World Wide Words -- 15 Sep 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 14 16:26:40 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 801 Saturday 15 September 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Hoity-toity.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Grand slam.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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PERCONTATION Marc Picard commented on my piece: "The distinction
between percontation and interrogation is alive and well in modern
linguistics, except that they're called wh-questions ["who", "what",
"why", "when", "which", "where", plus "how"] and yes-no questions.
In spoken English, as well as in many other languages, I suspect,
there's a clear-cut prosodic difference between them in that the
former have a rising-falling intonation and the latter a simple
rising intonation." Another pair of terms for them, Catherine Hurst
explained, is "open-ended" and "closed" questions.
Several other readers asked about a type "fount", which I had where
they would have used "font". "Fount" is an unfashionable British
English spelling of the same word; both forms derives from French
"fondre", to melt or cast. The other "fount", meaning source (as in
"fount of all wisdom"), is a different word, a back formation from
"fountain" on the pattern of the pair "mountain, mount". The church
font is - like "fountain" - from the Latin for a spring, "fonte", in
this case in the phrase "fontes baptismi", the waters of baptism; in
time "font" moved from the thing contained to its container.
2. Weird Words: Hoity-toity
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This word, another example of the love of English-speaking peoples
for reduplicated creations, has had an interesting 360 years since
it first appeared in the language. We use it now to mean somebody
who is haughty or snobbish or puts on airs. My mental image of a
hoity-toity person is one who has his or her nose elevated in
continual condemnation.
Look at Fawlty Towers. Every joke is stewed in class
resentment. Basil, the Torquay hotelier, is a mass of
lower-middle class insecurities. He is infuriated by the
hoity-toity airs that his coiffured wife Sybil gives
herself.
[Daily Mail, 4 May 2012.]
When "hoity-toity" first appeared in the language, however, it had
rather a different sense. Take this example:
By the way, Jack, there is generally a certain hoity-
toity inelegance of form and manner at seventeen, which in
my opinion is not balanc'd by freshness of complexion, the
only advantage girls have to boast of.
[The History of Emily Montague, by Frances Brooke,
1769.]
That isn't snobbishness. The writer is using an older sense that was
by then almost obsolete. About a century ago the editor who created
the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary defined that sense as
"frolicsome, romping, giddy, flighty". We might say that the young
lady exhibited boisterous or silly behaviour or was coltish.
"Hoity-toity" derives from the long-obsolete verb "hoit", meaning to
"indulge in riotous and noisy mirth" (have you hoited recently? it's
supposed to be very good for you) or to "romp inelegantly" (again
from the OED; is it even possible to romp elegantly?). Where "hoit"
comes from is uncertain, although an early form suggests a link with
"hoyden", which is now an unfashionable way to describe a noisy or
energetic girl but which at the time could also mean an ignorant or
clownish man. This is probably from the Middle Dutch "heiden", a
heath, hence a yokel; if so, "hoyden" is a close relative of
"heathen".
The shift to our current sense probably came about through a
variation, "highty-tighty", that was current between the seventeenth
and nineteenth centuries. The first part may have evoked the idea of
height and so led to assumptions of superiority, although no such
link ever actually existed.
3. Wordface
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NEW WORDS ON THE RECORD Since July the British dictionary makers
Collins have been accepting suggestions for words to be added to
their online site. Having sorted through 4,000 entries, this week
they announced a list of 86 that have been added. As you may guess,
they're an eclectic set, though many of them have circulated for
some time. A selection: AMAZEBALLS, an expression of enthusiastic
approval; BRIDEZILLA, a woman whose behaviour in planning details of
her wedding is regarded as intolerable; CLAUSTROPHILIA, abnormal
pleasure derived from being in a confined space (a rare condition,
I'd have thought); FLOORDROBE, a pile of clothes left on the floor
of a room; LAYMANIZE or LAYMANISE, to simplify technical information
into a form that can be understood by ordinary people; LOLLAGE, the
practice of using the text messaging abbreviation LOL ("laugh out
loud", not "lots of love" as the British press has reported Prime
Minister David Cameron used to believe); MUMMY PORN or MOMMY PORN, a
genre of erotic fiction that is designed to appeal to women (think
Fifty Shades of Grey); PODIUM, to finish in one of the first three
places in a sporting competition (much used by commentators during
the Olympics); SQUADOOSH, a US slang term meaning nothing; TOUCH-
READY, usable immediately on touch-screen devices and computers.
