World Wide Words -- 11 Oct 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 10 17:47:22 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 362 Saturday 11 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
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Miswanting.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Pocillovy.
5. Review: The Norfolk Dialect
6. Q&A: Why is "q" always followed by "u".
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BANT This verb, featured as last week's Weird Word, is now almost
obsolete in English. However, many subscribers with knowledge of
Swedish have e-mailed me to point out that it is the standard verb
in that language for dieting. Banting's influence clearly spread
more widely than I'd discovered.
GRUB Through a slip of the mental gears, I confused a few people
last week by seeming to imply that the derived adjective "grubby",
meaning grimy or covered with dirt, is now not a common English
term. And the noun "grub", a small chorus of Antipodean voices
tells me, survives in Australia as a term for a dirty person.
MURPHY'S LAW Several, presumably American, subscribers asked if
the British equivalent I quoted, Sod's law, also referred to a real
person. Though sod is turf everywhere, it's a coarse slang term for
an unpleasant or obnoxious person in Britain and most Commonwealth
countries, a suitable figure to attach the law to (it's short for
"sodomite"). Some British e-mailers queried whether Sod's law is
really the same as Murphy's law (though my reference works say it
is); for example, Tim Lodge defined it in these subtly different
terms: "If an event has more than one possible outcome, the least
desirable outcome is the one most likely to occur".
Several subscribers took the opportunity to tweak the old lion's
tail by criticising the first paragraph of the piece, which read
"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'". OK, so it's
possible to read it so that the description refers to the real
Nobels, but how many of you really, truly, honestly thought that
was what I meant to say?
SIC! This section returns by popular request. Pedants who wish to
exhibit their mastery of English prose may, instead of criticising
my writing, turn their attention to the failings of third parties.
Contributions of odd signs, weird statements and egregious errors
(especially if funny) are welcome. Please don't bother to send me
reports of such common errors as misplaced apostrophes - and we've
probably all seen as many Bushisms as we can stand. You should be
willing to swear on the deity of your choice, or otherwise provide
good evidence, that your contributions are both recent and real.
2. Turns of Phrase: Miswanting
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This word has been lurking in the academic undergrowth since two
researchers, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, used it in an
article, Miswanting: Some Problems in the Forecasting of Future
Affective States, in a book in 2000. It has suddenly taken on a
higher profile because it was used in an article by Jon Gertner,
entitled The Futile Pursuit of Happiness, in the New York Times on
7 September, and it has subsequently been taken up by other
journalists.
To miswant something means that you mistakenly believe getting it
will make you happy. Wanting to win the lottery may be your heart's
desire, but as many people who do win find it brings problems for
which they are unprepared and which often make them regret winning,
to want to win may be a miswant. Similarly, a new car, or that new
television, or even a new partner, may all seem to be your ultimate
want, but if you actually get them, the delight often cools more
quickly than you could ever have imagined, proving that they were
really miswanted.
The real problem with miswanting, the researchers argue, is that it
leads you to want the wrong things and make poor judgements about
what will really make you happy. As they said in their original
article: "Much unhappiness ... has less to do with not getting what
we want, and more to do with not wanting what we like".
It is not the big stuff, hysterical action and miswanted
acquisitions, that changes lives, but attending to the small
details ... and enjoying everyday pleasures now rather than looking
back at them with a sense of nostalgia at some point in the future.
[Independent, 12 Sep. 2003]
Derived from philosophy circles, to "miswant" means to erroneously
believe that something will make one happy, or happier than it
actually will.
[Observer, 28 Sep. 2003]
3. Sic!
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Dudly (with whom I've been struggling to establish an e-mail link
since his letter arrived; I hope my message of thanks got through
in the end) sent me a photograph of a sign on a path at Telegraph
Hill in San Francisco: "CAUTION PEDESTRIANS SLIPPERY WHEN WET".
Not an error in itself, but a comment from the Corrections and
Clarifications column of the Guardian last Saturday: "Snuck, the
informal US and Canadian past tense and past participle of sneak,
last appeared in the early edition of September 29, page 3, in a
report headlined, Gust of wind uprooted tree etc. It has shown
itself in our pages another 17 times in the past 12 months. The
appropriate word is sneaked. Hopefully, the habit has now puck".
4. Weird Words: Pocillovy /p at U'sIl at vI/
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Collecting egg cups.
A word of narrow focus and specialist appeal, this is rare enough
that no dictionary has yet opened its pages to admit it, although
it may be found among aficionados of this hobby and in occasional
news items. Its source is the Latin "pocillum" for a small cup (a
diminutive of "poculum", a cup). This root turns up in a few other
rare words, such as "pocilliform" for something in the shape of a
small cup, or "pocillator" for a cup-bearer. To it has been added
"ovi", an egg. It's an odd-looking term, which emphasises its
essential weirdness, since the only other common English words that
end in "-ovy" are "anchovy" and "groovy". A person who engages in
the pursuit may be called a "pocillovist".
