World Wide Words -- 29 Apr 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 188           Saturday 29 April 2000
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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. Turns of Phrase: Toxicogenomics.
2. Weird Words: Dactylonomy.
3. Q & A: Brouhaha, Aunt Sally, Range, Dichotomy.
4. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Turns of Phrase: Toxicogenomics
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This is a scientific sub-discipline that combines toxicology (the
study of the nature and effects of poisons) with genomics (the
investigation of the way that our genetic make-up, the genome,
translates into biological functions). It has come into being only
in the past couple of years. It has been made possible through an
investigative technique using microarrays (also called DNA chips),
which contain many hundreds or thousands of short DNA strands, each
in its own compartment. By washing a solution of a substance over
the whole chip at once, the section of DNA affected can be made to
fluoresce, so indicating which genes are turned on by the substance
and so suggesting its likely effect on the body (in the jargon of
the business, taken from computing, the chips are 'massively
parallel' discovery processes). It may soon be possible to include
the whole human genome on such a chip and so test all of it at once
for possible adverse effects.

"The most exciting thing about toxicogenomics is that we're going
to start investigating genes we never would have thought of looking
at," says CTL's Kimber. "That's where the big surprises - and big
benefits - are going to come from."
                                              [_Science_, May 1999]

An interest in new technologies, such as toxicogenomics and the use
of computerised systems for prediction of safety, as well as in
other scientific advances which can contribute to safety assessment
would be advantageous.
                      [Advertisement in _New Scientist_, Jan. 2000]


2. Weird Words: Dactylonomy
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The art of counting on the fingers.

To describe it so is to severely underestimate the skill of those
who employed this technique. For it was not just a matter of using
the whole finger, as some of us still do when we suffer temporary
numerical embarrassment. After all, every finger has a knuckle, two
joints and three bones (one joint and two bones for the thumb) and
all of them, on both hands, were used to count up to 9,999. There
are descriptions of the method from the Middle East, Asia and other
places, and by the Venerable Bede from the north-east of England in
the eighth century AD. Paintings exist from more than four thousand
years ago showing Egyptians counting in this way, and we know it
was common in classical Greece and Rome. Related methods were used
in some civilisations to negotiate prices between buyer and seller,
with the hands hidden under a cloth, in a serious exchange
reminiscent of paper-scissors-stone, or that ancient finger game
called 'morra' in Italy. The word is from Greek 'daktulos', finger,
plus '-nomia', related to 'nomos', law, that we use to mark some
specified area of knowledge.


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 WWWords Web site.]

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Q. Can you tell me anything about the derivation of the word
'bruhaha'?  I'm not sure this is the standard spelling, that is, if
there is a standard spelling. [William Wimmer; Rick Peeples and
Robert Fineberg asked related questions]

A. The usual spelling is 'brouhaha', meaning an overexcited and
noisy response, a commotion, hubbub or uproar. It's a negative word
for some unpleasant confusion; a more neutral alternative might be
the equally odd-looking 'hubbub'. We know the word came from the
French word spelled the same way; it's found in French from the
sixteenth century on, but it only arrived in English at the end of
the nineteenth century. It seems to have been used in French drama
as a noise made by the devil, who cried 'brou, ha, ha!'.

Many etymologists will say that the word was just a noisy nonsense
exclamation that imitated the thing it referred to. But there is a
theory, put forward by Walther von Wartberg, that it actually comes
from the Hebrew 'barukh habba', "welcome" - literally "blessed be
the one who comes" - a phrase that appears several times in the
Book of Psalms and which is used in Synagogue prayers and as a
greeting at Jewish weddings and other public occasions. You might
think that this is just another case of folk wisdom guessing on the
basis of slight resemblance, but there is evidence to suggest it
may be correct. There's a similar word in the Arezzo dialect of
Italian, 'barruccaba', that is without doubt borrowed from the
Hebrew, and phrases in several other languages suggest that other
Hebrew expressions were similarly borrowed.

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Q. It's not referenced at all in Collins dictionary, but it is in
common use around our work environment - "this is a bit of an Aunt
Sally". What does it mean and where does it come from? [Paul
Bowers, London]

A. The original Aunt Sally was a game, popular in Britain from the
middle of the nineteenth century at fairgrounds and racetracks. The
head of an old woman with a clay pipe in her mouth was set up and
players had to throw sticks at it to try to break the pipe. From
there it became a term for somebody or something that was an easy
target for attack or criticism.

