World Wide Words -- 10 May 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 340           Saturday 10 May 2003
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Nano.
3. Weird Words: Kelemenopy.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Down to the wire.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BILLY-O  In last week's piece, I mentioned Stephenson's locomotive
Puffing Billy. This raised hackles among railway buffs, who pointed
out that the locomotive was actually designed and built by William
Hedley in 1814. One subscriber who knows his Italian history tells
me that Garibaldi's lieutenant, mentioned in the same piece, was
actually Nino Bixio, though - being from Genoa - his name was said
a little like "billio".

As I wrote in the piece, one trouble with folk etymologists is that
they often can't get even their basic facts right; as the stories
were obviously untrue I didn't bother to check the details. It's a
mildly puzzling ethical dilemma: should one silently correct the
facts in such stories, thereby making them seem, at least to that
extent, more plausible? Or should one spend time pointing out the
errors, so giving them more space and attention than they warrant?


2. Topical Words: Nano
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In that descriptive British term for becoming upset or angry, the
heir to the throne has been getting his knickers in a twist over
the implications of nanotechnology, a new field in which scientists
are learning to manipulate matter pretty much atom by atom. He is
reported to have called on the Royal Society to discuss the risks
of this new technology, which has left British researchers somewhat
bewildered, as they consider there is no significant peril in what
they're doing.

Prince Charles's attitude towards the field has been described as
"nanophobia", yet another addition to the cornucopia of "nano-"
terms that have appeared in the past decade, as the implications of
this new technology have begun to filter through to the general
public.

It's a comment on the huge advances made in our understanding of
the very small that the prefix "nano-" is first recorded only in
the 1940s, when it became necessary to specify sub-units that were
a factor of a thousand million smaller. It was used first in
measurements of small electric currents (nanoamps), or powers
(nanowatts), small volumes of liquid (nanolitres), and the like.
Whimsical computer scientists have since invented "nanoacre", for
an area about 2mm square on the surface of a microchip.

It was the publication in 1986 of Eric Drexler's book The Engines
of Creation that brought to most people's attention the idea that
it might be possible to directly manipulate matter at the atomic
level. He didn't invent the term "nanotechnology" - it's first
recorded from 1974 - but he certainly gave it its current
associations, based on the fact that the size of atoms and
molecules is in the nanometre range.

Many technologists use "nanotechnology" or "nanotech" to mean any
way to construct things on the "nanoscale", such as the creation of
ever-smaller microchips. However, Drexler meant two ideas in
particular by the term. One was to create new substances, or better
ways of making existing materials, by moving atoms one by one to
where we want them to be. The other was the creation of molecular-
sized machines, capable of carrying out a variety of useful
functions semi-autonomously.

Science-fiction writers sometimes call these "nanomachines" or
"nanobots" (where "bot" is from "robot"), or "nanos" for short.
These might, for example, monitor a person's health, as Greg Bear
imagined in Moving Mars: "Medical nano filled my bloodstream,
rooting out problems, controlling my tendency to slip into shock".
Nanos might act as construction tools, turning raw materials into
useful objects, acting as "nanoassemblers", as in The Hammer of God
by Arthur C Clarke: "Luckily all the necessary components are
standard items - propellant tanks, thrusters, control systems, and
the framework to hold them together. So the nanoassemblers can
build ATLAS in a few days".

One of the key abilities of these machines would be to make copies
of themselves - self-replicating machines, or "replicators". This
is where Prince Charles's worries arise. Somebody evidently told
him about "grey goo", the unlovely name for what would result if
such tiny machines ever got out of control and turned the world and
everybody on it into an amorphous atomic soup. Nobody seems to have
explained to him that for the foreseeable future the concept lies
strictly in the realm of science fiction.


3. Weird Words: Kelemenopy
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A sequential straight line through the middle of everything,
leading nowhere.

Do not seek this word, gentle reader, in your dictionary of choice.
It will not be there. This is a recent example of what Walter Skeat
called ghost words. He coined the term in 1886 when he wrote about
the problems of compiling a dictionary. He said they were "words
which had never any real existence, being mere coinages due to the
blunders of printers or scribes, or to the perfervid imaginations
of ignorant or blundering editors".

