World Wide Words -- 30 Oct 04
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 29 16:48:16 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 416 Saturday 30 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. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Envirocrime.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Panglossian.
5. Ballyhoo, Buckaroo and Spuds.
6. Book review: Word Histories and Mysteries.
7. Noted this week.
8. Q&A: Sam Hill.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HORNSWOGGLE Many subscribers asked whether the second part of this
weird word featured last week had anything to do with the woggles
(neckerchief clips) worn by boy scouts, perhaps because some early
examples were made from bone or horn. We don't know where "woggle"
comes from, but it's a British term of the 1930s and "hornswoggle"
has never been at all common in this country. So a connection seems
improbable.
YORKSHIRE DIALECT Following on my note last week, Chris Church e-
mailed: "Every sympathy for the Austrian doctors naively assuming
that folk around Barnsley and Doncaster might speak English. The
area is actually one of the last strongholds of the true Yorkshire
dialect, which remains rich and impenetrable in many surrounding
villages. Of course, it was even more so a few years ago, before
every child on the planet began learning its English from The
Simpsons, as I found one night in the seventies on a bus ride out
of Barnsley. A woman and young son were on the seat behind me. She
told the lad to do something and he replied: 'Am nuan; tha mun.' I
am sure readers worldwide would immediately recognise: 'I'm not;
you (thou) must.'"
2. Turns of Phrase: Envirocrime
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This is well known to those who care about our environment, but it
has until recently rarely appeared in public. It refers to actions
that degrade our surroundings, such as spraying graffiti, leaving
litter, dumping cars, or plastering walls with posters. A stimulus
for its wider use in the UK was the Environmental Protection Act of
early 2004, which gave councils the power to fine businesses that
cause environmental damage. Many local councils combine the stick
of legal action with wardening schemes that aim to clear rubbish
quickly so it doesn't become an eyesore and to persuade people to
look after their neighbourhoods. The idea is to stop places looking
run-down and neglected and hence unsafe. The word is also used,
though less often, for much more serious pollution such as major
oil spills and illegal dumping of asbestos and chemical waste.
>>> From the London Evening Standard, 8 Oct. 2003: Lewisham is one
borough that involves local people in its fight against what it
calls "envirocrime". It has a network of street leaders: residents
around the borough who report problems such as litter, graffiti,
abandoned cars and fly-tipping to the council.
>>> From the Guardian, 11 Oct. 2004: A new "envirocrime" unit, set
up with money from the council budget but with extra funds coming
from the police through central government initiatives, has helped
provide some "joined-up thinking".
3. Sic!
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A Web site run by the US Marines in Okinawa, Japan, had a captioned
photograph last weekend: "The battery left today for a deployment
to Wake Island, an uninhibited island between Okinawa and Hawaii."
Ron Wheeler is unimpressed: "Here on Wake, we're wondering if that
was meant to suggest that we are immoral in the coral. Since there
are some 200 of us in permanent residence, 'uninhabited' doesn't
seem to fit much better." I hope you told them you're there, Ron -
they were coming to test Stinger missiles. But the major in charge
of the battery undermined the significance of the assignment by
saying, "The importance of this training cannot be understated".
Alan Price was startled by the first paragraph of a story in the
online Glasgow Evening Times last Monday: "Thieves are trying to
sell flowers stolen from a shrine to three men killed in a Glasgow
flat." He fears they may find it hard to extract payment.
4. Weird Words: Panglossian
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A person who is optimistic regardless of the circumstances.
Or, to put it in the words of the optimistic Dr Pangloss, the tutor
and philosopher in Voltaire's Candide (1759), "All is for the best
in the best of all possible worlds". Most of us will be as deeply
sceptical of this philosophy as Voltaire intended us to be, since
Dr Pangloss was old, pedantic and deluded, keeping to his misguided
beliefs even after experiencing great suffering. His name is one
clue to Voltaire's view of him, since it comes from Greek "pan",
all, and "glossa", tongue or language, so suggesting glibness and
talkativeness. Writers have since made several compounds out of his
name, such as "Panglossic" and "Panglossism", but the adjective
"Panglossian" is by far the most common and is frequently found
even today, as here in the Daily Telegraph in July 2004: "Most
management-speak is, as Schrijvers points out, Panglossian
balderdash designed to lull the weak and credulous - the feeble-
minded, the nice - into a position of supine docility."
5. Ballyhoo, Buckaroo and Spuds
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Now would be an excellent time to stock up on copies of my new book
for yourself, your family, work colleagues and friends. It relates
many of the weird stories that people believe, and tell each other,
about the origins of words and expressions. In the USA, it has the
title Ballyhoo, Buckaroo and Spuds.
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 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 £12.99.
