World Wide Words -- 30 Jan 99

[Michael B Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 129         Saturday 30 January 1999
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A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion       Thornbury, Bristol, UK

Contents
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1.  Notes and feedback.
2.  Article: Words of 1998.
3.  Topical words: Blue moon.
4.  In Brief: Judas biography.
5.  Weird Words: Deasil.
6.  Q & A.
7.  Beyond Words.
8.  Housekeeping.


1. Notes and feedback
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WORD BLOAT.  I keep trying to limit these mailings to four pages 
of text, because I know some subscribers' e-mail systems can't 
cope with longer messages. But, somehow, there's always so much to 
fit in that's topical. And there's a huge pile of answers to your 
questions still waiting to be fed through. The answer is probably 
a special mailing or two at some point to clear the backlog. Your 
views will be welcome, as always.

E-LAS: Following my piece two weeks ago about the 'e-' prefix (see 
below), I found 'elance' in a computer journal this week, meaning 
an "electronic freelance" or computer contractor. This is getting 
very silly ...

ERROR: NO ERROR.  The Corrections and Clarifications column in the 
_Guardian_ each day is regarded by many of us as the best bit of 
the newspaper, because of its clear-eyed and witty rectification 
of errors and omissions. In Tuesday's edition, the following note 
appeared: "The absence of corrections yesterday was due to a 
technical hitch rather than any sudden onset of accuracy".


2.  Article: Words of 1998
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We've had the season of goodwill, of first-footing and wassailing, 
and we're now well into the season of awards for the best of 1998. 
HarperCollins in Britain has just announced the result of its 
competition to choose the word that best represents the year. This 
follows the similar award by the American Dialect Society on 7 
January, and a set of words of the year from Oxford Dictionaries 
that came out close to Christmas.

HarperCollins gave the prize to 'millennium bug', which supports 
my suspicion that British word usage is running about a year 
behind that of North America (you may recall it was the choice of 
the American Dialect Society for 1997, and it was getting a bit 
shop-worn even then). This year, the ADS has chosen the 'e-' 
prefix, which I wrote about two weeks ago. It was also voted Most 
Useful and Most Likely to Succeed, awards I am less sure about.

Oxford doesn't select one word, but instead produces a list of 
some of those which have come to prominence; HarperCollins appends 
a similar list to its winner and runners-up. ADS also provides a 
list of runners-up, and the three lists together give a picture of 
what specialists presumably think have been the most high-profile 
of the year.

The Oxford list is at the same time the longest and the one with 
fewest surprises. It makes clear it's a selection of words which 
were spotted by their New Words team in 1998, not necessarily 
words which are new. If you've been a subscriber to World Wide 
Words for a while, you will have read about many of them already. 
(Quite a number of them have come from me, it seems, directly or 
indirectly; I did wonder why my Web site logs showed such interest 
from staff at Oxford near the end of last year! And, don't tell 
Oxford Dictionaries, but I wrote about several of them in 1997.) 
So, no need to dwell overlong on 'analysis paralysis', 'portal 
site', 'biopiracy', 'black-water rafting', 'exoplanet', 'global 
distillation', 'exformation', 'gorge-walking', 'polyamory', 
'trickle-up trend', or 'waitress mom'.

Some others from the Oxford list: 'call centre' (designed to 
handle large numbers of phone calls), 'domophobia' (hostility 
towards the Millennium Dome at Greenwich), 'ecological footprint' 
(impact or damage to the environment caused by human activity), 
'euro-wasp' (a large European species becoming resident in 
Britain), 'Furby' (that toy), 'horse-whispering' (from that film), 
'rage' (in all its variations). 'superweed' (one that's resistant 
to herbicides), and, perhaps inevitably, but also rather sadly, 
'Monicagate', 'fornigate' and 'zippergate'.

The Oxford list is more international in scope than either of the 
others, and so includes some words I have a feeling I should have 
featured: 'Hansonism', the political policies of Pauline Hanson, 
leader of the Australian _One Nation_ party (and the related term 
'Asianisation'); 'hoarding', which Oxford says has taken on a new 
meaning in Indian English that specifically refers to the illegal 
stockpiling of staple foods made scarce in 1998 by failed harvests 
(they also give 'ration shop' for an official open-market outlet 
in India for the sale of essential commodities); and two terms 
from South Africa: 'gravy', a shortening of 'gravy train', widely 
used in 1998, Oxford says, to refer to government corruption, and 
'muti murder', a spate of killings in Johannesburg that were 
related to 'muti' (traditional African magic).

