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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;" id="top">Contents</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt;margin-left:0pt;margin-top:1pt;padding-right:6pt;text-align:left;">1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt;margin-left:0pt;margin-top:1pt;padding-right:6pt;text-align:left;">2. Weird Words: Zemblanity.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt;margin-left:0pt;margin-top:1pt;padding-right:6pt;text-align:left;">3. Wordface.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt;margin-left:0pt;margin-top:1pt;padding-right:6pt;text-align:left;">4. Questions and Answers: Rozzer.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt;margin-left:0pt;margin-top:1pt;padding-right:6pt;text-align:left;">5. Sic!</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">1. Feedback, Notes and Comments</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">And more on sentences</b> Clark Stevens e-mailed: “Your discussion took me back to my seventh-grade English classes, Mrs Isabelle Stead presiding. Her unwavering opposition to beginning a sentence with <i>and</i> or <i>but</i> was matched only by her admiration for the novels of Sir Walter Scott. One day, as we were plodding through <em>Quentin Durward</em>, a smart aleck in the back of the room spotted a sentence starting with <i>and</i>. Seizing the chance to ally himself with a colossus of literature, he pointed it out and asked, ‘Why can’t we do that?’ All 4ft 10in of Mrs Stead was momentarily nonplussed. Then she said: ‘Young man, you may begin a sentence with <i>and</i> or <i>but</i> when you can write like Sir Walter Scott.’ And that was the end of that.”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">Several readers pointed out that the many <i>ands</i> in the quotation from Genesis in the King James Bible are a quirk of Hebrew. Shayna Kravetz commented, “In part, the reason is the grammatical structure known in Hebrew as the <i>vav ha-hipuch</i> or, in English, the <i>conversive vav</i>. The letter <i>vav</i>, when used as a prefix, functions as ‘and’. But in biblical Hebrew a <i>vav</i> prefix also converts the tense of a verb from past to future or vice versa. The phrase translated as ‘and there was light’, is literally the conversive vav plus the future tense. Modern translators usually don’t bother to reproduce the breathless narrative pulse that this string of <i>ands</i> provides in the Hebrew, and simply turn the verbs around and drop the <i>ands</i>.”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">“And another thing...”, e-mailed Anthony Massey, who went on to say something I was groping to express. “While using <i>and</i> at the start of every sentence can give a childlike feel, in the work of a great poet the effect can be one of tremendous power. Take the first half of William Blake’s Jerusalem, four sentences of which begin with <i>and</i>. As Blake knew very well, if you take <i>and</i> away it’s not the same at all:</p>
<p 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;">And did those feet in ancient time<br>
Walk upon England’s mountains green?<br>
And was the holy Lamb of God<br>
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?</p>
<p 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;">And did the Countenance Divine<br>
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?<br>
And was Jerusalem builded here<br>
Among these dark Satanic Mills?”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Sooth</b> In giving its origin, I should have said that the Sanskrit adjective <i>satyas</i> is a relative, not its origin. In the jargon of the etymological trade, it’s a cognate. Both words actually have a common origin.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">Speaking of common origins, others remarked on <i>soothe</i>. Though its meaning has substantially diverged, <i>soothe</i> has the same origin as <i>sooth</i>. In Old English <i>soothe</i> meant to verify something, to prove it to be true. From the sixteenth century on, <i>soothe</i> successively came to mean corroborate some statement, then to flatter or humour a person by agreeing with them, then mollify or appease and so to our current sense of rendering a person or animal calm or quiet. When I searched current newspapers — for the most part unavailingly — for examples of <i>sooth</i>, I was intrigued to see how often <i>soothe</i> was now being spelled <i>sooth</i>. Those who make what is still regarded as an error are actually returning to the word’s roots.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Cooking with Poo</b> Gerry Foley wrote, “In Thai, the word for crab is pronounced with an unaspirated <i>p</i>, which is something between a <i>p</i> and a <i>b</i> — hence crab is sometimes written as <i>bpoo</i>.” So the word doesn’t really sound the same as English <i>poo</i>, though often written that way. In the official transliteration of Thai to English, <i>p</i> represents the unaspirated <i>p</i>, while <i>ph</i> represents the aspirated <i>p</i> (<i>p</i> as in English <i>poo</i>). That’s why Phuket is spelt the way it is — and not pronounced as a coarse expletive.” Roger Denny added, “The correct Thai response on being given a copy of the above book as a gift would be <i>kop khun krap</i>, or ‘thank you’. <i>Krap</i> is a male participle used as a polite termination to a sentence or remark.”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Voting time again</b> <em>World Wide Words</em> has once again been nominated in the LSOFT Choice Awards (now the <i>Mailys</i>), in which you may recall we gained an award in 2009. The contest is organised as monthly heats from April to August; the winner of each becomes a finalist. You can <a href="http://wwwords.org?LSOFT">vote</a> every day until 31 August if you want and you have the stamina.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">2. Weird Words: Zemblanity</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">In an ideal lexicographical world, every word ought to be provided with its opposite, its antonym. Ever since 1754, when Horace Walpole included it in a letter, <a href="http://wwwords.org?SNDPTY">serendipity</a> has had to survive without one. It has only been very recently that its opposite has appeared:</p>
<p 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;">So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds, seawashed, sunbasted? Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone. Call it <i>Zembla</i>. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design. Serendipity and zemblanity: the twin poles of the axis around which we revolve.<br><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Armadillo</em>, by William Boyd, 1998.</span></p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">It hasn’t yet achieved mainstream status, though Mr Justice Michael Peart used it in a recent legal judgment in the UK and it has been borrowed as the title of a bit of madcap physical theatre, which was performed, for example, at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It has also featured in a book of endangered words. I hadn’t realised that it had been used enough to become endangered.