From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Apr 1 12:35:06 2011 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2011 17:35:06 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 02 Apr 11 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 730 Saturday 2 April 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/dmyo.htm This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Tilly-vally. 3. Wordface. 4. Q and A: Bounty hunter. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- LUSTRUM Peter Ingerman and Andrew Fisher pointed out that in writing about this word I had missed an opportunity for including yet another weird word: "suovetaurilia". So far as I know only the Chambers Dictionary includes this Latin mouthful, which is formed from "sus", pig, "ovis", sheep, and "taurus", ox. It refers to the sacrifice of a sheep, a pig and an ox at the lustrum ceremony. I mentioned the Robert Harris novel entitled Lustrum. David Larkin e-mailed from Cape Cod, "Except, of course, in the US, where Simon & Schuster, in their never-ending battle to protect us from big words, renamed the novel Conspirata, which isn't a word at all. I assume their publicists felt it had more marketing, er, luster." "'Lustrum' may be an odd ball on that side of the pond," wrote John Fentner, "but us Yanks learned it from the movie Rooster Cogburn of 1975: 'Judge Parker: You have served this court for almost two lustrums. Rooster Cogburn: What's a lustrum, Judge? Judge Parker: Five years. Don't interrupt me.'" Tony McCoy O'Grady pointed out that the word lingers in Catholic Church circles: "Archbishops and bishops from around the world have to report to Rome (on the state of things in their dioceses) every five years, and these trips are known as lustral visits." On "censor", Anne O'Brien Lloyd wrote from Saskatoon: "The teacher responsible for discipline in a French school was known as Monsieur le Censeur. Should the person responsible be a woman, she was known as Madame le (not la) Censeur, because otherwise the kids would turn her into a lift: Madame l'Ascenseur, and such disrespect was at all costs to be avoided." 2. Weird Words: Tilly-vally ------------------------------------------------------------------- No language can ever have too many words with which its speakers may deride an assertion as hogwash, codswallop, baloney, poppycock, twaddle, cobblers, bosh, tosh or stuff and nonsense. "Tilly-vally" is a member of this set, these days usefully obscure, so it may be employed without too great a risk of dire consequences. It also has the imprimatur of having been employed by our greatest playwright, though in an older spelling: HOSTESS QUICKLY: Tilly-fally, Sir John, never tell me; your ancient swaggerer comes not to my doors. [Henry IV, Part Two, by William Shakespeare, 1597-8. He uses it again in Twelfth Night.] It's fairly common in writings down to the nineteenth century, but in recent times we have preferred more boisterous epithets with which to express our disapprobation, letting it fall away with such other derogatory expressions as the imitative "pshaw!". Various forms are known, such as "tillie-vallie", "tilley-valley" and "tillie-wallie" as well as "tilly-fally". The source is quite remarkably obscure. Some older dictionaries insist it's Scots in origin. Other authorities have claimed it was a hunting phrase borrowed from the French (presumably connected with "tally-ho!") or that it was a mere minor variation on "fiddle-faddle". Sir Walter Scott had a character suggest that it derives from the Latin word "titivillitium", a trifle or a trivial item of gossip. Modern etymologists have wondered about a connection with "dilly-dally"; Anatoly Liberman commented in his Oxford Etymologist blog in 2007 that "The sound group 'dil', along with 'till-', suggests something frivolous. It alludes to meandering and useless work." "So please your Ladyship, we do not think of marrying her as yet," returned Susan, in consternation. "Tilly vally, Susan Talbot, tell me not such folly as that. Why, the maid is over seventeen at the very least!" [Unknown to History, by Charlotte M Yonge, 1882.] 3. Wordface ------------------------------------------------------------------- V2G This abbreviation is likely to be appearing more often in the future. It's short for VEHICLE-TO-GRID and is being promoted as a way to boost renewable energy sources. It's based on the fact that electric vehicles all contain powerful storage batteries, which are connected to a power supply for charging when the vehicles aren't being used. V2G connects the batteries to the electricity grid and exploits the energy stored in them to temporarily supplement the electricity supply instead of, for example, firing up another power station. The vehicle batteries would then be topped up using off- peak power, perhaps from renewable resources such as wind turbines, whose generated power would otherwise be going to waste. The term and the concept have been promoted for at least the last decade but are only now becoming more widely known as the number of electric vehicles grows. BANKRUPT The word BROSHERING turned up in one of the late Ivor Brown's books on language and led me down unfrequented pathways to ancient public-school slang. I found it in only one other place, Reminiscences of Eton by the Reverend Charles Allix Wilkinson of 1888, "'Appius', so-called, had been the head of a conspiracy for 'broshering' their dame, that was, eating her out of house and home - eating and drinking everything that was on the table, and what was sent up afterwards, and still always asking for more." (At Eton College, a dame was a matron - in the language of the time this meant a married woman, especially one of mature years - who kept a boarding-house for boys at the school.) Doug Wilson of the American Dialect Society suggested that it was the same word as "brosier" and indeed in Farmer and Henley's Slang and its Analogues of 1890 "brosiering my dame" was described as Eton College slang in this way: "At Eton, when a dame keeps an unusually bad table, the boys agree together on a day to eat, pocket, or waste everything eatable in the house. The censure is well understood, and the hint is generally effective". Other sources note it was originally Cheshire slang for a bankrupt and that an Eton boy who had spent all his pocket money was said to be "brosiered". Such is the school slang of yesteryear, of which there is nothing deader. 4. Q and A: Bounty hunter ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. A friend has circulated an e-mail that suggests that the term "bounty hunter" comes from the search for HMS Bounty, the famous ship captained by William Bligh that mutinied in April 1789. It also suggests that Captain Edward Edwards of HMS Pandora, who captured ten of the mutineers on Tahiti, was the original bounty hunter. What do you think? [Ray Hattingh, South Africa] A. The facts of the story about Captain Edwards being sent out to hunt down the mutineers and return them to England for trial are correct. His mission was only partly successful. He did capture some mutineers on Tahiti, but he failed to find the uncharted Pitcairn Island, his ship was wrecked on Australia's Great Barrier Reef and he and the surviving crew and mutineers were forced to make a long voyage in open boats, much as Bligh had had to after the mutiny. It's an extraordinary story but it has nothing whatever to do with the term "bounty hunter". Bligh's ship was named for the fruitfulness of nature or generosity of God. Bounties were also cash rewards to encourage some activity. For example, they were given to recruits on joining the army or navy. The American colonies offered bounties from about the middle of the eighteenth century for the scalps of American Indians and for wanted criminals taken dead or alive. The following century, it was common in the US to offer cash bounties for the pelts or scalps of some unwanted or dangerous species of animal, such as bears, wolves, skunks or coyotes. After a Supreme Court ruling in 1872, individuals outside formal law enforcement bodies could track down fugitives from bail to get a reward, especially those that the law had trouble apprehending because they'd skipped across county or state lines. Civilian bounty hunters are still known in the US (the only country apart from the Philippines that permits them); they go by names such as bail enforcement agent or recovery agent. Most early bounty hunters remained anonymous for very good reason. A very few were famous (or infamous), such as Jack Duncan of Texas and Charlie Siringo of the Pinkerton Agency. More recent fictional ones, such as Rooster Cogburn of True Grit, were based on their stories. When I began to look for the written evidence for the term, I was surprised by what turned up - or more correctly by what didn't. There's no evidence that the early real-life "bounty hunters" were called that by their contemporaries. The term came late into the language and the first examples are all references to hunters of wild animals, not humans. This is the earliest I've found: Cheyenne _Leader_, 23rd: A trifle over $500 worth of warrants were issued at the court house yesterday in favor of bounty hunters. From 8 o'clock in the morning until the closing hour in the afternoon boys and men were continually visiting the county clerk's office with installments of gopher scalps, varying from the small boy's mite of fifty-two to the professional's contribution of 500. [Salt Lake Daily Tribune, 26 June 1887.] A shift from a hunter of animals to a hunter-down of criminals is easy to understand but you have to come a lot nearer the present day to find examples. An ambiguous example dated 1930 is in the Oxford English Dictionary's entry, but the first I've been able to find that explicitly refer to the apprehension of humans are the 1954 film The Bounty Hunter, which starred Randolph Scott on the track of three murdering train robbers, and Elmore Leonard's book of the same title in the same year. Even if Captain Edwards had been paid a bounty for capturing the Bounty's mutineers - which he wasn't - he couldn't have been called a bounty hunter. To apply the term to the pursuers of fugitives in the late nineteenth-century US is equally anachronistic. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Norton described the sentence in a Washington Post report on 23 March as "the higher mathematics": "The two planes that landed without tower help were the last three inbound commercial flights until 5 a.m., the source said." This is from an item in the New York Times of 28 March, courtesy of Belinda Hardman: "Researchers using brain imagining technology have since found that foods high in sugar or fat activate the same reward system as cocaine and other drugs." On 25 March, Connie Schmitt tells us, The Capital of Annapolis, Maryland, reported that "Veterinarian says diabetes is easy to catch if you know the signs". Gordon Schochet found a rather grisly headline in an article with an Associated Press byline on FindLaw, dated 28 March, which I have filed under "could have been better expressed": "Fla [Florida] parents charged with killing daughter in court." A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org . Submissions will usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Apr 8 12:27:04 2011 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2011 17:27:04 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 09 Apr 11 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 731 Saturday 9 April 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/prwi.htm This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Hedera. 3. Q and A: Burke. 4. