<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" >
<title>World Wide Words E-Magazine 803</title>
</head><body style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<table cellpadding="0" border="0" cellspacing="0" style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;"><tr>
<td width="600">
<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 803: Saturday 29 September 2012</span></p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:9pt;background-color:#ffffff;color:#008000;text-align:center;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:24px;">
<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ureo.htm" style="text-decoration:none;color:#008000;">Online version</a><span style="margin-left:6px;margin-right:6px;text-align:center;">|</span>
<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/" style="text-decoration:none;color:#008000;">Home page</a><span style="margin-left:6px;margin-right:6px;text-align:center;">|</span>
<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/feedback.php" style="text-decoration:none;color:#008000;">Contact me</a><span style="margin-left:6px;margin-right:6px;text-align:center;">|</span>
<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/" style="text-decoration:none;color:#008000;">Subscriptions</a><span style="margin-left:6px;margin-right:6px;text-align:center;">|</span>
<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/php/bin/surprise.php" style="text-decoration:none;color:#008000;">Surprise me!</a>
</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:24px;text-align:center;margin-left:60px;margin-right:60px;font-style:italic;">This mailing also contains a plain-text version. Settings in your e-mail viewer will determine which version you see by default.</p>
<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: Illeism.</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: Fit to be tied.</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;">Hootenanny</b> Linn Schulz pointed me to a discussion thread on the Mudcat Café website. One post quoted from Pete Seeger’s book, <em>The Incompleat Folksinger</em>, published in 1972. Seeger says he encountered the word when he and Woody Guthrie played at one of the monthly fund-raising music events run by the people behind the <em>Washington New Dealer</em> newspaper in Seattle. They called them hootenannies, which Seeger says won out by a nose over <i>wingdings</i>. Seeger says he started to use the word for informal folk evenings in people’s homes. So there is a direct line of descent from the sense of an unspecified object through the <em>New Dealer</em>’s choice of name via Pete Seeger to the wider folk-music community.</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;">Philip Miller recalled yet another vintage sense of the word: “In the very early 1970s I was living in rural southern Michigan. I had a hand-cranked food mill to purée potatoes, make applesauce, and the like. My landlady, an elderly native of the area, saw it in my kitchen and exclaimed, ‘A hootenany! I did not know they still made them.’ This intrigued me, for I only knew the word in the folk-music context. She said that when she was a girl, around the time of the First World War, that is what the rural folks called a food mill.”</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;">One nonsense word in a quote in the piece was <i>dingus</i>. This is so characteristically American that it was surprising to be told by Julie Swenson that it’s also a common South African word. There’s doubt about where it was created — though some books say it was originally South African, the earliest US example on record is from 1876 while the first South African one is dated 1898. It might, of course, have been independently invented. Either way, it originated in Dutch <i>ding</i>, a thing. In South Africa the word has a wider range of meanings — it can be a person whose name one can’t recall (a <i>what’s-his-name</i>) as well as a thing. And unlike the US version, it’s said with a soft <i>g</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;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Reversed words</b> Following on the note in this column last time about the inversion of sense of <i>hoi polloi</i> in the US, Julia Cresswell noted, “It is not the only word or phrase that has reversed meaning in US use recently, influenced by similar sounding words. Two of my favourites are <i>sacrosanct</i>, taken to mean ‘blasphemous’ (presumably influenced by <i>sacrilegious</i>) and <i>nonplussed</i> used to mean ‘not surprised’. Presumably here the <i>non</i> has dominated.”</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: Illeism<span style="font-family:'Lucida Sans Unicode','Gentium','Charis SIL','Doulos SIL','Arial Unicode MS';background-color:#ffffff;color:#008000;font-style:normal;margin-left:12px;margin-right:12px;">/ˈɪlɪɪz(ə)m/</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;">Illeism is the habit of referring to oneself in the third person. Strictly speaking it refers to excessive use of the pronoun <i>he</i>, because it derives from <i>ille</i>, its Latin equivalent. That’s why it’s said like <i>illy-ism</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;">It is most often found in books about Shakespeare’s plays, in particular <em>Julius Caesar</em>, in which characters often refer to themselves in the third person, a trick that Shakespeare took from Caesar’s own writings. Characters in fiction sometimes refer to themselves in the third person, which can be an authorial device for indicating idiocy or overweening self-importance. Neither applies to Salman Rushdie’s new book, a record of the years he spent in hiding from the risk of retaliation by Muslims against <em>The Satanic Verses</em>. His book’s title is <em>Joseph Anton</em>, the pseudonym Rushdie took during this period; he distances himself from his alter ego by using the third person.