World Wide Words -- 13 Jul 13

[Michael Quinion]

--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 840           Saturday 13 July 2013
--------------------------------------------------------------------
       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
          A formatted version is also available online at
             http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/rzsj.htm


Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Gist.
3. Fly in the face of.
4. Sic!
5. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
LOOPHOLE  Lots of people asked whether there was a link between the 
old Dutch verb I mentioned, "lûpen", to watch or peer, and "loupe", 
a small magnifying glass that is typically used by jewellers and 
watchmakers. It appears that there isn't. "Loupe" was borrowed into 
English from the French word of the same sense about a century ago. 
It has been suggested that its source lies in the old German word 
"luppe" from the Rhine region, meaning a shapeless mass of material. 
In French, it early on meant a mass of pasty iron from the smelter 
ready to be hammered. This seems to have been flattish and round and 
led to its meaning a kind of sebaceous cyst and a knot or bur on a 
tree before it took on its modern sense about 1680. To pre-empt any 
query about "cantaloupe", that's named after Cantaluppi near Rome, 
where it was first cultivated in Europe after being imported from 
Armenia.

DUCT TAPE  I have been roundly told off for implying last week that 
gaffer tape and duct tape are related. Wayne Simpson wrote, "They 
are definitely not the same thing, as any motion picture lighting 
technician (such as me) or grip will tell you. Gaffer's tape (with 
or without the apostrophe) is cloth tape, not vinyl; the adhesive is 
much more friendly and doesn't leave the disgusting residue that 
duct tape does. It's meant to be removed without destroying what it 
was attached to (though you shouldn't use it on wallpaper)."

FORNICATION  I got my Latin inflections confused last week, as many 
readers told me. I wrongly said that "fornacis" is an adjective, but 
it's the genitive of "fornax", a furnace. 

NOSOPOETIC  "While 'nosopoetic' may have lost out to 'pathogenic'," 
Shayna Kravetz commented, "its half-sibling 'nosocomial' is alive 
and kicking. This refers to an illness arising from a stay in 
hospital and is sometimes seen as a synonym for 'iatrogenic' (caused 
by doctors), although it's not quite the same. With the rise of 
various treatment-resistant pathogens, nosocomial infections are a 
hot topic in medicine. This word has been earning its money for the 
last two decades or so."

"My education as a health economist began in 1972," Peter McMenamin 
emailed, "and I soon encountered the concepts of nosocomial 
infections and iatrogenic diseases. But the word that fascinated me 
was 'pathognomonic'.  A pathognomonic symptom was one whose presence 
meant that a particular disease was present beyond any doubt. And 
the reason medicine is so complicated is that there are very few 
diseases that have pathognomonic symptoms."

Harry Lake wrote, apropos of another word in "noso-": "Some years 
ago, doing a translation from Dutch into English, I needed to know 
the English for the Dutch 'smetvrees', which means an irrational 
fear of dirt or germs but appeared to have no direct equivalent in 
English. I looked it up in the Van Dale Dutch-English dictionary, 
and there it was: 'hosophobia'. 'Hosophobia'? Never heard of it. It 
turned out that the entry should have read 'nosophobia', which is of 
quite a different register in addition to meaning something else. (I 
have since found 'mysophobia', which is more accurate but very rare, 
unlike 'smetvrees', which every Dutch person understands.) Wondering 
how this error might have come about, I recalled that someone had 
told me that Van Dale worked with handwritten slips, and it occurred 
to me that in all likelihood the handwriting of whoever had written 
the word 'nosophobia' had had an uncommonly - if only slightly - 
long vertical in the 'n'. And nobody had checked the entry ..." 

What is most intriguing about Mr Lake's story is that a search of 
Google Books finds a number of examples of "hosophobia", most of 
which have authors with Dutch-sounding names. Entering "smetvrees" 
into Google Translate gets "hosophobia" as its English equivalent. 
The error in the Dutch dictionary seems to have had some small 
influence on the English language, but no longer, as the entry was 
corrected in the 1999 edition.


