World Wide Words -- 28 Oct 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 27 16:08:32 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 510 Saturday 28 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/irvn.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Biosimilar.
3. Your help requested.
4. Weird Words: Baragouin.
5. Recently noted.
6. Q&A: Swan song.
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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YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS Your response has been most kind, and I'm very
grateful for subscribers' contributions to my begging message that
went out in last week's newsletter. So far, 202 subscribers have
responded - that's about 0.4% of the readership. Many, especially
those based in Europe, pointed out that I'd missed a trick in not
posting instructions for sending money electronically, since Euro
transfers are free of charges in Europe. That information is given
in the repeated request for contributions, below.
ULTIMO Following up my piece on this last week, many subscribers
mentioned the suburb of Sydney, Australia, with this name. Jennifer
Booth explains where it comes from: "Dr John Harris was surgeon to
the New South Wales Corps (the notorious 'Rum Corps') in the early
colonial days of New South Wales. He faced a court martial in 1803
on charges relating to his role as prosecutor in a case against a
Rum Corps officer. The case was dismissed, however, because the
charge contained a clerical error. It alleged the offence had taken
place on 'the 19th ultimo' instead of 'the 19th instant'. Dr Harris
named his home 'Ultimo House' in memory of the occasion and the
name ultimately became that of the surrounding suburb."
BABYCCINO Ms Booth, as well as other Australian readers, tells me
that this term long predates its supposed creation by Starbucks.
Several remember it in use in coffee shops in Sydney, Melbourne,
Brisbane and Adelaide 15 or more years ago. It again points up that
over-hasty assertions about the provenance of words are likely to
be wrong! David Tiley told me of an alternative, "bubbacchino",
which he thinks has been around in Melbourne for at least a decade.
Ric Stevens reports, as do others from his country, "In New Zealand
the same concoction is known as a 'fluffy' - in other words, fluffy
milk, often with chocolate sprinkled on top and a marshmallow on
the saucer."
DUDGEON In one of its senses, the origin of this word isn't as
unknown as I suggested last week. Marc Picard noted that several
reference works say it's Middle English "dogeon", from Anglo-French
"digeon" or "dogeon". But that applies to the sense of a type of
wood used for dagger handles. We're still left to puzzle how that
transferred to our modern meaning. As an aside, Roy Fowler
commented, "I once had a friend whose ambition was to build a house
called High Dudgeon on Moot Point."
2. Turns of Phrase: Biosimilar
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The drug industry has been using this word for several years, but
it is only now beginning to appear more widely, in part as a result
of the recent approval of the first drug of its type by the
European Commission, as well as through attempts to create a
regulatory framework for them in the US Congress.
A class of drugs that has become available in the past two decades
is made by biotechnological processes using living materials such
as proteins and enzymes, often genetically engineered and grown in
cell cultures. The industry calls them "biologics", "biotechnology
drugs", and "biopharmaceuticals".
Biosimilars are generic, non-proprietary, versions of such drugs.
Another name for them is "generic biologics". They include insulin,
interferon and human growth hormone. Interest in them is growing
because patents on the first generation of biologics are expiring.
A complication is that because they're made using living processes,
biologics vary somewhat in nature and effectiveness from batch to
batch and they need to be tested in a different way to drugs that
have been created by non-living "conventional" chemical processes.
Biosimilars are closely related to the branded drugs that they're
designed to replace but they're not necessarily identical - hence
the name.
* Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 Sep. 2006: U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman
(D., Calif.) plans to introduce legislation in the current session
of Congress this fall to create a regulatory framework to approve
"biosimilar," or generic biologic drugs.
* Guardian, 26 Sep. 2006: Generics companies are also keen to get
into this area, and have started to branch out into biosimilars -
generic versions of biotech drugs.
3. Your help requested
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Three years ago, I asked subscribers for donations to help support
World Wide Words. It was described as an annual event, but your
response was so generous there hasn't been one since. Until now.
This newsletter and the Web site are free. They will stay that way.
But money is needed to pay for research subscriptions and the Web
site, which is now very big and very busy. Sales through Amazon
help (many thanks to everyone who does that) but that covers only a
part of the costs.
Electronic transfers are very welcome (they're free of charges for
subscribers resident within the EU). Please quote BIC: NWBKGB2L and
IBAN: GB87NWBK55613803263339. If you need more details, e-mail me
at wordsdonations at worldwidewords.org . If you use this method, do
e-mail me to say so.
