World Wide Words -- 20 Sep 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 19 17:54:46 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 359 Saturday 20 September 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. Turns of Phrase: Bookcrossing.
2. Weird Words: Gantlope.
3. Q&A: On all fours.
4. Book Review: Slayer Slang.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Turns of Phrase: Bookcrossing
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This is one of the nicest odd notions to come out of the Internet.
The idea is to leave a book in a public place with a note of how to
log on to the www.bookcrossing.com site to record where and when
you found it and what you thought of it. After you've read it, you
then "release" the book for a new reader - perhaps by giving it to
a friend, leaving it on a park bench, a coffee shop or some other
public place, or by donating it to charity. The Bookcrossing site
describes itself as a cross between a book club, a reading group
and an attempt to turn the whole world into a library. The idea was
taken up in the UK in August by Urbis, the centre for the urban
experience, based in Manchester. They released several hundred
books into the city. Within three weeks, one of their books had
been reported from Tangiers and another from Bangkok.
Unlike music or movie file swapping bookcrossing is unlikely to
face the wrath of the publishing industry. I don't think that
passing books on to friends is illegal (at least I hope not) and
this site is only likely to encourage people to read more not less.
[Birmingham Post, 11 March 2003]
Bookcrossing strikes at one of the industry's darkest fears: that
there are already enough books in the world. Some authors have
voiced anxieties about the phenomenon.
[Guardian, 30 Aug. 2003]
2. Weird Words: Gantlope
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A military or naval punishment.
This word is from an old Scandinavian word, "gatlopp", which is a
compound of "gata", a road or street, with "lopp", a course. You
might not recognise the first part, but as "gait" it survives in
English in the related sense of a manner of walking. Also, in
northern England a gate is not a barrier across a road but the road
itself. For example, streets in York have names such as Coppergate
and Micklegate, given to them by the Vikings who occupied the city
before the Norman Conquest. Visitors often think that these are
references to the openings in the city walls (for which the local
name is actually "bar", another word bequeathed by the Vikings).
"Gatlopp" was borrowed in the seventeenth century in the corrupted
form "gantlope" for a type of military punishment in which a man,
stripped to the waist, was forced to run between a double row of
men who struck at him with sticks or knotted cords. An example
turns up in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones: "Some said, he ought to be
tied neck and heels; others that he deserved to run the gantlope;
and the serjeant shook his cane at him, and wished he had him under
his command, swearing heartily he would make an example of him".
Hang on a minute, you may be saying, I know that as "running the
gauntlet". Indeed you may. That's the result of a folk etymology
that has turned the foreign "gantlope" into something that's more
familiar, in this case the old word for a fortified glove that
formed part of a suit of armour. By the beginning of the nineteenth
century, "gantlope" had vanished in favour of "gauntlet", almost
always in the form "to run the gauntlet".
Some North Americans prefer "gantlet" here, which is just an
earlier version of "gauntlet" that more closely resembles the
source, the Old French "gantelet". By one of those curious
coincidences that one sometimes comes across in word histories,
that's from another "gant" - the French word for glove.
3. Q&A
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Q. The legal expression "on all fours" is defined in Black's Law
Dictionary, Fifth Edition, as "A phrase used to express the idea
that a case at bar is in all points similar to another. The one is
said to be on all fours with the other when the facts are similar
and the same questions of law are involved". But that raises the
question - what is the origin of the phrase "on all fours"?
[Jeffrey W. Frazier]
A. The image behind it is that of a dog or similar animal. If it
has use of all four legs, it runs smoothly and evenly, as opposed
to the way it would limp if one of its legs were damaged. The
expression was originally "on all four", known from the sixteenth
century in phrases we're still familiar with, such as "to crawl
upon all four" (the final "-s" was added in the nineteenth century;
earlier, a word such as "legs" or "extremities" was understood).
In the eighteenth century, people started to use "to run on all
four" as a figurative expression to describe some proposition or
circumstance that was fair or equitable, well-founded, sturdily
able to stand by itself. "To be on all four" or "to stand on all
four" meant to be on a level with another, to present an exact
analogy or comparison with something else (presumably the image is
of two animals standing together, both on all four legs, hence in
closely similar situations).
