World Wide Words -- 16 Sep 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Thu Sep 14 09:07:59 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 205 Saturday 16 September 2000
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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>
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Contents
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1. Notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Pronoia.
3. Weird Words: Haplology.
4. In Brief: Allerednic, P2P, Weblish.
5. Q & A: Git, Much of a Muchness, Sticky wicket.
6. Administration: How to leave the list, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
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WEB PAGES UPDATE Updates to the Web site will be delayed this
weekend because I'm away at a conference.
GREEN ROOM The Q&A piece on this phrase last week has evoked more
correspondence suggesting alternative origins than on any subject
for weeks. The problem is that there's no agreement. Some point to
a grass area behind the stage in ancient Greek theatre where actors
changed, others to a similar grass area next to the Globe Theatre
in London.
Another subscriber suggested it was because seventeenth-century
stages were covered with imitation grass, called 'the green', so
that the waiting area became known as the 'green room'. Now, it is
true that the stage in the British theatre is sometimes still
called 'the green', but the direct connection seems to be twentieth
century rhyming slang: 'greengage' = 'stage', so it may be about
three hundred years too late to be the source of 'green room'.
Thanks particularly go to Louis Hansell for pointing me towards _De
Proverbio_, an online journal of proverb studies (see http://www.
utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/DP,3,1,97/GREENROOM.html). In an article by
George B Bryan, he firstly debunks - as I did - the common theory
that the room was painted green to ease the eyes of the actors
after exposure to bright stage lights. He also finds an earlier
example of the use of 'green room' than that of the _Oxford English
Dictionary_, in Thomas Shadwell's _The True Widow_ of 1678.
Mr Bryan also points out that green baize was sometimes used to
cover the stage at this period to protect the costumes of the
actors (so a possible origin of 'the green'), and that the colour
green has long been associated with the theatre, perhaps
originating in the liveries worn by members of acting companies in
the time of Shakespeare.
In short: we still don't know, but the plot thickens.
2. Turns of Phrase: Pronoia
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Pronoia is the suspicion that the universe is a conspiracy on your
behalf, the opposite of the popular sense of 'paranoia'. It seems
to have been invented by the sociologist Fred Goldner in an article
in _Social Problems_ in 1994, in which he defined it as "the
delusion that others think well of one", the unreasoning belief
that your superiors think you are indispensable, that your
colleagues adore you, and that you are doing brilliantly in your
work. He was warning against the dangers of the rose-tinted view,
in which an over-positive view of oneself and the world around one
can lead to fatal mistakes. It was soon taken up by the short-lived
group called the ZIPPies (the Zen Inspired Pronoia Pagans) invented
by a London club promoter named Fraser Clark. The word has a small
continuing niche, though its adjective 'pronoid' is less common.
Looking at these kids, it doesn't require my usual pronoia to think
that I'm glimpsing the future of this place.
[_Wired_, Jan. 1999]
She introduced the CEOs to the flip side of paranoia: "pronoia" -
the idea that everyone is not out to get you, but that they are out
to love you, or at least to appreciate you, if you reciprocate.
According to the new Darwinism, only the pronoid survive - in fact,
only the pronoid endure and flourish.
[_Fast Company_, Nov. 1999]
3. Weird Words: Haplology
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Omission of one of a pair of sounds or syllables.
If you've ever said 'libry' instead of 'library', or 'Febry'
instead of 'February', then you have perpetrated 'haplology'. The
word was invented by the American philologist Maurice Bloomfield at
the end of the nineteenth century. He derived it from the Greek
'haplos', one or single, and '-logy', a word or speech. It's very
common in English speech to drop the second of a pair of repeated
sounds like this. A nice irony is that 'haplology' is just the sort
of word to which 'haplology' happens ...
It's a special case of what's called syncopation, a grammatical
term for losing any kind of sound in the middle of a word, such as
the poetic shortening of 'even' to 'e'en', or the way 'pacifist'
has been created from the longer 'pacificist' that was its original
spelling. In writing, the equivalent is the rarer 'haplography' -
making the mistake of writing 'philogy' instead of 'philology' for
example.
4. In Brief
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ALLEREDNIC Think palindromically: it's 'Cinderella' backwards. It
was invented by Professor Jonathan Gershuny of the University of
Essex to describe a clever, successful, achieving woman who marries
a man who then rips the glass slipper from her foot, condemning her
to a life of kitchen drudgery and child-rearing.
P2P Honestly, if I see one more of these cutesy abbreviations with
a number between two letters, I shall scream ... This one is short
for 'peer-to-peer', a revitalised version of a well-known type of
computer system in which users communicate directly with each other
without needing a server.
WEBLISH A marketing consultancy, The Fourth Room, has discovered
that the Internet is spawning an informal global language, free of
capital letters and apostrophes but full of abbreviations and badly
spelled words. Now there's news ... not! They call it Weblish.
