World Wide Words -- 28 Sep 02
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 27 14:30:01 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 309 Saturday 28 September 2002
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Sent each Saturday to 15,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Chemtrail.
3. Weird Words: Gobo.
4. Q&A: Blackbirding; Cream crackered.
5. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. Help support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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2. Turns of Phrase: Chemtrail
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Definitely one from the conspiracy-theory end of the word-coining
spectrum, this term seems to have appeared first about three years
ago and is still going strong. Chemtrails are supposedly contrail-
like formations produced by military aircraft over the US, Europe,
and Australia, among other places. It's suggested that substances
are mixed with the engine exhausts for some purpose - among those
often mentioned are climate control, immunisation of populations
against future biowarfare, or a systematic attempt to kill off the
old and sick as part of the New World Order (some people say they
have suffered pneumonia-like symptoms, or mystery rashes). The
Illuminati (supposedly a secret group that controls major world
governments) are often mentioned as being behind chemtrails. Those
who believe claim that the trails have characteristic shapes that
can be distinguished from ordinary contrails - caused by engine
exhausts freezing to ice particles in the upper atmosphere. The
whole idea seems to be based on vague memories of attempts decades
ago to seed clouds with silver iodate to make rain fall.
"They call that white thing the chemtrail," he said. "They can mix
all kinds of chemicals in there, mix them in with the jet fuel.
Barium salt. Aluminum oxide. All different polymers. The chemicals
come out with the exhaust. They linger in the clouds. They can
easily change the weather."
[Newsday, Apr. 2002]
Believers call these tracks "chemtrails." They say they don't know
why the chemicals are being dropped, but that doesn't stop them
from speculating. Many guess that the federal government is trying
to slow global warming with compounds that reflect sunlight into
the sky. Some propose more ominous theories, such as a government
campaign to weed out the old and sick.
[USA Today, Mar. 2001]
3. Weird Words: Gobo
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A partial screen used in a spotlight to project a shape.
This word is common in theatre, film, and television, but appears
here because it looks so odd and unEnglish. It is most often used
by lighting technicians to refer to a metal plate with a pattern of
holes in it, which is placed in the gate of a spotlight to produce
an image or outline on the set. More sophisticated gobos rotate to
create moving patterns; some are of glass with complex coloured
patterns on them. The word can also be used for a fabric or wood
shape placed in front of a light to cast a shadow (in some circles
in the US this is called a cookie or a flag instead). But it can
also have other senses that relate to some sort of mask: perhaps a
shield used to shelter a microphone from extraneous noise or to
acoustically separate groups of instruments in an orchestra, or a
screen used to shield a lens from light. It has nothing to do with
the Japanese vegetable of the same name - its origin is somewhat
obscure, but it's most probably just a condensed version of "go
between".
4. Q&A
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Q. A recent controversy here involves aboriginal children being
enrolled in a boarding school some 1500km from their home. Although
the parents were involved, neither their school nor the Education
Department had any idea that this was happening until after the
buses had left. This led to accusations that the children have been
"blackbirded". I thought I knew Australian slang, but this is new
to me. The only clue is a throwaway comment in a newspaper article
that says the term refers to the (often underhanded) means by which
Kanakas were "recruited" to work in the Queensland cane fields in
days of yore. Do you have any further info? [Mark Raymond,
Australia]
A. The newspaper article is essentially correct.
To be more strictly accurate, there have been two distinct slang
senses of "blackbird" in Australian English, both of which refer to
indigenous peoples. The word would have been very familiar to
immigrants from the UK because it is the name there for a common
garden bird, a type of thrush. The transfer to "black" inhabitants
as a derogatory slang term would have been easy to make and seems
to have occurred early in Australian colonisation. The same word
was also used to refer to Africans in the slave trade from Africa
to America, and presumably came from the same source.
The older sense refers to Aborigines, especially in the phrase
"blackbird shooting". In the early decades of the nineteenth
century, some white settlers used to make up hunting parties with
the express aim of going out in the bush to kill native Australians
for a bit of fun.
But the sense you refer to is much better known. In the middle
decades of the nineteenth century farmers were finding it hard to
recruit local labour to work in the sugar and cotton fields in
Queensland - the heat was too great and the work too hard. From the
1860s, therefore, agents took schooners to Pacific islands, such as
the New Hebrides, Solomon Islands or Fiji, to collect Polynesians
for the plantations. A few came willingly as contract labour, some
were recruited by fraud, but most were kidnapped and sold into a
form of slavery as indentured servants (as you say, they were
called "Kanakas", from the Hawaiian word for a man).
The term "blackbirding" may have been transferred from the older
activity as another "sporting" activity involving native peoples
(though "blackbird-catching" is similarly known from the African-
American slave trade). It applies to any of these methods of
recruitment and early documents show there was little distinction
between them by the "blackbirders", who were notoriously brutal.
The trade only stopped when the new Australian national government
enacted a law against it in 1901.
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Q. I'm having trouble with a Brit expression that I haven't been
able to find a translation for: "cream crackered". I have a feeling
I know what it means, something like "tired, beaten, or broken". Is
that right? [Mark Alfson, Florida]
A. Yes, it is.
Can I assume you know what cream crackers literally are? Sometimes
I have trouble knowing which comestibles are known in the USA and
which not. A cream cracker is a savoury dry biscuit, often eaten
with cheese. Sometime in the past thirty years or so the phrase has
become rhyming slang in Britain for "knackered". That's a slightly
older slang term - there are examples going back into the 1950s -
which means exhausted or worn out. It can also mean some piece of
equipment which is damaged or broken. Both senses are common.
Where it comes from is not entirely certain. A "knacker" from the
sixteenth century on was a harness maker or saddler. The word just
might have come from "knack", a trinket (which we still have, but
only as one half of the reduplicated "knick-knack"), because the
knacker originally only made the small bits of harness. Another
sense from the beginning of the nineteenth century was for a person
who bought old or worn-out horses and slaughtered them for their
meat, hides and hoofs. He worked from a "knacker's yard". A
possible link with the modern slang sense is obvious enough: if
you're knackered you're fit only for the knacker's yard.
But there's another slang sense of "knackers", for the testicles,
which grew up a little later, possibly also from "knack", but
possibly from yet another sense of "knacker", that of castanets
(which could be an altered form of "knockers", but might come from
an obsolete sense of "knack", to knock or to make a sharp, abrupt
noise). To "knacker", therefore, is to castrate.
Modern dictionaries are cautious about whether "knackered" has its
origin in the horse-slaughterer sense or the castration one. After
all that, I'm cream-crackered ... See you all next week.
5. Endnote
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"One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been
called 'weasel words'. When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked
out of the egg. If you use a 'weasel word' after another, there is
nothing left of the other." [Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech given
in St Louis on 31 May 1916, quoted in the "Oxford Dictionary of
Literary Quotations" (1997).]
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