The 'aunt' part of the name probably means an old black woman,
employed both by blacks and whites in the USA from the eighteenth
century onwards but known in London; 'aunt' could also be applied
familiarly to any elderly woman. Jonathon Green suggests in the
_Cassell Dictionary of Slang_ that the direct influence may have
been an 1820s popular black-face doll, also called Aunt Sally.

This seems to have been an early example of merchandising spin-off,
following the popularity of a low-life character named Black Sal.
She was created by Pierce Egan in his successful series _Life In
London_, which he published monthly between 1821 and 1828 and in
which he told stories about the low amusements of sporting men
about Town. A stage adaptation appeared late in 1821. I mention
this mainly to be able to quote the playbill (for which I am once
again indebted to Jonathon Green), which is a wondrous example of
the advertising copy style of the time:

  On a scale of unprecedented extent ... an entirely new
  Classic, Comic, Operatic, Didactic, Aristophanic, Jocalic,
  Analytic, Panoramic, Camera-Obscura-ic, Extravaganza Burletta
  of Fun, Frolic, Fashion, and Flash, in three acts, called
  "TOM and JERRY; or, LIFE IN LONDON." Replete with Prime
  Chaunts, Rum Glees, and Kiddy Catches, founded on Pierce
  Egan's well-known and highly popular work of the same name,
  by a celebrated extra-vagant erratic Author.

Incidentally, this was the first use of 'Tom and Jerry' for a pair
of characters.

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Q. What is the origin of the word 'range' as pertaining to its usage
as the 'kitchen range' or 'gas range'? [Karen Rockhold, USA]

A. The sense is similar to the one we still use in phrases like
'range of mountains' for a set of things all in a row. It derives
from the Old French 'ranc', which may in turn have come from a
prehistoric Germanic 'khrengaz' for a circle, from which we also get
our word 'ring'. We borrowed the Old French as 'rank', which we
still use in the sense of a set of things in order, as in military
or social ranks or a taxi rank, and as 'range', which shares some
senses. 'Range' was first applied in the cooking sense in the
fifteenth century; it seems to have been first used for a collection
of hearths and ovens set in a row under one chimney, as one might
find in the kitchen of a large house serving many people. 'Gas
range', by the way, is a purely American term: in Britain, we'd talk
about a 'gas stove' or a 'gas cooker', though these usually have
ovens included (we do have 'kitchen range', but only for solid-fuel
cookers like the Aga which have a number of cooking positions,
including ovens).

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Q. Is it wrong to use 'dichotomy' to mean a puzzling contradiction?
If so what word could be used instead? [Trevor Williams, Essex, UK]

A. Many commentators on language and many readers of World Wide
Words will unhesitatingly say you can't correctly use the word in
that way. But there's plenty of evidence that it is used with that
meaning. It's a classic case of a word with specific technical
senses in logic, astronomy, botany and zoology having been taken
over by writers who have only a hazy idea of its meaning.

It comes from the Greek 'dikhotomia', a splitting into two, and in
English it originally referred to a division into two strongly
contrasted parts. For example, in logic you can argue that an
object is either red, or it is not red; this division is a
dichotomy in its strict sense. Writers quite early on started to
use it for anything divided into two parts or resulting from such a
division, or for situations in which a strongly marked difference
of opinion existed. This evolved into the sense you describe, in
which the division results in a situation that is paradoxical or
ambivalent.

The best discussion of the issue is perhaps that in _Merriam-
Webster's Dictionary of English Usage_, a book I unhesitatingly
recommend. The editors remark that the current meaning is hazy, to
the extent that it is not only difficult to give usage advice, but
even to describe accurately how the word is being used, as in this
example they quote: "the Eskimo today lives in a dichotomy, in a
kind of cultural and economic never-never world".

Their conclusion is worth quoting in full: "In many cases of such
dichotomizing, the message that gets across to the reader is
chiefly that the writer is using a fancy, academic-sounding word.
If this is the impression you want to convey, 'dichotomy' will
surely serve you. If you are mainly interested in having your
sentence understood, however, you might be better off finding
another way to word it".

That other way might well include 'ambivalence', 'split',
'division', 'paradox', or 'schism'. Or perhaps your own words,
'puzzling contradiction', if that is what you mean to say.


4. Administration
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