World Wide Words -- 04 Nov 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Nov 4 03:57:14 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 511 Saturday 4 November 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/xdur.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Digladiation.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Across the board.
5. The penultimate push.
6. Q&A: All-singing, all-dancing.
7. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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EFFING Last week, I wrote "For a start, it's from 'eff', the only
verb to have been created from a letter of the alphabet." Before I
wrote that, I went through the alphabet, checking. "Gee up" comes
from the interjection "gee" as encouragement to a horse; "queue" is
from an Old French word derived from Latin "couda", a tail; a golf
"tee" is an abbreviated form of the old word "teaz"; "x out" has a
history going back to an 1849 story by Edgar Allen Poe, but as it's
an abbreviation for "cross" it doesn't count. The one I missed was
"pee" as in urinate (an abbreviation for "piss"), and didn't you
all tell me so!
BARAGOUIN I really did know, honest, that Breton is a language in
its own right and not a dialect of anything. It's a relative of the
other Celtic languages Welsh and Cornish (the Brythonic languages),
so much so that "bara" and "gwyn", bread and wine, mean the same in
Welsh and Cornish as they do in Breton. You must put it down to old
age, stupidity, and typing fingers that occasionally take on a life
of their own.
COSTERMONGER This word turned up in the same piece and led to lots
of people sending messages along the lines of "Eh? What?" This is a
dated British term for a person - usually but not always male - who
sells fruit and vegetables from a handcart in the street. The name
is from an ancient type of cooking apple with a ribbed appearance,
the costard, whose name comes from the Anglo-Norman French "coste",
a rib, which in turn is from Latin "costa". The first costermongers
were apple sellers in the sixteenth century.
WOOF! Mark Hyman replied to my standard query about how he had
come to learn of the World Wide Words newsletter mailing list: "My
vet told me about it while we were in conversation about my dog's
liver problems. Perhaps that's a first."
2. Weird Words: Digladiation
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Strife or bickering.
That's the more recent sense, though not one you're likely to have
come across, "digladiation" being as archaic as any word that has
featured in this section. Dr Johnson included it in his Dictionary,
together with many another strange creation; Thomas McCrie wrote
disparagingly about "scholastic wrangling and digladiation" in his
work The Life of Andrew Melville of 1819.
It appeared a few times after that, as a ponderous and obscurely
humorous literary term, in reference especially to courtroom
advocatory sparring, but it seems to have died out completely by
the end of the nineteenth century.
The link with strife may suggest a connection with "gladiator", and
indeed physical aggression was the first meaning - in particular
hand-to-hand combat with swords. The word is from Latin "gladius",
the short sword wielded by the gladiators of classical times. To
digladiate, you might say, is to cross swords.
3. Recently noted
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TWADULT Really, the words these marketing people invent. This one
appeared in last Sunday's Observer. It ostensibly refers to young
people who are just entering adulthood, those aged between 18 and
25. It sounds like twaddle to me and looks as though it comes from
the same mould as "tweenager", though somebody must have broken the
mould first. The Urban Dictionary gives another sense - one that's
unconvincing in view of the changed middle consonant - a blend of
"adult" with the vulgar slang "twat" for a stupid or obnoxious
person (borrowed from the equally vulgar slang term for a part of
the female anatomy), hence a highly disagreeable 18-plus person.
BEAT THAT Have you heard about the new world record score in
Scrabble? Michael Cresta scored 830 points during a game at the
Lexington Scrabble Club in Massachusetts on 12 October 2006. His
words included "quixotry", which itself claims a record as the
highest recorded single turn, scoring 365 points. "Quixotry": the
state or condition of being extremely idealistic, unrealistic and
impractical.
ACRONYMPHOMANIA Rod Blackburn noted that the Canberra Times last
Saturday used this term to describe an excessive love and use of
acronyms. He wonders if the writer invented it. To judge from the
number of examples to be found online, he didn't (it is a favourite
of the alt.fan.pratchett discussion group in particular). But the
earliest I've found so far is from the New Republic back in April
1985. The word is a blend of "acronym" and "nymphomania". As Mr
Blackburn says, it's a more attractive term than the sober and
mundane "acronymania".
