World Wide Words -- 18 Dec 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 17 17:03:29 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 717 Saturday 18 December 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. Weird Words: Mumping.
3. Turns of Phrase: Kettling.
4. Wordface.
5. Q and A: The balloon's gone 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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HOLIDAY BREAK I'm taking two weeks off. There will be no issue
next week (25 December) or the one after (1 January 2011). Normal
service will be resumed on 8 January. Season's greetings and a
happy new year to everyone.
WORLD WIDE WORDS When I started this e-newsletter, back in 1996,
the Web was usually called in full the World Wide Web and my title
was an original play on words. Now it seems to be everywhere: the
Blogger and Clickwriters sites have blogs of that name. A writer in
Malaysia uses it, as does one in Germany; worldwidewords.com has
moved recently from a religious focus to a language one. P G
Wodehouse once had much the same problem. He regretted choosing
Summer Lightning as the title of a book when he found that half a
dozen others with the same title had either been published or were
in prospect. He wryly hoped that his offering might one day be
included in the list of the 100 best books named Summer Lightning.
I'm starting to feel the same way about World Wide Words.
2. Weird Words: Mumping /'mVmpIN/
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Tonight, 18 December, my local community centre in Gloucestershire
is reviving Mumping Night, a procession and entertainment under the
notional supervision of a Lord of Misrule. "Mumping" is an uncommon
word for this seasonal activity, mostly known in the West Country.
More commonly it's "mumming", for a performance that was originally
in mime or in which participants were in disguise. The name for my
local performance seems to be from a confusion between "mumming"
and another old custom of the pre-Christmas period, also called
"mumping".
"Mumping" is attached to the feast day of St Thomas the Apostle on
21 December. This used to be known in some parts of England as
"Mumping Day", when poor people went around their parish begging
for alms. It's from the seventeenth-century Dutch verb "mompen", to
cheat or deceive, but it became an English dialect word meaning to
scrounge or beg.
"Mumping" is also British police jargon for accepting small favours
such as free meals from friendly tradespeople:
Mumping free beer and a doughnut, well, that's part of
being a copper. And who knows, there might even be a few
greasy spoons in this town so happy to see a copper that
they will spontaneously offer him a free nosh. Stranger
things have happened.
[Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett, 2002.]
This "mumping", by the way, is not the same as the one, now mainly
Scottish, meaning grimacing or grumbling, mumbling or muttering, or
moving the jaws as if munching food. That's linked to another old
Dutch verb, also spelled "mompen", meaning to mumble, and with the
rare German verb "mumpfen", to chew with a full mouth.
"Mumping Day" was also sometimes called "Begging Day". In Kent it
was "Doleing Day", because gifts or doles - such as draughts of
beer or loaves of bread - were given by prosperous people to needy
locals. In various counties it has been referred to as "going a-
gooding", to ask for "good things" for Christmas, which usually
meant food or small sums of money, and also "going a-corning", to
ask farmers for gifts of wheat (English corn) to make bread.
3. Turns of Phrase: Kettling /'kEt(@)lIN/
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This jargon term of the British police first came widely to public
notice during the G20 summit in London in April 2009. It has been
in the news again as a result of demonstrations in London against
steep rises in university tuition fees.
Demonstrators are kettled by herding them into a limited area and
stopping them from leaving. As they are often constrained for many
hours without food, water or toilet facilities, opponents of the
method regard it as unlawful imprisonment.
We may guess that the image behind it is of demonstrators starting
to boil out of control, so they're contained in a figurative
kettle. But the term puzzles experts because it seems to have no
obvious English precursor. The nearest analogy, which isn't very
close, is the US term kettling for the circling and soaring of a
group of migrating hawks or other birds within air currents to gain
height, which is said to resemble the swirling motion of water
boiling in a kettle.
The most plausible suggestion is that the word is from German, in
which "Kessel" is the everyday word for a kettle or similar vessel,
such as a central-heating boiler. The derived verb "einkesseln"
("to enkettle") means to encircle or surround, principally in the
military. This may come from an older sense of "Kessel" for a semi-
circular ring of hunters driving game before them.
