World Wide Words -- 16 Feb 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 15 17:51:50 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 575 Saturday 16 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: Verecund.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Butterscotch.
5. Topical Words: Unclarity.
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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FRANGLAIS Colin Thornton was one reader of several who commented
on the special case of French-speaking Canada: "Mon ami. I live
dans la capitale mondial de Franglais. Shediac, New Brunswick, is a
small town on the east coast of Canada. Half of this province is
French and half English. So too is the day-to-day language. People
ask questions in French and answer in English, switch languages
halfway through sentences and add French endings to English verbs.
Purists are upset about this because it's a sign of assimilation.
To my ear, however, it's delightful. Examples: 'Worry pas ta brain,
bébé' (chill, baby); 'Pile on le bois sec' (let's move!); 'Quel
drag' (uncool); 'Quelle belle shortcut' (an unexpected dead end);
and 'Il prend le heart attack' (an unexpected dead end).' I could
go on and on, but it's been snowing all day and l'homme's just
arrived to plower mon driveway."
TWADDLE As an aside on this word, Andy Ibbotson pointed out that
"degrees Twaddle" is an arbitrary scale that measures the specific
gravity of liquids denser than water. I presume this is named for a
man with the surname Twaddle rather than asserting the scale is
nonsense, though I've not been able to confirm this or find out
anything about him. (He appears sometimes spelled "Twaddell", but
this would seem to be an error.)
UPDATES Recent comments in these columns about the cricket term
"sledging" and the Australian word of the year 2007 from Macquarie
Dictionary, "pod slurping", have led me to create permanent items
about them. I've also written a summary of all the selections for
Words of the Year 2007 and have updated the pieces that refer to
them. All these are linked from the home page.
2. Weird Words: Verecund /'verIKVnd/
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Modest, bashful, shy.
The Oxford English Dictionary's entry for this word, published back
in 1916, doesn't suggest it's obsolete or even rare. It isn't quite
obsolete yet, although it has never been common. You need to have
learned Latin in your youth, something that was once standard for
educated writers of earlier generations, of course, to have been
likely to include this word in your prose.
Its heyday, insofar as it ever had one, was roughly in the half
century after 1850. It turns up in an article penned by an erudite
columnist in the issue of The Marion Weekly Star of Ohio dated 17
February 1912, in a comment that can only make us marvel at how
times have changed:
What this country needs is men who are not afraid to proclaim
to the public their virtues of mind and character. There is too
little of the projection of self into the arena. Our politics
is speckled with men who are so diffident and verecund they
never say a word about themselves or their achievements.
The only example I can find from modern times is in Translations by
the Irish playwright Brian Friel, first performed in 1980, though
set in 1833. In it, characters speak in Irish, Greek, Latin and
English. So an obscure Latinate word fits perfectly: "He speaks -
on his own admission - only English; and to his credit he seemed
suitably verecund."
The word is from Latin "verecundus", which derives from the verb
"vereri", to revere or fear.
3. Recently noted
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DOWNMAN Michael Hocken wrote in to query this term, which turned
up in a BBC Scotland news report last Sunday in connection with a
security alert on a North Sea oil rig. It was new to me. Anthony
Massey, a BBC news producer, also e-mailed me to point it out: "One
of the curiosities of working in the BBC newsroom is that every now
and again a completely new word swims into your ken." It seems to
be a jargon term of the oil industry and means "evacuation". It
appeared in a press release from the oil rig's operator: "Britannia
Operator Ltd can confirm that the precautionary downman initiated
today from the Britannia field has been halted." It transpired that
the partial evacuation was the result of a bomb scare provoked by
an over-realistic dream by a person on board. I've found a very few
examples of the term, the earliest from 2003 in connection with an
incident on a Nigerian oil rig. It appears in The Canadian Review
of Sociology and Anthropology in 1998, in which it refers to laying
off workers, a sense related to "downsizing". This didn't fit, it
seemed. However, matters became clearer when Michael Hocken found
an example of the associated verb in a CBC report from 1999: "As a
precautionary measure, we're going to down man the rig today and
tomorrow." "Down" here is indeed in the sense of "reduce the size
or number of something", hence "downman" means to take men off a
rig, either temporarily or permanently. The noun then followed.
GENIUS WORDMAKER John Milton's 400th birthday is being celebrated
by an exhibition at his alma mater, Cambridge, for the next six
months. Gavin Alexander, a fellow of Milton's college, Christ's,
argues that his contribution to the language as a creator of new
words and new word forms is greater than any other writer in the
language, including Shakespeare. He points out in an article that's
available online (http://wwwords.org?MLTN) that the Oxford English
Dictionary credits Milton with adding some 630 words. Shakespeare
has only 229. Without Milton's multilingual background and powers
of invention, we might not now have such words as love-lorn, far-
sighted, liturgical, exhilarating, debauchery, cherubic, padlock,
besottedly, unhealthily, depravity, dismissive, embellishing,
fragrance, terrific, didactic, irresponsible, or unprincipled.
4. Q&A: Butterscotch
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Q. If I have managed to get it straight (a dubious proposition at
best, of course), caramel is the result of pyrolising sugar syrup.
I was under the impression that butterscotch was similar, but made
from honey (though the definitions I can find seem to suggest it's
actually butter and brown sugar). This leads to two questions: a)
what is butterscotch, and b) why is it called that? [Peter Zilahy
Ingerman]
A. Don't look to me for culinary advice - I can burn boiled eggs.
My references say that butterscotch is indeed a form of caramel,
but made with butter and brown sugar, as you say, plus a touch of
vanilla. That's the limit of my expertise.
Unfortunately, I can't do that much better with your second query.
