World Wide Words -- 29 Aug 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 28 15:05:50 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 654 Saturday 29 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: Dozenal.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Terrific.
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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RIPSNORTER Several readers disagreed with my assertion that the
"rip" part of the word is a meaningless intensifier. Pamela Wagner
suggested it meant "tear off roughly" and went on: "This sense, of
an extreme tearing apart, would then lend itself to metaphorical
extension to storms and to anything extraordinary." Anne Virtue
suggested that, because of the storm sense of its second element,
"rip" might be linked to its sense of a stretch of broken water, as
in "rip tide" and "rip current".
EDNOS A severe but luckily temporary senior moment had me expand
this medical abbreviation into "Eating Disorders Not Otherwise
Recognised". It should have read "Eating Disorders Not Otherwise
Specified". Thanks to the teeming millions (or so it felt) who put
me right on this.
SHORT-BREAK HOLIDAY My wife and I plan to be away for a few days
on either side of next weekend. Your e-mail comments will be as
welcome as always but won't be replied to until the middle of the
following week at the earliest.
2. Weird Words: Dozenal /'dVz(@)n at l/
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"We want to replace decimal numeration by dozenal," is the stated
aim of the Dozenal Society of Great Britain. That will give you the
necessary clue to its meaning - it's from the word "dozen" and it
refers to a system of counting by twelves. You're much more likely
to be familiar with the well-established "duodecimal". If you did
New Maths as a child you might also remember "base 12".
In a dozenal system, with counting based on twelve,
not ten, the number "100" would mean 144 in our base-ten
counting system, and twelve "dozades" (each twelve years
long) would make up a grossury, with 144 decimal
years.
[Coast Lines, by Mark S Monmonier, 2008.]
"Dozenal" is a rare adjective (sometimes a noun for an advocate of
the numbering system) that's absent from every dictionary on my
shelves, though it does appear occasionally in technical literature
as well as in reports about the system:
Dozenals contend much of life already is divided into
twelves: People buy dozens of eggs and dozens of
doughnuts. There are 12 months in the year and 12 inches
to a foot.
[Los Angeles Times, 17 May 1982.]
Any popularity it has would seem to be the result of its adoption
in its title about a couple of decades ago by the Dozenal Society
of America (the successor to the old Duodecimal Society of America)
and by its British cousin.
An enthusiast for the duodecimal number system has been called a
dozenalist or a dozener. Both are highly unusual.
3. What I've learned this week
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Duncan Morrow pointed me to a New York Times article of 13 August
that mentioned MASSTIGE. It sounds like a disease of cows but turns
out to be a marketing term that's well known in the trade (and can
be traced at least to the early 1990s). It's a fusion of "mass" and
"prestige". Michael J Silverstein and Neil Fiske called it "luxury
for the masses" in their book of 2008, Trading Up. A more formal,
if jargonistic, definition is "downward brand extension" - making a
premium brand more accessible by taking it down-market with cheaper
materials and lower prices. It was at first principally used for
the cosmetics business but is now much more widely employed.
Pedants and clever-clogs reviewers complain that the title of my
book Why Is Q Always Followed by U? is incorrect, citing words like
"Al Qaida" or "qat" as counter examples (one e-mailer went so far
as to call me a liar because of the title). I've become slightly
depressed through having to point out repeatedly that a) these are
Arabic words, not English ones; b) they're part of the point of the
question that's answered in the book; and c) I didn't choose the
title anyway. An awful gaffe in a press release last week by the
office of Stephen Harper, Canada's Prime Minister, demonstrated how
ingrained putting the two letters together is in English and at the
same time found for me another language in which Q isn't always
followed by U. It's Inuktitut, spoken by the Inuit of Nunavut.
Their capital is IQALUIT ("many fish"), but the PM's office spelled
it Iqualuit, which means "people with unwiped bums".
The nearly-new neologism STAYCATION, for holidaying at home, has
become almost as popular in the UK as it has in the US. Various
British newspapers, short of news at this tag-end of the silly
season, have this week reported receiving a PR e-mail from an
online holiday company. It claimed to have seen a 41% increase in
customers enquiring about honeymoons in the UK and a 448% increase
in enquiries over the last two years. Its press release was headed
"Honeymooning at home - the rise of the STAYCATION-MOON". So much
derision has been poured on it that the likelihood of encountering
STAYCATION-MOONERS or STAYCATION-MOONING seems thankfully slight.
