World Wide Words -- 27 May 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 192           Saturday 27 May 2000
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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. Topical Words: Arsenal.
2. Weird Words: Semordnilap.
3. Q & A: Begging the question, Dab hand.
4. Review: New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Topical Words: Arsenal
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Along the wires the electric message came, a story from the Press
Association: "Nuclear powers promise to eliminate their arsenals",
reporting the agreement by the 187 signatories to the Nuclear Non-
proliferation Treaty (though the unspecific timescale reminded me
of a wayside pulpit sign I saw outside a chapel in Wales: "The
promises of God are signed and sealed, but not dated").

The word 'arsenal' has a complicated history. It started in Arabic
as 'dar-as-sina', meaning "house of construction" or "house of
industry". In the fifteenth century the word was taken over by
several Mediterranean nations; both Spanish and Italian borrowed it
as 'darsena', a word for a dock. The citizens of Venice acquired it
in a different form, losing the first letter and adding 'al' to the
end, as the name of their naval dockyard, a substantial base as
befitted the leading maritime power in the Mediterranean at the
time; to this day it's called the Arzenale.

The English may have got the word from French but it is more likely
that it came directly from Venetian Italian, since early uses are
in descriptions of the dockyard. For example, William Thomas wrote
in a _History of Italy_ in 1549 - definitely the book to read at
the time if you wanted to know about the main Italian states: "The
Arsenale in myne eye excedeth all the rest: For there they haue
well neere two hundred galeys" ("In my eyes the Arsenale is greater
than all the others: they have almost two hundred galleys there").

Later in the sixteenth century the word's meaning began to shift in
English towards naming one part of a dockyard, a warehouse for
naval stores and weapons; later still it referred specifically to a
place of storage for weapons of all kinds, not just naval ones (a
famous examples was the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry which
John Brown stormed in 1859) and also for a place where weapons were
made and repaired. That remained its principal meaning in English
until comparatively recently. A famous example was the Royal
Arsenal on the Thames east of London, which stretched for a mile
along the river next to the Woolwich dockyard, and which gave its
name to the football club.

It was only a step further to use it for the whole collection of
weapons and other military equipment available to a group or
country, a meaning that appeared less than a century ago. Hence the
phrase 'nuclear arsenal'. It's a long way from a factory in Persia.


2. Weird Words: Semordnilap
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A word, phrase or sentence that makes sense when reversed, but is
not the same as the original.

A string of letters that reads the same backwards as forwards is a
palindrome ("Madam, I'm Adam"; "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!";
"Was it a car or a cat I saw?"). A semordnilap is closely related,
but the reversed text must be different. For example, if you
reverse "diaper" you get "repaid", and if you invert "desserts" the
word "stressed" appears. A more complicated example is "deliver no
evil", but you can probably invent better ones for yourself. As
semordnilap is palindromes written backwards, it's a self-
referential word, one that encapsulates within itself the thing it
represents. You could hardly say that it's common, but many earnest
palindromists have accidentally discovered it, and it has some
small circulation among word wizards.


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. Recently, I have observed that 'begging the question' has come
to mean "raising the question". Is this still an improper usage, or
has the meaning of the phrase changed due to the usage? [George
Beuselinck]

A. This one really bugs people who know some logic and are familiar
with the classical languages. From my attempts to research the
point, it also seems to cause trouble for dictionary writers and
compilers of style guides, so much so that I've not found two
authorities that entirely agree on the nature of the problem or
which senses of 'beg the question' are acceptable.

You can easily find examples of the sense you quote, which is used
just as though one might say "prompt the question" or "forces one
to ask". Here's an example from the 'Independent on Sunday' about
gay weddings: "It begs the question why the Church ever sanctioned
something it now abominates?". This meaning of the phrase seems to
have grown up because people have turned for a model to other
phrases in 'beg', especially the well-known 'I beg to differ',
where 'beg' is a fossil verb that actually used to mean "humbly
submit". But the way we use 'beg to differ' these days makes 'beg
the question' look the same as "wish to ask". It doesn't - or at
least, it didn't.

The original sense is of a logical fallacy, of taking for granted
or assuming the thing that you are setting out to prove. To take an
example, you might say that lying is wrong because we ought always
to tell the truth. That's a circular argument and makes no sense.
Another instance is to argue that democracy must be the best form
of government because the majority is always right. The fallacy was
described by Aristotle in his book on logic in about 350BC. His
Greek name for it was turned into Latin as 'petitio principii' and
then into English in 1581 as 'beg the question'. Most of our
problems arise because the person who translated it made a hash of
it. The Latin might better be translated as "laying claim to the
principle".

