World Wide Words -- 12 Jun 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 144           Saturday 12 June 1999
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>From Michael Quinion                        Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Sent every Saturday to more than 5,200 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: Electronic paper.
3. Book notice: Concise Oxford Dictionary, Tenth Edition.
4. In Brief: Filiarchy.
5. Weird Words: Brobdingnagian.
6. Q & A: Skell.
7. Beyond Words.
8. Administration.


1. Notes and feedback
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BOB. Enlarging on my note about 'bobby' perhaps having something
to do with the old verb 'to bob', meaning to strike a blow, Paul
Witheridge wrote to mention that he well remembers his British-
born grandmother say: "If your Bob doesn't give our Bob the bob
that your Bob owes our Bob, our Bob will give your Bob a bob in
the eye-bob!" Have fun teasing that out: of the many senses of
'bob', one is the slang term for the long-obsolete shilling.


2. Turns of Phrase: Electronic paper
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The late Isaac Asimov once gave a lecture describing the ultimate
data storage and display medium, which would require no power to
operate or maintain its image, could display text or pictures (in
colour if necessary), permit random access to its data, cause no
problems with future obsolescence of its recording system, and
would easily fit into a jacket pocket. Only at the end did he
reveal that he was describing - the book. At least two groups of
American researchers are currently working towards combining all
the best features of that most versatile and durable device with
those of the standard computer display. After several years' work,
they have produced prototypes of a medium almost as flexible and
thin as paper, but which can be repeatedly erased and rewritten
with data from computer storage and which requires no power to
maintain its image indefinitely. Unsurprisingly, this new stuff
has been dubbed electronic paper, a term which goes back at least
to the mid nineties, though the term 'digital paper' has also been
used. As you might imagine, the writing mechanism is called
'electronic ink'. At the moment, the display is limited to
monochrome, but researchers are predicting that by 2006 they will
have mastered the technique of displaying not only colour images
but video as well.

As increasing amounts of information are held and presented in the
electronic medium, it is an appropriate time to reflect on whether
'electronic paper' is a realistic proposition now or in the
future.
              [Roger Gimson, _Electronic paper - can it be real?_,
                      Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, 1995]

Sheridon and his team have already made square tiles of electronic
paper 30 centimetres across containing an embedded processor that
allows them to display a different image every second.
                                       [_New Scientist_, May 1999]


3. Book notice: Concise Oxford Dictionary, Tenth Edition
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The making of dictionaries may seem to be the ultimate in ivory-
towered academic pursuits, but it has become one of the toughest
and most competitive sections of the publishing business. In the
four years since the Ninth Edition came out, the offerings of
competing publishers, as well as Oxford's own new work published
last year, the _New Oxford Dictionary of English_, or NODE, have
shown up the _Concise_ as old-fashioned and insular, burdened as
it is with editorial decisions going back nearly a century.

So the Tenth Edition comes as a surprise, a break with the past.
The editors have made it in effect the concise version of NODE.
The design is cleaner and less fussy, making it easier to navigate
and also, very usefully, reducing the space needed for each
headword. Some usage notes have been added. Balancing losses have
been the appendices that used to give information on currencies,
the Beaufort wind scale, the Greek alphabet and the like. The
Ninth Edition gave pronunciations (in IPA) for virtually all
words; in the Tenth they are present only for difficult words. The
biggest change has been to the vocabulary - the emphasis has
shifted so that it is now much more a dictionary of World English.
Hundreds of standard terms from other national varieties of the
language have been added, to the extent that almost a fifth of the
entries now come from outside Britain.

Angus Stevenson, an associate editor of the new edition, explained
that space for all these new terms has been found by taking out a
lot of the more transparent compounds - like 'beach ball', 'hen
house' or 'dinner time' - that readers could reasonably be
expected to work out from their component parts. A few transiently
fashionable terms such as 'cowabunga' and 'ghostbuster' have also
gone, though a few rarer or older words beloved of word gamers and
crossword puzzlers have been included, such as 'manducate', "to
eat or chew". And the expected crop of newer terms, like 'Viagra',
'learned helplessness', 'docusoaps', 'upsizing', 'quad bike',
'biopiracy', and 'splatterpunk' are included for the first time.
Mr Stevenson emphasised that the core vocabulary of British
English is still there unchanged. "The emphasis has been on making
the dictionary as vocabulary-rich as possible within the limits of
space," he said. The result is a book the same size as the Ninth
Edition, but with about 2000 extra headwords, bringing the count
up to some 65,000.

The product is a dictionary which Angus Stevenson argues is still
as useful to British English users as the _Concise_ has ever been,
but one that will be equally helpful to speakers of other national
varieties of English. It will also help speakers of British
English understand the large number of terms from other Englishes
that reach them through films, television and books. As Catherine
Soanes, another of the editors, said: "What is fascinating is how,
partly because of the media and the Internet, World English is
increasingly reaching back to influence the vocabulary used in
Britain itself".

