World Wide Words -- 27 Nov 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 26 17:48:30 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 714 Saturday 27 November 2010
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A formatted version of this e-magazine is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ctuw.htm
This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font.
For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Widdiful.
3. Wordface.
4. Review: Green's Dictionary of Slang.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
SQILGEE Clark P Stevens and Bob Lee both pointed me to a standard
source of data about nineteenth-century seafaring vocabulary, The
Sailor's Word-Book of 1867 by the British admiral William Smyth,
which I really ought to have consulted. He notes both "squilgee"
and "squeegee". His definition of the former is clearly of the same
tool as the one described by Melville: "An effective swabbing
implement, having a plate of gutta-percha fitted at the end of a
broom handle." However, he gives the latter a quite different
meaning: "A small swab of untwisted yarns. Figuratively, a lazy
mean fellow".
Bill Dillon noted that "squilgee" continued to be used in the US
Navy after World War Two: "I served from 1951 through 1954. The
device was always referred to as a 'squilgee'. We had to adjust our
vocabulary in this as well as replacement terms for other common
landlubberly items."
TOLFRAEDIC Several readers wondered why a numbering system based
on twelves wasn't systematic, so leading to the gross (or twelve
twelves). It is an odd combination of two systems, I agree. Martin
Rose brought me to a dead stop by asking "what about a shock of
eggs?" I had to look that up. At one time, a shock was a count of
60 - the word derives, the OED says, from the same source as that
for a group of sheaves of grain (and as in the fixed phrase "shock
of hair"), and is linked to the Dutch word "schok" for that number.
"Shock" is a survival, like 60 seconds in a minute, of the
vigesimal measure, based on 20.
WICKED STEPMOTHER Chris Trundles and Susan Hassett noted something
that few press reports mentioned about of the Duchess of Cornwall's
use of "wicked" to describe the royal engagement, perhaps because
it weakened the story. She was making a joke about a different sort
of engagement she had just left, in which she had handed out prizes
at the Wicked Young Writers' Awards at the theatre in London at
which the musical Wicked is currently being performed.
Nick Humez mentioned that "wicked" has a long history in "Boston
and points north". He went on, "Inhabitants of Maine are much given
to using the expression 'wicked good', to the point where it has
become as much of a cliché for the Pine Tree State as the lobster
on the license plates." Richard Kahane adds "Indeed, the dentifrice
manufacturer Tom's of Maine recently launched a new line of
toothpastes named 'Wicked Fresh'." Scott Underwood comments that it
is always used as an adverb modifying an adjective: "A car might be
wicked fast, a concert wicked loud, a joke wicked funny. But I've
never here heard it as a standalone descriptor, as in the example
you gave."
SITE UPDATES Pieces on "McGuffin" (http://wwwords.org?MCGUF) and
"POTUS" (http://wwwords.org?POTUS) have been updated because new
information has come in. I've dumped my old home-brewed search
facility in favour of an all-singing, all-dancing version from
Google. This searches the whole of the site, including back issues,
and also returns results from my online Dictionary of Affixes.
2. Weird Words: Widdiful /'wIdIfUl/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Somebody who was widdiful deserved to be hanged.
The story behind it starts with the northern English and Scottish
word "widdy" or "widdie", the local forms of the standard English
"withy", a flexible branch from a tree such as willow used to make
baskets or to tie or fasten things together. One sense was of a
band or rope made of intertwined withies.
Later it came to mean a halter and in particular a hangman's rope.
To cheat the widdy meant to escape hanging. By an obvious process
of transfer the sense of gallows-bird grew up, one destined to fill
a widdy. This is a modern example:
"Will you shut the bloody noise off, you bloody
widdiful!" Philips said in a shout that was nearly a
scream.
[The Reaches, by David Drake, 2003.]
The word weakened in its later history in Scotland, turning into a
joking term for somebody who was merely a scamp or scoundrel. It
has been recorded in Yorkshire dialect in a very different sense,
one derived from the idea of a withy being tough and durable:
WIDDIFUL, Industrious, laborious, plodding. It is
applicable to a hard-working man, who never complains of
fatigue, and is derived from widdy; of such a character
it is often said, "he's as tough as a widdy."
[The Dialect of Craven, in the West-Riding of the
County of York, by William Carr, 1828.]
3. Wordface
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ANOTHER OXFORD WOTY Last week, the editors of the New Oxford
American Dictionary published their words of the year. This week,
it is the turn of their British counterparts. Their shortlist is
intriguingly different.
A BORIS BIKE, for example, is a bicycle in London that's rentable
for short periods of time; the name is an allusion to the extrovert
Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who introduced the scheme. Other
shortlisted terms are PRELOADING ("the practice of drinking large
quantities of alcohol at home before going out socially and then
consuming more, usually to save money"); SHOWMANCE ("a romantic
relationship that develops between actors during the course of
making a film etc., or between participants in a TV show, either
real or engineered for the sake of publicity"); DOUBLE-DIP ("a
recession during which a period of economic decline is followed by
a brief period of growth followed by a further period of decline");
and UPCYCLING ("the reuse of discarded or waste material in such a
way as to create a product of higher quality or value than the
original").
