World Wide Words -- 22 Apr 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Apr 22 07:48:21 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 187 Saturday 22 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. Notes and comments
2. Turns of Phrase: Data archaeology.
3. Weird Words: Houghmagandy.
4. Topical Words: Bogus.
5. Q & A: Rogue, Un- versus In-.
6. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
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TOFF Several people queried my unexplained use of that word in the
piece about Derby Day last week. (I like to slip these slangy old-
time British usages in from time to time to keep the patrons alert;
it's a word that's now pretty much defunct.) The OED has one of
its better definitions, worth quoting: "An appellation, originally
given by the lower classes, to a person who is stylishly dressed or
who has a smart appearance; a swell; hence, one of the well-to-do,
a 'nob'". It probably comes from the word 'tuft', as applied during
the nineteenth century to a nobleman at Oxford University - one who
was the son of a peer and hence had a seat in the House of Lords -
because he was marked by having a gold tassel on his academic cap.
2. Turns of Phrase: Data archaeology
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Things move fast in computing technology, as many people know only
too well. (Seen many 5.25" floppy disks recently?) But it's not
just the physical storage of data which gets outmoded very quickly
- so do the formats in which that data is stored. As methods
evolve, data stored in old structures becomes progressively less
accessible. Enter the 'data archaeologist', a specialist in
recovering historical data from such sources and translating it
into a form which is useful. The term is used especially for large
data stores like those accumulated in weather recording, of great
importance for assessing climate change. This seems to have been
where it originated: it's recorded about 1993 in the name of the
GODAR Project, the Global Oceanographic Data Archaeology and Rescue
Project. It is closely related to the more common 'data mining',
which refers to the trawling of corporate databases for meaningful
relationships between data.
"Data Archaeologist" smacks of postmodernism gone awry, but the
business of rummaging through now-forgotten tapes of health-care
records or satellite observations for archival data is already a
viable industry.
[Rohit Khare and Adam Rifkin, _Capturing the State
of Distributed Systems with XML_, 1997]
Data archeologists like Levitus have spent the past 7 years seeking
out ocean temperature data around the world and digitizing them for
archiving on modern media.
[_Science_, Mar. 2000]
[I'm grateful to Mike Anglin for telling me about this term.]
3. Weird Words: Houghmagandy /hQxm@'gandI/
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Adulterous sexual intercourse.
It's a rare word these days, but as it has a grand sound - and it
is of such universal application - perhaps somebody should begin a
campaign to restore it to common usage. One well-known appearance
is in Vladimir Nabokov's book _Pale Fire_: "She would have
preferred him to have gone through a bit of wholesome houghmagandy
with the wench". We do know the word was originally Scots, as the
guttural 'gh' indicates. The first part is the same word as 'hock',
the joint in a four-legged animal that matches the human ankle,
sometimes still spelt that way (as in the Scots' hough soup). It
can also refer to the hollow part behind the human knee joint
(didn't you always want a word for it? Actually it's better known
to medicine as the 'popliteal' area) as well as the nearby thigh.
The second element of the word is problematic; it could be from
'canty', a Scots and northern English dialect adjective for someone
who is lively or cheerful, or perhaps active or brisk. So, a bit of
active thigh work - you can see how the word could have arisen.
There seems to be no link with the similar-sounding but obsolete
Australian word for a thin and unpalatable stew, 'hashmagandy',
which comes from 'salmagundi' (see http://www.quinion.com/words/
weirdwords/ww-sal1.htm).
4. Topical Words: Bogus
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The two main political parties in Britain were severely criticised
by a union leader last week for their inflammatory language about
refugees, especially their use of the B-word: 'bogus'. It has been
used so much, especially in the more strident tabloids and by
government ministers, that if you try a word-association test on
somebody, the chances are 'bogus' will provoke an automatic
response of 'asylum seeker'.
It's an excellent word to wield as a denigratory weapon, you have
to admit: short and blunt with a strong first letter. Until the
recent furore its main employment was in headlines - along with
'wed', 'ban', 'quiz' and 'probe' it was a word that hardly anybody
actually said. Young people here have borrowed the American teen
slang use of the word as an all-purpose term of disapproval (via
the Bill and Ted and Wayne's World movies which spread it to the
outside world), but we've never really noticed the hacker culture
sense from which it came. This seems to have begun at Princeton
University in the late 1960s, where it meant a thing that was
useless, non-functional or incorrect; this led to words like
bogosity and bogometer, and so to that wonderful invention the
bogon, the elementary particle of bogusness. (If it existed,
everyone in Britain would now have radiation sickness.)
It's fair that Americans should have such fun with the word: they
invented it, after all, though there's considerable doubt about
when, why and where. What we do know is that in May 1827 a group of
counterfeiters was arrested in Painesville, Ohio. They had an odd
apparatus in their possession for stamping out fake coins. Somebody
in the crowd attending the arrest called it a 'bogus', a name which
was reported in the local newspaper, the Painesville Telegraph.
