World Wide Words -- 16 Oct 10

Fri Oct 15 14:11:30 UTC 2010

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 708         Saturday 16 October 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: Aposematic.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Sixpenny nails.
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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FIRST ENGLISH DICTIONARY OF SLANG  Fiona Fisher says, "Your comment 
in the review that red-haired people were even in 1699 being called 
'carrots' inspired me to write about Australian terms for redheads. 
'Blue' was traditional (especially for males), but has now largely 
been replaced by 'ranga' (rhymes with 'banger' or 'clanger'), which 
is derived from 'orang-utan' for obvious reasons. It's usually a 
non-offensive term, and may be applied to both males and females 
with red hair." [My reference works don't give a good reason why 
"blue" should have been adopted, but it may be from an Australian 
tradition of giving people nicknames that are the opposite of their 
real nature. Another theory suggests that nineteenth-century red-
haired Irish immigrants used to turn the air blue with their noisy 
confrontations. Neither explanation is wholly satisfying.]

FATOOTSED  Mary Ellen Foley, a sharp-eyed reader, spotted that I 
quoted Leo Rosten's definition of "fartootst" as "the state of 
being bewildered, disorientated, discombobulated". But surely, she 
argued, Leo Rosten would have written it in the American style as 
"disoriented"? Indeed he did. On retyping it, my fingers changed it 
into British English without telling me.

An article in the Chicago Tribune on Wednesday spotlighted this 
little difference between English dialects. Steve Kleinedler, the 
supervising editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, supplied 
what the headline described as "5 quick fixes to help you sound 
smarter". One tip was "Pay attention to how a word is spelled 
before you pronounce it. 'Specialty' should never become speci-AL-
ity. 'Disoriented' should never become disorien-TAT-ed." Both 
deprecated forms are common and unremarkable in British English.

Nelsen Spickard pointed me to an appearance of "fatootsed" in 
William Safire's On Language column in the New York Times on 11 
July 1993: "Connie Chung, following weeks of interviews about her 
elevation to co-anchor with Dan Rather on The CBS Evening News, 
gave her reaction to the ordeal to USA Today: "I'm fartumelt! 
Fartootst! Farmisht!" (Quick gloss: "fartumelt" or "fertummelt" 
means bewildered; "farmisht", utterly confused or flummoxed.) 
Safire commented that the three Yiddish words are in increasing 
order of emphasis and explained them, "for those without a copy of 
Leo Rosten's Joys of Yiddish at hand". However, Rosten doesn't 
include either of the other words, though he does have another that 
Safire mentions: "farblondjet", from a Slavic word meaning to roam, 
which means you are totally mixed-up, lost and wandering around 
without any idea where you are.

2. Weird Words: Aposematic /ap at Usi:matik/
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I came across the word in an article about Bristol Zoo, which has 
set up an amphibian sanctuary to breed two endangered species. One 
of them is the golden mantella frog native to Madagascar, which is 
a brilliant golden-orange. The colours are aposematic, referring to 
the bright markings or hues exhibited by some living creatures to 
warn predators that they are poisonous. (The frog cheats: it isn't 
toxic but the colours fool its enemies into thinking it is. Some 
writers restrict "aposematic" to such false warnings.)

Though this is common enough in the biological sciences, it's not 
often encountered elsewhere. Here's a rare example:

    A gigantic bird of prey was descending on him, its 
    claws outstretched. Its aposematic wings were spread 
    wide, as wide as the field itself. Looking up in shock, 
    Hungaman saw how fanciful the wings were, fretted at the 
    edges, iridescent, bright as a butterfly's wings and as 
    gentle.
    [Aboard the Beatitude, by Brian W Aldiss, 2002.]

The word is from classical Greek, based on "sema", a sign, which 
also appears in "polysemous", the coexistence of many possible 
meanings for a word or phrase, and "semantic", relating to meaning 
in language or logic. The prefix "apo-" means "away, off, from".

3. Wordface
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OUT OF AFRICA  Wilf Nussey asked about a news report on 8 October 
quoting the Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai: "To my 
utter surprise, and shall I say disgust, Mr Mugabe advised me on 
Monday that he had nichodemously reappointed the former governors 
in the same manner in which he appointed the previous governors on 
a Sunday when most of us were at church." His efforts to find more 
on "nichodemously" were made difficult because most appearances are 
better spelled NICODEMOUSLY. Even then, I can find no dictionary 
that includes it. It's fairly well known in African English but 
hardly at all elsewhere. It refers to something done secretly and 
derives from the story of the Pharisee Nicodemus who appears in the 
St John's gospel, the first time when he visits Jesus secretly one 
night to listen to his teachings. The word is a good example of an 
African English creation deeply influenced by the teachings of 
Christian missionaries.

