World Wide Words -- 08 Nov 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 7 17:09:55 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 366 Saturday 8 November 2003
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Sent each Saturday to 18,000+ subscribers in at least 120 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. Review: Between You and I: a Little Book of Bad English.
3. The Annual Fund Drive.
4. Weird Words: Obdiplostemonous.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: Whip round.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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2. Review: Between You and I: a Little Book of Bad English
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You can't fault James Cochrane's subtitle: this is a slim volume of
alphabetically arranged entries describing the mistakes that people
often make with the language. The author set out his position thus:
"I have not written it with the intention of being purist in the
sense of proposing that change nearly always means debasement, nor
have I been concerned with the 'educated' or 'uneducated' uses of
language in the traditional sense, both of which have their
strengths and weaknesses. It is more concerned with the particular
form of debasement we have now, which derives at least in part from
what might be called the 'half-educated' use of language.
Some examples picked pretty much at random: the mistaken use of
"alibi" to mean any excuse, rather than a plea that when the crime
was committed the suspect was somewhere else; the misspelling of
"consensus" with a "c" in the middle, in the belief that it has
something to do with counting; the misuse of "epicentre" to mean
simply a centre, rather than the technical sense of the point on
the Earth's surface immediately above the point of origin of an
earthquake; the belief that "fulsome" means generous (it actually
means excessively flattering, not at all the same thing); that to
say "a panacea for all ills" is a tautology, since a "panacea" is
already a universal cure; that the phrase is correctly "in the
throes of" and "when seen in the form 'in the throws of' it should
be treated with ridicule and contempt". And so on.
Despite the author's disclaimer, my feeling is that he would like
to be more authoritarian and prescriptive than his stated desire to
avoid being purist might suggest. He is deeply troubled by Robert
Burchfield's tolerance in the third edition of Fowler of "different
than"; he wants to keep the old distinction of sense between
"disinterested" and "uninterested", despite evidence that the
distinction has never been as clear-cut as our teachers would like
to think and that the battle has been lost in any case; he hates
terms like "executive" and "friendly fire". Interestingly, he
argues that the correct plural of "referendum" is the usual English
one of adding an "s", rather than "referenda".
The book has had more publicity than you might expect, not least
because the introduction was written by John Humphrys, one of the
presenters of the BBC's flagship radio breakfast programme Today.
The introduction is online, as it was republished in the Guardian:
see http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1066667,00.html .
[James Cochrane, Between You and I: a Little Book of Bad English,
published on 2 Oct. 2003 by Icon Books; hardback, pp132; ISBN: 1-
8404-6483-6; publisher's price in the UK GBP9.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
UK: GBP7.99 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?LB)
CA: CDN$17.00 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?LC)
DE: EUR 15,44 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?LD)
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3. The Annual Fund Drive
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World Wide Words, both this newsletter and the Web site, are free.
I intend to keep them that way, and not even to allow advertising.
But it would be good to get some income to help pay for the costs
of running the site (and more than 150,000 page hits a week really
eat up bandwidth). Some money comes in from the Amazon commissions
(many thanks to everyone who uses that route) but it's never going
to cover more than a small proportion of my costs.
So, once a year, I ask you all to let your credit cards take the
strain of providing a small contribution to keep the words coming.
Last year, you were very generous, as occasional visitors to the
Web site have continued to be throughout the year. Some 120 people
contributed, about 1% of those subscribed at the time. It isn't
reasonable to expect those who gave last time to do so again (this
isn't intended to be an annual subscription, after all) but I would
like to hear from some of the other 99%.
There are two ways to contribute. One is by credit card using the
PayPal system. All you have to do is point your Web browser at the
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As an alternative, you can send me a cheque or draft, preferably in
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I'll give you the details of where to send your donation.
Please don't worry that not feeling able to make a donation might
affect your welcome. Your most important contribution is to remain
a reader. Your comments, questions and continued interest make the
whole enterprise worthwhile.
