World Wide Words -- 17 Mar 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 16 16:03:22 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 778 Saturday 17 March 2012
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A formatted version of this e-magazine is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/kkcd.htm
Feedback, Notes and Comments
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ETIQUETTE Following up my piece about this word last time, Marc
Naimark noted: "'Ticket' has re-entered French from English. It
means a bus, tram or subway ticket. A regional rail ticket could be
either 'billet', which is probably the official term, or 'ticket',
used by most people." Claude Baudoin added, "The French have also
borrowed 'label' (pronounced like 'la belle') for a seal of approval
by some quality control organization. So you can have a 'label de
qualité' or simply 'label' that tells you that a certain food item
is organic, that an appliance is energy-saving, etc. This criss-
crossing of words and meanings is really interesting."
AMBULANCE Anthony Massey wrote in similar vein about this word,
also discussed last week. "In many European languages, ambulances
have lost their wheels, if they ever had them, and have become
buildings. So in Dutch, German and Danish, 'Ambulatorium' means a
hospital outpatients department. In German the department might also
be referred to as 'Ambulanz' or 'Spitalambulanz'. In Danish I have
found 'geriatrisk ambulatorium', a geriatic outpatients facility. In
Polish, 'Ambulatorium' could mean the outpatients department or the
accident and emergency department, but always part of a hospital. In
Serbian and Croatian (as we now call the language formerly known as
Serbo-Croat) 'Ambulanta' tends to mean a clinic or infirmary, but
again somewhere which can treat emergency cases. In rural areas,
such as part of Kosovo which I visited a few years ago, 'ambulanta'
would equate to a UK cottage hospital. The Albanian population would
probably have preferred to call it a 'spital', the Albanian for
hospital. But as this one had been built by the Serbs, the sign said
'ambulanta', and the locals told me in their best English (much
better than my Albanian!) that they were taking patients 'to the
ambulance', meaning 'to the hospital'."
Weird Words: Festucine /'festjUsaIn/
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The 4,000-year-old epic of the mighty warrior Gilgamesh includes a
description of distant mountains that has been translated as
And see! they change their hues incarnadine
To gold, and emerald, and opaline;
Swift changing to a softened festucine
Before the eye. And thus they change their hues
To please the sight of every soul that views
Them in that Land.
Obviously enough, festucine is a colour, though not one that often
appears on colourists' charts. That might be because nobody is quite
sure what hue it really represents. As it is from Latin "festuca", a
straw, it seems reasonable to argue that it's a yellowish colour -
some reference books indeed assert that it is. But as "festuca" was
also applied to any grass-like plant, others suggest it's a greenish
colour or one partway between green and yellow.
It was invented by the physician and author Sir Thomas Browne in his
1646 encyclopaedic work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica. He certainly meant
by it a shade of green: "Herein may be discovered a little insect of
a festucine or pale green, resembling in all parts a Locust, or what
we call a Grashopper."
It's been used rarely. I was startled to come across this example in
an old newspaper, an extended high-flown essay on a visit of a blue
jay to a local park, whose prose, however purple, doesn't include it
as a colour term:
It looked upon the gazing throng and with abandon cast
down the festinative fervor of its song, that festucine
song, thin as the reddening sting of ripe wine and as
elfinly vivacious as the querulous flight of oriental
melodies maddened by the flame of hashish or intoxicated
by the love-hungered stress of lutes.
[Hagerstown Mail (Maryland), 10 Oct. 1902.
"Festinative" isn't in any reference work that I've
consulted, but "festinate" and its relatives mean hurried
or hasty.]
These days, festucine is best known among biochemists; it's the name
of an alkaloid. It was extracted by S L Yates and H L Tookey in 1965
from a fungus growing on a grass called tall fescue, botanical name
Festuca arundinacea, which demonstrates that "fescue" is ultimately
also from Latin "festuca". I guess that their festucine was inspired
by the plant's botanical name rather than its colour.
Wordface
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IN FORMATION Some adjectives end in "-iform", meaning to have a
specified form, a suffix English has borrowed from Latin "forma", a
mould. Most of us know "cruciform" and "uniform". Less familiar ones
include "aviform", like a bird, and "vermiform", like a worm. Last
Sunday's Observer discussed symbols which our distant ancestors were
said to have painted on cave walls in France and Spain alongside the
much better-known representations of animals. The article gave words
describing a number of symbols. For example, "tectiform" accompanied
one with an inverted V shape on top, appropriate because it means
"resembling a roof" (Latin "tectum"); "reniform" captioned a kidney
shape (a relative therefore of "renal"); if you turn one symbol 90
degrees it looks a little like a ladder, hence it was said to be
"scalariform" (from Latin "scalaris", like a ladder); "unciform"
referred to a hooked symbol (Latin "uncus"), a term otherwise mainly
used in anatomy; a symbol with a central line and a series of short
lines extending from one side of it at right angles was given the
adjective "pectiform" (the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't admit
this one, but it's from Latin "pecten", a comb).
TIME MACHINE NOT SUPPLIED Jargon often defeats me. An item in my
newspaper on Wednesday reported that because of the loss of legal
aid for many people in the UK, ministers were pushing for people to
take out BTE insurance. The item explained that this stands for
"Before The Event". Hang on a moment, isn't all insurance supposed
to be taken out before the event?
