World Wide Words -- 11 May 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 288           Saturday 11 May 2002
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Contents
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1. Turns of Phrase: Culture jamming.
2. Review: Speak: A Short History of Languages.
3. In Passing? Roborat.
4. Weird Words: Kerfuffle.
5. Q&A: While versus whilst.
6. Over To You: The Queen of Spain's Legs.
7. Subscription commands.
8. Contact addresses.


1. Turns of Phrase: Culture jamming
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It has long been common for opposing groups to deface each other's
advertisements, billboards and posters. In the last decade, doing
so has advanced to the status of a witty art form, in which the
adverts are not so much defaced as rewritten or parodied. The term
"culture jamming" refers to this practice. It is intimately
associated with the Media Foundation of Vancouver, Canada, which
publishes Adbusters Quarterly, edited by Estonian-born Kalle Lasn.
The technique has been taken up by various anti-capitalist, green,
or anarchist groups, who consider advertising to be a polluting
invasion of personal privacy that supports the consumerist system.
A recent British exploit, for example, changed a billboard advert
for a BBC programme featuring Bush and Blair that read "The Ones"
to "The Clones". Ideas stretch beyond advertising: you may recall
the group which switched the sound chips on Barbie and GI Joe dolls
so that Barbie said "Vengeance is mine!" and GI Joe said "Let's go
shopping!". That's considered to be culture jamming, too. It's also
called "anti-advertising" and "subvertising", though these are much
less common.

Lasn views Buy Nothing Day as a form of "culture jamming" - a means
to subvert our heavily corporate- and media-driven culture. He
declares, "Culture jamming involves people who don't like consumer
culture and look for all sorts of ways to jam it up. We find ways
to make [consumerism] bite itself in the tail."
                                     ["University Wire", Nov. 2001]

In the 90s, Canadian 'culture jamming' magazine Adbusters took the
artform to new levels with the slick 'subvertising' of adverts for
American corporate giants such as Gap and McDonald's to convey
anti-consumerist messages.
                                             ["Guardian", May 2002]


2. Review: Speak: A Short History of Languages
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Like the old joke about London buses, you wait for ages and then
three come along at once. This is suddenly the season for books on
language development and change. This work covers some of the same
ground as John McWhorter's book I reviewed last week (see http://
www.worldwidewords.org/reviews/re-pow1.htm>) and another book on a
related theme will be reviewed next month.

This one could not be more different in style to the last: it is as
formal and European as John McWhorter's was informal and American
(the author, Tore Janson, is a distinguished Swedish linguist who
retired last year from his post as Professor of African Languages
at Göteborg University). By formal, I don't mean incomprehensibly
academic - Prof Janson writes in a clear, logical and accessible
way. But he doesn't include the personal asides or pop-cultural
references that John McWhorter does. He is also more cautious in
his assessments and conclusions. Don't be deceived by the small
format, the catchy title, or the attractive cover (with its detail
from a picture by Manet) - this is a serious work, which will repay
close attention.

His canvas is language and history, in two facets: the history of
language, and the effect of language on history. Early chapters
cover prehistory; the grouping of languages into families; the
invention of writing; the growth and influence of Greek and Latin;
the development of the Romance languages (such as French, Occitan
and Italian) from Latin after the end of the Roman Empire; the
creation of English through cultural mixing and political changes;
the reasons why the European national languages grew in importance
in medieval and post-medieval times compared with Latin.

That quick summary shows that the earlier and larger part is not a
short history of languages in general, but of European languages.
It's true that accidents of history, such as colonisation and
trade, have given these languages - in particular English - an
importance well above their geographical or cultural weight (the
reasons why are explored in a later chapter). But in this respect,
Tore Janson's book is narrower in focus than John McWhorter's.

Two later chapters move into other areas. The first focuses on one
way that new languages appear: through pidgins and creoles. The
second looks at the cultural and political factors that cause them
to vanish. The last two chapters show how it is that English has
become so dominant, especially as a lingua franca, and what the
language landscape might look like at various points in the future
(though a writer has to be especially brave to feel able to say
anything useful about a time two million years hence!).

Within its comparatively limited geographical scope, this is a
useful overview of the development and transformation of languages
through cultural and political upheavals over time.

[Tore Janson, "Speak: A Short History of Languages", published by
Oxford University Press in March 2002; pp301; ISBN 0-19-829978-8;
publisher's prices: GBP12.99, US$19.95, AU$49.95.]


