World Wide Words -- 03 Nov 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 2 17:54:31 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 560 Saturday 3 November 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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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Synthetic biology.
3. Weird Words: Doohickey.
4. Recently noted.
5. Book Reviews: Two books on euphemisms.
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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BITER BIT A query came in about this expression, which I used in a
Sic! item last time. It indicates that someone is being treated in
the same bad way they have treated others. The first word is an old
slang term, known from the seventeenth century but obsolete since
the early nineteenth; a biter set out to deceive or swindle, so the
term could refer to a card sharp or to a confidence trickster. (It
isn't linked to the modern American slang term for a contemptible
or despicable person.) The second word is the past tense of "bite".
"Biter bit" is a set phrase that lies somewhere between a proverb
and an idiom.
FROM WHENCE A stanza of verse by Sir Walter Scott featured in this
section last week. I tried to ward off adverse comment on his use
of "from whence" by pointing readers to my article about that form.
This provoked correspondents to propose that if "from whence" were
acceptable then English ought to have the analogous formation "to
whither". It's not common, but it wasn't hard to find examples in
my literature database. One is in Letters From High Latitudes, by
Lord Dufferin: "Swift are we, and light of foot, and soon we shall
have come to whither we are speeding." If you would prefer verse,
how about The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn by Andrew
Marvell: "Now my sweet fawn is vanished to / Whither the swans and
turtles go." The Oxford English Dictionary cites Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress: "How he got through to whither he intended." Most, as you
will note, are rather old, although this appears in a more recent
work, The People of the River by Edgar Wallace: "It was peculiar to
his office that no man knew to whither the Commissioner was bound."
2. Turns of Phrase: Synthetic biology
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Biotechnologists are beginning to move on from modifying organisms
by changing their DNA (genetic engineering) to creating them from
scratch. Synthetic biology refers to creating artificial life from
raw materials. This new field is regarded by many experts as the
next big thing in science, but one which may also have disastrous
consequences if mishandled.
It was in the news in the UK last week as the result of a visit by
the maverick US scientist, Craig Venter, who ran one of the two
projects that mapped the human genome. He has hinted that his team
has already created a minimal bacterial genome from its chemical
building blocks and may shortly succeed in making an artificial
organism. He tried to allay the fears of critics, who worry that
artificial life such as bacteria might escape into the environment
and cause unpredictable consequences, or be used to make military
bioweapons. The former eventuality has been called "bioerror" by
the astronomer Sir Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society.
Other critics object on religious grounds, arguing that scientists
ought not to "play God" by such experiments.
The term "synthetic biology" was first applied to this field of
research in 2003 but is only now beginning to be widely known to
the general public. A researcher is a synthetic biologist, a term
that may make the humorists among us smile. Much more recent is
"synbio", its abbreviation, which is showing signs of becoming
fashionable.
* BBC News, 24 Oct. 2007: Synthetic biology can help in the fight
against emerging infections, rather than aid the design of bio-
weapons, controversial scientist Craig Venter has told reporters
... Synthetic biology could provide the most effective way of
stopping infections in developing countries, such as malaria, and
emerging drug-resistant superbugs.
* Guardian, 21 Oct. 2007: Synthetic biology now occupies roughly
the same space on the public's radar that computing might have done
in the 1960s or genetic modification in the 1970s - it's largely
unheard of by anyone except the scientific community and its geeky
observers. But as the pace of breakthrough in this area quickens,
the sense of being on the edge of an extraordinary technological
revolution is giving even the scientists involved vertigo.
3. Weird Words: Doohickey
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An unspecified object or small device, especially a mechanical one.
Yes, yet another of these hand-waving terms for a thing that's too
unimportant to have a name of its own, or whose name you have for
the moment forgotten. An example is in The Tommyknockers by Stephen
King (1987): "You're almost done with this part. Just solder that
red wire to that point to the left of the long doohickey."
The best guess we can make is that it began as US Navy slang in the
early twentieth century. The first known example appeared in the
magazine Our Navy in November 1914: "We were compelled to christen
articles beyond our ken with such names as 'do-hickeys', 'gadgets'
and 'gilguys'."
There is some doubt where "doohickey" comes from, though most of
the authorities point to its being a blend of "doodad" (at first a
trivial or superfluous ornament, known from slightly earlier) and
"hickey", which today is more usually a pimple or a love bite but
which at the beginning of the twentieth century could be an odd
person or something of little consequence.
