World Wide Words -- 04 Oct 03

Fri Oct 3 18:10:08 UTC 2003

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 361          Saturday 4 October 2003
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Sent each Saturday to 17,000+ 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. Topical Words: Murphy's Law.
3. Weird Words: Bant.
4. Q&A: Grub.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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CHANGE OF ADDRESS  People often e-mail me to ask for their address
for receipt of newsletters to be changed. I'm always happy to help
if somebody is having trouble, but too many such requests eat into
the time available for more positive activities, such as writing
next week's newsletter. See the FAQ section at the end for how to
make your own changes. Cut out and keep for reference!

ATTBI.COM  This means you if you're one of the 94 subscribers who
are still subscribed at an ATTBI.COM address. (Take a look at the
message headers to see what address this issue was sent to.) That
domain is effectively defunct and addresses based on it won't last
for ever, so now is a good time to change yours!

FOOT IN MOUTH DEPARTMENT  When I referred last week to the kindness
of Patricia T O'Conner in mentioning World Wide Words in her radio
spot, I spelled her name wrong. Apologies. Alert readers spotted
the typo in the first name of Nathaniel Hawthorne, too.

HIGGLEDY-PIGGLEDY  Lots of messages came in from subscribers about
last week's Weird Word. They pointed out that it's a good example
of a verse shape called a double dactyl (a dactyl is a stressed
syllable followed by two unstressed syllables; it's named after the
Greek word for finger, whose joints represent the three syllables).
Another example of a double dactyl is "idiosyncrasy". Carolyn Dane
and others told me about a poetry game in a book of 1967 with the
title "Jiggery Pokery" (yet another example) by the American poets
Anthony Hecht and John Hollander. They outlined a verse form that's
as formal as a limerick (whose name is just a single dactyl) but
even more complicated and arcane. I'll spare you the full metrical
specification, but you'll find it - and many examples - if you
search around online for "double dactyl". A good starting point is
http://www.stinky.com/dactyl/dactyl.html .

2. Topical Words: Murphy's Law
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On Thursday evening, the thirteenth annual Ig Nobel Prize awards
were announced. The Ig Nobels are a tongue-in-cheek alternative to
the real Nobel Prizes, which celebrate "all that is bizarre, weird
and improbable in real-life scientific research" and which honour
those whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced". The
awards are an eclectic bunch that have commemorated the Norwegian
biologists who studied the effects of garlic and sour cream on the
appetite of leeches, an amateur scientist who discovered ten-mile-
high buildings on the back of the moon, the Scottish doctors who
researched the collapse of toilets in Glasgow, and (getting nearer
to this newsletter's concerns), the man who founded the Apostrophe
Protection Society.

One of this year's ten awards went to "the late John Paul Stapp,
the late Edward A Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols, for jointly
giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law". Now there's an interesting
citation. Why should it require three men to invent Murphy's Law,
even if one of them was indeed named Murphy?

It's a long story. Cut to the bare bones the "official" version is
this: in 1949, Captain Murphy was working on experiments at Edwards
Air Force Base in California to learn how much sudden deceleration
a person could stand in a crash; these used human volunteers and
dummies strapped to a rocket-propelled sledge. Murphy had designed
transducers for the sledge, but after John Paul Stapp, an Air Force
doctor, had been subjected to about 35G in one test, Murphy found
that a technician had wired them in backwards and they hadn't given
any readings. Stapp is then supposed to have said something (the
accounts vary) along the lines of "If there are two or more ways to
do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then
someone will do it that way". The project engineer working on the
tests, George E Nichols, noted this among a collection of "laws" he
had been amassing and named it after Murphy, even though Murphy
hadn't actually said it, because he had provoked it by proxy.

This story has been retold many times and a four-part article on
the background to it has just appeared in the Ig Nobel's journal,
the Annals of Improbable Research (link below). There's nothing new
about the famous Law in itself, of course. The form in which it is
now usually quoted, "If something can go wrong, it will", has long
been known to engineers as an awful warning that all possible
causes of misunderstanding among workers on a project must be
eliminated if disaster is to be prevented (we British have our own
version, Sod's Law).

