World Wide Words -- 13 Mar 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 135          Saturday 13 March 1999
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>From Michael Quinion                        Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Sent every Saturday to more than 4,500 subscribers in 83 countries
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/>   E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
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Contents
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1. Feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Aerobot.
3. In Brief: Pump and dump.
4. Weird Words: Bloviate.
5. Q & A: Put on dog, Talk turkey, Bunny rabbit, Charley horse.
6. Beyond Words.
7. Administration.


1. Feedback
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OPEN FOR BUSINESS. It was quiet this week, after my comment last
week about being overwhelmed. Perhaps I should have said that
comments are always welcome, even in times of crisis. All is now
well. And the Q&A section is open again, but under new rules.

SURVEY. It was so quiet, I felt able to send out the survey, under
the assumption that about 10% of subscribers would bother to reply
and that answers would trickle in over several days. When I logged
on next morning and found 971 messages waiting, I understood these
had not been valid assumptions.  Many thanks for your replies.


2. Turns of Phrase: Aerobot
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Agencies working for NASA use this term for a lighter-than-air
craft designed to explore the planets. An aerobot is a helium-
filled balloon fitted with heaters that are powered by solar
cells. During the day, solar energy will heat the helium and give
it extra buoyancy; at night, the balloon will drop to lower
altitudes or even touch the ground. A limitation of the design is
that its movements cannot be fully controlled, though it may have
some ability to dictate its altitude, perhaps through dropping
ballast, releasing gas or managing its temperature. An advantage
of this design is that it doesn't need fuel, which is expensive to
transport and which runs out all too soon. Unlike satellites,
'aerobots' fly in the atmosphere, so allowing experiments to be
carried out on its chemistry. They can also view and record the
ground from much lower altitudes than is possible with satellites.
NASA plans to send a device of this sort to Mars in 2003, and
possibly later to Titan, Venus and Jupiter.

The Martian aerobot will be based on a "superpressure" helium
balloon, designed to maintain a constant volume so that its height
above ground can be controlled by on-board intelligence rather
than external temperature.
                                           [_Scotsman_, Jan. 1998]

If they prove themselves on Mars, balloons - or aerobots, as
lighter-than-air craft are known in the space business - could be
sent to Venus, to Saturn's moon Titan and beyond.
                                      [_New Scientist_, Oct. 1998]


3. In Brief: Pump and dump
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This is a usage that has come from the American investment world;
it derives from a pernicious practice of some financial analysts.
They buy stock cheaply, promote it in articles or broadcasts (that
is, 'pump' it), and then sell it (or 'dump' it) when the price
rises. The sense has now widened to include any scam in which
prices in a market are artificially manipulated.


4. Weird Words: Bloviate
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To speak pompously.

This word is almost entirely restricted to the United States; it
doesn't appear in any of my British English dictionaries, not even
the big _Oxford English Dictionary_ or the very recent _New Oxford
Dictionary of English_. Yet it has a long history.

It's most closely associated with U S President Warren Gamaliel
Harding, who used it a lot and who was by all accounts the classic
example of somebody who orates verbosely and windily. It's a
compound of 'blow', in its sense of "to boast", (also in another
typical Americanism, 'blowhard') with a mock-Latin ending to give
it the self-important stature that's implicit in its meaning.

The word is actually much older than Harding; Fred Shapiro of the
Yale Law School has recently turned up several examples from the
middle of the last century, such as this one from the _Debates and
Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution
of the State of Ohio_ in 1851: "The bloviators attempt to disturb
the proceedings of this Convention". This and other examples
suggest it was at first a local word in Ohio, Harding's home
state. 'Bloviate' may be a back-formation from the noun
'bloviation'. This would fit with the US fashion in the early
nineteenth century for expansive mock-Latinate words like
'sockdolager', 'hornswoggle' and 'absquatulate'.

There's a gap in the citation record in the middle years of this
century. The word only began to be used again in the 1960s, even
then at first always in reference to Harding. This may be linked
with a number of biographies of him that appeared about that time.
The word only returned to any sort of regular use in the nineties.


