World Wide Words -- 25 March 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 24 18:02:15 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 480 Saturday 25 March 2006
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to at least 32,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Anatine.
3. Topical words: Bloody.
4. While I was otherwise occupied ...
5. Q&A: Top dog.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
--------------
A formatted version of this newsletter (which
contains several images) is available online at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/szbm.htm
--------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
RETURNED! To a vast accumulation of e-mail, which I'm only slowly
working through. Thank you all for your forbearance while my wife
and I took much time off to potter our way around New Zealand and
Australia. I would have done the traditional thing and sent each of
you a picture postcard, but you might not have appreciated a big
image appearing in your inbox. So I've posted a photograph in the
online version (see above) that I hope you'll accept as a belated
gesture towards vacation convention.
2. Weird Words: Anatine
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Resembling or characteristic of a duck.
There's a whole set of adjectives derived from Latin that refer to
animals, of which the most common are "bovine", relating to the ox,
"ovine" for sheep, and "lupine" for fox. Others are "murine" for
mouse, "leporine" for hare, "sciurine" for squirrel, "cervine" for
deer, and "anserine" for goose.
"Anatine" is from Latin "anas", a duck. The principal stamping
ground of this word is in scientific papers, in part because the
zoological family containing the ducks is the Anatinae. However, it
does very occasionally appear in literature. Perhaps its best-known
recent manifestation is in Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon of
1997: "I took refuge in wild theorizing,- if Angels be the next
higher being from Man, perhaps the Duck had 'morphos'd into some
Anatine Equivalent, acting as my Guardian,- purely, as an Angel
might."
3. Topical words: Bloody
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"So where the bloody hell are you?" is the punchline of a print and
television advertising campaign launched by Tourism Australia last
month. It features Australians relaxing in beautiful settings, with
lines like "We've poured you a beer", "We've got the sharks out of
the pool", and "We've saved you a spot on the beach", ending with a
nubile bikini-clad blonde uttering the line. (To see the ad, visit
http://www.wherethebloodyhellareyou.com/ .)
You might not believe, let alone understand, all the fuss this has
caused. Critics within Australia argued that the line is crude and
will remind people of the outdated boorish and aggressive image of
the Australia of previous decades. And prime minister John Howard
couldn't bring himself to utter the slogan when asked to do so by
an Australian radio interviewer. The kerfuffle would have remained
confined to Australia had not the Broadcast Advertising Clearance
Centre (BACC) banned it from television screens in the UK.
Americans might guess the offensive word is "hell", which is still
an expletive with some force in that country. But no, it's "bloody"
that's causing all the spluttering and high blood pressure, a word
that Americans have never much used, but which Australians took to
their hearts well over a century ago. The tourism minister, Fran
Bailey, argues that it isn't at all offensive. "It's the great
Australian adjective. We all use it, it's part of our language."
That's largely true for Australia, but not for Britain.
What we're seeing here is a vestige of a British attitude to the
word which is ancient but hard to explain. From about 1750 "bloody"
became taboo in polite society. In an entry published in 1887 in
what was then still called the New English Dictionary on Historical
Principles, James Murray noted that it was "now constantly in the
mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered
'a horrid word', on a par with obscene or profane language". In
1880, John Ruskin commented that "[t]he use of the word 'bloody' in
modern low English is a deeper corruption, not altering the form of
the word, but defiling the thought of it." British police reports
of the time usually wrote it as "b----y", a practice that continued
well into the twentieth century.
George Bernard Shaw caused a sensation when his play Pygmalion was
first performed in London in 1914. He had the flower girl Eliza
Doolittle flounce out in Act III with the words, "Walk! Not bloody
likely. I am going in a taxi". The line created an enormous fuss,
with people going to the play just to hear the forbidden word, and
led to the jocular euphemism "not Pygmalion likely", which survived
into the 1970s.