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- BOUNTY HUNTER Michael Templeton suggests that I hadn't found early examples of the term being used for a hunter of humans because my sources didn't include libraries of western pulp fiction. He found an example in The Crimson Horseshoe by Peter Dawson, dated 1941. As it happens, I've now taken the phrase back a bit further (Justin Beam also found it, in another source): The first four chapters deal with noted western characters: Charles Goodnight, the trail-blazer, John Chisum, the cattle king, Clay Allison, the man-killer, and Tom Horn, scout and human bounty-hunter. [A review of Fighting Men of the West by Dane Coolidge, in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly of Texas, July 1932.] As the writer felt it necessary to specify that the bounty hunter was after human beings and not animals, that sense of the term must have then been new. Justin Beam confirms that Dane Coolidge didn't use the term himself, describing the protagonist as a "man-hunter". BROSIERING As a further comment on the linguistic peculiarities of Eton College in the nineteenth century, Kirk Mattoon quoted from Boys Together by John Chandos, about British public schools in that period. Chandos wrote, "Everyone, male or female, except classics tutors, who kept a boarding house to accommodate Eton boys was a 'Dame'." What was so different about classics tutors? EXPERIMENT Following a suggestion from a reader, I've set up a new RSS feed - The Word File - as a trial. It will run from Monday to Friday of next week, though last Friday's test will be available over this weekend if you want a sneak preview. Each day a new random link will be presented to a page on the World Wide Words site. The URL is http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/wordfile.xml Try it and let me know what you think. Worth having? A waste of effort? Needs modifying? Send your comments to the usual address, wordseditor at worldwidewords.org, but include "Word File" in the subject line. 2. Weird Words: Hedera ------------------------------------------------------------------- Gardeners will prick up their ears in the expectation that they are about to hear something interesting about ivy, as "Hedera" is its genus name (Hedera helix is the common English ivy, where "helix" refers to the spiraling growth of the ivy stems). Ivy is closely involved, but I'm actually writing about punctuation. Most of the dots, marks, slashes and dashes that separate our words are relatively modern inventions that followed the introduction of printing in the fifteenth century. Commas date from the sixteenth century, while exclamation and question marks didn't appear until a century later, around the time that semicolons came in. Classical Latin writers didn't have any of these and didn't feel the lack, but then because written texts were intended to be read aloud rather than silently. They did have the capitulum, or chapter marker, which turned into the symbol we now call a pilcrow (see http://wwwords.org?PLCRW). Romans indicated the ends of texts with an ivy leaf, which they naturally called a hedera. Why they chose ivy is unknown. It was a symbol of Bacchus, the Greek and Roman god of wine, but that hardly seems to fit; perhaps it was just common and easy to draw. The mark was carried over into English printing but by then it had become an ornament, one of a group that became known as "fleurons" (from Old French "floron", a flower). You may still sometimes come across the hedera as a graphic symbol for a section break or as a decorative marker at the beginning of a paragraph. 3. Q and A: Burke ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. In one of C P Snow's Strangers & Brothers series, Time of Hope, I came across a verb that I'd not seen before: "I did not burke the certain truths". What did Snow mean by "burke"? [John Boaler] A. It's an intriguing verb. It takes us back to the 1820s and that notorious pair, Burke and Hare. Medical schools were finding it difficult to get enough cadavers for the anatomic dissection essential to train students. The only official source was executed criminals but their numbers had been decreasing because fewer were being condemned to death, while the number of students needing corpses was increasing. One source was grave-robbing, carried out by low-life scavengers who were given the ironic name of resurrectionists. Brendan Burke and William Hare, two Irish immigrants to Edinburgh, started their grisly trade by selling the body of a recently deceased tenant of their boarding house to Dr Robert Knox, a local anatomist. Having learned that bodies could be profitable, they began to murder individuals, usually by getting them drunk and then smothering them, to leave no marks on the bodies that would reduce their value as specimens. Burke was convicted of 16 murders and executed in January 1829; in a fitting end, his body was publicly dissected at the Edinburgh Medical College. Hare had turned King's Evidence and had been given immunity from prosecution. The case caused a huge sensation, as did the imitative but much more widespread activities of a gang in the English capital which became known as the London Burkers. With the public outcry over grave-robbing, these led to the passing of the Anatomy Act 1832, which legitimised the donation of bodies for medical science. The Times report on 2 February 1829 of his public hanging recorded of those attending that "every countenance wore the lively aspect of a gala-day" and that Burke's name had already become an eponymic verb: the spectators shouted "Burke Hare too!" By the time Charles Dickens was writing his first novel less than a decade later, the term was known to everybody: "Why, sir, bless your innocent eyebrows, that's where the mysterious disappearance of a 'spectable tradesman took place four years ago." "You don't mean to say he was burked, Sam?" said Mr. Pickwick, looking hastily round. [The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens, 1837.] By this time, too, the verb had become figurative. To burke is to suppress, hush up, or avoid discussing something. It comes from the idea of metaphorically smothering an issue. This is the sense in which Snow used it. Though it's hardly common, it's still around: In the case of the BNP [the British National Party], both Government and Opposition need to be compelled to confront the issue they have for so long burked; for it is the mishandling of this which has allowed the BNP to raise its ugly head. [Belfast Telegraph, 20 Oct. 2009.] By the way, "burke" has no connection with the British slang term "berk" for a stupid person. That's rhyming slang, known from the 1920s if not earlier, short for Berkeley (or Berkshire) Hunt, even though in British English the first parts of both are pronounced "bark". 4. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Ella Poindexter spotted a headline on the Sky News website over a story dated 3 April: "Police Name Severed Arms In Lake Victim". Once you know "decedent" is a formal term for a deceased person, a summary of an article in Zaritsky's Estate Planning Update for 1 April contains - as Kathleen Magone points out - an unfortunate error. It ends "... despite the fact the decedent lived there for six months after her death." After last week's instance, further higher mathematics in a news item came courtesy of Andrew Hawke: "The four candidates on the list ahead of Ms Wall (Judith Tizard, Mark Burton, Mahara Okeroa, Martin Gallagher and Dave Hereora) all turned down the role." This was in the New Zealand Herald on 6 April. Aoife Bairead saw a headline in the Sunday Business Post of Ireland dated 3 April: "Bishops agree sex abuse rules". Cecelia Poole found a job posting by Sutter Health for a secretary in a medical centre in northern California. Qualifications required included, "Type 75wpm. Excellent grammar, speloing, editing and composition skills." Suggestion: first hire a proofreader. The Daily Maverick of South Africa (masthead boast: "Not entirely omniscient") had an article on 5 April, Kristina Davidson tells us, about changes at a government agency: "The position of CEO became vacant after all four full-time members, Smunda Mokoena, Thembani Bukula, Ethel Teljeur and Rod Crompton, expired on 31 March." A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org . Submissions will usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Apr 15 12:38:29 2011 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:38:29 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 16 Apr 11 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 732 Saturday 16 April 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/zilb.htm This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. 3. Wordface. 4. Q and A: Cotton on. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- HEDERA AND FLEURON From David Nissen Kahn: "In the for-what-it's- worth vein, 'fleuron' is also a professional kitchen term, with a meaning akin to the typographic one: 'a tiny, crescent-shaped piece of puff pastry used as a garnish, usually atop hot food'. Tim Nau felt that I'd left a lot out of my brief description of punctuation before printing arrived. I agree that there was a long hiatus in my description that omitted the developments that came out of post-classical scribal practices, including the full stop (period) and the slash or virgule, used to mark brief pauses in reading and which evolved into the comma (in fact, "virgule" is from the French word for a comma, but it derives from the Latin "virga" for a rod). BURKE Michael Templeton pointed me to a once-famous Edinburgh skipping rhyme that commemorates the activities of Burke and Hare: Up the close and down the stair, But and ben with Burke and Hare. Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox, the boy who buys the beef. "But and ben" variously means "backwards and forwards", "to and fro" and "everywhere". These days, it's more often the name of a traditional two-room cottage, an "in and out", sometimes used as a holiday home. NEW RSS FEED Though numerous readers looked at the experimental new RSS feed - The Word File - after my note last week, comments came in from just 15 people, mostly favourable. It seems worth continuing, but following a suggestion from Randall Bart I've modified it so that each day's feed includes not only the current day's item but the previous four as well. The address of the feed again: http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/wordfile.xml . Further comments welcome. 2. Weird Words: Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis ------------------------------------------------------------------- Having come across it the other day in a popular science book, it seemed time to recognise this notorious weird word, the longest to appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, beating out such horrors as honorificabilitudinitatibus (see http://wwwords.org?HNFCS). It's supposed to be a lung disease that's caused by the inhalation of the very fine sand and ash dust found around volcanoes. This 45-letter monstrosity (word lovers prefer, with good reason, to refer to it as p45) primarily exists as an example of a very long word, a trophy to be exhibited as evidence of the superior knowledge and intellect of the person presenting it. Hardly anyone who does so realises that they're perpetuating a joke. The story starts in New York in 1935. The famous National Puzzlers' League of the US, the longest-surviving puzzle organisation in the world, was holding its 103rd semi-annual meeting at the Hotel New Yorker. The then president of the NPL was Everett M Smith, whose day job was news editor of the Christian Science Monitor, but who in these circles was known as Puzzlesmith. Mr Smith introduced p45 to the meeting to illustrate the ever-increasing length of medical terms. But doctors knew nothing of it, because it was the creation of Mr Smith's nimble mind. The word was reported in the issue of The New York Herald-Tribune for 23 February 1935, spelled "-koniosis". Frank Scully included it in Bedside Manna, the Third Fun in Bed Book the next year, though he spelled it wrongly. It gained a semi-official stamp of approval when in 1939 Merriam-Webster added it to the supplement of its New International Dictionary (it has been claimed that this was the result of a campaign by members of the NPL). Subsequently, p45 has so often been recorded that many publishers have felt obliged to include it in their larger dictionaries, though usually with disclaimers. If you need to refer to the disease, pneumoconiosis is shorter and means much the same. Or you could use the popular terms silicosis or black lung. 3. Wordface ------------------------------------------------------------------- GOOSE-STEP Tony McCoy O'Grady asked me why the stiff-legged army ceremonial march has this name. The Prussians, who invented it in the eighteenth century, called it the "stechschritt" or stabbing step. The English name was clearly mockingly pejorative, though in a curious lexical twist it has since been widely adopted in other armies. One suggestion is that it made a soldier performing it look as silly as a goose (in the sense of a simpleton, "goose" is from the 1500s). Another notes the application of the term, around 1800, to a bit of basic army drill in which a recruit stood on each leg alternately, so similarly being compared to a goose. This is a description of the drill: Imagine him standing on the right leg, the other being raised so that the foot just clears the ground. Upon the word "Front" from the instructor of the drill, he advanced the raised foot to the front to an extent rather short of a pace, and there keeps it suspended till he hears the word "Forward." He then places the suspended foot on the ground, and raises the other, keeping it off the ground in the rear, till at the further word "Tow," he brings it up to the standing foot, though still keeping it off the ground. He is then in the position from which he started; and at the successive words, "Front," "Forward," "Tow," each leg goes through the alternate standing and suspension required: and so on for as many hours as the drill is ordered to last. [Memoirs of Dr Blenkinsop, by Adam Blenkinsop, 1852.] 