World Wide Words -- 06 Dec 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 5 12:15:34 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 616 Saturday 6 December 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: Ecotarianism.
3. Weird Words: Aposiopesis.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Wax poetic.
6. Elsewhere.
7. 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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BAILOUT I confused everybody by saying in the last issue, in the
item on the Word of the Year from Merriam-Webster, that this word
clearly came from the aviation verb to "bail out" or "bale out".
This contradicted my assertion in the online piece - about "bail"
and "bale" - that "bail out" (and by implication, the derived noun
"bailout") in the financial sense probably came from the legal one
of granting an accused person bail.
Ben Zimmer, a former editor for American dictionaries at the Oxford
University Press and a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary,
pointed out in e-mail that the noun "bailout", in the financial
sense, is actually quite old (he found an example in Time magazine
for 9 October 1939) and that the financial sense of the verb "bail
out" dates from 1932, only 7 years after the verb is first recorded
in the aviation sense. He argues in a piece he wrote in September
2008 (http://wwwords.org?BAIL) that "bailout" in this sense does
indeed almost certainly derive from the aviation meaning. I'm not
entirely convinced, having looked at the evidence again, not least
because the aviator's sense was jargon and probably hadn't had time
to reach a threshold of recognition that would allow a figurative
sense to grow out of it. The legal meaning still seems more likely.
However, Ben Zimmer argues that all three associations - legal,
boat and aviation - combine in the modern "bailout" and concludes,
"It's somehow fitting that the origin of a name for a messy
financial fix is itself pretty messy."
NOT TO BE SNEEZED AT Some fascinating comments came in following
my item about this old idiom. The Revd Dr Margaret Joachim wrote,
"There is a long tradition (particularly, I think, in Central
Europe) of preceding a joke by sneezing, which indicated that what
followed was not to be taken seriously. This made its way into
music - the 'sneeze' at the beginning of Til Eulenspiegel is very
well-known, as is that in Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije."
Douglas Yates commented, "Eighteenth-century French aristocratic
etiquette decreed that, if you could think of nothing pleasant to
say in reply to a fellow, you should pause, think, and if desperate
change the subject. A common tactic was to take a pinch of snuff to
disguise the pause. It seems to me it would soon become apparent
that the taking of a pinch of snuff was synonymous with a dismissal
of whatever had just been said. Since taking a pinch of snuff would
inevitably be followed by a sneeze, could this practice be the
origin of both phrases?"
2. Turns of Phrase: Ecotarianism
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"Ecotarianism," wrote Tony Turnbull in The Times on 25 September,
"is the new buzzword, a kind of greatest hits of all our favourite
food movements from the past decade. It's about sourcing locally,
organically, sustainably, in season and leaving Earth's resources
untouched. It's goodbye to £3 chickens imported from Thailand and
hello to bean casseroles; no to winter asparagus and a resounding
yes to celeriac mash."
Turnbull says ecotarianism was "apparently coined two years ago by
a small group of Oxford undergraduates with an interest in food
politics". I can't confirm that, though the term was used in the
title of a paper by Jessica Lee at the Oxford Symposium on Food and
Cookery in September 2007, in which she noted that it "may be found
floating about on the internet in limited usage"; it has been said
since to be a catch-all term for anybody who is in general against
what is sometimes called "industrial food", but who varied in their
emphasis.
Ecotarians can be meat-eaters, vegetarians or vegans. At broadest,
it's an umbrella term for everybody who is concerned to eat food
with the lowest possible carbon footprint. From this wide usage, it
may be that "ecotarianism" is actually a blend of "ecological" with
"sectarianism" rather than with the more obvious "vegetarianism".
* Evening Standard, 25 Nov 2008: A good ecotarian bases their model
diet on Tara Garnett's study Cooking Up a Storm, a bible for people
who care about food and its impact on the environment.
* Observer, 23 Nov. 2008: It might seem unhelpful to fling in yet
another dietary definition, but ecotarianism has a winningly
common-sense approach. The concept is simple: eat the foods with
the lowest environmental burden, those with the lowest global-
warming potential (GWP) and the least chance of messing up the
planet via their acidification and pollution potential.
