World Wide Words -- 07 Aug 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 152          Saturday 7 August 1999
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Sent every Saturday to more than 5,400 subscribers in 93 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion                     Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/>   E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
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Contents
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1. Notes and feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Information rich/information poor.
3. Book review: The Encarta World English Dictionary.
4. In Brief: Lean-back technology.
5. Weird Words: Incunabulum.
6. Q & A: Fiddlesticks, Lock, stock and barrel.
7. Administration.


1. Notes and feedback
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OUGHT. I should know by now what when I say firmly that such-and-
such isn't true, somebody will immediately refute me. So when I
said that 'ought' was obsolete, a number of messages came in to
point out that a common way to refer to the calibre of firearms in
the US is to say things like 'thirty ought six'. Several people
from Ireland and elsewhere also mentioned that they knew of people
still using the word.


2. Turns of Phrase: Information rich/information poor
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In recent years researchers have pointed out that there are huge
differences in people's ability to obtain and act on information.
This is causing concern, with experts arguing that a fundamental
split is developing between the information haves and havenots
throughout the world. The 'information rich' have good access to
information - especially online, but also through more traditional
media such as newspapers, radio, television, and books - and can
plan their lives and react to changes in circumstances on the
basis of what they know or can find out. The 'information poor'
don't have such access and as a result are vulnerable to all kinds
of pressures. Though the 'information rich' are mainly in the
industrialised countries and the 'information poor' are mostly in
the developing world, similar splits are becoming obvious between
prosperous and disadvantaged groups inside industrialised
countries.

Information-rich and information-poor are a new classification of
rich and poor. .. If you keep people ignorant, they're more likely
to do what they're told.
                  [Tony Benn, in the _Daily Telegraph_, June 1998]

You are, by dint of reading this newspaper, information rich. You
belong to the knowledge class, for the purchase of a paper such as
this also implies you are more likely to have access at home or
work to the internet with all its wealth of information.
                                           [_Guardian_, July 1999]


3. Book review: The Encarta World English Dictionary
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Creating a completely new dictionary from scratch is a challenging
task. So this week's publication of _The Encarta World English
Dictionary_ is a rare event. It's been prepared by the British
publisher Bloomsbury for Microsoft, and so carries the name of the
latter's electronic encyclopedia. At the moment it's available as
a book only, but a CD-ROM version is to come out in September.

The first impression is of a book that is pleasant to consult
(though at about 7lb or 2.5 kg it weighs enough to make one wish
for the electronic version). The design and layout are easy on the
eyes, with a good mix of typefaces and weights of type. In both
content and size it's larger than a concise dictionary - perhaps
the nearest current equivalent is the 'New Oxford Dictionary of
English', whose typographical conventions and style it resembles
to some degree. Its definitions work hard to be in plain English,
often with example sentences to illustrate usage. Those
definitions I've sampled seem reasonable, often giving more
context than its competitors. For most words pronunciations are
supplied, but are signalled by a home-grown system that users will
have to work at understanding.

Most entries have a headline definition in bold capitals, followed
by a fuller one in normal type. This works well when the
definitions are of some length, but when they're short, as most
are, it virtually repeats the headline, making the entry seem
repetitive. As an example, the entry for 'glow' begins (note the
abbreviation - 'sth' is used throughout for 'something'): "LIGHT
FROM STH HOT a light produced by sth that has been heated to a
high temperature but is not in flame; SOFT STEADY LIGHT a soft
steady light, especially one without heat or flames; SOFT WARM
REFLECTED LIGHT a soft warm reflected light; ROSINESS OF
COMPLEXION a brightness or redness in one's complexion" and so on
for another three column inches. This could have been a valuable
innovation, but doesn't succeed much of the time.

Like many other current dictionaries, it aspires to the character
of an encyclopedia. It has lots of pictures illustrating terms,
though whether many users will need visual references for a
hatstand, a medal or a sheep is open to doubt. There are numerous
maps, photographs, drawings of wildlife and structural diagrams of
chemical compounds, the last of these a surprisingly technical
addition to a general reference work. Places and people get many
entries, but as so often in such works mostly too short to be
useful. Cultural notes are another original feature, which aim,
the press notes say, "to capture the cultural associations - the
famous books, plays, films, works of art - that the word calls
up". So 'home' is illustrated by a paragraph on the film _Home
Alone_, 'great' by one on _The Great Gatsby_ and 'scream' by a
piece on Edvard Munch's famous painting _The Scream_. It will be
interesting to see how users react to these.

Its notes about terms that may be considered rude are the oddest
thing about the new dictionary. They're PC in the extreme, often
censorious and sometimes missing linguistic shifts that are taking
place. It waggles its schoolmarmish finger even at 'crone' (hardly
a word most people employ these days), saying that it
"deliberately insults a woman's age, appearance, and temperament",
but it doesn't flag that some feminists have now reclaimed it and
use it in a positive sense. 'Queer' gets similar treatment, but
likewise it misses the way it is now used by gays themselves (as
for example, in 'queercore', the next entry on the page, which
wouldn't exist but for this shift). 'Nigger' provokes a solemn
sermonette: after warning about its offensiveness, it says "Those
who persist in using it, should remember that their use of the
word reflects directly upon them, the users". Every rude word is
spattered with "offensive term", repeated for every compound or
derivative, often in the definition as well as the heading; the
entry for the F-word, for example, contains the warning 28 times
in four column inches, plus seven instances of "taboo offensive",
just in case we don't get the point.

