World Wide Words -- 21 Apr 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 20 17:09:06 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 536 Saturday 21 April 2007
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Sent each Saturday to at least 48,000 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/qfyk.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Hircocervus.
3. Q&A: Blower.
4. Q&A: Eggcorns.
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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TOLLEY Last week's piece on this word and on the vocabulary of the
game of marbles in general produced many memories of childhood and
of terms used in the game. Bart Edmondson comments, "Growing up in
Liverpool in the forties and fifties, we never played 'marbles', we
always played 'ollies', some of which (the larger ones, I think)
were called 'bottle washers'. When we played with ball bearings,
these were called 'bollies'." "When I was a child in Lancashire in
the 1940s," Anne O'Brien Lloyd says, "my dad always referred to
marbles as 'glass alleys'." Brandon Sussman notes that he is more
familiar with "alley-taw" than with the form "taw-alley" from which
the Oxford English Dictionary derives "tolley". John Neave also
remembers it from his childhood in London. The OED doesn't know of
"alley-taw", although it appears in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's
1911 edition and as "alley tor" in The Pickwick Papers by Charles
Dickens and in Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling.
Melvin Moyer was brought up in Pennsylvania and recalls, "The large
glass shooter we called 'mommy troller', because you could troll it
from the edge of the circle for your target. The baked clay marbles
(which we hated) were called 'nertz'." Roger Drews - brought up in
Ohio - comments: "We old-timers (I'm 70) remember that our term for
getting closer than the rules allowed, instead of 'cabbaging', was
'hunching'. If our opponent tried to 'hunch up' on the marbles,
even by so much as a sixteenth of an inch, a chorus of cat-calls
followed, 'No hunching!'" "In my time," says Joel Anstett, "'molly'
was the term for a clay or non-glass 'marble'. I had never heard
'tolley' - we called it the 'shooter'. We also used ball bearings,
called 'steelies'. I do not recall where we found them, but they
usually were the favorite shooter, because they would usually knock
more marbles out of the circle." Morgiana Halley remembers that her
grandmother, who played marbles in California a century ago, kept
her favourite shooter marble: "She sometimes called it a 'taw', but
also used the term 'lagger'. The latter term was well-known to me
as the term for a marker in the game of hopscotch."
Several subscribers pointed out I'd missed a sense of "knuckling
down", which they correctly say is also now used in the sense of
applying oneself seriously to a task, as a player of marbles will
get down to the job of casting his tolley. It turns out that that
meaning is very much more recent than the submission one - the OED
says it appears in Webster's Dictionary in 1864, but I've not been
able to find an example even as old as that and the OED's entry,
published in 1901, contains no example of the usage.
Many subscribers leapt on my slightly sarcastic reference to the
baseball World Series, arguing that I'd misunderstood the title. It
came, they said, from its first sponsor, a long-defunct newspaper
called the New York World and has nothing to do with a worldwide
contest. I'd heard that as well. But it's a myth, albeit a very
persistent and widely-known one. The full story is outside the
remit of this newsletter, but in brief: there was an attempt to
create the series in the 1880s, when it was called the "World's
Championship Series" (and similar names) on the grounds that
baseball was an American game and that the winner was therefore
unassailably the best in the world. Other countries, such as the UK
and Australia, were welcome to join, it was said, but of course
they never did. The name was retained when the first modern contest
was held in 1903, though by 1910 at the latest it was being called
the World Series. The New York World never sponsored the games.
WILF It turns out that this acronym, mentioned last time, is not as
new as it seemed. Andrew Billington is a trainee teacher in the UK:
"I often come across WILF as 'What I Am Looking For', which we are
encouraged to share with the children as lesson objectives, along
with WALT, which is 'We Are Learning To'. Another British teacher,
Ben Merritt, enlarged on the usage: "WALT and WILF are sometimes,
and especially in primary schools, actual names of two imaginary
characters to help link the process in the young learners' minds.
Some companies even manufacture classroom posters and charts with
these characters on."
SHARPSHOOTER A further comment on this word, recently featured in
this newsletter, comes from Barbara Zimmerman. "I don't know how
universal it is in the US, but in my family, that has its roots in
South Texas, a 'sharpshooter' by any other name would be called a
'drain spade'. It is used to trench and to cut roots of things that
are growing where you intend to plant something. It can also be
used very handily to cut through plumbing and buried utilities, if
they are not buried very deep, so it is wise to know where they are
buried."
