World Wide Words -- 10 Apr 2010

Fri Apr 9 16:53:09 UTC 2010

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 685           Saturday 10 April 2010
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org       US advisory editor: Julane Marx
-------------------------------------------------------------------

   A formatted version of this e-magazine with illustrations 
        is available online at http://wwwords.org?IJNB

     My personal page on Facebook: http://wwwords.org?FBMQ
     A Facebook discussion group (http://wwwords.org?FBDG)
         Also now on Twitter: http://wwwords.org?TWTR.

 To leave the list or change your subscribed address, see Section 
  A below or go to http://wwwords.org?SUBS. Please don't e-mail 
   me with subscription matters unless you are having problems.

     This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font.
   For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON

Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Weird Words: Nye.
2. This week.
3. Q and A: Tacky.
4. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.

1. Weird Words: Nye  /nVI/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
We've all come across a pride of lions, a flock of sheep, a swarm 
of bees, and a gaggle of geese. Such collectives are part of our 
common language. Other fairly well-known cases are a parliament of 
rooks, a murmuration of starlings, and an exaltation of larks. 
There are so many, and so popular a subject, that they've generated 
a sub-genre of humour: a catalogue of librarians, an enumeration of 
accountants, a descent of relatives, even a wunch of bankers, as 
well as that hoary old joke about the essay of Trollopes/jam of 
tarts/anthology of pros.

Nye is a rarer example. It's usually said to be any collection or 
group of pheasants, though older lexicographical authorities insist 
that it really means a brood of the birds. That's because the word 
derives from Anglo-Norman "ny", from Latin "nidus", a nest. But as 
fowlers were using the group sense as long ago as 1701, it's hard 
to insist on etymological exactitude.

This is a rare example of the word appearing outside a list:

    Hark ye! only last week that jack-fool, the young Lord 
    of Brocas, was here talking of having seen a covey of 
    pheasants in the wood. One such speech would have been 
    the ruin of a young Squire at the court. How would you 
    have said it, Nigel?" "Surely, fair sir, it should be a 
    nye of pheasants." 
    [Sir Nigel, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1901. A covey, 
    as any countryman of the time would have known, is a 
    group term for partridge, ultimately from Latin "cubare", 
    to lie down.]

Another term from the same source for a brood or nest of pheasants 
is "nide". This, too, has long since become a general collective:

    The farmer informed us that the game was very 
    plentiful; and when we entered the first stubble field, 
    we saw a nide of fourteen pheasants run into the hedge 
    row.
    [Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq, by Henry Hunt, 1820.]

2. This week
-------------------------------------------------------------------
CHEXTING  A humorous piece mentioning this word came from Reuters 
on 1 April, so I was suspicious of it. But it had been recorded in 
the Urban Dictionary back in November 2006 and it had appeared in 
various publications the previous week in response to a "report" by 
a PR company, so the Reuters article was more probably a tongue-in-
cheek follow-up than an April Fool joke. CHEXTING is said to be a 
blend of "cheating" and "texting", a close relative of "sexting", 
and refers to text messages sent between lovers who are cheating on 
their spouses. The Reuters article noted, "But don't be fooled into 
thinking you're safe. If you've sexted and chexted, you might soon 
be 'exted' by your spouse." Ouch. There's also BREXTING, I'm told, 
from the same source, which is breaking up a relationship by means 
of a text message. I suspect that both terms are already past their 
sell-by date.

TWITTERPIDITY  Dozens of slangy terms have recently been invented 
in connection with Twitter, such as twittersphere, twitterrhoea, 
twitterer and twitterati - all examples of twitterspeak. Two UK 
inventors - an advertising consultant and a retail designer - have 
come up with the TWETTLE, a wireless-enabled kettle that sends you 
a tweet when it boils. As a result, you could spend an extra minute 
or two doing something really useful, instead of impatiently 
waiting for the water to boil for that nice cup of tea. I'd guess 
the old-fashioned whistling kettle is too low-tech for them? 

TRANSCREATION  This word appeared in a blog in MediaPost on Monday 
and I flagged it because it was unfamiliar. A quick search showed 
that it's common in international marketing, whose practitioners 
must not only translate material into another language but also get 
across the spirit of the original. The MediaPost piece described 
TRANSCREATION as "the process of rendering creative ideas so they 
resonate in other idioms and cultures". It's clearly enough a blend 
of "translation" and "creation". It's most often used in the US, in 
discussions about converting English advertising into Spanish.