5. Review: The Norfolk Dialect
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Peter Trudgill has written this little book about one of the more
idiosyncratic English dialects from a dual position of strength. He
is not only an academic expert on English dialects but his links
with the county are as close as one could imagine - all 16 of his
great-grandparents are from Norfolk and he was educated there.
Professor Trudgill does much to redress the undeserved yokel image
of the county through a brief but illuminating study of what makes
the Norfolk dialect different. He says it's "A form of the English
language with a fascinating history and a unique structure". That
might equally be said of many dialects, but his deep affection for
his native speech is clear. It's not so much its vocabulary that
distinguishes it, since that's largely shared with other dialects
south of a linguistic divide that passes through the Fens of East
Anglia. It's rather the way its words are combined, its grammar,
and - of course - its characteristic pronunciation. (Visit the
publisher's site at http://www.poppyland.co.uk/dialect.htm for
recordings of some local pronunciations).
So you may hear local people say things like "He wus a-hitten on
it", ("He was hitting it"); if a local says "Are y'alroight, boy?",
he's greeting a male person, not asking after his health; "do" is
characteristically used in the sense of "otherwise" ("Don't you
take yours off, do you'll get rheumatism") and "time" is used to
mean "while" ("Go you and have a good wash time I git tea ready").
[Peter Trudgill, The Norfolk Dialect; paperback, pp103; published
by Poppyland Publishing; ISBN 0-946148-63-5; publisher's price
GBP8.95.]
AMAZON PRICE FOR THIS BOOK
UK: GBP8.95 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?ND)
[Click on a link or paste it into your browser to order online. If
you do so you get World Wide Words a small commission that helps to
pay for the Web site and operating expenses. See also my Web page
http:/www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm .]
6. Q&A
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Q. In English words, the letter "q" is always followed by "u" - the
only such mandatory letter pair I can recall. But it is also used
in words transliterated from other alphabets (such as "qat" and
"Iraq"), where the letter "k" would presumably work just as well.
How did it achieve its rather odd status? [Ivan Berger]
A. It all started long before English even existed. The Phoenicians
had two symbols in their alphabet for "k", for the very best of
reasons - in their language, as in other Semitic languages such as
Hebrew and Arabic, there are two distinct "k" sounds, only one of
which exists in English. The one we don't have - a guttural sound
at the back of the mouth - the Phoenicians represented by a symbol
that they called "qop" (their word for a monkey). This was used in
particular before vowels that are also sounded at the back of the
mouth, especially "o" and "u".
The Greeks took the Phoenician symbol over as "qoppa" or "koppa".
This isn't in the classical Greek alphabet - it was dropped as
unnecessary around 400BC, because Greek has never had the sound it
represents. However, a version of the Greek alphabet that did still
contain koppa was borrowed by the Etruscans (they probably got it
from Greek colonists who settled in Campania). The Etruscan
alphabet actually had three symbols for the "k" sound - gamma was
used before "e" and "i", kappa was used before "a" and koppa before
"o" and "u" (gamma was available because Etruscans had no hard "g"
sound in their language).
In turn (you're still following my steps around the Mediterranean,
I hope), the Romans took their alphabet from the Etruscans; like
the Greeks, Latin had only the one "k" sound. As a result, over
time kappa was dropped, koppa evolved into "q", and gamma into "c"
(these changes explain why Greek words spelled with "k" have their
Latin equivalents spelled with "c"). The Romans used "q" only
before "u", though the combination was actually written as "qv",
since "v" was a vowel in classical Latin, to represent the "kw"
sound that was so common in the language.
If we move on about a thousand years, we find that Old English had
the same sound, but represented it by "cw", since "q" had been left
out of their version of the alphabet (so "queen" in Old English was
spelled "cwen", for example). French, however, continued the Latin
"qv", though by now written as "qu". After the Norman Conquest,
French spelling gradually took over in England, eventually
replacing the Old English "cw" by Latinate "qu", though this change
took about 300 years to complete. As many writers have since
pointed out, the change was unnecessary, as we don't need "qu" in
the alphabet any more than the English before the Norman Conquest
did - "cw" would work as well most of the time and in those
situations in which "qu" is said as "k", as in words from French
like "antique", we could use "c" or "k" instead).
After all this, the reason why versions of Arabic words written in
English use "q" without a following "u" is easy to understand -
it's a neat way of transcribing that guttural "k" sound (the Arabic
letter "qaf") that's faithful to the way the alphabet has evolved
over more than two millennia.
A. Subscription commands
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C. FAQ of the week
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Q. What's the meaning of these strange sets of symbols that appear
sometimes in pieces, like /p at U'sIl at vI/?
A. They are a way of showing pronunciation. As is usually the case
with British publications, in my Web pages I use the symbols of
the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to show how words are
said. Most IPA symbols do not appear in standard character sets,
so for the newsletter I translate them into SAMPA codes (Speech
Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet), a newish European system
that uses letters of the alphabet plus punctuation. See my page
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm for the symbols
in both IPA and SAMPA with supporting notes and links.
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