World Wide Words -- 27 Oct 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 260          Saturday 27 October 2001
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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>
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Gongoozler.
3. Out There: Dictionary.com.
4. Article: An Exceedance of Impactful Ignorals.
5. Over To You.
6. Q & A: Eggplant, Bootleg.
7. Subscription commands and information.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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MISPLACED MODIFIERS  A lot of very interesting material has come
in, though many don't concern misplaced modifiers in the sense that
was given by the examples in last week's issue, but instead other
unconsciously humorous juxtapositions, such as the newspaper report
that "A soldier hit one man gathering firewood with a rifle butt",
or the legal communication: "Please forward the papers to Bob and
Harold and have them executed immediately", or the ambiguous New
York sign, "Fine for parking", or the headline complaining of
bureaucratic delays: "Red tape holds up bridge". However much fun
these are, they aren't exactly what we're looking for. Someone
identified only as George from West Virginia hit it exactly with
this: "I saw an ad in a little local paper offering a 'black man's
dressing chair'". Do keep sending in examples. The best ones (in
your editor's arrogant opinion) will be featured next week.

BLACK MARIA  Douglas G Wilson suggested that the name might be a
transferred epithet from a famous racehorse of the period. Space is
at a premium here this week, so I've put the details in the archive
piece on the Web site. Follow the link from the home page.


2. Weird Words: Gongoozler  /gQN'gu:zl@/
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An idle spectator.

This is one of the odder words in the English lexicon and not only
because of its strange appearance. It suddenly started to become
popular in Britain from about 1970 onwards, but with very little
previous recorded history attached to it. It is closely linked with
canal life, and even now it seems to be a word especially favoured
by those who like to mess about on narrow waterways. It is said to
have been a bit of canal workers' slang, originally for a person
who stood on the towpath idly watching activity. You might expect
that it would date from the heyday of the canals in the early part
of the nineteenth century, but it is actually only recorded from
the end of that century or the early twentieth. It was given wider
public notice by the late L T C Rolt, who used it in his book about
canal life, Narrow Boat, in 1944. It is said to derive from a
couple of words in Lincolnshire dialect: "gawn" and "gooze", both
meaning to stare or gape. However, nobody seems too clear about
this.


3. Out There: Dictionary.com
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This commercial site, at <http://www.dictionary.com/>, allows you
to look up a word from a variety of dictionary sources. A Q&A page
allows queries to be posed to "Dr. Dictionary" (with an FAQ listing
many answers). There are word games, online foreign dictionaries,
and links to writing resources; you can also subscribe to a Word of
the Day by e-mail.


4. Article: An Exceedance of Impactful Ignorals
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New terms that blush unseen.

A subscriber asked me whether the word is spelled "exceedence" or
"exceedance". It was a surprisingly hard question to answer, since
many people would say there's no such word, and it appears in very
few dictionaries (the Fourth Edition of the American Heritage
Dictionary being the only one, so far as I know). An online search
through AltaVista, however, produced the remarkable information
that there were more than 30,000 examples of it recorded (most
spelling it "exceedance", a form that one might expect from related
compounds).

If the word, however spelled, is so common, why isn't it in most
dictionaries? By one of those odd coincidences, a similar question
was asked by another subscriber in reference to "impactful"; yet
another commented on the noun use of "strive", as in "our strive
towards profitability", found quite often online but which is also
unnoticed by lexicographers.

The opinion of many people, especially those who have been trained
in conventional writing environments, would be that such usages are
a reflection of the dumbing-down effect of the Internet, in which
badly written, badly spelled, and ignorant text is widespread.

Many dictionary writers and other specialist language watchers take
a more positive view. They would argue that what we are seeing here
is a genuinely new and fascinating phenomenon. For the first time
in history, large numbers of people, of widely varying educational
standards, are able to make the results of their writing available
to anyone who cares to enquire. For the first time, too, through
the medium of computer databases, it is possible to search for,
collect and summarise what is being written.

This unique combination is producing lots of examples like the ones
quoted above. Some are certainly just ignorance. Some seem to be
the result of a short-term failure in the brain's processing, so
that a writer can't for the moment think of "agreement", and
invents "agreeance". (It's possible that "administrate", a word
that sends some people to the verge of apoplexy, has evolved from
"administer" in a similar way.)

BW (Before the Web), when writing that became publicly available
had first to pass under the watchful eye of a sub-editor, such
formations would have been blue-pencilled into conventional forms.
What we are seeing is surely not a new phenomenon in itself, but an
accelerated evolution of word creation, a sudden outpouring of
large numbers of unmediated examples of a process that has been
going on for as long as we have had language. Some such words are
certainly not as new as they seem: the Oxford English Dictionary
database has an example of "exceedance" from 1836; "impactful" is
known from a learned journal of 1973 and is probably older still.

