World Wide Words -- 23 Feb 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 22 17:07:46 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 820 Saturday 23 February 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Defenestrate.
3. Oddest book title of the year.
4. Whale of a time.
5. Demitarian.
6. Sic!
7. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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Jane Halsey commented on the phrase "not on your tintype": "It might
have started out as an expression of absolute disbelief, meaning
'You could show me a photo and I still wouldn't believe you!' and
then morphed into a more general expression of absolute disagreement
or refusal. The cheapness of this kind of photo might have added a
backhanded swipe at the person you were disbelieving or disagreeing
with." Jane Steinberg suggested a similar idea: "I had a friend, a
Jewish refugee from Munich, who would vigorously opt out of a choice
by declaring, in a thick Münchener accent, 'Nett ahngemahlt!', 'not
even in a painting!' It seems similar to the tintype expression, to
be so averse to something you wouldn't even do it in a picture."
A common response to the piece was to quote a little puzzle poem in
various versions, which I have been able to trace back as far as
this, though it's presumably rather older:
Once a big molice pan met a bittle lum
Sitting on a sturb cone chewing gubber rum.
"Hi," said the molice pan, "won't you simme gum?"
"Tixxy on your nin type," said the bittle lum.
[Ice-breakers, by Edna Geister, 1920.]
Many subscribers picked up on the unfamiliar word "overhauls" in a
quotation in the piece that came from George Ade's Fables in Slang
("Git into some Overhauls an' come an' he'p me this afternoon.")
It's a mistaken spelling of "overalls", a term of the latter
eighteenth century in army and civilian life for protective over-
trousers (in the US and British armies, these were originally worn
over breeches and stockings but the overall replaced them as part of
the uniform). In the following century the term was extended to
protective clothing with a bib top or a complete top, the latter
also being called coveralls. Almost from the beginning there was
confusion about their name in the US: the Dictionary of American
Regional English has an example from 1781 in which the word was
written as "overhalls". "Overhauls" came along later as a very
common version, in the mistaken belief that they were called that
because they were hauled on over the trousers. Similar reasoning
caused "coveralls" to be written as "coverhauls".
Several readers pointed out following my piece on "nidicolous" and
"nidifugous" that two other terms form a pair with senses that are
equivalent. They are "altricial" and "precocial", introduced by the
Swedish zoologist Carl Jakob Sundevall in 1836. He coined the former
from Latin "altrix", foster mother or wet nurse. "Altricial" refers
to a bird or other animal born in an underdeveloped stage, needing
care and feeding by the parent, the same idea as "nidicolous". The
latter is from scientific Latin "praecoces", the plural of classical
Latin "praecox", early or premature. (You may know it from "dementia
praecox", literally "early insanity", an old medical term for
schizophrenia that presents in adolescence; it's also the root of
"precocious".) "Precocial" means a creature hatched or born in an
advanced state, able to feed itself almost immediately, the same
sense as "nidifugous". It's curious that we've ended up with two
equivalent pairs of technical terms.
2. Defenestrate
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Perhaps my brain sees patterns where none exist, but this verb seems
to be more than usually popular at the moment. I read recently, for
example, that the former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher,
had been defenestrated by her party.
The root of the word is the Latin "fenester", a window. Architects
speak of a building's fenestration, by which they mean the style and
placement of its window openings. To defenestrate, then, might be to
remove or block up a window, as happened during the period of the
window tax in England. But it's never been used that way. In its
earliest appearances, it referred to throwing somebody out of a
window.
There have been many cases of people being so thrown as a means of
execution, at least as far back as the fate of Queen Jezebel, who
the Second Book of Kings says was defenestrated by Jehu. The most
famous came during a confrontation in Prague Castle in May 1618
between a group of Bohemian Protestants complaining about
infringements of religious freedom and regents of the Catholic
Emperor Ferdinand II. The altercation led to two of the regents and
the council secretary being thrown out of the window of the council
room. An account by one of the regents, Jaroslav Martinic, says that
they fell thirty cubits (13 metres or 45 feet) into the dry moat but
survived. Catholic writers claimed that the three were saved by the
intercession of the Virgin Mary while Protestant ones argued that
they fortuitously landed on a heap of manure.
