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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>Saturday 5 December 2015.</i></span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:0.00mm; margin-bottom:6.33mm;"><font face="Calibri" color="#008000">
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><b>This newsletter is also available online at </b></span></font><a href="http://wwwords.org/rfye"><font face="Calibri" color="#0000ff">
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><b><u>http://wwwords.org/rfye</u></b></span></font></a><font face="Calibri" color="#008000"><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<b> <br />
and is also attached to this message as a PDF file containing illustrations.</b></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:12pt">
<i>Check the recipient address if you reply to this message. For security reasons, it will
be rejected if it is sent to </i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">worldwidewords@listserv.linguistlist.org</span><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>. Either use the
email address from the </i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">Reply-to:</span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i> header or — better — create a new message to the
most appropriate of the addresses listed at the end of this newsletter. </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:12pt">
<b>Bob’s-a-dying.</b></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> Adam Sampson pointed out that the Bodleian Library in Oxford has
copies of an early nineteenth-century song, </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Fancy Lad</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, whose chorus includes the
line “Go along Bob’s a dying”. He added, “Thomas Hardy — an enthusiastic
country-dance fiddler throughout his life — mentions </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>My Fancy-Lad</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> as a reel in the
short story </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>The Fiddler of the Reels</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> and the poem </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>The Dance at the Phoenix</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. Florence
Hardy’s </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Early Life of Thomas Hardy</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> lists this as one of the tunes he learned from his
father, which would put it in the right time period for the broadsides. So I think that’s
probably the place to look for a Napoleonic-era tune for </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Bob’s a dying</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">!”</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:12pt">New Zealand readers were quick to point out that they know of a variant version of
the expression: </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>kick up bobsy-die</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, which is still in use though perhaps a little
old-fashioned.</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:12pt">
<b>Bill of goods.</b></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> Henry Clark was one of several who mentioned, “In engineering we
often talk about a </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>bill of materials</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. This is a list of all the parts and components
needed to build a machine or a control panel.” Bob Johnson wrote of a usage in the
piece: “Your American cousins would have to think hard to understand </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>consignment
note or despatch note</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. We would be more likely to say </span><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>waybill</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> or </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>bill of lading</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">.” </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:12pt">
<b>Swipe.</b></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> Following my mention of </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>swipe</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"> for selecting or rejecting an option on a
smartphone or similar device, several readers pointed out that they knew it better in
the sense of stealing something. The two are connected, both deriving from an old
verb that was probably a variant form of </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>sweep</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. Originally this meant to make a
swinging blow or strike, as in cricket or fist fighting. The link to stealing probably
came from a swift but surreptitious reaching out to take something without being
noticed, or a more blatant and opportunistic attempt to grab something.</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:12pt">
<b>Binge-watching.</b></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> “Those of us who are fans of science fiction,” emailed Rupert
Smith, “have a pre-existing term for this, </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>to marathon</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. I remember it from the 1990s,
but I expect it’s been around longer. Conventions used to hold ‘marathons’ of a
television series. The word still persists in the same sense as binge-watching today,
but in my experience usually refers to re-watching something you’ve already seen
before. I once marathoned 135 episodes of </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Naruto</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> over one Christmas break (pausing
to sleep, of course), but that was an extreme example I won’t be repeating!”</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:12pt">
<b>Season’s greetings.</b></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> They’re a bit premature, but the next issue is not due until 9
January 2016. So a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone.</span></font></p>
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<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Nonplussed</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:12pt">If you’re nonplussed, that initial </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>non-</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> means you must be without something, right?
