World Wide Words -- 23 Feb 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 22 14:33:25 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 576 Saturday 23 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. Turns of Phrase: Yaoi.
3. Weird Words: Metemptosis.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Fall guy.
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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DOWNMAN Following my item on this jargon term of the oil business,
Tony Glaser e-mailed from South Carolina: "Today I saw a patient
who had been evacuated from an oil rig. He didn't use 'downman',
but without comment or explanation he used a word that is new to
me. He kept referring to the oil platform as an 'oplat'." This is
relatively common, I discover, though always written in capital
letters as an abbreviation of Oil PLATform. So it's not said as
"op-lat", as one might assume, but as "o-plat".
I SAY TWADDLE, YOU SAY TWADDELL ... My research skills escaped me
last week in trying to discover something about degrees Twaddle.
Crawford MacKeand and Joe Cunningham tell me that the inventor of
the scale was William Twaddell, an instrument maker of Glasgow in
the early nineteenth century. The National Museum of Scotland's Web
site (http://wwwords.org?TWHY) has a picture of a set of six of his
graded hydrometers. He made them to estimate the specific gravity
of various liquids (the NMS caption specifically mentions spirit
proofing, which presumably means the famous Glasgow whisky), though
his scale was later used in many other industries. The Dictionary
of National Biography doesn't mention him, though the scale named
after him has an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. He is so
little known that at least one maker currently sells hydrometers
engraved with the "Twaddle" scale. The many people who spell the
name wrong may be forgiven, however, since all three citations for
the OED's entry, dated between 1853 and 1873, spell it "Twaddle",
as do most of the earlier ones that I've now found. In 1825, The
Repertory of Patent Inventions said of the device, "It was first
constructed by a poor tippling glass-blower in Glasgow, whose name
was Twaddle. Hence it is called Twaddle's hydrometer." Might it be
that William Twaddell's obscurity lies in part in his imbibing too
much of the product he was testing?
MUTE INGLORIOUS MILTON? The number of words first recorded in the
works of Shakespeare was grossly understated in the piece on Milton
last week. The exact number is being revised downwards as research
finds examples that predate Shakespeare but it is still much larger
than the 229 given by the author of the article I quoted. Several
readers suggested he searched the online Oxford English Dictionary
without realising Shakespeare's name is abbreviated to "Shakes" in
older entries (or even "Shak" in one place). A search for the short
form as the first cited author produces 1663 results; searching on
Shakespeare's full name does indeed find only 229.
BUTTERSCOTCH In this piece last week, the Dundee firm famous for
its marmalade should have been given as Keiller, not Keillor. I may
have been thinking of Garrison Keillor of Lake Wobegon fame.
2. Turns of Phrase: Yaoi /'jaUi:/ or /'jeIOI/
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This word is only now beginning to appear in general publications,
though it has been around in its specialist area for some years.
It refers to a type of manga or anime, so originally Japanese, that
focuses on male-to-male sexual relationships. Though it's therefore
popular among gays, it has proved to be still more popular among
women. So it has that in common with the - originally SF - genre of
slash fiction, in which male stars of popular TV shows and films
are portrayed as engaging in gay relationships, a genre that's also
popular with and mostly written by women. ("Slash" because the
original pair were Spock/Kirk from Star Trek, so written.)
Yaoi is said to be a Japanese acronym formed from the phrase "yama
nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi", which can be translated into English
as "no climax, no resolution, no meaning" or "no peak, no point, no
problem", though a recent article suggests it actually means "no
story, just the good bits", that is, mostly descriptions of the sex
with the minimum of story. The pronunciation often confuses people.
In Japanese, I'm told, it ought to be three syllables (roughly as
"yah-oh-ee"), though it's frequently heard as two, as often happens
in rapid speech. In English it seems to be said either as "YOW-ee"
(roughly the noise you make when your home team scores, or you do)
or as "YAY-oi", the former being nearer the Japanese pronunciation.
>From a linguistic point of view it's interesting that, though the
term and the genre are classically Japanese, the term itself isn't
so much used there. The preferred local name for it is "BL", short
for "boy love".
* Washington Post, 27 Jan. 2008: If Jack London and A.N. Roquelaure
(Anne Rice's erotic avatar) had been commissioned to write a novel
that would appeal simultaneously to lovers of yaoi (X-rated manga
featuring gay men and favored by female readers) and to furries
(fans in fur suits who enjoy pretending to be anthropomorphic
animals), the result might very well have resembled *A Companion to
Wolves*.
* Peter Holland, Shakespeare Survey 60, 2007: One of the earliest
examples of "yaoi" Shakespeare is Yasuko Aoike's manga for girls,
titled *Ibu no musuko tachi* (*Sons of Eve*, Tokyo, 1978), in which
Shakespeare, Lear, Hamlet and Romeo appear as male gay characters.
2. Weird Words: Metemptosis /metemp't at UsIs/
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Omission of the extra day of a leap year.
Though this word is extremely rare, the situation that it refers to
is still very much with us, as it refers to one of the corrections
that form part of the Gregorian calendar we all use. The correction
will not affect the leap day at the end of this month, however: the
next metemptosis will occur in 2100.
The problem for calendar creators is that the number of days in the
year doesn't exactly fit the length of the year - there's about a
quarter of a day over. The older Julian calendar from Roman times
had a simple way to deal with this: it just added an extra leap day
every four years to make up the numbers and get the calendar back
into sync with the year.
