World Wide Words -- 02 Dec 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 215         Saturday 2 December 2000
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Sulphur.
3. Weird Words: Lithophone.
4. Q & A: On the Adrian, Within a gnat's ..., Hem and haw.
5. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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NAUSEOUS AND NAUSEATED  Several people challenged my statement in
last week's Q&A piece (derived from various dictionary sources)
that the new usage only appeared after 1945. Miriam Raphael said:
"I was a child in Westchester, New York, in the 1930s, and that was
the accepted way of announcing that one felt sick. My husband grew
up in Brooklyn in the same era and remembers his mother using the
phrase". And Professor Jascha Kessler wrote: "I grew up in the
Bronx, and learned that one felt nauseous (nawshiss), and so that
usage goes back more than one generation, since we are talking 60
years ago. 'I was nauseous', was common; and 'nauseated', as to
feel nauseated, would have sounded to our prole ears rather hoity-
toity, doncha know?" Andrew Stiller added: "My father (1916-1992)
was a pediatrician in the Washington DC area, and used 'nauseous'
to mean 'nauseated' all his life. One night, though, a panicky
mother called him, saying of her infant son, 'Doctor, he's
nauseating again!'"

NEPENTHE  Following up last week's Weird Word, Andrea Day wrote
from Australia: "A local vineyard here in the Adelaide Hills has
used the name 'Nepenthe'. I can't remember whether I've tasted
their wine ...".


2. Topical Words: Sulphur
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Americans will perhaps class this spelling as another example of
the olde-worlde quaintness of British life, since they have for the
better part of two centuries been used to 'sulfur'. In this, they
are now joined by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in
Britain, who sent advice last week to head teachers that 14-year-
olds taking school tests in science should adopt what was described
as "internationally standardised" versions of this and other words,
like 'fetus'.

A number of British newspaper commentators and teachers expressed
opinions on this change, with varying degrees of apoplexy, that
were partly based on a jingoistic feeling that, well, we invented
the damn language, why should we have to conform to the way other
people want to spell it? The phrase "American cultural imperialism"
was also used. The School Standards Minister, Estelle Morris, told
the QCA to think again (they don't have to and they're not going
to: they're an independent agency). The Conservative opposition
education secretary, Theresa May, said the ruling was ridiculous
and would only confuse teachers and pupils. All this despite the
fact that the QCA had emphasised that "British English spelling
should not be penalised".

Nobody is suggesting British people change these spellings for all
purposes, only when using them in scientific contexts. The Royal
Society of Chemistry rushed out a press release the next day to
support the QCA, pointing out that standardisation is especially
important for ease of communication (like looking things up in
databases, for example, where variant versions of common terms are
a bugbear). The Society added that standard chemical nomenclature
already specifies the 'f' forms of words like 'sulfur' following
agreement by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
(IUPAC) in 1990.

The difference in spelling, and the current controversy resulting
from it, must be laid at the feet of the late Noah Webster, a
humourless and deeply religious schoolmaster cum failed lawyer who,
after 15 years' work, published his _American Dictionary of the
English Language_ in 1828. One cannot imagine an individual less
well suited to the creation of a dictionary; he knew very little of
other languages, his ideas about etymology were based more on
religion and wishful thinking than historical fact (he thought all
languages derived from ancient Chaldee), and he had this bee in his
bonnet about simplifying the language by removing unnecessary
letters from words.

His most influential book was not the _Dictionary_, but the earlier
_American Spelling Book_, which went through about three hundred
editions during his lifetime and after. This was very conventional
by the standards of his day. It was only later that he began to
advocate spelling reform, especially in a piece with the splendid
title _An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of
Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of
Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation_, published in 1789.

His aim was to remove all extraneous letters from words and he put
forward a whole range of suggestions to this end. His aim was also
political: he wanted to make American orthography distinctive and
through this to help weld the disparate 13 founding colonies into a
nation. By 1806, though, when he published his first dictionary, he
had backtracked on the more outlandish of his ideas, saying "it
would be useless to attempt any change, even if practicable, in
those anomalies which form whole classes of words, and in which,
change would rather perplex than ease the learner" (still a strong
argument against spelling reform).

Because of his spelling revisions in the 1828 dictionary, Americans
now write 'color', 'jewelry', 'theater' and 'aluminum', as well as
'sulfur'. Had it not been for the conservatism of his readers and
publisher - and a "dictionary war" with a rival - that forced him
to modify his views, Americans would also now have 'tuf' (for
tough), 'groop' (for group) and 'tung' (for tongue) among many
others.

