World Wide Words - 23 Jul 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 22 17:44:53 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 450 Saturday 23 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. Weird Words: Trussell.
3. Recently noted.
4. Book review: Weeds in the Garden of Words.
5. Q&A: Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
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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CLEANSKIN Too many Australians to name pointed out that this word
I wrote about last week has a completely different meaning in their
country. It refers to unlabelled bottles of wine, usually sold by a
winery in bulk to a merchant specialising in such goods. The winery
is thereby able to dispose of excess stock while keeping the price
of its branded output high. The wine merchant then sells the wine
on with generic labels attached. But the term is much older. The
Australian National Dictionary has examples from 1881 in the sense
of an unbranded animal and - most interestingly - from 1907 for a
person with no criminal record, which appears to be police jargon.
Might the intelligence term have come from this? It seems likely.
2. Weird Words: Trussell
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A punch used to make coins.
It has been a long time since coins were made by hand in England
(the technical term is "hammered coinage", to distinguish it from
the modern machine-made type). The language associated with it is
as obsolete as the technique. Coin blanks were called "flans". This
is the same French word as the one we use in Britain for an open
tart (in the USA for a custard baked with a caramel glaze), which
can be traced back to the old Germanic "flado", a flat cake; we
once had a relative, "flawn", for a type of cheesecake or pancake,
which led to the proverb "as flat as a flawn". The flan was placed
on an anvil called a "pile". This is from Latin "pila", a pillar,
and is a close relative of the words for things piled in a heap and
piles driven into the ground to support a structure. The anvil got
that name because it was a short upright iron pillar, usually
driven into a wooden base. The coiner put the flan on the pile,
placed the trussell on top and hit it with a hammer. The top of the
pile and the bottom of the trussell were engraved with the designs
for the two sides of the coin, which were thereby transferred to
the flan. "Trussell" is from the same source as modern French
"trousseau" and our "truss", both at first meaning a bundle or
package, though it isn't obvious how it came to be used for a die
punch.
3. Recently noted
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TATOOINE Real scientists are often avid consumers of SF, so it's
not so strange that astronomer Maciej Konacki of the California
Institute of Technology has borrowed the name of Luke Skywalker's
home planet for an astonishing astronomical object. He has found a
planet far, far away in a system that has three suns, something
previously thought quite impossible. "If you stood on the planet's
surface," the press release says, "you would see three suns in the
sky, although its orbit centers around the main yellow star among
the trio. The larger of the other two suns would be orange and the
smaller would be red." As Dr Konacki says, "The sky view must be
out of this world, literally and figuratively", especially as the
planet's year is only three and a half Earth days long.
4. Book review: Weeds in the Garden of Words
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About a year ago, I reviewed Kate Burridge's earlier book "Blooming
English: Observations on the roots, cultivation and hybrids of the
English language" and mentioned that a sequel had been published in
Australia. Like its predecessor, it has now been republished by
Cambridge University Press.
As the title suggests, in this book she concentrates on some of the
aspects of English that might be regarded as non-standard or wrong,
such as jargon, slang, and euphemism. She also writes about the way
that false ideas about word origins can grow on fertile ground, and
how words can radically change their spellings and their meanings
over time (one of her examples is "gravy", which in the medieval
period was written as "graney", until it was changed by a scribe
who misread another scribe; it's from Old French "grané"). A later
chapter looks into some of the grammatical puzzles that have been
bequeathed to us through language change, such as the difficulty we
have choosing between "less" and "fewer" (she argues convincingly
that constructions like "ten items or less" will in time oust the
forms using "fewer") and why we have so many oddities of spelling
and pronunciation (one of her illustrations is "schism", which can
be said three ways - "skism", "sism" and "shism").
She writes chattily and clearly, with no linguistic jargon, and her
book is an easy ride through some of the complexities and oddities
of the language. A few things caused me to draw breath: she's awry
with her attempt to explain "the exception proves the rule"; terms
like "the bee's knees" are earlier than the 1930s; my own work has
improved on her dating of "gravy train"; it is now extremely rare
to hear the name of the Cotswold town of Cirencester said as "sis-
etter" (and certainly never as "sister"). These are minor blemishes
on a entertaining book that shows Professor Burridge's grasp of the
history of our language as well as her love of gardening.
[Kate Burridge, "Weeds in the Garden of Words: Further observations
on the tangled history of the English language", published by the
Cambridge University Press on 16 June 2005; hardback and paperback
published simultaneously, pp196; publisher's prices GBP35.00 for
hardback (ISBN 0521853133), GBP12.99 paperback (ISBN 0521618231).
First published in Australia by ABC Books in Aug. 2004, AUS$24.95;
ISBN 0733314104 (paperback).]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon USA: US$13.59 (http://quinion.com?W72W)
Amazon Canada: CDN$18.87 (http://quinion.com?W39W)
Amazon UK: GBP12.99 (http://quinion.com?W87W)
Amazon Germany: EUR18.95 (http://quinion.com?W25W)
[Please use these links to order. See C below for more details.]
[See http://quinion.com?BLOM for my review of her earlier book.]
5. Q&A
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Q. Have you heard of the saying "you might as well be tried for a
lamb rather than a sheep" or something like that? [Jo Ward]
A. Something like is right. The standard form is "one might as well
be hanged for a sheep as a lamb". Strictly, it's a justification or
excuse for going on to commit some greater offence once one has
perpetrated a minor one. These days it often suggests that once one
has become involved in some affair or incident (not necessarily
illegal), one may as well commit oneself entirely.
This example is from Son's and Lovers by D H Lawrence, of 1913: "It
seemed as if she did not like being discovered in her home
circumstances... But she might as well be hung for a sheep as for a
lamb. She invited him out of the mausoleum of a parlour into the
kitchen."
The origin lies in the brutal history of English law. At one time,
a great many crimes automatically attracted the death penalty: you
could be hanged, for example, for stealing goods worth more than a
shilling. Sheep stealing was among these capital crimes. So if you
were going to steal a sheep, you might as well take a full-grown
one rather than a lamb, because the penalty was going to be the
same either way.
Since the law was reformed in the 1820s to end the death penalty
for the crime, the proverb must be older; in fact the earliest
example known is from John Ray's English proverbs of 1678: "As good
be hang'd for an old sheep as a young lamb".
6. Sic!
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Ed Cassidy found this in the Niagara Gazette of Niagara Falls of 7
July: "Niagara Falls Board of Education members approved a policy
revision that would call for a flag to be lowered only on specific
anniversaries, like Sept. 11, or when a person of national or state
standing or a local serviceman dies at a meeting Wednesday night."
Corrections columns often entertain because of their illumination
of the pitfalls of the journalistic process. Dodi Schultz found an
excellent example in the New York Times on 12 July: "Because of a
telephone transcription error, an article in The Arts on Saturday
... misstated a word in a quotation from Don Vincent, a lawyer for
the city. He said that everything the plaintiffs' witnesses are
saying is 'hearsay,' not 'heresy.'"
A reader's offer for an electric shaver in the Observer last Sunday
claimed it featured "cutting-edge technology". How true.
Scott Swanson reports from Montana: "I received a Nigerian scam e-
mail today. Among the other information requested was my 'marital
statue'. Is that what I get if I put my wife on a pedestal?"
In times of disaster, a sense of humour helps. John MacDonald found
a comic side even to a headline on the BBC Web site last Saturday
that read "Suicide bombers strike in Baghdad". "No wonder," he
comments, "The pay and conditions are awful. Let's hope their
colleagues everywhere down tools in sympathy."
A. E-mail contact addresses
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