World Wide Words -- 28 Apr 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 234          Saturday 28 April 2001
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Editor: Michael Quinion   (ISSN 1470-1448)   Thornbury, Bristol, UK
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Digital divide.
3. Topical Words: Sophisticated.
4. Weird Words: Onomatopoeia.
5. Q & A: Shake a stick at.
6. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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PAIRS OF PANTS  A chorus of costume historians (I think that's the
correct collective term) wrote following my stumbling attempts last
week to explain why names for nether garments are always plural. It
is simple, apparently. Before modern techniques of tailoring were
invented, items like breeches were actually made in two halves. The
pieces were put on each leg separately and then wrapped and tied or
belted at the waist (just like cowboys' chaps). However, a shirt
was a single piece of cloth, so it was always singular. The plural
usage persisted out of habit even after the garments had become
physically one piece, and influenced words of later creation. One
subscriber asked the really deep question: why is a bra always
singular, since surely, he said, it's the garment that above all
others deserves to be in the plural. I couldn't possibly comment.

THEY HAVE A WORD FOR IT  A follow-up to my review of the book by
Harold Rheingold a couple of weeks ago: James Gleick wrote in the
New York Times last Sunday that the Japanese have a word for those
of us who jab obsessively one-handed at tiny keypads on remotes and
mobile phones: 'oyayubizoku', the thumb tribe.


2. Turns of Phrase: Digital divide
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This phrase appeared in the US in the middle 1990s to refer to the
gap developing between those who had access to the Internet and
those who did not. The implication was that poorer groups were
losing out through lack of access to the information available
online (a deprivation sometimes referred to as being 'information
poor'). It is now widely distributed and has become common in much
of the English-speaking world.

In the UK it has recently been redefined to refer to people who
can't afford, or are unwilling, to buy new television sets to
receive free-to-air digital terrestrial transmissions. The British
government originally set a date of 2006 for closing down the
existing analogue transmitters, a date that has since been revised
to 2006-2010. One reason for pressing on with the change-over is
that the government would be able to auction off the radio spectrum
used by the old analogue transmitters. The trouble is that many
people see no point in changing, and analogue sets, with a lifetime
of at least a decade, are still being sold in substantial numbers,
with no indication that they will shortly be obsolete.

Ministers want to gauge reaction to digital television from the
kind of households that have been slow to make the change to multi-
channel television. There are fears that, unless the take-up of
digital spreads to the middle-aged and elderly, a "digital divide"
could open up.
                                            [_Guardian_, Apr. 2001]


3. Topical Words: Sophisticated
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In the mass of news stories about the American spy plane that had
to force-land in China recently, the word that appeared most often
to describe the equipment on board was 'sophisticated'. It may
indeed have been "developed to a high degree of complexity", as the
dictionaries have it, but 'sophisticated' is one of those
surprisingly common words that has had a chequered history.

'Sophisticated' is closely connected with 'sophistry'. Though that
word in turn came from the Greek 'sophos' meaning wise, sophists in
classical Greece - around the fourth century BC - were itinerant
teachers of philosophy and rhetoric who didn't enjoy a good
reputation. They were sceptical about the possibility of achieving
genuine knowledge and were thought to be more concerned with
winning arguments than arriving at the truth. Plato considered them
to be a dishonest bunch of lecturers, and 'sophistry' came to mean
fallacious reasoning.

In medieval times, the Latin verb 'sophisticare' was invented with
a related sense of dishonest tampering with something. It was
applied particularly to traders who added foreign substances to
expensive goods to bulk them out and so increase their profits. The
earliest example we know of refers to merchants meddling with
pepper, then a rare and valuable spice. So the verb from its first
appearance in English meant to adulterate. Later writers applied it
to those who added cheap wines to bulk out expensive ones, and to
those who adulterated tobacco with the sweepings of the floor. In
the early nineteenth century, it was hard to find a basic foodstuff
on sale in London markets that hadn't been sophisticated in some
way: alum in bread, roasted acorns in coffee, dried hedgerow leaves
in tea, and so on.

