World Wide Words -- 02 May 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 1 17:11:26 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 637 Saturday 2 May 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: Ephebiphobia.
3. Weird Words: Ampersand.
4. Q and A: Fiasco.
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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DUMBBELL Christopher Joubert and Joseph Lomax pointed out that one
of these early devices is still in place at Knowle House in Kent.
This installation may predate our first known use of the term by a
century. There are in addition various literal dumbbells as aids to
teach the mechanics of bellringing.
Terry Walsh corrected me on one point. When Joseph Addison referred
to skiamachia, he meant the exercise, not the dumbbells with which
he did it. Addison actually wrote: "I used to employ myself in a
more laborious diversion, which I learned from a Latin treatise of
exercises that is written with great erudition; it is there called
the 'skiamachia', or the fighting with a man's own shadow, and
consists in the brandishing of two short sticks grasped in each
hand and laden with plugs of lead at either end."
Mark Sinden wondered if there was any link between early dumbbells
and the dumb waiter, which is similar in name and construction.
"Dumb waiter" certainly uses the same idea of an inanimate and
silent object, but otherwise there seems to be no connection and
"waiter" here has its usual sense of a serving man. In the sense of
a device for a dining table that consists of revolving trays for
condiments (the US name for which is "lazy Susan") it dates from
the 1740s. The lift or elevator version of "dumb waiter", more
familiar to us now, is from a century later.
As an illustration of differing word usage, several British readers
said that for them dumbbells were bottle-shaped clubs for twirling
in the hands (another name for them is Indian clubs). The Oxford
English Dictionary does not admit this sense. These readers instead
called the short bars with weights at the ends barbells. For me, a
barbell is a long rod, usually with weights that can be varied, for
lifting using both arms. No doubt readers will correct this
terminology!
ENGLISH IS DIFFICULT Patrick O'Callaghan e-mailed from Venezuela
about another poem, this one on the difficulties learners have in
pronouncing English words they come across in books. It begins:
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
The poem was created by the Dutch writer and schoolteacher Gerard
Nolst Trenité and first appeared, under the title of The Chaos, in
his English textbook Drop Your Foreign Accent in 1920. He revised
and enlarged it many times during his life and as a result there
are many versions in existence.
An extended version of this poem, plus last week's, is now online.
Go via http://wwwords.org?PMNS.
2. Turns of Phrase: Ephebiphobia /e'fi:bif at ubi@/
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The modern concern with the problems of youth and especially the
problems caused by young people has perhaps made it inevitable that
this word would be created. It refers to a fear and loathing of
adolescents by adults.
Tanya Byron, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at
Edge Hill University in Lancashire, has recently made ephebiphobia
better known by using it in a lecture. Despite a comment by Peter
Hitchens in the Daily Mail on 29 March that she had invented it,
she certainly hadn't. The earliest example I've so far found is in
the title of Kirk Astroth's article Beyond Ephebiphobia: Problem
Adults or Problem Youths? in Phi Delta Kappan for January 1993. He
pointed out then that the attitude behind the word was hardly new:
"Nearly every generation of young people has been chastised for
being 'out of control' or aberrant in some way. Adult claims of
degeneration among the young can be found in nearly every previous
decade." Here's another early use:
Many, if not most, adults dislike junior high kids. They
simply don't like being around them. Others suffer from
what has been called "ephebiphobia", a fear of
adolescents.
[Junior High Ministry, by Wayne Rice, 1997.]
The word derives from "ephebe", the classical Greek word that meant
a young man aged between 18 and 20 who undertook military service.
* Daily Telegraph, 17 Mar. 2009: You may not know the word, but
you've probably had the feeling. "Ephebiphobia", or "fear of
youth", is one of the most enduring phenomena in our society - and
it's more prevalent than ever.
* Liverpool Daily Post, 3 Mar. 2009: Prof Byron, clinical
psychologist, broadcaster and Government advisor, will address the
growing issue of ephebiphobia, the fear of young people. She will
argue that society demonises children, rather than the teenagers
being the problem themselves.
3. Weird Words: Ampersand /amp@'sand/
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This name for the character "&" is surprisingly recent, not being
known before the nineteenth century, though the character itself
was in use long before printing was invented. It started life as a
Roman scribe's abbreviation of the Latin "et", meaning "and", and
became common in the early medieval period. It was later taken over
as an abbreviation for the English word "and".
"Ampersand" is a contraction of "and per se, and". This sounds odd,
but it's a continuation of a medieval convention in which Latin
"per se", by or in itself, was often added to those letters that
could stand alone as words: A, I and O (as in "O for the wings of a
dove"). "A per se, a", meant "a by itself makes the word a". Since
it stood first in the recital of the alphabet, in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries it came to mean a pre-eminent person or thing:
In the one, that is for lands and possessions, you have
companions many; but in the other, my good lord, you are
A per se A with us, to our comfort and joy unspeakable.
[In a letter to Lord Russell from John Bradford, 1554.]
It was common enough that it was contracted to "apersey", meaning
the first, unique, or most distinguished person or thing.
It was usual in the eighteenth century to have children end their
recital of the letters of the alphabet with "&", because it was so
common. It was read out as "and per se, and", which meant that the
symbol "&", whose name was "and", stood by itself and actually
meant "and".
In time, the character became known by this phrase, which became
slurred through rote recital and oral transmission into all sorts
of dialectal and variant forms, including "anparse", "empus-and",
"emperzan" and "amperzed". It was only in the 1830s that one form,
"ampersand", became dominant and conventional. By then, the old
rote way of learning the alphabet seems to have been on the way
out:
The expression and per se, and, to signify the
contraction &, substituted for that conjunction, is not
yet forgotten in the nursery.
