World Wide Words -- 14 Jul 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 245           Saturday 14 July 2001
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Grok.
3. Topical Words: Meritocracy.
4. Q & A: Not worth the candle.
5. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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DOOLALLY  Several American subscribers wrote after last week's Q&A
piece on what I thought was a uniquely British expression, to say
that it was used in the US for something whose name one couldn't
for the moment remember. It has the same pattern as other US words
with the same meaning, like 'dohickey', 'doojigger' and 'doodad'.
I can't begin to discover whether 'doolally' has been imported from
the British word or is an independent local variation on one of
these other words, since 'doolally' appears in none of my American
dictionaries or works on American slang (it is in the _Dictionary
of American Regional English_, I'm told but not in that sense).
Does anyone know more?

FAME, FIFTEEN MINUTES OF, EXTENDED  A small cluster of references
to World Wide Words has appeared this week, mainly in American
local newspapers: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Reno Gazette,
Des Moines Register, Arizona Republic, Asbury Park (New Jersey)
Press, and the Wilmington News Journal, among others. Mentions have
also appeared in the Free Pint e-newsletter from Britain, in the
Humour-Net mailing, in a Belgian e-zine, and in a Dutch translators
magazine. The British Open University has included World Wide Words
in a list of web sites for students to evaluate as part of a course
about the Internet (I'd love to see the results!) News of further
sightings welcome.


2. Weird Words: Grok
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To understand something intuitively or by empathy.

We must look to Robert Anson Heinlein for the origins of this word,
which he invented for his science-fantasy book _Stranger in a
Strange Land_ in 1961. In this, Michael Valentine Smith, a human
being raised on Mars, returns to Earth with psi powers given him by
the Martians and is transformed into a messiah. Grok is a word
borrowed from Martian (and you won't see that written very often)
in which it literally meant to drink. To grok is to gain an instant
deep spiritual understanding of something or to establish a rapport
with somebody. The book became a cult classic despite its deeply
flawed nature (Heinlein himself remarked self-deprecatingly about
it that it was incredible what some people would do for money; it
was originally published in a brutally edited form and became
available as originally written only in 1990). The term went into
the language, at first among countercultural types in California,
but was eventually taken up by computer geeks, among whom it has
largely remained.


3. Topical Words: Meritocracy
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A small but significant spat has erupted in Britain recently about
the meaning of this word. It's especially interesting because not
only do we know who coined it, but he's still very much around to
argue about it.

The current furore began with the recent British General Election,
in which Tony Blair, the Labour Prime Minister, made much of his
commitment to what he regularly described as meritocracy. This word
is very widely used, more so even in the United States than in
Britain. It is usually now employed in the sense in which Mr Blair
seems from his speeches to have meant it - a social system which
allows people to achieve success proportionate to their talents and
abilities, as opposed to one in which social class or wealth is the
controlling factor.

But this, as recent counterblasts have made clear, is not what the
word was coined to mean. Michael Young invented it in 1958 in his
book, _The Rise of the Meritocracy_. He pointed out in an article
in the _Guardian_ last month that he had intended the book to be a
prophetic satire on what might happen if we placed gaining formal
educational qualifications over all other considerations. This, he
had argued in it, would lead to the permanent rejection of anybody
who was unable to jump through the educational hoops, including
many otherwise able working-class men and women. It would also
result in the rise of a new social class, just as discriminatory
and exclusive as the older ones. So the word as he used it was not
a positive one, but deeply negative in its implications for the
future of society.

It is the fate of prophets to be ignored, but in this case the very
reason why Michael Young coined the word has been forgotten. The
word as commonly employed (say by current British prime ministers)
now has a radically different sense from the one Michael Young had
intended.


4. Q&A
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[Send your questions to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will
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limited. If I can, a response will appear here and on the Web site.
If you wish to comment on one of the replies below, please do NOT
use that address, but e-mail <editor at worldwidewords.org> instead.]

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Q. Someone asked me about an expression they'd read but didn't
quite understand. The expression referred to a game being 'worth
its candle'. Can you provide any help? [Bob LeDrew]

A. The more usual form of this expression is 'not worth the
candle'. It dates from medieval times, when any night-time activity
had to be lit by candles, which were expensive. So some activity
that 'wasn't worth the candle' wasn't worth the cost of supplying
the light to see it by. It's only now, when the obvious link
between the situation and the expression has been lost as a result
of changing technology, that people can use forms like 'not worth
*its* candle', subtly shifting the sense and making it harder to
understand.

Incidentally, candles played such a large part in life in the
centuries before whale oil lamps, gas and electricity successively
appeared that several expressions are connected with them, such as
'can't hold a candle to him', meaning that a person isn't fit even
to hold the candle for somebody else to work. Another is 'burn the
candle at both ends', to be spendthrift, to expend one's effort too
lavishly, or try to do too much at once. (As Edna St Vincent Millay
put it:

   My candle burns at both ends;
   it will not last the night;
   But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
   It gives a lovely light!)



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