World Wide Words -- 22 Mar 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 21 17:35:07 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 580 Saturday 22 March 2008
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/gvtm.htm
The newsletter is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font.
For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Wigg.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Between versus among.
5. Q&A: Steam radio.
6. A note on "grog".
7. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
PINGUESCENCE Several readers asked whether the penguin might have
got its name from the same source, Latin "pinguis", fat. The word
history of "penguin" is confused and uncertain, with one favoured
origin being from Welsh (or perhaps Breton) words meaning "white
head". This is said to have originally been given to the great auk
in the northern hemisphere (since it had large white spots in front
of its eyes) and then later applied to the penguin in the southern.
The recent revision of the entry in the online OED runs to nearly
1,000 words of etymological speculation without coming to any very
definite conclusion; an origin in "pinguis" is said to be possible,
however. There is supporting linguistic evidence for this as well
as the fact that great auks and penguins were hunted for their fat.
TIMING IS EVERYTHING Apologies to those affected by a minor hiccup
last Saturday that led to the online newsletter not being available
when the e-mail one arrived. The online newsletter is updated with
the rest of the Web site on a server in Germany but the e-mail one
is sent out from one in Michigan. The move to daylight-saving time
in the US three weeks ahead of Europe led to the e-mail newsletter
going out an hour before the Web site was updated. With a bit of
luck I've got it right this time; let's hope I remember to change
things back for the last issue in March!
2. Weird Words: Wigg /wig/ w{shti}g
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A kind of bun or small cake made of fine flour.
On Good Friday 1664, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary, "Home to
the only Lenten supper I have had of wiggs and ale." Though they
were sometimes described as being like Good Friday buns, ancestors
of our hot-cross buns, they seem to have been linked not only with
the end of Lent but with any special occasion; Clement Miles noted
in Christmas in Ritual and Tradition in 1912, "In Shropshire 'wigs'
or caraway buns dipped in ale were eaten on Christmas Eve." They
were also recorded as being associated with St Andrew's Day on 30
November, for some reason notably in Bedfordshire.
A Lincolnshire variation on an old children's rhyme goes:
Tom, Tom, the baker's son,
Stole a wig and away he run;
The wig was eat, and Tom was beat,
And Tom went roaring down the street.
In the nineteenth century, wiggs (or wigs or whigs; spellings have
been very variable) were widely known and equally widely variable
in their recipes. Caraway was one constituent mentioned in some
parts of Britain (these were presumably the type recorded in The
Tale of Ginger and Pickles by Beatrix Potter: "But a person cannot
live on 'seed wigs' and sponge cake and butter buns"); in other
places it was said that they should be sweet and contain currents
(though in northern England this was a spice wig, a plain wig being
without them). In Lincolnshire, plums were considered to be a vital
ingredient, while in Hampshire honey was essential. On the other
hand, the austere burghers of Bristol said a wigg was a local name
for a plain halfpenny bun. They were nearest its origin, since a
wigg was at first simply a fine wheaten loaf lacking these later
elaborations.
Most recorders of this dialectal term said that wiggs should be
long or oval, though in 1900 The Farringdons by Ellen Thorneycroft
Fowler includes the line, "Elisabeth helped herself to one of the
three-cornered cakes, called 'wigs.'" Etymologically speaking they
should be wedge-shaped, as the word is from old Germanic "wigge", a
relative of "wegge", from which "wedge" is derived. The word is
recorded from about 1375.
3. Recently noted
-------------------------------------------------------------------
MIRDLE This has popped up in a couple of US newspapers this week,
including the Wall Street Journal, although sightings in papers go
back to the Washington Post in January. It wins the prize for the
oddest neologism spotted so far this year. Mirdles are man-girdles,
also known as support boxers and compression shorts and even more
euphemistically as shapewear, bodyshapers, and waist eliminators.
This last one must surely be a marketing own-goal, as the point is
to get rid of pear-shaped beer-bellies and to put the waist back.
Men who exhibit muffin tops, the Wall Street Journal reports, are
turning to such garments to retrieve that svelte shape from the
effects of ageing and overindulgence. Though one thinks of them as
the preserve of women, the report reminds us that in the nineteenth
century there was quite a male fashion for them. Thin is in again.
BLOGVERTISING This unlovely term appeared in New Scientist last
week. It's a combination, as you will guess, of "blog", an online
personal journal (a "Weblog"), and "advertising". It's especially
advertising associated with custom content, leading to a blog that
blurs the distinction between editorial content and advertising, so
that it's the online equivalent of the advertorial). It's not much
seen in print, not as yet, though the term is recorded from the
latter part of 2005.
