World Wide Words -- 16 Dec 00
Michael Quinion
editor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Dec 16 08:48:27 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 217 Saturday 16 December 2000
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Sent each Saturday to more than 10,000 subscribers in 100 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK
<http://www.worldwidewords.org> Mail: <editor at worldwidewords.org>
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Oyez.
3. In Brief: Merchantainment, Pavement rage, Webinar.
4. Q & A: Without day, Teller, Spendthrift, Twee, Swamper,
Merismus.
5. Exiled English
6. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK This is the last issue that will appear in December.
There will now be a two-week gap. The next newsletter is due to go
out on Saturday 6 January 2001.
SKIMMINGTON Several American subscribers e-mailed messages about a
different custom. For example, Richard Wood wrote from Tucson:
"When I was a young lad (more than 50 years ago) in rural
northeast Pennsylvania, there was a 'meeting' held at a
newlyweds home in the middle of the night, or later, and
the newlyweds did not know when it was going to happen. It
was called a 'skimelton (sp)'. The word may have other
spellings such as a 'shiveree (sp)'. The meeting consisted
of neighbors and friends sneaking up to the newlyweds home
and suddenly blowing car horns, shooting off rifles and
shotguns, pounding on metal wash tubs or anything to make
a helluva racket. When lights came on in the house,
everyone would enter with food, drinks, etc. and have a
party that sometimes lasted until morning milking (it was
a rural dairy area)".
'Shivaree', as it is often spelled, is an adaptation of the French
'charivari' (pronounced roughly like 'shari-vari') which in France
was used for the same custom as skimmington, and seems likewise to
have shifted its meaning. The OED gives an example of the word from
_Cassell's Saturday Journal_ of 1883: "It was a shiveree - that is,
the kind of serenade they give to a newly-married couple". Noisy
serenades of this sort were especially common when the marriage was
a second one, or when the couple were badly-matched because of age,
or for some other reason.
An earlier example, from 1857, appears in _A journey through Texas;
or, A Saddle-trip on the Southwestern Frontier_ by Frederick Law
Olmsted: "In the evening we heard a din which proved to be a
charivari, offered as a tribute of public opinion to a couple who
had been married in the morning. The bride was suspected not to be
immaculate. After some exhibition of endurance, the bridegroom, we
were told, 'caved and treated,' that is, came to the door, and
furnished drinks for the crowd".
You can imagine how the custom might later have softened to one of
the kind Mr Wood describes.
2. Weird Words: Oyez
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A call to attention.
This cry rang around the US recently when, for the first time, a
session of the Supreme Court was broadcast on the same day the
hearing took place. It may be heard at the start of proceedings in
courtrooms, but otherwise is now mostly the preserve of elaborately
costumed town criers in the more heritage-minded of English towns.
In Britain it's often spelled and shouted 'oyes', and at times
people think that is what is being said (Richard Barham borrowed
that in his _Ingoldsby Legends_ in 1840: "But when the Crier cried,
'O Yes!' the people cried, 'O No!'", though the joke was probably a
wizened ancient even then, and it doesn't work for Americans, who
say "oh yay!" instead). It's actually Norman French: 'oiez' or
'oyez', the imperative plural of the verb 'oir', to hear. The verb
turns up also in the historical term 'oyer and terminer', a
commission once issued to judges on a circuit to hold courts,
literally "hear and determine". What is actually being said when
'oyez' is shouted is "Hear ye!" or, in modern English, "Pay
attention, you lot", or "Listen up, you guys".
3. In Brief
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MERCHANTAINMENT Please try not to wince. This appears to have been
invented by Dave Lauren, son of Ralph Lauren, while plugging his
new website. He defined it, obviously enough, as "a combination of
merchandising and entertainment". Smile while you spend?
PAVEMENT RAGE Not exactly new, but it surfaced again recently as a
result of a strange plan by traders in Oxford Street, London. They
wanted to introduce fast and slow lanes on pavements (American:
sidewalks) to prevent outbursts of temper triggered by irritation
at walking behind someone with a slower pace.
