World Wide Words -- 10 Dec 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 9 18:10:44 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 471 Saturday 10 December 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. Turns of Phrase: Onshore offshoring.
3. Weird Words: Lorinery.
4. Noted this week.
5. Book Reviews: Three views of jargon.
6. Q&A: Pillar to post.
7. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
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A formatted version of this newsletter is online at
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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CHOCK-A-BLOCK Many subscribers strongly disputed my assertion last
week that this "is not a widely known North American term". I might
also have said (thanks to Clyde Broster for pointing this out) that
a common British variant spelling is "choc-a-bloc", which he feels
sounds "vaguely confectionous". Gordon Wuest and David Bracey both
noted that "chocka" is a common shortened form in Britain and both
Greg Ralph and Brett Debritz pointed out the Australian version of
"chockers".
BLEGGING Following my note last week about "splog", Vern Vonheeder
told me about this further example of the language of the blogging
community. "To bleg" is to beg for help on a blog, often for money,
though it might be for research help or other assistance. The word
has been around for a while. It was mentioned in a blog named The
Agitator on 23 February 2003, which said that it had been coined by
the National Review Online: "They came up with it to describe how
they're regularly hitting readers up for contributions, National
Review magazine subscriptions and ideas for Rich Lowry's or Jonah
Goldberg's syndicated columns."
2. Turns of Phrase: Onshore offshoring
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Offshoring is a well-known term for moving a business activity to
another country in order to take advantage of lower costs or tax
breaks - a controversial example is the way that many companies'
telephone call centres have been transferred to the Indian sub-
continent. "Onshore offshoring" is almost a reverse process, in
which skilled but comparatively low-paid workers are brought from
overseas to work in the business's country of operations. The term
has only recently started to appear, at first in the USA, but it -
and the activity - has come to public notice in the UK through the
discovery by the Association of Technology Staffing Companies
(ATSCo) that 21,000 foreign IT workers, mostly from India, have
been given work permits in the past year alone. This rather clunky
term has had to be created because jargoneers have already used up
"onshoring" for a related technique that has also been called
"homeshoring" ( see http://quinion.com?HOMS ).
* From Datamonitor CommentWire, 24 Nov. 2005: We must expect some
businesses to explore the option of onshore offshoring in the UK,
regardless of the potential social and economic impact this may
have long-term - after all, it is the job of the government, not
business, to regulate working opportunities and environments.
* From the Guardian, 21 Nov. 2005: ATSCo said its findings, based
on Home Office figures, are the first evidence that multinationals
recruiting workers in low-cost economies and transferring them to
high-cost ones - a phenomenon known as "onshore offshoring" in the
US - may have become widespread in Britain.
3. Weird Words: Lorinery
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The craft of making various metal parts of a horse's harness.
Lorinery is rare enough that there's no entry for it in the Oxford
English Dictionary; it seems to be relatively recent and not at all
common in print, though it is found quite a lot online. The oldest
example I know (for which many thanks to the staff of the Oxford
English Dictionary) is from the Times in 1923. Lorinery is carried
out by loriners; the Worshipful Company of Loriners, one of the
livery companies of the City of London, says: "A loriner makes and
sells bits, bridles, spurs, stirrups and the minor metal items of a
horse's harness, together with the saddle tree." There aren't any
loriners in the City of London nowadays, the centre of the British
craft being in Walsall, which is perhaps why the Company no longer
has a London headquarters (a "hall", in the jargon). Samuel Pepys
noted in his diary for 14 May 1668: "Thence with Lord Brouncker to
Loriners'-hall, by Mooregate, a hall I never heard of before." (He
wasn't alone, it transpires: though "loriner" and the Worshipful
Company are both medieval in date, this is the first reference to
their hall anywhere.) The older form of the word is "lorimer", the
source of the family name; both derive from the Old French word
"lorenier", which is from Latin "lorum", a strap or bridle.
4. Noted this week
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GEOMYTHOLOGY Last Sunday's Observer featured this word in a piece
describing the way geologists are now using evidence from legends
and folk memories to learn more about cataclysmic events of the
past. The article says that geomythology is a "new science", both
words in that phrase being open to dispute. It's true that the term
hasn't yet reached the dictionaries, but it's surprisingly old. The
word was coined by Dorothy Vitaliano, a geologist with an interest
in folklore, in an article with that title in the Journal of the
Folklore Institute in June 1968. [Many thanks to Benjamin Zimmer
for that reference.]
