World Wide Words -- 19 Nov 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 18 19:03:38 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 468 Saturday 19 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: Stoozing.
3. Weird Words: Cento.
4. Nannying software.
5. Book Review: The Cassell Dictionary of Slang.
6. Q&A: Lickety-split.
7. 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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ERRORS In the piece on "esculent" last week, I spelled the first
name of one half of the Lewis and Clark exploring duo wrongly - it
should be Meriwether. And somehow, I managed to quote the Latin
verb meaning to eat as "esse", which really means "to be". The
right word is "edere". (Perhaps I was mentally confusing it with
the German verb "essen"?)
2. Turns of Phrase: Stoozing
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This largely British slang term refers to ways of making money from
special offers by credit-card companies. The easiest way is to take
advantage of the cashback systems promoted by some issuers in which
the company pays you a small sum based on the value of purchases. A
riskier method is to make use of the interest-free credit periods
offered by some lenders by borrowing money on a card and investing
it in a savings account. If the loan is repaid before the end of
the interest-free period whatever has been earned in the savings
account is pure profit. There are now a number of Web sites which
provide advice to prospective punters about offers and how to
circumvent the risks of damaging their credit history. The term has
been around online since early 2004, though its origin is unknown.
The industry sometimes calls such industrious workers of the system
"rate tarts".
* From the Sunday Telegraph, 7 Nov. 2004: Even now there is always
someone prepared to offer an introductory deal. Even if it is not 0
per cent it is still possible to make money from stoozing.
* From the Guardian, 5 Nov. 2005: Revenge is sweet. And little's
sweeter than hitting back at credit card companies. This is my
practical guide to "stoozing" - legally making risk-free cash,
running into GBP100s a year (for some GBP1000s) out of credit
cards.
3. Weird Words: Cento
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A literary work made up of quotations from other authors.
This Latin word was borrowed into English at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. In its original language, it meant a garment
made of patches, but could also figuratively refer to a work that
had been created by sticking together bits of other compositions,
as patchwork recycles older garments.
Both of these senses came into English pretty much together, though
the literary one soon triumphed. An example appears in a letter
that Oliver Goldsmith wrote to a newspaper in 1767: "He had taken
my plan to form the fragments of Shakespeare into a ballad of his
own. He then read me his little Cento, if I may so call it, and I
highly approved it."
William Hazlitt created a typically forthright essay, On Familiar
Style, which should be required reading for aspiring writers. He
deprecated writers who favoured style over substance: "Their most
ordinary speech is never short of an hyperbole, splendid, imposing,
vague, incomprehensible, magniloquent, a cento of sounding common-
places."
4. Nannying software
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My despairing comment last week about idiotic censoring software
produced a large mailbag. Some pointed out the need for software to
prevent abuse or harassment in the workplace. I don't doubt the
need for some filtering, but would wish that programs were better
written so that they didn't just search for matching strings of
characters. Other messages came in from subscribers who have
suffered similar daft problems.
David Bowsher noted: "The internal e-mail network of the university
hospital in which I work has its own list of forbidden words. Among
these is 'spastic', as I found when I tried to send a message to
the Medical Director of the Stroke Unit about a patient with
spastic paraplegia following a stroke." Roland Sussex, Professor of
Applied Language Studies at the University of Queensland, suffers a
particularly personal problem: "I can't send e-mails to a number of
countries and institutions because my surname contains a prohibited
word. I have to strip all signatures before sending, and sometimes
in addition have to contact the email administrator at the other
end to allow passage of the most innocent and anodyne of messages."
Scott Simpson pithily remarked: "On the subject of censorship, try
e-mailing someone in Tuppenish, Washington." In this vein, there's
the famous case of Scunthorpe, a town in Northern England which it
sometimes seems impossible to mention in e-mail; some years back
AOL banned references to the RAF station Bentwaters for related
reasons; and let us not mention Penistone in Yorkshire.
Chris du Feu tells me his ornithological newsletter was blocked
because it referred to tits; Pete Thomas found it necessary, when
e-mailing about cooking sausages, to refer to "making repeated
holes in the skins using a fork" rather than employing the obvious
plain English word; Riva Berleant discovered that several people
were prevented from receiving a message with the subject "Adult
Religious Education".
5. Book Review: Cassell's Dictionary of Slang
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This is a second and enlarged edition, subtly renamed, of the work
that appeared in 1998 as The Cassell Dictionary of Slang. (For a
review of that edition, see http://quinion.com?GX9N .) Seemingly to
confuse the unwary purchaser, the Orion Group has now chosen to put
it out under its Weidenfeld & Nicolson imprint rather than that of
Cassell, the one that justified its previous title. The new name
implies that it has been compiled by someone named Cassell, rather
than by Jonathon Green.
So what more do you get for your money than last time? Well, in
crude measure, about 19% more (1565 pages instead of 1316). As a
counterbalance, the bibliography has gone, a retrograde step that
we can only hope is reversed in the next edition. There are so many
changes, both large and small, that any page chosen at random for
comparison between the First and Second Editions will throw up some
new entries (and some old ones deleted), plus improved etymologies
and definitions. The cross-references between entries have been
expanded, to an extent that the first impression, on opening at the
letter A, is that the first page is almost entirely composed of
them (the letter "a", for example, is glossed to mean amphetamine,
but 30 lines of links follow to other terms for the same drug; you
could write a thesis based on following up all those references).
