World Wide Words -- 05 May 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 4 18:00:29 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 538 Saturday 5 May 2007
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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
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Lollapaloosa.
3. Recently noted.
4. Book Review: Brave New Words.
5. 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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KNOWING THE ROPES Having gently reproved Alex Games in my review
last week of his book Balderdash & Piffle by pointing out that a
sheet on a sailing ship was not a sail but a rope, I was in turn
firmly told that they're not ropes but lines. Brian Lentle noted,
"Boat-speak almost qualifies as a separate language quite apart
from its gifts to English." Chet Shaddeau explained: "According to
my long-ago instructors in marlinespike seamanship, there are only
about seven 'ropes' on a ship; they are all specialised dinguses
like the bellrope, footrope, ridgerope, etc. Practically everything
you pull or heave on is a line." Peter Underwood went beyond the
nautical: "If we are going to be pedantic, you might like to know
that at the Royal School of Military Engineering in Chatham that
comment would have resulted in some arcane form of punishment. Rope
is made of metal. Any other form of lashings, including those made
of nylon, would be referred to as cordage."
EGGCORNS Too many people responded to the piece on eggcorns for me
to be able to give a rounded summary. But you may like the report
of the man said to be wearing a cygnet ring. And "deafly quiet" has
a certain logic to it.
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME Many people pointed out that the most
famous example of a name change for marketing purposes was that of
rapeseed to canola in North America. It didn't come to mind when I
wrote the item, as that name isn't well known in the UK, where we
call a spade a spade and a rape plant a rape plant, though its oil
is usually sold labelled euphemistically as "vegetable oil"). As an
aside, unlike the ones I quoted, the word is an invention, from
"Canada" + "-ola", based on Latin "oleum", oil.
Susan McLeary mentioned that in New Zealand honey is made from a
close relative of borage, another echium called viper's bugloss. We
know the plant by this name in Britain, too. The "viper" part is
from its former use as a treatment for snake bite, the viper being
the only venomous snake in the country. The second part is shared
by some other British plants and derives, via Latin, from ancient
Greek words meaning "ox tongue", because of the shape and rough
texture of the leaves. (It's said as "byu-gloss", by the way, not
"bug-loss".)
HIRCOCERVUS The Winchester College archivist has kindly sent a
copy of the picture of the Hircocervus or Trusty Servant, mentioned
in my piece about this exotic word two weeks ago. It is now online
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-hir1.htm
2. Weird Words: Lollapaloosa
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Something outstandingly good of its kind.
You can't easily misunderstand the meaning of this American word
once you've heard somebody say it, it's so obviously an over-the-
top cry of excitement or delight, highly suitable as the name for
the annual Lollapalooza pop festival. It has been spelt just about
every possible way down the years (the Oxford English Dictionary
has it under "lallapaloosa"). Its extravagant enthusiasm may be
judged from an early appearance, in Miss Minerva and William Green
Hill by Frances Boyd Calhoun, dated 1909:
"Lordee, Lordee," he gazed at them admiringly, "you sho'
is genoowine corn-fed, sterlin' silver, all-wool-an'-a-
yard-wide, pure-leaf, Green-River Lollapaloosas."
Another early example is in a baseball match report in the Fort
Wayne Sentinel of May 1903, one we may be glad to have missed (the
reporter said disgustedly that one pitcher was all too accurate,
since he hit the bat almost every time):
There wasn't enough ginger in the players nor audience,
either, to keep a colicky baby awake, the only excitement
being furnished by a loquacious individual in the grand
stand who was rooting for Evansville, and he rooted right,
too. He proclaimed himself the High-past-potent-grand-mufti-
lallapaloosa of the Amalgamated Knockers' Brotherhood and
had a bigger assortment of mallets on hand than a croquet
factory.
That was one of its earliest appearances in print, since it seems
to have been around in the language for only a few years by then.
Other early usages suggest an origin among card players, as in an
1899 report in the Daily Herald of Delphos, Ohio, about card sharps
fleecing a hick: "Another got a lallapaloosa, consisting of three
clubs and a pair of spades, and took $85 of the farmer's money." In
1897 the Idaho Daily Statesman had another: "'A lalla-pa-loosa,'
answered big John, and threw his hand to Scovel. There was a jack
of hearts and a deuce, tray, four and five of diamonds."
Where it comes from is uncertain. "Lulu" and "lolla", both also
meaning something good, are recorded earlier, and "lollapaloosa"
may be a super-extravagant enlargement of the latter.
3. Recently noted
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WELL BROUGHT UP In the Observer last Sunday, the author Sebastian
Faulks commented on what he calls the astonishing recent rate of
change in English. "For several hundred years, the past tense, or
preterite, of 'bring' was 'brought'. In roughly three years, it has
changed to 'bought'. Everyone I know, except my wife, now says: 'I
was bought up in X' or: 'I bought it with me.' The rapidity of the
switch is remarkable. In 2010, will the preterite of 'think' no
longer be 'thought', but 'taught' - as in 'I taught as much'? Such
a change would be no quicker than that of 'brought' to 'bought' and
no less odd." This hasn't come my way - it may be a metropolitan
shift that hasn't yet reached the semi-rural fastness from which I
communicate with the world. A shift from "taught" to "thought" is
hardly a parallel to one from "brought" to "bought", and of course
it´s already well known in those dialects that pronounce "th" as
"t", notably in Ireland.