4. Q&A: Between versus among
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. In your discussion of Ivy League colleges recently you referred
to an athletic competition "between the universities of Harvard,
Yale, Columbia and Princeton". I think that the correct usage is
"between" two people or entities and "among" when three or more are
mentioned. Am I right or wrong? [Lynne Baker, Dave Olander and
others]
A. William Safire commented in the New York Times in 1999 that
three style guides - those of his own newspaper, the Associated
Press and The Wall Street Journal - all "stand foursquare for the
between/among rule" that you cite. He noted that the AP guide
included the maxim that "between introduces two items and among
more than two", arguing that as a result it was correct to write
"between you and me" but "among the three of us'".
This is still a matter capable of arousing controversy in the US.
John McIntyre, an editor with the Baltimore Sun, was criticised for
saying in a radio broadcast on National Grammar Day earlier this
month that "between" could be used for more than two. He wrote in
the paper on Thursday that he had come across a passage in Robert
Dallek's Nixon and Kissinger that made his point: "Between February
25 and March 4, Kissinger resumed his shuttle diplomacy, traveling
between Damascus, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Amman, Riyadh, and Bonn, before
his return to the United States." Mr McIntyre comments, "He did not
travel among those six cities; he traveled between one and another
seriatim."
Most US style guides agree with Mr McIntyre that "between" can be
used for more than two. British guides say the same, following the
statement by James Murray in the Oxford English Dictionary over a
century ago: "Between has been, from its earliest appearance,
extended to more than two", with his earliest example being from
the year 971. Noah Webster made the same point in his dictionary in
1828; Sir Ernest Gowers described the rule as a superstition in the
Second Edition of Fowler in 1965. It seems to have grown out of a
view by grammarians of the eighteenth century that was falsely
based on etymology, since the second part of "between" is from a
Germanic source that's related to "twain" and "two". This led Dr
Johnson to assert the rule as you give it in his own dictionary in
1755, although he added, "but perhaps this accuracy is not always
observed".
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage says, "the enormous
amount of ink spilled in the explication of the subtleties of
between and among has been largely a waste; it is difficult for a
native speaker of English who is not distracted by irrelevant
considerations to misuse the two words" and ends "you are going to
be better off following you own instincts than trying to follow
somebody else's theory of what is correct", a statement that may
equally apply to this article.
The one part that's correct is that you must use "between" if only
two things are in consideration: "he stood among two people" is
clearly wrong. However, putting the complete rule into words isn't
easy. James Murray said that "between" expresses the relation of
things to surrounding things regarded separately and individually
but "among" expresses it to them only collectively and vaguely. A
modern guide says that "between" is right when the relationships of
the members of the group is essentially reciprocal or mutual, while
"among" suggests there is no close relationship.
I leave the last word with subscriber Malcolm Ross-Macdonald: "I
was cured of this shibboleth when I was challenged to use 'among'
instead of 'between' in the sentence, 'He lived in that ill-defined
triangle between East Town, West Town, and South Town.'"
5. Q&A: Steam radio
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Could you enlighten me about the origins of the English phrase
"steam radio"? In Icelandic we have a corresponding term which
probably came into being with the advent of television in Iceland
in 1966. Channel One on the radio, The Icelandic State Broadcasting
Service, is often called "Gufan", "the steam" or endearingly "gamla
gufan", "the old steam". Was the English term born with television
to distinguish the old "voice radio" from the new medium? [Eiður
Svanberg Guðnason, Faroe Islands]
A. That's pretty much it. It was coined in the UK no later than the
early 1950s at a time when television was the coming medium.
Radio, or sound broadcasting as it was still called in the BBC at
the time, was beginning to be thought of as old-fashioned and out
of tune with the times by the energetic pioneers of television. It
was also the period in which steam locomotives were being phased
out on British railways and in which steam power had gained the
image of a technology that was moribund and characteristic of the
previous century. The equation of "steam" and "old-fashioned" most
probably occurred to several people around this time and we may
never learn whose fertile mind came up with it first.
