World Wide Words -- 25 Aug 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 24 17:04:16 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 550 Saturday 25 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/mgeq.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Omnium-gatherum.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Crib.
5. Book Review: Faux Pas?
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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TAX, GLORIOUS TAX Several subscribers noted that I over-simplified
the British sales tax (value-added tax or VAT) system when I said
in the item on fat tax last week that food was untaxed. Inessential
foods like chocolate, sweets, ice cream and savoury snacks do incur
VAT, but you will appreciate that I preferred to oversimplify the
situation rather than undertake a disquisition on the British tax
system. (VAT experts will, I hope, also forgive my use of the terms
"untaxed" and "taxed" rather than the official "taxed at zero rate"
and "taxed at the standard rate".) The cases I quoted on which it
was suggested that a fat tax might be applied - cakes, biscuits and
puddings - are currently untaxed, although chocolate biscuits do
have VAT on them. The makers of Jaffa cakes went to court in the
1990s to successfully challenge HM Customs and Excise, who classed
them as chocolate biscuits and imposed VAT. The court ruled that
they were cakes and so were tax-free.
2. Weird Words: Omnium-gatherum
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A miscellaneous collection.
One of my reference books disparagingly calls this Dog Latin and
it's a fair description. The first part is genuine enough, being
the genitive plural of "omnis", all ("omnibus", for what we prefer
nowadays to call a bus, is the dative plural of the same word). The
second part, though, is just the English word "gather" with a fake
Latin ending. The 1788 second edition of Francis Grose's Classical
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue says that it's a "jocular imitation
of law Latin" and this seems plausible.
There's an older form, "omnigatherum", mainly Scots, which the OED
says was used from the seventeenth century for a group of craftsmen
in Stirling, such as coopers, glassworkers, dyers, and gardeners,
whose skills weren't recognised in a formal trade guild but who
were lumped together for some purposes, mostly taxation.
"Omnium-gatherum" has been known since the sixteenth century. In
view of its bastard form, it's odd that the first recorded user
should have been the highly educated Greek scholar Richard Croke,
in a letter to Thomas Cranmer in 1530.
3. Recently noted
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GO FORTH When somebody says some job is like painting the Forth
Bridge they mean it's never-ending. Although the famous railway
bridge across the Firth of Forth north of Edinburgh was opened in
1890, recent research by the Oxford English Dictionary shows that
the metaphor first appears in print only in 1955. But the symbolism
of the endless task was around long before then. As early as 1894,
it was reported in the Glasgow Herald: "The Forth bridge receives a
new coat of paint every three years, and one-third is done each
year, so that the painters are continually at work." In 1901, US
papers commented "The Forth bridge is constantly being repainted"
and the factette was repeated down the years until it was embedded
in the public mind on both sides of the Atlantic. Now an expensive
refit is using epoxy resin and polyurethane coverings in place of
traditional paint (though still in the same rust-red colour). Last
week, a BBC television programme reported that the finish is so
much more resistant to the rain, gales, salt spray and ice that
batter the bridge that when the refit ends in 2009, nobody will
need to paint the bridge for 30 years. But how long will it take
for the cliché to die?
BOSH The same programme mentioned that Sir Thomas Bouch was the
first architect of the Forth Bridge but that he had been dismissed
following the catastrophic collapse of his Tay Bridge in 1879. The
programme pointed out that his family name was pronounced "boosh"
and claimed that it was the origin of "bosh", nonsense or rubbish.
It was too good a story not to use in the context, though a casual
glance at a nearby dictionary would have shown that the word was
actually more interesting than that. In reality it's from Turkish,
in which language it means worthless or empty. It came into English
largely through its appearance in James Morier's novel Ayesha, the
Maid of Kars in 1834, which was highly popular at the time but
which is now almost forgotten.
BARIATRICS As an aside on last week's piece about the fat tax, the
Guardian printed an article by Raj Patel on 17 August, one sentence
of which caught my eye: "Bariatrics, the medical branch concerned
with obesity, is so new that it has yet to find its way into the
OED." (It is due to appear online in September, I'm told.) Out of
curiosity, I went word-hunting. It turns up in a 1964 news report
about the annual conference of the American Society of Bariatrics,
and so is presumably rather older still (incidentally, the report
warned that "Some 65 million Americans are overweight and thus subject
to quicker death than the lean and hungry", so concern about the risks
of obesity go back quite some way). The word was coined from Greek
"baros", weight; this is also in "barometer", a device to measure
the weight of the air (physicists will wince at the sloppy thinking
behind the etymology, since barometers actually measure pressure,
not weight). A practitioner is a bariatrician.
BACN To quote the actor and writer Stephen Fry, "the e-mail of the
species is more deadly than the mail" - but there are levels of
deadliness. Several net bloggers have reported on this word this
week, all saying that it was coined at the Pittsburgh Podcamp last
weekend. At this meeting developments in online communications were
discussed. (As an aside about another term that was new to me, the
Podcamp was called an "unconference", an unorganised conference;
haven't we all been to some that felt like that?) Bacn (pronounced
"bacon" and a creative misspelling along the lines of site names
like Flickr) lies between e-mail and spam; it's all that stuff you
do want but which is low-priority and which you often don't have
time to read. A Web site discussing it has already appeared, which
says that bacn might for example be "notifications of a new post to
your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It's the Google
alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company".
Don't bother learning it; it doesn't have the feel of a stayer.
