World Wide Words -- 08 Aug 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 7 16:02:00 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 651 Saturday 8 August 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. Weird Words: Aristology.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Trivial.
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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FACEBOOK A reminder that I've joined the twenty-first century and
become a member of Facebook. Friends welcome! I've also now set up
a discussion group on the site (go via http://wwwords.org?FBWW)
with the title World Wide Words for anyone who is a member and
wants to comment on matters arising from the issue or discuss
language issues.
CREPE HANGER Janet Fulmer is familiar with this term, discussed
last time: "Crepe hanger, in the USA, is not an everyday phrase
now, but it was when I was growing up (born 1932). Nowadays folks
no longer hang crepe on their doors when someone in the household
has died, but it was common when I was a child and a young girl, so
most folks knew what the allusion meant."
Several American doctors told me about a particular application of
the term. James Kahn explained: "In medical schools and on the
wards, to 'hang crepe' meant to paint the bleakest possible picture
of a patient's prognosis to the patient's family - even more dire
than circumstances perhaps warranted - to prepare them for the
worst case outcome in case things went downhill, but also to allow
the doctor to emerge as a hero if things turned out better than
predicted."
BEGHILOS Julie Egan followed up my discussion: "A nice example in
Dutch is showing off your mathematical or memory skills by knowing
the answer to the following sum: 6 x 2182189. The answer 13093134
when read in beghilos reads as 'heleboel' which in Dutch means
'lots, a whole lot, an awful lot'." Claude Baudoin continued the
cross-language theme: "In France in the early 1970s, students with
calculators would say, 'Do you know Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's
phone number? I do!' Giscard was at the time the finance minister.
When the other puzzled student said 'No, what is it?' the first
student would type 3771350 on his calculator and show it to the
other. Then he would turn the calculator upside down, reading
OSEILLE. 'Oseille' in French means sorrel, and for some reason
unknown to me, it is one of the many slang terms for money."
Kenneth Huey notes that, as so often, there's nothing new under the
sun: "You trace the use of 07734 to spell out 'hello' to the new
calculator technology of the 1970s, but I can attest that a Tex
Avery Merrie Melodies cartoon of the 1930s, Little Red Walking
Hood, includes a car license plate with that number. When the car's
driver, a wolf, spots Little Red Walking Hood, he pulls a lever
labelled 'Automatic Wink', which causes the plate to spin 180
degrees and display a jaunty 'hello' for her benefit." (See the
formatted online version for the visual proof.)
TOAD-IN-THE-HOLE Following comments in this section last time
about the use of this name for an egg fried in a hole cut in the
centre of a piece of bread, many readers supplied a variety of
other terms they used for that dish. Dorothy Daybell's family
called them "gashouse eggs" and she pointed me to a Web discussion
in which it was suggested this might be a corruption of "Gasthouse
eggs", perhaps from a German source. The same site gave a variety
of other names, including eggs in a bonnet, bird's nest eggs,
knothole eggs and one-eyed jacks. Another was Moon Over Miami, from
the 1941 film in which the dish had a minor supporting role; the
film connection probably explains why Bennett Woll's mother called
it Hollywood eggs. Many families seem to have had private names for
the food, such as chicky in a nest and one-eyed goddess (Sandra
Parker e-mailed from Australia to say her mother called them this).
Arthur Cox e-mailed from Essex: "in our family it's always referred
to as a 'devil's eye'". Randall Bart told me, "In Los Angeles in
the early to mid 1960s it was an egg in a basket." Alvin Rymsha and
Samantha Fisher, both also from the US, know it respectively as a
popeye and as an egg in a frame. Bruce Beatie of Cleveland State
University tells me, "I've always known this dish as 'egg with a
hat' - so called because one takes the cut-out hole and fries it
along with the bread-with-egg, and then tops the egg with the cut-
out piece." Trevor Evans wrote, "Back in the 50s and early 60s in
London I remember fried bread with a hole in it filled with a fried
egg being called 'egg in the hole', and I loved it."
Chris Neely mentioned another sense of "toad-in-the-hole" in
northern Appalachia, where it is an expression of luck that's
especially strong among coal miners. He wonders if it was brought
to the area by Cornish immigrants. He found a comment in Adrian
Morgan's book Toads and Toadstools: "Tin Miners in Cornwall
believed that to meet a toad in a mine shaft presaged a lucky
strike."
