World Wide Words -- 29 Dec 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 28 21:41:49 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 568 Saturday 29 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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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Paroemiological.
3. Q&A: News.
4. Q&A: Horse latitudes.
5. 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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MUSICOPHILIA The name of the author of this word was spelled two
different ways in one paragraph in an item last week. Correctly it
is Oliver Sacks.
CHURCH FABRIC Several puzzled comments came in from readers who
didn't get the joke in the Sic! item about the concert in aid of
the church curtains. I had been in two minds whether to include it
because I'd been warned it might not be understood. To architects,
the fabric of a building is its underlying structure, in particular
its floor, walls and roof. This goes back to its original sense in
English of being a product of skilled workmanship, something that
had been ingeniously fabricated, a sense which derives from Latin
"faber", a worker in wood, metal, stone or other durable materials.
("Forge" is from a closely related Latin word.) Although "fabric"
appears in the fifteenth century, the idea of woven cloth only came
along in the eighteenth, early in the Industrial Revolution, when
the term began to be used for goods manufactured in factories; it
started life meaning "textile fabric". In Britain, and I presume
elsewhere, fund-raising to maintain a church or historic building
is often called a fabric appeal or to be in aid of its fabric. In
the case I mentioned it was for money to repair the roof.
ONLY GOD CAN MAKE A STORM Lots of people had seasonally charged
fun with an item in the Sic! section last week in which I wrote,
"The BBC News site featured a number of photographs of the ice
storm contributed by its visitors." I didn't think it was that
strange a sentence myself. Exits stage right, grumbling ...
2. Weird Words: Paroemiological /p@,ri:mi'QlQdZik at l/ (*)
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Relating to the study of proverbs.
The word is from Latin, in which language it appeared in the third
century AD as a borrowing from Greek "paroemia", a proverb. In 1639
John Clarke, the headmaster of Lincoln grammar school, published an
early work on proverbs, from the works of Erasmus. He gave it the
title Paroemiologia anglolatina, Proverbs English and Latin. Many
paroemiological collections have been created since.
As it's comparatively easy to find examples, it's surprising that
the recent revision of the letter P in the online Oxford English
Dictionary doesn't feature "paroemiological". However, it does have
its close relatives, such as "paroemiologist", a student of or an
expert in proverbs and proverb lore, and "paroemiology", the study
itself, as well as "paroemiographer", a collector of or writer on
proverbs, and "paroemia" itself, an adage or proverb. Apart from
this last one, all were coined in the early nineteenth century.
If you prefer, as most scholarly users do these days, you can spell
all these without the first "o".
(*) For a guide to symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON .
3. Q&A: News
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Q. I wonder if you could tell me where the word "news" comes from?
Could be more than one "new" piece of information or could it be
made up from "North, East, West, South" or maybe derived from some
early English word? I really don't know but I feel I should! [Jim
Butterworth]
A. People mention the points-of-the-compass story so often as the
source of "news" that it's not surprising it makes you wonder if
it's correct. For the record, it isn't.
"New" is definitely early English - it can be traced to the Old
English of the ninth century. It was mainly an adjective, as it
still is, but it could also be a noun in the sense of a new thing.
The first example of the noun in the Oxford English Dictionary is
in a translation by King Alfred of a book by the fourth-century
Roman statesman Boethius. By the twelfth century "news" was being
used in the plural to mean new things or novelties.
The word is much more ancient still. It came from Germanic sources
that can be traced back to an ancient Indo-European root. This also
led to Latin "novus", and through it words like "novel", "novice",
"renovate", "innovate" (and "novelty"). Its feminine form "nova" is
used by astronomers to describe a star that shows a sudden large
increase in brightness (so called originally because it was thought
to be a new star).
