World Wide Words -- 05 Sept 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu Sep 3 17:50:32 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 655 Saturday 5 September 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. Weird Words: Ostrobogulous
3. Q and A: Bitter end.
4. Article: How to Promote your Dictionary.
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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STAYCATION-MOON G H Gordon Paterson responded to my little item
about this word last time: "I agree that 'staycation-moon' is just
too awful. How about 'homeymoon' instead? It's just as execrable,
but at least it requires only a single-letter transformation."
Stefanie Shuman similarly suggested this form.
UPDATES The discussion of the origins of "cloud nine" has been
substantially revised (go via http://wwwords.org?CLNN). The one on
"sick abed on two chairs" has been modified and a picture has been
added (go via http://wwwords.org?SATC).
RUDE WORDS The F-Word may not be the ultimate obscenity that it
was once considered, but business e-mail filters still routinely
block messages containing it. As next week's issue will contain a
review of Jesse Sheidlower's The F Word, which will include the
word and its compounds a number of times, there is a greater than
usual chance that you may not receive it by e-mail. In that case,
pop over to the World Wide Words site, where you will find the
issue at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/zyun.htm.
DELIVERY PROBLEMS We are still having problems with delivery of
the e-magazine to Yahoo! addresses worldwide. For many subscribers
e-mails are either arriving days late or not at all. We are sorry
about this, but the matter is outside our control and we have as
yet been unable to resolve it even after sustained and continuing
effort. If you're affected we can only suggest that you temporarily
subscribe from a different e-mail address or change to reading the
RSS version, which also links to the formatted HTML one. See the
link in Section A below.
SHORT-BREAK My wife and I are away for a few days. E-mail is very
welcome as usual but won't be replied to until the middle of next
week at the earliest.
2. Weird Words: Ostrobogulous /'Qstr at U,bQgjUl at s/
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The word is weird not only because it looks strange and is rather
rare but because it can refer to something weird (or to a strange,
bizarre or generally unusual happening). To increase its oddity, it
can also mean something mildly risqué, indecent or pornographic.
"Ostrobogulous" was Vickybird's favourite word. It
stood for anything from the bawdy to the slightly off-
colour. Any double entendre that might otherwise have
escaped his audience was prefaced by, "if you will pardon
the ostrobogulosity".
[Magic my Youth, by Arthur Calder-Marshall, 1951.]
It was coined by Victor Neuburg (Vickybird in the quotation), a gay
British Jewish poet and writer and a close friend of the occultist
Aleister Crowley, whose sexual magic practices he helped develop.
Neuburg said that the word was formed, highly irregularly as you
might expect, from Greek "ostro", rich, plus English "bog" in the
schoolboy slang sense of the toilet, hence "dirt", and ending in
Latin "ulus", full of. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't agree,
suggesting that the first part is from "oestrous". But we ought to
let Victor Neuburg have the last word on its etymology, as it was
his creation.
The word is a favourite of people like me who collect interestingly
weird words. A notable recent appearance was in the Mail on Sunday,
a British family newspaper which might have looked askance at it
had its editors known of its indecorous antecedents. It was quoted
as the favourite word of Professor Christian Kay, who has worked
for 42 years on the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English
Dictionary, due to be published next month.
3. Q and A: Bitter end
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Q. I have heard that the expression "bitter end" originated in
nautical references to the end of mooring ropes that are attached
to bitts, that is the posts on jetties and quaysides. Is this
correct? [Richard Levy]
A. Up to a point. By which I mean that it is universally given as
the origin, so to try to deny it may seem wilfully contrarian. But
there's enough evidence to cast some doubt on the matter. And the
Oxford English Dictionary notes that its history is uncertain.
The idiom has had two senses. "To go on until the bitter end" today
means that someone will persevere with something until it is quite
finished, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that is. However,
some dictionaries add a second sense: to continue to the last and
direst extremity, such as total defeat or even death. The two are
obviously linked, the former being a weaker version of the latter.
As you say, in nautical terminology the bitts are posts for fixing
ropes to. The word is usually plural because bitts normally turn up
in pairs, so that a sailor can speedily wind a rope around them in
a figure of eight pattern to hold it fast without having to tie a
knot. Alternatively, he can take a turn of a line around the bitts
to control the rate at which he's paying it out. They're a standard
part of shipboard equipment. They also turn up on quaysides, though
these are often larger and singular and are called bollards.
