World Wide Words -- 06 Aug 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 5 18:01:23 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 453 Saturday 6 August 2005
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Sent each Saturday to at least 25,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Spinster.
3. Weird Words: Poppysmic.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Aga saga.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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UNFOLDING OF LANGUAGE My review last week attributed a comment to
the author that was actually the result of a spelling mistake on my
part. When I wrote "He quotes examples in English of what seem to
be abrupt changes in sense - 'repent' three hundred years ago mean
to appreciate or feel grateful for, practically the opposite of its
modern sense", what I should have written was "resent". There's an
example in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1648: "God resents an
infinite satisfaction in the Accomplishment of his own Will."
2. Topical Words: Spinster
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It's official. From 21 December this year, the word "spinster" will
no longer be part of the British government's vocabulary.
It's because of the Civil Partnership Act, which comes into force
then and will permit a form of civil ceremony (which is carefully
not being called "marriage" but a "civil partnership") for gays and
lesbians. The Registrar General's office felt it desirable to come
up with fresh descriptions to fit the new situation, since to call
the contracting parties spinsters and bachelors is inappropriate.
The replacement will be the boringly accurate "single", to describe
the status of both men and women who haven't before been through
either ceremony.
Somehow, I can't feel the word is much of a loss. It must have been
a very long time since an unmarried woman referred to herself by
this title in seriousness. In our modern language it has too many
adverse connotations: a woman left on the shelf, an old maid, with
nothing left but to become a benign busybody, keen on gardening and
cats, bustling round the parish doing good works and cycling to
Holy Communion through the morning mist (image courtesy of George
Orwell via John Major) or, like Miss Marple, solving the problems
of the world with hard-headed sympathy and acute observation. But
there's nothing new about these implications - they've been linked
with the word since the seventeenth century through the suspicion
and hostility with which unmarried women above a certain age were
regarded, at risk of being arrested as prostitutes or condemned as
witches.
What we have lost is any clear connection with the word's roots.
That ending "-ster" is what grammarians call an agentive suffix,
one that turns a verb for some activity into the name of a person
who does it. Originally, it was always applied to a woman (though
that changed later), as in "brewster" (a woman who brews ale, a
female job in a medieval household), "maltster" (a woman who makes
the malt from which ale was brewed), and "spinster" (a woman who
spins). The word appeared in the written language in 1362, in
William Langland's poem Piers Plowman. So many women were described
in marriage records as having the occupation of spinster that by
the sixteenth century it began automatically to be used for all
unmarried women and became the legal description, as Thomas Blount
wrote in his Dictionary in 1656, "for all unmarried women, from the
Viscounts Daughter downward".
3. Weird Words: Poppysmic
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Produced with smacking of the lips.
You won't see this in your local newspaper any day soon. It comes
from the Latin "poppysma", via the defunct French "popisme". Romans
used the original for a kind of lip-smacking, clucking noise that
signified satisfaction and approval, especially during lovemaking.
In French, it referred to the tongue-clicking "tsk-tsk" sound that
riders use to encourage their mounts. The only writer in English
known to have used our word was James Joyce, in a stage direction
in Ulysses: "FLORRY WHISPERS TO HER. WHISPERING LOVEWORDS MURMUR,
LIPLAPPING LOUDLY, POPPYSMIC PLOPSLOP."
4. Recently noted
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MONKEY HURLAGE This expression appeared in the Dilbert comic strip
on 25 July: "Wally, your calf muscles and ankles are performing
well, but the rest of you is monkey hurlage." (That day's strip is
online via http://quinion.com?DILB.) This was obviously enough a
euphemism for "crap", based on the unfortunate habit of apes in
zoos of throwing the stuff at visitors, but what I hadn't known
until Markus Laker e-mailed me about it last weekend was that Scott
Adams had invented it. In itself, that's nothing remarkable, but as
he points out, the term has already taken root online, with at
least a dozen examples used for real without reference to the
strip. "It's not often that you can pinpoint the coining of a new
phrase right down to a single day," he writes.
XENA When four asteroids were named John, Paul, George and Ringo
many years ago, it was confirmation that the star system had really
hit astronomy. Two weeks ago I mentioned that Star Wars had gone
literally astronomical with an extraordinary celestial object being
named after Luke Skywalker's home world Tatooine. Now the minor
planet just discovered way out beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt has
been styled Xena after the heroine of that hokum-filled television
series Xena: Warrior Princess. At this moment this is a nickname,
since discoveries have to go through a formal procedure before a
name is accepted; currently, Xena is officially 2003UB313.
YEPPIES Another survey, another invented tag for a group of young
people. This survey was for eBay, carried out by Kate Fox, a social
anthropologist at the Social Issues Research Centre. It argues that
young people are now shopping around and experimenting to find, as
she puts it, "the perfect job, the ideal relationship and the most
fulfilling lifestyle". It's part of the supposed trend towards what
has been called delayed adulthood that has spawned terms such as
"adultescent". This one actually stands for "Young Experimenting
Perfection Seekers". Unfortunately, the word has been created at
least twice already, for "Young Environmental Professionals" and
those who are "Young, European and Proud of it" as well as those
who are graduates of the Youth Environmental Program in the USA.
5. Q&A
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Q. A clue in The Times crossword, published recently down under,
was "doubly funny middle-class stories". The answer was "agasagas"
("a gas, a gas" and "Aga sagas"). Many of us down here know that an
Aga is a battleship stove favoured by posh country folk in the UK.
But what about Aga saga? Does that expression have currency with
you? [Alex Hopkins, Melbourne, Australia.]
A. Indeed it does. It's quite common, though its heyday has perhaps
now passed.
Let's start by filling out the story of the Aga for those who have
never heard of it. Like many good things in Britain, the Aga is
actually Swedish. It was invented by Gustav Dorén in 1922 as what
turned out to be the culmination of the long history of the kitchen
range. It's named after the firm that manufactured it, the Svenska
Aktiebolaget Gas Accumulator. Literally weighing a ton, fuelled by
coke, superbly insulated and extremely efficient, they were ideal
for the larger kitchen, especially in farmhouses, in which lots of
cooking jobs had to be carried out throughout the day. It's the
kitchen equivalent of the Rolls-Royce, solid, dependable, and
reassuringly expensive, and it became a token of a prosperous,
conservative, countrified, middle-class lifestyle.
The term "Aga saga" was invented in 1992 by Terence Blacker in an
article in Publishing News to describe a class of novels based in
middle-class country or village families. The classic exponent of
the genre, for whom the name was coined, is Joanna Trollope, though
she hates it. She was quoted in an article in the Independent in
March 2005, as saying, "I am fairly tired of such an inaccurate and
patronising tag", pointing out that the Aga featured in only two of
her twelve novels.
6. Sic!
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Tim Johnstone read this in The Chronicle of Canberra, Australia, on
26 July: "RSPCA ACT has called on all pet owners to de-sex their
pets. It has introduced a low cost de-sexing service for health
care card holders and low income earners."
"Instructions given by Express Scripts for ordering prescription
drugs by mail," e-mailed J. Holan, "include the following: 'Note:
We cannot accept Schedule II controlled substances by fax.' Do you
suppose it was attempted, with messy results?"
In the Corrections and Clarifications section of the Guardian, Ian
Mayes is often required to correct the homophonic errors that turn
up in the newspaper. On Tuesday, he noted that the issue of 30 July
had included a reference to a person "peddling off into the night".
He commented, "One of the Guardian's more familiar sights, a pedlar
on a bicycle."
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