World Wide Words -- 20 Sep 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 19 16:38:09 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 605 Saturday 20 September 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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The newsletter is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font.
For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Gnathonic.
3. Personal publishing news.
4. Recently noted.
5. Elsewhere.
6. Q&A: Piggyback.
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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MOOREEFFOC Several readers objected that, as the only letters in
the word that are truly reversible are M and O, "coffee room" can't
be properly read backwards on a glass door. Such critics fail to
take into account Dickens's intelligence and literary acumen, even
at the tender age at which he first observed the sign. He was quite
capable of reading reversed letters. One that does work backwards
for us ordinary folks was recalled by Stephen Howlett: "I remember
the shock the first time I saw an IXAT in my rear-view mirror."
Others pointed out that my reference to Dickens's autobiography had
to be wrong, since he never published one, something I should have
known. A reference in John Forster's The Life of Charles Dickens of
1872 confused me. He quoted from material that Dickens wrote for an
autobiography he began but abandoned. Instead Dickens incorporated
much of the material on his early life (not the word "mooreeffoc")
into the chapters of David Copperfield in which David is sent to
work at Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse. Its manager, by the way,
was a Mr Quinion, a name that on one of his night-time rambles
about London Dickens must have plucked from the sign over the
saddlery shop in Southall owned by a long-dead relative of mine,
Samuel Quinion.
BLESS YOUR LITTLE COTTON SOCKS There are, it transpires, several
folk variations on this phrase in the US. Robert Sharp mentioned
"bless yore li'l pea-pickin' heart"; Greg Landheim recalled his
mother saying "Bless your heart and little mittens." Richard Strout
informed us that "'Bless your cotton socks' is an old southern US
saying used to show indulgence of someone who is 'playing poker
with a pinochle deck' but is trying as hard as they can." Joyce
Schnobrich remembered another version from her childhood in Florida
and Washington DC, as did Charlie Jensen Lecanto, who e-mailed from
Florida: "This has to be related to or at least the source of the
American Southern expression 'Bless your cotton pickin' heart',
often used in lieu of some expletive when a person does something
inconsiderate or says something out of place."
2. Weird Words: Gnathonic /neI'TQnIk/
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Sycophantic, toadying.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines this as "resembling Gnatho or
his proceedings". Next question, please.
Gnatho was a character in the play Eunuchus, the Eunuch, by the
Roman writer Terence. He was the worst kind of flatterer, who would
say that black was white or yes meant no if it would please Thraso,
the man to whom he has succeeded in attaching himself. The Latin
word for him was "parasitus", a parasite, a person who lives at the
expense of somebody else and repays him with flattery (this is the
original sense of "parasite" in English - the non-human sort came
along rather later). The parasite in Greek and Roman literature was
particularly fond of his food.
The word, and its older variation "gnathonical" are long dead in
English, though very occasionally resurrected to confuse the unwary
at spelling bees with that silent initial "g" or by some writer who
wishes to parade his erudition. The most recent example I can find
of a genuine use is from Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho!, as far
back as 1855: "That Jack's is somewhat of a gnathonic and parasitic
soul, or stomach, all Bideford apple-women know."
3. Personal publishing news
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BOOK NEWS The paperback of my book Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of
Our Vanishing Vocabulary has just come out and is available from
all good bookshops and online, though Americans will have to wait
until March 2009 for it to appear in their country. (If you're in a
hurry, you could sneak over the border and get it from Canada, or
buy the hardback). Go to my page via http://wwwords.org?GALI for
more about the book, a sample entry and Amazon links.
Less good news is that Oxford University Press have remaindered my
dictionary of affixes, Ologies and Isms, after six years. I was
sorry about this, though it wasn't making me much money, because I
felt the book served a need. As the copyright has reverted, I've
put it on a Web site of its own. It's at http://www.affixes.org,
where anybody can consult it for nothing. Do please visit and send
me your comments and reports of any errors you find - converting
the code for 1,300 Web pages was a big job, even with most of it
done programmatically, and there are bound to be mistakes. Please
use the e-mail address at the bottom of each page on that site.
To redress the bad news, Shire Publications have just brought out a
revised version of my little book about cidermaking, published back
in 1982 and out of print for some years. If you're interested, you
will find information at http://www.quinion.com/cidermaking .
Oh, and before I forget, the digital manuscript for my next book
was submitted to Penguin this week. Don't expect to see the book
anytime soon, as the wheels grind slowly at publishing houses,
especially in this case. You won't be able to buy a copy for the
better part of a year.
4. Recently noted
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CLBUTTIC MISTAKE This one has been circulating online for some
time, but surfaced in an article in the Daily Telegraph earlier
this month under the running head "President Abraham Lincoln was
buttbuttinated by an armed buttailant after a life devoted to the
reform of the US consbreastution." Yes, it's our old friends the
incompetent programmers of obscenity filters. They've decided that
certain nasty words in e-mail and on Web sites shouldn't just be
deleted, but converted to something more tasteful: "butt" replaces
"ass", "tit" is turned into "breast", and so on. The problem is
that they do it to such strings of letters within words as well as
whole words. Such slack programming once caused e-mail references
to the English town of Scunthorpe to be rejected by filters. We
must hope that the torrents of ridicule heaped upon their heads
will cause them to rewrite their code more carefully.
