World Wide Words -- 15 Apr 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 14 17:10:10 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 483 Saturday 15 April 2006
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to at least 32,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Social jet lag.
3. Weird Words: Anthropodermic.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Square meal.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
--------------
A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ahpx.htm
which includes one illustration
--------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
CAN OF WORMS Fishermen have told me that the annoying aspect of
opening a can of worms is that, being live bait, they crawl out and
are difficult to put back. So there may well be an association with
the idea of Pandora's Box, as the questioner suspected. The words
"can of ..." confused a few people, since in some countries, as in
the USA, this refers to a sealed tinplate container for preserving
food. This didn't worry me, as in Britain they're mostly called
tins (although beer comes in cans, for the very good reason that
these days they aren't tinplate but aluminium). The can in this
case is any small metal container with a handle and a lid. The OED
has a splendidly detailed definition: "Formerly used of vessels of
various materials, shapes, and sizes, including drinking-vessels;
now generally restricted to vessels of tin or other metal, mostly
larger than a drinking-vessel, and usually cylindrical in form,
with a handle over the top."
2. Turns of Phrase: Social jet lag
-------------------------------------------------------------------
An article in the journal Chronobiology International suggests that
many of us are living as though permanently in the wrong time zone,
because our body clocks are out of step with the routines of daily
life. Though the body's natural internal rhythm - what researchers
call our chronotype - is largely genetically determined, it's also
reset by daylight. Office workers, who spend long hours staring at
computer screens in artificial light, have body clocks that tend to
run free, uncorrected by reality. That could help to explain why so
many of us have trouble getting up in the morning. A study of more
than 500 volunteers by Prof Till Roenneberg of Ludwig Maximilians
University in Munich has suggested what may be an even more serious
consequence of this social jet lag, that the more out of step your
natural cycle is with reality, the more likely you are to become a
smoker.
* From the Scotsman, 30 Mar. 2006: Prof Roenneberg said the problem
was revealed at the weekends, when people reverted to more natural
sleep patterns. Those worst affected by "social jet-lag" slept for
about half their time off, simply to recover, he said.
* From New Scientist, 1 Apr. 2006: Only around 10 per cent of
people living within an hour of their natural body clock were
smokers, but this rose linearly to around 70 per cent of people
with 7 hours' social jet lag or more, as measured by the difference
between the mid-point of their sleep time on work days and free
days.
3. Weird Words: Anthropodermic
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Consisting of human skin.
West Yorkshire Police put out a macabre appeal on Friday 7 April. A
ledger had been found in the Headrow, one of the main streets in
Leeds, presumably dumped following a robbery. It had been written
in French and dated from the 1700s. The weird part is that it was
bound in human skin.
Surprisingly, though this is rare and remarkable, it isn't unique.
Archivists even have a name for it, "anthropodermic bibliopegy",
which, being translated from the decent obscurity of an ancient
tongue, literally means no more than the binding of books in human
skin. The first word is from Greek "anthropos", a human being, plus
"derma", skin or hide; the second is made up of "biblion", book",
plus "pegnunai", to fix - hence the art of binding books. One news
report called it "anthropodermic bibliophagy", an easy mistake to
make, but unfortunately suggesting that people devoured such books
(the last element is from Greek "phagein", to eat - a bibliophagist
is figuratively a voracious reader).
Libraries specialising in old books occasionally have examples.
Anatomy texts seem to have been favourites, which were covered in
skin taken from a dissected cadaver - suitably tanned first, of
course. There was some slight fashion in the nineteenth century of
binding the report of a murderer's trial with his skin. The most
famous British example is that of William Corder, hanged in 1828
for the murder of Maria Marten (still remembered by some as the
Murder in the Red Barn); the museum in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk
has an account of the trial bound in this way.
Why an account book should be so treated is puzzling. Perhaps the
owner had it covered in the skin of a defaulting debtor as a way of
getting his pound of flesh?
LINKS
* Follow http://quinion.com?BSEM for the full story of the Murder
in the Red Barn.
* There's a photograph of the William Corder book in the online
version of this newsletter.
* Follow http://quinion.com?WYHA for the West Yorkshire police
appeal regarding the book found in Leeds.
4. Recently noted
-------------------------------------------------------------------
FISHAPOD The reports last week of the discovery of a vital missing
link in the fossil record has led to this word appearing in public,
probably only briefly. The fossil is of a long-sought intermediate
between finned fish and four-footed land animals (the tetrapods),
that showed how animals first crawled from the sea on to land. The
fossil was found on Ellesmere Island in northern Canada and has
been given the formal name Tiktaalik roseae, whose first element is
the local Nunavut term for a large shallow-water species of fish.
Neil Shubin, a member of the team that found the fossil, jokingly
remarked that they called it a "fishapod", this being a blend of
"fish" and "tetrapod". Since the fossil provides insights into the
processes of evolution, others have started to call it the "Darwin
fish".