It's hard to explain why the word had such shock value, though it
is likely that people mistakenly believed it derived from old oaths
like "Christ's blood" or "by God's blood". The real origin, still
in doubt, may be traceable back to the aristocratic rowdies, the
bloods, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The word lost much of its force during the last century, especially
after World War II. When Alan Jay Lerner wrote the musical My Fair
Lady, based on Shaw's play, he felt "bloody" was too weak to make
the point to American audiences about Eliza's low-class origins
breaking through under stress. In the Ascot scene, which isn't in
the play, he has Eliza urge on her horse with "Move your blooming
arse!" I remember hearing gasps from members of the audience when I
saw the film in Britain on its release in 1964. The euphemistic
"blooming" is rather sweet; "bloody" turns up a couple of times
elsewhere in the film, but perhaps Lerner felt that "Move your
bloody arse!" would be pitching it too strong even for his more
tolerant times.
The response to the BACC ban has been uniformly mocking. Australian
papers, as you might expect, saw this as a case of stuffed-shirt
hypocritical Pommie attitudes. "This from the country," wrote the
Sydney Daily Telegraph, "that gave the world such marvellously
tasteful TV fare as Benny Hill, the Carry On genre, Little Britain,
Ali G and so on." Australian Andrew Mueller wrote in the Guardian
on 18 March, "One supposes that it's quite difficult to end up with
a job on a regulatory body like the Broadcast Advertising Clearance
Centre unless one is, at heart, a humourless, purse-lipped, lemon-
sucking wowser - what other sort of person seeks to appoint
themselves a guardian of public morality?" After protests from Fran
Bailey, the Centre has agreed to review its decision.
The controversy is wonderful publicity for Tourism Australia, of
course, though compared with the Australian press the British media
have hardly noticed the spat. It shows the word still has some
force, confirming the comment in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of
English Usage about British usage that "[i]t probably still offends
more delicate sensibilities". But there are so few of these to be
found these days that the ban makes little sense.
4. While I was otherwise occupied ...
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ONE FOR ALL YOU ZOMBIES On 5 March, the British trade magazine The
Bookseller awarded its Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of
the year to "People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach
Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It", by
Gary Leon Hill. It was described by Joel Tickett, the deputy editor
of the journal, as "a lively practical guide to dealing with the
undead". Runners-up were "Rhino Horn Stockpile Management: Minimum
Standards and Best Practices from East and Southern Africa" by
Simon Milledge, "Ancient Starch Research" by Robin Torrence and Huw
J Barton, "Soil Nailing: Best Practice Guidance", and "Bullying and
Sexual Harassment: A Practical Handbook". The 2005 winner is a
worthy successor to "Bombproof Your Horse" (winner in 2004), "The
Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories" (2003), and "Living with Crazy
Buttocks" (2002).
NIMFISM The British government is to try out car-sharing lanes in
a toe-dipping exercise next year on one mile of motorway. Motoring
organisations point to US experience that drivers are reluctant to
let other people share their vehicles. In an invention that surely
will not succeed, one linguistically experimental writer has taken
the older "nimby" ("not in my back yard") and created from it the
ugly "nimfism" - "not in my front (seat)".
OWN If you own something, you possess it indefinitely, right? Not
according to some advertisements that have been spotted by members
of the American Dialect Society mailing list. One on a Web site has
a special offer: "House on Haunted Hill will not be available in
stores until later this year. But you can own it for a limited time
only exclusively through Legend Films." The text makes it obvious
that it's an invitation to buy, not to hire. My American marketing
consultant tells me that "own" has indeed in some circumstances
come to mean "buy". It began with high-end products like expensive
cars or exclusive limited-edition items. The implication is that
their buyers are blessed with the resources and discriminating
taste to make sophisticated "ownership" choices. This may sound
right when one is selecting, say, a private plane, but it becomes
silly in the context of buying a special-offer horror film DVD.
ZILLOWING People just love turning nouns into verbs, something
that deeply troubles trademark lawyers and owners. It didn't take
long for "Google" to become an unremarkable verb, for example. A
Web site named zillow.com has been set up recently to provide
valuations of homes in the USA. On 10 March the Christian Science
Monitor commented that "You'll find yourself zillowing your friends
and neighbors. (They're probably zillowing you, too.)" Earlier
examples appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Herald Tribune
in Florida during late February.
