World Wide Words -- 26 Apr 14

Thu Apr 24 22:02:00 UTC 2014

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WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 879          Saturday 26 April 2014
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Nip-cheese.
3. Wordface.
4. Flammable.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.

1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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LONDON TO A BRICK  Alan Eason commented: "You make the same mistake 
as many Australian writers have in the 40-odd years since Howard's 
day. Those unfamiliar with betting parlance have used, and still do 
use, the expression in the sense of something almost certain to 
happen, but the expression is correctly - as Howard used to say - 
'London to a brick on', meaning long odds-on. 'London to a brick' 
logically means the opposite, that is, very long odds against, or 
extremely unlikely." [The error is the same as that in the idiom I 
quoted, "it's a pound to a penny ...", which is used for a sure 
thing though literally it means long odds against.]

Having had some time spare this week, I researched and wrote up a 
more detailed account of the history of the idiom. In doing so, I 
discovered that it was known decades before the days of Ken Howard 
and found an isolated example from 1820s London that might suggest 
its origin lay in a traditional Cockney expression. The extended 
piece is online here: http://wwwords.org/ltab .

BLENDED ANIMALS  Numerous readers supplied other examples of cross-
bred animals with mixed-up names to match their breeding but I feel 
this topic has delighted us enough. As a footnote, and perhaps also 
a comment on the whole naming matter, I quote a joke supplied by 
Vijay Kumar. A visitor to a zoo is being taken around enclosures 
containing cross-bred species, with one of the staff commenting on 
the creatures. "This is a cross between a hen and a sparrow and we 
call it a Harrow", he says. "The next is a cross between a magpie 
and a wren and we call it a Magren. And over there is a cross 
between a pheasant and a duck and we call him Joe."

BUG LETTER  Hugh Tulloch added further confirmation of the use of 
the term among Americans: "When I was stationed in the Pentagon in 
the 1960s, we also talked about the bedbug letter. Service members 
would often write letters to their Congressman complaining about 
some trivial aspect of service life. The Congressman's staff would 
send the letter to the Pentagon for response, and we would prepare 
and send a bedbug letter to the Congressman, who could then respond 
to his constituent. There was a demeaning sense to it, as in, 'Oh 
God, why do I have to waste my time responding to this ridiculous 
complaint?'"

ODD NUMBER  Congratulations to Alan Jackson, who knew why I included 
1729 in the list of odd numbers in last week's piece. It's known as 
the Hardy-Ramanujan Number. The British mathematician G H Hardy was 
visiting the Indian maths genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was ill. 
He mentioned that he had come in a taxi cab with that number, which 
he felt was a rather dull one. Ramanujan demurred, "No, it is a very 
interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum 
of two cubes in two different ways." (1 cubed + 12 cubed and 9 cubed 
+ 10 cubed.) Some obsess about words, some about numbers. A very few 
do both.

2. Nipcheese
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A nipcheese is a penny-pincher or skinflint, all three suggesting a 
sordidly covetous or penurious person who cuts the cost or quantity 
of everything to the minimum, often to his own benefit.

"Nip" here is in the sense you might use when speaking of nipping 
off the heads of dead flowers or of nipping some enterprise in the 
bud, stopping it before it gets fully underway. Cheese features in 
the word because it's a staple food whose portions can easily be 
reduced by trimming them, an idea that we also have in 
"cheeseparing".

"Nipcheese" began life as a seafaring term, a nickname for a ship's 
purser, the officer responsible for provisioning and keeping the 
accounts. Pursers were a notoriously hard-hearted and tight-fisted 
breed of men as Francis Grose explained in an entry for "nipcheese" 
in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1788: "A nick 
name for the parser of a ship: from those gentlemen being supposed 
sometimes to nip, or diminish, the allowance of the seamen, in that 
and every other article." They were often suspected of keeping the 
savings for themselves:

    There's Nipcheese, the purser, by grinding and 
    squeezing,
    First plund'ring, then leaving, the ship like a rat.
    [A Collection of Songs, Selected From the Works of Mr 
    Dibdin, 1796. Charles Dibdin was a famous actor, composer, 
    and writer of the period, whose songs included Tom 
    Bowling.]

As you can see from this example, a couple of centuries ago it was a 
useful name to give a character of miserly mien. The word appears in 
recent times only in historical novels:

    There's never been anything nip-cheese about my 
    parties, and nor there ever will be!
    [The Nonesuch, by Georgette Heyer, 1962.]

3. Wordface
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HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW  British newspapers this past week have 
featured references to "peak beard". They were prompted by a study 
in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters by researchers based 
at the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre of the University of 
New South Wales, Australia. They conclude that so many men now sport 
beards that their attractiveness is falling. The study showed that 
the more bearded men a person saw in succession, the more striking a 
clean-shaven face became. They noted that this occurs in several 
animal species and is known as "negative frequency-dependent sexual 
selection". The term "peak beard" seems to have been coined by the 
leader of the study, Professor Rob Brooks of UNSW. He took it from 
"peak coal", "peak oil" and similar expressions denoting the point 
at which the production of something reaches its maximum level and 
then declines.

