World Wide Words -- 08 Apr 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 185           Saturday 8 April 2000
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Editor: Michael Quinion    ISSN 1470-1448    Thornbury, Bristol, UK
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Contents
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1. Turns of Phrase: Cyberventing.
2. Topical Words: Quantum.
3. Weird Words: Tatterdemalion.
4. Q & A: All mouth and trousers, Out of sorts,
       Piping hot, Tickety-boo.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Turns of Phrase: Cyberventing
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What do you do when you're unhappy with your boss? Traditionally,
you grumble to co-workers in the hallway, round the water cooler or
over a drink after work. When e-mail, bulletin boards and chat
rooms came along, some wrote messages to each other. Now the idea
has been taken a step further: disgruntled employees are setting up
Web sites to provide a forum for complaints. The term for this is
'cyberventing': venting your anger by electronic means. Some
employers have even set up official grousing sites on internal Web
systems, reasoning that it's better to get the complaints out in
the open than have problems fester in the dark. The term has also
been applied to Web sites set up by people who are angry at the
treatment they've received from retailers or suppliers, and also to
the mass e-mailing of staff by aggrieved ex-workers, such as in a
recent case at Intel.

While cyberventing is a convenient way to blow off steam, conflict
resolution is the best way in the long run to build and maintain
strong work relationships, he contends.
                                         [_HR Magazine_, Nov. 1999]

Bosses in New Zealand must be pretty good, because none of them get
a mention in the My Boss Sucks website. This is part of a new trend
on the Internet - cyberventing, where you can complain to your
heart's content.
                 [_The Press_ (Canterbury, New Zealand), Mar. 2000]


2. Topical Words: Quantum
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A report in the _Guardian_ recently quoted a British solicitor (a
lawyer) speaking about the successful outcome of his client's case:
"The next stage will be to find out what liability there is and the
quantum of damages". Such is the association of the word with
nuclear physics that one's first instinct is to wonder what the
lawyer thought he was saying.

But, as every legal person knows, and as even a cursory glance at
the dictionary confirms, 'quantum' has been a perfectly good word
in English for nearly four centuries, in exactly the sense in which
the solicitor was using it. A 'quantum' is an amount - the word
comes from the Latin 'quantus', how much or how great, from which
we get 'quantity'. In law it means a sum of money, specifically one
due by way of damages, and the phrase 'quantum of damages' is long
established.

It's never been what you might call common outside the law, though
Robert Burns, for example, used it in one of his poems: "I waive
the quantum o' the sin" and the introduction to _Travels Through
France And Italy_ by Tobias Smollett remarks that it includes "a
respectable quantum of wisdom fit to become proverbial".

Scientists started to use it in English about 1910, following the
pioneering papers by Max Planck and Albert Einstein in the first
years of the century. In German, the word began in compounds like
'Elementarquantum', an elementary or fundamental quantity of energy
(Planck borrowed the word direct from Latin). The key idea was that
energy could only exist in discrete amounts or chunks: 'quanta'. To
shift from one energy level to another required a sudden change,
for which physicists coined 'quantum jump' in the 1920s. Such a
change was by normal standards an imperceptibly tiny alteration in
energy levels.

It was really only a short step - a quantum jump, perhaps - between
the idea of a sudden change and a sudden large change. That's the
meaning of 'quantum leap', which sounds like total nonsense to
anybody who knows about quanta. But before you complain about non-
specialists using it wrongly, consider the fact that its first
recorded use in 1970 was in - the science journal _New Scientist_.


3. Weird Words: Tatterdemalion
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A tattered or ragged person.

This is a lively, rattling, machine-gun word, one chosen by many
writers as suitable accompaniment to invective or disparagement.
Here's Lady Wishfort, in William Congreve's play _The Way of the
World_: "Frippery? Superannuated frippery?  I'll frippery the
villain; I'll reduce him to frippery and rags, a tatterdemalion!".
Or James Joyce, in full flow in _Ulysses_: "Florry Talbot, a blond
feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed
strawberry, lolls spreadeagle in the sofa corner, her limp forearm
pendent over the bolster, listening".

But where it comes from is open to argument. The first part seems
pretty certain to be our English 'tatter'. Some writers trace the
second bit to the French 'maillon', swaddling clothes. Others say
it comes from the Italian 'maglia' for undershirt or (British
English) vest. Support for this comes from the very earliest use,
by Ben Jonson in 1611, which he spelt as 'tatter-de-mallian',
reportedly said as though it were Italian.


