World Wide Words -- 25 Sep 04
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 24 17:08:47 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 411 Saturday 25 September 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: E-num.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Arenaceous.
5. Noted this week.
6. Book review: A Word in Your Shell-Like.
7. Q&A: Skive.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Helping World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BRAINSTORMING Following my piece on the sensitivities attached by
some to this word, Richard Brookman tells me he attended a course
recently in which one of the sessions was brainstorming a problem.
"The tutor told us we were no longer able to call it brainstorming.
The approved term was 'thought-shower'. How feeble can you get?"
2. Turns of Phrase: E-num
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In full "electronic numbering", this is a technology that few
people know much about at the moment, though it is being developed
in several countries, including Britain. The idea is that your
contact details - fixed and mobile telephone and fax numbers and e-
mail addresses - could all be registered in one place so that you
need only give a single number to contacts. The system making a
call would then translate this universal number into the right code
for the service. The technique would require a central registration
body to be set up to record and authenticate these numbers and the
British Department of Trade and Industry is reported to be working
on such a scheme at the moment. This is causing concern among some
technology experts, one of whom is on record as calling E-num a
"major privacy threat".
>>> From Computer Weekly, 9 Sept. 2004: The department's move
follows a UK e-num trial earlier this year when 5,000 numbers from
about 30 companies were used to test applications.
>>> From Telecom Asia, 1 Nov. 2003: Will telecom and Internet
addressing converge one day into a single number for mobile, fixed,
email and DNS? It is possible, but it is also a lot of work, as a
recent EC report into E-NUM (E-Number) points out.
3. Sic!
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Roger Humphreys heard BBC World News say repeatedly on 17 September
while reporting on the final stages to the opening of the disabled
games in Athens: "The Paralympic Torch is on its last leg".
Katherine Rotherham, who lives in California, found an item in the
online local news of Cox Communications, her cable provider, that
made her wonder just how punitive the law could become: "Essick is
accused of bludgeoning his mother with a pair of statutes". So he
threw the book at her, twice?
4. Weird Words: Arenaceous /arI'neIS at s/
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Having the appearance or consistency of sand.
Unlike "sabulous" and its close relative "arenose", both of which
also refer to something sandlike and which rarely appear outside
lists of rare words, "arenaceous" is still very much with us. But
it's a term you're most likely to find in a deeply technical
article that discusses matters such as "the influence of matrix
conduction upon hydrogeophysical relationships in arenaceous
aquifers" or refers to the "squamulose lichen of both calcareous
and arenaceous soils". The rest of us can make do with "sandy".
Its spelling is potentially confusing, since it has nothing to do
with arenas in the public entertainment sense, but derives from
"arena" or "harena", the Latin word for sand.
Very rarely you may find it used figuratively. James Russell Lowell
did so in Among My Books in 1876 when writing of William
Wordsworth: "He seems striving to bind the wizard Imagination with
the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the
potent spell-word which would make the particles cohere. There is
an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome."
5. Noted this week
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NUTRI-WASHING This appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle ten
days ago and has been widely copied in newsletters online. It's
based on "greenwashing", the name that environmentalists give to
disinformation from big businesses who falsely try to present an
environmentally responsible public image. "Nutri-washing" is the
same type of public-relations puffery, but done by major food
companies (collectively and pejoratively called Big Food, in
imitation of Big Pharma, a term for the pharmaceuticals industry)
to offset current criticism about the high salt, fat, and sugar
levels in their products.
EXPERIMERCIAL Talking of Big Pharma, Bernard Carroll used this in
a recent edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry. It's an
obvious-enough blend of "experimental" and "commercial"; the author
describes it as: "a cost-is-no-object exercise driven by the
corporate sponsor to create positive publicity for its product in a
market niche", or putting it another way, experimental work carried
out mainly to get good commercial PR.
6. Book review: A Word in Your Shell-Like
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Nigel Rees is well known in Britain as a broadcaster, presenter of
the radio quiz Quote, Unquote and the author of more than 50 books
on the popular use of the language. This one, his monster fun book
of 6000-plus entries and 768 pages, is a compilation of
catchphrases, clichés, euphemisms, proverbs, slogans and idioms.
They range from "ban the bomb", and "cleanliness is next to
godliness", through "feeding frenzy", "he who is not with us is
against us", "past one's sell-by date", and "remember the Alamo!",
to "sky-blue pink with a finny haddy border" and beyond. Each is
supplied with its meaning, some background and an example or two.
The title is an obscure outdated humorous phrase (it has an entry,
but it's listed under "in your shell-like", which took me a while
to find). It combines "a word in your ear", meaning a brief message
in confidence, with "shell-like ear", a poetic image that was
already being mocked as a cliché well over a century ago.
There's a lot of fascinating material here and the larger part of
the book is unexceptionable, with much interesting information. The
book is clearly a compilation without supporting original research.
There's nothing wrong with that, but unfortunately it has resulted
in an inability or unwillingness to judge the evidence he has. A
good example is the idiom "cold enough to freeze the balls off a
brass monkey". He repeats the folk etymology about its being a
brass plate on which cannonballs were piled on Royal Navy ships,
despite the obvious impossibility of the story. He then quotes two
challenges to the story by recent writers which leaves the reader
wondering whether he believes the naval story (he seems to) or is
just hedging his bets.
Several of his explanations are incorrect: a coot is not said to be
bald because it looks hairless, but because of the pale flash on
its forehead, "bald" once having meant "white". The phrase "bog
standard" is not an acronym from "British or German" but is most
probably a modification of "box standard". A mondegreen is not a
mishearing by a child but any mishearing of a song lyric. To find
so many errors in a random sampling of entries is worrying and
suggests you may need to treat other entries with caution.
[Nigel Rees, A Word in Your Shell-Like, published in the UK by
Collins on 6 September; hardback, pp768; ISBN 0-00-715593-X;
publisher's UK price GBP16.99. Published in Canada and the USA
under the title Collins Encyclopedia of Phrases: A Complete Guide
to Phrases in Everyday Life with the same ISBN.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
US: US$23.80 ( quinion.com?R93K )
CA: CDN$34.27 ( quinion.com?R47L )
UK: GBP10.19 ( quinion.com?R23M )
DE: EUR28,50 ( quinion.com?R54X )
[Please use these links to order. See Section C for more details.]
7. Q&A
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Q. A friend told me that the word "skive", to get off work, is from
the leather on top of a desk where elbows would rest and therefore
no work was done? Is this right and do you know the origin of this
word? [Pat Aithie]
A. Interesting. Completely wrong, but interesting.
"Skive" is British slang for avoiding work by staying away or
leaving early; it's often heard in the form "skive off"; US readers
may find it in British works such as the more recent Harry Potter
books. It seems to have been military slang from the time of the
First World War and the common assumption is that the British army
in France borrowed it from French "esquiver", to slink away. The
usual caveats apply, since that origin is informed guesswork.
The reason why the purported origin is interesting is that there's
another meaning of "skive", to split or cut a material such as
leather into slices or strips, or to shave or pare a material to
reduce its thickness. The word isn't that old (only recorded from
the 1820s) but almost certainly goes back to Old Norse.
So there is an association with leather, but using a piece as a
place to rest your elbows certainly isn't it!
A. Subscription commands
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