World Wide Words - 14 Oct 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 13 16:50:43 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 509 Saturday 14 October 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/gswt.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Aerotropolis.
3. Weird Words: Leechcraft.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Gringo.
6. Over To You: Morgan's Orchard.
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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BUFFALOED A sentence in a quotation from a newspaper article in my
piece last week about "on the ball" - "The two innings he worked he
had the Pirates buffaloed" - caused several subscribers to ask for
the origin of "buffalo" in the sense of overawing, intimidating or
frightening. This is known from the 1890s and derives from an older
Western sense of a heavyset, aggressive man, known from the 1850s.
In turn this certainly derives from the animal, likewise large and
potentially aggressive.
2. Turns of Phrase: Aerotropolis
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When this first appeared, from the mind of Professor John Kasarda
of the University of North Carolina in 2000, it looked like one of
those words whose life would be short and its death unmourned. But
it shows signs of achieving some permanence in the vocabulary of
aviation, economics, and urban planning.
The idea behind the term is that major hubs of air transport are
now associated with levels of economic importance that were once
the preserve of major seaports. The jobs directly generated by the
airport are obviously significant; much more financially important,
however, are the firms that relocate near the hub to take advantage
of the speed with which passengers and high-value cargo can be
flown all over the world.
In several places, new airports are being created explicitly to
exploit this, for example the new Suvarnabhumi International
Airport in Thailand and the Dubai World Central airport.
The term is a combination of "aero-", in its aircraft sense, with
"metropolis". There's some doubt in writers' minds what the plural
should be; both "aerotropolises" and "aerotropoli" have appeared.
* Detroit Free Press, 14 Apr. 2006: A vast assemblage of logistics
firms, warehouses, industrial production and other businesses that
rely on rapid air delivery, the aerotropolis has been a shimmering
vision since county officials proposed it several years ago.
* Cosmetics International, 8 Sep. 2006: Amsterdam's Schiphol
Airport is a prime example of an aerotropolis according to
Euromonitor. Around 58,000 people are daily employed at the airport
itself, and the surrounding business district stretches for 15
miles and includes the regional head quarters of such firms as
Unilever.
3. Weird Words: Leechcraft
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The art of healing.
Leeches have in earlier times been widely used in medicine as a way
to remove "bad blood" from patients and restore the balance of the
humours or bodily fluids. After a century and a half in which they
fell almost totally out of use, they are now returning in some
specialised areas, a practice called hirudotherapy, a term formed
from "hirudo", the Latin name for the little beasts.
So it would be reasonable to assume that that's where "leechcraft"
comes from. But this is a case where language trips us up. There
have been two meanings for "leech" in English. The other one, long
defunct, refers to a doctor or healer, from Old English læce, of
Germanic origin.
Though it's hardly an everyday word, you stand a good chance of
coming across it in modern works of fantasy, to which it lends the
necessary feeling of ancientness or otherworldliness, as in the
late André Norton's Wizard's World of 1989: "But she was renewed in
mind and body, feeling as if some leechcraft had been at work
during her rest, banishing all ills."
At one time a "dog-leech" was a vet, though that term could also
serve as a pejorative name for a quack doctor. The ring finger was
once called the "leech-finger" (also the "medical finger" and
"physic finger"), a translation of Latin "digitus medicus". We're
not sure how it got that name, though some writers say it was
because the vein that pulsed in it was believed to communicate
directly with the heart and so gave that finger healing properties,
for example in mixing ointments.
4. Recently noted
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ITEM GIRL A report in the Times of India on 6 October featured the
entertainer Shefali Zariwala. She comments that "There is no such
word as item girl in the dictionary. People have created this word
and I don't believe that I am an item girl." She's right about the
word not having reached the dictionaries, but it is an established
colloquial term in India. An item song or item number is a upbeat
dance or song that's interpolated in a Bollywood film but has no
connection with the storyline. An item girl sings or dances them,
which are often used as teasers to publicise the film. The term may
be from Indian slang "item bomb" for a sexy woman, as a reference
to "atom bomb"; it may also contain a hidden reference to "it
girl". There are also "item boys", but the term is less common.
CLICKPRINT Though this term has been used for the computerised
online printing of documents (and in that sense is a US trademark),
another meaning has appeared very recently. Its source is a paper
by Balaji Padmanabhan and Catherine Yang, entitled, "Clickprints on
the Web: Are There Signatures in Web Browsing Data?" A clickprint
is like a fingerprint, a unique identification of an individual. It
is a pattern of online usage: how many pages viewed per session,
the number of minutes spent on each web page, the time or day of
the week the page is visited, and so on. The authors argue that by
watching the pattern of usage, businesses can distinguish between
visitors with almost 100% accuracy. This may be a way to deter
fraud.
CONKERER No, that isn't a misspelling, but a name sometimes given
to a person who plays the ancient British game of conkers. (A brief
description for those unfamiliar with it: conkers has two players,
each armed with a nut of the horse chestnut threaded on a string.
Players take turns hitting their opponent's nut with their own. The
player whose nut breaks is the loser.) It has been a bad year for
gathering nuts, since our horse chestnut trees have been suffering
from the dry summer and from a disease with the unfortunate name of
bleeding canker. The organisers of last Sunday's World Conker
Championships in the village of Ashton in Northamptonshire had to
search as far away as Cambridgeshire to find enough that fitted the
tournament regulations (no flat sides and 32-35mm in diameter). The
winners in the men's and women's events respectively were Chris
Jones from London and Sandy Gardener from France. "Conker" is a
dialect word originally meaning a snail shell, with which a form of
the game was once played, though without the strings (it would be
classed as animal cruelty these days, as the shells were still
occupied); it might be from "conch", but could equally well be a
respelling of "conqueror", since the version with chestnuts on a
string was often spelled that way in the nineteenth century.
