World Wide Words -- 25 Oct 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 24 19:18:06 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 364 Saturday 25 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: T-ray.
3. Weird Words: Isabelline.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Double-dog dare; Spitting feathers.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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LANGUAGE VISIBLE In my review of this work last week, I said that
it wasn't available in Europe. However, that position changed just
before the newsletter went out, and it is now available this side
of the pond, under ISBN 0-767-91172-5. To reach the relevant pages
on the European Amazon sites, the short links are:
UK: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?LZ
DE: http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?LX
2. Turns of Phrase: T-ray
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Doctors may soon have a new diagnostic technique, which penetrates
just a few millimetres below the skin, an area of the body that
other procedures like X-rays can't easily image.
The scanning technology is based on "T-rays", short for "terahertz
rays". This is a type of radiation similar to X-rays and light, but
with frequencies around a million million cycles per second (the
prefix "tera-" refers to a factor of 10 to the power of 12). These
rays lie in the region between infra-red and microwave radio
frequencies, a region that's sometimes called "quasi-optics". It's
a type of radiation that has been hard to generate in the past, but
a team at the Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory has recently
found a relatively simple way, by firing a laser at a semiconductor
crystal.
T-rays are sensitive to very small changes in the composition of
the materials they pass through, so they're excellent for imaging.
They also have the highly desirable property that they don't damage
living tissues. It's likely that the first medical application will
be to image skin cancers prior to surgery.
Various reports suggest that T-rays' time is coming - they're also
being investigated for many other purposes. Because they penetrate
clothing, security experts hope that T-rays will prove useful in
airport scanners - to show up concealed weapons, for example. They
may help to create ever-more-detailed semiconductor displays. And
astronomers hope that they may reveal details of comets and other
astronomical bodies.
[U.S. News & World Report, 28 July 2003]: Recent breakthroughs -
combined with a range of potential applications stretching from
diagnosing cancer to detecting dangerous flaws in space shuttle
components - are moving T-rays out of the world of academic
curiosity toward the mainstream.
[New Scientist, 30 Aug. 2003]: T-rays could also be used for real-
time imaging during surgery, to highlight tumour cells the surgeon
has missed.
3. Weird Words: Isabelline
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Of a greyish-yellow colour.
This is what the dictionaries say, though it has also been used as
the name for a parchment or sand colour. It's clearly one of those
intermediate or indeterminate colours for which the creators of
paint catalogues must search creatively to find a good name. They
haven't borrowed "isabelline", however, which went out of use in
the nineteenth century, except in the fixed names of a few animals
and plants, such as the isabelline wheatear, the isabelline shrike,
and the isabelline bear, which is a reddish- or yellowish-brown
animal of the Himalayas.
The word clearly comes from the personal name Isabella. There's a
famous folk tale that says the origin was Isabella, Archduchess of
Austria, daughter of Philip II of Spain. He laid siege to Ostend in
1601 and in a moment of filial fervour Isabella vowed not to change
her intimate undergarments until the city was taken. Unfortunately
for her (and for those around her) the siege lasted another three
years, leading to this off-colour word for over-worn underwear.
It's easy to save the lady's reputation, as the name's recorded in
an inventory of the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth I a year before the
siege began, in 1600: "one rounde gowne of Isabella-colour satten
... set with silver bangles". But which Isabella gave rise to the
colour, or why, nobody seems to have the beginnings of a notion.
4. Sic!
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Harry Lake heard a BBC Radio 4 newsreader say last week that
attempts to show up the deficiencies in airline security have been
carried out in the past "by individuals, or government agents
disguised as individuals".
Being British, Craig Fisher is used to the word "solicitor" meaning
the frontline member of the legal profession whom one consults for
most day-to-day business: "Having just been through a divorce, the
signs all around the terminals at Los Angeles Airport had a certain
poignancy: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PAY SOLICITORS. If only ..."
5. Q&A
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Q. While in North Georgia last Christmas I saw - on the side of a
delivery truck - an advertisement that included the phrase: "I
double-dog dare you!" I have not seen this since I was a child,
when we used this as a counter-dare to up the ante when something
dared appeared to be particularly daunting. Have you heard this,
and any opinions from whence it came? [David Luther Woodward; a
related question came from Jim Powers]
A. Like so much slang, the phrase isn't that well recorded and so
it's hard to pin down its origins. It's certainly an American
expression, though, and one that's still quite common.
Chapman's Dictionary of American Slang mentions it and dates it
carefully as being current at least as far back as the 1940s. Many
subscribers to this newsletter have long memories, so I've no doubt
that they could take it back further without much effort. Jonathon
Green, in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, says it's nineteenth
century. He's certainly right, since it's listed in a book of 1896,
The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought by Alexander F Chamberlain.
Mr Chamberlain also mentions several other forms. As well as the
immemorial "I dare you", he gives "I dog dare you", "I double dog
dare you", "I black dog dare you", and the ultimate challenge that
must surely have been impossible to pass up without appearing
totally chicken, "I double black dog dare you".
A couple are based on yet another form, one that he interestingly
doesn't give, but which has long been common almost everywhere: "I
double dare you", an obvious escalation of taunt that must have
independently occurred to generations of young people, but which
only appears in printed works from the end of the nineteenth
century on. The oldest example I can find is from a story of young
love (much more chaste than its title of Cordelia's Night of
Romance appears to us moderns), which appeared in Harper's New
Monthly Magazine in April 1895: "Maybe one day I'll give you a
dare. I'll double dare you, maybe, to call me Clarice."
Where the dogs come in I'm not at all sure, except that "dog" is a
good strong word, with lots of potentially disparaging undertones,
whose alliteration must have made it especially attractive. The
reference to "black dog" has caused one writer to suggest a link
with a bad shilling, so named in Britain in the slang of Queen
Anne's reign nearly three centuries before, but that's stretching
any transatlantic link well beyond breaking point. Unless there's
something I'm missing, I suspect that black dogs were just that
much more scary than any old sort of dog.
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Q. Any idea as to the origin of the expression "spitting feathers"?
I know it means being thirsty and also being angry. [Ian Callaghan]
A. I'm less than certain about the thirsty part. I've only come
across it in reference to somebody being extremely agitated, most
usually because they're as angry as hell (as a result of which they
might instead be "spitting blood", a phrase that's clearly a close
relative).
"Spitting feathers" became common in British slang in the nineties
and these days often turns up in newspapers and books. An example
from the politically and linguistically conservative Daily
Telegraph for 28 February 2002 shows how it is used: "Edify is
working on software which responds to the pitch and tone of a
telephone caller's voice so that, if a complainant is spitting
feathers, they can be transferred to a human who can calm them
down".
The image could be that of somebody so angry that they're foaming
at the mouth, spitting flecks of sputum, which might be compared to
feathers. However, Tony Thorne, in his Dictionary of Contemporary
Slang (1997) says that the phrase refers to any "extreme enthusiasm
or agitation" and that it "probably evokes the squawking of a
frantic bird". From what he says, it might seem that the sense of
the phrase has since narrowed, since I can only find it used in
reference to anger.
Tony Thorne says the image came from the armed forces. If so, its
next move was into sporting slang, especially football (soccer).
That might support a tenuous avian association with "sick as a
parrot", for a person who is deeply depressed at failure, which is
as classic a British football cliché as is "over the moon" for
rapturous pleasure at success. In recent years - as my Daily
Telegraph example shows - it has been turning up in almost any
context, though it seems to have a particular connection with TV,
pop music and related fields and is more a favourite of the down-
market tabloids than the broadsheets.
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