World Wide Words -- 22 Jul 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 21 17:10:07 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 497 Saturday 22 July 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/zevs.htm
Contents
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1. Weird Words: POTUS.
2. Recently noted.
3. It was a dark and stormy night.
4. Q&A: Hooker.
5. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Weird Words: POTUS
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President of the United States.
The acronym has been common among Washington insiders for several
decades. It has spread far wider in recent years, even outside the
US, as a result in part of TV programmes like The West Wing. It has
to be said it's a pretty obvious abbreviation, one that must have
occurred to many people down the years. But we're sure its genesis
lies with Mr Walter P Phillips, at the time a telegrapher for the
United Press Association but who later became the president of the
Columbia Gramophone Company.
Mr Phillips created his code in 1879 to streamline the reporting of
court proceedings. It was used for many decades by news agencies
and newspaper offices and would have been known to everyone dealing
with copy coming in on the wire. It was a shorthand, in which those
expressions most likely to appear in news reports were abbreviated:
"fapib" meant "filed a petition in bankruptcy"; "ckx", "committed
suicide"; "utaf", "under the auspices of the". The names of people
in the news were frequently reduced to initials, as in this example
that appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1910: "T trl o HKT ft mu o
SW on Mu roof garden, nw in pg ...", which the transcriber would at
once have rendered as "The trial of Harry K Thaw for the murder of
Stanford White on the Madison Square Roof Garden, now in progress
..." The numerical code "73" was short for "best regards"; "30"
meant "end of message" and is still used by some reporters to mark
the end of stories.
A writer in the Daily Northwestern of Wisconsin said this about the
code in 1921:
One or more letters may mean one word, or may mean a
group of words. For instance, a dot, dash and a dot,
or the letter f, means "of the;" potus, "president of
the United States", xn, "constitution", and hundreds
of others, which, when sent at a high rate of speed,
keep an operator's attention constantly riveted on
every dot and dash in order that he may transcribe
the conglomeration, on a typewriter, into reading
matter such as appears in the daily newspapers.
"POTUS" appeared in every edition and is first recorded in print in
the Fort Wayne News of Indiana on 25 February 1903: "This is the
way a message is sent on the wire: T potus, ixs, wi km to Kevy ...
This jargon of letters conveys the following information: The
president of the United States, it is said, will communicate to
King Edward VII ..."
"SCOTUS", Supreme Court of the United States, was also in the code.
("FLOTUS", for First Lady of the United States, is much more recent
and less common.) As a result of the Phillips code, both acronyms
can lay claim to being the earliest known, beating "AWOL", Absent
Without Leave, which newspaper reports show was being said as a
pronounceable word around 1918.
2. Recently noted
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NON-EVOLVED GRANDMOTHER This splendid bit of sociological jargon
turned up in the Jamaica Gleaner last week. It doesn't meant that
your elderly maternal relative is still swinging from the trees. It
refers to a situation in which she is still actively involved in
caring for children in her later years. The theory is this stops
her moving on to her traditional role as grandmother, so leading to
a confusion of roles in the household. The term was created by a
sociologist named F Colon in 1980.
VISHING More Internet-related slang. This one is a variation on
phishing - itself a respelling of "fishing" - which refers to the
obtaining of passwords and other personal information by a ruse.
Vishers target individuals by telephoning them, taking advantage of
the low costs of calls made via the Net using a technique called
Voice-over-IP or VoIP (hence "vishing": "VoIP" + "phishing"). A
recorded message asks the victim to ring their credit-card provider
to verify account information. When he or she does so and enters a
credit-card number to authenticate themselves, the visher captures
the number and uses it to make fraudulent purchases.
OCPO The British government does love acronyms. I've mentioned
previously the controversial ASBOs, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders.
Now the proposal has appeared for a sort of super-ASBO to target
those involved in organised crime, especially drug and people
trafficking and money-laundering. Because hard evidence is hard to
come by, the idea is to create a court-imposed civil order that
requires a lower standard of proof than the "beyond reasonable
doubt" of the criminal law. The acronym is short for Organised
Crime Prevention Order.
3. It was a dark and stormy night
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I've always been ambivalent about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
for Bad Writing. He wasn't that awful a writer and doesn't deserve
such mockery. Admittedly, he wrote floridly, as did many authors of
the nineteenth century, but we don't point the finger of accusation
at Dickens, whose pages are often at least as enpurpled. To mock
decidedly bad writing, it should be renamed the Dan Brown Da Vinci
Code Bad Fiction Contest. Trying to outdo him really would be a
challenge.
