World Wide Words -- 19 Oct 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 312         Saturday 19 October 2002
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Review: Predicting New Words by Allan Metcalf.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Haberdasher.
5. Q&A: Sock it to them.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. Help support World Wide Words.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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PRONUNCIATION OF KILOMETRE  A vigorous correspondence followed the
piece last week on this vexing topic. Many subscribers pointed out
that the stress on the syllable containing the "o" is universal for
measuring instruments whose names end in "-ometer" (thermometer,
barometer, chronometer, hygrometer, speedometer, galvanometer). It
is almost certain that the stress in "kilometre/er" on the second
syllable appears there by analogy with all these. There's more on
this in the updated piece on the Web site, which you will find at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-kil2.htm .


2. Review: Predicting New Words by Allan Metcalf
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You may know that I spend a part of my time browsing publications
in search of new words - some of the results appear as Turns of
Phrase pieces in this newsletter. I'm cautious about the words I
choose, preferring to wait a year or five until a word has had a
chance to show its mettle in the only forum that matters, that of
public opinion. Even so, my hit rate of successful words is only
so-so, as anybody can tell by looking through the archive on the
World Wide Words web site. How much more difficult it is for the
American Dialect Society, which each year's end selects new words
(or "newly prominent" words) that deserve recognition.

Allan Metcalf, Executive Secretary of the ADS, was saddened to see
how few of the words selected by language experts in these annual
sessions actually made it into the dictionaries. The sad truth is
that most new words are failures. Who, for example, now remembers
"bushlips", for "insincere political rhetoric" (after George H
Bush's phrase "read my lips, no new taxes"), chosen as the Word of
the Year in 1990, or "newt", "to make aggressive changes as a
newcomer" (after Newt Gingrich) which tied for first place in 1994.
Even 1997's term "millennium bug", temporarily successful, has
become one with the dinosaurs.

Professor Metcalf began to wonder whether there were rules that
might help predict which words were to be the winners and which the
losers in the battle for popularity and eventual incorporation into
the language. This book is the result.

In successive chapters, he looks at deliberate coinages, which are
almost always unsuccessful, though a few examples such as "blurb"
or "scofflaw" have made it. He debunks the myth that words almost
automatically come into being to fill gaps in our vocabularies. He
discusses new words created for an immediate and specific need,
such as scientific terms or trade marks. He points out that
successful new words often have multiple births, and shows that
words are surprisingly often created as jokes ("couch potato",
"gerrymander", "soap opera", "big bang") but later become serious
and settled terms.

His book ends with his exposition of the "FUDGE factor", the chance
of a word having a long and healthy life. The letters stand for
"Frequency of use" (broadly its popularity), "Unobtrusiveness"
(disguised as something we already know about), "Diversity of users
and situations" (whether it is used by people in lots of different
situations), "Generation of other forms and meanings" (how fertile
it is in creating derived forms), and "Endurance of the concept"
(whether the thing it describes stays around so you need the word
to describe it). The more of these criteria the word meets, the
greater chance you have of seeing it in the dictionary.

The book is light-hearted, packed with interesting facts about the
origins of words and the people who have created them - it's worth
getting for this alone. That is fortunate, because his creation of
the FUDGE factor fails to meet his perceived need for a tool that
will predict the fate of new words early in their lives. If we wait
until we can determine the FUDGE factors with any accuracy, it will
probably be too late to be helpful. (Several of these criteria are
already in common use by dictionary makers to test whether to put
words into new editions.) Also, as he admits, it is the unobtrusive
new words that often win the neologism stakes; spotting these quiet
horses requires a lexicographical tipster with a sharper nose than
most of us possess.

As an unintended illustration of his FUDGE thesis, Allan Metcalf
perpetuates the wrong spelling of "borogove" in his citation of
Lewis Carroll's poem "The Jabberwock"; this often happens, probably
because the spelling as "borogrove" fits his second rule for
successful word formation better than the original. If only Carroll
had known the rules when he invented the word ...

[Metcalf, Allan Predicting New Words, to be published by Houghton
Mifflin on 21 October 2002; pp208; ISBN 0-618-13006-3; hardback;
publisher's price US$22.00.]

