World Wide Words -- 04 May 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 287           Saturday 4 May 2002
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Review: The Power of Babel, by John McWhorter.
3. In Passing? Vibralanguage; Pharmacotopia.
4. Weird Words: Sphragistics.
5. Out There: Ethnologue.
6. Q&A: Like the dickens; Mooncalf.
7. Endnote.
8. Subscription commands.
9. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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STEMWINDER  Back in March, I answered a question about this word by
giving the usual dictionary sense - that it was something first-
rate or excellent, especially a rousing speech. This was backed up
by checking in about a dozen older works by US writers such as Mark
Twain, Jack London and O Henry, all of whom used it this way.

But a dozen or so subscribers wrote to say that they understand the
word in a different sense - that it is a speech or sermon so long,
interminable and boring that it feels as though one needs to wind
one's watch before it ends. This would seem to be an interesting
example of one kind of folk etymology, in which a term that has
become divorced from its roots and its context takes on a new sense
by being analysed afresh.

The term is still quite common (a newspaper database search found
more than a hundred examples in the past ten years). Most use it in
the traditional sense, but not all. An example of the new sense
appeared in the "Washington Post" on 10 July 2001:

   The race is, in some respects, a giant popularity contest,
   and Hoyer's somewhat ponderous speaking style and white-
   bread image may be a drawback. "The question for Steny is,
   does he know when to stop?" said one ally, referring to
   Hoyer's stemwinder speeches.

Another interesting point is that "stemwinder" is also used in some
of these examples to refer to a person, particularly someone who is
the energising focus of some activity (the mainspring, perhaps?) or
the person who is giving the rousing speech that is the more usual
sense of "a real stemwinder".


2. Review: The Power of Babel: The Natural History of Language
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My comments above about "stemwinder" acquiring a new sense under
the noses of lexicographers shows one way out of the many in which
a language can change. Such change - in particular the inexorable
tendency of languages to do so, and why, and how - is the theme of
much of this book.

The author is John McWhorter, Associate Professor of Linguistics at
the University of California at Berkeley. He uses recent and
historical examples of change to demonstrate how primordial human
languages diversified into the six thousand or so known today. (He
seems to be convinced there was just one original human language,
but that seems extremely unlikely.) He is careful to describe such
shifts as language "transformation", rather than "evolution",
because the latter word so often suggests progress or advancement -
the evidence suggests early languages were at least as complex as
modern ones, though more limited in what it was possible to talk
about.

In the second chapter he explores the geopolitics of language: when
is a spoken tongue a dialect and when is it a language? Using
modern pairs like Urdu and Hindi, Serbian and Croatian, and the
Scandinavian languages, he shows that our definition of a language
has more to do with political history, perceptions and tensions
than with the nature of the languages themselves. Even within a
speech form that is considered to be a single language, wide
variations can exist that, he suggests, means that "in the end,
dialect is all there is: the 'language' part is just politics".

Later chapters discuss the changes to language through the mixing
of vocabularies and grammar following cultural contact (English,
the archetypal mongrel language, is a prime example here) and how
this has given rise to pidgins and creoles. The fifth chapter
considers the ways in which languages overshoot minimal functional
needs into what he calls "uselessly baroque elaborations" by adding
markers for gender, tones, and groups of prefixes and suffixes. He
argues these add inessential extra data, and he looks into why they
appear. The last chapter investigates language death and the loss
of diversity that results (he quotes David Crystal's assessment
that, on average, a language dies every two weeks).

John McWhorter's approach is largely non-technical (he explains the
few formal terms he uses when they first appear), but his arguments
become detailed when necessary, especially in later chapters, and
the going becomes tougher towards the end. However, the detail is
eased by his chatty and informal approach, with personal asides and
pop-cultural references thrown in from time to time. Though it is
grounded in and suffused with US style and culture (to the extent
of making a couple of blunders about British history), the book
includes a wealth of examples chosen from dozens of languages
world-wide.

Recommended.

[John McWhorter, "The Power of Babel: The Natural History of
Language"; hardback, pp327; published by the Random House Group, in
the US under the W H Freeman & Co imprint, ISBN 0-716-74473-2,
February 2002, US$26.00; published in the UK under the Heinemann
imprint, March 2002, ISBN 0-434-00789-7; GBP16.99.]

[See also next week's review of "Speak: A Short History of
Languages" by Tore Janson.]


