World Wide Words -- 06 Jan 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 5 17:38:40 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 521 Saturday 6 January 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/wchy.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Archaeogenetics.
3. Weird Words: Lexiphanic.
4. Q&A: Road.
5. Recently noted.
6. Q&A: Mangel-wurzel.
7. 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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WEB SITE At some point this weekend, probably Saturday morning my
time, the Web site is scheduled to be given a makeover. Some of the
alteration will be made to the format of pages, such as the indexes
and search function, but the major changes will be in appearance.
Your comments and criticism will be very welcome, as always. I'd
like to hear in particular from anybody with a disability who finds
it difficult to navigate the new site.
2. Turns of Phrase: Archaeogenetics
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The newish field of Archaeogenetics studies DNA recovered from
archaeological sites, cultivated plants, domesticated animals, or
from living humans. Through such analysis it has become possible to
say useful things about the way we have migrated about our planet
and altered our environment.
The archaeologist Colin Renfrew coined it in 2000 in a book that he
edited with Katie Boyle: Archaeogenetics: DNA and the population
prehistory of Europe. The word itself is still largely the preserve
of academic specialists, but the ideas behind it have had masses of
attention in the press.
Work with human DNA is sometimes instead called "genetic genealogy"
or "historical genetics". Some of our DNA can remain unchanged for
generations and can give clues about our origins. Men in Orkney
have a Y chromosome similar to modern Scandinavians, which suggests
that the Vikings who colonised the island may have wiped out all
the male members of its previous Pictish population. One gene often
gives its owners red hair and was common among ancient Britons;
invasions by non-redheads later pushed them to the margins, which
is why that colouring is especially common among Scots and Irish.
The idea that through analysis of one's DNA it may be possible to
deduce something interesting about one's ancient family history is
intriguing to anyone who has ever had an urge to find out who they
are by investigating their forebears.
* Western Mail, Cardiff, 25 Feb. 2006: There is one area of human
research which benefits from their continued existence:
archaeogenetics. It refers to the application of molecular genetics
to the study of the human past.
* Observer, 31 Dec. 2006: Such a revelation demonstrates the power
of archaeogenetics ... in which modern Britons explore their
Celtic, Viking and Anglo-Saxon origins.
3. Weird Words: Lexiphanic /lEksi'fanIk/ [*]
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Of people who use bombastic or pretentious language.
"The tinsel of Lexiphanic language in many places involves his
argument in almost inextricable mystery, and pains whom it was
intended to please, by making them toil for instruction, when an
easy, natural communication was practicable." Modern writers might
take this as a motto or an awful warning to be posted above their
desks. It was written by the US statesman William Pinkney in the
early 1800s.
"Lexiphanic" (said as /lEksi'fanIk/ or "lek-si-FAN-ik") comes from
"Lexiphanes" (pronounced /lEk'sif at ni:z/ or "lek-SIF-un-eez"), the
title of a dialogue composed by the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata
in the first century AD. It is also the name of the character who
was the subject of the satire in the dialogue, coined from "lexis",
word, and "phainein", to show. So Lexiphanes was a phrase-monger,
of whom another character, Lycinus (supposed to be Lucian himself)
says in the dialogue, "There is not a doubt I shall go raving mad
under the intoxication of your exuberant verbosity". This may
remind you of Benjamin Disraeli's quip about William Gladstone: "A
sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own
verbosity".
Few people read Lucian today and even fewer would recognise the
name of one of his characters. Two centuries ago, men and women of
education were more familiar with the classics. In Dr Johnson and
Fanny Burney, the latter wrote in surprise about the former: "How
little did I expect from this Lexiphanes, this great and dreaded
lord of English literature, a turn for burlesque humour!"
----
[*] For an explanation of the ASCII pronunciation symbols that pop
up occasionally, see http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm .
4. Q&A: Road
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Q. I live in an area named Hampton Roads, Virginia. When people
ask me why the area is named after its "roads", I have to explain
that its some old nautical term, or something. Do you have a
quick and easy explanation that I can use in the future? [Joe
Price]
A. "Quick and easy"? That's not what I do ...
The history of "road" is closely linked to that of both "ride"
and "raid". It's actually from the past tense of the Old English
verb "to ride", which we retain in a different spelling. In Old
English "road" meant a journey on horseback. A little later it
came to mean riding with hostile intent, hence the "raid" sense,
"raid" being an old Scots form of "road". The much later creation
"inroad" preserves this meaning.
By about 1300 "road" could also refer to a ship riding on the
waves and out of this came the harbour sense of "road", a partly
sheltered stretch of water near the shore in which ships could
ride at anchor, as in "roadstead", in which the second part is
the obsolete "stead" for a place.
Our sense of a road as being a fixed route or line on land for
getting from one place to another came along much later, at the
very end of the sixteenth century (Shakespeare is the first known
user). This explains the old joke that there are no roads in the
City of London (the medieval core of the metropolis), as indeed
there aren't: all the ways there had been named before the word
came into the language.