3. Q and A: Tacky
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I was looking for the origin of "tacky" when I came across your 
site. I was hoping to find validation of my conclusion (based on 
nothing but my experience of living in the US for 63 years) that it 
may have come from quilting. By comparison to a handmade quilt, the 
workmanship of a cheap quilt made by the process called tacking may 
be considerably below standard. It is tacked together; therefore it 
is "tacky" by comparison. Could this be the origin? [Tom Crain]

A. It's an interesting suggestion, Mr Crain.

In the sense that you mean - something exhibiting poor taste and 
quality - we don't know its ultimate origin for certain, though the 
chance of its being related to the embroidery sense of "tacking" 
seems remote. We might instead guess that it's related to the other 
sense of the adjective - for something, such as paint or varnish, 
that isn't quite dry and so is still slightly sticky. There's no 
evidence for that, either.

In your sense, "tacky" is firmly located in your own country. It 
appeared first around 1800 as a noun, variously spelled as "tackie" 
or "tackey". The earliest example is this:

    At some places, you are thus asked, in local phrase, 
    to _truck_ or _trade_ for a horse, a cow, or a little 
    _tackie_, a term which signifies a poney, or little 
    horse, of low price. 
    [Communications Concerning the Agriculture and 
    Commerce of America, by William Tathan, 1800.]

The horse sense continues in the name of the Carolina Marsh Tacky, 
a survivor of a breed of horse brought to the Americas by Spanish 
explorers. Such horses have existed for centuries as semi-wild 
herds in the marshes of coastal South Carolina and Georgia.

The link with horses might lead to the idea that it has something 
to do with "tack" for horse harness, but the one can't have led to 
the other, not least because "tack" in this sense dates only from 
the 1920s (it's an abbreviation of "tackle"). 

Web sites about the breed sometimes suggest that "tacky" is from an 
English word meaning "cheap" or "common", but it's the other way 
round - the adjective "tacky" in this sense certainly derives from 
the name for the horse. The link seems to have been the idea of a 
lack of breeding, since the horses weren't considered to be of high 
quality (one writer called them "scrubby"). Later in the century, 
"tacky" became a term for a "poor white" inhabitant of the southern 
states.

The adjective, enlarging on this sense of "ill-bred", began to be 
written down in the 1860s and has been in use ever since, though 
the full flowering of its popularity came only in the 1970s and 
1980s. It has since spread throughout the English-speaking world:

    In the glitzy, and often tacky, world of casinos, 
    Sydney's Star City is the ultimate ugly duckling.
    [Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), 3 Apr. 2010.]

In large part, its renewed popularity came from "ticky-tacky", a 
term derived from it in the 1960s for cheap or inferior materials. 
It was invented by Malvina Reynolds in her song Little Boxes, about 
poor-quality suburban housing in California, which is best known in 
a version by Pete Seeger: "And they're all made out of ticky tacky, 
And they all look just the same."

4. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"On 12 March," belatedly communicates Graham Mackie, "our local 
newspaper, the Peeblesshire News, carried a job advert for a part-
time position in the admin department of the local health centre.  
It stated that "a knowledge of medical termination would be of 
benefit but not essential".

Jerry Fox was left uncertain how to proceed when he looked up the 
maintenance contract for the lawn sprinklers at his place of work. 
One sentence read, "The property owner shall call and schedule an 
appointment between the months of April and May."

"Leonardo da Vinci accused in car accident". Though this headline 
appeared on BBC News on 1 April, Bill Wanlund is sure it wasn't a 
prank. It referred to a man on trial for extortion related to The 
Madonna of the Yarnwinder.

Norman Berns reports that the weight-loss site fatsecret.com has 
word of a curious beverage: "Zwiebelkuchen is an onion pie from 
Germany, usually served with new wine that's very similar to a 
quiche."

A. Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, 
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm . 

You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of 
commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:

  INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS

This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is 
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .

Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ .

B. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should 
  be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to 
  respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. 
* Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org .
  Submissions will not usually be acknowledged.
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should 
  be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't 
  use this address to respond to published answers to questions - 
  e-mail the comment address instead).
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list 
  server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To
  allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail
  me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself.

C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words e-magazine and Web site are free, but if you 
would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do 
so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2010. All rights 
reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing 
lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include 
the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts 
of items in printed publications or Web sites needs permission from 
the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). 
-------------------------------------------------------------------