World Wide Words -- 06 Jan 01
Michael Quinion
editor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Jan 6 08:50:41 UTC 2001
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 218 Saturday 6 January 2001
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Sent each Saturday to more than 10,000 subscribers in 100 countries
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: Evernet.
3. Weird Words: Nescient.
4. In Brief: 2K1, Edoarchy, Winterval.
5. Q&A: Ivory tower, Forthwith.
6. Beyond Words.
7. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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NEW SUBSCRIBERS During our two weeks away, many new subscribers
have joined, following pieces in the London _Guardian_ and the
_Atlanta Journal Constitution_, a mention in the _Arizona
Republic_, and a reference on the _Abuzz_ discussion group at the
_New York Times_. Welcome all!
NOSTRADAMUS, MOVE OVER And one subscriber joined having bought a
page-a-day calendar _The Whole Internet_ by Workman Publishing, but
couldn't resist peeking ahead. The entry for 9 April 2001 features
World Wide Words. I predict a sudden burst of interest just before
Easter.
SKIMMINGTON The saga continues. Michael Boddy wrote to say that
"In Tasmania, where I lived for a while, this performance at a
wedding night was known as a 'tin-kettling', which explains itself.
It would also be put on if the locals disapproved of some action on
the part of the person being tin-kettled. From what I remember it
is a relic of mining days and the mining camps". Peter Emery also
wrote from Australia to confirm that the practice is known there,
commenting that it is a custom now mainly of rural areas. Thanks
also to Terry Lane, Eileen Boyldew and others for related comments.
The Oxford English Dictionary includes the term, and adds: "also to
cause (swarming bees) to settle, by beating a tin-kettle". That's
not something you need a word for every day.
SWAMPER Following the Q&A piece on this John Wilkins wrote that
"'Swamper' is also used among Colorado River whitewater guides as
the name for a helper who assists the guide with meal preparation,
clean up, and boat duties". Gordon Louttit remembered that "As a
teenager in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the early 1960s, I worked
as a boxboy (nowadays a 'clerk's helper') and later a grocery
clerk. On the days when the delivery trucks rolled in, the more
athletic of the boxboys and young clerks were designated as
'swampers' to go help the drivers unload the trucks".
OYEZ! There seems to be only one firm rule about World Wide Words:
whenever I make a sweeping generalisation about a word or phrase,
somebody refutes me. I said in the Weird Words piece in the last
issue that the phrase "oyer and terminer" was obsolete. Immediately
Miriam Y Miller wrote from New Orleans to tell me that "In the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania the county criminal courts are known
as the Courts of Oyer and Terminer".
2. Turns of Phrase: Evernet
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This term has begun to appear in the past few months in magazines
and newspapers in North America to refer to the broadband "always-
on" instant Internet that's slowly becoming a reality. It applies
not only to the World Wide Web but also to the universal connection
of all sorts of domestic and industrial appliances to the Net, such
as the much-written-about fridge that can order its own replacement
food. If it succeeds in becoming other than a briefly fashionable
term, 'Evernet' will be a great nuisance to those people who have
been using it for years in various senses, not least Evernet
Systems, for whom it is a trade mark.
The next day we read that the Internet is giving way to the
Evernet, meaning that anything with electricity is having chips
embedded in it - from pagers to toasters to cars - and connected
to networks.
[_Dallas Morning News_, May 2000]
I think we're now quite early in the building of the Evernet, this
always-on, high-speed, broadband, ubiquitous, multiformat Web.
[_Fortune_, Nov. 2000]
3. Weird Words: Nescient
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Ignorant.
This is a most useful word, unknown to most people, with which you
may bait your opponents: if they don't know the word, then their
ignorance is doubly obvious. It comes from Latin 'nescire', to be
ignorant, from 'scire', to know. It is rare, though it appears in
_Ulysses_ by James Joyce, in which he speaks of "the lethargy of
nescient matter". The noun, 'nescience', is somewhat more common; G
K Chesterton used it in _The Innocence of Father Brown_: "Flambeau
had been missed at Harwich; and if he was in London at all, he
might be anything from a tall tramp on Wimbledon Common to a tall
toast-master at the Hotel Metropole. In such a naked state of
nescience, Valentin had a view and a method of his own".
4. In Brief
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2K1 Standing for the year 2001, this first appeared in 2000 in the
names of two Sega Dreamcast video games, the basketball NBA 2K1 and
the football NFL 2K1. It has begun to be used as a general term for
the year, for example it appeared in the _Boston Globe_ just after
Christmas; more examples are expected.