4. Q and A: Cotton on ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. In composing an email to a friend, I used the phrase "cottoned on", meaning I'd understood. It suddenly struck me that it's an odd way to describe taking a liking to, or taking advantage of, or becoming a fan of, or coming to understand something. Where and how did the expression originate? [Evan Parry, New Zealand] A. It's complicated, but I'll try to unravel it for you. We're sure that the verb comes from the noun "cotton" for the plant and the fibre. This derives from Arabic "qutn", because the plant's homeland is the Middle East. The very first sense of the verb was to raise the nap on cloth such as wool to draw out the loose ends of the fibres before shearing it to give it a smooth finish. It may have been because freshly woven cotton has a natural fuzzy nap that means it can be sheared without first having to artificially raise it. To call a fibre "cotton" at that time meant it had the finish of cotton, but was actually wool or linen or a mixture of linen and cotton. Confusingly for people who know Manchester as the traditional centre of the cotton trade (to the extent that in Australia and New Zealand "Manchester" means cotton goods such as household linen; it's short for "Manchester wares"), in the sixteenth century "Manchester cotton" could be a type of woollen cloth. By the middle of the sixteenth century the verb sense of "cotton" had become a figurative expression meaning to prosper or succeed. A writer in 1822 tried to explain it: "a metaphor, probably, from the finishing of cloth, which when it cottons, or rises to a regular nap, is nearly or quite complete." By about 1600, to "cotton together" or "cotton with" a person meant you got on well together. It has plausibly been suggested it came from the use of mixtures of cotton and other fibres in clothing. A little later, "cotton up" meant to strike up a friendship. In the early 1800s, to "cotton to" somebody implied that you were drawn or attached to that person. It may be that the idea here is how well a thread of cotton sticks to the surface of cloth. "Cotton to" was taken to Australia and became common there: "My word! Dick," Jim says, "it's a murder he and Aileen didn't cotton to one another in the old days. She'd have been just the girl to have fancied all this sort of swell racket, with a silk gown and dressed up a bit." [Robbery Under Arms, by Rolf Boldrewood, 1888.] Around 1900 this became "cotton on to" and then "cotton on", still in the same sense. Within a decade it was known both in Britain and the US and remains so in the latter country, though it is rather regional and feels old-fashioned or homely. By the 1920s, "cotton on" had developed the last of the meanings that you mention, of coming to understand some matter. It's not too surprising - if you can cotton on to a person, you can equally cotton on to an idea. The best clue I've found to its origin is in a glossary of English army slang used in World War One, published in Notes and Queries in December 1921. This included "cotton on (to)" in the sense "to understand". We may guess that it evolved in Australia and was communicated to British and American soldiers during that war. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Gordon Drukier noted that new signs have appeared In the past few months on the approaches to State Route 3 from Interstate 91 in Connecticut. These warn: "ROUTE 3 NO PERMITTED LOADS ALLOWED". A BBC News story on 14 April began: "The NHS in England could save money by carrying out fewer, less effective procedures" was spotted by Martin Wynne, who noted, "An operation to remove a harmful comma would be a start!" By the time I got to see it, that had happened. "The disclaimer on the back page of the Ford Accessories Pocket Guide booklet from my local Ford Garage," reports David Jackson, "optimistically rephrases the usual E&OE [Errors and Omissions Excepted] to become 'Errors and Omissions Expected'." A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org . Submissions will usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Apr 22 13:02:34 2011 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 18:02:34 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 23 Apr 11 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 733 Saturday 23 April 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/rzex.htm This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Logodaedalus. 3. Wordface. 4. Q and A: Private Eye. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- GOOSE STEP Several readers mentioned that German, as well as the military term "Stechschritt" for what we call the goose step in English, also has "Gänsemarsch", which is literally "goose march". This is centuries older than the other term but has always referred to people, especially children, walking in single file, as goslings do behind mum. I've written the piece up in more detail and put it on the website: http://wwwords.org?GSSTP. UPDATES The following two pieces on the website have been updated: Loo: http://wwwords.org?WCLOO Film trailer: http://wwwords.org?FTRLR RSS FEEDS AND TWITTER The Word File RSS feed is now permanent. I have also restarted my Twitter account (though Google has grabbed my old nickname of worldwidewords, so I'm now wwwordseditor): go to http://www.twitter.com/wwwordseditor) and linked various RSS feeds to it. There are now four feeds: The Word File (Mondays to Fridays, link to random piece): http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/wordfile.xml E-magazine (Saturdays, full text): http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml E-magazine (Saturdays, link only, for Twitter): http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/emagazine.xml Site updates (Saturdays, links to pieces): http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/updates.xml To those of you who have written in some concern to ask whether I'm making work for myself by introducing The Word File, be reassured that all these are generated automatically from my database, so the extra effort is minimal. 2. Weird Words: Logodaedalus /lQg at U'di:d at l@s/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Since the current Oxford English Dictionary entry for this word has no examples later than 1664, you might assume it is deader than the proverbial dodo. It lives on, however, among a select group who are fascinated by archaic words. It has even appeared in these columns, as the pseudonym of a British setter of fiendishly hard crossword puzzles. Logodaedalus, in real life Donald Putnam, chose his name with good reason. A "logodaedalus" manipulates words with great cunning. It commemorates Daedalus, the legendary ancient Greek craftsman who created the labyrinth on Crete to house the Minotaur. "Daidalos" in classical Greek meant "the cunning one". The prefix is from Greek "logos", word. A more recent variation is "logodaedalist", which Nathanial Bailey defined in his 1727 dictionary as "an Inventer or Forger of new Words, and strange Terms" ("forger" is in a figurative sense that comes from a person who casts metal - no criminal intent implied). A logodaedalist may be said to be a weaver of words into a rich and varied verbal tapestry. The Greek artificer has also lent his name to "daedal", which can refer to an inventive or skilful person but which was created by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser to mean the diverse or fruitful earth. There's also "logodaedaly", the skill of putting across a speech or a fluent employment of verbal legerdemain. Bailey said it was "a goodly shew and flourish of Words, without much matter" - that is, without much substance or content. It might be worth resurrecting to throw at your favourite politician when he gives a loquacious but evasive answer to an awkward question. 3. Wordface ------------------------------------------------------------------- DO IT WITH LIGHT News of the new field of OPTOGENETICS has begun to emerge from the research laboratories because of its astonishing results. By inserting genes into an animal which code for proteins that are light-sensitive, neuroscientists have been able to employ light of the right colour to turn brain cells on and off at will, like clicking a light switch. The process involves firing laser light deep into the animals' brains via fibre-optic cables. It has proved possible to stop the electrical activity of various kinds of neurons, such as those that control movement or the establishment of memories. The technique can also be used as a research tool to monitor when neurons fire. Though there is some hope that one day a method like this could be used, for example, to control epilepsy in humans, the need for genetic modification via gene therapy to set up the conditions for the laser light to work makes the idea very unattractive for now. A newer technique, MAGNETOGENETICS, uses a magnetic field rather than light to influence the modified neurons, so avoiding having to implant optical fibres. POTTERER A Yiddish expression new to me (but well known to many Americans) appeared in an interview with the film director Peter Bogdanovich, in which he commented on the usefulness of director's cuts of movies: "I'm not in favour of potchkying with it but if something's bothering you, or you just feel that it really is a better picture for the audience? Well then ...". POTCHKY means to tinker idly, or do something in an amateur fashion, from Yiddish "patshken", to daub or smear, a verb that comes from a Slavic root. I might use FAFFING ABOUT myself (see http://wwwords.org?FFNG). QUOTE OF THE WEEK Eminent British slang lexicographer Jonathon Green, in an article in the Guardian on Thursday: "My response to people saying slang destroys the language is: bollocks." 4. Q and A: Private Eye ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I was just reading about the history of "private eye" and came across conflicting explanations concerning the term's origin. Can you help? [Bernd Herrmann] A. One story you mention links it with the Pinkerton detective agency, the first anywhere, which was founded by Allan Pinkerton in Chicago in the 1850s. His firm's motto was "We Never Sleep" and his business insignia was an unblinking eye. Pinkerton was an early expert proponent of what we now call public relations - among other tricks publishing dime novels based on his experiences - and used to tell the story that criminals so feared him they called him "The Eye". It's easy to see how that might have become associated with all private detectives. It may well have contributed but the connection is indirect, since "private eye" came into use several decades after the Pinkerton Agency was in its heyday. The evidence is that the "eye" part of "private eye" is a pun derived from "private investigator", via the abbreviations "PI" and "Private I". It first appears in a story by Raymond Chandler in Dime Detective magazine in June 1938: "We don't use any private eyes in here. So sorry." "Private investigator" began as a general term for a specialist who was in private practice, as opposed to working for an employer. In the 1880s it was used - as examples - for a veterinary surgeon who had been brought in by a state government to look into an outbreak of cattle disease and for a research botanist working outside the academic system. Although both "private investigator" and "private eye" are closely linked with the US because of stories about hard-boiled gumshoes by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the first example I've found of "private investigator" being applied to a detective is actually from a British author: I think I have already said in another place that Hewitt's professional start as a private investigator dated from his connection with the famous will case of Hartley vs. Hartley and others. [The Holford Will Case, in The Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, by Arthur Morrison, 1895.] Martin Hewitt was one of the imitators of Sherlock Holmes, who ran a detective agency rather than being a lone wolf. He appeared shortly after Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in The Final Problem, published in December 1893. Morrison had some success with tales about him in the next decade. As was usual at the time, they were published first in monthly magazines (and syndicated in newspapers in America - initially I encountered The Holford Will Case in the Galveston Daily News of 10 March 1895) and collected into book form later. The term "private investigator" began to be used in the US for a detective from the early 1900s. It was popularised by E Phillips Oppenheim in his tales about the private detective Peter Ruff, who was billed as such. Might he have got it from Martin Hewitt? 