World Wide Words -- 20 May 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat May 20 07:38:27 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 191 Saturday 20 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: Molecular farming.
3. Weird Words: Tawdry.
4. Q & A: Funner and funnest, Settle a score.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
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LOBLOLLY Many people wrote to ask about the loblolly pine, found
in swampy areas in places like Florida. 'Loblolly' was used for any
material of a gloppy constituency, such as mud (in parts of the
southern US, it was a name for a mudhole). The plant name comes
from that link.
POLYCHRONIC All you Greek scholars out there were right to tell me
that the Greek for time is actually 'khronos'; finger trouble on
the keyboard left out the 'h'.
COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN Thank you for your responses. In addition to
those in the list in last week's issue, subscribers come also from
St Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
ADDRESSES FOR COMMUNICATIONS While I'm on housekeeping, a reminder
about e-mail addresses. If you want to comment on a newsletter, do
please write to <words at quinion.com>. The address <qa at quinion.com>
is specifically for queries to the Q&A section.
2. Turns of Phrase: Molecular farming
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This term describes growing and harvesting genetically modified
crops, with the object of producing pharmaceuticals rather than
foodstuffs. The idea is to use such crops as biological factories
to generate drugs difficult or expensive to produce in any other
way. Genes from other sources, such as microorganisms, are spliced
into the plant's genetic apparatus, its genome. During normal
growth these modified plants synthesise useful compounds, which are
then extracted from the crop. The technique is already being used
to produce vaccines for some animal diseases, like mink enteritis
virus. Many others are at the experimental stage, such as drugs to
fight infant diabetes and Crohn's disease. By one of life's little
ironies, tobacco plants are especially suited to this purpose, so
one day they may prove to be more valuable as a source of
pharmaceuticals than of tobacco. Though the term has been around
for a decade in the specialist literature, it is slowly becoming
more widely known. A closely related term, 'pharming', seems more
widely used for genetically modified animals than plants.
Comparisons and parallels continue to be drawn between molecular
farming and biotechnology, the latter suffering from more bad press
and negative perceptions than the former.
[_London Free Press_, Aug. 1999]
'Molecular farming' has seen vaccines, mammalian blood
constituents, enzymes, antibodies and low calorie sweeteners
produced in tobacco leaves.
[_Guardian_, Apr. 2000]
3. Weird Words: Tawdry
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Something showy but cheap and of poor quality.
To find the source of this word we must travel to Ely, a city whose
cathedral dominates the flat fen landscape of East Anglia. Long
before the cathedral was built, a small religious house had been
established there in the seventh century by Ethelreda, the daughter
of King Anna of East Anglia. She died in 679. Sixty years later the
Venerable Bede wrote that her death had been caused by a growth in
her throat, which she had said was a punishment for wearing
necklaces in her youth. She eventually became the patron saint of
Ely, under the Norman French name of St Audrey, and her feast day,
17 October, was celebrated by a fair. One of the favourite items
sold was a band of fine silk lace or ribbon worn about the neck in
memory of the city's patron saint. This became known as 'St
Audrey's lace', but by the end of the sixteenth century it had been
corrupted to 'tawdry lace'. Eventually the first word was taken to
be a description; by the nature of goods sold at fairs they often
looked good until the buyer got them home, so the word became
attached to such cheap and showy items, and not just at Ely.
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. Why can we not say 'funner' and 'funnest'? There are other one-
syllable adjectives that we can add '-er' and '-est' to, such as
'close' (closer and closest) and 'hot' (hotter and hottest). What
is it about 'fun' that would make this impossible? [Gary Claassen,
USA]
A. Interesting question. 'Fun' has conventionally been said to be a
noun, so that you can't make these comparative or superlative forms
from it.
But it's often difficult to work out exactly what job a word is
doing in an English sentence, because it's so easy to shift about
between using a word as a straight noun, as in "the television is
on", and using it to modify another noun, as in "the television
show has finished". In the second case - what grammarians refer to
as an attributive use - we know that 'television' is a noun because
it turns up in other situations. But if it didn't, we might just as
well decide that it's an adjective, as it's doing the same job as
an adjective. Because this is so easy to do in English, over time
words sometimes shift roles. 'Fun' is a good example; it has moved
away from being just a noun to being equally comfortable in an
adjectival role.
