World Wide Words -- 10 Feb 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 9 17:27:55 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 526 Saturday 10 February 2007
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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/clpn.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Carbon footprint.
3. Weird Words: Blood and thunder.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Widowered.
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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PRONUNCIATIONS In the piece about "dydler", which appeared in the
issue of 27 January, I said that it was pronounced like "diddler".
Hilary Maidstone, who lives in Norfolk, tells me that it's actually
said as "died-ler". And the IPA pronunciation of last week's Weird
Word "muliebrious" was wrong. It should have been /,mju:lI'Ebri at s/,
with an initial secondary stress followed by the main stress on the
third syllable, so making it roughly "myu-li-EB-rious". Sorry for
any confusion.
SAY UNCLE The origin of the children's expression, meaning to cry
for mercy or submit, has long puzzled etymologists. Dan Norder has
discovered that the first examples, in US newspapers in the early
1890s, present the saying in the form of a joke about a parrot. Is
that where it comes from? The full story is on the Web site (go via
http://quinion.com?UNCL) in an update to the original piece that
was written back in 1998.
2. Turns of Phrase: Carbon footprint
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Having used this term in a piece last week, so many people asked me
about it that a brief discussion seemed worthwhile.
It is very much the term of the moment, especially following the
report published last week by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change on the effect of human activities on the world's
climate. The term has received wider attention in the UK than in
the US: newspaper articles here tell environmentally conscious
readers how to reduce their carbon footprint by changing the way
they live. On Thursday, the Bishop of London agreed not to fly for
a year in order to reduce his footprint and to make the point that
such profligate use of fossil fuels was selfish.
The term carbon footprint refers to the amount of carbon dioxide -
a potent greenhouse gas - that is given off by an organisation or
an individual burning fossil fuels. This doesn't only include the
obvious, such as car and plane travel, heating and the like, but
also covers the cost in fossil fuel of creating and transporting
every item that we use or consume, including such necessities as
food and clothing (another term also used is "embodied energy").
The carbon footprint, measured in tons or tonnes, is taken to be a
measure of the extent to which such activities contribute to global
warming.
"Footprint" here is perhaps not the best term. It has been used
figuratively for several decades to express an area over which an
effect is felt, such as "noise footprint", or the area within which
a radio or television signal can be received, or the area a piece
of equipment covers, say on your desk. This footprint is a further
abstraction, being the metaphorical mark or imprint on the planet
left by our carbon-dioxide-emitting activities, which of course
cannot be expressed as an area.
* Evening Standard, 1 Feb. 2007: 20 ways YOU can cut your carbon
footprint; After the hottest January for 90 years, how to reduce
the global impact of your CO2 emissions.
* Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 Jan. 2007: At issue is an ongoing
story in Britain about the prince's "carbon footprint" - the amount
of greenhouse gases generated by his travel in private planes and
other activities - and Charles' stated efforts to reduce it,
including canceling a recent skiing trip.
3. Weird Words: Blood and thunder
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Bloodshed and violence.
This term has long been used figuratively, especially and at first
in the US, for books, plays and other stories about the murderous
exploits of desperadoes. George Augustus Sala, writing in Gaslight
and Daylight in 1859 about the Whitechapel area of London, referred
to "cheap literature (among which, I grieve to say it, the blood-
and-thunder school preponderates)". G K Chesterton once described
Jane Eyre thus: "While it is a human document written in blood, it
is also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective stories in the
world."
Earlier, it appeared in The Delaware Weekly Advertiser and Farmer's
Journal of 4 September 1828, whose masthead grandly states it is
"Devoted to general science, literature, mechanism, manufactures,
agriculture, political economy, and current news". It reports "By
following the example thus laudably set by Senator Bully Benton,
the blood-and-thunder-boys might possibly carry the election in
this Borough, and perhaps in a few other places." Earlier still, an
advertisement in The Times of London on 20 November 1789 announced
a farce in two acts, The Newspaper Coalition, whose characters
included Blood and Thunder, a hunting parson. As an expressive oath
it's clearly even older, since in 1751 Tobias Smollett used it in
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle: "'Blood and thunder! meaning
me, sir?' cried this artist, raising his voice, and curling his
visage into a most intimidating frown."
