World Wide Words -- 06 Feb 99

[Michael B Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 130         Saturday 6 February 1999
==================================================================
A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion       Thornbury, Bristol, UK

Contents
--------
1. Article: Pro bono publico.
2. Topical words: Ambient.
3. In Brief: Pretanic.
4. Weird Words: Copacetic.
5. Q & A: Jumper, Sixes and sevens, Gotham.
6. List of the Week.
7. Housekeeping.


1. Article: Pro bono publico: British legal language is changing
------------------------------------------------------------------
On 26 April this year, the civil courts of the British legal
system are to undergo a huge change. A new set of rules is being
brought in to simplify and streamline procedures, in an attempt to
make litigation quicker, cheaper and simpler. An 800-page document
published by the Lord Chancellor's Department abandons traditions
in favour of new procedures that give judges an active role in
managing cases and dictating the pace of litigation.

One of the more significant changes is that of language. For the
first time, people outside the legal system have been involved in
the process of drawing up the rules. As a result, many common but
obscure legal terms have been discarded, to be replaced by simple
English, or at least English that is as simple to understand as
possible in such a complex field. The Plain English Campaign,
which has been fighting for 20 years to change legal language, is
delighted: "This may be our greatest victory yet," its founder,
Chrissie Maher, is quoted as saying.

The changes have come about following a report last year by the
Master of the Rolls, Lord Wolff, on _Access to Justice_. He said:
"The system of civil justice and the rules which govern it must be
broadly comprehensible not only to an inner circle of initiates
but to non-professional advisers and, so far as possible, to
ordinary people of average ability who are unlikely to have more
than a single encounter with the system".

For example, 'plaintiff' goes, to be replaced by 'claimant'.
'Plaintiff' was at one time the same word as 'plaintive' and is
closely related to 'complaint'. Defendants in legal actions may
not be surprised to hear that it has close links to 'plague' as
well. All these words come from the Latin 'plaga' "stroke, blow"
and came into English through French. A 'plaintiff', therefore,
was originally just a person who made a complaint, but the word
became a fossil of legal terminology many centuries ago.

Another historic word that vanishes from the legal lexicon is
'writ', to be replaced by the prosaic "claim form". A 'writ' is in
origin just something written down, the same word that turns up in
'Holy Writ' for Christian sacred texts. By about 1400, it had
become the standard word for a formal legal document, usually one
that requires somebody to do something, or more often to stop
doing something. Because of its legal links, it also has a semi-
figurative sense of "authority, control", as in phrases like "his
writ doesn't run there".

A third word that vanishes is 'pleadings' for the formal
statements on both sides before a court case. Lord Wolff said: "I
have suggested that the word 'pleading' should be replaced by
'statement of case' ... The word has become too much identified
with a process which the legal profession itself readily
acknowledges has to change". The word goes back to the earliest
days of Norman law in Britain, at a time when you really did have
to plead your case. The word is related to 'plea' and, through its
Latin original, to 'please'.

Many other terms also change. The legal process of 'discovery'
becomes that of 'disclosure'. The curious 'Anton Pillar order',
named after the company that first successfully argued for powers
of search to be issued without warning so that goods could not be
spirited away, becomes just a 'search order'. Similarly a 'Mareva
injunction', intended to freeze assets pending the outcome of
litigation, turns into a 'freezing injunction'. The courts will no
longer 'give leave', but will simply and obviously 'give
permission' instead.

The area of language in which most changes are to be made is that
of legal Latin, which is being swept away in favour of words in
plain English. So no longer can the parties to a court case ask
for it to be 'in camera', they'll have to ask to be heard "in
private" instead. Hearings will no longer be 'inter partes' or 'ex
parte', they'll be "with notice" or "without notice". A 'guardian
ad litem' becomes a "litigation friend", 'sub judice' becomes
"pending litigation", and so on. But as the new rules apply only
to civil law, we still have 'habeas corpus', probably a good
thing, as finding a good English equivalent might not be easy.

Somehow, suing for libel will not be the same when you can no
longer "issue a writ" but have to "present a claim form" instead.
It's already been said by some English commentators that changes
like these will reduce the majesty of the law. A leader in the
_Guardian_ on Monday said "The lingua franca of the law may be
baffling to the lay person but that, surely, was part of its charm
and all of its function". But if the changes make the law more
comprehensible, surely that's to the public good? 'Pro bono
publico', in fact.


2. Topical words: Ambient  /'ambI at nt/
------------------------------------------------------------------
Wandering around my local supermarket the other day, I fell into
conversation with a member of staff I vaguely knew. "What's your
job these days?" I asked. "I'm the ambient stock control manager,"
he replied. For a moment, he seemed to say he was the 'ambulant'
stock control manager; though shop staff often talk about goods
walking, I never thought they really meant it. But then I realised
what he'd said.

It turns out that 'ambient', as a bit of food industry jargon, has
been around for a decade or two without attracting much attention.
The _Oxford English Dictionary_ has traced it back to the early
eighties. It mostly turns up in phrases like 'ambient food' (my
friend really ought to be called the 'ambient foods stock control
manager' but nobody in supermarketing has enough time for that).

