World Wide Words -- 19 Jan 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 18 06:51:52 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 571 Saturday 19 January 2008
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Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 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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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Cad.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Reticule.
5. Q&A: Naff.
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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SAFE HARBOUR/HAVEN Several members of the legal profession in the
US pointed out that "safe harbor" is a term of art, which refers to
some procedure in a law or regulation that affords protection from
liability or penalty if followed. Irving S Schloss noted, "I do not
mean to denigrate the creativity of my brethren at the bar, but we
would be hard put to create a synonym or an equally descriptive tag
phrase." Another specialised meaning was noted by Lin Gilbert: "To
shipping, 'safe haven' means a port where a ship that is damaged or
threatened by the weather may take refuge. The more common term now
seems to be 'port of refuge'."
SCAMBLE Following my notes on the close relationship between this
Weird Word last time and the newer verb "to shamble", many people
asked about the noun, which in the plural is an ancient term for a
slaughterhouse and survives, for example, the name of the street in
York. In Old English a shamble was a stool (it's from a diminutive
form of Latin "scamnum", a bench) but later it came to refer to a
trestle table, then to a butcher's stall in a market and so to the
slaughterhouse sense. Oddly, it was the legs of the trestle tables
that provoked the modern verb "shamble", since it developed out of
the phrase "shamble legs" for someone who walked with their legs
straddling like those of the trestles of a shamble.
DECIMATION David Tuggy e-mailed from Mexico to tell me about the
verb "vigesimate". The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't include
it, though it has "vigesimation", the act of putting to death one
in every twenty, a less severe punishment. It is an exceedingly
rare word about which I can find no further information. The OED
has it from only one source, Nathan Bailey's Dictionary of 1727.
2. Weird Words: Cad
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A man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards a woman.
If ever any person justified this epithet, it was Major-General Sir
Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE. George MacDonald Fraser, who
has recently died, borrowed the fictional bully of John Brown's
Schooldays and made him the hero of a series of novels. The conceit
of the books was that Flashman ended up as a famous and highly
decorated soldier, although by his own admission he had throughout
been a scoundrel, cheat, lecher, poltroon and cad.
"Cad" is the classic British contemptuous epithet of the nineteenth
century. It appears, as one example, in Jerome K Jerome's Passing
of the Third Floor Back: "That you and your wife lead a cat and dog
existence is a disgrace to both of you. At least you might have the
decency to try and hide it from the world - not make a jest of your
shame to every passing stranger. You are a cad, sir, a cad!"
Its history is as weird as one might like. The word started life as
"cadet", either a military trainee or a member of a younger branch
of a family. That developed into "caddie", now solely a golfer's
bag carrier, but in the eighteenth century any lad or man who hung
about in the hope of getting casual employment as an errand-boy,
messenger or odd-job man. Both "cadet" and "caddie" were shortened
to "cad". Early on - for reasons unknown - it had the sense of an
unbooked passenger who had been picked up by the driver of a horse-
drawn coach for personal profit. By the early 1830s, it had come to
mean the conductor of a new-fangled London omnibus, the man who
rode inside to take the fares. Might the job have been one that was
taken as casual employment by caddies? My references don't say. In
1895, George Augustus Sala commented in London Up to Date: "An
omnibus conductor, nowadays, would, I suppose, were the epithet of
'cad' applied to him, resent the appellation as a scandalous
insult; and, indeed, 'cad' has come to be considered a term of
contempt, now extended to any mean, vulgar fellow of whatever
social rank he may be."
The shift seems to have happened at the university of Oxford. Lads
from the town who hung about colleges in the hope of casual work of
the caddie type were called cads by the undergraduates. It became a
contemptuous way to describe townsmen townsmen and by about 1840 it
had achieved its full flowering as a term for a man whose behaviour
was unacceptable.
3. Recently noted
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WORDS OF THE YEAR 2007 Don't groan. This lot are more interesting
than most we've featured here, not least because there are more to
choose from. This contest, surely the final one for 2007, is being
run by the Macquarie Dictionary in Sydney, Australia. Its editors
have chosen five words in each of 17 categories and want visitors
to its Web site (http://www.macquariedictionary.com.au) to vote for
one from each set. The closing date is 31 January.
