World Wide Words -- 30 Jan 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 29 16:59:03 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 675 Saturday 30 January 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: Adust.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Southpaw.
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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NAUTS I missed a term for spacefarers. Marc Naimark e-mailed from
Paris to tell me there's also "spationaut". This is the official
term of the European Space Agency and is a slight modification of
French "spationaute" (from "espace", French for "space"). The term
goes back at least as far as the flight of Jean-Loup Chrétien on
the Russian Salyut 7 in 1982.
SO ... AS Mark Lee queried my use of this form last week: "Every
profession has its jargon, but especially one so influenced by
government bureaucracy as is British teaching." He commented, "I've
been taught 'so' can substitute for 'as' in negatives, but the
context is clearly positive. Shouldn't it be '... as influenced by
government bureaucracy as is British teaching.'"? That's a very
interesting point. I wasn't aware of that rule for the "so ... as"
construction (clearly my teachers were far too permissive in their
views). My references say it evolved, like so many rules, from the
writings of eighteenth and nineteenth century grammarians. However,
in the past century, opinion has relaxed and "so ... as" can now be
used in positive contexts without being criticised, although its
use has greatly declined overall. One work, the Merriam-Webster
Dictionary of English Usage, sarcastically calls the "so ... as"
negative rule "one of Miss Thistlebottom's hobgoblins". The same
source comments that the "so" form has survived particularly in
cases when it is used for emphasis, as it was in my example.
LIFELONG NATIVE Several readers objected to the mild mockery of
this expression in the Sic! column in the last issue. For them, it
has a specific meaning - of a person who was born in a place and
has always lived there, as opposed to one who was born in a place,
but for a period has lived somewhere else. Sharla Hardy put it like
this: "I was born in California and live there, but I spent seven
years living in Ohio and a couple in Michigan. So I may be a
native, but I'm not a lifelong native."
REBOOT Several readers suggested that the origin for the sense of
recreating a franchise lay not in Hollywood but in comics. They
also argued that a reboot is not the same thing as a remake. Anton
Sherwood explained, "With a reboot, the originator of a franchise
discards much of the burden of the pre-existing canon. I gather
that this usage originated in comics, particularly applied (in
retrospect) to DC Comics' 'Crisis on Infinite Earths' of 1985,
which was followed by a new origin story for Superman. Since then,
there never was such a thing as Red Kryptonite, for example."
2. Weird Words: Adust /@'dVst/
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With this word, you may be at one with Google - whenever I searched
for it, Google asked if I meant "adjust". No, "adust" is a distinct
word, with no link to "adjust". Nor is it linked to "dust", though
one of its senses is relevant - it can mean "scorched or burnt". At
one time it could also mean "gloomy or melancholic". These two very
different senses suggests there's a story to be told.
The first sense in English, back in the fifteenth century, came via
French from the Latin adjective "adustus", burnt. That derives from
the verb "adurere", which is based on "urere", to burn, with "ad"
on the front as an intensifier. The Latin verb means "to burn up;
consume". In English, it referred to something that was scorched,
seared, dried up with heat or parched. A writer in 1857 referred to
certain African islands, "whose desolate and adust beauty sets the
imagination all on fire."
For the other meaning, we have to turn to the medieval medical idea
of the four humours of the body - blood, phlegm, choler and black
bile. If the humours were kept in reasonable balance the body ran
smoothly; if they became seriously disordered, illness resulted.
Excess heat in the body, or heated emotions such as rage, caused
combustion of the humours. This led to the body becoming hot and
dry, accompanied by thirst and by a black or burnt colour of the
blood. Though any of the humours could be affected, combustion of
black bile in particular led to a state called "melancholy adust"
(adjective placed after the noun), in which depression alternated
with fits of rage.
The link between "adust" and "melancholy" led to "adust" taking on
its other sense, gloomy or depressed, though that died out during
the nineteenth century. This is among its last appearances:
His complexion was of the kind which used to be called
adust - burnt up with inner fires; his visage was long
and somewhat harshly designed, very apt, it would seem,
to the expression of bitter ironies or stern
resentments.
[The Emancipated, by George Gissing, 1890.]
3. What I've learned this week
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TUNITIES Two weeks ago, I mentioned "crisitunity". A relative came
to light this week: TRAGITUNITY ("tragedy" + "opportunity"). It was
used in an article about Scientologists who have travelled to Haiti
to offer survivors their unique approach to spiritual first aid.
GREENER GRASS The term SECTOR ENVY appeared in the Guardian last
Saturday. The article claimed that it was the invention of IFF
Research, which recently carried out a study of UK workers in the
private and public sectors and found that public-sector employment
is seen as more attractive. It's not new. My earliest sighting is
in the issue of the Public Administration Review for March/April
1996, which claimed that sector envy went the other way, putting
"private-sector organizations on a pedestal."
ENOUGH! WE CRY That 1996 article also included ADMINISTRATIONIST,
a mouth-filling minor horror that even then was a couple of decades
old. It's a nice example of unnecessary word-length inflation. On a
whim I searched around and also found ADMINISTRATIONALISM and its
agent noun ADMINISTRATIONALIST. Can ANTIDISADMINISTRATIONMENTISM be
far behind?
A FEW BOB SHORT OF A POUND Thanks to Ernie Freeman, I heard of a
minor linguistic spat over a TV advertisement by McDonalds in the
UK. It promotes the Pound Saver Menu and begins, "the pound, also
known as one bob". It isn't. A bob, in "old money" before the UK
went decimal in 1971, was a shilling, or five pence in "new money"
(as we called it at the time). Twenty shillings made a pound.
