World Wide Words -- 24 Jul 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 150           Saturday 24 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. Book review: Never Let a Fool Kiss You, or a Kiss Fool You.
3. Turns of Phrase: Riskometer.
4. In Brief: Goldilocks planet.
5. Weird Words: Carphology.
6. Q & A: Irregardless, Pommie.
7. Administration.


1. Notes and feedback
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LISTSERVER PROBES. Several people have written recently, asking
why the subscription renewal probe should go out as frequently as
monthly. That interval was set when this list started, as one that
seemed reasonable. But experience shows it can be sent out less
often, so I've changed the interval to three-monthly. I've also
added the date on which it was last amended, so you don't need to
check for changes (not that there have ever been any).


2. Book review: Never Let a Fool Kiss You, or a Kiss Fool You
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Here's a Weird Word for you: 'chiasmus'. It's a figure of speech
in which the order of words in two successive phrases is reversed.
The title of this book is itself an example of chiasmus, as is its
subtitle: "A world of quotations that say what they mean and mean
what they say".

Dr Mardy Grothe has put together this odd little volume, which
contains several hundred of the 10,000 chiastic quotations that
she has collected. Its publishers say, hopefully: "Not since the
oxymoron, the palindrome or 'An Exaltation of Larks' has there
been a category of wordplay so likely to fire the public
imagination".

The most famous modern example of chiasmus must be that from the
inaugural speech of President John F Kennedy: "Ask not what your
country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country".
Collected here you will find examples among others also from
Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Queen
Elizabeth I, Aristotle, Victor Hugo, Francis Bacon, Anatole
France, Henry Kissinger, Immanuel Kant, Benjamin Franklin, William
Shakespeare, and Samuel Johnson (who demolished his ex-patron Lord
Chesterfield with the chiastic sally: "This man I thought had been
a Lord among wits; But, I find, he is only a wit among Lords!").

Regretfully, I must deny the publisher's enthusiasm and say that
this book does little for me. As an occasional flourish or fillip
as part of a longer discourse, and used with care, chiasmus is
useful and memorable. But its essence is its unexpectedness. Even
taking the author's advice to dip into this book only a little at
a time, to have hundreds of them presented to you at once is just
too much. They come rolling off the page, relentless in their
standard format, their conclusions so obviously signalled once the
first few words have been read.

And in the hands of a less than felicitous wordsmith, of which
there are, alas, many examples here, they clomp along to their
inevitable end lacking not only surprise but wit: "The
conservative leader often has to choose between those who are
loyal and not bright and those who are bright but not loyal".
Thud. But then that was said by Richard Nixon. The better ones
have sparkle and pizzazz: "It is better to be looked over than
overlooked". But then that was said by Mae West.

The section that stands out is that recording the use of chiasmus
as put-down. For example, Abraham Lincoln's comment on an article
on spiritualism is the model of tactful dismissiveness: "Well, for
those that like that sort of thing, I should think that is just
the sort of thing they should like". And the tailor of the English
playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, fed up with his bills not
being paid, pleaded, "At least you can pay me the interest on the
principal", which provoked the reply: "It is not my interest to
pay the principal; nor is it my principle to pay the interest".

[Grothe, Dr Mardy, _Never Let a Fool Kiss You, or a Kiss Fool
You_, Published in hardback by Viking in July 1999 at a quoted
price of $17.95. ISBN 0-670-87827-0.]


3. Turns of Phrase: Riskometer
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It all started out so helpfully. Dr Frank Duckworth of the Royal
Statistical Society (who with Tony Lewis invented the cricket
scoring system now in use in Britain) knew that people found it
extremely difficult to judge relative risks. So at the RSS annual
conference last week he presented a scale, similar to the Richter
scale for earthquakes, design to make the risk of various
activities more obvious. This has been described as a
'riskometer', a term which has been independently invented by
several people down the years in other contexts. Level 0 in the
scale is safety, at least to the extent of surviving for a year;
you reach Level 8 by playing Russian Roulette with every chamber
of the gun filled (a dead certainty, as you might say). What he
didn't allow for was the inability of people to understand the
logarithmic scale involved (thus making Level 4, for example, seem
too close to Level 6); nor did he expect vilification from so many
women, who pointed out that most of his examples were male
activities such as rock-climbing or deep-sea fishing (At the risk
of seeming sexist, I must say that he did provide some estimates
of household chores, such as dying while washing up or vacuuming -
these have a risk factor of 5.5.)

Perhaps the Society should consider initiating a debate about the
need for appropriate forms of national "riskometer", to provide
easily understood operational guidance to the public about
everyday risks, and to enable new risks as they arise to be
calibrated against familiar ones.
              [Professor Adrian Smith, 'Address of the President
               to The Royal Statistical Society', 12 June 1996]

The riskometer originated from a call by an ex-RSS president for a
scale to help the public grapple with bafflingly big figures and
Whitehall evasions like "a small but significantly raised risk".
                                      ['Guardian', July 1999]


4. In Brief: Goldilocks planet
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This neat bit of jargon was lurking in a newspaper article on the
search for extrasolar planets, those that orbit other stars. One
called a Goldilocks planet would have surface conditions similar
to those of Earth - not too cold, not too hot. It's an obvious
reference to the fairy story, but also to the older 'Goldilocks
economy', one which is growing at just the right speed.