2. Weird Words: Hircocervus
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A fabulous beast, half goat, half stag.
When one reads Umberto Eco one must be prepared for exotic words.
This one appears in the English translation by William Weaver of
Eco's The Island of the Day Before: "Perhaps he would have done the
same if he had taken up creating scenes for the theater: do not
playwrights derive improbable and clever events from passages of
probable but insipid things, so that they may be satisfied with
unexpected hircocervi of action?"
The idea of the goat-stag goes back at least to Plato, who used it
as an example of a thing that was knowable even though it did not
exist. But its first appearance in English is in a manuscript of
1398 now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In origin it is just
the Latin word for a billy goat ("hircus") attached to that for a
stag ("cervus"). (The more usual Latin for a male goat is "caper"
and for a female "capra", as in the astrological sign Capricorn;
"hircus" appears only in some rare words such as "hircose", goat-
like, and in the formal name for the common goat, Capra hircus.)
The fabulous animal has not, however, always had a simple form of a
goat and a stag. In a book by Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Impressions of
England, published in 1856, he wrote about a famous painting at
Winchester College:
I must not omit to mention the time-honoured "Hircocervus",
or picture of the 'trusty servant,' which hangs near the kitchen,
and which emblematically sets forth those virtues in domestics,
of which we Americans know nothing. It is a figure, part man,
part porker, part deer, and part donkey; with a padlock on his
mouth, and various other symbols in his hands and about his
person, the whole signifying a most valuable character.
The views of the college trusty servants on this characterisation
are not recorded.
3. Q&A: Blower
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Q. I was reading Henry Green's novel "Loving", first published in
1945. I was surprised to find that one character mentioned "the
blower". I'd have expected that slang term to be much more recent.
Then I began to wonder why it's called a "blower". What actually
blows? [Dennis List]
A. As a British slang term for the telephone, it's actually a good
deal older than that book. The Oxford English Dictionary's first
example is from 1922. My suspicion is that it's even older, though.
That's because the slang term comes from a mechanical precursor to
the telephone, the speaking tube, each end of which was stoppered
with a whistle. In order to attract the attention of the person at
the other end, you took out your stopper and blew down the tube to
make the other whistle sound.
There is one small caveat. The very first usage noted in the OED is
from Edgar Wallace's story Flying Fifty-Five: "The club enjoyed a
'blower service'. The 'blower' is difficult for the outsider to
understand." This presumably wasn't a speaking-tube device but an
announcement service from a racecourse of the kind well known to
frequenters of betting shops. This would seem to be a transferred
sense of "blower" from an earlier, unrecorded, usage.
4. Q&A: Eggcorns
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Q. I think that you throw in these things to see if we are paying
attention and to ensure correspondence for the next week's World
Wide Words issue. Why did you describe changes due to errors as
"eggcorns"? [Jonathan McColl, Scotland; related queries came from
Betsy Cramer, Andrew Billington and Edie Bonferraro]
A. As well as last week's piece on the evolving shift from "home in
on" to "hone in on" that provoked this question, eggcorns have been
mentioned in passing several times: in December 2004, on hearing
about a shift of "centrifugal" towards "centrifical", and near the
end of last year when discussing the appearance of "flying collars"
for "flying colours" and "much adieu" for "much ado". But I've not
before talked about them in any detail, so now seems a good time.
The term was invented by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum in September
2003 in an online forum called The Language Log. Another linguist,
Mark Liberman, had mentioned a woman who wrote "eggcorn" instead of
"acorn", since in her American regional speech the first vowels are
the same; she also probably says "beg" like the first syllable of
"bagel". Professor Pullum suggested that this example should lend
its name to the whole class of such misanalyses. Their essential
quality is the change of a word into another which is either said
the same or is closely similar and which seems to make at least as
good sense in context as the original. It has now become quite well
established, not least because journalists find it great fun to
explain such an odd term and give examples.
