World Wide Words -- 25 Nov 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 24 15:56:16 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 515 Saturday 25 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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online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/vdgd.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Philanthropreneur.
3. Recently noted.
4. Weird Words: Inwit.
5. 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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BRINGING ERRORISTS TO JUSTICE It was a bad week in which to note
that quip from Ian Mayes. Tintagel, despite my bald assertion, is
in Cornwall, not Devon (as I know very well, of course; I wonder on
which other planet my mind was wandering while I edited last week's
issue). The catchphrase "Am I bovvered?" is from The Catherine Tate
Show, not Little Britain: I was thinking of the wrong mouthy
teenager.
BOVVERED Jonathan Baldwin disagreed with my put-down last week of
this word of the year. "I don't think it's a case of dumbing-down.
The word is used to mean a protested lack of interest in the face
of evidence to the contrary (as, someone sees their boyfriend with
another girl and claims not to be 'bovvered') so could be seen to
be a word in its own right, with a distinct meaning. I've certainly
heard it a lot recently, and used it myself (jokingly, I hasten to
add, though it's in that context that it has become so popular, I
think). It may not last, but rather than being the invention of
Catherine Tate it's an acute observation of a pronunciation that's
been around for a while in the south east of England. It belongs
with other 'words' such as 'end of' which is an abbreviation of
'end of story' but has become a wonderful (not) rhetorical device
that the ancient Greeks would have loved." Others have reminded me
that the word had an earlier moment of fashion in "bovver boys",
the skinhead gangs of the 1960s, though, as the Oxford English
Dictionary notes, "bovver" then meant "[t]rouble, disturbance, or
fighting."
HOKEY-POKEY A number of messages from the other side of the globe
told me firmly not to describe "hokey-pokey" as an inferior form of
ice cream, since the variety sold under that name in New Zealand,
consisting of vanilla ice cream with pieces of honeycomb toffee in
it, is the second most popular flavour in the country. Luckily for
my bank balance, it's a generic term, not a trademark, so m'learned
friends are unlikely to be in touch. Its name might be an allusion
to the hokey-pokey ice cream sold in the UK. How it came to refer
to a porous toffee is unclear, but there are New Zealand examples
on record with that sense back to 1899, the era of the hokey-pokey
men. New Zealanders sometimes refer to the dance as the "hokey-
tokey", yet another variation on the name.
BULLDOZER Several thoughtful writers argued that my interpretation
of the events of 1876 that gave rise to the earliest meaning of
"bulldozer" were at odds with the facts, in particular that I'd got
the Democrats and Republicans muddled. Kirk Mattoon said "At that
time, near the end of Reconstruction, the Republican party was
still known as the party of Lincoln, the party of the victorious
Union army and, to the slaves, the party of Liberty. It's hard to
imagine any large number of blacks wanting to join the party of
their oppressors." This sent me back to the contemporary newspaper
records. Much is hard to interpret, as journalists assumed their
readers would understand references that are now opaque, but there
are several contemporary news items that show that he and other
correspondents are correct. The earliest showing of "bull-dozer"
I've found was dated the day before the presidential election of
1876, which historians suggest may have been the most hard-fought,
corrupt and rigged election in the history of the Union. Several
articles refer to "bull-dozers" brutally intimidating blacks, as in
this item from the Janesville Gazette of Wisconsin in November:
"'Bull-dozers' mounted on the best horses in the state scoured the
country in squads by night, threatening colored men, and warning
them that if they attempted to vote the republican ticket they
would be killed." Their methods are so similar to what I've since
read were those of the "night-riders" of the Ku Klux Klan at that
time that it looks as though "bull-dozer" was an epithet applied to
those who followed their example (a newspaper article the following
April lists "ku-klux" and "bull-dozer" as synonyms). What is not in
doubt, however, is the popular view of the time that "bull-dozer"
derived from a former slave being given a "dose" with a bullwhip.
