World Wide Words - 08 Oct 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 7 17:45:34 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 462 Saturday 8 October 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. Weird Words: Scutching.
3. Q&A: To be in one's black books.
4. Noted this week.
5. Book review: The Meaning of Tingo.
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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HEAD-SHRINKER Thomas Pynchon's book, mentioned in this piece last
week, lost its terminating numeral; the title is, of course, "The
Crying of Lot 49".
AMAZON LINKS It's clear from the logs that some subscribers are
having problems with the way I provide short-form links to various
Amazon sites, such as (http://quinion.com?T32B). Some mail systems
include the parentheses when sending the link to a browser, leading
to an invalid URL or reference code. I've changed the link format
this week and hope this will resolve matters.
2. Weird Words: Scutching
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The dressing of fibres by beating them.
Before machines took over much of the hard work, the process of
making linen from flax was both protracted and arduous, but it
bequeathed us an interesting set of words: pulling, rippling,
retting, and scutching.
At harvest time in August, flax plants were pulled up by the roots
rather than cut to ensure that the fibres were long and unbroken.
The stems were then rippled by drawing them through a comb to take
out any seeds. The next stage was retting, in which bundles of the
stems were immersed in water in a pond, lake or stream for a couple
of months to soften and partly rot them. If no body of water was
available, they were instead laid out in a field to let the rain do
the job; this was sometimes called dew-retting and the field the
retting-ground. Then came scutching, in which the stems were beaten
to remove the useful fibres from the plant material around them.
Though the process is ancient, the English word for this final step
appears only at the end of the eighteenth century. It derives from
old French "escoucher", from Latin "excutere", to shake out. The
word also turns up in situations unconnected with linen-making, as
here in Laddie by Gene Stratton Porter: "I heard father tell him
he'd give him a scutching he'd remember to the day of his death."
That looks like a similar sense, of beating, and it's quite well
recorded in dialect in both Scotland and northern England - in fact
it's about two centuries older than the flax sense and there's some
small doubt whether it's the same word.
The English Dialect Dictionary, based on nineteenth-century dialect
recorded around Britain, included many other senses: "to strip,
peel; cut or sheer with a hook; to trim a hedge; to notch; to face
blocks of stone by chipping the surface with a small, sharp stick"
and "to throw nuts, &c., to be scrambled for; to throw or push one
body over the surface of another with a slightly grating noise; to
walk by pushing the feet lightly forward", and "to run; to move
quickly; to do work, especially garden-work, in a light, quick, or
imperfect manner". Truly, a word for all seasons and occasions.
3. Q&A
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Q. Do you have any notion of the origin of the phrase "in the black
books"? I've read it may have something to do with convicts being
logged by immigration or customs into their registers on arrival in
Tasmania. [Neil Livingston]
A. You've got the right idea, but as it happens, it's older than
that.
There were several literal black books in English history, such as
the Black Book of the Exchequer of about 1175, which recorded the
royal revenues, and the Black Book of the Admiralty, a code of
rules for the government of the navy, possibly from the fourteenth
century. The most famous one recorded monastic abuses uncovered by
official visitors and provided the evidence for the dissolution of
the monasteries in the 1530s by Henry VIII. Generally, "black book"
was used for any official book bound in black cloth. It was also
used for the Bible, commonly so bound.
By the sixteenth century, the term had started to be used for a
book in which names were recorded of people who had become liable
to punishment or censure for some reason. In 1726, this description
appeared in Terrae Filius: or the Secret History of the University
of Oxford, by Nicholas Amherst: "The black book is a register of
the university, kept by the proctor, in which he records any person
who affronts him, or the university; and no person, who is so
recorded, can proceed to his degree."
So "to be in somebody's black books" (the usual form of the idiom
today) is to be marked down or censured in some way, to have done
something that has caused significant disapproval. Frederick Niven
summed up the approach and the mentality in The Flying Years in
1942: "It was part of the Ettrick policy to seek occasion for
fault-finding. William kept a little black book with alphabetical
index in which he entered against the names of the members of his
staff all sins committed by them, however venial. Let any dare to
approach him with a request for a promised increase of salary and
out would come the Black Book. That was its main object."
4. Noted this week
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PROMATORIUM This is in the news because it has been announced that
the first promatorium will be opened in Sweden next year. It's an
ecological alternative to cremation or burial, in which the corpse
is frozen in liquid nitrogen and then shattered into powder by
ultrasonic vibration before being buried in a biodegradeable box in
a shallow grave. The inventor, Susanne Wiigh-Masak, claims that the
process is good for the environment because the powder (which is
essentially compost) breaks down in the soil more thoroughly and
quickly than by conventional burial. She suggests that relatives
plant a tree or bush above the grave as a long-term memorial. She
calls the process "promession", from Italian "promessione", to
swear to the truth; "promatorium" is a blend of "promession" and
"crematorium".
HETEROPOLITAN Yet another word that appears as the result of a
survey. This one was in Men's Health, which claims this is now the
buzzword du jour. Step aside, you metrosexuals and ubersexuals, the
times they are a-changing. Morgan Rees, the editor, said that "The
survey builds a picture of a man who can't be pigeonholed as either
a binge-drinking, skirt-chasing new lad or a preening metrosexual
who spends more time in the bathroom than his girlfriend. Today's
man is a 'heteropolitan', trying to balance looking good with pub
culture, and career success with a happy family life." The word has
previously been used to describe a heterogeneous style of urban
architecture.
