World Wide Words -- 28 May 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 27 16:35:00 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 738 Saturday 28 May 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: Criticaster.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: As the crow flies.
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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SOAP OPERA Several readers pointed out that the concept continues
to evolve through the creation of "space opera", which is applied
to SF television series and films such as Star Trek and Star Wars.
These are full of incident but are regarded by aficionados of the
genre as hopelessly shallow.
NEWSPAPER NAMES The Morrow family supplied two further examples of
newspapers whose titles included the word "telephone": the Waco
Evening Telephone, which was published in Waco, Texas, between 1892
and 1903, and the Sylvania Telephone of Sylvania, Georgia, a weekly
newspaper which is still in existence. I've also since found The
People's Telephone of Red Oak, Iowa (published 1881-1884). Richard
Collins wrote: "One of my favorite newspaper names was the weekly
in Viroqua, Wisconsin: the Vernon County Broadcaster-Censor. They
have since decided to quit censoring the news, and it is now simply
the Broadcaster." My own favourite odd newspaper name is the Weekly
Alibi of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
2. Weird Words: Criticaster /krItI'kast@(r)/
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It's not much met with now, more's the pity. This is one of its
rare modern appearances in print:
If I were deemed kosher by that classist, racist,
misogynistic bunch of criticasters, I would consider it
time to retire my pens and legal pads.
[A letter by Erica Jong in The New York Times, 1 Feb.
1998, on learning that her book, Of Blessed Memory, had
been nominated for The Literary Review's Bad Sex
Award.]
You may gather it is uncomplimentary. It refers to those who set
themselves up as arbiters of taste and literary discernment but
whose sensibilities are inadequate to the task. A blast against
such petty critics was penned 150 years ago:
What amount of obtuseness will disqualify a
criticaster who itches to be tinkering and cobbling the
noblest passages of thought that ever issued from mortal
brain, while at the same time he stumbles and bungles in
sentences of that simplicity and grammatical clearness,
as not to tax the powers of a third-form schoolboy to
explain?
[Notes and Queries, 11 Jun. 1853.]
It was coined in the late seventeenth century by adding the ending
"-aster" to "critic". The suffix came directly into English from
Latin, where it meant an incomplete resemblance. English adapted it
to refer to a person of inferior or inadequate qualities. It turns
up in a small number of words, of which "poetaster", a person who
writes bad poetry, and "philosophaster", a shallow or pretentious
philosopher, are the least rare. Others of similar form - though
almost never employed by anybody - are "politicaster", a petty or
contemptible politician, "mathematicaster", a minor or inferior
mathematician, and "witticaster", an inferior wit or witling.
3. Wordface
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IN THE RICHARD? A recent randomly chosen Word File item (available
Monday to Friday on my Twitter feed, @wwwordseditor) was the idiom
"up in Annie's room". That reminded Bruce Napier of another phrase,
IN DICKIE'S MEADOW, meaning to be in serious difficulties. He had
come across it in George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman on the March.
In a note, Fraser says it was current amongst the North Cumbrians
of the Border Regiment in Burma during the Second World War and he
speculates that since Richard III was Warden of the West March when
younger, with his headquarters in Carlisle, the meadow might have
been Bosworth Field. Nigel Rees records the phrase in two of his
collections of domestic catch phrases, Oops, Pardon, Mrs Arden and
More Tea, Vicar? and suggests the same origin. He also points out
that the 1811 edition of Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
defined "dickie" to be a donkey, so that if you were in Dickie's
meadow you might be in the mire. Other suggestions link it with
"dicky", a British term for a part of the body that isn't working
properly ("he's got a dicky heart"; "my left knee's a bit dicky")
and with "as tight as Dick's hatband" (http://wwwords.org?ATDHB).
AS THICK AS TWO PLANKS? Last Wednesday was World Planking Day, an
event that may have passed you by. It has nothing to do with timber
construction but refers to a curious activity that falls into the
same category as the extreme ironing I mentioned the other week. To
PLANK, you lie stiffly horizontal on top of some object. The rules
are strict: you must lie face down, your palms flat against your
sides and your feet together and pointing at the floor. Having
somebody present to take a photograph to post on your social
networking page is essential. The crazier the location, the more
points you get: the oddest I've seen is of a PLANKER lying across
the humps of two camels. The activity is most popular in Australia,
at least under that name, but two British youngsters, Gary Clarkson
and Christian Langdon, claim to have invented it 14 years ago under
the less intriguing title of the Lying Down Game. PLANKING has been
in the news because on 22 May a young man named Acton Beale fell
seven storeys to his death while planking on the balcony of an
apartment block in Kangaroo Point, Brisbane.
