World Wide Words -- 29 Apr 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 28 16:55:35 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 485 Saturday 29 April 2006
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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
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Quillon.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Up to speed.
5. Review: The Ring of Words.
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 - including
a small picture or two - is available online
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/mgav.htm
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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FORMATTED NEWSLETTER Apologies to everyone who tried to access the
formatted version last week, only to find it wasn't (yet) there. I
forgot to upload it the evening before, my usual practice. By the
way, there's now an index to the formatted newsletter back issues;
you'll find it at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/index.htm .
ONLY LANGUAGE The cockcrow critics were out in force last week. I
awoke to find a dozen messages, whose gentle ire was focused on the
item on "Vril": "But during his lifetime he was widely read, only
being outsold by Dickens." All objected to my placing of "only" and
said that it should have ended "... being outsold only by Dickens."
May I quote H W Fowler on the enduring controversy concerning where
to put "only" in a sentence? "Since the risk of misunderstanding
[is] chimerical, it is not worth while to depart from the natural."
A couplet by Lewis Carroll is also apposite, though you shouldn't
take the sentiment as relevant to the present case: "He only does
it to annoy, / Because he knows it teases." People have been upset
by the placing of "only" for at least the last 250 years, though
throughout that period all the best authors have - in theory - been
getting it wrong. The rule - that "only" should be placed as close
as possible to the word it modifies - was first promulgated by
Robert Louth, who in a varied career was a celebrated Hebrew
scholar, professor of poetry at Oxford, and bishop of London. If I
could take a time machine back to 1762, I'd try to dissuade him
from writing A Short Introduction to English Grammar, which -
though immensely popular at the time - has left a legacy of
misplaced prescriptivism.
LIFE IMITATES ART, AGAIN The Sic! section last week featured
"neckless" when "necklace" was meant. Jim Barrett comments: "I've
seen this in the US as well, and wondered just what the neckless
would do with a necklace. But in New York City last autumn, I saw
an ad for a piece of jewelry that is actually called a neckless. It
was the sort of bauble a woman might normally wear on a chain
around her neck, but was meant to be attached directly to the skin
with adhesive in the appropriate position."
HANGOVER Anne Chippindale pointed out a more modern appearance of
the idea of sleeping by leaning on a rope. It appears in Dido and
Pa, by Joan Aiken (1986), in which Mrs Bloodvessel charged 83
children a farthing a night for sleeping much the same way: "Dido
was puzzled, also, by the forest of ropes that dangled from bacon
hooks in the ceiling, with knotted loops at their lower ends, as if
this were a kind of hangman's warehouse; then she guessed what
their use must be as she saw Mrs Bloodvessel march over to a corner
where a sleeping boy dangled motionless with his head, arms and
shoulders through the loop of rope, and his feet dragging on the
flagstones."
Others said that they had come across the same story as a supposed
origin of "to be able to sleep on a clothesline", meaning to be so
tired one could sleep anywhere. There might be an association with
the dosshouse here, though it's impossible to be sure. But the idea
behind sleeping on a clothesline is that one lies along it, as in a
very thin hammock, being too dead tired to move about and so fall
off. It seems not to fit the situation.
2. Weird Words: Quillon
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The cross-guards of a sword.
Early in the history of sword-making it was realised that a guard
between the blade and the hilt was essential to stop the blade of
your opponent from sliding down yours and cutting into your hand.
The quillons are cross-pieces at right angles to the blade and
hilt, usually cast as an integral part of the hilt to give them
strength.
Though swords have had them for many centuries, this word for them
isn't recorded in English until R F Burton's The Book of the Sword
in 1884: "The quillons may be either straight - that is disposed at
right angles - or curved." (Before then, they seem simply to have
been called "cross-guards" or just "guards", as they often still
are.) The origin is said to be the French "quille", a ninepin,
though that makes more sense when you learn the French also used it
as a colloquial term for a leg, and so figuratively for the two
legs represented by the jutting quillons. You may prefer to write
the word as "quillion" instead, though this is less common.
