World Wide Words -- 14 Jan 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 13 17:58:09 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 476 Saturday 14 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: Ladult.
3. Weird Words: Mattoid.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Daylight robbery.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/aglm.htm
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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ONLINE FORMATTED NEWSLETTER Many thanks to everyone who provided
comments, especially those who ran the page through various HTML
validators and pointed out my coding errors! Your feedback was very
useful, particularly that from readers who found some colours hard
to read (as a result, I've amended the whole Web site, which uses
much the same colour scheme). I didn't make myself quite clear in
two respects: there is no proposal to amend or cease this plain-
text e-mail newsletter and the pretty version is intended to be an
alternative which will only be available online, not by e-mail.
SHOT Many subscribers asked whether "shout" in the sense of paying
for a round of drinks had any connection with last week's "shot".
It seems to have been an independent Australian creation, based on
a call to a waiter to replenish the glasses.
2. Turns of Phrase: Ladult
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It's tough being young and male these days. People keep reinventing
you or keep trying to fit you into ever-changing stereotypes. In
the 1990s, there was the Loaded type, all "greed is good" brashness
and conspicuous consumption; then came the caring, sensitive, and
non-aggressive New Man; the style- and appearance-obsessed, high-
earning young urban Metrosexual, deeply in touch with his feminine
side; and last year the confident, unashamedly masculine, stylish
Übersexual, politically aware and passionate about world causes.
Some pundits are predicting 2006 will be the year of the "ladult".
As the name suggests, he is of a laddish persuasion but can be
adult when it matters. ("Lad" and "laddish" here are British and
Commonwealth slang for a boisterously macho or high-spirited young
man.) He was noted last summer - perhaps more correctly invented -
by the crystal ball-gazing experts at the Future Laboratory, who
suggested that he might turn out to be the partner of another of
their creations, the young woman whom they acronymised as HEIDI
(highly educated, independent, degree-carrying individual).
* From the Independent on Sunday, 31 Oct. 2005: Ladult: This is the
Loaded lad who has grown up now he's reached his thirties - though
he still rides a 50cc Vespa. In a settled relationship, he's just
had his first child, and is a keen, enthusiastic and careful
father. Old habits die hard and occasionally he still likes to "get
bladdered" but he's always up first thing for the morning feed. He
read About A Boy and cried at the sad bits.
* From the Observer, 1 Jan. 2006: Long live the Ladult. He is
single, assured, solvent and secure in his new-found masculinity.
Aged between 25 and thirtysomething, the Ladult works moderately
hard at middle management. ... He spends a lot on gadgets and DVDs,
and enjoys poker, online gambling and even fly fishing. He irons
his own shirts and can cook simple meals. He has no problem with
the notion that women are his equals, but secretly thinks they are
different.
3. Weird Words: Mattoid
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Semi-insane.
That's the definition given by its inventor, the nineteenth-century
Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. He believed that criminality
was inherited and that a criminal was born with physical defects
identifying him as a degenerate human being, an atavism. He created
"mattoid" from the Italian "matto", insane, plus the ending "-oid"
for some likeness or resemblance (from Greek "eidos", form). He
used it for what psychiatrists call "borderline dwellers", those
who exist on the margins between reason and madness - in everyday
speech we might call them cranks, eccentrics, or misfits.
The word came into English in 1891 through a translation of his
work Man of Genius and became popular for a while. H G Wells used
it in several of his books, most notably in Mankind in the Making
of 1903, in which he derides the theories of Lombroso and the
Victorian phrenologists: "Among such theorists none at present are
in quite such urgent need of polemical suppression as those who
would persuade the heedless general reader that every social
failure is necessarily a 'degenerate', and who claim boldly that
they can trace a distinctly evil and mischievous strain in that
unfortunate miscellany which constitutes 'the criminal class'...
These mattoid scientists make a direct and disastrous attack upon
the latent self-respect of criminals."
