World Wide Words -- 12 Apr 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 11 15:32:27 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 583 Saturday 12 April 2008
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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: Femtocell.
3. Weird Words: Darg.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Lieutenant.
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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NOMOPHOBIA Giles Watson commented on this word from last week's
issue: "I hope it doesn't gain currency in the sense you quoted, as
it does have a legitimate Greek meaning: a fear of, or reluctance
to comply with, the law. 'Nomophobia', which admittedly isn't in
any of my Ancient or Modern Greek dictionaries, does appear in the
'aversion to the law' sense on a couple of Greek Web sites. As a
mobile phone in modern Greek is a 'kineto', you could call anxiety
over not having one 'akinetophobia', although I suppose that this
could be interpreted as a fear of the loss of the power of
voluntary movement (akinesia)."
RED-SHELF PLAYER Gary Whale contributed a memory that may help to
understand this phrase I wrote about in puzzled terms last time. "I
distinctly remember as a child (50+ years ago!) throwing three bean
bags at coconuts at a fun fair at Luna Park in Sydney, Australia.
By the purest chance I knocked down three coconuts and was offered
my choice of prizes from the 'red shelf' - the topmost shelf. So
when the Apprentice contestant refers to himself as a 'red shelf
player' I take it he is placing himself in the top echelon."
SHOOT ONESELF IN THE FOOT Many interesting comments came in about
what Scott Underwood called "the risk of pedal punctuation". Ed
Enstrom responded: "When I first came across this phrase, years
ago, it was explained to me as an image of an inept gunslinger in
the Old West who pulled the trigger on his six-shooter before he
had fully gotten it out of his holster, thereby shooting himself in
the foot. This image still comes to mind when I hear the phrase. In
my area (New York metro), 'shoot oneself in the foot' is used not
just to mean self-inflicted damage through incompetence but damage
done when in conflict with an opponent or when trying to build a
case in an argument. The connotation of incompetence is always
present." John Townley concurred with the Wild West link and added,
"Its first references should logically be when pistols were first
carried in holsters, in the mid-19th century."
Anthony Massey recalled: "My job as a BBC news producer has taken
me to a lot of rum places, so I have seen someone accidentally do
this. It was in Albania in 1997, when I was covering a presidential
election campaign. One of the bodyguards escorting the opposition
candidate, Fatos Nano, was a huge bear of a man, who wore just
jeans, boots and a bandolier of bullets. Walking up some concrete
steps he tripped and accidentally fired his Kalashnikov assault
rifle into his foot. Fortunately he had the gun set to 'single
shot' rather than the 'automatic' mode that would have delivered a
fusillade of bullets, but it was bad enough. He fell backwards into
the crowd and was carried to a car to be taken to hospital. As I
was very near him at the time, I was lucky that he didn't shoot me.
Earlier I'd been a passenger in the bodyguards' car, a beaten up
old Audi. As we bounced through the Albanian countryside I thought,
'This seat's a bit knobbly.' When we stopped I found that I'd been
sitting on a hand grenade for the last twenty miles. I pointed it
out and one of the gunmen said, 'Oh thanks, that's mine. I wondered
where that was,' and put it in his pocket. You can't help but love
a country like that."
SIC! "I'm interested to know," Ross Mulder e-mailed, "whether I'm
the only reader who briefly panics before reading the Sic! section
in case I'm about to be too thick to spot the amusing error. Is
there a phobia about appearing stupid in front of your peers?" One
certainly exists, usually called social phobia or social anxiety.
Fortunately, reading Sic! is in the main a private occupation ...
2. Turns of Phrase: Femtocell
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Although it's common within the telecommunications industry, this
term hasn't yet made much impact on the wider world. That's about
to change.
A femtocell is a mobile-telephone base station in the home that's
connected to your broadband internet service. The idea is to give
subscribers a better signal and faster data access, as buildings,
especially in cities, can block the wireless signal or reduce its
quality. As the mobile phone is often the first point of contact
for friends and family, many people would prefer to keep it as
their main phone, but poor indoors reception often makes this
difficult. Other benefits being touted are that your phone will
only have to operate at low signal levels, so extending battery
life, limiting the risk of adverse health effects and preventing
interference with other electrical equipment. Phone companies hope
that femtocells will encourage people to use the high-speed data
services that have been introduced at huge cost and will help to
draw users away from their competitors, the fixed-line telecoms
operators. Products are appearing at trade shows but have yet to go
on retail sale.
