World Wide Words -- 03 Apr 10

Fri Apr 2 17:12:17 UTC 2010

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 684           Saturday 3 April 2010
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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: Malvertising.
3. Weird Words: Pace egg play.
4. This week.
5. Q and A: Souped-up.
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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GUDDLING  As well as the sense I wrote about, another is known to 
Scots. This message came from Jodie Robson: "It's nice to see one 
of my favourite words, 'guddling', in World Wide Words this week - 
my friend Anne and I spent many happy hours as children guddling 
for the tiny flat fish that can be found in the saltings on the 
west coast of Scotland. But I was surprised you didn't mention the 
other use of it, as something messy - as well as guddling for the 
fish, Anne and I spent a good deal of time simply guddling about on 
the saltings, doing nothing very much but usually getting wet and 
muddy in the process. And I'm ashamed to admit it, but as I type 
this, my desk is in a right guddle."

UPDATES  In April 2008, I wrote a snippet about an exotic name for 
an unusual punctuation mark, seemingly spelled "comash". A piece by 
Frances Peck in the Canadian Language Update this month has given 
me the information necessary to write more about it. You will find 
the item online via http://wwwords.org?CMMSH. At the same time, 
I've updated the page about another odd punctuation mark, the 
interrobang: http://wwwords.org?NTRBG.

FEELING CHUFFED!  The message looked like spam, but it checked out. 
It began, "The United States Library of Congress has selected your 
Web site for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet 
materials." I wasn't sure whether I should I be flattered or should 
simply admire the breadth and inclusiveness of the Library's 
selection criteria. I've since been told that the former is the 
appropriate emotion.

2. Turns of Phrase: Malvertising
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Malvertising is formed from "malicious" plus "advertising". It's an 
online scam in which reputable sites are tricked into distributing 
bogus advertisements that link to malicious code. It has become a 
significant issue within the past year, with many well-known sites 
suffering from the problem, and it's expected to get worse.

A classic example is an ad that offers a free anti-virus scan, but 
which instead downloads an application that takes over your browser 
to harvest credit-card numbers and passwords or send fake e-mails 
through your account. The problem for legitimate owners of sites is 
that it's hard to detect the fake ads until somebody complains, by 
which time damage has been done and the publisher's reputation 
compromised.

"Malvertising" is one type of what's generically called "malware" 
("malicious software"), which can be installed on your computer in 
a variety of ways. It often used to arrive in e-mail attachments, 
but most users have got wise and protect themselves against it. It 
now infiltrates in other ways - disguised as a legitimate download 
or served up from a contaminated site.

    Publishers have told us that malvertising is one of 
    the biggest threats to their business, and antiquated ad 
    infrastructure technology is largely at fault. 
    [Business Wire, 12 Jan. 2010.]

    The latest threat for internet users is malvertising, 
    the use of ad networks for distributing malicious 
    software. 
    [Cape Times (South Africa), 16 March 2010.]

3. Weird Words: Pace egg play
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Easter is the time for many traditional and modern activities in 
England, such as the nutters' dance in Bacup, cheese-rolling in 
Stilton, the World Coal Carrying Championships in Gawthorpe, bottle 
kicking in Hallaton, and pace egg plays in various northern towns.

The last of these is an Easter mummers entertainment or folk play, 
related to the tale of St George and the Dragon. It was at one time 
common in northern England, particularly in Cumbria, Yorkshire and 
Lancashire. It was preserved in these areas, while in other parts 
of the country it moved to Christmastime. 

Lots of local variations are known, but in the Heptonstall version 
in Calderdale it depicts the battle between St George and the Bold 
Slasher, the Saracen knight. St George is at first killed, but is 
then brought back to life by a mysterious character, the Doctor, 
and defeats his enemy. Other characters include the King of Egypt 
and the comic Tosspot. In some versions, Tosspot is replaced by the 
Fool; extra characters also appear, such as Lord Nelson, Beelzebub 
and Dobbin the horse. Traditionally, the mummers were working men 
(very rarely women), for whom it was a way to earn money from 
audience contributions.

The etymological connection of "pace egg play" with Easter is that 
the first word is a variation on the ancient "Pasch", or "Paschal", 
both of which are from Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover. "Pasch 
egg", "pace egg" and "paste egg" were all names given at various 
times to Easter eggs, usually specially decorated. An etymological 
curiosity is that "pace egg play" is a relatively recent term, 
presumably created by folklorists, not recorded before it appeared 
here:

    In connection with Pace-egging there is the Pace-egg 
    or Easter play, which resembles in its main features the 
    Christmas mumming play.
    [Old English Customs, by P H Ditchfield, 1896.]

Before then, the play seems not to have been separately named, but 
was subsumed within other pace-egging activities, such as another 
form of mumming in which performers, "pace-eggers", paraded singing 
through the streets to collect funds. A century ago the play was 
still very popular in some towns:

    There are no signs of the decline of pace egging as a 
    seasonal custom. On the contrary this Easter there have 
    been more bands of actors than for years past. The play 
    is rather a mystery to many people, who can hardly credit 
    that in essentials it goes back to pagan times in 
    England.
    [Rochdale Observer, 14 April 1909.]

