World Wide Words -- 13 Dec 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 12 19:05:39 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 371 Saturday 13 December 2003
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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: Phishing.
3. Weird Words: Scalene.
4. Book Review: Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
5. Book Reviews in brief.
6. Sic!
7. Q&A: Bossy.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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PLAIN ENGLISH CAMPAIGN My comment about no marketing professional
understanding the advertisement from Warburtons ("With a launch
burst of 550 TVRs - and £34m in 'premiumisation' opportunities -
we're confident you'll rise to the challenge") was borrowed from
the PEC's press release on what seemed at the time a reasonable
presumption that they had checked the point with someone who knew
about the subject. In view of other inadequacies in their press
release, that's now looking rather naïve of me. Jonathan Baldwin
wrote: "Actually, any marketing professional worth their salt would
know what this means - it's essentially alerting grocers that
Warburtons are about to be seen in TV advertisements, and that
there are incentives for grocers who sell more Warburtons loaves.
It's still gibberish though. No grocer I know would understand it".
"TVR", he tells me, stands for "Television Rating" and measures the
popularity of a programme by comparing its audience to the whole
population who might buy the product.
DEAR JOHN LETTER Several subscribers mentioned a song on the theme
of receiving a "Dear John" letter, suggesting it was the origin of
the phrase. However, online sources say it appeared only in 1953,
several years after the phrase had become established. A more
plausible source was suggested by Dick Kovar - in a pre-WW2 radio
programme called "Dear John", starring Irene Rich, which was
presented as a letter by a gossipy female character to her never-
identified romantic interest and which opened with these words.
Proving a link is likely to be impossible, but it's conceivable
this played a part in the genesis of the term.
WEB-PAGE ADDRESSES Lot of people had trouble with the address I
gave in last week's issue for the piece on the 2002 Plain English
Campaign awards. It was correct in the text, but some mail programs
included the punctuation at the end of the address, calling up a
page that didn't exist. I try where possible to add a space after
such addresses, but forgot this time. Unfortunately, the official
recommendation, putting angle brackets (<>) around the address,
also fails in some mail programs, which then refuse to display the
address at all. All I can suggest is that you copy and paste the
addresses instead; those in the text will usually end in ".htm".
ANONYMOUS DONATIONS Two contributions to World Wide Words expenses
have arrived by bank transfer without any details of who the donors
are. One was dated 21 November, the other 9 December. If you have
sent money by electronic transfer but have not had an message from
me to acknowledge its arrival, would you contact me at the usual
address, TheEditor at worldwidewords.org , with all the details?
2. Turns of Phrase: Phishing
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"Phishers" lure unsuspecting visitors to fake Web sites that look
like those of legitimate organisations. The aim is to persuade
people to give their passwords and credit-card information, which
the thief can then exploit. Among the firms to be targeted in this
year's wave of attacks was PayPal; authentic-looking e-mails were
sent out asking people to update their details at a Web site that
seemed convincing. More recently other financial institutions have
been hit. As people are getting wise to the Web-site scam, phishing
expeditions are now being conducted by virus attacks, in which
message boxes pop up asking people for private information, which
is then sent by e-mail to the attacker; often the virus also grabs
the contents of the person's address book as a source for further
attacks. The term has been known in the hacker culture since about
1996, as an obvious respelling of "fishing", but it has only hit
the headlines in the mainstream press since about July this year.
>>> From Newsday, 18 Nov. 2003: An eBay spokeswoman said the
company is focusing on its ongoing effort to educate customers to
be suspicious of any e-mail messages that ask for personal
information. The company posted warnings yesterday on its community
message boards, security center and help area about phishing scams.
>>> From The Toronto Star, 15 Nov. 2003: Most phishing scams have
been delivered by massive spam blasts, but viruses have become the
latest mechanisms because of their ability to spread far and wide.
3. Weird Words: Scalene /'skeIli:n/
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Of a triangle, having unequal sides.
I can already hear cries from geometers that this isn't at all a
weird word, but one with a specific and useful technical meaning.