Another way to contribute is by credit card using PayPal. All you
have to do is point your browser at http://quinion.com?PP (this
short link redirects you to the relevant page at PayPal) and follow
the instructions. Please supply the country in which you live, as I
need this for UK tax purposes.
As a final option, you can send me a cheque, but only if you have a
bank account in pounds sterling. My bank won't cash small cheques
in foreign currencies (or what it calls small cheques) and charges
an arm and a leg when it does. So the only other useful way to help
is to send cash - when enough has accumulated, I can convert it to
British money in one go to minimise currency conversion charges.
Please e-mail me at wordsdonations at worldwidewords.org for the
address at to which to send your cheque or cash.
For other ways to support World Wide Words, see Section C below, or
visit the support page at http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm
4. Weird Words: Baragouin
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Language so altered as to be unintelligible.
The word itself is strange and uncouth, perhaps part of the reason
why it has only rarely been used in English. It's sixteenth-century
French and comes from two words in the Breton dialect, "bara",
bread, and "gwin", wine. It is said that Breton pilgrims on their
way to holy places demanded bread and wine from their hosts in inns
along the route. The innkeepers, not understanding their barbarous
- to them - dialect, created "baragouin" as a word for a language
so strange as to be unintelligible.
The story became confused in the famous dictionary of the French
language compiled by Émile Littré in the nineteenth century. He
said it was probably from "bara" + "gwenn", white, in reference to
the exclamation of Breton soldiers at seeing white bread for the
first time.
A classic use was in Two Years in the French West Indies of 1890,
in which Lafcadio Hearn commented on the strange speech of black
slaves: "He had scarcely acquired some idea of the language of his
first masters, when other rulers and another tongue were thrust
upon him, - and this may have occurred three or four times! The
result is a totally incoherent agglomeration of speech-forms - a
baragouin fantastic and unintelligible beyond the power of anyone
to imagine who has not heard it."
In the nineteenth century, it turns up in the speech of East End
Londoners in the forms "barrakin" or "barrikin" with the sense of
gibberish, double-Dutch, or a jumble of words. A rare sighting is
in Henry Mayhew's famous work, London Labour and the London Poor,
of 1851, quoting a costermonger on the difficulty of understanding
Shakespeare: "The high words in a tragedy we call jaw-breakers, and
say we can't tumble to that barrikin."
Some writers have suggested that the verb "barrack", to jeer
derisively at somebody, comes from the same source. But the experts
prefer to point to the Northern Irish dialect word of the same
spelling (which may be linked to the Scots "berrick") that means to
boast or brag, a word that my references say is still known among
schoolchildren in Belfast.
5. Recently noted
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UNPARLIAMENTARY LANGUAGE The British slang term "effing" featured
in an exchange in the House of Commons on Friday 27 October. George
Osborne, the opposition treasury spokesman, employed it during a
session of questions with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon
Brown. George Osborne claimed to be quoting a Labour minister when
he said that Brown would make "an effing awful prime minister". The
Speaker, Michael Martin, firmly told Mr Osborne to apologise. Of
course, this had been a bit of grandstanding - the word was clearly
intended to be insulting and embarrassing. "Effing" is odd. For a
start, it's from "eff", the only verb to have been created from a
letter of the alphabet. It started out as a euphemism but seems to
have become almost as offensive to some people as the F-word it was
intended to replace - it's too obvious to be a good euphemism. But
the only dictionary I've found that explicitly claims it is obscene
is the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary. Most works date it from
about 1950, but Jonathon Green, editor of the Cassell Dictionary of
Slang, says that he has found it in Robert Graves's First World War
memoir Goodbye To All That, in which Graves is writing of an event
in about 1916. The term also appears in the extended form "effing
and blinding", to swear continuously, the second word representing
"blimey", a shortened version of "may God blind me".
EH? Commentators were queuing up last weekend to savage the new
tourist slogan created for Seattle by its Convention and Visitors
Bureau as the result of an expensive 16-month project. Locals were
sceptical, two suggesting it made them think of an airport where
you can buy organic bananas and an urban nudist camp. The Bureau
says it evokes Seattle's two greatest assets: the city and nature.
No existing word did, so they invented a new one: "Metronatural".
Onlookers felt it was too much of a play on "metrosexual" and were
predicting it would last about as long as SayWA, which Washington
state created last spring but has had to drop because it didn't
catch on.
