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<title>World Wide Words E-Magazine 777</title>
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<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:18pt;background-color:#008000;color:#ffffff;padding-top:12px;padding-bottom:12px;text-align:center;margin-bottom:6px;">WORLD WIDE WORDS E-MAGAZINE<br><span style="font-size:15pt;">Issue 777: Saturday 10 March 2012</span></p>
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<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">Feedback, Notes and Comments</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">New format</b> Your comments were overwhelmingly positive. So I shall continue sending both formats each week. It’s particularly good to learn that older subscribers report that the formatted version is easier to read and that it works well on smartphones and tablets.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">Many readers noted exclamation marks in the middle of a couple of words. These weren’t typing errors but were inserted by e-mail software because some paragraphs were too long. I’ve changed the coding method to prevent this happening again.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">Some readers complained that lines were too long in some readers or that the fonts were too small. Lines can usually be shortened by reducing the width of the viewing window — the text will reformat to fit it. Font sizes can often be changed through a local setting. However, I’ve amended the code to set a maximum length for lines and also changed the font specification slightly. In response to other requests, I’ve added links to key pages on the website, including the online version of each issue.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Errors</b> Apart from the intrusive exclamation marks, subscribers also noted that I’d referred to the forward of a book when of course I meant its foreword and that I’d misspelled Sebastian Junger’s name in one place. The phrase <i>when it’s at home</i>, in the question about <i>perfect storm</i>, lost its apostrophe in one appearance (more about the expression below). Apologies.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">Weird Words: Froward</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">It’s not a mistake for <i>forward</i>, though a typing error in an e-mail brought it to mind.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">The first part of this archaic word could at one time stand alone. <i>Fro</i> is based on Old Norse <i>frá</i>, from which we also get <i>from</i>. We now know it only in <i>to and fro</i>, which is a scaled-down form of the Middle English <i>come toward and go froward</i>.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><i>Froward</i> means leading away. Old English also had <i>fromward</i> in the same sense, though they later diverged. <i>Fromward</i> retained its literal sense of direction — until it died out in the eighteenth century — whilst <i>froward</i> moved to the metaphorical.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">By the fourteenth century, <i>froward</i> was attached in particular to a person who figuratively moved away from others by doing the opposite of what was asked of them or what other people thought reasonable. A froward person was hard to deal with — obstinate, peevish, perverse or childish. Indeed, a difficult child was often said to be froward:</p>
<p id="em-quotetext" style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;margin-left:24px;margin-top:6px;margin-right:80px;margin-bottom:6px;font-size:11pt;line-height:14pt;">Human Life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward Child, that must be play’d with and humour’d a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep.<br ><span style="color:#008000;"><em>An Essay on Poetry</em> by Sir William Temple, 1690.</span></p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">That sense remained until <i>froward</i> slipped out of daily use in the latter part of the nineteenth century. If you read it today in a newspaper it’s either in a quotation from an old work or — to return to my starting point — a misprint for <i>forward</i>.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">Wordface</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Starstruck</b> An informal astronomical term swam into my ken the other day: <i><b>Milkomeda</b></i>. The experts who know our galactic neighbourhood are predicting that shortly — in about five billion years, give or take the odd billion — the Andromeda Galaxy may collide with our own, the Milky Way. After some churning and stirring, the two may coalesce into a new single galaxy, which has been named Milkomeda. Though we need not lose any sleep about its coming, it’s good to know that we already have a name for it.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Walking wounded</b> Following my piece two weeks ago on <i>somniloquent</i> several readers asked about the Latin verb <i>ambulare</i>, to walk. John Sieger put it this way: “I would be curious to know when <i>ambulare</i> acquired wheels to become <i>ambulance</i>.” It’s an odd story. The original was the late-eighteenth-century French <i>hôpital ambulant</i>, literally “walking hospital”, a horse-drawn vehicle that we would now call a mobile field hospital, taken to a battle to give rapid help to the wounded. This gave rise to <i>chariot d’ambulance</i> and <i>voiture d’ambulance</i> and at the end of the nineteenth century to the French <i>ambulance</i> in its modern sense of a civil emergency vehicle. The English word, initially meaning a vehicle with which to transport wounded away from the battlefield, was borrowed from <i>voiture d’ambulance</i> by the British army fighting alongside the French in the Crimean War.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">At home?</b> In last week’s issue, Thomas O’Dwyer wrote in his query about <i>perfect storm</i>, “What, I thought idly, is a perfect storm when it’s at home”. Lots of readers were clearly unfamiliar with this colloquial phrasing. It expresses surprise, incomprehension or scorn on encountering a reference to an unfamiliar person or thing: “Who’s he when he’s at home?”; “What on earth is an Immigration Appeals Tribunal when it’s at home?”; “What are banister finials when they’re at home?”