The most notorious example of the type is "dord", supposedly a word
meaning "density", which was included in the 1934 edition of
Webster's New International Dictionary (it was originally "d or D",
an abbreviation for the word "density", but was run together by an
editing error into what looked like a word).

To such origins Mr Skeat might have added deliberate inventions by
mischievous or bored editors. A famous example of this type is
"zzxjoanw", the last entry in Rupert Hughes' Music Lovers'
Encyclopedia of 1903, and subsequent editions down to the 1950s,
which was claimed to be a Maori word for a drum. It was later
proved to be a hoax (not least because there is no Z, X or J in the
Maori language).

This week's Weird Word falls into a sub-category of hoaxing ghost
words that are admitted not to exist. It was coined by John Ciardi,
the American poet, in A Browser's Dictionary in 1980. He said it
was "from my own psychic warp, to see if anyone would notice, and
because I have always dreamed of fathering a word". (Haven't we
all?) The genesis of his creation was the sequence "klmnop" from
the centre of the alphabet, with ten letters before and ten after
it, which Mr Ciardi described as "a strictly sequential
irrelevance".


4. Sic!
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Joe Jordan wrote: "On the government trains in Sydney, there are
signs advising passengers who are travelling at night to place
themselves 'near the guard's compartment illuminated with a blue
light'. I think there is an untapped market selling blue lights to
nocturnal passengers".

Following up last week's story about a highway sign (could a sub-
genre be evolving?) Maura Wahl passed this observation on: "There
is a highway sign on Interstate 10 in New Mexico, near the Arizona
border, that reads 'dust storms may exist'. We speculate that a
philosophy major was unable to find work anywhere but with the
state road commission".

Richard Marshall in the UK spotted a neatly painted sign at his
local refuse disposal site: "Asbestos and LPG containers not
excepted". That's an excellent example of a sign that says the
exact opposite of what's meant.

Gordon Robinson spotted this caption to a photograph in last
Monday's Bangkok Post: "Crude oil traders gesture as they conduct
business on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange on
Friday". These would be crude gestures, I take it?

Ian Dickinson noticed that Dr Stuart's herbal tea is "not suited to
the taste of children". He remarks, "perhaps one should only serve
it with fish dishes".

Martin Turner from Hong Kong was surprised to hear Jane Francis
Kelly say on BBC World News on Tuesday, "Shackled and practically
naked, many human rights organisations have complained about
conditions at Guantanamo Bay". Those human rights organisations can
sometimes have a really bad time of it.


5. Q&A
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Q. Why do we say "down to the wire", as in the present race for
football's premiership title? [Nick Sandham]

A. We use "down to the wire" for any situation which is tense
because its outcome may not be decided until the very last moment.
It's a favourite phrase of commentators in most sports pretty much
everywhere in the English-speaking world and it has been borrowed
for any problematic situation, especially in business and politics.
An example in the Birmingham Post in April 2003 referred to
football, but in a more melancholic sense: "I would say the future
is quite bright for Notts County but simply because of the
complexities of bringing a football club out of administration, the
number of hoops we have to jump through, it could go right down to
the wire".

The origin is indeed in sport, though not football but horse-
racing. American racetracks in the latter part of the nineteenth
century - before the days of cameras - had a wire strung across the
track at the finishing line to help stewards decide which nose had
got across the line first. An early example appeared in Scribner's
Magazine in July 1889: "As the end of the stand was reached Timarch
worked up to Petrel, and the two raced down to the "wire," cheered
on by the applause of the spectators. They ended the first half
mile of the race head and head, passing lapped together under the
wire, and beginning in earnest the mile which was yet to be
traversed". So, a race that was undecided until the very last
moment was said to go down to the wire.

Another wire was often placed across the track at the starting post
to help check for false starts; this led to another expression:
"from wire to wire", from the starting post to the finishing line,
hence from end to end of a contest. When you are "under the wire",
you're at the finishing line, figuratively at the last possible
opportunity or just in time.


6. Endnote
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"There is ... in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that
he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the
world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they
learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!" [Maria
Montessori; quoted in the "Cassell Dictionary of Contemporary
Quotations" (1996)]


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C. FAQ of the week
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