German police employ the same technique as the British calling it
"Polizeikessel". The term is older than "kettling" (it appears in
the publications Die Zeit and Der Spiegel in June 1986 and may well
be earlier) and we may assume that a sharing of experience between
the national police forces has lead to "kettling" being created by
the British police as a loan translation.
The kettling tactic used by police to pen in 5,000
people during the G20 protests carries significant risks,
the man leading the review of public order policing said
today.
[The Times, 21 Apr. 2009.]
I started to get anxious when I realised they were
kettling the children - blocking off exits to Westminster
Bridge, Parliament Square and Liberal headquarters.
Kettling children is hardly the mark of a civilised and
tolerant society.
[The Guardian, 27 Nov. 2010.]
[Thanks go to Paul Frank and Dan Goncharoff for their help.]
4. Wordface
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THE THINKING PERSON'S DRINK An article by Adam Brodie-McKenzie in
the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of Melbourne on 1 December
introduced Australians to the SOY CAP INTELLIGENTSIA, those who
espouse left-wing ideals but who are comfortably off. It's a new
term for what Australians have in the past called "chardonnay
socialists". Americans often use the term "limousine liberals",
while the British right prefers "champagne socialists". Margaret
Ruwoldt told me she had heard the term in conversation before it
appeared in print. She explained that it comes from the fashionable
drink SOY CAP, a cappuccino made with soy milk.
IN BRIEF Some words from the press that I've encountered recently,
mostly not new, except to me: HEVAGE (male cleavage, as adopted by
some pop stars); DORK KNOB (a short ponytail, said in a newspaper
of 1990 to be the new hair fad of the 1990s); JERKULES (a muscular
male with an attitude of superiority, perhaps from the 1997 Disney
film in which the nickname was given to young Hercules, though that
may echo a 1967 episode of the Batfink cartoon); LULZ (formed from
the online acronym LOL, "laugh out loud", as a sarcastic plural -
the spelling has changed but it's said as "lolz" - which means
roughly "cheap laughs" or "something done for a laugh"); FACEPALM
(the act of striking your face with a open palm, to indicate you
have heard something you believe to be particularly idiotic).
MARIST POLL The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion of
Poughkeepsie, NY, this week published the results of its annual
telephone poll to find the word or phrase in conversation today
that most annoys Americans. The survey, of 1,020 adults, was
conducted between 15 and 18 November. For the second year
running, WHATEVER was nominated as the word that vexed them
most. The runners-up in reducing order of unpopularity were
LIKE, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN and TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH. The
dislike of WHATEVER had little to do with educational level
or income but was significantly associated with age: The
over-60s were much more annoyed by it than 16-29 year-olds.
The pattern was reversed with LIKE, disfavour decreasing
rapidly in older people.
CULTURAL WORDS Reports appeared yesterday based on an article
in Science about a big word-crunching research enterprise that
has collated every word appearing in about five million books
digitised by Google, 361 billion of them in English. This is
a collection far larger than any dictionary corpus so far
created and the researchers - a group from Harvard University,
Encyclopaedia Britannica and Google - hope that it will be used
to investigate cultural trends as well as lexicographical
ones. The researchers have coined CULTUROMICS as a jazzy term
for this statistical approach to word research, basing the
analogy on genomics, the study of the evolution of the human
genome. Results are freely available in graphical form on a
new Google search site (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com), which
shows the relative rates of appearance of words annually from
1920 to 2000. The researchers cite "God" as an example of the
trends thrown up by the data: they say that references to the
deity in books fell from 17 mentions per 10,000 words in 1830 to
two per 10,000 words in 1998. One report quoted them as saying "We
estimated that 52% of the English lexicon - the majority of words
used in English books - consist of lexical 'dark matter'
undocumented in standard references", an astonishing figure that's
raising eyebrows among the makers of those standard references.
5. Q and A: The balloon's gone up
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Q. I've read the phrase "the balloon's gone up" (or variations) in
several British-authored books, especially in those having to do
with war. What is the derivation of this? [Roger Kapp]
A. The usual sense of the idiom is that some action, excitement, or
trouble has started, often but by no means always military. It's
closely associated in memory with the Second World War, as here:
"The balloon's gone up," he said. "You mean Rommel has
attacked?" "Yes, there's a tank battle going on now this
side of the Gazala Line."
