World Wide Words -- 07 Dec 02
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 6 19:05:02 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 319 Saturday 7 December 2002
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 15,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org> <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
ADDRESS TO ONE OF THOSE IN THE 'CONTACT ADDRESSES' SECTION.
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Book Review: Weird and Wonderful Words.
3. Weird Words: Colophonian.
4. Q&A: Eavesdrop; Huckleberry; Mind your beeswax.
5. Plain English Campaign Awards 2002.
6. Endnote.
A. How to join and leave the list.
B. Contact addresses.
C. Help support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
LAST WEEK'S ISSUE The system that sends the newsletters suffered a
serious hardware problem last weekend. The newsletters dribbled out
over a period of many hours and some didn't reach subscribers. Some
other subscribers, in what looks like a mindless mechanical attempt
at equalisation, got two copies. Apologies to everyone affected. If
you were one of those who didn't get a copy, visit this address and
follow the links to get the appropriate issue:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/worldwidewords.html
OTPOTSS Paul Hoffman e-mailed to point out - following my piece on
this strange acronym last week - that a variant, MOTSS, has existed
online as an abbreviation for "members of the same sex" as far back
as the creation of the Usenet newsgroup of that name in 1983.
2. Book Review: Weird and Wonderful Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Weird Words? Is this not a breach of my copyright? Actually I'm a
good part of the genesis of this little book. The original British
version was for a while given away with copies of the "New Oxford
Dictionary of English"; its editors in Oxford, being short of both
time and money, mined my Weird Words section for inspiration in
creating it.
Erin McKean has expanded and varied their selection and Roz Chast
has added some delightful illustrations; I wrote the webliography
(a word for the online equivalent of a bibliography that might well
be in the book itself), which also appears in the current issue of
"Verbatim", which Erin McKean edits in her spare time from her day
job as a Senior Editor in the North American Dictionary Program
(see http://www.worldwidewords.org/reviews/verbatim.htm for a
review of her collection of pieces from that journal).
So readers will recognise some of the words from the list that has
built up in my Weird Words archive, but there are hundreds more for
your delectation, each of which is provided with a sentence or two
of explanation: "apocrisiary" (a person appointed to give answers);
"bablatrice" (a female babbler), "elaqueate" (to free from a noose
or other entanglement); "jiffle" (to fidget); "ochlophobia" (an
extreme or irrational fear of crowds); "otacust" (an eavesdropper
or spy - see below for how the word "eavesdrop" came about);
"pollinctor" (a person who prepares a dead body for cremation or
embalming), and "siagonology" (the study of jawbones). Here's the
complete entry for a seasonal example that's longer than most:
"qualtagh", the first person you meet after leaving
your house on some special occasion. Also, the first person
entering a house on New Year's Day (often called a first
foot). The new year's qualtagh, for luck, is supposed to be
a dark-haired man. A red-headed or female qualtagh is
unlucky. Other things to bring luck to the house on New
Year's Day include serving black-eyed peas, having the
qualtagh bring shortbread and whiskey (sounds fine for any
day of the year), and sweeping all the garbage in the house
out through the front door before midnight on New Year's
Eve (so that any of the misfortune of the past year is
gone, not to return).
This week's Weird Word, below, also takes its inspiration from an
entry in the book. Ms McKean even includes some instructions for
creating your own weird words, which contains a table of suitable
prefixes and suffixes (I wonder where she got that from?).
Don't assume that because I seem to have been a kind of honorary
midwife to this book, and that my fingerprints may still be lightly
discerned on parts of it, that I am uncritically puffing it. If you
like my Weird Words section, you will certainly enjoy browsing
through this list of oddities. One for the holiday book list?
[McKean, Erin (ed), "Weird and Wonderful Words", published by
Oxford University Press, New York; hardback, pp132; ISBN 0-19-
515905-5; publisher's price in US $16.95; in UK GBP9.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THE BOOK
UK: GBP9.65 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?AB)
US: US$11.87 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?CV)
CA: CDN$ 22.73 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?EF)
[Click on a link or paste it into your browser to order online. If
you do so you get World Wide Words a small commission that helps to
pay for the Web site and general operating expenses. See the end of
the newsletter for general Amazon links and other ways to support
World Wide Words.]
3. Weird Words: Colophonian
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Relating to a colophon.