4. Weird Words: Obdiplostemonous /QbdIpl at U'sti:m at n@s/
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Having two sets of stamens, with the outer series opposite the
petals and the inner series alternating with them.
When it takes 19 words to define a term, you might think that it's
describing something extraordinarily obscure, but you've probably
got examples in your garden.
It's one of a large number of formal descriptive terms in botany.
This one refers to a type of flower which has twice as many stamens
as petals; the stamens are arranged in two rings, with those in the
outer ring placed opposite the petals and those in the inner one in
the gaps between the outer ones. About 20 plant families have
flowers like this; they include such common sorts as heathers and
geraniums, as well as oxalis, sorrels and many others.
If you break the word down into its component bits you will see
that they add up to exactly what it describes; it's formed from
"ob-", opposite, plus "diplo-" (Greek "diploos", doubled or
twofold), plus "stemon", the Greek word for a thread (our "stamen"
is its Latin equivalent), plus the adjectival ending "-ous". Hence
"relating to two oppositely placed sets of stamens". The state of
being obdiplostemonous is "obdiplostemony", a word I defy you to
drop into your next dinner party without stopping the conversation
dead.
5. Sic!
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Sharon Crawford mentioned that an editor friend of hers passed on a
gem from one of her authors: "Not to be mellow dramatic, but...".
That's surely better, however, than being harshly dramatic.
Problems with misplaced modifiers beset all of us, not least the
BBC. Henry Peacock spotted this on the their news Web site on 23
October: "A British woman is found guilty of running one of
Europe's biggest prostitution rings at a court in Paris".
Due to problems at its printers on Tuesday, the Guardian parted the
veil hiding the process of laying out its pages. A placeholder sub-
heading wasn't updated: "Talky standfirst mentioning fact that this
is second in a three-part analysis of state of society in Bush's
America". A "standfirst" is British newspaper jargon for a short
passage of text in larger type at the start of an article to draw
attention to it; American journalists call it a kicker. What should
have appeared there is in the Web archive version of the article:
"The second in a three-part series on Bush's America looks at the
inflated hospital bills facing the uninsured poor".
6. Q&A
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Q. I was wondering if you had a history and or explanation of the
phrase "whip round". [Dan Jones]
A. This colloquial phrase refers to taking a collection for some
informal purpose, such as buying somebody a present. It's mainly
British and Commonwealth usage, not much known in the USA. Its
history links the hunting field, the British parliament and the
officers' mess in a regiment.
The original term was "whipper-in", a term still used in fox
hunting in Britain for an assistant huntsman who stops the hounds
from straying by using his whip to drive them back into the main
body of the pack. By the 1840s at the latest, this had been
abbreviated to just "whip".
In Parliament, there have long been officials of each party whose
job it is to make sure that MPs attend the votes. In practice their
role has always been wider than this - they're the disciplinarians
of the House of Commons who make sure MPs don't step out of line or
do anything silly, and especially that they vote according to their
party's call. By the latter part of the eighteenth century they had
started to be jokingly referred to as "whippers-in"; by the 1840s
they too were commonly called "whips" (as indeed they still are,
and not only in the British parliament by any means).
This use of "whip" became broadened to refer to any appeal for
people to take part in some activity - as we still say, to "whip
up" interest or enthusiasm. In officers' messes, it was common at
this period for those attending who wanted more wine than the
official issue at dinner to contribute a set amount if they wanted
to continue to imbibe - an orderly went round the table with a wine
glass into which sums were placed. This collection was also called
a whip.
By extension, any call for money among the members of a group was
also a "whip". The first recorded use is in Thomas Hughes' novel of
1861, Tom Brown at Oxford: "If they would stand a whip of ten
shillings a man, they might have a new boat". By the 1870s, this
term had turned by an obvious process into our modern "whip round".
A. Subscription commands
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C. FAQ of the week
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Q. Last week's newsletter issue never arrived. Would you send me
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A. I'd rather not get into the habit of sending out replacement
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