World Wide Words -- 27 Jul 02
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 26 11:23:05 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 300 Saturday 27 July 2002
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Sent each Saturday to 15,000+ subscribers in at least 119 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: Warchalking.
3. Weird Words: Absquatulate.
4. Q&A: Serrancified; Cockles of your heart.
5. Endnote.
6. Subscription commands.
7. Contact addresses.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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ISSUE NUMBERING The attentive eyes of Tony Nelson-Smith, Gjermund
Austvik, and Graham Adams noted that the last three issues of the
newsletter have all been numbered 296. As I don't use issue numbers
internally, and I copy the heading from issue to issue, forgetting
to update the issue number is a mistake that is easy to make. The
corrections were timely, as next week's issue is by that reckoning
number 300, a notable milestone along the way to wherever World
Wide Words is heading. However, a careful check shows that I've
made a similar uncorrected mistake before, in November 2000, so it
is this issue that is number 300. I take a moment to congratulate
myself on having lasted so long, despite such numerical ineptitude,
and rapidly move on.
OLOGIES AND ISMS This is the slightly odd title of my new book,
which is to be published by Oxford University Press on 22 August.
It's a dictionary, but one in an extended prose format with lots of
examples that will be easier for non-specialists to refer to. It is
about affixes - word beginnings and endings. Two of them, "-ology"
and "-ism", are so common that they have become words in their own
right and so are available for the title. For details and sample
entries, see <http://www.worldwidewords.org/ologies.htm>. The date
is for publication in the UK only; it will appear in Australia and
New Zealand later this year and in North America in Spring 2003. A
review will appear here around the date of UK publication.
2. Turns of Phrase: Warchalking
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Sometimes an idea appears just at the right moment to be taken up
and spread so widely that it seems to have appeared everywhere at
once. Such has happened with "warchalking", which was invented only
at the end of June but which is now ubiquitous online.
The name refers to chalk symbols that indicate to those in the know
that an unsecured wireless networking station is nearby that can be
used to tap into a corporate network and get illicit free Internet
access. The term and the code were created by Matt Jones in the UK,
based on the symbols that tramps and hobos once chalked on walls
and doors to pass on information to others about houses to avoid or
where a meal was to be had. Within days of appearing on his web
site, the idea had been picked up by SlashDot in the USA and his
symbols had been seen in London, New York, and Seattle.
This is just the most recent of a set of terms which is threatening
to turn "war" into a computer geek prefix meaning something like
"attempting to gain unauthorised network access". The first was the
1980s term "war dialling" for the way that hackers systematically
dialled telephone numbers in search of a modem that might give them
network access. More recent examples include "war driving" (driving
around town with a portable computer, looking for unsecured
wireless networks) and "warwalking" (the same idea, but on foot).
In a sign of its vitality, "warchalking" has already given rise to
the parody terms "chalkchalking", "pubchalking", and "blogchalking"
and it is being seriously suggested that the symbols should also
mark legitimate access points.
See the links below for the symbols and more details.
Warchalking's rise to infamy has even been given an air of
governmental legitimacy, at least in the US: the state of Utah is
planning on using the warchalking symbols on 250 government
buildings.
["Guardian", July 2002]
Whether it be a coffee shop in Seattle, a chip shop in Newcastle or
an airport lounge in Hong Kong, any place that offers free wireless
access to attract customers should be encouraged to adopt the
conventions of warchalking to specify its network capabilities.
["Personal Computer World", Sep. 2002]
LINKS
* Matt Jones' site: <http://www.blackbeltjones.com/warchalking/>.
* A useful ZNET piece: <http://makeashorterlink.com/?R20765051>.
* A Guardian article: <http://makeashorterlink.com/?A21721051>.
3. Weird Words: Absquatulate /ab'skwQtju:leIt/
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To make off, decamp, or abscond.
The 1830s - a period of great vigour and expansiveness in the US -
was also a decade of inventiveness in language, featuring a fashion
for word play, obscure abbreviations, fanciful coinages, and puns.
Only a few inventions of that period have survived to our times,
such as "skedaddle" and "hornswoggle". Among those that haven't
lasted the distance were "dumfungled" (used up), "sockdologer" (a
decisive blow), "blustrification" (celebrating boisterously), and
"goshbustified" (greatly pleased and gratified)
"Absquatulate" has had a good run and is still to be found in
modern American dictionaries. It was common enough that it became
one of the favourite "bêtes noires" of writers on style in the
latter part of the century. One such was Walton Burgess, who wrote
"Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence in Speaking Pronouncing
and Writing the English Language, Corrected", a title sufficient in
itself to make the strongest heart quail. He included the word in a
list of those to avoid, with this evocative example of it in
action: "He has absquatulated, and taken the specie with him". He
remarked disdainfully that "'absconded' is a more classical word".
