World Wide Words -- 02 Aug 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 1 15:27:37 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 598 Saturday 2 August 2008
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Truepenny.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Tom.
5. Q&A: Waddle.
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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ERRORS, SCHMERRORS It was appropriate, following an issue in which
I mentioned laws relating to the perils of correcting others, that
the first message I should receive last Saturday consisted of the
pithy text, "Blind man's buff? Muphry's Law? Just two after a quick
scan ... Do you need a copyeditor?" "Blind man's buff" is the older
and still usual British term for what is often called "blind man's
bluff" in the US ("buff" is short for "buffet", a blow - the game
was once much rougher than it is nowadays). And "Muphry" was, of
course, correct, as a quick Google will show. The misspelling was
the deliberate act of the creator of the "law", not me. Several
more messages in similar vein followed. Then Michael Grounds noted
from Australia that I'd written "a e-mail", querying gently whether
this might be a typo or else "some subtle modern usage I haven't
caught up with?" Congratulations, Mr Grounds, your correction was
the first correct correction.
MORE LAWS Chips MacKinolty followed up from Australia: "There is a
corollary to Muphry's Law, and I write with some experience as an
advisor to the local education minister: 'All policy documents or
media releases on education or literacy contain spelling and
grammatical errors'!" Naomi Bloom contributed a further example of
the type: "Evans's Law is one of my favourites: 'Nothing, not love,
not greed, not passion or hatred, is stronger than a writer's need
to change another writer's copy.'" Peter Geldart e-mailed, "Your
piece on laws reminds me of a cartoon I saw years ago of a beggar
holding out his hat, with a sign saying 'Unemployed poofreader'."
GRAWLIX Judith Blair pointed me to discussions, a couple of years
old now, of cartoonists' typographical usages over at the Language
Log, which includes a fine example of what a contributor calls a
meta-commentary on the convention of obscuring obscenities through
non-alphabetical characters (go via http://wwwords.org?OBSE, where
they are called "obscenicons"). A link takes you to a Mother Goose
& Grimm cartoon of like type (clicking on http://wwwords.org?OBSF
will take you there direct).
PHAROLOGY Neil Paknadel commented, "I'm sure I won't be the only
one to suggest that 'the late Mr Purdy' is likely to have known not
only of the original Pharos, but also that other European languages
use the term generically to mean 'lighthouse'. Examples are French
'phare' (in use since 1546, my Petit Robert dictionary tells me),
Italian & Spanish 'faro', and indeed 'pharos' itself, still in
generic use in modern Greek. Incidentally, the first three of those
languages now also use the word to mean a vehicle's headlight."
ADDITIONALISED WORDS Russ Willey contributes a one-minute rant:
"Prompted by Garth Summers's disgust with the word 'additionalise',
and yours with the concept of 'evolutionisation', might I voice my
own pet hate of the moment? Google's photo editing software Picasa,
which seems to be catching on fast, offers numerous one-click ways
to improve the look of a digital image. One of the buttons warms
the colours. But is it labelled 'warm'? No, it's the 'warmify'
button. Grrr, as they say." A reader whom I know only as Columbine
writes, "By far the commonest example of this obfuscatory newspeak
in the USA is 'incentivize', used by business-school types who
can't remember 'motivate'. Many are now trying to ameliorate this
gratuitous hypersyllabification by shortening it to 'incent,' which
I find even more incendiary!"
2. Weird Words: Truepenny /'tru:peni/
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An honest or trustworthy person.
Though it appeared earlier, this word is best remembered because it
features in Hamlet, in the scene in which his father's ghost tells
Hamlet of his murder and asks him to avenge it. When Marcellus and
Horatio enter, the ghost cries from the cellar below for them to
swear that they will never divulge what Hamlet is about to tell
them. Hamlet shouts to his father, "Art thou there, truepenny?".
It was a term of affection, comparing a man to a genuine coin. This
may strike us today as not being important, when pennies are mere
tokens made of base metal, but in Shakespeare's day, pennies were
silver and comparatively valuable. Counterfeiting was rife.
The word has never been common. Sometimes it appears as a direct
quote of Hamlet's words, as a humorous way of asking "who's there?"
(as in Colin Wilson's Ritual in the Dark of 1976: "He pulled her
shoulders back on to the bed, and kissed her. There was a heavy
thump from overhead. Sorme looked at the ceiling, saying: Are you
there, truepenny?").
At one time, attempts were made to derive it from Greek "trupanon",
to bore or perforate; E Cobham Brewer in early editions of his
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, argued this and commented that it
was, "an excellent word to apply to a ghost 'boring through the
cellarage' to get to the place of purgatory before cock-crow."
