World Wide Words -- 30 Jun 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 243          Saturday 30 June 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. Turns of Phrase: E-science.
2. Topical Words: Deprecate.
3. Weird Words: Rigmarole.
4. Q & A: Orientated versus oriented.
5. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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DOH/DUH  Many people mentioned, following the piece last week on
the OED's inclusion of these two expressive monosyllables, that the
actor who plays Homer Simpson, Dan Castellaneta, has said that he
based the noise on those that were uttered by James Finlayson, a
Scots actor who appeared in many of Laurel and Hardy's comedies.
Others have reported earlier examples of similar sounds used for a
variety of purposes. The provenance of such inarticulate noises is
extremely hard to document - I suspect the true origin of "doh!"
lies in the aggrieved grunt made by the first ape man down from the
trees on realising that he had left his club back at the cave. The
Oxford English Dictionary is necessarily very dependent on written
evidence: such noises certainly existed long before anybody tried
to represent them in print.

BRIEF(ER) ENCOUNTERS  For the next two months, starting next week,
issues of World Wide Words are to be rather shorter than has been
usual. Newsletters will return to their normal length in September.
I'm fighting to meet an inexorable deadline on a book!


2. Turns of Phrase: E-science
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I usually avoid 'e' words, as there have been so many of them, most
destined only for eventual oblivion. But the evidence suggests this
one might be a favoured runner in the new words sweepstakes. It's a
largely British term for new developments in information technology
that aim to help researchers process the vast amounts of data that
come out of many scientific investigations. It's applied especially
to fields such as the human genome project and nuclear physics -
for example, a new particle accelerator due to come on line at CERN
in 2006 is expected to generate a petabyte of data every second
('peta-' represents one followed by 15 zeroes). Other parts of the
project are designed to help create a super-fast Internet that will
give researchers easy access to all this data and to supply new
software to process and visualise it. The term seems to have
appeared first at the beginning of last year, and was given a stamp
of approval through being used in a White Paper (a governmental
consultation document) in August.

e-Science is science which is increasingly done through distributed
global collaborations enabled by the Internet, possibly using very
large data collections, tera-scale computing resources and high
performance visualisation to achieve its objectives.
                                       [_New Scientist_, June 2001]

Also capturing a large share of new funding are projects that aim
to digest once-unfathomable amounts of data, an area the U.K.
government calls "e-science."
                                             [_Science_, Dec. 2000]


2. Topical Words: Deprecate
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It started with an e-mail message from subscriber Pete Jones: "Have
you come across 'deprecated' with the sense 'no longer valid or
current'?". He pointed me to a Web site that defined it in much
these terms.

It took a few minutes of sleuthing to track this down. The glossary
item is referring to HTML, the coding system behind the World Wide
Web. The formal specification uses 'deprecated' in sentences like
"The following elements are deprecated", and carefully defines what
it means by that: "A deprecated element or attribute is one that
has been outdated by newer constructs". The writer is saying that
some elements in earlier versions are not actually obsolete but are
now disapproved of - deprecated - and should be avoided. The writer
of the glossary has clearly never come across this somewhat formal
word, hasn't bothered to look it up, and has taken its sense from
context: one shouldn't use deprecated elements, therefore
'deprecated' means "no longer part of the current specification".

This is just a solecism, but it does illustrate one way in which
language change occurs - through ignorance, confusion and error. We
may feel an intense dislike of changes that have come about by such
ignoble means, but the history of language shows this is actually
extremely common.

'Deprecate' itself has shifted sense quite substantially down the
years. When it came into the language in the early seventeenth
century, its meaning was strongly influenced by its older cousin
'deprecation', from Latin 'precari', to pray. That meant a prayer
to ward off something evil or disastrous or to reverse its effects.
Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century Bishop of Winchester, used the
verb in this sense of warding off evil in his translation of the
book of Isaiah: "Evil shall come upon thee, which thou shalt not
know how to deprecate".

Anything we wish to deprecate we are likely to view with dread, and
the verb soon took on a sense of expressing earnest disapproval of
something. Over the next century or so that meaning took over so
completely that the old idea of prayer disappeared altogether. By
the end of the nineteenth century the word had shifted further so
that it could also mean disparage, belittle, condemn, or deplore.
This wasn't a big step from the earlier idea, since to disapprove
of something is first cousin to disparaging it, but the shift in
meaning was criticised by conservative writers, who didn't like the
way it was rapidly encroaching on the ground occupied by
'depreciate'.

This had appeared at about the same time as 'deprecate', in the
seventeenth century, but with the sense of lowering in value - we
still use it when we speak of depreciation in the value of our
investments. Later it took on the idea of lowering in estimation,
to undervalue and hence to belittle.

As recently as 1965 the second edition of _Fowler's Modern English
Usage_ was very firm about not confusing the two words, calling it
a blunder. The third edition is less censorious, merely suggesting
that writers keep the historical division in mind, and pointing out
that 'depreciate' is now largely restricted to the financial sense,
with 'deprecate' taking over elsewhere. The _New Oxford Dictionary
of English_ agrees.

But that dictionary's editors would stop short of endorsing "no
longer part of the current specification" ... for the moment,
anyway.


3. Weird Words: Rigmarole
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A lengthy and complicated procedure.

An older sense of the word was of a complicated and incoherent set
of statements or a wandering discourse - I shall try to avoid any
such tedious tale, but the history of this word is more than a
little odd and takes some recounting.

In medieval times, there was a game called 'ragman'. It used a
rolled-up scroll containing descriptions of characters, each with a
string attached. Players selected a string at random, the scroll
was then unrolled and the associated passage read out, to the great
hilarity of all present (these were simpler times). There are also
some suspicions that the same system was used for a gambling game.

The origin of the name for the game is obscure: the oldest form was
'rageman', said as three syllables, and this suggests it may have
been French in origin - a character called Rageman the Good
appeared in some French verses of about 1290. Others think it might
have come from 'rag' in the sense of tatters, used as a name for a
devil (as in 'ragamuffin', originally a demon).

The name was transferred to various English statutes at the end of
the thirteenth century, which were written on scrolls. With the
seals and ribbons of their signers sticking out, these reminded
people of the scroll used in the game. The most famous such
document was the one in 1291 in which the Scottish nobility and
gentry subscribed allegiance to Edward I before John Balliol took
the Scots throne.

It seems the terms 'ragman' and 'ragman roll' passed into the
language as a description of a long and rambling discourse, no
doubt from the disconnected nature of documents like the rolls of
allegiance. It later seems to have fallen out of use; it reappeared
in the eighteenth century in various spellings, such as 'riggmon-
rowle', but it eventually settled down as 'rigmarole', in the
process losing any clear connection with the older term.


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
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Q. I am uneasy about the word 'orientated' as in 'business-
orientated'. I feel the word should be 'oriented'. Am I right,
wrong, pedantic, or what? [David Holland]

A. We have a minor oddity here, in that both 'orient' and
'orientate' come from the same French verb, 'orienter', but were
introduced at different times, the shorter one in the eighteenth
century and the longer in the middle of the nineteenth. There's
been a quiet war going on between the two of them ever since. I
tend to use 'oriented' and 'orientated' pretty indiscriminately
myself, choosing the shorter one when it seems to fit the flow of
the sentence. Robert Burchfield, in the Third Edition of Fowler's
_Modern English Usage_, says "one can have no fundamental quarrel
with anyone who decides to use the longer of the two words". But
all this is a British view, since here 'orientated' is common; in
the US it is rather less so and considered much less a part of the
standard language. So, as always, it's as much a case of who you
are writing for and where you are doing so.


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