World Wide Words -- 17 Mar 01
Michael Quinion
editor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Mar 17 08:24:37 UTC 2001
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 228 Saturday 17 March 2001
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Sent each Saturday to 11,000+ subscribers in at least 105 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: Blogger.
3. Topical Words: Panic.
4. Weird Words: Droogish.
5. Q & A: -ati, Bint.
6. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SWAG Following my piece on this word last week, many subscribers
wrote to tell me about an acronymic version, for "Scientific Wild-
Ass Guess" or variations thereof. It refers to a finger-in-the-wind,
back-of-envelope quick estimate. One writer (name withheld to avoid
embarrassment) who works "in US government circles" said that this
process was "the basis for many policy decisions". It can be a verb
as well as a noun. To judge from the number of people who mentioned
it, it seems to be very well known in the US. I've not encountered
it before, and it doesn't appear in any of my slang dictionaries,
so it's yet another case where the record-keepers of language are
lagging behind the action.
2. Turns of Phrase: Blogger
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A blogger is a person who keeps a Web log, or blog for short. The
idea started sometime in 1998, but really caught on in 2000, to the
extent that there are now thousands of bloggers and blogs about. At
the beginning, the concept was that a person kept a diary of their
explorations of the World Wide Web, making it public for others to
inspect and follow up. But as blogging has expanded, that simple
idea has been so much modified that it is now difficult to get two
bloggers to agree on what the term means. Many blogs are online
diaries chronicling activities and events as they happen to the
writer, often with no reference to the Web at all. Some writers
create only brief entries, while others provide extended essays on
life, the universe and everything. There are several sites where
people can create accounts and publish their blogs, most notably
www.blogger.com, where blogs often have names like The Magnificent
Melting Object, or Exploits of a Dwarf Lover.
As the pool of blog writers has grown, perhaps inevitably so have
complaints about quality. It's true that some bloggers seem to feel
the need to log every sneeze.
[_San Francisco Chronicle_, Feb. 2001]
Bloggers add their own foraging notes to links discovered on other
weblogs. As a result, some estimate, anything new on the Web will
filter through the blog system in some form in about 30 days.
[_Dallas Morning News_, Apr. 2000]
3. Topical Words: Panic
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When an American president tells people not to panic, everybody
sits up and takes notice. Some even turn to their dictionaries.
Actually, there's no need, since it is well known that the word
comes from that most earthy of Greek gods, Pan, he of the human
upper and goat lower half, or sometimes the other way round. A goat
he certainly was, being both priapic and fertile. (Schoolboys of a
certain cast of mind used to get a dutiful snigger out of those
opening lines by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "What was he doing,
the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river?" It was a let-
down when it turned out he was just making his pipes.) He was the
god of rural places, where one should be wary, especially in the
heat of the noonday sun, lest one disturb his slumbers.
He was supposed to be the source of that irrational fear that even
today timid travellers into woods and other wild places may feel,
as their back hairs quiver and they constantly search for danger
behind every bush, startled by the least noise. Indeed, the quieter
the hush, the greater the risk of sudden fright caused by small
sounds - the ones which Pan was supposed to make.
We have many words for the emotion induced by something unpleasant
or dangerous, whether actual, prospective or imagined. The most
general, and the least intense, are fear, anxiety, alarm and
fright. Horror suggests revulsion at some sight or circumstance
and, like terror, is the result of direct personal experience.
Terror is the most intense of all the words (it comes from an Indo-
European root meaning to shake or tremble), and also the most
direct, since it follows some real and immediate threat.
Panic, on the other hand, is fear of a special kind, in which one
is given over to uncontrollable emotion and unthinking behaviour.
It is a contagious emotion, running through a crowd like a sudden
epidemic, turning a group into a mob and precipitating unconsidered
and hasty action. The Greeks emphasised the groundless nature of
the fear - that you were reacting to what you thought might be
there, not to any real and present danger. These days, panic is
often the word used to describe collective anxiety about financial
and commercial matters. President Bush's word is therefore all too
aptly chosen.