Also, mathematically inclined or not, we all have three of them,
since the word is also applied to each of a set of three muscles
that enable us to bend our necks - they're called that because of
their irregular triangular shapes; another name for them is
"scaleni", singly a "scalenus", which is the Latin word from which
"scalene" derives. But the origin is further back, in the Greek
"skalinos", uneven or unequal. One of its rare appearances outside
technical contexts was in Charles Dickens' Sketches by Boz: "Mr.
Minns found himself opposite a yellow brick house ... with 'a
garden' in front, that is to say, a small loose bit of gravelled
ground, with one round and two scalene triangular beds, containing
a fir-tree, twenty or thirty bulbs, and an unlimited number of
marigolds".
4. Book Review: Eats, Shoots and Leaves
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To much surprise, this book from a small publisher on the unsexy
subject of commas, colons and dashes is proving the UK publishing
success of Christmas 2003. There's good reason for this: it's
witty, thought-provoking, and brief.
Lynne Truss is passionate about punctuation. She confesses to an
urgent desire to be the militant wing of the Apostrophe Protection
Society, to the extent that she once attempted to demonstrate to
the cinema-going public with the aid of an apostrophe on a stick
how easy it would be to make the film title "Two Weeks Notice"
grammatical. It is all too obvious that many people do not know how
to use this little mark: "Why else," Ms Truss argues, "would they
open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying 'Giant
Kid's Playground', and then wonder why everybody stays away from
it? (Answer: everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.)" Her internal
anguish sometimes boils over. "No matter that you have a PhD and
have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in
writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by
lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave."
A little extreme, I feel: boiling in oil would be quite sufficient.
She says in her introduction, "You know those self-help books that
give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission
to love punctuation." Her own love of the subject turns what might
be a dry exposition into a romp. She regrets that marks such as the
colon and semi-colon are now much less used than they once were,
though she is sure they aren't necessarily doomed to fade into
obscurity. She also regrets that books are losing their value as
the main medium of communication in our society and that newer and
more egalitarian media may let the barbarians determine the fate of
our punctuation systems. (She remarks sadly about the Internet and
texting: "By tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal
under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected
explosion of global self-publishing".)
I have few quibbles. She even manages to explain the semi-colon and
colon in a way that is both comprehensible and corresponds to the
way I use them. But just to prove that I've actually read the book,
I point to one solecism: on page 186 she indicates traditional
punctuation of addresses by writing "Mr. A. Franklin, Esq." My old
English teacher would have had her guts for garters for doubling up
the honorific.
The title comes from a story about a panda in a cafe (so written on
the back cover; what a pity she never gets around to discussing
accents). The panda eats a sandwich, fires a gun in the air and
walks towards the door. When the waiter asks in confusion what he
thinks he's doing, the panda throws him a badly-punctuated book on
wildlife: "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to
China. Eats, shoots and leaves".
[Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, published by Profile Books
in hardback on 6 November 2003; ISBN 1-86197-612-7; pp207;
publisher's UK price GBP9.99. The US rights have been sold to
Penguin, who will be bringing it out in the new year.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
UK: GBP6.99 ( http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?GA )
Canada: GBP22.33 ( http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?GB )
[Click on a link or paste it into your browser to order online. If
you do so you get World Wide Words a small commission that helps to
pay for the Web site and operating expenses. See also the Web site
page http:/www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm .]
5. Book Reviews in brief
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THE NEW WELL-TEMPERED SENTENCE If you prefer an American take on
punctuation, you may like to try Karen Elizabeth Gordon's book,
first published in 1983 but here presented in paperback for the
first time. It is claimed to "rescue punctuation from the perils of
boredom", and covers much the same ground as Lynne Truss's work.
Despite that puff, and the subtitle "A Punctuation Handbook for the
Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed", it does so in a relatively
formal way that requires you to have some knowledge of grammar to
understand when to apply the rules. The examples are the funniest
part, which have been chosen as much for their whimsical sidelights
on the human condition as for their value as illustrations. [Karen
Elizabeth Gordon; published by Mariner Books (a Houghton Mifflin
imprint) at $10.00; ISBN 0-618-38201-1.]
MORE WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WORDS This is a sequel to last year's
Weird and Wonderful Words ( see the review at http://www.
worldwidewords.org/reviews/re-wei1.htm ); next year I confidently
expect Yet More Weird and Wonderful Words). It contains a further
section of curiosities from the dustier crannies of the Oxford
English Dictionary, such as "anopisthography", the practice of
writing on only one side of the paper, and "magnoperate", to work
on one's magnum opus. To my taste, many entries are too brief.
