World Wide Words -- 06 May 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 189            Saturday 6 May 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. Notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Captology.
3. Weird Words: Catoptromancy.
4. Q & A: Plurals in -en, Carpet, San fairy ann, Herb.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Notes and comments
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BROUHAHA  John Peter Maher wrote to say that he has done some work
on the origins of 'brou' in French (with which, as I said last
week, 'brouhaha' is linked). He suggests a more likely origin than
the Hebrew greeting I mentioned may be bull baiting and it may be
linked to the Italian or Spanish 'bravo'. He points to the French
'rabrouer', to taunt, as a connected term.

LOVE BUG  Not a single copy of that virus has arrived here. I feel
deeply unloved (and very grateful). But that may also be because
I've not been answering my mail as I should over the past week or
so. Apologies to those still awaiting a reply.


2. Turns of Phrase: Captology
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This word is still relatively rare outside a group of researchers
in the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. The group
studies the theory and design of the ways computing technology can
be used to influence people. If you think that sounds a bit Big
Brotherish, you are not altogether in error. The emphasis is on
influencing people for good, for example to encourage healthy
living or improve road safety, but the group is aware such methods
could just as well be used for baser ends, such as persuading you
to buy things, or to hand over personal data that could then be
misused. To that end the group, led by Professor B J Fogg, is also
studying the implications of the unreasoning trust that many of us
put into computers because they are wrongly thought of as as being
unaffected by human agency. The word was coined by Professor Fogg
in 1996 as a partial acronym - from the initials of 'Computers As
Persuasive Technology' - plus the ending '-ology' for a field of
study. Someone engaged in the field is a 'captologist'.

As pioneers of a nascent discipline called captology, Fogg and a
handful of other visionaries are exploring the theory, design and
analysis of computers and related technologies as instruments of
persuasion.
                        [_Electronic Engineering Times_, Jun. 1999]

The class in captology (Computers as Persuasive Technology) is
Stanford professor B. J. Fogg's brainchild, a new area of study
into ways that computers are particularly useful in persuading
people to change attitudes, buy certain products, or relinquish
personal information.
                                           [_SF Weekly_, Apr. 2000]

[I'm grateful to Don Chandler for telling me about this term.]


3. Weird Words: Catoptromancy  /ka'tQptr@,mansI/
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Divination by means of mirrors.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who is the fairest of them all?" At
some time or other, almost anything you can think of has been used
to foretell the future, from disembowelled chickens to straws on a
red-hot iron. But the mirror, that most strange thing that allows
not only reflection but self-reflection, has always been special.
As a result there are many superstitions about mirrors - such that
they must be covered or removed after a death to prevent the soul
of the dead person from being stolen. In part it also explains why
it is considered bad luck to break one (until modern times, they
were also rare, so breaking one really was bad luck).

There are records from many ancient civilisations of mirrors being
used for magic, and some not so ancient: John Dee, the sixteenth-
century English magician of the royal court, had a mirror made of a
highly polished piece of coal. Fortune-tellers and magicians would
use such stones, or perhaps polished metal mirrors or reflections
in bowls of water to answer questions or predict the future. The
word comes from the Greek word 'katoptron' for a mirror, plus
'manteia', divination. The same root appears in 'catoptrics', the
part of optics that deals with reflection.


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 have long been puzzled by the plural of 'ox'. Someone new to
the language might conclude that 'foxen' is the plural of fox, or
that 'chicken' means more than one chick. According to my Concise
OED, the suffix '-en', among other things, forms the plural of "a
few nouns such as children, oxen". However, I cannot find the noun
'childr' in any dictionary. What is the origin of this strange
plural-making suffix? What other examples, if any, are there in
addition to 'oxen'? [Charles Coon, Canada]

A. English grammar a thousand years ago was more like that of
modern German, with endings for the noun that varied according to
the job it was doing in the sentence. There were about a dozen
markers for the plural in all.

As the language changed in the centuries after the Norman Conquest
most of these were lost. The last survivors were '-s' and '-en',
the two most common plural markers in the old language; for a while
the two vied for supremacy. The rare plural forms like 'oxen' are
left over from that period, with '-en' used for a very few words
that fought off the encroachment of '-s' (the only other common one
is 'brethren').

