World Wide Words -- 09 Jun 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 8 16:10:57 UTC 2012
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 788 Saturday 9 June 2012
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
Settings in your e-mail viewer will determine
which version you see by default.
A formatted version of this e-magazine is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/hjdk.htm
Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Ferret.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Thimbles and thumbs.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
GODWOTTERY Following last week's Weird Word, Steven Harris wrote,
"This puts me in mind of 'yogsothery' used by H P Lovecraft and his
circle of friends to refer self-satirically to Lovecraft's (and his
friends') use of invented names of monstrous deities, such as Yog-
Sothoth. I don't have my sources handy to give you a reference, and
the web is of little use as the word has been appropriated by a
Lovecraft-inspired music group. But I know it's to be found among
Lovecraft's correspondence."
Jane Halsey commented, "Godwottery sounds like what Josephine Tey
meant by 'talking forsoothly', a criticism she levels at historical
novels in The Daughter of Time."
"Your explanation of the very irregular verb, 'wit'," Heather Liston
wrote, "left out one example that is commonly known to many people,
even if it's not exactly modern. In the King James Version of the
Bible, in Luke 2:49, when the parents of the twelve-year-old Jesus
find him in the temple with the learned men, he says, 'Wist ye not
that I must be about my Father's business?' This often becomes an
accidental homonym, with many people assuming Jesus means, 'Don't
you wish me to ...?' In fact, of course, the boy Jesus is asking,
'Don't you know this is what I have to do?'"
REDDING THE TABLE Hugo Johnson and Ken Gibb pointed out that
another sense of the word exists. The latter wrote, "You will be
aware I'm sure of its existence in the noun 'redd', connected with
areas prepared in stream gravel by salmon and other fish for
breeding and egg laying."
"My mother came from Lancashire," commented Ian Colley, "and her
expression for this was 'siding' or 'side' the table. Might this be
connected in some way to 'sideboard'? It was never used in any other
context." Nineteenth-century dialect glossaries suggest it was then
more common in Yorkshire, though known in Lancashire and Cheshire.
It often appears as "side up" and means tidying up or putting in
order as well as clearing away dishes. There are analogies in old
Dutch and German verbs that meant to set aside or stand aside. The
English Dialect Dictionary also records "sideation" and "sidement",
the actions of siding-up; the person doing it was a "sider-up", more
generally someone with an orderly mind.
OMISSION An item in the Wordface section about the British press
custom of "banging out" was accidentally left out of the HTML e-mail
version last week. It is here: http://wwwords.org?BNGT.
2. Weird Words: Ferret
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul McCann asked about this word. He had found a reference to green
ferret in Charles Dickens's Bleak House; it was one of a long list
of items retailed by the legal stationer Mr Snagsby, together with
"office-quills, pens, ink, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils,
sealing-wax, and wafers ... pocket-books, almanacs, diaries, and law
lists; string boxes, rulers, inkstands glass and leaden pen-knives,
scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery".
The second word has nothing to do with the animal but is a modified
form of Italian "fioretti", floss-silk, untwisted filaments of silk
shed from silk cocoons during spinning. By the time of Dickens the
material was more often made of cotton, woven into a stout tape.
Lawyers used a green-dyed version. In Dickens's time, it was as much
a symbol of the legal profession as red tape; the two were often
mentioned together, though its purpose seems not always to have been
clear to non-specialists. George Augustus Sala wrote in 1893 of a
lawyer, "he has a bundle of papers in his hand, tied up with green
ferret". However, a correspondent to Notes and Queries in 1861 said
firmly, "The only purpose for which green ferret is used is one to
which, as old deeds show, red tape was formerly applied, namely, the
attaching of seals to deeds engrossed on parchment".
