World Wide Words -- 07 Jul 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 7 16:25:16 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 495 Saturday 8 July 2006
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Sent each Saturday to at least 40,000 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/jvdy.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Net neutrality.
3. Weird Words: Sabrage.
4. Recently noted.
5. Book Review: The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English.
6. 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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OVER TO YOU World Wide Words subscribers are a knowledgeable lot.
Within an hour of the newsletter going out last Saturday, a reply
to Martin Rose's query about the name of the traditional building
material used around Brighton came in from Pam Davies. The name is
"bungaroosh", also spelled "bungeroosh". It was basically lime
mortar, bulked out with anything else that was handy, like bricks,
flints, bits of wood and lumps of chalk. Rob Fraser, at the time
the Conservation Officer of Brighton Borough Council, said in an
interesting and detailed article at http://quinion.com?BUNG (thanks
to Terence Sims and others for the link), that the material is a
horror for those looking after old buildings: "Bungaroosh has to be
a little damp. Too dry and the now leached mortar crumbles, too wet
and it becomes mobile ... You could probably demolish a third of
Brighton with a well-aimed hose." Its origin is obscure, though it
has been suggested that it's from "bung" because anything handy was
bunged in with the lime mortar. The ending sounds vaguely French.
But these are just guesses - we don't really have a clue.
2. Turns of Phrase: Net neutrality
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Debates in the US Congress have recently brought this term to wide
public attention inside and outside the US. The questions sound
simple: should the Internet remain equally accessible to everyone,
or should a two-tier system be created that requires companies who
pay more or who use more of the Net's capacity to pay a greater
share of the cost? And should those who want a faster and higher
quality service be asked to pay more for it?
The telecommunications companies (the telcos) argue that firms such
as Google, eBay and Amazon, and online telephone companies like
Skype, have built highly profitable businesses on the Net without
contributing their fair share of the cost of running it. Providers
of bandwidth-hungry technologies like video-on-demand should pay a
higher fee to recognise the risk that they will clog the network.
The decision by Channel Four, a British network, to stream many of
its broadcasts online at the same time as they are transmitted
conventionally is an example of what they're worried about. Earlier
this year AOL and Yahoo! announced they were introducing a two-tier
e-mail system, in which senders of messages who paid a fee would
receive faster service, bypassing the spam filters and other checks
that slow transmission.
Opponents argue that a dual-pricing system would remove the key
characteristic of the Net - that it is equally accessible to all
comers. They point out that this neutrality is the reason why it
has grown so spectacularly. They are afraid that the scheme would
hand power to big businesses at the cost of the individuals and
small groups who are its current main users. It might Balkanise the
Internet into fiefdoms that would be controlled by individual
telcos and ISPs, a possibility which Tim Berners-Lee, the creator
of the World Wide Web, has described as an Internet "dark age".
The earliest example of the term I can find is in the title of a
conference held in Washington in June 2003. A supporter of net
neutrality is a "net neutralist".
* The Motley Fool, 30 Jun. 2006: The road to hell is paved with
good intentions, and that idea is often borne out by overzealous
regulation, which often has entirely unexpected side effects.
Despite net neutrality's proponents' claims, such regulation might
actually mean that somewhere down the line, all of us will be stuck
on a dirt road instead of an information superhighway.
* New Scientist, 24 Jun. 2006: Net neutralists also fear that
telcos will use the new freedom to block content that interferes
with their own business interests. Telcos could do this by charging
extortionately high rates to competitors, slowing down their bits
so that their applications do not work well or simply blocking them
outright.
3. Weird Words: Sabrage
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The act of opening a bottle with a sabre.
Imagine opening a bottle with great ceremony by striking off its
neck with one sweep of a blade. Traditionally the bottle contains
champagne and the implement is always a sabre.
You might think the result will be lots of broken glass and mess,
but the skill of sabrage lies in hitting the bottle hard just at
the bottom edge of the annulus, the glass ring at the top of the
neck. The blow breaks the neck off cleanly, complete with cork.
Experts advise you chill the bottle very well and avoid shaking it,
remove the foil and wire cage, hold it away from you at an angle of
about 40 degrees and strike with the bottle seam uppermost. Do not
try this at home, kiddies. In truth, a sabre is optional: almost
any hard object with an edge will do it.
At least one organisation, the Confrérie du Sabre d'Or, maintains
this tradition at its champagne parties. But otherwise, both it and
the term are rarely encountered. Stories hold that it dates from
Napoleonic times and was invented by cavalry who found it difficult
to open champagne bottles while on horseback, but did have usefully
heavy sabres handy. You may celebrate the ingenuity of this story
with a small glass of something bubbly if you wish.
