World Wide Words -- 26 Nov 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 25 14:36:08 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 764 Saturday 26 November 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: Gobemouche.
3. Wordface.
4. Book Review: From Elvish to Klingon.
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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ERRORS Many keen-eyed readers pointed out that The Sun's nickname
should better have been written "Currant Bun" rather than "Current",
since the newspaper has never been that electrifying (In 1999, the
paper set up an online portal to give free access to its content and
gave it the name CurrantBun.com. The site is still registered to
News International, but is no longer in use.)
Others told me that I had misquoted Mrs Thatcher. Anthony Massey of
BBC News chidingly e-mailed thus: "The playwright Ronald Millar, who
wrote this speech for Mrs Thatcher, came up with a neater turn of
phrase. What she actually said was: 'To those waiting with bated
breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only
one thing to say: you turn if you want to.' (Pause for the laughter
and applause that Millar expected and which duly occurred.) 'The
lady's not for turning'. The relevant clip is, inevitably, on
YouTube (you tube if you want to ...): http://wwwords.org?UTIYW."
Two readers queried the pronunciation that I gave two weeks ago for
"siccity". On going to dictionaries of the nineteenth century, the
most recent that included a note on how to say it, I found that they
gave it as /'sIksItI/, roughly "sik-sity". I've corrected the
website's piece.
BEAT Many readers were surprised that the ancient parish ceremony
of beating the bounds wasn't mentioned in the piece. In the days
before maps, the only good way of keeping boundaries fresh in the
minds of inhabitants was to make a regular formal circuit, stopping
at key landmarks. Boys armed with willow or birch rods beat the
landmarks to help them remember their importance. Sometimes the boys
were themselves beaten to reinforce their memories. Though the
ceremony no longer has any useful function it is maintained in a few
places as a tradition. It is unclear to what extent, if at all,
beating the bounds contributed to the idea of the regular beat of a
police officer.
2. Weird Words: Gobemouche /gOb at muS/
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English borrowed this potentially useful word from French about two
centuries ago, though it has long since abandoned it again. A search
of newspaper archives suggests that it's used nowadays merely as a
rare word with which to stump contestants in US spelling bees.
The French continue to use it, hyphenated, for the bird that we call
a flycatcher, appropriately so since it is made up of "gober", to
swallow, and "mouche", a fly. In French it also means a credulous
person who accepts everything said to him as the plain truth.
Only the latter sense came over into English:
These people are great gobemouches; they always report
the most incredible things.
[Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of
1845 and 1846, by James Richardson, 1848.]
The inescapable image is of a naive individual thunderstruck by the
world around him, perpetually open-mouthed in astonishment and ready
to swallow whatever comes his way, whether flies or tall tales. This
sense of the word is said to have been popularised in French through
a play of 1759 by Charles Favart, La Soirée des Boulevards, which
featured a character named Gobemouche.
It's tempting to see a connection between "gobemouche" and "gob",
that infelicitous monosyllable which has been a British dialect and
slang term for the mouth since the sixteenth century. The similarity
is an accident of etymology, however, since "gob" is most likely to
be from the Gaelic and Irish word for a beak or mouth.
3. Wordface
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WORDS OF THE YEAR Christmas has nearly come and dictionary makers
have begun their annual trawl for the word or phrase that best
characterises the months we have just lived through. First off is
the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, whose British shortlist
includes two terms that are new - ARAB SPRING and SODCASTING, the
latter sounding ruder than it really is, since it's a play on
"podcasting" and refers to somebody listening to music through the
loudspeaker of a mobile phone while in a public place. The other
three are not new but have taken on new importance or new meanings
this year - OCCUPY (the international movement protesting against
economic injustice, taken from "Occupy Wall Street"), HACKTIVISM
(the action or practice of gaining unauthorized access to computer
files or networks in order to further social or political ends) and
PHONE HACKING (gaining unauthorized access to data stored in another
person's phone). The winner, however, is SQUEEZED MIDDLE, a short
form of "squeezed middle-classes", which was first used by former PM
Gordon Brown at the Labour Party conference in 2009. It's that part
of society that's regarded as particularly affected by inflation,
wage freezes, and cuts in public spending during a time of economic
difficulty. It's a mark of the global nature of the current economic
meltdown that both US and UK editors of the OED selected this as the
term that has had the greatest resonance in 2011.
NON-U A term they might have included, though it hasn't gained the
level of recognition of the others, is GENERATION U. This has been
used for the "unretired generation", those who are staying in work
when they might have retired. This year, it has shifted its meaning
so that the "U" stands for "unemployed", in reference to what some
are calling a lost generation of young people who are going from
school into long-term unemployment without ever knowing work.
