World Wide Words -- 19 Feb 11

Fri Feb 18 18:11:11 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 724         Saturday 19 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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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Spissitude.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Piss-poor.
5. Book Review: The Language Wars.
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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SAUCERED AND BLOWED  The piece last week about this American idiom 
provoked a lively correspondence from readers who remembered the 
technique being used by members of their families. Reports of the 
technique also came from Sweden, Russia and other countries. David 
A Bagwell recalled a story about George Washington, who is said to 
have observed that the US Senate should serve as a saucer to cool 
the impassioned legislation coming from the House. This is the 
earliest example of it I can find:

    "Why," asked Washington, "did you just now pour that 
    coffee into your saucer, before drinking ?" "To cool it," 
    answered Jefferson, "my throat is not made of brass." 
    "Even so," said Washington, "we pour our legislation into 
    the Senatorial saucer to cool it." 
    [Republican Superstitions as Illustrated in the 
    Political History of America, by Moncure Daniel Conway, 
    1872.]

Beverley Charles Rowe wrote, "I'm reminded of the old joke about 
the man castigated for drinking out of his saucer who protested 
that if you drank from the cup you got the spoon in your eye." 
Crawford MacKeand remembered the column about a snack bar, Snax at 
Jax by Alan Hackney, which appeared in Punch in the 1950s. One of 
the regulars at the bar saucers and blows his tea. This incurs the 
ire of his mate, who tells him it isn't good form. He asked what he 
was supposed to do and got the answer "Fan it wiv yer cap mate, fan 
it wiv yer cap!"

DATA  Several readers queried my writing in the last issue, "The 
data so far is unsurprising" because for them "data" is plural. It 
may be worth noting that British non-specialist usage has settled 
on "data" as a singular mass noun.

2. Weird Words: Spissitude  /'spIsItju:d/
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In January 1924 the Atlanta Constitution reported that "spissitude" 
had been added to others, such as "thermometer" and "truly rural", 
as words the New York police used to test the sobriety of midnight 
revellers. 

What the word meant was irrelevant, even if any midnight reveller 
knew it or was in a fit state to define it. It was enough that it 
contained those hissing sibilants that make it sound like a curse. 
In fact, it's respectably scholastic and technical, though hardly 
common. In brief, the spissitude of a material is its density, 
thickness or compactness.

    It is to the molasses chiefly, which gives a 
    spissitude to the beer, that the frothing property must 
    be ascribed.
    [A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary 
    Poisons, by Fredrick Accum, 1820. His book described the 
    horrific compounds commonly added to food and eventually 
    led to the first public health legislation.]

It appears most often in books about the history of philosophy and 
spiritual thought that discuss the ideas of Dr Henry More. He was a 
seventeenth-century philosopher, for whom spissitude was a fourth 
dimension that allowed supernatural spirits to occupy a material 
place at will.

This is a rare modern appearance of the word:

    From the same tree he untied a length of rope and 
    followed the line of wire, string, strips of sheet and 
    chain into the trembling spissitude of the swampland, 
    reeling in the line as he went. 
    [And the Ass Saw the Angel, by Nick Cave, 1989.]

Its source is the Latin "inspissare" (based on "spissus", thick or 
dense), which is also the origin of the English verb "inspissate", 
to thicken or congeal.

3. Wordface
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TITULAR ODDITIES  Yesterday, the Bookseller magazine announced its 
shortlist for the Diagram Prize, which showcases the strangest book 
titles of the year. A Mills & Boon bonkbuster, an examination of 
the ongoing debate surrounding organ procurement, and a guide to 
managing a dental practice are among the titles. The literary award 
was conceived in 1978 to avoid boredom at the annual Frankfurt Book 
Fair and has been held in all but two years since. The shortlist 
is: What Color Is Your Dog?; Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis 
Khan Way; Myth of the Social Volcano; The Generosity of the Dead; 
the 8th International Friction Stir Welding Symposium Proceedings; 
and The Italian's One-night Love-child. Public voting is now open 
at http://www.thebookseller.com/. The winner will be announced on 
25 March.

INFLATIONARY SUNS  Scientists have identified a type of star they 
are calling a BLOATAR, an unlovely name for one that has eaten its 
planets and become bigger and cooler than expected.

DIGITAL ETERNITY  The US stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt coined the 
acronym ETEWAF in an article in Wired Magazine on 27 December last. 
It expands to "Everything That Ever Was - Available Forever". It 
refers to the power of digital recording and the online world to 
make anything, from any era, instantly available. He is concerned 
about the potentially adverse implications for creativity: "Etewaf 
doesn't produce a new generation of artists - just an army of sated 
consumers. Why create anything new when there's a mountain of 
freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate 
on your iMovie?"

FRANKENSTEINIAN? The word ANTHROPOEIA has appeared several times in 
my reading in the past week, because it has featured in discussions 
of Philip Ball's new book Unnatural. He invented it for the concept 
of artificially creating human beings by processes such as cloning. 
It's from classical Greek "anthros", man + "poiein", to make (as in 
"onomatopoeia", forming a word from a sound, and "mythopoeia", the 
creation of myths). 

4. Q and A: Piss-poor
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Q. An item circulating online under the title Interesting History 
claims, "They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families 
used to all pee in a pot and then once a day it was sold to the 
tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were 'piss poor'." 
This screams of folk etymology. Can you offer real clarity? [Bob 
Fleck]

A. It certainly sounds like folk etymology, except that the piece 
is clearly a mischievous attempt to deceive its readers.

As with other tongue-in-cheek suggestions about origins, a grain of 
truth exists. Urine has been widely used in many parts of the world 
in the preparatory stages of tanning, in particular to help remove 
the hair from hides before applying tanning agents. The Romans, as 
one example, systematically collected urine for this purpose (in 
the first century AD the Emperor Nero even put a tax on it).

