World Wide Words -- 05 Nov 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 4 17:05:03 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 466 Saturday 5 November 2005
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Sent each Saturday to at least 25,000 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: Bioart.
3. Weird Words: Guy Fawkes night.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Double possessives.
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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MIGNON Did I confuse people? In "Sic!" last week, a web site's use
of "mignon" for "minion" was adversely noted. Several subscribers
pointed out that the latter actually derives from the former, so
making the error etymologically interesting. But others argued that
as "mignon" is recorded in English, it isn't an error, but rather a
variant form. Up to a point, Lord Copper. In English, "mignon" had
the sense of "delicately formed; prettily small or delicate", which
is quite some way from "a servile follower or underling". And
"mignon" in English in any sense is defunct, only ever appearing in
set phrases like "filet mignon". And that, puzzled subscribers, is
why I made the joke about cooking.
DISTANCE BETWEEN SUBJECT AND VERB Lots of subscribers flew to my
defence following the comment reproduced in last week's issue that
a sentence I'd written the previous week (do try to keep up) had an
exceptional and unpardonable distance between its subject and verb.
Comments fell into two classes: those who pointed out lots of other
examples of such wide separation, including the first stanza of
Paradise Lost, and those who felt the sentence to be effective as
it stood and that recasting it to fit the tenets of professors of
composition would be to destroy my unique style.
TITTLE Following on my piece last week that suggested "to a T"
derived from "to a tittle", many subscribers asked if this was the
same word as in "tittle-tattle". It seems not. "Tittle" here is a
reduplicated form of "tattle", though the prior existence of the
word "tittle" in other senses may have helped its acceptance.
GIGO Following up the subject of last week's piece on the saying
"Garbage In, Garbage Out", Leigh Anderson quoted Charles Babbage,
the inventor of the mechanical computer he called the Analytical
Engine: "On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if
you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come
out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of
ideas that could provoke such a question." How true, even today. It
comes from his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher of 1862.
SLANG DICTIONARIES 'Tis the season for works recording the seamier
side of our vocabulary. In the weeks to come I shall be featuring
three of them. Next week Jonathon Green will review a work that has
been described as "the foulest-mouthed book ever to stalk the face
of the Earth". If you're offended by discussion of coarse language,
you should read next week's issue with eyes closed. Nannying e-mail
obscenity filters may blow their fuses.
2. Turns of Phrase: Bioart
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This is a rather broad term that can refer to any kind of art that
has been inspired by biological mechanisms or which makes use of
biological concepts. These include pictorial art based on aspects
of nature or medical illustrations, software that turns the genetic
code into luminous, scientifically accurate pictures, and robotic
sculptures operated by fish. The creation by Eduardo Kac and others
of transgenic bioartistic plants and animals - using a jellyfish
gene that makes them glow in the dark - has provoked controversy
because it raises ethical issues that artists are unused to facing.
The field has been in the news recently through the prosecution of
Steven Kurtz, who used a biological laboratory at his home to make
artistic works based on bacteria and DNA; however, he denies his
work has any connection with the species-modification end of the
bioart spectrum, which one writer has called "Frankensteinian
aberrations".
* From the International Herald Tribune, 4 Jul. 2005: As
biotechnology advances and bioart grows - several American
universities are establishing centers for the art - it will
undoubtedly become more difficult to tell where one leaves off and
the other begins.
* From Australasian Business Intelligence, 27 Sep. 2005: Ionat
Zurr, the new course's academic co-ordinator, says other higher
education institutions have theoretical courses on "bioart", but
the UWA [University of Western Australia] is believed to be the
first to offer hands-on laboratory work in the field. The
university's ethics committees will have to approve student's
projects, as they will involve the manipulation of biological life
to create "living artworks".
3. Weird Words: Guy Fawkes night
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An annual British celebration on 5 November.
In itself, there's nothing uncommon or weird about this expression,
though it will not be so familiar to people outside Britain and the
Commonwealth. The festive day is also often called "bonfire night"
or "firework night". This year's celebration is special, however,
since 5 November 2005 is the 400th anniversary of the attempt by
Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators - as a Catholic protest
against the policies of the Protestant king, James I - to blow up
the Houses of Parliament and with it the king and peers who were
assembled for the state opening of Parliament.
For various reasons, this rather inept conspiracy became famous, in
part because of one-time strong anti-Catholic sentiment (the famous
celebrations in Lewes each year still burn the Pope in effigy). The
link of bonfires with the plot began the day it was discovered, as
Londoners were encouraged to light fires in the street to celebrate
the king's deliverance, provided that "this testemonye of joy be
carefull done without any danger or disorder". Fireworks became
associated with it in the 1650s. Guy Fawkes wasn't the ringleader,
but he became most deeply linked with the plot in the public mind
because he was discovered on the scene, having been deputed to
light the fuse.
The plot is also commemorated in the rhyme:
Remember, remember the fifth of November:
Gunpowder, treason, and plot.
We know no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Most famously, it also bequeathed us "guy". At first this meant the
effigy of Guy Fawkes traditionally burnt on the bonfire (children
once constructed guys and begged money with them for fireworks with
the cry "a penny for the guy!"). But it's also where "guy" in the
sense of a person comes from - it was originally applied to a man
of grotesque appearance, like a bonfire effigy, but when it was
taken to the US in the late nineteenth century it turned into a
neutral term for a man, more recently a person of either sex. It
was also used for a person who acted as a dupe in a confidence game
and led to the verb "to guy", to ridicule or hoax.
