World Wide Words -- 09 Jun 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 8 17:25:35 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 543 Saturday 9 June 2007
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Sent each Saturday to at least 48,000 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/dlns.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Chuck-farthing.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: The abbreviation pp.
5. Book review: By Hook or By Crook.
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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ADVANCE WARNING As my wife and I shall be departing shortly on our
summer holidays, next week's issue will be the last for four weeks.
After the issue of 16 June the next will be that of 21 July.
APOLOGIES Sorry about the late arrival of last week's newsletter,
which was due to circumstances beyond anybody's control. A power
failure caused the Web site of the University of Eastern Michigan
(where the World Wide Words list server is based) to go offline
just as the issue was about to be distributed.
HOT CELLING Lots of people pointed out, quite correctly, that this
expression derives from the much older practice of "hot bunking"
(also known as "hot racking" and "hot cotting"), in which sailors
coming off watch would swap bunks with men going on watch. Both
"hot celling" and "hot desking", which I cited as a precursor,
derive from this source.
VENOMOUS SPIDERS I wrote in the piece about "attercop" that the
Old English word "attor", poison, was applied to spiders in the
"mistaken belief that they were all venomous". Many entomologists
pointed out that virtually all spiders are venomous, as that's how
they immobilise and kill their prey. But only a small proportion
are dangerous to humans, which is what I meant and what the editors
of the Oxford English Dictionary had in mind when they refer in
their definition to "the supposed venomous properties of spiders".
2. Weird Words: Chuck-farthing
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A game of skill and chance.
You can't fault the name for accuracy. The game really did consist
of chucking farthings, that is, throwing small coins. The farthing
was a British coin, one quarter of a penny (it comes from an Old
English word for a fourth part), which went out of use in 1960,
even before the decimalisation of the currency in 1971.
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England by Joseph Strutt,
dated 1838, has a detailed description, albeit with a different
coin:
I have seen a game thus denominated played with halfpence,
every one of the competitors having a like number, either
two or four, and a hole being made in the ground with a
mark at a given distance for the players to stand, they
pitch their halfpence singly in succession towards the
hole, and he whose halfpenny lies the nearest to it has
the privilege of coming first to a second mark much nearer
than the former, and all the halfpence are given to him;
these he pitches in a mass towards the hole, and as many
of them as remain therein are his due; if any fall short
or jump out of it, the second player, that is, he whose
halfpenny in pitching lay nearest to the first goer's,
takes them and performs in like manner; he is followed by
the others so long as any of the halfpence remain.
It seems, though, that coins weren't always used, sometimes being
replaced by rough-cast leaden counters, called dumps because they
were dumpy in shape.
Like so many games, this one was disliked by serious-minded folks,
in part no doubt because of the implied warning in John Arbuthnot's
History of John Bull (1755): "He lost his money at chuck-farthing,
shuffle-cap, and all-fours." The last of these was a card game,
while in shuffle-cap money was shaken up in a hat, at least
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to what effect I've
been unable to discover.
3. Recently noted
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DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS Anthony Massey reports that he saw a van
belonging to Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council with "Street
Scene Enforcement" emblazoned on the side. He looked around to see
if someone was making a scene in the street, either of the filmic
or argumentative sort, which might possibly require enforcement.
But all was quiet. On closer investigation, the van proved to be
the council's litter patrol. A Google search showed the term to be
relatively common among British local authorities, with the phrase
going beyond the control of litter to the general improvement of
the look of local communities by removing abandoned motor vehicles,
reducing dog fouling and graffiti, and enforcing remedial work by
private property owners, all of these being misdemeanours lumped
under the heading of envirocrime.
BLEEDING EDGE Elias Friedman found this in Science Daily: "HPC
systems are on the bleeding edge of technology". He wonders if this
is a mistake, a confusion of similar words, or an eggcorn. It turns
out to be none of these, but a deliberate humorous coinage to refer
to a development ahead of the leading edge (and the cutting edge),
which is unperfected or unaccepted technology whose use entails a
risk of some kind. It's common in the computer business. At the
moment, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are bleeding-edge technologies - it's
uncertain which is to become market leader and so there's a risk of
backing the wrong horse, as there was a generation ago when buyers
and developers had to decide between Betamax and VHS. The Science
Daily article commented that parallel computing, becoming common on
desktop systems, might be a hardware technology too far on the
bleeding edge for software programmers to be able to cope with it.
4. Q&A: The abbreviation pp
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Q. I would like you to tell me about the origin of the abbreviation
"pp" when someone signs on behalf of someone else. I've heard that
comes from the Latin "per procurationem", but is it true? [Anthony
Vamvakidis]
A. This may be an unfamiliar business abbreviation to Americans, as
I believe it is not much used there. It's commonly placed alongside
a signature to show that it is being signed by somebody other than
the ostensible author, say by a secretary in the absence of the
writer.
