World Wide Words -- 31 Jul 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 151           Saturday 31 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: Retail anthropologist.
3. Article: Decadial Dismay.
4. Weird Words: Umami.
5. Q & A: Stone the crows.
6. Endnote.
7. Administration.


1. Notes and feedback
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IRREGARDLESS. After my Q&A piece last week, several professional
linguists wrote to support my implied criticism of those who
object so vigorously to this word. Prof Laurence Horn pointed out
that such duplication of negative affixes is actually quite common
in English. Few users query words such as 'debone' and 'unravel'
because they are so familiar. There were even more such words,
especially in the 16th and 17th centuries: 'undauntless',
'unboundless', 'uneffectless', 'unfathomless' and many others.
Prof Jascha Kessler added that as the stress on 'regardless' is on
'gar', this makes it sound insufficiently negative, despite the '-
less' suffix. The special dislike for 'irregardless' from the
group that one writer called the 'rabid prescriptivists' among
grammarians has much to do with the notion that in language 'two
negatives make a positive': putting two negatives together cancels
both out. This has long been the basis for condemnation of
statements like 'I never said nothing to nobody', which aren't
standard British or American English these days. But in many other
languages - and in many local or dialectal forms of English both
today and in earlier times - multiple negatives are intensifiers.

CORRECTIONS. (Book review) Richard Brinsley Sheridan, though he
spent all his working life in London, was born in Dublin and so
should more accurately have been described as Irish ... (Weird
Words) 'floccus' is not a Latin verb, but the noun meaning a bit
of wool or straw (hence the Roman idiom 'flocci non facio', for 'I
don't care a straw for ...'); it has bequeathed us the sense of
'flock' that refers to finely-chopped cotton or wool, as in flock
wallpaper - nothing to do with a gathering of sheep.

SMALL PLEA. Pressure of work means that I look at messages to Q&A
less frequently than I should. If you want to comment on a mailing
you should use <words at quinion.com>, which I monitor intensively.


2. Turns of Phrase: Retail anthropologist
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You can't even go shopping now without being watched and studied.
This term has turned up in several places recently, but in every
case it can be traced back to the same retail consultancy firm in
New York, Envirosell, so it's probably a clever piece of PR rather
than a genuine addition to the vocabulary. The founder of the
firm, the self-styled 'retail anthropologist' Paco Underhill,
calls it the science of shopping, which just happens to be the
subtitle of his recent book, _Why We Buy_. The idea is that
observing shoppers as though they were members of an alien culture
develops insights that can help stores persuade people to spend
more. Simple things can pay dividends - display shirt and tie
combinations, because men hate shopping and want it made as simple
as possible; don't put expensive merchandise just inside a shop
doorway because this is where shoppers are adjusting to the
ambience of the place and aren't noticing things; place goods so
shoppers have plenty of room to inspect them without being bumped
by passers-by in the aisles; organise displays to take account of
the way that people unconsciously navigate a store - in general
respond to the psychology of the customer.

Paco Underhill, retail anthropologist and passionate shoppers'
advocate, gave me a withering look. Macy's, the look said, wasn't
doing its job, and he was mad about it.
                                      [_New York Times_, May 1999]

According to 'retail anthropologists', who base their findings on
hours of videotapes of shoppers, the percentage of shoppers who
buy some items if they pick up a basket: 75.
                              [_Independent on Sunday_, July 1999]


3. Article: Decadial Dismay
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Puzzled enquiries and arguments about what you call the first
decade of the next century have been appearing in various online
and print forums for some time now.

This has been exercising the minds of the British public relations
consultancy QBO as well, because they need to refer to the coming
decade in advertising campaigns and were literally lost for words.
So they did what every organisation in Britain now does when they
need an answer to a troubling question: they commissioned a poll.

The results were about as strange as you might expect from such an
exercise. Some 33% of those questioned said they favoured 'the
zeroes'; in second place was the 'oh-ohs' and third place was
occupied by the 'earlies'. There were also small pockets of
support for my own favourite, the 'naughties', as well as for the
more idiosyncratic coinages of the 'beginnings' and the
'peacefuls'. However, these turn out not to be examples of terms
that people are actually using, or even of new words that were
created on the fly during questioning, but of choices that people
made from a list given them by the interviewers.

Hardly riveting conclusions, you may say, the almost inevitable
result of applying the principle of the focus group to language.
Frothy stuff on another level, too: after all, we have managed to
get through the first decades of the eighteenth, nineteenth and
twentieth centuries without a word for them, so why should one be
needed now? (The option of not calling the decade anything was
unsurprisingly left out of the QBO survey.) If a word is needed
you can be sure one will appear, possibly something surprising
that will add to the language.

