World Wide Words -- 05 Jun 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 4 18:05:41 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 395 Saturday 5 June 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 19,000+ 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. Book review: The Stories of English by David Crystal.
3. Noted this week.
4. Weird Words: Pridian.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: Kilter.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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PORT OUT, STARBOARD HOME To see the first part of the Telegraph
serialisation of my new book, enter http://quinion.com?M99Q into
your Web browser, which will redirect you to it. You may need to
log in or register (it is free) to see the piece.
NINETEEN TO THE DOZEN Alan Craig in Australia followed up recent
discussion on this expression by telling me about a version that's
known to him and others in that country: "ten to the dozen".
Newspaper archives show that to be common, not only in Australia,
but also in Britain. There are dozens of recent examples, such as
this one from the Liverpool Echo of February this year: "He's witty
and irreverent and talking ten to the dozen about his upcoming
projects." Logically, of course, one would expect that something
going at that rate to be slower than usual, though all the examples
show it is meant in the same sense as "nineteen to the dozen" -
that something is going very fast. It's a excellent example both of
the way that phrases can mutate over time and of the illogicality
of language (think of "head over heels" and "I could care less").
BONCE In my piece about this last week, I mentioned having found a
reference to games called checks or cubes played with a marble
called the bouncer. Bernard Long wrote: "I distinctly remember,
about 60 years ago, we Yorkshire street urchins playing a game (the
name of which I can't remember) with a large marble and cubes. The
cubes were placed on the ground and the idea was to bounce the
marble, pick up as many of the cubes as you could, and then catch
the marble before it hit the ground." Iona and Peter Opie's book
called Children's Games with Things say this was a form of jacks or
fivestones that has indeed been called checks, especially in
Yorkshire; it was played with four or five earthenware cubes and "a
large earthenware marble, almost the size of a golf ball". They
don't say it was ever called "cubes", but it isn't hard to see how
that could have been applied to the game. Thanks also to the many
other subscribers who suggested this was the game in question.
LEAD-PIPE CINCH Several subscribers suggested that the piece of
lead pipe might have been used to tighten a strap. Larry Krakauer
described it like this: "We 'cinch', or 'cinch up', anything that
is held tightly by a strap or rope. If you want to cinch something
really tightly, you put something like a stick, or perhaps a piece
of pipe, through the rope loop that goes around the object to be
held, and you twist it. The length of pipe twisting the rope gives
you enormous leverage. Lead pipe was a suitable size and was likely
to be available." This sounds possible, though we can't be sure.
Many others sought an origin in the plumbing trade itself, on the
basis that there might have been some device that held, or cinched,
pieces of pipe together. It might have been a version of a device
sometimes known as a strap wrench, which is used when the jaws of a
standard monkey wrench would damage the item being worked on. It's
a plausible-sounding origin, but I've found nothing to suggest a
link between the expression and the plumbing business.
TETRAPYLOCTOMY Several subscribers, writing with the appropriate
combination of tongue-in-cheek scholastic profundity and pedantic
correctness, have pointed out that nowhere in my piece last week
did I say that the four-way splitting of hairs had to be carried
out lengthwise. However, as all true scholars of the language will
at once appreciate, the concept is contained within "split".
2. Book review: The Stories of English by David Crystal
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David Crystal is a writer and broadcaster on language. He is best
known as editor of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English
Language (which, incidentally, was reissued by the Cambridge
University Press in a revised second edition last Autumn).
In this book he focuses on what he calls the "real story" of the
way that people have used English down the centuries and continue
to do so in slang, e-mail, text messaging and in the many varieties
of international English. He argues that there has never been a
monolithic, unitary English language. "A richness of diversity
exists everywhere," he writes, "and always has, over the language's
1500-year history; but the story of Standard English has hitherto
attracted all the attention. The other stories have never been
given their rightful place in English linguistic history, and it is
time they were." Elsewhere he remarks that the book "gives admiring
recognition to the centrality of language variation and change in
human affairs". That variation has never been so great as it is
now, when only one in three speakers of the language have it as a
mother tongue and when its homeland contributes only a few percent
of its regular users.
One of the curiosities he discusses is why we speak English at all.
Conquerors usually impose their language on the vanquished, so why
didn't Norman French supersede English after 1066? He points out
that the Norman invasion involved comparatively few people, who
took over the top positions and imposed French on the court and
legal system but who necessarily left the mass of the population to
continue speaking their ancestral tongue. Eventually, the weight of
the majority was too great for the usurpers, for whom French became
a foreign tongue, albeit a fashionable and influential one. After
300 years of subservience, to Latin as much as to French, English
returned to official life in the fourteenth century in many ways a
new language, with its lexicon heavily influenced by both languages
and with much of its grammatical complexity removed.
Among many other subjects, David Crystal examines the forces that
led to a standard English arising out of the mixture of dialectal
and regional forms that composed the newly resurgent language.
Despite the common belief that it was the introduction of printing
that forced convergence, he finds that legal, literary, religious
and other pressures towards a standard were there rather earlier.