FRAMILY This word has been popping up recently in the UK because
of a study and an associated competition being run by the food
manufacturer Dolmio. It seems to have invented the term - at least,
all the examples I've found are either associated with it or are
misprints for "family". A framily is a combination of friends and
family that the manufacturer suggests is becoming the core support
network for young people.
5. Q&A: Square meal
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. What's the origin of "square meal"? [Hendear]
A. A pithy question, which is going to need a rather longer answer.
This common term for a satisfying and filling repast (as in "three
square meals a day") leads many amateur etymologisers towards
origins based on a literal reading of the words:
* Sailors used to eat off wooden boards; these were square in shape
and were usually not filled with food. However, after a heavy watch
the sailors were given a large meal which filled the board - a
square meal.
* In Britain of yore, a dinner plate was a square piece of wood
with a bowl carved out to hold your serving of the perpetual stew
that was always cooking over the fire. You always took your
'square' with you when you went travelling, in hopes of a square
meal.
* In former times in the US military, you were required to sit
formally at meals, bolt upright with arms at right-angles, so
forming a square shape. So a meal in the mess was always a square
meal.
Wonderful stuff. Rubbish, of course, but entertaining rubbish.
It's an interesting comment on the imagination of such storytellers
that they haven't created similar stories about "square deal" or
"fair and square". Yet these also employ "square" for something that
is fair, honest, honourable or straightforward. Older phrases of
similar type include "the square thing" and "square play". Several of
them date to the seventeenth century and even possibly earlier. This
figurative sense comes from the idea that something made with exact
right angles has been properly constructed ("right" in "right angle"
is another reference to the same idea).
We know that "square meal" was originally American. Early examples
seem to have come out of miners' slang from the western side of the
country. Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, refers to it as a
Californian expression. The oldest example I know of appeared in
the Morning Oregonian of Portland, Oregon, in 1862, about a hotel
that had opened in the town: "If you want a good square meal and a
clean bed to sleep in, give Mr Lee a call."
I found another reference in Harper's New Monthly Magazine of 1865,
about the gold mining town of Virginia City in Nevada, created to
serve the famous Comstock lode. "Says the proprietor of a small
shanty, in letters that send a thrill of astonishment through your
brain: 'LOOK HERE! For fifty cents you CAN GET A GOOD SQUARE MEAL
at the HOWLING WILDERNESS SALOON!'"
The writer felt the need to explain this strange phrase: "A square
meal is not, as may be supposed, a meal placed upon the table in the
form of a solid cubic block, but a substantial repast of pork and
beans, onions, cabbage, and other articles of sustenance."
Just so. Modern storytellers please copy.
6. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Dean Ogle e-mailed from Vancouver, BC with news that the 5 April
issue of a free tabloid in that city, 24 Hours, told its readers:
"This morning, the time read as 01:02:03 a.m. on 04/05/06. This
will not happen again in our lifetimes until the year 3006 AD."
"Gee," Mr Ogle commented, "even Methuselah only lived to be what,
930? And, of course, 04/05/06 will occur in 2106, 2206, and so on."
Reports Kate Nicholson: "A sign at my gym says 'The people using
this equipment after you hope you're going to wipe them down after
use'. Some people expect more from their workout than I do..."
Graham Millar noted that a restaurant in Kenmore, NY, advertises a
"Pre Fix" menu. This led him to wonder what the food would be like
after the repairs were made. (Is dessert included, or is that a
suffix?)
"The Lyme Regis accommodation Web site," Henry Drury e-mailed to
say, "describes the Mariners Hotel 'newly opened Brassiere'. I
guess diners might get more than they bargained for!" Well, the
site does describe the hotel as being "memorably different".
A. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to respond to something in a newsletter, ask a question
for the Q&A section, or otherwise contact Michael Quinion, please
send it to one of the following addresses:
* Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should
be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should be
addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't
use this to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail
the comment address instead)
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list
server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org
Please do not send attachments with messages.
B. Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm .
You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a full list
of commands, send a message containing the following two lines to
listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:
INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS
END
The "END" ensures that the list server doesn't get confused by your
signature or other text added to the outgoing message.
This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. The address is
http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .
Recent back issues are archived at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/
C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words newsletter and Web site are free, but if you
would like to help with their costs, here are some ways to do so.
If you order any goods from any of these online stores (not just
new books), you can use one of these links, which gets World Wide
Words a small commission at no extra cost to you:
Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA
Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ
Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG
Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX
If you would like to contribute a sum to the upkeep of World Wide
Words through PayPal, enter this link into your browser:
http://quinion.com?PP
You could also buy one of my books, of course. See
http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm and
http://www.worldwidewords.org/ologies.htm .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2006. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online
newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include
this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed
publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which
you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list