World Wide Words -- 15 Nov 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 14 17:25:15 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 613 Saturday 15 November 2008
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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
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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
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For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Black swan.
3. Weird Words: Chatoyant.
4. Vote for World Wide Words.
5. Recently noted.
6. Q&A: Widow's peak.
7. 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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BOOK REVIEW Apologies to early readers of last week's newsletter.
I made two mistakes in coding the links that enable readers to buy
the book from Amazon (codes should be four alphanumeric characters,
but I made them five, then forgot to test them). My thanks to alert
subscribers who told me about the problem. It needed 15 minutes of
hurried reworking of the online translation routine, but the codes
have since worked.
2. Turns of Phrase: Black swan
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A black swan event is related to the "butterfly effect". The latter
term was coined by the American mathematician and meteorologist
Edward Lorenz in 1973 as a way to illustrate the chaotic nature of
weather and the difficulties of modelling it on computers. A tiny
change in the initial conditions can often lead to dramatically
different outcomes. His example was of a butterfly that fluttered
its wings in Brazil, setting off a tornado in Texas. (SF fans will
know Ray Bradbury anticipated the idea in his 1952 story A Sound of
Thunder; a time traveller to the age of the dinosaurs accidentally
kills a butterfly and finds when he returns to the present day that
history has changed in a small but vital way. But Bradbury didn't
use the term.)
"Black swan" came into the language in 2008 through the book The
Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas
Taleb, a former market trader. He argued that the stock market is
as unpredictable as any chaotic system and that people who thought
they could forecast it on the basis of past trends were fooling
themselves. At the time he wrote, in 2007, this was considered a
contrarian view, but recent events have convinced many doubters of
its truth.
For Taleb, a black swan is an unpredicted and unpredictable event,
like the finding of black swans in Australia by the seventeenth-
century Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh. It was taken for granted
by Europeans at the time that all swans were white, so his finding
could not have been expected and was outside previous experience.
The term has been taken up in financial circles and now appears
more widely. Though it mainly refers to the recent global financial
turmoil, it is also used for unexpected happenings - the closure of
the London Stock Exchange for most of 10 September 2008 due to a
computer failure was called a black-swan event at the time.
* Chicago Sun-Times, 10 Oct. 2008: Either the financial world as we
know it is coming to an end - or it's not! We'll only know in
hindsight. But unless this is the proverbial "black swan" - the
unimaginable and unique event that annihilates capitalism - this
panic will subside.
* The Press, New Zealand, 8 Oct. 2008: The credit crunch and
banking crisis definitely qualifies as a black swan. No one saw it
coming and no one knows how it is going to end. All we know is that
it is messy.
3. Weird Words: Chatoyant /S@'tOI at nt/
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Having a changeable, varying lustre or colour.
No two dictionaries seem to entirely agree on the current meaning
of the word. Some mention only the bright lustre of a gem caused by
reflections from within the stone, because the word now most often
appears in discussions by gemologists; other dictionaries include
the sheen of a bird's plumage or the changing colours and texture
of a material such as silk.
All agree, however, that the source of the expression is the gleam
of a cat's eyes in the dark. The direct source is the eighteenth-
century French verb "chatoyer", to shine like a cat's eyes. Its
French connections remain strong enough that it is still sometimes
said as though it were French (roughly "cha-twai-yan").
Many examples in English literature refer to shining eyes, as in
The Insidious Dr Fu-Manchu, by Sax Rohmer, of 1913: "I managed to
move sufficiently to see at the top, as I fired up the stairs, the
yellow face of Dr. Fu-Manchu, to see the gleaming, chatoyant eyes,
greenly terrible, as they sought to pierce the gloom."
4. Vote for World Wide Words
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Some of you may be jaded following recent electoral excitements in
the USA, New Zealand and elsewhere. But your further and continuing
help is required. Despite everyone's endeavours, World Wide Words
is dropping back in the contest for the 2008-09 Choice Awards. This
is the competition organised by L-Soft, creators of the LISTSERV
mailing list software on which the World Wide Words newsletter is
distributed. Do please vote via http://wwwords.org?LCAS and keep on
voting!