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3. Sic!
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Randall Bart writes: "Last week, the Port Authority of New York and
New Jersey was running ads saying 'Apply to be a Port Authority
police officer until October 11, 2002'". Short-term commission ...

And from George Hodgkin: "The county-wide newspaper originating in
San Luis Obispo is The Tribune. On October 9 a big headline on the
front page read: 'Downtown drinking strains police force'". Loosen
those belts, fellas ...

On Wednesday of this week the Guardian newspaper wrote: "In recent
weeks, the paper has revealed that Saddam is a heroine- and cocaine-
crazed junkie". The strategy is obvious, then - cut off access to
trashy romantic novels ...


4. Weird Words: Haberdasher
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In Britain and Australia, a dealer in dressmaking and sewing goods;
in North America, a dealer in men's clothing.

One of my American dictionaries, in making clear the ways in which
this word is used in different places, uses two words that sound
mildly odd in Britain. In the USA, it says, a haberdasher sells
men's "furnishings" (such as shirts, ties, gloves, socks, and
hats); in the UK, he or she sells small wares and "notions" (such
as buttons, needles, ribbons, and thread).

This substantial divergence in sense reflects the muddled history
of this odd-looking word, which in origin has nothing whatever to
do with anybody dashing anywhere. It may come from an Anglo-Norman
French word "hapertas", which may have been a type of fabric. But
nothing other than these vague suppositions is known about its
origin. It went through lots of variant spellings before it settled
down to the modern form around the middle of the sixteenth century.

Its meaning down the centuries has been as diverse as its origin is
mysterious. When it appeared, in the thirteenth century, it meant a
trader in a range of goods. According to early chroniclers, these
included: "glasses, daggers, swerdes [swords]", "mousetrappes, bird
cages, shooing hornes, lanthornes, and Jews trumpes [Jew's harps]",
and "bookes, pictures, beades, crucifixes" - what we would now
think of as the stock of an eclectic general store.

Around the sixteenth century, the trade narrowed in focus and often
referred to a hatter, a sense now obsolete (such sellers were also
called "milliners", originally a trader in goods from Milan, a term
now restricted to providers of female headgear). Another part of
the trade split off, that of providing a multitude of small items
needed by tailors and dressmakers, the "notions" of that dictionary
reference.

By some curiosity of cultural and linguistic history not fully
understood the term has come to have different senses in Britain
and North America.


5. Q&A
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Q. Quick question - where does the phrase "sock it to them" come
from? For example, hitting the ball in sport ("sock it to me") or
as encouragement ("sock it to 'em"). [George Fagg]

A. Quick answer - we don't know.

That deserves some footnotes. It is certainly American in origin.
Many Americans remember Judy Carne and others saying "sock it to
me" on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In between 1968 and 1973, a phrase
that in the words of my American cultural adviser was "at once
meaningless and very meaningful and carried - among other ideas - a
vague, implied sexual invitation". Richard Nixon was the most
famous guest who used it, ignorant - like me until I was briefed -
of its implications.

It wasn't new, of course. It dates from some point around the 1850s
or shortly after. The first example I can find is from a book about
the American Civil War, published in 1866, which contains this
line: "Now then, tell General Emory if they attack him again to go
after them, and to follow them up, and to sock it to them, and to
give them the devil".

Pretty clearly this comes from a much older low slang use of the
word "sock", meaning to hit or punch, to give somebody a heavy
blow, to assault or beat someone. There was also the phrase "to
give someone sock", to give someone a thrashing. These date back to
the late seventeenth century in Britain, and were presumably
carried to the USA by emigrants. We still have that sense of "sock"
in phrases like "The driver socked him on the jaw" (plus the
wonderful American "sockdolager" for a knock-down blow).

But where "sock" in this sense came from, nobody knows. I have a
mental image of a sand-filled sock used as a cosh or blackjack, but
that's probably misleading!


6. Endnote
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"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million type-
writers will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.
Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." [Robert
Wilensky (1997), in the "Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations",
published September 2002.]


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