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5. Recently noted
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MORE WORDS OF THE YEAR These are different, since they were chosen
by an American linguist working in the UK - Dr Lynne Murphy, Senior
Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sussex. The first is
her selection of the Most Useful Import from American English to
British English. She did toy with "size 00", which has had a lot of
exposure here this year, but she eliminated it because it doesn't
really mean much to British speakers (the equivalent here is size
2) and continues to feel like an Americanism. Her choice instead is
"muffin top", for a roll of fat that bulges over the waistband of
trousers that are too tight or too low. She suggests, though, that
it remains rather tentative in UK usage because it's rare to see an
American-style muffin in the UK that has a top that bulges out over
its containing paper cup. That used to be so, but all those I've
eaten recently do have mushroomy uppers. Her other winner is the
Most Useful Import from British English to American English. Here,
she says, there's a clear winner. It is "wanker", a general term of
abuse for a contemptible person (as in Irving Walsh's Trainspotting
of 1994: "Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We can't
even pick a decent vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by").
This has long been low slang here, as you may tell from its root
sense of masturbator, though it is common in what used to be called
the broadsheets before they mostly went tabloidish. She argues that
it "came into its own in American English this year, especially, it
seems, in political blogging, where many variants on the term are
found". [To read the blog, go via my link http://quinion.com?WOTY.]
DFY This abbreviation can be expanded in several different ways
(such as "Design For Yield" or "Division for Youth"), but the one
that has gained most exposure in British newspapers in the past
year or so is "Done For You". It's the opposite of DIY. The trend
is for busy people with disposable income to get someone in to do
those little annoying jobs around the house rather than try to do
them themselves. In our cities, this has been helped along by the
influx of large numbers of skilled workers from the new central
European members of the EU, especially Poland, and is said to be
the reason why DIY suppliers' profits are falling. The abbreviation
itself is recorded from at least as far back as 2000, but even now
articles that use it always explain it, so it hasn't yet become
established in everyday vocabulary.
BALDERDASH AND PIFFLE A new series of the word programme is being
produced for broadcast next Spring on BBC television. The BBC and
the OED have launched a new Wordhunt for information about some
puzzling or badly documented words. (The last series brought in
fascinating and previously unknown material about some of the
featured words.) Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/balderdash for more
information and a link to the OED's page that lists the appeal
words in detail.
6. Q&A: Mangel-wurzel
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Q. Any idea where the phrase "mangle worzel" for a large white
turnip comes from? [Chris Sheldon]
A. Root vegetables aren't the most sexy things either to eat or
write about but I hope to show that this one's an exception. Let's
get a couple of important things right before we go any further -
its name is usually written "mangel-wurzel" and it isn't a relative
of the turnip but a large variety of beet, closely related to the
sugar beet and the beetroot or red beet.
Mind you, many people have been confused about it down the years.
These root vegetables all look alike to the non-specialist and we
don't even all have the same names for them. The British swede is
the rutabaga in the US, for example, the latter name incidentally
having been taken from an old dialect Swedish word for this type of
turnip. But when H L Mencken wrote in The American Language in 1921
that Englishmen "still call the rutabaga a mangelwurzel", he was
seriously up the botanical and agricultural creek without a leg to
stand on. Later, Somerset Maugham made fun of such ignorance in Of
Human Bondage:
"I can see you in the country," she answered with good-humoured
scorn. "Why, the first rainy day we had in the winter you'd be
crying for London." She turned to Philip. "Athelny's always like
this when we come down here. Country, I like that! Why, he don't
know a swede from a mangel-wurzel."
"Mangel-wurzel" is mainly a British term, which is often shortened
to "mangel", or sometimes to "mangold". To many townies, it evokes
a stereotyped traditional yokel rurality in which every peasant
wears a smock, wields a pitchfork, and talks in a Mummerset accent.
Think of the scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, whose head was made from a
mangel-wurzel.
Perhaps surprisingly, in view of that, it's originally German. The
first part is the old word "Mangold", meaning beet or chard (the
latter being the green leaves from a variety of beet). The second
part is "Wurzel", a root. Germans became confused about the first
part several centuries ago and thought it was instead "Mangel", a
shortage or lack. From this has grown up the popular belief that
"mangel-wurzel" refers to a famine food, a root you eat only when
you're starving. This is a gross calumny, since when young it's as
tasty and sweet as other sorts of beet, though it's mainly used as
animal fodder.
7. Sic!
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"My son," e-mailed George Thomas, "received a Chinese toy darts set
for Christmas. Among the writing on the packaging is the following:
'all in keeping with Adult the game that child is' and 'Then the
score of the position game that in the clout The high speed ins the
clout the target accurately'. So that explains that!"
A headline on the Brisbane Sunday Mail Web site last weekend: "Teen
charged over ecstasy in underpants". "Ah yes," e-mailed Colin Burt,
who sent it in, "I remember it well!"
"The State Library of Queensland," says John Wainwright. "restrict
the size of bags and briefcases that can be taken into the library,
and a sign says of those that exceed the stated size 'Please cloak
them'." But will cloaking them make them any smaller?
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