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">3. Wordface</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Luck of the draw</b> Some words culled at random from recent reading: <i>netwalking</i> is similar to everyday networking with other people, but it’s done in an organised country walk with selected participants, free from interruptions; <i>bathtubbing</i> is an eccentric water sport, so far recorded only in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells (famous for its annual bog snorkelling championships), in which you propel old bathtubs with a kayak paddle (do remember not to pull the bathplug out); <i>pink slime</i> is slang for a form of reconstituted beef, known formally as lean finely textured beef, or by its critics as ammonia-treated beef trimmings, a controversial foodstuff in the US and now also in the UK; <i>mysophobic</i> refers to an irrationally intense fear of dirt or disease (ancient Greek <i>musos</i>, uncleanness); if your skin is <i>erythemal</i>, it’s going pink through irritation or illness (that is, you have <i>erythema</i>). And <i>fortunocracy</i> has been appearing in book reviews to mean a successful group of people who have gained that state not as a result of their abilities but from blind chance; it was coined by Ed Smith in his book <i>Luck: What it Means and Why it Matters</i> (I suspect that <i>fortunocracy</i> may be a temporary formation, unless it gets lucky).</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Bradree in bradford</b> In Britain, the surprising victory by George Galloway in a parliamentary by-election in Bradford West a week ago introduced a new word to the political lexicon: <i>bradreeism</i>. It seems to be from a bit of bilingual wordplay. The constituency has many second- or third-generation British Muslim voters, mainly of Pakistani stock. The word is from Urdu <i>biradiri</i>, roughly meaning brotherhood, family or kinship, but which also refers to social stratification based on clan affiliations. It has been blended with the name of the city to create <i>bradree</i> and then confirmed as an English word by adding the <i>-ism</i> suffix. It refers to the way in which political leaders from this community have in the past been chosen from a very small number of families through their connections rather than their talent.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">4. Questions and Answers: Rozzer</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;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 Andrew</em>: Too much <em>Top Gear</em> [a BBC television series on motoring] makes my mind wander. I was wondering about the origin of the word <i>rozzers</i> for the police, which is the one the presenters always use and which I’ve not heard elsewhere. Any thoughts?</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;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> Off the top of my head, I would have said that <i>rozzer</i> is rather out of fashion as a British slang term for the police and that the <em>Top Gear</em> use of it was affected. However, I find that <i>rozzer</i> does still have quite a wide currency, at least in newspapers, mostly in a mildly deprecatory way:</p>
<p 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;">The rozzers will lose money if they fail their fitness tests — a drop in salary of £3,000 a year has been suggested.<br><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Sunday Times</em>, 18 Mar. 2012.</span></p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">As I noted in August last year, the current youth favourite is <i>The Feds</i>, though <i>the filth</i>, <i>the pigs</i> and others are still current. Older ones include <i>coppers</i>, <i>the Bill</i>, <i>Woodentops</i> (from a 1950s children’s television programme) and <i>The Plods</i>. Slang terms for police go back a long way, at least to Shakespeare’s <i>bluebottles</i>, from the colour of watchmen’s uniforms. <i>Peeler</i> derives from the name of the founder of the Metropolitan Police in 1828, Sir Robert Peel (as does <i>bobby</i>). From the middle of the nineteenth century, <i>esclop</i> was in fashion, this being back slang for <i>police</i>, though it was usually pronounced (and often spelled) as <i>slop</i>.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><i>Rozzer</i> is easily the most mysterious of the set and one of the oldest still in use — it began to be recorded in the late 1880s. This is the earliest that the <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em> knows of:</p>
<p 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;">Up walks a rozzer and buckles me tight.<br><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Sporting Times</em>, 26 May 1888.</span></p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">An early suggestion held it was a variation on <i>Robert</i>, again from Sir Robert Peel. Others have unsatisfactorily found a connection to the early nineteenth century French criminal slang for a policeman, <i>roussin</i> or <i>rousse</i>, literally a redhead (from <i>roux</i>), considered to be a despised or marginalised individual. A common supposition is that it comes from Hebrew <i>khazeer</i> or Yiddish <i>chazer</i>, a pig, but this is almost certainly a guess derived from the 1960s slang term. Yet another candidate is the Romany <i>ruzalō</i>, strong. Some point to <i>roosher</i>, contemporary with <i>rozzer</i>, which is listed in Farmer and Henley’s <em>Slang and its Analogues</em> of 1903, but that merely transfers the problem to another word of which we know nothing.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">None of these have any direct evidence to support them. Once again, it’s “origin unknown”, I’m afraid.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">5. Sic!</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• An all-day visitor parking voucher issued by Islington Council to Alan Clayton contained this warning: “You are liable to a penalty charge if you ... do not use the voucher other than as described above.” He commented, “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t!”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• Paul Farrington-Douglas saw the headline over a report in the <em>Prague Daily Monitor</em> of 31 March: “Thieves steal car disguised as towing service”.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• An item in the <em>Traverse City Record-Eagle</em> on 29 March reported that soil erosion enforcement was being transferred from the office of the County Drain Commissioner to the office of County Construction. The omission of an <i>f</i> from the headline led to its appearing as “Drain enforcement duties shit away from McElyea”. Michael Sheehan saw it and sent a picture to prove it.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• In the <em>Daily Mirror</em> of 3 April, submitted by Liz: “Sarah claimed to have had an on-off affair with Gordon for seven years in 2008”. That year must have seemed awfully long.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• Wayne Norton found an article from <em>Postmedia News</em> in the <em>Victoria Times Colonist</em> on 2 April informing readers that an increase of 6.5 percent in local electricity rates will mean “an extra $5 a month for the atypical customer.” He wonders how much more the typical customer can expect to pay.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;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:15pt;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:15pt;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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