WIDESCALE Does that word strike you as strange? Probably not. It
appeared in an article in a computer magazine this week - perhaps
the specialist context made me notice it. The intriguing thing is
that it appears in none of the dozen single-volume dictionaries I
have consulted, whether British or American, neither as one word
nor as "wide-scale". And yet it is easy to find tens of thousands
of examples from the 1930s onwards. The only reference works that
include it are the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and the OED;
the latter cites a hyphenated example from 1958 and an unhyphenated
one from 1980. It is clearly a blend of "widespread" and "large-
scale". Do dictionary editors perhaps consider it too obvious to
notice? Surely not, since "large-scale" is to be found in every
work I've consulted.
4. Q&A: Across the board
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Q. What's the origin of "across the board"? A friend told me it
had something to do with gambling. Is he right? [Claire Williams,
UK]
A. Your friend is right. US readers will probably already know
this, since the term has a specialised gambling sense there. In
the UK, we only know it in the sense of something that applies to
all, as in "the cutbacks will be across the board".
It's definitely American in origin and comes from horse racing, in
which it refers to a bet in which equal amounts are staked on a
horse to win, place, or show in a race - that is, come in first,
second, or third. The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation is
from 1950, but it's actually much older - there are examples in US
newspapers going back to the beginning of the twentieth century.
The earliest I've found so far is from The Post-Standard of
Syracuse, New York, in 1902, about a scam perpetrated on a local
bookmaker: "This affected the bookmaker to the extent of allowing
him to make another bet of $30 across the board, this bet to net
$160".
The one remaining problem is what "board" refers to. It seems
reasonable to assume that it's the blackboard on which bookmakers
chalked up the odds for each horse in each race. But the exact
image here escapes me. Perhaps US horserace bettors can say?
5. The penultimate push
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6. Q&A: All-singing, all-dancing
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Q. Where does the expression "all-singing, all-dancing" come
from? I see it most often applied to some computer wizardry that
seems to do everything. Is it from the theatre? [James Hobart]
A. These days you do usually find that it means something that's
all-encompassing, or which does everything ("Swedish maker Volvo
is launching an all-singing, all-dancing, ultra sporty version",
Birmingham Post, 2006; "You have an all-singing, all-dancing
website, but no one is hitting on it", The Mirror, 2005; "The
Holy Grail of a multi-asset, all-singing, all-dancing trading
system is a myth", The Banker, 2004). Of course, you can also use
it of theatre shows, though a flashing cliché warning ought to
pop up if you do.
It sounds as though it's from a blurb for some Broadway musical,
but we can date it quite precisely to the early days of the
talkies in the US in 1929. Several films that year were heavily
promoted as being state-of-the-art aural experiences. The most
significant was Broadway Melody, famously the first film musical,
for which a version of this tagline was used. But it was beaten
in the etymological stakes by the slightly earlier Close Harmony,
advertised in March and April 1929 under several versions of the
catchline as "All talking-singing-dancing" and "100% all-talking
all-singing".
The canonical form "all-singing, all-dancing" came along a little
later. It became famous enough that it has entered the language.
Oddly perhaps, in view of its country of origin, the expression
appears much more often in British newspapers than American ones
these days. Perhaps we haven't yet tired of it.
7. Sic!
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"On a trip to China last week," Bernard Long communicates, "I had
to fill in a health form. It asked if I was suffering from fever,
headache, coughing or the snivels. I only snivel when my flight is
delayed."
Diana Platts found a sentence in the Shropshire Star of 27 October,
part of a report on the supposed inefficacy of the flu vaccine:
"There is little clinical evidence that the vaccines have an effect
on things such as hospital stay and time off work. There is also
little evidence that they effect death in healthy adults." We're
surely all relieved to hear that.
Brian Pearl recently saw a poster that invited him to the "100th
Centenary Celebration" of the Wellington YWCA, in New Zealand. He
knew they'd been around for a while but a hundred centuries is a
lot more than he'd imagined.
"Want to really kick back at the office?" read a caption on the PC
World Web site, spotted by Lew Hundley. "Keep your toes toasty with
Thanko's USB Heating Slippers ($29). These fuzzy slippers feature a
warming pad that generates heat that measures 13 inches long and 13
inches wide." How much heat is that in therms, or joules? [You may
be astonished to learn that it is a genuine product, though a poll
among readers of Computer Weekly in the UK - published this week -
preferred to cite the USB-powered coffee warmer as the most useless
hardware product of the past 40 years.]
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