World Wide Words -- 13 Mar 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 12 19:50:45 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 383 Saturday 13 March 2004
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Spermodynamics.
3. Book Review: The Word Spy by Paul McFedries.
4. Sic!
5. Weird Words: Zograscope.
6. Noted this week.
7. Q&A: Flummox.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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NEDS In last week's piece on "chav", I said that the Scottish
equivalent, ned, was an acronym from "non-educated delinquent". It
isn't. That supposed origin is a folk etymology, given credence in
Scotland through having been quoted in all seriousness by a member
of the Scottish Parliament during a debate. I should know by now to
treat such claims with scepticism. Jonathon Green says in his slang
dictionary that it is probably from a nickname for "Edward", linked
to yobbish youths through a previous generation of young louts, the
teddy boys, "teddy" being an abbreviated form of "Edwardian".
2. Turns of Phrase: Spermodynamics
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It's not every day that a researcher claims to have invented a new
science, but that is the bold statement made recently by Dr Richard
Green of Glasgow University's department of aerospace engineering.
In a cross-disciplinary association that's unusually broad even by
the standards of these collaborative days, his group worked with
fertility experts at Sheffield University to apply techniques of
their craft to the problem of determining the potency of sperm. The
previous test required three separate checks by an andrologist that
were time-consuming and subjective. But aerospace engineers, who
have long used automated methods for counting smoke particles in
the air flow inside wind tunnels, have now applied the techniques
to fertility investigations by zapping the sample with a laser and
so tracking the movement of individual sperm. A test that would
previously have taken several days can now, the researchers claim,
be done more accurately in minutes. Dr Green is clearly a master of
the neologism; not only has he coined "spermodynamics" for the new
process, but he is quoted as saying that "in a sense, we are
providing a man with a reading of his 'vigourosity'".
>>> From the Observer, 7 Mar. 2004: One in seven couples suffers
from fertility difficulties and in about 30 per cent of these cases
the problem can be traced to the man. But establishing that the
problem lies with his sperm can be tricky... Such measurements can
take days with highly variable results. By contrast, the
spermodynamics counter takes only a few minutes and produces
consistent results.
>>> From the Mirror, 8 Mar. 2004: Project leader Dr Richard Green,
of Glasgow University, said: "We have developed a new science -
spermodynamics. The device is important as it means we can quickly
spot if it is a woman or man who is the source of an infertility
problem and take action to help."
3. Book Review: The Word Spy by Paul McFedries
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This work has given me a bad case of "author envy", which is as
demeaning as any other example of that emotion. Heavens, this man
has done an appallingly large amount of research to create this
book. In coining "author envy", I join a long line of people who
generate new words and phrase for the fun of it, words that for the
past seven years have been Paul McFedries' special interest. This
book presents many of the invented words that first appeared in his
daily newsletter and which are archived on his Web site (at
http://www.wordspy.com ).
The great majority of the world's neologisms never see print and
vanish like frost in the sun before anybody takes notice of them.
That applies equally to words created in a moment of inspiration
for some temporary purpose and to those generated with some hope of
immortality. Even people like Rich Hall, the creator of sniglets,
are not immune, despite all the publicity his inventions gained in
several popular books - no sniglet, I believe, has yet made the
dictionary. His example (and that of Gelett Burgess, mentioned last
week in connection with "blurb" and "bromide") shows that inventing
a word is the easy bit. Getting it deep enough into the public
consciousness so that it is accepted as part of the language is
very much harder.
Mr McFedries restricts his choice of words to ones that have had at
least some degree of acceptance (meaning at least three separate
mentions somewhere in a printed source or online). Even then, most
of his examples are transient, some achieving a brief moment in the
public gaze before slipping into eternal night, some not achieving
even that. So you should not read his book as a guide to words and
phrases that you are likely to encounter, more as a extended series
of illustrations of the inventiveness of wordsmiths.
This isn't a dictionary, but a thematic collection embedded in an
informed commentary that - as the subtitle, "The Word Lover's Guide
to Modern Culture", suggests - is as much about interpreting
ourselves to ourselves through the vocabulary we create as it is
about the words themselves. After an introductory chapter that
discusses how new words are formed and what makes a neologism
likely to succeed, the chapters that follow have titles such as
"The accelerated culture", "Faster food", "Ad creep", "Weapons of
mass distraction", "The political correctness wars", "A baby-boom
lexicon", and "The art and science of politics".
The book is a meaty read (410 pages plus an index) and full of
goodness, well worth a nibble if neologisms are to your taste. My
name's in the acknowledgements, for a reason that I can't now
remember, but don't let that count against him.
[Paul McFedries, Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern
Culture, published by Broadway Books on 17 February 2004; ISBN 0-
7679-1466-X; paperback, pp419; publisher's price $15.95]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
US: $11.17 ( http://quinion.com?M14A )
CA: CDN$20.36 ( http://quinion.com?M23A )
UK: GBP7.88 ( http://quinion.com?M11A )
DE: EUR14,41 ( http://quinion.com?M09A )
[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
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page http:/www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm .]
4. Sic!
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A review in the issue of the Globe and Mail for 5 March of the new
movie, "Starsky and Hutch" provoked Mike DiCola to e-mail the most
intriguing sentence: "One of Huggy Bear's gunmen has an
encyclopedic knowledge of everything from Luxembourg's monarchy to
the regenerative powers of lizards' tales." He pointed out that the
never-ending stream of Godzilla movies demonstrates that last point
very nicely.