Perhaps the confusion developed because green ferret had by Sala's
time largely gone out of use. Frances Collins said of it in 1879:
"I was accustomed to keep it in my desk for tying up
little parcels nicely for the post; but, alas, like many
other old-fashioned things, it has degenerated, for the
last time I asked for it at a stationer's shop a common-
looking, loosely made, cottony green tape was offered to
me, instead of the strong, closely made ribbon of former
times. So I content myself with red tape, and green ferret
has dropped out of my little list of necessaries."
3. Wordface
--------------------------------------------------------------------
SEA PEOPLES Wilf Nussey wrote, "In the latest monthly newsletter of
Fine Music Radio, an excellent private broadcaster in Cape Town, the
editor, Victoria Cawood, used a word completely new to me in her
introduction. She stated that broadcasting improvements will 'bring
a robust signal down to the ORARIAN listeners.' Victoria said she
learned it at her grandmother's knee as meaning 'close to the sea'."
Her grandmother must have been highly literate, since the word is
vanishingly rare. It can indeed have that meaning, since it derives
from Latin "orarius", belonging to the coast. She might have been a
botanist, since a few plants include versions of the Latin original
in their scientific names, including Fontainea oraria, a critically
endangered rare rainforest plant growing near the sea in Australia.
She might have been an ethnographer, since "orarian" was introduced
in the 1860s by the American explorer William H Dall for the coastal
natives of Alaska.
AND AGAIN You may recall some time ago I mentioned sequences of
sentences beginning with "and" (see http://wwwords.org?ANDA). Last
weekend, I came across POLYSYNDETIC, an extremely rare adjective
derived from POLYSYNDETON (Greek "syndein", to bind together), the
grammatical term for such constructions, or as the Oxford English
Dictionary defines it, the "use of several conjunctions or, more
usually, the same conjunction several times, in swift succession".
The adjective appeared in a review of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon novel
Death of Kings, in reference to sentences such as this one, echoing
an Old-English narrative style: "And there was blood in the leaf-
mould and a choking sound and a body shaking beneath me and a dying
man's sword arm going limp as the spearman kicked his horse back
towards me."
NO MORE It was an unfortunate conjunction of events, much noted in
the British press, that in the same week as the celebrations of the
Queen's diamond jubilee the Queen's English Society has decided to
shut up shop through lack of interest. I can't be sad about its
demise, as I'd scarcely been aware of the Society's activities, and
the advice on its linked website, grandly called the Academy of
Contemporary English, was prescriptivist, fussy and - despite its
name and remit - out of touch with current usage. The linguist Geoff
Pullen, co-author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,
has written its obituary (http://wwwords.org?QESP), which is well
worth reading.
4. Q and A: Thimbles and thumbs
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I had never before heard the term "epenthesis" that you used the
other week, so I looked it up on my computer dictionary. It gave its
definition as "the insertion of a sound or an unetymological letter
within a word, eg, the 'b' in thimble." Why did it indicate that the
"b" was introduced into this word? Thumb has a "b" in it, although
it is silent, so it seems logical that a thumb covering should also
possess one! [Peter Hill, Canada]
A. Be careful. Arguing by analogy is a dangerous matter, especially
when applied to etymology.
There are many unetymological letters to be found in English words,
of which the best known is the "b" in "debt", which was added to
reflect the word's source in the Latin "debitum", something owed,
even though the word is actually recorded from the Middle English
period as "dette". Another is "doubt", in Middle English "douten",
ultimately from Latin "dubitare", to waver in opinion, hesitate.
Usually we can blame eighteenth-century grammar pedants for such
changes, but in this case not - both "debt" and "doubt" began to be
spelled with that intrusive and unnecessary "b" in the sixteenth
century. The first example of "debt" cited in the Oxford English
Dictionary is from the 1548 Book of Common Prayer: "To declare his
debtes, what he oweth." It was the influence of Latin spelling that
caused the changes, though as far as we know the "b"s were never
pronounced.
Another common cause of epenthesis has been shifts in pronunciation
that have led to changes in spelling. For example, "thunder" has an
added "d" (the Old English was "þunor" (the "þ" is the old character
thorn, pronounced the same as the "th" in modern "thunder"). "Empty"
has an epenthetic "p", since the Old English was "æmtig". (Modern
cases of intrusive "p" include "dreamt" and "hamster", though these
aren't reflected in the way they're spelled because our orthography
has long since become fixed.)
