World Wide Words -- 04 Apr 09

Fri Apr 3 15:53:59 UTC 2009

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 633          Saturday 4 April 2009
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Chiptune.
3. Weird Words: Purdonium.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q and A: Weaved or wove?
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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INFANDOUS  Several readers who know their Latin told me I missed 
one very common word derived from the Latin verb "fari", to speak: 
"infant", a child too young to be able to talk. "Infantry" is also 
from this source, using "infant" in the broader sense of a youth.

CURIOUS BOOK TITLES  Miriam Miller followed up the book I mentioned 
last week as having been unfairly excluded from the short list in 
the Diagram/Bookseller Competition. She learned that its full title 
would have made it even more of a contender: Excrement in the Late 
Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics. The last word 
was an invention of its American author, Susan Signe Morrison, 
presumably as a play on "ecopoetics", the literary term for finding 
poetry in natural things. She uses a lot of other specialist 
vocabulary, such as "stercoranist", a person who believed that the 
body of Christ in the form of the Eucharistic host was digested and 
excreted.

I commented that the title Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring was 
mundane and sensible. Neill Hicks made a similar point about an 
earlier winner: "While Bombproof Your Horse may seem like an odd 
book title to Mr Horace Bent, the subject is not at all peculiar to 
anyone familiar with horses. Horses are prey animals. They survive 
by running away at the slightest signal of danger. For thousands of 
years, humans have patiently and skilfully worked to train their 
mounts to override equine instincts and remain under the control of 
the rider, a desensitisation that is referred to as bombproofing." 

COPPER-FASTENED  Lots of people pointed out that a typing error had 
the name of the shipworm as "toredo", leading some to assume it was 
a misprint for "torpedo" (which, not entirely irrelevantly, was a 
fish, also called an electric ray, before it was a device to blow 
up ships). It should have been "teredo". A "toredo" is a Spanish 
bullfighter. No, I'm wrong again, that's a torero.

2. Turns of Phrase: Chiptune
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A chiptune is a piece of music made using vintage home computers. 

To create one, composers use only the sounds that can be generated 
by sound-generating chips inside old personal computers such as the 
Commodore 64, the Atari or the ZX Spectrum. The fascination of this 
sub-genre of electro music is partly the technical challenge of 
pummelling these old chips into producing something worth listening 
to, but also that their low-fi tonal quality is unlike any sound 
made by the current range of electronic gear.

The genre, and the term, have been around in the underground music 
scene for a couple of decades - my first sighting of "chiptune" is 
from 1992 and it clearly wasn't new then. In recent years it has 
been moving towards the mainstream and references to it now appear 
in the popular media, though mainly in Europe, Australia and Japan 
rather than North America. Chiptune artists have been presenting 
sessions on British radio and two concerts using antique computing 
machinery took place last month at the British National Museum of 
Computing at Bletchley Park.

The concept has also been an influence on the newish alternative 
musical genre called wonky or aquacrunk, a blend of hip-hop, crunk 
and electro, and it's related to what has been disparagingly called 
videogame music, early examples of which perforce used the same 
sound chips.

* CNET Reviews, 21 Mar. 2009: Music plays a huge role in the 
experience, and every beat that you deflect contributes a note to 
the level's chiptune song; each segment transition that you make 
adds another layer of complexity onto its ever-evolving soundtrack.

* Guardian, 26 Mar. 2009: What the article didn't mention was the 
huge debt this sound owes to the chiptune scene, an international 
underclass of musicians who create incredible tracks by 
electronically torturing the sound chips found in vintage videogame 
hardware.

3. Weird Words: Purdonium  /p@:'d at UnI@m/
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A coal-box.

At first glance, "purdonium" sounds like an exotic chemical element 
as yet unknown to science, a plot element in an SF story that might 
be a cousin of Wells's cavorite.

Less exotically, it was a trade name for a type of coal-box or 
coal-scuttle that had a removable metal lining. This allowed the 
messy and noisy work of refilling it to take place away from the 
firesides of the nineteenth-century middle classes, while keeping 
the elegant wooden outer box in pristine condition.

When it came on to the market, in 1847, its name was greeted with 
derisive howls at what was thought to be yet another example of the 
extraordinary fashion of the time for mock classicisms (its critics 
assumed that the name derived from Greek "pur", fire):

    In consequence of the absurd mania for making use of 
    Graeco-Latin compounds to describe inventions, it 
    requires some knowledge of the ancient languages to 
    understand even their names. But, perhaps, the difficulty 
    increases in proportion to the correctness of one's 
    scholarship. ... The term "idrotobolic", applied to hats, 
    may boast of a more correct etymology, but what shall we 
    say of "athicktobathron" for a carriage-step and 
    "purdonium" for a coal-scuttle? 
    [Hortensius: Or, The Advocate: An Historical Essay, by 
    William Forsyth, 1849. The idrotobolic hat, from Greek 
    words meaning throwing off perspiration, was patented by 
    the Queen's hatters in 1847; it had ventilation valves to 
    control the flow of air over the head. I can find nothing 
    about the carriage-step, however. The writer also noted 
    "antigropolos", a trade name for a type of leather boot. 
    A rare survivor of this fashion for mock-classical trade 
    names is Aquascutum.]

However, it is now understood that the true and only source of the 
name "purdonium" was a man named Purdon. Few details survive, but 
he was in some way associated with the London firm of Bell, Massey 
and Co who put the purdonium on the market.

