World Wide Words -- 16 Jul 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 15 18:38:46 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 449 Saturday 16 July 2005
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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
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Blobitecture.
3. Recently noted.
4. Weird Words: Sternutatory.
5. Q&A: Johnny-on-the-spot.
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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DEEP-FRIED MARS BARS Heavens, did I stir up trouble! Having last
week corrected my passing comment of the week before about the true
source of this Scottish confection, messages have come in from all
over the world denying that Scotland was the country of origin at
all. Subscribers have mentioned encountering them in other parts of
Britain, in the USA, in Australia and New Zealand, and elsewhere,
even before their first recorded appearance in Aberdeenshire. If
the dates are right, it seems the idea was originally American!
SWATH VERSUS SWATHE Ever vigilant to potential backsliding on the
part of your newsletter creator, lots of people queried whether my
use of "swathe" last week was a mistake for "swath". It depends
where you are. It would be incorrect in the USA, but in Britain,
"swathe" is a common spelling for the word meaning "a broad strip
or area of something". The third edition of Fowler agrees. However,
the verb "swathe" ("to wrap in several layers of fabric") is the
same everywhere.
FUSTILUGS Did I select the wrong meaning of "lug" in explaining
this Weird Word last week? Many subscribers suspected I might have,
since they know "lug" as a dialectal or regional English term for
the ear (a British comedian used to exhort his audience to listen
carefully with the cry "pin back your lugholes!"). If that sense
were intended, the term would mean "smelly ears", suggesting that
the person didn't wash, a plausible origin. But the Oxford English
Dictionary is sure that it's the idea of lugging around a heavy
weight that's at the root of the matter.
SOUS-SHERPA Following last week's note about this diplomatic term,
Thomas P Thornton recalled that "sherpa" was in use in Washington
in the time of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, applied specifically
to Ambassador Henry Owen. So it's a term of greater antiquity than
I'd guessed. Also, all the early examples are from either the USA
or Canada, which makes me wonder whether "sous-sherpa" really was
invented in French as I first supposed, or was an English joke on
the model of "sous-chef". But Le Petit Robert knows the diplomatic
sense of "sherpa" ("Personne qui participe à la préparation d'un
sommet politique ou qui y représente un chef d'État), so it may
indeed have originally been a French term.
2. Turns of Phrase: Blobitecture
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Blobitecture is curvy architecture, fluid protoplasmic shapes that
completely redefine what a building ought to look like. You can now
find examples in many cities, because adventurous architects are
using computer-aided design systems to create structures that would
otherwise be impossible to realise. Examples are Norman Foster's
Swiss Re building in London (dubbed the Erotic Gherkin) and Frank
Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall in
Los Angeles. The word has been known in the architectural world for
some years but the oldest appearance in print I can find is in
William Safire's On Language column in December 2002, in which he
says that its precursor "blob architecture" was coined in 1995 by
the architect Greg Lynn. He based it on "binary large object", or
"BLOB", a technical term for a computer representation of an
object; that "blob" is also a good word for the amoeboid buildings
that can result is no coincidence. The word appeared in the title
of a book by John K Waters in 2003 and the year after in Next
Generation Architecture by Joseph Rosa. Everywhere it is mildly
pejorative, but in Britain it is further coloured by associations
with an excessively rotund and very silly pink character with
yellow spots called Mr Blobby, who became famous in the early 1990s
in Noel Edmonds' Saturday night BBC television show Noel's House
Party.
* From Wikipedia, 17 May 2005: In large part, blobitecture derives
its forms from an architect's interpretation of natural organic
forms, but also depends on the advanced use of computer modeling to
ensure that the evolving design is structurally stable.
* From the Guardian, 6 Jun. 2005: Not only does the new Queen Mary
building point towards a fresh and confident future for hospital
design, it is also doing wonders for the reputation of its
architect, the flamboyant Will Alsop, whose toy-like
"blobitecture" and mad-hatter plans for reviving towns in northern
England with designs that resemble, among other things, Marge
Simpson's hairdo, have earned him as many brickbats as plaudits.
3. Recently noted
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CLEAN SKIN In the wake of the London bombings, this jargon term of
the law enforcement and security agencies has had some circulation
in the British press, variously as two words, hyphenated, or as one
word. It refers to a person with no criminal record or evidence of
actual or potential wrongdoing, who is able to move freely without
being flagged as suspicious. It isn't limited to terrorism; the
word appeared in the British press last year in reports that the
police were concerned that "clean skin" football supporters, with
no previous history of violence, would be able to travel to Euro
2004 matches without attracting attention and cause trouble. The
earliest examples I know of date from 2001 and refer to an IRA
bombing alert in London, including this from the Evening Standard:
"Detectives are faced with the difficulty that the terrorists are
thought to be 'clean-skins' - members not known to the security
services who have been recruited since the ceasefire. They usually
hold responsible jobs and keep a low profile until they are
activated to carry out an attack."
MAD AS CHEESE Regular subscribers will know that I'm frequently
confronted by expressions that seem well known but which are new to
me (perhaps I should get out more). This is another example, of
what appears to be mainly a British expression (in which "mad"
means someone crazy, not angry). It appeared in the Guardian last
Tuesday: "Yet some of the great bulge-bracket banks of Wall Street
seem to be on a mission to debunk such thinking, determined to
prove that, even at the very core of the capitalist system, an
institution can be as mad as cheese." There are plenty of examples
available online, showing it dates back to the middle 1990s if not
before. Logically minded readers may wonder why cheese should be
less sane than any other comestible, but considerations like these
have no place in the creation of such expressions. You can tell
that from others, such as "mad as a pink balloon", "mad as a box of
frogs", and that old Northern standby, "daft as a brush".