4. Book Review: Brave New Words
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Only a couple of weeks ago, British scientists were reported to be
working on a force field to protect astronauts from radiation on
the space station and space shuttle, on interplanetary journeys or
while working in the projected NASA moonbase. We take such language
in our stride these days, when science-fictional concepts seem to
become reality almost month by month. But if you go back more than
a couple of generations, words like these were mainly the preserve
of people who wrote and read science fiction.
This book is a pure dictionary, albeit with a few mini-essays on
aspects of SF vocabulary; each entry is supported by a number of
example citations, just as in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here
you will find hyperspace, organlegger, phaser, ramscoop, spacesuit,
Dyson sphere, generation ship, terraforming, holodeck and hundreds
of other terms familiar to SF readers and viewers, plus a lot that
are less so, even to those well-read in the field. Also included
are abbreviations like BDO (Big Dumb Object), a mysterious object
of alien origin found somewhere out there (think of the monolith in
Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey) and BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster), any
stereotypical alien creature of hideous form created through
authorial imagination to terrify and fascinate. The genres of SF
are here, too, such as cyberpunk, new wave, slipstream and
steampunk. It also includes the vocabulary of people who engage in
SF fandom (fan activities), who attend cons (conventions), who
compose and sing filk songs (folk songs with SF leanings, a name
borrowed from a misprint), take FIAWOL as their motto (Fandom Is A
Way Of Life) and are gutted when they have to fafiate (from FAFIA,
Forced Away From It All), leave the world of cons and fans and
return to mundania, the mundane everyday world.
Cross-fertilisation between SF and the real world of technology and
science has been so great that it is often difficult to know where
the stimulus for a term has come from. Was it created within the SF
field and subsequently widened its appeal, or did SF writers take
over and build upon an existing term? It would be good to have this
made clearer in the text at times, at least where we know for sure.
"Hyperspace", for example, is correctly glossed to point out that
it was a term in mathematics long before SF writers got their hands
on it. On the other hand, "completist" is dated to an SF source of
1944, eleven years before the OED's first example, so seems to be a
term of SF origin; likewise "gas giant" (a very large planet made
largely from gaseous material) appears in an SF context 13 years
before the first citation in the OED's entry, which was drafted as
recently as 2006 (respect to editor Jeff Prucher and his team for
that one). "Insectoid" looks like a word that has been around for
centuries, but turns out to have been first used in an SF work by
Olaf Stapledon as recently as 1937. Casual readers, however, might
be confused by the inclusion of an entry on "gadget" and assume
it's a term of SF origin, first noted from 1942, whereas it was
popularised by Rudyard Kipling in 1904 and is actually a sailors'
term going back at least as far as 1886.
The choice of entries seems somewhat eclectic. Some words that you
might think are SF-oriented enough to be here are absent, such as
"astronaut", no doubt because it was created in the mainstream
astronautics field rather than SF (also omitted are related terms
such as "astroengineering", though others like "astrogation" are
in). But "space station" isn't here either, although it was first
recorded, in the genre, in the 1930s; nor is "space habitat" (often
just "habitat"), an artificial world; this might be a spinning
hollowed-out asteroid or an artefact of similar type constructed
from scratch, like Babylon Five (they're called O'Neill cylinders
after their inventor, Gerard K O'Neill, another unglossed term).
"Kryptonite" is absent, alas, as is H G Wells's gravity-blocking
material "cavorite". And why does "COA" (change of address) merit
an entry? Clarke's laws are included, each separately glossed and
listed under the name of their creator, the British SF and science
writer Sir Arthur C Clarke, the most famous being his Third Law
("any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic"). But where are Isaac Asimov's more famous three laws of
robotics? They appear in no entry, neither under his name nor under
"robot" or its derivatives (ah, there they are, briefly mentioned
in passing on page 125).
It's easy to nitpick. This is a pioneering attempt to record the
vocabulary of the field; it's one which is notoriously difficult to
cover because of the number of neologisms for imaginative concepts
that writers are forced to invent, or take joy in inventing. Jeff
Prucher and his readers have scoured the literature for the early
history of the genre's language. If you're interested in the back-
story of SF, this is a reference work you will want to own.
[Jeff Prucher, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science
Fiction; ISBN-13 978-0-19530567-8, ISBN-10 0195305671; hardback,
pp342; published by Oxford University Press, USA on 1 May 2007;
publisher's price US$29.95.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
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5. Sic!
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Derek Stevens came across a headline in the Guardian of 27 April:
"Passengers face worse overcrowding as rail operators run out of
carriages". He suggests their rapid departure might be disquieting
but it would make more room for the passengers.
Daphne Sams came across an egregious example of bad translation on
a tag that came attached to a pair of jeans: "This Card Department
Guarantees The Over Merchandise Quality Without Blemish Toward You
Whole Responsibility, And From Purchase The Day Since In Seven Days
If Discover The Quantity Problem. Please Go To With This Card To
Purchase At First The Store Is Gratis To Replace The New Article,
If Because Of Artificial Damage, Then Not At Guarantee The Row Of
The Scope." She promises that she hasn't artificially damaged this
message, and she hopes that someone may understand the row of its
scope. Her best guess at the meaning is, "We would like very much
to offer you a guarantee, and we hope you think we have, but we
haven't and we won't."
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