World Wide Words -- 24 Jul 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 23 15:30:04 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 696 Saturday 24 July 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: Curtain lecture.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Dilemma.
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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TAXI Following my discussion of the origin of the noun last week,
numerous readers queried the origin of the verb, which is applied
to aircraft moving on the ground. This appeared in the early days
of aviation, no later than 1911. It seems certain that it was taken
from the hire-vehicle sense, though it isn't immediately obvious
why. The best suggestion I've come across is that it compared the
slow movement of the plane to a taxi driver cruising for fares.
I wondered why the French should have adopted "taximètre", when the
German was "Taxameter" and the root in French would seem to have
been "taxe", a tariff. Marc Picard pointed me to the answer. It was
as the result of a scholarly intervention by the famous Hellenist
Théodore Reinach in a letter to Le Temps newspaper in 1906; in it
he advocated instead going back to the classical Greek "taxis", an
arrangement or ordering (which appears in English words such as
"taxonomy" and "taxidermy"); it could also mean the imposition of
an obligation, which might be financial. The word was borrowed as
Latin "taxa", which became the French "taxe" (our "tax" comes from
it). If it were not for Reinach, we might be spelling "taxi" in
another way, or perhaps using a different word.
PEA-WET My tongue-in-cheek comment in this item provoked a strong
response from several Australian readers, including Greg Balding:
"I was both amused and bemused (not to mention horrified) at your
description of a pie floater as part of 'Australian cuisine'. Pie
floaters are very much a regional 'dish': South Australian to be
specific. I am quite sure that nearly all (non-South) Australians
would share my horror at the thought of actually eating one."
SWAN-UPPING As a side-note to last week's piece, readers pointed
out that there are several pubs in England that have the name Swan
With Two Nicks, for example in Worcester, at Little Bollington in
Cheshire, and at Sharnbrook in Bedfordshire. Two nicks put on a
swan's bill at the time of swan-upping signified that it was owned
by the Worshipful Company of Vintners, hence the connection with
pubs. The link has often puzzled people. Down the centuries several
pubs changed their names to Swan With Two Necks, in the toponymic
equivalent of popular etymology. The oldest that I know of was in
London, mentioned by Samuel Pepys in his diary for 4 April 1664.
Robert Waterhouse tells me that there's a pub called the Swan with
Two Knecks in Chorley, Lancashire, a double distancing from the
original, though what the heck a "kneck" is, I've no idea.
2. Weird Words: Curtain lecture
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"Curtain lecture" may be simply defined as a censorious lecture by
a wife to her husband, often while in bed. It has almost, but not
quite totally, vanished from the language; anyone coming across it
now might wrongly associate it with a talk preceding a performance
in a theatre. The direct mental link between beds and curtains has
disappeared because the four-poster, with its canopy and curtain
creating an intimate enclosure, is no longer a standard item of
domestic furniture.
The most famous giver of a curtain lecture was fictitious, by the
name of Mrs Margaret Caudle. She was "interminably loquacious and
militantly gloomy under fancied marital oppression", as a writer
later described her. Mrs Caudle was created by Douglas Jerrold, a
nineteenth-century humorist, once famous but now almost forgotten,
who was a contributor to Punch magazine from its second issue in
1841 until his death in 1857.
Mrs Caudle's monologues were first published in Punch; they became
a book in 1846, with the title Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures, which
went through dozens of editions in the decades that followed. They
expatiated at length on her supposed sufferings and denounced the
failings of her spouse. They were delivered when he found it least
easy to escape, just after they had gone to bed:
Well, Mr. Caudle, I hope you're in a little better
temper than you were this morning. There, you needn't
begin to whistle: people don't come to bed to whistle.
But it's like you; I can't speak that you don't try to
insult me. Once, I used to say you were the best creature
living: now, you get quite a fiend. _Do let you rest?_
No, I won't let you rest. It's the only time I have to
talk to you, and you _shall_ hear me. I'm put upon all
day long: it's very hard if I can't speak a word at
night; besides, it isn't often I open my mouth, goodness
knows!
[Lecture 10: On Mr Caudle's Shirt-buttons, in Mrs
Caudle's Curtain Lectures, by Douglas Jerrold, 1846.]
The first examples of "curtain lecture" are from the early part of
the seventeenth century. When Dryden used it in his translation of
Juvenal's Satires in 1693 ("Besides what endless brawls by wives
are bred, / The curtain lecture makes a mournful bed."), he implied
that its associations go back at least two millennia.