Incidentally, the Sailors' Word-Book of 1867 says a gilguy is "A
guy for tracing up, or bearing a boom or derrick. Often applied to
inefficient guys." Most of us know at least one inefficient guy, so
perhaps we could employ it as a subtle insult. However, "gilguy" is
still in use in sailing circles for a gadget, or to refer to a line
used as a temporary guy. In Australia, gilguys are depressions or
hollows in the ground. Altogether, it's a useful little word.
4. Recently noted
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BOAT-RACE POLITICS This splendid term, fully comprehensible only
to British voters, began to be widely used after an opinion poll
last weekend showed the Labour and Conservative parties to be neck
and neck, but that support for the Liberal Democrats had slipped
badly. The term is said to have been coined by a Conservative aide
and seems to be a genuine neologism. The Boat Race is the annual
sporting contest between Oxford and Cambridge on the River Thames
in London and "boat-race politics" suggests that only two teams
(parties) are in contention.
GRASS STATION We know when the end of the year is nigh because we
begin to get announcements of the Word of the Year or the Phrase of
the Year. But it was still October when the premature announcement
came from Webster's New World Dictionary that its choice for 2007
was "grass station". What's that? It can be traced to an article by
Constance Casey in the New York Times on 11 February 2006. This
noted a reference by President Bush in his State of the Union
message the week before about the potential of switch grass as a
source of ethanol-based fuel. The term "grass station" was a pun on
"gas station" that appeared in the story's headline. Having read
the Dictionary's press release I searched around but have found
only two examples of the phrase that aren't references to it. One
appeared in the New York Times in February this year, and the other
on a Web site commenting on that article. The press release noted
that in most cases a term designated as Word of the Year is not yet
in the dictionary. "The choice does not reflect an opinion that the
term will eventually be found in the dictionary," said Michael
Agnes, the Editor-in-Chief of the Dictionary. "It's merely one that
made us chuckle, think, reflect, or just shake our heads." I
concur. Head duly shaken.
WHATABOUTISM Barry Rein found this in The Economist of 29 October.
It means to change the focus of an argument or deflect criticism by
raising a different issue - "never mind this injustice, what about
... ". It's not quite a neologism. There are various examples to be
found in discussion forums online, though it is vanishingly rare in
print. One online post said it was used in Northern Ireland during
the Troubles by Seamus Mallon of the Social Democratic and Labour
Party, who called it "the curse of Northern Irish politics".
5. Book Reviews: Two books on euphemisms
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John Ayto's book Wobbly Bits and Other Euphemisms: Over 3,000 Ways
to Avoid Speaking Your Mind and Robert Holder's How Not To Say What
You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms are both revised editions. The
former came out in 1993 under the title A Dictionary of Euphemisms;
the latter has achieved its fourth edition after 30 years of being
published under three imprints.
What the authors mean by euphemisms is clear enough from the titles
of their books. They're expressions that soften blunt truths by
replacing them with indirect alternatives. You might think of them
as oil in the wheels of society, allowing us to discuss, using
circumlocutions, matters that are too hurtful or shaming to be
spoken of directly and which often replace a negative concept with
a positive one. Others regard them as genteelisms that cloak our
thoughts as well as our speech. Hugh Rawson wrote in his Dictionary
of Euphemisms (1981) that euphemisms are "outward and visible signs
of our inward anxieties, conflicts, fears, and shames". By our
euphemisms you shall know us. He went on, "They cover up the facts
of life - of sex and reproduction and excretion - which inevitably
remind even the most refined people that they are made of clay, or
worse." Mr Holder is blunter with his comment that euphemism is
"the language of evasion, hypocrisy, prudery, and deceit."
Style writers rather disparage the users of euphemisms, even though
they are so widespread that the issue should perhaps more properly
concern social scientists than grammarians. Critics often point out
that euphemisms are a form of code that is known to both hearers
and listeners, and that such obfuscation is therefore unnecessary
and silly. Why not, they ask, speak plainly and call a spade a
spade? The problem is that almost every word has a fuzzy cloud of
associations ringing it, sometimes unpalatable. To say somebody has
died is often too unsettling; much better to say he has passed on,
been laid to rest, gone to meet his maker, or departed this life, a
set of phrases that will cause readers of a certain age to think
of, perhaps even begin to recite, Monty Python's dead parrot sketch
that mocked such evasive language.
A problem for the users of euphemisms is that when the code becomes
well known, it starts to accrete the unpleasant associations of the
term that it replaces; it must then be replaced by a fresh one. The
classic example is the name that we give to the place in which one
defecates. Down the centuries it has been known as a privy, water
closet, lavatory, toilet, loo, restroom or washroom, among several
other terms; it has the distinction of being the only concept in
the whole language without a standard non-euphemistic alternative
(there are many expressive slang terms, but they don't count).