Many Sic! items are newspaper headlines whose brevity obfuscates. A
post on Tuesday on the Testy Copy Editors forum led to a suggestion
for a generic term: CRASH BLOSSOM. This is from an example posted
in the thread, taken from the Japan Today site: "Violinist linked
to JAL crash blossoms". To interpret - Diana Yukawa, who lost her
father in the 1985 Japan Airlines crash, has become a successful
violinist. Thanks to Chris Waigl for telling me about this.
4. Q and A: Terrific
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Q. I am re-reading Little Dorrit, in which Dickens describes a
character as "terrific", meaning terrifying. When did this word
change its meaning to its present sense, which is diametrically
opposed to Dickens's meaning? [Benny Tiefenbrunner]
A. Words often shift in meaning and decay in power through being
adopted as mere superlatives. Another good example is "horrid",
which originally meant something so frightful as to make one's hair
stand on end but which - as the first edition of the Oxford English
Dictionary noted in its gently chiding way a century ago - was then
"especially frequent as a feminine term of strong aversion". I was
going to write "dreadful" instead of "frightful" but that's another
word which has lost much of its muscle and can often suggest the
merely disagreeable instead of evoking dread.
"Terrific", as you say, has gone further than either of these by
not merely weakening but completely inverting its sense. It started
out, around the time of Milton, as the adjective related to terror,
"causing terror, terrifying; fitted to terrify; dreadful, terrible,
frightful", as the OED comprehensively puts it.
However, even before Dickens's time, it had begun to be used for
anything merely severe or excessive. A writer in 1809 complained
that business was terrific when he meant that he was busy. Another
in 1855 described applause as terrific when she wanted to say that
it was intense and prolonged. Examples from later in the century
mention a terrific explosion, which was powerful but didn't evoke
terror, while a terrific velocity was merely substantial. These
senses overlapped for decades and it can sometimes be hard to be
sure what was meant - a terrific storm might have presaged calamity
or it might just have been exceptional.
The shift from this nineteenth-century sense of excessively large
to our current most common one of being great in a positive sense
seems to have taken place in the spoken language after 1900. It
only began to surface in print in the 1920s:
"No doubt she had a terrific career." "Terrific! What
do you mean by terrific?" "Why, that she was what used to
be called a professional beauty, a social ruler,
immensely distinguished and smart and all that sort of
thing."
[December Love, by Robert Hichens, 1922.]
Another early example suggests through its accompanying slang that
the word had completed its transformation in the public schools of
Britain:
"Thanks awfully," said Rex. "That'll be ripping."
"Fine!" said Derek Yardley. "Great! Terrific!"
[Young Livingstones, by D G Mackail, 1930. "Ripping"
meant splendid or excellent, as in "ripping yarn", a
first-rate story. See also "ripsnorter".]
Today, of course, we can't use "terrific" in its original sense but
have to use "terrifying" instead.
5. Sic!
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Sally Stephenson tells us: "I was going to tender for a contract
with a local council in South Australia, until I noticed that item
4 of the 'Outcomes/Deliverables' states 'two hard copies and an
electronic version of the consultant are to be presented as the
final report.' Whilst I can't deliver this, I am tempted to offer
editing services instead!"
"Cop fired after waitress poses with rifle on car" was the headline
over a story on MSNBC dated 21 August that Peter Rugg encountered.
The young woman was in no danger during the photo (ahem) shoot: the
story beneath said that the policeman was dismissed for using an
official vehicle and weapon as props.
Similarly, an item in The News Journal of Wilmington, Delaware on
20 August was less scary than its headline, "Mother smothers off-
to-college son". It was a Dear Abby reply and the mother was just
being overly protective.
"I should like to meet the grandmother to whom reference is made in
this report in the Pensacola News-Journal," David Luther Woodward
wrote. The report, dated 20 August, included this, "Tom Barrett
spoke for the first time Wednesday about being attacked by a man as
he attempted to help a woman and her 1-year-old grandmother near
the Wisconsin State Fair on Saturday night."
Medical science advances, scarily. An article on the front page of
the Canberra Times on 15 August discussed swine flu fatalities and
the lack of communication with the families of victims. Amanda
Magnussen tells me it quoted the local Chief Health Officer, Dr
Charles Guest: "We've had a number of conversations with agencies
about communications and yes there has been adjustments to the way
we communicate with people after they've died."
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