World Wide Words -- 20 Nov 99
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Nov 20 08:19:00 UTC 1999
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 167 Saturday 20 November 1999
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Sent weekly to more than 6,500 subscribers in at least 94 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. Turns of Phrase: Prosumer.
3. Weird Words: Thaumaturgy.
4. In Brief: Disengagement, Frankenscience, Nanosoft.
5. Q & A: Cut your stick, Hard graft, Hunky-dory, Heavens to
Betsy, Blue blood.
6. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.
1. Notes and feedback
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RULE OF THUMB Two correspondents pointed out that similar phrases
exist in German. John Peter Maher and Nic Witton both told me about
'Faustregel', literally rule of fist, but used in the same way as
we do 'rule of thumb', and Nic Witton also mentioned "etwas ueber
den Daumen peilen", to plumb or measure a thing using one's thumb.
ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING? My mailbox is regularly swelled by
an astonishing variety of miscellaneous enquiries. There are many
marginally relevant questions such as that perennial and irritating
one about the third word ending in 'gry'. Some people think that as
I sometimes write about medical terms I must be a diagnostician, so
- quite unprovoked - they pour out intimate details of their health
problems (not only their own - one recent message asked what to do
about a West Highland Terrier with a tumour on its anal sphincter).
But recently I've begun to get even weirder ones: Is there enough
water on Earth to flood all the land on the planet up to the top of
the highest peak? What are the origins of the World Wide Web? How
do you test if a number is irrational? Is there a way to impeach
the governor of an American state? Would I comment on the phrase,
"What am I? Chopped liver?"? It is, of course, no coincidence that
these messages greatly increased in frequency soon after the start
of the college year. I am flattered to be thought such an eclectic
authority but words are most of what I know about! But if anybody
can explain the chopped liver reference, I would be so glad ...
2. Turns of Phrase: Prosumer
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This word is becoming fairly common but can be confusing, as it has
two meanings. It was coined in 1980 by the futurist Alvin Toffler -
in his book _The Third Wave_ - as a blend of 'producer' and
'consumer'. He used it to describe a possible future type of
consumer who would become involved in the design and manufacture of
products, so they could be made to individual specification. He
argued that we would then no longer be a passive market upon which
industry dumped consumer goods but a part of the creative process.
Derrick de Kerckhove has called this 'mass customisation', in which
everybody is in effect a member of a niche market, something
Internet e-commerce is encouraging through cutting out the
middleman between maker and buyer. This sense of 'prosumer' has
been taken up by some marketing people, but remains limited in its
application.
The second usage describes a purchaser of technical equipment who
wants to obtain goods of a better quality than consumer items, but
can't afford professional items (older terms for goods of this
intermediate quality are 'semi-professional' and 'industrial
quality'). Here, the word is a blend of 'professional' and
'consumer'. 'Prosumers' of this sort are famed for their enthusiasm
for new products and their tolerance of flaws and, from the
marketing point of view, have much in common with early adopters.
This usage is common among those selling video equipment, digital
cameras, and similar goods (and the examples below illustrate this
sense). Some manufacturers treat the SOHO (Small Office, Home
Office) market as being much the same thing.
DVDwiz represents the first truly professional-quality DVD
authoring software available to the prosumer and consumer markets,
offering the unique creativity level and compatibility so far only
available to professionals.
[_Business Wire_, Sep. 1999]
To make his next movie, 'Camera', Martini gathered a handful of
friends, some consumer-friendly but higher-end digital video (DV)
cameras (so-called 'prosumer' models), a high-powered PC and off-
the-shelf editing software.
[_USA Today_, Mar. 1999]
3. Weird Words: Thaumaturgy
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The performance of miracles; magic.
Of all the words in English that refer to the making of magic, this
is perhaps the most resonant. It doesn't have the negative
associations of words such as 'sorcery' or 'necromancy' because it
referred originally to the production of wonders for positive ends
rather than any intent to cause someone harm. The origin is the
Greek word 'thaumatourgos', miracle working (from 'thauma', marvel,
plus 'ergos', work). Though it's not that common a word, it seems
to have generated a surprisingly large set of derivatives since it
first appeared in English in 1727. There are several words for a
practitioner of 'thaumaturgy', including 'thaumaturge' and
'thaumaturgist'; another is 'thaumaturgus', which has been given to
a number of Christian saints and others who are said to have
performed wonders. The verb is 'thaumaturgise'. The 'thaumatrope'
was a Victorian toy, a card with two different pictures on its back
and front that magically combined into one when the card was
rapidly spun. And aficionados of Terry Pratchett's _Discworld_
novels will know that the wizards of Unseen University invented a
device with which to measure the intensity of a magic field - what
would you call that but a 'thaumometer'?
4. In Brief
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DISENGAGEMENT From newspaper reports of the troubled state of the
British fashion retailer Marks & Spencer comes this word, yet
another euphemism for the dismissal of staff.
