World Wide Words -- 18 Aug 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 17 17:27:25 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 549 Saturday 18 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/kdtn.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Fat tax.
3. Weird Words: Lippitude.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Cheese it!
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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UROGRAPHIST Lots of people had fun with this word I mentioned in
passing last week. Some suggested it would be better applied to a
person who wrote graffiti on lavatory walls. To others it brought
to mind an image that may best be described in the words of a folk
song from the Norfolk duo of Sid and Henry Kipper: "See, amid the
winter's snow someone have writ his name, And since I've had a lot
to drink, I think I'll do the same." Thanks to J Holan for that,
and for suggesting that a better title for a person who designs
logos for toilet doors (he calls then gender-contrasted glyphs)
would be "sexual-segregational symbologist". To be serious for a
moment, David Bowsher points out that "urography" is the medical
term for radiography of the urinary tract, which is also known as
pyelography. So a doctor who specialises in doing it ought to be a
urographist (or just possibly a urographer). Why then, I wonder,
not really expecting an answer, is "urographist" unknown?
JERICHO As an important addendum to comments over the past couple
of weeks, Alan Royal e-mailed from New Zealand to point out that
the famous slang dictionary by J S Farmer and W E Henley in seven
volumes, published a century ago under the wonderful title "Slang
and its Analogues Past and Present. A Dictionary Historical and
Comparative of the Heterodon Speech of All Classes of Society for
More Than Three Hundred Years. With Synonyms In English, French,
German, Italian, etc", includes "Jericho" as a slang term for an
outdoor privy. So it really was used and wasn't solely a private
joke of James Woodforde. I've updated the Web version of the item
(http:/wwwords.org?JERI).
2. Turns of Phrase: Fat tax
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A fat tax is a surcharge applied to certain kinds of high-fat and
high-energy foods whose consumption is most likely to contribute to
excessive weight gain. The hope is to reduce the increasing levels
of obesity, known to cause or exacerbate health problems like heart
disease, cancer and diabetes, and encourage people instead to eat
healthy foods that are low in salt, sugar, and saturated fats.
Some US cities and states levy taxes on soft drinks and junk food
but the idea hasn't yet spread to Europe. The term was in the news
in the UK in July 2007 following publication in the Journal of
Epidemiology of a report by Dr Mike Rayner and fellow researchers
at Oxford University. At the moment, all food is untaxed in the UK;
the researchers suggest that applying sales tax at the usual rate
of 17.5% to non-essential foods like cakes, biscuits and puddings
would potentially save up to 3,200 lives a year. A similar proposal
was put forward by Dr Tom Marshall in the British Medical Journal
in 2000; a fat tax was rejected by the British government in 2004
as being a product of a nanny state.
The term "fat tax" has been independently invented several times.
The earliest I know of was at the World Food Conference in 1973,
during which delegates were encouraged to weigh themselves and pay
a graduated "fat tax" to charity if they were overweight. The first
example I can find in the sense of a tax on foodstuffs appeared in
a letter by a reader in an issue of the Valley Independent of
Monessen, Pennsylvania, in July 1987.
* Evening Standard, 12 Jul 2007: Dr Rayner said: "Given the high
incidence of cardiovascular disease and the acknowledged
contributory role of dietary salt and fat a well-designed and
carefully targeted fat tax could be a useful tool for reducing the
burden of food-related disease."
* New Scientist, 21 Jul 2007: Critics say a "fat tax" would hit the
poor hardest because they spend 30 per cent of their income on
food, twice the proportion spent by richer households.
3. Weird Words: Lippitude
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Soreness of the eyes.
Various old dictionaries seek to explain this medical term through
a variety of others that are at least as obscure. To equate it with
"blearedness", "glama", or "epiphora" would seem, at least to us
today, to be ill-judged attempts to clarify the matter.
"Blearedness", although an uncommon word, may be converted without
great effort to the more common "bleary-eyed". But "glama" doesn't
even appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, so it's lucky that my
1913 edition of Webster does include it, defining it as "a copious
gummy secretion of the humor of the eyelids, in consequence of some
disorder", adding helpfully that it is from Latin "gramiae". The
Oxford Latin Dictionary glosses this as "rheum in the eye", "rheum"
in its turn being a watery fluid that collects in or drips from the
nose or eyes, borrowed from Greek "rhein", to flow. "Epiphora" is
still in the medical vocabulary, though hardly known outside the
profession, and means "an excessive watering of the eye". A medical
dictionary I consulted cross-referenced "epiphora" to "tearing",
which disconcerted me until I realised the latter word should be
rhymed with "fearing", not "bearing".
"Lippitude" arrived in English in the early seventeenth century,
probably from a French word that had been created from the Latin
"lippus", blear-eyed. It seems to have gone out of use in the
1850s.
4. Recently noted
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I'M ENTITLED World Wide Words was namechecked last Sunday in Jan
Freeman's language column in the Boston Globe. A reader complained
about the use of "entitled" in reference to the name of a book,
when "titled" would work as well. Ms Freeman noted that it may be
more common in the UK than the US, since I employ it. A search
shows I've used it 236 times in various pieces, which indicates
that I'm rather fond of it, a personal preference that overweighs
any likely marker of geographical distribution. Clearly, I prefer
it to "titled", though the latter is equally correct. The usage has
been criticised, most surprisingly by Emily Post in her Etiquette,
published in 1922, but also by John Bremner in his Words on Words
of 1980. The dislike may be because the other sense of "entitled",
having a legal right or a just claim to something, is more common.
