World Wide Words -- 18 Sep 99
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Sep 18 07:39:48 UTC 1999
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 158 Saturday 18 September 1999
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Sent every Saturday to at least 6,000 subscribers in 90+ 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. Turns of Phrase: Identity theft.
2. Book review: Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.
3. Weird Words: Alegar and beeregar.
4. Q & A: Riff-raff.
5. Affixia: hyper-.
6. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.
1. Notes and feedback
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'N ALL THAT Several sharp-eyed subscribers pointed out that in
the Turns of Phrase piece about echo boomers last week I said they
were "ethically diverse". That may be so - Julane Marx commented
"I am quite intrigued by the concept of ethical diversity: it
seems just the ticket for our times" - but it was intended to be
'ethnically diverse', of course.
STAYER Several people queried my use of 'stayer' in the piece on
the suffix '-dom', for a new word that shows some staying power. I
can't claim to have invented it, as the OED has citations for it
going back to 1591. But I must confess I re-invented it to fill a
need. Hey, if I can't neologise, who can?
BLUSHES UNSEEN Talking of neologisms, Dermot Purgavie mentioned
World Wide Words in the British newspaper _Mail on Sunday_ last
weekend (thanks, Dermot), in which he described me as a 'wordhead'
(by which I think he implied I'm either a word-obsessed nethead or
that I get my kicks from language, to both of which I must plead
guilty as charged). I was tempted to make this coinage an In Brief
item, but these self-referential quotes are so uncool ...
2. Turns of Phrase: Identity theft
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This crime is a product of the electronic age. We all now have a
series of electronic analogues of ourselves in the databases of
tax authorities, banks, credit agencies insurance companies, and
the like. This data is sometimes alarmingly insecure, allowing
crooks to borrow your electronic identity, perhaps to steal your
money, or impersonate you to commit a credit-card fraud, or obtain
a false driving licence or passport using your personal details.
This crime has been dubbed 'identity theft', a relatively new term
that has now been incorporated into American law through the
'Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act' of 1998. Strictly
speaking, a computer is not required to commit 'identity theft' -
criminals can use personal information obtained from other
sources, such as paper records - but it is most often described as
though it were electronic data theft. It remains a hot topic in
the US, to the extent that some households are reported as buying
shredders to make sure nobody can glean personal details from
papers thrown out with the garbage.
Vice President Al Gore ... will also endorse legislative proposals
... intended to deter identity theft by increasing the penalties
against people who use other individuals' personal data to obtain
things like credit cards and driver's licenses.
[_New York Times_, July 1998]
The FBI is advising senior officers in Britain's National Criminal
Intelligence Service (NCIS) on how to combat one of the fastest-
growing crimes in the US - "identity theft".
[_Independent on Sunday_, July 1999]
3. Book review: Chambers Dictionary of Etymology
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This work is really going around under an alias, as it's a British
edition of the 1988 _Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology_, a
respected work from the US which until now has been available in
the UK only by a pricey purchase from a transatlantic bookseller.
It has the same text as the original from the H W Wilson Company
and indeed, to judge from the printing, seems to be a facsimile.
Chambers have added the book to their stable of works on the
language that includes the idiosyncratic and famous _Chambers
Dictionary_ and the _Chambers 21st Century Dictionary_, a new
edition of which has also just come out.
There are quite a number of books dealing with the origins of
individual words, but most are highly selective in their choice of
terms and they are variably reliable. (The best and most scholarly
is probably John Ayto's _Dictionary of Word Origins_, but I would
also mention _The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories_,
which has longish articles on a small range of key words.)
There are other, more formal, dictionaries of etymology available;
for example in Europe _Klein's Comprehensive Etymological
Dictionary of the English Language_, but they are frequently
difficult for the non-linguist to understand, and they are
uniformly expensive. The _Chambers Dictionary of Etymology_ is
different on both counts - it is reasonably priced, and it is
written in a way that is easy to consult without losing its
scholarly integrity. Entries are in clear prose, with Greek terms
transliterated into Roman spelling, and pronunciations added for
difficult headwords.
Since this edition is the same as the original American one, these
pronunciations are for American rather than British English and
they use a key developed from normal English spelling, avoiding
the typographic conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA) that many people find difficult to use. This makes Chambers'
works non-uniform, as the _Chambers Dictionary_ has its own
(rather different) scheme, and the _Chambers 21st Century
Dictionary_ uses IPA.
This book will be most useful to students of the language and to
general readers who want more detail than can be gleaned from the
average dictionary. Despite its physical size, approaching that of
a desk dictionary, its scope is limited to the most common 25,000
or so words (only a small proportion of those in the average desk
dictionary, though many more than in the other works cited above).
Deep delvers will need to seek out a more detailed etymological
work for less common terms. And its 1988 date of publication means
that very recent words are excluded.
Interestingly, the pricing is such that it is now cheaper to buy
the Chambers edition than the original H W Wilson one, even in
North America; the original is priced there at $64.00, but the
Chambers edition has a list price of $45.00 and is widely
discounted from online bookstores (Amazon.com is quoting $31.50).