In its proper meaning, 'ambient' refers to the immediate
surroundings of something. It comes from the French 'ambiant' and,
further back, from the Latin 'ambientem', which is from the verb
meaning "to go about". By the end of the sixteenth century, it had
taken on its modern meaning in English which the _OED_
comprehensively lists as "lying round, surrounding, encircling,
encompassing, environing". It's related to 'ambience', another
word with interesting cultural overtones, which also refers to
one's surroundings, but especially to the character and atmosphere
of a place.

You might think that 'ambient' is just the adjective from
'ambience'. That is how it was formed in the nineteenth century,
but the two words have diverged enough that their associations are
different. So 'ambient music' is strictly speaking wrong, as it
refers to a style of music with textures but without a beat that
aims to create a mood or atmosphere, an 'ambience' in fact.

Engineers and other technical persons use the word correctly when
they speak of such matters as 'ambient temperature', meaning the
conditions surrounding some object they're interested in. This
phrase has become so fixed, and is so often how people come across
the word 'ambient', that many seem to think it means "normal room
conditions". That's not so, of course, as you can talk about the
'ambient temperature' of a lump of iron in a furnace, or of a
meteorite in Antarctic ice.

But when food technologists speak of 'ambient foods', they're
using the term as shorthand for 'ambient temperature foods' (which
makes my friend's job 'ambient temperature foods stock control
manager', which really is a mouthful). You can argue they're using
the word correctly, since they're speaking of foods that can be
stored at the temperature of their surroundings in the store,
without needing to be chilled, such as canned foods, jars of
coffee, fresh fruit or bags of sugar. But I've also come across
'ambient fishmonger', a wonderfully gnomic phrase meaning one of
those guys who sells unrefrigerated fresh fish.

You have to admit there's an 'ambiance' about 'ambient'.


3. In Brief: Pretanic
------------------------------------------------------------------
Simon Partridge, in his pamphlet _The British Union State_, which
is published this week by the radical British think-tank Catalyst,
suggests this could be a useful term to reintroduce. It's the
ancient Greek adjective referring to the British Isles, which
predates 'British'. Adopting it, he suggests, will avoid the
historical and cultural baggage attached to both 'Britain' and
'Republic of Ireland' and for the first time provide a single
neutral and inclusive word for all the inhabitants of both
countries, akin to 'Nordic' or 'Iberian'.


4. Weird Words: Copacetic  /,k at Up@'sEtIk/
------------------------------------------------------------------
Fine, excellent, going just right.

It's possible that this word has created more column inches of
speculation than any other apart from 'OK'. Most people outside
North America became aware of it as a result of the NASA space
program - it's very much a _Right Stuff_ kind of word - though it
doesn't have the circulation it did thirty years ago. Dictionaries
are cautious about attributing a source for it, reasonably so, as
there are at least five competing explanations, with no conclusive
evidence for any of them.

One suggestion that's commonly put forward is that it was
originally a word of the African-American community in the USA.
The name of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, a famous black tap-dancer,
singer and actor of the period round the turn of the twentieth
century is commonly linked to this belief about its origin.
Indeed, he claimed to have invented it as a shoeshine boy in
Richmond. But other blacks, especially Southerners, said later
that they had heard it earlier than Mr Robinson's day. But he
certainly did a lot to popularise the word.

A second explanation that's given credence is that it derives from
a Yiddish expression, 'hakol b'seder', "all is in order", or 'kol
b'tzedek', "all with justice". Other accounts say it derives from
a Chinook word 'copasenee', "everything is satisfactory", once
used on the waterways of Washington State, or from the French
'coupersetique', from 'couper', "to strike", or, in a hugely
strained derivation, from 'the cop is on the settee', supposedly a
hoodlum term used to describe a policeman who was not actively
watching out for crime, and so one who was OK.


5. Q & A
------------------------------------------------------------------
[The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. Send
your queries to <qa at quinion.com>. I can't guarantee to answer
them, but if I can, I will reply privately first; a response will
later appear here and on our Web site.]
-----------
Q. I'm curious about different meanings of the word 'jumper' as an
article of clothing.  In the U.S., this refers to a type of dress
with a pinafore-style top worn with a blouse or shirt; when my
Australian daughter-in-law uses it, she means what I, an American
English speaker, call a sweater or a sweatshirt. [Helen Schupp]

