World Wide Words -- 11 Aug 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 248          Saturday 11 August 2001
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Contents
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1. Topical Words: Cull.
2. Weird Words: Yclept.
3. Q&A: Likeness.
4. Subscription commands and copyright notice.


1. Topical Words: Cull
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The story in the _Daily Telegraph_ at the end of July told the
British public that "The computer downturn has also forced Infineon
Technologies, the German semiconductor maker, to start culling
5,000 from its workforce". Visions of extreme measures by managers
came to mind for a moment, but then a reality check kicked in.

The current popularity of this figurative sense lies in part with
Britain's agricultural disaster of recent months, in which millions
of cattle and sheep have had to be killed in an attempt to stem the
outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. News reporters seem to have
decided early on that 'cull' was a good strong, agricultural-
sounding word that had the happy additional advantage of avoiding
using emotive words like 'kill' or 'slaughter'. But when they write
things like "A million unwanted lambs may need to be culled", they
are stretching the word well beyond its normal sense.

They are presumably thinking of the more traditional type of cull
employed by wildlife managers. The idea here is that a proportion
of animals are killed, often the old and infirm ones, so leaving
the remaining population on average fitter and of higher quality,
better able to survive on the food available in the wild. The word
has, though, taken on a strongly pejorative sense with phrases like
'seal cull' and 'badger cull', in which many people consider the
intentions of the slaughterers to be suspect and any killing to be
wrong.

The word comes through French from Latin 'colligere', to gather
together - we get 'collect' from it, too. Its first sense in
English was of choosing or selecting, by implication picking out
the best from a group (you could cull great pieces of literature to
make an anthology, for example, or you might even cull the
strawberry patch for the best fruit).

The sense of selection in animal husbandry appeared in the latter
part of the nineteenth century, at first in Australia and New
Zealand, but then more widely. It seems to have evolved from the
idea of selecting the best animals from a herd, as a buyer of
livestock might do, but then extended to slaughtering the weaker
members. Its application to wildlife only appeared in the 1930s.

The key to all the senses usually given in dictionaries is the word
'selective'. It could be that the managers in that German
semiconductor factory were picking out the least competent people
to dismiss, but anyone who has been in that situation knows that's
rarely the reason for choosing who stays and who goes. No, it's
just a fashionable addition to that ever-increasing list of terms
for firing people - with the added implication of a mass disposal.
In the foot-and-mouth outbreak the element of selection isn't
there, either, since farmers don't have a choice about which
animals are slaughtered - if one goes, all go.

So 'cull' has shifted sense from "selection of the best" to "mass
disposal". Not a good move, you may feel.


2. Weird Words: Yclept
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By the name of; called.

Once this was the standard way of forming the past participle of
the verb 'clepe', to call (or, more strictly, its Old English
precursor, 'cleopian'). For the past few hundred years it has only
turned up as a deliberately archaic form, mostly in poetry, or as
light relief. It surfaces occasionally as ponderous humour in
journalistic pieces, as here in the _Jerusalem Post_ in 1997 (the
name of the writer has been suppressed to protect the guilty): "The
caption under the photo of the unfortunately yclept basketball
player just makes matters worse: 'David Putz dribbles away...'".
Such poppings-up are frequent enough that the word appears in most
modern dictionaries, even though it died out in the north of
England about 1200 and lingered in the south and east only a little
longer. It has been outside the mainstream of English for so long
that the person credited with popularising it again (Gavin Douglas,
a Scots poet and divine), wrote around the end of the fifteenth
century. The initial 'y' was once the standard way of marking the
past participle: 'yclensed', 'yfastened', 'ypunched', and dozens of
others. It was the Old English equivalent of a form which still
exists, for example, as 'ge-' in modern German. Advice to budding
writers: best avoided!


3. Q&A
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Q. Will you kindly let me know how (and why) the phrase 'a likeness
of' originated, in lieu of 'is a photograph of'. The term seems to
be used all the time in newspapers. [Barrie Street, Canada]

A. It goes back a lot further than photography, that's certain -
about a thousand years further back, in fact.

The word was being used to describe a thing that resembled another
even before the first Millennium (it appears in its Old English
form in the Lindisfarne Gospels, for example). We still use the
word in the sense of resemblance when we say things like 'the
family likeness is astonishing'.

At about the same time, the word could also mean a thing created as
a representation of something else, a copy of an object perhaps. It
could also refer to an image of a person, such as a painting or a
statue. By the seventeenth century, it had become common to use
'likeness' when you meant a portrait. The verb phrase 'to take a
likeness' for painting a portrait seems to have first appeared in
the eighteenth century. Here's a latish example, from _Little
Dorrit_ by Charles Dickens: "The demeanour of that gentleman at
first suggested to her mind that he might be a taker of likenesses,
so intently did he look at her, and so frequently did he glance at
the little note-book by his side". It was inevitable that the term
would be extended to refer to the new-fangled photographs.

However, current usage seems to differ between Britain and North
America. Here in Britain, when 'a likeness of' appears, which it
doesn't that often, it almost always refers to a medium other than
photography (statue, artist's impression, cartoon) in which skill
is involved in matching the representation to the original. The
application to photographs seems to be more common in the USA and
Canada, though not hugely so, to judge by the limited
investigations I've been able to make of newspaper archives.


4. Subscription commands
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