World Wide Words -- 14 Aug 04
Michael Quinion
editor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 13 18:53:13 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 405 Saturday 14 August 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 20,000+ 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. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Roo.
3. Sic!
4. Q&A: Brassiere.
5. Noted this week.
6. Book review: Blooming English.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Supporting World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BLIVET Many people mentioned that they knew this word, one half of
a question last week, as the name of an impossible two-pronged
trident thingy, otherwise known as the Devil's pitchfork. You can
see a picture of it at http://quinion.com?Q93H. That page suggests
the name derives from "believe it", which I don't. Helen Thursh
commented that she first heard the word in the 1950s, when it was
used to describe not a useless object but a person who was self-
important and full of himself, for whom the description "ten pounds
of horse manure in a five-pound bag" was only too apt. Kev Esposito
said that when he was in the Royal Australian Air Force a blivet
was a fuel bladder used for refuelling away from base. Dave Church
emailed from Kazakhstan to say he remembered them by this name from
World War Two, describing them as rubberised bladders used by the
American forces for holding fuel at temporary locations, usually
small airstrips. Once drained, the bags would go flat and be easily
stored until required for use elsewhere. It's clearly a word with a
history ...
NITNOID Lots more feedback on this one, the other half of the same
question last week. It is confidently said by many subscribers to
derive from the Thai "nit noi", meaning "just a little", with the
suggestion that it was brought back to the USA by servicemen
returning from the Vietnam war. I can't find evidence to directly
confirm or deny this one, though the gap between the Vietnam era
and the first appearance of the word might count against its being
the source.
BANGALORED For many subscribers, the name of the Indian city that
was the source of last week's Turns of Phrase piece immediately
brought to mind the Bangalore torpedo, a tube packed with explosive
used by troops for blowing up wire entanglements. It got its name
because it was invented in Bangalore. I had thought that the term,
which is first recorded in 1913 and was common in both world wars,
was now so rare among the public at large that it could not be an
influence on the new term. But I'm told that the phrase was used in
the recent film Saving Private Ryan, which conceivably might have
brought it to mind.
YAFFLE Derek Stevens mentioned that he remembered this word in the
1930s as a description of somebody who was eating greedily; Barry,
an expatriate Brit living in Florida, remembers it being used in
the Royal Navy in that sense; John Davies of Welwyn Garden City
found it defined as "voracious eating" in Rick Jolly's Jackspeak: a
Guide to Royal Navy Slanguage; this sense appears in the English
Dialect Dictionary, though it is impossible to be sure whether it's
directly related or a different word altogether. Rosemary Covert,
now in Ottawa but formerly of Newfoundland, remembers that in that
local dialect it refers to a handful. This is from another English
dialect word, spelled "yafful" in the English Dialect Dictionary.
PORT OUT, STARBOARD HOME I made a vow not to mention my new book
in this newsletter for a while because you heard rather a lot about
it when it was first published in Britain. I can't resist telling
you, though, that the book reached the hardback non-fiction top 10
in the UK this week. It's published in Australia in October, under
the same title, and will be available in the USA in early November
under the title Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds. For more, see
http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm .
2. Weird Words: Roo
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To pluck the wool from the fleece of a sheep.
The word is closely associated with the crofting communities of
Orkney and Shetland, though the technique is now rarely practised
because it takes so long. As you might guess from its heartland,
it's a Scandinavian term, brought to the islands by Norse settlers
more than a thousand years ago, and which has modern equivalents in
such languages as Norwegian and Icelandic. In such harsh northern
climates, to shear sheep would be to put them at risk of dying from
the cold and wet, even in summer. However, the local breeds
naturally shed their old wool in the Spring as the new fleece grows
out. With a lot of painstaking work that required nimble fingers,
local women would pluck or "roo" the old wool close to the sheep's
skin as it grew out on various parts of the body. The new fleece
was left in place, providing protection for the skin against the
elements. One of the advantages of this method was that the fibres,
being uncut, had no sharp ends and so the spun wool was softer than
that obtained by shearing.
3. Sic!
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Ethan de Seife writes: "I just noticed a marvelous little mistake
on a sign at the gym I frequent on the campus of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. The sign hangs next to the racquetball courts.
It reads, in part, 'SUGGESTIVE USE OF EYE WEAR ENCOURAGED'. I'm
still trying to figure out how to don my goggles in a provocative
manner."
4. Q&A
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Q. A page at snopes.com (see http://quinion.com?B66B), gives some
insight into the origins of the word "brassiere" and related
issues. As you are the one source I implicitly trust on matters
relating to etymology etc, and because your reporting is always
interesting, I desire to see an article on same by you. [Grahame
Gould]
A. You're very kind! I'm not well informed about the history of
women's underwear, and so can't say anything much about the details
of the evolution of the garment presented in the article. However,
I can say something about the history of the word itself.
As the piece says, one problem with tracing its evolution is that
"brassière" has been used in French for several centuries, at first
for a soldier's arm guard or shield (it derives ultimately from
"bras", arm). Later, it became a term for a military breast plate,
and later still for a type of women's corset. As an aside on the
way words can shift in meaning over time and between languages, a
"brassière" in modern French most commonly refers to a baby's vest
(in the British sense of an undershirt), while the usual word for a
bra in that language is "soutien-gorge", literally a throat
support.