That seems to be why many people in North America have interpreted this mildly odd
word in recent decades to mean calm, undisturbed, unfazed, unimpressed or
indifferent. In standard English and elsewhere it still means surprised, confused,
perplexed or bewildered. Add to this a tendency to spell it with one </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>s</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> and a British
reader can often be nonplussed in the old sense when encountering American
examples.</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:12pt">When </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Billboard</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> recently wrote, “She was very nonplussed and was happy to wait in
the queue”, we may be sure the sense intended was “unbothered”. Similarly a sports
magazine’s “MS Dhoni is popularly known in cricketing circles as ‘Captain Cool’ for
his nonplussed demeanour in tense situations” is clear enough. But what about “I’m
completely nonplused by most contemporary architecture” which was recently in the
</span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Wall Street Journal</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">? What emotion was the writer feeling? His later comments make
clear to a puzzled reader that he was unimpressed rather than confused.</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:12pt">
<i>Nonplussed</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> is rather odd in its origin. Its first form was as a noun phrase borrowed
directly from the classical Latin </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>nōn plūs</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, not more or no further. As two words it
appears first in an epistle by the Jesuit scholar Robert Parsons in 1582. He meant by
it a state in which no more can be said or done, in which a person was unable to
proceed in speech or action, resulting in perplexity or puzzlement.</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:12pt">Around the same time it became a verb, </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>to nonplus</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, meaning to bring somebody to a
standstill as a result of being perplexed or confused. The adjective </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>nonplussed</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> also
soon appeared. In the early nineteenth century, somebody invented </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>nonplussation</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">,
the state of being nonplussed, which had a brief period of popularity around the
middle of the century but is now obsolete.</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>Goon</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="Arial Black" color="#008000">
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><b>Q.</b></span></font><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt"> </span><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>From Dick Bentley:</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>World Wide Words</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> has many references to the </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Goon Show</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">,
the 1950s surreal British comedy radio programme, but none to </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>goon</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> itself. It’s a
mysterious word in some ways: it seems to have two separate meanings; “idiot” and
“hired thug”, which represent separate origins, perhaps? What is its true origin?</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Arial Black" color="#008000">
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><b>A.</b></span></font><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt"> </span><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>Goon</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> stepped shyly on to the public stage in the issue of </span><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>Harper’s Magazine</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> for
December 1921. A whimsical article by Frederick Allen had the title </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>The Goon and His
Style</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">: “A goon is a person with a heavy touch as distinguished from a jigger, who has
a light touch. While jiggers look on life with a genial eye, goons take a more stolid and
literal view.” He said the word was a family saying, but he might equally have made it
up. After this, the word vanishes again for a decade.</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:12pt">The beginning of its popularity dates only from January 1934, when the cartoonist
Elzie</span></font><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:7pt"><b> </b></span></font><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt">Segar got around to giving a new character a name: Alice the Goon. She had
appeared in his </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Thimble Theatre</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> comic strip on 10 December 1933, joining Popeye,
Olive Oyl and others. Alice was a fearsome character, immensely tall with shaggy
arms and legs and a long nose like a proboscis monkey. She was at first a guard
employed by Popeye’s antagonist, the pirate and sorcerer called Sea Hag. Alice was
powerful but dim-witted and </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>goon</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> came into the language first in the sense of a
stupid person. It is said college students used it first.</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:12pt">In the later 1930s, </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>goon</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> began to be used for a ruffian or violent thug, particularly
one employed by a labour union to frighten recalcitrant members and anybody who
opposed the union. It appeared most often in the phrase </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>goon squad</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">:</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt">Beck uses the mailed-fist and makes no bones about it. His staff includes
a gang of imported strongarm men, known locally as the “goon squad.”</span></font></p>
<div align="left" style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:1.06mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia" color="#006000">
<span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>Joplin Globe (Missouri)</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt">, 9 Oct. 1937. Beck was Dave Beck, union organiser for
the Teamsters in Oregon and Washington states.</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:12pt">
<i>Goon</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> in this sense was at first local slang; in early 1938 it achieved national notice
through the jailing of union organisers from the region. It was most likely taken from
Alice the Goon, who — at least in the early days before Segar softened her — was a
subhuman brute. It might have come from the same source as Segar got it, whatever
that was, but that seems less likely.</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:12pt">We may reasonably assume that the slang term for German guards in prisoner-of-war
camps followed from this sense of an unintelligent thug. However, Spike Milligan
says that he took the name of the </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Goon Show</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> from the cartoon character and not
from prison guards; he was using it in army training camp at Bexhill in Sussex in 1941
before that sense had become known or perhaps even coined. </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:12pt">This leaves us with the final part of your question: where did </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>goon</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> come from? We
can’t be absolutely certain, but </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>gooney</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> has a long history in English, also as </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>gony</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">,
</span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>gonnie</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>gawney</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"> and other forms, meaning a simpleton or fool. It may be from </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>gone</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt">,
implying that the person so described has lost their wits. </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Gooney</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> is recorded in New
