World Wide Words -- 07 Jan 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Jan 7 03:25:14 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 475 Saturday 7 January 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. Turns of Phrase: Web 2.0.
3. Weird Words: Stultiloquy.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Shot.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
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A prettily formatted version of this newsletter may be read
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/sdbg.htm
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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PRETTILY FORMATTED NEWSLETTERS Subscribers ask me sometimes if it
is possible to receive newsletters in a more easily readable form
than the plain text of e-mail. For technical reasons, it isn't that
easy to provide a choice between plain and formatted versions by e-
mail, and those who know about such things have advised me not to
try. As an alternative, for the past month I've been uploading a
formatted version to the Web site (see above for the link to this
week's issue). I've had two comments back, both positive, but would
now like to ask subscribers more generally what they think of it.
I'm not suggesting that these formatted versions should stop - they
are easy to produce, since they largely use the same database and
code that already outputs the RSS version. But if improvements can
be made, it would be good to hear.
THIRTEEN AND THE ODD Last week, I mentioned having found this US
expression for male formal dress but that its origin was unknown.
Dan Denver summed up the comments of several subscribers: "Don't
know if it is related, but the 'Cracker Jack' uniform, worn by
junior enlisted men in the US Navy, is fastened by a thirteen-
button flap in the front."
SPECIALISM I used this word last week and was instantly challenged
by lots of people (my copy editor had also flagged it in the draft,
but I overruled her). Some said they'd never encountered it before
and wondered why I didn't use "speciality" or "specialty" instead?
I was a little puzzled by your puzzlement to start with. If one is
a specialist in some subject, that can be your specialism, surely?
The word is in my dictionaries with that sense and is common. But
it turns out to be largely a British English term. Over here, we
use "specialism", "speciality", and "specialty" pretty much
equally, though the last of these - the most common version in the
US - has largely taken over from "speciality" in the sense of a
medical specialisation. "Speciality" for me is coloured too much by
its sense of a thing that's special or distinctive ("the speciality
of the house") for me to easily use it in the narrower sense of an
area of professional expertise, and "specialty" was linked too much
with the medical world, so I settled on "specialism".
PARTRIDGE DICTIONARY OF SLANG The price of this work was wrongly
given last week as rising to GBP140.00 next Spring. The price will
in fact rise to GBP120.00 in March 2006.
2. Turns of Phrase: Web 2.0
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"Web 2.0" is a classic case of a new term being bandied about by
commentators and publicists without anybody having a very clear
idea what they're talking about. Almost every new application or
idea for anything to do with online commerce or user interaction
with the Web is being described as part of this wonderful new
concept, but trying to tie down what it means is really hard.
What we do know is that the term was coined by Tim O'Reilly and
Dale Dougherty in a discussion about the future of the Web. Their
view was that the companies that had survived and prospered after
the dot.com bubble had burst had certain qualities in common. All
had a strong connection to and involvement with their user base or
customers (think of Amazon.com's reader reviews, for example) or
they were collaborative, like Wikipedia or Flickr, or they relied
on people telling each other about good ideas in a process called
viral marketing. Tim O'Reilly summed their ideas up in an article
in September 2005 as "Network effects from user contributions are
the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era". Or, putting it
more simply, "Users add value."
But others argue that the term means something rather different. As
the Birmingham Post put it in December 2005, "Typically, a Web 2.0
service is one that uses the very latest technologies to provide a
website that works more like an application on your desktop." And
others suggest it can include the idea of taking various sources of
Web information and mixing them to make a new interactive service,
for which the term "mashup" has been coined.
Perhaps one day everybody will come to a consensus about what "Web
2.0" actually means.
* From Entrepreneur, 1 Jan. 2006: All that guesswork underlines
another fundamental shift in the web: the move away from static web
pages to a more interactive, real-time environment. It's the next
generation. It's the Web 2.0. And it's already underway.
* From The Motley Fool, 20 Dec. 2005: Furthermore, some believe
that the future of the Internet is a trend dubbed Web 2.0 (though
some skeptics call that moniker an empty phrase, born of marketers
and smacking of empty sloganism). Community-based sites like
Wikipedia are a big part of the supposed Web 2.0 movement, and
companies like Yahoo! are moving to capitalize on what they
apparently believe will be a big part of the Web's future.
3. Weird Words: Stultiloquy
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Foolish babbling.
William Venator pretty much brought this word back from oblivion in
his self-published 2003 satire, Wither This Land, which told of
political upheavals following the opposition by saboteurs to fox
hunting in Britain (a vast controversy in the UK at the time): "The
day had proceeded well at Stanthorpe but Downing Street was fuming.
Cramp, caught unawares, had given an excellent stultiloquy, much to
the press's amusement, on the need for 'action, containment for
flaunting the law, overweening disapproval, community and tolerance
needed.'" (Was "flaunting" part of the satire or an authorial
error, I wonder?)
It's a pity it's so rare, as there are quite a number of current
political figures to whom it could be applied (no names, no pack
drill). The only other modern writer I know of who has used it is
John Steinbeck. It appears in his fictional portrayal of the life
of the buccaneer Henry Morgan, Cup of Gold (1929): "In all the mad
incongruity, the turgid stultiloquy of life, I felt, at last,
securely anchored to myself."
You might instead prefer the even rarer "stultiloquence". Both are
from Latin "stultiloquus", speaking foolishly, which come in turn
from "stultus", foolish, plus "loquus", that speaks.
