World Wide Words -- 01 Apr 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Apr 1 07:44:37 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 184 Saturday 1 April 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 8,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 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. Feedback and corrections.
2. Turns of Phrase: Asylo.
3. Weird Words: Chrestomathy.
4. Article: How many words?
5. Q & A: Butterfly.
6. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.
1. Feedback and corrections
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MAIL PROBLEMS Sorry you got last week's newsletter so late. There
was a problem with the mail server at the Linguist List.
CLANG As lots of you pointed out, a boxer has only one minute to
recover between rounds, not three. I mentally confused it with the
length of the rounds themselves.
GERMAN CHOCOLATE The correct German name under the EU rules for
British milk chocolate is actually 'Haushaltsmilchschokolade'.
2. Turns of Phrase: Asylo
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British refugee support groups are deeply disturbed about what they
see as the government's oppressive attitude towards asylum seekers.
For example, they're concerned by the recent decision to disperse
refugees away from the south east of the country, where most of
them arrive. Refugee groups argue also that paying the larger part
of refugees' small welfare benefits in vouchers rather than cash
has made their plight even worse than it would otherwise be. This
has been fuelled by the discovery that the Home Office (the
government department responsible for asylum seekers) is refusing
to permit shops to give change in cash when the full value of food
vouchers has not been spent, so depriving claimants of a part even
of what little they have. The refugee groups have sarcastically
coined 'asylo' - short for 'asylum' - as the name for what they see
as the debased currency represented by the vouchers.
A new 'currency' will soon start changing hands in the nation's
shops and supermarkets. The currency, which refugee groups have
dubbed the 'asylo', is a voucher system about to be introduced by
the Home Office as a means of giving cashless refugees the
opportunity to obtain food and basic toiletries.
[_Independent_, Feb. 1999]
The scheme has been attacked by critics as inventing a new
currency, the 'asylo', simply to avoid paying welfare benefits
direct to asylum seekers.
[_Guardian_, Mar. 2000]
3. Weird Words: Chrestomathy
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A selection or anthology.
This word has been literally staring me in the face for years, as
it forms part of the title of a book on my shelves: _A Mencken
Chrestomathy_, a selection of the choicest writings of the American
journalist and writer on language, the late H L Mencken. Other than
that, you may have to search a bit before finding another example,
since it is a word of singular shyness, venturing out only rarely
from inside our dictionaries to slip itself on to the cover of a
work here or there. It was formed and first used in Greek, from the
words 'khrestos', useful, and 'mathein', to know, hence useful
learning. Its most frequent sense these days is that of a selection
of passages designed to help in learning a language, so you may
find titles such as _Chrestomathy of modern literary Uzbek_ or _A
Chrestomathy of Pre-Angkorian Khmer_. When H L Mencken used it he
claimed he did so in part to wrest it back from the linguists. To
critics who argued that the word would not be understood he replied
in splendid arrogance: "Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and
adjectives that have stood in every decent dictionary for years are
still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses, and I do not solicit their
patronage. Let them continue to recreate themselves with whodunits,
and leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all
been to school".
4. Article: How many words?
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One of the more common questions that arrive for the Q&A section
asks how many words there are in the English language. Almost as
common are requests for the average size of a person's vocabulary.
These sound like easy questions; I have to tell you that they're
indeed easy to ask. But they're almost impossible to answer
satisfactorily, because it all depends what you mean by 'word' and
by 'vocabulary' (or even 'English').
What we mean by 'word' sounds obvious, but it's not. Take a verb
like 'climb'. The rules of English allow you to generate the forms
'climbs', 'climbed', 'climbable', and 'climbing', the nouns 'climb'
and 'climber' (and their plurals 'climbs' and 'climbers'),
compounds such as 'climb-down' and 'climbing frame', and phrasal
verbs like 'climb on', 'climb over', and 'climb down'. Now, here's
the question you've got to answer: are all these distinct words, or
do you lump them all together under 'climb'?
That this is not a trivial question can be proved by looking at
half a dozen current dictionaries. You won't find two that agree on
what to list. Almost every word in the language has this fuzzy
penumbra of inflected forms, separate senses and compounds, some to
a much greater extent than 'climb'. To take a famous case, the
entry for 'set' in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ runs to 60,000
words. The noun alone has 47 separate senses listed. Are all these
distinct words?
And in a wider sense, what do you include in your list of words? Do
you count all the regional variations of English? Or slang?
Dialect? Family or private language? Proper names and the names of
places? And what about abbreviations? The biggest dictionary of
them has more than 400,000 entries - do you count them all as
words? And what about informal and formal names for living things?
