World Wide Words -- 29 Sep 07

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 555        Saturday 29 September 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. Weird Words: Fletcherise.
3. Topical Words: Hyphen.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Reticent versus reluctant.
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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WHELM  The famous nineteenth-century geologist mentioned in this 
piece last week was of course Sir Charles Lyell, not Lyall.

SIC!  In the item about the extraordinarily translated English text 
on a Web site (http://wwwords.org?OLYM) outlining the Prague 2016 
Olympics bid, we said that it was the official site. It isn't. The 
official one is http://wwwords.org?CZOO with its English-language 
version at http://wwwords.org?CZOE. Several subscribers pointed out 
that the unofficial site has a note at the bottom: "translated by 
robot". Presumably "robot" here is a bad translation of "software", 
but as the word "robot" is from Czech, who knows?

PUSILLANIMOUS  Interestingly, most who wrote about this word after 
last week's issue did so to recall where and when they first came 
across it - it would seem to impress itself on the hearer. Many 
mentioned they remember it from the film of The Wizard of Oz, in 
which the wizard says to the scarecrow, "Why, anybody can have a 
brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous 
creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has 
a brain." Alison Taylor commented, "I was surprised you did not 
mention 'Look Back in Anger' when you wrote about 'pusillanimous'. 
My first encounter with this word was watching this play - and I 
still cannot hear the word without remembering Jimmy Porter hissing 
it at Alison." I clearly recall my own first encounter with it, on 
the BBC Home Service in the early 1950s during a programme called 
In Town Tonight. Peter Sellers did a fake interview as a down-and-
out who collected words; one choice specimen he proudly introduced 
was "pusillanimous".

I committed a shocking solecism in the last sentence of the piece: 
I wrote "it's", though "its" was correct. I was surprised that only 
four subscribers wrote to remonstrate with me. To all those readers 
who noticed my error but forbore from e-mailing me, many thanks. To 
those who didn't write because they didn't notice the error, I send 
my commiserations.

Such things happen even in the best-regulated circles. I sympathise 
with the Readers' Editor of the Guardian, who posted this sentence 
in her Corrections and Clarifications column yesterday (Friday 28 
September): "We misspelled the word misspelled twice, as mispelled, 
in the Corrections and clarifications column on September 26, page 
30."


2. Weird Words: Fletcherise
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To chew thoroughly.

The word commemorates The Great Masticator, a title that these days 
might lead to hearers getting the giggles. He was Horace Fletcher, 
a food faddist of the end of the nineteenth century and the early 
twentieth. He advised people to chew each bite of their food 32 
times, to eat small amounts, and only to eat when hungry and free 
from stress or anxiety. Hence this rhyme of the time:

  Eat somewhat less but eat it more
  Would you be hearty beyond fourscore.
  Eat not at all in worried mood
  Or suffer harm from best of food.
  Don't gobble your food but "Fletcherize"
  Each morsel you eat, if you'd be wise.
  Don't cause your blood pressure e'er to rise
  By prizing your menu by its size.

The heyday of Fletcherism was the early 1900s. Time Magazine wrote 
a retrospective on the fashion in 1928, "For a time wealthy mothers 
counted their children's jaw beats at the table while ragged micks 
in the streets threatened to 'Fletcherize' their little enemies." A 
good example appeared in 1908 in Food Remedies by Florence Daniel: 
"But whatever is taken must be 'Fletcherised,' that is, chewed and 
chewed and chewed until it is all reduced to liquid." The word for 
a while became frequent in writings of all sorts. In 1922, P G 
Wodehouse borrowed the term in The Adventures of Sally to 
illustrate the seriousness of a dog fight: "The raffish mongrel was 
apparently endeavouring to fletcherize a complete stranger of the 
Sealyham family."

Fletcherism was taken quite seriously by many people and had some 
distinguished adherents; it lasted until the 1930s. Unfortunately, 
eating meals took much longer than usual and there were complaints 
that it severely restricted conversation at dinner parties.


3. Topical Words: Hyphen
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The five-yearly update of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 
(SOED) came out last week. One matter has caused a lot of comment - 
the decision by its editors to omit the hyphen from some 16,000 
words in the work.

