World Wide Words -- 07 Aug 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 6 16:26:25 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 698 Saturday 7 August 2010
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Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Nurdle.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: First, Second and Third.
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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TEACUP CATTLE Lara Treard pointed out that, though this specific
term may have begun in the Guardian, "teacup" for a small animal of
its type is much older. She wrote, "I have a teacup poodle which is
over 9 years old and a friend has an even older teacup Yorkshire.
It has been an accepted term for very small animals (mostly dogs
under three kilos) for at least 10 years in Canada and the United
States. My poodle weighed 400 grams at the age of three months and
did fit in a teacup!" I stand corrected. However, while they're
smaller than average, "teacup cattle" is still a bit of a stretch.
Oxymoronic, in fact.
TELEGRAPHESE Stephen Browne wondered if I was refraining through
delicacy from completing the story about the news editor who had an
acerbic exchange of cables with a foreign correspondent. Avoidance
of the indelicate has no place in discussions about language, which
I shall proceed to demonstrate. The canonical version, I have since
learned, was told by Anthony Burgess in his book 1985, which was
inspired by George Orwell's 1984: "Orwell must have relished the
exchange between Evelyn Waugh and the Daily Mail, when that great
popular organ sent him to cover the conflict in Abyssinia: WHY
UNNEWS - UNNEWS GOODNEWS - UNNEWS UNJOB - UPSTICK JOB ASSWISE." I
can't easily accept the attribution of the story - Evelyn Waugh,
being British, would surely have written the first part as "arse".
I am confirmed in this opinion by the former Daily Mirror reporter
Revel Barker, who has the variant version UPSTICK JOB ARSEWARDS in
an article on gentlemenranters.com, though he attributes it to an
exchange between the Daily Telegraph's foreign desk and its man in
the Congo (thanks to David Pearson for pointing me to the piece).
2. Topical Words: Nurdle
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A pending court case between Colgate and Glaxo has reminded me of
this invaluable word, whose wide circulation and range of senses is
a wonder, even more so because it rarely features in dictionaries.
Some know it best as a term in cricket, for a tap by the batsman
that pushes the ball into a space among the fielders in order to
take a quick single ("One of our habitual opponents was captained
by a man who could, and often did, nurdle the ball down to fine
leg", noted The Times in January this year). It's also a term in
tiddlywinks for playing a wink so close to the pot that it's almost
impossible for your opponent to pot it ("To escape from a nurdle
you need a university degree, an agile wrist and a zany sense of
humor", the Toronto Star wrote in 1985). A couple of English pubs
play a game called nurdling, which has been described as "getting
old pennies down a hole in a bench". Generally speaking, if you're
nurdling you're faffing about doing nothing very constructive.
A nurdle in the plastics business, on the other hand, is properly a
pre-production pellet, the basic feedstuff that plastic products
are made from. When plastics biodegrade in the oceans they turn
back into particles that have been given the same name.
In the court case sense, "nurdle" is the term in the US for the
"correct" amount of toothpaste one should put on one's toothbrush,
a squeeze of the tube that exactly covers the whole length of the
bristles. The news report in which I found it said, "The complaint
seeks a declaration that Colgate's 'Triple Action' phrase and three
stripe nurdle are not confusingly similar to Glaxo's 'Triple
Protection' phrase and nurdle design in other colours." Let us hope
that this dispute is cleared up soon, for the sake of our communal
peace of mind. I'm told that we must give credit, or blame, to the
American Dental Association for its work in the 1990s to popularise
"nurdle" in this sense.
It has been claimed that "nurdle" was coined by the writers of the
US TV show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, with "farkel", "bippy" and
others. The true origin, as any Brit of mature years can tell you,
was in the crazy mind of Michael Bentine, one of the original Goons
and the chief perpetrator of a BBC television show between 1960-64
called It's a Square World. He invented a spoof pub game, drats,
supposedly played by Somerset yokels. It was dangerous, with the
main risk being that of nurdling, an unspecified but catastrophic
error ("Drat me! - He's Nurdled!!"). The word entered the American
lexicon in 1967 when reports appeared in various US media about a
mad pub group in Totten, near Southampton, that actually played the
game, under the title of the Nurdling Championships.
Truly, it's a word for all seasons and occasions.
3. Wordface
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WHAT'S IN A NAME? This week, after ten years' work, the Census of
Marine Life has finally been published; it estimates there are more
than 230,000 species in the world's oceans, although some experts
believe that they're going extinct faster than they can be named.
Language-wise, what struck me were the common names that had been
given already: green bomber, pram bug, manylight viperfish, one-
grooved diving beetle, twisted nudibranch, bearded fireworm, green-
banded snapping shrimp, cylindrical sandperch, Dumbo octopus,
zombie worm, bluestriped snapper, red-lined paper bubble ...
