World Wide Words - 13 Jan 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 219         Saturday 13 January 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Ethnic.
3. Weird Words: Mundungus.
4. Words of the Year 2000.
5. Q & A: Pie in the sky.
6. Competition: Five Collins Dictionaries to be won.
7. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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IVORY TOWER  Following last week's Q&A piece, several writers noted
that the idea of mild disparagement in the term may be connected
with an episode in the Greek epic _The Odyssey_: "Those that come
through the gate of ivory are fatuous, but those from the gate of
horn mean something to those that see them". Others have pointed
out that the phrase "tower of ivory" also appears in the Litany of
Loreto, a prayer to the Virgin Mary, composed in medieval times.
One of the calls and responses is "Turris eburnea, ora pro nobis"
("Tower of ivory, pray for us") which echoes the phrase in the Song
of Solomon. I've also since found that an English translation of
the French 'tour d'ivoire' appears in Oscar Wilde's _An Ideal
Husband_: "That great inheritance throw not away - that tower of
ivory do not destroy".

WINTERVAL  The mechanism of my mind slipped a cog when I wrote that
In Brief piece; the word comes, of course, from 'winter' plus
'festival'. And having said it was unknown outside Birmingham, the
curse of the Quinions strikes again. Kathleeen Hat wrote to say she
had seen it in The Concord (New Hampshire) Monitor late last year,
as a collective term for the Solstice, Chanukah, Christmas, and
Kwanza. Marc Lawrence wrote from the Antipodes to say "Perhaps
'Summerval' will catch on in the earth's dark, hot underbelly". I
hope all subscribers from that side of the equator will forgive my
rampant hemispherism.

EDOARCHY  Of this In Brief item last week, several subscribers who
are better Greek scholars than I am (but then so is my neighbour's
cat: at least she can get up to mu) have pointed out that 'edo' is
"I eat" in Greek as well as Latin, so that the charge of linguistic
miscegenation fails.


2. Topical Words: Ethnic
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A headline in the _Times_ of London just before Christmas read:
"Leicester to be first city with ethnic majority". It sounds daft
on first reading since, when you think about it, most cities have
an ethnic majority. But that wasn't what the _Times_ headline
writer had in mind, of course.

'Ethnic' has had an interesting history. It started its life in
English as long ago as the fourteenth century; it came from the
Greek 'ethnikos', heathen, from 'ethnos', nation. It meant the same
in English as it did in Greek, and it was applied indiscriminately
to anyone who was not a Christian or a Jew: a pagan. Thomas Carlyle
used it this way in 1851 in his _Life of John Sterling_: "I find
at this time his religion is as good as altogether Ethnic, Greekish,
what Goethe calls the Heathen form of religion".

By that time, it seems that for most people the word had lost the
connection with religion - disparaging in effect if not in intent -
and had adopted a more neutral one of a person belonging to an
identifiable culture with common racial, social, religious, or
linguistic characteristics, very much the way we use it now when we
are speaking formally. By the time Carlyle was writing, the Greek
root had been used to make 'ethnography' and 'ethnology' for the
study of other cultures. The word never quite lost its disparaging
edge, however, being so often attached in Europe and North America
to people who were considered "lesser breeds".

It was only from the 1950s onwards that the term started to be
applied widely and generally to aspects of cultures, especially
from non-Western traditions. By the seventies 'ethnobotany',
'ethnoarchaeology', 'ethnoscience' and others had been invented. We
also began to see phrases like 'ethnic music' and 'ethnic clothing'
in this period, causing 'ethnic' to soften in sense until in common
use it now often means little more than "exotic" or "foreign". But
by 1991 the awful term 'ethnic cleansing' had begun to appear,
first in the former Yugoslavia, probably as a loan translation of a
Serbian term dating from the 1940s, a usage from which 'ethnic' may
never quite recover.

By then we had also seen 'ethnic minority' coined to describe a
distinctive minority group within another, dominant culture. It's
this phrase that the headline writer in the _Times_ was playing on
when writing about the racial mix in Leicester, where many local
people have their origins in the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent
and China.

The headline really says that in Leicester "the foreigners are
outnumbering us", an understandable reference, though one that
gives rise to suspicions of unconscious xenophobia. It would be a
great pity if that were the case, since Leicester is easily the
most racially harmonious multicultural city in the UK.


3. Weird Words: Mundungus
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Rubbish; refuse.

In the seventeenth century the Spanish had a perfectly respectable
word 'mondongo' for the tripes, the stomach linings of cows or oxen
served as food. Many people adore tripe, especially served with
onions, but others find it mildly repulsive. Hence our slang use of
'tripe' for worthless stuff or rubbish. The English borrowed the
Spanish word, at first literally, but then hacked it about a bit to
fit English mouths and applied it to any offal or refuse.