The term survives in the technical vocabulary of antique dealers 
and auctioneers. This is a rare excursion into literature:

    On the hearth, behind the brass fender, stood a cheap 
    Japanese screen in black and gold, the centre piece 
    between a mock-mahogany coal purdonium on the one hand, 
    and an occasional table on the other.
    [Sorrell and Son, by Warwick Deeping, 1925.]

4. Recently noted
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UNEASY MONEY  The vogue phrase "quantitative easing", for a method 
of combating the current financial turmoil by doing the electronic 
equivalent of printing money, is ungainly jargon. Several British 
papers, starting I think with the Financial Times, have begun to 
use "queasing" as a neat abbreviation. Robert McCrum noted in the 
Observer on 22 March that the word "contains nice suggestions of 
queasy, sleaze and queer street, with a background hint of bank 
treachery (quisling). OED editors please note." [For the story 
behind "queer street" see http://wwwords.org?QRST.]

CAUGHT NAPPING  Seventeenth-century criminals abducted children to 
become servants or labourers in the American plantations. These 
were the original kidnappings, in which the second element meant 
stealing ("nap" being a relative of "nab", to thieve). Their legacy 
lives on in dozens of frivolous inventions that preserve the idea 
of the second element. "Dognapping" is the most common, though a 
decade ago there was a brief flurry of "gnomenapping" from British 
gardens. In the past week a new form has appeared as a result of 
the enforced incarceration of the foreign bosses of French firms by 
desperate workers protesting against mass layoffs. In one case, Luc 
Rousellet, the director of the French operations of 3M, was held 
for two days and nights; in another the chief executive of Sony 
France was detained overnight. This week four bosses of the US firm 
Caterpillar were seized in Grenoble. The technique has a long 
history in France as a method of negotiation. In French it's called 
sequestration, but the English term for it is new: "bossnapping".

5. Q and A: Weaved or wove?
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Q. In a recent issue you included a quote from a newspaper: "Shelby 
weaved through traffic." Am I old-fashioned to want to use the word 
"wove"?  Perhaps you have written about how certain past tenses 
have gone to the "-ed" form from an older format for making a verb 
past tense? Or is this the proper word because it isn't particular 
to creating cloth? [Anne Umphrey] 

A. Your second guess is the correct one. The reason why there are 
two different past tenses is that there are actually two different 
verbs here, though at times - such as in this case - their senses 
are sufficiently close to cause confusion.

The older one - to form cloth by interlacing strands - refers to 
such an ancient technique that the word for it can be traced back 
through Old English to a prehistoric Indo-European root that was 
later taken into Greek and Sanskrit. It has retained the way of 
forming the past tense that was once often found in Old English 
verbs. The method was to change the internal vowel in a standard 
way, a process called ablaut or gradation, in this case "weave" 
changing to "wove". Some 70 such verbs survive in English today, 
including "drive", "sing", "come", and "grow". Grammarians call 
these strong verbs, a term invented by the German grammarian and 
folklorist Jacob Grimm; it remains the standard way to describe 
them, although it's unsatisfactory and obscure.

A big shift happened in Middle English between about 1100 and 1500. 
Many strong verbs became weak, forming their past tenses in "-ed" 
or "-t", depending on the ending of the stem. To take just two 
examples: "glide", which had had the Old English strong form 
"glode" as the past tense, came to use "glided" instead; "help" 
changed its past tense from "halp" to "helped". Only the commonest 
retained their strong forms. Verbs that form their past tenses by 
adding one of these endings are said to be weak, another term 
invented by Jacob Grimm.

The verb in the quotation - to twist and turn from side to side to 
avoid obstructions while moving in some direction or other - is 
from a different source to the other "weave". It derives from the 
Old Norse word "veifa", to wave or brandish. In Middle English it 
was spelled "weve" and may be a relative of our modern "wave". 
"Weve" vanished from the written language but survived in dialect; 
it reappeared in books in the late sixteenth century with the 
spelling changed to "weave", almost certainly through the influence 
of the other verb. By the time it started to be used in writing 
again, the weak form had become dominant and this version of 
"weave" followed the trend, making "weaved".

A very few verbs retain both forms, causing some confusion; the 
classic case is "hang", in which pictures are hung but people are 
hanged. "Weave" is sometimes said to be another example of this 
multiple tense disorder but it's actually a confusion between two 
words of the same spelling from different sources.

6. Sic!
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A sign at a golf show in Ottawa on 22 March advertised a contest 
for which a small entrance fee was required. Ian Cottrell was very 
surprised to learn that proceeds would be used to fund "infantile 
projects". Not infandous ones?

A sentence in a Yahoo! article about medical conditions associated 
with Alzheimer's disease intrigued Paul Nichols because it implied 
such a sudden reduction in levels of affliction: "For example, 60 
percent have hypertension, 26 percent have coronary heart disease, 
23 percent have diabetes, and 18 percent have diabetes."

Another triumph for the spellchecker, seen in Graham Rogers' works 
canteen recently: "For reasons beyond our control, the canteen will 
close at 2pm today. The management apologises for any connivance."

Andrew Wyss heard on the BBC Radio Gloucestershire travel news on 
18 March that "there is an accident travelling towards Stow on the 
A436 from Andoversford". Not just waiting to happen, then?

A New York Times article about President Obama's meeting on March 
27 with the heads of financial institutions had him, to the mild 
surprise of Paul Ayars, "sitting at the center of a round table in 
the state dining room." In the lotus position, perhaps?

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