World Wide Words -- 02 Oct 04
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 1 18:42:29 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 411 Saturday 2 October 2004
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 20,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Green roof.
3. Sic!
4. Ballyhoo, Buckaroo and Spuds.
5. Weird Words: Honeyfuggle.
6. Noted this week.
7. Book review: The Oxford Guide to Plain English.
8. Q&A: To make a hames of something.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ARENACEOUS Many subscribers wrote to chide me about my comment in
a piece last week that this word, meaning "sandy", has nothing to
do with arenas in the public entertainment sense. It does. "Arena"
derives from the name for the central part of a Roman amphitheatre
in which gladiatorial fights and the like took place and which was
strewn with sand to absorb the blood. Apologies.
SKIVE Several subscribers recalled that "skiver", before it became
a term for a person avoiding work by suddenly remembering an urgent
appointment elsewhere, was a person involved in various trades that
were linked to leather, such as shoemaking.
2. Turns of Phrase: Green roof
-------------------------------------------------------------------
It's also called a "eco-roof" or a "living roof". It is a wild
garden of grasses and herbs planted on a suitable surface, usually
on an urban house. It traps rainfall and releases it slowly, so it
helps to prevent the flooding that can happen after a storm in a
built-up area. It also acts as extra insulation for the building.
But its main virtue is that it's a haven for wildlife, especially
beetles and spiders. In turn these provide food for birds - the
black redstart has been encouraged to nest in one part of London as
a result of green-roof construction. A recent survey for English
Nature found over a hundred species of bugs, some of them rare, in
a mixture not found in nature. This has led to the creation of
"tecticolous" as a term to describe this characteristic group (from
Latin "tectum", a roof).
>>> From The Capital Times (Madison, WI), 21 Sep. 2004: The
building features a "Green Roof" built on top of the parking deck
to provide additional outdoor space and help with storm water
runoff.
>>> From The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2 Sep. 2004: "It's a
remarkable thing, having a green roof," says Jon Alexander, who can
stand in his dining room and look out on his planted garage roof in
Ballard. "There is this constantly changing show, including
wildlife - birds, squirrels, butterflies and bees."
3. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Nelson Wattie received this automated response to his request for
information about the ferry between the two islands of New Zealand:
"I have spoken to Interisland Line, and they have advised me that
discounted fares are available (subject to availability)." You
can't fault the logic.
In an e-mail received from a finance house, David Coe was surprised
to read "Please feel free to contact me if you need assistance in
feeling out the attached form." It's a fun new game: e-mail blind
man's buff.
Larry Lester remembers a linguistic summer holiday experience: "At
an access point to the beach in the middle of the unending row of
chintzy tourist shops in Malia, Crete, we encountered the municipal
sign 'Trespassing to the Beach'. I thought about consulting my
attorney before proceeding and, in the end, took the risk."
4. Ballyhoo, Buckaroo and Spuds
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The US edition of my book on the weird stories that people believe,
and tell each other, about the origins of words and expressions is
about to hit the bookstores, so now would be an excellent time to
stock up on copies for yourself, your family, work colleagues and
friends. Read what Patrick Hanks thought of the book by visiting
http://www.worldwidewords.org/reviews/re-por1.htm .
Make it easy on yourself - buy online by using these links:
Amazon USA: $19.95 (http://quinion.com?BBAS)
Barnes & Noble: $15.96 (http://quinion.com?BNBB)
[Michael Quinion, Ballyhoo, Buckaroo and Spuds: Ingenious Tales of
Words and their Origins, published October 2004 by the Smithsonian
Institution Press; hardcover, pp280; ISBN 1-58834-219-0; US price
$19.95.]
Outside the USA, the book has the title Port Out, Starboard Home:
And Other Language Myths; published by Penguin Books; hardcover,
pp304; ISBN 0-14-051534-8; UK publisher's price GBP12.99.
Buy Port Out, Starboard Home online:
Amazon UK: GBP9.09 (http://quinion.com?POSH)
Amazon Canada: CDN$24.50 (http://quinion.com?PCAH)
Amazon Germany: EUR21,50 (http://quinion.com?PDEH)
5. Weird Words: Honeyfuggle
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Deceive by flattery or sweet-talk; swindle or cheat.
The great tradition of expressive American terms of the nineteenth
century brought forth this word, which has now vanished from daily
life. It has been variously spelt down the decades, with "honey-
fugle" or "honeyfugle" being common variants. The flattery was
usually assumed to be with an ulterior purpose, as here in the
Atlantic Monthly in 1861: "His habit of 'log-rolling,' or, as the
extreme Westerners call it, 'honey-fugling' for votes and support,
had so grown upon him, that his sincere friends feared lest he
would sink too low, and in the end defeat himself." Among its last
public appearances was one in the Syracuse Herald in 1934, in which
President Roosevelt was described as "the prize honeyfugler of his
time". One of the reasons why it dropped out of common usage may
have been that a sense grew up of sexual activity with young girls
(with "fuggle" being a modification of the F-word), as a semi-
euphemistic version of another, unambiguous, term. The "honey" part
is easy to link with sweet-talking, but the rest is puzzling. It's
usually assumed to be a variation on an English dialect word
"coneyfugle", to hoodwink or cajole by flattery, where "coney" is
the old word for an adult rabbit and "fugle" is an even more
enigmatic term that means to cheat. But how the two words came to
be put together in order to have that meaning is unknown.
