World Wide Words -- 11 Mar 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 181          Saturday 11 March 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 8,000 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: Hypernova.
2. Topical Words: Facile.
3. Q & A: Kitty-corner, Over the yardarm, Cock-up.
4. Weird Words: Whilom.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Turns of Phrase: Hypernova
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Sometimes the 'super-' prefix just isn't extravagant enough, or
it's been used already, or linguistic inflation has set in. This
term seems to be a product of all three, since it is an even more
spectacular cosmic event than the well-known 'supernova'. But
perhaps the superlative is warranted in this case, as the last such
event spotted from Earth was widely reported as being so intense
that if it had happened near to us we would have fried (luckily, it
actually happened long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away). Such
cataclysmic explosions - the biggest bangs since the Big Bang, NASA
called them, with perhaps permissible overstatement - are about a
hundred times as powerful as the biggest supernovae and may be
caused by the total collapse of a very large star. The concept was
put forward by Bohdan Paczynski of Princeton University in 1997 as
a possible origin of intense bursts of gamma rays that have been
observed by space-borne detectors since the 1970s (he seems also to
have coined the word 'hypernova'). In January 1999 the source of
one was seen for the first time as it was happening.

By this time, theorists had built up a picture in which GRBs
[gamma-ray bursters] result from the collision of two high-density
neutron stars or from a 'hypernova' - the total collapse of a very
massive star.
                                             [_Science_, Mar. 1999]

Really big stars such as Eta Carinae may go out in an even more
spectacular explosion called a hypernova. Such a hypernova could
produce another phenomenon known as a gamma-ray burster, which
sends powerful gamma radiation out into space.
                            [_Minneapolis Star Tribune_, Jun. 1999]


2. Topical Words: Facile
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A job advertisement from a Scottish university this week asked that
applicants should be "facile with numerical programming". It was
obvious enough in context that the university wanted researchers
who were good enough at it that they found it easy. Unfortunately,
the writer of the ad was almost certainly better at mathematics
than he was at English.

'Facile' has two main meanings. The much less common meaning, the
one the university was employing, is the older of the two. It means
something that's easy to understand, or easily accomplished. At one
time it could even imply that a person had good manners, or was
courteous or affable - in other words someone whose behaviour was
easy or effortless.

The word, and its positive senses, came to us through Middle French
from the Latin 'facilis' (so the word is closely connected to our
'facilitate' and 'facility'). When applied to things 'facilis'
meant they were easy to do, but applied to people it meant pliant
or courteous. It first appeared in English in an early printed
book, Caxton's translation of the _Fables of Aesop_ of 1483.

As always, something thought to be easy was valued accordingly: if
it was easy, it couldn't be important or valuable. So a second
meaning grew up, a derogatory one which is now often the first to
be cited in dictionaries: something glib that's superficially
convincing but actually simplistic. If you speak these days of a
man with a facile intellect, you're most likely to be saying that
he is shallow of mind and specious of opinion. As an echo of the
original Latin, it can also mean somebody who is markedly pliant,
easily convinced or swayed by the views of others.

Curiously, only two of my many style guides warn about this word.
The second edition of Fowler does (though the third doesn't). But
Geoffrey Howard is very firm in _The Good English Guide_: "Although
facile means easy and without effort, it always carries with it the
negative meaning of superficial ... facile should never be used in
a complimentary sense". Perhaps the other guides are so certain
this is known they don't feel they need to mention it. But it seems
to have passed our ad writer by.

I wonder how many people will be tempted to apply, on the grounds
that their capabilities with regard to numerical programming are,
indeed, as facile as anyone could ask for? That could be a problem
for the selection board.


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 have heard an American friend of mine use the phrase 'kitty
corner' to describe things that are diagonally opposed, as for
example: "The drugstore is kitty corner to the ice-cream parlor".
Have you heard this phrase before and do you have any clue as to
its origin? [Ian McAloon in the UK; Patricia P Miller also asked
about its origin.]

A. It's certainly a very odd-looking phrase. It has lots of variant
forms, such as 'catercorner', 'kitty-cornered', 'catty-cornered',
'cata-cornered', and 'cater-cornered', a sure sign that it puzzles
users.

