World Wide Words -- 2 Aug 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 21 17:59:42 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 653 Saturday 22 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: Ripsnorter.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Freelance.
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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BULLY PULPIT Following this piece last time, Ron Hann asked about
the use of "bully" to mean corned beef. The experts say that it is
most probably from the French "bouilli", stewed or boiled meat.
CACTUS In my snippet about the Australian expression last time, I
noted that there were no native cacti in that country. John Weiss
pointed out that the prickly pear had been imported from the US in
the early 1800s as stock fodder but had become a serious invasive
pest in New South Wales and Queensland by the latter part of the
nineteenth century. It was so well known he feels the expression
was most certainly native. Many Australians wrote to make the same
point Rob Coates did: "Sometimes the single word 'cactus' is used
but it's generally recognised to be a shortening of 'cactus
fuctus'. This is said as a pseudo-Latin phrase to bring a touch of
wry humour to an otherwise unfortunate situation. For example, a
mechanic, after inspecting the starter motor in your car might
announce 'No wonder it won't start, mate - this is cactus fuctus!'"
(An alternative spelling with the "k" in place is also common, I
gather.)
MEATSPACE I mentioned this geekish jargon word in another snippet
last time. A number of readers asked whether it should have been
"meetspace". To quote the invaluable Jargon File: "Meatspace: The
physical world, where the meat lives - as opposed to cyberspace."
2. Weird Words: Ripsnorter /'rIp,snO:t@(r)/
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This delightful word from rural America, meaning something violent,
extravagant, vigorous or a striking example of its kind, has become
known everywhere that English is spoken:
Just when you thought that every imaginable etiquette
question had been posed and answered, suddenly, from
nowhere, just when you're on holiday in the South of
France and at least 1,000 miles from the nearest
Debrett's or glossy-mag advice page, a real rip-snorter
leaps up and leaves you foundering, to wit: is it rude to
stare at a disabled dog?
[Giles Coren, writing in The Times, 1 Aug. 2009.]
Its first appearance, in 1840, was attributed to Davy Crockett ("Of
all the ripsnorters I ever tutched upon, thar never war one that
could pull her boat alongside of Grace Peabody"). But as it
appeared in one of the series of almanacs bearing his name four
years after he died at the Alamo, we must take the link with a
large pinch of salt - as we must such other supposed coinages of
his as "circumflustercated" and "scentoriferous", part of the
largely fictitious mouth-filling, tall-talking vocabulary of
mountain men that the almanacs almost single-handedly invented.
"Snorter" has had various senses that imply something is an extreme
or remarkable example of its kind. To take one example, around the
same time that "ripsnorter" appeared, "snorter" was applied to a
particularly ferocious storm, a sense alluded to in the slightly
opaque Crockett example that I've quoted. "Rip" is a pretty much
meaningless intensifier, as it is also in words like "rip-roaring".
3. What I've learned this week
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I've learned a new word: RUPESTRIAN from an item about a hotel in
caves at Matera in southern Italy: "As you ascend, the environment
becomes progressively less rupestrian until, at the very top,
guests find themselves staying in something that's akin to a normal
room." RUPESTRIAN is from the Latin word for a rock by way of its
adjective "rupestris", meaning "found on rocks". There's some
disagreement about its meaning. Oxford dictionaries firmly say that
it refers to art done on rocks or cave walls but other dictionaries
hold that it can also mean "composed of rock", as the writer meant.
There are enough examples of this rather rare word to be able to
say Oxford is wrong. The related "rupestral" is principally a term
in botany for a plant that grows on rocks, though it can also refer
to rock art.
An unlovely medical acronym greeted me on reading an article about
eating disorders: EDNOS. It means "Eating Disorders Not Otherwise
Recognised". The article concerned orthorexia nervosa, an unhealthy
fixation on healthy eating (see http:/wwwords.org?ORXA).
Martin Crim encountered PALEOTEMPESTOLOGY in an article in the New
York Times on 13 August. It looks like a facetious formation, and
indeed an article in the Orlando Sentinel of Florida back in 1998
said that it had been generated "as something of a joke". But it's
a serious, if recent, academic discipline, which studies past storm
activity through the evidence of historical and geological records.
