World Wide Words -- 17 Jul 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 149           Saturday 17 July 1999
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>From Michael Quinion                        Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Sent every Saturday to more than 5,300 subscribers in 93 countries
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: Metamediary.
3. Topical Words: Chemical.
4. In Brief: Eclipse tourism.
5. Weird Words: Ice house.
6. Q & A: Moggie, Let the cat out of the bag, In the field.
7. Beyond Words.
8. Administration.


1. Notes and feedback
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SNOLLYGOSTER. Mary Kaye Bates wrote to say: "Although I had never
heard of the mythological beast, we sailors in the Chesapeake Bay
referred to a weather phenomenon indigenous to the Bay called a
'snallygaster', which is a sudden, violent storm that seems to
spring up out of nowhere. The allusion to 'schnelle Geister' makes
a lot of sense since it is a swift-moving storm. I've been through
one - quite violent and scary".


2. Turns of Phrase: Metamediary
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It's been argued by pundits that the Internet's destruction of
distance would also result in the demise of middlemen. They point
to what has already happened as a result of direct telephone
access to many offline businesses such as travel agencies, banks
and stockbrokers (a process economists call disintermediation).
But online trading is so complex that it is creating a new breed
of middlemen to ease the process of finding what you want.
Professor Mohanbir Sawhney of Northwestern University calls them
'metamediaries' and argues that they work in a virtual trading
space called 'metamarkets' that connect customers with the
providers of goods and services they need to fill their needs. For
example, somebody buying a house might regard purchase, mortgage,
insurance, and maintenance as related functions - a metamarket.
The trouble is, these are provided by a great range of unconnected
types of firm. One function of the metamediary, he argues, is to
link all these together electronically in a way that makes sense
to customers and permits all their needs to be met by providers.
The process is called 'metamediation'. One mark of an concept that
hasn't settled down yet is that other words for similar ideas
exist, notably the more established 'infomediary', but also
'cybermediary'.

At their heart, metamediaries are providers of trusted advice and
information that customers need to make better decisions for a
cluster of activities.
                                        [_Business 2.0_, May 1999]

Customers have reduced transportation costs but increased search
costs, giving rise to a new wave of middlemen - metamediaries -
that will act as a trusted third party providing a single point of
contact between customers and suppliers.
                                             [_Edupage_, May 1999]


3. Topical Words: Chemical
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My text for today is taken once again from the British newspaper
the _Independent on Sunday_. Last weekend in its Real Life section
(a misnomer) a survey of sun creams recommended one product in
particular if readers wanted a "completely non-chemical
sunscreen". Now there's a comment to stop a chemist in his tracks
- what's in it, the pure vacuum of space? The writer meant, of
course, that the cream had no man-made substances in it, nothing
nastily synthetic; for her, a 'chemical' is something artificial,
and so at least potentially dangerous or unpleasant.

It's illuminating that this word has taken on such a pejorative
meaning. But it's not especially surprising. People have heard
such horror stories about the effects of man-made substances -
such as this week's report of dioxins in breast milk, or about the
health risks of organophosphate insecticides, or of
chlorofluorcarbons that add to global warming, or any one of a
dozen horror stories of recent years, not to mention older terms
like 'chemical warfare' and 'chemical weapon' - that it was easy
to shift in casual speech from talking about harmful chemicals to
just calling them all chemicals, with the negative sense built in.

The adjective has been around for 400 years, but the noun is
comparatively new. The _Oxford English Dictionary_, whose entry
was written earlier this century, hardly even admits the existence
of the noun, and then only in the plural. It seems it was
originally just scientists' jargon shorthand for something
produced by chemists, or as the result of some chemical operation.
So the writer was right to a degree: the word 'chemical' does
imply a substance created by human ingenuity. Where she went off
the rails was to assume that all such substances are noxious and
best avoided.

The word 'chemical', by the way, is a linguistic mongrel. We got
it through French from the Arabic 'alchemie', where the 'al' is
the Arabic definite article. The Arabs derived it from the Greek
'khemia', which was their word for what we know as 'alchemy',
which of course is the Arabic word taken over entire, with the
article intact. The Greek original is a form of their name for
Egypt, because they believed the Egyptians were skilled in the
transmutation of base metals into silver and gold, one of the
quests of alchemy. In French the article was stripped off the
Arabic to make 'chimiste' and 'chimique'. We borrowed these terms
in the sixteenth century in much the same sense as the existing
'alchemy'. It was only a century or more later that our modern
meaning emerged.

