World Wide Words -- 27 Feb 10

Fri Feb 26 19:06:03 UTC 2010

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 679         Saturday 27 February 2010
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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. Turns of Phrase: Neurocinematics.
3. Weird Words: Galanthophile.
4. What I've learned this week.
5. Q and A: Going to the dogs.
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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COCK-A-HOOP  Pat Forsey commented that "It has always been 'cock-a-
whoop' for me: picture a slightly demented rooster in full cry." I 
should have mentioned that that spelling is fairly common, no doubt 
from the same process of thought. It's written that way in the 1811 
edition of Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue as well 
as in many fiction works, including The Lord of the Rings: "Swagger 
it, swagger it, my little cock-a-whoop." Some writers have argued, 
against the evidence, that it was the original form.

PIGS  Ron Gerard and Giles Watson both noted this abbreviation had 
its genesis in the very early days of the Euro in 2002. The former 
told me about a Daily Mail article dated 29 December 2001: "Twelve 
member states of the European Union are replacing their national 
currency with the euro. The mnemonic 'baffling pigs' will help you 
to remember them, they are: Belgium, Austria, Finland, France, 
Luxembourg, Irish Republic, Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Italy, 
Greece and Spain." Since then, Slovakia, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta 
have joined the Eurozone, which ruins the mnemonic. Lorena Verdes 
pointed out another country-listing acronym: BRICK, standing for 
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Korea - the economies least 
susceptible to the current global recession.

HOCUS-POCUS  Melton Francis pointed out that my piece on this word, 
written in 2001, has been overtaken by some recent research. I've 
updated it: http://wwwords.org?HCPC.

2. Turns of Phrase: Neurocinematics
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In essence, this is the study of the way watching films affects the 
human mind. The term was invented in a paper by Uri Hasson in 2008, 
which showed that some films exert considerable control over brain 
activity and eye movements but that this depended - as one would 
expect - on their content, editing, and directing style. The paper 
suggested that this work, using magnetic resonance imaging, could 
lead to a fusion between film studies and cognitive neuroscience 
and suggested "neurocinematics" as the name for it.

In February 2010, research by Professor James Cutting and his team 
at Cornell University was widely reported. They measured the length 
of every shot in 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released between 
1935 and 2005. The more recent the film, the more likely it is that 
the pattern of duration of shots matches the attention span of its 
audience. This pattern, known as the 1/f rule or "pink noise" rule, 
had been deduced in earlier studies of volunteers working on tasks. 
It seems that, through experience, film editors have intuited the 
formula.

The term has appeared a number of times online but only rarely in 
print. As yet, it's a niche formation and may not survive.

    Such results have given rise to the term 
    neurocinematics, which measures the level of experiential 
    control that popular media have on people's brains.
    [The National, 18 Jan. 2009.]

    Given the gargantuan cost of blockbusters like Avatar, 
    it wouldn't be surprising if Hollywood's next step is to 
    use brain scanners to get inside the heads of movie-
    goers. It's impossible to translate brain activity into 
    'Oscar buzz', though, so the potential of 
    'neurocinematics' is unproven. 
    [New Scientist, 20 Feb. 2010.]

3. Weird Words: Galanthophile  /'galanT at UfVIl/
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This is a splendid term for a collector or lover of snowdrops:

    But if you run up against a committed galanthophile, 
    expect to become embroiled in their obsessive mania. 
    Suggest that snowdrops are all a bit similar and the 
    galanthophile will sit you down and take you through the 
    minute differences.
    [The Independent, 7 Feb. 2009.]

It comes from the formal botanical name for the genus, Galanthus, 
which derives from Greek "gala", milk, and "anthos", flower. (Words 
from "gala" include "galactose", milk sugar, and "galaxy", 
originally meaning the Milky Way.)

It's possible to trace the term to the late nineteenth century. It 
appears, spelled "galanthophil", in an issue of The Garden in 1892 
in reference to the Somerset gardener James Allen, a pioneer in 
hybridising snowdrops. Elsewhere, credit is given to the garden 
writer and plantsman E A Bowles; he is said to have created it in a 
letter, whose date isn't given, but is almost certainly after 1892. 
The earliest example of the modern form I've been able to trace is 
in the Royal Horticultural Society's Daffodil and Tulip Year Book 
for 1971.

In recent years the term has become moderately common among garden 
writers in the UK as study and collection of snowdrop varieties has 
become much more widespread, even fashionable.

4. What I've learned this week
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BOTTLED  I'd previously heard of the TOTTLE, a combination tube and 
bottle, a term of the packaging industry that's been around since 
the early 1990s. But this week I learned of the NOTTLE. It appeared 
in a packaging supplement in my daily paper. Details are sparse and 
an online search is befuddled by all the references to Gussie Fink-
Nottle, but it appears to be a bottle that has been turned upside 
down so it sits on its flat lid, to make squirting the last of its 
contents easier. My tomato ketchup has been sold me in a bottle 
like that for some years, but I never knew there was a name for it. 
Nor do I know where the term comes from. "Not a bottle"? "Negative 
bottle"?

