World Wide Words -- 24 Feb 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 23 17:16:37 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 528 Saturday 24 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/lgwv.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Egyptian days.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Vulgar fractions.
5. Q&A: Under weigh.
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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ROBINSON CRUSOE I gave the wrong publication date last week for
Daniel Defoe's novel. It should have been 1719, not 1721.
PRAISE INDEED I don't usually blow my own trumpet in this forum,
but a comment in the Mail Tribune of Oregon on 18 February cannot
be let pass, simply because it was so extravagantly excessive. A
reader posed a question about the phrase "teach your grandmother to
suck eggs", to which the writer said "For the answer, we turned to
the infinitely wise and humorous Michael Quinion". It was the least
he could say, you might feel, since I'd done his work for him!
2. Weird Words: Egyptian days
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Days of ill-omen or evil.
As far back as the historical record can be traced, we know that
certain days have been thought to be unlucky. In medieval times
they were often listed in calendars as the "dies Aegyptiaci", the
Egyptian days, since they were supposed to have been identified by
Egyptian astrologers, considered to be authorities on such matters.
Some said they were days on which calamitous events had occurred in
ancient Egypt, such as the plagues described in the Bible.
Medieval calendars precisely identified the days that were to be
considered inauspicious, on which no project or enterprise should
be begun: 1 and 25 January; 4 and 26 February; 1 and 28 March; 10
and 20 April; 3 and 25 May; 10 and 16 June; 13 and 22 July; 1 and
30 August; 3 and 21 September; 3 and 22 October; 5 and 28 November;
and 7 and 22 December. It was considered especially important that
doctors should not let blood on these days.
Another Latin term for them was "dies mali", the unlucky, evil, or
unpropitious days. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the
Latin phrase had been Anglicised into "dismal", at first in direct
reference to the evil days, but later to any event that brought
misfortune and disaster. By the seventeenth century the word had
weakened to our modern sense of something that merely causes gloom
or depression. When in 1849 Carlyle described economics as "the
dismal science", he meant merely that it was cheerless.
3. Recently noted
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FAME-INESS A few days after Ben Goldacre coined "referenciness" in
the Guardian on the model of Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" - as
noted in the last issue - the Los Angeles Times headlined a piece
with "fame-iness". It doesn't refer to real fame, but to celebrity,
the illusion of fame. The writer commented, "Now that the mystique
of so many celebrities is rooted less in their accomplishments than
in their ability to get our attention by provoking our disgust,
perhaps it's not fame they're offering but 'fame-iness.'" Do I
detect a trend here? Is "-iness" in the process of becoming a new
combining form, meaning something that affects to have or gives the
illusion of having some desirable property? Watch this space, or
your favourite newspaper.
NOM DE BLOG Alex MacDonell spotted this in the New York Times of
15 February. "It looks," he suggests, "as though 'blog' is joining
'plume' and 'guerre' as an American-French appellation." It turns
out to be fairly common and has already reached several online
glossaries of terms. There's also "nom de Web" and the much older
"nom de Usenet", which is recorded as far back as 1990.
E FOR EVERYTHING So many words in the public prints now come with
the "e-" (for "electronic") prefix that I've long since given up
mentioning them here, or in most cases even reporting them to the
Oxford English Dictionary. But a big row in the UK last week led to
the terms "e-petition" and "e-petitioner" becoming widely known. It
all started with some bright young person in the Prime Minister's
office - some papers have fingered the in-house Web guru, Benjamin
Wegg-Prosser, surely an escapee from a Wodehouse novel. He had the
idea that the Number 10 Web site should allow electronic petitions
to be submitted. Some spectacularly silly ones have been organised,
one of them demanding that mice be allowed to travel free on public
transport and another one - which has gained a surprising level of
informal support - arguing that Spandau Ballet's Gold should become
the new national anthem. The row, however, was over very tentative
proposals to introduce road-pricing - charging road users by the
distance they travel. At the last count, 1.8 million signatures had
been added to an e-petition demanding the scheme be scrapped, even
though trials are several years away and full run-out could not
happen for a decade. Douglas Alexander, the Transport Secretary,
was understandably displeased with the whole idea of electronic
petitions. "Whoever came up with this idea must be a prat," he
said. ("Prat": an incompetent or stupid person, from an old term
for a person's buttocks that also appears in "pratfall".)
ARSINESS Talking of buttocks, this British slang term refers to
the quality of being variously bad-tempered, arrogant, sarcastic,
or uncooperative. It's from the Australian "arsy", which is in turn
from "arsy-versey" (upside down, back to front, or contrariwise),
which derives in its turn from the slang English term "arse" for
the backside. "Arsiness" appeared in an article in the Observer
last Sunday about the Unicef report that children in the UK came
last of the 21 most developed countries for their quality of life.
Barbara Ellen argued that no survey of the views of young people in
Britain can be taken at all seriously because "British teenagers
have always loved nothing more than to pose, bitch, rebel, slag
everything and everyone off, and blow endless anti-establishment
raspberries." She went on, "it may be that it's the very restlessness of
British youth, its inbuilt disaffection (or, to call it by its technical
term, 'arsiness') that keeps our cultural heartbeat healthy and
racing, as it continues to be, in terms of everything from pop to comedy,
from art to fashion."