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- The Memphis Flyer of Tennessee featured an e-mail in its Verbatim column on 14 April, copied to us by Pat Foust: "Lt. Barham of the Union Station Task Force is asking for our help in locating an orange Chevrolet Tahoe that has recently been breaking into cars and taking purses. If you see such a car in Midtown, get the license plate and contact Lt. Barham immediately." An item in the Globe and Mail of Toronto dated 17 April was sent in by Mildred Gutkin. A story about a shortage of beds in Toronto's mental hospitals was headed: "Decision preventing offenders waiting for beds at Toronto's CAMH from being incarcerated overturned." She commented, "It's a topsy-turvy world." A report on smartplanet.com dated 18 April confirmed the suspicions of Norman Berns: "Toxic fracking fluids revealed in Congressional report". The second word isn't the favourite euphemistic obscenity of TV's Battlestar Galactica but gas extraction industry jargon for "hydraulic fracturing". A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org . Submissions will usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Apr 29 13:08:56 2011 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 18:08:56 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 30 Apr 11 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 734 Saturday 30 April 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Now on Twitter as @wwwordseditor A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/pmts.htm This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Mumchance. 3. Wordface. 4. Q and A: From hero to goat. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- POTCHKY Shayna Kravetz, a fluent Yiddish speaker (her given name means "beautiful"), wrote from Canada: "Potchky is not just about dabbling; it also means to take something that's finished and keep tinkering with it, adding unnecessary or incongruous bits." She added: "You missed a chance to address one of my favourite words: 'ongepatchked' (both Es are pronounced as schwas). Its root is the same word. It refers to anything ornate or overdecorated. It is an insult; you would not tell your friend that her bridal gown was ongepatchked - at least, not if you wanted to stay friends." PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR The assiduous Michael Templeton has again come up with earlier evidence, in this case for "private detective" and "private investigator" in the sense of a private detective: "You're mistaken," said his friend. "It's Windround, the private detective, or Investigator, as he calls himself. He's just now engaged for my house." ... "That's by no means my view of the case, Mr. Pikeham. Please to remember that I'm not one of the detective police; I'm a private investigator." [The Ringwoods of Ringwood, by Mervyn Merriton, a pseudonym of Henry Coe Coape, 1873.] Coape was an interesting character, by the way. At first sight, he was the very model of a moneyed upper-middle-class English gentleman: the eldest son of a sugar refiner who had amassed an enormous fortune of £300,000, he married into the Irish peerage, became a justice of the peace, served as a captain in the Royal Berkshire Yeomanry Cavalry and as Deputy Lieutenant of Essex. Court records and news reports show he was also what his contemporaries would have described as a cad and a bounder. He was made bankrupt in 1855, spent a year in prison, was accused but acquitted of fraud and was divorced by his wife for adultery, a public and scandalous matter at the time (his wife alleged in the divorce-court hearing that he insisted on bringing his lover on holiday with them to Rome, ostensibly as her maid). He wrote several novels and an opera, The Fairy Oak, performed at Drury Lane in 1845. LOGODAEDALUS Larry Nordell wrote: "I don't think I had ever come across this word before I read World Wide Words, and today I have come across a variant. I am reading Oreo by Fran Ross, published in 1974." The eponymous heroine is challenged by her tutor, Professor Lindau, to work out the supposed etymology of a term. When she succeeds: "The professor was impressed but not struck dumb. 'I am phonofounded,' he said logodaedalyly." 2. Weird Words: Mumchance /'mVmtsA:ns/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a rare recent appearance: His attendance was perfect. He attended every possible meeting. And he sat mumchance throughout every meeting. I suppose it's how you define work. You can sit like a lump throughout hundreds of meetings. Or you can engage your brain to question and to challenge. [Selkirk Weekend Advertiser, 11 Mar. 2010.] You may deduce that to remain mumchance is to stay silent, with a hint that to do so may be a sign of inferior intellect. In fact, in some English dialects its main sense has been remaining stupidly or solidly silent. However, its first meaning was of a game of dice: But, leaving cardes, lets go to dice a while, To passage, treitrippe, hazarde, or mumchance. [Machivell's Dog, an anonymous satire of 1617. The second of these games is frequently spelled "trey-trip", because success in playing it depended on the casting of a trey, a three.] Nobody now seems to know the exact rules, though as it was often mentioned in the same breath as the dice game hazard, ancestor of craps, it's assumed that it was similar. The form and meaning of "mumchance" suggest it ought to be a close relative of "mum" in phrases like "keep mum", stay silent. There is indeed a close connection, though the words have different origins. "Mum" is an imitative term known from the fourteenth century, while "mumchance" is sixteenth century, from Middle Dutch "mommecanse", which has cousins in other Germanic languages and in French. Paradoxically, the link between the dice game and silence is the notoriously noisy carnival, since it was traditionally played in the Netherlands during such festivities, in particular by mummers, masked actors in dumb-show. Mumchance was always played in silence, hence the sense. The game of hazard, by the way, is the source of our word meaning a risk or danger. Mumchance seems to have been similarly perilous, as it evolved to mean a high-risk venture and continued in use in that sense after the dice game had been forgotten. The same name was also given to a card game, whose rules are as poorly recorded as those of the dice game, but which was also played in silence. 3. Wordface ------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT I'VE LEARNED THIS WEEK If you should ever need the adjective relating to a pumpkin, you could try CUCURBITACEOUS, though it may be applied equally to gourds, cucumbers, melons and other trailing or climbing plants in the family Cucurbitaceae. On the same theme, PUMPKINIFICATION means being turned into a pumpkin, used especially for the elevation to divine status of the Roman emperor Claudius because it was given that name by Seneca the Younger in a political satire. A species of fish, found in waters off southern Asia and northern Australia, is known as the WHITEMARGIN STARGAZER, in part because it hides in the sand of the seabed, staring upwards. A medieval torture instrument was called a BARNACLE, an instrument formed from two hinged pieces, which derived from one for clamping the noses of recalcitrant horses to restrain them during shoeing. The closure of the M1 motorway in north London because of a fire had linguistic interest because a mad young man in a dressing gown ironed a shirt in the middle lane of the deserted road. He was described as an EXTREME IRONER. WORD BAG A headline on Sky News read "Iron Lady's bag to go under hammer", a puzzling reference for anybody unversed in the oddities of English idiom or of British politics of the 1980s. Former prime minister Baroness Thatcher is auctioning for charity her famous Asprey handbag, which she carried to meetings with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev as well as to cabinet. It became so central an image of her notoriously tough approach to political opponents and to recalcitrant ministers (hence the epithet "Iron Lady") that it led to a new figurative verb entering the language: to handbag. Some wit quipped that Margaret Thatcher used to keep order among her ministers by hitting them with her handbag. From The Times of 13 June 1988, "The Foreign Office told her she could not get 'our money' back from the Common Market. Mrs Thatcher handbagged her way through an EEC summit in Dublin and won us rebates." It's still to be found; this is from a Reuters tennis report of 20 January this year: "The highlight came afterwards when the third seed handbagged the courtside interviewer over a text message that he had sent to another player." As both the participants were male, it would seem that the verb has lost its original sexist overtones. 4. Q and A: From hero to goat ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I was wondering about the origins of the expression "from hero to goat". [Warren Macnab] A. Unlike you, Mr Macnab, I've never wondered about its origins. That's because until you wrote I'd never come across it. As I have commented previously, writing this e-magazine is educational for its author, whatever its value to its readers. So I started my answer from a position of total ignorance, not by any means a bad jumping-off point. It became clear straightaway that "from hero to goat" is fairly well known in north America and means that by his actions a person has in short order shifted from success to failure, with a concomitant move from praise to blame. It's common in sports: Before the final twist, Mack, who led all scorers with 30 points, looked as if he'd go from hero to goat in that split second when he fouled Brown, who led Pitt with 24 points. He admitted he was guilty of the infraction. [New York Daily News, 19 Mar. 2011.] though it turns up in other fields, particularly finance: Thain has gone from hero to goat in a matter of months, first saving Merrill Lynch by selling to Bank of America and then taking the fall when the brokerage reported a staggering $15 billion quarterly loss that forced bank executives to seek more financial help from the government. [Boston Globe, 23 Jan. 2009.] It seems clear from its history that the goat is the proverbial scapegoat, originally the animal sent into the wilderness after the Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it. The expression may also be connected with the slightly older "to get one's goat". (See http://wwwords.org?GTMGT.) Unsurprisingly, we've no idea who invented it. The first examples in the modern form turn up in the middle 1920s - the first one I can find was in the Baltimore Sun on 29 November 1927. All early examples are from football or basketball. A football story a year later, though not using the exact form, makes its meaning clear: But from none of this does one gather that Mr. Wilton is one of those colorful young men whose deeds in a big game always give room for praise due a hero - or raps due the goat - after the game is over. [Logansport Press, 15 Nov. 1928.] That example makes such a play on the words "hero" and "goat" that the expression must surely have been widely known by then. This is one precursor: There is no denying the fact that the accident made Bindley the hero and Alfred the goat. [Watch Yourself Go By, by Al G Field, 1912.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Susan Nuernberg described what she read in the online University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Today as a sentence construction mishap: "Both peregrines can be seen coming and going from their nesting site, having meals, overlooking the city of Oshkosh and laying eggs through the University's live webcam." Homophone alert, from Medical News Today on 21 April, spotted by Gerald Etkind: "A new joint team of scientists from both Japan and Europe have determined that there are three bacteria groups in a person, which is teaming with microorganisms and microbes." Mathematics revisited, via Norman C Berns. "SmartPlanet can count fractions (reporting the Canadian winner in Shell's eco-marathon, 'This vehicle gets 2,564.8 miles per gallon') but it comes up short on addition. 'Prototype entries included 39 vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Of those engines, 32 were gas powered and the remaining 6 entries were split between ethanol and biodiesel.'" John Samphier reports that on the ABC24 news in Sydney on 26 April the newsreader said that a "motorcyclist was killed when he hit a car not wearing a helmet." Over-compressed headlines continue to cause confusion. "Man Shot By Off Duty Cop in Coma" appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Wednesday, and "US criticizes leak of Guantanamo detainee briefs" was in the Jerusalem Post on Monday. Thanks to Bill McDermott and John Chandler for those. A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org . Submissions will usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Apr 1 16:35:06 2011 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2011 17:35:06 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 02 Apr 11 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 730 Saturday 2 April 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/dmyo.htm This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Tilly-vally. 