World Wide Words -- 30 Sep 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 207        Saturday 30 September 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 9,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion    ISSN 1470-1448    Thornbury, Bristol, UK
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>   Mail: <editor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Notes and comments.
2. Reviews: American Heritage Dictionary and American Heritage
       Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.
3. Weird Words: Sesquipedalian.
4. Q & A: Fuddy-duddy, Old Dart.
5. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.


1. Notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
WEB SITE  All the pages have now been updated with the new system
of navigation. A large job finally completed!

NEW WEB SITE ADDRESS  Now I can formally unveil the big update: our
new Web address: <http://www.worldwidewords.org>. E-mail addresses
have changed to suit: general messages and comments on newsletters
should be sent to <editor at worldwidewords.org>, while questions for
the Q&A section should come to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. The list
server addresses for subscriptions remain the same.

SEARCH ENGINE  The new search engine is also now installed. You
will find it at <http://www.worldwidewords.org/wordsearch.htm>.

HOO-HA  Several subscribers asked, following last week's Q&A piece,
whether there was a connection with 'brouhaha'. It looks as though
it is an abbreviated form, but it seems not to be. 'Brouhaha' comes
from a French word, and its use in English goes back only a little
further than 'hoo-ha', being first recorded in the 1890s.


2. Reviews: American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition, and the
American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Second Edition
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The new edition of the _American Heritage Dictionary_ is a
heavyweight one, at least physically, weighing in at more than 3kg
(7lb), with 2074 large-format pages. It wears its scholarship very
lightly, however, being easy to use with simple, clear definitions
and informally written notes and comments.

Visually, it's delightful. Each page contains two columns of text,
with up to five full-colour illustrations in the margin that relate
to terms on that page. Illustrations include photographs, drawings,
and maps - more than 4,000 of them. Headwords (some 200,000) are
picked out in dark green. As is now common in dictionaries, entries
cover famous people and important places as well as words, making
the work a mini-encyclopedia as well as a dictionary. In addition,
there are some 450 usage notes and about the same number of synonym
entries and paragraphs on word histories. Added to these are 150
entries on regional American English terms like 'krumkake',
'luminaria', 'muffuletta', 'summercater', and 'whiffletree'. A new
set of notes, "Our Living Language", contain background information
on the way social and other factors influence the way speakers
shape the language.

The list of words included for the first time is uncontroversial:
terms like 'control freak', 'digerati', 'McJob', 'jewel box',
'microcredit', 'nanny state' and 'wuss' are now well established;
some, like 'e-mail', 'domain name', 'dot-com' and 'bitmap', serve
to point up the great advances in the circulation and acceptance of
computer-related and Internet language that have occurred in the
seven years since the last edition.

A feature of this dictionary is the employment of a usage panel to
give advice; though all American and British publishers have an
editorial board, only the _American Heritage Dictionary_ polls its
panel members and records their opinions in entries. Most
publishers are suspicious of this approach, feeling it leads to an
unrepresentative or conservative view; for example, my heart fell
when I read that the panel deprecated 'hopefully'. But it turns out
that the usage note is better balanced than that simple statement
suggests, correctly pointing out that dislike of the word has
become a shibboleth, not shared by other sentence adverbs such as
'mercifully' and - in effect - politely telling its usage panel it
is wrong. But then, why bother recording its view? Again, on 'split
infinitive' the dictionary says it is acceptable, though care has
to be taken when more than one word divides the 'to' from the verb;
however, half the usage panel hates the thought of even a single
word being placed between them, a deeply conservative opinion (and
one, most linguists would say, that is alien to normal usage,
historical precedent, and the structure of the language). The usage
panel strongly deprecates what it sees as the confusion between
'disinterested' and 'uninterested'; this distaste I share, whilst
being aware that the shift is well under way and almost certainly
unstoppable; in any case it represents a relatively modern
distinction.

The CD-ROM is rather better organised than its equivalent from the
previous edition (though the anagramming feature and the thesaurus
are no longer included). It allows the user to search on headwords,
with the search box permitting wildcards that include punctuation,
like 's*-', which shows all suffixes starting with 's'; a pattern
search permits even more extensive use of this feature, with
'*q*w*' for example turning up entries from 'boutique brewery' to
'squawroot'. However, there is no full-text search. Users can also
find all the entries accompanied by the various kinds of supporting
notes and can browse through blocks of headwords. Almost every
entry has an audio pronunciation.

Appendixes to the book include notes on Indo-European and Semitic
roots that will mainly be of use to language specialists. If you
need this information, you will welcome the publication at the same
time of the second edition of _The American Heritage Dictionary of
Indo-European Roots_, a 150-page work which greatly extends the
coverage in AHD4. Information on roots has been updated from that
in the first edition of 1985, many place names and personal names
have been added, and a series of 26 language and cultural notes are
included in a similar style to AHD4. Some 13,000 English words have
their origins traced back to Indo-European sources, easily
consulted using the comprehensive index at the end.

