World Wide Words -- 01 Sep 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 31 17:50:00 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 551 Saturday 1 September 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/ejxy.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Heterography.
3. Turns of Phrase: Glamping.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Dead reckoning.
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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BOSH In "Recently Noted" last week I demolished the claim of a BBC
television programme that Sir Thomas Bouch, the civil engineer who
designed the Tay Bridge, gave his name to "bosh". It turns out that
I was firing at the wrong target. Several readers told me that I'd
misheard: the word that Bouch was supposed to have originated was
"botch". This is a widespread story, told as fact in several sites
online. But it's as wrong as it's possible to be. "Botch", meaning
simply to repair something, was used by Wyclif in his translation
of the New Testament back in 1382. The modern sense, "to construct
or repair in a bungling manner", is known from about the middle of
the sixteenth century.
David Shand mentioned another story he'd heard: that Bouch's name
was supposedly the source of "butchers", in the sense of an overly
cursory examination by a master craftsman. Leaving aside how you
could possibly get from "Bouch" to "butchers", the latter's origin
is known to be Cockney rhyming slang ("butcher's hook" -> "look").
CRIB Many New Zealanders pointed out that in cribbing (ahem) some
senses of the word from major dictionaries, I failed to convey all
the subtleties of usage known to people on the ground. Patricia
Norton wrote: "The use of 'crib' for a weekend or beach cottage is
strictly regional, limited to the south of the South Island. The
word universally used elsewhere is 'bach' (pronounced batch). A
bach or crib is not necessarily only for use during holidays. It is
often regarded as a second home, commonly just an hour or two from
home and used every weekend." John McNeil suggests that this sense
of "crib" may be used in this one area because of Scots influence.
And "bach" seems to be an abbreviation of "bachelor", originally
meaning living alone and doing one's own cooking and housekeeping.
2. Weird Words: Heterography /hEt at r'Qgr at fI/
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Incorrect or inconsistent spelling.
"His orthography, or rather heterography, has been a subject of
keen animadversion [criticism or censure]; and he has been charged
with misspelling his own name." A writer in Blackwoods Magazine in
1831 was referring to the painter William Hogarth (whose name, the
writer alleged, should be spelled "Hogart", to suit the family's
Westmorland origins).
In this period "heterography" (stress it on the third syllable as
"het-uh-ROG-ruh-fee") referred to an individual's idiosyncratic way
of spelling that didn't fit the conventions. (It's a combination of
Greek "heteros", other, plus "graphia", writing, the opposite of
"orthography", the correct or conventional spelling system of a
language, from Greek "orthos", correct.) In that sense, the word is
long defunct. That's a pity, you may feel, since there's a lot of
heterography about and it would be good to be able to describe a
bad speller as a heterographer and be understood.
"Heterography" is still with us. Linguists associate it with those
languages in which the written form doesn't properly reflect the
way in which it's spoken. Robert Trask explained in his Dictionary
of Phonetics and Phonology that it's a writing system that "lacks a
one-to-one correspondence between sounds and written symbols." In
systems of this kind, one letter or combination of letters can
represent more than one sound. He goes on to note that "English
orthography is, of course, a spectacular example of this."
That's the problem, as a lot of teachers tell us. Heterographers
are that way because English is heterographic.
3. Turns of Phrase: Glamping
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It's a hard thing to say in the year in which the Scout Movement is
celebrating its centenary, but something fundamental has shifted in
public perception of what camping's all about. We are experiencing
the rise of glamorous camping - a term that has been condensed in
the current fashion to glamping. Its proponents declare camping no
longer means leaky tents, unlightable campfires, smelly toilets and
lumpy ground to lie on. Instead, luxury accommodation is available
that can include - apart from really neat tents with comfortable
beds, duvets and carpeted floors - amenities such as power for your
hair dryers and PlayStations. A few high-end glamping sites even
have swimming pools, four-star baths, restaurants and camp butlers
to light fires and generally meet every need. It seems to be the
fault of us effete Europeans (at least, that's what US newspapers
say), especially such fashionable glampers as Kate Moss and Sienna
Miller who attend festivals like Glastonbury but want to avoid the
mud and mess. This year, British retailer Marks & Spencer has
brought out a special line in glamping tents, which includes floral
tent pegs. Floral tent pegs? Baden-Powell must be turning in his
grave.
* Seattle Times, 30 May 2007: It's known as "glamping," or
glamorous camping, a British import inspired by A-listers who
wanted to be in touch with nature without touching the dirt and
dishes.
* Los Angeles Times, 19 Aug. 2007: The number of visits to U.S.
national parks is declining, but "glamping" - glamorous camping -
is on the rise in North America after gaining popularity among
wealthy travelers in Africa and England, where luxury tents come
with Persian rugs and electricity to power blow dryers.
4. Recently noted
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LET ME COUNT THE WAYS We've long had sequels, then prequels came
along for a work telling an earlier part of the same story, then
the movie business invented "threequel" for the sequel to a sequel,
the third in a series. We've even had sightings of "intraquel", a
movie or book that's set within the time frame of the original but
which isn't either a sequel or a prequel (a reviewer in the British
SF magazine Interzone in 1996 said sniffily that intraquels "move
the protagonists round but don't further the fundamental plot."
