World Wide Words -- 28 Aug 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 155         Saturday 28 August 1999
------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent every Saturday to more than 5,800 subscribers in 93 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion                     Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/>   E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Weird Words: Trebuchet.
2. Book review: Twentieth Century Words, by John Ayto.
3. In Brief: Homebot, Viseme, White-van man.
4. Q & A: Buck up, Nit-picking, High jinks.
5. Administration.


3. Weird Words: Trebuchet
------------------------------------------------------------------
A medieval military siege engine for hurling heavy missiles.

This was the classic device for throwing rocks at an enemy, a big
boys' catapult. It consisted of a long pivoted arm with a sling at
one end and a heavy counterweight at the other. You put a missile
in the sling, wound the arm down by windlass and rope and released
it by a catch. It was commonly used to pound down the walls of a
castle or fortified town during a siege. As an alternative, you
might shoot the putrefying corpses of horses over the walls in the
hope of infecting the defenders with disease, or perhaps wage
psychological warfare by lobbing back your enemies' severed heads.

Don't confuse this with a 'mangonel', a smaller weapon in which
the power for flinging the missile came from twisted ropes or
animal guts.

The word 'trebuchet' came into English from Old French, meaning a
trap or balance. In imitation of other senses of the original
French word, it has also been used in English for a finely-
balanced set of scales, an animal trap, and as another name for
that instrument of punishment for fraudulent tradespeople,
disorderly women and scolds, the ducking-stool or cucking-stool.

You might think the word is as defunct as they get, but there are
people around who have re-created them for archaeological research
purposes, and others whose hobby is to build and fire the things.
One British enthusiast, Hew Kennedy, has used his to hurl grand
pianos and old cars about the Shropshire countryside. Asked why,
Mr. Kennedy answered, "Well why not? It's bloody good fun!".


2. Book review: Twentieth Century Words, by John Ayto
------------------------------------------------------------------
Now we're within kissing distance of the twenty-first century,
it's possible to stand back and look at the way the words we use
have changed in the past 100 eventful years. Estimates vary, but
the best guess is that some 90,000 new terms (and new meanings of
old terms) have been added to dictionaries as a result of the
cultural, technological, and economic upheavals of the twentieth
century. As a result, English is about 25 per cent richer in words
than it was in 1900.

John Ayto has put together a browseable compendium of about 5,000
of the more significant and widely used of these words. His book
is arranged by decade, with words in alphabetic order within each
section. Each word has the date it was first recorded, an extended
definition with some background (these are mostly 20-40 words
long, but some, like 'gay', have longish paragraphs of a couple of
hundred words), and one or two example citations. An alphabetical
index lets you pinpoint a particular term. There is a foreword,
and each decade is opened by a mini essay.

Words are often much older than we might expect, often predating
by decades widespread knowledge or use of the idea described, and
this collection gives some good examples. For example, 'tabloid
journalism' is first recorded from 1901, 'underpass' dates from
1904, 'television' is from 1907, 'atomic bomb' from 1914, 'D-Day'
(for the start of a military operation) from 1918, 'iron curtain'
and 'wimp' from 1920, 'pecking order' from 1928, 'greenhouse
effect' from 1929, and 'gay' in the homosexual sense from 1933.

In turning the pages, words jump out at you from the parade of
linguistic innovation that records our changing world. The
selection is eclectic, but with the emphasis on terms that most of
us have come across, leaving out the larger part of the torrent of
scientific and technical words invented during the century. Here
are 'limousine' and 'videotape', 'peanut butter' and 'vitamin',
'personal computer' and 'microwave oven', 'psychoanalyst' and
'psychedelic', 'penicillin' and 'freebase', 'freedom fighter' and
'yuppie', 'psychological warfare' and 'liberation theology',
'biodiversity' and 'solvent abuse'. As the strapline of a British
Sunday newspaper has it: "All human life is here".

We're too close to the nineties to be sure that all the words
listed for this decade will survive: what of 'Clintonomics', for
example, or 'handbag' for a genre of music, or 'mouse potato', or
'granny dumping', which I feel has already passed its 'sell-by
date' (a term from 1973)? This chapter is the least satisfying of
the ten, because many temporarily fashionable or slangy terms have
been included, such as 'bail bandit', 'babelicious', 'phat' and
'riot girl', few of which are likely to be still in use much into
the 2000s. But 'Web page' seems set to be among the survivors, as
will 'Gulf War syndrome' and 'genetically modified'. This chapter
has a noticeable British bias compared with earlier ones, with
terms like 'clear blue water', 'cash for questions', 'green shoots
of recovery', 'poptastic', 'red route', 'lunchbox' and 'New Lad'.

Recommended for anyone with the slightest interest in the way our
vocabulary has evolved.

[Ayto, John _Twentieth Century Words_, published by the Oxford
University Press, August 1999. ISBN 0-19-860230-8, 626pp. The
publishers' price in Britain is GBP18.99 and $25.00 in the USA.
Despite what Amazon.Com says, the book is already on sale.]