3. Weird Words: Aposiopesis /,ap at UsaI@U'pi:sIs/
{smm}æp{schwa}{shtu}sa{shti}{schwa}{shtu}{sm}pi{lm}s{shti}s
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The rhetorical device of suddenly breaking off in speech.
This rhetorical trick is perhaps best illustrated by examples. One
is from Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm: "'If you are acquainted
with Miss Dobson, a direct invitation should be sent to her,' said
the Duke. 'If you are not ...' The aposiopesis was icy." Another is
from P G Wodehouse, in The Adventures of Sally: "'So ...' said Mr.
Carmyle, becoming articulate, and allowed an impressive aposiopesis
to take the place of the rest of the speech."
It's a way to imply something without spelling it out, at the same
time suggesting unwillingness or inability to continue, as a result
of being overcome by a passion such as modesty, fear or anger.
The word is Latin, one of that vast stock of rhetorical terms that
was the backbone of political training in ancient Rome. When speech
was the only way to persuade an audience, mastery of the tricks of
oratory was vital. Its origins, however, lie further back, in the
Greek "aposiopan", be silent.
Many terms of rhetoric are obscure today and leave us as bemused
and uncomprehending as a character in Robert Silverberg's SF novel
Born With the Dead: "They spoke in fragments and ellipses, in
periphrastics and aposiopesis, in a style abundant in chiasmus,
metonymy, meiosis, oxymoron, and zeugma; their dazzling rhetorical
techniques left him baffled and uncomfortable, which beyond much
doubt was their intention." The nineteenth-century historian Lord
Macaulay dismissed the need to learn such tricks and the names for
them, here quoted in Trevelyan's Life: "Who ever reasoned better
for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an
enthymeme? Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance
because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis?"
4. Recently noted
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GIRNEY This turned up in an article in the issue of New Scientist
for 22 November. I thought immediately of girning, which the Oxford
English Dictionary defines as "showing one's teeth in rage, pain or
disappointment", but which is often used for a comic grimace, such
as in humorous competitions at fairs ("girn" comes from "grin", by
what's called metathesis, the transposition of sounds or letters in
a word; it's also spelled "gurn"). But "girney" is different and
seems to be specific to research into primates. Girneys are a type
of vocalisation, a bit like human baby talk, by which adult female
monkeys establish friendly contact with infant monkeys who are not
their own offspring. I haven't been able to find the origin of the
term, which appears for the first time that I can trace in the book
Primate Behavior in 1975.
NUMERATI They're all out to get you, including mathematicians. It
isn't just paranoia, journalist Stephen Baker asserts in his new
book The Numerati: How They'll Get My Number and Yours. They're the
data miners, who take the vast accumulation of digital data that we
involuntarily create in our daily lives and distil information from
it that marketers can use to target us individually, based on our
known habits and desires. Baker appears to have invented his term,
based on the plural ending in "literati" and "glitterati", though
Brian Bolt created Dr Numerati in his books on mathematics in the
1980s.
TRUMAN SYNDROME Thanks to Dave Langford and Ansible, I'm now aware
of this novel psychiatric classification. News of it came via an AP
report on 24 November which has appeared in dozens of newspapers,
though not the one that graces the Quinion breakfast table. The
report says it's "a delusion afflicting people who are convinced
that their lives are secretly playing out on a reality TV show."
Two psychiatrists in the US, Joel and Ian Gold, claim to have heard
of more than 50 people with the delusion. They have taken its name
from the film The Truman Show, in which Truman Burbank lives out
his life unaware that his every moment is broadcast as a TV show.
WOTY UPDATES The editors of Webster's New World College Dictionary
announced the winner of its 2008 Word of the Year competition, as
previewed here last week. The winner is "overshare", meaning to
divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast
interview, thereby prompting reactions that range from alarmed
discomfort to approval. As commentators have noted, it's a strange
choice because it has no particular associations with 2008 and it
has been known for a long time: parents were reporting it in mild
bemusement as teen slang back in 2000 and it wasn't new even then.