Unfortunately, over the next 1500 years it slowly became clear this
wasn't good enough. In fact, the number of days in the year is very
slightly less than 365¼, so the calendar was slowly gaining on the
seasons. In the sixteenth century, advisors to Pope Gregory XIII
told him that it was necessary to leave out some days to get things
back in step and to change the calendar to omit three leap years in
every 400 years. To do this, they suggested century years should
only be leap years if they were divisible by 400.
Astronomers created "metemptosis" in the early eighteenth century
for this process, when reform of the British calendar was becoming
urgent (Catholic countries had implemented it in 1582; Britain only
did so in 1752, though we weren't the last by any means). It's from
Greek "meta-", after, "em-", in, and "ptosis", a falling.
There is, to be complete, "proemptosis", its opposite, adding a day
to the calendar, in this case to keep it in line with what the moon
is doing. For reasons I have no intention of trying to explain, one
of these will not be needed until the year 4200.
3. Recently noted
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SEMICOLON This retiring and rarely encountered punctuation mark
gained some surprising exposure in the New York Times on Monday.
Neil Neches, who works for New York City Transit, wrote a sentence
in a sign asking subway passengers not to leave their newspapers
behind when they get off the train: "Please put it in a trash can;
that's good news for everyone." This was so rare - and even more
rarely accurate - a usage by a public servant that it made the
news.
SLEEVEFACING This curious fashion has reached the point this month
at which it has begun to be mentioned in the UK media. On Facebook,
people have taken to posting photographs of themselves with their
faces obscured by an LP record sleeve to create an arresting visual
illusion. The Observer recently noted, "The main motivation behind
such 'Sleevefacers' is to create larfs (in some cases 'awesome
larfs'), while letting it be known they are groovingly cool enough
to collect vinyl." The WOW Report is plangently enthusiastic about
it: "Sleevefacing's the sensation that's sweeping the nation. Or it
should be."
SPEEDRIDING It's hard to keep up with all the exotic pastimes now
being created, especially by someone like myself whose idea of an
extreme sport is climbing the stairs. Speedriding began to be more
widely known after it was publicised in a series of videos in the
winter of 2005-06. Skiers wear small parachute wings to give them
enough lift to get off the ground in order to avoid obstacles and
act as brakes, so making it an amalgam of skiing and hangliding.
The sport is being taught in various schools in Europe (the Swiss
and French have taken it up in particular) and the first contest in
the sport, the Speedriding Big Mountain competition, took place at
the end of January. It is also known as speedflying, though I am
told that aficionados make a distinction between the two.
4. Q&A: Fall guy
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Q. In a review by Tom Lutz in the Los Angeles Times for 10 February
2008 of Laton McCartney's book, The Teapot Dome Scandal, he refers
to Senator Albert B Fall of New Mexico: "His 1929 conviction for
accepting a bribe resulted in the first prison sentence handed to a
U.S. Cabinet member - and the coming of the term 'fall guy,' since
it was clear to most everyone that a wide conspiracy was afoot and
that very few were paying the price." This immediately set off my
finely honed Quinion folk-etymology radar. Could he be right?
[Brandon Gale]
A. Presumably this is from the book rather than Mr Lutz's own view
of the origin of the phrase. If so, Laton McCartney is the one who
has got it wrong, as a glance at a good dictionary would have told
him. He may have been misled by reference works that give Senator
Albert Bacon Fall as the source, such as Prison Slang by William K
Bentley and James M Corbett of 1992.
The instant and clinching objection to the story is that the term
was around before either Fall's conviction or the scandal itself,
which broke in 1922. A book, The Fall Guy by Brand Whitlock, was
published in 1912. The Oxford English Dictionary has examples from
1906 and Professor Jonathan's Lighter's Historical Dictionary of
American Slang has one from 1904. It's possible now to take it back
further. For example, it's in Life by John Ames Mitchell (1883):
"The president is the country's fall guy. He cannot call his soul
his own. He has to swallow his personal views and remember he is a
party man." My searches in historic newspaper files show, however,
that the term starts to appear in them only around 1904-05.
There are two senses given in dictionaries for "fall guy". It means
either a person who is easily duped, a victim, or one who takes the
blame and punishment for actions or crimes that have been committed
by someone else, a scapegoat. The latter sense was clearly present
right from the start.
The source is a US underworld slang sense of "fall", from the last
quarter of the nineteenth century - to be arrested for some crime
or to be convicted and imprisoned for it. (It's equivalent to the
roughly contemporary British slang "to go down", which originally
referred to the steps from the dock at the Old Bailey down to the
cells below.) It's also the origin of "taking the fall", but that
came along in the 1920s.
6. Sic!
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Department of post-mortem indecision: A cemetery manager was quoted
in the Guardian Weekend last Saturday (16 February). He explained
they sometimes had to exhume bodies: "Some people have an aversion
to burial and decide they would rather have a cremation after all."
While we're on such matters, Peter G Neumann reported in the Risks
Digest newsletter that the Web site of WSMV, Nashville, Tennessee,
had a story on 15 February under the headline "Woman Says Being
Declared Dead Ruins Life".
Department of clerical fecundity: Noted by Noel Donaghey on the Web
site of The Adelaide Advertiser for 15 February: "An effort to lift
South Australia's population to two million well before its target
of 2050 will be led by Monsignor David Cappo."
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