World Wide Words -- 13 Jul 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 296          Saturday 13 July 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. Turns of Phrase: Entitlement card.
2. Weird Words: Sternutation.
3. Topical Words: Frisbee.
4. Beyond Words.
5. Q&A: Happy as a clam.
6. Endnote.
7. Subscription commands.
8. Contact addresses.


1. Turns of Phrase: Entitlement card
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This one falls into the class of political euphemisms. The British
Home Office (the government department responsible for the police,
judicial system, and related matters) has proposed that all British
citizens be issued with identity cards. The aims include reducing
the levels of identity fraud (especially using stolen credit cards)
and to reassure people who are concerned about illegal immigrants
gaining access to employment and services. It is suggested that the
cards - which would be smart cards containing an embedded chip -
might contain biometric data such as fingerprints or iris records
as well as information about the holder. To help sugar the pill,
the Home Office decided not to call them identity cards, a concept
and a term that has been consistently and successfully opposed by
the libertarian left in Britain. Since the cards would prove the
holder was entitled to medical and other services, the consultation
document that put the idea out for discussion earlier this month
called them "entitlement cards" instead.

The Home Office believes that by building the entitlement cards
into newly issued driving licences or passports it can make the
scheme self-funding. Of the 51 million UK residents who would
require entitlement cards, some 38 million already hold driving
licences and 44 million have British passports.
                                  ["Independent", July 2002]

An entitlement card would make it far harder for firms to claim
they did not know someone had no right to work in the UK. And it
would help tackle one of the major 'pull' factors for people
traffickers who claim it is easy to work illegally in the UK.
                              ["Birmingham Post", July 2002]


2. Weird Words: Sternutation
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The act of sneezing.

This highfalutin alternative to "sneeze" cloaks the function in the
decent obscurity of an ancient language - it is from Latin
"sternuere", to sneeze. As you might guess, the word is more common
in medical use than in daily life, unless the user is being
deliberately and archly humorous. It appeared first in English in
1545, in a medical work on midwifery, "The Byrth of Mankynde,
Otherwyse Called the Womans Booke"; it referred to infants troubled
with "sternutation and sneesynge".

Later, it appeared in "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table" by
Oliver Wendell Holmes, in which he described the products of
Sumatra: "During the season of gathering the pepper, the persons
employed are subject to various incommodities, the chief of which
is violent and long-continued sternutation". (He wrote in the same
piece that "The bread-tree grows abundantly. Its branches are well
known to Europe and America under the familiar name of maccaroni.
The smaller twigs are called vermicelli". This shows you where his
tongue was placed when he wrote it.)

If you do word puzzles, you may have spotted that the word contains
all five vowels, though not in order. Not, you may agree, a word to
be sneezed at.


3. Topical Words: Frisbee
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Arthur "Spud" Melin has recently died. With his business partner,
Richard "Rich" Knerr, he successfully marketed the Frisbee, as well
as several other joyful additions to human silliness, such as the
Hula Hoop, the Slip 'N Slide and Silly Putty.

But neither Arthur Melin nor Richard Knerr can lay any claim to
inventing the thing. And, despite their registering the name as a
trade mark back in 1959, it's also pretty clear that they cannot
claim to have invented the word "Frisbee" either. It's not a
surprise that folklore should have grown up around an item that has
become an archetypal part of the American way of life; what is odd
is that the most commonly quoted story about where its name came
from may even be true.

The direct history of the device is well known. For a long time,
kids had played with throwing metal pie tins. Just after World War
Two, two former Army Air Corps pilots named Warren Franscioni and
Fred Morrison, based in San Luis Obispo, California, found a way of
moulding war-surplus plastics into a concave aerodynamic shape that
mimicked the action of pie tins but was a lot lighter and bruised
you less when it hit you. This was 1948, and the term "flying
saucer" had just appeared. Franscioni and Morrison borrowed it for
their new toy - it was also at various times called the "Rotary
Fingernail Clipper", the "Pipco Crash" (after Morrison's company)
and the "Pluto Platter".

