World Wide Words -- 20 Oct 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 259          Saturday 20 October 2001
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 13,000+ subscribers in at least 113 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>   Mail: <editor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to leave the list, please do not reply to this message.
 Instructions on how to leave are at the end of this newsletter.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
       This newsletter is best viewed in a monospaced font.


Contents
--------
1. Weird Words: Analemmatic.
2. Out There: The Word Court.
3. Q & A: Could care less, Black Maria.
4. Over To You: Misplaced modifiers.
5. Subscription commands, pronunciation guide, copyright notice.


1. Weird Words: Analemmatic  /,an@'lEmatIk/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Relating to a scale that shows the seasonal difference
between time as shown by clocks and by the sun.

I almost literally bumped into this word recently. My local council
has laid out a sundial in a patch of grass in front of the parish
church. The accompanying panel explains that the sundial is of the
'analemmatic' type. This word is in few of my dictionaries (and the
panel's author, naughtily, does not explain it), but it turns out
to be a well-known technical term among those who are skilled in
the mathematics needed to design sundials.

The more common sort of sundial has an angled post (usually called
the 'gnomon', or sometimes the 'style') which casts a shadow on a
circular dial. Its analemmatic cousin, on the other hand, has a
vertical gnomon, which casts a shadow on an elliptical scale. For
it to tell the time with adequate accuracy (remembering Hilaire
Belloc: "I am a sundial, and I make a botch, of what is done much
better by a watch"), the gnomon must first be moved to the correct
position along a north-south axis according to the season. Though a
small sundial of this type is rather fiddly to make and use, large
ones laid out on a flat area permit a person to act as the gnomon
(my local one is of this sort). Earnest seekers after chronological
intelligence then need only position themselves at the appropriate
spot along the axis for the time of year and - weather permitting -
they can then read off the time by noting where their shadow falls
on the scale.

The word is the adjective derived from 'analemma'. One sense of
this is a scale shaped like a figure 8, giving the declination of
the sun and the 'equation of time' for each day of the year. This
shows how clock time differs from that given by the sun (which
varies a little season by season because the Earth's orbit isn't
exactly circular). It derives from Latin 'analemma' for the
pedestal of a sundial (and hence the sundial itself), which comes
from the Greek word for a prop or support.


2. Out There: The Word Court
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Barbara Wallraff has been holding court in the Atlantic Monthly for
many years. You will find an index to her articles at this address:
<http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fugitives/courtrec.htm>. If you
can cope with the teeny-weeny print, this page will introduce you
to much interesting browsing on the subject of the English language
and how we mutilate it. In addition to her usual monthly question
and answer columns, another series features Word Fugitives, her
name for those terms that ought to exist in English, but which the
fertile minds of English speakers have somehow failed (until now)
to come up with. You may also be interested in Ms Wallraff's book,
also called _Word Court_, which was published by Harcourt last year
and which reproduces many of her pieces.


3. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[Send your questions to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will
be acknowledged, but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is very
limited. If I can reply, a response will appear here and on the Web
site. If you wish to comment on a reply below, please do NOT use
that address, but e-mail <editor at worldwidewords.org> instead.]

                        -----------

Q. Your discussion of the contradictory interpretations of 'cheap
at half the price' [see <http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-
che1.htm>] reminds me of a similar conundrum that keeps flustering
me in comparing the phrases 'I couldn't care less' and 'I could
care less', each of which (at least here in America) is used to
mean the same thing (which is basically 'I *really* don't care'),
even though their syntax suggests that they should be opposites.
[Leland Woodbury, New York; related questions came from Marc
Schoenfeld in San Francisco and many others.]

A. The form 'I could care less' has provoked a vast amount of
comment and criticism in the past thirty years or so. Few people
have had a kind word for it, and many have been vehemently opposed
to it (William and Mary Morris, for example, in the _Harper
Dictionary of Contemporary Usage_, back in 1975, called it "an
ignorant debasement of language", which seems much too powerful a
condemnation). Writers are less inclined to abuse it these days,
perhaps because Americans have had time to get used to it.

A bit of history first: the original expression, of course, was 'I
couldn't care less', meaning "it is impossible for me to have less
interest or concern in this matter, since I am already utterly
indifferent". It is originally British. The first record of it in
print I know of is in 1946, as the title of a book by Anthony
Phelps, recording his experiences in Air Transport Auxiliary during
World War II. By then it had clearly become sufficiently well known
that he could rely on its being recognised. It seems to have
reached the US some time in the 1950s and to have become popular in
the latter part of that decade. The inverted form 'I could care
less' was coined in the US and is found only there. It may have
begun to be used in the early 1960s, though it turns up in a
written form only in 1966.

Why it lost its negative has been much discussed. It's clear that
the process is different from the shift in meaning that took place
with 'cheap at half the price'. In that case, the inversion came
about through a mistaken interpretation of its meaning, as has
happened, for example, with 'beg the question' [see the piece at
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-beg1.htm>].