'Children' is a special case. Though 'child' was one of the
singular forms, another was 'childer', common in several English
dialects. This should have had the plural 'childeren', but the
first 'e' vanished, as it often does in unstressed syllables in the
middle of words. In modern English we have ended up with the
singular from one dialect but the plural from another. In
'chicken', the '-en' ending isn't a plural, but a diminutive,
expressing small size or affection, which also turns up in 'kitten'
and 'maiden'.

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Q. Why does the word 'carpet' mean three in English slang - as in a
prison sentence of either three years or three months or, even, a
three-pound bet? [John Abbeydale]

A. To find the origins of this we have to delve into criminals' and
prison slang. The first recorded use of 'carpet' for a prison
sentence comes from the book _The Mark of the Broad Arrow_ by "No
77", published in 1903. He suggests that the word was then current
prison slang for a six-months' sentence, with the usual term for a
three-month one being 'drag'. However, he was either wrong or
'carpet' took over the latter's meaning. I suspect No 77 made a
mistake, since 'carpet' came about as the result of a bit of
rhyming slang: 'carpet-bag' = 'drag', implying that the two words
have always meant the same thing.

'Drag' dates from near the end of the eighteenth century; J H Vaux
said in his _Flash Dictionary_ in 1812 that 'drag' was the name
given to robbing carts or wagons "of trunks, bale-goods, or any
other property" (probably because they were heavy and had to be
dragged about), and that 'done for a drag' meant that a thief had
been convicted of such a crime, for which the penalty was three
months in jail.

Some people have said that a three-month sentence was called a
'carpet' because it took that long to make one in the prison
workshop, but the rhyming slang joke on an existing usage makes
more sense. (It doesn't ever seem to have meant so long a sentence
as three years.)

The word was later extended to other instances of the number three.
These seem originally to have been Australian and include a sum of
three pounds, or odds of three to one, or car dealers' slang for a
sum of three hundred pounds.

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Q. What's the meaning and derivation of 'San Ferry Ann'? Apart from
anything else it happens to be the title of a song by Paul
McCartney. [John Cooper, Bermuda]

A. When the British Tommy arrived in France to fight in the First
World War, he was presented with a language he struggled to make
sense of. What he did to the pronunciation of French and Belgian
place names is a wonder, such as turning Ypres into Wipers. He
picked up a lot of French expressions, but he changed them into
something that sounded English. This was the fate of 'ca ne fait
rien', "it does not matter", which became a British Army catch
phrase in that war as an expression of resigned - or cynical -
acceptance of some state of affairs, usually brought about by
bungling officers. One English version of it was the one you quote,
others were 'san fairy anna' and even 'send for Mary Ann', though
perhaps 'san fairy ann' was the most common. It largely fell out of
use after the War, and seems not to have been taken up by
servicemen in the Second World War.

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Q. Although this is not strictly a word query, seeing that you
mentioned the _Longman Pronunciation Dictionary_, I have wondered
why on several American TV programmes, the characters pronounce the
word 'herb' without the 'h'. Is this general or just a regional
dialect? [Ian Harrison, South Africa]

Q. It is standard American English; in a 1993 pronunciation survey
quoted in the _Longman Pronunciation Dictionary_, 90% of Americans
used the pronunciation without the 'h'. (They do, however, sound it
in the proper name Herb.) It does sound odd to anybody from another
English-language community; to drop the 'h' in British English, for
example, would be classed as a solecism of the deepest hue, whereas
in the USA it's the other way around.

It's a good example of a type of linguistic conservatism sometimes
found in American English. Until the sixteenth century the word was
usually spelled 'erb' - the English got it from the French, who
didn't say the first letter either. Right down to the nineteenth
century, long after the 'h' had been added under later French
influence, that was also the way it was said. The seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century American colonists took this state of affairs
with them. During the nineteenth century, British people began to
sound the first letter, as a result of what linguists call a
spelling pronunciation.

So Americans kept the old pronunciation while British speakers
changed it. A sneaky trick, but there it is.


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