World Wide Words -- 12 Aug 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 11 16:51:00 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 500 Saturday 12 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/xtjk.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. A Pause to Reflect.
3. Weird Words: Totter.
4. Q&A: Stiff upper lip.
5. Recently noted.
6. Q&A: Orey-eyed.
7. 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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RED MERCURY I just knew mentioning this last week was going to be
a red rag to all you conspiracy theorists and amateur chemists. To
clear up one source of misunderstanding: the substance alchemists
once sometimes knew as red mercury is now usually called cinnabar,
an important ore of the metal consisting of mercuric sulphide. It
has no connection with the red mercury that I mentioned, which is
sometimes claimed to be mercury mixed with antimony that has been
irradiated in a nuclear reactor. Much has been written about this
substance, but the informed consensus is that it doesn't exist.
Search online for "red mercury conspiracy theories" for some
interesting comment.
GUNSEL Many Australians pointed out that in their country the word
- in the spelling "gunzel" - means a railway or tramway enthusiast
(otherwise in various countries a railfan, trainspotter or gricer).
In early appearances it referred to the kind of obsessive and over-
enthusiastic scruffy fan who travels with notebooks and cameras and
who would bore you to tears with arcane information if you let him
get started. This extraordinary shift in meaning is said to have
taken place at the Sydney Tramway Museum in the 1960s through a
misunderstanding of the term in The Maltese Falcon. These days, I
am told, the term is worn with pride.
2. A Pause to Reflect
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As the issue numbers at the top of newsletters have risen week by
week, a sense of impending celebration has grown in this ivory-
towered eyrie. And now the moment has come: you are reading issue
500 of World Wide Words.
It is also 10 years since the first pages were posted to the Web
site. What began as hobbyist self-indulgent self-publishing - we
might call it a blog today but the word wasn't then known - has
grown into a full-blooded if still non-commercial enterprise that
at times seems to have taken over my life. If there's ever a moment
at which to stand back and review how I got from there to here,
this must be it.
It all began in August 1995. Our son Brian was in the sixth form at
school and already an accomplished computer programmer. He wrote a
universal spelling checker that would work in any application that
ran under the then current version of Microsoft Windows, 3.1. He
realised it was commercially viable and created a Web site through
which to sell it - this at a time when Web sites were numbered in
the low thousands, not the hundreds of millions. The program was
popular and the proceeds helped to pay his way through university.
His pages took up only a small proportion of the space available on
the site. So I thought it would be interesting to post some pieces
about language that had been provoked by my contributions to the
Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english. By then I'd been a freelance
researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary for about three years,
an interesting job involving regular reading of many publications
for new words. That work generated additional material on language
that it seemed worth sharing with others.
The first week, World Wide Words online consisted of three pages,
among them an article on the almost vanished cant language of the
British theatre and showmen, Polari, which is still there. The e-
mail newsletter first appeared on 12 July 1996, a slim forerunner
of its expansive current format.
That first issue of the newsletter had seven subscribers. Now it
has 26,750+ by e-mail and another 15,000+ via RSS, with readers
coming from at least 120 countries (I've lost count). The Web site
has grown to more than 1,800 pieces. Each month, the site receives
1.7 million page hits from more than 750,000 individual visitors.
Many commercial sites would like to boast such numbers.
In the ten years from then to now, I've received many thousands of
interesting e-mails from subscribers and site visitors. There are
always readers who know more about the topics I write about than I
do. With their help, the site has become a respected, if somewhat
garrulous, reference point for people interested in the way our
language has evolved and continues to change.
I hope in absentia you will all raise a glass of something suitable
to join me in wishing for a happy continuation of our relationship.
But you must excuse me from being too extravagant with my imbibing
today. By an odd coincidence, tomorrow - 13 August - my wife and I
celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary.
3. Weird Words: Totter
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A rag-and-bone collector.
Not, you will note, the verb to move unsteadily (which comes from
the Middle Dutch "touteren", to swing), nor to do with tiny tots
(which you might wrongly guess is an abbreviated form of "totter",
but which is actually an old English dialect word whose origin is
unknown, though it's the same one as a tot of spirits and so means
something small), nor has it anything do with a person who tots up
figures to come to a total (that's an abbreviation from the Latin
"totum", total, which was once marked against a summed figure in
account books). Our totters' name is from the old slang term "tot"
for a bone, as in the nineteenth-century "tot-hunter", a gatherer
of bones, a word also used as a term of abuse; both may come from
the German "tot", dead.
