World Wide Words -- 06 Oct 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 5 17:00:52 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 556 Saturday 6 October 2007
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Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 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. Topical Words: Sputnik.
3. Weird Words: Cheapskate.
4. Recently noted.
5. Book review: The Language Report.
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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FLETCHERISE The item on this word last week brought back a memory
for F Jack Shasha in Israel: "I still remember that when I was in
boarding school in New Barnet, England, in 1938, we were ordered to
chew porridge 15 times. The principal, Mrs Wreford, insisted, and
had teachers sitting with us at the breakfast table; they watched
and counted." I can't imagine chewing porridge even once - it must
have been incredibly lumpy!
On a mildly contentious point, William Marshall, wrote: "A passing
thought - should it not be 'Fletcherize'?" I had a friendly dispute
about this with my American copyeditor, Julane Marx, since she felt
the same, pointing out that Mr Fletcher was American and that, in
the draft she saw, every example was from a US source and so was
spelled with "-ize". My counter argument, which prevailed because
it's my finger on the despatch button, was that this is a British
publication and so the word should be spelled with "-ise", at least
in the title. I softened the issue by adding a British example.
HYPHENS From Jon Voskuil: "I suspect you'll get a lot of questions
about this after today's piece on hyphens. Why no hyphen in 'World
Wide [Words]'"? Good point, though it's common to spell "worldwide"
as one word (as do the new Shorter Oxford and the current Concise
Oxford dictionaries). But the title of this newsletter is a play on
the name of the World Wide Web. When I started it ten years ago,
the full name of what's now just called the Web (often lower-cased)
was more widely known than now, and the punning nature of the title
was obvious. It's getting to the stage when it may need explaining
if it is not to appear illiterate. The times they are a-changing.
The person really at fault is Tim Berners-Lee (with a hyphen), who
invented and named the World Wide Web. He's British, but that's no
excuse.
Cathy Rowlands pointed out that "Misplaced or missing hyphens have
produced that mysterious object, the fine toothcomb!"
INTERWEB ET AL Following up my squib last time, Louise Dore noted,
"I wanted to add my perspective, that 'interweb' is used widely by
me and my peers (call us late-twenties professional types) as a
'cute', or even affectionate, alternative to 'internet'. I suspect
this is simply because it gets boring saying 'internet' all the
time, and you do end up saying it rather a lot these days! Another
alternative used unironically here in Sheffield, and I suspect
elsewhere in Yorkshire, is 't'internet'. I'm not surprised that one
hasn't made it to the London media though." Seth Elgart told me
about "intertube", a more recent term that's used sarcastically to
suggest ignorance about the Net and the Web, sometimes in the form
"tubular interwebs". This came from the phrase "series of tubes",
which was used in Congress by US Senator Ted Stevens in June 2006
when he spoke about Internet matters. He was ridiculed for failing
to understand the nature of the online system, though as he was
arguing that the Net wasn't a truck (lorry) but a series of tubes,
he wasn't creating a totally ridiculous analogy. Margaret Louise
Ruwoldt e-mailed from Australia, to mention that "intertube" was
well known there, and to say, "Once you add 'teh' as the definite
article, as in 'teh intertubes' or 'teh interweb', you're speaking
pure nerd ;-)".
WHATCHAMACALLIT My running title to the "interweb" item provoked a
complaint from an anonymous AOL user: "I wish people would use the
term 'thingie' only during foreplay, intercourse, or afterglow." I
feel I've been told more than I want to know.
SITE UPDATES As well as the usual pieces from last week's issue,
I've added "interweb" and its relatives and "unconference", another
recent reference. I've also updated the "Kilroy was here!" page
with new material, though unfortunately no new conclusions about
where it comes from. You can reach all of these via the Home Page
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/ .
THANKS! An analysis of the logs of the Web site this week revealed
that visitors came from 160 countries and territories, making the
site truly World Wide Words. Google says that there are now 79,026
links from other sites to various of its 2,000+ pages. Page views
by visitors total around 400,000 a week. This is a solid success
story, for which I thank readers.
2. Topical Words: Sputnik
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Thursday saw the 50th anniversary of the successful launch by the
USSR of Earth's first artificial satellite on 4 October 1957. It
was a sensation - many people who were around at the time will
remember the astonishment with which it was greeted.
It also immediately introduced a new term into the language. Within
two days, newspapers everywhere were referring to "Sputnik", which
first reports said was Russian for satellite or moon (looking back,
it's interesting to see how many contemporary reports referred to
Sputnik as a moon, a term that we reserve these days for a natural
satellite). The Russian term actually meant a travelling companion,
though other early reports translated it as "fellow-traveller",
probably with pejorative intent, since that phrase had the specific
meaning of somebody who sympathised with the Communist movement
without actually being a party member.
