World Wide Words -- 29 Nov 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 28 16:17:29 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 615 Saturday 29 November 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. Turns of Phrase: Stag-deflation.
2. Weird Words: Natiform.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Not to be sneezed at.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Turns of Phrase: Stag-deflation
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This new term is yet another consequence of the interesting times
we're living through. Its first known use was by Nouriel Roubini, a
professor of economics at New York University, writing in Forbes
Magazine on 29 October.
It's obviously enough a combination of "stagflation", persistent
high inflation combined with stagnant demand, with "deflation",
which is being discussed as a likely outcome of the current global
financial turmoil. Deflation is thought to be a greater evil than
inflation because it leads to people hoarding money rather than
spending it because of expectations that prices will fall. "Stag-
deflation" combines stagnant deflation with recession, leading to a
state in which the economy stalls and unemployment rises rapidly,
while commodity and goods prices continue to fall.
The term has received much attention, as much for its intriguing
neologistic flavour as for the recipe for gloom that it foretells.
* See Magazine, Canada, 19 Nov 2008: People who own things like
houses and publicly traded financial instruments and so forth,
they're walking around looking as deflated as the value of their
acquisitions while the world slouches toward depression or
recession or stag-deflation or whatever odd neologism they coin for
the impending global economic trainwreck.
* International Business Times, 30 Oct 2008: For now, the prospects
of the euro being the next victim of a rate cut have already turned
that currency back towards the low road, and the growing odds of
some kind of stag-deflation in the US and Europe spreading to Asia
have commodities speculators selling into rallies.
2. Weird Words: Natiform /'natIfO:m/
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Resembling or having the form of the buttocks.
Ammon Shea mentions this word in his book Reading the OED, in which
he records his experience of spending a year scanning the second
edition of the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover, all 21,730
pages of it. He commented that he was surprised to learn that it
had never been used as an insult, so refuting the premise of an
entry in Depraved and Insulting English, which he earlier wrote
with Peter Novobatzky.
This may be explained easily enough. The word never moved beyond a
very limited medical circulation and so it never gained the instant
recognition necessary for it to be applied insultingly. It derives
from Latin "nates", plural of "natis", a buttock. It has never been
used to refer to the buttocks themselves, instead always to some
anatomical feature that contains a deep cleft. The OED marks it as
obsolete, though "natiform skull", bony nodules on the surface of
the skull in infants with congenital syphilis (also called Parrot
nodes), is in some current medical dictionaries.
3. Recently noted
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MALUS If this word brings apples to mind, then you're probably a
gardener or a horticulturalist, since it's the botanical name for
the genus, from the Latin word for an apple tree. Though "malus"
isn't in any general dictionary I've consulted, it's also a fairly
common term in the world of banking, insurance and contracts. A
malus is the opposite of a bonus - you might call it a forfeit or a
clawback instead. It's receiving more attention as finance houses
seek to rein in excessive payments to senior staff (it was in the
news last week because the Swiss bank UBS has introduced malus
provisions for its executives). It turns up in particular in the
form "bonus-malus system", for a contract that rewards success but
penalises failure. The word is from Latin "malus", bad. "Bonus" is
also from Latin, from a word for a good thing, an association of
ideas that may be open to doubt as a result of the recent upsets in
the financial world.
ROMANETTE Eugene Volokh discussed this oddity of legal terminology
last week on his blog The Volokh Conspiracy. He had never heard it,
despite being the Gary T Schwartz Professor of Law at UCLA, but a
search turned up a number of examples in legal opinions. The word
means "small Roman numeral". It's used in speech to refer to sub-
clauses or subsections in contracts, so that "subsection (iv)" is
said as "subsection romanette four". He found that lawyers either
used it as a natural part of their vocabulary or had never heard of
it. It seems to have emerged among contract lawyers (who spend much
of their time among sub-clauses identified by Roman numerals), and
may have begun life back in the 1980s, since he found it, without
explanation, in a 1993 work, Corporate Internal Investigations. It
is mainly an oral term, something easily understandable because in
writing one would naturally refer to "subsection (iv)" or whatever.
Because of its oral nature, it has - so far - escaped every general
and specialist dictionary.
