World Wide Words -- 20 Feb 99

[Michael B Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 132        Saturday 20 February 1999
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A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion       Thornbury, Bristol, UK

Contents
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1. Turns of Phrase: Genetic pollution.
2. Article: A Word for All: The odd history of 'omnibus'.
3. In Brief: Flexecutive.
4. Weird Words: Eleemosynary.
5. Q & A: Oppposite of misogynist, Bee's knees, Skinning cats.
6. Housekeeping.


1. Turns of Phrase: Genetic pollution  /dZI'nEtIk p@'lu:S at n/
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This has recently become a common term in the environmental
movement and is increasingly turning up in newspaper reports. It
was popularised by the American environmental campaigner Jeremy
Rifkin in his book _The Biotech Century_, which was published in
May 1998. He used it for the risk that genes from genetically
modified organisms ('GMOs' in the jargon) could be dispersed as a
result of them breeding with wild relatives, or even with
unrelated species. As it is common for such genetic modification
in plants to include resistance to control sprays, one result
could be that weeds will become resistant to herbicides or
pesticides, becoming, in other words of the moment, 'superweeds'
that are 'supercompetitive'. The worst case is that such
transformed species could spread widely, take over other habitats,
and force rare or vulnerable wild species into extinction. This is
one basis for the great controversy in Britain at the moment over
genetically modified crops which has led to calls for a moratorium
on their introduction.

Tens of thousands of novel transgenic bacteria, viruses, plants
and animals could be released into the Earth's ecosystems for
commercial tasks ranging from "bio-remediation" to the production
of alternative fuels. Some of those releases, however, could wreak
havoc with the planet's biosphere, spreading destabilizing and
even deadly genetic pollution across the world.
                [Jeremy Rifin, _The Biotech Century_, 1998]

I think that it is likely that we will be plagued by genetic
pollution, and that we will look back and see chemical and nuclear
pollution as not as significant - even though one brought us
global warming and the other waste that we cannot deal with for
thousands of years.
                              [_New Scientist, Oct. 1998_]


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The _Sheffield Star_ reported recently that an outdoor pursuits
shop in the city was advertising a post-Christmas sale with the
words "Now is the discount of our winter tents".
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2. Article: A Word for All: The odd history of 'omnibus'
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Watching the film of _Apollo 13_ the other day, that famous
reference to the source of the astronauts' problem: "we have a
main bus B undervolt", reminded me that 'bus' is an excellent
example of language evolution in action.

It started out in French in 1828 in its full form 'omnibus' as
part of the name for a new type of public transport that was open
to everyone, of any social class. It was a long coach with seats
down each side, which was called a 'voiture omnibus', a "carriage
for everyone", where 'omnibus' is the dative plural of the Latin
'omnis', "all", hence "for all". (That classic Shakespearean stage
direction, 'exeunt omnes', or "everybody leaves", includes another
form of the same word.)

The idea, and the word, were brought over almost immediately into
England and into English. A London newsletter of 1829 noted that
"The new vehicle, called the omnibus, commenced running this
morning [4 July] from Paddington to the City". As this shows, the
French phrase was at once shortened ('voiture' was obviously
foreign rubbish, but 'omnibus' was classical and we could live
with that). By 1832, it had been abbreviated further to the form
we have today, 'bus', one of our weirder linguistic inventions,
since it consists just of part of a Latin suffix, '-ibus', with no
root word in it at all. So immediate was the acceptance of
'omnibus' into our language armoury that in 1831, only two years
after its first use in English, Washington Irving could aim and
fire it figuratively in reference to the Reform Bill: "The great
reform omnibus moves but slowly".

The most noticeable characteristic of the bus was that, being a
public conveyance, it gathered into itself all manner of diverse
people, who were brought together solely by their desire to travel
in the same direction. This idea of a miscellaneous collection was
taken up and, by the 1840s, 'omnibus' had gained the sense of a
large number of distinct items or objects lumped together solely
for convenience. This turned up first in the British Parliament,
where 'omnibus bills' were measures that contained a lot of
miscellaneous proposals; as one German commentator wrote in 1857,
they were "bills which contain laws dissimilar in their character
and purposes". So when a report appeared in the _Western Daily
Press_ of Bristol in February 1884, "The Omnibus Bill has been
rejected", you will understand that this may have had nothing at
all to do with public transport.

There were other phrases, too, indicating that the British really
took this strange new word to their hearts: 'omnibus box' was
adopted for a theatre box for the use of a number of subscribers,
and an 'omnibus train' stopped at all the stations along its
route. Both are long since defunct. But later on the word was
applied to the new technology of electricity, in which the term
'omnibus bar' was given to a conductor, a copper rod or bar, that
carried the whole of the power output from a source, for all
purposes. This is the origin of the term 'bus bar', so memorably
abbreviated to 'bus' by the astronauts. These days it is perhaps
more familiar to a lot of people because of its use in computing
for one of a series of control pathways.

