
though it is still rare in newspapers. The devices are common in
businesses, especially to give employees access to secure office
systems while on the road. They are now beginning to be made
available to bank customers. Security experts warn, however, they
won't stop every kind of attack and may indeed be most useful by
building awareness among customers of the need for security.
* Guardian, 11 Apr. 2007: Scams such as identity theft, "phishing"
attempts to trick customers into revealing account details and
advanced spyware that can capture a computer user's passwords have
led several banks, including HSBC and Lloyds TSB, to experiment
with a technique known as two-factor digital authentication.
* Computer Weekly, 24 Apr. 2007: Barclays said last year that it
would offer two-factor authentication via card readers to all of
its two million banking customers.
4. Recently noted
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A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME ... The stroke of genius by New Zealand
producers in the 1960s of renaming the Chinese gooseberry as the
kiwi fruit has been an inspiration to marketers everywhere. In the
1990s, a little herb called borage began to be widely cultivated
(if you come across a field in England in summer covered in blue
flowers, they're likely to be borage, if not lavender or lupins).
Its advocates claim that it is diuretic, emollient, demulcent,
anti-rheumatic, anti-depressive, diaphoretic, refrigerant, and
expectorant, and that its seeds have a high proportion of gamma
linolenic acid (GLA), an essential fatty acid. Its name, however,
was thought to be an impediment to sales. A traditional name for
plants with similar star-like petals is starflower - it has been
given to tormentil, lesser celandine, the star of Bethlehem, and
others. The fact that borage has never been known by this name
didn't hold marketers back and starflower oil is now widely
available. To add to the list of renamed plants, it was announced
last week that a firm of British chemists, Boots, is to produce and
market what is claimed to be the first essential oil to be
developed in the UK for commercial use for more than 40 years. It
is said to be four times more effective at killing acne bacteria
than tea tree oil. The problem for the marketers was that the herb
is best known by its Scottish name of bog myrtle, not one that was
likely to excite the buying public. What luck, then, when it was
found to have several alternative names, including sweet gale in
parts of England.
5. Book Review: Balderdash & Piffle
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The success of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary
rested very substantially on the shoulders of a small army of what
were essentially amateurs: readers who scoured books for examples
of words for the OED's editors to use as evidence in creating the
entries. It might be thought that such days are over, since there
are now so many electronic resources for lexicographers to call on
that non-professionals without access are at a fatal disadvantage.
But a BBC television series in 2006, which shares its name with
this linked book, proved otherwise. It was arranged in conjunction
with a word hunt, looking for prior evidence of a number of terms
that had puzzled the OED. Viewers with access to material that
hasn't been digitised and may never be - obscure journals, long-
forgotten minor novels, advertisements, letters, even autograph
albums - were able to produce some gems of antedating.
The British term "bog-standard" (basic, standard, unexceptional)
was taken back to an issue of Hot Car magazine for 1968, proving
that memories of its having first been used in the custom-vehicle
field were right. A search in the archives of the English Country
Cheese Council turned up references to showcards that advertised
the ploughman's lunch, not only taking the word back a decade to
1960 but proving the assertion of food experts that the term (if
not the meal) was the creation of cheese marketers.
You'll find the results of the Wordhunt written up in the final
chapter of this book. We can only hope that the new series, due to
begin on BBC2 in May, will produce more of this valuable data (see
http://www.oed.com/bbcwordhunt/ for details).
The main part of this book consists of eight chapters whose themes
are those of the programmes in the forthcoming TV series: madness,
fashion, obscure eponyms, idioms that refer to dogs, underhand
dealings, put-downs and insults, words for bodily functions, and X-
rated words. It is entertaining and popularly written, though you
may feel the dark side of life and language is overly represented,
with no shortage of rude words and words for rude things.
Do not expect great depths of research - it's not that sort of book
- since the author has relied on the OED, Partridge, and a small
number of other works for his information. In several cases, this
means that his dating is a bit out-of-date (those digital sources
again). But the only actual error I've so far caught him in is his
assertion that in "three sheets to the wind", a sheet is a sail.
No, Mr Games, it's a rope.
[Alex Games, Balderdash & Piffle, published by BBC Books on 5 April
2007; ISBN-13 978-1-84607-235-2, ISBN-10 1846072352; hardback,
pp239; publisher's price GBP9.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP6.59 http://quinion.com?B91P
Amazon USA: [Not yet available] http://quinion.com?B36P
Amazon Canada: CDN$16.35 http://quinion.com?B45P
Amazon Germany: EUR16,50 http://quinion.com?B28P
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
6. Sic!
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Mícheál Ó Doibhilín (and there's a good Irish name) came across a
startling item in the Dublin Evening Herald last week, reporting
police concern at the increased use in criminal feuds in Ireland of
pipe-bombs and similar weapons manufactured by ex-paramilitary bomb
makers. The police, the report said, were particularly worried by
the "increased use of Pope-bombs".
Paul in Pennsylvania noted an item on the Web site of WSAZ3 in West
Virginia, which contained a good example of a malapropism: "Family
members of the missing men reported to Kanawha County Sheriff's
Deputies during the afternoon yesterday that they believed the men
were lost in the mine. The proper mine authorities were notified
and immediately began immobilizing resources including specialized
search and rescue teams."
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