World Wide Words -- 22 Apr 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 21 17:08:12 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 484 Saturday 22 April 2006
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Sent each Saturday to at least 33,000 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. Topical Words: Jafaikan.
3. Weird Words: Vril.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Hangover.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/hcst.htm
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SQUARE MEAL Lots of people suggested that the various expressions
that used "square" to mean honest or fair came from Masonic ritual.
And others pointed out that my reference to the Comstock lode was
incorrect, in that it was primarily a silver mine, not gold.
2. Topical Words: Jafaikan
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It's not a word you'll find in any dictionary, but it can be heard
on the streets of London. A number of newspaper articles last week
used it to describe a new multicultural dialect that is appearing
among young Londoners, whether their parents are of Bengali, West
Indian, Arab, Brazilian, or English stock. There's no doubt that
such a dialect has appeared or that the word exists; the fault lies
in linking the two.
"Jafaikan" or "Jafaican" is a blend of "Jamaican" and "African",
created because the parents of most black Londoners came to the UK
in the 1940s and 1950s from the West Indies, the majority from
Jamaica. The blend also includes "fake" as its middle element - as
a slang term it appears online as a mildly insulting reference to
black Londoners. It has also been used for a black equivalent of a
Trustafarian - a well-off, middle-class young black Londoner of
West Indian ethnicity. It looks like a black-on-black derogatory
formation that has echoes of "wigga", originally US but now also
British, for a white person who imitates black culture. It seems
that journalists have misunderstood the street usage and have
applied it wrongly to the dialect.
A team of linguists are investigating this emerging speech form, as
a three-year project led by Professor Paul Kerswill at Lancaster
University. They prefer the neutral term Multicultural London
English (MLE). That's because its vocabulary is not wholly West
Indian, though it's based on Jamaican patois and contains few words
of direct African origin. However, the popular "neng", meaning
excellent, is ultimately from the Mende language of West Africa,
albeit filtered through generations of Jamaicans (it's certainly
not an Australian expression, as an inventive etymologist claimed
in the Guardian).
Professor Kerswill commented in an article in New Scientist in
December 2005: "A clear new vernacular is emerging in inner London,
linking ethnicities, and forging shared identities - often around
music like rap, hip-hop, grime or bangra." One important shift is
in pronunciation - older long London vowels are becoming shorter,
so that "face" sounds like "fehs"; the traditional glottal stop in
which "t" is swallowed in words like "butter" is now less obvious.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of MLE is that it seems to be
displacing Estuary English, the slightly older dialectal pattern
formed in London as a mixture of traditional East End speech and
standard English. This became almost standard in the 1990s among
radio and television personalities who wanted to sound classless
and in touch with ordinary people.
3. Weird Words: Vril
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A fictional energy source.
We owe this word to the nineteenth-century novelist Edward Bulwer-
Lytton. In 1871, he published anonymously a prototypical science-
fiction novel, The Coming Race. A utopia in an underground lost
world is inhabited by a higher form of man whose strengths derive
from an intangible source of power called vril. The narrator, a
wealthy young American who stumbles upon the community while
exploring a mine, discovers vril is capable of almost anything:
These subterranean philosophers assert that by one operation
of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call 'atmospheric
magnetism', they can influence the variations of temperature -
in plain words, the weather; that by operations, akin to
those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force,
&c., but applied scientifically, through vril conductors,
they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal
and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances
of our mystics. To all such agencies they give the common
name of vril.
["Odic" here refers to an imaginary force, "od", which the famous
German chemist Baron von Reichenbach had claimed in an article in
1846 pervaded all nature and which was said to explain mesmerism
and animal magnetism.]
Today we find Bulwer-Lytton difficult to read, too florid and long-
winded for our tastes (we love making fun of the notorious opening
words of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford, "It was a dark and stormy
night ..."), though The Coming Race is still in print. But during
his lifetime he was widely read, only being outsold by Dickens. In
1834, the American Quarterly Review had called him "without doubt,
the most popular writer now living". The Coming Race was extremely
successful, going through eight editions in eighteen months, and
influenced many later SF writers, including H G Wells. A secret
group called the Vril Society is said to have reverse-engineered a
flying saucer from a crashed interstellar craft in Germany in the
1930s.
