World Wide Words -- 1 May 10

Fri Apr 30 18:47:07 UTC 2010

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 688            Saturday 1 May 2010
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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. Weird Words: Urtication.
3. This week.
4. Q and A: Pluck the gowans fine.
5. Q and A: Just des(s)erts.
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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HUNG PARLIAMENT  In retrospect, perhaps I should have provided some 
footnotes. Many readers commented on or queried three words in the 
piece: psephological, discombobulation and commentariat. The first 
of these is the adjective from "psephology", the statistical study 
of elections and trends in voting (Greek "psephos", a pebble, but 
also a vote, because Greeks used small stones as voting counters); 
"commentariat" has been around since 1993, having been coined in 
the US as a blend of "commentator" and "proletariat"; it is now 
fairly common worldwide and has been given an entry in the Oxford 
English Dictionary. For "discombobulation" see my piece at 
http://wwwords.org?DSCBL.

COMEUPPANCE  I was surprised by the number of readers who told me 
that I'd spelled a word wrong in this piece. They felt it should be 
"just desserts", not "just deserts". This has come up before (once 
when I got it wrong myself) but it seems worth giving a definitive 
answer. See below!

2. Weird Words: Urtication  /3:tI'keIS at n/
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Your favourite word magazine may be accused of nearing the knuckle 
(a British idiom meaning verging on the indecent), since urtication 
- flogging with nettles - has been advocated for erotic stimulation 
in various cultures. But it's known best as a method of provoking 
inflammation, a folk remedy for several ailments.

    Have you urticated yourself today? People have been 
    doing it for a couple of thousand years to relieve 
    arthritis pain, hives, rashes and even sciatica. To 
    perform urtication, all you need is a nettle plant and a 
    glove. Put on the glove, pick up the plant, and smack 
    yourself repeatedly. ... Urtication is not 
    recommended.
    [The Green Pharmacy Herbal Handbook, by James A Duke, 
    2000.]

The word can be traced back to Roman times. Latin "urtica" is the 
stinging-nettle, a name in turn taken from the verb "urere", to 
burn. The medical term "urticaria" refers to a condition of the 
skin that's also called nettle rash and hives.

Romans are said to have performed the nettle-flogging technique 
with other aims in mind than easing arthritis:

    Dreading the English climate, [Romans] brought nettles 
    to plant around their first camp in Kent, intending to 
    use them as food, animal fodder and, more bizarrely, as a 
    quick heating system. A flogging with nettle stems was, 
    they had discovered, just the thing for warming chilly 
    limbs. Enthusiasts might like to know that it's called 
    urtication.
    [Independent, 22 Sep. 2001.]

3. This week
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YAKA-WOW!  In what seems to have been a mixture of rueful admission 
of error and pleasure in accidental accomplishment, the Times noted 
on 23 April that a transcription error in an interview on 15 April 
with the neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield has gone viral. She was 
concerned that excessive playing of computer games or using social 
networks such as Twitter would stop the malleable brains of young 
people developing as they should: "It's not going to destroy the 
planet but is it going to be a planet worth living in if you have a 
load of breezy people who go around saying yaka-wow. Is that the 
society we want?" Within 24 hours, it is said, Google had 75,000 
results for "yaka-wow". It has inspired a Twitter stream, a page on 
Facebook, mugs and T-shirts; it has become a personal philosophy: 
"I think, therefore I yaka-wow"; and it has led to the creation of 
the virtual First Church of the Yaka-Wow. What Baroness Greenfield 
really said was "yuck and wow", a derogatory comment about the 
limited emotional range and vocabulary of Twitter users. Considered 
linguistically and culturally, it's a fascinating example of the 
way electronic communications can today create and transmit a new 
word.

WEB SCIENCE  This term has been in the news because the second web 
science conference has been held this week in Raleigh, North 
Carolina. WEB SCIENCE was first publicly used in late 2006 when the 
Web Science Research Initiative (now the Web Science Trust, headed 
by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web) was launched as a 
collaboration between MIT and the University of Southampton. Web 
science is an interdisciplinary study, which brings together Web 
technologists with economists, lawyers, philosophers and social 
scientists. It covers such fields as security, trust and privacy 
and investigates the social and economic impact of the Web. A 
particular concern is the way in which data sets are increasingly 
being interconnected to make huge "data webs", which combine 
information in new ways, ways which are likely to have unforeseen 
social and privacy implications. The first undergraduate degree in 
web science has been announced this month by Rensselaer Polytechnic 
Institute in Troy, NY. 

COLLAPSONOMICS  This one popped up recently in a couple of sources 
I regularly read. It's vanishingly rare in printed texts - and even 
Wikipedia hasn't noticed it yet - but has a presence in blogs and 
especially on Twitter. COLLAPSONOMICS is clearly enough a blend of 
"collapse" and "economics". The term is the economics mirror of 
DISASTER STUDIES, which has been around since the 1950s and looks 
into the financial and social consequences of natural calamities 
such as earthquakes, asteroid strikes and volcanic eruptions and 
how to cope with them. COLLAPSONOMICS began to appear about a year 
ago to refer to the study of national economies on the brink of 
collapse.

