World Wide Words -- 03 Mar 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 2 18:33:25 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 529 Saturday 3 March 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/mqgp.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Bridewell.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Hapless.
5. Q&A: Take with a pinch of salt.
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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MYRIAD Dozens of subscribers queried my writing last week "It's
easy to find a myriad of examples". All believed that it should
instead have been "myriad examples". After a few moments of puzzled
thought, I worked out that the questioners used "myriad" only as an
adjective. But it was originally a noun, and often still is. The
original sense, from the Greek, was ten thousand, but it has long
since come to mean an unspecified very large number or a countless
multitude. A search for the noun found approximately that number of
examples. The Oxford English Dictionary has a dozen citations from
1609 onwards, the last being from a British newspaper of 1987. An
archive of recent newspapers supplied 29,000 examples, top of the
list being the Miami Herald of 22 February: "Coordinating airline
schedules is a complicated business that requires exquisite timing
of planes, crews, passengers and a myriad of other things."
ARSINESS Many Australians noted that the Australian sense of the
word "arsey" that I mentioned in this piece last week, is not bad-
tempered, sarcastic, arrogant, or uncooperative. That's the British
sense. Australians mean by it that somebody is lucky, most commonly
flukily or undeservedly so. This version turned up in its earlier
form, tin-arsed, in a piece last December.
Lots of people pointed out that "arsiness" was an example of a new
word ending in "-iness", which I had suggested earlier in the issue
may be the mark of an evolving form meaning "something that affects
to have or gives the illusion of having some desirable property".
To so instantly refute myself is an exceptional achievement.
VULGAR FRACTIONS Several readers knew a vulgar fraction as one in
which the numerator was bigger than the denominator, meaning that
the fraction's value was greater than unity. That is usually known
as an improper fraction (the other sort, of course, being proper).
The confusion is easy to understand, since "vulgar" and "improper"
mean much the same these days. To add a mildly vulgar or improper
addendum to the subject, Lisa Lineweaver noted, "My grade-school
classmates sometimes referred to these 'upside-down fractions' as
'Dolly Parton fractions' after the buxom country music star whose
curvaceous form is top-heavy as well."
2. Weird Words: Bridewell
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A prison or reform school for petty offenders.
In the early sixteenth century, what was modestly called a lodging
was built for Henry VIII on the banks of the Fleet River in London.
It was actually a brick palace arranged around three courtyards.
Its claim to fame is partly etymological and partly artistic.
The latter came about because in 1533 it was the scene of Holbein's
famous painting, The Ambassadors. The former was due to Edward VI,
who gave the palace to the City of London as a hospital, orphanage
and prison. Later it was used mainly for the short-term confinement
and punishment of petty offenders and those who were regarded as
anti-social misfits, such as vagrants, itinerants, vagabonds and
loose women.
The palace was sited near an ancient holy well called St. Bride's
(or St Bridget's) Well and became known as Bridewell. The name was
passed on to the prison. It was later applied to the hundreds of
others that were set up through the country on the same model, for
which an alternative name was "houses of correction", though these
were in practice mainly prisons for the poor and indigent. The term
was also taken to the British colonies.
Bridewells had a shocking reputation. In a biography of the prison
reformer Elizabeth Fry, Mrs E R Pitman wrote, "They made a point of
visiting most of the jails and bridewells in the towns through
which they passed, finding in some of them horrors far surpassing
anything that Newgate could have shown them even in its unreformed
days."
The term is now only historical, as the formal distinction between
bridewells and prisons was abolished in Britain in 1865, though
much of the work of the old bridewells had long since been taken
over by the workhouses. But the term lives on in the names of a few
police stations that were once attached to a bridewell, such as
those in Bristol and Leeds.
3. Recently noted
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VANISHING DIALECT We regularly hear reports of languages that are
disappearing as their few remaining speakers die. David Crystal has
estimated that one vanishes about every fortnight. In Europe, we
think of this as a concern for other continents, since a lot of
work is being put into supporting minority languages. So it was a
surprise to read reports this week that a local dialect in Scotland
is now down to its last two fluent speakers, the brothers Bobby and
Gordon Hogg, the former aged 87 and the latter seven years younger.
They speak the Cromarty fisher dialect, confined to local fishermen
in the town of Cromarty on the Black Isle north of Inverness. The
dialect is very unlike the ordinary town speech and is said to have
been formed through a fusion of the Scots language with the English
of visiting soldiers in the seventeenth century. The Guardian said
in its report, "Cromarty fisher sounds like a bizarre mixture of
twee Shakespearean English and thick Geordie. Archaic words like
'thou', 'thee' and 'thine' are combined with a virtuoso use of the
letter 'h': 'ear' becomes 'hear' and 'herring' becomes 'erring'.
The uninitiated listener is left in a daze as to which century they
are in." There are several more such very local dialects in the
area, all of which are dying out. The brothers' distinctive speech
is to be recorded for an online archive, Am Bailie, as part of the
Highland Year of Culture. To intrude upon a later section's brief,
Michael Hocken noted that The Scotsman's online coverage of the
story, on 21 February, added a level of linguistic confusion, "When
Bobby and Gordon Hogg meet up for a chat, they enter a linguistic
world that few, if any, can no longer understand."
