World Wide Words -- 17 May 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 16 15:19:17 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 341 Saturday 17 May 2003
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Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org TheEditor at worldwidewords.org
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Josser.
3. Sic!
4. Q&A: Hopefully; Tide one over.
5. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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KIND WORDS I can't put the piece by Emma Tom from the last edition
of The Weekend Australian in this newsletter, not least because it
would probably fuse every spam filter in existence. She's a cheeky
minx (describing my photograph as showing "the pundit kicking back
in his study in fawn knitwear, limp collars and reading glasses the
size of Polski Fiat windscreens"). You can read it for yourself by
following the short link: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?TA .
NANO In the flurry of last-minute composition of the Topical Words
piece last week, I forgot to include the etymology of "nano-". It
is from Greek "nanos", dwarf.
GHOST WORDS My aside on ghost words in last week's issue reminded
Ellen Scordato of hard times at the wordface: "One of my favorite
sort of 'ghost words' occurred when I was part of a large copy
editing department in the US in the 1980s, working on numerous
multi-volume works destined for the school and library market.
About six of us were crammed in one room; the volume was immense;
the schedule grueling. One afternoon a distraught young copy editor
spent hours seeking the exact geographic location of Theis Land, an
area in the North Sea. 'Theis Land did not produce enough food to
feed its inhabitants,' I recall. We combed through every geographic
reference we could find to help her out. At last it dawned on
someone that it was 'The island,' that did not produce enough food.
To this day, there is a minor mythology among us six, scattered
throughout New York publishers by now, that "Theis Land" is where
old tired copy editors go to recuperate. There are large, comfy
recliners, tea and toast, and absolutely no pencils or printed
matter whatsoever".
2. Weird Words: Josser
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One not born to circus life; an outsider.
It is easy to become lost in the fog surrounding the source of this
word. There are - or at least, there have been - several meanings
to it, which don't all come from the same source.
At one time "josser" was a mildly contemptuous word for a man of
the cloth, a clergyman or padre, a term that was better known in
Australia than elsewhere. This came from the seaports of the Malay
peninsula, having been taken from the pidgin English "joss" for a
Chinese idol or religious image (hence "joss stick" and "good
joss", meaning good luck). "Joss" isn't a Chinese word, however,
but from Portuguese "deos", "God", which makes the name for a
clergyman entirely apt, if deviously derived. Then there's the
sense of "joss" for the boss, which is from an obscure English
dialect word that was taken to Australia in the middle of the
nineteenth century.
Our word is used in Polari (or Palari, or other spellings), which
was once the private language of showmen and travelling folk (for
more see http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/polari.htm). The
word is originally from Romany, the language of the Gypsies, and
literally means an outsider; it was used for a person who wasn't
born to the trade but who joined a circus or travelling fair as an
adult. A member of a circus community might once have said (for
Polari is now virtually extinct), "Nante palari before the josser
cul", "Don't speak Palari before that outsider".
There's yet another meaning for "josser", for a man, often an old
man or one regarded with mild contempt (so it's quite close in
meaning to "geezer"). This is the sense that most often turns up in
British and Irish literature during a period of about half a
century from the 1880s on. An example is in Five Tales, by John
Galsworthy (for whom it was a favourite word): "He lowered himself
to the ground, and moved in the bluish darkness towards the gate of
his daughter's house. Bob Pillin walked beside him, thinking: 'Poor
old josser, he is gettin' a back number!'" Was this a variation on
the clergyman sense, or from the English dialect word for the boss,
or from the circus sense? Nobody seems to know.
3. Sic!
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The sub-genre of unconsciously amusing highway signs gains further
momentum. From Cal White: "I was recently travelling in Northern
Ontario when I drove by a small business apparently specializing in
alternative energy. The sign beside the highway said: 'Small solar
systems available'. I presume this to mean that you only get two or
three planets with your kit..." And Elizabeth G Smith commented:
"There is another great sign in the Great American Desert, along
Interstate 80 in western Nebraska, near the exit for the town of
Sydney. It reads: 'Watch for wind'". Jane Brown reported a sign,
not on the highway but on a vehicle: "Here in Australia I am often
amused to see a council truck moving slowly along the roadside
bearing the large sign, 'vehicle constantly stopping'".
Following my mention two weeks ago of the messy collision of two
metaphors in the phrase "concrete roadmap", Nigel Hulbert chuckled
over the main headline in last Monday's European edition of the
Financial Times: "Powell tries to kickstart road map for peace".
Nicholas Willmott e-mailed as follows: "You may be amused to learn
that my local Post Office (Cardiff, Wales) has a large sign which
reads, 'Please proceed to nearest vacant cashier when buzzer
sounds'. This seems to be rather insulting to the Post Office
staff, some of whom give the impression of being quite alert".
4. Q&A
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Q. You mentioned in your piece on "irregardless" [for which see
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa/qa-irr1.htm - Ed] that there
was some controversy surrounding "hopefully". After a search I
noticed that you mentioned it again in reviewing two dictionaries,
but you also used it yourself in other articles (so I'll happily
continue to use it). My curiosity has now been whetted, but not
sated. Perhaps you could prepare a summary of the pros and cons for
your site? [Grahame Gould]
A. I'll do more than that, because your query provides a peg on
which to hang as complete a discussion of the whole issue as would
seem to be required.
