World Wide Words -- 19 Aug 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 18 17:32:47 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 501 Saturday 19 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/sfdt.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Planet.
3. Turns of Phrase: Pluton.
4. Weird Words: Malarkey.
5. Recently noted.
6. Q&A: Fink.
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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STIFF UPPER LIP What would an issue of World Wide Words be without
errors for subscribers to spot? Beau Geste, mentioned in this piece
last week, was of course written by P C Wren, not by James Hilton,
who instead wrote among others Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr Chips.
2. Topical Words: Planet
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If a resolution at the International Astronomical Union's meeting
in Prague is passed next week, the word "planet" will formally
alter its meaning, requiring the reference books to be rewritten.
The reason lies with the development of observational astronomy.
The discovery in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh of Pluto, orbiting beyond
the then known limits of the Solar System, was a sensation at the
time. Because the initial estimates of its size were way too big,
it was immediately included in the list of planets. But in recent
years many similar objects have been found even further out, in a
distant part of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt, at least
one of them larger than Pluto. So is Pluto a planet or a minor
body? And if it is a planet, are these other new bodies also
planets?
It will seem an arcane and irrelevant argument for many people, but
for astronomers a definitive answer will end a controversy that has
been running for years, with many in the field wanting to downgrade
Pluto's status. The problem is that if they continue to consider
Pluto a fully fledged planet, they will also have to include many
of these newly discovered bodies.
It would not be the first time "planet" has changed its meaning. It
comes from Greek "planetes", a wanderer, and was applied in ancient
times to any celestial object that moved against the background of
the fixed stars. This included not only all the bodies visible to
the naked eye that we still call planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn - but the Sun and Moon as well. With greater
understanding of astronomical realities - that the Earth revolved
around the Sun, that the Moon was a satellite of Earth, and that
the Sun was very different to the others - the word changed its
meaning to the modern one of a large body that travels around the
Sun in a roughly circular orbit. There are currently nine major
planets - including Pluto - plus thousands of minor planets.
The proposed solution is rather neat, though a lot of astronomers
don't like it. A planet will be defined as any celestial object not
a star that orbits a star and whose mass is large enough for it to
have been pulled into a spherical shape by its own gravity. Pluto,
by that definition, remains a planet; Charon, its former satellite,
becomes the other half of a double planet; Ceres, the largest of
the asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, joins the big-
kids' club; the body officially known as 2003 UB313 but informally
as Xena becomes the twelfth planet.
But don't be in a hurry to rewrite those reference books: there are
dozens of other candidates in the outer darkness that are likely to
be added to the list, including those with unofficial names Varuna,
Quaoar and Sedna. Three other asteroids, Pallas, Vesta and Hygeia,
may become planets, too, if detailed astronomical observations
prove them to be spherical. The definition would make the planetary
Solar System a great deal more complicated.
3. Turns of Phrase: Pluton
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The same resolution at the International Astronomical Union (IAU)
would officially create this new word as a way of distinguishing
among several classes of bodies orbiting the Sun. The classical
planets are the most massive bodies: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. There are also large numbers
of small rocky bodies called collectively the minor planets.
In between would be this new class. They are massive enough to have
been formed into a spherical shape by their own gravity, they orbit
the sun so far out that one revolution of the Sun takes at least
200 years, and they have elliptical orbits that are inclined to
those of the classical planets, the implication being that plutons
have a different origin.
The word has been created from the name of Pluto, the ninth planet,
which is from Greek mythology, in which it was a euphemism for the
god of the underworld, Hades. Literally, "pluto" meant "rich one",
in reference to the wealth that came from the Earth. The planet was
famously named as a result of a suggestion by the 11-year-old Miss
Venetia Burney, of Oxford. Walt Disney's dog, by the way, was named
after the planet, not the other way round; popular culture didn't
have the influence it does now, when names like Xena - the Greek
warrior princess of the US television series - can be seriously
considered.
This week's news reports often implied that the committee which put
forward the word had invented it. But there are earlier examples:
the astronomer Tom Burns used it in the same sense in an article in
the Columbus Dispatch in June 1997, as did Frederik Pohl in his SF
novel Mining the Oort of 1992; Robert Heinlein created an Earth
currency of that name in his novelettesGulf (1949) and Tunnel in
the Sky (1955), though that was based on plutonium. "Pluton" is
also an established geological term, for a large body of intrusive
igneous rock beneath the Earth's surface; that was created in the
1930s as a back-formation from the adjective "plutonic", itself
taken from the Greek name, that referred to the action of intense
heat at great depths upon rocks forming the Earth's crust.
* Daily Telegraph, 16 Aug. 2006: Little Pluto, which had been in
peril of losing its place among the planets, keeps its status, but
only in a new category of "plutons," distant oddballs wandering
outside Neptune in weirdly shaped orbits.
