World Wide Words -- 18 May 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 289           Saturday 18 May 2002
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Obesogenic.
3. Topical Words: Good egg.
4. Weird Words: Latrociny.
5. Out There: Lingua Franca.
6. Q&A: Trailer; Nick of Time.
7. Over To You: The Queen of Spain's Legs.
8. Subscription commands.
9. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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TRACKS THAT SPEAK  In my review of this book on 16 April, I gave
the author's surname wrongly throughout as Culter. It is actually
Cutler. Apologies.


2. Turns of Phrase: Obesogenic  /@(U)bi:s@'dZEnIk/
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A strange-looking word, it comes from "obese" plus the ending "-
genic", something tending to generate or create. It refers to
conditions that lead people to become excessively fat - a worrying
trend in developed countries, especially among young people, who
are eating too much of the wrong things and not taking enough
exercise. The problem is variously put down to social causes (too
many sedentary pursuits available; fear that the outdoors in cities
is dangerous, leading to less cycling, walking and running about)
or to the results of our consumer lifestyle (eating pre-prepared
meals that contain excessive sugar and fats). The term seems to
have appeared in the last decade (the first example I can find is
from a British newspaper in 1996) and is not as yet mainstream,
though it is increasingly turning up in newspapers and medical
journals. Its opposite is not often called for, but if you need it,
it's "leptogenic", leading to weight loss, from Greek "leptos",
thin, fine or delicate.

Professor Wardle believes we are now living in an "obesogenic"
environment where it has become normal to eat lots of high-fat
food, spend hours watching TV and use the car instead of walking
even short distances.
                               ["Independent on Sunday", Jan. 2002]

You can't say today's generation is greedier than before, or larger
than before; it's just the environment is conducive to gaining
weight. We live in an obesogenic environment, and it's a growing
problem not just in the UK but around the developed world.
                                     ["Birmingham Post", Mar. 2002]


3. Topical Words: Good egg
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A phone call came from the BBC mid-week, asking about an item I'd
written on "nitty-gritty" (see <www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-
nit2.htm>). The day before, John Denham, the minister at the Home
Office responsible for the police, had been attending a conference
of the Police Federation of England and Wales. He used "nitty
gritty" in his speech. A report in the "Guardian" said that he had
been told by conference members that it was one of a number of
terms police forces have been told not to use, in this case because
of its supposed links with the slave trade (though there are none).

What raised my eyebrows ceiling-wards was that the same report
claimed conference members had told the minister that the police
were also now instructed not to use the phrase "good egg", because
it was too closely linked with "egg and spoon", rhyming slang for
"coon", an offensive racial slur.

While sensitivity over language is not inherently bad, sometimes
political correctness passes from needful consideration into a
parallel world of misunderstanding and mealy-mouthedness. These
days, it seems even PCs have to be PC. The chances of a British
policeman using the phrase "good egg" in conversation with a member
of the public is roughly the same as his pursuing an outfangthief
or enforcing the rules on the right to turbary.

The phrase is an excellent example of dated slang - still often to
be found, but frequently only as a self-conscious archaism that
reeks of a kind of old-fashioned, class-ridden Britishness that is
long extinct. It first appeared about 1900 as slang of the public
school and university classes for somebody pleasant, agreeable, or
trustworthy (and as "an exclamation of enthusiastic approbation",
as the big "Oxford English Dictionary" puts it).

If you associate it with the late P G Wodehouse, that's because he
did much to popularise it, having presumably picked it up during
his schooldays at Dulwich in the last years of the nineteenth
century. He seems to have used it first in "Something Fresh" in
1915: "'She isn't going to sue me for breach?' 'She never had any
intention of doing so.' The Hon. Frederick sank back on the
pillows. 'Good egg!' he said with fervour." But Wodehouse was
pipped to the post in the literary immortality stakes by Rudyard
Kipling, in his book "Traffics and Discoveries" of 1904.

"Good egg" was at first just a humorous inversion of "bad egg",
which is also public-school slang, but from half a century
previously. A bad egg was as thoroughly nasty a person as the
literal bad egg was unpleasant to encounter.

The police language issue became more convoluted the following
morning, when John Denham wrote to the "Guardian" saying that he
had checked most carefully and had established that there was no
list of banned words in the police force. The "Guardian" report
hadn't said there was, but that officers could face a charge of
breaching the codes on tolerance if anyone complained, a more
subtle form of control that requires officers to self-censor every
word (and yet still leaves them open to frivolous or malicious
complaints). Amid confusion and denials, the main loser here seems
to be the English language.