It's hardly common now outside the legal profession, and I suspect
is better known in the USA in that field than in Britain.
4. Book Review: Slayer Slang
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Buffyholic Michael Adams has written in enthusiastic terms about
the originality and significance of the language of the cult TV
series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I must confess that I've never
watched even one episode and was initially more than a little
bemused, not only that a professor of English should take the show
seriously, but that Oxford University Press should publish the
results.
But on casting about for enlightenment I found that Buffy has
become a fashionable topic among specialists - a lot of academic
sweat has gone into analysing Joss Whedon's story of a blonde
teenage girl chosen to combat the forces of darkness. Buffyology is
now definitely on the academic conference circuit: last October the
University of East Anglia hosted one entitled Blood, Text and
Fears: Reading Around Buffy the Vampire Slayer; another is to be
held in Nashville next May. You can find essays with titles like
"Sex and the Single Vampire: The Evolution of the Vampire Lothario
and Its Representation in Buffy" and "A Kantian Analysis Of Moral
Judgment in Buffy The Vampire Slayer". There are many spin-off
books, of which one is 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and Philosophy:
Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale. Many universities now include
investigations of the show as part of cultural studies courses. I
found comments like this totally over-the-top example, from
Professor David Lavery of Middle Tennessee State University: "There
is no question that 'Buffy' is the richest verbal show on
television. From the puns to the alliterations to the witticisms,
the writing, plain and simple, is fabulous. It is also the funniest
show on television."
The book falls into two main sections, an introduction that gives
the background to Buffy slang, teases out the sources and styles of
linguistic invention used by the writers (such as the extensive
employment of affixes like "-y" ("twelve-steppy", "out-of-the-
loopy"), "-age" ("slayage", "topicage") and "über-"("überevil",
"übersuck"), and deconstructs the name "Buffy" in some detail. The
rest of the book, the larger part, is a glossary of invented terms
used in the Buffyverse. This part of the book will be of interest
mainly to slang lexicographers and diehard Buffy fans, since it
records the details of who first said a term, in what context, in
which episode, plus a note on its etymology. After some study, you
will be able to translate sentences like "I'm in a pre-posy with
that dollsome Mr 'I Loved The English Patient'" ("I'm in the early
stages of a relationship with that extremely attractive sensitive
man").
Is all this effort worthwhile? If you're a fan, the answer will no
doubt be that it is. Non-watchers like me, even those interested in
the evolution of English, may be more equivocal, even though the
study of ephemeral English is interesting in itself. Many of us are
intrigued by the inventiveness of the writers in creating a self-
consistent linguistic universe. The relevance of the language of
the programme to the world outside Sunnydale is less than clear.
One verbal trick that has made the transition is the way it turns
cultural references into lexical items, often subtly and requiring
a sophisticated knowledge of literature and films that you perhaps
might not expect a teen audience to possess - as in the reference
to the English Patient above, or in phrases like "to go Wild Bunch"
(conduct a Western-style rescue), "Did you get anything less heart-
of-darknessy?" (that is, depressing), or "We must Clark Kent our
way through the dating scene" (go in disguise). One term for which
there's lots of evidence of imitation is "much", which is used as
an elliptical comment or question ("Egotistic much?", "Off message
much?"). Michael Adams has also noticed a small explosion of adding
the "-y" suffix to words. However, a lot of Buffy slang continued
and built on earlier trends, such as the Californian high-school,
Valley Girl slang lexicon of the eighties, and the teens and
twenties crowd may not want to perpetuate that style for much
longer.
With the first run of the whole series now having finished, the
next few years will reveal which terms have moved from sideline to
mainstream. The show's influence is sure to dissipate very quickly,
despite all the re-runs that will undoubtedly follow. The book is
definitely one for the serious Buffy fan or investigator of pop
culture.
[Michael Adams, Slayer Slang: A 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' Lexicon,
published in July 2003 by Oxford University Press; hardback, pp308;
ISBN 0-19-516033-9; publisher's price in the US $19.95, in the UK
GBP12.99.]
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