World Wide Words -- 26 Jul 08

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 597         Saturday 26 July 2008
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Pharology.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Faffing.
5. Q&A: Hoodwink.
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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CHEQUERED  In last week's piece, I mentioned "exchequer", a table 
covered with a cloth divided into squares on which the accounts of 
the revenue were kept by means of counters. Dvora Yanow e-mailed 
from Amsterdam to ask if this was the origin of "counter" for the 
serving position in a shop. It is. The word was at first anything 
used in keeping count or accounts, such as tokens; later - in the 
fifteenth century - it became a table or desk on which accounts 
were kept; two centuries later still it began to be used for a 
money-changer's table and also for a table in a shop where the 
money for goods was paid over.

LAWS  Following up comments in this section last week about the Law 
of Prescriptive Retaliation and McKean's Law, several readers told 
me about Muphry's Law, which is pretty much identical. One way of 
putting it is this: "if you write anything criticising editing or 
proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have 
written." Wikipedia says that it is attributed to John Bangsund of 
the Victorian Society of Editors in Australia. A classic example 
appeared in the Freakonomics blog on the New York Times site on 8 
July, in which Stephen J Dubner accused The Economist of making a 
mistake when it referred to Cornish pasties, assuming this was an 
error for "pastries". Lots of people put him right, including the 
editors of The Economist, who sent him a genuine Cornish pasty.


2. Weird Words: Pharology  /fe:'rQl at dZi/
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The scientific study of lighthouses and signal lights.

"Pharology" is first recorded in 1847 in the Transactions of the 
Royal Society of Arts of London. The author of the paper noted that 
it had been "first introduced by the late Mr Purdy". This otherwise 
unsung gentleman must have had in mind the famous lighthouse, one 
of the seven wonders of the ancient world, that was erected around 
280BC on the island of Pharos, off the coast of Alexandria.

The word is well known among those whose hobbyist or professional 
interest lies in studying or looking after lighthouses. Now that 
all British lights are automated, and the job of lighthouse keeper 
no longer exists, you might think that pharologists have less to 
interest them. Not so. Many of the lights are in remote locations 
that required great determination, skill and endurance to construct 
them and special qualities in the men isolated on them for a month 
at a time. In Britain, the Association of Lighthouse Keepers helps 
keep knowledge of them alive.

A rare appearance in literature is in E Annie Proulx's The Shipping 
News of 1993: "Pharology. Science of lighthouses and signal lights. 
Dawn knows elevations and candlepower, stuff about flashes and 
blinks and buoys. Bore you silly with it."


3. Recently noted
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#@%$?*!  Dave Aton pointed out an interesting word, which he found 
on the Ask section of typography.com. It's the name given to those 
strings of random non-alphabetical characters that cartoonists use 
in speech bubbles to indicate profanity. They call them grawlixes. 
The word was the creation of the cartoonist Mort Walker. He first 
used it in 1964 in an article he wrote for the National Cartoonists 
Society in the US and which he then included in his 1980 book The 
Lexicon of Comicana, a satire on the comic devices that cartoonists 
use but which ironically became a textbook for art students. Other 
terms he invented for various comic-artist graphical conventions 
include waftarom, squean, spurl, neoflect, plewd, vite, dite, hite, 
direct-a-tron (and throwatron, sailatron, staggeratron, swishatron 
...), jigg, briffit, solrad, whiteope, indotherm, crottle eyed, 
neoflect, and three other ways to indicate maladicta - jarn, quimp, 
and nittle. And no, I'm not going to define any of them, not least 
because you can really only do it by illustrating them, as Walker 
did. Buy his book if you're interested - it's still in print.

SUFFIXIFICATION  "I had to vent my disgust," wrote Garth Summers,  
"at the dreadful word 'additionalize' that I heard on a BBC radio 
documentary. It was used there in the context of adding different 
elements to achieve different results. Why not just 'add'?" There 
is a subtle difference of meaning intended, I would guess, but too 
small to be worth the effort of all those extra suffixes. My own 
candidate for any linguistical additionalising prize that might be 
on offer would be the polysyllabic monstrosity "evolutionising" 
("We're evolutionizing the textbook model by offering full-text and 
chapter-by-chapter sales with enhanced content, any time of the day 
or week" - Business Week, February 2005). There are, I find to my 
mild surprise, examples going back at least as far as an article in 
the Los Angeles Times dated March 1920 ("Picture theaters seem to 
be gradually evolutionizing into a sort of screen vaudeville show 
house").


