World Wide Words -- 22 Sep 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 21 17:09:31 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 554 Saturday 22 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/rxty.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Pusillanimous.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Whelmed.
5. Q&A: Ash.
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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ANOTHER MILESTONE It was only last weekend when I was checking the
database that I found I'd recently posted the 2000th piece to the
Web site - the article about the word "Crib". The pieces total some
108,000 words - equivalent to a couple of novels.
ZYMURGY Stanton McCandlish tells me that in this piece last week I
should not have equated "zymurgist" with "zymologist": "Zymurgy is
the craft or activity of brewing, while zymology is the scientific
study of yeast action in products for human consumption." He also
tells me, despite my dogmatic assertion, that "zymurgy" is indeed
often said as "ZIM-ur-gee".
2. Weird Words: Pusillanimous
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Faint-hearted, cowardly.
If you are pusillanimous, you have a small soul or weak spirit, one
with few reserves of inner strength with which to resist the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune. The implications are of utter
spinelessness and a contemptible lack of courage. Its origin lies
in old ecclesiastical Latin "pusillanimis" (translating a Greek
term), which was formed from "pusillus", very small, and "animus",
the soul or mind.
It first appeared in the sixteenth century and is still very much
with us, although it's a writer's word, hardly one you're likely to
hear in your local bar unless the patrons are literary types. In
the 1970s US Vice President Spiro Agnew famously accused his rivals
of "pusillanimous pussyfooting." In 1936, the humorist A P Herbert
wrote in What a Word that "Modern dictionaries are pusillanimous
works, preferring feebly to record what has been done than to say
what ought to be done." (He wrote in the same book, "American slang
is one part natural growth and nine parts a nervous disorder." But
then he wasn't much in favour of American English of any kind.)
"Pusillanimous" is a fine word to disparage your enemies with, one
that rolls extravagantly off the tongue. It's unusualness makes it
all the more effective.
3. Recently noted
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IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING You may have heard of the extraordinary
case, reported this week, of a 10-year-old boy in York, England. He
made a good recovery from a rare form of viral meningitis followed
by surgery but in the process lost his Yorkshire accent, replacing
it with one more like standard English. His mother said "He went in
with a York accent and came out all posh. He no longer had short
'a' and 'u' vowel sounds, they were all long." This is a rare but
not unknown situation and even has a name: foreign accent syndrome.
A few cases have been reported, including one last year in which a
woman in Newcastle awoke from a stroke to find that she now spoke
in what the reports say was a mixture of Jamaican, Canadian and
Slovakian (I sound like that when trying to mimic a Welsh accent).
It seems that damage to parts of the brain causes difficulties in
controlling the way such sufferers speak, subtly altering the way
they articulate and pitch syllables.
TONSIL HOCKEY AND BARM CAKES The quarterly update to the Oxford
English Dictionary was posted online on 14 September. Most of the
new and revised entries lie at the end of the letter P, but others
constitute an eclectic range of material from across the alphabet.
The US "chaise lounge" (a folk-etymological change to the French
"chaise longue", meaning "long chair") appears for the first time.
OED new-words editor Katherine Connor Martin comments, "'Longue' is
an adjective modifying the noun. Postmodifying adjectives are now
rare in English, and 'longue' has been reinterpreted as the English
noun 'lounge', which not only resembles the French word, but also
has logical associations with a piece of furniture meant for
reclining." Purists may not be satisfied with this, nor with the
inclusion of "puh-leeze", about which Ms Martin notes: "Respelling
is often used to convey qualities, such as emphasis or accent,
which are easily distinguished in speech but difficult to express
in written form. In this case, the respelling of please to indicate
an emphatic or sarcastic pronunciation has become sufficiently well
established to warrant inclusion in the OED as a separate entry."
The list confirms how broad and diverse the concerns of dictionary
makers have to be and what a struggle the OED's compilers have in
keeping up with changes and with repairing ancient omissions (some
of these words have been traced back to the nineteenth century).
New entries in P include "Prozac" (the antidepressant), "prozine"
("Chiefly science fiction, a professional magazine, as opposed to
an amateur fanzine"), "psammology" ("Scientific study of sand"),
"psychobilly" ("A style of popular music blending characteristics
of rockabilly with the raw, aggressive performance style of punk
rock"), "psychogeneticist" ("A specialist in psychogenetics, which
deals with the effects of genetic inheritance on mental processes
or behaviour"), "ptui" ("The sound of a person spitting; (hence)
expressing disgust or contempt"), and "punditocracy" ("The elite
members of the news media, typically seen as having political power
in their own right").