Most sets, such as those entitled Carbon Terms (including "carbon
footprint" and "carbon sequestration") and Travel (including "slow
travel" and "health tourism") contain newish terms that have wide
circulation in the English-speaking world. But others are what the
Adelaide Advertiser called Australish terms or the Sydney Morning
Herald has referred to as Strine (from a famous typically slurred
pronunciation of "Australian" by Australians that was immortalised
a quarter century ago in the title of a book, Let Stalk Strine, by
Afferbeck Lauder, whose pseudonym has to be said by an Australian
for you to fully appreciate the joke. (*))
Colloquial terms include "floordrobe", "lady garden" and "salad
dodger", respectively a floor littered with discarded clothes, a
woman's pubic region, and an overweight person. Other body terms
include "arse antlers" (a tattoo just above the buttocks, having a
central section and curving extensions on each side), "butt bra" (a
garment worn as a support for the buttocks), and "manscaping" (a
male grooming procedure in which hair is shaved or trimmed from all
over the body). The Social Terms section has "kipper" for an adult
child still living in the home of his or her parents (supposedly
from "Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings") and
"slummy mummy", for a mother of young children who has abandoned
all care for her personal appearance, a play on "yummy mummy" for
an older, immaculately-groomed and attractive woman.
A couple of characteristically Australian terms in the Environment
section are "toad juice", liquid fertiliser from pulverised cane
toads (a nasty introduced pest in the north of the continent), and
"green shoe brigade", those people who stand to profit from dubious
practices conducted in the name of environmental protection (this
is formed from "white shoe brigade", a deeply derogatory term for
the unscrupulous property developers who built up the coast of
Queensland in the 1980s).
UNWORD OF THE YEAR Perhaps a quick dose of inverted selection will
clear the head. On Tuesday, a jury of German linguists announced
its Unwort des Jahres, the word that the group considered to be the
worst linguistic misjudgement ("sprachliche Missgriff") of 2007.
It's "Herdprämie", literally "stove reward". A debate has been
taking place in Germany about the need to provide more childcare
facilities, the alternative being to persuade more mothers to stay
at home to look after their children by paying them Betreuungsgeld
(child-raising money). The chairman of the jury, Prof. Dr. Horst
Schlosser, said that "the word defames parents, especially women,
who educate their children at home instead of claiming a place at a
day nursery."
------
(*) Alphabetical Order.
4. Q&A: Reticule
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Q. I was recently told that "reticule", a lady's small purse of the
18th century, was actually called a "ridicule" because some thought
it was a silly fashion accessory. Is "reticule" the correct term,
or is this a sort of folk etymology that sounds very logical but
may not be correct? Thanks for your assistance. [Anne Breden]
A. If it's not just a silly joke, then it may be a folk etymology.
But it's more likely that the person who told you the story has got
their facts backwards.
The reticule was indeed sometimes slangily called a ridicule during
the early nineteenth century, but it was either an ignorant or a
joking transformation of the older term. Charles Dickens used it in
Oliver Twist in 1838:
"Tills be blowed!" said Mr. Claypole; "there's more things
besides tills to be emptied." "What do you mean?" asked
his companion. "Pockets, women's ridicules, houses, mail-
coaches, banks!" said Mr. Claypole, rising with the porter.
If my understanding of fashion history is correct (it's hardly my
field, I have to admit), the reticule was the forerunner of the
modern woman's handbag and so isn't a fashion accessory as such but
a much-needed costume item. Not knowing she was to achieve eternal
fame in the Oxford English Dictionary for putting the word down on
paper for the first time, Catherine Wilmot explained it in a letter
of 13 December 1801 (the word is therefore nineteenth-century, not
eighteenth). Reticules, she wrote, "are a species of little Workbag
worn by the Ladies, containing snuff-boxes, Billet-doux, Purses,
Handkerchiefs, Fans, Prayer-Books, Bon-Bons, Visiting tickets."
They were highly variable in appearance and materials, though their
most common construction, especially early on, was a bag of woven
cloth of some type, fastened by a drawstring.
This explains the name. "Reticule" comes from Latin "reticulum", a
diminutive of "rete", a net, from which we also get such words as
"reticulation", a pattern or arrangement of interlacing lines that
resembles a net (you may recall Samuel Johnson's famous definition
of "network" here: "any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal
distances, with interstices between the intersections").
It was a variation on the older "reticle", which survives (mainly
in North America, I'm told) as an alternative for "graticule", a
network of lines such as the latitudes and longitudes on a map or
crosshairs in the eyepiece of a device such as a telescope, for
which "reticule" is also used.
4. Q&A: Naff
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Q. The Economist often gives me a new word, but I'm confused by its
reference to the British entertainer Bruce Forsyth: "The jokes he
makes in his high-camp nasal voice are too naff for reproduction in
an upmarket newspaper. Yet Mr Forsyth is the improbable face of
Britain's favourite television programme." Is "naff" an odd way to
spell "naif"? [Robert L Sharp]
A. No, it's a word in its own right, though one with a mysterious
and intriguing history. Something that's naff in Britain (and also
Australia) is inferior and lacks taste or style. I'd not describe
Brucie's jokes by that word, though they're often so old they have
whiskers on.