5. Q&A: Gringo
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Q. While pondering weird words last night, I wondered if you had
ever researched the word "gringo". We all know what it means, but
where and when did it originate? I heard a story that when Anglos
from the US were settling in Texas in the 1820's and 1830's they
used to sing a song that had the repetitive chorus "Green Grow the
Lilacs Oh". It is said the Mexicans in that same land (which was
part of Mexico until the Revolution of 1836) took this phrase and
sobriqueted us thusly. [Michael B Grossi]
A. This derogatory Spanish term for a white person from an English-
speaking country does indeed have interesting stories linked to it,
the one you mention probably being the most common. Some tellers
prefer to associate the song with Irish volunteers serving in Simon
Bolivar's army in the early 19th century, or to American troops
attempting to track down Pancho Villa in Mexico in 1916-17, all of
whom were supposedly singing from the same song sheet (the last of
these often mentions Black Jack Pershing, since to attach a famous
name to a story improves its credibility no end). Other tales link
"gringo" with the green uniforms (hence "green coats") that were
worn by American troops of the period, who might have been urged by
the locals "green go home".
The real story is rather more interesting, since it takes us to two
continents and involves four languages. A medieval Latin proverb
referred to something unintelligible: "Graecum est; non potest
legi" ("It is Greek; it cannot be read"). Shakespeare borrowed it
in Julius Caesar: "Those that understood him smiled at one another
and shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was Greek to me."
It's the origin of our modern saying "it's all Greek to me".
The Spanish version of this Latin proverb was "hablar en griego",
literally to talk in Greek, and hence to speak unintelligibly. This
was known in Spain no later than the last decades of the eighteenth
century. Esteban de Terreros explained in his dictionary of 1787,
El Diccionario Castellano, that "gringos llaman en Málaga a los
estranjeros, que tienen cierta especie de acento, que los priva de
una locución fácil y natural castellana; y en Madrid dan el mismo,
y por la misma causa con particularidad a los Irlandeses"
("Foreigners in Malaga are called gringos, who have certain kinds
of accent that prevent them from speaking Spanish with an easy and
natural locution; and in Madrid they give this name to the Irish in
particular for the same reason"). He explained that "gringo" was a
phonetic alteration of "griego".
The first recorded use of the word in English is in 1849, which
does rather suggest it was the Mexican War that brought it to the
attention of Americans. It appears in the diary of John Woodhouse
Audubon, the son of the wildlife illustrator, who recorded on 13
June in that year that "We were hooted and shouted at as we passed
through, and called 'Gringoes'". As his diary wasn't published
until 1906, public notice of the word in America more probably
first came about through a book by one Lieutenant Wise of the US
Navy that appeared in January 1850: Los Gringos; or, an inside View
of Mexico and California, with Wanderings in Peru, Chili, and
Polynesia.
[This is a version of a piece from my book Port Out, Starboard Home
(Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds in the USA), which is available from
- as they say in the adverts - all good booksellers, and even from
some frankly terrible ones, too. See http://quinion.com?B93H .]
6. Over To You: Morgan's Orchard
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Lynn Humfress-Trute e-mailed from Canada to baffle me with this
question: "When my father and I play cribbage, he often uses the
expression 'And in my hand I have Morgan's Orchard', meaning he has
no score. Could you tell me the origin of this expression, please?"
The only reference I can find came in an e-mail from Ed Matthews
back in 2004 (he's based in the UK); he said his grandfather used
it, also when playing crib, to mean a hand with two pairs, which he
guessed was a pun on two pear trees, or a small orchard. To find
two examples of a previously unknown phrase, both used in the same
game from two different countries (though Ms Humfress-Trute's
father is British and the two senses are distinct) makes me wonder
if there might be more to it. But there's nothing in reference
books or my historical archives about it. Can anybody help?
7. Sic!
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Speaking of conkering, as we were earlier, Chris Sunderland found
an article about it in the Evening Standard this week, which says
that the city council in Newcastle Upon Tyne is picking the ripe
nuts off the chestnut trees to prevent children climbing for them.
( see http://quinion.com?CONQ ) A council representative is quoted.
"Someone might ring us because there's a horse chestnut tree near
their house or property and there's a risk of damage. When kids are
trying to get the conkers down they can fall and damage cars." No
problem with kids falling out of trees if they don't damage cars,
of course.
An e-mail arrived from Dublin resident Eoin C Bairéad concerning a
particularly egregious example of apostrophe misuse. "At the end of
that interesting film The Queen, starring Helen Mirren, credit is
given to British Actor's Equity. How singular, I thought."
J Holan's local music society in Vermont, the Friends of Music at
Guilford, reported a recent event in the current issue of their
newsletter Continuo: "The lunch was delicious and folks munched
away merrily on folding chairs." What does one drink with those?
Yahoo! News reported on 5 October, Peter Casey tells me, about an
anti-piracy feature to be introduced: "Reduced functionality is
already a part of the Windows XP activation process, but Windows
Vista will have a reduced functionality mode that is enhanced,
Microsoft said on its Web site on Wednesday." Enhanced reduced
functionality? Those Redmond programmers are geniuses.
The story was widely reported in US newspapers on Wednesday, under
headlines like that in the Boston Globe (noted by Barton Bresnik):
"Typo Will Cost Michigan County $40K". The report explained that
"Ottawa County will pay about $40,000 to correct an embarrassing
typo on its Nov. 7 election ballot: The 'L' was left out of
'public.'"
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