World Wide Words -- 05 Jan 13

Fri Jan 4 20:34:11 UTC 2013

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 813          Saturday 5 January 2013
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       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
          A formatted version is also available online at
             http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/coan.htm

Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Words of the Year 2012.
3. Milking.
4. Overweening.
5. Elsewhere.
6. Sic!
7. Subscriptions and other information.

1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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Happy New Year. Thanks for your patience during my absence in 
December.

In the last issue, dated 1 December, I wrote about "maggot" in its 
sense of a whimsical or eccentric idea. Many readers told me that a 
musical association also exists - some seventeenth and eighteenth 
century country dances include it in their titles, usually linked to 
a person's name, such as Mr Isaac's Maggot, Huntington's Maggot, 
Hill's Maggot, Betty's Maggot, and Mr Beveridge's Maggot.

Other readers mentioned that figurative senses of "maggot" are still 
in active use in Ireland. Roger O'Keeffe noted that it's a term of 
abuse for an undesirable person and that many readers may know it in 
that sense from the British Christmas favourite, Fairytale of New 
York by the Pogues. Others mentioned the Irish "acting the maggot", 
playing the fool.

Following my snippet about "torrefy" in the 24 November issue, Peter 
Rugg mentioned Carwardine's Tea and Coffee House in Bristol, which 
once boasted the slogan, "The Liquefaction of our Torrefaction 
Always Brings Satisfaction". Chas Blacker wrote from Somerset, "A 
Bristol University student production of Macbeth once replaced the 
line 'the multitudinous seas incarnadine' with an admiring 'the 
multitudinous teas in Carwardine's'."

The World Wide Words website has been nominated for the Macmillan 
Dictionary Love English Awards 2012. http://wwwords.org?MMDB . You 
may like to vote. (You will need to scroll down almost to the bottom 
- it's a long list of nominations!) Voting closes on 21 January.

2. Words of the Year 2012
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The selection by Oxford Dictionaries of "omnishambles" as its Word 
of the Year was noted in a previous issue. The US branch of Oxford 
Dictionaries curiously chose the verb "gif" (said as "jif"), meaning 
to create an image using the Graphics Interchange Format, GIF, which 
celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2012.

The British dictionary publisher Collins waited until 20 December to 
announce its own words of the year. Rather than one for the whole of 
2012, its editors chose one for each month, selected from words 
submitted to its online dictionary by members of the public. The 
publishers admit that several don't have the staying power to be 
worth adding to the print edition. My own guess is that at least 11 
of the 12 will soon become footnotes in lexicographical history.

Among these also-rans were June's choice of "Jubilympics", a word I 
can't remember having seen in print, a blend combining references to 
the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and to the Olympics. May's word was from 
the US: "Zuckered", a play on "suckered", an allusion to Mark 
Zuckerberg's less than successful offering of shares in Facebook. 
One that became better known, at least in the UK, was "games makers" 
for the 70,000 volunteers who helped make the Olympics run smoothly. 
"Mummy porn" (or "mommy porn") came into being through the success 
of the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey, its sequels and imitators. 
The term "Gangnam Style" experienced an explosion in exposure after 
the video in November by the South Korean Psy, whose weird dance 
became YouTube's most popular clip. It was only appropriate that 
Collins's choice for December was "fiscal cliff", a melodramatic but 
effective pejorative term for the huge reduction in US government 
spending and increase in taxes that was narrowly, if temporarily, 
averted at the last minute.

The biggest yearly wordfest is that of the American Dialect Society, 
on whose heads lie responsibility for the whole fashion for words of 
the year, since they thought of it first. Their annual conference is 
in Boston this week and their vote for the words of 2012 was held as 
usual yesterday evening (Friday) in its usual semi-seriousness and 
high humour. Also as usual, nominations were put forward for terms 
(words or phrases) in various categories, followed by selecting the 
overall Word of the Year.