England from the 1830s, though it’s probably older in North America. Sailors of the
nineteenth century called various albatross species </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>gooney birds</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> (which was adopted
during the Second World War for the Douglas C-47 Skytrain aircraft, which Brits
know as the Dakota). It seems most plausible that Segar took </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>goon</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> from </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>gooney</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">.</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" size="1">
<span style=" font-size:9pt"><i>[Include image of Alice from Thimble Theatre in Athens Sunday Messenger March 11, 1934. (J Wellington
Wimpy is unhappy) and image of first-ever appearance from 10 December 1933.]</i></span></font></p>
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<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Emoji</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:12pt">Dictionaries are hard to promote. They’re utilitarian and unexciting works, to the
extent that their users find it hard to differentiate between publishers and often lump
them all together as “the dictionary”. The relatively recent wheeze of announcing
Words of the Year has been a godsend to despairing publicity departments and an
annual opportunity for lexicographers to slide modestly into the public eye for a
seasonal rundown on what’s been happening with our vocabulary.</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:12pt">This year, however, Oxford Dictionaries has done something really odd. Its choice
isn’t a word but a picture, an </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>emoji</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, the one often known as </span></font>
<font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>face with tears of joy</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. </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:12pt">The news was greeted with all the publicity Oxford Dictionaries might have wanted,
but much comment was puzzled or sarcastic. Didn’t a dictionary know what a word
was? Did this render the idea of Words of the Year ridiculous? Was this the death
knell of the language of Shakespeare? Was Oxford cosying up to the internet
generation to the exclusion of more significant shifts in language? Had Oxford
jumped the shark?</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:12pt">Though the choice looks seriously misguided, this wasn’t some mad whim. Oxford’s
monitoring found that the word </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>emoji</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> increased its usage three-fold in 2015 over the
previous year, which would have made it a candidate for Word of the Year. The little
icons have become a widespread shorthand way of expressing emotion and ideas in
texts and social media; they’ve moved way beyond the teenage texters who embraced
them initially. Oxford Dictionaries argue that emoji and emoji culture have gone
mainstream in 2015, “embodying a core aspect of living in a digital world that is
visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.”</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:12pt">Emoji have without doubt come far since they were invented in Japan in the 1990s, as
a development of </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>smileys</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> or </span><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>emoticons</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> (“emotional icons”), symbols created from
keyboard characters that date from the earliest days of the internet. </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:12pt">
<i>Emoji</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> in Japanese (</span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>e</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> plus </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>moji</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">) literally means “picture character”. It predates the
digital world by at least eight decades, and may have been based on the English word
</span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>pictograph</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. The first use of </span><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>emoji</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> in English was in the Japanese publication </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Nikkei
Weekly</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> in October 1997, referring to a set of characters that had been created in
connection with </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>P-kies</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, a Japanese children’s show roughly equivalent to Sesame
Street.</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:12pt">The popularity of emoji outside Japan was hastened by their inclusion in various
mobile devices and led to their adoption as an international standard symbol set in
Unicode in 2010 under names such as </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>grinning face</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> and </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>winking face</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. Faces are the
most popular — the set included </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>persevering face</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>face screaming in fear</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> (very
Edvard Munch, this one) and </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>extraterrestrial alien face</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Face with tears of joy</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> </span></font><font face="Georgia">
<span style=" font-size:12pt">was
chosen as the Word of the Year because it </span></font><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt">made up 20% of all the emoji used in the
United Kingdom in 2015, and 17% of those in the United States, a sharp rise from 4%
and 9% respectively in 2014.</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:12pt">You can select from 1282 emoji in the Unicode set, including cats, hearts, hand
signals, clothing, animals, plants, vehicles, the flags of all nations and lots more,
including </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>man in a business suit levitating</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> and </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>pile of poo</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. Their name might have
helped them be accepted, though the similarity between </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>emoji</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> and </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>emoticon</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> is
accidental.</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:12pt">In an electronic world in which brevity and speed are key, an image is potent, not
perhaps worth a thousand words, but certainly removing the need for a description
that the writer might not be willing or well-equipped to provide or have space for. But
some commentators have gone further, arguing that emoji are no longer just a
convenient shorthand but a nuanced form of communication in their own right. </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:12pt">Although Random House has published emoji-speak versions of Shakespeare and
Herman Melville’s classic novel has been translated as </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Emoji Dick</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, neither can be
called nuanced: 1282 pictures conveying a restricted and unsophisticated range of
concepts is hardly a replacement for the subtlety and richness of a natural 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:12pt">Caspar Grathwohl of Oxford Dictionaries commented, “The fact that English alone is
proving insufficient to meet the needs of 21st-century digital communications is a
huge shift”. But it’s a shift restricted to one part of the online world. The suspicion
must be that emoji are a passing fashion and that to try to read into them a seismic
shift in the nature of communication is seriously misplaced.</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:12pt">Will the “Word” of the Year take its place in Oxford’s dictionaries? There are no plans
to include emoji, the publishers say. A wise decision, you may feel.</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>From my reading</b></span></font></div>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0mm; list-style-type: disc; ">
