World Wide Words -- 11 Oct 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 10 15:17:06 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 608 Saturday 11 October 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: Nympholepsy.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Jay-walking.
5. 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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KIPPERS AND CURTAINS As many subscribers pointed out, there's no
lack of disparaging terms for people who are thought to be trying
to live above their station. John Davies mentioned one common in
Coventry in his childhood: "Brown boots and no breakfast". Pat
Mackay recalled, "Another variation is 'Curtains on the windows, no
sheets on the beds.' It was common in Northern Ireland when I lived
there 40 years ago." Sandra Parker mentioned, "My Dad used to say
'Queen Anne front and Mary Anne behind'". Jake Morgan wrote, "The
town of West Bridgford, lying just south of the river Trent and
proudly independent of the City of Nottingham, is locally referred
to as 'bread and lard island'. This started in the late Victorian
era to reflect the price of the then new houses in West Bridgford.
It stemmed from a popular belief that once you had spent all your
money on the house all you could afford to eat was bread and lard."
Steve Flood commented: "Phrases for outward prosperity cloaking
poverty are not confined to English. I have been working in Dalian
in north-east China for 18 months and have discovered that Mandarin
is a rich source of unique phrases including 'Silk trousers with
corn in the belly' - corn being the cheap feed-all in Northern
China." Anton Sherwood noted another version of "she's no better
than she ought to be" - "she's no better than she should be"; this
appears more frequently than the other one, though both are fairly
common and neither is exactly a model of linguistic clarity.
OF- WORDS My throwaway query on "Ofsted" last time, wondering what
might be a term for words formed from the first syllables of other
words, rather than first letters, led to some interesting further
examples. Eryk Vershen noted "Nabisco"; Michael Delaney pointed out
"Benelux" and "Amex"; Bernie Corbett gave "Gestapo". The view is
that these are acronyms - most dictionaries (including the Shorter
Oxford but not my other Oxford dictionaries), say this term covers
pronounceable abbreviations formed from elements or syllables of a
phrase or series of words, not just the initial letters.
2. Weird Words: Nympholepsy /'nimf at lepsi/
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A wild frenzy caused by desire for an unattainable ideal.
That's one sense, which Edward Bulwer-Lytton described in Godolphin
in 1833: "The most common disease to genius is nympholepsy - the
saddening for a spirit that the world knows not." It can also refer
to the passion or desire aroused in men by young girls, which is,
unsurprisingly, in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. As a result, it's
often equated with paedophilia or the Lolita complex, though it's
strictly an unappeasable longing, not one that can be acted upon.
Nympholepsy started life in English in the late eighteenth century
with the idea behind it of a person in a frenzy from beholding
those mythological spirits of nature that the ancients imagined as
beautiful maidens living in rivers or woods. It's from the Greek
"numpholeptos", caught by nymphs. George Moore wrote about it in
his Memoirs of My Dead Life:
I have always thought it must be a wonderful thing to believe
in the dryad. Do you know that men wandering in the woods
sometimes used to catch sight of a white breast between the
leaves, and henceforth they could love no mortal woman? The
beautiful name of their malady was nympholepsy. A disease
that every one would like to catch.
By the early nineteenth century it had added the meaning in my
definition, the one Lord Byron called "The nympholepsy of some fond
despair".
3. Recently noted
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HAPPY, HAPPY FAT Jane Steinberg tells me she was researching the
residual toxicity of a termiticide (itself an interesting word, for
a substance that kills termites) when she found "lipofelicity" in
an article. "I like to think of it as meaning happiness at being
fat," she wrote. The writer of the article was undoubtedly looking
for "lipophilicity", the property of being soluble in fats, oils
and other non-polar solvents. It means "fat loving", not a million
miles from the other sense, but both she and I rather prefer the
mistake. For "lipo-", see http://www.affixes.org/l/lipo-.html.
SUPERLATIVES AHOY! The Guardian covered the Monte Carlo boat show
recently, mentioning that "Boats built to personal specifications
have grown to such vast proportions that the labels superyacht and
megayacht are no longer enough. Those on the dockside now talk of
the gigayacht - multi-storey, 120-metre floating mansions that
resemble cruise liners." I've fallen behind in my research on names
for the nautical playthings of the mega-rich, as a search finds
"gigayacht" from 2002; as a mark of its acceptance, compounds such
as "gigayachting" and "gigayachtsman" are also used in the yachting
business. As you would expect, "megayacht" is older still, recorded
from 1986. I was going to write that we should be looking out for
"terayacht" any year now, then thought to look for it and found
examples from 2005. But we've not yet reached the giddy heights of
"petayacht". (For more on the number prefixes, visit
http://www.affixes.org/m/multiples.html.)