3. Wordface. 4. Q and A: Bounty hunter. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- LUSTRUM Peter Ingerman and Andrew Fisher pointed out that in writing about this word I had missed an opportunity for including yet another weird word: "suovetaurilia". So far as I know only the Chambers Dictionary includes this Latin mouthful, which is formed from "sus", pig, "ovis", sheep, and "taurus", ox. It refers to the sacrifice of a sheep, a pig and an ox at the lustrum ceremony. I mentioned the Robert Harris novel entitled Lustrum. David Larkin e-mailed from Cape Cod, "Except, of course, in the US, where Simon & Schuster, in their never-ending battle to protect us from big words, renamed the novel Conspirata, which isn't a word at all. I assume their publicists felt it had more marketing, er, luster." "'Lustrum' may be an odd ball on that side of the pond," wrote John Fentner, "but us Yanks learned it from the movie Rooster Cogburn of 1975: 'Judge Parker: You have served this court for almost two lustrums. Rooster Cogburn: What's a lustrum, Judge? Judge Parker: Five years. Don't interrupt me.'" Tony McCoy O'Grady pointed out that the word lingers in Catholic Church circles: "Archbishops and bishops from around the world have to report to Rome (on the state of things in their dioceses) every five years, and these trips are known as lustral visits." On "censor", Anne O'Brien Lloyd wrote from Saskatoon: "The teacher responsible for discipline in a French school was known as Monsieur le Censeur. Should the person responsible be a woman, she was known as Madame le (not la) Censeur, because otherwise the kids would turn her into a lift: Madame l'Ascenseur, and such disrespect was at all costs to be avoided." 2. Weird Words: Tilly-vally ------------------------------------------------------------------- No language can ever have too many words with which its speakers may deride an assertion as hogwash, codswallop, baloney, poppycock, twaddle, cobblers, bosh, tosh or stuff and nonsense. "Tilly-vally" is a member of this set, these days usefully obscure, so it may be employed without too great a risk of dire consequences. It also has the imprimatur of having been employed by our greatest playwright, though in an older spelling: HOSTESS QUICKLY: Tilly-fally, Sir John, never tell me; your ancient swaggerer comes not to my doors. [Henry IV, Part Two, by William Shakespeare, 1597-8. He uses it again in Twelfth Night.] It's fairly common in writings down to the nineteenth century, but in recent times we have preferred more boisterous epithets with which to express our disapprobation, letting it fall away with such other derogatory expressions as the imitative "pshaw!". Various forms are known, such as "tillie-vallie", "tilley-valley" and "tillie-wallie" as well as "tilly-fally". The source is quite remarkably obscure. Some older dictionaries insist it's Scots in origin. Other authorities have claimed it was a hunting phrase borrowed from the French (presumably connected with "tally-ho!") or that it was a mere minor variation on "fiddle-faddle". Sir Walter Scott had a character suggest that it derives from the Latin word "titivillitium", a trifle or a trivial item of gossip. Modern etymologists have wondered about a connection with "dilly-dally"; Anatoly Liberman commented in his Oxford Etymologist blog in 2007 that "The sound group 'dil', along with 'till-', suggests something frivolous. It alludes to meandering and useless work." "So please your Ladyship, we do not think of marrying her as yet," returned Susan, in consternation. "Tilly vally, Susan Talbot, tell me not such folly as that. Why, the maid is over seventeen at the very least!" [Unknown to History, by Charlotte M Yonge, 1882.] 3. Wordface ------------------------------------------------------------------- V2G This abbreviation is likely to be appearing more often in the future. It's short for VEHICLE-TO-GRID and is being promoted as a way to boost renewable energy sources. It's based on the fact that electric vehicles all contain powerful storage batteries, which are connected to a power supply for charging when the vehicles aren't being used. V2G connects the batteries to the electricity grid and exploits the energy stored in them to temporarily supplement the electricity supply instead of, for example, firing up another power station. The vehicle batteries would then be topped up using off- peak power, perhaps from renewable resources such as wind turbines, whose generated power would otherwise be going to waste. The term and the concept have been promoted for at least the last decade but are only now becoming more widely known as the number of electric vehicles grows. BANKRUPT The word BROSHERING turned up in one of the late Ivor Brown's books on language and led me down unfrequented pathways to ancient public-school slang. I found it in only one other place, Reminiscences of Eton by the Reverend Charles Allix Wilkinson of 1888, "'Appius', so-called, had been the head of a conspiracy for 'broshering' their dame, that was, eating her out of house and home - eating and drinking everything that was on the table, and what was sent up afterwards, and still always asking for more." (At Eton College, a dame was a matron - in the language of the time this meant a married woman, especially one of mature years - who kept a boarding-house for boys at the school.) Doug Wilson of the American Dialect Society suggested that it was the same word as "brosier" and indeed in Farmer and Henley's Slang and its Analogues of 1890 "brosiering my dame" was described as Eton College slang in this way: "At Eton, when a dame keeps an unusually bad table, the boys agree together on a day to eat, pocket, or waste everything eatable in the house. The censure is well understood, and the hint is generally effective". Other sources note it was originally Cheshire slang for a bankrupt and that an Eton boy who had spent all his pocket money was said to be "brosiered". Such is the school slang of yesteryear, of which there is nothing deader. 4. Q and A: Bounty hunter ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. A friend has circulated an e-mail that suggests that the term "bounty hunter" comes from the search for HMS Bounty, the famous ship captained by William Bligh that mutinied in April 1789. It also suggests that Captain Edward Edwards of HMS Pandora, who captured ten of the mutineers on Tahiti, was the original bounty hunter. What do you think? [Ray Hattingh, South Africa] A. The facts of the story about Captain Edwards being sent out to hunt down the mutineers and return them to England for trial are correct. His mission was only partly successful. He did capture some mutineers on Tahiti, but he failed to find the uncharted Pitcairn Island, his ship was wrecked on Australia's Great Barrier Reef and he and the surviving crew and mutineers were forced to make a long voyage in open boats, much as Bligh had had to after the mutiny. It's an extraordinary story but it has nothing whatever to do with the term "bounty hunter". Bligh's ship was named for the fruitfulness of nature or generosity of God. Bounties were also cash rewards to encourage some activity. For example, they were given to recruits on joining the army or navy. The American colonies offered bounties from about the middle of the eighteenth century for the scalps of American Indians and for wanted criminals taken dead or alive. The following century, it was common in the US to offer cash bounties for the pelts or scalps of some unwanted or dangerous species of animal, such as bears, wolves, skunks or coyotes. After a Supreme Court ruling in 1872, individuals outside formal law enforcement bodies could track down fugitives from bail to get a reward, especially those that the law had trouble apprehending because they'd skipped across county or state lines. Civilian bounty hunters are still known in the US (the only country apart from the Philippines that permits them); they go by names such as bail enforcement agent or recovery agent. Most early bounty hunters remained anonymous for very good reason. A very few were famous (or infamous), such as Jack Duncan of Texas and Charlie Siringo of the Pinkerton Agency. More recent fictional ones, such as Rooster Cogburn of True Grit, were based on their stories. When I began to look for the written evidence for the term, I was surprised by what turned up - or more correctly by what didn't. There's no evidence that the early real-life "bounty hunters" were called that by their contemporaries. The term came late into the language and the first examples are all references to hunters of wild animals, not humans. This is the earliest I've found: Cheyenne _Leader_, 23rd: A trifle over $500 worth of warrants were issued at the court house yesterday in favor of bounty hunters. From 8 o'clock in the morning until the closing hour in the afternoon boys and men were continually visiting the county clerk's office with installments of gopher scalps, varying from the small boy's mite of fifty-two to the professional's contribution of 500. [Salt Lake Daily Tribune, 26 June 1887.] A shift from a hunter of animals to a hunter-down of criminals is easy to understand but you have to come a lot nearer the present day to find examples. An ambiguous example dated 1930 is in the Oxford English Dictionary's entry, but the first I've been able to find that explicitly refer to the apprehension of humans are the 1954 film The Bounty Hunter, which starred Randolph Scott on the track of three murdering train robbers, and Elmore Leonard's book of the same title in the same year. Even if Captain Edwards had been paid a bounty for capturing the Bounty's mutineers - which he wasn't - he couldn't have been called a bounty hunter. To apply the term to the pursuers of fugitives in the late nineteenth-century US is equally anachronistic. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Norton described the sentence in a Washington Post report on 23 March as "the higher mathematics": "The two planes that landed without tower help were the last three inbound commercial flights until 5 a.m., the source said." This is from an item in the New York Times of 28 March, courtesy of Belinda Hardman: "Researchers using brain imagining technology have since found that foods high in sugar or fat activate the same reward system as cocaine and other drugs." On 25 March, Connie Schmitt tells us, The Capital of Annapolis, Maryland, reported that "Veterinarian says diabetes is easy to catch if you know the signs". Gordon Schochet found a rather grisly headline in an article with an Associated Press byline on FindLaw, dated 28 March, which I have filed under "could have been better expressed": "Fla [Florida] parents charged with killing daughter in court." A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org . Submissions will usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Apr 8 16:27:04 2011 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2011 17:27:04 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 09 Apr 11 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 731 Saturday 9 April 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/prwi.htm This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Hedera. 3. Q and A: Burke. 4. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- BOUNTY HUNTER Michael Templeton suggests that I hadn't found early examples of the term being used for a hunter of humans because my sources didn't include libraries of western pulp fiction. He found an example in The Crimson Horseshoe by Peter Dawson, dated 1941. As it happens, I've now taken the phrase back a bit further (Justin Beam also found it, in another source): The first four chapters deal with noted western characters: Charles Goodnight, the trail-blazer, John Chisum, the cattle king, Clay Allison, the man-killer, and Tom Horn, scout and human bounty-hunter. [A review of Fighting Men of the West by Dane Coolidge, in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly of Texas, July 1932.] As the writer felt it necessary to specify that the bounty hunter was after human beings and not animals, that sense of the term must have then been new. Justin Beam confirms that Dane Coolidge didn't use the term himself, describing the protagonist as a "man-hunter". BROSIERING As a further comment on the linguistic peculiarities of Eton College in the nineteenth century, Kirk Mattoon quoted from Boys Together by John Chandos, about British public schools in that period. Chandos wrote, "Everyone, male or female, except classics tutors, who kept a boarding house to accommodate Eton boys was a 'Dame'." What was so different about classics tutors? EXPERIMENT Following a suggestion from a reader, I've set up a new RSS feed - The Word File - as a trial. It will run from Monday to Friday of next week, though last Friday's test will be available over this weekend if you want a sneak preview. Each day a new random link will be presented to a page on the World Wide Words site. The URL is http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/wordfile.xml Try it and let me know what you think. Worth having? A waste of effort? Needs modifying? Send your comments to the usual address, wordseditor at worldwidewords.org, but include "Word File" in the subject line. 2. Weird Words: Hedera ------------------------------------------------------------------- Gardeners will prick up their ears in the expectation that they are about to hear something interesting about ivy, as "Hedera" is its genus name (Hedera helix is the common English ivy, where "helix" refers to the spiraling growth of the ivy stems). Ivy is closely involved, but I'm actually writing about punctuation. Most of the dots, marks, slashes and dashes that separate our words are relatively modern inventions that followed the introduction of printing in the fifteenth century. Commas date from the sixteenth century, while exclamation and question marks didn't appear until a century later, around the time that semicolons came in. Classical Latin writers didn't have any of these and didn't feel the lack, but then because written texts were intended to be read aloud rather than silently. They did have the capitulum, or chapter marker, which turned into the symbol we now call a pilcrow (see http://wwwords.org?PLCRW). Romans indicated the ends of texts with an ivy leaf, which they naturally called a hedera. Why they chose ivy is unknown. It was a symbol of Bacchus, the Greek and Roman god of wine, but that hardly seems to fit; perhaps it was just common and easy to draw. The mark was carried over into English printing but by then it had become an ornament, one of a group that became known as "fleurons" (from Old French "floron", a flower). You may still sometimes come across the hedera as a graphic symbol for a section break or as a decorative marker at the beginning of a paragraph. 3. Q and A: Burke ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. In one of C P Snow's Strangers & Brothers series, Time of Hope, I came across a verb that I'd not seen before: "I did not burke the certain truths". What did Snow mean by "burke"? [John Boaler] A. It's an intriguing verb. It takes us back to the 1820s and that notorious pair, Burke and Hare. Medical schools were finding it difficult to get enough cadavers for the anatomic dissection essential to train students. The only official source was executed criminals but their numbers had been decreasing because fewer were being condemned to death, while the number of students needing corpses was increasing. One source was grave-robbing, carried out by low-life scavengers who were given the ironic name of resurrectionists. Brendan Burke and William Hare, two Irish immigrants to Edinburgh, started their grisly trade by selling the body of a recently deceased tenant of their boarding house to Dr Robert Knox, a local anatomist. Having learned that bodies could be profitable, they began to murder individuals, usually by getting them drunk and then smothering them, to leave no marks on the bodies that would reduce their value as specimens. Burke was convicted of 16 murders and executed in January 1829; in a fitting end, his body was publicly dissected at the Edinburgh Medical College. Hare had turned King's Evidence and had been given immunity from prosecution. The case caused a huge sensation, as did the imitative but much more widespread activities of a gang in the English capital which became known as the London Burkers. With the public outcry over grave-robbing, these led to the passing of the Anatomy Act 1832, which legitimised the donation of bodies for medical science. The Times report on 2 February 1829 of his public hanging recorded of those attending that "every countenance wore the lively aspect of a gala-day" and that Burke's name had already become an eponymic verb: the spectators shouted "Burke Hare too!" By the time Charles Dickens was writing his first novel less than a decade later, the term was known to everybody: "Why, sir, bless your innocent eyebrows, that's where the mysterious disappearance of a 'spectable tradesman took place four years ago." "You don't mean to say he was burked, Sam?" said Mr. Pickwick, looking hastily round. [The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens, 1837.] By this time, too, the verb had become figurative. To burke is to suppress, hush up, or avoid discussing something. It comes from the idea of metaphorically smothering an issue. This is the sense in which Snow used it. Though it's hardly common, it's still around: In the case of the BNP [the British National Party], both Government and Opposition need to be compelled to confront the issue they have for so long burked; for it is the mishandling of this which has allowed the BNP to raise its ugly head. [Belfast Telegraph, 20 Oct. 2009.] By the way, "burke" has no connection with the British slang term "berk" for a stupid person. That's rhyming slang, known from the 1920s if not earlier, short for Berkeley (or Berkshire) Hunt, even though in British English the first parts of both are pronounced "bark". 4. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Ella Poindexter spotted a headline on the Sky News website over a story dated 3 April: "Police Name Severed Arms In Lake Victim". Once you know "decedent" is a formal term for a deceased person, a summary of an article in Zaritsky's Estate Planning Update for 1 April contains - as Kathleen Magone points out - an unfortunate error. It ends "... despite the fact the decedent lived there for six months after her death." After last week's instance, further higher mathematics in a news item came courtesy of Andrew Hawke: "The four candidates on the list ahead of Ms Wall (Judith Tizard, Mark Burton, Mahara Okeroa, Martin Gallagher and Dave Hereora) all turned down the role." This was in the New Zealand Herald on 6 April. Aoife Bairead saw a headline in the Sunday Business Post of Ireland dated 3 April: "Bishops agree sex abuse rules". Cecelia Poole found a job posting by Sutter Health for a secretary in a medical centre in northern California. Qualifications required included, "Type 75wpm. Excellent grammar, speloing, editing and composition skills." Suggestion: first hire a proofreader. The Daily Maverick of South Africa (masthead boast: "Not entirely omniscient") had an article on 5 April, Kristina Davidson tells us, about changes at a government agency: "The position of CEO became vacant after all four full-time members, Smunda Mokoena, Thembani Bukula, Ethel Teljeur and Rod Crompton, expired on 31 March." A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org . Submissions will usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Apr 15 16:38:29 2011 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:38:29 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 16 Apr 11 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 732 Saturday 16 April 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/zilb.htm This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. 3. Wordface. 4. Q and A: Cotton on. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- HEDERA AND FLEURON From David Nissen Kahn: "In the for-what-it's- worth vein, 'fleuron' is also a professional kitchen term, with a meaning akin to the typographic one: 'a tiny, crescent-shaped piece of puff pastry used as a garnish, usually atop hot food'. Tim Nau felt that I'd left a lot out of my brief description of punctuation before printing arrived. I agree that there was a long hiatus in my description that omitted the developments that came out of post-classical scribal practices, including the full stop (period) and the slash or virgule, used to mark brief pauses in reading and which evolved into the comma (in fact, "virgule" is from the French word for a comma, but it derives from the Latin "virga" for a rod). BURKE Michael Templeton pointed me to a once-famous Edinburgh skipping rhyme that commemorates the activities of Burke and Hare: Up the close and down the stair, But and ben with Burke and Hare. Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox, the boy who buys the beef. "But and ben" variously means "backwards and forwards", "to and fro" and "everywhere". These days, it's more often the name of a traditional two-room cottage, an "in and out", sometimes used as a holiday home. NEW RSS FEED Though numerous readers looked at the experimental new RSS feed - The Word File - after my note last week, comments came in from just 15 people, mostly favourable. It seems worth continuing, but following a suggestion from Randall Bart I've modified it so that each day's feed includes not only the current day's item but the previous four as well. The address of the feed again: http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/wordfile.xml . Further comments welcome. 2. Weird Words: Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis ------------------------------------------------------------------- Having come across it the other day in a popular science book, it seemed time to recognise this notorious weird word, the longest to appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, beating out such horrors as honorificabilitudinitatibus (see http://wwwords.org?HNFCS). It's supposed to be a lung disease that's caused by the inhalation of the very fine sand and ash dust found around volcanoes. This 45-letter monstrosity (word lovers prefer, with good reason, to refer to it as p45) primarily exists as an example of a very long word, a trophy to be exhibited as evidence of the superior knowledge and intellect of the person presenting it. Hardly anyone who does so realises that they're perpetuating a joke. The story starts in New York in 1935. The famous National Puzzlers' League of the US, the longest-surviving puzzle organisation in the world, was holding its 103rd semi-annual meeting at the Hotel New Yorker. The then president of the NPL was Everett M Smith, whose day job was news editor of the Christian Science Monitor, but who in these circles was known as Puzzlesmith. Mr Smith introduced p45 to the meeting to illustrate the ever-increasing length of medical terms. But doctors knew nothing of it, because it was the creation of Mr Smith's nimble mind. The word was reported in the issue of The New York Herald-Tribune for 23 February 1935, spelled "-koniosis". Frank Scully included it in Bedside Manna, the Third Fun in Bed Book the next year, though he spelled it wrongly. It gained a semi-official stamp of approval when in 1939 Merriam-Webster added it to the supplement of its New International Dictionary (it has been claimed that this was the result of a campaign by members of the NPL). Subsequently, p45 has so often been recorded that many publishers have felt obliged to include it in their larger dictionaries, though usually with disclaimers. If you need to refer to the disease, pneumoconiosis is shorter and means much the same. Or you could use the popular terms silicosis or black lung. 3. Wordface ------------------------------------------------------------------- GOOSE-STEP Tony McCoy O'Grady asked me why the stiff-legged army ceremonial march has this name. The Prussians, who invented it in the eighteenth century, called it the "stechschritt" or stabbing step. The English name was clearly mockingly pejorative, though in a curious lexical twist it has since been widely adopted in other armies. One suggestion is that it made a soldier performing it look as silly as a goose (in the sense of a simpleton, "goose" is from the 1500s). Another notes the application of the term, around 1800, to a bit of basic army drill in which a recruit stood on each leg alternately, so similarly being compared to a goose. This is a description of the drill: Imagine him standing on the right leg, the other being raised so that the foot just clears the ground. Upon the word "Front" from the instructor of the drill, he advanced the raised foot to the front to an extent rather short of a pace, and there keeps it suspended till he hears the word "Forward." He then places the suspended foot on the ground, and raises the other, keeping it off the ground in the rear, till at the further word "Tow," he brings it up to the standing foot, though still keeping it off the ground. He is then in the position from which he started; and at the successive words, "Front," "Forward," "Tow," each leg goes through the alternate standing and suspension required: and so on for as many hours as the drill is ordered to last. [Memoirs of Dr Blenkinsop, by Adam Blenkinsop, 1852.] 