The first part comes from the French word 'quatre', four. It's
actually quite an old expression that first appeared in English as
the name for the four in dice, soon Anglicised to 'cater'. The
standard placement of the four dots at the corners of a square
almost certainly introduced the idea of diagonals. From this came a
verb 'cater', to place something diagonally opposite another or to
move diagonally, which can be found in the sixteenth century. Some
English dialects had it as an adverb in compounds such as
'caterways' or 'caterwise'. By the early years of the nineteenth
century it was beginning to be recorded in the USA in the compound
form of 'cater-cornered'. It had by then lost any link with the
French word; people invented spellings in attempts to make sense of
it, often thinking it had something to do with cats, which is why
we have forms like 'kitty-corner'.

That wonderful word 'catawampus' is often used in the central and
southern parts of the USA to mean the same thing, though it can
also refer to something that's askew, crooked, out of shape, or out
of joint. The first part of it comes from the same source, though
the second half is mysterious. It has been suggested its source is
the Scots dialect verb 'wampish', to brandish, flourish or wave
about. However, 'catawampus' can also refer to something ferocious,
impressive or remarkable. It may be this is an entirely separate
sense, deriving from 'catamount' for the mountain lion or cougar.

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Q. Do you know the meaning and origin of the phrase 'when the sun
has crossed over the yardarm'? I have heard it said when it's lunch
time and okay to have an alcoholic beverage.  [Nora Kelly, Canada]

A. That's the usual naval meaning, though landlubbers have tended
to use it for the early evening, after-work period from about 5pm
onwards. It turns up in various forms, of which the shorter 'the
sun's over the yardarm' is probably the most common, but one also
sees 'not till the sun's over the yardarm' as an injunction, or
perhaps a warning.

The yardarms on a sailing ship are the horizontal timbers or spars
mounted on the masts, from which the square sails are hung. (The
word 'yard' here is from an old Germanic word for a pointed stick,
the source also of our unit of measurement.) At certain times of
year it will seem from the deck that the sun has risen far enough
up the sky that it is above the topmost yardarm. In summer in the
north Atlantic, where the phrase seems to have originated, this
would have been at about 11am, just the time when officers had
their official forenoon break. It appears that officers in sailing
ships adopted a custom of waiting until this time before taking
their first alcoholic drink of the day.

My impression is that the phrase is becoming rare, which is hardly
surprising since the days of sail are so far behind us. Despite its
apparent antiquity, the phrase wasn't recorded in print until the
end of the nineteenth century.

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Q. I am not familiar with the term 'cock-up' that you used in a
recent column, and am interested in both its meaning and its
derivation. It is not a phrase that is commonly used in the United
States - indeed, it has connotations that would keep many from
using it in a column read by so many subscribers! [Marian Herman,
USA; related questions came from Richard Lathom in the USA, Anne
Ackroyd in Australia, and others]

A. Oddly, in British English it is not these days a vulgarism, or
at least only a very mild one. It comes from one of several senses
of 'cock', to bend at an angle, as in - for example - cocking a gun
or turning up the brim of one's headgear (so producing an old-time
naval officer's 'cocked hat'). The use of 'cock-up' to mean a
blunder or error was originally British military slang dating from
the 1920s. The slang sense of 'cock' clearly had a lot to do with
its adoption, but this hasn't stopped it being used in respectable
publications, and modern British dictionaries mark it merely as
informal or colloquial. The longer phrase I used it in, "a cock-up
on the [something] front" was coined in a BBC television comedy
_The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin_ some 20 years ago and has
become a minor catchphrase. The original was "there's been a bit of
a cock-up on the catering front", which was spoken by a former army
officer, not over-blessed with savvy, who was totally confused by
civilian life and had either forgotten to buy any food, or run out
of money to do so. [I'm indebted to Nigel Rees for confirming the
provenance of this catchphrase.]


4. Weird Words: Whilom  /'wVIl at m/
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An adjective meaning former.

This adjective is one of three - the others being 'erstwhile' and
'quondam' - all with the same meaning. They are equally strange and
un-English in appearance. But 'whilom' is probably the weirdest of
the set, and also the least used, to the extent that I had trouble
finding a contemporary example. Here's an older one, from J M
Barrie's book _The Little White Bird_ of 1903: "Whom did I see but
the whilom nursery governess sitting on a chair in one of these
gardens", meaning that the lady had once been a governess, but was
one no longer. The word dates to Old English, at a time when the
language was heavily inflected - adjectives, nouns, and verbs
taking different endings depending on the job they were doing.
'Whilom' - then spelt 'hwilom' - was the dative plural of 'hwil',
the same word as our modern 'while'. As English progressively lost
its inflections, the word became a fossil, with its ending stuck to
it permanently; at the same time the meaning shifted to mean
something of a former time, a change that was complete by the
fifteenth century.


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