* The Seattle Times, 16 Aug. 2006: Dozens more plutons could be
added after the objects are more thoroughly reviewed by the IAU.
4. Weird Words: Malarkey
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Meaningless talk; humbug; nonsense; foolishness.
It's still known in the US and to a lesser extent in the UK and
elsewhere, but where this odd-looking word comes from is decidedly
uncertain. What we do know is that it began to appear in the US in
the early 1920s in various spellings, such as "malaky", "malachy",
and "mullarkey". Its first recorded user was the cartoonist T A
Dorgan, in 1922, but it only began to appear widely at the end of
the decade. By 1930, Variety could pun on it: "The song is ended
but the Malarkey lingers on."
Various theories have been advanced. Eric Partridge pointed to the
modern Greek word "malakia" but he formed a group of one. His later
editor, Paul Beale, noted the London expression "Madame Misharty",
the personification of sales talk, exaggerated claims, and wild
predictions, a name that was supposedly that of a fortune teller.
But this is stretching a possible linguistic link to breaking point
and, in any case, we know it started life in North America. Others
point to the family name Malarkey, though who the eponymous member
of the tribe might have been whose Irish-derived gift of the gab
could have given rise to the name remains unknown. Jonathon Green
likewise suggests a Irish origin in "mullachan", a strongly-built
boy or ruffian, though this, too, seems a stretch of meaning.
We'll just have to settle for the unsatisfactory "origin unknown".
5. Recently noted
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PHONE-SCREWING There has been a great fuss in Britain about the
discovery that private investigators working for newspapers have
been tapping into the voicemail messages of members of the royal
household, celebrities, and a government minister. There's nothing
new about the practice, since in recent years most journalists have
subcontracted the dirty work of investigation to third parties.
What did appear in print last week, seemingly for the first time,
is this slang term of trade for the practice. The newsworthiness of
the story meant the term appeared in newspapers and magazines in
the USA, Australia and New Zealand.
6. Q&A: Fink
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Q. I was reading a comic strip, the Wizard Of Id, and came across
the word "fink". What does this word mean? Could you tell me its
origins? [Shona Krishna]
A. Brant Parker and Johnny Hart seem to use the word quite a bit
in the strip - as I don't regularly follow it, I don't know which
sense its authors mean. There are three possibilities. The first
sense recorded is of an unpleasant or contemptible person, but
the more common one today is that of someone who informs on
people to the authorities. There's also a third sense, now dated,
of a strike breaker. You definitely wouldn't want to be called
one, whichever sense was meant.
Where it comes from has been debated a lot down the decades. One
school of thought says it's a modified form of "Pink", short for
"Pinkertons". "Pinks" was the name that was given to the strike
breakers who were hired by the Pinkerton National Detective
Agency during the infamous 1892 strike at Andrew Carnegie's
steelworks at Homestead in Pennsylvania. If this sounds a bit
far-fetched to you, I'm not surprised. The supposed shift from
"pink" to "fink" is very unlikely and it isn't supported by the
early evidence. The story caught on largely because it was
asserted as fact in a 1925 article in the American Mercury.
Though the first known example dates from 1894 (in George Ade's
book Chicago Stories) only two years after the strike, Ade used
it in the sense of a worthless freeloader. The strike-breaking
meaning didn't appear until 1917, far too late to have come from
the strike, and well after the informer one, which is first found
in 1902 in another of Ade's books, People You Know.
The consensus is that it comes from German student slang. "Fink"
here is the German word for "finch". In the nineteenth century,
students who were not members of a college fraternity were called
finks, perhaps because they were considered to be wild birds,
uncaged or undomesticated. Later it became modified to refer to
somebody poorly regarded, "not one of us". An alternative German
source sometimes suggested lies in one of the insulting slang
terms "Dreckfink", "Schmierfink", or "Schmutzfink", all terms for
a low, dirty person.
7. Sic!
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Prentice Cushing noted a sign on the door of a restroom (which I
would call a public toilet) in a park in Norfolk, VA: NO BICYCLES
ALOUD IN RESTROOM. Don't ding that bell, boy!
The London free newspaper The Docklands of 9 August 2006 featured
the front-page news that "A deranged cheese counter assistant has
been convicted of terrorising a leading Limehouse psychiatrist for
more than a year." Fabian Moynihan passed this on and wonders if
the cheese was a schizophrenic Stilton or a mad Mozarella ...
That sentence would have intrigued the reader even if it had been
better hyphenated. You may feel the same about the headline that
appeared over an online story in The Statesman Journal of Salem,
Oregon, on 14 August. When Lew Hundley visited the Web site, it
read, "Salem driver sited when manufactured homes collide". The
report concerned two trucks, each with half a home on it, which
ran into each other. The headline has now been corrected.
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