World Wide Words -- 21 Jun 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 20 09:26:11 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 592 Saturday 21 June 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: Sapid.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Soapbox.
5. Q&A: Ahoy!
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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SQUARE ONE The discussion rumbles on. Nelsen Spickard joins many
others in putting forward a different origin: "Why do folks keep
fixating on Chutes and Ladders? The street game hopscotch has been
around since the Romans were in Britain. Hopscotch has a square
one. In the older rules (as when I was a kid in the 1950s), when
you make a mistake you return to square one and start over."
As countervailing arguments to the point made last week that almost
no snakes and ladders boards have a snake taking players back to
square one, some readers suggested that one had to allow for some
licence in creating figurative expressions; another reader noted
that in some versions of the rules two players' pieces could not
occupy the same square and that if a player's piece landed on an
occupied square, the first player was sent back to the start, to
that figurative square one.
ORIENTATION Several readers asked, as a sideline on the comment
last week regarding "orient" and "orientate", why a verb that in
its form seems to refer to the east is now used for any alignment.
The older of the pair is "orient"; its first meaning was indeed to
arrange something so that it faced east. It began by referring to
the alignment of a Christian church to face Jerusalem and to the
custom of burying people with their feet facing east. It was only
in the nineteenth century that its meaning broadened to mean any
alignment with a compass point or other specified point and to add
the idea of turning towards a specified direction. The figurative
sense of mentally getting one's bearings is from the same century.
"Orientate" dates from 1848 and has gone in the same direction and
taken on the same extended senses as "orient". Several US readers
noted they'd been taught that "orientate" meant "face east" but
that "orient" meant "to fix and locate one's position on a map".
This is distinction not given in standard dictionaries and which
doesn't fit the history of the words.
ALTERNATE Several readers queried my phrase "Harry Turtledove's
alternate history". No, they cried, it should be "alternative".
"Alternate history", for an SF story which takes place in a world
in which history has taken a different course, is first recorded in
1957 and is older than the other form by 20 years. It was coined in
the US, in which "alternate" has taken over much of the territory
of "alternative" during the past 50 years. It is mostly the British
who prefer "alternative history", though even here - as you will
note from my using it - the other form is often used because of US
influence. Let us not, please not, argue the relative merits of the
two words.
2. Weird Words: Sapid /'sapId/ {sm}sæp{shti}d
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Having a strong, pleasant taste.
An example appeared in a restaurant column by James Chatto in
Toronto Life on 30 April 2008: "It was an inspired pairing with a
sapid Berkshire pork tenderloin stuffed with lightweight shrimp-
and-saffron mousse."
More than a century ago, H G Wells employed it in his short story,
Filmer, which was collected in Twelve Stories And a Dream in 1903:
"As he spoke we had a glimpse of the other youngster, a little,
white face, pallid from sweet-eating and over-sapid food, and
distorted by evil passions, a ruthless little egotist, pawing at
the enchanted pane."
It comes from Latin "sapidus", savoury, in turn from "sapere", to
have a taste or savour, from which we get "insipid" as well as
"savour". That verb had another sense, to be sensible or wise, and
has given us "sapient", "savant", "sage" and the French "savoir-
faire".
3. Recently noted
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SUPER-SPIKE This term has become relatively common in the pages of
newspapers in recent weeks as a result of the recent unprecedented
rise in the price of oil. The reference is to the sharp peak on a
graph as a result of a sudden change in price. It appeared first in
a prescient report by oil strategist Arjun Murti at Goldman Sachs
in March 2005: "We believe oil markets may have entered the early
stages of a 'super spike' period". The price was then $55 a barrel;
he predicted that it would reach $105. The Bank's prediction now is
for $200 a barrel within the next 6-24 months.
