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<div align="left"><font face="Calibri" color="#008000" size="6"><span style=" font-size:24pt"><b>World Wide Words</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:0.00mm; margin-bottom:2.11mm;"><font face="Arial" color="#008000">
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Issue 902: 6 November 2014</i></span></font></p>
<div align="left" style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:6.33mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Calibri" color="#008000" size="4">
<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Feedback, Notes and Comments</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<b>Lost in translation.</b></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> A Sic! item in the last issue reproduced a report from the
</span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Sydney Morning News</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> on that supposed Russian incursion into Swedish
waters. Rear-admiral Anders Grenstad was reported as saying “It could be a
submarine, or a smaller submarine”. Many readers suspected, as I did, that the
newspaper quote was a bad translation. </span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">Terry Walsh went back to the Swedish original and confirmed that the English
version should have been “We are certainly able to exclude a conventional
submarine. Some of the observations do not allow for that depth, says
Grenstad. But he is sure of one thing. There is some type of underwater vehicle,
at least one.” How one gets from that to the quote in the newspaper is hard to
understand.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">By the way, the original text showed that the usual Swedish term for a
submarine is </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>u-båt</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">. This comes from </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>U-Boot</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, an abbreviation of German
</span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Unterseeboot</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, literally undersea boat, likewise the standard German term for a
submarine. We took this into English as </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>U-boat</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> to mean specifically German
military submarines of the two World Wars.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<b>Trunk and boot. </b></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">Lance Jones wrote, “I live in the wire-grass section of South
Georgia. My grandmother, and other folks I have known of her age (born
around the time of the First World War), call the trunk of a car the </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>cooter hull</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt">.
I think as in turtle shell. They tend to use </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>hull</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> more than </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>shell</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> but that seems to
be passing as they do.” [</span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Cooter</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> is a regional term for a freshwater turtle in parts
of the southern US.]</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>Boot</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> turns out not to be entirely unknown in the US in the car sense. John C
noted, “At least until the early 1950s in the mountains of North Carolina and
Georgia, it was common to refer to the trunk of an automobile as the boot. My
wife, who grew up in Springfield, Missouri, remembers that her grandparents
used </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>boot</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> for their car trunk.”</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">Randy Sigman wrote, “It may be of interest to you that the US automaker Tesla
Motors has coined the term </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>frunk</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">.” This is the front storage space where the
engine would have been in most petrol or diesel cars. So that was what we
should have called the same space in a Volkswagen!</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">Several readers have suggested I do a similar analysis of </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>bonnet</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> and </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>hood</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt">. I’ve
added it to my — alarmingly long — list of words to look at.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<b>Rumbles and dickies.</b></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> Karl Franklin wrote, “Your comments on the back
storage area of a car and its etymology reminded me that in the old days we
used to ride in the ‘rumble seat’ of a car. It was an outdoor seat that could fold
out or in, and was in about the same area as the trunk or boot. You probably are
familiar with the name but I wonder what the equivalent is in British English.” </span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">In Britain it was called the </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>dicky</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, or </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>dicky seat</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt">. We may guess it’s the same
word as the familiar form of </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Richard</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, but that merely takes the obscurity back a
step. </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Dicky</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> had been taken over for cars from a similar seat for servants at the
back of horse-drawn carriages and one writer has suggested that </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Richard</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> was
once a generic term for a servant. I’ve been unable to confirm this.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">The experts are sure it isn’t connected to another British English sense of
</span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>dicky</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, for something that isn’t working properly (“he had a dicky heart”)
though it may be connected with </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>dicky</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> for a false shirt front. The dicky in a car
was often used to carry luggage and the word is still in use in Indian English for
the boot/trunk. Another term for it in the US was </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>mother-in-law seat</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">Incidentally, a </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>rumble</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, or </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>rumble seat</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt">, was also used of servants’ seats at the
rear of carriages from early in the nineteenth century, presumably because
being over the back wheels it took up the vibration of the vehicle on the road.
