World Wide Words -- 26 Mar 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 25 17:24:31 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 729 Saturday 26 March 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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For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Lustrum.
3. Wordface.
4. Turns of Phrase: Clicktivism.
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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SORRY, SCHMORRY Thanks to everybody for your good wishes for my
recovery from my recent illness. Many readers took me to task for
apologising last week for deficiencies in the mailing because I had
been unwell. They felt I had no need to. So I apologise for having
inappropriately apologised. However, I do regret (without seeming
to apologise) having been unable to answer much of my huge backlog
of mail dating back two weeks.
2. Weird Words: Lustrum
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My guess is that more people have met this word as the title of the
Robert Harris bestseller about politics in ancient Rome than have
encountered it in real life. It came to mind when looking through
the 32-page monster of a census form that recently arrived in my
letterbox (27 March is enumeration day for the 2011 UK census).
In English, a lustrum is a rather rare literary word that means a
period of five years, a quinquennium.
What is very remarkable, a comparison of different
editions will show, that the fundamental doctrines of a
whole "Series of Grammars, English, Latin, and Greek,"
may so change in a single lustrum, as to rest upon
authorities altogether different.
[The Grammar of English Grammars, by Goold Brown,
1851.]
Robert Harris gave his book that title because it covers the five
years following 63 BC.
There's a link between a five-year period and a census because in
classical Rome the population was counted not every 10 years as is
conventional in modern nations, but every five years. The census
was carried out by two magistrates called censors, as part of a
valuation of the property of Romans for tax purposes - taxes which
the censors were responsible for collecting. When the enumeration
was over, one of the censors held a ceremony called a lustratio or
lustrum in the Campus Martius at which a pig, a sheep and an ox
were sacrificed in the presence of the people. "Lustrum" came to
mean by extension both the ceremony and the period of time between
two censuses.
Dictionaries don't agree about the source of "lustrum". Some argue
it comes from "luere", to wash, because the ceremony originally
involved ritual cleansing; others say it's from "lustrare", to
purify or brighten, which would make "lustrum" a close relative of
"lustre" and some other English words. Others warily include
variations on "ultimate origin unknown".
"Censor", by the way, has its modern English meaning because the
magistrates who conducted the census and collected taxes were also
responsible for maintaining public morals. Busy men.
3. Wordface
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MAKE, PUT, RUN A regular quarterly update to the OED came out on
Thursday, which brings the revision to the end of the letter R. One
entry has again broken the record for the largest. In the Second
Edition of 1989, "set" was the largest, requiring 60,000 words to
describe 430 senses. As entries began to be revised for the Third
Edition, the longest entry progressively became that for "make" in
2000 and then "put" in 2007. Now "run" has easily taken the title,
with the verb by itself containing 645 senses and the whole entry
running to some 124,000 words. There's no doubt that when the OED's
lexicographers again conquer the mountain of "set" that that entry
will again be the largest.
SEEING FURTHER? The Guardian on Wednesday noted that the lexicon
of politics in Britain has added a new term. It quoted one of its
own reports from the day before: "Senior cabinet ministers admitted
'the emotional optics' of cruise missiles raining down, backed by
coalition military briefings, had unwelcome echoes of Iraq" and one
from the London Daily Star: "US President Barack Obama temporized
for weeks, worrying about the optics of waging war in another Arab
state after the Iraq fiasco". "Optics" is political shorthand for
the public perception of some situation. It isn't new. Ben Zimmer
commented in his On Language column in the New York Times in March
2010 that he had found it in The Wall Street Journal on 31 May 1978
in a quote from Robert Strauss, Jimmy Carter's special counsellor
on inflation, but that its early heartland had been Canada, not the
US. Bilingual Canadians know "optique", which in French can refer
to optics but can also mean "perspective, point of view". Its
English translation became established as part of the political
jargon of that country, was taken over by its US counterparts and
has now reached the UK.
THE WINNER Yesterday, 25 March, The Bookseller magazine announced
the winner of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year
(see the issue of 19 February http://wwwords.org?DGRMPR for the
shortlist): Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way by
Michael R Young. Horace Bent, The Bookseller's custodian of the
Diagram Prize said: "In the end, it wasn't even close. Much like
the tyrant himself, Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way
ruthlessly slaughtered the opposition, and scored twice as many
votes as the runner-up, 8th International Friction Stir Welding
Symposium Proceedings."
4. Turns of Phrase: Clicktivism
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The tumultuous events in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt in
2011 have been called Twitter revolutions or Facebook revolutions,
though the role of these social networks in shaping political
events in these countries has been disputed.
Commentators have taken the same view about other online protests,
arguing that adding your name to an electronic petition or sending
out a tweet in support of some cause is an effortless activity that
makes you feel good without achieving anything useful. This view
was forcefully put forward in October 2010 by Malcolm Gladwell in
an article in the New Yorker, "Why the revolution will not be
tweeted".
Though "clicktivism" has been appearing as a derogatory collective
term for such purely symbolic actions, oddly it began life several
years ago as a positive term for the online support of good causes
and has only recently flipped sense.
Newspaper articles particularly refer to "clicktivism" in order to
compare it unfavourably with groups that employ networking sites to
take disciplined and strategic action. One notable example is UK
Uncut, which carries out peaceful high-street protests, such as
occupations of bank branches in protest against bankers' bonuses.
"Clicktivism" has become the common, derogatory catch-
all for online protest. But it's not always a fair one.
Allying yourself to a cause online may be easy, but
that's not to say it accomplishes nothing.
[The Independent, 1 Feb. 2011.]
The latest clicktivists are smart, media-savvy, highly
engaged with social media, accessible, usually only
loosely organised, and well aware of the pitfalls of
clicktivism.
[Evening Standard, 17 Jan. 2011.]
6. Sic!
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An unfortunate inversion of events has occurred, according to The
Independent of 20 March, Hazel Parry notes: "A British tourist who
has been missing for five days in Hong Kong is suspected to have
been murdered after being found dead, police said Sunday."
Helen Cushion at first thought the story on the BBC Sport website
referred to a miscarriage of justice: "Jordan banned after Gattuso
spat" but it turned out that the Tottenham Hotspur's first-team
coach Joe Jordan had been banned for having an argument with AC
Milan's Gennaro Gattuso.
CNN's health section on 22 March, reports Ari Sigal, advised its
readers that "Exercising or having sex roughly triples a person's
risk of heart attack in the hours immediately afterward." Rough
exercise, the curse of the sedentary classes.
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B. E-mail contact addresses
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