World Wide Words -- 22 Jan 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 21 17:34:40 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 720 Saturday 22 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: Rusticate.
3. Turns of Phrase: Exposome.
4. Wordface.
5. Q and A: Ruckus.
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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SIDEKICK Several readers mentioned that they had read, or had been
told, that the origin of the word lies in "kick", a cant term for a
trouser pocket. Scott W Langill recalled a book of the 1930s by a
pickpocket that mentioned this and noted that the side pocket - the
side kick - was the hardest pocket to pick and that the slang term
for a buddy and its connotation of trustworthiness both came from
it. You may judge the etymological insight of the writer from his
view that the rear trouser pocket, in pickpockets' slang called the
"prat", was the origin of "prat fall". It's the other way around -
"prat", as a slang term for a buttock, dates from about 1560 and
the hip-pocket sense is twentieth century. Unfortunately for the
tellers of trouser pocket tales, "kick" for a pocket was British
slang, not American, whereas the buddy meaning of "sidekick" is
definitely from the US.
Others mentioned several specialist uses of "kicker" that might
have contributed to its meaning. One is the poker sense of a side
card that breaks a tie. Another is the printer's sense of a device
that after a set count of pages pushes one slightly to the side so
pages can be easily counted or separated into sets. A third is that
the original sidekicks would have ridden horses, encouraged by
kicks to their sides, so a sidekick was one who rode alongside you.
Intriguing ideas, alas with no shred of evidence to support them.
SCHOONER It transpires that the legal British measure of one-third
of a pint I mentioned isn't so rare as I thought. Joan Brady wrote,
"My father sold beer in one-third pints in the 1950s. He kept a pub
in a poor part of Birmingham and this small measure was sold mainly
to women who had managed to economise on the housekeeping enough to
buy themselves an occasional drink, but not enough to afford a half
pint. It was known as a STICK, which I suspect was because it was
served in a straight-sided glass."
John Bradford recounted an encounter with this small measure: "I
noticed on a beer glass I recently bought at the Great British Beer
Festival that it was graded into pints, halves and thirds. Older
glasses from the Festival do not have the third-pint measure, so I
suspect its use to be on the increase, perhaps helping some of us
enjoy stronger brews whilst remaining no worse than one-third cut!"
Nobody from the UK wrote to say that they knew of schooner as a
term for a beer glass. However, Tim Nott introduced me to another
term: "In Cheltenham, where I lived 17 years ago, a SLEEVER was a
tall thin half-pint or pint beer glass without a handle." This is
well known, I discover, as a British term for a slightly tapered
glass with a bulge near the top. Online sources suggest it has that
name because they can be stacked, or sleeved. The term is also
known in Australia, where a LONG-SLEEVER is a large glass of beer.
2. Weird Words: Rusticate
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If this reminds you of "rustic", you're on the right lines. When it
first appeared, around 1660, it meant to live in the countryside,
or to move to the country to experience a quiet rural life. To get
away from it all, as we would say today. That sense is now rather
dated, particularly in Britain, though my unscientific impression
is that it survives in the USA, though only in writing:
August is traditionally the slowest month of the season,
the time to rusticate in the Hamptons, the Catskills,
the South of France or Litchfield County.
[The New York Observer, 11 Aug. 2003.]
Sometimes, the implication is derogatory:
If the RHS [Royal Horticultural Society] did not already
own Wisley, there would be no conceivable reason to
rusticate a library of the Lindley's status to this
inaccessible spot.
[The Independent, 11 Jan. 1995.]
It can also be used of a building technique in which masonry is
marked with sunk joints and a roughened surface to imitate a rustic
appearance.
>From the early eighteenth century, a distinctive sense grew up in
the ancient British universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A student
(I beg his pardon, an undergraduate) who had committed an offence
was sent down for a while - rusticated - as a punishment. Americans
are hardly aware of this meaning, I believe. In countries such as
India and Pakistan that sense has widened to mean any temporary
suspension of a person from their duties - I've found it used of
football players, judges and junior doctors as well as of students.
The source is the classical Latin verb "rusticari", which variously
meant to live or stay in the country, to work in the country or to
practise farming. "Rustic" is from the adjective "rusticus". Both
it and "rusticate" ultimately derive from "rus", the country. (It
looks as though this might be the source of "Russia" but it isn't.)
3. Turns of Phrase: Exposome
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Though vast efforts have been put into decoding the human genome,
it has become increasingly obvious that knowing the DNA sequence of
a person is a long way from knowing the person, because of other
influences. It's the nature versus nurture conundrum again, with
the genome being the nature part.
As examples of these other influences, researchers are mapping the
proteins expressed by a cell, together called the proteome (see
http://wwwords.org?PRTM), the chemical switches in the cell that
modify the way the genome works, collectively the epigenome (see
http://wwwords.org?EPGM), and the group of small molecules such as
hormones and signalling molecules dubbed the metabolome (from
"metabolism").
Some researchers are claiming that these internal influences are
greatly outweighed by external ones, such as diet, lifestyle, drug
use (medicinal or recreational) and the chemicals we absorb from
our environments. These factors have been given the collective name
"exposome". It's argued that mapping it for an individual may be
crucial in measuring the factors that lead to disease.
The name was coined as a combination of "exposure" and "genome" in
imitation of the others, in which, if you trace it back, the "-ome"
ending is taken from "chromosome" (actually from Greek soma, body).
The inventor was Chris Wild, director of the International Agency
for Research on Cancer, in a paper published in August 2005.
And if there is to be any hope of untangling the complex web
of risks behind chronic diseases, many scientists argue,
researchers need to develop an "exposome," a highly detailed
map of environmental exposures that might occur throughout a
lifetime.