Peter Bradshaw, reviewing The Bourne Ultimatum in the Guardian
recently, said he was looking forward to a fourth in the series of
Bourne films, which he called a "quadrequel".
NICE TO SMEET YOU, TO SMEET YOU, NICE Thus the veteran British
broadcaster Bruce Forsyth might modify his best-known catchphrase
to accommodate one of the newer Internet-related neologisms. This
one was reported, Ben Zimmer tells me, in the Chicago Tribune on 24
August. The paper reported that "smeet" was coined at the first of
the Second Life Community Conventions, at which contributors to the
online Second Life community could meet face-to-face. They coined
"smeet" to mean "make a second meeting", the first one having been
online.
TATTOOING TRUMPETS A word turned up in some television listings
the other day that I can't remember having seen in print before. A
note about a programme on the opening ceremony of the Edinburgh
Tattoo said "The fanfaric salute heralds the start of the event."
Few earlier examples are on record, though it does appear in Paul
Barker's 2003 book, Composing For Voice ("An obvious example is
popular films, where clichés of rumbling bass sounds habitually
compete with rhapsodic string and fanfaric brass sounds at the
threshold of auditory damage."). It's a good word, well-formed,
although its rarity is easily explained. When was the last time
that you needed the adjectival form of "fanfare"?
5. Q&A: Dead reckoning
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Q. I just came across this sentence about navigation from an old
Flight Simulator book: "Dead reckoning (DR), sometimes referred to
as 'ded reckoning' since it is short for 'deduced reckoning,' is
actually a more scientific approach to navigation than pilotage."
Is this origin for the term correct? [Don Monson]
A. It's always fun to learn about a popular etymology. No, it's not
correct. Not even close.
But a search shows that the story is widely believed and appears in
a lot of reference books, mainly US works on navigation. I've even
found an example in a US patent (number 6046565): "Ded-reckoning,
often called dead-reckoning in error, is a shortening of the term
deduced reckoning."
I'm indebted to The Straight Dope for a detailed discussion of the
matter back in 2002 (http://wwwords.org?SDPE), which is much fuller
than I would attempt here. In essence, the writer states that the
tale is first recorded in a work of 1931 but that it became common
during World War Two. My own enquiries support the latter point,
examples starting with Leland Lovette's 1939 book, Naval Customs,
Traditions and Usage, and becoming frequent during the war years.
It seems to have got a fair hold on people by the time this item
appeared in the Oakland Tribune on 24 January 1947:
A friend of mine who prides himself on being a precisionist,
went to see "Dead Reckoning" the other night and I asked him
how he liked it. "Oh, the picture was fine," he said, "but
the title ..." "What's wrong with the title?" I asked. He
looked down his nose at me. "There's no such thing as 'dead
reckoning'," he replied. "It's 'Ded' Reckoning, which is
short for 'Deduced Reckoning'. Ask any navigator."
This supposed derivation is given credence in the Fourth Edition of
the American Heritage Dictionary, which states the story without
any alternative, though it does prefix it with "possibly". Every
other dictionary on my shelves either keeps quiet or follows the
evidence laid out in the Oxford English Dictionary.
That shows that "dead reckoning", in that spelling, has been in the
language since the early seventeenth century. It had much the same
sense then as it does now, that of estimating the position of a
vessel from its speed, direction of travel and time elapsed, making
use of log, compass and clock. The alternatives were pilotage,
which made use of visible landmarks, and celestial navigation by
the sun, moon and stars.
What makes "deduced reckoning" and "ded" seem plausible is that
"dead reckoning" doesn't make sense, even though you might end up
dead if you got your sums wrong. Writers are divided on which sense
of "dead" the old-time mariners had in mind. Was it perhaps the
idea of being as still as a corpse, so referring your position to a
point that's "dead in the water"? Or is it something completely or
absolutely so, exact or precise, as in "dead level", "dead wrong",
or "dead ahead"? The OED plumps for the latter.
As so often happens, we are left in a state of less-than-perfect
understanding about the reason for an expression coming into being,
but the one thing we can be sure of is that "dead reckoning" has no
link with "deduced reckoning" or the abbreviated "ded. reckoning".
6. Sic!
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The menu at the British fast-food chain Little Chef, Beverley Rowe
reports, currently offers both "free-range omelettes" and "outdoor-
reared pork sausages".
Wilson Fowlie found a headline on the CBC's Web site that provoked
him to remark: "Leona Helmsley's dog is as cheap as she was. Plus,
it's a rare dog with two grandchildren." The headline? "Helmsley's
dog gets $12 million, but leaves 2 grandchildren zilch."
John Gray was captivated by the image of peripatetic daffs evoked
by the official Wordsworth Trust Web site: "Wordsworth's famous
poem about daffodils was composed in 1804, two years after he saw
the flowers walking by Ullswater on a stormy day with Dorothy."
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