World Wide Words -- 18 Nov 00
Michael Quinion
editor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Nov 18 09:06:48 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 213 Saturday 18 November 2000
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Contents
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1. Notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Gene chip.
3. Weird Words: Sitooterie.
4. Topical Words: Chad.
5. Q & A: Aksed, Boilerplate.
6. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
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FELL SWOOP Following last week's Q&A piece, several people wrote
to point out that Tolkien uses it frequently in _The Lord of the
Rings_. I would class that as a deliberately archaic usage rather
than as evidence of its continuing in regular employment. Others
mentioned that it still exists in Scots: Ian Marks mentioned 'fell
raw' for very cold. The sense there has become weaker over time so
that it's often more nearly equivalent to "very" or "extremely".
2. Turns of Phrase: Gene chip
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Gene chips are devices not much larger than postage stamps. They
are based on a glass substrate wafer and contain a large number of
tiny cells - 400,000 is common. Each holds DNA from a different
human gene. The array of cells makes it possible to carry out a
very large number of genetic tests on a sample at one time. At the
moment, the devices are used in pharmaceutical laboratories to
investigate what genes are involved in various normal and disease
processes and to speed up the slow and painstaking process of
finding new drugs. The hope is that it will soon be possible for
doctors to use these devices to run simple tests on patients during
examinations in order to diagnose diseases with a genetic base or
to find a treatment that is tailored to an individual's genetic
make-up. The concept is seen as having vast potential, and more
than a dozen firms are trying out various cost-effective ways of
making the chips. The devices are often called 'DNA chips', or -
generally - 'biochips'; more formally they are referred to as
'microarrays', and the process of testing the gene patterns of an
individual is sometimes called 'microarray profiling'.
In one of the first applications of high-powered 'gene chip'
technology to an important psychiatric syndrome, scientists
reported yesterday the discovery of genes that may prove key to
understanding schizophrenia.
[_Washington Times_, Nov. 2000]
People, not populations, will be treated with tailor-made drugs
that suit their genetic makeup; gene chips will identify who is at
most risk of disease, so they can have more check-ups; similar
chips will distinguish one type of cancer from another, so the best
treatment is chosen; gene transplants will be used to correct
mutations that cause metabolic disorders.
[_Daily Telegraph_, June 2000]
3. Weird Words: Sitooterie
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A summerhouse or gazebo.
This word is said to be a Scots colloquial term, though I've not
been able to track down a reference. It means a place to sit out
in, from 'sit' plus 'oot' (a Scots pronunciation of 'out') plus the
noun ending '-erie' of French origin that's familiar from words
like 'menagerie' and 'rotisserie'. English newspaper readers
suddenly started to see this word during this past summer because
it was applied to an art exhibition in the historic landscaped
gardens of Belsay House in Northumberland, near Newcastle upon
Tyne. A dozen designers and architects were each given a budget and
invited to interpret the idea of a 'sitooterie' as a meditation on
the perception of landscape. This resulted in several intriguing
structures, some practical, some more like follies. Whether the
exhibition (which has now closed, by the way) will do anything to
make 'sitooterie' a permanent part of the English - as opposed to
the Scots - tongue, is open to debate.
4. Topical Words: Chad
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That's the trouble with obsolete technology: when you need to talk
about it, you need to drag out obsolete terminology. Yes, I'm still
following the big political soap opera of the season in Florida. It
was reported that the automatic vote-counting machines sometimes
got confused because voters didn't punch the holes in the voting
papers right through and the dangling 'chad' messed up the sensors.
As a result, and perhaps inevitably, last Sunday's _New York Post_
referred to 'Chadgate'. We've also had a lot of arcane technology
appear, including 'swing-door chad', 'tri-chad', 'dimpled chad' and
even 'pregnant chad'.
Most people associated with computing thought 'chad' had gone out
with punch-card tabulating machines, well BME (Before the Microsoft
Era). Every time you created a new card, little punched-out bits of
card would fall into a hopper below the machine, if you were lucky;
otherwise on the floor. This was the chad. You can see exactly the
same type of stuff if you give your office hole punch a good shake.
By extension, it was also used for the perforated edge strips on
continuous printer stationery after they had been torn off by hand
or by a vicious machine called a burster. The Jargon File says it
has also been known as 'chaff', 'computer confetti', and 'keypunch
droppings'.
According to the main reference works, nobody has the slightest
idea where the word 'chad' came from, though there's a good chance
that it pre-dates the computer. Punched tabulator cards have been
around since the machines Herman Hollerith invented to analyse the
1890 US census. However, such information as we have dates the word
to the period immediately after the Second World War.