One option that was seriously suggested in alt.usage.english some
time ago was the rather odd-sounding 'the oughts' or 'the aughts'.
'Ought' was indeed at one time used for zero. It was an uneducated
form of 'nought', from the mistaken belief that 'a nought' was
actually 'an ought'. It was still common in the nineteenth century
(you may recall Mr Micawber's famous dictum, "Annual income twenty
pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result
misery") and in short forms of years in the first decade of that
century ('ought eight' for 1808). But it doesn't ever seem to have
been applied to the decade. As the word is now defunct in this
sense in any case, it hardly seems appropriate to resurrect it
(though we could try the 'noughts', another option seemingly left
out of the survey).

What is so troubling about this failure to grasp the linguistic
nettle is that somebody will force us to go through the whole sad
business again in about ten years' time, since English lacks a
word for the next decade as well. The 'teens', perhaps, or the
'oncers'?

But we do seem to have settled how we should say the next few
years. Perhaps under the premature influence of Kubrick's movie
_2001: A Space Odyssey_, we have mostly decided to say that year
as 'two thousand and one'. The proportion of us which prefers
'twenty oh one' is very small, according to some ad-hoc listening
I've been doing, even though it might seem to be the logical
choice after the pattern of previous centuries. It has been
suggested that usage is going to shift on this one: as we get well
into the ... the whatevers ... and become used to years with
noughts in them, we shall start to hear, and use, 'twenty oh
three' and their kin.

Those of us whose ears are permanently cocked for such shifts in
usage will be listening hard.


4. Weird Words: Umami
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The fifth taste.

It's usually said that the human tongue can detect only four basic
tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and that all tastes are
combinations of these. Many specialists now believe that taste is
actually more complicated than this, with the taste buds being
helped along by sense of smell, by the feel of substances in the
mouth and even by the noise that food makes when we chew it.

In recent years some workers have added a fifth taste, 'umami', to
the other four, though western food scientists are divided about
whether it really exists or not. It has been suggested that the
taste is triggered by compounds of some amino acids, such as
glutamates or aspartates, especially the flavour-enhancing
substance monosodium glutamate.

Both the word and the concept are Japanese, and in Japan are of
some antiquity. 'Umami' is hard to translate, to judge by the
number of English words that have been suggested as equivalents,
such as 'savoury', 'essence', 'pungent', 'deliciousness', and
'meaty'. It's sometimes associated with a feeling of perfect
quality in a taste, or of some special emotional circumstance in
which a taste is experienced. It is also said to involve all the
senses, not just that of taste. There's more than a suggestion of
a spiritual or mystical quality about the word.


5. 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 heard the expression 'stone the crows' as one of
incredulity, but do not know its origin. Can you help? [Heather
Hanley, Rhode Island]

A. In the fifties I regularly heard the late Tony Hancock use
'stone me!' as a term of astonished disgust in his BBC radio
comedy _Hancock's Half Hour_. It sounded so much part of his
London character that I am surprised to find that 'stone the
crows' is attested in the dictionaries as being Australian in
origin. It seems there were a number of similar expressions around
in the early decades of the twentieth century, such as 'starve the
mopokes', 'stiffen the crows', 'speed the wombats', 'spare the
crows', and 'starve the bardies' ('mopokes' is a variant of
'moreporks', an imitative name for a small brown native owl;
'bardies' are a kind of edible grub). From this spread of terms,
it seems they were all variations on a basic theme, fuelled by the
Australian love of playing with language. The original intention
may have been to suggest an action that was as exotic as the event
that provoked the cry. In its popularity and speed of mutation it
has parallels with the craze for catchphrases like 'bees knees',
fashionable in America in the twenties, which also generated lots
of creative variations in a short period, now mostly forgotten.
But where exactly 'stone the crows' comes from, it seems nobody
can say for sure.


6. Endnote
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Political correctness hits children's crayons. The American firm
Binney & Smith, makers of Crayola, has just announced that the
colour once called Indian Red will now be called Chestnut instead.
They claim to have had 100,000 suggestions for the replacement
colour, including Prairie Dog, Baseball Mitt Brown, Ginger Spice,
Adobe, and Barn Red. (My private prize goes to the wise guy who
suggested "The Crayon Formerly Known as Indian Red".) The company
claims to have renamed only two other crayons in its history: they
changed Flesh to Peach in recognition that not everybody is that
funny colour, and amended Prussian Blue to Midnight Blue because
teachers kept telling them that children no longer understood
German history. See the announcement at <http://education.crayola.
com/indianred/home.html>.


7. Administration
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