4. Noted this week
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BLOGEBRITY While I'm wearing my professional hat, all new words
are equal. In private, though, opinions are allowed, and this one
gets a grimace because of its inelegance. It's a blend of "blog"
and "celebrity" that refers to prominent blog writers. A search
threw up vast numbers of examples: Google claims to have indexed
419,000 instances. That's a lot for me to have missed it until now,
even though many of the hits are for a Web site that last year was
supposed to be launching a magazine of that title about bloggers.
[Thanks to Marty Ryerson for telling me about the word.]
WALE My personal word of the week popped up in a newspaper I was
reading the other day. It made me stop and think about common items
for which only the people who make them or use them regularly know
the names for. Take "aglet", for example, the metal or plastic tube
fixed round each end of a shoelace to stop the fabric from fraying.
Another is "tang", the extension of the blade of a knife by which
it is fixed into the handle. Then there's my "wale", which is the
raised ridge on corduroy. This is from the Old English "walu" that
meant a stripe - the same origin as "weal".
5. Q&A: Daylight robbery
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Q. In the BBC Radio 4 programme Midweek recently, Victoria Coren
said that the phrase "daylight robbery" came from the old window
tax and so was a crime that took away one's daylight. But an online
site says that it has a much more prosaic meaning, of a barefaced
requirement to pay, and only dates from 1949. What do you think?
[John Gray]
A. I think Ms Coren has it completely wrong. But we can't pin its
origin so neatly to 1949, even though that's its first appearance
in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Let's get the window tax out of the way first. It was imposed by
William III in 1696; every household had to pay a levy depending on
the number of windows in the house, a crude measure of prosperity
or income. It was hated, because it was considered to be a tax on
light and air. It led to some cases of windows being blocked up,
usually temporarily when an inspection was due, though some houses
were actually built with no bedroom windows. The tax was finally
abolished only in 1851.
The OED's first example of "daylight robbery" from 1949, being a
century after the tax was abolished, certainly seems to scotch any
link. Actually, the figurative sense has been around a bit longer
than the OED says - it appears for example in Harold Brighouse's
1916 play Hobson's Choice.
And the idiom doesn't necessarily refer to a crime as such, but to
any unreasonable financial demand or outrageous injustice: if you
went into a pub in a strange town and were charged a tenner for a
pint of beer, you'd no doubt describe that as daylight robbery (or
possibly "highway robbery", a related term with the same sense).
But no reputable authority would suggest the phrase and the window
tax were connected, because of the way it clearly developed. It
comes without doubt from a literal daylight robbery; to attempt one
during the day rather than under cover of darkness was to be daring
or audacious because of the much greater risk of being opposed or
recognised. These associations were carried over into the metaphor.
I say again: nothing to do with windows!
6. Sic!
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On the Australian TV programme "Renovation Rescue" recently, Annie
Dwyer shuddered when the recipient was given some band instruments,
among which the on-screen caption identified a "symbols pack".
A news item on the ABC Web site reported that a police search for a
man who shot a woman in an Adelaide suburb had been called off. Bob
Secombe was struck by the last sentence of the report: "Police now
plan to use intelligence in an effort to track the suspect to an
address." Now there's an innovation.
Roger Downham e-mailed to say that a newspaper in Cornwall, The
Falmouth Packet, last week contained the headline, "Passengers
stranded as ferry brakes down".
Talking of matters nautical, John Gray found this sentence on the
BBC news Web site: "I was surprised to find a massive brand like
EBay represented by a few understated stalls, tucked away in a
dinghy thoroughfare, at odds with the audacious palatial stands of
other big hitters like Microsoft, Panasonic and Yamaha."
Department of Amorous Ambiguity: "She caught Jimmy's eye and
smiled, and Jimmy beamed back and she walked right up to him and
planted a big one right on his hips." [Lodestar, by Michael Flynn,
2000.]
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