World Wide Words -- 30 Apr 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 29 17:38:31 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 438 Saturday 30 April 2005
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 23,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: School gate mum.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Perverb.
5. Recently noted.
6. Q&A: The F-word.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
THE F-WORD To reassure subscribers who may worry that I have been
taken over by the spirit of Thomas (or Harriet) Bowdler, my reason
for avoiding printing this word in full in the Q&A item below has
nothing to do with squeamishness in the face of rudery, just an
attempt to stop this issue of the newsletter from being bounced by
every e-mail filter on the planet. However, the full version with
no expurgations will be available on the Web site next weekend.
And lots of people objected to my calling it "the rudest word in
the language" last week. That, my respondents tell me, is actually
the C-word, as confirmed by at least one survey. It seems that we
are now too familiar with the F one for it to be so shocking.
POLLYANNA Following last week's piece on this type of gift-giving,
Morgiana Halley commented "The members of the Quaker Women's Group
at my current Meeting in Virginia use the term regularly to
indicate that, at a given function, each woman should bring (and be
prepared to receive) an inexpensive gift, but that none of these
should be earmarked for a specific individual."
Virginia Graziani provided a description of a variation: "Everyone
brings a wrapped gift (cost is limited) and puts it under the tree.
The master of ceremonies passes a hat from which everyone draws a
numbered piece of paper. Whoever draws number one chooses a gift,
unwraps it, and shows it to the group. Then number two can either
choose a new gift, or take number one's gift. If the latter, number
one chooses a new gift. In either case the new gift is unwrapped
and displayed. Number three can choose a new gift or take either of
the previous gifts, and so on, until everyone has had a turn and
all the gifts have been distributed."
Many people mentioned that the Christmastide (sorry, the Holiday
Season) version is often called "Secret Santa" in the USA.
Ray Wood provided an Australian perspective: "We have the 'Kris
Kringle'. This is a custom where at Christmas office workmates buy
gifts of equal value. Sometimes people draw names and choose a gift
appropriate to the person selected by chance; in some offices the
gifts are all piled and people take one each." [It's interesting
that "Kris Kringle" is used in Australia particularly for this type
of present giving. In the USA, of course, it's another name for
Santa Claus, which comes from the German Christkindl for the Christ
child. This discussion is getting rather unseasonal!]
See the full piece on "pollyanna" at http://quinion.com?POLL, which
will be put on the Web site sometime this weekend.
2. Turns of Phrase: School gate mum
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Elections are often good sources of coinages. This is one peculiar
to the current British election, which is being used by the Labour
Party to emphasise its family-friendly polices on child benefit,
child tax credits, and investments in childcare. It's a linear
descendent of Labour stereotypes from the 1997 and 2001 elections -
"Worcester woman" (a married, middle-aged, lower-middle-class woman
from a provincial town, seen as a crucial swing voter) and "Mondeo
man" (a 30-something middle-income homeowner, named after his
unexciting car, the Ford Mondeo). All these terms are on the same
model as American coinages like "soccer mom". Another from this
election is "Do-it-all woman" (one in her thirties or forties who
juggles commitments at work and at home, probably with both
children and elderly relatives to look after, an inversion of the
"Have It All" woman of 1980s advertising).
* From the News and Star, 24 Apr. 2005: Ross Kemp has been drafted
in by the Labour party to appeal to the one million "school gate
mums" who are currently floating voters and who could swing the
election result one way or the other.
* From the Guardian, 20 Apr. 2005: Tony Blair and his culture
secretary, Tessa Jowell, yesterday tried to woo "school gate mums"
by offering their children more sport, healthier lunches, and a
purge on junk food adverts on TV. The prime minister also pledged a
nurse for every secondary school.
3. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
In the UK, much the biggest supermarket is Tesco, which has as its
main competitors Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrison's. Mike Edwards
sent this report: "In any Tesco (should I say Tesco's?) supermarket
currently you will find a sign that says 'You can check Asda's,
Sainsbury's, and Morrisons's prices on our website'. Is this
suitable for Michael Quinions's newsletter?" Probably not.
While we're trespassing on Lynne Truss territory (and to pre-empt
any puzzled comments, I'm using her name attributively, not as a
possessive) here's another example from an e-mail received by John
Eliot Spofford in the USA: "Due to the popularity of our Jasmine
Green Tea, we have had difficulty keeping it in stock. ... We are
pleased to announce a recent shipment of Jasmine Green Tea has
arrived with adequate quantity to handle all orders. Thank you for
your patience's."
Lee Schlesinger found this in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune of April
23, in a story by Glenn Roberts Jr. on past tax protests: "On Feb.
23, 1933, a crowd of hundreds of people gathered in Salt Lake City,
Utah, to protest the sheriff's sale of six homes and a farm that
were in a foreclosure process, local newspapers reported. Salt Lake
County Sheriff Grant Young told the crowd to disburse, but they
would not." No ante, no protest ...
