World Wide Words -- 15 Sep 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 14 17:42:41 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 552 Saturday 15 September 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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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/glpz.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Locavore.
3. Weird Words: Zymurgy.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Fist.
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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YEOMEN OF THE GUARD Robert Ward commented on this term I used last
week: "Oops! A common mistake - they're actually 'Yeomen Warders of
Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London'.
The 'Yeomen of the Guard', properly the 'Queen's Body Guard of the
Yeomen of the Guard' are a distinct body, the ceremonial bodyguard
of the Queen, and the oldest military unit of the British armed
forces." I blame W S Gilbert, who got it wrong in his Savoy Opera.
Ernest Smith disputes my assertion that the word "yeomanette" went
out of use after World War One: "Following World War Two, many sea-
going positions in the US Merchant Marine were opened up to women,
including department secretaries or writers. Yeoman positions
became yeomanette ones, generally on passenger vessels. Of my own
knowledge, I know that yeomanettes continued to serve until the
very early 1970s when the United States basically went out of the
passenger-ship business. I think that at least one American-flag
passenger liner still may be cruising between the islands of
Hawaii, and if so, it will no doubt have at least one yeomanette in
the steward's department. Also, Department of Defense MSTS (Marine
Sea Transport Service) troop transports may be using yeomanettes in
place of yeomen currently." My conclusion was based on the absence
of any examples of "yeomanette(s)" in a major historical newspaper
archive in the period in question; clearly yeomanettes have been
keeping a low profile!
HETEROGRAPHY Tony Augarde, author of the Oxford Guide to Word
Games, e-mailed after last week's issue, "The full form of the
verse you were sent half of is: 'Though the rough (or tough) cough
and hiccough plough me through, / O'er life's dark lough my course
I still pursue.'" He went on to give another demonstration of just
how heterographic the English language is: "Someone suggested that
the proper spelling of potato is GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU, if the P is
sounded like the GH in hiccough, the O is pronounced like the OUGH
in dough, the T like the PHTH in phthisis, the A like the EIGH in
neighbour, the T like the TTE in gazette, and the final O like the
EAU in plateau!" By comparison, spelling "fish" as "ghoti" is a
student's exercise.
GOING LIKE THE CLAPPERS Many subscribers pointed out that longer
versions of the expression may be relevant. Nev Robinson commented,
"As a member of aircrew in the RAF during the last war, I recall
that it was common to describe a person needlessly rushing around
in confusion as 'going like the clappers on the bells of hell'."
This might have been a fanciful elaboration, but might equally be
the original long form that was shortened, first to "going like the
clappers of hell" (a recorded form) and then to "going like the
clappers". The expression ties in with the mild oath "hell's
bells", which appeared in the US in the 1840s and later became
widely known in the English-speaking world, no doubt because of its
rhyme. The version "hell's bells and buckets of blood", however, is
definitely a later elaborated form. Many people have suggested that
another influence might have been the First World War soldiers'
song "The bells of hell go ding-a-ling, / For you but not for me".
(This may be familiar because it was used in the musical and film
Oh, What a Lovely War in the 1960s.) I've amended the online piece;
it is at http://www.wwwords.org?HELL .
2. Turns of Phrase: Locavore
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The word began life two years ago, according to reports on the west
coast of the US, and has grown in popularity, so much so that Adam
Platt writes in the issue of New York magazine dated 17 September:
"What self-respecting restaurant critic isn´t weary of the whole
locavore phenomenon?"
It's all about the distance that food travels to reach our plates.
For supermarkets, it makes commercial sense to source foodstuffs
where they can be grown most cheaply and consistently, which can be
thousands of miles from their markets. Consumers want to eat fruit
and vegetables all year round, so they have to be brought in from
where they're in season. There's nothing new in transporting
foodstuffs to markets but what concerns environmentalists is the
extent to which they're now being moved long distances by road and
air, leading to great expenditures of energy and the dumping of
masses of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The British term
"food miles", dating from the 1990s, is a measure of the distance
that food travels to reach us and of the complexity of the supply
chains involved.
