World Wide Words -- 30 Aug 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 29 09:00:16 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 602 Saturday 30 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: Gossypiboma.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Indexes versus indices.
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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DANDIPRAT Peter Weinrich remarked, following last week's Weird
Word article, "Do I assume you are not a listener to twentieth-
century classical music? Understandable in light of all your other
labours, but surely the most frequent use of the word is in Malcolm
Arnold's comedy overture 'Beckus the Dandipratt'." Thanks to all
the other classical music fans who also mentioned the piece. David
Duncan elaborated, "To Arnold a dandipratt meant something like an
urchin. He got the idea while on holiday in Cornwall when a small
boy made friends with him on the beach. As you might expect, the
music is brilliantly orchestrated, tuneful and cheeky."
2. Weird Words: Gossypiboma
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A surgical sponge left within a patient after an operation.
Ammon Shea, who spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary
from cover to cover and wrote about it in his book Reading the OED,
commented on this word in a piece on the OUPBlog. He had been told
about it by a surgeon, who called it "a memento that we surgeons
sometimes accidentally leave behind to commemorate our presence in
some poor patient's abdomen."
It's worrying that the condition happens often enough that surgeons
have found it necessary to create a word for it (it's fairly common
in specialist articles and books). It's even more worrying that two
other terms exist to describe cotton or synthetic fibre gauze left
in error in a patient: "textiloma" and "cottonoid".
In both subject and appearance, "gossypiboma" surely fits anybody's
definition of a weird word. Its strange look comes from its being
an amalgam of words from two languages: Latin "gossypium", cotton,
and Swahili "boma", a place of concealment. This leads - surely not
by accident - to a word seeming to contain the ending "-oma" that
denotes a tumour or other abnormal growth (as in carcinoma or
lymphoma), since such growths can develop around alien material
left in the body.
"Gossypiboma" was said in a book on surgery in 2004 to have been
coined in an article of 1994 by A M Patel and others. They may well
have done so, since I've not found an earlier example.
I've no idea how surgeons say it [Julane Marx suggests "malpractice
lawsuit"] but with luck one will be able to tell me.
3. Recently noted
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BOFFINATED Reader Jim Delton asked about this word, which he had
seen used in a couple of places online but for which he couldn't
find a definition. It was new to me, too, but examples suggest it
derives from "boffin", in the sense of a person with knowledge or a
skill considered to be complex, arcane, and difficult; this is a
World War Two British term for a research scientist, of unknown
origin. "Boffinated" seems to be a disparaging reference to matters
variously considered swottishly or boringly academic. One reference
is to "Harry Potter's boffinated sidekick Hermione". In The End of
Innocence: Photographs from the Decades That Defined Pop, dated
1997, there's a reference to musicians who "wore long white coats
like boffinated B-movie scientists". The earliest reference I can
find is from way back in 1969, in Kathleen Nott's book A Soul in
the Quad: The Use of Language in Philosophy and Literature.
PRACADEMIC A newspaper report about Huddersfield University used
this word to describe its new degrees in enterprise development.
That suggested the origin, a blend of "practical" and "academic",
and the meaning - somebody experienced in both theory and practice.
The degree course combines a theoretical business framework with
the practical experience of starting and running a business. The
earliest example I can find is in an advertisement for a course at
a Bible college in California in 1973, which combines the study of
theology with hands-on experience in a local church.
DARK AND STORMY, AGAIN That's not a weather report, though it's
close enough to the conditions in your editor's home town this
week. It's a hint that I'm about to write of the results of the
26th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, staged by the San Jose
State University, whose title is taken from the opening words of
that author's Paul Clifford of 1830: "It was a dark and stormy
night". Each year, contestants aim to provide the best parody of
various genres. The winner was Garrison Spik:
Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning
rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7,
steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling
warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped
"Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."
But I much prefer the runner-up myself:
"Hmm ..." thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the
veranda past the bright white patio to the cerulean sea
beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where
splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a
thousand tiny bells, where great gray whales bellowed and
the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of sequins on the
flyfish's bow ties, "time to get my meds checked."
4. Q&A: Indexes versus indices
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Q. I wish you wouldn't spell the plural of "index" as "indexes" in
your side banner! We're being dragged screaming into the American
version of English. [Bert Forage, Australia; related questions came
from Mark Smith and David Parks]
A. "Index" is one of those oddball words with two different plurals
in English. Since it's from Latin, English copied the Latin one at
first, making "indices". As with a lot of other Latin plurals, the
standard English way of marking the plural, using "-s" or "-es" has
progressively been taking over. Generally speaking, we now prefer
"crematoriums" to the Latin "crematoria", "miasmas" to "miasmata",
"forums" to "fora", and "referendums" to "referenda", though the
Latin plurals are still about and regularly used by some writers.
Since Latin is so little taught these days, it's getting difficult
to remember some of these irregular plurals: "apices" (of "apex"),
"corpora" (of "corpus"), "helices" (of "helix"), "matrices" (of
"matrix"), and many others.
"Index" is a good example of a small subgroup in which both plurals
are alive and well but in which usage has separated their senses.
Another is "appendix", in which "appendices" refers to books but
"appendixes" to bodily organs.
"Indices" has survived in scientific work, especially mathematics.
When "index" refers to a number or symbol, such as an exponent -
the superscript figure 2 to indicate a number is to be squared, for
example - it has the Latin plural. Statisticians also talk about
indices when they mean figures comparing a value to a standard, so
that "retail price index" turns into "retail price indices" in the
plural. An example appeared in the Guardian on 12 November 2007:
"The figures are for property sales actually completed during the
month, which means they lag behind other price indices." Despite
Bryan Garner's comment in his Modern American Usage that "indices"
is pretentious and highfalutin, this technical plural form is well
established and unlikely to fall out of use any time soon.
But it's the only situation in which it's found. The usual plural
is "indexes", which first appeared in the seventeenth century. If
you're talking about several of the sort of indexes to be found in
books, for example, that's the right one to use. Since my indexes
are the book sort - a list of pointers that show where relevant
content may be found - that's the right spelling.
By the way, people sometimes think "indices" is an English plural
and so make a singular noun "indice" from it ("apice" and "vertice"
are also very occasionally seen). Examples of "indice" can be found
going back a century or more, not always in uneducated writing. A
note by Charles Doyle appeared in the Winter 1979 issue of American
Speech about it: "At a recent academic gathering, a literary savant
began his speech with a quotation that spoke of certain indices.
Thereafter, at least a dozen times, the speaker referred to this or
that indice (ending like jaundice)." It most recently appeared in
the Washington Post on 22 August 2008: "Yet as an indice of some of
the lines of attack that the McCain camp is employing it is of
great interest." Thus does language change ...
5. Sic!
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Following up my piece on "lukewarm" in the last issue, John Causer
sent over a copy of the menu at the Hotel Sirmione, which is at the
southern end of Lake Garda, not far from Verona. One dish was "Foie
gras terrine with porto wine served on a salad bouquet with
pukewarm sweet bread". He says it was excellent.
Jim McLoughlin forwarded a wedding announcement from the Houston
Chronicle of 24 August 2008: "Amber was escorted by her father
wearing a strapless silk wedding gown designed by Marianne Lanting
carrying a tropical floral bouquet." Quick question: which of the
three of them was holding the flowers?
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