World Wide Words -- 05 Jan 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Jan 5 06:01:58 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 569 Saturday 5 January 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: Shopdropping.
3. Weird Words: Crimping.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Strait and narrow.
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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MISTAKES, I'VE MADE A FEW ... Apologies again for the mix-up last
Monday. Getting 29,000+ automated e-mails from the list server into
my mailbox was a bit of a shock to the system, both the computer's
and mine. The situation reminded me of a tag my physics professor
at Cambridge, who was also a Shakespeare scholar, used to put on a
guide to his practical classes: "Bloody instructions, which being
taught, return to plague the inventor." Bob Parks reminded me, "To
err is human but to really screw things up requires a computer."
To compound my error, as dozens of you pointed out, I wrote in my
follow-up apology about getting my "just desserts", instead of my
"just deserts". (I'd just consumed the last of my wife's splendid
Christmas cake at lunchtime; perhaps that was in my mind?) As James
Harbeck noted, "Sometimes you can't win for losing." Not wishing to
waste an opportunity to elucidate, I went for details to the Oxford
English Dictionary's "desert" entry ("An action or quality that
deserves its appropriate recompense"; a word from Old French that's
a close relative of "deserve"). Surprisingly, the OED's entry does
not have an example of "just deserts", even though the set phrase
goes back to the eighteenth century if not before. However, I did
find an example in the New York Times of 29 July 1862 spelled as
"just desserts". So I have historical precedent, if not accuracy,
on my side.
Michael Mollohan notes that where he comes from (he describes it as
a rather isolated part of West Virginia) the expression is "just
deserves", not "just deserts", as in "he got his just deserves".
Though it looks like a folk etymological error, it makes sense in
view of the close link between "desert" and "deserve", though the
OED doesn't admit to knowledge of "deserve" as a noun. I would
guess that this version is moderately well known in the US, in view
of the number of results from a Google search, but it doesn't
appear in any of my reference works. Most examples I've found are
from recent decades, but it turns up in a 1920 report of a US
Congress hearing on soldiers' compensation, "Give the boys their
just deserves." Edwin Casady's biography, Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey, quotes a letter from the earl dated 14 July 1546 (spelling
modernised): "May it please you, at my hearty request, to grant him
your letters for the obtaining his wages and the rest of his just
deserves." These older examples makes me wonder if "just deserves"
has been lurking in the language for centuries as a dialectal or
non-standard version.
On the American Dialect Society list, Douglas G Wilson pointed out
a further version, "just deservings", which he notes was not
uncommon in the nineteenth century and which is still around to
some extent. "Deserving" is recorded in the OED in the same sense
as "desert", with the first example coming from John Wyclif's
translation of the Psalms, dated 1388. I've found an example of
"just deservings" in a letter dated 23 April 1685 from James II to
the Scottish parliament.
2. Turns of Phrase: Shopdropping
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This word featured in a piece by Ian Urbina in the New York Times
on Christmas Eve. It's a curious process that the writer succinctly
described as reverse shoplifting.
Its beginnings lie in a US west-coast guerrilla-art movement that
wants to take over part of the public spaces of stores for artistic
and political purposes. One aim is to subvert commercialism as a
form of culture jamming (see http://wwwords.org?CLTR). As one
example, an artist might replace a product label with another that
features a political or consumerist message.
To judge by the New York Times article, the term has since spread
beyond its artistic origins to refer to any unauthorised placing of
materials in stores. Some is still political or consumer activism,
but the technique is now used for religious proselytising and for
straightforward advertising and promotion. Independent bands, for
instance, put copies of their albums in stores to promote them.
Early appearances of the term were linked to the California artist
Packard Jennings. The first example I've so far found was as the
title of an exhibition in San Francisco in March 2005 that included
some of Jennings' work.
Another term, which specifically refers to putting copies of CDs in
record shops, is "droplifting", which was coined by Richard Holland
of Turntable Trainwreck and The Institute for Sonic Ponderance in
2000.
* Ryan Watkins-Hughes, on shopdropping.net, 26 Dec. 2007: Similar
to the way street art stakes a claim to public space for self
expression, my shopdropping project subverts commercial space for
artistic use in an attempt to disrupt the mundane commercial
process with a purely artistic moment.