WEBINAR To say this is a blend of 'web' and 'seminar' is to tell
most of the story: it is an online seminar run across the World
Wide Web using teleconferencing systems. It seems to have been
invented within IBM, but is now becoming common in the internet
community. Not a felicitous formation ...
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. The last sentence of a ruling by Judge N. Sanders Sauls in Yet
Another Election Trial in Florida contains the phrase 'go hence
without day'. At first, I thought it was merely a typo and should
have read 'go hence without delay', but a search on the Web turned
up 31 instances of that exact phrase, all from legal documents or
minutes of legal proceedings. Where did this phrase come from, and
what does it mean? [Bob Nelson, Tobyhanna, PA, USA]
A. Go hence 'without day' - henceforth you will only be allowed
nights. It sounds weird and I'm not surprised you were brought up
short by it. I hadn't come across this before and the _Oxford
English Dictionary_ marks it as obsolete. It's an Anglicisation of
the Latin phrase 'sine die', which looks as though it might mean
'without day', but actually means 'without a day'. It is used of
setting a date for resuming a hearing or calling another meeting.
It means that a date has not been set, and it can refer either to
an indefinite postponement or a permanent abandonment of
proceedings. If a meeting is adjourned 'sine die' or 'without day'
it can mean either that the date for resumption will be set later,
or that you shouldn't live in hope of another one, ever.
Not being too familiar with American legal practice (though recent
events have done a lot to change that) I checked with James E
Clapp, author of the _Random House Webster's Dictionary of the
Law_. He confirmed this was the explanation and also told me that
both 'sine die' and 'without day' are used in American legislative
and judicial practice. He added: "When the regular annual or
biennial session of a legislature comes to an end, it adjourns
'without day', meaning that in the normal course of events that's
the end of it. But if an emergency arises, the legislators might be
called back into special session. On the other hand, when a case is
dismissed and the defendant is told that he may go hence 'without
day', it really means that the defendant is permanently freed -
except for the possibility of a reversal on appeal".
What has happened is that an incorrect English translation of the
Latin tag has become an idiom, meaningless in itself, but well
understood by all legal practitioners in the United States (as the
OED says, it is obsolete in the UK).
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Q. I work in curriculum development at The Open University, Israel.
We were writing an article the other day which contained the term
'ATMs' (automatic teller machines). The question we all asked was,
how or when did this sense of the word 'teller' come down to us?
[Ellen Schur]
A. It's almost as ancient as the verb 'to tell'. It comes from a
Germanic source that mainly meant to relate something, but it also
had the sense of counting or reckoning (the modern German verb
'za"hlen', to count, comes from the same root, as do words in other
Germanic languages). It suggests that the original sense may have
been something like "put in order".
The sense of counting attached to the verb is recorded from about
the year 1000 and remained in the language until the nineteenth
century at least. The rustic poet John Clare had a line in his poem
_The Village Minstrel_ of 1821: "The shepherd had told all his
sheep", meaning not that he had announced some item of news to his
flock, but that he had counted them. (Don't confuse this with "They
went and told the sexton, and / The sexton tolled the bell", from
_Faithless Sally Brown_ by that arch-punner Thomas Hood.) We still
have a strong echo of that when we use 'tell' to mean decide or
determine something correctly or with certainty: "you can tell
they're in love"; "I can't tell who has won".
The sense of 'teller' for a person who counts money dates from 1480
at the latest. At the time in Britain there were officials called
tellers, in particular four officers of the Exchequer who were
responsible for the receipt and payment of money.
The same word also turns up a little later in reference to a person
who counts the votes at an election. Those who do that job in
various places to this day are still called 'tellers'. In 1669 the
poet Andrew Marvell wrote in a letter that "The tellers for the
ayes chanced to be very ill reckoners, so that they were forced to
tell severall times over".