ADIEU Someone identifying herself only as Olivia found an article
on the Safehaven Web site whose opening sentence reads: "Much adieu
was made this week about the U.S. population crossing the 300
million mark on Tuesday, Oct. 17." It's an error, of course, but
also yet another good example of what several US linguists now call
eggcorns, word and phrases whose spelling changes through a type of
folk etymology in which words are mistaken for similar-sounding
ones or in which a person uses a well-known expression but a wrong
word (the name comes from an error in which an American woman wrote
"eggcorn" for "acorn"). Last week's "flying collars" in this
section is another.
PLASHY Yet another eggcorn was discussed in the Guardian a couple
of weeks ago, a word in the famous line from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop,
"Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole". A
reader pointed out that his edition has "splashy", presumably the
result of an editor or typesetter replacing a strange word with one
he knew, a classic case of eggcornery. "Plashy" is correct: it's a
quote from John Milton (and also from Shelley: "[I]n that green
glen, / Like stifled torrents, made a plashy fen / Under the
feet"). "Plashy" means "abounding in or characterized by shallow
pools or puddles; marshy, swampy, boggy". It's probably imitative,
the OED says.
BENIDORM LEAVE In a speech to the charity Age Concern on Tuesday
24 October, David Cameron, the Conservative Party Leader, used this
phrase in reference to the employment policies of the supermarket
chain Asda (owned by the giant US company WalMart). It is a period
of up to three months unpaid leave between January and March that
doesn't affect an individual's employment history. The term is also
used by the retailer B&Q and some other large organisations and is
named for the Spanish resort on the Mediterranean - popular among
the British - to which it seems it is assumed older staff may wish
to decamp during the coldest months of the British winter.
6. Q&A: Swan song
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Q. I wonder if you can tell me the origin of the word "swan song"?
I noticed it was used in a reference to Tony Blair's speech to the
Labour Party Conference recently, and it made me wonder what swans
have to do with farewell speeches! Perhaps you could enlighten me.
[Hilary Hicklin]
A. No problem. An ancient legend - it goes back to classical Greece
- holds that swans are silent throughout their lives but sing once,
beautifully, just before they die. Figuratively, the swan song is
the final performance or activity of a person's life or career. It
isn't quite accurate in the case of Tony Blair, since he has told
us he's about to step down as prime minister, but hasn't left yet
and irritatingly hasn't got around to telling anybody exactly when
he does plan to go. But it was his final speech to the Labour Party
Conference and the speech was by all accounts a cracker, so in that
sense it's fair.
The legend is all nonsense, of course. The most common species of
swan is called the mute swan, but it is capable of making quite a
lot of noise when provoked. Having got too close to the nest of a
pair some years ago, I can confirm they're capable of loud hissing
noises as well as grunts, snorts, and physical aggression, though
none of it could possibly be called singing. The ancient Greeks and
Romans believed the story, however, and it's mentioned in the works
of Euripides, Aristotle, Plato, Seneca, and Cicero. Plato said that
Socrates had explained it as a song of gladness because the swan,
sacred to the god Apollo, was shortly to join the god it served.
In AD77 Pliny said it was untrue ("olorum morte narratur flebilis
cantus, falso, ut arbitror, aliquot experimentis", "observation
shows that the story that the dying swan sings is false"). He had
no effect on the popularity of the fable; the idea was eventually
taken into English in the medieval period, being alluded to by
Chaucer and Shakespeare. It's in the latter's The Merchant of
Venice: "Let music sound while he doth make his choice; / Then, if
he lose, he makes a swan-like end, / Fading in music."
But the term itself was created as recently as 1831, in a book by
Thomas Carlyle: "The Phoenix soars aloft ... or, as now, she sinks,
and with spheral [sphere-like] swan-song immolates herself in
flame." He took it from the German Schwanenlied or Schwanengesang
with the same sense, which derives of course from the same legend.
As the final collection of songs by Franz Schubert was published in
the year he died (1828), it is known as his Schwanengesang. That
was probably what put the idea for the English word in Carlyle's
mind.
Three years later, in 1834, Coleridge made a joke of it in his poem
entitled On a Volunteer Singer:
Swans sing before they die; 'twere no bad thing
Did certain persons die before they sing.
7. Sic!
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>From Thursday's Telegraph: "Peter Foster, the Australian conman,
has been arrested by police wearing nothing more than swimming
trunks after a manhunt across the Fijian archipelago." It was seen
on the newspaper's Web site by Sean Groarke, who asks where the
police kept their truncheons?
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