SPACE HOPPER  The New Scientist last week introduced me to a term 
Australians mostly learned about in a series of news reports last 
February: KANGATARIANISM (a blend of kangaroo and vegetarianism). A 
KANGATARIAN (very rarely called a VEGEROO) eats no meat apart from 
that of the kangaroo. Supporters regard it as an ecologically sound 
choice, as kangaroos cannot be farmed (their meat acquires a taint 
when they are restrained) and they require no additional land, feed 
or water - the ultimate, it is argued, in free-range, organic meat.

WOOL GATHERING  It has been YARN BOMBING week in the UK, according 
to the Guardian last Monday. Knitters tag lampposts with knitted 
legwarmers, wrap public statues in scarves, hide the harsh outlines 
of bicycles in cheerful wrappers and cover phone boxes in 
multicoloured cosies. Other names, I am told, are GRAFFITI KNITTING 
and YARN STORMING, this last term being preferred by those who 
dislike the violent associations of the word "bomb". The idea of 
decorating the urban landscape in colourful fabrics is said to have 
been begun by Magda Sayeg of Texas in 2005. Unlike other forms of 
graffiti, it's easy to remove, and it brightens up dull public 
spaces.

4. Q and A: Sixpenny nails
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Q. Why is the length of a nail indicated by a number of pennies? (I 
don't know if this is the usage in the UK, but in the US nails are 
always measured this way.) A 6d nail is 2 inches long, for example. 
I have read that this is because, at one time, sixpence was the 
price of a hundred 6d nails. [Richard Bell]

A. We did once use the same system in the UK - it was invented here 
and taken to the US by colonists - but it died out early in the 
twentieth century. Not only have we gone over to measuring nails by 
length but we've adopted the metric system. So an American 6d nail 
is a 50mm one. As in other matters, the US conservatively holds on 
to things we've abandoned in Britain.

Many enquirers have found the story you quote to be unbelievable 
and have sought others. One holds that nails were actually sold by 
weight and that the measure was the pennyweight; the abbreviation 
for a pennyweight was "dwt" (the "d" is from Latin "denarius", a 
penny) and it is argued that this became shortened still further to 
"d", which was the symbol for the British pre-decimalisation penny 
coin, hence the confusion.

A second suggestion was put forward here and has been quoted since:

    The term penny, when used to mark the size of nails, 
    is supposed to be a corruption of pound. Thus, a four-
    penny nail was such that 1000 of them weighed 4 lbs., a 
    ten-penny such that 1000 weighed 10 lbs.
    [The American Cyclopaedia, edited by George Ripley and 
    Charles Dana, 1875.]

With Ripley, you may believe it or not, but you had best not. 
Neither the pound nor pennyweight stories are right. Yours is.

In the fifteenth century, nails were sold by number and, as an 
example, fourpenny nails were indeed 4 pence for a hundred. This 
was proved when in 1904 Henry Littlehales edited and published the 
accounts of a church in the City of London (St Mary at Hill). This 
showed that in 1426, 400 sixpenny nails did indeed cost 24 pence 
and 300 tenpenny nails cost 30 pence. (You may like to compare 
these prices with a nearby item which recorded that a man named 
Elymesford and his mate were together paid 10 pence for a day's 
work.) Other accounts show that nail prices fell around the end of 
the 1400s and stayed lower - in the 1570s, you could have bought a 
hundred fourpenny nails for just 3 pence.

However, the old names for the sizes were kept. Although they lost 
their direct equivalence to the cost of the nails, they remained a 
useful way of identifying the various sizes.

5. Sic!
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Father Eric Funston was as delighted as you might expect by having 
recently seen that a cinema in Brunswick, Ohio, was advertising the 
Julia Roberts movie as "Eat, Prey, Love".

The issue of 6 October of the Post Star of Glens Falls, New York, 
had its usual Today In History item, in which Paul Brady learned 
that in 1958, "The nuclear submarine USS Seawolf surfaced after 
spending 60 days submerged in water."

The Chilean miners having been brought out safely, the point is now 
moot but - Brian Barratt asked - should the BBC website really have 
described its coverage of their plight as "in-depth"?

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