It’s yet another oddity of automobile vocabulary that it was transferred to the
car seat in the US but not in Britain.</span></font></p>
<div align="left" style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:6.33mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Calibri" color="#008000" size="4">
<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>The Language Myth, by Vyvyan Evans</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">For the past half-century, the dominant view in linguistics has been that
human beings uniquely possess a hard-wired concept of language. This implies
that all languages are related at a deep level, because all of them are created on
the same fundamental grammar template. It explains how a child is able to
readily learn any language. </span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">The idea, called Universal Grammar, was created by the linguist Noam
Chomsky in the 1950s and has been enormously influential, not only in
linguistics but also in fields such as psychology and philosophy. It’s still the
standard view in most textbooks and has been popularised by Steven Pinker in
</span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>The Language Instinct</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> and later books.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">However, the concept that language is an instinct, and a uniquely human one,
has been challenged as a result of research in a number of fields in recent
decades. We now know much more about how children acquire language, the
diversity of the world’s languages, the evolution of the human species, the
structure and function of our brains, and the ways in which other animals
communicate. </span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">A vigorous debate is raging. Vyvyan Evans, the professor of linguistics at
Bangor University in north Wales, has written </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>The Language Myth</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> to bring
together the growing evidence against Universal Grammar. </span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">For example, Chomsky’s view that this instinct for language is unique to
humans and arrived suddenly as a mutation about 100,000 years ago cannot be
true. Our complicated vocal apparatus, with the sophisticated brain necessary
to manipulate it to utter and remember speech, couldn’t have been the result of
a single sudden change but must have evolved stage by stage among our
hominin ancestors. Neanderthals had similar vocal anatomy to ours and so
were very probably able to communicate through speech.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">One implication of Universal Grammar is that there must be some module or
faculty in the brain, present at birth, dedicated to processing grammar. Though
the brain does have sections devoted to specific functions, such as Broca’s area,
responsible for the creation of speech, we know now that this area does other
jobs as well and that the work of processing language takes place quite widely
across various parts of the brain. A grammar module as such doesn’t exist.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">The truth, Professor Evans argues on the basis of current research, is very
different. Babies are not born with a set of internal rules but with a universal
capacity to learn about themselves and the world around them. The brains of
infants are plastic: experience and discovery moulds them and acquiring a
language is one aspect of this.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">Professor Evans also partly rehabilitates a theory developed in the 1930s by
Benjamin Whorf; a version that was developed after Whorf’s death is called the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after him and his mentor Edward Sapir. Whorf called
it linguistic relativity, arguing that speakers of different languages
conceptualize and experience the world differently. This has been denied by
followers of Chomsky’s work, since if true it would refute the view that
language is innate and universal. Subtle neurological experiments in the past
couple of decades have suggested that at an unconscious level people can be
influenced by the nature of their language.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>The Language Myth</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> is a wide-ranging polemical dismissal of the received
wisdom of many linguists. It’s worth reading also as a classic case study of an
orthodoxy undergoing what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift. </span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">[Evans, Vyvyan, </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>The Language Myth: Why Language is Not an Instinct</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">;
published by Cambridge University Press in hardback, paperback and e-book;
ISBN 978-1-107-04396-1 (hbk), 978-1-107-61975-3 (pbk).]</span></font></p>
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<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Wordface</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<b>Shining light.</b></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> Kathy Atkinson asked about the term </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>lilly-lo</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, which her late
grandmother in Yorkshire used for a child’s nursery light, or any light if she
was talking to a baby or small child. The </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>English Dialect Dictionary</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, compiled
at the end of the nineteenth century, has it in that spelling and also as </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>lilly-low</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt">
and confirms that it was then used throughout northern England and Scotland.
The second part is from an old Scandinavian word that meant a light or a flame
(a distant relative through Indo-European of our </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>light</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">) and, as </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>lowe</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, has been
used for a fire or a small candle or other naked flame. It’s still known in
Scotland and parts of northern England. The longer form is a playful extension
used particularly with children, source unknown, though we might guess at a
nursery version of </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>little</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">.</span></font></p>
<div align="left" style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:6.33mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Calibri" color="#008000" size="4">
<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Sic!</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">An e-newsletter from an organisation called Better Markets was sent to Todd
Bernhardt. He found that it referred to “Washington's white-color defense
lawyers”. </span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">A mailing from Damart surprised Philip Stevens: “Don't miss our brand new
TV ad with 20% off & Free Delivery!” He didn't realise he had to pay for an ad
to be delivered, especially four-fifths of one.</span></font></p>
<div align="left" style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:6.33mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Calibri" color="#008000" size="4">
<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Useful information</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:11pt">
<b>About this newsletter</b></span><span style=" font-size:11pt">: World Wide Words is researched, written and published by
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice are provided by Julane
Marx, Robert Waterhouse, John Bagnall and Peter Morris. Any residual errors are the fault of
the author. The linked website is http://www.worldwidewords.org.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:11pt">
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<b>Email addresses:</b></span><span style=" font-size:11pt"> Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should be
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