World Wide Words - 05 Aug 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 4 18:29:15 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 499 Saturday 5 August 2006
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Sent each Saturday to at least 45,000 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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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/hdit.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Gunsel.
3. Weird Words: Astrobolism.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: List slippers.
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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DEMOCRAZY My squib on this word last week ended with a note that
it was the title of the Smith's album in 1991. Subscribers were
quick to tell me that the Smiths have never had an album of that
title; others criticised my grammatical error, since it should have
been "Smiths'", or perhaps "Smiths's". The album was actually a
little-known solo one by Judge Smith, a founder member of the band
Van der Graaf Generator, so the error was including the "the"!
EPEOLATRY Learned subscribers pointed out that it is not possible
for this word to have come from ancient Greek "epeos", since there
was no such word. The correct derivation is from "epos".
2. Topical Words: Gunsel
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In modern American slang a gunsel is a criminal carrying a gun. So
it was natural that it should be spoken in the episode of Deadwood
aired in the US this week. The two saloon keepers Al Swearengen and
Cy Tolliver both refer to the brothers Wyatt and Morgan Earp, who
had supposedly saved the stagecoach from road agents, as "gunsels",
meaning gunslingers. The summary of the plot on the Home Box Office
Web site says: "Cy presents to Hearst his plot to engender a duel
between Bullock and Wyatt Earp; '...whether Bullock or this gunsel
stood at the finish there'd be no losing in it for you.'"
Wyatt Earp, the famous US marshal of Wichita and Dodge City, was
certainly recorded as being in Deadwood in 1876, so the historical
setting is right. But nobody could have called him a gunsel for two
reasons: the word didn't exist then, and even when it came into
existence, about twenty years later, it didn't mean a gunman but a
raw youth. In particular, in convict and tramp slang a gunsel was a
young homosexual male, especially one who was the companion of an
older man. It is generally taken to derive from the Yiddish
"gendzel", a little goose, from German "Gänslein", a gosling.
A plausible story of the way the word changed sense was told by
Erle Stanley Gardner in an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1965.
He claimed it was all the fault of Dashiell Hammett. Together with
Gardner, Raymond Chandler and others, he was a contributor to the
old Black Mask pulp magazine edited by Joseph Shaw that featured
naturalistic crime stories. But Shaw was dead against including
vulgarisms and blue-pencilled some of Hammett's underworld usages.
To retaliate, as Gardner told the story, Hammett laid a trap for
Shaw. In his next story he included the term "gooseberry lay". Shaw
pounced on this and rejected it, though it wasn't a rude term at
all but tramps' slang for stealing washing off clotheslines to
sell. But Hammett also included "gunsel" in the story, which Shaw
left in, thinking it meant "gunman".
The significant appearance of the word was in Hammett's The Maltese
Falcon, serialised in Black Mask in 1929 and published as a novel
the following year: "'Another thing,' Spade repeated, glaring at
the boy: 'Keep that gunsel away from me while you're making up your
mind. I'll kill him." The word was spoken by Humphrey Bogart as Sam
Spade in the 1941 film of the book and so became much more widely
known. If you read Hammett's description of the boy, you'll realise
that he was subtly making the point that he actually was gay, but
if you hadn't been tuned into that you might miss it.
3. Weird Words: Astrobolism
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The blasting of plants by the sun during high summer.
Literally, it's the result of being struck by a star, as it comes
from the Greek "astron" (as in "astronomy" and many other words),
plus "bolis", a missile (which is also the source of "bolide").
The star is Sirius, the dog star; because it rises and sets with
the sun during summer in the northern hemisphere, it has lent its
name to "dog days" for the hottest part of the year in places north
of the equator. The dog days are those from about the middle of
July to the middle of August (though opinions about the exact dates
vary depending on where you live).
The thought behind "astrobolism" is connected to the old idea that
this period of summer is under a malign influence, in which dogs
run mad, the air is unwholesome, sunstroke is common, and all
useful works stagnate for want of effort.
It was first recorded in Nathaniel Bailey's Dictionary, dated 1721.
Apart from very occasional appearances in other reference works, it
has had almost no circulation at all.
4. Recently noted
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CELLYWOOD John McNeil spotted this the other day. By a strained
analogy with Hollywood and Bollywood, it refers to films made to be
shown on cellphones. As that is the usual US name for the devices
we in Britain prefer to call mobile phones (or just mobiles or even
mobes), it is probably an American creation. The earliest instance
I can find was in Wired Magazine in March 2005 and it seems to have
had its brief fling of popularity last year.
LUDOLOGY This is in the Jargon Watch column of the current issue
of Wired Magazine (August 2006). It refers to the study of games,
in particular computer and video ones. The word derives from the
Latin "ludus", which is also the source of the name of the board
game Ludo. The earliest example I can find is from a Usenet posting
in 1996, but it began to be more widely known around 2004, to judge
from its appearances in newspapers. By that date many colleges in
the USA and elsewhere had begun to offer courses in video-game
design. A person who studies such games is, of course, a
ludologist.