3. Wordface
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INCOMING! A usage by the letters editor of the Guardian on Monday
struck me as strange: "Generally around 5%-10% of the letters,
faxes and emails we receive are for ONPASSING to someone else in
the organisation." Several readers on the website queried it, along
the lines of "is this a real word?" I uplooked it online and found
that Mark Liberman had discussed it in Language Log in 2005. He had
found it odd, too, though he noted that it was well-established for
some people, especially in the financial world, with the earliest
examples appearing in print in the 1980s. He commented that, in
itself, the construction - in which the preposition of a phrasal
verb is turned into a prefix to the verb - is not so unusual. He
cited "uplift", "bypass" and some others as parallel formations.
4. Q and A: Dilemma
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Q. My daughter, who lives in the Cayman Islands and works in the
media, asked me the other day whether "dilemma" is ever spelt
"dilemna". Apparently her boss insisted that it was and my daughter
said that she had a residual memory of having been taught that at
school. Good grief, what schools did I send her to? Do you have any
views or comments on this? [Andrew Lewis, UK; a similar question
came from Jim Black in the US.]
A. This is very strange. A search in mailing lists showed that many
other people also report they had been taught that spelling, though
always told that it was pronounced as though with a double M. The
error has been reported both in the US and in the UK.
There is no doubt about the correct spelling: the word is Greek,
from "di-", twice, plus "lemma", a premise. It has always been
spelled that way, at least according to the dictionaries that I've
consulted, ancient and modern (it dates from the sixteenth century
as a term in rhetoric). Though the Oxford English Dictionary is
usually punctilious in recording variant forms, it doesn't note any
alternative spellings other than the French "dilemme", which was
sometimes used early in its English history.
The spelling is certainly rife today. It's easy to find thousands
of examples by searching newspaper and book archives. Of these, a
large number, certainly a significant majority, are misprints or
simple errors. The reason for it seems to be a mental confusion
with other words in English that are spelled with "mn" but said as
"mm", including "autumn", "hymn", "condemn", "solemn" and "column".
It's all too easy to miss as a typographical error because "mm" and
"mn" look so similar on the printed page. This visual confusion
could be part of the reason why so many people, having learned the
wrong spelling, fail to correct themselves when they notice the
properly-spelled form.
A search of historical literature shows that in earlier times it
was quite common and turned up in works by well-known authors.
These are a few eighteenth-century examples:
In this Dilemna, as I was very pensive, I stept into
the Cabin, and sat me down.
[Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, 1719.]
The nation saw themselves reduced to a ridiculous
dilemna upon their testimony.
[The History of England, by Oliver Goldsmith, Vol 3,
1771.]
There was a famous ancient Instance of this Case,
wherein a _Dilemna_ was retorted.
[Logick, by Isaac Watts, 1772.]
It even appears in a list of difficult three-syllable words in The
Civil Service Spelling Book, by R Johnson, published in London in
1868. If this is a mistake left uncorrected at the proofing stage,
it's a particularly unfortunate one.
Modern reprints of old works usually "correct" the spelling, their
proofreaders presumably taking it to be a printer's error. However,
there are so many old examples that it is difficult to write them
off as a mass word blindness among printers and proofreaders.
It's not just in English that the problem is known. In French it
sometimes appears as "dilemne" instead of "dilemme". Native French
speakers have reported that they, too, were taught the wrong form.
It is frequent enough that it appears in lists of common spelling
mistakes. In French, it's said to be the consequence of a false
comparison with "indemne".
I've not found any example of a spelling book or primer that has
the "dilemna" version. Anyone who taught that form must have been
perpetuating what they had learned without reference to any book.
In view of the very large number of historical examples, it makes
me wonder if the variant spelling has persisted in the language for
many generations, unnoticed by dictionary makers or repeatedly
dismissed as a simple error.
5. Sic!
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Helen Thursh spotted a headline on 15 July in the News-Gazette of
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Inspections had turned up problems at
same-day surgery clinics: "Reused devices, tainted sanity areas
among lapses seen at 22 of 29 facilities inspected."
A sign, says Ray Neinstein, that's posted conspicuously in three
places at Ralph's Ice Cream in Glen Head, New York, announces that
"coupons will only be accepted a week after their expiration date."
Monday's Yahoo! News, Gary Christian notes, had an article headed
"WWI troops found in mass grave reburied in France". It reported,
"The ceremony was attended by Prince Charles, wearing a grey suit
hung with military decorations and top Australian officials."
Stephanie Stapleton, who lives in Florida, found this AP headline
on Thursday: "Georgia man sentenced to life in Maine." She wrote,
"The weather's bad there, but is it that bad?"
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