World Wide Words -- 21 Jan 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 20 19:35:28 UTC 2012
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 770 Saturday 21 January 2012
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Author/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: Yale.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Two Australian expressions.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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JANOPAUSE After I wondered in last week's issue about spelling this
neologism with an "o" in the middle, subscribers suggested en masse
that it had been formed from "January" + "menopause". You may be
right, but no reader has yet been able to enlighten me why a brief
abstinence from alcohol should be linked to a permanent cessation of
female fertility.
Rick McArthur commented from Finland: "As there are less than six
million Finns and knowledge of the Finnish language outside Finland
is rare, it is unlikely to be more than an interesting coincidence
that 'jano' is the Finnish word for thirst (of all types). Finnish
also has the useful property that words can be combined at will to
create the required meaning or emotion. In this context, 'Janopause'
makes complete sense."
COMPETITION UPDATE Your additional votes last week kept World Wide
Words well in the lead in the Macmillan Dictionary contest for the
2011 Best Website About the English Language. Until Wednesday, that
is. We are now in second place and falling badly behind. Every vote
is urgently needed! If you haven't voted, please do so by following
this link: http://wwwords.org?MCMVC. (World Wide Words is on page
three of the list.)
2. Weird Words: Yale
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Your first thought may be of the famous Yale University in the US,
or perhaps of a make of cylinder lock. Neither is the sense that's
involved here, though there is a close link with two colleges of
Britain's Cambridge University.
We are concerned here with mythical beasts. Classical and modern
literature is full of them, ranging from centaurs and dragons to
jabberwocks and Harry Potter's blast-ended skrewts. This one is
classical Roman, having first been described by Pliny the Elder. He
gave it the name of eale and included it as one of the animals of
Ethiopia:
It is the size of the river-horse, has the tail of the
elephant, and is of a black or tawny colour. It has also
the jaws of the wild boar, and horns that are moveable,
and more than a cubit in length, so that, in fighting, it
can employ them alternately, and vary their position by
presenting them directly or obliquely, according as
necessity may dictate.
[The Natural History, by Pliny the Elder, circa 77 CE,
translated by John Bostock. We know the river-horse better
by its ancient Greek name of hippopotamus. A cubit was a
measure of length roughly that of the forearm, about 18
inches (44 cm).]
Nobody knows what animal Pliny was trying to describe. As so often,
he may have been conflating inaccurate travellers' tales about a
number of different kinds of beasts, such as a type of big-horned
African ox, an antelope or a species of goat. Following Pliny's
description, the yale is usually shown in illustrations as a mixture
of bits of other animals, a chimera, with the snout of a wild boar,
the body and head of an antelope, and a couple of long pointed horns
of indeterminate origin.
The beast turns up in English heraldry in late medieval times, with
its form borrowed from Pliny. By then its coat had changed to silver
with gold spots. In herald-speak these are bezants, a name that was
originally attached to gold coins minted in Byzantium. Because of
the animal's supposed skill in using its horns it came to represent
proud defence. The connection with Cambridge University comes via
Margaret of Beaufort, the mother of King Henry VII and reputedly the
richest woman in medieval England. She founded two of the colleges
of the university - Christ's and St John's - at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. Because of this, her arms, including two yales,
may still be seen over the gatehouses of the two colleges.
3. Wordface
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HALFWAY HOUSE The current constitutional kerfuffle between the UK
parliament in Westminster and the devolved Scottish one in Holyrood
is about Scotland's status. Should it remain part of the UK, become
an independent country, or be something in between? The last option,
favoured only as a fallback position by the ruling Scottish National
Party, is summed up in the political catchphrase DEVO-MAX, short for
"maximum devolution of powers", which has recently appeared almost
daily in most serious British newspapers. Among other matters, the
SNP wants the power to set, raise and keep taxes, with a proportion
remitted to London to pay for its share of the costs of defence and
foreign affairs (the jargon term for this is FISCAL AUTONOMY). The
UK government objects strenuously and wants to keep devo-max off the
ballot paper in a referendum proposed for 1213 (by Westminster) or
1214 (by Holyrood, as it is the symbolic 700th anniversary of the
Battle of Bannockburn in which the Scots under Robert the Bruce gave
the English a bloody nose). "Devo-max" is first recorded in 2007 in
a book by Henry McLeish and Tom Brown, entitled Scotland: the Road
Divided.
