World Wide Words -- 10 May 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 9 17:11:19 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 587 Saturday 10 May 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: Struthonian.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Cock and bull story.
5. Q&A: Bad cess.
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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PILCROW Lots of people supported my view that this word isn't as
dead as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it is. But it turns
out that they mostly meant the symbol is still common, as indeed it
is, since it is widely used - for example - in word-processing
programs to display otherwise hidden paragraph breaks.
CHICKENS ROOSTING My mention of the incongruous image created by
the phrase "wild oats are coming home to roost", reminded Anelie
Walsh of one of her favourite mixed metaphors, in Tom Stoppard's
play The Real Inspector Hound, in which the character Birdboot
comments, "The skeleton in the cupboard is coming home to roost."
KNOW-ALL Donald Kaspersen picked up on a term that I used in this
section last week, "The expression 'know-all' seems to be missing
something for Americans, who always say 'know-it-all,' something
that I am constantly accused of due to my peripatetic quests for
knowledge. It is strongly pejorative rather than mildly irritating.
Is know-all the same?" "Know-all" is the British version, which is
indeed just as derogatory as the US one.
2. Weird Words: Struthonian /stru:'T at UnIan/
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Tending to hide one's head in the sand.
This is a modern weird word, used a few times after the late Arthur
Koestler invented it in 1963, but now almost unknown. His aim, in
an article in Encounter magazine, was to describe those pundits who
prefer honest self-deception to ignoble truths.
You may recall that there is an animal famed for its in-sand head-
burying, so you won't be surprised to learn that "struthonian" is
from Latin "struthio", an ostrich. Related to it is the standard -
albeit technical - English "struthious", of or like an ostrich.
An ancient, rare and defunct name for the ostrich, by the way, was
"struthiocamel", from the Latin "struthiocamelus". The Romans took
it wrongly from Greek "strouthokamelos", literally "sparrow camel"
or, more loosely, "camel-bird" (the scientific name of the ostrich
to this day is Struthio camelus). It's difficult to imagine a cross
between a sparrow and a camel, but the Greeks managed it. In later
Latin it became "avis struthio", the struthio bird.
The only recent example of "struthonian" I can turn up is in the
journal of the Royal United Services Institute dated July 2007:
"Even if looking into the future can be demonstrated usually to be
futile, you still need to practise; you might get better, and one
day you strike lucky and you hit a tipping point. As the wisdom of
snooker players informs us: 'The more I practise, the luckier I
become'. Being struthonian is not an option."
3. Recently noted
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KETOGENIC DIET This phrase was all over the newspapers this last
weekend following a report in The Lancet of a study at University
College London that showed epileptic children had fewer seizures if
they were given a special high-fat diet. One intriguing aspect of
the story is that there's nothing at all new in the idea. The diet,
and its name, are recorded in the literature as being helpful in
reducing epileptic seizures as far back as the 1920s. It went out
of favour when anticonvulsive drugs became available; interest in
it has been growing again in recent years to help sufferers who
don't respond well to drugs. The study is surprisingly claimed to
be the first ever "gold standard" clinical trial (one conducted
using the very best controlled and randomised methods) to have been
carried out. The diet is similar to the famous Atkins diet and has
been used for various therapeutic purposes for many years. It's
said to be ketogenic as it leads to ketosis, overproduction in the
body of ketone bodies, ketones being members of a chemical group
that includes acetone. The ketone bodies alter the behaviour of the
brain in some way, decreasing the number of fits.
NON, NON, NON! The latest issue of NZWords arrived on Tuesday from
the New Zealand Dictionary Centre. One item was on the slang term
"rat", now not much used, which referred to "an under-the-counter
or subsidiary job carried out by journalists, who naturally use a
non-de-plume". I mention it not to take a cheap shot at an error in
a journal on language (though it appears there twice in successive
sentences) but to note that "non-de-plume" has become an extremely
common reformulation of "nom-de-plume", presumably because it makes
more sense to writers who know no French. It's even getting into
textbooks, for example in a comprehension exercise on foreign words
and phrases in Vocabulary Success by Murray Bromberg & Cedric Gale
of 1998, and in High School English Grammar and Composition by P C
Wren (2005), "If the writer does not wish his name to be published,
he can sign his letter with a non-de-plume". It's recorded from as
far back as the nineteenth century, though these might merely be
typographical errors.
SMILE, YOU'RE ON CANDIDCAM! Having tuned in to the world snooker
championship on television last Sunday, I heard a commentator refer
to the tiny "pocketcams" used to get really close close-ups of the
ball. Who first abbreviated "camera" to "cam" is unknown, but as a
combining form it seems to be everywhere, like the cameras. They're
in habitats to spy on wildlife (animalcams, crittercams, bearcams,
eaglecams, pandacams); in cricket stumps to get big close-ups of
batsmen (stumpcams); for surveillance and observation (nannycams,
spycams, thiefcams, weathercams, jamcams or traffic-cams, and even
poopcams, proposed in New Zealand to check that people are scooping
their pets' leavings); or otherwise used to create digital pictures
for many reasons (webcams, deskcams, homecams, phonecams, girlcams,
porncams). The most recent example was unveiled last week in the
UK. Crossing wardens, often known as lollipop men and women from
the shape of the warning signs on poles they hold up to stop the
traffic, are increasingly being injured by drivers who don't stop.
Some local authorities are thinking of adding mini-cameras to the
signs to snap offenders. They're calling them lollicams.
