World Wide Words -- 10 Apr 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 139         Saturday 10 April 1999
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>From Michael Quinion                        Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Sent every Saturday to more than 4,700 subscribers in 87 countries
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/>   E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
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Contents
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1. Turns of Phrase: Informavore.
2. Topical Words: List.
3. List of the Week: Top tunes.
4. Weird Words: Zenzizenzizenzic.
5. Q & A: Whole kit and caboodle.
6. Beyond Words.
7. Administration.


1. Turns of Phrase: Informavore
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This word is always applied to human beings. By analogy with terms
like 'herbivore' and 'carnivore', it seeks to suggest that we are
a species that lives by processing and communicating information.
It's not a particularly appropriate linguistic analogy as a matter
of fact, as the only thing all these words have in common is the
suffix '-ivore'. That's a close relative of our 'voracious', and
comes from the Latin 'vorare' "to devour". So it properly refers
to consumption rather than manipulation. Though it's sometimes
said that we humans devour information, we actually process it,
not consume it. Cognitive scientists usually take 'informavore' to
refer to our ability to manipulate representations of the outside
world inside our heads and to transmit information to each other
through language. These are regarded by many as the crucial
abilities that distinguish modern humans from all other species.
The word is sometimes used in connection with the huge growth in
information media in the developed countries in recent decades.
Its coinage is usually attributed to the psychologist George
Miller in the 1980s, but it has achieved wider circulation in the
1990s through popular works by Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker.

The user is an adaptive informavore who makes use of extensive
resources, interleaving planned and opportunistic episodes and
using both automatic and intentional processes.
          [Lisa Tweedie, "Interactive Visualisation Artifacts", in
                       _People and Computers X, Proceedings of the
                                        HCI'95 Conference_ (1996)]

We would expect organisms, especially informavores such as humans,
to have evolved acute intuitions about probability.
                      [Steven Pinker, _How the Mind Works_ (1997)]


2. Topical words: List
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The urge to categorise is always with us. It's a way of making
sense of the world around us, to record it if not actually to
control it. Under the influence of the impending millennium,
newspapers are currently full of 'lists'. Everyone's compiling
them: the hundred best plays, the hundred best Inuit bee-keepers
of the century, the hundred strangest words ever invented. We're
all at it, one way or another. This week, BBC Radio 2 announced
its list of the 100 best tunes of the century.

This is by way of being what computer types would call a 'meta-
list', a list about 'list', since the noun and verb 'list' have
had well over a dozen meanings in the last thousand years, derived
from five different words that arrived at various times. Only a
couple are still with us.

"I've got a little list," sang the Mikado's Lord High Executioner.
This sense, the one we know best nowadays, arrived only in the
seventeenth century, having been borrowed from the French 'liste',
which could variously mean a border, a band, or a strip of paper.
It turns up first in _Hamlet_, in which young Fortinbras of Norway
had "shark'd up a list of landless resolutes" to invade Denmark.
So a list was just names written down on a strip of paper, and to
be on a list meant that you had been tagged for some special
status or enterprise (hence 'enlist' for joining the army).

The French word 'liste' came from an old Germanic root. Through
the path of Old English this bequeathed us another form of the
word that kept to the meaning of the original: a border or
selvage. We're familiar with it in the plural as the name for a
tournament area, which was enclosed or bordered by rails or the
like. Some etymologists say the sense here was heavily influenced
by the Old French 'lisse' or 'lice', "place of combat".

The only other sense of 'list' we still use is the verbal one of
something which leans over at an angle, especially a ship. But
nobody seems able to say where it comes from, though we know it
appears in the early part of the sixteenth century.

One of the many senses of 'list' that hasn't survived is that of
"to hear; be attentive". About 1200 this transformed itself into
the modern 'listen', though the old form survived for many
centuries, slowly becoming more and more archaic. When Ralph Waldo
Emerson wrote in a poem in 1857: "Great Napoleon stops his horse,
and lists with delight" he didn't intend to say that Napoleon was
happily leaning over, though the image is almost irresistible now.
The adjective lasted even longer in English dialect in the sense
of "quick of hearing". Another noun form of 'list' that hasn't
survived is one that meant "craft; art; cunning"; that one didn't
even outlast the medieval period.

That diminishing band which is familiar with the King James' Bible
will recall the phrase "the wind bloweth where it listeth". This
is another verb form of 'list', which comes from an Old English
verb 'lystan' that meant "to please; desire", so the phrase meant
that the wind blew where it wanted to. It's conceivably a source
of the sense of a ship leaning over: it may be that a ship leant
over or 'listed' because either the wind or the ship felt
inclined, so to speak. This sense was obsolete by the end of the
seventeenth century, though it was reintroduced as an archaism in
the nineteenth century (Sir Walter Scott used it a lot, as in
_Peveril_ in 1832: "We will, if your ladyship lists, leave him").