4. 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. I have always known the saying as 'all mouth and trousers'. But
Matthew Parris recently wrote in _The Times_about the tendency of
the Conservative Party to use soundbites such as "All mouth and no
delivery". He said: "The phrase (surely?) is 'all mouth and no
trousers'. The Tory grip on gritty northern folk truths is
uncertain, and there may be some mental confusion with 'all talk
and no action' or even 'all fur coat and no knickers'". Can you
shed light on the subject? [Pete Jones, Brussels]

A. The form with the negative is certainly common. I can't give you
chapter and verse from direct experience, though I know that the
BBC television programme _Last of the Summer Wine_ - firmly based
in Yorkshire - has always used your form, 'all mouth and trousers',
as an effective put-down of a certain kind of over-confident man.

In the _Cassell Dictionary of Slang_, Jonathon Green is also quite
sure that the expression should lack a negative. He explains it as
being a pairing of 'mouth', cheek or insolence, with 'trousers', a
pushy sexual bravado, a fine double example of metonymy ("a
container for the thing contained").

I think Matthew Paris, like others who don't know the origin of the
expression, is trying to make sense of it by adding the 'no'. And
the other idioms he quotes are persuasive in supporting this faulty
interpretation. It's a lovely phrase, though, as good a put-down as
anyone could want (all the better for being slightly obscure), and
it's one that ought to be preserved pristine. Eliminate the
negative!

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Q. Where does the expression 'out of sorts' come from? What are
'sorts' in this context? My wife accuses me of this malady and I
know what she means, but I don't know why I know. [Ron Vaughn]

A. English idioms are often extremely puzzling and their origins
are notoriously difficult to track down. So people invent all kinds
of yarns to make sense of them.

The most common story about this phrase refers to the printer's
word 'sorts' for the individual metal characters in his boxes of
type, so called because they have been arranged, each into its own
compartment, with all of one kind together. It would obviously be a
substantial inconvenience if a printer were to run out of a sort
during composition. The problem with this story is that the
figurative expression 'out of sorts' is recorded much earlier than
the printers' term; the first recorded use of it for printers' type
in the big _Oxford English Dictionary_ is from as late as 1784,
from Benjamin Franklin: "The founts, too, must be very scanty, or
strangely out of sorts". It would seem he was attaching an already
well-known idiom to the printer's trade, not the other way around.

A second idea is that it has something to do with playing cards. A
pack that hasn't been shuffled is said to be 'out of sort' and not
suitable for playing with. The but problem with this is that the
OED doesn't give any example of it being used in this connection,
which it surely would if the expression had been common.

The Latin original of our word 'sort' was applied to a piece of
wood that was used for drawing lots. Later, still in Latin, it
developed into the idea of one's fate, fortune or condition. This
was the first meaning of 'sort' in English, in the thirteenth
century. It survived until shortly after Shakespeare's time, until
about the point that 'out of sorts' is first found. But 'sort' soon
evolved another meaning in English that related to rank, order, or
class. It was used to describe people, especially their qualities
or standing. There were once phrases such as 'of sort' that implied
high quality or rank. Others that we still use today, such as 'of
your own sort', 'the right sort', or 'of all sorts', evolved out of
the same idea.

It would seem 'out of sorts' developed from this idea of quality
(lack of it in this case), perhaps influenced by the other meaning
of fate or one's lot in life, so implying that fortune wasn't
smiling on one, or that all wasn't well.

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Q. When I looked up the phrase 'piping hot' in a dictionary, it
gave the definition "very hot". When I looked up 'piping', I didn't
find any such sense. Can you elaborate? [Steve Ellis]

A. The sense of 'piping' that's relevant here is the one for making
a musical sound, as by playing the pipes. The idea is that a dish
that's 'piping hot' is one so hot it makes a sizzling or hissing
noise, perhaps not closely similar to the sound of the pipes, but
at least audible. It's first recorded near the end of the
fourteenth century, in Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_. In the
Miller's Tale it says (in modernised spelling): "Wafers piping hot
out of the gleed", where a wafer is a kind of thin cake, baked
between wafer-irons, and 'gleed' is the hot coals of a fire.

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Q. Several of my Canadian friends use the term 'tickety-boo' to
describe an event that is proceeding quickly. Any idea where this
one originates? [Christopher Key]

A. It's certainly common in Canada, but is very probably British in
origin. The usual meaning, by the way, is more that something is
satisfactory, all in order, or OK. We can't be sure what its origin
is. Eric Partridge always contended that the word was forces'
slang, most probably from the Royal Air Force, and that it dates
from the early 1920s or thereabouts (though the _Oxford English
Dictionary_ doesn't find a written example before 1939).
Considering the number of Canadians who flew with the RAF during
World War II, its move to Canada isn't surprising. The difficult
bit is taking the word back any further than the 1920s. It could
combine 'that's the ticket' - with much the same sense - with the
childish phrase 'peek-a-boo'. But some find a link with the British
Army in India, suggesting it comes from the Hindi phrase 'tikai
babu', which is translated as "it's all right, sir".


5. Administration
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