World Wide Words -- 09 Nov 02

Fri Nov 8 16:15:02 UTC 2002

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 315         Saturday 9 November 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. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Confide.
3. Book Review: A Word A Day, by Anu Garg.
4. Weird Words: Rodomontade.
5. Q&A: Yonks.
6. Endnote: Clichés, by Roger Whitehead.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. Help support World Wide Words.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
HANG A LOUIE, AND RELATIVES  I guessed this piece last week would
provoke a lot of messages, but not that so many would come in. In
addition to the terms for a right turn I mentioned, subscribers
listed several variations they had learned in parts of the USA at
various periods: "hang (or make) a Rochester" (Tennessee), "hang a
Reggie" (Illinois and Wisconsin), "hang a Rachel" (Seattle), and
"hang a Roger" (Miami).

Jonathan Green wrote, "Yesterday, in a mouldering copy of 'Current
Slang' (University of Dakota, 1969) I came across 'hang a Ulysses'
for a 'U-turn'".  A U-turn can be "flip a bitch", in California,
Boston (and probably elsewhere). Sherry Garfio e-mailed that "In
Denver, we simply hang a left or hang a right, but we 'whip' a U-
ie. This, of course, is properly taken as a comment on the driving
habits of Coloradans". That's nothing: in Australia, I'm told, they
"chuck a U-ie". Several people told me their memory was that "U-ie"
came first in the 1960s or thereabouts and that the other terms
appeared afterwards through imitation.

Lots of people tried to explain "Louie" through the different ways
British and American speakers pronounce "lieutenant", so linking
"leftie" with "louie". As we don't know the real story it's not
possible to be dogmatic about this, but it seems rather stretched
as an explanation. A more plausible explanation is that it comes
from the famous left hook of the boxer Joe Louis. It has also been
suggested it might just be a pun on the name of the New York
politician Louie Lefkowicz.

2. Topical Words: Confide
-------------------------------------------------------------------
In 2005 Britain will undoubtedly make a vast splash about the two-
hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, at which Admiral
Horatio Nelson beat the French but lost his own life. A preliminary
skirmish took place in London last week when a mass of Nelsoniana
was auctioned. The catalogue contained a quiz in which the story of
Nelson's famous signal before the battle, "England expects that
every man will do his duty", was revisited.

Nelson originally wanted his signal to read "England confides that
every man will do his duty". His signal officer, Lieutenant John
Pascoe, persuaded him to replace "confides" by "expects" because it
would need fewer flags at a time of great haste. As an unintended
result, the signal makes as much sense now as it did at the time,
whereas the original version would have needed explaining anew to
each generation that encounters it.

It's another example of the way language changes. When we confide
in somebody today we mean we entrust a secret on the understanding
that it won't be passed on. That sense actually dates only from the
middle of the eighteenth century and overlaps with the one that
Lord Nelson was using.

"Confide" comes from Latin "confidere", to trust or rely on. We get
"confident" and "confidence" from the same source. The original
sense of the verb "to confide" was to be confident about something.
Another great sailor, Sir George Anson, wrote in his "Voyage round
the World" of 1748, "The stoutest cables are not to be confided
in", an extraordinary sentiment to us today. Some people talk to
the trees, our heir to the throne is reported to chat to plants,
but nobody that we know of tells their secrets to ropes.

Nelson was saying - in the standard English of his time - that his
country was confident that every man would do his duty. They did.
In 2005 we shall hear all about it in immense detail - of that we
can be confident.

4. Book Review: A Word A Day, by Anu Garg
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Anu Garg's mailing list of the same name is famous online. It's the
granddaddy of e-mail language lists, having been founded in 1994.
It now has more than half a million daily subscribers distributed
through just about every country in the world, a figure that makes
this writer at once envious and horrified at the implications for
managing such vast numbers.

His new book is essentially a printed version of rather more than a
year of the mailing list. It's in 55 chapters, each one containing
commentary on five words on a theme. If you are a subscriber (as I
have been for years) you will recognise thematic headings such as
Toponyms, Gender-specific Nouns, Red-Herring Words, Words that Make
One Say "I Didn't Know There Was a Word for That!", Coined Words,
Words from Medicine, and Words That Contain the Vowels AEIOU Once
and Only Once. If you felt strong, you could read an entry every
weekday and so make the book last 55 weeks, but I will lay you
heavy odds that such self-control is impossible.

Entries are essentially the same as the e-mail versions that went
out to subscribers - succinct explanations with pronunciations,
definitions, and quotations, each set introduced by a paragraph or
two. Some of the messages that have come to Anu Garg as the result
of mailings are interspersed between entries. This is a browser's
book - if it should end up on a shelf in the smallest room in the
house, it's no worse for that, particularly if your sojourns result
in an enlarged vocabulary.

Give it to your nearest word lover as a present. If the recipient
already knows A Word A Day, it will be a conveniently portable
version of remembered small pleasures; if it is new, then a free
online subscription will provide daily additional enjoyment.

[Garg, Anu, "A Word A Day"; paperback, pp202; ISBN 0-471-23032-4;
published by Wiley on 24 October 2002 at US$14.95. For the online
mailing list, see http://www.wordsmith.org]

AMAZON PRICES FOR THE BOOK
 UK: GBP8.68 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?OF)
 US: GBP10.47 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?LK)
 CA: CDN$19.98 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?HH)
[Click on a link or paste it into your browser to order online. If
you do so you get World Wide Words a small commission that helps to
pay for the Web site and general operating expenses. See the end of
the newsletter for general Amazon links and another way to support
World Wide Words.]

