World Wide Words -- 29 Jan 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 28 17:52:27 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 721 Saturday 29 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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A formatted version of this e-magazine is available
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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: Prognosticate.
3. Turns of Phrase: Marketopia.
4. Wordface.
5. Book review: OK:
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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RUSTICATE Following last week's piece, several puzzled readers
asked me why undergraduates expelled from Oxford and Cambridge
should be "sent down" rather than "sent away". That form is also
used at the more prestigious British public schools, especially
Eton. It might make you think that the authorities at such bodies
believe themselves to be on a figurative pinnacle, every move from
which has to be in an inferior direction.
It's a bit more subtle than that. The verb phrase ties in with an
ancient convention in which travel to a city or important centre
(the capital, the government, wherever the king happened to be in
the days of peripatetic monarchs) was "up", irrespective of its
elevation or location, and journeys away from it were "down". As,
for example, Miss La Creevey, the London landlady in Nicholas
Nickleby: "You don't mean to say that you are really going all the
way down into Yorkshire this cold winter's weather, Mr Nickleby?".
Passenger railways in Britain adopted the system from the outset:
in England the up line always takes you towards London, the down
line away; in Scotland, Edinburgh is the up-line destination. The
convention is being superseded by one based on maps, in which to
travel north is to go up and south is down (so Londoners now go up
to Yorkshire).
Members of Oxford and Cambridge universities go up at the beginning
of term and down at the end, if they haven't been sent down in the
interim. This is an extension of the hierarchical system, because
the university is the most important place in their lives. However,
if while at university they travel from there to London, they go up
to town and back down again like everybody else.
In its entry for "send", the OED implies that "send down" began as
undergraduate slang of the mid-nineteenth century (as its earliest
example it quotes from a Cuthbert Bede humorous story of university
life); even in the 1890s, The Times put the phrase in quotes, to
indicate that the editors considered it upstart slang.
RUCKUS Readers asked if "ruck", either in the rugby sense of a
loose scrum or the Australian rules football sense of a group of
three players who follow the play without fixed positions, might
have common origin with "ruckus". Though the rugby links may have
helped "ruck" develop the British English sense of a quarrel or
fight (though dictionaries prefer to say this is a shortened form
of "ruckus"), the words are etymologically distinct. The rugby
"ruck" is from a Scandinavian word for a pile or stack, usually of
fuel, which was its first use in English. By the sixteenth century,
it described a crowd of people or a close-packed group of horses,
but without any implications of violence. The specialised sporting
senses came along early in the twentieth century for British rugby
and more recently still in Australian football.
SCHOONER As a further comment on names for glasses, Rob Buttress
pointed out NONIC as a more common alternative name for the British
"straight" pint or half-pint glass, slightly tapered with a bulge
near the top, which others had called a SLEEVER. The term derives,
several online sources suggest, from "no-nick" because the bulge
helps to prevent the rim from becoming chipped in use. I've not
been able to confirm this.
SIC? Numerous subscribers suggested that the Judge Judy quote last
time, "If you'd push the hair out of your eyes, you could hear me
better" made perfect sense. It belongs with the saying, "I can't
hear you, I haven't got my glasses on." The reason is that many of
us unconsciously pick up information from watching the speaker, not
always as obviously as lip reading. Martin Gilmore pointed out that
it has a name: the MCGURK EFFECT. It's named after Harry McGurk, a
developmental psychologist at the University of Surrey; examples
are on record from 1973.
SITE UPDATES AND ADDITIONS My item last week about the colour
names of modern revolutions is now online in a greatly extended
form. The pieces on "echo boomer" and "blow the gaff" have also
been revised and extended. Links:
Revolutionary colours: http://wwwords.org?TNOR
Echo boomer: http://wwwords.org?ECBM
Blow the gaff: http://wwwords.org?BLTG
2. Weird Words: Prognosticate
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"Predict", "prophesy" or "foretell" are more pithy and serviceable
choices in these plainer-speaking days when long words have rather
fallen out of fashion. On the infrequent occasions that journalists
today select it as the right word in the right place, they often
imply by it pretentiousness or gentle humour:
As British financial commentators assume expressions
of pious concern to prognosticate on the euro crisis,
wickedly self-serving thoughts run through their
minds.