The first chosen was the Most Useful word of the year, which proved 
to be neither a word nor a phrase but two suffixes, "-(po)calypse" 
and "(ma)geddon", which were described as "hyberbolic combining 
forms for various catastrophes", such as "snowmageddon" (first used 
for the blizzard of February 2010) and "alpacalypse" (for the Mayan 
prophesy that the world would end on 21 December; the first part is 
from "alpaca", a poor choice since alpacas are South American, while 
the Mayans were a Central American civilisation). The winning Most 
Creative term was "gate lice", airline passengers who crowd around a 
gate waiting to board. In the Most Likely To Succeed category, I 
expected "fiscal cliff" to be a runaway winner, but by 156 votes to 
8, the winner was "marriage equality", in reference to the legal 
recognition of same-sex marriage. 

One term, "legitimate rape", managed to win in two categories, Most 
Unnecessary and Most Outrageous, both appropriate descriptions of 
the extraordinary suggestion by the Missouri Senate candidate Todd 
Akin that women can't get pregnant after "legitimate rape", a view 
that lost him the election. The Most Euphemistic term of the year, 
"self-deportation" (the policy of making life so hard for illegal 
immigrants that they voluntarily leave the country), was highlighted 
by Mitt Romney's use of it during the presidential primary campaign. 
There was a special section for Election Word of the Year, which was 
won by the nomination from the floor of "binders full of women", the 
unfortunate comment by Mitt Romney during the second presidential 
debate that while he was governor of Massachusetts he asked for more 
women suitable for public office and was offered binders full of 
them. 

There was a run-off vote in the Least Likely to Succeed class 
between "phablet" (an electronic device halfway between a smartphone 
and a tablet in size) and the write-in candidate "YOLO" (short for 
"you only live once", a Twitter acronym among young people that is 
not so much about living life to the full but more about brash 
decisions and unthinking risks - "driving hands-free at 100mph! 
YOLO!"). A cry came from the audience at this point, "They're both 
stupid!", to which came the reply "That's the whole point!" The 
audience agreed, making them joint winners.

The Word of the Year, after much voting in a packed auditorium, was 
none of these, but "hashtag", a write-in from the audience, which is 
a word or phrase prefixed with the # symbol (usually called "hash" 
in the US) which identified keywords or topics in Twitter messages. 
It narrowly beat "marriage equality".

The ADS shares its conference with the American Name Society, which 
since 2004 has chosen its Names of the Year. Two terms we've already 
met were runners-up: "Gangnam", which belongs here because the style 
is named after an affluent district of Seoul in South Korea, and 
"fiscal cliff", which was voted Trade Name of the Year (not because 
it is one but because the category title is a catch-all for anything 
that doesn't fit other categories). Lovers of British period TV soap 
opera will be pleased to learn that the choice for fictional name of 
the year was Downton Abbey. The 2012 overall winner in the onomastic 
stakes was "Sandy", a name that was burned into the brains of East 
Coast Americans through the hurricane (call it a superstorm if you 
want another trendy word of 2012) which devastated New Jersey and 
New York in late October. 

LINKS
Collins Words of the Year: http://wwwords.org?CLWD 
Omnishambles: http://wwwords.org?OMSB and http://wwwords.org?OMNSM  
Gif: http://wwwords.org?OXGF and http://wwwords.org?OXGF2 
American Dialect Society: http://wwwords.org?ADSW
ANS Names of the Year: http://wwwords.org?ANS12

3. Milking
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To pour milk over one's own head or that of someone else, either as 
a silly prank or a form of protest. The former follows other bizarre 
student fashions like planking and owling. Milking became a YouTube 
"sensation" in late November 2012, where one jaundiced soul called 
it "the latest pointless internet craze". It may have been sparked 
off by a protest by dairy farmers in Brussels on 26 November against 
the low price of milk and excessive milk quotas, during which the 
European Parliament building was sprayed with high-pressure jets of 
milk, as were the massed ranks of the local police trying to keep 
order. Some prosperous British students are said to have taken the 
idea further by creating "champagning" and "porting", a shocking 
waste of good liquor.