<li style="margin-left: -7pt; margin-right: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt; font-family: Symbol; color: #010101; "><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt; font-family:Georgia; color:#010101; font-weight:Normal; font-style:Normal; font-decoration:Normal">There is truth in the adage “Thrice armed is he who hath his quarrel
just, but four
times he who gets his blow in first”, which the military has pithily summarised as
</span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>pre-emptive strike</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. On 9 November a British MP used </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>pretaliation</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> in a Twitter
post, marking it as a “new word”. Not so. It appeared in September in guidance by
the US Securities and Exchange Commission about whistleblower protection and I
came across it in 2012 in </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Blue Remembered Earth</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> by Alastair Reynolds. It’s older
still. By 2007 it had reached the online Urban Dictionary; around that time it was
borrowed for the name of a US heavy metal band. It turns up in various Google
Groups back to 1998 (“They believe in proactive security measures and
pretaliation”). And an isolated example featured in </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>The Listener</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> as long ago as
1971. All of which forces us to conclude that if you’re inventing words, it’s best to
get your pretaliation in first.</span></font></li>
<li style="margin-left: -7pt; margin-right: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt; font-family: Symbol; color: #010101; "><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt; font-family:Georgia; color:#010101; font-weight:Normal; font-style:Italic; font-decoration:Normal">
<i>Quingel</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>flingam, blablesoc</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> and </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>probble</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. Do these sound funny? As in
funny-ha-ha, not funny-peculiar, since you’re unlikely to have encountered them.
They’re nonsense words created by a computer program for a project on humour
by four researchers from the universities of Alberta and Tübingen and published
in the current issue of the </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Journal of Memory and Language</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. Alberta students
were asked to rate words for how funny they found them. The study proved that
non-words are funnier the more they look like real words but aren’t, because
they’re incongruous and contradict our expectation that what we read is
meaningful. The researchers actually discovered that words are funniest when
they sound “dirty” — the highest rated words were </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>whong</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, </span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>dongl</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>shart</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt">, </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>focky</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> and
</span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>clunt</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">, though this may have been a function of the age and nature of the
participants (also, </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>shart</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> and </span><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>clunt</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> are recorded as real slang words, while </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>dongl</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:12pt"> is
close to the computer term </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>dongle</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">). The study also demonstrated that judgments
were consistent from one person to another, at least within the restricted group
surveyed.</span></font></li>
</ul>
<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>Thank your mother for the rabbits</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="Arial Black" color="#008000">
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><b>Q.</b></span></font><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt"> </span><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>From Helen Jeffery in the UK</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">: My late granddad had a quaint way of bidding
people goodbye. He would say “Goodbye, and thank your mother for the rabbits”. Do
you think that was just him being himself, or was it an expression in general use? He
lived a bit further north than I do at the moment, in north-west Durham.</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:12pt">A. You may be disappointed to hear that he didn’t invent it, though he was following
in some famous footsteps.</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:12pt">A detailed discussion of this nonsense phrase appeared in the Australian language
journal </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>OzWords</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> a decade ago, which made it clear that it has long been known in
that country and is still to be heard. The stereotypical association of Australia with
rabbits might suggest that the expression began its life there. Some Australians argue
that it arose during the depression of the 1930s when money for food was scarce and
rabbits were free to anybody who could catch them. It is said that rabbits became
known during that period as </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>underground mutton</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">.</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:12pt">But the evidence says it isn’t native to Australia. One important pointer is this:</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>Bloom starts forward involuntarily and, half closing the door as he
passes, takes the chocolate from his pocket and offers it nervously to
Zoe</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">. ZOE: (</span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Sniffs his hair briskly</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">) Hmmm! Thank your mother for the
rabbits. I’m very fond of what I like. </span></font></p>
<div align="left" style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:1.06mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia" color="#006000">
<span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>Ulysses</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt">, by James Joyce, 1922.</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:12pt">More evidence comes from an oddly inconsequential snippet in an Australian
newspaper, which happens to be the earliest occurrence of the phrase in print
anywhere:</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt">Lady Tree insists on trying to make her comrades laugh during the
progress of the piece whilst she acts. One night, when she was playing the
part of an elderly lady in “Diplomacy” she quite suddenly invented a new
line in the play by saying “Thank your mother for the rabbits” to a parting
guest. The audience enjoyed it so much that the actress has kept in the
line ever since.</span></font></p>
<div align="left" style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:1.06mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia" color="#006000">
<span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>Goulburn Evening Penny Post</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt"> (NSW), 8 Nov. 1913. Lady Tree was better
known professionally as Mrs Beerbohm Tree, she being the wife of and
collaborator with the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree.</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:12pt">We may guess the editors included this because they thought Australians would
appreciate a reference to a phrase they knew. We may also be pretty sure Lady Tree
didn’t make it up. The event, however humorous to the audience, wasn’t sufficiently
important to spread public knowledge of it, since the number of appearances didn’t
subsequently rise.</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:12pt">So is it Irish, as the Ulysses appearance implies? Almost certainly not, since Zoe
makes clear in the book that she was born in Yorkshire. Your own experience also
suggests an English source. Eric Partridge noted the phrase in his </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Dictionary of
Catchphrases</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> as having been “brought to my notice by the late Frank Shaw in 1969”.
