World Wide Words -- 26 Apr 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 25 13:19:34 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 585 Saturday 26 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. Weird Words: Wiseacre.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Moniker.
5. Book Review: The Secret Life of Words.
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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STILLICIDE As numerous Latin scholars pointed out, I confused my
Latin verbs last time. The "-cide" in words like "suicide" is from
Latin "caedere", to kill, while that in "stillicide" derives from
"cadere", to fall. Terry Walsh wrote to soften his correction, "The
two Latin verbs acquire prefixes in Latin that reduce them to the
same spelling. Hence endless confusion for Latin learners!" Alas, I
never was a Latin learner. To misquote the late Peter Cook, I could
never have become a judge, because I didn't have the Latin.
Richard Losch suggested that "stillicide" is what revenuers do when
they raid a moonshiner. Along the same lines, Laurence Horn at once
"thought of the wonderful Gillian Welch song 'Tear My Stillhouse
Down' as the prime instance of stillicide."
In the piece, I listed some words that Vladimir Nabokov used in a
poem in his novel Pale Fire. Bob Lee wrote, "I had a good idea of
the meaning of the other words quoted from Nabokov, but wotinell is
'iridule'?" It was invented by Nabokov for what he describes as an
opal cloudlet which "reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm". It's
from "iris", originally the name of the Greek goddess who appeared
as the rainbow.
BLACK HOLE Emery Fletcher, who was one of John Wheeler's graduate
students in 1962, commented on last week's discussion of the origin
of this term. "Wheeler was indeed its popularizer. Furthermore, he
learned that the literal French translation was obscene, and as one
who strongly objected to what he regarded as French arrogance in
expunging any hint of Anglicizing, he used 'black hole' at every
opportunity. The phrase he did actually coin, to describe the fact
that no light or material issues from a black hole, was 'a black
hole has no hair'. That one is even more formidably obscene to the
French. Throughout his life he claimed that he'd coined the phrase
innocently, but the claim was always made with the famous Wheeler
twinkle in his eye."
(I wonder if he was influenced in creating that phrase by "comet",
whose name derives from the classical Greek "aster kometes", or
long-haired star.)
John Wheeler, as he would wish, has the last laugh, since everybody
links his name to "black hole", on a principle that Walter Meyer
pointed out was promulgated by Ogden Nash in his poem Columbus:
He discovered America and they put him in jail for it,
And the fetters gave him welts,
And they named America after somebody else,
So the sad fate of Columbus ought to be pointed out
to every child and every voter,
Because it has a very important moral, which is,
Don't be a discoverer, be a promoter.
2. Weird Words: Wiseacre /'waiz,eik@/
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A pretender to wisdom.
A subscriber queried this odd-looking word. A friend had suggested
to him that the link with a measurement of land was that it alluded
to a person having acres of wisdom.
Ho, Ho. Although some experts do profess themselves baffled by the
"acre" part of this word, we know where it comes from - the Middle
Dutch "wijsseggher", a soothsayer, a wise sayer. The first part is
from the same source as our "wit". The Oxford English Dictionary
says that the Dutch pronunciation was /'wais,zeg at r/ (roughly WAIS-
zegger).
The word first appeared in English in a scurrilous ballad of 1595
that had the catchy title A Quest of Enquirie, by women to know,
Whether the Tripe-Wife were trimmed by Doll. A tripe-wife was a
tripe dresser, in this case a well-to-do London widow who sold her
wares from a stall; the trimming referred to the cheating of her by
one Doll Phillips, who pretended to be a fortune teller who could
tell her which of her suitors she was to marry. The story was based
on real events, though embroidered. We know the Dutch pronunciation
had already changed, since in the ballad it's given as "wise-aker".
The shift from Dutch to English is a good example of a common form
of folk etymology, in which an odd or foreign word is changed until
it looks familiar, even if its parts make no real sense.
Curiously, the word seems never to have been used in English in the
literal sense of a wise person that it had in Dutch. It has always
meant only a person with an unjustified appearance of wisdom. At
one time the home of the Royal Society in London, Gresham College,
was called Wiseacres Hall by those sneering at its intellectuality.
3. Recently noted
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HAIRCUT Steve Doerr pointed out a Reuters article on Monday that
reported on plans to provide funds for cash-strapped British banks
caught by the current shortage of credit. The Bank of England said
it would swap at least 50 billion pounds in government securities
with the banks' mortgage-based assets but would impose "variable
haircuts". A haircut, the article helpfully explained, is the name
of the percentage discount applied in each case to the value of the
assets being swapped under the scheme. "The riskier the collateral,
the larger the haircut." This comes from the older phrase "to take
a haircut", to accept a pay cut or some other limit on earnings.