So why do so many people dislike such creations? It may be a hang-
over of an older view, that the creation of new words was a mark
only of badly-educated writers. In the nineteenth century, for
example, good writers took great care to avoid seeming to invent
new terms, though they sometimes did so unwittingly. Mark Twain
claimed never to have coined a word as far as he knew, though
historical dictionaries list him as the first user of many. Thomas
Hardy once wrote: "Once or twice recently I have looked up a word
in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and
have found it there right enough - only to read on and find that
the sole authority is myself in a half-forgotten novel".

Many of these words cannot be regarded simply as mistakes, because
they serve a useful purpose. There's no simple alternative to
"impactful", for example. To avoid "exceedance" one has to write a
rather awkward construction involving the verbal noun "exceeding".
Though the noun "strive" could be replaced by synonyms such as
"effort" or "attempt", it suggests a great and sustained effort
that the alternatives do not quite convey. Another example is
"ignoral", the quality or state of being ignored. This was
championed by the British writer Richard Boston in the 1970s on the
grounds that nothing similar existed.

If these words are useful and are of some age why aren't they in
most dictionaries? It's not that lexicographers are slow to catch
on to them (their reading programmes flag them quickly enough), nor
that they dislike them (dictionary makers, in their professional
capacities, have no views on the relative desirability of words)
but rather that such words are still uncommon off the Net (though
this is changing). If that suggests a prejudice against online
sources, even if an unconscious one, you may well be right.

Since small dictionaries are hard pressed for space, and regularly
weed out less frequently used terms to make room for the continual
influx of, for example, new technical terms, it's unsurprising that
a term like "ignoral" should be left on the discard pile; it is
less obvious why "exceedance" should be. Its editors tell me that
the big Oxford English Dictionary will certainly notice all of
them, though it will take a while, since the current revision is
working forward from M and it will be a year or several before its
researchers get to them.


5. Over to You
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Despite my appearance of omniscience, queries sometimes come in for
which I can find nothing useful to say, but which look as though an
explanation ought to exist. Time for subscribers to tell me and the
questioner what they know.  Send your comments and stories to me at
<editor at worldwidewords.org>.

Chester Graham e-mailed from Australia: "Is anyone familiar with
the expression 'sleeping her head into train oil' for someone who
is sleeping longer than usual? I have only one family as a source
for it, as a Scots use in Australia. We tried looking around for
it, but got lazy".

Train oil I know, but not the full expression. Does anybody else
know of it, or is it one family's private saying? Over To You ...


6. Q&A
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[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.]

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Q. Why do we call the "eggplant" by that name? [Thomas Casey]

A. This curious comestible (actually a fruit, but eaten as a
vegetable) probably has more names in varieties of the English
language than any other. That's because it has been cultivated for
a very long time and it has been widely transmitted across the
world from its heartland in eastern and southern Asia (the Arabs
introduced it to Spain from India as early as the eighth century
AD, and the Persians took it to Africa).

The name of "eggplant" was given it by Europeans in the middle of
the eighteenth century because the variety they knew had fruits
that were the shape and size of goose eggs. That variety also had
fruits that are a whitish or yellowish colour rather than the wine
purple that is more familiar to us nowadays. So the variety they
knew really did look as though it had fruits like eggs.

In Britain, it is usually called an "aubergine", a name which was
borrowed through French and Catalan from its Arabic name "al-
badinjan". That word had reached Arabic through Persian from the
Sanskrit "vatimgana", which indicates how long it has been cultivated
in India. In that country, and in South Africa, it is often called
"brinjal", a word which comes from the same Arabic source as the
British "aubergine", but filtered through Portuguese. Some people
in the southern states of the US still know it as "Guinea squash",
a name that commemorates its having been brought there from West
Africa in the eighteenth century.

Of these names, "eggplant" is the easiest to say and remember, but
its prosaic descriptiveness lacks the romance and sense of history
that is attached to the others.

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Q. How did "bootleg" come to mean something of illegal manufacture?
[Jeff Martin]

A. It's a surprisingly late coinage, first being recorded from
Omaha, Nebraska in 1889 (with the related "bootlegger" being
recorded in Oklahoma the same year). Prohibition gave it a huge
boost, of course.

"Bootleg" was at first a literal term. In the days when horsemen
wore long boots, their bootlegs were good places to hide things.
For example, this description comes from The War in Kansas by G
Douglas Brewerton of 1856: "He sports a sky-blue blanket overcoat
(a favorite color in Missouri), from the side-pocket of which the
butt of a six-shooter peeps threateningly out, and if you will take
a look into his right bootleg, we should say that a serviceable
bowie-knife might be found inserted between the leather and his
tucked-in Kentucky jean pantaloons".

By an obvious-enough figurative extension, illicit goods that had
to be kept hidden were referred to as "bootleg" commodities. The
word seems to have been applied specifically to alcohol at first
(again, Prohibition helped that association greatly), though more
recently its application has broadened to encompass a whole range
of other illicit or pirated goods.


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