Its language origin is definitely the French "sabrer", to hit with
a sabre. It's a close relative of "sabreur", one who fights with a
sabre, best known in "beau sabreur", a fine soldier or dashing
adventurer. But the modern French "sabrage" mundanely refers to
cleaning vegetable detritus from sheep fleeces.
4. Recently noted
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BLAWGING Those who write or read blogs on legal topics will know
I'm behind the curve here, since this term for the type has been
around for a year or two. The coiner is said to be the California
technology lawyer Denise Howell. It was coined by stuffing "law"
into the middle of "blog". (I don't know a proper linguistic term
for the process, though it might be referred to as infixing.)
GLOBALISATION An example of how legends can accrue around a major
figure appeared in the Boston Business Journal on 29 June, in an
item announcing the death of the marketing guru Professor Theodore
Levitt. The article said that "Levitt was the first to use the word
'globalization', in a 1983 article asserting that technology had
created worldwide markets for standardized consumer products at
lower prices." The article, "The Globalisation of Markets", did
appear in that year (Harvard Business Review, 1 May 1983). But he
didn't invent the word: the first instance in the Oxford English
Dictionary's entry is from the Spectator magazine of October 1962:
"Globalisation is, indeed, a staggering concept." However, he did
popularise it in the current business sense and he did invent other
terms, such as "marketing matrix".
GAK-ADDLED This might be of interest to Grant Barrett (see below).
It turned up in this spelling in a piece in the Guardian a week ago
last Saturday. The more usual British spelling is "gack-addled".
The first part may be from the Irish dialect "gack", to talk idly
or chatter. As that's one of the symptoms of cocaine usage, the
word came to be used in UK drug culture in the 1990s as a slang
term for the drug. As long ago as the seventeenth century "Addled"
moved from its standard English sense of a bad egg to refer to
somebody whose brains were addled (as in "addle-pated" and "addle-
head"). The following century it became part of the vast vocabulary
of slang terms for somebody who was under the influence of alcohol.
Like "gack", it was re-borrowed in the 1990s to refer to somebody
whose brain has been scrambled through imbibing drugs.
5. Book Review: The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English
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Much has been said and written about the influence of the Internet
on our language, a lot of it by commentators who feel that its love
of slang and unconventional terms, its informality, and the poor
linguistic abilities of many of its users, show English is going to
hell in a handbasket. What is less appreciated is that the Net is
semi-formalising the way that people have always communicated, so
that we're now able to eavesdrop on unedited conversations that
show us the way the language operates when it isn't being mediated
by editors and professional writers.
Conventional lexicographical research is still largely wedded to
the printed page. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, does
not cite Net sources and so its researchers don't search for new
words and revised senses online. Grant Barrett's book is different.
He has created it from the Internet using methods impossible before
the Net existed, such as the Google Alerts that send you e-mails
when some word or phrase you specify turns up in a news report.
Once he has identified a term, he hunts for its origin in the many
electronic databases available online: as he says, "etymological
work has never been easier". Or more fun.
The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English is a teasing title
(its subtitle even more so: A Crunk Omnibus for Trillionaires and
Bampots for the Ecozoic Age), one that you might expect from a
lexicographer who has given his Web site the name Double-Tongued
Word Wrester (which is from an obscure 1571 citation in the OED).
Grant Barrett spends his life immersed in colloquial language and
slang, since his day job is as the project editor for Oxford's
Historical Dictionary of American Slang, a work that everybody with
an interest in such matters is waiting for with ill-disguised
impatience. This book, however, is firmly an extramural activity,
though his professional background results in a work created on the
best principles of historical lexicography, with terms carefully
researched and every entry defined, discussed and illustrated by a
set of citations.
Despite the modern means of identifying and researching the words
in this book, the most obvious feature is how many of them predate
the Net. Some of the terms have been around for long enough that
they could easily already be in standard works on informal English:
"armchair pilot", an aviation enthusiast, recorded from 1934; "cat
face", an irregular appearance on fruit or vegetables, which dates
from 1890; "heartsink", a feeling of disappointment or dismay, from
1937. Some have indeed already appeared in dictionaries, such as
"ASBO" ("Anti-Social Behaviour Order"), a British term from 1997;
"colourway", any of a range of combinations of colours in which a
style or design is available; "Ediacaran", a Precambrian period;
and "molecular gastronomy", the application of science to food
choices and preparation. Others are modifications of terms that are
well known, such as "to blue-sky", to propose ideas that are as yet
unfeasible, which even in its verb form predates the Net.
