World Wide Words -- 01 Jan 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 31 19:25:21 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 424 Saturday 1 January 2005
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Sent each Saturday to 21,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Nanopublishing.
3. Weird Words: Janus-faced.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Death toll.
6. Sic!
7. Q&A: Punctuation and quotation marks.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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CATCHWORD CONSEQUENCES Following Harry Campbell's description of
this game in the last issue, Ed Enstrom reported a variant that he
saw in Games Magazine many years ago, in which the suggestion was
to use the Yellow Pages of your local telephone book instead. He
says: "This is a great way to pass the time when you are in a hotel
room far from home with nothing to do. It seems that the smaller
the city is, the funnier the word pairs are. Here are some from my
telephone book: abrasive accountants, antique appliances, auto
awnings, burglar business, corrective counseling, fireplace fish,
garbage garden, pizza plumbers, and religious restaurants."
Chester Graham pointed out that section titles on encyclopedias can
also be amusing. One volume of the Australian Encyclopedia has the
title "Marsupials to Parliament". He said, "I don't think there's a
novel in it, but it explains much of the Canberra Hansard." My own
favourite is an old encyclopedia I found in a junk shop, one volume
of which was entitled "Fun to Hug". It wasn't.
Only one subscriber (take a bow, Pam Davies of Leeds) noticed my
error in the list of pairs from the Shorter Oxford. The editors
would have to be alphabetically challenged to include "scrambling
scandaroon" as a page heading. The correct version is "scambling
scandaroon", in which the first word of the pair is an old form of
"scrambling". The OED's definition of the verb "scamble" is worth
repeating as an example of Victorian primness: "To struggle with
others for money, fruit, sweetmeats, etc. lying on the ground or
thrown to a crowd; hence, to struggle in an indecorous and
rapacious manner in order to obtain something."
SMART ALEC Some comments on my piece about the origins of this
expression, including one from Professor Cohen himself, sent me
back to his article in which he set out his theory about where it
came from. There's more to be said, not least that the connection
with Alex Hoag is not as established as I had asserted. The version
on the Web site at http://quinion.com?H23G contains a fuller story.
WEB SITE CHANGES Visitors to the site over Christmas will have
noticed that the home page has been redesigned; changes have now
been extended to the rest of the site. Following requests, I've now
added a back-issue archive (restored it, really, as there used to
be one years ago, which I took out because it wasn't much used).
The archive contains a year's back issues, plus a link to the full
archive at the Linguist List. It is at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/
2. Turns of Phrase: Nanopublishing
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This word has been around for nearly two years, though it has only
in recent months begun to be at all common. It's a development of
the blogging revolution. Some bloggers have realised that the
format allows them to reach large numbers of people very quickly
and cheaply and that - through a mixture of sponsorship, donations
and targeted links to online marketing sites such as Amazon - it is
possible to make money. The essence of the approach is to provide a
targeted audience with informed news and comment on some specialist
subject, whether it's political gossip or the latest in electronic
gadgets (or even the English language). The idea behind the name
for the technique uses the prefix "nano-" in a figurative sense of
something extremely small-scale.
* From Newsday, 16 Feb. 2004: It was launched by New York-based
Brit Nick Denton - who also started the ultra-hip blog site
Gawker.com, a mix of New York party gossip and news. Denton's
approach to online publishing is part of a trend that's been dubbed
"nanopublishing."
* From the Guardian, 18 Nov. 2004: In a final piece of
nanopublishing news, the pair behind Guardian blog award-winning
The Big Smoker have relaunched as the London outpost of the blog
network Gothamist.
3. Weird Words: Janus-faced
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Having two contrasting aspects.
The name of the Roman god Janus comes from Latin "ianua", an
entrance gate. He was the god of doorways and gateways; as doors
can be passed in either direction, he came to represent both the
past and the future. Because of that, his image was of a man with
two faces, looking both forwards and backwards. The Romans always
put Janus first in prayers, because in particular he symbolised
beginnings. But he could also represent success or failure,
especially in war. He was the god of January, whose name comes from
him (in Latin "Januarius (mensis)", the month of Janus), which had
become the first month of the Roman calendar probably some time in
the second century BCE. A person who is "Janus-faced" has two
contrasting aspects and in particular is two-faced or deceitful.