CALL ME SQUIDGY The advertisement in New Scientist on 6 September
for a "soft condensed matter scientist" might have ended up a Sic!
item, had I not discovered that the study of soft condensed matter
is a sub-discipline of physics that's concerned with the properties
of colloidal suspensions, polymers, and surfactants.
DANCE OF THE MINUSCULE The same issue reported that one fear some
people had about turning on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in
Geneva was that it would create bosenovas. I read that first as
bossanovas, which brought quite the wrong image to mind. I learn
that bosenovas can be produced in a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC),
matter cooled to a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero,
in which all the atoms behave like one superatom. If the BEC is
squeezed with a magnetic field, it can explode like a microscopic
supernova. "Bosenova" is clearly a blend of "bose" with "nova" and
was invented by the team that created one in 2001; the same team
had been the first to create a BEC, in 1995. The Bose-Einstein
Condensate is named for Albert Einstein and the Indian physicist
Satyendra Bose, who in 1924 predicted its existence.
5. Elsewhere
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WEIRD WORDS Aydin Örstan wrote, "Thank you for the wonderful list
of weird words. I was so intrigued by them that I challenged myself
(and my niece) to construct a sentence using as many of them as I
can." His version is at http://wwwords.org?WWAO. Don't miss the
link at the end to his niece's one!
OED UPDATES The Oxford English Dictionary, which is incidentally
about to celebrate its eightieth birthday, posted its quarterly
update of new and revised entries to its online site last week. OED
editor Graeme Diamond picks some out in his notes on the latest new
words at http://wwwords.org?OEDG; John Simpson, the Chief Editor,
comments on some of the most interesting features of this batch at
http://wwwords.org?OEDS.
6. Q&A: Piggyback
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Q. "Piggyback" is used so commonly that I've never really wondered
about it until an advertisement on television here in New Zealand
showed cartoon pigs standing on each other's backs. Did the word
ever actually have anything to do with pigs? [Donna Gush]
A. Not originally. The pigs have sneaked in through human error.
It started out in the sixteenth century as "pick pack", carrying
something on the back or shoulders. "Pick" is a medieval version of
"pitch", so it meant a load that was pitched on to a person's back
for carrying. A little later, "pickpack" meant a ride on somebody's
shoulders.
After that, matters started to get muddled. "Pack" was changed into
"back" through the obvious associations. Then it became "pick-a-
back". Finally, the pigs arrived, in the nineteenth century, by a
confusion between "pick" and "pig", an obvious-enough change, not
least because then "pick" made no more sense than it does today.
"Piggy-back" came along later in the century, with "piggyback" a
modern loss of the hyphen.
We're not sure where the pigs were introduced - some writers say it
was in north America, others in Britain. There's lots of evidence
from English regional dialects of "pig" being part of the phrase by
the early to middle nineteenth century, which suggests that it may
originally have been British. "Pig-a-back" is known from the US no
later than the 1860s but from Britain rather earlier - it appears
in The Life of Beau Brummell, published in London in 1844, and in A
Dialogue in the Devonshire Dialect of 1838 whose glossary says,
"Pig-a-back, said of schoolboys that ride on one another's backs,
straddling, as an Irishman would carry a pig."
The earliest cases of "piggy-back" are from the US in the 1880s,
though cases came along soon afterwards in Britain (the OED has a
US citation dated 1843, but as this is in a comic description of a
riot interrupting a wedding and refers to men actually carrying
pigs, it looks like wordplay on "pick-a-back"). I'd guess the same
processes of change were going on in both countries more or less at
the same time and pace.
7. Sic!
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A friend of Esther Cup Choy on Oahu sent her this extract from the
Honolulu Star Bulletin of 7 September: "By 6:15 p.m., no one had
been reported missing, and officials called off the search, Seelig
said. 'There was no body at Bellows,' he said. 'We did see a shark
in the helicopter.'"
Kay in Denver reports, "As Hurricane Ike barreled towards Texas
last Friday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer stated that the residents of
Galveston should 'leave or possibly face certain death.'"
A reader who works for Royal Mail says that in a recent discussion
between workers and management a postman was complaining about the
standard of the footwear issued. "Basically", he said, "these shoes
are pants!"
Christine Shuttleworth was reading Charlotte Metcalf's food column
in the Spectator for 13 September: "If anything, luxury food sales
are rocketing and appear to be recession-proof. Mary Adams, buyer
at Fortnum & Mason, says: 'Grouse are literally flying off the
counter.'"
Peter Ronai read an article by the physicist Brian Greene in the
online version of the New York Times for 12 September: "After more
than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands
of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8
billion, the 'on' switch for the collider was thrown this week." He
reckons that was an expensive switch and wonders how much the whole
machine cost.
A. Subscription information
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B. E-mail contact addresses
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* Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should
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C. Ways to support World Wide Words
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