CREDIT CRISIS NEOLOGISMS On Monday, The Times reported a new term
for our times: "recessionista", describing it thus: "Apparently a
recessionista is a fashionista (natch) who is decisively on trend
in these straitened times and dresses exclusively in black (it's
grim), vintage (it's all we can afford) and long skirts (going
short during bad economic times is as frowned on in hemlines as it
is in hedge funds)." It's not new - it has previously been sighted
in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the
Washington Post and the Daily Mail. The word is obviously based on
"fashionista", a term which borrows the "-ista" suffix for a
committed supporter of a person or organisation: see
http://www.affixes.org/i/-ista.html .
Another credit-crunch neologism in the news this week is "square
mile syndrome", where the square mile is the City of London. It was
coined by an independent mental health hospital in Marylebone. It
has experienced a 33% rise in the number of City workers in banks
and hedge funds seeking treatment for depression, anxiety and
stress as a result of the current financial turmoil. The hospital
stresses that the term isn't a diagnostic definition.
4. Q&A: Jay-walking
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Q. When someone crosses the street in a city illegally, it's called
jay-walking. This usually means crossing at a point other than the
intersection. What does the "J" stand for, or who is Jay? What is
the origin of this term? [Marty Ryerson; related questions came
from Fred A Roth, Matthias Werner, Richard Hacker, Robert L Hamm
and Dalia Wolfson]
A. It has been said that people who take their lives in their hands
in the big city by crossing the street anywhere dodge across in the
pattern of a letter J - hence J-walking. Do not believe this.
The experts are sure the jay is the bird, one of the American jays,
presumably the common bluejay. From around the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, "jay" had been a slang term in North America
for a stupid, gullible, ignorant, or provincial person, a rustic,
bumpkin, simpleton or greenhorn. I would guess it's a reference to
the noisy squabbling of these slightly dim-witted birds. The jay I
sometimes see on country walks, the European species, is placed in
the genus Garrulus and garrulous is the right word for it - "jay"
was an insulting term for a foolish chattering person back in the
1500s. It's not hard to see how country cousins, unversed to city
ways, could have had this well-established sobriquet attached to
them by supercilious metropolitans when they cluelessly wandered
across a busy street or hopped about dodging the traffic.
In the second decade of the twentieth century we start to see
references in US newspapers to jaywalkers, usually because city
councils are passing ordinances to stop pedestrians crossing the
street anywhere they like. The earliest that I've so far found is
from February 1912 in a periodical called The Survey, reporting on
restrictions proposed in Kansas City. Numerous others turn up in
newspapers the following year: in March in Washington DC, in June
in Fort Wayne, Indiana (in a report which defines a jaywalker as
"an alleged human being who crosses the street at other points than
the regular crossings") and in October in Lincoln, Nebraska. These
show that the term had quite suddenly become widely distributed and
fairly common. I would guess that it had been around for some time
in the spoken language and private usage but that something had
made it break out into public discourse at this time.
The Nebraska appearance was in an open letter in the Lincoln Daily
Star to the city commissioners from a disgruntled citizen: "Dear
Friends: Forget all about that 'jaywalking' ordinance, the very
name of which insults every citizen. Give the people credit for
having a grain of common sense, like yourselves, and of being able
to take care of themselves, as they have heretofore managed to do
without your grandmotherly help." It had no effect - the ordinance
became law the following month.
5. Sic!
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On Wednesday of this week, the Guardian reported on the auction of
a rare medieval Islamic ewer: "The bid was annulled by 'private
agreement', prompting rumours that the vendor had agreed to sell
the item along with the buyer." But who will buy the buyer?
Gerry Zanzalari shook his head over a Fox News online headline on
26 September: "Jury Convicts New York Man of Killing Wife for the
Second Time". He comments, "I thought you only got to die once.
Silly me."
Paul Birch recollects: "Some time ago a choir in which I sing was
advertised here in Vancouver as having performed previously in
several countries overseas. The conductor of the performance was to
be the well-known Bernard Labadie. Unfortunately, the copy was
passed through a spell checker without human review before it was
sent out to subscribers. Our friends were somewhat surprised to
read that the choir, 'conducted by the famous maestro, Mr. Libido,
had recently sung in London at St. Martini's in the Field.'"
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