World Wide Words -- 01 Oct 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 30 17:03:46 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 461 Saturday 1 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: Spatterdashes.
3. Book review: Talking For Britain.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Shrink.
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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NIHILARTIKEL Last week's issue mentioned the recently discovered
fake entry in the New Oxford American Dictionary. It turns out that
"Nihilartikel" is a German term for such entries, formed from Latin
"nihil", nothing, plus "Artikel", so a "nothing article". Some
writers have borrowed it to fill a gap in English vocabulary.
Others have used "Mountweazel", derived from the deliberately false
entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel that appeared in the 1975
edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. (The article claimed that
she was a fountain designer turned photographer, celebrated for a
collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled "Flags
Up!") Another term is "ghost word", though this strictly refers to
an entry that appears in a dictionary as the result of an editorial
error, such as the one for "dord" in Webster's New International
Dictionary in 1934, a misprint for "D or d", as an abbreviation for
"density".
A much older example of a Nihilarticle (or it may have been a hoax
by the editor, celebrating the end of the job) formed the final
entry in several editions of Rupert Hughes' The Music Lovers'
Encyclopedia, first published in 1903; it asserted that "zzxjoanw"
was the name of a Maori drum. I know several popular works on
etymology that cite the word in all seriousness, despite the fact
that there's no Z, X or J in the Maori language and that it was
exposed as a fake in 1976.
2. Weird Words: Spatterdashes
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Long gaiters or leggings.
Travelling on horseback in earlier centuries could be unpleasant in
wet weather, with all that water and mud kicked up by the hooves.
Nobody found a way to put mudguards on horses, but they did the
next best thing by putting guards on the rider's legs. (It was the
same idea as the chaps of cowboys, except that the latter guarded
against the thorns of the chaparral rather than mud.) These gaiters
or spatterdashes - an obvious but effective name - were of leather,
tied around the legs below the knees, as Daniel Defoe has Robinson
Crusoe describe: "Stockings and shoes I had none, but had made me a
pair of somethings, I scarce knew what to call them, like buskins,
to flap over my legs, and lace on either side like spatterdashes,
but of a most barbarous shape, as indeed were all the rest of my
clothes." (Buskins were a kind of high-legged leather boots.)
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, people had started to
abbreviate the word to spats; in sympathy with their abbreviated
name these had become much shorter, fastening under the shoe but
reaching little higher than the ankle. In this form - and always in
sober grey, black or white - they became part of the uniform of the
well-dressed city man, as Conan Doyle implies in the Sherlock Homes
story The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge: "From his spats to his gold-
rimmed spectacles he was a Conservative, a churchman, a good
citizen, orthodox and conventional to the last degree."
P G Wodehouse had great fun inventing stories featuring young men
in spats (in 1936 he even gave a book that title). In Jill the
Reckless of 1921, one named Freddie attempts to stop a man called
Henry from poking a parrot with a stick: "'Just because you've got
white spats,' proceeded Henry, on whose sensitive mind these
adjuncts of the costume of the well-dressed man about town seemed
to have made a deep and unfavourable impression, 'you think you can
come mucking around and messing abart and interfering and mucking
around. This bird's bit me in the finger, and 'ere's the finger, if
you don't believe me - and I'm going to twist 'is ruddy neck, if
all the perishers with white spats in London come messing abart and
mucking around, so you take them white spats of yours 'ome and give
'em to the old woman to cook for your Sunday dinner!'"
3. Book review: Talking For Britain
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The BBC, for whom author Simon Elmes works as Creative Director in
the Radio Documentaries Unit, has recently finished a series of six
radio broadcasts on Radio 4 called Word 4 Word. These are available
via http://quinion.com?W44W (though the link at the top, "Listen to
the most recent edition", gives you the wrong programme at the time
of writing).
The series is part of the BBC's Voices project, which involved the
staff of local and regional radio recording hundreds of hours of
speech in the winter of 2004/2005. This book is complementary to
the Word 4 Word series - and also to earlier ones such as Routes of
English - and has the subtitle "A Journey Through the Nation's
Dialects". Simon Elmes has been able to draw not only on this new
material, but on previous recording projects of the BBC and on the
older Survey of English Dialects by Harold Orton and colleagues at
Leeds University, as well as the more recent work of Stanley Ellis
and others.
He tours Britain, starting in Cornwall and travelling up-country to
end in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Along the way he describes
not only the local language and pronunciation but also the cultural
links of local words with daily life, present and past. His source
material is rich, so he doesn't only give an up-to-date snapshot of
British regional speech (important in itself), but also contrasts
it with older material and so show how it has changed, not only
using old language recordings but also historical writing by people
who knew their area intimately. He's particularly good with the
modern urban dialects of London and other big cities, which have
borrowed from American English, Afro-Caribbean English and - to a
lesser extent - from the languages of immigrants from the Indian
subcontinent. But he doesn't neglect the older accents of the
countryside and small towns; they're in relative decline, but
historically they're the source of much vocabulary that we now
regard as standard.
