World Wide Words -- 29 Mar 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 334          Saturday 29 March 2003
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: SARS.
3. Turns of Phrase: Shock and Awe.
4. Weird Words: Metoposcopist.
5. Q&A: Green ink letter; Chook.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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UNANSWERED MAIL  I'm fighting deadlines for the next few weeks, so
please do not be offended that e-mail is not always answered. And
newsletters might become a little shorter!

SMALL CRIES OF JOY  Oxford University Press tell me that the first
US printing of my book "Ologies and Isms" has sold out already. I
was going to make promotional noises to American subscribers this
week about its being available, but now I'll hold off until new
stock arrives, probably in late April.


2. Turns of Phrase: SARS
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Much medical and media attention has focused on this mysterious new
disease in the fortnight since Gro Harlem Brundtland, the director
of the World Health Organisation, took the unusual step of issuing
a warning. However, press coverage has been muted in recent days
because of the war with Iraq. The acronym is short for "Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome".

So far several hundred people have been infected and some 50 have
died. The disease - also named "super pneumonia" because a life-
threatening pneumonia is a major symptom - is causing concern
because of the ease with which it can spread at close quarters. Its
cause is as yet unknown, although a virus is strongly suspected;
despite some press reports, it isn't a form of influenza. It's
thought the illness may have began in Guangdong Province in China
some months ago, and the greatest impact on the public has been in
South-East Asia countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong. As a
result, another name that has emerged for it this week is "Asian
pneumonia".

SARS is believed to be the first new, often life-threatening
disease to emerge in decades that can be spread from one person to
another.
                                       [Washington Post, Mar. 2003]

SARS has been tentatively identified as a virus similar to those
which cause measles, mumps and canine distemper.
                                          [The Scotsman, Mar. 2003]


3. Turns of Phrase: Shock and Awe
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This looks set to be the Second Gulf War's signature phrase, much
as "mother of all ..." was of the first. It's all over the press
reportage of the conflict, it being the Pentagon's term for the
process of instilling fear and doubt in the minds of Iraqis.

The phrase first appeared publicly in the book of the same title by
Harlan Ullman and James Wade in 1996, which came out of a report by
the Rapid Dominance Study Group, an informal association of mainly
ex-military men. The concept they put forward was, as Harlan Ullman
explains it, one that involved "inflicting minimum casualties and
doing minimum damage using minimum force". Shock and Awe is not
about destruction but about power. By demonstrating such might that
an opponent is stunned into surrender, and by concentrating on
matters that reduced the ability to resist, it combines military
force with psychological warfare. Their book said, "The ability to
shock and awe rests ultimately in the ability to frighten, scare,
intimidate and disarm".

Mr Ullman is reported as saying that the way the Pentagon has used
it "has not been helpful" because it has put too much emphasis on a
Doomsday approach, though this could itself, of course, be just
another application of Shock and Awe.

It is all part of the administration's basic approach toward
foreign policy, which is best described by the phrase used for its
war plan - "shock and awe." The notion is that the United States
needs to intimidate countries with its power and assertiveness,
always threatening, always denouncing, never showing weakness.
                                              [Newsweek, Mar. 2003]

Washington's assessment that a "shock and awe" bombing campaign
would crumble the Iraqi regime's morale, or even kill its leaders
in the first round, has not so far proved correct.
                                          [Toronto Star, Mar. 2003]


4. Weird Words: Metoposcopist
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A person who practices metoposcopy.

Metoposcopy is the art of judging a person's character and fortune
from his face, principally his forehead. This is not so strange an
idea, since the forehead is a prominent and expressive part of the
face. Persons with high foreheads are considered brainy; those with
short ones are sometimes thought to be almost Neanderthal. The play
of the muscles on the forehead in concentration or contemplation is
an expressive reflection of the mind working beneath the skin.

Metoposcopy was a medieval method of assessment, together with such
related techniques as "chiromancy" (divination using the hand) and
"podomancy" (prognostication from the condition of one's feet). The
more general term that refers to the whole face is "physiognomy".
Metoposcopy is said to have been invented in the sixteenth century
by Gerolomo Cardano, a man better known for his pioneering work in
medicine and mathematics. His book, Metoposcopia Libri Tredecim,
contained more than 800 woodcuts illustrating facial positions he
suggested were associated with temperament and destiny.

The word comes via Late Latin from Greek and derives from the Greek
word "metopon", forehead.


5. Q&A
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Q. Although the meaning is quite clear to us and examples of use
are readily available on the Web, so far we have not been able to
locate the expression in any dictionary, let alone discover how it
came about! Why "green ink letter"? [Anna Beria, University of
Bath, UK]

A. I know immediately what you mean by a "green-ink letter", or one
written by a member of the "green-ink brigade". Since they are
terms largely restricted to Britain (though I have come across a
couple of isolated references in American publications) some
background would seem to be a good idea.

