World Wide Words -- 21 Aug 04

Fri Aug 20 18:29:54 UTC 2004

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 406         Saturday 21 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        wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Internet.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Spifflicate.
5. Over To You.
6. Q&A: Digs.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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E-MAIL MESSAGES  My new Web site provider has better facilities for
coping with spam and virus-laden messages, as a result of which the
number of incoming e-mails has dropped from 1500 a day to 200. I've
now rationalised the various addresses for World Wide Words to make
it easier to see the gems among the rubbish, mainly by stopping the
use of those which have become compromised. The valid addresses are
listed at the very end of this message. Please tidy up your address
books! (You will note that addresses have become rather cryptic, in
order to foil what are called dictionary attacks, in which spammers
attach common words and names to known Internet domains in the hope
that at least some are valid and will be delivered.) Sometime soon,
the system will change so that a message sent to any e-mail address
other than these will be deleted unread. There's no longer any need
for you to include the code word "XYZZY" in your subject line. Many
thanks for your support in recent months as I've tried to cope with
the flood of unwanted messages.

CHUFFED TO MINTBALLS  Several British Army veterans tell me that
two of the few clean precursors to this expression I mentioned last
week that were known to the 1950s military included "chuffed to
NAAFI cakes" and "chuffed to NAAFI breaks". (NAAFI  = "Navy, Army,
and Air Force Institutes", an organisation that runs canteens and
shops for British service personnel.) A rather later version, that
was mentioned by Chris Church, was "chuffed to little meatballs",
which may be a transitional form that explains the odd "mintballs",
otherwise not a term in common use anywhere, which may have come
from it by a folk etymology.

2. Topical Words: Internet
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Do you put an initial capital letter on "Internet", or the related
words "Net" and "Web"? This may seem a fussy, not to say pedantic,
question. But it's one that copy editors and those charged with
creating the house styles for publishing firms must wrestle with in
order to create text that looks consistent, avoids annoying or
confusing readers, and quietly states that it forms part of a
unified publication, whoever wrote the words.

This came into the news this week because Wired magazine, the house
magazine of Net geeks, publicised a change of policy (see
http://quinion.com?X59J). From now on, it says, all three words
will be written in lower case. "Why?", writes Tony Long, the copy
chief. "The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to
capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was."

Hm. There are arguments for following the magazine's lead, as we
shall see, but Tony Long's comment ignores the historical evidence.
The Internet was originally, in the late 1960s, a US Department of
Defense project called ARPAnet (after the Department's Advanced
Research Projects Agency). It was designed to permit its academic
researchers to talk to each other more effectively by linking their
individual computer networks. So it was an "inter-network", or
"internet". The latter word, in lower-case, seems to have been
first used in 1974, in a standards document written by Vint Cerf;
references to it in memoranda and technical specifications in the
following years were also usually lower case. The first example in
the Oxford English Dictionary's entry with an initial capital
letter is from the magazine Network World in 1986, though by then
it had become common in standards documents, too. Virtually all
publications adopted this style into and through the 1990s.

The reasoning behind capitalising it was that there was just one
entity that was called by this title, that it was a specific thing
with a proper name, and that by the usual rules that name ought to
be capitalised. In the USA, an initial capital is still the norm
and is recommended in style guides. But we've begun to see a shift
away from the use of an initial capital letter in all three words,
especially in the UK, where the Daily Telegraph, the Independent,
the Guardian, and the New Scientist have all lower-cased "Internet"
for several years.

The reason is hinted at in Tony Long's piece: in public perception
the Internet has changed from a device to a process. It's becoming
regarded as a communications medium and most people don't think of
themselves as Internet users. Instead, their mental focus is on
what they're doing - they're getting information, sending e-mails
to their friends, or downloading music - in just the same way that
they think of the telephone. You don't call it "The Telephone", you
regard it as a generalised mechanism with which to get in touch
with a friend or order a pizza. And just as we don't capitalise the
words for media such as "television", "radio", "mail", "telephone",
or "newspaper", why should we capitalise "Internet"? The change,
though minor in itself, is a cultural marker for a shift in public
perception and a further sign that the Internet is becoming a
mature medium. I've no doubt myself that the lower-case forms will
eventually prevail.

So what do I do now? My personal house style says the words should
have initial caps. As with everybody else in the business of words,
the decision by Wired magazine is another indication that at some
point I may have to rethink.