In these cases people have tried to apply logic, and it has failed
them. Attempts to be logical about 'I could care less' also fail.
Taken literally, if one could care less, then one must care at
least a little, which is obviously the opposite of what is meant.
It is so clearly logical nonsense that to condemn it for being so
(as some commentators have done) misses the point. The intent is
obviously sarcastic - the speaker is really saying, "As if there
was something in the world that I care less about".

However, this doesn't explain how it came about in the first place.
Something caused the negative to vanish even while the original
form of the expression was still very much in vogue and available
for comparison. Stephen Pinker, in _The Language Instinct_, points
out that the pattern of intonation in the two versions is very
different.

There's a close link between the stress pattern of 'I could care
less' and the kind that appears in certain sarcastic or self-
deprecatory phrases associated with Yiddish speakers. Perhaps the
best known is "I should be so lucky!", in which the real sense is
"I have no hope of being so lucky", a closely similar stress
pattern with the same sarcastic inversion of meaning. There's no
evidence to suggest that 'I could care less' came directly from
Yiddish, but the similarity is suggestive.

So it's actually a very interesting linguistic development. But it
is still regarded as slangy, and also has some social class stigma
attached. And because it is hard to be sarcastic in writing, it
loses its force when put on paper and just ends up looking stupid.
In such cases, the older form, while still rather colloquial, at
least will communicate your meaning - at least to those who really
could care less.

                        -----------

Q. What is the origin of 'Black Maria'? The _Bloomsbury Dictionary
of Phrase & Allusion_ attributes it to a "brawny American negress"
who kept a boarding house in Boston. However, there was a play on
BBC Radio 4 recently that suggests the origin lies in a lady who
came to court in London wearing black dresses of exceeding
splendour. Partridge refers to a story by Joseph C Neal, _Peter
Ploddy_ (1844). Can you shed some light on this matter? [David
Hannah]

A. We can dispose of the fashionable London lady straightaway, as
the expression for a police or prison van is quite certainly
American in origin.

The Boston story is about Maria Lee, a large black woman who kept a
boarding house in the 1820s with such severity that she became more
feared than the police, who called on her to help them catch and
restrain criminals. The story almost certainly became attached to
her much later because she was well-known, black, and was named
Maria, but there's no evidence that she was actually the source of
the name for the police vans. The first reference we have to such a
vehicle in Boston is dated 1847, which might seem to be rather too
long after her heyday for there to be a direct connection.

The book that Eric Partridge mentions is _Peter Ploddy, and Other
Oddities_, by Joseph Clay Neal, a well-known American journalist
and humorist of the period. It contains the story _The Prison Van;
or, The Black Maria_, whose title is the first recorded use of the
term. In it, the author wrote: "In Philadelphia ... the popular
voice applies the name of 'Black Maria' to each of these melancholy
vehicles". As Philadelphia is quite some way from Boston, either
the term had become very widely known by the date of its first
recorded use, or we have to rule out a Boston link.

One problem in tracking the term down is that it seems to have been
highly colloquial, and references to it are rare before the start
of the twentieth century. There seems to be little hope of ever
finding out more about its origins.


4. Over To You: Misplaced modifiers
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Some time ago, Tony Nelson-Smith e-mailed me to mention that _New
Scientist_ magazine had referred to a Health and Safety information
sheet on bouncy castles with the title 'inflatable children's play
equipment'.

He went on to say: "This reminded me of two potentially misleading
items from my own experience: a work bucket labelled 'black
plasterer's bucket' (what do Caucasian plasterers use?) and 'extra
thick child wipes' (which mother is going to buy them and thus
admit that her child is subnormal?)".

Once your mind is attuned to such ill-placed modifying words, the
damn things pop out at every turn. My wife found her favourite
example in an advertisement, also in _New Scientist_, which asked
for a "brown fat scientist".

Mr Nelson-Smith ended his message with these words: "Any chance of
your asking your readers for more examples and giving us a list of
the best?" Every chance. Over to you ...

No prizes, alas. I'll post a selection in two weeks' time.


5. Subscription commands
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* All messages relating to subscriptions MUST be sent to the list
  server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>. DO NOT REPLY
  TO THIS MESSAGE. Instructions must be in the body of e-mails -
  subject lines are ignored.

* To leave the list, send <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> the
  instruction

     SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS

* To join the list, send <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> the
  instruction

     SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS Your-first-name Your-last-name

* For a complete list of commands, including instructions on how
  to change your e-mail address, send the list server the message

     INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS

-------------------------------------------------------------------
* For a key to the IPA pronunciations used in these mailings, see
  <http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm>, or send a blank
  e-mail message to <pronguide at worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2001. You
  may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free
  media provided that you don't alter the text in any way, you give
  the source as World Wide Words, and you quote the site address
  of <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------