World Wide Words -- 23 Jun 12

[Michael Quinion]

--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 790          Saturday 23 June 2012
--------------------------------------------------------------------
     This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version; 
       a formatted version is also available online at 
          http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/pgfa.htm

   For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON


Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Mastigophorous.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Wrong and wrongly.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
GREAT WEN  Someone I know only as Dick commented, "Being familiar 
with the word 'wen' I have been amused recently to see it being used 
as the brand name for a heavily promoted line of hair-care products 
in the US. It doesn't conjure up a very appealing image ..." After 
exhaustive research (that is, I asked my invaluable US associate) it 
transpires that this has nothing to do with the Great Wen but is 
merely "new" spelled backwards.

Two comments suggest that I sounded the death knell on "Great Wen" 
too precipitately. Louise Bolotin wrote, "it's still in common use 
in speech in the north of England - possibly because of the north-
south divide and the general feeling in the north that London is 
positioned as the centre of everything. People up here only travel 
to London when they absolutely have to and so you hear a fair bit of 
grumbling along the lines of 'I'm off to the Great Wen on Tuesday 
for a meeting'. I first heard it in frequent use in Leeds in the 
1980s, I've seen it a lot on Twitter and indeed use it myself. It 
has by no means become archaic, at least not in speech." Richard Bos 
wrote from the Netherlands: "It is alive and well in certain parts 
of the internet, specifically certain Usenet groups, in the same 
spirit which keeps alive garden sheds, sloe gin and pickled walnuts. 
Even digitally, the English do love their traditionality; perhaps 
they love their traditionality even more than their traditions."

MEGATSUNAMI  Following last week's piece, Peter Casey introduced me 
to the related term SEICHE (pronounced like "saish"), a phenomenon 
of lakes and bays, in which water can bounce back and forth between 
the banks as a result of changes in air pressure. It is commonly 
associated with the Great Lakes, particularly Lake Michigan, but the 
word came into the scientific literature as the result of studies 
carried out on Lake Geneva in Switzerland in the late nineteenth 
century. It is from Swiss French "seiche", perhaps taken from German 
"Seiche", the sinking of water.

ACT OF CREATION  Philip Arnold e-mailed, "I am wondering if we may 
credit you with coining a new word. In the snippet on Great Wen you 
use "eruditism". I could not locate it in any online dictionary, 
finding only "erudite". Congratulations." It's very kind of him, but 
I can't take any credit. Though it's not in any dictionary that I've 
consulted, not even the Oxford English Dictionary, a search found a 
number of examples - one from the nineteenth century - which use it 
in the same sense as I did, for an erudite word. It wasn't an error 
for "erudition".


2. Weird Words: Mastigophorous  /mastI'gQf(@)r at s/
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"Mastigophoros" is classical Greek, derived from "mastix", a whip, 
and "-phoros", bearing or carrying. A mastigophore was an attendant 
or officer carrying a whip.

This rare word is about to celebrate its 200th birthday, having been 
used in English in a letter from the writer and minister Samuel Parr 
to his close friend Charles Burney on 12 December 1812. The letter 
is effusive and academically humorous in the way of one scholar of 
the time to another, peppered with classical allusions in Latin and 
Greek.

It may have been some mental association with Parr, who had been a 
schoolmaster, and Burney, who then still was, but the word was used 
subsequently as a jocular way to refer to a pedagogue who was over-
fond of corporal punishment. Sydney Smith wrote in 1826 of a boy 
trying to look up words in his dictionary while his "mastigophorous 
superior" frowned over him; another writer in 1832 described how the 
boys of Winchester College rebelled against their "mastigophorous 
tyrant"; the reviewer of Sir Walter Scott's biography of John Dryden 
in 1842 noted that Dryden was educated at Westminster School under 
"the celebrated Dr Busby", who had "mastigophorous propensities" and 
"who revelled in groans, and tears, and learning". 

"Mastigophorous", a bit of obscure academic drollery, is now as dead 
as dead can be, but the Greek word and its Latin successor remain in 
the vocabularies of zoologists. The Mastigophora are single-celled 
organisms that propel themselves with whip-like flagella (another 
Latin word, singular "flagellum", a whip or scourge). The related 
adjective is "mastigophoran".


3. Wordface
--------------------------------------------------------------------
OVER THE TOP  A number of articles in recent months have discussed 
the idea of PEAK STUFF, that beyond a certain level of economic 
development people simply stop consuming so much. The term was 
created in imitation of "peak oil" and "peak coal", the points in 
time in which our consumption of a commodity will reach a maximum 
before falling away as it runs out. The term was coined by the 
British environmental activist Chris Goodall, who claims to have 
found that in the decade since 2001 Brits have been consuming less 
building materials, water, paper, food, cars, textiles and 
fertilizers, are travelling less, using less energy and producing 
less waste. He argues that the trend was clear before the economic 
woes of 2008 onwards. The concept is disputed by other 
environmentalists.

AN ABBREVIATION TOO FAR?  The use of mobile phone applications and 
wireless sensors to gather information about a person's health is 
growing rapidly. There are apps for gauging nutrition, counting 
calories, tracking workouts, calculating your body mass index and 
quitting smoking. Wireless monitors can transmit information such as 
blood pressure or blood glucose level, providing instant indications 
of a person's state. The umbrella term for these technologies is 
MOBILE HEALTH, usually abbreviated to the inelegant "mHealth". The 
term has been around for about a decade but is becoming more common 
in parallel with the huge growth in recent years of smartphones, 
tablets and other portable wireless devices.