ARE WE THERE YET? As if we weren't beset by enough worries in these
troubled times, another concern has appeared in recent months: RANGE
ANXIETY. It's said to be suffered by drivers of electric cars who
have a continual nagging fear that the charge on the vehicle's
battery isn't enough to get them to their destination.
WHAT'S IN A NAME (A VERY OCCASIONAL SERIES) Two years ago, readers
listed animals whose names suggested emotion, such as the sarcastic
fringehead, the depressed mussel, the blushing snail, the melancholy
woodpecker and the confused flour beetle. Clark Stevens pointed out
an item on owlet moths in the current issue of Audubon Magazine,
which records that among the 35,000 species worldwide are the
festive midget, the confused woodgrain, the thoughtful apamea and
the ignorant apamea. Mr Stevens notes, "the lepidopterological
nomenclators seem to be a fanciful bunch."
4. Q and A: Two Australian expressions
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Q. There are two Australian phrases which I understand but have no
idea how they came about: "don't come the raw prawn with me" and
"don't piss in my pocket". The first is used to mean don't present
an idea to me that is underdone or not thought out. The other is
used in the context of don't attempt to flatter me. How do you get
from that to pissing in someone's pocket? Can you advise if you have
the origins of these phrases? And if not I wish you happy hunting.
[Peter Butler]
A. With the first of these, my principal feeling - being about as
far away from its stamping ground as it's possible to be on this
planet - is that it would be good if everybody concerned agreed on
what's meant by "coming the raw prawn". In addition to yours, I've
come across the definitions "to try to impose on someone, as though
playing the innocent", "an act of deception; an unfair action or
circumstance, a raw deal", "to try to deceive; to misrepresent a
situation" and "to act resentfully or unpleasantly; to be rude".
These are all, I suspect, attempts to categorise a colloquial saying
whose meaning shifts erratically and unconsciously according to the
situation in which it's used. The general idea may perhaps be best
summed up as "don't try to put one over on me".
After that, don't expect a definitive answer about its source. The
best I can do is point to a progenitor, the slang term "prawn" for a
fool, perhaps from the idea of a prawn being a stupid-looking marine
animal. It's known from the late nineteenth century.
Well, boys, the "Worker" is a prawn - a fool for all
his pains; He has the muscle and the brawn, the "Fat Man"
has the brains.
[The Cornstalk: his Habits and Habitat, by Daniel
Healey, Sydney, 1893.]
The evidence suggests that the fuller expression was a product of
service slang in World War Two, perhaps in part based on this usage.
In May 1942 the Sunday Times of Perth listed it with other slang
expressions then current among AIF servicemen in the Middle East.
The earliest appearance I know of is in a publication called Any
Complaints, published in Newcastle NSW in 1940. There may be a link
with the "green" quality of raw prawns, suggesting "greenhorn", but
this doesn't really fit the meaning. A more probable idea behind it
was that the story the speaker was being told was as hard to swallow
as an uncooked crustacean.
As to the second expression, I agree that to piss in somebody's
pocket seems like a strange way to curry favour or ingratiate
yourself. I suspect that the idiom is suggesting how close you have
to be to somebody in order to do this. It's a modern Australianism,
recorded from the 1960s, but a precursor - "pissing down any one's
back" - is recorded in the same sense in the 1811 enlarged edition
of Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Beyond that I
cannot go.
5. Sic!
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A good example of our perennial, the misplaced modifier: "Having
been a boarded-up eyesore for nearly six years, I am extremely
pleased that the development project for the Metro Theater on Union
Street is finally making its way through the Planning Department."
Thanks go to Nancy Miller, who saw this in the Marina Times, a San
Francisco neighbourhood newspaper.
Nancy Leek tells us she was considering joining a gym near her home
in California. She thought again after reading on its website. "At
Chico Sports Club we believe in moving the body. CSC also believes
that being present in the body is important to achieving wellness."
Not to mention continued conscious existence.
The Spring 2012 issue of the National Trust magazine startled Teresa
Lander with this sentence, "To mark the centenary of the death of
one of our founders, Octavia Hill, there will be a programme of
events across Kent, the county she later made her home".
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