World Wide Words -- 15 Jan 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 14 16:02:36 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 719 Saturday 15 January 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: Fritinancy.
3. 3. Topical Words: Schooner.
4. Wordface.
5. Q and A: Sidekick.
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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TINTAMARRE One of the delights, occasionally annoyances, of this
publication is that a reader often knows more about a word than I
do. J Michael Keating consulted the entry for "tintamarre" in the
Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française. This reports that
it was derived (about 1470) from "tinter" (to ring a bell) by
adding an obscure ending. It explains that it originally meant the
noise made by hitting something and especially referred to a method
of hunting wood pigeons in the middle of the night by confusing the
birds with the sound of drums and pans. It adds that the modern
sense of a very loud noise that's accompanied by confusion and
disorder is attributed to Rabelais in 1546. "Tinter" is from Latin
"tinnire", to ring or jingle, a close relative of "tintinnabulum",
a bell, from which English gets "tintinnabulation". So the two
words are indeed related, despite what I said.
One of the pleasures of etymology for me is that in the process I
so often unearth fascinating little nuggets of social history; how
else could I have learned the method of hunting wood pigeons
employed by fifteenth-century Frenchmen?
GLAD TO BE GLAD On reading my comment in the last issue that
"etymology is a delightfully uncertain business", Gregory Harris
wrote, "Thanks for upgrading from your usual gloomy 'We will never
know'." I'm not sure I'm ever that positively negative. My
etymological principle is more correctly "never say never", whilst
accepting that it is often extremely unlikely that evidence will
turn up.
PUZZLE Following my tongue-in-cheek snippet about this word last
time, a number of readers forwarded me links to online sites that
purported to give the origin. The certitude of these is at odds
with, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary. Its recently
revised entry for the word has a note discussing origins, which is
peppered with phrases such as "[it is] hard to find any clear
semantic connection", "this must remain no more than speculation",
and "unlikely on semantic grounds", leaving the reader with a clear
impression of Oxford's Chief Etymologist scratching his head in
bewilderment.
UPDATES I've updated another three pieces on the website this
week, about the words "blighty", "whilom" and "jinx", the last of
these giving a radically revised origin based on research in the
past few years. The updated pages lined from the home page.
2. Weird Words: Fritinancy
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Few words could be rarer than this exotic creation by a master of
neologisms, the physician and author Sir Thomas Browne, who is at
number 69 in the list of most quoted authors in the Oxford English
Dictionary. Browne - whom the English writer Philip Howard recently
described as "a polysyllabic old quack" - invented it in his vast
encyclopaedic work of 1646, Pseudodoxia Epidemica. This attempted
to refute many of the errors and superstitions of his age, but has
been ridiculed since for its own many errors.
Browne spelled his creation "fritiniancy" and used it for the
sounds of insects ("The note or fritiniancy [of the Cicada] is far
more shrill then that of the Locust"). He took it from the Latin
"fritinnire", to twitter or chirp. The Oxford English Dictionary,
in an entry of 1898, prefers "fritiniency", but notes that "modern
dictionaries" prefer "fritinancy". Today's modern dictionaries
don't include it but the very few authors who have borrowed it have
indeed mostly used that spelling. This is a rare sighting:
"The native thought of mankind is gratitude. The most
significant noise of earth is the singing of birds," said
the professor with determination. "Fritinancy," declared
the young man beside the fire. "What's that?" said the
professor. "I said fritinancy, which is the whimper of
gnats and the buzzing of flies." "You're talking
nonsense."
[Poet's Pub, by Eric Linklater, 1929.]
3. Topical Words: Schooner
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The British press reported last week that rules on the serving of
alcoholic drinks were to be relaxed to permit beer to be served in
schooners of two-thirds of a pint.
Australians and New Zealanders are very familiar with this usage
but press reports suggested UK journalists were less so, some of
them suggesting that "schooner" was to appear in British pubs for
the first time in this sense (though sherry, for example, has long
been offered in schooners of varying sizes). It has been illegal
for the past 313 years, following a 1698 Act of Parliament, to
serve beer in the UK other than in pints, half-pints or thirds of a
pint (few people know about this last one). However, a century ago
you wouldn't have found it hard to buy a schooner of beer, or at
least a drink that was closely similar in size to that now being
proposed:
Of these [local measures] "the schooner" containing 14
fluid ounces, or 2 4-5ths imperial gills, occupied
perhaps the most prominent place ... being found in
everyday use, under various names, in London, Glasgow,
Aberdeen, and elsewhere.
[North British Daily Mail (Glasgow), 7 Mar. 1896; 14
fluid ounces in British measure is 400ml, or just over
two-thirds of an Imperial pint.]
The etymological issue is why the drink should have that name. The
Oxford English Dictionary says "perhaps a fanciful usage" of the
ship sense of "schooner", which isn't a lot of help. The only hint
I can find, which doesn't take us very far, is that the earliest
sense of "schooner" in the drink sense, in the USA, was not of a
particular measure, but one served in a tall glass (I'm told that a
pint so served was known as a schooner in Manchester in the 1960s,
and presumably at other times and places as well; well-informed
habitués of pubs and bars may like to comment on its popularity
today). It may be a bit of a stretch to equate tall glasses with
tall ships, you may agree.