* New York Times, 24 Dec. 2007: At Mac's Backs Paperbacks, a used
bookstore in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, employees are dealing with
the influx of shopdropped works by local poets and playwrights by
putting a price tag on them and leaving them on the shelves.
3. Weird Words: Crimping
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Impressing men into the army, navy or merchant marine.
We all think we know what "crimping" means, but the common idea of
compressing something into small folds has nothing to do with this
process - or at least so far as we know, since it is of uncertain
origin. "Crimping" was like press-ganging, but done on a freelance
basis by men acting as agents or go-betweens.
That reflects the relevant sense of "crimp" for a man who crimped.
It's recorded from around the middle of the eighteenth century, for
example in John Blake's A Plan For Regulating the Marine System of
Great Britain of 1758: "When a master of a ship hath lost any of
his hands, he applies to a crimp who makes it his business to
seduce the men belonging to some other ship." It also appears in a
better known work, Captain Marryat's Mr Midshipman Easy of 1836:
"Offering three guineas ahead to the crimps for every good able
seaman." Writers in the later eighteenth century had fun comparing
crimps with pimps but there's no etymological connection.
The impressed men were often temporarily imprisoned in a crimping
house before being handed over. In 1794, a man attempted to escape
via a skylight from one near Charing Cross in London that was run
on behalf of the East India Company but fell to his death. This led
to riots in which several such houses were destroyed by the mob.
Another word for the process was "trepanning", which probably has
no linguistic link with the medical technique of cutting a hole in
the skull. We know little about where it's from; the Oxford English
Dictionary says it is "a word of obscure and low origin, probably
originally a term of thieves' or rogues' slang." To trepan someone
(stress on the second syllable) was to entrap, ensnare, inveigle or
lure them into some situation not to their benefit. It was of wider
application than just press-ganging and some contemporary writers
made a distinction between the two methods.
4. Recently noted
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LAST WORDS OF 2007 As is now traditional, the annual conference of
the American Dialect Society, this year in Chicago, featured the
slightly skittish and not over-serious process of selecting words
of the year for 2007, together with a variety of lesser terms in
specialist sub-categories.
The 2007 winner, announced on the evening of Friday 4 January, was
"subprime", a term thrust this year from financial jargonhood into
the mainstream. It refers to mortgages offered to applicants who do
not have a good credit history or who are unlikely to be able to
afford the cost of the loan; the packaging of these loans into
investments sold on to other financial institutions has led to
destabilisation of the global financial markets.
Rather oddly, the winner of the Most Likely To Succeed category was
the prefix "green-" that indicates environmental concern; this form
has been around for decades and one might think it had succeeded
already. As a free-standing adjective in this sense, it dates back
to Germany in the 1970s and the Grüne Aktion Zukunft, the Green
Campaign for the Future, and the Grüne Listen, the green lists (of
ecological election candidates), both of which emerged mainly from
campaigns against nuclear power stations. As a prefix, "green-" is
still unusual, best known in "greenwashing", a 1990 coinage for
cynical attempts by an organisation to give itself an unwarranted
environmentally friendly image.
The winner of the Most Creative category was "Googlegänger", based
on "doppelgänger", a ghostly likeness or double of a living person;
a Googlegänger is a person with the same name as you who shows up
instead when you egosurf using Google. The Most Unnecessary term
was the seasonal "Happy Kwanhanamas!", a ponderous portmanteau
formed by stuffing "Kwanza", "Hanukka" and "Christmas" into an all-
purpose, hopefully inoffensive greeting. The winner of the Most
Outrageous category, "toe-tapper", came out of the scandal of the
arrest of US senator Larry Craig last June for importuning in a
public toilet. It means a homosexual and it derives from the claim
by a police officer that Craig advertised his availability by
tapping his toes on the floor.
Some runners-up were more interesting than the winners, though few
stand much chance of catching on. "Wrap rage" is anger brought on
by the frustration of trying to open a factory-sealed purchase; a
"vegansexual" eats no meat and prefers not to have sex with non-
vegans; an "earmarxist" is a US congressman or senator who adds
earmarks - money designated for a particular person or group - to
legislation, a term that was coined by the blog Redstate to refer
to Democrats; and "quadriboobage" is the appearance of having four
breasts caused by wearing a bra that is too small.
