World Wide Words -- 04 Aug 01

Sat Aug 4 08:11:54 UTC 2001

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 248           Saturday 4 August 2001
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Contents
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1. Weird Words: Orotund.
2. Q & A: One another, On the fritz.
3. Subscription commands and copyright notice.

1. Weird Words: Orotund  /'Qr@(U)tVnd/
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Speech that is full, round and imposing.

This started its life, at the end of the eighteenth century, as a
positive word, associated with qualities of good public speaking.
It comes from the Latin phrase 'ore rotundo', "with rounded mouth"
which appears in _Ars Poetica_ by the Roman writer Horace (so the
word has a very close link to 'rotund', which comes from Latin
'rotundus', as indeed does 'round', all three ultimately deriving
from 'rota', a wheel.)

In 1840, the _Penny Cyclopaedia_ described the qualities of such
speech in terms themselves as orotund as one could reasonably wish:
"The name of orotund ... is given to that natural or improved manner
of uttering the elements, which exhibits them with a fulness,
clearness, strength, smoothness, and a ringing or musical quality
rarely heard in ordinary speech". One thinks of rounded vowels
rumbling up from rounded bellies, of expansive language accompanied
by equally expansive gestures.

But such oratorial tendencies can quickly tip over into pretentious
or pompous long-windedness, and this is the word's downside. When
William Makepeace Thackeray wrote _The Book of Snobs_, which
appeared in 1848, he had this other sense in mind, but preferred
the Latin original to the derived English term: "Jawkins is a most
pertinacious Club Snob. Every day he is at that fireplace, holding
that STANDARD, of which he reads up the leading-article, and pours
it out ORE ROTUNDO, with the most astonishing composure, in the
face of his neighbour, who has just read every word of it in the
paper".

2. Q&A
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Q. My ears are still burning! Hear my crime! I used the term 'one
another' to someone. I was told that I am (apparently) the only
English user on the planet who is not aware this term is for use
among three or more people, and that 'each other' is the correct
term between two. How much of a faux pas is it, really? Is a firing
squad at dawn too good for me? I have searched, in vain, for the
answer. [Caiti]

A. Be at peace. It is your critic who is wrong to force this view
on you. There is some reason for it, though, since the belief has
been widely held in the past. However, no modern writer on the
language attempts to justify it, not even the sainted Fowler back
in 1926.

It seems to have been one of those pedagogical assertions invented
by eighteenth-century grammarians. It has been traced back to a
1785 grammar by a George N Ussher, though it was most widely and
firmly promulgated by several writers in the following century,
notably the American grammarian Goold Brown, in _The Grammar of
English Grammars_, published in New York in 1851.

He was somewhat surprised to find that the rule was often broken,
and commented that both Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster were guilty
of getting it wrong (actually of using 'each other' for more than
two persons). These impeccably grammatical writers were not in
error at all, of course, since there never has been any such rule
in real life. It seems to have been invented according to some whim
or mistaken belief, either by Mr Ussher or by one of his brethren.
The _Oxford English Dictionary_ has nearly 2000 examples of the
phrase 'one another' in various places. I can hardly claim to have
inspected more than a few of them, but the evidence is clear that
'each other' and 'one another' were used interchangeably centuries
before anyone attempted to place a formal restriction on their use.
Here's Shakespeare, in _Henry VIII_: "his mind and place Infecting
one another, yea, reciprocally".

Accept this gobbet of academic etymology with which to confound
your opponent: historically 'one another' is an abbreviation of
'the one the other' and in that form was certainly used only of two
people. The extension to more than two was a later development
allied to its shift in form. So, if the pedant who thought up this
artificial restriction had had his historical antennae properly
tuned, you might now be hearing the rule the other way round.

Observe the rule if you wish, ignore it if you wish. If you choose
the latter, you will have hundreds of the best writers from
Shakespeare onwards on your side.

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Q. I am looking into how the expression 'on the fritz' came about.
Please help. [Dan Leneker]

A. I'd like to, but most dictionaries just say, very cautiously and
flatly, "origin unknown", and I can't do much to improve on that
verdict. The phrase now means that some mechanism is malfunctioning
or broken: "The washing machine's on the fritz again". However,
when it first appeared - about 1902 - it meant that something was
in a bad way or bad condition. Early recorded examples refer to the
poor state of some domestic affairs, the lack of success of a stage
show, and an injured leg - not a machine or device in sight.

Some people, especially the late John Ciardi, the American poet and
writer on words, have suggested it might be an imitation of the
'pfzt' noise that a faulty connection in an electrical machine
might make, or the sound of a fuse blowing. This theory falls down
because none of the early examples is connected with electrical
devices, and the phrase pre-dates widespread use of electricity
anyway.

Others feel it must be connected with 'Fritz', the nickname for a
German soldier. It's a seductive idea. There's one problem, though
- that nickname didn't really start to appear until World War One,
about 1914, long after the saying had been coined.

William and Mary Morris, in the _Morris Dictionary of Word and
Phrase Origins_, suggest that it may nevertheless have come from
someone called Fritz - in the comic strip called _The Katzenjammer
Kids_. In this two youngsters called Hans and Fritz got up to some
awful capers, fouling things up and definitely putting the plans of
other members of the strip community 'on the Fritz'. The strip
appeared in newspapers from 1897 onwards, so the dates fit rather
nicely. But there's no evidence that confirms it so far as I know.
There's also the key question: why don't we talk about being 'on
the Hans'?

As is so often, Mr Leneker, I've gone around the houses, considered
this theory and that, but come to no very definite conclusion. But
the truth is that nobody really knows, nor now is ever likely to.

3. Subscription commands
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