World Wide Words -- 09 Oct 04
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 8 18:03:27 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 413 Saturday 9 October 2004
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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
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Contents
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1. Weird Words: Ergophobia.
2. Noted this week.
3. Book review: Gobbledygook by Don Watson.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Skivvies.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
D. My new book is now available in the USA.
1. Weird Words: Ergophobia
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Fear of work.
Many people experience this as a chronic ailment that blights their
weekends and accounts for much of that Monday-morning feeling or
post-holiday blues. It is not a new problem: the word was coined by
a doctor named W D Spanton, writing in the British Medical Journal
in 1905. He did so in all seriousness, recognising that it can be a
real medical condition, an abnormal or persistent fear of work and
the workplace.
Notwithstanding this, the word spends much of its life as the butt
of heavy-handed humour, on the assumption that it is a mere synonym
for laziness. An early case was an article in the Bedford Gazette,
Pennsylvania, in February 1910: "The tramp is in reality a sufferer
from ergophobia, or fear of work, often complicated with aquaphobia
and sapophobia, which make him shun the bathtub." Most of its
remaining appearances in books and newspapers are in lists of odd
phobias, such as arachibutyrophobia for the fear that peanut butter
will stick to the roof of one's mouth.
2. Noted this week
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SPIT We've long had spam, formally known as unsolicited commercial
e-mail. Back in May I reported on spim, unwanted advertising sent
by instant messaging. Now we have spit, voicemail spam sent using
IT or internet telephony - a technique of making cheap phone calls
over the Net rather than through fixed telephone lines. It hasn't
happened yet, but one firm has already created a spit filter to
weed out such commercial messages (a term that's a potential source
of confusion, as broadcasters have long used it for a device that
keeps oral effluvia out of microphones). The company also predicts
that spitbots will soon be released on the network to launch
denial-of-service attacks to block phone lines.
SPANISH WOOD At a recent family reunion with my eldest brother and
sister they both recalled buying a sweet of this name in London in
the 1930s. It looked like twigs, which they chewed. It turns out to
be raw liquorice root. I'm told that liquorice is still sometimes
called Spanish in Yorkshire because the local crop (the ancient
centre of the trade is Pontefract) was by the nineteenth century
supplemented by liquorice imported from Spain. Interestingly, the
term isn't in any dictionary I've consulted - the Oxford English
Dictionary has Spanish wood only as another name for mahogany - and
it doesn't often appear in newspapers or books, though it is well
recorded online. My brother also remembered that when he was
working as a cowman in Wiltshire in the 1950s it was supplied to
his farm in bags as an animal feed supplement.
3. Book review: Gobbledygook, by Don Watson
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Subscribers in Australia may already know this book, as it appeared
there last year under the title Death Sentence. It attracted much
media attention, and has now been published in the UK. Don Watson's
book is a polemic that rails against a certain kind of obfuscated
public language; his introduction calls it "the language of leaders
more than the led, managers rather than the managed". His principal
argument is that poor business writing, especially the jargon of
management, marketing and human resources, has corrupted that of
political life and other fields, especially academia. Most of his
examples derive from business; considering his former position as
scriptwriter for the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating,
surprisingly few are from Australian politics.
He castigates turgid jargon-ridden prose such as "identify major
change drivers impacting on the sectors", "penetration, development
and expansion of the vertical market segment and strategic close of
high impact deals" or "an exigency to restrict dissemination of
this publication to professional end-users and institutions only".
He also derides military euphemisms from Iraq such as "embed" and
"degrade" (in "we have degraded 70% of a body of Iraqi soldiers").
He hates "commitment" in particular, which is indeed often a weasel
word but which doesn't deserve the repeated opprobrium he heaps on
it.
While the book contains interesting reflections on the state of
public language, ultimately it fails because his diatribe doesn't
go anywhere. It's a cantankerous ramble with little structure and
no conclusion except to say he hopes he has made people more aware
of the issue (though he isn't sanguine his book will help because
"powerful forces, including possibly the whole tide of history" are
against reform).
Perhaps the biggest difficulty with taking the message to heart is
that the book is just another in a line - traceable back to Plato -
that tells us the language is going to the dogs. Every generation
has one and Professor Watson has updated the views of George Orwell
for our times. Is today's business-speak so much worse than the
"yours of the 14th ult. to hand" stereotyped writing of an earlier
age's commerce? Politicians have been talking a great deal while
saying very little for as long as the breed has existed; are we
really that much worse off now because they've changed the words
they use?
Solving the problem in business won't be easy. Too few people have
the ability or time to work out exactly what they want to say and
then say it. They fall back on boilerplate text, shop-worn clichés,
or inarticulate paraphrases of their real meaning. That isn't a
matter of correct grammar, good punctuation or impressive
vocabulary, and curing it will need more than style guides or
diatribes.
[Don Watson, Gobbledygook, published in the UK and Canada by
Atlantic Books on 2 September 2004; hardback, pp155; ISBN 1-843-
54356-7; publisher's price GBP12.99. Published in Australia as
Death Sentence by Knopf in November 2003; hardback, pp198; ISBN 1-
74051-206-5; publisher's price AUS$29.95.]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon USA: Not available
Amazon Canada: CDN$20.97 (http://quinion.com?D37W)
Amazon UK: GBP9.09 (http://quinion.com?D91W)
Amazon Germany: EUR21,50 (http://quinion.com?D48W)
Barnes & Noble: Not available
[Please use these links to order. See Section C for more details.]