4. Q&A: Faffing
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Q. What's the origin of "faffing" which means to aimlessly waste 
time doing useless tasks? [Raymond Wargo, Vancouver]

A. It's originally British, informal but not rude, and moderately 
common, especially in the form "to faff about". The Daily Telegraph 
included this on 15 March 2008: "The early boarders certainly bag 
their seats quickly, but then they immediately relax and happily 
faff about putting their things in the overhead locker, generally 
getting in the way of the other passengers."

It can be used as a politer alternative to another four-letter word 
beginning with "f" but has no link with it. It starts to appear as 
a dialect word in Scotland and Northern England at the end of the 
eighteenth century, as a description of the wind blowing in puffs 
or small gusts. A North Yorkshire glossary of 1868 described how it 
was used: "As when a person blows chaff away from corn held in his 
hands, or the wind when it causes brief puffs of smoke to return 
down the chimney."

It may have been imitative of the sound of gusty wind, or it may be 
a variation on "maffle", a more widely distributed dialect term in 
Scotland and England that means to stutter or stammer, or to waste 
time and procrastinate; this might be from the old Dutch regional 
word "maffelen", meaning to move the jaws. There's also "faffle", 
another dialect word, which also means to stammer or stutter, and 
which might have influenced the sense.

The word started to move into the wider language around the end of 
the nineteenth century in its modern sense, though it didn't much 
appear in print until the 1980s.


5. Q&A: Hoodwink
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Q. I know what "to hoodwink" means, but cannot imagine how it came 
about. There seems no connection between its meaning and the 
individual words it is made up from. [Frank Danielzik, Germany]

A. The original sense of "hoodwink" was to prevent somebody seeing 
by covering their head with a hood or blindfolding them. Our main 
sense now is a figurative one derived from it, to deceive or trick 
(as we might also say, to pull the wool over someone's eyes), which 
appeared in the early seventeenth century.

There's no problem with the first part, but "wink" here isn't in 
the sense we use now of closing and opening one eye quickly as a 
signal of some sort. When it first appeared, in Old English in the 
form "wincian", it meant to close both eyes for some reason, or to 
blink, or close the eyes in sleep (hence "forty winks"). A hoodwink 
forcibly lost somebody the power of sight as though they had closed 
their eyes. And "hoodwink" was long ago an alternative name for 
blind man's buff.

When we say that somebody winks at some offence, meaning that they 
connive at it, we're also using a relic of the same sense. And long 
before "wink" became a flicker of one eyelid it meant a significant 
glance instead. If you find something written before the nineteenth 
century that says one person winked at another, a glance is what's 
meant - both indicate that the person is sending a message, but the 
method is slightly different. Today's meaning first appears in The 
Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, 1837: "Mr. Weller communicated 
this secret with great glee, and winked so indefatigably after 
doing so, that Sam began to think he must have got the 'tic 
doloureux' in his right eyelid."


6. Sic!
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Another Eden? Barry Prince, a retired journalist in Auckland, New 
Zealand, sent through a e-mail he'd received on Friday promoting 
BBC World. A blurb about a forthcoming programme on Michelangelo's 
Sistine Chapel explains "This programme explores some of the main 
challenges he faced by recruiting two modern fresco artists, Fleur 
Kelly and Leo Stevenson, to produce their own version of the iconic 
scene where God creates Adam at a church in London."

"A notice was posted at the local Shoppers Drug Mart," Vin Murph e-
mailed from Canada. "'Shopping carts are no longer allowed to leave 
the store.' Are they being punished for bad behaviour?"

Ann Jones was looking at the Web site of the Solomon Star, based in 
the Solomon Islands. An item quoted the New Zealand Foreign Affairs 
Minister Winston Peters, commenting on his country's sanctions of 
the islands: "You don't have a coup, change a government at the 
barrel of a gnu and it comes without a cost." A wonderful image.


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