World Wide Words -- 07 May 05

Fri May 6 17:51:31 UTC 2005

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 439            Saturday 7 May 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. Turns of Phrase: Folksonomy.
2. Sic!
3. Weird Words: Nipperkin.
4. Book review: The Superior Person's Third Book of Words.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.

1. Turns of Phrase: Folksonomy
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Though this term has become known online in the past year and the
idea behind it is arousing interest in the technology community, it
is rare outside such specialist groups. This may be changing. A
folksonomy is a type of classification system that spontaneously
arises out of the way users tag items of information with freely
chosen keywords (a more common term, in fact, is "tagging"). Such
tags might be attached to photographs that individuals upload to
Web sites such as Flickr, or to sites listed on StumbleUpon, a user
network for sharing information about them. It's a "bottom-up" form
of informal classification that's fundamentally different to the
"top-down" type imposed from above, such as the Dewey system for
classifying books. A useful article on the word on the Wikipedia
site (http://quinion.com?FSMY) says it's a blend of "folk" and
"taxonomy" and that its invention has been attributed to Thomas
Vander Wal.

* From PR Newswire, 8 February 2005: Tagging, or Folksonomy,
represents an alternative and complement to traditional enterprise
rigid ontology.

* From the Guardian, 24 Mar. 2005: Folksonomies work because
although users can choose idiosyncratic tags, most people tend to
use fairly obvious ones most of the time.

2. Sic!
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"Here's one I stumbled across in a local store the other day," e-
mailed Breen Mullins. "Glancing at the back of a package of pancake
mix I read the instruction 'fry the pancakes, taking care not to
burn them until the batter has solidified'." Afterwards, of course,
no problem.

The New York Times of 1 May, reports Howard Sinberg, included this
in an article about the wines of Mexico: "This winter's storms -
which dropped 25 inches of rain, more than the last three years
combined - have left the boulder-strewn hills verdant and green."
"Both?" he e-mailed, "Wow!"

Matthew Walker communicates: "Further to the 'Sic!' column of April
30th, I have noted recently that Asda is advertising 'Permanently
low prices forever'. Is there any other way?"

The following comment was noted by John McNeil at the Scoop (New
Zealand) website: "Scoop understands the Iraqi man who has had his
visitor's visa revoked along with his wife has not broken any New
Zealand laws." Wife revoking? Is that like divorce?

TGTEO (Thank God The Election's Over). Diana Platts encountered an
intriguingly awful sentence in the election address of her local
Conservative candidate: "Every seven minutes one in three children
leaves primary school unable to write properly." It was under the
heading "Education". And Craig Murray, an independent candidate in
Blackburn, told the story in the Guardian of a local postman who
assured one of his canvassers that he would certainly vote for that
nice Mr Rigging. All became clear when he remembered his election
address was headed "You can beat Labour vote rigging."

The May 2005 issue of The Garden, the journal of the Royal
Horticultural Society, reports Nicholas Willmott from Cardiff, has
a half-page advertisement boldly headlined, "Protect Plants from
Slugs like this Allotment Holder".

3. Weird Words: Nipperkin
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An old unit of volume.

A famous English West Country song called the Barley Mow was once a
favourite at the raucous celebrations that followed the completion
of the barley harvest. An early verse in some versions is this:

  We'll drink it out of the nipperkin, boys,
  Here's a health to the barley-mow!
  The nipperkin and the jolly brown bowl,
  Here's a health to the barley-mow, my brave boys,
  Here's a health to the barley-mow!

Because the size of the toast increased verse by verse, by reading
it (or preferably singing it with beer in hand) you will get a good
education in the old British names for units of volume, some still
familiar, some defunct: gills, pints, quarts, pottles, gallons,
ankers, hogsheads and pipes (this last was 126 American gallons, or
old British wine gallons, roughly 475 litres). Most units were
twice the size of the one before. At the end, the song goes totally
out of control and speaks of wells, rivers and oceans ...

The word was still around as the nineteenth century turned into the
twentieth, but lasted little longer. At this period, it seems to
have been commonest in Scotland, though it was still remembered in
the West Country. There are a number of references to it in books
of the period, as in The Dynasts by Thomas Hardy, published 1904-8
but set at the time of the Napoleonic wars: "I'd sooner have a
nipperkin of our own real 'Bristol milk' than a mash-tub full of
this barbarian wine!" [Bristol milk = sherry.]

The word could be used equally for the measure or for the container
it was served in. There is some confusion about the actual size of
a nipperkin, but most agree that it was one-eighth of an English
pint (or about 70ml). The song agrees with that measure, as the
doubling-up sequence in a well-known version goes nipperkin, gill
(quarter-pint), half-pint, pint.

Its name is so intimately tied to English and Scottish rural and
domestic life that it comes as a mild shock to learn that the word
is probably Dutch in origin and is related to the German and Dutch
verbs "nippen", to sip.

We still sometimes speak of taking a "nip" of spirits, often
notionally for medicinal purposes, as a character did in The First
Men in the Moon by H G Wells: "He recommended a nip of brandy, and
set me the example, and presently I felt better." "Nip" here is an
abbreviation of nipperkin, in the looser sense of any small
quantity.

4. Book review: The Superior Person's Third Book of Words
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The tone of this volume is evident from the first entry, "AASVOGEL:
A vulture. Ideal term for oral insults, the sound being even more
offensive than the meaning, which no-one will know anyway", and is
maintained through "LATESCENT: Becoming obscure or hidden away, as
old-world courtesy in a teenager", and "PSILOSIS: Two different
meanings: alopecia (i.e., baldness) and sprue (a tropical disease).
In cursing an enemy, your imprecation should therefore include, as
the climactic phrase, 'and both kinds of psilosis'", through to
"ZOOPHILOUS: Animal-loving - a practice illegal in some countries".

The ghost of Ambrose Bierce may be nodding in quiet approval, or
perhaps organising a claim for infringement of spiritual copyright.
To judge from the number of entries referring to religion, however,
this is more God's dictionary than the Devil's. Peter Bowler says
in his introduction that - except two or three unspecified cases -
all the words in his book are real. The tease suggests you ought to
be wary about improving your vocabulary using it without a sanity
check provided by a really big dictionary, though too many of the
words are missing even from the OED for you to be able to separate
the real from the invented so easily.

[Peter Bowler, The Superior Person's Third Book of Words,
Bloomsbury; 1 December 2004; hardback, pp145; ISBN 0747569185;
publisher's UK price £9.99. Originally published by David R Godine
in the USA under the title The Superior Person's Third Book of
Well-Bred Words, at $16.95; ISBN 1567921612.]

ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
  Amazon USA:      US$11.53  (http://quinion.com?SW26)
  Amazon Canada:   CDN$22.67 (http://quinion.com?SW73)
  Amazon UK:       GBP6.99   (http://quinion.com?SW92)
  Amazon Germany:  EUR16,50  (http://quinion.com?SW54)
  Barnes & Noble:  US$16.95  (http://quinion.com?SW38)
[Please use these links to order. See Section C for more details.]

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