World Wide Words -- 13 Sep 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 12 13:11:07 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 604 Saturday 13 September 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. Turns of Phrase: Ecotown.
3. Weird Words: Mooreeffoc.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Bless your cotton socks.
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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BESPOKE Within minutes of last week's newsletter going out, a
message came winging back from Pat Walton in Cumbria concerning the
meaning of the word. A ruling by the British Advertising Standards
Authority (ASA) in June was a rare case of formalising linguistic
change by fiat. It concerned the use of "bespoke" by a tailoring
firm for suits that they admitted weren't hand-made but were cut
and sewn by machine. The Financial Times reported the story like
this on 17 June: "The ASA said that the historic term of art had
moved on. While customers would still expect a bespoke suit to be
tailored to their measurements, the majority would not expect that
garment to be entirely handcrafted, the regulator said."
Other readers suggest that "bespoke" is not quite as rare in the US
as the questioner thought, though it is restricted in scope to
areas like high-end clothing and computer software, sometimes with
a hint of pretentiousness.
ESURIENT Neil Paknadel wrote after my piece last time, "A large
proportion of the population of a certain age in the UK will recall
the use of 'esurient' in the cheese shop sketch from the BBC TV
comedy programme Monty Python's Flying Circus. A significant number
can even recite it, and unfortunately some of them do." To judge
from correspondence this week, most of the last group has written
to me, quoting the opening lines verbatim:
Mousebender (John Cleese): Good morning.
Wensleydale (Michael Palin): Good morning, sir. Welcome to the
National Cheese Emporium!
Mousebender: Ah, thank you, my good man.
Wensleydale: What can I do for you, sir?
Mousebender: I was sitting in the public library in Thurmond
Street just now, skimming through Rogue Herries by Horace
Walpole, when I suddenly came over all peckish.
Wensleydale: Peckish, sir?
Mousebender: Esurient.
Wensleydale: Eh?
Mousebender (broad Yorkshire): Eee, I were all 'ungry like!
2. Turns of Phrase: Geo-engineering
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This term was in the news earlier this month after the publication
by the Royal Society of a special edition of its academic journal
Philosophical Transactions on the subject.
Geo-engineering is engineering on a planetary scale to mitigate or
reverse the effects of global warming and climate change. It's far
from new - it is recorded from the late 1980s, but until recently
it has been the province of specialists. Schemes include seeding
the oceans with iron to help plankton grow in greater abundance, so
that when the organisms died they would take carbon to the sea
bottom with their corpses. Another idea is to pump aerosols of
sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to block some of the sun's
light falling on Earth. Yet another is to reduce the sun's
radiation by a giant sunshade in space.
For a long while, such geo-engineering proposals were thought to be
the stuff of science fiction; indeed, several SF writers have noted
in their works that we are in such a mess that we're going to have
to terraform the Earth. Most scientists regard them as dangerous
ideas that are likely to do at least as much harm as good; the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dismissed geo-engineering
in 2007 as "largely speculative and unproven and with the risk of
unknown side-effects".
Though nobody is going to put sunshades in space any decade soon,
in recent years the other geo-scale ideas have begun to get serious
attention, almost in desperation as experts realise that political
inaction is letting catastrophe overtake us by default.
Confusingly, "geo-engineering" has for several decades been used as
an abbreviation of "geological engineering", a discipline that puts
the skills and techniques of the geological sciences together with
those of engineering to design facilities such as roads, tunnels,
and mines.
* The Hindustan Times, 25 Apr. 2008: Climate scientists, concerned
that society is not taking sufficient action to prevent significant
changes in climate, have studied various "geo-engineering"
proposals to cool the planet and mitigate the most severe impacts
of global warming.
* The Journal (Newcastle), 1 Sep. 2008: Humans may have to attempt
planet-scale engineering of the climate because global warming is
happening faster than experts have been predicting, leading
scientist James Lovelock said yesterday. Safe forms of "geo-
engineering" should be used if they can buy us a little time to
adapt to a rapidly changing climate.
3. Weird Words: Mooreeffoc
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Relating to things suddenly seen in a new and different way.
Though this word is rare to the point of never being used in its
ostensible sense, but only as a keyword to initiate discussion, it
has been keeping illustrious company, since its few appearances in
print have been in works by G K Chesterton, J R R Tolkien and
Charles Dickens.
