World Wide Words -- 11 Aug 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 10 17:33:16 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 548 Saturday 11 August 2007
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Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 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/mkdw.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Activitystat.
3. Weird Words: Pitmatic.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Joe Soap.
6. 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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GLURGE Snopes.com says that this word, for a mawkishly sentimental
story with facts fabricated to tug on the heart strings, was coined
on its urban legends mailing list by Patricia Chapin in 1998. The
site comments that "At a loss for words to describe the retching
sensation this then-unnamed category of stories subjected her to,
she fashioned a word that simultaneously named the genre and
described its effect." Many thanks to everybody who pointed me to
this explanation of its origin.
HUMP DAY Many readers told me that "hump day", which I mentioned
last time, has a long pedigree, their memories taking it back into
the 1960s. The reason for including it was its appearance in the
new edition of the Collins Australian Dictionary, but it's actually
an Americanism. Though it's usually understood to mean midweek,
Harry Hickey recalls that he came across it in the US Army in the
mid-1950s to mean the halfway point in one's term of enlistment.
JERICHO Following my slightly puzzled comments last week on the
use of this word for a outdoor privy, Bill Stewart pointed out that
one Web site (http://www.cabin40.com/the_road_to_jericho.htm) says
"the road to Jericho" is the path to the privy. That would suggest
that "Jericho" is a known term for the outhouse, perhaps with a nod
to the story of the Good Samaritan who came to the relief of the
traveller on that road, but I can find no other example of "road to
Jericho" in this sense, so if anything the mystery deepens!
BOWSER Continuing with this word that featured two weeks ago, Roy
Zukerman asked whether the American usage of Bowser as a name for a
dog might have derived from Bowser the Hound, the children's book
by Thornton W Burgess, published in 1920. It turns out that Burgess
didn't invent the name, but borrowed one already in circulation -
I've found it an 1883 issue of the Allen County Democrat of Ohio.
SAVIOUR SIBLING This term was mentioned in the newsletter back in
2004. Its reappearance last week in a British parliamentary report
suggests it should be given a substantive entry. It is on the Web
site at http://wwwords.org?SAVS .
2. Turns of Phrase: Activitystat
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Several recently reported research findings suggest that there's a
setting in the brain that determines how active each of us is going
to be or wants to be.
The EarlyBird project at the Peninsula Medical School in Devon, led
by Professor Terence Wilkin, is following the progress of a group
of 300 British children from age 5 to age 16, monitoring their
activity levels and metabolism as they grow up. Although children
vary a lot in how active they are (Prof Wilkin's group found a
four-fold variation between children in their test subjects), each
child is consistent in how active he or she is day-to-day. This
doesn't depend on how much organised physical activity there is at
school, or on daily routine, socio-economic status or background.
If children are more active at school, they're less so at home and
vice versa. In particular, confounding a popular view, how much TV
a child watches didn't affect how much exercise he or she takes.
One implication is that you can't necessarily assume that obese
children are that way because they're sedentary.
Professor Wilkin coined "activitystat" for the mechanism in the
brain - probably in the hypothalamus - that sets energy expenditure
and hence physical activity for an individual. The word comes from
"activity" plus "thermostat", a parallel formation to "appestat", a
known brain mechanism that controls appetite. "Activitystat" is
first recorded in print in The Journal of Diabetes Nursing in 2005.
* Guardian, 7 Aug. 2007: This activitystat, like a thermostat, will
adjust your energy expenditure down when it thinks you have been
too active, and up when you haven't been active enough.
* Times, 23 Apr. 2007: The activitystat hypothesis emerged after
trials suggested that no matter how much or how little exercise
children were offered, they found their own level. "Like horses
brought to water," says Professor Wilkin, "children with low-
activity settings may simply not participate."
3. Weird Words: Pitmatic
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A vernacular used by miners in the north-east of England.
Its name is hardly known even in the area in which it was once best
known, though it has received attention from dialectologists and
was featured in Melvyn Bragg's The Routes of English BBC Radio 4
series back in 2000. It has been in the news recently as a result
of the publication of a book on it by Bill Griffiths.
It was the language of colliers and pitmen, miners in the coal
seams of Durham and Northumberland, once the capital of coal (not
for nothing was the saying "carrying coals to Newcastle" coined to
refer to a useless undertaking). It has gradually died out as the
deep pits of the area have progressively closed. Pitmatic is full
of mining terms: "at bank", on the surface; "cavil", to choose your
underground coal hewing station by lot; "hoggers", footless socks
that made it easy to clean coal from between the toes, later a type
of flannel drawers; "cracket", a stool on which a pitman sat while
hewing coal; "kenner", the end of the shift; and "arse-flap", a
loop attached to the winding rope in a shaft on which a man sat
while carrying out repairs. Many of the terms can be traced back to
Scots, Old Norse and Low German.
Trying to classify it isn't so easy. It isn't a dialect, because it
is mainly vocabulary, lacking grammatical features that separate it
from other types of speech (the main dialect of the area is the one
commonly called Geordie). It isn't just a workplace jargon, though
that's where it comes from, because some of the terms have escaped
into the wider community, such as "greaser", a device to lubricate
the wheels of the coal tubs, which led to the expression "gan canny
ower (go carefully over) the greaser", meaning "mind how you go";
It can't be called an argot, which is a semi-secret vocabulary with
criminal associations, or a patois, which is a low-status dialect,
which Pitmatic certainly wasn't. Call it a vernacular.
