World Wide Words -- 17 Jun 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 16 21:29:38 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 492 Saturday 17 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/mucz.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Citizen journalism.
3. Weird Words: Gelatologist.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: C3.
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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LINSEY-WOOLSEY In my piece on this word last week, I quoted the
Elizabethan preacher Silver-Tongued Smith, who noted that people
were forbidden to wear the cloth. Many subscribers have told me
that his comment refers to a Biblical prohibition against wearing
clothes made from a mixture of linen and wool. It is in Leviticus
19:19 and also in Deuteronomy 22:11, "Thou shalt not wear a garment
of divers sorts, as of woollen and linen together". Among orthodox
Jews the name for this principle is shatnez; it forbids any cloth
in which linen and wool are attached in any way, for example a wool
garment sewn together with linen thread. The word refers both to
the principle and to the fabrics themselves.
SLANGING MATCH Some subscribers were puzzled by this phrase, which
I included in last week's issue. It's principally British, for an
exchange of abuse or a vituperative argument. It derives from the
verb "to slang" (which the Oxford English Dictionary neatly notes
as being itself a slang term).
2. Turns of Phrase: Citizen journalism
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Though the term is relatively new, with few examples before 2005,
it is now common, in part because it appeared in Dan Gillmor's book
We the Media of 2004. It refers to individuals who report on the
news from outside traditional journalism channels. This might be as
simple as photographing or videoing a news event as it unfolds and
passing the images on to a newspaper or newscast, or writing a blog
on current events from a position of specialist knowledge. Its rise
has been entirely due to the Internet, which has provided a vast
forum in which anybody can, in theory, talk to anybody and in which
it is infinitely easier both to research facts and to communicate
them.
The term "citizen journalism" has been in the news recently because
of a recent ruling against Apple Computer by an appeals court in
the USA. Apple tried to get bloggers who had revealed trade secrets
to hand over their sources, but the court said that bloggers were
covered by the same shield law as journalists and by the First
Amendment protections of the press. "We can think of no workable
test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from
'illegitimate' news," the opinion said.
Citizen journalism is often seen as two-edged. It provides a large
pool of informed and concerned members of the public who can, and
often do, expose inaccuracy or mendacity in announcements by public
figures or the mainstream press. The downside is that such citizen
journalism is usually by people who lack many of the key skills of
finding and interpreting information and who often have trouble
avoiding bias or selective reporting.
* The Independent, 8 May 2006: With the rise in citizen journalism,
the internet and video phones, big world events unfold before our
eyes in a very different way to a few years ago.
* PR Newswire, 14 Mar. 2006: "Citizen journalism allows the true
voice of the people to emerge free of the inaccurate spinning often
found in traditional media reports," says Arianna Huffington, co-
founder and editor of HuffingtonPost.com.
3. Weird Words: Gelatologist /'dZEl@,tQl at dZIst/
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A researcher into humour.
You might think that this is a maker of Italian ice creams, sold in
gelaterias, or possibly some arcane culinary specialist in the use
of gelatine. It's nothing to do with either (though confusingly, I
did find one example of the latter sense in a book on cocktails).
The word actually comes from Greek "gelos", laughter. It's a close
relative of the adjective "gelastic", either something funny or a
remedy that works by making us laugh, no doubt on the principle of
laughter being the best medicine. On the reverse of that coin, a
gelastic seizure is a form of epilepsy that causes the sufferer to
laugh. "Geloscopy", an excessively rare word, is divination by
means of laughter.
"Gelatology" is the study of humour, laughter and the exercising of
the gelastic muscles, a serious exploration of what happens to our
physical systems, such as respiration and circulation, when we're
exposed to humour. The topic is as yet fairly obscure, though the
name for it can be traced back at least as far as the issue of the
Chronicle-Telegram of Elyria, Ohio, dated 3 June 1986.
[See http://quinion.com?PRON for a guide to pronunciation symbols.]
4. Recently noted
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TREE JIBBING This appeared recently in a caption to a photo of a
skier apparently perched about eight metres up a pine tree in the
Sierra Nevada of the USA. He got up speed by being towed behind a
snowmobile, then made a huge leap off a ramp. Having planted his
skis flat against the trunk of the tree, he pushed off backwards,
made a reverse turn and landed back on the ground. It seems not to
be an especially well known extreme sport, to judge from the few
references online.