3. Recently noted
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NUKED THE FRIDGE Several newspapers columns monitoring language
change have reported on this phrase in the past month, the first
being the Guardian's media blog, MediaMonkey, on 13 June and the
most recent the New York Times last Monday. This piece was under
the headline "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Absurdly Implausible
Excess", which gives those who haven't seen the latest film in the
Indiana Jones franchise - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the
Crystal Skull - the clue to its origin. I haven't seen the film
either, but I'm told there's a scene near the start in which the
hero avoids being killed by a nuclear explosion by hiding inside a
kitchen refrigerator, which is hurled several miles through the
air. This is so ridiculously funny and incredible that you can't
suspend your disbelief for the rest of the film. The New York Times
says "nuke the fridge" means "to introduce a wildly implausible
element to a once-respected franchise, or more generally, to signal
the abandonment of past standards of quality." It is the exact
filmic equivalent of television's "jump the shark", which is now
pretty much mainstream in circles that discuss the media and which
derives from a 1980s US television show called Happy Days in which
"the Fonz" does jump a shark while water-skiing, signalling the
show's rapid decline.
4. Q&A: Tom
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Q. Very often, while watching British TV crime series on TV, one
hears the word "tom" used to refer to a (female) prostitute. Why
should this be. A tom-cat, after all, is male. Is it rhyming slang?
[Mike Kennedy]
A. It seems not to be.
Tom, the common short form for the given name Thomas, has since
late Middle English been a generic name for a man, as in tomfool,
tomboy (a girl who behaves more like a boy), peeping tom, and Tom,
Dick, and Harry. The clue to how it became connected with a woman
may lie in an old bit of Australian slang, "tom-tart", recorded
since 1882. This had no implication of vice at the time, being one
of the many mildly dismissive male terms that have been around at
various times for a girl friend or sweetheart, like "donah",
"sheila" or "dinah". It looks as though it was formed from "Tom's
tart", a generic name for a female companion.
Though "tart" is now an insulting term for a promiscuous woman, it
was originally a short form of "sweetheart" and was a compliment.
John Camden Hotten defined it in his 1864 slang dictionary as "a
term of approval applied by the London lower orders to a young
woman for whom some affection is felt. The expression is not
generally employed by the young men, unless the female is in 'her
best'." Hence the subsidiary meaning today of "tart" as being an
overdressed woman; it also accounts for the British verb "to tart
up", to dress or make oneself up in order to look attractive or
eye-catching, or more generally to decorate or improve the look of
something.
Though the only recorded examples of "tom-tart" are Australian, our
best guess is that it was taken there by emigrants who had learned
it in England. In time, "tom-tart" was abbreviated to just "tom",
both in Australia and in Britain, and went seriously downhill to
become a deeply derogatory description.
Incidentally, Louis E Jackson and C R Hellyer, in A Vocabulary of
Criminal Slang of 1914, said that a tommy was a prostitute; this is
often cited in support of a derivation from the male name. This may
have been a temporary form, based on "tom" or "tom-tart". But it is
much more likely that it has no bearing at all on the evolution of
the English slang term, since the book was complied in the US
(Hellyer was a detective in Portland, Oregon).
5. Q&A: Waddle
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Q. What is the origin of the word "waddle"? I have recently read
about the famous Confederate captain, James Waddell, who commanded
the CSS Shenandoah and apparently had only one leg and weighed
around 200lbs. This made me wonder if it was a corruption of his
name referring to his gait, although I doubt it. [Phil Young]
A. It's a neat guess but you're right to doubt this as the origin.
There's no connection at all and the verb "waddle" is known from
about three centuries before Captain Wadddell's time.
The first known user is our old friend William Shakespeare, in his
play Romeo and Juliet of 1592, in a speech which Juliet's nurse is
trying to explain in an outpouring of muddled exposition that her
charge is not yet fourteen, along the way pretty much detailing
Juliet's entire early history. A brief extract from her waterfall
of words: "And since that time it is eleven years, for then she
could stand alone. nay, by th'rood, she could have run and waddled
all about".
"Waddle" is most often used of ducks and geese and other wading
birds, which is appropriate, since it is an extension of "wade" by
adding the "-le" ending that indicates an action continually or
regularly taken, what grammarians call a frequentive. In that, it
joins a long list that includes "crackle", "crumple", "dazzle",
"hobble", "niggle", "paddle", "sparkle", "topple" and "wriggle".
6. Sic!
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Richard Glasson quotes from an article that appeared in the Sydney
Daily Telegraph on 25 July about the run-down state of the commuter
railway system: "Despite being earmarked for replacement years ago,
early morning commuters are forced to ride on old L-set, K-set and
S-set carriages." Obsolete commuters, the curse of any rail system.
Phil Young found a headline on the Web site of Australia's Channel
9 News that suggests technology has already outsmarted us: "Solar
panel to hear means test objection". It also appeared on the site
of the Brisbane Times, but both have since changed to the anodyne
"Union slams solar panel means test".
"The building in which my physiotherapists have their premises," e-
mailed Richard Levy last Saturday, "is being refurbished. They have
therefore put up a notice outside: 'The Hampstead Physiotherapy
Practice is open as usual. Apologies for any inconvenience'."
On 22 July David Hay found an article on the BBC news site about
network security problems, which is still there: "These two cases
highlight a major problem facing the computing industry, one that
goes back many years and is still far from being unresolved." Is
that good news, then?
Mike James saw a sign on the door of a supermarket in the suburbs
of Washington, DC: "Perishable Manager". He hopes that the office
is thoroughly chilled.
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