World Wide Words -- 11 Nov 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 10 16:49:06 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 512 Saturday 11 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/pgeh.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Eco-auditor.
3. Weird Words: Bellwether.
4. Recently noted.
5. Definitely the last time round.
6. Article: The Mighty Burger.
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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DEPARTMENT OF I'LL GET THIS RIGHT IF IT KILLS ME My correction in
the last issue about the Breton language contained its own error.
The Welsh, Cornish and Breton word for wine is "gwin", not "gwyn".
The latter means "white".
ACROSS THE BOARD Following my slight puzzlement about the nature
of the board in the horse-racing contexts I mentioned in this piece
last week, subscribers suggested I rent a copy of The Sting to see
an example of bets listed on a board in the way presumably meant.
Others pointed to the tote - in the first years of the twentieth
century then more commonly called the pari-mutuel - as the type of
board in question.
2. Turns of Phrase: Eco-auditor
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Every problem, the business gurus say, should be viewed instead as
an opportunity. Now that the economic and climatic consequences of
our profligate Western lifestyles are regularly held up to adverse
scrutiny, as they were recently by the Stern report in the UK, a
new group - eco-auditors - becomes available to advise us. Through
eco-auditing we can learn to become environmentally responsible in
our daily lives by reducing our gas, electricity and water use, by
recycling more, and shopping responsibly - it's like having a
personal trainer for our homes. The job and the term grew out of
European Union initiatives of the 1990s - and was discussed as a
case of widening EU professionalisation in an article dated 2000 in
the journal European Sociological Review - but until very recently
has been unfamiliar outside the EU administration.
* The Observer, 5 Nov. 2006: A new deal just struck with the
National Federation of Women's Institutes to provide as many of its
215,000 members who want it with detailed eco-auditing advice,
funded by a government grant, will increase demand still further.
* The Independent, 27 Sept. 2006: Donnachadh McCarthy, author of
Saving the Planet Without Costing the Earth and a home and business
eco-auditor, is concerned about how much water is wasted.
3. Weird Words: Bellwether
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Something that leads or indicates a trend.
It's not uncommon these days, even though the word is still widely
used, to find it spelled "bellweather" or even "bellwhether". For
example - I do not shrink from naming the guilty - the Washington
Times for 29 October 2006: "That's why we should have used some
bellweather event like the signing of the Iraqi constitution, or
the parliamentary elections as our moment to declare victory and
exit stage left."
There's some excuse for this, assuming a lack of prior knowledge
and the absence of a dictionary, since the second part is now rare
in our urbanised existence. "Wether" is an old English word for a
castrated ram. The experts think it comes from a prehistoric root
meaning a year, perhaps because the ram concerned was a yearling;
it's a relative of "veal", via the Latin "vitulus", a calf.
The shepherd used a wether as the leader of the flock, whom the
rest would follow. To be sure to know exactly where he was, a bell
was hung around his neck. So: bellwether. By the fifteenth century,
it was being applied to people, as a contemptuous term for a leader
whom only sheep would follow, especially one possessed of a loud
mouth but little judgement. That was still in use centuries later,
as you may tell from Captain Francis Grosse's Dictionary of the
Vulgar Tongue of 1811, in which the word is defined as "[t]he chief
or leader of a mob".
In more modern times - within the past century or so - it has moved
sense to refer to things, rather than people, that lead or indicate
a trend, such as the way we are likely to vote in an election. A
"bellwether security" is one that predicts the way the stock market
is moving. To blindly follow trends as though we were sheep, of
course, merely returns us to the old meaning.
4. Recently noted
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ANOTHER WEEK, ANOTHER SURVEY My Monday began badly with the widely
reported results of a survey by the British company Investors in
People (IIP). This suggested that workers were fed up with jargon
in the workplace, wanting plain talk from managers. An IIP director
was quoted: "Bosses need to lead by example, ditch needless jargon
and concentrate on communicating clearly with their employees." You
won't hear a dispute from here. What saddened me were the examples
put forward as being bad management jargon: "get our ducks in a
row", "blue-sky thinking", "sing from the same hymn sheet", "think
outside the box", "joined-up thinking", "push the envelope", and
"grab the low-hanging fruit". Few of these are jargon expressions
in the principal technical sense of the word - a verbal shorthand
used by the members of a group to simplify internal communication -
but rather exhortatory clichés.