WOTY UPDATES It was the turn of the editors of Webster's New World
College Dictionary to announce its candidates for its 2008 Word of
the Year last week. The five words on the short list are "leisure
sickness", in which some people are more likely to report feeling
ill outside work hours; "overshare", to divulge too much personal
information; "cyberchondriac", a hypochondriac who gets his medical
information from the Internet; "selective ignorance", ignoring any
distracting or irrelevant information; and "youthanasia", a word
best known from the 2004 Megadeth lyric and the film of 2005, which
I've never seen in the wild but which was said by Armand Limnander
in the New York Times in April 2007 to refer to the "controversial
practice of performing a battery of age-defying medical procedures
to end lifeless skin and wrinkles; advocated by some as a last-
resort measure to put the chronically youth-obsessed out of their
misery". It's an eclectic and slightly strange bunch of words, but
as the Editor in Chief, Michael Agnes, said, "The choice does not
reflect an opinion that the term will eventually be found in the
dictionary. In short, it's merely one that made us chuckle, think,
reflect, or just shake our heads." Add your vote to those of the
dictionary's editors and researchers via http://wwwords.org?WNWC.
This week, Merriam-Webster's choice for Word of the Year 2008 was
"bailout", an act of giving financial assistance to a failing
business or economy to save it from collapse. The Oxford English
Dictionary marks it as rare, but that entry was written for the
second edition back in 1989. The first recorded example is from
1955 and it's clearly from the aviation verb "bail out" or "bale
out" (for more, see http://wwwords.org?BLZT). The publisher says
that it was looked up so often at its online dictionary site that
it was an easy choice; people seemed to know what it meant but
wanted to learn whether it had negative nuances or suggested
irresponsibility or blame.
VALEDICTOCRACY Readers in North America may immediately recognise
this new word as a combination of "valedictorian", the person who
comes first in their high-school graduation class and who delivers
the valedictory, or farewell address, with the ending "-cracy" for
a particular form of government, rule, or influence. It appeared in
an article by David Brooks in the New York Times on 21 November. He
was writing about the intellectual qualifications of the foreign
and domestic policy teams of president-elect Barack Obama (mostly
graduates of Yale and Harvard law schools): "This truly will be an
administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of
America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past
administrations, this will be a valedictocracy - rule by those who
graduate first in their high school classes."
4. Q&A: Not to be sneezed at
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Q. During a recent visit abroad I was having a conversation with a
friend. As he doesn't speak English as a first language, he would
often ask the meaning of slang I used quite frequently, such as
"not to be sneezed at". Could you could provide some information as
to where this comes from? [Sybil Cubilette]
A. Since the expression dates from the early nineteenth century, we
are in the realm of supposition here, since nothing on record gives
any convincing evidence about where it comes from.
We do know that it's almost exactly contemporary with the form
without the negative. "To sneeze at" something was to despise,
disregard or underrate it, to treat it with derision or consider it
worth little or nothing. We may guess that a sneeze was considered
to be a gesture of contempt or disrespect. The first known example
is in a popular novel of 1806, A Winter in London, by Thomas
Skinner Surr:
"A word in your ear," said his lordship: "Do you know, I have
quite changed my mind about that business since I met the
marquis. He tells me that it's a sort of thing a young fellow
of my expectations ought to sneeze at. 'It would be well
enough,' says he, 'for a fifteenth or sixteenth son of lord
Roseville'; but, my dear fellow, it would be murder of the
foulest dye for one of your spirit, with such an exchequer as
your dad possesses, for you, an only son, to turn engrossing-
clerk, and copy a parcel of humdrum dispatches."
The first example of our modern negative form - for something that
shouldn't be rejected without careful consideration, or something
worth having or taking into account - is actually slightly older
than Surr's novel. It appeared in a popular play, Fortune's Frolic,
by John Till Allingham, which was first produced at Covent Garden
in 1799: "Why, as to his consent I don't value it a button; but
then £5000 is a sum not to be sneezed at."
Indeed it wasn't: £5000 then would be very roughly £150,000 now
(about US$225,000, as of the time of writing).
5. Sic!
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Gloria Bryant read an item on BBC news on Saturday 22 November that
included an unfortunate juxtaposition of words: "A former police
chief in Argentina, wanted for alleged crimes against human rights,
shoots himself dead live on television." The article has since been
very reasonably corrected to read, "... shot himself dead in front
of television cameras."
Gordon Caruana Dingli communicates that The Malta Housing Authority
is offering social housing as an environmentally friendly measure,
but with a special feature, its Web site says: "All the properties
have environmental friendly measures including roof insulation,
double glazing, lovers and wells." Hello, young louvres, wherever
you are ...
Sporting News Today for 21 November - John Carlson reports - seemed
to look into the future with this muddled sentence: "Jazz musician
Wayne Tisdale will make his first musical appearance since having a
portion of his right leg amputated at halftime of the Sooners
basketball game against Virginia Commonwealth next month."
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