There are few issues of usage that are as contentious as the matter
of "hopefully"; almost every modern style guide contains a
paragraph warning of the objections of conservative grammarians to
it. The objection is not to the word itself: it has been used for
centuries in the sense of "In a hopeful manner; with a feeling of
hope" (the Oxford English Dictionary records its first use from
1639) and there's nothing controversial in employing it like this,
for example in the proverb "It is better to travel hopefully than
to arrive". What has alarmed and annoyed language purists is its
comparatively modern appearance in the sense of "it is to be hoped
that", as in "Hopefully, we'll win the contract", or "Hopefully, it
won't rain on the parade".
The objection is not only to "hopefully", though that word has
suffered more than most, but to the twentieth-century fashion for a
set of such words - which grammarians often call sentence adverbs -
in which the word refers not just to one part of a sentence but to
the whole construction. Such adverbs are usually (but not by any
means always) the first word in the sentence, and are often marked
off with a comma from what follows. There are perhaps a dozen or so
that people use in this way, including "frankly" ("Frankly, my
dear, I don't give a damn"), "strictly" ("Strictly, one ought not
to use this construction"), "thankfully" ("Thankfully, the
surfboard missed his head"), and "actually" ("Actually, I don't
really like taramasalata"). In grammatical terms, they're
elliptical forms that abbreviate a comment into a single word. As
we've seen, "hopefully" is short for "it is to be hoped that",
"thankfully" can be rephrased as "by good fortune", or "as luck
would have it", "frankly" as "to speak frankly", and so on. It's
the compactness of these forms that's their attraction, one that
seems to fit our hurried modern lifestyle.
Though sentence adverbs came into the language in earnest in the
twentieth century, it's possible to find older examples. Fielding
employed "luckily" in Tom Jones in 1749: "Luckily, he had fallen
into more merciful hands". Charles Darwin wrote in a letter in
1847, "Oddly, I was never at all staggered by this theory until
now". Jane Austen also used "luckily", in Mansfield Park in 1814:
"Luckily the strength of the piece did not depend upon him".
Virginia Woolf turned "mercifully" into a sentence adverb in To the
Lighthouse (1927): "Mercifully, he turned sharp, and rode off, to
die gloriously she supposed upon the heights of Balaclava".
The dispute is comparatively recent. Even the Second Edition of
Fowler's Modern English Usage of 1965 has no entry for sentence
adverbs, let alone "hopefully". In the USA, the tirade against it
began around that date, reached a peak in the 1970s, and has
substantially subsided since. In Britain, the fuss started rather
later, and since the form was originally American, was also tinged
with distrust of it as an upstart Americanism. The objection to it
in the USA seem in part to have been based on a mistaken idea that
it was a German term, "hoffentlich", that had been transferred into
English, so that arguments against it in the US were at times as
chauvinistic as some of the later ones in Britain.
In its favour, "hopefully" conforms to a type of construction that
is far from new, is a useful condensation of an idea that would
otherwise require a wordy circumlocution, and is widely used. It is
hard to provide much in the way of a list of objections save that
it has become a shibboleth of correctness among conservative
grammarians and stylists, which requires today's writer, even forty
years after the great witch hunt began, to be a little circumspect
in bringing it into action. As always with any sort of writing, you
need to consider your audience. For myself, as you have noticed, I
use it when it seems appropriate, untroubled by any potential
strictures. That's because I have a row of modern style guides
ranged at my back, chorusing that it is standard English and that
it is both acceptable and accepted.
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Q. Could you please clear up a disagreement my husband and I are
having regarding the proper usage of the phrases "to tie you over"
versus "to tide you over"? [Kathleen Zimmermann]
A. You don't say which of you is on the side of which version, so I
don't know whether it is you or your husband who is going to be
disappointed when I say that the true form is "to tide one over".
In some slight defence of "to tie one over", it is becoming more
common, but it is a folk etymology (read "error" if you prefer)
that has grown up because the word "tide" here seems to make no
sense.
The phrase means that something - especially money - will see one
through a difficult period and keep one going until things improve.
An example from the Daily Telegraph from 31 August 2002: "As well
as putting money aside, which can be used to tide him over when he
returns from his post in Antarctica, Mr Bursnall can begin to build
up a deposit for a flat".
The idea is that of the swelling tide, which will carry you over
some obstacle. It may be that it's a deliberate echo of Brutus's
comment, in Julius Caesar: "There is a Tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the Flood, leads on to Fortune", or it may at least
be taken from the same idea of a ship, say, waiting for the tide to
rise and carry it over the bar into a harbour.
Perhaps oddly for an expression that concerns something so basic
and immemorial, the phrase is first recorded only in 1860. Many of
the early instances evoked the watery associations explicitly, as
does this, from Edward Meyrick Goulburn's book The Pursuit of
Holiness of 1869: "As an exuberant mounting flood shall tide us
over the difficulties of our career".
5. Endnote
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"If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice
to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for
film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography.
Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind." [Salman
Rushdie; quoted in the Cassell Dictionary of Contemporary
Quotations (1996)]
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C. FAQ of the week
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