The word is from "femto-", the metric prefix that means 10^-15 or
one quadrillionth (a million billionth) of some unit (it's from
Danish or Norwegian "femten", fifteen), plus "cell" from "cellular
radio". The term is already being widely abbreviated to "femto" in
the telecoms business.
* Business Week, 29 Feb. 2008: For femtocell technology to achieve
the kind of growth in service use and data consumption operators
hope, it needs to be more than just niche take-up. But getting the
cost per unit low enough to facilitate the firing of femtocells
into scores of homes may require carriers to subsidise the hardware
- which of course would come at a cost.
* Economist, 14 Feb. 2008: Hooked up to a home's broadband-internet
connection, femtocells provide solid indoor coverage and allow
residents to make cheap calls using their existing handsets. Leave
the house while chatting, and your call is automatically handed
over to the wider mobile-phone network.
3. Weird Words: Darg /'da:g/ d{fata}{lm}g
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A day's work.
In the UK, "darg" has mainly been Scots and northern English usage,
though it did appear in Life in the London Streets by Richard Rowe,
published in 1881: "He must go out bone-grubbing; but even his dull
face showed, or seemed to my fancy to show, that, his dreary 'daily
darg' got through, he wanted to hide in a hole." However, Mr Rowe
spent some years working for the Scotsman in Edinburgh, so probably
picked it up there.
It was taken to Australia and New Zealand by emigrants. Though Rowe
spent 14 years in Australia from 1853 on, it's unlikely he heard it
there, as it began to appear in print in both countries only in the
1920s. It has now fallen out of favour once again - the Australian
Dictionary Centre included "darg" in a list of words in 2000 for
which it would like printed evidence, noting that it had none after
1978. Some has since come in, but it is clearly rare these days.
The "darg" referred not to how much work you could do in a day, but
how much was considered a reasonable day's work, or one's allotted
or fixed share of work for the day. A New Zealand journalist, Fred
Miller, who wrote a column in the old Southland Daily News with the
title The Daily Darg, noted in his book Ink on My Fingers in 1967:
"Theoretically, when you have finished your darg you go home."
The darg was often a matter of dispute between workers and bosses,
as Dan Stalker explained by e-mail: "The challenge for Australian
managers in the 60s and 70s was 'lifting the darg'. New technology
meant more could be done in less time, while staff were resistant
to 'upping the darg'."
The OED says it's a half-swallowed version of "daywork", a day's
work, especially the amount of land that could be ploughed in one
day (hence a close equivalent of "acre").
4. Recently noted
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COMMA, DASH It's not every day, even every year, that one learns
the new name of a punctuation mark. Nothing seems as inflexible or
unalterable in this world, not even the laws of the Medes and the
Persians, as the names of these little dots. And yet, one new to me
appeared in the Guardian last Friday in a piece about the semicolon
(see http://wwwords.org?SECO), provoked by French reports that it
is under threat in part through a perfidious Anglo-Saxon preference
for short sentences. The article includes a comment by the novelist
Will Self: "Prose has its own musicality, and the more notation the
better. I like dashes, double dashes, comashes and double comashes
just as much." Comashes? A search in books found only a historical
reference to an export from the Levant, which may have been a type
of stocking or stocking material; a search of the Web was almost as
unrewarding but did find a note that a comash is a comma followed
by a dash: ",-". Its name is so rare that we may presume that Will
Self invented it. The stop was once common in English prose, going
back at least to the First Quarto of Shakespeare's Othello, printed
in 1622 ("I'le tell you what you should do,- our General's wife is
now the General"). It could appear in pairs to mark a parenthesis
(hence "double comashes") where we would now use just a pair of
dashes. Its usual name is "comma dash". In 1949, Eric Partridge
wrote that "The comma-dash, whether single or double, is gradually
being discarded." That process has continued to extinction, except
it seems in the writings of one author.
