World Wide Words -- 27 Mar 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 26 19:33:36 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 385 Saturday 27 March 2004
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Contents
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1. Turns of Phrase: Sonofusion.
2. Sic!
3. Weird Words: Jingoism.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Catbird seat; Esprit de l'escalier.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Useful URLs.
1. Turns of Phrase: Sonofusion
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Cold fusion is the general name given to processes that fuse atomic
nuclei at or near room temperature. In theory these would provide
useful energy without the complex apparatus required to emulate the
nuclear fusion that powers the stars. The latter needs temperatures
approaching 100 million degrees.
However, if you mention cold fusion to most scientists, they tend
to back off. The subject has almost been relegated to pseudoscience
since the controversy concerning the experiments by Stanley Pons
and Martin Fleishman some 15 years ago. But recent events suggest
the idea is gaining respectability once again. The US Department of
Energy is to review the evidence from more recent research which
claims to provide a theoretical basis for the idea. Some types of
cold fusion are certainly known to be possible, such as the one
formally called muon-catalysed cold fusion.
The situation is now complicated by a report by Rusi P Taleyarkhan
of Purdue University which is shortly to appear in a journal of the
American Physical Society. News of the article has already reached
the public through articles in newspapers such as the New York
Times and is causing controversy among specialists. For several
years, Dr Taleyarkhan has been working on experiments that combine
high-frequency bursts of sound waves (ultrasound) with pulses of
neutrons in a process that he describes as "sonofusion" or
"tabletop fusion". He claims to have detected fusion reactions
taking place, though his results are disputed by other
experimenters.
>>> From the Washington Post, 8 Mar. 2004: Nuclear engineer Rusi P.
Taleyarkhan, of Purdue University, said his "sonofusion" device
cost less than $1,000 and in the short-term could probably be
engineered as a cheap source of neutron emissions for use in
portable detection devices.
>> From the Guardian, 11 Mar. 2004: The bigger issue is the knock-
on effect Taleyarkhan's ... paper could have for others in the
field. If funding agencies start to think sonofusion is nonsense or
simply being done badly, it could become as big a fiasco as cold
fusion.
2. Sic!
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A subscriber named Gabrielle found this intriguing description of
modern child rearing in the February issue of Urb Magazine:
"Colette de Barros, who shot our style feature this month, grew up
between Carmel, CA and Paris. She spent several years in Paris
shooting and raising her son before moving back to Los Angeles."
While we're on the subject, Vic Waggoner spotted that the issue of
the New York Post for 17 March carried a story about toy guns:
"Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said cops have shot people with toy
guns 14 times since 1998." Which sounds like a good trick, until
you learn that it was the people who had been shot who were
carrying the (highly realistic) toy guns.
Paul Lewis wrote in the Guardian on Tuesday that he had never been
one for breakfast, as he had enough trouble keeping down his
morning bile, let alone food. His morning ritual, he said,
consisted of "a coffee, a Marlboro Light, a wretch". Homophones,
the curse of the harried writer.
Allan Paris writes: "I don't know if the sign on a restaurant in
North Carolina is a non sequitur or is merely ignorant: 'Lenten
Specials. All You Can Eat'."
3. Weird Words: Jingoism
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Aggressive or warlike patriotism.
This word is still as popular as it ever was, but few writers who
use it to describe a bellicose chauvinistic attitude to foreigners
know it's from a magician's catchphrase via a music-hall song.
"Jingo" dates from the late seventeenth century and is first
recorded in the forms "by jingo!" or "high jingo!" as a bit of
conjuror's patter when some item was revealed as though by magic
(the opposite of "hey presto!", used when something was ordered to
disappear). "By jingo!" was also used around this time as another
of the many euphemisms for "by God" or "by Jesus" and so became an
interjection to show one's surprise or to give emphasis. It turns
up, as one example out of a very large number, in Fanny Burney's
Evelina of 1778: "'If I live an hundred springs,' answered he, 'I
shall never forget it; by Jingo, it has served me for a most
excellent good joke ever since.'"
Exactly a century later, during the Russo-Turkish war, Russia was
threatening to capture Constantinople. George Hunt, a prolific
writer of music-hall songs, composed a topical song for the actor
and singer Gilbert Macdermot (real name Gilbert Farrell), who was
then performing regularly at the London Pavilion under the stage
name of The Great MacDermot. The song immediately became a hit,
especially the first four lines of its refrain:
We don't want to fight
but by jingo if we do...
We've got the ships, we've got the men,
and got the money too!
This was taken up by what we would now call the hawks of the London
public, who were baying for the Russians' blood. The Daily News
first called them "jingoes" in its issue of 11 March 1878; a
subscriber wrote to the paper two days later about "The Jingoes -
the new type of music-hall patriots who sing the Jingo song."
The prime minister, William Gladstone, had by then ordered the
Mediterranean fleet to the defence of Constantinople and indeed the
war had already ended on 3 March through the signing of the treaty
of San Stefano between Russia and Turkey. But the word, especially
the derived nouns "jingoist" and "jingoism", survived to become
fixed parts of the language.
