World Wide Words -- 12 Jan 02

Sat Jan 12 08:45:27 UTC 2002

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 271         Saturday 12 January 2002
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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. Turns of Phrase: Evo-devo.
 2. Weird Words: Insinuendo.
 3. Out There: The American Heritage Book of English Usage.
 4. Q&A: Tinhorn, To boot.
 5. In passing? Europhoria.
 6. Over To You: Not this little black duck.
 7. Subscription commands.
 8. Contact addresses.

 1. Turns of Phrase: Evo-devo
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When you've invented a jaw-stretching phrase like "evolutionary
developmental biology", shortening it again seems a neat idea. So
the term "evo-devo" was born, sometime around the middle 1990s,
though it is only gradually beginning to appear outside a narrow
specialist arena.

In essence, it's a marriage of the approaches of two groups of
scientists - those who study how the genetic make-up of organisms
has evolved between species over millions of years, and those who
investigate the way that genes control the growth of individual
living organisms from conception to maturity.

Researchers have found that genes are extraordinarily stable, even
between species that evolved millions of years apart. Some genetic
markers and chemical structures have survived fundamental changes
in the physical appearance of species. The most famous is the hox
gene sequence that controls the way the body develops - in essence,
this was much the same in lowly organisms 700 million years ago as
it is in humans today.

Studying these genes from both points of view - both evolution and
development - helps researchers to understand how organisms today
develop from egg to mature adult, and provides insights into the
genetics of organisms like the dinosaurs that are known only from
fossils. The fusion of the two approaches is predicted to result in
many important discoveries.

 2. Weird Words: Insinuendo  /InsInju:'End at U/
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Insinuation and innuendo.

This week, Weird Words comes with a health warning: unwise use of
this word may seriously damage your linguistic credibility.

It is one of the few words in the Second Edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary to which an editorial note has been attached: "A
tasteless word", it says, signed with the initials of the then
editor, Dr Robert Burchfield. I would not normally wish to dispute
lexicographical matters with someone so senior, especially one who
has since edited the Third Edition of Fowler's Modern English
Usage, but that's surely a harsh verdict on a little word that
flows trippingly off the tongue.

It is a blend of "insinuation" and "innuendo", a portmanteau
construction containing elements of both. Throughout its life (and
it is more than a century old, as we shall see), it has been used
either humorously, or to indicate that a speaker in a book or play
is uneducated.

The OED knows of it from 1885. Its first example says that it was
invented by a legislator from South Carolina. This seems to be
confirmed by this little squib, which appeared in Appletons'
Journal of New York in 1875. It manages the trick of being both
heavy-handed and tongue-in-cheek at the same time:

  The South Carolina Legislature has immortalized itself
  by coining the word "insinuendos." Seeing the wideness
  of its application, the "Tribune" begs to be "permitted
  to express the obligations which society, and especially
  society's representatives in official life, legislators,
  cabinet officers, and such, are under for an uncommonly
  fresh, beautiful, and expressive phrase. It admirably
  fits the time. It is a contribution to current politics
  as well as to philology."

I can reveal that this belief about its origin is wrong. The
unnamed legislator from South Carolina may have re-invented the
word, but it was around earlier, since it appeared in 1871 in
"Putkins", a now totally forgotten one-act comic drama by William
Emerson. In this, he has an uneducated person say "I scorn the
insinuendo!". Whether Mr Emerson invented it, or whether he
borrowed a term already known, the linguistic record is as yet
unable to say.

It is rarely seen today, but anyone using it would have to flag
their facetious intent, or be assumed to be as ignorant as Mr
Emerson's character. But it is inoffensive enough, in all truth,
and neatly encapsulates two ideas themselves closely related.

 3. Out There: The American Heritage Book of English Usage.
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Many books are available to give help with English usage, but few
can be accessed online. An exception is "The American Heritage Book
of English Usage", published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1996.
You will find it at <http://www.bartleby.com/64/> on the Project
Bartleby site (which has several other works of language interest
and is well worth browsing). The book includes notes on grammar,
style, choosing the right word, pronunciation, science terms, word
formation, e-mail, and a list of linguistic terms. The book is also
available for purchase.