Dickens invented it, if that's the right word. He mentions it in
his autobiography, when he describes his poverty-stricken youth:
In the door there was an oval glass plate, with COFFEE-
ROOM painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I
ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room
now, but where there is such an inscription on glass,
and read it backward on the wrong side MOOR-EEFFOC (as I
often used to do then, in a dismal reverie,) a shock
goes through my blood.
In his biography of Dickens, Chesterton said that it denoted the
queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen
suddenly from a new angle. Tolkien read more into it still in his
work On Fairy-stories:
The word Mooreeffoc may cause you to realise that
England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some
remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange
dim future reached only by a time-machine; to see the
amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their
customs and feeding-habits.
4. Recently noted
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TEMPORARY TERM Sometimes I think the most important word-coining
force in English at the moment is the survey industry, though few
of its creations stand the test of public acceptance. Last week the
pollsters YouGov produced a report on addiction to broadband - the
feeling many users have that they cannot survive without access to
the online world. Its writers spiced it up to get press attention
by inventing "discomgoogolation" for the stress and anxiety that a
heavy user feels when they're unable to get online. It's a blend of
"discombobulation", a faded and rather jokey US term for confusion
or frustration (see my piece, via http://wwwords.org?DSCB), with
"Google", a word that, in the week in which the organisation has
celebrated its tenth anniversary, needs no explanation.
PRETTYING PIGS Several readers have asked about the provenance of
Barack Obama's quip this week that "You can put lipstick on a pig,
but it's still a pig." A couple of good explanations are those by
Benjamin Zimmer on the Slate site, http://wwwords.org?LSP1 (with
some follow-up comments at http://wwwords.org?LSP3), and Dennis
Baron's blog on the Web of Language: http://wwwords.org?LSP2.
5. Q&A: Bless your cotton socks
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Q. Do you know the origin of "bless your cotton socks"? [Stacey
Newman, Australia; a related question came from Adrian Harris]
A. Short question, followed by inadequate answer. We don't have
much of an idea at all. But it may be worth putting down what is
known.
Most writers turn, as I'm forced to do, to Eric Partridge. In his
Dictionary of Catchphrases he records this expression in its older
and longer form, "bless your little cotton socks" (which is the one
I know and instinctively hunted for). He dates it from around 1905,
presumably from personal knowledge since he quotes no examples. By
implication he regards it as British. He says it was a middle-class
way of elaborately thanking someone, which he said was extended a
little later into "bless your little heart and cotton socks".
My feeling is that it may actually be the other way round, "Bless
your little heart" is recorded from the start of the nineteenth
century. Though most of my sources for it are North American, the
earliest ones are British - the first one I can find is in a slim
volume of 1801, Farther Excursions of the Observant Pedestrian. It
seems more likely that the "cotton socks" bit was tacked on as a
fanciful or skittish elaboration, which then took on a life of its
own.
It is hinted, or assumed, by other writers that the little cotton
socks are those of an infant, so that "bless his little cotton
socks" was once a pleasant-enough but meaningless - not to say
slightly idiotic - term of approbation for a small child.
6. Sic!
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Caroline Woodward, who's in the accountancy business in London, e-
mailed following last week's Sic! item about the Underage Drinking
Enforcement Conference item: "I was amused this week to receive a
flyer for a conference in central London - A Practical Introduction
to Financial Crime. Presumably delegates register anonymously!"
Jeremy Ardley found this in the Washington Post on 8 September:
"'We are the ones who saved our country,' Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha,
whose slain younger brother first allied himself with U.S. forces
and who now serves as president of the Iraqi Awakening Council,
said in an interview." Call him Lazarus.
"I don't know if oral announcements qualify for the Sic! section,"
says Jim Helbig from St John's, Newfoundland, "but I overheard the
following recently on an Air Canada flight from London to Halifax:
'Passengers are reminded to remain in their seats with their seat
belts fastened when the seat belt sign is illuminated. The captain
is expecting some unexpected turbulence.'"
Oral items do qualify. Here's another: "Although I have nothing in
print," reports Chris Edge , "I heard a newsreader here in Perth,
Western Australia, quote a maintenance union official as saying:
'Qantas didn't get its reputation as the world's safest airline by
accident.' Er, no ..."
It would seem the wrong people were in the dock this week. A BBC
Breaking News Alert on 8 September included the sentence, "Three
men are found guilty of a terrorism conspiracy to murder involving
home-made liquid bombs by jurors at Woolwich Crown Court." Thanks
to Chambers Taylor and Denis Barter for sending that in.
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