World Wide Words -- 19 Jun 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 145           Saturday 19 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: Techgnosis.
3. In Brief: Downgrade.
4. Topical Words: Pagan.
5. Weird Words: Acrophony.
6. Q & A: To hang fire; Bohemian; Countryside.
7. Administration.


1. Notes and feedback
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MAN-HATER. Cary Birdwell responded to my Q&A item in the issue of
1 May to argue that there's another way to look at the opposite of
misogynist, "woman-hater": not "woman-lover", but "man-hater". The
latter could be Greeked as 'misandronist', using 'andros' for man
instead of 'gunos', woman. It is very rare: no dictionary that I
know of includes it, but I've found a few examples online. It
seems to be from the more extreme end of the feminist spectrum.

SHAGGY DOG STORY. Following a Q&A exchange on the origin of the
term 'shaggy dog story', I've now got my hands on a copy of Eric
Partridge's little monograph of 1953, _The 'Shaggy Dog' Story, Its
Origin, Development and Nature_, which was almost, but not quite,
as unhelpful as I had feared. He suggests that the origin arose as
the result of a story about a shaggy dog, which he reproduces. I
shall save space here by putting a summary of it on the Words Web
site as an update to the original answer, which you will find at
<http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-sha1.htm>.


2. Turns of Phrase: Techgnosis
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This word was invented by Erik Davis in an article in 1994 and
used as the title of his 1998 book, subtitled 'Myth, Magic and
Mysticism in the Age of Information'. His is not the easiest book
to read or summarise - _Publisher's Weekly_ called it a "deluge of
information and theory" - because he ranges very widely over
spirituality and its interaction with technology. He argues that
for many Net users there's a spiritual component to their links
with it, and that valid comparisons can be made with earlier
technological developments that also became metaphors for our view
of the world. He cites the example of the Extropians, a sect in
California which believes it may one day be possible to download
the essence of the human mind into a computer and so achieve
immortality, and suggests this has elements in common with the
Christian belief in the afterlife. He argues this spiritual
feeling is a high-tech update of 'gnosis', an early Christian
belief, hence his title and the word 'techgnosis' for its modern
equivalent. The topic is 'techgnostics' and someone who studies
the subject is a 'techgnostic'. With an internal capital,
_TechGnosis_, it's the trading name of an American computer
company.

The moment you have that notion that we are really information
instead of bodies or souls, then you have that possibility of
techgnosis.
                                  [Erik Davis, _Techgnosis_, 1998]

Davis suggests that 'techgnosis' is a kind of information age
update of gnosticism, a Christian heresy in which believers
rejected the world of matter and yearned for gnosis, a flash of
transcendent illumination in which individuals cast off the body
and ascended to the real world of the spirit.
                                           [_Guardian_, Dec. 1998]


3. In Brief: Downgrade
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This word, both verb and noun, has turned up in the computer world
recently as the opposite of 'upgrade'. In this situation it refers
to the replacement of current versions of computer software by
older versions with fewer facilities. It's an idea that's been
seriously put forward by users fed up with buggy, slow, over-
complex and virus-prone software, who want to return to software
that is simple, fast and easy to use.


4. Topical Words: Pagan
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In his parish newsletter, the Reverend David Leaver, curate at the
parish church at Wilmslow in Cheshire, accused local people last
week of being more interested in worldly goods and status than in
the care of their souls. He said Wilmslow people were "as pagan as
any group of people I have ever met".

In every sense, 'pagan' is a fighting word. To search out its
origins we have to delve into Roman military slang. In Latin, one
meaning of the word 'pagus' was that of a country district or a
rural area. From this came 'paganus', a country dweller or
villager, the opposite of 'urbanus', someone who lived in a town.
Then as now, many townspeople felt themselves superior to those
from the countryside, which is why the latter has spawned 'urbane'
but why 'pagus' has given us 'peasant', by way of the French
'pays' and 'paisant'. For the urban Roman, 'paganus' had much the
same undertones as 'peasant' has for us now.

Roman soldiers, who called themselves 'miles', used 'paganus' as a
belittling slangy term for somebody not in the army, a civilian.
The early Christians in Rome thought of themselves as soldiers of
Christ, taking seriously St Paul's instruction to put on the whole
armour of God. They adopted the same vocabulary as Roman soldiers
- 'miles' for one of their number and 'paganus' for a person who
wasn't a Christian.

'Pagan' isn't just a fighting word, it's also a slippery one, at
least to judge from the attempts of various dictionaries to get
across what it means.

Oxford dictionaries have variations on "a person not subscribing
to any of the main religions of the world", which leaves open the
question of what is a main religion, who decides what is or isn't
one, and whether those not subscribing to any of them have a say
in the matter. _Chambers Dictionary_ defines the word as referring
to someone who holds pre-Christian beliefs, especially those that
involve the worship of more than one god. This neatly reinterprets
the word for our modern and sensitive, PC generation, albeit
ignoring about a millennium of usage.

