World Wide Words -- 16 Jun 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 15 16:58:50 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 544 Saturday 16 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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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Nostoc.
3. Readers write.
4. Q&A: Trimmer.
5. Q&A: Spoonerism.
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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VACATION BREAK My wife and I will be leaving shortly on our summer
holidays, so this is the last issue for four weeks. The next is due
to appear on 21 July. Many thanks to everybody who has already sent
bon voyage messages.
CHUCK-FARTHING Several US subscribers noted that a similar game
exists in their country under the name of "pitching pennies".
I mentioned the word "dump" for a rough-cast leaden counter that
was sometimes used in the game. Jim McCrudden and Peter Rose noted
that coins were in short supply in the early days of the New South
Wales colony in Australia; the centre portions of some were cut out
and used as coins in their own right. "Dump", the same word, was
used for one cut from the centre of a Spanish dollar, used in the
colony from 1813 to 1828, and was given the value of a quarter of a
dollar. The rest of the coin was called a holey dollar, and was
worth, as you may expect, three-quarters of a dollar.
COUNT THE LEGS, DUMMY! Many readers found time to exercise their
pedantry muscles by pointing out that in this section last week it
was wrong for me to call a student of spiders an entomologist (from
Greek "entomon", an insect). Spiders aren't insects; somebody who
studies them is an arachnologist (from Greek "arakhne", a spider).
BITER BIT Jim Lattie notes, "Your comments regarding improvements
in street scenes, 'by removing abandoned motor vehicles, reducing
dog fouling and graffiti, and enforcing remedial work by private
property owners,' leaves me somewhat puzzled. Although I have seen
many examples of dog fouling, I have never knowingly spotted any
dog graffiti. Perhaps its true origins tend to be hidden?"
2. Weird Words: Nostoc
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A gelatinous mass.
Neither the name nor the definition sound at all romantic, but if I
mention that nostoc's other names include star jelly, star-shot and
the Welsh pwdre sêr ("rot of the stars"), you will appreciate that
there's more to the matter.
There are many legends about it. In a translation in 1640 of van
Helmont's Ternary of Paradoxes it is suggested that nostoc may be
the "nocturnal Pollution of some plethorical and wanton Star, or
rather excrement blown from the nostrils of some rheumatic planet".
For centuries it was assumed to have fallen to the earth during
meteor showers. In modern times it has been linked with organic
detritus from unidentified flying objects or corpses of fictional
atmospheric beasts. It has also been claimed to be extraterrestrial
cellular matter that exists in molecular clouds in space.
Whatever you decide to call it, nostoc appears on the ground as a
foul-smelling jelly-like mass. The geologist Bill Baird encountered
some in Scotland in 2004. He said the lumps were about the size of
a half-brick, had "the consistency of a firm blancmange" and looked
like bits of a "settled fragmented snow bank".
The real cause is very much more mundane than the stories. Several
types of slime moulds can produce jelly-like masses when millions
of individual cells clump together preparatory to producing spores.
In particular, a cyanobacterium, Nostoc commune, sometimes forms
filamentous colonies at the roots of grass when it is very wet.
In the eighteenth century the cyanobacterium was given the genus
name of Nostoc because of this behaviour. The term "nostoc" had by
then been around for at least two centuries in the sense of this
mysterious star jelly. Despite its mundane nature, there remains
one mystery about nostoc - we've no idea where the word comes from,
not even whether it was coined in Latin or English.
3. Readers write
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JETSO Malcolm I'Anson writes: "This word is so common and has been
in popular use in Hong Kong for so many years that I wonder if it's
gone into any dictionary yet. It's used to describe what we'd call
'freebies', benefits or sweeteners that are thrown in to attract
custom - e.g. sign up for our credit card and you'll receive 3,568
restaurant discount vouchers, that sort of thing." He notes that it
has been borrowed from Cantonese "da jit tau", grant a discount, or
"jeuk so", meaning an advantage or benefit. So far as I know it has
yet to reach any English-language dictionary.
4. Q&A: Trimmer
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Q. Could you help to define an obscure term? In its online edition,
The Economist called the Belgian prime minister a "serial trimmer".
Surprisingly, Google was of little help in defining this term. Can
you explain what is a "trimmer"? [Barry Rein, California]
A. No problem.
The problem with looking up "trimmer" online is that the political
sense is swamped by references to tools that cut and neaten, such
as hedge-trimmers and hair-trimmers. The political sense of the
word isn't now so common as it once was, though you can still find
it - as you have discovered - in the more heavyweight type of
journalism.
The reference was originally to the trim of a yacht or sailing ship
and to the action of keeping the vessel balanced against the forces
of wave and wind. Sails continually need trimming and a person who
does it can be called a trimmer.
In the late seventeenth century, this idea was applied to English
politics during the administrations of George Savile, Lord Halifax.
