World Wide Words -- 29 Jan 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 175          Saturday 29 January 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: Artilect.
2. Book Review: A Little Alphabet Book.
3. Weird Words: Panorama.
4. Q & A: Vamp, Palooka, Read the riot act.
5. Beyond Words.
6. Administration: How to leave the list, Copyright.


1. Turns of Phrase: Artilect
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Since the 1950s, it has been the goal of workers in the field of
artificial intelligence to create an autonomous thinking computer.
This aim has always been ten years in the future, its attainment
retreating as fast as we approached it. Many gave up hope of ever
seeing it; indeed the very term 'artificial intelligence' has
become a joke in some circles. More recent projects, such as the
Japanese drive to develop a Fifth Generation computer, have also
failed to meet their ultimate aims. But the idea of a machine that
can match or surpass the human brain in its ability to reason has
recently resurfaced, along with a debate on the ethics of actually
building one. Part of the resurgence in interest can be attributed
to Sony's toy dog Aibo, shortly to be joined by Poo-Chi from Sega.
'Artilect' has started to be used as a term for devices that
exhibit autonomous learning behaviour, a blend from 'artificial
intellect'. It was apparently coined by Professor Hugo de Garis,
head of the Brain Builder Group at the Advanced Telecommunications
Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan. Prof de Garis, who calls
himself an 'intelligist' (another word he seems to have invented),
argues that by 2050 we shall indeed have computers of superhuman
intelligence. At the moment, he's working on Robokitten, a device
with the intelligence level of a kitten, a big step in computer
terms, but hardly threatening to humanity's dominance as yet -
well, not till it gets hung up on the curtains ...

Asteroid-sized, self-assembling, nanoteched, one bit per atom,
reversible, heatless, 3D, quantum-computing artilects could have
intelligences literally trillions of trillions of trillions of
times the human level.
                                  [_Independent_, Nov. 1999]

"Humanity will have to make a choice about whether we want to build
these artilects or not," says De Garis, who sees two factions
arising - one for and one against the "artilects".
                              [_Daily Telegraph_, Dec. 1999]


2. Book Review: A Little Alphabet Book
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You can't fault this as a title: it's a little book (of just 63
pages) about the alphabet. Every teacher of young children, and
every concerned parent, will find this to be a source of ideas to
help children understand the mysteries of our alphabet and how we
use it to construct words.

Sue Palmer, a freelance author and consultant on literacy teaching,
has given each letter a whole page of notes, comments, ideas and
wordplay. Opposite each is a full-colour cartoon by Bill Sanderson
illustrating some point from the piece, an enjoyable update to all
those old "A is for Apple" alphabet primers our forebears had to
struggle through. Here's part of the piece on my favourite letter
of the alphabet:

  Q is a quaint and quirky sort of letter. It came to us via
  Latin and the Romance languages. In Latin q opens many
  questioning words - quo, quis, quae - which is perhaps why q
  has such quizzical associations. The word 'queue' (a pretty
  roundabout spelling for a word which sounds like its own
  initial letter) creates spelling problems for some children.
  They benefit from knowing its original, highly evocative
  French meaning (an animal's tail), and from rhythmic
  recitation of the letters: 'Q-UE-UE'. This is what spelling
  lessons should be about - savouring the sounds and stories of
  English, and thus making the spelling memorable.

[Palmer, Sue _A Little Alphabet Book_, Oxford University Press,
January 2000, ISBN 0-19-838265-0. Publisher's quoted price of
GBP4.99.]


3. Weird Words: Panorama
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An unbroken view of the whole region surrounding an observer.

The 'panorama' was invented by an Irishman, Robert Barker, a
painter of portraits and miniatures. He was sketching on the summit
of Carlton Hill at Edinburgh in 1787 when he thought of the idea of
reproducing the view on a large cylindrical painting that would
encircle the viewer.

After a lot of experimentation, he produced a work painted on paper
stuck to canvas, which he took up to London to show to the famous
painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy. Sir
Joshua said it was impracticable, because of the difficulties of
getting the perspective right, and of mounting and lighting such
large pictures, but added that he would cheerfully leave his bed at
any time of night to inspect such a work of art if it could be
made.

Robert Barker persisted, and eventually produced a view of London
that he exhibited in premises in Castle Street, off Leicester
Square, in 1792. True to his word, Sir Joshua left his breakfast-
table and walked in his dressing-gown and slippers to Castle Street
to inspect it (he liked it). Mr Barker patented his invention,
calling it 'La Nature a coup d'Oeil' at first, but he soon renamed
it, taking the word from the Greek 'pan', all, and 'horama', a view
(from 'horan', to see). The enterprise was a huge hit with the
public and Robert Barker made a lot of money from it.

