World Wide Words -- 19 May 07
Michael Quinion
michael.quinion at GMAIL.COM
Fri May 18 16:57:51 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 540 Saturday 19 May 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/fykg.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Vomitorium.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Apostrophes.
5. 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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SIC! One item last week amused those American readers for whom a
outdoor display of pot plants would be more likely to attract the
attention of the law than of potential purchasers of a house. I
introduced "pot plants" in a summary of part of the item without
thinking of cannabis implications - it's so commonplace a phrase in
the UK that it didn't occur to me. Those who responded suggested
that "potted plants" would have been better. In my version of the
language, I pot plants, but once they have been potted, they become
pot plants, not potted plants. Meat and shrimps can be potted, as
can histories, but not plants (though the phrase is by no means
unknown in the UK).
The poor translation quoted in the same section last time ("if the
car dash to piecesed, and should pass by the per son check or
profession personnel maintain the rear can continue to use") was
re-translated from the Chinese by several helpful readers. The
consensus is that it would be more idiomatically rendered as: "if
the car is badly damaged, it should be inspected and repaired by an
adult or a qualified technician before using it again." Why didn't
I think of that? Though this will not become a regular feature of
the newsletter, as making fun of poor translations quickly palls, I
can't resist quoting from a leaflet for a child's scooter that John
Greig bought in Perth in 2002: "No guaranty these: 1. the disstria
and derogate from the misdaventures; 2. normal frazzle." I'm glad
to say I've never suffered from disstria, surely an unpleasant
condition, but frazzle is undoubtedly a normal part of my life.
BOUGHT VERSUS BROUGHT Firm rebuttals arrived from New Zealand in
response to the comment from a reader last week that "brought" for
"bought" was commonplace in that country. Richard Bentley wrote:
"The misuse is not uncommon, but to suggest that it's used 'almost
exclusively' is quite incorrect in my experience." Russell McMahon
wrote to agree, "Although we have friends and acquaintances from a
wide cross section of backgrounds, it's not something that I or my
wife hear very often here." On the other hand, Christine
Shuttleworth wrote on Monday to say she had just received a message
from friends in New Zealand: "Just wanted to let you know, that we
brought a house across the road from us on Sunday". She felt this
must have been a major operation.
TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION Technology advances quickly and so does
its language, sometimes leaving aged lexicographers like me panting
in its wake. Almost as soon as I'd written about this arcane term
two weeks ago, several British banks announced that they were about
to introduce devices to improve the security of online transactions
under the more friendly-sounding name of "chip and pin at home".
I've updated my piece (http://quinion.com?TWCN) to reflect this.
2. Weird Words: Vomitorium
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An access passage in a Roman theatre.
Several decades ago, I was involved with a theatre in west London
that had been built in the round. The theatre chairman delighted in
referring to the access ways for patrons, some in passages under
the seating, as the vomitoria, to the confusion and mild disgust of
some patrons.
The disgust might merely have been due to the form of the word, but
there has also long been an erroneous belief about the purpose of a
Roman vomitorium. A classic example appeared in a totally forgotten
American publication for children, Evening Round-Up by Col William
C Hunter, dated 1915:
The residents of Pompeii had fine plumbing, baths and
luxuries. They had a place called a vomitorium. The old
Roman sports were gluttons; they stuffed themselves, then
went to the vomitorium and threw up so they could eat more.
This is most definitely not true. H Rider Haggard, who had earlier
written King Solomon's Mines and She, got it exactly right in his
book Pearl-Maiden of 1901, about the fall of Jerusalem:
Beyond lay the broad passage of the vomitorium. They
gained it, and in an instant were mixed with the thousands
who sought to escape the panic.
There's some excuse for the error. Latin "vomitorium" also referred
to an emetic and "vomere" meant to vomit (and indeed is the source
of our English word, via French); the figurative idea of violently
issuing forth gave rise to its application to an exit.
The theatre world continues to keep the word alive in the sense
that Romans would have understood.
3. Recently noted
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BLAGGING I've recently been watching episodes of a famous 1970s
ITV police series called The Sweeney, whose name is rhyming slang:
Sweeney Todd (the demon barber of Fleet Street) = Flying Squad, the
Metropolitan Police elite quick-response major-crime squad, now
officially named the Central Robbery Squad). The term "blag" is
used in episodes to mean a violent robbery or raid, a slang term
that dates from the 1880s. But there were then - still are - two
senses of "blag" in British English, the other meaning to lie or to
use clever talk to obtain something, a verb recorded from the
1930s. Both senses are variations on the idea of theft, though they
have separate origins. The first may derive from an abbreviation of
the word "blackguard" (often pronounced "blaggard"); it's more than
likely that the second is from French "blaguer", to tell lies, as
the word has at times been spelled "blague". A version of the
second sense has been appearing in the British media recently. It
refers to what is sardonically called "social engineering": getting
passwords, personal details and confidential information over the
phone from unsuspecting workers in a government department or
business through a persuasive manner coupled with inside knowledge.
The trick has long been used by private investigators working for
debt collectors, national newspapers and criminals. A man was
imprisoned recently for blagging civil servants into giving him the
home addresses of 250 people.
NEET You might be a neet, though you would have to be in the UK to
be officially called one. It's a dehumanising bureaucratic acronym
for young people, aged 16-24, who are "Not in Education, Employment
or Training", that is, unemployed. The term dates from 2005. The
current estimate is that there are 1.3 million neets in the UK.