There are hundreds of eggcorns. Jeanette Winterson wrote in the
Times recently about a repairman who told her that her washing
machine had "given up the goat" (and who invented a wondrous story
to explain it about farmers passing on their livestock to their
heirs when they died). People "give reign" to their emotions or
await some event with "baited breath", tell others to "tow the
line" or that they're acting like a "bowl in a china shop", or
firmly assert that they're not going to "mix their words". They
might claim something is "fullproof" or that their "chickens are
coming home to roast" or that an item cost "a nominal egg" instead
of "an arm and a leg". In March 2007, the Economist said that an
eruption of mud in Indonesia was of "scolding slurry". People
sometimes describe experiences as "nerve-wrecking" instead of
"nerve-wracking". (In a recording for a BBC programme recently on
eggcorns I pointed out that the "wrecking" form appears 17 times on
the BBC's Web site; somehow this didn't make it to transmission.)
Bernard Long e-mailed from Borneo after last week's item to say
that people there often change "damp squib" into "damp squid", they
being more familiar with the sea creature (which can reasonably be
described as wettish) than with firework displays. (This shift is
known in the USA, as well.) There are so many eggcorns that Chris
Waigl has a Web site devoted to them, The Eggcorn Database (via
http://quinion.com?EGGC), verily an eggcornucopia.
Several subscribers roundly dismissed such shifts as errors. They
are indeed just that, at least to start with, when they are made by
only one or two people. When they become common, as "hone in on" is
becoming in the US, one has to start treating them as signals of a
possible impending shift in acceptability. A good case is "chaise
lounge" in the USA (which has reached some dictionaries), instead
of "chaise longue". There are hundreds of words and expressions in
the language today that began similarly as mistakes; if we were to
continue to insist on their being errors, the language would be to
that extent impoverished. The formal name for such shifts occurring
through ignorance is "folk etymology" (a confusing term because it
can also refer to stories that people invent to explain the origins
of words). "Acorn" itself is a good example of a mistake becoming
established; in Old English it was "akran", meaning a fruit of the
forest, but by an eggcornish process it was later taken to refer to
both oak and corn (as a seed) and took on its modern form.
For the sake of completeness, it may be worth saying what eggcorns
are not. They are not (yet) folk etymologies, because - at the
stage at which they're being recorded - they're errors made by
individuals, not by an entire speech community. They are also not
malapropisms, though they share some characteristics with them,
because in a true malapropism the correct word is replaced by one
with no more than a glancing similarity ("allegory" for "alligator"
or "oracular" for "vernacular"). They are not mishearings of song
lyrics so can't be called mondegreens (see
http://quinion.com?MOND). Another type of error outside the ambit
of eggcorns has been given the cumbersome name of morphological
reanalysis, with examples like "doctorial", "mischievious" and
"mixature", and the notorious shift of "nuclear" towards "nucular"
in the US. These evolve because native speakers reanalyse words and
change elements in them to fit a pattern they are more familiar
with - "doctoral" changes to "doctorial" because the "-ial" ending
is more common than "-al". (Some would put my "centrifical" in this
class, because it has been influenced by the common ending "-ical",
which is much better known than the correct "-(f)ugal".)
Linguists are interested in eggcorns because they illustrate how
speakers think about the words they are producing. For the rest of
us, we can either ridicule them as errors and complain about how
the language is going to the dogs, or we can view them in the same
inquiring spirit as an aspect of the unending evolution of English.
For me, many eggcorns provoke thought-provoking or surreal imagery
that takes them halfway to poetry. Can you encounter "damp squid",
"scolding slurry", "bowl in a china shop" or "flying collars" and
not be struck by the exotic mental pictures they evoke?
5. Sic!
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We return this week to the joys of misplaced modifiers, a frequent
mistake that produces many incongruous juxtapositions.
The Washington Post last Sunday surprised Jack Shumway with a story
strapline: "Get the latest research and understand the politics of
saving the planet from Post environment reporter Juliet Eilperin."
"Ms Eilperin," he comments, "is clearly a greater threat than we
had suspected."
I found a heading like that in the Guardian on 14 April: "Branded
Stalinist, languishing in the polls and facing the most crucial
period in his career, Ian Jack spoke to the man aiming to be the
next prime minister." You will gather it wasn't Ian Jack who was
suffering such trials, but the person being interviewed, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown.
Roy Zukerman encountered an article at AsianWeek.com, datelined 6
April, about Edmund C Moy, Director of the US Mint: "Established in
1792, Moy now oversees a self-funded agency that generates more
than $1 billion annually and is responsible for the country´s
coinage."
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