World Wide Words -- 15 Feb 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 328        Saturday 15 February 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: Financial phobia.
3. Out There.
4. Topical Words: Moment.
5. Sic!
6. Weird Words: Ichthyophagous.
7. Q&A: Hue and cry; Brown study.
8. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HIGH STREET  In writing about this last week, I unconsciously but
confusingly used the word "highway" several times, which is from
the same figurative sense of "high". Several correspondents asked
whether "high" could be literal, through a main street being often
placed on high ground to avoid flooding. That was no doubt a factor
in their placing, but the linguistic evidence suggests that the
name is indeed figurative in origin.

PROFANITY FILTERS  A number of subscribers didn't get last week's
mailing, as their firms' profanity filters took exception to some
words in it (presumably those in the second paragraph of the book
review, for anyone interested). I won't amend what I write to take
into account the possibility that newsletters will be bounced in
this way. For those who didn't get the mailing, that issue can be
retrieved from

 http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/worldwidewords.html


2. Turns of Phrase: Financial phobia
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British newspapers have employed this phrase frequently, as well as
variations such as "fiscal phobia", ever since a report appeared
from researchers at Cambridge University at the end of January. The
researchers claim to have identified a psychological condition in
which some nine million people in Britain have a morbid fear of
coping with their financial affairs, to the extent of never reading
their bank statements or replying to letters about their personal
finances. The researchers argue they're not feckless spendthrifts,
but otherwise sane and rational people who have got themselves into
a state in which they can't deal with such matters sensibly. The
cause often seems to be some financial upset outside the person's
control that triggers a complete aversion to everything connected
with money. A person who is suffering from the state is said to be
a "financial phobe".

The highest levels of financial phobia are found among younger age
groups, with 30 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds suffering from the
condition and 26 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds. Women are more
likely to suffer from the condition than men.
                                       [Birmingham Post, Feb. 2003]

I'm talking financial phobia. It's official. Researchers at the
Social and Political Science faculty at Cambridge University have
discovered that 20 per cent of the population is affected with FP.
Yes, about 10 million people greet the appearance of a bank
statement on the doormat as they might react to a hand grenade:
they'd like to get rid of it, but they'd rather not touch it, so
they just ignore it.
                                           [Independent, Jan. 2003]


3. Out There
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Subscribers who are native speakers of North American English are
likely to find the Dialect Survey of interest. This was created by
Professor Bert Vaux at Harvard University. You can take a test and
view the collected results, which include maps. See where people
say the vowel in "cot" and "caught" the same way, where they use
double models as in "I might could do that", where they consider
"anymore" to be a standard form meaning "nowadays", or any of 120
other variations. See: http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/


4. Topical Words: Moment
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Commentators were asked to rate Colin Powell's performance in the
Security Council last week. One writer combined two current buzz
phrases when he wrote: "There was no smoking gun and it certainly
was not an Adlai Stevenson moment". The reference here is to the
dramatic evidence Stevenson showed the Council on 25 October 1962
about the Soviet Union's positioning of nuclear missiles in Cuba.

New uses of "moment" in the sense of "a significant instant in
time" seem to be creeping up on us all the time. There's "senior
moment" for an elderly person's momentary forgetfulness. "Zen
moment" was defined by John and Adele Algeo in a 1997 issue of
American Speech as a "state of altered consciousness in a sport
when the athlete has a sense of wholeness with the activity and
consequently of confidence and success". Further back, there was
"defining moment", which I think was first used by Howell Raines in
1983. There's also "Kodak moment", coined as an advertising slogan
by the film maker in the early 1990s for the customer's emotional
need to take a picture at the right time, which became a catch
phrase and is not yet quite dead.

All of these may be the fault of Ernest Hemingway. He used the
phrase "moment of truth" in 1932 in his Death in the Afternoon,
borrowing the Spanish "el momento de la verdad": "The whole end of
the bullfight was the final sword thrust, the actual encounter
between the man and the animal, what the Spanish call the moment of
truth". The phrase has since become common in the broader sense of
a crisis, turning-point or testing situation.

Such special moments are not so far from the way the Romans used
"momentum", the word from which we get "moment" (it was later
borrowed a second time for the scientific term). It meant motion,
but also the cause of motion and so figuratively a cause or
influence, an essential factor or a decisive consideration.

Though the first English sense was its now usual one of an instant
of time too short to be taken into account, it could also, though
not commonly, be a specific duration - one tenth of a point, where
a point was either a quarter or a fifth of an hour - so a moment
was a little more than a minute.

Hardly long enough to be momentous.