Totters were once a familiar sight in the streets of every town and
city in Britain, often announcing their presence with the ringing
of a handbell and the cry of "rags, bones, bottles" that had been
so often repeated it had been reduced to a hoarse, inarticulate
shout. The original totters, of nineteenth-century Britain, really
did collect rags and bones, among other items. The former were sold
to a rag merchant who sold them on to firms that reprocessed them
into the cheap material called shoddy. The latter were the remnants
of families' meals, which were sent to firms that rendered them
down for glue. Some even swept out the fireplaces and ovens of the
more prosperous households, sifting out the ashes to sell to soap-
makers and selling on the half-burnt coals and logs to those in
need of cheap fuel. It was recycling at its most basic.
Later, the cry was often "any old iron", commemorated in a famous
music-hall song. By the early 1960s, when BBC Television produced
Steptoe and Son about two rag-and-bone men in Shepherd's Bush, west
London, the totting trade in its old form was pretty much extinct:
nobody wanted rags and bones any more. The men of that period and
later were scrap merchants, picking up any unwanted item of junk
that looked as though it might be worth a few coins.
4. Q&A: Stiff upper lip
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Q. I couldn't find the origin of the phrase "stiff upper lip". Any
suggestions? [Isabel Hefner]
A. To keep a stiff upper lip is to display courage and resolution
in the face of adversity, to maintain a stoic appearance and so
avoid showing weakness or emotion. The idea behind it is that when
fear or other deep emotion threaten to overcome a person, one of
the first signs is the upper lip beginning to tremble. In Britain,
it has long since become a cliché linked to the once much-admired
products of the public schools, who were sent into the Empire to
battle adversity while keeping their emotions bottled up and their
countenances cheerful, because it was the thing to do.
George Orwell semi-satirised it in his essay Inside The Whale of
1940: "With Maugham it is a kind of stoical resignation, the stiff
upper lip of the pukka sahib somewhere east of Suez, carrying on
with his job without believing in it, like an Antonine Emperor."
James Hilton used it in all seriousness in Beau Geste in 1924:
"Anyhow, I conquered the yearning to go back to her, and when the
local train loafed in I got into it, with a stiff upper lip and a
bleeding heart, and set out on as eventful and strange a journey as
ever a man took."
It's so characteristically English (P G Wodehouse wrote a novel
with the title Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves) that I was amazed to find
it's American. The earliest known example appeared in a publication
called the Massachusetts Spy on 14 June 1815; "I kept a stiff upper
lip, and bought [a] license to sell my goods." It's well recorded
throughout the nineteenth century in works like Thomas Haliburton's
The Clockmaker of 1837, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
of 1852, and in works by Horatio Alger, Petroleum V Nasby, Mark
Twain, and others. It was only near the end of the century that it
started to appear in British publications.
5. Recently noted
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INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY Anybody who makes a firm statement about
language arouses my researcher's instinct. When Peter Preston wrote
in the Observer of 30 July that this phrase "did not exist in May
1948", it was a challenge impossible to ignore. Presumably he had
checked the Oxford English Dictionary, which includes the term only
from 1959 (and doesn't have a separate entry for it). But a little
searching found it a number of times in news reports near the end
of the Second World War in reference to the setting up of what was
to become the United Nations. But the earliest example I've found
is thirty years earlier, in the manifesto of Theodore Roosevelt's
US Progressive Party (the Bull Moose party) of 7 June 1916: "The
United States is now a part of a world system of civilization. We
stand or fall as we prepare to take our parts in peace or war and
hold our own therein. As members of an international community we
are subject to certain basic duties."
FIRESCAPING The Daily Bulletin of Ontario (the California one) has
introduced me to this term, one well understood in areas subject to
forest fires. Firescaping is landscaping that helps protect your
home from wildfires, for example by replacing flammable shrubs and
trees with fire-resistant species. The earliest example I've found
so far is from a newspaper in Placerville, California, in 1994.
