World Wide Words -- 27 Sep 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 26 15:08:00 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 606 Saturday 27 September 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. Topical Words: Satisfactory.
3. Weird Words: Enchiridion.
4. Elsewhere.
5. Q&A: Take the biscuit.
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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SCUNTHORPE MATTERS My comment last week about the barriers that
some online filters put on places like "Scunthorpe" provoked Andre
Roy to write: "I work at Nipissing University. We can't enter our
domain name, nipissingu.ca, in some places."
GNATHONIC David Bowsher pointed out that this Weird Word last week
might have referred to the lower jaw, since there are words in the
language like "prognathic", having a projecting lower jaw or chin
and gnathology, the dental study of the process of chewing. It may
be the Roman writer Terence intended a pun when he gave the name of
Gnatho to his character in Eunuchus. Another case that Mr Bowsher
gave me was "agnathic"; lampreys belong to this group because they
haven't got a lower jaw. He commented, "Some of our colleagues may
perhaps be categorised as micrognathic miracles, because they are
chinless wonders."
AFFIXES Thanks to everybody who visited the site and made helpful
suggestions. The site is the better for it. If you haven't yet been
to http://www.affixes.org, please do! I've now also got the search
function working.
2. Topical Words: Satisfactory
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A report by the British educational standards body Ofsted last week
said teaching in almost half of maths lessons was satisfactory. It
doesn't sound too bad. But when you read the actual words of the
report, the implication is very different: "teaching in almost a
half of all maths lessons was only satisfactory or worse." The
Guardian felt it necessary to gloss the word "satisfactory" with
the parenthetical note "Ofsted-speak for not good enough."
We have an ambiguous relationship with "satisfactory". Sometimes it
can mean "fulfilling expectations" or "all that can be reasonably
desired". But more often it says something is less good than that.
A patient who is in satisfactory condition is some way from being
well; in law it means that the evidence is merely sufficient for
the needs of the case. "Satisfactory" says that something is OK but
it's most certainly not going to win any prizes. If you're told
your work is satisfactory you're left with a suspicion that you're
being damned with faint praise. As the saying goes, it might be
good enough for government work. It belongs somewhere around the
level of middling and mediocre in the grade spectrum, better than
bad but a whole lot less good than excellent.
However, one common meaning is of meeting some requirements set in
advance. A candidate may satisfy the examiners that he can proceed
to a degree; a film may satisfy one's expectations; a meal can be
satisfying. Taking the word in this way, Ofstead's pronouncement
reads oddly, since presumably that body's examiners are applying
predetermined measures of competence. I can hear teachers arguing
that if they've met the requirements, then why criticise them? The
reason is that Ofsted has found mathematics is being taught by rote
- "taught to the test", in the catchphrase - so that students can
pass their exams but are left without any sense of what the subject
is all about. Nothing new there, though the hothouse atmosphere of
continual testing and examinations in British schools nowadays
means that it is often hard to do anything else.
The sense of mere adequacy is present in the Latin words from which
it derives: "satis", enough, plus "facere", to do. The verb came
first in English, in the fifteenth century, meaning to discharge an
obligation, pay off a debt, comply with a demand, or atone for an
offence by reparation or punishment (think of a glove slapping a
face and a cry of "I demand satisfaction!"). These all had a idea
of complete fulfilment absent from modern usage. The adjective
appeared the following century with the initial meaning of atoning
for sin, but it broadened a century later still into the range of
senses we have now; over time it has come to mean no more than
adequate, passable, acceptable or barely competent.
To do merely enough isn't good enough: a hard lesson to learn.
3. Weird Words: Enchiridion /enkaI'rIdI at n/
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A handbook or concise treatise.
In origin, an "enchiridion" is literally a small thing to hold in
the hand, from Greek "enkheiridion", which is made up of the parts
"en-", within, plus "kheir", hand, plus the diminutive suffix "-
idion".
A famous example of a treatise with this name is the one that St
Augustine wrote around the year AD421, the Enchiridion de Fide Spe
et Caritate (a treatise on faith, hope, and charity), in whose
title appears the Latin form of the original Greek, the version
that English has borrowed. Another example was penned by Erasmus in
1503, Enchiridion Militis Christiani, in English "Handbook of a
Christian Knight".