4. Q and A: Grand slam
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Q. There's been lots of talk about "grand slam" as a result of Andy
Murray's success in the US Open. Where did it come from? [Jonathan
Odell]
A. Etymologically this "slam" has no connection with the word for a
violent action, such as slamming a door. The immediate origin was
the card game, bridge. "Grand slam", to take all 13 tricks in a
hand, has for more than a century been part of the vocabulary of
players. Bridge became hugely popular in the US from the last years
of the nineteenth century on and the term very soon began to take on
other associations.
It's often said that the American journalist Allison Danzig took the
card term and applied it to tennis in 1938. He was writing about the
achievement of the Australian Donald Budge that year in winning all
four major singles titles - the Australian Open, the French Open,
Wimbledon, and the US Open. (Budge wasn't the first to win them all,
Fred Perry having achieved that two years earlier with his US Open
success, but Perry didn't win all four in the same year.) Danzig's
employment of it, if he did, was beaten by five years by this:
Crawford, already the holder this year of the
Australian, French and British singles championships, will
make his bid for the first "grand slam" in tennis history
when he plays Perry tomorrow afternoon for the American
title.
[Salt Lake City Tribune (Utah), 10 Sep. 1933. In a
syndicated report by Alan Gould of the Associated Press.
Crawford failed: Fred Perry beat him.]
This wasn't its first use in sports. Paul Dickson, in The Dickson
Baseball Dictionary, notes that it refers to a "home run hit with
the bases loaded" (I have since learned this means that the first,
second and third bases are occupied when a batter steps up to the
plate; Americans may forgive my ignorance of baseball.) He notes
that the usage dates from an article in the New York Times on 27 May
1929: "One pinch-hitter thus producing what is known in baseball as
a grand slam is enough to make a ball game momentous". He also says
it was used earlier for any hard-hit ball that scored a lot of runs,
or indeed any home run. This is the earliest baseball reference I
can find:
After the game had been cinched in the sixth, the
Infants couldn't stop that awful stampede by the Camels.
The herd almost pushed one across in the seventh but
clever work by Sterling stopped it. The eighth however,
was a grand slam for the Camels.
[Muscatine Journal (Iowa), 15 July 1910.]
I've found it in the same year as a figurative term for a decisive
or knockout blow:
Lulu's press agent, having exhausted all other schemes,
advertises for a husband for his star, the idea being to
give the victim the "grand slam" at the altar, thus
affording the reporters a great first page story.
[San Antonio Light and Gazette, 20 Oct. 1910. This is
from a review of a comedy play, Lulu's Husbands by
Thompson Buchanan.]
The venerable bridge sense seems in turn to have acquired it from
whist, in which a slam (without the "grand") was likewise the taking
of all 13 tricks in a hand. The Oxford English Dictionary has taken
this back to a book of 1660. But it's older still. An earlier game
called ruff and honours, an ancestor of whist, had several names,
one of them slam. It's now thought that "slam" here is likely to be
from the obsolete "slampant" of the previous century, which meant
trickery. To "give someone a slampant" meant to play a trick on a
person or hoodwink them. It must surely be connected with "trick" in
the card sense, which dates from about the same time.
This penumbra of sense around "slam" has long since vanished. The
first figurative users of "grand slam" had "slam" in the bridge
sense in their minds but coloured by the physical one. Today the
physical sense overwhelms the other.
Incidentally, "grand slam" in tennis, in the sense of winning all
four of the major singles tournaments, is so rare an accomplishment
that the term has weakened to winning any of the four titles, which
are often called grand-slam titles. When this happened is hard to
pin down. Andy Murray is a grand slam winner in this weaker sense -
he hasn't won any of the four majors other than the US Open, though
he has been finalist or semi-finalist in all of them. But getting
Olympic gold and winning the US Open within one month is surely
enough of a grand slam for anyone.
5. Sic!
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David Halperin and Gila Blits sent this headline from the English-
language edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on September 7,
reporting on the Israel cricket team: "Israel enjoys perfect week,
earning birth in semifinals".
A headline in the Daily Mail on 6 September startled Paula Maier and
Martin Brodetsky: "Bank worker tried to film naked women as they lay
in tanning booths on his mobile phone."
In the Columbia Daily Tribune of Missouri, Dennis Wright found this
Associated Press report dated 8 September: "The Army is taking over
the prosecution of a Missouri soldier accused of killing a man who
slept with his wife just hours before attending her funeral."
For want of a hyphen ... Bruce Robb submitted this sentence from an
article in The Huffington Post on Jay Leno's 50% pay cut for The
Tonight Show: "In August, the Los Angeles Times reported Leno
volunteered to the salary cut if it could save the jobs of some of
the show's 200 odd staffers."
Chuck Wuest called a headline he had found in the Chicago Tribune of
10 September "a case of a truant apostrophe": "Teachers strike heads
into second day".
6. Useful information
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