World Wide Words - 07 Jun 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 6 15:45:59 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 344 Saturday 7 June 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: Diabesity.
3. Review: Oxford Guide to Word Games.
4. Sic!
5. Weird Words: Bodacious.
6. Q&A: Make ends meet; Ketchup versus catsup.
7. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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COMPETITION REMINDER Tomorrow, Sunday 8 June, is the last date on
which you can submit entries to our competition to find a new term
by which to describe deliberately misspelled words, especially
those that are designed to fool spam filters. See last week's issue
for the details (at http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?ZX if you
missed it).
MESSAGE QUEUE I've been away for several days, resulting in a long
tailback of messages awaiting answers. If yours is among them, be
reassured that I'll get to it sometime soon ...
2. Turns of Phrase: Diabesity
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The word is a blend of "diabetes" and "obesity", which sums up the
problem. Doctors in the West and some Asian developing countries
are deeply worried about the rapid increase in a form of diabetes
called adult-onset or Type 2 diabetes. This used to be a problem of
later life but it is now being seen more and more among obese
younger people, sometimes even children. A person who is grossly
overweight - another problem which is now endemic in some Western
nations - has a very high risk of contracting diabetes, so high
that the two conditions are considered intimately connected - a
situation the new term seeks to express. The cure is the deeply
unpopular one of eating less and taking more exercise to reduce
weight; even if a person already has adult-onset diabetes caused by
being overweight, getting slim can put it into remission. In the
US, "diabesity" is a trademark of a non-profit organisation, Shape
Up America, which raises awareness of the health effects of obesity
and promotes a healthy lifestyle.
A particular concern is the rapid spread among Asian children of
what was once known as adult-onset diabetes. The ailment, which
rarely affected children in the past, is so closely linked to
obesity that it has been nicknamed "diabesity."
[International Herald Tribune, 17 Mar. 2003]
Hand in hand with the obesity rates is a rocketing rate of
diabetes. In America, they are even coining a new word for it:
diabesity.
[Guardian, 10 May 2003]
3. Review: Oxford Guide to Word Games
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Tony Augarde's book includes chapters on every sort of game with
words that you can think of - riddles, charades, twenty questions,
Scrabble, acrostics, crosswords, palindromes, hangman, and so on -
plus some you may not have heard of. Each chapter describes a game
and its variations, with many illustrative examples in each case,
but also outlines its history in a way that is both scholarly and
enjoyable to read - a combination that's hard to pull off.
Some facts I discovered: The chapter on riddles traces them back to
ancient Babylonia; the game of charades appeared in the eighteenth
century, interestingly as a written game rather than one in which
the players act out scenes; acrostics are known from Roman times.
Mr Augarde gives the story behind the development of the crossword,
an invention of the American journalist Arthur Wynne, whose first
example appeared in the New York World on 21 December 1913 (it's
reproduced in the book) and he goes into the game of Scrabble in
some detail, as befits the most popular word game of our times.
This second edition - the book was originally published in 1984 -
has been extended to include material on various sorts of wordplay,
slips of the tongue, puns, and even text messaging. You will find
the story of Mondegreens (misheard song lyrics, see my piece at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/monde.htm). The section on
spoonerisms analyses to what extent the Reverend William Archibald
Spooner, Warden of New College, Oxford, actually uttered any of the
twisted fragments of English attributed to him - ones like "Young
man, you have tasted your worm and must leave Oxford by the town
drain" were certainly invented by undergraduates. He's said to have
admitted to announcing a hymn in chapel as "Kinquering Kongs their
Titles Take" but denied the rest, though others claim to have heard
him say things like "Through a dark, glassly". A chapter on slips
of the tongue refers to malapropisms, schoolboy howlers, misprints,
Irish bulls and oxymorons. Another chapter goes into cross-language
errors and the contortions that have appeared in old-time phrase
books (although the archetypal "My postillion has been struck by
lightning" seems to have been an invention, some of the phrases
that really appeared were almost as stilted and unlikely, such as
this from 1814: "She is the only daughter of a woollen-draper").
You may find some words new to you, such as telestich, an acrostic
in which not the first but the last letter of each line spells out
the word; a metallege is a type of anagram in which the positions
of just two letters have been swapped - such as "dog" and "god", or
"dawdle" and "waddle"; a chronogram is an inscription in which
letters representing Roman numerals are given prominence so that
they can be added together to denote a given year (they're often
found on old bells, for example); a pangram is a sentence that
includes every letter of the alphabet, ideally just once (examples
with repeated letters are probably familiar to everybody who has
learned to type, such as "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy
dog" or "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs").
I'm always conscious that my associations with Oxford University
Press might cause readers to suspect that an endorsement of an OUP
book might be the result of bias. But I had nothing to do with this
work (hadn't even read the previous edition, as it happens) so that
when I say that I found it delightful, it comes from the heart.
[Tony Augarde, Oxford Guide to Word Games, 2nd Edition, published
by Oxford University Press, 8 May 2003; hardback, pp294; ISBN 0-19-
866264-5; publisher's prices: GBP14.99 (UK), $22.00 (USA).]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
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[Click on a link or paste it into your browser to order online. If
you do so you will get World Wide Words a small commission that
helps to pay for the Web site and general operating expenses.]