4. Q and A: Cotton on ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. In composing an email to a friend, I used the phrase "cottoned on", meaning I'd understood. It suddenly struck me that it's an odd way to describe taking a liking to, or taking advantage of, or becoming a fan of, or coming to understand something. Where and how did the expression originate? [Evan Parry, New Zealand] A. It's complicated, but I'll try to unravel it for you. We're sure that the verb comes from the noun "cotton" for the plant and the fibre. This derives from Arabic "qutn", because the plant's homeland is the Middle East. The very first sense of the verb was to raise the nap on cloth such as wool to draw out the loose ends of the fibres before shearing it to give it a smooth finish. It may have been because freshly woven cotton has a natural fuzzy nap that means it can be sheared without first having to artificially raise it. To call a fibre "cotton" at that time meant it had the finish of cotton, but was actually wool or linen or a mixture of linen and cotton. Confusingly for people who know Manchester as the traditional centre of the cotton trade (to the extent that in Australia and New Zealand "Manchester" means cotton goods such as household linen; it's short for "Manchester wares"), in the sixteenth century "Manchester cotton" could be a type of woollen cloth. By the middle of the sixteenth century the verb sense of "cotton" had become a figurative expression meaning to prosper or succeed. A writer in 1822 tried to explain it: "a metaphor, probably, from the finishing of cloth, which when it cottons, or rises to a regular nap, is nearly or quite complete." By about 1600, to "cotton together" or "cotton with" a person meant you got on well together. It has plausibly been suggested it came from the use of mixtures of cotton and other fibres in clothing. A little later, "cotton up" meant to strike up a friendship. In the early 1800s, to "cotton to" somebody implied that you were drawn or attached to that person. It may be that the idea here is how well a thread of cotton sticks to the surface of cloth. "Cotton to" was taken to Australia and became common there: "My word! Dick," Jim says, "it's a murder he and Aileen didn't cotton to one another in the old days. She'd have been just the girl to have fancied all this sort of swell racket, with a silk gown and dressed up a bit." [Robbery Under Arms, by Rolf Boldrewood, 1888.] Around 1900 this became "cotton on to" and then "cotton on", still in the same sense. Within a decade it was known both in Britain and the US and remains so in the latter country, though it is rather regional and feels old-fashioned or homely. By the 1920s, "cotton on" had developed the last of the meanings that you mention, of coming to understand some matter. It's not too surprising - if you can cotton on to a person, you can equally cotton on to an idea. The best clue I've found to its origin is in a glossary of English army slang used in World War One, published in Notes and Queries in December 1921. This included "cotton on (to)" in the sense "to understand". We may guess that it evolved in Australia and was communicated to British and American soldiers during that war. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Gordon Drukier noted that new signs have appeared In the past few months on the approaches to State Route 3 from Interstate 91 in Connecticut. These warn: "ROUTE 3 NO PERMITTED LOADS ALLOWED". A BBC News story on 14 April began: "The NHS in England could save money by carrying out fewer, less effective procedures" was spotted by Martin Wynne, who noted, "An operation to remove a harmful comma would be a start!" By the time I got to see it, that had happened. "The disclaimer on the back page of the Ford Accessories Pocket Guide booklet from my local Ford Garage," reports David Jackson, "optimistically rephrases the usual E&OE [Errors and Omissions Excepted] to become 'Errors and Omissions Expected'." A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org . Submissions will usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Apr 22 17:02:34 2011 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 18:02:34 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 23 Apr 11 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 733 Saturday 23 April 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/rzex.htm This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Logodaedalus. 3. Wordface. 4. Q and A: Private Eye. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- GOOSE STEP Several readers mentioned that German, as well as the military term "Stechschritt" for what we call the goose step in English, also has "G?nsemarsch", which is literally "goose march". This is centuries older than the other term but has always referred to people, especially children, walking in single file, as goslings do behind mum. I've written the piece up in more detail and put it on the website: http://wwwords.org?GSSTP. UPDATES The following two pieces on the website have been updated: Loo: http://wwwords.org?WCLOO Film trailer: http://wwwords.org?FTRLR RSS FEEDS AND TWITTER The Word File RSS feed is now permanent. I have also restarted my Twitter account (though Google has grabbed my old nickname of worldwidewords, so I'm now wwwordseditor): go to http://www.twitter.com/wwwordseditor) and linked various RSS feeds to it. There are now four feeds: The Word File (Mondays to Fridays, link to random piece): http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/wordfile.xml E-magazine (Saturdays, full text): http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml E-magazine (Saturdays, link only, for Twitter): http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/emagazine.xml Site updates (Saturdays, links to pieces): http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/updates.xml To those of you who have written in some concern to ask whether I'm making work for myself by introducing The Word File, be reassured that all these are generated automatically from my database, so the extra effort is minimal. 2. Weird Words: Logodaedalus /lQg at U'di:d at l@s/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Since the current Oxford English Dictionary entry for this word has no examples later than 1664, you might assume it is deader than the proverbial dodo. It lives on, however, among a select group who are fascinated by archaic words. It has even appeared in these columns, as the pseudonym of a British setter of fiendishly hard crossword puzzles. Logodaedalus, in real life Donald Putnam, chose his name with good reason. A "logodaedalus" manipulates words with great cunning. It commemorates Daedalus, the legendary ancient Greek craftsman who created the labyrinth on Crete to house the Minotaur. "Daidalos" in classical Greek meant "the cunning one". The prefix is from Greek "logos", word. A more recent variation is "logodaedalist", which Nathanial Bailey defined in his 1727 dictionary as "an Inventer or Forger of new Words, and strange Terms" ("forger" is in a figurative sense that comes from a person who casts metal - no criminal intent implied). A logodaedalist may be said to be a weaver of words into a rich and varied verbal tapestry. The Greek artificer has also lent his name to "daedal", which can refer to an inventive or skilful person but which was created by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser to mean the diverse or fruitful earth. There's also "logodaedaly", the skill of putting across a speech or a fluent employment of verbal legerdemain. Bailey said it was "a goodly shew and flourish of Words, without much matter" - that is, without much substance or content. It might be worth resurrecting to throw at your favourite politician when he gives a loquacious but evasive answer to an awkward question. 3. Wordface ------------------------------------------------------------------- DO IT WITH LIGHT News of the new field of OPTOGENETICS has begun to emerge from the research laboratories because of its astonishing results. By inserting genes into an animal which code for proteins that are light-sensitive, neuroscientists have been able to employ light of the right colour to turn brain cells on and off at will, like clicking a light switch. The process involves firing laser light deep into the animals' brains via fibre-optic cables. It has proved possible to stop the electrical activity of various kinds of neurons, such as those that control movement or the establishment of memories. The technique can also be used as a research tool to monitor when neurons fire. Though there is some hope that one day a method like this could be used, for example, to control epilepsy in humans, the need for genetic modification via gene therapy to set up the conditions for the laser light to work makes the idea very unattractive for now. A newer technique, MAGNETOGENETICS, uses a magnetic field rather than light to influence the modified neurons, so avoiding having to implant optical fibres. POTTERER A Yiddish expression new to me (but well known to many Americans) appeared in an interview with the film director Peter Bogdanovich, in which he commented on the usefulness of director's cuts of movies: "I'm not in favour of potchkying with it but if something's bothering you, or you just feel that it really is a better picture for the audience? Well then ...". POTCHKY means to tinker idly, or do something in an amateur fashion, from Yiddish "patshken", to daub or smear, a verb that comes from a Slavic root. I might use FAFFING ABOUT myself (see http://wwwords.org?FFNG). QUOTE OF THE WEEK Eminent British slang lexicographer Jonathon Green, in an article in the Guardian on Thursday: "My response to people saying slang destroys the language is: bollocks." 4. Q and A: Private Eye ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I was just reading about the history of "private eye" and came across conflicting explanations concerning the term's origin. Can you help? [Bernd Herrmann] A. One story you mention links it with the Pinkerton detective agency, the first anywhere, which was founded by Allan Pinkerton in Chicago in the 1850s. His firm's motto was "We Never Sleep" and his business insignia was an unblinking eye. Pinkerton was an early expert proponent of what we now call public relations - among other tricks publishing dime novels based on his experiences - and used to tell the story that criminals so feared him they called him "The Eye". It's easy to see how that might have become associated with all private detectives. It may well have contributed but the connection is indirect, since "private eye" came into use several decades after the Pinkerton Agency was in its heyday. The evidence is that the "eye" part of "private eye" is a pun derived from "private investigator", via the abbreviations "PI" and "Private I". It first appears in a story by Raymond Chandler in Dime Detective magazine in June 1938: "We don't use any private eyes in here. So sorry." "Private investigator" began as a general term for a specialist who was in private practice, as opposed to working for an employer. In the 1880s it was used - as examples - for a veterinary surgeon who had been brought in by a state government to look into an outbreak of cattle disease and for a research botanist working outside the academic system. Although both "private investigator" and "private eye" are closely linked with the US because of stories about hard-boiled gumshoes by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the first example I've found of "private investigator" being applied to a detective is actually from a British author: I think I have already said in another place that Hewitt's professional start as a private investigator dated from his connection with the famous will case of Hartley vs. Hartley and others. [The Holford Will Case, in The Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, by Arthur Morrison, 1895.] Martin Hewitt was one of the imitators of Sherlock Holmes, who ran a detective agency rather than being a lone wolf. He appeared shortly after Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in The Final Problem, published in December 1893. Morrison had some success with tales about him in the next decade. As was usual at the time, they were published first in monthly magazines (and syndicated in newspapers in America - initially I encountered The Holford Will Case in the Galveston Daily News of 10 March 1895) and collected into book form later. The term "private investigator" began to be used in the US for a detective from the early 1900s. It was popularised by E Phillips Oppenheim in his tales about the private detective Peter Ruff, who was billed as such. Might he have got it from Martin Hewitt? 