World Wide Words -- 18 Oct 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 17 17:00:43 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 363 Saturday 18 October 2003
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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: Yuhangyuan.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Squabash.
5. Review: Language Visible.
6. Q&A: Harsh one's mellow.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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following mentions this week in the Earthlink newsletter, in Copy
Editor magazine, and on Australian Talk Radio. As a result, I'm
struggling to respond to all the messages that have come in!
RARE PUBLIC APPEARANCE Subscribers near Oxford (the British one)
may like to know that I shall be giving a lecture in the OED Forum
series on the subject of folk etymology on Tuesday 28 October at
5pm for about an hour. It's free but places are limited. If you'd
like to come, please e-mail me for details.
NORFOLK DIALECT As I staggered, bleary-eyed, to the computer last
Saturday morning, I found that three subscribers had already sent
messages pointing out that to have 16 forebears usually required a
person to go back to the great-great-grandparent stage, not merely
to great-grandparents. Yes, people, I left out a "great" ...
2. Turns of Phrase: Yuhangyuan
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With China successfully launching its first manned space flight
this week, there have been some differences of opinion in English-
language reports about what to call the pilot, Colonel Yang Liwei.
Ever since the start of space travel we've had two words for a
space traveller, "cosmonaut" from the old USSR and the more common
US term "astronaut". A third began to appear about 1999 in
reference to the Chinese space programme: "taikonaut", a cross-bred
offspring of the Chinese term "tai kong", space, with the "-naut"
ending of the other terms (which derives from Greek "nautes", a
sailor). "Taikonaut" seems to have been invented by amateur space
enthusiasts and taken up by journalists.
However, the usual Chinese term is "yuhangyuan", which has been
used for many years to refer to participants in the American and
Russian space programmes. This has been borrowed by English-
language newspapers in the last couple of months or so in reports
of the Chinese project. It's a transliteration of Chinese words
that literally mean "universe travel worker", an individual paid to
go into space. Knowing that somehow takes the mystery out of it.
Since "astronaut" is available, why English-language writers are
bothering with the Chinese word isn't clear (especially when the
China Daily and the South China Morning Post both use "astronaut"
in their English-language reports). Perhaps it's just the restless
journalistic quest for novelty. If so, "yuhangyuan" is likely soon
to vanish from English again.
[Many thanks to Martin Turner in Hong Kong for his help.]
As the countdown clock ticks away, best-guesses have set the
Chinese launching of their first taikonaut, or yuhangyuan, into
orbit on or around Oct. 15, 2003.
[International Herald Tribune, 10 Oct. 2003]
After the launch from the Jiuquan site in Gansu province, the
Shenzhou is expected to make more than a dozen orbits of Earth,
providing time for a possible spacewalk by the yuhangyuan who by
then will not be feeling the weight of their 10kg spacesuits.
[Guardian, 6 Oct. 2003]
3. Sic!
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>From Jonathan Spencer: "Your piece on Murphy's Law reminded this
transplanted Brit living in New York of being temporarily taken
aback by the sign on a local highway after the median had been
returfed. KEEP OFF SOD, it said".
This note in the Daily Telegraph's television guide last Wednesday
was presumably the result of a unconscious mental association and
not an ill-judged attempt at a joke: "With the Pope's health fast
failing, critics argue that this is not the time for the BBC to
pontificate".
Dermod Quirke mentioned a letter from Professor Yiannis Gabriel,
which appeared in the Guardian on 24 September (see the Web page
http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1048372,00.html):
"Why should childless parents pay taxes to fund schools?"
4. Weird Words: Squabash
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A put-down, squashing, or crushing defeat.
This comes from a great period of Scottish letters, that of the
rivalry between the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's Magazine from
1817 onwards. The latter was a Tory journal, full of what one
contemporary called sentimental Jacobitism, which was created
specifically to oppose the Whig policies of its rival.
Among its writers were Thomas de Quincy, James Hogg (the Ettrick
Shepherd), and John Wilson. The last of these was soon to be
appointed by political shenanigans on the part of the Tory council
of Edinburgh to be Professor of Moral Philosophy at the local
University, a post for which he was entirely unqualified (he relied
on his friends to write his lectures for him, though a biographer
commented that "he probably managed to become something of an
expert on the subject by the time he retired in 1851").
This did nothing to stop his prodigious literary output for the
magazine under the pen name of Christopher North, which was by
turns fearless, violent, measured and scurrilous; no better word
could be imagined to describe its tone than Wilson's own invention
in its pages of "squabash" for the process of utterly demolishing
some rival in print. He seems to have made it up, a fanciful
compound of "squash" and "bash", though there's a Scots word
"stramash", for an uproar or commotion, that might have contributed
to its invention.
5. Review: Language Visible
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Anyone who has the slightest interest in the way that our alphabet
has evolved will find something to fascinate them in this scholarly
but very readable book. Among the many questions that David Sacks
answers is why the letter C is sometimes said like S and sometimes
like K, why Americans say "Zee" for Z while we British prefer
"Zed", and why Q is always followed by U (I was relieved to find
his was essentially the same story as the one I told in last week's
issue).
Quite the most intriguing part of his story is that the alphabet
(and that includes the Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Cyrillic versions
as well as our Roman one) was actually invented only once. Carvings
found on rock faces in Egypt in 1999 seem to confirm that the first
version was developed by Semitic peoples employed by the Egyptians
about 2000BC, perhaps as soldiers or labourers. It is likely that
it was based on the ideas behind hieroglyphics, though not on any
of the actual symbols of that ancient writing system.
After some preliminary remarks, Mr Sacks takes each letter in turn,
describing its evolution through the various alphabet systems and
illustrating how the shape of the letter has changed over time. He
also explains some of the associations that each letter has had to
people of the past and of today.
Recommended.
[David Sacks, Language Visible; hardback, pp395; published by
Random House under the imprint of Broadway Books in the USA and
that of Alfred A Knopf in Canada; ISBN 0-676-97487-2; publisher's
price in the USA $24.95, in Canada CDN$39.95. So far as I can tell,
the book isn't available in Europe.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
US: $17.47 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?LV)
CA: CDN$27.97 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?AK)
[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 the Web site
page http:/www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm .]
6. Q&A
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Q. I read in the newspaper the following sentence: "And if that is
not enough to harsh his mellow, his pal wades in about making the
rent and getting his act together" I make a wild guess that harsh
one's mellow might mean to "harry one some more" but it might as
well be a case where your lights are needed. [Pierre Garon, Canada]
A. You're pretty much there. "Don't harsh my mellow" is American
slang, meaning variously and roughly "don't treat me badly", "don't
get on my nerves", "don't make life difficult for me", roughly the
same as "buzzkill" in phrases like "don't be such a buzzkill". It's
a development of US campus slang, in which in the 1980s "harsh"
became a verb in the sense of "to mistreat", "to be unfair to".
The longer expression seems to have originally been West Coast drug
and hacker slang of the middle 1990s. It became more widely known
in 1997 when it turned up in The Online Adventures of Ozzie the Elf
on ABC television. When Ozzie is criticised by an elf in Santa's
workshop, he says, "Don't harsh my mellow". Since then, as you've
discovered, it has begun to appear from time to time in mainstream
newspapers and magazines; I've seen it in Time and also in Fortune
for March 2003: "That guy really harshes my mellow, and I don't
appreciate it".
"Mellow" here is presumably a reference to that gentle high one
gets during a drug trip. To harsh it is to introduce a jarring or
discordant note, usually because you're being criticised or leaned
on by some figure of authority.
A. Subscription commands
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C. FAQ of the week
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