5. Book review: The Meaning of Tingo
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This little book, published in the UK last month, has attracted a
lot of media attention, with many subscribers forwarding notices to
me asking whether I was going to review it. The Independent said it
"is destined to be the Eats, Shoots and Leaves of the autumn" and
it looks certain to get on the non-fiction best-seller list. I had
the pleasure recently of taking part in a radio recording with its
author, Adam Jacot de Boinod, for the BBC World Service language
programme, The Word. And we share an editor, since Mr de Boinod is
published by Penguin, as is my own book Port Out, Starboard Home.
You must decide whether any of this influences my view of the book.
It's an odd little volume, which brings together hundreds of words
from 140 languages, "extraordinary words from around the world", as
the subtitle puts it. These are divided into chapterettes, short
sections on a theme. One of these is headed "Atishoo!" and begins
by noting that in Japan, one sneeze signifies praise, two sneezes,
criticism, and three, disparagement. This review stands at about
the two-and-a-quarter-sneeze mark.
He claims to have become entranced by language when he discovered
27 words for "moustache" in an Albanian dictionary, and another 27
for "eyebrows". He has found some gems of over-precise usage in his
trawls through dictionaries, such as the Persian "nakhur", which
means "a camel that won't give milk until her nostrils have been
tickled", or the Indonesian "didis", "to search and pick up lice
from one's own hair, usually when in bed at night", or one that
hits home, being a sufferer myself, the Cook Islands Maori word
"papakata", meaning to have one leg shorter than the other. The
Japanese have more than their share of terms in the book, such as
the wonderful "bakkushan", for a girl who looks as though she might
be pretty when seen from behind, but isn't from the front (though
the author doesn't mention it, this is an excellent example of the
Japanese ability to creatively borrow words from other languages,
in this case English "back" plus German "schön", beautiful). And
the meaning of "tingo"? It's from the Pascuense language of Easter
Island, meaning "to borrow objects from a friend's house, one by
one, until there's nothing left".
It is in etymology where Mr de Boinod's essentially amateur word-
sleuthing trips up most badly. The word "snob" does not derive from
"sine nobilitate", but from an old word for a cobbler (perhaps he
should have borrowed my book from our mutual editor, since it is
explained there). I suspect he doesn't know the origins of "putz",
which he glosses as "simpleton", but which both in Yiddish and in
English is a much ruder term that can mean the penis. My eyes went
round when he says that "papa" is used for "father" in "seventy per
cent of languages across the world". As there are 6,000+ languages,
and he says he has consulted no more than 280 dictionaries, that's
a whopping great generalisation from a tiny statistical sample. He
is cautious, however, about the common but false story that there
are vast numbers of Inuit words for snow, though he lists a jumbled
collection from various Inuit languages (as an aside on this, it
has been reported recently that climate change in the Arctic means
that snow and ice conditions are occurring for which the native
population has no words, since they've never seen them before). The
Inuit calendar words he lists are culturally fascinating, though he
has got them a bit mixed up, pushing together words from various
languages without identifying which come from which.
What bothers me about this book is that it's the product of a lot
of research slog - think of poring over all those dictionaries in
strange languages - but that the result is curiously superficial.
Few of the entries have more than a word or two of explanation; the
terms, such as those above, for complex and untranslatable ideas
have been seized upon by writers but constitute only a part of a
work which has too many inconsequentials (do readers really want a
list of the ancient Chinese counting words?) And I curse the lack
of an index.
I'd class The Meaning of Tingo as one for the Christmas stocking.
If you prefer something with more meat in it, you might try Howard
Rheingold's They Have a Word For It, or C J Moore's In Other Words,
which I was lacklustre about at the time, but which stands up well
against this competition.
[Adam Jacot de Boinod, "The Meaning of Tingo", published by Penguin
Books on 29 Sep 2005; hardback, pp209; ISBN 0140515615; publisher's
price GBP10.00. Not yet available in the USA.]
LINKS TO PREVIOUS REVIEWS
They Have a Word For It http://quinion.com?THAW
In Other Words http://quinion.com?INOW
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP6.00 http://quinion.com?M94T
Amazon Canada: CDN$18.40 http://quinion.com?M22T
Amazon Germany: EUR16,95 http://quinion.com?M83T
[Please use these links to buy. See C below for more details.]
6. Sic!
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A journalist on the BBC Radio Four news at 6pm on Friday evening
reported on the award of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize: "The IAEA's
director, Mohamed ElBaradei, began life as a diplomat." I bet he
didn't - he started as a baby like everybody else.
And BBC journalist Anthony Massey encountered a wonderful verbalism
while he waited for a long-delayed tube train. "I was intrigued to
hear the announcement: 'We severely apologise for the late running
of your train.' If that was how London Underground were talking,
none of us dared complain! Things are no better on London buses, on
which you will see a notice displayed behind the driver: 'Do not
speak to or obstruct the vision of the driver while the vehicle is
moving.' I'm not sure I like the idea of the driver having visions,
but at least you can address the vision, even get in its way if you
dare, once the bus has stopped."
Martin Turner reported from Hong Kong on 30 September: "In a BBC TV
report today, a US soldier leading a team searching house-to-house
in northern Iraq explained that they had found an arms cachet."
That sits nicely alongside the foodstuff spotted by Molly Wolf in a
photograph caption in last Wednesday's Toronto Star: "Saffa Hamid
prepares salmon canopies for the Daily Bread Food Bank ..."
Many thanks to Richard Larson, who found this on U-Wire, a college
wire service: "Joseph Webb went to his parents' house in New Mexico
to learn how to make wine from his stepfather." Mash, ferment, and
filter. How else? On the same lines, Shelley Stuart writes "A
recent banner ad caught my eye, which stated 'Recipes you can make
with your kids'. A companion guide, I assume, to the classic 'How
to Serve Man'."
A. E-mail contact addresses
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