"Colophon", a weird-enough word in its own right, is the name for
the inscription at the end of a book that gives facts about its
publication or design - hence the old saying "from title page to
colophon", from beginning to end. These days the information is
more frequently on the title page and its reverse and the word is
often used instead for a publisher's emblem on the spine or title
page and hence a publisher's imprint. The word "colophonian" in the
sense above doesn't exist in the language: it was originally a
mistake for "Colophonian" (with a capital C), which means "an
inhabitant of Colophon", a town in Lydia that is part of modern
Turkey. However, the word could still be redeemed - there isn't one
now that means "relating to a colophon" (even though there is the
word "colophonize", to give a book a colophon), and this is as good
a candidate as any. "Colophon" and its relatives come ultimately
from a Greek word meaning "finishing touch". None is to be confused
with "colophony", a pine resin which is named after ancient
Colophon.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS TO WORLD WIDE WORDS
You surely know somebody who would like to receive this newsletter
every week. During the next two weeks, I am offering a service by
which you can gift a subscription in time for the holidays.
Just send an e-mail message to giftsubs at worldwidewords.org and I'll
do the rest. Include:
- the exact, full e-mail address of the recipient
- the recipient's name (first name & family name both needed)
- any message you would like to send
- any special date on which you would like the gift message
to be despatched (must be before 20 December, so recipients
get the Christmas edition of the newsletter on 21 December;
there will be no issue on 28 December)
I'll then send a simple, but of course beautifully written, e-mail
message with all the details you provide, inviting the recipient of
your gift to become a member of the list.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
4. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Can you please tell where "eavesdrop" originates. [Gary Beech]
A. It began in Anglo-Saxon England. The word came from Old Norse
and originally referred to the area around a building that was
liable to be wetted by water flowing off the projecting eaves of
the roof above (gutters hadn't been invented yet). There was an
ancient custom that stopped a landowner from building within two
feet of his boundary, for fear that the water cascading off the
eaves might cause problems for his neighbour.
By the end of the medieval period, the word "eavesdropper" had been
invented for somebody who stood within this strip of ground, under
the projecting eaves and close to the walls of a building, in order
to listen surreptitiously to the conversations within. The verb "to
eavesdrop" in the same sense came along about a century later.
-----------
Q. What is the origin of the expression "I'll be your Huckleberry"?
What exactly does it mean? [Cristlyn Randazzo]
A. What it means is easy enough. To be one's huckleberry - usually
as the phrase "I'm your huckleberry" - is to be just the right
person for a given job, or a willing executor of some commission.
Where it comes from needs a bit more explaining.
First a bit of botanical history. When European settlers arrived in
the New World, they found several plants that provided small, dark-
coloured sweet berries. They reminded them of the English bilberry
and similar fruits and they gave them one of the dialect terms they
knew for them, "hurtleberry", whose origin is unknown (though some
say it has something to do with "hurt", from the bruised colour of
the berries). Very early on - at the latest 1670 - this was
corrupted to "huckleberry".
As huckleberries are small, dark and rather insignificant, in the
early part of the nineteenth century the word became a synonym for
something humble or minor, or a tiny amount. An example from 1832:
"He was within a huckleberry of being smothered to death". Later on
it came to mean somebody inconsequential. Mark Twain borrowed some
aspects of these ideas to name his famous character, Huckleberry
Finn. His idea, as he told an interviewer in 1895, was to establish
that he was a boy "of lower extraction or degree" than Tom Sawyer.
Also around the 1830s, we see the same idea of something small
being elaborated and bombasted in the way so typical of the period
to make the comparison "a huckleberry to a persimmon", the
persimmon being so much larger that it immediately establishes the
image of something tiny against something substantial. There's also
"a huckleberry over one's persimmon", something just a little bit
beyond one's reach or abilities; an example is in "David Crockett:
His Life and Adventures" by John S C Abbott, of 1874: "This was a
hard business on me, for I could just barely write my own name. But
to do this, and write the warrants too, was at least a huckleberry
over my persimmon".
Quite how "I'm your huckleberry" came out of all that with the
sense of the man for the job isn't obvious. It seems that the word
came to be given as a mark of affection or comradeship to one's
partner or sidekick. There is often an identification of oneself as
a willing helper or assistant about it, as here in "True to
Himself", by Edward Stratemeyer, dated 1900: "'I will pay you for
whatever you do for me.' 'Then I'm your huckleberry. Who are you
and what do you want to know?'".
Short question, long answer!
-----------
Q. Is it true that "mind your beeswax" comes from the use of wax on
one's face to fill in small pox scars? If one got too close to the
fire these would melt and run; therefore, mind your beeswax.
[Louise]
A. The questions people ask ... This one was educational, speaking
personally, since I had no idea that there was a slang expression
"mind your own beeswax" until you asked, though I've since
discovered it is known both in Britain and the USA.