[Scientific American, Oct. 2010]
"We're reaching the point where we're capable of assessing
the exposome," says Balshaw. With the implications for
understanding disease causes and risks, and a real prospect of
developing personalised medicine, the exposome is showing more
promise than the genome already, he adds.
[New Scientist, 25 Dec. 2010.]
4. Wordface
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FLORAL REVOLUTIONS The overthrow of President Ben Ali in Tunisia
evoked the tradition of naming regime change after plants. The one
in Tunisia is the JASMINE REVOLUTION, after the country's national
flower. Other recent ones are the CEDAR REVOLUTION in Lebanon in
2005 and the TULIP REVOLUTION in Kyrgyzstan the same year (which
for a while had other names: Pink, Lemon, Silk, and Daffodil). In
2004, Ukraine had its CHESTNUT REVOLUTION, from the trees that line
Kiev's main thoroughfare (though in the West it became known as the
ORANGE REVOLUTION). The ROSE REVOLUTION took place in Georgia in
November 2003. The roots of these names for uprisings may be
traceable back to the CARNATION REVOLUTION of Portugal in 1974,
when carnations were worn by protesters. The early twenty-first
century ones have been collectively dubbed the COLOUR REVOLUTIONS,
though only the Orange Revolution strictly fits that title (the
Rose Revolution referred to real roses). "Jasmine Revolution" has
confusingly also been used for non-revolutionary events in Syria in
2005 and Pakistan in 2007.
LUDDITE TENDENCY The BBC News Magazine online has posted a list of
linguistic creations contributed by readers to identify some of the
less desirable aspects of the digital revolution. You may already
know of SPAMNESIA, which has been used in the sense of forgetting
to check your e-mail system for spam but which is reinterpreted as
failing to reply to friends' e-mails because your computer has
marked them as spam. MEANDERTHAL has also been around for a while,
having been defined on the Urban Dictionary in 2006 as a person who
talks on their mobile phone in public places, oblivious to their
surroundings and getting in your way (this week, Urban Dictionary
also records SMARTPHONE SHUFFLE for a similar situation). Perhaps
the best of the set is a neutral term that has also been recorded
previously on Urban Dictionary: INTERMET, a person one has met on
the internet.
WOMB WORD Therese Weber asked me about a phrase: she had read that
Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban had thanked their GESTATIONAL CARRIER
for providing them with a daughter. It's a technical term used in
surrogacy. While a SURROGATE MOTHER is the biological mother of the
child she bears, a gestational carrier has had a pre-fertilised
embryo implanted and so has no genetic relationship with the child.
The term isn't new: examples exist from as far back as 1989, if not
before, and it is now relatively common in the US.
5. Q and A: Ruckus
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Q. I'm interested in the origin of "ruckus", as in "There was quite
a ruckus in the bar until the police arrived." It's more American
than English I think? Can you comment? [Stephen Slade. Washington,
DC.]
A. It's certainly American in origin, though it's now widely known
throughout the English-speaking world:
The gardai got jostled and pelted with snowballs. A
cameraman who was busy following the ruckus slipped on the
thawing ice.
[Irish Times, 8 Dec. 2010.]
At the AICC plenary in Delhi last week, delegates from Bihar
created ruckus and accused party general secretary in-charge
Mukul Wasnik of "selling party tickets."
[The Hindustan Times, 29 Dec. 2010.]
As these examples and yours show, it means an uproar, row, quarrel,
disturbance or commotion. It goes back a long way, to the 1880s at
least. Early examples, into the 1920s, are variously spelled as
"rucus", "rukus" or "rookus", which hint at the way the word was
said by various communities throughout the US. A couple of early
examples:
It is but right that they should know how the matter stands,
and have fair warning to avoid a "pending" rucus of some
sort.
[Cherokee Advocate (Tahlequah, Oklahoma), 24 Feb. 1882.]
Boys of that age always has to raise a rukus somehow.
[Overland Monthly, Mar. 1885.]
Modern dictionaries try to avoid the easy cop-out of a comment such
as "origin uncertain", but the evidence is inconclusive.
There are hints that "ruckus" grew out of earlier words, likewise
of obscure ancestry. "Rook", for example, a Scottish word first
recorded in 1808 that meant a quarrel or uproar. Or "ruction", of
much the same sense, which appeared at about the same time and was
a dialect term of Scotland, Ireland and parts of England. Either
could have been taken to the US by emigrants. Some writers have
suggested that "ruckus" was created by blending "ruction" with
"rumpus", a noisy disturbance or row that's recorded from the
middle of the previous century.
6. Sic!
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On Tuesday, Alison Melville wrote in confusion from Azerbaijan: "I
had a couple of false starts in trying to understand the headline
that appeared on Sky TV sports news: 'Bent Hands in Resignation'. I
could think of a literal and a figurative meaning of 'bent'. How
was I to know that there's a footballer named Darren Bent?"
Kenn Fong took a photograph of a soothsayer's sign in Chinatown in
Oakland, California: "Forturn Teller". The sign is a neon one that
is impossible to amend.
Since returning to live in the US, Cheryl Caesar has become a fan
of the courtroom TV programme Judge Judy. She recently noticed two
verbal slips: "If the plaintiff had been killed in this accident,
she could have sued you, and won" and "If you'd push the hair out
of your eyes, you could hear me better."
Bette Ressel reports that this appeared in the 13 January issue of
Caliente, the Tucson Daily Star entertainment weekly: "Another
great resource is the nonprofit Southern Arizona Roadrunners, which
includes a number of running groups that train for free on its
website."
Last Saturday's Guardian included a quote from a woman whom it
identified as Atha Cain "who carried her husband's ashes into Hull
Crown Court for the trial of the woman who caused his death by
wreckless driving."
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