And sometimes it's shaky in its regional references. That word
'shag' about which I wrote the other week is there: "shag ... vti.
OFFENSIVE TERM an offensive term referring to sexual intercourse
('slang taboo') n. OFFENSIVE TERM an act of sexual intercourse
('slang offensive')", but it doesn't say that it's mainly British
in its constituency. Conversely, it gives another sense of the
word as "to run and retrieve" and marks it as regional, but
doesn't say which region. Under 'rubber' it notes the eraser and
condom senses but doesn't make fully clear that the former is
British and the latter American.

The work appears initially in two editions, British and US, each
using its local conventions of spelling and punctuation. Though
they're the same length, cultural differences mean that they're
about 15% different in the words they define. For example, the US
edition replaces the British 'green fingers' by 'green thumb' and
'Rube Goldberg' replaces 'Heath Robinson', though each is cross-
referenced to the other in both editions. In their definitions,
they're about 25% different, the publisher tells me, which may be
a measure of the distinctiveness of American and British
Englishes.

Leaving aside my strictures, the dictionary stands comparision
with others on the market. It must be worrying other dictionary
makers, though you might need hot tongs to get them to admit it,
largely because of the marketing and financial might of Microsoft
behind it. That will help give this work huge worldwide sales, and
will significantly affect a market that, though large, represents
only about five per cent of book sales. The cake isn't large, and
too many companies have a claim on a slice of it. In the end, it's
not the content of this work that may prove decisive, but its mere
existence.

[_The Encarta World Dictionary_, 2208 pages, published on 4 August
1999; American edition, editor Anne Soukhanov, from St Martin's
Press (ISBN 0-312-22222-X), US$50.00; British edition, editor
Kathy Rooney, published by Bloomsbury Press (ISBN 0-7475-4371-2),
30.00 pounds.]


4. In Brief: Lean-back technology
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Using your television rather than your PC to gain access to the
Internet. Proponents of interactive digital TV argue that PCs are
considered unreliable and hard to use and have coined the term
'lean-forward technology' to describe them. Television, on the
other hand, is seen to be reliable, familiar and easy to use -
hence 'lean-back technology'.


5. Weird Words: Incunabulum
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A book printed before 1501 (sometimes 1500).

This word is better known in its plural form 'incunabula'. Though
rare, it survives because there is so much interest in early
printed works. It conjures up an image of shelves of dusty and
ancient books, no doubt overseen by dusty and ancient collectors.
The odd thing about this word is that originally it had nothing
whatever to do with books. It derives from a Latin word
'incunabula', plural like its English descendant, meaning the
swaddling bands that held an infant in the cradle (if you trace it
back further still, you arrive at the Latin root 'cunae', cradle).
Even in Latin, the word had a figurative sense of infancy in
general, very much as we use 'cradle' in in phrases like "The
cradle of the Industrial Revolution". 'Incunabulum' is a fairly
recent import into English, appearing only at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. At this stage it could refer to the early
stages in the development of anything. Thomas De Quincey - the
author of _Confessions of an Opium Eater_ - is the first recorded
user. But the first person to apply it to early printed books,
those created in the infancy of the art, was John Mason Neale, in
his splendidly entitled _Notes Ecclesiological and Picturesque on
Dalmatia, Croatia, Istria, Styria, with a Visit to Montenegro_ of
1861, though he makes it clear he was borrowing it from German. A
variant form of the singular is 'incunable' and someone who
collects such works is an 'incunabulist'.


6. 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 limited. If I can do
so, a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site.]
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Q. I'm looking for the origin of 'fiddlesticks'. [Brian
Archimbaud]

A. A 'fiddlestick' was at first just a violin bow. (Both 'fiddle'
and 'violin' come from the Roman goddess of joy, Vitula, who gave
her name to a stringed instrument; 'fiddle' came down to us via
the Germanic languages, 'violin' through the Romance ones.)
'Fiddlestick' is recorded from the fifteenth century, and
Shakespeare used a proverb based on it in _Henry IV_: "the devil
rides on a fiddle-stick", meaning that a commotion has broken out;
the imagery is obviously related to the broomstick of a witch, and
perhaps there's some thought of the noise a fiddle might make if
the devil got to play it. At some point in Shakespeare's lifetime,
it seems 'fiddlestick' began to be used for something trivial or
insignificant, perhaps because fiddle-playing itself was regarded
as something worthless or inconsequential. It took on a humorous
slant as a word one could use to replace another in a contemptuous
response to a remark. George Farquhar used it in this way in his
play _Sir Henry Wildair_ of 1701: "Golden pleasures! golden
fiddlesticks!". From here it was a short step to using the word as
a disparaging comment to mean that something just said was
nonsense.
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Q. What is the source of the expression 'lock, stock and barrel'?
[Jesse J Wasserman]

A. Could this question perhaps have some connection with the film
_Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels_? As that film title
suggests, the expression originated with guns. The 'lock' was the
firing mechanism of early types of firearms, such as the firelock,
flintlock, and matchlock. It's likely the name was given to the
mechanism because it looked a bit like the primitive door locks of
the period. The 'stock' is the wooden handle of such a firearm.
The complete weapon consisted just of the three parts of lock,
stock and barrel, so the expression means "everything, the whole
thing". Perhaps oddly, it came into use only in the nineteenth
century, when such weapons were long obsolete. The first reference
in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ is to a letter of Sir Walter
Scott's of 1817: "She wants stock, lock, and barrel, to put her
into repair". It seems the expression was invented as a deliberate
archaism, something for which Sir Walter Scott was well known, and
it may in fact have come from him.


7. Administration
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