World Wide Words -- 16 Jul 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 15 16:05:28 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 745 Saturday 16 July 2011
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Author/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: Yealm.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Meteoric rise.
5. 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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PUT A SOCK IN IT Several readers suggested that early non-electric
gramophones would produce more noise than I had asserted. Geoffrey
Ogden Browne wrote, "I have a friend who has a large cabinet wind-
up gramophone which can make quite a sound. I can assure readers
that putting a sock in it is the most efficient way to lower the
volume." Rob Coates added, "An episode of I'm Sorry I Haven't a
Clue recently broadcast here in Australia had that question in one
of the rounds. Humphrey Lyttelton claimed - to the incredulity of
the panellists - to have muted a gramophone with a sock in his
younger years. As he was born in 1921 and probably had experience
with horn gramophones this may be true. However, I suspect his
claim may also have been a device to provide the punch line about
the underpants."
2. Weird Words: Yealm /jElm/
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This is a term of the thatcher's trade. A yealm - in older works
spelled "yelm" - is one of the individual bundles of straw, a sort
of straw tile, that's laid on the roof. A writer in East Anglia in
1825 explained that a yealm was the largest quantity of straw that
could be carried under the arm at one time.
As befits such an ancient trade, "yealm" is Old English, spelled
then as "gielm", "gylm" and in other ways. Its first sense was of a
sheaf of reaped corn (wheat or barley) and only later changed to
mean the long straw that remained after threshing. It has often
been confused with "halm" or "helm" in the same sense, and with
"haulm" for the stems or stalks of peas, beans, potatoes and other
crops that remain after harvesting. However, these last three are
from a different Germanic source which comes from an Indo-European
root that appears in Latin "culmus", a stalk, and Greek "kalamos",
a reed.
"Yealm" doesn't often appear outside technical descriptions of
thatching. This is a rare example, from a novel:
Luxuriously full, the cat slept on the window-ledge.
Meantime a roadman was cleaning a gutter, a thatcher
pegged down his yelm.
[In a Green Shade, by Maurice Hewlett, 1920.]
The yealms are fixed in place by hazel sticks called brotches, a
word that was once commonly spelled "broach" or "broche" and which
could mean a pointed device of several kinds. It's the same word as
"brooch" for the ornamental pin. The Oxford English Dictionary, in
an entry that was written rather more than a century ago, says of
"brooch" that the differentiation of spelling from "broach" was
recent "and hardly yet established".
3. Wordface
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MULTILOQUENT VERBOSITY This week I stumbled upon a review in an
American magazine, The Academy, dated 1 October 1881. It was of E W
White's Cameos from the Silver-land; or the Experiences of a Young
Naturalist in the Argentine Republic, a classic work of economic
geography and natural history. The reviewer complained, "The author
is terribly fond of long words. To him plants become bosquetish,
plains are sabulous, cattle are meat-bearing beeves, dead men are
cadavers, parrots are psittacs. The Republic is 'a vast cerealic
and frugiferous as well as a lanigerous and pelliferous region'."
A glossary - "bosquetish": of bushes or woods (related to "bosky");
"sabulous": sandy; "psittac": parrot (the review is one of only two
citations for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary's entry,
the other being from 1425); "cerealic": of cereals (the only
example in the OED); "frugiferous": fruit-bearing: "lanigerous":
wool-bearing (related to "lanolin", from Latin "lana", wool); and
"pelliferous": this is unknown to the Oxford English Dictionary or
any other source I've checked. I'm guessing the author created it
from the old word "pell" for an animal's hide (a close relative of
"pelt", from Latin "pellis", skin, leather, or parchment), from
which came the equally rare "pell-monger", a dealer in skins and
furs; from context the word means "rich in fur-bearing animals".
4. Q and A: Meteoric rise
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Q. I am curious about the term "meteoric rise". Since meteors fall
to the earth and do not rise back up from it, this term doesn't
appear to make sense. Several online sources I've consulted agree
that it's an oxymoron but have no further explanation for its
origin. I consider World Wide Words to be one of the premier
English language sites available, and I would appreciate your
insight on this strange term. [Jeff Grindle]
A. Many thanks for your kind words and your interesting question.
>From our modern perspective, your puzzlement is understandable. The
idiom does sound like a contradiction. However, when we look into
the history of "meteoric", it isn't as silly as it sounds.
To start with, the phrase "meteoric rise" is a lot older than you
might think. It starts to appear in print in the 1860s, though
there are hints that it may be older. Since then, the phrase has
itself rapidly risen in popularity and has become a cliché best
avoided. This is an early example:
He [Lord Byron] called himself, in one of his poems,
"The grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme;" and there is
some similarity between the suddenness and splendour of
his literary career and the meteoric rise and domination
of the First Bonaparte.
[A Complete Manual of English Literature, by Thomas
Budd Shaw, 1865.]
Older forms are "meteoric career", known from the early part of the
century (for example, in A Year in Europe by John Griscom, dated
1823), and "meteoric talent", which is recorded from 1833. These
and your form are all based on a figurative sense of "meteoric"
that came into existence about 1820.
One reason why the expression now seems wrong is that we've lost a
key part of the image in the minds of these early users. For them,
something meteoric began unexpectedly and spectacularly but soon
sputtered and died. People had in mind the sudden appearance and
transient brilliance of a meteor or shooting star streaking across
the night sky. By implication, a meteoric rise was swiftly followed
by a meteoric fall that led to extinction of talent or reputation.
Both "rise" and "fall" here are themselves figurative, with no
implication of physical direction.
I'll leave it to psychologists of language to explain why we should
now stress the rise and not the fall.
5. Sic!
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"Those precocious colonial boys" commented Robert Wake on a line in
the New York Review of Books of 23 June: "It is probably true that
Bancroft's farmer father succumbed to an epileptic fit in a pigsty
when he was a small boy."
Julie Egan saw a headline in The Sydney Morning Herald of 12 July
(it appeared in other news outlets, too): "Dismembered man quizzed
by men posing as police".
An advertisement in the Racing Post of 9 July caught the attention
of Simon Rowlands: "Editorial Internship at Racing Post. "It is
essential that applicant's have a high standard of written English
and excellent attention to detail."
The difference a missing hyphen can make, noted Steve Hirsch. He
saw a sign outside a medical office building recently: "TOBACCO
FREE FOR YOUR HEALTH".
Allan Price submitted this intriguing snippet from the Shropshire
Star of 12 July: "July has five Fridays, five Saturdays and five
Sundays this year - something which hasn't happened for 823 years.
The same happened last October."
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