4. Noted this week
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WORDS OF THE YEAR At their annual meeting in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, on Friday evening, the members of the American Dialect
Society voted for their words of the year in a process that was
described as "serious but far from solemn". Their Word of the Year
is the odd term "truthiness". First heard on the Colbert Report, a
satirical mock news show on the Comedy Channel, "truthiness" refers
to the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes
to be true rather than those known to be true. "Podcast", a digital
feed containing audio or video files for downloading to a portable
MP3 player, was voted Most Useful Word, while "whale tail", the
appearance of thong or g-string underwear above the waistband of
pants, shorts or skirt, won the Most Creative section. The award
for the Most Outrageous Word of 2005 went to "crotchfruit", a child
or children (perhaps inspired by the expression the fruit of one's
loins, it began among proponents of child-free public spaces, but
has since spread to parents who use it jocularly). The word voted
Most Likely to Succeed went to "sudoku", the number puzzle (which
has already succeeded in the UK beyond all understanding) while the
one Least Likely to Succeed was "pope-squatting", registering a
domain name that is the same as that of a new pope before the pope
chooses his official name in order to profit from it. In a special
category for this year only, the best Tom-Cruise-Related Word was
"jump the couch", to exhibit strange or frenetic behaviour, a term
inspired by the couch-bouncing antics of Tom Cruise on Oprah
Winfrey's talk show in May; it derives from an earlier term, "jump
the shark", meaning to (irretrievably) diminish in quality; to
outlast public interest or popular support.
GAS WARS Americans have often used this for various outbreaks of
competitive pricing at the petrol pumps. In the UK this week, it is
the rubber-stamp term in the press for the row between Russia and
Ukraine about how much the latter should pay for the former's gas
supplies.
FUTUROLOGY My personal word of the week has been provoked by the
acreage of newsprint devoted to prognostications about the trends
and events of 2006. The general view, backed up by some research,
is that futurology is a pretty dodgy endeavour, echoing the wise
man who said, "Predicting is difficult, especially the future." The
word in my mind is inextricably linked with the physicist Herman
Kahn, the model for Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's film, and
with Alvin Toffler, who made the word widely known from the late
1960s on. But it's older - the OED's first example is from a letter
written by Aldous Huxley in 1946.
5. Q&A: Shot
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Q. At a recent re-enactment of the infamous shootout at the OK
Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, the narrator claimed that the term 'a
shot of whiskey' comes from paying for drinks with bullets. (He
displayed his empty ammo belt as evidence of this.) Is this true?
[Ellen Smithee]
A. Heavens - the curse of the tourist guide hits etymology once
again. They're a wonderful breed, these guides, but they're capable
of unblushingly telling the most extraordinary stories about word
origins. No, this one most certainly isn't true.
But it's an odd word when you stop to think about it. What possible
connection could there be between "shot" and a measure of drink?
The truth is that your one, and the more common term that's linked
with the verb "to shoot" in many different senses, come from two
different sources.
The whiskey shot actually derives from an ancient Scandinavian word
that became the Old English "scéotan", to pay or contribute. Its
more direct descendent is "scot" (which, of course, has nothing to
do with the Scots) and which we still have in the phrase "scot
free", to get away from a situation without suffering punishment or
injury; the original sense was "not required to pay scot". (See
http://quinion.com?SCOT for more on this.)
But "scot" also became known and spelled as "shot", perhaps under
the influence of the other word. It developed several senses and
associated idioms meaning paying or contributing, most of which
closely parallel those of "scot" and are now defunct. For example,
"shot" could once mean one's share of the bill at an entertainment
or at an inn, from which came "to stand shot", to pay the bill for
everyone. As a related idea, the shot could be one's contribution
to a fund to pay for some purpose, often like the modern drinkers'
pub kitty.
There was also a seventeenth-century sense of a supply or amount of
drink, this presumably being from the idea that the supply was the
result of everybody's clubbing together by paying shot. There's a
big gap between that and the modern sense of a specific serving of
strong liquor. The first example in the Oxford English Dictionary
is a 1928 quote from P G Wodehouse. But it is older - I've found an
instance in a story of 1912 and it's almost certainly earlier still
(it's not the easiest word to search for, you will appreciate). We
have to assume that it had been lurking in the spoken language for
generations without being much noticed.
But, I say again, nothing to do with bullets.
6. Sic!
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David Brooks's column in The New York Times on 29 December gave an
award to an Atlantic Monthly article about Yasser Arafat by David
Samuels. Harold Pinkley e-mailed, "While I'm sure Mr. Samuels was
gratified by the award, he may not have been overjoyed at this
sentence in Brooks's article: 'After his death, Samuels interviewed
Arafat's intimates and put together the pieces of the man.' Neat
trick."
Anne O'Brien Lloyd was given The Book of Who? for Christmas. She
comments, "The editing leaves a fair amount to be desired, but I
wouldn't change the definition of a totter, as 'One who sifts
rubbish to find items worth savaging.'"
Following on from last week's item that featured "house cleaning,
dusting, and moping", Kristy Foulcher tells me that near her home
in Melbourne, Australia, a dog minder refuses to care for "pick
bulls or rock weilers".
In the 3 January issue of her daily newspaper, the Boulder Daily
Camera, Elsi Dodge came across this headline: "Fewer middle-class
jobs cripple workers". This left her wondering whether upper-class
jobs were still attacking people.
Mara Math found a Goodwill store in San Francisco advertising its
Manager's Special throughout the store with the tongue-in-cheek
sign, "SHOES! BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE!"
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