World Wide Words -- 11 Dec 99
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Fri Dec 10 22:13:23 UTC 1999
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 170 Saturday 11 December 1999
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Sent weekly to more than 6,500 subscribers in at least 94 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: WAP.
3. Book review: Cassell Dictionary of Word Histories.
4. Topical Words: Enormity.
5. Weird Words: Panjandrum.
6. Q&A: Toad-eater, Groundswell.
7. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.
1. Notes and feedback
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HUNKY-DORY More information has come in, but I'm not going to bore
you with another update, especially as new readers won't have a
clue what I'm talking about. If you're interested, see the Web page
at <http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-hun2.htm>.
NO DICE. Which is what a large number of people shouted following
my aside at the end of the piece on 'no soap' last week. I've now
checked with Tom Dalzell, West Coast slangmeister and author of
_The Slang of Sin_, who confirms what my critics said: that the cry
originated as a fault call in craps earlier this century.
2. Turns of Phrase: WAP
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This is short for 'Wireless Application Protocol' and is a scheme
that expands the functions available on mobile phones. Both the
full term and its abbreviation are beginning to appear in
newspapers and periodicals because products using 'WAP' are coming
on to the market. The system allows users to connect to the
Internet via a small text screen running a 'microbrowser'. In
theory it then becomes possible to do a whole range of useful
things: examples given in articles include downloading a local
street map, checking the time of your flight, or making a theatre
booking. Industry pundits predict its impact on mobile telephony
will be as great as the World Wide Web was on the Internet, turning
mobiles from voice devices into data ones. Recent strategic
alliances - including one between Microsoft and Ericsson announced
this week - have generated predictions that within a few years most
Internet access will be via mobile phones rather than PCs. A
related term is 'WML' (Wireless Markup Language); this is a
specialised type of tagging forming a key part of the WAP scheme,
as it permits formatted text to be displayed on the phone. It's
closely related to HTML, the tagging scheme for the Web.
The Wireless Markup Language specification portion of WAP is based
on the HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language) specification and is
an XML (Extensible Markup Language)-based language.
[_PC Week_, Oct. 1998]
Thanks to WAP, GPRS and some other hot new acronyms in mobile
communications, your phone can be used to settle all sorts of
shopping and business transactions.
[_Data Communications_, Sep. 1999]
3. Book review: Cassell Dictionary of Word Histories
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This is a disappointing book. Adrian Room has produced a work that
looks like a slim concise dictionary, containing both definitions
and word histories. In many cases the latter are no more detailed
than those you would get in any good college or desk dictionary,
and shorter than in some. Typically they run to no more than two or
three lines of small print, though some are more expansive. Oddly,
the longer ones tend to be for less common words.
The range of terms covered is much wider than in most books on word
history. For example, there are entries for 'cudbear',
'fissirostral', 'hamartiology', 'isopleth', 'outfangthief',
'preconise', 'recalescence', 'schindylesis', and 'sympiesometer'.
I'm not convinced this is a plus point, as these are words unlikely
to be in most people's vocabulary. Only two of them are in the
Tenth Edition of the _Concise Oxford Dictionary_, which is more
than twice the size. In a work of only 690 pages, it also means
detail has had to be sacrificed. There are limited cross-
references, so it's not good at showing family connections between
groups of words (a function that, for example, John Ayto's
_Dictionary of Word Origins_ is much better at, though his scope is
a great deal more restricted).
If you want basic information on word histories, I'd suggest buying
instead the biggest desk dictionary you can afford, which will be
more informative both on definitions and (in some cases) etymology,
and could well be cheaper. If you want to look in depth at the
histories of words, better to get a more discursive book, such as
John Ayto's, or the _Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories_.
Or you could buy the _Chambers Dictionary of Etymology_ that I
reviewed a while ago (see <http://www.quinion.com/articles/
chamdictetym.htm>).
[Room, Adrian _The Cassell Dictionary of Word Histories_, Cassell,
London, pp690, ISBN 0-304-35007-9. Published 7 December 1999;
publisher's quoted price GBP25.00]
4. Topical Words: Enormity
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I nearly choked on my cornflakes. Peter Mandelson, the Secretary of
State for Northern Ireland, used this word while being interviewed
on breakfast-time radio about Northern Ireland. I'd come in part-
way through, so I cringed at the thought of what awful happening
had just transpired in that troubled province. But he was actually
talking about the new Northern Ireland Assembly.
Mr Mandelson is apparently highly regarded by all sides in Northern
Ireland, but not - it seems - for the precision of his vocabulary.
He shares a misapprehension about the meaning of 'enormity' with
many other people, especially those reporting for the media.
'Enormity' has for generations had a special meaning that is quite
distinct from 'enormousness', the word that those who misuse
'enormity' are presumably groping for. "Extreme or monstrous
wickedness", the _Oxford English Dictionary_ says, or "a gross and
monstrous offence". Both of those would fit many events in Northern
Ireland in the past twenty years, but not the creation of the
Assembly.
