World Wide Words -- 13 Dec 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 12 14:07:44 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 617 Saturday 13 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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For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Burgoo.
3. Vote for World Wide Words.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Cupertino.
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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NOT TO BE SNEEZED AT Following up last week's comments on the
possible musical associations with this expression, Martin Kuskis
and James Pickford denied there were musical sneezes in Richard
Strauss's Til Eulenspiegel or in Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije but
commented that a famous musical sneeze is at the start of Zoltán
Kodály´s Háry János suite. Mr Kuskis noted that Wikipedia quotes
Kodály: "According to Hungarian superstition, if a statement is
followed by a sneeze of one of the hearers, it is regarded as
confirmation of its truth."
This is the wrong way round for it to be the source of the English
expression. But it does match a Yiddish superstition Mordechai Ben-
Menachem wrote from Jerusalem to tell us about. It's encapsulated
in the expression "sneezed to the truth", which he heard in his
childhood in the US. An example is in Children of the Ghetto, by
Israel Zangwill:
"Of course!" said Malka in her most acid tone. "My kinder
[children] always know better than me." There was a moment
of painful silence. ... Then Ezekiel sneezed. It was a
convulsive "atichoo," and agitated the infant to its most
intimate flannel-roll. "For thy Salvation do I hope, O
Lord," murmured Malka, piously, adding triumphantly aloud,
"There! the kind has sneezed to the truth of it. I knew I
was right."
It's an ancient belief, I've since discovered; it appears in the
Odyssey, in which Penelope laughs with delight because Telemachus
has sneezed to what she hopes will be the truth.
Though it's interesting in its own right, I'm unsure of the extent
to which this helps with the origin of "not to be sneezed at".
WELL, I'M ... "I don't know if this can be considered aposiopesis,"
writes Wilson Fowlie, "as it wasn't used as a rhetorical device as
such, but my favourite example of the phenomenon occurred when a
co-worker got lost mid-thought, then got distracted in the middle
of saying so. The result was 'I just lost my train of...'."
2. Weird Words: Burgoo /b3:'gu:/
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A stew or thick soup.
This is traditionally a dish associated with the wild frontier of
the US. At one time burgoo was a meal of wild game, such as turkey,
quail, venison, squirrel, rabbit, opossum, or raccoon, that was
slow-cooked outdoors in iron pots; chicken, vegetables, and pork
were among the ingredients that came along later. It's linked to
Kentucky in particular, where it has traditionally been served
during the Kentucky Derby, though the Kentucky Post lamented in
2003 that "Burgoo's heyday is gone".
This description of its making by John Hill Aughey in his 1905 book
entitled Tupelo confirms the similarity to an Irish stew:
Burgoo has a basis, as the chemist says. The basis on this
occasion consists of 150 chickens and 225 pounds of beef
in joints, and other forms best suited for soup. To this
has been added a bushel or two of tomatoes. The heap of
shaven roasting ears tells of another accessory before the
fact. Cabbage and potatoes and probably other things in
small quantities, but too numerous to mention, have gone
into the pots... Gradually vegetables lose all distinctive
form and appearance and the compound is reduced to a
homogeneous liquid, about the consistency of molasses.
"Burgoo ought to boil about 14 hours," says the old expert,
"we've only had about 8 for this, but I think they'll be
able to eat it."
It was sailor's food to start with, a very different kind of dish.
It was a type of porridge, perhaps seasoned with salt, butter and
sugar. That makes sense, since its name comes via Turkish "bulgur"
from a Persian word for wheat that has been cooked, dried, and
crushed. When C S Forester wrote in his naval story The Happy
Return about the version served up to Captain Horatio Hornblower -
"The burgoo was a savoury mess of unspeakable appearance compounded
of mashed biscuit crumbs and minced salt beef" - he was describing
a recipe unknown to historians of maritime cuisine, though he may
have had in mind a variation on the North American sense of the
word.
3. Vote for World Wide Words
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Spare a moment from seasonal preparations. Your continuing help is
required. World Wide Words is dropping back in the contest for the
2008-09 Choice Awards. This is the competition organised by L-Soft,
creators of the LISTSERV mailing list software on which the World
Wide Words newsletter is distributed. Do vote and keep on voting
(you're allowed to vote once a day) via http://wwwords.org?LCAS.
You might put the L-Soft voting page address in your browser's
bookmarks to remind you.
4. Recently noted
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MEGA MONDAY Americans have long had Black Friday, the day after
Thanksgiving, traditionally shoppers' big day for getting in their
Christmas gifts. "Cyber Monday" (http://wwwords.org?CYMO) appeared
in 2006 for the Monday after Black Friday, which was claimed to be
the biggest online shopping day of the year. Last week, British
newspapers widely employed another term, Mega Monday, for the day
on which we're all supposed to go mad on the Internet. However, it
was linked instead to the first Monday in December. Mega Monday
actually appeared last year, though my linguistic radar failed to
pick it up. One report after the event said that Monday had been
big online but that next Monday would be bigger. Megaplus Monday?
GERMAN WOTY The publishers of Langenscheidt dictionaries announced
their young person's word of the year (Jugendwort 2008). They chose
"Gammelfleischparty". It's unflattering youth slang for a gathering
of people aged over 30. The word may be translated as "spoiled meat
party". "Gammelfleisch" has been in the news this year because of a
scandal involving meat packers who were supplying kebab restaurants
with products past their sell-by date. The runner up in the awards
was "Bildschirmbräune", screen suntan, for the notoriously pasty
faces of computer geeks. The words were chosen through a poll of
young people on a German Web site.