What Sputnik also did was introduce a lot of people to the "-nik"
ending, which was reinforced later by a common Russian and English
term "lunik" for the rockets the USSR sent to the moon, which came
from the Latin and Russian "luna" for our moon. One early result,
though, was a lot of short-lived and humorous formations. When the
USSR sent up a second satellite on 3 November with the dog Laika on
board, some American writers referred to it as "Muttnik". The very
public failure of the US Navy to launch a satellite on 6 December
resulted in sarcastic terms like "Kaputnik" and "Flopnik".
It also led to many figurative creations, mostly intended jokingly
but a few of which have permanently entered the language. In 1958,
the rise of the beat generation led to "beatnik" (folk enthusiasts
briefly becoming "folkniks") and to "neatnik", a person excessively
neat in his personal habits, the opposite of a scruffy beatnik. A
"robotnik" was a person who blindly obeyed authority, the opposite
of a "refusenik", one sense of which in the 1980s was a person who
refused to obey orders as a form of protest, though its main sense,
from the 1970s, was of a Jew in the Soviet Union who was refused
permission to emigrate to Israel. A member of a pacifist movement
was from the 1960s called a "peacenik". In the late 1980s in the
UK, "noisenik" came on the scene for a loud musician, especially
one who played a form of rock music.
The "-nik" ending became so widely used that it is assumed by many
people that Sputnik started it. But it's a long-standing Slavic
ending that implies an agent or a member of a class or group. In
fact, as early as the end of the nineteenth century, a few Russian
words ending in "-nik" became rather rare unnaturalised immigrants
into English, such as "chinovnik", a minor government functionary
or civil servant, and "Narodnik", literally a member of the common
people (Russian "narod", people) but which in the late nineteenth
century meant a member of a socialist political group among the
Russian intelligentsia.
The ending is shared in particular with Yiddish and also appears in
modern Hebrew, hence "kibbutznik", a member of a kibbutz, a term
that wasn't much known in English at the time of Sputnik, though it
had been recorded 10 years earlier. In American English, "-nik" has
been an active word-forming agent from the early twentieth century
as a result of Yiddish influence. One result was "alrightnik", an
immigrant Jew who has raised himself from poverty to prosperity
(though the main sense of the Yiddish "olraytnik", borrowed from US
English, was of an upstart, offensive boaster or parvenu who is
smug or philistine). His opposite was the "nogoodnik", recorded
from 1936. Another still with us is "nudnik", a nagging, pestering
or irritating person, from Yiddish "nudyen", to bore. The ending
was kept in the public consciousness in the US through Al Capp's
frequent use of "-nik" words in his L'il Abner cartoons.
So the entry of Sputnik into the language only reinforced a trend
in American English, but one whose linguistic echoes are still with
us and which we may celebrate along with the achievements of Soviet
rocketry.
3. Weird Words: Cheapskate
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A miserly or stingy person.
It's never nice to be called a cheapskate, especially if it's true.
The second part has nothing whatever to do with any of the more
common senses of "skate". A writer in the San Francisco Chronicle
in September 2007 was way wide of the mark when he wondered if a
cheapskate was avoiding paying his share by adroitly sliding past
the transaction, as though on skates or a skateboard. And there's
nothing in the least fishy about the word.
Well, up to a point. The origin, as often with slangy words, isn't
easy to fathom. "Skate" began to appear in print in the US at the
end of the nineteenth century, almost simultaneously meaning a
worn-out horse, a mean or contemptible person, and a second-rate
sportsman (later, in the Royal Navy, according to Eric Partridge,
it became a slang term for a troublesome rating). "Cheap" was added
early on to refer to a person's tight-fisted nature rather than any
of his other perceived inadequacies. An early example appeared in
the Newark Daily Advocate of Ohio in September 1896; the motorman
of a streetcar is remonstrating with the driver of a coal wagon:
"You're a gol dinged, insignificant, pusillanimous, ragged, cheap
skate of a tenth assistant barnyard corporal."
The best suggestion we have is that "skate" was originally a Scots
contemptuous word, still known in Australia and New Zealand, where
it's usually written as "skite". We retain it in "blatherskite" for
a person who talks at great length without making much sense. (For
more, see http://wwwords.org?BLAT.) It appeared first in a slightly
different form in a Scots song, Maggie Lauder, written by Francis
Semphill about 1643 ("Jog on your gait, ye bletherskate / My name
is Maggie Lauder!"). This was a favourite camp song among American
soldiers during the War of Independence and remained popular in the
decades that followed. We guess that this may have helped "skate"
or "skite" to be preserved among emigrant Scots and others in the
US during the nineteenth century.