The pair sold their saucer toys in California markets in the late
1940s and early 1950s, without huge success. Around 1955, they met
Melin and Knerr, who had been running a novelty toy company since
1948 under the name of "Wham-O", from the name of their first
product, a wooden slingshot. They bought Morrison out (but didn't
pay anything to Franscioni, it appears) and marketed the Pluto
Platters with mixed success. It was only after they renamed it the
"Frisbee" that the device really caught on. The rest, to coin a
cliché, is history.

But why "Frisbee"? It has been said that it came from the name of
Mr Frisbie, a US comic strip. But another story takes us across the
continent to the Frisbie Baking Company of Connecticut. The Frisbie
company sold its pies in tins embossed with the firm's name. As
elsewhere, the empty pie tins were found to be throwable with a
little skill. It is particularly said that games with them were
played by Yale undergraduates around the time of the Second World
War and after. Naturally they borrowed the company's name for the
game. Quite how Spud Melin or Rich Knerr heard about this from 3000
miles away is not clear, but it is suggested that one or other of
them encountered it during a sales trip to the East Coast.

Despite the anecdotal nature of the link, and the lack of really
firm evidence, it is now cautiously accepted by the experts that
this is indeed where the name came from.

The saddest part of all this is that the Frisbie Baking Company
went out of business in 1958, just when a respelled version of
their name was about to become famous.


4. Beyond Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Heather May, of St. John's, Newfoundland, found a reference in her
local community newspaper, "The Compass", to a politician who was
acting like a "pre-Madonna", rather than a "prima donna". (We must
assume, such is celebrity these days, that the Madonna in question
is Ms Ciccone, not the mother of Jesus.) A quick search turned up a
surprising number of other examples, such as this one from the US
publication "University Wire", dated 14 February 2002: "We won't
hear this kind of clarity and logical truth reported in today's
liberal media. That's why I, the harbinger of truth and intelligent
journalism, must make up for these pre-Madonna liberal reporters
who are in the pocket of the DNC". Another is from the "Birmingham
Post" of 4 June, on World Cup footballers: "They're mostly pre-
madonnas who don't give a damn". If they are pre-Madonna, might it
be that they're a bit past it?


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Do you have any idea of the origins of the phrase "happy as a
clam"? I've heard it and used it for years without wondering just
how one would determine that a clam is happy - my acquaintance with
the mollusc is strictly through consumption. [Judy Austin, Idaho]

A. Near that stage in their lives, only the most masochistic of
molluscs could be expected to experience anything but a sense of
imminent dread. Even the most comfortable of clams, however, can
hardly be called the life and soul of the party. All they can
expect is a watery existence, likely at any moment to be rudely
interrupted by a man with a spade, followed by conveyance to a very
hot place.

John G Saxe put it better, or at any rate more poetically, in his
"Sonnet to a Clam", in the late 1840s:

  Inglorious friend! most confident I am
  Thy life is one of very little ease;
  Albeit men mock thee with their similes,
  And prate of being "happy as a clam!"
  What though thy shell protects thy fragile head
  From the sharp bailiffs of the briny sea?
  Thy valves are, sure, no safety-valves to thee,
  While rakes are free to desecrate thy bed,
  And bear thee off, - as foemen take their spoil,
  Far from thy friends and family to roam;
  Forced, like a Hessian, from thy native home,
  To meet destruction in a foreign broil!
  Though thou art tender, yet thy humble bard
  Declares, 0 clam! thy case is shocking hard!

The saying is very definitely American, hardly known elsewhere. The
fact is, we've lost its second half, which makes everything clear.
The full expression is "happy as a clam at high tide" or "happy as
a clam at high water". Clam digging has to be done at low tide,
when you stand a chance of finding them and extracting them. At
high water, clams are comfortably covered in water and so able to
feed, comparatively at ease and free of the risk that some hunter
will rip them untimely from their sandy berths. I guess that's a
good enough definition of "happy".

The saying in its shortened form is first recorded in the 1830s,
though it is almost certainly a lot older; by 1848 the "Southern
Literary Messenger" of Richmond, Virginia could say that the
expression in its short form "is familiar to every one".


6. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"It’s a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a
word!" [Attributed to US President Andrew Jackson, a notoriously
bad speller.]


7. Subscription commands
-------------------------------------------------------------------
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


8. 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: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>.
  For Q&A section questions: <QandA at worldwidewords.org>.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
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 pages requires
prior permission: contact <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------