World Wide Words -- 30 Oct 10

Fri Oct 29 17:02:59 UTC 2010

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 710         Saturday 30 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: Crinkum-crankum.
3. Wordface.
4. Article: Collins English Dictionary.
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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THROWN FOR A LOOP  Many readers wondered about a connection between 
"loopy", mad or crazy, and this American expression. It is recorded 
from no later than 1919. However, all early examples are British in 
origin, which suggests there's no direct connection.

FISH-BASS Virginia Lane asked if "bass" here is the same thing as 
"bast". It is. I should have mentioned that "bass" is merely a 
phonetic alteration of "bast".

COLPON  Gary Allen and his wife were disappointed to realise that 
there exist no conventional collective terms for plants to match 
such joys as "exaltation of larks". So they invented some of their 
own: "rash of poison ivy", "gallery of peanuts", "wetnurse of 
honeysuckles", "shepherd of phlox", "mommy of poppies", "shyness of 
wallflowers", "osculation of mistletoe", "greasing of palms" and 
"alpert of herbs". More at http://wwwords.org?PUNS . Their efforts 
prompted me to invent another: a perpetration of punsters.

DOGALOGUES AND FROGALOGUES  Joel Karasik notes the extension of the 
idea beyond animals: "Las Vegas casinos have issued a 'deckalogue' 
of card games and the National Education Association has issued a 
'pedalogue' of teachers." I found a couple of blogs had the second 
name, one by a retired teacher and the other by a cyclist. Steve 
Lockley points out that the British Hedgehog Preservation Society 
(and how very British that is) raises funds by selling articles in 
its "hogalogue". I've also found a report that a farm supplier has 
issued a "cowalogue". No more, please: my pun ration for the month 
has already been exceeded.

SITE UPDATES  New information has come in about the terms "yonks" 
and "grockle" and I've updated the pieces on the website (the links 
to them are http://wwwords.org?YONK and http://wwwords.org?GROC).

2. Weird Words: Crinkum-crankum
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We are once again among those curious bifurcated words of which our 
language is so fond - "dilly-dally", "flim-flam", "knick-knack", 
"pitter-patter", "riff-raff", "see-saw", "shilly-shally" ... This 
one has almost completely vanished from the language and few today 
know it's a semi-humorous word that refers to elaborate decoration 
or detail or to something that is curious or peculiar.

The English Dialect Dictionary of 1905 quotes a disparaging comment 
by the compiler of a Northamptonshire glossary, "This word is often 
made use of by the lower class in describing anything that is much 
ornamented, as carved chests, &c." Robert Burns wrote in a letter 
in the year 1793 about "That crinkum-crankum tune, 'Robin Adair'". 
Herman Melville has a mariner scratching his head in puzzlement 
over whales that didn't look like the ones he was familiar with: "I 
tell ye, men, them's crinkum-crankum whales." This is a more recent 
example:

    Some painstaking penman had found a way of writing the 
    Scripture account of the Passion with such a multitude of 
    eloquent squiggles and crinkum-crankum that he had 
    produced a monument of pious ingenuity, if not a work of 
    art. 
    [The Manticore, by Robertson Davies, 1977.]

The word has a confused origin. It's related to the older "crinkle-
crankle" and "cringle-crangle", which are both based on "crankle", 
meaning a bend, twist or curve. In turn this derives from "crank", 
something winding or crooked or a cranny or inaccessible hole or 
crevice, a sense that had been borrowed from that of a handle.

"Crinkum-crankum" was also a vulgar slang term, which Francis Gross 
explained in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1784 as being 
"a woman's commodity: the private parts of a modest woman, and the 
public parts of a prostitute." A century earlier, it had been noted 
in a book about the law that at one time a widow would forfeit her 
lands and possessions if she was caught in "amorous conversation" 
but that she might reclaim them if she appeared at the next manor-
court, riding backwards on a black ram with his tail in her hand, 
and reciting the following words:

    Here I am,  
    Riding on a black ram,  
    Like a whore as I am;  
    And for my crinkum-crankum,  
    Have lost my binkum-bankum; 
    And for my tail's game  
    Am brought to this worldly shame.  
    Therefore good Mr Steward let me have my lands again. 
    [Nomo-Lexicon: A Law Dictionary, by Thomas Blount, 
    1670. "Binkum-bankum" is recorded nowhere else. Might it 
    refer to a bank in the financial sense? The text implies 
    the rhyme was already old in 1670, but it's just 
    possible, as "bank" in this sense dates from the early 
    1600s.]