By the way, the fish sense of "skate" is from Old Norse "skata";
the word for ice skates and similar devices come to us from Dutch
"schaats", although its origin is the Old French "escache", meaning
a stilt; there's also the South African sense of a disreputable or
irresponsible young white man, which may be from Afrikaans "skuit",
excreta.
4. Recently noted
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IGNOBLE? The annual razzmatazz of the IgNobel Prices, sponsored by
the Annals of Improbable Research and timed for the week before the
real Nobel Prizes are announced, is always good for some knockabout
fun. On Thursday, awards went to two British researchers who found
that sword-swallowing causes sore throats and a US Air Force team
who proposed creating a chemical weapon that would make soldiers
sexually irresistible to each other. Glenda Brown won the award for
literature for her study of the indexing problems of "the". Three
researchers at Barcelona University collected the linguistics prize
for proving that rats cannot tell the difference between a person
speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
5. Book review: The Language Report 2007
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This is the fifth annual report published by the Oxford University
Press and edited by Susie Dent, best known in Britain through her
contributions to the television programme Countdown. The subtitle
of this year's edition is English on the Move 2000-2007. As Susie
Dent notes, 2007 has not been a vintage year for language change,
but one in which the turbulence of the first years of the century
has subsided into "a feeling more of limbo than of change". This
gives her a chance to recapitulate what has been happening to the
English language in the past seven years.
Language, of course, is driven by events, exemplified by the shift
of "tsunami" from a technical term of seismologists and geographers
into mainstream public use as a result of the disastrous events of
the last days of 2004. So it's no surprise that some vocabularies
have been augmented this century, including those of war (enemy
combatant, extraordinary rendition, axis of evil), the online world
(podcasting, folksonomy, Web 2.0, wiki, mashup, phishing) and of
politics (big conversation, progressive consensus). Climate change
has been a potent force popularising terms and creating new ones
(eco-savvy, carbon credit, offsetting, global dimming, green
urbanism). "Footprint" has been reinterpreted in this context to
refer to the extent of one's ecological imprint on the planet and
has been used so widely that Susie Dent nominates it as her Word of
the Year.
A more subtle marker for the way our language is changing comes not
so much from the words we use but from those we use them with. The
Oxford English Corpus, a vast searchable repository of 1.5 billion
words from every conceivable source, has been in preparation since
2000 but only became available to researchers in 2006. Among other
functions, it allows searches for collocations, words that often
occur together. Susie Dent points out that in the Corpus, seven out
of 10 instances of "feed" in this century's writing are in phrases
like "RSS feed", so linked to information, not food; "attachment"
in 2000 was most likely to be preceded by "emotional", but by 2005
this had been overtaken by "e-mail"; in the past five years, the
word "surveillance" has not only become much more common, but is
most often linked to "warrantless", "covert" and "constant".
Indeed, we have become the most surveilled generation in history.
One pointer is that verb - "surveil" was coined at the end of the
nineteenth century as a back-formation from "surveillance". In the
hundred years that followed, it remained a jargon term of the law-
enforcement agencies, but this century it has already appeared
three times more often than it did in the 1990s.
Through language you shall know your culture.
[Susie Dent, The Language Report 2007, published on 4 October 2007
by Oxford University Press; hardback, pp166; publisher's price in
the UK, £10.99; ISBN13: 978-0-19-923388-5, ISBN10: 0-19-923388-8.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP7.14 http://wwwords.org?S45D
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[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
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6. Sic!
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Faith Jones's new employer recently sent her a set of forms to fill
in, of which her favourite was the one headed "Voluntary Accidental
Death and Dismemberment Application."
Norman Simons found that the Web site of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in
Philadelphia provided helpful general information for visitors. It
explained, "The national language of the United States of America
is English. English is widely spoken in Philadelphia." Mr Simons
commented, "Many of us who live in the area are unsure of the
accuracy of either statement."
An Associated Press news item dated 3 October surprised Norman C
Berns: "Sampson said fossils of duck-billed dinosaurs once lived
throughout the northwestern part of North America." Mr Berns now
feels there's more to evolution than he ever imagined.
"The mention in last week's issue of the canary in the coal mine
singing loudly," wrote Elaine Blackman, "reminded me of a report in
the Hereford Times for 27 September. It quoted Cllr Olwyn Barnett,
Herefordshire council cabinet member for social care and health, on
the subject of the county's proposed Public Service Trust. She
said, 'With the demands on both bodies and their budgets getting
greater, we risk a headless chicken coming home to roost.'"
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