Locavore is a compound of "local" with one of the words ending in
"-vore", such as "omnivore" or "carnivore"; "localvore" is also
used. Locavores try to obtain their food from as near as possible
to where they live and so restrict themselves to seasonal produce.
They argue local food is often fresher, better-tasting and more
nutritious than that from supermarkets, and helps to improve their
health as well as support local enterprise and save the planet.
What "local" means is open to interpretation, but a radius of 100
miles is often quoted, leading to the term "100-mile diet". The
area from which food is sourced is sometimes called the "food
shed", presumably taken from "watershed", which for Americans is
the area drained by a river (this needs to be explained, since in
the UK a watershed is the boundary between two drainage systems,
which in the US is a divide).
* Chicago Sun-Times, 4 Sep. 2007: The Windsors do emerge in this
book as "locavores" before the trend, relying on foods raised or
caught on their own estates for much of their diet. And they eat
seasonally. As McGrady notes, woe to the chef who would dare serve
the queen a strawberry in January.
* Advertising Age, 4 Jun. 2007: On a cloudy May Saturday in
Columbus, Ohio, the self-described "locavore" is making a meal of
almost all local ingredients - not an easy feat for an unabashed
foodie who waitresses at a local restaurant.
[Many thanks to Dave Cook for pointing me to this word.]
3. Weird Words: Zymurgy /'zaIm at rdZi/ (*)
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The chemistry or practice of fermentation processes.
Though a useful term, people's interest in it outside winemaking
and brewing focuses on its supposedly being the literal last word.
"From aardvark to zymurgy" is sometimes used to mean everything,
these supposedly being the first and last nouns in the dictionary.
However, a check on my stack of single-volume dictionaries shows
that - apart from the New Oxford American Dictionary - "zymurgy" is
rarely the last word. Some have one of related sense, "zythum", a
beer that was made by the ancient Egyptians; others prefer to end
with "Zyrian", another name for the language now usually called
Komi; the American Heritage Dictionary selects "zyzzyva", a genus
of tropical American weevils, the last word also in The Official
Scrabble Players Dictionary; you may feel The Bloomsbury English
Dictionary has cheated by including "zzz", which it defines as "a
representation of the sound made by somebody sleeping or snoring,
often used in cartoons".
When not the focus of wordsmiths' musings and occasional wordplay,
"zymurgy" is rather rare, though as you would expect it is well
known among brewers and winemakers. The journal of the American
Homebrewers Association has that title and its readers may be
either zymurgists or zymologists, to taste. If you need a related
adjective, there's "zymurgical". All these words come from Greek
"zume", meaning a leaven, typically a yeast, that is added to make
a substance ferment.
Notwithstanding the pronunciation that's given in some word books,
the first vowel is like that in "bite", not "bit", so it's roughly
"ZAI-mur-jee".
(*) See http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm for a guide to
this version of the IPA symbols used to show pronunciation.
4. Recently noted
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KNECK AND KNECK Over on the American Dialect Society list, James
Harbeck reports he has found a significant number of examples of
this phrase ("Still I'm going pretty fast and I'm kneck and kneck
with another girl in the lead.") as well as many examples of "kneck
ties". Laurence Horn followed this up and discovered 600 examples
on Google of "pain in the kneck" and many of "sore kneck". There
are Google search results in double or triple figures for "kneck
brace", "scoop kneck", "kneck collar", "kneck injuries", "kneck
pain" and "V-kneck sweater". I've found one example of the idiom in
a newspaper, The Sunday Capital of Annapolis, dated 1997: "The crew
of Chessie skippered by Mark Fischer is racing Silk Cut kneck and
kneck for fourth place." Professor Horn also turned up instances of
"broken knose" and "knavel gazing" (one in a reader's review on
Amazon: "Why oh why do we have this kind of self-absorbed knavel
gazing pretending to be academic research.") So what's going on
here? Some cases may be jokes, the sort of creative respellings of
words that have become an Internet trademark, but all the ones that
I've looked into are clearly intended seriously. Though "neck and
neck" is a fixed phrase that may be puzzling to some people (it's
actually from horse racing) that it might have been misunderstood
and given a new spelling, this can't account for the other cases.