MONGO A Talk of the Town piece in the current issue of the New
Yorker reports on an anthropologist-in-residence programme in the
city's Department of Sanitation. An aside mentions "mongo", a word
said to be used by sanitation workers for the act of creatively
recycling refuse, reclaiming and putting back into useful purpose
items that have been thrown out. It's one of that very large group
of terms which is almost impossible to research and about whose
origin nobody seems to know anything. But we may assume it is not
the same word as the US slang terms meaning "huge" or "idiot", nor
that it refers to the Flash Gordon planet. It matches least badly
to "mungo", another name for shoddy, an inferior cloth made from
recycled fibres taken from old woven or felted material. The Oxford
English Dictionary points, very cautiously, to an origin in "mung"
for "a mingling, a mixture, a confusion, or a mess" (a definition
that ought to be set to music, it has such rhythm); in turn this
may be from "ymong", a company of people, which is a precursor of
"among". The OED retells an old tale told to explain "mungo": when
the first sample of the article was made, a Yorkshire foreman said
"It won't go" (it's inadequate, it won't fill the need), to which
the master replied "But it mun go" (it must go).
5. Definitely the last time round
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6. Article: The Mighty Burger
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Hunting through an electronic database of ancient US newspapers the
other day, I came across this squib by the editor of the Mansfield
News Journal of Ohio, dated March 1942:
Hamburgers are known to everybody. Newer, but still familiar,
are steakburgers and cheeseburgers. Now comes a Florida
restaurant advertising turtleburgers. The idea has
possibilities. There could be fishburgers, jellyburgers,
eggburgers and chickenburgers. No one contemplating these
developments could call our language dead.
It set me on a trail to discover more about the linguistic legacy
of this iconic American food. It's well known that the original was
"Hamburger steak", a thin patty made of ground beef seasoned with
onions and fried. It began in (or became associated with) the north
German port of Hamburg in the middle decades of the nineteenth
century, the ending "-er" being the standard German way of making
adjectives relating to place. The hamburger concept was introduced
to North America by immigrants from Germany from the 1870s onwards
(the exact sequence of events still being a matter of historical
controversy), with the term being recorded in print for the first
time in The Caterer and Household Magazine in August 1885. The idea
of putting it in a sandwich followed in the 1880s (it's often said
it was invented at the 1904 World's Fair in St Louis, but it
certainly predates this event) and the classic bun seems to have
followed shortly afterwards.
Despite the fact that it was well known that hamburgers were made
from beef, Americans somehow got the idea that the word was made up
from "ham" and "burger". When inventive cooks started to make the
patties from other sorts of meat, or add other ingredients, the
linguistic basis was there for "-burger" to become a semi-detached
ending to be stuck on to other words (what grammarians call a
combining form); it began life around 1930 and became so popular
during that decade that a writer in American Speech in 1939 was able
to call it "a favorite broth of the word-brewers".
The first compound I can find evidence for is "lamburger". An example
turned up in the Helena Independent of Montana in September 1930:
"The dinner and banquet originally planned has been called off but
Eddy Gallivan will serve 'lamburger' sandwiches and coffee during the
sale. Lamburger is a comparatively new dish, the principal ingredient
of which is lamb meat, which takes the place of beef in the old-time
hamburger."
"Cheeseburger" was next up, which is listed in diner menus in
newspaper advertisements from 1936 onwards. Also from that year is
"beefburger", strictly a redundancy or tautology, but perhaps a
signal to word watchers that people are beginning to be unsure about
what actually went into those flat fried slabs. The following year,
"fishburgers" and "steakburgers" appear, as does another variety, one
promoted in the Limestone Democrat of Athens, Alabama: "These
chickenburgers are a versatile dish, too, for they go equally well as
the entree of a Sunday supper or luncheon and as a 'snack,' disguised
like its more lowly relative, the hamburger." "Turtleburgers" appear
in 1940; a newspaper in Massachusetts reported that the residents of
Key West, Florida, had solved the problem of being 180 miles from
their nearest suppliers of meat by making creative use of what was
available; turtleburgers were a luxury item among tourists, the
reporter wrote - 25 cents each. An enterprising but unsuccessful
businessman advertised during 1941 for entrepreneurs to invest in his
scheme for selling oysterburgers, oceanburgers and seaburgers, the
last of these made from lobster and shrimps.