The wood louse is known in Britain by many local names - 'tiggy-
hog', 'cheeselog', 'pill bug', 'chiggy pig', and 'rolypoly' among
others. Are these all to be counted as separate words? And, to take
a more specialist example, is 'Saccharomyces cerevisiae', the
formal name for bread yeast, to be counted as a word (or perhaps
two)? If you say yes, you've got to add another couple of million
such names to the English-language word count. And what about
medical terms, such as 'syncytiotrophoblastic' or
'holoprosencephaly', that few of us ever encounter?
The other difficult term is 'vocabulary'. What counts as a word
that somebody knows? Is it one that a person uses regularly and
accurately? Or perhaps one that will be correctly recognised - say
in written text - but not used? Or perhaps one that will be
understood in context but which the person may not easily be able
to define? This distinction between what linguists call active and
passive vocabularies is hard to measure, and it skews estimates.
The problem doesn't stop there. English speakers not only know
words, they know word-forming elements, such as the ending '-
phobia' for some irrational fear. A journalist rushing to meet a
deadline might take a word he knows, like 'Serb', and tack on the
ending to make 'Serbophobia'. He's just added a word to the
language (probably only temporarily), but can he really be said to
have that word in his vocabulary? If nobody ever uses it again, can
we legitimately count it? By reversing the coining process, a
reader of the newspaper can easily work out the word's origin and
meaning. Has the reader also added a word to his vocabulary?
Can you now see why estimates of the total number of words in the
English language and in a person's vocabulary are so difficult to
make, and why they vary so much one from another? David Crystal, in
the _Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language_, suggests that
there must be at least a million words in the language. Tom
McArthur, in the _Oxford Companion to the English Language_, comes
up with a similar figure. David Crystal further says that if you
allow all scientific terms the total could easily reach two million
(this doesn't count the formal names for organisms I spoke about
earlier, just technical vocabulary).
Assessing the size of the vocabulary of an individual is at least
as problematical. Take Shakespeare: you'd think it would be easy to
assess his vocabulary. We have the plays and sonnets and we just
have to count the words in them (according to the _American
Heritage Dictionary_, there are 884,647 of them, made up of 29,066
distinct forms, including proper names). Estimates of Shakespeare's
vocabulary vary from about 18,000 to 25,000 in various books, since
writers have different views about what make a word distinct.
It's common to see figures for vocabulary quoted such as 10,000-
12,000 words for a 16-year-old, and 20,000-25,000 for a college
graduate. These seem not to have much research to back them up.
Usually they don't make clear whether active or passive vocabulary
is being quoted, and they don't account for differences in
lifestyle, profession and hobby interests between individuals.
David Crystal described a simple research project - using random
pages from a dictionary - that suggests these figures are severe
underestimates. He concludes that a better average for a college
graduate might be 60,000 active words and 75,000 passive ones. But
this method of assessing vocabulary counts dictionary headwords
only; it would be possible to multiply it several-fold to include
different senses, inflected forms, and compounds. Another
assessment - of a million-word collection of American texts -
identified about 38,000 headwords. Bearing in mind this was all
general writing, this doesn't sound so different from David
Crystal's estimates for graduate vocabularies.
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 WWWords Web site.]
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Q. Could the word 'butterfly', which has no obvious connection with
butter (outside of its name), possibly be an ancient corruption of
'flutter by', which is exactly what the creature does? I can
imagine a child mispronouncing it thusly and the result sticking in
our language. [David Powell]
A. This has been suggested as a possible source of the name - the
inversion is terribly seductive. There's a big problem, though. J B
S Haldane once spoke sadly of "a beautiful theory, slain by an ugly
fact" and I'm about to tread all over the idea with my size nine
clodhoppers of evidence. The word can be traced right back to the
Old English 'buterflege', found in a glossary of about the year
700. Nowhere along its trip from those times to today does it ever
appear in the inverted form. The word does indeed seem to be
'butter' plus 'fly'.
Why butter? We wish we knew for sure. Some authorities suggest the
link comes from the insect's yellow faeces. Others say there was
once a belief that butterflies like to land on milk or butter left
uncovered, or even that fairies and witches took on the form of
butterflies at night to steal butter from the dairy. Nice stories,
but lacking rather a lot on the firm-evidence front.
Several butterflies in Britain have wings that are shades of yellow
or gold, such as the clouded yellow, the brimstone, and several of
the skippers. Unfortunately, a lot don't, which seems to dispose of
that idea. But Stephen Potter pointed out in his book _Pedigree:
Words From Nature_ that the most common British butterflies around
habitations, such as the small white and cabbage white, are
actually cream or pale yellow in colour. This would be my first
choice for an explanation, too, so making a 'butterfly' a butter-
coloured flying thing.
6. Administration
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