World Wide Words -- 12 Feb 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 177         Saturday 12 February 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 7,000 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. Turns of Phrase: Permission-based marketing.
2. Weird Words: Dwile flonking.
3. Q & A: Turn up for the book, Ascian, Bridie, On tenterhooks.
4. In Brief: Head-shunt, Internet year, Telecelibate.
5. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.


1. Turns of Phrase: Permission-based marketing
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The backlash against what is formally called unsolicited commercial
e-mail - what most of us refer to as spam, when some stronger
description doesn't come to mind - has forced online marketers to
find more responsible ways to communicate with their potential
customers. Methods regarded as acceptable in direct mail, such as
buying lists of prospects from a list broker, are considered
objectionable online. And the electronic medium makes it difficult
for list brokers to retain control over a list of addresses. One
solution being tried is an opt-in system in which people sign up to
receive messages about specific kinds of products from a middleman.
This firm doesn't sell lists of addresses, but instead forwards
information supplied by marketers to people on its list who say
they want to receive it. This system has been given the name of
'permission-based marketing', a term that is still mainly jargon,
but which is beginning to appear more widely. Other forms of the
phrase which have also been used are 'permission e-mail marketing'
and 'permission-based direct marketing'.

The Company offers a comprehensive suite of outsource messaging
services for information delivery, e-commerce services, permission-
based direct marketing, ongoing customer communications and real-
time customer feedback solutions using industry standard Internet
protocols.
                                [_Business Wire_, Dec. 1999]

Jay McAniff, an Aristotle spokesman, said the firm used only
'permission-based marketing', based on information entered
voluntarily by internet users.
                                     [_Guardian_, Jan. 2000]


2. Weird Words: Dwile flonking
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An English pub game.

When summer comes or charity fund-raising is involved, English pub
games often veer from mere eccentricity towards total lunacy. These
are the days of marrow dangling, passing the splod, Portuguese
sardine racing, conger cuddling, rhubarb thrashing, and dwile
flonking.

The game is officially played by two teams of twelve players,
though there is great flexibility in numbers (the terminology and
rules also vary from place to place). The fielding team gathers in
a circle, called a 'girter', enclosing a member of the other team,
the 'flonker'. He holds a broom handle (usually called the
'driveller'), on top of which is a beer-soaked rag, the 'dwile' or
'dwyle'.

At a signal, the girter dances around the flonker in a circle. He
must flick (or flonk) the dwile with the driveller so it hits a
girter team member. His score depends on which part of the body he
hits - the usual scoring is three points for a hit on the head (a
'wanton'), two for a hit on the body, (a 'marther'), and just one
for a leg strike (a 'ripple'). If after two shots the flonker
hasn't scored he is 'swadged', or 'potted', which means he has to
drink a quantity of beer from a chamber pot within a given time.
After all the members of one team have flonked, the other team is
put in. The winner is the team with the most points after two
innings, usually the one with more members still upright.

There are two schools of thought about its origins. Some say it's a
traditional game known from medieval times, others that it was
invented by a couple of Suffolk printers in 1966. The information
we have strongly supports the latter thesis. The first reference to
the game that researchers at the _Oxford English Dictionary_ can
find is from the _Beccles and Bungay Journal_ of June 1966, in
reference to a game involving a team from Richard Clay (The Chaucer
Press) of Bungay in Suffolk.

'Dwile' is a real word: an old Suffolk dialect term for a
dishcloth. Several others seem to be fanciful derivations of
obsolete or rare words: 'girter' looks as though it comes from
'gird', a strap or band; 'flonk' could be based on 'flong', an old
past tense of 'fling'; 'swadge' might be another form of the
obsolete 'swage', to pacify or appease, from the same origin as the
more common 'assuage'. The rest seem to have been invented.

[I'm indebted to the staff of the OED for making available the
results of their research into this expression.]


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. I wonder if you can help with a query: what is the origin of the
expression 'a turn up for the book', presumably indicating an
unexpected outcome, a surprise? [Laura F Spira]

A. It now means exactly what you say, something surprising. The
origin is in horse racing, where 'the book' was the record of bets
laid on a race kept by - who else - a bookmaker. So when a horse
performed in a way that nobody expected, so that most bets lost, it
was something that benefited the 'book' and so the bookmaker. The
classic example would be a rank outsider that won with few bets on
it, netting the bookmaker a nice windfall profit.

