World Wide Words -- 13 May 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat May 13 07:29:31 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 190 Saturday 13 May 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
--------
1. Notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Bezoar.
3. Turns of Phrase: Polychronic.
4. Q & A: Loblolly boy, Up in Annie's room.
5. Review: Cambridge International Dictionary of English.
6. Request: Subscribers' countries of origin.
7. Administration: LISTSERV commands, IPA codes, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
PLURALS IN -EN I may have misled you last week about the plural of
'child'. The dialect form 'childer' was actually a plural that used
one of the Old English endings that vanished from the language in
medieval times (it survives in German). This was then re-pluralised
using '-en' in some parts of the country, perhaps under the belief
that 'childer' was singular. Several subscribers wrote to say that
the same thing happened in Dutch, to make the plural 'kinderen'.
Several people pointed out very reasonably that if 'chicken' is a
diminutive form, a chicken ought to be smaller or younger than a
chick. It does look that way, but 'chicken' is actually derived
from the same root as 'cock' (through several layers of change) and
originally referred to a young bird; 'chick' is an abbreviated form
of 'chicken' that appeared in the fourteenth century.
See <http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-plu1.htm> for an updated
version of the piece.
INFLAMMABLE/FLAMMABLE Following the Q&A piece on words in 'in-',
many people wrote enquiring about 'inflammable' and why it means
something easily set on fire rather than fireproof, as the prefix
ought to suggest. The word comes from Latin 'inflammare'. It uses a
different 'in-' prefix, one that intensifies the meaning of the
root word. It is very confusing; the old form 'flammable' has had
to be revived in modern times so that people would not think that
something 'inflammable' was fireproof. If only we'd stuck to the
older 'enflame' from French, and used it to make 'enflammable', we
wouldn't have had the problem in the first place.
2. Weird Words: Bezoar /'bi:zO:/ or /'bEz at UA:/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A supposed antidote against poison.
The 'bezoar' is a stony calcified hairball or gallstone that occurs
in the stomachs of cud-chewing animals such as goats (though humans
sometimes get them, too). The word is Persian ('pad-zahr', counter-
poison or antidote); the bezoar's fame as a cure for poison spread
westwards from there in medieval times. You swallowed it, or
occasionally rubbed it on the infected part. In _A Voyage to
Abyssinia_, written by Father Lobo in the eighteenth century, he
says: "I had recourse to bezoar, a sovereign remedy against these
poisons, which I always carried about me". Belief in its near-
magical properties was then common.
Old herbals are full of recipes using it, such as this one from
Nicholas Culpeper's _Complete Herbal_ of 1653: "Take of Pearls
prepared, Crab's eyes, red Coral, white Amber Hart's-horn, oriental
Bezoar, of each half an ounce, powder of the black tops of Crab's
claws, the weight of them all, beat them into powder, which may be
made into balls with jelly, and the skins which our vipers have
cast off, warily dried and kept for use". Culpeper remarks that
"four, or five, or six grains is excellently good in a fever to be
taken in any cordial, for it cheers the heart and vital spirits
exceedingly, and makes them impregnable". Don't try this at home!
If you feel like categorising them, a 'trichobezoar' is a hairball,
while a 'phytobezoar' is one containing mostly vegetable fibres.
3. Turns of Phrase: Polychronic
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This word isn't especially new - examples occur from the early
nineties at least - but it has only recently begun to appear more
widely, usually in reference to the stress suffered by office
workers trying to cope with too many things at once. That has led
to buzz phrases such as 'time poor', 'acceleration disorder',
'hurry sickness', and 'compression tiredness'. If you're a
'polychronic' personality, you work happily with many things
happening at one time, in a non-linear and emotional way that lets
you change your plans at a moment's notice without distress and
without worrying about deadlines. It's the opposite of the
personality type that human-resource experts say works best in the
modern workplace, one that's termed 'monochronic': time-driven,
working in a linear and orderly way, intent on getting one job
completed before starting the next. Both words contain the suffix
'chronic' that comes from the Greek 'kronos', time; 'monochronic'
has another meaning dating from the 1840s that denotes events
happening at one period of time.
Traditionally, cultures are divided into monochronic (where time is
regarded as linear, people do one thing at a time and lateness and
interruptions are not tolerated) and polychronic (where time is
seen as cyclical, punctuality is unimportant and interruptions are
acceptable).
[_Daily Telegraph_, Dec. 1999]
Our move into a nonstop culture is inevitable. But the question is
whether we want it to be a monochronic-type one, or a polychronic-
type one? For business the answer is easy, the former, because it
means schedules can still be adhered to, but for the rest of us?
[_Viewpoint_, Issue Seven, 2000]
4. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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.]
-----------
Q. After spending a half an hour, I have been unable to locate the
term 'loblolly boy', and would therefore appreciate your explaining
its meaning, if you can. It is a term often used in Patrick
O'Brian's marvellous _Master and Commander_. Tom Goldsmith, Denver,
USA]
A. Let's start with 'loblolly' itself. This was a medicinal food, a
thick oatmeal gruel or porridge, perhaps with a bit of meat or some
vegetables in it; another name for it was 'burgoo'. It was given to
seamen recovering from sickness or injury, and so it belonged in
the same category as that other supposedly restorative foodstuff,
'portable soup', which Patrick O'Brian frequently has Dr Maturin
mention; this was soup that had been concentrated into a solid form
to preserve it and make it easy to carry about.