 4. Q&A
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Q. I've been watching Westerns for years and the term "tinhorn" is
always used to describe people who are new to the West. Where did
the term come from?  [I Millinger]

A. My guess is that either you've misunderstood the way people were
using it, or you were actually thinking of "greenhorn" (a greenhorn
was originally a young ox with newly grown horns; later on it came
to mean anyone young or inexperienced). The usual sense of tinhorn,
on the other hand, is of someone contemptible, especially a person
who is pretending to have money, influence, or ability. "Tinhorn"
has a much more interesting history than "greenhorn", so having
answered your query let me digress ...

To find the origin of "tinhorn" we must delve into the murky world
of gambling with dice. There was a game in the nineteenth century
called grand hazard (nothing to do, however, with the old French
and British dice game from which our noun "hazard" derives and
which was the origin of the game of craps). A cruder version of
grand hazard was given the name chuck-a-luck in North America.

Both games were played with three dice, a chute containing a set of
inclined planes that tumbled the dice as they fell, and a flat area
on which the dice fell and whose layout determined whether the
player had won or not. The difference between grand hazard and
chuck-a-luck was that the former's layout was more complex, with
opportunities for betting on odds or evens or other combinations
(rather like roulette); the chuck-a-luck layout consisted only of
six areas numbered from one to six.

Chuck-a-luck was unsophisticated and easy to set up, so it was the
province of small-time gamblers on river boats, on street corners,
or in low gaming establishments. Though the proper chute was made
of leather, those with limited resources used a cruder one made of
tin.

The term "tinhorn" referred to this cheap chute. It's actually an
abbreviation of the fuller phrase "tinhorn gambler". This was a
term of contempt for these small-time operators of games of chuck-
a-luck, whose patrons ("tinhorn sports") played for small stakes.
It also reflected the common view that all things made of tin were
poor imitations of better quality goods (an idea that survives in
our derogatory adjective "tinny") and was also a pun on the
existing sense of "tin horn" for a cheaply constructed and
inharmonious musical instrument.

Tinhorn gamblers tended to make up for the poor quality of their
gaming equipment by a dressy appearance and showy demeanour, from
which the later sense of the word derives. In truth, they belonged
with the keepers of cheap saloons and three-card trick men, down
near the bottom of the social pyramid.

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Q. Can you give a bit of history on the little orphan phrase "to
boot"?  It looks like it should be related to the historic
"pirate's booty", or even "bootlegger". [Skip Huffman]

A. Don't be confused by apparent associations with "boot" for the
heavyweight footwear. The only one of your three terms linked in
this way is "bootlegger" (see <http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-
boo1.htm>). "Booty" comes from Middle Low German "buite", exchange
or distribution.

"To boot" usually means "in addition, besides, moreover", as here
in Falk, by Joseph Conrad: "At all events he was a Scandinavian of
some sort, and a bloated monopolist to boot". The phrase can
sometimes contain the idea of some positive outcome or advantage,
not just something additional. In this, it's reflecting its ancient
origin in Old English "bot", advantage, remedy. It's of Germanic
origin and is related to Dutch "boete" and German "Busse" (a
penance or fine) as well as to the English words "better" and
"best".

"Boot" could at one time exist alone with the idea of profit or
advantage. Shakespeare uses it this way in Antony and Cleopatra:
"Give him no breath, but now / Make boot of his distraction" - in
other words, take advantage of his being distracted. It also turns
up in several terms from feudal times that referred to the right of
tenants to take materials from the manor for their own use, such as
"firebote", "hedgebote", and "housebote", in which it can be
translated as "benefit".

 5. In passing? Europhoria
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A punning combination of "euro" and "euphoria", this is the
supposedly highly positive reaction to the introduction of euro
notes and coins across Europe. Both emotion and word are likely to
be short-lived.

 6. Over To You
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Samantha Dickinson wrote: "Where does the phrase "not this little
black duck" originate? It's used quite extensively in Australia,
and when doing a bit of research on it, I found a reference to
young Australian Aborigines taking up the expression from Daffy
Duck. But if it's from Daffy Duck, why don't Americans use it? Do
you have any ideas?"

I don't - my reference books are silent on the matter, though it
sounds like a catchphrase that has entered the language. Over to
you, Australian subscribers!

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