World Wide Words -- 10 Apr 09

Fri Apr 10 14:30:02 UTC 2009

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 634          Saturday 11 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: AfPak.
3. Weird Words: Ixnay.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q and A: Well, blow me!
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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MOCK-CLASSICAL TRADE NAMES  Following my confession in the piece on 
"purdonium" last week that I had been unable to trace any mention 
of "athicktobathron", Shayna Kravetz searched using a variation in 
spelling and found these further examples of the early nineteenth-
century fashion for exotic trade names:

    It is hardly to be expected that we who wear Idrotobolic 
    hats, Eureka shirts, Impilia boots, and Panscutorium 
    coats - who ride in Eumetableeton carriages, fitted with 
    the patent Athiktobathron carriage-steps - who cook our 
    potatoes in the Anhydrohepseterion, and envelope our 
    heads in Korychlamid night-caps when we retire to rest - 
    it is hardly to be expected that we should see anything 
    much stranger than ourselves in our visions by day, or 
    our dreams by night.
    [People Whom We Have Never Met, by Frank Ives Scudamore, 
    1861.]

CHIPTUNE  Several readers pointed out that mainframe computers were 
programmed to make music back in the 1950s and 1960s, a famous case 
being that of the IBM 7094 that played and sang Daisy Bell in 1962 
(Arthur C Clarke heard it and had the computer HAL sing it in the 
film 2001: A Space Odyssey). Richard Hallas noted that one computer 
I mentioned, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, didn't have a sound chip and 
getting music out of it was a special technical challenge, as it 
had been for the earlier mainframe computers.

STRONG AND WEAK VERBS  This piece generated many comments. Richard 
Hallas asked whether the two past forms of "hang" might suggest two 
separate verbs, as happened with "weave". Up to a point. The story 
behind the two forms is complicated, but essentially two different 
versions of the same verb came in, from Old English and Old Norse. 
The Old English form became weak early on but the Old Norse one 
stayed strong. The strong form ousted the weak one, an exception to 
the general trend, except in the legal sense regarding execution, 
which kept the archaic weak form.

Others mentioned characteristically American strong verb forms, in 
particular "dove", "snuck" and "pled" as the past tenses of "dive", 
"sneak" and "plead". National usages aren't quite so clear cut - 
"dived" remains common in the US while "dove" has been recorded in 
non-standard British English; "pled" is common only in American law 
and in Scots. "Dive" became weak in standard English centuries ago, 
before America was colonised, but "dove" reappeared in nineteenth-
century American English through analogy with other strong verbs, 
in particular "drive"; it remains restricted largely by geography 
rather than by social class. "Snuck" came along rather later, in 
the 1870s, probably also through analogy. Writers early on used it 
to suggest the speech of ill-educated rural people but it has now 
become widely accepted and may even take over as the standard form 
in the US.

2. Turns of Phrase: AfPak
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AfPak is now the usual way in Washington and within NATO to refer 
to Afghanistan and Pakistan jointly. The reasons were spelled out 
by the US diplomat Richard Holbrooke in early 2008:

    First of all, we often call the problem AfPak, as in 
    Afghanistan Pakistan. This is not just an effort to save 
    eight syllables. It is an attempt to indicate and imprint 
    in our DNA the fact that there is one theater of war, 
    straddling an ill-defined border, the Durand Line, and 
    that on the western side of that border, NATO and other 
    forces are able to operate. On the eastern side, it's the 
    sovereign territory of Pakistan. But it is on the eastern 
    side of this ill-defined border that the international 
    terrorist movement is located. 
    [Hampton Roads International Security Quarterly, 22 March 
    2008.]

The abbreviation began to appear in newspapers in February 2009, 
following the appointment of Holbrooke as President Obama's special 
envoy for the region and the introduction of policies designed to 
encourage Pakistan to become more active in countering terrorists 
within its borders. It quickly became common.

* Independent, 27 Mar. 2009: The resulting document offers a four-
pronged strategy, including the adoption of the so-called AfPak 
approach in which Afghanistan and Pakistan will be handled jointly 
under the leadership of the special US envoy Richard Holbrooke. 