Back when the abbreviation first began to be used in business, in
the latter part of the nineteenth century, it was indeed taken to
be a shortened form of the Latin phrase "per procurationem". But
reference books today often say that it's actually short for the
Latin "per pro", and that's how I learned it when I first came
across it.
This is a more important difference than one might think. "Per
procurationem" means "through the agency of" or "by proxy", while
"per pro" means "for and on behalf of". Which meaning you take
changes where you put the abbreviation. If the former, it should be
alongside the name of the person who actually signs the letter; if
the latter, it should precede the name of the true writer. Most
people these days would assume the latter.
Even in Britain, an alternative form such as "dictated by Y but
signed in his (or her) absence" is now common.
For completeness, it's worth noting that there's a third Latin
phrase with some similarities, "in pro per", in full "in propria
persona", meaning "in their own person". This is required in some
legal jurisdictions to show that a person is handling their own
case, without a lawyer. And "pp" may be more familiar in the sense
of "pages", a nineteenth-century abbreviation from the English word
"page" in which the doubling of the letter represents the plural.
5. Book review: By Hook or By Crook
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It's impossible to give you a brief description of this book. Its
subtitle is A Journey In Search of English and David Crystal spends
the book driving more or less purposefully around bits of the UK,
with mental excursions to California, India and Europe. You might
describe it as a travelogue coupled with literary and linguistic
reflections. There are many references to local history and the
origins of place names as well as substantial sections on the
language of Shakespeare, the linguistic melting-pot of India, and
the evolution of Euro-English.
If it resembles anything at all, it is a comfortable and unhurried
car journey to interesting places in the company of an entertaining
guide. Did you know, for example, that Shaw named the character
Henry Higgins in Pygmalion after the co-owner of a department store
in Peckham? Or that the letter "o" in words such as "come", "love",
"one", and "son" ought to be "u" but that medieval scribes changed
it to avoid a chain of identical downward strokes that were
difficult to read? Or that the patron saint of booksellers, St John
of God, is also - shades of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 - the
patron saint of firemen? Or that a parrot was the last surviving
speaker of one South American language? Or that the towns of
Welshpool and Llanfair PG - the one on Anglesey with the 58-letter
name - were both renamed by railway companies? (The former was
originally just Pool, renamed to avoid confusion with Poole in
Dorset, the latter was formerly Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll and was
gifted its overweighted name as a tourist attraction.)
You do have to accept that your guide will become discursive, even
meandering at times. In places it's not so much a narrative as a
stream of consciousness. On one page, he moves within three brief
paragraphs from Roget's Thesaurus to J M Barrie's Peter Pan to the
origin of a Herefordshire place name to its namesake railway
locomotive and to the system for classifying engines by their wheel
arrangements.
In short, don't expect a textbook. But if you would like to curl up
for a few hours in the company of an erudite if free-associative
literary and linguistic companion, you could do worse.
[David Crystal, By Hook or By Crook: A Journey In Search of
English; published by HarperPress on 1 May 2007; hardback, pp314;
ISBN-13 978-0-00-723558-2; ISBN-10 0-00-723558-5; publisher's price
GBP16.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP11.04 http://quinion.com?H0C9
Amazon USA: Not listed
Amazon Canada: CDN$20.76 http://quinion.com?H7C8
Amazon Germany: EUR27,40 http://quinion.com?H2C4
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
6. Sic!
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Last Friday evening, an item on the BBC Radio 4 six o'clock news
concerned the 15th attempt by the jockey Frankie Dettori to win the
Epsom Derby. The reporter noted: "He always talks up his chances
but this time he's partnered with a horse that speaks for itself."
As he won, perhaps talking horses is the way to go.
Gardin Carroll reports that the Federal Citizen Information Center
in Pueblo, Colorado, sent out a press release, Get The Facts About
Reproductive Health, promoting a free Reproductive Health Kit. One
sentence read "It features valuable information on sexually
transmitted diseases that every woman can use and share with her
loved ones."
Am I perhaps getting over-pedantic? In Kim Stanley Robinson's new
book, Sixty Days and Counting, occurs this sentence: "She walked on
to the grocery store to see if there were any vegetables left from
the day's farmer's market thinking furiously." Although it's SF,
the book has otherwise no sentient vegetables in it.
Much has been made in the public prints of the sign behind Hillary
Clinton during her speech on 31 May in Santa Clara, California:
"New Jobs for Tommorrow". That wasn't as embarrassing as the error
perpetrated by the organisers of the US National Spelling Bee, in
which during preliminary heats the placards around the necks of two
competitors spelled their states as "Maryalnd" and "Virgina".
Susan Abraham reports that public servants were on strike in South
Africa last week, so that schools, hospitals, police services and
the like were being run by very few employees. The National Radio
service claimed that emergency services in the major hospitals were
being kept going by skeleton staff.
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