4. Noted this week
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FIREWORKS While we're on pyrotechnic matters, you may be intrigued
by some of the specialist names that firework makers use for their
products. A comet bursts in the air and leaves a trail of sparks,
like its namesake; a crossette (from the French word for a little
cross) is a comet with a small charge that breaks it into pieces to
make a cross shape; a nautic (from French nautique, nautical) is a
firework that floats on water; a Catherine wheel spins vertically
about a fixed axis and spurts coloured rain; a Roman candle spits
out starlike bursts at intervals; a tourbillon (French, whirlwind
or tornado) throws out sparks and spins eccentrically to create a
vertical spiral; a girandola (Italian, from the verb to turn in a
circle) is a wheel that spins horizontally and has drivers that
lift it into the air (it's also called a flying saucer). Other
names are, as you may expect, from military science, including the
shell, which is fired high into the air and explodes to create a
number of different effects, and the mine, which shoots a large
number of stars into the air at one time.
5. Q&A
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Q. You recently wrote "a friend of Pope's". What? Do I not remember
correctly that "Pope's" is already possessive - so the use of "of"
before it makes a double possessive? That was drummed into my ears
when I was a freshman in high school in Latin I class. Curious -
because I sometimes slip and write it that way - then have to go
back and "correct" it. Is this no longer the rule? [Frances Pack]
A. It never was. You've been led into a misunderstanding, as some
grammarians of the eighteenth century were, by trying to apply the
rules of Latin to English, where they don't fit. It must be said
that disputes about it are unrelated to effective communication,
since nobody would ever fail to understand "a friend of Pope's".
You can immediately see that the construction is valid in English
by replacing the noun with a pronoun. You wouldn't say or write "a
friend of you" or "a friend of me" - that is, not if you wanted to
be thought capable of composing acceptable standard English. If "a
friend of mine" is good English, why not "a friend of Pope's"?
The technical name for this construction is double genitive or
double possessive (it has also been called the appositional of-
phrase, and the post-genitive). It's of great age - examples are to
be found in writings of the fourteenth century; by the eighteenth
century it was common and unremarkable. This instance, picked
pretty much at random but showing both forms of the idiom, is from
Charles Dickens's novel David Copperfield: "An aunt of my father's,
and consequently a great-aunt of mine, of whom I shall have more to
relate by and by, was the principal magnate of our family."
In particular, grammarians say a double possessive is essential to
avoid giving the wrong meaning when a word indicating ownership is
placed after "of", as "a bone of the dog's". The extra possessive
is required because "a bone of the dog" means, not a bone in the
possession of the dog, but one inside the dog. "A picture of Jane"
means an image of Jane, whereas "a picture of Jane's" is a picture
of any sort that happens to be owned by Jane.
But there are some limitations. The phrase has to be indefinite -
"a friend of Pope's" is OK, but if I meant a particular one I would
have had to write "the friend of Pope" or "Pope's friend"; also, "a
friend of ours" is idiomatic, but not "the friends of ours", which
would have to recast as "our friends". And the second noun must be
human, or at least animate, and also definite - so you can't say "a
friend of the British Library's" or "a lover of the furniture's".
What's fascinating about all this, and one reason why I've gone
into so much detail, is that the rules are precise and strict and
are understood and followed by every speaker of idiomatic English,
even though they're not usually taught in school. Fluent speakers
don't know they know them and couldn't explain them, say to someone
learning the language, but they know immediately when they've been
broken. Native speakers pick up the rules for using such idioms by
example and experience and only suffer confusion when these real-
life rules conflict with the ones that grammarians of an earlier
period would have had us believe were correct.
If you feel these rules to be arbitrary and unreasonable, the only
response I can make is that it's an idiom and that's just the way
things are. Robert Burchfield says at the end of his entry on it in
the Third Edition of Fowler, "It is not easy to explain why such
constructions are idiomatic: one can only assert that they are."
6. Sic!
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A story I spotted in the Guardian last Saturday about the role of
Karl Rove in mentoring the US president provoked disturbed musings
about the latter's predilections: "Mr Rove found Mr Bush as a
gland-handing good 'ol boy trading on his family name and his
charm."
Speaking of disturbing images, Jim O'Connor found a Reuters report
dated 1 November on the Yahoo! News Web site: "Quaker Maid Meats
Inc. on Tuesday said it would voluntarily recall 94,400 pounds of
frozen ground beef panties that may be contaminated with E. coli."
Clyde McConnell e-mailed to report: "The fad for the extra '-ed'
has reached Calgary. Yesterday at the mall I noticed a food outlet
was advertising a special on 'blackended shrimp or calamari'. I
could almost picture a 'blackended' shrimp, but not calamari; I
passed on both."
I found this in the Observer for 23 October: "At first my sister
and I used nets to catch minnows in the local river, but on my
first proper fly-fishing trip, when I was eight, I caught an 8lb
rainbow trout and was absolutely hooked."
"I went to my local Burger King last night," writes Douglas Yates,
"and found that the staff member serving me had a sign on top of
her till saying 'I am being trained. Please bare with me'. Although
she was a most attractive young lady, I politely declined her kind
offer."
Paul Nienaber SJ, whose e-mail identified him as "Chair of Physics
and soi-disant Guerrilla Grammarian at Saint Mary's University of
Minnesota", confessed to hypomanic giggles on reading a schedule of
events: "All Souls' Day: Wednesday November 2, 7:00 PM: Virgil for
Fallen Soldiers". He suggests as a suitable text: "Forsan et haec
olim meminisse iuvabit." For non-Virgilians, that may be loosely
translated as "Perhaps, one day, even this will seem pleasant to
remember." He also found a poster advertising a concert: "Proceeds
will benefit victims of Hurricane Katrina and the University Music
Department". "Rescuing," he comments, "lives ruined by drive-by
trio sonatas."
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