[Financial Times, 21 May 2010.]
It - and its relatives "prognosis" and "prognostic" - come from the
medieval Latin verb "prognosticare", to make a prediction. All can
be traced back to the classical Greek "gnosis", knowledge, plus the
prefix "pro-", earlier in time.
To prognosticate in classical times was to predict the future from
signs or portents, to augur. This was the first meaning in English.
Later, it shifted slightly to refer to a person who predicts on the
basis of such signs:
As whiteness of flesh is considered a great advantage
in veal, butchers, in the selection of their calves, are
in the habit of examining the inside of its mouth, and
noting the colour of the calf's eyes; alleging that, from
the signs they there see, they can prognosticate whether
the veal will be white or florid.
[The Book of Household Management, by Mrs Isabella
Beeton, 1861.]
As prediction is so difficult (as the wag said, especially about
the future), some writers have mordantly suggested "prognosticate"
really means "guess".
3. Turns of Phrase: Marketopia
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"Marketopia" was created by Professor Terence Ball of Arizona State
University in an article in the magazine Dissent in 2001. He formed
it from "marketing" and "utopia" to identify and satirise a world
in which social responsibility has been lost, all public services
have been privatised and market forces rule absolutely. The quality
of life experienced by those living in his imagined world is so
poor that a better root would be "dystopia".
It has a small continuing circulation among left-leaning liberal
commentators on economics, with its adjective "marketopian". It's
perhaps best known from Peter Lunn's book of 2009, Basic Instincts:
Human Nature and the New Economics, in which Lunn invents the city
of Marketopia, where everybody is as rational and selfish as
conventional economic theory holds.
A US provider of warranties for home equipment has adopted the term
"marketopia" as a service mark, presumably in ignorance of its
origin and associations.
The main shortcoming of marketopia is its massive and
systematic violation of a fundamental sense of fairness.
Marketopians who cannot afford health care, education,
police protection, and other of life's necessities are
denied a fair (or even minimally sufficient) share of
social goods.
[The Abandoned Generation, by Henry A Giroux,
2003.]
Mistrust ... is evident in marketopian reforms which
treat public servants as knaves to be slapped into line
by the self-interested whack of the invisible hand.
[Guardian, 1 Jan. 2011.]
4. Wordface
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LOST SENSES The Feedback column in New Scientist has introduced me
to a newly coined word: URAGNOSIA. It was created by Andrew Ross,
who was responding to a query by another reader, Alastair Beaven.
The latter wanted a term for a person who knows a word only in a
novel sense and not its original. The example he gave was of an
interpreter in Afghanistan who knew about viruses in computers, but
not about biological viruses. Andrew Ross generated his word from
"ur-", origin, plus Greek "agnosia", ignorance (from "gnosis", as I
noted in connection with "prognosticate", above). So "uragnosia"
means ignorance of origin.
DEVIL ROCK The word MALOIK turned up in a newspaper piece this
week about the purported decline in rock music. It's the term in
the metal music scene for that gesture you make with the index and
little fingers while holding down the other two with the thumb.
There are many other names for it, including "cornuto" and "devil's
horns". Historically, it has been widely used as a sign to ward off
the devil or evil eye. In music it indicates that the gesturer is
rocking with enthusiasm and is encouraging others to join in. It's
associated particularly with the late Ronnie James Dio of Black
Sabbath and other bands, who borrowed gesture and name from his
Italian-born parents. It comes from Italian "malocchio", which is
the evil eye itself, not the gesture warding it off. Dio seems to
have both abbreviated it and shifted its sense.
DOH! How the language changes and how I struggle sometimes to keep
up. I began to read an extract from O: A Presidential Novel. A
sense of foggy incomprehension overcame me, like watching Inception
with a headache: "O watched the cable anchor laugh again ...". Had
the narrative become a surreal dream sequence? Then I read on: "...
as the video clip ran for the third time that morning." Ah, the
anchor's a person. A generation ago an anchor, with or without its
cable, was a tined metal device, useful but mute.
5. Book review: OK
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In OK, Allan Metcalf tells the story of the most famous and widely
used abbreviation in the English language. The cover calls it an
"improbable story" and there are enough improbables in the tale to
satisfy any reader.