[A Glossary, or Collection, of Words, by Robert Nares,
1822.]
4. Q AND A: Fiasco
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Q. The word "fiasco" apparently comes from the Italian word "a wine
glass" or "making a wine glass". How and when did it take on the
negative connotation of a complete breakdown or failure? [Neal
Evenhuis]
A. Ah, a difficult one. Writings about the origins of "fiasco" are
full of subtle conjecture, misunderstandings and downright ignorant
assertions, but everyone who tackles the subject ends by saying
sadly that the problem is insoluble. This includes me: be warned
that I shall come to no very definite conclusion.
The basic facts are simple enough. "Fiasco" is the Italian word for
a bottle (related to English "flask") and the idiom "far fiasco",
literally "make a bottle", developed among Italian theatre and
opera people in the eighteenth century in the sense of perpetrating
a bad performance, from which it moved into English through reports
of Italian productions:
But if we may believe the common town talk, it is
impossible for a piece not to make a fiasco on St.
Stephen's Day.
[The Harmonicon, July 1825. The 1825 annual volume of
this London journal, and the volumes following, are so
peppered with references to fiascos we must assume that
either its critics were difficult to satisfy or the
standard of Italian theatre was shockingly low. Early
examples, like this one, all translated the Italian into
English as "make a fiasco".]
The first known use of the term is in the same magazine a little
earlier:
In the letters which he [Rossini] wrote to his mother at
Bologna, he was accustomed to draw a smaller or larger
figure of a flask, (fiasco) at the side of the account of
any new opera he had brought out, to indicate the degree
of failure which his work had met with. The reader should
be apprised that fare fiasco is the Italian cant phrase
for a failure.
[The Harmonicon, May 1824.]
This is one version of a common story about its origin:
A German, one day, seeing a glassblower at his
occupation, thought nothing could be easier than
glassblowing, and that he could soon learn to blow as
well as the workman. He accordingly commenced operations
by blowing vigorously, but could only produce a sort of
pear-shaped balloon or little flask (fiasco). The second
attempt had a similar result, and so on until fiasco
after fiasco had been made. Hence arose the expression
which we not unfrequently have occasion to use when
describing the result of our private and public
undertakings.
[Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields of
Literature, by Charles Bombaugh, 1874. Mr Bombaugh's
story falls to the ground because he thought a fiasco was
a little bottle, rather than any bottle. Other versions
link it particularly with Venetian glassblowers, who were
alleged to set aside imperfect glass to make a common
bottle or flask. Why they didn't just put the glass back
into the furnace isn't explained. To pre-empt questions,
this is *not* the source of the idiom "pear-shaped".]
Italians are just as puzzled by the idiom as we are. Etymologists in
that country have put forward various incidents in theatrical history
to account for it, such as the dropping of a real bottle, vital to the
plot, during a performance. This is the canonical story:
But, touching "fiasco," D. J. obligingly tells me that
there was once at Florence a celebrated harlequin by the
name of Biancolelli, whose forte was the improvisation of
comic harangues on any object which he might chance to
hold in his hand. One evening he appeared on the stage
with a flask ("fiasco") in his hand. But, as ill-luck
would have it, he failed in extracting any "funniments"
out of the bottle. At last, exasperated, he thus
apostrophised the flask: "It is thy fault that I am so
stupid to-night. Fuori! Get out of this!" So saying, he
threw the flask behind him, and shattered it into atoms.
Since then, whenever an actor or singer failed to please
an audience, they used to say that it was like
Biancolelli's "fiasco."
[Illustrated London News, 22 September 1883. I'm indebted
to Stephen Goranson for finding this.]
I've also found a tale that connects the word with those Chianti
bottles with rounded bottoms that must be encased in a wicker sheath
because they won't stand up by themselves, so perhaps implying
something that has been poorly constructed or which, like trying to
stand the bottle up, will surely fail. This story gains in ingenuity
what it loses in credibility.
Others have connected it with the long-dead French idiom "faire une
bouteille", to make a mistake (literally, again, to make a bottle). It
has been suggested that Italian actors picked it up from French ones
in the eighteenth century and translated it into Italian. If so, this
merely takes the problem from one language to another, but it's hard
to explain the loss of the article. Notably, the Italian expression
moved back into French around 1822 (as "faire fiasco"), at roughly the
same time as it was beginning to appear in English, so contradicting
the standard theory that the expression got into English via French.
Don't believe anybody who claims to have the complete answer; at least
not without incontrovertible written historical evidence.
5. Sic!
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Jim Blue and Brenda Clough were separately surprised to read the
headline over a story in the Washington Post on 24 April: "Murphy
Eeks Out Win in NY-20 Special Election." Did he just squeak home?
The UK Pension Service presumably knows what it means when it says
on its Web site that the increase in the pensionable age of women
to 65 reflects "the fact that people are living longer than
average." Mark Swingler, who spotted that, isn't so sure. Perhaps
the service is thinking of Lake Wobegon where, as Garrison Keillor
tells us, "all the children are above average".
Thanks to Frank Packard, we can ponder the implications of the
headline in the Financial Times on 21 April: "Minnows left to
'wither on the vine'".
Paul Thielen noted a sentence that appeared in the Press Democrat,
Santa Rosa, California, on 23 March, regarding the "morning after"
birth-control pill: "If taken with 72 hours of unprotected sex, it
can reduce pregnancy chances by 89 percent". Or you could try 72
hours with no sex at all: that's 100% reliable.
On Monday, Robert Nathan discovered, FindLaw Legal News had a story
about the European tour of the US Attorney General, Eric Holder:
"Holder meets with British intelligent officials". Supply your own
punchline.
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