* Washington Post, 25 Feb. 2009: The Obama administration has 
stated that it wants a regional solution to what acronym-loving 
Washington insiders are now referring to as the AFPAK problem, but 
they are playing catch-up to the militants who have always viewed 
this struggle in regional terms. [It's not an acronym--Ed.]

3. Weird Words: Ixnay  /'IksnEI/
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Nix. Nothing.

This delightfully weird word is best known in the US, as the type 
of wordplay that created it was invented in that country and has 
always been most popular there. It's Pig Latin, or igpay atinlay, 
as Pig Latinists would name it, sometimes instead called Hog Latin. 
Originally a children's word game that had been around since at 
least the 1890s, it became fashionable among adults in the 1920s 
and 1930s. The first known appearance of "ixnay" in print is in the 
film script for the early talkie Broadway Melody in 1929.

The Pig Latin rules are simple: if a word starts with a vowel, then 
add "ay" to the end; otherwise move the first letter (or pair of 
letters if they represent one sound) to the end and add "ay" to it. 
So "imay oingay ootay ostonbay" is Pig Latin for "I'm going to 
Boston". The film The Lion King included "ixnay on the upidstay" - 
"nix on the stupid" or "don't be stupid". Yet another example:

    Something glinted and caught his eye. He hissed to the 
    nearest kid, "Ixnay on the ottlebay!" The eight-year-old, 
    squirming in his unaccustomed clothes, flushed and tucked 
    the busted bottle farther out of sight.
    [Gladiator-at-Law, by Frederik Pohl and C M Kornbluth, 
    1955.]

"Ixnay" is from "nix", nothing, a slang term that was imported from 
German "nichts" at the end of the eighteenth century.

It's uncertain to what extent Pig Latin was used as a cant or argot 
designed to keep criminal discussions private, but "ixnay" seems to 
have become part of the vocabulary of the hard-boiled hoodlums of 
the period:

    I would've done the job only he wanted to put me on the 
    nut, so I says ixnay, gimme the geetus now.
    [Los Angeles Times, 8 November 1931, in an article with 
    the title Underworld "Lingo" Brought up to Date. "Nut" 
    means a debt; "geetus" is money.]

The term was carried abroad in the detective novels of the time, 
initially perplexing British readers until greater understanding of 
American mores in wartime and after clued us all up and allowed 
"ixnay" to appear in British English, though as an exoticism.

4. Recently noted
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STEAMED-UP  A slang term of the British police came to wide public 
attention as the result of the G20 summit in London earlier this 
month. Kettling is a system by which police contain demonstrators 
within an area, often for many hours, as a method of control. The 
tactic has been used for some years, following the passing of laws 
designed to counter terrorism, and has been ruled as legal by the 
Law Lords despite strong criticism of it as false imprisonment, in 
particular of passers-by accidentally caught within the cordon. The 
term for it, however, is new. Some puzzlement over its origin has 
followed, with one academic finding a linguistic parallel in German 
tactics in the Warsaw ghetto in the early 1940s. But it is 
reasonably certain it arose because someone in the police watches 
television nature programmes. "Kettling" is used in the US for the 
circling and soaring of a group of migrating hawks within rising 
air currents to gain height. It has also been employed for a 
hunting technique of dolphins, which circle a shoal of fish while 
emitting a curtain of air bubbles to trap the fish inside. Though 
the origin of the hawk sense is obscure, the other is presumably 
related to the term for the noise that's caused by bubbles of steam 
forming and condensing within the boiler of a heating system.

WHAT'S THE FRENCH FOR CODPIECE?  Now that cod is hard to come by 
because of over-fishing around the British Isles, retailers and the 
public are turning to a more plentiful, if less tasty, alternative. 
Its name is pollack, which rhymes with bollock, as in the British 
low slang term for a testicle (usually as the dismissive expletive 
"bollocks!"). The Sainsbury supermarket chain fears embarrassment 
may cause the more sensitive among its shoppers to avoid it. So 
they've rebranded pollack as "colin". This is said not as in Firth 
or Powell but as in French: say it as "co-lan" with a nasal ending. 
Of course, people will Anglicise it, so making it sound alarmingly 
cannibalistic ("we've serving up colin for dinner"). But the big 
linguistic issue is that in French colin isn't pollack, but another 
fish, hake. The French for pollack is "lieu jaune".