The first example I know about is in a 1953 book by Percy Cradock,
Recollections of the Cambridge Union, "Today radio broadcasting is
so commonplace that the TV men speak of it patronisingly as 'steam
radio'." Four years later, Val Gielgud, a pioneer of radio drama on
the BBC in the 1920s, wrote that "The flight from 'steam-radio' to
television has become an admitted rout." Radio, of course, has long
since shaken off this defeatist and depressing belief and is still
a very important force in British broadcasting, belying the critics
who thought it would waste away in the face of the visual medium.
Until I came to research the term, I had believed that it was the
writers of the Goon Show, Spike Milligan in particular, who coined
the term as a defensive epithet for the older medium. The show used
it so often, however, with sound effects, that it must have done a
lot to popularise it.
6. A note on "Grog"
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Last week's piece on "grog", which told the conventional story of
its origin, led to two very interesting countervailing suggestions.
Martin Watts told me that the Wikipedia article on the word asserts
there's an earlier example, in Daniel Defoe's The Family Instructor
of 1718, which has a Barbados slave boy say that "black men" in the
West Indies "make the sugar, make the grog, much great work, much
weary work all day long." Jonathon Green records in his Cassell's
Dictionary of Slang that another earlier example is given in The
Roxburghe Ballads, a famous collection of broadsheet songs, mainly
from the seventeenth century. He tells me that it appears in volume
7, edited by Joseph Ebsworth and published in 1893, in a ballad
whose title is Pensive Maid and whose date is given as 1672-85: "In
a public-house then they both sot down / And talk'd of admirals of
high renown / And drunk'd as much grog as come to half-a-crown."
On the principle that you only need one white crow to disprove the
assertion that all crows are black, either of these would be enough
to sink the Admiral Vernon story full fathom five with no prospect
of rescue. However, matters, as so often in etymology, aren't as
clear-cut as they might seem. The Defoe citation is given in later
editions of the book and in quotations from it (I'm still trying to
get access to a first edition) not as Wikipedia cites it, but as
"makee the sugar, makee the ginger; much great work, weary work,
all day, all night". Ebsworth, despite his many failings, was a
scrupulous editor, and his dating ought to be on the mark (though I
can't find Green's date in the volume). But it's a one-off example
in a collection bedevilled by fakes and which has later additions
(there's one about the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, for example). The
reference to admirals, and the general tone of the piece, hints it
might have been written after 1740 in knowledge of the Vernon tale.
The only firm date is that it must be older than its reproduction
in a book of comic songs of 1818 compiled by Thomas Hudson.
Incidentally, the comic song might conceivably be our source for
the expression "before one can say Jack Robinson", meaning very
fast, since its last line reads "And he was off before they could
say Jack Robinson." The first known use of the expression in the
OED is dated 1778. It's more likely, however, that the comic song
uses an already known expression, which would be a further pointer
to its being of post-1740 date.
6. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Derek Helling found this on the Web site of TV Station KSDK in St
Louis: "The St. Clair County coroner's jury found Mitchell was
driving 126 miles-per-hour just moments before the accident on
November 23. The grand jury determined Mitchell was going to fast
while responding to an accident call". See what happens when you
don't keep your sugar levels up?
Last Saturday I started to giggle while reading a Guardian profile
of Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's one-time chief of staff. Powell
says of Blair, "He would get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and
write in his underpants, then we'd have to dash downstairs and give
it to the No 10 secretaries to type up." We have to assume Blair
had a spare pair to change into.
Department of hydrological excess: Jim Woodfield reports that the
Vancouver Sun of 23 February has this sentence under the heading
"Canada's water crisis 'escalating'": "Canada is crisscrossed by
innumerable rivers, some of which flow into three oceans."
Jim Getz e-mailed from Columbus, Ohio. He had found this first
paragraph on a story dated 10 March on the TransWorldNews Web site:
"Representative Sally Kern said that gays are a bigger threat to
American society than terrorists on Saturday." It's good of gays to
limit their depredations to one day a week.
Education Guardian on Tuesday included an article about the new
Terminal 5 at Heathrow that mentions the history of the airport:
"Some fascinating film footage from 1949 shows ... the rather
gentile first travellers."
A. Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm .
You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of
commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:
INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS
This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. For the details,
visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .
Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ .
B. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should
be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to
respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so.
* Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org .
Submissions will not usually be acknowledged.
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should be
addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't
use this address to respond to published answers to questions -
e-mail the comment address instead)
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list
server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org .
C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words newsletter and Web site are free, but if you
would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do
so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2008. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online
newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include
the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or
on Web sites or blogs needs prior permission, for which you should
contact the editor at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list