Attempts at creating new ones are not always successful: "wardrobe
malfunction" for the breast-baring of Janet Jackson in 2004 was
ridiculed for the inadequate attempt at spinning the situation that
it was; the group of teachers in the UK in 2005 who suggested that
children should not suffer failure but "deferred success" suffered
similar opprobrium.
Like slang, euphemism is most often encountered in association with
sex, death, alcohol and crime. The examples given by both authors
suggest there's a fine line between slang and euphemism, which they
cross and recross. If you say somebody is rat-arsed or stoned, are
you employing slang or euphemism? Robert Holder includes both, John
Ayto only the latter. Both appear in authoritative dictionaries of
slang. Is the term Dutch auction, the method of selling by which
the price is reduced until a buyer is found, truly a euphemism, as
Robert Holder implies by including it? I'd argue it lies somewhere
between jargon and standard English (historically, terms beginning
"Dutch" have been insulting references rather than euphemisms). If
a newspaper reports that a person has been gunned down, is it using
a euphemism, as John Ayto asserts? Surely not. It evokes a powerful
and potentially disturbing image that may be even more unsettling
than the straightforward "murder" or "shoot". If anything, it's a
dysphemism rather than a euphemism. This isn't nit-nicking pedantry
but a pointer to understanding that euphemisms are hard to define.
The corollary is that it's all too easy to use one without
realising it.
The arrangement of the two books is different, reflecting the two
fashionable ways to organise such data for easy reading. Robert
Holder goes for a standard A-Z alphabetical arrangement linked with
a set of themed lists. John Ayto's method is the inverse: terms are
introduced in themed chapters as part of a narrative, which is made
accessible by an index. Holder's is the more comprehensive work,
though his net has been cast very wide.
[John Ayto, Wobbly Bits and Other Euphemisms, Second Edition; A & C
Black, September 2007; paperback, pp352; ISBN13: 978-0-7136-7840-6;
ISBN10: 0-7136-7840-2; list price GBP9.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP5.99 http://wwwords.org?AYT1
Amazon USA: $11.53 http://wwwords.org?AYT4
Amazon Canada: CDN$16.02 http://wwwords.org?AYT6
Amazon Germany: EUR15,99 http://wwwords.org?AYT7
[R W Holder, How Not To Say What You Mean, Fourth Edition, Oxford
University Press, October 2007; Hardback, pp412; ISBN13: 978-0-19-
920838-5; ISBN10: 0-19-920839-5; list price GBP9.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP6.49 http://wwwords.org?HOL3
Amazon USA: $12.89 http://wwwords.org?HOL5
Amazon Canada: CDN$16.75 http://wwwords.org?HOL8
Amazon Germany: EUR14,99 http://wwwords.org?HOL9
[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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Jack Lilley e-mails to say that last week's issue of the Bendigo
Weekly (Victoria, Australia), had this property news: "In a quiet
street in Kennington sits this immaculately presented split-level
home, currently occupied by a charming couple who are the original
and only owners, just waiting to be snapped up by an astute buyer
looking for a great investment opportunity." And he reports that
they're less than AUS$320,000 the pair, too.
Still on such matters, David Milsted e-mailed from Dorset to say
that the property section of the Western Gazette of 25th October
had an item about an "idealistic three-bedroom bungalow" for sale.
There's nothing grammatically wrong with the headline over a story
from the BBC Web site dated 26 October, but the juxtaposition of
ideas may well raise a smile: "Wave power firm in plans to float."
Thanks to John Gray for sending that in. The story explains that a
company harnessing wave power to produce electricity has unveiled
plans to float (offer its shares on the stock market for the first
time) on the "AIM market". Since "AIM" is short for Alternative
Investment Market, the form is parallel to "ATM machine" and "PIN
number", often derided for their unnecessary repetition.
Another incongruous image was generated by a sentence on a BBC item
of 29 October: "Police said the bomber arrived at the scene of the
Baquba attack on a bicycle dressed in civilian clothes concealing a
suicide belt."
While we're on the subject of bicycles, lots of people sent me this
headline, from the Daily Telegraph of 26 October: "Man who had sex
with bike in court." I won't repeat the salacious details. You can
read them via this link: http://wwwords.org?MSBC.
The Guardian put this headline on its front page on Monday above a
story about problems that a Scandinavian airline has been having:
"SAS drops aircraft after crash landings." Making sure it's really,
really broken?
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