World Wide Words -- 28 October 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 211          Saturday 28 October 2000
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Contents
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1. Notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Economy-class syndrome.
3. Weird Words: Welkin.
4. In Brief: Acrobranching, Internet hotel, Wapaliser.
5. Oxford Pop-up English Language Reference Shelf.
6. Q & A: Tub-thumping, Can 'whose' apply to people?
7. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.


1. Notes and comments
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JALOPY  Norm Brust wrote about this recent Q&A piece: "I doubt that
jalopy was derived from galapago because the Spanish word actually
refers to a type of saddle, one which has the front and rear turned
up so that the rider has a more secure seat.  The large tortoise
found on a group of volcanic islands in the Pacific was named
'galapago' because its carapace is shaped like the saddle. The
islands, of course, were named for the tortoise".

PENGUIN THESAURUS  In my review last week I mentioned that the full
edition of Roget's Thesaurus used to be published by Longmans but
seemed to be out of print. Martin Toseland at Penguin has now told
me that the full updated edition of the Thesaurus was published as
a hardback under the Penguin imprint in August 1998.

NEW SUBSCRIBERS  Welcome to everyone who subscribed following a
mention in Charles Kessler's Cool Tricks and Trinkets newsletter.


2. Turns of Phrase: Economy-class syndrome
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The death of a 28-year-old woman in the arrival hall at Heathrow
Airport this week following a flight from Australia has brought
this phrase into the news. It refers to a deep vein thrombosis,
usually in the leg, caused by sitting immobile for long periods in
a cramped aircraft seat. Once movement begins again the clot can
move to heart or lungs, causing rapid death. Air operators are now
being urged to give prominent advice about precautions travellers
can follow to avoid the problem, which include taking an aspirin
before boarding (to help stop blood clotting), exercising during
the flight, and consuming plenty of soft drinks. The finger is also
being pointed at poor cabin ventilation, which some doctors say is
a contributory factor. The airlines say the phrase is a misnomer as
it isn't a problem only with economy class passengers - not exactly
reassuring for business travellers. However, Roderik Kraaijenhagen
and colleagues from the University of Amsterdam say in the British
medical journal _Lancet_ this week that they can find no evidence
for the syndrome; they argue its risk has been overestimated by
previous studies.

Other life-threatening conditions such as deep vein thromboses and
strokes have also been connected with what has become known as
'economy class syndrome'.
                                [_Independent on Sunday_, May 2000]

This type of schedule has become so common that last year the
British science journal The Lancet published a study pointing to a
new medical condition, 'economy-class syndrome' as a major
contributor to heart disease and stroke deaths among business
people.
                         [_International Herald Tribune_, May 2000]


3. Weird Words: Welkin
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The sky; heaven; the firmament.

We don't use this much nowadays - dictionaries usually tag it as
archaic or literary - except in the set phrase 'make the welkin
ring', meaning to make a very loud sound. What supposedly rings in
this situation is the vault of heaven, the bowl of the sky. In
older cosmology this was thought to be a real crystal sphere that
enclosed the Earth, to which the stars were attached, so it would
have been capable of ringing like a bell if you made enough noise.
The word comes from the Old English 'wolcen', a cloud, related to
the Dutch 'wolk' and German 'Wolke'. Very early on, for example in
the epic poem _Beowulf_ of the eighth century AD, the phrase 'under
wolcen' meant under the sky or under heaven (the bard wrote it
'wolcnum', but it's the same word). Ever since, it has had a strong
literary or poetic connection. It appears often in Shakespeare and
also in Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_: "This day in mirth and revel
to dispend, / Till on the welkin shone the starres bright". In
1739, a book with the title _Hymns and Sacred Poems_ introduced one
for Christmas that began: "Hark! how all the welkin rings, / Glory
to the King of kings". If that seems a little familiar, it is
because 15 years later George Whitefield rewrote it as "Hark! the
herald-angels sing / Glory to the new born king".


4. In Brief
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ACROBRANCHING  This is another of those curious extreme sports, of
which new examples seem to appear monthly. Those taking part are
secured by harnesses attached to ropes round the trunks of trees.
They use skills borrowed from potholing (spelunking) and rock
climbing to 'walk' across the tree canopy.

INTERNET HOTEL  This is a mainly British term for a site that rents
out highly secure temperature-controlled spaces by the month to
house computer servers. It is intended as a generic equivalent for
the trademarked term 'Telehouse'.

WAPALISER  (in the US 'Wapalizer') Computer software that enables
you to view World Wide Web pages in an ordinary browser as they
would be seen by a user accessing them through a WAP-enabled mobile
phone - a useful way of testing how they will look in that very
limited format.


