World Wide Words -- 12 Mar 11

Fri Mar 11 17:14:19 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 727          Saturday 12 March 2011
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Editor: Michael Quinion             US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org               ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Chronogram.
3. Turns of Phrase: Water poverty.
4. Wordface.
5. Q and A: Beefing.
6. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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LIMERICK  Margaret Joachim commented, "The custom of sitting in a 
group and singing limericks in turn is not lost - or at least it 
wasn't when I was at university forty years ago. The group of 
undergraduate geologists of which I was a part undertook regular 
week or ten-day fieldwork trips. On several occasions we rounded 
off the trip by building a big fire on a beach, providing ourselves 
with a variety of forms of liquid refreshments, and singing what we 
called 'the limerick song' exactly as you describe except that the 
chorus was 'That was a jolly good song. Sing us another one, just 
like the other one, sing us another one, do.'" I remember a similar 
version being sung by the late Alan Breeze on the Billy Cotton Band 
Show in about 1955. The chorus was "That was a cute little rhyme. 
Sing us another one, do". A book search finds that quoted as being 
sung by Canadian and British forces in the Second World War, though 
the Alan Breeze one was cleaner. There are others.

As I promised in the piece, I have written more about the history 
of the limerick. The full version, which has been greatly expanded 
and illustrated, is now online via http://wwwords.org?LMRK.

2. Weird Words: Chronogram
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Even a nodding acquaintance with classical Greek will tell us that 
a chronogram is writing that's connected with time. Etymology will 
not take us any further and we have to consult the reference books 
for additional enlightenment.

A chronogram is a phrase or sentence, often an inscription, in 
which certain letters, taken to be Roman numerals, express a date. 
The letters available are I, V, X, L, C, D and M, though we moderns 
are allowed to cheat with three not in the Latin alphabet: J can be 
taken to be I, U to be the same as V and W to be a double U or VV. 
A famous example appeared in an old pamphlet, attributed to George 
Wither: "LorD haVe MerCIe Vpon Vs". If we add the Roman numerals 
up, we get 1666, the date of publication.

Such encoded dates were once popular, especially on medals and on 
bells to show the date they were cast. In the latter part of the 
nineteenth century, James Hilton wrote three big books detailing 
every example of the technique he could find. The arrival of the 
first of these prompted this verbal assault:

    It is impossible to think of any more witless, 
    pointless effort of literary ingenuity. ... We confess to 
    a feeling of dread lest the thing should spread and 
    become common. Nothing can be more likely unless it is 
    nipped in the bud. We have hardly yet got rid of 'double 
    acrostics'. They linger still in the back pages of some 
    of the 'society papers'. But chronograms are so much more 
    foolish, so much more senseless, and so much easier to 
    make and to guess, that there is every reason to fear an 
    outbreak of them before long. 
    [Saturday Review, 6 Jan. 1883. Quoted in The Oxford 
    Guide to Word Games, by Tony Augarde.]

Isaac D'Israeli (father of Benjamin Disraeli) didn't think much of 
chronograms either, describing them as "literary follies". In 1888, 
the Birmingham Daily Post greeted the publication of the second of 
Mr Hilton's volumes by calling them "vexatious and gratuitous 
fritterings". Whether it was the force of these criticisms, or the 
narrow compass offered by the technique, they fell out of favour.

3. Turns of Phrase: Water poverty
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Humans can, at a pinch, make do without a lot of things, but they 
must have water. Some people in developing countries have access 
only to water that is unfit to drink. In other countries, even some 
prosperous ones such as the oil-rich nations of the Middle East, 
there isn't enough water for their populations.

The term "water poverty" for the lack of access to potable water 
isn't new: it's on record as far back as 1950 in reference to the 
problems of Texas farmers during a prolonged drought. But it has 
become widely used only in the past decade. In February, a report 
from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation used the term to describe the 
state of four million British low-income households who struggle to 
pay their bills.

As 22 March is World Water Day - the theme this year is water for 
cities - the term is likely to appear in news reports.

    She concluded that Jamaica was suffering from water 
    poverty, as it is a nation that cannot constantly afford 
    the cost of sustainable clean water to everyone.
    [Jamaica Observer, 3 Aug. 2010.]

