World Wide Words -- 07 Apr 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 231           Saturday 7 April 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Pants.
3. Weird Words: Financephalograph.
4. Q & A: Kludge.
5. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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INTERROBANG  Philip Newton wrote instantly on receiving last week's
issue to point out that in the most comprehensive character set in
electronic use, Unicode, interrobang does indeed exist, under that
name, as character 203D. So news of its demise is premature. If you
want to see the character, it is illustrated on the web version of
the article at <www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-int1.htm>.

DENGLISCH  I was prompted last week to write about this term for
English invading German by its sudden series of appearances in both
English and German newspapers recently. There are, as subscribers
have reminded me, many similar terms for other languages, including
Japlish, Chinglish, Konglish (Korean), Russlish, Hinglish (see
below), Spanglish, Polglish (Polish), Dunglish (Dutch), Singlish
(Singaporean English) and Swenglish (Swedish), not to mention
Franglais, of course.

One of the peculiarities of such hybrid forms is the common use of
terms that seem to native speakers of the other language to be
English, but in fact aren't. The German 'Handy' for a portable
phone is a good example: Germans think this is English, which leads
to bafflement when they use it to native English speakers. Derry
Cook-Radmore told me about a Dutch abbreviation LAT, as in "een
LAT-relatie", a LAT relationship, in which a couple keep their own
homes but share their time between them. The Dutch term is supposed
to be short for the English "Living Apart Together". Since such
terms in various languages are mutually unintelligible, it would
seem to be a force working against English as a world language.

DENGLISCH  Eckart Werthebach is not the German interior minister,
as I said last week. He actually holds the equivalent post in the
regional government in Berlin (and is also Mayor of Berlin). The
federal interior minister is Otto Schily.

HOPPED THE TWIG  David Perry e-mailed me to challenge my assertion
in the last issue that "He's hopped the twig" appears in the Monty
Python parrot sketch. He's right. It seems there are at least two
versions of it, one from the original BBC TV show and another from
a later stage show. In the latter one only, there appears the line
"he's off the twig", which was wrongly transcribed in the text
version I consulted.


2. Topical Words: Pants
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The headline in last Saturday's _Guardian_ read: "French dictionary
says pants to the past". It was about the new edition of the
Oxford-Hachette French dictionary, which includes for the first
time French equivalents for many popular English language terms,
such as 'visible panty line' (translated rather sniffily as "marque
disgracieuse de la culotte" or "unbecoming mark of the knickers",
this last word being the common British English term for them).
However, that word 'pants' from the headline is one that the
dictionary doesn't attempt to translate. As it happens, Americans
have been queuing up to ask me about it, since it appears in
television shows imported from Britain (and was used in the
catchphrase for the recent BBC Television charity telethon: "Say
pants to poverty!").

It has been an all-purpose term of disapproval among young people
in the UK during the middle to late nineties. It first turned up in
print in 1994, in pieces that indicate it was popularised by DJs on
the BBC's radio pop channel, Radio 1, most probably by Simon Mayo,
though the finger is often pointed at Zoë Ball. By a year or so
later, it was very much in vogue among teenagers. In the way of
such things, by the time older people picked it up and started
using it, it was already a bit passé; its recent very public
exposure has almost certainly put paid to its popularity among its
younger users.

But there's evidence that the word in this sense is somewhat older,
and that it comes from student slang. Graham Diamond, of the Oxford
English Dictionary, tells me that he came across it at university
about two years earlier, and actually used it in slogans on posters
advertising bands around January 1993.

Pants in British usage are not trousers, of course, but underpants,
principally male. These intimate nether garments have long been a
source of innocent merriment among pubescent youth, and this was
just another example, in the tradition of the earlier exclamation
'knickers!', indicating contempt or exasperation. It appears in
phrases like "it's a pile of pants!" (Simon Mayo's catchphrase) and
"it's pants!" or "it's absolute pants", meaning that it's a total
load of rubbish. Later, we began to hear it from older people as in
"My tomato crop was pants last year". In phrases like "say pants to
..." it's an injunction to wave goodbye to something considered
outmoded, unwanted or unnecessary.