The first mention in English of its being called a defenestration is
in an account by an anonymous engineer serving in the French Army at
the siege of Prague in 1743. It wasn't until the 1850s that the
events of 1618 came to be known in English history books as the
defenestration of Prague.
Around 1900 we start seeing "defenestrate" as a joking term, actual
throwing not being implied. In the early 1990s or a little before it
took on a colloquial sense of removing a person from office by
sacking them, as happened to Margaret Thatcher:
Mr Bob Hawke, Australia's long-serving prime minister,
has been defenestrated.
[Financial Times, 22 Feb. 1992. Mr Hawke had lost a
leadership challenge in December 1991.]
This figurative sense is either too recent or too slangy to have
reached any of the print dictionaries that I've consulted. It has
over time broadened further to mean confounded, defeated or removed.
A football team that had been knocked out of a competition was said
to have been defenestrated. Abandonment of a government retail
prices index has been described as its defenestration. Another
example:
There were some sweet moments - like the pre-ordering
requests and dedications from the audience on their
website - but this was a performance defenestrated by its
own timidity.
[Independent, 30 Jan. 2013.]
3. Oddest book title of the year
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The shortlist for the Bookseller-Diagram prize for the oddest book
title of the year has just been announced. It is as fine a set as
has ever appeared in its 35-year history.
The titles are: Was Hitler Ill? (A historian and professor of
medicine analyse whether the Führer was fully responsible for his
crimes.); Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts (A pigeon fancier's
professional guide to pigeon housing.); God's Doodle: The Life and
Times of the Penis (An analysis of the schizophrenic, up-and-down
relationship between man and his manhood.); Goblinproofing One's
Chicken Coop (How to identify, track and destroy bothersome members
of the fairy realm.); How Tea Cosies Changed the World (A
comprehensive and inspirational guide to the humble tea cosy.); How
to Sharpen Pencils (The art of achieving the perfect point.)
You can vote for your choice at The Bookseller's sister site, We
Love This Book (short link: http://wwwords.org?BKDGP). The winners
are to be announced on 22 March.
4. Whale of a time
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Q. I cannot find on your website anything about the origin and
meaning of the phrase "a whale of a time". [Julian Arkell]
A. If someone says they are having a whale of a time they mean that
they're enjoying themselves very much. It's one instance of the more
general idiom "a whale of a ...", an exceedingly great example - for
good or bad - of a particular thing. Grammarians call this kind of
usage an intensifier, since it adds a superlative to what follows.
The idea behind it, of course, is that whales are big beasts. From
the early years of the nineteenth century in the US - and also the
UK - people were making the comparison in an idiomatic usage of the
related word "whaler":
They fib by equivocation - they don't come plump out,
with a tremendous whaler of a fib, but seek to do it by
equivocation and confusion of words and ideas, but, in any
way, it is all fibbing.
[The Day (Glasgow), 28 Mar. 1832.]
It may have originally been a saying of the literal sort of whaler,
as Maximilian Schele De Vere suggested in his Americanisms in 1872:
"That the huge size of a whale should have led sailors, and after
their example others also, to speak of any man or event of unusual
and imposing proportions as a whaler, seems natural enough."
A little later in the century the formulation "a whale on" appeared,
with the sense of having a great capacity or appetite for something:
"Of course I've got to keep up my authority, you know,"
pursued Mr. Binney. "It won't do to slack the rein yet
awhile." "By George, no," said Dizzy. "I should be a whale
on parental authority myself if I were in your place."
[Peter Binney, by Archibald Marshall, 1899.]
I don't think it was all gallantry that made me do what
I did. I'd never been a whale on that sort of thing.
