World Wide Words -- 24 Jan 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 23 16:41:45 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 623 Saturday 24 January 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: Carrotmobbing.
3. Weird Words: Bombilation.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Shovel-ready.
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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ROUND THE BEND As several frustrated readers pointed out, I left
the story of this idiom in an unsatisfactory state - literally at
sea, having established its naval origins. Many pointed out that a
bend in maritime contexts is a class of knots, specifically those
that either join two ropes or link a rope to something else (or is
the latter a hitch? nautical terminology always trips me up).
To Scott Perry it suggests the image of wrapping "someone gone mad
at sea in the confines of a canvas sail until reaching the next
port", while John Benz Fentner argues that a mad sailor might be
"bent round" with a rope to keep him under control. Jane Harris
noted that some bends are fiendishly complicated and that it might
refer to something or someone "quite thoroughly kinked"; James Falk
wonders if the complexity of the knots might drive some sailors
crazy trying to learn how to do them. Jeremy Kirk mentioned "loopy"
as a related term for eccentricity or craziness. Jonathon Green, in
the Chambers Slang Dictionary, says that it's likewise nautical
slang, dating from slightly later than "round the bend"; he points
to a connection with the Scots "loopy", meaning cunning (possibly,
as Eric Partridge noted many years ago, an ironic reference).
The conceptual links between "round the bend" and "loopy" (and with
the much more recent "round the twist", which seems to have been a
humorous reformulation of "round the bend") are obvious enough,
with the idea being of a person who is twisted or out of true. To
what extent "round the bend" or "loopy" are linked to knots is
unclear, and quite certainly no longer possible to discover.
PANKING POLE After my little item last time about this regional
usage, a couple of subscribers wondered if there might be an "s"
missing off the front of "pank". Barney Deibert pointed me to the
Dictionary of American Regional English, which has an entry for
"pank". I've also now consulted more nineteenth-century dialect
dictionaries and other sources and added the piece, considerably
enlarged, to the Web site as a Weird Word (to read it, go via
http://wwwords.org?PKPL).
PAPARAZZO John Marciano helpfully shared the results of research
in Italy into the origins of this word, which confirms a link with
George Gissing. I've incorporated it into the Topical Words piece
dating from 1998 (http://wwwords.org?PPRZ), provoked by the death
of the man who inspired Fellini's original street photographer.
Since writing the piece, the Oxford English Dictionary has revised
its entry for the word and information from that has been added.
RUMBLEDETHUMPS Following recent discussion about this dialect term
of cookery, Cara De Silva posted a question to the discussion list
of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, a wonderfully
eclectic-sounding group. As a result, she was able to tell me about
a special sense of "rumble", to stir or agitate violently, to mash
potatoes or scramble eggs (the Oxford English Dictionary entry has
a nineteenth-century citation that refers to "rumbled eggs", what
we would now call scrambled eggs). So rumbledethumps need not refer
to especially heavy treatment of the raw materials. For a revised
version of the piece, go via http://wwwords.org?RBDT.
2. Turns of Phrase: Carrotmobbing
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It's a form of social activism. It was coined last year by Brent
Schulkin, a US environmentalist based in San Francisco. When people
carrotmob, they shop at a small business, specially chosen for its
good environmental practices, in large numbers on the same day. But
Mr Schulkin has introduced a twist: he asks the business to invest
a proportion of that day's takings in energy-efficient improvements
at its stores.
The second part of the name is based on "flash mob" (see the Web
site piece at http://wwwords.org?F89H). The first part borrows the
idea of using a carrot rather than a stick to encourage behaviour.
It's a form of what's been called a "buycott" or a "procott", the
opposite of a boycott, a form of collective action in which people
choose to buy from firms whose values - in areas such as social
justice and environmental protection - reflect and support their
own.
* San Francisco Magazine, Jun. 2008: You might call Carrotmob
"Flash Mob 2.0," since it combines the whimsy of those events with
the Sierra Club's seriousness of purpose, hitting the sweet spot
between the Bay Area's two dominant poses: pointless irony and
earnest do-gooderism.
* Guardian, 18 Sep. 2008: CarrotMobbing emerged in the US earlier
this year. It uses the "carrot" of consumer buying rather than the
"stick" of boycotting or bad publicity to encourage ethical
business. Alone, our consumer choices make a minimal impact, but
together and organised we unlock a bigger bargaining power.
3. Weird Words: Bombilation /bQmbI'leIS at n/
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A loud sound.
This word turned up the other day in Scarlett Thomas's The End of
Mr Y: "She was playing an organ; an old battered thing from which
emanated the most harrowing bombilations."
Writers and reference books can't agree on what they mean by the
word. The entry in the Oxford English Dictionary suggests only a
buzzing or droning, which fits Nathan Bailey's definition in his
1721 Universal Etymological English Dictionary that "bombilation"
refers to the humming of bees. This matches its provenance, via an
Old French word that derives from Latin "bombizatio", a buzzing.
Hissing is another possibility, since writers from the nineteenth
century mention bombilation by angry swans.
