World Wide Words -- 29 Jul 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 28 19:27:27 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 498 Saturday 29 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/fjrd.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Menaissance.
3. Weird Words: Epeolatry.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Banter.
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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CORRECTION In the piece on POTUS last week, I stated that Walter
Phillips had been president of the Columbia Gramophone Company. As
John Winn noted, the firm was the Columbia Graphophone Company (The
Gramophone Company, better known by its slogan His Master's Voice,
had grabbed the word "gramophone".)
ENPURPLED Lots of people queried this, which appeared in the piece
on the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, because they couldn't find it
in their dictionaries. I have to confess I'd made it up in the heat
of composition, being in need of a word to communicate the idea of
excessively flowery language. Roger Cooper pointed out that English
doesn't like "enp-" and very few words begin with it. One British
example is "enprint" for a standard-sized photo, though that's an
invented term that really ought to be hyphenated, and there's also
the aviation term "enplane" for getting passengers on board. But -
and this is why it may be worth all this space - "enpurpled" feels
right to me while the alternative given in the bigger dictionaries,
"empurpled", doesn't. That this isn't solely an idiosyncrasy is due
to the Daily Mail of 13 June 2003: "Lord Irvine of Lairg brought to
the historic House of Lords a whole new meaning to our concept of
enpurpled majesty", as well as many historical examples. Now having
started this hare running, I mean to try to catch it and store it
between the pages of the OED.
2. Turns of Phrase: Menaissance
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Farewell metrosexuals, with your gelled hair, moisturised skin and
impeccable clothing. Hello real men: macho, carnivorous, hanging-
out-with-your-mates, beer-swilling, sexist. It's the menaissance.
It's the backlash. American newspapers, quick to spot a trendette,
have pounced on a series of recent US television advertisements
that pander to one's inner caveman, and on books like The Alphabet
of Manliness by George Ouzounian (alias Maddox), I Hope They Serve
Beer In Hell by Tucker Max, and Real Men Don't Apologize by Jim
Belushi. In various ways, all preach a return to a pre-modernist
old-style masculinity. Another term for the unreconstructed (or
reconstituted) male that pops up in some articles is "retrosexual".
Thoughtful commentators point to the male sex's struggle to adjust
to a world of sexual equality as the main driver for the backlash.
Professor Harvey Mansfield's recent book Manliness argues that men
need to recapture some virtues of manliness - such as decisiveness
and assertiveness - and not be afraid to display them.
* Daily Mail, 12 Jul. 2006: Of course, advocates of the Menaissance
may argue that we shouldn't be too concerned about what kind of a
man women want these days. Isn't that, they would say, the way we
arrived at simpering metrosexuals desperate to please their other
halves?
* Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 Apr. 2006: A woman friend tells me
there's a desperate need for a "menaissance." Many women are weary
of sensitive emo-boys and metrosexuals.
3. Weird Words: Epeolatry
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The worship of words.
Though an appropriate term for this forum, it hasn't achieved any
great success in the world at large. It's not even especially old,
since its first known user, and presumably its creator, was Oliver
Wendell Holmes, in his Professor at the Breakfast Table of 1860:
"Time, time only, can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or
word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing signified."
It derives from Greek "epeos", a word, plus the "-latry" ending
from Greek "latreia", worship, that turns up also in words such as
"idolatry". For some reason, "epeos" lost out in the Greek-roots
popularity stakes to "logos". However, "epic" is from the same
source, an "epoist" is a writer of epic poetry, and "cacoepy" means
faulty pronunciation (a word that's suitably easy to say wrongly:
it's CACO-ipi).
Its appearances are so few that the tag "obscure" attached to it in
some dictionaries is all too apt. However, I did find it in a work
called Anurada Negotiates Our Wobbly Planet, a self-published title
of 2006 by Roger Day: "I read my dictionary for a few more minutes,
until tiredness eventually brought my epeolatry to an end for the
day."
4. Recently noted
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HOTITUDINAL SKINTERNS The Washington Times told the story on 5
July: "Tank tops, flip-flops, bare flesh and cleavage. It's the
unofficial uniform of the summer interns, gaggles of college-age
women and recent graduates who invade buttoned-down conservative
Washington every summer, bringing a large dose of hotitude to
offices from Capitol Hill to K Street." The piece explained that
the nickname for these barely dressed incomers is "skinterns".
DEMOCRAZY Stephen Colbert used this in his US TV show The Colbert
Report this week in reference to events in the Middle East. Unlike
his "truthiness" last year, which was selected as Word of the Year
by the American Dialect Society, this one isn't original to him,
despite at least one commentator's belief that it is. For starters,
a film of 2005 and the 2003 album by Damon Albarn both have that
title. The earliest print example I've so far found is in the title
of an article in the National Review of 8 January 1992, which began
"At the Japanese war trials of 1946, the defunct empire's former
propaganda minister, Shumei Okawa, inadvertently made a good pun.