Examples on newsgroups date from 1996 and it reached the New York
Times in November 1998: "In fact, in an elevator once, making what
he considered neighborly conversation, someone told him that he
'overshares.'" The word gained wider recognition by being used in
the cheerleader film Bring it On in 2000. An equivalent of even
greater age is "TMI", too much information.
5. Q&A: Wax poetic
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Q. I am wondering if you could explain what "wax poetic" means and
its origin. There is a US-based music band called Wax Poetic and I
have heard the phrase or idiom on a couple of other occasions but
have never been able to figure out what the speaker meant. [Erol
Bozok, Turkey; a related question came from John Russo]
A. These days, the verb "to wax" - if we leave aside such meanings
as polishing cars and removing hair from legs - almost only turns
up in connection with the phases of the moon. The moon waxes when
its illuminated face grows larger from new moon to full moon, then
wanes until the cycle starts again.
At one time "wax" was the usual verb meaning to become bigger, but
from the fifteenth century onwards it was progressively replaced by
"grow", so that it survives now only in discussions of the moon or
in set phrases such as your "wax poetic" and similar formations -
"wax eloquent", "wax lyrical", even "wax sententious".
I agree this is an idiomatic form that's not easy to understand. In
everyday usage, in which such set forms are bordering on cliché, it
means merely to communicate in the way that's described. So "wax
poetic" means only "speak or write poetically". Sometimes there's a
hint that the person is doing so increasingly - becoming expansive
in his language, figuratively increasing or enlarging the specified
quality - but that's present rarely enough that a connection with
the "grow" sense of "wax" can't be assumed. However, a link exists,
since the usage perpetuates one old sense of the verb, "become or
turn", with a nod to another, in which "wax" before an adjective
meant to gradually increase that quality or become it.
It may be significant that the first edition of the Oxford English
Dictionary, whose entry for "wax" was published in 1926, didn't
include this idiomatic sense of the verb and it had to wait until
2006 before it was added to the online entry. The first example in
this sense in the entry is dated 1842, but there's no instance
included of "wax poetic". The earliest I can find is in Sir Henry
Morton Stanley's book of 1872, How I Found Livingstone: "One could
almost wax poetic, but we will keep such ambitious ideas for a
future day."
It certainly seems that this construction became common only after
the literal usage of the verb had declined to almost nothing.
6. Elsewhere
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You may recall that in the issue of 22 November the Sic! section
included an item about a menu that listed "Ground veal patties with
aborigine", when "aubergine" was meant. This turns out to be a more
widespread and subtle error than it seemed at first sight. Arnold
Zwicky, Visiting Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University,
has written about it on Language Log (http://wwwords.org?BRGN).
7. Sic!
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Matthew Francis writes: "I saw the following on the Guardian's site
about a new species of ant threatening the UK: 'Boomsma and his
team think it is moved around by the horticultural trade because it
hides inside plant pots. "That is the most reasonable hypothesis
for how these ants get transported because the ants themselves have
lost the ability to fly so they are very poor disbursers," he
said.' Yes, ants are known for being miserly. Give me grasshoppers
any day."
Sometimes we can't be sure whether a bored subeditor is having a
joke or not. On Wednesday, the BBC Web site, Henry Drury found, had
a story about an original Whisky Galore bottle recovered from the
wreck of the SS Politician off the Outer Hebrides, which was about
to be auctioned. The headline read "Whisky Galore bottle goes under
the hammer."
"In the online version of the Salina Journal, Kansas," writes Kevin
Dettmer, "I was reading an article about a wind farm, and I ran
across this sentence: 'It represented a positive result to Rep
Elaine Bowers, R-Concordia, who recalled the perils of Kansas gales
while riding her bicycle and throwing the discus at track meets.'
That event sounds almost as dangerous as hurling the javelin while
on roller skates, especially in a strong wind."
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