GOSSIPOLOGIST Starting the day with the Dilbert comic strip, as I
do, Monday's strip presented me with the new word "gossipsize". It
was presumably invented by Scott Adams on the model of "downsize",
since he used it for spreading slanderous gossip about an employee
until he's compelled to quit. While unavailingly searching for any
prior examples, Google suggested "gossipist", a gossip columnist.
Though this hasn't reached dictionaries, and probably never will,
there are a number of examples on record. It looks like a coinage
of Time magazine, since it appears many times in its columns, the
earliest being on 7 April 1930: "One of his best friends is Walter
('Vulture') Winchell, gossipist of the New York Mirror, who writes
his blurbs only with a heavy-leaded Variety pencil."
IT'S A DOG'S LIFE? Back in August 2006, you may recall some fuss
over the decision by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to
downgrade Pluto from planetary status to "dwarf planet". Those of
us who follow language development were relieved, once the furore
was over, that the matter was settled. We relaxed too soon. The IAU
executive committee met in Oslo last week and resurrected one of
the proposed neologisms, "plutoid", as the class name for Pluto and
another distant object, Eris. The formal definition of a plutoid is
of a celestial body in orbit around the sun at a distance greater
than that of Neptune that has sufficient mass for its self-gravity
to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a near-spherical
shape and has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit. The
issue is being rehashed because planetary scientists were left out
of the 2006 debate and want their voice heard. In particular, they
want to differentiate between rocky dwarf planets such as Ceres,
which orbits between Mars and Jupiter, and icy outer worlds like
Pluto, Eris and others they expect to discover. The naming issue
will be thrashed out as one topic at a conference in August in the
US. Editors of dictionaries and school textbooks may be aghast at
having to rewrite the books again, but that's the way it goes.
Background:
Pluton: http://wwwords.org?PLUT
Dwarf planet: http://wwwords.org?DWAR
OED UPDATES The quarterly update of the Oxford English Dictionary
was posted on 12 June. John Simpson, its chief editor, discusses
some of the interesting words: http://wwwords.org?OEDR. The OED's
Senior New Words Editor, Katherine Connor Martin, contributes notes
on new words and senses added from across the alphabet. Go via the
link http://wwwords.org?OEDM to read her comments.
4. Q&A: Soapbox
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Q. In the light of all the campaigning in an American election
year, I mentioned the term "soapbox" and got a few strange looks
from people who had never heard the term. I refer to politicians
using a platform or box to speak or preach. Can you find any other
history to the use of "soapbox" or perhaps "soapboxing"? [Brian
Fawcett]
A. Useful things, soapboxes. In quantity, bars of soap are rather
weighty and they used to be packed in stout wooden boxes or crates
for transport. Once emptied, the boxes were in demand. The indigent
turned them into improvised furniture; children loved to put old
pram wheels on them and make them into mini-racing cars, so they
could run soap-box derbies. They were also just the ticket to stand
on so you could be seen more easily when haranguing an audience in
the street.
The most recent literal example I can think of is the soapbox, so-
called, that the British prime minister John Major spoke from in
the 1992 general election. My journalistic contacts say it first
appeared in Cheltenham on 30 March 1992; it was certainly a wooden
box from a supermarket, but as nobody packed soap in wooden boxes
even then, it was instead a more flimsy orange box or crate (at
least that's what it looks like in the news photographs, with black
gaffer tape wound round it to make sure it didn't fall apart and
precipitate the PM into the crowd). John Major called it a soapbox
to reinforce the idea he was conducting a traditional meet-the-
people campaign - on the stump, as Americans say, in reference to
another kind of wooden platform.
There's no way of knowing when public speakers first turned to the
soap box or exactly when it became a known term for a certain kind
of strident, in-your-face public oratory, the sort long famous at
Hyde Park Corner in London or that Fannie Hurst wrote about in her
Gaslight Sonatas in 1918: "It is the pulpit of the reformer and the
housetop of the fanatic, this soapbox. From it the voice to the
city is often a pious one, [or] impious one, and almost always a
raucous one." An early literal reference appeared in March 1896 in
the Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel of Indiana: "Then the band divided
and scattered throughout the town, distributing their pamphlets and
occasionally mounting a soapbox or a barrel to make a speech." But
I suspect it goes back a lot further.