DECATHECT An amusing article in last Sunday's Observer about the
Lumos 2006 conference in Las Vegas, which was billed as "a Harry
Potter symposium", noted it included lectures such as "Muggles and
Mental Health: Rites of Transformation and a Psychoanalytical
Perspective on the Inner World of Harry Potter", a title which it
is impossible to parody. The lecturer was quoted: "Hogwarts is a
tangible liminal space where Harry learns to re-sort Bad Objects
and decathect from them". It took a while to interpret this bit of
academic jargon with the help of the Web. "Decathect" is a recent
verb, not yet in most dictionaries, which has been formed from the
older "decathexis". This is a psychoanalytical term for the process
of withdrawing one's feelings of attachment from some person, idea,
or object in anticipation of a future loss. So you might say, "He
decathected from her in order to cope with her impending death."
THREEQUEL The desire to cash in on a profitable book or film by
producing another using the same characters is keeping neologists
busy. A letter published in the Guardian last weekend pointed me to
this odd-looking example. The standard term is sequel, from which
the others derive. We're also now well used to prequel, for a work
that's published later but set earlier in time. A threequel is the
third in a series, such as Return of the Jedi, Terminator 3: Rise
of the Machines, and Godfather III. You can also have an interquel,
which is set in the period between two previously published works.
6. Q&A: Orey-eyed
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Q. Firstly thanks for your great and informative Web site. I have
an interesting term I have came across: orey-eyed. The etymology is
unknown, as far as my research could tell, so I'm interested to see
if you can discover where its origin lies. [Maurits Zwankhuizen,
Canberra, Australia]
A. It was new to me too, which added interest to my search. It is
common online, especially in reference to the Orey-eyed Oghamist,
whoever he is. One dictionary site defined it as "expressing anger
through the eyes". An article on horsemanship said that "orey-eyed"
meant roughly the same as "wall-eyed", for a horse that shows white
around the rim of the eyes because he is frightened.
None of my standard reference works contained it, but I ran it to
earth in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), which
says it means "having bleary or wild-looking eyes, especially as a
result of drunkenness" and that it could also mean that somebody is
drunk or enraged. It has examples going back to a discussion of it
by H L Mencken in 1919, though the first appearance DARE gives from
real life is in Chevrons, a war novel by Leonard Nason dated 1926:
"'I know him,' said Short, 'he's the man that brought you home the
night you got orey-eyed at Cokeydawn." The earliest I've found is
in The Post Standard of Syracuse, NY, in 1910: "And Harte did a job
on the orey-eyed slob that was vivid and livid and nifty."
Now at last to your question. Nobody knows the answer for certain.
Mencken thought it was actually "awry-eyed", which is a reasonable
guess, but DARE points to the old Scottish term "oorie", which is
defined in the Concise Scots Dictionary as referring to persons or
things that are "dismal, gloomy, miserable-looking, from cold,
illness, etc." If you include drunkenness in that "etc.", you're
well on the way to the modern American sense.
7. Sic!
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Following the foiled terrorist plot to blow up aircraft leaving the
UK, security was tightened. The Gatwick Airport site, Ben Ostrowsky
notes, interprets this disturbingly: "Hand baggage restrictions are
in place; Passengers will be handsearched; Footwear and all items
(including pushchairs and walking aids) must be x-ray screened;
Liquids will be removed from the passenger." Is that like taking
the piss?
Linda Kerby read the Patient Discharge Instructions when she was
released from hospital and began to wonder about the dressings
that had been placed over her surgical incision: "Leave clear tape
or steri strips intact, it will peal off on its own." Ask not for
whom the dressings toll ...
A note on a standard Australian prescription repeat form is "Valid
only if patient/pharmacist or duplicate prescription is attached".
Ronald Besdansky suggests you'd need a really big staple to affix
either of the first two.
Sarah Snieger noted an instruction at a nail drying station in her
beauty parlour: "Fan will shut off automatically when you move out
of your hands". Don't leave it too long before moving back.
An item in the Observer last Sunday on the threat to the American
suburban dream quoted James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long
Emergency, which - among other catastrophes - predicts the end of
suburbia: "We have these terrible perfect storm conditions. The
real estate market in America has gone south. We will get a death
spiral." Be reassured that, whatever is happening to the suburbs,
clichés will always be with us.
In The Globe and Mail of Toronto dated 5 August, seen by Edward
Parker: "Ms. Schwarzkopf more or less gave up her career after Mr.
Legge died in 1979 and retired to Zurich, Switzerland." Mr Parker
commented, "I'll take Zurich over hell any day."
A. E-mail contact addresses
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