Though there had been a couple of examples of its use for a type
of newspaper back in the early 1830s, it was only in the 1920s
that the word was also employed for collections of varied
writings, usually by the same author. The _Daily Telegraph_ said
in 1929: "It is a day of what the publishers call 'omnibus books',
meaning works which carry many and varied passengers". Later, of
course, it was applied to radio and television programmes,
frequently soaps, that were compilations of several broadcasts in
a series, like the long-established omnibus editions of _The
Archers_ on British radio.


3. In Brief: Flexecutive
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A name, a blend of 'flexible' and 'executive', in short 'flexec',
coined by Richard Benson in the March 1999 issue of 'Arena' for a
young, fashionable, multi-lifestyling group of media-savvy
Londoners who have projects rather than careers (he calls it
'horizontal ambition'), archetypal portfolio workers with little
job security but plenty of angst.


4. Weird Words:  Eleemosynary  /,ElIi:'mQsIn at ri/
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Of or pertaining to alms or almsgiving; charitable.

This strange word was introduced into English in the early part of
the seventeenth century. It derives from medieval Latin
'eleemosynarius', "compassion, mercy", which can be traced back to
the Greek 'eleos', "pity". The 1911 edition of the _Encyclopedia
Britannia_ used it to describe the medieval Canterbury Cathedral:
"At the greatest possible distance from the church, beyond the
precinct of the convent, is the eleemosynary department. The
almonry for the relief of the poor, with a great hall annexed,
forms the paupers' hospitium". Though they don't look it,
'eleemosynary' and 'alms' are connected. The second is the older,
which arrived in Old English in a very distorted form via Old High
German from a relative of the Latin original. At first it was
spelt 'almes', but by the seventeenth century had been shortened
to its modern form. By another route, this time through French,
the Latin word turned up as 'aumonry', "a place where alms were
given", an office in a religious house or household of a prince or
bishop; the person in charge was called the 'aumoner'. By the
seventeenth century these had come to be spelt in the modern way
as 'almonry' and 'almoner', but it was only at the very end of the
nineteenth century that the latter was applied to an officer in a
hospital who looks after patients' welfare, a post now more
commonly called a 'medical social worker'.


5. Q & A
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[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 the Words web site.]
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Q. Is there an opposite of 'misogynist'? [Douglas Muir Hutton]

A. The only one given in any of my books of synonyms and antonyms
is 'feminist', which doesn't meet the need at all. If you split
the Greek word into its constituent parts, you find it is made up
of 'miso-', "hate" (a prefix that turns up in English in a number
of rare or facetious words, including 'misocapnist' for a hater of
tobacco smoke), plus 'gyn', from the Greek 'gunos', "woman" (as in
'gynaecologist'), plus the '-ist' ending that indicates an agent
noun. So we can replace the first element with 'philo-' "love" to
get 'philogynist' instead. This does indeed have an entry in most
larger dictionaries, with the abstract noun given as 'philogyny'
"love of women". The first citation in the _Oxford English
Dictionary_ is from T H Huxley's _Lay Sermons_ of 1865, and if
it's good enough for Darwin's Bulldog, it's good enough for me.
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Q. 'The bee's knees' informally means the best, the most
desirable. How did the saying originate? [T Senthilnathan]

A. It's one of a set of nonsense catchphrases that originated in
North America in the 1920s, the period of the flappers, nearly all
of which compared some thing of excellent quality to a part of an
animal. You might at that period have heard such curious
concoctions as 'cat's miaow', 'elephant's adenoids', 'bullfrog's
beard', 'gnat's elbows', 'monkey's eyebrows', 'cat's whiskers',
and dozens of others. Only a very few have survived, of which
'bee's knees' is perhaps the best known, though 'cat's pyjamas'
(an exception to the anatomical rule) also survives.
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Q. Anything interesting in the origin of 'There's more than one
way to skin a cat'?  [Mike Reilly]

A. To a lexicographer, all phrases are interesting, it's just that
some of them are more interesting than others ... There are
several versions of this saying. Charles Kingsley used the older
British form in _Westward Ho!_ in 1855: "there are more ways of
killing a cat than choking it with cream", meaning that there are
good ways of doing something, and then there are foolish ways, one
of the latter being to give a cat cream in the hope of killing it.
Mark Twain used your version in _A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court_ in 1889: "she was wise, subtle, and knew more than
one way to skin a cat", that is, more than one way to get what she
wanted. The latter version seems to have nothing to do with the
American English term 'to skin a cat', which is to perform a type
of gymnastic exercise.


6. Housekeeping
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