This goes back to the 1970s in the US, if not further. The first
example that I can find appeared in the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin
in June 1973: "In sympathy with commissions in some other sports,
Kolton is advising some of the players to take a haircut. By this
he means institutions should consider trimming the stated value of
their holdings." At least "haircut" is more homely than the sub-
prime mortgages, structured investment vehicles, collateralised
debt obligations, credit default swaps and all the other jargon
that's become so depressingly familiar in today's credit crunch.
This last term is so inextricably linked to the current financial
crisis that one might guess it was created to describe it - but
"credit crunch" is found in the USA at least as far back as 1967.
BADGING While we're on jargon, Chris Pringle e-mailed to point out
a term in a consultation document from the British Department for
Innovation, Universities & Skills (DIUS). It suggested recipients
should "cascade" the document to others and went on, "You'll be
very welcome to joint-badge the learner version alongside DIUS."
She was struck by "joint-badge", a verb that neither she nor I had
previously come across. The idea behind it is that a document from
an official organisation is identified - "badged" - by its logo. A
document that goes out jointly from more than one body may contain
the logos of all of them and so is jointly badged. I've found an
example from the Scottish Parliament dated 2003: "Murray MacFarlane
also advised that an issue had been raised on the joint badging of
documents and whether a joint badge should be developed rather than
the three separate logos."
SPELLING FISH The famous story about English spelling being so
idiosyncratic that it is possible to spell "fish" as "ghoti" (hint:
use the spellings of "enough", "women", and "motion") is often said
to have been created by George Bernard Shaw, though nobody has been
able to find it in his writings despite assiduous searching. The
best we have been able to say until now was that the story appeared
quite suddenly in various publications around 1937, but only began
to be attached to Shaw's name a decade later. But Matt Gordon of
the University of Missouri-Columbia has found it in an 1874 issue
of St James Magazine, which quotes a letter dated 11 December 1855
from the publisher Charles Ollier to Leigh Hunt. This disposes of
any possible Shaw connection, since he was born in 1856. The letter
reads: "My son William has hit upon a new method of spelling Fish.
As thus: - G.h.o.t.i., Ghoti, fish. Nonsense! say you. By no means,
say I. It is perfectly vindicable orthography. You give it up? Well
then, here is the proof. Gh is f, as in tough, rough, enough; o is
i as in women; and ti is sh, as in mention, attention, &c. So that
ghoti is fish."
4. Q&A: Moniker
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Q. Your use of "moniker" in a recent newsletter in the delightful
phrase "grandly Latinate moniker fumage" started me thinking. I've
heard the word many times in the last fifty years, and even used it
myself, but don't recall seeing it in print. All the Concise Oxford
Dictionary (COD) can offer, spelling it with or without a "c" in
the middle, is "19th century, origin unknown". I feel sure that you
can do better than the COD in telling us the origin of the word!
[Andrew Purkiss]
A. I can write a lot more, and propose to do so, but I have to warn
you that my conclusion is pretty much the same as the pithy note in
the Concise.
"Moniker" has had so many spellings that it's hard to keep track of
them. Jonathon Green gives 14 in The Cassell Dictionary of Slang,
for example. This variability is a sure sign the word was for long
passed from person to person in speech rather than in writing. The
first known written example is from 1851, in Henry Mayhew's London
Labour and the London Poor, in which Mayhew gives it as "monekeer".
The word was recorded in the Sydney Slang Dictionary in Australia
in 1881, spelled "monniker", and seems to have reached the USA not
long afterwards. This may imply that it was a London term, exported
by migrants. Most writers on slang , including Eric Partridge and
Jonathon Green, suggest that it was originally tramps' slang. As a
moniker was often, even usually, an assumed name or nickname, this
is plausible.
There are as many suggestions of its origin as there are variants
on its name, though few of them sound even marginally convincing. A
long list of them is given in Paul Beale's 1984 revision of Eric
Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Some
early forms suggest that it might be from "monarch", the idea being
that it is one's name that partly rules one's life. One learned
proposal was that it was "ekename" (an ancient term for a nickname,
from "eke", additional - a relative of "eke out" - which changed to
"nickname" through a shift of the "n" in "an ekename") that was
converted into "moniker" by backslang. A further idea is that it
derives from the saintly name "Monica". Others link it to one or
other of a pair of Italian words, just possible if we assume that
it's old enough to have entered slanguage via Lingua Franca. The
association with tramps has led some writers to find a source in
Shelta, an ancient secret language used by Irish and Welsh tinkers
and gypsies, in which it would be derived from Irish "ainm", name
(there's support for this in The Secret Languages of Ireland by R A
Stewart Macalister, dated 1937, which gives "munika" as one form of
the Shelta word.)