LINKS
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4413720,00.html>
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1988000/1988776.stm>


4. Weird Words: Latrociny  /l@'trQsini:/
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Robbery; brigandage.

Do not seek this word in your dictionary, unless it be of the size
and comprehensiveness of the "Oxford English Dictionary": it is
obsolete and vanished from the treasury of writers' vocabularies
more than a century ago. Indeed, the OED doesn't have an example
after 1732. In 1865, John Mitchell Bonnell listed "latrociny" in
his "Manual of the Art of Prose Composition" as one of the many
words "rejected by good writers, though properly formed".

Clearly, nobody had told the anonymous reviewer (over 13 pages of
small type: these were more leisurely days) of J J Audubon's "The
Birds of America", which appeared in "The American Whig Review" of
March 1845. He is being rude about John Gould, whose "Birds of
Europe" had appeared some years before:

  "By a sagacious duplication so as barely to avoid the
  penalties consequent upon a direct infringment of
  copyright, he has managed to give his last four volumes
  a partially spirited tone, altogether foreign to the
  first. There are yet one or two instances of this
  cunning latrociny which occur to us as too rich not to
  be noted".

The original sense was of highway robbery and came from the Latin
"latrocinium" for that activity, or for the band of robbers or
brigands who practised it. To "latrocinate", therefore, is to rob
upon the highway. The same Latin root occurs in the even more
obscure adjective "latruncular", which refers to the ancient Roman
game of "latrunculi", robbers, which was something like chess or
draughts (US checkers).


5. Out There: Lingua Franca
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These days, a "lingua franca" is any language which is borrowed to
let people communicate who otherwise don't have a tongue in common.
The original Lingua Franca (the "Frankish Tongue") was a pidgin or
trade language used by merchants, who traded in the Levant and then
later along the Barbary Coast. It contains elements of Italian with
French, Greek, Arabic, and Spanish. It is the oldest pidgin known,
with written records from the latter part of the 14th century. Alan
D. Corré has put his book "A Glossary of Lingua Franca" online at
<http://www.uwm.edu/~corre/franca/go.html>, together with a history
and introduction.


6. Q&A
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Q. The previews of coming attractions in movie theaters are
generally called "trailers", a term I have known from my childhood
in the late 1930s. Why should they be called that? They do not
trail behind the shows they are advertising; and (at least today)
they invariably precede the main feature. [Harry W Hickey]

A. An intriguing question, and one which needs a little delving
into the history of the cinema to answer. I have seen it argued in
all seriousness that a movie "trailer" is analogous to the scent
trail of a drag race, so trailing an advertisement before the
audience in the expectation (or, at least, the hope) that it will
be followed. But the real story is less fanciful. Back in the days
when most film programmes were presented as double features, the
piece of film advertising a forthcoming attraction was originally
attached by the cinema projectionist to the end of the reel that
contained the B feature or supporting film, so that it was shown
between it and the main feature - so trailing the supporting film.
These days, as you say, when cinemas usually show just the one
feature film, the advertisements for forthcoming attractions have
to be run before it to ensure a captive audience, so making the
name puzzlingly inaccurate. It's more of a technological fossil
than a linguistic one.


7. Over To You: The Queen of Spain's Legs
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Last week, Marilyn Marshall asked for the source of a reference in
several late nineteenth-century works to the Queen of Spain's legs.
The references had in common a suggestion that they seemed not to
exist, or at least to be unmentionable. Lots of you responded -
many thanks to you all.

It turns out that the story is associated with a Queen of Spain at
around the end of the sixteenth century, but the stories can't
agree which one. The references I've been sent variously refer to
the wives of Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV. This vagueness
does suggest that the story may be apocryphal, though one version,
from Spain, refers specifically to Mariana of Austria, the wife of
Philip IV.

The story goes that, during her journey south to be married, the
young queen-to-be passed through a town that was famed for its silk
stockings, then rare and expensive items. Wishing to show her due
courtesy, the merchants of the town offered to present her with a
pair.

This was a period in which women wore skirts down to the ankles and
stockings were considered undergarments of a decidedly intimate
nature (as Cole Porter put it in "Anything Goes": "In olden days a
glimpse of stocking / Was looked on as something shocking"). The
Queen's courtiers were aghast at this embarrassing breach of
decorum, regarded as both indecent and audacious, and one replied
loftily that "The Queen of Spain has no legs".


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