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NOT BEFORE TIME. Last Tuesday the _Guardian_ accidentally put its
time machine into reverse: "A plan to protect Britain's smaller
creatures is to be launched by the Government yesterday".
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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 so limited. If I can do
so, a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site.]
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Q. While serving as a tour guide at a museum, an English lady told
me that, in the days of castles, the very finest shoes were made
of dog skin. So if you were invited to the castle for a party or
event, you would dress in your finest, and for shoes, you would
'put on the dog', meaning shoes made of dog skin! [Ken Blose; a
related question came from Dennis Montgomery]

A. Inventive, these English. Firstly, 'to put on the dog' (or 'to
put on dog', in the form I learnt it) is first recorded only in
1871, in a book by L H Bagg called 'Four Years at Yale': "Dog,
style, splurge. To put on dog, is to make a flashy display, to cut
a swell", and is certainly a US expression. So there's really no
chance at all of an English medieval origin. It has been suggested
that it developed out of the rise in popularity of ladies' lap
dogs in the period after the American Civil War. Such animals were
presumably pampered and beribboned, and this might have suggested
that 'to put on the dog' was to show off. This has the ring of a
story made up after the event, but it's the only explanation I've
come across.
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Q. I've been searching for the origin of 'talk turkey'. [Selinda
Chiquoine]

A. I've found three stories about this, none of them wholly
convincing. We do know that it's a US term. It's first recorded in
1824, but is probably much older; one suggestion is that it goes
back as far as colonial times.

But the meaning of the phrase seems to have shifted down the
years. To start with it meant to speak agreeably, or to say
pleasant things; nowadays it usually refers to speaking frankly,
discussing hard facts, or getting down to serious business. The
change seems to have happened because to "talk turkey" was
augmented at some point in the nineteenth century to "talk cold
turkey", with the modern meaning. In the course of time it was
abbreviated again, with the shorter form keeping the newer
meaning. (The other meaning of "cold turkey" is unrelated.)

The most prosaic answer is that the "to talk pleasantly" sense
came about through the nature of family conversation around the
Thanksgiving dinner table. It is also suggested that it arose
because the first contacts between Native Americans and settlers
often centred on the supply of wild turkeys, to the extent that
Indians were said to have enquired whenever they met a colonist,
"you come to talk turkey?".

The most complicated explanation is a story about a colonist and a
native who went hunting, agreeing to share their spoils equally.
At the end of the day, the bag was four crows and four turkeys.
The colonist tried to partition the spoils by saying "here's a
crow for you" to the Indian, then keeping a turkey to himself,
giving another crow to the Indian, and so on. At this point the
Indian very reasonably protested, saying "you talk all turkey for
you. Only talk crow for Indian".

I plump for the prosaic Thanksgiving explanation, with a side bet
on the turkey trading thesis.
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Q. My wife was wondering about the origin of 'bunny'. She can't
find the answer in the dictionary. [Paul Savarese]

A. Alas, it's not there largely because we don't know. 'Bun' was
an English dialect word, recorded from the sixteenth century,
which was used for a squirrel or rabbit. It seems that the word
turned into the endearment 'bunny' in the following century, and
only later was it transferred back to the rabbit. There is a
suggestion that the word may have originally referred to the small
tail of the rabbit, in the same way that a tight coil of hair at
the back of the neck was also called a 'bun', because both were
roughly the shape and size of the cake. Others argue that the
origin was the Gaelic word 'bun' that meant a stump or root, and
which could refer to the tail of a hare. But neither origin
explains why it was applied to a squirrel, whose tail looks rather
different. But then, we don't know for sure where the word 'bun'
in the sense of the cake comes from either, so it's all obscure.
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Q. Have you ever heard of a 'charley horse'? Where does this
phrase come from? [Gerard Joannes, France; a related question came
from Edmund Matthews in the UK]

A. It's American, dating from the 1880s, and was originally
baseball slang. It refers to a painful involuntary cramp in an arm
or leg muscle, usually that of an athlete, as a result of a
muscular strain or a blow. We're not sure where it comes from, but
there are lots of theories. There's a persistent story that the
original Charley was a lame horse of that name that pulled the
roller at the White Sox ballpark in Chicago near the end of last
century. The American Dialect Society's archives reproduces a
story that was printed in the _Washington Post_ in 1907, long
enough after the event that people were trying to explain
something already mysterious. This piece said it referred to the
pitcher Charley Radbourne, nicknamed 'Old Hoss', who suffered this
problem during a game in the 1880s; the condition was then named
by putting together his first name and the second half of his
nickname. The first recorded use, again from the ADS archives, is
from the _Sporting Life_ of 1886; that and other citations suggest
it was coined not long before.


6. Beyond Words
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It was reported in the _Daily Telegraph_ on Thursday that one of
the presenters of the British _Big Breakfast_ TV programme has had
trouble with obscure words and that an assistant producer had to
ask the scriptwriters to avoid hard expressions, like 'intrepid'
and 'satirical'. Worse, the bit of the producer's memo reproduced
in facsimile in the article contained two grammatical errors and
misspelled the word 'phonetically'.


7. Administration
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