World Wide Words -- 15 Aug 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 14 16:43:46 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 652 Saturday 15 August 2009
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Cunicular.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Bully pulpit.
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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ARISTOLOGY Many readers were misled by the start of this word into
thinking it might have a link with "aristocracy". my dictionaries
say that the two "aristo-" elements come from different roots:
"aristocracy" is from "aristos", the best, while "aristology" is
from "ariston", breakfast or lunch. It would seem to be one of
those accidental similarities of language.
Max Coltheart, Lesley Beresford and Gordon Andrew all told me about
another sighting of the rare term "aristologist", in Australia. Mr
Andrew explained: "When my wife and I were courting, our favourite
restaurant was the Uraidla Aristologist, in the town of Uraidla in
the Adelaide Hills. The part-owner, Michael Symons, was a food
commentator and critic who wrote the definitive book on the history
of Australian food, One Continuous Picnic. The restaurant has since
closed, which is a great loss. But anyone who dined there knew what
'aristologist' meant."
ALLERGOLOGIST Following my mention of this word in the "What I've
learned ..." section last time, several contributors to the World
Wide Words group on Facebook queried where it might be in use. The
word turned up in an article about allergies in the issue of New
Scientist dated 1 August. The full quotation is: "'The proportion
of severe reactions is higher than for peanut,' says Montserrat
Fernández Rivas, an allergologist from the San Carlos Clinical
Hospital in Madrid, Spain." On checking through my sources again,
it's noteworthy that many appearances refer to allergy specialists
in non-English-speaking countries such as France, Austria and
Russia. The earliest example I've found, in the New Yorker in 1952,
refers to Finland. It may be that the word isn't used by English-
speaking specialists, but is a translation of terms used in foreign
medical cultures. The pronunciation causes problems, too: the first
"g" ought to be soft, since the word is from "allergy", but "g"
followed by "o" is hard in English.
2. Weird Words: Cunicular /kju:'nIkjUl@(r)/
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This is where I recently came across this very rare word:
If it was hard being a small boy in a time of rapid
change, it was a doubly hard burden to be a meter-tall
rabbit cursed with human sentience and cunicular
instincts.
[Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross, 2003. It would
take too long to explain the background to this
Carrollian image (the rabbit does have a waistcoat, but
no pocket watch is mentioned).]
It's better known to biologists than to SF authors. It simply means
"rabbit-like". It derives from Latin "cuniculus", rabbit (itself
taken from Green "kyniklos"), which is also the source of the old
English name for the animal, "coney" or "cony". The Latin word
could also mean a burrow, an underground passage, or a military
mine. Variations on it appear in systematic scientific names - an
American owl, to take one example, is formally known as Speotyto
cunicularia because it lives in burrows.
"Cunicular" has occasionally been used in botany and medicine for
various kinds of tubular formation. Apart from that, sightings are
extremely rare.
3. What I've learned this week
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DEADLOCK is too familiar to warrant comment, but this week I came
across LIVELOCK. It's a jargon term in computing for a state in
which two processes each continually change their state in response
to changes in the other without either doing anything useful. A
close analogy in MEATSPACE (a charming term for the real world) is
two people meeting in a narrow passage who dodge about trying to
get out of the other's way but succeeding only in blocking each
other.
Those of us outside the US who read the Doonesbury cartoon strip
know all about the rise of BIRTHERS, those opponents of President
Obama who hold that he wasn't born in Hawaii and so is ineligible
to be president. Now that term has spawned DEATHERS. It has been
traced back to an article on slate.com at the end of July, in which
Christopher Beam coined it for those who believe Obama's health-
care reforms are a cover for a secret plot to kill off the old and
the sick.
I have learned, thanks to a question about it from Jo McRae, that
in Australia something that's CACTUS is unserviceable, broken, or
defunct. It derives from the phrase "in the cactus", military slang
of World War Two, to be in trouble or to be in difficulties, as one
would be if caught up on the spines of a cactus. As there are, so
far as I know, no native cacti in Australia, the idea has
presumably been imported.
On Monday, the New York Times headed a economics blog piece with
the word MANCESSION. Blending "man" and "recession", it makes the
point that the US economic downturn has disproportionately hit men,
who are more likely to work in industries such as manufacturing and
construction that are sensitive to bad times. The word has gained
a fair bit of press usage since it first appeared back in March,
even appearing in papers in Russia, the Netherlands and China. But
I doubt it has become part of anybody's working vocabulary. Other
commentators have coined HE-CESSION for the same idea.
4. Q and A: Bully pulpit
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Q. We've been hearing a lot about the President using his bully
pulpit. We know what it means, but where did the term come from?
[S O Waife, Florida]
A. It's certainly in the news at the moment.
I wonder, though, if the meaning that I think you have in mind is
really known to everybody? When I first came across it, years ago,
I assumed that "bully" was in the usual current sense of a person
who intimidates others through force and that "bully pulpit" meant
that some person in authority was abusing his powers. This is by no
means an uncommon assumption:
Consider the case of the government using the bully
pulpit of eminent domain to effectively seize a business
it didn't like.
[Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 29 May 2009.]
It was a while before I realised that "bully" here had a different
sense, one now hardly known, of something first-rate or excellent.
Oddly, the two senses are from the same source, since "bully" was
originally a term of endearment, from Dutch "boel", lover, and
later became a compliment for a male companion, meaning admirable.
Our current sense grew out of this as the word went down in public
estimation. At one time you might have heard people say "bully for
you!" as a way to express admiration for another's action.
Enough on the background. This is the origin:
Half a dozen of us were with the President [Theodore
Roosevelt] in his library. He was sitting at his desk
reading to us his forthcoming Message. He had just
finished reading a paragraph of a distinctly ethical
character when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his
swivel chair and said "I suppose my critics will call
that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit!"
[Lyman Abbott, in The Outlook, 27 Feb. 1909. Dr
Abbott, a notable Protestant theologian and author, was
editor-in-chief of the magazine. The anecdote was thought
worth repeating in the New York Times on 6 March.
Roosevelt was fond of "bully" as an adjective; when he
returned to the US following his successful campaign in
Cuba in 1898, he said "I've had a bully time and a bully
fight!"]
To quote William Safire's Political Dictionary, a bully pulpit is
"active use of the president's prestige and high visibility to
inspire or moralize." That's certainly the most common meaning,
directly arising from Roosevelt's usage, but it's now wider in
application than just the presidency and is used of other persons
and also of organisations.
The term became known, though hardly fashionable, in the years that
followed its first appearance, most frequently in commentaries on
Roosevelt's presidency, but then largely fell out of use. It's
notable that one newspaper archive I consulted has no examples
between 1909 and 1958. It returned to significant use in the
language in the 1960s, becoming widely known from about 1985. An
early stimulus was its appearances in books about the Kennedy
administration, such as Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days and
Theodore C Sorensen's Kennedy.
5. Sic!
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Some of these new cars are really compact, as Dodi Schultz found on
reading an item in last Saturday's New York Times: "One of the two
safes that Mr. Brinkmann kept in his apartment, along with his car,
a Honda Civic, had been stolen."
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