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Q. Is 'bridey' such a limited regional term? I cannot find it in
any dictionary I have consulted. I saw it on _Victory Garden_ (a
PBS gardening show), and I believe they were in Scotland. The
thing, as it was explained, resembles a large pasty, being pastry
with a meat filling which is then baked. The origin was, they said,
unknown. Surely you have something on this?  [Jimmie Ellis, USA]

A. I know the word, but had to look it up to double-check the usual
spelling, which is the slightly different 'bridie'. It's in
_Chambers Dictionary_ and the _New Oxford Dictionary of English_
(NODE) but not in many American equivalents. The word is indeed
Scots, but is nothing like so well known south of the border or
abroad, which is why its appearance in dictionaries is patchy.

The Scots would probably take offence if I agreed with you that it
was a Scottish pasty, since pasties are traditionally Cornish, but
that's essentially what it is: meat and vegetables placed on a
round pastry base, which is turned over and folded down to enclose
the contents, then baked. There are quite a number of types of
these meat pies, whose fillings vary with the region. The 'bridie'
traditionally contains mainly beef and onions, while the Cornish
pasty's filling is based more on potato and swede (rutabaga in the
US) with a little beef; the Sussex 'churdle' contains liver, bacon
and vegetables with a cheese topping. But the fillings are even
more variable than the names.

The dish was originally a portable 'piece' for a workman to take
with him for his meal break, and it was made from whatever was
available at the time, often with little or no meat in it. Nobody
knows where the word 'bridie' comes from, though NODE hazards a
guess that it's a corruption of "bride's pie". What that says about
the standard of catering at old-time Scottish weddings I hardly
like to consider.


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Q. I heard a word in a trivia game: 'ascian'. Apparently, it means
"Without a shadow". Is that like having no shadow on a rainy day or
something that's completely impossible? [Jeffrey]

A. This one defeats even the big Oxford English Dictionary, but it
seems clear enough that it's a compound of the Greek 'a-' (without,
as in words like 'aseptic') with 'skia' for shade or shadow. So it
should be pronounced with a hard 'c': /eI'ski:@n/ or ay-'skee-an.
There are old legends that a person who doesn't throw a shadow in
sunlight is a supernatural being, often a devil, and that's
probably what is being referred to here.

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Q. What's the meaning and origin of 'on tenterhooks'? [Lee Becker]

A. It's been so long since anyone has seen either a 'tenter', or
the hooks on one, that the word and the idea behind it are now
quite mysterious, so much so that it sometimes appears as 'on
tenderhooks', which sounds as though it ought to make more sense.
But at one time, the phrase 'on tenterhooks' would have evoked an
image that was immediately understandable.

It comes from one of the processes of making woollen cloth. After
it had been woven, the cloth still contained oil from the fleece,
mixed with dirt. It was cleaned in a fulling mill, but then it had
to be dried carefully or it would shrink and crease. So the lengths
of wet cloth were stretched on wooden frames, and left out in the
open for some time. This allowed them to dry and straightened their
weave. These frames were the 'tenters', and the 'tenter hooks' were
the metal hooks used to fix the cloth to the frame. At one time, it
would have been common in manufacturing areas to see fields full of
these frames (older English maps sometimes marked an area as a
'tenter-field'). So it was not a huge leap of the imagination to
think of somebody on tenterhooks as being in an state of anxious
suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter. The tenters have
gone, but the meaning has survived.

'Tenter' comes from the Latin 'tendere', to stretch, via a French
intermediate. The word has been in the language since the
fourteenth century, and 'on tenters' soon after became a phrase
meaning painful anxiety. The exact phrase 'on tenterhooks' seems
first to have been used by Tobias Smollett in _Roderick Random_ in
1748.


4. In Brief
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HEAD-SHUNT  This punning term appeared in the _Guardian_; as I
can't find an example elsewhere, it seems the writer invented it.
It describes cases of apparent head-hunting that had actually been
instigated by employees' own bosses, as a way of gently easing them
out of jobs in which they didn't fit.

INTERNET YEAR  Observers of the frantic pace of the evolution of
the online world have coined this term by analogy with dog years,
where one dog year equals seven human years. Net gurus say that an
'Internet year' is three months. The phrase 'Net time' is also used
for the same idea.

TELECELIBATE  This word was spotted by subscriber Ellen Detlefsen
in _The Chronicle of Higher Education_. It refers to someone who by
choice or necessity does without television.


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