World Wide Words -- 05 Aug 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Aug 5 07:37:11 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 199 Saturday 5 August 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 8,800 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>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
--------
1. Notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Mountainboarding.
3. Weird Words: Solar sail.
4. In Brief: Chip, Conflict diamonds, Gastrobot.
5. Q & A: Jesus H Christ, Push the envelope, Big cheese.
6. Administration: How to leave the list, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
THE @ SIGN It seems that this ubiquitous symbol of the Internet is
even older than we thought. An Italian academic, Giorgio Stabile, a
professor of the history of science at La Sapienza University, has
found evidence of its use in the records of Florentine merchants
nearly 500 years ago. At that time, it was both a unit of weight
and of volume, representing one amphora, a measure that was based
on the capacity of the standard terracotta jars that were employed
to transport grain and liquid about the Mediterranean (the capacity
of an amphora was one thirtieth of a barrel). So the sign was at
first a script letter A, embellished in the typical Florentine way.
In Spain, a related measure, the 'arroba' - still the Spanish word
for the symbol - represented either 25lb (just over 11kg) or six
Imperial gallons (nearly 23 litres). The symbol seems to have moved
across Europe, changing its meaning as it went to the modern sense
of "at the price of". I've updated the article on the symbol, at
<http://www.quinion.com/words/articles/whereat.htm>, where there is
much more information on its history and names.
2. Turns of Phrase: Mountainboarding
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This may just be the answer to the continual problem faced by ski
resorts - what to offer the customers in the summer; indeed it's
predicted to be the Next Big Thing on the slopes. A mountainboard
looks like the confused offspring of a skateboard, a surfboard and
a scooter. It has big wheels at the back, a steerable front wheel,
shock absorbers, and - all-important for beginners - brakes. It can
be fitted with different kinds of wheels to suit the local terrain.
Its visual provenance does not deceive: it has to an extent evolved
from all of these, and from the much longer established grass-skis,
through the intermediate forms of outbackboards, grassboards and
dirtboards. Several designs have been produced under this name by
various innovators in recent years, some with the wheels in-line,
others with them set side-by-side.
Sunday River mountainboarding instructor Braden Douglass, 16,
believes mountainboarding will catch on at ski resorts, just like
mountain biking did more than a decade ago.
[_AP Online_, July 2000]
To try mountainboarding, another of the activities on offer at the
weekend, I travelled to Cheltenham to meet Pete Tatham, a partner
in No Sno, a leading mountainboard company, and he took me out for
a spot of 'grass surfing'.
[_Independent on Sunday_, July 2000]
3. Weird Words: Solar sail
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A spacecraft propulsion device that employs the pressure of light
and energetic particles from the Sun.
Like so many ideas concerning space travel, this one has been in
existence for decades, mostly in science-fiction stories, though it
is now being thought about more seriously as new materials become
available. The first use of the name was by Arthur C Clarke, in his
short story _Sunjammer_ of 1964 (reprinted as the title story of
_The Wind from the Sun_ in 1972), though the concept goes back at
least as far as Cordwainer Smith's _The Lady who Sailed the Soul_
of 1960.
The idea is that a spacecraft would unfurl a huge but incredibly
thin 'solar sail', perhaps a kilometre in diameter. The pressure on
the sail of energetic particles from the Sun (the solar wind) and
of sunlight would be tiny, but it would be there. A craft massing
several tonnes could accelerate to more than a kilometre per second
within days, and then go on accelerating so long as it remained
relatively close to the sun. It is suggested that an initial shove
could be given by giant ground-based lasers (as in Larry Niven's
novel _The Mote in God's Eye_). A combination of the sun's gravity,
lasers and a solar sail could make it possible to travel anywhere
within the Solar System, provided you're not in a hurry.
4. In Brief
-------------------------------------------------------------------
CHIP Here's another specialised verb that has recently appeared.
If somebody offers to 'chip' your nice new Playstation, DVD player,
Nintendo or the like, they are offering to replace a vital silicon
chip with one that defeats anti-copying measures or stops you
playing films designed for another region.
CONFLICT DIAMONDS These are gemstones from mines in Africa that
are sold on the international market to help fund warring groups,
such as the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone or Unita in
Angola. Another term for them is 'blood diamonds'. Diamond dealers
have recently put measures in place to try to prevent them from
being sold.
GASTROBOT If you invent a robot that gets the energy to run itself
from a colony of captive bacteria in a fuel cell which converts
organic matter into electricity, what else would you call it? It's
more appealing than the one being built at the University of the
West of England in Bristol, which eats slugs ...
5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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.]
-----------
Q. During an Internet dialogue, the question came up - why do
people say 'Jesus H Christ'? It never seems to be any other letter.
