World Wide Words -- 08 Feb 14
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu Feb 6 23:01:00 UTC 2014
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 868 Saturday 8 February 2014
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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/vped.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Gibbous.
3. Wordface.
4. Whet one's appetite.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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GIVE THE MITTEN A large correspondence suggested many possible ways
in which this expression could have grown up.
Slang lexicographer Jonathon Green commented: "Given that 'mittens',
meaning hands, can be found in James Hardy Vaux's Vocabulary of the
Flash Language of 1812, which suggests that it must be at least a
little older yet, could the imagery underpinning 'give (someone) the
mitten(s)' simply suggest a farewell handshake, or alternatively a
dismissive wave goodbye?"
"I've known that phrase since I was in my early teens," Padmavyuha
Green commented, "as Robertson Davies used it in his Cornish Trilogy
- except he phrased it as 'she quite rightly handed me the mitt'.
I'd always assumed it came from baseball!" That's reasonable, since
baseball "mitt" does derive from "mitten". However, the abbreviation
is eighteenth century in origin and "hand someone the mitt" might
have arisen any time since. It most probably did so in the early
twentieth century around the time that it came to mean hands.
Other readers pointed out "frozen mitt" and "icy mitt" as variations
on the theme. This refers to a broader sense of rejection than in
love, as in Shandygaff, by Christopher Morley of 1918: "Paunchy
Connor has been my best - indeed my only - friend in this city, when
every editor, publisher, and critic has given me the frozen mitt."
CHLOEPHOBIA Dan Perlman wrote, "Purely speculative and mayhaps
completely off-base, but as a pop-culture reference that would fit
with the timeline, Chloe Sullivan is the newspaper editor in the
Smallville series (young Superman), which has generated storylines
in related comic books and a spin-off show dedicated to her
'adventures' in the newspaper world."
Karen Murdarasi wondered if the word was actually a corruption. She
pointed out that one sense of the classical Greek "kleos" was rumour
or report, a fair description of the function of newspapers. That
would make the word "cleophobia", which turns up online a few times
as a name (and several more as an error for "oleophobia", a tendency
for a material to reject oils or oily substances), but nowhere in a
relevant context.
Andy Behrens pointed out that "chloephobia" is the answer to the
question "what is the fear of newspapers called?" on the answers.com
website, which was first posted on 14 April 2008. This is long
before the word otherwise appears and is very probably the source of
the two known subsequent usages, especially the one in the Daily
Mail that has been widely reproduced online and was the stimulus for
my piece last week. Unfortunately, the answer was a bald assertion
without supporting evidence and so we know nothing about its source;
it may even have been a joke. Whatever it was, it has established
"chloephobia" as the term for a fear of newspapers, a disquieting
(you might say horrifying) instance of the power of the unedited
internet to propagate error.
2. Gibbous \ˈɡɪbəs\ /gIb at s/
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Romantically, the next full moon is due on St Valentine's Day, so it
seems a good time to discuss "gibbous".
Though other planetary bodies can appear gibbous in our skies, the
word is for excellent reasons most closely attached to the moon.
It's said to be gibbous when it's more than halfway towards full,
when the initial crescent has filled out to make a convex shape.
The link is so close that it comes as a surprise to find that it has
other meanings and that its application to the moon is a bit of a
Johnny-come-lately among its senses. The origin is Latin "gibbus", a
hump, and its first meaning in English was of something rounded or
protuberant. The medieval Italian surgeon Lanfranc of Milan wrote,
in modern English translation, "On one side he is gibbous but on the
other side he is flatter." Many of us are that shape, especially us
older ones.
"Gibbous" has been used in medicine to describe tumours and other
deformities and in biology for bones, fruits, leaves, shells or
fungi. Wider still it could be anything convex, including rocks or
jars or even habitations - Walter Pater wrote of "the range of old
gibbous towns ... expanding their gay quays upon the water-side."
However, it's now largely restricted to astronomical bodies. This is
a pity, as it's a fine word that deserves to be more used. So I was
delighted to come across a description of the well-muscled popstress
Madonna in the Daily Telegraph some years ago: "She was photographed
last week with veins popping on her gibbous biceps as she strode out
of a restaurant."
Incidentally, it's an exception to the usual rule that "g" followed
by "i" is soft, as in "giant". The "g" in "gibbous" has always been
hard.
3. Wordface
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ALL AT SEA Fans of the Harry Potter series of books and films were
either aghast or agog at the admission last week by J K Rowling that
she had got the romantic relationships wrong. Hermione should not
have married Ron. This brought the slang term "shipper" into the
news. Fervid fans of popular media, in particular TV, have for
decades imagined romantic relationships between characters and have
written stories about them. In the days of Star Trek, this was
called slash fiction, because the relationships were abbreviated
with a slash mark, such as "Kirk/Spock". (Nobody said anything about
the relationships having to be heterosexual, though this pair was at
times conceived as a bromance.) "Shippers" is an abbreviation of
"relationshippers", first used by fans of the TV series The X-Files,
who thought that Mulder and Scully ought to be a couple.
HANG ABOUT We're all familiar with the idea of being on a waiting
list, which around the 1960s in the US was abbreviated to "waitlist"
and which later turned into a verb. An email arrived to tell me that
an email I had sent to a potential subscriber had been "waitlisted".
From context this meant that it was being held back from delivery
until I had confirmed that it had been sent by a human being and
wasn't spam. So it's an intermediate stage between the extremes of
blacklisting and whitelisting. This sense is new to me but a quick
look round online shows it has some currency.
