World Wide Words -- 14 Mar 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 13 17:27:16 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 629 Saturday 14 March 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: Great Recession.
3. Weird Words: Sequacious.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Give one's eye teeth.
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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OH, BELGIUM! My silly mistake of the week was geographical. Paul
Gretton was the first of many to point it out: "Many Dutch people
would be overjoyed if the fine city of Antwerp were in fact in the
Netherlands. Unfortunately it's in Belgium, a very different place.
Much better beer, for one thing!" Lyda Fens-de Zeeuw commented, "I
was surprised to discover that Antwerp has again become part of the
Netherlands. Being Dutch myself, I was under the impression that we
'lost' the southern part of the Netherlands to Belgium centuries
ago and never regained it."
To compound my error, another Sic! item referred incorrectly to the
town of Middlesborough. It's Middlesbrough. Andrew Haynes wrote,
"As a journalist I know that it's an easy mistake to make. To my
knowledge Middlesbrough is the only place of significant size with
a name that ends in '-brough' rather than the more usual '-borough'
or '-burgh', though there are quite a number of small villages and
suburbs with that ending. For some reason, almost all of these are
in Yorkshire." Confusingly, the Middlesborough near the Cumberland
Gap in Kentucky is sometimes spelled that way as an alternative to
Middlesboro and my spelling checker marks Middlesbrough as wrong.
CARROT AND STICK There seems no end to the interesting things to
be said about this expression. Jan Freeman devoted her column in
the Boston Globe last Sunday to it, quoting me but adding some
other early examples. See http://wwwords.org?JFCS.
2. Turns of Phrase: Great Recession
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This term for the fine financial mess we're all in has begun to
appear worldwide following a widely reported speech by the head of
the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on 10
March: "I think that we can now say that we've entered a Great
Recession." Note the capital letters.
This follows a period in which writers had been casting around for
a suitable term. William Safire recorded several in his On Language
column in the New York Times on 9 February, including "global
economic crisis", "credit crunch" and "market crash" and wrote of
other possibilities that "'Slump' is too cheerful and 'depression'
too alarmist, especially when capitalized. 'Economic Armageddon' is
panic-stricken, though the combination of four-syllable words
nicely fills the mouth." He also noted the rise of "Great
Recession".
Catherine Rampell wrote about it in the same paper the day after Mr
Strauss-Kahn's speech, illustrating her comments with a chart taken
from the Nexis newspaper database. This showed that the term caught
on in December 2008, a landmark usage appearing on the US Federal
News Service on 5 December: "Some economists are already calling
this 'the Great Recession' because they fear it may be longer and
deeper than any recession in recent history." An early example was
in a prescient article by Jesse Eisinger in Portfolio, dated April
2008: "The next president will take office during what may well
come to be known as the Great Recession."
Ms Rampell notes that the term isn't new and had been used for the
earlier downturns of 1974-75, 1979-82, the early 1990s and 2001.
Hundreds of examples are on record that refer to these and other
dates. It's a puzzle why commentators should keep returning to it,
though the desire to be reporting on a great catastrophe is innate
to every journalist and superlatives sell papers. The difference
this time is the stimulus given to it by Dominique Strauss-Kahn's
speech. It is probable - at this stage we can be no more definite -
that the current crisis will become the definitive Great Recession
and that the next will need some new term.
* The Australian, 12 Mar. 2009: Just as the "Great Recession"
ratchets up unemployment, the Rudd Government is making it less
attractive to employ labour.
* Daily Telegraph, 10 Mar. 2009: We may well be in the grip of a
"Great Recession" but there was at least one very small piece of
good news on the economics front on Tuesday.
3. Weird Words: Sequacious /sI'kweIS at s/
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Lacking independence or originality of thought; unthinkingly
following another; servile.
The adjective started out simply enough in the seventeenth century
to refer to a person who was inclined to follow a leader; almost at
once it took on the idea of slavishly or unreasoningly following
the ideas of other people. It's unusual but still around::
I could discern omens of nothing newer than the old fate
of the sequacious: to be for ever at the mercy of the
exploiting proclivities of the bold and buccaneering in
their bullying and greed.