These were especially partisan times, with differing social and
religious views fighting for supremacy in the decades following the
English Civil War. He was an advocate of what is now fashionably
called the third way, seeking a middle ground between extremes. His
opponents began calling him and his supporters trimmers, supposedly
members of a third party of neutrals and traitors, who figuratively
trimmed their sails to accommodate prevailing political winds. In
his defence, Halifax wrote a pamphlet with the title The Character
of a Trimmer to set out his views. He even accepted the title, but
in the sense of "one who keeps even the ship of state".
His attempts to soften the term were unsuccessful, though they did
help to ensure that the word entered the language. Trimmers today
adapt their views to prevailing political trends not for the good
of the country but for personal or political advancement. The
Economist's comment you quote describes the Belgian prime minister,
Guy Verhofstadt, as "a populist and serial trimmer who will say or
do anything to get elected".
The "serial" part is a resurgence of a usage, fashionable in the
1990s and based on "serial killer", for a person who repeatedly
follows the same behaviour pattern, as a serial adulterer or serial
truant.
5. Q&A: Spoonerism
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Q. I've been told that the man who gave rise to the term Spoonerism
never said one. Can this possibly be true? [James MacNaughton]
A. The legends, mischievous inventions and simple errors that have
accreted around the term obscure the truth. But there is evidence
to suggest that the Reverend William Archibald Spooner rarely if
ever uttered a Spoonerism.
Spooner spent all his adult life at New College, Oxford, joining it
as a scholar in 1862 and retiring as Warden (head of college) in
1924. The term "Spoonerism" began to appear in print around 1900,
though the Oxford English Dictionary records that it had been known
in Oxford colloquially since about 1885.
A classic Spoonerism is the swapping of the initial sounds of two
words: "young man, you have hissed my mystery lectures and tasted
your worm and you must leave Oxford by the town drain"; "let us
raise our glasses to the queer old Dean"; and "which of us has not
felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?". When Teddy Roosevelt came
to Britain in 1910, the heads of four Oxford colleges - Spooner
among them - gave receptions in his honour. A US newspaper took the
opportunity to retell some further examples:
He is said to have asked his neighbor [at lunch] to have
"some of this stink puff", pointing to an ornamental dish
of pink jelly. In chapel it is recorded that he has read
out the first line of the well-known hymn which starts
"From Greenland's icy mountains" as "From Iceland's greasy
mountains", and has spoken of the wicked man whose words
were "as ears and sparrows".
Virtually every example on record, including all the famous ones,
is an invention by ingenious members of the university who, as one
undergraduate remembers, used to spend hours making them up.
Spooner did transpose items, but not like this - his inversions
were more often of whole words or of ideas rather than sounds. A
reliable witness records him repeatedly referring to a friend of a
Dr Child as "Dr Friend's child". One day he passed a woman who was
dressed in black and told his companion that her late husband was a
very sad case, poor man, "eaten by missionaries". He did things
backwards sometimes. One story - well attested - recounts how he
spilled some salt during a college dinner and carefully poured some
claret on it to mop it up, a reversal of the usual process. He is
also said to have remarked on the poor lighting of some stairs and
then to have turned off the lights and attempted to lead his party
downstairs in the dark.
Wordplay of the type we now call Spoonerisms was rife among Oxford
undergraduates from about the middle of the nineteenth century. It
appears in The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1854-7) by Cuthbert
Bede, the pseudonym of another Oxford don, the Reverend Edward
Bradley ("'Will you poke a smipe, Pet?' asked Mr. Bouncer, rather
enigmatically.")
Spooner was very well known in the small community of Oxford. He
was instantly recognisable, since he was an albino, with the pale
face, pink eyes, poor eyesight, white hair and small stature that
is characteristic of his type. (Some writers have suggested his
verbal and physical quirks may have been linked with his albinism,
perhaps a form of what is now called dyspraxia.) Spooner later
became famous for his verbal and conceptual inversions, so it's
easy to see how his name could have become linked to products of
undergraduate wordplay. This seems to have been from affection
rather than malice, since Spooner (known as the Spoo) was kindly
and well-liked.
Spooner was an excellent lecturer, speaker and administrator who
did much to transform New College into a modern institution. But he
was no great scholar, and it's a cruel twist of fate that he is now
only remembered for a concept he largely had foisted upon him.
6. Sic!
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Mary McMillan noted a sign in a women's restroom in what she calls
a "barbecue joint" in Texas: "Employees must wash your hands". She
guesses that staff wouldn't get too much else done running into the
restroom to assist every customer.
Ed Pixley e-mailed to report that on NewsMax.com, a right-wing US
blog, a mass mailing to congressional representatives was offered
for readers' signatures to try to stop new mileage standards for
cars. In the letter, signers told the congressional recipients that
"Engineers should design cars and trucks, not politicians." Raise
your hand if you think a politician designed by an engineer would
be an improvement.
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