The editor of the Mansfield News Journal was clearly lagging behind
the breaking wave of linguistic invention by suggesting that some of
these terms were new or even yet to be invented. He was right about
"eggburger", though, which is first recorded in the newspaper
database only in 1947. We have yet to see a jellyburger, at least not
in print.
The step that the editor missed was the development of "burger" as a
generic standalone term. This starts to appear in earnest the year
after he wrote. The evidence suggests that it was made popular by
meat rationing (older Americans will remember the red points that
controlled how much you could buy). Many ingenious ways were sought
to pad out limited supplies, especially using up scraps and offcuts
of several kinds of meat in patties. Government-inspired articles and
ingenious advertisers suggested veal burgers, liver burgers, and even
Bologna burgers, as well as eking out what you had through creating
the potato burger and the bran burger, the latter made in part of
Kellogg's All-Bran.
The next culinary-linguistic wave came in the decades after the end
of the war, when exotic varieties spawned, such as "turkeyburger"
(1945), "porkburger" (1947), "gatorburger" (alligator, 1959) and
"mooseburger" (1953, appropriately from Alaska). Vegetarians were
also active, creating the "nutburger" in 1945 and the "vegiburger"
in 1967. The "soyaburger" appeared first in fiction, in 1953, in
the futuristic SF satire on the Madison-Avenue advertising
industry, The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C M Kornbluth;
in real life it was first noted in Canada in 1973.
A wide-eyed piece documenting further fantastic varieties appeared
in The Newport Daily News of Rhode Island in April 1953:
These Californians have also forsaken beef entirely and come
up with the shrimpburger, the tunaburger, the chickenburger,
the lambburger, and the whaleburger. The lobsterburger and
the crabburger are just around the corner. Not far away are
the beanburger and the peanutburger for vegetarians. But the
apex or summit or something has been reached in Kansas City,
where, according to reports, they are now serving the
coonburger, made from carefully chopped raccoons, with onions
and garlic salt added. The Constitution guarantees every man
the right to eat a coonburger if that's what he wants, and
here it is - the finest flowering of the lowly hamburger.
After that, it's a relief to learn that "jumboburgers" (1945) don't
contain real elephant, that "bunnyburger" (1941) was a short-lived
name for a kiddies' treat devoid of disquieting associations with our
furry friends, and that a "mouseburger" isn't designed to be eaten,
but is a US slang term for "a young woman of unexceptional appearance
and talents".
The oddest thing about the false analysis that spawned all these
compounds is that few people make literal hamburgers out of ham,
though "baconburgers" - beef hamburgers embellished with strips of
bacon - have been sold since at least 1947.
7. Sic!
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Laurie Graham found this in Oh, Danny Boy by Rhys Bowen: "It had a
fancy chandelier in the center, lit by hundreds of electric light
bulbs, a row of red plush chairs around the perimeter, as well as
little tables on which candles flickered." That's one hell of a
chandelier.
"Having bought a miniature tripod for my camera," Tom Briggs wrote
from Vancouver, "the instructions assured me it could be placed on
any vertical surface!" That's an obvious error for "horizontal",
one that may have more to do with faulty brain processing than with
poor use of language. Another classic case is the confusion between
"ancestor" and "descendant". Steven Abrams found an example in the
Baltimore Sun for 3 November. An infant's tombstone, dated 1848,
had been found by the side of a road in Baltimore. It was
eventually traced to a family cemetery in West Virginia about 150
miles away. The article states: "A couple, believed by several
genealogists to be ancestors of the child, came to retrieve the
tombstone." They live a long time in West Virginia, it would seem.
Though it would be equally odd, now I come to think of it, if a
deceased infant had descendants.
Bernard Long's reference to a Chinese medical form that asked him
if he had the snivels reminded Rebecca Ewert of the "sliming tea"
available in Asian food stores and supermarkets around Wellington,
New Zealand. But isn't it on the menu at Hogwarts?
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