In modern times, such technical terms have become useful in giving
a sense of place and time in sword-and-sorcery fantasy tales, as
here in a 1970 story by Fritz Leiber that was republished in 1995
in Ill Met in Lankhmar: "He took a few shuffling steps, tapping the
cobbles ahead with wrapped sword, gripping it by the quillons, or
cross guard, so that the grip and pommel were up his sleeve - and
groping ahead with his other hand." The other spelling appeared in
The Oathbreakers by Mercedes Lackey (1989): "The sheath looked as
if it had once had metal fittings; there were gaping sockets in the
pommel and at the ends of the quillions of the sword that had
undoubtedly once held gemstones."
3. Recently noted
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FRATIRE This turned up in the New York Times recently: "Young men,
long written off by publishers as simply uninterested in reading,
are driving sales of a growing genre of books like [Tucker] Max's
that combine a fraternity house-style celebration of masculinity
with a mocking attitude toward social convention, traditional male
roles and aspirations of power and authority... [T]hey collectively
represent the once-elusive male counterpart to so-called chick lit,
and so perhaps deserve an epithet of their own." The Guardian said,
"The fratire writers are cyber-characters, who hold themselves up
as a paragon of backlash - cocksure in the discovery that the more
misogynistic they are, the more attractive women seem to find
them." An older term, "dick-lit", might seem to have already filled
the linguistic need, but that's a more direct equivalent to chick-
lit, in which male narrators fret over their romantic screw-ups.
The Times' article didn't explain the origin of "fratire" but it
presumably comes from "fraternity" + "satire".
360-DEGREE COMMISSIONING The business field has long known of 360-
degree appraisals, 360-degree evaluations, and 360-degree feedback
as terms for getting formal reviews of an employee's performance
from everybody he or she comes into contact with. It's a jargony
way of saying "all-round". But this week, the Director General of
the BBC, Mark Thompson, used this variation in a press conference
about the future of the organisation. It turns out that "360-degree
commissioning" is a BBC insiders' term for creating concepts for
programmes that can employ several media at one time - not just
television and radio, but also interactive TV, local radio, mobile
phones, and the Net. The term goes back at least to 2004 and is
conceivably somewhat older.
4. Q&A: Up to speed
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Q. I am accustomed to hearing and using the phrase "up to speed". I
have always assumed it was a reference to the motion picture
industry practice of having film cameras ramp up to operating speed
before action is announced. Do you know the origin of this phrase?
[James McAdams]
A. These days, "up to speed" mostly often appears in non-technical
writing in the figurative sense of being fully informed or up to
date on some matter: "Kids know much more about these technologies
than their parents, and it's heavy lifting to get the adults up to
speed"; "Following the private meeting, the board now is up to
speed on the investigation".
"To bring up to speed" was reported by the New York Times in 1974
as a new jargon term, in the sense of "to brief", that had been
used during the Watergate hearings the previous year. It seems to
have been around earlier than that - there's a example in April
1970 in a report about the ill-fated Apollo 13 moon shot in which
John Swigert was a last-minute replacement for another astronaut:
"It's really a compatibility sort of thing to get him up to speed,
in language and responses."
So many examples refer to a machine being brought up to operating
speed - a boat, an electric motor, a car, or indeed a film camera -
that it looks as though that was the source. This goes back a long
way - I found an example in an advertisement for a waterwheel that
appeared in a lot of US newspapers around 1867; a letter from a
satisfied customer noted that "The wheel drives all my saws truly
up to speed, and gives abundance of power to do all the work the
saws are capable of doing."
However, the origin may not be mechanical but a person or animal
that was performing at its best rate. The Oxford English Dictionary
quotes the New York Times of 1879: "The mare was shown and her
qualities and record were expatiated on. She looked decent and up
to speed." I found another in a book of 1857 about a voyage of
exploration, in which the writer is chasing a boat that's floating
away, which he knew would leave them stranded if he didn't retrieve
it: "It was this conviction which, combined with my 'badly-scared'
condition, served to keep me up to speed, while I felt every moment
more and more like fainting."