. As so often with such formulations, the origin is lost in history, but it’s been in use in Britain for 150 years. The earliest on record is in <em>St Patrick’s Eve</em>, by Charles Lever, published in 1845: “‘And who is Mr. Lucas when he’s at home?’ said Owen, half-sneeringly.”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">In hot water</b> Perhaps, being officially retired, I’m now out of the loop, workplace-wise, but I was surprised when a catalogue of office supplies that I was glancing through offered me “hot and cold water coolers”. The models listed do indeed dispense hot water as well as cold. Though the English language is flexible, using <i>water cooler</i> to mean <i>water heater</i> bends it so far it might snap.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">Questions and Answers: Etiquette</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:6px;"><span style="background-color:#008000;color:#ffffff;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica;font-weight:bold;font-style:normal;font-size:1.1em;margin-right:6px;padding-left:4px;padding-top:1px;padding-right:4px;padding-bottom:1px;">Q</span> <em>From Sarah Ingram</em>: I have noticed that the word for a label in several languages (French, Dutch, German and Spanish at least) is <i>etiquette</i>, or a variant of it. How did we come to have such different meanings, and what do these other languages use when they want to talk about the prescribed way of behaving?</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:6px;"><span style="background-color:#008000;color:#ffffff;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica;font-weight:bold;font-style:normal;font-size:1.1em;margin-right:6px;padding-left:4px;padding-top:1px;padding-right:4px;padding-bottom:1px;">A</span> Both senses have the same source, as does <i>etiquette</i> in English. Something similar happened in English, too, though in a disguised way.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">The extension of sense first happened in French. It derives from the ancient French <i>estiquette</i> that meant to press, pierce, insert or attach and which may be linked to the Latin <i>stilus</i>, a stylus. It meant a post stuck in the ground that served some purpose or other not fully understood in games, perhaps as a goal. Because the posts often had a sign attached to them, it extended its sense to a label, in a later usage one in a lawyer’s book bag or valise that detailed the papers relating to a trial, including a list of witnesses. This moved further over time to refer to any sort of ticket, such as a price tag, which is one of its meanings in modern French.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">At the beginning of the sixteenth century the word was used in the court of Philippe the Good, the Duke of Bourgogne, for the schedule of the Duke and his court. By the end of the century, it had come to mean the court ceremonial, particularly at Versailles, and hence a code of polite behaviour in formal situations.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">Because French was for so long the formal language of courts and diplomacy throughout Europe, <i>etiquette</i> in this sense spread into other languages. Confusingly, several of them adopted the label sense as well, though the two may be spelled slightly differently.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">Like other languages, English borrowed <i>etiquette</i> in the behaviour sense in the eighteenth century. But two centuries earlier we had acquired a word close in sense to <i>label</i> by dropping the initial <i>es</i> from <i>estiquette</i> to make <i>ticket</i>.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">Sic!</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• Pete Jones was watching the snooker on Sky Sports recently when a commentator said: “If he can stay ahead, he’s going to win”.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• Several cases of unfortunate headline constructions appeared this week. “Woman hit by triathlon cyclist in coma” was seen by Rosemary Zammarelli on the Fox Sports site on 6 March. MSN News had the sad news, submitted by Michael Daily, that “Toddler found after twister dies in hospital”. On 7 March the <em>Washington Times</em> site had “Dead inmate killed up to 20”; thanks go to Norman Cooper for the zombie alert. </p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• Sharyn Turney sent a report from Yahoo News Australia: “Nearly 3500 have been evacuated in NSW as a Sydney dam overflew.” The <em>Canberra Times</em> wrote in similar mode two days earlier: “Floods have overflown other Canberra dams during construction with no ill effect.”</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;background-color:#ffffff;color:#ffffff;margin-top:24px;margin-bottom:15px;border-bottom:2px solid #008000;">x</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;color:#008000;">About this e-magazine</b> <em>World Wide Words</em> is written, edited and published in the UK by Michael Quinion. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice are provided by Julane Marx in the US and Robert Waterhouse in the UK. The linked website is <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org">http://www.worldwidewords.org</a>.</p>
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<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;color:#008000;">E-mail contact addresses</b> Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be <a href="mailto:wordseditor@worldwidewords.org">sent to me</a>. I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. Items intended for the <i>Sic!</i> section should go to <a href="mailto:sic@worldwidewords.org">sic@worldwidewords.org</a>. Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be sent to <a href="mailto:wordsquestions@worldwidewords.org">wordsquestions@worldwidewords.org</a>, not to me directly.</p>
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<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:19px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;color:#008000;">Copyright</b> <em>World Wide Words</em> is copyright © Michael Quinion 2012. All rights reserved. You may reproduce this e-magazine in whole or part in free newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists online provided that you include the copyright notice above and give the website address. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites requires permission from the editor beforehand.</p>
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