World Wide Words -- 17 Dec 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 16 18:10:48 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 472 Saturday 17 December 2005
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Sent each Saturday to at least 26,000 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: Long tail.
3. Weird Words: Saturnalia.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Cash on the nail.
6. 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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ANOTHER SMALL STEP TOWARDS WORLD DOMINATION The number of e-mail
subscribers to World Wide Words has reached 25,000. There's no way
to know how many people read the newsletter via RSS, but I've been
assuming 1,000 (it might be a lot more). The popularity of the site
has also reached a new high, with 1.5 million page hits every month
from about 710,000 visits and a weekly peak figure of 400,000 page
hits.
ONSHORE OFFSHORING Following the piece last week on this term,
with its references to offshoring, onshoring, and homeshoring,
Barry Rein mentioned that an item in the 1 December issue of the
Economist featured nearshoring. "This is a form of offshoring," he
explains, "except that the external workers are closer to home. The
example given is western European companies outsourcing to eastern
Europe."
FROM PILLAR TO POST Pepijn Hendriks e-mailed with these thoughts
on the expression I discussed last time: "Dutch has a very similar
metaphor, 'van het kastje naar de muur' ('from cupboard to wall'),
mainly used in the expression 'van het kastje naar de muur gestuurd
worden' ('to be sent from cupboard to wall'). Because cupboards can
mainly be found against the wall, the expression evokes the image
of not getting any further towards the resolution of a problem. A
person says you're to go to another place which turns out to be
merely synonymous to where you already were, and as such doesn't
get you any further. The same could be said for the words 'post'
and 'pillar', also largely synonymous." Dominik Weber commented:
"Although I have never heard of 'from pillar to post' its meaning
is identical to a German expression, to be sent or to run 'von
Pontius zu Pilatus'." Pepijn Hendriks tells me this is also known
in Dutch. Pontius and Pilatus were of course the same person: in
English Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator of Judea. These Dutch
and German idioms certainly suggest a model for the English phrase.
2. Turns of Phrase: Long tail
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This retailing concept has become widely known and discussed in the
past year. It was popularised in Wired Magazine in October 2004 by
that journal's editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson. The long tail is
that of the demand curve of products versus sales. The best-sellers
are all at one end, but as we move to the other sales drop off in a
long slow curve that never quite hits zero. Traditional retailers
draw a line only part-way along this curve, because slow-moving
items return less profit than the cost of stocking them. But online
retailers backed by huge warehouses and fast stock deliveries can
easily afford to keep them permanently available. Helped by clever
search engines that can suggest possibilities for customers with
special interests, these niche items suddenly become profitable.
Amazon, for example, gets half its sales from outside its 130,000
top titles. Chris Anderson is expanding his thesis into a book, The
Long Tail: The Radical New Shape of Culture and Commerce, to be
published in 2006.
* From KMWorld, 1 Nov. 2005: The counterintuitive reality of the
long tail is that its potential is based on aggregating supply and
demand, but its realization is based on helping individuals find
just the right thing, one scenario at a time.
* From the Independent, 14 Sep. 2005: Westergren hopes to exploit
what Wired magazine calls the 'long tail effect'. The idea is that,
while a small number of products make up a large quantity of sales,
there are many products in relatively low demand that don't sell
well on their own, but which together can outsell the more popular
products.
3. Weird Words: Saturnalia
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An occasion of wild revelry or indulgence.
The original Saturnalia was a Roman mid-winter festival held in the
middle of December, starting on the 17th in the modern calendar (or
the 25th in the Roman one). It lasted for seven days and was a
period when excess was encouraged: the shops were closed, gambling
was permitted, presents were exchanged, slaves were given licence
to speak their minds and join in the fun, and generally joy was
unconfined. The holiday began with a sacrifice to the Roman god of
agriculture, Saturn (Latin "satus" means sown), whose day it was.
>From the eighteenth century on, the word became a more general one
in English for a period of unrestrained licence at any time of
year, often with a lower-case initial letter. An example of modern
use is in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 of 1961: "Other men picked up
steam as the hours passed, and the aimless, riotous celebration
continued. It was a raw, violent, guzzling saturnalia that spilled
obstreperously through the woods to the officers' club and spread
up into the hills toward the hospital and the antiaircraft-gun
emplacements."
The name of Saturn has also given us "Saturday" ("Saturni dies" in
Latin, the day of Saturn) and "saturnine", gloomy, dark featured,
dull, and moody - a description that sits oddly with the revelry of
his annual festival. But the medieval alchemists identified Saturn
with the element lead and astrologers with slowness and gloom.
4. Noted this week
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INFOSNACKING After last week's selection of "podcast" as the Word
of the Year from the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary,
the editors of Webster's New World College Dictionary have chosen
"infosnacking" to be theirs. It's a strange choice. It has turned
up in a few places and there's even a Web site by that name. But
few of us have come across it and it certainly hasn't gained the
public visibility that makes it a defining word of 2005. The News &
Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, this week reported Mike Agnes,
the editor in chief of Webster's, as saying that there aren't any
plans to add it to the dictionary, but that the editors each year
try to choose a word that tickles their linguistic funny bones or
is significant in the way that language reflects culture. It fails
on both counts for me. It means to browse or "snack" online in odd
moments to get quick snippets of information.
