World Wide Words -- 26 Sep 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 25 18:02:29 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 658 Saturday 26 September 2009
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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. Weird Words: Agrestic.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Herf.
5. Book Review: Writing and Script.
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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JORUM Jonathon Green, who reviewed The F Word here two weeks ago
(online via http://wwwords.org?TFWO), e-mailed about this word from
last week's issue (http://wwwords.org?JRUM): "We denizens of the
literary lower depths know that 'jorum' lives. It flickered back
into life in the pulp fiction era of the 1940s; when US writer Tim
Dorsey, about 1994, created the character of a deranged cop who
thinks he's a 1940s private dick (he crops up as a recurring figure
in Dorsey's series of comedy-thrillers set in Florida), he gives
him the pulp era's clichés: 'Chicago overcoats, Harlem sunsets, a
jorum of skee, a chippie with boss getaway sticks, giving a canary
the Broderick.' Dickens aside, the term had obviously long since
been seen as emblematic of bygone days. Harrison Ainsworth, whose
books groan with period language, offered this from Rookwood, a
mid-eighteenth century tale of highwayman Dick Turpin: 'If that's a
bowl of huckle-my-butt you are brewing, ... you may send me a jorum
at your convenience.'"
[You will gather that "huckle-my-butt" is not an instruction but a
beverage. It was a mixture of beer and brandy into which raw eggs
were beaten and spices added; it was usually served hot. In the
Dorsey quote (from Cadillac Beach, 1994), a "Chicago overcoat" is a
block of cement encasing a victim; a "Harlem sunset" is the blood-
red line on freshly razor-slashed skin; a "chippie" is a young
woman, whose "getaway sticks" are her legs, here considered "boss",
or excellent; a gangster who "gives a canary the Broderick" gives
an informer a severe beating.--Ed]
UNSUSPECTED TALENTS Amazon.co.uk is currently claiming I wrote
Wirklich ungeheuer praktisch. Lesbische Lach- und Sachgeschichten,
a German book whose publisher's blurb says "Its stories display a
keen eye for the absurdities of the everyday life of lesbians."
2. Weird Words: Agrestic /@'grestIk/
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"Agrestic" gained a melancholy moment in the news in 2008 when it
was reported that it was one of 24 words that the English publisher
Collins was proposing to drop from its dictionaries, on the grounds
that newer and more common words needed the space.
The root meaning is rural or rustic, hence a person who is uncouth
or unpolished. It's from the Latin "agrestis", itself derived from
"ager", a field, which makes it a close relative of "agriculture"
and of "agrestal", which refers to uncultivated plants growing on
cultivated land - you might prefer to call those weeds. Another,
extremely rare, relative is "agresty", defined in one old
dictionary as "rusticity; clownishness".
In early 2009 Collins reprieved the word because it turned out to
have a continuing usefulness in the perfumery business. It's one of
the standard terms used to classify odours. The scent sense is of
an aroma that reminds you of the countryside, such as hay, heather
or meadow or one which is earthy, herbal or woody.
The word is now rare enough outside such specialist use to justify
the decision by Collins. A rare modern example:
The aggregate floorspace of the outbuildings probably
totalled as much as that of the central spire, but the
careful planners had succeeded in preserving the
illusion of agrestic emptiness.
[The Voyage, by David Drake, 1998.]
Fans of the US television series Weeds will recognise it as the
name of the fictional California suburb in which it is set.
3. What I've learned this week
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CREEPING PERFECTION Colin Campbell e-mailed from Australia to ask
me about the origin of a phrase new to me, EXCELLENCE CREEP. He had
heard it at work to mean a looming threat to finishing a task on
time. I had to hunt around to find out what it meant. It describes
the eternal conflict between pragmatism and perfection, a shorthand
version of the lament of the harried boss, "I don't want it good, I
want it Friday." It's satisfying to make something outstandingly
good, and to be able to add all those nice bells and whistles, but
it's all in vain if you never get the product to market. I've so
far found only one example, on Twitter.
BELLISSIMO! On the subject of bells, while searching for something
else this week I stumbled over a monograph written by Lewis Carroll
in 1872. He was a fellow of Christ Church College, Oxford, whose
church is also Oxford's cathedral. He was distressed by a wooden
belfry that had been constructed, describing it as being in the
"Early Debased" style - "very early, and remarkably debased". He
expressed his dislike in scholarly satire: "The word 'Belfry' is
derived from the French 'bel', 'beautiful, becoming, meet', and
from the German 'frei', 'free, unfettered, secure, safe'. Thus the
word is strictly equivalent to 'meat safe', to which the new Belfry
bears a resemblance so perfect as almost to amount to coincidence."
FOR CALLING BIRDS An item in my daily newspaper found me a new
sense to the word PISHING. I knew it as a counterpart to tutting,
the making of sounds indicating contempt, impatience, or disgust.
But it turns out that American birdwatchers (who would probably
prefer to be called birders) use it for the hissing noises that
they make to attract some kinds of small birds. It imitates the
scolding calls of tits and chickadees, which attracts other birds
to find out what the fuss is about. There's even a book on how to
do it, The Art of Pishing, by Pete Dunne.
4. Q and A: Herf
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Q. Recently I received an invitation to attend a cigar "herf". On
looking through my dictionaries I found no entries for the term. Do
you have any information regarding this apparently new slang word?
[William Tarbi]
A. This is a curious term, with an odd genesis.
It has now been firmly established, in part by the work of Barry
Popik (see http://wwwords.org?HERF), that the term first appeared
online:
I tried several when I first began smoking cigars and
found them all to be very bland and almost impossible to
herf, they were so tightly wrapped.
[A posting by somebody known only by his nickname
Prince of Skeeves to the newsgroup alt.smokers.cigars, 21
Nov. 1996.]