[The Conquest of North Africa, by Alexander G
Clifford, 1943. Mr Clifford was a British war
correspondent for the Daily Mail.]
Today, it's possible only to use it humorously:
Take a seat, Double-Oh Nine. Look, I won't beat about
the bush. Balloon's gone up in Patagonia. Our old friend
Blofeld is threatening to launch a nuclear warhead at the
polar icecap.
[The Independent, 15 May 2007. In John Walsh's
irreverent riff on an advertisement by MI6 for new
staff.]
In this next instance, the meaning is that a deception has been
exposed and that difficulties have ensued:
"I still want to know who this other young woman is."
Patrick turned with relief as Julia, cool and aloof, came
into the room. "The balloon's gone up," he said. Julia
raised her eyebrows. Then, still cool, she came forward
and sat down. "O.K.," she said. "That's that. I suppose
you're very angry?"
[A Murder is Announced, by Agatha Christie, 1950.]
It would be reasonable to assume that it dates from the period of
the Second World War. It brings to mind - at least it does for
those of us replete in years - the raising of defensive barrage
balloons over cities at the start of an air-raid to force enemy
bombers to fly high. But the idiom turns out to predate not only
that conflict but even the First World War. This, currently the
first known example, comes from a very recently revised entry in
the Oxford English Dictionary:
Being also a close-fisted chap, he hates to have the
audience get more than it pays for. In brief, Alfonso,
cut out the musical extras or your balloon goes up.
[Putnam's Monthly, 1909.]
It's intriguing that Putnam's Monthly was an American publication,
not a British one. It can't be an allusion to a barrage balloon,
since they hadn't been invented yet. It might be from a military
observation balloon, as these were frequently hoisted for artillery
spotting purposes during a battle. In fact, this is sometimes given
as the origin. But in the nineteenth century there are references
in British and American periodicals to literal balloons going up.
These were manned hot-air balloons and the launch of one was a rare
event that was excitedly anticipated and well attended. By the last
quarter of the century the idea of one going up being a marker of
something significant happening was beginning to appear:
The first huge pioneer balloon has gone up in the
shape of the following strange, long, and may we not say
windy document in the New York Evening Post.
[Dwight's Journal of Music (Boston), 1873.]
As matters stand, it's not possible to decide for sure whether it
is originally British or American. I suspect independent creation.
6. Sic!
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Elspeth Pope's eye was caught by a potentially misleading headline
in The Olympian of Washington State: "Man who killed wife during
dive out of jail". Every other newspaper has the slightly clearer,
"Man who killed wife during dive released from jail."
The text on the Coffee Addict website, which Bob Gray recently came
across, is presumably automatically translated. It contains some
delightfully fractured English, referring to "uninformed brewed
coffee" and to filters that "freshen your daub water". Throughout,
yerba maté is called "yerba partner", an "erotically delectable
full of illness plant", which "offers a engorgement of pick illness
benefits". Bob Grey's favourite is the reference to "belligerent
coffee", which must reflect the experience of many of us.
Bob McGill took a picture of a poster in a Church's Fried Chicken
restaurant in Texas. It advertised "New! Southern Sweet Tea". At
the bottom it said "Available in sweet or unsweetened".
On 9 December, Paul Kimberley noted that the Sydney Morning Herald
reported on its front page the arrival of Oprah Winfrey to record
two shows: "Wearing a white shirt, black trousers and an Akubra
hat, Winfrey was quickly whisked away in two black vans."
The final sentence in an Associated Press report appeared unchanged
in several US media outlets on 14 December: "The gunfire damaged
several vehicles in the parking lot, including a Chinese restaurant
across the street about 200 yards away." Thanks to everybody who
sent that in.
The Open University Israel Centre brochure, Benny Tiefenbrunner
tells us, has the sentence "Aharon Romm is a certified life coach
who teaches classes on how to have a fantastically good life on
Sunday mornings." The rest of the week, however ...
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