World Wide Words -- 30 Dec 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 29 17:14:53 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 520 Saturday 30 December 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/kdev.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Wave and pay.
3. Weird Words: Plenilune.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Bringing home the bacon.
6. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SCHINFING Following my comment last week about this British Army
slang term for complaining, many people e-mailed to put forward a
different source to the one I suggested, among them Reinhold Aman,
the editor of the slang magazine Maledicta: "As the author of a
Bavarian 'Schimpfwörterbuch' (dictionary of terms of abuse), I am
certain that the English slang term is derived from the German verb
'schimpfen', 'to complain about, to grouse, to grumble, to rant, to
rail against, to bitch about'." Some writers commented that they
remember it from British Army service in Germany, so the word has
some history.
2. Turns of Phrase: Wave and pay
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In recent years, many of us in the UK and other countries have had
to learn about "chip and pin" as a security method when we pay for
things using a credit card. "Wave and pay" is the next new idea in
the field, which is described formally as a contactless payment
card.
The card works by a radio-frequency detection method that requires
the card only to be placed close to the merchant's terminal for the
details of the transaction to be transferred and logged. The main
value of the system is that it's fast, so small transactions - at
newsagents, fast-food outlets, coffee shops and pubs, car parks,
ticket machines and the like - can be carried out without causing
queues to lengthen unnecessarily.
The concept is already being used in the US and other countries. In
the UK, a scheme has been recently announced to begin next summer.
It will run in association with Transport for London and the new
cards will double as the Oyster cards that for some years commuters
in London have used in a similar way to pay bus and tube fares.
* From Banking Strategies, Nov 2006: Card issuers, including Chase
and KeyCorp., have been building U.S. consumers' familiarity with
the habit of "wave and pay" technology by issuing a total of about
10 million contactless credit and debit cards.
* From the Daily Mail, 14 Dec. 2006: Visa signed a deal with
Barclaycard to offer a new generation of "wave and pay" plastic
cards for small change purchases such as the morning paper, a bus
fare, a loaf of bread or a pint of beer.
3. Weird Words: Plenilune
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The full moon or the time of a full moon.
In a letter to his aunt in 1961, J R R Tolkien wrote of this word
that it was beautiful even before it was understood, that he wished
he could have the pleasure of meeting it for the first time again,
and that "Surely the first meeting should be in a living context,
and not in a dictionary."
Sadly, that is unlikely, its having dropped almost entirely out of
use. Even coming across it in dictionaries would be unlikely, as
only the very largest include it these days. But then it has always
been poetic and literary, from Ben Jonson's "Whose glory (like a
lasting Plenilune) / Seems ignorant of what it is to wane" of 1601,
down to James Joyce's "What counsel has the hooded moon / Put in
thy heart, my shyly sweet, / Of love in ancient plenilune, / Glory
and stars beneath his feet" in Chamber Music in 1907.
Tolkien employed it in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, published in
1962: "Of crystal was his habergeon, / his scabbard of chalcedony;
/ with silver tipped at plenilune / his spear was hewn of ebony."
[Habergeon: A sleeveless coat or jacket of mail or scale armour.] A
rare recent sighting is in William Weaver's translation of Umberto
Eco's Island of the Day Before (1995): "You can see ... when recur
the Sundays and the Epacts, and the Solar Circle, and the Moveable
and Paschal Feasts, and novilunes and plenilunes, quadratures of
the sun and moon."
4. Recently noted
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MINIGARCH A minigarch is like an oligarch, only less well-endowed
in the back-pocket department. It's a weird formation, not least
because "oligarch" means a member of a small group that holds power
in a state (from Greek "oligoi", few, plus "arkhein", to rule), and
strictly has nothing to do with money. But the term has long been
tainted with the implication that oligarchs use their great power
to gather riches; in particular it has been used for the members of
the nomenklatura, former Communist Party appointees, who were most
directly involved in gaining wealth in post-communist Russia. The
Financial Times wrote in January 2001, "The oligarchs divided up
among themselves the most valuable state companies, which Yeltsin
privatized under fire-sale conditions." "Minigarch" has appeared at
least three times in British newspapers this year, most recently in
the Observer a couple of weeks ago. Another appearance was last May
in an article in the Independent: "Vladimir Gusinsky, 53, used to
be one of Russia's most powerful media magnates, but he lost almost
everything and is now more minigarch than oligarch."
