World Wide Words -- 06 Nov 99
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Nov 6 08:50:10 UTC 1999
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 165 Saturday 6 November 1999
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Sent weekly to more than 6,000 subscribers in at least 93 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion Thornbury, Bristol, UK
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: Phenomenon.
3. Book reviews: The Pocket Fowler & the Plain English Guide.
4. Weird Words: Leucipottomy.
5. In Brief: E-lancer, Entomopter, Picosatellite.
6. Q & A: Snob.
7. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.
1. Notes and feedback
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ROOKERY. Following last week's Topical Words piece, several people
asked whether the name for the chess piece was linked to that of
the bird. It seems not. It comes via Old French from an old Arabic
word 'rukk', but nobody seems to be sure what that word meant.
2. Topical Words: Phenomenon
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In a recent review in the _Guardian_ newspaper of a biography of
Marie Corelli, the reviewer remarked that "She was in effect the
first of the lady novelist bestsellers, her books read by everyone
from Queen Victoria to shop assistants. In her day she had been
nothing short of a phenomenon".
Now Marie Corelli existed - all too obviously as she was a lady of
expansive attitudes and ample construction, though rather short of
stature. So she was a phenomenon, all right, but that was surely
something about which no special note needed to be taken. That is,
if you use the word in the original sense given in the _Oxford
English Dictionary_. There it is grandly defined as "a thing that
appears, or is perceived or observed; an individual fact,
occurrence, or change as perceived by any of the senses, or by the
mind". So anything we can observe is a 'phenomenon', which is as
all-inclusive a term as one might wish.
But of course the writer was using the word in another sense. We
find it further down the entry: "Something very notable or
extraordinary; a highly exceptional or unaccountable fact or
occurrence; colloquially a thing, person, or animal remarkable for
some unusual quality; a prodigy". By all accounts, Ms Corelli was
most of those things.
What is mildly surprising is that this second meaning of the word
is so old. The _OED_ records it from 1771, and by the time Dickens
was writing _Nicholas Nickleby_ in 1838 it was well established:
"'This, Sir', said Mr. Vincent Crummles, bringing the maiden
forward, 'this is the infant phenomenon - Miss Ninetta Crummles'".
The word itself goes back to the Greek 'phantazein', make visible,
which is derived from 'phainein', to show. It's also a relative of
our 'phantom', 'diaphanous', 'fancy', 'fantasy' and other words. It
arrived in English as the plural, 'phenomena', which Francis Bacon
is credited as introducing in his _Advancement of Learning_ of
1605. In early appearances, it was confined to what was then termed
natural philosophy but which we would call science. Since then, it
has acted as the root for John Stuart Mill's 'phenomenalism' and
Edmund Husserl's 'phenomenology', two theories in philosophy that I
will go to any lengths to avoid explaining.
Notably, both senses, the scientific and popular, have survived
alongside each other in the language for the better part of two
centuries. Because they appear in such different contexts, they
hardly conflict and neither has ousted the other.
3. Book reviews: The Pocket Fowler & the Plain English Guide
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When Dr Robert Burchfield revised H W Fowler's _Modern English
Usage_, published as the Third Edition in 1996, it was greeted with
less happily than the good doctor might have expected. Some critics
took exception to what they saw as excessively permissive comments
and lack of firm guidance compared with earlier editions.
There's actually much good advice in the Third Edition, though most
is delicately worded as observation rather than instruction. But
the emphasis on the historical development of the language and on
describing rather than prescribing usage means that its value as a
practical guide is less than many either wanted or expected. To
some extent this is to misunderstand the job the book is doing;
perhaps it should have appeared as a new work without the Fowler
associations to encumber it.
Now we have a shortened form of the Third Edition, the _Pocket
Fowler_, edited down to some 600 pages in a smaller format, though
perhaps not small enough to suit the title unless your jacket has
poacher's pockets. Its editor, Robert Allen, says the 8,000 entries
of the Third Edition have been reduced to 4,000 shorter ones. "The
aim has been to present the arguments and recommendations in a more
accessible form for quicker consultation", he says. Some material
has been moved into tables, and 150 new entries added. There is now
more discussion of American and other national Englishes.
The text is often so different from that in the Third Edition that
it is in effect new. As I've recently been criticised for using
"most importantly" at the start of a sentence rather than "most
important", I compared that entry in the full and condensed
versions. In the Third Edition, Dr Burchfield says that this and
some related forms "must now be considered standard and useful
acquisitions to the language", one of his stronger comments. So
it's sad to see that the _Pocket Fowler_ has only the less
assertive comment that "'importantly' conforms more closely than
'important' does to the regular type of sentence adverb".
The whole matter of sentence adverbs, including 'thankfully',
'regretfully' and - above all - 'hopefully', is still contentious
among conservative writers. Burchfield wrote a longish piece in the
Third Edition pointing out the irresistible growth in popularity of
these forms in recent decades, but supplied no clear advice. The
_Pocket Fowler_ does advise, recommending that we use such forms
with caution, since "rearguard actions continue to be fought over
them" and that 'hopefully' in particular can sound irritating.