The deciding factor in modern standardisation, of course, is the
American influence on the language world-wide, and especially on
the vocabulary of the technical world. This has been considerable,
and is the basis for the recommendations of IUPAC and the QCA. The
majority of English writers world-wide already spell the word
'sulfur'; that it looks odd and suspicious to some British speakers
is as much an indication of parochialism as patriotism.

Interestingly, the IUPAC also said that 'aluminium' should be so
spelled - one for Britain, it might seem, except that what IUPAC
was actually doing was bringing that spelling into line with the
other 55 elements whose names end in '-ium'.

The Royal Society of Chemistry tried to make the point that "in
18th and 19th century Britain it was commonplace for sulfur to
be spelt with either an 'f' or 'ph'". In this, they take their case
too far, since the _Oxford English Dictionary_ entry shows that the
word has had 'ph' in the middle ever since spelling settled down
about 1600. Except in the US after Noah Webster, of course, and now
internationally. And that's official.


3. Weird Words: Lithophone
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A percussion instrument made of stone.

This name is applied to any instrument made of stone that produces
a ringing sound when hit; another is 'idiophone', something that
sounds by natural internal resonance. There are a surprising number
of them around the world in places as far apart as Togo, Iceland
and Venezuela. The Chinese ch'ing is a set of 16 L-shaped tuned
stone slabs, which are suspended in a large frame and struck on
their long side with wooden mallets or padded sticks.

The word is often applied to a specific example, the Vietnamese
'dan da', a set of resonant stones. A set in Ho Chi Minh City and
another now in Paris can lay claim to be the oldest extant music
instruments in the world, from 6,000 years ago. The stones were
found in 1949 by Georges Condominas in a village in the central
highlands of Vietnam. They were quarried from a place nearby where
the rock is made of petrified wood and were chipped and shaped to
tune them to a perfect pentatonic scale. They can still be played,
by hitting them with wooden mallets, to make a sort of hugely
antique stone marimba.


4. Q&A
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[Send your queries to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will be
acknowledged, but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited.
If I can, a response will appear here and on the Words Web site. If
you wish to comment, please e-mail editor at worldwidewords.org]

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Q. A friend of mine uses two colourful phrases: 'on the Adrian',
meaning crooked or not straight, and 'within a gnat's ...', meaning
very close-fitting. Any ideas on the origin of these terms? [Doug
Dew]

A. This week's special offer: two answers for the price of one.

'Adrian' is a well-known bit of Australian slang, dating from the
1970s. I'd always associated it with being drunk; somebody drunk
certainly doesn't always walk straight and there's probably a link
in there somewhere. The word is supposed to originate in the name
of the Australian tennis player Adrian Quist, and is a bit of
typical Aussie rhyming slang: Quist = pissed, that is, drunk. (Some
readers may be surprised that Australians have rhyming slang; many
people know only of the Cockney variety, but in reality rhyming
slang is quite widely distributed and the Australian variety in
particular is colourful and very much alive.)  Why Mr Quist should
be so favoured I've no idea - apart from his having once been so
well known that his name was a good peg to hang a rhyme on (but I
have a feeling that an Australian subscriber or ten may shortly
enlighten me).

The other expression wasn't originally Australian, so far as I
know. Various phrases of the type have been known in the US for at
least 160 years to indicate something very small. The first example
I found is cited by John Lighter in the _Random House Historical
Dictionary of American Slang_ from 1840: 'gnat's heel', a very
small amount. Others are 'gnat's eyebrow', 'gnat's ass' ("Fine
enough to split the hairs on a gnat's ass"), and 'fit to a gnat's
heel', for something that fits or suits perfectly. There's also the
English 'gnat's piss' for any weak and unsatisfying drink. Others
exist, some even more crude.

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Q. I was wondering about the expression 'hem and haw'? Has it
anything to do with teamstering? I ask because of the horse team
commands for turning left and right ('gee' and 'haw'). Could it be
one of the American expressions placing two unrelated actions
together indicating confusion or hesitation? [T Foxe]

A. Nothing at all to do with teamstering commands, so far as I
know. Incidentally, yours is the usual American version of the
expression. In Britain, we know it as 'hum and haw'. Either way the
phrase contains a pair of words that are imitative. A close
relative of the first of these is 'ahem', indicating a gentle
clearing of the throat designed to attract attention; 'hem' more
often represents the slight clearing of the throat of a hesitating
or nonplussed speaker. 'Haw' is very much the same kind of word,
and a close relative of that is 'haw-haw', which is also an
imitative word for a kind of loftily affected way of speaking (as
in Lord Haw-Haw, the British nickname for William Joyce, who
broadcast for Hitler in the Second World War). In the British
version of the phrase, 'hum' is another word for a low inarticulate
murmur. Either way, the two words together illustrate very well the
hesitation and indecisiveness to which the phrases refer.


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