5. Oxford Pop-up English Language Reference Shelf
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This CD-ROM contains the full text of the _New Oxford Dictionary of
English_ (NODE), the _New Oxford Thesaurus of English_ (NOTE), the
_Oxford World Encyclopedia_ and of the _Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations_. (See <http://www.worldwidewords.org/reviews/node.htm>
for a review of NODE; for NOTE, reviewed last week, see <http://
www.worldwidewords.org/review/note.htm>).

The program installs on your hard disk under Windows 95 or higher
and puts an icon in the system tray. You can either call it from
there or select a word in any application and use the hot-key
combination ctrl-F11; you don't need the CD-ROM to be present to
activate it. A pop-up box appears with icons for the works that
contain a match. Clicking on an icon brings up the relevant entry.
You can highlight text within an entry; right-clicking on the
highlight brings up a menu that enables you to copy the text to the
clipboard, or print the material. You can also highlight a word and
ask the program to look that up in turn, but there are no buttons
to allow you to return to previous entries.

Inside Internet Explorer (but not other browsers such as Netscape),
the program will pop up on any word that you let the mouse pointer
linger over, though you can turn this off by selecting sleep mode.
You can configure the program to use another hot key, or to exclude
any of the works from the search. The software comes from iFinger
and several Oxford language dictionaries (French, German, Spanish)
are available for downloading and adding to the set (see <http://
www.ifinger.com>).

A useful little utility, not exactly cheap, but it bundles a lot of
information in one place.

[_The Oxford Pop-up English Language Reference Shelf_, published by
Oxford University Press on 28 September 2000; publisher's price of
GBP29.99.]


6. 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.]

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Q. In a magazine article about Australia, the term 'tub thumping'
was used. My students asked me what it meant, and I couldn't figure
it out. Any idea? [Donna Marie Watson, New Jersey]

A. The phrase originally referred to a preacher of a type still
familiar: one who preaches in an aggressive way and who bangs on
the pulpit to give emphasis. At the time the expression was first
recorded - in the Cromwellian period of English history, roughly
the 1650s - the allusion was to fundamentalist nonconformist
preachers. There may be a connection here with the literal tub-
thumping of an outdoor orator using an inverted tub as a lectern,
or perhaps the practice of converting wash-tubs into improvised
drums during processions or demonstrations.

It was interesting to see that British and American dictionaries
had slightly different definitions. In Britain, the phrase usage
still focuses largely on the ranting, so that definitions usually
say something like "expressing opinions in a loud and violent or
dramatic manner", with the implication that the speaker is making
up for inadequacies in the logic of his argument by shouting a lot.
American ones focus instead on forcefulness and strength, with
definitions like "to argue for or promote something vigorously",
which sounds as though it is meant positively. If so, this suggests
a difference of meaning between the countries that no dictionary I
know points out. Perhaps American subscribers could put me right on
this?

                        -----------

Q. A magazine photograph was captioned "The car whose interior was
destroyed by fire". Is there a good alternative to humanising the
car? "The car, the interior of which was destroyed by fire" is a
little long-winded. [John Dear, Scotland]

A. Yours is an interesting question, with its underlying belief
that 'whose' can only properly be applied to people, not to things.
This has in the past been the firm rule of grammarians; generations
of children have been taught it.

Modern authorities deny that any such rule exists. For example, in
the first edition of _Modern English Usage_ back in 1926, H W
Fowler argued that the rule was no more than a folk belief and he
was vehement about the rigidity it imposed. He ended his article
"Let us, in the name of common sense, prohibit the prohibition of
'whose' inanimate; good writing is surely difficult enough without
the forbidding of things that have historical grammar, and present
intelligibility, and obvious convenience, on their side". All the
other writers on usage that I have consulted say the same thing,
with roughly equivalent degrees of exasperation. They all point to
authors of impeccable credentials over the past 400 years who have
used 'whose' to refer to inanimate objects, including Shakespeare,
Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Wordsworth. Even the (rather
conservative) usage panel of the _American Heritage Dictionary_ has
no problem with it.

The basis for the rule is that 'whose' is the possessive form of
'who', so strictly ought only to be used when persons are referred
to. The problem is that English doesn't have an equivalent
possessive form for 'which' or 'that', so we must either not use
one at all, or borrow 'whose'. Writers from medieval times onwards
have taken the second course, mainly because it leads to smoother
prose than the inverted sentences that are required by 'of which',
as you have illustrated. As the 'Merriam Webster Dictionary of
English Usage' remarks, the result is that this is one disputed
usage which is more common in the works of good writers than bad
ones.

The belief is in the same category as not splitting an infinitive,
or not ending a sentence with a preposition, other invented rules
of eighteenth century grammarians that have been ignored by a large
proportion of writers of good English. These rules all grew out of
formal arguments about what ought to be right; they didn't take
into account the way the language actually works, nor how people
actually use it.

In the sentence you quote, 'whose' is acceptable.


7. Administration
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