World Wide Words -- 08 Nov 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 7 09:51:01 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 612 Saturday 8 November 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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For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Mycodiesel.
3. Weird Words: Agelastic.
4. Recently noted.
5. Book review: Damp Squid.
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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A FLEA IN MY EAR Just one letter different, resulting in dozens of
querying or correcting messages. I wrote in the piece on "flea in
one's ear" that "houses - and their occupants - were often infected
with fleas". "Infested" would have been better.
In the same piece, I suggested that the French "puce à l'oreille"
meant you had some fixed idea or notion. Several French speakers
disagreed. The full phrase "mettre une puce à l'oreille", to put a
flea in one's ear, means to make one suspicious or put doubts in
one's mind. I was confused by notes from three twenty-first century
translators about George Feydeau's farce "La puce à l'oreille", all
of whom suggested that a better English title would be "A Bee in
Her Bonnet", that is, an obsession or (to stay with French) an idée
fixe. I've not been able to discover whether this was a meaning of
the French phrase at the time Feydeau wrote his farce in 1907.
YES WE CAN Several subscribers wrote in mildly shocked terms about
the use by President-elect Barack Obama of "enormity" in his speech
of acceptance. One writer was surprised at my uncharacteristically
prescriptive condemnation of it in a piece written some ten years
ago. On re-reading it, I agreed with him and have rewritten it in
more positive terms. It is at http://wwwords.org?ENOR.
In other updates online, I've been expanding pieces that started
out as brief items in the newsletter into Turns of Phrase entries.
This week I've included "hypermiling" (http://wwwords.org?HPRM); I
forgot to mention last week that I'd added pages for two other new
words: "recessionista" (http://wwwords.org?RCSS) and "minigarch"
(http://wwwords.org?MNGH).
2. Turns of Phrase: Mycodiesel
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On 2 November, this word was known only to a very few people, all
associated with Montana State University. Within two days, it had
appeared in hundreds of press reports worldwide. Of such is the
speed of linguistic evolution in our wired world. The stimulus was
a press release from the university, announcing a discovery by a
plant scientist named Gary Strobel.
He and his team at MSU have found a remarkable fungus living inside
the ulmo tree in northern Patagonia. Unlike any organism previously
known, the fungus produces a range of hydrocarbons to fight off
competitors that are very similar to compounds in existing fossil
fuels and which, he says, could be used in a diesel engine without
modification. Better still, the fungus feeds on cellulose - the
main constituent of the organic waste, such as sawdust and plant
stalks, that's left after timber and food production - so valuable
agricultural land to grow its raw material wouldn't be needed.
The fungus may be just what's needed to make biofuels to replace
fossil fuels; or the genes that enable it to produce hydrocarbons
could be transferred to organisms that could do the job better.
Though this discovery has excited many researchers, it's as yet a
long way from being a practical method of making biofuels.
The word includes the prefix "myco-", an irregular creation from
the Greek "mukes", a fungus or mushroom, which appears in words
such as "mycology", the scientific study of fungi.
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* Press Association, 4 Nov. 2008: Scientists were amazed to find
that it was able to convert plant cellulose directly into the
biofuel, dubbed "myco-diesel". Crops normally have to be converted
to sugar and fermented before they can be turned into useful fuel.
* The Hindu, India, 4 Nov. 2008: Some car manufacturers who shun
ethanol might consider myco-diesel or fuels produced by other
microbes, said a MSU release.
3. Weird Words: Agelastic /eI'dZIlastIk/
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Unmarked by laughter or rarely laughing.
The Oxford English Dictionary not only marks this as obsolete, but
finds only two examples, from seventeenth and eighteenth century
dictionaries.
Searching the literature shows that it's not that rare and in fact
seems to be enjoying something of a mini-boom in popularity at the
moment. Its modern recrudescence may have been provoked by its use
by George Meredith in An Essay on Comedy, dated 1877: "It is but
one step from being agelastic to misogelastic" ("miso-", a hatred
of something, as in "misogyny", the hatred of women by men; see
http://wwwords.org?MISO), though nearly all the examples that I can
find are in works of the 1990s on. It turned up in an article in
the Guardian recently, together with "agelast", meaning a person
who rarely or never laughs. Walter Redfern utilises it in his book
French Laughter: Literary Humour from Diderot to Tournier (2008):
"Is not sex spasmodically but regularly comic, for everyone except
the most mechanical, brutal, and agelastic performers?" (You do get
less elastic with age, but that's not what he means.)
Its opposite, "gelastic", is more common and hasn't suffered the
vicissitudes of fortune of its negative partner. You will come
across this most often in medical terminology, mainly in "gelastic
seizure", a form of epilepsy in which brief bursts of pathological
laughter is a symptom.
Both words derived ultimately from Greek "gelos", laughter.
4. Recently noted
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SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND A phrase known in the spoken language in
Britain for generations but rarely written down, this euphemistic
expression has long frustrated lexicographers. It was traditionally
a discreet query in a hushed voice from a barber to his customer at
the end of a haircut or shave, asking whether he wanted any condoms
(though they were never called that). Despite extensive research,
the Oxford English Dictionary has found nothing earlier than 1972
(on a Monty Python record). But anybody with a long memory in the
UK knows that it had much earlier become a nudge-nudge wink-wink
allusion to anti-procreative purchases. This week I've been reading
the reminiscences of Dennis Norden, one half of a British script-
writing duo with Frank Muir, now best remembered from their regular
appearances on My Word and My Music. He recalls that when - back in
1950 - they began to write the scripts for a Saturday morning radio
comedy show that was to star Bernard Braden, their working title
was Something for the Weekend. Auntie BBC was not amused, refusing
to countenance such vulgarity (times have changed, as anybody will
know who has been following the recent furore over a broadcast by
Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross). The show was broadcast instead as
Breakfast with Braden. Unfortunately, but with good reason, the
anecdote of an 86-year-old more than half a century after the event
isn't by itself good enough evidence for the OED's editors. But if
a draft script with that title had only survived, it would have
taken the written record back a generation.
