World Wide Words -- 09 Feb 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 8 21:54:31 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 574 Saturday 9 February 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: Franglais.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Hard graft.
5. Q&A: Twaddle.
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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SLEDGING A further follow-up came from Geoffrey Ogden-Browne. He
pointed out that the Australian spin bowler and commentator Kerry
O'Keefe remembered the circumstances of its creation in his book
According to Skull in 2004. In brief, he says it came about at a
barbecue in an Adelaide backyard in the early 1970s during which a
member of a team "made inappropriate comments to a lady" and was
ruled out of order by John Benaud, Ritchie Benaud's cricket-coach
brother. "Benaud added that the transgressor's outburst was as
'subtle as a sledgehammer' and he momentarily became known as
'Percy Sledgehammer' (a reference to the artist who belted out the
tune When A Man Loves A Woman). The 'Percy' soon disappeared and
for the remainder of the season anyone who used over the top
language was known as a 'sledge'." This neatly combines the two
main stories about the origin. As they say in the printed papers,
this correspondence is now closed!
PHONETIC GUIDE A number of fonts are now widely available for the
major operating systems that include symbols of the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the standard method for representing the
pronunciation of words. I've finally found time to change all the
IPA pronunciations on the Web site, about 600 of them, to use such
fonts. When I started the site (many years ago), I had to create
IPA pronunciations as images. Frankly, they were a nuisance and I
included pronunciations as little as possible. Now I can just type
in the appropriate characters. The results look better, too. The
page that gives all the details (http:/wwwords.org?PRON) has also
been updated.
2. Weird Words: Franglais /fra~gleI/ (*)
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French containing many loans from English.
The death was announced on 30 January of the British humorist Miles
Kington. During his time working for Punch magazine in the 1970s,
he wrote a regular weekly column, Let's Parler Franglais!, short
pieces pretending to be a course in basic French ("Teach yourself
dans dix minutes. C'est un walk-over."); these were published as a
series of books from 1979 on. (He also produced a Latin Tourist
Phrase Book that included such gems of mistranslation as "ad hoc",
wine not included, and "ex cathedra", ruined church.)
Though his is the name most closely associated with Franglais in
the UK, he didn't invent the term. It was created in French in 1959
as a blend of "Français" and "Anglais". It referred to the dilution
of the purity of French through the uncontrolled introduction of
such Americanisms (or what were considered to be Americanisms - we
British were excused) as "le weekend", "le melting-pot", "le snack-
bar" and "le striptease". It appeared in Parlez-vous Franglais, by
Professor René Étiemble, then professor of comparative languages at
the Sorbonne. "The French language is a treasure," he wrote. "To
violate it is a crime."
In English, under the influence of writers such as Miles Kington,
"Franglais" came instead to mean the macaronic mangling of both
languages for humorous purposes. However, the genre, if we can
dignify it by that name, goes back a lot further. Surtees had fun
with it in Jorrock's Jaunts and Jollities (1838): "'Oui, Monsieur,
cinq fois,' repeated the Countess, telling the number off on her
fingers - 'Café at nine of the matin, déjeuner à la fourchette at
onze o'clock, diner at cinq heure, café at six hour, and souper at
neuf hour.'"
(*) See http:/wwwords.org?PRON for a pronunciation guide. The "a~"
indicates a nasalised "a" sound as in French "banque" or "sans".
3. Recently noted
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MACQUARIE DICTIONARY WORDS OF 2007 Forget the Oscars, it's time to
open the envelopes in this final round of voting for the best words
of 2007. The Macquarie Dictionary asked visitors to its Web site to
vote on their favourite words of the year in no less than seventeen
categories (now you can see why I thought of the Oscars). If you're
interested in the details, you will find them on the Dictionary's
site (http://wwwords.org?MCQD). The term receiving the most votes
out of the 75 on offer and which therefore wins the People's Choice
Award is "password fatigue", frustration caused by having too many
different passwords to remember, which results in an inability to
remember even those most commonly used. The choice of the Macquarie
Dictionary Word of the Year Committee was "pod slurping", which is
defined as "the downloading of large quantities of data to an MP3
player or memory stick from a computer". The press release said,
"The committee felt that the most important criterion for word of
the year should be linguistic creativity and evocativeness, rather
than simple worthiness or usefulness." The earliest example of "pod
slurping" I have in my database was in the New Scientist on 25 June
2005 in an article that was widely picked up by other media. The
article quotes the US American security expert Abe Usher, who seems
to have invented it. The Macquarie definition doesn't give the full
context - the term refers specifically to using MP3 players such as
iPods and other USB storage devices to steal sensitive corporate
data. There is also the closely related but rarer "data slurping".
CHURNALISM This word has gained what will almost certainly prove
to be temporary public notice through the publication in the UK on
Thursday of a book, Flat Earth News, by the journalist Nick Davies.
He argues that journalism in the UK is in a terrible state, with
reporters frequently being merely "passive processors of second-
hand material generated by the booming PR industry and a handful of
wire agencies, most of which flows into our stories without being
properly checked." Part of the problem is the greatly increased
workload on journalists in the past decade as proprietors slash
costs by reducing staff. Davies' conclusion is that "The relentless
impact of commercialisation has seen our journalism reduced to mere
churnalism."