It died out in the following decades, largely as a result of social 
changes provoked by the First World War. Today's enactments, for 
example in Calderdale and Cumbria, are reintroductions of the past 
half century.

4. This week
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NUME NA'VI  If you have long envied students of Klingon, you can 
now startle them with your knowledge of Na'vi, the language of the 
big blue aliens in Avatar: http://www.learnnavi.org/.

HE'S BEHIND YOU!  A term that has become well established in its 
own territory but is unfamiliar outside it is PHOTOBOMB. In its 
original sense, a photobomb is a photo in which something odd or 
embarrassing is happening in the background that the photographer 
didn't notice. The earliest examples of the term I can find date 
from 2007. It has since broadened its sense to refer to what one 
site calls "the fine art of spoiling a photograph by jumping in on 
the action," for example by pulling faces or mooning at the camera. 
There's even the REVERSE PHOTOBOMB, in which a photo, ostensibly of 
something else, is framed to include an oddity as a way of 
recording it without seeming to focus on it.

SURVEYING NATURE  In this International Year of Biodiversity 14 
events have been organised across the UK to find, identify and 
record species. A report on one of them introduced me to the odd-
looking term BIOBLITZING. It's not new - it was invented in the USA 
back in 1996 - but events under its general heading have been run 
in Britain only since 2006. The idea behind a BioBlitz (it can be 
written with or without capital letters) is that scientists and 
volunteers work together to survey a given area within a brief 
period, usually 24 hours. Hence the "blitz" part of the word, in 
its common sense of a sudden, energetic, and concerted effort to 
deal with something. As well as its research value, it also gives 
students field experience and popularises science to the public.

5. Q and A: Souped-up
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Q. I was reading an article the other day where the writer referred 
to something as having been "souped up", and it struck me for the 
first time that this is a curious phrase. I'm not sure if it's 
common in the UK or the US, but in Australia it's used to refer to 
something that's been strengthened or added to, or made more 
impressive in some way. I'm not sure whether it should be spelt 
"suped up". Do you know its origins? [Peter Coatman, Melbourne, 
Australia]

A. "Souped-up" is known both in the UK and the US and was actually 
created in the latter country. It's one of the longer-lived slang 
terms, still widely used.

In its first sense, in the 1920s, "souped-up" specifically meant to 
modify a motor vehicle to increase its power and efficiency. The 
earliest example I can find is this:

    Speedster, classy, souped up ... $125.
    [A newspaper advertisement by a Ford dealer in the 
    Oakland Tribune of California, 21 Sep. 1924.]

"Souped-up" must at root derive from "super", as in "supercharger". 
This term for a device to increase the pressure of the fuel-air 
mixture in an engine to improve its performance is known from 1919. 
Versions of the device had been invented much earlier, but the term 
was created to refer to one developed for aero engines by Sanford A 
Moss of General Electric in 1918.

However, there's almost certainly a connection with the foodstuff, 
which would account for the shift in spelling. "Soup" has at times 
been a slang term applied to several murky liquids. If you're a fan 
of American detective stories, you may know "soup" as a term for 
nitroglycerine employed in safe-cracking, a slang term widely used 
in newspaper reports of criminal activity from 1911 onwards (it was 
called soup because it was extracted from dynamite by immersing the 
sticks in boiling water). As another application, it was recorded 
in Webster's Dictionary in 1911 that "soup" was "any material 
injected into a horse with a view to changing its speed or 
temperament". 

It seems that, in the early 1920s, "supercharger" combined with the 
racing and criminal senses of "soup" to make "souped-up".

6. Sic!
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"Looking in the window of a children's clothes shop in Ripley, 
Derbyshire," writes Marj Jawo, "I admired some pretty baby clothes 
but was surprised to see a little bonnet labelled as a Hell Mitt." 
And half a world away, in Ashfield NSW, David Marshall-Martin found 
a similar shop advertising "Holly Communion Outfits."

"I picked up one of my hubby's magazines, issue 43 of Kiteworld." 
Nina Brevik says. "I opened it randomly to page 98 and found the 
following: 'Davey Blair is a bit different. For starters, he's the 
only rider ... who sends me pictures of the mousse he hunts with 
his dad for dinner.' I agree. That is different."

Phil Clutts found a sentence in Monday's Charlotte Observer that he 
had to read twice: "A man who authorities say is a prison escapee 
claims he is a Virginia man who died 27 years ago."

A conundrum for copyeditors from Eoin C Bairéad: "A local-history 
society here in Dublin just had a lecture on 'the many Irishmen who 
fought on both sides in the Boer War'. How could you phrase that 
better without getting over-verbose?"

"As we approach Tax Day over here,", wrote Jim Tang from Hawaii, 
"certain core truths still apply, one of which is that lawyers must 
never speak in absolutes." He was referring to a quote from a tax 
attorney in a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle on 29 March: 
"People who work for the IRS in most cases are human."

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