5. Q&A: Lieutenant
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Q. The members of my wife's online quilt workshop were discussing
the different pronunciations of "lieutenant". Can you add to or
clear up the confusion? [Rocky Hitchcock]
A. I'd rather not add to it, if you don't mind. There's been quite
enough head-scratching down the years about why Americans say the
word as "lju'tenant" or "loo'tenant" while British and Commonwealth
people prefer "lef'tenant". The Royal Navy and Commonwealth navies
have had a third way of saying it, a half-swallowed "l'tenant"; I'm
told this was mainly a lower-deck form and has now largely gone out
of use.
Like other military words (army, captain, corporal, sergeant and
soldier), "lieutenant" came into English from Old French after the
Norman Conquest. It's from "lieu", meaning "place" (ultimately from
Latin "locus"), plus "tenant", holding. A lieutenant is a place-
holder, a person who at need fulfils the role of a more senior one
or who functions as his deputy. He acts - one might say - "in lieu"
of another, where "in lieu" now means "instead" but could equally
be construed as "in the place of". (As an example, the Lieutenant
Governor of New York, David Paterson, replaced Governor Eliot
Spitzer, albeit briefly, when Spitzer resigned in March 2008.)
On etymological grounds, therefore, the pronunciation ought to be
like "lieu", which suggests that Americans are nearer saying it
"correctly". But historical evidence shows that we English early on
adopted the way of saying the word which is still our standard one,
that this was taken by colonists to the US and that it was only in
the nineteenth century in that country that it slowly changed to
its modern pronunciation.
Some writers have suggested that early readers misread "u" as "v".
This is plausible, since in fourteenth-century English, when the
word first appeared in the written language, a distinction between
the two letters didn't yet exist and they were used more or less
interchangeably. However, the Oxford English Dictionary says that
the theory doesn't fit the facts. Examples are known of a medieval
form "lueftenant" (for example in a letter of 29 May 1447 in the
records of the canton of Fribourg in Switzerland, which was signed
by Ly Leuftenant douz Chastellent Davenche; Fribourg is one area in
which the French-related language survives that's variously called
Franco-Provençal, Romand, Burgundian and Arpitan; other examples
are recorded from the same canton). This matches a Scots spelling
of the fifteenth century and it may be that English speakers picked
up this variant way of saying the word. Or they may have heard the
glided sound at the end of "lieu" when it appeared in compounds as
a "v" or an "f".
Early spellings like "leef-", "lyff-" and "leif-" show that writers
were trying to record a pronunciation rather like the now-standard
British one; others like "lyeu-" and "lew-" suggest that the other
form was also around, most probably modelled on the common French
pronunciation. The spelling settled on "lieutenant" only in the
seventeenth century.
The change to the "lju" or "loo" versions might be as a result of
the speak-as-you-spell movement but, if that were the case, why did
it happen in the US and not in the UK? Step forward Noah Webster.
He advocated spelling and pronunciation reform and was influential
through the enormous popularity of his American Spelling Book of
1788, which sold more than 60 million copies down the years. In
that book, and in his famous dictionary of 1828, he said the word
should be said as "lutenant".
Others also felt that the usual pronunciation of the word should be
deplored as a corruption and ought to be corrected. In the 1797
edition of A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (it's probably also in
the first edition of 1791, but I can't lay my electronic hands on a
copy), John Walker wrote that "the regular sound, as if written
Lewtenant, seems not so remote from the corruption as to make us
lose all hope that it will in time be the actual pronunciation".
But it was only slowly adopted in the US. In 1838 James Fenimore
Cooper argued in The American Democrat, "there is not sufficient
authority" for the version advocated by Walker and Webster and "the
true pronunciation" was the British one. But then, he said that
"cucumber" should be said as "cowcumber" and "gold" as "goold",
both being old-fashioned British and American pronunciations. By
1893 Funk's Standard Dictionary in the US was able to note that the
British pronunciation was "almost confined to the retired list of
the navy", indicating that Walker and Webster had triumphed.
[Many thanks to Douglas G Wilson for his help in research.]
6. Sic!
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Fear of fire? Reporting on Monday on the demonstrations during the
progress of the Olympic flame through London, the Guardian noted,
"One woman says she is told to place her banners in plastic bags
after police judged them to be inflammatory."
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