Val Hadley saw a news streamer on Canadian television on Tuesday:
"BUSH PRESSES SAUDIS FOR MORE OIL". So that's how they make it!
4. Weird Words: Perverb
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A portmanteau proverb.
"Perverbs" were popularised by the American Harry Matthews in his
Selected Declarations of Dependence in 1977 and have gained a small
but respectable niche among aficionados of wordplay. The word was
allegedly coined by Maxine Groffsky and is presumably a blend or
portmanteau from "perverse proverb". You create one by snapping a
couple of existing proverbs in half and joining the end of one to
the beginning of the other. So you might create "A rolling stone
gets the worm", "Don't count your chickens before you can walk",
"The devil takes the sailor's delight", and "The road to Hell
wasn't paved in a day". One recent writer has used the term for
what he calls "portmantreau" proverbs, those created by augmenting
an existing proverb through adding a single consonant: "Fine swords
butter no parsnips", "Slaughter is the best medicine".
5. Recently noted
-------------------------------------------------------------------
SKYPECASTING The plethora of terms of this type seem unending. We
have had "podcasting" (see http://quinion.com?P91X), in which MP3-
encoded copies of radio broadcasts are automatically downloaded to
your player. Enterprising DJs, New Scientist magazine reports, are
combining this idea with Skype, a software package that allows
broadband users to make free telephone calls over the Internet.
They set up Skype-mediated telephone interviews with members of
bands or experts on some topic. With a little technical wizardry,
it is possible to record the conversation and turn it into an MP3
file that can be podcast together with relevant music, which
results in something that sounds remarkably like a radio programme
made the traditional way. Such is progress.
6. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I remember someone telling me once, long ago, that actually the
F-word is an abbreviation. The last two letters of the word were, I
believe, contracted from the words "Carnal Knowledge". Could you
help me out here, perhaps with some additional etymological data?
[Heres Snijder, Canada]
A. This, the most-used item of vulgar slang in the language and
still one capable of shocking even in these linguistically tolerant
times, has always fascinated the know-alls of etymology, especially
those who see acronyms everywhere.
Jesse Sheidlower, in The F-Word, his magisterial examination of the
word's origins and usage based on the researches of Professor
Jonathan Lighter, says that acronymic suggestions for its origin
only began to appear in the 1960s, at about the time that the
traditional taboos on printing it were beginning to decline. If you
hunt about you will find quite a number, all variations on a theme:
* It originated as a medical diagnostic notation relating to
soldiers in the British Imperial Army. When a soldier reported sick
and was found to have VD, an abbreviation was stamped on his
documents, short for "Found Under Carnal Knowledge".
* The origin was in the fifteenth century, when a married couple
had to have permission from the king to procreate. Hence,
"Fornication Under Consent of the King" (or sometimes "Fornication
Upon Command of the King").
* During the time of the Puritans, a person imprisoned in the
stocks would have his or her crime displayed on the timbers.
Because space was tight, when adultery was involved they used an
acronym that represented the words "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge".
There are others. All are nonsense, of course, as is a story I've
heard, told to a World Wide Words subscriber during his journalism
training by a law lecturer, that the F-word was commonly used in
Chaucerian times in the sense of "dibble". A farmer would use his
thumb to dibble the soil, to make a hole into which he then dropped
a seed. There is, as you may surmise, not the slightest evidence
that the word was ever used in this sense.
It is often classed as one of the archetypal Anglo-Saxon four-
letter words, but it isn't Anglo-Saxon - it's not recorded until
the fifteenth century. The first known appearance is in a Latin
poem dated sometime before 1500 that satirises the Carmelite friars
of Cambridge. It includes the line "Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov
xxkxzt pg ifmk". The code can easily be broken to read "Non sunt in
coeli, quia fvccant vvivys of heli". Being translated, this says
"They are not in heaven because they f**k wives of Ely". "Fuccant"
(in modern spelling) looks like Latin, but it's a humorous fake -
the F-word is actually Germanic, related to Middle Dutch "fokken",
Norwegian "fukka" and Swedish "focka".
The word seems from the start to have been regarded as unacceptable
in polite company. It remained literally unprintable other than in
privately circulated material until the 1960s, though it has been
in sustained and constant use in coarse speech, of course. In 1948,
the publishers of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead forced him
to bowdlerise it as "fug", leading to the (surely apocryphal) story
that Dorothy Parker remarked on meeting him, "So you're the young
man who can't spell "f**k"?"
[This article, without the obfuscations, is one of those in my book
on folk etymology, Port Out, Starboard Home (available in the USA
under the title Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds). For more details,
see http://quinion.com?B93H .]
A. Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. The address is
http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .
Recent back issues are archived at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/
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 some ways to do so.
If you order any goods from any of these online stores (not just
new 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
Barnes & Noble US: http://quinion.com?BN
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 2005. 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