World Wide Words -- 09 Aug 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 353          Saturday 9 August 2003
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Sent each Saturday to 17,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>      <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY SCALING-BACK  August's issues are short, because I'm taking
a break. Normal service will be resumed in September.

SAFIRE, SO GOOD  Part of my allotted fifteen minutes of fame was
used up last weekend, courtesy of William Safire's "On Language"
column in the New York Times. He said I was "the world's expert" on
the origins of the saying "Katy, bar the door". Not, I feel, my
chief claim to fame, but one could do worse ...


3. Weird Words: Apocope  /@'pQk at pi:/
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Leaving out the last letter, syllable, or part of a word.

When you hear about the "huntin', shootin', fishin'" aristocracy of
eighteenth-century Britain, the speakers are committing apocope. In
the same way, when you talk about "mag" instead of magazine, "fab"
when you mean fabulous, or "cred" for credibility, these are all
apocopic cases.

Perhaps it's our rush-hurry-urgent age, but it seems that such
energetic abbreviations are becoming more common, not merely with
students who produce slangy in-terms such as "psych", "chem" and
"maths" ("math" in the US). "Apocope" comes from the Greek word
"apokoptein", to cut off, made up of "apo-", from or away, plus
"koptein", to cut.

Incidentally, if you instead cut the sound off the start of a word,
the right name is "aphesis" (an example being "squire", an aphetic
form of "esquire"); if you drop sounds in the middle (for which the
classic - and extreme - example is "fo'c's'le" for the crews'
quarters on board ship, in full "forecastle"), the process is
called "syncope".


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