World Wide Words -- 27 Feb 99

[Michael B Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 133        Saturday 27 February 1999
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A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion       Thornbury, Bristol, UK

Contents
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1. Feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Open source.
3. Book review: Jesse's Word of the Day.
4. In Brief: Floridisation.
5. Weird Words: Caltrop.
6. Q & A: Kick the bucket, Quiz, Round robin.
7. Housekeeping.


1. Feedback
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BEE'S KNEES. Several British subscribers wondered if I'd left out
another example of the type, 'dog's bollocks'. This is a term of
approbation in British English of the more vulgar sort, where the
word 'bollock' means "testicle" (a variant form of 'ballock', from
the same source as 'ball'). The original expression was "it sticks
out like a dog's bollocks", meaning that something was obvious,
but the shortened form gained a new sense and popularity in the
second half of the century. Most probably it was created after the
example of American English imports like 'bee's knees', which have
much the same meaning. But it's certainly home-grown and not one
of the set invented in twenties America. Oddly, to cry 'bollocks!'
on its own means you think something is complete rubbish, and a
'bollocking', an import from Australian English, has taken on the
meaning of a severe telling-off. Truly an all-purpose expletive.

OPPOSITE OF WOMAN-HATER. Several people wrote after last week's
answer about the opposite of 'misogynist', or hater of women, to
say that there was another possible opposite, a hater of men. But
as my wife said when I mentioned the point, it's only so if you
consider 'man' to be the opposite of 'woman'. The original query
was quite clear about the word that was wanted, but in editing it
down for publication I may have made it less so. There is a word
for a man-hater, 'misandrist', which can be found in most of the
bigger dictionaries. But it's very recent. It was only in 1946
that 'misandry' was coined in _Scrutiny_. It was formed after the
model of 'polyandry', "the state of having more than one husband"
and includes the Greek roots 'miso-', "hate", and 'andros', "man".
'Misandrist' is derived from 'misandry' and is even less old, and
less commonly used.

BRITANNICA. A sharp-eyed subscriber pointed out that the article
about "eleemosynary" last week contained a reference to a non-
existent work. It should have been the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_,
of course, so spelt.


2. Turns of Phrase: Open source  /'@Up(@)n sO:s/
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This is a buzzphrase of the computer software world, one that, if
you believe all the hype, is making Microsoft quake and promises a
new era of ease and contentment. The concept is that computer
software firms should make their products available in the normal
executable form, but should also publish the source code, the text
files from which the applications are compiled. This permits users
to inspect the code, perhaps to find and fix bugs or check its
compatibility with other software, and also to modify it to meet
their specific needs. There's nothing new about making source code
available - mainframe computer firms have often done so, and there
is a similar tradition in the freeware field. But now producers of
commercial software are toying with the idea. The first to gain
much public notice was Netscape, which in 1998 made available the
source code of the newest version of its browser. A major force in
free open source software has been the rise of an alternative to
the UNIX operating system called LINUX, which it is reported some
companies are considering as an alternative to Windows NT.

IBM is contributing to the momentum of the 'open source software'
movement by freely distributing original ('source') code to a new
e-mail program called Secure Mailer which, like products such as
Sendmail, Q Mail, and Microsoft Exchange, stores and forwards e-
mail messages with a high degree of security.
                                     [_Edupage_, Dec. 1998]

The open source crusade moved into new territory when real-time
specialist Cygnus promised to support the open source operating
system eCos, claiming the OS could rival Windows CE in the same
way that Linux threatens NT.
                                   [_Computing_, Jan. 1999]


3. Book review: Jesse's Word of the Day
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It has been remiss of me not to have mentioned this book here
before now, as it was published in June 1998. But, as they say,
better late than never ...

Jesse, of course, is Jesse Sheidlower, lexicographer extraordinary
for the Random House Webster's dictionaries department, who's been
answering questions online for much longer than I have. Every
working day since early in 1996, Jesse has dealt with a word issue
raised by visitors to his site, and he now has a large archive of
them available for reference. This book brings together his
replies to the questions posed in the first eighteen months.

>From 'amathophobe' and 'brouhaha' to 'nosopoetic' and 'walm' you
will find here answers to questions about the origins of words. If
you need considered thoughts on whether you should start a
sentence with 'and', or when 'whom' is to be used, or whether to
use 'between you and I' at all, you will find them here. If you
want to know more about strange expressions such as 'ollie ollie
oxen free', 'the whole kit and caboodle', 'hoist with one's own
petard' or 'by the skin of one's teeth', this is an excellent
place to enquire.

It's not a comprehensive treatise on usage nor a dictionary of
word histories. That would be impossible in a volume organised
according to random readers' enquiries. But he manages to cover a
lot of entertaining and interesting ground in 216 pages, not least
yet another attempt to shoot down that blasted riddle about the
third word ending in '-gry', which every writer on words has had a
go at debunking, including me, without appearing to affect its
circulation one iota.