ODDITIES GALORE  As it's February, it must be time to announce the 
shortlist for the Diagram prize run by Bookseller magazine. It 
rewards the oddest book title of the year. Horace Bent, who runs 
the contest, reports that the field was very wide this time, even 
after he had eliminated titles because they were published before 
2009, such as On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers 
and Sketches of a Few Jellyfish. He also removed titles that looked 
as though they were deliberately quirky, such as Bacon: A Love 
Story and The Origin of Faeces. The six finalists, with Mr Bent's 
comments, are: THE CHANGING WORLD OF INFLAMMATORY BOWEL DISEASE 
("It has yet to sell a single copy on UK shores, no doubt because 
our enviable diet (curry, etc) bequeaths us with immaculate 
intestines"), AFTERTHOUGHTS OF A WORM HUNTER ("All proceeds from 
the sales of helminthologist (look it up) Crompton's notes on his 
worm-hunting travels go to the Glasgow Centre for International 
Development's scholarship fund"), CROCHETING ADVENTURES WITH 
HYPERBOLIC PLANES ("The gripping yarn will keep you hooked to the 
final chapter: 'Who is Interested in Hyperbolic Geometry Now and 
How Can it be Used?'"), GOVERNING LETHAL BEHAVIOR IN AUTONOMOUS 
ROBOTS ("Where else can one find an exploration of a new breed of 
robots, illustrating 'the first steps toward creating robots that 
not only conform to international law but outperform human soldiers 
in their ethical capacity'?"), WHAT KIND OF BEAN IS THIS CHIHUAHUA? 
("Rumours of a follow-up, What Kind of Asparagus is this Shetland 
Pony?, are disappointingly still just rumours") and COLLECTIBLE 
SPOONS OF THE 3RD REICH ("Yours for just £13(ish), no longer will 
you have to ponder: 'What did the dessert spoons used on the 
Kriegsmarine's U-47 look like?'").

TIRED, SO TIRED  All Horace Bent's choices are non-fiction, so he 
is unlikely to suffer from a condition that has recently been given 
a name of its own: FICTION FATIGUE. It has been used for a state in 
which you no longer want to devote time to "contrived plots and 
imagined scenarios", as Blake Morrison described it recently, but 
have a hunger for reality. The author Scott Bailey wrote in his 
Literary Lab blog last month that for him it was a state in which 
his "own brilliant work no longer seems interesting". Been there.

5. Q and A: Going to the dogs
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Q. Everyone knows that "going to the dogs" means going to rack and 
ruin or becoming worthless, as in "this country is going to the 
dogs". But what exactly did go to the dogs to get the expression 
started? [Tom Halsted]

A. In my callow and uninformed youth I used to think this referred 
to a visit to a greyhound racing track (usually called "the dogs" 
in Britain) and the consequent adverse effect on one's wallet 
through betting on animals with no skill in chasing imitation 
hares. I now know better, though lots of humorists have had the 
same thought:

    Greyhound racing in the UK appears to be going to the 
    dogs according to the latest figures.
    [Daily Telegraph, 16 Nov. 2009. The first known use of 
    this jokey reference was in the Daily Mail in July 1927. 
    It's time it was retired.]

The idiom is actually one of the older in the language. There are 
references to bequeathing various useless things to dogs as long 
ago as the early sixteenth century. It was later borrowed by the 
Bard:

    DOCTOR: Therein the patient Must minister to himself.
    MACBETH: Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it.
    [Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, 1605.]

These and earlier examples - all suggesting throwing something to 
the dogs rather than going to them - evoke the famously unsanitary 
meals of the English medieval period, in which dogs were regularly 
present and were thrown scraps from the table. The sense shifted 
later from a useless thing to something that had been thrown away, 
hence ruined or destroyed. The idea of deterioration to a shocking 
extent, "going to the dogs", came along rather later.

6. Sic!
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"A coffee shop near my place of work," commented Patrick Mullins 
from Brooklyn, NY, "recently began advertising their breakfast, 
including a 'blubbery muffin'. It doesn't appeal."

Roger Williams wondered whether a 29-year-old Sic! was permissible. 
He had just disinterred a fragment torn from television listings in 
the issue of the Sunday Times for 16 August 1981, a photo of which 
he sent with his message: "After his death at the age of 42, Elvis 
Presley became a living legend."

"Now, that's entertainment!" commented Margaret Collins, having 
seen a Yahoo! entertainment headline last Saturday: "Sean Penn 
charged with battery in Los Angeles."

Linda Sewell, in Hartlepool, was reading the Northern Echo for 12 
February when she spotted this ad for a mobile home: "Willerby 
Boston Lodge 40x20 fully sited on stunning south facing pitch with 
paramaniac views". With that outlook it's a snip at £84,995.

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