And now it seems dictionaries must consider adding a derogatory
sense, which almost places it alongside the disparaging meaning
attached to its precursor 'alchemy'. It's an association that it
would have been nice to do without.


4. In Brief: Eclipse tourism
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This is in the news at the moment in Britain, where we are about
to witness the first total eclipse of the sun for seventy years.
The term refers to travel by people to see it, and provision for
them by tourist operators. Some 'eclipse tourists' may 'eclipse
chase': travel to see as many total eclipses as possible, with the
help of companies that offer package tours.


5. Weird Words: Ice house
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A building used to preserve winter ice for use in summer.

It is said that the Chinese got there first, having learned as
early as the eighth century BC to store ice in caves or pits,
using the evaporation from some of it to keep the rest cool. In
Britain, the first recorded ice house was built at Greenwich in
1619, though there are earlier ones in southern Europe. The heyday
of building them came in the eighteenth century, when no
aristocratic estate was without one. Ice houses were built
underground, as a brick-lined pit 25 to 30 feet deep, usually in
the shape of a blunt cone with the point downwards. The pit was
covered by a more-or-less ornate domed superstructure with a
north-facing entrance passage. Blocks of ice were cut from ponds
or rivers on the estate and transported to the ice house, where
they were stacked between layers of straw. Ice so preserved could
keep for up to three years. In the US, ice houses were once
common, though there they tended to be surface constructions; as
Richard Allen said decisively in _The American Farm Book_ of 1858:
"It is not necessary to dig into the earth for the purpose of
securing a good ice house".


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. In the British TV series _Are You Being Served_ a cat is often
referred to as a 'moggy' (I'm not sure of the spelling).  Can you
explain the derivation of this? [Arthur Middleton]

A. Though I have to tell you that _Are You Being Served_ hasn't
been shown on British televisions for the better part of twenty
years, that word is still common, often spelled 'moggie' and
sometimes shortened to 'mog'. The latter often refers to a feline
of undistinguished type and manners, the cat equivalent of a
mongrel dog, but in general usage the former is just a pet name
for any domesticated cat. It seems to be from 'Maggie', the
affectionate short form of Margaret. In the eighteenth century,
this was applied as a name for a cow or calf. In the nineteenth
century it could refer to an untidily dressed woman or slattern.
It was only in the twentieth century that it became a pet name for
a cat. How or why the sense shifted in this way is not understood.
Eric Partridge, in his _Dictionary of Historical Slang_ implies
that the cat sense may be Cockney rhyming slang, but I can find no
evidence for that origin.
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Q. Is it true that to 'let the cat out of the bag' relates to
flogging with a cat o' nine tails? [Ian].

A. One theory is indeed that it refers to removing that infamous
tool of punishment from its canvas bag. But this doesn't really
fit the meaning of the phrase, to disclose some secret, as
punishment was made as public as possible in order to deter
others. It's also said that it comes from a sneaky trick of a
stall keeper in a market of swapping a useless cat for a valuable
piglet when making a sale (a version of selling a pig in a poke)
and that 'to let the cat out of the bag' was to expose the fraud.
But anybody who has ever kept a live cat in a bag for more than a
couple of seconds will know that even the most gullible purchaser
would hardly mistake it for a piglet. It may be that the phrase
comes from the explosive exit of the cat from the bag when it's
opened, so suggesting an original connection more with the shock
and surprise of the event than of disclosure of the secret itself.
But I think there's some other explanation that has now been lost.
We do know, though, that it is first recorded in the eighteenth
century.
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Q. We were having a discussion at work and were wondering what the
origin of the phrase 'in the field' was. The reference was to
people who work outside or remotely from the main office. [Meg
Pitt]

A. It comes from one of the earliest senses of 'field', one that
is now obsolete. Originally 'field' meant any open, flat stretch
of unwooded landscape, not one that was necessarily cultivated. It
was also used specifically as the opposite of an urban area, as in
'town and field'. Such open areas were the sort of terrain
preferred for the set-piece battles of earlier times, and so it
became used in such expressions as 'field of battle'. To be 'in
the field' then meant to be away from headquarters on a military
campaign. The phrase has more recently shifted to refer to anybody
who works away from base, even though they may actually be in an
urban area and not out in the countryside at all.


7. Beyond Words
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The _Guardian_ reported recently that firewalking was being
revived in Scotland. The Scottish Tourist Board was about to
become involved in a millennium event, for which, as the writer
felicitously put it, "plans are afoot".


8. Administration
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