He ends with a list of other English language resources on the
Internet. The last in the list is something called World Wide
Words, which he says is "consistently interesting and reliable".
Let me pause to blush unseen, but then remark that it's a comment
I would wish to apply with at least equal force to this book.
Anyone who likes World Wide Words will like this book.

[Sheidlower, Jesse 'Jesse's Word of the Day', published by Random
House Reference, New York, June 1998, ISBN 0-375-70245-8. Quoted
price of US$12.95 for the paperback. See also <http://www.
jesseword.com> and <http://www.randomhouse.com/jesse/>.]


4. In Brief: Floridisation
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Coined by Peter Peterson, deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, this refers to 'global ageing', a threat he
views more seriously even than global warming because of the
unprecedented burdens it will place on productive workers to
maintain the fabric of society. 'Floridisation' occurs when a
country reaches that state's concentration of senior citizens,
currently said to be 19% of the total population.


5. Weird Words: Caltrop  /'kaltr at p/
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A four-pointed device used to impede vehicles.

The military mind is often both twisted and ingenious. A 'caltrop'
consists of four pointed legs or spines splayed out at the points
of a tetrahedron so that however it falls it will sit on three of
the points with the fourth uppermost. It was apparently thought up
in medieval times as a way of slowing pursuit, and was updated for
the motorised age earlier this century. Scatter a few dozen behind
you, and pursuit becomes instantly more difficult, whether it's on
horseback or in a vehicle with pneumatic tyres. Caltrop, which is
sometimes written and said caltrap, is also applied to a number of
plants with spiny burrs; for example, it's another name for the
star thistle and a local name for the curled pondweed, and the
water chestnut is also known as the water caltrop. This botanical
connection is no accident - in fact the military device is named
after the plants. The word is from the Old English 'calcatrippe',
for any plant that tended to catch the feet. In turn this comes
from the medieval Latin 'calcatrippa', a compound either of
'calx', "heel" or 'calare', "to tread", with 'trippa', "trap".


6. 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.]
-----------
Q. Could you please tell me where the phrase 'kick the bucket'
originated?  [Fred]

A. There are two main theories about this one. One suggests that
the word doesn't refer to our modern bucket at all, but to a
sixteenth century word that comes from the French 'buque', meaning
a yoke or similar piece of wood. It is said that the word was
applied in particular to the beam from which a pig was hung in
order to be slaughtered. Inevitably, the pig would struggle during
the process, and would kick the 'buque'. The expression is
attested to in particular by a citation in the _Oxford English
Dictionary_: "The beam on which a pig is suspended after he has
been slaughtered is called in Norfolk, even in the present day, a
'bucket'. Since he is suspended by his heels, the phrase to 'kick
the bucket' came to signify to die" (I can't give you a date, as
the editors just say it comes from a "modern newspaper", a rather
sniffy annotation they used a century ago for sources not
considered quite kosher. But it was probably in the 1890s). The
other explanation, much less credible, is that the bucket is the
one on which a suicide stands when hanging himself - kick away the
bucket and the job is done. I've even seen the story attached
specifically to the sad end of an ostler working at an inn on the
Great North Road out of London. Don't believe a word of it.
-----------
Q. Could you tell me the origin of 'quiz'; I have heard that it
dates back to William Shakespeare's time. [Kay Larson]

A. We don't know for sure where it comes from, but it doesn't seem
to be as old as Shakespeare's day. It was first recorded in the
late 1700s, in the sense of an odd or eccentric person. Later it
became another word for a joke or a witticism and only about the
middle of the nineteenth century did it take on the modern meaning
of a more-or-less formal set of questions. There is a famous tale
about a Dublin theatre manager named James Daly, who accepted a
bet that he could create a new word without any meaning and have
everybody in the city using it within 24 hours. He is said to have
employed a large number of urchins to go around the city and chalk
the word 'quiz' on every surface they could find so that the next
day everybody was asking what this word meant. The story is best
viewed through the bottom of a glass of something Irish.
-----------
Q. Who is the Robin referred to in the term 'round robin'?  Is it
a person, or does it refer to the bird? [Todd Laufenberg]

A. The short answer is that we don't know for sure where it comes
from, though we're pretty sure that it has nothing to do with the
bird, nor with any person named Robin. The phrase had a short-
lived existence in the middle of the sixteenth century as a
derogatory - some said blasphemous - slang term for the Christian
communion host and, a little later, as an ill-defined term for a
person. It came back into the language at the beginning of the
eighteenth century as a sailor's term for a letter of complaint on
which the names of those signing were written in a circle so that
no one of them could be identified as the ringleader. Some books
say that this comes from a French expression 'rond rouban', for an
earlier version of the same idea in which names were written on an
endless ribbon attached to the document. There seems to be little
or no actual evidence for this assertion, and the French phrase
would have been 'rouban rond' anyway, which rather spoils the
story (though there might be a link between 'rouban' and 'robin',
with the word 'round' being added later for alliteration). Only at
the end of the nineteenth century was it applied to tournaments in
which every contestant plays every other at least once.


7. Housekeeping
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WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c)
Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other
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