2. Turns of Phrase: Philanthropreneur
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This turned up in an article in the New York Times last week, as a
term to describe "young billionaires who have reaped the benefits
of capitalism and believe that it can be applied in the service of
charity". It turns out not to be a neologism, but one that has had
a few earlier outings.
It is claimed that the difference between old-style philanthropists
like Carnegie or Rockefeller and the new philanthropreneurs is that
the latter combine active money-making with a willingness to tackle
social problems of the kind that have previously been thought to
require governmental action. It is in essence capitalism that aims
to do good at the same time, a hybrid activity that is causing some
classically trained economists to scratch their heads in disbelief.
Cases quoted in the New York Times article include Jeffrey Skoll,
the former president of eBay, who has invested in a firm that makes
waterless urinals to save water in arid countries; Stephen Case,
the founder of America Online, whose charitable foundation pays to
install water pumps in African villages but also operates a for-
profit firm that ensures that they continue to be maintained; and
Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin brand, who is investing in a
scheme to combine mine-disposal in Mozambique with opportunities
for Africans to grow sugar cane to make ethanol for fuel.
* New York Times, 13 Nov. 2006: The approach of these
philanthropreneurs reflects the culture of the business that
brought them their wealth: information technology, with its ethos
that everyone should have access to information. By their way of
thinking, the marketplace can have the same level-the-playing-field
impact, and supply the world´s poor with basic needs like food,
sanitation and shelter.
* Wall Street Journal, 2 Apr. 1999: Especially among today's young
business leaders, philanthropy and entrepreneurialism are becoming
indistinguishable. Consider the following "philanthropreneurs."
Regardless of taxation status or accounting objectives, they're all
hard-charging business people who revel in the fulfillment that
comes from building a better world.
[Thanks to Harold Pinkley for pointing out the NYT article.]
3. Recently noted
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MURPHY'S LAW Though a popular tale about the origin of the famous
maxim, "if something can go wrong, it will" is widely believed (see
http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-mur2.htm for the full
story), the experts have always been cautious about it. That is now
justified, since researcher Bill Mullins has found several examples
in conjurors' magazines long before Mr Murphy had even been thought
of, in one case attributed to the famous magician David Devant. The
earliest case is from The Magic Wand, published in London in May
1913: "There is an old saying among conjurers that it is impossible
for a performer to know a trick thoroughly well until everything
that can possibly go wrong with it has gone wrong - in front of an
audience." Not only is it nothing to do with Murphy, it's not even
American, but British! Fred Shapiro (whose Yale Book of Quotations,
just out, finds that many popular sayings are older than we think)
had previously found a variant in George Orwell's War-time Diary
for 18 May 1941: "If there is a wrong thing to do, it will be done,
infallibly. One has come to believe in that as if it were a law of
nature." Another law of nature, to quote a yet more famous source,
is that there's nothing new under the sun.
VIEWSER This term turned up this week on the tvtechnology.com Web
site, where it was described as a neologism. It's certainly new to
me, though an archive search turned up several dozen appearances
that date back to 1991. The evidence suggests it has been lurking
as a jargon term of the digital communications business and has
rarely reached general audiences. A viewser is a consumer of online
programming or interactive media, especially a person who watches
television via the Web rather than their TV set. The term is said
to be a blend of "viewer" and "user" (though it might equally be
from "viewer" and "browser"). Either way, it's a ugly creation,
though preferable to the alternatives that have been mentioned in
recent years, "SIMMs" (simultaneous media users) and "telewebbers".
INTERPERSONAL TERRORISM A review in the Guardian last weekend of
Bran Nicol's new book Stalking featured this heavy-footed term. It
isn't new - it's recorded as far back as John Mordechai Gottman's
work What Predicts Divorce? of 1994, albeit in a slightly different
sense. It is used these days as a broad collective term for various
types of stalking behaviour, especially its online versions that
are known as cyberstalking and cyberbullying.