Very often, the fact that you are using the matter to be proved as
part of your argument is a good deal more subtle than in these
examples. It comes across rather as an attempt to evade the issue
or avoid giving a straightforward answer, making the phrase mean
"avoid the question". This meaning of the phrase is common and most
authorities agree it is now part of standard English.

The meaning you give is the newest. It is gaining ground, and one
or two recent dictionaries claim that it is now acceptable - the
_New Oxford Dictionary of English_, for example, says it is "widely
accepted in modern standard English". I wouldn't go so far myself.
Because of possible confusion over what you actually mean, and
inevitable condemnation from people who have taken the trouble to
find out what it once did mean, it's better avoided altogether.

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Q. I wondered how the phrase 'dab hand' originated, meaning someone
particularly skilled at a task. Any ideas? [Ken Hart, Dundee,
Scotland]

A. This is mainly a British Commonwealth phrase, commonly used in
sentences such as "My son has become a dab hand at renovating cast-
off computers". We're able to trace its origin back to the end of
the seventeenth century, but then the trail runs into the sand.

The phrase 'dab hand' turns up first in the early nineteenth
century and is widely recorded in English regional and dialect
usage through the century. The first recorded use of 'dab' by
itself in a related sense is in the _Athenian Mercury_ of 1691.
It's also in the _Dictionary of the Canting Crew_ of 1698-99: a
'dab' there is "an exquisite expert" in some form of roguery. The
US word 'dabster' for an expert comes from the same source, and is
recorded from about the same time. 'Dab' is often reported as being
school slang, but that may be a later development, as the early
sightings all seem to have had criminal associations.

Nobody is even sure where the original 'dab' came from: it may be
linked to the Old Dutch 'dabben' and German 'tappen'. The verb
first appears about 1300, when it meant to give somebody a sharp
blow; it weakened in sense over time, until in the sixteenth
century it arrived at its modern meaning of pressing lightly and
repeatedly with something soft (the criminal slang 'dabs' for
fingerprints seems to derive from this sense, perhaps with a nod
towards 'dab hand'). It's difficult to see how the idea of
expertise grew out of the various senses of 'dab' and it's possible
that in this sense it is a separate word, perhaps from 'adept'.


4. Review: New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM
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When in August 1998 I reviewed the hardback publication of this
ground-breaking dictionary, I said no CD-ROM was envisaged. Times
move on and we now have that CD-ROM. It's cheaper than the book,
and certainly weighs a whole lot less.

Oxford has gone to Versaware for the controlling software engine.
This permits the publisher to produce other works in the same
format which can be indexed and consulted in the same environment.
Entries are presented as fully-formatted text, closely similar to
the format of the printed work, and can be copied and pasted with
formatting intact, or printed out. Material can also be copied and
stored for future reference in 'binders', which act like bookmarks;
these can be searched separately. You can highlight text and search
only the highlighted material.

The Versaware system seems not to have been designed with
dictionaries in mind and it has some oddities. For example, there's
no wildcard facility for searches. The help file implies there is,
but the publishers acknowledge it doesn't exist. If you just want
to look up a word, there's no problem, but if you want to try
something more complicated, such as find all the words that end in
'ology', you're stymied.

And if you're looking for a word given in an entry as a derivative,
it doesn't appear in the index list. For example, you'll find
'apposite' but not 'appositely', 'serious' but not 'seriousness'.
This is less of a problem with this dictionary than it would be
with most others, as it brings most derivatives and compounds out
as separate entries, but it can be a nuisance, and could confuse a
user unfamiliar with dictionaries. (You can find the words by means
of a full text search, admittedly, but then you will find other
matches too; also, the full text search is slow).

A minor nuisance is that the cut and paste facility has been oddly
and inconsistently implemented. You can copy using Ctrl-Insert or
Ctrl-C, but Shift-Insert doesn't work to paste into search boxes -
you have to use Ctrl-V (and don't look for it on the menu: it isn't
there). Paste doesn't work at all in the Full Text search box, so
you can't copy and paste a word out of another text.

So I'm in two minds: it's a nice dictionary (but then I'm biased)
but the CD-ROM is not quite as useful as I'd hoped it would be. Of
course I may just be an untypical user.

[_New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM_, published by the
Oxford University Press on 25 May 2000; GBP21.27 (GBP24.99 in
Europe including VAT); Windows format only. The original review is
archived at <http://www.quinion.com/words/articles/node.htm>.]


5. Administration
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