World Wide Words -- 05 Jan 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 270          Saturday 5 January 2002
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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. Turns of Phrase: Linguistic profiling.
3. Topical Words: Wildfire.
4. Weird Words: Taghairm.
5. Words of the Year, 2001.
6. Subscription commands.
7. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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ECOFACT  The storm broke about my ears within hours of last week's
mailing going out. The consensus was that I had been too harsh on
the etymological abilities of archaeologists when I described the
word as an error of derivation. It can be argued - as lots of you
did - that if an "artifact" is something made by man, an "ecofact"
can be something made by nature. There's another term, "ventifact",
rather older, which refers to a stone or rock sculpted by wind or
wind-blown sand. This is definitely derived from "ventus", wind,
plus "factum", something made.

POTBOILER  Douglas G Wilson pointed out that the expression "to
boil the pot", to supply one's livelihood, existed in the language
at least half a century before "potboiler" was recorded. Something
that boiled the pot was obviously enough a pot-boiler, so the term
is probably much the same age as "boil the pot" - it's just that we
don't have written examples to prove it existed.

A SPECIAL WELCOME to everyone who joined the mailing list having
seen the write-up in Wednesday's List-A-Day feature.


2. Turns of Phrase: Linguistic profiling
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The term "linguistic profiling" is not in itself new, but in recent
months seems to have taken on two fresh meanings. The key idea
behind both is that the ethnic group a person belongs to can be
identified from the way he or she speaks.

One sense stems from the older "psychological profiling", a
technique increasingly being used by law-enforcement agencies to
deduce the character and motivations of an unknown person who has
committed a serious crime; here, the voices of suspects yield clues
about their origins and identities. "Linguistic profiling" has also
been in the news in the US in another sense. It is almost certainly
derived from "racial profiling", as are other phrases like "ethnic
profiling" and "facial profiling" (see Words of the Year below)
that are less common, as a new term for a long-standing form of
racial discrimination (for example in housing) based on whether a
telephone caller sounds black or not. In this sense the profiling
is done by those who exercise discrimination. This second meaning
is mainly associated with John Baugh, professor of education and
linguistics at Stanford University, who has done research in this
area.

Confusingly, "linguistic profiling" has an older, more neutral
sense - techniques employed by educationalists to diagnose and
treat children with language problems such as dyslexia.

He found that when he showed up to see places in person, they were
suddenly unavailable, and he suspected he only got the appointment
on the telephone because, as he says, he's a black man who doesn't
sound black.
                     ["Analysis", National Public Radio, Sep. 2001]

Johnson is suing the landlord for "linguistic profiling," a form of
racial discrimination the courts have yet to fully recognize. His
case will be set for trial early in the new year.
                                            ["ABC News", Dec. 2001]


3. Topical Words: Wildfire
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"Sydney braces for surge in wildfires" said a headline on the BBC
Online site earlier this week about the bushfires raging in New
South Wales. That was an odd-sounding choice of word, so far has
"wildfire" moved - especially in Britain - from a literal reference
to a raging conflagration to a metaphorical word for something that
moves rapidly.

According to the big "Oxford English Dictionary", the sense of a
fast-moving blaze burning out of control died out in Britain in the
seventeenth century; it isn't in the "New Oxford Dictionary of
English" in that sense at all (though it is in other dictionaries
from Britain and around the world, often as a subsidiary sense).
The original meaning - sometime in the twelfth century - was of a
fire caused by lightning (and so a doubly inappropriate word for
these current Australian outbreaks, many of which are alleged to
have been deliberately started). It was a fire that occurred in the
wild, the uncultivated countryside, not necessarily one that was
untameable (though the association of ideas between these two
senses must have been hugely powerful).

Somehow this idea got tangled up in people's mind with the Jack-o'-
lantern, will-o'-the-wisp, friar's lantern, or ignis fatuus, that
mysterious, cool, dancing flame of burning methane sometimes to be
seen in marshes. The word "wildfire" comes from the old Germanic
"wildfeuer" for that phenomenon (modern German prefers "Irrlicht"
or "Trugbild").

In the thirteenth century, the same word became the usual English
way to speak about the invention otherwise called Greek fire - a
mixture of inflammable substances that was a precursor to napalm -
easy to light but as hard to put out as any bushfire. The link with
lightning resurfaced at the end of the seventeenth century, when
the word was used for that curious phenomenon in which lightning
flashes but no thunder is heard, better known as summer lightning.

But our current sense of "wildfire", for something that moves as
fast as a fire in dry country, seems to be owed to Shakespeare, who
used it in "The Rape of Lucrece" for an enchanting storyteller
"Whose words like wildfire burnt the shining glory / Of rich-built
Ilion". So far had the figurative sense taken over that by the end
of the seventeenth century William Dampier could write in his "New
Voyage round the World" of 1699, quite without any punning
intention, that they set fire to some grassland, which burnt "like
Wild-fire". How else?


