World Wide Words -- 27 Nov 04
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 26 18:37:01 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 420 Saturday 27 November 2004
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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: Botnet.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Saggar.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: Lightning in a bottle; Centrifical.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BUG In the piece on this word last week, I misspelled Thomas Alva
Edison's middle name. Apologies.
Bob Rosenberg e-mailed: "As an editor of Edison's papers for two
decades, I can assure you that the word 'bug' was commonly used in
his notebooks from the 1870s to describe a problem. As far as we
can tell, the word was used by telegraphers for electromechanical
glitches. It can be found throughout his writings and those of his
co-workers."
Two possible sources for the telegraphers' coinage were suggested
by many subscribers. One was from "a fly in the ointment". The OED
has its first example from 1914, which made it seem much too late
to be the origin, but I've now found that it is fairly common in
American newspapers from the early 1870s on. There might be a link
but my instincts tell me the two are distinct creations. The other
suggestion was of a link with "bugaboo", some imaginary object of
fear or alarm. This is old enough to be the source (it's from the
eighteenth century) but the meaning doesn't fit well with the idea
of a mechanical fault. The verb "to bug", to annoy or bother, is
much more recent, dating in print from the 1940s.
NAVE The general response to my piece on this word last week was
that in restricting my discussion to English I'd missed out a large
part of its history and religious associations. A word with similar
seafaring links is known, I am told, in several European languages,
including Danish, French and German (in this last, it's "Schiff",
literally a ship), and in these languages is older than in English;
the Latin word "navis", its source, may have been influenced by the
Classical Greek word for a temple that was similar to its word for
a ship. Before "nave" came into English, "navis" was sometimes
employed instead (for example, it's in a book by Sir Christopher
Wren, dated 1669: "The Ailes, from whence arise Bows or Flying
Buttresses to the Walls of the Navis"). Other writers pointed out
that there's an ancient metaphor that links the Church with a ship
and specifically Noah's Ark. A clerical polemic of 1844 says of the
word "government" (from a Greek term that means "steersman"): "A
metaphor from mariners or pilots, that steer and govern the ship:
translated thence, to signify the power and authority of church
governors, spiritual pilots, steering the ship or ark of Christ's
Church."
2. Turns of Phrase: Botnet
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One of the methods of those using the Internet for illegal purposes
is to grab control of your computer and use it to distribute spam
and viruses anonymously. A computer taken over in this way is known
to hackers as a "zombie". A more sinister recent development has
been the entry of organised crime groups, who harness networks of
these zombies, called "botnets" (where "bot" is an abbreviation for
"robot"). The aim in this case is not usually to send spam but to
bring down a Web site through what's called a distributed denial-
of-service attack. The network of zombies is told to send a very
large number of request signals to the site all at once, so denying
access to legitimate users and possibly causing the Web server to
collapse under the load. There have been reports that this type of
attack has been used for blackmail, especially of gambling sites
and financial institutions, and obvious risks exist of its being
used for terrorism. The term "botnet" has been known in the hacker
community at least since the middle 1990s, but has only recently
started to appear in more general contexts.
* From New Scientist, 6 Nov. 2004: This modus operandi is fuelling
a growing crime wave against e-commerce in which these networks of
bots, dubbed botnets, are increasingly being offered for hire by
hacking groups.
* From the Birmingham Post, 13 Jul. 2004: A more sinister use of
botnets is sabotage, police say. A fear is growing that a botnet
could be used to take down a major data network or prominent Web
sites.
3. Sic!
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Mark Broad attended a seminar organised by his local enterprise
agency in the UK. "Mr Consultant stood up and advised us all about
the wonders of Generative Collaboration (sometimes known simply as
'teamwork'). His slide told us that 'a team is more than the some
of it's parts'. Curious to know how it is that people get business
for themselves on this basis, I checked his Web site and found:
'The sum of the whole is greater than its parts'. It's all highly
motivating, wouldn't you agree?"
Brian Ashurst e-mails to mention a photograph of a sign that has
been making the rounds of blogs and e-mail lists. "It demonstrates
the harsh, unforgiving nature of the Australian legal system. It's
outside a tram depot in Newcastle, NSW, and features two skulls and
crossbones flanking the words: 'TOUCHING WIRES CAUSES INSTANT
DEATH. $200 FINE. Newcastle Tramway Authority'."
Still in Australia, Jane Edwards reports that a friend was at a
meeting last week of her trade practices reading group. They were
surprised to see this sign on their lunch table: "Melbourne
Business School welcomes restrictive trade practices".
4. Weird Words: Saggar
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A protective box enclosing ceramic ware while it is being fired.