But the book sense is older, being first used by Chaucer around
1380. It is not until the next century that we first encounter it
to mean bestowing a title or designation on a person that expresses
his rank, office, or character, which almost immediately extended
to the idea of his having a rightful claim to something.
ACRONYM ALERT It's always fun to spy on someone else's jargon,
this time via a BBC Radio 4 programme about private equity. As a
cousin to terms such as Oink, "One Income, No Kids", Dink, "Dual
Income, No Kids", Sitcom, "Single Income, Two Kids, Outrageous
Mortgage", and many others, we now have "Ninja mortgage" from the
infamous US sub-prime house-loan market. The first word stands -
approximately - either for "no income, no job" or "no income, no
job, no assets".
NEOLOGISM OF THE WEEK? This one turned up in a press release from
a wine company based in Napa Valley, California. It announced that
it would in future be packaging some of its vintages in plastic
bottles. (Oenophiles may pause for a moment to allow horror-induced
dizziness to pass.) The argument was that it would let the drinking
of wine be more "occasionistic". This presumably means that you can
take bottles on picnics without fear of getting glass fragments in
the sandwiches.
5. Q&A: Cheese it!
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Q. Do you have any notion of the meaning and origin of "Cheese it"?
It is from my childhood reading of comic books, and was always used
in expressions like "Cheese it! The cops!" I can only guess it is
intended to be a PC adaptation of Jesus, used as an expletive, but
feel that is unlikely. [Dave Olander]
A. The exclamation "cheese!", often written "jeez!", is definitely
a euphemism for "Jesus!" But the word in the sense you give isn't
from that source.
"Cheese it!" means either to be silent ("Will you cheese it! I
don't want to hear!") or to stop what you are doing, presumably
something illegal or inappropriate. The expression is now virtually
defunct, but it turns up often enough in older writing, as you say,
that it's not entirely unknown even now.
It was originally British slang of the early nineteenth century,
but was later taken to the US - it turns up, for example, in a
story in O Henry's The Voice of the City, published in 1908: "The
defence of Mr Conover was so prompt and admirable that the conflict
was protracted until the onlookers unselfishly gave the warning cry
of 'Cheese it - the cop!'" Another appearance is in The Inimitable
Jeeves by P G Wodehouse, published in 1923: "He had been clearing
away the breakfast things, but at the sound of the young master's
voice cheesed it courteously." The first example of all occurs in
James Hardy Vaux's A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash
Language of 1812. "Flash" at the time referred to men associated
with disreputable sports such as boxing and generally to thieves,
tramps, and prostitutes, so the flash language was the cant or
slang of criminals.
Vaux said that "cheese it" meant to keep quiet or to stop, desist
or leave off doing something. What he actually wrote was that it
meant the same as "stow it", which Vaux explained as "an intimation
from a thief to his pall, to desist from what he is about, on the
occasion of some alarm." This is a much older expression that comes
from the idea of putting cargo in ship's storage and shutting the
hatches.
Unfortunately, we don't have such a simple explanation for "cheese
it". It might have been a version of "cease". Jonathon Green, in
the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, also points to an old proverb,
"after cheese comes nothing", which refers to cheese being the last
item in a meal. This sounds a little literary and stretched, but
perhaps the proverb was well enough known then that it made sense
just to say "cheese!"
6. Sic!
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A placard caught David Sands's eye at a Tim Horton's coffee shop in
the Winnipeg international airport (Tim Horton's being the largest
fast food franchise in Canada): "Our homestyle recipes are freshly
prepared daily." Unfortunately, they wouldn't sell him any.
Thanks to Elspeth Pope for passing on this gardening query from the
Home Section of the 11 August issue of The Olympian, the newspaper
for Olympia, WA: "We are growing pumpkins and I remember from my
childhood that my grandparents poured milk on the skin of the young
pumpkins. Do you know why they did this? Should I do this with my
grandchildren?" Only if they are pumpkins.
Brian Hooper read the following in a job vacancy advertisement for
an interior designer posted by the Design Institute of Australia:
"A competitive rumination package will be negotiated with the
successful applicant." Don't have a cow, man!
The Web site of Revo Uninstaller says that "AutoRun Manager allows
you to manage auto ruining programs on Windows startup." Bruce Robb
commented, "I'm so tired of having to ruin all those programs
myself; I'm delirious that it can now be done automatically."
The Sharon Herald of Pennsylvania recently included a note that
"The Survivors of Suicide Support Group meets at 7 p.m. Thursday at
Grace Chapel Church. Heeling comes when we can work with and for
others." Norman Berns suggests, "A bit of heeling might distract
mourners from their sorrows." And it's also good for the sole.
On Monday, Peter Ronai tells us, the Sydney Morning Herald reported
that "Kevin Federline's lawyer is aiming for the jugular in his new
custody battle for the two sons he fathered with Britney Spears."
That complicates the court case more than somewhat.
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