Money-conscious locals with an impish urge to provoke have been
asking McDonalds if they can have the Menu for five pence. A
McDonalds spokesman proved the truth of the adage that when in a
hole, one should stop digging. He was quoted in an item on Sky
News: "Although a 'bob' was formerly used as a slang term for the
shilling until the introduction of decimalisation in 1971, research
has shown it is now more commonly used as slang for a pound or
money in general." Up to a point. Older British people still use
phrases like "that's worth a few bob" for an unspecified but
moderately large sum of money. But never for a pound. No way.
4. Q and A: Southpaw
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Q. I just recently discovered your site, and love it! Here's one
I've always wondered about - why are left-handed baseball pitchers
referred to as "southpaws"? And, why aren't right handed pitchers
called "northpaws"? [Lance Schulz]
A. As it happens, "northpaw" turns up often enough that it has been
recognised in at least one slang dictionary and has an entry in the
Oxford English Dictionary. As you'd guess, it's usually intended as
a joke, but not always signalled as such:
In fact, the Fishers are missing left-handers
entirely, as all 13 pitchers who began the year with the
club are northpaws.
[Concord Monitor, New Hampshire, 10 Apr. 2005.]
I may not be the very best person to answer the first part of your
question, as I am utterly uninterested in any sport that runs the
risk of raising a sweat, even vicariously. And as I come from a
country in which baseball is almost never played, my knowledge of
the game could be written in felt-tipped pen on the back of a torn
postage stamp. But as this is a language question, not a sporting
one, perhaps I may be allowed to discuss the matter.
The usual story about "southpaw" is set out in a standard work on
the game:
The oft-repeated etymology of the term is that it
derives from the "fact" that ballparks were laid out with
home plate to the west, which meant that a left-handed
pitcher faced the west and threw with his "southern"
limb. This westward orientation kept the glare of the
afternoon sun out of the batter's eyes and out of the
eyes of the customers in the more expensive seats behind
the plate during a game.
[The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, by Paul Dickson,
Third Edition, 2009.]
Nobody conversant with the history of the game now believes this.
It seems likely, Dickson comments, that the story was the invention
of either the political humorist Finley Peter Dunne of the Chicago
News or Charles Seymour of the Chicago Herald. Dunne's biographer
says that Dunne invented it about 1887 because the Chicago ball
park happened to be laid out that way; H L Mencken noted in The
American Language that Richard J Finnigan, publisher of the Chicago
Times, attributed the term to Seymour.
Other reports suggest that the term was applied to a pitcher simply
because he was left-handed, with the term being already known from
elsewhere. Paul Dickson quotes Tim Murnane, a left-handed pitcher,
as saying that the local newspaper in St Louis began to refer to
him as a southpaw in 1876. I can't find a reference to him in the
archives of the paper that year, but another contemporary comment
from the same paper shows that it was used for other players than
just the pitcher. It supports the view that the story about the
orientation of ball parks was an invention:
The following good players have been engaged: Redmond,
the little gallant short stop, with his south paw, who,
by the way, is the "daddy of them all," as his record of
last season placed him on top of all the short stops.
[St Louis Globe-Democrat, 27 Feb. 1876.]
Earlier examples, in fact, make no mention of baseball. One in the
Milwaukee Daily Sentinel in August 1870 lists seven local newsboys,
one of whom, James Sullivan, was nicknamed "South-Paw". The OED has
another, from 1848, referring to a heavy blow with the left hand
(though the application of the term to boxing had to await the
twentieth century). This is the earliest so far known, unearthed by
Benjamin Zimmer very recently (October 2009):
"_Luk_ here _mon_, and convince yourself," said he,
holding up the Tickler, in the right paw, between the
ceiling and the floor, and with the south paw pointing to
the "bow, vow, vow."
[The Tickler, 30 Jun. 1813. The Tickler was a comic
newspaper published in Philadelphia. The speaker, Honest
Bob, was commenting on the way that Yankees pronounced
their Ws as Vs.]
Having rebutted the tale about the orientation of ball parks, I am
left with no good explanation for where "southpaw" comes from.
Nothing in the early examples gives us a clue. Conclusion: origin
unknown. Sorry.
5. Sic!
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The recent wild weather in California was the subject of a report
from the Associated Press which appeared in various newspapers on
Monday. Karen Courtenay read it in the Boston Globe: "A team of
scientists hunkered down at the California Institute of Technology
to work on a 'Frankenstorm' scenario - a mother lode wintry blast
that could potentially sock the Golden State. The hypothetical but
plausible storm would be similar to the 1861-1862 extreme floods
that temporarily moved the state capital from Sacramento to San
Francisco." Now *that's* a flood!
Joel S Berson reported that somebody on another list had received
an automatic e-mail response in response to a message: "Thank you
for your email. I am out of the office toady." Joel wrote, "This is
clearly from someone who drops the 'the' - in my dialect, the above
would have to be 'I am the out of the office toady'."
The NZCity site in New Zealand, Lorna Russell reports, had this
lead sentence in a report on 22 January: "Stu Jacobs, who stepped
in to stop dog fight, wants owner of Bull Mastiff that started the
fight put down and owner charged". It was later changed to "Former
All White soccer player Stu Jacobs wants the owner of a dog which
attacked him charged and the dog put down." Better.
A sentence Ed Sundt read on the back of a gift card for P F Chang's
(a chain of Chinese restaurants in the US) puzzled him: "This card
cannot be redeemed for cash, except where prohibited by law."
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