That identification by the bystander seems to have been a cry of
recognition (a bit of a give-away, you might think) and strongly
suggests the word was already well known in certain select circles.
_The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang_ found an
example from thirty years earlier, in a book called Band of
Brothers: "'Coney' means Counterfeit paper money ... 'Bogus' means
spurious coin". So it was a bit of counterfeiters' slang that was
presumably well established by the time the Painesville Telegraph
heard about it. The word suddenly became popular in America from
about 1850 onwards, quite why I haven't been able to establish, and
has been in the language ever since.
Where it came from is almost a complete mystery. The editor of the
paper at the time, Eber D Howe, suggested that it was a shortened
version of 'tantrabogus', a word he knew from his childhood and
which in his father's time back in Vermont meant any ill-looking
object. It might be linked to the old Devonshire dialect word
'tantarabobs' for the devil, making it a relative of words like
'bogy'.
Other writers of the Victorian period suggested it might have come
from the name of an Italian forger named Borghese, but he seems to
have appeared on the scene several decades too late, or from
'bagasse', the refuse of sugar cane after the juice was extracted.
I think we can dismiss these - we know a good word for such ideas,
after all.
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. Can you throw any light on the origin of the word 'rogue'? I've
looked it up in several dictionaries which give the origin as
French, or Celtic via Breton. On the other hand, some dictionaries
claim its origin is unknown. The question is raised by a listing of
words I found on the Internet, which otherwise seems accurate,
claiming that the word comes from Sinhalese, meaning originally an
elephant which had been expelled from the herd. [Frank Bohan]
A. It sounds confusing. But with a bit of investigation we can make
sense of all these suggestions - even the elephants.
Let's take first the basic meaning of 'rogue', an unprincipled or
dishonest man. This can be traced back to the sixteenth century, to
a thieves' cant that invented a series of words for categories of
villains. The 'rogue' was said to belong to the Fourth Order of
Canters and was a beggar, idle vagrant or vagabond. By
Shakespeare's day it had become well established in standard
English with a meaning much as today's, and had already developed a
playful sense as a term of mild reproach.
It's sometimes suggested that it was originally a Celtic word, and
the Breton 'rog', haughty, is put in evidence (though that word is
probably not the direct source, just its cousin); the related
French word 'rogue' is also suggested as an possible origin. But
such theories have been superseded by a better understanding of the
roots of cant. It seems it comes from a slang term 'roger', a
beggar who pretended to be a poor university student in order to
play on people's feelings. This can be traced to the Latin
'rogare', to ask (and so was said with a hard 'g', not like the
proper name).
Now to the elephants. There is a specific sense of 'rogue' that
refers to a solitary elephant that is savage or destructive. This
can't be the source of our word, since it's only recorded in the
nineteenth century, long after 'rogue' had become part of the
language. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ suggests this sense was
actually based on the existing meaning of 'rogue', perhaps
influenced by the Sinhalese 'hora' or 'sora', a thief.
[I'm grateful, as so often, to Jonathon Green's superb Cassell
Dictionary of Slang for information here. You may like to know that
it has just appeared in paperback, ISDN 0-304-35167-9. This
substantial doorstop of 1316 pages will set you back GBP15.99 or
the equivalent in local dosh or moolah (see pages 358 and 801).]
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Q. If there are any useful rules or methods to remember when to use
'un-' versus 'in-' to indicate 'not', I must have been looking at
the pretty girl in the next desk that day. I can never figure out
which to use and depend entirely on rote memorization, but is this
the only way? [Walt Smith, North Carolina, USA]
A. There is a rule, but it's only of value to somebody who knows
which language the root word came from, so it's really no help at
all for most of us. In general, words take 'un-' when they are of
English (Germanic) origin and 'in-' if they come from Latin. (The
forms 'im-', 'il-', and 'ir-' are variations on 'in-'.) Apart from
that, there's really no good guide to which one you should choose.
You're just going to have to stick to learning them by rote.
If it's any consolation to you, the battle between 'in-' and 'un-'
has been going on for centuries, with sometimes one form winning
and sometimes the other, which suggests that the problem has been
troubling English speakers for a very long time. As an example, for
several centuries English had both 'inability' and 'unability', but
the latter disappeared in the eighteenth century for no very
obvious reason. Another is familiar from the American Declaration
of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights ..."; these days, it's 'inalienable' (it
should always have been, by the rule, since 'alien' comes from the
Latin 'alienus', of or belonging to another person or place).
A few pairs are still fighting it out, such as 'inarguable' and
'unarguable'. Others have distinct senses, such as 'unhuman' and
'inhuman', or 'inartistic' and 'unartistic'. Even more confusingly,
some pairs of adjectives and nouns have different prefixes:
'unstable' has the noun 'instability', and 'uncivil' has
'incivility'. All these have to be learned, I'm afraid.
One thing we can say for sure is that 'in-' and its relatives are
not living prefixes. If you want to negate a word today, you are
much more likely to use 'un-' (or perhaps 'non-' or 'a-', but
that's another story.)
6. Administration
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