5. Q&A: Cupertino
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Q. In last week's issue of your newsletter, you gave a link to an
article by Arnold Zwicky at Language Log. He writes "there's a
remote possibility that some of the hits for aborigine on its own
are Cupertinos." What's a Cupertino - and why? [M Nease]
A. I had a feeling this might come up. This answer is based in part
on Benjamin Zimmer's discussion of the topic, also in Language Log.
An automated spelling checker attached to a word-processing program
is one of the curses of our age. In the hands of an inexperienced,
over-hasty or ignorant user it readily perpetrates dreadful errors
in the name of correctness. One example appeared in a piece in the
New York Times in October 2005 about Stephen Colbert's neologism
"truthiness": throughout it instead referred to "trustiness", the
first suggestion from the paper's automated checking software. In
September 2006 an issue of the Arlington Advocate included the
sentence, "Police denitrified the youths and seized the paintball
guns." The writer left the first letter off "identified" and the
spelling checker corrected what remained.
In 2000 the second issue of Language Matters, a magazine by the
European Commission's English-language translators, included an
article by Elizabeth Muller on the problem with the title Cupertino
and After.
Cupertino, the city in California, is best known for hosting the
headquarters of Apple Computers. But the term doesn't come from the
firm. The real source is spelling checkers that helpfully include
the names of places as well as lists of words. In a notorious case
documented by Ms Muller, European writers who omitted the hyphen
from "co-operation" (the standard form in British English) found
that their automated checkers were turning it into "Cupertino".
Being way behind the computing curve, I'm writing this text using
Microsoft Word 97, which seems to be the offending software (more
recent editions have corrected the error); in that, if you set the
language to British English, "cooperation" does get automatically
changed to "Cupertino", the first spelling suggestion in the list.
For reasons known only to God and Word's programmers, the obvious
"co-operation" comes second.
Hence "Cupertino effect" for the phenomenon and "Cupertino" for a
word or phrase that has been involuntarily transmogrified through
ill-programmed computer software unmediated by common sense or
timely proofreading.
A search through the Web pages of international organisations such
as the UN and NATO (and, of course, the EU) finds lots of examples
of the canonical form of the error. A 1999 NATO report mentions the
"Organization for Security and Cupertino in Europe"; an EU paper of
2003 talks of "the scope for Cupertino and joint development of
programmes"; a UN report dated January 2005 argues for "improving
the efficiency of international Cupertino". And so on.
Other notorious examples of the Cupertino effect include an article
in the Denver Post that turned the Harry Potter villain Voldemort
into Voltmeter, one in The New York Times that gave the first name
of American footballer DeMeco Ryans as Demerol, and a Reuters story
which changed the name of the Muttahida Quami movement of Pakistan
into the Muttonhead Quail movement.
It could be worse. Leave out one of the "o"s from the beginning of
"co-operation" as well as the hyphen and you might be offered not
"Cupertino" but "copulation". Now that would be an error to write
home about. Or perhaps not.
6. Elsewhere
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SNOWCLONE IS THE NEW CUPERTINO To continue the theme of humorous
terminology linked with contributors to Language Log, how about
"snowclone"? My lead-in is a strained example of the snowclone "X
is the new Y", of which there are many examples, such as "pink is
the new black". Mark Peters has written a useful introduction to
the term in his article "May I Compare Thee to a Snowclone?"; go
via http://wwwords.org?SNCL to read it.
OED UPDATES Revisions to the online Oxford English Dictionary went
online on 11 December; a quarter of the third edition has now been
published. See comments on the new entries, in the range from "ran"
(a regional term for a particular width of net or twine) to "reamy"
(creamy, frothy) from John Simpson (http://wwwords.org?OEDA) the
OED's Chief Editor, and Graeme Diamond (http://wwwords.org?OEDB),
the Principal Editor, New Words.
DICTIONARY FURORE There's been a fuss in the UK this week over the
decision by Oxford University Press to leave out a number of words
connected with religion, British history and UK wildlife from its
children's dictionary, the Oxford Junior Dictionary, and replace
them with words such as "blog" and "broadband". For the story from
the Daily Telegraph and a list of the words that are out and in, go
via http://wwwords.org?ODRW.
SESQUIOTICA This neologistic formation is the title of a daily
blog on words by James Harbeck, a Canadian editor and writer, who
explains that "Sesquiotica is things sesquiotic. Sesquiotics is
three times as good as semiotics. Lend me an ear and a half!" Get
to his blog via http://wwwords.org?SQTC.
WORLD WIDE WORDS UPDATES I've updated or expanded several pieces
on the World Wide Words Web site this week. The first two have been
substantially rewritten:
Goody two shoes (http://wwwords.org?GTSS)
MacGuffin (http://wwwords.org?MCGN)
Horse latitudes (http://wwwords.org?HRLD)
Octothorpe (http://wwwords.org?OCTT)
7. Sic!
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Colm Osiris discovered a report on the BBC news site about a labour
dispute among bus drivers and depot staff in Aberdeen, Scotland,
which is disrupting Christmas shopping. Its headline is "Festive
bus strike gets under way".
Toronto's Globe & Mail, like many other newspapers, has a regular
"from the archives" feature. James Spence found this in the "50
Years Ago" section of last Monday's column: "Prince Philip was a
member of a shooting party which bagged 450 peasants in the hills
around Highclere Castle, Berkshire." James Spence speculates this
"might explain the ambiguous feelings many Britons are reported to
have towards HRH".
In the Snapshots section of the online Sydney Morning Herald on 10
December, under a picture of people who have chained themselves
together, Andre Roy found this caption: "Greenpeace activists stand
chained together in protest outside Japan's embassy to demand the
country halt whale hunting in Mexico City." We didn't know they had
whales in Mexico City.
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