UNBOILDOWNABLE Stephen Moss produced this conglomerated succession
of word elements in a piece in the Guardian on Wednesday. It refers
to a book that's impossible to abridge without losing its essential
qualities. This led me to a brief and unsystematic examination of
some long words I've collected over 15 years of methodical reading.
Leaving aside the many jaw-breaking terms created in physics and
biology, such as superantiferromagnetism, pharmacometabonomics and
hydroxysteroidsulphotransferase, and cross-disciplinary specialisms
of many modern researchers - archaeogeophysics, astropalaeobiology,
biochronostratigraphy - complex words seem customarily to be the
special province of various social sciences: debureaucratisation,
embourgeoisification, deinstitutionalisation, revernacularisation,
prepositionalisation and subcategorisational. I leave working out
what these mean to the reader.
4. Q&A: Hapless
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Q. I have heard and used "hapless", but have often wondered where
this word originated, what its opposite is and what a "hap" could
possibly be! [Allan Todd, New Zealand]
A. "Hapless" is another of those famous unpaired negatives, like
"gormless", "ruthless", and "feckless".
At one time, you could indeed have had some hap. It was a state of
luck or fortune, in particular some chance occurrence that might
befall you, for good or ill, though - like "luck" and "fortune" -
it tended to accentuate the positive. It comes from a Scandinavian
source, was first recorded in the Middle English period, around
1200, but survived in mainstream use into the nineteenth century -
it was still well enough known to appear in the definitions of some
words in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary around
the end of that century. If you were hapless, you lacked the chance
to gain good fortune and so were unfortunate or unlucky.
Though "hap" itself is now archaic, some very familiar words come
from it, including "happy"; this originally referred to a state of
good fortune, from which today's meaning evolved in the sixteenth
century. The verb "happen" evolved out of "hap", and can still have
a strong sense of something coming about by chance ("We happened to
meet in the supermarket.") "Haphazard" once meant mere chance or a
lack of design, from which comes our modern idea of an absence of
organisation. Other compounds we still use today are "perhaps" and
"mishap" (which was once a state of misfortune, ill chance, or bad
luck). "Mayhap", perhaps or possibly, survives in dialect.
There has never been a direct opposite - no "hapful" - though there
have been at various times a number of other compounds: "by hap" or
"haply" (by chance or accident), and "goodhap" (good fortune).
5. Q&A: Take with a pinch of salt
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Q. I was wondering where the expression "take it with a pinch of
salt" came from? [Mark Lipman]
A. There are two standard versions of this idiom, the much older
one being "a grain of salt". Both suggest a need for scepticism or
reserve in believing something you've been told: "Take everything
she says with a pinch of salt - she's unreliable".
The expression has been used in English since the seventeenth
century at least. It's puzzling to us now because it's based on a
misunderstanding of a comment in a Latin document nearly 2,000
years old. Around 77 AD, Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural
History that the Roman general Pompey had discovered something odd
a century before when he conquered Pontus, a small country on the
shores of the Dead Sea. On searching the private apartments of the
king, Mithridates VI, Pompey discovered that the king had built up
his famous immunity to poisoning by first fasting and then taking
doses of a mixture of poisons until he was able to tolerate lethal
levels. (This is the origin of "mithridate", an antidote to poison;
see http://quinion.com?M5L3.)
Pliny wrote that the king had taken his doses of poison with the
addition of a grain of salt ("addito salis grano" in his Latin).
Pliny meant this as a straightforward report. But later readers
thought he was saying that one shouldn't necessarily believe this
story about a king who had been a notorious enemy of Rome. Modern
scholars say there's no evidence in Latin literature of writers
using salt as a figurative expression of scepticism. The Latin tag
usually taken to be the original, "cum grano salis", is very likely
to be medieval Latin.
But there is a sort of rationale to the idiom even if you discount
the Plinian link. Someone who says this to you could be taken to
suggest that if you're really intent on believing what you've been
told, then taking a figurative pinch of salt with it will help you
to swallow it, just as taking a literal pinch with your meal makes
it taste better.
6. Sic!
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David Laurie, based in Wellington, New Zealand, sent a leaflet from
a local bank advertising an account-opening service for those who
are thinking of moving to Australia: "It only takes a few minuets
and best of all, we provide this service absolutely free!"
Wednesday's Wisconsin State Journal included this headline: "Car
hits tow truck driver, flees". Janice Minardi wondered if the car
left the scene because it felt so guilty and frightened.
Richard Glynn Burton found a note from a mathematically challenged
writer in the International Herald Tribune dated 24 February: "The
typical New York rat weighs about 1 pound (45 kilograms)." He feels
this lends credence to the general belief that everything really is
bigger in the United States. But only in metric units.
Ah, ambiguous headlines! Judith Gordon found one on the Web site of
the Federal Times, a US newspaper designed for government managers:
"Security needs swell federal work force". "As a federal employee,"
she wrote, "I had to ask, 'Aren't I swell enough?'"
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