World Wide Words - 15 Dec 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 14 19:48:12 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 566 Saturday 15 December 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
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Teleplasmic.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Cut and dried.
5. Q&A: Gibus.
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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SARAH BERNHARDT In my piece on Sardoodledom last week, two of the
three versions - the formatted Web version and the RSS one - said
correctly that she was French. However, the e-mail version had it
that she was English, an error I somehow forgot to correct.
MOOF Technically aware readers were quick to point out, following
my little note about this word last time, that Microsoft was using
a term that had been linked with Apple Computers since 1988 and
which at one point the firm had trademarked. Clarus the Dogcow is
the name given to a creature whose image at times appeared on an
Apple Mac. She was said to make a noise Mac people spell "moof!",
as a vocal blend of "moo" and "woof". (I can't believe that at my
time of life I'm actually writing this stuff.) James Rose noted, "I
suspect that the genius of the PR person you mention is the well-
documented genius of Microsoft for appropriation." Said like a true
Apple aficionado. See http://wwwords.org?DGCW for the story behind
Clarus, which may tell you more than you want to know.
MORE BOOK TITLES The reference last week to the unfortunate title
Cooking With Pooh brought in more references to works that should
have been run past somebody with a sense of humour before being
published. Karl Clarke said that his favourite so far is a medical
textbook, Psoriasis At Your Fingertips. Art Scott mentioned Scouts
in Bondage, a compendium of odd titles by Michael Bell. Among his
selections is How to Recognise Leprosy: A Popular Guide. As I
commented in a recent radio interview, I sometimes feel that my
Gallimaufry is in this category, since my publisher's dictionaries
define the word as "a confused jumble". But my personal favourite
is one I saw in Hove library 50 years ago: How to Grow Cut Flowers.
NO PEACE FOR THE WICKED World Wide Words will appear as usual on
22 and 29 December.
2. Weird Words: Teleplasmic
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Relating to teleplasm.
Teleplasm is another word for ectoplasm, the supernatural substance
that is said to exude from the body of a medium during a trance.
This appearance of the word is in Dumbstruck: a Cultural History of
Ventriloquism by Steven Connor, published in 2000:
In one remarkable image, the teleplasmic larynx sits on her
head like a caul, while a thin but perfectly visible thread
runs into her ear; in others the miniature teleplasmic mass
rests on her shoulder, connected to her by a thick cable
that runs into her nose.
"Teleplasm" is rather younger than "ectoplasm", appearing only in
the middle 1920s. It was obviously modelled on the latter, which
starts to appear a couple of decades earlier. Both are based on
Latin and Greek "plasma", something formed, moulded, or simulated.
This is the source of the ending "-plasm" that refers to living
tissue in words such as cytoplasm and protoplasm. "Ecto-" means
outside, so "ectoplasm" is a living tissue formed by the medium
outside her body; "tele-" here means much the same, though its root
sense is something happening at a distance.
A recent appearance in fiction is in the 1998 Hugo Award-winning SF
novel by Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog, or How We Found
The Bishop's Bird Stump At Last, described in one review as "a time
travel story, a mystery, a romance, and a screwball comedy: think
Bringing Up Baby meets Three Men in a Boat", in which a fake seance
occurs:
"How wonderful!" Mrs. Mering said. "Do come sit down. Baine,
pull up a chair for Madame Iritosky." "No, no," Madame
Iritosky said, indicating Professor Peddick's chair. "It is
here that the teleplasmic vibrations converge." Professor
Peddick obligingly changed chairs.
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3. Recently noted
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GEEK TREAT Another Word of the Year, this time from the dictionary
maker Merriam-Webster. It presented a list of 20 words on its Web
site that had been the subject of a large number of searches during
the past year and asked visitors to vote. The winner is "w00t", an
unlikely choice that makes one wonder if electronic ballot-stuffing
has been going on. "W00t" is indeed spelled with a couple of zeroes
in the middle but it's pronounced "woot". It's a small cry of joy,
perhaps after completing some task, after besting an opponent, or
for no reason at all. Merriam-Webster says, "It became popular in
online gaming as part of what is known as l33t ('leet', or 'elite')
speak, an esoteric computer language in which numbers and symbols
are put together to look like letters."
