World Wide Words -- 17 Jun 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Jun 17 05:59:40 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 195 Saturday 17 June 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 8,500 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. Notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Data haven.
3. In Brief: Bobo, Bratlash, Portillista.
4. Weird Words: Lycanthropy.
5. Q & A: Curate's egg, Eighty-six, Spiff.
6. Information please.
7. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
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SERVER SHIFT We seem to have got the new Web site up and working,
though many people will not have been able to connect for most of
Thursday and Friday. Mail sent to quinion.com on those days may
have been lost; if you sent an e-mail then, please send it again,
just in case. My apologies for the inconvenience.
SEARCH LOST We've taken the search facility offline; the site is
now so big that it was becoming impossibly slow (and was putting a
lot of strain on the server, too). We're working on an enhanced
search facility to replace it. More news when it happens.
POP GOES THE WEASEL Andrew Stiller of the Kallisti Music Press
looked this up in _The Book of World-Famous Music_ by James J Fuld,
and found that it was published in Britain by Boosey and Sons in
1854. David Joyce wrote to say that "The tune is a version of that
used for the country dance, 'The Haymakers', which has the same
form as 'Strip the Willow', and 'Bab at the Bowster' (a couple hold
hands, forming a bridge, which the other couples have to pass
under). The tune was published in _Gow's Repository_ which was
issued in 4 volumes between 1799 and 1820". Thus the tune was
around at least half a century before the American publication of
Pop Goes The Weasel, but is certainly very much older. (It is
similar to the tune used for Humpty Dumpty, and not far removed
from Lilliebulero and Rock A-bye Baby, all jigs traceable back to
the seventeenth century.)" It seems that this traditional tune was
repackaged in the United States in the sheet music of 1850 I
mentioned, and that it was republished in Britain some four years
later, with the words being added later still.
HOLIDAY BREAK This newsletter will not be published on the first
three Saturdays in July (1st, 8th and 15th), as my wife and I will
be on holiday in Ireland. Next week's issue will be the last before
the break. Normal service will be resumed on 22 July.
2. Turns of Phrase: Data haven
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This phrase has been around for at least 15 years, but only in a
specialist way. One sense is that of a place of safety and security
for electronic information, for example where encrypted copies of
crucial data can be stored as a backup away from one's place of
business. But it can also mean a site in which data can be stored
outside the jurisdiction of regulatory authorities. This sense has
come to wider public notice recently as a result of the success of
Neal Stephenson's book _Cryptonomicon_, in which setting up such a
haven in South East Asia is part of the plot. In a classic case of
life imitating art, there is now a proposal to set up a data haven
on one of the old World War Two forts off the east coast of
Britain, which declared independence under the name of Sealand back
in 1967 (it issues stamps and money, for example, and even has its
own Web site at <http://www.principality-sealand.net/>). The idea
is to get round a proposed British law - the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill - that would force firms to hand
over decryption keys if a crime is suspected and make Internet
providers install equipment to allow interception of e-mails by the
security services.
The Privacy Act doesn't protect information from being transferred
from New Zealand to data havens - countries that don't have
adequate privacy protection.
[_Computerworld_, May 1999]
The government last night poured cold water on a plan by a group of
entrepreneurs to establish a "data haven" on a rusting iron
fortress in the North Sea in an attempt to circumvent new anti-
cryptography laws.
[_Guardian_, June 2000]
3. In Brief
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BOBO According to a British Sunday newspaper, this is a new type
of middle-class person - the BOurgeois BOhemian, one of the elite
of the information age, living in comfort combined with conscience,
a mixture of corporate success and creative rebellion, prosperous
without ostentation.
BRATLASH One problem of being rich is that it's hard to stop your
children becoming spoilt. 'Bratlash' is a word coined recently in
an article in the _Wall Street Journal_ for a backlash by parents
against raising obnoxious offspring; 'bobos' do so by living
relatively frugally, making children earn their allowances and
letting them spend only what they've earned.
PORTILLISTA Michael Portillo returned to Parliament in Britain a
few months ago and is tipped to displace the present Conservative
Party leader one day. His father was Spanish; this word for one of
his supporters is both dismissive and mildly xenophobic.
4. Weird Words: Lycanthropy
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The supposed transformation of a person into a wolf.
The concept of the werewolf is embedded in European folklore; it
must have been triggered by dread of the wolf, the top predator of
the region. In other cultures humans were similarly said to change
into the most dangerous predator of the area, such as bear, hyena,
leopard or tiger.
Ancient stories of man-wolf transformations told by writers like
Ovid and Pliny (for example, the legend of Lycaon, who was turned
into a wolf by the god Zeus) continued in medieval folklore.
Stories told of humans who became wolves at night, and who in that
form hunted people, but who returned to human form by day. The
transformation, often at the full moon, was sometimes said to be
the result of a curse. Lycanthropy was also at times thought to be
a kind of witchcraft, the power to metamorphose at will from human
to wolf and back having been given by the Devil. There are several
cases of supposed witches who were burned at the stake for the
crime. Stories of werewolves have been kept alive by writers such
as Bram Stoker and by films like _An American Werewolf in London_
and _The Howling_. The same word also applies to a kind of mental
disorder in which a person thinks that he or she can turn into a
wolf.
