World Wide Words -- 20 Aug 11

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 750          Saturday 20 August 2011
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Author/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/hkex.htm


Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Did you know?
3. Q and A: Marmalade.
4. Sic!
5. Subscription information.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks to everyone who wrote with comments on last week's issue. It 
was briefer than usual, and this one is different to usual, because 
I am unwell. I'm not sure what will happen next week. I'll let you 
know.


2. Did you know?
-------------------------------------------------------------------
... that the chances are very high that you're cisgendered? It's a 
newish term for the default state of the world's population, those 
whose sense of gender identity matches their sex at birth. It was 
created to avoid the clunky "non-transgendered" and the pejorative 
"normal". "Cis-" is from Latin "cis", on this side of something, , 
as opposed to "trans-", on the opposite side, which is from Latin 
"trans", across..

... that a person born without fingerprints has adermatoglyphia? 
The term is all Greek: "dermato-" is from "derma"/"dermat-", skin 
or hide; "glyphia" from "gluphe", carving; "a-" means without and, 
in this case, the "-ia" ending marks a medical state or disorder.

... that the fashionable term for the police among young people in 
the UK and Ireland is "the Feds"? This was much noted in the media 
during the recent riots, though it's far from new - Jonathon Green 
notes an example in his Slang Dictionary from 1997. Watching too 
much American television - and misunderstanding the term in its US 
context - is clearly the source of this linguistic inexactitude. 
Will it totally supersede traditional nicknames such as rozzers, 
the old Bill, pigs and filth?


3. Q and A: Marmalade
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I was reading an old cookery book the other day and learned that 
the origin of the word marmalade had some connection with Mary, the 
Queen of Scotland. This is fascinating! Do tell me more! [Joan 
Leary, Alabama; a related question came from Dick Stacy]

A. It is fascinating but unfortunately for the wrong reasons. Most 
writers on food and cookery would probably be very willing to admit 
that they're not as expert in etymology as they are in the culinary 
arts. This story proves the point. To be fair, it has been known 
for many years and was far from new when this appeared:

    Spanish oranges had been stored there, and she [Mary] 
    made a new sort of preserve - called after herself as she 
    told them proudly, for the cook at her grandmother's 
    chateau of Joinville had made it to tempt her appetite 
    when she was ill; "Marie est malade," he had muttered 
    again and again as he racked his brain to invent 
    something new for her, and "Mariemalade" they had called 
    it ever since.
    [The Gay Galliard: the Love Story of Mary, Queen of 
    Scots, by Margaret Irwin, 1942.]

Mary's French connections (she was at one time married to Francis, 
the Dauphin, the eldest son of the then king of France, Henri II) 
were enough to peg this extraordinary invention to her. This is yet 
another case of the way that a good story can triumph over 
historical veracity.

As it happens, the truth is more interesting. The original food 
wasn't made from oranges, but from quinces. These were cooked with 
honey and in the process the unpromising bitter green fruit was 
transformed into a sweet pink paste, which was stiff enough to be 
cut with a knife and be served in slices as a kind of dessert. The 
first of these preserves were made in Portugal and were called 
"marmelada", from the word for quince in Portuguese, "marmelo". 
This is from the Latin "melimelum", a sweet variety of apple, in 
turn from the Greek, usually translated as "summer-apple" (surely a 
tautology?), which seems to have been the name for a type of apple 
grafted on to a quince rootstock.

The product kept well and was exported to Britain in wooden cases. 
It was at first a luxury item (customs duty was slapped on it in 
the fifteenth century, so it must have been worth taxing) but 
English cooks later learned to make their own.

The first name for it was "chardecoynes" or "char de quince", the 
Old French term for a pulp made from quinces, but the Portuguese 
alternative began to appear in the latter part of the fifteenth 
century; in 1524, the papers of King Henry VIII recorded a gift, 
which in modern English would read, "Presented by Hull of Exeter 
one box of marmalade". 

An early English recipe called for quinces to be beaten to a pulp 
with warden apples, boiled with honey until the mixture was thick 
and then spiced with a mixture of ginger, galingale and cinnamon. 
The shift to oranges happened rather slowly. In the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries, plums, dates, cherries and other fruits were 
all made into preserves called marmalades. This has continued to 
the present day, though in the UK, as a result of EU legislation, 
it's now illegal to use "marmalade" for preserves made from any 
fruit other than oranges.

In time, the link with quinces was lost and the historical link 
with them is preserved only in the name, leaving its origin open to 
ingenious storytelling.


4. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Many sources repeated a report about the London riots on 9 August 
(Margaret Chandler saw it in a Sky News report on the UK/Ireland 
edition of Yahoo!): "At one point in the evening, various people 
broke into the back of a stationary lorry. They pulled its contents 
out onto the road, and some hurled it at police, while others used 
it to smash windows of a parked bus." 

A piece by Philip Sherwell on the Telegraph site, dated 31 July, 
could have been better headlined: "New York Post staff told to keep 
'hacking' documents". What had actually happened was that lawyers 
had instructed the paper's staff to retain the documents.

Gerhard Burger found this in a story on News24 in South Africa on 7 
August: "A hitchhiker has been arrested after he was found with a 
blag bag containing 7290kg of dagga." That's about 8 tons of dagga 
(cannabis). The report made clear that the 7,290 referred to its 
street value in rand, not its weight.

Cause and effect? A wire-story report from AP that Carola Dunn saw 
on 6 August in the Register Guard of Eugene, Oregon, also appeared 
in many other papers: "The oppressive heat already has been blamed 
on nine deaths in Oklahoma."

Peter Taylor was amused but also bemused by an e-mailed newsletter 
sent by his telephone company: "All new installs and line faults 
are carried out by Openreach engineers."


5. 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/ .

-------------------------------------------------------------------
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). 
-------------------------------------------------------------------