The word "bitt" may be Scandinavian, though nobody knows for sure.
"Bitter" goes back to the early seventeenth century. It appears
first in Captain John Smith's Seaman's Grammar of 1627. It meant
the end of a cable or rope that remained fixed on board ship when
it was being paid out through the bitts. The word would seem to be
"bitt" plus "-er", as in "header", "rounder" and "cropper". It has
no etymological connection with the adjective "bitter" for a sharp
unpleasant taste, which is Old English.
Admiral William Smyth explained in The Sailor's Word-book in 1867
that "When a chain or rope is paid out to the bitter-end, no more
remains to be let go." Hence, so the argument goes, the meaning of
the idiom. But there's nothing that's necessarily unpleasant or
difficult in that definition. And it's hard to imagine its giving
rise to the second sense - the ultimate and direst end. Modern
works usually say that the idiomatic meaning arose when a ship was
trying to anchor but the water turned out to be deeper than
expected; the whole cable would then be run out without the anchor
touching ground. This was clearly potentially disastrous. But it
may be just an attempt to explain the idiom, since glossaries in
the sailing era - such as Smyth's - give the definition neutrally
and generally, with no mention of anchor cables or emergencies.
There is another possibility. Some larger dictionaries note this:
For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb,
and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter
as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down
to death; her steps take hold on hell.
[Proverbs 5:3-5, from the King James Bible, 1611.]
That quotation seems to be the source of usages such as the two
that follow, which refer to the second sense - final and complete
defeat or death:
With hunger parch'd, and consumed with heat,
I will enforce them to a bitter end;
The teeth of beasts I will upon them set,
And will the pois'nous dust-fed serpent send.
[The Second Song of Moses, in Juvenilia, by George
Withers, 1622.]
Tho', by her own curs'd arts the woman fell,
With care, unbounded, did I not attend,
And, undeserving, sooth'd her bitter end,
Clasp'd her cold limbs, beheld the dead'ning eye,
And, thro' my lips, receiv'd her latest sigh.
[An anonymous song, in the Gentleman's Magazine, Feb.
1744. "Latest" here means "last".]
Other examples of "bitter end" occur in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, well before the first example cited in the
Oxford English Dictionary, which is from the USA in 1849. Many of
these are in religious tracts or sermons, which suggests it was
indeed Biblical in origin. As an intriguing aside, "bitter end"
appears several times in Dutch and German works of the eighteenth
century as a English expression that seemed well known.
It may well be that two distinct strands developed in parallel - a
literal one from the maritime world and a figurative one based on
the Biblical quotation. They may well have influenced each other.
We have no way of knowing. But enough evidence exists for us to be
able to say that it wasn't just a sailor's expression, conceivably
even that the figurative meaning isn't nautical at all.
4. Article: How to Promote your Dictionary
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When so many people merely refer to looking something up in "the
dictionary", publishers find it hard to market their dictionaries
as distinctive products. The similarities of competing products
that lead naive users to conflate them into one universal work is a
barrier to brand recognition. All dictionaries record much the same
vocabulary, using evidence gleaned from closely similar sources;
they have identical problems of fitting an inchoate mass of facts
into a work that's both easy on the buyer's arms and not too hard
on his pocket. Once you've added mini-encyclopaedia entries and
guidance on style and grammar and you've worked and reworked the
design of the pages to make them as attractive as possible, what
more can you do to persuade people that yours is better than the
competition's?
On Thursday, Collins, one of the big three British publishers of
dictionaries, along with Oxford and Chambers, published the 30th
anniversary edition of their heavyweight single-volume Collins
English Dictionary. They've been highly successful in getting their
name before the public in that most valued of promotional media,
editorial coverage.
The publicity drive started more than a year ago. In a stroke of
near-genius, Collins publicised a decision by its editors that 24
antique words should be removed to make room for new stuff. It
persuaded newspapers to run a campaign to ask the public whether
they were loved enough to be kept. Enough support was gained for
"embrangle", to be confused, "apodeictic", beyond dispute, "fubsy",
short and stout, "compossible", able to coexist, and "skirr", the
noise of birds' wings in flight, for a another burst of publicity
in Spring 2009 to say they had been reprieved.