"Vril" briefly entered the language to mean a strength-giving
elixir. Its enduring legacy came with the decision in 1889 to name
a concentrated beef tea Bovril, a blend of "bovine" with the name
of Bulwer-Lytton's energising force.
4. Recently noted
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SPEAR-PHISHING The ability of computer professionals to come up
with fresh jargon never ceases to intrigue observers. We have just
about got used to the idea of "phishing" (a respelled "fishing")
for an attempt by e-mail to persuade you to visit what seems like
your bank's Web site - which is actually fake - and hand over your
password. Now the idea has been extended. A spear-phisher targets
you as an individual with an e-mail message that appears to come
from your employer or from your firm's help desk or a colleague -
anybody who might legitimately ask you for your password. If you
make the mistake of giving it, your company's entire computer
system is open to fraud.
NEW ONLINE RESOURCE World Wide Words subscribers in England (but
not the other parts of the UK) are now likely to have free access
to several of the major archive resources of the Oxford University
Press through their local library membership. All participating
libraries have access to the Oxford Reference Online, the Oxford
English Dictionary, and the Dictionary of National Biography. Most
also give access to Grove Art Online and Grove Music Online. The
best part is that you don't need to visit your library: you can log
on to the sites from any computer at any time using your library
card number.
LINKS
Participating libraries: http://quinion.com?OXLL
URLs of the resources: http://quinion.com?OXLS
5. Q&A: Hangover
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Q. A Sunday newspaper article recently claimed that 'hangover' has
nothing to do with alcohol but refers to Victorian workhouses, in
which inmates slept by draping their arms over a stretched-out rope
which they 'hung over' as it supported them. Is there any truth in
this? [Dennis J Hudson, London]
A. None whatsoever, but it's yet another good example of people
jumping to completely the wrong conclusion on the basis of knowing
a bit of esoteric information.
There really was once a sleeping system like that. The principal
reference I have for it is George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris
and London of 1933: "At the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit in a
row on a bench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on
this as though leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the
valet, cuts the rope at five in the morning. I have never been
there myself, but Bozo had been there often. I asked him whether
anyone could possibly sleep in such an attitude, and he said that
it was more comfortable than it sounded - at any rate, better than
bare floor." It's mentioned in a work of a century earlier, The
Magic Skin by Honoré de Balzac, which was translated into English
by Ellen Marriage in 1895: "We ... made it a point of honour to
find out whether you were roosting in a tree in the Champs-Elysées,
or in one of those philanthropic abodes where the beggars sleep on
a twopenny rope."
The connection sounds pretty convincing, with Orwell actually using
"hangover" to describe the method. But the historical evidence for
the word in the alcoholic sense shows that it's from the idea of
something that remains or is left over - a remainder or survival or
after-effect - not of a person literally being hung over anything.
Another folk etymology vanquished!
6. Sic!
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"I lament the lack of proofreading nowadays," e-mailed Annmaree
Dwyer from Australia, "and cringed when I chanced upon an error as
obvious as this from the Lincraft Essentials Catalogue 2006: 'Make
this neckless and earing set with Ribtex Beads.'"
"On the Enchilosa brand cup of noodles that I bought for lunch,"
James Armstrong thoughtfully communicates, "it says 'Be Careful
When Serving Children'. I've never served children, but I am a fan
of Swift."
Jody MacEachern e-mailed on Tuesday, having seen a job advert on
the Web site of the Public Service Commission of Canada offering a
post with Environment Canada as an "Ocean Disposal Technician".
"Where do you think they put all that water?" she asked.
A report in the New York Times of 18 April explored the history of
a purported feud between two Republican politicians in which - as
Dodi Schultz noted with some amusement - this sentence appeared:
"Through clenched teeth, he handed me a check for $750,000."
And Arnold Zwicky found a splendid mixed metaphor in an article in
the 17 April issue of Business Weekly: "Douglas fills a niche that
has fallen to the wayside."
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