It sounds American, but what does it stand for and where did it
originate? 'Holy' seems to be a strong candidate, or could it be
from "Hallowed be Thy (middle) name"? [Paul Tracy, UK]
A. There have been various theories, but the one that seems most
plausible is that it comes from the Greek monogram for Jesus, 'IHS'
or 'IHC'. This is formed from the first two letters plus the last
letter of His name in Greek (the letters iota, eta, and sigma; in
the second instance, the C is a Byzantine Greek form of sigma). The
H is actually the capital letter form of eta, but churchgoers who
were unfamiliar with Greek took it to be a Latin H.
The oath does indeed seem to be American, first recorded in print
at the end of the nineteenth century, although around 1910 Mark
Twain wrote in his _Autobiography_ that the expression had been in
use about 1850 and was considered old even then. Its long survival
must have a lot to do with its cadence, and the way that an
especially strong emphasis can be placed on the H.
Nineteenth-century Americans weren't the first to take the Greek
letters to be Latin ones - since medieval times the monogram has
often been expanded into Latin phrases, such as 'Iesus Hominum
Salvator', Jesus Saviour of Men, 'In Hoc Signo (vinces)', in this
sign (thou shalt conquer), and 'In Hac Salus', in this (cross) is
salvation.
-----------
Q. I've always been puzzled by the phrase 'pushing the envelope';
it's an incongruous image that doesn't seem to have any
relationship to its meaning. Can you tell me where it comes from?
[Claire Walsh; related questions came from Clive Pullinger, Linda
Webb, Brian MacWhinney, Sue McCoy, and others]
A. It comes from mathematics, specifically as it is used in
aeroplane design. It was popularised by Tom Wolfe's book of 1979,
_The Right Stuff_, about test pilots and the early space programme.
It's an excellent example of the way that a bit of specialised
jargon known only to a few practitioners can move into the general
language.
In mathematics, an 'envelope' is the enclosing boundary of a set or
family of curves that is touched by every curve in the system. This
usage is known from the latter part of the nineteenth century. It's
also used in electrical engineering for the curve that you get when
you connect the successive peaks of a wave. This 'envelope' curve
encloses or envelops all the component curves.
In aeronautics, the 'envelope' is the outer boundary of all the
curves that describe the performance of the aircraft under various
conditions of engine thrust, speed, altitude, atmospheric
conditions, and the like. It is generally taken to be the known
limits for the safe performance of the craft.
Test pilots have to test (or 'push') these limits to establish
exactly what the plane is capable of doing, and where failure is
likely to occur - to compare calculated performance limits with
ones derived from experience. Test pilots called this 'pushing the
envelope' in the 1950s and 1960s.
Following Tom Wolfe's book and film, the phrase began to move out
into the wider world; the first recorded use in the more general
sense of going (or attempting to go) beyond the limits of what is
known to be possible came in the late 1980s.
-----------
Q. What is the origin of the term 'big cheese' as in "He's a
big cheese in the rugby world", etc. [Edward Teague]
A. There's no shortage of expressions invoking cheese: one may be
'cheesed off' (miserable, annoyed, fed up), or something may be
'cheesy' (cheap, unpleasant or blatantly inauthentic). These refer
to the unhappy habit of ripe cheese making its presence known to
anyone within sniffing distance.
But 'big cheese' has a quite different origin, based in the only
positive slang sense of 'cheese' that seems ever to have existed.
This was first recorded in London in the early part of the
nineteenth century, with the sense of "good, first-rate in quality,
genuine, pleasant or advantageous".
Originally it had nothing to do with cheese - the source is the
Persian or Hindi word 'chiz', meaning a thing. Sir Henry Yule wrote
it up in _Hobson-Jobson_, his famous Anglo-Indian Dictionary of
1886. He said that the expression "used to be common among Anglo-
Indians" and cites expressions such as "My new Arab is the real
chiz" and "These cheroots are the real chiz". Another expression
with the same meaning that predated 'the real chiz' was 'the real
thing', so it's highly probable that Anglo-Indians changed 'thing'
to 'chiz' as a bilingual joke. Once returnees from India started to
use it in Britain, hearers naturally enough converted the
unfamiliar foreign word into something more recognisable, and it
became 'cheese'.
The phrase 'big cheese' developed from it in early twentieth-
century America, as a term to describe the most influential or
important person in a group. The first written example we know
about is in Ring Lardner's _Haircut_ of 1914. It followed on
several other American phrases containing 'big' to describe a
person of this kind, most with animal or vegetable associations -
'big bug', 'big potato', 'big fish' and 'big toad', of which the
oldest is probably the British English 'bigwig' of the eighteenth
century (more recent examples are 'big shot', 'big enchilada' and
'big banana'). Like the others, 'big cheese' was by no means always
complimentary and often had derisive undertones, no doubt helped
along by the influence of other slang meanings of 'cheese'.
6. Administration
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* To leave the list, send the e-mail message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS
to the list server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>.
The subject line of your message will be ignored. For a complete
list of commands, instead send the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS.
* WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You
may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free
media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the
Web address of <http://www.quinion.com/words/>.
===================================================================
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list