Another campaign was launched in late 2008 to get the public to
nominate words for inclusion in the anniversary edition. Erin
Whyte, from Nottingham, suggested "meh", which she said was "an
expression of utter boredom or an indication of how little you care
for an idea". That started out in the US and Canada ("the Canadian
election was so meh"), but became popular, especially online, in
part through an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is trying to
prise the kids away from the TV with a suggestion for a day trip,
to which they reply dismissively "meh!" More recently, the news
that "Twitter" was to be added, as noun and verb, made a useful
press teaser back in July.
This week the publicity machine has gone into high gear with the
publication of the work itself and the full list of some 270 new
words and phrases that have been included.
Yes, "meh" is there. The new edition is strong on interjections,
because they turn up a lot on social networking sites, where they
have displaced emoticons. Joining "meh" are "hmm", a sound made
when considering or puzzling over something; "heh" and "heh-heh",
indicating sly amusement; "mwah", the sound of a kiss; "woohoo", a
cry of joy or approval; and "woot" (often written "w00t") a slang
term that's especially popular among players in online games as a
shout of joy or victory. Much has also been made in the press of
the inclusion of "heigh-ho" (or "hey-ho"), a noise that suggests
weariness, disappointment, surprise or happiness, which Collins
editors suggest went out of fashion in the early twentieth century
but which recently returned to use. I've been using it for decades
- perhaps I belong in the nineteenth century? But I don't think it
ever really went away - it turns up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in
various works by Douglas Adams, in John Le Carré's Smiley novels
and in lots of earlier twentieth-century works, even if you ignore
its currency in song lyrics.
Alongside these are other abbreviated forms: "defo", definitely, a
British way to indicate agreement or consent; "ish", reservation or
qualified assent; and "soz", another British interjection meaning
sorry.
Despite the tenor of the press coverage, many sensible words are
included among the 270 new terms. An unrepresentative short list is
"anatexis" (the partial melting of rocks), "bad bank" (a financial
institution set up to hold and manage underperforming assets owned
by other banks), "cloud computing" (a computer term for services
stored on the internet), "embryo vitrification" (a method of in
vitro fertilisation), "quantitative easing" (increasing the supply
of money to stimulate economic activity), "social intelligence"
(the ability to form rewarding relationships with other people),
and "synthetic biology" (the application of computer science
techniques to create artificial biological systems).
6. Sic!
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Brian Barratt e-mails sadly from Melbourne: "A local supermarket
has labelled its shelves of pens, pencils and paper as 'stationary'
since it opened a few years ago. I have pointed this out several
times and am now delighted to see that, during current renovations,
it has been corrected. However, there is now a neat little sign in
another aisle, apologising for the inconvenience because that aisle
is 'temporally one way'. What hope is there for sinners?" Perhaps
the signwriter is a philosopher? All our paths are temporally one-
way.
The Autosport site had an item on 27 August about the racing driver
Fernando Alonso and who he might be driving for next year. When
Greg Webb visited, the report ended "The Spaniard ... said he is
'very active' in his discussions with other teams, but insisted
there will be no liniment announcements." The page has since been
changed, to "no inminent announcements". Third time lucky?
Already thinking about next year's holiday, we visited the Web site
of a well-known American travel business. My wife wondered how they
expected certain clients to hold their breath for the whole of a
vacation. The last sentence on many pages says the firm "can only
offer air to guests traveling from the U.S. or Canada." Breathing:
an optional extra.
Brief Encounter. Julie Egan spotted this in The Age newspaper of
Melbourne on 1 September: "Revelations he had an affair with a 26-
year-old woman last night sank any hopes John Della Bosca had of
becoming NSW premier."
Charles Weishar found a good example of a misleading headline over
an AP story on 1 September: "91 Countries agree to illegal fishing
treaty". Intrigued, he read on, to learn that, in Rome, a group of
91 countries reached agreement on a UN-backed treaty that aims to
outlaw those engaged in illegal fishing.
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