    Even if the new deal does not cut back on Egypt's share of the Nile, 
    water poverty is a daunting reality as the population grows by an 
    estimated 1.5 million people annually.
    [Manila Bulletin, 31 May 2010.]

4. Wordface
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THE LONG AND THIN OF IT  A story on the BBC website a few days ago 
introduced me to the scientific term SPAGHETTIFICATION. It has 
nothing to do with Italian cuisine but refers to what happens to an 
object that is caught in the gravitational field of a black hole. 
Some theories hold that it is stretched vertically and compressed 
horizontally until it looks like a length of spaghetti. The term 
has been around for at least a decade and is said to derive from a 
comment by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time that an 
astronaut passing through the event horizon of a black hole would 
be "stretched like spaghetti".

5. Q and A: Beefing
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Q. In an article about cattle exports, The Economist used "beefing" 
in the sense of "whinging, complaining, or moaning". How did cow-
meat, usually regarded as a premium meal, become associated with 
such a downbeat concept? [Alec Cawley]

A. The verb "beef", with the meaning you give, has been in the 
language for a surprisingly long time - it's on record from the 
1860s.

We have to go back further to trace the verb to its beginnings. In 
the early eighteenth century there was a slang phrase "to cry hot 
beef" or "give hot beef", which meant to raise the alarm, to start 
pursuit or to set up a hue and cry. This may have been based on a 
street hawker's cry and to have been a pun on "stop thief!" The New 
Canting Dictionary records in 1725, "to cry beef upon us: they have 
discover'd us and are in Pursuit of us". A few years later, the 
verb "beef" by itself also meant to raise a hue and cry and this 
continued in use well into the nineteenth century. 

The next step is a bit disconnected, because the written evidence 
for it only begins to appear in the 1860s and it doesn't chart the 
way that "beef" had been developing. One change was that "beef" 
became a general cry of alarm, unconnected with theft, and then 
merely a shout or cry, a sense that came out of the theatre and was 
later taken to Australia by emigrants. At around the same period 
"beef" shifted to mean a complaint, thus giving us the slang sense 
we have today.

You gave your message the punning subject line "what's the beef?" 
That obviously comes from the verb "to beef" and is still a common 
idiom meaning "what's the problem?" or "what's going on?", though 
it typically turns up in the popular prints as a humorous reference 
to ranching, mad cow disease, the Calgary stampede, McDonalds 
restaurants and related bovine topics. Here's a recent example:

    The Dallas Observer newspaper even had a story about 
    it more than a year ago, based on a press release issued 
    by the Houston-based chain. So, what's the beef all of a 
    sudden? 
    [The Fort Worth Star Telegram (Texas), 9 Jan. 
    2011.]

We must, of course, make a careful distinction between "what's the 
beef?" and "where's the beef?" The latter, which questions the 
importance, significance, inner meaning or substance of something, 
derives from the early-1980s advertising campaign for Wendy's 
hamburgers in the US and Canada and briefly became a political 
slogan. 

6. Sic!
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Following my mention of vespasiennes recently, Rachel Wentz wanted 
to know more. She checked Wikipedia and found a reference on the 
page entitled "Urinal". It included this note: "In other bathrooms, 
trough urinals are placed, which most of the time can hold large 
numbers of men and boys."

An email advertisement for a seminar on "An Integrative Approach to 
Health and Wellbeing" came into Jim Hart's mailbox. After listing 
the guest lecturer's qualifications, it said: "His expertise is the 
cause of disease, cancer and difficult clinical problems." 

Steve Ryan tells us that the Winter 2011 issue of UCR Magazine (UCR 
being the University of California, Riverside) reported on a study 
into personality as a predictor of longevity. The article included 
this comment: "Children from divorced families died almost five 
years earlier on average than children from intact families. But 
many such children recovered and thrived."

And three headlines to ponder, courtesy of Karen Rappaport, Pete 
Jones and Julie Egan: "German Bishops Offer Cash to Abuse Victims" 
(Huffington Post, 3 March), "Student Athlete Suspended for Sex" 
(BBC News, 4 March), and "Dead man demanded kinky sex" (The Age, 
Melbourne, 2 March).

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