World Wide Words -- 10 Jun 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 9 17:43:54 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 491 Saturday 10 June 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/odex.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Patent troll.
3. Weird Words: Linsey-woolsey.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: One-off.
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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FAR FROM THE MADDING GERUND In my review last week, I might have
confused some readers with my explanation why some Americans say
"vowels" and "vows" alike. The book explained, "There are many
dialects of English that fully vocalize syllable-final /l/, turning
it into a high back off-glide, and for speakers of these dialects,
'vows' and 'vowels' have merged phonologically." Mark Lieberman,
who wrote that piece, generously says it was his fault and that I'd
been led astray by an ambiguity in his usage of "vocalize"; the
everyday sense is to utter a word or a sound, but he used it in the
technical sense, to change a consonant to a semivowel or vowel.
COMPUTERS: CAN'T LIVE WITH THEM, CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT THEM As many
of you discovered, the http://www.languagelog.com URL for reaching
the site that I quoted in the review wasn't working last weekend,
though it is now. Mark Lieberman tells me it was a server problem.
My automatic system for updating the World Wide Words site while I
sleep the sleep of the just failed last weekend. Subscribers were
left without the pretty version of the newsletter until I awoke,
cursed a little, and corrected matters. My apologies. This may have
been connected with what the support person at my service provider
called a "glitch" the day before, which rendered the site totally
unavailable for some time. If you got a "403: Permission Denied"
error, blame the glitch, which I visualise as a small spiky rodent
with excellent teeth.
Many subscribers didn't get last week's newsletter because a four-
letter word meaning micturition was present, which triggered those
nannying and annoying obscenity filters that are installed on many
mail systems. My apologies to those who thereby missed the issue,
but I really thought it was too common and inoffensive a word to be
likely to cause a problem. You can catch up with it by visiting the
back issues page at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ .
Computers are getting so picky. A copy of last week's newsletter
was bounced from one site with the message, "Blocked because the
system you are trying to mail cannot spell".
CASHED-UP BOGANS Alex Piece's comments on this term suggest that
this new Australian colloquialism is much nearer the British "chav"
even than my sources suggested: "Bogans are usually male, but not
always blue-collar - white-collar workers can also be bogans if
they are particularly loutish or sexist, are - or at least pretend
to be - poorly-educated, and enjoy hooning [driving recklessly] in
a ute [utility vehicle] on the weekend with their mates. Cashed-up
bogans are ridiculed (by those of us who don't want to be seen as
bogans) for being sucked in by slick marketing, and for being
ostentatious with their wealth - the ultimate being the Jacuzzi
[hot tub] in the backyard!" Pam Peters of the Australian Dictionary
Research Centre tells me that an article in the Sydney Morning
Herald on Wednesday discussed the term, its author hoping that it
would not catch on. As it had to be explained to Sydneysiders, she
suggests that it is still principally a term of the Melbourne area.
2. Turns of Phrase: Patent troll
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There are two sorts of companies in the high-tech world today. Some
invent things, manufacture them, and bring them to market. Others
register or buy patents, not in order to develop them, but in order
to collect money from other firms whose products they consider to
be covered by the patents. A relatively polite term for the latter
is "patent troll".
It began to appear in print in early 2005 and has since been used
in a number of newspaper reports on lawsuits, such as the one in
which a patent holding company sued the makers of the BlackBerry
e-mail device for infringement and settled for $612.5m.
Some commentators say that a US Supreme Court judgement in May 2006
may limit the patent-trolling, though others argue that the real
problem lies with an understaffed and overburdened US patent
system, working by outdated rules, that cannot cope with today's
fast-moving technological landscape.
The term derives from an old sense of "troll" for a way of fishing
in which lines are trailed behind a moving boat. In turn, that may
be from an old confusion with "trawl" or "trail". "Troll" has long
been known online as the name for a person who posts provocative
messages to a discussion group with the aim of creating a slanging
match. Though this came from the trawling sense, it also linked
into the folktale concept of a troll as an ugly, malevolent cave-
dwelling being.
* Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 15 May 2006: Critics of the U.S.
patent system ... have argued the patent system is riddled with
abuse, mainly from "patent trolls," or small businesses that sue
established companies to enforce patents for ideas that have never
been developed into products.
* InternetNews, 18 April 2006: RIM's defense throughout the case
was that NTP was merely a "patent troll," hoarding an innovation it
never intended to use.
3. Weird Words: Linsey-woolsey
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A textile material; a strange medley.
Back in Tudor times in England there was a coarse linen material
called "linsey", whose name was formerly believed to derive from
the dialect word "line" for linen, but is now thought to be from
Lindsey, the village in Suffolk where it was first made.
Linen was woven together with wool to make a less costly fabric
that became known as "linsey-woolsey", with the ending of "wool"
changed to make a rhyming couplet. Henry Smith, a Church of England
clergyman and renowned preacher - he was known as Silver-Tongued
Smith - included an odd comment in his sermon, A Preparative to
Marriage, that was published in 1591: "God forbad the people to
weare linsey wolsey, because it was a signe of inconstancie."
Rather later, "linsey-woolsey" became an inferior coarse cloth of
wool woven on cotton. You can tell its humble status from Elizabeth
Gaskell's mention of it in Sylvia's Lovers of 1863: "How well it
was, thought the young girl, that she had doffed her bed-gown and
linsey-woolsey petticoat, her working-dress, and made herself smart
in her stuff gown, when she sat down to work with her mother." The
Ohio Democrat commented in 1869 on local small farmers who had come
into Charlotte, North Carolina, to sell their cotton crop: "They were
uniformly dressed in the roughest sort of homemade linsey-wolsey."