However, the expression "piss-poor" is recent and has nothing to do 
with tanning. The current state of research suggests it may have 
been invented during World War Two, because the first examples in 
print date from 1946. Though it is still classed as low slang by 
dictionaries, its mildly unpleasant associations have become 
blunted by time and familiarity.

The origin is straightforward. "Piss" began to be attached to other 
words during the twentieth century to intensify their meaning. Ezra 
Pound invented "piss-rotten" in 1940 (the first example on record) 
and since then we've had "piss-easy" (very easy), "piss-elegant" 
(affectedly refined, pretentious) and other forms. "Piss-poor" just 
means extremely poor:

    Larkin's letters, wrote Philippe Auclair, writer and 
    broadcaster, were "very funny, very beautiful, and very 
    sad; the grace of an angel, the precision of a geometer, 
    and the short-sighted, intolerant piss-poor idées fixes 
    of a provincial buffoon".
    [The Spectator, 27 Nov. 2010.]

5. Book Review: The Language Wars
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Henry Hitchings's previous works include a biography of the man he 
wrote his PhD thesis on, Dr Samuel Johnson. Here he turns to the 
history of disputes about what constitutes good English. To call it 
warfare is to seriously overstate matters - nobody has ever manned 
a barricade in defence of the right to split an infinitive - but 
publishers do like catchpenny titles.

He unpacks the history of proper usage, occasionally diverting to 
offer up examples from other languages as mirrors to English. He 
shows that complaints about the decline of our language are almost 
always illogical, that later generations frequently find the view 
of pundits to be either irrelevant or risible and that attempts to 
hold back change are futile. He is sympathetic to the view that 
there is nothing absolute about grammar; its rules are not laws of 
nature but conventional beliefs which are modified through changing 
fashion and shifting everyday use. 

Debate over meaning and standards isn't peculiar to our times. But 
today's prescribers and proscribers may be surprised to learn for 
how many centuries the idea of good usage has been debated and how 
much standards have varied. As one example, the apostrophe has been 
the subject of unending debate since it was first used in English 
in 1559 (the next century, John Donne could write "any mans death 
diminishes me" without needing it). Writers in the early eighteenth 
century used it to mark the plurals of nouns. It wasn't until the 
late nineteenth century that usage settled down. Today's mistakes 
with it aren't a sudden eruption of ignorance but a continuation of 
misunderstandings and differences of opinion that are centuries 
old. The author believes the apostrophe is likely to disappear, not 
least through a desire for crisper design and less cluttered pages.

The value of individual words has long been debated, often with a 
sense that there are good words and bad words. The history of such 
objections shows how ill-judged most of them are. Eric Partridge 
hated "economic". Fowler objected to "gullible", "antagonise", 
"placate" and "transpire". Last century, as they became known 
through the talkies and other imports, British writers complained 
about Americanisms such as "reliable", "lengthy", "curvaceous",  
"hindsight" and "mileage". In 1978, the Lake Superior University 
Banned Words unavailingly deprecated "parenting" and "medication". 
Conversely, many Words of the Year selections ("pod slurping", 
"locavore") show that the usual fate of new words, even fashionable 
ones, is obscurity. 

We all speak more than one variety of the language. We pitch our 
vocabulary and style to suit our hearers, whether those are our 
children, our friends, our colleagues or the unseen readership of 
public prose. Standard English has the highest prestige, the one 
appropriate to formal communication, and the one we need to master 
if we're to be taken seriously in that world. But it's useless to 
apply the rules of standard English to the informal registers of 
conversation or of slang and dialect. Hitchings argues that - in 
spite of widespread condemnation - instant messaging, textspeak, 
with all its abbreviations, informality and often casual disregard 
for the rules of the standard language, doesn't degrade English. He 
contents that the people who use it are easily able to distinguish 
it from the language needed in an essay or report.

Some parts of The Language Wars will be familiar to anyone who has 
read previous works on the evolution of language. But Hitchings 
provides a wealth of examples to illustrate his points. He writes 
well and is never dull. Even if you're predisposed to disagree with 
him, he's worth reading.

[The Language Wars: A History of Proper English by Henry Hitchings, 
published by John Murray in the UK on 3 Feb. 2010; hardback, pp408, 
including bibliography and index; publisher's UK price, GBP17.99; 
ISBN 978-1-84854-2082.]

AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK  
Amazon UK       GBP11.61    http://wwwords.org?HOPE3
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Amazon Germany  EUR22,99    http://wwwords.org?HOPE9
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small 
commission at no extra cost to you.]

6. Sic!
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Anne O'Brien Lloyd e-mailed from Saskatoon, Canada: "Discussing the 
benefits to be obtained from the sharing of technical information 
among police forces, a representative of one force noted on CBC 
radio last week that there would be lots of cross pollination and 
that there would be plenty of grist to their mills so they wouldn't 
be re-inventing the wheel."

The description of a recipe for a savoury pie on the WebMD website 
left Thomas Seng wondering about its appeal: "Invented out of the 
need for a one-dish supper, it's light and easy and guaranteed to 
leave you with leftovers."

Belinda Hardman suggests that the headline over a story dated 9 
February on the MedPage Today site implies that membership in the 
Benjamin Button club comes at too high a price: "Stroke Patients 
Getting Younger".

It happened a month ago, but the story Don Doherty tells us about 
is still worth repeating. During the recent devastating floods in 
Queensland, Australia, the front page of the Morning Bulletin of 
Rockhampton on 6 January included the headline "30,000 pigs swept 
away in flood". The next day, the paper featured this correction: 
"What Baralaba piggery-owner Sid Everingham actually said was '30 
sows and pigs', not '30,000 pigs'."

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