3. In Passing?
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ROBORAT  An unlovely term for one of the more disquieting animal
experiments of our times, in which a rat was persuaded to carry out
actions by stimulating its "reward centre" in the brain with small
electric currents sent by radio. It is suggested the rats might be
used as scouts to sniff out hidden land mines or for search and
rescue teams that look for survivors in rubble.


4. Weird Words: Kerfuffle
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A commotion or fuss.

You will most commonly come across this wonderfully expressive word
in Britain and the British Commonwealth countries (though the White
House spokesman Ari Fleischer used it in January this year). It is
rather informal, though it often appears in newspapers. One of the
odder things about it is that it changed its first letter in quite
recent times. Up to the 1960s, it was written in all sorts of ways
- "curfuffle", "carfuffle", "cafuffle", "cafoufle", even "gefuffle"
- a clear indication that its main means of transmission was speech,
too rarely written down to have established a standard spelling.
But in that decade it suddenly became much more popular and settled
on the current "kerfuffle". Lexicographers suspect the change came
in response to the way that a number of imitative words were
spelled, like "kerplop" and "kerplunk".

In those cases, the initial "ker-" has no meaning or purpose except
to add a touch of emphasis. But we know "kerfuffle" was originally
Scots and it's thought that its first part came from Scots Gaelic
"car", to twist or bend. The second bit is more of a puzzle: there
is a Scots verb "fuffle" (now known only in local dialect), to
throw into disorder, dishevel, or ruffle. No obvious origin for it
is known and experts suspect it was an imitative word. It is
probably linked with Scots "fuff", to emit puffs of smoke or steam,
definitely imitative, which in the late eighteenth century also had
a sense of going off in a huff or flying into a temper.

Some specialists think "kerfuffle" is also related to the Irish
"cior thual", confusion or disorder. It seems to be a minority
opinion, though.


5. Q&A
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Q. As an American who has spent some bit of time with British
English, I have always wondered about the difference between
"while" and "whilst". Is there a relationship to formal and
informal tenses left over from Old English? I also think of "amid"
and "amidst". [Gary Wade]

A. You're close to the target with your second example. Another
pair of a similar kind is "among" and "amongst" (a third pair,
"again" and "against", has a similar origin but the sense of the
words has since diverged).

In both cases, the form ending in "-st" actually contains the "-s"
of the genitive ending (which we still have today, though usually
written as "'s", of course). In Middle English, this was often
added to words used as adverbs (as in "whiles", which often turned
up in the compound adverbs "somewhiles" and "otherwhiles"). What
seems to have happened is that a "-t" was later added in the south
of England through confusion with the superlative ending "-st" (as
in "gentlest").

Both "while" and "whilst" are ancient, though "while" is older.
There's no difference in meaning between them. For reasons that
aren't clear, "whilst" has survived in British English but has died
out in the US. However, in Britain it is considered to be a more
formal and literary word than its counterpart. I have a small
weakness for it, for which I've been gently teased in the past.


6. Over To You: The Queen of Spain's Legs
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Well, I've heard of singeing the King of Spain's beard (Sir Francis
Drake did it, you may remember, by setting alight Spanish ships in
Cadiz harbour in 1586), but this one is new to me. Marilyn Marshall
e-mailed thus: "My reading group recently discussed 'Cranford' by
Elizabeth Gaskell and were amused and curious when we read, 'Till
she came back to give us our cue, we felt that it would be better
to consider the engagement in the same light as the Queen of
Spain's legs - facts which certainly existed, but the less said
about the better.' What is the story behind this expression?"

There's clearly a real allusion here, one that was once well known.
Marilyn Marshall also found this, in "The Civilization of China" by
Herbert A Giles (1911): "At such interviews it would not be correct
to allude to wives, who are no more to be mentioned than were the
queen of Spain's legs", and this, in "Letters From High Latitudes"
by Lord Dufferin (1857): "I am afraid, however, many a smart
yachtsman would have been scandalized at our decks, lumbered up
with hen-coops, sacks of coal, and other necessaries, which, like
the Queen of Spain's legs, not only ought never to be seen, but
must not be supposed even to exist, on board a tip-top craft". It
also appears in a poem by Bret Harte: "And the merlin - seen on
heraldic panes - / With legs as vague as the Queen of Spain's".

"Cranford" was published in 1853. Taken with the dates of the other
works, it looks like an allusion characteristic of the mid to late
Victorian period, something akin to the "unmentionables" of that
period. I can't find its origin, though. Can anybody?


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