Curiously, while all this was going on, 'sophisticated' itself was
shifting sense. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, it
could refer to something that had been deprived of its primitive or
natural state, and so rendered artificial. But the real shift was
going on with 'unsophisticated'; early on this meant something that
was genuine or unspoiled, but then moved to refer to somebody who
was in a natural and unspoiled state, and so was ingenuous or
inexperienced. It was only around the end of the nineteenth century
that it began to be possible to use 'sophisticated' as the opposite
of 'unsophisticated' in this sense, for somebody worldly-wise, well
versed in life's ways and who had a subtle and discriminating
nature. And it was applied to theories, techniques and equipment
even more recently - only from the middle of last century on.

Sophistication in this sense is a truly modern phenomenon.


4. Weird Words: Onomatopoeia  /,Qn@(U)mat@'pi:@/
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The formation of a word from a sound.

This is not so unusual a word among those who write about words -
though linguists today often prefer others, like 'echoism' or
'imitation'. The Greeks had a word for it and we have borrowed it
through Latin: 'onomatopoiia', the process of making words, which
derives from 'onoma', a name, and 'poiein', to make. But we have
extended the meaning beyond just making words to making words in a
specific way - by echoing a sound that is linked to the thing we
want to name.

English is full of such terms. Among them are repetitive childish
imitations like boo-hoo, choo-choo and bow-wow, and exclamations
such as argh and ouch. But there's also a whole medley of nouns and
verbs, some of them created in other languages and borrowed into
English: bang, bash, bawl, beep, belch, blab, blare, bleat, blurt,
bonk, bump, burble, buzz, clang, cheep, chirp, clank, clap,
clatter, cuckoo ... life and this newsletter are both too short to
go right through the alphabet, but you get the idea.

It's not only single words that can be onomatopoeic. The effect is
common in poetry, as in "The moan of doves in immemorial elms / And
murmuring of innumerable bees" and "I heard the ripple washing in
the reeds / And the wild water lapping on the crag", both of which
are from poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson.


5. Q&A
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Q. In a recent issue, you wrote "'Tall' is one of those curious
words, like 'nice', that has had more meanings down the centuries
than you can shake a stick at". Very clever, too clever by half as
one of your mystery writers might have put it, to answer a phrase
origin query with a phrase 'shake a stick at' that has no obvious
origin. I have spent the last several hours trying to track it
down, to no avail. I'd appreciate it if you could put me out of my
misery. Shake a leg. [Mark Worden]

A. I plead guilty as charged. Sometimes I throw in expressions like
this from a quiet sense of devilment. This time, however, I am
hoist by my own petard.

Its recorded history began - at least, so far as the _Oxford
English Dictionary_ knows - in the issue of the _Lancaster Journal_
of Pennsylvania dated 5 August 1818: "We have in Lancaster as many
Taverns as you can shake a stick at". Another early example is from
Davy Crockett's _Tour to the North and Down East_ of 1835: "This
was a temperance house, and there was nothing to treat a friend
that was worth shaking a stick at". A little later, in _A Book of
Vagaries_ by James K Paulding of 1868, this appears: "The
roistering barbecue fellow swore he was equal to any man you could
shake a stick at".

The modern use of the phrase always exists as part of the extended
and fixed phrase "more ... than you can shake a stick at", meaning
an abundance, plenty. The phrase without the "more than" element is
rather older, but not by much.

Shaking a stick at somebody, of course, is a threatening gesture,
or at least one of defiance. So to say that you have shaken a stick
at somebody is to suggest that person is an opponent, perhaps a
worthy one. The sense in the second and third quotations above seem
to fit this idea: "nothing worth shaking a stick at" means nothing
of value; "equal to any man you could shake a stick at" means that
the speaker is equal to any man of consequence. The first one, the
oldest, may have a rather different sense - though without a lot
more of the surrounding text the writer's meaning isn't clear - but
it doesn't seem to mean "plenty".

Where it comes from can only be conjecture. One possibility that
has been put forward is that it derives from the counting of farm
animals, which one might do by pointing one's stick at each in
turn. So having more than one can shake one's stick at, or tally,
would imply a great number. This doesn't fit the early examples,
though, which don't have any idea of counting about them. Another
idea is that it comes from battle, in which one might shake a stick
at one's vanquished enemy. This could possibly have led into the
early usages.

Let me summarise: nobody knows.


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