4. Overweening
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A bookish term, it is often found in serious up-market periodicals, 
mostly next to nouns such as "power", "ambition" or "pride". It is 
not complimentary. A person or group described as overweening may 
demonstrate presumptuousness, arrogance, conceit, self-importance or 
an excessively high opinion of themselves.

    While I share the general European aversion to the 
    overweening US firearms lobby, gun ownership has two 
    compelling arguments on its side.
    [The Independent, 18 Dec. 2012.]

The word comes from the older noun and verb "overween". Both have 
now almost entirely vanished but were available to the writers of an 
earlier age, including John Aubrey in the seventeenth century, who 
produced this concisely damning word portrait:

    A better instance of a squeamish, disobligeing, 
    slighting, insolent, proud fellow perhaps can't be found 
    than in Gwin, the Earle of Oxford's Secretary. No reason 
    satisfies him but he overweenes, and cutts some sower 
    faces that would turn the milke in a fair ladie's breast. 

    [From the collection of essays, not published in his 
    lifetime, that are now known as Aubrey's Brief Lives.]

Perhaps one reason why "overween" became unfashionable is that we 
lost its second part. "Ween" is Old English, a Germanic form that 
survives, for example, in modern German "wähnen", to imagine or to 
believe wrongly. In English, it meant to think or surmise. By the 
nineteenth century it had ceased to be a common verb and turned up 
almost exclusively in the fixed phrase "I ween":

    Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip  
    That they took me into the partnership.  
    And that junior partnership, I ween,  
    Was the only ship that I ever had seen.
    [HMS Pinafore, by W S Gilbert, 1878.]

5. Elsewhere
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The New York Times reports on recent research by Bonnie Taylor-Blake 
and Fred Shapiro about the origin of that puzzling American phrase, 
"the whole nine yards". It results from what Fred Shapiro calls 
"numerical phrase inflation", having found numerous examples from as 
far back as 1912 of "the whole six yards". http://wwwords.org?TWNY 

The New Yorker tells the story of an amateur linguist, John Quijada, 
who invented a language, Ithkuil, on the model of Bishop Wilkins's 
Philosophical Language of 350 years before, with the aim of being 
maximally precise but also maximally concise. He lost control of it 
to a right-wing Russian group. http://wwwords.org?NYLK 

Anthony Gardner writes a squib in Intelligent Life, a journal from 
the publishers of The Economist, about the increasing tendency for 
people to use abstract nouns such as "future", "geography" and 
"fiction" in the plural. http://wwwords.org?ANIT 

6. Sic!
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The Main Line Times of Pennsylvania published this verbatim extract 
from a police report: "On Dec. 20 shortly before 4 p.m. Lower Merion 
police responded to the 200 block of Gypsy Lane in Wynnewood on the 
report of a burglary in progress. A description of a white male 
wearing a black sweatshirt was observed fleeing the scene." Thanks 
to Christopher Hart for sending that.

Barry Nordin found an article on the death of the 1920s child actor 
Jack Hanlon in The Huffington Post, though the AP source also turned 
up verbatim in other media outlets. It ended, "He will be buried in 
Santa Monica, Calif., along with his wife of 37 years, Jean." 

"An interesting mental image was raised by a letter in today's 
Times," e-mailed Michael Grosvenor Myer on 14 December: "'If we were 
ruled two centuries ago by the pressure groups we are today I doubt 
if the coal mines would ever have got off the ground.'"

The London Mail online was visited on the same day from New Zealand 
by John Neave. He found this court report: "He told Cardiff Crown 
Court that he suffers from 'sexomnia' and has a history of trying to 
sleep with partners while asleep."

The Guardian of 13 December included this correction: "A review of 
Scott Walker's latest album, Bish Bosch, referred to one of its 
tracks as SDSS14+3B (Zircon, A Flagpole Sitter). That should of 
course have been SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)." Of 
course.

6. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: 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 
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