World Wide Words -- 01 Apr 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 31 18:03:29 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 481 Saturday 1 April 2006
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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
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Eugeroic.
3. Weird Words: Smellfeast.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Purse-lipped.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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ERROR ONE "Those who live by the sword, perish by the sword," says
the old proverb. What brought this to mind last Saturday morning
was a rush of e-mails from subscribers delighted to be able to
exhibit their sense of humour over an error in the section in which
I expose the mistakes of others. The first I read was this gnomic
comment from Peter Ronai: "Did you miss him terribly?" He and the
others were commenting on a line in the Sic! column: "An e-mail
came while I was away from Peter Weinrich in Canada." You're all
quite right, of course, a comma was needed after "away" ...
ERROR TWO More seriously, lots of alert readers spotted that I'd
mixed up the words "lupine" and "vulpine". The former refers to the
wolf, the latter to the fox. Pat Corbett e-mailed, "I'm certain you
plugged the lupine/fox item into the newsletter just to make sure
all your readers were paying attention." I didn't and I wasn't
(paying attention). Would you settle for the old "Even Homer nods"
defence? Or possibly delayed jetlag?
BLOODY Following up the piece last week, the most frequent comment
was that the writer had believed or been told that the origin was
from the oath "by our lady", in reference to the Virgin Mary. From
the evidence it seems as unlikely as being from either of the other
oaths I quoted.
2. Turns of Phrase: Eugeroic
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It's a comparatively recent invention, of the 1990s, supposedly
from classical Greek words meaning "good arousal" ("eu-" is from
Greek "eus", good, but I can't work out where the second half comes
from). Eugeroics are drugs that reduce the need for sleep. They're
claimed to deliver an alert and wakeful state that feels natural
without the side effects of earlier types of stimulant. The best
known is modafinil, though the earlier drug adrafinil and the newer
armodafinil also belong in the same group. They're officially
intended to treat sleeping disorders, but they've become lifestyle
drugs which allow people to cope with the stress of excessively
busy working and domestic lives. The military sees huge potential
in them because they enable soldiers to remain active and alert for
up to 48 hours at a time. They've been reported to ease flight crew
fatigue on long trips and to help with the symptoms of attention
deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) in children.
* From Australasian Business Intelligence, 22 Feb 2006: New drugs
are being developed that allow people to go without sleep.
Modafinil was launched in the late 1990s. It has made possible 48
hours of continuous wakefulness with few ill effects. It is an
eugeroic, and gives a natural feeling of alertness and wakefulness.
* From the Sunday Telegraph, 6 Jan 2004: Modafinil belongs to a new
class of awakening drugs known as eugeroics, which are unravelling
the mechanisms of sleepiness. Once you've done that you will end up
in a world where the need to sleep is optional.
3. Weird Words: Smellfeast
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A parasite, a greedy sponger, a freeloader.
You can see where this one is coming from. Such a person has a good
nose for the scent, literal or figurative, of a good meal in the
offing. The word has vanished from the active language but was very
common in the seventeenth century and didn't die out altogether for
another couple of hundred years.
An even ruder term was the much less well recorded "lickdish". If
you would like to obscure that insult through a classical allusion,
you could call such a person a catillo, from Latin "catillare", to
lick a plate.
The prolific writer and translator Sir Roger L'Estrange published
an English edition of Aesop's Fables in the 1690s. Some fifty years
later, a sentence from it was borrowed by Dr Johnson to illustrate
the word in his Dictionary: "The ant lives upon her own, honestly
gotten; whereas the fly is an intruder, and a common smellfeast
that spunges [sponges] upon other people's trenchers."
4. Recently noted
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SINGLE/DOUBLE SUMMER TIME A bill was debated in the House of Lords
on 24 March whose intent is to bring in this curiously named system
as a three-year experiment in Britain. Non-Brits may require a
footnote. "Summer time" is the same as the American daylight saving
time - the moving of clocks forward an hour in spring and back in
autumn to make better use of daylight in the evening. Single/double
summer time (SDST) would in effect move Britain to Central European
Time, one hour ahead of GMT in winter and two hours in summer. The
name seems to have been invented to allay ingrained suspicions of
many in the UK about adopting a bizarre continental practice. The
shift has been advocated for many years by campaigners as an easy
way to make roads safer in the evenings - the Royal Society for the
Prevention of Accidents argues that 100 lives a year would be saved
by it. An all-year summer time experiment was tried in 1968, but
failed because of objections by the Scots, whose children had to go
to school in the dark throughout the winter months. The current
proposal allows for Scotland to opt out, which would make time-
keeping complicated at places on the border, such as Berwick-upon-
Tweed.