Some reports have assumed that this means the end of the hyphen in 
all word compounds and even its demise as a punctuation mark. It's 
too early to assert this, though Angus Stevenson, the editor of the 
SOED, does say that "we've been finding the hyphen is used less and 
less" and five years ago the Oxford English Dictionary noted that 
even then the hyphen was being used only half as much as it had 
been 10 years earlier. It seems that people just can't be bothered 
with it. He suggests that it is being squeezed as informal ways of 
communicating - popularised by text messages and emails - become 
more common in newspapers and books. "People aren't confident about 
using hyphens any more; they're not really sure what they are for." 
Because they are unsure how to use the punctuation mark, he says, 
"It's now popping up in places where it was never used before, as 
in the ubiquitous 'Time to top-up your mobile'." He feels designers 
are a significant influence: "Printed writing is very much design-
led these days, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a 
nice bit of typography. The hyphen is seen as messy looking and 
old-fashioned."

A hyphen is a short dash specifically used to connect two words or 
to join syllables of a word that have been separated by the end of 
a line in printing. Its name is from the Greek "huphen", together, 
though the Greek hyphen was a half circle under the words to link 
them. The use of hyphens to fill out or justify lines of text of 
fixed length goes back to Gutenberg. The hyphen is not the same as 
the dash - in typography, a dash is a form of parenthesis; it was 
once also used to mark the omission of words or letters, perhaps 
because they were considered rude. 

Compound nouns have traditionally begun as separate or hyphenated 
words but with a strong tendency over time to collapse into single 
words. A century ago, it was standard practice to write "to-day", 
but the hyphen has long since evaporated from the page; similarly 
with "teenager" ("teen-ager" from its first use in 1941 until the 
later 1950s) and "lipstick" (two words in the 1880s, but becoming 
hyphenated around the 1920s). Americans have long been much more 
willing to write words such as "postmodern" without the hyphens 
that British standards require. It will be no surprise to learn 
that the SOED writes "email", not "e-mail", and "website" rather 
than "Web site", since neither is new - they were so listed in the 
11th edition of the Concise Oxford in 2004 (I'm old-fashioned in 
preferring the separated forms). The new SOED lists many hyphenless 
words such as "leapfrog", "bumblebee", "crybaby", "pigeonhole", 
"lowlife", and "upmarket", which will be a relief to those of us 
who have been spelling them like that all along (and all except 
"lowlife" are written without hyphens in the 2004 Concise Oxford 
anyway). The SOED does retain hyphens for compound verbs such as 
"court-martial".

But what is more interesting is the number of words that - on the 
evidence of the big Oxford English Corpus and the Reading Programme 
of the Oxford English Dictionary - are bucking the conflationary 
trend and are returning to separate words without their dashing 
copulas. So the SOED writes the terms - among many others - as "fig 
leaf", "fire drill", "ice cream", "pot belly", "test tube", and 
"water bed". It's notable that this extends to their attributive 
forms, such as "ice cream headache" from last week's OED update (I 
ache to change that to "ice-cream headache"). The grammar books 
argue that a hyphen is required here. In this situation, leaving 
the hyphen out can sometimes lead to misunderstanding ("twenty odd 
people" is not the same as "twenty-odd people") which is why its 
inclusion has been urged. But most of the time the meaning is clear 
without it, so the trend towards omitting it isn't causing many 
problems.

There can be no doubt from the accumulated evidence that the hyphen 
is on its way out, though reports of its demise are premature.


4. Recently noted
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GRAMMIES  The English language contains hundreds of words that end 
in "-gram", such as "cardiogram", "diagram", "epigram", "pentagram" 
and "stereogram". All can be traced back to Greek "gramma", a thing 
that is written. An odder set of such words is that of the humorous 
inventions based on "cablegram" or "telegram" with the idea being 
of an entertainer who delivers a message in an outlandish or risqué 
way, such as a strippergram, kissogram, gorillagram, candygram or  
poetrygram. In the 1990s came the herogram, a message of support or 
congratulation. More recently, we have begun to hear of the dreaded 
lawyergram, which has nothing entertaining about it, being a cease-
and-desist warning from m'learned friends - though a stripper in 
wig and gown delivering the letter would take some of the sting out 
of it. The earliest example I've so far found appeared in Wired 
News in 2001.