But the San Jose State University's annual event throws up some
intriguing attempts to deliberately write badly. This year's winner
- announced last week - was Jim Guigli of California, who submitted
this: "Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light
from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the
door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your
last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and
whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the
shovel clean." Roll over, Raymond Chandler.
The runner-up, it may be argued, doesn't conform to the rules of
the contest, since it is a parody, not an attempt to write badly,
but it may be particularly appreciated in this forum. It was penned
by Stuart Vasepuru of Edinburgh: "'I know what you're thinking,
punk,' hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, 'you're thinking, "Did
he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?" - and to tell the
truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is
English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle
nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself
one question: "Do I feel loquacious?" - well do you, punk?'"
4. Q&A: Hooker
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Q. In a biography of General U S Grant, there was mention of a
charismatic American Civil War general called 'Fighting Joe'
Hooker, and his female camp followers, known as Hooker's women, or
Hookers, for short. Do you know, is this the origin of the word
'Hooker' for a lady of negotiable affections, or is it folk
etymology? [Vince Baughan, UK]
A. This is a persistent story in the USA, but it's untrue.
General Hooker was a real person, though one not universally popular
- one biographer calls him "a conniver and carouser" - because he was
quarrelsome, deeply disrespectful of his superiors, a womaniser, a
drunkard, and (worst of all) an unsuccessful soldier. Hooker's
headquarters were described as a combination of bar and brothel into
which no decent woman could go. It is also said that his men were an
undisciplined lot who often frequented prostitutes (a red-light area
of Washington is supposed to have briefly been called "Hooker's
division" for this reason). So it's not surprising that "hooker" is
often assumed to derive from his short-lived command.
However, there's a fatal flaw: the word is recorded several times
before the Civil War. It's listed in the second edition of John
Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms of 1859 and another example is
known from North Carolina in 1845. An even earlier instance was
turned up by George Thompson of New York University in The New York
Transcript of 25 September 1835, which contains a whimsical report of
a police court hearing in which a woman of no reputation at all is
called a hooker because she "hangs around the hook".
This obscure reference is to Corlear's Hook, an area of New York.
Bartlett suggests the same origin for the term, based on "the number
of houses of ill-fame frequented by sailors" in the area. Though this
origin sounds plausible, it may well be that John Bartlett and others
who made this connection were falling victim to an earlier version of
folk etymology.
There is some evidence to suggest that it really comes from a much
older British low slang term for a specialist thief who snatches
items using a hook. In 1592, in a book on low-life called The Art of
Conny Catching ("conny" or "cony", the old word for a rabbit, was
then a cant term for a mark or sucker), Robert Greene says that such
thieves, "pull out of a window any loose linen cloth, apparel, or
else any other household stuff". The implication is that the hooker
catches her clients by similar, albeit less tangible, methods.
[A version of this piece appears in my book, Port Out, Starboard Home
(Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds in the US), which is available in good
bookshops everywhere. See http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm .]
5. Sic!
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"An item in this evening's BBC local news 'South Today'", e-mailed
Peter Zivanovic, "reported the visit by their Colonel in Chief, the
Duke of Gloucester, to the Hampshire base of the RAMC. Members of
the regiment were interviewed and the caption showing their names
also showed their unit as the "Royal Army Medical Core". Perhaps
they felt that Corps(e) would be far too defeatist as a name for a
medical unit?"
Not entirely incidentally, the article I mentioned here two weeks
ago about a seven-member drum quartet resulted in several messages
pointing out that it also referred to a "bugle core". This turns
out to be extremely common online but also appears from time to
time in newspapers. It may one day even become the usual spelling.
Yet another recipe for eternal life was found on MSNBC by Jennifer
Painter: "The study of 302 people aged 70 to 82 found those who
engaged in more physical activity - not necessarily formal exercise
- were much less likely to die than those who did not move as
much."
Riva Berleant reports that in the summer of 2004 she came across a
notice posted on a commercial fishing dock in Stonington, Maine:
"TWO HOUR BIRTHING LIMIT Violators may be towed at owners expense!
All birthing shall be at your own risk." She wonders if it's still
there.
A sign outside a DIY store in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, caught
Kenneth Peterson's eye last weekend (and his camera's: a photograph
is included in the online version of this newsletter): "Confused In
Home Consults Available". Some punctuation would have helped.
"You may be amused," says Louis McMeeken, "by this item from The
Independent on 15th July: "A postman was jailed for nine months
yesterday after police found more than 34,000 items of unopened
mail at his home. Sheffield Crown Court heard that when police
turned up at 49-year-old Roger Parkinson's home, near Barnsley, he
said: 'I'm glad in a way. It needs sorting.'"
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