World Wide Words -- 21 Jul 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 246           Saturday 21 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. Review: Concise Oxford Dictionary, Revised Tenth Edition.
2. Weird Words: Callipygian.
3. Q & A: Toerag.
4. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Review: Concise Oxford Dictionary, Revised Tenth Edition.
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Do you get the same feeling as I do: that new dictionary editions
are appearing more frequently than they used to? It was only two
years ago that I reviewed the new Tenth Edition of the _Concise
Oxford Dictionary_ (see <http://www.worldwidewords.org/reviews/
cod10.htm>), and here comes a revised version thudding on to my
doormat.

As you might expect, the revised edition is not that different, so
I'll spare you a recapitulation. The big change is that some of the
back matter present in earlier editions but removed from the Tenth
has now returned (unlike surgeons, publishers can put an appendix
back in), though you will look in vain for some of the joys of the
Ninth edition, such as the periodic table, the chart of weights and
measures, and the Beaufort scale of wind speeds.

What you have instead is something about which newspapers have been
writing mildly astonished or critical pieces ever since the work
was officially published on 12 July: a page and a bit of notes
about the abbreviations used in electronic text messaging or SMS.
Messages, limited to 150 characters, can be sent from most mobile
phones, but because they are cumbersome to type they have to be
kept short. So lots of emoticons and abbreviations have come into
use, some very much like those common online: LOL for Laughing out
Loud, CUL8R for See You Later, WAN2TLK for Want To Talk? SMS has
become hugely fashionable, mainly among teenagers (some 85% of whom
in Britain have mobile phones), so much so that last Christmas a
canny publisher brought out _WAN2TLK? Ltle Bk of Txt Msgs_, at a
suitably minuscule price. Now Oxford has added its twopenn'orth and
made a surprising amount of noise about it for such a little list.

The compilers have also added the usual gleanings of new words:
'digital divide', 'genomics', 'viral marketing' and 'deep-vein
thrombosis' - all of which will be familiar to regular readers of
World Wide Words - and of course 'SMS' and 'text message' as well
as 'mobe', a common British abbreviated term for a mobile phone.

At the same time, a revised CD-ROM has been published. It's a nice
little program (MS Windows 95+ only), which can sit in a corner of
your screen, responding to words typed into it, or sent through the
clipboard, or double-clicked in most Windows applications. There's
also a more comprehensive search function which allows simple
Boolean searches on the complete text of the dictionary.

[_The Concise Oxford Dictionary_, Revised Tenth Edition, edited by
Judy Pearsall, pp 1708, hardback, ISBN 0-19-860438-6, publisher's
recommended price GBP17.99.  The CD-ROM is available under ISBN 0-
19-860471-8 at GBP19.99.]

(The co-editor of the first edition of the Concise, published in
1911, was Henry Watson Fowler, better known for _Modern English
Usage_. A biography has just been published - more next week.)


2. Weird Words: Callipygian  /kalI'pIdzI at n/
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Having well-shaped buttocks.

This is a word about which it would be possible to generate many
bad puns, thereby making an ass of oneself and becoming the butt of
jokes. The subject matter - and the rather beautiful form of the
word itself - has lent itself to adoption by word-hungry authors,
even though the first recorded use is only in 1880. Thomas Pynchon
wrote this in _Gravity's Rainbow_: "Those dusky Afro-Scandinavian
buttocks, which combine the callipygian rondure observed among the
races of the Dark Continent with the taut and noble musculature of
sturdy Olaf, our blond Northern cousin". Its origin is in Greek
'kallipugos', used to describe a famous statue of Venus; that comes
from 'kallos', beauty (as in 'calligraphy', or 'callisthenics', or
the lily called 'hemerocallis') plus 'puge', buttocks (which also
appears in a word for a less comely characteristic, 'steatopygia',
accumulation of large amounts of fat on the backside).


3. Q&A
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[Send your questions to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will
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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. 'Toe-rag' or 'tow-rag'? I can't find it in any dictionary, slang
dictionary or Fowler's. What's the derivation? [Tessa Huyshe]

A. Aha, another term from that inexhaustible store of rude British
slang expressions (though it is also well-known in Australia). It
means that the person addressed is contemptible or worthless, a
scrounger. Though it can be a relatively mild insult among friends,
you should avoid saying it to strangers unless you want a smack in
the mush or a punch up the bracket.

The original form - in the nineteenth century - was 'toe rag'. It
referred to the strips of cloth that convicts or tramps wrapped
around their feet as an inadequate substitute for socks. The first
recorded use is by J F Mortlock in his _Experiences of a Convict_
of 1864: "Stockings being unknown, some luxurious men wrapped round
their feet a piece of old shirting, called, in language more
expressive than elegant, a 'toe-rag'". It didn't take long to
become a term of abuse - in 1875 a book on British circus life said
that "Toe rags is another expression of contempt ... used ...
chiefly by the lower grades of circus men, and the acrobats who
stroll about the country, performing at fairs".

It seems to have come to wider British knowledge and use from the
1970s on, largely because it was aired in the ITV police series
_The Sweeney_ about the London mobile detective force called the
flying squad (rhyming slang: 'flying squad' = 'Sweeney Todd', the
demon barber of Fleet Street), a programme that delighted in using
London slang.

The 'tow-rag' spelling is sometimes seen because people have lost
the link to the original sense, long since obsolete.


4. Subscription commands
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