However, it is a curious characteristic of panic that to name it is
often to cause it, and that exhortations against it can have the
opposite effect. Think of Corporal Jones in the old BBC sitcom
_Dad's Army_: "Don't panic!", he would cry, panicking. Its
publishers meant well when they had those words inscribed in large
friendly letters on the cover of _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy_, but I can't believe they were always as reassuring as
Arthur Dent found them.
4. Weird Words: Droogish
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Relating to the nature or attitudes of a member of a street gang.
This derives from a member of a large set of slang terms invented
by Anthony Burgess in his book _A Clockwork Orange_ of 1962. A
droog is a young ruffian, or an accomplice or henchman of a gang-
leader. The continuing impact of Burgess's novel (and the notorious
Stanley Kubrick film made from it) is clear from the way that droog
continues to appear in English writing (and has even reached a few
dictionaries) and that droogish has been created as a derived term
that wasn't in the original vocabulary.
Droog, like much of the slang in the book, is Russian in origin, in
this case coming from 'drug', friend. Burgess called his slang
Nadsat, from the ending in Russian of the number words from 11 to
19 (so it's a close equivalent of our 'teen'). Other words from the
set that are sometimes seen are malenky, small or little, and
poogly, scared.
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 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. Help me please to understand the suffix '-ati'. The word
'glitterati' is slangy or derogative, while 'literati' is formal. I
can't find anything about 'digerati' or 'fasherati'. Is this suffix
used to make pejorative plurals, or is it used to give a formal
overtone to new words? [Svetlana Neshko, Ukraine]
A. You're right to suggest that words ending in '-ati' do tend to
be mildly pejorative, often with undertones of triviality. Examples
include glitterati, the fashionable set of people engaged in show
business or some other glamorous activity; fasherati, the set of
people concerned with fashion; soccerati, those involved with
soccer; digerati, people with expertise or professional involvement
in information technology (sometimes used neutrally), and
illuminati, people who claim to possess special enlightenment or
knowledge of something (it was originally the name of a Bavarian
secret society founded in 1776, and of a sect of 16th-century
Spanish heretics; it's also used by conspiracy theorists for that
mysterious group of people who really run the world).
Informal or slang terms ending in '-ati' have become quite common
in recent years, but it's unclear whether we are actually seeing a
new suffix (lexicographers would prefer me to say that it is
actually a combining form, since it adds an additional layer of
meaning to the words it attaches to, rather than just changing its
grammatical function, which is what suffixes do). Dictionaries that
include such terms usually say they're blends of English words with
the older 'literati', tacking the second part of that word on to
the first part of another. A factor that suggests we're dealing
with blends is that words are created with '-erati' as well as '-
ati', the former being used when the stem doesn't already end in '-
er'.
I'm not entirely sure of its status myself: it may be that what
started out as punning inventions of new words by analogy is
turning into a true combining form. But the chances are, fashion
being so ephemeral, that the fasherati will have got bored with
such words before we can be sure.
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Q. In reading the novel _How the Dead Live_ by Will Self I've
encountered the unfamiliar word 'bint' in the phrase: "widows,
spinsters, and bints". At first I thought this might be similar to
an 'ex' in US slang for a divorcee. But when I searched on the Web,
I found references that hint at a pejorative connotation. [Luci
Koizumi]
A. You're right: bint is British slang for a woman or girl, but it
is always disparaging and offensive and signals the user as lower
class and unrefined. It's also now rather dated.
The word is Arabic for a daughter, specifically one who has yet to
bear a child. It was in common use as a slang term during the first
and second World Wars among British and Allied servicemen stationed
in Egypt and neighbouring countries.
Sir Richard Burton was the first person to use the word in English,
in his _Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and
Meccah_ in 1855: "'Allah! upon Allah! O daughter!' cry the by-
standers, when the obstinate 'bint' of sixty years seizes their
hands".
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