Last Friday night, "five" (The UK Terrestrial TV Station Formerly
Known As Channel Five) broadcast "Greatest Reality TV Moments",
described on Malcom Pack's Digital TV as "An exclusive countdown of
twenty-five of the greatest reality television moments ever, as
voted for by five viewers." But did all five five viewers agree?
>From Boston Metro (a free daily newspaper), 4 March 2004, "Ohio's
Supreme Court said yesterday that a lawyer must reveal what a dead
client told her about the fate of a 9-year old girl that
disappeared five years ago." Barton Bresnik, who spotted this,
remarks, "Metro's source is Reuters; the lawyer's source may be a
ouija board."
Rosalind in Houston, Texas, was not expecting to find a fire a few
miles from her home this week in any way amusing, but Click2Houston
managed it with its headline: "Warehouse Stored Insecticides Used
For Killing Weeds, Mice". Neat trick. See http://quinion.com?W14H .
The Napa Valley Register daily police report for 11 March 2004
reported: "Officers searched the area and found other property
inside and outside a house in the 1400 block of Oak Street that had
been reported stolen in a string of burglaries starting last
November." As David Kassel says, who found this puzzling statement,
it's not so much that the house had gone missing, but that it took
so long to find it again.
5. Weird Words: Zograscope
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A device for viewing pseudo-stereoscopic images.
The zograscope, consisting of a lens and mirror on a wooden stand,
was a device of the eighteenth-century for viewing perspective
prints, sometimes known as "vues d'optique". It was named the
"Zograscope" for reasons lost to us, though it was also more
variously and prosaically called a "diagonal mirror", an "optical
pillar machine" or an "optical diagonal machine". The picture to be
viewed was placed on a table and observed through a slanting mirror
by means of a lens, large enough to see through with both eyes at
once, whose curved edges distorted the image to give a surprisingly
good sensation of depth. The surviving examples are elegant and
highly collectible pieces of mahogany furniture, designed for the
drawing rooms of well-to-do families who desired the latest in
technology for their after-dinner entertainment, and who wanted, to
quote a catalogue of 1784, to look at "remarkable Views of
Shipping, eminent Cities, Towns, Royal Palaces, Noblemen and
Gentleman's Seats and Gardens in Great Britain, France and Holland,
Views of Venice, Florence, Ancient and Modern Rome, and the most
striking public Buildings in and about London". These pictures were
available at a price of a shilling plain or two shillings coloured,
a substantial sum for the period.
6. Noted this week
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FIFTY-QUID BLOKE Connoisseurs of trivia were pleased to spot this
term appearing recently in British newspapers. Last November, the
Independent described the type thus: "There is what some retailers
have called 'the fifty quid bloke' - the middle-aged man who has
money, who maybe goes out for lunch, turns up in the music store
with his tie slightly askew, browses around and before he knows it,
has spent GBP50 on CDs. That's the type of person who is helping
sales of CDs." The Guardian recently quoted an industry specialist
as saying, "It looks as if the fifty-quid bloke is keeping the
music business afloat."
SPAM JAM Many senders of spam include a series of randomly chosen
words in their messages in the hope of confusing spam filters. The
effect is often surreal, as you can see from several that arrived
in my in-box this week: "manumitted spiral draftsperson", "haughty
truculent creole nagy", "halfhearted doubloon drunk mccoy", and
"duplicate armload ladylike hiroshi potts".
MISGENDERED Carol Cunningham e-mailed to say that she had seen this
word in a message in a forum on the New York Times Web site. A
writer mistook a man for a woman, and wrote in apology, "A friend
informs me I have misgendered you." Carol Cunningham asks if this
is a new word. It isn't, but it's rare to find it in print and it
isn't in any dictionary I have here.
7. Q&A
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Q. Thanks for creating an excellent site, which is very useful and
interesting. However, "flummox" isn't there and everyone seems
flummoxed as to its origins. Any ideas? [Rob Stallard]
A. Neat.
It's certainly one of the odder-looking words in the language, with
that final "x". We can take the word back a couple of hundred
years, but after that it's all guesswork.
The word first appears in mainstream English in the middle of the
nineteenth century. Charles Dickens is the first writer known to
have used it, in his Pickwick Papers: "And my 'pinion is, Sammy,
that if your governor don't prove a alleybi, he'll be what the
Italians call reg'larly flummoxed, and that's all about it."
Don't be misled by that reference to Italians, that's just a fancy
of old Mr Weller. But there's evidence that the word is older in
Scots and English dialects, in the same sense that we use it now,
to be bewildered, perplexed, or puzzled, or to defeat or overcome
somebody in argument ("That fair flummoxed 'im!"). At one time,
Americans sometimes used it in the sense of failing or being
defeated and so being exhausted or beaten, but that sense seems to
have died out.
There's also the English dialect "flummock", at one time known from
Yorkshire down to Gloucestershire, to go about in a slovenly or
untidy manner, or to make things untidy, or to confuse, which may
be a slightly older version of the same word. It might also be
linked to "lommock" or "lummox", a clumsy or stupid person, known
from the same area.
That's where the trail runs cold. The suggestion is that all these
words are in some degree imitative of the noise of throwing things
down noisily or untidily, so it may be associated with another
dialect word "flump", a heavy or noisy fall.
A. FAQ of the week
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B. Subscription commands
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C. Useful URLs
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Michael Quinion
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