4. Sic!
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Jerry Whitmarsh came across an advertisement for Bang & Olufsen in
last Saturday's Financial Times. Its headline boasted its products
were "close to perfection" and went on: "Attention to the smallest
detail is vital when we take our products to the boundary of what
is possible." Unfortunately, it then went on: "Or when an intricate
breaking system has to bring this extreme acceleration to a precise
halt at the CD of your choice." Let's hope their engineering is
better than their copywriter's spelling.
While we're on wrongly spelled words, Paul Busby e-mailed to say
that when he flew from New York to Mexico City last year, he was
amused to read, on the form foreign visitors to Mexico must fill
in: "Remember to sing in the space reserved for the foreigner."
Janet Berliner-Gluckman encountered a legal warning on a beach at
Cape Canaveral, Florida: "Unlawful to cut, remove, or eradicate any
vegetation on dunes. Florida Statue 370.041/161.053".
Some spelling mistakes become permanently all too public. A road
sign near my home has, for the past 20 years to my knowledge, said
"Alexandra Way leaiding to Kensington Close". Bob Fry says that an
illuminated sign on a New South Wales Hotel has for many years
displayed the slogan "Where the croud gathers".
5. Q&A
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Q. Your comments on the British slang "skive" makes me wonder about
the origin of the term "skivvies" for men's underwear. All the
dictionaries I've consulted say the origin is unknown. Any ideas?
[Terrell Tebbetts]
A. Unfortunately, "origin unknown" is a pretty fair summary.
Your dictionaries probably give outdated information about it. Most
suggest it's a term from the early 1930s, based on the earliest
example given in the OED's entry. But researchers have taken that
date back progressively, and I can unveil my own contribution,
which appeared in December 1918 in the Evening State Journal of
Lincoln, Nebraska, as part of a humorous piece under the headline
"Boys Will Be Boys - Even in the Marine Corps": "'Well, boys, I
believe I'll play a little golf today and not go to the office at
all. I'm all run down and need a little hard physical labor,'
declares an athlete in the act of putting on his 'skivvies.'"
Some works say it derives from a trademark. That's wrong, too. The
word has been briefly trademarked several times, but the earliest
in the US Trademarks Registry is dated 1954 (by Norwich Mills Inc,
Norwich, New York) and by then the word had been in public use for
some time.
In the singular, a "skivvy" is usually defined as a vest (as we
would call it in Britain) or undershirt, sometimes specifically
named as a "skivvy shirt". In the plural it either refers to both
vest and underpants or to male underwear in general. Most examples
suggest that this last meaning came along after the one for a vest.
But that 1918 citation is in the plural, which may indicate it was
already a fairly broad term. The early examples all indicate it was
US military slang.
One suggestion often touted is that it comes from "skibby", a west-
coast World War Two term for a Japanese. A lot of people quote this
as fact, so it may be worth a digression to look into what is in
any case an interesting word.
Damon Runyon described it in an article in 1942: "'Skibby' is what
Japs are called to this day by most Californians even in polite
circles, and it is unlikely that the California home-grown soldiers
will dismiss it for the more polite 'Charlie' and 'Tojo' that the
dispatches from the Far East would have us believe are now terms
for the enemy. It is not at all uncommon to see 'Skibby' in the
local public prints." That was certainly true. But the term is much
older - he wrote his comment because he had been criticised by
servicemen who remembered it from the Philippines in the early
1900s. To them it meant a Japanese prostitute. That comes from
Japanese "sukebei", randy or lecherous, a word that Japanese
prostitutes may have used as part of a greeting along the lines of
"Hello, sailor, are you horny tonight?". It was later generalised
to mean any Japanese, though it remained derogatory and was deeply
resented by those so described.
If "skivvies" did come from that Japanese word, the dating of my
first citation and the context of early examples shows it must have
entered the language through US military slang from its first
meaning, "prostitute". Though the association is obvious enough in
one way, linguistically speaking it's not clear how one gets from
Japanese prostitutes to American male underwear.
I'm sceptical myself, but have no alternative to offer.
A. Subscription commands
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Or you could buy one of my books ...
D. My new book is now available in the USA
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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
in the bookstores under the title Ballyhoo, Buckaroo and Spuds, so
now would be an excellent time to stock up on copies for you, your
family, work colleagues and friends. For a lot more details, visit
http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm .
Make it easy on yourself - buy online by using these links:
Amazon USA: $13.97 (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 and is published by Penguin Books [pp304,
hardcover; 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)
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And my earlier book, Ologies and Isms: Word Beginnings and Endings,
a dictionary of affixes, is still available:
Amazon UK: GBP7.19 (http://quinion.com?LSUD)
Amazon USA: $11.87 (http://quinion.com?LSWJ)
Amazon Canada: CDN$18.17 (http://quinion.com?LSCH)
Amazon Germany: EUR14,95 (http://quinion.com?LSBK)
Barnes & Noble: $16.95 (http://quinion.com?LSBN)
[Michael Quinion, Ologies and Isms: Word Beginnings and Endings,
published by Oxford University Press; paperback, pp280; ISBN 0-19-
280123-6; UK publisher's price GBP8.99.]
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