SIC! One item last week, from the Globe and Mail, said it was
based in Boston. It is, of course, a Toronto newspaper. My mistake,
not that of the submitter of the item. That explains the spelling
"colourful" in the item, which puzzled some readers, one of whom
wondered if the British had recolonised the site of the tea party.
UPDATES I've updated the pieces on the Web site that discuss the
phrases "egg on one's face" (go via http://wwwords.org?EOOF) and "I
should cocoa" (go via http://wwwords.org?ISCC).
MY COVER IS BLOWN! James Lubell thought I might find interesting a
message he received from Amazon.com: "We've noticed that customers
who have purchased or rated books by Michael Quinion have also
purchased Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies by Arthur
Goldwag."
2. Weird Words: Aristology /arI'stQl at dZI/
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This word appeared in an obituary in my daily newspaper recently,
defined as "the art and science of cooking". Not having this word
in my working vocabulary, I was at first prepared to take the
obituarist's gloss at face value. However, that significant part of
me that may be described as an eternal student persuaded me to look
it up. It turns out instead to be the art or science of dining, a
rather different matter.
In an unusual example of etymological exactitude, it's possible to
identify the author of this rare word:
According to the lexicons, the Greek for dinner is
Ariston, and therefore, for the convenience of the terms,
and without entering into any inquiry, critical or
antiquarian, I call the art of dining Aristology, and
those who study it, Aristologists.
[The Original, by Thomas Walker, 12 Aug. 1835. This
was a weekly publication which ran only from May to
December in that year. In it, Mr Walker - a lawyer,
police magistrate and author - collected his thoughts on
many subjects, in particular health and gastronomy, which
were original and interesting enough to have been
anthologised since.]
The classical Greek word strictly means breakfast or lunch rather
than dinner, though we should allow much latitude in translating
the prandial habits of one culture into another, not least because
the timing of the meal called dinner in England has varied greatly
down the centuries.
Among other precepts, Mr Walker argued that "As contentment ought
to be an accompaniment to every meal, punctuality is essential, and
the diner and the dinner should be ready at the same time." He
added, "A chief maxim in dining with comfort is to have what you
want when you want it." He admitted that it was all too easy to
take the satisfaction of the appetite to excess, but that as "upon
the due regulation of the appetite assuredly depends our physical
well-being" and also our mental energies, some concern to ensure
that appropriate adjuncts to a good meal were available that would
"add poetry to a repast".
The word has never become more than a marginal addition to the
language, a source of obscure scholarly humour rather than a term
of utility. It's best known from books by Rex Stout, in which his
corpulent protagonist, Nero Wolfe, has a couple of encounters with
a group of gourmets, the Ten for Aristology.
An aristologist should not be confused with a deipnosophist (see my
page at http://wwwords.org?DEIP), a person skilled in dinner-table
conversation, though the latter word once meant something close to
the former.
3. What I've learned this week
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The word REFRIGERATOR is recorded much earlier than we might think.
It appeared in the title of a pamphlet by Thomas Moore, a civil
engineer and farmer, An Essay on the Most Eligible Construction of
Ice-Houses and a Description of the Newly-Invented Machine called
the Refrigerator, dated 1803. It was what later generations called
an icebox, in which food was cooled by blocks of ice cut from lakes
and rivers in the winter and stored in ice houses until needed in
the summer. Thomas Jefferson bought one.
A term that's fairly well known in the medical profession but isn't
yet in the Oxford English Dictionary turned up in a magazine. An
ALLERGOLOGIST is a medical specialist who researches allergies and
investigates ways to treat them, as opposed to an ALLERGIST, who
diagnoses and treats conditions caused by allergies.
Have you ever heard of NIGHTTIME SPINACH? I encountered it for the
first time on Wednesday. It's apparently a slang term in parts of
Africa for bushmeat, such as chimpanzee, antelope, and giraffe,
poached and illicitly consumed after dark by residents of refugee
camps. The term turned up in the World Vision Report in June but I
wonder how common it really is - most online references are to the
Jargon Watch in Wired Magazine, which listed it in June 2008.