The Old English word is very closely linked to another Germanic
word, 'lust'. If at the end of this catalogue you're feeling
'listless' (you should be so lucky), that's where it comes from.


3. List of the Week: Top tunes
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These are the top twenty tunes of the twentieth century, compiled
by BBC Radio 2 from listeners' votes, a panel of song writers and
DJs and sales figures: Yesterday, Star Dust, Bridge over Troubled
Water, White Christmas, Unchained Melody, Imagine, Summertime, My
Way, Over the Rainbow, As Time Goes By, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,
You'll Never Walk Alone, Candle in the Wind, Rudolph the Red-Nose
Reindeer, Hey Jude, Alexander's Ragtime Band, Bohemian Rhapsody,
In The Mood, Rock Around the Clock, and Ol' Man River.


4. Weird Words: Zenzizenzizenzic
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The eighth power of a number.

This word is long obsolete, so much so that the _Oxford English
Dictionary_ only has one citation for it, from a famous work by
the English mathematician Robert Recorde, _The Whetstone of Wit_,
published in 1557. It turns up from time to time as one of those
weird words which is best known for being held up as an example of
a weird word.

The root word, also obsolete, is 'zenzic'. This was borrowed from
German (the Germans were very big in algebra in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries). They got it from the medieval Italian word
'censo', which is a close relative of the Latin 'census'. The
Italians (who were big in algebra even earlier) used 'censo' to
translate the Arabic word 'mal', "possessions; property", which
was the usual word in that language for the square of a number.
This came about because the Arabs, like most mathematicians of
those and earlier times, thought of a square number as a depiction
of an area, especially of land, hence property. So 'censo', and
later our English 'zenzic', was the word for a squared number.

Even by Robert Recorde's time, there was no easy way of denoting
the powers of numbers, a great hindrance to effective mathematics.
The only term he had apart from the square was the cube, the third
power of a number, and formulae were usually written out in words.
Recorde, like his predecessors, represented a fourth power by the
square of a square, 'zenzizenzic', which is just a condensed form
of the Italian 'censo di censo', used by Leonardo of Pisa in his
famous book _Liber Abaci_ of 1202. An eighth power was by obvious
extension 'zenzizenzizenzic'. And similarly the sixth power was
'zenzicube', the square of a cube. None of these words survives in
the language except as historical curiosities.


5. Q & A
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[Send queries to <qa at quinion.com>. Messages will be acknowledged,
but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is so limited. If I can do
so, a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site. Any
question sent to <words at quinion.com> will be moved over to Q&A!]
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Q. What is the source of 'the whole kit and kaboodle'? [Elma
Brooks]

A. 'Caboodle' has a complicated history. It's been spelt down the
years in many different ways, and these days is usually listed in
dictionaries with an initial 'c'. It means a collection of
objects, sometimes of people. It commonly turns up in 'the whole
caboodle', meaning "the whole lot". It's recorded in the US from
the middle of the nineteenth century. It's probable that the word
was originally 'boodle', with the phrase being 'the whole kit and
boodle', but that the initial 'k' was added for euphony.

There are examples of similar phrases around the beginning of the
nineteenth century, such as 'whole kit and boiling' (or 'whole kit
and bilin'') and 'whole kit and cargo', with the original very
likely to have just been 'the whole kit' - it's recorded in this
form in Grose's _Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue_ in 1785. It was
also current in the US as 'the whole boodle' from the 1830s. It
seems that 'the whole kit and caboodle' eventually won the
linguistic battle for survival in the US because of that repeated
'k' sound, though _Dialect Notes_ in 1908 said that these other
versions were still known from various parts of the country.
Sinclair Lewis used one of them in _Main Street_ in 1920: "The
whole kit and bilin' of 'em are nothing in God's world but
socialism in disguise".

'Boodle' is familiar as the relatively modern US word for money
illegally obtained, particularly linked to bribery and corruption.
This is usually suggested as coming from the Dutch 'boedel',
"inheritance, household effects; possessions". But it's uncertain
whether it's the same word as the one in 'the whole kit and
boodle'. Some writers suggest the latter comes from the English
'buddle', meaning a bundle or bunch (closely connected with
'bindle', as in the North American 'bindlestiff' for a tramp). As
'kit' here means one's equipment, to put the two together in the
sense of everything that one has, equipment and personal
possessions, seems reasonable.


6. Beyond Words
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Words subscriber Polar posted this item doing the rounds to the
newsgroup alt.usage.english this week: "If lawyers are disbarred
and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can
be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed,
tree surgeons debarked and dry cleaners depressed?" To which Bob
Newman and Evan Kirshenbaum responded that of course salesmen can
be decommissioned, barristers debriefed, magicians disillusioned,
guides detoured, computer scientists deprogrammed, organ donors
delivered, ecologists denatured, entomologists debugged, teachers
declassified, students degraded and detested, strippers denuded,
judges disrobed, secretaries defiled, and gardeners deflowered.


7. Administration
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