World Wide Words -- 16 Aug 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 354          Saturday 16 August 2003
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BRIEF ENCOUNTERS  August's issues are short, because I'm taking a
bit of a break. Normal service will be resumed in September.

LATE ARRIVAL  Apologies for the tardy distribution of this week's
newsletter: the server that handles the mailing list is in Michigan
and was brought down by the power failures in the eastern US.

APOCOPE  I walked into a minefield of definition while trying to
explain this word last week. If you check various dictionaries, you
find that some give much the definition I supplied ("leaving out
the last letter, syllable, or part of a word") while others have a
more restrictive meaning ("omission of the final sound or sounds of
a word"). This is a subtle but significant difference.

Linguists prefer to restrict this word to situations in which one
or more sounds (technically, phonemes) are lost from the end of a
word. Spelling differences or changes in pronunciation don't count.
As Professor Larry Horn pointed out, the definition I quoted would
allow "catalog" to be an apocopic form of "catalogue", which he is
sure it isn't - the loss of the final letters is to him irrelevant,
because they're not pronounced. Other linguist subscribers have
similarly argued that words such as "huntin'" (an example I used)
cannot be apocope, since the missing last letter signals a change
in the value of the final sound, not its loss.

The problem for mere interpreters of language such as myself is
that some reference works take a wider view that includes this sort
of abbreviation. I place in evidence, as one example, The Columbia
Guide to Standard American English of 1983: "Common examples in
American English are singin', dancin', and raisin' cain".

If not raised Cain, I've certainly ruffled a few feathers, which
brings me to my main piece this week ...


2. Weird Words: Austringer  /'QstrIndZ at r/
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A keeper of goshawks.

It's a rare word now, though some falconers keep it alive, out of
historical sentiment as much as anything, I'd guess. It's bound up
with the technical distinction between a hawk and a falcon - the
true hawks are smaller than the true falcons and have shorter and
more rounded wings; hawks usually prefer to hunt by chasing their
prey at low level, while falcons plummet down on it from above. In
English tradition, the two birds that exemplify the types are the
goshawk and the peregrine falcon.

In medieval times, falcons had higher social status than hawks
(though the claim often made that your rank determined which type
of bird you could fly seems to have been invented in the fifteenth-
century Boke of St Albans). As a result, "falconer" seems to have
been an upper-class word, with "hawker" used for the lower classes
who hunted with goshawk, sparrowhawk or kestrel; in time "falconer"
has become the general term for a person who trains and hunts with
any kind of bird of prey, including eagles and owls (the existence
of another sense of "hawker", for a travelling seller of goods,
with a quite different origin, has probably been a factor in its
decline). Quite why the keeper of just one species, the goshawk,
should have been singled out by giving him yet another name isn't
clear.

"Austringer" has in earlier times been written as "ostringer" or
"astringer" (this last form turns up in a stage direction in
Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost: "Enter a gentle astringer").
All of these spellings are modified forms of the older "ostreger",
which comes from French "ostricier", ultimately from Latin
"accipiter", a hawk.

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