PALAEOTEMPESTOLOGIST This superb job title for a researcher turned
up in last week's issue of New Scientist. A palaeotempestologist
(in the US usually paleotempestologist) studies the frequency and
intensity of ancient storms. Methods include taking core samples to
find evidence of sand washed into lakes by storm surges, studying
microfossils in coastal sediments, or investigating oxygen isotope
ratios in tree rings. One important result of this work is that it
is becoming possible to predict how often and how violently such
storms will occur in the future.
DEAD CLEVER You have to admire the creative ability of scientists
to find pithy names for chemical substances. The other day I learnt
that when bodies decompose as a result of bacterial action, two of
the chemicals that are produced have been given the common names of
putrescine and cadaverine. If you would prefer to avoid the mental
associations, you could refer to them instead as 1,4-diaminobutane
and 1,5-diaminopentane respectively. These names are not, by the
way, the unfeeling inventions of some modern worker in the field -
both date from 1887.
5. Q&A: C3
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Q. In my traversals through Wodehouse I have three or four times
encountered the Bertie Woosterism "C3", as in Comrade Bingo, in
which Bertie describes Bingo's comrades: "They were a very C3
collection". From context it obviously means substandard, low-
grade, bottom-of-the-barrel, but I haven't found a reference
explaining the origin and precise meaning of the term. My guess is
that it comes from some sort of government grading or rating
system, C3 being the antithesis of A1, analogous to the old US
Draft Board designation of 4F. [Art Scott]
A. You have it exactly right. In the First World War, as a result
of conscription under the Military Service Act of January 1916,
British recruits were graded from A1 to C3. The latter was the
lowest grade, for men who were totally unsuitable for combat
training, fit only for clerical and other sedentary jobs (it was
discovered that a scandalously and horrifyingly large proportion of
men - about 40% - fell into this category). The C3 classification
became a figurative term for somebody of the lowest grade or of
grossly inferior status or quality. The system was simplified not
much more than a year later, but "C3" caught on as a dismissive
epithet and took a long time to vanish again.
It turns up in the literal sense in D H Lawrence's Novel Kangaroo
of 1923: "He was only two hours in the barracks. He was examined.
He could tell they knew about him and disliked him. He was put in
class C3 - unfit for military service, but conscripted for light
non-military duties." And it was used figuratively by Sir Albert
Howard in An Agricultural Testament (1943): "The population, fed on
improperly grown food, has to be bolstered up by an expensive
system of patent medicines, panel doctors, dispensaries, hospitals,
and convalescent homes. A C3 population is being created."
As you say, it was a favourite of P G Wodehouse in the Bertie
Wooster stories. Another example is from Right Ho, Jeeves of 1934:
"Anatole, I learned, had retired to his bed with a fit of the
vapours, and the meal now before us had been cooked by the kitchen
maid - as C3 a performer as ever wielded a skillet."
Today "C3" is better known as the military abbreviation for
"command, control and communication".
6. Sic!
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Bob Shepard e-mailed from Oregon. "I found this headline in The
World of Coos Bay, Oregon, on June 5: 'Senate to take up same-sex
marriage'."
Daniel Hill found an oddly hyphenated headline on the BBC Web site
over a story datelined 13 June: "Ex-Irish Taoiseach Haughey dies".
Whatever you may say about the late Charles Haughey, he was never
ex-Irish. ("Taoiseach", by the way, which is said roughly as "tee-
shoch", is the title given to the Irish prime minister.)
David Mearns was struck by the intelligence of a vehicle mentioned
in a USA Today online news item on Thursday 8 June. "Inman's DNA
matched samples taken from the crime scene, said Robert Stewart,
head of South Carolina's Law Enforcement Division. He said a car of
the same model and year of one owned by Inman was spotted trying to
get money from an ATM near the apartment."
Stephen Trower tells me that the e-mail edition of the New York
Times of 12 June contained this: "Two Los Angeles women took out
life insurance policies on homeless men and collected over $2.2
million after they died in hit-and-run traffic cases, authorities
said." So you *can* take it with you.
Kathy Jolowicz encountered an intriguing comment in the Internet
Scout Report dated 9 June: "Upon hearing about a site dedicated to
State of the Union speeches, the eyes (and mousse) of some gentle
readers may gravitate elsewhere." Self-gravitating mousse: messy.
Barry Clegg forwarded a line he found in the Guardian of 27 May,
which I must confess I read at the time without spotting its Sic!
potential: "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ben-Shahar notes, planned to
write his life's greatest work by the time he died."
A. E-mail contact addresses
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