2. Gist
--------------------------------------------------------------------
There are three senses of "gist" in the Oxford English Dictionary. 
We're not concerned with the obsolete sense of a right of pasture 
for cattle (from Anglo-Norman "agister", to pasture animals) nor the 
equally obsolete one of a stopping place or lodging (from old French 
"giste", in modern French the more familiar "gîte" for a furnished 
holiday home). This one is the essence or substance of a speech or 
text.

It evolved out of the legal language in medieval England after the 
Norman Conquest at a time when court cases were recorded in French. 
There was a fixed phrase, "cest action gist", in which "gist" is 
from Latin "jacere", to lie, via Old French "gesir", to lie. Its 
literal translation was "this action lies". It didn't mean that the 
accusation was untruthful (though we may guess that many of them 
must have been), since the original Latin verb could also mean "be 
situated". It meant that sufficient grounds existed for continuing 
with the action. This sense of "lie" is still known in legal 
English.

Early in the eighteenth century "gist" shifted from meaning that an 
action was admissible or sustainable to referring to what the action 
was actually about. The phrases "the gist of the action" or "the 
gist of the indictment" were common:

    Mr Sturgeon, the surgeon, depos'd, That being sent for, 
    he came to Mr. Crispe at Coke's about Eleven, found him 
    wretchedly cut in seven places ... It will be too tedious 
    to describe the other Wounds, only that on the Nose, 
    because it was the Gist of the Indictment.
    [The Historical Register, 1722.]

It took another century for this usage to extend beyond the legal 
world to mean in everyday language the essence of some speech or 
text.


3. Fly in the face of 
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. While recently reading an article on the BBC about one of the 
latest pop stars over here in Japan, I came across the phrase "fly 
in the face": "Her quirkiness and imperfections fly in the face of 
the conventional view of Japanese culture." Being an English teacher 
myself, I anticipate my students asking me to explain the phrase and 
be asked its origins. It's something I have never thought about and 
so I wondered if you could shed some light on the matter. [Jonathan, 
in Tokyo]

A. You're in good company, as I suspect few English speakers have 
stopped to wonder why we should have this odd expression. I must 
confess to never having done so myself.

The idiom usually refers to something that appears to deny the truth 
of a statement or belief ("Their actions fly in the face of their 
claim that they are looking to avoid civilian casualties"). Rather 
less often, it describes a person who defies someone else or shows 
disrespect for someone or something ("He is above all a tease. Like 
Gore Vidal, he likes to fly in the face of received opinions.") 
There's also the much less common and relatively recent derivative 
"fly in the teeth of", which is, I think, solely American.

The first version, from the 1550s, was "to fly in a person's face" 
and its literal meaning was of a dog that attacked by springing at a 
person. Very early on, it acquired the figurative sense of verbally 
attacking someone who disagreed with your opinions or your actions, 
decidedly getting in their face. This is now rare but not yet 
obsolete:

    Don't fly in their face with it. Don't try to browbeat 
    them with your point of view.
    [Independent on Sunday, 9 Aug. 1998.]

It's not clear from the record when the impersonal form took over, 
but it was at least a century ago.


4. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Kuebbing found that the front page of the Atlanta Journal-
Constitution on 7 July asserted, about the crash in San Francisco of 
the Asiana flight 214, "All have been unaccounted for among the 307 
passengers and crew, said airport spokesman Doug Yakel."

Liz Moynihan emailed: "Our local newspaper, the SanTan Sun News in 
Chandler, AZ, had this headline in the July 6-19 issue: 'Chandler 
City Council to address urban chickens'. I have a feeling the sheep 
and cows might demand equal time."

On 10 July, the Femail section of the Daily Mail website had this 
tagline: "Shorts can be chic: And you don't have to be a twenty-
something to pull them off."


5. Useful information
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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 by Robert Waterhouse in 
Europe. 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 
on 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 2013. 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 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/20130712/a9b481aa/attachment.htm>