Israel Zangwill wrote a century ago that "Life is Janus-faced, and
the humourist invests his characters with a double mask; they stand
for comedy as well as for tragedy." A "Janus-faced word" is a
contronym, a word like "cleave" that has two opposing meanings.
4. Noted this week
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MORE CROSS-WORDS A couple of weeks ago, I discussed various names
for accidental animal cross-breeds. Many names have been created
for deliberate crosses, this time of fruits. Take "peacotum", a
fruit that is to be marketed in North America this Spring. It's a
cross between a peach, a plum and an apricot, described as "a rosy-
red creature with just a wisp of fuzz" (which sounds too much like
an acned adolescent for my liking) and its name rhymes with "sea
bottom" according to a recent article in Fortune magazine which Joe
Kennedy told me about. The fruit was created by Floyd Zaiger, a
California breeder, who also developed the "pluot", a plum-apricot
hybrid, mostly plum, which the Fortune piece says is "available in
purple, yellow, or green with red polka dots" and is sometimes
called a "dinosaur egg"; it should not be confused with the
"aprium", another apricot-plum cross that is mostly apricot. Others
are the "nectarcot" and the "nectaplum", crosses between a
nectarine and respectively an apricot and a plum. All these are
trademarked names. So also is the "grapple", but this is a ripe
apple that has been marinated to produce a grape flavour, so it's
the product of cookery, not genetics.
CODE SWITCHING There has been some controversy about the possible
deleterious effects on children's literacy of the current fashion
for texting messages using mobile phones. To be good at it requires
users to be quick and concise and has led to a widespread language
of abbreviations that are unintelligible to the uninitiated, such
as "CWOT" for "complete waste of time", or "cu l8r" for "see you
later". (These are relatively easy examples to decode. My son
Brian, aged 28, tells me that the texting language has evolved
considerably over its short life, so much so that he can read texts
from friends aged down to about 20 with no difficulty, but that he
sometimes has to go online to search out the meaning of extremely
abbreviated, almost encrypted, symbols in messages from younger
ones. John Arlidge, writing in the Observer last Sunday, coined the
infelicitous "Textsperanto" for this deeply coded text.)
A small-scale study at the City University in London reported just
before Christmas suggests that even the most extremely abbreviated
texting may not prove a literacy problem, since children can easily
code-switch - move between texting and plain language according to
need. The term was created by linguists to describe the ability of
bilingual speakers to swap between one language and another, often
from sentence to sentence, but it frequently refers to the closely
related ability to switch between a local dialect or patois to the
standard language and back (or the way we can swap in an instant
between different conversational styles in addressing a friend and
granny). The same process is going on with texters, according to
the study's researcher, Veenal Raval, which will reassure teachers
and parents that the supposed menace of texting is not so serious
as believed.
5. Q&A
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Q. I've been taught in journalism school - way back in the 1980s -
that "death" is redundant when you use "toll" to describe the
number of casualties. Yet, time and again, even prestigious
magazines like the Economist and Time, refer to "death toll". Your
comments please. [Nithin Belle]
A. There's most definitely no problem finding examples in print. I
put the search term into a newspaper database covering the past
decade and nearly blew its fuses: 63,000 examples came back. But
there's no reference to it in any of the style guides that are
readily to hand or mouse. I'd argue that it's much too late to
complain about the usage and that the reason for the objection
isn't valid in any case.
The Oxford English Dictionary has its first example from 1981,
which might suggest that it's modern. But a search in another
newspaper database turned up lots of examples from the end of the
nineteenth century in American newspapers. The oldest I can find is
dated 1897 and is in a report sent via London: "Special despatches
from Bombay say that from 600 to 1,000 rioters were killed during
the recent rioting in the vicinity of Calcutta and it is added that
native circles put the death toll as high as 1,500." By 1910 it had
become common and has remained so ever since.
The two words were put together because the word "toll" then didn't
necessarily mean death, but any loss or injury or cost in health
(I'd argue it still does: it's in modern dictionaries). It was a
development of its original sense of a tax, charge or imposed cost
and seems to have appeared in American English in the 1870s, often
in the phrase "to take its toll" that we still use. The OED quotes
Blackwood's Magazine in 1909 as an example of the broader meaning:
"Nott's gallant division ... paid its toll of killed and wounded."
"Death toll" was created to clarify the sense.