TACKY TERMS William Bennett, Republican US Secretary of Education
during the Reagan years, used "bloated educational bureaucracy" for
groups opposed to change. His phrase, and many of his ideas, have
been taken up by Michael Gove, the current Secretary of State for
Education here in the UK, who abbreviates the phrase to "blob". It's
in the news this week because of a speech Gove gave on Monday, in
which he argued that teachers' trade unions were complicit in
falling standards in schools. The speech has provoked the creation
of "non-blobberati", experts who offer intelligent criticism of his
policies, and the adjective "un-blobby" - two interesting examples
of negatives whose corresponding positives aren't in use. Gove's
"blob" may remind people not only of the slimy alien creature from
the 1958 Steve McQueen film but also Mr Blobby, a bulbous pink comic
figure covered with yellow spots, who appeared in the 1990s BBC
television show Noel's House Party.
4. Whet one's appetite
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Q. I recently wrote to someone that I would "whet his appetite" with
an extract from a report. I double-checked with an English colleague
that it should be "whet" but I find your website only deals with
"wet your whistle". Now I'm left wondering - have I (and my British
colleague) got it wrong in terms of appetite? [Claire, France]
A. No need to worry: you're using it correctly.
Native English speakers have been confusing "whet" and "wet" in
"whet one's appetite" and "wet one's whistle" for three centuries.
As I said in my item about the latter (http://wwwords.org/wtwh), its
first word has often been spelled as "whet", with the earliest known
example being from a book of 1674 by Thomas Flatman with the title
Belly God. Similarly, "whet one's appetite" often turns up with
"wet" instead:
Attention spans are short enough on the internet, at
least give us something to wet the appetite.
[PC Pro, Dec. 2013.]
Could users of the "wet" form have been thinking of their mouths
filling with saliva in happy expectation of a good meal? Or of their
appetites being stimulated by an aperitif? The second idea, and the
consequent misspelling of "whet", seems much the more probable and
goes back at least a couple of centuries:
When a Sijarmatian of this description is visited by a
stranger, the first thing offered him is a glass of
brandy; another dram is taken to wet the appetite
immediately before dinner, and after it the dose is
repeated to help digestion.
[Travels in Poland, Austria, Saxony, Bavaria, and the
Tyrol, by Baron d'Uklanski, 1808.]
You can see how easily confusion with "wet one's whistle" grew up.
However, where appetites are concerned it's definitely "whet", from
the verb meaning to sharpen. It's from old English "hwettan" and
turns up also in "whetstone", a device for sharpening knives and
other edged tools.
Quite early on, "whet" added a figurative sense. A potential enemy
was said to be whetting its swords if it was becoming aggressive.
People spoke of whetting their teeth, meaning that they were ready
or eager for battle; they might even have whetted their tongues,
figuratively sharpening them for verbal warfare.
The verb extended its figurative meaning still further from the
fifteenth century to suggest exciting, stimulating or sharpening
somebody's interest, curiosity, desire (or appetite). Such usages
may still be found: "They have whetted a lust for sensationalism
that has turned us into a nation of accident watchers" (A Coward's
Chronicles by Marti Caine, 1990); "Brains are being whetted for the
onslaught of work" (Rolling Stone, 2007); "A sheepish fascination
seems to have whetted the public's curiosity" (New York Times,
2007); "The narrow glimpses she managed to catch between buildings
whetted her impatience to behold it unobstructed" (The Deception at
Lyme, by Carrie Bebris, 2011).
The noun has gone through similar stages but long ago settled on the
particular sense of something that stimulates the appetite. This
might be a snack but has been much more often an appetiser in the
form of a small glass of strong liquor:
Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man,
perhaps of thirty-five, took me to the pantry, and gave me
a glass of liqueur to stay me until dinner. ... The whet
administered, I was left alone for a little in the
monastery garden.
[Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, by Robert Louis
Stevenson, 1879.]
This is now rare outside historical contexts ("The gunroom welcomed
their guest, pressed him to take a whet" - Clarissa Oakes, by
Patrick O'Brian, 1992) and must have added to the confusion between
"whet" and "wet".
"Whet" is uncommon today. In literal contexts it has been replaced
almost entirely by "sharpen"; in figurative ones the phrase "whet
one's appetite" accounts for almost all its appearances. But it is
misspelled so often that it seem likely sometime soon to be replaced
by "wet", which would be a sad loss.
5. Sic!
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A headline that evokes a curious image of therapy was found by L
Sewell in i, the cut-down version of the Independent: "Compulsory
Mental Health Treatment Balloons."
Denis Healy found this in the Living supplement of the print edition
of Dublin's Sunday Independent of 26 January: "A family of four can
travel on Brittany Ferries with their car in a four-berth cabin from
€66 per person each way, a total of €528." But would there be room
for the family as well as the car?
The Daily Telegraph had a news brief online on 29 January that Mark
Smith felt needed its logic adjusting: "The amendment would make it
a legal obligation for drivers of private vehicles to fail to
prevent smoking when a child is present."
"During the holidays," Charles Crawford told us, "the Louisville
Courier-Journal of Kentucky ran a series of articles about
overeating. One of them was called 'Sliming down your portions'. I
suppose if food is repulsive enough, one will eat less."
Brian Barratt tells us that the Independent reported on 4 February:
"Another Atlantic depression set to better Britain, bringing gale-
force winds, rain and travel disruption." You might argue that
Britain needs bettering, but not with yet another depression.
6. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: World Wide Words is researched, written and
published by Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting
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