CRYPTOZOOLOGY My personal word of the week is prompted by this
week's announcement of the odd little mammal, new to science,
recently photographed in Borneo. Cryptozoology is the study of the
lore concerning legendary animals to work out whether they exist or
not. It tends to be thought of as the province of slightly obsessed
individuals looking for the Loch Ness monster or the yeti, but the
literature has many well-recorded and often widespread tales about
animals that are as yet unknown to science. You might well think of
it as the biological equivalent of geomythology.
PODCAST (see http://quinion.com?N34R) is the Word of the Year from
the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. Erin McKean, the
dictionary's editor in chief, said: "Podcast was considered for
inclusion last year, but we found that not enough people were using
it, or were even familiar with the concept. This year it's a
completely different story." The runners-up included "bird flu",
"lifehack" (a more efficient or effective way of completing an
everyday task), "reggaeton" (a Latin American dance music which
combines elements of reggae music with hip-hop and rap), "squick"
(to cause immediate and thorough revulsion) and "sudoku", the
numbers game (see http://quinion.com?S29K).
FAT FINGER ERROR The calamitous mistake by a trader on the Tokyo
stock exchange this week brought this slang term to many front
pages. Under the pressure of dealing, it's easy for a stressed
trader to press the wrong button on his keyboard and lose his
employer a vast sum of money. The term dates from several decades
back, when miskeying a command on a computer console could cause a
serious error on the system.
IPOD FINGER While we're on the subject of digital difficulties, my
candidate of the week for a PR-inspired neologism (PRIN for short),
which will surely soon vanish again like frost in the sun, came in
a warning from the British Chiropractic Association of the dangers
of "iPod finger". A BCA spokesman said, "The nature of modern
technology means that these devices are only going to get smaller
and I would not be surprised if hand and finger related injuries
become one of the most common repetitive strain injuries that
chiropractors treat."
5. Book Reviews: Three views of jargon
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DUCKS IN A ROW: THE A-Z OF OFFLISH
Do not be misled by the cynical humour of this little book: there's
more truth here than in a shelf of management guides. "Offlish", of
course, is Office English, a language with a passing resemblance to
the one we know and love. In Offlish, one's thinking may be joined-
up, lateral, blue skies, ideas-driven, inspirational, off the wall,
or it may even be outside the box; one may even conceivably think
the unthinkable. One may be a big hitter, a mover and shaker, a big
cheese, exhibiting bouncebackability, punching above one's weight,
or be quality-driven and proactive, a person who makes it happen.
One may be an always-on or full-on worker with a can-do attitude.
But do avoid being thought a bean-counting micromanager. To reduce
costs managers may downsize, retrench, reorganise, re-engineer, de-
layer, rightsize, smartsize, streamline, consolidate, let go, cut
out the dead wood, or trim the fat, but less often sack anyone. If
you send a copy as a present to your boss, it is advisable to do so
anonymously. It was nice to note that he mentions my Web site, less
good that he quotes its address incorrectly.
[Carl Newbrook, Ducks in a Row: The A-Z of Offlish; Short Books;
hardback, pp246; ISBN 1904977359; list price GBP9.99.]
THE DICTIONARY OF BULLSHIT
Nick Webb would say that few of the words in his more serious but
if possible even more cynical compilation could be called jargon.
"Bullshit," he writes, "is much broader than jargon; its defining
characteristic is well-camouflaged mendacity of a particularly
insidious kind." His first chapter covers much the same ground as
Carl Newbrook's, though his entries are more discursive and include
such oxymoronic aspirational concepts as the paperless office. The
later chapters feature the bullshit of politicians, sales managers,
the professions, and new agers. He also introduces us to such magic
concepts as "porkometrics", the obfuscation of truth by numbers.
The final chapter contains entries on "fossil words and knackered
old images", in one of which he is kind enough to describe me as an
"all-round word maestro". I'd return the compliment, except that
five pages later he gets the origin of "cash on the nail" wrong.
[Nick Webb, The Dictionary of Bullshit, Robson Books; hardback,
pp174; ISBN 1861058888; list price GBP9.99.]