[Pickett, Joe (ed), _The American Heritage Dictionary_, Fourth
Edition, published by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, on 16
September 2000; ISBN 0-395-82517-2 (hardback, $60.00), ISBN 0-618-
08230-1 (hardback with CD-ROM, $74.95), ISBN 0-618-09455-5 (CD-ROM
only, $24.95). Watkins, Calvert (ed), _The American Heritage
Dictionary of Indo-European Roots_, Second Edition, Houghton
Mifflin Company, Boston; ISBN 0-395-98610-0 (hardback), ISBN 0-618-
08250-6; publisher's price $18.00 in paperback.]


3. Weird Words: Sesquipedalian
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Relating to a long word; characterised by using long words.

We owe this word to the Roman writer Horace, who wrote in his _Ars
Poetica_ (The Art of Poetry): "Proicit ampullas et sesquipedalia
verba" ("He throws aside his paint pots and his words that are a
foot and a half long"). It comes from Latin 'sesqui-', one and a
half, plus 'ped', a foot. It was borrowed into English in the
seventeenth century and has become a favourite of those writers who
like self-referential terms, or are addicted to polysyllabic
humour.

It appears, somewhat disguised, in _The History of Mr Polly_ by H G
Wells: "Words attracted [Mr Polly] curiously, words rich in
suggestion, and he loved a novel and striking phrase. His school
training had given him little or no mastery of the mysterious
pronunciation of English, and no confidence in himself... He
avoided every recognized phrase in the language, and mispronounced
everything in order that he shouldn't be suspected of ignorance but
whim. 'Sesquippledan,' he would say. 'Sesquippledan verboojuice.'"

Somebody who uses long words is a 'sesquipedalianist', and this
style of writing is 'sesquipedalianism'. The noun 'sesquipedality'
means 'lengthiness'. If such words are not enough, there's always
'hyperpolysyllabicsesquipedalianist' for someone who enjoys using
really long words.


4. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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.]

                        -----------

Q. Where does 'fuddy-duddy' come from? [John Haigh, South Africa]

A.  Most dictionaries say they don't know where this odd term for
an old-fashioned, narrow-minded and pompous person comes from. It
first appears in mainstream texts at the beginning of the twentieth
century, with very little clue as to its antecedents. Internal
repetition has certainly helped its popularity, as it has with
'dilly-dally', 'helter-skelter', 'tittle-tattle', 'willy-nilly',
and dozens of others.

There is one hint to where it originated: a glossary of the
Cumberland dialect published in 1899 contains an entry for 'duddy
fuddiel', a ragged fellow. 'Fuddiel' seems to be a dialect form of
'fellow', while 'duddy' is a Scots term meaning 'ragged', which
turns up in Sir Walter Scott's _Heart of Midlothian_ in 1818 and in
John Galt's _Annals of the Parish_ three years later: "But it was
no more like the true play of Shakespeare the poet, according to
their account, than a duddy betheral, set up to fright the sparrows
from the peas, is like a living gentleman" ('betheral' is actually
a Scots version of the word 'beadle', but here seems to be Ayrshire
dialect for a scarecrow).

What seems to have happened is that 'duddy fuddiel' became inverted
and changed into 'fuddy-duddy'. How this happened, or why the sense
shifted from somebody ragged to somebody old-fashioned, is quite
unclear. There might be a clue or two in the sounds: 'fuddy' sounds
like an amalgamation of 'fussy' and 'faddy' (first recorded early
in the nineteenth century) and 'duddy' is close in sound to
'daddy'. Actually, 'faddy daddy' is a fine reduplicated phrase in
its own right, which I submit to the English-speaking world to use
or ignore as it sees fit. These associations may have helped its
acceptance.

Or perhaps not: nobody can say for certain.

                        -----------

Q. We are trying to establish what is meant by the 'Old Dart' and
where it comes from. On a genealogy list we belong to they seem to
think it means 'England', due to Dartmoor Prison, but we have never
heard the expression before and nor have any of our friends and
family. If you could please enlighten us to its origins we would be
grateful, especially as we are English and have never heard of it!
[Chris and Caroline Hayles, Hampshire, UK]

A. The first part is easy: it's a term in Australia and New Zealand
with the same meaning as 'Old Country', that is, the British Isles,
in particular England. It's unknown in the Old Country, so it's not
surprising you have never heard it. The _Australian National
Dictionary_ (AND) from Oxford University Press first records it in
an Adelaide newspaper in 1892: "He was from England ... He is one
of the sort who return to the old dart and say that fruit-growing
here is a failure". The lack of explanation suggests that the
writer expected it to be understood by his readers.

Nobody can be entirely certain where it comes from, though it is
quite certain it has nothing to do with the infamous Dartmoor
Prison. There are earlier usages of 'dart' that suggest it is a
dialect way of saying 'dirt' - the AND has an example from 1859
showing it was specifically applied to 'pay dirt' in gold diggings.
By the 1880s it had been extended in Sydney slang to refer to an
object of attraction, some enticing thing or event, or some set
purpose. But the usage in 'Old Dart' seems to look back to the
original sense of dirt, albeit figuratively, and the idea behind it
seems to be close to the Irish 'old sod' for one's native district
or country.


5. 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.worldwidewords.org>.
===================================================================