This is not an extraordinary occurrence: similar lists appear for
other words (such as "bag" for scrotum, "-head", a combining form
that implies a person is a fool or a habitual user of some drug,
"off one's base" for insane or crazy, or "queen" in the homosexual
sense), though they become less frequent as the alphabet proceeds.
However, the links do not cross-reference back - for example, the
entry for "mollies", to which one is led from "a", doesn't provide
a similar list, or a link back to the full list under the "a" entry
- so encountering a list seems to be a matter of chance.
Jonathon Green does not limit his notes to etymology, but gives,
where relevant, cultural and social background. His entry for
"crack", to take a good case, includes: "Its strength, alleged
addictiveness and destructive popularity have made it a source of
social disruption. Unlike its powdered form, known as 'the rich
man's drug', crack, for all that it has many middle-class devotees,
is very much a drug of the ghetto and the housing estate, bringing
the effects of cocaine to an underclass market." Other entries
contain discussions of origins and theories relating to the origin
of a term, often by citing an earlier writer, as for instance that
for "hobo", a word still of deeply contentious origin among the
experts, which includes a quote from Mencken. The longest such
etymological discussion must surely be that for "OK", which lists
dozens of purported origins, though to me it is not sufficiently
strongly worded to distinguish the accepted origin from the many
folk etymological stories that have gone the rounds (I'd make a
similar point about other entries, such as that for "chav"). The
entry for "grockle" (a tourist) contains a comment from the issue
of this newsletter for 22 July 2000. You read it here first.
Despite these quibbles, this work is scholastically impressive. Not
only will it answer most of your questions about the world-wide use
of English-language slang, but the notes and comments included with
many of the entries will repay browsing. If you're serious about
looking into slang, this is an indispensable work.
[Jonathon Green, Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, Second Edition;
Weidenfeld & Nicolson; hardback, pp1565; ISBN 0304366366; list
price GBP30.00. To be published in Canada at the end of March
2006.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP21.00 http://quinion.com?J92G
Amazon USA: US$33.47 http://quinion.com?J45G
Amazon Canada: CDN$37.59 http://quinion.com?J38G
Amazon Germany: EUR49,90 http://quinion.com?J67G
[Please use these links to buy. More information at C below.]
6. Q&A
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Q. Do you know the correct spelling, meaning and origin of
"Likidie split". (Pardon my spelling.) [Steve Cannell]
A. It's usually written "lickety-split" these days, but don't be
too sensitive about misspelling it - though it has been known since
the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has only comparatively
recently settled down to that form. Other ways of expressing the
idea of moving headlong or at full speed have included "lickety-
click", "lickety-brindle", "lickety-switch", "lickety-smash", and
"lickety-clickety". The first part has been spelled in all sorts of
ways, such as "lickitie" or "lickoty", which is a good clue that in
its early days people were unsure where it came from. The earliest
form was "as fast as lickety", at full speed, from 1817. Though
it's native to the US, it has also been known in other countries.
Where it comes from is open to argument. Some dictionaries prefer
to say cautiously "origin unknown" but others consider it combines
"split" with a fanciful elaboration of "lick". The latter turned up
at about the same date in expressions we still have: "at a great
lick" or "at full lick", also meaning to move fast. This might have
something to do with an animal persuaded to go fast by means of a
"lick" from a whip, a figurative use of the standard sense that's
also the source of "lick" for giving somebody a beating. Another
form around in US dialect in the nineteenth century was "lick it",
as in "he went as fast as he could lick it" and some writers think
that "lick it" was the source of "lickety", though the dates of
recording of the various forms suggest otherwise.
"Split" is just an intensifying word that happens to have formed a
satisfying combination, perhaps because splitting implied a violent
separation. If things had turned out differently, we might now be
saying "lickety-click" instead, which is just as meaningless. In
settling on "split", however, Americans provided a springboard for
"split" in the sense of leaving or departing, recorded from the
1950s.
7. Sic!
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"During a recent rainstorm," writes Olen Jones, "our office roof
leaked, resulting in electrical problems that required the air
conditioners to be turned off. As the temperature rose, and with it
the number of complaints, the office manager sent out an e-mail:
'Please bare with us on the temperature in the office.' I asked if
that meant we were becoming a 'clothing optional' workplace."
Elliot Kretzmer was reading MSNBC News on Friday 11 November and
learned to his surprise that "The fossils were found in Patagonia,
in an area that was once a deep tropical bay attached to the
Pacific Ocean by paleontologists".
A review in the Washington Post of 7 November was caught by Lisa
Simeone, but unfortunately not by the paper's subeditors: "Alyson
Cambridge began the opera with an assured and hopeful 'Summertime,'
sung languidly with spot-on pitch. Her reprisal of it in the second
act was haunting."
"Having become more sensitised to words that should have 'ed' on
the end," e-mailed Rosemary Collier, "today in Capital on the Quay
shopping centre in Wellington I noticed a nicely printed sign at a
food stall: 'Smoke salmon sushi'. With bans everywhere on smoking
tobacco, people must be getting desperate!"
Perhaps somebody borrowed the "-ed" to use in Los Angeles, where
Ellen Smithee was excited to read that the Mann Theatre chain has
on offer "advanced" tickets for the new Harry Potter film. She says
she's always up for a really progressive film experience.
A. E-mail contact addresses
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