UNCANNY VALLEY It's a real place, California residents will tell
me, but it's also the name of a principle in computer animation
that turned up in an article on the gamasutra.com Web site this
week. As imaging techniques improve and faces become progressively
more photorealistic and human-like, our attitudes to them change in
an interesting way. In the early stages, we become more positive
about them as they become more realistic, but once they reach a
critical point they begin to look eerie and disquieting because
they're just wrong enough to make us extremely uneasy about them.
As the quality of the images improve further we once again begin to
react positively to them. A graph of our responses against realism
has a big dip in it - this is the Uncanny Valley. The concept was
formulated in the 1970s by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist,
but the earliest English translation of the phrase dates from about
1995.
BLACK DOLLARS This term usually refers to money belonging to black
Americans, but another sense turned up this week in reports of a
London libel case. Black dollars are black pieces of paper. In
parts of Africa and India some people believe that if these are
dipped in the appropriate chemicals, they turn into real US dollar
bills. Fraudsters have reportedly sold paper dyed black to gullible
businessmen. The scam reported this week added another level of
confusion by alleging that red mercury was needed to make the
change. This would be difficult, as red mercury doesn't exist. It
was supposedly a powerful explosive that could be used to make
fusion bombs; it was invented by the KGB during the Cold War as a
sting for terrorists. If they tried to buy it they were arrested.
5. Q&A: List slippers
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Q. Any idea what "list slippers" are? Arnold Bennett, the Old
Wives' Tale, refers. [Peter Chitty]
A. The passage you refer to reads: "Sophia wore list slippers in
the morning. It was a habit which she had formed in the Rue Lord
Byron - by accident rather than with an intention to utilize list
slippers for the effective supervision of servants." That, by
itself, serves only to deepen the mystery, since it's far from
immediately clear why such footwear should help with that.
Let's take it from the top. There are eight different senses of the
noun "list" in the Oxford English Dictionary. The relevant one is
now rare. It came into English from the Germanic languages with the
meaning of a border or boundary (the lists, the place where a
medieval jousting tournament was held, is an example of that sense;
it derives from the name given to the barriers that enclosed the
space in which the tournament took place).
More particularly, a list was the border or edging of a piece of
cloth, its selvage, woven in a slightly different way from the body
of the material so that it would not fray or unravel. List slippers
were made of material woven in this way.
List slippers were often worn when quiet was needed, say when a
person in the house was ill and people walking about in ordinary
shoes on bare floors would disturb them. In an old parenting
manual, Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children, by
Pye Henry Chavasse, of 1878, the author noted that in a sick room
nurses ought to wear "list slippers - soles and all being made of
list" to maintain quiet. So Sophia could more easily supervise her
servants by wearing them because she could creep up on them
unawares. The same idea turns up in Oscar Wilde's The Canterville
Ghost, in which the put-upon spectre "gave up all hope of ever
frightening this rude American family, and contented himself, as a
rule, with creeping about the passages in list slippers".
The same footwear was worn by gunners on board ship when working
with gunpowder, as C S Forester explained in Lieutenant Hornblower:
"Mr Hobbs, the acting-gunner, with his mates and helpers, made a
momentary appearance on their way down to the magazine. They were
all wearing list slippers to obviate any chance of setting off
loose powder which would be bound to be strewn about down there in
the heat of action."
6. Sic!
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"Did you know the lung is a memory device?" asked Ron Krueger. He
had been reading the Claim with Colchamiro column in the July 2006
issue of Bridge Bulletin, produced by the American Contract Bridge
League: "COPA is a pneumonic device that helps players understand
signaling better."
The New York Times of 29 June reported: "The F.B.I. has said that a
separate raid on Mr. Jefferson's home in Washington turned up
$90,000 in cash hidden in a freezer that had been provided to the
lawmaker as part of an F.B.I. sting." Amy Livingston read this
through several times but still isn't sure whether it was the cash
or the freezer that was provided as part of the sting.
On the job wire of the US National Association of Science Writers
Merry Maisel spotted an advertisement for the post of director of
public relations and communications at the San Diego Supercomputer
Center: "Develop communication vehicles that meet the highest
editorial standards and follow the tenants of communications
etiquette."
"I don't know whether this is eligible for the 'sic' part of your
newsletter," e-mailed Ted Friethoff from the Netherlands, "but when
on holiday in Ireland I passed a sign which read: 'Waterfall closes
at 7'. I imagined Paddy turning a huge tap."
Sometimes spelling errors can be terribly public. Jayne Mahoney
tells me that a trailer currently running on Sky Movies in the UK
for the six Star Wars films focuses on the Roman numeral "VI".
Words such as "vile" and "vicious" caption shots of the baddies.
The first one, a shot of Darth Vader, is captioned "villan".
Martin Turner noted this on the Yahoo! Movie Directory listing:
"Official site of the animated movie The Ant Bully, about a boy who
is shrunken down to the size of an aunt and put on trial by the ant
colony after repeatedly stomping on aunts and their homes." That's
a relatively minor error, you may feel.
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