Outside references to such works, the word is extremely rare. It
does appear in the SF novel Shadowfires by Dean R Koontz:
Sharp had remade his reputation by the manipulation of
electrons, and Eric Leben had attempted to remake himself
from a corpse into a living man by the manipulation of his
own genes, and to Sharp it was all part of the same wondrous
enchiridion to be found in the sorcerer's bag of twentieth-
century science.
4. Elsewhere
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CHOCKER? "Is the English language full?" was the intriguing title
of a piece (go via http://wwwords.org?IELF) by Alex Beam in the
Boston Globe on Wednesday. The answer seems to lie between "maybe"
and "possibly".
SAVE OUR WORDS! A cute publicity campaign is under way in the UK,
led by public figures that include the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion,
to prevent some 2,000 terms being removed from the Collins English
Dictionary to make room for new ones like "credit crunch", "equity
release" or "toxic investment". The Times wrote about it on Monday
(http://wwwords.org?ABST) the same day the Today programme on BBC
Radio 4 (http://wwwords.org?SKIR) covered the story, interviewing
Andrew Motion and Elaine Higgleton of Harper Collins Dictionaries.
Some excellent weird words are mentioned, some of which may appear
here in future weeks.
5. Q&A: Take the biscuit
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Q. Does the phrase "take the biscuit" have something to do with
winning a prize? It seems strange since it seems to mean that
something is "worse than expected". [John Czeiner, Salzburg]
A. Does it perhaps feel to you as though somebody has had their
biscuit taken away from them? No, "take" here has the sense of
acquire, in the same way that one might take a trick in a game of
cards.
"Take the biscuit" could indeed once mean winning or excelling. In
1882, George Peck, described in the blurb to one of his books as
"America's favourite humorist", used it in his Peck's Sunshine:
"Any good play writer can take the cue from this article and give
the country a play that will take the biscuit." These days, it's an
exclamation to suggest somebody has done something unprincipled
that would win them a prize in a contest of unethicalness. An early
example that shows how this sense developed appeared in the Fort
Wayne Daily Gazette of Indiana in November 1880. There seemed to be
a quarrel going on between the editor of the Gazette and a rival
paper: "For pure cussedness, the new and exceedingly fresh young
person [at] the Sentinel takes the biscuit."
You might think that any expression containing "biscuit" ought to
be British, as we use it as the standard term for those sweet items
of food that Americans call cookies. Americans have biscuits, too,
of course, though they mean something different by them. But the
examples I've quoted show that "take the biscuit" was originally
American.
It appears to be a variation on "take the cake" or on "take the
cakes", a couple of older Americanisms. It's sometimes said this
refers to the strutting dance called the cakewalk, but the first
known examples of that word - for a contest in graceful walking
among blacks in the Southern states that had a cake as a prize -
appears some 30 years after "take the cake".
"Take the cake" may be a classical reference: the ancient Greeks
awarded cakes as prizes to the imbiber in a drinking contest who
lasted the longest.
6. Sic!
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Scott Milsom reports: "On the edition of CBC Television's Newsworld
program on September 18th, 'Canada Votes 2008' (a federal election
campaign is underway), viewers were asked how well they thought the
various political parties had kept their manifesto promises. One
response displayed as the show ended claimed the Conservatives had
done 'an admiral job' of keeping its previous election promises."
Were naval battles among them?
An ad in the October issue of Black Belt magazine had the following
caption, spotted by RoseAnne Mussar: "What price would you pay for
excellance?" It would be worth a bit to get better spelling.
George Mannes found a curious sentence in a report on 18 September
from the Associated Press, about a complicated issue with the rules
of American football: "NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said Thursday
he expected the league's competition committee would review the
rule that possession could not change because the whistle blew
during the offseason, as it has in the past."
Vance R. Koven noticed a sentence in the official National Public
Radio transcript of a radio program broadcast on 16 September. It
concerned the conversion of Catholic schools in Washington DC to
public charter schools: "A marquis in front of the school now
reads, Center City Public Charter School, tuition free." He feels
the city could have saved a good deal of money by hiring a mere
baronet.
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