World Wide Words -- 17 Nov 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 16 17:15:44 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 562 Saturday 17 November 2007
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Turns of Phrase: Knork.
2. Weird Words: Ceraunograph.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Marylebone Stage.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Turns of Phrase: Knork
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It's a combination knife and fork, whose integration has led to the
creation of this infelicitous term, surely the greatest barrier to
its adoption (though the name of the combined spoon and fork, the
spork, is almost equally off-putting). The term suddenly appeared
all over the British press during October and early November 2007
as the result of a survey of our eating habits by the supermarket
chain Sainsbury's. Because meals are now so informal, often eaten
on the sofa in front of the television, traditional cutlery is too
much hassle. The survey reported that 11% of 18- to 34-year-olds
did away with knives and used a fork as an all-in-one eating tool.
The survey called this a knork, but it's merely an improvised tool,
not a true knork. The real one is an American invention of 2003 by
a young entrepreneur named Mike Miller, whose UK sales prospects
have had a wonderful PR boost as a result of the survey. His knork
is of stainless-steel, with an enlarged handle for gripping and
outer tines bevelled into a curved shape to help it cut foods. The
word is, of course, said with the initial "k" silent, as in
"knife".
* York Press, 12 Nov. 2007: People - and when I say "people", I
actually mean idiots like me in the media - are already claiming
that the knork will "destroy divisive cutlery hierarchies and erode
social distinctions" which, I think, means that us commoners won't
feel like proper berks anymore when we don't know our shrimp fork
from a tuning fork at dinner parties.
* Scotland on Sunday, 27 Oct. 2007: Just 19% of the population now
use a knife, fork and spoon at dinner time, with many opting for a
"knork" - a fork that, transferred to the right hand, doubles as a
knife, as they balance plates on their knees in front of the
television.
2. Weird Words: Ceraunograph /s@'rQnogrA:f/ (*)
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A lightning recorder.
A ceraunograph detects lightning strikes through the radio waves
they give off. The earliest reference I've found to this device
says that it was invented in the late 1890s by the Jesuit Father
Frederick Odenbach of St Ignatius College in Cleveland, Ohio.
He spelled the word with an initial "c", but you may also come
across the spelling "keraunograph", which reflects the classical
Greek term it came from. The first part is from "keraunos", thunder
or thunderbolt (as opposed to "bronte", thunder, which turns up in
brontosaurus or thunder lizard, the dinosaur now properly called
apatosaurus). "Keraunos" was taken over into Latin and spelled with
a "c" instead, always a hard "k" sound then. When it was brought
into English as a word forming agent, spelled in the Latin way, it
was said as though it began with an "s" instead.
Words beginning in "kerauno-" or "cerauno-" are extremely rare. If
you have keraunophobia, you have a fear of thunderstorms, though as
people are more scared by the sound of thunder than by the storm
itself, the alternative "brontophobia" would be better; the OED
says that a ceraunoscope is a machine for producing stage-thunder,
from a Greek word meaning an apparatus used by the ancients in
their mysteries. A ceraunite is a thunderstone or thunderbolt.
"Ceraunograph" has also been used for a figure or picture that has
been impressed by lightning upon the human body or elsewhere.
(*) For a guide to pronunciation, see http://wwords.org?PRON .
3. Recently noted
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LOCAVORE A faint feeling that I was being followed came upon me on
Monday when I learned that the New Oxford American Dictionary had
chosen "locavore" as its Word of the Year 2007. After all, it was
only in September that it featured here as a Turns of Phrase item.
It's on the Web site at http://wwwords.org?LOCA, which saves me
from having to give you all the details again. The press release
adds the information that the word was coined in 2005 by a group of
four women in San Francisco; it notes that "The choice reflects an
ongoing shift in environmental and ecological awareness over the
last several years. Lexicographers at Oxford University Press have
observed that this social transformation is having a noticeable
effect on the English language." Among the listed runners-up are
"cloudware", online applications such as Web mail that are powered
by massive data storage facilities, often called "cloud servers";
"previvor", a person who has not been diagnosed with cancer but has
survived a genetic predisposition for it; and "upcycling", the
transformation of waste materials into something more useful or
valuable.
UNBRICK A word that might be in the list of words of the year is
"brick", which has become common in relation to the Apple iPhone.
Because the iPhone is tied to one telephone network, programmers
have found ways of unlocking it so it can be used with the network
they want. This has annoyed Apple, which gets a slice of the income
from the phone contracts. A recent upgrade to the software in the
iPhone stopped hacked phones from being used with rival networks
and rendered them useless. In the jargon, Apple "bricked" it - made
it about as useful as a brick (another term for a disabled iPhone
that's frequently seen is "iBrick"). "Brick" has also been applied
to the Apple iPod Touch, which hackers rendered capable of running
third-party applications. Its inverse, "unbrick", has started to
appear for the original hacking exploits, as in this warning from
Apple-Touch.com on 7 November: "If you do install the update and in
result get a bricked iPod Touch, it will be rendered useless until
a third-party company will release a program to unbrick it."
