World Wide Words -- 19 Feb 05

Fri Feb 18 19:49:41 UTC 2005

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 428        Saturday 19 February 2005
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Sent each Saturday to 22,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org       US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Crunk.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Jaculation.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: First, second and third worlds.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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MORGANATIC  The modern German word meaning "morning gift" given in
this piece last week had its vowels accidentally inverted through
my keyboarding fingers getting muddled; it should be "Morgengabe".

[S]MILED  And lots of people had fun with my other typing error
last week that gave rise to "e-miled" in place of "e-mailed". "Are
these like Air Miles?" one e-mailed. "And how do we cash them in?"
enquired another.

2. Turns of Phrase: Crunk
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Aficionados of this US musical style will know that I'm behindhand
in mentioning it, since it was described by Slate magazine eight
months ago as the defining sound of 2004 in the States. But it has
only recently crossed the Atlantic to the UK, so it's new for many
people. The usual problem applies of explaining what distinguishes
it from other musical genres that come and go. The best I can do is
quote from the same Slate article, which talked of its "lurching
beats and bellowed choruses" and said that "there's no mistaking
the genre's sonic blueprint: a pulverizing low end and lots of
rowdy shouting, party music that mixes menace and pure mayhem."
Just the thing with which to annoy the neighbours, in fact. It is
said to have begun in the clubs of Atlanta as yet another variation
on hip-hop. Where the name came from is disputed: some say it's
just the existing US slang term, a mixture of "crazy" and "drunk";
others argue it's from a southern slang term meaning "cranked up".

* Evening Standard, 1 Feb. 2005: There has been much talk of the
crunk phenomenon lately, with some dismissing it as a mere gimmick
or publicity stunt. But Lil' Jon and his crew proved that the hype
is not without foundation, with a show that more than made up for
in energy what it may have lacked in lyricism.

* Daily Telegraph, 22 Jan. 2005: Crunk is a high-impact brand of
woofer-popping party hip-hop that eschews all musical and lyrical
invention in wild-eyed search of a good time.

3. Sic!
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Tim Riley was intrigued to see a notice circulated recently within
the British civil service, whose heading announced: "Government
Whips Assistant". It turned out not to be a news item but details
of a job vacancy in the Cabinet Office.

Meg Manderson found a sign she listed as one of the "Sights I'd
rather not see". It was at a supermarket chain in the Carolinas:
"Boneless Family Chicken Packages". It suggested there are enough
amoeboid families in the area to be worth the special promotion.
While we're on this theme, Heidi Swanson found an item in her local
supermarket in Southampton with the label "Healthy living chicken".
She said: "I expected a live chicken to jump out of the packet. Or
perhaps they meant the chicken had led a happy, healthy life before
being processed. Or they might have meant the product to be
especially good to promote healthy living. Who knows?"

4. Weird Words: Jaculation
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The act of throwing or hurling.

Hardly a common word at any time, this is as dead as can be, now
only to be found fossilised within the pages of the very largest
dictionaries. It appeared about 1610, at almost exactly the same
date as its close relative "ejaculation". Both are from the Latin
verb "jaculari", to hurl.

Charles Dickens used this rare word in Bleak House: "Grandfather
Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her. 'Drat you, be
quiet!' says the good old man. The effect of this act of jaculation
is twofold. It not only doubles up Mrs. Smallweed's head against
the side of her porter's chair and causes her to present, when
extricated by her granddaughter, a highly unbecoming state of cap,
but the necessary exertion recoils on Mr. Smallweed himself, whom
it throws back into HIS porter's chair like a broken puppet."

Almost the only place you will find it, or at least the agent noun
"jaculator" for one who hurls, is in the formal name for the archer
fish of Asia, "Toxotes jaculator", which catches insects by
squirting a jet of water at them. There's also a parasitic wasp
called "Gasteruption jaculator", which deposits her eggs into the
larvae of bees, though it is less obvious what this insect throws,
if anything. But one may with justice argue that neither word is
English, but scientific Latin.

5. Noted this week
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COMPUTER, HE SAY  We've probably all heard the old tale about the
early computer translating Russian into English that kept referring
to a water sheep, only explained when a human translator checked
the original text and found it was about hydraulic rams. Professor
Gerald Cohen has updated the story. He reports that in helping a
student translate a recipe for blueberry pancakes into German, he
looked at various online recipes in that language for linguistic
inspiration. On a whim he tried out Google's automatic translation
feature on one of them. Among the ingredients it listed was "impact
suspect". He turned disbelievingly to the original, which included
Schlagsahne, whipped cream ("Schlag", a blow, plus "Sahne", cream).
But the translator software had read this as "Schlags ahne", where
the second part is from the verb "ahnen", to suspect. He concludes
that machine translation has yet some way to go.

6. Q&A
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Q. The expression "third world country" means an underdeveloped
one. What would "first world" and "second world" countries be, and
how did the designations come about? [Jean Pyle]

A. These expressions were born in the Cold War era. Because of
their numbering, it's reasonable to assume that they were coined in
that order, or at least all at once. However, "third world" came
first, and the other two were created later.

"Third world" was coined in French ("le tiers monde") by the
population expert Alfred Sauvy, to refer to those poor countries,
especially in Latin America, Africa and Asia, which were aligned
with neither the communist nor the capitalist blocs. It appeared in
an article in L'Observateur on 14 August 1952: "Ce Tiers-Monde,
ignoré, exploité, méprisé comme le Tiers-État" ("That Third World,
ignored, exploited, scorned, like the Third Estate). He created it
with a nod to a famous pamphlet by the Abbé Sieyès in January 1789
about the Third Estate, "le Tiers-État", one of the classes in the
National Assembly, a pamphlet that was influential in the lead-up
to the French Revolution later that year. The Third Estate was the
commons or the ordinary people, the First Estate being the nobility
and the Second Estate the clergy (the English term "Fourth Estate",
meaning the press, came from this classification by analogy some
decades later).

"Third world" was taken up in translation by economists and
politicians in Britain and the United States in the early 1960s. By
analogy, "first world" and "second world" were later coined from it
in English, being recorded respectively in 1967 and 1974. The
former was a collective term for the developed countries that were
based on a capitalist model of high-income market economies, of
which the USA is the principal example. This was contrasted with
the "second world", the relatively high-income Communist countries
or those with centrally planned economies in which the government
owns the means of production; here the USSR was the prime case.
Neither term was as widely used as "third world" and both have
largely gone out of use since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991
except in historical contexts.

As most third-world countries were poor or relatively undeveloped,
the term has since shifted in sense somewhat to refer especially to
countries with those characteristics, though the formal term for
them is now "developing countries".

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