World Wide Words -- 03 Nov 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 261          Saturday 3 November 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. Review: Verbatim.
3. Weird Words: Cyborg.
4. Q & A: Barking mad.
5. Over To You: Misplaced Modifiers.
6. Subscription commands and information.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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EXCEEDANCE OF IMPACTFUL IGNORALS  Perhaps I should have explained
the word "exceedance" in last week's piece, since several queries
concerning it came in. It doesn't just mean "excess", but refers to
the amount by which some quantity exceeds a permitted maximum or a
stated norm. It sometimes appears, for example, in US government
and state regulations limiting pollution levels. And having said
that "ignoral" has never caught on, I was contradicted by Simon
Hoggart, who used it in a column in the Guardian the same day ...


2. Review: Verbatim
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Many Americans interested in language have sometime in the last
thirty years come across the US quarterly called Verbatim. It was
founded in 1974 by Laurence Urdang, who edited it for its first 23
years. The publication was feared to be defunct at one point but
was resurrected with the aid of a philanthropic grant.

The current editor, Erin McKean, has assembled an anthology that
contains an eclectic group of articles from the whole history of
the journal, in the process bringing together contributions from
some of the better-known names in linguistics, dictionary making,
and language writing, including the late Frederick Cassidy, Frank
Abate, Richard Lederer, and Jesse Sheidlower, as well as Laurence
Urdang himself.

Some idea of the fun to be found within this anthology is obvious
from the titles of a few of its 58 articles: "Sexual Intercourse in
American College Dictionaries", "Thunderboxes and Chuggies", "Noun
Overuse Phenomenon Article", "British Football Chants", "Nullspeak:
A Question of Rotating Strawberry Madonnas", and "Never Ask a
Uruguayan Waitress for a Little Box: She Might Apply Her Foot to
Your Eyelet".

If you wish to find out what these tantalising titles refer to,
you'll just have to buy the book. But in tasting my way through the
text during what would otherwise have been a boring rail journey,
many things jumped out at me. Erin McKean described what she calls
McKean's Law: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others
will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical
error" (Amen, sister). An article on US placenames could feature in
one of my Cornucopia lists (it will, Michael, it will) and reveals
the existence of Toad Suck in Arkansas, Knockemstiff in Ohio, and
Hell and Gone Creek in Oklahoma. Walter C Kidney tried to persuade
me in another piece that a "verbunkos" was a dance performed to
persuade people to enlist in the Hungarian army. It turns out there
is a link between "breakfast", "scarecrow", and "pickpocket" (clue:
check the grammatical function of their elements). Another article
provided a fascinating disquisition on the vocabulary of the
popular TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The volume, like its parent journal, inevitably has a strong US
bias - broadened only by occasional pieces such as one on Sussex
dialect - but most of the articles can be read with pleasure by
anyone interested in the vagaries of the English language.

My train arrived at its London terminus almost before I realised
it. Thank you, Verbatim and Erin McKean, for filling the time so
pleasantly.

[McKean, Erin [ed.] Verbatim, published by Harcourt in October
2001; pp352; ISBN 0-15-60129-X; publisher's price US$14.00. Not
formally available outside North America, but obtainable from
online booksellers. For more on the journal, including selected
articles, see <http://www.verbatimmag.com>]


3. Weird Words: Cyborg
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A human being whose powers have been augmented by mechanical means.

You might not know the name, but you've seen these creations in so
many SF action movies, all seeming to star Arnold Schwarzenegger:
pumped-up individuals with prosthetic implants, built-in armaments,
extended sight and hearing, and other physical enhancements. TV
exploiters of the idea - described by a couple of academics in 1960
as an "exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as
an integrated homeostatic system" - include Dr Who's Daleks, the
Six Million Dollar Man (based on the novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin)
and its spin-off, the Bionic Woman. SF writing has explored people-
machine hybrids for much of its history, featuring mechanical
devices that are powered by human brains (up to and including
starships), people who have been enhanced by mechanical means so
they can operate in alien environments, and people who have been
modified so that they can plug into computers (a central theme of
the cyberpunk novels of the 1980s). If all this brings to mind
those baddies in Star Trek called the Borg, that is hardly
accidental, since their name was borrowed from its second element.
The word was invented in 1960 as a blend of "cybernetic" with
"organism"; the first word is the adjective from "cybernetics", the
study of the control of and communication with machines, which was
created in 1947 by Norbert Weiner from the Greek word "kubernetes",
a steersman.


4. Q&A
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[Send your questions to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will
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Q. Where does the term "barking mad" come from? My theory is that
it comes from: "One stop short of Barking", referring to the London
underground station. Any other ideas? [Paul Hughes]

A. I can see the way you're thinking: there are lots of phrases
along these lines (sorry, accidental pun) that suggest somebody has
less than his full complement of little grey cells: "Two sandwiches
short of a picnic", "three sheep short in the top paddock", "two
bricks short of a load".

And the name of the East London suburb is a seductive choice for
the origins of this slang term. Peter Ackroyd, in his recent book
London: A Biography goes so far as to suggest that monks in
medieval times had a lunatic asylum there, which gave rise to the
term. The problem with Mr Ackroyd's idea is that the evidence
strongly suggests the term is nothing like so old as that.