NEW WORD If you're unable to make a decision, you are indecisive,
and you suffer from indecision. But until now, there has been no
good word to describe you as a person. There is now: INDECIDER. It
appeared in a study by Professor Harriet Bradley, of the sociology
department of the University of Bristol, published last Monday. It
has been widely reported in the British press, since it concluded
that the UK is a nation which is overwhelmed by too much choice and
information and that modern life has created a generation of people
incapable of making quick, confident decisions. I'd like to suggest
what the future holds for the word, but can't make up my mind ...
WHOSE VAULT IS THAT? The Daily Telegraph's headline screamed off
the webpage on Wednesday: "Secret vault of words rejected by the
Oxford English Dictionary uncovered". The piece, quite the daftest
dictionary-related story I've ever read, quoted a design student at
Kingston University, Luke Ngakane: "I was fascinated when I read
that the Oxford University Press has a vault where all their failed
words, which didn't make the dictionary, are kept. This storeroom
contains millions of words and some of them date back hundreds of
years. It's a very hush-hush vault and I really struggled to find
out information about it because it is so secretive. But when I
spoke to them they were happy to confirm its existence and although
I didn't actually get to see the room they did send me some
examples." So the supposedly secret vault is so secret that the
OED's editors were willing to tell him all about it and what was in
it? Don't tell anyone, but I've been in this vault, actually a
rather boring office filled with filing cabinets housing citation
slips (though almost everything's on computer these days). The
piece listed some of the "failed" words: "accordionated", being
able to drive and refold a road map at the same time; "scrax", the
waxy coating that is scratched off an instant lottery ticket;
"pregreening", to creep forwards while waiting for a red light to
change; "precuperate", to prepare for the possibility of being ill;
"optotoxical", a look that could kill, normally from a parent or
spouse; "headset jockey", a telephone call centre worker. You may
now have a smidgen of "xenolexica", a grave confusion when faced
with unusual words, but it doesn't take a lot of "lexpionage", the
sleuthing of words and phrases, to work out that the words haven't
failed, but that the evidence to date suggests they aren't used
enough to meet the criteria for inclusion.
4. Q and A: First, Second and Third
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Q. I can't find where "first", "second" and "third" originated, as
opposed to "oneth", "twoth", and "threeth", which is the way all
other numbers are formed that end in any number other than one, two
or three. Do you know how these forms came about and why all other
numbers simply end in "th"? Though "eleventh" is regularly formed
from "eleven", why is it so unlike "one"? [Neal Mohlmann]
A. These differences might be cause for a sad reflection on the
inconsistencies and irregularity of the English language, except
that there's nothing at all surprising about them. Most languages
are irregular in the way they create the small ordinal numbers, the
adjectives that express position in a series. This illustrates the
seemingly universal rule that the commonest words are the ones that
least conform to the rules.
Old English was no exception. It had a standard ending "-(o)tha" or
"-(o)the" to create the ordinals (in modern English this has turned
into "-(e)th", as in "fifth" or "twentieth") and it used them for
the numbers from three onwards. However, it had no regularly formed
ordinals for the numbers one and two (why that should be so is lost
in prehistory) and it had to make do with whatever circumlocutions
could be made to serve.
To fill the blank for the number one, for example, Old English used
various superlatives, including old versions of words that we now
write as "earliest" and "foremost". Our "first", to start with in
the forms "fyrst" or "fyrest", appeared about the year 1000 but
took over from the older terms a couple of hundred years later;
it's from Germanic predecessors that meant the foremost person in a
society, a term we would now translate as "prince". In Dutch and
German it has evolved into "vorst" and "Fürst" in that sense.
Expressing the idea of "second" posed similar problems but there
wasn't a word that could easily be adapted. Old English fell back
on "other", which you will appreciate was horribly ambiguous. The
situation was saved by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which brought
the French word "second" into the language. This was from Latin
"secundus", the following or next in a series; it was based on
"sequi", to follow, from which we get "sequel".
"Third" wasn't a problem, as the Germanic languages did have a word
for it, "thridda", which is closely related to "three" and also to
modern Dutch "derde" and German "dritte". By one of those oddities
of usage, around the sixteenth century the middle letters became
inverted, a process called metathesis, to create "third", thereby
obscuring its close connection to "three".
"Eleven" does contain a reference to "one", though much disguised.
In Old English the word was "endleofon". This is made up from an
old form of "one" plus a ancient German word that appeared in Old
English as "laefan", to leave. In essence, eleven was "one left",
or ten plus one left over. "Twelve" is formed in the same way.
5. Sic!
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Numerous readers pointed me to an Associated Press report, widely
reproduced, about a sad event in Romania, headlined "528-pound mom
dies 5 months after birth". That's an amazing growth rate for a
mother so young.
Department of ambulatory illumination: "Streets were empty of all
but the occasional hand lantern, hurrying through the dismal murk."
(Oceans of Eternity, by S M Stirling, 2000.)
The issue of the Raleigh News and Observer of North Carolina last
Saturday, Paul Keene tells us, ran this headline above the fold:
"Caterpillar to build new plant." He suggests, "after years of
depredations, the little critters want to make it up to us."
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