World Wide Words -- 02 Oct 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 160         Saturday 2 October 1999
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Editor: Michael Quinion                     Thornbury, Bristol, UK
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Contents
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1. Turns of Phrase: Phage therapy.
2. Weird Words: Zany.
3. Q & A: Carry the can, Juju and jujube, Give no quarter.
4. Affixia: -grade.
5. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.


1. Turns of Phrase: Phage therapy
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Antibiotics have been so overused, not only in medicine but also
to promote the growth of farm animals, that many bacterial
diseases are becoming resistant to them. The fear is that we may
be thrown back to the period before antibiotics, when diseases we
now think minor were killers. One suggestion for a new way of
attacking resistant bacteria has recently been reported to the
annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science. It comes from a group in Tbilisi in Georgia, in the
former Soviet Union, who have been researching viruses that kill
bacteria. Such a virus is called a 'bacteriophage', usually
shortened to 'phage'. The full term comes from 'bacterium', plus
the Greek 'phagein', to eat. So a 'phage' is an eater, and 'phage
therapy' puts phage viruses to work inside the body to destroy the
disease-causing bacteria. Because any given phage only attacks a
single bacterium, and has no effect on human cells, it promises to
be a highly targeted therapy. It's likely to be a slow-acting
cure, and we've a long way to go before it becomes common, if it
ever does. However, it has recently been reported that a Canadian
woman has been cured of a antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection
by a form of 'phage therapy'.

Phage therapy isn't the only alternative to antibiotics, but it
has great promise.
                       [_Independent on Sunday_, Sep. 1999]

Scientists say the success of "phage therapy" ... could represent
an important step in the war against multi-resistant bacteria.
                             [_Daily Telegraph_, Sep. 1999]


2. Weird Words: Zany
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Amusingly crazy or clownish.

If you object to my definition, then you may be in the company of
the compilers of several current dictionaries. It's a hard word to
pin down - we all think we know what we mean by it, but we may
find describing it in plain English surprisingly hard.

That may have something to do with the way the word has evolved.
It was first a noun, to describe a performer in the commedia
dell'arte, an improvised Italian comic form of the sixteenth to
eighteenth centuries. The 'zany' was a foolish servant, a buffoon,
who attempted to mimic the actions of his master, himself a clown.
The servant was given the generic name 'Giovanni' (the Italian
equivalent of John), much as English servants of the same period
were frequently called 'Andrew' (indeed, one English equivalent to
the 'zany' was a 'merry-andrew'), or as a Glaswegian might call
someone 'Jimmy' as an all-purpose name. In time 'Giovanni' turned
into 'zannie' and we imported it in that form.

Its first use in English was exactly equivalent to the Italian, "a
comic performer attending on a clown, acrobat, or mountebank, who
imitates his master's acts in a ludicrously awkward way", as the
_Oxford English Dictionary_ puts it. This dates back as far as
Shakespeare's _Love's Labour's Lost_ in which Berowne says that a
trick must have been carried out by "Some carry-tale, some please-
man, some slight zany".

'Zany' quickly evolved related senses, first contemptuously
suggesting someone who was a hanger-on or toady, then somebody who
played the fool for the amusement of others. The noun survived
almost to our day; Tennyson wrote in 1847 that "The printers are
awful zanies, they print erasures and corrections too, and other
sins they commit of the utmost inhumanity". But that '-y' ending
made the word look like an adjective, and that is how it has more
and more been employed, until now one really can't use it as a
noun. Here's an example from 1978: "Television shows that lean
heavily on the brand of humor known as 'zany', consisting largely
of sight gags and the sight of appealing people making cheerful
fools of themselves".

But the essence of 'zaniness' surely must be that the foolish
behaviour is gently unconventional, unexpected or idiosyncratic.
'Crazy' in its much-diluted sense sums it up.


3. 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'd like to know the origin of 'carry the can'. [Mike Davis,
California]

A. This is another of those odd expressions that's best known in
British English. If you 'carry the can' for something you're
bearing the responsibility for its having gone wrong, often with
the implication that you're taking the blame for someone else.
Here's a good example, from the _Times_ in 1957: "Senior officers
who were forced to 'carry the can' because of the misdeeds of
others".

It's a particularly relevant example because we're fairly sure it
comes from services' slang. The first recorded references are from
the Royal Navy in the late 1920s, though Eric Partridge, in his
_Dictionary of Historical Slang_, says it had been around since
the late nineteenth century. In his _Dictionary of Forces' Slang_
he suggests that the idiom refers to "the member of a gang or
party who fetches the beer for all and then has the melancholy
task of returning the empty". The job of carrying the group's
ration of beer was obviously one that laid you open to much
unpleasantness if you spilled any or dropped the can.

