World Wide Words -- 13 Sep 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 358        Saturday 13 September 2003
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Turns of Phrase: RFID.
2. Weird Words: Ginglyform.
3. Book Review: Four new editions of British dictionaries.
4. Q&A: Why are 'eleven' and 'twelve' unlike other '-teen' words?
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.


1. Turns of Phrase: RFID
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Though the abbreviation, for Radio Frequency Identification, has
been known in the specialist literature since at least 1995, it has
risen to much wider public notice in recent months. RFID refers to
tiny passive tags, as small as a grain of sand. When triggered by a
radio query, they send back a unique identification number.

Retailers love the idea, especially if bulk usage brings the price
of each tag down to a few pennies. They're just what's needed to
run an automated stock control system and reduce theft. They will
make checkout much easier, too: no more painstaking swiping of bar
codes  but just one pass across a sensor with your purchases. The
potential is very great - it has been suggested, for example, that
banknotes should have chips embedded as a precaution against fraud.
The US military are already using it to monitor shipments of
supplies and personnel in Iraq.

The controversy arises from potential problems of privacy if the
tags are left active once you leave the store. Imagine buying an
item of clothing that contains an RFID tag. Every time you wear it,
the tag could be triggered by a sensor, so recording where you go.
A trial in a Tesco store in Cambridge this year photographed anyone
removing a packet of a frequently stolen brand of Gillette blades
from the shelf, and again when it was presented at the cash desk.
Though it was denied this was a security measure, customers got the
trial stopped.

We shall be hearing much more about such concerns. For the moment,
some retailers, such as Wal-Mart, have backed away from using the
technology in stores, mainly, they say, because it isn't yet robust
enough for the real world.

 Soon after this backlash, the RFID industry started talking about
"kill switches" that would, if the customer wanted, deactivate tags
at the checkout stage. This, along with assurances that all RFID-
tagged goods will be marked as such, has become the main means to
quell privacy fears.
                                           [Guardian, 19 July 2003]

 Starting with RFID in the supply chain instead of at the item level
might also give the industry time to deal with consumers' privacy
concerns. The industry needs to assure customers that RFID tags on
items can't be used to collect information on products outside the
store.
                                   [Information Week, 16 June 2003]


2. Weird Words: Ginglyform
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Hinge-shaped.

Together with its close relative "ginglymoid", these turn up - in
the infrequent occasions on which they appear at all, for they are
extremely rare - in anatomy. The noun, "ginglymus", is a good deal
more common. All derive from the Greek ginglumos, a hinge, and all
refer to one of the types of joint found in the skeleton, one that
allows movement in one plane only, just as a hinge does; examples
are the knee and elbow joints and the joints between the bones of
the fingers. The only example I've been able to find in literature
of any of these words is in a nineteenth-century short story, The
Enthusiast in Anatomy by John Oxenford: "The skeleton lost all
patience, and, raising its arm, shook its fist angrily at Tom, who,
with his eyes fixed on the elbow, merely shouted his joy, at
perceiving the 'ginglymoid' movement".


3. Book Review: Four new editions of British dictionaries
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Summer is the traditional season for publishing new editions of
dictionaries, and four of the major British single-volume desk
dictionaries (the equivalent of the American college dictionary)
have come out in new versions in the past couple of months. This
would seem a good time to update earlier reviews, to compare and
contrast their treatments of new and fashionable words, and to note
the trends and tendencies on which their press materials focus.

[See http://www.worldwidewords.org/reviews/re-fou1.htm for the full
text. As the review is long and contains several illustrations and
a table, plus a lot of links to earlier reviews and various archive
pieces on words, it seemed better to post it as a private page for
subscribers on the Web site rather than try to reformat it for the
newsletter. Please note that this page will not be linked to the
rest of the site until 20 September, so does not yet appear on the
home page, in the indexes, or in search page results.]


4. Q&A
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Q. My wife is Japanese and we were discussing why Japanese have 10
different names for the same number. I asked why? She returned with
a really tough one. Why are "eleven" and "twelve" so named? Why not
"eleventeen" and "twelveteen"? She had a point. Where did those
words originate? [Tony]

A. The ending "-teen" is just an old form of "ten", so that
"sixteen" is "six-ten" or "six plus ten". If you were following the
rule of such numbers strictly, you ought to count "oneteen",
"twoteen", "threeteen", "fourteen", and so on. ("Thirteen" is
actually a modified form of "threeteen", a word that existed at one
time, though written as "threteen".)

As you say, "eleven" and "twelve" don't fit this neat system.
That's probably because people a thousand years ago didn't
necessarily think in tens all the time, but often preferred
twelves. The posh name for it is the duodecimal system; think of 12
inches to the foot or 12 pence to the shilling in old British money
and the way that items even now can be counted out by dozens or by
the gross. It may also in part be tied up with the idea of the dual
case, in which things were classed as one, two, or many (singular,
dual, plural); Old English had a dual case, as do other languages.
So ten plus one and ten plus two were special numbers, not quite in
the same situation as ten plus three or the higher examples.

The oldest form of "eleven" in English is "endleofan" (which
appears in King Alfred's translation from the Latin of Bede's
Ecclesiastical History). It's made up of two words that mean "one
left over", that is, after one has counted ten, there's one
remaining. Similarly "twelve" is from Old English words that meant
"two left over". So why didn't people talk about "three left over"
and so on? It seems that once they had got past the magic twelve,
people swapped to counting in a more direct way.

Note, though, that this pattern isn't by any means universal even
among European languages. Though German and Dutch match it, French
and the other Romance tongues don't. It seems to be peculiar to the
Germanic languages.


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C. FAQ of the week
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