The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains not a
single reference to "barking mad" and I can't find an example in my
electronic database of more than 4,000 works of literature. Eric
Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English,
dates it to about 1965. Nicholas Shearing of the OED kindly hunted
through their database of citations and found that their earliest
reference - almost certainly anachronistic, as it's in a historical
novel about the Napoleonic wars - is from Patrick O'Brian's Post
Captain of 1972: "A thief from the Winchester assizes had gone
raving, staring, barking mad off Ushant". However, he did discover
an example of "barking" used alone; it's in a book of 1968 by John
Welcome, entitled Hell is Where You Find It: "She's mad, that's the
worst of it. Bonkers, barking, round the bend".

All these pointers add up to a strong presumption that "barking
mad" is a bit of modern British slang. The dates of the examples
might suggest that the abbreviated form "barking" came first, but
probably just shows that we haven't yet tracked down its first use.
The idea behind the saying is surely that the person referred to is
so deranged that he or she barks like a dog.

Your idea for its origin does have a relative in a more recent, but
temporary, London expression, "dagenham", presumably invented by
somebody familiar with the Underground route map in East London.
One who is "Dagenham" is three stations east of Barking ...


5. Over To You: Misplaced Modifiers
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An intriguing and entertaining selection of ambiguous phrases came
in as a result of the request two weeks ago.

Lots of people mentioned the common North American highway caution
sign, "Slow Children Playing". Joe and Mary Gilliland pointed out
that it raised the question, "where do intelligent children play?"
for which the answer had to be, "not in the street". Jim Blue felt
it implied that "faster children can fend for themselves". (Terri
Davies mentioned the common British equivalent of: "Slow Children
Crossing", which reminds me of the old P G Wodehouse gag about "the
pace that kills" really being a quiet amble across a busy street).
Still on roadside signs - in Sydney, Australia, Alan Jeary travels
to work each day past one that exhorts: "Drive in Manure".

Some examples were old enough for me to have to brush the cobwebs
off before reading them. In particular, Mike Young reminded me of
the village in Essex called Ugley, one of whose organisations, of
long repute, is the Ugley Women's Institute. Its members got so fed
up with all the witticisms that a little while ago they changed its
name to "The Women's Institute (Ugley branch)".

Jeanne Goodman e-mailed this: "I used to work in The Open Book in
South Carolina and one of our book reps told us a story I've never
forgotten. He was in The Intimate Bookshop and they called for him
over the loudspeaker, 'Will the little brown man please come to the
office,' shocking the customers. He was the rep for the publisher,
Little Brown". Richard Moore wrote: "Listening to a radio station
here in Michigan, the host said to check 'Michigan's Home For the
Ageing Website'. I didn't know the internet was that old!"

One example was sadly topical. Following the anthrax attacks in the
US, Don Paterson found that the San Mateo County Times' online
edition had the headline: "County workers to get suspicious mail
training". As he said, "It's a shame that they couldn't afford a
reputable training programme".

Robert Aquilina said that "science produces a plethora of these,
but my favorite for a long time has been the job, again advertised
in the New Scientist, of 'incoherent radiation scientist'". (My own
private favourite from that magazine is the repeated request for a
'synthetic organic chemist' - why not hire a natural one?). Earl
Padfield found another technical instance in a corporate recruiting
brochure for a large oil company, which solicited applicants to be
a "crude oil man".

Advertisements can raise different problems. Richard English from
the UK mentioned that "An advertisement on the UKHRD board recently
asked for a 'Young Witness Service Training Officer'. The post was,
of course, for a training officer for the Young Witness Service. It
provoked criticism from those who thought it was ageist". Another
British subscriber, John Nurick, said that "My favourite, from the
Society supplement to the Guardian about 1992, is the council that
wanted a 'black arts officer'. Alas, it wasn't the black arts but
the arts of black people". A potentially more serious example of
this problem, remembered by Alan Harrison and Fran Acheson, was a
court report in the same newspaper about a rape said to have been
committed by "a black cab driver". This provoked angry reactions
from readers who felt it unnecessarily revealed the ethnic origin
of an offender, when it really referred to the driver of a London
black cab.

There were lots of food-related examples. Alison Crosland wrote:
"During a visit to the Cafe du Jardin restaurant in Covent Garden,
London, on Friday evening I was almost tempted to try the menu's
'Seared diver caught scallops'. However, while I will eat scallops,
I do not approve of cruelty to divers in catching them". This came
from Peter Ingerman: "I have a little card that was clipped to a
menu to inform browsers of the day's special culinary delights. It
read 'Our special one half Swedish pan fried chicken'. I still have
difficulty imagining a Swedish chicken in half of a fried pan, but
perhaps there are others with better skills at mental images?" Mark
Mallett recently heard of "The All-American Cowboy Cookbook", which
raises an interesting image. Harry Campbell found a reference in
the Glasgow Herald last Christmas to a seasonal offer from the
Safeway supermarket chain of "outdoor-reared pork chipolatas".

But I must give the palm to Dennis Whitehead. He was perusing a
hospital supplies catalogue recently and found listed a "large-
bottomed patient commode".


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