Professor Horn suggests that bad spellers might be applying the
spelling of "knee" to other body parts that begin with the "n"
sound. Whatever the cause, it's weird.
5. Q&A: Fist
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Q. I love the Economist, the only publication I read that gives me
at least one word per issue that I have to look up. One obvious
Briticism puzzles me. I wonder about the source of "an attempt to
make a better fist of it." Understandable, but "fist?" [Robert L
Sharp, California]
A. Phrases such as "good fist", "better fist" and "poor fist" all
refer to degrees of competence in attempting something. If you make
a good fist of something, you're doing it to the required degree of
success. An example appeared in the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette
recently: "Music star Timberlake makes a pretty good fist of this
acting lark but Yelchin is the real star of the show." Contrarily,
if you make a poor fist of a task you are incompetent or inadequate
at it.
In various forms, it goes back to the early part of the nineteenth
century. "Fist" is closely related to figurative senses of "hand",
as a factory workman would be described as a hand, or in phrases
such as "to give somebody a hand". "To make a fist" was to have a
go at some task or enterprise, to try doing it, the idea being to
get to grips with it. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Caroline
Gilman's Recollections of a Southern Matron (1838): "He reckoned he
should make a better fist at farming than edicating." It also notes
a book of 1880 by William D Howells, The Undiscovered Country:
"Mrs. Burton is really making a very pretty fist at a salon."
Confusingly enough, "fist" can sometimes be used by itself to mean
a poor attempt or a failure; "he made a fist of that job" meant he
made a complete mess of it. The OED's first example is from The
Life and Adventures of Dr Dodimus Duckworth, published in 1833 by
the American writer Asa Greene. Dodimus, later a quack doctor, is
an apprentice dentist at this point; in his master's absence he
tries pulling a rotten tooth, but he pulls two by mistake. His
patient objects vigorously. Dodimus says coolly that he will only
charge for pulling one tooth. The patient rejoins with spirit. "You
had'nt ought to ax any thing for pulling either of these, seeing
you've made such a fist of it."
"Fist" used figuratively in this way is these days British, and
British Commonwealth, English. However, and slightly surprisingly,
the Oxford English Dictionary says it was at first a US expression
and its early examples bear that out. However, the English Dialect
Dictionary of a century ago noted it was northern English dialect;
presumably it was taken to the US and has since returned home. My
impression is that it is most often used in Britain these days on
the sports pages.
6. Sic!
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"Found under my windscreen wiper", wrote John Rooke, "was a flyer
from a local (East London) watering hole that describes itself as a
'GASTRO PUB W ORGANIC PRODUCTS'. It seems to have been printed from
someone's rough initial notes; featured alongside such attractions
as 'ORGANIC PIZZAS' and 'SUN BRUNCH W ROASTS & NEWSPAPERS' are
'BATTERED SOFAS'. A touch indigestible I'd say, though it is nice
to be offered a sit-down meal."
In an article by Jennifer Ferguson about beers in the 6 September
issue of Buzz Weekly, the student newspaper of the University of
Illinois, appears this: "The ol' factory system has a lot to do
with taste." Industrial-scale brewing, the curse of the zymurgy
business. Thanks to Rick Larson for noting that.
"'For the first time in its 522 years, a woman began work on Monday
as a member of the Yeomen of the Guard who act as warders at the
Tower of London.' I don't think I need to quote the source on this
one. Sometimes even Homer nods." Thanks, Peter Scoging.
Donna M Farrell found a feature story in the Washington Post last
Saturday about the memorabilia of gay activist Frank Kameny being
included in the Smithsonian. It commented about his firing by the
government in 1957: "he got busted in Lafayette Square across from
the White House (a gay cruising ground)." "Who knew?" Ms Farrell
marvelled. "And during the Eisenhower administration, no less!"
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