World Wide Words -- 10 Jan 04
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Jan 10 09:26:21 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 375 Saturday 10 January 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 18,000+ 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. Turns of Phrase: Global Dimming.
3. Weird Words: Cockamamie.
4. Words of the Year, 2003.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: Toe the line.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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NEW FEATURE ON THE WEB SITE Thanks to everybody who tried out the
new "send this page to a friend" feature. Some were caught out by
an attribute of some computer systems that stopped Web browsers
from sending information to my Web site routines. Sunday morning
was spent rewriting around this and the system is now working.
Several people commented that they were expecting the full text of
the page to be sent, not just a link. Your wish is my command:
you'll now find that the form on which you enter your details
includes an option to send either the short version or the full
text. Note that the full text has all accented characters filtered
out so it gets through those mail servers that don't know about 8-
bit character sets.
ERROR OF THE WEEK Number 45129 in a series. My ISP didn't update
the Words Web site, as expected, to allow revised short-form links
to Amazon. I forgot to change the links back to their old format
and a few people found that they were presented with an irrelevant
page. My apologies. The links now work - see the list at the end of
this newsletter.
SPAM FILTER Might I draw your attention once again to the message
at the top of this and every issue? If you send a direct reply to
this newsletter, it will be deleted by my spam filter. See the FAQ
of the week for some background.
NEWSLETTER LATE I should have said last week that I would delay
sending this newsletter a few hours until I could write up the
results of the ADS poll (see item 4).
2. Turns of Phrase: Global Dimming
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An article in the "Guardian" on 18 December has created some
interest, as many readers concluded it threw the whole topic of
global warming into confusion. As an indication of the article's
impact, the number of references to "global dimming" on Google went
from 21 to 6000+ in the week after it appeared, though there have
been no references in other newspapers or magazines that I can
find, before or since.
It publicised the fact - known since the late 1980s but supposedly
ignored or disbelieved until recently - that over the past fifty
years the average amount of sunlight reaching the ground (the name
for which is "insolation") has gone down by about 3% a decade. It
doesn't mean the sun is sending out less radiation, but that less
of it is reaching the Earth's surface because of pollution in the
atmosphere. This effect seems to have been named "global dimming"
in an article in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology in 2001.
There's really no conflict with observed global warming, whose
likely severe impact on the world's plant and animal species a
report in this week's Nature makes clear, a message that was
reinforced by a stern rebuke to the current US administration by
David King, chief scientific adviser to the British Government, in
Friday's Science magazine. The sun's heat is still being absorbed,
but at a higher level in the atmosphere, probably on particles of
soot and the like. The Guardian article argues that the adverse
impact on agriculture could be substantial, since even a 1%
reduction is enough to affect the ripening of some crops.
3. Weird Words: Cockamamie
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Something ridiculous, incredible or implausible.
"Cockamamie" is intrinsically funny, but it's truly incredible that
word historians believe it's a close relative of "decal", a design
prepared on special paper for transfer to another surface. (It is
instead sometimes said to be Yiddish, but this turns out not to be
the case.)
The original of both "cockamamie" and "decal" is the French
"décalcomanie", which was created in the early 1860s to refer to
the craze for decorating objects with transfers (it combines
"décalquer", to transport a tracing, with "manie", a mania or
craze). The craze, and the word, soon transferred to Britain - it's
recorded in the magazine The Queen on 27 February 1864: "There are
few employments for leisure hours which for the past eighteen
months have proved either so fashionable or fascinating as
decalcomanie". It reached the United States around 1869 and - to
judge from the number of newspaper references in that year - became
as wildly popular as it had earlier in France and Britain. The word
was quickly Anglicised as "decalcomania" and in the 1950s it became
abbreviated to "decal".
The link between "decalcomania" and "cockamamie" isn't proved, but
the evidence suggests strongly that children in New York City in
the 1930s (or perhaps a decade earlier) converted the one into the
other. There was a fashion for self-decoration at that period,
using coloured transfers given away with candy and chewing gum.
Shelly Winters wrote of "cockamamie" in The New York Times in 1956
that "This word, translated from the Brooklynese, is the authorized
pronunciation of decalcomania. Anyone there who calls a cockamamie
a decalcomania is stared at."
Quite how the word changed sense to mean something incredible is
least clear of all. An early sense was of something inferior or
second-rate, which presumably referred to the poor quality of the
cheap transfers. It might have been influenced by words such as
"cock-and-bull" or "poppycock". Anyone who adopted the craze for
sticking transfers on oneself may have been regarded by adults or
more serious-minded youngsters as silly - certainly the first sense
was of a person who was ridiculous or crazy; the current sense came
along a few years later.
4. ADS Words of the Year, 2003
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Each year, the conference of the American Dialect Society elects
those words and phrases of the preceding year that seem noteworthy.
Whilst not exactly frivolous, the voting is lighthearted, as one
may tell from the categories and some of the selections. Last
night's session in Boston was no exception.