The winner is BIG SOCIETY, a term much used by the current prime
minister, David Cameron. Commentators have frequently complained
that they don't know what it means, so I'm delighted to be able to
provide Oxford's tentative definition. They say it is "a political
concept whereby a significant amount of responsibility for the
running of a society's services is devolved to local communities
and volunteers". The press release said, "'Big society' was for us
a clear winner because it embraces so much of the year's political
and economic mood. Taken to mean many things, it has begun to take
on a life of its own, a sure sign of linguistic success."
4. Review: Green's Dictionary of Slang
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This work is monumental in several senses. It is physically huge:
6000+ pages in three hefty volumes with ten million words, 110,000-
plus definitions and 413,000 citations. Unfortunately, the price is
likewise massive, which is hardly going to make it a household
purchase, even at the deep discounts being offered by some online
retailers. Leaving aside the superlatives, it is principally a
testimony to the industry of its editor.
It is only right that Jonathon Green's magnum opus should carry his
name in the title. GDoS (as it is already commonly abbreviated) is
an important publication in the history of slang lexicography. It's
so big because it's that rare thing, a dictionary that records the
historical development of slang. Every entry includes a range of
dated citations, going back to the first firmly attested example,
to show the way the word or phrase has been used through its life.
Few slang dictionaries attempt this - though many include examples
- because the written record of slang is poor (it is, after all,
primarily a spoken medium) and a huge research effort is needed to
acquire early citations. The only works I know of that are at all
comparable in their approach, if not size, are Jonathan Lighter's
Historical Dictionary of American slang, which sadly has stalled at
the letter O, and its spin-off, Jesse Sheidlower's The F-Word. In
its historical approach, GDoS matches the Oxford English Dictionary
and it's not hyperbolic to suggest that it's the OED of slang.
Mr Slang, as Martin Amis called Jonathon Green (a cognomen that he
has adopted as his Nom de Twitter) has an enviable reputation as
the premier slang lexicographer of his generation. His first foray
was Newspeak: A Dictionary of Jargon, published in 1983. His
single-volume dictionary, already regarded as the best available
and which forms the skeleton of this work, is the Chambers Slang
Dictionary of 2008, itself building on The Cassell Dictionary of
Slang of 1998.
GDoS is striking not only in its comprehensiveness. Though Green is
more than ready to acknowledge the assistance of many individuals,
his editor-in-chief Sarah Chatwin especially, GDoS is unusual in
today's publishing world in that it has been conceived and produced
by one person. It is also remarkable for coming out as a printed
book at all. When in 1997 he was commissioned to prepare it, print
was still a natural medium for reference works. Online publication
has since become the norm. GDoS may have the melancholy attribute
of being the last substantial reference work to appear as a
physical object. Even here, online publication is in prospect:
Oxford University Press, which distributes the book in North
America, plans to make it available as an e-book via the Oxford
Reference Bookshelf.
Not only has publication of reference works moved online, so has
much of the research work. However, Green and his helpers, his wife
in particular, have focussed their attention on printed material
and have spent 12 years scouring libraries for citations. Green is
rightly wary of online sources for their unreliability as dating
evidence, but some are usable with care and I wonder if he has yet
to fully exploit their potential. While working on various word
histories, I've accidentally antedated several GDoS terms in the
month since my copy arrived.
Although he has now researched English slang in more detail than
any lexicographer before him, Green has no plans to retire. He told
me, "One does not finish a dictionary. One pauses. And not for
long. Then gets back to work. I have already added 1500 citations
and new definitions and headwords to those in the book." He looks
forward to online publication: "Unlike an e-book it will be 'live',
with continuous revision, correction, expansion and improvement,
offered in quarterly or six-monthly increments, until, as I hope,
my lifeless body crashes forward on to the keyboard at some ripe
old age."
[Jonathon Green, Green's Dictionary of Slang; 3 volumes, pp6085;
published in the UK by Chambers; ISBN 978-0550-10440-3; publisher's
UK price £295.00.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK GBP130.00 http://wwwords.org?GREE6
Amazon US US$360.00 http://wwwords.org?GREE8
Amazon Canada CDN$429.85 http://wwwords.org?GREE2
Amazon Germany EUR252,99 http://wwwords.org?GREE4
5. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Jerry W passed us a cutting from the latest edition of the Downs
Mail, a free newspaper in Maidstone, Kent. An article about a local
business having its busiest time in the run-up to Christmas quotes
a director as saying that they are so busy that "Weekends will be
24-seven".
The Daily Telegraph front page on 22 November, Peter Smith tells
us, headlines the news that "Husband flies to South Africa to help
murder police".
It's not hard to find an unintended meaning in the headline that
Norm Jensen found on the website of the American Society for
Microbiology: "Bacteria Help Infants Digest Milk More Effectively
Than Adults".
A classic: The Star of South Africa reported on 20 November: "Four
crack teams swept Gugulethu and Khayelitsha. They were looking for
a man with a gold tooth called Thulani." Rod Curling-Hope wondered
about the names of his other teeth.
As Chris Welch notes, it's hard to beat the headline that he found
in an e-mail newsletter from the US Centers for Disease Control on
23 November: "Pope's Male Prostitute Becomes Female in Translation
Mix-Up".
A. Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm
You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of
commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:
INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS
This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .
Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ .
B. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should
be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to
respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so.
* Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org .
Submissions will not usually be acknowledged.
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should
be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't
use this address to respond to published answers to questions -
e-mail the comment address instead).
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list
server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To
allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail
me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you
would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do
so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2010. All rights
reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing
lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include
the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts
of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from
the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org).
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list