4. Weird Words: Taghairm  /t@'g@:rm/
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A method of divination once practised in the Scottish Highlands.

The big "Oxford English Dictionary" has more than 100 words for
various methods of divination (mostly ending in "-mancy"). Such
techniques include inspecting the entrails of animals, studying the
appearance of water in a basin or the look of one's urine, watching
the movements of mice, observing the cries of birds, or reading
random sentences from a book. Of them all, this one is possibly the
weirdest.

When investigating anything historical to do with the Scots, Sir
Walter Scott usually pops up. He describes the method in a scornful
footnote to his "Lady of the Lake":

  The Highlanders, like all rude people, had various superstitious
  modes of inquiring into futurity. One of the most noted was the
  Taghairm. A person was wrapped up in the skin of a newly-slain
  bullock, and deposited beside a waterfall, or at the bottom of a
  precipice, or in some other strange, wild, and unusual situation,
  where the scenery around him suggested nothing but objects of
  horror. In this situation, he revolved in his mind the question
  proposed; and whatever was impressed upon him by his exalted
  imagination, passed for the inspiration of the disembodied
  spirits, who haunt these desolate recesses.

The method is well recorded, though with variations in method from
place to place. The same name has been applied to a more barbarous
custom, in which live black cats were spitted and roasted over a
fire, their dying wails supposedly calling a cat-spirit, sometimes
called Big Ears, who would grant one favours.

The word, in Scots Gaelic, refers to a summons or invocation.


5. Words of the Year
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Sharply differing views emerged this week about "911" or "nine-
eleven", which has come to be shorthand in the US for the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

At the Annual Meeting of the American Dialect Society last night in
San Francisco, members voted the term not only to be the one Most
Likely to Succeed, but also declared it to be their Word of the
Year. However, earlier in the week, the Lake Superior State
University issued its list of words which should be banished from
the language. "Nine-eleven" was on that list, too, as a term which
many people seem to have found trivialising or unnecessary.

The American Dialect Society each year chooses a group of words in
various categories that seem to be most representative of the year
just past. It must be said that voting is governed by intentions
that are not always wholly scholarly. Tongues are often firmly in
cheeks, and mischievous intent is not unknown. The full list of the
awards last night were:

Most Outrageous: "assoline", methane used as a fuel.
Most Euphemistic: "daisy cutter", a bomb used by US Air Forces
   in Afghanistan (not new, but definitely a distinguishing
   word of 2001).
Most Useful: there was a tie between "facial profiling",
   videotaping a crowd to identify criminals and terrorists,
   and "second-hand speech", overheard cell-phone conversation.
Most Creative: "shuicide bomber", a terrorist with a bomb in
   his shoe.
Most Unnecessary: "impeachment nostalgia", longing for the
   superficial news of the Clinton era
Least Likely to Succeed: "Osamaniac", a woman sexually
   attracted to Osama bin Laden
Most Inspirational: "Let's roll!", the words of the late Todd
  Beamer, who mobilised passengers on Flight 93 on 11 September
  to overcome the terrorists who had hijacked the plane.

See the ADS page at <http://www.americandialect.org/woty.shtml> for
previous annual selections going back to 1990.

On the flip side, every New Year’s Day since 1976 the Lake Superior
State University has issued a list of words that should be banished
from the language for misuse, overuse or general uselessness. The
list is compiled from nominations sent in to the University by
people from all over the place. It began as a publicity ploy for
this small college, and should be taken in much the same spirit as
the unicorn hunts and the world stone-skipping tournaments that
were two other initiatives of LSSU's former head of publicity, the
late Bill Rabe.

Also, it has to be taken more as a measure of words and phrases
that generally annoy submitters than as a list of unwanted words of
the year 2001. For example, the current set includes "synergy",
"car-jacking", "infomercial" (wrongly spelled, alas), and "no-
brainer", none of which are new. Some words in the list have no
good alternatives and some of those who wrote seemed less concerned
with cleansing the language of unwanted or useless terms than they
were with seizing the opportunity to complain by proxy about the
thing the word identifies ("faith-based" is a good example).

Apart from "911", in the same area of life, the phrase "then the
terrorists will have won" gained much support as an annoying
expression: as one nominator put it: "It has become so over-used as
to become almost meaningless, especially when, for example, the
Smallville Chamber of Commerce says, 'If you don't come to the
annual parade, then the terrorists win'."

Though you should provide yourself with the proverbial pinch of
salt before visiting the site, you may spot some over-familiar
terms in the full list of nominations that you, too, feel strongly
about. See <http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current/>. For the lists
from previous years, and the story of how the Banished Words List
came about, see <http://www.lssu.edu/banished/>. You can also
nominate a word of your own ...


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