4. Sic!
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Jeremy Shaw e-mailed thus: "My favourite sign was on a shop I used
to pass in Leytonstone, London. It said simply 'A. Virgin & Son'".
Rod Blackburn said that a junk mail advertisement for a Shoe Sale
that recently arrived in his letter box included the statement: "At
this price they won't last".
John Daly e-mailed from Houston (the one in Scotland): "South of
Dublin on the road to Killarney, Ireland, my wife and I saw a road-
side sign with an arrow pointing to 'Drive-In Car Park'. How
else, we ask ourselves?"
5. Weird Words: Bodacious
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Blatant, remarkable, audacious, impressive, or attractive.
As you can tell from the wide-spectrum definition, this American
word is one of those wide-ranging superlatives to which speakers
turn when they want to say that some quality is present in large
degree; that quality might be unreasonableness, impressiveness,
insolence, or (most recently) female attraction, specifically big
breasts. This last meaning grew up in the middle 1980s following
its appearance in the film An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982.
Another film, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure of 1989, also
contributed to its growing nationwide popularity.
As a result, many people would guess the word is modern, but the
earliest record (actually of the adverb "bodaciously", which
appeared as "body-aciously") is from as long ago as 1832. The
adjective is known from the 1840s, often as "bowdacious" in the
early years. This leads lexicographers to think that both it and
the adverb are from a English West Country dialect form, written as
"boldacious" or "bowldacious", which was probably an amalgam of
"bold" and "audacious".
Among older users and before its recent surge to popularity, the
word seems to have been most common in the American South, though
not among African-Americans. One of the earliest examples is from
Georgia, dated 1845: "She's so bowdacious unreasonable when she's
riled".
6. Q&A
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Q. Is the origin of the expression "to make ends meet" known?
[Robert Priddy, Norway]
A. Not really. It's old enough that it has centuries ago become an
idiom, a turn of phrase that we don't usually stop to think about
at all. The oldest example I can find is from Thomas Fuller's The
History of the Worthies of England of about 1661: "Worldly wealth
he cared not for, desiring only to make both ends meet; and as for
that little that lapped over he gave it to pious uses", but the
fact that Fuller is making a little joke using it suggests he
already knew of it as a set phrase.
Where it comes from is hard to be sure about. It's often said that
it's from bookkeeping, in which the total at the bottom ("end") of
the column of income must at least match that at the bottom of the
expenditure column if one is not to be living beyond one's income
(think of Mr Micawber's advice to the young David Copperfield). The
phrase is also known in the form "to make both ends of the year
meet", which might strengthen that connection if we think of the
usual end-of-year accounting, except that that form isn't the
original one and wasn't recorded until Tobias Smollett used it in
Roderick Random in 1748.
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Q. Why is "ketchup" also called "catsup"? [Suzanne]
A. "Ketchup" was one of the earliest names given to this condiment,
so spelled in Charles Lockyer's book of 1711, An Account of the
Trade in India: "Soy comes in Tubbs from Jappan, and the best
Ketchup from Tonquin; yet good of both sorts are made and sold very
cheap in China". Nobody seems quite sure where it comes from, and I
won't bore you with a long disquisition concerning the scholarly
debate on the matter, which is reflected in the varied origins
given in major dictionaries. It's likely to be from a Chinese
dialect, imported into English through Malay. The original was a
kind of fish sauce.
I'm told the first ketchup recipe appeared in Elizabeth Smith's
book The Compleat Housewife of 1727 and that it included anchovies,
shallots, vinegar, white wine, sweet spices (cloves, ginger, mace,
nutmeg), pepper and lemon peel. Not a tomato in sight, you will
note - tomato ketchup was not introduced until about a century
later, in the US, and caught on only slowly. It was more usual to
base the condiment on mushrooms, or sometimes walnuts.
The confusion about names started even before Charles Lockyer wrote
about it, since there is an entry dated 1690 in the Dictionary of
the Canting Crew which gives it as "catchup", which is another
Anglicisation of the original Eastern term. "Catchup" was used much
more in North America than in Britain: it was still common in the
middle years of the nineteenth century, as in a story in Scribner's
Magazine in 1859: "I do not object to take a few slices of cold
boiled ham ... with a little mushroom catchup, some Worcester
sauce, and a pickle or so". Indeed, "catchup" could still be found
in American works decades later and is still to be found on
occasion.
There were lots of other spellings, too, of which "catsup" is the
best known, a modification of "catchup". You can blame Jonathan
Swift for it if you like, since he used it first in 1730: "And, for
our home-bred British cheer, Botargo, catsup, and caveer".
["Caveer" is caviar; "botargo" is a fish-based relish made of the
roe of the mullet or tunny.] That form was also once common in the
US but is much less so these days, at least on bottle labels: all
the big US manufacturers now call their product "ketchup".
Simple question: complicated answer!
7. Endnote
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"Some day I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for
the copies I give away." [attributed to Clarence Darrow in the
Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations (2001)]
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C. FAQ of the week
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