5. Weird Words: Rodomontade  /,rQd@(U)mQn'teId/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Boastful or inflated talk or behaviour.

This is a delightfully imitative word, that rolls swaggeringly off
the tongue. It was created from the name of the boastful Saracen
king of Algiers, Rodomonte, in two late medieval epics, "Orlando
Innamorato" of 1485 by Matteo Boiardo, and the sequel of 1516,
"Orlando Furioso" by Ludivico Aristo. English borrowed it via
French in the seventeenth century. At first it meant a single
boastful act, so that one could speak in the plural of
"rodomontades", but then it became both an adjective and a verb.
These days we use it as a mass noun to refer to the whole business
of making your point by laying it on rather too thick.

===================================================================
                 DONATIONS TO WORLD WIDE WORDS
Recently, I've been trying an experiment - asking for donations in
this newsletter and on the Web site. I am more than grateful to the
following 17 people for their support (there are others, but they
have asked to remain anonymous): Robin Boyd, Marti Eastman, Carolyn
Johnson-Gutter, Lynn & Bob Kloss, Shan Lancaster, Joanne Marshall,
R Moyer, John & James Parr, Toby Poynder, Barbara Rosborg, Toni
Savage, Patrick Shannon, Kathy L Smith, Carmel Swann, and C F
Weishar. Please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm if
you would like to contribute.
===================================================================

6. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I often say, "I haven't seen you for yonks!", meaning that I
haven't seen the person for quite a while. I have no idea where it
comes from and it's not in my Concise Oxford Dictionary. Can you
help at all? Oh, by the way, I'm English. [Jill Cormier]

A. You would indeed have to be from Britain or the Commonwealth to
know "yonks", since I don't think it's found in the USA at all.
Everyone is as puzzled as you are by this curious word, which
appeared in Britain in the 1960s with no apparent link to any other
word in the language. It usually turns up in the phrase "for
yonks", for a long time.

A few reference books suggest that it might be a clipped version of
"donkey's years" (see http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-don1.htm)
also meaning a long time. This sounds quite daft on first hearing,
but if you think about it, you can see how the "onk" of "donkey"
might just have been prefixed by the "y" of "years", perhaps as
conscious or unconscious back slang. It's only a theory, mind -
nobody knows for sure one way or the other.

A quick tip: buy a new edition of your dictionary - "yonks" has
been in the "Concise Oxford Dictionary" at least since the Ninth
Edition.

7. Endnote: Clichés, by Roger Whitehead
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Following last week's review of "The Dimwit's Dictionary" by Robert
Hartwell Fiske, Roger Whitehead sent me this piece, which he wrote
as part of a style guide for British civil servants. It shows there
is another way of telling people that - to quote William Safire -
"You should avoid clichés like the plague". You don't have to be
rude to them, you can overwhelm them into laughing submission ...

"Although part and parcel of the warp and weft of the language of
the man on the Clapham omnibus, clichés should be conspicuous by
their absence. As and when you get down to the wire, rolling out a
whole raft of tattered and torn expressions that have seen better
days is going to have all the impact of a wet weekend in Wigan.
Another downside, one that goes without saying, is that if you
deploy clichés like they're going out of fashion, especially on an
ongoing basis, the message in whatever you write will to all
intents and purposes be rendered null and void. Also, you'll end up
looking wet behind the ears and with a mountain to climb, possibly
with egg on your face, having let a golden opportunity go by like
ships in the night. You need trials and tribulations like these
like a hole in the head.

"First and foremost, the bottom line is that the difference between
good and bad writing has to be like chalk and cheese - it's a whole
new ballgame. Bear in mind, though, that the way you seamlessly set
out your stall is not a question of rules and regulations, more of
custom and practice. If you are to write like an angel, your purple
prose has to be to die for. It has to be cutting edge enough to
establish an abiding presence in the hearts and minds not just of
the serried ranks of the powers that be, including the great and
the good and the movers and shakers, but with all and sundry at the
grass roots level. Reading it has to be a real defining moment for
people of every rank and station, as though you were talking to
them one-on-one even though they may be spread far and wide. It's
got to make them hot to trot and ready to rumble and, even as we
speak, give them a compelling reason to change.

"Last but not least, the fact of the matter is that details count.
No matter how finely honed your style may or may not be, you have
to make certain beyond peradventure that your spelling is spot on,
your punctuation squeaky clean and your grammar above reproach. To
err is human but you still need to make as certain as day that your
mistakes are few and far between.

There, that's done and dusted: I rest my case."

A. 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

B. 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, especially responses to Q&A pieces:
      TheEditor at worldwidewords.org
  For questions intended for reply in a future Q&A feature:
      QandA at worldwidewords.org

C. Help support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You can now donate through PayPal to help cover the operating costs
of this newsletter and the web site. Another way is to buy things
through an Amazon site, which gets World Wide Words a commission at
no extra cost to you. See http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm
for more details. The direct links to the Amazon sites are these:

  AMAZON USA: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?QA
  AMAZON UK: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?JZ
  AMAZON CANADA: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?MG

Bill Hackett wrote from Santa Barbara in California: "The holiday
season offers opportunity for your readers to have Amazon.com.uk
send copies of your 'Ologies and Isms' to their family members and
friends as great educational gifts! No need for Americans to wait,
the UK people sent mine and it arrived almost before they debited
my Visa account".

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