But the group that is largest and most interesting is that of
colloquial or slang terms that rarely appear in mainstream works.
"Bustdown", for example, a Chicago Black-English term for a woman
who is promiscuous or undesirable; "merk", to attack, overcome or
defeat somebody or something, a hip-hop term recorded from 1999;
"otherkin", people who believe themselves to be something other
than human; "skidiot", an unsophisticated computer hacker; "temp",
a slang abbreviation for "interpreter"; "wad", to crash, probably a
motorcycle, perhaps because that's what the result looks like; the
TV series The West Wing accustomed us to "POTUS" ("President Of The
United States") but Barrett includes the more recent "TMPMITW"
("The Most Powerful Man In the World").
Terms come from every national variety of English: "half-past-six"
is from Singapore and means something bad or shoddy; "gronk", as a
general derogatory term for a man, is Australian; "gbege", for an
act of vengeful violence, is from Nigeria; "freeco", a cost-free
service, item or performance, is West Indian; "vernac", a casual
abbreviation of "vernacular", is a derogatory Indian term meaning
culturally backwards or unfashionable; "trapo", from the Tagalog
word for a dirty rag, in turn from Spanish, is a Philippines term
for a corrupt politician. Others come from creative meetings of
English and another language, such as Spanglish, Hinglish, or the
many other "glishes", as he calls them: "goonda tax", protection
money or a bribe, is from Pakistan, with "goonda" being Hindi or
Urdu for a ruffian; "freeter" for a temporary worker or freelance
is known in German, Japanese and Korean and is variously identified
as a blend of "free" with "Arbeit", German for work, or Japanese
"arubaito", part-time or casual work. Some are foreign terms that
have been included because they have appeared in English, such as
the Austrian "Verwaltungsvereinfachungsmassnahmen", a drive against
bureaucracy and bureaucratic jargon.
>From a British perspective, I must query "handbags at ten paces", a
British term for a verbal spat, often in sports - it may have had
its origin in a Monty Python sketch, but its earliest datings shows
it was influenced by Margaret Thatcher's time as prime minister, in
which she was said to keep order among her ministers by hitting
them with her handbag; "frogspawn", a schoolboy's term for tapioca,
is surely a lot older than the first citation from 1991 would
suggest, as I can remember it from my childhood.
But these are minor quibbles. If you want to find out more about
the way English is being creatively used worldwide, then this is
the book for you. Recommended.
[Grant Barrett, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, A
Crunk Omnibus for Trillionaires and Bampots for the Ecozoic Age,
published by McGraw Hill in May 2006; paperback, pp412; ISBN
0071458042; publisher's price US$14.95.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP7.19 http://quinion.com?S94K
Amazon USA: US$10.17 http://quinion.com?S37K
Amazon Canada: CDN$15.16 http://quinion.com?S52K
Amazon Germany: EUR13,50 http://quinion.com?S46K
[Please use these links to buy. More information below.]
6. Sic!
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The People, a British Sunday newspaper known for its exposés, ran a
story two weekends ago under the headline "Disgraceful security
lapses at Prince William's military academy are today exposed by
The People". An appeal appeared at the bottom: "Do you know of a
sandal? Call our newsdesk ..." I know of two, size nine, that may
be disreputable enough for them.
Campbell Downie e-mailed from South Africa: "Our municipal public
library has been extended and modernised recently, aided by a grant
from the Carnegie Foundation. The official opening is to take place
today, and the following notice appeared in the newspaper, 'The
library will be closed today due to the opening'."
The caption under a photograph in The Independent of Northumberland
County, Ontario read: "Seven students were part of a drum quartet
at Spring Valley's talent show this month." Denis Barter felt this
to be seriously numerically challenged. "How many would be needed
to form an octet?" he wonders. And anyway there are actually nine
people in the picture.
Bitter complaints are raging about leakage from the pipes of Thames
Water, the water company that supplies London. The Notes & Queries
column of the Guardian was asked where all the lost water went. One
reply began "The aquifers for London are the North and South Downs,
which are made of chalk and continue under London where they are
capped by a thick bed of London clay laid down by Thames Water."
Janet Swisher was listening to a report on National Public Radio.
"It probably made better sense when the reporter wrote it out with
parentheses, she says, "but it gave me a giggle when I heard it
read on the radio." It concerned the launch of the space shuttle
Discovery: "The astronauts will resupply the space station and do
some experiments. Some fruit flies are hitching a ride. They'll
take a couple of walks in space to inspect the shuttle and do some
chores."
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