Incidentally, though the tolling of bells is often associated with
death (remember John Donne: "Any man's death diminishes me, because
I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee"), the verb comes from another
source, probably a special use of the dialect "toll", meaning to
drag or pull, which was transferred from the pulling of the bell
rope to the sound of the bell.
These days it has to be classed as a fixed phrase that's virtually
an idiom, but one that's still useful to make clear what's meant.
6. Sic!
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John T. Scott e-mailed: "In The Rangeley Highlander of Rangeley,
Maine, December 10 2004, one can read: 'Thumbs Up to Mike Schrader
and his band for their great food stomping fiddle tunes and an
occasional waltz.' It's difficult to waltz when your feet are
sticky with gravy and cranberry sauce."
Mike Mellor in New Zealand made an intriguing discovery: "On a
container of Waproo shoe polish ('All Australian Owned', but made
in Spain): appears 'international misuse may cause injury'." To do
some real good, it should be stamped on munitions.
Fred Condo was surprised to receive an e-mail message from PayPal
on 20 December that included the following sentence: "Today, many
buyers receive two emails at the end of an auction or transaction -
eBay's End of Auction and PayPal's Winning Buyer Notification.
PayPal and eBay are eliminating the duplicity." It was candid of
them to admit they have been deceiving winners. The same day he
noticed a Reuters news report: "Archaeologists in the United Arab
Emirates have found the remains of a 7,500-year-old man, the oldest
skeleton found in the country." Methuselah? Schmethuselah!
A notice on the Manly ferry in Sydney harbour just before Christmas
caused Bryan Hodgson to crack up: "Toilet out of order. We regret
the inconvenience". Was it, I wonder, written by a humourless and
harried functionary or a worker with a sense of fun?
Before Christmas, my wife saw that a stall in the local farmer's
market here in Thornbury was selling loaves of the German sweet
bread called stollen. She wasn't tempted, in part because she
prefers to make her own, but also because a notice advertised them
as being "stolen".
7. Q&A
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Q. Occasionally I see a comma after quotes, such as in this example
on your website: 'short for "Mid-InfraRed Advanced Chemical Laser",
part of the Star Wars program'. Can you please let me know under
what circumstance the comma become correct before the quotes, if at
all? [Bob Thorsen, South Africa]
A. Or, putting it another way, am I making a mistake by putting the
comma outside the quotes? Most American style guides would say that
I'm wrong, but British and Commonwealth ones will equally firmly
say I'm right. This is another example of the tiny differences that
exist between styles in different varieties of English and which
cause much unnecessary controversy, criticism and irritation.
At one time Britain and America agreed. The convention used to be,
and in American English still is, to put full stops (periods) and
commas inside the quotation marks, irrespective of the sense. So
American publications usually punctuate like this:
The show began with a "sneak preview," held at the hotel.
He made his debut singing in "Faust."
British English has moved away from this style while American
English has retained it. British style now prefers to punctuate
according to the sense, in which punctuation marks only appear
inside quotation marks if they were there in the original. So
British usage would punctuate the sentences above as:
The show began with a "sneak preview", held at the hotel.
He made his debut singing in "Faust".
But this isn't by any means the whole story. In US style, question
or exclamation marks and semicolons are always inserted according
to the sense. And the system for marking dialogue is the same in
both countries:
"The police," he protested, "Have always been fair to me."
"Keep away from me!" she shouted. "I hate you!"
Moreover, formal British English practice requires a closing full
stop to be put inside the quotation marks if the quoted item is a
complete sentence that ends where the main sentence ends:
She had told me, "I still love you."
The sign said, "Keep off the grass."
but it's common to see the stop outside the closing quotes.
There's actually a lot more variation in practice than the style
guides imply. For instance, the American system is not universal
even in that country. The Chicago Manual of Style remarks that "The
British style is strongly advocated by some American language
experts." But it goes on: "In defense of nearly a century and a
half of the American style, however, it may be said that it seems
to have been working fairly well and has not resulted in serious
miscommunication."
It can seem a bit of a muddle. And I don't always follow the letter
of British rules, either, especially when I quote an extract in a
sentence. My feeling is that this debate is largely sterile. There
is a case for consistency within any one publication. But nobody
will misunderstand what you write because of where you choose to
put your stops relative to quotation marks. A writer who fixes too
much attention on the correctness of his punctuation, or a reader
who does the same, is missing the point: the job of text is to
communicate, not satisfy pedantic rule makers.
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