Britain seems to have cornered the market in undergarment-related
slang words in the nineties, having popularised 'chuddies' (as in
"kiss my chuddies"). This was a catchphrase in the comedy show on
BBC television, _Goodness Gracious Me!_, based on the experiences
of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, whose dialogue is in a
curious mixed language sometimes called Hinglish. Yes, the Hindi
word for underpants is indeed 'chuddies'.

Never say World Wide Words isn't multicultural.


3. Weird Words: Financephalograph
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An analogue computer designed to model a national economy.
It is extremely doubtful whether you will find this word in any
dictionary, but it was once well known within a narrow circle. It
started with Bill Phillips, a student at the London School of
Economics in the late 1940s, who had trouble understanding his
lecturers' explanations of macroeconomic theory. He wanted to be
able to visualise the flow of money round the economy and see what
happened if (say) inflation went up, or you gave pensioners more
money, or increased fuel taxes. Being a good practical engineer, he
built a hydraulic device which used water coloured red to simulate
money - you poured the money in at the top and it flowed through a
complicated set of tubes and tanks and over sluices, finally
operating a pen plotter which printed out the results. This was a
true analogue computer, which became quite famous for a while; 14
of them were constructed for Harvard University, the Ford Motor
Company and the Bank of Guatemala, among others. One is now on
permanent display at the Science Museum in London.


4. 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 Web site. If you
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Q. My background is in computer programming, and in my early days
(somewhere around 1988), I ran into the word 'kludge', which was
used to describe a work of programming that was done hastily and
inelegantly. Over the years I've seen it many times from diverse
sources - though always in the context of programming or
electronics engineering. Does this word have any usage outside of
computers? Can you shed any light on its origin? [Rich Holton]

A. I can shed a little light, but less definitively so than I had
hoped. I had expected to be able to give you an exact origin for
the term and to be able to say it is one of the very few words for
which we know the author, the date and the source.

That's because several reputable dictionary sources say it was
invented by J W Granholm in an article "How to Design a Kludge" in
the February 1962 issue of the computer magazine _Datamation_. He
defined it as "an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts,
forming a distressing whole". It's used in computing and
electronics, as you say, for a hastily improvised solution to some
fault or bug, but doesn't seem to have moved much outside those
fields, if at all.

Mr Granholm borrowed it from German 'kluge', smart or witty,
presumably also being influenced by 'bodge' and 'fudge'. He says in
the article: "The building of a Kludge ... is not work for
amateurs. There is a certain indefinable, masochistic finesse that
must go into true Kludge building".

There is some disagreement over pronunciation and spelling. Eric
Raymond, in _The New Hacker's Dictionary_ (the printed version of
the online Jargon File, the standard work for anyone interested in
computer slang) argues that it ought to be spelled like its German
original, 'kluge'; but, as we've seen, Mr Granholm spelled it with
the inserted 'd', and that surely ought to be good enough for the
rest of us? But having two spellings means we also have two
pronunciations. The definitive American one is /klu:dZ/ ('klooj',
to rhyme with 'huge'), reflecting the vowel of the German word, but
the usual spelling results in it also being heard as /klVdZ/
(rhyming with 'nudge'), which is more common in British English.

Mr Raymond's argument for preferring 'kluge' is that old-timers in
the computer business have consistently reported that the word was
around in the 1950s, always spelled 'kluge' and originally used for
bodged-up hardware repairs, not for programming (which was in its
infancy then, anyway). He also cites a 1947 article reporting a
shaggy-dog story current in the American armed forces, in which a
'kluge' was "a complex and puzzling artifact with a trivial
function". He has had reports that the word was World War Two US
Navy slang for any piece of electronic equipment that worked well
on shore but consistently failed at sea.

He reports suggestions that the word may have came from a device
called a Kluge paper feeder, an adjunct to mechanical printing
presses, originally designed in 1919. It has been described as a
fiendishly complicated and clever device, which often broke down
and was hard to repair, though it seems in reality to have been a
relatively simple mechanism (leading to a suspicion that its
complexity has been exaggerated in order to bolster a connection
between the device and the word).

It seems pretty clear that the current spelling and sense were
indeed Mr Granholm's invention, but that he may have drawn on an
existing jargon term.

All this only goes to prove that linguistic truth is rarely pure
and never simple and that there's no subject that investigation
can't make more complicated.


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