AUTOGRAT The Daily Record in New Jersey mentioned this odd-looking
creation this week. It's a short form of "autogratuity". Another
term for it is service charge - the automatic adding of a fixed tip
to the bill in a restaurant, usually 15% or 20%. It's often applied
specifically to tables of six or more patrons. The Double-Tongued
Word Wrester site has found examples going back to 2004.
4. Weird Words: Inwit
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Conscience; inward knowledge; wisdom.
We must thank (or perhaps blame) James Joyce for this word ever
appearing in modern writing, since he helped to revive it by using
it several times in Ulysses in 1922: "You spent most of it in
Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter. Agenbite of inwit."
It had gone out of the language around the middle of the fifteenth
century and would have remained a historical curiosity had not he
and a very few other writers of his time found something in it that
was worth the risk of puzzling his readers.
It was formed in Middle English from "in" plus "wit", the latter
meaning the mind as the seat of consciousness and intelligence (we
continue the same idea when we talk about native wit or we describe
somebody as having a quick wit). To have inwit meant that you had
an inward sense of what was right and wrong.
Modern examples - they're rare enough for the word to be extremely
unlikely to be in anybody's active vocabulary - almost always echo
Joyce's full phrase "agenbite of inwit", which dates from 1340. In
that year, Dan Michel of Canterbury translated a devotional manual
from French into English and gave it the title Ayenbite of Inwit.
"Ayenbite", or "agenbite", is literally "again-bite", a literal
translation of the Latin word meaning "remorse", This has as its
root the verb "mordere", to bite (the Romans felt that remorse was
the emotion that came back to bite you after the event). The title
meant "the remorse of conscience".
One appearance was in Samuel L Delany's SF work Nova of 1968: "His
fate suggests the agenbite of inwit came too late; flaunting the
gods even once reaped a classical reward." (That's as he wrote it;
Delaney has made the classic mistake of confusing "flaunt" with
"flout".) Mike Madison's 2006 book, Blithe Tomato, also features
it: "'Not at all,' I said, 'I'm very happily married,' but even as
I said it I felt the agenbite of inwit, as if I were telling a
lie."
"Inwit" presents no pronunciation difficulty, but "agenbite" is
another matter - none of the few dictionaries that include it say
how it should be said, perhaps because they don't know. It's not,
after all, a word very likely to be heard over the dinner table.
5. Sic!
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Jeff Kinn noted a headline on the BBC News Web site on 14 November:
"Armed robbers strike outside bank". He would like to know how many
people crossed the picket line. On Friday morning, Neil Greenwood
reports, a headline on the site said "Dead Russian ex-spy accuses
Putin". They must have had the Ouija board out again.
Sybil Ehrlich found this on the Sunday Telegraph Web site on 19
November: "Greeting his adopted family each morning with a bird-
like chirp, Rupert was a 'playful and docile' pet who liked to
lounge on the living room rug. But during a burst of energy he
could reek havoc on the house. Unlike most family pets, Rupert was
a 500lb rhinoceros." He would seem to have been doing more on the
living room rug than just lounging.
It's nice to know one's expertise is so wide-ranging. The WCVB TV
site, TheBostonChannel, had an item this week on the mild weather
bringing out winter moths. "Briggs said a predatory fly native to
Europe can kill the moth. 'The etymologists believe it will take
tens of thousands of the predatory flies to even make a difference
on the outbreak,' Briggs said."
>From The Mercury of Hobart in Tasmania for 22 November, noted by Jo
McRae: "Shark finning involves removing the fins from sharks at sea
and discarding the carcasses overboard where they are sold for
between $160 and $170 a kilogram." Who to? Perhaps through seaBay?
Talking of matters maritime, Rory Gordon was looking at the travel
site Travelmole.com, when he noted this news item: "Qantas owned
budget airline Jetstar has cleared the final hurdle on the home
strait of commencing its international services on Thursday". As he
says, to have hurdles in a strait would hardly be practicable. But
it might make for an innovative Olympic sport.
>From this week's issue of Computer Weekly, "They need to simplify
their elevator pitches and communicate in layman's terms." Let he
who is without sin ...
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