World Wide Words -- 18 Sep 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 17 18:09:31 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 704 Saturday 18 September 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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For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Gong farmer.
3. Wordface.
4. Books in brief.
5. Q and A: Shrinking violet.
6. 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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SINGULAR TROOP Like many other readers, John Benz Fentner recalls
that singular "troop" was already a common usage in the military in
the 1960s: "In one's own service there was always a generic term
like 'soldier' or 'sailor' or 'airman' but the generic term across
the services was 'troop' - 'Yo troop! Take ten troops and police up
that latrine!'"
For an early example of the singular form, albeit in a compound,
Sheenagh Pugh pointed me to John Betjeman's poem Invasion Exercise
on the Poultry Farm, published in New Bats in Old Belfries in 1945,
but from context written in 1944: "She will teach that Judy girl to
trifle with the heart / And go and kiss a paratroop like any common
tart." The recently revised entry in the Oxford English Dictionary
has an instance of singular "paratroop" from 1943.
Katharine Holden does editing work for the US Department of Defense
and commented, "The term I'm obligated to use to denote someone
serving in the US military is warfighter, plural warfighters. This
is used throughout this particular government sector and applies to
any member of the US military, regardless of gender, theater, and
assigned category of combatancy." Others similarly mentioned that
"warfighter" has superseded "servicemember".
Anthony Massey, a BBC news producer, commented on the BBC's views
of the word: "I'm not convinced that 'troop' for a single member of
the armed forces has yet crossed the Atlantic. Rather, it's trying
to do so and, at least at the BBC, we are trying to beat it back.
We refer to 'members of the armed forces' or 'service personnel',
cumbersome as it may be."
BEDIZENED Carolyn Dane commented, "You didn't mention the word
'diz' in your discussion, but it seems probable that it's related
to 'dis' and 'bedizened'. It's a device used by spinners: a small
disc (about 2-3" in diameter, usually) with one or more holes in it
through which one pulls small strands of wool (or flax, etc.) to
align the fibers. The small strands are combined to make a combed
top, the usual form in which wool is prepared for spinning."
2. Weird Words: Gong farmer
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John Stow published his Survey of London in 1562. Under the heading
"Statutes of the Streets of this City" is this: "No Goungfermour
shall carry any Ordure till after nine of the Clocke in the night."
That identifies the "goungfermour" as one of the lowest orders of
men, a dung carrier, nightman or cleaner-out of privies, who dealt
with the product that a more squeamish later generation would refer
to euphemistically as night soil.
As "goungfermour", the word is known almost exclusively from the
statute. It's a variation on a term that appears much more often as
"gong farmer" or "gang farmour". "Farmer" was a slangy sense of the
usual word; the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it meant someone
who cleanses or purifies a place, though I suspect it's more likely
a sarcastic reference to harvesting. The first part, "gong", is an
Old English word we might replace with "privy", "jakes", "latrine",
"loo" or related term. "Gong" is from "gang", one's walk or gait (a
sense that survives in German), so a gong was a place where one
"went" to do what was necessary.
"Gong farmer" does still turn up from time to time, for example in
discussions of the sanitary arrangements of castles. It also
appears as an exoticism in historical or fantasy writing:
It seemed to me that nearly everyone in Hesperu, from
the lowliest gong farmer to the King, was a slave of some
sort.
[Black Jade, by David Zindall, 2005.]
3. Wordface
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MARS AND VENUS A recently published book by Dr Cordelia Fine,
Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, has
brought the word NEUROSEXISM to the review pages. This refers to
the widespread belief, which she denies, that the brains of men and
women are wired differently, so that perceived differences between
the sexes are innate and unalterable. Though male brains are indeed
physically slightly different to female ones, she argues that all
brains are sufficiently plastic in their abilities that most of the
traits commonly associated with the sexes are a result of cultural
conditioning that children absorb unconsciously. She argues that
neurosexism holds back the education of children because teachers'
and parents' preconceived views about the differing abilities of
boys and girls put obstacles in their way. The earliest example of
the word I can find is from 2008, which also mentions Dr Fine.
OED CHANGES An update to the online Oxford English Dictionary came
out on Thursday, the last before the site is relaunched in December
to include - among other improvements - the Historical Thesaurus of
the Oxford English Dictionary (I've had a sneak preview and it's
going to be excellent). Chief Editor John Simpson discusses some of
the new and revised entries (go via http://wwwords.org?OEDYL), in
particular the immense entry for the verb "roll", which now has 187
distinct senses. Graeme Diamond comments on some of the interesting
entries in the batch, such as "eggcorn" and the World War Two US
term "Rosie the Riveter". (http://wwwords.org?OEDGD).
4. Books in brief
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SHORT CUTS The subtitle of this book by Alexander Humez, Nicholas
Humez and Rob Flynn is "a guide to oaths, ring tones, ransom notes,
famous last words, & other forms of minimalist communication". I
was tempted to make my review suit the subject by reducing it to
"mildly interesting". It's a melange that popularly discusses and
illustrates the semiotics of communication methods such as bank
robbery notes, postcards, wanted posters, billboards, obituaries,
police language, suicide notes, Mountweazels, ghost-words, weasel
words, Sniglets, pre-nups, computer error messages, car vanity
plates, bumper stickers, clothing brand names, telephone answering
machines, and neckties. Some of the discussion strays into areas
that have little connection with brevity, such as the nature of
dictionaries and newspapers.