THAT INTERNET THINGIE  This week, I've been made more aware of a 
couple of deprecatory terms for the medium by which this missive is 
transmitted. Both "internetweb" and "interweb" have popped up in 
newspaper columns, together with the very rare adjectival form of 
the latter, "interwebular" (though the writer made it even rarer by 
using it as a noun). All are conflations of "internet", "net", and 
"World Wide Web". Both "internetweb" and "interweb" were created 
online and are mainly used as joking terms to imply ignorance or 
naivety about the Net, real or assumed. They're not especially new: 
"internetweb" goes back at least to 1995; Wikipedia says the first 
use of "interweb" was in an episode of Babylon 5 first broadcast in 
July 1994. Writers in newspapers sometimes use these forms to show 
their antipathy towards online matters or that they're above having 
to bother themselves with them. But there are enough examples of 
"internetweb" used neutrally in books and newspapers to make me 
unsure what's going on; do naive writers really believe it's the 
right way to describe the online world, do they think that they've 
invented a neat new shorthand term for it, or is it a real, albeit 
rare, term? It appears, to take one instance, in the Cambridge 
World History of Food (2000): "Monthly magazines and internetweb 
sites listed enormous numbers of hot and hotter dishes." 


5. Q&A: Reticent versus reluctant
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Q. People are now using "reticent" when they mean "reluctant", as 
in the following sentence: "I felt quite reticent to take part in 
the event". How has it been hijacked? And is it widespread enough 
to be taking over the previous meaning of the word? [Alison Chan]

A. We are indeed witnessing an extension in sense that has been 
developing over the past four decades or so, originally in the US 
but now widely in the English-speaking world. While researching 
this answer a few days ago, I found an example of the related noun 
in the Guardian, a British newspaper: "Theatre critics habitually 
complain about artistic directors' reticence to tackle untried 
repertoire." A few US dictionaries have begun to notice it (recent 
American Heritage and Merriam-Webster ones, which are regarded as 
dangerously permissive by purists, now note it as a subsidiary 
sense), though style guides suggest that it should be avoided and 
many language watchers are vociferous in disliking it.

"Reticent" hasn't been in the language so very long in relative 
terms in any sense: it's first recorded in the 1830s together with 
its noun "reticence". It was borrowed from Latin "reticere", which 
is a compound of "tacere", to be silent, from which we also get 
"tacit" and "taciturn". Its standard meanings are "disinclined to 
speak freely" or "not revealing thoughts or feelings readily". So 
it can be used as George Orwell did in The Road to Wigan Pier in 
1937: "How many of these caravan-colonies exist throughout the 
industrial areas it would be difficult to discover with any 
accuracy. The local authorities are reticent about them and the 
census report of 1931 seems to have decided to ignore them."

So why has it taken on this new sense? It may be that "reticent" 
sounds more classy than "reluctant". But it's easy to understand 
confusion arising between "reticent" and "reluctant", since the 
context is often similar. If a person is reluctant, he's unwilling 
to do something; if reticent, he is unwilling to speak. Compare 
"He's reluctant to talk about that issue" with "He's reticent on 
that issue". The result is the same either way. If you're reticent, 
you can very easily also give the impression of being reluctant to 
act or hesitant about doing so.

Merriam-Webster's editors put it this way in their Word of the Day 
mailing in September 2001: "We first tended to use the 'reluctant' 
sense of 'reticent' when the context was speech (as in 'reticent to 
talk about her past'), thus keeping the word close to its 'silent' 
sense. Eventually, however, exclusive association with speech was 
abandoned. Now one can be 'reticent' to do anything."

There can be little doubt this meaning will continue to spread, in 
spite of much criticism. It's a pity, as we will lose precision - 
we will have no word available that expresses quite the same idea. 
Though "taciturn" will still be to hand, it implies a person with a 
reserve that borders on unsociability rather than one who merely 
wishes to avoid discussing his private affairs.


6. Sic!
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"I always feel guilty laughing at foreigners' attempts at English," 
writes Stephen Turner, "but I couldn't help being tickled by a sign 
I saw in Slovenia last week [a picture is in the online edition]: 
'Trespassing allowed for proprietors and their guests only.'" 

David Armstrong passed a restaurant in Ottawa last week and saw a 
notice advertising its "Indian cosine". Clearly a sine to treasure.

Congratulations to Charlotte on her new arrival, but if you don't 
know all about the songstress, your mind might be as boggled as 
John Pearson's was when he saw the headline on the BBC news Web 
site on 22 September: "Church gives birth to baby girl".

An article about the melting of Arctic ice appeared in the Times on 
22 September: "John Sauven, of Greenpeace, said 'The canary in the 
coal mine is singing very loudly now.'" Jeremy Shaw asks if we are 
witnessing metaphoric fusion in the making or whether Mr Sauven is 
just a bit confused?

It appears dead men do tell tales in Adelaide, Australia. Ray Wood 
discovered this from a report in the Advertiser of that city: "Mr 
Xenikis died when his Mazda sedan and Longbottom's Holden Commodore 
collided. He will appear in court again in November."


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