World Wide Words -- 26 Jun 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 25 16:03:26 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 692 Saturday 26 June 2010
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Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Divagation.
3. Wordface.
4. Book review: Globish, by Robert McCrum.
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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UP THE CREEK Numerous readers wondered why the extended version of
the expression, "up the creek without a paddle", should reinforce
the idea of being in a potentially disastrous situation. It was
argued that if you're without a paddle while you are up the stream,
the current (or tide: British creeks are inlets of the sea, while
American ones are small streams) will take you downstream and it
would be worse to be down the creek without a paddle, for then you
would have no way of going upstream. This is a misunderstanding of
the idea behind it, since to be without a paddle means that you're
at the mercy of any figurative current (events, in other words),
powerless to influence your situation.
UPDATE The set expression, "to put the kibosh on", to put an end
to or dispose of decisively, has long been a puzzle. I've updated
the article about it online with some new information and a fresh
theory about its origins. See http://wwwords.org?KBSH.
2. Weird Words: Divagation /daIv@'geIS at n/
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An admittedly extremely old entry in the Oxford English Dictionary
defines this as "the action of divagating". Thanks very much. That
sends one to the preceding entry, the verb "divagate": "to wander
about".
"Divagation" isn't particularly rare and may be readily found in
writings of the more literate sort:
While the film's plot progresses, with a few
divagations, in a straight line through the decades of
Benjamin Button's life, the backward vector of that
biography turns this "Curious Case" into a genuine
mystery.
[International Herald Tribune, 3 Jan. 2009. This is in
a review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which
the eponymous character lives his life backwards.]
The meaning becomes clear when we recall that it derives from the
Latin verb "divagari", in turn from "vagari", to wander. In English
the wandering has always been figurative - deviation, digression or
straying from the point.
Dinner at nine o'clock, before the big open hearth,
with a friendly fire. Much chaffing and pleasant talk
about the arrangements for to-morrow. A man to be sent
off at daybreak to have two buckboards ready at the
landing at seven for the drive to Tadousac. Then a
reprehensible quantity of tobacco smoked in the book-
room, and the tale of the season's angling told from the
beginning with many embellishments and divagations.
[Days off and Other Digressions, by Henry Van Dyke,
1907.]
3. Wordface
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ALPHABETICAL NOUNS Daniel James e-mailed from Japan about an odd
assertion by some of his students of English. He was discussing bad
manners concerning chopsticks and had written that a person should
not hold "chopsticks and a bowl" in the same hand. One student was
adamant that it should be "a bowl and chopsticks". She and other
students said that children at school in Japan - since the group
are all adult learners in their 50s and 60s, this would be shortly
after World War Two - were taught that nouns in English should be
put in alphabetical order. Even after showing them collocations
such as "ladies and gentlemen", "salt and pepper" and "fish and
chips", they wouldn't budge. Mr James would very much like more
information about how this curious preconception arose.
4. Book review: Globish by Robert McCrum
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Robert McCrum, the Literary Editor of the London Sunday newspaper,
The Observer, is best known in linguistic circles as co-author of
the 1986 book The Story of English, based on the television series
of the same name.
In this work he argues that English has established itself as a
medium of international communication far beyond those who claim it
as a first language. It has turned into a global lingua franca,
Globish ("global" + "English"). The term was created by a French
former IBM executive and amateur linguist, Jean-Paul Nerrière, who
in 2004 published a book with the title Parlez Globish. This was
based on his experience that non-native English speakers in the Far
East communicated more successfully in English with their Korean
and Japanese clients than competing British or American executives.
They were speaking a stripped-down, simplified version of English,
shorn of the idiom, figures of speech and colloquialisms that can
make native speakers hard to understand. In his book, he codified
Globish as a streamlined English of 1,500 words. It's not quite the
Basic English of Ogden and Richards but similar in purpose and size
and indeed partly drawn from it, as his vocabulary is to a large
extent taken from the Simplified English of the Voice of America
broadcasts that was in turn taken from Basic English. Grammar is
simplified and circumlocutions make up for the limited vocabulary
("nephew" becomes "son of your brother", and "chat" is "speak
casually to each other").