Not everybody believes the official line, which makes the award of
an Ig Nobel for it somewhat provocative, even 54 years after the
supposed event. Barry Popik of the American Dialect Society has
researched it, but has found no reference in contemporary archives.
The first known use of the term was in an American publication
Aviation Mechanics Bulletin for 11 May 1955, in which a headline
read "'Backward' mechanics prove Murphy's Law"; it turned up in
Scientific American and the New York Times early in the following
year and from then on quickly achieved the iconic status in
American life that it retains. A similar law was attributed to one
O'Reilly in 1954, which might suggest an Irish joke in the making
(some people still think it is one). Until the story above was told
in the 1970s, nobody connected the law to the very real Captain
Edward Aloysius Murphy, who wasn't widely known. In fact, a 1962
book by seven US astronauts, We Seven asserted that Murphy was a
fictitious character in a US navy training cartoon. However, the
film was made in 1957, two years after the saying's first
appearance in print, so we can rule out that origin. Others claim
the eponymous Murphy dates from the 1930s, though without giving
firm evidence.

Much uncertainty remains about the origin of the saying. It's not
that anyone is doubting the story told by the three men (although,
as you might expect of an event remembered years later, details of
their stories conflict). The problem for historians is that without
an audit trail of recorded evidence it's not possible to say for
sure that the Captain Murphy of the story and the first appearance
in print of Murphy's Law are linked. It might well be, as one wag
remarked, that it wasn't Murphy, but another man of the same name.

LINKS
The Ig Nobel home page is at http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-top.html.
The article, "Fastest Man on Earth", from the Annals of Improbable
Research, can be found at http://www.improbable.com/airchives/
paperair/volume9/v9i5/murphy/murphy0.html .

3. Weird Words: Bant
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To diet.

Strictly speaking, not any old diet, but a Victorian precursor of
the fashionable Atkins high-protein diet. Few people know it was
anticipated by William Banting, in Victorian times a London cabinet
maker and undertaker to royalty (his firm buried Prince Albert, for
example, and years later his sons organised the funeral of Queen
Victoria). Banting was overweight, but neither diet nor exercise
helped him. Finally he consulted a doctor, who told him to cut out
carbohydrates from his diet. This was so successful that Mr Banting
published a booklet in 1864, A Letter on Corpulence Addressed to
the Public, extolling its virtues, which sold some 60,000 copies
(he made no money from this, not wanting to profit from sufferers;
he gave early printings away and the income from later editions was
donated to medical charities).

His diet became as widely known and controversial in Britain (and
later in America) as the Atkins one is in our century, so much so
that people took his name to be a participle and created from it -
by a process called back-formation - the verb "to bant". (By this
he joined a select company of men, two of the very few others being
Boycott and Pasteur, whose names have become verbs.) However, it
was commonly used for any sort of diet, not necessarily one that
conformed to Banting's precepts.

"Bant" often turned up in books in the next half century or so, as
here in The Minister's Charge, by William D Howells, published in
1887: "He added, with another glance at his relative, 'Charles, you
ought to bant. It's beginning to affect your wind.' 'Beginning!
Your memory's going, Bromfield. But they say there's a new system
that allows you to eat everything. I'm waiting for that. In the
meantime, I've gone back to my baccy.'"

Even in comparatively recent times, the word has not quite vanished
from the language. Subscriber Jonathan McColl (who provoked this
piece) found it in The Satanist by Dennis Wheatley, dated 1960:
"She felt ill owing to a combination of overwork and banting".

4. Q&A
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Q. What is the origin of the term "grub" for food? [Colin Bain,
Canada]

A. You might not like to learn that it's the same word as that for
a caterpillar or other insect larva, though you will be relieved to
hear that it has nothing to do with actually eating them.

The source is the old Germanic word meaning to dig (which is also
the source of "grave"). The verb "to grub" came first in English,
around 1300, and meant just what it still does: to break up the
surface of the ground or to clear the ground of roots and stumps.
The connection with food is the idea of animals foraging for food.
In their wild state, for example, pigs grub for edible roots and
the like. The larval sense comes from this, because grubs often
feed in leaf litter or around roots. The slang sense of human food
appears around the middle of the seventeenth century and is also
linked to grubbing in the ground for something to eat.

Interestingly, in case you should think that slang words must
either soon transform themselves into standard English or quickly
vanish again, "grub" has remained slangy - at best informal - in
all the years since, as have compounds like "grubstake" (from the
nineteenth-century goldfields practice of investing in a prospector
by providing him with money to buy food).

"Grub" has had several other slang senses that have not survived,
such as that for a dwarfish, mean, slovenly sort of person, or
someone of small abilities who can survive only by the most menial
sort of work. "Grub Street" was the name of a real thoroughfare in
London (possibly named after a man named Grubbe), which Dr Johnson
said was "much inhabited by writers of small histories,
dictionaries, and temporary poems"; Andrew Marvel borrowed its name
as a collective for such drudges and their products - hence the
short-lived sense of "grub" for an impoverished author or needy
scribbler.

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