5. Book review: Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare
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"A word," said Humpty Dumpty to Alice, "means just what I choose it
to mean" and went on to assert dogmatically, "The question is which
is to be master." Is the language to rule us or we it?
This goes to the heart of modern dictionary-making. Their editors
feel, almost to a man or woman, that language is what language does
and that if people at large choose to join the fragile old egg in
believing that "glory" means "a nice knock-down argument", then the
word means just that, "neither more nor less", as Humpty Dumpty
peremptorily told Alice. This permissive approach ("descriptive" in
lexicographic jargon, as opposed to a "prescriptive" one), by which
dictionaries record usage without claiming authority, still saddens
some people.
That view, however, is at the heart of this new book from Jeremy
Butterfield, a lexicographer himself. Central these days to making
a dictionary is the corpus, a huge electronic word hoard. He begins
by describing the Oxford corpus, a third-generation corpus of 2006,
a monumental accumulation of more than two billion words from every
type of English language use, ranging from the free-wheeling text
of the blogger to the formal language of scholars. Each text is
tagged in various ways, such as the subject matter and the sex and
country of origin of the writer; these allow detailed analysis of
what words are used in what context and by which groups of people.
It's almost magical what a skilled researcher can pull out of this
conglomeration. One quarter of all that we write, on average, is
made up of just ten words: the, be, to, and, of, a, in, that, have,
I; it requires only another 90 words to cover half of our writing.
(Strictly, as Butterfield is careful to explain, we should replace
"word" by "lemma", the term for the version of a word that appears
at the head of an entry in a dictionary and which stands in for all
the varied forms that it can take; for example, "drive" in corpus
discussions implies also the other forms of the verb - "drives",
"driving", "drove", and "driven".)
Butterfield shows how the corpus illustrates the presence of common
errors, some of which are on their way to acceptance. The incorrect
"just desserts", for example, is nearly twice as common as "just
deserts" (60% against 40%), suggesting that it may well become the
standard form. On the other hand, "baited breath", though common at
34%, is some way as yet from taking over from "bated breath". He
notes that in the past ten years, "Web site" (which is how, in my
conservative way, I still write it) has been largely replaced by
"website", with 80% of examples in the latter form. One day, I'm
going to have to change, or people will think I'm making a mistake.
His title is taken from another error of similar type: "damp squid"
instead of "damp squib", which makes sense if you don't know about
the firework and feel that squid are more likely to be wet.
In later chapters, he continues to use the corpus to tease out the
nature of English. He focuses for example on collocations, another
technical term, this time for words that tend to appear together.
These provide dictionary editors with personality profiles that
help to make clear how words are being used, in particular in the
kinds of ways that entrap unwary learners of English. One pair he
uses is "naked" and "bare". We don't much talk about naked knees or
feet, for example - they're "bare" - but when we're talking about
the body we almost always use "naked", not "bare". Each word has
its own well-defined constituency of associations.
His style is chatty and examples are plentiful. If you want a quick
glimpse into the way dictionaries are compiled today, along the way
getting insights into our language, both static and changing, you
could do worse than buy this book.
[Jeremy Butterfield, Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare,
published by Oxford University Press on 29 October 2008; hardback,
pp179, including index; ISBN-13: 978-0-19-923906-1, ISBN-10: 0-19-
923906-1, publisher's list price GBP9.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP5.99 http://wwwords.org?DSEL4
Amazon US: US$13.57 http://wwwords.org?DSEL7
Amazon Canada: CDN$14.56 http://wwwords.org?DSEL2
Amazon Germany: EUR13,99 http://wwwords.org?DSEL9
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
6. Sic!
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We've been having fun with bad translations from Chinese in recent
weeks, but it's by no means the only language that loses a lot in
translation. The BBC news on 31 October, too late to mention it in
last week's newsletter, had a story about a bilingual road sign in
Swansea, South Wales. In English it reads "No entry for heavy goods
vehicles. Residential site only." Underneath, the text in Welsh is
"Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w
gyfieithu", which may be translated as "I am not in the office at
the moment. Send any work to be translated." This was the text of
an e-mail that came back from the translation service used by staff
of Swansea council when a Welsh equivalent of the English sign was
requested. Go via http://wwwords.org?WRSC to see a picture of the
sign, which has now been taken down.
And another translation problem, this time from Europe. Bram Amsel
e-mailed from Antwerp: "The Dutch word 'nuchter' means both fasting
and sober. In a hospital release letter written in English a doctor
stated that the patient should be 'non-sober' when he comes back
for his blood test. Fortunately the gaffe was caught in time."
This one will startle you if you know any chemistry. Steve Hirsch
found that the advertisements for a currently available Student
Chemistry Kit from Arbor Scientific (repeated on the box) assert
it's an "Introduction to the elements from Ammonium to Zinc." To
stay with scientific howlers, Tim Weekes thought we might like to
know about a sentence in the Bristol City Council's October 2008
"Your City" newsletter: "Bristol City Council's plastic recycling
subcontractor - Recresco - uses a completely new way of collecting
plastic bottles: a high-pressure vacuum to empty the bottle banks."
"Our local bakery," reports Fred Wallis from Perth in Australia,
"has a sign proudly proclaiming, 'Tuesday is Pensioner's Day - buy
one, get one free'. But what would you do with two half-price
pensioners?"
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C. Ways to support World Wide Words
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