WHAT'S IN A NAME? Did you see the story this week about the newly
discovered orchid that flowers only at night? The piece about it in
my newspaper listed other plants that flower similarly, including
the night-blooming jasmine, the queen of the night cactus, and the
MIDNIGHT HORROR TREE. This last one sounded like one to avoid, even
more so after a search unearthed other names for it: the broken
bones tree and the tree of Damocles. The last of these came about
because of the metre-long curved seed pods high in the tree that
resemble scimitars hanging over one's head. When they fall to the
ground, they look like a pile of broken bones. Why midnight horror
is less easy to work out, though perhaps coming across a pile of
bones in the deep dark would be sufficiently frightening. Curiously,
the tree - incidentally, pollinated by a bat - has long been known
as an important medicinal source in Asia.
COUNTRY CLASSES We've got used to PIGS, an acronym for the four EU
countries with the most severe economic problems (Portugal, Greece,
Spain and either Ireland or Italy, or sometimes both, making PIIGS).
Then there's BRIC (the developing countries Brazil, Russia, India
and China, though India hates being called "developing"), which is
now often extended to BRICS to include South Africa. That country
also appears in another acronym - CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia,
Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa, six countries with diverse
economies and a young, growing population) - that the British press
has popularised this week because of an official visit by Juan
Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia. CIVETS was coined by
Robert Ward of the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2009.
4. Book Review: From Elvish to Klingon
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The history of invented languages ranges from the philosophical
languages of the seventeenth century to modern creations linked to
books, films and games.
The story of the international auxiliary languages such as Volapük
and Esperanto - created with high moral purpose to aid communication
between peoples lacking a common tongue - take up only one chapter
of this book. The emphasis is rather on languages of various levels
of completeness that have been created in the past century to add a
sense of place and culture to creative works.
Some are long-established, such as J R R Tolkien's Elvish languages
Sindarin and Quenya, well-developed tongues created by a linguistic
scholar that are woven into The Lord of the Rings. George Orwell
created Newspeak in his 1984, a regularised and pared-down English
designed to make it impossible to even think anything that didn't
conform to the beliefs of his dystopian state. In A Clockwork
Orange, Anthony Burgess used Nadsat, an argot based on Russian, to
characterise the worldview of the book's violent gangs. Followers of
the Star Trek SF franchise will have encountered the Klingon tongue,
originally a few phrases introduced to give colour but later worked
up by Klingonists into a tongue in which it's possible to perform
Shakespeare. A more recent case is Na'vi, the speech of the natives
in Avatar. The development of computer games has led to several
languages - mostly only partially developed - that include Gargish,
D'Ni, Simlish, Al-Bhed and Logos, to help provide a flavour of the
culture of groups being portrayed.
Michael Adams's academic contributors offer a very mixed bag of
eight chapters in which these and other languages are discussed in
detail. The last, by Suzanne Romaine, takes a different line; she
investigates natural languages that have been revitalised in recent
times, including Hawaiian, Irish, Breton Cornish and Hebrew. She
points out that to bring a dead or dying tongue back to daily use
requires many decisions to be made, not least how it should be said
and spelled and how words for aspects of modern life - aircraft,
telephones, antibiotics - should be created. The potential for
splittist factions who compete to gain ownership of a language is
always present; Cornish has several, which led in 2004 to the county
offices in Camborne trying to accommodate all parties by using four
different spellings of the Cornish word for welcome in different
places within the building. Trying to build the consensus essential
for widespread take-up of a language in such circumstances is very
difficult.
This work will give readers with a serious interest in invented and
revitalised languages a good grounding in the issues involved. If
you would prefer a more popular approach, Arika Okrent's In the Land
of Invented Languages (http://wwwords.org?ILIL) may be more to your
taste.
[Michael Adams [ed], From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented
Languages; Oxford University Press; published 24 Nov. 2011; pp294,
including index; ISBN 978-0-19-280709-0; publisher's UK price
£12.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP7.14 http://wwwords.org?FETK2
Amazon US: US$12.14 http://wwwords.org?FETK8
Amazon Canada: CDN$16.68 http://wwwords.org?FETK5
Amazon Germany: EUR15,99 http://wwwords.org?FETK7
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
5. Sic!
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A widely syndicated Associated Press story dated 16 November (Gerry
Zanzalari saw it on the Drudge Report) had the headline: "Blast at
South Lebanon Hotel popular with UN Staff."
I didn't know the University of Colorado was that old," commented
Jeff Brandt about a story of 14 November from the Alaska Dispatch:
"The buckle ... was found inside an excavation of a 1,000-year-old
Inupiat house that had been dug into a beach ridge at Cape Espenberg
by a team from the University of Colorado at Boulder."
On 21 November, a story in the New York Times (noted by Jim Conroy)
stated that "Cities like Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and San Juan, P.R.,
have started to fly to Havana in recent months."
Gordon S Jackson was reading a syndicated column on the environment
in The Spokesman-Review of Spokane on 14 November. It reported "A
novel scheme to repel mosquitoes and combat the diseases they spread
with lasers is being funded by the world's second-richest man (Bill
Gates)."
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