4. Noted this week
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RUDE GESTURES As every deaf person knows, signing is not just a
shorthand to aid comprehension, but a series of fully developed
languages with their own grammars, dialects and slangs, and which
evolve over time. In a development that echoes debate in the USA
over the nature of some signs, it has been reported this week that
Vee-TV, a programme for deaf people made by the British TV station
Channel 4, has banned certain signs because they might be thought
racist or homophobic. The Daily Telegraph said that: "The abandoned
signs include 'Jewish', in which a hand mimes a hooked nose; the
sign for 'gay', a flick of a limp wrist; and 'Chinese', in which
the index fingertips pull the eyes into a slant. Another dropped
sign is that for 'Indian', which is a finger pointing to an
imaginary spot in the middle of a forehead." These signs have been
replaced with others considered inoffensive. Some critics are said
to feel that the ban is a form of discrimination against the
culture of deaf people.
AT THE END OF THE DAY It was announced on Tuesday that an informal
poll among 5000 supporters worldwide of the Plain English Campaign
had voted this the most irritating phrase in the English language.
In decreasing order of unpopularity, the runners-up were "at this
moment in time", the repetition of "like" as a form of punctuation,
"with all due respect" and "to be perfectly honest with you". John
Lister, the Campaign's spokesman, said that such clichés were a
barrier to communication. "When readers or listeners come across
these tired expressions, they start tuning out and completely miss
the message - assuming there is one! Using these terms in daily
business is about as professional as wearing a novelty tie or
having a wacky ringtone on your phone."
5. Q&A
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Q. What is the origin of the phrase "catbird's seat"? Is there
such a thing as a catbird? [Andrew]
A. The second half of your question is easy to answer, so I'll do
that first. There really is an American bird called the catbird, a
type of thrush. The American species is strictly speaking the grey
catbird, which lays the most beautiful turquoise eggs. It's called
a catbird because it often makes a screaming noise, a bit like a
cat mewing. Boring, but true.
Now the hard bit. I have to confess to complete ignorance about the
origin of "catbird seat" (as it is usually written) in phrases like
"in the catbird seat", meaning to be in an advantageous position,
one of ease and superiority. Its first appearance in print was in a
famous short story of that name by James Thurber, published in the
New Yorker in 1942:
In the halls, in the elevator, even in his own office, into
which she romped now and then like a circus horse, she was
constantly shouting these silly questions at him. "Are you
lifting the oxcart out of the ditch? Are you tearing up the
pea patch? Are you hollering down the rain barrel? Are you
scraping around the bottom of the pickle barrel? Are you
sitting in the catbird seat?"
It was Joey Hart, one of Mr. Martin's two assistants, who
had explained what the gibberish meant. "She must be a
Dodger fan," he had said. "Red Barber announces the Dodger
games over the radio and he uses those expressions - picked
'em up down South." Joey had gone on to explain one or two.
"Tearing up the pea patch" meant going on a rampage; "sitting
in the catbird seat" means sitting pretty, like a batter
with three balls and no strikes on him.
All the early examples are indeed associated with baseball, like
this from the Middletown Times Herald in 1945: "On the other hand,
should Munger beat Big Tex Hughson and the Red Sox, Dyer would be
sitting in the catbird seat." And Thurber is right to have his
character say that the expression was popularised by the famous
radio baseball commentator Walter Lanier "Red" Barber. Where Barber
got it from, though, is a complete mystery - the comment about
"down South" is probably a guess based on his having been born in
Columbus, Mississippi and having worked in Florida.
That's all I can write. Sorry about that.
----------------
Q. On reading your piece on "blurb", I noticed that you wrote about
"esprit de l'escalier" (a French expression, no doubt), for a witty
remark made a posteriori. This expression is fascinating. Can you
give us a bit more about it? [Pierre Garon, Canada]
A. I throw these nuggets of foreign culture in from time to time to
unsettle the complacent and generally keep readers on their toes.
"Esprit de l'escalier" literally means "spirit of the staircase",
but is usually translated as "staircase wit". It is credited to the
French author and encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, in his Paradoxe sur
le Comédien, written between 1773 and 1778 but not published until
1830.
In the original it refers to that infuriating situation in which
you leave a drawing room and are halfway down the stairs before you
suddenly think of that devastatingly witty comment you could have
made. (Architectural note: eighteenth-century grand houses had
their principal public rooms on the first floor, the second floor
if you're American.) More generally, it's any sparkling remark you
wish you had thought of at the time but were too slow-witted to
produce.
Though well known in French, it seems to have begun to appear in
English writing only at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Apart from a reference to it by the brothers Fowler in 1906, the
first recorded use in English is in Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
(1911), but in a wittily inverted sense that shows the author
expected his readers to understand and appreciate the reference:
"What ought he to have said? He prayed, as he followed the
victorious young woman downstairs, that "l'esprit de l'escalier"
might befall him. Alas, it did not."
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