World Wide Words -- 05 Feb 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 4 17:35:40 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 722 Saturday 5 February 2011
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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: Metagrobolise.
3. Turns of Phrase: Blood minerals.
4. Wordface.
5. Q and A: Dashboard.
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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SENT DOWN A copious and instructive stream of messages followed my
notes about the source of the undergraduate sense of this phrase.
(I've written it up as a separate piece for the website, which you
will find via http://wwwords.org?SNTD.) Most discussed the railway
usage of up and down directions. Several readers pointed out that a
train leaving either Oxford or Cambridge towards London does so in
the down direction ("down" must change to "up" at some point in the
journey), matching the figurative direction taken by the disgraced
undergraduate. This must be so to fit the famous spoonerism: "You
have tasted your worm and you must leave Oxford by the town drain."
Matching the utterance of Miss La Creevey in Nicholas Nickleby,
Dick White pointed out that a passenger on a train from London to
Yorkshire still travels on the down line even though today's map-
based verbal convention says he's going up.
RUCK The other principal topic of interest to readers in the last
issue was the origin of the sporting sense of "ruck" in rugby and
Australian Rules Football. So many subscribers wrote to me about
the latter that I now almost comprehend its rules. The consensus is
that the Oxford English Dictionary's first sighting of "ruck" from
the Australian game, dated 1967, is much, much too late. Supporting
evidence comes by some sightings in an Australian newspaper archive
that puts this use of "ruck", and "ruckman" for the player, back to
1900 if not earlier.
MALOIK Laura Bagnell's memories of this word counter my comment in
the last issue that the late heavy metal vocalist Ronnie James Dio
might have created it: "I remember my best friend's elderly Italian
grandmother using the term in the early 1970s in Cleveland, Ohio.
She would tell her children and grandchildren to behave or she'd
put the 'maloich' on them. My friend's immigrant grandmother spoke
very little English and it was heavily accented, but I learned to
understand the gesture and the word quick enough. Grandmother would
not know heavy metal from heavy cream but the word might have come
from a mishearing between the Italian accent and the American ear.
But she never said 'maloicchio', it was always 'maloich' with the
hard 'k' sound on the end accompanied by the stabbing gesture of
the bent-fingered hand."
2. Weird Words: Metagrobolise
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If this word puzzles you, your response is appropriate. That's what
the word means - to puzzle, mystify, baffle or confound. It and its
relatives are notable by their extreme rarity. A diligent search is
required to find any instances of it.
Your broker is a real dipstick and slick as one too.
You don't need to have your brains metagrobolized by his
inscrutable statements to know that something's amiss.
[Sunday Star-News (Wilmington, North Carolina), 20
Jan. 1991.]
A previous generation might well have found "metagrobolise" in this
once-famous school story:
"It's the olive branch," was Stalky's comment. "It's
the giddy white flag, by gum! Come to think of it, we
_have_ metagrobolized 'em."
[Stalky & Co, by Rudyard Kipling, 1899.]
Some students of puzzles have adopted "metagrobology" to describe
their pursuit, which makes them "metagrobologists". Wikipedia says
that the word was first applied to puzzlers in the early 1970s by
Rick Irby, a well-known designer and constructor of wire puzzles. I
haven't been able to confirm this.
It's originally French, invented in the form "matagraboliser" in
1534 by the humorist and satirist François Rabelais in one of his
tales about the giant Gargantua. To create it, Rabelais turned to
ancient Latin and Greek, finding the first part in a Greek word
that meant vain or frivolous and the rest in "cribulum", the Latin
for a sieve, which arrived much changed in French via Arabic and
Italian as "grabeler", to sift (and later into English as "garble",
to sift the rubbish from spices, which later became our current
verb meaning to confuse or distort). By Rabelais's time, "grabeler"
had taken on a broader sense of examining something closely.
Peter Motteux introduced the English to the word "metagrobolise" in
1693 when he published his revised version of Sir Thomas Urquhart's
translation of the works of Rabelais: "I have been these eighteen
days in metagrabolising this brave speech". A footnote says that it
was "a word forged at pleasure, which signifies the studying and
writing of vain things". However, one French edition suggested it
was a burlesque word meaning "to give a lot of trouble for nothing,
to bore and annoy others".
How appropriate that it should confuse writers as to what it means.
3. Turns of Phrase: Blood minerals
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Sales of gemstones such as diamonds from mines in Africa have been
used to fund groups fighting civil wars in Sierra Leone, the Congo
and Angola. In the late 1990s, this trade gave rise to the term
CONFLICT DIAMONDS, which was soon joined by the more emotive BLOOD
DIAMONDS. Considerable efforts have been made to stop such sales to
cut off an important source of funding.
More recently, emphasis has moved to minerals in great demand as
sources of the elements needed to make essential components for
electronic devices - computers, mobile phones, DVD players. They
include cassiterite (an ore of tin), wolframite (of tungsten) and
coltan (an important source of niobium and tantalum). All of these
are illicitly mined in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic
of the Congo and the income from them funds the civil war in that
country.
By analogy with the older terms, since about 2008 these ores (with
the addition of gold) have begun to be called CONFLICT MINERALS or
BLOOD MINERALS. Efforts are being made, such as through the Frank-
Dodd Act in the US (due to come into effect this year), to force
electronics firms to get these key elements only from legitimate
sources.
Signs are surfacing that manufacturers are taking
steps ahead of the U.S. Frank-Dodd act to ensure so-
called blood minerals no longer make it into cellphones
and other electronic devices.
