World Wide Words -- 17 Mar 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 16 17:27:49 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 531 Saturday 17 March 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/ldpa.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Titch.
3. Turns of Phrase: Claytronics.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Dribs and drabs.
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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SIC? Several readers were puzzled by one "Sic!" item last week,
which contained the advice to avoid ticket "scallopers". For non-
Americans, the original writer should have written "scalpers", for
people who resell tickets at a profit. In the UK and elsewhere,
they're ticket touts. My punchline for the item puzzled others.
Glenn Cardwell e-mailed: "As many people will no doubt write and
ask what 'deckle edging' is, I won't add to your burden of email
requests." Thank you for not doing so. "Deckle edging" is the rough
uncut edge to handmade paper, or to paper or card that imitates
that appearance. "Deckle" is a German word meaning a little cover;
it's the usual name for the frame that encloses the pulp during
papermaking.
HUGGER-MUGGER Several readers disagreed with my definition of this
word last week. I took it from standard dictionaries, none of which
mention the sense readers cited, that of being crowded together or
close packed. Alec Cawley gave as an example "There were five of us
hugger-mugger in a two-man tent". It would seem to derive from the
idea of clandestine or secretive activity, or perhaps that of
muddle and confusion.
HAPPENSTANCE My note about this word in this section in the last
issue defined it as "coincidence". This was challenged by several
readers, supported by numerous dictionaries. All said it meant a
meeting or event happening by chance, not quite the same. Several
quoted "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time
is enemy action", which Auric Goldfinger quotes in Ian Fleming's
Goldfinger.
NOT A WORD TO BESSIE! An editor in South Africa found this in the
memoirs of an elderly diplomat. The catchphrase is a bit specialist
for this newsletter, unless you're a British radio listener with a
very long memory, so I've put my response online instead. It's
available now via http://quinion.com?NAWB.
2. Weird Words: Titch
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A small person.
This is a mainly British and Australian colloquial term.
The original was Little Tich, a famous music hall performer whose
real name was Harry Relph. He was born in 1867 with slightly webbed
hands that had an extra finger on each. He stopped growing at age
10 and as an adult was only 4 ft 6 ins tall (about 1.4 m). As a
child, he was nicknamed Tichborne because he was short and stoutly
built, like Arthur Orton, the famous fraudulent claimant to the
Tichborne inheritance.
Little Tich became known as an eccentric dancer and a character
comedian. At some point his name began to be given to other small
people or to youngsters. The Oxford English Dictionary's first
example is from 1934, but I've turned up examples in books
published in 1916 and 1917, plus a Punch cartoon caption of 1920,
that suggest it was originally a First World War British army term.
The 1917 example is from All In It, by John Hay Beith, recording
the experiences of an American serving on the Western Front:
It was weeks since any one (except Second Lieutenant
M'Corquodale, newly joined, and addressed, for painfully
obvious reasons, as "Tich") had found himself at table in
an apartment where it was possible to stand upright.
At some point - it's hard to be sure when, though presumably long
enough after Little Tich's death in 1928 for the connection to him
to have been forgotten - the spelling shifted to "titch" to match
that of rhyming words like "itch", "pitch" and "stitch".
3. Turns of Phrase: Claytronics
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Confusingly, and perhaps annoyingly for the firm concerned, this
relatively new technical term has no direct connection with the
business of the same name selling educational products for young
children.
This type of claytronics is definitely grown-up play dough, also
known as programmable matter or dynamic physical rendering. The
project - currently a long way from realisation - is to create
nanoscale robotic mechanisms with computing ability, capable of
changing form and joining together to form larger-scale mechanisms
or objects. The researchers have called these individual micro-
robots "catoms", claytronic atoms. The name "claytronics" was
deliberately chosen to suggest modelling clay. The research, at
Carnegie-Mellon University in the US, goes by the name of the
Synthetic Reality Project.
One of the aims of the project is to create a new communications
medium that the researchers called "pario", which will reproduce
moving, physical, three-dimensional objects (made up of collections
of these catoms) that are realistic enough that you will accept
them as real, so creating in effect 3D television.
* Personal Computer World, Jan. 2007: Researchers in the US ...
reckon that within two decades a talking, walking Claytronic human
morph could be visually indistinguishable from the person it
represents.
* Science News for Kids, 17 May 2006: If it works, claytronics
could transform communication, entertainment, medicine, and more.
The research may help scientists learn how to better manage
networks that consist of millions of computers. It will also
advance their understanding of nanotechnology - how to make tiny,
tiny parts do useful things.
4. Recently noted
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NEWPEAT This television term appeared this week in announcements
about the US version of The Office. Instead of just rerunning
episodes, NBC is putting together pairs of episodes with previously
untransmitted material to make one-hour slightly new specials. It
seems to be a genuinely new term, albeit formed from a partial
blend of "new" and "repeat". To judge from the sarcastic comments
in US newspapers, it's not one destined to survive.