Q and A: Nerd
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Q. A friend posted on Facebook that, according to dictionary.com, Dr
Seuss coined the word "nerd". According to the best available
evidence I have, he was the first to print it, in If I Ran the Zoo;
however, one year later, Newsweek printed an article in which it
described "nerd" as a popular slang term. It seems unlikely to me
that it could go so quickly from Dr Seuss to teen slang, especially
considering that I doubt many teens would be reading Dr S, let alone
quoting him. Aside from a lot of stories about acronyms and ne'er-
do-wells, I can find no definitive answer. Do you have any insights?
[Ros Hirch]
A. That's an excellent summary of one of the puzzles surrounding the
word. "Nerd" has become firmly established in the language since its
first appearance in print a little over half a century ago but we
don't know enough to be sure where it comes from. The Oxford English
Dictionary says "Origin uncertain and disputed".
It's worth noting that "nerd" (also "nurd") has evolved in meaning.
Early on, it meant a dull, unattractive, or offensive person. The
associations with obsessive technical expertise and fussy dressing
(remember "nerd pack" for a pocket protector?) only came along in
the 1970s - famously illustrated in the National Lampoon's "Are you
a Nurd?" poster of 1977. Compare and contrast "geek", which once had
similar associations (if you disregard the stories about biting the
heads off live chickens) but has largely been rehabilitated. Geeks
are intelligent, hugely knowledgeable about a technical subject but
able to get ahead in life (Time had a headline in 1995: "The Geek
Shall Inherit the Earth"). Nerds retain an idiot-savant association
of being obsessively good at one thing but poor at anything else.
Nerds are geeks with no social skills.
The two earliest appearances of "nerd", the two you mention, are
these:
And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Katroo
And bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo,
A Nerkle, a Nerd and a Seersucker too!
[If I Ran the Zoo, by Dr Seuss, 1950.]
Nerds and Scurves: In Detroit, someone who once would
be called a drip or a square is now, regrettably, a nerd,
or in a less severe case, a scurve.
[Newsweek, 8 Oct 1951.]
The Dr Seuss origin might be considered confirmed by these, but as
you say, a shift from a work for young children to a fashionable
teenager term is unlikely to have happened so quickly.
Several other theories have been proposed. One is that it's short
for the Northern Electric Research and Development Laboratories,
part of a power utility of Ontario, not so far from Detroit. But the
laboratory wasn't given that name until 1959. As one early spelling
was "nurd", another suggestion is that it's a modified or rhyming-
slang form of "turd". That's very unlikely.
In 1938, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen created a new addle-pated
country-bumpkin dummy to accompany his suave top-hatted Charlie
McCarthy and gave it the name Mortimer Snerd. It's been argued that
Dr Seuss may have subconsciously had this in mind. This source is
dismissed by etymologists, but I have come across a few instances of
somebody being nicknamed Snerd in the years before "nerd" was first
recorded.
There's also "knurd", which is "drunk" backwards. The Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute usually gets a mention here, since there are
persistent reports that the term was in use there in the 1950s. The
joke is one that might have turned up at any time and a version of
it is recorded in John Camden Hotten's Dictionary of Modern Slang of
1859. It also appears in Henry Mayhew's London Life and the London
Poor of 1851 in the spelling "kanurd" (which suggests the "k" wasn't
then silent); it seems to have been a popular bit of back slang at
this time. Readers of Terry Pratchett know he reinvented "knurd" in
his Discworld fantasy story Sourcery as being "as far on the other
side of sober as drunk is on the inebriated side".
We can't point to the British English "nerk" or "nurk" as being its
source because the experts are sure that it's a blend of "nerd" and
"berk", the latter being an abbreviated form of the euphemistic
rhyming slang "Berkshire Hunt".
It would be impossible - or at least deeply unwise - to support a
claim for any of these words being the direct source. My suspicion
is that there's something about the combination of sounds that we
conventionally spell "nerd" that causes it to be reinvented from
time to time as a term of disparagement. Perhaps this is because it
reminds us of a growl of disgust, disapproval or negation. Bergen
surely named his dummy Snerd because of the adverse image that it
conjured up. It may be worth recording that English dialect once had
"knurt" for a man who was oafish or stunted in growth and "gnarr"
for peevish fault-finding.
As so often, matters turn out to be more complicated and obscure
than those in love with a simple story or obvious explanation will
be happy with. But that's life, or at least etymology.
Sic!
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Pick the sense out of this headline over an article in the Boston
Globe of 10 March, seen by Joe Quinton and Vance R Koven: "Walpole
firm's anonymity software aids elicit deals".
Similarly for this headline that was seen on AOL News on 9 March by
Jim Tang: "Man Killed, Dismembered Dad Kills Self".
There's also the potentially misleading "Man Builds Healing Harp
from Stand-Up Wheelchair", a story on care2.com on 12 March seen by
Laurence Horn.
Miles Irving found this in an article on Dalhousie Castle in the
Scotsman on 14 March: "The castle was visited by England's King
Edward I, also known as Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots, and
Oliver Cromwell."
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