World Wide Words -- 17 Feb 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 16 17:52:34 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 527 Saturday 17 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/swde.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Television 2.0.
3. Weird Words: Robinsonade.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Gas and gaiters.
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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CARBON FOOTPRINT I was rather dismissive of the image behind this
term in my piece last week. Several subscribers pointed out that it
was almost certainly derived from the older "ecological footprint".
This attempts to measure the resource needs of a population by
calculating the area of land needed to support it.
BINGO WINGS Of the various deprecatory anatomical terms mentioned
last week, this one was most commented upon. Mickey Rogers e-mailed
from Indiana with another term: "lunch lady arms". Sandra Parker
says they're known in Australia as "nana flaps" - because nanas
(grandmothers) have them - or as "ta ta flaps", because they flap
when you wave "ta ta" (goodbye).
2. Turns of Phrase: Television 2.0
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This is a spin-off from "Web 2.0" (see http://quinion.com?WEB2) and
refers to the convergence between Internet services and television.
The term has been around for a couple of years, but is only slowly
becoming known outside the business, though the rush of conferences
currently being held to discuss the future of digital media may
cause it to appear in newspapers from time to time. The key word
here is "convergence", one in the minds of communications companies
these days, which are working towards what they sometimes call
"quadruple-play" services (Internet, television, fixed-line
telephone and mobile telephone), exploiting the possibilities of
linking them together.
"It was only a matter of time," one commentator wrote in May 2006,
"before the Internet changed TV in a way more profound than color
or cable." The World Wide Web is seen as the new key distribution
medium for TV; companies hope to persuade subscribers to download
programmes (some call them "webisodes"), which can be viewed on
personal computers or mobile phones, not even needing a television
set. One problem is the vast amount of video potentially available;
one challenge will be to create a reliable Internet-based filtering
and search system so online viewers can find what they want and
what they might like if they only knew it existed.
But the biggest problem, everyone agrees, is how to keep the money
flowing in when there are no commercial breaks in the programmes
that the new Television 2.0 audience is viewing. One commentator
said at a media conference recently that the issue was "revenue,
revenue, revenue".
* Guardian, 12 Feb. 2007: A room full of executives planning
"television 2.0" suddenly realised that the internet can come to
the TV set, as well as vice versa. And panicked a bit.
* Business Wire, 29 Sep. 2006: Explore the new frontier of digital
content and entertainment - user generated media, television 2.0
and the fully connected universe.
3. Weird Words: Robinsonade
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A novel with a theme similar to that of Robinson Crusoe.
It may sound like a brand name for a fizzy soft drink, but it
appeared in all seriousness around the middle of the nineteenth
century as a literary term. It describes a story with a theme like
that of Daniel Defoe's famous 1721 work about a castaway on a
tropical island.
In the early days, it seems to have been a favourite of writers for
Blackwood's Magazine. The Oxford English Dictionary's first example
from that journal is dated 1847: "These outcasts from civilisation,
the adventures of most of whom would furnish abundant materials for
a Robinsonade." But it was coined in German, by the writer Johann
Gottfried Schnabel, in 1731, and it was also known earlier in
French, for example in Frédéric Schoell's 1824 Histoire de la
littérature Grecque profane.
In modern times, it is moderately common in literary criticism as a
description of works in which a hero is snatched without warning
from the comforts of civilisation and must attempt to survive in
difficult circumstances through his wits and personal qualities.
The Swiss Family Robinson, Coral Island, Lord of the Flies, and
Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before are all in their own
ways examples of the type.
4. Recently noted
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REFERENCINESS Paul Farrington and I both spotted this word in an
article in the Guardian on Monday, about a British TV presenter who
has agreed to stop using the title "Doctor" from a non-accredited
college in the US, after a complaint to the Advertising Standards
Authority. (http://quinion.com?EXYJ will get you the full story.)
The writer, Dr Ben Goldacre, used this word to suggest a supposed
scholarly reference that wasn't a real one: "The scholarliness of
her work is a thing to behold: she produces lengthy documents that
have an air of 'referenciness' ... but when you follow the numbers,
and check the references, it's shocking how often they aren't what
she claimed them to be." Mr Farrington and I both wondered if he
has borrowed the ending from Stephen Colbert's "truthiness", which
describes things that a person claims to know, without regard to
evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts. Dr
Goldacre confirms that this was his inspiration.
5. Q&A: Gas and gaiters
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Q. In the P G Wodehouse novel, Joy in the Morning, Bertie Wooster
uses the expression, "and everything is once more gas and gaiters."
Could you enlighten us on the origin and relevance of the phrase
and its terms? [Bob Ashforth]
A. It's a delightfully typical Wodehousian expression. It also
turns up in Ice in the Bedroom, for example, published in 1961:
She cries "Oh, Freddie darling!" and flings herself into his
arms, and all is gas and gaiters again.
But the original is in Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby of 1839,
in which a mad old gentleman who has been paying his addresses to
Mrs Nickleby arrives precipitously down the chimney of an upstairs
chamber dressed only in his underwear. Then Miss La Creevy comes
into the room, whom the old man immediately mistakes for Mrs
Nickleby:
"Aha!" cried the old gentleman, folding his hands, and
squeezing them with great force against each other. "I see
her now; I see her now! My love, my life, my bride, my
peerless beauty. She is come at last - at last - and all
is gas and gaiters!"
This must have been incomprehensible to Dickens's readers, who will
have wondered what vapours and protective leg coverings had to do
with the matter in hand. But when you consider what the old man had
said immediately beforehand, incomprehensibility comes as no
surprise:
"Very good," said the old gentleman, raising his voice,
"then bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and
a corkscrew." Nobody executing this order, the old gentleman,
after a short pause, raised his voice again and demanded a
thunder sandwich. This article not being forthcoming either,
he requested to be served with a fricassee of boot-tops and
goldfish sauce, and then laughing heartily, gratified his
hearers with a very long, very loud, and most melodious
bellow.
Despite its being nonsense (or possibly because it was), "all is
gas and gaiters" became a well-known interjection. The original
sense - as you can tell from the text - was of a most satisfactory
state of affairs. This is how nineteenth-century speakers used it
and also clearly what Wodehouse meant by it. But another sense grew
up in the twentieth century in which "gaiters" referred to the
senior clergy - such as bishops and archbishops - because of their
traditional dress that included those garments, and "gas" alluded
to their supposedly meaningless eloquence. So "all gas and gaiters"
has come to mean mere verbiage.
There was a BBC television and radio programme in the late 1960s
with the title "All Gas and Gaiters", about the goings-on at a
cathedral, starring Robertson Hare and Derek Nimmo, for which an
alternative title might have been "fun with the clergy".
6. Sic!
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A headline on the Voice of America site, datelined 13 February:
"Guinea Capital Largely Calm Under Curfew, Marital Law". As finder
Espen Hauglid notes from Norway, "Marriage certainly seems to be a
stabilising force in Conakry."
Marilyn Kloss spotted an article in the Boston Globe of 12 February
which states, "'It's a very big public health problem flying under
the radar screen,' he said." And dangerous, to boot.
The BBC web site had this headline on 14 February: "Dark matters -
mysteries of galaxies may be unearthed." Bernard Abramson wonders
if this was an astrophysical or an archaeological discovery. "It's
time someone said 'Whoa!' to the BBC's sub-editors," argued John
MacDonald, having seen another headline on the site the following
day: "Eric Joyce explains how he has reigned in his expenses."
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