Others attempt multiple definitions that often include something
like "a heathen; a barbarous or unenlightened person". 'Heathen'
is a Germanic word that means exactly the same as 'pagan', since
it originally referred to a person who lived on a heath, a
upcountry and wild bit of land, and so was uncultured or savage.
It took on its religious sense from 'pagan'. Using it to define
'pagan' is a circularity that inquiring minds can do without.

Other dictionaries try meanings for 'pagan' such as "a person who
has no religion or disregards Christian beliefs", or "someone who
has little or no religion and who delights in sensual pleasures
and material goods; an irreligious or hedonistic person". This is
where we arrive at Mr Leaver's sense of the word, for he can
hardly regard his parishioners as non-Christians, however much
they backslide.

Taking a global view, 'pagan' can't easily be employed these days
because it is bound to be unnecessarily offensive to many people
and because its meaning is so imprecise. Despite Mr Leaver, it
seems safe to use 'pagan' only for those long dead.


5. Weird Words: Acrophony
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The use of a word starting with a letter of the alphabet as the
name of the letter.

We don't do this in English, as the names of our letters of the
alphabet are just invented words that convey the sound indicated
by the letter. But in some languages the names of letters are
words that have a meaning of their own. The best-known cases are
Classical Greek and Hebrew. In Hebrew, for example, the first four
letters of the alphabet are 'aleph', which is also the Hebrew word
for ox, 'beth' - house, 'gimel' - camel, and 'daleth' - door. It's
as though our children's alphabet, A for Apple, B for Ball, C for
Cat, were transformed into the actual names for the letters, so
that 'A' wouldn't be called or said 'ay', but 'apple'. It used to
be thought this wasn't a coincidence, that the letters of the
Hebrew alphabet had evolved from hieroglyphs that pictured the
objects; as the hieroglyphs had evolved into letters, the names
had been carried over with them. This is now not thought to be the
case. The word combines the Greek prefix 'acro-' meaning "head;
uppermost", with '-phony', "sound", hence "the sound of the
initial letter".


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. Can you tell me the origin of the expression 'to hang fire'? A
friend in the States came across the expression in an article on
the Reuters online news service: "NATO warplanes were stepping up
air strikes on Yugoslavia as peace efforts, which seemed all but
successful a few days ago, hung fire". [Joy Burrough-Boenisch, The
Netherlands]

A. Unlike so many expressions, this one is well understood. It
dates from a time when firearms were loaded using a gunpowder
charge poured from a flask, which was then ignited by a spark from
a flint striking against an iron plate. Gunpowder was notoriously
unreliable, partly because it varied a great deal in quality, but
also because the slightest damp stopped it igniting properly. When
this happened, the powder in the firearm smouldered instead of
exploding and was said to 'hang fire'. (This was highly dangerous,
as you may imagine, because the remainder of the powder might
explode at any time, perhaps while its owner was trying to clean
the gun out and reload it.) So 'to hang fire' became an expression
for some event that was slow in acting or of a person hesitating,
usually with the inference that a matter of some importance was
involved.
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Q. I would like to know how the word 'bohemian' came to mean
someone or some idea that is offbeat. [Annlasa]

A. It comes to us through French, in which language the word has
long been applied to gypsies, who were at one time thought to come
from Bohemia, or at least to have entered Europe through that
country. This is just the same way our gypsies were so named,
because they were thought to have come from Egypt ('gypsy' being a
corrupted form of 'Egyptian'). In the nineteenth century, the word
shifted sense in French to mean somebody who was a vagabond, or a
person of irregular life and habits, an obvious enough extension
of meaning if you accepted the then common disparaging view of
gypsies. This sense was introduced into English by Thackeray in
_Vanity Fair_ in 1848: "She was of a wild, roving nature,
inherited from father and mother, who were both Bohemians, by
taste and circumstances". The word quickly came to be applied with
special reference to an artist, writer or actor who despised
conventionality. By 1862, the _Westminster Review_ was able to say
that "The term 'Bohemian' has come to be very commonly accepted in
our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gipsey,
no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits ...
A Bohemian is simply an artist or litterateur who, consciously or
unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art".
Our modern senses are based on that idea.
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Q. If a mountainside is the side of a mountain, the seaside is
beside the sea and a riverside is beside a river, what is the
countryside beside? [Peter Smith]

A. Originally it referred to an element of open landscape. Since
flatness is rare in the country, most of it can be thought of as
being on one side or the other of some natural feature, such as a
hill or a valley. So the term originally meant a rural feature
that had a natural unity and was on one side of, such a feature.
This fits with the older sense of 'country' as being some tract of
land that had well-defined limits or boundaries. In the nineteenth
century, 'countryside' became fashionable among descriptive
writers following the Wordsworthian discovery of the aesthetic
value of landscape, and its sense shifted to mean not one part or
section of the visible terrain, but the natural or rural landscape
as a whole.


7. Administration
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