World Wide Words -- 15 Jul 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 14 17:47:44 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 496 Saturday 15 July 2006
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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: Passive survivability.
3. Weird Words: Sponging-house.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Believe you me.
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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OOPS In my review of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English
last week, a typing error turned the abbreviation for "interpreter"
into "temp" rather than the correct "terp".
2. Turns of Phrase: Passive survivability
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This term has come to the fore in the USA and elsewhere in recent
months largely as a result of hurricane Katrina, which devastated
New Orleans and the Gulf coast last August. The concept is that
buildings should be designed so that they can survive the loss of
essential services - electricity, piped water, sewerage - in the
event of a natural disaster.
It grew out of a post-hurricane reconstruction conference held in
Atlanta in November 2005. This led to a set of proposals with the
title "The New Orleans Principles". One of these states, "Provide
for passive survivability: Homes, schools, public buildings, and
neighborhoods should be designed and built or rebuilt to serve as
livable refuges in the event of crisis or breakdown of energy,
water, and sewer systems". Techniques include many that are also
advocated by green campaigners: use natural ventilation, heavily
insulate buildings against heat loss, use natural daylight, collect
and store rainwater, install solar electricity generation, and so
on.
Advocates point to the risk of terrorism that might lead to similar
losses of public services. They also argue that possible shortages
of fuel in decades to come will require buildings to use much less
energy than they do now.
* Guardian, 20 Jun. 2006: There is now talk among some enlightened
architects of incorporating "passive survivability" into their
designs - the ability of a building to operate on its own should
systems such as water and electricity ever fail by, for example,
using better "thermal envelopes", natural daylighting and rainwater
storage.
* HPAC Engineering, Jan. 2006: Passive-survivability measures are
so important that it may make sense to incorporate them into
building codes. Most, but not all, passive-survivability features
will add some cost to a building, so the impact on affordability
needs to be considered if such measures are to be required by code.
3. Weird Words: Sponging-house
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A one-time place of temporary confinement for debtors.
Here's how it used to work: you got into debt, your creditor laid a
complaint with the sheriff, the sheriff sent his bailiffs, and you
were taken to the local sponging-house. This wasn't a prison, not
as such, but a private house, often the bailiff's own home. You
were held there temporarily in the hope that you could make some
arrangement with your creditors. Anthony Trollope set out the
system in his novel The Three Clerks of 1857:
He was taken to the sponging-house, and it was there
imparted to him that he had better send for two things -
first of all for money, which was by far the more
desirable of the two; and secondly, for bail, which even
if forthcoming was represented as being at best but a
dubious advantage.
If you couldn't sort matters out quickly you were then brought up
in court and sent to a debtor's prison. How you were ever expected
to pay off your debts while incarcerated is hard to imagine, but
that was the system.
Sponging-houses had a terrible reputation, which was made clear in
a description by Montagu Williams, a London lawyer who surely knew
them well, in his Down East and Up West of 1894:
Ah, my dear fellow, you´ve never seen a sponging-house!
Ye gods - what a place! I had an apartment they were
pleased to call a bedroom to myself certainly, but if I
wanted to breathe the air I had to do so in a cage in
the back garden - iron bars all round, and about the size
of one of the beast receptacles at the Zoo. For this
luxury I had to pay two guineas a day. A bottle of
sherry cost a guinea, a bottle of Bass half-a-crown, and
food was upon the same sort of economical tariff.
The idea of the sponging-house was based on that of the sponge that
gave it its name, which readily gives up its contents on being
squeezed. The sponging-house was the place where a debtor had any
available cash squeezed out of him, partly to the creditor's
benefit, but also to that to the bailiff who ran it.
4. Recently noted
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RHUBARB ORCHARD I'm not sure whether this is a Sic! item or a note
flagging an unusual usage. Andrew Turner was reading the label on a
jar of Tesco's Finest Champagne Rhubarb Yogurt. It was described as
"Sweet and tender champagne rhubarb from selected fruit orchards
blended with cream and West Country milk." Yummy. I'd never speak
of a "rhubarb orchard" but - as he points out - Google has a couple
of examples. So what do you call a rhubarb growing ground if you
don't call it an orchard? A rhubarb field, presumably?
WYATTING A newish phenomenon in British pubs is the device dubbed
the infinite jukebox, one connected to the Internet and so capable
of playing tens of thousands of tracks. Some pranksters subvert the
machines by choosing avant-garde tracks to disrupt the conviviality
and stop others from playing the same pop tracks over and over. The
favourite tracks among the exponents of this cruel cultural warfare
include Brian Eno's ambient music Thursday Afternoon, anything by
Philip Glass, and Robert Wyatt's Dondestan, hence the name. The
idea was mentioned in a New York Times article by Wendy McClure and
then picked up by blogger Simon Reynolds and by others, though the
name is said to have been coined by schoolteacher Carl Neville of
South London, who described it as "the cowardly white muso boys
anonymous attempt at provocation and civil disobedience".