Older people in Britain might think of a link with a curious little
cartoon figure from the same period, forever saying things like
"Wot? No bread?" as comments on shortages during and after the War.
He was the British equivalent of the American Kilroy (indeed, the
two met and merged in places with the cartoon appearing above
"Kilroy was here!"). To the British man in the street he was always
known as Mr Chad. Mr Chad, however, is not a relative of chad.
Though some lexicographers would point to it being a variant form
of 'chaff', there is another possibility. The story goes that a
genius of the mechanical world was fed up with all these bits of
confetti lying about on the floors of computer rooms and invented a
machine that did away with them. Instead of punching a hole right
through, it cut a notch and folded the flap back. The inventor, it
is said, was a Mr Chadless and his machine was called the Chadless
keypunch. The logic was inescapable: if the Chadless punch didn't
make computer confetti, then the stuff it didn't make must be chad.
There's one big problem with this: I've not been able to turn up
any evidence that Mr Chadless ever existed, or indeed that anybody
of that name exists anywhere. There is no reference to it in the US
patents and trademarks registry, and it doesn't occur anywhere in
telephone directories in the US, Canada, UK or Australia. We must
deduce that 'chadless' was derived from 'chad' to describe machines
that didn't litter. Damn, another good story broken on the wheel of
academic research. The word is still around, though it seems to be
used only by the makers of automatic letter openers: chadless ones
slit only the top surface of envelopes, so your mail room doesn't
end up looking like a hamster cage.
5. Q&A
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[Send your queries to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will be
acknowledged, but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited.
If I can, a response will appear here and on the Words Web site. If
you wish to comment, please e-mail editor at worldwidewords.org]
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Q. 'Aksed' in lieu of 'asked' is a grating mispronunciation. Yet, I
recently heard a linguist on radio claim that the word was
originally spelled, and pronounced, 'aksed', and that the spelling
was varied to reflect a widespread change in pronunciation. Is
this so? [Tim Messer, Melbourne, Australia]
A. Some decades ago, when I first became a freelance producer, I
worked on natural history scripts and - to my annoyance - regularly
typed 'bird' as 'brid', so much so that in our family we still
refer to them that way, puzzling visitors no end. It was only when
I happened to look up its word history that I found that in Old
English it had indeed been 'bryd' (plural 'bryddas').
This process by which a sound changes place with another in a word
is called metathesis. 'Wasp' has gone through the same change, as
it was spelled both 'waesp' and 'waeps' in Old English (the Latin
equivalent is indeed 'vespa', but it seems that the prehistoric
form may have been nearer 'waps'). Another example is 'pattern',
which was created from 'patron' in the sixteenth century. Yet
another was common in the British Army in the nineteenth century,
when 'cavalry' was often said as though it was spelled 'Calvary'.
You hear it in the spoken language - one example is 'relevant',
which is often said with the middle consonants inverted, as
'revelant'. Children do it a lot while they're learning new words.
'Aks' is a common (and notorious) example. Though in standard
English it's considered a mistake, it's common in various dialects,
for example in Black American English. The linguist you heard on
the radio was quite right: the two forms go back to Old English, in
which 'axian' and 'ascian' (with a hard 'c') existed side by side.
In this case, the '-sk-' sound is the older, and it seems to have
won the battle for survival. But the existence of the two forms,
its widespread use in dialect - plus all the other cases of
metathesis - suggests that someone today who says 'aks' is actually
going through a mental process that isn't at all abnormal, and
which is probably allied to Spoonerism.
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Q. A member of the CompuServe Journalism Forum has been brooding
about the word 'boilerplate', often mentioned in discussions of
contracts. We all know what it means - but why? "How," he asks,
"did 'boiler' and 'plate' get combined to mean something which
resembles neither?" [Dodi Schultz]
A. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, news agencies in
the United States would regularly send out material to the many
small-town newspapers across the country. To make it as simple to
use as possible, the text was supplied ready typeset on metal
plates, so that all the editor had to do was slot it into the right
place on the page.
These reminded printers of the standard-sized metal plates that
were supplied by iron foundries to riveters constructing steam
boilers. Soon 'boilerplate' shifted from meaning the printing
plates to the text on them. Because the syndicated material was
often third-rate filler stuff, or semi-disguised advertising puffs,
boilerplate quickly came to mean hackneyed or unoriginal writing.
(It has close connections with 'stereotype', which comes from a
related printing idea.)
The same term was taken over by the legal profession (only from the
1970s according to the citations I've seen, but it may well be
older) to refer to the standard clauses in a contract, which didn't
change often and which could similarly be slotted into place in the
text.
6 Administration
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