4. Q and A: As the crow flies
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Q. I've come across an interesting suggestion for the origins of
the expression "as the crow flies". It's said it has its roots in
something called "raven flocking", a method medieval sailors used
to find land. They supposedly kept a raven or a crow on board ship
and when the sailors thought they might be near land, they would
let the raven or crow loose and would assume land was in the
direction that the bird flew. Is this true? [Lynne Spear]
A. It's amazing how people can make a simple topic complicated in
the search for a good story.
I've not come across "raven flocking" and can't find a reference to
it anywhere. So far as I know, adult ravens don't flock: they mate
for life and defend a territory. Crows don't flock either, though
the closely similar European rooks do, being gregarious birds that
nest in colonies. (As a bit of British ornithological trivia, an
old adage has it that you can always tell a crow from a rook, even
at a distance: if there's one bird, it's a crow, if more than one,
they're rooks.)
You sent me a link that your husband found to a website of sailing
trivia. It explains the expression in a related way:
The term "As The Crow Flies" came from British coastal
vessels that customarily carried a cage of crows. Crows
detest large expanses of water and head, as straight as a
crow flies, towards the nearest land if released at sea -
very useful if you were unsure of the nearest land when
sailing in foggy waters before the days of radar. The
lookout perch on sailing vessels thus became known as the
crow's nest.
I'd hate to see a cage of crows: the birds would probably peck each
other to death. And the birds must have had supernatural powers, to
be able unerringly to see land through fog. You can tell this is
folk etymology through its linking of the story to the crow's nest,
which has no etymological connection with "as the crow flies". The
crow's nest was given that name because, like the nest of a crow in
a tree, it was perched high on the mast.
The expression can't be from medieval times, because it's recorded
only from the eighteenth century. And all early instances refer to
directions on land with no mention of the sea.
The true explanation lies in a bit of British country lore that's
based on observation of the birds. Anyone who has watched a crow
flying any distance knows it tends to do so in a steady, unwavering
line - not always, but then this is a generalisation of a tendency,
not invariable fact. Since the flight of the crow is unaffected by
obstacles on the ground, its route came to represent the shortest
distance between two points.
This is the earliest example I've so far found:
Now the country that those Indians inhabit is upwards
of 400 miles broad, and above 600 long, each as the crow
flies.
[The Gentleman's and London Magazine, Dec. 1761.]
And this slightly later one makes the link explicit:
The Spaniard, if on foot, always travels as the crow
flies, which the openness and dryness of the country
permits; neither rivers nor the steepest mountains stop
his course, he swims over the one, and scales the other,
and by this means shortens his journey so considerably,
that he can carry an express with greater expedition than
any horseman.
[The Political Magazine, Nov. 1782.]
Another expression from the natural world has a related sense: "to
make a bee-line" for something means to take the shortest and
quickest route towards some objective. This comes from another old
country belief, that bees returning to the hive after gathering
nectar always do so in a straight line. This has been disproved.
6. Sic!
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Michael Daily communicated this sentence from the online New York
Times of 21 May: "Messi is an agile, darting virtuoso tethered to a
soccer ball with an almost preternatural sense of the field." With
balls like that, who needs players?
News reports frequently juxtapose ideas incongruously as a result
of hurried writing to meet deadlines. For example, the BBC News
website of 18 May, seen by Stephen Turner: "She arrived with the
Duke of Edinburgh by her side in a dress adorned with 2,091 hand
sewn embroidered shamrocks." A news headline on 20 May, widely
syndicated, was spotted by Janet Walker: "Texas woman accused of
killing son in court". Chuck Wuest tells us that CBS News reported
on 24 May: "A helicopter flying near Longdale, Oklahoma caught a
tornado forming and touching down on tape."
"The world turned upside down?" queried John Orford, who noted an
inappropriate idiom in an item in Yahoo UK on 23 May: "Deadly
earthquakes could strike out of the blue and kill millions of
people, scientists warn."
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