World Wide Words -- 05 May 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 235           Saturday 5 May 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. The Oxford Dictionary of Allusions.
3. Turns of Phrase: Bioinformatics.
4. Weird Words: Floccinaucinihilipilification.
5. Q & A: Barbecue.
6. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SHAKE A STICK AT  Following last week's Q&A piece on this puzzling
expression, Suzan Hendren and Sherwin Cogan suggested that it might
have come from the Native American practice of 'counting coup', in
which merit was gained by touching a vanquished enemy in battle. In
that case, "too many to shake a stick at" might indicate a surplus
of fallen enemies, and "not worth shaking a stick at" would equate
a person with "an enemy who is so cowardly or worthless that there
is no merit to be gained from counting coup on him", as Sherwin
Cogan put it. An intriguing idea.


2. The Oxford Dictionary of Allusions
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[As always when reviewing Oxford publications, I must declare a
potential conflict of interest, in that I am a freelance researcher
for the Oxford English Dictionary and the Press will be publishing
a book of mine next year.]

Allusion is one of the devices by which an author draws his or her
readers into a pleasantly complicit world. By including literary,
classical or popular references which readers will appreciate, the
writer hopes to establish common ground as well shortcutting the
process of introducing associations to other ideas.

That only works, of course, if the allusions are understood. While
most readers would immediately recognise a reference to Scrooge or
Darth Vader (and could very probably call to mind the Mad Hatter,
King Canute and Hercules), to include a mention of Birnham Wood,
Persephone, Wackford Squeers, Procrustes or the Hyperboreans might
very possibly break the fragile thread linking reader and writer.

As the editors say, the influence is still strong of such standard
sources in the Western canon of literature as the Bible (especially
the Authorised Version of the Old Testament), Shakespeare, and many
classical writers. References to them still turn up frequently. But
as many of them are now less often read (or taught) than they were,
readers increasingly need help to make sense of allusions to such
names as Proteus, Gargantua, the Rubicon, or the Argonauts.

That's where this book comes in. The editors have created a themed
volume explaining the background to several hundred such allusions,
mostly to people, but also to places, both real and fictional. The
book is organised in about 150 themes, from Abundance to Youth, and
from Adventure to Wholesomeness (this last section contains
entries, among others, for Mary Poppins, Cliff Richard, Doris Day,
and the Waltons). Each entry contains a section of interpretive
text, plus one or two real examples of the allusion in action. An
index gives access to an entry wherever it has been placed. If you
need to know who Doubting Thomas, Happy Hooligan, or Dorian Gray
was, the answers are here.

There are also 22 boxed texts (Oxford is very into boxed texts at
the moment) with short pieces on the background to allusions that
derive from specific sources, such as Alice in Wonderland, Adam and
Eve, Gulliver's Travels, and Don Quixote. Some of these have few
allusions linked to them and their inclusion seems questionable; it
is noticeable that major sources, like the Bible, Shakespeare and
Dickens, do not have such pieces. Although they might have become a
bit unwieldy, to leave them out does make the boxed texts seem even
more inconsequential. An index of origins would have been a more
helpful use of space.

[_The Oxford Dictionary of Allusions_, by Andrew Delahunty, Sheila
Dignen and Penny Stock, published by Oxford University Press on 26
April 2001; ISBN 0-19-860031-3; publisher's price GBP15.99 or
US$25.00]


3. Turns of Phrase: Bioinformatics
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Though the term has been around for well over a decade and a quick
AltaVista search turned up more than 400,000 hits for the word, it
has not yet reached any dictionary that I know of. That's because,
though it is a field with a high public profile, it is also a field
in its infancy, and one that is as yet ill-defined. You can tell
that by the way people are still arguing about what it covers.
Some, such as the National Institutes for Health in the US, take it
to be a general term for any use of computers to handle biological
information in a wide variety of fields, including medicine. But it
has been applied much more tightly in recent years to the use of
computers to organise and interpret the vast amount of data that is
coming out of the Human Genome Project. Yet a third definition says
it is the science of developing computer databases and algorithms
for the purpose of speeding up and helping biological research
(which includes the second definition, but is a good deal broader).
Whatever it's about, someone who does it is a bioinformaticist,
less commonly a bioinformatician.