[Aliens, by William McFee, 1918.]
The first examples of the idiom you're asking about seem to have
arisen as part of student slang at the very end of the nineteenth
century, at least to judge from this reference:
whale. 1. A person who is a prodigy either physically
or intellectually; one who is exceptionally strong,
skilful, or brilliant. "He's a whale at tennis." "He's a
whale in mathematics." 2. Something exceptionally large,
as "a whale of a procession;" jolly, as "a whale of a
time;" or severe, as "a whale of an examination."
[Student Slang, by Willard C Gore, in The Inlander, a
Monthly Magazine of the Students of Michigan University,
Dec. 1895.]
Within a few years it was appearing more widely:
The other side from camp is straight up, and no man in
God's land need try to climb it; but we had a whale of a
time rolling down rocks; and the way they went!
[Manitoba Morning Free Press (Winnipeg, Canada), 21
Jun. 1901.]
It has never gone away.
5. Demitarian
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The UN Environment Programme published a study this week, entitled
Our Nutrient World, which argues that people in the developed world
eat far too much meat. Intensive meat production, it says, requires
large amounts of fertilisers to grow grain for fodder, which leads
to "a web of water and air pollution that is damaging human health".
Our lust for cheap meat is unsustainable, the study asserts, and
fuels a trade in undocumented livestock and mislabelled cheap ready
meals that has, for example, led to the current European horsemeat
scandal.
According to the lead author of the study, Professor Mark Sutton of
the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, one solution is for people
to halve their consumption of meat, to become "demitarians" (a semi-
blend of "vegetarian" with the prefix "demi-", a half). Professor
Sutton is credited with having coined the term, which first appeared
in print in the title of the 2009 Barsac Declaration about ways to
reduce usage of nitrogen fertilisers in Europe.
Dr Sutton ... and the other scientists involved in the
project have signed an agreement pledging to be
"demitarians" or eat half as much meat. He said the idea
was to encourage people to cut down rather than go
vegetarian completely. "We are not saying do not eat meat
full stop," he said.
[Daily Telegraph, 11 Apr. 2011.]
He said a good aim was to be demitarian, halving the
amount of meat normally eaten. This would also benefit
health, as Europeans currently consume 70% more protein
per day on average than is needed.
[MSN News, 18 Feb. 2013.]
6. Sic!
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Robert Kernish read this in an op-ed piece in the New York Times of
14 February: "He focuses on African-American literature - not just
books about black dysfunction, readily available in the marketplace,
but a variety of texts that give students alternative role models to
those provided by the media, who are too often seen toting
semiautomatic weapons."
The Brisbane Times of 13 February 2013 had this headline, sent in by
Bernard Ashby: "Police find footage of slain woman walking home."
In Jim Kelly's 2012 book Nightrise, Ira Rimson found mention of a
clerical nuisance: "Both of them had stayed awake, listening to the
noises of the lonely fen: a door banging with maddening infrequency,
the Tylers' dog barking a mile away, the swish of the wind turbine
towards dawn, and finally the dull percussion of the bird-scaring
canon."
A classic mental inversion appeared in an article on the Australian
Geographic website on 11 February: "Traditionally, a tree's height
was calculated by using a clinometer and working with the angle made
between a tree's crown and the ground. You would have to assume that
the tree's top was directly below the base and that never was the
case," says Brett.
"Whilst shopping for a new wallet today," e-mailed Ben Crompton, "I
noticed this advert on Etsy.com: 'Denim wallet for men with brown
trim and lining.' My question is not about the sense of this, but
rather how I can tell if I have brown trim and lining?"
The Guardian of 8 February (I'm running very behind with my reading)
had a review of the film A Liar's Autobiography about the late
Graham Chapman of Monty Python fame: "Born in wartime, Chapman began
life as a teenage fantasist (lonely, bookish, clever) who joined the
Footlights at Cambridge."
7. Useful information
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