5. Q&A: Believe you me
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Q. Why do people use the phrase "believe you me", when they want to
emphasise a point or opinion? I really don't think it makes any
sense; possibly it would be better if it were "believe me you", but
even that is poor English. [Andrew Gerrie]
A. It's a puzzling way of speaking because we don't use English in
that way any more. My knowledge of formal grammar being more than a
bit shaky, I went for information to Professor Geoffrey Pullum, co-
author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, the 1800-
page volume that is the standard work.
Because English doesn't add endings to words to show how they are
being used in a sentence, word order is crucially important. Today,
virtually all sentences that make a statement have to be put in the
order subject-verb-object (SVO): "The man pats the dog". That makes
clear who is doing what to whom. "The dog pats the man" has a quite
different sense.
At one time, however, English used to allow verb-subject-object
(VSO) in certain situations, mainly imperatives. The 1611 King
James version of the Bible has many examples: "And he went out to
meet Asa, and said unto him, Hear ye me"; "Ask me of things to come
concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye
me"; "For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me,
and ye shall live"; and "Lay ye them in two heaps at the entering
in of the gate until the morning." And here's G Herbert Temple in
1633: "Come ye hither all, whom wine Doth define" and another
writer in 1695: "Mark ye me; that's holy stuffe". These days, we
only see them in old writings or fossil expressions like:
Mind you, she's very intelligent.
This was the fifth time, mark you.
Oh, come ye back...
In every case, "you" or "ye" is the subject, but it comes after the
verb it's attached to. "Believe you me" belongs in this set. It
seems odd to us today because English language rules forbid us to
construct such expressions. We can't naturally say "Take you care
of yourself, now!" for example.
But, having said all that, an oddity is that "believe you me" is
relatively modern. The Oxford English Dictionary's first example is
from 1926. I've only been able to improve on that by six years - it
turns up in the USA in 1919 as the title of a novel by Nina Wilcox
Putnam. For further help here, I turned to Benjamin Zimmer, at the
University of Pennsylvania, an ace at researching historical word
usage. He tells me that there are earlier examples, but that nearly
all of them are in verse, where the phrasing is useful for
scansion. He has been able to find only three examples in prose
from the nineteenth century.
What seems to have happened is that a once-standard phrase that had
been lurking in the language for generations suddenly became much
more popular and widespread around the 1920s. What we have here is
a revitalised fossil, a semi-invented anachronism.
6. Sic!
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Greg Payne spotted a sign on the highway in Norwalk, Connecticut:
"Superman Returns Toys." He found himself asking, "Why, was he
dissatisfied with them?"
Amazon.co.uk's review of the Steve Coogan movie Tristram Shandy: A
Cock and Bull Story included this, to the surprise of Paul Hassett:
"Nor is the versatile filmmaker a stranger to the post-modern romp,
like 24 Hour Party People. In that peon to Manchester's music
scene, Steve Coogan was Factory honcho Tony Wilson."
"I always knew that moving up in a corporation was hard work," Reg
Brehaut e-mailed, "but now it has been documented: an editorial in
Computerworld (Vol 22, No. 12) refers to their current Salary
Survey results, in which 'Every wrung of the corporate ladder is
represented.'"
Susan Gable found a comment in the Mashpee Enterprise, a newspaper
based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, that may arouse an image you'd
prefer to avoid at the breakfast table: "Coyotes will gladly go for
food left in unsecured garbage cans and household pets."
Our old favourite the misplaced modifier has turned up again, this
time in the Netscape News Anchor Commentary last Monday about that
building that collapsed in Manhattan: "There was one person inside
the building at the time of the explosion, a doctor of Emergency
Medicine. After spending about 90 minutes trapped in the rubble,
firefighters pulled the doctor to safety." You've got to admire
those firefighters; even being buried doesn't stop 'em.
And finally, a couple of headlines that might be errors or could be
quiet jokes by bored sub-editors. Michael Keating found this one on
the normally extremely sober news at nature.com site: "Bruno the bear:
released to the Italian Alps, meets grizzly end in Germany." And a
headline from last Monday's Guardian: "Rare flower found on site is
a plant, says developer." [A word of explanation is perhaps needed
here: a California developer claims a rare protected plant called
the Sebastopol meadowfoam found on a site he is about to develop
was transplanted there by opponents in order to stop him. The
dispute has become known as Foamgate.]
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