'Fun' has long been used attributively, as in 'this is a fun game',
in a way that's no different from saying 'this is a card game', in
which 'card' is certainly a noun (at least, that's true in writing;
in speech subtle differences in stress on the two elements give
hints of the relationship between them). Examples are recorded in
the _Oxford English Dictionary_ from the nineteenth century that
use 'fun' in this attributive way, such as "There was a room at
Holly House called the 'fun-room', without chair or table". But
other examples in the OED from about the same period look decidedly
adjectival, such as "Fun jottings; or, Laughs I have taken pen to"
from 1853. In 1876 Mark Twain had Huckleberry Finn say in _Tom
Sawyer_: "Tom - honest injun, now - is it fun or earnest?" where
'fun' certainly looks like an adjective because it's paired with
'earnest'.
This process has accelerated greatly in the past fifty years. The
result is that you regularly come across expressions like 'this
party is fun', 'it's really fun', 'we're going to have a fun time
tonight', 'that game was more fun than the last one', where the
distinction between noun and adjective is decidedly blurred (some
of these go back a long way in American and British English,
especially regionally; I'm happy to use all of them myself, though
that view is not shared by everyone). It's also possible to use
'fun' with verbs such as 'remain' and 'seem' that don't usually
allow nouns to appear after the verb ('this seems fun').
Once this process got well under way, people started to say things
like 'how fun is it?', and 'it's very fun'. The move to adjective
has gone so far in the USA that its comparative and superlative are
not infrequently found in informal writing: 'funner' for 'more fun'
and 'funnest' for 'most fun' ("basketball is funner than football,
and soccer is the funnest game of all"). A scan of newspapers in
the NEXIS database from 1998 found over a thousand examples of the
latter form. Some of these are no doubt intended to be humorous,
and some are probably mistakes, but surely not all of them are.
What we're seeing here is language evolution in action. So the
straightforward answer to your question is: yes, you can use these
forms, and people are doing so increasingly often. But if your
question was really asking whether it is acceptable to use them in
all circumstances, then I have to say firmly that, no, it isn't,
not yet anyway. They are definitely informal and they should still
be avoided when speaking or writing standard or formal English.
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Q. I am trying to help a student with a research project. He must
find the origins of the idiom, 'a score to settle' or 'to settle a
score'. [Deborah Reese, USA]
A. Before the days of paper records, the usual way of keeping count
was to cut marks into wooden rods called tallies (hence our verb
'tally', to count). Tally sticks have been used for thousands of
years - Roman numerals evolved out of a system for notching them -
and they survived until very recently (tallies were usually split
in two lengthways so both parties had an identical record). For
example, the English government kept its tax records on tallies
until they were abolished in 1826 (the Palace of Westminster was
gutted in 1834 because somebody over-enthusiastically burned old
tally sticks in a furnace under the House of Lords). Cutting the
notches on tallies was called 'scoring' (from Old Norse 'scora', to
make an incision, related to our 'shear'), a word we still use in
much the same sense.
>From about 1400, 'score' was also the word for a record or an
amount due, the total of the score marks on a tally. It became a
common word for the total of a tradesman's or innkeeper's account.
So, 'to settle the score' originally meant just to pay one's bill.
But it acquired the figurative sense of taking revenge on somebody,
and that's usually what we mean by it now.
The same idea is behind our word for the number of points achieved
in a game; this was first used in print by the famous Edmund Hoyle
(as in 'according to Hoyle') in his _Short Treatise on the Game of
Whist_ of 1742. The word also turns up in several slang phrases or
idioms, such as 'to know the score', to be aware of what's going
on, or to 'score points off', to outdo somebody. It is also the
origin of 'score' for twenty, though we're not entirely sure how it
became linked specifically to that number. A 'score' in music comes
from a related idea of engraving or drawing the stave lines.
5. Administration
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