[Barnhart, R K (ed.), _Chambers Dictionary of Etymology_, pp1312,
officially published on 23 September 1999 but already widely
available; ISBN 0-550-14230-4, publisher's price of GBP30.00 or
US$45.00.]
4. Weird Words: Alegar and beeregar
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Vinegar formed by fermentation of ale or beer; malt vinegar.
I've combined these two words into one entry because they were
names for similar things, and both are now obsolete. It's obvious
enough where the first part of each of these names comes from -
'ale' and 'beer'. The second half, which both share with
'vinegar', the related fermented product made from wine, is the
French word 'aigre', sour. Of the words, 'alegar' was much the
more common, even though the product was mainly brewed from sour
beer rather than from ale (the difference is that ale was made
without hops or with only a very small amount). Both products came
into English during the late Middle Ages, their names being
recorded first about 1500, and became well-known preserving
agents, often as a mixture with salt and spices. But they were
fiery products, much fiercer on the palate than the milder wine
vinegar. An Italian visitor to England during the first
Elizabeth's reign noted sadly that all salads were drowning in
'alegar', with nothing added to modify its raw ferocity. Neither
word has ever been well known in North America, where its modern
equivalent that goes by the name of 'malt vinegar' is also
uncommon ('malt' because the beer it derives from is made from
malted barley). Actually true malt vinegar is rare even in Britain
these days, since the stuff that most of us put on our fish and
chips is a non-brewed product of a chemical laboratory, dilute
acetic acid with brown colour and flavourings added.
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. My mother used to warn me not to associate with 'riff-raff'.
What are the origins of this phrase? [Steven Shumak]
A. To trace this one, we have to start in medieval French. There
was then a set expression 'rifle et rafle'. These words are from
the verbs 'rifler', to spoil or strip, and 'raffler', to carry
off. The phrase referred to the plundering of the bodies of the
dead on the battlefield and the carrying off of the booty.
The French phrase moved into English in the forms 'rif and raf' or
'riffe and raf', which meant at first every scrap, from which we
may guess that medieval plunderers were extremely thorough. It's
known by at least 1338 (it appears in Mannyng's 'Chronicle of
English' of that date). Later it shifted sense through a series of
stages, first referring to one and all, or everybody, and then
later taking on the idea of the common people, those of no special
social standing. The phrase was abbreviated to 'riff-raff' and can
be found in Gregory's 'Chronicle of London' of about 1470. It
seems to have taken some decades longer for it to have gone even
further downhill and for it to be associated in particular with
the dregs of society. It's likely that the negative associations
of common soldiers ransacking the bodies of the dead coloured the
expression even after it had shifted its meaning.
We're familiar with descendants of both of the original old French
words in English, by the way. 'Riffler' is the origin of our
'riffle' in the card-shuffling sense, amongst others, and of
'rifle', for searching hurriedly through possessions for
something, or to steal. It also gave rise to the firearms sense,
since a 'rifle' takes its name from the spiral grooves cut in the
barrel of such a gun to improve its accuracy; this comes from a
different sense of the French word, meaning to graze or scratch.
And 'raffler' lent its name to a game played with three dice,
perhaps because the winner snatched up or carried off the winnings
(we're not quite sure of the connection). In English the game was
called 'raffle', and the word was only much later applied to
another form of gambling, a lottery.
And in the early nineteenth century 'raffish' appeared. This
adjective originally referred to somebody who was disreputable or
vulgar. Only later did it acquire the undertones it now has of a
person who is attractively unconventional. This may have come from
the second half of 'riff-raff', or from 'raff', which had survived
by itself in dialect usage in much the same sense of the lowest
class of the population.
6. Affixia: hyper-
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This prefix comes from the Greek 'huper' for something above or
beyond; in English it often has a sense of something excessive or
above normal. It's a common prefix that has been part of English
since the sixteenth century - the earliest recorded example is in
'hyperbole', from 1529. Another early compound was 'hyperborean',
literally beyond the north wind, for peoples living in the extreme
north, supposedly in a region beyond the ice and show. Many words
in 'hyper-' are medical terms dating from the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries: 'hyperacusis' for abnormally acute hearing,
'hyperhidrosis', for excessive sweating, 'hyperthyroidism', for
thyroid overactivity, and 'hypertension', meaning excessive blood
pressure. Others come from physics, chemistry and mathematics, as
in 'hyperbola', 'hypersonic' or 'hyperspace'). The prefix has
become especially well known through 'hypertext' (a word invented
by Ted Nelson in the 1960s) which became a key term of the World
Wide Web. From the 1970s on it has been an occasional superlative
in marketing, one turn of the crank up from 'super', as in words
like 'hypermarket' (a British English term for a large out-of-town
supermarket). Since the 1940s it has also been a word in its own
right, 'hyper', a shortening of 'hyperactive', for someone who is
overly energetic.
6. Administration
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