Nobody seems to know. Some argue that the second part is actually
"scorch", from the manner of its making. The Collins Dictionary
says that it may have been called that because it was first made in
Scotland. Neither suggestion is supported by evidence, though the
Scottish link seems plausible because Keillors of Dundee was one
firm that made butterscotch commercially.
The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation (indeed, its only
citation) is from 1865. It's not hard to take that back a while:
the first example I can find is from The Boy's Autumn Book of 1847.
Though that was published in New York it quotes a British itinerant
seller of sweets. It's worth quoting at some length for the period
flavour (to coin a phrase):
Well, you know, next morning I put my things in my cart,
ready for Nottingham goose-fair: the brandy-balls here, by
themselves - the butter-scotch there - the tuffey in this
place - the black-jack in that; and then I filled in with
cure-all, and hard-bake, and peppermint pincushions: really
it was beautiful to look at, I'd done it so nicely.
Wikipedia states that the first maker of butterscotch was Samuel
Parkinson of Doncaster, in 1817. The firm certainly did make it
during the nineteenth century and Doncaster became famous for it.
However, I'm suspicious of the Wikipedia article, since it cites no
sources and claims that Queen Victoria used Thomas Crapper's famous
water closet on a visit to Doncaster in 1851; this would have been
hard, as Crapper started his business, in London, ten years later.
The Parkinson papers are deposited at the Doncaster Archives, from
where Dr Charles Kelham tells me they begin only in 1848, although
an article published in The Doncaster Review in September 1896 says
that "It was on the 11th of May 1817, that the late Mr. Samuel
Parkinson commenced the manufacture of butter-scotch." If he did
so, it seems unlikely, from the lack of written evidence before
1847, that he called it by that name.
Other writers argue that the sweetmeat has no link with Scotland.
Charles Earl Funk noted in Horsefeathers in 1958: "All directions
for the preparation of this candy after it is properly cooked close
with some such statement as: Pour upon oiled paper or well-buttered
pan and when slightly cool *score* with a knife into squares." He
points out that one sense of "scotch" was to score or cut a shallow
groove in something.
This seems more reasonable than to assume it was originally Scots,
especially in view of the known early history of its manufacture in
England. But, as often with word histories, it can't be proved.
5. Topical Words: Unclarity
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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, plunged himself
into enormous controversy by saying last week in a radio interview
and a lecture that it is inevitable that some aspects of sharia law
will have to be incorporated into UK law to accommodate our Muslim
population. The lecture, at the Royal Courts of Justice before an
audience of members of the legal profession, was a detailed and
subtle academic argument, not easy for a layperson to understand.
Leaving aside the issues he raised and the reasons for the immense
criticism he has since been subjected to, his half-apology to the
meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England this week
raised a linguistic issue.
He said, "I must take responsibility for any unclarity and for any
misleading choice of words that has helped to cause distress or
misunderstanding among the public." Unclarity? Every journalist,
broadcaster and cartoonist who quoted that sentence has focused on
the word through some sort of emphasis. This may have been because
it is rare. But why didn't he use "confusion" or "obscurity"? Was
it a scholar's diffidence or was he trying to euphemise his error
by means of a terribly British type of negative? I'm sure that it
was the former and that he undoubtedly meant "unclarity" literally,
an utterance that lacked clarity. But its history suggests its
users often prefer it to retain a penumbra of imprecision.
It was employed in the sense of a deliberate attempt to confuse by
hoaxer Alan Sokal, who wrote the famous fake article Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
Gravity that was published in Social Text in 1996. He was quoted in
Scientific American in March 1998: "'It took me a lot of writing
and rewriting and rewriting before the article reached the desired
level of unclarity,' he chuckles."
It has a longer history. It's recorded in Webster's Dictionary in
1934 and would therefore seem to be even older in the US. Though it
is most frequently encountered in the academic environment in which
Dr Williams is most comfortable, it turns up surprisingly often in
popular fiction. John Le Carré used it in Smiley's People in 1980:
"'Vladimir telephoned the Circus at lunch-time today, sir,' Mostyn
began, leaving some unclarity as to which 'sir' he was addressing."
Another example is in Ghost Ship by Diane Carey, a work from the
Star Trek fiction franchise, dated 1988: "To offer unclarity in
place of another unclarity - to replace ignorance with ambiguity -
is this my only service?" That might be a message for Dr Williams.
6. Sic!
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In the 11 February edition of The Oregonian, a description of the
movie Kings appears: "A tale of disenfranchisement and the search
for identity in which six friends from the west of Ireland reunite
after thirty years at a wake." Scott Jamieson suggests that, after
thirty years, you might as well declare the wake perpetual.
Peter Zilahy Ingerman found a headline on an AP wire story, which
has been widely reproduced in newspapers whose sub-editors don't
have time to think about such things: "Water Drops From Air Used on
Sugar Fire". Dr Ingerman commented, "I'm not entirely sure how many
different ways I can read this, but it's certainly at least three!"
Department of non-sentient hairdressing. In Murder at the Opera by
the late Margaret Truman, Miriam Raphael records, she describes a
gala opera ball in Washington: "Later, as whiskey and wine and heat
and humidity loosened lips and lacquered hair".
The Guardian Travel section last Saturday (9 February) included an
item on the new winter sport of "air-dating", which is speed-dating
on ski lifts. The author wrote, "The après-ski cocktail party is
outside a bar called Fantastique. As I walk there, past people on
crutches and small dogs, I can hear the pounding Euro music."
Menachem Vinegrad was sent an advertising e-mail with the subject
line, "Celebate Valentine's Eve". He feels that that is the last
thing anyone would want to do on St Valentine's Eve.
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