A writer in the New Orleans "Weekly Picayune" in December 1839
noted that the origin of the word lay in "squat", to which had been
added the Latin "ab-" (from "abscond"), meaning "off, away", and
the verb ending "-ulate" (borrowed from words like "perambulate"),
so making a word meaning to get up and depart quickly. Or, as a
writer in the old "Vanity Fair" magazine in 1875 elaborated: "They
dusted, vamoosed the ranch, made tracks, cut dirt, hoed it out of
there".
4. Q&A
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Q. I hope you can run down an elusive phrase, part of which I can't
spell. It's from Virginia-North Carolina, an older generation,
(maybe a hundred years back) and probably from the Appalachians.
Three different older friends remember their grandmothers' using
it. It means "I'm full" or "I've had plenty to eat". Phonetically:
"My sufficiency is serrancified". All four of us are curious about
its origins. [Ruth Gaeta]
A. You've led me a merry dance with this one. I can't find that
exact word, but there are a number of close relatives around, which
some American Dialect Society members have helped me tease out.
The phrase seems to be a variation on a polite rejoinder that was
once quite widely known and is still around. A host might ask if
you have had enough to eat. Rather than just say that you had had
enough, being fearful that so bald a statement might be taken as
unrefined or ill-bred, you might instead say, "I've had an elegant
sufficiency". This presumably has its origin in some catch phrase
old enough that it has had time to disseminate widely, since I've
seen examples from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, and the
USA. A possible source is a poem called "Spring" by James Thomson,
dating from the middle of the eighteenth century, very widely
quoted during that century and the following one:
An elegant sufficiency, content,
Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books,
Ease and alternate labor, useful life,
Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven;
These are the matchless joys of virtuous love.
Paul McFedries, who runs the WordSpy mailing list, wrote to say,
"My grandmother-in-law (born and raised in Southern Ontario) often
says 'my sufficiency is suffonsified'". He found an example of this
spelling online: "My sufficiency is suffonsified; any more would be
double superfluency". He also turned up some variations, such as:
"After a fine meal was served and eaten, she would sit back in her
chair and say 'My sufficiency is suffancified'", as well as the
hugely elaborated "All of my sufficiencies have been suffulsified
and any further indulgence on my part may well prove to be super
sanctimonious".
All the examples I've quoted seem to be jocular elaborations of
"satisfied", but nothing I've turned up shows how that word became
so baroquely decorated in parts of North America. I suspect that it
is from the same grandiloquent and flamboyant fashion that gave us
words like "absquatulate", but tying down its early history seems
next to impossible. Perhaps American readers with long memories may
be able to help with more information?
An inelegantly insufficient response, I must admit, which may even
leave you unserrancified. Can't be helped.
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Q. I'm curious about the idiom "warm the cockles of your heart".
[Craig Bodhi]
A. It's one of the more lovely idioms in the language, isn't it?
Something that warms the cockles of one's heart induces a glow of
pleasure, sympathy, affection, or some such similar emotion. What
gets warmed is the innermost part of one's being. It's not that
surprising that it should be associated with the heart, that being
the presumed seat of the emotions for most people. But what are the
cockles?
We're not sure. Cockles are a type of bivalve mollusc, once a
staple part of the diet for many British people (you may recall
that Sweet Molly Malone once wheeled her wheelbarrow through
Dublin's fair city, crying "cockles and mussels, alive, alive
oh!"). They are frequently heart-shaped (their formal zoological
genus was at one time Cardium, of the heart), with ribbed shells.
It may be that the shape and spiral ribbing of the ventricles of
the heart reminded surgeons of the two valves of the cockle. But I
can't find an example of the word "cockle" being applied to the
heart outside this expression, which makes me a bit suspicious of
this explanation. It may be that the shape of the cockleshell,
suggesting the heart as it so obviously does, gave rise to "cockles
of the heart" as an expansion. Apart from that, researchers seem to
be at a loss.
What we do know is that it turns up first in the middle of the
seventeenth century, and that the earliest form of the idiom was
"rejoice the cockles of one's heart".
5. Endnote
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"The English language no longer belongs to the English. It's an
export reject." [George Lamming, in a BBC radio programme "Third
World" (1958), quoted in M J Cohen's "Penguin Thesaurus of
Quotations" (1998)]
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