World Wide Words -- 09 Feb 02

Fri Feb 8 09:58:59 UTC 2002

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 275         Saturday 9 February 2002
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Sent each Saturday to 14,000+ subscribers in at least 117 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Darwin Day.
3. Weird Words: Ell.
4. In passing: MVVD.
5. Q&A: Roger.
6. Misplaced Modifiers Redux.
7. Subscription commands.
8. Contact addresses.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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DICE  "Shame, shame!" Don Lewis e-mailed. "The singular of dice is
die. It's comforting to see that even a word maven makes mistakes."
Many other subscribers, from America and elsewhere, made similar
comments. World Wide Words' copy editor, Julane Marx, who lives in
California, queried this in the draft, but I overruled her. British
usage is distinctive: here the singular of "dice" is also "dice",
so you can refer to "a dice", as I did. Robert Burchfield, in the
Third Edition of "Fowler's Modern English Usage" says specifically
of "dice", plural: "one of them is also called a dice", and other
British usage guides echo him. Both forms were in use in Britain
from at least the fifteenth century onwards, but what seems to have
happened, as so often, is that Americans (and others) kept the
singular, while British usage came to prefer the invariant form.

YE GODS AND LITTLE FISHES  Several subscribers mentioned variations
on this phrase that they remember from times past. Myrna Finnell
said, "My mother (1905-1989) used to say smilingly: 'Great guns and
little fishes!' as if to indicate mild surprise." James P Rambo
heard it in his youth as "Great cats and little fishes". Anne
Camper remembers her mother using "Ye gods and little catfishes!"
These are most probably euphemistic equivalents or embroideries.
The link to fish may be to the parable of the loaves and fishes in
St Matthew's Gospel.

LONG ARM  Several subscribers versed in US law pointed out, after
the piece on "long arm of the law", that there is a principle named
"long-arm jurisdiction", which allows courts to exercise powers
over individuals outside their own area. Despite a legal reference
saying firmly that this comes from the phrase "the long arm of the
law", it seems more probable that it is a parallel development from
"making a long arm".

COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN  Many thanks to everyone who responded to my
request for countries to add to the World Wide Words subscription
list. American Samoa got scrubbed, since that subscriber now lives
half a world away, but people come in addition from the Netherlands
Antilles, Palestine, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, and St Kitts and
Nevis.

2. Turns of Phrase: Darwin Day
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February 12 is the anniversary of the birthday of Charles Darwin,
the author of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Since 1997, when it began at the University of Tennessee, events
have been organised annually in the USA to mark this day, under the
title "Darwin Day". It has came about because many scientists are
concerned about the number of schools and colleges in the US which
- under pressure from the religious right - either do not teach
evolution or teach creationism instead. The purpose of the day is
to raise the profile of the ideas behind evolutionary theory, to
encourage debate, and to rebut fundamentalist ideas.

A campaign was launched in the USA two years ago to make Darwin's
birthday an international day of celebration of his life and
achievements and of the theory of evolution. The organisers are
placing particular emphasis on getting the Day established in
Britain, where Darwin was born, and where anti-evolution sentiment
is rare. It is hoped to have the Day in place by the bicentenary of
Darwin's birth in 2009.

It's going to be rather harder getting Darwin Day widely accepted
in the US, because 12 February 1809, by an odd coincidence, was
also the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

3. Weird Words: Ell
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An obsolete unit of length.

Find a convenient male adult of roughly average size. Measure the
distance from his shoulder to his wrist. You should find that it is
about 22-23 inches (56-58 cm). That's one of the oldest ways to
define an "ell", once the usual measure in large parts of Europe
for textiles such as woollen cloth. It was considered to be roughly
equal to six hand-breadths - a hand was 4 inches, a unit still used
for measuring the heights of horses, which would make an "ell"
about 24 inches.

In Old English, "ell" meant the arm, so that the "elbow" is the arm
bend. There was even an saying "give him an inch and he will take
an ell"; when the ell was replaced by the yard, the saying changed,
too.