The HarperCollins appended list is described as "words coined in 
1998", a startling assertion, as it includes 'DVD', 'heroin chic', 
'middle youth', 'mouse potato', 'grey market', 'pharming', and 
'Y2K'. These are newish terms, but I have citations for 'heroin 
chic' from 1997, 'Y2K' from 1996, 'DVD' and 'mouse potato' from 
1994, and 'grey market' from 1993, and I'm sure older examples 
could be found for all of them. They are words which achieved a 
certain prominence in Britain in 1998, but they were most 
certainly not coined in that year.

And these are the HarperCollins runners-up in its competition, in 
descending order based on the votes of readers, I assume mainly 
from Britain: 'Viagra', 'digital television', 'Millennium Dome', 
'Zippergate', 'Monicagate', 'girl power', 'Furby', 'Cool 
Britannia' and 'docusoap'. Few surprises there, except that voters 
seem less cynical about the Dome than the press, and that they 
have been heavily influenced by a certain American scandal.

So has the American Dialect Society, whose runners-up to 'e-' 
included, with what I suspect is a certain tongue-in-cheekness, 
'sexual relations' and 'is' (though it surely depends what they 
meant by that word). Also included were 'Viagra' and the various 
forms in 'rage'.

It's in the other ADS sections that choices reveal much about the 
lexical state of America (and perhaps what HarperCollins readers 
will be voting on in early 2000). In the Most Useful category: 
'senior moment' (a momentary lapse of memory due to age) got most 
votes, followed by 'multislacking' (playing at the computer when 
one should be working) and 'open source' (the source code of 
software programs available to all). In the Most Unnecessary 
category, most votes went to the entire Monica Lewinsky word 
family. Under the Least Likely to Succeed heading, votes were cast 
for, among others, 'explornography' (tourism in exotic and 
dangerous places), although 'compfusion' (a confusion over 
computers) came out on top. One other category: Most Original, won 
by 'multislacking', followed by 'angst bunny' (a young woman with 
black clothes and lots of body piercing); 'Preslyterianism' (a 
cult of Elvis Presley in the South), and 'bililoquy' (a 
conversation with one's alter ego).

What these various lists confirm, as it if needed to be confirmed, 
is that British English is heavily influenced by American events 
and culture.


3. Topical words: Blue moon  /'blu: mu:n/
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Tomorrow (31 January 1999), newspapers have been telling us, we 
shall see the second blue moon of January, at least we will in 
Europe and North America. This stopped me dead the first time I 
saw the phrase a few years ago, as 'blue moon' to me only has the 
meaning of some event that happens extremely rarely, if ever, so 
matching a favourite expression of my father's: "never in a month 
of Sundays". There's nothing in any of my dictionaries or books on 
phrase origins about two full moons in one month. But the 
expression has become common in that sense in recent years in 
north America, to the extent of almost usurping the older meaning.

The idea of a 'blue moon' has been traced back to 1528, to a 
sceptical little item entitled _Rede Me and Be Not Wrothe_: "Yf 
they say the mone is belewe, we must believe that it is true". 
This implies the expression had a meaning of something that was 
absurd, very like another moon-related proverb first recorded in 
the following year "They woulde make men beleue ... that ye Moone 
is made of grene chese". Because it was absurd, saying that 
something happened only 'once in a blue moon' was the same as 
saying it never happened. And this was what the phrase meant for 
several hundred years.

Charles Earle Funk suggested in 1948 that the two expressions are 
connected, the green cheese being the freshly pressed round cheese 
that looks white like the full moon, and the blue moon the one 
just before the new moon begins to show, when rarely the Moon's 
surface, bathed only in faint Earthlight, may look blue. This is 
eminently plausible for 'green cheese', indeed it's the usual 
explanation of how the saying came about, but his explanation 
doesn't fit the fact that 'blue moon' then meant "never".

The version that most of have grown up with has a sense that has 
shifted, like the opinion of the captain of the 'Pinafore', from 
"never" to "hardly ever". This sense was first recorded only in 
1821, but is probably eighteenth-century. Various writers have 
guessed that the change in meaning came about because people 
realised that the moon can indeed look blue, because of dust in 
the upper atmosphere, say from forest fires or volcanic eruptions. 
As with Mr Funk's thesis, that hardly sounds convincing, but as so 
often there's no evidence either way.