[Prelude to Waking, by Miles Franklin, 1950]
Other senses you may very occasionally come across are of a thing
that follows another with logic and unwavering direction of thought
or form, or of musical notes that succeed each other with unvarying
regularity (Coleridge described "long sequacious notes" in a poem).
I'd guess this is the sense meant in this rare modern example:
When she closed her fingers around it, the shapes flared
briefly once more, and she saw that they were indeed
runes: inexplicable to her, but sequacious and acute.
[Fatal Revenant, by Stephen R Donaldson, 2007.]
To call writing non-sequacious is to say that it lacks logic, that
it jumps about from one topic to another and that it's replete with
non-sequiturs. That word is appropriate, since both "sequacious"
and "sequitur" are from the Latin verb "sequi", to follow, from
which we also get "sequel" and "sequence". The immediate source of
"sequacious" is "sequax", following; "sequitur" is the third-person
present tense of "sequi", meaning "it follows", though it so often
doesn't that we mainly use the negative.
4. Recently noted
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HOW SHORT IS SHORT? In 2003, I wrote about the use, becoming very
common even then, of the "nano-" prefix (http://wwwords.org?NANO)
in the figurative sense of a very small thing. A new member of the
group has just surfaced: "nano-break". It suddenly appeared in the
travel press in Britain in the middle of February for the shortest
of short mini-breaks - just one night away from home. The word, you
may not be too surprised to hear, was coined by a PR firm reporting
on a survey that suggested demand for one-night getaways had risen
by 29% compared with the same time last year.
5. Q&A: Give one's eye teeth
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Q. Why on earth would I even dream of "giving my eye teeth" for
something? And why are they called eye teeth - they cannot see!
This is quite a significant topic for me, as my father lost his eye
teeth at the age of around 40, and I have just completed extensive
oral surgery to prevent the same happening to me. So you see, eye
teeth are indeed valuable, at least to me! [David Aslin]
A. Your second question is the easy bit to answer, so I'll do that
first. The pointed long teeth - also called canines because they
look a bit like those in dogs - are called eye teeth because the
pair in the upper jaw lie immediately below the eyes. Originally,
only the upper pair were given the name but later the pair in the
lower jaw also came to be called eye teeth.
The first question is less simple. If only you were asking about
"cut one's eye teeth" or "cut one's teeth", I could respond at once
by pointing out that the eye teeth are among the last of a baby's
first set of teeth to appear and so to cut them (have them emerge
from the gums) implies that babyhood is effectively over. To say
that somebody has cut his eye teeth means he's wide awake and isn't
easily fooled. If you're cutting your eye teeth (or just teeth) on
something you're gaining experience in a situation you're new to.
These suggest that eye teeth are especially valuable, because they
figuratively embody hard-learned skills and one's experience of
life. To lose them would cause one to be severely hampered, not
merely in eating but in everyday affairs.
Do I look like a fool? Barton'd give his eye-teeth to put
the halter round my neck with his own hands.
[The Story of Kennett, by Bayard Taylor, 1866.]
6. Sic!
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Kate Bunting tells us that the blurb on the DVD of the Channel 4 TV
drama "A Very British Coup" says the hero "finds himself caught up
in a no-holes barred battle for control of the country".
A circular that Daniel Utevsky received from Harrington's of
Vermont, a mail order source of smoked meats, included this offer:
"Boneless smoked duck and peasant. These are lean, moist and smoked
to perfection."
An article in the Orange County Register of California on 12 March
about the police pursuit of a suspect surprised Keith Underwood by
including the line, "Shelby weaved through traffic as patrol cars
and a helicopter pursued her inside a 1995 Saturn."
Thanks to Jim Sandrik I now know that on the same day the Chicago
Tribune reproduced an item from the Orlando Sentinel that reported
on an emergency on the space station: "According to NASA, a piece
of a spent satellite motor was within stinking distance of [the]
station."
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