World Wide Words -- 03 Jun 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 193           Saturday 3 June 2000
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Contents
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1. Notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Grid.
3. Weird Words: Emmet.
4. Q & A: Chip on one's shoulder, Feckless, Wrong side of the bed.
5. Review: Words on Words: Quotations about Language and Languages.
6. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Notes and comments
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UNTYPICAL  I startled several subscribers by using this word in the
last sentence of my review of the New Oxford Dictionary of English
(NODE) last week. Surely I should have used 'atypical'? Bob Nelson
wrote: "Of course, the fact that you know a word like 'untypical'
proves that you are, indeed, an 'untypical' user of dictionaries".
I plead guilty as charged, but 'untypical' does actually appear in
NODE, with no hint that it is unusual (or even atypical), with the
same sense as 'atypical'; my imprecise impression is that it's more
common in British English than American.


2. Turns of Phrase: Grid
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This has become the usual abbreviation in Britain for what is known
formally as the 'National Grid for Learning', a massively ambitious
initiative to connect all 32,000 schools to the Internet by 2002;
the objective is to give all 450,000 teachers and nine million
pupils access, and to provide every child over the age of nine with
an email address. Development is well under way, with a series of
interconnecting educational Web sites already set up. These offer
teacher training, curriculum material and access to services such
as libraries and databases. The cost will be £1bn, which
includes £235m for teacher training in IT, taken from the
proceeds of the National Lottery.

The name perhaps requires explanation. In the 1930s, electricity
companies in Britain built a national network of high-voltage
transmission lines to connect power stations with consumers. This
was called the National Grid, a term that was afterwards used in
other parts of the world. The new initiative borrowed that name
(though everybody is abbreviating it to 'Grid'), even though this
has confused some people into thinking it is a separate network of
actual cabling, when it is really an Internet access initiative.

What surprised me most was the extent to which the internet - the
Government's much-spun National Grid for Learning - has penetrated
the classroom. Almost every school has a Web page; and hundreds
more can be accessed from all over the world.
                                  [_Daily Telegraph_, January 2000]

The Grid will allow computer users to assess almost unlimited
amounts of information from a central computer network without the
complication of time-consuming searches of the internet or having
to download information onto their own computers.
                        [_Guardian_, Education Section, March 2000]


3. Weird Words: Emmet
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A tourist, especially in Cornwall.

The word actually means an ant. If you're a local resident it's an
excellent term to describe the hordes of tourists that descend on
your locality to enjoy the summer weather, beaches and countryside
of Cornwall, in the process clogging the narrow local roads and
generally getting in the way of everyday life. It comes from the
Old English 'aemette', which developed one way into our standard
English 'ant', another into 'emmet', which survived as a dialect
word. The dictionaries first record it in the tourism sense from
the mid 1970s, but I remember it being used some years earlier as
an already well-established term.

One peculiarity is that it's used mainly in Cornwall; if you cross
the River Tamar into Devon you will instead hear 'grockle', a word
that can now be heard in other tourist areas as well. In the
Cassell Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green suggests that this had
its origin in the name of the famous British clown, Grock. A
resident of Torquay, the biggest resort on the south Devon coast,
was said sometime in the 1950s to have remarked that visitors
resembled 'grockles', little Grocks, because of their boorishness
and clownish behaviour. The name stuck.


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 was wondering what the origin of the phrase 'chip on
the shoulder' was?  [Jessica Ronaldson, USA]

A. Very occasionally, someone asks about an phrase for which a good
explanation exists. This is one of those rare cases. Let us pause a
moment to celebrate, and then turn to the _Long Island Telegraph_
of Hempstead, Long Island, for 20 May 1830. On page three it says:
"When two churlish boys were determined to fight, a chip would be
placed on the shoulder of one, and the other demanded to knock it
off at his peril". It seems to have been a challenge in the same
spirit as a medieval knight throwing down his gauntlet. If your
opponent picked up the glove, or knocked the chip of wood off your
shoulder, the challenge was accepted and the fight was on. Later it
came to suggest somebody who shows a belligerent attitude, acting
as though he were spoiling for a fight; the chip was figurative,
but the idea was the same.