So how did 'blue moon' get this new meaning? I'm indebted to 
Philip Hiscock of the Folklore and Language Archive at the 
Memorial University of Newfoundland, who has done a lot of 
research on this phrase, the results of which are presented in the 
March 1999 issue of _Sky and Telescope Magazine_. He managed to 
trace it back to an edition of _Trivial Pursuit_ published in 
1986; its compilers got it from _The Kids' World Almanac of 
Records and Facts_ of the year before, which probably got it from 
a radio programme in 1979 that quoted a reference to a quiz in 
_Sky and Telescope_ in July 1943, which attributed it to the 1937 
_Maine Farmers' Almanac_. And there the trail goes cold. (And, in 
any case, the _Farmers' Almanac_ article seems to suggest that the 
term refers to a second full moon within one zodiacal sign, not 
one calendar month.)

What seems clear from reports is that this "two full moons in one 
month" meaning of 'blue moon' only started to achieve much 
circulation from about 1988, no doubt principally as a result of 
the _Trivial Pursuit_ reference. So what we have is a truly modern 
piece of language folklore, and a fine example of the way that a 
supposed fact can become widely reported and accepted within a 
very short space of time. It shows also how an expression can lurk 
in the language until something causes it to bursts upon the 
public stage. 

Astronomers say that this type of 'blue moon' is actually a lot 
more frequent than the older sort. There is a month with two full 
moons in it rather more than once every three years. That's 
because, though 'moon' and 'month' are intimately related words, 
our months are all, apart from February, a little longer than the 
interval between two full moons. Much more rare is to have two 
blue-moon months in one year. This happens this year, as both 
January and March have two, whilst poor old February has no full 
moon at all. The next years in which this happens are 2018 and 
2037. Now that's what I really call 'once in a blue moon'.

[You can find Philip Hiscock's article from _Sky & Telescope_ at 
<http://www.skypub.com/>. His 1993 piece in the _Griffiths 
Observer_ is at <http://ww.griffithobs.org/IPSBlueMoon.html>.]


4. In Brief: Judas biography
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Many biographies have appeared in the past few years that presume 
to tell the truth about some relative or friend. A current British 
example is the intimate history of Jacqueline du Pre', which has 
now become the film _Hilary and Jackie_. In the current issue of 
the _New York Review of Books_, John Updike wrote: "Recent years 
in America have given rise to what we might call the Judas 
biography, in which a former spouse or friend of a living writer 
confides to print an intimate portrait less flattering than might 
be expected". Another name is 'spiterature'.


5. Weird Words: Deasil  /dEs(@)l/
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Righthandwards; in the direction of the sun; clockwise.

This is a word which now mainly conjures up associations with 
witchcraft, as it's the much rarer converse of 'widdershins'. 
Trying to define it immediately runs into the fundamental problem 
of how to explain the difference between left and right (clockwise 
is fine, unless you're a clock, or one of those jokers who has one 
that runs backwards; sunwise works in the northern hemisphere 
only; just try explaining to an alien visitor which is right and 
which left, using words only). 

In immediate origin 'deasil' is a Gaelic word that derives from 
the same root as the Latin 'dexter', "right, right-handed" which 
even then could mean "skilful" (hence our word 'dextrous'). In 
witchcraft, including modern Wicca, to move deasil is to invoke 
positive qualities.

As an example of its associations, here is Sir Walter Scott, in 
_Chronicles of the Canongate_: "In the meantime, she traced around 
him, with wavering steps, the propitiation, which some have 
thought has been derived from the Druidical mythology. It 
consists, as is well known, in the person who makes the DEASIL 
walking three times round the person who is the object of the 
ceremony, taking care to move according to the course of the sun".