If you're online a lot, you may encounter APPVERTISEMENTS, a word I
spotted in a MediaPost blog on Tuesday. These are little computer
applications (apps in the jargon) that are also adverts. They run
inside social media networks such as Facebook; they might be games
involving virtual currency or virtual gifts that promote a product
- send a friend a virtual gift of a bottle of (branded) beer, or a
virtual gift that's delivered (virtually, of course) by a shipping
firm, so spreading its name around the network. The technique is
called APPVERTISING.
There's a new abbreviation in British law: VOO, in full Violent
Offender Order, a means to control dangerous criminals after their
release from jail, limiting where they can go and who they can
associate with. The term turned up first in April 2006 but the
orders came into force this week.
4. Q and A: Trivial
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Q. Can you advise the correct derivation of "trivial"? I have had
quoted to me several times that it means "three roads", where the
Romans would post notices, gossip etc. This seems to me too cute,
as there are few instances of three roads meeting - "crossroads"
would have been more useful. Also, why would the notices be called
after the location - why not the Latin for "notices" or "twitter"?
[Geoff Mattingley]
A. Variations on this story turn up from time to time. This one has
been embellished, since the bit about posting notices doesn't fit
what we know about the Roman period. There is indeed a connection,
quite a strong one, but the story's rather more complicated.
The word "trivium" in classical Latin was made up of "tri", meaning
three, plus "via", a road or way, so it literally did mean a place
where three roads met. But a frequent sense was of a crossroads, as
you suggest would be more appropriate. The word later took on a
figurative sense of the street corner, a place where the common
people met and passed the time of day. Something "trivialis", the
adjective from "trivium", was commonplace, ordinary or everyday.
However, the first sense of "trivial" in English, in the fifteenth
century, referred to a quite different matter. In the educational
system of medieval times, learning was organised in seven aspects,
the liberal arts, where "liberal" meant study suitable for a free
man, a gentleman, a person not tied to a trade. It was divided into
two groups. The first part - you might call it Liberal Arts 101 -
was called the trivium. This comprised grammar, logic and rhetoric;
a more advanced set, the quadrivium, consisted of the mathematical
sciences - arithmetic, geometry and astronomy - together with
music. The Latin names for these two divisions of learning likewise
came from "via", and you might translate them as "the threefold
way" and "the fourfold way". "Trivial" was the usual adjective
applied to the trivium. Because the quadrivium was thought to be
more difficult to learn than the trivium and dealt with matters
that were less commonly met with in daily life, the subjects of the
trivium came to be thought of as ordinary or of lesser status.
Our modern sense of the word was first used by Shakespeare, in the
second part of Henry VI, more than a century after it had begun to
be applied to the trivium.
Those with a knowledge of Latin - that was everybody involved in
education at the time, of course - also knew what Romans of the
classical period meant by "trivialis". That must have powerfully
influenced the development of the modern sense of "trivial" but
doesn't seem to have been its foundation.
5. Sic!
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Rhys Lewis was looking for somewhere to eat in London. He decided
against the Capital Hotel after reading on its Web site: "Enjoy
homemade pastries and scones and delicious jams made from our
Pastry Chef." Definitely not vegetarian, then?
The Age, Melbourne, Australia, had a story on 4 August which began,
"Mourners at two open-coffin viewings found they were grieving for
strangers after a funeral company mix-up. Victoria Funerals, which
specialises in serving Melbourne's Greek community, said it was
mortified at the error." A highly appropriate emotion, as Terry
Davidson comments.
Remaining in Australia, Laurie Malone reported a thoroughly mixed
metaphor from Steve Fielding, senator for the Family First party.
Commenting on a current financial scandal, he said on Thursday,
"The OzCar affair has become a political storm that must be put to
bed because Parliament shouldn't have this cloud hanging over its
head."
Beate Czogalla found a paradoxical sentence on Time magazine's Web
site, in a story about bodies not being buried because relatives
can't afford funerals: "These people are really heartbroken about
the fact that they can't [bury their loved ones]. This is not just
a distant relative - you have kids who can't bury their parents a
lot of times, or siblings who can't bury each other."
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