Indeed, he suggests that pioneering printers such as Caxton put
standardisation back a generation by circulating large numbers of
copies of works that lacked a consistent style. It took another
century for printers to begin to work to common standards and more
than 200 years more before a true standard emerged. Though he is as
scathing as any modern linguist about the misplaced efforts of
eighteenth-century grammarians to impose structure on the language,
efforts that have bedevilled the study of English almost to the
present day, he makes clear that their efforts were entirely in the
spirit of the time, in which English was regarded as an anarchic
mess, desperately in need of formalising.
Though David Crystal writes very readable prose, largely avoiding
technical terms, his is a detailed series of stories that are not a
casual read. It is too big a book, in scope and detail as well as
in physical size, to be taken at one gulp or easily summarised. But
for anybody with an interest in how our language has evolved, it's
a fascinating tale.
[David Crystal, The Stories of English, published by Allen Lane (an
imprint of Penguin Books) on 27 May 2004; ISBN 0-713-99752-4;
hardback, pp592; publisher's price GBP25.00. To be published in the
USA by Overlook Press in September 2004 at US$35.00; ISBN 1-585-
67601-2.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
UK: GBP17.50 ( http://quinion.com?C45J )
US: $23.80 ( http://quinion.com?C11G )(pre-order)
Canada: CDN$31.50 ( http://quinion.com?C91K )
Germany: EUR41,60 ( http://quinion.com?C47D )
[Click on a link or paste it into your browser to order online. If
you do so you get World Wide Words a small commission that helps to
pay for the Web site and operating expenses. See also the Web site
page http:/www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm .]
3. Noted this week
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TANOREXIA This has popped up in a number of articles in British
newspapers in the past week to refer to people, mainly teenage
girls, who are addicted to tanning using sunbeds. The stimulus for
the pieces were warnings from the British Medical Association and
Cancer Research UK that the practice was leading to an increase in
the number of cases of skin cancer. The term can be traced back at
least to the mid-1990s; though it is known from American sources,
the majority are British. The obvious pun on "anorexia" does make a
kind of sense, since the Greek root of the latter word is "orexis",
appetite, so that "tanorexia" might be thought of as an excess
appetite for tanning.
4. Weird Words: Pridian
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Relating to yesterday.
You're extremely unlikely to encounter this word, it being one of
the rarest in the language. The Oxford English Dictionary has only
two examples, one from a glossary of 1656; my electronic searches
have failed to find any more beyond the OED's other citation, which
is from William Makepeace Thackeray's A Shabby Genteel Story of
1840: "Thrice a-week, at least, does Gann breakfast in bed - sure
sign of pridian intoxication". "Pridian" has the most respectable
antecedents - it's from Latin "pri-", before, plus "dies", day, and
so belongs with "diary", "diurnal", "journal", and "journey", all
of which can likewise be traced back to "dies". However, like an
ineffectual political candidate, it never mustered enough support
to be elected a permanent member of the English lexicon, and we
must now consider it to be one of yesterday's words.
5. Sic!
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A headline in the Bay City Times (of Bay City, Michigan) for 21 May
2004 was spotted by G H Gordon Paterson, among others: "Community
bands together to help burn victim's family". Vigilantism isn't
dead, then?
Harvey Frey heard the following on KUSC (the radio station of the
University of Southern California) on 1 June, 2004: "Some of the
most fortuitous meetings occur by accident." Indubitably.
An entry for the Department of Double Takes, which Jim McLoughlin
found on Yahoo News: "Designed by an Irishman, hailed as a hero and
renowned as a drinker, the squared bowed Landing Craft Vehicles and
Personnel, played a critical role disgorging thousands of allied
soldiers on the Normandy beaches of France on June 6, 1944."
6. Q&A
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Q. Any idea of the origin of the word "kilter", as used in "out of
kilter", to mean not aligned? [Paul Nix, UK]
A. To be truthful, not really. What we do know, though, is that it
started out as "kelter" rather than "kilter". In that form it was
once widely known in various English and Scots dialects from at
least the sixteenth century onwards. It means a state of good
health or spirits, or good order. Unfortunately, we've no idea
where it comes from.
(In the interests of accuracy and completeness, there were several
other dialect senses of kelter, including that of money or
property, rubbish or litter, silly talk or nonsense, or - as a verb
- to move in an undulating manner. The English Dialect Dictionary
has a wonderful quote from a Scottish source about this last one:
"Eels are said to kelter in the water when they wamble." To
"wamble" is to turn and twist the body about, roll or wriggle
about, or roll over and over.)
Sometime in the seventeenth century, the word started to be spelled
"kilter", for a reason as much lost in time as the origin of the
word itself. For a while, both spellings co-existed - the older one
appears in the 1811 edition of Captain Francis Grose's Dictionary
of the Vulgar Tongue: "KELTER. Condition, order. Out of kelter; out
of order", which also gives the money sense. Eventually, the
"kilter" spelling mostly prevailed, though the older version still
turns up occasionally.
A. Subscription commands
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