5. 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. What is the origin of the word 'git' that I read in a British
book? [E Corvin; Gabriella McLeish in London]
A. Could that have been one of the Harry Potter books? It certainly
appears in at least one of them. From before 1300 a 'get' was what
had been begotten, a child or offspring. But by about 1500 it had
started to be used in Scotland and northern England in the sense of
'misbegotten', a bastard; from there it became a general term of
abuse for a fool or idiot. By about 1700 'get' seems to have lapsed
into slang or dialect, only to reappear in the wider language in
the 1940s with a different spelling and lacking the associations
with illegitimacy. James Joyce uses the older spelling (and
meaning) in Ulysses in 1922: "The bloody thicklugged sons of
whores' gets!" These days, it's a widely known and used term of
abuse in Britain for somebody regarded as totally worthless or
useless, most commonly appearing in cries of frustration such as
"that stupid git, now look what he's done!".
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Q. The dormouse says in _Alice in Wonderland_: "You know you say
things are 'much of a muchness' - did you ever see such a thing as
a drawing of a 'muchness'?" Alice couldn't explain - can you?
[Steven Gibbs, Guernsey]
A. 'Muchness' is 'much' plus '-ness', so the quality of being
'much'. It has been around since medieval times, but in Lewis
Carroll's time it was no more common than it is today. It has never
quite vanished from the language, but survives mainly in this set
phrase 'much of a muchness'.
'Much' is a more tricky word than it seems: it often has a sense of
"to a great extent; a great deal"; it can also introduce some
comparison or relative quantity where the idea of large size is
missing, as in adjective phrases like 'so much', 'how much', and
'that much'. So you can say things like "The nights were so much
longer than the days" or "We can't push the analogy much further".
It's that relative sense that turns up in the saying, where there's
no strong idea of large size, merely of comparison, so that 'much
of a muchness' means no more than "very similar" or "just about the
same".
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Q. What is the history of 'sticky wicket')? I have been told that,
before the invention of toilet paper, there were sticks placed in a
rack in public toilets for use by folks when they completed their
business. The sticks were then replaced in the racks. At night some
of the younger crowd would switch ends of the sticks in the rack,
thus when the next person reached for a stick he would get hold of
a sticky wicket. [Bill Gage]
A. That's a wonderfully inventive story, with just enough truth
about it to stop one for a moment. It's true that, before toilet
paper, people did at times use sponges on sticks (the Romans did,
for example), but they were never called 'wickets'. The real
explanation is either more mundane or more esoteric, depending on
whether you live in a country that plays the ancient game of
cricket or not.
A 'wicket' was originally (and can still be) a small door or
grille, especially one cut into a larger door. It was borrowed in
the early eighteenth century to refer to the three wooden sticks
called 'stumps' that form the structure at which the bowler aims
and which the batsman must defend. In the usual double-ended game
there are two sets, 22 yards apart. By a further extension, the
word came to apply to the ground between them (we're now some way
from a small door, but the sequence is plain). After rain, the
ground becomes soft and the ball doesn't bounce so well. Hence 'a
sticky wicket'. To be on one, figuratively speaking, is to
experience great difficulty.
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Q. We had a discussion recently about a 'theodolite' and came to
wonder where the word originated since 'theo-' means God. The
Chambers 20th Century dictionary simply said the etymology was
unknown. [Alasdair Downes]
A. There's an intriguing story behind the word, but in essence it
boils down to what Chambers says.
The portable surveying instrument that we call a 'theodolite' was
invented in the middle of the sixteenth century by Leonard Digges
of Kent, who gave it a name that was expressed in the common
Latinate form of the time: 'theodelitus'. (The name changed to an
Anglicised form later, at which time the 'e' in the middle shifted
to 'o' for no very good reason anybody can discover.) His
theodolite, by the way, was not quite the same as the modern
device, since it consisted of a circle for measuring horizontal
angles only. It was described in a book published posthumously by
his son Thomas in 1571: _A Geometricall Practise, named
Pantometria, divided into Three Bookes, Longimetria, Planimetria,
and Stereometria, containing Rules manifolde for Mensuration of all
Lines, Superficies, and Solides_ (but then you knew that).
The problem for those seeking the true origin of the word is that
Mr Digges never recorded how he invented it. The suspicion is that
he was a better surveyor and inventor than he was a scholar. The
word looks Greek, as is 'theos', the word meaning "god" that we
have in English words such as 'theology'. It may be - this is only
an educated guess, mind you - that he derived it from the Greek
stem 'thea-', sight or view, which is also, through Greek
compounds, the root of 'theorem' (from 'theorein', to look at or be
a spectator), and 'theatre' (from 'theasthai', to see or to look
at). If he did, we shall never know.
6. Administration
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