4. Q and A: Pluck the gowans fine
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Q. I have searched the Web to the best of my ability to find some  
explanation of the derivation of the phrase "plucking the gowans 
fine", which P G Wodehouse employed many times in his writings. It 
seems to express the nostalgic recollection of "a good time being 
had by all," and the possibility of renewing those good times among 
long-parted friends. Its etymology seems - online, at least - to be 
a closed book. Can you shed any light on this curious phrase? 
[Barton Brown]

A. Wodehouse seems to have used the complete expression only in his 
later works - the earliest example I've found is in the Code of the 
Woosters of 1938. This is a more recent one:

    It was many years since this Cheesewright and I had 
    started what I believe is known as plucking the gowans 
    fine, and there had been a time when we had plucked them 
    rather assiduously.
    [Joy in the Morning, by P G Wodehouse, 1947.]

The problem in your finding the origin most probably lies in your 
searching for the whole phrase. It seems to have been invented by 
Wodehouse and to have been used only by him, since I can't find it 
anywhere else. On the other hand, lots of examples of "gowans fine" 
turn up in online references, which at once send one to the source. 
It's in a song by Robert Burns that later became famous in a rather 
different form. His version includes this stanza:

    We twa hae run about the braes
    And pu'd the gowans fine
    But we've wander'd mony a weary foot
    Sin' auld lang syne.
    [Auld Lang Syne, by Robert Burns, 1788. The title 
    roughly translates as "times long past". "Twa" means two; 
    "hae" means have; a "brae" is a hillside; "mony" means 
    many; "sin'" is short for since.]

The line needs some translation. "Pu'd" is the past tense of the 
Scots verb "pou" (sometimes written as "pu" in Burns's time). This 
may be translated as "pull", but it has a rather wider compass. It 
covers the actions of plucking flowers (or chickens), gathering 
fruit, or harvesting or collecting produce of any kind. A "gowan" 
with a supporting adjective may be a wild flower of several sorts, 
but standing alone it's the common daisy. "Pu'd the gowans fine" 
may therefore be rendered in modern English less obscurely but also 
less romantically as "picked the fine daisies". As you suggest, the 
line does evoke carefree former times, as Wodehouse meant by it.

There's no mystery why he chose "plucked", which is a perfectly 
good equivalent of the Scots verb and is both more powerful and 
evocative than "picked". Perhaps the greater mystery is why nobody 
else seems to have done so.

5. Q and A: Just des(s)erts
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Q. In last week's issue, in your item on "comeuppance", you wrote 
"Why should it mean the punishment or fate that someone deserves, a 
just retribution or just deserts?" Surely that should be "just 
desserts"? [Megan Zurawicz; related questions came from others.]

A. I didn't make a mistake, but the confusion between the two forms 
is now so widespread that it's hard to be sure which one is right. 
The evidence of the Oxford corpus of recent English is that "just 
desserts" is now more common than "just deserts" (60% against 40%), 
suggesting it may one day become the standard form. Even my Sunday 
newspaper, the Observer, had it in a headline on 11 April: "Perhaps 
the parties will get their just desserts". It wasn't suggesting 
they might be served with apple pie or Black Forest gateau. The 
muddle isn't helped by the bakery chains and authors of cookery 
books who think "just desserts" is a deliciously punning title. 

The problem is that there are three nouns involved (and a verb as 
well, though that's less of an issue), two of them spelled with 
just one "s" in the middle and the third with two. It's fatally 
easy to get them mixed up.

We have no problem with "desert" when we mean the dry, barren area 
or with "dessert" when we refer to the sweet course of a meal. The 
former is from Latin "desertus", abandoned, deserted or left waste; 
in turn it's from the verb "deserere", to abandon, which is the 
source also of the verb. The latter is from French "desservir", to 
remove what has been served or to clear the table - the dessert 
course was usually laid out in another room to give the servants 
free rein to clear the table after the main course. It's the third 
word - the "desert" in "just deserts" - that causes the trouble, as 
it's spelled like the barren desert but said like the sweet course. 
This "desert" is from another Old French verb that means "deserve". 

The confusion between "just deserts" and "just desserts" is mainly 
one of pronunciation. We don't confuse the barren desert with the 
other two words because it's stressed on the first syllable, while 
the others are stressed on the second

It's because the "deserts" in "just deserts" is said the same way 
as the foodstuff "desserts" that leaves us puzzled how to spell the 
former. If you need a memory aid, remember the sentence "Deserts 
are what one deserves". "Deserve" and "desert" both have one "s" 
and are both stressed on the second syllable. So it's "just 
deserts".

6. Sic!
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Bob Lee read about a malevolent natural event in the issue of the 
Calgary Herald for 23 April. A report noted that Princess Alexandra 
was unable to attend an event in the city: "After more than a year 
of meticulous preparations, the volcano in Iceland disrupted air 
travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers, including the 
princess." 

He spotted another in a story in the same issue about an update of 
what was once called the badger game: "A man hired a female escort 
online. After she arrived, she received a phone call from a friend, 
police said. Within minutes, two men burst inside the home." That 
must have been really messy.

Norman C Berns found a link in the Huffington Post to a story from 
the Daily Telegraph last Tuesday: "A touch of Mission: Impossible 
has come to text messaging, with the launch of a new service called 
Safe Text. The system sends messages to mobile phones that self-
destruct as soon as they have been read." Mr Berns would prefer to 
keep his phone intact.

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