4. Q&A: Vulgar fractions
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Q. Some fractions were, maybe still are, called "vulgar" fractions.
I cannot think there is anything rude about putting a numerator
over a denominator, so why "vulgar"? [Andrew Purkiss]
A. This bothered me at school and I can't recall having been given
a satisfactory answer at the time. The problem lies in the changing
meaning of "vulgar". It comes from the Latin adjective "vulgaris"
that derives from "vulgus", the common people. This is also the
origin of "Vulgate", the Latin version of the Bible, which comes
from the closely related "vulgata", meaning "for the public" (it
was so, when it was written, in the fourth century AD).
"Vulgar" turned up first in English in the fourteenth century and
then referred to something that was in common or general use or
something customary or done as a matter of everyday practice. There
was nothing disapproving about it.
That old usage survived in a few fixed phrases. A couple that are
now archaic are "vulgar tongue", the language spoken by ordinary
people, not one full of expletives; another was "vulgar name", the
common name of a species, as opposed to its scientific one. And a
"vulgar fraction" is one based on ordinary or everyday arithmetic
as opposed to these highfalutin decimal thingies. Specifically it
refers to one in which two numbers (the numerator and denominator)
are placed above and below a horizontal line.
Over time, "vulgar" went down in the world, a shift suffered also
by "common". It moved from "in ordinary use", and "relating to the
ordinary people", to "commonplace"; by the seventeenth century it
had begun to assume our modern senses of "lacking sophistication or
good taste" and "making explicit and offensive reference to sex or
bodily functions".
5. Q&A: Under weigh
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Q. An office colleague of mine insisted on writing "a project got
under weigh" rather than "a project got under way", whenever he
described the start of some task. His explanation was that the
expression had a maritime beginning, along the lines of weighing
anchor to get a ship moving. I rather fancied the idea at the time,
but I suspect that his story is pure fiction. The next time I use
the expression, should I use "weigh" or "way"? [Paul Bondin]
A. According to the best current style manuals, definitely "way".
But your colleague has the ghostly support of generations of
writers. In fact, at one time, "under weigh" could be regarded as
the standard spelling.
What happened was that the Dutch, who were European masters of the
sea in the seventeenth century, gave us - among many other nautical
expressions - the term "onderweg", meaning "on the way". This
became naturalised as "under way" and is first recorded in English
around 1740, specifically as a maritime term (its broader meanings
didn't appear until the following century). Some over-clever
individuals connected with the sea almost immediately erroneously
linked it with the phrase "to weigh anchor". "Weigh" here is the
same word as the one for finding out how heavy an object is. Both
it and the anchor sense go back to the Old English verb, which
could mean "raise up". The link between the senses is the act of
raising an object on scales.
It's easy to find a myriad of examples of "under weigh" from the
best English authors in the following two centuries, such as
William Makepeace Thackeray, Captain Marryat, Washington Irving,
Thomas Carlyle, Herman Melville, Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens
("There were the bad odours of the town, and the rain and the
refuse in the kennels, and the faint lamps slung across the road,
and the huge Diligence, and its mountain of luggage, and its six
grey horses with their tails tied up, getting under weigh at the
coach office." - Little Dorrit).
It was still common as recently as the 1930s ("He felt her gaze
upon him, all the same, as he stood with his back to her attending
to the business of getting under weigh." - The Happy Return by C S
Forester, 1937) but "weigh" has dropped off almost to nothing now.
This paralleled another change, starting around the same time, in
which the two words began to be combined into a single adverb,
"underway" (though many style manuals still recommend it be written
as two words). It may be that the influence of other words ending
in "-way", especially "anyway", encouraged the shift in spelling
back to the original and in the process killed off a persistent
misunderstanding.
6. Sic!
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Pat Bitton found a worrying development in breathalyzer technology
in a local newspaper, the Eureka Reporter of Eureka, California:
"Dollison [a local Assistant District Attorney] said the IID -
which has a tube drivers must blow in - detects whether any alcohol
is present on the driver's breath. If so, the vehicle will not
ignite."
An online article at Fox Sports about the Daytona 500 was noted by
John Brunner as reporting a rare example of spontaneous combustion:
"All hell broke loose behind the Nos. 01 and 29 as sparks flew,
sheet metal mangled and Clint Bowyer landed on the roof of his car
before flipping over and bursting into flames."
Our friends the sub-editors of the BBC News Web site have been at
it again it would seem, though in one sense they are not alone. An
item appeared on 14 February under the headline "Is sex on a plane
legal?": "Janet Jackson and Richard Branson are self-confessed
members of the 'Mile-High Club' and Ralph Fiennes may have joined
them." Vivienne Smith suggests that really would be a story. Yes, a
"three in a bed romp", as the News of the World would headline it.
Speaking of such matters, Pete Jones found this revealing comment
in top chef Heston Blumenthal's biography, at www.fatduck.co.uk:
"Towards the end of 2001, I opened a brassiere in Bray Marina on
the side of the Thames." Telling us more than we need to know?
We shouldn't hurry to make fun of a typing error made in the rush
to meet a deadline. However, it's particularly unfortunate, not to
say relevant to this newsletter, that the British MP Frank Field
sent out a press release on Wednesday welcoming the proposal that
immigrants to the UK should learn English before they arrive. It
began "Endlsigh For Immigrants Is Common Sense".
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