World Wide Words -- 03 Feb 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 2 19:02:12 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 525 Saturday 3 February 2007
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Sent each Saturday to at least 45,000 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/jnmk.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Slow travel.
3. Weird Words: Muliebrious.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Salt of the earth.
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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RECEIPT AND RECIPE My comment last week about the old-fashioned
use of the former to mean the latter provoked further illustrations
of the survival of "receipt". John Wilson noted, "It was used on
British television, up to the late 1990s, on the programme Two Fat
Ladies, featuring Clarissa Dickson Wright and the late Jennifer
Paterson, who invariably spoke of 'receipts'. She said this with
(metaphorical) relish and I feel sure she did it for effect as a
conscious statement of her background and style." John Sweney says,
"My mother, born in Iowa in 1912, still sends me what she calls
'receipts' for various dishes, so the usage persists into the 21st
century." Douglas G Wilson confirms its long survival: "I heard it
routinely in the 1960s, only from older people, true, but this was
in the city, not in the hills. The Dictionary of American Regional
English seems to suggest it became more-or-less obsolete around
1960. William and Mary Morris wrote in their column Words, Wit, and
Wisdom in 1970, 'Throughout New England and in rural areas in many
other parts of the country, you will still hear "receipt" more
often than "recipe."' So at least the Morrises thought it was still
very widely current in 1970."
LOONSPUDDERY I asked last week whether anybody knew anything about
the origin of this strange word. Stuart McLachlan pointed out that
"loonspud" appears several times in a dictionary of terms created
from user contributions to the message boards on the Urban75 Web
site (see http://quinion.com?URBA), which is based in Brixton in
South London. It is defined as a derogatory term for a conspiracy
theorist, which exactly fits the context of the place where I found
it. The first part is obviously enough a form of "loony" and the
second, which also appears in another word in the list, may be the
slang term for a potato, used as a term of insult (though the word
"spudder", which appears in the list, has excretory associations).
2. Turns of Phrase: Slow travel
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Back in 1989, "slow food" was created in Italy as a reaction to the
increasing globalisation and standardisation of food, especially
fast food (hence its name). Its main aim was to preserve, encourage
and promote local culinary specialities. That idea has since spread
widely. Now we are seeing a cousin beginning to make headlines.
Slow travellers eschew plane travel and especially short breaks in
distant places. They prefer to travel more gently, by train, bus,
cargo ship, even bicycle. They want to luxuriate in the experience
of a stress-free journey, not rush to a destination. That such slow
travel is kinder on the environment because of its lower carbon
footprint is a bonus.
For most travellers, the thought of trying to get to some long-haul
destination by train or ship is daunting. It takes too long or it's
difficult to arrange and more expensive than by plane. A recent
news story about a woman from North Wales who got to a friend's
wedding in Brisbane by train, bus and boat via Moscow, Beijing,
Hanoi, Singapore and Darwin, taking two months, is either an awful
warning or an inspiration. Most slow travellers stick to European
destinations where the good rail system makes access easy.
* Time Magazine, 25 Sep. 2006: Slow Travel is also gaining traction
in other countries. "The global affliction of the hurry virus has
afflicted every corner of the planet," says Carl Honoré, the
London-based author of In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult
of Speed.
* The Independent, 25 Jan. 2007: The West family obligingly took
the train to Tuscany rather than travelling by air, to test out the
delights of slow travel. Two days and three hours later, they
finally arrived, after one missed train, broken air-conditioning in
the sleeper compartment and a couple of sightseeing stop-offs.
3. Weird Words: Muliebrious /'mju:lIEbri at s/ (*)
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Effeminate.
I found this rare word in the last chapter of S M Stirling's book
The Sky People, though he spells it slightly differently: "The
muliebrous features could have been man or woman or creature from
the stories his grandmother had told."
His spelling has been used by others but mine is that of the Oxford
English Dictionary, which has just one example, from 1652. It's not
quite that rare, though one has to search around for instances. It
appeared in an article, The Industrial Value of Woman (a title that
would today raise a few eyebrows) in The North American Review in
1882, in which the author wrote of a muliebrious or over-feminine
woman.