By the thirteenth century, "news", while still being plural, had
taken on its modern sense of reports or accounts of interesting or
important events. "Ay me! What is this world! What news are these!"
cried Queen Margaret in Part Two of Shakespeare's King Henry the
Sixth. It was still being pluralised as recently as the nineteenth
century. Princess Victoria wrote in a letter in 1837, "I am very
sorry that the Portuguese news are still so very unfavourable." In
The Prime Minister of 1876 by Anthony Trollope occurs the sentence
"They were in a state of enthusiasm at these news, amounting almost
to fury." But from the sixteenth century, this plural usage ran in
parallel with our modern one of treating it as a singular mass
noun, which has now, of course, prevailed.
So where did this idea of its being an acronym come from? George A
Thompson recently found it falsely asserted in the Morning Courier
& New-York Enquirer, dated 23 April 1842: "'News' is not, as many
imagine, derived from the adjective 'New'. In former times, it was
a prevalent practice to put over the periodical publications of the
day the initial letters of the cardinal points of the compass ...
importing that these papers contained intelligence from the four
quarters of the globe; and from this practice is derived the term
of newspaper."
So far as anybody knows, no such emblem existed. And it certainly
isn't the origin of the word. But the story has long legs and - to
judge by this quotation - clearly a long history, too.
4. Q&A: Horse latitudes
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Q. Where does "horse latitudes" come from, meaning areas that have
little or no wind? One of my professors recounted a story that the
term came from sailors being stranded there for so long that they'd
throw their horses overboard to conserve the remaining supplies and
lighten the ship. He doubted this explanation, and I'm inclined to
agree. What do you say? [Paul Wiele, Syracuse University]
A. "Horse latitudes" is a mariner's term for a band of irregular
and unreliable winds that lie about 30 degrees north and south of
the equator. They can suffer periods of calm, a persistent nuisance
in the days of sail, though less well known to landlubbers than the
infamous doldrums around the equator.
The story about casting horses overboard is old and, for example,
appears in George Forster's memoir about one of Captain Cook's
expeditions, A Voyage Round the World in his Britannic Majesty's
Sloop Resolution, dated 1777. You might feel it would have been
more practical to kill and eat the horses, fresh meat being at a
premium on board ship.
Another explanation appears in Seafaring Lore and Legend by Peter D
Jeans, published in 2004, "In the earlier days of sail, ships out
of the English Channel took about two months to get clear of these
particular latitudes, by which time the crew had worked off their
advance pay, known as the dead horse. The crew celebrated this
event by parading a straw horse around the deck, flogging it with a
rope's end, and then throwing it overboard." Let us not flog this
dead horse for more than it's worth, which isn't a lot.
A third explanation is in Robert Scott's Elementary Meteorology of
1883: "The Horse Latitudes, a title which Mr. Laughton derives from
the Spanish El Golfo de las Yeguas, the Mares' Sea, from its unruly
and boisterous nature." This has a lot going for it. "Golfo de las
Yeguas" is a term of some antiquity in Spanish. Lopez de Gómara
wrote in El Camino Para las Indias (The Road to the Indies) in
1552: "The worst part of the passage is the Golfo de las Yeguas
between the Canaries and Spain." But why mares? A little earlier,
1535, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés noted in his Historia
General y Natural de las Indias that mariners gave it this name
because many brood mares being shipped from Spain to the Canaries
died on board.
This explanation, though much nearer the date of creation of the
expression, may be just as incorrect as other stories. But it would
surely be too much of a coincidence for this not to be the source
of the English term.
5. Sic!
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We were at the end of Christmas lunch. The turkey and the pudding
were settling nicely and the wine had rendered us conversational in
that idling way in which nothing said is of any great significance.
My son Brian mentioned that he ought to find a new hobby; I replied
that he might try steel engraving. He and my wife stared at me in
utter confusion and amazement. "Why would anybody want to do that?"
she demanded. "Well," I replied, "It came to my mind because I've
just been reading about a nineteenth-century artist who did it."
Brian shook his head in puzzled exasperation. "Stealing gravy?"
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