The term refers to a particular kind of letter writer - most often
to newspapers - who claims that he is the victim of some injustice,
or who composes long and vehement complaints against a person or an
organisation, or who believes that a numerical calculation based on
the name of the Prime Minister shows he's an agent of the devil, or
who is sure that invisible rays are being beamed into his house by
his next-door neighbour to cause him injury, or who puts forward a
thesis which, if adopted, will lead inevitably to world peace.

In 1998, the newly appointed Readers' Editor of the Guardian, Ian
Mayes, wrote: "Even before I began I had numerous warnings from
colleagues to 'beware of the green-ink brigade', conjuring the
spectre of obsessive correspondents who would write at great length
and persistently, typically covering their copious sheets in
longhand scrawled in green ink".

In 1999, this appeared in the Independent newspaper: "All of which
might be dismissed as a bad joke - a green-ink letter written by a
malicious eccentric - were it an isolated case"; the New Statesman
of January 1995 had: "So is Busby a paid-up member of the green-ink
brigade or does he actually have a point? And is his phone really
tapped?"

The earliest example I know of (many thanks to Fred Shapiro of Yale
Law School for his help in finding it; he would like me to mention
that he's Editor of the forthcoming Yale Dictionary of Quotations)
is dated 8 March 1985 and is once again from the "Guardian": "Our
elected legislature was taken over lock, stock and barrel by the
green ink brigade". In this case MPs weren't actually writing
letters, but debating fluoridation in the House of Commons in a way
that the article's writer, Ian Aitkin, felt was unbalanced. He
thought it necessary to add this note to his comment:

  The expression is the more-or-less affectionate description
  given by journalists and politicians to the people who write
  them eccentric letters, often in block capitals and frequently
  underlined in multicoloured inks. For some reason I have never
  heard satisfactorily explained, the most obsessive of these
  correspondents seem to prefer green.

In recent examples, the key characteristic is the eccentricity or
disturbed reasoning of the individuals, not their actual use of
green ink. Or indeed their writing of letters - as Ian Aitkin's
piece demonstrates, the term had even by then become figurative.

I'm sure that the term arose in journalism, though - like you - I
can find no good information about exactly when. I've asked several
senior journalists of my acquaintance about it. They all know the
expressions. Some claim to remember receiving letters of the type
in their younger days, while others deny literal green-ink letters
ever existed. But they all think the phrases were coined relatively
recently to reflect journalistic experience or folklore.

                        -----------

Q. I have found a term that appears to be completely Australian in
usage, if not origin. The word is "chook" which is slang for a
chicken. Is this native to Australia or did it originate elsewhere
and then take root here better than anywhere else? Any ideas on the
origin of the word would be helpful. [Mark Hansen]

A. Not solely Australian, since New Zealanders make a claim to it
as well. And I'm not sure that it's actually slang: I'd prefer to
describe it as colloquial regional English.

In one sense it's natively Antipodean, since that form of the word
certainly grew up there - it's recorded in various pronunciations
and spellings in Australia from the 1850s on (in New Zealand
somewhat later), at first as "chookie" or "chucky". The "chook"
form emerged about 1900 and has outlasted the others.

In another sense, it's actually an English word, one that was taken
to Australia and New Zealand by emigrants. Back in the sixteenth
century "chuck" was a familiar endearment. Shakespeare is first
recorded as using it, appropriately enough in Love's Labour's Lost.
It survives as an endearment in some parts of Britain today, such
as Yorkshire and Liverpool, the latter having the vowel pronounced
to my ear part-way towards "chook". And, of course, there's the
American nickname (even sometimes the given name) of "Chuck", often
used as a pet form of "Charles", which comes from the same term of
affection (the sense "to give a gentle blow under the chin" is
probably from a different source).

All these except the given name could, and indeed still can, refer
to literal chickens. The name seems to have been an attempt at
imitating the clucking of farmyard fowls, so it's a close relative
of "cluck", which was similarly invented.

There are other forms, too, principally the "chucky" one that seems
to have been the first Australian version. Those of us who were
young in the 1980s, or who like me had a misspent middle age, will
remember the arcade game "Chuckie Egg"; in Britain there's a
supplier of table birds whose name is Chuckie Chicken. I'm told
that in Liverpool a "chucky egg" can be a soft-boiled egg mashed up
with butter, and "chook" can be a general word for food and also a
mildly insulting term for an old woman.


6. Endnote
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"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the
range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally
impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
[George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-four" (1949)]


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