Its companion adjective is "muliebral", characteristic of women or
womanhood, which lacks the other's negative implications and which
featured in the magazine The World & I in 1995: "Muller and Gillis
represent the vibrant and irresistible muliebral force that has
been weaving its way through the dance world for the last twenty
years."
Both derive from the classical Latin "muliebris", womanly, which is
from "mulier", a woman. The latter is also the source of the even
rarer and long obsolete legal term "mulier" that describes a child
born in wedlock and so legitimate, and of the rather more common
"muliebrity", womanhood or femininity.
(*) See http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm for a guide to
the pronunciation symbols used in newsletters.
4. Recently noted
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GOOGLEBOMBING IS DEAD? Notoriously, at one time if you entered the
search phrase "miserable failure" as the search term in Google, the
page that appeared top of the list of results was President Bush's
biography from the official White House site. As Google ranks pages
by their popularity, based on the number of external links to them,
pranksters were able to manipulate the order of its results through
setting up lots of links from other sites that were keyed to the
phrase. This is Googlebombing. The trick doesn't work any more -
Google have got tired of the game and have taken their ball home.
Top of the list will probably be a BBC News report from 2003 about
the Googlebombing of Bush. It has begun to filter such prankster
results, supposedly to protect its reputation, fearing that people
might think such frivolous results were its opinion. The earliest
example I can find for the term Googlebombing is from the newsgroup
alt.religion.kibology (don't ask) dated March 2002. As a result of
Google's action, the word "Googlebombing" seems likely to vanish
from the online vocabulary fairly soon.
5. Q&A: Salt of the earth
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Q. If someone is the "salt of the earth" they have admirable
qualities and in particular can be relied upon. Why is this when
salt added to the earth makes it sterile? [Aleda and Ian Turnbull]
A. The expression is Biblical and comes from Matthew, 5:13. From
the King James Bible of 1611: "Ye are the salt of the earth: but if
the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is
thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden
under foot of men."
Salt has always been one of the most prized commodities, essential
both for life and for preserving food. Roman soldiers were paid an
allowance to buy salt, the origin of our "salary". A man "worth his
salt" is efficient or capable. To eat salt with someone was to
accept his hospitality and a person who did so was bound to look
after his host's interests. The Bible also speaks of a covenant of
salt, one of holy and perpetual obligation. Newborn children were
anciently rubbed with salt to protect them against evil forces.
To Jesus, therefore, "salt of the earth" was a great compliment. To
understand his comment fully, though, you have to know a bit about
where Jews of his time got their salt. Some came from saltpans on
the margins of the Dead Sea, but much was obtained from Mount Sodom
(Jebel Usdum in Arabic), a ridge of limestone and rock salt at the
south-west corner of the Dead Sea (a pillar of salt here is said to
have given rise to the legend of Lot's wife). This rock salt was
the literal salt of the earth. Because the deposit's outer layer
was exposed to the elements, it became contaminated and its salt
content depleted by weathering, losing its taste and value, so
becoming good for nothing.
The use of salt to poison the ground is entirely separate.
6. Sic!
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This one sounds like a joke, but Jon Ackroyd convinced me it was a
genuine advertisement for a sale of Volvo cars, which appeared in
the Times-Colonist of Victoria BC, Canada, on 29 January: "HURRY.
THE SAVINGS WON'T LAST AND NEITHER WILL OUR CARS".
Lorraine Wilson was amused by an advertisement posted alongside the
highway at an car dealers in Bakersfield, California: "Wanted: New
and Used Car Salesmen."
An article on the Web site of KYW radio (Philadelphia, USA) was
noted by Grace Gagliardi: "If convicted on all charges the trio
could, at minimum, spend the rest of their lives in jail." If the
legal system could guarantee resurrection the prisons would be
full.
A news item on the BBC Web site on Monday, seen by Brendan Hale,
seems to suggest a particularly drastic redundancy measure by the
Simclar Group, which is laying off workers at two factories in
Scotland: "Allan Wilson, deputy minister for enterprise, said:
'This is devastating news for those who will lose their jobs and
their families.'"
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