World Wide Words -- 26 Jun 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 146           Saturday 26 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. Topical Words: Carnage.
3. In Brief: Mesicopter.
4. Weird Words: Bruxer.
5. Q & A: Take the mickey, Get my goat, Patient, Spitting image.
6. Beyond Words.
7. Administration.


1. Notes and feedback
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MAN-HATER. The discussion continues on a suitable Greek word for
this condition. Several readers who are better Greek scholars than
I am - a state easy to achieve - have pointed out that my comment
last week was less than adequate. As I said in the piece I wrote
back in February, if you want a word from Greek that means a man-
hater, you could try 'misandrist'. Terry Walsh told me that the
alternative I gave last week was way off beam: "misandronist, if
it means anything, means someone who is against the idea of there
being rooms or clubs reserved for men, which is derived from
'andron', the men's room in an ancient Greek house, into which
women could not go" (a potentially useful word, but not the one we
were looking for).

PAGAN. And thanks also to all those who pointed out that for some
people today 'pagan' is a positive and affirming word, something
that came forcefully to notice at Stonehenge last Monday, when
large numbers of self-described pagans arrived to celebrate the
summer solstice. Many of them believe in what at one time was
called the old religion or witchcraft, but which is now commonly
called Wicca. The more formal term is 'neo-pagan', but that often
gets abbreviated.

ACROPHONY. Several people wrote to ask whether this word covers
the phonetic alphabets used in radio communications, such as A
Alpha, B Bravo, C Charlie, so that one might spell out a sequence
as Foxtrot Zulu Tango, meaning FZT. It's an interesting thought,
but these are really phonetic markers for letters, and not names
for the letters themselves. But you could argue that they're at
least partway along the road towards it.

MAIL BACKLOG. The last couple of weeks have been excessively busy
here, as the number of unanswered messages testifies. If you're
still waiting for a reply, my apologies.


2. Topical Words: Carnage
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Flipping through the _Independent on Sunday_ last weekend, I found
a reference to "the cost of cleaning up the carnage left in the
City of London by violent clashes between anarchist demonstrators
and police". Hang on a minute, I thought, piles of dead bodies
scattered about the streets? Why haven't we been told?

But as I read on, it became clear I'd been duped by some
overwrought journalistic language. Stones and concrete blocks had
been thrown at police, one motorist had been drenched in bleach
for reasons unknown, but casualties had actually been rather
light. Nobody dead and only a few injured, though a lot of damage
done.

So are we to run the risk of losing yet another useful word from
our language, just because a sloppy and time-pressed writer wanted
an emotive term to pack out a minor update to an oldish story? I
very much hope not, but the auguries are not good. And yet
'carnage' is one of the most powerful words in the language - my
thesaurus offers me the alternatives of 'bloodshed', 'slaughter',
'massacre', 'butchery' and 'bloodbath'.

'Carnage' derives from Latin 'caro', meaning flesh or meat, which
was the source of the medieval Latin 'carnaticum' for the
slaughter of animals and for the meat that resulted. In particular
it referred to the ration of flesh that tenants had to provide to
their feudal lords. This word moved through Italian and French to
appear in English as the figurative term carnage. It was first
used by Philemon Holland early in the seventeenth century, to
evoke an image of the bloody butcher's shop transferred to the
hand-to-hand hack and slash of the battlefield. He employed it in
translations of various Latin and Greek authors, but it was only
taken up by other writers many years later.

Some other words derived from 'caro' are obvious enough, like
'carnivore' for a meat-eating animal; 'carrion' for the dead flesh
of animals; and 'charnel house', a place in which dead bodies were
placed. But would you put that attractive flower the carnation in
the same group? One theory is that it was named in the sixteenth
century because its flowers were a pink that reminded people of
the colour of flesh. But it might just be linguistic confusion, as
it had earlier had the name 'coronation', perhaps because it had
been used in chaplets or because its flowers looked like little
crowns. And 'carnival', another odd word derived from 'caro', came
to be so named because such festivities were originally held in
the period leading up to Ash Wednesday, the start of the season of
Lent in which meat was not eaten ('carnival' means to put away
flesh).

But none of these evoke an image of a demonstrator throwing a
brick at a policeman. Long may 'carnage' remain so.


3. In Brief: Mesicopter
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This is a miniature helicopter, currently being designed at
Stanford University. It's small enough to be held in the palm of
the hand, with four tiny rotors at the corners. The idea is that
they would be manufactured in quantity, like mechanical insects,
to carry sensors. Suggested uses are to carry instruments into
tornadoes or to help explore Mars. The word is formed from the
Greek word 'mesos', meaning middle or intermediate, on the model
of 'helicopter'.


4. Weird Words: Bruxer
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Someone who habitually and involuntarily grinds their teeth.