4. Weird Words: Sternutatory
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A substance that induces sneezing.
If you want to be grand about it, you can refer to sneezing as the
"sternutatory reflex" or as "sternutation". All these words come
from Latin "sternuere", to sneeze. The word often turns up in old
herbals. In The Botanist's Companion of 1816, William Salisbury
wrote of mountain arnica: "Its principal use at present is as a
sternutatory. The root is perhaps the strongest of all the
vegetable errhines, white hellebore itself not excepted."
Sternutatories were believed to help expel noxious influences from
the body.
"Errhine", now even rarer than "sternutatory", had much the same
meaning. It comes via Latin from two Greek words meaning "in the
nostril". The same root appears in "rhinitis", inflammation of the
mucous membranes of the nose, and in "rhinoceros", literally the
animal with a horn on its nose.
Writers outside the medical field found "sternutatory" to be
usefully humorous, if somewhat ponderous. This is from Sea and
Shore of 1876, by the Kentucky writer Catharine Warfield:
"Good snuff is not to be sneezed at," said Major Favraud.
"None offered to young ladies, it seems," taking a huge
pinch, and thrusting it bravely up his nostrils, as one
takes a spoonful of unpleasant medicine. Then contradicting
his own assertion immediately afterward, he succeeded in
expelling most of it in a series of violent sternutatory
spasms, which left him breathless, red-faced, and watery-
eyed, with a handkerchief much begrimed.
The word can be found in some modern dictionaries because the term
was taken over in the early twentieth century to describe an agent
used in chemical warfare that causes irritation to the nose and
eyes, pain in the chest, and nausea.
5. Q&A
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Q. After about an hour Googling "johnny-on-the-spot", for a person
who is on hand and ready to perform a service, I can't seem to find
anything that seems a reasonable history. Perchance, do you know
the history of this phrase? [Furqan Nazeeri]
A. Perchance I do, with the help of an unknown writer on the New
York Sun in April 1896, who penned an article on it which was
syndicated among local newspapers (I found it in the Steubenville
Daily Herald of Ohio, which is always to hand).
The piece is headed "JOHNNY ON THE SPOT A New Phrase Which Has
Become Popular in New York". Its author says "The expression
'Johnny on the spot' has come into popularity very suddenly". This
agrees with the Oxford English Dictionary, which dates its genesis
in print to the same year (though it must be somewhat older in the
spoken language).
The writer explains where it came from: "The grammatical genesis of
'Johnny on the spot' cannot be traced very clearly, but the phrase
certainly originated from the longer and less expressive one,
'Johnny is always on the spot when wanted.' ... The expression is
to some extent a variation or rather a continuation of that other
phrase, 'He gets there.'" "Johnny" here must be a general name for
any young male and doesn't refer to a real person.
He goes on to give a pen portrait of the type: "A 'Johnny on the
spot' is a man or youth who may be relied upon to be at a certain
stated place when wanted and on whose assured appearance confident
expectation may be based. It is not sufficient that an alert and
trustworthy individual, to be thought deserving of the name 'Johnny
on the spot,' should restrict his beneficent activity to the matter
of being at a certain place when needed. He must, in addition,
render such service and attend to such business when there as the
occasion may require, and such a 'Johnny' must be on the spot not
merely to attend to the business of others, but also to look after
his own. Hence an individual who is prompt and farseeing, alive to
his own interests and keenly sensible of means for promoting his
own advantage is a 'Johnny on the spot.'"
However, the writer goes off the rails when he tries prediction:
"It will probably go out of popularity after some pretty hard usage
in paragraphers' columns, variety theaters, campaign speeches and
cheap plays in an equally unconventional way, but until a successor
is found it is likely to be in pretty general use hereabout." It's
still commonly in use thereabouts, and in lots of other places too.
It would seem that, having found a good phrase, people stayed with
it, though many of the implications of a person equally eager to
further his own chances as to give assistance have vanished.
6. Sic!
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Douglas Tippetts was intrigued by a word image in the TV Magazine
of The West Australian. A note appeared in reference to The Bill (a
long-running British police soap): "DS Nixon's daughter Abi ...
appearing to lie lifeless on a website".
Talking of intriguing word images, Caroline Picking, Cecil Chapman,
Peter Pucill, and John Simpson all independently noted a splendid
error in The Week of 9 July: "The first non-stop Atlantic flight
was made in 1919 by two Britons, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten
Brown. They took 16hrs 22mins to get from Newfoundland to County
Galway, with only a compass and a sexton to guide them."
Terry Collins in Jakarta was momentarily startled by the headline
in last week's Jakarta Post: "Crocodiles Go Hungry due to Shortage
of Tourists". The story beneath was banal by comparison: "The Asam
Kumbang Crocodile Breeding Farm ... in North Sumatra, needs the
entrance fees from tourists to buy the ton of chicken meat needed
every day to feed an estimated 2,700 animals." You can't fault the
correctness of the headline, though he and I both suspect the sub-
editor who composed it was enlivening a quiet day in the newsroom.
Last week's Sunday Herald reported increased incidences of sexually
transmitted diseases among those under sixteen: "A spokesman for
the Scottish Executive said the sexual health strategy included the
delivery of 'high-quality' sex and relationships education." James
Carson saw it and notes: "If 'high-quality' sex is on offer, I'm
sure it won't be just the under-16s that are in the queue."
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