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)
Read about both editions at http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm
6. Book review: Word Histories and Mysteries
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This paperback compendium of articles on the origins of words has
been compiled by the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries.
Among the oddities revealed by its writers are that "average"
derives from an Old French word meaning "damage to shipping", that
"caprice" comes by a devious route from an old Italian word for a
hedgehog, that "deer" might have been used in medieval times for an
ant, since it was then the name for any creature, that in Middle
English "dinner" could mean breakfast, that "fawn" and "fetus" are
etymologically connected, that "garage" is from a French word whose
first sense in that language was a place where one moors one's
boat, that "junk" originally meant old rope ... and so on. Its
writers have not shied away from discussing features of some of the
most common words, such as "a", "it" and "they".
You will also be painlessly introduced to some of the terminology
and ideas of etymology, such as back-formation (a word mistakenly
formed from another by removing what looks like an ending), folk
etymology (popular legends about word origins), metanalysis (a
shift in the division between words, as "a napron" became "an
apron", metathesis (in which sounds are transposed inside a word,
as "wops" turned into "wasp"), and "melioration" (in which over
time a word becomes more elevated or positive in meaning). Though
not all these terms are explained in the text, there is a glossary
at the end of the book.
[Word Histories and Mysteries: From Abracadabra to Zeus, published
by Houghton Mifflin on 13 October 2004; paperback, pp348; ISBN
0618454500; publisher's price $12.95.]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon USA: US$10.36 (http://quinion.com?W5K8)
Amazon Canada: CDN$13.07 (http://quinion.com?W9D2)
Amazon UK: GBP6.49 (http://quinion.com?W2G3)
Amazon Germany: EUR11,95 (http://quinion.com?W7A6)
Barnes & Noble: US$11.65 (http://quinion.com?W5M4)
[Please use these links to order. See Section C for more details.]
7. Noted this week
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VICTIMS OF ARTIFICE Greg Ralph saw this phrase in the Metropolitan
Police's London Gets Safer newsletter, which boasts that cases of
"artifice burglary" are plummeting. These seem to be terms of art
among British criminologists - the newsletter defines the latter as
a crime in which thieves con householders, frequently elderly, into
letting them into their homes. Police reports mention other types
of "crimes of artifice", such as bogus door-to-door salesmen.
GREENSHIFTING This looked like a candidate for Turns of Phrase
until I discovered that every press and online reference led back
to a survey by a national property Web site earlier this month. It
used the word to describe middle-aged, financially secure couples
who leave the cities to live in the countryside because of its
supposed better quality of life (though many are soon disenchanted
and want to move back). The survey distinguished greenshifters from
downshifters. The latter sell their expensive city homes and buy
cheaper property, often still in town, in order to release equity
or pay off a mortgage and to live an easier life as a result.
STRANGERS A tiny part of British parliamentary tradition was this
week consigned to history. Until now, a person who was not a member
or official of the House of Commons was officially a stranger, who
was allowed to be present at debates on sufferance. Until the rules
were amended in 1998, it was permissible for any MP to call out "I
spy strangers!" on the floor of the house and so provoke a vote on
whether the house should go into private session to exclude every
visitor, including the press (in recent times it has been used only
to express indignation or delay proceedings). Today's MPs regard
the word as insulting to visitors and a debate on Wednesday means
it is to be expunged from the rule book, to be replaced by "members
of the public".
8. Q&A
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Q. I have often heard in American movies and on television phrases
like "What in the Sam Hill is going on?" Or, "What the Sam Hill
happened here?" Or, some such exclamation. I have not been able to
find the basis of this expression. [Doug Hickey]
Q. There is a story sometimes told (for example in Edwin Mitchell's
Encyclopedia of American Politics in 1946) that one Colonel Samuel
Hill of Guilford, Connecticut, would often run for political office
at some point in the early nineteenth century but always without
success. Hence, "to run like Sam Hill" or "go like Sam Hill". The
problem is that nobody has found any trace of this monumentally
unsuccessful candidate.
On the other hand, an article in the New England Magazine in
December 1889 entitled Two Centuries and a Half in Guilford
Connecticut mentioned that, "Between 1727 and 1752 Mr. Sam. Hill
represented Guilford in forty-three out of forty-nine sessions of
the Legislature, and when he was gathered to his fathers, his son
Nathaniel reigned in his stead" and a footnote queried whether this
might be the source of the "popular Connecticut adjuration to 'Give
'em Sam Hill'?" So the tale has long legs.
The expression has been known since the late 1830s. Despite the
story, it seems to be no more than a personalised euphemism for
"hell".
A. Subscription commands
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C. Ways to support World Wide Words
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The World Wide Words newsletter and Web site are free, but if you
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If you order any goods from any of these online stores (not just
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