5. Q&A: Top dog
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. A display at a museum I was at recently featured pit-sawing. It
said that the man who stood on the top of the log hauling on one
end of the saw was called the top dog and the one in the pit below
pulling the other end was the bottom dog. This was claimed to be
where the expressions come from. Is this right? [James Meredith]
A. The story's quite common and you will find it in other museum
displays and also online. As it happens, I came across it during my
recent holiday in an exhibition at the former convict settlement of
Port Arthur in Tasmania. The idea behind it is that the "top dog"
was the senior of the team, who controlled the cutting, but that
the "bottom dog" contributed nothing more than muscle power and had
the worst of it, not least because he got covered in sawdust.
The Oxford English Dictionary records both terms (and notes that
"bottom dog" is equivalent to the more common "underdog" and that
the same idea as "top dog" appears in "overdog"). It has examples
of "top dog" from 1900 and of "bottom dog" from 1884. I've been
able to find earlier examples in newspaper archives, the oldest
from 1859.
I can't prove the stories untrue, but I'm extremely suspicious of
them. That's because all the early examples I've been able to trace
refer to literal dog fights, in which the dog on top is clearly
getting the better of the dispute and is able to impose himself on
the one underneath. I can't find a single historical example that
refers to the sawing of wood.
As always, it's hard to prove a negative. But I remain sceptical.
It wouldn't be too surprising to find that "top dog", "bottom dog"
and related terms later became attached to the upper and lower
sawyers through the obvious association of ideas (though, as I say,
I can't find any evidence for this at all). But the earliest
examples show that the origin does lie in literal dog fights.
If anyone can find a usage of "top dog" before 1859 that relates to
sawing wood, and hence before the first known example that refers
to a dog fight, I shall accept the tellers of the tale are right.
But not otherwise!
6. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
In the New Scientist for 4 February appeared an advertisement for a
regulatory scientist, whose specified duties included helping with
"wash-up meetings". ("Wash-up" was - I believe - originally a Royal
Navy informal name for a post-mortem discussion following a sea
exercise.) How appropriate that the body advertising the post was
London's water-supply company, Thames Water.
Neil Reid found a news item in the Independent online for 14 March
about two US detectives who were accused of acting as killers for
the Mafia and who, the report claimed, were guilty of "abetting no
fewer than eight grizzly underworld murders". Bearly believable.
Errors of omission are at times as comical as those of commission,
as Lisa Simone discovered from an AP report of 10 March that she
picked up off the wire. We both suspect that it left out a numeral:
"A 9-year-old suspected drunken driver was arrested today in Cosa
Mesa after he allegedly told officers he was a Los Angeles police
detective, authorities said." Or was he really so extraordinarily
precocious?
An e-mail came while I was away from Peter Weinrich in Canada: "I
cannot resist sending you this, which appeared in our local paper,
Saanich News, for 10 February: 'As we run through the information
technology revolution, the underbelly of society follows along in
our footsteps.' Sluggishly, one assumes."
David Luther Woodward bought some eye drops and was intrigued by a
sentence in the leaflet inside the box: "Do not use this product if
you have heart disease, high blood pressure, narrow angle glaucoma
or trouble urinating unless directed by a physician."
A. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to respond to something in a newsletter, ask a question
for the Q&A section, or otherwise contact Michael Quinion, please
send it to one of the following addresses:
* Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should
be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should be
addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't
use this to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail
the comment address instead)
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list
server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org
Please do not send attachments with messages.
B. Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm .
You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a full list
of commands, send a message containing the following two lines to
listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:
INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS
END
The "END" ensures that the list server doesn't get confused by your
signature or other text added to the outgoing message.
This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. The address is
http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .
Recent back issues are archived at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/
C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words newsletter and Web site are free, but if you
would like to help with their costs, here are some ways to do so.
If you order any goods from any of these online stores (not just
new books), you can use one of these links, which gets World Wide
Words a small commission at no extra cost to you:
Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA
Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ
Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG
Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX
If you would like to contribute a sum to the upkeep of World Wide
Words through PayPal, enter this link into your browser:
http://quinion.com?PP
You could also buy one of my books, of course. See
http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm and
http://www.worldwidewords.org/ologies.htm .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2006. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online
newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include
this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed
publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which
you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list