3. Sic!
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Susan Korrel messaged from Australia: "A financing company recently
opened up shop near to us.  In bold lettering on their front window
they proclaim 'Money worries made easy'. I think I can easily make
my own money worries without their help."

4. Weird Words: Spifflicate
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To treat roughly or severely; destroy.

The dictionary senses given for this now rather rare word hardly do
justice to a slang term that has had several meanings. Its origins
lie in the eighteenth century in Britain, though where its first
users got it from remains a mystery. The experts hazard a guess
that it was probably a fanciful conflation - suggestions include
"stifle" + "suffocate" and "spill" + "castigate". You can spell it
with one "f" or two, as the fancy takes you, though when it first
appeared it had only one.

Over half a century, it rapidly developed from its initial sense of
"confound, silence or dumbfound", through "handle roughly or treat
severely", to "crush, destroy or kill". T W E Holdsworth borrowed
the last of these in Campaign of the Indus of 1840: "Of the enemy,
about 500 were killed, and more than 1500 made prisoners; and of
the remainder, who made their escape over the walls, the greater
part were cut down by the Dragoons, or spifflicated by the
Lancers." Despite these gory associations, by about 1900 it had
softened in Britain into a jokey term for some unspecified but
vaguely unpleasant punishment with which one might threaten a
naughty child ("I'll spifflicate you if you won't be quiet!").

In America at around the same date, the word took on another sense
still, that of being drunk. An early example is from the sporting
section of the Washington Post of July 1904: "They forced his teeth
open, and, while a couple of them sat on his chest, they poured
about a quart of corn liquor into his system. He was so
spifflicated before they let him up that they had to lift him
bodily and plant him in a seat."

5. Over To You
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Christine e-mailed from Maine in the USA with a question I can't
answer: "When I was a child my friends and I used a common term
when someone did something wrong, such as swearing or breaking
something -  we would say 'umvah'. I'm not sure of that spelling
and I have searched for the origin of this word with no luck."
Perhaps American subscribers can help?

6. Q&A
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Q. Any ideas of the origin of "digs" as in accommodation, rooms
etc? [David Seaton, UK]

A. In British usage, to be in "digs" is to live in a room in a
house with shared facilities, frequently with meals supplied by the
landlady. It's typically a lodging for students or young unmarried
men and women.

It's short for "diggings", which is the older word for the same
idea. That derives - as you might guess - from a place where one
digs. Many books argue that the original diggings were the gold
fields of California and Australia. We do know that the Australian
nickname "digger" is from this area of life and so it's sometimes
assumed that the word is likewise Australian, though all the early
evidence is American and the term predates both these gold rushes
anyway. But there is a gold fields connection.

It's often said that the word comes from the idea of a person who
"digs in", who makes a bolthole or burrow in which to live. No
doubt there's something of that lurking in the background. However,
it's possible to trace a chain of shifts in meaning that links the
mine workings sense of "diggings" with the accommodation one. The
first was that "diggings" transferred to the whole locality, which
it did in the 1830s. The first writer to use the word in this sense
was William Gilmore Simms, who included it in a book of 1834 called
Guy Rivers about the gold rush of the 1820s in the wilds of what
was then frontier north Georgia. The word moved from the locality
to the towns that mushroomed up to service the mines and provide
accommodation for the miners, and then to the accommodation itself.
The first instance of "diggings" for lodgings is in a humorous book
by Joseph Clay Neal of 1838 with the title Charcoal Sketches: "Look
here, Ned, I reckon it's about time we should go to our diggings; I
am dead beat."

The Oxford English Dictionary quotes an example taken from Charles
Dickens' book Martin Chuzzlewit of 1844, which might suggest that
it was widely known in Britain at this time. But it appears during
a railway journey in the American part of the story, among other
vocabulary that Dickens presumably picked up during his US trip of
1842, and to me the speaker means "place", not "lodgings". However,
by the latter part of the century, "diggings" is most certainly in
wide use in Britain - to take just one example, it's in Jerome K
Jerome's Three Men in a Boat of 1889: "We were tired and hungry, we
same three, and when we got to Datchet we took out the hamper, the
two bags, and the rugs and coats, and such like things, and started
off to look for diggings."

The abbreviation "digs" came along about that time; most definitely
that's a British invention. Because it turns up first in an issue
of The Stage in 1893, it is thought to have been created by actors
(who, frequently being itinerant, had more need of them than most
people), though later examples suggest that if it was originally
theatrical slang it quickly moved out into the population at large.

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Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
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Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>