It derives from Greek 'lukos', wolf, plus 'anthropos', man. If you
want a Germanic equivalent, try the rather rare 'werewolfery' - the
first element of that has often been identified as the Old English
'wer', man, though this is not altogether certain.
5. 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. Could you please give the meaning and derivation of 'the
curate's egg'? [Brian Smith, California]
A. Perhaps I should start by explaining 'curate', since I'm told
that this name for a junior ecclesiastical post is not well known
outside Britain. A curate is an ordained minister who is an
assistant to a vicar or parish priest; he (these days sometimes
she) is at the bottom of the priestly pecking order, poorly paid
and with no job security.
Let us now turn to the humorous British magazine _Punch_ for 9
November 1895, which featured a cartoon drawn by George du Maurier.
This showed a timid curate having breakfast in his bishop's home.
The bishop is saying "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones",
to which the curate replies, in a desperate attempt not to give
offence: "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are
excellent!".
Readers liked this exchange so much that the cartoon led to the
catchphrases "parts of it are excellent", and "good in parts",
which are recorded from the beginning of the twentieth century. The
phrase 'curate's egg' itself means something that is partly good
and partly bad and so not wholly satisfactory: "this book is a bit
of a curate's egg". (Despite one American dictionary, it does not
mean "something discreetly declared to be partly good but in fact
thoroughly bad", which would be its literal interpretation.)
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Q. One of the standard stories about the origin of this puzzling
expression does connect it to Chumley's, though the one I've heard
is that when a customer was forcefully ejected from the premises,
he would find himself lying woozily on the sidewalk looking up at
the number 86 on the door. Neither story, I'm sorry to have to tell
you, is likely to be true.
There are other explanations: that it derives from British merchant
shipping, in which the standard crew was 85, so that the 86th man
was left behind; that 86 was the number of the American law that
forbade bartenders to serve anyone who was drunk (stories disagree
about which state it had been enacted in); that a fashionable New
York restaurant only had 85 tables, so the eighty-sixth was the one
you gave to somebody you didn't want to serve; or that a restaurant
(usually said to be in New York) had an especially popular item as
number 86 on the menu, so that it frequently ran out. All but the
last send my bullshit detector into overload.
It does seem to be true that 'eighty-six' originated in restaurants
and bars in the late 1920s or early 1930s; the first firmly
attested source is in the journal _American Speech_ for February
1936; another example may be from the mid 1920s - the date is
uncertain - which would rule out Chumley's, as it didn't open until
1927. The original sense was that the establishment had run out of
some item on the menu.
Nobody knows why 'eighty-six' was so applied. The _Oxford English
Dictionary_ suggests it may have been rhyming slang for 'nix',
which seems plausible. Although it's often thought of as typically
American, 'nix' actually entered the language in the latter part of
the eighteenth century in Britain; it was borrowed from a version
of the German 'nichts', nothing. But it seems that 'eighty-six' was
created as rhyming slang in the United States.
The sense that indicated a patron was not to be served because he
was drunk or obnoxious appeared later (the first written example is
only from 1943); the verb meaning to discard or get rid of
something is even more recent, from the 1950s.
Many people quote other examples of number slang used by hard-
pressed servers: '99' meant "the manager is prowling about" and
'98' similarly referred to the assistant manager (was '97' a
busybody child who wanted to grow up to be a manager?); '19' is a
banana split; '55' is root beer, and so on. Presumably some of
these related to the numbering on a standard menu somewhere at some
time, but the details have been lost.
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Q. 'Spiff' is a word that has been in use in the sales and
marketing business for decades (at least). It is a small, immediate
bonus for a sale, but I cannot find what the letters stand for or
where it came from. [An AOL subscriber]
A. You'll be glad in a moment that you included that parenthetical
note. There is a reference to a 'spiff' in a slang dictionary of
1859: "the percentage allowed by drapers to their young men when
they effect sale of old fashioned or undesirable stock". It seems
to be connected with the use of the word in that period to mean a
dandy or somebody smartly dressed (hence 'spiffy', and 'to spiff
up' - to improve the appearance of a place or a person), but nobody
seems to have been able to disentangle the threads of which came
first, or what influenced what, or where the word originally came
from. It's certainly not an acronym, as you hint it might be -
words formed from the initial letters of other words are rare
before the 1930s.
6. Information please
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WORD FOR A WORD A writer to Q&A asks whether there's a name that
describes a word with no repeated letters in it. I've hunted about,
but can't find anything. Any ideas, anyone?
SIAP Another questioner asks about the origin/meaning of 'siap',
apparently used as a curse in computer gaming contexts. It looks
like an acronym, but can anyone give a definitive answer?
7. Administration
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