[Pearsall, Judy [ed.], _The Concise Oxford Dictionary_, Tenth
Edition, 1666pp, published worldwide on 9 June by the Oxford
University Press; the British price is given as GBP16.99. ISBN
0-19-860259-6.]


4. In Brief: Filiarchy
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A term, roughly translatable as "rule by rugrats", coined by the
American marketing guru Professor James McNeal in his book _Kids
as Customers_ to describe the purchasing power of pre-teens. He
has recently gone on record as arguing that children begin to put
pressure on family purchases from as early as two years of age,
and that they now influence more than $500 billion of sales a
year, making them an important target group for advertisers.


5. Weird Words: Brobdingnagian
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Of or relating to a gigantic person or thing.

It is given to only a limited number of people to add a word to
the language, or at least to have been given the credit for doing
so. But Jonathan Swift originated eight words in his most famous
and enduring book, _Gulliver's Travels_, of 1726.

The second part of the book, in which Lemuel Gulliver meets the
huge inhabitants of Brobdingnag, has bequeathed us this awkward
adjective; these days it can be used for anything huge, not just
people. Here's a typical example of its use, from _The Warlord of
Mars_ by Edgar Rice Burroughs: "When compared to the relatively
small red man and his breed of thoats they assume Brobdingnagian
proportions that are truly appalling".

His satirical descriptions of the political vices and follies of
the miniature people of Lilliput suggested 'Lilliputian' for
people who may be small either in stature or in mind. That race's
tedious and irrelevant arguments over which is the right end from
which to eat an egg have led to 'big-endian' and 'little-endian'
for controversies over nothing at all; both terms have been taken
up in recent decades by computer scientists to describe ways of
organising digital data.

One of the more common of all his invented words from the book is
'yahoo' for the race of brutes in the shape of men in a later part
of the book, which has survived as an abusive term for any person
considered uncivilised. The race of intelligent horses in the same
section also gave us the rare 'houyhnhnm', which Swift invented to
echo the sound of a neigh. Yet another unusual one is 'Struldbrug'
(with its even less common adjective 'Struldbruggian'), for the
race of people, unable to die, who survive in a state of senseless
decrepitude, a fate which has become one of the great fears of
modern life. Yet another rarity is 'Laputan', in reference to the
flying island of Laputa whose inhabitants were addicted to
visionary projects; hence its modern meaning of something so
inventive or imaginative as to be absurd.


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 so limited. If I can do
so, a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site.]
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Q. Do you know the origin and spelling of the police slang word
pronounced 'skel' (often heard on ABC's _NYPD Blue_ TV show in the
USA) which seems to be used to refer to street crooks, thugs, or
con men. [William B McMillan]

A. The word is usually spelled 'skell', and it's defined in my
books as referring to a homeless person, vagrant or derelict,
though others have mentioned that there is some idea of small-
scale villainy attached to it. It's an odd word with a mysterious
history. In its modern form it's first recorded only from the
1970s in the US, most especially from New York, though it is
almost certainly older.

The origin is supposed by some lexicographers to be a bit of
English low-life slang or cant of the seventeenth century, the
verb and noun 'skelder'. This described a person who worked as a
professional beggar, especially someone who falsely pretended to
be a wounded former soldier to gain sympathy; more generally, it
could be used for a swindler or cheat. The first recorded use is
by Ben Jonson, from his play _Poetaster_ of 1601: "An honest
decayed commander, cannot skelder, cheat, nor be seene in a bawdie
house".

It has been suggested that the word came into English from the
Dutch 'schelm', pronounced /skElm/, for a villain or rogue, though
where the additional 'd' in 'skelder' came from is not explained.
The original Dutch word itself turns up in English at the same
period and with the same sense and pronunciation, but with the
Anglicised spelling of 'skelm'. Both it and 'skelder' are long
obsolete in British English, but South African readers may know
'skelm' as a term for a scoundrel, which came through Afrikaans
from the same Dutch source. (If you're familiar with the Scots
'skelly', "cross-eyed", you may think you've found a relative, but
that has a quite different source, coming from an Old Norse word
for "wry, oblique"; it's possible that 'scallywag' has some
connection, but nobody can be sure; the northern English 'scally',
"a roguish, disruptive, self-assured young person" is an
abbreviation of 'scallywag'.)

I have to say that others disagree with this whole provenance,
arguing that the modern American slang term is nothing more than
an abbreviated form of 'skeleton', in reference perhaps to the
emaciated forms of many vagrants.


7. Beyond Words
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The Feedback column of the _New Scientist_ on 8 May told of an
advertisement that appeared in the Lonely Hearts section of a
northern English newspaper recently: "Professional man, 45, head
on a stick, seeks similar woman". Investigation revealed that the
copytaker had creatively reinterpreted what the advertiser had
actually dictated, which was "hedonistic".


8. Administration
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