6. Q & A
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[The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. I'm 
inundated with questions at the moment; hold off sending me any 
more until I've cleared the backlog!]
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Q. Can you shed light on the meaning or origin of 'it's a dog's 
life'? Those of us over 50 seem to use to suggest the need to 
accept the existential fact that things are hard; but in the 
under-50 set, the idea is that dogs have it easy, and so 'it's a 
dog's life' equates to "how cushy!". [Stephen P Goldman] 

A. It certainly seems that the phrase has become more ambiguous 
than it once was, though I've not come across many examples myself 
of its use as a description of a pampered existence. Most of our 
expressions that include 'dog' are old enough to be based in times 
when dogs were not cosseted, but were kept as watchdogs or hunting 
animals, not as pets. They often weren't allowed in the house, but 
were kept in kennels, fed scraps, worked hard, and often died 
young. So 'going to the dogs', 'dog tired', 'to die like a dog', 
'dog's dinner', 'dogsbody', 'dog eat dog', and 'a dog's life' all 
refer to a state of affairs best avoided. Specifically, 'a dog's 
life' is first recorded in the sixteenth century and seems to have 
remained in the language with the sense of "a life of misery, or 
of miserable subserviency" ever since. I'd hate to lose it myself.
-------------
Q. I'm trying to find out the origin of the phrase, 'on the QT', 
meaning off the record or in confidence. [Mike Willis]

A. According to Robert Hendrickson, in _The Facts on File 
Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins_, the first reference is 
from a British ballad of 1870, which contained the line "Whatever 
I tell you is on the QT". It seems to have been just an 
abbreviated spelling, using the first and last letters of the word 
'quiet', the mild obfuscation also suggesting a meaning for the 
expression. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ has a first sighting 
from 1884: "It will be possible to have one spree on the strict 
q.t.". Mr Hendrickson points out that it also occurs in a famous 
London ditty of 1891, sung by Lottie Collins, which also 
introduced the famous chorus line "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay":

    A sweet Tuxedo girl you see,
    Queen of swell society,
    Fond of fun as fun can be,
    When it's on the strict Q.T.

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Q. How did 'spoil' (go bad or rotten) come to mean to overindulge 
someone (as in 'spoil a child' or 'the kid is spoiled rotten')? 
[Richard Nixon]

A. Both meanings of the word are derived from an older sense of 
the word in English, which was to strip the armour and weapons 
from a slain enemy. (This came via French from the Latin word 
'spolium', which originally meant the skin that had been taken 
from a dead animal. So the first meaning in English was already a 
figurative one.) From here, the word came to mean the items so 
removed, booty or plunder, hence our word 'spoils', as in phrases 
such as "the spoils of war". The verb could also be used at one 
time for seizing goods by violence, to "deprive, despoil, pillage, 
or rob" as the _Oxford English Dictionary_ graphically puts it. It 
then took on a less literal meaning of depriving someone of some 
quality or distinction, and later still to impair or damage 
something to the extent that it became useless. By the end of the 
seventeenth century, this had reached the point where 'to spoil' 
could mean "to injure in respect of character, especially by over-
indulgence or undue lenience" and "to become unfit for use; to 
deteriorate; to go bad, decay", the two senses you give.
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Q. What is the origin and true meaning of 'knock on wood' or 
'touch wood'? [Mike Gast]

A. To 'touch wood' is a superstition action to ward off any evil 
consequences, say of untimely boasting; it can also be a charm to 
bring good luck. The origin is quite unknown, though some writers 
have pointed to pre-Christian rituals involving the spirits of 
sacred trees such as the oak, ash, holly or hawthorn. There is, 
I'm told, an old Irish belief that you should knock on wood to let 
the little people know that you are thanking them for a bit of 
good luck. Others have sought a meaning in which the wood 
symbolises the timber of the cross, but this may be a 
Christianisation of an older ritual. The children's game of tag in 
which you are only safe so long as you are touching wood is not 
likely to be connected (an indicator of this may be that at times 
iron was substituted for wood if there was no wood handy). The 
phrase itself seems to be modern, as the oldest citation for 
'touch wood' in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ dates only from 
1908; my searches haven't turned up anything earlier. 
(Incidentally, that work doesn't have a single example of 'knock 
on wood', which is the American version of the British 'touch 
wood'.)


7. Beyond Words
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The US magazine _Philosophy and Literature_ has announced the 
winners of its 1998 Bad Writing Contest, which "celebrates the 
most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books 
and articles published in the last few years" though "deliberate 
parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody 
is so widespread". First prize was won by Judith Butler, professor 
of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of Calif-
ornia at Berkeley, in a 1997 article in the _Diacritics_ journal 
entitled _Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time_: 
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is 
understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous 
ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to 
repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question 
of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift 
from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural 
totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights 
into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed 
conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and 
strategies of the rearticulation of power". More details can be 
found through a link at <http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/>.


8. Housekeeping
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Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other 
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