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- The Memphis Flyer of Tennessee featured an e-mail in its Verbatim column on 14 April, copied to us by Pat Foust: "Lt. Barham of the Union Station Task Force is asking for our help in locating an orange Chevrolet Tahoe that has recently been breaking into cars and taking purses. If you see such a car in Midtown, get the license plate and contact Lt. Barham immediately." An item in the Globe and Mail of Toronto dated 17 April was sent in by Mildred Gutkin. A story about a shortage of beds in Toronto's mental hospitals was headed: "Decision preventing offenders waiting for beds at Toronto's CAMH from being incarcerated overturned." She commented, "It's a topsy-turvy world." A report on smartplanet.com dated 18 April confirmed the suspicions of Norman Berns: "Toxic fracking fluids revealed in Congressional report". The second word isn't the favourite euphemistic obscenity of TV's Battlestar Galactica but gas extraction industry jargon for "hydraulic fracturing". A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org . Submissions will usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). ------------------------------------------------------------------- From wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG Fri Apr 29 17:08:56 2011 From: wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion) Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 18:08:56 +0100 Subject: World Wide Words -- 30 Apr 11 Message-ID: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 734 Saturday 30 April 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Now on Twitter as @wwwordseditor A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/pmts.htm This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Mumchance. 3. Wordface. 4. Q and A: From hero to goat. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- POTCHKY Shayna Kravetz, a fluent Yiddish speaker (her given name means "beautiful"), wrote from Canada: "Potchky is not just about dabbling; it also means to take something that's finished and keep tinkering with it, adding unnecessary or incongruous bits." She added: "You missed a chance to address one of my favourite words: 'ongepatchked' (both Es are pronounced as schwas). Its root is the same word. It refers to anything ornate or overdecorated. It is an insult; you would not tell your friend that her bridal gown was ongepatchked - at least, not if you wanted to stay friends." PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR The assiduous Michael Templeton has again come up with earlier evidence, in this case for "private detective" and "private investigator" in the sense of a private detective: "You're mistaken," said his friend. "It's Windround, the private detective, or Investigator, as he calls himself. He's just now engaged for my house." ... "That's by no means my view of the case, Mr. Pikeham. Please to remember that I'm not one of the detective police; I'm a private investigator." [The Ringwoods of Ringwood, by Mervyn Merriton, a pseudonym of Henry Coe Coape, 1873.] Coape was an interesting character, by the way. At first sight, he was the very model of a moneyed upper-middle-class English gentleman: the eldest son of a sugar refiner who had amassed an enormous fortune of ?300,000, he married into the Irish peerage, became a justice of the peace, served as a captain in the Royal Berkshire Yeomanry Cavalry and as Deputy Lieutenant of Essex. Court records and news reports show he was also what his contemporaries would have described as a cad and a bounder. He was made bankrupt in 1855, spent a year in prison, was accused but acquitted of fraud and was divorced by his wife for adultery, a public and scandalous matter at the time (his wife alleged in the divorce-court hearing that he insisted on bringing his lover on holiday with them to Rome, ostensibly as her maid). He wrote several novels and an opera, The Fairy Oak, performed at Drury Lane in 1845. LOGODAEDALUS Larry Nordell wrote: "I don't think I had ever come across this word before I read World Wide Words, and today I have come across a variant. I am reading Oreo by Fran Ross, published in 1974." The eponymous heroine is challenged by her tutor, Professor Lindau, to work out the supposed etymology of a term. When she succeeds: "The professor was impressed but not struck dumb. 'I am phonofounded,' he said logodaedalyly." 2. Weird Words: Mumchance /'mVmtsA:ns/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a rare recent appearance: His attendance was perfect. He attended every possible meeting. And he sat mumchance throughout every meeting. I suppose it's how you define work. You can sit like a lump throughout hundreds of meetings. Or you can engage your brain to question and to challenge. [Selkirk Weekend Advertiser, 11 Mar. 2010.] You may deduce that to remain mumchance is to stay silent, with a hint that to do so may be a sign of inferior intellect. In fact, in some English dialects its main sense has been remaining stupidly or solidly silent. However, its first meaning was of a game of dice: But, leaving cardes, lets go to dice a while, To passage, treitrippe, hazarde, or mumchance. [Machivell's Dog, an anonymous satire of 1617. The second of these games is frequently spelled "trey-trip", because success in playing it depended on the casting of a trey, a three.] Nobody now seems to know the exact rules, though as it was often mentioned in the same breath as the dice game hazard, ancestor of craps, it's assumed that it was similar. The form and meaning of "mumchance" suggest it ought to be a close relative of "mum" in phrases like "keep mum", stay silent. There is indeed a close connection, though the words have different origins. "Mum" is an imitative term known from the fourteenth century, while "mumchance" is sixteenth century, from Middle Dutch "mommecanse", which has cousins in other Germanic languages and in French. Paradoxically, the link between the dice game and silence is the notoriously noisy carnival, since it was traditionally played in the Netherlands during such festivities, in particular by mummers, masked actors in dumb-show. Mumchance was always played in silence, hence the sense. The game of hazard, by the way, is the source of our word meaning a risk or danger. Mumchance seems to have been similarly perilous, as it evolved to mean a high-risk venture and continued in use in that sense after the dice game had been forgotten. The same name was also given to a card game, whose rules are as poorly recorded as those of the dice game, but which was also played in silence. 3. Wordface ------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT I'VE LEARNED THIS WEEK If you should ever need the adjective relating to a pumpkin, you could try CUCURBITACEOUS, though it may be applied equally to gourds, cucumbers, melons and other trailing or climbing plants in the family Cucurbitaceae. On the same theme, PUMPKINIFICATION means being turned into a pumpkin, used especially for the elevation to divine status of the Roman emperor Claudius because it was given that name by Seneca the Younger in a political satire. A species of fish, found in waters off southern Asia and northern Australia, is known as the WHITEMARGIN STARGAZER, in part because it hides in the sand of the seabed, staring upwards. A medieval torture instrument was called a BARNACLE, an instrument formed from two hinged pieces, which derived from one for clamping the noses of recalcitrant horses to restrain them during shoeing. The closure of the M1 motorway in north London because of a fire had linguistic interest because a mad young man in a dressing gown ironed a shirt in the middle lane of the deserted road. He was described as an EXTREME IRONER. WORD BAG A headline on Sky News read "Iron Lady's bag to go under hammer", a puzzling reference for anybody unversed in the oddities of English idiom or of British politics of the 1980s. Former prime minister Baroness Thatcher is auctioning for charity her famous Asprey handbag, which she carried to meetings with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev as well as to cabinet. It became so central an image of her notoriously tough approach to political opponents and to recalcitrant ministers (hence the epithet "Iron Lady") that it led to a new figurative verb entering the language: to handbag. Some wit quipped that Margaret Thatcher used to keep order among her ministers by hitting them with her handbag. From The Times of 13 June 1988, "The Foreign Office told her she could not get 'our money' back from the Common Market. Mrs Thatcher handbagged her way through an EEC summit in Dublin and won us rebates." It's still to be found; this is from a Reuters tennis report of 20 January this year: "The highlight came afterwards when the third seed handbagged the courtside interviewer over a text message that he had sent to another player." As both the participants were male, it would seem that the verb has lost its original sexist overtones. 4. Q and A: From hero to goat ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I was wondering about the origins of the expression "from hero to goat". [Warren Macnab] A. Unlike you, Mr Macnab, I've never wondered about its origins. That's because until you wrote I'd never come across it. As I have commented previously, writing this e-magazine is educational for its author, whatever its value to its readers. So I started my answer from a position of total ignorance, not by any means a bad jumping-off point. It became clear straightaway that "from hero to goat" is fairly well known in north America and means that by his actions a person has in short order shifted from success to failure, with a concomitant move from praise to blame. It's common in sports: Before the final twist, Mack, who led all scorers with 30 points, looked as if he'd go from hero to goat in that split second when he fouled Brown, who led Pitt with 24 points. He admitted he was guilty of the infraction. [New York Daily News, 19 Mar. 2011.] though it turns up in other fields, particularly finance: Thain has gone from hero to goat in a matter of months, first saving Merrill Lynch by selling to Bank of America and then taking the fall when the brokerage reported a staggering $15 billion quarterly loss that forced bank executives to seek more financial help from the government. [Boston Globe, 23 Jan. 2009.] It seems clear from its history that the goat is the proverbial scapegoat, originally the animal sent into the wilderness after the Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people upon it. The expression may also be connected with the slightly older "to get one's goat". (See http://wwwords.org?GTMGT.) Unsurprisingly, we've no idea who invented it. The first examples in the modern form turn up in the middle 1920s - the first one I can find was in the Baltimore Sun on 29 November 1927. All early examples are from football or basketball. A football story a year later, though not using the exact form, makes its meaning clear: But from none of this does one gather that Mr. Wilton is one of those colorful young men whose deeds in a big game always give room for praise due a hero - or raps due the goat - after the game is over. [Logansport Press, 15 Nov. 1928.] That example makes such a play on the words "hero" and "goat" that the expression must surely have been widely known by then. This is one precursor: There is no denying the fact that the accident made Bindley the hero and Alfred the goat. [Watch Yourself Go By, by Al G Field, 1912.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Susan Nuernberg described what she read in the online University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Today as a sentence construction mishap: "Both peregrines can be seen coming and going from their nesting site, having meals, overlooking the city of Oshkosh and laying eggs through the University's live webcam." Homophone alert, from Medical News Today on 21 April, spotted by Gerald Etkind: "A new joint team of scientists from both Japan and Europe have determined that there are three bacteria groups in a person, which is teaming with microorganisms and microbes." Mathematics revisited, via Norman C Berns. "SmartPlanet can count fractions (reporting the Canadian winner in Shell's eco-marathon, 'This vehicle gets 2,564.8 miles per gallon') but it comes up short on addition. 'Prototype entries included 39 vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Of those engines, 32 were gas powered and the remaining 6 entries were split between ethanol and biodiesel.'" John Samphier reports that on the ABC24 news in Sydney on 26 April the newsreader said that a "motorcyclist was killed when he hit a car not wearing a helmet." Over-compressed headlines continue to cause confusion. "Man Shot By Off Duty Cop in Coma" appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Wednesday, and "US criticizes leak of Guantanamo detainee briefs" was in the Jerusalem Post on Monday. Thanks to Bill McDermott and John Chandler for those. A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org . Submissions will usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). -------------------------------------------------------------------