The origin of the ship sense is also a mystery. A frequently-told
story of its origins holds that a bystander watching the first
schooner being launched at Gloucester, Massachusetts, about 1713,
exclaimed "Oh, how she scoons!" The ship's builder, Captain Andrew
Robinson, was said to have replied, "A scooner let her be!"
Though the date is about right for the first appearance of a ship
of the type, we have to regard this story, first written down in a
letter in 1790, as a classic etymological folktale. Not least among
the objections is that a New England verb "scoon" isn't known,
though it's just possible that it's a variant of the Scottish
"scon", "to make flat stones skip along the surface of the water"
(a word that should be in everyone's vocabulary). The "h" was added
later in the eighteenth century because of Dutch domination of the
oceans, which suggested that a seafaring term must be Dutch in
origin. Oddly, the Dutch name for the ship, "schoener", is a loan-
word from English.
4. Wordface
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WIND RUSH Plans to build giant windfarms off England's east coast
mean that many ports are gearing up to become bases to supply and
maintain them. The impact is expected to resemble that on Scottish
ports when the North Sea oil rush began in the 1970s. One article
uses the term WINDPORT for this new generation; at the moment this
is mainly business and government jargon.
POETIC LAURELS I recently encountered the Scots MAKAR in the news.
It's an old word that literally means "maker", but in the sense of
"bard" it was applied especially to a group of medieval Scottish
poets that included William Dunbar. In 2004, the Scots parliament
appointed Edwin Morgan as the first Scots Makar or poet laureate.
He died three months ago and a new makar has yet to be appointed.
The plural, by the way, is MAKARIS, as in Dunbar's poem "Lament for
the Makaris".
BRIEF ENCOUNTER? Yet another neologism of the survey makers has
turned up, almost certainly a temporary term. It's WEBROOM. The
suggestion was that our love affair with gadgets is changing our
domestic arrangements. So many people are now surfing the internet,
playing computer games, and watching television online while in bed
that the bedroom ought to be renamed.
YUMMY! Newcomers to mobile phones might be baffled by an advert
from the British operator Three, which is offering new users ALL-
YOU-CAN-EAT DATA. It makes sense to those in the know, since "all-
you-can-eat" means "unrestricted" and to have "all-you-can-eat
data" means there's no limit on how much of it you may download.
5. Q and A: Sidekick
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Q. A "sidekick" is a person's unofficial helper, assistant or aide
and all around faithful pal and buddy. How did that term originate?
American West, I'll betcha. [Paul Nichols]
A. Since I only bet on certainties, I'm not taking that one. The
early evidence does include examples from Texas but there are too
few of them for me to be sure about its geographic origin.
But I am sure that before the hero's assistant and confidant was a
sidekick, he was a "sidekicker". The longer form was popularised by
the stories of O Henry, who was writing in New York but as a young
man had lived in Texas. The first example from his works is 1903,
but it's older elsewhere:
Guthrie, Ok., Dec. 25. -- "Tulsa Jack," side kicker of
the late bandit Dalton, and a gang of eight men rode into
Ingalls and declared that Bill Dalton had been betrayed
by a saloon keeper named Nicholls and proceeded to
demolish his saloon.
[Galveston Daily News (Texas), 26 Dec. 1894.]
It's a relative of a rather older and much more obvious American
colloquialism, "side-partner", for one's colleague, counterpart,
buddy, mate or opposite number. That dates to the 1850s, if not
before:
We think that the evidence establishes the charges,
and the excuse of Mahon cannot be received as sufficient,
as he should have notified his side-partner in case he
was taken sick on his post.
[New York Daily-Times, 19 Apr, 1854.]
The "side" part is easy enough to explain. It meant a person who
was literally or figuratively at one's side. The most likely source
for the second part is an old sense of "kick", meaning to walk or
wander (the idea is of idly kicking stones) that turned into "kick
around" or "kick about", to hang around. Those are recorded in the
US from the 1830s. So a sidekicker, later a sidekick, was a friend
you kicked around with.
6. Sic!
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My comment last week in this section about having a backup program
that issued the message "An invalid argument was encountered" put
Robert Hart in mind of a response he once received from an earlier
generation of computers: "Wrong Error". He commented, "This was
from IBM in its heyday. I feel it transcended mere obscurity and
approached the metaphysical."
The tagline on the New Humanist website, advertising an article in
the issue of January/February 2011, startled Steve Phelps with its
implication of post-mortem activity: "Twenty-five years after his
death, Michael Bywater revisits the sacred texts of the pulp
science writer turned prophet L Ron Hubbard".
Thanks to Stuart McLachlan, we learn of a story about the floods in
Queensland on ABC News Brisbane. Patrick Quirk, Acting General
Manager of Maritime Safety Queensland, urged boat-owners to secure
their moorings before the expected peak of the flood: "We don't
want people injuring themselves tomorrow trying to rescue their
boats, when they could be doing it today," he said.
Lawrence Plotkin found this mystifying sentence in the New York
Times of 7 January about the playwright Julian Fellowes (who wrote
Gosford Park and, as of last Thursday, is now Lord Fellowes of
West Stafford): "But there are times when a sincere imitation is
not only better than nothing - it's nearly as good."
The Observer's monthly food supplement in December recommended the
single malt Highland Park as "a genuine classic that never fails to
disappoint."
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