Frank Shaw was a Liverpudlian writer who did much to publicise the local dialect,
Scouse. So the expression is quite strongly linked with northern England.</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:12pt">Beyond that, the trail runs into the sand. It’s probably late nineteenth century in date,
perhaps from a catchphrase in some long-forgotten music-hall comedian’s act.</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:12pt">Sometimes mysteries are more fun than facts, though frustrating to enquirers.</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>
<ul style="margin-bottom: 0mm; list-style-type: disc; ">
<li style="margin-left: -7pt; margin-right: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt; font-family: Symbol; color: #010101; "><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt; font-family:Georgia; color:#010101; font-weight:Normal; font-style:Normal; font-decoration:Normal">The text below a photograph in the </span></font>
<font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt">print edition of the </span></font><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt">
<i>Guardian</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> of 7 November
read: “Caption goes here and don’t forget to twiddle your triang.” (See the image
in the attached PDF version or online for a clue.)</span></font></li>
<li style="margin-left: -7pt; margin-right: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt; font-family: Symbol; color: #010101; "><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt; font-family:Georgia; color:#010101; font-weight:Normal; font-style:Normal; font-decoration:Normal">Grant Agnew sent me to the opening sentence of a story on ABC News on 11
November: “Queensland beef producer Mick Hewitt has been elected to the new
grass-fed position on the Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) board selection
committee.”</span></font></li>
<li style="margin-left: -7pt; margin-right: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt; font-family: Symbol; color: #010101; "><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt; font-family:Georgia; color:#010101; font-weight:Normal; font-style:Normal; font-decoration:Normal">From the Department of Unfortunate Phrasing: Margaret Joachim found this
sentence in the </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Acton W3 Gazette</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> of West London: “Thames Water apologises for
over-running sewer works”.</span></font></li>
<li style="margin-left: -7pt; margin-right: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt; font-family: Symbol; color: #010101; "><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt; font-family:Georgia; color:#010101; font-weight:Normal; font-style:Normal; font-decoration:Normal">The website of the American Civil Liberties Union, David Daniel reports, had
an
article dated 9 November under the ambiguous headline “How Can the Justice
Department Help CIA Torture Victims?”</span></font></li>
<li style="margin-left: -7pt; margin-right: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt; font-family: Symbol; color: #010101; "><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt; font-family:Georgia; color:#010101; font-weight:Normal; font-style:Normal; font-decoration:Normal">A BBC news item of 19 November seen by Timothy Conway featured the finding
of
a large hoard of Roman coins by a small Swiss farmer: “Weighing around 15kg
(33lb), he discovered the coins after spotting something shimmering in a
molehill.”</span></font></li>
<li style="margin-left: -7pt; margin-right: 0pt; padding-left: 0pt; font-family: Symbol; color: #010101; "><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt; font-family:Georgia; color:#010101; font-weight:Normal; font-style:Italic; font-decoration:Normal">
<i>The Age</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> of Melbourne surprised Jack Harvey with news of a novel process for
decontaminating asbestos found in a school. The school president was quoted as
saying, “The ground is contaminated and needs to be fixed. ... We have been
raising money for it to be fixed with cake stalls and art shows.”</span></font></li>
</ul>
<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>
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<b>About this newsletter:</b></span><span style=" font-size:12pt"> World Wide Words is researched, written and published by
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice are freely
provided by Julane Marx, Robert Waterhouse, John Bagnall and Peter Morris,
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