MY MONTH People often write and ask about my day job. Insofar as I
have one, it is as a freelance field worker for the Oxford English
Dictionary, always on the watch for new or interesting words. The
list of those I've marked in the past month are as eclectic a bunch
as one might want. They include "liturgist", in the original Greek
sense of a rich citizen in a community who took on a public office
or duty which was discharged at his own expense; "unijohn", an all-
in-one male undergarment, described in the article as "a kind of
man-sized babygro"; "fishmaster", the person in charge of fisheries
work on a trawler; "umbilicoplasty", plastic surgery to turn your
navel from an innie to an outie (plus "undo-plasty", an operation
to reverse incompetent or unwanted plastic surgery); "Boyzilian",
presumably modelled on "Brazilian", waxing to remove most or all of
the hair from a man's most intimate areas; "zythologist", a person
who studies beer (presumably from the Latin "zythum" for a type of
malted beer brewed in Egypt, which has had some notoriety as the
last word in a few dictionaries); "limbo-skating", skateboarding in
which a boarder slides under obstacles such as cars; "apart-hotel",
an apartment or flat that provides hotel services, which sounds
like a snazzy new name for serviced accommodation; and "strategic
incompetence", a sudden inability to do a job as a way of avoiding
undesirable tasks.
4. Q&A: Hard graft
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Q. I was wondering if anyone knew where the term "hard graft" came
from, as in the British sense of hard work. I believe in the US the
term has a different pejorative meaning. [Raymond Hogg, Edinburgh]
A. There are several senses of "graft" in the language, such as the
gardening, medical and the bribery and corruption from the US that
you mention, all from different sources.
Yours started life as another word for "spit", the depth of earth
that can be thrown up at once with a spade. This comes from the Old
Norse "groftr", digging, and is also linked with the verb "grave",
an ancient Germanic one also meaning to dig (from which we get the
noun "grave" in the body-burial sense).
Most commonly, "graft" turned up in the phrase "spade's graft" for
one spit's depth, as in this from the Transactions of the Society
of Arts in 1792: "We dug one spade's graft (about nine inches deep,
and seven inches wide) into the quick sand." It was also used for a
trench or ditch, something that had been grafted, and for a narrow,
crescent-shaped spade workmen cut drains with. The West Somerset
Word-Book of 1888 noted that to graft was to go much deeper than
"to spit"; a glossary of 1891 of North Devon speech recorded that
to graft was "to push the tool down to its full depth each time the
soil is lifted".
The implication was that grafting is hard work. But the English
Dialect Dictionary noted that in some counties, "graft" had taken
on a broader sense of work of any kind, but not particularly hard
work.
The evidence strongly suggests that it was in Australia and New
Zealand that it came to mean heavy labour and where "hard graft"
first appeared. John Rochfort, writing in 1853 in Adventures of a
Surveyor in New Zealand, said, "I could make more money by 'hard
graft', as they call labour in the colonies." An Australian work of
1873, Christmas on Carringa, includes, "My name is Jim the Cadger.
I'm a downy cove, you see. 'Hard graft', it ain't my fancy."
It appears in the United States at the end of the century, where -
for example - the Fresno Weekly Republican uses it on 10 August
1899: "Two years of strict military discipline, hard "graft" and
sobriety will make a man out of him, if anything will." But it
never seems to have caught on in that country.
5. Q&A: Twaddle
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Q. On Radio 5 today (15 January 2008) Janet Street-Porter and Simon
Mayo agreed that "twaddle" was (or had been) an indecent word. I've
never heard this before, and have always used the word freely. Can
you enlighten me on its meaning and origin? [Alison Saville, West
Sussex]
A. So far as I can find out, "twaddle" has always been an insult
but it has never been indecent. But I can guess why they should
think that.
Facts first, inference later.
"Twaddle", meaning trivial or foolish speech or writing, has been
in the language since the latter part of the eighteenth century. It
turns up first in the correspondence of Mrs Mary Delany, a famous
letter writer, better known for her flower compositions under the
title of Hortus Siccus. In 1782, she wrote about an author of the
period: "Fanny Burney has taken possession of the ear of those who
found their amusement in reading her twaddle (that piece of old
fashioned slang I should not have dared to write or utter, within
hearing of my dear mother)."
Aha. But it turns out that Mrs Delany just meant that the word was
impolite, not obscene. It's a variant of an older word, "twattle",
which has mainly been dialectal and hasn't been recorded much in
print. That meant to talk foolishly or idly or to chatter inanely.
A twattle-basket was a chatterbox. It seems to have been itself a
variation on "tattle", as in "tittle-tattle", another of those many
reduplicated terms that English is so fond of, which has also been
written as "twittle-twattle". The Oxford English Dictionary notes
that these, and other forms, are probably echoic in origin and are
primarily colloquial, not often having been written down. So it's
difficult to work out which came first.
My guess is that Janet Street-Porter and Simon Mayo knew about the
link with "twattle" and made the unreasonable assumption that it
had a direct link with "twat" for a woman's genitals, a low slang
term dating from the seventeenth century, whose origin is unknown.
Of such wild guesses are folk etymologies born.
6. Sic!
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My wife and I were puzzled by an advertisement in last Saturday's
Guardian Weekend magazine for a UK short-break holiday: "Scenic
Scottish Railways by air." We visualised low-flying helicopters.
Walter Sheppard e-mailed from Virginia: "An ad for a TV broadcast
by the singer Chantal Chamandy proclaims, 'The first time in 5000
years that a concert has been filmed at The Pyramids!' Who do you
suppose sang at the last filming? Tut and the Tooters?"
The old errors are the best. From the Guardian's Corrections and
Clarifications column on Wednesday, referring to an article two
days earlier: "Whether the romance of the French president and
Carla Bruni was very pubic, only they can say. We meant to say it
was very public."
Trevor Cowell of Perth in Tasmania noticed a caption under a photo
in the issue of The Mercury for 6 February: 'Josephine Brownhill,
of Pontville, waters her garden with her dog, Cooper. Coming from
Adelaide she is used to being sparing with water'. It would seem
the dog is more generous.
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