Both 'enormousness' and 'enormity' come from the same Latin root
'enormis', which is a compound of 'e', out, plus 'norma', which was
the word for a carpenter's set square or pattern (it's also the
origin of our 'normal'). So something described as 'enormis' was
literally misshapen or out of true, though its usual sense in Latin
was a transgression or some deviation from legal or moral
rectitude.
The word came over into English via French first as 'enorm' and
only later split into the two adjectives we now have. Both
'enormity' and 'enormousness' began life with much the meaning of
'enorm', and for a while both were used in the same sense, for
something that was unusual or strikingly irregular. As late as 1774
Thomas Warton could write in his _History of English Poetry_ that
people "entered the choir in ... enormous disguises", and didn't
mean they were big. But by his time both words usually meant
something so out of the ordinary that it was monstrous or
outrageous. Gradually they split meanings, with 'enormity' taking
on the whole of the condemnatory sense, while 'enormousness'
settled for mere size.
It would be good to keep them apart, but 'enormity' is almost
certainly condemned to a future as a grander (and pithier) version
of 'enormousness'. Between 5 and 10 percent of its appearances in
the British National Corpus already use it this way. Language
evolves, and we mustn't emulate King Canute, but to lose precision
in this way is like watching the waves erode the beach.
5. Weird Words: Panjandrum
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A mock title for a person, real or imaginary, who has or claims to
have great influence or authority.
The actor Charles Macklin retired from the London stage in 1753 and
opened an entertainment in Covent Garden that he called the British
Inquisition. Every evening at seven o'clock this featured a lecture
by Macklin followed by a debate. These became popular for a while;
so much so that a playwright and fellow actor named Samuel Foote
was provoked to attend. Among his many accomplishments, Foote was a
master mimic, aided by a devilishly sharp wit; he seems to have
barracked Macklin without mercy. Macklin was unwise enough to claim
as part of a lecture on memory that his own was so highly trained
he could remember any text he had read just once. Foote composed on
the spot as a challenge a bit of nonsense that has since become
famous:
So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-
pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street,
pops its head into the shop. "What! No soap?" So he died, and she
very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the
Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the grand
Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they
all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can till the
gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
I can't discover whether Macklin actually managed to repeat this
nonsense back - it seems unlikely. Most of Foote's invented words
in this piece vanished as quickly as they appeared, but 'grand
panjandrum' survived to become a part of the language, no doubt
because of its cadence and internal rhyme, and was later shortened
just to 'panjandrum'.
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 have been re-reading _Framley Parsonage_ by Anthony Trollope
and I wonder if you can explain the derivation of the phrase 'toad
eater'? I can deduce what it means but the entire process sounds
horrid. [Roberta Groom, USA]
A. We have to go back to British market and fairground quack
doctors of the seventeenth century and earlier for the origin of
this one. It was common for such men to have an assistant to do the
dirty work, often somebody young or half-witted or otherwise under
the boss's thumb. As part of their sales pitch, such fake medical
men sometimes made their assistants eat (or more usually, pretend
to eat) a toad.
The common European toad was commonly regarded as poisonous, as the
warty glands on its skin secrete a rather nasty milky fluid when
the animal is threatened (friends who are into natural history
report they've handled toads many times and never had any trouble,
but then they've not actually tried eating one alive; I'm told a
dead one isn't poisonous, provided you strip the skin off first,
but the experiment is not to be recommended). The quack doctor
would use his nostrums to make an apparently miraculous cure on his
assistant and so enhance his reputation and his sales.
As a result, 'toad-eater' came to be a nickname for a servile
assistant to a showman. By the following century it had generalised
into a term for any fawning flatterer or sycophant, and by the
nineteenth century was often shortened to 'toady'.
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Q. My dictionary gives the origin of 'groundswell' in terms of a
deep ocean wave, which seems plausible, I suppose, notwithstanding
that we do not think of the ocean floor as ground, per se. How did
it get to mean increasing popular support? [Alden Harwood, USA]
A. As you say, 'groundswell' was originally a sailor's word for a
deep ocean swell, such as might be generated by a distant storm or
earthquake. It's an odd term, and I had to hunt around to find out
why it was so named.
It seems that the first sense of the word 'ground' in English was
that of a place covered by water. It was used especially of the
bottom of the sea, and turns up in this sense in the early epic
poem _Beowulf_. Two nautical phrases preserve this sense: 'to break
ground', meaning to heave the anchor clear of the bottom, and 'to
run aground'. This second phrase predates by several centuries the
use of 'ground' to mean dry land. So a 'groundswell' was presumably
one so huge that its troughs seemed to reach the bottom of the
ocean.
The figurative use grew up at the start of the nineteenth century
to describe some kind of political or social agitation, an obvious
allusion to the effect on a ship of encountering such a swell. This
example is from 1856: "The religious world was rocking still with
the groundswell that followed those stormy synods". It has since
shifted meaning to refer to any up-welling or build-up of opinion
in a section of the population, taking its reference from the peaks
of the swell rather than from its troughs.
7. Administration
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