COOKING THE COMMAS  Lots of people have been sending me links to the 
cover of an edition of Tails magazine which purports to say "Rachael 
Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog." Nah. It's 
a fake, which has had two commas neatly excised. It's also old - the 
cover is dated October 2010 and I first saw the fake shortly after 
that issue came out. The real cover is at http://wwwords.org?TAILS .


4. Q and A: Wrong and wrongly
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Correction to a correction. When you wrote in the last issue, 
"Apologies to Geoff Pullum for spelling his name wrong", surely you 
meant "wrongly"? [Dr Peter Rose, Australia]

A. The 20 exclamation marks Dr Rose added at the end of his message 
surely said "Aha! I've caught you in an error." Rob Brennan, also 
from Australia, questioned my usage in a more restrained way: "Am I 
being too much of a prescriptivist by suggesting that one may 
sometimes spell a name wrongly, not wrong?"

Was I doing something wrong? Have I been wrongly accused? These are 
not easy questions. They remind me that people get confused about 
when to use many such pairs, not just "wrong" and "wrongly".

One cause is that the form of the two suggests that the first is an 
adjective and the second an adverb, with "wrong" only to be used to 
modify nouns ("this is the wrong colour") and "wrongly" to modify 
verbs ("several men were wrongly detained"). But "wrong" can also be 
an adverb. There's nothing in the least new about this - the Oxford 
English Dictionary has examples from the thirteenth century onwards.

Robert Burchfield noted in his 1996 revision of Fowler's Modern 
English Usage that "The subtleties attending the various uses are 
considerable", pointing out that the OED devotes five times as much 
space to adverbial "wrong" as it does to the notionally correct 
"wrongly". 

The quick and easy rule is that "wrongly" appears before the verb 
being modified ("the earlier case was wrongly decided") and "wrong" 
after the verb ("he answered the question wrong"). Like most such 
rules, it's not even half the story. Style guides and grammars for 
learners try to give more complete guidance, variously stating that, 
if the situation is formal, "wrongly" may be the better choice in 
either position; if the adverb comes before the verb, "wrongly" is 
the only possible form; if the verb is a common short one, such as 
"do", "get", "have" or "go", it often forms a set phrase in which 
"wrong" is the idiomatic choice ("don't get me wrong", "she did him 
wrong", "how did he go wrong?"); "wrong" is preferred after the verb 
when the intended meaning is "in an unsuitable or undesirable manner 
or direction" or "incorrect" (as in spelling something incorrectly); 
if it means "falsely", then "wrongly" is the correct form ("rightly 
or wrongly", "the award was denied him wrongly", "he was incapable 
of acting wrongly"); if it is followed by a "that" clause, then 
"wrongly" is used ("she guessed wrongly that he was a teacher"). I 
suspect that this profusion of advice aiming to codify the 
eccentricities of English idiom confuses the learner rather than 
helping.

More generally, English makes much less distinction between adverbs 
and adjectives than the more elementary grammar books would have us 
believe. It might be better to class such words under the general 
title of modifier (though contemporary grammarians reserve this word 
for a different phenomenon); often the form of the modifier doesn't 
match the rule we learned in childhood about adding "-ly" to make 
adverbs. Lots of words that look like adjectives can act as adverbs, 
particularly in idiomatic English: "try hard", "turn sharp left", 
"hold tight", "he had spread himself too thin", "the desk was piled 
high with files", "he burrowed deep into his memory", "leave it as 
late as you can", "the ships were wide apart", "teach him to hold 
his pen right".

In his article entitled "unidiomatic -ly", Robert Burchfield wrote 
that "Standard speakers for the most part instinctively know which 
form is appropriate in a given context" but added "To regard the 
addition of -ly as the only way of turning an adjective into a word 
meaning 'in the manner of, after the style of, etc.', is to fall far 
short of understanding how the language works."

To sum all this up, in the phrase "spelling his name wrong", "wrong" 
is idiomatically correct but "wrongly" is acceptable, though formal 
and less common. However, both questioners are Australian, so I must 
enter a caveat that antipodean English may march to the beat of a 
different drummer.


5. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
John Pearson spotted a reader's travel tip in the Guardian on 16 
June: "The swordfish and revueltos (scrambled eggs) in particular 
are incredible and the wine list, concentrating on local wines from 
Málaga and Cádiz, never fails to disappoint."

Robyn Arvier found an advertisement in the Tasmanian newspaper, The 
Examiner, on 16 June for what was presumably intended to refer to a 
fowl (or foul) housing: "Poultry Chicken Coup". What other sort of 
chicken is there? And what will they do, peck us into submission?

Brian Clark sent a link to a report on the WAFF site in Huntsville, 
Alabama, dated 21 June: "Researchers at Washington State University 
said spontaneous combustion is common among farmers." The story was 
actually about a fire in a haystack.


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 author. 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 author beforehand.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/worldwidewords/attachments/20120622/3dbe1ad6/attachment.htm>