4. Flammable
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Q. In the 1940s my high-school chemistry teacher dad noted a change 
in the wording for a substance that would easily burn: "inflammable" 
became "flammable". Why did this happen? Is the use unchanged in the 
UK? Or is it still changing? Or maybe we Americans are incorrect? Or 
maybe it makes no difference? [Bob Leavitt]

A. The problem with "inflammable" is the "in-" at the front. English 
has many words in which it means "without" or "not". A majority have 
been imported from Latin with the prefix already attached, such as 
"infertile" and "inarticulate". Others, such as "inexpensive" and 
"invariable", have had it added in English. We don't turn words into 
their negatives using "in-" any more; we prefer "un-" or "non-", or 
sometimes "a-", but the aura of negativity surrounding "in-" is 
still very strong in our minds. 

Unfortunately, Latin had another "in-" prefix, whose root sense was 
the same as English "in" but which could sometimes strengthen the 
meaning of the word it was attached to, as in "indoctrinate" and 
"incantation" and also in "inflammable". This is much less common or 
obvious, so much so that "inflammable" can all too easily be taken 
to mean "not capable of burning", when it really means "very easily 
set on fire". 

It's impossible to establish how often confusion over "inflammable" 
led to accidents but evidence exists in US newspapers more than a 
century ago of the mistaken meaning of "inflammable":

    These bricks are said to be light, impervious to wet 
    and utterly inflammable.
    [Davenport Daily Leader, 29 Jan. 1892.]

    [The dresses] will be rendered almost inflammable, or 
    at least will with difficulty take fire, and if they do, 
    will burn without flame.
    [Nashua Reporter, 30 Jul. 1903.]

This confusion has survived to the present day. A US study of 2010 
demonstrated this among American adults: "Inflammable has the same 
meaning as Flammable but was rated as if it was of very low 
flammability, consistent with previous research."

From the beginning of the twentieth century the potential confusion 
started to worry American safety experts and insurance companies. 
Under their urging, "flammable" had begun to appear in safety advice 
and local bylaws in the first decade of the century but it was then 
a technical term unknown to the wider public. In 1920, they ran a 
campaign to try to change the language. This notice appeared widely 
in technical journals:

    The National Safety Council, The National Fire 
    Protection Association, and similar organizations have set 
    out to discourage the use of the word "inflammable" and to 
    encourage the use of the word "flammable" instead. The 
    reason for this change is that the meaning of 
    "inflammable" has so often been misinterpreted.

It was convenient that these bodies had a word with which to replace 
the potentially disastrous one. "Flammable" had been created early 
in the nineteenth century and "flammability" two centuries earlier 
still; though they had never caught on, they were available to be 
resurrected. Advocates also preferred "non-flammable" to the common 
"non-inflammable". Perhaps strangely, the first appearance of "non-
flammable" in the US preceded "flammable" by about a decade. It did 
so earlier still in the UK, where it was a term of art in naval 
gunnery as early as 1888.

Despite this early effort, progress was slow. "Flammable" really 
only started to take hold in the US from the 1950s. For example, the 
official shift from "inflammable" to "flammable" on fuel trucks took 
place as recently as 1964. Purists hated the change, ranting at the 
time that the fine literary word "inflammable" was being replaced by 
a corrupt form, an unnecessary dumbing down of language in order to 
accommodate the ignorance of the great unwashed. Objections died out 
eventually and Americans are now much more likely to use "flammable" 
than "inflammable" both in speech and writing, substantially more so 
than Australians, Canadians or Britons.

In Australia, "flammable" began to appear only in the 1960s. The 
first modern example of "flammable" that I can find in British usage 
is dated 1952 and it wasn't until 1959 that the British Standards 
Institution issued the advice: "In order to avoid any possible 
ambiguity, it is the Institution's policy to encourage the use of 
the terms 'flammable' and 'non-flammable' rather than 'inflammable' 
and 'non-inflammable'." 

The use of "flammable" and "non-flammable" in technical contexts is 
now universal.

5. Sic!
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Thanks to Lee Ann Roberts for sharing this sentence from a Daily 
Mail website report of 19 April (Mr Murt is a horse): "Back in the 
saddle: Zara Philips [sic] is riding in public again for the first 
time since she gave birth to her baby on Mr Murt."

The online Mail's penchant for long headlines and its sloppy sub-
editing can lead to strange results, as Roy Lomas and Lauren Onraët 
spotted with a story of 20 April: "Michael Jackson's bodyguards 
reveal how the King of Pop romanced a mystery 'drop dead gorgeous' 
Eastern European girl and used to visit her hotel while his kids 
slept in a tell-all book about his last days."

The website of the Star-Ledger of New Jersey, B J Smith tells us, 
introduced a news item on 15 April with these words: "A week after 
collapsing in a parking lot and dying, doctors have determined the 
cause of death for World Wrestling Entertainment icon Ultimate 
Warrior."

Such misplaced modifiers are usually accidental. But on 16 April, 
The Times had this item: "A longboat full of Vikings, promoting the 
new British Museum exhibition, was seen sailing past the Palace of 
Westminster yesterday. Famously uncivilized, destructive and 
rapacious, with an almost insatiable appetite for rough sex and 
heavy drinking, the MPs nonetheless looked up for a bit to admire 
the vessel."

David Macreavy's wife spotted this in an article about decorating in 
the 9 April issue of the Lamorinda Weekly of Lafayette, near San 
Francisco: "I probably don't need to remind you, but the paper you 
choose will only look as good as the wallpaper installer who hangs 
it."  

6. Useful information
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published by Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting 
and advice are provided by Julane Marx, Robert Waterhouse, John 
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