Punch had fun with its name in its issue of 14 February 1917:
When I grow up to be a man and wear whate'er I please,
Black-cloth and serge and Harris-tweed - I will have none of these;
For shaggy men wear Harris-tweed, so Harris-tweed won't do,
And fat commercial travellers are dressed in dingy blue;
Lack-lustre black to lawyers leave and sad souls in the City,
But I'll wear Linsey-Woolsey because it sounds so pretty.
I don't know what it looks like,
I don't know how it feels,
But Linsey-Woolsey to my fancy
Prettily appeals.
Because linsey-woolsey combines two fabrics, the word came, as
early as the end of the sixteenth century, to refer to a strange
mixture and so to confusion or nonsense. Shakespeare was an early
user in All's Well That Ends Well (1601): "But what linsey-woolsey
has thou to speak to us again?" It's long defunct in that sense;
one of the last users was an anonymous critic in The Examiner in
1823: "A perking, prurient, linsey-wolsey species of composition."
[Perking: upstart, insolent or impudent.]
4. Recently noted
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HEXAKOSIOIHEXEKONTAHEXAPHOBIA Much has been made in some quarters
of last Tuesday's date, 6-6-06, which is close enough to the Number
of the Beast in the New Testament Book of Revelation to have caused
some anxiety among those who fear the consequences of numerological
coincidences. This term for morbid anxiety about the number 666 is
not, so far as I know, to be found in any dictionary. The "-phobia"
ending is easy and the rest is an English transliteration of the
Greek for 666: "hexakosioi" - 600, "hexekonta" - 60, "hex" - 6.
RINGXIETY You know the problem: a mobile phone (cellphone) rings
and everybody frantically starts checking their pockets or bags,
only to become distressed when they realise the call isn't for
them. Sometimes people also hear their phone ringing when it isn't,
perhaps at a concert, while watching television or driving the car.
"Ringxiety" ("ring" + "anxiety") was coined by David Laramie of
California's School of Professional Psychology, himself a sufferer.
It seems to have appeared first in an article in the New York Times
on 4 May, which also introduced us to its synonyms "fauxcellarm"
and the more prosaic "phantom ring". Psychologists say ringxiety
comes about through a continual state of heightened vigilance that
is induced by a fear of missing calls and so being out of touch.
It's triggered by sounds that happen to be in the same frequency
range as a phone ring. It isn't, as yet, a recognised medical
condition.
ONLINE RESOURCE EXTENDED Back in April, I reported that libraries
in England had been given free access to several resources of the
Oxford University Press through their library membership. The Press
has now announced that this has been extended to Northern Ireland.
The best part is that you don't need to visit your library: you can
log on from any computer. To get access, visit Northern Ireland
Libraries at http://www.ni-libraries.net/, click on Online Library,
and enter your library ticket number and PIN. All NI libraries have
access to the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford Reference Online,
the Dictionary of National Biography, Grove Art Online and Grove
Music Online. The agreement lasts until 31 March 2008.
5. Q&A:
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Q. Whence the term "one-off" which obviously means "one of a kind"?
[Jim Brewster]
A. This is mainly a British and Commonwealth usage, not so much
known in the US, I believe.
It comes out of manufacturing, in which "off" has long been used to
mark a number of items to be produced of one kind: "20-off", "500-
off". This seems to have begun in foundry work, or a similar trade,
in which items were cast "off" a mould or from a pattern ("We'll
have 20 off that pattern and 500 off that other one".) An example
is in a book of 1947 by James Crowther and Richard Whiddington,
Science at War: "Manufacturers found it very difficult to give up
mass production, in order to make the 200 or so sets 'off'."
A "one-off" was just a single item, used in particular to refer to
a prototype. The first known example appeared in the Proceedings of
the Institute of British Foundrymen in 1934: "A splendid one-off
pattern can be swept up in very little time." (The reference is to
a casting mould formed in sand.)
Out of this came our current figurative sense of something that is
done, made, or happens only once - as you say, one of a kind. An
example appeared in the Coventry Evening Telegraph in February
2006: "Anyone who would like to donate in Mo's memory is welcome to
make a one-off donation or more long-term contributions."
It can also be used of a special person, someone for whom it might
be said "After they made him, they broke the mould". Here's an
example from the Daily Telegraph of 13 April 2006, about Michael
Eavis, who runs the Glastonbury Festival: "I have great respect for
him. He's a fantastic eccentric, really, a one-off."
6. Sic!
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I tried to close my savings account last week. It wouldn't let me.
The error message that appeared said "Your account must be at least
zero before you can close it." It turned out to mean that all funds
had to be withdrawn first. But "at least zero"?
John Gray notes the doubly tragic sentence in a UK local newspaper
report (Gloucester Citizen, 1 June): "A little girl is devastated
after her pony was viscously attacked".
A caption to a photograph on the BBC Web site from the Hay-on-Wye
Literary Festival was spotted by Con Mansell: "Alan Rusbridger -
Editor of the Guardian newspaper - walking through Hay on his
mobile phone".
"A recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, reports Stu Lang,
"was headlined 'Turkey forms committee on saving poultry industry'.
Real concern or enlightened self-interest?"
John Parr's local paper, The Fresno Bee, included an advertisement
in its issue for 26 May: "Stop annoying birds". He snorts, "I don't
deliberately annoy birds. What it means is, 'Repel birds that annoy
you'. Quite a difference!"
A. E-mail contact addresses
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