Many attempts have been made to explain the origin, which are made
more difficult by there being not only an adjective but also a
verb, which usually appears as the impolite instruction to "naff
off!", an obvious euphemism for "f**k off!" (*)
The adjective featured in a famous BBC radio comedy series of the
1960s, Round the Horne, written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman. A
regular sketch featured a couple of gay men named Julian and Sandy,
who frequently employed "naff" as a term of abuse: "I couldn't be
doing with a garden like this... I mean all them horrible little
naff gnomes." Round the Horne undoubtedly brought the word into the
wider British vocabulary. It became famous later when Princess Anne
supposedly told photographers to "naff off" when they snapped her
coming off her horse and taking a ducking at the Badminton Horse
Trials (though a reporter who was there told me some years ago
during a radio broadcast that this was a euphemism by journalists
reporting the incident and that Anne actually used the F-word.)
To what extent the verb and adjective are connected is disputed.
The verb is recorded some years earlier (in 1959 in Billy Liar by
Keith Waterhouse) and may simply be a variation on "eff off", where
"eff" is a written version of the letter "F", meaning the F-word,
as in "to eff and blind", to use vulgar expletives.
Some hold that "naff" is an acronym from the phrase "Not Available
For F**king", though this seems, if it ever existed, to have been a
post-hoc reinterpretation. Some dictionaries, such as Collins and
Chambers, suggest it was formed as backslang from "fan", a short
form of "fanny" in the British sense of the female genitals. The
idea that it derives from NAAFI, the Navy, Army, and Air Force
Institutes, who provide canteens and shops for British service
personnel, is a stretch too far.
More sensible is the idea that it comes from dialect, either from
the northern English "naffy", "naffhead", or "naffin" for an idiot
or simpleton, or Scots "nyaff", a puny or insignificant person.
But the most plausible origin takes us back to Julian and Sandy.
Their patois was Polari, the old showmen's private language that
had been taken up by homosexuals. (See http://wwwords.org?P23J for
my article about it.) If "naff" is from Polari, as in phrases like
"naff omi", a dreary man, it's most probably from the sixteenth-
century Italian "gnaffa", a despicable person.
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(*) Please excuse the elisions - this is to stop newsletters being
trapped by obscenity filters and doesn't indicate any sudden onset
of prudishness. If you want to read this article with the words
written out in full, consult the online version.
6. Sic!
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Commenting on the item last week about a bag of peanuts that was
labelled "may contain traces of nuts", Scott Pollard noted that
such warnings are common these days: Sainsbury's smoked salmon is
labelled with the useful allergy advice "contains fish".
A bad case of cliché overload vexed Mary Ellen Foley. The Winter
2007 number of Keeping You Posted, a free publication for customers
of the British Post Office, includes this comment from actor and
director George Clooney: "I think the internet is a free-for-all.
Until someone figures out how to tame the wild wild west, then I
don't really know if you can put the genie back in the bottle."
Alan Featherstone heard a comment from cricketer Geoffrey Boycott
on BBC Radio 5 Live on 11 January. Referring to the recent squabble
between the Australian and Indian cricket teams about taunts passed
between opposing team members (it's called "sledging", derived from
"sledgehammer"), he said that umpires who were seeking a quiet life
tended to "turn a blind ear" to sledging.
The San Francisco non-profit organisation Community United Against
Violence has some unfortunate phrasing in job titles, according to
Mara Math. "They have just posted an opening for a 'Hate Violence
Advocate' who will report to the 'Hate Violence Director'. The job
description offers 'long-term disability' as the position's final
benefit. It's a really tough job hating all that violence."
Simon Behenna says "G'day Michael" from Australia and notes, "This
is from the first line of an online car ad: 'Deceased Estate, this
car was my father's pride and joy. The only reason it is being sold
is because he no longer requires it.'"
Marie-Louise Edwards forwarded a fractured foreignism from a hotel
in Paris: "Cultivate a different art of life to make your life
being be our purpose. On this subject, the colors harmony gives a
very chic parisian charm, an invitation to relaxation an dreams,
particularly in our romms who will provide to you the most marrowy
comfort. To make your trip to Paris one of the most unforgivable
moment of your life." She says her sister has booked in for a visit
shortly. I hope that she will find the romms to be as marrowy as
advertised.
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