He writes in the introduction: "Alongside such wonderful old local
usages (still just about surviving) as 'ferntickle' for freckle and
'erriwiggle' for earwig, Voices recorded the nation-beating triumph
of a handful of modern slang terms that have passed into almost
everyone's lexicon: 'knackered' for tired (despite the frequent
observation that it was a rather vulgar word), 'chuffed' for
pleased and 'loaded' for rich. There were some surprises too: the
spreading use of the originally northern word 'keks' for trousers,
as also 'strides' (surprisingly widespread) and 'pants' - though it
seems this is indigenous usage and not borrowed from the US."
He manages all this while writing in an easy conversational style.
His descriptions link transcripts of conversations (translated when
they become too richly obscure) and include many anecdotes drawn
from interviewees, researchers and his own memories of his youth in
Bristol. A vocabulary at the end of each chapter lists the key
words he has discussed and an index of all the regional words means
you can be sure of finding those you're interested in. His book
shows that Britain is still a country of linguistic contrasts, with
many local dialects holding their own against change.
Recommended.
[Simon Elmes, Talking for Britain, published by Penguin Books on 22
August 2005; hardback, pp333; ISBN 0140515623; publisher's UK price
GBP14.99.]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP10.49 (http://quinion.com?T76B)
Amazon Canada: CDN$22.40 (http://quinion.com?T98B)
Amazon USA: US$19.49 (http://quinion.com?T32B)(via agent)
Amazon Germany: EUR24,90 (http://quinion.com?T54B)
[Please use these links to buy. See C below for more details.]
4. Noted this week
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NOSE DISTRACTION This is a fine example of official euphemism in
Britain. It is part of a restraint system called "physical control
in care" for young offenders held in secure training centres. Nose
distraction is a method of last resort to end a violent situation.
Essentially it is a karate chop to the nose.
5. Q&A
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Q. How did "shrink" come to mean a psychiatrist? I noticed on one
site they referred to the psychiatrist as a "head-shrinker", which
also had the meaning of a person who cuts off and preserves other
people's heads as trophies. Are the two meanings related? [Susan
Korrel]
A. It looks pretty clear that they are, though absolute proof, as
so often, cannot be forthcoming because there's no way to find the
person who invented the term and ask him. The original meaning of
the term head-shrinker was in reference to a member of a group in
Amazonia, the Jivaro, who preserved the heads of their enemies by
stripping the skin from the skull, which resulted in a shrunken
mummified remnant the size of a fist. The term isn't that old -
it's first recorded from 1926.
All the early evidence suggests that the person who invented the
psychiatrist sense worked in the movies (no jokes please). We have
to assume that the term came about because people had deep-seated
anxieties and suspicions about what psychiatrists actually did to
their heads and how they did it. So they started to compare it to
the reduction of enemies' heads to a ceremonial token.
The earliest example we have is from an article in Time in November
1950 to which an editor has helpfully added a footnote to say that
"head-shrinker" was Hollywood jargon for a psychiatrist. The term
afterwards became moderately popular, in part because it was used
in the film Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. Robert Heinlein felt his
readers needed it to be explained when he introduced it into Time
For The Stars in 1956: "'Dr. Devereaux is the boss head-shrinker.'
I looked puzzled and Uncle Steve went on, 'You don't savvy?
Psychiatrist.'" By the time it turns up in West Side Story on
Broadway in 1957 it was becoming established.
"Shrink", the abbreviation, became popular in the USA in the 1970s,
though it had first appeared in one of Thomas Pynchon's books, The
Crying of Lot, in 1965.
6. Sic!
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Randall Bart saw a television weatherman commenting on hurricane
Rita (he thinks it was on CNN, but he might be wrong), who pointed
at the map and said "You'll see Rita is now not as symmetrical on
the west side as it is on the east side."
And Mr Bart recently visited a Mongolian restaurant, which supplied
patrons with a pamphlet containing Mrs Kim's advice for a happy
family. "I was intrigued by one of her claims: 'Eighty percent of
divorces involve a gamboling problem.' I suppose it depends who one
gambols with."
On 24 September, Robert Smallwood read an article in The Calgary
Herald about the registration of minor hockey players. Ken Moore,
President of the Minor Hockey Association of Calgary, commented on
the benefits to players: "The life skills they get are next to
none". Mr Smallwood thinks he may have meant to say "second to
none", but perhaps he was just being brutally honest.
The Reverend John Carl Bowers writes: "A sidewalk sign in Brooklyn,
NY, reads: 'Psychic Reader! Come in for FREE questions!' Thanks,
but what I'd like is some answers." Not wishing to be impertinent,
Rev, but isn't that more in your line?
A. E-mail contact addresses
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