World Wide Words -- 20 Mar 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 19 17:30:27 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 682 Saturday 20 March 2010
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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: Hyetal.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Cabal.
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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TECNONYMOUS In the piece about "mononymous" last week, I defined
"tecnonymous" as "relating to the practice of naming a parent after
their child". You might not believe how many sarcastic comments
came in, suggesting either that a time machine or a senior moment
on my part was involved. Think of the word "parent", you doubters.
This shows that the naming (or renaming) occurs after the child is
born. It's used in several cultures, I'm told, including Korean:
Given the rather pervasive taboo in Korean culture
against using personal names when speaking to or about
adults, Koreans can resort to one of two interesting
strategies: teknonymy or geononymy. Teknonymy is the
practice of addressing or referring to an adult by way of
that adult's relationship to a child. Thus Mrs Kim, the
ajumoni next door, may also be Chinho omoni, or "Chinho's
mother."
[Korean Language in Culture and Society, by Ho-min
Sohn, 2006. The spelling with a "k" is now more usual,
matching the usual transliteration of the Greek word for
child ("teknon"), from which it derives. "Geononymy", the
author explains, "is the practice of qualifying kinship
terms with place names."]
But tecnonymy is also common in the English-speaking world. You may
often hear a child, or an adult speaking to a child, refer to an
adult by relational reference, for example, "Patrick's mum". You
may feel that it would have been better to define the term as "the
practice of *referring* to a parent by the name of their child".
2. Weird Words: Hyetal /'haI at t@l/
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You may wish to save this adjective for a rainy day, when you can
enliven the inevitable discussion about the weather by dropping it
into the conversation. Do not, however, expect it to be understood,
even though you're merely referring to rain.
The Oxford English Dictionary, my first stop in investigating our
language, has no examples of it at all in its entry (written about
110 years ago), noting only that it is recorded in the 1864 edition
of Webster's Dictionary. A further century of opportunities for the
word to be used, coupled with the magic of searchable electronic
databases, allows me to do better:
The hydrologic cycle has undergone an atmospheric
mutation here. They don't measure the rain in inches but
in feet. A waterproofing contractor could definitely find
happiness here, while rainmakers and dousers would
quickly go out of business. This is the kind of place
where words like pluviose, hyetal, and affusion actually
belong in conversation.
[The Washington Post, 4 March 1990. "Affusion" means
the pouring of water on the body, as in one form of
baptism; "pluviose" is another adjective meaning
"rainy".]
"Hyetal" comes from Greek "huetos", rain, and is related to Greek
"hyei", it is raining. It means "relating to rain". A hyetal chart
is a rain chart; an isohyetal is a line on a map connecting places
of equal rainfall; a hyetograph is a self-registering rain gauge;
and hyetology is the study of the geographical variation and annual
distribution of rainfall. Meteorologists, the main users of the
word and its compounds, have extended the meaning to include all
forms of precipitation.
3. What I've learned this week
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WHISTLING WORD My main task this week has been to systematically
read a book about old crafts to extract vocabulary for the OED. I
could fuel the Weird Words section for years on what turned up,
though readers might quickly become bored by its resulting narrow
compass. But one word in particular struck me: FIPPLE. It's still
used, though it's somewhat specialist. The fipple is an essential
part of a recorder, penny whistle or other instrument that belongs
to a type musicologists call end-blown. A wedge in the mouthpiece
directs air on to the lip in the blowhole, setting up the essential
vibrations in the body. This wedge is the fipple. It's an old word
with an obscure history, though lexicographers point to Icelandic
"flipi", a horse's lip, which may suggest that it's from Old Norse.
WOOF! I've previously had reason to mention a British form of
social control, the ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order). A proposal
by the government to revise the Dangerous Dogs Act (a notoriously
badly drafted law from 1991) suggested a variety of methods to
control potentially savage dogs often kept as status symbols by
young men. One idea put forward was a dog control order, which
instantly led commentators to coin the name DOGBO for it.
4. Q and A: Cabal
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Q. Here in Nigeria, it is said that the true state of the health of
the president has been shielded from Nigerians by a cabal, who are
bent on holding on to power. How did the word come about? [Taiwo
Obe].
A. This term for a semi-secret political clique is sometimes said
to be an acronym, from the initials of five leading members of
Charles II's government of 1667-73 that covered the period of the
third Anglo-Dutch war. The five members were Sir Thomas Clifford,
Henry Bennet (Lord Arlington), George Villiers (the Duke of
Buckingham), Anthony Ashley Cooper (Earl of Shaftesbury) and John
Maitland (Earl of Lauderdale). Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham,
Ashley and Lauderdale - CABAL.
Even without detailed knowledge of word history this should cause
your mental eyebrows to rise in scepticism. The earliest known
acronyms date from around the time of the First World War (the
military slang AWOL, "Absent Without Leave", is among the earliest,
which newspaper reports around 1918 demonstrate was being said as a
pronounceable word) and yet the source of cabal is dated on this
theory to an acronymic origin some 250 years earlier.
What scuppers the idea completely is that cabal is known from
earlier in the seventeenth century through usages linked to Charles
I and Oliver Cromwell. It came into English via French "cabale"
from medieval Latin "cabbala" (these days more usually Kabbalah).
This is an esoteric secret Jewish system of mystical practices
based on a study of the Torah, the first five books of the Old
Testament. Kabbalistic teaching was based on oral transmission from
a personal guide, so "cabal", at first referring directly to the
Kabbalah, came to mean a private or semi-secret interpretation. By
the middle of the seventeenth century it had developed further to
mean some intrigue entered into by a small group, and also referred
to the group of people so involved.
The word was indeed applied to the five ministers (in a pamphlet
issued in 1673), but it was no more than a scurrilous joke based on
the accident of their initials. Unfortunately, it's a joke that has
long since gone sour on etymologists, who have to keep explaining
the facts, a problem compounded by historians, who continue to
refer to the Cabal Ministry as a convenient shorthand.
5. Sic!
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The Record newspaper in Bergen County, New Jersey, e-mails Jean
Beidl, had an article on 10 March headlined "Officials get tough
with sea lions". It notes that wildlife officials in Portland,
Oregon, are trying to "keep sea lions from eating endangered
salmon, dropping bombs that explode under water and firing rubber
bullets and bean bags from shotguns and boats."
Heather Liston came across an online advertisement for the post of
Director of Development of the Museum of the African Diaspora in
San Francisco. Under "minimum requirements" it listed "At least 57
years of fundraising/development experience."
"How strong is this man?" asks Tanja Cilia, having read a report in
the Canadian CNews: "When the 36-year-old man got out of his car -
carrying his wife and two kids - to talk to the three men to try to
calm them down, they got out of the truck and assaulted him, police
said."
"Apple Hires Wearable Computing Engineer" was the headline that
Nick Adler came across in the New York Times online on 16 March.
Suitable for dress-down Fridays, perhaps?
Has the drive for diversity within the Aberdeen police led to its
recruiting hermaphrodite officers? Susie Elins wondered this on
reading a BBC News report on 16 March, headlined "Man assaulted
female police officer with penis." It has since been changed to
"Man used penis to assault female police officer", which, come to
think of it, is still pretty weird.
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