4. Q&A: Crib
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Q. A simple question, but it's bothering me. Where does "crib" come
from in the sense of a cheat's answer sheet or illicitly copying
somebody else's work? It's listed as the same word as the baby's
bed, but the connection is beyond me. [Martin Turner, Hong Kong]
A. It is the same word, though you may not be surprised to hear
that a lot more lies behind it. The use of the term for a baby's
cot is more common in US English than in Britain, where it's mainly
reserved for the bed of the infant Jesus in Nativity plays. The
verb "to crib" in the sense of plagiarism or stealing another's
schoolwork is mainly British English, though both US and British
English know "crib notes". Both varieties of English share the
sense of a barred container or rack for animal fodder, a manger.
This is the original, which turns up in English around the year
1000 and which is from an Old German word whose descendants are to
be found in modern Dutch and German.
There are other senses of "crib", especially that of a small house,
cabin or hovel (from an extension of the sense of an animal stall),
which eventually led to the New Zealand meaning of a small house at
the seaside or at a holiday resort, to thieves' slang of the early
nineteenth century for a house, shop or public-house and to the
slightly later US slang usage for a saloon, a low dive, or brothel
(and also the current US Black English sense of one's room, house
or apartment). The sense of the baby's bed doesn't arrive until the
seventeenth century as an application of the barred container idea,
others being a repository for hops during harvest and a wickerwork
basket or pannier. A shift from container to contents may explain
why in Australia and New Zealand the word can mean a light meal or
snack, though it's also suggested that an eighteenth-century slang
sense of the stomach may be the direct link.
The basket sense was used in particular for one in which a poacher
might conceal his catch. The experts guess this may have led to the
thievery sense around the middle of the eighteenth century. Much
rests on an appearance in Samuel Foote's play The Nabob of 1778: "A
brace of birds and a hare, that I cribbed this morning out of a
basket of game." The plagiarism sense arrived at around the same
time, though it seems to have become applied to stealing another's
school work only in the following century.
5. Book Review: Faux Pas?
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On being criticised by Kermit in a long-ago edition of The Muppet
Show, Miss Piggy flounced, tossed her head, rolled her eyes, placed
one trotter on her ample bosom and cried, "Pretentious? Moi?" In
the flagging system of this book, "moi" is given the highest
possible pretentiousness rating of three exclamation marks.
The idea behind this helpful little guide, reissued in paperback
last month, is firstly to explain puzzling expressions from other
languages that have made their way into English, and then in many
cases to warn prospective users of the risk of sounding like a
pompous prat.
Many of the book's entries are straightforward explanations of
words and phrases that may puzzle or confuse: "arcanum", "coup de
foudre", "de jure", "encomium", "femme fatale", "idiot savant",
"kowtow", "memento mori", "nota bene", "picayune", "reductio ad
absurdum", "shtum", "ukase".
But a high proportion are attached to warnings about potential
misuse: don't use words like "perestroika", "glasnost", or "gulag"
outside their historical Russian contexts; "karma" is too often
used sloppily to mean just fate, whereas in Buddhist and Hindu
belief it refers to actions in this life that will affect your
status in the next; only use "Götterdämmerung" if you really mean
the world is to end in smoke and flame; never describe a lady as
being "d'un certain age" when you mean she's middle-aged; do avoid
"canaille", the rabble or the mob, Mr Gooden points out, since it
comes "with an in-built aristocratic sneer" that you will almost
certainly wish to avoid.
Miss Piggy's usage is in a select group of only four expressions
that get the top pretentiousness rating. Even "moi", he noted, is
most often used in a mocking, self-deprecatory way to defuse a
preceding statement that might be thought to be pretentious. The
others are "dégringolade", a rapid decline or fall into decadence,
rarely found in English and which Mr Gooden points out is more or
less the preserve of a single (unnamed) newspaper columnist; "au
contraire", on the contrary, disparaged because of "the slightly
camp context in which it's usually found"; and "quartier" for a
district in a (French) town or city, which he argues deserves the
full raspberry because it sounds ridiculous or precious if used
about a district of a British city ("We have suburbs.")
Well worth the small investment involved.
[Philip Gooden, Faux Pas? A No-nonsense Guide to Words and Phrases
>From Other Languages; published in paperback by A & C Black in July
2007 at £7.99 in the UK; pp231; ISBN-13: 9780713685237, ISBN-10:
0713685239.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP6.39 http://wwwords.org?FP9T
Amazon USA: $13.22 http://wwwords.org?PG9Z (hardcover)
Amazon Canada: CDN$16.79 http://wwwords.org?FS4P
Amazon Germany: EUR13,50 http://wwwords.org?S1PF
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
6. Sic!
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The Channel 4 Web site recently promoted a program about John Wayne
Bobbitt: "Twelve years on, after [a] brief porn career, a job as a
Las Vegas minister, a stint as a limo driver for a brothel and a
spell in jail, film-maker Vicky Hamburger went to find out what
happened to the man with the world's most famous penis." Phil Wolff
sent that in, wondering which of Ms Hamburger's adventures landed
her in jail.
Reuters posted a story on 16 August with the headline "Earthquakes
can move faster than thought". Jim Grusendorf commented, "I can't
begin to imagine what sort of experiment could compare the speed of
earthquakes to the speed of thought." Adding "previously" before
"thought" would have helped ...
"I was intrigued," wrote Eli Jacobs, "to find on the menu at the
Fook Yuen Chinese restaurant in Millbrae, California, a listing for
'Wanton Soup'. I was going to ask the waitress whether they were
referring to its sensual properties or its merciless character, but
restrained myself, and opted for the egg drop soup instead."
The Boston Globe site reported on the progress of an injury to the
Red Sox backup catcher: "Doug Mirabelli's sore ankle is still in a
boot and is not with the team. He's expected to join the Sox on
this trip - perhaps in New York when he can begin working out."
Josh Weiland suggests that Mirabelli's ankle should continue its
rehab in the Sox's training centre in Fort Myers until it's ready
to play again.
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