The supposed explanation you quote is the product of a warped
imagination. The phrase "mind your own beeswax" has the same sense
as "mind your own business" - it's just a rather feeble attempt at
creating a humorous alternative. It belongs to a group of such
facetious inventions that includes the Australian "mind your own
fish" and the slightly more witty New Zealand version "mind your
own pigeon" ("pigeon" here being derived from "pidgin", business,
as in Pidgin English).
5. Plain English Campaign Awards 2002
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The Plain English Campaign is a British organisation striving for
public information to be written in straightforward language. Its
2002 awards ceremony was held on Wednesday. Several government,
commercial and charitable bodies were praised for the quality of
their recent publications. The judges noted an improvement in the
writing of internal government documents. "If civil servants can
communicate so clearly with each other, there must be hope for
those who write documents for the public," they said.
But as so often, it was the awards for gobbledegook that got the
attention of the press. The movie star Richard Gere won this year's
Foot in Mouth award for incomprehensible sentences. Interviewed
over rumours about his sexual orientation, he said: "You have to
start to really look at yourself. I know who I am. No one else
knows who I am. Does it change the fact of who I am what anyone
says about it? If I was a giraffe, and someone said I was a snake,
I'd think, no, actually I'm a giraffe. Those kind of things hurt
people round you more than they hurt you, because they hurt for
you". I dispute the PEC's view that this is incomprehensible: it
sounds odd, could certainly be better phrased and the last bit has
to be read twice to be understood, but it does make sense, more so
than the speech of some other public figures I could mention.
Golden Bull awards were presented to a number of organisations that
succeeded in generating baffling statements, such as this one from
the British electronics company Marconi: "The benefit of having
dedicated subject matter experts who are able to evangelise the
attributes and business imperatives of their products is starting
to bear fruit" (I'm told by my publicity adviser that this also
makes perfect sense if you know business-speak). And this letter to
a customer from the Halifax General Insurance Services Ltd gained
an award: "I can confirm that you have not inform us a conservatory
that has never been built and that you have not been charged any
extra for one built". Oh, good.
The Golden Bull award that newspapers seized on with glee appears
on the Web site of a design firm named Anadrom Ltd. A statement on
the site is reproduced by the Campaign: "Please browse the site to
see our full range of services, we can remain customer focused and
goal-directed, innovate and be an inside-out organization which
facilitates sticky web-readiness transforming turnkey eyeballs to
brand 24/365 paradigms with benchmark turnkey channels implementing
viral e-services and dot-com action-items while we take that action
item off-line and raise a red flag and remember touch base as you
think about the red tape outside of the box and seize B2B e-tailers
and re-envisioneer innovative partnerships that evolve dot-com
initiatives delivering synergistic earballs to incentivize".
Hang on one minute. Earballs? Re-envisioneer? Sticky web-readiness?
That doesn't sound like anything intended to be taken seriously. On
checking, the site contains one page, with no further information,
no links, and no contact details. It's obviously a placeholder for
future development - the web designer has typed in tongue-in-cheek
inventive rubbish to fill a space into which he intends later to
insert real content (it's similar to the cod-Latin text used by
print designers for the same purpose, which they confusingly call
Greeking). It would seem the Plain English Campaign has made itself
look a bit silly by taking it seriously.
LINKS
PEC awards: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/awards.html
Anadrom: http://www.anadrom.net
Guardian: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?PE
[Thanks to Roger Whitehead for telling me about all this.]
6. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"The cure for mixed metaphors, I have always found, is for the
patient to be obliged to draw a picture of the result." [Bernard
Levin, "In These Times" (1986); quoted in the "Oxford Dictionary of
Thematic Quotations" (2000)]
A. How to join and leave the list
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/wordlist.htm.
Or, you can send a message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org
from the address at which you are (or want to be) subscribed:
To leave, send: SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS
To join, send: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First-name Last-name
B. Contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Do not use the address that comes up when you hit 'Reply' on this
mailing, or your message will be sent to an electronic dead-letter
office. Either create a new message, or change the outgoing 'To:'
address to one of these:
For general comments, especially responses to Q&A pieces:
TheEditor at worldwidewords.org
For questions intended for reply in a future Q&A feature:
QandA at worldwidewords.org
C. Help support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You can now donate through PayPal to help cover the operating costs
of this newsletter and the web site. Another way is to buy things
through an Amazon site, which gets World Wide Words a commission at
no extra cost to you. See http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm
for more details. The direct links to the Amazon sites are these:
AMAZON USA: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?QA
AMAZON UK: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?JZ
AMAZON CANADA: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?MG
The direct link to PayPal is:
http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?PP
-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2002. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or in part in other free
media online provided that you include this note and the copyright
notice above. Reproduction in print media or on Web sites requires
prior permission: contact TheEditor at worldwidewords.org.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list