3. In Passing?
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VIBRALANGUAGE  A research team at the MIT Media Lab has come up
with a mobile phone that can transmit and receive vibrations by
tiny loudspeakers and sensors under your fingers and thumbs. In
trials, users have been able to transmit messages using a sort of
informal Morse code. The researches think such a "vibralanguage"
could take off for the same reason as texting has: sometimes people
want to communicate without everyone nearby knowing about it.

PHARMACOTOPIA  Michael Tremberth heard this on an edition of the
BBC's Woman's Hour programme last week, in which Dr Cecil Helman,
an anthropologist and qualified doctor, spoke of "pharmacotopia", a
future world in which there will be a chemical or pharmaceutical
product not only to treat each disease but also to counter each
inconvenient symptom of life.


4. Weird Words: Sphragistics  /sfr@'dZIstIKs/
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The scientific study of seals or signet rings.

Though rare, this word has its place in the fields of decorative
arts and archaeology. It is almost the only word in English today
that contains the /sfr/ combination of sounds, not the easiest
cluster of consonants to say. It is from Greek "sphragis", a seal
("sphragistes" is the Greek term for an Egyptian priest who kept
and used the temple seal).

The original idea behind this word in English was very much tied up
with diplomacy, since there was a real practical need to confirm
that the seals on what purported to be official documents from
foreign countries were genuine. So specialists studied the history
of seals. They still do, but these days for less pressing reasons.


5. Out There: Ethnologue
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If you are intrigued by the great diversity of human languages, you
will find this site fascinating. It is essentially a catalogue of
the world's languages. A particularly dispiriting section records
the 400+ languages that are nearly extinct (some of which must have
lost the battle for survival since the work was prepared). You can
select languages by country, by area from a world map, or by name.
See the home page at <http://www.ethnologue.com/>


6. Q&A
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Q. Do you know where the phrase "hurts like the dickens" comes
from? [Jan Walsh]

A. Let's focus in on "dickens" as the important word here, since
there are lots of different expressions with it in, such as "what
the dickens", "where the dickens", "the dickens you are!", and "the
dickens you say!".

It goes back a lot further than Charles Dickens, though it does
seem to have been borrowed from the English surname, most likely
sometime in the sixteenth century or before. (The surname itself
probably derives from "Dickin" or "Dickon", familiar diminutive
forms of "Dick".) It was - and still is, though people hardly know
it any more - a euphemism for the Devil. It's very much in the same
style as "deuce", as in old oaths like "what the deuce!" which
contains another name for the Devil.

The first person we know who used it was that great recorder of
Elizabethan expressions, William Shakespeare, in "The Merry Wives
of Windsor": "FORD: Where had you this pretty weathercock? MRS
PAGE: I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him
of". That pun relied on the audience knowing that "Dickens" was a
personal name and that "what the dickens" was a mild oath which
called on the Devil.

                        -----------

Q. In reading John Updike's review of the new Sinclair Lewis
biography in the current issue of the "New Yorker", I came across
the word "mooncalf". The online Merriam-Webster dictionary offers a
terse definition, "a foolish or absentminded person," and dates the
word to 1614. I suspect the word derives from farming lore, but can
you offer any scholarship to prove me right or wrong? [John
McGinnis]

A. It would indeed be reasonable to assume that the presence of
"calf" here necessarily means that the word came out of animal
husbandry. But by the time that "mooncalf" first appeared, in the
1550s, "calf" was being applied humorously to human beings,
sometimes as a term of endearment, but also sometimes to somebody
who was stupid, meek or inoffensive.

The earliest recorded example of "mooncalf" was in a thesaurus of
1565, in which the term was explicitly applied to a woman. The
reference here was to a false pregnancy, to a growth in the womb
that was not a foetus. The idea was that it had been created under
the baleful influence of the moon. Later - by Shakespeare's day -
it could refer to a misshapen birth or a child with a congenital
defect.

But the figurative sense of "calf" I've already mentioned, and the
idea of somebody who is under the influence of the moon (later
generations would talk about somebody being "moonstruck")
influenced "mooncalf" to the point where it shifted its sense to
mean either a person who wasted time idly daydreaming (who "mooned"
about in an absentminded way), or who was incorrigibly foolish.


7. Endnote
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"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands
and goes to work." [Carl Sandburg, American poet, in the "New York
Times" of 13 February 1959, quoted in the "Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations".]


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