[Oxford University Press USA, $19.95. ISBN 978-0-19-538913-5.]
CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE This doorstep of a reference for writers
and editors has just appeared in its sixteenth edition. In the US,
the work has long been the arbiter of book style, though newspapers
tend to have their own styles or follow AP style. As befits a work
of the electronic age, the Manual has now been published online as
well as in print and includes guidance on publishing in a digital
world. It has information on such matters as electronic mark-up of
documents, the international Unicode character system, and how to
cite blogs, podcasts and electronic sources. Having just changed my
own house style to lower-case "internet", I note with interest that
the Manual conservatively argues that it should continue to begin
with a capital letter. However, "website" (as one word) and other
"web" words are now lower-cased. And "e-mail" still has its hyphen.
Other changes include arcane revisions to the rules about
apostrophes and a relaxation of the rule that the first line of a
new paragraph should not appear alone at the bottom of the page.
[University of Chicago Press, $65.00. ISBN 978-0-226-10420-1.]
GERMANY: BIOGRAPHY OF A LANGUAGE Ruth H Saunders comprehensively
covers the development of the German language from prehistory to
today, using a blend of anthropology, archaeology, genetics and
linguistics. Much of the story is outside the ambit of World Wide
Words, but the early chapters throw much interesting light on the
background to a group of dialects that were the ancestors of
English. She shows that their survival was a geographical and
military accident because of the failure of the Romans to conquer
the German tribes east of the Rhine. If the Roman legions had
subjugated that region, as they did the rest of western Europe,
Latin would probably have supplanted the German tongues and English
might well never have evolved.
[Oxford University Press USA, $29.95. ISBN 978-0-19-538845-9.]
5. Q and A: Shrinking violet
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Q. I find "shrinking violet" to be a curious phrase. Violets are
certainly small but can't shrink. I can't find on the Internet
where this comes from. [Nigel Clark]
A. I'm not surprised. It takes more than a little teasing out, to
the extent that few reference books say much about where it comes
from. Most stick to verbal variations on shrugged shoulders.
The violet is definitely the flowering plant, specifically the wild
European sweet violet (Viola odorata), which is also naturalised in
North America, having been taken there by colonists. This plant has
had a special place in people's affections at least since classical
times because of its medicinal value and its scent. A curiosity of
the active chemical constituent of the latter is that after a few
seconds it briefly inhibits the sense of smell, a valuable property
when households and towns were whiffy. Violets were added to the
rushes on the floors of medieval houses to sweeten rooms and posies
were carried by ladies to block out the stink of the streets.
The violet has long had figurative associations with qualities such
as faithfulness and chastity, but especially with modesty. There's
a good reason for this. Wild violets are dainty plants whose small
flowers are often hidden among its leaves and they are frequently
inconspicuous among larger and more aggressive plants. It's hardly
surprising that this self-effacing species should have become
linked to the idea of modesty, even though it colonises vigorously
by seeds and underground runners and is sometimes regarded as an
invasive pest by gardeners.
The term "shrinking violet" appears quite suddenly on both sides of
the Atlantic in the early nineteenth century. In Britain, the poet
and journalist Leigh Hunt, born in London to one-time American
colonists, is first known to have used it, in a magazine called The
Indicator in February 1820. In the US, James Gates Percival
included it in a poem, The Perpetual Youth of Nature, published in
the United States Literary Gazette on 1 November 1825 and later
widely anthologised. I suspect that the closeness of the dates is
accidental, and that both writers were separately drawing on an
existing idea whose source I haven't been able to identify.
The sense of "shrinking" in both cases is not that of becoming
smaller, or of recoiling from something distasteful, but of being
retiring, shy or self-effacing.
For decades after these two appearances, "shrinking violet" was a
poetical term and uncommon at that. It didn't begin to appear more
widely in either country until near the end of the century. Part of
its growing appeal may be linked to the fervour for violets in
Europe and North America, especially Parma violets; by the 1890s
the violet had become the third most important commercially-grown
flower, after carnations and roses, often sold on street corners
with the cry "lovely sweet violets".
Since then the phrase has emulated the expansive qualities of its
wild begetter by becoming an ineradicable cliché.
6. Sic!
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Hazel McDonald told me of the most recent Bush Fire Survival Plan,
issued to residents of New South Wales, Australia. She comments
that one piece of advice requires psychic ability: "The safest
option is for you and your family to leave early, hours or the day
before a fire occurs."
David Read and Anthony Chadwick were startled by a report on the
CBC News website on the same day: "Police in the Bahamas believe
they have found the remains of a boater who disappeared off a beach
where one of the Jaws movies was filmed in the belly of a shark."
Diana Platts encountered an accident report in the Shropshire Star
of 8 September: "In the collision, two cyclists were injured. One
appears to be a 12 year-old-boy and a woman."
Andrew Haynes e-mails, "Since the BBC2 series Gareth Malone's
Extraordinary School for Boys shows Malone trying to improve the
boys' literacy, it's particularly unfortunate that the TV review in
the Times on Friday 10 September included the sentence, 'So Malone
... coached the boys in how to martial an argument.'"
Suzanne McCarthy read a news item on AOL news on 15 September about
a traffic incident in Orange County, Florida, during which a driver
crashed a car and vanished into a wooded area. The headline was
"One-Legged Man Escapes on Foot".
A. Subscription information
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