Despite such occasional outbreaks of counsel, the broadly
historical approach of the Third Edition remains: usage is
discussed and recommendations, if any, are couched in broad terms,
sometimes so broad that the impatient seeker after authority will
come away still wondering what to do. And I suspect that most
people wanting to understand how the language has evolved and how
it now works will want the unabridged version rather than this one.
Martin Coutt's _The Plain English Guide_ will be valuable if you
are struggling to express yourself well. This is a paperback
reissue of a work first published by Oxford in 1996. It's full of
good advice on how to write briefly, clearly, and to the point,
supported by many examples. Its twenty chapters cover the essence
of good plain writing and the list of chapter topics is worth
pinning up as a memory jogger: Prefer plain words, Favour the
active voice, Use vigorous verbs, Prefer the positive to the
negative, Use non-sexist language, and so on. Recommended to any
writer, but especially if writing is not central to your job and
causes you anxiety.
[Allen, Robert (ed.), _The Pocket Fowler_, hardback, pp623, ISBN 0-
19-866237-8, 9.99 pounds; Cutts, Martin _The Plain English Guide_,
paperback, pp165, ISBN 0-19-866243-2, 3.99 pounds; both published
by Oxford University Press on 28 October 1999.]
4. Weird Words: Leucipottomy /l(j)u:si'pQt at mI/
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The craft of cutting white horses on hillsides.
This is a word that falls firmly into the category of invention for
invention's sake, since the number of carved white figures of any
kind on hillsides is quite small, the number of horses even fewer,
and their rate of creation is as near zero as makes no difference.
The oldest example of the genre in the UK is probably the white
horse at Uffington in Berkshire, which has been dated, cautiously,
to the late Bronze Age. Apart from one in Aberdeenshire and another
in Yorkshire, most hillside horse carvings are on the chalk of
southern England, with the biggest concentration on the Wiltshire
downs. 'Leucipottomy' has had an airing recently because the
citizens of Devizes in that county decided that they wanted a white
horse of their own as a millennium project, which - after 10 days
of carving - they now have. The word is a combination of the Greek
roots 'leuci-', white, 'hippo', horse, and '-tomy', a noun ending;
by my reckoning it ought to have just one 't' in it, but that may
be a matter of taste. It seems to have been coined by Morris
Marples in his book _White Horses and other Hill Figures_ of 1949.
5. In Brief
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E-LANCER A fashionable breed of freelance employee or home worker
so reliant on the telephone, fax and e-mail that they never visit
the office at all. Some who have tried it report that it's fine in
many ways, but that they miss the gossip, politics and social life.
ENTOMOPTER A tiny spy aircraft. This one flies by flapping its
wings - hence the name, literally 'insect-wing'. It's powered by a
chemical muscle in what's been dubbed 'bioflight'. The inventor
expects to see such 'MAVs' (micro air vehicles) flying and crawling
about so the police and military can spy on us.
PICOSATELLITE The US Department of Defense is planning to launch a
pair of tiny satellites each weighing merely half a pound (225g)
('pico-' is a prefix meaning one divided by a million million). The
idea is to test ways of creating clusters of tiny satellites that
can work together in space but be individually hard to knock out.
If the test succeeds, the next stage is 'nanosatellites' ...
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 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 an article which claims the word 'snob' was "originally a
reduction of the Latin phrase sine nobilitate". The _Oxford English
Dictionary_ doesn't know this, saying the origin is obscure, but
confirms my belief that a snob was originally a cobbler. Is there
any authority for this Latin source? [Kenneth Payne]
A. None: the reference to the Latin tag is either mischievous or
mistaken. As you have discovered, the origin lies in a dialect word
meaning a cobbler. It seems that early usage implied a person of
humble rank or status, as cobblers of course were. Only later was
it attached to the idea of somebody who sought to imitate those of
superior social standing, as the _Oxford English Dictionary_ so
effectively puts it: "One who meanly or vulgarly admires and seeks
to imitate, or associate with, those of superior rank or wealth;
one who wishes to be regarded as a person of social importance".
The Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray pretty much
invented this sense through his series of articles in _Punch_ in
the 1840s called _The Snobs of England by One of Themselves_, which
was republished as _The Book of Snobs_ in 1848. In this he
dissected the character of various types of English snobs, such as
the military snob and the country snob. Later still 'snob' was
applied to a person who despised others whom he saw as being of
lower rank, a sense that is first recorded in one of George Bernard
Shaw's works in 1911. (As an antipodean aside, the Australian slang
sense of the last and most awkward sheep in the pen waiting to be
shorn is a bit of double-derived wordplay, as the older term is
'cobbler', itself a joke on the phrase 'cobbler's last' for the
little anvil shoemakers use.)
7. Administration
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