FRANKENSCIENCE Another deeply derogatory term, following the older
'Frankenfoods', also based on the name 'Frankenstein', for genetic
engineering, and in particular the proposed use of engineered pig
organs as human transplant material.
NANOSOFT After the recent preliminary finding in the Microsoft
case, there's speculation that the business may eventually have to
break up into smaller 'Nanosofts', each running part of the
company's current operations. (An older name is 'Baby Bill', named
after the 'Baby Bells' formed through the break-up of AT&T.)
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. Do you have the source of the phrase 'to cut your stick',
meaning to get up and leave? I learned this phrase from a friend
who grew up in rural Ireland. [Christel Devlin]
A. The informal phrase is well recorded, in the _Oxford English
Dictionary_ and elsewhere, but it's old enough that the origin is
misty. It seems that it refers to the custom centuries ago of
cutting a stout walking stick or staff - which could double as a
weapon - before beginning a long journey on foot. There was once a
similar medieval expression which suggests the truth of this
reading: 'to pike oneself' - usually reduced just to the verb 'to
pike' - which literally meant to furnish oneself with a pike or
pilgrim's staff. But in a figurative sense, 'to pike' meant to
leave, make off, or go away, just as 'to cut one's stick' does.
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Q. I'm not sure how you would spell 'hunky dorey', but it means
"just great", or something like that. Where does it come from?
[Brad Lytle]
Usually 'hunky-dory', but the other spelling does appear from time
to time. The most usual theory is that it originates in an earlier
American word 'hunk', which means that one is in a safe or good
position, or all right. This derives from the Dutch 'honk', meaning
"goal" or "home" in a Frisian variant of the game of tag. This word
(and presumably the game, too) was said to have been taken by the
Dutch to New Amsterdam, later New York, but was first recorded in
print only around the middle of the nineteenth century. But we've
no idea where the 'dory' part comes from. And though the first part
sounds a bit like the 'hunker' of 'hunker down' that I discussed
here recently (which is also of Dutch origin), the words seem not
to be related.
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Q. What does the expression 'hard graft' mean? Is it a British
expression? If graft is a kind of unfair gain, maybe hard graft is
brutally unfair. [Don Chandler]
A. This meaning of 'graft' has much more to do with burying people
than with the American sense of corruption. It seems that both it
and 'grave' are from the same Germanic root that meant to dig. The
verb survives in modern German and Dutch but has died out in
English (though 'engrave' is still around). So 'hard graft' was
heavy digging, in later years any kind of hard manual labour, and
so figuratively any gruelling task. This sense survives in Britain
and Australia, but is not so well known in America. We in Britain
have learned 'graft' for corruption, on the other hand, though we
don't use it so much. Another sense of 'graft', for propagating a
plant by inserting a piece of it into the stem of another plant,
actually comes from the Greek word meaning to write. This moved
into French to mean a pencil, and was taken up as a word for the
technique, as that's what a graft was thought to look like. It may
be that the corruption sense comes from this, though it's not clear
how.
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Q. I am looking for the origin and meaning of the phrase 'Heavens
to Betsy'. [Mark Lord]
A. The meaning is simple enough: it's just a mild exclamation of
shock or surprise. It is almost exclusively an American expression,
associated in my mind with mature females of the Prohibition era or
earlier (though this may just be a reflection of my recent
reading). As to where it came from, nobody has the slightest idea.
It seems to be one of those traditional sayings that have been
around in the language for generations, but which only latterly
have come to be recorded in print. The big _Oxford English
Dictionary_ has a first citation from 1914, but I'm told it can be
found as far back as 1891. Some have tried to trace it to the
Revolutionary War and to Betsy Ross, but have failed; others think
it may have something to do with the frontiersman's rifle, often
called 'Old Betsy', but there's no evidence that saying and name
are associated. Charles Earle Funk, who in 1955 used the phrase as
part of the title of a book about curious phrases, said that its
origins were "completely unsolvable". We have to leave it as one of
the great mysteries of lexicography, along with the similar
'heavens to Murgatroyd'. Unless someone reading this knows
different?
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Q. I was wondering about the origin of the phrase 'blue blood'.
[Jennifer Bunner, USA]
A. Unlike so many other expressions, this one is well documented.
It's a direct translation of the Spanish 'sangre azul'. Many of the
oldest and proudest families of Castile used to boast that they
were pure bred, having no link with the Moors who had for so long
controlled the country, or indeed any other group. As a mark of
this, they pointed to their veins, which seemed bluer in colour
than those of such foreigners. This was simply because the blue-
tinted venous blood showed up more prominently in their lighter
skin, but they took it to be a mark of their pure breeding. So the
phrase 'blue blood' came to refer to the blood which flowed in the
veins of the oldest and most aristocratic families. The phrase was
taken over into English in the 1830s.
6. Administration
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