Although analysts estimate that bioinformatics will grow into a $2
billion industry in the next five years, most IT companies believe
the payoffs will be much higher.
                                       [_Business Week_, Apr. 2001]

Susan Baker, workforce director at the Northern Virginia Technology
Council, says many companies are turning to areas such as
bioinformatics, which marries technology with biology.
                                     [_Washington Post_, Apr. 2001]


4. Weird Words: Floccinaucinihilipilification
/,flQksI,nO:sI,nIhIlI,pIlIfI'keiS(@)n/
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The action or habit of judging something to be worthless.

Back in the eighteenth century, Eton College had a grammar book
which listed a set of words from Latin which all meant "of little
or no value". In order, those were 'flocci', 'nauci', 'nihili', and
'pili' (which sound like four of the seven dwarves, Roman version,
but I digress). As a learned joke, somebody put all four of these
together and then stuck '-fication' on the end to make a noun for
something that is totally and absolutely valueless (a verb, meaning
to judge something to be valueless, 'floccinaucinihilipilificate',
could also be constructed, but hardly anybody ever does). The first
recorded use is by William Shenstone in 1741: "I loved him for
nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money".

A quick Latin lesson: 'flocci' is the plural of 'floccus', a tuft
of wool and the source of English words like 'flocculate', but also
figuratively in Latin something trivial; 'pili' is likewise the
plural of 'pilus', a hair, which we have inherited in words like
'depilatory', but which in Latin could meant a whit, jot, trifle or
other insignificant thing; 'nihili' is from 'nihil', nothing, as in
words like 'nihilism' and 'annihilate'; 'nauci' means worthless.

The word's principal function is to be trotted out as an example of
a long word (it was the longest recorded in the first edition of
the _Oxford English Dictionary_ but it was supplanted in the second
by 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis'). It had a rare
public airing in 1999 when Senator Jesse Helms used it to comment
on the demise of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: "I note your
distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT".


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. What is the origin of the word 'barbecue'? [Frances Beith]

A. We have to go back to the West Indian island of Hispaniola in
the seventeenth century to begin the search for this word. The
local Arawakan Indians had a method of erecting a frame of wooden
sticks over a fire in order to dry meat. In their language, Taino
(long since extinct), they called it a 'barbacòa', which Spanish
explorers borrowed.

This word seems also to have been applied by Europeans to sleeping
platforms raised off the ground to reduce the risk of snakebite,
presumably without the fire underneath. That extraordinary seaman
William Dampier was the first person to use the word in English
writing, in his _New Voyage round the World_ of 1699, and did so in
this variant sense: "And lay there all night, upon our Borbecu's,
or frames of Sticks, raised about 3 foot from the Ground".

It seems that the word began to be applied quite quickly to cooking
meat rather than drying it, and for such outdoor cooking to become
a social event, even though barbecues in those days differed from
the modern suburban ritual in that animals were often cooked whole
over pits of hot coals. In 1733, a certain Benjamin Lynde, who
lived in Salem, Massachusetts, wrote in his diary "Fair and hot;
Browne, barbacue; hack overset". This is rather a cryptic comment,
but then he could hardly have known that nearly three centuries
later his jotted note would be transmitted across the Internet as
the first ever recorded usage of the word in our modern sense. It
seems that on this hot but pleasant summer's day he went to some
neighbours called Browne to have a barbecue, but that at some
point, presumably on the way back, his hack - either his hired
horse or carriage - had an accident.

William Dampier, by the way, had a varied and controversial career:
the _Dictionary of National Biography_ describes him as "buccaneer,
pirate, circumnavigator, captain in the navy, and hydrographer". It
is appropriate that the man who first brought 'barbecue' into
English should have been a buccaneer, since that word derives from
'mukem', which a group of Brazilian Indians, the Tupi, used to
describe - a wooden framework on which meat was dried.


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