EDOARCHY Coined just before Christmas 2000 by the novelist Fay
Weldon to describe a consumer culture ruled by greed (she had Sir
Elton John in mind, he of the expensive taste in flowers). Purists
have taken a dim view of it, pointing out that 'edo', I eat, is
from Latin but 'arkhia', rule, is from Greek. No good will come of
this word, they said. They're probably right. How about
'pleonectarchy', from Greek 'pleonektein', to be greedy?
WINTERVAL This was invented a couple of years ago by officers of
the City of Birmingham (the UK one), who needed an all-encompassing
seasonal term that referred not only to Christmas, but also to
Diwali, Chanukah, and sometimes the Chinese New Year. It's from
'winter' plus 'interval'. It has been greatly derided, and shows
few signs of use outside Birmingham.
5. 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 Words Web site. If
you wish to comment, please e-mail editor at worldwidewords.org]
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Q. Why is the tower in 'ivory tower' ivory? What are the origins of
this expression? [Cecil A Oberbeck, New York]
A. Usually I can explain the meaning of an expression well enough,
but have a lot of trouble finding out where it came from. In this
instance, I can give you literal chapter and verse on its origin,
but the first half of your question is still causing me to scratch
my head a bit.
The direct origin is the Bible, specifically Chapter 7, Verse 4 of
the _Song of Solomon_, in which Solomon is extolling the beauty of
his beloved: "Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the
fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the
tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus". Not quite the
thing today - few young women would want their eyes compared with
fishponds (or their noses with towers) - but it struck a chord with
Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve.
He was a literary critic and poet in France at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. He wrote a poem in October 1837 called _Pensees
d'Aout_ ('Thoughts of August') in which he refers to two fellow
poets, Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny. I'll spare you the whole
thing, but in English the third stanza goes roughly like this:
Hugo, strong partisan ... fought in armour,
And held high his banner in the middle of the tumult;
He still holds it; and Vigny, more discreet,
As if in his ivory tower, retired before noon.
He was suggesting that Alfred de Vigny was aloof from the cares and
practicalities of daily life. That's how we use it today: someone
living in an ivory tower is - by accident or design - sheltered
from the realities of existence, out of touch with the real world.
Saint-Beuve's allusion was picked up by Henry James, who used it as
the title of a book in 1916. It became very popular and was used in
the next two decades by H G Wells, Hart Crane, Aldous Huxley, Ezra
Pound and others, ensuring it a lasting place in the language.
But why 'ivory'? I'm far from sure that I've got to the bottom of
Saint-Beuve's allusion. The _Song of Solomon_ was obviously
referring to the whiteness of ivory. That's the colour also of
purity and chastity, perhaps suggesting an innocence and lack of
exposure to worldly cares. Ivory has also been a symbol for
hardness: unbreakable and incorruptible. The two ideas together
suggest a tower of adamantine unworldliness, against whose base the
waves of the world may break without effect.
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Q. Could you please let me know if you have ever made any sense out
of the word 'forthwith'? I know it means immediately, but the words
'forth' and 'with' don't combine to mean immediately. [Glenn
Dunlap, Texas]
A. They don't now, but they did once. 'Forth' is one of those words
that has gone out of the language except in a number of set
phrases. Way back beyond the Norman Conquest it meant forwards.
That sense lingers in the phrase 'back and forth', backwards and
forwards.
Another phrase, now archaic, is 'from this day forth', in which
'forth' has the figurative sense of onwards; 'and so forth'
includes it in a similar sense; to 'hold forth' is to talk at
length about some subject, often tediously. 'Sally forth' is still
known, though not much used outside a certain American comic strip.
Round the middle of the twelfth century, the phrase 'forth mid'
appeared ('mid' being essentially the same as the modern German
word 'mit', with), later 'forth with', to go somewhere in the
company of other people. Necessarily, if you go forth with others,
you go at the same time as they do. It seems this sense of time
eventually took over, though the process of transition isn't very
clear, and it's mixed up with other phrases that also referred to
time. Certainly, by about 1450 the phrase had condensed to a single
adverb with the modern meaning of immediately, without delay.
Much of the idea of 'forth' has been taken over in today's language
by 'forwards', but that word itself is a contracted compound of
'forth' with the suffix '-ward', to go in a specified direction.
6. Beyond Words
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BANISHED? Each year since 1976, the people at Lake Superior State
University in Michigan have invited nominations for the words that
ought to be banished from the language. This year's winner, perhaps
unsurprisingly, is the one we all thought had already vanished into
oblivion, but which suffered an unholy resurrection: 'chad'.
UP SHE RISES I nearly choked on my soup yesterday lunchtime when
Michael Fish, the BBC weatherman, passed on the astonishing news
regarding impending floods: "rivers are balanced on a knife edge".
7. Administration
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