World Wide Words -- 02 Sep 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Fri Sep 1 08:46:11 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 203 Saturday 2 September 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 9,000 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. Book review: The World In So Many Words.
3. Turns of Phrase: Econophysics.
4. Weird Words: Paraphernalia.
5. Q & A: Tip, Curmudgeon.
6. The Last Word.
7. Administration: How to leave the list, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
YOUR HELP REQUESTED The World Wide Words site is now so big that
it's becoming hard to find one's way around it, and I'm trying to
improve things. I've created a new navigation system and am trying
it out first with the In Brief section. Do visit some of the pages
in that section and let me know what you think. The In Brief index
page is at <http://www.quinion.com/words/inbrief/index.htm>. The
special address to send your comments to is <feedback at quinion.com>.
PONCEY I startled a lot of people with this word last week. They
went to their dictionaries to find that in British English it was
associated with 'ponce', a man who lives off a prostitute's
earnings, a pimp. But it has also had a sense of a male homosexual.
>From this has developed a weakened idea of something considered to
be pretentious or affected - which was how I was using it. There
are also the verbs 'to ponce about', to behave in a ridiculous,
ineffective, or posturing way, and 'to ponce something up', to make
overly elaborate and unnecessary changes to something in an attempt
to improve it (another Briticism with much the same sense is 'to
tart something up'). Not perhaps a word to use in the most polite
company.
ETAOIN SHRDLU Several subscribers wrote about other examples of
the use of this nonsense phrase. Jake Loddington mentioned _The
Naughty Princess_ by Anthony Armstrong, written in 1945, in which
there is a whimsical short story called _Etaoin and Shrdlu_ which
ends "And Sir Etaoin and Shrdlu married and lived so happily ever
after that whenever you come across Etaoin's name even today it's
generally followed by Shrdlu's". I'm told that the phrase also
appeared in one of H P Lovecraft's horror stories, but my
correspondent couldn't track down the reference. Andrew Stiller
wrote about a once-famous play, _The Adding Machine_, whose
protagonist was "a poor shlub named Shrdlu". (Yiddish: 'shlub' or
'schlub', a talentless, unattractive, or boorish person). From
these and other references, the phrase seems to have been most
popular during the 1930s and early 1940s. The second half of the
phrase was used by Terry Winograd in 1972 as the name for an early
artificial-intelligence system.
Several people mentioned QWERTY, for the left-hand section of the
first line of letters on the standard keyboard (AZERTY in France).
That, too, seems to have made the dictionaries - rather more so
than ETAOIN has, in fact.
2. Book review: The World In So Many Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
In that comparatively brief period in which the sun never set on
the British Empire, it was not only the wealth and produce of
nations that filtered back to Britain, it was useful bits of their
languages, too. But the linguistic produce of the world would not
have been so readily accepted had not English been ready for it.
For a thousand years, English has been a linguistic mongrel, based
on Germanic roots but with a huge influx of French words after the
Norman Conquest; so much so, that some writers have described the
language as a creole. Hardly so in most specialists' view, but the
collision between different linguistic traditions created one of
the main characteristics of creoles: a simplified grammar.
In the 400 years after the Conquest, English lost most of the
inflections that had been so noticeable a part of the language in
the Anglo-Saxon period. And when words became fixed things, not
needing to change their form to suit the moment, and when any word
could be fitted into any part of a sentence to do the job that was
needed, and when the vocabulary was already such a mixture anyway,
bringing in new words from other languages became easy.
Allan Metcalf has brought together about a hundred examples from a
hundred different languages to show how extensive this borrowing
has been: South America gave us 'alpaca' from Aymara and
'buccaneer' from Tupi; Australia provided 'kangaroo' from Guugu
Yimidhirr and 'boomerang' from Dharuk; India supplied 'catamaran'
from Tamil and 'guru' from Hindi; from the Middle East came
'algebra' and 'alcohol' from Arabic and 'mammon' from Aramaic ...
so the list goes on. As Mr Metcalf says in his introduction:
You're a savant in French, a genius in Latin, a philosopher in
Greek. If you made it through kindergarten, you've mastered a bit
of German. If you have a yen to be a tycoon, whether or not you
become one, you're speaking Chinese and Japanese. If you trek to
paradise, you're going through Afrikaans and Persian.
In places, the book struggles to increase the language count;
though many languages have contributed to English, only a few have
done so in quantity, and examples he cites from some lesser-known
tongues are often rare, local or specialist: 'hora' from Romanian,
'muffuletta' from Sicilian, 'Kachina' from Hopi, 'sampot' from
Khmer, 'serow' from Lepcha. And to ascribe 'dynamite' to Swedish,
simply because the late Mr Nobel borrowed it from classical Greek,
is a bit of a stretch.
_The World In So Many Words_ is a companion volume to the one he
wrote with David Barnhart, _America in So Many Words_ (far be it
from me as an outsider to query this dichotomy); see <http://www.
quinion.com/words/articles/articles/america.htm>. The format is
much the same: a page or so for each word, with much interesting
associated detail. An excellent book for dipping into, provided you
want to know about some odd little words.