UNSILOING On 27 March, the Wall Street Journal wrote in an item on
business language, "Another current buzzword, 'unsiloing,' mangles
the noun silo to make an important but simple point: Managers must
cooperate across departments and functions, share resources and
cross-sell products to boost the bottom line." The word is ugly and
opaque management-speak to those not in the know. I learned, thanks
to Benjamin Zimmer, who unravelled the word on the Language Log,
that around the 1980s "silo" took on the sense of a hierarchical
business, figuratively like a tall silo, in which communication is
mainly "vertical", up and down the hierarchy, rather than between
departments. This makes cooperation between them difficult and
prevents the organisation presenting itself as an single entity to
the outside world. (Similarly, an "information silo" is a computer
system that cannot easily communicate with other computer systems.)
The verb "to silo" means to communicate only up and down the
organisation, so it means the same as "to stovepipe", which the
Oxford American Dictionary defines as "[to] transmit (information)
directly through levels of a hierarchy". To "unsilo" is to improve
communications and cooperation between departments. It's a long way
from storing wheat ...
5. Q&A:
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Q. In your piece last week on the Tourism Australia "bloody" usage
fiasco, you use the term "purse-lipped". I'm not familiar with the
true meaning of the term, and a brief online search didn't reveal
much either. I was hoping that you could perhaps explain the term
and how it originated. [Rish]
A. It was actually an Australian writing in the Guardian who used
it; since I knew what it meant, I didn't comment on it. But it's
surprising how rarely it turns up in dictionaries: I've checked
through more than 20 current ones in my collection and it isn't in
any of them. It has either been missed or their editors have felt
its not worth including. And yet, the expression is common enough,
and it isn't immediately clear what it means, so it would be worth
their explaining it.
To be purse-lipped is to be censorious, or silently disapproving.
The image was of a person pressing their lips together firmly in
disgust or prudishness, which reminded bystanders of the shape of
the tightly clasped metal lips of a small purse.
The term is actually quite old - the Oxford English Dictionary
doesn't feature the exact expression but it has two related ones
from the seventeenth century. A clergyman named John Gaule used it
in "Pusmantia the mag-astro-mancer; or the magicall-astrologicall-
diviner posed and puzzled" (don't ask) in 1652: "A purse lip
[forespeaks] a scraping sneak; and a blabber lip, a nasty slut."
Not quite the modern sense, but close.
A better example appeared in the Oakland Tribune in August 1949:
"Snyder arrived - purse-lipped, prepared to scold. He scolded, and
left, more purse-lipped than before."
6. Sic!
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"In the Editorial in the March edition of Total Gambler," e-mailed
Mark Robinson (who explains this is a freebie inserted into various
titles of Dennis Publishing), "Stephen McDowell writes, 'So it is
understandable that when Caesar's Palace reopened its poker room
after a 16 year absence due to popular demand ...' I wonder if the
reopening was as popular as the absence?"
Having just returned from Tasmania, I was intrigued to hear about
last Monday's weather report for Hobart, given on the Classic FM
station of the Australian Broadcasting Commission and relayed by
Bert Forage. "The maximum temperature for today is 15 degrees. The
current temperature is 16 degrees".
Gail Kernish sent a photograph (available in the online version of
this issue) of a sign at a resort hotel by the Dead Sea in Israel:
"The hotel will not be responsible for theft or damage to cares
parked in the hotel parking area." Parking your cares - isn't that
what a holiday's all about?
A whimsical note has come from Gordon Black in Australia. One of
his sons is about to marry and sought out a place at which to hold
the reception. The hotel's Web site suggests holding the reception
"in a stunning silk-lined Marquis". It asserts that this "will be
serene, stunning and certainly unique". Gordon Black notes, "I'm
not sure whether celebrating my son's marriage inside a silk-lined
nobleman will be serene, but stunning and unique it will certainly
be."
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