The term is first recorded in print, in a slightly different form,
in an article in The Newcastle Weekly Chronicle back in 1873:
A great many of the lads, especially from the Durham district,
had evidently never been in Newcastle previously, and the air
of wonder with which they gazed at the crowds, at the buildings,
and especially at the fine folks who occupied the windows, was
very amusing. If the quality criticized and quizzed them, the
lads returned the compliment, and it was entertaining enough
to catch snatches of criticism on the manners and customs of
the upper ten thousand of Newcastle, reduced to the purest
"pitmatical", shouted across the streets, as the men and lads
belonging to collieries swept by where I stood in the crowd...
That fuller form, "Pitmatical", soon abbreviated, gives the clue to
its origin. It's a compound of "pit" and "mathematical", which may
have been intended to stress the skill, precision and craft of the
colliers' work.
[Pitmatic: The Talk of the North East Coalfield, is published by
Northumbria University Press, £9.99. ISBN 1-904794-25-4. The book
goes well beyond vocabulary to include many examples of songs and
stories written in Pitmatic by colliers about pit life and shows
how the speech fitted into the wider language-world of the region.]
4. Recently noted
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UROGRAPHIST This seems to be a true neologism. Paul Berman used it
in posing a question to the Guardian's Notes & Queries section this
week. A "urographist", he said, was a person who designs amusing
symbols representing "ladies" and "gents" on toilet doors (I would
guess like those in a sailing club I once visited that had pictures
of buoys and gulls for this purpose).
NO SEX PLEASE, I'M A VEGAN The story broke in the Christchurch
News at the end of July and has been picked up all over the world.
Annie Potts, co-director of the Centre of Human and Animal Studies
at Canterbury University in New Zealand, conducted research into
the experiences of cruelty-free ethical consumers, who included
vegetarians, pescetarians (who eat fish) and vegans (who consume no
products of animal origin). Dr Potts found that some of the vegans
she interviewed, mainly women, refuse to have sexual contact with
meat-eaters because their bodies are made up of the dead animals
they've eaten. She has coined the word "vegansexual" to describe
this group. I suppose that makes the meat-eaters among us
carnisexuals.
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE The recent serious floods in Britain might
encourage people to look at creating a "hydrometropolis". It's a
rather rare Dutch-inspired term for major housing areas that partly
float and may be surrounded by water. Some houses have already been
built on flood plains in the Netherlands that rise and fall with
flood water levels.
5. Q&A: Joe Soap
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Q. "Who do you think I am - Joe Soap?" My dear old mother used to
use this expression occasionally. We migrated to Australia from the
Old Dart[*] in 1951. I've never heard it used by Australians. What
is its origin and is it still in use in the UK? [Steve Campbell]
A. It remains moderately common. This example is from the Mirror
of 4 October 2006: "You believe in the tooth fairy if you believe
that businessmen happen along to a posh hotel in Manchester to
hear any old Joe Soap lecture on the Irish economy." In 1994
Andrew Motion published a long poem with the title Joe Soap.
But the meaning has shifted since your mother learned it. She was
clearly using the expression to refer to a stupid person, one who
could be easily put upon or deceived. That was the first sense;
these days it usually refers to an archetypally ordinary person.
The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from
Service Slang by John Hunt and Alan Pringle, published in 1943:
"Joe Soap, the 'dumb' or not so intelligent members of the forces. The
men who are 'over-willing' and therefore the usual 'stooges'." A
services origin is supported by an item in the Lethbridge Herald in
Canada the same year: "Farther along the road to Enna I saw many
captured German vehicles. German divisional and regimental signs had
been painted out and flaring red Canadian maple leaves painted on
sides and fenders. On one captured truck was painted in huge letters
'Smith's Transport.' Another had the sign 'Joe Soap and Company.'"
The usual view is that the second part is rhyming slang for "dope", a
stupid person, which started life as local English dialect (it's first
recorded in Cumberland in 1851). The first part is the short form of
Joseph, widely used in compounds to refer to an ordinary person - Joe
Bloggs, Joe Blow, Joe Sixpack, Joe Average, Joe Citizen, plain Joe,
ordinary Joe, Joe Doakes, Joe Public - there are lots of examples. It
was first noted as a generic term in 1846, in a different sense, when
it appeared in The Swell's Night Guide: "Joe, an imaginary person,
nobody, as Who do those things belong to? Joe."
* Old Dart: see http://wwwords.org?OLDA
6. Sic!
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Dave Hay read in his local newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, about
John Wayne's 100th birthday party. His granddaughter, Anita LaCava
Swift, was quoted as saying, "It's always an amazing thing for our
family whenever we are out among his fans because he's almost been
dead for 30 years." Amazing isn't quite the word.
"Our New York City police department is known as an ace outfit,"
says Dodi Schultz, "but this must be a first in crime-fighting
history. On 8 August the Web site of New York 1, our all-local-news
TV station had the headline 'Boyfriend of Slain Woman Found in NYU
Building Charged with Murder.' I guess the suspect was unlikely to
flee."
Brenda Clough forwarded an extract from an article in the New York
Times on Wednesday: "India stands to bear the brunt of some of the
worst effects of climate change, in large measure because it is
ill-prepared. When the rivers swell, fragile embankments burst. Mud
and thatch houses easily crumble. When the water rises, as it does
year after year to varying degrees, Indian peasants are ritually
stranded." She says she would love to know more about the rituals.
"Do they involve hymns? Vestments? Sacraments?"
Mark Goucher has produced a musical at the Edinburgh Festival based
on the 1978 adult film Debbie Does Dallas. The Guardian reported on
Wednesday: "Goucher's main concern is whether Debbie should be seen
having sex. 'I don't want it to be offensive, but we need a bigger
climax.'"
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