3. Wordface
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DON'T MIND THE GAP  The word DIASTEMA doesn't often appear in my 
reading, least of all in items about fashion. But it's the latest 
craze among young models, I've learned from recent reports, largely 
in imitation of the models Lara Stone, Lauren Hutton and Jessica 
Hart. Diastema is the technical term for a gap between the front 
teeth. It's said that it is now so much of the moment, as part of a 
move away from perfection towards a more natural look, that some 
young models are having dental work to create one.

4. Article: Collins English Dictionary
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It's always a problem promoting new editions of dictionaries. They 
are unsexy books that are rarely reviewed. And there's too strong a 
belief among the public at large that there's actually only one 
"dictionary" in the world, an eternal, unchanging authority, so why 
buy a new one? One British publisher has gone the populist route 
this year, adding words of temporary visibility to the 2010 update 
of the Collins English Dictionary to attract press coverage and so 
put its work before the public.

Don't get me wrong - if you are going to buy a solid, dependable, 
weighty, single-volume British dictionary, you won't go far wrong 
with this one. But I do wonder about some of the additions this 
time, which are heavily biased towards evanescent words from the 
online world, television and politics. 

"Cleggmania", for example, was coined in the British press to mark 
the sudden rise in popularity of Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal 
Democrats, following the leaders' debates in the general election 
earlier this year. It has never been used other than by newspaper 
pundits and is dead, in large part because the LibDems, partners in 
the coalition government, are already tainted by going along with 
swingeing budget cuts. The editors have even included "Cleggstasy", 
a second Clegg-inspired neologism, which is even rarer but equally 
defunct. Another election term added, "bigotgate", was applied by 
the press to a gaffe by the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, who 
was overheard on a radio microphone describing a Labour supporter 
who accosted him in the street as a bigot; it had little usage at 
the time and is as forgotten by the British public as the incident 
that gave rise to it. Also included are "new politics", which the 
new edition defines as "a form of consensual politics promised by 
the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition", and "Big Society", a 
catchphrase of the new prime minister, David Cameron, even though 
nobody seems to quite know what it is. 

In other nods to current popular culture, the new edition includes 
"BGT", which sounds like a sandwich but is an abbreviation of the 
title of a popular TV show, Britain's Got Talent, and "simples!", a 
daft catchphrase from a TV advertisement featuring the fractured 
English of a Russian meerkat called Aleksandr.

The online world is well represented in other additions, including 
formations based on the name of the micro-blogging site Twitter, 
such as "tweetheart" (a Twitter user who is much loved or admired 
by other users); "tweet-out" (a greeting sent to one's friends via 
Twitter); and "tweetable" (a message short enough to be posted on 
Twitter). Facebook is represented by the specialised use of "panic 
button" (a term that goes back to US military pilots of the Korean 
War: see http://wwwords.org?PCBN), a button for alerting the police 
if a user thinks another user on the site is committing a criminal 
act. That iconic technology item the iPod also gets its own entry, 
defined as "a type of small portable tablet computer with a touch 
screen", a low-key description that might bring Apple's marketing 
manager out in a cold sweat (presumably the iPad is too new to be 
added). Mobile phone texting has provided other entries: "sext", a 
text of a sexual nature (and "sexting", the process); "drexting", 
sending a text message while drunk; and "intexicated", to drive 
while being distracted by either reading or creating a text.

My guess is that a goodly proportion of these words will be quietly 
removed from future annual updates, perhaps to be replaced by 
others of similar lexicographical fragility. I wonder whether this 
publicity trick might backfire by reducing the authority of the 
work as a whole? I do hope not.

5. Sic!
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Paul Witheridge favoured us with an article from The Observer of 
Sarnia, Ontario, dated 18 October. It concerned the canonisation of 
Mary McKillop as Australia's first saint, noting that "McKillop was 
beautified by John Paul II in 1995".

An aerial photo submitted to the Boston Globe, Anne Reece tells us, 
had the intriguing caption "A view of Diamond Head crater taking 
off from Honolulu at the end of August".

Peter Smith read an item on Sky News, dated 22 October (Laurence 
May found the same piece on Yahoo! News), about a plane crash in 
the Congo that killed 20 people, including the pilot, Chris Wilson: 
"Generally viewed as being in a chronic state of disrepair, Mr 
Wilson had apparently expressed concern about the Czech-built Let-
410 before the crash."

On his blog, Making Light, on 24 October, Patrick Nielsen Hayden 
reported an example of a classic error that's reminiscent of the 
famous (and apocryphal) book dedication, "To my parents, Ayn Rand 
and God". It was a caption to a picture of Merle Haggard in the Los 
Angeles Times of 21 July and referred to a documentary about him: 
"Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson 
and Robert Duvall".

Graeme McRae writes: "I received this spam today: "High pitched 
sound keeps animals away when motion censor is triggered". So keep 
those obscene motions to a minimum!"

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