PHONETICALLY CORRECT SPORTS A question came in from a subscriber:
"I was recently with some friends at a trivia evening. One question
asked 'What is the only correct phonetically spelled sport?' The
answer turned out to be 'golf'." I was as puzzled as she was. On
the face of it, the question was daft, since a lot of people don't
pronounce the "l" in "golf", so the word can hardly be said to be
correctly spelled phonetically. It required help from people with
minds more tuned than mine to solving cryptic puzzles to work this
out (take a bow, Jim Parish). It really refers to the international
phonetic alphabet, which begins "A Alfa, B Bravo, C Charlie". The
only sport in the list is Golf, for the letter G.
CO2LONIALISM That "2" ought to be a subscript, of course, which I
can't show in this e-mail newsletter. The word is a blend of CO2,
the chemical abbreviation for carbon dioxide, with "colonialism".
It popped up in last week's issue of New Scientist in reference to
the growth in the number of firms offering to offset your carbon
emissions, say those you create by flying abroad for a holiday or
on business. For a fee, the firms organise the planting of trees or
invest in renewable-energy projects on your behalf. As a way of
reducing your guilt, it's effective, but environmentalists query
the value of such schemes, especially if they happen in developing
countries, which some see as carbon colonialism. So far as I can
discover, the term was invented by Harald Eraker in a report for
Norwatch, a Norwegian non-governmental organisation, in 2000. This
oddly constructed and hard-to-say word has rarely appeared since
and is unlikely to find a permanent place in the language.
5. Q&A:
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Q. I overheard someone recently saying money was arriving "in dribs
and drabs". What is the origin of that phrase? Is it to do with art
or painting? [Lynn Peterson]
A. Neither of those things, as it happens. Through its survival,
"dribs and drabs" - scattered or sporadic amounts of something -
contains some interesting etymological archaeology.
"Drib" is known in some English, Irish and Scottish dialects from
at least the eighteenth century, meaning an inconsiderable quantity
or a drop and is probably a variant form of "drip" or "drop". It
was taken by emigrants to the US and at one time was fairly common
there. The English Dialect Dictionary quotes a letter written by
Abraham Lincoln in 1862: "We are sending such regiments and dribs
from here and Baltimore as we can spare to Harper's Ferry".
The experts are undecided whether the second half is a mere echo of
the first, as in many reduplicated compounds like "helter-skelter",
"see-saw" and "hurly-burly", or if "drab" is a real word in its own
right.
"Drab" certainly existed as a dialect term that could mean much the
same as "drib", though it was used in particular for a minor debt
or a small sum of money. The first example in the Oxford English
Dictionary is from a glossary of the dialect of Craven in Yorkshire
of 1828 with that meaning: "He's gain away for good, and he's left
some drabs." [He has gone away for ever and he's left some debts.]
The OED is fairly sure that it isn't the same word as the one which
describes a dirty and untidy woman, which is probably linked to the
old Low German "drabbe", a mire. Nor is it the word for something
drearily dull - this originally referred to undyed cloth and comes
from French. The English Dialect Dictionary, written at the end of
the nineteenth century, notes that the word is recorded only from
Yorkshire and Cheshire.
The limited distribution of "drab" suggests that the word in the
phrase is indeed a mere variation on "drib" for the sake of a neat
and bouncy phrase.
6. Sic!
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A New York Times headline on 13 March: "Mexican President Presses
Bush on Border Fence". Robert Bendesky's response was "Ouch!"
The morning news show on WBAL-TV in Baltimore has a "Water Cooler
Question of the Day". Michael Turniansky tells me a recent question
was "Should mandatory drug testing for steroids be required for
high school athletes?" His immediate response was that mandatory
drug testing should certainly be required. Of drug testing that
isn't mandatory, he says that he hasn't yet formed an opinion. He
suggests that mandatory English courses should be required for
television news staffers.
While we're being careful about language, I'd like to object to a
headline on The Independent's Web site last Sunday: "Subliminal
messages do reach your brain - but you won't know it". But isn't
that the point? ["Subliminal", below the threshold of sensation or
consciousness, from Latin "limen", threshold.]
The Saanich News of 7 March reported: "The rainfall has since been
attributed to a mudslide in Doumac Park and overflow at Colquitz
Creek." Peter Weinrich suggests that global warming is producing
some very strange effects.
Andy Baxter saw a headline on Sky News for 11 March. It concerned
plans by the British Conservative Party to reduce carbon emissions,
especially from air travel. It read "Tories Want To Hit Frequent
Flyers". He felt this seemed a tad harsh as a disincentive.
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