World Wide Words -- 23 Jul 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Wed Jul 20 14:36:57 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 746 Saturday 23 July 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/yrlx.htm
Now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/wwwordseditor.
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: Borametz.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Seven-year itch.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
METEORIC RISE Readers pointed out that I might have added that a
meteor trail starting low in the sky seems to rise as it travels
towards the zenith. I might also have mentioned, though it isn't
strictly relevant to the question, that "meteor" derives from a
Greek word meaning raised or lofty and that its first sense in
English was of any atmospheric phenomenon, hence "meteorology".
Meteors were divided into several classes: an aerial meteor might
be a cloud; watery meteors were rain, snow, hail and the like; a
1576 translation of a work by Erasmus mentioned "hoar frosts and
such like cold meteors". A fiery meteor might be a shooting star
but could equally be lightning. But from quite early on, "meteor"
by itself could refer specifically to the bright streak caused by
an extra-terrestrial object heated to incandescence in the upper
atmosphere.
SIC TRANSIT GLORIA FRIDAY One Sic! item last time reproduced a
claim that this month, which has five Fridays, five Saturdays and
five Sundays, hasn't happened for 823 years. Lots of readers wrote
in to tell me this was nonsense, which they somehow concluded I
didn't already know. It happens, of course, in any month of 31 days
that begins on a Friday: the next will be March 2013; the previous
July of this kind was in 2005 and the next will be in 2016. My
reason for adding the item wasn't so much the calendrically
ignorant assertion (one that has been circulating for some months
as a chain letter online) but that, having said it was the first
such month for 823 years, it flatly contradicted itself by saying,
correctly, that it also happened last October.
2. Weird Words: Borametz
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This word appears in no standard dictionary, I suspect because it
belongs in works about fables rather than lexicons. "Borametz" is
another name for the vegetable lamb of Tartary.
Therein lies a tale. Long ago and far away, in a mysterious place
called Scythia that lay on the northern shores of the Black Sea in
the territory of the Tartars, there was said to grow a tree of
miraculous form. It was first described in a French book of about
1357 which purported to be the recollections of an English knight,
Sir John Mandeville. It was really a compilation of travel stories
from classical and medieval times put together by a Benedictine
monk who probably never travelled further than his monastery's
library. (So many works continue to claim that he was a real person
that the Dictionary of National Biography has included an entry to
make clear that he's fictional. He joins a select company of myth
figures in the DNB that includes Britannia, Merlin, Robin Hood,
John Bull, Ned Ludd, Piltdown Man and the Unknown Warrior.) His
travel work became popular and was translated into at least ten
languages. This is the description of the plant from a much later
English translation:
There groweth a sort of Fruit as it were Gourds, and
when it is ripe, Men cut it asunder, and they find
therein a Beast as it were of flesh, bone and blood, as
it were a little Lamb without Wool, and Men eat the Beast
and Fruit also, and sure it seemeth very strange.
[The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandevile,
Knight; Wherein is set down the Way to the Holy Land, and
to Hierusalem: as also to the Lands of the Great Caan,
and of Prestor John; to India, and divers other
Countries: Together with many and strange Marvels
therein, London, 1727.]
The story was later embroidered to suggest that the beast was a
real lamb, which was linked to the plant by an umbilical stem so
that it could browse on nearby vegetation. When all was consumed,
the lamb died. The story is often supported by the assertion that
"borametz" was a Tartar word meaning "lamb", difficult to check
because Tartary was a vast and poorly-defined region of central
Asia with many languages.
Travellers' tales were often so much embroidered that only a wide-
eyed innocent could believe them. But a kernel of truth frequently
lay buried within them. In this case, the source was works by the
classical authors Herodotus ("Certain trees bear for their fruit
fleeces surpassing those of sheep in beauty and excellence") and
Pliny ("These trees bear gourds the size of a quince which burst
when ripe and display balls of wool out of which the inhabitants
make cloths like valuable linen"). The borametz was almost
certainly cotton, native to India.
3. Wordface
-------------------------------------------------------------------
OWLS OF DERISION Last month, I mentioned the mad activity called
PLANKING, in which individuals lie stiffly horizontal on top of
some object, the odder the better. On 16 July The Times of India
reported on a follow-up craze: "OWLING, believed to have started in
Australia, consists of nothing more taxing than crouching on one's
haunches and staring into the middle distance like the nocturnal
birds." As with planking, a photograph to prove you've done it is
mandatory. Several of them were reproduced in an article in the
London Metro free newspaper on 15 July. Howard Sinberg sent me the
link, mainly because of the caption to one picture: "Owling - the
ancient art of perching on something then putting the pictures on
the internet." There is indeed a moderately ancient art called
OWLING but it refers to smuggling sheep or wool from Britain to
France. In 1674 an Act of Charles II made it illegal to transport
wool at night and it seems that's where the term comes from, since
it was first recorded in 1690.