'Panoramas' became very popular in the nineteenth century,
sometimes being as much as 300 feet long and 50 feet high; they
included some that advanced on rollers to give an illusion of
movement. These days, the word doesn't so much bring to mind a
painting or photograph as the original view which Robert Barker so
successfully simulated in his constructions.


4. 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 am curious as to the origin of 'vamp'. The 'vampire' to 'vamp'
connection (as in Theda Bara) is straightforward, but how on earth
did it come to have something to do with music? [Ginger Johnson]

A. It has nothing to do with vampires, but its origin is almost
equally weird. The word comes from the medieval French 'avant-
pied', literally "before the foot", in reference to the forepart of
the foot, in particular the part of hose or stockings below the
ankle. It became corrupted in English to 'vampe', said as two
syllables, and then 'vamp'. (In the eighteenth century the old
pronunciation was revived through a fashion for short stockings
that covered only the foot and ankle, which were called 'vampeys'.)
This sense of 'vamp' is preserved in the meaning that denotes the
part of a boot or shoe that covers the upper front part of the
foot.

It seems that in the middle seventeenth century the word came to be
used for anything that had been patched up or refurbished (like
darned stockings, we may guess), as in the old phrase 'to vamp
something up' for repairing or improving something. This is more
commonly now found in the verb 'to revamp', an American term
invented in the 1850s from this existing sense of 'vamp'. Nearer
the end of the nineteenth century 'vamp' was adopted by musicians
for those short simple phrases, usually improvised, that one plays
quietly in the background or as an introduction, presumably because
they were patching up a gap or silence.

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Q. I have come across the term 'palooka' as in 'they are a
couple of palookas' and in 'Palookaville'. Could you explain what
it means? [Ana Alfaro, Panama]

A. The word has two main senses. One refers to an unsuccessful
boxer, especially one who is both large and stupid, the other to
any large and stupid or clumsy person, an oaf or lout.

Many older people first came across the word as the name of the
boxer in Ham Fisher's famous comic strip. This first appeared in
1928; it featured the eponymous Joe Palooka as a slow-witted and
inarticulate boxer, even though "his heart was pure and his ideals
high". But Ham Fisher didn't invent the word: it had been around
for several years as a slang term and is first recorded in print in
1925. The boxing associations seem to have been particularly
strong, to judge from the magazine _The Ring_, which in November
1926 glossed the word to mean "A tenth rater, a boxer without
ability, a nobody" and which implied it had been known for some
time.

It's often said that 'palooka' was the invention of Jack Conway, a
former baseball player who became the editor of _Variety_ magazine;
he is credited by some with creating a whole group of slang terms
that include 'pushover' and 'baloney'. Whether he actually invented
'palooka', or popularised it, we have no way of knowing, nor do we
have any idea what it was based on.

Some of Joe Palooka's adventures were made into films, and
'Palookaville' came to be a slang term for a hick town full of
gentle losers.

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Q. What is the origin of the expression 'to read someone the riot
act'? [Gloria Spielman]

A. These days, it's just a figurative expression meaning to give a
an individual or a group a severe scolding or caution, or to
announce that some unruly behaviour must cease. But originally it
was a deadly serious injunction to a rioting crowd to disperse.

The Riot Act was passed by the British government in 1715. This was
the period of the Catholic Jacobite riots, when mobs opposed to the
new Hanoverian king, George I, were attacking the meeting houses of
dissenting groups. There was a very real threat of invasion by
supporters of the deposed Stuart kings - as actually happened later
that year and also in 1745. The government feared uprisings, and
passed a draconian law making it a felony if a group of more than
12 persons refused to disperse more than an hour after magistrates
had told them to do so. To invoke the law, the magistrates had to
read the relevant section of the Act aloud to the mob, something
that often required courage:

  Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all
  persons being assembled immediately to disperse themselves,
  and peaceably to depart to their habitations or to their
  lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in
  the first year of King George for preventing tumultuous and
  riotous assemblies. God save the King.

The 'pains' or penalties were penal servitude for life or not less
than three years, or imprisonment with or without hard labour for
up to two years. The Act remained in force for a surprisingly long
time, only finally being repealed in 1973, though it had been
effectively defunct for decades.


5. Beyond Words
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The British government's Department for Education recently sent out
lots of glossy posters to schools at vast expense to promote its
literacy campaign through extending childrens' vocabulary. Such a
pity they spelt it 'vocabluary' ...


6. Administration
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