The cheap literature sense of "blood and thunder" became common in
the US around 1850. It didn't take long for humorists to see the
value in spoonerising the words and thereby guying the excesses of
such tales about dastardly exploits. In Brook Farm, by John Thomas
Codman (1894) appeared this: "'Well, how was Drew's play?' said one
wag. 'All blood and thunder, eh?' 'No; all thud and blunder,' was
the rejoinder." But the first use of "thud and blunder" I can find
was in The Globe of Atchison, Kansas, which in 1879 reported on
some distressing local events under the headline "THUD AND BLUNDER,
A Chapter of Highway Robberies, Fights and Thefts". The article
included the sad news that the local sheriff had had his saddle
harness stolen so he couldn't go chasing those desperadoes.
4. Recently noted
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MOOBSTER This punning take on "mobster" appeared in the Observer
last Sunday. A moobster is a man with moobs. The latter is a very
British term for that affliction of the overweight male: man-boobs,
fatty deposits in the chest area. The Independent explained it on
30 January: "Popularised in the 1990s by Colin Montgomerie and
Meatloaf, the moob look has fallen on hard times - more British men
than ever are surgically reducing their breasts." The Independent
article listed other deprecatory expressions about the body, such
as "muffin top", previously discussed here. It included "cankle"
("a melding of calf and ankle, this anatomical curiosity became
prevalent in the leggings-rich 1980s, and has made an unwelcome
reappearance with the footless tight. Refers to a disappointing
lack of definition in the lower third of the leg"), as well as the
older "bingo wing" ("a flap of skin that hangs from the underside
of a mature woman's arm. So termed because of its prevalence in
gaming halls, where the average bingo-player's tricep activity is
limited to raising a hand to indicate a full house") and "welcome
mat" ("the dense gathering of hair at the base of the back of a
hirsute male (or, in extreme cases, female) - often displayed by
overweight joggers.")
5. Q&A: Widowered
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Q. In the movie Sleepless in Seattle (that I recently saw again)
the Meg Ryan character muses over the Tom Hanks character, whose
wife has recently and suddenly died, that he has become a widower.
She says that a widow is widowed, but a widower is also widowed.
She wonders, why not widowered? Any thoughts? [Richard Blair,
Sydney, Australia]
A. Strictly speaking, "widowered" exists, as does "widowerhood",
the state of being a widower. The Oxford English Dictionary has a
couple of nineteenth-century examples of the former. Thomas Hardy
used it in a satirical poem, The Coronation, written in May 1910
when George V was about to be crowned; in it he described Henry
VIII as "much self-widowered".
I've turned up a few other examples, but it is true to say that in
British and Commonwealth English "widowered" is extremely rare. It
is, so far as I can tell, a smidgen less so in the US. It appeared,
to take one case, in a review of the film Boynton Beach Club in the
Chicago Sun-Times in August 2006: "Here he meets Harry, who takes
him under his widowered wing with personal cooking lessons and
dating advice."
There's nothing wrong with the word in itself - its form follows
the rules of English grammar. It's less common, though, largely
because "widower" is in any case less often used than "widow".
6. Sic!
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John Bradfield communicated: "I have been checking the Web site of
a company that produces styrofoam mouldings for enhancing the
appearance of a building. The very first error I found was: 'All of
our products are specially crafted to beatify the interior and
exterior of your home or structure'." Is this a preliminary step
before converting one's property to a church?"
The Sunday San Diego Union Tribune reported a mishap last weekend,
which Rikki Ellwood passed on to us. "Two vintage biplanes collided
yesterday over the ocean off the Palos Verdes peninsula, but both
pilots walked away from the crash uninjured, federal officials
said." They can do that in California - walk on water, that is.
Seen by Michael Porter at a garden centre in Essex: "No refunds
without a valid receipt. This does not affect your statuary
rights". Especially if you've bought a statue.
"Today's Sunday Borneo Post," e-mailed Bernard Long last weekend,
"has an article on the cruelty and mistreatment of migrant maids -
sadly all too common here in Malaysia. However, the seriousness of
the article was spoiled by a caption that read: 'File picture shows
Rubiwatie on Sept 27, 2006, with serious burns on her back, after
allegedly being splashed with hot water during a press conference.'
As a journalist I know those conferences can be rough, but that's
going too far."
Kevin Pindjak says, "My wife and I were camping in our RV at a
small campground outside of Ocala, Florida. Most campgrounds have
faucets where you can fill your fresh water tank. This particular
campground had such a faucet available and the sign above it read
'Portable Water'. My thought was, 'OK, so I can take it with me,
but is it safe to drink?'"
John Gould sent in an item from AP News of 29 January, about the
accidental discharge of a gun: "Since the bullet traveled through
two walls, across a courtyard and ricocheted off a shower wall, it
left only a small bruise on the chest of the man it hit and did not
require treatment, police said." Lucky bullet.
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