5. Review: The Ring of Words
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Unless you've been imitating Rip Van Winkle for the past umpteen
years, any book with the word "ring" in its title will probably
remind you of J R R Tolkien's three-volume epic The Lord of the
Rings and the memorable films derived from it. The reference is
deliberate, as Tolkien's inventive use of language is its central
theme. Though it is accessibly written, The Ring of Words is
serious and scholarly both in intent and execution.
It's little known that, before he wrote his famous books, Tolkien
worked as a sub-editor at the Oxford English Dictionary for two
years, helping to compile the last section to be published. Peter
Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner - the authors of this
book - are among the present-day senior editors of the same work.
Their commemoration of his linguistic facility comes a little late
to the Tolkien party, but will interest anybody who regards the
language of the books to be one of their prime qualities.
This book is divided into three main parts. The first describes
Tolkien's work at the OED, which by a quirk of publication, dealt
with many words in W, such as "waggle", "wain", "waist", "wallop",
"walnut", "walrus", and "wampum". The second section focuses on the
influences that shaped Tolkien's linguistic invention, including
the deliberate archaisms of writers such as Sir Walter Scott and
his literary descendants. The third is a detailed treatment of a
hundred or so of Tolkien's most characteristic words, ranging from
"amidmost" to "wraith", via "confusticate", "eleventy-one", "ent",
"hobbit", "orc", "waybread", and "weregild".
Among them is "mathom", an archaic Old English word which he
revived to mean "anything that hobbits had no immediate use for,
but were unwilling to throw away". It's a favourite word of mine,
since I had a small hand in drafting the word's OED Online entry,
having found it, of all places, in an old issue of the computer
magazine Byte.
An afterword discusses Tolkien's influence on the English language
and shows how more recent writers - especially those working in the
fantasy genre - have frequently adopted his style and language.
[Peter Gilliver et al, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford
English Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press on 27
April 2006; hardback, pp240; ISBN 0-19-861069-6; publisher's UK
price GBP12.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP8.57 http://quinion.com?R38W
Amazon USA: US$15.75 http://quinion.com?R93W
Amazon Canada: CDN$17.13 http://quinion.com?R76W
Amazon Germany: EUR20,04 http://quinion.com?R28W
[Please use these links to buy. More information at C below.]
6. Sic!
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Alan Turner found this in the Shrewsbury Chronicle, dated 20 April:
"Police are appealing for witnesses to a road traffic collision at
Albrighton in which a cyclist suffered a broken ankle. The man was
cycling along the A528 when the collision occurred between the
Albrighton Hall Hotel and the Albright Hussey Hotel on March 25."
It gives an entirely new meaning to the term "mobile home".
Chester Graham read this in last weekend's Sydney Morning Herald,
in an interview with Glenn Richards of the Augie March music group:
"At the same time I'd been reading the poet Galway Kinnell and his
poem After Making Love We Hear Footsteps, a really lovely poem
about hearing a child walking up the hallway on a summer's evening
after making love to your wife."
"As a former magazine editor," Anthony Prete comments, "I usually
grin at typos rather than grimace. But I am less forgiving when the
mistake appears in the headline of a full-page ad opposite the
editorial page of the New York Times (Sunday 23 April), in which a
publishing company (Pantheon Books) spells the name of the biblical
prophet 'Jerememiah'!"
Louden Masterton reports, "I use some Hewlett-Packard equipment,
and yesterday my Inbox displayed an unsolicited item entitled 'HP
Technology at Work'. Item 4 of the section 'E-mail etiquette at
work' is headed 'Spelling and grammar still matters'. I'm sure that
you and I agrees with this assertion, as HP might put it."
Karen Hassall reports that a job ad in the newspaper Fort McMurray
Today of Alberta, Canada, claimed to have "positions available for
new and used salesmen."
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