In large-scale pottery manufacture years ago, the furnaces (called
bottle kilns from their shape) were usually heated by coal or coke
furnaces. Flames, ashes and corrosive gases would have damaged the
pottery if it wasn't protected by being put into "saggars", a word
that seems to be a contraction of "safeguard". These were hollow
squat cylinders with flat tops and bottoms so they could be stacked
in the kiln, often in piles 30 feet high or more. Saggars were made
from a type of fireclay that was mixed with a proportion of ground-
up reused saggar called "grog"; they only lasted for about forty
firings, so every large works had its own saggar-makers. These men
had assistants whose job was to make the heavy flat bottoms of the
saggars, beating the fireclay into shape inside an iron hoop using
a mallet called a mawl (pronounced "maw" in Staffordshire). These
assistants, lads in their teens, were the "saggar-maker's bottom
knockers". These and related jobs - such as the "batter-outs" who
beat out the strips of clay for the sides of the saggars - vanished
when kilns began to be fired instead by clean gas or electricity so
that protective saggars weren't needed.
5. Noted this week
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WORLD'S FAVOURITE ENGLISH WORDS On Thursday, the British Council,
the agency that promotes British culture worldwide, published the
results of a survey of 40,000 people in 102 non-English speaking
countries about their favourite English words. The list was of 70
words, the number chosen to mark the Council's 70th anniversary.
Mother came first, but Father wasn't in the list. The rest of the
top ten were Passion, Smile, Love, Eternity, Fantastic, Destiny,
Freedom, Liberty, and Tranquillity. The list has many mellifluous
but literary words (Serendipity, Renaissance, Loquacious) and some
dated slangy terms (Whoops, Smashing) suggesting that learners have
been exposed to some old-fashioned books for children. The oddest
words to appear are If and Oi.
6. Q&A
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Q. I've recently seen the phrase "lightning in a bottle". It has
appeared in recent book titles and in the title of a CD for a
collection of the blues which I just saw yesterday. Can you tell me
what it means and what the derivation of the phrase is? [George T.
Mercer, Newton, MA]
A. It's a phrase that's well known to many Americans. There's also
Martin Scorsese's recent film of that title, featuring a benefit
concert performance by 50 blues artists - presumably you saw the CD
of the soundtrack that's been issued.
Though it's common, it doesn't appear in any of my collections of
catchphrases and aphorisms. The full expression is "like trying to
catch lightning in a bottle", sometimes "to keep lightning in a
bottle", and it describes something that's extremely difficult,
perhaps bordering on the impossible. It can express the idea that a
person has succeeded in trapping the essence of some elusive
creative process, which is presumably where the film title came
from.
The phrase appears in sports reporting to describe a team that wins
against difficult odds. This instance is from the Washington Post
of 8 November 2004: "'That's how hard it is to win on the road,'
Cardinals first-year coach Dennis Green said. 'You hope to have
good fortune smile on you and catch lightning in a bottle, and
today that happened for us.'"
This sporting connection is appropriate because the source appears
to be baseball. I put in evidence a report in the Nevada State
Journal for 8 October 1941, which said: "The Yanks were the
dominant team throughout, outhitting, outfielding, outpitching and
outmaneuvering the Dodgers. Brooklyn was not outgamed but the
Dodgers, to use Lippy Leo Durocher's favorite expression, went out
to try to catch lightning in a bottle."
Aha. Leo Durocher, as his nickname suggests, was a famously mouthy
player who became a celebrated coach for the Dodgers. He's credited
with the saying "nice guys finish last" and it may well be that he
invented your expression too. Either that, or - as with Yogi Berra
- other people's gems were attributed to him because he was known
to have an inventive way with words.
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Q. Until I took high school physics, I believed that there was such
a thing as centrifical force. In class I learned that there was no
such thing, only two related forces called "centripetal" and
"centrifugal". Is "centrifical" a conflation of the two? A mistake
for centrifugal? Is there a history for the word, or was it, say,
heard on Saturday morning cartoons and spread from there? [Sharla
Hardy]
A. Until you mentioned it, I'd not to my knowledge ever encountered
"centrifical", and would at once have marked it as the error it is.
But it's surprisingly common.
Google turned up 3000 examples. A newspaper search found hundreds
of others, the oldest being from the Manitoba Daily Free Press of
11 October 1879. An obituary in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in
February 2003 credited its subject with a book entitled Power Your
Golf Swing With Centrifical Force, which would be a trick worth
watching. Air-conditioning engineers seem particularly fond of it -
I found many references to devices called centrifical chillers.
It's not hard to see how "centrifugal" and "centripetal" might have
been thrust together to make it - they're confusingly similar,
after all. What interests me as a language watcher is how often the
mistake has been repeated down the decades, each time disregarded
by any knowledgeable person who encountered it.
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