In the medieval period in England, the ell was fixed in size by
various acts of Parliament to be 45 inches - twice the size of the
older unit. Even this is open to some variation, as the same acts
of Parliament defined an inch to be the breadth of the thumb, in
particular that of the official, the "alnager", whose job it was to
measure and stamp each piece of cloth as conforming to the law. His
name comes from Old French "aulne", to measure by the ell, a word
which has the same Indo-European root as Latin "ulna", the forearm.

The "aunager" was once an important part of medieval consumer
protection, whose job was to protect buyers of woollen cloth (a key
English export of the period) from fraud. Parliament passed several
laws concerning his duties, most of them self-contradictory, by
1500 reaching a point at which it was hard to see how he could do
much that was useful at all. The post was finally abolished in
1699, in the reign of William III.

4. In passing: MVVD
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Collins' Dictionaries have for some years been producing a Word of
the Year. This year is their centenary and they have already begun
citing terms that might make it big in 2002. One of them is MVVD,
for "Male Vertical Volume Drinker", a man who drinks standing up at
a bar, especially one who consumes large quantities, moves from bar
to bar, and ends up being violent. Collins bases the recommendation
on just one sighting, which seems to been invented by a journalist
in peril of a deadline. Its chances of becoming popular, let alone
a defining word of the year, seem extremely remote. For more, see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4349162,00.html

5. Q&A
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Q. I've been getting space-e-mails (a friend on the station) and
it's reminded me that I've been long pondering "Roger that" in the
meaning of "I've heard what you've said". I realize all occupations
have their own buzzwords, and one can't get distracted by them all,
but this one's well-known, and, well, why "Roger"? Why not "Ginger"
or "Daniel"? [Sharlene Baker, USA]

A. They came from outer space ...

The word is definitely the proper name, but it's not been chosen
randomly. Nor was there a famous early radio operator named Roger,
as some wit somewhere is probably at this moment trying to convince
somebody. It all goes back to phonetic radio alphabets, designed to
transmit words by spelling them out letter by letter over poor-
quality circuits. The phonetic expressions are chosen to be as
distinctive as possible to limit the risk of confusing them.

We're so used to the internationally accepted "Alpha, Bravo,
Charlie ... X-Ray, Yankee, Zulu" alphabet, dating from about 1955,
that only the older among us remember that there were others that
preceded it. In particular, the phonetic alphabets used by the US
Navy and the Royal Air Force from about 1941 both used "Roger" as
the standard abbreviation for the letter "R". Some at different
times used the very similar "Robert", but we are most familiar with
"Roger" because it was standard for a large part of the Second
World War.

(A friend of mine many years ago had served in the RAF during the
War - so long ago, he would say, that Pontius was a pilot. He once
had to spell a word out to a telephone operator - this would have
been about 1970 - and automatically used the "Able", "Baker",
"Charlie" alphabet he had learnt in signals training. After he had
finished, there was a little pause, then the operator said, very
sweetly, "You *are* old-fashioned, aren't you, sir".)

The letter R, expanded to "Roger", was used to mean "message
received". Since the operator was often acknowledging receipt of a
message on which he would have to act in some way, the response
came not only to mean that he had received it, but that he had
understood it, a subtle but crucial extension. (If he wanted to say
explicitly that he would carry out an instruction, he would add
"wilco", short for "I will comply". Hence all these handle-bar
moustached aviators in films like The Dam Busters shouting "Roger,
Wilco!" into their handsets before peeling off to do some deed of
daring.)

This meaning for "Roger" became so stereotyped that it survived the
shift to the international phonetic alphabet that almost everybody
now uses, which instead has "Romeo" for "R". It's a good thing it
only came in after the War: "Romeo, Wilco!" doesn't have the same
ring ...

6. Misplaced Modifiers Redux
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Elyssa R Downs wrote: "On my way in to work this morning I passed
Apsley House (aka "No 1 London"), the former home of the Duke of
Wellington at Hyde Park Corner. I was amused to see that it has
been awarded the 'Small visitor attraction of the year' award,
making me wonder if my 6'3" husband would be allowed entry (I'm OK
as I'm only 5'3") ... ."

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