As well as those in my headline ("tonsil hockey" - passionate, deep
or French kissing; "barm cake" - a northern English dialect term
for a bread roll), other terms from the remainder of the alphabet
include "terrible twos", which every parent knows and which the OED
defines as "the period in a child's social development (typically
around the age of two years) associated with defiant or challenging
behaviour"; "ice cream headache" ("a momentary but intense pain in
the head caused by exposure to cold temperatures, typically when
consuming very cold food or drink") and its synonym "brain freeze"
(which can also mean "a sudden mental paralysis; a lapse of memory
or concentration, a mental block"); and "goody-bag", which goes
back to 1929.
SMILE, PLEASE Wednesday 19 September was the 25th anniversary of
the invention of the smiley character in online communications,
also known as the emoticon. The :-) symbol, necessarily created
from standard keyboard characters, was invented on 19 September
1982 by Scott E Fahlman in a post on a bulletin board at Carnegie
Mellon University. It formed part of a thread on the way humorous
remarks could be tagged to avoid misunderstandings. His message was
brief, though a tad ungrammatical: "I propose that the following
character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways." Scott
Fahlman is these days the Research Professor of Computer Science at
Carnegie Mellon University.
4. Q&A: Whelmed
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Q. I've been overwhelmed and I've been underwhelmed. Is it possible
to ever just be whelmed? [Steve Simoneaux, Atlanta, GA]
A. You could once. But remember that "underwhelmed" started life as
a joke based on "overwhelmed" and in language terms is relatively
recent - it was first recorded in 1956, but it only became popular
a decade or so later. It is now common, because it fills a need for
a single word to communicate the idea of failing to impress.
The verb "whelm" does exist, though you might search for some time
before you find examples in modern prose. That's excluding fantasy
and historical fiction, of course - when S M Stirling wrote in 2000
in On the Oceans of Eternity, "Whelm not our ships with Your anger,
but give us swift voyaging and good winds, full nets and victory",
his choice of "whelm" was deliberately archaic, to help convey to
his readers the sense of being in another time and place. On the
other hand, to come across "It was a late-arriving crowd that saw
the Hurricanes whelm the Philadelphia Flyers Saturday night", which
appeared in The News & Record of North Carolina back in 1998, is to
be brought up short, wondering if the word's a misprint.
But it was once common. It started as a medieval English sea term
meaning to capsize - it's related to the even older "whelve", to
overturn. Around 1513, Robert Fabyan used it in The Newe Cronycles
of Englande and of Fraunce: "By the mysgydynge of the sterysman, he
was set vpon the pylys of the brydge, and the barge whelmyd" (in
modern spelling: "By the misguidance of the steersman, he was set
upon the piles of the bridge, and the barge whelmed"). It could
also mean to turn a hollow vessel upside down to cover something;
in 1842 the Florist's Journal wrote that "Pansies that were planted
out in the autumn, should be protected by whelming a small pot over
each plant." It also came to mean, as an extension of the capsizing
sense, being covered by water or drowning. Sir Charles Lyall used
it that way in his Principles of Geology (1830): Marsh land ... has
at last been overflowed, and thousands of the inhabitants whelmed
in the waves." One might once have talked about the whelm of the
tide, which covers the shore as it rises.
But a writer can't use any of these senses any more, unless he's
deliberately using an archaism for effect, or is showing off his
knowledge of language, or is perhaps archly trying to invent a new
word, not knowing that "whelm" exists.
5. Q&A: Ash
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Q. Why are the letters "ae" joined together in Old English? [Colin
de'Ath]
A. The answer involves Germanic runemasters, Irish missionaries and
attempts to fit English pronunciation to the Latin alphabet. The
answer also presents a typographical challenge, since I can't be
sure that my attempts in this e-mail newsletter to show the Old
English letter in question will be readable by everybody. However,
it and others will appear in the online version (see above for the
link), plus some pictures of the scripts.
The first writing in English, in the fifth century AD, was brought
over by the Jutes, Angles and Saxons from the continent of Europe.
When they wrote, which they didn't much, these Germanic peoples did
so in runes, using an alphabet that they'd borrowed from Etruscan,
shaping the letters so that they could be cut into hard materials
like wood, bone or stone. The runic script was called futhorc, from
its first six letters ("th", called thorn, was one letter).