There's an older slang expression that's probably relevant: 'to
carry the keg', also as 'to carry the cag'. 'Cag' and 'keg' are
variants of the same dialect word, meaning to offend or insult
('cag' or 'kag' was also once British Navy slang for one of those
arguments in which everybody is shouting and nobody is listening).
'To carry the cag' then was to hold a grudge, or to be easily
annoyed or unable to take a joke. There's an obvious pun in the
phrase on 'keg', a small cask, being something that you literally
might carry, as you would figuratively carry a grudge.

It may be that 'carry the can' developed as a joking reference to
the older idiom, but then took on a life of its own.
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Q. A current advertisement on American TV uses 'juju'. And as a
youth, I remember a specific type of candy called 'jujubes' that I
saw for sale only in movie theater lobbies. Are the two words
connected? [Peter Piecuch, Maryland]

A. Two such similar words as 'juju' and 'jujube' really do look as
though they might be related in some way. However, as far as I can
discover the only connection between them is that they both came
into English through French.

The sweetmeat was originally the dried dark red fruit of a tree
called zizyphus, a relative of the blackthorn, or a sweet dyed and
flavoured with its juice. Though it doesn't look like it, there is
a direct link between 'Zizyphus' and 'jujube'. The ancient Greeks
called the tree 'zizyphon', possibly from the Arabic 'zizouf', a
name for the mythical lotus. This was taken into medical Latin as
'zizyphum', or 'zizypha' for the fruits. The change of the 'z's to
'j's seems to have occurred in the Old Aretine dialect of Italian
in medieval times, turning it into 'giuggeba' or 'jujuba'. From
there the word moved into French in roughly its modern form, and
so into English as the name both of the tree and the dried fruits.
('Zizyphus' itself has become the name of the genus that includes
the jujube, 'Zizyphus mauritiana'.)

The word 'juju' for a native African charm or spell seems to be a
form of the French 'joujou' for a toy, which derives from 'jouer',
to play. Quite how the word came about nobody seems to know,
though it was certainly created at the end of the nineteenth
century in West Africa, probably somewhere around the Niger Coast.
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Q. Recently, I had a person ask me the etymology of 'to give no
quarter'. What bothers me is that I can find no rationale for
connecting 'quarter' for one-fourth to its meanings of living
space or accepting the surrender of a vanquished enemy. [Carl]

A. The idiom is certainly odd. So far as I can understand, it's
the result of a series of shifts in meaning and the growth of
various idioms which took place in the period from late medieval
times into the seventeenth century.

In the fourteenth century, 'quarter' added to its basic meaning of
the fourth part of something by taking on a sense of one of the
four principal divisions of the horizon or the dpoints of the
compass. It then seems to have transferred to one of the four
quarters of a city, in particular one occupied by a specific group
(as we might still today speak of "the French quarter"), not
literally meaning one fourth of the area, but a rough direction
based on the four main compass points. The same meaning was
applied to one section of an army camp. So 'quarter' came to have
attached to it the idea of an area in which one lived, and further
shifts of meaning seem to have taken place that lead to 'quarters'
(in the plural) for one's living accommodation, especially in
military contexts.

There seem to have been one or two further stages. By the 1590s an
idiom 'to keep good quarters with' had grown up, meaning to have
good relations with a person, presumably a reference to the need
to stay on good terms with those living with or around you -
Shakespeare used it in _The Comedy of Errors_ in 1590 in a way
that showed he was having fun with an expression already well
known. So to 'give no quarter' might have meant "don't show any
friendliness to the enemy". It's possible also that 'to give
quarters' could refer to the need to provide prisoners with a
place to stay, so that 'to give no quarter' was a figurative way
of saying "take no prisoners".

It's all a bit obscure from this distance, but the essence of it
seems to be there.


4. Affixia: -grade
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A combining form that indicates a method of locomotion or a type
of division, from the Latin 'gradus', meaning stepping or walking.
The Latin original is also the source of the English 'gradation'
for a division on a scale, and the combining form is sometimes
used in this sense; an example is 'centigrade', having a hundred
divisions, hence the thermometer scale now known formally as the
Celsius scale. A second common compound is 'retrograde', directed
or moving backwards (a term often applied to an apparent temporary
reversal of movement of the outer planets in the sky). However,
the combining form has been applied most frequently in compounds
that indicate methods of animal locomotion; these are mostly rare
or scholarly, for example 'digitigrade', walking on the toes or
digits; 'plantigrade', walking upon the soles of the feet (from
the Latin 'planta' for the sole of the foot); 'tardigrade', moving
slowly (a term often applied to the sloths); 'unguligrade', moving
on the tips of the digits (from the Latin 'ungulus', claw); and
'vermigrade', moving in a wormlike manner.


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