World Wide Words -- 05 Dec 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 4 17:44:27 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 668 Saturday 5 December 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: Smartbook.
3. Weird Words: Emuscation.
4. What I've learned this week.
5. Q and A: Amn't.
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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DELIQUESCENT Several chemists suggested I might like to add to my
piece the information that the reason crystals deliquesce is that
they are hygroscopic, tending to absorb moisture from the air. If
that effect is strong enough, the crystals dissolve into a liquid.
But the deliquescence is a consequence of hygroscopicity, which is
the key process at work. As it happens, I did think of including
"hygroscopic" and its opposite, "efflorescent". This refers to a
process in which crystals lose water by evaporation and turn to a
powder (the usual example that teachers used to point to, in the
days when it could be found in most households, was washing soda,
hydrated sodium carbonate). But the piece was getting long and
discursiveness is fine only up to a point!
2. Turns of Phrase: Smartbook
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In the past two decades, manufacturers have delivered us laptops,
notebooks, mini-notebooks, subnotebooks and netbooks in successive
attempts to achieve lightweight computing on the move. "Smartbook"
may be the jazzy new term for 2010.
They are small portable computers that look like netbooks but have
different processors, which means that they won't be able to run
Windows. Instead they will operate using one of the many varieties
of Linux. They are being touted as giving better battery life than
netbooks (though with 11 hours life currently being advertised for
one type of netbook, perhaps that isn't so important an issue). So
far as their functions are concerned, they fit somewhere between
netbooks and smartphones.
One obstacle to the term becoming a generic description is that
Smartbook is a trademark of a German company, Smartbook AG, which
is suing the US company Qualcomm, one of the promoters of the new
term, in a German district court for infringement.
In a quest to promote a new type of mobile computing
device called the smartbook, Qualcomm unveiled a new
Lenovo gadget Thursday. The wireless technology company
is betting that consumers will gravitate to smartbooks,
which are designed to combine the most appealing features
of smart phones and laptops.
[Forbes, 12 Nov. 2009.]
I'd shed no tears if the chip companies and others
behind the new gadgets were forced to find a new name for
their platform. Unless you want to argue that smartbooks
are, indeed, the smartest computing device to date, the
term isn't descriptive. Unlike "desktop" or "notebook"
it's just marketing-speak.
[PC World, 25 Nov. 2009.]
3. Weird Words: Emuscation /emUs'KeiS at n/
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A useful word, albeit specialist, being principally of interest to
arboriculturists. Many have no doubt undertaken the task this word
identifies, though it is certain that almost none among them have
thought to apply the term to the chore. This is an exception:
The most infallible art of emuscation, is taking away
the cause, (which is superfluous moisture in clayey and
spewing grounds) by dressing with lime.
[Sylva: A Discourse of Forest Trees & the Propagation
of Timber, by John Evelyn, 1664.]
Mr Evelyn precedes these sage remarks by a description of various
methods of emuscation, which will serve to explain it:
Moss, (which is an adnascent plant) is to be rubb'd
and scrap'd off with some fit instrument of wood, which
may not excorticate the tree, or with a piece of hair-
cloth after a sobbing rain; or by setting it on fire with
a wisp of straw, about the end of December, if the season
be dry, as they practise it in Staffordshire.
[Sylva, ibid. "Sobbing" here is not from our usual
"sob" but from another of unknown origin that means
"soaking, saturated".]
So, emuscation means to remove moss from the bark of a tree. Its
source is Latin "muscus", moss, preceded by "e", meaning "out".
A plain English equivalent would be "de-moss", but Evelyn was never
one for the brief and homely term when a Latinate extravagancy was
possible. In the second quotation above he has "adnascent", meaning
something that grows upon something else, and "excorticate", remove
the bark from a tree. Elsewhere in the same work - among many other
examples - are "ablaqueation", removal or loosening of soil around
the roots of a tree or vine; "decubation", the act of lying down;
"introsume", take internally or absorb nourishment; "perflatile",
exposed to the wind or well ventilated; and "stercoration", the
action of manuring with dung.
4. What I've learned this week
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THE PYRITES OF PENZANCE Following the Cumbrian dialect word that
turned up in the national press recently, one from the language of
Cornwall attracted similar attention last weekend. A four-bedroom
property in Perranporth with Atlantic views was advertised for sale
last week at GBP425,000. The snag is that it's affected by MUNDIC.
It's a Cornish term recorded from the seventeenth century. Mundic
is a form of pyrites, a waste product of the tin and copper mines
of Cornwall and west Devon, often sparkling and colourful because
it contains arsenic, copper, iron and other elements. Up to the
1950s, it was widely mixed with cement to make concrete and mortar.
Unfortunately, pyrites generates sulphuric acid on exposure to air
and water, rotting the material. Many older houses can be hard to
sell as a result. The origin of "mundic" is unknown, although the
OED suggests it might conceivably be linked with the Cornish and
Breton "men", meaning stone, as in "menhir", the second part of
which is "hir", long.
RENEW FUELS Colin Fine has introduced me to DEFOSSILISE. He heard
the former British Chief Scientific Adviser Professor Sir David
King use it on a Radio 4 programme about climate change this week.
To defossilise an economy is to reduce its dependence on fossil
fuels. The word turns up a few times online and in printed sources
(I found it in a WWF publication, EU Consumption, Global Pollution:
"Although biofuels may contribute to reducing the carbon emissions
of transport, the EU biofuels target of 10% also demonstrates that
biofuels will not by themselves result in the 'defossilisation' of
transport.") It's more often found in reference to the teaching of
a second language, where it refers to techniques by which learners
are taught to avoid automatically carrying over aspects of their
first language into the new one.