[Metcalf, Allan, _The World In So Many Words_, published by
Houghton Mifflin in 1999; ISBN 0-395-95920-9. Publisher's price
US$19.00]
3. Turns of Phrase: Econophysics
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This term has been around for some years, but has yet to appear in
any dictionary I know of. It is the application of the principles
of mathematical physics to the study of financial markets. Experts
are beginning to discover that the world economy behaves like a
collection of electrons or a group of water molecules that interact
with each other. With new tools of statistical analysis, such as
the recent breakthroughs in understanding chaotic systems, it is
beginning to be possible to make sense of these hugely complicated
systems (one year of the world's financial markets produces about
24 CD-ROMs' worth of data, so there's no shortage of material to
number-crunch). As a result, specialists are addressing a variety
of questions that are difficult or impossible to understand using
conventional economic principles: Is the market random, or is there
any underlying order? In particular, are there any long-term trends
that can be foretold? Are financial crashes inevitable? Someone who
is an expert in this arcane field is an 'econophysicist'.
"Obviously, you can't predict the future," said Gene Stanley, a
physicist at Boston University who organized the econophysics
session. But, he added, such research reveals how physicists and
economists should compare notes in the future.
[_Dallas Morning News_, Mar. 2000]
Judging by the work of two Parisian econophysicists, they are
making a controversial start at tearing up some perplexing
economics and reducing them to a few elegant general principles -
with the help of some serious mathematics borrowed from the study
of disordered materials.
[_New Scientist_, Aug. 2000]
4. Weird Words: Paraphernalia
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Miscellaneous articles or personal possessions.
We're most familiar with this word to describe the equipment or
materials that are used in some activity or craft. But it also has
a negative meaning: of things that are unnecessary or superfluous,
the trappings and impedimenta that have accreted around something
as blown sand might collect around a pebble. That makes the origin
of the word deeply galling to those who are passionate about the
rights of women. It derives from a term in Greek and Roman law; the
root is the Greek 'parapherna', from 'para', distinct from, plus
'pherna', a dowry, so it referred to the bride's personal property,
things other than her dowry. All other goods became the property of
her husband, as they did, for example, in England until the first
Married Women's Property Act was passed in 1870. The legal sense
was the first one in English, from medieval times; the senses of
personal possessions or items of equipment or accessories only
arose in the eighteenth century. By the time Anthony Trollope wrote
in 1862 about "the paraphernalia of justice: the judge, and the
jury, and the lawyers", it had begun to take on the associations
with outmodedness it now sometimes has.
5. 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. What is the origin of the word 'tip' as in the tip you would
give a waitress at a restaurant? [Claire McBain, Thomas Lusk, Donna
Guindon, and others]
Q. Could I first dispose of the odd belief that it is an acronym
for the phrase 'To Improve Performance'? Modern folk etymology has
a curious idea that the source of almost any short word lies in an
acronym (perhaps because we're surrounded by them), but the truth
is that few such inventions are found before the 1930s.
Actually, this is a most interesting word. There are three distinct
senses of 'tip' in English: the one for an extremity probably comes
from Old Norse; the one with the sense of overturn possibly also
comes from a Scandinavian language, though nobody is sure. The one
you're asking about may derive from the German 'tippen', or
possibly also be connected with the idea of an extremity, though
authorities in language history are hedging their bets through lack
of evidence.
It turns up first in the thirteenth century, meaning to touch
lightly (as in the game 'tip and run'). By the early 1600s, it had
become thieves' cant with the sense of handing something over, or
passing something surreptitiously to another person. This may
derive from the idea of lightly touching somebody's arm in order to
communicate. (This is supported by other appearances of the word in
phrases like 'tip the wink' and 'tip off' and the noun 'tip' for a
piece of inside information, say on a horse race.)
One specific thing that was passed was a small sum of money. By the
beginning of the eighteenth century it had taken on its modern
meaning of giving a gratuity for a small service rendered; the
first recorded use is in George Farquhar's play _The Beaux
Stratagem_ of 1706 ("Then I, Sir, tips me the Verger with half a
Crown"). By the 1750s, it could also mean the gratuity itself.
-----------
Q. BBC Radio 4 this morning (Sunday 13 Aug) reported that following
the death of Sir Robin Day last week, his London club is now
looking for a new 'curmudgeon' - a semi-official post held, and
apparently relished, by Sir Robin. Listeners were asked to submit
names of possible candidates. My Collins dictionary gives "C16, of
unknown origin" for 'curmudgeon'. I'd be very interested in any
further information about this lovely word. [Pat Walton, Bath, UK]
A. It is an excellent word. Its usual meaning is of a bad-tempered
or surly person, hardly a description of Robin Day, who was one of
the most witty and urbane people imaginable, despite his public
persona as a ruthless television interrogator (but then, nobody
would accept the post of curmudgeon if he really were one).
The problem, so far as your question is concerned, is that nobody
has the slightest idea of where the word originated. It appears
fully formed in 1577, as if out of the mists of the ages, with
nothing to indicate where it comes from, or what its linguistic
relatives are.
As a result, there have been many theories. The most famous is that
of Dr Samuel Johnson; in his _Dictionary_ of 1755 he quoted an
unknown correspondent as suggesting that it came from the French
'coeur me'chant' (evil or malicious heart). This is not considered
at all likely. The note in Johnson's dictionary is best remembered
for the howling blunder it caused John Ash to perpetrate in 1775 in
his _New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language_ in which
he suggested it came from 'coeur', unknown, and 'méchant',
correspondent.
6. The Last Word
-------------------------------------------------------------------
It's not usually physically dangerous to have somebody mix up their
words, but it happened this week to a wholly innocent woman in
Newport, South Wales, whose house was attacked by a mob claiming
she was a paedophile. She was actually a local paediatrician.
7. Administration
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* To join the list, send the message SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS to
the list server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>.
The subject line of your message will be ignored. To leave the
list, instead send the message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS. For a
complete list of commands, send INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS.
* 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