Later, Irish Christian missionaries introduced the Latin alphabet
into England. The Irish had been Christianised by missionaries from
Rome who brought the Latin alphabet with them, written in a style
called uncial. The Irish adapted it to meet their needs, producing
a rounded script called the Insular hand. Modern Irish Gaelic can
still be seen written in much the same style.
The problem for the early English scribes was that English included
sounds that didn't fit the letters of the Latin alphabet. So they
added three new ones, to which they gave the names ash, thorn and
wynn, taken from the names of the letters that represented the same
sounds in the runic alphabet. They also added eth (a crossed "d")
and (later) yogh. The one you're referring to is ash, "æ", which
was created by combining "a" and "e", technically a ligature or a
digraph. The runic name meant the ash tree as well as the letter.
The sound was that of the "a" in "cat" or "apple", if you say them
with a standard British English accent, though it varied in length.
When the Normans conquered England in 1066, they brought in their
own scribes, who had been taught in a different tradition. (As just
one example, they changed Old English "cw" in words like "cwen" to
"qu", in this case making the word we now spell "queen".) Most of
the Old English special forms fairly soon vanished, although ash
survived until the thirteenth century.
It did continue in use elsewhere, notably in many words in medieval
Latin. These had been taken from Greek progenitors that included
the letter combination alpha followed by iota. The character came
back into English in the sixteenth century when writers started to
borrow these Latin words for concepts not in the language, as well
as Greek ones containing the same letter combination. Some examples
are "æther", "anæsthetic", "archæology", "anæmia", "encyclopædia",
"gynæcology", "hyæna", and "mediæval", although there were at one
time hundreds of others, mostly technical or scientific terms. Æ
was also used when words of Latin origin that ended in "-a" made
their plurals by adding "e", so generating forms such as "algæ",
"antennæ", "larvæ" and "nebulæ". Many of these now have their
plurals in "-s" instead.
As such words became established over time, a few of them changed
their spelling, replacing "æ" by "e", so that "æther" changed to
"ether", "phænomenon" to "phenomenon" and "musæum" to "museum". In
British English, others kept the symbol and continued to be spelled
with it into the twentieth century.
But ash is almost completely obsolete (the name itself is used only
by linguists studying Old English; its official title now is "Latin
ligature ae"). It has been replaced in British English in all but
the most scholarly or old-fashioned writing by "ae" (hence "aegis",
"aeon" and "leukaemia", where older works had "ægis", "æon" and
"leukæmia"). Americans sidestepped the whole problem by extending
the change to "e" to most such words, creating spellings such as
"archeology", "eon" and "leukemia". Brits are increasingly doing
the same, so - as a notable example - "medieval" is now standard,
with "mediaeval" hardly seen, let alone the even older "mediæval".
It's been a roller-coaster ride for the character during the last
millennium and a bit, but it's now certain it won't be around in
English typography much longer.
6. Sic!
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BBC News reported on 16 September that "Ex-American football star
OJ Simpson has been arrested by Las Vegas police investigating an
alleged armed robbery at a casino hotel room." Judith Haemmerle
snorted. "Ex-American? If you Brits want him, I'm sure we'd be glad
to let him go." As they say, thanks but no thanks.
Chris Hayward obtained this confusing piece of travel advice from
the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, a British government department:
"Drug taking and smuggling is an offence." He wonders if it is an
offence only if you do the two together. "Does it mean it's OK to
do the one without the other?"
"Unfortunately," Alan Hattle begins ominously, "I was a passenger
in someone else's car travelling to Kano from Abuja in Nigeria some
time ago, so I didn't get the chance to stop and find out exactly
what product was on sale when we passed a roadside sign advertising
'Live Frozen Chickens'. I've been haunted by the image it conjures
up ever since!"
Roger Beale urges us to look at the official Web site of the Prague
bid for the 2016 Olympics (http://wwwords.org?OLYM). "There is page
after page of hilarious mistranslation, presumably by software, of
which this is a taster: 'At which time Prague begun peep at peas in
years 1932 and 1936. "but while before for action inspire with
politicians and people, in thirtieth years nobody after peas doesnt
want. Whole it go out taperingly," says Francis wheelwright.'" I
rather like the opening sentence myself: "Three times will Prague
examine courting with international Olympic collection. Previous
two advances arrange games are over always inglorious."
Pete Swindells noted a sign at the Lion Hotel in Barmouth, Gwynedd
(a photo is included in the online version of this issue): "Due to
a shortage of space, only food purchased on the premises is to be
consumed at these tables. (Babies excepted)." Mr Swindells tells me
he didn't see anybody taking advantage of the exception made for
eating babies bought off the premises.
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