As Allan Metcalf has written elsewhere, "It's improbable that a
casual attempt at humor with a deliberately misspelled abbreviation
in 1839 should have been drafted for the presidential election of
1840 ("Old Kinderhook", Martin Van Buren) and then be the subject
of a hoax (that Andrew Jackson couldn't spell so he marked "OK" for
"all correct" on documents) that led to people actually marking OK
on documents and in telegraphy." And, even more improbably, to its
now being understood worldwide, even where English isn't spoken,
and to its having been the first word spoken on the Moon.
Many writers on etymology have summarised the story of this curious
term. My own is at http://wwwords.org?OKOK and so obviates the need
to repeat its history in more detail. Its origin has been known
since the 1960s, when the American lexicographer Allen Walker Read
found clues through a careful reading of Boston newspapers of the
late 1830s. Despite this, many folk-etymological tales are told
about its origin - that it's from Greek, or Choctaw, or French, or
Scots, or that's it's short for the German "Oberst Kommandant", or
from the initials of "Orrin Kendall" biscuits or of the freight
agent Obadiah Kelly. These result from its true history having been
lost for more than a century.
Metcalf's book is the most complete of the various explanations
that have appeared, the first ever in book form, more detailed in
some respects even than Read's original papers. Within its pages
you will find, for example, the highly improbable ABRS, the Anti-
Bell-Ringing Society of Boston; a news story about it in the Boston
Morning Post on 23 March 1839 included the first-ever use of "OK"
as a joking abbreviation of "all correct".
Metcalf takes the story on, chapter by chapter, through the 1840
election, the calumnies about Andrew Jackson's supposedly being
unable to spell, the various untruths about its provenance and its
acceptance by railway telegraphers who leapt on it as a usefully
brief way to signal the safe arrival of trains. He charts its move
into the literary world (improbably, the first author to use it was
Henry David Thoreau in Walden in 1854), its extension into slangy
humorous forms such as "okey-dokey", and its modern adoption in
computers, in which "OK" is a ubiquitous caption for any button
requesting acceptance.
OK is indeed the most improbable of expressions, created as a lame
joke and surviving by a series of unlikely coincidences to become a
worldwide symbol of American English.
[Allan Metcalf, OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest
Word; published by Oxford University Press; hardback, pp210
including index; ISBN 978-0-1953-7793-4; publishers" price $18.85
(US), £12.99 (UK).]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK GBP11.65 http://wwwords.org?OKOK6
Amazon US US$12.07 http://wwwords.org?OKOK8
Amazon Canada CDN$14.56 http://wwwords.org?OKOK2
Amazon Germany EUR14.99 http://wwwords.org?OKOK4
[These links get World Wide Words a small commission at no extra
cost to you.]
6. Sic!
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Carl Bowers found this in a Daily Galaxy story of 21 January about
a prehistoric whale: "Scientists [who] discovered the ancient whale
named it after the author of 'Moby Dick', whose bite ripped huge
chunks of flesh out of other whales about 12 million years ago."
Jolyon Kay reports that the latest Cambridge University Alumni
Newsletter promises its readers a selection of fantastic
productions from the ADC, the Amateur Dramatic Club. "Michael
Frayn's classic farce Noises Off, billed the funniest farce ever
written by the New York Post, will have you in stitches."
The Lobster House of Tequesta, Florida, advertised a special offer
recently on Facebook, which was spotted by Sandra Curtis: "Starting
this Friday, New Prepared meals to go!! Get two three coarse meals
for $20." After she remonstrated with the business, it was changed,
to "Get a three course meals for $10".
Several readers noted a video item on Yahoo! News about a flying
display in New Zealand: "Historic planes hit Masterton sky".
On the Wrexham Council website, Naomi Squire came across a sign
from the archive of the defunct Brymbo Steelworks: "You are now
entering the melting shop. Molten metal clothing must be worn
beyond this point".
Terry Karney encountered this sentence in a travel piece about
London on the website of the Toronto Star, dated 11 January: "It's
easy to let your imagination wander to picture the kings and queens
who walked here and the historic figures who died on Tower Green,
including two of King Henry VIII's wives, Sir Thomas More and Lady
Jane Grey."
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