UNIONISED The late Isaac Asimov said that he could tell somebody's
academic background by asking them to say this word. If it came out
as "un-ion-ised" he knew the person was a chemist; everybody else
would say it as "union-ised". Until recently, these were the only
two senses of the word. Pat Crowley points out that there is now a
third. The state of New Jersey recently passed a bill to legalise
civil unions between members of the same sex. He heard on a local
talk show a man saying that he and his partner were going to get
"unionised". It turns out to be well attested online, not least in
the phrase "civil unionised". This has appeared in some newspapers,
including an article in the San Jose Mercury News back in June on
the problems couples have with the language of these new unions.
But the view of someone quoted in the piece will surely echo those
of most readers of this newsletter: "'Let's get civil unionized'
just doesn't cut it, she said. It's just not a natural part of our
vocabulary."
5. Q&A: Bringing Home the Bacon
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Q. While looking in Wikipedia for something else, I found a page
that said "Bringing Home the Bacon" came from a twelfth-century
practice that survives only in the English town of Great Dunmow.
The church promised a side of bacon (a flitch) to any man who could
swear that he and his wife had "not wisht themselves unmarried
again" for a year and a day. Men who "brought home the bacon" in
this way were held in high esteem in their communities. This is one
of those too neat explanations that defy belief. [Ed Smits, Canada]
A. Agreed. It's also been said that it refers to the old fairground
contest of catching the greased pig, whose prize was the pig, so
the winner literally brought home the bacon. Your story reminded me
at once of one of the tales told in that infamous e-mail about life
in the 1500s that endlessly circulates online. That claims "it was
a sign of wealth that a man could 'bring home the bacon'."
That's true today, though usually in a broader sense of supplying
material support to one's family or achieving success, but it's
hard to assert with a straight face that it was so back in 1500 or
1300. We can't absolutely prove it wasn't around then - proving a
negative is always difficult - but its total absence from the
historical record before 1906 rather gives a pointer to its being
modern.
The first recorded user of the expression was Mrs Gans, mother of
Joe. He was a famous boxer at the end of the nineteenth century and
beginning of the twentieth, the first native-born black American to
win a world title. That was in 1900, when he was 26. Six years
later he fought Oscar "Battling" Nelson in Goldfield, Nevada, now
virtually a ghost town but then a booming community, the largest in
the state. The match has been rated as the greatest lightweight
championship bout ever contested, whose fame has endured enough
that its centenary was recently marked in the area.
This is the way the crucial linguistic moment was reported in the
Reno Evening Gazette for Monday, 3 September, 1906:
The following telegrams were read by Announcer Larry Sullivan.
Gans received this from his mother: "Joe, the eyes of the world
are on you. Everybody says you ought to win. Peter Jackson will
tell me the news and you bring back the bacon."
Various stories say that after he won the fight (it ended in Gans's
favour after 42 rounds when his opponent hit a low blow and was
disqualified) he sent a telegram back to his mother in Baltimore:
"Bringing home the bacon". Other reports claim that what he really
said was that he wasn't only bringing back the bacon but the gravy,
too. These are probably later elaborations of what clearly soon
became a widely known story.
Was Mrs Gans repeating a saying that was already well known to her?
Perhaps, even probably. But it isn't recorded anywhere that I can
discover before she sent that telegram. And it clearly struck a
powerful chord of both originality and relevance with those at the
1906 bout. She repeated the phrase in her telegram at his next
match the following January and her words were greeted with
laughter and repartee.
Almost immediately - within weeks rather than months - it became
common on the sports pages of the newspapers, at first referring to
boxing but later to baseball, football, horse racing and rugby. By
1911 it had started to be used of politics. When P G Wodehouse used
it in Ukridge in 1924 ("It may be that my bit will turn out to be
just the trifle that brings home the bacon") it had become firmly
established in the US.
6. Sic!
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Paul Kujawsky came across a brochure from AJOP, the Association for
Jewish Outreach Programs, announcing their convention in Baltimore
in January 2007: "Three packed days of intensive programs designed
to stimulate, educate and enervate!"
Glenda Millgate found an article on the News.com.au site dated 26
December: "Possums may hold the key scientists have been looking
for to help treat some prostrate problems in men." It makes them
get up and go?
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