SINISTROSPHERE This has started to appear online as a disparaging
collective term for bloggers with left-wing political affiliations.
Its opposite is the dextrosphere, a sweeter-sounding and much less
sinister term. Both words are based on "blogosphere", a collective
term for the whole blogging environment. [My thanks to Barry Popik
and Ben Zimmer for these references.]
ZUGZWANG My personal word of the week, which is familiar to every
serious chess player. It's from two German words: "zug", to move,
and "Zwang", a compulsion or force. It's a chess position in which
a player must move but in which any move he makes will only make
his position worse. Much like real life, really ...
5. Q&A
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Q. You mentioned in the newsletter last week that the author of The
Dictionary of Bullshit got the origin of "cash on the nail" wrong.
Curious as to the correct origin, I searched your Web site, but
could not find it. Could you please provide the correct origin in
your next newsletter? [Ian Swan]
A. I'll do my best, Mr Swan, but the evidence is a little obscure,
so bear with me while I trace the most direct route through the
linguistic thickets.
Nick Webb gave the story usually told about the origin of "cash on
the nail". It's linked to four famous "nails", bronze pillars with
flat tops, like small circular tables, that are set in the pavement
(sidewalk) outside the Corn Exchange in Bristol. (He actually said
that the pillars are iron and located inside a building called the
Royal Exchange, but never mind.) The story says that merchants paid
their debts by putting their money on a nail. So "pay on the nail"
or "cash on the nail" came to mean settling a debt promptly.
The story is retold in almost every popular book on word history I
have on my shelves, as well as in Bristol's tourist literature and
on its Web sites. Nevertheless, it is untrue.
Some history first. The nails were erected in Bristol from about
1550 to 1631. They were originally elsewhere but were moved to
their present site after the Corn Exchange was built in the 1740s.
Although the story seems to have been captured by Bristol, nails
have also been recorded in the Stock Exchanges in Liverpool and
Limerick. The latter dates from 1685 and was described by the blind
Irish playwright John O'Keeffe in his Recollections of 1826: "In
the centre of Limerick Exchange is a pillar with a circular plate
of copper about three feet in diameter, called The Nail, on which
the earnest of all stock-exchange bargains has to be paid." At one
time, merchants did transact their business on them as a public way
of demonstrating that they were making a deal. The Tome Stone in
Barnstaple once served a similar purpose.
All this might seem to confirm the truth of the story. However, the
popular link of the various nails with the expression seems to have
begun only with an entry by Dr E Cobham Brewer in the first edition
of his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, in 1870.
The expression "on the nail", on the spot, at once, without delay,
is first recorded in print in 1596. This predates most of the known
nails. This isn't definitive, because they might have replaced
others of earlier date. But the reference by John O'Keeffe is the
first record of the name, a surprisingly late one if they were
known by that name before 1596.
Similar expressions have been recorded in other languages from even
earlier, including German and Dutch, and in particular the Anglo-
Norman "payer sur le ungle", to pay immediately and in full, known
from about 1320. "Ungle" here is from Latin "unguis", a finger or
toe nail, a relative of "ungula", a hoof or claw, from which we get
"ungulate" for a hoofed animal (the modern French word is "ongle").
The phrase "ad ungulum", "on the nail" - to a nicety, to perfection
or to the utmost - is in the Satires of the Roman poet Horace 2000
years ago and is based on an even older Greek expression. This may
be from the idea of a sculptor giving a finishing touch to his work
with a fingernail or a joiner testing the accuracy of a joint. This
is likely to have been the inspiration for the Anglo-Norman phrase,
albeit with a shift in sense.
So the evidence suggests strongly that "on the nail" is the English
version of an old phrase that came into the language via Latin and
Anglo-Norman, one that actually refers to a different sort of nail.
The presumption must be that the nails in the exchanges borrowed
their names from the expression, and not the other way round.
6. Sic!
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"I was in town the other day," writes Sarah Balfour, "and happened
to glance at the newsagent's window. There was a poster advertising
a forthcoming class at the community centre: 'Beginning Cruel
Embroidery'. I wonder if they've had many takers?"
Tommy Reynolds and Rick Snyder independently found a story in the
Electric New Paper online about a couple on a flight to Jamaica who
tried to join the mile-high club in a toilet. On being interrupted,
the couple attacked the cabin staff. The item reports: "And despite
being restrained with plastic handcuffs, the pilot decided he had
no choice but to divert the 777 jet to Bermuda."
An online advertisement for a book about cooking for astronauts was
spotted by Marty Ryerson: "Included are the baking directions for
Dotti's world famous chocolate chip cookies and the only cake that
can travel into space; why? because it has no crumbs. (It also
makes for a perfect recipe for kids birthday parties and carpets.)"
Crumbless carpets! Yummy!
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