5. Recently noted
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EPHEBICIDE George Monbiot created this word in an article, "Lest
we forget", in the Guardian on 11 November: "There are plenty of
words to describe the horrors of the 1939-45 war. But there were
none, as far as I could discover, that captured the character of
the first world war. So I constructed one from the Greek word
'ephebos', a young man of fighting age. Ephebicide is the wanton
mass slaughter of the young by the old." The root appears in a few
English words, including "ephebe", the Greek word filtered through
Latin, meaning a young man aged between 18 and 20 who undertook
military service. "Ephebiatrics" is a rare medical term for the
branch of medicine that deals with the study of adolescence and the
diseases of young adults; an "ephebophile" is a homosexual adult
sexually attracted to adolescents. Though George Monbiot created it
afresh, there is one previous example of "ephebicide" on record, in
a work of 1979, Saul's Fall: A Critical Fiction. This purported to
be a collection of critical essays about a play by a forgotten
Spanish author, but the whole book, including the play, was an
invention by Herbert Lindenberger, now Emeritus Professor of
Humanities at Stanford University.
6. Q&A: Widow's peak
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Q. I read a sentence in a book and can't figure the last part out:
"Her dark hair was drawn back in a simple chignon that accentuated
the elegance of her widow's peak." I cannot find an explanation of
what "widow's peak" means or where it comes from. I hope you can
explain. [Ton Hayward, The Netherlands]
A. "Widow's peak" is a well-known English term for a small V-shaped
protrusion of hair at the forehead.
There has been a widespread superstition - I've found it recorded
in Britain, Ireland and North America, and it was probably at one
time a common belief throughout the English-speaking world - that a
woman with this shape of forehead hair is destined to outlive her
husband.
Some writers argue the superstition actually refers to another hair
feature, the "widow's lock". G F Northall noted in his Warwickshire
Word-book in 1895 that this was "a small lock or fringe growing
apart from the hair above the forehead"; he commented, "Credulous
persons believe that a girl so distinguished will become a widow
soon after marriage." Another version of the superstition appeared
in Notes and Queries on 7 May 1853, which reproduced the report of
a jury, dated 4 July 1692, on the physical examination of several
women accused of witchcraft in Ipswich, Suffolk: "Upon searching
the body of Widow Hoer, nothing appeared on her unnaturall, only
her body verry much scratched, and on her head a strange lock of
haire, verry long, and differing in color from the rest on her
head, and matted or tangled together, which she said was a widow's
lock, and said, if it were cutt off she should die." A book with
the title Current Superstitions, published in 1896, recorded that
in Labrador it was believed that if a girl's lock were cut before
marriage, she would be a widow.
Many writers have traced the widow's peak superstition to old-time
conventions about the clothing appropriate to a mourning widow, the
traditional widow's weeds. ("Weed" was a millennium ago a standard
word for an item of clothing; it was only in the sixteenth century
that it became restricted to mourning clothes, and in particular to
those of a widow.) It is said that part of the widow's costume at
the time was a hood (perhaps a version of the bycoket, worn by both
men and women) with a pointed crest at the front that resembled the
widow's peak. Through a kind of sympathetic magic, a woman who had
that shape at the front of her hair was believed to be destined to
wear widow's weeds.
The term "widow's lock" is recorded from about 1540 but "widow's
peak" doesn't arrive until the eighteenth century, in an entry in
Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721.
He equates it with the bandore, a form of head-dress that was even
then quite out of fashion; a book of 1712 said that it was part of
the costume of "our grandmothers". This suggests people may indeed
have imagined a link between hair shape and headwear.
Though it's explicitly female, these days men are at least as often
described as having widow's peaks ("widower's peak" is known but is
rare), because the receding hairline of a balding man often leaves
a central protruding peak. The term frequently turns up in books
about genetics, because the hair shape is a classic example of a
dominant inherited trait.
7. Sic!
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"I submit this example to the Department of Funny Mistranslations,"
Claude Baudoin wrote. "'Salad with believed ham'. It was an English
subtitle on the menu at a brasserie in Paris I dined at last month.
It comes from the fact that 'cru' is the adjective meaning raw (in
this case, it refers to air-cured ham) and also the past participle
of 'croire', to believe. I would like my ham to really be there but
I'll believe it when I see it."
John Leonard continues the theme of unfortunate translations: "My
friend's son is in northern China on business. The other morning
his breakfast buffet offered 'fungus burning rape'. We guess that
it was wood-ear mushrooms sautéed in canola (rapeseed) oil. Jay
said he was afraid to even lift the lid."
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C. Ways to support World Wide Words
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