Its origins are disputed. Some say it's a blend of "Wow! Loot!", a
cry that might be uttered when a Dungeons & Dragons player came
across treasure; Merriam-Webster notes it might be an acronym for
"we owned the other team"; others argue that it derives from Scots
"hoot!", which really is a bit of a hoot, since the Scots word
expresses annoyance, disgust, incredulity or remonstrance with not
a scintilla of pleasure in it at all.
Grant Barrett, who runs the Double-Tongued Dictionary site, is sure
these are all folk etymologies. He says that woot was most likely
derived from and popularised by the dance catchphrase of 1993 in
the US, "whoot, there it is!" He notes, "In clubs and on dance
floors across the country, in half-time shows and in baseball
stadiums, 'whoot, there it is' and plain 'woot!' were shouted long
and loud by millions. It was used by hype men at hip-hop shows,
dancers and cheerleaders at ball games, DJs at discos, and probably
by ball-callers at bingos." (See http://wwwords.org?W00T for his
article.)
But what of its future? Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the
American Dialect Society, was quoted in an Associated Press story
as being rather less than w00tish about it. "It's amusing, but it's
limited to a small community and unlikely to spread and unlikely to
last".
WÖRTER DES JAHRES In case you feel that it's only English speakers
who give annual locutionary accolades, let me quote you two in the
German language. "Klimakatastrophe" (climate disaster) is the pick
of the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (the Society of the German
Language), which it says concisely points up the direction in which
climate change is heading. The term is much more powerful than our
weaselling "climate change" or "global warming". Last week, a jury
of Swiss journalists made a climate-change term their linguistic
unword of the year (one they consider to be crassly inappropriate)
by selecting "Klimakompensation" (climate compensation; the English
equivalent is "carbon offset"). This refers to the way many people
salve their consciences - for example - by paying money to a tree-
planting scheme to offset the environmental effect of their taking
a long-haul flight somewhere. The same jury chose as their Word of
the Year "Sterbetourismus" ("death tourism", which has been used as
the English equivalent) which refers to the practice of terminally
ill people travelling to Switzerland to take advantage of the
country's liberal laws that permit assisted suicide.
WOTTA LOTTA WOTYS What will almost certainly not be the last word
on Words of the Year (WOTYs) appeared in an article in The New York
Times on Tuesday. "Jan Freeman, a language columnist for The Boston
Globe, has grown weary of it all. 'The WOTY season now rivals our
endless holiday shopfest, stretching from Halloween into January,'
she wrote. 'I can't help thinking that 10 weeks of WOTY fever is
about eight weeks more than anyone wants.'"
4. Q&A: Cut and dried
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Q. I would appreciate help with the origin of the expression "cut
and dried" if you would. [Murray Berkowitz]
A. Something that is "cut and dried" (sometimes "cut and dry") is
prearranged or inflexible, completely decided in advance, so it
lacks freshness, originality or spontaneity. So much is widely
known, but the expression itself often exercises the ingenuity of
people who try to find a rationale for it.
A common American story, harking back to frontier days, is that it
comes from meat that has been turned into jerky by cutting it into
strips and drying it in the sun so it will keep on long journeys.
An alternative story is that it refers to timber that has been cut
and left to season by drying. In either case, the resulting product
is standard and unremarkable.
The problem with the second story is that timber was traditionally
seasoned in the round and cut afterwards, so that if the expression
came from that source, it would be more likely to be "dried and
cut". The problem with the first is simply that of date and place,
since the expression is known from the early eighteenth century in
Britain and has no known connection with situations in which dried
meat might be encountered.
The true story is likely to be as prosaic as the expression itself.
Though we can't prove it, the saying is almost certainly from the
cutting and drying of herbs for sale in herbalists' shops. Such
dried herbs would be pre-prepared and lack freshness.