5. Weird Words: Carphology
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The movements of delirious patients, as if searching for or
grasping at imaginary objects, or picking the bed-clothes.

Not a word that's likely to be in most people's vocabulary, nor
indeed one that often appears outside large dictionaries. It comes
from the Greek 'karphologia', a compound of the two words
'karphos', straw, and 'legeln', to collect. So it means to act as
though one was picking up bits of straw, a neat description of the
involuntary movements sometimes seen in delirious patients.
Brande's _Dictionary of Science_ of 1842 described it as "an
alarming symptom in many acute diseases". All the dictionaries I
know of that include 'carphology' also refer the reader to
'floccilation' (and usually the other way around, too, making one
of those infinite loops that sometimes turn up in even the most
scrupulously edited works). This is the Latin equivalent, formed
from 'floccus', to flock, in its sense of bringing or collecting
things together. There is an even rarer verb 'to floccillate',
meaning to twitch aimlessly, which I can't find in any dictionary
at all, though it does turn up in Samuel Beckett's _Watt_ of 1959.


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. I have more than once seen the corruption 'irregardless' used
in some standard writings and with a straight face. Has it become
acceptable? [Randall E Larson, Tuscon]

A. The word is thoroughly and consistently condemned in all
American references I can find. But it's also surprisingly common.
It's formed from 'regardless' by adding the negative prefix 'ir-';
as 'regardless' is already negative, the word is considered a
logical absurdity.

It's been around a while: the _Oxford English Dictionary_ quotes a
citation from Indiana that appeared in Harold Wentworth's
_American Dialect Dictionary_ of 1912. And it turns up even in the
better newspapers from time to time: as here from the _New York
Times_ of 8 February 1993: "Irregardless of the benefit to
children from what he calls his 'crusade to rescue American
education,' his own political miscalculations and sometimes
deliberate artlessness have greatly contributed to his present
difficulties".

But, as I say, it's still generally regarded by people with an
informed opinion on the matter as unacceptable. The Third Edition
of _The American Heritage Dictionary_ states firmly that "the
label 'nonstandard' does not begin to do justice to the status of
this word" and "it has no legitimate antecedents in either
standard or nonstandard varieties of English". Some writers even
try to turn it into a non-word, virtually denying its existence,
which is pretty hard to do in the face of the evidence. The level
of abuse hurled at the poor thing is astonishingly high, almost as
great as that once directed at 'hopefully'; it seems to have
become something of a grammatical shibboleth.

The word has a fine flow about it, with a stronger negative sense
than 'regardless' that some people obviously find attractive.
Notwithstanding the opinions of the experts, I suspect this will
cause it to become even more popular in the US in the future.
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Q. Is 'pom' short for Port of Melbourne (where the ships docked),
Prisoners Of her Majesty, as they were convict ships, or did we
all really look like a cargo of pomegranates when we caught the
sun?  Or is it simply rhyming slang for 'immigrant'? [Rosemary
Wetherall]

A. You've done a great job of listing many of the explanations
that one comes across of the origin of this Australian term for
British immigrants, though you could have added a derivation from
the common naval slang term for Portsmouth, 'Pompey', or from
'pommes' for potatoes, much eaten by British troops in World War
One, or an abbreviation for 'Permit of Migration'. All of them
except your last two, I have to tell you, are folk etymology
(which, for some reason I've never understood, loves to invent
origins based on acronyms).

Part of the reason for all these theories growing up is that there
was for years much doubt over the true origin of the expression,
with various Oxford dictionaries, for example, continuing to say
that there is no firm evidence for the 'pomegranate' theory. That
origin was described by D H Lawrence in his _Kangaroo_ of 1923:
"Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate,
pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to
immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country. Furthermore, immigrants
are known in their first months, before their blood 'thins down',
by their round and ruddy cheeks. So we are told". You will note
that he had to explain the pronunciation that we would now take to
be standard: in standard English it used not to have the first 'e'
sounded, with 'pome' often rhyming with 'home'.

It is now pretty well accepted that the pomegranate theory is
close to the truth, though there's a slight twist to take note of.
H J Rumsey wrote about it in 1920 in the introduction to his book
_The Pommies, or New Chums in Australia_. He suggested that the
word began life on the wharves in Melbourne as a form of rhyming
slang. An immigrant was at first called a 'Jimmy Grant' (was there
perhaps a famous real person by that name around at the time?),
but over time this shifted to 'Pommy Grant', perhaps as a
reference to 'pomegranate', because the new chums did burn in the
sun. Later 'pommy' became a word on its own. The pomegranate
theory was given some years earlier in _The Anzac Book_ of 1916.

Whatever your beliefs about this one, what seems to be true is
that the term is not especially old, dating from the end of the
nineteenth century at the earliest, certainly not so far back as
convict ship days.


7. Administration
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