World Wide Words -- 18 Jan 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 324         Saturday 18 January 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. Book Review: Convict Words.
3. Topical Words: Curriculum.
4. Weird Words: Gargalesis.
5. Q&A: Cast aspersions.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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VERBS IN -IZE AND -ISE  After my item on this subject last week, a
polite chorus of mild condemnation came from Canadians, who pointed
out that they are in the Commonwealth, too, but spell their verbs
in "-ize", just like you chaps to the south of them. I should have
remembered that in linguistic matters Canada is always special ...
as it is, of course, in everything else.

OVER TO YOU ...  Here's a question: what term do you apply to this
weekly communication? Is it, as I have been calling it for the past
five years, a newsletter? Or do you have another suitable term? I
ask because "newsletter" isn't really appropriate (because it isn't
one, dealing as it does mostly with subjects as newsworthy as last
year's calendar), but I have called it that for lack of a suitable
alternative. "E-zine" and "e-letter" are just too pretentious to be
considered, "bulletin" suggests stop-press updates, "magazine" to
me implies glossy photographs and lifestyle columns, "publication"
is too vague, "journal" too scholarly. Any thoughts?


2. Book Review:  Convict Words
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Language is so closely entwined with culture that to study the one
must also be to investigate the other. That's the founding thesis
of this work by a researcher at the Australian National Dictionary
Centre. In Convict Words, Dr Amanda Laugesen seeks to illuminate
the story of the European penal settlements in Australia through
the language they used.

This is not an easy task. History, they say, is written by the
victors; it might equally be said that the history of a convict
settlement is written by its guards. Direct records from prisoners
are infrequent and descriptions of settlements were often written
for European consumption, with local jargon expunged. Trying to
establish exactly how the transportees actually spoke is therefore
a matter of extrapolating from occasional references in official
documents and the few surviving personal writings.

The prisoners, of course, did not arrive in a linguistic vacuum.
They came with the vocabularies of their English homeland, which
included the low slang of the criminal underworld - the "flash
language" as it was called, a term that was itself known in England
before the "first fleet" arrived in Australia in January 1788. So
perhaps it is not too surprising that many of the terms discussed
in this book are ones that are familiar from the standard language,
though often with a twist or slant given to them by local
conditions; for example "barracks" came to mean a place for the
temporary accommodation of convicts awaiting placement.

Having said that, Dr Laugesen often drags in terms that have only
marginal local associations in order to make a point about convict
conditions: "government", for example, or "cell", "convict",
"flog", "overseer", "pardon", or "treadmill", all of which have
their standard English senses. She also introduces numbers of
derived phrases, many of them transparent in meaning: what could a
"convict woman" or "female convict" be, other than the obvious? The
same points may be made with equal force of "convict
establishment", "prison population" and other phrases. To a non-
lexicographer, the distinctions of meaning involved will often seem
fussily over-subtle.

Of course, it's the truly indigenous formations that are the most
interesting: convicts were known as "canaries" (partly because they
were in essence encaged if not actually behind bars, but also
because their uniforms, when they had them, were yellow), or later
as "magpies" (a reference to the parti-coloured uniform issued as a
mark of disgrace); "public" was borrowed early on to refer to
aspects of the convict system, to show it was a penal settlement
run as a public institution, not one in which a person could live
privately; a "gentleman convict" was one with some education and
possibly a trade or profession; a "croppie" was at first an
Irishman who cut his hair short, but was later a more general term
for a convict; in the 1840s, those who opposed the end of the
transportation system were politely called "transportationists";
their "abolitionist" opponents preferred the less polite
"pollutionists" (because they sought to continue polluting the
country with convicts).

Despite the patchy chronicling of vocabulary, some standard English
terms are either better recorded in Australia (and New Zealand) in
the early years than in Britain, or are recorded earlier. Examples
are "hard labour" (recorded in 1853 in Britain but in 1803 in
Australia) and "chain gang" (now often thought to be typically
American, but recorded first from Australia in 1822).

The strength of the book lies not merely (perhaps not even so much)
in its vocabulary as in the extended citations from contemporary
documents that illustrate each term. These are typically paragraphs
taken either from the earliest known instance or from an insightful
later work. All together, they provide a fascinating glimpse of
early Australian colonisation, both involuntary and otherwise.

[Laugesen, Amanda, "Convict Words"; published by Oxford University
Press Australia on 1 January 2003; ISBN 0-19-551655-9; paperback,
pp208; publisher's price AU$34.95. It will be available in the USA,
Canada and the UK later in the Spring.]

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3. Topical Words: Curriculum
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There was a big fuss made last week by commercial suppliers at the
decision by the British government to allow the BBC to offer a
"digital curriculum", albeit with strings attached. As part of the
government's "e-learning" strategy, the BBC will spend GBP150m over
five years on providing interactive multimedia learning materials
for schools, colleges and individuals via the Internet.

Such a collection of buzzwords ought to warn us that we are - to
borrow yet another - at the cutting edge of technology, even though
the term "digital curriculum" itself is now some years old and has
been borrowed from initiatives in the USA. It could be worse. If
meaning were to follow etymology, the BBC might have been asked to
provide carriage-driving lessons.