Expert opinion, for which you may read "guesswork" if you like, is
leaning towards a blend of "monogram" with "signature", largely
because "moniker" can mean someone's John Hancock.
5. Book Review: The Secret Life of Words
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Don't be confused by the title of this book, which feels like one
dreamt up by publicity people and which may not have been the first
choice of the author, Henry Hitchings. The subtitle says it better:
How English Became English.
Language is much more than simply a way to communicate and English
retains within itself a record of invasion (of England and of other
countries by English speakers), seafaring explorations, trade, and
colonisation and empire. Every contact with other cultures has left
its mark in the words that we use. Henry Hitchings chronicles them
in a study that is as much a survey of the relevant bits of English
history as it is of the archaeology of the language.
It has become a cliché to say that English is a mongrel, having
taken in words and influences from so many languages that its true
origins have become submerged, along the way losing its grammatical
baggage of verb endings, moods and cases. Some linguists even argue
that modern English is a creole, a simplified tongue stripped of
its grammatical intricacy by the collision of different linguistic
groups through the urgent need to communicate. One view is that the
language clash was that between post-Conquest medieval English and
Norman French. In his survey of the forces that led to our modern
language Henry Hitchings hints that he agrees, though for him the
simplifying force is the impact between pre-Conquest English and
the Scandinavian languages of the Vikings and Danes.
Hitchings' exploration of the roots of English is presented in 16
chapters with enigmatic titles such as Powwow, Bonsai and Voodoo,
illustrative words brought into the language as a result of the
changes he writes about in each chapter. For example, "onslaught"
is a word of Dutch origin (Middle Dutch "aenslag", from "aen", on,
plus "slag" blow); he picks it to head the chapter on the influence
of that language on English, which began well before the Glorious
Revolution of 1688 in which William of Orange took over the English
throne. "Cambric", "selvage" and "stripe" attest to the cloth trade
with the low countries; "sketch", "masterpiece", "landscape" and
"etch" remind us of Dutch and Flemish painters; "waffle", "boss"
and "cookie" are tokens of early Dutch influence in North America;
the large numbers of Dutch-originated maritime terms in English,
such as "deck", "boom", "reef", "orlop", "bowsprit", "skipper",
"hull" and "dock", show the maritime power of the Dutch in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the many denigratory terms on
the model of "Dutch courage" that were once common highlight the
antipathy between the English and Dutch through their competition
for sea supremacy.
It's a densely illustrated tale, essentially chronological but with
many excursions up interesting byways. As he says at the beginning
of his journey, "Words frequently come from unlikely places, and
the unlikelihood is illuminating."
Recommended.
[Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became
English; John Murray, 3 Apr 2008 (UK); Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
16 Sep 2008 (US and Canada); hardback, pp440, including indexes;
list price GBP16.99 in the UK; ISBN13: 978-0-7195-6454-3, ISBN10:
0-7195-6454-9.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
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6. Sic!
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Jonathan McColl reports from Dingwall that the Aberdeen Press and
Journal had a short item on 17 April headed "RAF to respond to low-
flying complaints." He comments, "It's the ones that come in under
the radar that get you."
When Nigel Neve got around to reading a sign in his local pub, The
Railway Tavern in West Wickham, Kent, he did a double-take, then
took a photo. It reads "SHIRTS/TOPS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES BOTH
INTERNALLY AND EXTERNALLY".
Department of aphorism mangling: As practised by the BBC in a piece
on 22 April about the launch of the Quilliam Foundation, a think
tank to oppose the world-view of Al Qaeda: "It hopes to become a
rolling ball gathering the moss of former Islamists - and the more
moss it gathers, the greater its momentum in communities." Thanks
to Andrew Ellam for passing it on.
Judith Baron e-mailed on Tuesday, "The misplaced modifier is my
favorite form of grammatical error. Here's the latest misdeed from
today's New York Times (a plentiful source): 'His granddaughter, a
bright-eyed 17-year-old in blue jeans named Katya.'" Does she also
have a T-shirt named Charlie?
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