The loblolly boy was an assistant to the ship's surgeon; one of his
jobs was to feed the patients, hence his name. But 'loblolly' had
another sense, a figurative one of a rustic bumpkin, which reveals
the loblolly boy's position in the hierarchy of the ship -
somewhere between the cabin boy and a ship's rat.
The word may come from the dialectal 'lob', to bubble while
boiling, and 'lolly', for broth, soup, or other food boiled in a
pot, both recorded in the English Dialect Dictionary. It's almost
certainly connected to 'lobscouse', originally a sailor's dish of
meat stewed with vegetables and ship's biscuit. Abbreviated to
'scouse' it has become attached to the English port city of
Liverpool and to its dialect and inhabitants.
-----------
Q. My grandfather had many weird and wonderful expressions. When
something was lost and could not be found, even after a thorough
and sustained search, he often said it's 'up in Annie's room,
behind the clock'. Could you tell me the origin of this expression?
[Jeannette Dam-Hansen, Australia]
A. I recognised this immediately and have even occasionally used
it, much to the mystification of younger people around me. Could
your grandfather perhaps have fought in the First World War, as my
father did? It was British army slang of that period and became
more widely known from there. According to Eric Partridge, 'up in
Annie's room' was a common dismissive reply to a colleague who was
asking where somebody was. The implication was that either the
speaker didn't know or the person sought either didn't want to be
found or didn't want to be disturbed - you could translate it as
"don't ask".
Partridge suggested the phrase was coined to suggest the person
sought was "a bit of a lad with the girls", which sounds rather too
much like a rationalisation after the event to be altogether
convincing (I suspect it had more to do with the lack of female
company in the trenches, so 'he's up in Annie's room' could have
meant he's not around, he's no more here than Annie is). It was
after the War ended that 'behind the clock' was added, though
nobody seems to know why. If anybody has any information, I'd be
glad to hear.
5. Review: Cambridge International Dictionary of English
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cambridge International Dictionary of English on CD-ROM is an
electronic dictionary designed for advanced learners of English.
Its text is essentially that of the printed edition, but it has
various electronic extensions.
Every entry has its definition in simple English with an example
sentence to illustrate a sense; you can ask it to display a list of
related words. Every word has spoken pronunciations in British and
American English, accompanied by IPA phonetic transcriptions. You
can decide how much detail to show in each entry: whether you want
to see phonetic icons, grammar codes, related words and so on. You
can add notes to definitions and a history list allows you to
backtrack from your current location. You can copy text to the
clipboard or into a supported word processor. Full integration with
a word processor is said to be possible, but it failed whenever I
tried it with Word 97.
There is a separate search panel that allows users to find words
according to a variety of categories, such as headword, or part of
speech (so you can find all the suffixes, for example). A set of
study sections gives general background in a variety of grammatical
and other topics; on my 500MHz Pentium III these were very slow to
display and update, and were a complete system hog while they were
doing so. About 150 sets of pictures allow users to identify and
look up words for a variety of types of objects, from aircraft to
the living room to the playground to types of windows. There are
grouped sets of exercises on eight grammatical topics - such as
affixes, homophones, and problem verbs - as well as a large number
that are based on the picture sets. Many different users can work
through these, each with his or her own scoring record.
[_Cambridge International Dictionary of English_, published by
Cambridge University Press on 20 April 2000; ISBN 0-521-77575-2;
price GBP12.72 (+ VAT in Europe). Requires Windows 95/98/2000 with
16Mb RAM, a sound card, and 16-bit graphics card with resolution of
at least 800x600. Visit <http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/elt/dictionary/>
to see it in action, as well as other Cambridge dictionaries, such
as the recently published US one.]
6. Request: Subscribers' countries of origin
-------------------------------------------------------------------
According to subscribers' e-mail addresses, World Wide Words has
readers in the following countries:
Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium,
Bermuda, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia,
Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican
Republic, Egypt, Eritrea, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Finland,
France, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guyana, Hong Kong,
Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy,
Japan, Jordan, Kazachstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos,
Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia,
Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Montserrat, Morocco,
Mozambique, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger,
Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland,
Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia,
Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea,
Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand,
Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates,
United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela,
Vietnam, Yugoslavia.
If you live in a country that is not on this list, I'd like to hear
from you. Please write to me at <wherefrom at quinion.com> (but please
*don't* write if your country is already listed).
7. Administration
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* To leave the list, send the e-mail message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS
to the list server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>.
The subject line of your message will be ignored. For a complete
list of commands, instead send the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS.
* For a key to the IPA pronunciations used in these mailings, see
<http://www.quinion.com/words/pronguide.htm>, or send a blank
e-mail message to our autoresponder at <pronguide at quinion.com>.
* WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You
may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free
media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the
Web address of <http://www.quinion.com/words/>.
===================================================================
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list