5. Q and A: Well, blow me!
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Q. For many years during my childhood, I took violin lessons from 
an elderly Englishman in Quebec. On occasion, when expressing great 
astonishment, he would heartily slap his knees and exclaim, "Well, 
blow me!" Another English acquaintance of my parents, who was of 
the same generation (born in the 30s, I would surmise), also used 
the expression, which baffled and amused us collectively time and 
time again. Do you know the less bawdy origins of this phrase? 
[Elisabeth Lauffer]

A. Despite the giggles if an elderly Englishman should without 
thinking use this dated exclamation in public these days, there's 
nothing particularly indelicate in its origins.

It can be traced back to Britain near the end of the eighteenth 
century. The verb is in the sense of the wind blowing. The earliest 
form was "blow me tight!" which may suggest inflating a balloon to 
the point of explosion, but which is related to an older sense of 
"blow" for speaking loudly or angrily or uttering boastful language 
that - as you might say - figuratively inflates the speaker's self-
esteem (the American "blowhard" contains the same idea). It was a 
mild general curse, sometimes humorous, which an anonymous London 
writer in 1848 described as "a burlesque oath". The speaker might 
be vexed, or perhaps surprised:

    "Wallingford lock!" they answered. "Lor' love you, sir, 
    that's been done away with for over a year. There ain't 
    no Wallingford lock now, sir. You're close to Cleeve now. 
    Blow me tight if 'ere ain't a gentleman been looking for 
    Wallingford lock, Bill!" 
    [Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K Jerome, 1888.]

The expression was soon shortened to the "blow me!" form that you 
learned from your music teacher. Lots of variations appeared, such 
as "blow me pink", "blow me over!", "blow my buttons!", "blow me 
down!", and "blow me backwards!"

One uncommonly splendid version of World War Two vintage forcefully 
conveyed the speaker's disgust at the prospect of some unpleasant 
activity that he had no wish to engage in: "blow that for a game of 
soldiers!", which one may guess was first said by some army private 
fed up with his lot and in which "blow" was commonly replaced by a 
more forceful verb.

    Vermine are ancestors of the lemming. Over the millennia 
    more and more vermine were descendants of those vermine 
    who, when faced with a cliff edge, squeaked the rodent 
    equivalent of Blow that for a Game of Soldiers. Vermine 
    now abseil down cliffs, and build small boats to cross 
    lakes.
    [Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett, 1991.]

6. Sic!
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A recent US television advertisement for Celebrex, John O'Creagh 
says, cautions against side effects that might be experienced by 
"patients taking aspirin or the elderly."  

Peter Millington-Wallace reports: "Here in Denmark, I recently saw 
a weird example of globalisation, much as an Italian might view 
tinned spaghetti - German canned shish-kebab. As if to emphasise 
the strangeness of the product, it said on the label, in Danish: 
'Warning. Wooden skewers are not edible'. Damned food fads. Next 
they'll be telling me I can't eat pencils, or drink paint."

A story dated 5 April about a kids' fundraiser in the Greensboro 
News & Record, North Carolina, was sent in by Peggy Clapper: "They 
sold homemade cookies and brownies and lemonade they squeezed from 
tables parked at the end of their driveway."

"The question of how IBM intends to finance their intended purchase 
of Sun Microsystems," John Kennard notes, "was answered by the IT 
PRO Newsletter on Tuesday: 'IBM specifically still appears keen to 
open up its coiffeurs and make a play for Sun Microsystems.'"

Jenny Drayden was browsing the entertainment section of the BBC Web 
site on Tuesday and was intrigued to come across a heading, "Planet 
of the Dead Trailer Revealed!" She wondered if this might be the 
place where old trailers go to die. Prosaically, it was announcing 
the release of a trailer for the Easter special of Dr Who, Planet 
of the Dead - so it was a trailer for a trailer.

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