GREEN WEENIES AND DUE DILIGENCE
This is an American view of the same field, though the close links
between the financial and commercial worlds of Britain and the US
mean that many terms are common to all three books. It's larger and
more serious than the others, and benefits from Gahan Wilson's
witty cartoons. Ron Sturgeon has included much shorthand jargon of
business people, accountants, and lawyers. "Due diligence", for
example, is a standard term for the care required of professionals
to make sure that the assets and liabilities listed in the contract
are accurate. But many of his terms are funny, because business
people really do use a weird language all their own. The author's
classic case, the one that he says got him started on collecting
terms, makes up the other half of his title: "green weenie", an
unpleasant surprise discovered belatedly as part of a transaction
or deal (often as a result of too little due diligence). Here you
will find - to list some of the 1200 entries at random - "starter
marriage" ("a college graduate's first real job"); "kissing your
sister" ("some action that has no excitement or result"); "banana
problem" ("a project so simple that a big, dumb gorilla would
handle it"); and "pencil whip" ("to criticize someone in a written
report instead of verbally"). On a down note, the index has clearly
been generated automatically, which has led to some oddities of
reference. And Mr Sturgeon distinguishes himself in this company by
not mentioning World Wide Words ...
[Ron Sturgeon, Green Weenies and Due Diligence: Insider Business
Jargon - Raw, Serious and Sometimes Funny; Mike French and Company
Inc; hardback, pp305; ISBN 0971703116; list price US$28.95.]
BUY ONLINE VIA AMAZON To get these books, please use the following
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Buying in this way gets World Wide Words a small commission that
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6. Q&A
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Q. Please shed light on the origin and meaning of "from pillar to
post". I recently came across the version "from pile to pillar".
[Rice Mixon]
A. An interesting variation, showing how little the idiom is now
understood. A lot of people are unsure even of the meaning, which
is to be forced to go from one place to another in an unceremonious
or fruitless manner, occasioning much frustration and anger in the
process.
There are two theories about its origin. (You didn't think you were
going to get a straightforwardly simple answer, did you?)
One suggests that the post was a whipping post and that "pillar"
actually refers to the pillory. The suggestion is that a criminal
being punished in medieval times would first be tied to the post to
be whipped and then put in the pillory for public amusement. One
thing in favour of this idea is that the original version of our
idiom, which first appeared around 1420, was the other way around:
"from post to pillar". But if it were true, you'd expect to get at
least one recorded usage of "from post to pillory" and none are
known. I count this a folk etymology of an especially ingenious
type.
However, the alternative - the one that most dictionaries rather
cautiously subscribe to - sounds even more outlandish. It is said
that it derives from the ancient game of tennis, the version that
is now called real tennis (court tennis in the USA) to distinguish
it from its upstart successor, lawn tennis. The original game was
played by personages of high status in rather complex indoor courts
and it is supposed that the pillars and posts were parts of it.
7. Sic!
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"Recently I purchased a packet of ground coffee, " e-mailed Michael
Shannon. "While reading the instructions on the side, I found this
gem: 'Heat the water to just below boiling temperature. Don't use
boiling water as scolding of the coffee may occur.'"
Jerry Morelock tells me that US currency has been designed to react
when marked with a special pen. He noticed a sign on the door of a
national burger establishment: "Counterfeit pens will be used to
mark all currency". It's a pity, he comments, that there aren't
enough legal pens to go around.
Greg Grove found a correction in the Wall Street Journal recently:
"While Mr. Fallows did not go to Iraq, as we reported correctly, he
did interview US military officers involved in training Iraqi
forces by phone and email." I've heard of distance learning, but
that's ridiculous.
In a news story on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
website, Alan Wilson read that a bank has released a booklet which
gives its staff tips on "how to maximise their appearance". "High
heels, padded shoulders, and bouffant hairdos come to mind," he
comments, "but presumably they were tips intended to 'optimise'
their appearance."
An item in Slate this week intrigued Marilyn Kloss with the seeming
size of the White House piano: "With the giant, over-decorated tree
in the Blue Room, the pastry chef's marzipan model of the White
House in the dining room, the boughs and lights twinkling in the
East Room, and a Marine band playing Christmas songs on the grand
piano in the foyer, visiting the White House is as magical as
climbing aboard the Polar Express."
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