The first known use of the expression is in a letter to a clergyman
in 1710 in which the writer commented that a sermon was "ready cut
and dried", meaning it had been prepared in advance, so lacking
freshness and spontaneity. The next recorded use is in a poem by
Jonathan Swift in 1730 which speaks of "Sets of Phrases, cut and
dry, / Evermore thy Tongue supply" - clichés, in other words.
5. Q&A: Gibus
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Q. What the heck does "gibus" mean? I saw it in a Dorothy L Sayers'
Lord Peter Wimsey mystery. From context it might be an article of
clothing, a type of hat perhaps, but I find no mention of it in any
of my dictionaries. [Neill Bassford]
A. It's one of those words that have almost entirely gone out of
the language because the things they refer to are now rarely used.
Was the book Murder Must Advertise of 1933? Lord Peter Wimsey is in
disguise as Mr Breedon; at one point he's going down in a lift with
a woman. Sayers says "Mr Bredon the ever-polite, expanded and
assumed his gibus during the descent, apparently for the express
purpose of taking it off to her when he emerged." The unknowing
reader will be puzzled what the object was and how it might be
expanded while in a lift.
You're spot on with your guess. It's a type of hat. More precisely,
it's a species of top hat, whose crown can be folded flat to make
it easier to carry when visiting the theatre. The general name for
them is opera hats or crush hats.
The gibus (the "g" is soft), often with an initial capital letter,
was named after the Frenchman Antoine Gibus, who invented it in the
early part of the nineteenth century. Reference books usually say
1823; my Petit Robert dictionary gives 1834 for the first use of
the hat's name in French. Such hats became popular and the word
frequently turns up in English works of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. By the time that Dorothy L Sayers was writing,
it was going out of style, as H G Wells noted in a minor work of
1929, The Autocracy of Mr Parham ("His Gibus hat, a trifle old-
fashioned in these slovenly times"). If you ever saw the film Top
Hat, you may remember that Fred Astaire popped open a collapsible
top hat as part of a routine. That was of the Gibus type.
So far as I know, the first appearance in English was in William
Makepeace Thackeray's Book of Snobs of 1848: "Ask little Tom Prig,
who is there in all his glory, knows everybody, has a story about
every one; and, as he trips home to his lodgings in Jermyn Street,
with his gibus-hat and his little glazed pumps, thinks he is the
fashionablest young fellow in town, and that he really has passed a
night of exquisite enjoyment."
6. Sic!
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"According to the current issue of the Cambridge alumni magazine
CAM," e-mailed Peter Smith, "'The Great Auk laid a single egg at
breeding sites on both sides of the North Atlantic.' Even assuming
that that means one egg at each site, it seems distinctly possible
that the poor bird may have become extinct through exhaustion."
Jonathan McColl reports that The Press and Journal of Aberdeen had
a filler under a picture of a woman's face: "Velour tracksuits worn
by famous faces such as Coleen McLoughlin, above, were today named
the number one fashion disaster, a survey for UKTV Style found." Mr
McColl confesses that he never wears tracksuits on his face, but
then he admits his isn't famous.
On 7 December, this report appeared in The Geelong Advertiser of
Victoria, Australia: "A man hit by a train in Bell Park last night
miraculously walked away with serious leg injuries." Rob Young says
it certainly sounds like a miracle to him. However, the report goes
on to say he had a broken arm but that his leg was merely gashed.
The BBC's Web site reported on new flights to Germany from the UK
and ended its brief piece, "Cologne, perhaps best known for its
flagrant history, is one of Germany's most historic cities and is
also a major cultural and media hub." Andreas Schaefer, who lives
in the city, suggests it may be the marketing of cologne that is
flagrant rather than the history of Cologne.
Peter Rose tells us that the Sydney Morning Herald Web site for 9
December had a report about potentially lethal legislation: "As you
can imagine, we may have unexploded ordinances in there so we need
to ensure that it's safe before anyone goes into the premises."
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