This last name seems to have been bestowed by Herminie Cadolle, who
marketed the first type recognisable as its modern form in France
in 1905. Though the early history is somewhat confused and open to
conflicting claims, the first American patent was issued in 1914 to
Mary Phelps Jacob (so it is sometimes said that the bra is 90 years
old this year). If you have heard a story about its creation by a
New York garment maker named Otto Titzling, don't believe a word of
it - it was a hoax perpetrated by Wallace Reyburn in 1971 in a book
entitled Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the
Development of the Bra.
Its early history suggests that the word ought to appear in English
in the second decade of the twentieth century, and the Oxford
English Dictionary indeed dates its first example of the word
"brassiere" to 1911. However, I've been able to track down large
numbers of examples of the term in the years before this (it became
especially common in advertisements in American newspapers from
about 1907 onwards), though this was a direct borrowing of the then
usual French term for a bust corset. For example, this appeared in
the Syracuse, New York Evening Herald in March 1893: "Still of
course the short waisted gowns mean short waisted corsets and those
ladies who wish to be in the real absolute fashion are adopting for
evening wear the six inch straight boned band or brassiere which
Sarah Bernhardt made a necessity with her directoire gowns."
The abbreviation "bra", by the way, is recorded from the mid-1930s,
though an earlier abbreviation was "bras", which -despite its
apparent plural form - was a singular noun.
5. Noted this week
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WHAT'S IN A NAME? The vowel sound might make a difference to your
perceived sexiness, according to a study carried out by linguist
Amy Perfors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported
at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Chicago.
She posted pictures of men and women with fake names on a Web site
and asked visitors to rate them. She found that males whose names
have a vowel sound that's formed at the front of the mouth, such as
the "a" in "Matt" or the "e" in "Ben", were thought more attractive
than those whose names contained vowels made at the back, such as
the "aw" sound in "Paul". The opposite is true for female names.
This suggests that a common assumption of linguists, that vowels
are arbitrary sounds lacking intrinsic meaning, may not be the
whole truth.
CHUFFED TO MINTBALLS The British judo player Kate Howey used this
expression in response to the announcement that she was to have the
honour of leading the British team and of carrying the flag at the
Olympics opening ceremony. As you might guess, it's a colloquial
English phrase indicating great pleasure, though not an especially
common one. "Chuffed" by itself usually means "pleased", though it
can confusingly also mean "annoyed, disgruntled". The conflicting
senses come about because "chuff" has had a number of meanings in
various English dialects, among them "ill-tempered" and "pleased,
elated", presumably because the various senses come from distinct
sources. But why the mintballs? Nobody knows, but the expression is
certainly a cleaned-up version of several rather rude 1950s British
army expressions.
6. Book review: Blooming English
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Australian readers may recognise the title, if not its author, Kate
Burridge, since the book was first published in Australia two years
ago. In her words, it has been pruned of many of its Australianisms
and has now been released into the Northern Hemisphere by Cambridge
University Press. It's a set of essays on language that were first
heard on, or provoked by callers to, the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation's "Soundbank" programme. In her day job, she's Chair of
Linguistics at Melbourne's Monash University.
She has written a series of very readable standalone chapters on
various themes associated with her subtitle, "Observations on the
roots, cultivation and hybrids of the English language". These
include the way that pronunciations change, the reasons why some
words vanish from the language while others are continually being
invented, and whether any word has a real intrinsic meaning that's
distinct from the way people might misuse it.
She points out that at one time somebody who was daft was humble
rather than foolish or insane, an apple could be any fruit and a
slut was merely untidy. Such changes often leave telltale remnants
behind in fossilised survivals - "cobweb" contains the old word
"coppe" for a spider, "noisome" contains "noy" from "annoy", and
"midriff" has within it an old word for the belly, "hriff". She
also talks about the sources of some of our vocabulary, about
supposedly poor or incorrect usage (very often a view imposed by
pedants and verbal hygienists with a linguistic axe to grind), and
about slang, taboo language and euphemisms.
Chapters contain asides describing such specifics as the curious
origin of the pronoun "she", why such words as "pants" and
"trousers" are plural, the curiosities of rhyming slang, the
mystery of the disappearing "l" in words like "calm" and "walk",
and why some words, such as "deer" and "sheep", are the same in
singular and plural.
It's a fair bet that anyone who finds this newsletter interesting
will also like Professor Burridge's book and will look forward to
the sequel, Weeds in the Garden of Words. This is shortly to be
published by ABC Books, but is likely for the moment to be
available only in Australia and New Zealand.
[Kate Burridge, Blooming English, published by Cambridge University
Press; paperback, pp242, including index; ISBN 0-521-54832-2;
publisher's price in the UK GBP13.95.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
US: US$13.99 ( http://quinion.com?G91H )
CA: CDN$19.60 ( http://quinion.com?G29H )
UK: GBP9.76 ( http://quinion.com?G73H )
DE: EUR14,50 ( http://quinion.com?G64H )
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