A few months later the writer explained that he first heard the
term at a "junior college in Clyde, Texas, in 1982 from a blueblood
derelict friend of mine named Stu". It meant "the ungainly and
humorous facial contortion required to deeply draw on a large,
hand-rolled cigarette of unknown filling."
The word became popular in the newsgroup, leading to coinages such
as "herfers", "herfnicks" and "herfaholics". A number of Web pages
record that a herf, in your meaning of a meeting of cigar fans (a
herf obviously enough being a situation in which one herfs) was
arranged by members of the newsgroup in April 1997 under the title
of The Texas Herf On The Lake. A newspaper report three years later
about another meeting that had been organised through the newsgroup
is one of the few times the term has appeared in print:
They are cigar fanciers. More than 100 of them in all
shapes and sizes came to York recently to swap stories,
down some beer, and, of course, puff happily on their
favorite stogies. These get-togethers are called herfs,
and they're a big deal for people with computers, a love
of cigars and a willingness to travel.
[Daily Herald (Tyrone, Pennsylvania), 18 May 1999.]
"Herf" is well established within the cigar fraternity in the US,
though it's unknown outside it. One site describes it as "A lively
gathering of cigar-smoking comrades who meet in a club, restaurant,
cigar store or home to share their appreciation of fine cigars."
That leaves us with the head-scratching problem of where the Prince
of Skeeves's friend Stu got it from. I posed the question on the
American Dialect Society's mailing list. Douglas Wilson suggested
that it might be linked to the slang verb "huff", which is defined
in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang as "to inhale the
vapors of [a drug], as a method of becoming intoxicated", with
examples going back into the 1960s. "Huff" and "herf" aren't so
very far apart in sound.
As things stand, that's the best I can offer.
5. Book Review: Writing and Script
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This is the most recent addition to the 200-strong list of Oxford's
Very Short Introduction series. The author, Andrew Robinson, has
written three previous works on writing, scripts and decipherment.
In 157 small pages, packed full of detailed information without a
wasted word, the book fulfils the promise of its title and format.
We are taken at a trot through chapters on how writing emerged; the
early forms of alphabetic, syllabic and pictographic scripts; a
discussion of the competing views that writing was either invented
once or was the creation of several language groups at different
times; a treatment of scripts that have gone out of use; and of
scripts that remain wholly or partly undeciphered (such as the
Linear A, Easter Island rongorongo, Etruscan and Zapotec ones). The
illustrations, of which there are many, complement the text.
One chapter discusses whether the Western alphabet was created by
Canaanite slaves in Sinai mines from the hieroglyphics of their
Egyptian masters, as some scholars suggest. Wherever it came from,
Mr Robinson takes us through its evolution via Phoenician traders,
the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans into the modern world, along the
way nicely explaining how the Etruscans ended up with three letters
representing the letter "k" ("k" before "a", "c" before "e" and
"i", and "q" before "u"), so explaining how it is that in English
"q" is always natively followed by "u".
His discussion of the Chinese and Japanese scripts, necessarily a
brief one, is nonetheless clear. He denies the common belief that a
speaker of any Chinese language can read the script (speakers of
Cantonese, he notes, need to know Mandarin before they can become
fluent readers). He explains the technical difficulties Chinese
lexicographers have in constructing dictionaries in the absence of
a neat A-Z classification system, being forced to fall back on a
system that categorises symbols by shape.
He ends the book by pointing out that the complex Japanese scheme,
and those of other writing systems that western writers in the past
have considered unusably unwieldy, are not regarded by their users
as inferior to alphabets. Writing systems, after all, are enmeshed
within societies and cultures and are not solely a technical means
of recording speech.
[Andrew Robinson, Writing and Script: A Really Short Introduction;
Oxford University Press; published in the UK on 27 August, due in
the US on 1 October; pp158, with index; ISBN-13:978-0-19-956778-2,
ISBN-10:0199567786, publisher's UK price £7.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: £4.79 http://wwwords.org?WSSI2
Amazon US: US$9.56 http://wwwords.org?WSSI6
Amazon Canada: CDN$10.76 http://wwwords.org?WSSI8
Amazon Germany: EUR9,99 http://wwwords.org?WSSI5
[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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"I've heard of new homes popping up like mushrooms, but grown from
cuttings? That's new!" Carolyn Barnes wrote that after reading the
real-estate section of the Toronto Globe and Mail on 18 September:
"The ivy-clad home, which was started from a cutting taken 25 years
ago from Queen's Park."
On 16 September, Phil Burton read the headline on the BBC Web site
over a story about Northern Ireland: "Leckey wants shoot-to-kill
briefs". He was disappointed to learn that the senior coroner, John
Leckey, was insisting that controversial police reports be handed
over and didn't refer to arming the police with James Bond-style
deadly underpants.
In New Orleans, Maurice Fox was bemused by a headline in the Times-
Picayune: "Shift caves to Russia, GOP says". He wondered, "Which
caves? Where?" The story actually reported that Republicans were
complaining that President Obama's shift in policy over the missile
defence shield in Eastern Europe was caving in to Russia.
"Prison cells are getting smaller," Jo Leath commented from Nova
Scotia, after reading an AP headline that appeared widely online
and in US newspapers on 23 September: "Ex-NY Giant Burress gets 2
years in gun case." Plaxico Burress was convicted of gun charges
after he shot himself in the thigh with an unlicensed weapon. His
foot was uninjured but the figurative effect was the same.
Also from AP, on the same date, came the most misleading headline
of the week (what some of us have started to call crash blossoms
because of a particularly egregious example a while ago). Laurence
Horn was told about it by Steve Anderson, who saw it on Salon.com:
"McDonald's fries the holy grail for potato farmers".
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