Later, it was used in particular for a foul-smelling form of cheap
tobacco. In his _Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon_, published in 1755,
Henry Fielding wrote: "It was in truth no other than a tobacco of
the mundungus species". It has largely gone out of use, except when
an author is attempting to reinforce an historical period, as
Patrick O'Brian does in _HMS Surprise_: "If you have finished,
Stephen, pray smoke away. I am sure you bought some of your best
mundungus in Mahon".


4. Words of the Year 2000
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The American Dialect Society chose its Words of the Year 2000 at
its annual meeting in Washington DC this week. Their selections are
not always totally serious - in fact sometimes definitely tongue in
cheek - but they give interesting insights into the previous year's
activity word-wise.

Like everyone else who has been producing lists of Words of the
Year, the Society put 'chad' at the top; it was voted overall Word
of the Year.

Words of the Year were also chosen in eight specific categories:
Most Outrageous was 'wall humping', rubbing a thigh against a
security card scanner to allow access without having to both to
remove the card from one's pocket. Most Euphemistic was 'courtesy
call' an uninvited call from a telemarketer. Most Likely to Succeed
was 'muggle', the Harry Potter books' term for a non-wizard, but
which shows signs of becoming a more general word for a mundane,
unimaginative person.

Most Useful was 'civil union', legal same-sex marriage. Most
Creative was 'dot bomb', a failed dot-com operation. Most
Unnecessary was 'sudden loss of wealth syndrome'. Least Likely to
Succeed was 'kablokeys', a hard-to-pronounce word used in phrases
like "It scared the kablokeys out of me". The winner in the Brand-
Spanking New category was 'unconcede', to rescind a concession
(though subsequently, its proposer did some more research and
realised he should have suggested 'unconcession', which has more
claim to being new).


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. I was wondering if you could tell me where the phrase 'pie in
the sky' came from? (Lindsay Chalson)

A. It comes from the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World,
the anarchist-syndicalist labour organisation formed in the US in
1905. The Wobblies concentrated on organising migrant and casual
workers; one of the ways in which they brought such disparate and
fragmented groups together was by song. Every member got a little
red book when he joined, containing parodies of popular songs or
hymns (the book had a motto on the cover: "To Fan the Flames of
Discontent"). One of the early ones, predating the IWW, was
_Hallelujah, I'm a Bum_.

One IWW member was Joe Hill, a Swedish-born seaman and hobo (one of
the martyrs of the union movement: he was convicted of murder on
dubious circumstantial evidence and hanged in 1915; you may recall
a folk song about him, sung memorably by Joan Baez). He wrote
several popular pro-union parodies for them, such as _Coffee An'_,
_Nearer My Job to Thee_, _The Rebel Girl_ and _The Preacher and the
Slave_.

This last song, dating from 1911, was aimed directly at the
Salvation Army, a body anxious to save the Wobblies' souls, while
the Wobblies were more interested in filling their bellies. The
Wobblies hated the Sally Army's middle-class Christian view that
one would get one's reward in heaven for virtue or suffering on
earth. The song was a parody of the Salvation Army hymn _In the
Sweet Bye and Bye_:

  Long-haired preachers come out every night,
  Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
  But when asked how 'bout something to eat
  They will answer with voices so sweet:

    CHORUS:
    You will eat, bye and bye,
    In that glorious land above the sky;
    Work and pray, live on hay,
    You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

By 1911, other expressions using 'pie' had already been around for
some time, such as 'nice as pie' and 'easy as pie' and it had begun
to be used for a bribe or for political patronage (of rewards being
distributed like slices of pie) so 'pie' was already in the air, so
to speak.


6. Competition
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Ioannis Paraskevopoulos wrote from Athens asking why, if English
has such a large vocabulary, there is no equivalent of the Greek
'lathranagnostes', for a person who furtively tries to read another
passenger's newspaper on a bus or train.

Can you think of a witty word that English ought to add to its
vocabulary? It can be invented, or based on existing English words,
or on words from other languages. If you can tie it to a word that
already exists in another language, so much the better, but it
isn't essential. What is vital is that it must be original. When
you submit it, please provide details of how you derived it, plus a
definition as it might appear in a future dictionary.

Collins have very kindly offered to give a copy of their top-of-
the-range dictionary to the best five entries submitted. This is
the newly-released fifth edition of the Collins English Dictionary,
the publisher's price for which is GBP24.99 (about US$40.00).

Entries should be e-mailed to <competition at worldwidewords.org>, to
reach us no later than Monday, 22 January 2001. Please keep entries
short and to the point (any comments on other subjects, or indeed
about the competition, should be sent separately to our usual
editorial address).

Judging will be by Michael Quinion, editor of World Wide Words, and
Jeremy Butterfield, Editorial Director of Collins dictionaries,
whose joint decision will be final. The winning entries will be
published in the issue of World Wide Words for 3 February 2001.


7. Administration
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