Mr McCrum features Globish in the introduction and in the final
sections. In between, he recapitulates much of the material from
The Story of English to explain how the language travelled from its
earliest beginnings as the native tongue of a Germanic tribe to its
current international status. It is a fascinating cultural, social
and political story, as well told as you would expect, but for many
readers it will be going over well-trodden ground. There is little
in it that's directly concerned with the linguistic evolution of
English, though the Great Vowel Shift makes a brief appearance. He
treats the story as one of continuing and inevitable progress, when
the truth is that - as so often in human affairs - the language has
succeeded through a series of accidents. The crucial development in
modern times has been the decline of the British Empire, coinciding
with the rise of American domination, the only case in history, so
far as we know, in which a transfer of power and influence involved
nations which spoke the same language.
It was confusing to discover that, despite comments in interviews
and a description of Jean-Paul Nerrière's work in the introduction,
Robert McCrum doesn't mean by "Globish" in this book what Nerrière
does - a limited auxiliary language with no native speakers. For
McCrum, Globish is international English, a rich fully-featured
language in which books, plays and films can be written, in which
G8 leaders can hold press conferences and call centre workers in
Bangalore can resolve the technical problems of American computer
users. For him, Globish is a "global means of communication that is
irrepressibly contagious, adaptable, populist and subversive." It
is, he says, "a contemporary phenomenon of extraordinary range and
complexity", in which for "the first time in the history of the
planet the whole world can transmit and receive the same language".
There are several errors in etymology that are worrying in a work
about language: "honkie", a disparaging way for black Americans to
refer to whites, isn't from a Wolof word for pink but comes from
"hunky", a term for Polish immigrants in the Chicago stockyards;
"jazz" was never used in the sense of "speed up" and hadn't become
part of the mainstream of American culture as early as the start of
the First World War; the origin of "kangaroo" is no longer "obscure
and disputed" but, following the work of John Haviland in 1972, is
known to be from the Australian aborigine language Guugu Yimithirr;
"jamboree" wasn't a new word in 1897 that had been "imported from
some imperial outpost, no one knows quite where" but had been US
slang for a noisy revel from the 1860s; Warren Harding didn't put
"normalcy" into the American lexicon, as it had been there from the
1850s; "CD", for "Compact Disc", wasn't coined in Japan but by
Philips in the Netherlands.
It's a wide-ranging - if etymologically flawed - work, which will
be of interest to readers coming fresh to the history of the way
the English language has developed.
[Robert McCrum; Globish: How the English Language Became the
World's Language; Published on 27 May 2010 in the UK by Penguin
Viking (ISBN 978-0-670-91640-5), in the US by W W Norton & Company
(ISBN 978-0-393-06255-7), and in Canada by Doubleday Canada (ISBN
978-0-385-66375-5); hardback, pp310, including index; publisher's
UK price £20.00. Also available as an audiobook.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: £12.00 http://wwwords.org?GLBS8
Amazon US: US$17.79 http://wwwords.org?GLBS0
Amazon Canada: CDN$20.65 http://wwwords.org?GLBS5
Amazon Germany: EUR20,00 http://wwwords.org?GLBS2
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
5. Sic!
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On the website of the Boston Globe, Eric Funston found a blurb for
an article on Emily Dickinson: "A book reveals the poet began to
romance her father's best friend following his death." We knew that
Emily Dickinson had her quirks, but post-mortem romance?
"Train platform moves forward" was the headline Paul Brady found in
last Saturday's issue of the Post-Star newspaper of Glens Falls,
New York. It transpired that it was actually the plans for building
the platform that were advancing.
Darryl Francis noted that The Times reported on June 18: "Sebastian
Horsley, an artist and writer whose dandyish lifestyle made him an
institution in Soho, has died of a suspected heroin overdose at the
age of 47 days after the opening of a show based on his memoirs."
Yet another precocious artistic life cut tragically short.
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