Most of the relatively few examples I've found, however, emphasise
loudness as its prime quality, perhaps through mental associations
with "bomb". A book by Kenneth Robeson (this was a house pseudonym
of various authors employed by the US publishers Street and Smith,
especially those who wrote the Doc Savage adventures in the 1930s)
has this:
The sound was the movement, and the movement was the
sound. It was too great to be real or sensible. It was
holocaust, din, bombilation, charivari, blare, blast.
It was hell come there and having its moment.
A prolific author of works about the old West, James B Hendryx,
included this description in The Texan of 1918:
The pound of the horse's feet was lost in the titanic
bombilation of the elements - the incessant crash and
rumble of thunder and the ever increasing roar of
rushing waters.
The word is so rare these days, however, that nobody is going to
dispute your meaning, whether you use it for droning or din.
4. Recently noted
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ABSENCE OF BEVERAGE Much fun has been had by some members of the
British press with an obscure item of current British Army slang.
This follows the revelations that Prince Harry used a racist term
in a video to describe a fellow officer. Army sources said he would
be called before his Household Cavalry commanding officer for what
- we're told - is politely known as an "interview without coffee",
or in more demotic language a bollocking or - formally - a severe
reprimand.
TELEVISION IS USEFUL The recent death of the British wit, lawyer
and writer Sir John Mortimer was commemorated on BBC television on
Monday with an evening of programmes. One was a re-run of his 1975
television play, Rumpole of the Bailey, which introduced the "Old
Bailey hack" Horace Rumpole to the world. The story centred on a
supposed knifing by a young man of Jamaican origin. At one point in
the story he refers to his "baby father", a term Rumpole clearly
doesn't understand. The boy was using it in the standard sense of a
man who is the father of a woman's child without being her current
or exclusive partner. My antennae twitched and afterwards, I looked
it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, to find the first example
is from three years after the play and from Jamaica, not London.
Sir John was clearly on the linguistic ball. And if we can lay our
hands on the original script (the OED doesn't cite radio, film or
television programmes directly, objecting to any medium of record
that can't be traced back to Gutenberg), his use will stand first
in the entry when it is next revised. A minor memorial to a great
writer, but mine own.
5. Q&A: Shovel-ready
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Q. I don't find "shovel-ready" on your site. I've heard it quoted
as a buzzword of our new president for a property that's ready for
construction and development. I've known the word for years and was
surprised that so many didn't. It also doesn't appear in any
dictionaries that I've consulted. [Joe Whalen]
A. It has caused much comment among the lexicographical classes -
as reported here, it was voted Word Most Likely to Succeed in the
annual contest of the American Dialect Society in early January.
It's easy to make a case that it already has succeeded. It's to be
found everywhere in the press at the moment. One newspaper archive
online has more than a hundred examples of it from December 2008
and a further 150 from the first two weeks of January 2009 alone.
It was noted as Washington's latest buzzword in a journal piece in
early December. Its popularity, as you say, is largely due to the
transition team of the president-elect from November 2008 on. One
major aim has been to build a stimulus package to create new jobs,
but it has to be for projects that are primed to go - ready for the
first shovel to be wielded on site.
Though the Obama team have made "shovel-ready" their own, they did
not invent it. It was already becoming widely used in the preceding
months, as state governments battled against the growing recession
by authorising stimulus packages involving public works. Some of
these aimed to get sites ready for development, including obtaining
planning permissions, cleaning up contamination and laying roads
and services. But the term goes back much further. Benjamin Zimmer,
of Visual Thesaurus, found this:
Brewer noted that projects seeking approval from the state
Board of Education have to be "shovel ready."
[Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 22 Feb. 1995.]
It becomes steadily more widely recorded during the remainder of
the decade and on into the first years of the current century,
picking up in popularity even more from about 2003.
Where it comes from is, as so often, far from clear. An article in
the Washington Post on 8 January 2009 tried to trace it to its
roots. The writer found a Web site, shovelready.com, maintained by
an electrical utility, National Grid. Art Hamlin, its upstate New
York economic development director, said his company started using
the term - by implication inventing it - in the late 1990s; they
registered the domain in 1998.
It would be nice to be able to say that that's where it came from,
but the writer of the article acknowledged that somebody else may
have got to it first and - as Ben Zimmer has shown - the term is at
least three years older. Its unsung inventor probably doesn't even
realise he created the term that has become so closely associated
with the new US administration.
6. Sic!
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"In tough economic times, merchants must get creative." Randall
Bart e-mailed. "A few days ago I was down in Los Angeles and saw a
sign which said in full 'Shoes 3 for $20'." Special offer for Jake
the Peg? [http://wwwords.org?JKTP]
Colin Hague noted that a signpost outside the Citroen car showrooms
in Slough, west London, instructs "used customers" to turn left.
The Top News in Yahoo! Philippines last weekend, John Orford tells
us suffered from a bad case of the floating hyphens: "Filipino
receives first US anti-child labor award."
"My wife, Lisa," says Steve Engelhardt, "discovered a conversation
piece in the Uncommon Goods mail-order catalog: 'Eco-friendly and
innovative, these lovely paper products are made out of elephant
poop! Odorless, 100% recycled and sanitary. A percentage of the
proceeds from these products goes to support elephant welfare and
conversation.'" He says that if he could talk to the animals, he'd
support their conversation, too.
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