World Wide Words -- 10 Jul 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 9 16:40:14 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 694 Saturday 10 July 2010
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Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
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: Xeric.
3. Wordface.
4. Book review: Through the Language Glass, by Guy Deutscher.
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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BOOT CAMP George Ernsberger e-mailed: "My father was in boot camp
in the US Navy in 1944, and I in 1955. Recruits ('boots') wore
leggings ('boots') just about all the time, and nobody else did.
Boots were the things that we wore that identified us as under
training and distinguished us from full-fledged sailors. Everyone
assumed that was the sense of the word. I guess none of this adds
anything to what you've said, but it really sticks in my mind that
the obvious explanation is the correct one."
Gordon Schochet communicated a fine example of popular etymology:
"I was told that 'boot camp' was related to 'tenderfoot,' a term
that I first encountered in cub scouting as a name for a newcomer
and more generally a recruit who had not been around long enough to
develop the calluses that permitted him to walk barefoot through
the woods and so had to wear boots to protect his tender feet. It's
probably another baseless myth, but it has a certain romantic charm
and is related to the 'rubber-boot sailor' of your column."
2. Weird Words: Xeric /'zI at rIk/
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Three words for the price of one this time: "xeric", "hydric" and
"mesic". Something xeric is very dry. It's a term in ecology and
might be applied, for example, to a bare rock exposed to the sun.
Though formed from Greek "xeros", dry (also the source of "Xerox",
a method of dry copying), it's a comparatively modern creation:
We offer the terms 'xeric', 'hydric' and 'mesic', to
be defined as follows: Xeric (hydric, mesic):
characterized by or pertaining to conditions of scanty
(abundant, medium) moisture supply.
[A Suggestion to Amend Certain Familiar Ecological
Terms, by W S Cooper and A O Weese, in Ecology, 1926.
Both authors were pioneering ecologists, in a period in
which the term was hardly known to the general public.
The Ecological Society of America commemorates one of the
authors in its annual William Skinner Cooper award.]
Until then, the only word available was "xerophytic", which could
be used solely of plants (because of the ending "-phytic", from
Greek "phuton", a plant) that were adapted to dry habitats. Messrs
Cooper and Weese wanted a term to describe habitats in general.
The second word they invented, "hydric" (Greek "hudor", water), of
a habitat that has a plentiful supply of water, was potentially
confusing, since it already existed as a term in chemistry for
hydrogen in chemical combination. And "mesic" (from Greek "mesos",
middle), a habitat having an intermediate supply of water, has
since been independently reinvented by atomic physicists to refer
to the subatomic particle called the meson. But in practice
ambiguity in either case is unlikely.
These days, though "xeric" is hardly an everyday word, serious
gardeners will know it in connection with dry landscaping or
"xeriscaping":
Instead of seeing the park as half empty, he saw the
opportunity to design drought-tolerant gardens to promote
the benefits of planting native and xeric plants.
[The Denver Post, 21 May 2010.]
3. Wordface
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PLUMMETING PROFITS In May 2007, a report was published by the
business information researchers Datamonitor on the financial
outlook for pharmaceutical companies. It warned that so many drugs
were about to leave patent protection, from 2011 onwards, that
profits would nosedive, figuratively fall off a cliff. PATENT CLIFF
has since become fairly common in specialist business publications
and in the past year or so has started to appear more widely,
particularly in the UK. It was in the Financial Times on 4 May: "J
P Morgan notes that GSK becomes the first big pharma to hit its
patent cliff this year. As investors fully grasp its post-cliff
outlook, its trading performance will provide some guidance to the
rest of the market." Note POST-CLIFF: it's a sign that a term has
become accepted when derivatives start to appear.
IS CLEANING A CRIME? We've all seen those sarcastic messages on
dirty vehicles, in which some wag has traced out "clean me!" by
removing some of the grime. I've only just learned that the trick
has a number of names, including eco-tagging, grime writing and
clean tagging, but which is perhaps best known as REVERSE GRAFFITI.
A report about it in the New York Times on 3 June noted that it's
being used by advertisers in several countries. One method is to
pressure-wash dirty surfaces to leave behind a promotional message,
though some advertising firms have been more inventive - a London
company is said to have tagged snowbanks after a storm in 2008. The
first example I can find is from the Toronto Star of October 2006,
which featured the British graffiti artist Paul Curtis, who runs a
business creating such advertising and who was threatened with
prosecution for vandalism in Leeds in 2004 because of his reverse-
graffiti advertisement in an underpass.
IN THE SHADOWS The word UMBRAPHILE turned up this week in a piece
about the total solar eclipse that will take place this Sunday near
Tahiti. Literally, "umbraphile" means a lover of shade (from Latin
"umbra", shade + Greek "philos", loving); biologists occasionally
use it for shade-loving plants (the adjective is "umbraphilic").