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Q. I have often wondered how 'thrift' applied to 'spend' can end up
being someone who is not thrifty. Any suggestions? [A N Page,
Maryland]
A. It's an interesting collision of ideas to us now. That's because
we think of 'thrift' as the state of using one's money and other
resources carefully. But 'thrift' is closely connected with
'thrive', which comes from an Old Norse word meaning to grasp or
seize; this evolved into the idea of achieving prosperity, success
and good luck, or of having achieved it, a sense it still has. So
'thrift' was the state of being prosperous. Only later under
Puritan influence was thrift seen as frugality, an essential
prerequisite for prosperity. The word 'spendthrift' predates this
shift in sense. Literally it means somebody who has spent his
prosperity, that is, thrown away his accumulated wealth.
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Q. In your answer to the question about goody two shoes on the web
site, there is a word 'twee'. I can't find it, other than a noise
made by a small bird, and I would like to know its meaning.
[Peppel]
A. Ah yes, another of my curious Briticisms. It means excessively
or affectedly quaint, sentimental or mawkish, sometimes coupled
with words like 'nauseatingly'. It's a strongly negative word, and
a very useful one, that is in common British use. It appeared at
the beginning of the twentieth century to mean something dainty or
sweet, a girly and gushing word. It appears to have developed from
'tweet', not the noise a bird makes, but a childish attempt at
saying 'sweet'. It might have been helped along by a feeling that
it could be a blend of 'tiny' and 'wee' (Scots for small), though
it isn't.
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Q. I am in the household moving (removals) business in Canada. We
call a driver's assistant a 'swamper'. No one can tell me why. Can
you help? [Don Kachur, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada]
A. I would have laid bets against being able to turn up the answer
to this, but the _Oxford English Dictionary_ has all the details.
It seems it was originally applied to workmen who cleared roads for
the fellers of trees in a 'swamp' or forest. The word uses 'swamp'
in its old sense from the American colonies of an area of rich soil
having trees and other vegetation, but too moist for cultivation,
not necessarily an area that always contains standing water. The
usage goes back at least to 1857. The job was unskilled labouring
and later the word moved over to refer to other jobs of similar
kind - a man-of-all-work in a liquor saloon, an assistant to a
cook, then an assistant to a driver of horses or mules. This dates
from 1870, and seems to be the direct ancestor of the usage you
describe.
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Q. Have you ever come across the word 'merismus'? I couldn't find
it in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary. The author, a rabbi,
used this word in connection with the explication of Adam and Eve's
choices. He defined it as something like "from the good to the bad
and everything in between". [Bob Rosen, Eugene, Oregon]
A. You're right to be puzzled. It's hardly a common word, and when
it does appear its meaning doesn't always seem obvious. It's not in
any dictionary I've looked at, not even the big _Oxford English
Dictionary_. So I asked the researchers at Oxford Dictionaries for
their help.
It turns out that they have been investigating the word with a view
to including it in the OED. Their unpublished research shows that
it's a term used in rhetoric to describe a type of synecdoche in
which two parts of something, perhaps contrasting or complementary
parts, are made to stand for the whole. In your example, good and
bad are used to stand for everything in the world. The term was
around in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but then seems
to have fallen into disuse, only being revived in the middle of the
twentieth century. It comes from ancient Greek 'merismos', a
division, derived from the verb 'merizein', to divide.
5. Exiled English
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The James Murray Society for English Excellence (named after the
famous early editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; see their
site at <http://jms.webjump.com>) has published its annual list of
words that, in the view of its members, should be exiled from the
language. Their picks are an eclectic selection of choice American
buzzwords and phrases, mostly well enough known and widely used
that they have managed to cross the Atlantic.
The full list is: Gravitas; Bring closure; Toast (as in 'You're
toast'); Whassup? or Whatsup? (from that beer commercial); Drop-
Dead Gorgeous; Thinking outside the box; At the end of the day;
24/7; and Hottie.
Some of these mildly annoy me, too, though not so much as they seem
to oppress members of the James Murray Society. They've mostly been
overused, to the extent that 'gravitas' has lost much of its force;
'at the end of the day' is an overworked cliche and not especially
new, either; '24/7' (and '365/24' and other variations) is mildly
fashionable jargon that will probably die a quiet death if left
alone.
6. Administration
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