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Q. We've never heard the word 'feckless' here in our part of the
USA. Yet we hear it occasionally in BBC television productions.
What is its origin? Why isn't it used here? [Lee Burough, Colorado
Springs]

A. These days it's not particularly common anywhere, I would guess,
though I'm surprised it has completely vanished from your part of
the world; on the other hand, it does tend to appear more often in
writing than in speech, and to my ear it does sound a touch old-
fashioned. It's a excellent example of a word for which only the
negative now exists; some other examples are 'gormless', 'hapless',
and 'ruthless'. At first 'feck' was a Scots word, a cropped form of
'effect', so to say that a person is feckless is to describe them
as ineffective. But it also suggests more strongly that a person is
lazy, incompetent, unreliable, or irresponsible. It's a powerful
word, one it would be good to keep in the language. Try using it a
few times - perhaps you'll persuade people to take it up again ...

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Q. I was hoping you could help me out. You've heard about getting
out of the 'wrong side' of bed? What is considered the wrong side?
And could you give me a little history on the saying? [Jim from
AOL]

A. The wrong side of the bed is the one that leaves you grumpy and
unsociable first thing in the morning (my own has two wrong sides).
There are many similar expressions that begin 'the wrong side of
...', of which the original seems to be 'wrong side of the blanket'
for a child born illegitimately. Some others are 'getting on the
wrong side of somebody', 'the wrong side of the law', 'laughing on
the wrong side of one's mouth', and 'on the wrong side of forty'
(or thirty, or fifty, or almost any age, really).

All express the idea that there are good and bad aspects of any
situation. A well-known American example, 'the wrong side of the
tracks', is the only one of the set that seems to be based in a
real, physical location.

Some writers say there was once a superstition that to get out of
bed on the left side, the sinister side, led to bad luck, but this
sounds like a well-meaning attempt to explain the mysterious. If
there ever was such a belief, it's not reflected in the recorded
use of the expression, which is actually not that old; it seems to
have been derived from another phrase of similar type.


5. Review: Words on Words: Quotations about Language and Languages
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I don't usually review books of quotations, but I am happy to make
an exception for this one by David and Hilary Crystal, because it
is specifically about language and it's great fun to browse.

David Crystal is best known for his superb <ex>Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the English Language</ex>, which I urge everyone
with spare cash and a convenient bookshop to rush out and buy. This
volume is very different: a selection in 65 chapters of more than
4000 quotations about language from at least a thousand sources.

They're divided into seven sections, and include quotations sets on
language myths and origins (Mark Twain: "What a good thing Adam
had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before"),
dictionaries and makers of dictionaries (Ambrose Bierce once
defined a dictionary as "A malevolent literary device for cramping
the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic"), the
supposed qualities of different languages (the Emperor Charles V:
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and
German to my horse"), on names and nicknames (Mae West, hearing
that a life jacket was to be named after her: "I've been in Who's
Who, and I know what's what, but it's the first time I ever made
the dictionary"), and the curse of jargonising (A N Whitehead: "It
is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical
author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense"). As
you may gather, this book is a mine of useful aphorisms, though
most quotations are both longer and more serious than these
examples, which have been plucked, Jack Horner-wise, from the
delights within.

Of the book's 580 pages, only the first 298 contain quotations; the
rest is indexes of authors, sources, and keywords. So if it's in
the book, you should have no trouble finding it. Definitely a book
for dipping into.

[Crystal, David and Hilary, _Words on Words: Quotations about
Language and Languages_, published by Penguin Books in hardback at
GBP18.99 on 31 May 2000; ISBN 0-14-029134-2.]


6. Administration
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