3. In Brief
------------------------------------------------------------------
HOMEBOT  Artificial intelligence experts have been talking for
decades about a home robot (a 'homebot') that would do all your
chores for you. It has been much tougher to create than anyone at
first thought, but at long last one has come to market. Called
Cye, it is said to be able to serve you a TV dinner and even
vacuum the carpet.

VISEME  Training computers to recognise speech is not the easiest
of tasks. To improve accuracy in noisy conditions, researchers at
Carnegie Mellon University have borrowed a trick from humans and
are teaching theirs to lip read. A 'viseme' is what they call one
unit of lip movement - the visual equivalent of the unit of
speech, the phoneme.

WHITE-VAN MAN  Male, young and often self-employed, he drives his
delivery van like a maniac around Britain's cities to meet his
deadlines, ruthlessly cutting up other drivers and frequently
risking accidents. And, yes, his van is usually white.


4. Q&A
------------------------------------------------------------------
[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.]
----------
Q. I found myself urging a dear friend to 'buck up!' in spite of
his having been given a distressing medical diagnosis. Why would I
say that? [Charlotte Heimann]

A. We use it now to suggest somebody should cheer up, and not be
downhearted or oppressed by circumstances. It is a phrase from
nineteenth century Britain, derived from those 'bucks' or dandies
who were regarded as the acme of snappy dressing in the Regency
period. (In its turn, that word came from 'buck' in the sense of
the male deer, and had a slightly older meaning still that
suggested male gaiety or spirit, with unsubtle suggestions of
rutting deer.) In its dandyfied sense 'buck up' first meant to
dress smartly, for a man to get out of those comfortable old
clothes and into something drop-dead gorgeous. Since to do so was
often a fillip to the spirit, the phrase shifted sometime around
the 1880s to its modern meaning. It seems to have been public
school slang to start with, probably from Winchester College, and
rather stiff-upper-lip British. It could suggest that the person
being addressed should stop acting like a wuss, ninny or coward,
as here from Edith Nesbit's _The Wouldbegoods_ of 1901: "Be a man!
Buck up!", and was something of a cliché at one time in
stories of Englishmen abroad bravely facing adversity. From the
early years of the twentieth century, it could also be an
injunction on somebody to get a move on or hurry up; here's an
example, from D H Lawrence's _Sons and Lovers_ of 1913: "'Half-
past eight!' he said. 'We'd better buck up'".
----------
Q. What is the origin of the expression 'nit-picking'? [Tim Nagle]

A. The phrase comes from the task of removing the tiny eggs of
lice (nits) from someone's hair and clothing, a tedious activity
that required close attention and care. The word 'nit', which
could also refer to the eggs of other insect parasites such as
fleas, has been around in the language for as long as we have
records (it appears in Old English around 825 as 'hnitu', but it
has relatives in most European languages and has been traced back
to an Indo-European root, so ancient has been the association of
such pests with human beings).

But what seems a little odd is that the figurative sense of 'nit-
picking', of petty criticism or fault finding, is modern. The
_Oxford English Dictionary_ records it first only in 1951, in the
form 'nit-picker', in this helpful explanation from _Collier's_:
"Two long-time Pentagon stand-bys are 'fly-speckers' and 'nit-
pickers'. The first of these nouns refers to people whose sole
occupation seems to be studying papers in the hope of finding
flaws in the writing, rather than making any effort to improve the
thought or meaning; nit-pickers are those who quarrel with
trivialities of expression and meaning, but who usually end up
without making concrete or justified suggestions for improvement".
The first of these two slang terms has died out, with the second
taking on much of its meaning.

Why it took so long for this expressive figurative sense to appear
is a small mystery. Perhaps we had to wait for a time when the
memory of the finicky nature of the task was still current, but
when the need for it in industrialised countries had been greatly
reduced through better hygiene and insecticides. Or perhaps the
image came not from humans, but from some natural-history
programme about our simian relatives, who spend much of their time
literally nit-picking as part of grooming.
----------
Q. If Captain Jinks is the origin of 'jinx', what accounts for
'high jinks'? [Ann Byrne, USA] (This was a reference to an earlier
article on 'jinx', which you will find archived at
<http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-jin1.htm>.)

A. Captain Jinks presumably got his name either from 'high jinks'
or from the existing English word 'jink', which meant then as now
to make an unexpected turn or change in direction so as to avoid
or elude some pursuer. 'Jink' in this sense is recorded from the
latter part of the eighteenth century, and is assumed to be
connected with your phrase 'high jinks', which by then had been
around for the better part of a century. This referred to a game
played at drinking parties. Guests threw dice to decide who should
perform some daft task for the amusement of the company, or down a
large drink, failure to do either requiring some forfeit. It was
originally a Scots term and in that sense is long obsolete. In the
early nineteenth century, the phrase could refer to a gambler who
would drink with his victim to soften him up. By the 1840s it had
broadened into its modern sense of any kind of high-spirited fun,
noisy revelry or boisterousness. But though we know the more
recent parts of their stories, nobody seems to know where either
'jink' or 'high jinks' come from, though the former may have been
influenced by 'kink'.


5. Administration
------------------------------------------------------------------
* To leave the list, send the message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to
  the list server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>.
  The subject line of your e-mail message will be ignored.

* WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. You
  may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free
  media provided that you give the source and Web site address.
==================================================================