The earliest example of the term used figuratively I can find is in
the report of the 1904 National Convention of the Socialist Party
of America, which referred to the party's "soap-box orators". Only
three years later, Jack London wrote in The Road, his account of
his hoboing experiences of 1894, "I get up on a soap-box to trot
out the particular economic bees that buzz in my bonnet."
The verb is also known, as is "soap-boxer", both from early in the
twentieth century.
5. Q&A: Ahoy!
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Q. I have heard "ahoy" derives from a Czech greeting, apparently
popularised by sailors docking in English speaking ports - from the
Czech "ahoj", meaning "hello". [Dave Nash]
A. You've brightened my day by supplying yet another folk etymology
to add to my growing collection. "Ahoj", said the same as "ahoy",
is indeed used informally in Czech, and more widely still, I'm
told, in Slovak.
It's too neat an origin not to be believable but there's absolutely
no truth in it. Too few Czech or Slovak sailors could have landed
in English-speaking ports down the years for the word to become at
all widely known. And in any case they would have had to arrive
before 1751, when Tobias Smollett used it in The Adventures of
Perigrine Pickle: "While he was thus occupied, a voice, still more
uncouth than the former, bawled aloud, 'Ho! the house, a-hoy!'"
"Hoy" actually goes back to medieval times. It was a formalised
spelling of a natural, inarticulate cry. The first person known to
have written it down was William Langland, in his poem Piers
Plowman, in the latter part of the fourteenth century. It was used
when driving pigs or cattle, or just when you wanted to attract
somebody's attention.
In particular - and this is where the maritime connection really
does appear - sailors used it to hail another ship. "Ahoy" was a
development of this that added force to the cry.
I was wakened - indeed, we were all wakened, for I could
see even the sentinel shake himself together from where
he had fallen against the door-post - by a clear, hearty
voice hailing us from the margin of the wood: "Block house,
ahoy!" it cried. "Here's the doctor." - Treasure Island,
Robert Louis Stevenson (1883).
Alexander Graham Bell suggested "ahoy" as the way to answer his new
telephone and operators at the first exchange did just that. It's
sometimes erroneously said - by the way - that "hello" was invented
by Thomas Edison because he didn't like "ahoy". This story has been
finally scotched this week by the Oxford English Dictionary through
the publication online of a revised entry for "hello", which notes
evidence from the 1820s, long before the telephone was thought of.
6. Sic!
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The devastating floods that hit the US midwest last week might not
seem like a source of humour. But the hyperbole in a report in the
Cedar Rapids Gazette last Saturday raised a smile: "Those who live
in the 500-year flood boundary were advised to prepare to evacuate.
'Never in a million years did anybody think that we'd be dealing
with this magnitude of an event,' Iowa City Manager Michael
Lombardo said." No, just every 500 years.
Daniel Timms e-mailed to mention an article on the BBC News site on
Wednesday about skills shortages: "'We are facing a serious decline
in the quality of graduates looking to enter the industry,' said
David Braben. 'The death of maths, physics and computer science
graduates is hitting us hard.' A surge of sudden demise certainly
would, but he wonders if the true skills shortage might be of BBC
copyeditors.
Elaine Blackman reported an advertisement feature in last week's
Hereford Times that included the featured establishment's menu for
Father's Day. One of the starters was "French onion soup with
greyer croutons". Somehow she just didn't fancy it.
The Apple Store Web site, Padmavyuha found, is advertising their
Ultimate Ears headset for the iPhone with a description whose last
sentence reads: "The armature is embedded in an anodised aluminium
housing that is both small and lightweight and is an atheistic
complement to the iPhone." Are they trying to tell us it isn't the
result of intelligent design?
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