Another word that sounds like a witticism was pointed out by Janusz
Lukasiak. It appeared in an online BBC story discussing the reasons
for UNIPEDAL resting in flamingoes. Yes, it means standing on one
foot. It isn't in any of the dictionaries I've consulted but it's
clear from the evidence that it is a serious, if jargonistic, term
of scientists, and is relatively common. My earliest example, which
really was a joke, appeared in the 1829 book Constantinople in 1828
by Charles MacFarlane. He wrote about the way in which women sat in
Smyrna: "The 'received position,' even in company, is to sit with
one leg on the sofa bent under them, and the other hanging over the
edge." A visiting Frenchman, "who saw, for the first time in his
life, this unipedal exhibition" of a seated row of women, asked if
all the women in the city had but the one leg. Another example is
in Principles of Abnormal Psychology by Edmund Conklin of 1928, in
which he refers not only to unipedal and bipedal foot actions but
also wrote, "The last two actions involved the use of the hands in
both unimanual and bimanual activities." He could have written that
the individuals sometimes used one hand and sometimes both, but
this presumably wouldn't have been scholarly enough.
The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain performed at the Albert Hall
in London at a late evening concert last Tuesday as part of the BBC
Proms season (you should hear them play Beethoven). The orchestra's
founder, George Hinchliffe, used the splendid UKULELEATOR for one
of the many amateur players of the instrument who joined them for
the concert. A nonce word, but fun:
A feisty young lady named Baytor,
At about ten pm, not much later,
Had a bit of a ball,
With her uke at the Hall,
As an invited ukuleleator.
4. Q and A: Freelance
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Q. A Web site says: "Freelancers can trace their job title back to
Sir Walter Scott, who introduced the term in his 1819 novel,
Ivanhoe. His 'free-lance' characters were medieval mercenaries who
pledged their loyalty (and weapons) to lords and kings, for a fee."
As a freelance translator my curiosity is aroused. Is this
etymological story correct? Perhaps it could provide an entry point
for one of your excellent articles. [Steve Dyson, Lisbon]
A. We are so used to being told that "freelance" did derive from
medieval mercenaries in just this way that the story brings one up
short disbelievingly. But it's correct. The word is not recorded
before Sir Walter Scott introduced it in that book.
This is its first appearance:
I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and
he refused them - I will lead them to Hull, seize on
shipping, and embark for Flanders; thanks to the bustling
times, a man of action will always find employment.
[Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, 1819. "Free", of
course, means "unbound", not "without cost".]
It's one mark of the huge influence that Scott had in his lifetime.
He has quite gone out of fashion these days but in his time he was
a famous and widely read writer (Henry James later remarked that
Scott had made the nineteenth-century English novel possible). He
also invented the historical novel, of which Ivanhoe is a classic
example.
He's credited with either popularising or inventing many words and
phrases, to the extent that he is marked as the first user of more
than 700 in the Oxford English Dictionary and he lies third behind
the Bible and Shakespeare in innovation in that work. He's recorded
as the first user of, to take a few terms at random, Calvinistic,
blood is thicker than water, clansmen, cold shoulder, deferential,
flat (meaning an apartment), Glaswegian, jeroboam, lady-love, lock,
stock and barrel, Norseman, otter hunt, roisterer, Scotswoman (in
place of the older Scotchwoman), sick-nurse, sporran, weather-stain
and wolf-hound. He also introduced his readers to many obscure old
terms, especially from the Scots language and from chivalry.
There was a slightly earlier term, "free companion", which appeared
in 1804 in a translation of the fourteenth-century chronicles of
the French historian Jean Froissart about the Hundred Years War.
Scott uses this, too, in the same book:
A knight who rode near him, the leader of a band of
free companions, or Condottieri, that is, of mercenaries
belonging to no particular nation, but attached for the
time to any prince by whom they were paid.
[Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, 1819.]
5. Sic!
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Nigel Ross wrote: "I recently enjoyed a good cup of coffee here in
Monterey, California, watching the sunset over the harbour. But I
didn't enjoy the coffee shop's sign advertising 'Pastry's Do-nuts
and Sweet Roles'!" Of course not. Surely the sweet roles are down
the coast in Hollywood? [He took a photo, which is in the online
version of this issue.]
The subheading over a story in last Sunday's Herald-Sun of Durham,
North Carolina, got to Dick Gebhardt: "Many Outraged Guns Allowed
in National Parks." He felt that guns with emotions are a step too
far. The headlinese obscured the fact that it was people who were
outraged because a bill signed by the president allows owners to
take their guns into national parks.
In a case of "I know what you mean but it could have been better
expressed", a report in the Midland Daily News of Michigan last
Saturday noted that "Dr. Kamu Vigani, medical examiner in Oakland
who does autopsies in Bay and other counties, determined the man
died from accidental drowning following an autopsy at Bay Regional
Medical Center." Thanks to someone I know only as Penny Nickle for
sending that in.
On Monday, the New York Times had a story with the headline "DNA
Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show". Professor Chad Orzel
pointed out on ScienceBlogs that the report said "Dr Frumkin is a
founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed
a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes
to sell to forensics laboratories." The plot thickens ...
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