6. Noted this week
-------------------------------------------------------------------
LIVEBLOGGING Often also as two words. This is a type of blog, a
personal diary posted to the Web (a shortened form of "Web log",
see http://quinion.com?B92G), which is sent out as a report on an
event as it is happening. It has been around for some months but it
has been in the news in the past couple of days because bloggers
reported online in real time on the first presidential election
debate between John Kerry and George W Bush.
COASTAL SQUEEZE This appeared this week in research published in
the journal of the Royal Geographical Society. Coasts in the UK are
becoming steeper, beaches are vanishing and erosion is getting
worse because the gap between high and low tide lines is reducing.
Work to create or improve coastal defences is part of the problem,
since rising sea levels are compressing the intertidal gap - the
low-tide mark moves inland but the high-tide mark is fixed by the
defences. In places on the south coast of England the intertidal
gap has reduced by up to 90% in the past 100 years. Wildlife is
badly affected, birds in particular, as they need the beaches and
mudflats to feed. A related term is "shingle squeeze", which refers
to vegetated shingle.
SECONDARY MANDATE The Labour Party conference voted on Thursday
for further reform of the British House of Lords. It is likely that
it would be by an indirect election - for which this is the jargon
term - in which most of its members would be drawn from party lists
in proportion to the way people voted at a general election. The
scheme has been advocated by the singer Billy Bragg and has gained
support among MPs as a way to break a long-standing impasse about
reform in which the government's favoured plan has been to appoint
all the members of the upper house.
7. Book review: The Oxford Guide to Plain English
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A subscriber tells me of a writing class he attended as part of his
management training. The instructor ruled that an important part of
business writing was to train oneself to use words no more than six
letters in length. It's presumably no more than a nuisance that by
that rule the phrase "business writing" cannot be written.
Such asinine attempts at prescribing good writing have no place in
Marin Cutts' handbook, an updated version of a book with the title
Plain English Guide published in 1995. He is the research director
of the Plain English Commission in the UK and so is able to provide
many horror stories from his own experiences and to suggest
solutions.
His advice is in 21 short chapters, each on one aspect of writing
straightforward English: prefer short words (but with no ridiculous
prohibitions), avoid flabby text or weak verbs, favour the active
voice, avoid sexist terms, accentuate the positive, and take care
of the punctuation. If similar advice is given in every book that
aims to cultivate a good writing style, it bears repeating for a
fresh audience. He also suggests ways to improve the writing of e-
mails and to simplify legal language, in both of which writing
quality is notoriously poor.
The book's brevity is not a failing but an illustration of his
message, since he practices his own advice and gets across much
helpful guidance in surprisingly few words.
[Martin Cutts, The Oxford Guide to Plain English, published by
Oxford University Press on 23 September; paperback, pp202; ISBN 0-
19-861011-4; publisher's UK price £.5.99.]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon USA: No information available
Amazon Canada: CDN$14.00 (http://quinion.com?M91C)
Amazon UK: GBP4.79 (http://quinion.com?M83C)
Amazon Germany: EUR10,00 (http://quinion.com?M32C)
[Please use these links to order. See Section C for more details.]
8. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. In Ireland the expression "to make a hames of something" (as in
"Sure, your one made an awful hames of it") is used where standard
UK English would say "to make a mess of". I've often wondered what
the etymology of "hames" was. [Paul Blake, UK]
A. The expression is indeed restricted to Ireland and doesn't now
seem to be so very common even there, at least to judge from the
small number of examples I've been able to turn up. Here's one from
the Irish Examiner in August 2004, describing a local politician's
chances in a reshuffle: "You know he'd be thrilled with Finance,
and it wouldn't do you any harm to watch him make a hames of it. He
could even be the scapegoat for the next election."
Though the expression isn't known elsewhere, anyone who has much to
do with working horses will know the term, because the hames are
the two curved supports attached to the collar of a draft horse to
which the traces are fastened. I'm no horseman - I know which end
bites and that's about it - but my carriage-driving consultant
tells me it's all too easy to put the hames on a horse the wrong
way up, thus making a complete mess of things and risking adverse
comments from bystanders.
Here's a literary example, from Hugh Leonard's Out After Dark of
1989: "Instead I made a hames of it, mislaying a verb, marooning a
noun on a foreign shore, starting a jerry-built sentence that caved
in halfway through".
"Hame", in lots of different spellings, was once common in dialects
throughout Britain and Ireland and there are terms in Old Dutch and
German that are similar. The best we can say about its origins is
that it's a Germanic word, perhaps imported from Dutch around 1300.
A. Subscription commands
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm .
You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a full list
of commands, send a message containing the following two lines to
listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:
INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS
END
The "END" ensures that the list server doesn't get confused by your
signature or other text added to the outgoing message.
To send a gift subscription (it's the thought that counts), visit
http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/giftsub.htm .
This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. The address is
http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .
B. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to respond to something in a newsletter, ask a question
for the Q&A section, or otherwise contact Michael Quinion, please
send it to one of the following addresses. All others are now
permanently discontinued - please update your address book.
* Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should
be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should be
addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't
use this to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail
the comment address instead)
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list
server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org
Please do not send attachments with messages.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words newsletter and Web site are free, but if you
would like to help with their costs, here are two ways to do so.
If you order goods from Amazon (not just books), you can use one of
these links, which gets World Wide Words a small commission at no
extra cost to you:
Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA
Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ
Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG
Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX
If you would like to contribute a sum to the upkeep of World Wide
Words through PayPal, enter this link into your browser:
http://quinion.com?PP
-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2004. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online
newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include
this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed
publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which
you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list