You may be one of these, since it's been estimated that about one
in four people do grind their teeth. There's some continuing
controversy in the dental profession over the extent to which it
is a natural action rather than a condition needing treatment;
many animals regularly grind their teeth as a way of sharpening
them (a process called thegosis) and some experts argue that a
proportion of human tooth-grinding may be an evolutionary hangover
from this. But many bruxers grind their teeth excessively, often
through stress or nervous tension, usually while they're asleep so
they aren't aware they're doing it. This is bad, as it wears away
tooth enamel, can cause cracks in teeth, and often leads to sore
and tired facial and jaw muscles. One way to resolve the problem
is to make a plastic guard, sometimes called a bruxing appliance,
to relieve the symptoms at night. The term is dental surgeons'
jargon, more often found in the US than in the UK; dictionaries
generally don't include it, though the base term for the concept,
bruxism (where 'brux' rhymes with 'flux'), has been around since
the 1930s and is well established. It's modern Greek, derived from
'brukhein', to gnash the teeth.


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. While I was an exchange student in England, I heard the phrase
'to take the Mickey', meaning "to tease".  Do you know where this
expression comes from? Does it have something to do with disdain
for the Irish? Is it a euphemism for 'to take the piss'? [Lisa
Russell-Pinson]

A. It is, yes. It dates from at least the 1930s in various forms;
the oldest version recorded in print, from 1935, is 'to take the
mike out of', as in this from a book with the title _Cockney
Cavalcade_: "He wouldn't let Pancake 'take the mike' out of him".
It's said to have its origin in the rhyming slang 'to take the
mickey bliss', that means to take the piss. Mickey as a diminutive
form of Michael has been common for many years, but how it got
together with 'bliss' is unknown, so we've no idea whether it is a
reference to an Irish Mick. As the form first recorded is already
elliptical, either the rhyming slang is actually older than the
1930s or some other source has to be looked for. In the 1950s a
mock-genteel version 'to extract the Michael' became briefly
fashionable.
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Q. My new puppy has really 'gotten my goat', and I was wondering
how the heck that phrase came to be?  [Selinda Chiquoine]

A. It's a perplexing expression right enough. Though the phrase is
recorded from near the beginning of the twentieth century, nobody
seems to know where it came from. It was Jack London who seems to
have put it in print first, in his book _Smoke Bellew_ of 1912,
though he used it two years earlier in a letter: "Honestly, I
believe I've got Samuels' goat! He's afraid to come back". But
other examples show that it was pretty widely known around that
date, so either it had been lurking in the language for some time,
or it had suddenly burst on the scene as a result of some event or
situation not now recallable.

The most common story to explain the phrase relates to American
horse racing. It is said to have once been common to put a goat in
with a skittish thoroughbred racehorse to help calm it before a
race; enterprising villains capitalised on this by gambling on the
horse to lose and then stealing the goat. I would suggest that a
fair measure of suspension of disbelief is needed to accept that
story at face value. Other people have tried to identify it in
some way with 'scapegoat', have seen it as a variant form of
'goad', and have linked it with an old French phrase 'prendre la
che`vre' (to take the goat). But evidence is lacking for all of
them.
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Q. Can you tell me the origin of the word 'patient'? [Henry de
Souza]

A. I take it you mean the medical sense? Actually, the noun
meaning a person who is being treated for some illness or injury
is closely related to the adjective relating to a capacity for
calm waiting. The original is the Latin verb 'pati', to suffer
(from which we also get passion and passive, by the way), through
the participle form 'patientem', for one who is suffering. In
Latin this word took on the extra sense of somebody who suffers
their afflictions with calmness and composure, hence longsuffering
or forbearing, all ideas intimately tied up with our word
'patience'. The medical sense of the word was present in English
right from its first recorded use by Chaucer near the end of the
fourteenth century. Down the years, the adjective and the noun
have moved apart somewhat in meaning, so hearing a person
described as being patient doesn't now immediately evoke medical
associations.
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Q. Any idea as to the origin of the expression 'spitting image'?
[Henrik Soderstrom, Spain]

A. Several phrases have been used down the years to indicate that
one person is the exact likeness of another: 'spitten image',
'spit and image', 'the very spit of', 'dead spit for'. There are
two main theories about this, both of which suggest that our
modern phrase is, via one or other of these forms, a corruption of
'spit and image'. This contains the even older 'spit' which
existed by itself in phrases like "He's the very spit of his
father". The dispute comes over the origin of 'spit'. One view is
that it's the same as our usual meaning of liquid ejected from the
mouth, perhaps meaning that one person is as like the other as
though he'd been spat out by him. But another view is that 'spit'
here is an abbreviation of 'spirit', suggesting that someone is so
similar to another as to be identical in mind as well as body.


6. Beyond Words
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>From an advertisement in the _New Scientist_ of 1 May: "The two
students will be working together in collaboration with each
other". Even jointly, perhaps?

The same journal revealed that a local primary school somewhere in
England has the following timetable: "09.40 to 10.30 - Literacy
Hour; 10.45 to 12.00 - Numeracy Hour". Now that's education!


7. Administration
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