5. Q&A: Strait and narrow
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Q. I hope that you can help me remain on the strait and narrow. I
am a journalist who was about to write a headline containing the
words "strait and narrow", which I believe is the proper usage,
from the Bible. However, I am fairly sure that my US readers would
be more familiar with "straight and narrow". Faced with the choice
between being correct and being thought incorrect - or vice versa,
I chose to phrase the headline an entirely different way. Am I
being too much of a stickler? Or are there convincing precedents
for the correctness of both? [Nancy Shepherdson]
A. Both have been widely used down the centuries. However, the
evidence is that you would have been safe, and indeed better
advised, to use "straight and narrow" for both your British and
your US readers.
We often use "straight and narrow", in the sense of morally correct
and law-abiding behaviour, as a clipped version of the full saying,
variously "the straight and narrow way" or "the straight and narrow
path". As you say, it's from the Bible, specifically the Gospel of
Matthew (Chapter 7, Verse 14) in the King James Version: "Because
strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life,
and few there be that find it."
The oldest sense of "strait" is of something restricted or confined
(it derives from Latin "stringere", to bind tightly, which is the
root of our "constrain", "strict" and "stringent", among others);
that's why that obsolete method of restraining lunatics called the
straitjacket is correctly spelled in that way. These days we know
it mainly in the sense of a narrow stretch of navigable seaway, as
in the Straits of Gibraltar. Its other extant meaning refers to a
situation of difficulty, distress, or need, but it usually appears
only in the fixed phrases "dire straits", for a situation of great
need or extreme danger (a phrase known from the last decades of the
nineteenth century), or "straitened circumstances", for a person
who is living in poverty.
The Gospel writer was using "narrow" and "strait" in similar senses
to reinforce each other in successive phrases, but the writers who
borrowed the image and the reference conflated them into a single
phrase. So "strait and narrow" is a tautology, which may by itself
be enough reason to avoid using it.
The first example of it that I can find is from the North American
Review, a long defunct publication of Cedar Falls, Iowa, dated
January 1834. In a review of Thomas Taylor's The Life of William
Cowper appears: "His zeal ... could have no other effect than to
attract them onward in the strait and narrow path of duty." There
is a convincing precedent for the other form, however, since it
appears almost contemporaneously. The Oxford English Dictionary
notes that the first recorded use of "straight and narrow" is in J
E Leeson's Hymns and Scenes of Childhood of 1842: "Loving Shepherd,
ever near, / Teach Thy lamb Thy voice to hear; / Suffer not my
steps to stray / From the straight and narrow way."
The folk-etymological confusion between "straight" and "strait" is
widespread. Not only do we see references to "straightjackets", to
the extent that this spelling is frequently given as an alternative
in dictionaries, but it also appears in "straight-laced" to refer
to someone with strict and unbending moral attitudes, a form which
dictionaries also now allow. In the latter case, the original was
certainly "strait-laced", referring to stays or corsets that were
tightly laced and confining, but which by the sixteenth century had
already taken on the modern moralistic sense.
There is a common sense image behind "straight and narrow" that has
helped it to be accepted, since it can be said to contain the idea
of a road which is direct and undeviating, the true path of virtue
that leads us unswervingly to our destination without succumbing to
byways of temptation.
"Straight and narrow" is now by far the more common spelling, both
in the UK and the US, which is given as standard in dictionaries.
Anyone who insists on "strait and narrow" may well be regarded as
pedantic.
6. Sic!
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The Web site Married Or Not, Nick Dunlavey discovered, has useful
information about the value of writing life insurance in trust for
beneficiaries: "Doing this is particularly helpful for unmarried or
uncivil partnered people." Punctuation does matter ...
Following up my note last time about a mishearing over the lunch
table, Deborah Lake wrote with another example. "As an addition to
the transition from 'steel engraving' to 'stealing gravy', our
local rural Northumberland newspaper has a young reporter who has
spent his whole life in London. Telephoned with the information
that the Grace Darling Museum at Bamburgh was about to re-open on
18 December after refurbishment, he spent some time wondering why
the local population should have a museum devoted to the grey
starling."
Kevin A. Wescott sent a CBS News report dated 31 December 2007: "A
head-on collision between a drunk pickup truck going the wrong way
on an interstate and a minivan killed five people in the minivan."
Was there too much ethanol in the fuel?
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