SNIFFING PLACE There are many odd names for parts of the human
anatomy but one that I came across recently tops my personal list:
the ANATOMICAL SNUFF BOX. It's a small depression on the inside of
the wrist immediately behind the thumb joint, formally called the
radial fossa. It got its common name because it was a convenient
place to put a pinch of snuff before snorting it up one's nose.
4. Q and A: Seven-year itch
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. In the final chapter of Walden, almost at the final paragraph,
Thoreau refers to mankind as human insects and uses the phrase "the
seven year itch". My wife and I were trying to locate the original
use as the author was not in any way referring to relationships or
sexual boredom. Perhaps you can shed some light. [Loren Crispell]
A. Well spotted. This example of the phrase is one of the earliest
known. But the sense of Henry Thoreau's text isn't what you might
call limpidly clear to most people today:
There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a
whole human life. These may be but the spring months in
the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years'
itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in
Concord.
[Walden, or Life in the Woods, by Henry Thoreau,
1854.]
The seven-year itch that he had in mind was an infection by a mite
which lays its eggs in burrows under the skin. Its medical name is
scabies, whose name comes appropriately from Latin "scabere", to
scratch. It was once extremely common in all kinds of situations
and historical American sources are full of names for it, among
them Indiana itch, Illinois itch, Jackson itch, Cuban itch, prairie
itch, camp itch, army itch, ship itch, jail itch, mattress itch,
swamp itch, winter itch, barley itch and grain itch. It was very
hard to treat before effective insecticides came along.
Many remedies were advertised that claimed to cure the condition.
The earliest example on record is this, which is also the first
appearance of "seven-year itch" in print:
To the Afflicted. Dr. Mason's Indian Vegetable
Panacea, which may be taken with perfect safety, by all
ages, for the cure of the following diseases:--
Dyspepsia, Scrofula, afflictions of the Chest and Lungs,
Cods, Coughs, Liver complaints, Mercurial disease,
Ulcers, Sores ... also, that corruption so commonly known
to the western country as the scab or seven year Itch,
&c.
[An advertisement by Dr John Mason in the Ohio
Statesman (Columbus, Ohio), 26 Mar. 1839. Thanks to
Stephen Goranson for finding this.]
Because it was so hard to get rid of, a story grew up in North
America that those who got the itch were stuck with it for the next
seven years. The phrase was sometimes later reinterpreted to mean
that it would recur after seven years, or would reappear every year
for seven years. More recently, "seven-year itch" has occasionally
been used for the itch caused by poison ivy and for a while became
a figurative term for something or someone that was persistently
irritating or a continual nuisance.
Your sense, which one work on idioms calls "a real or imagined
longing for other women in a man's seventh year of marriage",
appeared a century after Walden. There's no known example before
George Axelrod borrowed it for the title of his stage comedy of
1952. It was popularised worldwide by the 1955 Billy Wilder film
version starring Marilyn Monroe.
In 1992, William Safire recorded a conversation he had had with Mr
Axelrod about why he chose the title. The latter was sure that it
had never been used in a "marital wanderlust connotation" before he
borrowed it:
How did he come across this Americanism? "I was
writing jokes for a hillbilly comedian called Rod
Brassfield," recalls Mr. Axelrod, "who starred with
Minnie Pearl on the 'Grand Ole Opry' radio show. ... One
of his favorite lines was: 'I know she's over 21 because
she's had the seven-year itch four times!' That hideous
line," says Mr. Axelrod, now 69, "was running through my
head when I was desperately seeking a title for the play
I had just finished ... In the first draft, the guy had
been married 10 years (as had I) but the title, when it
came, had a natural ring to it and I changed the number
of years the hero had been married accordingly."
[On Language in the New York Times, 29 Mar. 1992.]
Modern medicine cures scabies quickly. Together with Axelrod's
inspired play title and the success of the film, "seven-year itch"
now refers almost exclusively to a married man's wandering eye,
even in the US where the term originated.
6. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
William Duncan read this on SI.com, the website of the magazine
Sports Illustrated: "After losing to Japan in the 2011 World Cup
final, SI.com takes a look at the last twelve years of the U.S.
Women's National Team." He confesses that he didn't know SI.com
even had a women's soccer team.
Sometimes a missing letter is enough to generate an incongruous
image. Stan Firth came across this on the Mail Online site on 17
July: "The woman known as 'America's most hated mother' was jeered
and taunted with shouts of 'killer' by a huge crow as she walked
out in a pink tshirt and jeans." Is this what's meant by getting
the bird?
Peter Kay wrote: "In a seafront souvenir shop in St Ives, Cornwall,
this month I found a basket of plastic chains with the handwritten
notice NECKLESS'S. Apart from struggling to identify just how many
mistakes there are in the word, I wondered where on the body you
would wear them."
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).
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list