But it has been borrowed, or reinvented, by astronomers to refer to
someone who is "addicted to the glory and majesty of total solar
eclipses" as the American astronomer Glenn H Schneider put it. In
2003, the New Scientist wrote, "There are people who like solar
eclipses and then there are umbraphiles, those who like them so
much they'll drop everything to see one." Professor Schneider says
he recalls using it in that sense after the total solar eclipse of
1976, but thinks that it may be older; however, the earliest
published example that I've found was in the Philadelphia Inquirer
in July 1991.
4. Book review: Through the Language Glass, by Guy Deutscher
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In his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell created
Newspeak, a language constructed to render its speakers incapable
of articulating any idea contrary to the dogma of the ruling party.
The implication behind Orwell's creation is that the language you
speak controls the way in which you think, limiting the concepts
you're able to understand.
One formulation of this idea is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
though neither Edward Sapir nor his student Benjamin Whorf actually
published anything so succinct and even the name is a construct of
later commentators. The hypothesis has largely been dismissed, in
particular because of Whorf's many errors, which have overshadowed
the work of his teacher, and has been out of fashion among
linguists for the past half century.
Guy Deutscher's thesis is that it was wrong to dismiss the ideas of
Edward Sapir, in particular that a person's native language can
affect the workings of his mind. Some researchers argue against
Noam Chomsky's theory that we are born with a genetic template that
allows us to learn language and that therefore all languages must
be alike at a deep level. Instead, the hypothesis is gaining ground
that infants' brains are mouldable and that early in life they
generate the structures they need in order to understand language.
This might mean that speakers of different languages do indeed view
the world differently. The idea that our interpretation of the
world may be influenced, albeit subtly, by the language we learn as
infants is becoming more widely accepted through recent research
into language diversity, supported by neurological experiments.
Many of these experiments have involved colour perception and Guy
Deutscher starts his exploration with this aspect. Many societies
have a curious lack of colour words, often limited to black, white
and red, where the first two are used generally for dark and light
colours respectively. Their speakers have perfect colour vision,
but in the environment in which they live they don't need colour
descriptions that are more complex. The reverse of the Sapir-Whorf
view is therefore certainly true - that one's environment and
culture control one's language. Recent research has demonstrated,
however, that colour concepts in one's mother tongue do interfere
subtly with the way the brain processes colour.
Another major theme in Deutscher's book is the way that languages
describe directions. Most use schemes related to the observer
("turn left at the traffic lights and take the third turning on
your right"). A few languages, however, use absolute directions,
including Guugu Yimithirr of Australia (famous as being the source
of the word "kangaroo"). Speakers might warn you that a stinging
ant was "north of your foot" or say that they left something "on
the southern edge of the western table" in a room. Their scheme is
appropriate for a group living in open country with few natural or
human-made landmarks, but in our more complex civilisations the
relational one works better. The Guugu Yimithirr method requires
its speakers to acquire an absolute sense of direction, a marvel to
the rest of us who don't possess it and a strong indication that
language does indeed in some cases modify thought.
Deutscher argues that the key to differences between languages is a
contained in a maxim of the linguist Roman Jakobson: "Languages
differ essentially in what they *must* convey and not in what they
*may* convey." As an example, he quotes the English statement, "I
spent last night with a neighbour", in which we may keep private
whether the person was male or female. In French there is no such
privilege: one must say "voisin" or "voisine".
This is a most entertaining book, easy to read but packed with
fascinating detail.
[Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your
World; published by William Heinemann in the UK on 3 June and in
the US by Metropolitan Books on 31 August; hardback, pp310, index;
ISBN 978-0-434-016900-7 (UK), 978-0-8050-8195-4 (US); publishers'
list prices £20.00 (UK), $27.50 (US).]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: £13.00 http://wwwords.org?THLG4
Amazon US: US$18.48 http://wwwords.org?THLG7 (pre-order)
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Amazon Germany: EUR23,20 http://wwwords.org?THLG1
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
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5. Sic!
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Jan Matthews reports, "Our local paper, Margaret River Mail, in the
south-west of Western Australia, has featured for consecutive weeks
an advertisement for a new emporium in town which will sell 'French
Provisional Furniture'."
A personal ad in the "men seeking women" section of the contacts
page of the Stockport Times on 1 July ought instead - Ian Colley
suggests - to have been listed under the "fairground situations
vacant" heading instead: "Caring male, 44, 5' 11", stocky build,
goatee beard, seeks similar female for good relationship".
The Geelong Advertiser of South Australia, Ralph Sinclair noted,
featured this advertisement on 2 July for a cool property: "Located
on the fridge on Belmont and Highton it is a walk or short drive to
shopping precincts, public transport, medical and local schools."
A Daily Telegraph blog on 30 June had the headline, "Andy Murray
could save England coach Fabio Capello's job at Wimbledon." John
Daly commented, "No wonder the England team didn't do too well at
the World Cup, if their manager was moonlighting at the tennis."
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