In other English words an epenthetic "b" has been introduced after
"m". Often, the "b" was interpolated when the ending "-le" was added
to a stem ending in "m" ("crumble" from Old English "cruma"; other
cases include "bumble", "bramble", "fumble", "jumble", "mumble" and
"nimble"). Once established, in some cases the root word ("crumb"
for example) came to be spelled the same way by analogy, even though
the "b" wasn't pronounced.
Something similar happened with "thimble". This is from Old English
"þýmel". It was derived from "þúma", a thumb, by adding the "-le"
suffix, which in this case marked the names of instruments. So a
þýmel was a device one used on the þúma. All very sensible, but
confusing to modern users, who generally put a thimble on a finger,
not a thumb. The OED guesses that a leather thumb stall was the
earliest form of thimble.
The first recorded uses of "thumb" and "thimble" don't appear to
support this move, since "thumb" is recorded first around 1300,
about a century before "thimble" appeared. However, this may merely
be an artefact of the records that happen to have come down to us.
It would seem more likely from all the other examples that "þýmel"
turned into "thimble" and "thumb" was afterwards respelled to match.
5. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
From the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Bronwyn Cozens communicated:
"The Sunshine Valley Gazette printed a front-page banner headline
'Living fossils open garden for a rare viewing'. I'm not sure if the
gardeners appreciate this description as they display the ancient
cycads."
Liz wrote in horror from Costa Rica on 1 June about a sentence in an
article about the Queen in what she describes as "that bastion of
language and culture", the Guardian (a rare accolade): "the people
she cannot bare to acknowledge or mention in public."
Flames of passion: from a small ad in the Stirling News of 1 June,
submitted by Charles Goodall: "Small black Victorian reproductive
fireplace and granite hearth."
It could have been better expressed. Bernard Robertson-Dunn read a
Daily Mail article of 30 May about the declining British desire for
marmalade. It said of maker Premier Foods, "It has launched a tie-up
between Paddington Bear and a new sweet squeezy marmalade for
children without any bits."
Ernie Scheuer found another oddly phrased - and widely reproduced -
headline over a story from the Associated Press: "Wis. Man Accused
of Starving Daughter Out of Jail".
6. Useful information
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT THIS E-MAGAZINE: World Wide Words is written and published by
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice
are provided by Julane Marx in the US and Robert Waterhouse in the
UK. Any residual errors are the fault of the editor. The linked
website is http://www.worldwidewords.org.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: The website provides all the tools you need to manage
your own subscription. Please don't contact me asking for changes
you can make yourself, though if problems occur you can e-mail me at
wordssubs at worldwidewords.org. To change your subscribed address,
leave the list or re-subscribe, go to http://wwwords.org?SUBS. This
e-magazine is also available on RSS (http://wwwords.org?RSSFD) and
Twitter (http://wwwords.org?TWTTR). Back issues are available via
http://wwwords.org?BKISS.
E-MAIL CONTACT ADDRESSES: Comments on e-magazine mailings are always
welcome. They should be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org. I do
try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing
so. Items for the Sic! section should go to sic at worldwidewords.org.
Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be
sent to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org, not to me directly.
SUPPORT WORLD WIDE WORDS: If you have enjoyed this e-magazine and
would like to help defray its costs and those of the linked Web
site, please visit the support page via http://wwwords.org?SPPRT .
COPYRIGHT: World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2012. All
rights reserved. You may reproduce this e-magazine in whole or part
in free newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists or as educational
resources provided that you include the copyright notice above and
give the web address of http://www.worldwidewords.org. Reproduction
of substantial parts of items in printed publications or commercial
websites requires permission from the editor beforehand.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/worldwidewords/attachments/20120608/7671b911/attachment.htm>
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list