The original Latin meaning of "curriculum" was a course, but of the
kind that one runs around (it came from "currere", to run), or
perhaps traverses in a racing chariot, a transferred sense. The
first borrowing of the Latin word into English - in the late
seventeenth century - was for a light, two-wheeled, twin-horsed
carriage, the "curricle", the sports car of carriage days. A very
Jane-Austen word is curricle, as in Northanger Abbey:

  A very short trial convinced her that a curricle was the
  prettiest equipage in the world; the chaise and four
  wheeled off with some grandeur, to be sure, but it was a
  heavy and troublesome business, and she could not easily
  forget its having stopped two hours at Petty France. Half
  the time would have been enough for the curricle, and so
  nimbly were the light horses disposed to move, that, had
  not the general chosen to have his own carriage lead the
  way, they could have passed it with ease in half a minute.

By then, the Latin word "curriculum" had already been in use for
half a century in Latin texts in at least one of our ancient
universities in the figurative sense of a course of study (if you
are thinking here of Oxford or Cambridge, I have to correct you,
since the ancient university in which it appeared first was that of
Glasgow; the word gained acceptance there before it moved south).
However, it doesn't appear as an English word until 1824, again at
Glasgow University. Even more recent - dating from 1902 - is
"curriculum vitae", literally "the course of one's life", the
British term (usually abbreviated to CV) for what Americans usually
call a résumé (though they get confused about how many, if any,
accents to put on it).

We have now thoroughly accepted "curriculum" into the language and
have created the adjective "curricular" to go with it (and by
extension, "extracurricular"). At first, though, "curricular" meant
"pertaining to driving or to carriages", the only sense given in
the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary - its
educational associations are twentieth century.

Our only surviving problem with "curriculum" is whether the plural
is to be "curricula", as Latinists would prefer, or whether we
should English it into "curriculums". Even more problematic is what
to call more than one CV: if you're tempted on the basis of a
little Latin to refer to "curricula vitarum", scholars will
immediately correct you - this refers to a set of documents, each
of which describes more than one life. The correct term is
"curricula vitae".


4. Weird Words: Gargalesis
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Forceful tickling.

Learned men have been arguing about the function of tickling for at
least the last couple of millennia and we are no nearer to finding
out why it is that when people are tickled they laugh. It can't be
that they enjoy it, because they usually don't.

In 1999, Christine Harris, a research scientist at the University
of California, San Diego, proved that people laugh even when they
think they are being tickled by a machine (so it has nothing to do
with a person doing it) and that the quality of the laugh was not
the same as that provoked by humour. The response is also different
when a person is tickled lightly, say by a feather on the sole of
the foot or a bug crawling across you. For example, you can't give
yourself a heavy tickle, but you can a light one.

Because the responses are of different kinds, psychologists have
contrasted "gargalesis", heavy tickling (which is from Greek
"gargalismos", tickling) with "knismesis", the light tickle of a
feather. Though both terms date back to an academic article of
1897, they're extremely rare, and you won't find either in even the
largest dictionary.


5. Q&A
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Q. A friend of mine took to contemplating the term "cast
dispersions" and emailed me with his findings from searching the
web. I always thought the term was "cast aspersions" but apparently
both are, or have been, in usage. What are the origins and usage of
these terms? [Mariah Blackhorse]

A. "Cast dispersions" is an excellent example of a malapropism:
using the wrong word through ignorance. The term is named after Mrs
Malaprop, a comic character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The
Rivals, who constantly seeks to sound high-flown but fails
catastrophically because she doesn't know what the words she is
using really mean. So she says of her daughter, "She should have a
supercilious knowledge in accounts; and as she grew up, I would
have her instructed in geometry, that she might know something of
the contagious countries".

It's fine knockabout stuff, and it's easy to mock the afflicted,
but malapropism is a very common problem. It is also one route by
which language changes, because if enough people refer to "card
sharks", or "another thing coming", or "bare with me", or "chaise
lounge", at least some of the phrases may in time be accepted as
correct.

In this case, "aspersion" is a relatively uncommon word and
"dispersion" seems to fit better. Originally, aspersion was the
action of sprinkling somebody with something, usually water - it
was commonly used of one form of Christian baptism, for example. It
comes from slightly older verbs "asperse" and "asperge", both of
which can be traced back to Latin "aspergere", to sprinkle.

Around the middle of the seventeenth century, "aspersion" began to
refer to the figurative idea that a person was sprinkling his
neighbourhood with damaging imputations or false statements. Our
modern idiom "to cast aspersions" seems to have been first used by
Henry Fielding in his novel Tom Jones of 1749.


6. Endnote
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"Nobody really knows the story of 'OK' or 'posh' or 'bloody' or a
great deal else, and all we need is our existing knowledge of what
the words mean and how they are used. The rest is small-talk and
readers' letters in the 'Daily Mail'" [Kingsley Amis, "The King's
English" (1997)]


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