WORD OF THE YEAR Switzerland is up to the minute with its choice
of its word of the year for 2009, as you might expect from a jury
of journalists. They are all from German-speaking Switzerland and
Liechtenstein; their choice was "Minarettverbot", minaret ban. It
was only last Sunday that a referendum in Switzerland banned the
erection of minarets on mosques, a deeply controversial decision.
Its members argued the term had the potential to become as notable
a Swiss export as "Müesli". We must assume tongues were firmly in
cheeks when drafting this statement. The Unwort, taboo word of the
year, was "Ventilklausel", which literally translates as "valve
clause". It describes the way that the migration of people from the
European Union into Switzerland and back is regulated.
5. Q and A: Amn't
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Q. Why don't we say "I amn't"? All the other personal pronouns have
two contracted forms that can be used in present-tense negative
constructions, such as "we're not" or "we aren't". The first person
singular, however, has only one - "I'm not". What happened to "I
amn't"? [Fred A Roth, Idaho; a related question came from Shailesh
Ramanuj, India]
A. This is a surprisingly complicated question. First off, "amn't"
(which is short for "am not") may be unfamiliar to most of us, but
isn't entirely unknown, though almost exclusively in the inverted
form "amn't I". It's used in Ireland and Scotland, for example. Why
the rest of us don't is a result of shifts in pronunciation that
were associated with a loss of favour generations ago.
"Amn't" has a long recorded history - the Oxford English Dictionary
has an example from a magazine called The Athenian Gazette in 1691,
but it was almost certainly known earlier, as many other shortened
forms, such as "can't", "don't" and "shan't", seem to have arrived
in the language around 1600. But it was never as popular as another
contraction, "an't". This was probably preferred because speakers
disliked putting an "m" and an "n" together in one syllable. One of
the two was elided away (as happened with the "n" in "column", for
example). In this case I'd guess that the "n" was kept because it
matched the other short forms and also signalled negative intent.
"An't" used to be widely acceptable:
You need not sit so near one, if you have anything to
say. I can hear you farther off, I an't deaf.
[Love for Love, by William Congreve, 1695.]
"An't" was also used in place of "are not" and "is not" around the
same time. Jonathan Swift, later a severe critic of abbreviated
forms, included it in his Journal to Stella of 1710: "An't you an
impudent slut?" Edward Ward wrote in Hudibras Redivivus in 1706,
"But if your Eyes a'n't quick of Motion", with the extra apostrophe
showing how he thought the contraction was formed. It stayed in the
language until the nineteenth century:
"An't he beautiful, John? Don't he look precious in
his sleep?" "Very precious," said John. "Very much so. He
generally IS asleep, an't he?"
[The Cricket on the Hearth, by Charles Dickens,
1845.]
The way that "a" was pronounced in these forms wasn't always as we
might say it today. Sometimes it was more like "ay". The result was
that "an't" began to be spelled "ain't".
Early on, "ain't" was as respectable as "an't", as it still is in
some language communities, such as Black American English, and
humorously in some fixed phrases ("if it ain't broke, don't fix
it"). But the prescriptive grammar chaps got at it during the
eighteenth century, objecting to it as a vulgar corruption, and
writers of the next century and after were even more vociferous in
their condemnation. Much of it was directed at the use of "ain't
he" and "ain't they" rather than "ain't I" (Eric Partridge wrote
that using "ain't" for "isn't" was for him "an error so illiterate
that I blush to record it"). However, all its uses became tainted.
The dislike of "ain't" rubbed off on "an't", too, which eventually
led to its replacement.
There was another pronunciation of "an't", in which the vowel was
drawn out and somewhat drawled. Eventually this led to the spelling
pronunciation "aren't", with the "r" silent, a form for which we
have little evidence before the twentieth century. It explains why
"aren't I" exists, which is otherwise a puzzle, since there's no
obvious way that it could have been formed from "am I not". Despite
dislike of it by some stylists, "aren't I" has become accepted in
standard English as the successor to "an't" and as a respectable
alternative to "ain't". But "I aren't" was a shift too far for
people to accept, which is why we have no parallel in the language
today to the old "I amn't" or "I an't" and have to make do just
with "I'm not".
In 1926, H W Fowler wrote an even-handed comment on the use of
these contractions that showed that, for him, "an't" wasn't yet
extinct while "aren't I" didn't yet exist:
"A(i)n't" is merely colloquial, & as used for "isn't"
is an uneducated blunder & serves no useful purpose. But
it is a pity that "a(i)n't" for "am not", being a natural
contraction & supplying a real want, should shock us as
though tarred with the same brush. Though "I'm not"
serves well enough in statements, there is no
abbreviation but "a(i)n't I?" for "am I not?" or "am not
I?"; & the shamefaced reluctance with which these full
forms are often brought out betrays the speaker's
sneaking affection for the "ain't I" that he (or still
more she) fears will convict him of low breeding.
[A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H W Fowler,
1926.]
6. Sic!
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The Dumbledore lookalike Leland Sklar was the subject of a comment
Rick Palley found on a Toto fan Web site: "His very recognizable
bass playing style, along with his beard, have been heard on hits
by Phil Collins, Billy Cobham, Rod Stewart ... ."
In an article on page 24 of the Daily Express of 26 November, David
Balfour read, "I think people trust us because we've lived life and
been through various aspects like divorce and death."
Bob Lee thinks a spell checker had something to do with the weird
hyphenation he saw in a quote from the Lakewood police chief, Bret
Farrar, in the Calgary Herald on Thursday, which had been reprinted
from the Los Angles Times: "I just want to thank all my brothers
and sisters-in-law enforcement for the hours and hours of tireless
work."
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