World Wide Words -- 12 Apr 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 336          Saturday 12 April 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ 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. Weird Words: Ultracrepidarian.
3. Book Review: Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Tempest in a teapot.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BRIMBORION  Last week's Weird Word turns out to be much less weird
in German, where the closely connected "Brimborium", also borrowed
from French but given a Latinate ending, is an informal term for an
unnecessary fuss. The sentence "du machst viel zu viel Brimborium
um eine Kleinigkeit" might be translated as "you're making a lot of
fuss about nothing", or "you're creating a storm in a teacup" (or
perhaps "a tempest in a teapot", see below).

I SHOULD COCOA  Many American subscribers couldn't believe their
eyes when they saw the Guardian quote with which I illustrated this
phrase last week. Some pointed out my embarrassing typographical
error for "pin-striped shirts". No, there's no "r" in that last
word: the Guardian believes in using the right word in the right
place and that's what it feels is the appropriate word to describe
the rapacious louts who so often occupy City dealing rooms (Louise
Barton, an Australian who brought a sex-discrimination case against
a firm in this field, commented last week that "the only difference
between a shearing shed and a trading floor is that the men in a
shearing shed wear singlets and on a trading floor wear suits. The
people are equally as coarse"). The pin-stripes would in any case
be on suiting, as part of the traditional garb of the City gent
(though nobody now wears the traditional bowler hat, nor carries
the neatly furled umbrella that completed the uniform).


2. Weird Words: Ultracrepidarian
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Of somebody who gives opinions on matters beyond his knowledge.

Last Thursday, 10 April, was the 225th anniversary of the birth of
the essayist William Hazlitt (a date commemorated by the unveiling
of his restored memorial in St Anne's churchyard, Soho). To further
mark the date, this week's Weird Word is one he is first recorded
as using.

He did so in a famous letter of 1819 to William Gifford, the editor
of the Quarterly Review, a letter which has been described as "one
of the finest works of invective in the language". In one of his
more moderate castigations, Hazlitt wrote: "You have been well
called an Ultra-Crepidarian critic". You may deduce what Hazlitt
thought of Gifford's journal from this passage in The Spirit of the
Age (1825):

  His Journal, then, is a depository for every species of
  political sophistry and personal calumny. There is no
  abuse or corruption that does not there find a Jesuitical
  palliation or a bare-faced vindication. There we meet the
  slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant of
  pedantry, the cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of power.
  Its object is as mischievous as the means by which it is
  pursued are odious.

You can see why Hazlitt described himself as "a good hater".

"Ultracrepidarian" comes from a classical allusion. The Latin
writer Pliny recorded that Apelles, the famous Greek painter who
was a contemporary of Alexander the Great, had been criticised by a
shoemaker, to which Apelles is reported as replying (no doubt with
expletives deleted) that the shoemaker should not judge beyond his
soles, in other words, that critics should only comment on matters
they know something about. In modern English, we might say "the
cobbler should stick to his last", a proverb that comes from the
same incident. (A "last" is a shoemaker's pattern, ultimately from
a Germanic root meaning to follow a track, hence footstep.)

What Pliny actually wrote was "ne supra crepidam judicaret", where
"crepidam" is the sole of a shoe, but the idea has been expressed
in several ways in Latin tags, such as "Ne sutor ultra crepidam"
("sutor" means "cobbler", a word still known in Scotland in the
spelling "souter"). The best-known version is the abbreviated tag
"ultra crepidam", "beyond the sole", from which Hazlitt formed
"ultracrepidarian".

"Crepidam" derives from Greek "krepis", a shoe; it has no link with
words like "decrepit" or "crepitation" (which are from Latin
"crepare", to creak, rattle, or make a noise) or "crepuscular"
(from the Latin word for twilight), though "crepidarian" is a very
rare adjective meaning "pertaining to a shoemaker".


3. Book Review: Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Teachers of English to foreign learners will be glad to see this
work available in a new fourth edition that has been completely
redesigned. It is now in colour throughout, with the headwords
mainly picked out in blue, but with the most common 3000 words
printed in red to flag vocabulary that learners need to focus on
first. There are many full-colour illustrations. (Della Summers,
director of Longman Dictionaries, is quoted in the publicity blurb
as saying, "This is the first full-scale dictionary ever produced
in full colour", which will be a surprise to the editors of the
fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, the Petit
Larousse, and others.)

It is aimed, as were previous editions, at the upper intermediate
level of proficiency. The dictionary definitions use a controlled
vocabulary of 2000 words to produce simple explanations in sentence
form (this vocabulary is listed at the end of the book). Most of
the entries contain pronunciations (in the IPA system), notes of
synonyms, antonyms and collocations (set phrases containing the
word), together with examples drawn from real usage. The publisher
would describe the vocabulary as being World English, principally
an amalgam of British and American English, with the other regional
varieties much less well represented.

