World Wide Words -- 21 Feb 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 20 16:50:58 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 627 Saturday 21 February 2009
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Altermodernism.
3. LSoft Choice Awards.
4. Weird Words: Glebe.
5. Recently noted.
6. Q&A: Getting a word into dictionaries.
7. 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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CARROT AND STICK Following last week's piece, Timothy Williams
noted that, intriguingly, the idiom is recorded also in Italian.
Benito Mussolini published a brochure with the title Il tempo del
bastone & della carota (The Time of the Carrot and the Stick) in
the newspaper Corriere della Sera of Milan in August 1944.
BORN TO BLUSH UNSEEN This not being video, you have been spared
the sight of my embarrassed face when I heard Grant Barrett and
Martha Barnett praise this newsletter to the skies on the US NPR
programme A Way With Words this week (http://wwwords.org?AWWW).
Many thanks to them both. And a warm welcome to everybody who
joined the mailing list as a result.
SNARGE AND STANNATOR Last week's pieces on these two words have
now been expanded and put on the Web site. You can reach them via
links on the home page at http://www.worldwidewords.org.
2. Turns of Phrase: Altermodernism
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This has appeared, like a dusty fly speck dotted across the review
pages of the more upmarket British newspapers this month, because
"Altermodern" is the name given to Tate Britain's Triennial 2009
exhibition. The term was coined by the exhibition's curator, the
French cultural theorist Nicolas Bourriaud.
Explanations of it are varied and more than a little difficult to
get one's mind around if one hasn't already had a firm grounding in
Barthes, Derrida and their successors. The exhibition catalogue
says it refers to "the in-progress redefinition of modernity in the
era of globalisation, stressing the experience of wandering in
time, space and medium." More simply, the curator argues that, just
as modernism was succeeded by post-modernism, the latter's era is
ending and a new one is being born, which will be expressed in the
language of a global culture and will be an alternative style to
both its predecessors. Hence "Altermodern" and "Altermodernism".
The trouble with the idea is that the critics dislike the result.
The Observer called the Triennial dull and came close to saying it
was a waste of space; the Financial Times said it was "confused,
aimless and hideous" and that it was drowned in its curator's own
critical theory jargon; The Times complained that even reading the
catalogue was "ball-crushingly dispiriting". The Telegraph's critic
noted that "too many artists were allowed to bang on and on without
taking us anywhere in particular or giving us anything of interest
to look at."
The general feeling is that, rather than being the next big thing
in the art world, Altermodernism isn't going anywhere and isn't a
term likely to be included in dictionaries any time soon.
* The Observer, 8 Feb. 2008: Altermodernism, if I understand it, is
international art that never quite touches down but keeps on moving
through places and ideas, made by artists connected across the
globe rather than grouped around any central hub such as New York
or London.
* The Independent, 13 Feb. 2008: It isn't easy to work out what
Altermodernism might be - even when it's been explained to you
several times. The description given in the catalogue leaves you
with the distinct suspicion that Postmodernism has been towed off
to a chop-shop, given a quick respray and they're now trying to
sell it back to us as this year's model.
3. LSoft Choice Awards
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We're still second in the LSoft Choice Awards contest this month,
despite all the efforts of subscribers. Please continue and, if
possible, increase your level of support of World Wide Words. You
can vote once a day, every day, from any computer to which you have
access, including networked machines. To vote, follow this link:
http://wwwords.org?LCAS.
4. Weird Words: Glebe /gli:b/
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Land that once supplied part of a clergyman's income.
This came to mind when passing a field in the town where I live. It
lies opposite the church and a house beside it, Glebe Cottage, was
the vicarage centuries ago.
In England, the glebe was historically endowed land that provided
the rector of a parish with part of his income, either through his
farming it himself, or by his letting it out to a tenant.
The Parson, who farmed his own glebe and bred cattle in
its rich pastures, had won a prize at the county show.
[Kenelm Chillingly, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1873.]
I'm not well up on the history of my local glebe land, but even a
casual glance at the small field shows it couldn't have brought in
much income. A gazetteer of 1845 noted that even then the glebe was
a mere 1¼ acres. To find out more I'd have to search out the local
terriers, church registers of landed property, a word that derives
from Latin "terra", earth. (The name of the type of dog comes from
the same source, because terriers followed their quarry underground
into burrows or earths.) At one time, a rector's living included
other income, mainly tithes (from a Latin word meaning a tenth),
based on the produce of the parish.
Glebes and tithes were sometimes extensive, providing rich returns
for absentee rectors who might accumulate multiple livings called
pluralities. They would appoint vicars (from Latin "vicarius", a
substitute) to be the parish priests.
Crabtree Canonicorum is a very nice thing; there are only
two hundred parishioners; there are four hundred acres of
glebe; and the great and small tithes, which both go to
the rector, are worth four hundred pounds a year more.
[The Warden, by Anthony Trollope, 1855. £400 a year at
that time would be worth now about £15,000 or $22,000.
The great tithes came from wheat, barley, hay and wood,
small tithes from other growing things and from animal
produce. The small tithes usually went to the vicar.]
Tithes have long since vanished and glebe lands are no longer part
of the livings of rectors. However, the word survives widely in
parts of the UK and Ireland in names such as Glebe Farm, Glebe
Field, Glebe Pasture and Glebe Cottage. The word derives from Latin
"gleba", meaning a clod or lump, more broadly soil or land.
[My thanks to David Primrose, Vicar of Thornbury, for his help in
sorting out the ecclesiastical vocabulary.]