5. Weird Words: Ichthyophagous
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Fish-eating.

A student of the classical languages would spot the meaning of this
word instantly, since it derives from Greek "ikhthus", a fish, plus
"phagein", to eat, plus the English adjective ending "-ous". It has
its proper place in biology, where an animal would be so described
if fish formed a significant part of its diet.

It may with equal seriousness be transferred to human individuals
and populations who subsist similarly, though if you're not careful
it comes out sounding irretrievably pompous, as in this comment
from The Manufacturer and Builder of New York City in 1876: "We
find that the ichthyophagous class are especially strong, healthy,
and prolific". Eating fish is good for you. Henry Mayhew, in his
London Labour and the London Poor, borrowed it for the purpose of
elegant variation when he wrote in the 1850s that "Of sprats there
are 3,000,000 lbs. weight consumed - and these, with the addition
of plaice, are the staple comestibles at the dinners and suppers of
the ichthyophagous part of the labouring population of London".

We moderns eschew polysyllabic pomposities in favour of simple
English equivalents, so it's not seen as often as it once was.


6. Sic!
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Joseph Kerrigan spotted a placard for the London Evening Standard a
couple of weeks ago that read "POLICE MURDER SUSPECT IN DOCK". Or,
in plain English, that the alleged murderers of a policeman were in
court, not that the police had turned into vigilantes.

John Skemp saw a package in his supermarket with the label "Turkey
Kielbasa". In slightly smaller letters it said "Made with beef for
better flavor".

Robert Nathan reports having recently received a handbill from an
aspiring secretarial agency, which offered, in addition to typing
and transcription, "a wide range of duplicitous services".

As he reported in the newsgroup alt.usage.english, John O'Flaherty
was dismayed to read in the February issue of the Communications of
the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) "If a member does not
follow this code by engaging in gross misconduct, membership in ACM
may be terminated". John Estill commented sadly, "That's why I let
my membership lapse. I found the 'gross misconduct' requirement
beyond my capabilities. Even 'net misconduct' was a stretch."


7. Q&A
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Q. What does "hue and cry" mean? [Dave]

This idiom, meaning a loud clamour or public outcry, contains the
obsolete word "hue", which people these days know only as a
slightly formal or technical word for a colour or shade. As a
result, you sometimes see the phrase written as "hew and cry".

Our modern meaning goes back to part of English common law in the
centuries after the Norman Conquest. There wasn't an organised
police force and the job of fighting crime fell mostly on ordinary
people. If somebody robbed you, or you saw a murder or other crime
of violence, it was up to you to raise the alarm, the "hue and
cry". Everybody in the neighbourhood was then obliged to drop what
they were doing and help pursue and capture the supposed criminal.
If the criminal was caught with stolen goods on him, he was
summarily convicted (he wasn't allowed to say anything in his
defence, for example), while if he resisted arrest he could be
killed. The same term was used for a proclamation relating to the
capture of a criminal or the finding of stolen goods. The laws
relating to hue and cry were repealed in Britain in 1827.

This mysterious word "hue" is from the first part of the Anglo-
Norman French legal phrase "hu e cri". This came from the Old
French "hu" for an outcry, in turn from "huer", to shout. It seems
that "hue" could mean any cry, or even the sound of a horn or
trumpet - the phrase "hu e cri" had a Latin equivalent, "hutesium
et clamor", "with horn and with voice".

As an etymological footnote, the Old French "huer" survived in
Cornwall right down to the nineteenth century. At that time a key
part of the local livelihood came from the seasonal catch of fish
called pilchards, which migrated past the coast in great shoals. To
be sure of not missing their arrival, fishermen posted lookouts on
the cliffs, who would sound horns to warn the waiting fishermen
below. These lookouts were called "huers".

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Q. I once read the expression "brown study" somewhere. I think it
meant something like a morose mood or mental fog. Do you know the
origin and true meaning of this expression? [Ken Jaede]

A. Its first meaning in the language was indeed a state of gloomy
meditation. These days it usually means a state of abstraction,
absent-mindedness or deep thought.

The expression is old, dating at least from the sixteenth century.
We've now lost the original meanings of both halves of the phrase
and so it has long since turned into an idiom. "Brown" does refer
to the colour, but it seems that in the late medieval period it
could also mean no more than dark or gloomy and it was then
transferred figuratively to the mental state. A "study" at that
time could be a state of reverie or abstraction, a sense of the
word that is long since obsolete.

The first example is a surprisingly modern-sounding bit of sage
advice in a book called Dice-Play of 1532: "Lack of company will
soon lead a man into a brown study".


8. Endnote
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"Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons,
they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider
magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to
dictate how they will be used." David Lehman; quoted in the
"Cassell Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations" (1996)]


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