To read a list of the words added in this new edition is to see
one's culture reflected in a disturbingly distorted mirror. One
substantial set of words is from youth vocabulary, not a surprising
choice in view of the core usership: "bling, bling", expensive
jewellery worn ostentatiously; "bootylicious", highly attractive;
"chill room", a place to relax and chill out; "flava", a respelling
of "flavour" used especially in connection with Caribbean music;
"phat", good; "hoodie", a type of hooded jacket; and "hottie", an
extremely attractive person.

Some other examples of newly added words, chosen pretty much at
random, include "birth father", the natural father as opposed to
one who has adopted a child, which has now joined the older "birth
mother" in a similar sense; "chick lit", novels about young women
and their problems; "cybercrime", electronic crime (plus several
other words in "cyber-" and its more recent sibling "e-", such as
"e-fatigue", tiredness that is caused by using computers for too
long); "frankenfood", genetically modified foodstuffs; and
"presenteeism", staying at work unnecessarily for fear of being
made redundant. A couple of recent specifically British terms are
"white van man", an aggressively dangerous driver of a delivery
van, and "redtop", a media jargon term for a downmarket tabloid
newspaper, whose mastheads are usually printed in red.

Some editions come with a supporting CD-ROM suitable for both the
Macintosh and Windows systems, containing a much-extended set of
dictionary examples, collocations and example sentences, together
with spoken pronunciations in both British and American English and
sets of interactive exercises.

[The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, fourth edition;
published on 27 March 2003; available in hardback, paperback and
flexicover with and without the CD-ROM; pp1950; the paperback with
CD-ROM has ISBN 0-582-77646-5 at a publisher's price of GBP18.95.
See http://www.longman.com/dictionaries/which_dict/ldocenew.html
for full details of options and prices. There is a Web site devoted
to the dictionary at http://www.longman.com/ldoce/]

AMAZON PRICES FOR THE PAPERBACK WITH CD-ROM
 UK: GBP18.95 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?DC)
 US: US$26.95 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?ZQ)
[Click on a link or paste it into your browser to order online. If
you do so you will get World Wide Words a small commission that
helps to pay for the Web site and general operating expenses.]


4. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Kevin Lawson noticed this in an article on Asia's heroin industry
in the issue of the San Francisco Chronicle for 4 April: "For the
past 15 years, heroin has turned Tariq Jameel into a confused,
friendless and jobless 44-year-old man". He commented: "There're
always trade-offs, but if you lose your friends because they get
old while you stay 44, who needs 'em?"

Julane Marx attended a school science fair last weekend: "There was
one display board that told in large letters of something having an
'affect' on something else, and another that questioned whether a
thing 'effects' another (trust me, this was not the proper use of
'effect'). I thought it might be nice to get the two kids together
so they could exchange vowels".

Phil Curtiss found a classified ad in The Record, New Jersey on 6
April: "Social Services, Case Coordinator - [full-time] position
for individuals with brain injuries".

Mara Math was watching the San Francisco channel of NBC television
recently. To her surprise a report on an anti-war demonstration
said that "Demonstrators were charged with failure to disburse",
with a caption that spelled the word that way. That's one trick for
keeping anti-war protests to a minimum - when the police commander
shouts "Charge!", issue invoices.


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Where does "tempest in a teapot" come from? [Susan G McManus]

A. I'm not familiar with that American version. If I wanted to
express the same idea, I'd say it was a "storm in a teacup", which
is the common British equivalent. Either way, it's a delightful
phrase for a fuss about nothing very much, or a dispute of only
minor or local importance.

These two forms are by no means the only ones. The big Oxford
English Dictionary has examples of "a storm in a cream bowl" and "
a storm in a wash-hand basin", and suggests that there were others.
All have this idea of a violent disturbance in a small compass, by
implication therefore one of little significance. The alliteration
of "tempest in a teapot" must have helped its acceptance.

Of the two best-known versions "tempest in a teapot" seems to be
the older, since I've found an example from a long-defunct journal
called The United States Democratic Review of January 1838 about
the Supreme Court: "This collegiate tempest in a teapot might serve
for the lads of the University to moot; but, surely, was unworthy
the solemn adjudication attempted for it".


6. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fact is that some among us have put almost as much ingenuity
into misexplaining the origins of words and phrases as the race has
put into making language." [John Ciardi, "A Browser's Dictionary"
(1980)]


A. Subscription commands
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm. You
can also send a gift subscription: see the same page for the link.

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

-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2003.  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>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------