[Erin McKean; published by Oxford University Press at GBP9.95; ISBN
0-19-517057-1.]
GREENSPEAK: IRELAND IN HER OWN WORDS Like all regional varieties
of the language, Irish English has its special vocabulary. Some of
these are English words borrowed for local purposes, such as
"marching season" or "peace process"; others from Gaelic have
achieved currency beyond Ireland, such as "bodhrán" (a tambourine-
like small drum) or "drumlin" (which sounds as though it might be a
small drum but is actually a hillock of clay deposited by a
glacier); yet others are native expressions, such as "gombeen man"
(a usurer) or "tilly" (the Irish equivalent of a lagniappe). All
these are explained and their origins given where they are known.
Author Paddy Sammon also includes some names of things that were
invented in Ireland, such as "Hamiltonian" (the mathematical
operator) and "induction coil", so that in many cases the link with
the language of Ireland is tenuous. A useful checklist, however,
for anyone who needs to know the vocabulary of Irish affairs.
[Paddy Sammon; published by Town House Books, Dublin, under ISBN 1-
86059-144-2; distributed internationally by Simon & Schuster under
ISBN 0-684-02015-7; publisher's price US$16.00.]
These books are available from the following Amazon sites; please
use one of these links to reach each home page, which will get
World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you:
AMAZON USA: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?QA
AMAZON UK: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?JZ
AMAZON CANADA: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?MG
AMAZON GERMANY: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?DX
6. Sic!
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Martin Eayrs found a leaflet of tips for safer driving provided by
the UK mobile-phone company O2 included the following: "Handy Tip
2: Why not give yourself time and concentration for your mobile
calls by taking a break from driving and parking safely?" Better
not show that to Lynne Truss ...
This recent CNN headline startled Jim Ripley: "Police probe killed
prosecutor's personal life". Intrusive police investigations might
indeed prevent a person from enjoying his private life, but that
wasn't the story. When you learn that the prosecutor died before
the investigation started, it makes more sense.
>From BBC online sports news last Monday, spotted by Peter Dillon-
Hooper: "To mark the enormity of England's achievement in securing
their first major World Cup triumph since 1966 ... ". As he says,
it sounds as though it was written by a disgruntled Aussie, though
this neutral sense of "enormity" for something large is taking over
from the older one of something seriously bad or morally wrong. It
is a sad loss of a useful word.
7. Q&A
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Q. I have been trying for many years without success to find out
where "bossy", the affectionate nickname for a cow, at least in the
US, comes from. If you can find anything on this word I thank you
very much in advance. [Meyer Garber, Bellport, NY]
A. Most people know "bossy" for a person who's domineering or fond
of giving people orders. That's an adjective from "boss", a word
which derives from the Dutch "baas", meaning "master". It was taken
to the New World by the Dutch about 1650 (for more, see
http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-bos1.htm ).
However, we're fairly sure that the bovine sense you mention isn't
linked to that. Nor does it come from a modification of the proper
name Bessy or Betsy, as some have suggested. The true story is
somewhat elusive and there are two possible explanations.
One theory has it that the noun is from West Country dialect. The
word "boss" is known from the eighteenth century, sometimes as
"buss" or "buss-calf" or "bussa", a name that was given to a young,
unweaned calf. It's suggested that this word was taken to North
America by some of the pioneering immigrants. The other theory
suggests that "bossy" might have come from the Latin "bos" for an
ox or cow (it's the source of the word "bovine" that I used
earlier). It's just possible that the West Country dialect word
might also have come from the Latin term, though it seems an
obscure and literary word to have been taken up in dialect. If that
theory is right, no matter which of the two theories you pick, you
end up in Latin.
As usual, nobody's prepared to put any money on one or the other.
"Bossy" is too poorly recorded in its early years for it to be
clear what was going on in people's minds at the time.
A. FAQ of the week
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can retrieve past issues of World Wide Words - from December
1999 onwards - by visiting
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/worldwidewords.html
This archive is searchable.
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C. Useful URLs
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