4. Q&A: Cock and bull story
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Q. Whilst at a meeting recently, someone told the story of how "a
cock and bull story" got its name. According to the tale-teller,
there were two inns in England (the name of the town escapes me),
The Cock and The Bull. To entice customers into either inn, each
had its own barker, constantly extolling the virtues of his inn.
Each time the barker tried to get a customer to come in, the story
would be more outlandish than the previous, and hence the term.
This seems simplistic to me, is there a grain of truth in this?
[David Armstrong, Ontario, Canada]
A. Nary a smidgen of a trace of a germ of truth. It's a cock-and-
bull story in two senses.
The tale is a variation on the standard version, which tells of two
inns of those names which still stand on the High Street in Stony
Stratford in Buckinghamshire. The two inns were the staging posts
for rival coach lines, whose passengers were regarded by the locals
as sources of news. Unfortunately, the story goes, travellers were
inclined to embroider or invent outlandish stories to entertain
themselves and confuse the natives. There was even, it is said in
one version, a competition between the patrons of the two inns as
to which could produce the most eye-poppingly ludicrous creation.
Hence the idea that a cock and bull story is a concocted tale or a
over-elaborate lie.
The story is widely believed in Stony Stratford and is a source of
civic pride. Step warily if you ever go there; do not suggest the
tale is untrue, even though there's no evidence for it. If you are
unwise enough to dispute the matter, any local who ripostes with
"well, then, tell us where it really comes from then, smart-arse"
will leave you in embarrassed confusion, as you won't be able to
supply an altogether satisfactory answer.
The experts note a French expression, "coq-à-l'âne", which appears
these days in phrases such as "passer du coq à l'âne", literally to
go from the cock to the donkey, but figuratively to jump from one
subject to another (in older French, to tell a satirical story or
an incoherent one). This meaning is said to have come about through
a satirical poem of 1531 by Clément Marot with the title Epistre du
Coq en l'Asne (the epistle of the cock to the donkey), though the
phrase itself is two centuries older. "Coq-à-l'âne" was taken into
Scots in the early seventeenth century as "cockalane", a satire or
lampoon, or a disconnected or rambling story.
The suggestion is that some similar story once existed in English,
akin to one of Aesop's fables, in which a cock communicated with a
bull rather than with a donkey. Nobody, however, has been able to
discover what it might have been. An alternative idea is that the
French phrase was borrowed in partial translation with "donkey"
changed to "bull" for some reason.
5. Q&A: Bad cess
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Q. I know "bad cess" is an Irish curse, but where does it come
from? [Ruth McVeigh]
A. To say "bad cess to you" to somebody is to wish them bad luck,
so it's hardly pleasant, though as curses go there are worse. The
second word is the problem in working out the phrase's history. An
initial idea might be that it has some connection with cesspits or
cesspools, suitably revolting associations for any imprecation.
It's a red herring, however, because it was possible at one time to
wish somebody "good cess" - to wish them good luck - and so there's
hardly likely to be a link with sewage. The US publication Putnam's
Magazine, in an issue of 1857, includes an Irish character saying:
"Oh, he's a curious crayther [creature], the pig, an has his own
ways, good cess to him!". R D Blackmore's Lorna Doone of 1869 also
has "good cess", said by a character who is native to Exmoor. That
may sound odd, since everybody associates "cess" with Ireland, but
the English Dialect Dictionary records "bad cess" from Devon near
the end of the nineteenth century, so it's not out of place. (The
same work also records it from Cheshire.)
Deciding where "cess" comes from isn't simple. Let's round up the
usual suspects. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it might be
a shortened form of "success"; J Redding Ware, in Passing English
of the Victorian Era of 1909, preferred to find its origin in a
dialect term that means a piece of turf - hence a place to be in or
live, which is more than a bit stretched; Eric Partridge notes
"cess", a tax.
This last one makes a lot of sense. "Cess", often in its early days
in the sixteenth century spelled as "sess", is from "assess" in the
taxation sense. The first cess was an obligation put on the Irish
to supply the Lord Deputy's household and garrison with provisions
at prices "assessed" by the government. The word has been since
become widely known throughout the English-speaking world and is
still used for a tax in Ireland, Scotland and India.
Taxation, being one of life's eternal verities, would seem to be a
suitable subject around which to create curses. It's easily the
most plausible of the possibilities, although - of course - that
doesn't mean it's the right one.
6. Sic!
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Department of inadvertent inversion: David Killeen reports that on
1 May The Australian began an article headed "Literacy plan works,
take it as read" with "A simple edict that Aboriginal children read
and write for two hours every morning is finally reducing appalling
levels of literacy in remote parts of Australia."
An advertisement for cleaning services in Arlington, Virginia,
failed to impress Susan Gay: "Check listed deep cleaning by hard-
beaten professional maids." As a motivational technique, she felt
that it left something to be desired; she added, "I assume they
were going for 'hard-bitten' but even that's pretty awkward."
Alan Turner had to make a couple of attempts at understanding the
headline over a story on AOL news this week. His first impression
was that some poor schoolmaster had been kidnapped at the checkout
and sent for recycling: "Co-op bags head for compost heap."
The San Francisco Chronicle may have accidentally invented a new
Olympic (or possibly Formula 1) sport, suggests Sue Worthington.
This comment appeared in its issue of 19 April: "Drivers eastbound
on Cesar Chavez Street near Highway 101 are prohibited from making
U-turns: With so many cars hurdling along in both directions, a U-
turn would endanger other vehicles."
Dennis Ginley saw this description on a bouquet of roses a friend
received for Mothers' Day: "Yellow variety with large size bloom,
medium petal count, light shiny green foliage and thorns that open
slowly into a teacup shape." He plans to return in a few days to
get another look at those thorns.
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