Leaping to his feet, he screamed in his uncertain English: 'I hate
United States! It is democrazy!'" But the current winner is the
Smith's album of 1991, so titled.
ENVELOPMENTAL JOURNALISM This appeared in a piece in a Philippines
newspaper last week and was new to me, though it turns out to have
long been known in that country and elsewhere. It refers to giving
journalists envelopes containing money - bribery, in other words -
to put a favourable gloss on reporting a story.
5. Q&A: Banter
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Q. What is the origin of the word "banter"? [Donald Hopkins]
A. Presumably you would prefer not to settle for "origin unknown"?
It makes a short answer and is accurate, but is hardly satisfying.
There is a story behind it, though, that may be worth the telling.
The word began as low slang around the last third of the
seventeenth century. The verb came first, then the noun. When it
first appeared, it referred to exchanges that were more aggressive
and vicious than the mild, playful and friendly exchange of teasing
remarks, usually preceded in descriptions by "good-natured", that
it became later. It variously meant then to delude or bamboozle
somebody, to hold them up to ridicule and to give them a roasting,
in a term of the day we still possess. You can see that in the
first appearance of the verb in Madam Fickle, a play dated 1676 by
Thomas D'Urfey, in which Zechiel cries to his brother: "Banter him,
banter him, Toby. 'Tis a conceited old Scarab, and will yield us
excellent sport - go play upon him a little - exercise thy Wit." A
letter of 1723 equated banter with Billingsgate, the foul and
vituperative language of the porters at the London fish market of
that name.
"Banter" became notorious because of a spirited attack on it by
Jonathan Swift in a famous article he wrote for The Tatler in 1710.
In it he attacked what he called "the continual corruption of our
English tongue":
The third refinement observable in the letter I send you, consists
in the choice of certain words invented by some "pretty fellows";
such as "banter", "bamboozle", "country put", and "kidney", as it
is there applied; some of which are now struggling for the vogue,
and others are in possession of it. I have done my utmost for some
years past to stop the progress of "mobb" and "banter", but have
been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who
promised to assist me.
The same year he wrote of the word in his Apology to The Tale of a
Tub ("apology" meaning a formal defence of the work), that "This
polite word of theirs was first borrowed from the bullies in White-
Friars, then fell among the footmen, and at last retired to the
pedants; by whom it is applied as properly to the productions of
wit, as if I should apply it to Sir Isaac Newton's mathematics."
Note that nobody has anything to say about where those bullies took
it from. That is lost in the mists of ancient linguistic invention.
6. Sic!
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Alvin Rymsha e-mailed from the US Virgin Islands with news of an
article in the Boston Magazine for July 2006: "Barnacle Billy's is
an Ogunquit institution. And so is its owner Billy Tower, who's
been catching, cooking and feeding rich, famous and dedicated
lobster-lovers for 45 years." Ummmm! Those crusty New Englanders!
John Carrick reports: "In real-estate advertisements in Sydney and
elsewhere in Australia, a desirable property is increasingly being
called 'sort-after', although not always with the luxury of a
linking hyphen. This practice seems to be spreading, presumably
through online advertising, where agents see each other's ads and
presumably copy this especially keen usage from each other."
Speaking of Australia ... while researching a possible holiday in
outback New South Wales, Elizabeth Chow went to the National Parks
Web site. One of the tours looked interesting: "Tours leave from
the Historic Woolshed. Participating vehicles need to be high
clearance, a hat, cup, drink, sturdy shoes & sunscreen."
The 21 July issue of the Saanich News, the local paper of both Don
Wilkes and Peter Weinrich, included a picture caption: "Jagged
glass marks the holes left by a trio of builders an angry man
tossed through the windows of the CBC's Pandora Avenue studios
Tuesday." Fortunately the article makes it clear that "boulders"
were meant, and not that the man was offended by the creators of
the building.
Judith Rascoe tells me that the San Rafael greenmarket, a Sunday
rendezvous in Marin County, California, is known for its organic
produce and 'artisanal' food products competing for the foodies'
dollars. For years it's been the place to buy heirloom tomatoes,
those special varieties revived by small-scale market gardeners.
But maybe they're demodé these days, she says, since last Sunday
she encountered a stall featuring bins of "air loom tomatoes."
>From the Guardian of 20 July: "The less ignorant will be aware that
Joseph Pilates, a German of Greek descent, first developed his
system of 'contrology' in order to rehabilitate victims of the 1918
flu pandemic while he was interred in the Isle of Man during the
first world war." That would have been a neat trick, but then he
had merely been interned, not interred.
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