TAKE A MOMENT TO READ THIS Over on the A Word A Day list, William
Abbott wrote in response to "aliterate" (a person who can read but
chooses not to), the featured word on 6 November: "Maybe I am an
achronoliterate (I made that up), someone who does not have enough
time to read everything that he wants to read!" I do hope that it
catches on, as it exactly fits our cash-rich, time-poor world.
4. Q&A: Marylebone Stage
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Q. For years, I was curious about the line 'So I will take the
Marley Bone Coach / And whistle down the wind' in the song Whistle
Down The Wind by Tom Waits. Later, I discovered that Marylebone was
an area in central London. Then I found online: 'I can't grade
papers because the campus mail's web interface appears to have come
a cropper, gone tits up, ridden the Marylebone Coach, and other
unlikely things.' So, apparently it's a slang expression for dying,
though I don't know how common it is in England, nor its origin.
Can you help? [Dave Aton]
A. Many people have queried this line but to no useful effect. The
other reference you quoted (which seems to be the only one of its
kind online that's other than literal, according to Google, and of
which my fairly wide-ranging literature search throws up no other
example) is presumably an allusion to the song. There was no slang
expression "Marley Bone Coach" or "Marylebone Coach" that I can
find. There was, however, "Marylebone stage", where "stage" refers
to a stagecoach. Tom Waits may have had this in mind. Your asking
the question gives me an opportunity to expatiate on this item of
totally defunct British slang.
You're right about Marylebone being an area of London, most famous
for being the titular home of the Marylebone Cricket Club - better
known by its initials MCC - formerly the governing body of English
cricket. "Marylebone" is an abbreviation of its 14th century name,
St Mary-by-the-Bourne, where the bourn is the Tyburn stream, which
gave its name to the infamous gallows in the parish. It is said as
"MARRY-le-bone", an attempted clarification which may confuse those
Americans who say "Mary", "marry" and "merry" all the same way.
"Marylebone stage" meant to go on foot. It appears in a novel by
Mary Elizabeth Braddon called Charlotte's Inheritance that came out
in 1868: "'The cabmen are trying it on, anyhow, just now,' thought
Mr Sheldon; 'but I don't think they'll try it on with me. And if
they do, there's the Marylebone stage. I'm not afraid of a five-
mile walk.'" There was indeed a stagecoach which ran (staggered
would be a better term - a contemporary writer said it "dragged
tediously") the four miles from Marylebone to the City of London,
taking two and a half hours to get there and three hours to come
back, this duration being partly accounted for by the extremely bad
roads of the period but mainly by an unnecessarily long stop at an
inn along the way. The earliest reference I can find to it is in a
court case at the Old Bailey in 1822, in which a young man was
found guilty of stealing two handkerchiefs from a passenger.
It was quicker to walk, which may have been part of the allusion,
since "Marylebone stage" was itself a joke based on, or perhaps a
corruption of, of the older expression "marrowbone stage", known
from the 1820s. Here, "marrowbone" is a figurative term meaning the
shinbones, hence the legs. It has exactly the same meaning as
Shanks's pony or Shanks's mare (http://wwwords.org?SHAN). (There
was also the more obvious "going by Walkers' bus", which Dr Cobham
Brewer mentions in early editions of his Dictionary of Phrase and
Fable.) The first two expressions are equated in a book by George
Augustus Sala with the title Twice Around the Clock, dated 1859:
"The humbler conveyances known as 'Shanks's mare', and the
'Marrowbone stage' - in more refined language, walking."
5. Sic!
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On 11 November, the Sydney Morning Herald had a serious problem
with its syntax: "The turnaround in Coles supermarkets could take
up to five years as Wesfarmers seeks to revive the workplace and
management culture and grapple with structural issues. Meanwhile,
Wesfarmers will be working on reducing costs, store cleanliness and
availability of product." Thanks to Anthony Douglas for that.
The Daily News, Halifax, Nova Scotia, carried the following banner
headline to an article: "Man touches himself in south end". You may
easily work out what the story was about (the full piece is online
via http://wwwords.org?STHD if you want details). It may be worth
noting, however, as David Carr points out, that "south-end" is an
area of Halifax, not a previously unknown anatomical term.
Back in Australia, ABC News online had a cricket story about the
first test between Sri Lanka and Australia: "The dogged Vandort had
been the pillar of a resolved Sri Lankan showing before Stuart
MacGill, who was struggling to grip a wet ball, ripped a viscous
leg-break to bowl the left-hander for 82." Dan Stalker reckons the
Sri Lankans were batting on a sticky wicket.
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