4. Q&A: Apostrophes
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Q. I was watching Never Mind The Full Stops on BBC4 recently, in
which an altercation broke out between Julian Fellowes and one of
the panellists over spelling. Was it "mind your ps and qs" or "mind
your p's and q's"? When the programme ended I logged on to World
Wide Words for your views. It was as usual very interesting. But as
a struggling apostrophe user I was puzzled when you wrote "mind
your please's and thank-you's". Are you not simply talking about
the plural of "please" and "thank-you", which surely require no
apostrophes? What have I missed? [Michael Wilson]
A. Your puzzlement is understandable. Everybody gets confused these
days about when to use the apostrophe, never more so than in this
situation. It doesn't help that style guides differ somewhat in
their advice, that the rules are changing, and that, as so often,
US usage is more conservative than in some other countries.
The older rule was that apostrophes were used to form the plurals
of letters of the alphabet ("you have too few s's in Mississippi"),
of abbreviations and numerals ("none of the MP's voted for the
measure"; "he was stoned for most of the 1960's"), and in those
situations in which the word was being referred to as a word rather
than being used normally ("if if's and an's were pots and pans!").
Nowadays, it's normal to omit the apostrophe when we make plurals
of abbreviations and numerals ("both the CPUs overheated"; "married
by their early 20s"). That the superfluous marks are often recycled
to make plurals ("lettuce's and cucumber's") is just one of those
little ironies of usage.
But opinions differ on what to do with words being referred to as
words without regard to their usual meaning. Take the phrase "do's
and don'ts". Some style guides - such as the Oxford Style Guide -
suggest writing it as "dos and don'ts" and that's how it usually
turns up in British sources. But it also often appears with the
apostrophes - this is the advice in some books (we may ignore Lynne
Truss's suggestion in Eats, Shoots & Leaves that it should be "do's
and don't's"; it's logical, but it's also awfully ugly). There's
less argument over words that have become part of fixed phrases
("whys and wherefores", "oohs and ahs", "ins and outs") with the
consensus being that apostrophes are otiose here. It's also still
standard for single letters of the alphabet to be made into plurals
with apostrophes; Dr Burchfield's advice in the third edition of
Fowler's Modern English Usage is to retain them in situations in
which leaving them out might lead to confusion ("dot your i's and
cross your t's"; "there are three i's in 'inimical'"; "mind your
p's and q's").
This leaves the situation you query. Should the phrase be written
as "mind your please's and thank-you's" or "mind your pleases and
thank-yous"? The advice is inconsistent, though the style guides
mostly say that the version with apostrophes is better. The piece
you're quoting was written a decade ago and my gut feeling is that
these days I'd prefer to leave the apostrophes out, such is the
speed of change (I'd now rewrite another of Lynne Truss's examples
without the fly specks as "Are there too many ands and buts at the
beginnings of sentences these days?").
The apostrophe still also appears in phrases like "he sent brief
thank-you's to his teammates", though by a clear margin more often
in US usage than British. That case is much more clear-cut, since
"thank-you" is a elliptical form - which has been known since the
end of the eighteenth century - for a letter or other expression of
thanks ("did you send her a thank-you?"), not a word that's being
commented on, so it's an ordinary noun that should take a standard
plural (Hannah Poole wrote in the Guardian in November 2006: "I
leave a trail of hellos and goodbyes and thank-yous wherever I
go"). Americans may remain unconvinced that this is quite the done
thing, despite "thank-yous" having a long history in that country
(I've found it as far back as the 1860s).
The shift is towards leaving out the punctuation and letting the
context determine whether - for example - you mean the verb "is" or
the letter plural "i's". However, it will be a while yet before it
becomes accepted by everyone.
5. Sic!
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Nigel Ross sent a photograph - viewable in the online version of
this newsletter - of a sign over one section of the Sainsbury's
supermarket in Stockton-on-Tees: "free from foods". He worked out
that as it was next to the health-food section, it would make more
sense if there were a hyphen in it. The shelves actually contain
"free-from" foods that are "free from" gluten and the like. The
term - albeit with a hyphen or quotes - is common in the food
business.
"As a professional typesetter of several decades' standing in the
printing industry," wrote Nancy Klee, "I figure I've seen it all.
Today, I spotted a new eggcorn that I think you and your readers
would appreciate. The text came from a hotel in Japanese ownership.
It was a press handout announcing a number of newly renovated and
updated rooms. They were also quite proud of some added amenities
provided for each guest in these new rooms, including a high-end
Asian brand of 'toilet trees'. My internal visual on this was, I
must say, quite stunning."
Ask not for whom the eggcorns toll ... Robb Hoover visited the Web
site of the American football team the Green Bay Packers and read
that "32 rolls of Kentucky bluegrass sod" were to be laid and that
"Each roll weighs between 1,200 and 1,300 pounds, which calculates
to half a million pounds of sod all-tolled." (That reads strangely
to me for a second reason: in Britain we don't use "sod" in this
sense, less still "sod farms", also mentioned; we call it turf.)
John Cray recently saw a sign at a Chinese Restaurant in Beverly,
Massachusetts. It was posted next to an urn full of hot water and
read, "Please avoid boiling water and your children." He wasn't
sure whether he was being asked to avoid boiling his children, or
just to avoid them.
One of those "I know what the writer meant but it could have been
better expressed" moments occurred in the Society supplement of the
Guardian last Wednesday, as Gideon Koch noted: "In an effort to
intervene as early as possible in troubled families, first-time
mothers identified just 16 weeks after conception will be given
intensive weekly support from midwives and health visitors until
the unborn child reaches two years old." So that's a two-year-old
unborn child that had been identified as a first-time mother only
16 weeks after conception, then?
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