5. Recently noted
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THIEVES THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT The Guardian this week had an item
on a report to English Heritage, the statutory body responsible for
safeguarding England's historic environment. The report claims that
stealing valuable objects from historical sites has become a semi-
professional criminal activity. Thieves mainly work by night and
use metal detectors to identify and unearth objects such as bronze
axes, Roman coins, Saxon jewels and other saleable objects. The
practice is called nighthawking, with those involved being, as you
would expect, nighthawkers. "Nighthawking" has been known among
archaeologists in the UK since at least 1995 (it appeared in an
article in the magazine Antiquity in that year). It's a specific
use of a US term that's at least a century older, which was taken
from the name of an American bird. To nighthawk meant to go about
at night because you were working or seeking entertainment (and in
that sense formed the subject of the famous Edward Hopper painting
of that title of 1942) but has since also been linked with various
nefarious nocturnal activities. The British usage is a reasonable
extension but sounds slightly odd because we have no bird of that
name to make a mental connection with (we have the closely related
nightjar instead). Another colloquial sense is used by doctors in
the US for sending x-rays for analysis overnight to a country in a
different time zone to speed diagnosis, a form of offshoring.
TIME PASSES A piece in the New York Times on Thursday quoted the
new director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers,
responding to a question at a press conference: "I just don't do
ticktock." It's US newspaper jargon. William Safire defined it in
the Times as long ago as September 1973: "Journalists' argot for a
story detailing the chronology leading up to a major announcement
or event." An article in Slate in 1999 explained the term in more
detail: "'Ticktock' was reporter-ese for a portentous narrative
about the making of some significant event, usually having to do
with the government. It had been invented decades ago by the
newsmagazines, but appropriated in recent years by the major
newspapers, which liked to scoop the newsmagazines by running big
ticktocks on Sundays." These days, it can refer to books and TV
programmes. Mr Summers presumably took the word to mean no more
than insider gossip about the making of some decision, which in
practice is often a major constituent of a ticktock.
6. Q&A: Getting a word into dictionaries
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Q. If someone wanted to pose a new word to the major dictionaries,
what would they do? How would they go about it? [Michael Day]
A. Readers ask this question frequently of World Wide Words, as
they do of dictionary publishers. Your pithy question provides an
excellent opportunity to supply a definitive answer.
The experience of Mary O'Neill, the editor-in-chief of Chambers
Dictionaries, is typical: "People often call or write to us with
words they would like to see in a dictionary. Alex Horne created a
Edinburgh Festival Fringe show in 2008 around his attempts to have
dictionary publishers recognise words that he had coined. And the
Edinburgh publisher Canongate recently launched a campaign to have
the word 'eunoia' - translated from Greek as 'beautiful thinking',
and the title of a book by one of their published poets - entered
into The Chambers Dictionary."
I wouldn't go so far as to tell you not to waste your time, but
dictionaries base decisions on what to include on a wide variety of
factors; information from members of the public about words they
have invented that are untested in the forum of public opinion
forms only a tiny part of the process. As Mary O'Neill went on to
say: "At Chambers, we're always happy to receive suggestions for
new words. However, like other dictionary publishers, it's not our
policy to include words until we have evidence that they have been
used by a range of people over a reasonable period of time. We do
not include words just because they are etymologically plausible if
we don't have evidence that they are in current use."
The traditional method of collecting evidence of new words and of
how much they're used has been for editors and freelance helpers to
systematically read books and newspapers (I do this for the Oxford
English Dictionary). These days, with computing resources at their
disposal that would have been the envy of earlier generations of
lexicographers, all dictionary publishers maintain vast databases
of current usage, collectively called corpora (from Latin "corpus",
a body). Chambers has the Chambers Harrap International Corpus of
nearly one billion words; Collins and Oxford have collections that
are similar in size and scope. Mary O'Neill told me, "With a little
analysis, such a corpus can show how frequently a word is used and
whether it is restricted to a small group of users."
As a result of systematic reading and corpus enquiry, editors can
decide whether to include a word. Cormac McKeown, a senior editor
at Collins English Dictionaries, comments: "If we find it used a
sufficient number of times across a sufficient number of sources,
over a sufficiently long period of time, we include it in our
dictionaries. What these thresholds are depends on the size of the
dictionary - generally, the smaller the dictionary the higher the
requisite number of hits in our corpus."
If you want to persist, Mary O'Neill has some encouragement and
advice: "If people do find words useful, and start to repeat them,
it is possible that they will catch on and eventually merit a place
in the dictionary. If someone wants to have their coinage included,
they should use it as much as possible, encourage others to do so
and, if they can, use it where it will ensure a wider audience, for
example a letter to a newspaper, or a radio or TV interview or
phone-in. Keep a record of where and when you have heard it used by
others. Then, when you have enough evidence to prove that the word
is established, send it to your dictionary publisher of choice."
Over to you and good luck!
7. Sic!
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"In the newsletter of the American Birding Association," e-mailed
Harlow Bielefeldt, "a caption under a photo of a boat-billed heron
described the bird as 'incredulous'. Perhaps it had never before
seen a photographer."
Tom Watkins reports that Bay Harbour News, the community newspaper
for the eastern suburbs of Christchurch, New Zealand, ran a feature
in their 11 February issue advertising a "delightful and charming
cottage" for sale which boasts a "lamented benchtop finish".
The New York Times E-mail Headlines for 11 February included this
comment, spotted by Peter Strauss: "Improved technology has made
the use of frozen sperm commonplace at the breeding of dog shows."
So that's why there are so many dog shows!
The Fox News site, Dennis Ellenburg tells us, features the story of
the English and French nuclear submarines that earlier this month
bumped together like a pair of mildly amorous whales. It reported
that, because of the nuclear warheads on board, "An accident, even
an unintentional one, could have had serious consequences."
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