For example, the Most Unnecessary Word of the year. Many of us
could compile a list of possibilities here. The ADS members came up
with "freedom", replacing "French" in phrases or compound nouns
such as "French fries" and "French kiss". This easily beat
"Bennifer", a blended noun describing the couple of Ben Affleck and
Jennifer Lopez. In the Most Outrageous category nominations
included "torture lite", torture short of bodily harm and "useful
idiot", a human shield for the enemy. But the winner, clearly a
word which fits its slot perfectly, was "cliterati", a collective
noun for feminist or woman-oriented writers or opinion-leaders.
The word voted Least Likely To Succeed, that is, the word or phrase
least likely to be here next year, was "tomacco", a hybrid of
tomato and tobacco. "Spider hole", was voted Best Revival, a word
or phrase brought back from the past (this, you may recall, was the
American military term used in news reports for the hole in which
Saddam Hussein was captured; it goes back at least to 1941). The
word voted Most Likely to Succeed, that is, the word or phrase most
likely to be here next year was "SARS", Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (see http://quinion.com?XC). And the award for the word or
phrase which least says what it means to was given to "pre-emptive
self-defense": noun phrase, an attack made before a possible
attack.
The Most Creative award required several rounds of voting to get
the mood of the meeting clear. Among those suggested were the
several terms devised to refer to the new governor of California,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, "governator", "gropenator", and
"gropenführer", variously referring to his part in the Terminator
films, his origins, and the allegations of sexual harassment made
against him. But the winner here was a word that subscribers to
this newsletter have recently heard about (see
http://quinion.com?XB): "freegan", a person, nominally vegan, who
eats only what they can get for nothing. Still on food, the Most
Useful category winner for a word or phrase which most fills a need
for a new word was won by "flexitarian", a vegetarian who
occasionally eats meat.
And now (a drum roll, maestro, please) the Word (or Phrase) of the
Year. This required three rounds of voting. But the final winner
was "metrosexual", a fashion-conscious heterosexual male, or, as
Mark Simpson put it, a man who "has clearly taken himself as his
own love object" (see http://quinion.com?XA).
What, then, of 2004? It is hardly likely to be dull. It is, after
all, the UN International Year of Rice and - in the UK - will be
featuring the Be Nice To Nettles Week (actually the ten-day period
from 19-28 May).
5. Sic!
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The Philadelphia Inquirer last Saturday had a news item about the
NASA probe that captured dust from a comet's halo. Gerry Zanzalari
read in the third paragraph: "Mission members said the unmanned
probe made its closest approach at 2:44 p.m. in Philadelphia, while
traveling at a relative speed of 13,650 m.p.h." He commented, "I
wonder where, exactly, in Philadelphia."
Last Sunday Alan D Gray was visiting www.bourque.org, a daily news
site in Ottawa. That morning's edition carried a headline on a
piece about the collapse of the Italian firm Parmalat: "The rise
and fall of a milk magnet".
Tricia Lowrey saw an article on the CBC's online news service about
the launch of the Queen Mary 2 last Thursday, which said, "With a
top speed of 30 knots, Queen Mary 2's whistle can be heard for 16
kilometres". She asks, how fast does the rest of the ship go?
6. Q&A
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Q. I did not see the phrase, "toe the line" (or could it be "tow
the line"?) on your site. That one has never made sense to me. Can
you help? [Andrew]
A. It's correctly "toe the line", but it is indeed often seen as
"tow the line", an error that's all too easy to make when in a
hurry. In this case, the association of ideas between "tow" and
"line" (in the sense of a rope) is often too powerful to overcome,
and the lack of any clear mental image of where it comes from is a
contributing factor.
"Toe the line" is the survivor of a set of phrases that were common
in the nineteenth century; others were "toe the mark", "toe the
scratch", "toe the crack", or "toe the trig". In every case, the
image was that of men lining up with the tips of their toes
touching some line. They might be on parade, or preparing to
undertake some task, or in readiness for a race or fight. The
earliest recorded form is dated 1813, in a book by Hector Bull-Us
(a pseudonym, you will not be surprised to hear, in this case of
James Kirke Paulding) with the title The Diverting History of John
Bull and Brother Jonathan. This already had the modern figurative
sense of conforming to the usual standards or rules: "He began to
think it was high time to toe the mark". Many early examples are
from the British Navy, which is where it may have originated.
"Toe the crack" is an American form of the 1820s in reference to a
crack in the floorboards that delineates a straight line. "Toe the
scratch" is from prize fighting, where "scratch" was the line drawn
across the ring (often in the earth of an informal outdoor ring) to
which the fighters were brought ready for the contest - it's a
close relative of "to come up to scratch". In "toe the trig",
"trig" is an old term for a boundary or centre line in various
sports.
A. FAQ of the week
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Typically I get about fifty of them each week, rising to several
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B. Subscription commands
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C. Useful URLs
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