</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;">Illeism was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1809 as the inverse of egotism, a mark of which is overuse of the pronoun <i>I</i>. Coleridge also invented <i>tuism</i>, meaning to refer to oneself as <i>thou</i> (on occasion people then still used <i>thou</i> as a familiar second-person pronoun equivalent to French <i>tu</i>, from which he took the name). <i>Tuism</i> also means giving priority to the interests of other people rather than oneself:</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 professional’s attitude is or ought to be one of “tuism” — in other words, he is concerned, through beneficence coupled with integrity, to promote the interests of his clients.<br><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Ethics in Education</em>, by David Fenner, 1999.</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;">The plural equivalent of illeism is <i>nosism</i> (from Latin <i>nos</i>, we), referring to oneself as <i>we</i>, something not much heard even from royalty these days (“We are not amused”). However it’s often still called the <i>royal we</i>. It can also be the <i>editorial we</i>, since commentators like to use it in the hope that they will sound like spokespeople for the public, or at least the organisation for which they write. Nosisms can be heard from patronising doctors or nurses (“How are we feeling this morning? Any better?”) or in sarcastic comments (“Well, well! Aren’t we looking awfully chic tonight?”).</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;">Looking back</b> If you have a secret yearning for the good old days and a general distaste for our contemporary culture, you may be a <i>retrophile</i>. Retrophiles yearn for the simplicity of earlier times, without all those complicated electronics that seem to be taking us over, when people were polite to one another and strangers didn’t call you by your first name and when films had plots rather than just sequences of computer-generated mayhem. The condition is called <i>retrophilia</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;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Rage again</b> Observers of neologisms had begun to hope that the craze of the 1990s for compounds of <i>rage</i> had gone for ever. Terms like <i>road rage</i>, <i>trolley rage</i>, <i>computer rage</i> and their like are now rarely seen. One has reappeared widely: <i>Muslim rage</i>. It refers particularly to protests in Islamic countries against the amateur video <em>Innocence of Muslims</em>. The term has actually been in use since the early 1990s and may have originated in an essay by the Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis in <em>Atlantic</em> magazine in 1990.</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;">Exam changes</b> The acronym <i>EBACC</i> (said as <i>e-back</i>) began to appear in British sources in 2011 but has been widely discussed this month. The coalition government announced that it was scrapping existing school examinations for 16-year-olds in England and Wales and replace them with the English Baccalaureate Certificate. This is designed on a European model and intended to test English, sciences, history, mathematics, geography and languages. Older Brits who delight in it because it reminds them of the School Certificate of their youth may be accused of retrophilia.</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: Fit to be tied</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 Stephen Wilder</em>: Do you have anything on the origins of <i>fit to be tied</i>?</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> A. Just a few 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;">It’s a puzzling slang expression, largely because it’s hard to be sure which of the many adjectival senses of <i>fit</i> is appearing here. It isn’t the one that means in good physical condition (“are you feeling fit?”), nor being sufficiently skilled or competent to take on a task (“it’s all she’s fit for”), nor matching accepted social standards (“a fit subject for discussion”), nor deserving or worthy (“a book fit to be read”), least of all the mainly British slang sense of being sexually attractive (“she’s fit!”).