A. The British usage also describes a sweater or pullover, that
is, a knitted garment with long sleeves for the upper part of the
body, though my impression is that the word is rather old-
fashioned, with 'sweater' now much more common. It seems to have
appeared about the middle of the nineteenth century, originally
for what the _Oxford English Dictionary_ describes as "A kind of
loose outer jacket or shirt reaching to the hips", in other words
what I would call a fisherman's smock. The origin has nothing to
do with the verb 'to jump', but comes from the dialect 'jump' or
'jup', meaning a man's short coat or a woman's under-bodice or
tunic. This may itself derive from the French 'juppe', a petticoat
(now in modern French, 'jupe', "skirt"), which ultimately derived
from the Arabic 'jubba', a loose outer garment. The word has
evolved differently in Britain and the US; British usage has moved
towards a garment that is specifically woollen, the US towards any
upper-body garment for women. The _OED_ refers to a catalogue of
1908 which talks about a loose-fitting blouse worn over a skirt,
from which Americans later derived 'jumper suit' for a jumper and
skirt combination; I've found a plate in a Sears, Roebuck
catalogue of 1916 that uses 'jumper frock' to describe a pinafore
dress worn over a blouse or shirt, which seems to be the original
term, later shortened to 'jumper'.
---------------
Q. Any idea where the phrase 'at sixes and sevens' came from, and
what it really means? [Robin R Lynch]

A. It's one of the more ancient expressions in the language, being
recorded in the fourteenth century. There are various theories
about its origin, but the most probable is that it arose out of an
old game of dice called 'hazard', one in which one's chances of
winning were complicated by a set of rather arbitrary rules. It is
thought that the expression was originally 'to set on cinque and
sice' (from the French numerals, "five" and "six"). These were
apparently the most risky numbers to shoot for ("to set on") and
anyone who tried for them was considered careless or confused.
Later, the number words shifted to their modern values, perhaps
because the link with the game (and the original French words) had
by then been severed, or perhaps it was a joke, as seven is an
impossible number to throw with one die. The change may also be
linked to the sum of the new numbers being thirteen, always
considered unlucky. Its modern sense is simply "to be confused".
Incidentally, our word 'hazard' came into the language first to
refer to the dice game (via the Old French 'hasard' and the
Spanish 'azar' from the Arabic 'az-zahr' "luck, chance"), and only
later took on the meaning of a danger or risk, or as a verb, to
venture something.
---------
Q. Could you please tell me how 'Gotham' came to be a reference to
New York City? [Gregory Hefner]

A. It's the fault of Washington Irving. He applied the name to New
York in an issue of a humorous magazine name _Salmagundi_, a title
taken from the name of a salad which consists of a variety of
ingredients. The original Gotham is popularly supposed to be the
village of that name in Nottinghamshire, though I gather there's
little good evidence of this. The story is that bad King John
(Magna Carta etc) decided to visit Gotham on a royal progress,
though why he should when he had a perfectly good castle to stay
at just up the road at Nottingham is not explained. The villagers
realised this would be inconvenient and expensive because of the
size of the king's retinue. They decided to pretend to be
imbecilic in front of the king's heralds, by trying to fish the
moon out of a pond, running madly in circles, trying to drown an
eel, clasping hands around a thorn bush to imprison a cuckoo, and
other crazy actions. The ploy worked and the king decided not to
come. A collection of tales about stupidity was published in the
reign of Henry VIII, entitled _The Merrie Tales of the Mad Men of
Gotham_. So the name had by Washington Irving's time long been
associated with stupidity, even though the original story was
actually about a kind of twisted cleverness. Washington Irving
thought this just the name to give to a city which he believed was
inhabited by fools.


6. List of the Week
------------------------------------------------------------------
The International Astronomical Union will later this year debate
whether to downgrade Pluto from its status as the outmost planet
of the Solar System to that of merely being a minor planet or
asteroid. There are getting on for 30,000 of these, all numbered
in order of discovery. The names of the first 30 are: Ceres,
Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Astraea, Hebe, Iris, Flora, Metis, Hygiea,
Parthenope, Victoria, Egeria, Irene, Eunomia, Psyche, Thetis,
Melpomene, Fortuna, Massalia, Lutetia, Kalliope, Thalia, Themis,
Phocaea, Proserpina, Euterpe, Bellona, Amphitrite, and Urania. But
there are so many of them that finding names is a tough task. So
the list also contains Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr (the
Fab Four), Clapton (for Eric), Sinatra (for Frank), TARDIS (the Dr
Who time machine; note the careful capitalisation of a word that
was originally an acronym), and, confusingly, one called Moons.


7. Housekeeping
------------------------------------------------------------------
* To leave the list, send the following message to the list server
  address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> (the subject line
  will be ignored):

    SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS

* To subscribe to the list, send the following message to the list
  server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> from the
  e-mail address which is to receive mailings:

    SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name

* To change address, send a SIGNOFF message from your old address,
  followed by a SUBSCRIBE message from the new one.

* To obtain information on other commands, send the text:

    INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS

* Other messages, including feedback and comments, should be sent
  to <words at quinion.com> (general feedback, problems, screams of
  rage, etc) or <qa at quinion.com> (if you are asking a question).
  Please do *not* send subscription requests to these addresses.

* A key to the pronunciation symbols used in these mailings is
  available at <http://www.quinion.com/words/pronguide.htm>. A
  plain text version may be obtained any time by sending a blank
  e-mail message to our autoresponder at <pronguide at quinion.com>.
  (Note that any text in your message will be ignored.)

------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c)
Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other
online lists in whole or in part is permitted provided this notice
is included. Reproduction in paid-for media or Web sites requires
prior permission from the author. The World Wide Words Web site is
at <http://www.quinion.com/words/>.