[The Globe and Mail (Boston), 7 Dec. 2010.]
Conflict minerals are an increasing cause for concern
in eastern Congo, with metals used to make electronics
mined in exploitative conditions and the profits used to
fund the ongoing war.
[PC Pro, Mar. 2011.]
4. Wordface
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AUSTRALIAN WORDS OF THE YEAR The Macquarie Dictionary waits until
a year has ended before it posts it selection of the words that
have come to prominence during it; its decisions put a stop on the
season of such announcements. The editorial committee has chosen as
its Word of the Year 2010 GOOGLEGANGER, "a person with the same
name as oneself, whose online references are mixed with one's own
among search results for one's name". Runner-up with an honourable
mention is VUVUZELA, the noisy plastic horn that so enlivened the
football World Cup in South Africa. The People's Choice award,
voted by the public, is SHOCKUMENTARY, either "a documentary film
or television show featuring footage of accidents or violence" or
"a documentary film or television show which gives damaging
information, often presented in such a way as to magnify the
inherent shock value of the facts".
ENGLISH IN GERMAN As with other languages, the vocabulary of
German is being strongly influenced by English. A jury chaired by
Anatol Stefanowitsch, a professor of linguistics at Hamburg
University, has this week given its inaugural selection of English
terms that have recently entered German. Before Wikileaks, Germans
used to speak of "durchgesickerte Unterlagen", leaked documents;
they have now learned to say "geleakte Dokumente". The new verb
LEAKEN, to leak, was voted as the English import of the Year. The
jury argued that it's an enrichment of the German language, fitting
perfectly into its sound system, morphology and grammar. That's not
so of the word that came third, WHISTLEBLOWER, a concept for which
there hasn't before been a simple German equivalent; that has to be
pummelled somewhat to fit German pronunciation. Further showing the
significance of the online world, second place went to ENTFREUNDEN,
a literal translation of the English verb "unfriend" that's used on
social networking sites.
5. Q and A: Dashboard
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Q. What was the dash in dashboard? [Peter McMenamin]
A. A simple one for a change, with a straightforward answer.
This key component of vehicles, with its gauges and controls, has
been called a dashboard since early in the history of motoring.
Despite the obvious associations, however, it has nothing to do
with speed.
It's an example of technological and linguistic conservatism. When
railways began, passenger accommodation was built by artisans who
were skilled in constructing their road equivalents. They used the
same techniques and employed the same vocabulary. They literally
put stagecoach bodies on bogies and, in Britain and some other
countries, even continued to call them carriages. The builders of
the early motor vehicles likewise borrowed their methods and their
language from the horse-drawn vehicles they had long been familiar
with.
More than a century ago, an anonymous writer of a syndicated column
in a US newspaper discussed this conservatism under the headline
"Evolution in Carriages":
The motor carriage is already in evidence, and it,
too, bears the earmarks of its horsy, though horseless,
origin. One of the latest forms of these carriages bears
all over indications of the existence of the horse that
isn't there. In front there is a high leather dashboard
to protect the riders against the splashing from the
hooves of the absent animal.
[Tyrone Daily Herald (Pennsylvania), 28 Oct. 1897.]
The sense of "dash" is the one that refers to the "violent throwing
and breaking of water or other liquids upon or against anything",
as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. The dashboard was a
wooden board, or a leather apron like the one that the article
mentions. It was placed at the front of a carriage, sleigh or other
vehicle to catch the mud or water thrown up by the horses' hooves
and stop it from soaking the driver and his passengers. We would
now call it a kind of mudguard.
The very earliest examples of the original sense of "dash-board"
are from the second decade of the nineteenth century. This is a
slightly later appearance:
On Monday evening, Lord Lyndhurst was driving a gig
near Guildford, when the horse began to kick and plunge,
and at length breaking the dash-board, his Lordship and
his friend jumped out, and sustained no injuries.
[The Morning Post (London), 24 July 1832.]
Since horse-drawn vehicles were hardly new, it had presumably had
other names before this, although the only other one I can turn up
is "splash-board", which is contemporary with it.
Early motor vehicles left the driver exposed to the weather, so the
dashboard wasn't as useless as suggested by the anonymous writer
I've quoted. It did protect the legs of the driver against wind and
rain. A similar design appeared on trolley cars, trams and other
public transport and had the same name. As car design evolved, a
windscreen (windshield) was introduced above the dashboard and the
latter evolved into a handy place to put the instruments. But it
kept its name.
The term has recently stepped even further away from its origins by
being borrowed, in a figurative echo of a vehicle dashboard, for a
computer display that shows useful data such as the time, weather,
news headlines, stock prices and phone numbers.
6. Sic!
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A conference venue attended by Ernest Freeman posted a sign that
might have been better worded: "This way to the Crippling Diseases
Lunch".
Lesley Browne came across a death notice in the Irish Times of 29
January: "Funeral on Monday following 11.00 am Requiem Mass. Family
flowers only. Damnations if desired to Blanchardstown Hospice."
Alan Clayton informs us that the cover of the Kindle edition of War
and Peace proclaims "War & Peace Formatted for the Kindle by Leo
Tolstoy". A man ahead of his time.
"In going through safety training at work," says Randall Bart, "I
was amused by the instruction 'Evacuate to a location that is not
alarming.'" Where else?
I found an intriguing sentence in a letter to the Guardian on 29
January about the reliability of a brand of vacuum cleaner, but
then learned John Allen had beaten me to it: "My old Dyson worked
for 10 years despite two kids and a dog shedding fur all over the
place."
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