</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;">All these go back to the first sense of <i>fit</i> in English in the fourteenth century of a thing that’s well adapted or suitable. It’s probably from the Middle Dutch <i>fitten</i>, which is related to the Old Norse <i>fitja</i>, to knit. If Norse knitting came out right, it was presumably <i>fit for purpose</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;">We have several similar expressions to yours in the language, in all of which <i>fit</i> has rather broad meanings, very roughly “ready; about to; likely to”. These include <i>fit to bust</i> (or <i>burst</i>), to do something with great energy (“he was laughing fit to burst”); <i>fit to drop</i>, worn out or exhausted (“I worked till I was fit to drop”); and <i>fit to kill</i>, doing something to excess, especially in fashion (“she was dressed fit to kill”), though this is now usually heard as <i>dressed to kill</i>. Older ones that have now vanished include <i>fit to freeze</i>, extremely cold (“it was fit to freeze the very marrow in one’s bones”), and <i>fit to sink</i>, to be alarmed or ashamed (“I was fit to sink with fear that the bomb would explode”). Most of these are found in British and American writings going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century.</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>Fit to be tied</i> means to be extremely angry. The idea behind it is that the person so described is in such a state of emotional excess that they need to be restrained to protect themselves or others. Luckily, most people described as fit to be tied are no more than extremely annoyed and the risk of violence is merely figurative.</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;">The earliest examples I’ve found are these, respectively from the UK and the US:</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;">It is amusing to mark the rage and disappointment of the <i>Courier</i>. ... “It is absolutely fit to be tied.”<br><span style="color:#008000;"><em>The Champion and Sunday Review</em> (London), 15 Aug. 1819. The quotes indicate it is considered very slangy.</span></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;">[Two young women and their beaux are teasing their chaperone on a train journey.] Shortly they were whisked into a tunnel and all was darkness. “Smack? smack!” from Cromwell, and ditto ditto from the Muffin as he faithfully imitated loud kissing. It was pitch dark, and the old lady was “fit to be tied.” “Girls, what are you about?”<br><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Wisconsin Democrat</em> (Madison, Wisconsin), 1 Sep 1849.</span></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;">• Bob Johnson tells us that on 24 September, <em>The Weekly Standard</em> of Maryland wrote about speed cameras, “it seems that residents ... are not taking this effort to squeeze money out of them for the crime of commuting lying down”. Bob considers that lying down would be a fine way to commute.</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;">• This headline appeared over a story dated 24 September which Fr Eric Funston found on the website of KREM 2 News of Spokane, Washington state: “Woman found guilty of killing husband for second time”.</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;">• “Funny how a missing comma creates a child prodigy,” Claude Baudoin commented, having seen a sentence in <em>The Houston Chronicle</em> of 20 September: “The 31-year-old Pasadena native, husband and father of a 3-year-old who works as a freelance writer and sheet music salesman when not on stage ...”</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;">• Chris Smith, Peter Chase and Kathy Rowe all sent in the opening sentence of a story of 21 September in the <em>Newport Plain Talk</em> of Tennessee: “April Dawn Peters ... was charged with aggravated assault after she allegedly hit a man on his head at least five times with a hammer that she was having sex with.”</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;">• “If at first you don’t succeed”, was Myron Linder comment on an engagement announcement in the <em>Las Cruces Sun-News</em> of New Mexico on 23 September, in which proud parents announced the “fourth coming marriage of their son”.</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>
<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;">Subscriptions</b> 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 <a href="mailto:wordssubs@worldwidewords.org">wordssubs@worldwidewords.org</a>. To leave the list, change your subscribed address or resubscribe, please visit the <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm">mailing-list page</a>. You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail; to get a list of commands, send the <a href="mailto:listserv@listserv.linguistlist.org">list server</a> the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS. This e-magazine is also available as an <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml">RSS feed</a> and via <a href="https://twitter.com/wwwordseditor">Twitter</a>. Back issues are available on the <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/">website</a>.</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;">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>
<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;">Support World Wide Words</b> If you have enjoyed this e-magazine and would like to help defray its costs and those of the linked website, please visit the <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm">support page</a>.</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;">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>
</td></tr></table>
</body></html>